Nathaniel Mackey’s Agnostic History and “The Creaking of the Wheel”

Abstract

In a question-and-answer session held during the 2002 convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA), experimental poet and literary critic Nathaniel Mackey invoked the well-established cultural sense that “grand narratives” have given way to a sort of cultural pluralism.¹ “These days,” Mackey offered, “there seems to be a greater openness to openness.” At the same time, Mackey implied that the literary-critical potential for cultural pluralism is not yet aware of itself—in other words, pluralist possibilities for expression and, especially, as modes of intervention into hegemony, have not yet been explicitly theorized. As a political and aesthetic goal, an undertheorized, unreigned pluralism is no pluralism at all, since differences that merely get put into circulation can be evacuated of their authority over people for whom they matter. For example, the poetry of particular racial experience can be deployed either by neoliberal interests, as diversions for consumption, or be conjured as evidence that (bureaucratic) multiculturalism has finally been achieved. In either case—as monism or relativism—“do your own thing” pluralisms construct differences as alternative facets of a singular, unified cultural understanding and play into the neoliberal system already in place.

None of these concepts were incongruous to the Egyptian. He could believe in an afterlife in which he would spend eternity in the company of the circumpolar stars as a blessed akh [the crested ibis, embodiment of competence], yet also be restricted to the burial chamber and offering chapel of the tomb as a ka [shadow self], but also visit the world of the living, inhabit the Field of Reed, and travel across the sky and through the underworld as a ba [a falcon, embodiment of the spiritual self] with the sun-god.

—Marie Parson, The Book of the Dead: An Introduction

In general, ancient Near Eastern religion does not attempt to codify a single correct mythology or liturgy; in fact, three distinct creation myths coexisted peacefully during the historical period in Egypt.

—Zahi Hawass, Cradle and Crucible