I am delighted to be able to begin my response by thanking my fellow panelists for writing papers that I could enjoy hearing again even after spending considerable time with them. I want to thank them also for being so impressive on Stein as to force me to confine my remarks to the Wittgenstein aspect of their papers, where they help stage a conflict that I think is very much worth pursuing. I will argue that it is misleading to impose a pragmatist grid on what Wittgenstein says about language games and about the role of philosophical grammar. Pragmatism depends on the ability to determine shared purposes. Wittgenstein is at once more ambitious and less demanding, for he is not interested in the empirical question of how agreement is reached and purposes satisfied. Instead his primary purpose is reflective: he wants to understand not the fact of agreement but the possibility of agreement in terms of how individuals find their way to a way, that is, to a sense of "fit" from within which questions about meaning and purpose simply dissolve, at least relative to the specific practice at hand.
These two papers provide an excellent laboratory experiment for testing this assertion because they take opposing positions that I think are both limited by abstract philosophical agendas distorting the full reflective resources provided by Wittgenstein's notion of grammar. Meyer faults Wittgenstein for not achieving a radical empiricism comparable to Stein's, while for Lezra, Wittgenstein is too much the empiricist to appreciate how the Hegelian concept of reserve reveals necessary tensions between the pull of explanation and the pull of an immediacy, a pure "there" displaying what proves an unnarratizable subjectivity. By engaging the alternatives that these critics represent I hope to show how Wittgenstein in fact does allow for an immediacy that is deeply connected to something like "a determined excess of reserve," since his imagined dialogues create exemplary contexts by which the "there" of "perspicuous representation" becomes resonant in its concreteness. To make this case I will concentrate on what seems shared by Stein and Wittgenstein on the notion of grammar and its relation to the staging of subjective agency.
I think it is fair to take Meyer's praise of "radical empiricism" as an idealizing of those writerly stances that can treat sentences entirely in terms of the roles they play "swimming in the stream of thought" . If language can swim in these waters, then a behaviorist theory of emotions will not suffice because, contra James, one cannot simply treat emotions as the expressions of physiological states. Rather one must also develop a proprioceptive psychology in which self-reflection and imagination are acknowledged as elemental building blocks of what emerges as "feeling," i. e., as "the experience of a particular succession of sensations" . In my view this critique is clearly on the right track, but I am bothered by two possible conceptual problems in Meyer's formulation of his case. First, a truly radical empiricism would have serious trouble accounting for any "reserve" within this proprioceptive process: all it allows us to do is track the flow of feeling without having the ability to characterize the frameworks and structures that give the feelings shape and meaning over time. In relation to texts this empiricism might account for the movement within a paragraph but it would be hard-pressed to track any larger semantic units. And even within the paragraph there are relations among sentences that would be very difficult to account for in any empirical model, if by "empirical" we mean phenomena that in principle could be located by some tracking machine like a semantic MRI. In fact Meyer is terrific in showing just how much the idea of a paragraph differs from the idea of a sentence because where sentences offer only types, infinitely combinable but without direction, paragraphs bring to bear something like an intentionality that can only be inferred. Hence in Stein's example of the dog drinking, what makes a paragraph is the rhythmic process that pervades and distinguishes the whole. What can it mean to locate this process as the object of a radical empiricism? Clearly no idealism will be able to capture its distinctive singularity. But why must empiricism be the only alternative to idealism? Why can we not simply stop with the fact that as we learn to read Stein we learn to allow such singularity to function as perspicuous representatives of what remains singular and untranslatable in our affective practices?
So my first problem with Meyer is that his empiricism is not concrete enough. As Wittgenstein was fond of showing, empiricism about mental states will always lead to conditions that cannot be measured or included within empiricist practices. The second problem then involves how we characterize the consequences of such misplaced concreteness. While I laud Meyer's stress on the complexity and immediacy of Steinian writing, I think he is not fair to what Wittgenstein offers for our attributing value to such work. In particular I want to challenge Meyer's claim that Wittgenstein is himself so committed to theory that his thinking lacks any middle ground between instance and language game, and hence cannot get at the rich singularity of particular paragraphings. For while Wittgenstein does attack James for lacking the appropriate experimental method, he is not proposing that such a method is possible, but simply criticizing James for claiming the status of science for his research. Analogously, while Wittgenstein does say that there can be a physiognomy of error, he is careful not to extend that claim to any positive assertions that there can be a physiognomy about human meanings. What Wittgenstein does say turns out to be much closer to Stein and to help define the specific orientation that her writing takes further than Wittgenstein himself does.
One cannot capture this link if one insists that Stein is a radical empiricist. Rather one has to insist on the deep suspicion in both Stein and Wittgenstein of any such philosophical positioning. Consider Stein's statement that "Grammar does not consist in rain raining that has nothing to do with expectation." 1 And recall how for both Stein and Wittgenstein the positive force of writing becomes its capacity to build upon the negative realization that abstract categories like "emotion" or "reserve" or "singularity" or "identity" rarely do any actual work. These categories are good for eliciting slogans we can argue for, like "radical empiricism," but they cannot get us a clear grasp of what we are arguing about or what we might gain from our arguments. For that grasp, or, better, for moments when such grasp seems almost attainable, Wittgenstein insists that the most his writing can do is provide perspicuous representations, and Stein seems to follow similar principles. Such representations are not singular in any significant way. They do not refer to what might occur only once nor is their mode of expression unique. What matters is their particular process of becoming representative--not by the arguments proposed or the human powers dramatized but simply by the distinctive angle of vision the representations maintain in areas where our minds have become cramped by remaining too long in what prove awkward and misleading postures.
I claim then that Meyer buys into a typical philosophical error in his insistence that Stein realizes a particular vision of the world, a radical empiricism, that Wittgenstein failed to accomplish. He may not be wrong about how one might provide a philosophical translation of Stein's accomplishment, but he is wrong to think that any translation into specific philosophical positions will capture what most matters humanly and hence philosophically in Stein's writing. And I claim further that what he misses in Wittgenstein is precisely what now provides us the best means we have of getting at this force in Stein's texts. This trait in Wittgenstein is his way of not worrying about ideas like immediacy because for him what matters is not any truth the writing possesses but simply its power to develop a potential representativeness by virtue of how it handles concrete details. (To call this concreteness "immediacy" is to have to oppose it to mediation, yet there is little point to any reflective enterprise that is not involved in mediating some significant concerns.)
As my example of how such perspicuous representation uses concreteness as its means of mediation I turn to Wittgenstein's reminder that it "sound[s] queer to say: 'For a second he felt deep grief.'" 2 Wittgenstein does not deny that we could produce a context in which this statement makes sense, and he does not insist that he has somehow captured something immediate. He does invite us to realize that providing such contexts or making such claims does little more than demonstrate how clever the analyst is. The important self-reflexive task is managing to keep what seems queer foregrounded without displacing its critical and its projective force. Then we may be able to sneak past the borders established by our habits to allow this queerness in effect to put those habits on trial, and to indicate what they have been preventing us from appreciating. The positive task of the writing is relational. Its force is less in the immediacy it establishes than in the uses that this immediacy seems to project so that we can self-reflexively balance between seeing why we have not been able to see and registering further connections that follow from the framing provided by this odd position.
In this case the perspicuous representation foregrounds two surprising features within the grammar of certain emotions, features that clarify why writing about the emotions requires a very complex sense of mediation. First, as Meyer shows, this example dramatizes a temporality for grief very different from the temporality of sensations (hence it suggests basic limitations in the empiricism of the James-Lange theory of the emotions). We cannot measure grief in seconds. Grief has a duration; it involves a relation to other emotions from the past that binds us to the object of grief and it involves projections into the future. Second, we can begin to understand why there is a temptation to treat emotions as if they were sensations. If we take the verb "feel" as part of a two-place predicate, then we are likely to have to postulate some kind of force that acts upon the subject so that the subject can respond with feeling. But we are also then postulating psychological factors that are not really evident in our experience of grief. It turns out to be more economical and more precise to treat "feeling grief" as if it were a one-place, intransitive expression. For if we examine our statements of grief we will find that we do not set an independent subject over against some object that he or she begins to feel. Instead our feeling takes the form of an atmosphere or framing condition in which subject and object are not easily distinguished, at least within the state of grieving. For analogies, think of how logic cannot be identified apart from its manifestations or happiness apart from its particular realizations. Hence in Steinian terms feeling grief involves paragraphs, not sentences. The feeling is an index of a direction in which we are oriented and of a framework within which sentences can cohere. When we recognize the feeling we do not so much identify a distinct mappable psychological state as project a way of engaging the sentences another speaks that may allow us to continue appreciating what they say and do without feeling we have lost our way.
The stakes for critical languages here are quite high. If Wittgenstein is right, we have to accept an irreducible metaphoricity in our efforts to create discursive frameworks for our experiences. This metaphoricity is not Nietzschean. It makes as little sense to say that metaphoricity is in fact the nature of language as it does to insist on an unequivocal analytic standard for description in these domains. We need to acknowledge metaphoricity because we cannot stand outside language to describe its nature, just as we cannot characterize the temporality of grief unless we project ourselves into realms where we speculate on why sensations do not provide the appropriate model. Thinking is a complex dance of negation and indirect affirmation, with each activity delicately balancing first-order direct perceptual relations to the world and second-order interpretive expectations and reinterpretations. Wittgenstein's representation of grief shares with Stein's writing the power of perspicuous representations to fold these first- and second-order aspects of our grammars in ways that enable us to appreciate the differences implicit in them and the paths that become possible as we notice possible relations among these differences. We come to understand why a language of sensations cannot suffice, and we get a glimpse of how far we still have to go to replace the overall rationalist and empiricist orientations we have inherited from the Enlightenment as conditions of enlightenment.
Lezra has no illusions about immediacy. In this he is Meyer's opposite. Yet the two critics share much more than, I suspect, they suspect. This is in part because both base their interpretations on established conceptual models and in part because both seem committed to treading a very delicate line where the critic's brilliance becomes the measure of the writer's value (or failure, when the critic's brilliance seems the brighter instrument). There is no avoiding some version of this equation between who the reader becomes in reading and how the reader values texts, but there are ways of becoming more aware of the dangers in this temptation to brilliance than either critic is (and perhaps than Stein is at her most glib). And there is no avoiding Lezra's brilliance, so criticism of his work must try to problematize precisely that source of his strength. However, I also focus on his most intricate claims because our seeing how these become problematic should help by contrast to display the strange indirect forms of asserting positive representativeness that is fundamental to Stein's and Wittgenstein's investigations. Let me then treat two of Lezra's formulations as if they were voiced by the interlocutor that Wittgenstein is constantly resisting:
1. Does grammar provide the means by which "I" becomes one or another thing--a grammarian, for example? Does the subject of "I am" precede its grammatical articulation? Which pre-poses the other? [123]
2. Difficulties with Stein's argument immediately surface. In what way does the nonidentity to itself of grammar "make" anything, without falling into [what Nietzsche calls] the "snare of language" [123]
Why do these statements require that resistance? I think they represent the temptation in much philosophically oriented literary criticism to rely on strings of problematic assertions, each asked to prop up the other. If grammar were some kind of entity or determinable content, then it might make sense to employ predicates like "nonidentity to itself." And if grammar means rules of syntax, there would be clear boundaries enabling one to specify what is part of its identity and what lies beyond it. But for Wittgenstein's philosophical grammar and probably for Stein's notion of grammar, these assertions will not do. Nonidentity must be as much a part of grammar as identity, since we have to rely on language games to determine either one. Analogously we cannot get far speaking of the "snare of language" as some general ontological condition because we cannot know what the general opposite of language might be. There are many specific snares within language, as Lezra shows superbly. But it does not help to treat the source of the problem as language itself; nor are we likely to escape the snare if we try to avoid language (since avoiding language depends on linguistic representation for its significance). Snares and escapes are both aspects of our language use, not to be escaped but to be recognized as particular phenomena that arise from certain kinds of language employed and misemployed in certain contexts. We realize that we have encountered a snare by recognizing that our specific sentences leave us no way to proceed intelligibly. But we also can realize within language that we have managed to escape snares and to achieve a sense of new permissions, as when we encounter Merleau-Ponty teaching us to engage Cézanne.
These are not mere debating points. It is crucial that we recognize the degree to which abstractions about language blind us to how we actually live within it, as well as to how we might explore new conrations adapting both the prison house and the kaleidoscope as necessary res for self-reflection. And, more important here, resisting Lezra's formulations seems to me to open intriguing speculative paths for Stein criticism, especially in regard to his discussion of whether the subject precedes its grammatical articulation. The separation of these categories is problematic in itself because the very idea of a subject is a grammatical one: what lies outside grammar may have many attributes, but it cannot be a subject. But I find exciting the particular traps that this line of thinking creates for Lezra, primarily because thinking against his thinking seems to me to provide an opportunity to see what is representative in some of Stein's richest ways of proceeding. Lezra hopes to bring Hegelian ironies to bear against what he sees as Stein's unwarranted faith in identity by calling attention to various aspects of subjective agency like depersonalized drives that precede the grammatical articulation of identities and cannot be articulated as determinate features of such identities. But I will use his claims to indicate how Stein develops a version of agency that simply cannot be approached in the terms that Lezra wants to impose, and so the better that Lezra can be seen as representing traditional philosophical imperatives, the better the measure we have of Stein's originality, and of her relation to Wittgenstein's experiments in the same vein (which I develop in my Subjective Agency). And because Stein escapes those categories, grappling with how she does stage subjective agency will also require our relying on aspects of philosophical grammar that clearly do not fit a pragmatist emphasis on established practices but instead requires attending to how that grammar enables constant shifting among modes of awareness and expression. As Stein put it, "On the edge of grammar is why they make things" (HW, 109).
Lezra wants grammar to be reducible to those practices because then he can sustain the Lacanian notion of the symbolic order as a texture of repressions. But a brief analysis of one representative passage should indicate why the conventional models of language and of the self compatible with this hypothesis simply do not apply to the innovative work of either Stein or Wittgenstein. Here is Stein: "I like the feeling the everlasting feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves. In that way one is completely possessing oneself and incidentally one's self." 3 Now Lezra on this statement: "'Diagraming sentences' turns out not to be a case of what 'I' do, but itself the subject and object of a 'doing' of which 'I' am the incidental product." Yet there is nothing in Stein's statement that refers to the "I" as a product. But once Lezra equates self-possession with treating the "I" as a product, he also has to read "incidental" as an adjective modifying that product rather than as an adverb modifying the possessing. He sees that the adverbial dimension may matter, but he does not have a perspective from which he can develop the significance of his observation.
We can occupy this alternative perspective if we focus on what is involved in this contrast between adjectival and adverbial readings of "incidental." Indeed this expression can bear adverbial functions precisely because the sense of self here need not be read as a product but can instead be regarded as a force or modality that we recognize simply in the way that it is woven into the incident--perhaps as that which allows us to make a paragraph of the work of diagraming. From this perspective the self is incidental only because it is not thematized, is not specifiable within the diagram but nonetheless creates the site to which we can attribute the pleasures involved. And then it makes sense to claim that loss of self-consciousness as one gets absorbed within the work of diagraming is not opposed to a sense of presence or conative fullness. For the activity itself calls attention to how the actor is contained within it and able to will that containment without having to thematize the willing.
Stein's sentence then offers a version of subjectivity that we can treat as incidental in time and co-incidental in space because self here is not a product of any process: not thematized as idea and not torn between seeing and doing, the self emerges as the condition of acting in a certain way. There is no object to fix as self; there is nonetheless an agency and a sense of investment that one locates simply in how the diagraming manages to show signs of the person's presence within it. Therefore being "incidentally oneself" is in no way what Lezra calls an agrammatical mode of appearing that falls "outside a regulated or economized field of effects" . Were there no grammar here, there could be no incidental mode manifesting the person's relations to a clearly defined process. And the "I" cannot be outside the effects of that process. Rather the "I" is not reducible to the process. The "I" makes itself felt by how the effects of the process are engaged in specific cases.
But how then do we know we are dealing with anything positive at all? Why are the effects of these processes not entirely contingent? The best answer I can give, and the best access to Stein on subjectivity, is simply to invoke the forces brought into play by all the negatives I have been using in order to hold off the cultural models informing Lezra's approach to philosophical grammar. The "I" that I here assert takes what substance it can have from its capacity to compose a way of negotiating sites where many paths seem to cross. For Oedipus that locus was the scene of tragedy. The hope shared by Stein and by Wittgenstein was that this sense of tragedy could be understood as inseparable from his effort to maintain a logic sharply distinguishing identity from nonidentity.
Charles Altieri teaches modern literature and literary theory at the University of California, Berkeley. His Postmodernism Now is forthcoming from Penn State Press. His two recent volumes, Subjective Agency: A Theory of First-Person Expressivity and its Social Implications and Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry , engage the issues raised in this exchange.
1. Gertrude Stein, How to Write (New York: Dover, 1975), 100; hereafter abbreviated HW.
2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (1953; New York: Macmillan, 1968), 174e.
3. Gertrude Stein, "Poetry and Grammar," in Lectures in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 210-11.
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Although poets such as Elizabeth Bishop or May Swenson share Marianne Moore's well known aversion to self-indulgent poetry, it is Moore's unmatched ability to proffer moral standards without recourse to a fleshy, lyric "I" that has made her, for feminist critics, the most difficult and diversely read poet of this century. Grounding feminist principle in autonomous self-definition, and the autonomous self in female sexuality, the most vocal feminist critics of the past thirty years have largely contributed to what Taffy Martin terms the "myth" of Marianne Moore: 1 the popular conception of a self-protective, well mannered eccentric who flirted coyly with her peers, dutifully went to church, and wrote reticent poems with what Louise Bogan called "her delightful innocence of approach." 2 In some ways, of course, Moore was all of these things; however, in search of autobiography, political purpose, and sexual frankness, the majority of feminist critics through the mid-1980s glossed over the intricate and often paradoxical ways in which Moore was also none of these things at all. As Elizabeth Bishop once wryly reminisced, Moore "was rather contradictory, you know, illogical sometimes. . . . You could never tell what she was going to like or dislike." 3
In the last ten years, several critics have sought to remedy, or complicate, this portrait of Moore, but it lingers tenaciously. 4 Undoubtedly this is due in part to Moore's own cape-bedecked complicity in fostering this persona within the public spotlight of her later life. Cristanne Miller notes that this stereotype of Moore was so firmly entrenched by midcentury that even her close friend Bishop encouraged it, at least in part; Bishop's memoir, "Efforts of Affection," and especially her poem "Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore" frequently construct an "image of the poet as quaintly harmless." 5 At the same time, recent feminist scholarship on Bishop often endorses, and thus inadvertently strengthens, the image of Moore as archaically prim and private in an effort to position Bishop as a different--namely autobiographical--poet.
Within Moore criticism, this myth appears, at once innocently and insidiously, in readings that emphasize her observational prowess at the expense of her moral and political integrity, or in analyses that describe her difficult technique as self-protective armor, a "shield that [Moore] constantly hides behind." 6 Moore's poems are marked by stunning concrete descriptions and a shifting, restless, even reticent "I," but to dismiss or praise her work as masked or object-oriented is to ignore the biting satire and subversive coils of language that make her work so radical, as both modernist and feminist. The power of Moore's observations cannot be grasped in isolation from her refusal of the stable lyric "I," for, as Swenson once asked, who "of us is able to be such an acute instrument for the objectification of sensual perceptions and states of mind as she, without emphasizing self as subject?" 7
Swenson's question implies that it is exactly the tension created by Moore's remarkably precise observations and her simultaneous undermining of the "I"/eye from which they emanate that marks Moore's most puzzling, and rewarding, poetic. That poetic, with its vital relevance to the currently shifting parameters of American feminist criticism, is the focus of this essay. In the following pages, I will draw from Moore's poetry and archive to suggest that she developed a style of authorship based on the self as strategy, an adjustable lens through which to view the world without demanding a look in return. In an effort to establish the contemporary currency of Moore's feminist method, I employ the work of Donna Haraway and Judith Butler to show why Moore came to believe that
. . . The I of each is tothe I of each,
a kind of fretful speech
which sets a limit on itself 8
or, as Moore phrased it in 1955, "The self does not realize itself most fully when self-realization is its most conscious aim." 9 Exploring the implications of Moore's strategic selfhood, we will see how her poetry deconstructs the lyric "I," and even more radically, the sexed body through which this "I" is made to seem essential. Like the glacial octopod in "An Octopus," Moore's restless eye is discernible only at moments of intricately palpable existence, the slippery but tenacious tentacles of sensual connection. As we are led through layer after layer of material detail in Moore's poems, we are taken farther astray from any sense of an a priori or ontological perspective: "Completing a circle, / you have been deceived into thinking that you have progressed." 10 In marking subjectivity by sensual response rather than sexual convention, Moore asks that we loosen sensual experience from the dictates of sexuality, and in doing so, reformulate what it means to have both a sex and a self.
Moore's poems are perhaps most recognizable by their acutely descriptive observations, a point made manifest in the great amount of critical work devoted to this aspect of the poetry. 11 In a conversation with Taffy Martin, Kenneth Burke once said that on "occasion . . . [Moore] would be nearly overcome by the visual stimuli in a museum." 12 Eliot described her poetic eye as akin to a "high-powered microscope," 13 while Bishop once referred to Moore as "The World's Greatest . . . Observer." 14 Moore's letters to friends and family are suffused with sensual details about artwork, architecture, clothing, style, and plant and animal life. 15 Indeed, in the words of Jean Garrigue, might "we not attribute to [Moore] what she did to Henry James: 'a rapture of observation'? For who has held up to inspection more 'skeined, stained, veined variety'?" 16
Miller suggests that Moore's love of science, particularly her fascination with physics' recently popularized quantum theory, helps explain Moore's angle on vision. "According to quantum theory, an object manifests itself differently according to the context of the experiment in which it is seen," so that for Moore redefining "clarity . . . dovetails with redefining authority, both positive values for Moore but only to the extent that clarity does not entail transparency and authority does not rest on inflexible notions of identity and truth" (QA, 47). As an avid biology student at Bryn Mawr, Moore contemplated a major in science but settled on history and political science instead. Her lifelong devotion to scientific precision is evident in her poems as well as her prose: "Do the poet and the scientist not work analogously?" asked Moore in an interview with Donald Hall; "[e]ach is attentive to clues, each must narrow the choice, must strive for precision. . . . [S]cience is the process of discovering. In any case it's not a thing established once and for all, it's evolving." 17
Of course fascination with scientific perspective and analysis was not unique to Moore; Ezra Pound used metaphors of scientific method to elucidate his "new" poetics, as Eliot did after him. 18 The early imagists, led by Pound, Richard Aldington, and H. D., unsuccessfully sought Moore's membership, urged by what seemed a mutual affinity for "[d]irect treatment of the 'thing.'" 19 Like her modernist contemporaries, Moore's allegiance to empirical acuity was in tension with a skepticism of objective vision. For Moore, though, this tension produced a contingent and partial, yet always self-possessed, lyric "I." The object of her observation "means just as much or just as little as it is understood to / mean by the observer" (P, 17); or, in Wallace Stevens's words, "no individual fact is a universe in itself." 20 The experience of observation was consonant with writing poetry; Moore's "I" was precise in its efforts to delineate its debts, as the extensive notes and habits of quotation suggest.
Moore's passion for partial vision finds a fitting explication in Donna Haraway's notion of "situated knowledge," a "practice of objectivity that privileges contestation, deconstruction, passionate construction, webbed connections, and hope for transformation of systems of knowledge and ways of seeing," where "partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims." 21 A feminist historian of science, Haraway takes to task both the standard claims to scientific objectivity and popular academic attempts to discount the necessity of some such effort, warning that "[f]or political people, social constructionism cannot be allowed to decay into the radiant emanations of cynicism" (SC, 184). At the same time, mirroring Moore's distaste for movements, Haraway cautions against the temptation to replace one doctrine of transcendence--scientific knowledge--with another--marxism, psychoanalysis, "feminist empiricism" (SC, 186), or, Moore might add, the autonomous lyric "I":
[M]y problem and "our" problem is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own "semiotic technologies" for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a "real" world. . . . Feminists don't need a doctrine of objectivity that promises transcendence, a story that loses track of its mediations just where someone might be held responsible for something [SC, 187].
For Haraway "feminist objectivity" is opposed to the search for identity and an understanding of the self as whole, since "only partial perspective promises objective vision" (SC, 190). Because "the knowing self is partial in all its guises" (SC, 193)--because, as Moore's "gossamer-like" 22 associations suggest, we are constantly being constructed through our interactions with the world--we are always "stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another" (SC, 193). Thus it is at the very nexus of accurate description ("the objectification of sensual perceptions and states of mind") and acknowledgment of that description as partial and contingent ("without emphasizing self as subject") that what Haraway terms accountability, or what Moore might call moral responsibility, is made possible. Transforming the world in which we live, a goal Moore never would have expressed as such but one with which her ambitious sense of fairness and duty is akin, is achieved not by transcendence, but through "conscious fastidiousness" combined with "armor's undermining honesty." 23 "The only way to find a larger vision," asserts Haraway, "is to be somewhere in particular" (SC, 196).
Haraway is instructive when it comes to Moore's poetry because she makes clear the potential of partiality, the possibilities of the particular. Moore's "messages," in other words, are contingent upon her method: "We do not seek partiality for its own sake, but for the sake of the connections and unexpected openings situated knowledges make possible" (SC, 196). I cannot think of a more apt theoretical paradigm for the workings of Moore's poetic. Her sentences and stanzas, like the sea creatures in "The Fish," "slide each on the other,"
. . . with spotlight swift-
ness
into the crevices--
in and out, illuminating
the limits to which we are accustomed by repeatedly citing and then blurring them, creating bridges out of boundaries. 24 What at first seems a "defiant edifice," the limit of one's understanding carved out by human "burns / and / hatchet strokes," is shown to harbor teeming life, a "sea" of sensibilities that has in turn transformed the edifice that may seem "dead":
Repeated
evidence has proved that it can
live
on what cannot revive
its youth.
[P, 15]
By recalling Foucault's explication of knowledge as produced rather than foreclosed by prohibition, we may better understand Moore's "edifice," the "chasm side" (P, 15) of which seems dead, as the shape of our assumptions. 25 Apparently static and immovable, "defiant" in its authority, the lifeless edifice appears both to predate and outlive the sea; its inorganic nature seems to claim omniscience and thus a kind of a priori realness. But the incessant, wavelike motion of the poem disrupts this vision of impermeability, as Moore's highly constructed "edifice" is seen to embrace the sea, which "grows old in it" (P, 15). Collapsing the distance between title and poem, beginning and end, the rippling stanzas become the wave of the poem, driving a
wedge
of iron through the iron edge
of the cliff, whereupon the stars,pink
rice grains, ink-
bespattered jelly-fish, crabs like
green
lilies and submarine
toadstools, slide each on the other.
[P, 15]
The tide of the poem, the motion of the speaker's vision, erodes the stability of the edifice by introducing, then interlacing, the particularities of its inhabitants; consequently the "defiance" of the edifice becomes a life-giving embrace. The juxtaposition of rocklike cliff and life-drenched sea is confounded as each becomes the agent of the other. Importantly, the sea "cannot revive" the cliff's "youth," and vice versa--innocence is lost in the wake of unfinished, as opposed to an a priori, meaning. No lyric "I"/eye transcends this poem, and as we come to understand the cliff as changing after all, we also learn that Moore's "objective," partial vision is most promising in its exposure of our own.
It is crucial to focus on the transformative potential of Moore's situated knowledge and partial objectivity because this method of observation has been misunderstood as apolitical, superficial, or distancing. Various critics, feminist and otherwise, have interpreted Moore's observational verse as deflective, warding off connection with its dazzling surface sheen. Echoed by Moore's eclectic vocabulary, weblike network of notes and quotations, unconventional rhymes, midword enjambments, and fastidious manipulations of form, Moore's strategic selfhood has seemed to many the hallmark of a self-protective distancing. I believe, however, that Moore is after just the opposite; by offering a remarkably precise vision of her surroundings and a concomitant undermining of the "I"/eye that frames the environment, Moore proffers poetry as an ongoing process in which meaning is made through interaction with an audience, rather than simply presented. (In this light we can better understand Moore's almost unparalleled dedication to revision.) Just as Moore's poems displace the static lyric "I," so they reveal the extent to which the poet is implicated by her strategy of selfhood. Moore's poems are often followed with notes that, unlike Eliot's, do not direct the reader to a fuller understanding of the poem by way of broader contextualization, but rather point one outward, toward an ever widening pool of associations that may or may not add any discernible "meanings" to the poem. In this case the poem emerges as a starting-point, an occasion for interaction with the world, rather than a conclusion garnered from the roamings of a poet's "I"/eye.
All of this means that Moore expects her readers to work. At the same time we can rest assured that the energy we put into enjoying her poems is surpassed by that which she gave them herself: "the most difficult thing for me," Moore confessed, "is to be satisfactorily lucid, yet have enough implication in it to suit myself." 26 What may seem to be an abstruse foreclosure is in fact Moore's attempt to connect the reader with a challenge--what she calls "implication." A lover of riddles from a very young age, Moore often found explicitness disrespectful. For this reason she felt that William Carlos Williams's "uncompromising conscientiousness sometimes seems misplaced; he is at times almost insultingly unevasive." 27 Miller puts it nicely: "Moore does not see the 'self' as a refuge against a hostile outer world and therefore does not imagine her most essential 'armor' as that which protects her from others; the difficult surface of her poetry is not meant to keep a reader out or to protect a vulnerable private poet but to promote 'inquisitive intensity' and hence enable perception" (QA, 38). 28 The act of revelation is what Moore is after and, as she knows, a mapped epiphany is a contradiction in terms. For Moore complexity, not transparency, yields clarity.
No poem of Moore's speaks to this better than "In the Days of Prismatic Color" , in which the speaker famously declares "complexity is not a crime." 29 Leading up to this proclamation, however, is a sketch of a time when Adam
was alone; when there was no smoke and color was
fine, not with the fineness of
early civilization art but by virtue
of its originality; with nothing to modify it but themist that went up . . .
["ID," 49].
Composed of a series of overlapping descriptions, this initial stanza builds to a final observation: in the Adamic days of "prismatic color," "obliqueness was a varia- / tion of the perpendicular, plain to see and / to account for" ("ID," 49). The voice shifts abruptly as the speaker announces that today, presumably in the days of Adam and Eve, things aren't so simple:
. . . it [obliqueness] is no
longer that; nor did the blue red yellow band
of incandescence that was color keep its stripe: it also is one ofthose things into which much that is peculiar can be
read . . .
["ID," 49].
Here, almost in the middle of the poem, is where the speaker defends the ostensible transition from clarity to complexity by describing the latter as "not a crime." But just as the speaker tolerates complexity, she cautions against its extreme:
carry
it to the point of murki-
ness and nothing is plain. complexity
moreover, that has been committed to darkness, instead of
granting it-self to be the pestilence that it is, moves all a-
bout as if to bewilder us with the dismal
fallacy that insistence
is the measure of achievement and that all
truth must be dark.
["ID," 49]
On one level Moore is clarifying the perpetually thorny issue of "implication," showing that, when "not a crime," "complexity" is achieved with precarious balance: it harbors "much that is peculiar" (and therefore much of the material of Moore's verse), while simultaneously avoiding "murkiness," "insistence," and the fallacy that "truth must be dark." Complexity must allow itself to be the "pestilence that it is." Clearly, complexity here is a challenge, even a burden, to be confronted and perhaps even cured; when something is a pestilence it nags, begging for attention, whether as an itch or an unsolved problem. Complexity becomes "a crime," though, when it shuts people out, when it attempts to "bewilder" and makes grandiose claims about "truth" being "dark." Though the Adamic days of "prismatic color" were free from murkiness, they were also void of the difference that engenders complexity--both kinds. And as Moore's poetics repeatedly suggest, the risk of "murkiness" is better than no risk at all.
Introduced as a kind of fairy-tale ideal of clarity, Adam's Eveless Eden thus emerges as rather a bore--an opinion whose complicated profits are manifested four years later in the brilliant achievement of "Marriage." In a reading diary from which Moore worked when composing "Prismatic Color," she copied down a translated passage from Baudelaire's "Anywhere Out of the World" that may further explain this sense of transparency as tedium. Baudelaire is having a conversation with his enervated soul about new places to live, trying to address his insatiable desire to be wherever he is not. After a series of unsuccessful attempts at provocation, he exclaims, "Let us set up our camp at the Pole! There the sun strikes the earth obliquely and the slow alteration of light and night suppresses variety and increases monotony--that better half of nothing." At this, his soul finally "[breaks] forth" and "wisely" cries: "No matter where, no matter where, so long as it is out of the world!" 30 Given the reference to "antipodes" in the penultimate stanza of "In the Days of Prismatic Color" and "obliqueness" in the second, the connection between Moore's poem and this passage is likely. Furthermore, Moore uses the word "oblique" in the same way that the translated Baudelaire does--not as the popularized term for "indirection" or "deviousness," but to delineate a sloping angle, a "varia- / tion of the perpendicular" ("ID," 49). But what is, in Moore's poem, "plain to see and / account for" is, in Baudelaire, that which "suppresses variety," causing "prolonged baths of shadow." 31 The difference here lies between Baudelaire's grounding in this world of complexity (to which his soul's cry attests), and Moore's grounding in the Adamic land of fantastical clarity; obliqueness can only seem plain when the word "plain" itself has no meaning--when, in other words, there is nothing but more plainness with which to compare it.
Miller suggests that the ideal days of clarity and color in Moore's poem are an illusion, and that truth for Moore is found in the region of "negation, contradiction, and modification, all verbal characteristics in distinct contrast to Adamic language or Lacan's symbolic, with its representation in the law" (QA, 82). I agree with Miller that the progress of Moore's poem subverts the ideality with which it ostensibly opens; after all, "[w]hat is more precise than precision" but "[i]llusion"? 32 But what is so clever about this poem is the way Moore subtly insists that this illusion is a product of our own complexities.
Reviewing the first stanza of the poem, we can see that the "fineness" of the "days of prismatic color," recognizable as such "with nothing to modify" it, is in fact constantly being modified --more clearly than any other element of the poem--by the series of qualifications in which it is couched. Indeed, our vision of this unmodified "fineness" is actually produced by a succession of modifications: it is the fineness "not in the days of Adam and Eve but when Adam / was alone" ("ID," 49), "not . . . the fineness / of early civilization art" but fine in its "originality." Moore's method of description thus contests the possibility of the "days of prismatic color" just as she writes it into the poem. At the same time, the halting effect of the first stanza's numerous modifications is recalled in the "short-legged, fit- / ful advance, the gurgling and all the minutiae" ("ID," 49) of the penultimate, so that Adamic clarity becomes, in review, the double of complexity--not the good kind, but the bad. Likewise, as the speaker moves from clarity to "complexity" in the third stanza, the mood becomes decidedly more declarative; phrases become shorter, no-nonsense: "it is no / longer that," "complexity is not a crime," "it is also one of // those things" ("ID," 49). Ironically, what seemed so "plain" and up-front is the epitome of obliquity after all.
At the end of the fourth stanza, Moore presents "sophistication," presumably in contrast to the earlier days of color and clarity, as that which is
. . . as
it al-ways has been--at the antipodes from the init-
ial great truths.
["ID," 49]
Juxtaposed with the apparent evolution from clarity to complexity--an evolution that is, by this point in the poem, undermined by its own "insistence"--"sophistication," in its age-old sameness, seems to be what has been there all along. This is a stunning assertion on Moore's part, given the "initial great truths" that open the poem--the story of Adam and Eve and the Fall. Sophistication, then, is the result of complexity, while the "initial great truths" are an illusion. But in the process of differentiating sophistication from prismatic plainness, the distance between the "initial great truths" that open the poem and the illusion of clarity is elided: in search of clarity, we construct "initial great truths" that claim, tautologically, they are the key to their own construction. But in reality--the version of truth that ends the poem by assuring us, as "sophistication" might, that "'I shall be there when the wave has gone by'" ("ID," 50)--there is no such thing as clarity, and to claim otherwise is to be duped into believing that there once were days of only "fine" prismatic color.
It is now clear that Moore is making a parallel between the illusory nature of our "initial great truths" and the story of Eve's fall. In light of Moore's religious convictions this may seem unlikely, but given her love of complexity and challenge, combined with an unmistakable--if sometimes subtle--distaste for masculinist presumption, it is actually quite apt. Not only is Moore contesting the authority or "plainness" of this mythic truth, but redeploying its very terms, constructing a different truth, one that quietly but confidently ends the poem by asserting its endurance. According to the story of the Fall, Eve's introduction to the Garden of Eden summoned the end of innocence; by eating the forbidden apple, Eve ushered in the world of knowledge, and hence, enslavement and mortality. But Moore's poem mocks the innocence, the clarity, that the Adamic "days of prismatic color" purport to have offered.  Having chosen the myth of her native culture most squarely concerned with heterosexual difference, Moore's revisionist version should be read accordingly: it is the advent of women in the poem that enables the complexity of which the poem itself is an example. Clearly, the genesis of sexual difference and its relationship to our "initial great truths" are at the core of Moore's thoughts in "In the Days of Prismatic Color." However, it is crucial to remember that Moore is most interested here in complexity, not women, and according to the script of this poem, complexity would not exist in an Adamless Eden any more than it would in an Eveless one. Most importantly, if "the days of prismatic color" are indeed an illusion of our own making, a making precipitated by the interaction of women and men, then nobody is innocent--least of all Moore.
Understanding Moore's commitment to complexity as an invitation to participate in the process of her poems is key to comprehending the feminist tenor of her work. All poetry functions to a certain extent by allowing readers to confront the limited terms of their selves, but Moore invites a participation quite unlike that of her peers. In refusing the parallel positions of either omniscience or innocence, Moore's strategic selfhood imparts a remarkable agency to her readers. Within her poems this sense of agency is most evident in the way Moore privileges the animals, plants, objects, and scenes of which she writes rather than her own perspective of them. Nevertheless, Moore has no truck with a nostalgic view of nature; the world she observes is wholly contingent upon her framing of it. Again we are led to the tension between Moore's partial "I" and her intensely detailed observations. Haraway can help us to understand this methodology when she writes that "[s]ituated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not a screen or a ground or a resource, never finally as slave to the master that closes off the dialectic in his unique agency and authorship of 'objective' knowledge" (SC, 198). Simultaneously, "[a]ccounts of a 'real' world do not . . . depend on a logic of 'discovery,' but on a power-charged social relation of 'conversation.' The world neither speaks itself nor disappears in favour of a master decoder. The codes of the world are not still, waiting only to be read" (SC, 198).
The implications of this perspective on one's understanding of bodily existence are particularly profound for feminism; if neither one's own knowledge nor the outside world from which that knowledge is gleaned has authority over the other, the distance between the two--one's sense of inner and outer--is displaced. (It is amusing to note that in 1906 Moore wrote home announcing she'd failed a biology quiz for giving an external diagram of the grasshopper and lobster instead of an internal one). 33 From this vantage point the body becomes inextricably wed to its surroundings; fish are buoyed by the sea in which they live, a chameleon feeds upon the light that paints its skin. Moore's explorations of embodiment find current expression in Haraway's cyborg, a fusion of human, animal, and machine, a being "wary of holism, but needy for connection" (SC, 151), who has an "intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction" (SC, 181). In the cyborg world, "[n]ature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. The relationships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world" (SC, 151).
"Black Earth" offers an early and telling confrontation of these issues that lie at the heart of Moore's poetic--perhaps too telling, for Moore never republished it after the poem appeared as "Melancthon" in her Collected Poems of 1952. "Melancthon" ("black earth" in Greek) is the name of the Protestant reformer Philip Melancthon, famous for his distaste for theological dogmatism and subsequent importation of humanism to the German reformation. (Moore had a windup toy elephant named Melancthon as well.) In light of this later title, Martin has written that "'Melancthon' addresses quite specifically the difficult and yet obvious necessity of acknowledging another's perspective while remaining oneself" (SM, 19). To this I would add that Moore also asks what it means to be a self in relation to another's perspective. Moreover, the most striking characteristic of "Black Earth" is its sensual immediacy; as in "A Jellyfish" , "My Senses Do Not Deceive Me" , and the later "An Octopus" , questions of identity are very clearly questions of embodiment throughout the poem.
The relationship between the lyric "I" and material existence is assertively announced in the first two stanzas:
Openly, yes,
with the naturalness
of the hippopotamus or the alligator
when it climbs out on the bank to experience thesun, I do these
things which I do, which please
no one but myself. Now I breathe and now I am sub-
merged
[P, 10].
This speaker, one of the most unabashedly self-indulgent in Moore's repertoire, "openly" declares its love of sensuous experience: "Now I breathe and now I am sub/merged." The rhythm of the speaker's voice is mesmerizing, so that we too are lulled into the languid pleasures of sensual immersion. Indeed, the "I" with which this poem so emphatically begins is only known to us through its bodily contact with the world it inhabits--
. . . The sediment of the river which
encrusts my joints, makes me very gray but I am usedto it, it may
remain there; do away
with it and I am myself done away with, for the
patina of circumstance can but enrich what wasthere to begin
with.
[P, 10]
Although the speaker suggests an essence that has been "there to begin / with," somehow preexisting the "patina of circumstance" that encrusts its joints, the fusion of river-bed and body undermines any such possibility--were one to "do away / with it [the sediment of river] . . . I [would be] . . . done away with" (P, 10). Suitably, the speaker's body is red as its map: "This elephant skin / which I inhabit, . . . is a manual for the peanut-tongued and the / hairy toed" (P, 10)--literally a guide to itself. "[F]ibred [sic] over like the shell of / the coco-nut," "cut into checkers by rut / upon rut of unpreventable experience" (P, 10), the elephant's skin bears the history of its experience, that which has engendered its very being. Surroundings and selfhood, outer and inner, are collapsed, and the utterance of "I" appears as "natural" as the alligator's swagger.
But even cursory familiarity with Moore asks that we examine such self-indulgence; when we look closely it becomes clear that the hippopotamus and alligator are exemplars of "naturalness" (P, 10) because they are not aware of themselves as such. In contrast, the speaker's "I" is drenched in self-consciousness, and its attempt at naturalness ("I do these / things which I do") becomes a parody of its own self-confidence. Indeed, as the poem progresses, the comfortable "I" of the first few stanzas becomes increasingly unstable; as soon as the speaker specifies its body as an elephant's, the narrative voice shifts from an unmediated first- to a strangely detached third-person voice, referring to itself no longer as "I" but as one of the generic "peanut-tongued and . . . / hairy toed." The elephant/speaker's easy existence is interrupted as it begins to question its own assertions:
. . . Black
but beautiful, my back
is full of the history of power. Of power? What
is powerful and what is not?
[P, 10]
Whether or not Moore intended here to invoke an understanding of bodies as racially marked, her interrogation of embodied selfhood certainly demands it. "[C]ut / into checkers by rut / upon rut of unpreventable experience," one is, of course, constructed as a body, mapping not only one's self, but also the "history of power." The ecstasy of sensuous experience that opens the poem thus becomes tempered, as the body itself is "checker[ed]" by experience; the elephant, by stanza nine, is now "on [its] guard" (P, 10).
The second half of the poem (at seventeen stanzas this is the longest poem Moore had written by the time of its 1918 publication) enacts a different approach than the first, turning upon the relationship between embodiment and intellection. Exactly halfway through the poem, the elephant tells us that
. . . through-
out childhood to the present time, the unity of
life and death has been expressed by the circumferencedescribed by my
trunk
[P, 10],
but that "nevertheless," it "perceives feats of strength to be inexplicable after / all" (P, 10). As the elephant becomes conscious of its embodied vision (its partial perspective), the easy union of body and speaking "I" turns elastic, more interactive than fused. Simultaneously, the unity of the poem and the lyric "I" begins to crumble when selfhood becomes an object of contemplation as a potential strategy rather than a foundation for expression. Immersion in one's self gives way to observation--
. . . external poise, ithas its centre
well nurtured--we know
where--in pride, but spiritual poise, it has its centre where?
[P, 10-11]
--then judgment: "I see / and I hear" (P, 11), says the elephant. This hearing, though, is not like "the / wandlike body of which one hears so much, which was made / to see and not to see; to hear and not to hear" (P, 11). Contemplating the contingency between identity and observation (Moore's primary concern), the speaker compares the "wandlike" human, the marker of "external poise," to its
spiritual
brother to the coral
plant, absorbed into which, the equable sapphire light
becomes a nebulous green
[P, 11],
and assertively concludes the "I of each is to // the I of each, / a kind of fretful speech / which sets a limit on itself" (P, 11). Egoism, or "pride" (P, 11), does not enhance one's reach, but truncates it.
Technically, the "I of each"--the "pride" behind "external poise"--refers to the human and coral, and not the elephant/speaker. But the close repetition of "I"'s within the speaker's warning cannot help but recall the emphatic "I" of the elephant that so heavily marked the poem until now. Moreover, as if to contest the limit of this insistent "I," the narrative voice again immediately shifts to third person, asking ironically what "the elephant is" (P, 11). The final three stanzas of the poem are a labyrinthine answer to this question; the speaker is no longer distinct as elephant, human, coral plant, or omniscient "I," but exists as a fleeting interaction of them all:
. . . It is to thatphenomenon
the above formation,
translucent like the atmosphere--a cortex merely--
that on which darts cannot strike decisively the firsttime, a substance
needful as an instance
of the indestructibility of matter; it
has looked at the electricity and at the earth-quake and is still
here; the name means thick. Will
depth be depth, thick skin be thick, to one who can see no
beautiful element of unreason under it?
[P, 11]
The "it," the subject of this sentence, seems to be at once the elephant, and thus the speaker, while at the same time, "It is to that // phenomenon / the above formation." But what above formation? A "kind of fretful speech"? The "spiritual / brother to the coral / plant"? A "tree trunk without / roots" (P, 11)? As if to assure us that there is an answer to this question, that there is sense--literally--in this concluding grid of metonymic metaphors, we are told that "it / . . . is still / here; the name means thick." But as it happens, the key to understanding lies in this confusion, in what Moore would call "complexity": depth is depth, thick skin is thick, only to those who see unreason under it. In other words, truth is more likely to be found in the messy "patina of circumstance" than in "the days of prismatic color."
The emphatic "I" that begins "Black Earth," unmediated and whole, gives way by the end to a radically unfixed voice no longer linked to a self.  [It] incorporat[es] the entirety of the world, physical and spiritual, rather than simply the perimeters of the self." 34 In other words, the distinction between inside and outside has been collapsed. This process does not enable omniscience or pure objectivity, however, because, continues Costello, "the self that manipulates language is only a small part of the totality it ponders. Like the six blind men of Buddhist legend who were asked to describe the elephant, Moore can only name it part by part." 35
Judith Butler's work on language and embodiment is helpful in understanding this juncture in Moore's poetry between body and self, as well as its implications for notions of subjectivity. Writing about the culturally mediated "nature" of our bodies, Butler argues that
"Inner" and "outer" make sense only with reference to a mediating boundary that strives for stability. And this stability, this coherence, is determined in large part by cultural orders that sanction the subject and compel its differentiation from the abject. Hence, "inner" and "outer" constitute a binary distinction that stabilizes and consolidates the coherent subject. When that subject is challenged, the meaning and necessity of the terms are subject to displacement. If the "inner world" no longer designates a topos, then the internal fixity of the self and, indeed, the internal locale of gender identity, become similarly suspect. 36
Given the blatant collapse between environment and inner self that begins "Black Earth," we can understand the progressively troubled lyric "I" of the poem as entirely logical. Concurrently, the "I" of the opening stanzas, brazen in its collapse of environment and self, may be read retrospectively as anything but natural; the speaker's initial ability to gesture toward a "self" so surely seems almost comically self-conscious, akin to those unenlightened who cannot see the "element of beautiful unreason under it."
This is, of course, another instance of Moore's strategic selfhood, another angle of her situated knowledge. The most provocative aspect of both Butler's formulation and Moore's "Black Earth," though, is the troubled place the body occupies in terms of the unfixed lyric "I." As both Butler and Moore suggest, the illusion of autonomous selfhood is grounded in, or naturalized in regard to, the actual body. The speaker of Moore's poem announces itself "openly," with all the "naturalness" in the world, through the contours of its flesh: "Now I breathe and now I am sub- / merged." Moore's poem, however, is a warning against the limitations of that wallowing "I"; hence, the body as a foundation for that "I" is also questioned. By the end of the poem, the speaker floats among myriad metaphors of bodily existence: "translucent like the atmosphere--a cortex merely-- / that on which darts cannot strike decisively." Materiality still exists--"substance" "is still / here"--but, unleashed from a fretful dialectic with the declarative "I," its reach is significantly extended. The trade-off, as I have suggested, is the "I" that is lost at the end of the poem. As Butler explains, "coherence is . . . an effect of a corporeal signification. . . . [A]cts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause." 37 Which is to say that one's physical experience, though it is always from one's perspective, is not any less mediated or any more innocent than the "self" that grounds itself there.
From such a vantage point, the body, like Haraway's cyborg, cannot be understood as contained or passive. Instead, much like Moore's poems, it is a continual process, marked by but not moored in its contingency with the world it inhabits. The hierarchical relationship between body and intellect is undermined: selfhood depends upon the sensual perceptions of the body, but at the same time it cannot take refuge in, or find legitimization through, the mutating dimensions of the flesh. In this way we have come full circle. What began for Moore as a strategy of selfhood has become a strategy of embodiment. Though Moore constantly insists on the primacy of sensual experience within her poems, she also shows perception to be a highly mediated means to knowledge. The notion of a stable materiality, then, is not a priori to the perceptions it enables, but is, in fact, like Melancthon's, a product of one's own desire to ground one's "self."
This insight is both disturbing and exciting, and lies at the heart of Moore's discomfort with sexually explicit and gender-specific poetry. For if Moore's poetic asserts a mistrust of bodily "truth," then it simultaneously contests the sexed body as a viable foundation for political or aesthetic agency. This conviction is ferociously etched into the stylized portraiture of "Those Various Scalpels," a poem Moore published in 1917, one year before "Black Earth." The speaker of this poem itemizes with a majestic violence the various body parts of a fantastic, ornately dressed woman, emphatically drawing our attention to the constructed nature of her materiality. 38 The title begins the poem, which I will quote in its entirety.
Those
various sounds consistently indistinct, like intermingled
echoes
struck from thin glass successively at random--the
inflection disguised: your hair, the tails of two
ting-cocks head to head in stone--like sculptured
scimitars re-
peating the curve of your ears in reverse order: your eyes,
flowers of ice
and
snow sown by tearing winds on the cordage of disabled
ships: your raised hand
an ambiguous signature: your cheeks, those rosettes
of blood on the stone floors of French châteaux, with
regard to which guides are so affirmative:
your other hand
a
bundle of lances all alike, partly hid by emeralds from
Persia
and the fractional magnificence of Florentine
goldwork--a collection of half a dozen little objects
made fine
with enamel in gray, yellow, and dragonfly blue: a lemon, a
pear
and three bunches of grapes, tied with silver: your dress, a
magnificent square
cathedral of uniform
and at the same time, diverse appearance--a species of
vertical vineyard rustling in the storm
of conventional opinion. Are they weapons or scalpels?
Whetted
to
brilliance by the hard majesty of that sophistication which
is su-
perior to opportunity, these things are rich
instruments with which to experiment but surgery is
not tentative: why dissect destiny with instruments
which
are more highly specialized than the tissues of destiny
itself?
[P, 7]
Several critics read this poem as an analysis of the tension between a whole and its parts. Margaret Holley, for instance, maintains that the
portrait both reduces and expands its subject drastically. On the one hand, the poem is a condemnation by systemic reduction of an outlandish person to a pile of non-human objects. On the other hand, it makes this individual embody a whole chain of being. She is animal, vegetable, and mineral, wild and cultivated; she is a work of art. 39
At the same time, though, I would argue that "systemic reduction" is in line with Moore's unnostalgic view of self and artistic vision. Like Jeanne Heuving, I believe that "Moore's brilliance in the poem is that the re is not merely depicted by bodily parts, but by the depictions that depict it." 40
Indeed, we should not overlook the fact that Moore's portrait is produced by a poem whose stylistic structures draw as much attention to their own constructedness as they do to the lady herself. Like the various parts of the woman, the stanzas of the poem are highly irregular in shape, yet, as is almost always the case with Moore's work, they are "consistently" so, emphasizing the connection between artifice and autonomy, or repetition and construction. For "construction," maintains Butler,
is neither a subject nor its act, but a process of reiteration by which both "subjects" and "acts" come to appear at all. . . . Crucially, then, construction is neither a single act nor a causal process initiated by a subject and culminating in a set of fixed effects. Construction not only takes place in time, but is itself a temporal process which operates through the reiteration of norms; [the] sex[ed body] is both produced and destabilized in the course of this reiteration. 41
Moore blatantly appropriates the Renaissance convention of portraying a female beloved through an itemization of body parts, fantastically exaggerating her own descriptions in an attempt to expose what Moore calls the "inflection"--the gaps between Butler's "reiterations"--that is usually "disguised" by such conventional poetics. In other words, Moore's material reductions call attention to the sexed body as a process of inscription. The poem wields "those various scalpels," whose "sounds [are] consistently indistinct, like intermingled / echoes / struck from thin glass successively at random." The sharp metallic clash of the speaker's descriptions--a series of hard Cs, piercing Ss, stony Ds and Ts--"echoes" the sound of scalpel on scalpel, steel on steel. These sounds are clearly punctuated by stanzaic breaks, halting enjambments, and lines ending midword, so that each echo is unraveled from the other, even as each sound is rendered emphatically distinct. This effect is mirrored by the dissection the poem enacts: each body part is lavishly described through a metaphor that shares no continuity with the next, a metaphor so elaborate in its associations that moving from one to the other is like leaving behind an unfinished story in order to start another. As we are led from "ting-cocks" to "the cordage of disabled / ships" to "emeralds from / Persia," we are introduced to a body whose only mark of coherence is her "hard majesty of . . . sophistication," that which is "su- / perior to opportunity"--her steely powers of deflection. Unlike conventional poems of this sort, there is no recourse to totality through either a final image of integrity or the grounding of a lover's lyric "I." Instead, the poem's "surgery," though clearly not "tentative," is no less "ambiguous" in its discovery than the woman's raised hand; "[a]re they weapons or scalpels?" Does this dissection yield a more precise understanding of an interior state, or does it ward off closer inspection?
Given the title and the weaponlike feel of the poem's imagery, this question is (typically) misleading. The tools of dissection--the speaker's gaze, the dialectic of subject/object through which identity is formed--are both scalpels and weapons; in Butler's words, they both "produce" and "destabilize" the woman's embodiment. Thus, her ornate, larger-than-life appearance is "uniform / and at the same time, diverse." As Heuving has implied, the emphasis here is on the process, not the product, of construction. In effect, the speaker dissects its own actions just as it depicts the woman; for this reason the poem, despite its efforts, cannot provide a coherent image. Similarly, its final turn, the question upon which the poem closes, must be read as ironic:
. . . why dissect destiny with instruments
which
are more highly specialized than the tissues of destiny
itself?
The parallel positions in the poem of "destiny" and the woman's body (both are objects of dissection) suggest that they are one and the same, that the woman's destiny is traced by her anatomy. In light of the use of the word "tissues" instead of Moore's later revision to "components of destiny" (CP, 52), this reading seems all the more accurate. But as this poem elaborately reiterates, the woman's body is both created and dislodged by the speaker's address; hence, an embodied destiny is less "highly specialized" than the "instruments" by which it is shaped, precisely because in its promise of ontological plenitude such "destiny" is an illusion, a wry commentary suitably expressed without recourse to a single gendered pronoun. Appropriately, the metaphors through which the woman's body is established do not coalesce into some kind of intractable casing, but rather deliver her beyond corporeal limits and national borders, to Persia, Florence, "French châteaux," and shipwreck sites.
In Bodies That Matter , Butler explores the consequences for feminism of an antifoundational view of bodily materiality, observing, as Moore's poetics did nearly ninety years ago, that although "sexual difference is often invoked as an issue of material differences," it "is never simply a function of material differences which are not in some way both marked and formed by discursive practices" (BM, 1). Often criticized as asexual, Moore has been largely misunderstood. Moore was, on the contrary, fascinated by the "discursive practices" and cultural markings that make up sex to begin with--the notions of bodily truth and the autonomous self that roots itself there. By refusing the material irreducibility of the sexed body, her poetics undermine the popular distinction between gender and sex, suggesting that the latter is a product of the former, and its antecedent: if "gender is the social construction of sex," explains Butler, "and if there is no access to this 'sex' except by means of its construction, then it appears not only that sex is absorbed by gender, but that 'sex' becomes something like a fiction, perhaps a fantasy, retroactively installed at a prelinguistic site to which there is no direct access" (BM, 5). For Moore, to ground one's politics, one's "self," or one's poetry within something called female sexuality or female experience is to have been "deceived into thinking that you have progressed." At the same time, Moore's own life choices make it clear that an antifoundational approach to issues of sexuality and selfhood does not foreclose the possibility of committed political action; Moore was an avid suffragist throughout her years in college and in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and continued to advocate women's rights throughout her life. Nevertheless, by rejecting the sexed body as a password, stamp of authenticity, or site of truth, Moore asks us to review the ground upon which feminist poetics have traditionally been recognized as such.
Kirstin Hotelling will receive her Ph. D. in English Literature from the University of Rochester this spring. "Marianne Moore's Strategic Selfhood" is part of her dissertation, titled "After Autonomy: The Feminist Poetics of Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and May Swenson." A portion of her chapter on Swenson appears in a forthcoming issue of Twentieth Century Literature.
1. See Taffy Martin, Marianne Moore: Subversive Modernist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986); hereafter abbreviated SM. See also idem, "Portrait of a Writing Master: Beyond the Myth of Marianne Moore," in Twentieth Century Literature 30 (summer-fall 1984): 192-209. Suzanne Juhasz claims that "When [Moore] writes about 'the particular strength' that chastity confers, she writes from direct experience" (Suzanne Juhasz, Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry By Women [New York: Harper and Row, 1976], 4). More recently, Joanne Feit Diehl argues that Moore's poetic "reinforces a disengagement of affect from voice. Moore's poetry displays the absence of eros and its attending desires" (Joanne Feit Diehl, Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore: The Psychodynamics of Creativity [Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1993], 46), while Jeanne Larsen describes Moore's poems as having the "appearance of neutered chastity" (Jeanne Larsen, "Lowell, Teasdale, Wylie, Millay and Bogan," in The Columbia History of American Poets, ed. Jay Parini and Brett C. Millier [New York: Columbia University Press, 1993], 204).
2. Louise Bogan, Achievement in American Poetry, 1900-1950 (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1951), 102.
3. Elizabeth Bishop, quoted in George Starbuck, "'The Work!': A Conversation with Elizabeth Bishop," in Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, ed. Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), 327.
4. Charles Molesworth, for instance, writes that Moore's work is "an intimate modernism, almost precious, but redeemed from mere preciocity by great skill and moral balance" (Charles Molesworth, "Moore's Masterpiece: The Pangolin's Alternating Blaze," in Marianne Moore: Woman and Poet, ed. Patricia C. Willis [Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1990], 95). To his credit Molesworth does give important insight into Moore's persona that directly challenges this "myth," particularly with regard to her early suffrage activities; see his Marianne Moore: A Literary Life (New York: Atheneum, 1990). See also Bonnie Costello, Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); Jeredith Merrin, An Enabling Humility: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and the Uses of Tradition (London: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Celeste Goodridge, Hints and Disguises: Marianne Moore and Her Contemporaries (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989); and SM.
5. Cristanne Miller, Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 22; hereafter abbreviated QA.
6. Betsy Erkkila, The Wicked Sisters: Women Poets, Literary History, and Discord (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 104.
7. May Swenson, "A Matter of Diction," in A Festschrift for Marianne Moore's Seventy-Seventh Birthday By Various Hands, ed. Thurairajah Tambimuttu (New York: Tambimuttu and Mass, 1964), 45.
8. Marianne Moore, "Black Earth," in Poems (New York: Egoist Press, 1921), 10-11; this volume is hereafter abbreviated P. The poem was first published in The Egoist 5 (spring 1918): 55-56, and later appeared in Observations (New York: The Dial Press, 1924), 45-47. Given Moore's life-long devotion to (sometimes extreme) revisions, and the fact that sixty-nine of her published poems are not included in The Complete Poems, I read from her first collection, Poems, and her second, Observations. I will be working from the poems' first versions unless otherwise noted because of my focus on her early years (1907-25).
9. Marianne Moore, speech delivered at Barnard College in October 1955, quoted in Molesworth, Marianne Moore, 365.
10. Marianne Moore, "An Octopus," in The Complete Poems (New York: Macmillan/Viking, 1982), 71; this volume is hereafter abbreviated CP.
11. See for instance Linda Leavell, Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts: Prismatic Color (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma University Press, 1995). Leavell gives the most well researched account to date of the influence of the visual arts on Moore's work. For a comparison of the feminisms of O'Keeffe and Moore, see Leavell, "Marianne Moore and Georgia O'Keeffe: 'The Feelings of a Mother--a Woman or a Cat,'" in Marianne Moore, ed. Willis, 297-319.
12. Kenneth Burke, quoted in SM, 4.
13. T. S. Eliot, "Introduction to Selected Poems," in Marianne Moore: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Charles Tomlinson (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 62. This originally appeared as the introduction to Moore's 1935 Selected Poems.
14. Elizabeth Bishop, "As We Like It," The Quarterly Review of Literature 4 (spring 1948): 129. This is a special issue on Moore.
15. Daniel L. Guillory makes the argument that Moore's poetry, specifically "her celebration of the hard, technological reality of things surpasses that of her male contemporaries because she possesses a far more technological mind than any of them" (Daniel L. Guillory, "Marianne Moore and Technology," in Marianne Moore, ed. Willis, 85). Observing the structure of Moore's notes and quotations, Guillory concludes that Moore's poetic is "not altogether different from Frank Lloyd Wright's use of exposed beams or unpainted and naturally oxidized surfaces" .
16. Jean Garrigue, Marianne Moore, University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, no. 50 (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1965), 8.
17. Marianne Moore, interview with Donald Hall, "The Art of Poetry: Marianne Moore," in Marianne Moore, ed. Tomlinson, 44.
18. See Ezra Pound, "The Serious Artist," in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1954), 41-57; and T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (New York: Methuen, 1960), 37-44.
19. F. S. Flint, "Imagisme," Poetry 1 (March 1913): 198.
20. Wallace Stevens, "About One of Marianne Moore's Poems," Quarterly Review of Literature 4 (spring 1948): 145.
21. Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 191-92, 195; hereafter abbreviated SC.
22. Christopher J. Knight, "Marianne Moore: Appreciating Both the Trope of the Imagination and Wallace Stevens' Handling of the Same," in Marianne Moore, ed. Willis, 426.
23. Marianne Moore, "Critics and Connoisseurs" and "Armor's Undermining Modesty," in CP, 38, 151, respectively.
24. Marianne Moore, "The Fish," in P, 14-15. I read from this version rather than the slightly revised version in The Collected Poems because the fluid stanzaic form of the earlier draft more clearly underlines the connection between poem and sea. The poem was first published in The Egoist 5 (August 1918): 95.
25. See Michel Foucault, "The Repressive Hypothesis," in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 17-49.
26. Moore, interview with Hall, 31.
27. Marianne Moore, "Things Others Never Notice," quoted in Goodridge, Hints and Disguises, 92.
28. Martin gives an excellent interpretation of Moore's love of challenge as it appears in her poetry, suggesting that "Moore's poems frequently glorify passionate intensity and seek out chaos and danger" (SM, 7).
29. Marianne Moore, "In the Days of Prismatic Color," in Observations, 49; hereafter abbreviated "ID." In addition to a few minor revisions in form, this earlier version differs from the final one in only one word: "fineness" in the third line is changed to "refinement" (CP, 41). This poem was first published in The Lantern 27 : 35.
30. Charles Baudelaire, "Anywhere Out of the World," copied from Vanity Fair, 4 March 1916, 54, quoted in Marianne Moore, reading notebook 1916-21, notebook 1250/2, series VII, box 01, folder 02, Marianne Moore Collection, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, Pa.
31. Ibid.
32. Moore, "Armor's Undermining Modesty," 151.
33. Marianne Moore to her family, 17 January 1906, family correspondence, series VI, box 12a, folder 02, Marianne Moore Collection, Rosenbach Museum and Library.
34. Costello, Marianne Moore, 61.
35. Ibid., 62.
36. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1990), 134.
37. Ibid., 136.
38. Though no gendered pronouns are used in this poem to denote its re's sex, Moore's mother, Mary Warner Moore, wrote a letter to Mary Shoemaker on 21 April 1925 in which she briefly described the part of "the lady's" hair in "Those Various Scalpels." I thank Dr. Evelyn Feldman at the Rosenbach Museum and Library for drawing my attention to this letter (a portion of which I read transcribed in Feldman's own notes). For this reason, along with what I consider to be Moore's appropriation of the Renaissance convention in which a female beloved is named through the itemization of her body parts, I take the re of this poem to be a woman.
39. Margaret Holley, The Poetry of Marianne Moore: A Study in Voice and Value (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 33.
40. Jeanne Heuving, Omissions Are Not Accidents: Gender in the Art of Marianne Moore (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 38. Heuving's account offers a relationship to Pound's "Portrait d'une femme" and Eliot's "Portrait of a Lady"; see her "Gender in Marianne Moore's Art: Can'ts and Refusals," Sagetrieb 6 (winter 1987): 117-26.
41. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993), 9-10; hereafter abbreviated BM.
.
During the earliest and most severe years of the Great Depression, from 1930 to 1931, migrant laborers from Georgia to North Carolina followed word of employment to work-camps near the mouth of a hydro tunnel in the mountains of West Virginia. One of a series of massive hydroelectric projects launched during the 1920s and 1930s, this three-mile conduit had been licensed to divert water from the New River to a nearby power plant, generating "white coal" for both public and commercial use. 1 From its inception in 1924, however, Hawk's Nest Tunnel had been intended not as a public utility, but as a power source for a new electrometallurgical complex--one owned by Union Carbide and Carbon, the corporate entity that had commissioned the tunnel. 2 With metallurgic processing apparently in mind, engineers and geologists had plotted the tunnel to run through veins of ninety-seven to ninety-nine percent pure silica. 3 During construction, these highly refined mineral concentrations were extracted and sold to the Electro-Metallurgical Company for use in processing steel. Large sections of the tunnel, those that contained the richest deposits, had been widened to maximize profits from in-house transactions (HC, 20, 27, 66). Licensed as a public utility, Hawk's Nest Tunnel had been drilled as a silica mine.
Illicit dry-drilling practices, said to be three times faster than drilling with water, sped the project toward completion, foreclosing a possible shutdown by the Federal Power Commission (HC, 4-5, 59-62, 66). Coupled with substandard ventilation and the contractor's failure to issue respirators to workers, high velocity drilling had aggravated what industry specialists knew to be a dangerous enterprise. During an epoch when displaced southern agricultural workers found themselves vulnerable to industrial exploitation, racist divisions of labor facilitated the reckless construction of an "oddly obscure" landmark that still stands as a "marvel of engineering prowess" (HN, 1, 22). Of the 2500 men who worked the tunnel's interior between 1930 and 1931, a small percentage were white-coal miners and laborers from the nearby town of Gauley Bridge. African Americans, most of them emigrants from southern coastal states, made up eighty percent of this low-paid work force; and they composed an even larger majority of the tunnel's drillers, nippers, and muckers, workers whose proximity to the drilling-face treated them to the highest concentrations of silica dust. 4 While it is still not known how many black workers were killed by their exposure to the Gauley Bridge tunnel, it was clear to many by the mid-1930s that a large number may have succumbed to industrial disease. Living in segregated, company-owned work camps, and earning subsistence-level wages, black migrant workers in particular lacked the resources to resist hazards that resulted in close to 600 deaths. 5
In late 1935, with rumors of mass graves in West Virginia now circulating in the national press, the New York congressman and labor advocate Vito Marcantonio called for an investigation into allegations of corporate negligence in the suspected silicosis deaths at Gauley Bridge. 6 A group of doctors, journalists, and former tunnel workers arrived in Washington to testify in early 1936. At the congressional hearings mandated by House Joint Resolution 449, a silicotic bench driller named George Robison was asked to testify regarding the working conditions in and around Hawk's Nest Tunnel. Robison spoke of threats and beatings used by white foremen to coerce black workers back into the mountain after interval dynamite blasts. Reentering the bore within minutes of each shoot, teams of muckers and drillers could see only with difficulty through a white haze of silica (HC, 58, 67). As work resumed at the head, accelerated rounds of dry drilling forced fresh jets of mineral straight back into the faces of workers. Pails of drinking water carried into the shaft looked like buckets of milk. In describing the deathly white residue that coated the tunnel's interior as well as the "flour-sprinkled" woods around its mouth, Robison treated the white congressional committee to an unsettling image. "As dark as I am," Robison told the committee chairman, "when I came out of that tunnel in the mornings, if you had been in the tunnel too and come out at my side, nobody could have told which was the white man.
Previous federal and state trial testimony had referred to workers lightened rather than darkened by their exposure to the dust in Hawk's Nest Tunnel, and Robison himself had so far spoken only literally of the whitening effects of silica (HC, 4, 37-8; HN, 46). Yet none of the white congressmen questioning the former tunnel worker asked Robison how a white man could be blackened by white dust. Untenable as literal description, the image of workers blackened by silica was a metaphor driven by tacit racial conventions. In an essay published in 1925 in Alaine Locke's anthology The New Negro, Jessie Fauset described the deeply ingrained racial codes that restricted African American contributions to drama. "There is an unwritten law in America," Fauset wrote, "that though white may imitate black, black . . . must never imitate white." 7 Fauset's observation that "grease-paint may be used to darken but never to lighten" refers to the racial dynamics of caricature; but a black witness such as Robison would have risked breaching these conventions--laws that licensed blackness to whites, withholding whiteness from blacks--by illustrating the lightening effects of industrial contaminants. Barred from painting himself the color of his superiors, Robison chose to switch the black-and-white terms of his congressional testimony. In so doing, he reversed an image that might have stood for the colorblindness of capitalist exploitation. Shifting literal to rative description, the supernatural "blackening" of white workers suggested that, far from being a class-based phenomenon, silicosis was a disease of racial proportions. At the Gauley Bridge tunnel, the absorption of white dust would have made a black man of even a white congressman who emerged, in the morning that follows from a dark day of work, from the opposite end of a racialized spectrum of exploitation. Within the conventional limits of racial performance, Robison's metaphor suggested that, if racial identities were initially written on the surface of the body, they could be written more firmly across its invisible interior. The idea that white men could be blackened by industrial poisons affirmed not only that race was unfixed, but that, as a social construct, race was central to the story of the Gauley tunnel disaster.
If conventions delimiting the performance of racial identities had prompted Robison's shift to a metaphorical description of industrial contamination, the striking medical imagery that surrounded Hawk's Nest Tunnel lent a conceptual resonance to his image of white-blackened white workers. Effecting shadowy reversals of visual and conceptual poles, and displacing surface "appearances" with uncovered "essences," X-ray testimonials provided an epistemological complement to the searching conceptions of racial identity that the tunnel engendered. From the beginning of the gradual public exposure of the disaster, X-ray pictures had been instrumental in identifying the industrial nature of deaths falsely attributed to pneumonia and tuberculosis. With state hearings on the incident beginning as early as 1933, the story of the Gauley tunnel incident had been suffused with images of dark chests illuminated by bursts of white scars (HC, 4, 37-38). During the 1936 Congressional Investigation of the Health Conditions of Public Utility Workers, X-ray pictures lent strange credence to Robison's exposure of the hidden industrial origins of race. Robison's image of blackened white workers at the daylit night mouth of the tunnel, for example, was contained in the murky X-ray transparencies that specialists held up to courtroom windows for jury inspection (HC, 96). What the daylight released from these plates was an uncanny inversion of fundamental conceptual and visual binary terms. The true industrial nature of these workers' diseases could not be revealed through "indefinite" symptoms; it was rather illuminated through a technology that collapsed surface and depth, disclosing interior landscapes filled with negative "white shadows" and the deathly "snow storm[s]" produced by dark scars (HC, 27, 96). X-ray testimonials and Robison's testimony regarding the industrial racial nature of the disaster at Hawk's Nest Tunnel were conjoined by a shared set of visual and conceptual inversions.
Amid a series of Depression Era social documentary poems, including Charles Reznikoff's verse renderings of southern court records , and Mike Gold's and Tillie Olsen's poetic fashionings of letters from workers , Muriel Rukeyser's "The Book of the Dead" was unique in its effort to adapt the conceptual premises of new visual technologies to a documentary telling of the Gauley Bridge tunnel story. Plumbing the disaster and its aftermath through trial transcripts, letters, interviews, and descriptions of conventional and medical photographs, Rukeyser used the penetrating gaze of the X-ray to bridge high-modernist with more politically acute social-realist aesthetics. In her Gauley tunnel poem, however, the poet's arcane exposure of capitalistic mechanisms of erasure was bought at the cost of the historical racial dimensions of Hawk's Nest. While the feminist social poet had been criticized by male peers for promoting "unscientific" varieties of socialism in "The Book of the Dead," her sharp portrayal of the class basis of industrial exploitation was nothing if not doctrinaire. 8 In the congressional testimony upon which Rukeyser based much of her poem, X-ray images had provided a conceptual framework for George Robison's account of the racial makeup of Hawk's Nest Tunnel. These same images prompted Rukeyser to envision a gendered poetic release from industrial capitalist exploitation. But modern visual technologies--particularly those deployed in state photographic and radiographic campaigns--also blinded the social poet to the black-and-white depths of the Depression Era's worst incident of industrial poisoning. Excavating the material of class consciousness from workers' bodies, and deciphering its encryptions through poetic methods engendered by new visual technologies, Rukeyser restored a universalizing whiteness to the blackened workers that Robison had summoned before the congressional committee. Sacrificing racial to class interests, "The Book of the Dead" illustrated that, during an epoch much celebrated for its sweeping radical alliances, modern visual technologies could be used to limit the spectrum that these alliances encompassed. 9
As a literary effort to "photograph . . . the voice" of a missing industrial constituency, Rukeyser's tunnel poem was conceived in the interstices of mass radiographic campaigns and the massive photographic programs of the Roosevelt administration. 10 Between 1935 and 1943, as mobile X-ray screening units began to circulate in England and America, the Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) was "vividly demonstrat[ing] the value of the camera as [an] instrument of government" by commissioning and exhibiting images of rural poverty in the South and West. 11 Distributed to government agencies, published in newspapers and magazines, and exhibited in museums, schools, and libraries across the country during the late 1930s, FSA images garnered support for New Deal social initiatives; and they worked to restore a racially composed credibility to an administration burdened by political and economic crises. By slanting its photographic displays to feature disproportionately high numbers of white farmers and laborers, the Roosevelt administration exhibited its capacity not only to see but to circumscribe the human effects of environmental and economic corrosion. 12 In the racial management of FSA photographic displays, the humane objectives of New Deal reformers seemed to harmonize with the universalizing class aims of more radical contemporaries. 13
Serving a range of institutional purposes, medical and conventional photographic equipment carried vexed social and political overtones in the late 1930s. Rukeyser portrayed the X-ray camera as a penetrating medium that could retrieve emancipatory truths from Gauley tunnel. Displayed as "map[s]" of a "country marked by error / and one air" (US, 61), the scarred interiors of the legendary "walking skeletons" of "Silicosis Village" provided more than empirical evidence of the human cost of industrial production: they were potential guides to an afterlife, to an enlightening political future. 14 Rukeyser derived the title of U. S. 1, her 1938 collection featuring the long Gauley tunnel poem, from a contemporaneous Federal Writers' Project travelogue called U. S. One: Maine to Florida. In so doing, she cast "The Book of the Dead" as a potent enhancement of the American Guide Series' effort "to highlight the history, resources and points of interest in an area of more than three million square miles." 15 What Rukeyser's extension of this state-sponsored survey finally exposed, however, was a crippling conjunction of somatic and institutional corruption.
It sets up a gradual scar formation;
this increases, blocking all drainage from the lung,
eventually scars, blocking the blood supply,
and then they block the air passageways.
Shortness of breath,
pains around the chest,
he notices lack of vigor.
Bill blocked; investigation blocked.
[US, 61]
Despite growing concerns for a nationwide epidemic of industrial dust disease, bills to add silicosis coverage to worker's compensation met with bipartisan opposition in the mid- to late 1930s. 16 Rukeyser charts this legislative failure in "The Book of the Dead" by suggesting that, while the new medical gaze had the power to enlighten and transform society, its emancipatory potential lay snagged in the gap between diagnosis and cure. Versed in marxist conceptions of ideological production, the radical poet understood that conventional photographs and texts commissioned by the Works Progress Administration performed a number of institutional functions. They worked to expose economic hardships and iniquities, but they did so in a manner that placed the solutions to social problems within the confines of corporate interests and structures. In this sense, the reformist objectives of New Deal documentaries dimmed the light that they shed on the national body's interior. In her portrayal of the X-ray camera as a medium that was less tainted and more encompassing than the conventional camera, however, and in her suggestion that it modeled processes by which poems might be made penetrate to real truths and identities, Rukeyser failed to identify the X-ray's own ideological functions. Her neglect of these functions compromises not only her metaphor of the X-ray as map, but also her portrayal of the Gauley tunnel incident at large. In the 1930s, Rukeyser knew, conventional state-sponsored photographs served the larger corporate interests of the liberal Roosevelt administration. But the state- and corporate-sponsored medical imaging techniques that exposed and publicized industrial abuses were themselves being used on a mass scale to "survey" and "manage" "large populations" (SB, 147). 17 Among these populations was a newly identified body of silicotic miners and foundry workers. This lingering constituency was believed to number between 100,000 and 500,000 nationwide, and its members represented potential financial liabilities to companies that neglected to screen them from hire. 18
If Rukeyser hedged in her celebration of the emancipatory power of new medical pictures, she was sharper in her poetic condemnation of conventional documentary images. Despite what we now recognize as the racist nature of FSA displays and publications, the poet had praised their capacity to "widen" social horizons in a New Masses review. 19 As a critic, Rukeyser was unstinting in her praise of the work of government photographers like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, and Ben Shahn; but in her poetry of the late 1930s, she exhibits a principled wariness toward state-sponsored social photography. The proliferating images of glass and of cameras that fill the opening passages of "The Book of the Dead" express a marked ambivalence toward what Walter Kalaidjian calls the "emergent visual culture" of New Deal America (AC, 166).
Camera at the crossing sees the city
a street of wooden walls and empty windows,
the doors shut handless in the empty street,
and the deserted Negro standing on the corner.
The little boy runs with his dog
up the street to the bridge over the river where
nine men are mending road for the government.
He blurs the camera-glass fixed on the street.
Railway tracks here and many panes of glass
tin under light, the grey shine of towns and forests:
in the commercial hotel (Switzerland of America)
the owner is keeping his books behind the public glass.
[US, 16]
Noting that glass is a product of silica, the toxic mineral mined from the tunnel, Kalaidjian suggests that Rukeyser here portrays the daily matter of American life as tainted by the human cost of its production. Through such a reading, the poet's references to the camera's own "groundglass" (US, 10) work to implicate further the state visual apparatus that came to chronicle this life in the late 1930s. 20 Identifying the deathly material of the lens with the material of the town's "deserted" inhabitants, the poet begins her exposé with an account of alienation and complicity that indicts the state documentarian's equipment. Visually undermining the town of Gauley Bridge by reducing it to a series of refracting surfaces (doors, walls, windows, mended roadway, race-marked skin), the poet will endeavor, in her own words, to "widen the lens" (US, 71) of the New Deal documentary apparatus, modeling her penetrating poetic gaze on the ghostly medical camera that had become central to the exposure of the Gauley tunnel disaster.
If the early "photographic" passages of Rukeyser's poem serve to indict state-sanctioned instruments of social investigation, later visual images endeavor to revitalize these instruments by modeling them on new medical visual technologies. In "The Book of the Dead," there is a historical feminist component to the drive to bring the power of the X-ray to the documentary lens. At a time when large numbers of American women had already begun to participate in state-sponsored artistic and sociological projects, medically affiliated critics discouraged the feminist writer from entering into more strictly gendered institutional domains. 21 Reviewing U. S. 1 for The New Republic in 1938, the poet-physician William Carlos Williams praised Rukeyser for knowing "how to use the language of an X-ray report" (Williams's emphasis). 22 Rather than "twist[ing]" her medical source materials "in order to make 'poetry' of them," Williams wrote, the selective young poet adhered to principles of straight presentation, displaying her sources as artifacts, as things in themselves ("MR," 141). It was in her faithful renderings of the language of X-ray reports, renderings that conformed to aesthetic parameters mapped by masters like "Pound in the material of his 'Cantos,'" ("MR," 141) that the ingenue's otherwise "uncritical" "passion" ("MR," 142) as a social poet was tempered and sharpened. Here, Williams's praise shored up the masculine borders of both the medical and poetical professions. By dwelling on Rukeyser's truthfulness to, not the content, but "the language" of materials that were often gathered, but not deciphered, by female X-ray technicians, Williams widened the gulf between apprentice and master, portraying it as a gendered divide between physician and nurse. 23 What the doctor conferred on "Miss Rukeyser" was the license to write poetry that she would never qualify to read.
Rukeyser aspired to more than fidelity to the institutionally gendered language of X-ray reports, however. In "The Book of the Dead," she pointedly misread her medical textual materials, truing them to the perceptual processes of the visual technologies to which they referred. In a section of the poem drawn from congressional testimony, for example, the poet edited and reshaped a lung specialist's lengthy reading of radiographic encryptions (HC, 96-97). Trimming the descriptive portions of his testimony, Rukeyser fashioned it into a discursive descent, one that leads closer and closer to a luminous core. "This is the X-ray picture taken last April," states an expert in dust diseases:
I would point out to you : these are the ribs;
this is the region of the breastbone;
this is the heart (a wide white shadow filled with blood).
Now, this lung's mottled, beginning, in these areas.

Let us have the second.
Come to the window again. Here is the heart.
More numerous nodules, thicker, see, in the upper lobes.
You will notice the increase : here, streaked fibrous tissue--
Indicating?
That indicates the progress in ten months' time.

Blood vessels shut. Model conglomeration.
What stage?
Third stage. Each time I place my pencil point:
There and there and there, there, there.
"It is growing worse every day. At night
"I get up to catch my breath. If I remained
"flat on my back I believe I would die."
[US, 31-32] 24
In this passage, the mounting empirical precision of the scientist--"There and there and there, there, there"--culminates and collapses in the voice of a sufferer who grows "worse every day." In constructing this powerful testimonial juncture, the poet burrows through layers of physical and discursive surfaces, reclaiming the patient's experience from a clinical illustration of the progressive stages of the disease. Here "The Book of the Dead" elicits the human cost of Hawk's Nest Tunnel not through straight presentation, but through a poetic approximation of the spatial and temporal depths of modern medical visual technologies. Tunneling through medical and personal testimonials, the poet photographed the voice of an unburied casualty, a member of the "invisible" constituency of the depression. 25
The X-ray reports through which Rukeyser sought to recover the hidden victims of Hawk's Nest Tunnel constituted a well fortified discourse in the 1930s. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison write that the early-twentieth-century emergence of the X-ray photograph precipitated a heightened attention to the precautions that ought to surround the reliable production and dissemination of information from the medium. While appearing to penetrate to new foundations of reality, X-ray imaging was in fact riddled with technical contingencies. Diagnosticians had to learn first how not to shoot straight, mediating "the mechanical procedure of X-raying with a knowledge of systematic deviations between anatomy and its Roentgen [X-ray] representation." 26 Cognizant of the increasing juridical uses of photographs in the early twentieth century, and frightened by the possibility of malpractice suits based on a new visual medium that "fairly radiated authority," modern clinicians began to scramble for both mechanical and interpretive control of a medium in which "the encryption of information takes place in the technology itself." 27 Juridically minded clinicians knew well that the X-ray presented challenges to the diagnostic and even the semiotic authority of medical professionals.
In "The Book of the Dead," the documentary camera was shown to be compromised by the deathly material of its lens. While the medical camera had a greater emancipatory potential, it was still an intrinsically complicit machine. Even the celebratory medical portions of Rukeyser's Gauley tunnel poem contain hints of the X-ray's embeddedness in capitalist structures of alienation. In her rendering of congressional X-ray testimonials, for example, the shift from the specialist's voice to the voice of the absent sufferer marks the estrangement of the radiographed subject from his encrypted interior. The disjunctive union of these voices dramatizes not only the physical distance of the patient from the specialist who deciphers his X-ray, but also the discursive remove accruing from the doctor's habit of looking and speaking through machines. 28 Rukeyser's condemnation of new medical visual apparatus was more restrained than her indictment of the documentary camera in "The Book of the Dead," however, because X-rays finally marked a turning of technology itself against the masculine institutions that possessed it. Modern medicine had generated a self-encrypting machine, one that robbed patients of the insides of their bodies as it wrested powers of signification away from the professionals it served.
As uncertainties regarding how to see and read bodies were added to the broader clamor of modern semiotic crisis, the defensive situation of medical professionals came to resemble that of professional poets. 29 In an age of literary and cultural positivism, when "unprejudiced observation" was said to have "put verbal notions out of court," poets appeared to have lost their autonomy as readers of culture in the way that machine-bound physicians had lost theirs as organic readers of bodies. 30 Male modernists in particular answered charges of charlatanism with airs of hyped-up authority, dressing their poetry with allusions and cryptic textual inscriptions. In the tradition of Emersonians who used "Nature as [their] hieroglyphic," writers like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound began to unfold curative truths from mysterious "anaglyphic" texts. 31 With their capacity to diagnose having been infringed upon (in modern Britain particularly) by a new wave of sociologists and new social-realist writers, these would-be philologists traced debased words and customs to hidden originary reserves, mastering Sanskritic thunder claps, and conjuring silk-and-stone visual essences from classical Chinese ideograms. 32 Marshaling the alienating features of emerging modern technologies to reactionary cultural ends, high-modernist writers came to specialize in generating and deciphering their own literary self-encryptions.
As a politically minded modernist poet, Rukeyser recognized that "radiant" new visual perspectives could both blind and enlighten. On the one hand, the infamous "Poster Girl" of proletariat literature heeded marxist appeals to X-ray imaging as a means of enlightening the eyes and minds of the masses. 33 Penetrating layers of flesh to exhume the powerful texts buried within and among the proletariat body, the modern medical camera united poets and workers as agents who could see, and seek to publish, the invisible effects of capitalist exploitation. At the same time, however, Rukeyser was criticized by radically minded colleagues for skimming the "erudition" that surrounded the poetic trade in arcanum. 34 Hidden in the allusive title of her Gauley tunnel poem, for example, was a metaphor that mapped snowy silicotic X-ray encryptions onto hieroglyphic writings buried with, and within, the bodies of ancient Egyptian mummies. The lacing of the Gauley tunnel story with prayers from amulets and papyrus rolls, however, was hardly fashioned as an inflationary appeal to the arcane. Like mechanically generated medical images that could serve to locate and enlighten a poisoned industrial constituency, Rukeyser's funereal texts signified a set of cultural practices that united, rather than separating, bodies and signs. Prayers carved into stones to be sewn into bodies--"My heart my mother my heart my mother" (US, 27)--were the mark of a culture in which textual and physical ministerings were thoroughly merged. 35
Rukeyser's exploration of the cultural functions of bodily inscriptions was based on contemporary medical testimony and on a plum-sized funereal scarab exhibited at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. 36 Carved from near-black serpentine, and glinting with fine white hieroglyphic inscriptions, the Heart Amulet of Hatnofer was on display in the poet's own city between 1936 and 1937 ("CE," 178-79), the years during which the poet wrote "The Book of the Dead." Considered vital to the judgment of the soul and to its eventual preservation after death, heart amulets such as this one were designed to be wrapped over, or inserted directly into, the eviscerated chests of embalmed kings and queens. 37 The text on the Heart Amulet of Hatnofer was characteristic of the texts carved into other such stones: "Hatnofer says: Heart of my mother, heart of my mother! Heart of my [present] form!" ("CE," 179). New Kingdom heart amulets were universally inscribed with variants of a single small chapter from the hundreds of papyrus rolls that make up the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and it was with a translation of this chapter that Rukeyser elected to introduce Egypt into Hawk's Nest Tunnel ("CE," 179). The snowy scoring of the Metropolitan Heart Scarab's white-on-black encryptions, together with the stone's location within the chest of its bearer, places this particular textual artifact at the confluence of divergent modernist streams in "The Book of the Dead."
Rukeyser hoped to "widen the lens" of the "paternalistic" New Deal documentary apparatus not only by using medical visual technologies to recover invisible texts, but by challenging conventionally gendered claims to the instruments of both medical and poetical seeing. 38 By exposing encrypted male interiors in her poem, and by foregrounding the women--the journalist Philippa Allen, and the bereaved mother, Emma Jones--who secured interviews, autopsies, and X-rays to uncover the industrial truth of the tunnel incident, Rukeyser regendered her medical reportage, restoring agency to women through a visual medium that was conceived to erase it. 39 The passage from the Heart Amulet of Hatnofer, the first arcane inscription to appear in "The Book of the Dead," paid tribute to the matriarchal aspects of a society that, at the time of the production of the Eighteenth-Dynasty stone, was ruled by an innovative queen, Hatshepsut, who had claimed for herself the traditionally male role of sun god. 40 Rukeyser extended the words on this amulet, a treasure stolen from the breast of the Egyptian mother who had borne it, into the testimony of the modern West Virginia mother who procured the first "X-ray pictures" (HC, 38) of the tunnel workers' lungs: 41
I first discovered what was killing these men.

They used to work in a coal mine, not steady work
for the mines were not going much of the time.
A power Co. foreman learned that we made home brew,
and he formed a habit of dropping in evenings to drink,
persuading the boys and my husband--
give up their jobs and take this other work.
It would pay them better.
Shirley was my youngest son; the boy.
He went into the tunnel.
My heart my mother my heart my mother
My heart my coming into being.
[US, 27]
Egyptian icons and religious texts featured powerful matriarchs like the Heart Amulet's Hatshepsut, and prophetic goddesses like Isis who, according to Egyptian texts, "lived in the form of a woman" (BD, 122) and cured diseases through her knowledge of the healing properties of words. 42 Within the iconographic traditions of Western science, on the other hand, modern women were more often the objects than the agents of such knowledge and power. In her study of gendered imagery in modern science, Ludmilla Jordanova finds a historical gendering of the penetrating medical gaze in the macabre genre of anatomist paintings. Reviewing a series of European and American paintings and lithographs that depict scenes of dissection, Jordanova notes that nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists broke with earlier conventions by featuring not male or unsexed cadavers, but instead women as the objects of the male anatomists' attention. Jordanova attributes this appearance of the sexed cadaver, whose once-living tissue is peeled back like clothing, to the so-called romantic confusion of the erotic with the deathly. 43 In anatomist paintings, the male scientist's unveiling of truth from the dead woman on the table invokes a traditional association of women with nature's esoteric verities, providing a backdrop for the ritualized containment of a pair of mysterious and threatening forces. 44
In her own poetic unveiling of the truth of industrial poisoning, Rukeyser's X-ray testimonials release a modern visual technology from its historically gendered moorings. Lisa Cartwright attributes some of the popular as well as professional fascination with turn-of-the-century X-ray images to the same "stunning spectacle of death in life" exhibited in anatomist paintings of the preceding decades (SB, 121). That this spectacle was gendered in accordance with nineteenth-century representations of medical dissection is suggested by Wilhelm Röntgen's decision to withhold from public view the first X-ray image that he observed through the fluoroscope. What Röntgen photographed and published for scientific and popular consumption was not his own hand, but rather his wife's ( 1), with the skeletal splay of her fingers gendered by the negative shadow of a wedding ring (SB, 114-15).
In the latter years of the New Deal, mass X-ray screenings were implemented both by public-health agencies and private corporations. In these screenings, new visual technologies were used to identify, and ultimately to segregate, populations that included diseased women and industrial workers. Insofar as women and workers were conjoined as targets for tuberculosis and silicosis screenings respectively, the emerging practice of mass radiography could be said to bolster Rukeyser's feminist authority as an artist equipped to photograph the invisible voice of the oppressed laborer. Here, X-ray screenings might be said to trace the sources of oppression that, beginning around 1935, forged the coalitional political alliances that made up the Popular Front. Used by eugenically minded scientists to survey and manage those subpopulations that threatened the political and biological integrity of the nation, however, mass screenings were also directed at a larger constituency, one that included many of the women and workers who were specifically targeted. X-rays were also used to survey and manage a range of "racial" populations that were threatening to a nation whose genetic makeup had been altered by recent patterns of immigration. Deployed in an effort to contain contaminating women and workers, then, mass radiography campaigns served to cleanse "racial" and "ethnic" groups of the very claims to identity that might enable them to identify their mass subjugation. Penetrating visible markers of identity, X-ray screenings hid the evidence of the racist work that they performed. The historical erasure of this evidence casts a shadow over Rukeyser's marxist appeal to the emancipatory potential of new visual technologies.
Beginning in the late 1930s British and American promotional films for mass radiography--films geared toward women in particular--had begun to portray women "as deceptive carriers of a disease that is invisible except under the X ray, threatening the integrity of the family, the community, and the nation" (SB, 146). Framing the disease as a corrosive to both familial and national structures, these films played to lingering perceptions of tuberculosis as an illness carried and spread not only by women, but by foreigners and members of other "races." 45 Here, the anatomist's cadaver was made to bleed into a range of modern subjects who were perceived as threatening to the hereditarian integrity of the "American race." 46 During the 1910s and early 1920s, as immigration swelled to peaks of close to one million newcomers per year, racialist Americans came increasingly to echo Madison Grant, author of The Passing of the Great Race , in warning against the dilution of not only their Anglo-American cultural inheritance but their "Nordic" American genetic makeup as well. 47 The migration of African Americans from remote southern to northern industrial centers contributed to diatribes against "mongrelization" such as Calvin Coolidge's in Good Housekeeping in 1921, and it encouraged the growth of the Ku Klux Klan in northern cities in the early 1920s. 48 But American racialists during the first two decades of the century had begun to react also to the genetic threat posed by "subspecies" of "whites." 49 The vast majority of immigrants entering the U. S. between 1900 and 1924 were newcomers of eastern and southern European ancestry; and by popular modern racialist taxonomies they were classified as belonging to distinctly inferior "Alpine" and "Mediterranean" races. 50 During the first decades of the twentieth century, in forums ranging from medical conferences on immigrant screening to prohibitionist rallies, the dilution of America's Nordic genetic makeup was linked to the spread of disease. African Americans were grouped with newcomers ranging from Asians to Italians and Jews as dangerous agents whose constitutions and habits predisposed them to illnesses including syphilis and tuberculosis.
Sheila Rothman writes of the modern perception of tuberculosis as "a disease of the masses," noting the upsurge during the immigrant boom of the 1910s and 1920s in American legislation calling for involuntary sanatorium confinement. 51 In medical and legal efforts to check the spread of immigrant diseases, the threat posed by women's sexuality and the traditionally feminized specter of death in life merged with the modern American eugenists' fear of racial contamination. From a public health standpoint, there were certainly sound reasons for implementing programs to manage large populations during the years before the midcentury discovery of a chemotherapeutic "cure" for tuberculosis. 52 Still, when coupled with the historical use of X-rays in the radiographic sterilization of women, the fact that new medical imaging techniques were used to single out and designate tubercular women for confinement suggests that TB screening campaigns provided a complement to modern legislative efforts to regulate sexual reproduction. If X-rays had been used in obvious ways to deprive women of their social and sexual agency, however, their use against racial and ethnic groups was a more subtle matter. Directed against the very impoverished immigrant and African American populations that suffered from the highest rates of tuberculosis infection, the penetrating gaze of the X-ray performed a ghostly, essentializing function. It skinned away markers of race and ethnicity in search of more clinical justifications for containment and segregation.
If the gendered campaign for mass tuberculosis screenings was undergirded by lingering racial anxieties in the 1930s, mass industrial screenings compounded this cultural fear with a corporate fear of the new labor-unionism. 53 Although third-stage silicosis was usually attended by the onset of TB, dust diseases differed from deadly infections in that they could not be passed from host to host. As state legislatures began to consider adding silicosis to the roster of afflictions covered by worker's compensation laws in the mid-1930s, however, industries and insurance companies came to fear dust disease as much as any contagion ("IMC," 198-99). Implemented in the late 1930s in major industrial states, including Illinois and New York, industrial X-ray screenings led to the immediate dismissal of miners and foundry workers whose chests displayed signs of silicosis and related diseases. What these industrial screenings unveiled was an objective criterion for protecting industries from workers whose disease now threatened not the racial integrity of the community or the nation, but rather the financial integrity of the corporate body in the newly emerging welfare state. In the 1930s, unskilled laborers were more than twice as likely as highly skilled workers to suffer from work-related disabilities ("IMC," 196); and of those at the bottom of the pay scale, African American and immigrant workers were routinely coerced into performing the most dangerous tasks. Industrial X-ray screenings demonstrated that, in industry's hands, the medical camera could be used to peel back layers of racial identity in order to provide an objective and essentializing ground for insulating industries against the very bodies that it had formerly been privileged to waste. Here the power of the X-ray to penetrate surfaces toward buried truths was deployed to conceal the practice of racial discrimination.
Rukeyser's rendering of the Gauley tunnel story was based on an emerging visual technology that seemed powerful enough to overthrow its masters, but in her displacement of race in "The Book of Dead" the poet also partook of the essentializing premises of mass radiography. In mass X-ray screenings, people were categorized and sorted according to visual markers that seemed to run deeper than surface identities. Reading identity as an encryption of "fitness," these screenings buried the racial differences that often conditioned the entitlement to health. In "The Book of the Dead," Rukeyser linked silica clouds with X-rays as materials that could penetrate layers of "false consciousness" to reveal the essential solidarity of industrial workers. This strange fusion of visible with invisible particles emerges, tellingly, in the testimony of an African American tunnel survivor. "As dark as I am, when I came out at morning after the tunnel at night, / with a white man, nobody could have told which man was white. / The dust had covered us both, and the dust was white." (US, 34) Using greasepaint illicitly to lighten rather than to darken, the "deserted Negro" from the poem's opening stanzas describes a literal phenomenon that carries a new set of overtones. In the context of Rukeyser's appeal to the bedrock of class consciousness, the normative whitening of emerging tunnel workers marks not the construction but a collapse of race itself. Adapting George Robison's testimony to visual premises that strip the markings of race from depths and surfaces both, the poet altered the worker's account of the lethal dimensions of racial identity, converting it into a specious tribute to the insignificance of skin color to Hawk's Nest Tunnel. Here, amid the many racially unmarked tunnel workers who speak through Rukeyser's poem, a single black survivor appears in whiteface to eulogize the industrial solidarity of the victimized workers. Imaging a revolutionary future in the tones of X-ray shadows and silica dust, "The Book of the Dead" performs a service similar to that of mass radiography, using its penetrating gaze to submerge differences central to the history of American labor and poetry in the 1930s.