The Voice Over

What does it mean, this will-to-death-of-the-author revealed one way or another in texts of the recent period? “I” leaching out from poetry collections and anthologies, anonymous and pseudonymous projects, experiments at speaking in voices, experiments at adding in someone else’s word (on which people lie down prone, as if on newly discovered land), speech that hovers, like a dirigible, over the border between the individual and the impersonal—these are all details of the big picture. But almost the whole stretch of the canvas shows the author unclenching his hands and refusing to be rather than staying in charge—keeping control over the text and guiding it like troops, in various directions. What can this mean—and, most importantly, how does it work? Could it be that, as they promised at the dawn of automatic writing, our text is beginning to live on autopilot and, all by itself, is forming a substitute, a wax model, an author for an hour? It wasn’t me, it was another.⁵ The main thing, it seems to me, is that the person writing willingly admits a non-identity with him- or herself at each stage of the poem’s existence. On the level of the concept, then of the writing (not to mention the particular stage that will have to be called the cooling down of the text—the lapse of time between completion of a poetic work and its final assimilation-dissipation in linguistic reality), the relations between text and author presume a kind of gap: an unstable equivalence, incomplete comprehension.

But the text and the author are fighting on the same side—they aren’t master and hired man (nor horse and mounted ranger) but rather a gun crew where each soldier has their own function (and a common goal). To make sure the artillery doesn’t shoot at its own side, one has to confirm the sense and place of each one—and presume that the rationale for their standing together is con-frontation with the external thing, foe or friend, that stands before both of them.

If the center of the poetic world, its navel-omphalos, turns out to be not the selfhood of the poet (eternally stuck with the arrows of ecstasies, like Saint Sebastian, or sending rays of valency in every direction), but something from-outside, exterior—an immovable question that stands before a singular poetic practice, calling for an answer and a solution—then it turns out that we can see the relations “author-language,” “author-text,” and even “author-author” in a different way. This question, as a rule, has nothing to do with a common cause, with a generation’s or language’s tasks, but it stands so close and so clearly before the person it addresses (before me, for example) that not answering is impossible—and we give our answers until it becomes clear that our own experience is not sufficient here. The opponent (the one who ought to change, subjected to reworking and rebirth) turns out to be, then, not the fabric of language and not the matter of the poetic but rather one’s own boundaries. “And I feel that ‘I’ is too small for me.”⁶ The depletion and finality of “I” (against the scope of the tasks facing the person and the text) appear to me as the greatest trap for lyric poetry, as it has approached yet another finish line—where, in order to survive, the poet must become a choir.

The very thought of being one’s own master (“I” as a candle manufactory) seems somewhat faded and a bit silly, but you can’t get away from it. Among the various rights of ownership connected with the practice of poetry (in which the right of precedence, where themes or devices are concerned, continues to mean something, as before), only “I” can’t possibly be patented, or copied, and it remains the sole inalienable possession, the sole token of established destiny. But the present situation seems to provide a possibility for revamping the usual correlations.

In a 2001 article about the poetry of the 1990s, Ilya Kukulin introduced the critical concept of fictive erotic bodies of authorship. I’ll permit myself to quote at length.