<Perloff教授との懇談のためのメール/A Mail for an Interview with Prof. Perloff＞
1 (Mail addresses and some lines have been deleted for our confidentiality.).
>Re: Inquiries for our meeting: Koga Date:.....From: 古賀　哲男 <......> Reply-To:....
To: Marjorie Perloff <.........>

Dear Prof. Perloff:
The following is a list of inquiries which might benefit our conversation during
my stay at Stanford (Nov. 21 through 25) 1997.

I) Concerning the question of postmodern subjectivity
After reading your "Radical Artifice" book and your 1992 Contemp. Lit. essay
on Wittgensteinian poetics (which may be the key essay in your recent
"Wittgenstein's Ladder" book, which I don't have yet), I come to realize some
general questions about the status of postmodern subjectivity; more
specifically, I have several interrelated questions of subjectivity directed
toward the following three possibilities:

a) that the idea of contemporary subjectivity may be viable only in the
so-called "inter-subjectivity" which may be the undeniable feature of cyberworld
and techno-utopian consciousness, as in an imagined communality of the internet
or the SF visions of AI or virtual reality.
(William Gibson and other "cyberpunk" writers may show this way.)
b) that the very identity of our "subjectivity" comprises some otherness
within itself, that is, that "we," or even "I," is not monolythical at all; its
identity is a composite of our cultural and historical realities which may well
exceed our controlling capacities. This view is, of course, very popular among
new historicists, postcolonialists, and multiculturalists, or even "new
exoticists," who may all overhaul it into nothing other than the mere
historical/cultural/ideological "data," quite uncapable of its own
decision-making.
c) that our experiential self or subject may easily be deconstructed; so
necessarily reconstructed into a new "pragmatic" (post-religious) entity of more
numinous super-realities or some god-heads. For example, such luminary
Emersonian scholars like Harold Bloom or Richard Poirier suggest this
possibility when they dictate the importance of Emerson or William James (but
not continental Derrida or Foucault in their theorizing). This position may
have a complex relation to the position (a) and (b) which both should take the
Language into consideration, since the Language is quite logically the most
"natural" otherness in us, which is also the tool to communicate with "others,"
ennabling an inter-subjectivity into operation. The difference between any two
positions may finally be concerning the issue of Language: how can we ever be
free of language while we are utterly governed by it, even sexually? This
last position (Is there any other?) seems to me to transcend the issue of
language by believing in some revelatory theories of post-humanism, or in some
primitive extra-linguistic forms of ritual and occult, which may ironically
return us back to the burden of our past and cultural memories.

Question: How do you respond to each from your Wittgensteinian position? As a
defender of Language Poetics, what is the most reliable definition of postmodern
subjectivity which may be no subjectivity at all? Indeed with Fred Jameson and
others, we cannot think otherwise that so-called "postmodern" features of late
capitalist economy are almost totally submerging or debunking everything
"natural"; we thus need to "de-naturalize" (problematize) any conceivable
concept (including language) which has become too "unnatural" to us. Hence, as
with Wallace Stevens, we must "see the sun again with an ignorant eye / And see
it clearly in the idea of it" ("Notes" Abstract, I) beyond any politicization or
ideological manipulation of our daily activities, What do you say about this?

II) Concerning the issue of avant-garde writing in America
The next cluster of my questions concern more specifically several moments of
the avant-garde writing in America.
As a scholar of "American" arts and letters, I have been most fascinated by the
country's "frontier spirit" or avant-garde radicalism in American version. After
the original "revolution" and declaration of independence, America has been the
single most successful country to pursue the idea of freedom, Though the idea
of "frontier spirit" may be in danger now as with the idea of "America" itself,
this notion of highly radical "freedom" as an experiment has, I think, been one
of the main features of avant-garde writing in America. A contemporary practice
of language writing is a case; another may be a cyberpunk SF or experimental
theatre plays, of John Cage or Laurie Anderson, not to mention other more
technically marvellous artistic experiments in other genres or manifestations.
Here I would like to touch on the poetry of Susan Howe and the fiction of Thomas
Pynchon.

a) Sexuality and writing; or what is a gender difference in writing, if any?
In recent years, I have been most fascinated by the poetry of Howe among other
language poets. Though I am mostly puzzled at her experiments, I can draw more
enjoyments from her than from the others. My first encounters are some of her
most celebrated poems like "Pythagorean Silence" or "Defenestration of Prague";
more recent poems collected in "Singularities" and "The Nonconformist's
Memorial," however, remain still unknowable to me. Here is my very rough and
brief sketch of the importance of Howe's poetry in wider issues of gender and
experimental writing.

The presence of human voices from various histories, strongly controlled by and
characterized in her own voice, may be one of the most salient features of her
poetry; a blend of confessional impulse and impersonal manipulation creates here
a unique experimental outcome. When compared with other language poets like
Bernstein or Andrews, she may posit a more challenging perspective: an amalgam
of futuristic surrealism and metafictionalii mirror world, with a strongly
self-conscious analysis of one's past and memories. Again compared with some
visionary non-language poets like Merril or Ashbery, she has an advantage of
using the poetic language as an extrinsic tool, thereby ennabling the separation
f a writing self from one's experiencing self, whiose gap may cause a deeper
self-analysis than the more holistically mystical or autonomous
self-expressions.

Question: How do you see her poetry in general? I sometimes see her with a
perspective for the "radical/radiating/revolutionary" artifice of the new
millennium. But is her poetry really an expression of new feminim? I wonder.

b) Exotic culture and avant-garde writing; or where goes the subject of Oedipa
in Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49"?

Beside my interest in poetry, I read some contemporary fiction as it interests
me as a prose-poetry, especially Pynchon. Though the novelistic language use is
all we have even for an avant-garde fiction, I am excited by its visionary
recomposition of the world. The literary experience of a novel may well satisfy
a reader's mind better than that of a short poem. Here this celebrated novel by
Pynchon may suggest my meditation on American freedom and the idea of frontier.

This part forms merely an expectation on my side; the fictional setting of San
Franscisco and California in the Pynchon novel may open my "exotic" longing to
analyze my otherness in America.

Beside wishing to look at the paintings of Remedios Varo (a Spanish surrealist
painter, exiled in Mexico), I would like to think of the meaning of exile and
avant-gardism. A recent "Yasusada" scandal has surely shown an aspect of
exoticism.

More generally, I wish to explore the issue of cultural mass-production and
individual orientation: what drives a person to "other" cultures, while he or
she feels most alienated within his/her own culture? Can "art" be an pretext
for the exile from our daily lives, or what is a possible stance of the artists
in a community which tries to use them against the very thing they flee from, as
in the case of Pound?

Again as Stevens says, how can art be the "imagination pressing back against the
pressure of reality," when its pressure should be higher beyond the unbearable
point of life and death for the artist, as in the case of poetic death/suicide
of the artist like Berryman or Crane?

HERE, inquiries may abound, but I must stop. Any response either in person or
on a net may be most welcome. I am thinking of probing further into the
questions above in the next e-mail installment, and wishing you be my most
wonderful mentor-companion.
Yours,

Tet Koga
Assoc. Prof. of English at Osaka City University, Japan

2.<A Reply Mail from Prof. Perloff>
INET GATE.....Date: Sun, 26 Oct 1997 13:44:58 +0100 From Marjorie Perloff <.....> Reply-To:.......To:　古賀　哲男 <........>

Dear Tet Koga:

Those are big questions! We'll discuss when you come. But let me say here that the issue of subjectivity is, as you say, very complex. I myself don't believe the subject is just or even primarily a cultural construction and even the language poets, despite all their denigration of the "voice," have very different "signatures" themselves.
I think "capitalism" (Jameson) has much less to do with the issue than the questions of masses and media. No matter what the economic systeme would be, the "individual" no longer has the power he/she once had. In a mass society, it's had to talk of the "uniqueness" of X or Y. Still, the paradox is tha twe do continue to find certain artists unique! So how explain this?

We'll talk in late November. Why don't we say that that Monday, Nov. 24 I would like to take you out to dinner and we can before that have a long conference. The weekend before will be difficult.....

Best wishes,
Marjorie Perloff