The Challenges of Orpheus
Page 18
Given the impact of poststructuralism on linguistic theory and the impact of the mediating devices I analyze on poetic practice, why are references to presence and the qualities associated with it so frequently—and often so uncritically—adduced in critical discourse? Certain explanations lie in the cultural and psychic work lyric performs. Poets and their readers often turn to poetry, whether in a spirit of nostalgia or of grief, for recuperation, restoration, and reassurance. “In contrasting the rhetoric of warmongering …with the exact and creative powers of poetry, the poet assumes that the immediacy of lyric will counter the abstraction of rhetoric and propaganda,” Susan Stewart observes.30 An analogue to the drive she identifies may occur on the level of more personal experience as well: the preface to the collaborative dialogue between two poets, Allen Grossman and Mark Halliday, insists, “Poetry is a principle of power invoked by all of us against our vanishing.”31 Although the authors are talking about poetry in general, given the preoccupation of lyric with loss these observations are especially germane to that mode. Or, to put it another way, since lyric so often confronts death in its many forms, its readers often want it to call back the dead, to make the past an unchanging present. (In this and a number of other respects, pastoral is metalyric.) And given that, as so many of its students and practitioners have claimed, poetry begins and ends in silence, in those frozen deserts of the blank page, one wants it to give voice as clearly and fully as possible.
From another perspective, explored in more detail in Chapter 4, lyric is involved in both scattering and reclaiming, as the founding myth of Orpheus indicates; an emphasis on presence reassuringly emphasizes the latter. Even if Eurydice must return to the dead, even if Orpheus’s body is dismembered, the poem itself remains, at least putatively, alive and well and whole. Hence the interlocking drives to associate lyric with the magical, the pure, and the sacred further help to explain critics’ resistance to seeing it as mediated: fears that the magical is inherently unsubstantial increase anxieties about presence, while at the same time the drive to recuperate and celebrate the special, even holy, world that lyric can represent intensifies the desire for that presence in its several senses, a desire experienced by an individual writer or critic and realized in the cultural work Theodor Adorno attributes to lyric.32
Discussing the concept of performance in relation to cognitive theory, Mary Thomas Crane has powerfully argued that representation and experience are “mutually constitutive”; many texts analyzed in this chapter will support her claim, thus demonstrating why an acknowledgment of representation does not necessarily preclude immediacy.33 These poems will demonstrate, too, how frequently representation interacts with presence. Another anthropological study offers a useful parallel. In describing a form of ritualistic speaking event practiced by the Weyewa tribe, the anthropologist Joel Kuipers demonstrates that the term they use for it, li’i, suggests, on the one hand, “a message, a mandate, a promise, and a duty” and, on the other, aspects of the immediate performance, such as rhythm.34 Within many early modern lyrics, as within this Weyewa term, is a juxtaposition of the mandates and promises often established by distancing elements and equally potent forms of immediacy.
The juxtaposition of effects of presence and distance is obviously not unique to the early modern period, but that era’s lyrics are shaped by some distinctive reasons for pursuing immediacy, as well as distinctive types of and motivations for qualifying it, a few of which I have already indicated. Those reasons involve the interaction of etiologies and hence again demonstrate the virtues of dovetailing numerous critical approaches; genre, the conditions of production of both literary texts and art, the availability of relevant models, and theology all contribute to the combinations of immediacy and distance in lyrics of the English Renaissance.
Certain genres popular in the period intensified this predilection of lyric: much English Renaissance religious poetry invokes or attempts to embody a scriptural event, while the agenda of songs in masques is often to call forth a presence, the aesthetic analogue to the machinery that literally brought forth nymphs and goddesses. Thus, famously demonstrating the affective intensity of so much devotional poetry, Robert Southwell’s “Burning Babe” gives presence to the vision through repeated tactile references to heat; demonstrating both the instrumentality and immediacy masques associate with lyric, at one moment in Thomas Campion’s Lord Hay’s Masque the text explicitly states that trees move in response to a song. As I have already pointed out, rhetorical treatises widely circulated in the Renaissance preached what Southwell and Campion practiced by drawing attention to techniques for making what is evoked immediate. Demonstratio, the Rhetorica ad Herennium informs us, ensures “that the business seems to be enacted and the subject to pass vividly before our eyes” (IV.lv.68), and in the Apology for Poetry, Sidney’s advocacy of energia promises similar results.35
Less familiar but no less important are the period’s distinctive approaches to mediating immediacy and to combining an impression and a denial of presence. Most obviously, poets did not regularly attach titles to their work. The dissociation of titling and authoring is neatly reflected in how George Gascoigne talks about poems he pretends were written by someone else: “adding nothing of myne owne, but onely a tytle to every Poeme, wherby the cause of writinge the same maye the more evidently appeare.”36 Moreover, a poet who attempted to affix a title risked the changes to it that scribal practice facilitated. Despite—and precisely because of—many authors’ inability to attach a title, the period saw certain cognate practices that filled some of the same functions, such as the lengthy headnotes most memorably used by Thomas Watson.
The increased use of titles during the seventeenth century again demonstrates the importance of registering changes within an era; all-encompassing generalizations about early modern England are among the the unfortunate legacies of second-rate new historicist work, though the first-rate versions cannot be faulted for this. Ben Jonson was one of the earliest poets regularly to assign his own titles; in many poems by Herbert, such as “The Collar” and “The Pearl,” the title’s contribution is no less central than subtle. If, as many have rightly demonstrated, the growing ability and desire of poets to attach their own titles reflected and contributed to early modern changes in the status of the author, it also contributed to changes in the status of the text by rendering it more distant and more clearly framed as a work of art. But practices of titling have further implications for our own critical practices, warning us against positing a neatly linear historical movement that corresponds to what we want or expect to find—in this instance evidence of shifting conceptions of the author—rather than fully acknowledging the survival and coexistence of competing systems: despite changes in authorship that would apparently encourage authorial assignment of titles, that practice was followed sporadically in the seventeenth century and by no means became universal.37
Also located in the early modern period, crucial changes in both the conception and execution of the literal framing of pictures certainly paralleled and arguably influenced the framing of lyrics. During the sixteenth century, as Rayna Kalas demonstrates in her acute study of those artistic practices, the word “frame” shifted from suggesting making something to denoting enclosing it, though both meanings coexisted for some time. Inasmuch as that process of construction could literally suggest hands-on work, the word itself contains the paradoxical juxtaposition of a pressing of hands and distance that I have been tracing.38 In England, Kalas goes on to show, the sixteenth century witnessed as well a movement from the so-called engaged frame, which is part of the picture, to the type of frame that is separate from it. This change, I suggest, alerted writers and readers to the potentialities of verbal framing, and especially to the types of distancing they could produce. If alienable frames emphasize the distinction between subject and object, as Kalas persuasively maintains, they would have been a particularly attractive analogue for writers ambivalent about the poetry they were producing.
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Certain texts and traditions that were exceptionally popular in the period both encouraged and modeled mediatory strategies: Psalms 1 and 2 can be seen as a type of headnote or frame for the ensuing poems; Dante’s Vita nuova provided an influential precedent for an authorial decision to situate a lyric in relation to some sort of explanatory prose; many sixteenth-century editions of Petrarch’s Rime sparse demonstrated editorial glosses; and the emblem tradition exemplified the interaction among different types of representation that gloss and extend each other.39 Especially significant was the widespread familiarity with the Geneva Bible, which went through nearly one hundred fifty editions between 1560 and 1644; the commentaries with which it framed the psalms anticipated paratextual headnotes, while in this, like other editions of the Bible, the metapoetic references to singing and to the status of the psalms as poems also anticipated widespread practices in both spiritual and secular lyric.40
Theological traditions more indirectly influenced the early modern dialogue between techniques evoking immediacy and those suggesting distance. Often debated not only in this but earlier eras was a broad and multifaceted problem: the extent and ways scriptural episodes could be immanent in the mind of the believer, alive in her or his culture, or both. Liturgical events were seen as happening in the present even though they were associated with a distant historical moment and with recurrent previous celebrations of it.41 The artistic practice, common in both the Middle Ages and Renaissance, of portraying historically specific biblical stories in a contemporary setting implies the presentness of the Christian past; in a painting by Duccio in the Frick Museum, for example, the devil tempts Christ in a locale with recognizable Sienese buildings, while in Rogier Van der Weyden’s famous canvas of St. Luke sketching the virgin, that disciple has the artist’s features, and the people outside the window look like his, not Mary’s or Luke’s, contemporaries. Even devotional works that do not themselves explicitly evoke their own culture in many cases do so implicitly; for instance, frames used in altarpieces typically incorporate architectural elements, implying that the figure within it is, as it were, alive and well in that very church at that very moment.42
Augustine, for Protestants the most influential patristic writer, explicates these issues in his commentary on the psalms. Challenging the assertion that Christ dies anew every Easter, he insists that it “happened but once,” yet “the yearly remembrance brings before our eyes, in a way, what once happened long ago.”43 The emphasis on sight, as well as the qualifying “in a way,” recalls to us, as it must have to many of his Renaissance and earlier readers, Paul’s observation that fallen man sees through a glass darkly. In “Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward,” Donne’s question “Could I behold” (21, 23), repeated and stressed through anaphora, also emphasizes the limitations on human vision, and later in his discourse on the psalms Augustine stresses our inability adequately to mourn Christ’s death.
While acknowledging those restrictions, however, Augustine is concerned to emphasize the affective power of representation: that yearly remembrance, he explains, “stirs in us the same emotions as if we beheld our Lord hanging upon the cross” (207). Earlier in the same discourse he draws attention to the motive impelling the re-creation of the event: “for fear we should forget what occurred but once, it is re-enacted every year for us to remember” (207). Augustine in effect warns us against oversimplifying the putative contrast between the immediacy of presence and the detachment of representation.
Indeed, a number of theological treatises and traditions devote themselves to techniques through which our ability to re-create and represent scriptural events can be heightened within the parameters of its inevitable limitations. In particular, both Catholic and Reformed meditative traditions emphasize strategies for creating a mental image of a scriptural episode or character. One stage in the Ignatian meditation is the compositio loci, in which one pictures the place being contemplated, attempting to create physical immediacy.44 Also highly influential in early modern England, as Barbara K. Lewalski insists in her corrective to an exclusive focus on Catholic writings, were the extensive Protestant writings on meditation.45 Here too, despite the predictable recommendations to meditate on sermons and other linguistic texts, making scriptural events and characters present visually is promoted; Joseph Hall, for example, assures his readers that if one masters the art of meditation, “wee see our Saviour with Steven, we talke with God as Moses.”46
The significance of these issues in early modern England was intensified by their connection to two distinct but related theological cruxes especially germane to the relationship between immediacy and distance: the eucharistic debates about Real Presence and the millennial controversies. Whereas the Reformers distinguished their interpretations from Catholic doctrine on eucharistic presence, they are divided among themselves on the issue, and their positions are complex enough that a brief summary risks oversimplification. Zwingli’s “memorialism,” the most radical of those position, defines the sacrament as a so-called “ordinary” sign representing what is absent—in other words, a sign with no natural link to what is being signified. Luther’s “ubiquitarianism” or “consubstantiation,” in contrast, maintains that Christ, present in all things, is hence present as well in the Eucharist. Calvin effects a kind of compromise through his “virtualism,” the assertion that Christians do not receive Christ’s body and blood carnally but are invested with the virtue of it.47
Apocalyptic and millenarian assertions, which intensified in their frequency and their political ramifications during the seventeenth century, in a sense involve the obverse temporality, that is, the possibility that events prophesied in the Bible will be realized immediately or shortly. In commenting on the proximity of the apocalyse, early modern writers were, of course, drawing on a long exegetical tradition, but the Reformation encouraged its application to contemporary events. That practice was modeled and stimulated in particular by John Bale’s presentation of the pope as the Antichrist and by his friend John Foxe’s application and extension of this and other connections between Revelations and the Reformation. Many other Protestant thinkers followed suit, for example, by emphasizing that the number of letters in Archbishop Laud’s name adds up to eighteen and that the devil is associated with the sequence 666.
All these theological debates about presence and presentness are germane in that two texts I will examine closely, Marvell’s “Bermudas” and Milton’s Nativity Ode, deploy literary strategies for suggesting both immediacy and distance in the course of exploring to what extent fallen man can experience Eden and the birth of Christ respectively with the immediacy of the original time and place. Arguably the rise of religious poetry in the seventeenth century, like the increasing urgency of apocalyptic and millenarian debates, intensified the culture’s interest in the relationship between immediacy and distance, a relationship explored through lyric as well as in many other venues. Once again one is reminded that English Renaissance lyric needs to be discussed in terms of many historical subdivisions. Yet one must posit those subdivisions with care; although it is likely that the seventeenth-century vogue for religious lyrics heightened interest in the dialogue between presence and distance, these issues were actively debated in prose texts of the sixteenth century. As Debora Kuller Shuger has cogently shown, the concerns about absence and loss that surface in the religious lyrics of the seven-teeth century appear also in prose by Lancelot Andrewes, Richard Hooker, and other sixteenth-century theologians.48
In any event, much as the psalms profoundly influenced even secular lyrics, so too the doctrinal disputes in question offered models and analogues for many texts that have nothing to do with religion; these debates may be heard as a significant though subterranean subtext when early modern lyrics attempt to negotiate the relationship among presentness, representation, and distance. As the Donne poem on which this chapter opened reminds us, many early modern lyrics resist being classified in terms of either the immediacy conventionally associated
with lyric or the distance and deceit commonly linked to representation; like the theological discussions, they move among various versions of apparent poles, and often that movement is itself part of their meanings. Moreover, as we have seen, meditative practices stress that the immediacy of spiritual vision sometimes is achieved only gradually and laboriously; and, similarly, many poems examined below, present both immediacy and distancing as processes.
At poetry readings in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the author often intersperses patter with the presentation of the poems. Although the styles of delivering these conversational remarks are as varied as the styles of the texts they accompany, certain functions do recur—demonstrating that the term “patter,” though regularly used by writers themselves for this practice, inappropriately attributes to it a kind of casualness and even pointlessness that is far from the case. Usually the patter is more conversational and quotidian than the poems; thus it creates a contrast with their linguistic registers, in its close juxtaposition with the lyric representing the default position from which, Jonathan Culler rightly claims, lyrics typically deviate.49 (Typically, not universally, one might add. One measure of Billy Collins’s refusal of the intense registers associated with lyricism is that at his readings it is not always clear when the patter ends and the poem itself starts. Indeed, his work could usefully clarify the distinctions between lyric and lyricism.) The function of creating a contrast with the text itself is, of course, particularly marked when what Frye famously called the “radical of presentation” is song. But the poet’s interspersed comments can serve to provide not simply a contrast but also a bridge, allowing the reading to encompass poems of very different types and moods. I myself have sometimes switched from a couple of lyrics about my mother’s death to poems on, say, dill or irises, wanting to provide some relief from the wrenching subject matter of the first texts; to move from one to the other without the sort of preparation for the audience that patter can provide would itself be wrenching.