Intertexts

Intmexts,Vo\. 5, No. 1, 2001 Lyric Poetry and Subjectivity A m i t t a i F. A v i r a m U n i v e r s i t y o f S o u t h C a r o l i n a i' It is acommonplace of the criticism and history of lyric poetry to asso¬ ciate this genre with subjectivity—from Wordsworth’s “spontaneous over¬ flow of powerful feelings” (1800/1802 Preface, Lyrical Ballads 2A6) to Nietzsche’s comments on Archilochus (48-56) to Easthope’s materialist history of English lyric metrical genres as expressions of the rise and later teetering of bourgeois subjectivity (30-47). In his excellent “lyric” entry in his Glossary of Literary Terms, even the sober M. H.Abrams finds at the core of the modern sense of the term “a speaker who expresses astate of mind or aprocess of thought and feeling” (97-8). The notion of “lyric sub¬ jectivity” is crucial to Theodor Adorno’s account of the power and attrac¬ tivenessoflyricinhisessay,“OnLyricPoetryandSociety,”andthesimulre flection” and “production” of subjectivity—i.e., bourgeois subjectivity—is the primary function of literature in general according to Marxist critics Pierre Macherey and Etienne Balibar. In this essay, however, Ishall argue against the idea of “lyric subjectivity” as auseful concept, es¬ pecially in its Marxist version, and shall urge, instead, aconcept of lyric thzt maintains an allusive connection to its etymological origins in song. Inso¬ far as lyric poetry is akind of game involving the recognition of the semblanceofaspeakingsubject,andatthesametimetheunrealityofthat semblance,lyricpoetryworkstothecontraryofsubjectivity,enablingtheistenerorreadermomentarilytostepoutsidethesincere —andtransparentrealmofsubjectivity ,contemplatingandenjoyingitsparadoxesasaestheoc structuresoftvitratherthanaspsychologicalorsocialproblems.Inorder to define and understand this game of imitation and recognition in greater detail, Ishall draw upon one of the first and still one ofthe greatest thinkers on this matter,Aristotle.Accordingly, my discussion of the nature of imita¬ tionandverbalartwillnecessarilystrayattimesfromthepathoflyricsub¬ jectivity,asIdevelopmycritiqueofthisconceptbywayofitscontrary,the game of lyric poetry. Wit,play,andparadoxarebynomeansrestrictedtolyricpoetry,but inhereineverythingwecallart.Wefindacomparablewit,forinstance,in representationalpainting,insofarasthemereshapesandgradationsofpig¬ mentonasurfacemanagetolooklikesomethingelse.Thetraitsthatmake lyric poetry distinctive among the arts include, first, that it is averbal art, the imitation of acommunicative utterance, and hence akind of fiction (see my “Literariness, Markedness, and Surprise in Poetry”). What we call poetry or verse, then, is that kind of fiction designed to draw attention multaneously in the contrary directions of sense and sound. What we some¬ times call the content—that is, what the words would if they occurred t a n e o u s s i 6 1 6 2 I N T E R T E X T S i n a n a c t u a l c o m m u n i c a t i v e u t t e r a n c e r a t h e r t h a n a fi c t i o n — d e m a n d s o u r focus, but the mere physical features of those same words and how they are arranged distract us playfully, sometimes by means of the additional game of the sound (or visual appearance) somehow pretending to mimic the sense, even though such athing is impossible according to the real logic of signs and meaning (see my Telling Rhythm, 43-57). It is this tension be¬ tween sound and sense that helps alert the listener or reader to the very fact that the text at hand is awork of fiction, to be enjoyed rather than ques¬ tioned, answered, or obeyed. The phonemes, rhythmic contours, words, and syntactic structures of the poem are thus comparable to those shapes of paint on the canvas that somehow “become” flowers —and yet remain mere paint. This divided attention between sound and sense defines poetry or verse in general. What sets lyric poetry oiHtom other kinds of verse, then, is the placement of focus, relatively speaking, primarily on qualities of song—that is, precisely, on the game of tension and paradox between the sense and the sound that both expresses that sense and distracts us from it. Whereas the “spoken” verse of epic and dramatic poetry allow us, in dis¬ tinct ways, to pay relatively more attention to the events of the story, lyric poetry keeps its focus...