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as the subject recalls, in broken fragments, “shouting and laughing and intense felicity;” as he, “hears the child her blue coat! His new shoes and boat!”(230).28 In place of his immediate experience of the world, we have trace memories, fragments of information, sensory data, and the experiential reactions which constitute memory; these allow the reader to situate the subjective position in the poem. The ambiguity produced from contrastive and overlaying representations of the subjective leaves gaps where the significance of this indeterminacy can be measured, thus strengthening the importance of Prynne’s transmission of tacit knowledge to the reader. In theorising about the importance of subjectivity in late-modernism Anthony Mellors writes: “Any encompassing subjectivity proposed on its [the modernist poem’s] behalf comes into being through this “opening,” which is to say that indeterminacy is imbued with what I will call a determined opening.”29 Subjectivity, defined and utilised in this manner, opens itself to the possibility of indeterminacy, and as Mellors claims, the ambiguity becomes a site of reconstituted situations, images and referential patterns from which subjectivity can be constituted. Integrated within the semantic and semiotic frameworks of the poem is an implicit knowledge, presented through fragmentary images or phrases, which situate the subjective. It is through the comparison and contrast of images that the reader ascertains information about how the phrases of different discourses and narrative positions affect, amend and constrain the other. What Mellors presents in his argument is subjectivity presented as “another way of refusing any determinate identity, which is to say that it expects to open onto a transcendent subjectivity in the form of a sublimated self-identity.”30 The continuation of this argument forces subjectivity to be established outside of the frameworks of meaning as a conjecture of the reader. The framework creates a negative dialectic which limits the hermeneutic conditions of language to act as determinate of the structure of subjectivity, and 28 The division between remembrance and diagnostic reference is paralleled in the titles, as noted earlier, with the sequence of: ‘Treatment in The Field,’ ‘The Blade Given Back,’ ‘Cool as a Mountain Stream,’ ‘Thanks for the Memory,’ ‘Pigment Depot,’ Of Movement Towards a Natural Place,’ ‘Landing Area,’ ‘Chromatin,’ ‘Melanin,’ ‘An Evening Walk,’ and ‘Again in the Black Cloud’ indicating the movement between one state and the other.
again shows a reliance on the communication of tacit knowledge. In Prynne’s attempt to define subjectivity as a derivative of discourse, it should be noted that Prynne constitutes experience as a collation of lines of perception, scientific data, secondary voices and memory. The ambiguous nature of any singular image or narrative within the poem is indicative of the non-identifiable nature of a fragmentary speaking subject. By constantly eschewing the condition of voice in the poem, Prynne works to destabilise meaning and to ensure that each scene functions as a condition of the images and fragments presented. Indicative of this is the section from “Cool as a Mountain Stream”:
By this vane in the ground The roots start to sicken, Snow normal to zulu time stuns soft news Of choice all over the earth. You spin with erotic doubt, ah then, Hysteric tenderness, is this The mount of our youth Or his body? He must be eaten slowly, by autolysis of face thus forced to riot, claimed by soft hands in his shirt: not a beast of virtue (219).
In this small section of the poem, Prynne presents a geological strain, which appears to be placing detrimental stress on the “roots,” of growth. The media obfuscation of “snow” returns as, “zulu time stuns soft news.” “Zulu” as it is used in this incidence has multiple connotations; it historically ties this poem back to the Anglo-Zulu Battle of Islandwala, and ongoing discussions regarding primitive versus civilised societies and warfare. “Zulu time” can also imply a time denoting spatial relativity; as it is military parlance for Greenwich Mean Time.31 Also implicated in Prynne’s use of this phrase is the fact that “zulu time,” in Vietnam argot, was the time in which the casualty report was read.32 The hysteria mentioned in the poem, contrasts with the tranquil residual effect of the title, which seems pathologically descriptive, but also indicative of subtlety distended Chinese themes within
29 Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics : From Pound to Prynne, 177.
31 PBS American Experience, Vietnam Online: The Language of War, 2005, PBS, 1.06. 2008.
30 Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics : From Pound to Prynne, 177.
32 Experience, Vietnam Online: The Language of War.