Tradition as an Interpretation

Abstract

Postmodernism considers a literary text to be created not by imitating and reflecting reality, but as a rereading and recreating of an already existing text. As a result, in the analysis of a postmodern text it is essential to take into consideration the context, i.e., those texts which are used as a hypertext by various methods, whether it is citation, parody or allusion. It should be also noted that for the majority of postmodern writers’ intertextuality is a conscious aesthetic method that enables to construct the text with a bold experimentation and artistic play.

Contemporary British poet Richard Burns (Berengarten) is one of those authors in whose poems postmodern variations of other famous writers’ texts create a highly allusive work.   His most famous work The Manager written in the 90ies of the 20^th century is an answer of the post-modern poet to the works of the great authors of the high modernism T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

Richard Burns has remarked in his numerous interviews and essays that he views history as an unfinished sentence, where every work created is in constant dynamic dialogue with the works created chronologically before or after it. Such an understanding of tradition which resonates with that of T.S. Eliot is well-apparent in his poetry as well as in his essays. Hence, his ‘Big Narrative’ is in a dialogue with the two seminal texts of high modernism: The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot and Cantos by Ezra Pound. Burns himself remarked that the poem is his ‘conscious attempt “to answer”’ his great predecessor Eliot.  (Burns: 2002).

Recycling the experience of high modernism and using it as an intertext is apparent not only on the conceptual level, but in the form of the poem. Fragmentary, chaotic text with no linear narrative, abundance of literary allusions and reminiscences – all these characteristics of high modernism, which made it differ from a traditional narrative poem, are apparent in The Manager.

Like his great modernist predecessors, postmodernist poet Richard Burns uses the technique of fragmentation and disjointed timeline as a means to express existential alienation and dissociated consciousness of his hero who lives in the second half of the 20^th century. Thus, fragmentation does not mean absence of form, bus a new kind of form, as after Eliot’s and Pound’s works it acquired a certain significance as a formal technique. Consequently, it is not unexpected that the question about the significance of the form is one of the many themes of The Manager. Self-reflexivity, characteristic to the post-modern aesthetics, questions the relationship between “reality” and art and attempts to comment and explain itself, i.e., the text of the poem by metafictional auto-references. Allusions to the texts by Eliot and Pound (as well as using Pound as one of the voices/characters in the poem) work together to create the text that reflects upon its own process of artful composition.

Richard Burns is well-aware that modernist quest, or as he puts it ‘building new bridges’ urged its representatives to reject conventional forms. At the same time the innovations introduced by them became to some extent a cliché and a tradition which needs to be valuated and answered. The poem The Manager is an ironic reply to the poetics and worldview of High Modernism, haunted by the ghosts of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. By citation, allusion, parody of the modernists’ canonic texts the author creates a post-modern hyper-text. As Richard Burns himself remarked: ‘If The Waste Land and Cantos are the paradigm of modernism, than The Manager is its criticism.’ (Burns 2002). Although, the poem is not only a criticism, as it is apparent from the analysis, the author is well-aware of the novelty that modernism brought about and without which neither his poem nor post-modernism would exist.

References:

Burns, R. (2001) Burns, Richard. The Manager. A poem. Elliott & Thompson. London & Bath, UK.

Burns, R. (2002). Burns, Richard, “The Manager: Eliot’s ‘influence’”. 

        http://www.richardburns.eu/site/Eliot-influence.html

Gelashvili, M., Kobakhidze T. (2015). Manana Gelashvili & Temur Kobakhidze, The Manager: Tradition and the Individual Talent. In: The Companion to Richard Berengarten Edited by Norman Jope, Paul Scott Derrick and Catherine E. Byfield. Published by Shearsman Books Ltd, UK. Pp. 240-250.