can be traced back to the homage paid to Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse”).
Indeed, exploring such venues as the “Women/Writing/Theory” symposium
for Raddle Moon (#11 and #13), the “Poetics and Exposition” section of Mov-
ing Borders (1998), or the ¤nal issue of Poetics Journal (#10, June 1998), I ¤nd
myself wishing that the poets in question would engage in more stringent
critique of one another’s poems rather than producing so much “theoretical”
prose.
In an essay for the “Poetics” section of Moving Borders, for example, I
came across the following sentence: “Mimesis can partner metonymy, an-
other obstruction to either/or.”^28 What can this mean? Metonymy is the
trope that relates one image or phrase to another along the axis of contiguity,
as in “hut,” “hovel,” “poor little house,” “shack” (Jakobson’s example). The
discussion of mimesis or representation is perhaps the cornerstone of liter-
ary theory from Plato on down, but however we construe mimesis, the word
refers to the mode of the verbal construct itself and its relation (or nonrela-
tion) to an external reality. Metonymy, on the other hand, is a trope and
hence exists, if it exists at all, within the mimesis, not side by side with it.
Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, for example, is considered a highly mimetic novel,
and one of its main verbal devices is metonymy, as when Anna sees her hus-
band at the train station after she has already fallen in love with Vronsky and
notes that Karenin’s ears stick out underneath his hat in a peculiar (and un-
pleasant) fashion, the protruding ears becoming a synecdoche (the most
common form of metonymy) by which Karenin is known throughout the
novel. Not only can’t mimesis “partner” metonymy, there being no equiva-
lence between the two (“another obstruction to either/or”), but metonymy
is in fact one of the key features of the mimetic contract.
Farther down on the same page we read, “Can the rational accommodate
the irrational? Can forms exist which truly allow for the accidental, absurd,
grotesque, horri¤c, incommensurate—is this what Adorno meant?” The an-
swer is quite simply no, for Adorno never equated “form” with the “rational”;
he knew it was quite possible to have complex and subtle forms that are by
no means “rational”; moreover, he did not conceive of form as the container
of the thing contained. Again, in an essay called “In Re ‘Person,’ ” there is a
statement that reads, “The value of perspective to nascent capitalism was
that it eventually aided in the creation of a new reality, a rationalized ob-
jecti¤ed space which could then be opened to exploitation.”^29 What artist
can this author have in mind? Perugino? Raphael? Leonardo? Giorgione? All
those wonderful Italian painters who used perspective to create the most
amazing sense of palpability of nearness and distance, of mysterious back-
172 Chapter 8