The Challenges of Orpheus
Page 2
Negotiating such problems in relation to the systemic workings of genre, Alastair Fowler cogently argues for definitions based on Wittgensteinian family resemblances. Fowler adduces that philosopher’s analogy between language games and other games (“‘These phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all—but they are related to one another in many different ways’” [italics in original]) and demonstrates its relevance: “Literary genre seems just the sort of concept with blurred edges that is suited to such an approach. Representatives of a genre may then be regarded as making up a family whose septs [clans] and individual members are related in various ways, without necessarily having any single feature shared in common by all.…Genres appear to be much more like families than classes.” He proceeds to formulate useful models for tracing how such potentialities are modified in particular periods.31 The chapters that succeed this one will both exemplify and justify my debt to such approaches. For example, rather than simply noting the relative scarcity of prosopopoeia in early modern poetry, I employ arguments developed by Jonathan Culler, among others, about the roles that figure can serve, especially his trenchant suggestion that it permits poetic agency, however limited; thus at a couple of junctures I posit a “prosopopoeia function”—that is, comparable devices that serve comparable functions, such as implicit allusions to earlier poets. In other words, not the least reason for drawing attention to the transhistorical potentialities of lyric is that doing so alerts one to how they may be translated or traduced in response to specific cultural pressures.
The issue of whether or not lyric should be defined transhistorically is related to but separable from other choices that necessarily antedate and shape a book like this. Should one write a transhistorical study or one that concentrates on a particular period? Does the current emphasis on globalization call into question a study that focuses on a single country? Some of the most acute and influential volumes on genre and genres, notably Paul Alpers’s What Is Pastoral?, have been transhistorical books, many of which engage with history precisely by playing constant characteristics of the type in question against changing ones; similarly, Michael McKeon’s Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 in fact adduces evidence from a broader time period than its title suggests.32 More immediately relevant here, the same breadth enriches recent studies of lyric and other poetry by Timothy Bahti, Susan Stewart, and William Waters, volumes that are not only transhistorical but comparatist in their orientation.33
In return for the often stimulating and sometimes brilliant insights of studies like the ones enumerated above, however, their authors necessarily comment very selectively on any particular historical moment. In part because I am particularly interested in tracing in some detail the influences on lyric distinctive of or even unique to a given period and country, such as the interaction among writer, printer, and publisher in English early modern print culture, I have chosen to concentrate on a single—and singular—era, the one extending roughly between 1500 and 1660, though with the awareness that those boundaries, like so much else about periodization, are now being redefined. (So too is the terminology; this study uses both “English Renaissance” and “early modern period” for the specified years, though with the awareness that both terms are problematical, the second in particular sometimes referring to a longer era.)
This is not to say that I intend to limit the audience of a book that emphasizes the multiple audiences of lyric to students of early modern England. Quite the contrary. The issues about lyric analyzed herein—How is it defined and discussed? Who are its audiences? How valid is the conventional wisdom about its immediacy? In what senses is it indeed short? What are its relationships with narrative?—occur in lyric poetry written in other historical periods and other countries. In the subtitle, “Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England,” I try to gesture towards the relevance of this book to studies of lyrics composed in other eras. Thus, as I suggest, my discussion of the reinterpretations of prosopopoeia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries might well cast new light on the more mainstream versions of that trope in other periods. Similarly, in response to the current emphasis on the global, my analysis of how the songs in Shakespearean drama empower the disempowered could fruitfully be read in relation to, for example, the ghinnāwa, a type of popular Bedouin song that is associated with the disadvantaged members of the society and often expresses sentiments challenging cultural norms.34 But these are the sort of investigations this book aims to encourage and enable, not enact.
One advantage of delimitation of historical and geographical scope is the opportunity to be capacious in the choice of poems from within that period and country. Among the principal aims of this book is to offer new perspectives on some of the most familiar canonical texts while also drawing attention to relatively neglected writings. I discuss Robert Sidney as well as his better-known brother and daughter; I include both Samuel Daniel’s Delia and Richard Lynche’s Diella; and, although I concentrate largely on the print tradition, I allude to texts from manuscripts as well at several junctures.
Focusing closely on one chronological period and one country has also allowed me to identify and explore in some detail many characteristics that, though not necessarily unique to England in the early modern era, occurred with particular frequency or intensity or assumed distinctive contours there and then. I argue, for example, that a major change in ecclesiastical practice, the congregational singing of psalms, affected both subject positions and the use of framing devices even in secular poems. I trace the consequences of the vogue for poetry of praise in the early modern era, ranging from the guilt engendered by lauding a mistress or patron to its assuagement through celebrating God. I demonstrate certain forms that such guilt and other anxieties about lyric assumed, such as connections between lyric and the contagion of the plague, and trace how the period finessed some of these concerns. Conversely, responding to Miner’s and Perloff’s warnings about imposing transhistorical definitions, I devote less space than would otherwise be necessary to some issues that are central in lyric poetry of other periods but relatively minor in the English Renaissance, notably anthropomorphism. In his discerning study of Catullus, William Fitzgerald laments the fact that the influence of de Man and the resulting emphasis on Romantic and modernist lyric has rendered unduly prominent issues less significant in Latin poetry, such as presence and voice: “A large part of my project in this book is to read the positional structures of the lyric through Roman concerns and relations; I argue that an alternative set of issues about the lyric can be elaborated from Catullus’ poetry and its Roman cultural context, in which questions of performance, positionality, and power are more central.”35 The Challenges of Orpheus similarly concentrates on issues about lyric that are central to early modern “concerns and relations.” Thus, as noted above, this book aims not to resolve the problems of defining lyric with a stable transcultural and transhistorical encapsulation of its characteristics, let alone the privileging of a single attribute, but rather to explore how and why multiple characteristics assumed the form they did, or lay dormant, or were superseded by other predilections in that era. (Because so many distinctions between lyric and narrative occur transhistorically, my discussion of those modes devotes proportionately less space than the other chapters to what is historically specific, but even there the analyses are rooted in the potentialities and problems of early modern England.)
If studies that bridge many centuries risk overlooking nuances within apparent similarities and positing the local as normative, those that largely concentrate on a specific period obviously must acknowledge and accommodate, if not finesse, their own temptations. Some dangers result from the slipperiness of periodization itself. Recent challenges to it remind us that some of John Milton’s lyrics might fruitfully be read in relation to Dryden’s or to the literature of the Revolution, rather than as the culmination of that hypostasized English Renaissance. Sir Thomas Wyatt is in some important senses and in some impo
rtant lyrics a late medieval poet. Moreover, critics focusing on a given period need to eschew the common temptation to oversimplify its predecessors in order to celebrate it or establish its distinctiveness; for example, many of the indeterminacies attributed by some to post-Enlightenment lyric could have been lifted from a description of Petrarch’s poetry, while attempts to distinguish the Victorian dramatic monologue from the work of Donne are often unsuccessful.
A study of a particular era must of course address historical shifts within it; for example, the flowering of religious poetry in the seventeenth century countered, though it did not erase, anxieties about the triviality of its mode, and Nigel Smith persuasively traces changes in the social functions of lyric and the gendering of its authorship to events associated with the Civil War.36 No less important is the coexistence of conflicting styles of writing and representing lyric. Charles Bernstein’s observation about poetry in general applies to early modern lyric in particular: “There is of course no state of American poetry, but states, moods, agitations, dissipations … no music to our verse but vastly incompatible musics; no single sentiment but clashes of sentience.”37 Although Bernstein’s commitment to conflictual models may explain some of the severity of this pronouncement, it aptly glosses the range even within a chronologically circumscribed group of lyrics.
Possibly the most useful monitory example of Bernstein’s contention comes from the visual arts. Less acute or more polemically driven art historians sometimes merely describe Christopher Dresser, who lived between 1834 and 1904, as a precursor of modernism, yet some of his best work develops conceptions of decoration antithetical to many modern aesthetic principles. Dresser’s career also exemplifies the coexistence of a range of styles at a given moment. Much of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene and many of Donne’s love lyrics were probably written during the 1590s, in close conjunction temporally though not stylistically, and so too Dresser did indeed craft objects that appear to be prototypes of modern design as well as ones that violate its principles. Consisting as it does of two conjoined hexagonal shapes, clean and handsome in their lines, one of his toast racks could be mistaken for something Frank Lloyd Wright created for his own paean to the hexagon, Hanna House. Early modern lyric, like Dresser’s designs, complicates and even on occasion mocks labels like “modern” and “protomodern.”
The student of historical shifts within an era, or between eras, also needs to be alert to the risks involved in drafting predication into the service of narration, especially teleological storytelling—in other words, using a statement like “lyric is x and y” to establish its superiority over preceding forms or its prefigurement of later ones. Celebrating Dresser as a modernist is a case in point, as is the predilection for seeing the dramatic monologue as a welcome rejection of the Romantic lyric and a no less happy anticipation of its modernist successor. The agendas—political in many senses—that may underwrite that form of narrative are nowhere more apparent than in an otherwise valuable study of the English sonnet initially published, arguably not by chance, only about ten years after the end of World War II: “When therefore Petrarch begins a sonnet to Laura by describing her as the joint handiwork of nature and heaven …he is voicing …the primeval convictions of Mediterranean peoples. But convictions such as these were essentially alien to the English mind.…The Tudor poets were indeed true pioneers both in form and content, breaking a virgin soil on which, in the fullness of days, the great Elizabethans were to raise their golden harvest.”38
In addition to the challenges variously resolved and posed by the decision to focus on a single historical era and a single national tradition, studying the mode on which this book focuses poses further methodological problems. Writing about lyric, no less than writing lyric, is inevitably an art of omission, compression, and elision, and even a book that devotes itself to a relatively narrow time frame must omit potentially valuable material. The state of the field, the strengths and limitations of my own expertise, and the stringencies of publishers’ budgets have all shaped my decisions, especially those about the foci of my principal chapters. For example, given the plethora of excellent studies on the relationship of music and poetry and my own lack of training in musicology, that issue, while pervasive, is a passing concern in these chapters rather than the subject of one of them. My original plan to devote a chapter to the lyric speaker was superseded by an awareness that this subject really requires a book in its own right, not least because the very act of positing and focusing on such a figure would be controversial; so again I include many observations on the issue, thus suggesting directions for future study, rather than pretending to definitive treatment.
Other challenges stem from the difficulties of classification, especially when addressing an era whose usages of terms associated with lyric are varied and inconsistent. Whereas many early modern statements about song, for example, have evident implications for lyric, the two are obviously not synonymous. If evocations of the Orpheus myth are clearly germane to lyric, that pied piper is also the patron saint of poetry in general and of eloquence. Moreover, many poems that critics of the English Renaissance regularly label lyric, such as dialogic pastorals or sonnets addressing the mistress, would not be accepted as such according to the norms associated with texts in other periods.
Similar complexities attend the usage of the related term “ode” both in the early modern period and other eras. One may employ it as precisely as Ben Jonson does or as broadly as many eighteenth-century writers do, turning the word into an all-purpose label for poetry; one eighteenth-century treatise classifies “Lycidas” as an “irregular ode.”39 The association between lyric and the ode in the more limited senses of twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics, though prominent in that period, arises in the early modern era as well; for example, the manuscript of an unpublished commonplace book now in the Newberry Library, Case MS A. 15.179, enumerates genres and lists the writers associated with each of them. Next to “Lyrique” appears “Pindarus, Anacreon, Callimachus, Horace, Catullus,” a catalogue that emphasizes the connections between lyric and ode and also tells us for the first of many times that the former was often associated not with meditation but with public poetry.40 Such problems are further complicated by the contradictions that Paul H. Fry has trenchantly pointed out within the ode, especially its propensity for undermining its ostensible public and celebratory mission.41
The best approach to these classificatory dilemmas, like many other problems about genre, is an informed and cautious engagement with them; hence I recur to such issues when they are particularly relevant to the argument. Although this study necessarily encompasses many texts labeled lyric according to some but not all of the many criteria of their age and our own, in choosing texts to illustrate central arguments, I have attempted to include at least some whose claim to be lyrics is virtually indisputable.
It is tempting and sometimes appropriate to resolve such problems by asserting that even texts that resist the label “lyric” may be lyrical, much as one talks of dramatic elements in texts that are clearly not drama. Fair enough in many instances, yet such adjectives are often used too loosely, as David Lindley among others has argued.42 Moreover, in the instance of lyric in particular, the relationship between the noun and adjective proves paradoxical, the first of many paradoxes encountered in defining and describing the mode. For lyricality in the sense of a timeless state, dreamlike or visionary in its intensity, often is not inherent in lyric but rather functions as the goal towards which lyric strives—and which lyric often criticizes or ironizes even as it is achieved. Witness John Milton’s Nativity Ode.
That poem both celebrates and questions the association of lyric with spiritual enlightenment, a widespread linkage that exemplifies another challenge in studying the mode—recognizing and negotiating the investments of critics from many different eras.43 For example, if the doctrine of American exceptionalism has complicated politics in a range of respects, a commitment to lyric as an atypical, even
deviant form of discourse that contrasts with ordinary language and in so doing fulfills a special mission has shaped and misshaped analyses. The adjectives critics use to distinguish this alternative from the everyday vary, but usually they suggest something magical, almost supernatural. As George T. Wright puts it, “This sublimity, this sense of enchantment, seems to me essentially a quality of the lyric poem….it is a new light on the experience of human beings in a world full of feelings and troubles.”44 That sense, he argues, is expressed grammatically through a special type of present tense: “Deliberately bypassing all the modifiers that normal speech requires, the lyric present appears to offer as actual, conditions that we normally accept only as possible, special, figurative, provisional.”45Reflecting the survival of Romantic and symbolist conceptions of lyric, these representations of it as something extraordinary, atypical, even holy, draw attention to the cultural work it does for many movements and cultures; lyric often becomes the repository of what the ostensibly dispassionate analyst of it sees as precious but imperiled in the current climate. At the same time, in many instances lyric is imbued with profound anxieties, represented as symbol, and perhaps source as well, of what the author or the entire culture fears. Given how often it takes the form of love poetry, it is hardly surprising that lyric is frequently associated with the irrationality of desire, the triviality of love games, or both. The poem that concludes Chapter 1, Herrick’s “Vision” (“Me thought I saw”), exemplifies commonly made connections between that mode and female temptation, as well as the temptation of effeminization. Hence the late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics who in effect conflate lyric with New Criticism and see the genre itself as synecdochic for a mystified concept of individualism and an adulation of the aesthetic may rightly be interpreted as part a trend that predates them of conscripting lyric into preexisting battles.