ABSTRACT
Prynne’s above words, from a review of Charles Olson’s Maximus, consider the mutations of biochemistry alongside shifting environmental conditions. Some of the environmental shifts we find in Prynne’s own work, such as the Pleistocene thaws of The White Stones, are gradual. Others, like the post-Chernobyl irradiated landscapes that Simon Perril (2003) reads in Bands about the Throat, speak to more sudden upheavals. Of course Chernobyl, like the agricultural chemicals of High Pink on Chrome or the exploitation of the Tar Sands in Sub Songs, represents the capacity of human technology to radically transform an environment. However, we should be wary of the presumptions of over-humanised history. The materials which shape life in Prynne’s poetry (including RNA, hydrocarbon deposits, workable metals and genotoxic herbicides) are, Prynne reminds us, resistant to human control; they exert a different kind of agency. This chapter examines how Prynne treats different imbrications of technology, environment and biology. As it does so it moves across different scales, moving in space from the processes of gene-expression to pictures of the globe from lunar orbit, and in time from the transhuman communities of prehistory to the marginalised populations dealing with the repercussions of climate change. Prynne does not draw an analogy lightly. ‘Analogy’, he wrote to Olson, ‘is
the means by which we finally do come to know; the cognate, parallel utterance’. But this is only the case if the ‘whole pattern is allowed its substantive integrity, and not merely employed as rhetorical ornament’. That is, the ‘mind must venture some real weight on the proposed image; commit a portion of trust to its stability’ (Prynne, 1964). Prynne’s late-modernist poetics engage with bodies of knowledge that extend beyond Marianne Moore’s claims for ‘business documents and schoolbooks’ into stock market jargon and cuttingedge biochemistry. This range of reference indicates an expansive purview for poetry but also a profound interest in the ramifications of certain ideas across different spheres. And so, Prynne tells Olson in another letter, ‘there seems to
me a great need to take certain operating metaphors very literally indeed, to know as much as possible about them in some detail’. In this he distinguishes himself from ‘that dolt E.P. [Ezra Pound] whose local ignorance is unsurpassed: wrong about Chinese syntax, and hopelessly stupid about the modern scientist’s “shapeless ‘mass’ of force” […] why in hell didn’t he look for the facts?’ (1963b). Prynne has been rather more stably institutionally ensconced than Pound –
and this afforded him the acquaintance of several scientists at Gonville and Caius. Over the years at Cambridge he interacted with Stephen Hawking, Rupert Sheldrake, Joseph Needham and, significantly for this chapter, Francis Crick, whom he met in early 1963 and stayed in contact with even after the Nobel Laureate transferred his operations to the USA.1 In Stars, Tigers and the Shape of Words, Prynne’s William Matthews lectures on linguistic arbitrariness and poetic language, he uses a term from biochemistry – ‘reverse transcription’ – to describe certain ways the linguistic sign might be partially motivated. This runs against the central dogma of Ferdinand de Saussure’s thought which asserts the fundamental arbitrariness of the linguistic sign and that associations may not be attached to the ‘system of sounds or graphs and coded back onto the level of sense or idea’. Prynne sees aspects of Saussure’s argument as shadowing Crick’s ‘Central Dogma’ of ‘the biochemistry of genetic coding’ which also
excluded all reverse transcription. Francis Crick’s hypothesis about the asymmetrical direction of intracellular data flow took the form (to put matters simply) that genetic information could and did pass from DNA to protein, but was barred from passing in the reverse direction: the mediating RNA characters would thus be, in Saussure’s sense, ‘arbitrary’, as mere carrier templates of the coding. This feature was argued to be requisite in both systems, cells and language, and for the same reason, namely to preserve the integrity of the inner genetic material against the contamination of damaged forms.
