Zero poetics

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.