Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2000. [Vol. 6.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Enikő Bollobás: "My son is a Magyar": Ideas of Firstness and Origin in Charles Olson 's Poems

that certain coincidences of place, environment, and man were necessary for a culture to begin (see George Hutchinson 83ff).'This means that in cultural morphology he might have found reassurance to the possibility of firstness and origin. In this poem his interest in beginnings figures in the insistence on seeing vs. recognizing

, on one time events vs. repetitive events. Indeed, Olson registers what la Cosa sees and not what he might recognize from existing narratives (of scenes of which he had not been part). Since he did not know he landed in the "New World," he did not recognize a cultural concept, but saw waters of cod and lands surrounded by deep mud banks to be sounded. Using his own eyes only (and not the abstraction of aerial maps), he remained part of the picture, whose primary function was to capture the viewer in a new circumstance. This implies that he still saw the scene, to apply a current New Americanist distinction, not as "other" but simply in terms of "difference," granting an identity of its own to the land and the people. While "otherness" is part of an imperial monologue, "difference," Myra Jehlen points out, is part of a two-sided exchange: it "denies the centrality of any point of view and the allencompassingness of any horizon" and is thus "the anticolonial response to the imperial history of otherness" (42-^3). In addition, la Cosa drew his map, the first one to show the "New World," based on his own tactile experience (when he felt his way, as if with his fingers). These two firsts involved here refer to experience and text, both valorized for their particularity and contingency, their being unlike anything else preceding it. Properly understood, all experience is a first if it is lived in its contingency and relieved of having to fit into pre-existing patterns of abstraction, generalization, comparison, or metaphorization. What with hindsight we know as a first was only a once event at the time it happened. Epiphany comes about from the recognition of particularity and singularity, where the imprint of precedence does not determine the "meaning" of the event, where experience remains act without claims on knowledge. In other words, Olson tries the impossible: he allows la Cosa to see what one does not know. To present what is in front of the senses, but in such a way that what he knows should not interfere with what he sees. Olson tries to get out of the trap posed by cultural and social paradigms by picking a scene where somebody sees things for the first time, sees 14