Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing.

Reviewed by Heather Hathaway Marquette University 

A pairing of the Black Mountain poets with black writers from the United States and the Caribbean probably would not immediately occur to most readers, yet Nathaniel Mackey's study Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing provocatively examines this very relationship. Mackey, who is professor of literature at the University of California-Santa Cruz and himself an important contemporary poet, astutely analyzes the work of Black Mountainers Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson, African Americans Amiri Baraka and Clarence Major, and Caribbeaners Edward Kamau Brathwaite and Wilson Harris in order to make two fundamental points. First, Mackey argues that the experimentalism intrinsic to the work of these seemingly disparate authors links them in a common enterprise of "engaging the discrepancy" between norms of conventional literary, poetic, and cultural practice and "qualities of experience" which these norms cannot embody. Second, Mackey contends that critical attention to similarities in style and form - as opposed, for example, to content-based readings, which he implies are often shaped by reductive assumptions about race or region - allows for a richer understanding of the cross-cultural dimension of figures presumed to be divided by geographic, racial, and even temporal boundaries. By highlighting connections between writers not usually associated with one another and illustrating their collective (although independent) emphases on disrupting literary and cultural expectations, Mackey not only challenges us to consider the assumptions we as readers and critics bring to texts, but he also raises important questions about the consequences of those assumptions for current and historical debates about definitions of "the canon."

More specifically, through his juxtaposition of Duncan, Creeley, and Olson with Baraka, Major, Brathwaite, and Harris, Mackey challenges traditional conceptions of "schools" of literature by arguing that the combination of experimentation and marginalization (both aesthetic and social) which characterizes each of these writers' works suggests not dissonance but rather a form of alliance that is rooted in their shared and insistent contesting of categorization. Mackey calls upon us, for example, to resist "shallow, simplistic readings" of black literature "that belabor the most obvious aspects of the writer's work and situation, readings that go something like this: 'So-and-so is a black writer. Black people are victims of racism. So-and-so's writing speaks out against racism.'" "Failures or refusal to acknowledge complexity among writers from socially marginalized groups," Mackey argues, "no matter how 'well-intentioned,' condescend to the work and to the writers and thus, hardly the solution they purport to be, are a part of the problem." Mackey contends that such interpretations have dominated literary criticism about nearly all "marginalized" writers, resulting in insufficient attention being paid to the "variance and divergent approaches" inherent in the work of a wide range of authors whose writing "defies canons of accessibility" (18). Through his analyses of experimental poetry and prose by both black authors and the Black Mountain writers, Mackey attempts to unseat definitions of literary center and periphery in order to remind us that "the aesthetic margin is not the domain solely of those from socially non-marginalized groups," but that all the writers discussed - black and Black Mountain alike - "have sought new ways to show us not only what we don't see but that we don't see, the constructs by which we are both blinded and enlightened" (19).

Mackey presents his theoretical orientation in the introduction "And All the Birds Sing 'Bass," a reference to the "Black Mountain Blues," recorded by Bessie Smith in 1930. He argues "that in the 'bass notes' bottoming the work of these various writers - writers who, poet or novelist, black or white, from the United States or from the Caribbean, produce work of a refractory, oppositional sort - one hears the rumblings of some such 'place' of subordination" (1). Mackey offers "marginality" as "another name for that 'place,'" locating his interest in both the relationship between content and form, and in the impact of a "marginalized context" on that relationship. He then explores the correlation between marginalization and experimentation through the remaining fourteen chapters, most of which focus upon the work of a single author, but which reference repeatedly the range of authors shaping his overall thesis.

The chapters are organized thematically: The first two concentrate on African American literature and culture (specifically the work of Amiri Baraka and Clarence Major); the next four center on the Black Mountain poets (chapters 4 and 5 concern Robert Duncan, while 6 and 7 consider Robert Creeley and Charles Olson, respectively); and chapters 8 through 11 highlight writing by Caribbeaners (chapter 8 assesses the experimentation inherent in Edward Kamau Brathwaite's New World Trilogy, while chapters 9, 10, and 11 discuss the work of Wilson Harris at length). Despite the largely single-author focus of the chapters, Mackey's entire enterprise is designed to burst the boundaries of such crude categories, and he accomplishes this effectively by continually emphasizing the ways in which all of the authors resist and reframe the various traditions with which they might be expected to comply. The final three chapters are perhaps most successful at this type of cross-cultural analysis. Chapter 12, "On Edge," attempts to complicate simplistic interpretations of Robert Duncan's phrase "symposium of the whole" by pondering the implicit "edge" within that supposed whole - the edge, according to Mackey, "where differences intersect,... where half-truths or partial wisdoms converse, contend, interlock" (260) in the work of authors ranging from Edouard Glissant to Jay Wright to Charles Olson. Chapters 13 and 15 elaborate upon a discussion begun in chapter 2, "The Changing Same: Black Music in the Poetry of Amiri Baraka," about a pervasive interest of Mackey's - the potential of black music to intervene in social and cultural hierarchies, to serve "as a form of social and epistemological dissent" (9). Chapter 13, "Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol," expresses most clearly Mackey's conception of the transcendental potential of music and/in literature, as he considers the way in which writing by Americans Jean Toomer, William Carlos Williams, and Ralph Ellison, and Guyanan Wilson Harris uses song as the mechanism by which to create "alternate realit[ies]" that elevate one beyond the planes of everyday existence (236). Chapter 15, "Other: From Noun to Verb," concludes the book with a forceful call for non-racial, non-representational readings of black writers which recognize, as Mackey argues is more commonly the case with black musical forms (most notably jazz), the radical innovations in subject and structure that often imbue such works. According to Mackey, the same impulse toward experimentation that is praised and acknowledged in the creation of black music similarly shapes much black literature, and in so doing it actually "move[s] the medium" of writing to new boundaries which have generally gone unacknowledged. Acclaim of this type of literary experimentation, however, has been denied black authors, according to Mackey, because recognition would "entail an order of animacy" which he believes is "granted only to whites when it comes to writing" (284-85).

While the general consideration of the relationship between marginalization and experimentation in Discrepant Engagement is insightful, the central strength of the book - the wide range of authors and regions discussed -is also a weakness. The atypical combination of writers addressed is undeniably stimulating; Mackey's goal of creating a cross-cultural consideration of experimental writing is not simply intriguing but vitally necessary to the growth of the discipline. But his reliance upon previously published essays results in an incongruity among the individual chapters that leaves the reader longing for conclusions. Mackey seems to anticipate this, however, and states outright that he intends to "make no large claims for a single unifying argument running throughout" (1). Indeed, he goes on to describe this very "discrepancy" as intrinsic to the subject at hand:

. . . because of preconceptions regarding who belongs where and with whom, which have been shaped and reinforced by existing rubrics and academic practice, there are readers who will find the mix of writers dealt with in this book incongruous and problematic. In this respect, the book's title refers to its own practice, its willingness to engage what will be seen by some as an unlikely or unsanctioned fit, a non-fit. (21)

Offering the text as a means by which to call "attention to the problematics of rubric-making, a caveat meant to make the act of categorization creak," Mackey argues that "such creaking is always present, even in the case of more customary groupings - groupings that appear unproblematic, proper, only because we agree not to hear it." His hope, as he describes it, is that the "book lives up to its title, that it avails itself of resonances and dissonances, the interstitial play between fit and non-fit, the non-totalizing drift a book of essays affords" (21).

Given these objectives, Nathaniel Mackey has accomplished his task admirably. Discrepant Engagement demands from us an openness to alternative flames of reference and a recognition of the ways in which traditional categories restrict our own perceptions of the potential for intertextuality among cultures, literary schools, races, regions, and rubrics. If Mackey leaves the responsibility for making connections upon our shoulders, perhaps he does so in order to attain his most fundamental objective: that of stretching our minds to accommodate more expansive visions of literature which, in turn, allow for the possibility of transcendence through embracing the very "discrepancies" that actually link cultures in dialogue with one another.