The mysterious title character of Thomas Pynchon's first novel V. resembles in some ways Beckett's "Godot" in her capacity to dominate the story almost from its beginning without ever actually materialising within it. Pynchon emphasizes the allusive, symbolic nature of this figure early in the tale:

As spread thighs are to the libertine, flights of migratory birds to
the ornithologist, the working part of his tool bit to the production
machinist, so was the letter V to young Stencil. He would dream
perhaps once a week that it had all been a dream, and that
now he'd awakened to discover the pursuit of V. was merely a
scholarly quest after all, an adventure of the mind, in the
tradition of The Golden Bough or The White Goddess.

(V. 50)

Bereft of any actual objects Pynchon's novel presents, accordingly, a rather effervescent image of the American postwar state. Although symbolically integrated, its culture encourages a corresponding subjectivity that is completely transient at best, unable to offer any definitive interpretation of its surroundings. As Stencil himself admits, in Pynchon's modernity, there is neither a proper nor false way to read "V". More than a single figure, V. hosts a wide variety of equally arbitrary disguises, including Victory in Europe, the mythological land of "Vheissu" and even Queen Victoria.

As an initial symbol of the postwar era, therefore, V. reigns supreme. Yet, even her ubiquitous presence at this time does not fully account for the intensely political nature of her role in the 1949 trial of Alger Hiss for espionage. This time, "V" appears in one of her more culturally authoritarian disguises: the little steel "V" in mechanical typewriters that guides individual letters to the ribbon before making an imprint. In many models, there was an unfortunate tendency for this "V" to bend under repeated use, thereby causing it to mis-channel and disfigure the approaching letters. In the case of Alger Hiss, it was exactly this type of flawed mechanism which misaligned the capital letters of his wife's old Woodstock, thus incriminating the machine as the one typewriter that copied sensitive government letters for Soviet agents during the Second World War.

Given this new evidence, between twenty-five and thirty FBI agents diligently combed Washington D.C. for the unamerican typewriter. As with Stencil's search in Pynchon's narrative, however, this manifestation, too, of the enigmatic V. was to remain elusive -- though not before causing much anxiety in the public mind. For one brief moment, a disfigured symbol revealed itself from inside the wider spectacle. A gap appeared within the cultural order, one serious enough to require the corrective energies of the police state.

As most accounts of the trial maintain, eventhough the typewriter was never found, the disruptive and ephemeral manner in which Hiss's capital letters escaped the lines of type contributed more publically to his image as traitor than any actual material evidence. Hiss's typographic offenses, in other words, conveyed symbolically what his prosecutors had long suspected: that in a cultural matrix as seamless and fully incorporated as that produced by the bi-polar politics of the cold war, any typewriter could be mistaken for an enemy agent.

The prominent role of this machine in generating modern cultural meaning appears also in Olson's writing when he notes its unique ability to provide a more direct connection between the individual and his/her community. "It is the advantage of the typewriter" Olson declares in his 1950 statement, "Projectivist Verse", "that due, to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends" (Selected Writings 22). The typewriter, Olson recognised, initiated a profoundly different relationship between writers and language as a medium of symbolic exchange. In general, one's access to an entire network of ongoing cultural production seemed much more immediate and comprehensive. Exactly "how far," Olson admits in this essay, "a new poet can stretch the very conventions on which communication by language rests, is too big for these notes,..."; nevertheless, the potential for intensive social revision never seemed quite so convenient.

In his poetics, Olson continued to emphasize a widely inclusive typology, one that featured, as with V. a fairly ephemeral social vision. Within this typology, one's engagement with the symbolic begins at the very level of breath, itself, producing what has been commonly described as a kinetic, fluid theory of language. This more immediate, direct sense of symbolic exchange prefaces, for Olson, an entirely new epistemology, one that originates in the development of the natural sciences of the 19th century. At that time, Olson notes,

An idea shook loose, and energy became as important a
structure of things as that they are plural, and, by matter,
mass. It was shown that in the infinitely small the older
concepts of space ceased to be valid at all...Nothing
was now inert fact, all things were there for feeling, to
promote it, and to be felt....

(Selected Writings 47-48)

In this manner, Olson abandons a conventional object-oriented perception for a more relativistic, internalised sense of things, what Olson called "proprioception". An elusive term at best, "proprioception" has inspired a wide array of definitions ranging from Duncan's ontology of the body to what Stephen Fredman characterises as a "spiritual discipline," based upon a "bottomless sense of self as founded on inexhaustible mystery". Robin Blaser also defines these themes in Olson's poetry as "spiritual" in the sense that they outline a type of "cosmology". In an essay comparing Olson's poetics to the philosophy of Alfred N. Whitehead, Blaser contends that "the most striking matter of these poetics ...is the fundamental struggle for the nature of the real. And this, in my view, is a spiritual struggle, both philosophical and poetic" (Line 2 62).

Olson first encountered many of these more philosophical themes through the poetry of Ezra Pound. The younger poet studied Pound throughout the 1940s and was among his first visitors at St.Elizabeth's. In Pound's intellectual forays into fascism and moral dogmatism, however, Olson quickly glimpsed the more disturbing social ramifications of an uncritical, propagandistic use of aesthetics. The politics of Olson's poetics suggest, accordingly, a very different agenda. On guard against any overtly politicised use of culture for social change, Olson remained skeptical that a revolutionary poetics would ever be justified. Rather an alternate, more capacious assessment of what comprises a discourse's social legitimacy tended to neutralise all explicit ideological censure. If there are resistant factors in his poetics, they derive solely from an ontology of flux -- itself, a fairly coherent category of value.

This repudiation of fixed structure and containment is also apparent in Olson's early rejection of the Objectivist poetics of writers like Zukofsky, Reznikoff, and, to some extent, Williams. His critique of "Objectivism" appears first in "Projectivist Verse" in a section that attempts to isolate further some of the weaknesses in Pound's cultural theory. The very fact that Olson labels both Pound's and Williams's writing as an "objectivism" comments well on his limited exposure at that time to the 1930s aesthetic movement. Likely what he called "objectivism" depended almost exclusively upon Zukofsky's short summary of his aesthetics for Poetry magazine in 1931. In February of that year, at the instigation of Pound, Harriet Monroe formally contracted Zukofsky to edit a special issue devoted to the work of such new writers as George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, and Zukofsky himself. However limited Olson's exposure to these writers may have been, it does not change the fact that in 1950 he felt it necessary to respond to a very particular set of aesthetic issues, generalised here under the heading of "objectivism"; and this response, in itself, still establishes a useful dialogue between his methodological interests and these earlier reformisms.

Immediately evident in comparing the work of the Objectivists to the poetic theory of Olson, is a similar concern for wide-scale revisionism. For Olson, however, the unique coherence of Objectivism, remained too dependent upon an abstract notion of structure. This quality is, in some ways, substantiated by Zukofsky himself in the 1931 essay where, in no uncertain terms, his methodology appears as a new formal system of organising human knowledge. The capabilities of the Objectivist poem were such that they could provide what Zukofsky called a "rested totality" within one's interpretative framework. Zukofsky writes,

The need for standards in poetry is no less than in science
...Good verse is determined by the poet's susceptibilities
involving a precise awareness of differences, forms and
possibilities of existence - words with their own attractions
included. The poet, no less than the scientist, works on
the assumption that inert and live things and relations
hold enough interest to keep him alive as part of nature.

(Prepositions 67)

My one voice. My other: is
An objective - rays of the object brought to a focus,
An objective - nature as creator - desire
for what is objectively perfect...

("A-6")

Olson, for the most part, strongly accepted this interpretation of language as a potential tool of disenchantment, a new eye as lens, so to speak. Both Pound's and Fenollosa's earlier study of the pictograph had already impressed upon him the importance of technical precision in aesthetics. Laszlo Géfin, in fact, formally groups such writings into a single genealogy he calls the "ideogrammic stream." The use of the ideogramme signals to Géfin more than a common imaging technique, it implied a wider thematic search for an increasingly naturalised discourse of the Real. In Olson's own methodology, this search is conducted by way of the syllable as an even more exact mediating device. That "objectivisms" continued to critique representational forms of writing as overly biased and anthropomorphic further testified, for Olson, to the earlier movement's past cultural validity. For both Olson and Zukofsky, the "realness" of a poem's object or focus remained a function of disenchantment, not the work's ability to reference some form of universal. The aesthetic principle operating here, in other words, is not a type of mimesis; rather, Objectivist writing attempts to convey a more immanent notion of the Real. Poetry thus conceived does not record reality so much as it attempts to re-enact it as an integral, rational process.

Consistent with this logic, Zukofsky considered his poems to be nothing less than natural structures, "keeping time with existence" -- a perspective that evokes as distinctive a paradigm of nature as it does a theory of writing. Hence, his use of formal devices implied no significant detachment from human experience. Zukofsky's sense of the Real stressed its precise organisation as a coherent framework or composition. Reality, itself, in other words, remained commensurate with a discourse of value. Accordingly, as a poetics of disenchantment, Zukofsy's writing literally encouraged objects to become objects; reality defined itself as a reality.

It is this characteristic of Objectivism that Peter Quartermain further qualifies as a unique resolution of aesthetics with social activism where "the demand for the poem to be political is a formal demand." As Quartermain suggests, to separate the two propositions is to ignore one of Objectivism's most salient features. Properly read, each line, perhaps even each individual word in a Zukofsky poem inherently evokes wider moral themes. Hence, when Zukofsky, himself, describes his aesthetic methods, it is usually with reference to a work's "sincerity" and linguistic "integrity". As Michael Heller notes, Zukofsky's structural vision "has about it a moral burden: the Objectivist poet, meaning to inform, to convey or translate to the reader the existence which he knows through the media of objectification and sincerity, must resist not only the aleatory, freewheeling associativeness of words but also the usual decorative conceit of the symbol or image."

Such a moral repudiation of the decorative appears throughout Géfin's "ideogrammic stream" of modernism. Of Imagism, Pound declared in 1913, "the natural object is always the adequate symbol" (The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound 5). Even in Olson, social reform properly conceived proceeds directly from a naturalised paradigm of discourse. In all three movements of revisionary modernism, issues of public morality remain effectively sublimated as themes of symbolic reform: Proper signification in the ideogrammic vision equals proper government.

As I've implied , this equilibrium is even more evident in Olson's works than in the poetics of the earlier two writers. His keen promotion of a more kinetic or gestural aesthetics, in many ways, overtly exhibits what was only hypothesised in the work of Pound and Zukofsky. The tendency in Zukofsky's early poetry, for example, for the conditions of aesthetic reform to remain theoretically abstract implies that the proper symbol itself is still very much an unfinished project, still very much an object of desire. One reads Zukofsky's science of disenchantment, his "ABC" of objectivity, consequently, as a set of principles not yet enacted. By contrast, Olson's projectivism declared a much less hypothetical sense of "realness" as a formal quality. In the later poet's vision, the nature of the Real demanded an even more immanent, indwelling sense of structure, one that automatically rejected all abstract speculation as evidence of a false universal. For this reason, Olson consistently refrained from attaching any formal conditions to the objectivity of his verse; a poem's legitimacy, instead, continued to derive from an almost intuitive notion of the real particular.

Given its essentially innate authority, projectivist verse required no explicit aesthetic theories with which to counter either Pound's or Zukofsky's more doctrinal approach to poetry. In fact, if Olson's relationship to these earlier attempts to construct a transparent epistemology of the Real can be reduced to a single strategy it is that of reconciliation. Consistent with his antagonism to abstraction, Olson promises no new symbolism in his poetics, but rather a recycling of older ones by setting them in motion. Under the aura of kinesis, one glimpses, thus, not so much an alternate objectivity as a new tolerance for objectivity as an inherently relative and pluralistic mode of thinking.

Such an attitude of open compromise translated, for many of Olson's contemporaries, into its own agenda of political progressiveness and cultural emancipation. Consequently, with its pretense of natural immanence, projectivism comforms well to wider trends in the American postwar political economy and the shifts in consumer capitalism precipitated by it. After World War II, industrial production emphasized then as now a newly de-objectified, de-centralised economic framework. A more sophisticated, reified network of consumer markets contributed to an increasingly autonomous system of symbolic exchange, one in which the semantic attribution of value is able to transcend most material contexts. One clear correspondence between the symbolic "openness" or recyclability of projectivist verse and these newer economic networks appears in the various ecological paradigms of social development popularised during this period. In the ecological vision, important parallels quickly emerge between the particularity of Olson's "composition by field" and America's postwar management of its commercial resources, between the open text and the open market.

For Olson, a proprioceptive focus upon phenomena extols not only a more relevant social agency, but a naturally authentic human voice. The sincerity, thus, with which Zukofsky claimed to mediate his real environment is effectively reiterated according to the very terms that he, himself, had set. However, what was for Zukofsky a highly theoretical, often politicised struggle for total coherence becomes in Olson's hands an open dialogue where criticism is replaced by feed-back, argument with negotiation. in Olson's vision there is, after all,

  not one death but many,
  not accumulation but change, the feed-back proves,
                                                 the feed-back is
  the law

       ("The Kingfishers" 170)