Decartes' Error

Excuse me for the half-bakedness of this post. I had my mind blown by cognitive science.

Robert Sapolsky's article, "To Understand Facebook, Study Capgras Syndrome," published on Pocket Worthy, explains a fundamental paradigm shift in cognitive science which I, as total non-scientist had no knowledge of whatsoever.

"Starting at least with Descartes, there has been the dualist distinction between “mind” and “brain,” or in a spinoff that has particularly engaged neuroscientists recently, between “cognition” and “emotion.” In the standard view, the latter two are functionally and neurobiologically separable, and are in some sort of perpetual, epic struggle over the control of your behavior. Moreover, this dichotomizing has typically given rise to the view that one of the two, in some sense a mixture of ethics and aesthetics, should dominate the other.

A dichotomy between cognition and emotion, we now know, is false, clearly explored in neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s 1994 book, Descartes’ Error. The two endlessly interact, both functionally and neurobiologically. And most importantly, they’d better, because what we view as normal function requires extensive integration of the two. "

While it probably surprises no one who's encountered post-structuralism that dichotomies of understanding are typically false and misleading, this work explains how cognition and emotion, once thought to be opposite and conflicting brain processes, are interwined in a healthy brain. The article that explains how this phenomenon is centered around a emotionally horrifying delusional syndrome where the cognitive function, recognition, is divorced from the emotional function, familiarity. People with Capgras syndrome recognize loved ones, but do not feel familiarity for them, so they believe that their loved one has been replaced by a double.

(originally appeared on Nautilus and was published November 10, 2016)

While the majority of us haven't experienced this syndrome, our cultural objects report its terror in the horror trope of the Doppleganger. You've seen this movie: The Changeling, and Us.

Before I could even begin to start down the rabbit hole of what the necessary interplay of ethics and aesthetics for healthy cognition would do to my reading of Wayne Booth's The Morality of Fiction, I came back to the incomprehensible boogeyman of my postmodern literature and narratology experience: Nabokov's Lolita.

WTF is going on with people's readings of, responses to, and productions of this text? I realized, functionally, that readers were being seduced by the aesthetic beauty of the text into losing their damn minds (actual academic language) and reinterpreting the text, in a way that now seems to be a symptom of mass delusion, altering details to allow the aesthetic pleasure of the text to co-opt what should otherwise cause moral disgust. People's memories of, and readings of the text, constantly seem to change Lolita into a teenage vixen in order to romanticize Humbert Humbert. But Nabokov's text is unrelenting in reminding its readers that she is a prepubescent child victim. So by what mechanism does this deluded reading arise?

Putting aside for the moment (how?) that the text itself tells us what it is doing, that it makes clear that Humbert Humbert himself deploys this technique of aesthetic mystification over his victims (except for Dolores, his victim, whom he fills with disgust), reader responses to the text are startlingly divergent. As in, I can not understand a theory of that explains how people interact with a text that can explain the scope of how differently different people read this text.

BUT CAPGRAS SYNDROME. I didn't even get all the way through the article, which applies this cognition/emotion interaction to the uncanniness of Facebook cultural phenomenon, before I had to stop. OMG LOLITA finally makes sense. In Capgras syndrome, the emotional response of familiarity interacts with the cognitive function of recognition and creates an uncanniness that gives rise to an explanatory delusion. The brain recognizes the subject (loved one), but the subject is unfamiliar (stranger). To reconcile these two opposites, the emotional response straight up trumps the cognitive response and the delusion that the subject has been replaced with an imposter, a ghostly double, a doppleganger, a freakin dastardly uncanny look-alike occurs.

This framework for understanding cognitive FAILURE (kidnapping and raping an 11 year old is not ROMANTIC, YA'LL KNOW THIS) as a delusion caused by irreconcilable tension between the aesthetic and the ethical actions of the brain FINALLY illuminates the bizarre phenomenon created by Nabokov's text.

I've struggled with how I feel about Nabokov for a while. Obviously he is a genius, because his texts poke and prod at the reaction they stoke in his readers, building on each other to explore the lengths to which human ethics and cognition can be subverted by aesthetics and emotion. But without any sort of revelation to the general audience, this philosophical and artistic experiment seems dangerous and unethical. There are real consequences, that extend beyond the pages of his book and the life of Dolores, to letting loose the aesthetic machinery of a romanticized child predator loose on our cultural consciousness. A culture already inclined to excuse sexual exploitation of teenage female children now has a compelling and powerful mode of overwhelming its small tremors of moral outrage in aesthetic justification. As gross old dudes on the internet often say, "If God didn't want us to have sex with teenagers, then why is that when women are most attractive?" Basically a very bad paraphrase of Humbert Humbert's philosophy on "nymphettes."

Watching our culture consume this text over the past 60 years really drives home the widespread and pervasive ways in which art, aesthetics, cultural constructs that tell an emotional story, can overpower and derail our ethical (also culturally constructed) norms. I'm sure there's a lesson there, for me, on PSYOPS, that is pertinent to today's iteration of viral propaganda as a cheap and effective tool of international conflict by driving democratic decay. I'm also sure there's an interesting corollary, which is what delusions occur when our ethical framework overwhelms our aesthetic judgements? (Thomas Kincaid paintings?) But Nabokov as a cognitive science genius 30 years before Descartes' Error explained his experiment is enough of a revelation for me today.

(Not) Final Thoughts

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been

As a somewhat interdisciplinary project, “Transgeneric Narratology” suffers from problems of focus and scope. It would be impossible for me to offer a representative review of either narratology, with the companion critical movements of rhetorical criticism and narrative theory, or the rich tradition of criticism that comes from the multiple competing movements of the contemporary lyric poetry scene. At the beginning of this project, I hoped that the detailed tools of structural analysis offered by literary theorists in narratology, narrative theory and rhetorical criticism could give me a vocabulary and thought structure to apply to some of the more contested spaces in lyric poetry’s discourse. I felt that at a minimum, using more precise language to describe the logic-structures and reader responses of lyric poetry would be a useful addition to the craft discourse in poetry—a discussion among practitioners about how poetic effects are achieved. This has certainly been the case, as work by both Brian McHale and James Phelan have offered me highly insightful critiques of several lyric methods such as negation and focalization. But as I discovered the work of James Phelan, I found the discourse of rhetorical criticism, and those who problematize it as ‘ethical criticsm,’ began to address fundamental concerns that I have as a poet and critic.

Although Claudia Rankine has asked the poetry world to move past using her as an spring board into the conversation about ethics and the lyric subject, in my mind there is no more explicit or polarizing example of the tension between ethical reading/rhetorical criticism and its rejection than the wide-ranging reaction to her 2011 reading of Tony Hoagland’s poem, “The Change.” Hoagland is a generally respected member of the contemporary academic poetry scene with high status as a conference participant, well-respected university tenured faculty, well –published award winning poet who commands high reading fees and judges multiple literary awards every year. Rankine, although she has achieved some of these same accomplishments, has a slightly more marginal status—judging smaller prizes, teaching at a smaller school, less publications, reading at conferences but not as a keynote speaker. At the Associated Writing Programs conference of 2011, the academic literary world’s largest annual conference, Rankine read a statement about her reaction as a woman of color to Hoagland’s poem, “The Change,” in which a white speaker admits that he bases his sympathy of two women in a tennis game on their race.

The criticism of a major poet’s work as racially offensive, at the United States’ biggest creative writing venue, got a lot of attention from poets. On social media and blogs, on literary journal’s websites and in their editorial pages, in graduate writing program lounges and tenured faculty offices, a discussion blazed. There were multiple readings of the poem itself, and ad hominem attacks on both Rankine and Hoagland. Ultimately, there seems to be an intellectual stalemate between what I’ll grossly oversimplify as two camps. One, something like a neo-aesthetic “art for art’s sake” camp, suggested that it was inappropriate to judge poetry on the basis of “political correctness.” They screamed censorship and they argued that the convention of withholding judgment of a poet based on their poetry is necessary to allow poets the freedom to create challenging art.

A second group, empowered by the more political forms of literary criticism, argued that literature creates cultural mores and effects the people who read it, sometimes for the worse, as Rankine described her personal reaction to seeing a woman of color, with whom she identified, being subjected to the speaker of Hoagland’s poems’ prejudice. Thus it isn’t just “fair game,” but actually crucial, to critique art according to the ideology that forms it. Aesthetics are ideological, the second group argues. To allow for an aesthetic moral cop-out is simply to naturalize the ideology of the dominant at the expense of exoticizing or politicizing the aesthetics of the non-dominant.

With my background in feminist literary criticism, this debate struck a major cord with me. How many times had I been involved in discussions on social media, in classrooms, or at conferences, where a feminist poet (particularly Adrienne Rich, always poor Adrienne) would be held up as an artless political didactic when the structure (if not the message) of the poem being discussed was very similar to the work of a different poet who was supposedly more literary? It seemed to me like aesthetics was an excellent camouflage for privilege and prejudice.

After the feminist poet Adrienne Rich died this year, The Nation ran a review by Angie Mlinko of Rich’s last book, Later Poems: Selected and New, 1971–2012. You’ll be hard-pressed to find the title of the collection on the first page of the review, because it is mostly concerned with a retrospective on Rich as a poet whose politics gave her formerly “formal and elegant” poetry a “newfound stridency.” Mlinko argues that by relinquishing her “inheritance” as a “daughter of Auden and Yeats” that Rich made her poetry more political than literary, influencing a generation of activists but not of writers. The aesthetic grounds on which Mlinko objects to the stridency of Rich’s poetry is its lack of “play,” “negative capability,” and “indeterminance,” forgivable perhaps of “enduring poets” like Blake, Shelly, and Yeats who “have had compensating visionary virtues,” but not of Rich. Marjorie Perloff, that postmodern language poet and theorist, is invoked to suggest that Rich’s “rhetoric is inherently conservative. This claim is an arresting reversal of the usual terms—“art for art’s sake” is supposed to be quietist; “feminist art” is supposed to be revolutionary” and indeed, Mlinko critiques Rich both coming and going. Here we are at the vortex of conflict in art—in which aesthetics and ethics collide and create this awkward two –pronged attack on revolutionary poets. On one hand, Rich is too revolutionary by abandoning the poetics of the male canon of poets. In the same essay, she is too conservative because she does not accept the indeterminancy and play of ethically and politically motivated postmodern poetics.

Where is all of this going? I had hoped that my studies in narrative theory would give me some tools to use when approaching the main problems of feminist poetics, particularly that battlefield of the lyric, but I didn’t expect the conversation to address it directly. The aesthetic reaction to how poems are read has a similar function in creating values around how poems are written, and in the following pieces by rhetorical and structuralist critics, I found a good bit of material on how one could create texts with features that result in very specific emotional effects that are desirable to feminist poets. Mlinko, Angie. “Diagram This: On Adrienne Rich. “ The Nation Jan 29 2013. Web. http://www.thenation.com/article/172513/diagram-adrienne-rich?page=0,0

Research Question: Once we are convinced by Phelan that ethical reactions are a part of reader’s response to texts and that they are created by rhetorical choices made by the author, then we can enter the ongoing debate of what ethical feminist texts should be (such as in Armantrout’s essay), while seeking to understand textual examples of features that such responses. In the work that critics trained in narrative theory have done on lyric texts, they have offered readings of several textual structures that might be useful to feminist poets in order to locate their discussion of abstract values in specific textual practices.

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."

Armantrout and the Poem as Anti-Story

One of the major elements that seems to seperate narrative and lyric poetry is the idea of "story." Bal suggested that even the traditional lyric formula of "I saw this and now it makes me think about this" is a story with an action and character experiencing change. Many schools of contemporary poetry don't follow this formula, however. What does narratology have to offer the analysis of experimental poems?

Seymour Chatman explores the idea of the antistory in his book, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. He quotes Paul Goodman's The Structure of Literature : "'The formal analysis of a poem is largely the demonstration of a probability through all the parts. Or better, in the beginning anything is possible; in the middle things become probable; in the end everything is necessary'" (Chatman 46). Goodman's formula applies the rule of "enchainment" or "causaliy" outlined by Aristotle to the genre of poetry. But Chatman critiques the traditional formula of plot, that "the working out of a plot...is a process of declining or narrowing possibility" (Chatman 46). Chatman argues that modern literature, specifically short stories and novels "reject or modify the notion of strict causality" (47). One modification he mentions is theorized by Jean Poullon, the idea of 'contingency' (47), in which events depend on causes which remain uncertain. Chatman discusses another element, closely related to causality: "In the traditional narrative of resolution, there is a sense of problem-solving, of things being worked out in some way, of a kind ratiocinaive or emotional teleology" (48). Chatman argues that there is no such thing as a narrative without a plot. Instead, he seems to suggest that the presence of resolution can happen without strong causality, perhaps with Poullon's "contingency," and this "working out" signals the presence of plot.

Chatman argues that two types of antistories exist, one, such as Jorge Louis Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths," which values all outcomes as equally possible, and the second possibility, presented in Allan Robbe-Grillet's La Jalousie, where crucial story elements are left out by the narrator. In both instances, Chatman argues that "If a classical narrative is a network (or "enchainment") of kernels affording avenues of choice only one of which is possible, the antistory may be defined as an attack on this convention which treats all choices as equally valid" (56). Although it's critical in nature, the anti-story depends on the conventions of causal plots for its effects. Even Borges critique of causality depends on our expectations of causality in order to make both its story and discourse progressions. Chatman's argument on the last point depends on his understanding that readers expect narrative causality and will read in into the narrative in which it is missing, and against the narrative which is criticizing it. But does lyric or experiemental poetry have the same conventional expectations?

It didn't take long for me to think of a poet who also rejects the idea that each event has one outcome, who also rebels at the thought of "narrowing possibility." Rae Armantrout’s foundational essay “Feminist Poetics and the Meaning of Clarity” offers a way of understanding the social in experimental poetry that is critical of a particular type of lyric subjectivity, described as univocal, closed, Romantic, imperial, and appropriative: “The conventional or mainstream poem today is univocal, more or less plainspoken, short narrative, often culminating in a sort of epiphany” (Armantrout 288). Elaborating, Armantrout argues that “such a form must convey an impression of closure, and wholeness, no matter what it says” (288). Closure and wholeness are bad things for Armantrout, as she suggests they don’t adequately represent the fragmented reality of a marginalized or oppressed subjectivity, and use language to turn subjects into objects for meaning-making.

Armantrout instead valorizes the work of Lyn Hejinian, a poet who Armantrout describes as creating “dynamic, contrapuntal systems in which conflicting forces and voices (inner and outer) are allowed to work” to create paradox and doubt (Armantrout 294). In the other poets discussed in the essay, doubt is stressed as well, using methods described as “counter point,” “epistemological double take” (294), “regression from solution to problem” (294), and finally “ambivalence and doubt” (294). For Armantrout, it is not only poems which present solutions instead of problems (epiphanies), or the failures of a univocal poem to present the fractured and doubly conscious reality of marginalized people that is a problem, but also, and perhaps more importantly, a lyric subjectivity which objectifies other people and claims to speak for them. In her description of mainstream poetry, in which poems see the world only in order to organize it into neat systems of meaning, Armantrout convincingly damns them as appropriative. She suggests a language-based alternative, “another kind of clarity that doesn’t have to do with control but with attention, one in which the sensorium of the world can enter as it presents itself” (Armantrout 290). Armantrout offers a vision of polyvocality which is paying attention to the world that influences the poet’s speaker without subjecting that world, including Other’s voices within it, to appropriation. The key there seems to be that doubt and uncertainty, rather than personal epiphany, allow “conflicting voices” to exist.

One of the ways that Armantrout's poetry uses the principle of "contingency" to undermine narrative causality and enable uncertainty, even against a reader's narrative inclinations, is explained in "This," a review of Rae Armantrout's Versed by Rob Stanton, published at Jacket. Stanton describes how Armantrout regularly uses the hypothetical, conditional phrase "as if" to create a "virtual space" in which events and effects can be explored but remain undefinitive(par 9). Armantrout seems to support Chatman's argument about resolution even without narrative causation. Stanton quotes Armantrout's piece of the group-memoir Grand Piano as a "useful working definintion of 'lyric' as 'a clearly yet arbitrarily finite entity within which a feedback loop of sonic resonances, echoes, familiarities, and meanings evolves'" (par 1). But do meanings equal resolution? Armantrout's championing of "ambivalence and doubt" certainly can't fulfill Chatman's formula for traditional resolution, that of problem-solving or "emotional teleology." Can the poetry that Armantrout describes find resolution in "resonances" and "meanings"? And if not, is such poetry finally beyond the scope of narrative?

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.