"When novelists become Cubists": the prose ideograms of Guy Davenport - Critical Essay

Style, Spring, 2002 by Andre Furlani

Guy Davenport's narratives are hybrids of fiction, documentary, poem, and illustration, A disciple of Ezra Pound, he adapts to the short story the ideogrammatic method of The Cantos, where a grammar of images, emblems, and symbols replaces that of logical sequence. This grammar allows for the grafting of particulars into a congeries of implied relation without subordination. In contrast to postmodernists, Davenport does not omit causal connection and linear narrative continuity for the sake of an aleatory play of signification but in order to intimate by combinational logic kinships and correspondences among eras, ideas and forces. His collages (he calls them "assemblages of fact and necessary fiction") are arbitrary without being gratuitous, play proceeding in them under the auspices of emancipatory containment. These features of Davenport's experimentation are revealed in three exemplary texts. Although rich meditations on squandered or misdirected cultural possibility, each is encomiastic and prospective r ather than elegiac and nostalgic. Davenport summons and rechannels dormant energies released by his archival subjects--the Vorticist art of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, the discovery of the Aurignacian cave paintings at Lascaux, and the utopian project of Charles Fourier.

Assemblage

For Guy Davenport "every force evolves a form." It is typical of him, who makes this epigram the title both of an essay and of a book, to find a contemporary avant-garde formula not in, say, Shklovsky, Marinetti, or Rimbaud but in the founder of the Shakers, Mother Ann Lee. He scarcely trusts an idea that is not on closer inspection an old one. For Davenport it is always later the same day. He shares with the modernists a disposition towards syncretic structures. A Lascaux aurochs and a Picasso bull share their pigment; a Pre-Socratic fragment and a Wittgenstein Zettel share their ink.

"A work of art," Davenport claims in the forward to Every Force Evolves a Form, "is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible" (xi). Seeking out forms that might faithfully correspond to the range of forces inhering in his literary subjects, he follows his modernist precursors in assuming that a new subject entails the renegotiation of formal convention. As a consequence, his is one of the most eclectic and innovative bodies of fiction in contemporary American literature. Indeed, he has renegotiated the conventions distinguishing prose from verse. During a period when the first person present retrospective narrative has nearly monopolized American short fiction, he has almost entirely eschewed the subgenre, except to adapt it. (Thus the youths who narrate "The River" and "O Gadjo Niglo" omit all punctuation except the period and the question mark.) He prefers to draw on much more heterogeneous stylistic instigations, such as surrealism, hexameter mime, formalism, dramatic monologue, classical e clogue, collage, Roman cento, Japanese renka, postcard, imaginary dialogue, Hellenistic philosophical sketch, and journal.

In Davenport, collage structures predominate. Encouraged by William Carlos Williams's maverick defiance of the proprieties separating verse from prose, he has treated the story in a kindred way. In narratives inspired as much by modernist painting and poetry as by fiction, he juxtaposes a variety of discontinuous and discrete writings and images. Laurence Zachar argues that Davenport's writing is situated "aux frontieres intergeneriques" where manifold modes are brought into concord: "L'etonnant chez Davenport est la facon don't ce materiau qui parait l'incarnation meme du chaos--hermetique, enigmatique, obscur, avec son tropplein de references--se revele en fait etre construit, ordonne, structure. Plus l'on s'y plonge, et plus l'on distingue de cohesion dans le texte" 'What astonishes in Davenport is the way in which material that seems the very incarnation of chaos--hermetic, enigmatic, obscure, with its proliferation of allusions--in fact reveals itself to be constructed, organized, structured. The more on e immerses oneself in them the more one discerns the texts' cohesion, (62).

Davenport also works along the intergeneric border between text and graphic, for he illustrates many of his texts. (1) "The prime use of words is for imagery: my writing is drawing," he states in an interview (Hoeppfner 123). Visual imagery is not subordinated to writing in Davenport, who draws on the assemblage practice of superimposing image and writing. "I trust the image; my business is to get it onto the page," he writes in the essay "Ernst Machs Max Ernst." "A page, which I think of as a picture, is essentially a texture of images. [...]The text of a story is therefore a continuous graph, kin to the imagist poem, to a collage (Ernst, Willi Baumeister, El Lissitzky), a page of Pound, a Brakhage film" (Geography 374-75).

At the University of Kentucky (where he taught for most of his academic career), Davenport once offered a course with the Olsonian title "The Poem as a Field of Force." The force remains for him immanent in matter rather than transcendent in spirit. Particularity rather than abstraction discovers the orders of the real. The materiality of the work of art and its constructed nature are consequently emphasized by his use of an ideogrammatic method that allows for the grafting of particulars into a congeries of implied relations without subordination. For him writing can enter into an isomorphic relationship with nature and a cosmos which is itself conceived of as a harmonization of independent forces.