It is surprising that such a thing as post-m odern poetry exists at all.
I’m not even sure it does.
This doubt is partly based on experience and partly on theory.
So I shall begin with a few worlds about the present state of Hungarian poetry. In the global view we can distinguish four main tendencies. The first and the most traditional one, we may say, has been exhausted as a creative force, but is still alive in readers’
expectations. It keeps the forms and moral, even political com m it
ment o f last century’s national rom anticism , without ever ref
lecting the archaism or anachronism o f such a position. The aim of the poetic m anifestation here is usually som ething independent from poetry or language: it’s a part o f ‘reality’ or ‘life’. The second tendency could be called ‘classical m odernity’, and it has close connections to the ‘neo-classical’ views of the first h alf of our century. The po et’s personality is kept in the background. The aim is to express the inexpressible, to com m unicate a certain meaning that cannot be com m unicated in any other way, but which has a w ell-defined existence outside the language. The poet’s moral com m itm ent is to save the cultural values o f the past through hostile tim es o f the present for a happier future. The third tendency is very easy to distinguish: this is the avant-garde. The lyric self here has a very lim ited role, usually even the lyric situa
tion is given up. The poet is regarded as an inventor who works on the renew ing of the means of poetic expression, often leaving the field o f language. Ironically the best avant-garde works are the experim ents o f rather traditional poets.
A nd so we arrive at the fourth tendency, that we can call post
modern, until we find a better name for it. It was initiated around the end o f the sixties with the independent appearance o f a few young poets, m ost notably Dezsö Tandori and György Petri. Its foundation is an epistem ological scepticism , the realization of the inscrutability o f reality. The belief in the unity o f the world and the reliability o f language is shaken. The aim o f the literary work of art is not some ab ovo m eaning that exists outside language, nor the m ost intensive com m unication o f som ething given, or the finding o f the only possible form of a certain idea, rather, the exploitation o f the creative uncertainty, rich m ultiplicity inherent in language. The post-m odern poet creates open, interactive texts instead of finished works with unam biguous codes. As both the material and the subject o f these texts is language itself, self-refe- rential gestures, quotations, allusions and generally the tropes of irony are very frequent.
The post-m odern view o f the language questions the very foundation o f the lyric genre, as the expressive m anifestation of the ‘s e lf . The post-m odern poet has to face the dangers o f this contradiction. Tandori answered this challenge with the building of a very com plex and self-containing private mythology, with sparrows and teddy bears as characters, and Petri created a kind of political poetry in which he could exploit the possibilities of irony to expose the language of pow er (that is language as a means of exercising o f power.) Other m em bers o f their generation and those follow ing them worked out several ways to make lyrical m anifes
tation and the doubt in the reliability o f language com patible with each other. It is characteristic, however, that many o f them turn towards short and longer prose forms, and those who hold up to the lyric context gradually give way in their texts to the narrative or the dram atic.
This phenom enon seems to back up the above doubt. And there’s another experience that supports it: in our times the lyric is very often left out from the taxonom ic attem pts to divide the field of literature. One o f the possible causes is that the plurality o f the post-m odern cultural situation makes more and m ore impossible the singular situation of the lyric subject, the ‘s e lf . One could object that a poet like Fernando Pessoa clearly had a plural self.
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That is true, but if you read any o f his poems, you can see a well defined, centred personality who utters his views and expresses his feelings. The fact that all these imaginary persons are the projec
tions o f the same real-w orld person has some post-m odernistic aspects, Pessoa can be seen as a post-m odern poet, but it does not make any o f his texts post-m odern.
Preparing this article I was looking for a piece o f contem porary poetry on which I could dem onstrate my views. To use a H un
garian poem seem ed hopeless. The m ore characteristic ones, that use the self-m imetic feature o f language, are simply untranslatable.
Others could be translated technically, but would have required complex cultural or political explanations. So I tried to find a piece of world poetry that every participant in the conference and every reader o f the paper would certainly know. I have to report a failure here. I could not think of one single poet whom we w ould un
animously know and respect as we know and respect G arcia M ar
quez, Eco, Rushdie, Pynchon or Calvino — or as we know and respect A pollinaire, T. S. Eliot, or, say, M ajakovskij. In this view, it seems, there is no poetry today that would be part o f world literature.
W hat to do then? W e should reconsider the idea o f the lyric, but we cannot do it w ithout referring to a text. And if we cannot find a proper contem porary example, we shall look further back in time for a poem that everyone knows. The one I chose has the advantage that it corresponds to my title in another way: it is a literary work o f art that has no genre. This so-called poem is usually considered a par excellence m odernist work o f art, but it also had a great part in elim inating lyric as a genre, or probably it was one o f the initiators o f this process. And the most obvious advantage: it uses m ost o f the linguistic and poetical means that present-day post-m odern poetry uses. W hat can genre theory do with such a text as T. S. E liot’s The Waste Land?
‘No contem porary poem has been subjected to more detailed analysis than The Waste Land, yet no critic has either confidently assigned it to one o f the traditional kinds o f poetry or, if he con
siders it as the invention o f a quite new kind o f a poem, has in
vented a new name for that kind.’ (Fraser 1953: 28). Though both parts o f this utterance seem to be true, the latter part is more
interesting for us. It clearly describes the main problem in the critical reception o f the complex, polym orph, polyhistoric, poly- semic texts like The Waste Land: the work cannot be classified by any taxonom ic system. It did not fit into any category present at the tim e o f its publication, and it did not create a new category.
This fact can be considered in several ways. It can be used, as it were, to support a hoax-theory about the poem (for exam ples of the ‘hoax-theory’, see Cox 1968: 11), a view that is sim ilar to the position o f the old man in the joke, who seeing a giraffe in the zoo declared that such an animal does not exist.
This taxonom ist status is ridiculous from a pragm atist point of view: Rorty or Fish would not make a category even o f two giraffes. And we also can say that there are other lonely master
pieces as well: we can define such a category as ‘a picaresque chevalier-novel-parody enriched with interwoven pastoral novel
las’1, but we will not find another tenant for this category than the great novel of Cervantes. And quite sim ilar things can be said about the works o f Rabelais or Sterne. Eliot said this on the matter:
‘the only obvious com m on characteristic of The R oad to Xanadu and the Finnegans Wake is that we may say o f each: one book like this is enough.’ (Eliot 1957: 108). And probably we also may say this about the above m entioned works, including The Waste Land.
Hypothetically we may say of these works that they do not belong to an archetype, they do not have an architext, they them selves are architexts in some way.
For sim ilar phenom ena in the visual arts Hans Richter has a prom ising suggestion: ‘If, like D ucham p’s, they are first o f their kind, such works may be preserved in museums, as the old aero
planes in the Sm ithsonian. If so, one w ould need to have a sort of resting-place for works of “art for a day” . But this would be a m useum, not an art gallery.’ (Richter 1965: 208). The solution cannot be applied to literary inventions, because their aesthetic effect or m eaning does not exhaust itself after the first perception.
If the work of art is a thing and a sign sim ultaneously, as M ukarovsky says (1977: 89-128, esp. 106), then the difference is 1 This ’category’ is based upon the description of Szerb 1945: 23. This
is still the most popular general account of world-literature in Hungary.
The Case o f the M issing Genre 97
probably caused by the different materials of kinds o f art. W hat D ucham p does, is putting a thing in a context that has been so far reserved for signs. He forces us to consider as a sign something that does not contain any imminent meaning, something that is originally m ade not for understanding, but for use. W e have to extract a m eaning that is not put in; to decode something no one has coded.
Thus, D ucham p’s ready-mades can be interpreted in the frame of a hoax-theory (though these are obviously very clever hoaxes).
In literature it would be much more difficult to create such clear examples o f hoax, because language, the raw material of literary works of art, cannot get rid o f its sign-function, the reference to something other than itself. A linguistic artefact can never be uniquely a ‘thing’ and cannot be transposed to the context of
‘things’ as Ducham p did it in the other way. Even Kurt Schw itters’
one letter poem (W) (see M otherw ell 1981: xxviii) keeps its linguistic sign-function as, becom ing also a ‘thing’, it takes up its new, aesthetic function.
The latter is also a piece o f which one is enough, and that could be placed in a m useum among many sim ilar avant-garde pieces.
But the work of Cervantes, Rabelais, Sterne, Joyce or Eliot cannot be sent into a museum, because their m eaning cannot be extracted in one perception, rather the opposite, the process o f this extrac
tion does not seem to reach any resting point, and, especially with the latter two authors, does not seem to aim at any kind of con
sensus. The radical quality of these works is not in their simplicity (as in the case o f Ducham p or Schwitters), but in their complexity.
And this com plexity is very important for genre theory.
We reached our main theoretical question: how do we know of a literary work o f art that it is a lyric. E. D. Hirsch answers this question by suggesting the change of G adam er’s notion of preju
dice (V orurteil) to that of pre-understanding, which is in fact the recognition o f the genre. (Hirsch 1967: 24 5-264, esp. 258-264:
“Prejudice and Pre-U nderstanding”). In his view this pre-under
standing is a hypothesis on the genre of the text as a whole, that is not determ ined by the prejudices the reader brings with her/him self, but by the gen re’s imprints in the parts.
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This difference is dissolved in Jau ß ’s idea o f expectations’
horizon (Erw artungshorizont), which is by definition both histo
rical and imminent. (Jauß 1970: 145-206). A ccording to Jauß it is possible that a text builds up an expectations’ horizon of its genre, and then system atically destroys it; his exam ple is the Don Qui
xote. Joyce’s Ulysses m ultiplies this process: it changes the genre, the mode and point of view of narration and the whole thematic fram e chapter by chapter. If ‘the continuous process of horizon- building and horizon-changing determ ines the relation o f a parti- cular text to its genre-creating set o f texts’ then Ulysses reverses this relation. There is not one but several dozens o f ‘genre-creating sets o f texts’ the text refers to, so there is no particular set o f texts that could contain the Ulysses, while Ulysses contains several genres.
The case is very sim ilar with The Waste Land, with the impor
tant difference that horizon-changes are much more frequent and less obvious, and, because o f the shortness and fragm entary quality o f the parts, the particular horizons are much more difficult to identify. To make the m atter even m ore obscure, the context here suggests the lyric genre, where there is no such soft and undefined category as the novel in the epic genre.
It seems to be useful here to turn to the classical categories of genre theory. According to Tzvetan Todorov it looks like this:
‘lyric = those works where only the author speaks; dramatic = where only the characters speak; epic = where both the author and the characters may speak.’ This seems simple, but in many texts including The Waste Land no one can tell in advance who speaks at a certain point. We have to build our hypotheses upon other hypotheses. The other problem is that it seems doubtful whether the author speaks at all in a text. W e would rather say that the
2 ‘Ein entsprechender Prozeß fortgesetzert H orizontstiftung und Ho
rizontveränderung bestimmt auch das V erhältnis vom einzelnen Text zur gattungsbildenden T extreiche.’ Ib. 175.
3 iy r iq u e = les oeuvres ou seul parle Г auteur; dram atique = les oeuvres ou seuls parlent les personnages; epique = les oeuvres ou auteur et personnages ont egalem eni droit ä la parole.’ (Ducrot- T cdorov 1972: 198).
The Case o f the M issing Genre 99
voice o f the author belongs to the author-function (in the sense of Foucault), so it is only one o f the characters.
So we may modify the scheme this way: lyric = one character speaks; dram atic = several, co-ordinated characters speak; epic = the other characters are subordinated to one character. It can be seen now that we have switched from genres to ‘m odes’. A c
cording to Genette, in the dram atic mode the situational discourse appears outside the text proper, as a paratext (the character’s name, instruction); while in the narrative mode it appears within the text, through a specific character, the narrator (Genette 1986:
89-159). These m odes rarely prevail in their purity; the great majority of literary texts are mixed. But the change o f the modes doesn’t mean a change o f the genres, as it does not invalidate the genre-code of the whole text as a specific speech act. Usually we can identify the dom inant mode.
In this taxonom y there is no room for the lyric mode. Lets turn to another authority: Ben veniste says that there are two separate but com plem entary systems w orking in the language: that o f the story and that o f the discourse (Benveniste 1966: 238). If we trans
late this to genre theory, we can say that in the dramatic mode the system o f the story is em bedded into the system of the discourse (character’s name, etc.); in the narrative mode both systems are inside the text proper; and in the lyric mode the system o f the discourse is em bedded in the system o f the story that is usually not explicit (but think o f certain titles like ‘Lines Com posed a Few Miles Above T intem A bbey’.)
A ristotle, the definitive authority in genre theory, also knows of three modes: ‘Given both the same means and the same kind of object for im itation, one may either speak at one moment in narra
tive and at another an assumed character, as Hom er does; or one may rem ain the same throughout, without any such change; or the imitators may represent the whole story dram atically, as though they were actually doing the things described.’ (Aristotle 1984:
2317). The first mode refers to the epic and the third to dramatic poetry. The second is usually understood as the mode of the lyric, but it seems to be the arbitrariness of posterity, as Aristotle tells about the modes o f im itating an act, and according to our modem ideas acts or im itation do not b e lo n g to the nature of the lyric.
If we put together Genette, Benveniste and A ristotle, we can draw the conclusion that the main distinctive feature o f the lyric mode is the absence o f the story, or sujet — that is a very weak criterion. Now let us put the question this way: is there a sujet in The Waste L and? There have been several affirm ative answers to this question, but unfortunately, very different ones. The work has been a spiritual autobiography; an urban apocalypse; and the expression o f a generation’s lost illusions, to m ention only the most characteristic. These obviously exclude each other, and such divergence will not help in deciding about the genre.
W e have limited the lyric mode to one criterion, but it has not proved decisive. Let us recall then the intuitive m eaning o f the lyric mode and imagine our example, The Waste Land, based on this. There is an individual in the centre who stays intact and rem ains unchanged while s/he projects, hallucinates, spiritually experiences all the em bedded narrative and dram atic elem ents. The m onograph o f Calvin Bedient is based upon such a concept (Bedient 1986). He postulates a protagonist, an actor, who (in the theatrical sense) plays all the characters. Thus the whole lyric process is subordinated to a narrative aim, a story that has to be told in the preface. W hat is more, a spiritual theatre has to be constructed. The concept creates a certain unity, but it forces all the dynamic changes to a subordinated level, m aking them projec
tions or roles for an allegorical actor.
It seems we are not able to give a definition of the lyric, though the dram atic and the epic still have some form al criterions. If before the text proper we read ‘The Protagonist: [colon]’ then it is dram atic. If at the end of the text proper we read ‘said the protagonist’ then it is epic (or narrative). But what if there is neither o f the two? Is this the only criterion of the lyric we can have? This is the point where the difference between the genres dissolves. Post-m odern plurality brings an end not only to the lyric, but to genre theory as well.
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Aristotle 1984. Poetics. 1448a 20-24. — Barnes, J., ed. The Complete Works o f Aristotle. The R evised Oxford Translation. Vol. II. Prince
ton: Princeton University Press.
Bedient, С. 1986. He Do the Police in Different Voices. Chicago: Univer
sity of Chicago Press.
Benveniste, E. 1966. Probem es de linguistique generale. I. Paris: Galli- mard.
Cox, C. B., Hinchliffe, A. eds. 1968. T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land. A Casebook. London: Macmillan.
Cox, C. B., Hinchliffe, A. eds. 1968. T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land. A Casebook. London: Macmillan.