• Skip to main content

The Muriel Rukeyser Living Archive

Engendering lively interdisciplinary conversations about Muriel Rukeyser

  • Welcome
  • About Us
  • Selected Writings
  • Scholarship
  • Ruke Blog
  • Pedagogy
  • Contact

objective correllative

Synecdoche, Minnesota

December 14, 2012 by mthunter22 3 Comments

Posted on December 14, 2012 by Joe Sacksteder

My bio on the homepage for “Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive” states that I just completed a novel partly inspired by The Book of the Dead, and I wanted to use this post to relate how Rukeyser’s poetry has influenced my creative work. Back in undergrad at St. John’s University, I was lucky enough to be able to do volunteer work at the Minnesota Correctional Facility in St. Cloud, an institution with a very unique history.

Most of my initial knowledge was word-of-mouth, and it disturbed me in a gut-level way that I found difficult to articulate. Pulling up to the mammoth structure, you can’t help but admire the prison wall – the largest granite wall in the world (other than some sections of the Great Wall of China), I’ve heard from questionable sources. Whether or not it belongs in the Guinness Book, the wall is three feet wide at the top, four feet at the base, and a mile and a half long. What’s truly interesting is that it was built by prisoners from granite mined within the prison yard. St. Cloud’s nickname is Granite City, and the Breen and Young Quarry was the very first to be established in Minnesota, this back in 1868. Twenty years later, the state purchased 240 acres of land, which included the Breen and Young, for the purpose of building what would become the St. Cloud State Reformatory.

I don’t have a date for when they stopped using inmate labor in the quarry, but eventually the hollowed land suffered the same fate as any abandoned quarry; it filled with rainwater. The resulting body of water is not the same as a normal lake. In addition to its great depth in proportion to its breadth, something about the granite prevents algae and other plant life from growing in the water. As I found on swimming trips in college to other quarries, the water is cold, and you can see a great distance into its depths. Perhaps if you stood on the edge of the Breen and Young, you could see the steam-powered derrick they abandoned at the bottom of the quarry. It might even be the light-colored “island” in this Google Earth photograph of the yard:

Minnesota Correctional Facility

Some people might find this history lesson unremarkable. But it presented itself to me as a horror story with ghastly implications. Something about the land itself yielding the materials that would isolate it, something about the containment-within-containment-within-containment, something about the workers…

It wasn’t until I read Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead in graduate school at Eastern Michigan University that I began to gather a means to express what bothered me so much about the Breen and Young. Rukeyser, I felt, surveyed the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel Disaster, and the actual land where it played out, with a similar feeling of horror – which she expresses most abstractly but urgently in what I like to call the “industrial trilogy” of “Alloy,” “Power,” and “The Dam.” Try to keep the above image in mind during these words from “Alloy”:

Forced through this crucible: a million men.
Above this pasture, the highway passes those
who curse the air, breathing their fear again.

The roaring flowers of the chimney-stacks
less poison, at their lips in fire, than this
dust that is blown from off the field of glass;

blows and will blow, rising over the mills,
crystallized and beyond the fierce corrosion
disintegrated angel upon these hills.

In my third post, my open letter to the objective correlative, I quoted from Shoshana Wechsler’s essay “A Ma(t)ter of Fact and Vision: The Objectivity Question and Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead,” a quote that might help explain what nagged at Rukeyser’s mind and continues to nag at mine:

For the scientific observer as for the poet, what is important is the overriding fact, and fate, of invisibility – the invisibility of occupational disease and its ravages, the social invisibility of a mostly black, marginalized labor force – which led to the laborers’ brutal exploitation and death as well as their erasure from memory. The submerged tunnel neatly lends itself as the perfect objective correlative for Union Carbide’s corporate obfuscation.

And maybe comparing Wechsler’s observations about the submerged tunnel and my uncanny vibes from the submerged crane give me another perspective on the objective correlative, one that gets at Elisabeth’s comment on my objective correlative post; namely, that these compounding images hit us on a pre-rational level, a feeling that further research and examination sometimes uphold.

For, back when I first heard about the Breen and Young, it bothered me solely in an abstract way. I didn’t yet know about silicosis, didn’t consider that the conditions for inmate labor in the late 1800s probably weren’t better than those at Hawk’s Nest. While the work of Rukeyser and others has preserved the tragedy in West Virginia, I haven’t been able to find any real research regarding the inmate workers at the Breen and Young site. Perhaps you think that this is where I, Joe Sacksteder, sweep in and devote my life to resurrecting this history. Alas, my aspirations are that of a cowardly novelist, and it was far simpler to fabricate an exaggeration of what the history might have entailed… you know, so that responsible researchers might become interested and do the real work.

The current novel I’m shopping around revels in the horror film convention of what I call the “research montage,” that moment three-quarters of the way through many horror films where the protagonists have to figure out what event from the past is continuing to plague them. My version of the Breen and Young became the historical locus of my characters’ research, the root of evil. But the real horror story would be the actual truth, the evidence itself – and that’s the power of objectivist literature at its best.

Filed Under: Ruke Blog Tagged With: Creative Writing, Minnesota Correctional Facility, objective correllative, Shoshana Wechsler, The Book of the Dead

Dear The Objective Correlative,

December 1, 2012 by mthunter22 1 Comment

Posted on December 1, 2012 by Joe Sacksteder

I admit it: I don’t understand you. But it’s not that I haven’t tried. I Google your name to see what you’re up to these days. At faculty parties I have a few too many Two-Hearteds and then beg my colleagues to tell me if they’ve seen you recently. I consider editing your Wikipedia page, and it kills me to know that there are others who are far more qualified. I try to remember those days back in undergrad when we were so bold and carefree. Remember how we used to make fun of Hamlet? And just when I thought I was getting over you, that I could forget you and move on with my life, there you were on the list of terms I was supposed to teach my Creative Writing 201 class. It was like seeing your name on a party guest list after so many years and knowing that I was the same confused, love-sick puppy I’d ever been.

In the past I admit I’ve tried to fit you into a tidy definition: one or more events or objects charged with metaphoric value that create a desired reaction or emotion from the reader and/or character. I’ve used Hemingway’s famous six word story (For sale: baby shoes, never worn.) to render you as a formula: potential baby + cuteness of Baby Jordans + baby didn’t happen + need of money = ☹ But we both know that you’re so much more than that. The problem is that there are other literary terms that seem so similar to you – montage, mimesis, even plain ol’ metaphor – and they’re so much easier to understand!

…

I’m sorry, the objective correlative. I was upset. I didn’t mean it. I know that you’re unique and that you’re worthy of every brain muscle I strain trying to comprehend your ambiguities. In the days leading up to that moment I’d have to introduce you to my Intro students, I was a nervous wreck. But then – bolt of lightning! – Shoshana Wechsler’s essay, “A Ma(t)ter of Fact and Vision: The Objectivity Question and Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead,” rescued me from a 48-hour web surfing bender:

For the scientific observer as for the poet, what is important is the overriding fact, and fate, of invisibility – the invisibility of occupational disease and its ravages, the social invisibility of a mostly black, marginalized labor force – which led to the laborers’ brutal exploitation and death as well as their erasure from memory. The submerged tunnel neatly lends itself as the perfect objective correlative for Union Carbide’s corporate obfuscation.

I paraded this quote triumphantly to the front of the classroom. Just as the workers’ deaths and even their bodies vanished behind the convenience of the electrical power their labor produced, so did the tunnel that killed them disappear under the river it rerouted. But halfway through my arrogant pontification, I realized that I was still confusing you with simpler phrasings, like “symbol for” or even “example of.”

Perhaps you are the reason why Rukeyser’s poems often have a list-like feel to them. I think that, when poets try to disrupt syntax so that their work doesn’t sound like lineated prose, the result is often something that sounds like the poetic version of a grocery list. And perhaps it is in the way the items in Rukeyser’s lists come together to brew new meaning that I can begin to understand you, the objective correlative. I think back to Rukeyser’s poem “Ann Burlak”:

The neighbor called in to nurse the baby of a spy,
the schoolboy washing off the painted word
“scab” on the front stoop, his mother watering flowers
pouring the milk-bottle of water from the ledge,
who stops in horror, seeing. The grandmother going
down to her cellar with a full clothes-basket,
turns at the shot, sees men running past brick,
smoke-spurt and fallen face.

Are you there behind the words, the objective correlative, whispering that the accumulation of these loaded images create the “field of faces” at Ann Burlak’s feet, the “system of looms in constellations whirred,” the “disasters dancing” that require the heroism of the labor organizer? I sense your presence in John Jay Chapman’s act of sticking his hand into fire in the poem “Chapman” (and in real life), but it’s not so “neat” as the submerged tunnel, and… and I have decided to stay in again tonight. But reminders of you are everywhere, and I wonder if there’s anyone who can mediate between us. Until then, you know where I’ll be; my office hours are on Tuesday and Wednesday, and I’ll be waiting for you.

Filed Under: Ruke Blog Tagged With: Ann Burlak, Chapman, Lives, metaphor, mimesis, montage, Muriel Rukeyser, objective correllative, Pedagogy, Shoshana Wechsler, The Book of the Dead

Copyright © 2022 · Elisabeth Däumer and Bill Rukeyser · site by Organic Bytes