Review: Robyn Schiff, Information Desk: An Epic, New York: Penguin Poets, 2023
The expression is “Positive Romanticism,” and in Chinese literary criticism of the Mao Era it was applied to the poet Li Bai (Li Po). The argument, as far as I understand, was: if Li Bai had been alive today he’d have undoubtedly denounced the injustice of his times in terms of the Class Struggle. But since he lived in the eighth century, Li could only use the imagery, the tropes and the analogies available.
There’s a lot of poetry these days that’s stuck in a posture of perpetual Positive Romanticism: there are meaningful issues addressed I’m sure, and if the analogies are confused it must be because the poets are struggling by means of all available imagery, objective correlatives, etc., to break through the carapace of Time to the Poetry of the Future. (Karl Marx? Yes. Also, Wallace Stevens.)1
This is the type of performance staged by Robyn Schiff in her book-length poem, Information Desk, An Epic. Museum confessionals like this one are a subgenre in their own right: Our museum guard, or docent, (or poet) wanders through the galleries in a dazed postponement, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern do the Met:
“…a mechanical table built for Marie Antoinette to convert from writing surface to makeup desk with the turn of a crank.[…]
…buttons open marquetry panels that turn out to be the lids of six hidden com-
partments that held the queen’s cochineal and vermilion rouge and lipstick and the lead white face powder that— in production for two thousand years, poisonous and luminous—made the crazed whites of that age
crazier and whiter.” [p. 65]
A snarky critic wrote of Ingres that he was a “Chinese man lost in the streets of Athens” (« Un Chinois égaré dans les rues d'Athènes »). Schiff is an American lost in the Galleries of European Painting. And, just to make sure you know she’s not clueless, the author appends a list of the objects interpreted, which makes it easy to compare. Then you begin to realize how shallow and tendentious her interpretations are:
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/197339
No use dwelling on the inaccuracies: Marie Antoinette, for one, was not particularly obsessed with cosmetics, and certainly not white lead, in fact she made a point of showing off her “natural” complexion. What’s more disturbing is the poet’s hectoring, sanctimonious tone, her flattening of all nuance and complexity. In general, People of Color see right through this out-of-the-can righteousness because—guess what? People of Color are generally aware that their ancestors were enslaved; they’re highly suspicious of those for whom the whole of their own history is nothing but slavery; and they resent having the whole of their history subsumed under the rubric, especially by White folks with their own unexamined motives.
Schiff’s meanderings are not so much naivete or ignorance, however, as repetition compulsion, as a psychoanalyst would call it: the repetition of an unendurable trauma that, to Freud’s puzzlement, is taken up as pleasurable. The puzzlement was why those who’ve suffered trauma should be eager to take up the role of the oppressor, and to take pleasure by imposing it on others, as in this case the trauma of Male Entitlement:
“I used to man [sic] the Information Desk in the center of the Great Hall
of the Metropolitan Museum of Art” [p. 9]
This is what Walter Benjamin had in mind when he suggested that there is no innocent dredging of the past; that nothing but a total break with those Positivist ideologies that vehicle suffering under pretense of denouncing it, can free us.2 Schiff takes a barbaric pleasure in the three ornate passages that interleave her more prosaic narrative. Here is the beginning of the first passage, in effect the invocation of the poem as a whole:
"When the American cockroach lands on its back trying to flick the glorious wasp off that moves like the hybrid of green tin and blue glass, gem-tragic cerulean" [p. 1]
Could the conceit have been more obvious? Only if “wasp” were capitalized. Schiff has chosen to play the role of the Wasp—or waspish, throughout:
…and catechism commences: Where’s the bathroom? Where’s
the bathroom? Can you direct me to a men’s room? To the Elgin Marbles? Is there a bag check? Who’s your daddy? Are those your real breasts?Why is there an entry fee?What is a ‘suggestion”? Am I not a taxpayer?Where’s the bathroom? [pp. 12-13.]
Good questions. Especially the one about the entry fee, and I should know. Surely by now you’ve recognized your friends from Visitor Services, the ones who hustle you for money at the Admissions desk, though I haven’t heard anyone refer to visitors as American cockroaches, not within earshot anyhow. As Benjamin argued, the transmission of Culture is never free of the barbarism inherent in the documents of culture itself. Today there is a whole class—of teachers, administrators, museum staff and junior-level organic intellectuals, all committed to perpetuate this barbarism. Every monument to Culture is, potentially, a monument to shallow confessional poetry and sadomasochism.
WOID XXIII-34
December 31, 2023
Wallace Stevens. "Effects of Analogy," in The Necessary Angel. Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), p. 115; Karl Marx, Der achzehnten Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, in Marx Engels Werke, Bd. 8 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1960), p. 115.
Walter Benjamin. Über den Begriff der Geschichte. Gesammelte Schriften Band I.2 (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2015), p. 695; see also Benjamin to Max Horkheimer, January 29, 1939, in Écrits Français, Introduction et notices de Jean-Maurice Monnoyer (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), p. 429.