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THE POUNETHICAL WAGER

Toward a Theory of Irresponsible Seriousness

A Brief Monograph

Preface: Against the Tyranny of Consequence

In The Poethical Wager, Joan Retallack proposes a poetics enlarged by ethical responsibility, a practice of making that recognizes its implication in the world. The addition of the h to poetics marks a commitment to the difficult work of living among others, embracing contingency, and producing forms adequate to the complexities of experience.

University of California Press

The present monograph proposes a modest but consequential subtraction: the removal of responsibility as poetry’s necessary justification and the substitution of the pun as the fundamental unit of poetic ethics.

We call this pounethics.

Where poethics asks what poetry can do for the world, pounethics asks what happens when the world is obliged to endure poetry.

The distinction is not trivial.

Neither is it entirely serious.

This is our wager.

I. The Pun as Epistemological Catastrophe

The pun is traditionally regarded as the lowest form of wit, a judgment that mistakes altitude for significance.

Indeed, the pun occupies a peculiarly disreputable position in the hierarchy of literary devices. It is tolerated in Shakespeare, deplored in conversation, and frequently punished by groaning. Yet this very disreputability constitutes its philosophical importance.

The pun exposes the scandal that language means more than it means to.

Consider the word sole.

It designates the bottom of a foot, a fish, and, when sounded, a soul. The proximity of these meanings does not necessarily disclose any profound metaphysical relationship between fish, feet, and the immaterial essence of human beings. Rather, it discloses the absurdity of supposing that meaning must always be justified by profundity.

A fish is not a soul.

Yet a fish can be a sole.

And a sole can be lost.

The pounethical thinker refuses to resolve this difficulty.

More importantly, the pounethical thinker refuses to pretend that it is a difficulty.

II. Against the Ethical Imperative

Contemporary experimental poetics has frequently been called upon to account for its political, social, and ethical implications. The poet is asked to acknowledge complicity, practice attentiveness, embrace alterity, resist dominant structures, and cultivate modes of responsible engagement.

These are admirable activities.

They are also exhausting.

Pounethics proposes that the burden of moral seriousness has become so thoroughly attached to poetic experimentation that the poem risks being transformed into an exceptionally elaborate declaration of good intentions.

The pounethical poem declines this assignment.

It need not improve the reader.

It need not model a desirable form of social interaction.

It need not even be particularly good.

Indeed, the bad pun, in its glorious indifference to approval, may offer a more radical model of poetic freedom than the most scrupulously constructed ethical statement.

The bad pun knows that it is bad and proceeds anyway.

It is, in this respect, a model of courage.

III. The Swerve and the Swivel

Retallack’s poethical wager draws upon the Epicurean swerve, that unpredictable departure from predetermined trajectories through which contingency enters the universe.

Pounethics replaces the swerve with the swivel.

The distinction is essential.

The swerve alters a trajectory.

The swivel remains more or less in place while changing its orientation.

A swivel chair is therefore the exemplary pounethical apparatus.

Seated in such a chair, the poet may confront the world, turn away from it, confront it again, and eventually become dizzy.

No progress is guaranteed.

No revolutionary transformation is necessarily achieved.

Nevertheless, something has turned.

This is sufficient.

The swivel also describes the movement of the pun, which does not escape language but rotates within it, revealing an entirely different semantic landscape without traveling anywhere.

The pounethical poet is thus a traveler who never leaves the premises.

IV. The Ethics of the Groan

The groan is the characteristic reception of the pun.

Unlike laughter, which may signify pleasure, surprise, superiority, or nervousness, the groan registers the listener’s simultaneous comprehension and refusal.

The groaner understands the pun perfectly.

This is precisely the problem.

A successful pun produces an involuntary recognition of a connection the listener would prefer not to acknowledge. Its force lies in compelling participation without securing consent to enjoyment.

The ethical dimensions of this event are not entirely comfortable.

Nevertheless, the groan establishes a form of social intimacy unavailable to the solemn pronouncement. One cannot groan at a pun without having participated, however reluctantly, in its production of meaning.

The pounethical community is therefore constituted not through agreement but through shared exasperation.

Its members are united by the recognition that something terrible has happened to language and that everyone is implicated.

V. On the Right to Be Ridiculous

One of the central assumptions of the poethical project is that aesthetic practice participates in the construction of forms of life.

Pounethics accepts this proposition while rejecting the implication that the forms of life so constructed must be ethically exemplary.

Ridiculousness is also a form of life.

Indeed, the ridiculous may possess a peculiar value in a culture that demands that every activity demonstrate its seriousness, utility, productivity, or moral legitimacy.

The pun refuses such accounting.

It wastes time.

It diverts attention.

It makes an already complicated world unnecessarily more complicated.

It gives us two things where one would have sufficed.

In doing so, it challenges the economy of significance itself.

Why must the poet produce significance when language is already producing a surplus of it?

Why must every surprise become an occasion for ethical improvement?

Why not allow the surprise to remain a surprise, or to deteriorate into a joke?

The pounethical wager is that the permission to be ridiculous may itself be a necessary condition of intellectual and imaginative freedom.

Not every deviation needs to become a destination.

Some are simply detours.

Others are de-tours.

And some, admittedly, should never have been attempted.

VI. Toward a Pounethical Practice

The pounethical practitioner must cultivate a particular disposition toward language.

She must be willing to mistake one word for another, to follow a resemblance beyond the limits of plausibility, to entertain propositions that have no business appearing together, and to relinquish the comforting assumption that linguistic accidents conceal important truths.

For pounethics is not a hermeneutics of hidden meaning.

The pun does not uncover a secret buried beneath the surface of language.

It produces a temporary collision on that surface.

Meaning is not excavated.

It is sideswiped.

A pounethical practice therefore encourages a disciplined irresponsibility toward interpretation. One must attend closely to language while remaining cheerfully indifferent to whether the resulting observations deserve to exist.

This indifference should not be confused with carelessness.

To construct a genuinely atrocious pun requires considerable sensitivity to phonology, syntax, semantic expectation, and the psychological vulnerabilities of one’s audience.

Badness, properly cultivated, is an achievement.

VII. The Wager

What, finally, is at stake?

Retallack’s wager locates possibility in the encounter between experimental form and the uncertainties of ethical life.

The pounethical wager proposes a different possibility: that poetry might matter most when it declines to matter in the ways we have been taught to expect.

Its wager is not that the pun will save us.

It will not.

Nor is it that linguistic play constitutes an adequate response to injustice, suffering, ecological catastrophe, or the other emergencies of contemporary existence.

It does not.

The wager is rather that no such adequacy need be established before play can begin.

There is no shortage of seriousness in the world. There may, however, be a shortage of permissible unseriousness.

Pounethics seeks to restore the right to squander language, to pursue gratuitous correspondences, to arrive at conclusions that turn out to be beginnings, and to construct elaborate intellectual edifices upon foundations of breathtaking silliness.

Its fundamental proposition is that the ethical value of art cannot be exhausted by its ethical intentions.

Nor, for that matter, by its ethical value.

Some things may simply be funny.

Some may not be funny at all, although their authors persist in believing otherwise.

Both possibilities must be preserved.

Coda: A Pounethical Manifesto

We refuse the proposition that every poem must justify its existence by improving the conditions of existence.

We refuse to believe that seriousness is the necessary evidence of thought.

We refuse the compulsory conversion of linguistic pleasure into moral instruction.

We affirm the typo, the malapropism, the spoonerism, the double entendre, the misunderstood instruction, and the splendidly misdirected inference.

We insist upon the importance of the unimportant.

We welcome the groan.

We wager that language, left to its own devices, will continue to produce possibilities beyond the intentions of its users.

And where Retallack asks us to recognize the ethical stakes of the poetic act, we ask whether the stakes themselves might not occasionally be mistaken for steaks.

If so, they should be served.

Preferably rare.

For the pounethical wager is, in the last analysis, not a question of what we stand to gain.

It is a question of what we can afford to pun.

Fin. Or perhaps finned.