Chimeric Entanglements

In Critical Revolutionaries: Five Critics Who Changed the Way We Read, critic Terry Eagleton declares: “A critique must establish a certain distance from its object in order to appraise it.” For Eagleton (and others), the critic’s authority exists in relation to this performed distance. I’d like to needle this hallowing of critical distance, and seam-rip both the performance of distance and its value.

Eagleton’s book highlights five Anglo-Saxon men who “revolutionized” poetry criticism from within the fine shrubbery of Cambridge. All five believed criticism played a role in diagnosing social ills. Leaning into this gravitas, Eagleton likens the duties of the critic to “those of the priest, prophet, or politician.” (Alas, he ignores the extent to which reviewing is also form of book marketing and publicity, which is to say, Eagleton overlooks the critic’s role as pimp.)

As the “monitor of the spiritual health of the modern age,” Eagleton’s critic supposedly creates the language in which we know ourselves. But there is no shortage of diagnoses, therapy industries, lifestyle coaches, and privatized solutions to social problems. Diagnosing has never been easier. What’s difficult is explaining why this abundance of diagnoses, therapies, and capitalist realisms fail to heal.

Forget healing, diagnosis, and critical distance for a moment. Imagine a criticism so entangled with its subject that the breath-prints blur together. 

Carving an ontology that foregrounds critical resonance rather than reference, Daniela Cascella’s Chimeras presents a new form of writing (“chimeric writing”) as well as a new form of border-bending critique (“transcelation”), drawing on intimate relationships between the writer and their private canon. For Cascella, this canon includes the Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik and the Italian writer/translator Cristina Campo. To entangle myself further and to emphasize the intimacy of this approach in its refusal of critical distance, I’ll imitate Cascella’s decision to refer to her subjects by their first names.

In “Appearances, Encounters (A Deranged Essay),” which appears in Chimeras, Cascella establishes her critical approach as a site of ongoing conversation with the text and its writer. Correspondence folds into critique; derangement broadens to include refrains, echoes, direct address, and heightened textual dimensionality. Cascella is haunted by this excerpt from Alejandra’s journal:

4 December 1962: The new criticism that interests me […] [presents] an approach which, whether formal, or internal, has a shared quality: the notion of the tie. A tie between the critic and the literary work […] which leads to the tie between the subject and object, that is to say [TEXT INCOMPLETE].

The material incompleteness of the text launches Cascella straight into the book she is writing: “I write in the space carved by that text incomplete.” Unfinishedness lures Cascella to co-create the criticism Alejandra imagined: “I practice Alejandra’s yearning for criticism as tie, the unspoken substance that connects a writer to the subject of her study.”

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “correspondence” (noun) is defined as 1) a close similarity, connection, or equivalence 2) communication by exchanging letters with someone or 3) letters sent or received. For Cascella, correspondence re-visions critical distance. She demonstrates, for example, how Pizarnik corresponds with her “third interlocutor,” Cristina, by postal mail and via the dedication of her poem “Rings of Ash,” in which Pizarnik describes voices that sing “so the others can’t sing.” All three dictionary definitions of correspondence meet in the relationship between these interlocutors and their texts.

“As you will see, Alejandra, your presence is the cause of all sorts of uncanny phenomena,” Cristina writes in a letter to Alejandra. Correspondence is a causal agent, a thing that makes things happen, as Cascella muses: 

Consider the polysemy in the term correspondence: consonants, mutual adjusting, letter-writing, nexus, keeping in touch with, receiving messages from, even from what was before, remote, or imagined.

Cascella ends “Appearances, Encounters (A Deranged Essay)” with an asterisk signaling that what follows will be “written from recollections and echoes” culled from the words of Alejandra and Cristina, particularly their letters and journals, which haven’t yet been translated into English. In this way, Cascella will perform “chimeric writing as entanglement with the subjects of its study and yearning: in conversation, before translation.” Cascella creates “imaginary conversations” between the critic and her subject, turning criticism into “a space to be inhabited together.”

“Monstrous, composite, burning, yearning: a chimera,” writes Cascella, and in my notebook I find Kate Zambreno’s definition of collage as “a chimera, a strange combination.” An interrupture becomes a dialogue between these two writers in my mind.

In Appendix Project, Zambreno plays with the appendix as a form in order to enact an “uncanny… doubling and return back to a previous text.” Each lecture and essay is titled as an appendix that returns to her email correspondences with other female writers, including Sofia Samatar, and to excised sections of Zambreno’s novel. Samatar and Zambreno correspond through their shared interest in “the performance of disappearance, the poetics of anonymity,” and “the uncanniness of intertextuality.”

Appendix Project anchors itself in the work of a book's unfinishedness, demonstrating how the next book picks up from unfinished conversations begun in prior books, conversations, and readings. So, too, Cascella’s forms embrace this monstrosity, this thing we fear for its perversion of the natural or the normal.

Art and poetry often begin in the upsetting of the natural—in the uncanny or out-of-place image, in the queering metaphor. Frank O’Hara’s “neon in daylight” reminds us that neon is made for the night. There is the undertow of the nocturne, a song form that emerges in dim-ness, that gets tangled in the provocation of daytime neon. In poetry, entanglement is as natural as sex, mudslides, earthworms, and tornadoes. Uncanny entanglements give us electric earthworms who travel by tornado.

Cascella begins “A Bell for Cristina, or Writing an Image of Echo and Chimera (A transcelation),” by quoting Maurice Blanchot on the purpose of criticism: “Perhaps commentary is just a little snowflake making a bell toll.” I think again of what Zambreno calls the “ghostliness” in this “speaking someone else’s image.” And that she wrote this in a piece titled “Index C: Translations of the Uncanny.” How thick the skin of translation.

Above my desk, pinned with a thumbtack, inscribed in faded orange marker, this quote from Anne Lauterbach:

What I know is sometimes a defense against what there is to be known. This defense can realize itself as fear, as contempt, as doubt, as ideology, as polemics—the desire to fasten one’s partial knowledge and conviction into universal value.

I glance at it as a reminder that I don’t yet know what I don’t know. My desire to theorize what I know, or to find words with which to explain how I know it, often leads me to invoke conventional critical distance. But if we take critique as a literary form that draws the reader into a deeper relationship with the text, then how deep—or what deepness involves—depends on the reader’s appetite for risk. Construing the role of critic as closer to that of reader allows us to experiment with stand-insideness rather than stand-asideness as a critical approach.

Like Elias Canetti, “I want to keep smashing myself until I am whole.” There is nothing seductive in the patina of my own innocence, or the critical distance that makes such innocence possible. Don’t be definitive; be interesting. Pose intractable questions that challenge the world as we know it. Experiment with formal challenges to knowing. Don’t re-invent the wheel but please do re-vision it. Broaden the banks of the critique-creek, as Cascella does with transcelation. Concoct new ways for polylingual critics to engage texts that haven’t yet been translated into English. Palpate the posthumous embodiment that challenges the border between self and text.

Conviction does not allow the world to change; it refuses happenings. Over-investment in ideology gives us a ready-made critical lens while depriving us of a relationship with the reality that the world has changed, that it will continue to change, that it will be unrecognizable. Re-visioning the world requires us to get dirty, to be implicated, to theorize from inside capitalist realism.

Ideology turns a promise into an absolute—this is why people compare ideology to God, or why religions become ideologies. Judgment that doesn’t interrupt itself comes closer to conviction than thought.