If there's one thing that can be said of a grotesquely collated (perhaps of any primarily Objectivist) work like Zukofsky's Bottom: On Shakespeare it is that it was written in order merely to be written.Zukofsky would only give his papers to Harry Ransom Research Collection (University of Texas) provided the university agree to publish a work that comprises almost entirely of quoted materials. It seems to violate every law of historico-literary logic and yet it does bewitch the eye hungry for empty diversion. The largest of his prose work patches venerable personages from antiquity to his present for the sake of some intellectually dizzying collage effect. And the "eye" is its primary focus: or what he calls the "'compounding' eye-thought of its culture" (p.85) and cultures do intersect clumsily in Zukofsky. In fact, Shakespeare (the work's putative center) finds himself in a kind of continual discourse with Wittgenstein, Spinoza and Aristotle, all unmercifully threaded through quotations into a single preoccupation ("graph of culture", as the author says) with the nature of "seeing". And yet they do anything but that. They all seem to think the "same" or have similar ideas because Zukofsky says so. It's pleasing to the childish eye, perhaps, in the way the eye delights in cartoons. In Zukofsky, however, the cartoon bubbles are full of adult erudition. But in what sense do smart cartoon characters "see" anyways?
There's also something keenly fanatical in Zukofsky's Bottom. He's always struck me as the reformer holding the whip. Here's the writer of manifestos sweating over something new to say to a world stuck to outworn paradigms (like Paul to Ephesians). And treating Shakespeare as an "object"-- or solidified into so many elementary philosophico-lyrical particles--is decidedly new. I've laboured to read it only because Frank Samperi had read it (in the days when he'd struggled equally hard to learn his poetry from Zukofsky and even be a friend) and because I'm presently finishing a work on Samperi. The impressionable young Brooklyn poet, just back from Korea, had shaken author and work off as a kind of gross materialism that never reverences life and certainly doesn't know its "music" from a hole in the ground. Samperi looked to a single author and his De Vulgari Eloquentia for that. The character Bottom from Midsummer Night's Dream is the book's putative exemplum: he's one of those 'mechanical' characters in Shakespeare (like those in the opening scene of Julius Caesar who always appear without their apron and rule and aggravate the authorities) that experimental poets like to tinker with. Perhaps Samperi had resented how churlishly Zukofsky had treated him, as if he were another Bottom. The man and his wife could be cruel to young impressionable poets.
Bottom, like every self-indulgently daring exposition, at first tries to be hieratical but can't: in the end it is inherently unreadable and like each of Zukofsky's works from "A" to Prepositions to A Test of Poetry is a case of just plain cruel theorizing. It seems to offend wherever it goes. The Zukofskys' sound translation of Catallus must have been a private joke. His saying in Bottom that "eyes are understood to be so often there in the Works [of Shakespeare, Wittgenstein, Boole, Charles Sander Peirce, etc.]it appears they wish to unite others to them in friendship" is rhetorical gibberish. He was no more a friend to classical authors than he was to Samperi. Zukofsky's penchant for an "alphabet of subjects" certainly would set all his imitators astir with language activity in the years after his death. But in Silliman's abcediary, to his credit, there's not this tampering with subjects he hasn't really mastered and certainly none of undergraduate's love of quotation-gathering. He's a "jigging fool" and he knows it. Zukofsky chose the "eye" or "seeing" as the work's central idea because it is necessarily vague enough to appear to convince without actually doing so. In Zukofsky you can appear to see and yet remain essentially "witless", and those are his own words.
Of course, I've offered only a few general comments, mainly "off the cuff", because I can't be bothered to look at individual examples for very long. I do dare anyone, however, to read Bottom: On Shakespeare (as Samperi and I have had to) and tell me what's really worth seeing there. I'm open to suggestions.
