We've had discussions since classical times about the nature
of poetic language, and we're inclined to think that it has always been the
business of practicing poets to reflect on the practice of their business. The
various redefinitions of what poetic language may mean, however radical they
may be since, let's say, Wordsworth, have never questioned the existence of
this category, up to the extent that even with Jacobson in the 20th century,
linguistic theory itself seems to have conserved its existence in its cabin of
terminology.
We would like to think that a zero degree writing in this
direction is one radical attempt by its search for a realm of writing that
deprives itself of all markers of the literary, if at all this is a possible
goal, as if it were possible to rid ourselves of the poetic by going to another
extreme end. What is useful in this attempt, at least, is the way it exposes
the contingent nature of any conception of the literary or poetic, and how this
conception may be implicated in the cultural politics of the time.
To insert a text like "January Zero" by an
American writer Ray DiPalma in the thread of this discussion is already
assuming that this text can be seen to be a part of this whole debate, if alone
we take cues from the fact that it appears in Ron Silliman's anthology In the
American Tree, which in itself is part of an ongoing polemic in American
letters. These are all paratextual elements conditioning our reception of the
text, in the same way that the simple knowledge of art production in France
created the shock effect of Marcel Duchamps' urinals. The inertia of the
dynamic weave of history and myth sets the ground for a collective imaginary
affecting the significance of acts and events, allowing us to swim back and
forth from a quotidian deprived of any importance, to a cultural framing that
foregrounds the values of that culture.
To read "January Zero" is like a return to an
exercise of style, reminding us as did Queneau before that the literary is
essentially a question of form. The mechanical reproduction of the same
syntactic pattern is reinforced by the narration, in the present tense, of a
series of routine acts unaccompanied by any psychological depth. This flat
procedure keeps us bouncing back into the formal and material grid of the text,
impeding any escape into representational or referential content, and making us
doubt the existence of any real narrative at work (the way Beckett began it
with Watt). By a movement to one extreme moment of style, "January
Zero" reincarnates formal self-reference as literary feature, but in a
post-narratorial and post-lyrical context. In the end, however, this procedure
does not revalorize reflexivity as poetic or literary style, but simply
emphasizes the material efficiency of a language powerful in its mechanics, but
empty of ultimate meaning.
