#364

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Ubu Roi was a play by the French writer Alfred Jarry, first performed in Paris in 1896. The response to its opening was riotous. William Butler Yeats was present in the audience, and is reported to have commented, “What more is possible? After us the Savage God.” Wikipedia describes it as “a precursor to Dada, Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. It is the first of three stylized burlesques in which Jarry satirizes power, greed, and their evil practices—in particular the propensity of the complacent bourgeoisie to abuse the authority engendered by success.” So, the infamous play opened the door to modernist absurdity, and appears to have been instrumental in the modernist deconstruction of the dominant metanarrative of the value of success. Success in orthodox cultural systems that are unethical, corrupt, broken, or absurd themselves is thus absurd and corrupt and unethical. The fragmented, fractured, colliding elements of The Dream Songs ought to recognize the play’s ancestral relationship to B.’s poetic cycle, but it also makes sense that B. would avoid it, invested as he was in the recognition of his success in the orthodox cultural system of the literary tradition. The literary tradition has always had cultural critique built into it—think of Swift, for example, one of B.’s literary forbears. But it was critique as cultural corrective, guiding change, trimming excess, dispensing with absurdity by exposing it, with the ultimate aim of safeguarding the dominant cultural paradigms in the long run. Some modernist and much later postmodern work developed a more anarchic approach, with deconstruction as the goal. The assumption was that old cultural systems were so worn out, so corrupt, so decayed and rotten that there was nothing left to save. Get rid of it. B.’s poetic approach is right in line with this: His obsessive narcissistic focus on the disintegration of the addicted persona is founded first on an egoistic self-absorption, but there are broader implications: His addiction can be read as a metaphor for something larger, but it is also a direct consequence of the decay of the systems he critiques. It is both a literary statement about cultural disintegration and a real-world enactment of the cultural disintegration it exposes. The bind for B. comes in that at the same time, he is invested completely in the ongoing validity of the literary culture that he sees decaying and whose decay he is fostering even as he participates in it. This is postmodernism. But B. also has a foot in the old ways, in that he reads everything, has read everything, was thoroughly literate, and by all accounts this is not an empty boast. He read constantly, giving himself as thorough a grounding in the literary tradition as anyone ever. That’s what much of this poem is about. Henry was a reader, is a reader, exhausts libraries. Thoroughly grounded in the tradition he’s helping to destroy.

In the end, of course, the tradition is vastly, incomprehensibly greater than any single writer. Whatever a Berryman or a Jarry can dish out, the tradition is vital enough and resilient enough to absorb it. Modernism and its preordained offspring, postmodernism, has worked its way into a death spiral, following the absurd fragmentation and corruption of the broader cultural systems they follow and that ultimately support the literary tradition they are part of. These “broader cultural systems” I’m referring to are corrupt, civilized, mainly Western. But the human is far, far broader and deeper even than that, and there is much more of life and the human to come, so there will also be a new literature and a new tradition that follows from that. The decay of postmodern civilization is just another phase in the human pageant. As long as the planet itself makes it through this present ecological crisis, human beings will continue their cultural production in response to their lives on this planet. Nature will be there as the ultimate and final guidelight. B. wasn’t equipped to see that, and would never have thought in these terms. He became death obsessed. But individual human death as a metaphor for the disintegration, the death, of cultural systems doesn’t work that well. There is a lot of life throbbing, latent, underneath culture and civilization, and that will be much more difficult to kill off. We can do it if we really try, by killing the planet. But the planet is resilient. I think there’s much of an ecological future left, and our cultural systems are beginning to adapt themselves to it already. Should be interesting. God, in the end, is not Savage, as Yeats feared.