Issue 35: Adam Piette

Keston Sutherland, Jokes (Amsterdam: The Last Books, 2025)

Jennifer Scappettone, Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2025)

In the arts, strategies of resistance to hostile forces might be thought best left to the activists – out of fear of posturing, parti pris irrelevance, bad faith, misplaced self-importance. Another angle in to the question would be to settle once and for all on what art does, what it knows, its powers, its responsibilities, its community and advocacies held in common. On that admittedly shaky ground, voices can be released which connect to culture and the public realm with a confidence that reason and heckling, inner and outward, cannot undo. What makes many pause among the consumers of art are the innovative modes of engagement in experimental work: as though a plain style were the only style capable of any resistant energy, since democratic, since commonsensical, since transparently consumable. Any difficulty in an experimental presenting of the artwork is a terrible faux pas, as though the artist were some isolate incapable of talking to their peers. But what breaks this all down, apart from recognition of the mean-minded self-righteousness of the heckler, is the problem: the hostile forces out there doing evil in the world are of an immense complexity despite the ruthless simplicity of their violences, a complexity that is hungry for all systems of knowledge, recruiting the middling liberal world of art, as much as all other modes of understanding, to its networks and poisons, as cultural apparatus. Strategies of resistance are not enough: to become fully discursive, the act of intellectual and affective resistance has to be variously heart-felt, intellectually rigorous, scholarly, bold in satirical knowledge of the enemy, and capable of a shifting set of styles of representation that are diagnostically and symptomatically doubled in on themselves, productive of and generated by a hyperawareness of the toxicity of what is being faced down, passionate in advocacy of what must be defended: art for the future's sake. What art does is to state the imaginative case. What it knows is the world at the borders of being and culture. It has power to represent the work of those with the power to hurt such that the consumer of art is invited to spit that consumer out of its guts. Its responsibilities are not to be easily, glibly clear, but to go beyond rationality towards a language that is both aware of complicities of speech and tongue, and capable of passionate representation of those under threat. It is an art that is communitarian necessarily since addressed in the public realm to those willing to have their minds changed for the good of the commons: but just as necessarily in the intimate know, at the borderline, of the problem of a community in thrall.

         Keston Sutherland's new collection with Last Books, Jokes, takes as its angle in on the problem of resistance a fierce and ferocious satire of the evils being committed in Gaza on the Palestinian population, and also of the timid, lazy chattering classes in the pubs of England, consuming as Gaza starves, having views and opinions and arguments over their drinks, tut tutting the news in their snugs. The set-up is hard to grasp, and the style of the twenty-seven prose blocks of Jokes is unremittingly 'difficult', but emerges as a beast fable of an artefact: a Manager runs the joint, and all his clients are animals, rapt in their views on the world and immediate environment like the non-human creatures swimming alongside Alice in the bath of her tears. The Dodgson connection resonates as this is a little pastoral textworld, the Manager a facilitator of the dialogues of the beasts inhabiting his fever dream like the reasonable child among mildly unhinged adults. Empson, in his Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto & Windus, 1935) thought pastoral migrated from adult fictions into children's literature in the 19th century (the child-as-judge) as the genre shifted inwards: 'this version was more open to neurosis than the older ones; it is less hopeful and more a return into oneself' (254). Empson reads pastoral as a genre that helped readers through the thickets of class difference and antinomies of simplicity and complexity, city and country, the social nexus and the individual's psyche, and also, importantly, invited covert commentary on immediate cultural affairs. Empson's child as judge and dialogue-facilitator becomes the Manager-as-publican in Sutherland's poem. The animals Alice encounters become an arbitrary ark and menagerie  of Darwinian jokers (the default joke being 'an [animal] enters a bar, orders a drink ...], species-vocalisers of various forms of subjection. In Sutherland's satire, the dog and pig have the most to say, and the dog is closest to what one might presume to be an activist-artist subject-position. Empson quotes Pope in his Alice essay, a couplet engraved on the collar Pope gave to Frederick, Prince of Wales: 'I am his Highness' dog at Kew / Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?'. As Empson goes on to remark: 'Presumably Frederick himself would be the first to read it. The joke carries a certain praise for the underdog; the point is not that men are slaves but that they find it suits them and remain good-humoured' (259). The point of the animals surrounding Alice is that they strike her as strangely and puzzlingly other as if another species, but that they also speak out the tendencies and voices of the kinds of adult she might find herself becoming when eventually fully evolved. Je est les autres. The others she might become are variously happy with their subjection, and remain good-humoured even when they lose the plot. The animals are her toys, of course: but as Winnicott might say, the toys act out the views of the deep psyche as well as the dramas of the social nexus: 'In playing, the child manipulates external phenomena in the service of the dream and invests chosen external phenomena with dream meaning and feeling'.[1] Sutherland's animals play-act and service the Manager's  dream, and their babble and chat, 'good-humoured' as it is, manipulates their own external world with their own investments, signalling as they do the reader's parallel subjection.

         The external world being manipulated is at once the local habitation of the pub-as-toyshop, and the public realm of the UK responding or not to the atrocious news from Gaza. It has the verve and energy of a satire alive to the dangers of comedy: Baudelaire, in his essay  'L'Essence du rire', thought comedy, as in the caricatures of Gavarni, a doubling mode, a thing connected to violence and troubling subterfuge: 'caricature is double: drawing and concept: the drawing is violent, the concept caustic and veiled'.[2] For Bergson, comedy stages individual short-comings and habit-ridden lack of true agency for audiences hungry for victims: 'The comic character always errs through obstinacy of mind or of disposition, through absentmindedness, in short, through automatism. At the root of the comic there is a sort of rigidity which compels its victims to keep strictly to one path, to follow it straight along, to shut their ears and refuse to listen'.[3] A joke triggers the potential violence of its own concept as repressed, as concealed within the play, the social unconscious hidden away in the language, in the things we say in the pub. As Freud found thinking about the unconscious cathexes released by jokes, one source of the comic is about dog-like expectations of customary consumption:

In Pavlov’s experiments on salivary secretions, various kinds of food are set before dogs in whom a salivary fistula has been opened; the amounts of saliva secreted then vary according to whether the experimental conditions confirm or disappoint the dogs’ expectations of being fed with the food set before them.  [Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, transl. James Strachey (1905) (London: Norton, 1960), p. 198.]

Food is an obsession in the Alice books: rich food, Empson speculates, 'is the child's symbol for all luxuries reserved for grown-ups' (264). Jokes, then, taking these all with Sutherland's pinch of salt, make you double up, indulging the violence of your secret drives whilst repressing the real news. They feed hunger for sensation with victimizing luxurious relish, and work because of a persecutory dream that assumes the absent-mindedness and automatism of the victim. They make dogs of us all, salivating at the ring of the last orders bell as we expect to be fed or to once again slake our thirst.

         The first of Sutherland's Jokes opens:

What is it this time, says the manager. Now look at you, says the dog. Is that the time already, says the pig. Look me in the eye, says the thaumatopsyllus paradoxus, and tell me that you don't know what I mean. Not now, says the manager, I'm expecting to do something else. Give it to me. Give me that break. Says the, says the, how many times do we, give it. Or else. Straight, says the seal. A rest. Here, says. Let's try. You do that. Stupet novo captus, says the hoarse-echoing. Humanitarians on site. Littleneck, carmine ianitor. Says the shepherdless oarfish. That again, shall. Not you again. Baith day. Tergeminus, says the egret, minus the odd captivity. No, it's fine, you go. We, says the tree. And. Frog. Says. Back up a second, says the dog, do I understand. I know. You right. Nycht, says the harp. Take it. Seal. The crackhead haddock, before you jump down my throat. You know where the door is, says the manager, if you don't. Out of þis loþe. (7)

The dialogue in the bar is always breaking down or up into orts and fragments, in a compulsive disintegration of the speech units, as though being misheard, misremembered, garbled by the mechanics of the recording apparatus. No focalisation, zero characterisation beyond the flip adjectival throwaways: the prose has crazy zeal for patches of talk overheard, tags read and regurgitated badly onto the page, a parody of the ways the classic essay from Montaigne to Hazlitt weaves traditional lore into its reflections. The prose block opens with publican and drinkers arguing, like Dr Doolittle with his animals, and the shreds and patches of talk merge and break into each other, as where 'give me a break' breaks into 'give it a rest' and makes 'give it to me straight' all crooked, as though miming cross-talk, interruptions, chaotic blather in a close space, like some crazy comment thread under one of the Manager's posts. The tags, though, draw us into other allusive contexts: 'Stupet novo captus', 'tergeminus' and 'carmine ianitor' are from Boethius on Orpheus in the underworld (The Consolation of Philosophy, metrum 12, Book III), his strange new song striking the doorkeeper dog, Cerberus, dumb. We are in hell, and the dog now looking at you has three heads. Again, the quotation is a mash-up and disintegrative in principle. Boethius's lines are: 'Stupet tergeminus novo / captus carmine janitor ' ('Stunned  and captivated by the strange new song was the three-headed doorkeeper') – implying one of the satirical points of Jokes being the Orphic lyric and work of art in an age of informational reproduction.

         The hell context is there too in the fragment ' Out of þis loþe', snatched from The Harrowing of Hell where the souls thank Christ for releasing them 'out of this loath house'. The 'odd captivity' which the egret brings to the table refers to the temporary capture of Cerberus by Herakles for his last labour. The fable crosses the Graeco-Roman Hades with the hell of the Dunciad, the witness statements of Dante's Inferno reduced to banter, display of random knowledge, broken thoughts and slanging matches as the clients get fitfully drunk. Policed by the manager's threats, the animals struggle to make their meanings clear, or even to mean at all. One of the targets of this many-headed satire may very well be the baffled readership of poems like this: 'Look me in the eye, says the thaumatopsyllus paradoxus, and tell me that you don't know what I mean.' The poem's many voices gain ephemeral animal being just for the puff of the sentence, and challenge the Manager as though he were Reader Incarnate. They are animals these poetry-bits also because we consume art-language recreationally. In this hell the consumers may very well end up being consumed, all is food for the maw of language at play ('jump down my throat').

         But the real target of the three-headed satire (Cerberus's three heads might be aesthetics, politics, economics) is the complicity of the readership and citizens of this nation and their like and ilk in the violence being meted out in West Asia. The tags and allusions, as the Jokes succeed each other, build and build a special meaning to the hell that is the pub of toys: it is a space where the knowledge of the suffering and deaths in Gaza filter through as empty dread, then as desultory topic of chat, then as trigger for waves of guilty self-exculpation as the animals register their government's collective washing of hands and persecution of Palestine Action protesters. The deaths of so many children in the rubble, under the bombardments, in the starvation conditions, haunts each fitt. The hunger strike of the Palestine Action protesters in prison and the hunger of the Gazan population shadow the consuming and feeding going on in the hellish bar-room. The dog brings dark stories over from the newsrooms: zeroing in on the GHF, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (alluded to in the opening quoted above, ' Humanitarians on site') set up by the Israelis and Americans to distribute food in February 2025, but actually designed as death traps where mass killings could take place. That hellish organisation had as its head, David Papazian, Armenian money-launderer put in place to run the aid just as fraudulently, and Johnnie Moore, the Christian Zionist businessman who was GHF's chairman, a glib and oily liar if ever there was one. The satires present this toxic news as kinds of sick jokes. In fitt number 10, the sky (an animal with a voice too, standing in for the absent godhead) states:

I'd quite like to hear the one about the Swiss affiliate and the Moscow branch of the Armenian National Interest Fund, yet again, and I'd like you to not to leave out the outmoded bit about the CAT scan slice of the propugnacles of David Papazian's battered abdomen after that legendary night out on the psychoactive contrast agents. What a horror show that was, pizdets (43-44).

This riffs on the fact Papazian, before being appointed head of GHF, is accused of channelling nearly seven million dollars from the ANIF into coffers controlled by Putin's regime with a nod from Trump's US: and that the GHF job was a kiss-off thank-you for being such a compliant money-launderer.  The reaction of the bar-room to the story is weary and cynical:

Not that again, says the manager, who knew. Nature calls, says the dog, you a cunt. Not these tones, says the turkey, these tones. When you've got to go, you've got to go, says the doe, when you've got a minute. The Swiss affiliate is for donors who may prefer to participate outside of the US structure, says the dog. Can we not, says the pig. (44).

And so on and so forth: the evil of the atrocities in Gaza and of the structures of corruption and sleazy power-broking that finance its operations become meat for lazy banter and artificial disputation as the animals drink and piss. 'Who knew': the manager's sarcasm enshrouds the news as old hat story, yet we all now know, we know. The doe and turkey are milder versions of the more adept and mouthy animals but it all comes down to the same flat fact: the bar is shooting the breeze, merely, feeding off the darkness at this far remove in space and time.

         The bestiary in Jokes takes the readership and 'general public' as a public house of voices aimless and self-marginalizing with something of the needle and point of a novel by Henry Green or Thomas Bernhard, but as though over-written by Beckett on various kinds of speed. The prose blocks play games with the nonsense people say, the avalanche of trivial pursuits and clichés an evening down the pub might collectively generate: as diversion, as distraction, as denial of the political facts staring us all in the face. This is vital activist art, passionate, angry, witty in ways that turn the powers of comedy back in on itself with a lacerating force.

         Sutherland when charting the important shift in Prynne's work from the early and late poems in White Stones and then Brass saw what is tantamount to a turn against confident poetics:

The earlier poems are for the most part both rhetorically and propositionally coherent. Their prosody is sustained across specimen and trial disruptions by an emphatic confidence in the power of lyric to assert fluency. The poems of Brass satirise that confidence. Their disruptions are not propaedeutics to fluency. [...] Brass is the reversal of a reversal, “the question / returned upon itself”' [quoting from Prynne's 'Crown].[4]  

That turn upon itself chimes with the neurotic turn inwards of pastoral tracked by Empson: the turn enables a neurotic and satirical probing of motive and writerly commitments necessarily at the same time as real victims and sufferers are being defended. The turning in on itself is a turn towards satire, then, as Alex Latter has argued, from the Olsonian open line in favour of 'long, unbroken blocks of verse reminiscent, almost, of the Augustan satirists. The tone changes too, moving away from the aureate symbolism of [the early poems] towards something more scabrous and satirical.'[5] 'Not these tones', says the turkey, not these White Stones tones: but satire, biting, scabrous, self-correcting, targeting the self-infantilizing mental operations of fluent lyric and pub-room argufying as we make political toys of ourselves in uneasy and 'good-humoured' compliance.

If satire is one of the modes of resistance to the politics of the right, another is put forward by Jennifer Scappettone in her monograph, Poetry After Barbarism. It is a translatory mode, or rather a poetics coming from a zone between languages, patchworked from discourse orphaned of any originary mother tongue, playful with many tongues and dialects, improvisatory, eccentrically scholarly, radically in tune with the marginalised and repressed populations of nation states. Scappettone theorises the discourse as xenoglossia, a foreigner-speech, and has as her case studies the work of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven in contradistinction to Marinetti's fascist and colonial trumpeting of a monolingual common imperial language; the rogue and brilliant etymological play of Emilio Villa, scholar of classical and Semitic languages, Ugaritic and Assyro-Babylonian as well as daring translator of the Bible-as-philology of West Asia; Amelia Rosselli's translingual and panmusical poetry; Etel Adnan's reinscription of geopoetics in The Arab Collective; LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs' ophaning of her mother tongues and cultures in Village; ending with a coda celebrating the radical translation by Sawako Nakayasu of Sagawa Chika in Mouth: Eats Color. The case studies speak to Scappettone's Italian-American variousness and translation work; but also imagine an antifascist mode of innovative writing that might enable, through deliberately awkward, ungrammatical, incorrectly translated or etymologised work in multiple languages. The xenoglossia is made powerfully distinct from the cosmopolitan and civilisational projects of Poundian and Eliotic modernism with their collaging of languages; which is resisted as harbouring Eurocentric, nation-state ideology and fascist potential for switch to monolingual hegemony. Scappettone grounds xenoglossia in an alternative utopian impulse, a Pentecostal variousness that is Babelic, the tongues of fire speaking not some universal Esperanto but a border-language of many tongues at once, like the Pentecostalists falling into their language trances:

The unstudied or inspired, even divine or otherwise paranormal channeling of natural languages by subjects deemed improper to those languages places on display language’s bursting at its imagined seams in accounts of experience that transgress policed national and ethnic divisions — such that the resultant idiolects come across as dissonant, dissident, made for no given group or no yet-extant one, destabilizing the authoritarian dicta and myths of rootedness notoriously enforced over the course of the twentieth century.  (16)

The Pentecostal xenoglossic poetry that emerges from the mouths of the unstudied and inspired is 'disfluent', Scappettone argues, 'contrary to the satisfying hermeneutic game of multilingual modernist monuments', it is eccentric, 'impossibly bizarre, opaque, and shrouded to hermeneutics' (16). The xenoglossic poem dares to sound wrong, to fall on critical ears, patches itself together out of the languages of the marginalised, and though condemned to non-standard, stateless wandering as discourse, is free of the nationalist and reactionary politics of the mother tongue. The poets celebrated in the monograph all had exilic or displaced linguistic journeys: Freytag-Loringhoven in exile in the States gathering together the languages of her pasts to cobble together a counter-patriarchal poetics; Emilio Villa using philology and the ancient languages to generate poetry beyond a fascist Italian; Rosselli similarly evading the fascist lure of Italian, the language of the regime that murdered her father and brother, and experimenting with a collage of languages; the weave of languages in The Arab Apocalypse speaking to Adnan's immersion in Greek, Turkish, French, exiled from any mother tongue fluency in Arabic; Nevada Diggs' extraordinary performance of the 'k'-glottal stop in her work articulating her disfluency between her Cherokee and Black upbringing and languages. Poetry After Barbarism is itself an exercise in disfluency, advocating these difficult and between-states/stateless voices with scholarly attentioin that is animated by a fellow-poet's political passion and compassion for the peoples under subjection; yet as passionately celebrating the energy, vitality, joyful making that emerges as the xenoglossia sings, laments, plays and enjoys the pentecostal differences on the tongue.

[1] D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (1971) (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 69.

[2] Charles Baudelaire, 'L'essence du rire', Oeuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1976) 2: p. 529.

[3] Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, transl C. Brereton and F. Rothwell (1900) (New York: Macmillan, 1913), p. 185.

[4] Sutherland, 'Hilarious Absolute Daybreak: Brass [1971]', 'On the Poems of J.H. Prynne', ed. Ryan Dobran, Glossator 2 (2010), pp. 115-148. https://glossator.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/g2-sutherland.pdf.

[5] Alex Latter, '"Scheming for the possible world": J.H. Prynne's The White Stones and The English Intelligencer', Intercapillary Space (April 2010): https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2010/04/scheming-for-possible-world-j.html#:~:text=Keston%20Sutherland%20has%20written%20that,The%20White%20Stones'%5B20%5D

Adam Piette teaches as the University of Sheffield and co-edits Blackbox Manifold with Alex Houen. He is the author of Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Beckett, Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939-1945, The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam. His collection CCCLXV is just out with Crater Press.

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