Disingenuity

[Editor's Note: Lucy Ives delivered a version this talk at the Poetry Foundation on October 9, 2014 as part of the Harriet Reading Series. Other "Open Door" features can be found here.]

I find I can never stop thinking about, nor for that matter, can I think enough about, anticipation. Similarly, I cannot get enough of thinking about lies. And I’ve been troubled, lately, by my own inability not to tweak descriptions of events. I am talking to someone I know and I say, “Hi X, y and z (happened).” When what has really happened is y and z and a. Or: what has really happened is a(y + z). I look at a narrative occurrence like this and think also that my response has been designed for X, has been destined for X, and for this reason, is somehow invested with all the qualities of X, and perhaps X is not just one person, perhaps X is three people or 17. Meanwhile “a,” my omission, an atmosphere or attitude, something I know to be the case but cannot bring into words, floats away to accrue to some private stock of memory, or maybe it’s just a category, something I lazily and vaguely term, “the case.”

And even though “a” never makes it out into the world, I still care so much about anticipation, the mechanism by means of which “a” gets scraped away. Anticipation and paraphrase are so close to one another. Really, they are cousins. And I speak (write) about these things as if they pertain to real life, but really they are most important for writing, especially if we are the sorts of people who consider writing to be a kind of precondition for speech.

I’m interested in the way in which everyday speech, which is to say, everyday thinking, returns to writing—may even inspire formal innovation. Or perhaps it’s better to say: I’m interested in the way in which everyday speech (my basic functional social thought) is already writing, is already a kind of writing project or a part of writing. This is, anyway, the kind of author I am interested in. I like—and this is merely a way of keeping everything I do in this register—simplicity. The kind of author I am interested in may simply be being a social being (As if that weren’t enough!)

To explain: Last winter I made up a word, disingenuity, and it caused a certain amount of confusion—though let me not kid myself, it wasn’t a big deal. (Ben Fama posted on Facebook that he wanted to read more about this word, and others commented, saying, “That is not a real word!” And Ben deleted his comment. I hate Facebook to begin with and felt terrible that Ben was criticized. And I told Ben that I would write this essay for him, because of those grammarians.) But why would I not have used “disingenuousness,” which we all know is the correct nominal form and “real”? (Though, in fact, “disingenuity” is an archaic synonym and technically not incorrect, though it is unfamiliar.) There are a few reasons:

To begin with, disingenuity is obviously a term having to do with indiscipline. It’s not a real word (though, as I’ve said, it’s archaic) and may, therefore, cause us to pause and cough. When we speak, more conventionally, about disingenuousness we’re talking about behavior, and the behavior we are talking about is not out-and-out lying. We are talking about a condition in which someone knows more than she lets on. It’s not a question of information, exactly; it is, rather, a kind of atmospheric thinking about what’s known, as opposed to what should or must be revealed. We’re talking about a fraudulent attitude, a pose of insincerity, in which what’s known and what is shown do not exist in a relation of symmetry. We’re talking about performance: She knows more than she lets on. She is not characterized by candor. She performs a state of innocence. A negative judgment follows. The term comes from a negation of the Latin, ingenuus, native, inborn, free-born, having the qualities of a freeman, noble, frank. One thinks of the guileless ingénue. I wanted to take this term and rewrite it. For it refers to an attitude toward language—in social space. I wanted to take this term and give it a positive valence. Thus: disingenuity.

Anyway, when I wrote disingenuity last February, I was simultaneously writing a series of posts on Harriet under the either painfully earnest, or disingenuously plain, title, “How I Write Now.” Either I was saying that this was the story of how I came to write as I write (a saga, to be sure) or I was saying that what was to come were a series of samples of how I wrote—and I had not bothered myself with a better title. Was there a whiff of brag in this? I was taking, anyway, as my subject my own activity. I was toying with something having to do with immediacy, and not just that: with the notion—obvious again but nonetheless—that there was someone, a someone, doing these things, doing this writing, performing these gestures.

Deixis is so important for a contemporary author. Deixis: literally, “pointing.” I could also say, “Deixis is so important for the contemporary author.” I’m talking about pointing, in language, writing; a meaning contingent with respect to spatial, and often social, context. “Over there.” Some say that the Romantics invented an authorial construct the likes of which has not yet been, and may never be, equaled. The Romantic author, prototypically a poet and an Englishman and (usually also) William Wordsworth, though sometimes shifting to include Coleridge, or Keats of the 1818 letter, or, very seldom, Dorothy Wordsworth, the sister possessed of a powerful talent for description, and at times the Germans, creates a structure in which the self must be both studiously felt or experienced and maintained at a great and insurmountable distance. Emotion (a thing or event) is recollected in tranquility; a rigid wad, “not myself,” retires into the space formerly known as “myself”; “I” is depicted by someone. “Here am ‘I,’” he says, and in the space between this he, annotator or recorder, and his subject, “I,” emerges contemporary literary authority.

As other theorists and historians have indicated, the poetic speaker imagined in Wordsworth (and Coleridge)’s canon-busting Lyrical Ballads of 1798 is an ingenious complement to the newly proprietarily empowered author imagined by the British copyright act of 1710. Ending the monopoly of the Stationers’ Company, a guild representing London booksellers who acted as both printers and distributors, this act, “for the encouragement of Learning by vesting the copies of printed books in the authors or purchasers of such copies during the times therein mentioned,” recognized a creative agent in the field of literary production. Wordsworth, 1815: the author must “creat[e] the taste by which he is to be enjoyed.” But, as Wordsworth was keen to indicate, there are authors and then are authors. There was the author named in law, a proprietor, and then there was the immortal font of poetry, an author who would be appreciated for all time and who hardly had need of financial remuneration, so significant was his everlasting contribution.

The modern, or modernist, western literary author—still occurring on the model of the poet, regardless of generic output (e.g., Joyce, Woolf, Dos Passos, just to name a few Anglophones, the list goes on)—focused myopically on the mediation of language. The modernist author analogized, via the mediation of language(s), via the mediation of various contemporary technologies, Romantic distance; in place of the contemplative, suffering distance across which the Romantic recognized his “I,” the modernist cultivated a technologized distance. (As Tan Lin writes, “…modernist literature, or what might be more aptly deemed the Literature of Information, [is] itself conditioned by early technological developments in radio transmission and encryption.”) Indeed, as the twentieth century wore on, some deepened their commitment to technical distanciation, arguing that it was not the self that counted, in its dramatic alienation or euphoric self-recognition, but rather mediation in or as itself, whether by means of something roughly known as “language” or else by means of other surfaces, systems (examples might include but are not limited to: commerce, the American “media,” and, later, Internet tubes). The all-important authorial pointing became a pointing up, not of private emotion, but of certain recalcitrant discourses, lists, affidavits, search results. Sometimes these were historical, sometimes the stuff of everyday, which is to say, profoundly non-transcendent matter, or, rather: the writing that in fact surrounds us, on the back of a Metrocard or in an IRS notice, in contrast to—though sometimes mixed with—that voice which shudders with each wing beat of the soul, which is calculatingly designed to shudder at this precise moment. (American art was “simultaneously” turning toward conceptualism.)

But I am writing this as an American and therefore am also capable of fatigue with respect to avant-gardes. (Indeed, Romanticism, in its own time, was an avant-garde.) I’ve wanted, anyway, to think a little differently, concerning the figure of the author. I’ve wanted to think about this for contemporary poetry, but also in a more general way, and I have wanted to see if there were a way to think about the author without thinking about Romantic distance, per se—without becoming so excited about the drama of some mediated “I.” But how to do this? I’m not saying, by the way, that “I” don’t think that mediation is real. “I” see it as extremely real. What I’m more baffled by is the distance, seeing as it’s assumed, i.e., a priori of some text or technology (or economy) actually getting in the way of so-called direct expression.

I also feel that I want to move away from value claims that are associated with individuality because I don’t think they make a lot of sense. In other words, to say that a certain poem is “too individualistic,” or “too much about the self,” “It’s too ‘selfy,’” or, contrastingly, “This poem isn’t selfish enough,” isn’t really useful. Instead, I’d like to think more about the social space that surrounds publication and the contemporary figure of the author. This kind of social space is applicable both to commercial literary endeavors and to small publications. I am about to use the term “minor” to talk about this, and I want to use this as a critical term, and I will prefer not to use it in the conventional sense, i.e. to mean, “No one is reading this. This work is minor.”

Someone else has said that the difference between a minor work and a classic is a difference between “indiscipline and discipline at work in language.” Indiscipline could be a good thing. Anyway, it’s not merely an idea of mine, this use of the term “minor” with a positive valence. Others will have already recognized it from 1975’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Deleuze and Guattari). In this account, literary space is usurped from the dictates of the market, becoming “minor,” even if still canonical and famous (i.e., the writings of Franz Kafka), by means of indirection. “Indirect discourse”—the distinct lack of individual enunciation, which is to say, the difference between “Hi!” and “She says, ‘Hi!’”—is a powerful marker, or figurative directive, that changes our relationship to the rhetoric of expression. As we engage indirection, what we say gets farther away from direct personal expression and closer to something impersonal, even thing-like. We stop speaking of stuff and start speaking at the same level as stuff, at the same level as writing or language, itself. Indeed, it wouldn’t be very disciplined of me to be so indirect as to 1.), start talking about the podium right now. Or to 2.), describe in detail the cost of my appearance here to present allegedly coherent thoughts. If I do 1.), you will become disoriented. If I do 2.), you’ll be vaguely fascinated by my lack of tact, slightly sorry for me, and, eventually, disoriented. I’ll be progressing in the wrong way, providing not content but context. You’ll want to challenge me, as I go on in detail about my airfare and the car that brought me here. Perhaps I’ll find myself only abstractly describing surfaces: for starters, the frosted plastic surface upon which I currently rest my notes…

I am describing a ridiculous sort of indirection. But aren’t activities like bragging, hype, etc., similarly indirect, similarly redundant? They are redundant activities with respect to any work of art unless they somehow also (and at once) constitute the work. Meanwhile here I am threatening to dismantle this occasion by describing in grindingly dull detail every object in this room…

Authorship, as disingenuity, should be associated with a certain kind of formalized dishonesty and stylish refusal. I’m not talking about intellectual property, per se, but rather the difference between the person “supposed to have made the work” and the/a/any real person, who is presumably sitting or standing somewhere, reading or writing or thinking. What will we do with this difference? Will we leverage it to our advantage or will we waste it for fun? Will this difference become a picturesque and unbridgeable distance, fit to be painted by Caspar David Friedrich, or will become a sort of tawdry performative default, me reading out the names of the “Contacts” in my iPhone, for example? Or could it become something even smaller, less important, and nearly value-free? A kind of scratch or nick in the surface of everyday, a twitch, a nod toward the strangeness of the conventions of literary property…

Here I’d like to introduce a tiny manual of forms, a triad. These three forms show what I conceive of as an ongoing dawning of disingenuity in American letters, as Romanticism is slowly but surely metabolized and converted into something else—something, to my mind, of striking, and even breathtaking and blatant, insignificance.

a. the obvious

I am not John Berryman’s best reader. I do not love confessional poetry, and yet there is a thing Berryman said. I imagine you may know the sonnet “Snowline,” in which Berryman is talking about things that have more or less legs? Here a sad entity wants to hear music, is cold and hungry and not optimistic in its outlook. A perplexed individual once asked Berryman about this poem. Berryman announced, “It was written by a sheep!” Berryman did not say, “This is the voice of a sheep, this is the true and sensitively imagined psychology of a sheep. I, Berryman, have accomplished the masterful gesture of putting myself in the place of an animal. He, in some sense, instead insulted his own endeavor, which is to say, said nearly nothing about it at all, the bare minimum. That Berryman made this comment in life is meaningful to me in a way that his writing alone isn’t. Obviously the sonnet was not written by a sheep, a pathetic beast frequently eaten by wolves and emitting tragic goo from small, melting eyes. Neither an example of understatement nor of humility, per se, this is rather an example of statement (a.k.a., restatement) of the obvious. What makes this anecdote interesting at all is the way in which it seems to recede—or sink, bathetically—back into the context that generated it: A question no doubt concerning the deep significance of the poem was rewarded with a somewhat rude, if silly/insignificant, lie about authorship. There’s an oddness here; a probe takes us, not deeper, but rather back to the surface. The written thing will have to speak for itself, because of its author’s obvious (i.e., stylish) incapacitation. I think, too, of related formulations: Flaubert’s claim that Madame Bovary is autobiographical, the tale of a life ruined by cheap novels; Gertrude Stein’s famous note to the effect, “I am writing for myself and strangers”…

b. understatement

People love litotes. (Litotes: rhetoric for, “understatement for effect.”) We love sarcasm and irony and when things are light. Disinguenity can be associated with a kind of understatement, a kind of reluctance to describe, associated with or regarding one’s own work. This is different, for example, from modernist disavowal of tradition and canons. This does not, for example, entail the aggressive correction of anyone else’s aesthetics, including those derived from the past. The use of understatement is an off-hand (i.e., indirect) way of dealing with convention and tradition. Think: the Marcel Duchamp of Rrose Selavy rather than the Duchamp of the readymade and its legion progeny. Just a click away from the touter of the obvious, the understater is not reticent, since she will say anything, just so long as the asymmetry of her statement runs in a certain direction. The reticent author is irritating. The reticent author aggressively omits, leaving behind blanks that demand to be filled. The understater, by contrast, is gentle and a very good liar. The understater graciously leaves nothing to the imagination. The understater produces, again, an attractive asymmetry. I could listen to understatements for hours on end. The poet Aaron Kunin has a line, an aphorism: “He has an unfair advantage in that his subject is inherently interesting.” It’s kind of crushing when you think about it. How can one hope to escape an author of this kind? And: How can we run from something that has never attempted (or been tempted) to obtain us?

c. refusal

There’s restatement of the obvious and understatement, the others of the brag; and then there are also flat-out refusals, refusals of attribution. I think these are the most beautiful forms of disingenuity. Here reticence swallows its tail. One could speak of anonymity or of pseudonyms—I of course find myself drawn to the notion that someone could find it impossible to attribute her work to herself—but better and perhaps more complex to speak of instances in which an author has not written, has refused to write, the book of which she claims to be the author. A number of ways to account for such a strange refusal: Perhaps the book exists within the context of another fiction and is therefore simply not a real book. There is also the classic example, a little too well worn for my taste, of so-called plagiarism, the case in which another’s agency or work or material is overtaken, stolen by some unprincipled author. Yet there is a bigger problem with authority, which neither of these rather more adorable scenarios seems to acknowledge, which is the general problem of the association of authorship with propriety, in other words, the treatment of the work of the author as a form of property. For at the moment in which my writing becomes the work of the author “Lucy Ives” it becomes a form of property rather than an act and is in some sense “severed,” as the critic Susan Stewart writes, from me, as a being with a body and a life, even as it is given over to someone whom the law recognizes by my name. Not only does my work enter a weird, hovering sort of state by means of this process, but so do “I, Lucy,” whoever that may now be, becoming “a place of quotation already located within a system of quotation.”

In this case, which is to say, granted the real and actual form of intellectual property, it may be preferable to write none of one’s own books, to refuse to. I’d suggest, too, that it’s not enough (fun) simply to cite or appropriate the writing of other authors. If “literary property” is already an oxymoron, how dull to simply repeat the gesture. Better to do as little to act as the author you are, or may be, as possible: Tell a few friends to paste any text they like into a Google doc and publish it under your name without reading it first. (You will come to know what kind of friends you have.) Paste the text of the most famous poems in the western world (Shakespeare’s sonnets) into an online anagram generator and then methodically use the traditional constraints of iambic pentameter and rhyme to arrange the new words generated into sonnets. Any remaining letters may be used for a title. (Become the poet K. Silem Mohammad.)

Make technique into a byzantine lie, a fiction in itself, rather than remunerable labor. Live on the cultural capital this act indirectly affords you. Work for an hourly wage as an educator or consultant. See that the author exists but never know how exactly this artificial person serves your own financial interests. Observe the generation of a strange form of textual property—infinitely and instantaneously reproducible—that never redounds to any living person, even after your death. Begin speaking strangely and, at times, with great reluctance, of the products of your acts, which, you have to admit, are nothing more than an order of words. Deny the existence of any such products. Behave in a fashion that would alienate almost everyone you know if all these people did not know you are a writer. Spend years perplexed by the question of how to do anything productive, in light of the fact that in writing the thief and dissimulator can do everything under the law that the truth-teller can do, if not far, far more.

Having said (and/or written) all this, there is one thing left to admit, which is that I continue to anticipate a reader. I, a living person, do so. I toy with this notion. And when I think about the form of the lie, the untruth, the most interesting thing about it, for me, is its anticipatory structure. I consider this anticipatory structure a mode of indirection, something that basically belongs to everyone alive; it’s another way of saying “There are other ones,” even if we are not really sure who they are or if we’ll ever reach them. I surely consider this anticipatory structure the most pleasurable aspect of everything I do, and everything I do not do, as an author. Cloaked in my own breathtaking insignificance, I do nothing much: I go down to the beach every so often to examine the new detritus.