Destruction and Universals in William Carlos Williams’s The Wedge

Abstract

This article is part of a larger study on the cultural poetics of mid-century modernism, using a series of American and German postwar examples, both literary and visual.1 My literary examples are, at the outset, a series of late modernist American poets writing before, during, and after the end of the war, the destruction of European cities, and the disclosure of the Holocaust, including T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets (1936-43), H.D.'s Trilogy (1946), Williams's Paterson (1946-51, 1958), Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos (1948), Charles Olson's Kingfishers (1950), Robert Duncan's An Essay at War (1966), and Sylvia Plath's Lady Lazarus (1965).2 This series of mid-century modernism advances from an anticipatory wish for destruction to an anguished positing of that which succeeds it: a historically contingent demand for universals. In each of these modernist, postmodernist, humanist or antihumanist works, a wish for destruction is the prior condition for positing (or rejecting) any sort of universal.3 On this evidence, I propose: there is no universal without destruction. Critical Theory's dialectic between reason and unreason itself anticipates the historical construction of ethical universals promulgated at the Nuremberg Trials, while it makes a common caused with modernists who either negotiated these perversions or sought a way out through an invocation of universality, however imagined or represented. The poetry of mid-century modernists and what Theodor W. Adorno termed the new categorical imperative of the Nuremberg Trials connects via Critical Theory to delineate the constructedness of universals themselves.4 In an age that has flagrantly renounced the Nuremberg standards-for instance, in the detention of persons seen as without rights in Guantanamo-or that sees universals as merely the mystification of global capitalism, such a critique is timely and necessary.Anticipatory DestructionWilliam Carlos Williams, that mild-mannered physician, is my prime exemplar of an anticipatory poetics of destruction. The necessity of renewal- by means of a poetry founded on the senses and on the overturning of tradition-is thematized throughout early Williams, from Kora in Hell's negative mimesis to Spring and All and The Descent of Winter's dialectic of creation and destruction. This dialectic is central to the construction of art in Spring and All, and throughout Williams's work: decay of cathedrals / is efflorescent / through the phenomenal / growth of movie houses // whose catholicity is / progress since / destruction and creation / are simultaneous (CP1 213); modernity elicits violent change and is only comprehensible once that is recognized. In a prose section, Williams explains: word is not liberated, therefore able to communicate release from the fixities which destroy it until it is accurately tuned to the fact which giving it reality, by its own reality establishes its own freedom from the necessity of a word, thus freeing it and dynamizing it at the same time (CP1 235). Only by returning to material existence can the word be liberated from being fixated on it: poetry is the destruction of the condition of fixity by means of encounter with the material. In Williams's modernism, the necessity of destruction elevates the material and particular to the status of a universal, yielding the so much depends upon of the red wheelbarrow.The war-time publication of The Wedge produced a volume that, in its theoretical framing, objectivist techniques, and thematic disjunction, pursues the same destructive renewal as Williams's avant-garde volumes, but later in time.5 At mid century and in middle age-well-published but undervalued-Williams no longer sees the dialectic of creation and destruction as merely aesthetic but as a fact of life in history. The aesthetic is where we comprehend the creativity of destruction; destruction is the prior condition for the vitality of art. Throughout his mixed collection of atemporal lyrics and meditative verse, themes of destruction emerge out of nowhere; a feared event (and not only the war) seems to be rapidly approaching-in fact it may already have arrived and there is nothing we can do but record it. …