The Challenges of Orpheus

by Heather Dubrow

  Another approach for future work would be to explore how and why the dialogic and choric propensities of lyric as much as its inwardness are an arena for the development of the subject; Ramie Targoff’s argument that social rules formulate the self in devotional situations is not unproblematical, but one could build on her insights by considering the cognate possibility that it is through interaction as much as meditation that the self is defined in lyric.10 Similarly, future studies could profitably consider whether lyric contributes to the development of subjectivity as much by the positionalities it designs for its audiences as by its speaker’s voice. Indeed, despite the widespread demonization of that student and victim of demons Freud, he could be fruitfully adduced in this context: the process of voicing that is critical rather than identificatory, that repeats words in an ironic or twisted form much as the dissonant singer of psalms might do, is strikingly similar to the Freudian theory that the self develops by incorporating but also criticizing a superego.

  Although, as I have noted, an extensive discussion of other eras is outside the scope of The Challenges of Orpheus, one of its aims has been to develop perspectives from which students of those periods could themselves profitably reconsider fundamental questions about lyric. The following brief samples of and suggestions for that endeavor are among the several reasons the title of this conclusion deploys the plural, “rhetorics.” To begin with, adducing some of the analyses from this study could illuminate issues about the relationship of speaker and audience, including their manifestations in cruxes of both canonical and less familiar texts, in periods other than the English Renaissance. Recalling the shifting direction of address and the volatility of the audience’s subject position in early modern lyric, consider, for example, the moment in “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” when Wordsworth famously turns to direct address to Dorothy.11 On one level, in so doing he gains sustenance from her and an antidote to the losses the poem elsewhere chronicles: “in thy voice I catch / The language of my former heart” (117–118).12 On another level, in lines whose speech act swerves among declaration, prophecy, and injunction (“Nor …wilt thou then forget” [147–150], “Nor wilt thou then forget” [156]), his brotherly address acquires an avuncular didacticism. But, alerted by the insistence in the copulatio and epizeuxis earlier in the verse stanza (“my dearest Friend, / My dear, dear Friend …My dear, dear Sister” [116–117, 122]), as well as by the covert agendas uncovered in my analyses of early modern audiences, readers are likely to note the limitations on the interpersonal intimacy apparently established by the turn to direct address, a pattern we encountered in early modern lyric as well. And just as those lyrics often problematize the relationships established through address, here the interlocking roles of comforted and comforter apparently facilitated by that turn are qualified and questioned in many ways; the verse paragraph is weighted down with apotropaic negatives referring to what must not happen; and, like the opening of the poem, it stresses the losses inherent in passing time. In short, this passage, like so many others we have studied, demonstrates the significance of changes in address—and in so doing demonstrates too how often it is precisely within those changes that we discover the poet’s desires in not only the erotic sense relevant to early modern lyric but also the broader sense germane here.

  Poetry more recent than Wordsworth’s also offers intriguing instances of how both overt meaning and covert agendas emerge when one studies the relationship of speaker and audience from the perspectives employed in Chapter 2. As I demonstrated there, when one recognizes that a coterie of gallants, or of women, or both might overhear within the diegetic world of the poem—a possibility to which early modern readers would be particularly alert because of the nondiegetic lack of privacy to which I referred—such texts as “Blame not my lute” and many sonnets in the Amoretti become even nastier. Future readings of the poems in Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters might explore how they are mirror images of these early modern practices. As Hughes’s title indicates, these lyrics speak to Sylvia Plath—or, more precisely, a representation of her—directly through second person pronouns, whereas many Renaissance love poems ostensibly turn their back on the lady. On the other hand, to the extent that living readers are imagined as bystanders, Hughes’s missives, like their early modern counterparts, are involved in the rhetoric of self-justification. Once again, anxieties about judges shape direction of address.

  My argument that malleability of size and structure is often a more significant factor in interpreting early modern lyrics than the mode’s putative brevity glosses texts by numerous writers of other periods as well. For instance, Robert Lowell’s “Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” a poem that pivots on rupture and return, also enacts those processes in the history of its many versions, and Americanists could fruitfully analyze it from the perspectives developed in Chapter 4. In particular, the stanza about Our Lady of Walsingham appears in the version published in Lord Weary’s Castle in 1946, while twenty-eight years later, in Robert Lowell’s Poems: A Selection, edited by Jonathan Raban, it is detached and printed as a separate lyric; in his collected poems, it migrates back to its original home. Thus the spiritual hope that it represents, in however ironized a form, and more specifically the turn to Catholicism, is profferred, rejected, restored.

  Medieval literature offers a telling example of how another of the arguments of The Challenges of Orpheus, the contention that lyric may impel, not just impede, narrative, could be exported to other fields. Set off from the text in some manuscripts by the title “Canticus Troili” and by one of Chaucer’s self-consciously distancing frames (“I dar wel seyn, in al, that Troilus / Seyde in his song” [I.396–397]), Troilus’s song in Book I, lines 400–420 might at first appear a textbook instance of the deferrals of narrativity often associated with lyric.13 But it is succeeded immediately by two stanzas in which Troilus addresses the god of love, beginning, “O lord, now youres is / My spirit” (422–423). The use of the exclamatory “O” here links the rhetoric of this passage to that of the preceding lament. Even more to the point, alerted by the wording of lines 422–423 and two subsequent usages of “lord” (424, 430), a medieval audience would have interpreted these stanzas as a pledge of fealty to the lover’s equivalent of a feudal lord—in other words, as an action carrying with it the obligation to perform many future actions. Hence here, as in many other instances, lyric recalls the workings of that often misunderstood strategy, so-called comic relief. Much as lyric reflections are conventionally read as an interruption to narrative, so those comic episodes have often been interpreted as a temporary blockage in the dramatic and narrative action; and, much as that “relief” in fact frequently comments on the main action in a way that complicates and intensifies it, so Chaucer’s passage intensifies and in so doing instigates narrative. Thus the turning to the god of love is the product of the lament; thus an indisputably lyric passage advances, not interrupts, the progress of the story.

  The arguments made in this book have implications not only for specific texts but also for broader literary and cultural inquiries. Witness, for example, debates about the dramatic monologue, a form as slippery as some of the characters who deliver it. The object of a number of subtle studies, this genre has proved the arena for highly contested debates, with students of Victorian literature parting company on subjects that include its sources, its relationship to modern literature, and its central characteristics. Many of their analyses, however, are based on neglecting or misreading the early modern lyric, especially the work of Donne and Marvell, in order to establish differences between it and the dramatic monologue. (This desire to locate the exceptional, especially the harbinger or prototype of change, in the period in which one specializes has all too many analogues in the criticism of early modern texts.)14 In fact, we have already seen that the identificatory voicing used by some critics to distinguish lyric from various other forms, including the dramatic monologue, is not a consistent characteristic of early modern lyric
and perhaps less common in its counterparts in other eras. Indeed, Marshall Brown argues that all poems are to some extent dramatic monologues.15

  Similarly, among the most contested subjects in the study of the dramatic monologue is to what extent, if at all, the nondiegetic audience experiences sympathy for the main figure and to what extent instead passes judgment; and here too critics have often gone astray by addressing lyric in general baldly and early modern lyric not at all.16 To be sure, John Maynard’s work on the dramatic monologue does dovetail with my arguments about lyric by emphasizing how the reader’s shifting positions complicate judgment and so much else.17 But many other students of the dramatic monologue accept without qualification the commonplace that lyric does not encourage judgment, thus facilitating an overly neat contrast between the forms.

  Also relevant to that putatively nineteenth-century type the dramatic monologue is how I have here anatomized the motives—often dubious—that inform definitions and descriptions of literary types. Teleological approaches risk misreading literary forms in the interest of establishing them as an improvement over a demonized predecessor or an anticipation of a privileged successor. Thus students of Victorian poetry sometimes create a chronology that turns a statement like “The dramatic monologue is a character study with a listener present” into “The dramatic monologue is what reacted against and ensued from the Romantic lyric” or “The dramatic monologue prefigures modern poetry.” Such analyses are not without truth, but they carry with them the customary dangers of progress models and of Oedipal scenarios, as well as the risk I just identified of ignoring similar patterns in Renaissance lyrics.

  Recognizing such dangers also alerts us to how an examination of Renaissance lyric from the vantage points of this book could provide a useful matrix for some future studies of contemporary verse, including experimental poetry (though, given the range and complexity within that category, these suggestions are necessarily even more preliminary than the examples that precede them). The absence in early modern texts of qualities that many Language poets attribute to lyric in their dismissive commentaries on it, such as a solipsistic focus on the individual, calls some of their analyses into question, reminding us yet again of the subterranean agendas that so often distort the study of lyric. At the same time, early modern antecedents to characteristics frequently and sometimes exclusively associated with the experimental writing of our own age, such as an emphasis on the visual appearance of the poem, could help us better understand the poetry of both periods. Similarly, tracing parallels between the seriality often attributed to postmodern poetry and the early modern sonnet cycle might well be productive. Although certain sequences do achieve the sort of decisive closure that distinguishes them from serial forms, most do not; and they share with such forms a predilection for the disjunctive and the labile. The methodological agenda of this comparison should not be to substitute for the celebration of the postmodern period as the originary moment of seriality a comparable privileging of the early modern, but rather to recall yet again the dubious investments that often impel such acclaim and the selective reading of texts outside one’s own specialty that facilitates it.

  Many examples above focus on similarities between early modern and other poems, but of course extending the arguments of The Challenges of Orpheus to other eras uncovers no less significant differences, and both are apparent in the arenas of gender. For example, in asserting that poetry should be like granite, Ezra Pound contrasts that ideal with the putative practices of his Victorian predecessors, thus implicitly effeminizing them while asserting the masculinity of his own verse; arguably experimental poets craft verse that is hard in more senses than one in reaction against the flaccidity they attribute to that contemned category lyric.18 Future studies might usefully compare these recent practices of gendering to the ways Sidney re-genders lyric, beginning with the observation that the military ideal and the public celebratory stance of poetry of praise are more accessible to him as an alternative realm for a masculinized lyric than they were to many subsequent writers.

  In addition, transhistorical comparisons could fruitfully encompass the conditions of production. For example, participating as it does in the current challenges to the binary contrast of scribal versus print culture, The Challenges of Orpheus invites one to observe parallels between modes of writing often categorized as scribal in early modern England and their analogues in our own culture. Interactions among writers today permit and even facilitate many characteristics associated with scribal transmission. Poets in the twenty-first century share their work informally with each other all the time; in one common version of this, the round robin, a poem will be passed around among a circle of writers, each of whom will comment on it, often adding a poem of her or his own. Lines suggested by another poet may well be incorporated into a later version of the text. Writing workshops, an activity in which not only novice but established writers often participate, involve a similar circulation of manuscripts. In both instances, having in effect shared authorship with those making suggestions, the original poet will reassert agency and control over the text by winnowing the recommended revisions. The striking similarities between early modern coterie circulation and twenty-first century practices like the round robin are, then, yet another reason to reject a historical trajectory that positions characteristics putatively associated with scribal culture, such as coterie exchange, in the distant past. This is not to deny that contemporary practices also differ from their early modern analogues in significant respects; for example, the exchange of poetry was but one of many social and socializing activities within early modern coteries, while it is generally the primary focus of modern workshops. And whereas poets in our own day do still transmit their texts by hand or by traditional mail, one might explore how the potentialities of electronic mail have reshaped such exchanges.

  In addition to suggesting new directions like these for critics of early modern literature and their counterparts in other fields, The Challenges of Orpheus has implications for certain professional procedures. Like virtually all my previous books, this study has attempted to foster a more capacious and generous approach to critical methodologies. Whereas some of them are obviously incompatible with each other in their practices and assumptions, many apparent in-compatabilities are posited to fulfill political agendas, notably the drive to establish one’s own cohort as the victors over the forces of darkness. In demonizing New Criticism, many assume it necessarily and inevitably mandated an ahistorical focus on deracinated texts; that perspective was certainly normative in the movement, yet the writings of one of its deans, William Empson, exemplify the need to challenge a totalizing representation of New Criticism on this and other issues.19 Indeed, comparing its English and American versions and even distinctions within America might tempt us to refer to it as a series of related movements. More to the point now, close attention to the text should not be seen as synonymous with New Criticism in any of its versions, and many techniques of close reading can and should be deployed today to further historicized analysis.

  The same is true of the recuperation of form. Having demonstrated and defended what I termed the “new formalism” for about twenty years in a professional climate less hospitable to such arguments than the current one, it is a pleasure to be preaching, if not to the choir, at least to committed and potential converts.20 The goals of the recent drive to develop a redefined formalism are supported and exemplified by this book. My exploration of stanzas, for example, demonstrates the connections among form, cultural history, and materialist analysis. Perhaps it is not wholly coincidental that my enjoinders to trace cooperation and collaboration, not just warfare, in the relationship between narrative and lyric, as well as that among authors, readers, printers, and publishers, trope these recommendations about critical approaches. In particular, to dismiss the study of form as old-fashioned is to cast as a demonic siren what is in fact a far more protean and promising member of our professional choruses. More specifi
cally, as I have argued at length elsewhere when demonstrating and defending this new formalism, to see the aesthetic, whether manifested through form or other strategies, as an Enlightenment construct inimical to progressive political analysis is to reduce complexities to another either/or binary.21 My analysis of stanzas also indicates how questions about subjectivity and agency that preoccupy so many critics today are, so to speak, informed by aesthetic issues; my emphasis on the solitary work involved in producing an elaborate metrical or stanzaic pattern complicates common presuppositions about the relationship of the individual writer to an audience, coterie or otherwise. As this book has pointed out on more than one occasion, Adorno reminds us that the apparently asocial aesthetic space of literature can enable experiments that have not only social but profoundly political consequences.22 But I am not advocating the recuperation of the study of form solely on the grounds that it can help us understand materiality and other recent critical concerns. Techne is worth exploring in its own right; and surely, as I have attempted to demonstrate, one can not only analyze but also delight in the resulting accomplishments without reverting to belles-lettristic platitudes or to the uncritical acclamation of an autonomous author.