March 26, 2005

Cargo Cult poetry?

In reference to my recent series of posts on the origins of literary theory in "cargo cult linguistics," John McChesney-Young wrote to draw my attention to a passage in Clive James's review of Camille Paglia's "Break, Blow, Burn":

The penalty for talking about poets in universal terms before, or instead of, talking about their particular achievements is to devalue what they do while fetishizing what they are.

This insidious process is far advanced in America, to the point where it corrupts not just the academics but the creators themselves. John Ashbery would have given us dozens more poems as thrilling as his jeu d'esprit about Daffy Duck if he had never been raised to the combined status of totem pole and wind tunnel, in which configuration he produces one interminable outpouring that deals with everything in general, with nothing in particular, can be cut off at any length from six inches to a mile, and will be printed by editors who feel that the presence in their publication of an isotropic rigmarole signed with Ashbery's name is a guarantee of seriousness precisely because they don't enjoy a line of it. Paglia, commendably, refuses such cargo-cult status even to Shakespeare. [emphasis added]

James is referring to Ashbery's 1975 poem "Daffy Duck in Hollywood" -- but what does he mean by "such cargo-cult status"?

I've always interpreted the cargo cult metaphor as describing a case where unsophisticated people "go through the motions" in imitation of a respected and powerful group with more advanced capabilities, without any understanding of the real functions of the imitated activities or the causal processes behind them. But for James in this passage, it seems that "cargo cult status" means something like "value assigned blindly, without any understanding of the real basis of such value". Is Ashbery (according to James) cluelessly going through the motions of being a poet? Perhaps, but it's readers who are assigning or refusing "cargo cult status". So for James, apparently, Ashbery's audience is cluelessly going through the motions of appreciating his poetry.

Cults aside, James' review is full of little linguistic curiosities. Two examples among many: the anonymous "editors who feel that the presence in their publication of an isotropic rigmarole signed with Ashbery's name is a guarantee of seriousness"; and Paglia described as "a woman who sometimes gives the impression that she finds reticence a big ask".

Isotropic is a term from physics, first used in the late 19th century, meaning "Identical in all directions; invariant with respect to direction." Usually it's properties such as elasticity or conductivity that are at issue, though there is that famous joke about the recovering physicist whose consultant's report to the dairy cooperative began "Consider a perfectly spherical cow, radiating milk isotropically."

According to the OED, Ragman (dating from 1276) was "A game of chance, app. played with a written roll having strings attached to the various items contained in it, one of which the player selected or ‘drew’ at random." The roll used in the game was called a ragman's roll or a ragman roll, and rigmarole was a reduced form of this, sometimes re-analyzed as "rig-my-roll" and similar things. So aleatoric poetry could be described with historical exactitude as a rigmarole.

"Isotropic rigmarole" is a cute collocation, with a texture like chrome and bone. It's never been used before, within the ken of Google anyhow, but it's worth recycling and even turning into a cliché. You could make up other phrases on the same pattern, like "adiabatic gobbledygook", or "ergodic gibberish", but it's hard to create one that goes down as smoothly as "isotropic rigmarole". (Though maybe "adiabatic technobabble" has some promise, in the right context...)

And as for "big ask", when John Kerry used that phrase, it made Eric Bakovic doubt his own native-speaker status. I'm with Eric on this one, but I have to admit that it works better than the obvious alternatives: "a woman who sometimes gives the impression that she finds reticence a lot to ask"; "a woman who sometimes gives the impression that she finds reticence difficult "; etc.

Anyhow, if you're in search of some really Xtreme ritual displacement, you can download the video game version of Daffy Duck in Hollywood...

[Update: Cosma Shalizi sent in a pointer to Espeth Aarseth's Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. adding that "'ergodic gibberish sounds much better to me than 'isotropic rigmarole'". Well, Cosma has the advantage (or perhaps disadvantage) of knowing what the words mean. I suppose that Clive James really meant something like "ergodic", anyhow, since he says that (poor abused) Ashbery's poetry is "one interminable outpouring that ... can be cut off at any length from six inches to a mile". This certainly sounds like the result of "a process in which a sequence or sizable sample is equally representative of the whole", which would make it ergodic. And since there's really only one direction in text, anyhow, it's hard to avoid having text be "identical in all (available) directions", and thus isotropic, even if it's not semantic yardgoods. But what I liked about "isotropic rigmarole" was its prosody, anyhow. And maybe the geographical resonances of "-tropic". I mean, we're talking about poetry here. ]

Posted by Mark Liberman at March 26, 2005 01:32 PM