The purpose of this chapter is to resituate and reconceptualise O'Hara as a forerunner of postmodernism, whose poems are hyperscapes characterised by textual and cultural difference. Using literary and cultural theory as a springboard, the chapter negotiates the breakdown of unities in O'Hara's poetry, the emergence of a hypertextual web, and a splintered subjectivity. The chapter also repositions the poet in terms of a personalised hyperpolitics, postmodern eclecticism, and parallelism between real life and text life.

From Difference to Hypertext

O'Hara's poetry thrives on the unrestrained reconstitution of textuality, subjectivity and representation. Within the poems the distinctions between the metaphoric and the metonymic, the self and the non-self, the humorous and serious, are constantly overthrown and reworked. Consequently, the hallmark of O'Hara's poetry is reversal, eclecticism and the celebration of the marginal.

In O'Hara's poetry, then, everything differs from itself and this is always an ongoing process. Ways of being and modes of writing are constantly deconstructing themselves and sliding into their opposites, as they swing athletically between the poles of difference and identity. This coexistence of opposites, and their reciprocal transformation, is fundamental to the work and is the essence of the hyperscape. Therefore, nobody with even a passing acquaintance with Derridean deconstruction could be blind to its relevance to O'Hara's work, for O'Hara is the arch-deconstructionist. His poems anticipate Derrida's concept of ‘the play of differences’ in which ‘Nothing, neither among the elements nor within the system, is anywhere ever simply present or absent’ (Derrida 1987, p. 26). Through this process text becomes ‘textile’ and meaning is constantly deferred. The embrace of différance generates similarities, coincidences and identities which then immediately fall back into difference. As Geoff Ward says, ‘The differential play of language which literary theory strives to expose in texts … is so much to the fore in an oeuvre such as O'Hara's that it needs no special argument or exposure’ (Ward 1993, p. 68). Nevertheless, it is useful to examine this différance systematically, if only because it underpins the whole psychological, political and artistic fabric of O'Hara's work. Here I begin a process of analysis which is intensified in Chapter 3.