More often, however, the position of observer involves making ethical judgments on the lyric, its speaker, and its poet. Because of the guilt widely associated with lyric, only partly obviated by that Good Girl–Bad Girl divide between versions of the mode, early modern texts encourage these judgments. (This is not to say that this effect is unique to early modern poetry, of course; many confessional poems of the twentieth century, for example, encourage an amalgamation of empathy and evaluation, while a Romantic lyric like the one examined above, Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” scripts the grounds for judgment, inviting the reader to assume the position of judge.) Jonson’s Charis sequence, as well as this example from Wordsworth, recall the frequency with which the position of observer is, or in the course of the poem becomes, contiguous to, or even identical to, that of the poet, who may criticize his own discourse in ways that invite the reader to do the same. Alternatively, the speaker may assume the role of observer even more directly, as a previously uncouth and now much more knowing swain does at the end of “Lycidas.” In instances like these, identificatory voicing can overlap with judgment.
A sibling to the role of moral or ethical critic, the stance of aesthetic critic, is a no less significant option for early modern readers. The fact that a reader who might voice a poem may also, or instead, study its formal and other literary strategies—its meter, how it changes its source, its responses to generic conventions, and so on—may seem too obvious to require attention; but the ways such examinations interact with or substitute for voiceability have not been adequately analyzed, perhaps because many critics, impelled by a drive to locate prelapsarian purity in this mode, still attempt to focus on naïve, not sentimental, responses to it. In point of fact, the audience of a lyric frequently examines it as an artifact, a mode of reading that is more likely to occur after the first contact with the text but by no means impossible on that initial encounter, and certain textual strategies common in early modern poetry encourage the reader to adopt this role. Indeed, by thematizing the position of observer and deploying obtrusive formal devices such as the numbers that are sometimes printed on correlative verse, many texts compromise any attempt to separate an initial, “pure” reading from the later sentimental ones. Perhaps the most extreme version occurs in the Vita nuova, where sonnets are analyzed formally in some detail, and the English tradition itself offers many analogues, especially in the paratextual materials so often associated with lyrics. The extensive notes in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender urge us to study the poems. (Because this paratextual exposition may be written by Spenser himself, however, once again a position that seems antithetical to identificatory voicing may in fact incorporate it.) Similarly, the text may incorporate aesthetic judgments directly, as George Gascoigne does when he comments on the lyrics incorporated within his Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, or encourage them by discussing the sources and structure of the poem in the third person, as Thomas Watson does in his headnotes. When the use of superscript numbers draws attention to the workings of correlative verse, the reader is encouraged to approach the text as a student of poetry.
While the literature of other periods certainly sometimes generates this aesthetic or academic observation, several circumstances made this especially the case in early modern England. Many readers were themselves amateur poets and hence as likely to identify with the formal challenges of crafting a poem as with the sentiments within it. Contemporary debates about quantitative meter alerted many sixteenth-century readers to the prosodic choices of the poet at hand. Scribal practices allowed readers to see and compare several versions of a text, demonstrating that, besides considering how reactions would vary between successive encounters with the same poem, we should acknowledge that they might shift in response to a new version of a text one had previously read.
In short, the original audiences of early modern lyric, like their counterparts today, no doubt participated unreservedly in identificatory voicing on occasion; but in other instances they did so temporarily or ironically or not at all. The subject matter of these poems and their conditions of production both complicated and in some circumstances obviated voicing. And early modern culture encouraged alternative positionalities, especially those involving ethical and aesthetic judgment. These patterns, then, again demonstrate my contentions about the lability of early modern audiences. And the issue of identificatory voicing also substantiates and develops issues analyzed earlier in this book. Most obviously, the types of voicing posited here involve further versions of turning. They also involve an intensification of the anxieties associated with reading and writing lyric: the reader may move from complicity in, say, the aggression of a farewell poem to a critique of it, and the author may be uneasily aware that her audience is likely to shift from identification to criticism.
A textbook example of the interrelated questions I have been tracing—the variety and motility of the positions the audience of lyric may assume, the imbrication of the roles of audience and speaker, the variations on and alternatives to voiceability, and the relationship of all these patterns to the central issues in the text—Shakespeare’s thirty-fifth sonnet thus encapsulates the problems and theses pursued throughout this chapter. Above all, it again demonstrates that changes in direction of address often enact and thematize issues at the core of an early modern lyric.
This sonnet enacts a process in which the speaker starts by excusing the addressee (“No more be griev’d at that which thou hast done” [1]), then moves to the realization that the act of excusing is itself culpable, that he has caught the addressee’s case of a sensual fault. If among the poem’s purposes is establishing a clear divide between the guilty party who speaks and the magisterial magistrate who observes and judges, its praxis is the dissolution of that divide: “Such civil war is in my love and hate, / That I an accessary needs must be” (12–13). Once again, a poem that directly addresses the question of blurred subject positions itself effects their dissolution in the relationship of author and nondiegetic audience.
Notice, first, how the opening line—“No more be griev’d at that which thou hast done”—urges readers into not one but several different roles. The very vagueness of the line may permit and even encourage us to voice the poem, yet readers are held back from that option, instead encouraged to see ourselves as eavesdroppers, by a sense of entering in medias res (“No more be grieved”; italics inserted) a situation we but imperfectly understand. And both reactions are intensified, not resolved, by the comparably vague reference to the “sensual fault” (9) later on. These types of concealment resonate with the gloss that Colin Burrow assigns to “stain” (3) in his splendid edition, “obscure.”137 But if readers are both drawn into and distanced from the role of animator, the second person address, as immediate and intense as some of Celan’s openings, may lead us to see ourselves as the accused party, the ratified listener. Yet, as Paul Alpers points out in one of the few acute readings this curiously neglected sonnet has received, the images in the first quatrain sometimes lose touch with the auditor; to the extent that he is right (I would argue that the intensification of the criticism gestures towards some continuing awareness of the principal addressee), the nondiegetic reader’s identification with the accused is likely to weaken.138
As the poem progresses, its role as metalyric intensifies. In particular, as a lyric about the dangers of speaking lyric excuses, it both seduces us into and warns us against identificatory voicing. The speaker watches himself making excuses: “All men make faults and even I in this” (5). Such confessions, as noted earlier, invite us to assume the more distanced role of judge—a position that both discourages voicing and encourages it inasmuch as the speaker himself is adopting the role of judge as well as that of plaintiff and defendant.139 And this distancing may intensify on subsequent readings as one meditates on the price the speaker pays for his excuses and the possibility that his confessions are in fact lies to himself or his reader or both. Yet the poem is general
ized enough to encourage identification even or especially with the corrupt and corrupting process of making excuses; indeed, as its tropes of disease suggest, other people’s cases of confessing may prove contagious. At the same time, much as the poem enacts the speaker’s impulse to identify with the accused (notice how the auditory homology in “sensual fault” and “sense” [9] suggests a homology between accuser and accused), so too the reader may continue to see himself as addressee. Thus yet again shifts in position, especially those associated with direction of address, enact and express meanings at the core of the lyric.
As striking an instance of anticlosural closure as the conclusion of Henry V, the final four lines intensify the predilections I have been tracing: “And ’gainst myself a lawful plea commence. / Such civil war is in my love and hate, / That I an accessory needs must be / To that sweet thief which sourly robs from me.” Notice that formally this ending both stages the epigrammatic certainties associated with closural couplets and breaks down that sense of control. On the one hand, the epigrammatic antitheses of the final line gesture towards decisiveness and closure; on the other hand, at the same time, the dissolution of the usual binary couplet into a curious three-line statement enacts the dissolution of such certainties. This resolution is about the inability to achieve resolution and especially the inability to distinguish oneself from the sweet thief through clear-cut binary moral judgments. If this pull between moral resolution and amoral or even immoral confusion is enacted formally, it is also staged in two ways of reading the lines. One could see them as a summary of the eleven preceding lines, in effect placing a period after “commence” (11). Or if, as other editors do, one posits a colon at this point, the lines become not a detached summary but yet another version of the illicitly lawful pleas that constitute—and corrupt—the rest of the poem. From this perspective, “commence” emphasizes not closure but the anticlosural continuation of a series of such pleas, a continuation flagged by the workings of enjambment, and lines 12–14 create an ending as abrupt and indeterminate as the final shot in “The Four Hundred Blows” and many other New Wave films. All this is relevant to voiceability in that the multiple interpretive possibilities represent positions the reader may assume, becoming an accessory to the speaker by voicing the excuses, or a judge of that excusing who distances herself from its practitioner, or a version of the sweet thief. Thus we, like the speaker, change roles rapidly, suborned and seduced into the reflections and refractions that constitute this poem no less than the sculptural and architectural creations on which this chapter opened.
CHAPTER 3
The Craft of Pygmalion
Immediacy and Distancing
Poetry, Paul Celan declares, is a handshake.1 Or, following William Waters’s acute and suggestively revisionist translation of this poet who so often resists translation, the phrase becomes a “pressing of hands,” an expression that, Waters demonstrates, deploys the double meanings of the German “Handwerk” to suggest both craft and the actions of literal human hands.2 “Handshake” gestures towards the honesty and immediacy so commonly attributed to lyric. Waters’s translation implies several sources and symptoms of that immediacy: a lack of intermediaries (no third hand intervenes in the pressing), an expression of what is directly apprehended (in this case tactilely experienced), an emphasis on the present and on presence (what better instance of the sense of touch so often associated with lyric than the meeting of hands).3
Yet in turning to a lyric that might at first appear to be a textbook example of everything Celan’s observation evokes, whichever way it is translated, one encounters a sleight—and a slighting—of hand. Indebted to the so-called ugly beauty tradition, the libertine defiance of the opening stanza is immediate in many respects:
I can love both faire and browne,
Her whom abundance melts, and her whom want betraies,
Her who loves lonenesse best, and her who maskes and plaies,
Her whom the country form’d, and whom the town,
Her who believes, and her who tries,
Her who still weepes with spungie eyes,
And her who is dry corke, and never cries;
I can love her, and her, and you and you,
I can love any, so she be not true.
(“The Indifferent,” 1–9)4
Donne’s characteristic creation of a distinctive voice calls up a sense of the speaker’s presence, and that figure eschews temporal shifts by addressing the reader in the present about attitudes that appear unchanging. The presence of an audience is established as clearly as that of the speaker: the deixis that, as many students of lyric have acknowledged, so often encourages immediacy is here literalized, inasmuch as “her, and her, and you and you” (8) achieves signification through an act of gesturing or pointing. A poem that glorifies in emotional distance insists in another sense on an immediate relationship with its readers, both the internal audience and other women and men as well.
The second stanza continues these types of immediacy. But Donne is the master of endings that turn the poem and in so doing often turn on and against the addressee.5 In the third strophe he engineers a different but related type of reversal:
Venus heard me sigh this song,
And by Love’s sweetest Part, Variety, she swore,
She heard not this till now; and’t should be so no more.
She went, examin’d, and return’d ere long,
And said, alas, Some two or three
Poore Heretiques in love there bee,
Which thinke to stablish dangerous constancie.
But I have told them, since you will be true,
You shall be true to them, who’are false to you.
(19–27)
Pace Carew, the stanza reminds us that Donne does not always exile the gods and goddesses of earlier poetry; here, however, the introduction of Venus is characteristic, both in the fact that it startles the reader and in its insistence that Venus, rather than occupying a more elevated realm, shares the world and the values of the speaker. Indeed, whereas he seems to cede authority to her, she in fact serves his purposes.
But if it sustains the amoral values introduced earlier, the conclusion, eschewing any aesthetic temptation of its own towards “dangerous constancie” (25), involves a number of abrupt shifts in the immediacy the text had so firmly established. The reader is pulled from the present tense commonly associated with lyric to not one but two alternative time sequences. The poem removes the observations in the first two stanzas from the lyric present, establishing them instead as a song performed on a particular occasion; moreover, the third stanza contrasts the sequential events about Venus being narrated, what narratologists call story time, and the discourse time in which they are being told. Venus’s own words, though enlivened by direct discourse, also lack the immediacy we encountered, or thought we were encountering, in the first eighteen lines of the poem: they are reported as occurring on a specific occasion in the past, and they themselves incorporate the reportage of indirect discourse, thus mirroring the changed status of the opening two stanzas. John Carey acutely asserts that Donne typically writes of “unique instances,” and one might add that this poem supports his point precisely by rejecting the alternative temporality on which it opens.6 To be sure, the deictic in “sigh this song” (19) re-creates some of the immediacy at the beginning of the poem—Donne is not constant even in his literary inconstancy—and arguably the intensity associated with singing contributes to that recovery as well. Yet the primary effect of those three words is to distance the opening stanzas by removing them from their apparent status of speech to that of an aesthetic performance in several senses of that noun.7 Conversely, Venus’s location in the world of myth emphasizes fictiveness at the same time that her presence is associated with the apparent move from the fictiveness of the previous song to a more quotidian world.
In these and so many other respects, then, Donne’s poem demonstrates the central arguments that will be pursued in this chapter
. What is most characteristic of lyric in the early modern period, I maintain, is not the sense of immediacy that its proximal deictics, like a number of other devices, evoke but rather the coexistence of those techniques suggesting immediacy and those creating forms of distance. And it is precisely the presence, and on occasion the interaction, of those two types of technique that impels important attributes of this mode, such as how it is an event and why lyric, that domain of the intangible and ephemeral, is represented as a product in the sense of something produced, or in the sense of a literal, tangible object, or both. That interaction is often relevant as well to the agendas of a given poem, which may thematize and problematize it.
Numerous critics, however, continue to posit immediacy as normative, the default position for early modern lyric and its counterparts in other eras, and distancing devices as secondary or even aberrant; others, especially poststructuralists, assume that presence is the illusion that the text tries to maintain, while representation is the dirty secret that it tries to conceal, the aesthetic principle that dare not speak its name. However powerful demonstrations of lyric immediacy have been, they have typically unbalanced interpretations of the mode by neglecting the interaction in question; however persuasive theorized denials of presence in certain senses have been, they have too often dismissed as a mere ploy its survival as a poetic effect. This chapter attempts to calibrate the balances by instead looking more closely at the too often neglected ways the lyric poetry of the English Renaissance creates the impression of various forms of distance, and by tracing their relationship to the creation of forms of immediacy or apparent immediacy. Thus it directs its attention primarily to strategies for creating those impressions rather than to the extensive philosophical debates about presence, though the latter inevitably figure in my analyses at certain points.
The Challenges of Orpheus Page 16