The Challenges of Orpheus

by Heather Dubrow

  In these and many other regards, then, the woodcut reminds us that to study the issues it raises, one must distinguish among various types of audience, schooling oneself to note the variety and changeability associated with the role of listener and the range of possible interactions between author and auditor. For example, the senses in which the courtly ladies are openly and overtly auditors to each other’s music should be distinguished from those in which they may hear and be heard by Colin. And an analysis should consider audiences who are not present and accounted for within the illustration; developing the distinction between diegetic and nondiegetic readers is a first step in doing so.

  In fact, however, many of the categories used to classify audiences prove problematical on examination. If analysis of this woodcut is a first step towards reconceptualizing the audiences of early modern lyric, it is also a step down a slippery slope. In which category, for instance, should one place the future auditors emphasized by “record” (an audience through which many ostensibly atemporal lyrics in fact locate themselves within time)? If distinguishing the diegetic and nondiegetic has proved as challenging in narrative as many students of that form have demonstrated, that act is no easier in lyric.17 Answer poems, whose popularity in the coterie circles of manuscript circulation has been established by Marotti among other critics, repeatedly raise a similar problem with the binary separation of diegetic and nondiegetic.18 So too do the many love poems that intertwine but do not necessarily unite the lover within the poem and the poet. A lady who speaks in a poem to which I will return at several points in this chapter, Jonson’s “Celebration of Charis in Ten Lyrick Peeces,” addresses “Ben” (“Her Man Described by Her Owne Dictamen,” 1); thus she implicitly calls into question her own status as a fictional character, the mirror image, as it were, of how a visitor to Graham’s construction can insert herself into the composition by standing where she will be reflected in it.19 If critics are tempted to finesse potential slippages by declaring that Astrophil addresses Stella within the diegetic world of the sonnet cycle, whereas Philip Sidney directs the poems to Penelope Rich, the pun on “rich” that recurs in Sonnet 37 undermines that solution. (Sidney’s niece Lady Mary Wroth was to go one better in the blurring of the boundaries separating “real” people, fictional characters, and fictional characters who insistently gesture towards their living counterparts: she names a minor character in the first part of her Urania Philistella.) These issues are far from unique to the early modern period or to literary texts; medieval religious paintings, for example, often insert donors into scriptural scenes, with their spatial marginality aptly figuring that of their ontological status. This chapter will, however, demonstrate how issues ranging from the guilt associated with writing and reading lyric to its conditions of production reshape these questions in the era on which this study focuses.

  Considering a future audience crystallizes another methodological problem, the divide between physical presence and absence, though because it is explored more thoroughly in Chapter 3, I will only briefly gesture towards a few of its implications here. The impact of that apparently binary distinction is often less crucial than one might expect. A soliloquy delivered when another character happens to be on stage resembles other soliloquies more than it resembles dialogic interchange among characters on stage together. Conversely, a lyric like Astrophil and Stella 64 (“No more, my deare, no more these counsels trie”) that directly addresses the lady even though she may not be physically present (like many sonnets, this one may rehearse what the speaker would like to say) in some respects is very similar to other instances of direct address, such as the appeal to the Muses in Sidney’s fifty-fifth sonnet (“Muses, I oft invoked your holy ayde”), even though the issue of physical presence differs significantly in each case.20 Indeed, texts that focus on engendering a response and those that provide one, whether or not they both mime solitary speech, may have more in common with each other than do a text that represents solitude but reaches out to an addressee and one delivered in isolation but without an addressee. Moreover, as George T. Wright points out, the letter format (a number of early modern poems resemble letters and others allude to that genre without unmistakably participating in it) encourages speech delivered as though both parties are present even though they are not; hence, one should add, the letter, icon of absence though it may be, often resembles the process of addressing an auditor who is physically with the speaker more than it does that of addressing an absent one.21 As I will demonstrate at several junctures in this chapter, devotional poetry further complicates the distinction between physical presence and absence: many models of the relationship between speaker and audience were developed by critics envisioning the urn, not the Eternal, as the prototypical addressee.22

  Closely related to the problematical divide between presence and absence are the overlapping ones between monologue and dialogue and between the solitary and the social, also issues to which this chapter will repeatedly speak. Because of these imbrications and for other reasons, the distinctions among various types of “lyric of address” posited in Gémino H. Abad’s Chicago School study of the form prove deceptive.23 In some instances a diegetic listener is not currently present but may be present—and may respond—on a subsequent occasion, another reason to see lyric as part of a process. Thus meditation may involve an obsessive rehearsal of what one plans to say on some future occasion; as I have argued elsewhere, the centrality of that and other forms of obsession in Petrarchism makes this form of thought very common in early modern poetry.24 More broadly, Pamela S. Hammons has persuasively demonstrated how many female-authored texts from the period of the Civil War are in fact social in important respects, even if their mode of address appears private.25 And dialogic propensities may be deflected onto a characteristic of the verse other than its direction of address, such as the interplay between words in correlative poetry. All language is social in many important regards, David Schalkwyk provocatively maintains when rebutting Helen Vendler’s support for the customary ascription of solitude to lyric: “‘solitary speech’ is as marked by social specification as any other.”26 Yet if contentions like Schalkwyk’s are adduced to read private, internalized discourse as a mere screen for the invariable centrality of the social in early modern poetry, lyrics are likely to be misread: the interplay of types of address is more often what is central and significant.

  Like Spenser’s use of “record,” an etymology that would have been familiar to many early modern writers and readers encapsulates these problems of classification. The Latin verb “meditor” packs among its meanings not only contemplation but also “design, purpose, intend …practise.”27 In his seventh letter to Charles Diodati, Milton describes himself as growing wings “& volare meditor,” leading the Columbia editors to offer the translation “meditating flight” but their counterparts in the Yale University Press to substitute “practicing flight,” with the latter version supported by the subsequent phrase, which refers to a fledgling Pegasus raising himself on tender wings.28 Because the verb in question also appears in the opening of a text that enjoyed a virtually iconic status in the early modern period, Virgil’s first eclogue, readers in that period were surely aware of such resonances. To what extent, then, are lyric’s meditative monologues, such as the one by Colin on which the April eclogue focuses, an exercise or practice for dialogues and for other social action?

  In short, a principal, if not indeed the principal, methodological problem associated with the audiences of lyric is precisely that the clear-cut categories that the subject invites prove as deceptive as the divides between inside and out, reflection and original in the works by Graham, Nouvel, and Piano on which I opened. What many students of “race” have observed about that category is no less true of classifying audiences: there are typically more differences among members of a class than between classes. Commentaries by Wordsworth, Mill, Frye, and other theorists of lyric demand attention from students of early modern lyric in part because, for all
their insights, they provide additional illustrations of such problems and how the commentators’ investments generate such errors. Yet, at the same time, each of these highly influential statements provides useful directives for studying the audiences of Renaissance lyric, in particular by suggesting approaches to the multiplicity whose presence and consequences are the central arguments of this chapter.

  The Preface to Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, a document that went through significant editorial changes, is further compromised for the purposes of this chapter by its focus on all poetry, not just lyric, and also by the blurring of generic categories suggested by the author’s title; moreover, many of the issues it raises demand an extended analysis, not a brief overview. Nonetheless, one can note in passing that the conflicting models of the democratic poet who speaks to other men and the inspired vates have obvious implications for the possibility of identificatory voicing. Also significant for this chapter is Wordsworth’s repeated hope that the members of his audience will respond in a consistent way. As many readers of his Preface have noted, principles from the Enlightenment (that movement whose own variety is often collapsed in unenlightening maneuvers by those eager to make it a straw man) lie behind the author’s generalizations about “the primary laws of our nature”; and one is not surprised that he emphasizes communalities in his readers, a model that may lie behind Frye’s comparison of the audience to a chorus.29 The idea of an audience offering communal and consistent response, as we will see, is as pernicious as it is pervasive in discussions of lyric.

  John Stuart Mill’s principal statement about the audiences of that mode, his essay “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” turns on two contrasts, each as problematical as the divides examined above: the distinction between narrative and poetry and the one between poetry and eloquence, which he describes as no less fundamental.30 As I have observed, in discussions of poetry as of so many other subjects, comparisons often encode hierarchies, and this essay is no exception. I demonstrated above that Mill is not alone when he tellingly associates narratives with the immature stages of human life and the “rude state” of cultures (345); similarly, his preference for poetry over eloquence is implicitly glossed when he establishes the former as the higher form and associates it with the English, in contrast to inferior creatures across the Channel from them.

  Central to this essay and most crucial to its impact on later discussions of lyric is one corollary of the contrasts Mill draws: “eloquence is heard, poetry is over-heard,” he affirms (348; emphasis in original). This contrast was to be singled out and seconded by Frye and more implicitly celebrated by many other commentators on lyric, though it has recently been interrogated as well, notably by Virginia Jackson.31 Mill goes on to refer to “the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener” (348) and to describe poetry as “the natural fruit of solitude and meditation” and eloquence as the product of “intercourse with the world” (349). He thus instantiates two divides whose limitations I have already flagged, positing an explicit distinction between the solitary and the social and an implicit one between presence and absence.

  Elsewhere in the essay, however, he suggests that the “natural” solitude that involves “utter unconsciousness” of a listener (349, 348) is in fact an act that he compares to the so-called “fourth wall” of theater: “no trace of consciousness that any eyes are upon us must be visible in the work itself. The actor knows that there is an audience present; but if he act as though he knew it, he acts ill” (349). Much of this apparent paradox can be readily resolved by distinguishing the moment of poetic utterance from later reproduction of it motivated in part by consciousness of the marketplace, as Mill in fact does, and by distinguishing the speaker who is totally unaware of an audience from the poet behind him who creates a mimesis of solitude. But these distinctions do not completely resolve the contradiction in question: indeed, as Jackson also notes, the theatrical metaphor confounds the argument.32 The actor, a figure more analogous to the speaker than to the poet, only pretends not to notice the audience, and the language of excluding vestiges is quite different from “utter unconsciousness” (348). That “fourth wall” is apparently transparent, and the effects may recall those of the walls by Graham, Nouvel, and Piano. Hence if the poem is the natural fruit of meditation, this is produce and product that has been carefully prepared and sauced.

  Later in this treatise Mill contrasts the world of poetry and that of “the man of science …or of business” (357), thus flagging the hidden investments and agendas that impel him and others to posit the isolated lyric speaker. Behind the split Mill establishes, as well as behind the ambivalence about representing solitude as a performance if not a pretense, I suggest, lies the desire to establish poetry as pure, as the angel in the house uncontaminated by the marketplace or even by that language of the marketplace, rhetoric. Poetry, Mill believes, should be free of exchange of all sorts, whether it be the exchanges of dialogue or the more pecuniary tradings of the marketplace. Thus Mill anticipates Adorno’s drive to distinguish poetry from the social world, though their motives for that divide of course differ, Adorno attempting to position poetry in a space that allows experimentation without ruling out its interaction with social formations.33

  Although T. S. Eliot explicitly acknowledges the influence of the German critic Gottfried Benn on his work, the impact of Mill is manifest as well. Insisting that his system does not simply correspond to literary modes, Eliot distinguishes three voices in poetry, the first and second being suggestively similar to Mill’s distinction between poetry and eloquence: the poet may talk to himself or to nobody, may address an audience, or may speak through a character. The system is shaped, and arguably misshaped, first by Eliot’s dismissal of a category in which the poet addresses only one person (surely such religious lyrics as Traherne’s “Desire” would fall under that rubric, and despite Eliot’s claims on the subject of love poetry, it sometimes would too), and second by his focus on dramatic monologue, which he attempts to differentiate from drama through some debatable claims, such as the assertion that the poet typically identifies with the speaker.34 A more fundamental problem is Eliot’s absolute distinction between talking to oneself and addressing an audience.

  Despite limitations like these—indeed, W. R. Johnson terms the essay “one of the last and most effective of [Eliot’s] smokescreens”35—some of his observations can gloss or resolve the very problems that complicate other discussions of the audiences of early modern lyric. Especially significant are Eliot’s brief but suggestive comments on how the voices overlap—“I doubt whether in any real poem only one voice is audible”36—which, although focusing on the speaker, invite the sort of analyses of shifting auditory positions that are the agenda of this chapter. More specifically, when Eliot talks of the poet “allowing himself to be overheard,” he directs attention to what one might term “staged overhearing,” the invited presence of a bystander that interests Frye also and to which I will return.37

  Although commentaries on Frye’s approach to lyric understandably direct most of their attention to his Anatomy of Criticism, his observations about the mode in the collection Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism provide a useful introduction to the more extensive treatment in his magisterial tome.38 Citing the psalms and the odes of Pindar, Frye stresses here that lyric may well be communal, an alternative that recalls the trope of posies and Wordsworth’s reference to group singing, and in so doing again warns us against establishing the solitary poet speaking only to himself as normative. Also suggestive is his observation in this essay that, because of its association with music, lyric turns away not only from ordinary space and time but also from quotidian language, “so often retreat[ing] from sense into sound.” (34). This emphasis on what is tellingly described as retreat is echoed in the discussions of lyric audience in Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism.

  Arguing that the “radical of presentation” is the fundamental distinction among genres, Frye asserts there:

  Words
may be acted in front of a spectator; they may be spoken in front of a listener; they may be sung or chanted; or they may be written for a reader. … The basis of generic criticism in any case is rhetorical, in the sense that the genre is determined by the conditions established between the poet and his public.

  We have to speak of the radical of presentation if the distinctions of acted, spoken, and written word are to mean anything in the age of the printing press. One may print a lyric or read a novel aloud, but such incidental changes are not enough in themselves to alter the genre. (247)

  Although, as Jonathan Hart has demonstrated, an interest in history of several types informs not only the Anatomy of Criticism but other texts of Frye, the ahistoricity on which the concept of the radicals depends reflects the troubling universalism for which Frye is often faulted.39 If the difference between a genre that is sung and one that is acted is fundamental in the ways Frye claims, surely the difference between singing or chanting a lyric in the early stages of that mode and reading it silently in a post-Gutenburg era should not be dismissed as “incidental.” Nor is the history of reciting epics like Beowulf “incidental” to the ontology of epos. Frye stresses that he is considering not actual conditions but some sort of ideal, but that ideal itself changes in different periods.

  More troubling—and more revealing—is what Frye does not say. Notice that whereas three of the four categories specified in the first sentence are defined in terms of both method of presentation and audience, in the instance of the radical of presentation he associates with lyric, only half that formula appears: “they may be sung or chanted.” What tension produces this imbalance in a critic who is more prone to celebrate and demonstrate fearful symmetry? Frye’s subsequent observations direct one towards answers.