First Thoughts

The title of my independent study is “Transgeneric Narratology.” The idea behind the project was that Narratology, a system of tools used to analyze narrative, might be helpful in discussing poetry. One book into the project, I’m already finding myself back in my first creative writing class. What is the meaningful difference between prose and poetry?

In the book I read for this week, Narratology:Introduction to the Theory of Narrative by Mieke Bal, Bal suggests that while poetry has narrative elements, those elements aren’t the main focus of the poem. But she also suggests that texts not usually considered narrative can be fruitfully analyzed using narratological precepts—and she models this with an analysis of what she argues are events depicted in a temple carving—a visual text which cannot depict time passing except through the interpretation of its interlocutor. I’m still uncertain whether Bal would claim that the carving is a narrative text or not—this question remains very open for me. But Bal’s reading of the carving is a compelling case for abandoning rigid definitions of narrative as the boundaries for using narratological methods.

The carving she describes is of a yogi meditating, a cat meditating, and mice dancing around the cat. Bal notes that the carving might seem to be a piece of humorous frivolity until the narrative of the image is uncoded. Her reading of the carving is that the cat sees the yogi meditate and attempts to mimic him. When the mice see that the cat is meditating, they know that they are free from it’s attention and safe from it’s attack, so they dance. Bal’s reading of the carving continues to explore how perspective, or focalization is traced through these events of vision and create comic effects and value judgments. Her reading not only adds layers of richness and enjoyment to the piece, but resolves confusion about its meaning that might only have been available otherwise through a “frame of reference” that gives a familiarity with the fabula of the cat and the yogi. So in what directions might one start to look for ways in which narratology can be useful in examining and understanding complex relationships between events and their meanings in poetry? I think one important argument that Bal makes in the anecdote above, as well as through the rest of her book, is that vision is an event. While many might be willing to accept that some poetry is “narrative poetry,” many people (Bal included) seem to suggest that “lyric poetry” is less concerned with relating events. What is meant by “lyric poetry”? I think it’s worthwhile to stop for a moment here and talk about the centrality of two major concepts in what I would call lyric poetry, which are memory and vision.

I wanted to see what the most generic definition of lyric poetry, so I went to Wikipedia to see what that could be. In a list of genres of poetry, lyric poetry was specifically describes as the less-narrative version of poetry: “Lyric poetry is a genre that, unlike epic and dramatic poetry, does not attempt to tell a story but instead is of a more personal nature. Poems in this genre tend to be shorter, melodic, and contemplative. Rather than depicting characters and actions, it portrays the poet's own feelings, states of mind, and perceptions.” It’s interesting to me that the lyric mode seems to be defined against narrative. I want to challenge this definition. But first it might be helpful to see a positively, rather than negatively constructed definition of what lyric poetry is.

In “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” William Wordsworth defends his new type of poetry and tries to explain what the goals of the poems are. The oft-quoted essay validates the Wikipedia, or general understanding of the lyric by suggesting that “a state of vivid sensation,” is it’s goal (par 1). Lyrical ballads attempt to “choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them […] at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of the imagination” (par 5). Wordsworth describes the relationship in time between the moment of the poem and the moment of the event in what is perhaps the most famous section of the essay, when he describes lyrical poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility” (par 26). For Wordsworth, it seems like the heart of lyric is reflecting or contemplating events from the past. It might be useful here to think about what Wikipedia might mean by “story.” Most people may not think that describing an image and then contemplating it constitutes a story. Wordsworth’s “situations” are often tableaus or visions rather than the “story” of someone doing something. But even in a poem where something is seen, “recollected in tranquility,” and emotionally reflected upon—there is an event—according to Bal, one in which the vision is the action, the person who saw it is the actor, and the speaker of the poem is narrating the past vision and the current contemplation. Even in the most lyric of poems, understanding the relationship between the actor, or character as it would be here, and the narrator, and being able to tease out the differences, might become crucial to understanding a shift in the judgments made by the narrator of the poem toward its object over the time of recollection. This shift in judgment over time is often directly responsible for what later writers will call epiphany—that moment of clarity or insight that is offered at the time of recollection and contemplation that was not available at the moment of the event. And while Wordsworth hasn’t gotten there yet, Adam Beach and Rae Armantrout and numerous other 20th century poets will make the argument that by the late 20th century, the lyric-epiphanic formula is the mainstay of American poetry.

Why is it useful to understand the speaker of a poem as a narrator, with a relationship to its own past which can be dissected and analyzed as narratologists do with novels? Is the relationship in a lyric poem complicated enough to warrant such analysis? I’d like to argue that in some poems, the meaning of the poem that a particular reader will get out of a poem does depend on what judgments are made in the past by the seeing eye of the narrator during the event and the judgments made by the narrating speaker, in the present, making (perhaps) new and different judgments about both the past self and the object of its vision. It is the convention of lyric poetry that the judgments of the narrating, present self are privileged over those of the past self, the actor of the poem, because of the expectation that recollection and contemplation lead to better judgments. So in poems where the meaning is controversial, such analysis can help better understand the position of the narrator—and thus, for many readers, the ethical stance of the poem.