The Challenges of Orpheus

by Heather Dubrow

  To avoid the problems in even these revisionist studies, critics need to refine the models currently deployed for the interaction of narrative and lyric and develop new ones. Although the first group of models involve conflicts variously won by narrative and by lyric, the succeeding varieties of cooperation are, I argue, no less significant and no less intriguing. To begin with, however, much as clear-cut contrasts between the modes are by no means hard to find, so too do hostile takeover bids occur in early modern texts, as in the poetry of many other cultures. The writing of lyric provides a moratorium from cultural struggles and yet at the same time enables a more effective participation in them, as Theodor W. Adorno so famously observes in “Lyric Poetry and Society”; so too does the participation in it sometimes provide a temporary break from the responsibilities and pressures of narrative, but in such instances not lyric but the rival genre may insist on the termination of that hiatus.27 At once writ large and rewritten in Book VI of The Faerie Queene, with Pastorella representing not only the genre to which her name refers but also lyric in general, this pattern appears as well in many individual lyrics. The temporality that will turn Richard Lovelace’s eponymous grasshopper from verdancy to green ice is represented through the shift from the exclamatory mode we often find in lyric (“Oh thou that swing’st upon the waving haire / Of some well-filled Oaten Beard” [1–2]) to the declarative past perfect statements often associated with narrative (“Golden Eares are Cropt; / Ceres and Bacchus bid good night” [13–14]).28 Offering an intriguing parallel to this and other victories by narrative, in Giacomo Puccini’s opera Turandot, our hero Calaf sings of his love for Turandot while a procession related to the impending execution of a previous suitor moves across the stage, a spatial analogue to the narrative about the victim; Calaf’s song and its values only briefly interrupt the music and tale related to that slaughter, and, indeed, we are ironically aware that the sentiments he expresses potentially impel, not impede, the story of death inasmuch as he risks becoming Turandot’s next victim.

  But if narrative sometimes conquers lyric in these and related respects, in other poems it is lyric that emerges victorious, supporting again, though with the relative strength of the warring camps reversed, the model of hostile takeovers. Incisively glossing one of the most intriguing examples of the interruption of narrative and the permanent triumph of lyric and what it symbolizes, Susan Stewart points out that the praxis of Augustine’s Confessions is a turn from his sinful life, a world of narrativity described in the past tense, to a spiritual world associated with the present tense and implicitly linked to lyric.29 A similar spiritual dynamic impels the triumph of lyric in certain early modern poems. As we have already observed, whereas on one level the conclusion of Herbert’s “Collar”—“Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child! / And I reply’d, My Lord” (35—36)—is the final incident in a narrative, on another the lines apparently effect the transformation from a world of action to one of meditation, though they do so through what could aptly be described as a version of narrative resolution. Northrop Frye suggests that what he terms the “private poem” is often the product of a blockage, such as frustrated love; as the instances of St. Augustine and Herbert again demonstrate, lyric may also itself effectively frustrate narrative.30

  Pace St. Augustine and Herbert, however, the conquest of worldly narrativity by lyric spirituality may be qualified and partial. At first glance, Donne’s “Good-friday, 1613. Riding Westward” appears to offer a textbook example of that victory, contrasting as it does the material body’s movement in the fallen world with the soul’s meditations about Christ: “I am carryed towards the West / This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East” (9–10).31 In other words, to borrow the term Stewart uses so skillfully at many points in Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, in a poem that is about leanings in many senses of the term, the soul arguably “intends” towards lyric, away from narrative; according to this reading, it is “fully persuasive,” as one fine reader puts it, in its staging of the effects of grace.32 But in fact that pattern is complicated and compromised: “bends” (10) obviously also suggests a version of movement, and, as some of the most acute readings it has received have argued, the turn towards Christ, like many of the other turns in verse, is partial and ambiguous.33

  Of course, the victory or partial victory of lyric over narrative need not be imbued with spiritual resonances. In Donne’s “Sunne Rising,” the invasion of the sun represents the apparent victory of narrativity, subsequently contested by the battalions of lyric. Not only does the poem in effect tell a story about the sun, but the sun’s entrance carries with it the preconditions for narrative, the assumption of a before and an after, in this case the unchanging world of consummated love and the subsequent time when it has been threatened. It is telling that both the challenges to the sun’s power and the closural assertion that such challenges have triumphed banish the grammar of action verbs and substitute the stillness of predication, the grammatical formula “x is y”: “She’is all States, and all Princes, I” (21), Donne famously writes, and the poem concludes on another instance of predication, “This bed thy center is, these walls, thy spheare” (30).34

  Although the examples of lyric impeding narrative that I have just been examining are intriguing, the generalization about the conflictual relationship between the two modes that they substantiate is no surprise. More surprising and no less important is how often, rather than blocking narrative, lyric enables it, matching not Dido but Lavinia with Aeneas and in so doing making sure the dynasties are founded in time.35 In its revisionist emphasis on these instances, this chapter, like several other sections of the book, attempts to counter a tendency in literary studies to project its own competitive hierarchies onto a number of literary arenas.

  One reason lyric enables narrative is that, unlike Lavinia, it often functions not as an icon of stability but rather as source and symbol of an intensification, a wind-up that must be released in action. In some of these instances, the result is literally that end so often attributed to narrative, sexual consummation, so that the lyric functions as a kind of heightening of emotion and sensation leading to its release; we may recall the double meanings of “increase.” Peter Brooks and others have claimed that narrative itself effects a release; but in many such cases it is precisely the interplay between that mode and lyric that is instrumental.36 In other instances, the intensification allows the speaker or the text to make war, not love: what is released is aggression. As Robert Kaufman has incisively emphasized, Adorno makes lyric safe for progressive politics by arguing that it creates the lyric moment, a ruptural space of experimentation that facilitates the recognition of the new; the lyric moment thus functions like the revolutionary moment often posited by some Marxist theorists, that is, the point when cultural conflicts have intensified to the point of explosive change.37

  Early modern texts provide many instances of how lyric meditation can propel narrative action. Arguably the song of the nymphs in the sixth stanza of Spenser’s “Prothalamion” creates a kind of energy that facilitates the swans’ progress to London; the breeding of the song in the “undersong” (110) of the other nymphs anticipates the breeding of the brides, and the murmuring of the water that enables their journey represents another echo of the song.38 The direction of address in Donne’s “Funerall” is not the least complexity in this splendid poem, but on some levels the author’s reflections on the hair are internalized, manifesting an increasing anger that culminates in the final stanza of the poem. There his move from a partly playful religious reference and a command that someone else bury the hair sometime in the future to the insistence that the speaker is performing that action now—“since you would save none of mee, I bury some of you” (24)—exemplifies the ways lyric reflection can lead to the activities of narrative. In other instances, the action in question includes the type involved in speech acts. Not surprisingly, the meditations in Donne’s other lyrics also often culminate in commands: “Twicknam Ga
rden” turns from laments to a series of orders (and thence to reflections whose direction of address is ambiguous), while the grieving meditations that occupy most of the “Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day” lead to imperatives to other lovers and to the speaker’s decision to prepare for his own death.

  Such poems thus encourage us to reevaluate yet another common assumption about lyric. Recognizing the types of heightening I am analyzing, many critics have observed that the mode often moves towards an epiphany, a pattern of which this chapter has found numerous instances. But rather than achieving insight—that is, rather than seeing into, seeing inwards—lyrics may enable, even demand, the process of speaking out and in so doing reaching outwards to the social circles that, as I have repeatedly observed, are so important a component of many types of lyric.

  In addition to impelling action through this kind of heightening and tightening, lyric may more directly generate narrative action by releasing whatever is blocking it, which recalls Frye’s brief but suggestive association of that mode with moments of blockage.39 In a text to which I will turn in the concluding chapter, Milton’s Comus, Sabrina’s song literally releases the Lady, thus also allowing the praxis of moving towards the parents’ house to continue. In another operatic analogue, it is Orpheus’s song in Monteverdi’s opera that releases a blockage and enables him to visit the underworld; in “La Traviata,” Violetta’s intriguingly echoed aria “Sempre libera” opens by reinforcing the barrier between the lovers but is echoed and reshaped in a way that advances the action and enables the love scene that directly follows, for that and other reasons assuming some of the functions usually attributed to recitativo. As I observed in my analysis of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender in Chapter 2, the Latin verb for meditation, meditor, can denote certain preparations for action, that is, exercise and practice, as well as designing and intending, while the Hebrew word for the same concept can suggest plotting.40

  Also, of course, lyric may lead to action in another sense because of its rhetorical efficacy, though often this is action that presumably occurs after the poem has ended rather than within its diegetic confines. Early modern readers must have been aware how many sonnets and other love songs were persuasion poems, whether or not they advertised that aim. The titles in George Gascoigne’s Hun-dreth Sundrie Flowres, a text that, as we have seen, repeatedly interweaves lyric and narrative, often stress the rhetorical agenda of the succeeding lines. The twenty-third poem in his Devises of Sundrie Gentlemen purports to be sent to accompany a ring, and Shakespeare’s “Lover’s Complaint” reminds us, if we needed reminding, that such gifts carry with them agendas. More subtly, the title “Corinna’s Going A-Maying” assumes the rhetorical success of the persuasion poem it introduces, substituting its certainty for the invitation on which the poem concludes, “let’s goe a Maying” (70).41

  Lyric in the sense of a material text in that mode may also generate narrative in a different respect: many texts incorporate situations in which encountering a poem leads to an attempt to find an explanation for it. In the opening sequence of Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania, attracted by a light and an apparently newly written sonnet, the title character soon also finds its author, Perissus. Indeed, texts are often discovered, deracinated from their author, in prose romances (thus miming conditions of production examined in the preceding chapter). In other circumstances too, lyric may create a puzzle that narrative attempts to solve, in so doing intensifying the effect of the lyric, as James Schiffer has shown.42 The implicit “plot” of the procreation sonnets, he suggests, helps us to interpret Sonnet 20, and Sonnet 147 can be glossed through the triangle suggested in Sonnet 144 and elsewhere.

  I have been focusing primarily on how lyric may lead to narrative and to action, but the opposite, narrative culminating on lyric, occurs in many different forms—and thus again encourages one to challenge the expectation that a conflictual relationship between them is normative, even virtually inevitable. This is not to deny that on occasion the lyric termination of narrative can be a rejection, even a rebuke: the stillness at the end of Milton’s Nativity Ode suggests that not only the pagan gods but also narrative has been banished, at least temporarily.43 Yet a poem examined earlier, Ben Jonson’s “Celebration of Charis in Ten Lyrick Peeces,” demonstrates how seamless the connection between storytelling and the lyric transcendence it introduces can on occasion be. Intriguing in this and so many other respects, this poem—or series of poems—introduces the narrative act in its first text (“if then you will read the storie” [13]) and devotes the second and third to recounting the events in this love.44 “Her Triumph,” a lyric celebration of the lady, seems to be the product of those narratives, as if the energies for this tribute had been released by them, the obverse of the lyrics whose energies release narrative. The twenty-third sonnet in Spenser’s Amoretti (“Penelope for her Ulisses sake”) exemplifies its genre’s potentiality of starting on a story and culminating on a meditation on it, a predilection often facilitated by the movement from octet to sestet or from the body of the poem to its couplet. Generically complex in the ways I have already identified, dream visions may also move from a narrative about the dream to a meditation on it, and sometimes back again. In Chapter 1, I examined a fascinating instance in Robert Herrick, the poem “Vision” that begins “Me thought I saw (as I did dreame in bed)” (he writes two with that title).45 Because of the relative paucity of dream visions in early modern texts, for another apt example we can usefully turn to Chaucer: in his “Book of the Duchess” the act of reading the story of Alcyone and Seyes leads to the dream of the birds, and the narrative about encountering the knight in black culminates on his lyric complaint.

  The reader encounters similar shifts in item 109 in the manuscript of poems compiled by Henry Stanford, a poem about whether the speaker’s eye and heart should be blamed for love. This lyric is structured around a series of episodes involving those organs, with the words “An other tyme” (7) and “At last” (14) emphasizing the temporal shifts associated with narrativity:

  Calling to mynd myn eye went long about

  to cause my hart for to forsake my brest

  All in a rage I thought to pull yt out

  by whose devise I lyved in such unrest

  what could he saye then to regayn my grace?

  forsothe that yt had sene his mistres face

  An other tyme I cald unto my mynd

  It was my hart that all my woe had wrought

  … … … … …

  I found my self the cause of all my smart

  and told my self my self now slaye I will

  but when I saw my self to you was true

  I loved my self because my self loved you.

  (1–8, 15–18)46

  But, as is often the case in love lyrics, the reader focuses not on those incidents but on the lover’s responses and unchanging devotion, qualities that gesture towards lyric; moreover, the opening words, “Calling to mynd” (1) encourage us to read this as a reflection on previous reflections, like Shakespeare’s twelfth sonnet.

  My opening instances from Wyatt and Herbert draw attention to one of the most significant ways narrative and lyric may interact. It is no accident that both of those poems involve allusions to the future, for modal conflation often occurs in a form we might term the “anticipatory amalgam” inasmuch as in foreseeing events that may occur it blends modes and temporalities. Although Sharon Cameron does not comment specifically on this phenomenon, such conflations are related to patterns she traces throughout her study of lyric temporality, the overlapping of time frames and the attempt to convert fixed time.47 Threats, prophecies, and promises—speech acts that are intriguingly similar in a number of ways—are all instances of anticipatory amalgams; and, returning to Wittgenstein’s model of family resemblances, summarized in my introductory chapter as a model for studying genre, one might also link this kind of conflation to sexual fantasies and dreams.

  These amalgams are types of text, often associated with futur
e tense narration, that combine qualities of narrative and lyric by referring to events that generally are explicitly or implicitly flagged as not having occurred in what is diegetically identified as a “real” world—and that may and may or may not do so at some point. Hence on some level they occur within the speaker’s mind. If these in stances often involve events in the future, they may also blur and displace time sequences, creating the fuzzy temporality about which David Herman has recently written well, and, as I will suggest shortly, also in some respects imitating the lyric present.48 For example, as we have seen, the sixth stanza of “My lute, awake!” opens on a line implicitly set in the future but without the auxiliary “will”; the central section of “The Collar” both enacts the freedom that will come from going abroad and anticipates it.

  As this description and the Wyatt poem on which this chapter opened demonstrate, anticipatory amalgams recall Gerald Prince’s category of “the disnarrated,” which he defines as “all the events that do not happen but, nonetheless, are referred to (in a negative or hypothetical mode) by the narrative text” (italics in original).49 Including as it does what could have happened but did not and many types of impossibility, Prince’s concept is a broad one, and so his analysis of its functions includes many less germane to anticipatory amalgams in particular, such as making the logic of the narrative clear. One reason it is fruitful to distinguish the category of anticipatory amalgams is that they assume distinctive functions relevant to the workings of lyric; another is that they crystallize the relationship of that mode to narrative.