Some Scattered Literary Reflections

The Birth of Narrative from the Spirit of Lyric

Wordsworth famously expounded on his notion of “spots of time” in the Prelude, claiming they bestowed a “renovating virtue” that we carry with us amid the quotidian enervation of daily life. That is to say, these spots of time constituted isolated moments that coherently drew together the extended duration of a biography.

Much of Wordworth’s poetry is dedicated to the realization of this dynamic. “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud” captures the moment of intense perception as the poet intuits the indwelling joy of creation in the dance of the golden daffodils. But the significance of this spot of time only reveals itself in the insight it bestows on later moments, when the image of the daffodils “flash(es) upon (the) inward eye.”

At larger scale, Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey begins with a spot of time located in a scene that was five years earlier the scene of a different spot of time. What the experience of that moment serves to reveal to him is the changes that have occurred in his spirit in the interim. He is no longer impelled by his boyish “animal movements” but a “sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused.” In other words, the poet’s contemplation of the significance of the isolated experience (which is the function of the lyric) opens up inevitably upon the way that significance binds moments together coherently (which is the function of narrative).

This consideration, if explored through all its ramifications, would remind us of a fact we have almost completely forgotten, which is that narrative is a mode of poetics. More emphatically, story-telling emerges from the overflow of lyric concentration – from the insufficiency of the moment to the moment – and loses its vitality as it loses contact with that origin.

The Last Step of the Staircase

Coleridge more or less sums up all my objections to contemporary formalist poetry in Chapter 18 of the Biographia Literaria. It is the chapter where he expounds on the nature of poetic meter, which he partly defines in terms of an agreement between the poet and the reader, what he calls “a previous and well understood, though tacit, compact between the poet and his reader, that the latter is entitled to expect, and the former bound to supply this species and degree of pleasurable excitement.” That excitement arises from “the workings of passion,” which of itself compels the poet to resort to “a frequency of forms and figures of speech” and to “a more frequent employment of picturesque and vivifying language.”

Meter announces a uniquely momentous cause for attention, and summons all the other resources of language to capture and convey that momentousness. When meter is employed without that exuberance of stylistic demarcation, or in the absence of a subject matter of any real magnitude, the effect on the reader is one of stymied expectations: “Where, therefore, correspondent food and appropriate matter are not provided for the attention and feelings thus roused there must needs be a disappointment felt; like that of leaping in the dark from the last step of a stair-case, when we had prepared our muscles for a leap of three or four.”

Almost the entirety of contemporary formalist verse represents an attempt to see how far a writer may flout Coleridge’s admonitions and still receive the indulgence of the public. The use of meter to articulate experiences revolving around the mundane, the picayune, and the quotidian is a standard modus operandi of this brand of literature. For instance:

So strange to hear that song again tonight
Travelling on business in a rented car
Miles from anywhere I’ve been before.
And now a tune I haven’t heard for years
Probably not since it last left the charts
Back in L.A. in 1969.
I can’t believe I know the words by heart
And can’t think of a girl to blame them on.

Or:

He window shops. He yawns. He checks his watch.

He sips his Starbucks through a spillproof lid.

No one knows who he is or what he did

Except a black van loitering down the block.

He buys a pack of gum. He briefly stops

To crouch and read the headlines of the Times

Before continuing up 12^th and Vine

His neck prickles. He slows. The coffee drops.

Or:

Up front the stewardesses really care.

They have kind eyes, like guides in Disneyland.

(Doctors, great statesmen, writers go by air:

The people at United lend a hand.)

And at the terminal a car is waiting,

Blue windshield showing a fresh trace of suds;

They’ve left the blower on, refrigerating;

The tape deck breathes “Moon River”; the door thuds

In contemporary formal verse, the meter never summons “a frequency of forms and figures of speech,” as Coleridge suggested it ought, but gets deployed alongside language of the most pedestrian flatness, almost totally lacking in any other stylistic invention:

A month ago, I bought myself a case

Of reasonably priced Pouilly-Fuisse,

But drink bottled tapwater ever day

With nursery hour suppers, wedged in place

Elbow to elbow with another Fellow

On each side sawing pre-apportioned meat.

Or:

We dine sitting on folding chairs—they were cheap but cheery.

We’ve taped the broken window pane. tv’s still out of whack.

We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query.

When we crossed the water, we only brought what we could carry,

But there are always boxes that you never do unpack.

Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

Or:

A Greek I worked for once would always say

that tragedies which still appall and thrill

happen daily on a village scale.

Except that he put it the other way:

dark doings in the sleepiest small town

loom dire and histrionic as a play.

It is obvious that the purveyors of this brand of metrical writing believe they are recovering something central to the poetic tradition in recovering this one element of formalism. But anyone moderately familiar with that tradition cannot help but be struck by the near complete lack of affinity between its most representative creations and the kind of metrical writing produced in our day age. On Coleridge’s account, it is not clear that this kind of writing qualifies as poetry at all, since meter, being something “superadded,” does not supply the sufficient conditions of the art. Its power lies in the exaltation of language and thematic material to which it is artistically joined: “metre resembles, (if the aptness of the simile may excuse its meanness), yeast, worthless or disagreeable by itself, but giving vivacity and spirit to the liquor with which it is proportionally combined.”

Meter serves, on Coleridge’s account, as a technique of assertion. It is the means by which the poet declares the import of his matter, and his intentions to address that matter with the stylistic elevation it demands. It is the affirmation of his intent to undertake the duties of art. “Metre in itself is simply a stimulant of the attention, and therefore excites the question: Why is the attention to be thus stimulated? Now the question cannot be answered by the pleasure of the metre itself; for this we have shown to be conditional, and dependent on the appropriateness of the thoughts and expressions, to which the metrical form is superadded. Neither can I conceive any other answer that can be rationally given, short of this: I write in metre, because I am about to use a language different from that of prose.”

What is demonstrated by the examples cited above is that in the work of our contemporaries, meter functions as a means to avoid the responsibilities of art. It is the cloak for the timidity and insipidity of the content to which it is ungainly joined. The contemporary formalist wants to maintain the pretense that he is preserving a heritage whose spirit he has never caught. He writes in meter to uphold that pretense, and to distract the reader from the absence of everything that is fundamental to the art. The contemporary writer in verse says to himself and to the world: “I write in meter to hide the fact that I have nothing to say, and no technical skill to say it, that would not be perfectly at home in the most humdrum passage of prose.”

The Un-novelistic Novel

To my mind the best novels are the ones that refuse to be a novel, the ones that strain and rebel against the inherent limitations of the genre.

Ortega y Gasset, in his “Meditation on Quixote,” described the development of the novel in terms of its loss of traffic with the mythical, its descent from the plane of “in illo tempore” to the plane of the quotidian, with the attendant loss of symbolic resonance. One sees this transformation well underway in the descriptive passages of Balzac, which render a world replete with “stuff” that has no reference beyond itself. His are novels content to be novels.

To the contrary, in a work like “To the Lighthouse,” all the elements of the fiction aspire towards an ontological resonance that is the hallmark of the mythic. So Mrs. Ramsay is at once the Great Mother, enduring the recurrent pains of childbirth in the growth and division of her children, and the Mater Dolorosa, whose compassion consoles her children for the pains she engendered into them. It is Lily Briscoe who strains to discover the perspective through which the kaleidoscopic tedium of Mrs. Ramsay’s daily life will resolve into an icon of eternal motherhood.

This aspiration towards myth manifests itself in Woolf’s style, which, in its pronounced lyricism and sonority, represents an obvious attempt to rise above the level of quotidian discourse. Prose style attempts to do here all that meter did in the old epics, by erecting a boundary between the mythical discourse of the fiction and the deflationary discourse of the everyday. All of the un-novelistic novels I have in mind, such as Lord Jim, The Death of Virgil, or sections of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, are marked by this stylistic dynamic.

The most obvious example of these tendencies is Moby Dick, a novel so un-novelistic that it feels absurdly inappropriate to refer to it as a novel. The language of the work resorts to nearly every register imaginable – oratorical, elegiac, epic, ritualistic – to elevate the story into the plane of “in illo tempore,” a plane inhabited not by imitations, but emblems of the irresolvable ambiguities at the heart of the human experience.

Melville of course drew heavily on the work of Hawthorne, whose reappropriation of the genre of allegory helped infuse his own fictions with a mythical status of their own. And he bestowed a model on Faulkner (who claimed Moby Dick was the one book he wish he had written), whose Absalom! Absalom! renders the outskirts of Mississippi a stage where the titanic and aboriginal rivalry between father and son is played out.

These figures represent the main line of the tradition of American fiction, marked by an awareness of having inherited a genre in crisis, and dedicated to the discovery of the stylistic resources that would enable the art of fiction to overcome that crisis. It was a tradition carried on by men who took responsibility for the preservation of our cultural heritage amid the onslaught of modernity.

The descent of American fiction into mere realism over the last half century represents an abnegation of that responsibility, and a willingness to see the American story degenerate into something entirely quotidian and entirely provincial.