My argument is, in short, revisionist in its rejection of several alternative approaches to the effects of immediacy in early modern lyric poetry (and thus, too, it adumbrates—though it does not address—similar challenges to the ways lyric texts of other periods have been read). Critics should not regard those effects as the norm for lyric during the English Renaissance and their reverse as what linguists call the marked case. Nor should we simply dismiss all such impressions of presence as mere ruses; my aim is not to substitute a privileging of distancing devices for the widespread privileging of those that suggest the opposite.8 Despite the contemporary fascination with hybridity, neither do I posit a hybrid relationship between immediacy and its opposite as normative. The dynamics in question are too various to support any of those agendas. Instead this chapter develops a series of templates for the ways lyric avoids or modulates the very impression of immediacy that it also is concerned to establish, typically tempering or contrasting effects of presence with impressions of distance, and then traces the consequences of those practices.
Studying immediacy and distance in early modern lyric poses a number of methodological problems, addressed in this section. The first step in both analyzing and avoiding common misreadings of all these issues is clarifying the terms in question, in the process explaining how the rest of the chapter will deploy them. Immediacy and distance assume a wide range of forms, including some that blur the line between them, while in other instances a single technique, such as a refrain, may generate both members of the pair. These varied forms can fruitfully be scrutinized as effects without definitively resolving the theoretical issues they raise, which is necessarily the task of a different book; but a resolution of the methodological challenges of discussing immediacy and distance does demand analyzing the investments both early modern writers and critics in our own day have brought to those challenges.
My use of “forms” in the preceding paragraph indicates a distinction between my own and some other approaches to these issues: not only may a given version of immediacy engage in an irenic dialogue or a heated argument or both with a type of distancing, so too multiple versions of each apparent pole typically interact with each other. The apparent denial of presence in one form, such as a reminder of fictiveness, does not only preclude but may even encourage its assertion in another form. Jonathan Bate’s insistence that the early modern recognition of the problematical relationship between res and verba did not entail the poststructuralist radical distrust of res is very much to the point (indeed, I emphasize below that poems that acknowledge their own status as representations nonetheless may culminate on a proffered material product).9
Not the least slippery of the many fraught concepts associated with lyric, immediacy may be suggested in lyric through several effects, in particular, the sort of tactility suggested by Celan’s statement, types of vividness that may or may not involve the other four senses, voice in the senses emphasized by critics of twentieth-century poetry, and the type of rhetorical positioning accomplished by linguistic devices, notably deictics. This chapter approaches the concept of immediacy in terms of those devices and traces versions of all of them.10 (As this brief summary suggests, I do not propose an equation between presence and realism, a term no less slippery and in most of its senses far less relevant to the early modern lyric; nor do I assume that the impression of immediacy resolves poststructuralist doubts about the linguistic and ontological impediments to presence.)
John Keats’s poem, or possibly fragment, beginning “This living hand, now warm and capable” exemplifies the impressions of presence summarized immediately above and demonstrates how they often unite in creating the sense that the poem is speaking directly to the reader. It cries out to be included even in a study of early modern lyric, not only because it is arguably the best single example and examination of those patterns in the language, and thus a useful gloss on their manifestations in the English Renaissance, but also because it will provide a textbook comparison with early modern poems to which I will turn shortly:
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thy own heart dry of blood,
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d. See, here it is—
I hold it towards you.11
A poem that thematizes touching, this extraordinary lyric enacts—or attempts to enact—analogues to tactility in many other ways as well, thus creating a sense of presence. It invokes other senses besides touch through the synesthesia so characteristic of its author. The physical cold and warmth to which it refers mirror the subtle shifts between their emotional analogues. The poem moves between implicit threats and reassurances, and this intensity helps to create voice in the sense of realized subjectivity and hence one version of presence. And the deictics “This” (1) and “here” (6) build yet another version of it. These effects may be further intensified, for, as Lawrence Lipking points out, if readers identify as addressees and imagine the poet’s living hand reaching towards them, “most … will strain toward Keats in sympathetic grasping.”12
At the same time, all these assertions of the immediate are complicated by the unresolved paradoxes and ambiguities of the conclusion. A number of distinguished critics have commented acutely but not decisively on whether the living hand is extended as a peace offering or the dead one as a threat; the question of in what senses, if at all, the hand is present is further troubled by the issue of whether the addressee is in fact the reader, or a character in a play, or, as critics formerly assumed, Fanny Brawne.13 These questions anticipate cognate ones, addressed below, about the shepherdess’s speech in Lady Mary Wroth’s Song 1. However one resolves these dilemmas and disagreements in the instance of Keats’s text, a corpse’s hand is certainly vividly invoked in the course of the lyric—and gestures, as it were, towards further complications in discussing and defining presence. A vividly realized image may be a sign of absence and loss: the corpse’s hand can be present precisely when and because the living hand cannot, much as the poststructuralists have repeatedly emphasized that words, like other surrogates, testify to the lack of what they introduce. Moreover, the uncanniness that Brooke Hopkins incisively traces in the poem can make readers recoil from the very poem that so intensely invites and enacts touch.14
As these lyrics by Donne and Keats demonstrate, putative presence may assume a range of forms, many of them unstable enough to recall the poststructuralist position that apparent presence is a response to and even symptom of loss. So too does mediation of presence take many shapes. I am defining mediatory elements for the purposes of this chapter as textual strategies that delimit or distance the immediacy of a lyric, typically through a type of intervention or standing-between—encasing that pressing hand in a glove, as it were. But versions of mediation vary in their structure from a headnote to the introduction of another voice, and in their effects from evading anticipated judgments of the text to showcasing such evaluations. In response to such variety, I focus below primarily on types of distancing that are in some sense part of the text—as it were, immediate to it—such as titles; the many other types involved in the category Gérard Genette analyzes as paratexts, such as title pages and dedicatory epistles, are treated only in passing here, though some of them are discussed elsewhere in this study.15 Often the strategies I chronicle achieve their ends by introducing an alternative spatial or temporal dimension; they may also remind readers that they are encountering a literary representation of an event rather than participating in it as it unfolds.
Yet certain methods of mediation, however effectively they distance the text in some instances, can heighten an impression of immediacy under other circumstances, or even increase and diminish it simultaneously within the same passage of a poem—thus further complicating the agen
da of this section, defining the concepts in question and addressing cognate methodological challenges. Metapoetic allusions to holding the poem as a physical object, for instance, can both intensify and qualify the presentness of lyric. Refrains sometimes strengthen and sometimes lessen the presence of what the stanza evokes. Above all, reminders of representation often qualify immediacy in certain respects while intensifying it in others. Mediating, one may recall, implies bringing about or conveying, and sometimes part of what it effects is a different version of immediacy.
Many methodological challenges in analyzing immediacy and distance are explicated by earlier critical commentaries on these subjects; some of these passages also gesture towards the investments readers in both early modern England and our own era bring to those concepts. To begin with, Renaissance discussions often emphasize the rhetorical roots of immediacy, which for that and other reasons are an important perspective throughout this chapter. Those roots are, however, somewhat tangled by the verbal and conceptual similarities between the concepts of enargia, which can roughly be translated as a vividness that makes it possible to see in the mind’s eye, and energia, which suggests activity or energy.
Describing the workings of enargia, Quintilian declares that “vivid illustration, or, as some prefer to call it, representation, is something more than mere clearness, since the latter merely lets itself be seen, whereas the former thrusts itself upon our notice.”16 In the same book, he goes on at some length to discuss how these intense portrayals, created by specified rhetorical figures, move the listener and “[place] a thing vividly before the eye” (VIII.iii.81), and he subse quently discusses how “vivid illustration” may appeal to the senses (IX.ii.40). Notice in particular the aggressive agency implied, which recalls my previous analyses of connections between lyric and blocked or imperiled agency in early modern texts. In Book 3, Chapter 3, Puttenham seconds Quintilian’s emphasis on vigor when he tries to designate enargia as appealing only to the ear and energia as involving meaning: to the latter he attributes “strong and vertuous operation …efficacie by sence.”17
Both the focus on an energetic depiction and the concern with its rhetorical effect on the reader recur when Sidney famously observes, “But truly many of such writings as come under the banner of unresistible love, if I were a mistress, would never persuade me they were in love; so coldly they apply fiery speeches, as men that had rather read lovers’ writings …than that in truth they feel those passions, which easily (as I think) may be betrayed by that same forcibleness or energia (as the Greeks call it) of the writer.”18 Whereas “betrayed” could simply signify “to reveal” in early modern English, it is tempting to wonder whether Sidney’s preoccupation with the treacheries of love, of rhetoric, and of their interrelationship unwittingly impelled his choice of the term (and no less tempting to observe that when its more common sense is adduced here, Sidney anticipates the poststructuralist emphasis on how apparently effective language in fact compromises itself).19
In any event, all of these early modern passages explicate how their authors conceive immediacy: it is produced by vivid descriptions, presented in language that evokes stereotypically male characteristics, and analyzed in terms of its rhetorical agenda, that is, in terms of how it is meant to shapes the reader’s responses. Most relevant to my purposes, these discussions indicate some reasons for the seesaw between immediacy and distance posited by this chapter. The efficacy of contrast, a commonplace of rhetorical theory, argues for playing vivid passages against less intense ones; the hints of aggressive control, or even manipulation, of the reader activate anxieties indisputably common in early modern England, about the dangerously suasive power of rhetoric, and hence could impel the writer to disown or at least distance its effects (as Sidney arguably does through the double meaning of “betrayed”).
Whereas rhetorical sources and effects remain crucial in modern discussions of presence, many other perspectives have been explored as well; a few examples chosen from a multitude will demonstrate the range of assumptions many critics bring to early modern texts, at times importing them from commentaries written about and more suited to other poetry. Discussions of Erlebnis, still powerful despite the many attacks on them, stress the speaker’s consciousness and voice more than the poem’s rhetorical impact on the reader; and in the sense of a realized subjectivity, voice remains a crucial concept, especially in analyses of modern poetry.20 Committed to emphasizing the figural elements in lyric, especially prosopopoeia and related figures, many other critics attribute presence—or apparent presence—to their handwork. In an influential analysis of apostrophe, Jonathan Culler focuses on its role in producing “a detemporalized space with forms and forces which have pasts and futures but which are addressed as potential presences”—in other words, many of the characteristics of lyric immediacy.21 Yet observe how “potential” hedges the bets and allies Culler’s argument more closely with how Paul de Man and others approach the limitations and even bad faith of such figures. At the same time, the concern for tactile and other forms of vividness expressed by early modern commentators has not been neglected by their counterparts today. In particular, in organizing her brilliant analysis of poetry around the five senses, Susan Stewart draws attention to how presence may be realized on sensory and sensual levels; she also shows how deixis can contribute to such effects.22
Other commentators, adopting a range of perspectives, have emphasized that lyric is distant from actual, lived experience (and in so doing, of course, often challenged that category itself). To begin with, treatises by poets may complicate assertions or implications of immediacy presented elsewhere in the same document. While he praises the immediacy created by energia, in developing the Greek concept of the poet as maker Sir Philip Sidney also turns to Platonic models; he draws attention to the element of artifice in art, an element redefined, defended, and celebrated when he famously compares the golden world of the poet to that of the First Maker: “Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect into another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature.…Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden” (100).23 Later in the treatise, when defending poesy from the charge of falsehood on the grounds that it does not claim to tell the truth, he rebuts the equation of representation with misrepresentation in the sense of deceit, a point that I have already emphasized and to which I will return. On very different grounds, Wordsworth distances poetry from the here and now, famously defining it in terms of recollected emotion, while Shelley, for all his emphasis on the incarnational force of poetry, also stresses its role in representing something prior and separate from it: “Poetry …reproduces all that it represents.…Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds” (“A Defence of Poetry”).24
The past century has witnessed numerous critical denials and rejections of the several types of immediacy traditionally associated with lyric. Most obviously and most influentially, the deconstructionist attack on the concept of presence, famously spearheaded by the work of Paul de Man, has often included labeling its apparent exemplification by the lyric illusory.25 Statements like these, however, were preceded by many challenges on other grounds. W. R. Johnson, for example, argued that the “I-You” structures that he finds in the mode establish it as discourse in the sense of “description and deliberation” rather than “unpremeditated warblings.”26 In both theory and practice the Language Poets have condemned the concept of voice in the sense of the realized subjectivity of the speaker; an analogue, often impelled by the putative association between the concept of the individual and capitalism that typically informs Language Poetry as well, may be found in recent studies of the sonnet tradition that eschew the earlier focus on the character of its speakers. The more sophisticated studies of lyric time often at the very least complicate a bald association of that form with the pre
sent tense.27 Supplementing these theorized overviews, a number of powerful recent studies of specific poetic elements, such as titles and other paratexts, have also qualified or queried the immediacy of lyric.28
As the relative brevity with which I summarize these and related debates suggests, my primary goal is neither to produce an alternative theoretical position nor to engage at length with previous ones. The focus of this chapter is more rhetorical than ontological in that it focuses on how and why effects of immediacy—and, even more important for my purposes, distance—are produced in a given historical period rather than on the transhistorical potentialities and betrayals of language; and my focus is more on process than teleology in that I show throughout that discouraging or blocking certain versions of immediacy does not preclude and may even encourage its assertion in other senses. The same is true of distancing devices. Above all, I aim to dislodge immediacy as the putative norm for lyric and instead look at its coexistence with, and occasional interaction with, its opposite number.
Nonetheless, poststructuralist and related debates do undergird some of my discussions and the methodological assumptions propelling them. I assume throughout, for example, that texts are representations, and I demonstrate that early modern texts in particular often devote considerable energy to establishing their status as such. But, as I will argue, that does not preclude significant effects of presence nor establish those effects as ploys. As Sidney encourages us to recognize, the poems in question often signal their mediation of what they represent rhetorically, and even address it semantically, potentially obviating the charge of “bad faith.”29 In lieu of concentrating on broader generalizations about all language, I emphasize the varied forms that strategies for establishing presence and distance may assume, and I demonstrate how and why the balances and imbalances of those effects vary significantly and intriguingly from text to text.
The Challenges of Orpheus Page 17