‘dichtung und wahrheit’ What Adorno distrusts most of all is a naive trust in dissent to rise above our
‘administeredsociety’, unaware of how it is mediated and managed by the forces it
opposes. His solution is not political quietism, but a form of wounded autonomous
art, leaking political awareness and import from its own despairing inadequacy:
‘This is not a time for political art, but politics has migrated into autonomous art,
and nowhere more so than where it seems to be politically dead.’^11
A list of contemporary poets who have braved the dilemmas of commitment and
quietism to write about conflict would include Galway Kinnell, Rita Dove, Marilyn
Hacker, Adrienne Rich, Sharon Olds, Carolyn Forche, Harold Pinter, Tony Har- ́
rison, Andrew Motion, Paul Muldoon, and Sean O’Brien. While a dwindling band of
living writers has first-hand experience of combat (Richard Wilbur, Louis Simpson),
most write as civilians and bystanders. Yet, as the example of one of the best-known
contemporary ‘war’ poems shows, the distinction between combatant and bystander
is no longer what it was. In Jo Shapcott’s ‘Phrase Book’, written during the First Gulf
War,theenemyisnoclosertotheAlliedpilot,onhis fighterplane’scomputerscreen,
than to the poet’s speaker, covering the war as a reporter. To be ‘lost in the action’
might mean crashing behind enemy lines or channel-surfing on satellite television:
I’m standing here inside my skin,
which will do for a Human Remains Pouch
for the moment. Look down there (up here).
Quickly. Slowly. This is my own front room
where I’m lost in the action, live from a war...^12The First Gulf War was also the occasion of Jean Baudrillard’s declaration that ‘The
Gulf War Will Not Take Place’, his title expressing its postmodern doubts about the
reality of war (and everything else) by way of Giraudoux’sLa guerre de Troie n’aura
pas lieu. In Baudrillard’s analysis, the real is evacuated in favour of the spectacle and
the simulacrum, and those who would have us believe in a hidden truth behind the
media fac ̧ade are the true deceivers. From an initial position of power as a reporter
inside the bubble of a media-packaged reality, the speaker finds herself invaded
by what, on one level, appears to be a sexual assault, but on another is the dark
side of her euphemism-laden language, as the military acronym ‘bliss’ (standing for
‘Blend, Low silhouette, Irregular shape, Small,|Secluded’) prefigures the violence
that follows the bliss of a random sexual encounter. As fear overcomes the speaker,
she falls back on phrase book-derived cries for help that appeal to a deep-rooted
sense of imperialist entitlement: ‘What have I done? I have done|nothing. Let me
pass please. I am an Englishwoman.’ The poem punctures the speaker’s assumptions
of superiority and exemption from violence, vengefully withdrawing her bystander
status, but Keith Tuma identifies its central weakness: the ‘boundaries of the self’
(^11) Ibid. 194.
(^12) Jo Shapcott, ‘Phrase Book’, inHer Book: Poems 1988–1998(London: Faber, 2000), 65.