Beyond Theory of the Lyric
2022; Wiley; Volume: 64; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/criq.12661
ISSN1467-8705
Autores Tópico(s)Poetry Analysis and Criticism
ResumoWithout contraries is no progression; let Culler’s, or Warton’s, or Albright’s, claim – that ‘lyric’ has almost always been with us in some form, even if it is not called by that name; even if it does not dominate every literary period where it occurs – stand as the contrary, or the antithesis, to the New Lyric Studies’ claim that ‘lyricization’ occludes the categories and the ways of reading of even the recent past. Can we have, now, a synthesis? What could it accomplish? Is this ambitious, admirable, yet partial anthology the best that we can do?1 Culler’s writing on lyric, I will be arguing in the course of this article, provides us with a partial picture of lyric poetry because, to borrow Eric Griffiths’s paraphrase of the ordinary language philosopher J.L. Austin, it ‘over-concentrat[es] on a narrow range of examples’; and it does this both because it insists on the production of a lyric theory, and as a result both of its rejection of interpretation as a valid mode of reading poetry and of its insistence on studiously demarcating poetry into categories which are too clear-cut.3 To achieve a fuller picture of lyric, we need to widen our range, putting theory to one side and focusing on example – examples which often invite and demand interpretation and which resist and trouble theories as often as they seem to confirm them. In 1975 I wrote an essay on the figure of apostrophe, in which I argued that this strange habit of address was central to the lyric tradition – the epitome of everything most daring and potentially embarrassing in lyric. That essay, the seed from which this project eventually developed, was a break with my own training in the New Criticism, where close attention to the language of literary works focused on elements that most contribute to a complex interpretation of the poem, and where, since questions of tone were extremely important – ‘What is the speaker’s tone of voice here?’ – apostrophes were neglected: they are so distinctly poetic, so unlike ordinary speech or mediation, that they do not help identify a tone recognizable from our usual experience. Apostrophes are set aside or, at best, treated as conventional marks of emotional intensity, but there they are, in the poems. What do they tell us?5 The phantom presence of New Criticism is particularly strong in lyric studies, because the New Critics are perceived to have prioritised lyric poetry above all other forms, ‘erasing generic differences between poems’, in effect wanting ‘lyric’ to stand for all poetry.8 The push to divide and demarcate that can be found in both Culler and the New Lyric Studies (the former warding narrative and drama off from lyric, the latter splitting up the supposedly non-existent into ever smaller sub-categories) takes its impetus from a reaction against this apparent New Critical erasure. Culler’s continued pursuit of an alternative to interpretation as a mode of reading poetry usually locates interpretation as New Critical in origin (even though much other recent criticism, perhaps most (in)famously that of Sharon Best and Stephen Marcus, locates the drive towards interpretation with the ‘symptomatic reading’ of those who replaced the New Critics).9 This is not the place for a thorough investigation of the nature of the role which the New Critical phantom continues to play in our critical conversations, especially those about lyric poetry – such an investigation demands several volumes.10 I am simply aiming to do two things here: first, to acknowledge and call attention to the extent to which any disagreement with Culler’s work on lyric can be framed as a disagreement with the move beyond the New Criticism, and indeed a direct endorsement of New Criticism in its imagined lingering existence as critical and institutional threat. This framing is preposterous when spelled out – when the manufacturing process is attended to, to extend the metaphor – but like much shoddy workmanship, it produces a result which does not immediately look wrong or flimsy. In disagreeing with Culler’s arguments, I am not, of course, proposing anything like a return to New Criticism; it is my hope that calling attention to the mechanics of such a knee-jerk response will, so to speak, break the mechanism, and thus provoke thought.11 Secondly, my aim is to conduct the argument on plain terms; once we strip Culler’s arguments of their New Critical backburners, we can take them on for what they are, and not what they represent. If viewing apostrophe as the essence of lyric poetry – or indeed the construction of a theory of lyric poetry – is seen as a critical choice, and not the only and inevitable alternative to an outmoded style of literary criticism, then the merits of that choice can be critically evaluated, and other possibilities, other choices, can begin to be more thoroughly considered. There is an inevitable danger of hypocrisy in writing an essay which will call for a sustained attention to a greater variety of lyric examples whilst being extremely selective with the critical examples it takes. I began by justifying the importance of Culler’s lyric work in particular; I predominantly discuss, in the following two sections, material from ‘Apostrophe’ and Theory of the Lyric as they form a neat bookend of Culler’s lyric thinking, and represent his two must important contributions to the lyric debate. But it should also be said that my ultimate appeal for a greater variety of examples does not amount to an endorsement of a kind of scattergun, free-associative critical approach. Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose thinking on exemplarity will underpin the final section of this essay, repeatedly implored his students and readers to do philosophy slowly. One of the tasks of philosophers, he wrote, is to go on thinking in the face of ‘a physical need to tell themselves when at work: “Let’s have done with it now”’. ‘This is how philosophers should greet each other: “Take your time!”’.12 I am in favour both of more examples and more time spent on each; I have thought it better here, in taking my critical examples in this short space, to prioritise depth over range. The ostensible argument of ‘Apostrophe’, for the uninitiated, runs as follows. Apostrophe has been ‘systematically [...] excluded’ from lyric criticism (Apos, 60). This, Culler thinks, is because apostrophes are embarrassing. In the process of justifying that statement, he divides up apostrophe into levels, first discussing a simple ‘I-thou’ relationship. Here, apostrophes have been described as springing from spontaneous outbursts of feeling, the implication being that passion seeks apostrophe, since to apostrophise is to will something to happen. The embarrassment stems from the fact that that something can’t and won’t. Critics and readers thus temper this embarrassment by treating apostrophe as a poetic convention, a relic of outdated religious beliefs. Culler then moves to introduce a third term: ‘I-thou-audience’. In this case, an ‘I’ calls to a ‘thou’ in order to dramatise or constitute an image of self, a self which, he claims, is embarrassingly poetic: the ‘I’ announces that he is not merely a writer of verse, but the embodiment of a whole tradition, or spirit, of poetry. Finally, Culler turns to poems which parody their own apostrophic modes, describing this act as one of radical interiorization: either aspects of the self are expanded to fill the world, or else aspects of the world (external objects) are internalised. This leads to the claim that ‘apostrophe involves a drama of “the one mind’s” modifications more than a relationship between an I and a you’ (Apos, 66). Apostrophes function as ‘stages in a drama of mind’, and so apostrophe works against narrative, because the address is happening amongst and within a single self. Apostrophe’s time is one composed of a set of present moments, or moments at which writing can be in the ‘now’: thus a poem in which apostrophe wins out against narrative is an event in itself. Lyric is defined as being constituted of such poems in which apostrophe triumphs, that is to say, in which the present moment, the now, is not a moment in a chronological sequence but the moment of writing. Lyrics, then, are monuments to immediacy, in which the temporary passes into the eternal. Redefined in Culler’s terms, apostrophes should now no longer provoke embarrassment but instead provoke further study. Stated baldly like this, the argument makes an internal sense which might be seen to collapse quickly under external pressure. J. Douglas Kneale, one of only two literary critics to have taken extended issue with Culler’s essay in article form, at one point offers a rebuttal which doesn’t land with nearly as much force as he thinks. Listing ten writers who ‘regularly and systematically discuss[ed] apostrophe’ between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, Kneale appears to dismantle Culler’s opening point about the supposed exclusion of apostrophe from lyric criticism. But the punch misses – or grazes the ear (it is odd that the only one of many historical commentators on apostrophe Culler discusses is Quintilian, and a selectively partial version of his work at that) – because Culler’s argument is not about writing about lyric poetry in toto but one particular instantiation of such writing: the New Criticism.13 The ‘[c]lassic essays’ and ‘critics’ to which Culler refers must be understood in such terms if the argument is to be properly understood. No evidence for a systematic New Critical exclusion of apostrophe is provided because none is there to find; or rather, counter-evidence is easily supplied. Cleanth Brooks discusses apostrophe in what is regarded as one of the most important New Critical publications (The Well Wrought Urn), as he examines a line from the Keats ode which gives it its title, and observes that ‘the apostrophe, “O Attic shape …”’ is employed because ‘[i]t is the urn itself as a formed thing, as an autonomous world, to which the poet addresses these last words’.14 Attempting, in Counter-Statement (1931), to ‘define the principles underlying the appeal of literature’, to account for how ‘effects are produced, Kenneth Burke begins by discussing ‘the Nature of Form’, and soon comes to a discussion of ‘minor or incidental forms’ of which apostrophe is one of ten listed by name.15 Apostrophe is by no means at the centre of New Critical theorisings of lyric poetry; but nor is it entirely – or even noticeably – absent. Indeed, it is only noticeably absent to a critic who has decided that apostrophe is of central importance to lyric, has even sought ‘to identify apostrophe with lyric itself’. The passage from Culler’s supposition that ‘one might be justified in’ making such a decision to the certain knowledge that it is right and absolute is travelled at light speed, as we are confidently told on the same page that ‘if we would know something of the poetics of the lyric we should study apostrophe: its forms and meanings’. ‘Such a project would confront at the outset complex problems of definition and delimitation’, Culler admits, but he leaves these aside here ‘in order to focus on cases which will be apostrophic by any definition’ (Apos, 60). (In fact, the supposed apostrophes Culler considers are not in fact apostrophes according to his cherry-picked selections from Quintilian, the only hint of definition he provides.) What helps the argument up to such speeds is the critical paradigm shift which was occurring at the time of writing: a combination of the rejection of New Criticism and the welcoming in (then, at least) of deconstruction. What the argument of ‘Apostrophe’ – supremely cleverly – does is bounce its readers into mistaking the circular introduction of an arbitrary figure for a long-overdue examination of what lyric really is; it disguises a radically rethought theory of lyric and language as an inevitable movement from the old to the new. It was, one might say, a highly successful smash-and-grab; and one whose success, for Culler in his lyric incarnation (and I’ll be considering this in my next section), continues even while deconstruction fell by the way. has been using some sort of prodigious volte-face or coup de théâtre: in other words, a twist or ‘apostrophe’. And this is what Longinus calls a figure: ‘let us speak now of all the figures; but let me show you, first, what is a figure. An oath, yes, but what an oath, what an orator, what an ability for volte-face!’16 Similarly, for Culler, apostrophe is something which we don’t know how to talk about; it is thus mysterious, ‘mystificatory’, the soul, the ‘je ne sais quoi’ of lyric poetry. This is something which we don’t know how to define, but which comes to be defined by that very impossibility of definition. Culler’s essay has no sustained interest in the ‘definition and delimitation’ of its titular term because so much of the force of the argument stems from its looseness: apostrophe is defined in ‘Apostrophe’ not as a precise effect but as an essentially indefinable mystery which is the essence of lyric. We may not know how to talk about ‘apostrophe’, as Culler uses it, because he has not defined what he means, in any sense which goes beyond a subjective feeling of lyric’s elusive quintessence. But rather than imploring another, in the words of Stanley Cavell, to ‘[l]ook and find out whether you can see what I see, wish to say what I wish to say’, Culler builds a theory before he has submitted his feeling to test, one which is grounded by the essentially circular argument that apostrophe is central to lyric because apostrophe is the indefinable centre of lyric.18 The test is necessary, because what to one person looks like the soul of something to another might look quite extraneous, or even absent. And the test needs to consist in a consideration of concrete examples which hold the potential to alter our feelings towards lyric as a general conception, as opposed to examples which, as they do in ‘Apostrophe’, merely illustrate a pre-conceived theory. Kramer detested Koch’s AIDS policies and would loudly berate him in the lobby of their apartment building until the building management threatened Kramer with eviction. After that, whenever he would find himself with Koch in the lobby, Kramer would instead address his dog, Molly, with comments such as ‘[t]here’s the man who murdered all of Daddy’s friends’ uttered loudly enough for the mayor to overhear them.21 the apostrophes give us an alternation which is reversible in the temporality of discourse: O, weep for Adonais – he is dead! Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and weep! Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed Thy fiery tears, … Most musical of mourners, weep again! Lament anew, Urania! Mourn not for Adonais … Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moan! My love, if I write a song for you, To that extent you’re gone[?]27 The opening of Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s ‘Sonnet’ – who, once married to Culler, would no doubt have debated such issues with him at some length – transcends ‘levels’ of apostrophe as it appears to make a faltering address to someone whom the very act of address makes (to that extent) disappear. The poem – whose author was well versed in French theory – takes seriously the structuralist claim that a ‘poem [is] not a repository for a poet’s feelings and intuitions but an experiment with the system of language; or an attempt to discover the system’, and that ‘it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality … to reach that point where only language acts, “performs”, and not “me”’.28 (Culler’s claim that, ‘[d]evoid of semantic reference, the O of apsotrophe refers to other apostrophes and thus to the lineage and conventions of sublime poetry’ (Apos, 63) is a spiritual brother of this kind of thinking).29 Central to ‘Sonnet’ is a tension between individual feeling and general system and tradition, as the poem considers the possibilities and limitations of address. As they speak of a passage from individual voice to linguistic system, Mallarmé and Barthes tell us that the ‘I’ and ‘you’ of lyric poems refer not to real or fictional things or people but become a general ‘I’ and ‘You’, comments upon the act and tradition of expressing oneself in poetic language. This view of lyric naturally precludes the possibility that a poet might want to write a poem for any other reason than to produce a linguistic experiment in a long tradition of similar experiments. The central question of ‘Sonnet’, ‘what if I actually just want to write a poem for you?’, is one with which a critic cannot engage unless she is prepared to think beyond one totalising theory of poetry and language and consider two or more at once – or even leave all such totalising behind. Ever since Pindar and doubtless before, lyrics have been constructed for reperformance, with an iterable now: not timeless but a moment of time that is repeated every time the poem is read, and the English simple present only intensifies that underlying possibility of lyric. Its structure, like that of triangulated address or of hyperbole is only dissimulated, never eliminated, and provides a framework for a great range of lyric invention.30 The first words of Paul Alpers’s article on apostrophe state that Culler’s essay ‘has become a classic of deconstructive criticism’; L.M. Findlay saw ‘Apostrophe’ as attempting to ‘claim the lyric for deconstruction’; for Alan Richardson, the ‘trope of apostrophe has come to epitomise the excessive, disruptive, and insistently literary character of rhetorical figures [that is, the deconstructive understanding of them] as perhaps no other’.31 Colin Burrow’s review of Theory of the Lyric, meanwhile, makes no mention of Culler’s deconstructive heritage, nor do many similar accounts.32 Elizabeth Helsinger, indeed, opens her review with the assertion that Theory of the Lyric is not ‘Theory’ but ‘theory’, describing the book as ‘a poetics of the lyric poem’ intended ‘to be of practical use to poets, readers, and teachers of poetry’.33 Reviewers do not miss the similarity of the book’s arguments to those espoused in ‘Apostrophe’ – Isobel Palmer, for example, describes Culler’s chapter on ‘lyric address’ as ‘a rehearsal of his seminal discussion of apostrophe’ – yet seem uninterested in connections between Culler as major figure in the lyric studies conversation and his previous existence as a translator and interpreter of Continental theory for an American audience, despite the fact that ‘Apostrophe’ is where those two existences most closely touch.34 In a barnstormingly polemical book criticising Saussurean and post-Saussurean literary theory, Raymond Tallis writes again and again of that theory’s resistance to common sense, of positions which claim, for instance, that speech is the predominant mode of communication, that language is not a closed system, that intention is of key importance in the ways we make ourselves understood (to name but a few).35 A similar account of the Culler of Theory of the Lyric would be wayward. In the dominant lyric studies conversation, the common-sense position is that lyric exists: we read what we can call ‘lyric poems’ all the time. Culler is still presenting us with complex ideas, but ones which no longer seem to go against the grain of common sense. His book appeals to readers across disciplines for its perceived ‘practical’ approach. It is a testament to the clarity of Culler’s style that readers do not tend to think they are reading literary theory, or its legacy, when reading Theory of the Lyric. But Culler’s book is nevertheless heavily grounded in deconstructionist thinking. We might write off ‘Apostrophe’s’ influence: we could claim, for instance, that in developing into Theory of the Lyric’s tree, ‘Apostrophe’s’ seed shed its deconstructive husk. But in fact, that development continued to accord with many of the counter-intuitive deconstructive tenets and narratives which Culler once made it his business to explain. This section will attempt to illuminate these deconstructive influences, focussing in particular on a section of Theory of the Lyric which deals with the work of J.L. Austin and Jacques Derrida, and the latter’s word ‘iterability’. Culler’s command of numerous examples might make us suspect that his is an empirically achieved theory and that we can be confident of its practical use. But it remains, in fact, rooted in Theory; the attempt to offer an alternative mode of thinking about lyric needs to consider that theory and its influence on Culler, as a means of showing the lack of, and consequent need for, that way of thinking: one which will be of real practical use for our reading of individual poems. [i]f men write it is: (1) because they have to communicate; (2) because what they have to communicate is their ‘thought’, their ‘ideas’, their representations. Thought, as representation, precedes and governs communication, which transports the ‘idea’, the signified content; (3) because men are already in a state that allows them to communicate their thought to themselves and each other when, in a continuous manner, they invent the particular means of communication, writing.38 Culler refers to ‘Signature Event Context’ in a brief paragraph of Theory of the Lyric, amidst a wider discussion of ‘the performative’, attending in particular to J.L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words. Culler’s initial version of Austin’s description is quickly found wanting on the grounds that it is ‘narrowly drawn’: it cannot account for the ‘link of the concept of performative language to the creative power of language and to the problem of origination’, whereas Derrida’s more widely drawn version can, as it asserts that ‘we act through language in singular yet iterable ways all the time’, which ‘may originate or inaugurate, create something new’ (TotL, 126). Theory of the Lyric’s paragraph thus presents a ‘Signature Event Context’ which subtly extends Austin’s apparent theory of language to account for a wider range of instances, ‘makes explicit’ what is already there, but simply not drawn out. This is hardly consistent with Derrida’s overarching claims about the entirety of the Western philosophical tradition, and its errors, which Austin’s work is presumed to fit: as David Gorman puts it, ‘Derrida is interested solely, and reductively, in the fact that Austin’s lectures can be shown to fit a certain pattern already established by Derrida as exemplified in the whole tradition of Western thought about language and representation’.40 No one who attends to the Searle-Derrida debate – neutral or partisan – can be under the impression that its stakes are simply the differences between more or less explicit accounts of the same phenomena.41 These are radically different approaches to language – entirely different worlds. [r]estricting the notion of the performative to illocutionary effects, effects achieved in saying something in particular, we can discuss directly what Austin calls perlocutionary effects, without worrying about ‘felicity’ or the general structure of Austin’s theory of language. What sorts of effects do poems have? (TotL, 130) the poem’s efficacy is not to be given by virtue of the poem’s formulations but depends on the ways in which its performance is received. It is far better – certainly more accurate – to think of a poem as performance, which may or may not be efficacious, rather than as a performative, which is supposed to bring about, by convention, that of which it speaks. (TotL, 130–1) ‘The poetic’, Derrida writes, ‘would be what you desire to learn but from the other, thanks to the other, and under dictation from the other, by heart, imparare a memoria’. The poem addresses you – ‘learn me by heart, copy out, watch over and preserve me’. The lyric, by its formal patterning and mode of address, asks to be learned by heart, even if that seldom happens; its efficacy depends upon its success in making its words memorable, having them remembered. And Derrida’s text calls ‘poem’ not just that which asks to be learned by heart but ‘that which learns or teaches us the heart, which invents the heart’.46 In order for my ‘written communication’ to retain its function as writing, i.e., its readability, it must remain readable despite the absolute disappearance of any receiver, determined in general. My communication must be repeatable – iterable – in the absolute absence of the receiver or of any empirically determinable collectivity of receivers. Such iterability – (iter, again, probably comes from itara, other [sic] in Sanskrit, and everything that follows can be read as the working out of the logic that ties repetition to alterity) structures the mark of writing itself, no matter what particular type of writing is involved (whether pictographical, hieroglyphic, ideographic, phonetic, alphabetic, to cite the old categories). A writing that is not structurally readable – iterable – beyond the death of the addressee would not be writing.50 To define the poetic as such or to give a description of what is poetic horrifies nearly all who have written about poetry. And in fact if a man begins to talk about poetry as an imaginative art without having previously examined what art’s content and general mode of representation is, he will find it extremely difficult to know where to look for the proper essence of poetry. But the awkwardness of his problem especially increases if he starts from the individual character of single works and then proposes to assert some universal derived from this character and supposed to be valid for the most varied genres and sorts of poetry. Along these lines the most heterogeneous works count as poetry. If this assumption is presupposed and the question is then raised: By what right should such productions be recognised as poems? the difficulty just mentioned enters at once. Fortunately, at this point in our discussion we can evade this difficulty. In the first place, we have not reached the general conception of the matter in hand by deriving it from single examples; on the contrary, we have endeavoured to develop the real exemplifications of this conception from the conception itself and consequently we cannot be required, e.g. in the sphere we are dealing with now, to subsume under this conception whatever is commonly called a poem, because the decision on whether something actually is a poetical production or not is to be derived solely from the conception of poetry itself.52 The function of that ‘but’, then, remains uncertain. It’s a small moment which is indicative of the role played by examples in Theory of the Lyric as a whole. Culler finds himself torn between a desire to produce a ‘properly philosophical’ theory and an account of lyric which will be applicable to a long and well-populated lyric tradition, and thus more widely applicable than Hegel himself promises his own theory to be. This, as we saw with Adonais, drives the critic into error; this is Theory of the Lyric’s practical failure, as in forcing poems to conform to its lyric model it sacrifices genuine and sustained encounters with individual poems, the kind of encounters which might trouble its theory. It is possible such error can be avoided if, like Hegel, we stick to a very narrow range of examples, both when constructing a theory and when employing it. But to avoid error when it comes to a general conception as wide as ‘lyric’, we need to re-think what Hegel’s ‘proper philosoph[y]’ might be. I want to end by briefly gesturing towards a set of relations between examples and general conceptions which cannot be classed as merely derivative, but might nonetheless illuminate both example and conception. Here example, and not any general proposition, would take centre stage, in a mode of exemplarity radically different from that of Hegel, and indeed the pre-twentieth-century Western philosophical tradition. Remembering Austin’s philosophically grounded plea for a keener attention to a greater variety of examples, it will, I hope, be clear that it is not in a spirit of anti-intellectualism or anti-theory that I offer no formulation of the essence of comedy. Thinking about comedy does have to submit to the test and the pleasure of examples, and has to deny itself the relaxations of the Big Idea.57 For someone might object against me: ‘You make things easy for yourself! You talk about all sorts of language-games, but have nowhere said what is essential to a language-game, and so to language: what is common to all these activities, and makes them into language or parts of language. So you let yourself off the very part of the investigation that once gave you the most headache, the part about the general form of the proposition and of language’.58 The philosopher appealing to everyday language turns to the reader not to convince him without proof but to get him to prove something, test something, against himself. He is saying: Look and find out whether you can see what I see, wish to say what I wish to say. Of course he often seems to answer or beg his own question by posing it in plural form. […] But this plural is still first person: it does not, to use Kant’s word, ‘postulate’ that ‘we’, you and I and he, say and want and imagine and feel and suffer together. If we do not, then the philosopher’s remarks are irrelevant to us. Of course he doesn’t think they are irrelevant, but the implication is that philosophy, like art, is, and should be, powerless to prove its relevance; and that says something about the kind of relevance it wishes to have. All the philosopher, this kind of philosopher, can do is to express, as fully as he can, his world, and attract our undivided attention to our own.59
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