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.