Her Mouth was Sealed: Scenes for a Working Through, after J.H. Prynne's The Oval Window and Towards Acrylic Tips

The active poetic text is thus characteristically in dispute with its own ways and means, contrary implication running inwards to its roots and outwards to its surface proliferations: not as acrobatic display but as working the work that, when fit for purpose, poetry needs to do. These are the proper arguments of poetry as a non-trivial pursuit, the templates for ethical seriousness. (Prynne 2010b: 141)

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Is this a sex-role as the top decoy in the pack. (Prynne 2007: 99)

Some years ago I was present at a richly considered discussion of the poetry of J.H. Prynne, in which the two speakers—poets Keston Sutherland and John Hall—were reflecting on ways of approaching the work of the major late modernist poet of these times.1

As debate widened among the audience this reflection became for a moment a passionately contested question, as if there was to be a divide: between an exact and scholarly engagement with the difficulty of this poetry, holding off from quick conclusions in attentive recognition of a lyric authority to be found there; and a reading that might build from the material unknowing of the reader's sensuous encounter, whatever the labour of knowledge recognition the work might appear to demand. It might seem a curious divide to rehearse here, since working with avowedly difficult poetry involves the interaction of a patient readerly labour over time, with an immediacy of response to the event of the poem. Indeed, it might be that the promise of certain poetry, one dimension of its dialectical ‘working the work’, involves an integration of this kind: thought with sensuous knowing. At stake that evening however were also the rumblings of a broader argument about the performative place of the reader—the reader's ‘freedom’ to create meaning—which has been part of the debate around Prynne's work as well as his argument with the poetics of others. What it turns on, for the purposes of this essay, is a reflection on the scene of this poetry, the environs of a working through. And there, an exploration of what might seem—to put it in deliberately hypostatised form just now—an ‘authorised’ terrain for negotiation, on the one hand, and what it might entail to be radically mistaken on the other.

The occasion for this essay—the exchange between poetry and psychoanalysis—has brought me to reflect on the process of working through Prynne's poetry. His late poetry, in particular, poses distinct challenges for a reader who may be stumped in finding points of entry, though also drawn to the lyric intensities and critical irony of this extraordinary writing, the intention of its ‘ethical seriousness’, its work. At times the reader is intensely engaged, in some sequences, the occlusions of the poetry seem almost total in their challenge. Its cognitive and

sensory processes might appear to pass language through calibrations and neural pathways of another perhaps unintelligible nature, demanding a different way of responding, resources not yet mustered. Who is the reader, are the recipients, addressed by this work? What is the nature of that address? Something holds off, even as I read. Is it refusal on my part, or some form of withholding that might allow me to return? Is it a failure of commitment? Might that be a necessary failure? The armature of a reading, whether that involves a patient prosodic and etymological passing through the body of language, or trust in what the ‘working the work’ might yield to the reader as researcher2, is not always possible to find. Perhaps it requires a listening without understanding, to use an analytic analogy, but the question remains as to who or what listens here and to what or whom.

Following the Poem: Two Scenes

John Wilkinson has argued that rather than considering the intractability of difficult poetry as a barrier, it is enabling to think of a poem as a transitional space. The reader might ‘follow the poem’, thereby connected to a ‘dense intersubjective world’: one in which, in a Winnicottian sense, the relation between hallucinated objects—including the Kleinian child's ‘furious, chewing and excreting bundle of fantasies’—and the social world is worked through, reality understood as ‘hard-won’ (Wilkinson 2007: 197). The prosody of the poem is key to a working through of the body of its thought, whereby the reader might grasp through a poem's faltering between subject and object, its precise placements, grammar, and rhythms, what exceeds its own figuration, what it binds, as part of a process that might promise reintegration and knowledge. Stumbling and intermittent attention, detours and resistances, are then part of an activity both subjective and social. As Wilkinson argues,

the ‘poetic’ in the widest sense, whereby people contrive a world and its contents including those around them, might support (but does not at all guarantee) an edge-world materialised between a primary greed and a world of hallucinated and exploited objects. A prosody can continuously

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reunite and break the inner object from and to the outside, creating a thick, impure and hybrid incorporation, a porous skinscape which is neither objective nor subjective. This zone may be termed hybrid not only because it is neither inside nor outside, but because it is at once cognitive and sensual. (Wilkinson 2007: 196)

In this light the reader moves through a journey, with its unpickings and moments of reintegration, towards the potential of ‘a healed and full being in the world’, glimpsing the shared construction of ‘a world of use but not of exploitation’ (2007: 200). The trace of the journey may become ‘no longer an event-sequence but something like an ideogram compacting past, present and future’. A form of afterwardsness, perhaps, incorporating what is ‘other-than-me’ in Winnicott's terms (2007: 205), which is, importantly, of use.

This vision of the ‘edge world’ materialised in the transitional space of poetry is a persuasive one, its exploration deserving of more space than I have here. Its stress on the body might be noted, both in terms of a phenomenological understanding of ‘prosody as cognition’3, and the culturing of a poetic ‘skinscape’, which might suggest a bioengineering as much as a zone of contact, wounding and mending. One unacknowledged term here is the maternal, since the success or failure of this transitional passage in Winnicott is famously dependent on whether the mother is good enough. Indeed, as Winnicott states, ‘perhaps at times of great distress, sadness or deprivation there is… a loss altogether of the capacity to use symbols and substitutes at all’ (Winnicott 1989: 56). Yet the mother arrives in Wilkinson's account, in the vision of intersubjectivity discovered in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. Her imagined ‘murmur shaping the emergence of her baby into the linguistic world’ (Wilkinson 2007: 210) is an ideal one, and it gives way (ethically) to the managing of that separation, the intersubjective and gendered dynamics of such a prosody-as-thought. This is for Wilkinson a form of love, one that crops up earlier in his discussion as a ‘consisting with the real’ that recalls a certain Christian model of sacrifice: ‘a love that offers itself for use through accepting trials and death, ensuring continuing life’ (Wilkinson 2007: 203).

There is, then, a future-oriented promise in ‘following the poem’.

But also a kind of injunction, it seems, since to get this wrong, to appropriate the intersubjective ‘work’ for narrowly narcissistic ends, is to ‘obliterate’ it, or to carry off its ‘residue’ of supposed meaning in so much ‘resonant claptrap’. Even worthy intentions, Wilkinson suggests, may inflict ‘scars’ upon the text (Wilkinson 2007: 210-211). The reader, then, is implicated in a violence that has a certain pathology and may likely fall short of a certain ethical command, ‘false steps being part of the journey’ (Wilkinson 2007: 204). Meanwhile, should she or he strike out for ‘last-ditch independence’ (Prynne 1996: 157) and resist this calling, there is no freedom to be had, certainly no writerly Barthesian indulgence in the free play of signifiers. The oft invoked counterpoint of an ‘open text’, associated with the ‘ideal feminine’ is home of the false hope of the ‘innocent child-like ramble’, and the ‘violent U-turn’ (Prynne 1996: 156). ‘No free signifiers: no unvalorised process: no free lunch!’ (Prynne 2000: 41). Language Poetry and indeed Sound Poetry traditions are deemed to fall according to this logic in cults of the narcissistic personality and an imputed ‘recidivism’, as Wilkinson writes elsewhere (Wilkinson 2007: 30), where materiality and acoustic sonorities offered to the ear are held not to offer something to the intellect, as St Augustine might have reflected.4 Freedoms, then, seen as deeply implicated in what Bernard Stiegler terms the ‘consumerist libidinal diseconomy’ of our time (Stiegler : ).

The reader, then, might feel ambivalence. Not least because if she or he sets out on this path, with its inclusive promise and yet proscription, it can repeatedly appear foreclosed, not just by the reader's own limitations, but also by the work that seems to be the lot of the writing itself, the pulse of its attachments and aggressions, its drives. What does it take to ‘cleave’ to the poem, in these terms? To writing that can at times overwhelm and block, even attack, the process of prosodic thought and its attachments so conceived. A complex scene, in which the reader and the poem-body are among other objects being metabolised in more enigmatic ways than the writing may admit. There are multiple reader-subjects and recipients to be found here, reeling in contradiction, and central to the work and the force of its demand. To follow Prynne's brilliant late poetry is also to contend with what is occluded and unassimilable in it, to think about a sustained encounter with material that is traumatic, conflictual, energic. The challenge in

such material is also to think the event of this encounter, and its potential translation, even as the dialectical and contestatory movement of ‘working the work’ is held in view.

It might then be necessary to find, as another pole in that readerly journey, another scene. In the work of Jean Laplanche the risk of the unrecuperated becomes a question of enigmatic signification:

the enigmatic signifier is doubly enigmatic, not only in the usual meaning of puzzling or interrogative, rich in meaning, but also enigmatic in the precise sense that the meaning remains hidden, not only for the one who receives the message but also for the one who sends it. (Laplanche, in Fletcher and Stanton 1992: 22-23)

Why might it be useful to take this route? How might it differ from the ‘skinscape’ Wilkinson describes? Laplanche's account has a strong sense of the reality of an external world, phenomenologically inflected. Yet its sense of socialisation is distinct from a Winnicottian transitional working through, because of its understanding of social relations as constituted in the unconscious. As Laplanche notes: ‘The problem, on our human level, is that the other does not have to be reconstructed. The other is prior to the subject. The other on a sexual level is intruding the biological world. So it first comes to you, as an enigma’. In this account it is not just a question of incorporating what is ‘other-than-me’ in that journey towards being in the world, but initially what Laplanche calls (in distinction from Winnicott) a ‘first-me possession. That is, to build an ego starting from too much otherness’ (Laplanche, in Caruth 2001: np).

In this account of the formation of subjectivity the child encounters enigmatic and traumatizing messages (not only linguistic) relayed from the adult world. That world is contingent and social (the real mother, but not only the mother), freighted with knowledge and unconscious desires, cultural invasions. It arrives as an address, which demands translation. The relation to the concrete other is not a dynamic based on reciprocity, but concerns passivity and seduction, and ‘may be likened to a metabolism that breaks down food into its constituent parts and reassembles them into a completely different entity’

(Laplanche 1999: 160). The unconscious in the child is formed from the implanted untranslatable elements of the message (Laplanche, in Fletcher and Stanton 1992: 176). There is a drive to translate, a ‘demand for work’ because of the difference between this absolute otherness and ‘those elements in the primal enigmatic signifiers which can be signified’. These drives are ‘a symptom of the human being’ (Laplanche in Fletcher and Stanton: 39). As Peter Osborne describes:

The inside-other is the unconscious. It is the product of the repression of the of untranslated fragments of communication, alienated from their context of origin, which consequently acquire a status of their own, at a level at which ‘thoughts behave like things’. These untranslatable (or ‘de-translated’) fragments are, however, endlessly re-translated as they enter new contexts of significance, encounter new signifiers. It is through this process of de-translation and re-translation that temporality enters the picture, as the movement of a process of translation which is ‘at once a taking up and a leaving behind’. The child thus forms its subjectivity through a process of auto-translation in which it mediates in relations to outside-others through continually renewed relations to its inside-other. The temporality of this process is the temporality of a fundamental questioning, ‘the movement of the interrogation of the enigma’, a movement in which the significance of the signifier is only ever established ‘afterwards’ (nachträglich). (Osborne 1995: 106, 222 n109)

To think of working through in this light is another means of grasping the relation between the psychic and the social. It is not just that the subject is understood as constitutively ‘with others’, but that this continuous process of de-translation and re-translation actively connects an alterity within the self to the social and its opacities; the registers of nature and history unbinding and binding in both psychic and social economies. The unconscious is thought here precisely as ‘collective’. ‘Repression translates the opacity of the social (the unfulfilled element of the demand for translation) into the quasi-naturalistic

force of a drive’ (Osborne 1995: 107, 111). It may be then that the demand of Prynne's work, the reader's struggle to translate, the presence of inevitable misrecognition and thus failure (for the recipient and for the work itself), can be seen to involve opacities of a social as well as psychic kind.

In this way the shared psycho-physiological ‘skinscape’ of the poem invoked by Wilkinson might be imagined to take on other dimensions: ‘the volume of the body, its skin-envelope and its orifices’(Laplanche 1999: 136-137). This too is a surface that cannot be understood through the sovereignty of an individual subject who acts and appropriates in the determination of meaning, who inhabits the diremption of subject and object. The subject, here, however, in what Laplanche terms ‘the unfinished Copernican revolution’ (Laplanche 1999: 52-83), is the other: an inside-other constituted through the address from the outside-other, an outside-other who may in turn be opaque to itself. It is this self-opacity that is a condition for ethical thought, perhaps, a fundamental and shared unknowing. At the same time attempts at the centring of the self (a ‘Ptolemaic’ tendency), result in the ‘continual threat of narcissistic closure’ and the repression of unconscious elements, including sadistic material of cruelty and persecution (Laplanche 1999: 81). That infantile material, drawn from this encounter, will continually return to decentre adult experience.5

In Laplanche's account, which also counters Klein, the ‘surface of the body as a whole, and its perceptive periphery’ is associated with the implantation of enigmatic signifiers, and thus by active translation and repression. And ‘also by ‘its violent variant’, intromission, associated primarily with orality and anality, which ‘blocks’ and ‘short-circuits’ this process, ‘and puts into the interior an element resistant to all metabolisation’. It is, interestingly, a violence connected with the formation of the superego, ‘a foreign body that cannot be metabolised’ (Laplanche 1999: 136-137). The question arises as to how such a ‘scene’ is to be thought in relation to the engagement with the language and form of the poetry, as a zone of metabolisation and resistance, a place of composition with its voices and ears, the silent working of the drives as symptoms of the human. The dynamic of a ‘radical counter-tension’, in Prynne's terms, might be connected here. And beyond that, a larger question: how to think the address of such enigmatic material within a

poetic ‘work’ and the terms of its ‘ethical seriousness’ (Prynne 2010b: 141)?

What follows here is a process of thought. It is the start of a speculative journey to find resources for a reading of Prynne's poetry, and to see what its misrecognition might entail. It moves on a singular route across the psychoanalytic scenes of a working through, including those of Wilkinson and Laplanche, as I have sketched above. It sets out (repeatedly) from a moment in The Oval Window (1983). A small remnant, whose de-translation and re-translation is tracked to Acrylic Tips (2002). It offers the beginnings of a working through of Prynne's late poetry, which also concerns, for this reader, an initial moment of encounter.

Her Mouth Was Sealed

During that remembered evening, one poem under brief discussion—from a way into Prynne's 1983 collection The Oval Window—hooked my attention, in fact, produced a visceral response, a kind of anger. It was half heard, fragmentary. I had not been expecting it, and knew little of the collection from which it came. So it caught me off guard, was to an extent something I had ‘found’ coming in on the ear. Whether it was the speed of its passing by, or the arrest of the material that prompted it, the reaction was precise. Central in this poem, framed by the language of financial markets, was news as if reported on the wires, of the sealing up of a woman's mouth, the burning of her face:

How a gang of boys

set her face alight with a flaming aerosol can,

“her mouth was sealed up by the burns.” (OW, 317)6

The hook of that moment and its relation to a violent silencing has remained, in some key sense unassimilable for me within the terms of discussion of Prynne's work. It has persisted like a remnant, throughout my subsequent engagement with the challenge of the writing, with its acute registry of ‘the anatomy of ethical depletion’ that catches a reader in the music of a precisely driven uncertainty (Nolan 2003: np). How to comprehend it?

It's not unusual to relate to Prynne's work in these terms, as a continual dislodging and repetition of carefully orchestrated fragments. Singular phrasal instances or nodes of material may be picked up and echoed, repeated and re-translated, across the sequence of a writing, indeed across longer reaches of work. Familiarity entails the piecing of recognition, a sense of the poet's attention sustained over years. It may be the disruptive ‘switch’, as much as the content, that drives this pulse, informing the poem's construction. As Prynne considers in an essay on the translation of difficult poems:

a switch of the semantic field may seem locally disruptive in the most extreme manner; but then the reader may observe some later recurrence of the switched field that sets up a trace or thread, somehow obliquely or many lines later. This may not be meaning determining its pattern of expression, so much as pattern and pattern-violation generating their own tendencies of meaning.

Contrasting this practice with the surface-skim and arbitrariness of ‘post-modernist playfulness’, Prynne argues for ‘difficulty as a mode of poetic thought’, as ‘different both in intention and effect from difficulty as a playground or a funfair’ (Prynne 2010: 158). So if the reader is to meet this difficulty, she or he is also encountering its intent.

Such a movement in Prynne's poetry, argue N.H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge, wards off ‘the tendency to reification’ in an Adornian sense, or keeps the semiotic in play against symbolic control, as Kristeva might argue. As they describe:

Every prospect or proposition that arises is formed within the surround we described as unaccommodated residue; and in a long sequence calling on so wide a range of discourse as The Oval Window, the residue can include the lingering resonances of meanings, allusions and references that were recognized, or half-remembered, or which somehow stuck in the reader's mind, making the place of the dislodging process itself uneven and unpredictable. (Reeve and Kerridge 1995: 147)

If this process is useful for the reader, it may be because it connects with a wider condition in the world, as they note: ‘wherever there is so marked a disproportion between potential meaning and the capacity to absorb or otherwise deal with it’ (Reeve and Kerridge 1995: 148). The fragments are then material to that sense of overload, only partially translatable. Their ‘unaccommodation’ may suggest beyond the immediate experiential labour of the poem, the circulation of objects within rationalised forms of accumulation, or their mediated consumption in virtual circuits: bad versions of a social working through which the poem mimics and estranges. The drama may precisely concern a reifying movement, a passage of objects, word and phrasal shards become material and opaque, ruined or obdurate in their thing-ness. Some that find a form of implantation in the translative work of the poem, its metabolising. Others that remain. How then to think ‘recurrence in the switched field’ (Prynne 2010: 158), as the dialectical work of the writing?

The singular hook of this violent image of a silencing, then, coming through the ear—the aural cavity figured by the ‘Oval Window’ itself—has first to be located:

Somewhere else in the market it's called

a downward sell-out, to get there first

and cut open a fire-break. Less won't do,

more isn't on either. How a gang of boys

set her face alight with a flaming aerosol can,

“her mouth was sealed up by the burns.”

Attention is low in historic terms and will

drift down, seeming to falter slowly and

making excuses for the money numbers ahead. (OW, 317)

The fragment of found material is a kind of voicing, a moment of reportage. It testifies to the cruel sealing of a mouth, a face set alight by a flaming aerosol can. It produces a subjective twist in the objective social world, a quasi-drama of violent gendered subjection, and yet there is only a trace of the woman, her imputed propriation. ‘Her face’, ‘her mouth’. Examined more closely, this material is embedded centrally in declarative, cynical modes of financial rhetoric, in which the

terminology itself appears to cut abstractly to the chase even as market movements set in train a containing action, the ‘cut’ of a ‘fire-break’. There are echoes of proverbial equivalences (‘less is more’) turned disjunctive pivot: ‘Less won't do, / more isn't on either’. We are left with what is. Attention might seem to have, like the market, its own faltering economy, subsuming the reported violence in distracted equivalences of profit and loss, stock risings and fallings. The present is somehow already distributed (‘somewhere else’) and being set, as if by an unacknowledged future perfect, what will have happened. There is no way out. The news comes in of violent gang attack, yet the phrase beginning ‘How a gang of boys…’ is curiously pitched, as if in the process of becoming an explanatory noun clause, a news object, its naming located in something like a triple witnessing: of the event by some posited media, of the incorporation of the mediated image by the poem, of the event of the poem by the reader. Yet it is a kind of blank witnessing, and tonally the poem appears to have some oversight, as if it has occupied and then vacated the position of a subject supposed to know. Why does the poem need that ‘found’ moment, if not to pin the work into the social truth of its mimesis, and bring the reader to its attention? It is a kind of act. Is that what is heard, in the ‘switch’, an interruption of equivalence; a brief allostatic breakdown in its economy, and there glimpse of an inarticulable violence.

Such singular cited instances of found material, abstracted from context and id entifying names, may arrive in the flow and splicings of the poem as they do in news montage. On the news these instances function as indicators of a hidden administration of need, a ‘working through’ of a mediated kind, as John Ellis notes of television in an age of information overload:

The events cannot be poignant because they are radically incomplete: they exist in almost the same moment as we do when we see them. They demand explanation, they incite curiosity, revulsion, and the usually frustrated or passing desire for action. We need, in other words, to work them through. Hence the tactical use by news bulletins of narrative speculations. But these alone are not enough. We need to carry out the same process of repression upon

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these representations that psychoanalysis describes: a process that does not eradicate them, but places them elsewhere, which is necessary for civilised life to remain possible. (Ellis 2002: 80)

Prynne's late poetry diagnoses such a televisual condition (‘an engorged sink’ (Prynne 2000: 45)), continually challenging such a process of distracted removal to an ‘elsewhere’, in whatever form it arrives. It does this in part by instantiating just such a desire, including elsewheres that take on the forms and protective illusions of poetic removal. The reader-spectator is confronted with the necessity and cost of such a forgetting, hoist on liberal dilemmas, which are continually played out, as if such a working through the box might here be a hallucinated social promise, mediated bad faith. Ellis notes in his terms that televisual working through is ‘the unwitting by-product of the economic drive to expand television as part of a general development of consumer choice’ (Ellis 2002: 85): it is this form of consumption and its illusory freedom that is under attack in Prynne's work. A reader who might expect the consolation of meaning, or its textual management and narrative reconciliation—or indeed a distributive holding environment, in which anxiety is to be relieved and life to be redeemed—is met full on, exposed. These found instances are on occasion points of intensity and provocation for the work of the poetry, and heighten the encounter for the reader, the acuteness of that exposure: in a sense they are in the first instance forms of event.

Perhaps these intensive instances suggest the production of a particular form of subject, necessary to the energy of the work and its difficult ‘intent’. One that is driven by the mimetic action of the writing, hooking in the readers who pass through: a hysterical doubling. Refusing the surface flow of arbitrary meaning generation, might these ‘found’ events in the poem function like points de capiton, in a Lacanian sense—those quilting points or knots of convergence, where the signifier is pinned to signified, interrupting that continual slide (Lacan 1993: 268). And through them, the retroactive piercing of intent, the potential for master signifiers, halting the free play of meaning. Might the making of a hysterical position in the text concern the powerful demand for paternal meaning, authorisation, at such moments? One that the

reader is held to misrecognise, in thinking himself or herself free, caught in a kind of transferential illusion? And yet also addressed, held at that point of encounter, to particular ends? Does ‘voice’ moreover emerge at these points of rupture, when the subject is assigned a place, in a wider distribution: ‘In so far as a piece of signifying chain—broken because of what we call this libidinal charge—cannot be assumed by the subject, this piece passes to the real and is assigned to the Other. The voice appears in its dimension of object when it is the Other's voice’ (Miller 2001: 102). What is it that ‘Prynne’ intends? Suddenly a hysterical question? A process that the poetry is playing out in its own terms, it might seem, from another scene.

Encountering Voice

In the ‘encounter’ I am associating with found material, I have in mind the Lacanian notion of the tuché, which has its roots in Aristotle's account of cause—something that occurs ‘as if by chance’: translated by Lacan as ‘the encounter with the real’. This ‘radical point’ is beyond signification, in this formulation: ‘beyond… the return, the coming back, the insistence of signs, by which we see ourselves governed by the pleasure principle’. Continuously screened—‘a missed encounter’—the tuché marks the insistence of trauma, presented as what is unassimilable in the real (Lacan 1977: 53-5). It is, writes Hal Foster, with Roland Barthes's notion of the punctum also in view, ‘a rupture less in the world than in the subject—between the perception and the consciousness of a subject touched by an image’ (Foster 1996: 132). In Lacan's terms, such ‘radical points in the real… enable us to conceive reality as unterlegt, untertragen, which, with the superb ambiguity of the French language, appear to be translated by the same word—souffrance.’ This point of singular translation names that enigmatic encounter, as a point of suspension—‘in abeyance there, awaiting attention’—and ‘pain’ (Lacan 1977: 55-6).

How then to translate the ‘found’ moment in this poem as if it marks a radical point of this kind? Doubly found perhaps: by the compositional work of the poem, and by the ‘touch’ that enters by the ear and eye. However wary of a hypostatised Real, it arrives nonetheless as a question. In Her Weasels Wild Returning (1994), for example, as a violence attached to ‘she, she, she, and only she’ (Prynne 2005: 412):

Her step pervades

the slashed shelf life here to utter startled bleeding, (413)

or arriving in the cadences of seeming conversational report:

By now flit to fled, put your hand across he said to

a file taking intimate convulsion; level at the throat

of nearly glad rages, a gully retired. Isn't a fast

grazing stop as stupefied anyway, to split the list

between field trips. What is this void now bled from. (415)

What is it in the remnant that provokes anger in the violence of ‘her’ mutilation and silencing? This is a victim that has no voice, and yet, like Barthes's punctum, sound would seem to arrive: ‘it is acute yet muffled, it cries out in silence’ (Barthes 1981: 53). There is play here, in this textual recording of the administration of violence, an unreeling of voice and voicelessness. This is not about the value of the voice of the excluded to the ethics of the poem. ‘We cannot live without believing that some voice we know (and own) has been given to the suffering of others, and that this voice is truthful’, writes Keston Sutherland in the light of Adorno's phrase, ‘the need to lend a voice to suffering is the condition of all truth’ (Adorno 1990: 17-18). ‘So what Adorno calls a “need” and a “condition” are worn through by us to a bare necessity, in the sense that food is a necessity: it is what we always buy. Or it is what someone else buys for us’. As Sutherland notes, the ‘intractable’ problem for Prynne's poetry ‘is that “we are immune to disbelief” (Prynne 1999: 165). Does this moment translate into ‘fear enzyme’, as that poem asks? Or is the face already ‘part-eaten’ (OW, 329)? Is the reader object and informant in this ‘moral anthropology of the consumerism of suffering’ (Sutherland 2009: 109)?

How then is this reader held by something awaiting attention in this immune state, the address of a fused mouth? Jennifer Cooke reflects on the way ‘found’ voices address the reader in her account of the process of reading To Pollen (2006). With its wresting of the languages of global war and Iraq in particular, the rubble and pulsions of linguistic excess, there are pinpricks of voiced fragments, soundings of victims of violence and atrocity, military discourse and its agents, from sources

which are in some cases identifiable from news archives. The reader meets language that is unfamiliar, under stress and geological compression, forceful ‘as a juggernaut or an armoured humvee’, in Cooke's words. But the poems in the sequence gradually shift, extend intelligibility in parts:

By the time we reach the more comprehendible sections of To Pollen, we should have learnt to be suspicious of the desire for translucency which the complexity of the earlier poems is likely to have initially provoked. The way in which Prynne specifically nurtures this distrust is by interpolating, within the sections which are most syntactically disturbing, a surprisingly lyrical moment, a life-line, we could call it:

More to pollen ascript for elated finish, above scale at draw tact elicit did both clamber all in fused aloud. Shoot quickly now. It hurt so much. As to submit engraver likeness mirror from terror alto style lifted at furnish to a stroke. (Prynne 2006: 6)

The clarity of ‘Shoot quickly now. It hurt so much’ stands out starkly against its dense and difficult surroundings; a reader is more than likely to grasp onto the rare and apparently plain simplicity of two such sentences: they constitute a poetic shock, a two-line parody of either side, military command and victim lament, cause and effect neatly lined up. (Cooke 2007)

These moments of shock are necessary ‘life-lines’, perhaps, if the reader is to be hooked in. These ‘voice’ fragments have an interpellative charge, have the power to move, and yet are built into highly constructed (‘engraver likeness mirror from terror alto style’), densely packed (‘clamber all in fused / aloud’) lyric blocks. Equivalences are played out through them: soldier and victim. Yet these ventriloquations are immediate, close. They not only offer a welcome point of respite—one that we must learn to distrust, as Cooke puts it—but almost a different phase of time. This sense of variable speeds, including a time of identification

and being moved, as part of the flow of dense construction and administration, is a thinking which grasps the process of news montage by pushing it to a kind of mimetic excess.

The affective resources of lyric poetry are pushed into full service, too, since these abstracted instances and anonymous fragments become the material for sympathetic ‘personal’ identification. As Cooke writes, it is ‘a disturbing paradox that lyric poetry has always exploited through the slippage of the first person, the “I” of a poem which is irresistibly also “me’”. (Cooke 2007) Found moments may produce a sense of proximity and immediacy, a freight carried by the distribution of pronouns which powerfully extend to ‘we’ and ‘us’. But at the same time the poetry has ‘us’ question what it is to witness, to participate in the drama of identification as a derealization of certain lives, and its inevitable forms of affective consumption. Brought close, and then ‘Somewhere else’ (OW, 317). Working through in Ellis's sense of the term, becomes a sign of complicity, an illusion of relation to suffering others that is in fact a form of administration.

How does the displacement of ‘the masque of liberal sympathy’ that Cooke notes figure within the poetry's work, the jouissance of its linguistic violence? Found voices, which are no voice at all, may be ‘a lifeline’ in the poem because such instances tether the reader to a particular scene of subjectivation. If identification is one dimension of this, what binds the reading subject to a suffering other and fellow human, there is also a fantasy which suppresses such mimetic identification, one in which the reeling in and out of such material suggest a form of mastery, like the child's play with the cotton reel in the game of fort-da. Something in this connection remains occluded. There is a mimetic blind spot: the reader-subject ‘loses himself in the very gesture through which he is attempting to constitute himself as a proper subject, an autonomous, free, independent, and active subject’ (Borch-Jakobsen 1988: 33). In the game, the child identifies with the mother and her loss, and so is itself in play; part of the subject itself is being brought near, and sent away. It is this point of mimesis, of otherness, which is ‘unrecountable’, remaining ‘invisible’ unless a vantage point is arrived at, at which point ‘he is no longer miming’ (1988: 40). The voice, I am suggesting, functions as an object in such a gestics, and at times is ‘unrecountable’ in key respects. It is, in Lacan's account, a ‘self-mutilation

on the basis of which the order of significance will be put in perspective’ (Lacan 1977: 62).

‘Some later recurrence of a switched field’. Anger can express a demand for justice. But The Oval Window distributes it, so that the encounter with ‘her’ sealed mouth is now picked up in other traces. It is the poet-reader—and the transitivity in that compound subject is part of the energy here—not an image of a victimised other, which is primarily in play. Part of the shock of this moment of reporting, “her mouth was sealed up by the burns”, is the paradox of unacknowledged identification: this event is addressing the subject who comes to witness. Indeed, more than that, it is the violence of that subject, whose complicity leads to silence:

Think now

or pay now and think later, the levels

of control nesting presume a reason

to cut back only and keep mum. (OW, 322)

‘Keep mum’: the maternal turn of phrase is not accidental. The fused mouth returns as if figuratively contagious, subject to partial and failed translations, or the excitations of ‘traumatophilia’, a creative sublimation (Laplanche in Fletcher and Stanton 1992: 32). Perhaps what provokes anger, to follow this logic, is that spontaneous indignation at violence against a woman and its further repetition as the stuff of poetic composition, itself a translation after the fact, is revealed as masquerade. Fury, then, it would be, at being discovered in complicity, and that intensified by a further silencing, since there is no easy means of protest or exit from that bind. Identification, what cannot be said, impotent and parasitic on the not-me, generates an ambiguity. It continually works across a cut where someone speaks. For who is speaking now, and in the name of what pathos: ‘you blame the victim. / Pity me!’ (OW, 338).

The sequence of poems in The Oval Window powerfully work the terrible equivalences of this mimetic ‘reciprocity’, the address that comes through the ear. Components of that traumatic naming return in disassembled image fragments: ‘burning along / this frame’ (OW, 335), ‘part-eaten’ faces, ‘deaf to the face’ (OW, 329), ‘in face of the

brow/closed to sorrow’ (OW, 332), sealed spaces, the rim of the mouth, the orality of what is tasted and spoken. If there is an intimation of voicing—characteristically through the potential for song—the violent forging of voicelessness finds translation in the gestics of a sealing. Sealing up, ‘her mouth’. Sealing off, the ear, a protection from the world. Sealing off, a scene of ‘perfect crime’ (OW, 325).

Violence repeats. Judith Butler writes:

If violence is done to those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated. But they have a strange way of remaining animated and so must be negated again (and again). They cannot be mourned because they are always already lost or, rather, never ‘were,’ and they must be killed, since they seem to live on, stubbornly, in this state of deadness. Violence renews itself in the face of the apparently inexhaustibility of its object. The derealisation of the ‘Other’ means that it is neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral. (Butler 2006: 33-34)

Butler's account reminds that working through is a form of mourning, which cannot here take place. Certain lives are repeatedly negated in a cruelty that implies a form of nature.7 In Prynne's later work, To Pollen, the global stakes of this derealizing and its attendant racisms are evident. The poem from The Oval Window continues to speak to the violence of the present.8 In 1983, ‘her’ unreality is a stain in the screens of Thatcherite accumulation. The poems address the immune defences of neoliberal equivalence, freedom and safety, the kernel of violence named in the Nazi slogan':

Changes to the real data

are visible through the view; and operations

against the view are converted, through

a kind of unofficial window on Treasury policy,

into operations on the real data.

To this world given over, now safely,

work makes free logic joined to the afterlife. (OW, 319)

Prynne writes in ‘A Letter to Allen Fisher’ in 1985 of his intentions in Down Where Changed: ‘the reader's freedom was to be constantly interfered with, as an invidious commodity; pretending (precisely) that there had been no acceptance of immunity to the violence and yet also noticing that pretence as just that’ (Prynne 1996: 157). The reader is here the subject of an immune logic, in which the relation to the suffering other might seem visceral, even unmediated, and yet always already part of a cynical structure which knows a fundamental complicity with the realm of violence and its buffering. An inoculate self, perhaps, introjecting the very toxic material that keeps it safe. Eat, eat.

Anger, Shame and the Remnant

Perhaps the hook of that moment from The Oval Window has begun to find its place. Anger is tracked to a sense of shame. ‘How could it be otherwise?’ reflects John Wilkinson, in this ‘autoimmune dynamic’:

Whatever autonomy poetry secures or claims, shames the author complicit with the historical and material conditions required for such relative independence; and whatever distance from corrupt discourse is asserted by the lyric text, its embedded cadences, its connective tissues, have been cultured in the factories of the human genome project—and patented for use. (Wilkinson 2007: 31)

The violence of the remnant is thus recapitulated, figured in the poetry's own self-harm: a mouth that is hurt and bleeds, a slashed throat. It is as if the circuit of a lyric practice that might denote one form of poetic subjectivity must be invoked in imputed narcissism, only to lead inevitably to sacrifice and shame if it is to find a way to connect with the social world. ‘What can't be helped/ is the vantage, private and inert’ (OW, 312), yet ‘the whole/ falling short is wounded vantage’ (OW, 315). Such a wound is intimation of a realm of ‘damaged life’, in Adorno's terms, but also a point of intimate and sometimes explosive opening into language, what Merleau-Ponty termed ‘dehiscence’, where the subject is born, finds itself spoken, split (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 123).

The reader, as narcissistic object for the poetry itself, is implicated in

an alert working through of this collusive condition, a shared shame that he or she must come to know. That knowledge, though, has the ambivalence of its libidinal economies to contend with, rests at times at ironised points of heroic failure: ‘the honour of exhausted defeat is such a come-on!’ (Prynne 1993-4: 62), though its indifference to loss can also be seen as a form of ‘invincible’ power. Negotiation of failure and its complicities (and misrecognitions) might nonetheless seem necessary to a working through, its political use. Gillian Rose recalls the discussion of anger in Plato's Republic, where looking on the bodies of the executed outside the city walls produces a passionate response. It combines a sense of desire—‘for men it is hard not to look at dead bodies’—and angry repugnance, turned back on the self at the shame of its shameless gaze. The debate concerns whether

anger (Thumos) fights against desire and forms a third to reason and desire, or whether it is indistinguishable from one of them… The gaze arouses the most acute struggle between the three parts of the soul: Thumos does not constrain the desire nor aid rational scruple, it accentuates all three to the point of internecine warfare. Plato offers this battle within the soul as the analogy with the city—its constitution and its disharmonies. (Rose 1996: 112)

Anger and shame then, where desire, reason and antagonism form a vocal and live part of the activity of the polis. For Rose this contrasts with the silence of unworkable mourning in Blanchot's thought, after the disaster, ‘drained of passion’ and in unsituated exile from the city (Rose 1996: 113). Responsibility to the other is ‘disastrous’ for the integrity of the subject, in his terms: ‘the responsibility that never lightens the Other's burden (never lightens the burden he is for me), and makes us mute as far as the word we owe him is concerned’. (Blanchot 1995: 25-27).

For Rose this produces two contrary kinds of movement: worked and unworked mourning. One route in her Hegelian account actively moves from sense experience and the naming of language, through the means of a deeply interested and deceptive social world, to the actuality of a shared self-knowledge: an ‘ethical consciousness’, which repeatedly

takes up the work of learning that ‘requires the fullest acknowledgement of complicity’. The other (Blanchot) moves in reverse, from the work's worldly deception and action back ‘to the name (la chose) and its ungraspable remnant, and thence to the absolute meaning of meaning’ (Rose 1996: 117). It is an ‘aberrant’ form of mourning (1996, 113).

The intent of Prynne's poetic ‘working the work’ would seem to connect with the activity and learning Rose describes. In his essay ‘Mental Ears’, the poet is enjoined to get his or her ‘hands dirty’:

active human knowledge is thus inherently dialectical and in dispute with itself and its base in reality, the apparently segregated domains of poetry turn out, by reverse transit through the mental ears, to connect at full intensity with the disorders of public conscience; so that, in my own view at least, even silence on this account must be reckoned and held accountable.

This is part of the patient labour of knowledge that discussions of Prynne often underline. In his ‘Mental Ears’ essay its ‘working the work’ is rooted for the poet in the deep phonological resources of poetry, its etymological wirings, the emergence of ‘voice’ as if from the holding environment of a mother language (‘cradle-speech’), and yet always unsettled by an ‘intrinsic fault system’, leaning ‘upon the inevitable fault-lines in ethical being and in material reality’ (Prynne 2010b: 142, 127, 141).

Yet the reader of his late poetry also encounters material that remains occluded, psychic and social intromissions shaped by the radical and globalised unbindings of a death drive, which appear unrecuperable. That movement towards knowledge is no resting place. ‘I knew’, declares the male voice in Her Weasels Wild Returning, in a poem from the sequence entitled ‘That Now She Knows’ (Prynne 2005: 416). The interrogation of this poetic work is a movement through recoils of worked and aberrant mourning. It can seem locked in an impasse. As Kevin Nolan argues, reflecting on Triodes (1999):

the traumatic (historical) events which disable persons are isomorphic with the psychic traumas that make individual

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subjectivity possible in the first place. We may argue that traumatisation is still only a metaphor for the primacy of ‘event’ over ‘representation’, but even so need to ask how it is that events decisive for psychic or collective history cannot be recognised? How indeed can we call them formative, if there is not some normative region beyond their reach? If that circular movement appears politically disturbing, I think it is meant to be, for Triodes seeks to argue simultaneously that the trauma of warfare and state terrorism is completely constitutive of the social body yet simultaneously repulsive to it. (Nolan 2003)

The poetry uses comic and unremitting forms of satiric brokerage to work this bind. In Triodes a vision of the polis and its libidinal and pitiless realpolitik returns in mock epic form, ‘crowned / by a giant classical nipple’ (Prynne 2005: 514). The mythic gateway figures of Pandora (the ‘all-giving’, who kept hope pinioned in her box) and Irene (goddess of peace), cook up and consume sweet stuff, watch starvation and suffering on TV, flaunting ‘every asset we had’ (Prynne 2005: 512).

Later at the cutaneous Sack of Rome

with nipples bleeding I saw we both

were mutilated as by fierce bites, the word

stripping the tongue by instant

corrosion of lip service. Pandora guzzled

and I did, we were so famished

for blight spores to play

humectant breeding, we desired

all foreign babble for ourselves

(Prynne 2005: 510)

Yet the porno spectacle they drag in their wake, ‘slick extrusion / of the carnal body image’, ‘tacit choice / of ethnic origin’ (Prynne 2005: 509), is imbricated with another: the violence of law, ‘arbiter's freedom’, another vision of the ‘word’, bringing us back to the poem and its prosodic calibrations:

The crime of the rational script permits a script

of crime in time to calibrate the forces

of pent-up sentence: word by word.

(Prynne 2005: 513)

‘So it was that Pandora and Irene, the chicks / were donated entirely and waivered in themselves / and stitched up’ (Prynne 2005: 514). In this allegorical ‘stitch up’ and its ‘corrosion of lip service’, the remnant returns for a last time.

‘Mother Up’ Now

So far I have found the remnant reconfigured in the terms of a poetic working through. It might reveal, in one logic, an ongoing process of knowledge, the slow steps towards a readerly ethical consciousness. But misrecognition persists, and with it, anger at a silencing. What has been missed in the encounter? For Laplanche enigmatic signification always concerns seduction, which arrives in traumatic form, demanding translation. The cruelty of a ‘gang of boys’ burning the face of a woman, fusing ‘her’ sealed mouth. Sex is fundamental to this ‘verbal smash up’. A condition named in Brass (1971):

Who is it: what person could be generalised

on a basis of a “specifically” sexual damage,

the townscape of that question. (Prynne 2005: 161)

Rubbish is

pertinent; essential; the

most intricate presence in

our entire culture; the

ultimate sexual point of the whole place turned

into a model question.

(Prynne 2005: 162)

Rubbish and remnant, the ‘ultimate sexual point of the whole place’. How could it be otherwise, if social and historical violence works remorselessly through bodies, and bodies are sexed? Yet something in

that sexualised cruelty remains outside symbolization, as Balibar argues (2002: 143-144). The isomorphic pinning together of psychic and social trauma positions the sexual point incontrovertibly, as if there is to be no disputing the foundational logic. And with that, the place of the maternal, in particular, as a zone for occupation: love and war. If there is conflict and violence here, in Prynne's late work, as well as failure and shame, it is less a question of the centrality of the image of man and the polis (and its imperialism), than a ‘townscape’ held and opened to a terra nullius, its somatic wreckage, by women.

The Oval Window is perhaps the last sequence in Prynne's poetry where the elements of this isomorphism of the psychic and social are spun through a kind of metaphysical unreeling. It's interesting to consider how living under Thatcherism, with the need to think the psychic economy of a woman's wielding of state violence, might haunt the poetry and what follows in symbolic terms. The form of the sequence seems to narrativise the knowing alignment of the coordinates of psychic and social trauma, what Laplanche might understand, at the sociocultural level as well as in psychic terms, as ‘codes’ of primal fantasy (of which the oedipal would be one) (Laplanche 2000: 33). In a sense, what arises here is the nature of the social bond and its hallucination. And also the impossibility of the maintenance of that bond, in what will later become ‘the destroyed symbolic crisis’ (Prynne 2006: 9).

The crisis of maternal separation (that point where the subject enters the symbolic order, the cut of castration) is revisioned in The Oval Window in stark profit and loss, the scission of proverbial phrases. Fallen vestiges of welfarist social care, ‘safe in our hands’, give way to the projected solace of love, the protective hut of poetry with walls open to the world. The ‘work’ of the poetry is metaphorised in the reeling in and out of voice and gaze, parts of the subject which are sent out across the ‘ditch’ of the mother's absence, the objects through which s/he thinks (Lacan 1977: 62). The child's toy, like the sealed snow globe, is contained, ‘almost below speech / lip-read by swaying lamps’ (OW, 338). ‘Keep mum’ might read, in this context, as an imperative to refuse loss, holding on to the mother. It finds meaning among fragments of mourning, a self sent away, turned towards death. And the figure of the feminine surfaces here as a kind of narcissant threshold companion, a muse ‘waiting for his return’, ‘face and flower

shining each upon the other’. Redemption might nonetheless seem held off. If ‘even life’ is heard, it is ‘hurt in the mouth but /exhausted with passion and joy’, a joy which ‘Beyond help’ is ‘joy at death itself: / a toy hard to bear’ (OW, 339).

The lines from Ben Jonson from Love Restored that arrive here (‘So did these turn…’ (OW, 335)), if pursued to the song from which they are taken, tell more:

Worked through archetypal relations of ‘male’ and ‘female’, this sacrificial logic is claimed for a redemptive ethics of love, which Prynne finds in the full humanity of Bellini's Norma (Prynne 2010b: 156, n54; 2007: 97). As the Jonson verse suggests, ‘his female eyes’ might invite us to see a kernel of identification in it. The poetry reels between identification, what is unrecountable in its own bodily mimesis, and a point of vantage. If there is a blind spot, it seems here, in that ‘continual threat of narcissistic closure’, in Laplanche's terms, and the enigmatic material that accompanies it.

The relation between sacrifice and the feminine / feminised is repeatedly returned to in this poetry, the point at which sacrifice meets shame, even ‘humiliation’, in order that others might live. The maternal, in this light, is key to an ethical work, giving way to the terms of the couple, as they surface as hallucination in the poetry. But the obverse of this maternal ideal is a deeply implicated position, a foundational violence, which frames the psychoethics of such an ordering: ‘Sort and merge, there is burning along/ this frame’ (OW, 335). Sacrifice, rather than leading to a Girardian ritual of purgation, the disbursing of collective guilt, or a sign of Antigonean rebellion, is here a cynical deployment, ‘the stitch up’, ‘the sex role as the top decoy in the pack’ (Prynne 2007: 99). Warfare continues, beyond the ruins of the polis and its part-objects.

To ‘mother up’ in To Pollen is to be implicated in conflict, to work a form of emergency:

Soon by mistake

gains overfill commander to mother up fewer or

single nerve balances in averted along elate for

normal, drastic. (Prynne 2006: 7)

In its intense and encrypted sensual battle between the sexes, Her Weasels Wild Returning invokes a US anti-radar aircraft programme (which used its Wild Weasels aircraft as ‘bait’ or decoys in order to destroy the radar defences as they engaged). Pronouns might unlock the intersubjective dynamics of prosodic thought, but here the excess of feminine pronouns would seem part of its blockage. ‘Cleaving’ to ‘she, she, she and only she’, as the Dowland song addresses, is to meet with ‘endless no’. And domination, the ‘blue on blue aptitude so sweet’ of friendly fire (Prynne 2005: 416). The women who emerge in the poetry occupy its symbolic crisis, but they seem viewed from it and its modes of narcissance, rather than engaging in it as subjects with self-relation, endowed with intersubjective life.

‘What is this void now bled from’ (Prynne 2005: 415)? In a work such as Acrylic Tips (2002) the force of occlusion voraciously goes to work, as demand. The poem-body is ground and rubble, neither inside nor outside. It is as if the elements that have constellated through the remnant—‘face value seared’ (Prynne 2005, 544)—find continual and energic translation. In the build-up of material there is a charge, the emergence of psychotic enclaves, where the skinscape and its orifices becomes a space for violent introjection and intromission. The maternal body is strewn through the sequence, language returning in its intercalations as carnage, amputation, curious intussusceptions. The sequence begins with fragments of mourning:’ to cry / and mourn for her as he goes, to bring her home’; ‘how fast / the grievance solitary’, the latter catching both a sense of injury and yet grief, in quick transit. The opening movements are stuffed with references to orality, the ‘mouthing action’ of the voice, or more likely a Kleinian greed: ‘chomp’, ‘guzzle don't chew get bloated / instance’, ‘beasts sucking their fill’ (537). Later: ‘Sorrow will you turn remain muzzle gripe’ (539). And from the outset, the truth of this consumption is offered: its ‘intimate newsy entrances’, ‘the morning bulletin’, ‘Split-screen seepage tills’. (537). Such ‘mourning’ is a working through the news networks

of extreme and barbaric violence; an immune state ravened up, ‘engorged’.

The maternal here is not the ideal and available body of the language, its ‘cradle-speech’, (Prynne 2010b: 127) offered for transformation. Nor is it an object of post-oedipal attachment, love, the underwriting of a harmonious reintegration, or its sacrificial labour. It is speechless, primal, and possesses a ‘prey-gene’. Something of a species-thought ‘clastic agile like monkfish’ (544), reduced in violent coupling, evolutionary torsions, ‘post-hormone limb crisis’ (545). Subject to disaggregation, and physical reassignment, the throat is forced ‘in/wards’, the mouth, a ‘Dental roof in spasm’:

All set for drilled sternum. Loaded nutron base star

angle to grind flash aslant, grip her wrist his

matchwood paddock raft. She forces her throat in

wards only pulse, carborundum infer so tile cover,

Dental roof in spasm word by word expulsed for lack

for roasted spit, latter spatchcock pronation; aver

grapple juices. Acrid flash over over, across even

next overtaken and stuck subdued, each one quick

(543)

The mouth is framed again by a sexual economy of struggle, as if looking for new pronouns of address. What ‘person’ could be ‘generalised’ here? Isn't that reportedly the place of women, as the irony of political community? But it gives way to what kind of speechlessness? What is exposed if the pharmacological illusion of immunity breaks down, its orality let loose? ‘Do we feed on our own kind… is the autoimmune failure cannibalistic?’ Prynne asks, in considering John Wilkinson's Iphigenia. ‘We are cut up all over, surrogate body we are the decoy’ (Prynne 2007: 99, 100). ‘We’ as identification and ‘decoy’; the remorseless symbolic sacrifice and its sexing. The maternal body emerges here in Acrylic Tips as primary pharmakon.

In the last page of Acrylic Tips the material from the remnant returns, as if its ‘interrogation of the enigma’ finds yet another translation and with it the slight allowance of pathos. Burning, a sealed

mouth:

Burning child says shall we gather micron glass to

dress admonishment at the river-bed, observing

mass stricken touch your lips sewn to silence at air

the stream by day care who does.

It arrives in a different reporting, the address of the child victim of catastrophic violence (and burning babe perhaps) meeting the self-awareness of the complicit you who might ‘touch your lips sewn to silence’, ‘observing/ mass stricken’. An example of ‘she-child foiled prism dialect’ perhaps, as if the working through of remnants is to find some prismatic reintegration in a spoken language, as if a shared narrative might be grasped, yet threatening all the time to fall back into pretence, the ‘foil’ of relation, ‘care who does’ (546).

In The Oval Window the report of a woman's sealed mouth arrived embedded in rhetoric of financial accumulation. Here, the enigmatic and somatic force of it emerges, within such registry of the gross pharmacological body of contemporary life under capitalism, its organology, a metabolising ‘devoid of knowledge’ (Stiegler 2010: 46). In tracking through this remnant, it has been possible to think the truth of this writing, its unremitting attention. But also to explore the presence of misrecognition and opacity, as integral to the poem's own dialectics and my own, and what is scotomized there. And in the silencing of a sealed mouth, discovering the conditions of what has to be contested, vocally mourned.

‘Working the work’: the dialectic of Prynne's poetry and its disputing concern the ‘double and triple binds’ of Western citizenship, the fact that there is no way out from its implication in violence and exploitation (Wilkinson 2007: 32). If community is imagined in loving and fraternal terms in his earlier writing, here it would seem that the irony (and indeed the narcissism) of women is both the ruin of that community and gateway to a vision of its arbitrary power. Women in particular occupy its thresholds and ‘edge-world’, bearing as human symptom its sacrificial freight of shame and silence, or birthing into violence, which returns sometimes sadistically in textual form. To the extent that women are present, they would seem to be outside the terms

of political citizenship and its ruins, though constitutive of it. There is a symbolic work accompanying the dialectics of this writing, and the poetry sometimes comes to rest on the jeopardy of such a work, as if ultimately, it is this—and the site of the maternal in particular—which carries something unspeakable. This is the focus of an intense process of detranslation and retranslation in the compositional force of the writing, and also its relation to voice. There is a dominant imaginary, in this poetry, and ‘cleaving’ to its prosody has its repercussions. It is poetry that makes me acutely aware of the fact that I am a woman, reading; and may want, while working through and acknowledging the truth of the strangeness it carries, to refuse the symbolic burden of its address.

Notes

• John Hall's talk that evening was subsequently published online (Hall, 2006). For Prynne as a major late modernist poet see Mellors (2005).

• See Jarvis (2002), for reflections on the competence of the reader.

• Wilkinson's account of prosody as cognition is informed by Jarvis (1998) and Sutherland (2004).

• See Dolar 2006, 16 on the ‘spontaneous teleology’ of the movement from voice (understood as what is resonant but has no sense, the sound of the mouth screaming) to the word or logos in St Augustine, and its implications for understanding the ‘object voice’. I would read this account of the evacuation of the (female) object voice, alongside Prynne's discussion of ‘voice’ in his ‘Mental Ears’ essay.

• On this point and for a careful elaboration of this decentering in Laplanche see Butler 2005 p.76.

• All references to The Oval Window cited by page number in the text, referring to Prynne 2005. Thanks to J.H Prynne for granting permission to quote from his work in full and in part.

• See the discussion of cruelty and the ‘disposible human being’ in Balibar 2002, 143, where cruelty is naturalised outside the intelligibility of the logic of power or the economy of violence and counter-violence. Its forms ‘unleash and realize “in the Real”, at a collective level, processes which are not, and cannot be, completely

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  symbolized, which in Freudian terms would be described as primary or pre-Oedipal’.

• The poem in The Oval Window which is my starting point surfaced recently on on a US blog site dedicated to FAQs on poetry and lyric work, in which it is quoted in full alongside Prynne's ‘Refuse Collection’. The blog page concerns poems that employ a ‘war lexicon’ and address a vision of US terror, work the bloggers wish they had written. (). Accessed 21st July, 2012.

• See Mengham and Kinsella 1999 on ‘wound response’ and agency, and Perril 2009 on the necessary ‘impurity’ of the voice and ‘wounded utterance’ in Prynne's work from the 1980s.

• See Nolan 2003, quoting André Green: ‘there are still more radical ways of thwarting the other as in the he who loses wins (or vice versa) here, the indifference to loss, the integration of suffering to the rank of an ordinary psychic condition, replaces the search for pleasure—the cancelling out of all hope of victory makes the subject invincible’.