Michael Heller: Antennae of the Race
An approximation to “Earth and Cave” as a model to mimic

1. Ordering propositions

1.1 For my final project I have chosen a poetry-memoir book by Michael Heller [b. 1937], an Objectivist American Jewish Poet who has been awarded several poetry prizes, including the NEH Poet/Scholar grant, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (NYFA), National Endowment for the Humanities award, and The Fund for Poetry.

1.2 The book in question is “Earth and Cave”, published by Dos Madres Press, Loveland, Ohio, 2006, but written in 1965 in Nerja, Spain, at the start of a then “unarticulated commitment to writing, to poetry” [Heller]. The book contains poems, prose, drawings, photographs, journal entries, haikus, and maps. It applies the basic tenets of Objectivism: memory, the relation place-poet, politics, emphasis on form over content, and the use of everyday language.

1.3 Given Heller’s personal and literary relationships to first and second generation Modernist Imagistes, the early Objectivist poets, the Beat Generation, The Language School, the Black Mountain Poets, and other American Avant Garde movements, I will use an Integral approach of analysis.

1.4 Integralism[1], as a literary criticism scheme, is in its infancy. I intend to provide, therefore, orienting generalizations drawing from the Objectivists’ poetics, but also from vital elements of the four quadrants that an Integral poetics would employ: the I [internal world of the Author], the We [cultural order of potential Readers], the It [or actual Text], and the Its [or Context(s) where the concretization of the text occurs].

2. Methodological topics: the histories of literary theory and criticism

2.1.1 It is believed that Aristotle wrote his Poetics in 335 BCE as a compilation or prescription of guiding principles to write good poetry [tragedy, comedy, and epic verse]. His study of tragedy is summed up thus:

Tragedy, then, is an imitation [mimesis] of an action[praxis] that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude [epic]; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper catharsis of these emotions. [2]

2.1.2 If tragedy is an imitation of life, we must look at life [at memoir] as an inspiration of tragedy. The poetry of tragedy -action, characters, place, language- is reflected in the book we are about to analyze.

2.2 Aristotle found that every tragedy includes six parts: plot (mythos), character (ethos), thought (dianoia), diction (lexis), melody (melos), and spectacle (opsis). Up until the 1960s Aristotle was the major source of guiding principles regarding literary creation, analysis, and criticism in the Western civilization. Concepts like feeling, imagination, genius, reality were used by philosopher-critics to describe and highlight the value of literary works.

2.3 Then Roman Jakobson[3], based on the work of Karl Bühler[4] came up with a modified Organon Model about linguistics shown in Figure 1 below:
Figure 1 – Organon Model modified
In this model the following Functions[5] are depicted with numbers:
1. referential (= contextual information)
2. poetic (= autotelic)
3. emotive (= self-expression)
4. conative (= vocative or imperative addressing of receiver)
5. phatic (= checking channel working)
6. metalingual (= checking code working)
2.4 One of the six functions is always the dominant function in a text and usually related to the type of text. In poetry, the dominant function is the poetic function: the focus is on the message itself. When used for literary communication, the Organon Model may suffer another transformation as shown in Figure 2:

Writer
Code
Text
Context
Reader



Figure 2 – Organon Model in Literature

2.5 Depending on which viewpoint critics adopted, different analyses and theories have been derived about literary texts or narratives:

2.5.1 Writer centered theories are those known as Romantic, Aestheticism or Humanistic. Aristotle, Muni, Longinus, Horace, Bloom, Wilde are examples of theorists on this venue. They were concerned with the author’s genius, technique, and voice, and saw text as an extension of her and her mastery of craft: metaphor, simile, imagery, voice, diction.

2.5.2 Context, Writing [text], and Code centered theories gave rise to Marxist, Formalistic, and Structural literary analyses among others. Trotsky, Lukacs, Brecht, Adorno, Benjamin, Althuser, Eagleton, Jakobson, Bakhtin, Shklovsky, Tomashevsky, Murakovsky, and many others developed these theories. Before free verse and the beginnings of structuralism, text was studied by its metrics, stanza, rhyme, rhythm –in one word- form independent of meaning.

2.5.3 Reader centered theories are known as Reader-Oriented literary analysis. Prince, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Jauss, Iser, Fish, Rifaterre, Culler and others are examples of theoreticians in this vein. Reading was an innocent activity, until structuralism, reader oriented and psychoanalytic theories uncovered the implied minds writing and concretizing texts. Meaning and intention, reception and response became the dominant of the era.

2.6 The separation or isolation of the text from writer and reader, were conducive to Structuralist and Post-Structuralist theories, whose proponents have been many since their beginnings in the 1960s up to this day. Among others, important contributors were Saussure, Barthes, Propp, Levi-Strauss, Greimas, Todorov, Genette, Lacan, Kristeva, Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, Man, White, Bloom, Focault, etc.

2.7 Outside of the domain of this course, but no less important, are other theories like Modernism, Post-Modernism, Postcolonial, Feminists, New Historicism, New Criticism, Queer Theory, Deconstruction, Eco-Criticism, etc. whose exponents include Baudrillard, Lyotard, Jameson, Eagleton, Said, Spivak, T.S. Eliot, Woolf, Beauvoir, Millett, Showalter, Cixous, Irigaray, and countless others.

2.8 Different to theories are poetic movements [i.e.: Dadaism, Ultraism, Exteriorism], phenomena [i.e.: Latin American Boom], and scattered writings from more or less famous writers [Besant, James, Vargas Llosa, Borges, Ramirez], or paradigmatic texts by certain authors [A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Hopscotch] that have inspired numerous theories or served as research and test ground.

3. Holons within holons ad infinitum: the Integral Approach to art and literature

3.1 What appears evident is that new spheres of knowledge [holons] arise as science, technology, and social, literary and cultural studies employ new research techniques in their fields of study. There is always a new “ism” in the ever moving away horizon of epistemic quests. It is the same for literary criticism. These are not true or untrue theories, they are simply partial. It is in the sum of the parts or in the complementarity of the same that a full theory –a theory of everything- is possible or at least useful. But even this theory of everything is destined to be short lived when it is surpassed by new epistemic discoveries.

3.2 An Integral approach would use 4 quadrants of reality is shown in Figure 1 next page[6]:


I
The writer
IT
The Text
WE
The reader
ITS
The context
INTERIOR/
INDIVIDUAL:
Intentional

Freud
Plotinus
Buddha

Hermeneutics
Consciousness


EXTERIOR/
INDIVIDUAL:
Behavioral

Locke
Watson
Skinner

Empirical
Form

INTERIOR/
COLLECTIVE:
Cultural

Khun
Weber
Gadamer

Interpretive

EXTERIOR/
COLLECTIVE:
Social

Comte
Marx
Lenski

Systems



















Figure 3 – Four Quadrants of Reality adapted from Ken Wilber

The I quadrant is the interior of the writer, her intentions and consciousness [or unconsciousness]. Freud, Plotinus and Buddha are examples of people who have studied this realm. The We quadrant constitutes the reader[s] realm, that elusive entity that is at one time specific and archetypal; a cultural phenomenon. The Its quadrant becomes the context[s] realm, the social systems that exist in place and time. The It quadrant –in a modification of the original figure- is made the text, the resulting form so extensively studied by Propp, Bakhtin and structuralist, post-structuralist, and deconstructivist theoreticians.

3.3 In other words “(…) the holonic nature of reality –contexts within contexts forever- means that each of these theories is part of a nested series of truths. Each is true when highlighting its own context, but false when it tries to deny reality or significance to other existing contexts. And an integral art or literary theory –covering the nature, meaning, and interpretation of art- will of necessity be a holonic theory: concentric circles of nested truths and interpretations” [Wilber, 113].

3.4 It would be almost impossible to analyze a work of literature from all possible viewpoints, so one must make decisions and: 1) define the universe of study [what theory or instrument]; 2) select the holon from which the analysis will be done [author, text, context, reader or any combination thereof] keeping in mind that choosing a theory or focus should not imply any demerit to other theories not used; and 3) draw the conclusions of rigor.

3.5 Four holons envelop a literary work: the primal holon or maker [author, writer] with her conscious ad unconscious intentions; the artwork itself or text in form, function, structure, and content; the history of reception and response of the viewers or readers; and the numerous contexts [space and time] in which the work is produced, read, and continually recreated.

4. Heller wandered from the Imagistes to the Objectivists and to Nerja: the writer’s I as the sum of his histories

4.1 Imagism as a way of making poetry was pushed by Ezra Pound, a first generation Modernist poet, in the USA in the 1909-1913 period. Louis Zukovsy, a second generation Modernist poet, befriended Pound in 1927. William Carlos Williams, another Imagist poet also befriended Zukovsky through Pound. This net of poetic friendship expanded through the 1930s to include Charles Reznikov, Carl Rakosi, George Oppen and Basil Bunting. They published in the famous magazine Poetry, edited by Harriett Monroe, who insisted in providing a name for the group. Objectivist was such name, their poetics: a look at the poem as an object of art, an emphasis on form over content, of resonance of words over meaning. They believed in using everyday words as opposed to elitist vocabulary; they wanted to highlight language, ethics, a world vision, and were against war. They also promoted verse libre, a concentrated language of imagery, an opposition to the use of mythology or classicism, and eventually, the exaltation of a modern, urban. and Jewish life and heritage. They also were in favor of left wing politics and Marxism.

4.2 Zukovski wrote on the Objectivists poetics:

"Writing occurs which is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody", and that objectification relates to "the appearance of the art form as an object".[7]

4.3 The Beat Generation Poets of the 1940s [Ginsberg, Kerouac] got in contact with the Objectivists through Pound. Other younger poets also contacted the Objectivists in the 1950s [Levertov, Sorrentino] as did the Black Mountain Poets [Creeley, Corman] who published Objectivist work in their magazine Origin. Zukovski’s aleatory writing influenced the Language Poets in the 1970s [Hejinian, Harryman, Howe]; while Oppen and Reznikoff –less formal and more political- influenced other poets like Shapiro, Schwerner, Filkenstein, DuPlessis, and Michael Heller.

4.4 On the poetics of the Objectivists, Poet Ron Silliman writes:
“... The process requires you to position yourself within the terrain of a poetics. All any literary formation is, in one sense, is just such a process carried out consciously, collectively & in public.
To see that, one need only look at the three broad phases of Objectivism –

§ The 1930s, interactivity, optimism, joint publishing projects, critical statements, recruiting (Niedecker)
§ The 1940s & ‘50s, almost totally receding, with several Objectivists either not publishing and even not writing for long periods of time
§ 1960s onward, the emergence & success of these writers precisely as a literary formation”. [8]
Heller got in contact with the Objectivists in the 1960s, so he belongs to the third phase of the movement and its expansive net of branches:

“Poetry renaissances, I think, are very individual occurrences—that is, they happen on a personal, even private level. My sense of one began while reading Oppen and Zukofsky in the late 1960s and continues to this day whenever I return to their work. Experiments, great activity, enlarged publics do not necessarily constitute a rebirth. We poets are so hungry. And between hopes and resentments, we descry prophetic uprisings and revolutions of the word. Meanwhile, to borrow from Marianne Moore, every time a poet or poem "takes the top of one's head off," the possibility of renaissance is implicit”.[9]

5. Earth and Cave: parenthesis and new beginning for the emotional I

5.1 In order to know the primal holon, the poet, one can resort to primary sources –the poet- through interviews or to secondary sources, the texts, other critics’ studies, inference, deductions, and inductions become the tools to be used. But psychoanalytic theory tells us that the poet cannot know about the unconscious, so the primal holon can never be fully comprehended. A glimpse on Heller’s poetics:

“Holderlin, Heidegger, Hitler, the three Hs (as well as those lovely three German Bs) are inescapable elements of our environing culture. Beyond that climatology, when I was living in a small village in Spain in the 1960s, beginning to write and publish, the Irish novelist Aidan Higgins (a neighbor that idyllic and formative year) placed the works of Benjamin and Musil in my hands. Scholem, Gadamer, Habermas, Kleist, Canetti, one could go on and on. The hook of the German philosopher-writer has been set deep in me. It has probably cast an unnecessarily ponderous mordancy across my poems. Needless to say, my reading skills in German are nearly atrocious, thus much has come to me via translation”.[10]

5.2 We know that Earth and Cave was written at the beginning of his career, a period of avid reading, of formation and soul search. He had probably read also Oppen and Zukovsky whom he continues to read to this day. That is proof of his faithfulness to the Objectivists as a source of inspiration and formation, of evolution and positioning. It is a defining lifetime worldview.

5.3 Heller recalls the first night of late June 1965 arriving at Nerja with his wife by bus, the acrid manure smell in the air, the hunchback carrying their bags into the hostel. “Nerja in the 1960s was a place in transition, and so was I” [i]. The air also smelled of political change for the decaying Franco Regime. Nerja was a sort of refuge for political activists, like poet Jorge Guillen and Garcia Lorca’s brother, Paco. The book came about from notes taken in the streets, at the beach, at the desk on the rented house, some were completed in New York upon Heller’s return to the USA.

5.4 He calls himself a then “would be-poet, semi-tourist and sentimental traveler” [ii]. The caves are a “metaphor and reality” [ii]; one wanders inside the caves, discovering and searching, with no fixed charter; as he was himself at that point in time: “a wanderer of my own inner life” [ii].

5.5 Before we get to the Introduction a two-page drawing –plan and section in black and red ink respectively- of the caves dated 1961 places the reader in context. A memoir is a very personal account, no mimesis there. This is what fiction tries to imitate. What better way to know the reality we want to mimic than to look at our won life or the life of others?

6. Chaos and complexity: patterns and structure of the It work

6.1 Earth and Cave cover portrays a full-body picture of the young Heller walking along a narrow street of Nerja. It is a gravel dead-end alley surrounded by white two-story houses with closed wooden windows. He faces the camera wearing sun-glasses, a blue polo shirt, white khakis, boat shoes, and a dark brown belt. His already bald head and constant beard are clearly visible. An overlaid palm tree adorns the cover. The book itself is an object of art with its sturdy cream-colored cover and inside sheets. Numerous drawings and sketches illustrate the book: of the caves, of instruments found in them, of figures drawn on the walls millennia ago, of skeletons semi-buried on the ground.

6.2 The formal structure of the book can be described thus:
Castaña Silvestre Introduction, a poem
5 prose pieces, histories within histories
Short takes on a bus, a poem
A poem
A prose-poem
The Parities Sunday/sundown, a poem, haikus
Notes from a trip to Toledo, journal entries
Timespace
Timespace
Incident
Space
Space
We extranjeros A poem
A political poem
Before breakfast, haiku
Fishermen’s quarters
Buriana beach
4 prose-poems
In English Fishing, a poem
Prose-poem, history
Devekuth A poem
Three prose pieces
Find sense to change A poem
Dream [dated 1968-2005]

7. Magic and Reason as perceived by We

7.1 The essence of the caves are its darkness, bring light and they cease to be. They are changed, carnivalized. To the locals they are a source of proud origin but also of income. To Heller they are a metaphor for search, self, and change. He regrets the conversion of the cave into a fake:
“Installing the Son et Luminaire which pettifies. A Hollywood cave, not one bit real” [25]
“A gypsy family. They live in caves just above the gorge, work only when they have to.” [9]
“the old men
The survivors
They come to live in daylight
Mending nets” [24]
“They used the bolld of the animalsthey painted or they drew blood from themselves and made the images upside down or in other ways secretive”. [37]

8. Text and sub-texts: the many layers of “Earth and Cave”

The poet as observer:

“How do they exist?” [3]
“The complexity of forces at work on this people” [3]
“The foreground shimmers, wavers. The far banks green and brown…” [4]

The uses and failings of memory:

“Strange, but after that nothing is clear in my mind” [3]
“Twice I couldn’t find myself” [36]
The histories within histories:
“…a fisherman hung himself…” [3]
“…she grabs a knife and chases him…” [3]
“G., foreign born, American novelist…” [5]

City name as list poem:

“Almururadiel
Valdepenas
Manzanares
Ciudad Real
Orgaz” [16]

The poet as philosopher:

“We are not ourselves
But the paradox, we are no other” [29]
The politics encountered:
“When dedicated the cross in the churchyard, the town officials and the guardia, I did not hiss with the others”. [31]

The Jewish roots:

“Feeling myself the stranger, the Jew” [37]

9. A stranger in Paradise: the village Its as maker of the soul

9.1 In Earth and Cave, the inhabitants as much as their land are an important part of Heller’s transformation. He feels a stranger always, but not necessarily rejected, looking for a common sign, even if a metaphorical one:

“Strangers, they to me and vice-versa. (…) The stranger makes quite evident that he or she is different. The commonality –if there is any- is in the primary roots, maybe hidden in the caves” [25]

9.2 He sees the objects but not always its implications:

“So are we separated because we do not acknowledge what a phenomenon like the caves might tell us?” [25]

9.3 The quest of the hero [the poet] involves always displacement in timespace, but also a travel to the self, a coming of age. WE are always coming of age, as we mature:
“From Malaga to Granada over the mountains (…)
Many stops in the middle of nowhere” [7]

10. Beyond the limits: a possible agenda for future examination

10.1 In the author quadrant: how do we get to know the author? Are interviews and psychoanalysis enough? To what extent inference, deduction, and induction help? Are biographies and auto-biographies helpful?

10.2 In the text quadrant: how do we comprehend the text? What can we ask about form, function, and structure of the work? How can we discover meaning?

10.3 In the reader quadrant: Are there principles that bridge the arc between author and reader, creation and re-creation? What works best for different types of readers? Can readers dissociate the author’s intention from their own interpretation and still find meaningfulness in the text?

10.4 In the context quadrant: How do reader and author contexts interact? Is there a context that encompasses all contexts? If contexts are in constant change, what is the importance of knowing them? What is context, what are the important constitutive elements?

10.5 In general: are the tools we use to write and analyze literature a direct result of our worldview? Do all theories stem from or favor a political ideology? What can we learn from real life and history that we can apply to fiction? Is the historical novel a new genre or a hybrid genre?

11. Useless are the battles without visions: findings that enrich my poetics

11.1 Heller notes that:

“There is no question that the tenor of contemporary civilization is marked by its uncertainty, its hesitant mood on matters both cultural and political. Poetry, ever sensitive to the nuances of its surroundings, must limn or bode forth the environmental conditions out of which it arises. That poets, those presumed antennae of the race, might be picking up the signals and putting them somehow into the work seems only too obvious.”[11]

11.2 A poetics is a conscious act; it is a decision that stems from our worldview. Its workings may belong to the arcane, at times a discipline, others an inspiration. The conscious act, nevertheless, may take the shape of a manifesto, a mission, a philosophical formulation, or a series of principles or beliefs that inform and form our work.

11.3 These principles most address the writer, the text, the reader, and the context[s]: what we think of them, how we engage them, how we relate them, how we build them, what our intention is. Constant self-criticism is paramount, as is the reading of other authors, the interaction with them and readers, with culture[s], and the creation of the conditions propitious to the creative act itself.
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Works Cited

Heller, Michael, “Earth and Cave”. Loveland: Dos Madres Press, 2006
Middleton, Richard, “Studying Popular Music”. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999
Wilber, Ken, “The Eye of Spirit”. Boston: Shambala, 1998
Wilber, Ken, “A Theory of Everything”. Boston: Shambala, 2000



[1] In his book “The Eye of Spirit” Ken Wilber sketches the contents of this integral approach to literary and art criticism.
[2] Poetics, Chapter 6.
[3] Roman Osipovich Jakobson, (1896 – 1982) was a Russian linguist and literary critic, associated with the Formalist school. He became one of the most influential linguists of the 20th century by pioneering the development of structural analysis of language, poetry, and art.
[4] Karl Bühler (1879 - 1963) was a German psychologist known for his work about gestalt.

[5] Middleton, Richard (1990/2002). Studying Popular Music. Philadelphia: Open University Press, p.241.

[6] Adapted from Ken Wilber, The Eye of Spirit, p. 10
[7] "Program: 'Objectivists' 1931" and "Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff”, by Louis Zukovski. Wikipedia.
[8] Silliman’s Blog, October 30, 2002. Internet.
[9] The Cortland Review, interview with Michael Heller December 4, 2008. Internet.
[10] The Cortland Review, interview with Michael Heller December 4, 2008. Internet.
[11] Michael Heller in an interview at www.saltpublishing.com