Published by Baseline Press in 2018, remnants is Shelly Harder’s first single authored chapbook. The remnant, as it has often been understood and which is
outlined at the beginning of this work, is defined as “a part or quantity that is left / after the greater part
has been used, / removed or destroyed” (1-3), thus serving as a corollary to a
pre-exiting whole. However, it also
functions as an Adornoean pre-aesthetic impulse which precedes and conditions
the formation of an artistic whole. Unlike the common definition of the
remnant, this work theorizes a concept of the remnant which is no longer
subordinated as an effect of an artistic whole or unified meaning. This
pre-aesthetic is explored through a series of inter-related poetic strategies,
or remnants, some of which are outlined even before one begins reading the
first poem.
Opposed
to merely being a book of small collected poems, as the name chapbook commonly connotes, this work is
an aesthetic object at the level of its material construction. Upon opening the
book, the reader is met with a sparkling Philippine Sheen flyleaf against the
backdrop of a white cover. The distinct silver fibres bundled together in
sporadic and uneven spaces is illuminated by a white backdrop that allows viewers
to trace the uneven fibrous and textured density of the flyleaf. This image of
simultaneous disparate and bundled fibres on the flyleaf approximates a
differential image of Adorno’s pre-aesthetic intimated in Aesthetic Theory.
In
Aesthetic theory, Adorno outlines the constitution of an artwork as
having a semblance of unity. According to Adorno, an artwork’s own
consistency “is predicated on the illusory” (101) idea of the artwork as fully
formed, completed, and unified. The semblance of
closure is designed to conceal the fact of closure’s non-existence in artworks. Initially, the artwork “draws differentiated partial
elements … into the amorphous realm” (101) which allows the semblance of an
artwork’s unity to be possible. It is this grouping of elements before the
‘unity’ or constitution of an artwork which serves as a differential image of
the pre-aesthetic, and which appears more positively as the shimmering image of
the fibrous nexus bundled and loosened on the Philippine flyleaf in Shelly’s remnants.
The clustering and scattering of threads on the flyleaf are an image of the
pre-aesthetic that presupposes Adorno’s understanding of the artwork.
The
remnant’s defiance of a homogenous aesthetic is also expressed through the use
of the ungrammatical to produce new meanings. Take for example, the title remnants, whose non-capitalization
suggests its divorce from a previous sentence out of which it came. The remnant
is instead a grammatical fragment that conditions and precedes an artistic
whole. In “Cyclades,” periods are deliberately removed forcing the reader to
differentiate the clauses from one another. Grammatical fragments are often
created to more directly present an image without immediately making them the
subject or object of a verb. Thus, “A traditional village with narrow streets”
(3) and “the port of bluest water” (2) present descriptions as a grammatical
fragment without functioning in a ‘comprehensive’ grammar, i.e. without the aid
of a predicate to form an independent clause.
In
several of the work, there is an additional italicized text often presented as
a grammatical fragment juxtaposed alongside a preceding poem. The relation
between the italicized text and the poem-- as well as the relation between
details within the grammatical fragment itself—is somewhat ambiguous. For
example, it is not clear how Shelly’s description of Avignon in the poem with
the same title relates to the italicized text that likens words to “toads
slinking morning” or “a pig rooting across dew-dense fields” (7). But it is
perhaps this judgement of ambiguity that typifies the relation of these poems
and their text-fragments that we should be avoiding when reading these poems.
It is not a case of making the relation of these text and text-fragments meaningful,
but rather recognizing that the ambiguity of this relation as the pre-aesthetic
grouping of elements which precede any ‘meaningful’ judgement of the texts. Instead
of reading the relation of these poems and their text-fragments as something we
should know, the relation functions as a Shellyean remnant whose
formation precedes the whole that we often unconsciously presuppose.
The
critique of singular authorship through the mode of commentary is another
pre-aesthetic strategy with which to probe the remnant. Some of the poems appear
to be in conversation with both themselves and other poems by their
facilitation of a dialogue. In “Charcoal Nectar,” the speaker initially describes
a state in which different “Irises have waned” (1) as the “smooth of sleep
unfolds” (2), yet it is unclear whether this description also applies to the
speaker. Soon after sleep, the speaker notes that “some / unthought hunger
skulks” (2-3) although it is also unclear to whom the hunger of these
unthoughts belong. These questions always end in judgements of uncertainty
because they presuppose a subject to whom these verbs are attached. Instead,
the remnant refuses to posit the pre-conceived idea of the predicative subject
in favour of a set of experiences (i.e. the falling of sleep, the desiring of
unthoughts) that acts as a pre-aesthetic anterior to the subject.
In
“conversions,” the speaker engages in conversation with a Catholic missionary
while simultaneously—at a formal level— conversing with another poem, written
in another voice, across the following page. This polyvocality in conversations
challenges the authority of a singular author spoken in a monolithic voice; the
multivocal effacement of the single author is the pre-aesthetic which both
precedes and produces the idea of a single author in the first place. This is
not the first time Shelly has used the mode of commentary to challenge the
authority of single authorships. In 2016 she and Brescia University College
professor Monika Lee co-published a chapbook Skin to Skin, which
gathered a group of poems that were written by both authors such that a reader
could not tell from whom each poem was written; the question of a singular authorship
was challenged by both Monika’s and Shelly’s undifferentiated composition of
the poems, similar to the way that some of Shelly’s poems in this collection
refuse to posit a single authoritative voice.
Perhaps
the most visible strategy of the remnant is the disruption of conventional
understandings of time. If time is commonly understood as a sequence of linear
events, poems like “There and Back Again” directly challenge this linearity. In
the poem, the speaker notes that “places happen in no predictable way” (1),
which conditions our perception of places according to spontaneity and
precarity rather than causality. Unlike tropes like the Romantic Return popularized
by Wordsworth which describes a subject’s changed perception of a location
after lengthy travels ‘there and back again,’ locations in these poems are
explored through specular and novel productions of experience without assuming
the stabile representation of these locations. This is why there is “no knowing
where / you’re going,” (1-2) if where you’re going is confounded with the same
uncertainty as where you’ve began. These locations that Shelly describes are
not meant to be positively signified as part of a cohesive aesthetic, but are
instead conduits for pre-aesthetic affects that produce new experiences. Thus,
in some locations we are given surreal descriptions such as “poodles …
strolling” while “pigeons [are] pecking in heaven” (5). In “The Story of
Berlin,” we are not so much presented with an impression of Berlin or the story
of Berlin, but rather a set of events that ‘could’ or ‘would’ have happened
without directly relaying what did happen.
These
pre-aesthetic experiences that exist before linear formations of time are not
only explored in relation to locations through the genre of travel-writing, but
also through the re-writing of well-known works of philosophy and poetry. Instead
of merely offering an impression on philosophy, Shelly emphasizes a pre-philosophical
concept which precedes and alters the composition of well-known philosophical
concepts. In “Being and Teatime,” itself a reference to Heidegger’s Being
and Time, the repeated ontological question inquiring about the ‘what’ of
objects like “cat[s]” and “shadow[s]” (12) mirrors the ontological questioning
of Dasein. However, unlike a feature of Dasein who makes its own Being an
issue, Shelly presents a different kind of phenomenology which asks the
ontological question of what it means “to be woman” (14). Instead of merely
commenting on Heidegger’s phenomenology as an already formed idea, Shelly makes
a new phenomenology by imbuing within the traditional primordial question of
Being, gender.
The
remnant is expressed in Shelly’s work through various strategies including the
material composition of the book, plays with grammaticality, and modes of
commentary. While these strategies emphasize the remnant as an originary
production anterior to the unified and cohesive ideas of the artwork, they are
far from exhaustive of the remnant’s function. We need only look at the Philippine
flyleaf at the beginning of the book. If you look closely, the legibility of
the title remnants struggles to break through the slightly translucent texture
of the flyleaf. The partial and on-going struggle of legibility beneath the
webbed flyleaf appears differently to each copy of the chapbook; since each
copy of this chapbook uses a unique pattern of the flyleaf, Shelly’s remnants
encourages us to trace how the semblance of aesthetic coherency in our own
lives and reading of this work is produced from an originary remnant.
Adam Mohamed is an incoming
Ph.D student in the English Literature department at Western university. His
research concerns the interdisciplinary nature of poetry and philosophy
explored in British and German Romantic literature.