More specifically, much as my instance from Wyatt not only locates itself in but also comments on temporality, so “The Collar” opens by both portraying and thematizing action: “I struck the board, and cry’d, No more. / I will abroad.”7 Narrativity is figured in the opening lines through the physical gesture on which the poem begins and prefigured in the anticipated restless movement of the speaker’s body (“I will abroad” [2]). Michael C. Schoenfeldt’s acute reading of this poem draws attention to its implicit rejection of silence, a form of passivity; one can add that when these initial lines recount and also discuss the action conventionally associated with narrative, the author is also turning storytelling itself into an alternative to that silence and hence into a trope for its alternative, the assertive autonomy that Schoenfeldt scrutinizes here and elsewhere in his study.8
Yet notice that the central activity in question, leaving the spiritual world of travail for an earthly pleasure dome of travel, is located in the future, much as Wyatt’s fantasy is. And, indeed, on one level almost all the succeeding lines, like their analogues in the selection from Wyatt, emphasize mental activity and anticipation, rather than events. As Richard Strier points out, our expectation that the opening will be followed by a story about what its speaker does abroad is frustrated.9 For example, immediately after declaring he will go abroad, he strenuously affirms his right to do so, recalling Wyatt’s insistence that he indeed is done and has done:
What? shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free; free as the rode,
Loose as the winde, as large as store.
Shall I be still in suit?
(3–6)
If the opening two lines thematize action, the third line does the same for lyric meditation, at once continuing to sigh about its limitations and apparently rejecting the world of complaint for the freedom of action.
The speaker’s lines may or may not be free, but in the passages between the queries in lines 3 and 6 and the conclusion, the lines between lyric and narrative modes indubitably blur yet again. His spiritual state is on a cusp, with rebellion certainly represented and the redemptive power of grace arguably adumbrated through references, however distorted in their current form, to wine and thorns.10 Similarly, the meditative mood of these lines is on a cusp for several reasons. If he is reflecting on the past, at the same time, as I suggested, the initial lines of the poem encourage us to read what ensues as a story about the consequences of the decision to travel, a story whose multiple audiences become more explicit in the final lines.
In some important senses the conclusion of the poem is the final incident in a narrative:
But as I rav’d and grew more fierce and wilde
At every word,
Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child!
And I reply’d, My Lord.
(33–36)
Indeed, the poem might be said to follow some of the formulas narratologists have established for that mode: the initial action is followed by the complications in the central part of the poem and by the resolution, a spiritual version of nostos, in the concluding four lines. Through the very act of telling this tale, the speaker assumes the role of dutiful child to God and perhaps preacher to other would-be sinners as well, the latter possibility recalling arguments also made about Herbert’s “Aaron” and “Church-floore”; as Chapter 2 indicates, that poet, like many other ministers, emphasizes the role of storytelling in preaching. Yet not the least effect of the use of “Me thoughts” (35) is to direct our attention again to the speaker’s mental processes. On one level this conclusion is a reflection on the perception expressed through “Me thoughts.” Much as he moves from fantasies of an outer world of pleasure to the presence of grace, so the text moves here from the fruits of the secular world of pleasure outside the speaker to the fruits of spirituality and inner peace. Notice, too, that in that transformation it is narrativity in some of its senses, not lyricism, that is associated with the transgressive and childish. All this is further complicated, however, by the anticlosural force of “Me thoughts” (35), which, like a comparable usage in a poem examined earlier, Herrick’s “Vision,” introduces the possibility of the repetition and entrapment so often associated with lyric.11 In short, modally as well as spiritually, the text abruptly moves between apparent opposites and thematizes other types of movement through that one.12
The two texts I have examined are not, of course, chosen at random: their methods of troping literary modes and their complex temporalities are not universally found in early modern lyric. But neither are they unique in these or many other respects, and the problems in the relationship between lyric and narrative that they crystallize recur repeatedly in early modern texts. Hence in demonstrating the complex relationships between narrative and lyric, my two opening poems mimetically invite the move from reflection to action enacted by the next section of this chapter, which aims to craft alternative methodological protocols for approaching the dilemmas those two lyrics reveal. In addition to resolving such methodological challenges, the critical community needs to design a series of new models for the relationship of the literary types in question. The texts by Wyatt and Herbert introduce a number of patterns to incorporate in doing so, such as the use of the future tense and the troubling of the boundaries between the two modes.
My purpose in opening on those poems is certainly not to suggest that a monolithic paradigm of hybridity should replace the equally rigid contrasts between lyric and narrative that are currently in use: their relationship assumes so wide a range of forms that no single pattern should be privileged as normative. Even when the line between lyric and narrative blurs, as it not infrequently does, hybridity, a concept used too readily and loosely in contemporary parlance, is sometimes but certainly not always the most apt description. This chapter aims to explore the range of ways elements of narrative and lyric variously supersede one another, suppress one another, and coexist, emphasizing that very variety.
In so doing, however, it also aims to redirect attention to one issue in particular. In re-envisioning the varied interactions of lyric and narrative, literary critics—not coincidentally members of a professional community too often roiled and soiled by a competitiveness that can destabilize the very concept of community—should also be especially alert to a pattern that is frequently neglected. In many instances, rather than attempting to impede or suppress each other, lyric and narrative may further common agendas. In some of these cases their boundaries blur, as they do in the poems by Wyatt and Herbert, and in others they remain distinct; but in either instance cooperation replaces co-option, and interplay is a more apt description than interruption.
As I just suggested, discussions of the connections between these two modes, like analyses of lyric audiences, insistently pose methodological challenges. Neither these problems nor their solutions are specific to the early modern period; but this chapter proceeds to demonstrate how they are related to that era’s more distinctive characteristics. Three such problems in particular need to be acknowledged and addressed: dubious definitions and the rankings they often encode or justify; that expectation of a combative relationship issuing in a clear victor; and the absence of historical distinctions.
The first problem, definitions, is initially complicated inasmuch as the ontological status of the narrativity in question may vary considerably, ranging from storytelling clearly represented within the text to its analogues in paratextual materials to its versions in the nondiegetic world, such as the situation in which a lyric is passed on as an event in an ongoing courtship. Moreover, in considering the interaction of the modes, critics too often rely on definitions and evaluative descriptions that are partial in more than one sense. Whereas the poems that I just examined demonstrate the range of temporalities that can characterize passages that are indubitably lyric, let alone those in which elements of lyric and narrative merge, students of narrative often repeat the commonplace that lyric is rooted in, and rootbound by, a static temp
orality. Conversely, critics whose primary work is in lyric risk associating narrative only with clear-cut events and unambiguous closure, ignoring the poststructuralist—and earlier—emphasis on the edginess of what may or may not be happening. Splendidly subtle as a lyric poet, the contemporary writer Heather McHugh falls into this very trap as a critic: poetry, she maintains, excitingly offers “a constant unsettling [that] undermine[s] the constitutional groundwork of narration,” neglecting the fact that narration itself often in fact posits seismically shifting ground.13
Such problems are endemic to the relational analysis of genres. To be sure, literary forms invite and often reward such comparisons; for example, the formal verse satire of the 1590s achieves some of its rhetorical energy from its determination not to be love poetry; science fiction both is and is not pastoral. At the same time, this type of relational definition is perilous, impelled as it often is by a covert agenda of privileging or defending one of the forms being compared, or, alternatively, denigrating the other. The Virgilian wheel tempts us to see pastoral, the form associated with the fledgling poet, as less sophisticated and less valuable than the epic putatively written during his mature years. Later critics have, as it were, reinvented the Virgilian wheel; thus Mikhail Bakhtin misreads romance in his eagerness to establish contrasts. Comparisons of genres are often driven less by an objective drive to explore than a covert need to celebrate one form as lacking the limitations and dangers of another, a variant of a schoolyard game: “My genre is bigger than your genre.”
In this instance, many students and celebrants of narrative represent it as the norm and lyric as hence both deviant and less powerful. Such a hierarchization of lyric and narrative would lead us simply to read the ending of “The Collar” as a return to narrative, authorized by the most powerful of all storytellers, after the temporary divagations of lyric complaint. Similarly, an analysis of Sir Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia represents its distinction between lyric and narrative as a contrast between “a static, idolatrous verse of the past (‘Petrarchan’) and fluid, allusive, emerging prose (‘Ovidian’)” and goes on to assert that the eclogues “present the author’s nostalgia for a lofty, rhetorically intricate, and conventional verse, even as they affirm, by contrast, the superiority of prose as a more supple means of literary expression.”14 Whereas this reading misrepresents Sidney’s verse (not least because it downplays the poetic experimentation and variety), the passage does map the territory of the author’s (and many other critics’) presuppositions and agendas; it reflects in particular how she historicizes her own rejection of a critical interest in aesthetic achievement, an approach putatively static in its relationship to newer critical methodologies and idolatrous in its enthusiasm for the text. Readings like this are often impelled by the move, incisively challenged in Robert Kaufman’s revisionist interpretations of Theodor W. Adorno among other studies, of associating lyric with an aestheticization that resists the engagement with historical change facilitated and troped by narrative.15
On the other hand, as the passage by Heather McHugh implies, those critics who identify themselves with lyric, whether because of its putative gendering or its centrality in their own work or both, are prone to establish narrative as a masculinist rival mode associated with an authoritarianism that should be and can be combatted by the excitingly powerful semiotic force of lyric. Susan Stanford Friedman effectively warns against such errors when emphasizing the polyvocality of narrative.16 And my samples from Wyatt and Herbert caution one about these oversimplified and self-serving rankings; for example, Wyatt’s narrator sometimes reaches out towards narrative for authority that he cannot in fact achieve.
However dubious, that comparative privileging of lyric by twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics has a distinguished lineage, though these predecessors often contrast narrative with poetry in general, taking lyric’s prototypical status as implicit but not unambiguous. Examples from many eras abound. Shelley’s comparison privileges the poetic, contrasting its organic and divine power with the limits of historical narrative in particular: “a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other bond of connexion than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the creator, which is itself the image of all other minds. The one is partial …the other is universal.”17 The Platonic values shaping the passage are apparent in the way the phrase “no other bond of connexion” trivializes precisely what narrative respects, that is, the workings of “time, place, circumstance, cause and effect.” Later in the century, the hierarchies adumbrated in such documents were to prove grist to Mill, though the author of the Principles of Political Economy is more explicit about his rankings than Shelley: the love of narrative, John Stuart Mill declares, is associated with the childhood of an individual and the “rude state” of a society.18
If the difficulty of defining lyric and narrative and the often related appetite for ranking them constitute the first methodological challenge, those implicit and sometimes explicit rankings generate a second problem: critics too often assume that encounters between lyric and narrative are a battleground on which the most powerful army enjoys a clear-cut final victory, though perhaps not without skirmishes where the other side gets in and temporarily appears to triumph. These readings typically and not coincidentally replicate the assumption that when rival narratives struggle for power, one of them, often identified with the discourses of the dominant culture, eventually suppresses and replaces the others.
In the instance of narrative and lyric, the winner-take-all paradigm depends on the type of clear contrast between narrative and lyric that the examples from Wyatt and Herbert call into question, as well as on an essentially conflictual conception of their relationship undermined by, for example, the multiple readings of Wyatt’s “I have done.” Feminine and potentially effeminizing, lyric, according to one version of this winner-take-all story, plays Dido to the Aeneas of narrative. Witness the critic who, while on the one hand stressing the role of the eclogues in presenting and inculcating the moral values of the text, nonetheless on the other hand draws his diction from commonplaces that recall that ill-fated Carthagian queen: “Writing eclogues was Sidney’s pastoral retreat from the responsibilities of narrative,” “an escape from another kind of constraint,” “as Sidney retreats from poetry into prose,” “an escape from the constraints of his narrative” (italics added).19 Or, to shift metaphors though not peninsulas, the ultimate powerless-ness of lyric is reflected in the fact that it cannot and should not prevent the trains of narrative from running—and running away from Dido—on time. In the obverse, twinned version favored by many other feminist scholars and numerous poststructuralists, feminist and otherwise, lyric, enhanced with the power of the semiotic, is an excitingly transgressive force that overturns the power of narrative; here, too, as the connection with Kristeva’s concepts of the semiotic and symbolic might imply, lyric is often gendered.
Encountered at many other junctures in this study, a third and closely related problem in studying the interplay of lyric and narrative involves incautiously importing generalizations from the period in which the critic specializes into the poetry of other time zones. Thus, for example, one scholar assumes the normativeness of a narrative that focuses on the quotidian.20 But, as Mary Thomas Crane reminds us, in the early modern period narrativity was associated with romance in particular and errancy in general—thus, one might add, not with a genre that makes those trains run on time but rather with one that transforms the trains into cavorting magic carpets.21
Early and enthusiastic registrants at most academic conferences, straw men are also all too likely to populate scholarly books. So it is important to acknowledge that the idols of our tribe catalogued above, powerful and perilous though they are, have in fact variously been avoided and critiqued by studies before this one. Although some of the alternatives that have been offered are not without their o
wn problems, my study gratefully builds on these important revisionist attempts. For example, highlighting the interplay of lyric and narrative, Timothy Bahti fruitfully avoids the oversimplified dichotomies that cannot speak to the complexities exemplified by the texts on which this chapter opened; but in so doing he attributes to lyrics a narrativelike movement from predication to conclusion, an argument that is at the very least compromised by, for example, the interpretation that suggests that Wyatt’s speaker is unreliable throughout.22 Having argued in an earlier essay for the gendered victory of a transgressive lyric, Susan Stanford Friedman subsequently stresses the interplay of the modes and then posits a continuing need for narrative by many women and people of color; Friedman does not, however, fully consider how lyric could and does serve some functions comparable to those she assigns to narrative.23
Particularly relevant to my study are the recent writings of a number of narratologists: although they focus mainly on nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts, as they rethink their mode in relation to lyric they suggest directions for the reverse undertaking. James Phelan has astutely complicated the relationship of the two types by denying the linkage of lyric to stasis, an important revisionist position supported at several junctures in The Challenges of Orpheus.24 Phelan adds further subtlety to that relationship by positing a third term that shares certain qualities of each mode, “portraiture,” and by tracing the interaction of the modes, and particularly their relationship to ethical criticism, in what he calls “lyric narrative.”25 Jay Clayton acutely explores what he terms “visionary moments” in narrative, moments that are clearly related to lyric, thus, like Phelan, modeling some ways of tracing the interaction of narrative and lyric.26 And, as we will shortly see, the reinterpretations of narrative temporality by a number of narratologists are particularly useful in addressing the future tense narrations in some of the passages on which this chapter opened.
The Challenges of Orpheus Page 29