Evgeny Pavlov, University of Canterbury Labyrinths of Non-coincidence: Postmodernism, Russia, Poetics, Memory

If postmodernism is about anything at all, it is about shifting landscapes and crossed borders. That the speed of this process in post-Communist Russia has been truly astounding is a commonplace. And that Russian common places are changing at almost the same rate is even more of a cliché.¹ Yet it is not changes and shifts but rather the spatial metaphors used to describe them that form key features of our postmodern critical landscape. Fredric Jameson, among many others, emphasizes the dominance of spatial logic in the postmodern and its "momentous effect on what used to be historical time."² The kind of spatial logic one finds in the fast-growing, albeit still rather skimpy critical literature on Russian postmodernism is, strangely enough, far from postmodern: it is generative, axis-based, hierarchical, arborescent. It usually seeks to define the phenomenon through series of contextual determinants.

Indeed, only ten years ago the very geographical novelty of "Russian postmodernism" seemed so strange as to have Marjorie Perloff and other leading scholars wonder how Soviet and post-Soviet cultural products randomly grouped under this label could ever be reconciled with the canonical criteria of the postmodern-considering that these latter had been elaborated for a very different socioeconomic context.³ In 1993 it took an entire symposium in Postmodern Culture to establish conclusively that Russian postmodernism was not at all an oxymoron but a very real phenomenon that urgently required examining the contextual specifics of Second World cultural production in relation to those determining its First World counterpart.⁴ Since then several models have been constructed that are sufficiently flexible to describe the postmodern condition in both late Soviet and post-Soviet culture without having to create an entirely new designation for it.⁵ And needless to say, in all of these models contextual considerations have inevitably taken the upper hand.

It scarcely could have been otherwise-if only because an uncritical extension of Western postmodern tenets beyond the collapsed Iron Curtain would have been at best a denial of its other possible paradigms. A secondary but no less compelling explanation has to do with Russia's post-Communist identity crisis. The disappearance of the familiar native context has become the emerging new culture's central obsession. The resurrection of various literary cults is a good case in point-above all the Pushkin myth. The massive, state-encouraged outpouring of love for "our" poet during the 1999 Pushkin bicentennial celebration, when even Boris Yeltsin took the time to open a Pushkin volume and delight in the beauty of the poet's verse, is sure to become fertile ground for cultural theorists of all persuasions. Russia's continued search for a new, homogenous national identity that would be fitting for its drastically reshaped geopolitical and social realities has predictably brought literature to the forefront of the cultural debate. As so many times in the past, old icons are yet again held up high as the ultimate, infallible authority capable of miraculously filling the gap created by the disruption of old certainties.

In these circumstances, one wonders how productive the continued genetic tracing and taxonomizing of the Russian postmodern is going to be, and whether time is not ripe for deterritorializations. A call for taking the discussion of the Russian postmodern "out of context" already came from one of the participants in the 1993 symposium, the poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko,⁶ who then gently questioned the absolute necessity of conducting the debate in terms of hierarchical logic-i. e., the logic of either "history", "geopolitics", or "contemporary cultural situation." His call was largely ignored as the scholars went on busily delineating the affinities and differences between American Language poets and Russian conceptualists, as well as debating whether Socialist Realism was in the business of creating postmodern simulacra already in the 30s. But then, to paraphrase the authors of A Thousand Plateaus, successes in the rhizomatic critical discourse are rare. It seems that the nomadic alternatives to the contextual critical model work best if they rely on the poetic function itself. As Félix Guattari writes in his "Text for the Russians" (a talk presented to poets and writers in Leningrad in 1988), "[the] efficacy [of this poetico-existential catalyst] rests essentially in its capacity to promote active, procedural ruptures at the core of significatory tissues and semiotic denotatives, from which it will set new worlds of reference to work."⁷

But can the poetic function be viewed as a serious alternative to the generative logic of contextual/culture-specific criticism? Is it more effective if launched in a particular enunciative context-say, that of the "Second World"? And when Guattari recommends that it be considered from two angles-"as a molecular rupture, an imperceptible bifurcation, capable of subverting the course of the dominant redundancies, the organization of the already ... classical order; and as what selects particular segments from this same chain of redundancies in order to confer on them... the existential a-signifying function"⁸-what are the practical implications "for the Russians," or indeed the Mongolians, the Zulus, the New Zealanders? These cursory notes do not attempt to answer these questions but aim to open them up for debate.

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko's work is an interesting case to consider because it fashions itself as precisely the kind of a poetic alternative to the dominant hierarchical logic of contextual theory. It also has few, if any, apparent links to the dominant poetic practice of the last several decades, and is hence hard to fit into the conveniently available paradigms of Russia's contemporary literary history. As Michael Molnar notes in one of the most perceptive analyses on Dragomoshchenko's poetry to date, "at present ... he is working virtually alone, there is no school or movement within the diffuse Russian avant-garde that is operating in [his] particular area. It is as if the cultural conditions encouraged firmly-grounded epistemologies, whether in the reigning orthodoxies or their antagonists, and left no room for ... uncertainties."⁹ Meanwhile, uncertainties reign supreme in Dragomoshchenko's own work. In another astute commentary on it, the American critic Mikhail Iampolskii suggests that "[Dragomoshchenko's] poetry does not deploy itself in a world of ready-made notions and citations but wanders in a world of uncertainties, substituting knowledge with the caress of a momentary, spontaneous touch."¹⁰ The movement of this caress is the movement of memory discovering similarity in the gaps of non-coincidence: memory, writes Dragomoshchenko, "signifies only some other memory";¹¹ "beyond memory, however, only the memory-producing machine reveals itself, i. e., the structure of a sign that consists of a trace, that fits into a trace."¹² In his numerous poetic manifestoes and prose meditations on poetry and writing, he always painstakingly insists on there being no mnemonic context for poetry that is not always already exceeded by the latter. As he writes in "Konspekt/kontekst", a chapter in his recent essay collection Fosfor, "we talk about people, love, the line, poetry. Do all these things exist? Poetry is that state of language which in its workings constantly exceeds the actual order of truth."¹³ Poetry, he claims, is "always something else." Its historical, political, cultural, finally, personal framing is always there for the asking, but the framing and the framed keep changing places, and "courage consists in an unending affirmation of thought which overcomes 'the order of actual truth' itself".¹⁴ One would be hard pressed to find a more unorthodox proposition coming from a Russian poet.

Indeed, even Osip Mandelstam whose famous re-working of the literary and cultural tradition was informed by the same resistance to the pressure of the authoritative discourse sought to ground memory in the immediacy of the articulated poetic word and the seamless totality of its phonic presence. Dragomoshchenko's poetics owes more perhaps to the experiments of Opoyaz critics and OBERIU writers-particularly Vvedensky and Vaginov-who each in his own way were supremely preoccupied with the absence of any firm ground antecedent to poetic discourse, including the ground of the author's very personality. Their line of questioning memory, continuity, and language was broken off with the untimely end of the Russian avant-garde. It was not until the advent of new, underground writing of the 1970s that this line was picked up and the same questions began to be asked again-although until the late 80s mainly in a vacuum, as even the unofficial poetry of the late Soviet period was doggedly attached to the idea of poetic voice and unified cultural narrative.

The literary-historical background to Dragomoshchenko's phenomenon is too familiar to elaborate on it any further. Yet the question remains: in what sense can poetry's questioning the limits of memory, history, tradition, and cultural identity be said to overstep them? Dragomoshchenko tells us that it is only within language, "within the limits of its profuseness undepleted by meanings," that "the world unfolds and generates itself within the process of our acts of perception, the correlation between objectified reality and our methods of inquiry that incessantly alter it."¹⁵ In his poetics, the discovery of truth stands for poetry's incessant testing of its very horizons, "the act of including questioning into the horizons that are poetry itself."¹⁶ It is a process of an unending oscillation between intention and retreat-a process in which poetry constantly approaches its finitude but is never able to immobilize itself by coinciding with its own limits.

In order to demonstrate how Dragomoshchenko deploys his poetic critique of spatial non-coincidence, let us consider a page-long example from The Chinese Sun, a prose text I am currently attempting to recreate in English. The author calls this text a novel, but it is at every point a becoming-novel, for its inner logic consciously and deliberately follows theorems of deterritorialization postulated by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. It is the experience of this becoming that unfolds into the ever-expanding labyrinth at whose heart lies the gap of oblivion/incomprehension: "It is preferable to write about something that never happened-childhood- or something that will never happen-death"¹⁷

Night walked on without a splash: there's someone who crossed waters "as dry land"! The voices of mother, father, guests moved incidental shadows, like shaky islands of tender disturbance, across my room; the windows, as usual, restructured the dusk. Beyond the edge of indistinct voices, a steady, dull noise rolled on; back then, the sense of its wave-like approach was especially pleasant. It was as if one were reaching the threshold of sleep, the ivory gate that immediately issued one back, into the anticipation of the blissful instant of transition, transformation, into the moment that contained (in a triple exposure) the unrealized past, the already actualized present, and that which was just about to enter itself, having enclosed the all-reflecting nexus of time, or the absence of the word that signifies this possible never radiating in all directions in a luster of incredible blindness and omnivision where no means are left, only aims: always remaining an anticipation of that same past that never happened. The sequence is familiar: first, parents catch up with you, then disappear leaving you to your own appearance, then you create your parents disappearing in their last return to you.

Was I the continuation, the source, the beginning of the noise-or of the voices coming from down below? The day's majestic yet helpless and pitiful world unhurriedly turned its gigantic disk, lengthened shadows, re-drew contours. Grass is straight, it stretches in a stratum of ochre to the borders of consciousness. As if for the last time (every night in a new approximation), with a strangely groundless and sentimental feeling, I touched sunflower stems, rough fence boards, seemed to press myself to the tangible, balsamic odor of dry daisies, dried fish, and, dissolving in it, fleshless and unconquered by space, moved on to the brass tinkling of window glass, studying the membranous, mother-of-pearl stamping of French perfume, the curvature and speed of a light ray, of printer's ink, the ice of playing cards, the keys of the Blüthner grand piano. Pubescence. Carpets revealed spirals of Sufi precepts, the bony hornet of porcelain buzzed by the teeth, splitting molecular conjunctions of walnut dust, while behind the windows, a high water of cabbage butterflies, whitewashed to cinders by noon, flowed like the dry waters of the Koran. These butterflies-I'm now quite certain-will never leave that time, just as the silhouettes of train engines never for a second leave de Chirico's potato clock dials. The origin of a child's love lies at the center of the galactic dizziness of absolute loneliness. Soot. Calm clarity upsets: the landscape is a dictionary whose silkworm nests overflow with the vanishing of the touches that make it-and of yourself, with your fingers dipped into the frosty fire of your own shadow.

It is impossible to stop and sort out these images-they are dynamic like the flow of butterflies. There are at least two layers of writing here, and the distinction between them is temporal: one layer is that of the tangible writing of memory, the other is a layer of phenomenological experiences brought forth by perception. Yet, as Mikhail Iampolskii demonstrated, what we won't find in Dragomoshchenko's passage is a determinate narrative space-be it the space of memory or the space of perception. The palimpsests of his writings include a simultaneous movement of several temporal streams, and none of them can be safely isolated without violating the elusive whole. "Was I the continuation, the source, the beginning of the noise-or of the voices coming from down below?" An answer to this question is not to be found in the passage that follows it. Postulating non-coincidence as the essential condition of poetic language and the world it generates, Dragomoshchenko's prose of necessity questions the most basic of narrative conventions, without, however, willfully destroying them. Instead, The Chinese Sun introduces its own rules-those required by the logic of relentless transition and unpredictable shifting. As the author explains elsewhere in the text, "Individual facts held by memory in a particular sequence or chain, remain isolated facts extracted from a certain moment of time (this may be the origin of the mysterious, vertiginous charm and elusiveness they sometimes occasion). Subsequently, something else is becoming: not facts themselves, not events, but the way in which they correlate with my/your current intentions, with my today's desire, intent."¹⁸ It is the experience of this becoming that unfolds into the ever-expanding labyrinth of encroaching oblivion/incomprehension, while the space of the unfolding is language itself.

The texture of our passage is thus made up of uncertainty, of a superimposition of a white noise and of recognizable yet indistinct voices of others. It is an overlaying of memory and oblivion whereby the voice of the text constantly emerges from its mnemonic echo coming back from the past to its own source in oblivion. The promise of a straightforward mnemonic narrative is at every point disrupted by poetic observations on the act of perception that is both identical with, and different from, the act of remembering. Night noiselessly "crossing waters as dry land" is the crowning metaphor of the sequence. Its approach heralds the imminent disappearance that never quite comes but is only anticipated. Hovering at the threshold of darkness, sleep, complete incomprehension, and oblivion, the first person singular blends in with the intoxicating blur of acoustic, visual, tactile, and olfactory images only to vanish in the soot of their bodiless, "dictionary landscape" at the end of the passage. The passage talks of lengthened shadows, redrawn contours, and we find this lengthening and redrawing mirrored and enhanced in the shape of its sentences: each movement of thought is prolonged by numerous clauses and modifiers. The unrealized anticipation of the "blissful moment of transition" is similarly enacted on the level of syntax: the moment of comprehension always slips away, and by the end of the sentence one needs to retrace one's steps, to go back to the beginning.

As Dragomoshchenko writes elsewhere,

Inevitably, the question (any question, without exception) of poetry brings with it an infinite number of other potential questions, in chains woven into the fabric of some infinite spatial inquiry, which itself takes on the function of a strange voyage, a wandering, continually detaching from illusory possibility at least one partial answer to some of them, and it's in this sense that I speak of space, since neither time for its apparent condensation into hypothetical taxonomies nor time for its shimmering in the displacements and overflow of existence is essential-or rather, its extent becomes the purest abstraction, a question of speed, propelling the world into synchronicity, where motion has no aim of any kind, but emerges from itself, enclosing itself in constancy within the nonbinding boundaries of gravity and the granules of space.¹⁹

This understanding of space is certainly not new, but the space in which it is launched matters: the very possibility of posing it in the Russian context, even in the context of today's Russia, is a perilous one. The price one pays for coming to poetry, memory, and place from this, barely accessible angle is, at the very best, neglect-Dragomoshchenko's is not a household name in Russia, and I doubt it ever will be. At worst, one gets a full load of ideological accusations, including the hefty charge of falling out of one's native context (however mythical the latter may be) and thus betraying one's literary heritage. As Dragomoshchenko observes in Phosphor, "The all too human face of fascism is covered with the ritual tattoos of a [uniquely] correct language. There is much that did not occur in front of our eyes, but we have repeatedly seen how language died and became a murderer, abandoning itself to soapy fantasies about basic values. Imagination differs from fantasy as the word 'is' from the word 'if'."²⁰

One wonders then, to what extent our "striated" discussions of various national/ politically contextualized "postmoderns" are going to offer a viable alternative to this ever-present danger.

Notes

¹ For example, in her Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia, Svetlana Boym writes, "The common place is not as transparent as it might seem; it is a barricade, a battleground of warring definitions and disparate discourses-philosophical, political, aesthetic, and religious. By the twentieth century the common place has turned into a complex palimpsest, a museum o the Romantic ruins of authenticity and of modern homesickness. The common place is where the Romantic poet stages the rebellion and where the modernist searches for anonymity; in the twentieth century it has sharply contrasted political meanings, from the communist paradise of the common citizen to the commercial bliss of the common consumer" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994, p. 19f.).

² Fredrick Jameson, Postmodernism , Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 18.

³ See Marjorie Perloff, "Russian Postmodernism: an Oxymoron?", Postmodern Culture, v. 3, no. 2 (January, 1993), no pagination (http://jefferson.vilalge.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.193/sympos-2.193). Barrett Watten's contribution to the same issue similarly suggests that the "post-Soviet project" is to be carefully distinguished from the postmodern one, with the latter's cultural specificity to the West (http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.193/watten.193).

⁴ See "Symposium on Russian Postmodernism", Postmodern Culture, v.3, no.2 (January, 1993), no pagination (http://jefferson.vilalge.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.193/sympos-1.193).

⁵ See for example, Mikhail Epstein, After the Future: the Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture, translated with an introduction by Anesa Miller-Pogacar (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995); Mikhail Epstein, Aleksandr Genis and Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture, translated and edited by Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover (New York: Bergahn Books, 1999); Mark Lipovetsky, Russian Postmodernist Fiction: Dialogue with Chaos, edited by Eliot Borenstein (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999).

⁶ Born in Potsdam in 1946 where his father was a colonel in the occupying forces, Dragomoshchenko grew up in Vinnitsa in the Ukraine (Ukrainian is his first language), and lived in Leningrad/Petersburg most of his adult years. He started writing poetry early in life, and like many fellow authors whose work did not conform to official canons, made a living as a caretaker, night watchman, and a boiler room attendant. He published in samizdat, mostly in the Leningrad journal Chasy during the 1970s and 80s. He later was one of the founders of the writers' group Klub-81 and was first officially published in the group's anthology that came out in 1985. Since then his poetry appeared in literary journals, many of them provincial, and it was not until 1989 that his first poetry collection came out in Russia. In the 1990s he became a prominent presence in St Petersburg and Moscow intellectual and literary circles. In the early 90s he co-founded the journal Kommentarii that quickly became one of the most highly-regarded new intellectual periodicals. Later he published a brilliant collection of essays Fosfor, and, most recently the novel Kitaiskoe solntse. He now teaches at the Petersburg branch of Bard College, has his own TV show on the Petersburg channel and regularly contributes to a number of publications, many of them on the Internet (notably Russkii zhurnal). In 1983 Dragomoshchenko met the American poet Lyn Hejinian who became his English translator and, together with other American poets of the Language school (Charles Bernstein, Barrett Watten, Clark Coolidge, to name a few), a significant influence on his own writing. Dragomoshchenko's first translated poetry volume, Description was published in the United States even before his very first collection of poetry officially came out in Russia. Description garnered a great deal of attention in the US, with the electronic journal Postmodern Culture dedicating half an issue to Dragomoshchenko's work, and led Marjorie Perloff to consider the possibility of influence of contemporary Russian poetry upon American writers. Dragomoshchenko lectured at many US and European universities; his second translated volume Xenia (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1994) provoked an even greater response, firmly establishing him together with Prigov, Parshchikov, Zhdanov, and others as one of the most important names in contemporary Russian poetry.

⁷ Félix Guattari. "A Text for the Russians," Poetics Journal, no. 8 (1989), p. 3.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Michael Molnar, "The Vagaries of Description: the Poetry of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko". Essays in Poetics, vol. 14, no. 1, April 1989, p. 97.

¹⁰ Mikhail Iampolskii, "Poeziia kasaniia", preface to Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Opisanie (St. Petersburg: Gumanitarnaiia akademiia, 2000, forthcoming), p. 14, my translation.

¹¹ Description, p. 18.

¹² Arkadii Dragomoshchenko. "On the Superfluous.", tr. Evgeny Pavlov, Postmodern Culture, vol. 9, no. 1, 1998.

¹³ Description, p. 19.

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 21.

¹⁵ Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, "The Shadow of Reading," tr. Lyn Hejinian and Mikhail Hazin, in Re-Entering the Sign: Articulating New Russian Culture, eds. Ellen E. Berry and Anesa Miller-Pogacar (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 236.

¹⁶ Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Fosfor (St. Petersburg: Severo-zapad, 1994), p. 26, my translation.

¹⁷ Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Kitaiskoe solntse (St. Petersburg: Borey Art Center, 1997), p. 6, my translation.

¹⁸ Ibid, p. 47.

¹⁹ Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, "I(S), tr. Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova, Poetics Journal, no. 9, 1991, p. 129.

²⁰ Description, p. 19, translation modified.