Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 15 Number 1, April 2014
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Hart, George. Inventing the Language to Tell It: Robinson Jeffers and the Biology of Consciousness. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. 192 pages, hardback. ISBN: 9780823254897
Reviewed by
University at Albany-SUNY
While Robinson Jeffers has a secure place in environmental literary history, his contribution to modernist American poetry traditionally has been elided. George Hart’s Inventing the Language to Tell It: Robinson Jeffers and the Biology of Consciousness repositions Jeffers in literary history, reading him as a key figure within modernist and post-war movements. Hart furnishes an important counterpoint to a critical trend in environmental literature that reads Jeffers as a prophet or philosopher, arguing instead that a full appreciation of his poetics must take into account the poet’s complex negotiation with the inherent sacramentalism and materialism in nature. Situating Jeffers within a literary genealogy that spans from Walt Whitman to Robert Duncan, Hart argues that he opposed a monistic vision of nature that would displace the mutual embeddedness of spirit and matter, which is mediated by language. Drawing from neuroscience, physics, evolution, and the philosophy of embodiment, Hart offers a nuanced, ecologically informed reading of Jeffers’ sacramental poetics, which “attempts to integrate the individual into the living and divine system of nature in order to recover the whole” (5).
For Hart, the challenge that faced Jeffers was coming to terms with the paradoxical relationship between language and nature. On the one hand, the sacramentality of nature is expressed in language, and yet in using language, we are bracketing ourselves off from nature. Thus the poet was tasked with testing, questioning, and inventing language to speak of it. For Hart, it is this engagement with language as construct that makes his poetics sacramental, rather than his poems’ allusions to the sacred. In chapter one, Hart posits that Jeffers’ poems written during the twenties employ narrative, lyric, and rhetorical strategies to mediate the relationship between the material and sacred. Hart smartly reads Jeffers’ poem “O Lovely Rock” alongside and against work by Gary Snyder and Kenneth Rexroth that typifies their West Coast “geological mysticism,” but finds that Jeffers’ poetics is unique to the extent that it deploys rhetorical devices—in this case, the pathetic fallacy— to bridge the material to the sacred. In this process, Jeffers sacramentalizes the human, including the reader.
Chapter two “The Strain in the Skull: Biopoetics and the Biology of Consciousness” theorizes Jeffers’ ongoing inquiry into the biology of the mind. Integral to this investigation was Jeffers’ notion of consciousness as an analogue to original sin. In his formulation, consciousness is the excess of the mind through which we come into awareness of divine power, yet it also humanizes and disconnects us from our natural foundations. Attempting to find a material basis for consciousness, Jeffers developed a biopoetics that Hart elucidates beautifully, recruiting both a constructivist and evolutionary perspective to read his poetics. As Hart points out, evolutionary literary analysis may be limited in its tendency to diminish the importance of literature’s non-telos, its element of play, in favor of an evolutionary explanation that reads the development of art as coterminous with processes of natural selection. However, Hart’s astute reading of Jeffers’ “Prelude” combines a modernist lens and an evolutionary perspective for understanding his unique brand of a biopoetics. Like Ezra Pound, Jeffers engaged in a project that emphasized the materiality of language, but in Jeffers’ case, language is not reduced to pure reference, but instead is based in experience and language itself, which is an occasion for discovery. This experiential, experimental mode understands language as sacramental not because it references the divine, but because it structures human experience in the same way as consciousness.
Hart goes on to explain the comic dimension of Jeffers’ poetics in the thirties, contributing to critical discussion about the poet’s shift to an epic, historical mode as he left behind the tragic elements of his earlier work. He also continues to read Jeffers’ investment in a biopoetics in the thirties. In Jeffers’ short narrative poems, his characters act out “dramas of consciousness,” as he assigns animals, stones, and humans (with the exception of the caretaker in “The Inhumanist”) with a primary consciousness. These “low-comic” figures are ontologically in sync with natural processes, rather than in conflict with them as humans with higher order consciousness might be.
Setting the stage for a close reading of Jeffers’ “most ecological” poem “The Inhumanist,” Hart writes that during the early and mid-thirties, Jeffers “resolved the tensions of his struggle with the biology of consciousness into a philosophical holism” (89). This paradigm, according to Hart, allowed Jeffers to contend with the crisis of the release of the first atomic bomb, as well as the growing political conflicts of the late thirties and forties. In tandem with his growing political awareness, Jeffers produced a theory of inhumanism that provided a reparative vision of the universe in the historical moment when his generation confronted the possibility of the extinction of the species. “The Inhumanist” is a rejection of the human ego, a revision of the man to the “not-man,” a philosophy that opens up thought to the possibility of the universe without humanity. Beauty remains vital within this vision, yet as Hart writes, Jeffers eliminated the subject from this model. In this poetics, beauty exists within thingness itself; as such, beauty—divorced from its relation to a contemplative subject— “is an ontological rather than epistemological category” (101). In unfixing the human subject from its privileged status as subject, Jeffers—according to Hart—offers not salvation, but a prospect for healing that is closely bound up with his sacramentalism. Hart’s reading of Jeffers’ lyric poems during this period—the outset of WWII—are compelling and rigorous, filled with exciting moments of close analysis and offering new directions for ecological literary criticism.
Hart writes that in his later poems, Jeffers, who was coming to terms with the death of his wife and his own mortality, developed a poetics that embraced entropy, even while its experimental fulcrum continued to be impelled by the prospect of discovery. Jeffers continued to be gripped by the question of consciousness, which does not contribute to natural processes but gives back to us a way to experience divinity. Reading Jeffers within an Emersonian vein, Hart writes that the poet understood consciousness also as a burden of knowledge through which we know our own mortality. That we have not evolved to ameliorate this pain is what Jeffers called “the wound in the brain.”
In his conclusion, Hart seeks to explain why Jeffers’ role has been overlooked in most narratives of modernist poetry, as well as why he should be critically regarded as a prominent and influential middle-generation twentieth century poet. Hart aptly notes that east coast publishers and critics have long tended to overlook Western poets and disregard their place within modernist history. Moreover, Kenneth Rexroth, who Hart argues was influenced by Jeffers’ sacramental poetics, nevertheless played a significant role in diminishing the impact of his influence in the West Coast literary renaissance. In confronting Rexroth’s dismissal of the poet, Hart re-situates Jeffers as the forerunner of a West Coast movement that included Gary Snyder and Rexroth himself.
Hart’s intervention in Jeffers’ studies is persuasive and most welcome. Perhaps most exciting though is Hart’s much-needed contribution to modernist studies, such as his reading of Jeffers’ experimental strategies that emphasize the materiality of language yet diverge from a modernist rubric that reduces language to pure reference. Ultimately, Hart’s study exemplifies the ways in which literary criticism can be enriched, rather than constricted, through recourse to evolutionary studies. Inventing the Language to Tell It: Robinson Jeffers and the Biology of Consciousness models the rich, vital exchange that can occur when modernist studies are coupled with ecological literary criticism.