Below are two paragraphs from the original conclusion of Chapter 6 on European and North American writers on India, paragraphs that had to be cut before the book went to print. They briefly discuss the writers and poets who are the focus of this chapter: Frederic Prokosch, Henri Michaux, Octavio Paz, and Allen Ginsberg. #allenginsberg #octaviopaz #henrimichaux #fredericprokosch #avantgardeorientalism
In each of the works examined, certain features and superficies of India are made to seem analogous to avant-garde strategies of deregulating the human impulse toward ποιειν (i.e., “making” or creative fabrication) which constitutes the process of knowing and thus of self-definition. Though an avant-gardist’s self-justificatory reflexes typically interpret his deliberately defective creations as newer, more pertinent forms of art for a new world in which the self still strives to understand what it is, he also recognizes the subtle modes of dehumanization that are risked in the process of aestheticization. The avant-gardist therefore strives to short-circuit or disorganize such modes through subversion and invention. In this way a certain space or gap is opened by which Otherness can affirm its difference or even opposition, can undertake an alternative deciphering of signs to reveal the simultaneous contrasts inherent to creative production. In the aporia of avant-garde contradiction and self-dismantling a plausible reciprocity is staked out at the borders of mutual human frailties and sensitivities. But aggression, too, is required to provoke a new kind of honesty and to appeal to diverse or even divergent sensibilities, to younger bodies, to open minds. As such, the avant-garde interpreter’s representational dysfunction both captivates and mobilizes the participant Other to assume a different kind of agency in the production and consumption of poetic signs.
As Prokosch’s novel of imaginary travel suggests, the travel genre itself is a kind of adumbration of this process, since automatic displacement is the foundational principle of the work, undermining expectations insofar as classic novels, no matter how encompassing, must initiate and finally conclude a unified action. Though regularly interrupted by encounters that imply simple digression and complication of a continuous journey, the journey itself never fully materializes in Prokosch’s novel. It is always truncated, discontinued by the requirement to move sideways, placing the traveler in a perpetual nowhere between self and Other, beginning and end. The end itself is in medias res. Michaux, on the other hand, seems to engage in a very deliberate, precise act of dismemberment—the “Other” sliced into semiotic pieces—only to find that he has cannibalized himself in an act of barbaric self-exhibitionism. Both Paz and Ginsberg obsessively, voyeuristically interrogate Indian poverty, chaos, and filth in a poetic act of reclamation, sublimation and hoped-for transcendence. Yet both seem caught up in an erotics of bodily and communal expulsion, of rotting flesh and sediments of decay being recuperated with a kind of love. Lepers and the ashes of the dead become indices of a kind of verbal self-immolation, the spiritual efficacy of which seems suspect if also effective as an exercise in total creative immersion.
