The Challenges of Orpheus

by Heather Dubrow

  He proceeds to comment on the audiences of lyric. Although his observations are varied and complex, many of them usefully distinguish the diegetic and nondiegetic audiences by assuming that the mode is publicly performed in some sense but involves a mimesis of solitary speech predicated on a fiction that there is no audience: “There is, as usual, no word for the audience of the lyric: what is wanted is something analogous to ‘chorus’ which does not suggest simultaneous presence or dramatic context. The lyric is, to go back to Mill’s aphorism referred to at the beginning of this book, preeminently the utterance that is overheard.” Immediately afterwards, however, Frye observes, “The lyric poet normally pretends to be talking to himself or to someone else,” and whereas the first part of that statement is not surprising, the others whom lyric “normally” addresses comprise a long list, including friends and lovers (249).

  Frye’s conception of lyric audiences is, then, pulled between a model stressing solitude and another stressing interaction. The former is apparent when he compares lyric and irony, at first glance strange bedfellows indeed, on the grounds that both involve turning away from the marketplace and, more obviously, when he emphasizes the process of communing with oneself (271). Yet the social dimensions of lyric, emphasized in “Approaching the Lyric,” achieve prominence when Frye lists friends and lovers among the audiences “normally” addressed by the mode (249). And to describe the lyric audience as choruslike, even though, to return to our woodcut, they are not present on the same plane as the speaker, is to imply interaction and again to trouble the divide between presence and absence.

  That possibility of interaction emerges also in a tension in Frye’s argument that deserves far more attention than it has received. “The fourth possible arrangement, the concealment of the poet’s audience from the poet, is presented in the lyric” (249), he writes, and Frye’s commitment to this formulation is evident in the decision to offer a version of it in the glossary, where lyric is presented as “characterized by the assumed concealment of the audience from the poet.” (366). Although this phraseology indicates neither who is doing the assuming nor who the concealing, like the similar statement within the text itself, it implies that the poet is not himself involved in the process, except perhaps to join in assuming its results. But compare, “The poet, so to speak, turns his back on his listeners, though he may speak for them, and though they may repeat some of his words after him” (250). Some readers, including one distinguished poet, have claimed that the image of the poet with a turned back merely abbreviates Mill’s point about overhearing;40 but in fact the two models are substantially different. For although “so to speak” reminds the reader to interpret this metaphorically, not as a mimesis of someone literally turning a back, the statement does attribute more agency to the poet than Mill’s commentary and Frye’s own alternative formulations do. Notice, too, that it suggests a continuing consciousness of the presence of that audience rather than their concealment and the poet’s “utter” unawareness of them posited by Mill (348). The model of concealment from—but not by—the poet suggests artlessness, the alternative of his turning his back, art if not artifice. At stake in the difference are the poet’s agency and attraction to performance in several of its senses. Or, to put it another way, a statement like “the concealment of the poet’s audience” from the poet turns those auditors into eavesdroppers, while in the alternative version that refers to turning the back they become participants of whose presence the poet is still aware. That second position also allows for the possibility they will shortly be addressed directly, that the poet who has turned his back will, as it were, turn back, as in fact arguably happens at the end of Donne’s “Funerall,” among many other secular poems. Similarly, as we will see, many religious lyrics may be read in terms of a returning to and turning towards God.

  So acute about other distinctions, Frye nonetheless allows these alternative models to coexist uneasily. The explanation is the same one that lies behind the asymmetry with which he enumerates his radicals of presentation, not specifying the audience of the model for lyric: Frye, reenacting a tension often found also in other critics, is divided between two models for lyric—that is, he is divided between the competing claims of that bible Aristotle’s Rhetoric and the literal Bible. On the one hand, his expressed commitment to rhetoric as the guiding principle behind genres leads him to emphasize a model for lyric in which the poet is performing the poem for an audience even if it is not diegetically present in the situation mimed in the poem; on the other hand, as hinted by his curious statement that lyric shares with irony a rejection of the marketplace, he joins Mill, Sidney, and many others in the drive to locate that mode, disengaged and unmediated, in a world of transcendent truth. He does not assign an audience to the radical of singing and chanting because on some level the author of The Secular Scripture wants to see lyric as uncontaminated by the negotiations of rhetoric, a field about which he has clear reservations. Thus we again encounter the drive to establish lyric as a pure sphere, adumbrated in my introduction and explicated by some of the tropes analyzed in Chapter 1. Indeed, Frye’s suggestion that the relationship between lyric and epos resembles that between prayer and sermon exemplifies the predilection, encountered at many points in his study, for representing lyric as not only pure but holy.

  The writings of Wordsworth, Mill, Eliot, and Frye, divergent though they are in a number of ways, thus crystallize questions central to early modern lyric. To what extent and in what regards is it private, and to what extent and in what ways communal? Does the poet implicitly communicate with audiences not directly addressed? And why are these subjects so unsettling for the critics examining them? To address these and other problems raised but not fully resolved by that quartet of writers, one needs a critical vocabulary as supple as it is subtle. Although the study of lyric audiences is not their primary objective, three groups of theorists—the narratologists, M. M. Bakhtin and his heirs and assigns, and the practitioners of discourse analysis—offer promising though not unproblematical routes for resolving some of the dilemmas and pursuing further questions about lyric audience, especially the types of diversification and profusion on which this chapter focuses. Analogues to the “implied reader” and to various forms of resistant reader, as well as the significance of epistolary communications, all concepts common to many narratological systems, recur also in lyric. But some of the principal differences between narrative and lyric, notably the centrality of a consciousness often identified with the first person in so many instances of the latter and the absence or submersion of direct address in the former, complicate adducing narratology when studying the interaction of speaker and audience in lyric poetry.

  That interaction can often aptly be described as dialogic, and, as we have already seen, the indisputably canonical work of M. M. Bakhtin, as well as a number of essays that he may or may not have written under a pseudonym, provides an alternative to narratology. The potential value of Bakhtinian interpretation is confirmed by the students of William Wordsworth, notably Don H. Bialostosky and Michael Macovski, who have fruitfully approached that oeuvre in terms of its dialogics.41 Bakhtin emphasizes an anticipated response: “the word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer’s direction.”42 This aspect is especially relevant to lyric, suggesting, for example, that our common habit of describing certain lyrics as “answer poems” is an important step and yet still focuses, potentially misleadingly, on one stage in a continuing process of communication (and often miscommunication).

  Reading poetry in general and lyric in particular from a Bakhtinian paradigm is, however, problematical, not least because the master’s own position is not self-evident. The author of The Dialogic Imagination does not escape his characteristic predilection for straw men when discussing the mode in question. “Poetic style is by convention suspended from any mutual interaction with alien discourse,” he a
sserts, and proceeds to associate poetic language with “one unitary and indisputable discourse.”43 On the other hand, though this assertion is often cited, it is not clear that it is his firm position on the subject; an essay widely attributed to him insists that both inner and outer speech are always oriented towards a listener, who is an active participant.44 Another essay that may or may not be by Bakhtin himself makes a similar point by asserting that listeners are in fact especially important in lyric, and when the sympathy that lyric normally expects from them does not materialize, a dialogic irony ensues.45 Several critics have seconded these positions; Bialostosky manages to make dialogics safe for lyric by focusing largely on the category of the novelized poetry, and Marianne and Michael Shapiro find widespread dialogic elements in lyric.46

  In any event, in the case of lyric, Bakhtinian dialogical models need to be inflected with repeated reminders of how often a listener responds by refusing to respond, notably in the instance of the Petrarchan mistress who remains stony, or that of the deity whom the worshiper fears does not answer, as in George Herbert’s “Deniall.” Likewise, many poems of mourning focus on unresponsiveness in several senses, and we recall its illustration in the woodcut examined above. Numerous deconstructive readings of Romantic texts remind us that this lack of response is hardly historically specific to the English Renaissance; for example, building on the work on apostrophe by Paul de Man, Barbara Johnson, and others, Sara Guyer suggests that Wordsworth represents insomnia as a state where both subjects and objects are absent.47 Given that the Lauras who do not deign to react and the Lucys who, rolled in earth’s diurnal course as they are, cannot respond, are paradigmatic subjects for lyric, not the least valuable application of dialogics is an emphasis on what blocks dialogue in lyric, the form that Frye famously associates with blockage.

  Similar and often preferable to the narratologists’ or the Bakhtinians’ ways of discussing the audiences of lyric is the work of certain students of conversational interaction, participants in a larger enterprise known as discourse analysis, a subject that has received too little attention thus far from literary critics. Most practitioners of these trades are linguists by training, but thinkers like the sociologist Erving Goffman and the psychologist Richard Gerrig have also contributed influentially. Although such studies are sometimes limited by a positivistic and inappropriately benign model of the workings of conversation, they are germane to lyric in many ways. To begin with, although these discourse analysts generally study quotidian social exchanges, their emphasis on the interactions between speaker and audience alerts us to the dialogic interchanges concealed within or facilitated by even those lyrics that appear to be straightforward monologues, such as certain Petrarchan laments and devotional poems. Also useful for the purposes of this chapter are discourse analysts’ demonstrations of how even a largely silent listener can evoke or challenge the speech of a storyteller. (Those arguments may recall anthropological studies of how audiences participate in rituals, such as Ellen B. Basso’s intriguing analysis of the crucial role of the “what-sayer.”)48

  Particularly valuable to students of lyric are the subdivisions in the position of both author and listener mapped through varying terminology by discourse analysts. Borrowing one of several comparable systems, the terminology proposed by Erving Goffman, one could distinguish the animator, or the person who fulfills a kind of ambassador role by speaking someone else’s ideas, from the original author of the sentiments.49 These categories, I will demonstrate at several junctures, gloss and demonstrate similarities among the relationships of lyric poet and audience, of poet and printer, and of printer and publisher, not least because in all three cases the participants can switch roles. But further complications present themselves immediately. What if the text frames its internalized meditations with a commentary, as is so often the case in lyric (Marvell’s metalyrical “Hark how the mower Damon sung” [“Damon the Mower”, 1]50 or, indeed, Shakespeare’s opening line, “When I do count the clock that tells the time” [Sonnet 12])?51 What if the animator changes a meaning through intonation?

  Similarly, students of discourse analysis have subdivided the position of listener. It is common to separate the person or persons directly addressed from other hearers, termed by Herbert H. Clark and Thomas B. Carlson “side participants,” although that label reduces them to a secondary status when, as I will demonstrate, they are really central in many lyric poems.52 Adding further subdivisions, Clark and Carlson also distinguish participants, addressees, and over-hearers; Goffman’s system separates the ratified listeners, who are directly and openly addressed, from bystanders whose presence is assumed even though not acknowledged through direct address, and from eavesdroppers.53

  William Waters’s recent book, Poetry’s Touch, another of the relatively few critical studies to deploy distinctions among types of listening, adeptly traces movements among the positions in question, though he focuses largely on modern poetry.54 An overview of Ben Jonson’s “Celebration of Charis in Ten Lyrick Peeces,” however, demonstrates that discourse analysis is no less relevant to early modern lyric: its categories help us to see how many different types of audience are involved in the sequence, how often the author assumes the role of hearer, and how unstable the assignment of the label “auditor” to any personage may be. Picking up Jonson’s “peeces,” as it were, also summarizes other observations about the auditors of lyric and gestures towards some questions for future study, especially on issues related to tensions concealed in or broken apart by the poem.

  “Celebration” is a series of loosely linked poems about love deploying a range of speakers and metrical patterns. The sequence opens on one of several lyrics in which the speaker addresses the lady directly, utilizing both first and second person pronouns. This reminds us, for the first of many times in this chapter, that in Renaissance lyric a typical dynamic is not solitary speech but rather a man speaking to a woman. But the lady is not the only audience: as Anne Ferry has pointed out, titles may at once assert ownership and put distance between the poet and his creation. In this instance, the title, “His Excuse for Loving,” creates a vantage point from which the reader—and the poet framing the lyric in those four words—can evaluate the poem from a remove that permits the judgment involved in “excuse.” In effect, the author and reader, like the lady, become auditors and judges; or, to return to discourse analysis, the lady becomes a ratified listener and the author and reader eavesdroppers.

  In the next three poems the speaker uses the first person while referring to the lady in the third much or all of the time, depending on the particular lyric. But the reader is surely meant to speculate that she is a side participant, hence overhearing praise and complaint, an option confirmed by the subsequent lyric. In the fifth poem the speaker lauds his lady in a conversation with Cupid, but she is directly invited to attend to their conversation: “Heare, what late discourse of you / Love, and I have had” (“His Discourse with Cupid,” 5–6). This invitation demonstrates the potential mistake in the term “side participant”; this invited overhearing is the very point of the poem at hand, and I will cite many other examples of it in other lyrics of the early modern period.

  Whereas the sixth and seventh texts address the lady directly, the eighth includes both a narrative in which she is represented in the third person and direct address. In the ninth poem the lady responds, speaking to “Ben”; her list of the qualities she would ideally prefer in a man includes several that he obviously does not have, such as noble birth; her admission that she could be content with something less than her ideal may remind us of Jonson’s “Inviting a Friend to Supper.” In the tenth, “Another Ladyes Exception Present at the Hearing,” someone who may have been either an eavesdropper or bystander responds with a bawdy joke about what part of a man she prefers. If one conceives of Jonson as audience, the comments are at once reassuring and flirtatious, recalling the artist Dan Graham’s comment about “people looking at other people looking at other people inside a
nd outside” (77). In short, this sequence resembles many other lyrics of its period in demonstrating the wide range of ways lyrics were conceived as interacting with their audiences and the resulting variety between and within specific poems; it differs from many of them in that it renders as realized dramatic characters the listeners whose implicit presence in the world of early modern lyric has been traced by Ilona Bell, among other scholars.55

  What functions are served by this sort of game of musical chairs? On many levels, responsibility for lyric, the domain of the civilizing Orpheus and the seducing sirens, is variously acknowledged and deflected. A master of equivocation, Jonson delights in making and then breaking promises, avowing and then denying, as the menu attached to his famous dinner invitation indicates. That characteristic habit of saying and unsaying becomes literal here when the third person title implies that it was not the historical character Ben Jonson who spoke these words. Jonson was to repeat and intensify that gesture by assigning a song from his sequence “A Celebration of Charis” to one of the least savory characters in The Devil is an Ass. Often represented as prototype and even progenitor of modern conceptions of authorship, Jonson is here primarily concerned to deflect, to distance himself from that role—one of many early modern examples of such a response to the ambivalences about lyric anatomized throughout this book.56 The other lady, who as eavesdropper or bystander ends the sequence on a risqué joke about the male body, serves the function of allowing Jonson to deflect the somatic anxieties that emerge elsewhere in his poetry; and for the purposes of this chapter she serves the function of alerting us to the implicit presence of figures like her even in poems where they are not so overtly realized.

  In exemplifying the multiple and fluid positions taken by the audiences in early modern lyric, Jonson’s poem demonstrates the central arguments traced in this section: the challenges of labeling and analyzing those stances and, in particular, the value of deploying discourse analysis in doing so. It also exemplifies many approaches to lyric audiences that recur throughout the poetry of the English Renaissance, notably Jonson’s strategies of deflection and denial, and thus introduces the problem explored in the next two sections: how and why the early modern era represents lyric audiences in the ways it does.