The Challenges of Orpheus

by Heather Dubrow

  In his high-rise edifice on Macquarie Street in Sydney, Piano giftwraps in glass the bricklike terracotta he so often uses in his buildings, creating the transparency and immateriality he celebrates when writing about architecture. Similiarly, the Morgan Library juxtaposes glass with stone and steel. If transparency “is very important on the plane of poetic language”2 in the senses of “poetic” Piano apparently intends (expressiveness, intensity, and so on), it also, with apt paradoxes, introduces ontological opacities very germane to poetry. Is the space between the terra cotta and the glass within or without the edifice? Is the viewer on Macquarie Street who is reflected in the glass, or the diner sitting in front of it at an outside table of the café, inside or outside the building? In like manner, as one faces the far wall in the court of the Morgan Library, one wonders whether the images one glimpses are representations of activity on the street behind it or reflections from another wall behind the viewer; louvers with panels of glass visible between them can further complicate this play of images. As these effects suggest, Piano’s glass confounds the planes in many of his buildings; “we have often created spaces with multiple and successive vertical planes,” he writes of his work, and the observer is likely to encounter multiple reflections of herself, occupying different planes.3

  Even more tantalizing are the questions raised by similar techniques in Jean Nouvel’s Cartier building in Paris. On one level, when he replaced the stone wall that had previously cut off the surrounding gardens with a glazed screen, he opened up the space to those outside it. At the same time, however, he also opened up intriguing issues: the building itself is surrounded by two glazed screens that are considerably larger than the structure itself, and reflections also play off some walls within the structure, so when trees or viewers or inhabitants appear in the glass, it is impossible to tell what is inside and what is not, which reflections come from denizens and which from observers, and indeed, where the building should be said to begin and end. Enigmas are the principal plants in these gardens. Glass, Piano, and Nouvel demonstrate, not only teases and troubles in the way mirrors can do but delights in adding the additional complication of a claim to transparency that is itself far from transparent: neither simply true nor simply mendacious.

  A particularly intriguing expression—and expansion—of these techniques and the issues they raise is Nouvel’s Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Numerous enlarged photographs of earlier stage productions are reproduced with ghostly faintness on a material like air-mail paper that adheres to the stone walls; a huge representation of the Weird Sisters who haunted Macbeth, for example, haunts those walls as well. Especially apropos of my purposes, however, is the variation on that technique in the café on Level 5: the images from the plays appear not on stone but on back- and front-lit mirrors, so that the viewer sees her own reflection among those of the characters in the represented scenes. Thus the past of the theater merges with its present, spectators interact with actors on these reflective walls as they do during the play itself, and again inside and outside, here and there, are confounded.

  Both the aesthetic pleasure and the epistemological conundrums of such buildings are replicated and analyzed in the work of the sculptor and designer Dan Graham. Varied though Graham’s installations are, many of them share an agenda of using mirrors and glass to confound boundaries between parts of the construction and between its audience and what they are observing. Subject is always becoming object, object always becoming subject. As Graham writes of these constructions, “they are not for one person. They are always for people looking at other people looking at other people inside and outside.”4

  In his installation in the sculpture garden of the Walker Gallery in Minneapolis, for example, greenery is partly enclosed by a series of wall-like planes, forming cubicles that resemble rooms but lack a ceiling and one or more walls. Some of the planes are transparent glass, some reflect spectators, landscape, and other walls. Hence the effect that Graham attributes to another, similar construction recurs here as well: “Reflections of people within are superimposed for them to view.… They [spectators] can perceive themselves perceiving; or they may perceive themselves as the subject of the perception of other (interior or exterior) spectators” (247). The movement between the passive construction of Graham’s first sentence (“are superimposed”), the qualified ascription of agency in “to view,” and the amalgam of positions in the concept of perceiving oneself perceiving enact grammatically his point about spectators themselves being both subjects and objects.

  Graham’s glass and mirrors raise the same problems posed by Piano and Nouvel, and his glosses on those issues render more explicit their relevance to this chapter. In particular, he draws attention to its central question: what is the relationship between an object and its audiences? More specifically, to what extent are onlookers detached, outside observers and to what extent participants? And how does their self-consciousness—“they can perceive themselves perceiving” (247)—affect their responses, an issue that will prove particularly relevant to the guilt associated with lyric? Graham also directs our attention to a problem especially germane to the multiplicity of audiences in lyric poetry: what is the relationship among and between various spectators, or, as he puts it, “people looking at other people looking at other people inside and outside” (77)?

  Questioning and qualifying seminal statements by Northrop Frye and John Stuart Mill among others, the central contentions of this chapter are first, the need to acknowledge the multiplicity of audiences and audience positions in early modern lyric, and second, the far-ranging significance of that diversity. In particular, recognizing that range of positions reveals the fluidity and variety of the relationship of listeners and readers to the text and its speaker. For these and other reasons, the presence of lyric auditors is often as unstable as the reflecting echoes in the glass of Nouvel, Piano, Graham, and so many other masters of mirroring; yet, this chapter argues, it is often precisely through that instability, and especially through shifts between internalized and social direction of address, that the core meanings of a poem are expressed and core agendas, especially aggressive ones, pursued.

  As my emphasis on fluidity suggests, in the form that is associated with versus in so many senses, the mutability and variety that this chapter posits typically involves several turns. Focusing on conditions of production and reception, Wendy Wall wittily observes that “Coterie circles thus encouraged a ‘con-verse-ation’ … a turning back and forth of scripted messages between writers”; this chapter explores many additional forms of turning that mime the types of circulation she traces.5 Some texts evoke or hint at a wide range of audiences present simultaneously, establishing differing relationships with them; others dismiss or turn away from certain audiences and face others; members of a given audience may shift positions in relation to direction of address, themselves turning away, as God is represented doing in certain religious lyrics; the relationship of the diegetic addressees to the poem and its author may change not only in the course of a given reading but from one reading to the next.

  Though the criticism it has attracted is often fruitful and sometimes brilliant, the very concept of lyric address can tempt one to neglect some of these complexities. Not the question “To whom is this text addressed?” but rather “Who are or will be or might be its audiences, whether addressed or not, at several different junctures?” is more encompassing and hence more profitable.6 Such perspectives will, for example, demonstrate that early modern lyrics finesse many of the problems identified in Chapter 1 through strategies of deflected speech, turning away, or apparently turning away, from one potential audience to another. This chapter’s principal argument—the multiplicity of audiences and the lability of their connections to the poem and to its poet—thus redefines lyric address. In so doing, as I will demonstrate at the conclusion of the chapter, that thesis also asserts a revisionist challenge to the widespread concept that the audience of lyric normatively engages in an identific
atory voicing of it—the concept that the author erects for us a single mirror rather than an installation like Graham’s.

  Pursuing those central arguments about multiple and shifting listeners insistently poses a number of difficult methodological challenges, best introduced by another analogue that is both visual and verbal. In the April eclogue of Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, the shepherds Thenot and Hobbinoll lament the fate of their colleague, Colin. Enchanted with Rosalind, he has abandoned his enchanting poetry. Thenot invites Hobbinoll to repeat one of the songs in question, thus moving from the position of Colin’s auditor to his ventriloquist. The center of the accompanying woodcut is occupied by ladies in courtly garb, gathered in a partial circle around one figure, apparently the queen, who stands slightly forward; several of the ladies are playing musical instruments. In a lower plane to the left, a considerably smaller figure in the clothing of a lower class is piping in apparent isolation—though his rustic instrument is directed to the turned backs of some of the ladies. Above him and not seeming to attend to him are two other rustic figures. Since Colin created that lyric “as by a spring he laye” (35), the standing piper, near water that appears to issue from a cistern, might suggest that the artist read the text hastily;7 critics do, however, have reason to believe that Spenser himself took a real interest in the woodcuts, even if he did not closely supervise them, so it is unlikely that they include significant reinterpretations of which he would have disapproved.8 In any event, the woodcut aptly draws our attention to issues central to these and many other lyrics, especially my contentions that auditory positions are labile and that their shifts often express meanings at the core of the text.

  Perhaps the most suggestive gloss on this illustration is Thenot’s inviting Hobbinoll to “recorde” (30) one of the songs in question—a verb emphasized by its presence in a similar context in the Argument and by a note to that usage linking it to the Latin verb for remembering. The Oxford English Dictionary enlarges that annotation by citing contemporaneous usages of “record,” some now obsolete, involving meditating, making a record, remembering, relating, bearing witness, and recording in song.9 Like the tropes examined in Chapter 1, this word compacts many implications about lyric, notably song’s role as a medium for memorializing something, thus recalling the connections with the inscriptions in posies I have already discussed, as well as links with monuments. In relation to the woodcut, the word suggests the privacy of meditation—Colin presumably lay by that stream alone—while also emphasizing an interaction with auditors, sharers of the fruits of that meditation, who could comprise both people to whom the poem is currently related and future generations with whom what it preserves will be shared.10 In other words, “record” suggests multiple audiences, some present in the situation being mimetically represented and some not, and it implies that meditation is not necessarily an alternative to but in some instances a step towards social interaction, anticipating my analyses of the relationship between lyric and narrative.

  This tension between lyric as the product of solitary reflection and as a version of social interactions is enacted in many levels in the woodcut, which repeatedly complicates the representation of both private and social performance. Piping in apparent privacy, the singer in the lower left is indubitably separated from his fellow shepherds spatially. And he is distanced from the courtly ladies by distinctions in space and scale, distinctions that underscore the differences in garb and in so doing trope the uneasy social divides manifest in the promulgation of numerous sumptuary laws, those regulations that based permissible attire on social status, during Elizabeth’s reign. The backs of the women immediately in front of the shepherd form a wall, anticipating the “long fruitlesse stay” (6) searching for patronage that Spenser was to write about in his “Prothalamion.” To this extent the illustration accords to Roland Greene’s argument about failures of the dialogic in the poem itself.11

  Yet the fact remains that several figures in the illustration may be audiences to each other’s music, or performers to an audience, or both at once. To begin with, more than one courtly lady is a musician, raising the question of what happens to the distinction between performer and hearer in the instance of choral music. Moreover, the direction of the shepherd’s musical instrument, like the direction of address it literalizes and materializes, hints that in some sense he is singing not only about but also to the court. Certainly the content of the April eclogue encourages that interpretation. And the use of “record” reminds one of the possibility, indeed the probability, of auditors who are not present now but will respond to the song sometime in the future, a likely eventuality given the content of this song. More immediately, despite those turned backs, is not our piper on some level at least potentially an audience for the courtly music as well as producer of his own songs? In fact, citing an early modern instructional manual, Carla Zecher has demonstrated that, whereas lute players usually faced the audience, players of the virginal often did not—thus anticipating Miles Davis’s famous decision to perform with his back to his listeners.12 These and other possibilities are, however, confounded by the planes in the illustration, which, in the ways they partially separate the courtly from the pastoral characters, may well recall the playful complexities of a Piano or Nouvel building.

  Although the two shepherds in the background show no sign of attending to their colleague in the foreground, they are linked to him visually by their garb, by the similarity between the posture of one of them and that of the rustic musician, and by the triangle the three figures form, which is further emphasized by their crooks and by the presence of the same geometrical figure in the garments of some of the courtly ladies. So the isolated shepherd potentially at least has a coterie of his male peers like those about which Arthur F. Marotti has written so influentially, in this instance a sheepcoterie.13 Yet, despite the claims of Marotti and many other students of the conditions of production, here the coterie audience is not the only or the primary one, a pattern that I will suggest also characterizes a number of early modern lyrics. This multiplicity of audiences recurs throughout the illustrations and texts of Spenser’s pastoral sequence; the December eclogue, whose diegetic addressees include Pan, shepherd boys, sheep, Hobbinol, and Rosalind, is a particularly striking instance.

  At the same time, the woodcut lends itself to a different explanation. Many early modern visual representations include an intermediary or onlooker figure who, often literally, points out the scene to the audience.14 “I like to see someone who admonishes and points out to us what is happening there; or beckons with his hand to see,” Leon Battista Alberti, author of the highly influential fifteenth-century treatise Della pittura, observes.15 Demonstrating connections among such figures, the festaiuolo or master of revels, and choric actors in drama, Michael Baxandall explains that such characters are often involved in establishing relationships among diegetic participants and with the audience.16

  Reading the piper in Spenser’s woodcut in such terms is complicated but not obviated by the fact that Alberti was not readily available in the English Renaissance; the author of The Shepheardes Calender, or the illustrator, or the audience, or all of them could have been aware of such figures through their presence in illustrations. It is also true that Colin does not directly interact with the nondiegetic audience, as such figures customarily do. He is, however, literally marginalized, as they often are, and he does share their deictic, pointing, function. Adducing this tradition helps us to see that if his musical instrument most obviously represents his playing for and to the unresponsive court, it may also serve to point out the court to the viewers. Although he is not a textbook instance of the figures in question, he is related to them in respects viewers familiar with artistic traditions are likely to have recognized.

  Colin is apparently powerless in his relationship to the court ladies. Yet when interpreted as a festaiuolo-like character, he asserts and achieves a significant measure of power in relation to the readers of the book. And what
if, like other figures in this tradition, he is calling up the courtly scene, piping it into being, thus truly becoming a master of revels? If one admits that admittedly debatable possibility, he becomes at once the creature and the creator of the disdainful courtly ladies. The October eclogue encourages its readers to ask whether these paradoxes are the very point: might not the presence of a festaiuolo figure who does not directly address onlookers and a shepherd who on another level is master of even the court represent the ambivalences about poetry manifest in that lyric and others in the collection so clearly involved with poetic instauration? More to my immediate purposes, when one does read Colin as some analogue to or even reference to the mediating characters Alberti advocates, he embodies the multiplicity and variety of audiences traced in this chapter by himself becoming more than one type of auditor. He demonstrates, too, some recurrent corollaries of that multiplicity: like the spectators on Level 5 of Nouvel’s Guthrie Theater, he is both inside and outside the diegetic scene, and the swerve between interpreting Colin as an excluded outsider, reduced in scale in more senses than one, and reinterpreting him as the sine qua non of the scene recalls the potential instability of such roles.