McHale on Image and Discourse in Modern and Postmodern Poetry

One of the more useful dualistic distinctions of narratology is the division between story and discourse. (Story--the abstractable content of narrative which remains the same among many different tellings, and discourse--the way in which story is told in a particular way, for a particular purpose.) Brian McHale's "Postmodern Lyric and the Ontology of Poetry" offers a history of the application of such a divide in poetry with some fruitful results in navigating the often confused line between modern and postmodern avant garde poetics.

McHale argues that the Jameson definition of postmodern and modern (epistemological vs. ontological dominant) applies to the poetic tradition. Modernist poetry is a way of accessing knowledge, where as postmodern poetry questions the construction of knowledge itself as fragmented, contingent, and multiple. The content of a poem, or the interpretation of its "meaning," has often been the focus of critics trying to decide if the dominant focus of a poem is epistemological or ontological. McHale instead redirects our attention to the tension and play between the "meaning" level and the "discourse" level of the poem, refocusing on poetics as a site of epistemological or ontological action.

McHale's article first lays the groundwork for looking at poems in such terms, which are unfortunately fluid. He explores a number of critics' language: Charles Morris's "symbol" vs. "icon," Ransom's idea that Imagism turns ideas into images instead of Platonic poetry's movement to turn images into ideas, the traditional tension between "meter" and "meaning," Forrest-Thompson's "empirical imagery" vs. "discursive imagery," and others. While each dyad revolves around a slightly different difference to create its focused meaning, the picture created by the overlapping definitions is of what McHale calls an "ontological cut." This is the fissure created between the world of the poem, its images, meanings, and icons, and the constructedness of the world of the poem, not only its form and meter, but also the language of the poem that functions to point out, highlight, or reveal its existence as a mental and linguistic construction.

In workshop language, this difference in registers of language is understood as "concrete" and "abstract." Words like box, can, or jacket all work mimetically to create the illusion of reality, the image. Words like lovely, tender, or painful reveal the editorializing eye of the creator of the poem's world, and by extension, highlight its status as a construction.

McHale argues that poetry has usually struggled to gloss over or reconcile the tension between the "realness" of the world of the poem and the highly visible fact of its lineated, stanza-broken existence as hyper-constructed language. This tension makes the historical terms "modern" and "postmodern" slightly confusing to use. McHale discusses the postmodern poetics of 17th century and Dada poets, so despite their clunkiness and the fear of appearing jargony, I'll use epistemological and ontological when discussing poetry.

When poetry's purpose is rhetorical or didactic or (simply?) narrative, then balancing the tension between "meter" and "meaning" was simply considered a success or failure of the poet's skill. To have rhyme, for example, clearly shape the content of a poem into nonsense was a failing on the part of the poet. But with modernism's use of the poem as an epistemological technique, the tension had to be reconciled or obliterated in some way. How can one value, as revealed truth, something which might be contaminated by the arbitrariness of poetic mechanics? The rallying cry of free verse is that the form should organically mirror, enable, and bolster the images and meaning of the poem. In workshop language, we are often exorted to let "discover" the form, or to "let it reveal" itself to us as the writing and revising poet. Through the poetic investment in "discovery," the epistemological function of poetry is highlighted at the expense of its ontological instabilities.

The best formulation I've heard for how the contemporary imagistic epiphanic lyric is constructed is related by McHale from Forrest-Thompson: "the disconnected image-complex" (which McHale suggests is typical of both "radical modern and postmodernist poetry") where "the poem vacillates between empirical and discursive imagery, and the reader is made to hesitate between a concrete 'scenic' context and an abstract discursive context for understanding of the images" (24).

McHale argues that postmodern poetry, on the other hand, rejects the efforts of modernist poetry to cover over the "ontological cut," and instead foreground it using a variety of poetic effects which highlight the world of the poem as only one among many possibilities. While he gestures toward a number of poets and poetic methods, he focuses on "radical stylization" and "self-erasure," perhaps most clearly demonstrated in the poetry of Maclow and Ashberry.

More on McHale's "radical stylization" and "self-erasure."