The Challenges of Orpheus

by Heather Dubrow

  The recent interest in the social and cultural determinants of lyric utterances has in fact drawn attention to a range of alternative models that rely on diverse theoretical paradigms and ideological investments. Arthur F. Marotti’s pioneering work on coterie readers, developed by many subsequent scholars, posits not a generalized audience who would inevitably identify and, in effect, recite back a poem but rather a group of listeners with more specific agendas and interests, who on occasion expressed them by writing answer poems or changing a text they had copied into a commonplace book.117 Neither precludes the possibility that such readers would also voice the poem when reading it, but both practices render absolute, uncritical identification with the speaker less likely. Moreover, copying yet altering a text at once literalizes and materializes voiceability while at the same time radically redefining it from, as it were, homophony to polyphony. Happily, the second-generation feminism that replaces laments for the silencing of women with discovery of an often limited but nonetheless present agency has also encouraged gendered descriptions of lyric audiences that emphasize active participation; for instance, locating love poetry within the dynamic practices of courtship, Ilona Bell argues that the responses of nondiegetic audiences to such lyrics are often mirrored by hints of responsive addressees within the poems themselves.118

  Drawing on the work of linguists, including, on occasion, the discourse analysts, other critics have pioneered different but compatible descriptions of the responsiveness that they too consider characteristic of lyric. David Schalkwyk, who emphasizes communalities rather than contrasts between dramatic and lyric registers, advocates studying what he terms the “embeddedness” of lyric; he shows, for example, how the use of speech act performatives implies social interaction even when the addressee is not clearly specified, as in Shakespeare’s sonnets.119 Although she focuses primarily on drama and on letters, Lynne Magnusson’s insistence on a type of social interaction that anticipates a reply is germane to lyric as well.120

  To what extent, then, do the audiences of early modern lyric engage in identificatory voicing? Many transhistorical and transcultural characteristics associated with lyric support that paradigm; but I argue that such voicing is often limited and sometimes undermined. To begin with, the seductiveness of many lyric poems, like so many other forms of seduction, invites unthinking involvement: one hardly imagines the victims of the sirens arriving on their island with a checklist of criticisms of the song. Remembering Northrop Frye’s emphasis on the sound effects of the genre that he associates with “babble” (275–278) and Andrew Welsh’s cogent analysis of its connections to chant invites us to adduce anthropological studies of the sound effects of ritual; in particular, Richard Schechner’s suggestion that repetitive rhythms create arousal and even ecstasy neurologically implies that comparable responses to poetry are more likely to involve enthusiastic identification with its speaking voice than critique.121 Mark W. Booth’s contention that the audience of song in effect merges with the singer, an assertion often though not invariably true, demonstrates ways identification may occur in lyrics that are literally sung or resemble song especially closely.122

  The generic palette, conditions of production, and ecclesiastical practices all further encouraged identificatory voicing in the early modern period in particular. In three forms of poetry especially prevalent in the Renaissance, the poet models animating for the reader: pastoral involves sophisticated writers taking the voice of a shepherd, who then may well repeat the words of another shepherd; sonneteers, even more than most other poets, are conscious of their progenitors in their form; and devotional poetry is sometimes seen as voicing the words of God. Furthermore, as Harold Love reminds us, many texts were read aloud, literally voiced, in colleges and universities.123 Devotional practices are yet again germane, since choral singing, like ritualistic recitals of a previously established text, encourage merging one’s own voice with those of others.

  Yet identificatory voicing needs, as it were, to be queered in ways that acknowledge the other positionalities it competes with and generates; this reinterpretation creates a revisionist model for early modern lyric that has implications for the poetry of other eras as well. To begin with, as my analysis of congregational singing suggests, identificatory voicing may be temporary. A reader may identify with the speaker completely for part but not all of a specific reading, though a rupture in that identification is less likely when a poem is close to those analogues to lyric—chant and magical incantation. Alternatively and more frequently, she may identify throughout an initial reading but, troubled by the poem on reflection, may assume a more distinct and critical stance on subsequent readings. The very brevity of lyric renders the process of reviewing the poem, studied by narratologists in relation to much longer texts, highly likely. That process may sometimes intensify identification—Stephen Owen compares returning to a poem with repeating the steps of a dance in a way that binds one to it—but I will demonstrate that this version of iterative performance can and often does instead facilitate distancing.124 Shifts during the process of reading may be effected grammatically as well, especially since the second person pronoun, a powerful recruiter in the ways William Waters has traced so cogently in Poetry’s Touch, often does not appear until relatively late in a lyric; and when it does it may not only interpellate but re-interpellate.

  Thus in lyrics like Vaughan’s “World” (I) or “Waterfall,” the reader well may start by merging his subjectivity with that of the speaker and voicing his words; but in “World,” unlike “Waterfall,” as the poem progresses, the evocation and monition of wandering sinners provides a subsequent positionality that may well encourage a shift in identification. Responding sympathetically to an elegiac opening, a reader might well participate in identificatory voicing when beginning to read “The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn,” only to distance her- or himself—as it were, inserting quotation marks in more senses than one—when voicing subsequent passages that hint that the speaker might be not only vulnerable but also culpable.

  Similarly, an audience may initially identify with the speaker in Wyatt’s “Whoso list to hunt,” especially since the opening word defines the addressee in the vaguest terms, but as the poem progresses may become increasingly identified with that addressee. Moreover, whereas Vendler claims that identificatory voicing trumps specific social and cultural positionalities, surely a female reader may well identify more with the deer than the frustrated hunter. Ilona Bell comments acutely on the distanced irony with which a female reader might voice a male-authored love poem, thus introducing yet another version of dialogue.125 Yet the extent to which a given reader will identify with one component of her status and rank, or identify with it more than with another component, is by no means obvious; and in cataloguing interacting coordinates of subjectivity, literary and cultural critics need to encompass not only the three commonly cited traits—race, class, and gender—but also such issues as age and geographical region.

  One should recall as well that in Wyatt’s lyric the speaker is animator of the deer’s words, which the deer may in turn be displaying for Caesar, thus in turn assuming the role of animator or that of ambassador, the distinction between those possibilities depending in part on whether the reader envisions the final line of the sonnet, “And wylde for to hold though I seme tame,” as that hind’s addition to Caesar’s message. In this and other instances, the heteroglossia so common in early modern and other lyrics clearly complicates straightforward identificatory voicing.

  As identificatory voicing may be temporary, it may also be delimited, even ironized. The performance of the psalms signals yet another qualification to the voiceability of lyric, the need to separate repetition from endorsement of sentiments and identification with their speaker, an issue we will also encounter in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 35. The categories of the discourse analysts are again useful here, reminding us that someone who takes on an ambassadorial role, for example, may supplement a message with his
own comments or, more subtly, deliver it in a way that implicitly comments on it. Pace Roland Greene’s contrast between fictional and ritualistic modes, iterability does not necessarily assume a unified and constant relationship to what is being repeated.126 Consider the range of identificatory possibilities for a male reciting one of Sappho’s lyrics at a Greek symposium.127

  Moreover, many of the texts discussed in this chapter would encourage readers who did voice them to do so with some measure of ironizing distance, either throughout or at some junctures. Frye’s initially unsettling connection between lyric and irony usefully glosses this process, though he deploys it quite differently.128 The voicing of the April eclogue might well be complicated, but not precluded, by political reservations about the queen or the frustrations of a disappointed courtier. As that text also demonstrates, if pastoral’s Chinese box effect of people voicing words voiced by others can encourage identificatory voicing, the self-conscious performativity of the mode also suggested by those boxes within boxes can in turn encourage distance. Voiceability is further complicated in the many poems, notably religious and love lyrics, whose speaker, troubled by a divided subjectivity, in effect becomes an audience to a side of himself, often a side he condemns. Whereas a reader could identify with and in effect voice all parts in a psychodrama, it would also be possible, especially on later readings, to identify more with one voice than another. In short, whereas Marshall Brown’s revisionist claim that skeptical distancing is not only a potentiality but the norm of lyric is a somewhat hyperbolic corrective, these examples remind us how a range of conditions, varying from one culture to another, can on occasion produce exactly the response Brown traces.129

  If the material conditions of production encouraged identificatory voicing in the ways noted above, from another perspective they also further abetted and modeled this type of delimited voiceability. As noted, many texts were read aloud, literally voiced, in colleges and universities. But much as a reader copying a text into a commonplace book might change it, given the association of the Inns of Court with satire, can we assume that voicing by readers there was always straightforward, as opposed to ironic or otherwise transgressive? In other words, voiceability, like that cognate mode of lyric iterability the refrain, is often in fact repetition-with-a-difference. One might usefully compare the psychological version of repetition-with-a-difference, the game Freud labels fort-da, which not co-incidentally aims to achieve mastery and revenge.130 Or, to put it another way, voiceability is often rhyme, or even slant rhyme.

  I am arguing, then, first, that the degree of voicing may vary from one reading to the next or within the same reading; second, that it may not involve total, uncritical identification with the speaker; and finally, that it coexists with and helps to create alternative positions for the audience, positions whose shifts often themselves produce important meanings. One of the most significant of these alternatives to voicing, the adoption of the position of addressee, I have already traced in detail in several texts above, in so doing noting William Waters’s cogent arguments in Poetry’s Touch about the forcefulness the second person pronoun may carry with it. Early modern literature offers a host of other instances of this type of compelling second person pronoun. For example, when Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 (“That time of year thou mayst in me behold”) repeatedly uses the second person in connection with verbs of looking or observing, it connects the external reader beholding the text and the diegetic lover beholding its speaker. Similarly, to return to the opening of Spenser’s Amoretti, when a woman—or, indeed, a man—reading a copy of the volume in which the work appears encounters the introductory poem in which the lady is represented as holding the book, that nondiegetic audience is clearly encouraged to identify with the diegetic one. Opening a poem on a reference to reading, a pattern Wendy Wall traces from the different but cognate perspective of the consciousness of production and circulation thus reflected, fosters that type of identification, and many poets deployed the device.131 Compare, too, Donne’s “Funerall,” in which the diegetic audience coming to observe and shroud the dead body is in a position analogous to that of the reader coming to observe the text; this need not prevent identificatory voicing, but it does complicate it by offering an alternative subject position. And it is no accident that the instance from “The Funerall” involves the opening of Donne’s lyric: much as the first day of a class profoundly shapes the relationship of teacher and student, so the beginning of a poem is especially potent in defining the position of an audience (though often it is easier to revise an audience’s position during the first or subsequent reading than to rewrite the implicit contracts established at the beginning of a course). Hence opening a poem on one of the speech acts involving instruction or command—the line quoted above, “Mark you the floore?” from Herbert’s “The Church-floore” (1), for example, or Donne’s “Marke but this flea” (“The Flea,” 1)—can readily interpellate the nondiegetic reader into the position of observer, at least temporarily, in lieu of encouraging identificatory voicing.132

  This is not to say, of course, that readers always identify with the figure evoked through a second person pronoun: if any proof beyond that supplied by common sense is needed, it is readily provided by the many poems of the period addressed to God. But on this issue, too, a spectrum is a more useful heuristic instrument than a polar division between identification and its absence, and in some instances the movement between identification and separation is itself intriguing. Witness Herrick’s “To Robin Red-brest,” which is more complex in this and other regards than a cursory reading might suggest.133 Anticipating his own death, Herrick asks the bird to cover him with leaves and sing his dirge: “For Epitaph, in Foliage, next write this, / Here, here the Tomb of Robin Herrick is” (5–6).134 The proximal deictics in the lines quoted above establish the spatial contiguity of the bird and the poet and also achieve a cognate temporal contiguity, making the grave and the moment of the poet’s death present. Intending in many of his other poems to blur the boundary between the natural and the human world (perhaps because of his anxieties about the political and sexual tensions in the latter), Herrick here proceeds to turn contiguity into virtual identity through many techniques; for example, the bird is the ratified listener who is directly addressed in the final lines, but that couplet enjoins that creature to switch positions with its creator and write the words itself.

  Given the fact that few of Herrick’s audience will consider themselves and the addressee birds of a feather, surely most readers are likely to voice the poem instead; alternatively, or in addition, the concluding inscription interpellates us into the position of its reader, the perusal of the inscription synecdochically representing a detached, observatory stance towards the whole lyric. On yet another level, however, the poet is implicitly asking his human audience to respond much as he wishes the bird to do—to be kind, to memorialize him. Arguably the act of voicing the poem is an analogue to what the bird does; and hence when the reader accepts the invitation “Sing thou my Dirge” (4), the lyric not only invites but becomes the dirge in question. Thus, in a limited but not insignificant way, we can identify with the position evoked by the second person pronoun; yet again the reader is offered multiple and overlapping roles.

  As this poem and many of my previous analyses illustrate, in addition to and often in lieu of the positions of speaker and addressee, nondiegetic readers may adopt the role of an observer, distanced from rather than identifying with the first and second person pronouns within the lyric. Third person titles like those in Jonson’s Charis sequence enable and even encourage this stance, in so doing activating the doubts about even “good” lyric that some readers surely shared with the authors of those poems.135 Herrick’s “To Robin Red-brest” demonstrates one of several ways this observer function may work: given the elegiac impetus that so often drives lyric, it is not surprising that a number of poems end on an inscription, an example of the performed “product” studied in my chapter on immediacy and d
istance, hence interpellating the reader of the poem as the reader of its epigraph as well. And even a lyric that does not end by representing an inscription may well achieve closure through a comparably detached and aphoristic saying, such as the concluding line of Wyatt’s “Ffarewell, Love, and all thy lawes for ever”: “Me lusteth no lenger rotten boughes to clyme” (14).136