Overview
Ghostly Figures contends that this poetics of belatedness, along with the way it is bound to questions of poetic making, is a central, if critically neglected, force in postwar American poetry. Discussing works by Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Jorie Graham, Susan Howe, and a group of poets responding to the AIDS epidemic, Ann Keniston draws on and critically assesses trauma theory and psychoanalysis, as well as earlier discussions of witness, elegy, lyric trope and figure, postmodernism, allusion, and performance, to define the ghosts that clearly dramatize poetics of belatedness throughout the diverse poetry of post–World War II America.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609383541 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2015 |
| Series: | Contemp North American Poetry |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 228 |
| File size: | 700 KB |
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Ghostly Figures
Memory and Belatedness in Postwar American Poetry
By Ann Keniston
University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2015 University of Iowa PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-354-1
CHAPTER 1
The Holocaust Again Literal and Figurative Fragmentation in Sylvia Plath's Ariel
To read Plath is to engage from the outset with belatedness. I am, to begin with, focusing in this chapter on what are perhaps Sylvia Plath's most anthologized and most discussed poems. And by considering, as many have before me, how "Daddy" (Ariel Restored 74–76) and "Lady Lazarus" (14–17) depict the Holocaust, I am returning to a topic about which it may seem that everything has already been said. I am in this way reading Plath's Holocaust poems again. I begin by acknowledging this situation because the pressures associated with it are fundamental to belatedness. Being conscious of one's belatedness can create a sense of exhaustion, even paralysis, originating in the awareness that it is impossible to devise a new or wholly original way of understanding an already familiar topic. But this situation can also impel the belated reader — recklessly, cautiously, or with a sense of urgency — to attempt to do something new, however modest, with these familiar materials. Belatedness in fact often seems to engage both these impulses.
Certainly a similar mixture of exhaustion and urgency informs Plath's belated relation to the Holocaust. Rather than depicting the Holocaust as a literal or actual event, Plath's poems make it available only in fragments or what Plath several times calls "bit[s]." The poems thus present a doubly belated relation to the Holocaust, imposing distance on an event that, while it remains relevant for the poet, is already temporally and physically inaccessible. Plath's Holocaust poems manipulate and deface this already disrupted event by further fracturing the pieces that remain. In this way, Plath reveals that belatedness is not simply an effect of temporal distance from the Holocaust but rather a stance adopted and also performed by the poems written about it.
Plath's late Holocaust poems thus offer an especially clear model of the poetics of belatedness as defined in the introduction, a model also evident, if less explicitly, in Plath's late poems on other subjects, as I will argue in the final section of this chapter. In particular, Plath's treatment of what I have called literal belatedness — prompted by Plath's actual, lived situation after and apart from the Holocaust — is enacted thematically through her manipulations of chronology within the poems. In ways that cannot be separated from these temporal effects, belatedness is also evident figuratively, through Plath's repeated and often violent interrogations of metaphor, simile, metonymy, synecdoche, and apostrophe. These effects intensify the poems' belatedness; because the Holocaust is already inaccessible, the poems' figurative disruptions reiterate and intensify what has already occurred.
By juxtaposing my position as a belated reader of Plath's poems with what is already present in the poems, I am engaging in an act of repetition that recalls another recurrent feature of Plath criticism: critical discussion of and debate about Plath's poems and life have often uncannily mimicked conflicts within the poems, as several readers have noted. Although Plath's belatedness has been mentioned only in passing, it deeply informs the experience of reading Plath's late poems. The poems that end the original published version of Ariel, edited by Ted Hughes and published posthumously in 1965, were composed just five days before Plath's death. Many of these late poems refer to death, including suicide, and thus seem to look proleptically ahead to Plath's actual suicide. It is in fact difficult to read Ariel without being aware of this future event; many readers have noted the poems' suicidal rhetoric, and even readers who attempt to avoid doing so tend to reinscribe it. The poems in this way invite readings that resist chronology; their imagery, generally seen as part of a poem's figurative apparatus, seems to predict what will literally occur to its author. Arguing that the speakers of these poems do not necessarily know about their author's imminent suicide tends to be ineffectual as well, since the poems themselves seem anticipatory. Related problems arise when the poems' author is distinguished from their speaker. As readers, we cannot avoid the knowledge that comes with hindsight; we can (and in some ways must) look back on the suicide that Plath herself could not ascertain would occur.
This condition is not identical to belatedness, which involves a consciousness of being too late and thus impelled toward the past, but it is related. Prolepsis jumps forward in time so it can look back; it establishes a kind of artificial situation of memory and thus of belatedness. Reading Plath's late poems through her subsequent death makes the poems themselves seem posthumous, although of course they are not. This situation also impels a feeling of powerlessness in the reader — we wish to stop the inevitable from occurring, but cannot — that recalls the flashbacks that trauma theory associates with traumatic belatedness. Because we are too late to intervene, we reexperience the story of Plath's suicide whenever we read the poems. To read late Plath thus affirms the irrevocability of chronology (insofar as Plath must die after writing these poems) and also reveals how deeply informed that chronology is by both anticipation and remembering.
A related interplay of anticipation and remembering is even more apparent in the 2004 publication of Ariel: The Restored Edition, edited by Plath's daughter, Frieda Hughes, following the death of her father, Ted Hughes. As the title indicates, this edition restores Plath's selection and ordering of the poems included in her final volume, replacing Hughes's posthumous alterations to the order and contents with a "restored" original that had until that point been lost or concealed. Much of this edition's power thus comes from its challenge to the proleptic narrative of Plath's suicide foregrounded by Hughes's edition. But this restoration is also in some ways too late: it exists alongside the originally published edition, which remains in print and better known. Several features of the restored Ariel highlight this belatedness. The book's cover image, a facsimile of a typed and hand-annotated earlier cover page by Plath, includes a series of crossed-out, handwritten titles, none of which is "Ariel," implying that Plath's final ordering and title were provisional. The foreword by Frieda Hughes also offers rationales for and affirms the superiority of her father's ordering of the volume. That such issues are related to the problem of how to remember Plath is apparent in the foreword's juxtaposition of contradictory versions of Plath's life and composition process, including hearsay about Plath, Frieda's personal recollections, Ted's accounts, and attempts to imagine Plath's experiences from Plath's own perspective.
I begin with these issues, which have been inadequately examined in discussions of the restored Ariel, because they reveal the centrality of dynamics of belatedness and anticipation in Plath studies. Questions of truth are often implicit in discussions of the two versions of Ariel: is the version that Plath compiled truer to her intention, or is it fair to assume that, had she lived, she would have amended the book's contents, including, as Hughes did, poems composed later? Related questions have long been central to critical evaluation of Plath's Holocaust poems. With few exceptions, scholars have based their assessments of Plath's Holocaust poems on the accuracy of the poems' depiction of the Holocaust itself. This tendency is surprising; it seems to ignore the persistent difficulty of determining what is literally true both of Plath's life and of her poems. It also mostly disregards the general critical consensus that distorted, ironic, or parodic representations of past events are not only morally acceptable but often aesthetically necessary.
Critical approaches to Plath's Holocaust poems, though, have changed quite dramatically over time. Early readers often condemned the poems for their unethical and appropriative treatment of the Holocaust. These readers generally claimed that Plath used the Holocaust to describe fundamentally personal issues, but more recent readings focus on the ways Plath's writing, in Robin Peel's terms, "relat[es] to the public, often political discourses from which it emerged" (18, italics added). Many readings from the 1980s and 1990s focused on the ways Plath's Holocaust references signaled her ambivalence about gender roles; more recent readers have considered how Plath's representation of the Holocaust reflected her attitudes toward Cold War politics.
These diverse readings, though, share a common assumption: they view Plath's poems as fundamentally metaphorical and thus assume that the Holocaust in the poems stands for something else, although the tenor of this metaphor has changed over time. Thus, Irving Howe's 1972 condemnation of "Daddy" for the "monstrous, utterly disproportionate" (12) nature of its analogy between private suffering and the Holocaust rests on the claim that "Sylvia Plath identifies the father ... with the Nazis" (11, italics added), a notion echoed by George Steiner's assertion that Plath's "last, greatest poems culminate in an act of identification, of total communion with those tortured and massacred" (300–01, italics added). James Young includes his quite different reading of Plath's Holocaust imagery in a larger discussion entitled "Interpreting Holocaust Metaphor" (Writing 117–33). An implicitly metaphorical framework is also evoked by Robin Peel's general claim that "Plath's poetry and prose" should be read "as reconstructed barometers of" — that is, as ways of accurately measuring and representing — "their time" (19, italics added). It is also evident in Susan Gubar's revisionary attempt to transform what others have viewed as the "mere figure" of her poems into their literal subject (or their vehicle into their tenor); for Gubar, the poems are "'really' about the psychological repercussions of Auschwitz on literature and Jewish identity" ("Prosopopoeia" 194).
A quite different critical trend has only occasionally informed readings of Plath's representation of the Holocaust. As Susan Van Dyne was among the first to note, Plath's poems reveal a persistent interest in performance and artifice, one that recalls Judith Butler's well-known claims about the performativity of gender. Jacqueline Rose's reading of Plath's writing in terms of fantasy draws on similar assumptions. Such readings imply that Plath in fact destabilizes identification and verisimilitude, as well as metaphor, revealing what one critic has called a "postmodern conception of historical understanding" (Boswell 58).
Several statements Plath made about her poems, although they are often read in different terms, reveal her aversion to metaphoric readings of her poems. In an essay published in October 1962, the month she wrote "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus," Plath resists the idea that what she called "Hiroshima" stands for the personal. Instead, she describes her reliance on "deflection," claiming, "My poems do not turn out to be about Hiroshima, but about a child forming itself finger by finger in the dark" ("Context" 64, italics added). Here Plath refuses analogy altogether. In an interview the same month, she also links public to personal events, and here too, she avoids equating the two, instead claiming only that "personal experience ... should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on" (Orr 169–70). This "relevan[ce]" assumes discrepancies, including that in size (for example, between the apparently small "personal" and something "bigger") and thus implies an act of juxtaposition rather than equivalence. ("Hiroshima" similarly functions as a synecdoche for human cruelty and violence more generally in both statements.) Insofar as Hiroshima and the Holocaust were often seen as predictors of a coming nuclear apocalypse (Strangeways 373–74), Plath's references to them may also link the past with an anticipated future.
My claims about Plath's Holocaust poems build on the resistance to metaphoric equivalence implicit in these statements. They also evoke Paul Ricoeur's general assertion that metaphor reveals not a static and fixed equivalence between two unlike entities but the limits of that equivalence: "instead of giving the name of the species to the genus, of the genus to the species, or of the species to another species, metaphor ... blurs the conceptual boundaries of the terms considered" and thus "confus[es] ... established logical boundaries" (81). This confusion is perhaps especially apparent in relation to the Holocaust, which — as Young has suggested — "literaliz[ed] metaphor" (Writing 93).
As I will argue in the remainder of this chapter, Plath's late poems systematically disrupt the structure and assumptions of metaphor. "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus," Plath's most developed and successful poems about the Holocaust, reveal features that recur in many of the poems of Plath's Ariel. These poems do not report on or recall actual past events, although it has been credibly argued that Plath's poems about the Holocaust were at least partly reactions to the Eichmann trials, which were going on at the time and about which Plath almost certainly read in the newspaper (Peel 38–41). Instead, Plath makes her literally belated relation to the Holocaust evident by repeatedly disrupting chronology and adopting a stance of posthumousness through which past events continue to contaminate the present. At the same time, belatedness is apparent in figures that emphasize discrepancy and contingency. Metaphors and similes are frequently disrupted by metonymy, as Rose has pointed out in relation to "Daddy" (228), as well as by a provisional synecdoche. Plath's apostrophe disrupts the possibility of genuine, intimate speech addressed to a sympathetic listener, instead emphasizing the staged and parodic. I will elaborate these points throughout this chapter, first through close readings of "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" and then through a discussion of the different dynamics evident in poems included only in Ted Hughes's Ariel and in Plath's own version of the volume.
* * *
In the introduction, I referred to the difficulty of directly defining the relation of the literal to the figurative in the context of writing about trauma. As the at times inconsistent metaphors by Walter Kalaidjian and Jacqueline Rose make clear, it is nearly impossible to describe this relation without recourse to figurative language, a tendency that reveals the entanglement of the figurative with the literal (as well as the theoretical). In two essays focusing on the figures employed by the critic Paul de Man, Neil Hertz offers a mode of reading that attempts to acknowledge the influence of literal events on figuration without reducing the latter to the former. Hertz first identifies a series of recurrent and "lurid" figures in de Man's writings, including images of dismemberment, mutilation, and disfigurement ("Lurid"). He later associates these figures with de Man's lived experience, especially the likelihood that he witnessed his mother's suicide by hanging ("More" 8). While Hertz acknowledges the presence in de Man's writings of recurrent "obsessions" (10), he also resists that idea, claiming instead that de Man's figures express "veiled autobiography" (10). The implication is that factual or biographical knowledge helps situate the figurative but does not eradicate its strangeness as figure.
Something similar is evident in Plath's Holocaust imagery. Here too the figurative (broadly construed as the trope, the word, the image, the phrase) does not merely or wholly express the literal (the outside world, the object, the event, the recollection). Instead, the poems insist that the Holocaust, which from the outset is not depicted as intact or real, can be depicted only via the poems' fractured figures.
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Excerpted from Ghostly Figures by Ann Keniston. Copyright © 2015 University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
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