4.1 Análisis De Los Resultados
4.1.1 INTERPRETACIÓN DE LOS RESULTADOS
'At last after many years, they found out a thing they had been specifically trying for. They discovered that if you took a tiny little vein out of a man's body, and put it in a glass jar with certain leaves and plants, it became a man. When it had grown as big as a boy, you could take it out of the jar, and then it would live and keep on growing till it became a man, a fine man who would never die. He would be undying.'
~Lawrence, The Undying Man
She. I have heard said
There is danger in the body.
He. Did God in portioning wine and bread Give man His thought or His mere body?
~Yeats, 'Michael Robartes and the Dancer'
'The Master of Rime, time after time, came down the arranged lad- ders of vision or ascended the smoke and flame towers of the opposite of vision, into or out of the language of daily life, husband to one word, wife to the other, breath that leaps forward upon the edge of dying.'
The Resurrecting Fairy tale and Wounds of 'the man who died' in 'Towards the Shaman'
1935-1941
Robert Duncan's poetry is known for both unmasking the homosexual poet and avoiding the label of a 'homosexual'. A controversial voice for the gay-community, Duncan's semi-occasional refusals to be a 'leader' are self-fulfilling, antagonising his readers since high school while building a humanistic poetic out of fostering conflict.373 His groundbreaking essay, 'The Homosexual in Society' (1944), scorned homophobia yet found the gay-community's reactionary exclusivity no less disturbing than heteronormative prejudice, and his 1970 lecture, 'Changing Perspectives Reading Whitman,' challenged empathetic readings of Whitman (a leading figure of the gay community) by pointing to Whitman's American exceptionalism.374 Perhaps more provocative is Duncan's long dependence upon gender and sexual difference in his poetry. The gendering in Duncan's poetry is often implemented into fantasy narratives, in many ways representative of Duncan's particular Freudianism, but such gendering is also rooted in Duncan's readings of D.H. Lawrence, who remains a remote figure in Duncan criticism. To explore Duncan's provocative poetics of bi-sexuality, gender performance and sexual difference, his reliance upon Lawrence seems critical. Duncan had acknowledged criticism's general disregard for Lawrence in 1985 when addressing the veiled influences within Allen's The New American Poetry: 'I think Lawrence is a hidden integer in there, the estimate of Lawrence'.375 Such critical blind-spots widen despite Duncan's occasional listings of Lawrence as one of his three forefathers: 'I had three: Pound, Williams, and D.H. Lawrence'.376 This chapter therefore attempts to introduce a
373 Robert Duncan, 'Man's Fulfillment in Order and Strife,' Collected Essays and Other Prose
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), p. 202.
374 Nathaniel Mackey, Paracritical Hinge (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2005), p. 126. 375 Michael Andre Bernstein and Burton Hatlen, 'Interview with Robert Duncan,' Sagetrieb, 4:2-3
(Fall/Winter 1985), p. 109.
376 Robert Duncan, 'Early Poetic Community (with Robert Duncan)'. The American Poetry Review, 3:3 (May/June 1974), pp. 54-58 (54). In a 1971 interview with Kent State, Duncan stated
history of Duncan's use of Lawrence. By retracing Duncan's poetics on gender and sexual difference, through queer readings of Lawrence, Lawrence emerges as an integral component for Duncan's queer poetics.
Though Duncan's earliest work from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s is often overlooked, his reliance upon a poetics of gender and resurrection, as found in Lawrence, appears to be foundational during these years. With the onset of WWII, Duncan's earliest poetry began to correlate sexual and social violence, which in turn enabled his literary guides to adopt a vital role. In 1976 Duncan looked back at his early WWII poems and elaborated upon the emergence of a bi-sexual 'fairy tale' utilised to control and resignify the sexual psychodramas estranging society, which he witnessed after the break up with Ned Fahs, Duncan's first boyfriend.377 A 'wound' of loss returns throughout many of the poems in Duncan's first collection, The Years As Catches, particularly around its signature poem, 'Toward the Shaman,' which is part of series that relies upon male and female guides for the poet's resurrection. It is in this formibable phase that Duncan also expresses a dependence upon Lawrence's own resurrecting narrative, The Man Who Died, a novella which follows the mythological consummation between Christ and Isis. In this fantasy, 'the man who died' must also perpetually re-heal his 'wounds'. Duncan's and Lawrence's resurrection narratives each hinge upon gender and sexual difference, in order to create a new identity. However, such narratives of resurrection often invoke a teleology, not unlike the workings of fantasy, which can be problematic for the non-linear and dis-orienting trajectories of queer theory. Therefore, by first contextualising the crises of Duncan's bi-sexual fairy tale and its vital relation to Lawrence, a subsequent analysis finds that the recurring 'wounds' within The Man Who Died and Duncan's early poetry continually disrupt the progression of the text's resurrection.
In a 1976 interview Duncan recalls the 'bisexual' 'psychodramas' which were not only structuring his early poems but were plaguing 'the whole society, including
that Kabalism had four fathers (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Adam), 'And I had three: Pound, Williams, and D.H. Lawrence,' but then adds 'Olson'.
377 The concept of the 'fairy tale' is defined throughout the following pages, but Duncan uses it to
refer to a fantasy narrative of gender norms which one is inscribed into, with what he soon calls 'Prince Charming', for example. These unconsciously narratives or fantasies, structured by gender roles, is what Duncan describes as a 'psychodrama' driving and alienating him and society, causing harm to psychical and social communities, because such structures are divisive, restricting, and unreal.
heterosexuals,' wherein individuals either need to 'have a fuck' or feel 'lonely,' incapable of fostering real 'conviviality' among gendered communities.378 For Duncan, a sexuality reduced to impulsive fucking was an apocalyptic symptom, as society's 'urges or pleasures have been channeled so exclusively in the sexual direction that our sexuality becomes very extraordinary' and cannot 'permit conviviality,' which has 'proved very hard for me, for one thing, to learn'.379 Duncan witnessed the alienating structuration of heteronormative narratives, which he relates to the archetypal gendering of a 'fairy tale': 'We have come back to the fairy tale'.380 Duncan speaks personally of his own bisexual escapades after Ned Fahs broke up with him in 1938: Duncan briefly became a gigolo, carried on sexual exploits with AnaïsNin's wealthy cousin, Paul, in New York City, and constructed a relationship with Marjorie McKee in '41, whom he married in '43. Ekbert Faas's biography entitles this life phase, 'The Husband and Gigolo'. But soon Duncan began to create a poetic that could pilot such a fractious fairy tale:
I'd inherited the conventional fairy tale idea of a household, consisting of wife and husband. So I actually married [McKee], and always felt guilty in the marriage, although I married because I was in love. I felt guilt because in dreams and in poems it was the male I craved for marriage. In fact, my first poems where a woman really appears came some years after my marriage, and had to do with fairy tale experience.381
Duncan introduces a 'fairy tale experience' being integrated into his poetry around 1943. Since poems composed between '40 and '44 were worked into Duncan's '47 collection, Heavenly City, Earthly City, the early poems can be read as Duncan's fatal
378 Robert Duncan, Robert Peters, Paul Trachtenberg, 'A Conversation with Robert Duncan'. Chicago Review, 43:4 (Fall 1997), pp. 83-105 (96). Duncan uses the term 'conviviality' to express his aim at achieving a psychical and social community that is not driven apart by the 'fairy tale psychodrama–of gender roles and the drive of fucking it causes due to a lacking identity or real community. Conviviality is the achievement of a psychical and social community where each person can be both genders to another person, or their lover, as Duncan describes.
379 Ibid. 380 Ibid, p. 97 381 Ibid, p. 91.
psychodramatic transition into the fairy tale movement through poems such as 'Toward the Shaman,' wherein the poet returns to the loss of 'N' (Ned) in order to 'pass thru'.
The naming of such a 'fairy tale experience' is a resignification itself, referring to fantasies of particular gender roles while reinscribing them into a queer pun. In playing out the structured bisexual psychodramas more creatively in his poetry, Duncan's psychical and social conviviality becomes less burdened, without the splitting (gendered) demands of either heteronormative or homonormative 'boundaries'. Duncan continues the interview by advocating his own fairy tale as a mise en scène with ranging roles, which the poet or its beloved can interchangeably perform: 'Bisexuality must mean the fairy tale stance where your Prince Charming knows his role and seeks for others who also require a mix of male / female. So we no longer have a psychodrama based on bartering,' since the 'true bisexual tries to arrive at a secret inner appointment he has with life and with a substantive partner who will manifest both genders'.382 Duncan allows freeplay within fairy tale roles but also recognises such performances as mere creation, albeit restorative. Therefore Duncan is also conveniently obliged to cast off such symbolic and imaginary roles as unreal: 'since one's actual love for a living person is always stronger than any in a fairy tale, I could tell the fairy tale to go and fuck itself'.383 By attending to the psychical structures and narratives of a bi-sexual fantasy, Duncan can then manipulate such structures and their relations.
Duncan's fairy tale performance resonates less with the homosexual tradition in American poetry that had disguised itself with heteronormative masks384 and more with Judith Butler's Undoing Gender, where gender plays a role in its own undoing, for 'one does not "do" one's gender alone. One is always "doing" with or for another, even if the other is only imaginary'.385 Butler observes a practice 'for grasping the workings of fantasy construed not as a set of projections on an internal screen but as part of human relationality itself. It is on the basis of [psychoanalytic] insight that we can come to understand how fantasy is essential to an experience of one's own body, or that of
382 Ibid, p. 97. 383 Ibid.
384 Robert K. Martin, The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1979).
another, as gendered'.386 Duncan does not repress the fairy tale psychodrama but repurposes it, and reappropriates such for queer substitutions. Thus the fairy tale poetic is a redeployed performance; a technique not unlike Butler's resignification of Althusserian interpellation, since Duncan, in recognising the psychical subjectivation of the fairy tale, renders the fairy tale itself as a regime to restructure. The poetics of Duncan's fairy tale seek to manipulate the unconscious structures of fantasy in order to utilise gender relations as a generative construct for reality. As such, Duncan's fairy tale does not seem bound by Laplanchean fantasies of sexual roles, for example, since Duncan's poetic resists being determined by the unconscious, though Duncan still re-presents gendered fantasy. For Laplanche, fantasy can reveal itself through free-association or daydreams, but Duncan's poetic seems aware of its facilitation. The split symbolisations of gender thus surface as part of Duncan's unconscious history, but Duncan's re-assignment and re- deployment of the fairy tale is a process wherein his determined fantasy becomes queer in the making.387 Such a creative process seems reconciliatory and therapeutic, but never complete. Indeed, the fairy tale becomes one of Duncan's most formative literary devices, in support for a queer movement towards psychical and social community.
Duncan's early poems and his model for appropriating the gendered 'fairy tale' narrative stem from a Lawrentian background, for in the above interview Duncan observes Lawrence trying to reinstate a similar sexual communitas. Duncan empathises with Lawrence's like desire for a 'conviviality' which could remain contingent to sexuality without being dependent upon the concept of 'sex'. The objectification of 'sex,' Duncan states, 'is what I think D.H. Lawrence found so abhorrent he was almost ready to dispense with loving,' since 'he was surrounded by people who loved him and by people he
386 Ibid, p. 15.
387 See Laplanche's 'Gender, Sex, and the sexual,' where Laplanche applies his Freudian concept
of Nachträglichkeit (not explicitly mentioned in the article) to the formation of "gender"
symbolization, which, Laplanche argues, comes before both sex and the sexual, influenced by the child's social unconscious (the external other, the parental, the socii), and yet gender is re-
fashioned once teenage sexuality becomes a psychical influence. For Laplanche, gender is a signification process that is always already re-inscribing the en-gendered Past within the
conscious experience of the present/future. Duncan also is re-creating the original fairy tale in the ongoing event of the poem, or fairy tale poetic. Jean Laplanche, trans Susan Fairfield. 'Gender, Sex, and the Sexual'. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 8:2, 201-219 (2007).
loved'.388 Duncan was well aware of the bisexual communitisation Lawrence struggled with, for as early as 1949 Duncan worked with Jamie de Angulo, 'the very young man that D.H. Lawrence had fallen in love with' at Taos, notes Duncan.389 Lawrence had at one time confessed his bisexuality to William Henry,390 yet Howard Booth argues that Lawrence changes his position on bisexuality, homosexuality and heterosexuality in tidal shifts that surface mostly as 'strategies to discipline his sexuality'.391 Duncan also portrays Lawrence's struggle for a (bi)sexual accord as a quite exhausting yet restorative project. Critics such as Fiona Becket and Sanatan Bhowal confirm that gender conflicts remain the junction for Lawrence criticism,392 and Mark Kinkead-Weekes's biography finds that Lawrence's struggle with gender differences was the locus of his poetics, since male- female confrontation in Lawrence seems 'more creative and transforming, if more difficult'.393
Unlike Duncan criticism, Lawrence scholarship tends to associate Lawrence's struggle with homosexuality with narcissistic shame, yet both Duncan and Lawrence distanced themselves from 'homosexuality' during a time of war and appealed to a politics of otherness. Lawrence's sudden fear of women and homophobia has been observed with the rise of WWI, particularly during his traumatic encounter with homosexuality at Cambridge in 1915.394 After completing The Rainbow (1915), Lawrence visited Garnett
388 Ibid, p. 97.
389 Christopher Wagstaff, A Poet's Mind: Collected Interviews with Robert Duncan, 1960-1985
(Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2012), p. 234.
390 Mark Kinkead-Weekes, D.H. Lawrence: Triumph into Exile, 1912-1922 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 377-385.
391 Howard Booth, 'D.H. Lawrence and Male Homosexual Desire,' The Review of English Studies,
53:209 (Feb, 2002), p. 106. Booth uses drafts of Women in Love to represent Lawrence's textual practices of sexual or self-management, as the narrator speaks for Birkin's bisexual conflicts: 'All the time, he recognized that, although he was always drawn to women, feeling more at home with a woman than man, yet it was for men that he felt the hot, flushing, roused attraction which a man is supposed to feel for the other sex,' and yet 'He never accepted the desire, and received it as part of himself' (98). Such an example hints at Lawrence's self-censorship, and yet Birkin's repression is not necessarily the narrator's, and Lawrence's changing position on bisexuality has often proven as difficult to pin down as Duncan suggests.
392 Sanatan Bhowal, 'Lawrence and the Question of Gender in our Times,' Études Lawrenciennes
45 (2014), pp. 141-160.
393Triumph in Exile, p. 303.
394 Cornelia Nixon, Lawrence's Leadership Politics and Turn Against Women (Berkeley:
and friends at Cambridge,395 but after Keynes surprised Lawrence by acting out 'a nightmare of two men copulating,' this 'purblind sense of identification shocked Lawrence to the core'.396However, Kinkead-Weekes contextualises Lawrence's shock and conflict from 1913 through 1915 by implying that despite the homosexual-panic following Oscar Wilde's sentencing, Lawrence's working-class background was rather more repelled by the exclusivity of Cambridge's homosexual circles, who symbolised England's exclusive gay intellegensia and artists. The narcissism of the Cambridge circle, concludes Kinkead-Weekes, was 'strikingly embodied in the kind of homosexual he encountered at the heart of English civilisation,' that is, at the time of the Great War.397 Such a context puts Lawrence in a comparable frame with Duncan's WWII essay, 'The Homosexual in Society' (1944), where homosexuals themselves contain a 'problem more treacherous,' since they 'turned to a second outcast society as inhumane as the first'.398 The gay-community's prideful exclusion of general humanity, as Duncan saw it, could not entreat outsiders for the sake of a more generative world, and neither could heteronormativity. He continues: 'Alone, not only I, but, I felt, the others who had appeared as I did so mocking, so superior in feeling, had known, knew still, those troubled emotions, the deep and integral longings that we as human beings feel, holding us from violate actions by the powerful sense of humanity that is their source, longings that lead us to love, to envision a creative life'.399 Though Lawrence and Duncan are a world apart in their biographical and poetic practices of (homo)sexuality, Duncan's reading of Lawrence's own struggle to form a utopian community by managing gender and sexual difference reinforces Duncan's own creativity.
After relating to Lawrence's own fairy tale mission, Duncan's '76 interview exemplifies Lawrence's literary depictions of dueling genders as a vital poetic for queer identities, and Duncan does so by privileging Lawrence over Whitman or Shakespeare. 'Whitman imposes his own feeling for the male body over what is essentially a woman's position,' while 'Shakespeare and Lawrence were truly gifted in absorbing dual identities,'
395 Garnett, Duncan, Grant, [John Maynard] Keynes and Birrell.
396 Michael Squires, Living at the Edge: a Biography of D.H. Lawrence and Frieda Von Richthofen (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), p. 119.
397Triumph in Exile, p. 305. 398Collected Essays, p. 10. 399 Ibid.
though Shakespeare 'did get caught in Antony and Cleopatra when he identifies with the Queen of the Nile. He usually doesn't "identify," but rather fully creates by entering the personas he creates. There's an important difference'.400 Here Duncan stipulates the subtle yet vital difference between identifying or reinforcing gender and creating one. Duncan