The Character
Jena Osman
publisher: Beacon Press, 1999
isbn: 0-8070-6847-0
price: $15
What I thought was a sudden chip in
the metal was actually a drop of
water one foot in front of the
metal, my eye joining the two in a
simple surgery
[50]
Winner of the 1998 Barnard New Women Poets Prize, Osman presents a complete portrait of the interests of postmodern aesthetic theory, ranging from the rarified take on Brecht's alienation effect that keeps its metaphysics while discarding its directness, to such techniques as the "page-as-score," the legibility of non-linguistic signs, the use of disjunctive footnotes (some of which are footnotes to footnotes), collage texts (and its natural biproduct, surrealism), the epistomology of vision and the cancelling plays of multiple identities.
As Hejinian writes in her introduction, this is all combined in the term of the "character," which at times can mean the elements of the alphabet, the "moral fiber" of an individual, the unique figure as found in novels and plays ("Performance requires the person who is the actor (i.e., already a character) to be in character, and this, in turn, cannot occur without performance" [xii]), and the mark of difference in identities: "she's such a character."
At times the writing is compelling, creating a range of interests that circulate around specific themes, as in the long poem "Authorities (A Lecture)", a rumination on power and evil which circles around the figure of Iago in Shakespeare's Othello with a concurrent strand of discourse around experimental poetics, defending the cult of the aleatoric to the "nature of judgement itself" [64] being grounded in chance:
The presence of Iago questions the flawed system. He goes beyond the stance of necessary evil, a tool for ultimately attaining (through his discard) a cathartic utopian state for the spectator. He is, in fact, part of that 'utopian' state. He can never be totally purged; he is the scene which allows for Othello (and our understanding of Othello/ourselves) to exist at all. We are meant to empathize with (see ourselves as) Othello.
[65]
The poem ends with a re-editing of transcripts from a session of the Supreme Court which reads like a conversation among the gods of a dangerously enfeebled Parnassus, as Sandra Day O'Conner asks: "Does a reasonable person know how to read?"
The excerpt from "The Periodic Table as Assembled by Dr. Zhivago, Oculist," a long, 'pataphysical hypertext poem that, once on-line, would allow the user to create new compounds from the poems provided, rewrites the abbreviations of this table according to subjective or aleatoric laws, such that "hydrogen" becomes "harness," and is listed under the "elements that contribute to sight" [27].
While in its static state on the page the poem is doesn't add up to much more than often engaging juxtapositions of words -- the poems broken into lines often lack any rhythmal drive, though one suspects that this aggregative method may have been her intention -- a section from "Rayguns to Radium" explains how this scrambling of the foundational glyph of modern science expands to take on social mores:
Madame Curie discovered us in the pitchblende
and no subject since has so interested the mind
of the general public. Next in line was the discovery
of a radius of light, generic weaponry for all.
[28]
Osman can sink into a mannered academic mode with already conventional attempts at density that only throw the reader off in her prose poems -- certainly, much of the tone here has been adopted from readings in "theory" -- but the poems thrive on the compelling promise of depth without ever surrendering their complete contents, which is, one supposes, what a "character" in its many manifestations invariably does.
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