Poetry has fallen on hard times in the American academy recently. In the ideological criticism that dominates anglophone literary studies today, the lyric has become the whipping boy for ambitious scholars anxious to prove their credentials as expert unmaskers of political agendas disguised as pure art. The sins for which the lyric has been taken to task are many. To critics reared on post-structuralist theory, lyric poetry manifests a suspicious commitment to a slew of discredited values. It stubbornly buttresses the bourgeois myth of individual autonomy, or so the argument runs. It privileges personal voice over postmodern textuality; it seeks to circumvent history through attention to aesthetic form; it turns its back on the public realm in its quest for private truths; and it places transcendental timelessness over active engagement in the here-and-now. The Romantic clichés from which these charges stem have been challenged by disgruntled New Historicists and die-hard formalists alike. Still they persist: they have become staples of recent criticism.
Indeed, in much current theory the lyric now serves as a stand-in for
aesthetic isolationism
generally, that is, for art's
apparent refusal of life actually conducted in actual society,
which in fact amounts to a complicity with class-interested
strategies of smoothing over historical conflict and contradictions with
claims of natural and innate organization.
With the advent of
Romanticism, Terry Eagleton explains, all art was ostensibly rescued
from the material practices, social relations and ideological
meanings in which it is always caught up, and raised to the status of a
solitary fetish.
And Romanticism's favored form, the lyric, is
invariably the worst offender in such socially irresponsible
sleight-of-hand.
The ideological critics have taken their lead from the Russian
theorist Mixail Baxtin in creating a lyric antipode to the particular
vision of art and society that they themselves wish to advance. The lyric,
as Baxtin sees it, is a deplorably anti-social genre. The poet's
utopian
goal is to speak timelessly
from an
Edenic world
far removed from the petty rounds of
everyday life.
Authoritarian, dogmatic and conservative,
Baxtin's poet struggles to assume a complete single-personed hegemony
over his own language,
destroying in the process all
traces
of other people,
of social heteroglossia
and diversity of language.
It is not surprising that this reactionary foe of otherness and diversity should find itself under fire in the American academy. But Baxtin and his hegemonic poet notwithstanding, Eastern Europe is virtually absent from recent discussions of the lyric. This omission is troubling on two counts. The underpinnings of current ideological criticism are explicitly Marxist. Yet, in a peculiarly unmarxist move, contemporary Marxist literary theory has virtually divorced itself from Marxist practice as we've seen it in this century. The ideological critics close their eyes to the morally bankrupt regimes that have tumbled recently in Eastern Europe. They refuse to account for the disparity between the methodology they follow in their writings and its real-life consequences in the totalitarian states of the former Soviet Bloc. If totalitarianism comes up at all in their discussions, it is only as a kind of shorthand for the evils of modern industrial society generally.
Not surprisingly, these critics also overlook the distinctive role
that poetry has played in modern Eastern European history. And this is
unfortunate, since that role runs directly counter to the assumptions
informing current discussions of the lyric. Plato of course expelled
all trouble-making poets from his ideal kingdom of the mind: Plato's
poet, a natural democrat, was of no use to heads of
state,
as Mark Edmundson remarks. The Polish poet Aleksander
Wat was quick to see the analogy between Plato's republic and the
repressive regimes of post-war Eastern Europe. Plato ordered us
cast out/of the City where Wisdom reigns./In a new Ivory Tower made of
(human) bones,
he writes in his poem Dark
Light.
But why should the lyric poets who, according to
current doctrine, complacently uphold the bourgeois status quo prove
to be so troublesome to left-wing dictators? How do the self-absorbed
reactionaries of recent theory become Eastern Europe's
subversives?
If you live in the world's center/ You must
account for everything/The living and the dead are watching
you.
This phrase, taken from Adam Zagajewski's early poem
New World
(the heart of Europe.
The voice
we hear in these lines is hardly that of the self-absorbed aesthete
who passes for the lyric poet as such in recent theory. For the Polish
poet the weight of the past is not simply the overwhelming literary
tradition that burdens the modern artist in the essays of Eliot,
Borges or Bloom. It is also the heavy load of social and civic
responsibility that Poland's writers have been expected to shoulder
since the time of the partitions that erased their nation from the map
of Europe in the late eighteenth century and the emergence in the
early nineteenth century of the great Romantic poets—Adam
Mickiewicz, Juliusz S&lbar;owacki, Zygmunt Krasiński—who felt
compelled to replace their vanished state through their own poetry and
prose. Polish Romanticism is the antipode then, to the otherworldly,
effete form of writing condemned by Eagleton and others. And the
discrepancy between these two versions of Romanticism not only points
to the tacit ethnocentricism that shapes current critical debates on
the nature of Romantic writing. It also hints at the radical
oversimplification that marrs recent ideological
demystifications
of Romantic aesthetics (Where
are the starving peasants in
one
Wordsworth scholar has famously complained: her charge sounds
strangely familiar to the student of Socialist Realism.) And it
suggests the limits of the singularly blinkered definition of lyric
poetry that has taken root in recent scholarship.Tintern Abbey
?