Facing Loss and Death

Narrative and Eventfulness in Lyric Poetry

Peter Hühn

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9783110484984
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Lyric poetry as a temporal art-form makes pervasive use of narrative elements in organizing the progressive course of the poetic text. This observation justifies the application of the advanced methodology of narratology to the systematic analysis of lyric poems. After a concise presentation of this transgeneric approach to poetry, the study sets out to demonstrate its practical fruitfulness in detailed analyses of a large number of English (and some American) poems from the early modern period to the present. The narratological approach proves particularly suited to focus on the hitherto widely neglected dimension of sequentiality, the dynamic progression of the poetic utterance and its eventful turns, which largely constitute the raison d'être of the poem. To facilitate comparisons, the examples chosen share one special thematic complex, the traumatic experience of severe loss: the death of a beloved person, the imminence of one's own death, the death of a revered fellow-poet and the loss of a fundamental stabilizing order. The function of the poems can be described as facing the traumatic experience in the poetic medium and employing various coping strategies. The poems thus possess a therapeutic impetus.

1Introduction

Lyric poetry has always had a marked preference for elemental themes of human experience. In treating their topics, typically from a first-person perspective, the speakers of poems employ various “text-types” such as description, narration, argumentation, evaluation and exposition in the course of their utterances. Although the genre of lyric poetry – in contradistinction to narrative fiction – is not defined by narrativity as the predominating “discourse-type”1, poems do use narrative devices and they even do so pervasively and extensively. This is due to the function of narration as a privileged instrument for ordering and making sense of experience as well as communicating such meaning and understanding to others or to oneself. Ultimately, this privileging of narrative is based on the anthropological fact that human existence in the world, the conditions of life, experience, consciousness, social relations and communication are fundamentally and inevitably determined by change, that is, by being subject to time and transience – a condition which individuals constantly attempt to understand, structure and control with the aim of achieving or securing happiness, fulfillment, stability or clarity, processes which centrally underlie the courses of reflection and utterance represented in poems.

Because of the pervasive use of narrative elements in lyric poetry, it is legitimate and fruitful to apply categories and methods originally designed for the study of narrative prose fiction to analyze how lyric poems provide an aesthetic expression of experience and make sense of it. The narrative organization of the poetic utterance operates in two dimensions, the temporal concatenation of individual elements into a coherent sequence and the mediation of this sequence from a particular position and perspective: sequentiality and mediacy. The analytic application of narratological categories and principles has to be adapted to the genre of lyrical poetry, by taking into account the distinctly poetic manner in which poems render story elements such as characters, settings, actions, changes, narrators and perspectives and thereby mediate stories. Narrative sequences in poems are essentially made up of changes in the mental or psychological dimension, similar to what Dorrit Cohn2 has termed “psycho-narration” in fiction. Moreover, narrative sequences occur typically in a condensed, abbreviated or summarized form, as compact “stories”, as it were, as “micro-narratives”3 or “mini-stories”4, omitting circumstantial details such as proper names, identified settings, dates, specified time spans, social backgrounds or outward appearances. For their understanding such mini-stories rely on the readers’ narrative competence to fill in gaps and supply missing or merely implied links by associating the backgrounds or outward appearances. For their understanding such mini-stories rely on the readers’ narrative competence to fill in gaps and supply missing or merely implied links by associating the appropriate “frames” and “scripts” (Schank and Abelson 1977), that is, the conventional schemata, stereotypical scenarios or procedural patterns, with which readers are already familiar on account of their world-knowledge.

As for the dimension of mediacy, narratives are always presented from a particular position, that of the speaker (equivalent to the narrator in prose fiction) or the protagonist, and from a particular perspective (focalization). It is typical of poetry that speaker and protagonist are often identical persons, possibly with a temporal and psychological distance between experiencing self and narrating self. Speakers typically present their own experiences, telling – as it were – stories about themselves, a widespread phenomenon in lyric poetry, which accounts for the association of the poetic genre with a subjective stance. The mediation of narrative sequences in poetry may take two forms: the succession of thoughts, perceptions, imaginations can be presented diegetically (that is, narrated by a mediating speaker-narrator, usually in the past tense, as in prose fiction) or mimetically (that is, performed directly, in the present tense, without mediating speaker, as in drama).

One essential further aspect of narrativity in all literary as well as non-literary genres is the feature of eventfulness. The ordering function vis-à-vis the sequence of changes (and thus the definition of their meaning) is achieved by the device of constituting an “event”, some decisive turn in the narrative sequence, some unforeseen, surprising deviation from the expected or familiar, which usually concludes the course of changes and renders the experience tellable or noteworthy.

Events can assume a wide variety of shapes, from manifest change to the significant non-occurrence of an expected change (“non-events”) on the story level. But an event can also consist in the shift from story to discourse level. Essentially, events are linked to a figure, which undergoes a significant change: usually either the protagonist or the speaker (as the narrator), but in certain – unusual – cases the eventful change is attributable to the implied author and in others to the reader. Accordingly, one can distinguish events in the happenings (on the story level), presentation events (on the level of the speaker’s act of narration) and reception events (on the level of the reading process).

Furthermore, another important aspect of the genre-specific use of narrative in poems concerns the material body of the poem, the conspicuous over-structuring of the language itself. Prosodic and poetic devices (such as rhymes, meter, segmentation, repetition and variation of elements, images and rhetorical figures, manipulation of syntax etc.) may be employed in order to shape, emphasize, differentiate, modify or undermine the meaning.

Previous concepts and procedures of poetry analysis have predominantly neglected the dimension of sequentiality in poems, the way in which the speaker’s utterance progresses from beginning to end. The narratological approach is better suited to offer a more differentiated and specified approach for the description and analysis of this central dimension of poetry than was possible before. This can be considered the most valuable and productive contribution of narratology to poetry analysis.5 The purpose of the analyses in this book is to demonstrate the methodological and analytic value and the practical fruitfulness of such an approach for a deeper and clearer understanding of what the poems intend to achieve.

It must be emphasized that applying narratological categories and tools to the analysis of lyrical poems is by no means intended to blur the distinction between poetry and prose fiction and treat poetry indiscriminately as a narrative genre. Rather, this approach is apt to highlight the specificity of the poetic uses of narrative, with respect both to the manner of their employment (for example the reduced circumstantiality of characterization and story) and their function (for example the self-attribution of a story for the definition of subjective identity).

The poems selected in these chapters represent different facets of one specific thematic complex – the severe existential crisis caused by the shattering – traumatic – experience of loss or death: for instance, the death of a beloved or revered person, the disruption of love, the threat of extinction, the loss of stable orientation in life. These experiences are typically presented with clear indications of their biographical significance for the author. The thematic focus on loss and death is particularly apt to highlight the function of narrative in poetry for rendering, structuring, interpreting and controlling experience, since the confrontation with such a severe blow to the individual’s stability and existence constitutes a breach within the continuation of his life story and creates the need to come to terms with this destabilizing impact (Rosenblatt 2001). The poetic process of lamenting the loss and coping with it can be described as a narrative, more precisely: as a doubly eventful narrative. Event is defined as a profound change of state in a narrative development, an unforeseen, surprising deviation from the expected or familiar, which can take a negative or a positive turn for the person concerned, a change for the worse or for the better (Lotman 1977; Schmid 2003; Hühn 2008 and 2010, 1–13). The speaker’s initial confrontation, for instance, with a loved person’s death constitutes a negative event disrupting his life and undermining his identity. This negative event triggers the speaker’s attempt to come to terms with the disruption by revising his on-going life-story and integrating the loss in some way into a new narrative coherence of his life, which may lead to a new – a positive – event or else ultimately fail to achieve such a transformation, confirming the unrelieved trauma of loss. Although the cause of the initial event – death, destruction, loss – is a change in the external, physical world, the effect and decisive impact on the speaker is not physical, but mental, a change in his psychological condition. This is particularly apparent in the case of the loss of stable orientation. The remedy, the coping with this traumatic impact, is likewise mental, consisting in the cognitive integration of the loss into the speaker’s life’s tale. To be sure, the emphasis on the mental dimension of these events does not mean that such changes are subject to conscious control and can be manipulated at will. The narrative revision of the traumatic experience can only consciously be constructed by the bereaved speaker and offered to himself as a possible continuation of his life story and may subsequently meet with acceptance or rejection. What this acceptance or rejection depends on is another question.

The analytic chapters of this book exemplify the experience of loss in five different forms and constellations: the loss – by death – of a beloved person (such as lover, spouse, friend or child), typically with indications of its biographical significance for the author, a constellation which can be classified as the prototypical experience of loss (Chapter 2), the (threatened) loss in love by absence, estrangement, betrayal or imminent death (Chapter 3), the imminence of one’s own death (Chapter 4), lamenting the death of a revered fellow-poet (Chapter 5), the loss of a basic stabilizing frame of orientation or meaning system in life (Chapter 6). The respective poem can then be seen to enact a poetic reaction to the disruptive (supposedly or allegedly real-life) event, constituting a poetic means of coping with the crisis. Experiences of death and loss may be dealt with in single poems, in poetic sequences or in entire poetry collections. The examples chosen for the five chapters are predominantly made up of single poems, in some cases analyzed in contrastive pairs. In addition, three poetic sequences or collections have been included to explore how the confrontation with the crisis is developed in an extended sequence of poems: Shakespeare’s The Sonnets (the young-man section), Wordsworth’s “Lucy Poems” and Ted Hughes’s The Birthday Letters.

The aim of coping with threatened or manifest loss through narrative in poetry can basically be achieved in two ways: first, by creating an aestheticizing, distancing effect through employing formal, poetic devices for formulating and thereby constraining the emotionally disturbing, traumatic experience (Robinson 2004) – a fundamental capacity and function of art in general and poetry in particular (Heaney 1996, 2, 10 and passim); second, by imposing some kind of clarifying structure upon the happenings through association with already familiar narrative patterns or schemata, some established, re-assuring procedure or process (“frame” and “script”), particularly in conjunction with an event, a decisive turn or significant change of state, which in some way or other concludes the course of changes, constituting a reassuring resolution (or else significantly failing to do so) and rendering the experience and its conclusion tellable or noteworthy (Baroni 2009).

The experiences of loss which underlie the poems and initiate the dynamic coping process, in the great majority of cases and most particularly with respect to the loss of a beloved person in Chapter 2, possess the quality of trauma. The processes enacted in the texts can therefore tentatively be viewed in the light of trauma theory, as introduced by Freud, especially in “Jenseits des Lustprinzips” / “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1955), and subsequently developed further (see Caruth 1996). Trauma theory divides itself into two basic trends: “the focus on trauma as the ‘shattering’ of a previously whole self” and “the focus on the survival function of trauma as allowing one to get through an overwhelming experience by numbing oneself to it” (Caruth 1996 131, 58). The definition of trauma as shattering the self’s wholeness clearly applies to the experiences of loss and death thematized in the poems analyzed here as does the function of survival which can be seen to motivate the poetic enactment in these texts. But the latent, evasive reaction to trauma in the form of repetition compulsion usually associated with traumatic experience – “overwhelming violent […] events […] are not fully grasped as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• 1 Introduction (Peter Hühn)
• 2 Mourning the Death of a Beloved Person
• 3 Coping with Loss in Love
• 4 Confronting One’s Own Death
• 5 Lamenting the Death of Poets
• 6 Thematizing the Loss of an Old Order
• 7 Conclusion: Summary and Results (Peter Hühn)
• Index (authors and titles)
• Endnotes