Joshua Corey Proposes the Pebble of Modernist Theory

"Could it be that the poem is better equipped than the novel, not to simply reverse the realist formula, but to put the unheard-of and the everyday in a tense and open relation, a relation disclosive of realism in the philosophical rather than the literary sense?" asks Joshua Corey in a new piece at Jacket2, "Three pebbles." "To explore this question, I propose to think small — very small. I propose the pebble of modernist poetry." To continue:

The pebble is a thing, a fragmentary rock, a bit of nature that fits easily in the hand, yet which can scarcely serve effectively as any sort of weapon or simple tool. The pebble is an individual marked by its participation in and never more than partial emergence from multiplicity; a heap of pebbles is a figure for, or metonymic of, multiplicity itself.[5] To pick up a pebble is to separate it from its fellows, arbitrarily removing it from the multitude of other pebbles — on the beach, in a ravine, out of a quarry — among which it is invariably found. Each pebble is marked by its never more than partial emergence from something larger: rounded, worn, unimaginably old, each the result, if Francis Ponge is to be believed, of “scission from the same enormous grandfather,” the primeval “hero” of the earth itself, a “fabulous body” that, “having been liberated from Limbo … is nowhere to be found.” In Ponge’s poetic cosmogony, “The Pebble,” which reaches “even further back than the Flood,” imagines “the baptism of a hero as big as the world, only to discover the gruesome mess of his deathbed.” This “deathbed” or “sacred skeleton” is “the gray chaos of the earth, our humble yet magnificent dwelling.” It stands under and apart from “the millions of infinitely small and ephemeral beings that dwell on it.” Human life “envies the indestructible stability of its stony habitation, [when] in reality it assists in the continuous disintegration of its environment. And this unity of action seems like life’s central drama: confusedly it suspects that its pedestal may fail it one day, yet it feels itself to be eternally regenerative.”

Read the full essay at Jacket2.