Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush suppos’d a bear! (5.1.18–22)
To suppose the bush a bear, to see or read it as a bear (in the night, in the darkness, in the dream world), is not, or not only, a mistake; it is also a true reading, for the moment, at least. This is the power of strong imagination, and if Theseus’s tone is dismissive (like that of Lakoff and Turner’s “literal meaning theorist”), his words are truer than he understands them to be: the frightening bush/bear is not a mistake, but a creative act.
The literary critic Rosalie Colie describes what she calls “unmetaphoring” in the work of Shakespeare and other writers, whose practice of “unmetaphoring and remetaphoring familiar literary clichés” creates “new forms and patterns to bequeath to successors.”
An author who treats a conventionalized figure of speech as if it were a description of actuality is unmetaphoring that figure. Shakespeare’s quietly making the garden enclosed of virginal love the locus of Romeo’s second exchange with Juliet or his transforming a standard prop in the tableaux of noble melancholy into the specific skull of a dead friend [in Hamlet] are examples of the sort I mean.39
Remetaphoring is, for Colie, in part a reminder by the poet that culture and literary tradition think through figures—not the “conceptual” figures of Lakoff and Turner but literary figures, the language “bequeathed” from poet to poet.40
“The best in this kind are but shadows,” Theseus says to Hippolyta before they sit down to watch the play, explaining his forbearance with imperfect or unschooled performers, and in the play’s epilogue, Puck will remind the audience that the actors they have been watching, as well as the denizens of fairyland, are “shadows,” too. The fact that Theseus is a fiction—that these speculations on the power and limits of the imagination are spoken by a literary character imagined by a poet/playwright about whom much has been written and imagined—may gesture further toward the work of art as a mise en abyme: the frame within a frame, the dream within a dream, the play within a play, the door that opens only onto another door. Which is the figure and which is the ground? Which is the metaphor and which is the concept? Theseus may smile at the idea of a bush (mis)taken for a bear, but then he has not seen what the audience has seen: the “translated” Bottom, whose metaphorical status (“man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream”) is as powerful as his disconcertingly hybrid presence, half man, half beast (“methought I was—and methought I had”). Onstage Bottom is a walking and dreaming catachresis, a man with an ass’s head. Would we call such an onstage representation “literal”? It is certainly an example of creative “unmetaphoring.” The effect is to make the audience see something of the transformative—and dangerous—effect of figurative language.
Neither Theseus nor Hippolyta grasp the dimensions of this power, which is wielded in their play by the other royal pair, Oberon and Titania, the king and queen of fairies. Bottom’s metaphorical identity as an ass is violently unmetaphored by Oberon so that his estranged queen will awaken to find herself in love with a monster. Titania seems perfectly content in this erotic space of fantasy—it is her husband who decides to “pity” her “dotage” and to restore her to ordinary sight (“My Oberon, what visions I have seen,” she later reports. “Methought I was enamoured of an ass”). The wish and the unwish are both accomplished by the string-pulling Oberon, leaving Bottom unmoved and unscathed, ready to perform his part in yet another play, where yet another hybrid monster (a timorous amateur actor in a lion suit) menaces a young woman. As her histrionic lover, Bottom draws his sword and kills himself, to the amusement, rather than the horror, of the onstage audience watching the play:
BOTTOM [as Pyramus]: Now die, die, die, die, die.
DEMETRIUS: No die, but an ace for him; for he is but one.
LYSANDER: Less than an ace, man; for he is dead, he is nothing.
THESEUS: With the help of a surgeon he might yet recover, and prove an ass.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.295–299
Ace and ass were pronounced the same in Shakespeare’s time. Each was a “low” entity—the ass in the animal kingdom, the ace, the smallest number, so that Demetrius’s pun on “die” (the singular of “dice” as well as a familiar Renaissance pun on sexual climax) trivializes both Bottom’s language and the “death of Pyramus.” These joking spectators have not encountered the transformed figure of Bottom as an ass, but—uncannily—they rename him as one. In other words, their joke unwittingly re-creates the metaphor, the “vision” of Bottom-is-an-ass. They don’t know what they know. Their language speaks through them to us. But Lysander and Demetrius are themselves dramatic characters, literary creations. The profoundly trivial and yet astonishingly apt little conversation that we in the audience overhear offers us another insight into the many layers of this world of Dream. It is not because they are real that their words function in this dizzying way, but because they are figures: literary or dramatic figures speaking in figures of speech.
Language does change our world. It does make possible what we think and how we think it. This is one vital reason to read and study literature, rather than merely to apply its strategies. As for the conceptual metaphors, from “Life Is Fire” to “Death Is a Reaper”—perhaps we should look to the words of a former politician and rhetorical expert and ask what the meaning of is is.
Consider a wisely riddling observation by Harold Bloom from his powerful work of literary theory, The Anxiety of Influence, published in 1973 and subtitled A Theory of Poetry. “The meaning of a poem can only be another poem.”41 The argument is first set out in the context of a paragraph describing what Bloom calls “antithetical criticism,” a term he develops from his reading of—and productive resistance to—his two great critical “precursors,” Nietzsche and Freud.
Antithetical criticism must begin by denying both tautology and reduction: a denial best delivered by the assertion that the meaning of a poem can only be a poem, but another poem—a poem not itself.42
“Tautology” is a version of what Cleanth Brooks called “paraphrase”; “reduction” is the idea that poetry conveys a message, a moral, or a theme. What Bloom proposes is what he observes in the literary tradition—that poems beget poems, that imaginative thinking produces imaginative thinking, that literature is what I have called a first-order phenomenon, not a conveyor belt for ideas that find their “impact,” their “reality,” or their “application” elsewhere.
Literature is figure.
NINE
The Impossibility of Closure
Because no interpretation of literature is “final” or “definitive,” literary study, like literature, is a process rather than a product. If it progresses, it does so in a way that often involves doubling back upon a track or meandering by the wayside rather than forging ahead, relentlessly and single-mindedly, toward some imagined goal or solution. As we have noticed, one of the defining characteristics of literature and literary study is to open questions, not to close them. This has sometimes been regarded as a trait—as something that makes literature and literary study both unique and also “useless,” in contrast with problem-solving disciplines like economics, political theory, or even certain branches of philosophy. And in an era when persistent questions about outcomes and impact have gained ascendancy for legislatures, educational researchers, and the public press, the absence of answers may look like a manifest failure either on the part of imaginative writers, or of critics and scholars, or of both. Hence some of the desire to convert passages of poetry or taglines from novels into social and ethical doxa: “Good fences make good neighbors”; “Only connect.” Quotations like this, taken out of context, seem like useful advice, or wisdom.
Let me illustrate the difficulty about closure with a brief anecdote. Once, when I was lecturing to my Sh
akespeare class at Harvard, I decided to give them an object lesson in literary interpretation. I chose a famous crux from one of the plays and offered an extended “answer” to it. Students all over the lecture hall wrote busily in their notebooks. I then observed that although this answer once had been deemed satisfactory, it was no longer highly regarded by critics. All over the hall, students crossed out what they had written. I next offered a newer solution to the crux with the same set of results; students took down every word I said, then reacted with consternation when I remarked that this solution, too, had been questioned by subsequent critics. It took a third “solution” and a third qualification of that solution to begin to make the point, which was that literary interpretation is a conversation taking place over time and space, and that the really interesting questions do not have final answers.
Still, many students in the large introductory course left the lecture hall unsatisfied, frustrated, or worse. I had failed to convince them that such a method, if it could—in their eyes—be called a method, had value in and of itself. Why couldn’t I just tell them what the real meaning of the play was, then move on to the meaning of the next? I was the professor; they were there to write down what was true. Since Shakespeare wrote so many years ago, scholars had had all this time to get it right, hadn’t they? What was the problem, and why couldn’t the professor give them the right answer right away, instead of beating around the bush?
The absence of answers or determinate meanings—that is to say, the presence of the qualities that make a passage or a work literary—has given rise to persistent misunderstandings, including many of the rather desperate attempts we have already noted to try to make the literary work useful by “applying” it to something else. Requests on the part of institutions, officials, and government agencies for information on impact and assessment are attempts to figure out what literary study does, or accomplishes, or proves, or solves. But such requests pose the question maladroitly from the perspective of literature, where in formal terms, the beginning and ending are part of the structure, and thus part of the internal process of self-questioning and revision that is at the heart of creative work. To put it another way, a key feature of what might be called the literary unconscious is a tendency on the part of the text to outwit or to confound the activity of closing or ending.
One of the most famous and most praised themes in literature—the idea that the work lives on beyond the life of the author and serves as both a memorial and a revivification—delights in subverting closure through the agency of the living word or the living voice.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Shakespeare, Sonnet 18
While there is not a perfect symmetry between the activity of criticism and the activity of writing, the bridge between the two is the reader. Reading and criticism are themselves creative acts, remaking the work: making it new, making it contemporary, making it personal, making it productively strange, and therefore endowing it with fresh and startling power.
Against Closure
Closure as a term has suffered some indignities over the last several years, as it has become a staple of pop psychology. Closure as a synonym for “a sense of personal resolution; a feeling that an emotionally difficult experience has been conclusively settled or accepted”1 is a fairly recent addition to the lexicon, but it is all over the general media, whether the closure sought (or denied) is that of a surviving spouse, a bereft lover, a witness to a national calamity, or a soldier returned from war. Individuals who have never experienced psychotherapy or serious trauma now talk freely about needing, wanting, or getting closure, whether the closure they have in mind is their own or someone else’s.
As we’ll see, there is some connection between this wish to resolve or avoid trauma and the process that Freud called, in connection with his clinical practice, “analysis terminable and interminable.” But getting to closure in the popular sense is really the antithesis of the experience of literary reading.
“My life closed twice before its close” is how Emily Dickinson began one of her poems. Contrary to what might at first seem to be the case, the poem is about non-closure, not closure, if it can be said to be “about” anything. The non-“about”-ness of literature, its refusal to be grounded or compromised by referentiality, is one of its distinguishing traits, perhaps the one most readily underestimated or disbelieved.
Perhaps my favorite non-ending ending is the last line of Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Man on the Dump.” Early in the poem, the speaker observes that “The dump is full / Of images,” including “the janitor’s poems / Of every day, the wrapper on the can of pears, / The cat in the paper-bag, the corset, the box / From Esthonia: the tiger chest, for tea.” Here are the final lines, which begin by invoking the traditional bird of poetry, celebrated from Ovid to Keats to (with a twist) T. S. Eliot:
Did the nightingale torture the ear,
Pack the heart and scratch the mind? And does the ear
Solace itself in peevish birds? Is it peace,
Is it a philosopher’s honeymoon, one finds
On the dump? Is it to sit among mattresses of the dead,
Bottles, pots, shoes and grass and murmur aptest eve:
Is it to hear the blatter of grackles and say
Invisible priest; is it to eject, to pull
The day to pieces and cry stanza my stone?
Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.
The may be part of the philosopher’s quest for truth, but it is also the beginning of a poem as well as an ending for one. The inevitable recursiveness of poetry, beginning at its end, ending at its beginning, is here gorgeously and economically evoked.
It was a commonplace of formalist literary criticism that poems were inescapably self-referential, that whatever their ostensible topic in the world, they also gestured, in an unmistakable and important way, toward their own shape and structure. The idea was that beginnings and endings mattered, that the poem or work would re-begin itself at the supposed “end.” The poem might be imagined as taking the form of the ouroboros, the snake (or dragon) with its tail in its mouth, the ancient symbol of psychic continuity, or of eternal process, or of redemption, or of self-sufficiency, or of infinity. Its perfection (literally, its “finished-ness”) lay precisely in its capacity to indicate that in its beginning was its end, but also that in its end was its beginning.
We might look at some specific cases, to see how each folds in the material components of writing (or printing). Here are three examples of this poetic capacity, one having to do with rhyme, another with stanza form, and the third with punctuation. The first is from a magnificent short poem by George Herbert that takes poetic invention as its topic:
JORDAN (I)
Who says that fictions only and false hair
Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?
Is all good structure in a winding stair?
May no lines pass, except they do their duty
Not to a true, but painted chair?
Is it no verse, except enchanted groves
And sudden arbours shadow coarse-spun lines?
Must purling streams refresh a lover’s loves?
Must all be veiled while he that reads, divines,
Catching the sense at two removes?
Shepherds are honest people; let them sing:
Riddle who list, for me, and pull for Prime:
I envy no man’s nightingale or spring;
Nor let them punish me with loss of rhyme,
Who plainly say, My God, My King.
Here we have a poem that purports to rail against poetry as a fiction, against “catching the sense at two removes,” and against poets poetizing (and falsifying) themselves by calling themselves shepherds. The nightingale is a classical source of poetic inspiration, as is the Pierian spring of the Muses. But the witty (and ardent) denouement comes in the apparent abdication of eart
hly rhyme (“God” and “King” rhyme only in the sense that they are a perfect fit) while at the same time the final line does rhyme with “sing” and “spring,” just as in the previous stanzas, the last line rhymes with lines 1 and 3 (hair / stair / chair; groves/loves/removes). Arguably, the imperfect aural chiming of these last three words sets up the question of rhyme-that-is-not-rhyme, and thus of its obverse, not-rhyme-that-is-rhyme.
It’s characteristic of Herbert to use pairs of last lines as a way of turning the poem upside down and compelling a rereading, as he does, equally famously, in poems like “Love (III)” and “The Collar.” In all these cases, ending, or closure, is a signal to the reader about self-reference, authorship, authority, continuity, and the place of poetry in the world, the mind, the church, and the heart. Closure is both necessary and impossible.
My second example is a sonnet by William Butler Yeats, an early poem that bears the indicative title “The Fascination of What’s Difficult.”
The fascination of what’s difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There’s something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road-metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day’s war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I’ll find the stable and pull out the bolt.
I said that the poem was a sonnet, but a count of the lines will come up one short for the traditional, canonical fourteen-line form. The rhyme scheme is unusual, too: abba cc adda ee a, which means that the poet has inserted two couplets (the verse form that, in the Shakespearean or English sonnet, is the emblem of closure) in the midst of the poem, producing a formal impossibility, a thirteen-line inside-out sonnet. The challenge of the first line, the fascination of what’s difficult, is triumphantly displayed and achieved. At the same time the argument of the poem seems to rue the dailiness of work (“the day’s war with every knave and dolt, / Theatre business, management of men”) in a way that might even be glancing, sidelong, at the quotidian life of that earlier poet-playwright after whom the English sonnet form is named.
The Use and Abuse of Literature Page 30