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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2011
This paper examines the representation of American everyday life and the language of the legal system in the work of Charles Reznikoff. It draws comparisons between Reznikoff's accounts of the lives of immigrants to America in his work, and Jacques Derrida's experience of colonial relationships as described in his book Monolingualism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin. Charles Reznikoff was the son of Russian Jews who moved to America to escape the pogroms of the late nineteenth century. His parents spoke Yiddish and Russian, his grandparents spoke Hebrew, and Reznikoff's first language was English. This familial linguistic complexity was further added to by his associations with experimental modernist poetry and poetics through the “Objectivists,” an environment that provided him with the poetic forms in which to explore relationships between language, experience and its representation. I cite two other linguistic contexts: that of the law, acquired through his legal training, and that of commerce and sales, acquired through working as a hat salesman for his parents' business. Reznikoff therefore had no naturalized relationship between language and either family or national identity, or between language and place. I use Derrida's notion of “a first language that is not my own” to explore the implications for Reznikoff's poetry, and particularly the relationship between the specific accounts of experience in Testimony and the more general notions of nation and justice. While I conclude that a concern of the poems is always language, and what language means in different contexts, the poems also seek to connect with the material consequences of injustice for the fleshly bodies of the victims.
1 I use three publications called Testimony: Testimony (Tales founded on Law Reports) (New York: Objectivist Press, 1934); Testimony: The United States 1885–1890: Recitative (San Francisco: New Directions, 1965); Testimony: The United States, 1885–1915, Volumes 1 and 2 (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1978); source: Literature Online. Charles Reznikoff, Holocaust (New Hampshire: David R. Godine (A Black Sparrow Book) 2007).
2 The “Objectivists” were a loose association of poets who began publishing in the 1930s. They were influenced by Imagism, a poetic movement from earlier in the century in which Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound were (in different ways) important figures. Zukofsky's essay “Sincerity and Objectification” was the principal statement of Objectivist poetics. Although different in many ways, one common factor between the Objectivists was that, while suffering critical neglect, they continued to publish throughout long poetic careers, in some cases until the 1980s. They became increasingly influential on subsequent poetic movements, including “Language” poetry of the 1970s and 1980s.
3 Charles Reznikoff, The Manner Music (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1977).
4 Charles Reznikoff, Family Chronicle (New York: Markus Wiener, 1988).
5 Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin, trans Patrick Menash (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
6 Charles Bernstein, in his essay “Reznikoff's Nearness,” in R. B. DuPlessis and P. Quartermain, eds., The Objectivist Nexus (Tucaloosa: University of Alabama, 1999) 210–39, discusses the implications of seriality in Reznikoff's work.
7 Charles Reznikoff, The Complete Poems 1918–1975 (Santa Rosa Press: Black Sparrow, 1996), 105–29.
8 Ibid., 113.
9 Ibid., 123–25.
10 Cohen-Cheminet, Geneviève, “Serial Rhythm in Charles Reznikoff's Poetry,” Sagetrieb, 13, 1–2 (1994), 83–122Google Scholar.
11 Hatlen, Burton, “Objectivism in Context: Charles Reznikoff and Jewish-American Modernism,” Sagetrieb, 13, 1–2 (1994), 147–68Google Scholar.
12 Cohen-Cheminet, 106.
13 Ibid., 108.
14 Ibid., 109.
15 Ibid., 114.
16 Objectivism principally promotes the idea of the poem as object, an idea that also contains within it the promotion of an “objective” stance towards experience.
17 Reznikoff, Complete Poems, 107.
18 Derrida, 1.
19 Ibid., 2.
20 Ibid., 14.
21 Ibid., 19–20.
22 Ibid., 19–20.
23 Ibid., 20.
24 Ibid., 21.
25 Reznikoff himself says of Testimony in the 1962 New Directions publication of By the Waters of Manhattan (New York: New Directions, 1992) that it is “a projected series of five volumes of a social, economic, cultural and legal history of the United States and its people in verse” (114).
26 Charles Reznikoff, The Lionhearted (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1944).
27 Reznikoff, Complete Poems, 15–56.
28 Reznikoff, Testimony (1934), xiii.
29 Milton Hindus, Charles Reznikoff: A Critical Essay (London: The Menard Press, 1977), 57.
30 In this Derrida and Reznikoff share another interest. Both are concerned with the ways different possible meanings of language relate to a notion of justice, and how legal processes come to decisions through acts of interpretation of linguistic evidence that is made believable by acts of witness.
31 Reznikoff, Testimony (1965), 110.
32 Ibid., 110–11.
33 Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundations of Authority,” in Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson, eds., Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (London: Routledge, 1992), 5.
34 Derrida, Monolingualism, 22.
35 Ibid., 23.
36 Ibid.
37 Reznikoff, Testimony (1965), 11.
38 Ibid., 14.
39 Ibid., 19.
40 Ibid., 50.
41 Ibid., 56.
42 Ibid., 61.
43 Ibid.
44 Reznikoff, Testimony (1934), 8.
45 Reznikoff, Testimony (1965), preface.
46 Reznikoff Testimony (1934), author's note.
47 Ibid., xiv.
48 Ibid., 13.
49 Derrida, Monolingualism, 22–23.
50 Ibid., 23.
51 Ibid., Derrida's emphasis.
52 Ibid., 23–24, Derrida's emphasis.
53 Ibid., 23.
54 Ibid., 24.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid.
