Cognitive Ecopoetics

A New Theory of Lyric

Sharon Lattig

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350069275
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

New insights from cognitive theory and literary ecocriticism have the power to transform our understanding of one of the most important literary genres: the lyric poem. In Cognitive Ecopoetics, Sharon Lattig brings these two schools of criticism together for the first time to consider the ways in which lyric forms re-enact cognitive processes of the mind and brain. Along the way the book reads anew the long history of the lyric, from Andrew Marvell, through canonical poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson to contemporary writers such as Susan Howe and Charles Olson.

1

Occasional Cries: Prelude to Lyric

Appearance clings to being, and pain alone can tear them from each other.

—Simone Weil

If every poetics does not understand lyric utterance to echo the vital activity of perception, the terms of poetry as they are negotiated within seminal thinking on the subject nevertheless indicate the genre’s perceptual bent. Within the plot twists of myth and in knots tied and tightened by philosophy, one can interpret the poet to be a perceiver— if at times a forced perceiver—extraordinaire. A foray into archetypal stories explaining the origin and role of the lyric poet lays bare the basis for this common insight and provides a platform from which to understand poetry as a perceptual act. I begin, then, with the intuition, pervasive within poetic lore, that the poet, to be a poet, must be removed from his native circumstance and subjected to original experience.

The trope of the singer’s ouster from society arises from diverse cultural and historical matrices, yet its motivation varies, at least on the surface. Within the Western tradition, Plato’s expulsion of the poet from the Republic submits as grounds for banishment the unfit status of a deriving mind, one sodden with truth-fogging impurities. Unlike mere enthusiasts of poetry, who are to be “loved” and “saluted” if condescendingly, the poet is a subversive, a provocateur whose seductive ways must be steadfastly opposed (“Republic” X.606e–607a). As the polemic establishing artisanal and artistic inferiority by virtue of their second- and third-degree remove from the truth is mounted, a certain urgency arises whenever poetry is its subject. Book X’s trajectory at length exposes Platonic anxiety before the form to be a reaction to the vulnerability of ideal knowledge to emotion. In Socratic thought, the remembrance of the glimpse at truth (anamnesis) that is a precondition of human birth (“Phaedrus” 249e–250a) is a rare and tenuous event that follows upon mastery over emotion as much as it does the renunciation of semblance. In fact, the former achievement follows logically from the latter, and Plato’s argument pivots at the site of their linkage. Imitative practice causes identification with the imitated, which arouses in the spectator the emotions portrayed.¹ The ability to discriminate that brings one nearer the recognition of the perfect is thereby compromised (“Republic” 603b): “The imitative poet implants an evil constitution, for he indulges the irrational nature which has no discernment of greater or less”² (605b). Left to his devices, such a poet panders to the ignorant, perpetuating their delusions. As Plato’s tack evolves, it becomes clear that it is affective possession that poses the more virulent threat to his utopia. He who grieves, he tells Glaucon, best moderates his grief and maintains, at all costs, equanimity fit for public display. Immoderate emotional response, if indulged at all, must be confined to private quarters where it may be quarantined. The dialectic method, the end of which is to steer acolytes toward anamnesis, tacitly concedes the dependence of doctrine on decorum. The hope of restoring ideal forms to consciousness is then socially preserved because the conditions fostering its realization are socially facilitated. Logos is a civic virtue.

That platonic practice hinges on the maintenance of what is, in sum and substance, a value system is to be expected. Its metaphysics subsumes its ethics: truth, beauty, and goodness merge in the divine and stand in for one another in their earthly manifestations. As is true of any value system, its preservation rests to some extent on consensus, here the consensus to resist the erosive influence of art.³ Plato’s wish to maintain the social order is underscored by his resort to the forcible expatriation of the nonconsenting poet. His fiat to exile decrees, as such fiats did, the removal of an unruly element, one with the perceived capacity to infect that which is self-contained: “Few persons ever reflect, as I should imagine, that the contagion must pass from others to themselves”⁴ (X.606b) (emphasis added), he writes of the empathic connection art begets. His choice of a metaphor of disease to characterize the effects of art makes it impossible to regard the poet as quaint or spectacular, the author of a mere pastime or divertissement.

In Book III of the “Republic”, Plato takes pains to distinguish two diegetic, or narrative, modes. The first and more problematic of the two employs a purely imitative technique in which the poet speaks as if he were another, that is, he mimics him. In the alternative mode, the poet dispenses with imitation to speak on his own behalf. Drama is the most menacing of genres because it is wholly imitative; as its imitative vehicle is character, it runs the greatest risk of exemplifying—and thus inducing—disruptive behavior (III.394c). Would-be citizens must beware “lest from the imitation they imbibe the reality”⁵ (III.395c). As epic blends mimesis with direct narrative, that is, the recital of the poet himself, it is qualified on this basis to be less pernicious (III.394-b-c, 397d). Plato’s attitude toward the lyric, which would seem to avoid the trap of imitation altogether, is less clearly formulated. His brief mention in Book X of the dithyramb, a barely extant form comprised of Dionysian hymns and heroic narratives epitomizing the direct report of the poet, is by way of rounding out the categories established in Book III. He will dispense of it as well, but not before salvaging encomium, sung praise for the just, and according it the full privileges of literary citizenship (X.607a). This subgenre of songs extolling the virtues of gods and heroes is deemed worthy because it is thought to inculcate the goodness it relates. The unidentified remaining examples of direct address, poetic forms such as Pindar’s odes or Sappho’s love poetry that today strike us as quintessentially lyrical, though the least imitative of the three types, are at last glance no less threatening. While Plato does not account for lyric in his taxonomy of mimesis (a fact significant in itself), it is hard to imagine that he would approve of its emotional power. It is safe to say that the genre is more or less intact upon its banishment in spite of the fact that it is not delineated by Plato as such, and that he considers it to be, with epic, the instrument of “the honeyed Muse,” purveyor of pleasure and pain, menace to law and reason (X.607a).

Despite outranking drama on his scale of admissibility, it is also the epic, and Homer’s rendering of it in particular, that is Plato’s target. Eric Havelock sheds light on an attack that seems at best heavy-handed and at worst misconceived to modern sensibilities, to which an aesthetic medium is hardly to be judged by the same criteria as carpentry (25–7). The philosopher’s repulse, he argues, has no such aesthetic basis, but is rather directed at a prevailing educational system (12–13, 23–4). Epic was the primary means by which social mores, customs, and ethics were imparted to Hellenic youth. Replete with detailed descriptions of behavior to be emulated or avoided, it functioned as what he calls a “tribal encyclopedia”⁶ (66): instructional passages interpolated into the narrative modeled desirable behavior of one sort or another (chapter 3). As a form that was transmitted orally well into Plato’s time, an era that was at best semiliterate, epic poetry was constructed for mnemonic efficacy in order to ensure that its lessons would be recalled (43–5, 96). The mnemonic devices employed techniques that included rhythmic lyre strumming and dancing, as well as the verbal devices of parallelism, echo, and refrain the Greeks called mousike, combined to enrapture audiences. One was inhabited by what was sung; one embodied, empathized with, possessed the characters (45, 145–60). As a result, “the whole memory of a people was poeticised” (134). As information was drunk in, true knowledge, attainable only by a mind undulled by this reason-drowning liqueur, was, in Plato’s view, rendered impossible. Poetic knowing precludes the indifference and the distance the dialectic method demands.

Though derived from Socratic thinking, the famous dictum is emblematic in placing the poet in a comfort zone acoustically well beyond social perimeters. Like Milton’s Satan, the outcast is deemed to be viral, dependent on the parasitic ravaging of others to manifest his own vitality, imperiling the aspirant to intellectual purity, the philosophe, as Lucifer might doom his righteous if hapless hosts seeking to purify the heart. Satan’s evildoing is likewise derivative: wickedness is mediated, that is, realized through another medium, the earthly creature in whom it is reproduced. Like the poet, Satan “implants an evil constitution,” choosing “fit vessel, fittest imp of fraud, in whom/To enter, and his dark suggestions hide” (PL 9.89–90). Self-propagating at the expense of others, each figure is cast down and out from the ideality he threatens. Irresistible, he must in consequence be exorcised. And although he at times sings admissible songs, it is finally the lyricist who internalizes the predicament of exile and exile’s consequences for perception.

The Always Already Rejected, Infected Poet

The banishment of the poet is not a remedy peculiar to Platonism, or even the West. For lyric to arise, “individual” and “society” must be disentangled as terms, however provisionally. Exile, as concept, is seminal for lyric: its poetic significance is deeply seeded in a response to the danger of Orphic absorption, of Orphic sway. In articulating a prevailing attitude toward the poet-lyricist among conservationists of the status quo—one that will inspire the reactive forms of apologia and defense—Plato assumes that a dedication to the poetic entails turning on the expectations of social circumstance. Logically, the purging of a dangerous element must be preceded by the decision on the part of that element to embrace nonconformity. Yet, within poetic lore, this “decision” is often portrayed to be the outcome of the exile itself.⁷ An understanding of the way lyric’s paradoxical beginning and complex temporality are inscribed within lyrical utterance may be cultivated, fruitfully, within the adumbrations of myth.

In his book Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression, anthropologist and jazz musician Steven Feld decodes the bird-inspired poetics of the Kaluli islanders of Papua New Guinea. To account for the genesis of an inherently lyrical poetry, the Kaluli tell the story of a fateful fishing expedition undertaken by a young boy and his older sister. On this particular outing, the girl nets several crayfish, her brother none. Complaining of his hunger, the boy begs his sister for each of her fish, but she allocates them instead to other family members: the children’s mother, their father, their older brother, and so on. Though the boy’s pleas grow more plaintive, his sister persists in her refusal to share her bounty. At length, he catches a single shrimp and places its shell on his nose, which shades to the distinct, reddish-purple hue of the beak of a fruit dove the Kaluli call muni. His hands sprout feathers, at length mutate into wings, and when his metamorphosis into a bird is complete, he takes to the air. Faced with the consequence of her selfishness, his sister grows inconsolable. Tearfully, she begs her brother to return, offering him all of her fish; yet, he does not heed her pleas. He rather intones, in his new bird voice, a sorrowful, half-sung oration:

Your crayfish

you didn’t give it to me

I have no ade

I’m hungry. (Feld 20–1)

Feld’s ethnographic study of Kaluli poetics uncovers the symbolic order structuring the myth. The tone of the muni bird’s cry is said to verge on weeping: its melodic contours descend in mournful cadence. As such, it is the source of the Kaluli’s sole original song form, the gisalo, a ritualistic genre in attendance at funerals and séances (36–7). Employing an elaborate semantic system derived from the tones of rain forest birds, gisalo signifies the pain born of the denial of nourishment and of the loss of communal sustenance such a denial entails. The relationship of an older sister to her younger brother in Kaluli culture is one of primary caregiver and protector once the boy is no longer an infant, that is, once he speaks. A brother and sister so related call one another ade (ah-day), a term of endearment that both mediates and betokens their mutual fondness (24–7). It is conventional in songs of the dead to express sadness for the loss of an ade only after mother, father, sister, and brother have been lamented; that this sequence is inviolable attests to the Kaluli’s ultimate regard for the ade relationship (158). In the story of “The Boy Who Became a Muni Bird,” the sister’s refusal to share her food, and especially her expressed intention to serve other family members when confronted with her brother’s hunger, negates the caretaking and the sharing that construct an ade relationship and in turn its primacy (27).

For the Kaluli, as for many cultures, food is both symbol and currency of social connection. Sharing a meal signifies intimacy: once bread has been broken, the partakers may refer to one another by the name of the food they have consumed (27). “Hunger and loss are thus at the center of a basic Kaluli symbolic equation; they stand for isolation and abandonment” (28). To begrudge an ade food is perhaps the ultimate tran...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Region of the Song
• 1 Occasional Cries: Prelude to Lyric
• 2 Dwelling with the Possible: Lyric Obscurity and Embedded Perception
• 3 This Is “Where the Meanings Are”: Lyric Disjunction and Perceptual Shattering
• 4 Acts of the Mind: Lyric Action and the Whole of Perception
• Works Cited
• Index
• Copyright Page