The Substance of Shadow: A Darkening Trope in Poetic History
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The Substance of Shadow: A Darkening Trope in Poetic History
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Overview
Shadow shows itself here in myriad literary identities, revealing its force as a way of seeing and a form of knowing, as material for fable and parable. Taking up a vast range of texts—from the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton to Poe, Dickinson, Eliot, and Stevens—Hollander describes how metaphors of shadow influence our ideas of dreaming, desire, doubt, and death. These shadows of poetry and prose fiction point to unknown, often fearful domains of human experience, showing us concealed shapes of truth and possibility. Crucially, Hollander explores how shadows in poetic history become things with a strange substance and life of their own: they acquire the power to console, haunt, stalk, wander, threaten, command, and destroy. Shadow speaks, even sings, revealing to us the lost as much as the hidden self.
An extraordinary blend of literary analysis and speculative thought, Hollander’s account of the substance of shadow lays bare the substance of poetry itself.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226354309 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 184 |
| File size: | 635 KB |
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The Substance of Shadow
A Darkening Trope in Poetic History
By John Hollander, Kenneth Gross
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2016 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-35430-9
CHAPTER 1
A Lecture upon the Shadow
Except in darkness, we are bound to our shadows, and our thoughts continue to be involved with them. These shadows grow and contract, and seem variously to partake of the surface on which they are cast, yet each is as personal to us as our names, and although we may change our names, we cannot take another shadow. We tend to feel that it is ourselves and not a specific source of light which is responsible for the presence of our shadows, even though moving that light source will animate a cast shadow as much as moving a body would. Shadows are literal, optical phenomena, but we must always remember the complex role they have played in the history of visual representation, particularly in the depiction of objects and of the bodies of persons considered as more general bodies occupying three-dimensional space. These attached shadows are of the very stuff of painting. Leonardo da Vinci calls this sort "adhering shadow" (ombra congionta), which he distinguishes from "separate shadow" (ombra separata), the former being the shaded side of a body and the latter its cast shadow. Night is, after all, the attached shadow of the earth, the implications of which Sir Thomas Browne so pointedly celebrated in observing how "Light that makes things seen, makes some things invisible, were it not for darknesse and the shadow of the earth, the noblest part of the Creation had remained unseen, and the Stars in heaven as invisible as on the fourth day, when they were created above the Horizon." (Yet it must be remembered that "attached" here does not refer to what might be called the "attachment" of a cast shadow to the foot or bottom of its object — actually to a notional line on the ground.) It is only by interesting metaphoric extensions that the shadow of an object becomes as complex and problematic a matter as the shadow of a person. Objects, or groups of objects considerably larger than persons, cast ordinary shadows, but often of the more extensive kind generally called shade in English (in its OED sense III), whereas in Romance languages, shadow and shade are both covered by the derivatives of umbra, of which more later on.
Optically speaking, shadows are set into motion either by the activity of the objects casting them or by some movement of the source of light those objects partially and prominently occlude. Apparent solar motion is indiscernibly slow, and the cast shadow of a person, whether moving or motionless, is thought to grow and shrink and grow again during the course of a sunlit day, whereas the same sort of shadow cast by a sundial gnomon will be thought of as moving across a dial so shaped as to compensate for the contracting length of its pointer. Both moving and stationary cast shadows, then, can be longer and shorter, and it may be for a host of reasons that the postmeridian lengthening has been for so long the most significantly remarked upon. "When the sun sets, shadows, that showed at noon / But small appear most long and terrible," says the Oedipus of Dryden and Lee (Oedipus, IV.i.80–81). Shadow has also provided the basis for parable: "Like our Shadows, / Our Wishes lengthen, as our Sun declines" (Edward Young, Night Thoughts, "Night the Fifth," lines 661–62), and the latent (or even metaphoric) part of the simile invokes the insubstantiality of human desires as well as their vanity.
In general, it is the occluding object which is spoken of as being the source or origin or matrix or cause (whether in some Scholastic sense or not) of a particular shadow — indeed, of its shadow. As the psychologist of perception Rudolf Arnheim puts it, "There are two things the eye must understand. First, the shadow does not belong to the object on which it is seen; and second, it does belong to another object, which it does not cover." But this invokes a limited sense of possession, and for literary language speaking for the untutored eye, the shadow is the sun's, or the lamp's, or the open fire's, as well. Paul Valéry invokes his palm tree as "Ce bel arbitre mobile / Entre l'ombre et le soleil" (this lovely moving arbiter [with a upon play on arbre = "tree"] between shadow and sun ["Palme," lines 32–33]), thus elegantly transcending the issue of property, but a host of such figurations will emerge in the history of modern poetry.
Shadows are related to our eternal condition — to our contours, rather than to our more substantial mass. And yet their very insubstantiality has allowed shadows to be seen both as residues or traces of something palpable and more profoundly animated and, more enigmatically, as emanations of something internal to us. These sorts of "shadow" are projections, as it were, of an inner form or entity, expressions of something within us rather than representations of our appearances. In any event, anomalies and enigmas abound in discourse about shadows even more than in the phenomena themselves. These anomalies appear to have been distributed throughout the course of poetry in modern English. I propose to explore some of them in these lectures, working toward a systematic delineation of the peculiar shadow cast upon the language of poetry by the checkered senses of the word shadow itself. I shall proceed largely chronologically — for reasons which should be clear later on — but I shall feel free to adduce at any point a text from a later moment in poetic history. In view of the transference and translation of trope in poetic history, I shall be obliged to look at the language of shadow in some other relevant literary languages as well. I shall stay with optical facts and figurations for a while, but it will be necessary to introduce some linguistic ones a bit further on.
It is hard to resist — and particularly when there is no good reason to do so — starting out with a four-hundred-year-old deliberation on something about personal projections. John Donne's "A Lecture upon the Shadow" is a fine poem which hasn't, it seems to me, received the attention it might have in the critical literature. It is a somber but not really gloomy moralizing love poem of the sort in which the male speaker and his female lover are, if not conspirators as in certain other of the Songs and Sonnets, at least totally complicit. The poem's emblematic occasion is a three-hour morning stroll. It is now noon, and the speaker — one of the two lovers on the walk — halts their progress at the point of noon to make a point of what has been happening. Their shadows, striding behind them, have contracted, during the course of their walk, to the degree at which they have disappeared beneath their feet. Even so — the emblematic lecturer continues — something analogous has happened during the course of our love: like the sun, it has grown, and we and our care, our concern not to be seen as lovers, have led to deceptions, disguises (of our actions? of ourselves?) and shadows of another sort. But by this point, the sun of our love at its zenith, this is no longer the case; and generally, love which is still overcareful (as we'll see, Donne's word is diligent here) about anyone else knowing about it has not reached, either as metaphorical sun or more abstractly as love, "its highest Degree."
The second stanza warns that unless the sun of our love remains at its noon, we'll produce new shadows rising to meet us, disguises and deceptions which will now work on us, and which will continue to lengthen. These figurative shadows will blind our eyes, and falsely disguise from one another our behavior toward one another. Morning shadows or shows of complicit feigning shorten as love grows. Evening shadows of mutual and self-deception — for which each of the lovers has become one of those others of the morning hours — lengthen as love's sun sinks and love itself shortens. Once love has stopped growing, it had better remain at its height; the next step is into the night of its own death.
The poem's lesson unfolds gradually, but that lesson's two central points will be seen to be driven home halfway through and at the end. "Stand still, and I will read to thee / A lecture, love, in love's philosophy." This is unlike the opening of another of Donne's Songs and Sonnets that also starts out as if emblematically, "The Flea" ("Mark but this flea, and mark in this / How little that which thou deny'st me is"). In the case of the shadow poem, the very strophic structure seems to suggest an emblem book's format, the eleven-line stanza being in each case followed by a typographically separated couplet framing what could be an independent motto. The specific natural science he will address is that of love's optics:
Those three hours which we have spent
In walking here, two shadows went
Along with us, which we ourselves produc'd;
But, now the Sun is just above our head,
We do those shadows tread;
And to brave clearness all things are reduc'd.
What will this mean, then? We "produced" (a complex word to which we shall return) the shadows, but so did the relative height of the sun; the two lovers could be seen merely as a passive style on the sundial of where they were at the moment. But for Donne they are agents in the "production" of the shadows. He even notes the mild irony that, when a person's shadow is shortest at noon, he or she could be said to tread on it, rather than, more literally, merely on the ground upon which the shadow is cast. Well and good, and the particular agency with relation to the shadows will be of persons considered as lovers. But with the next line, the question of what these shadows are composed of becomes a bit more problematic. Their visual matter becomes as important as what they are "of" — in that other sense of what were the objects that cast them — with the phrase "reduced" to "brave clearness."
Here the three principal words need glossing for us today — brave in its older sense of "splendid" or "illuminated"; clearness again in its original sense of "radiant," "bright" (contrary to modern usage, which makes it synonymous with "distinct," so that Descartes's celebrated characterization of ideas as "clear and distinct" seems redundant if "clear" is taken in any of the modern senses). And finally, reduced — the sense is not any of those of "dismemberment," "breaking up," "lowering" or "lessening," but rather of leading or going back to a former state or condition (with perhaps an overtone of usage, common in the seventeenth century, of bringing back from error to truth). Donne isn't only propounding the paradox that the material of the shadows has gradually been diminished to the immateriality — in the world of shadows — of light. It is also as if the heightening sun has led the shadows back into the condition of light — the splendid radiance — from which they emerged.
With this in mind, we might consider what shadow production might mean here. The OED "produce": 1 to bring forth or into view, to present to view, to exhibit — often of witnesses or evidence; 2 [geometric] to extend (a line in length) or continue in space; 2B stretch out, lengthen; 2C obscure (but OK until the 1640s), lengthen in time; 3 to bring into being; 3B of plants or animals, to generate; 3C yield, supply, furnish (as fields or rivers or mines, etc.); 3D manufacture, generate by human device (but this only in the eighteenth century, really). So that the walking couple have been exhibiting, presenting, manifesting their shadows all the while that the sun has been "producing" them, in another sense, by extending them.
The poem does indeed expound natural philosophy to this degree: the conceit depends upon the fact that although we often tend to think of ourselves as producing (sense 3) our particular shadows, it is the sun which does so, in all of the senses Donne is probably using the word. In another more celebrated poem, Donne treats the cast shadow as "an ordinary nothing," an unremarkable absence or privation, and there he privileges neither light source nor occluding object: "If I an ordinary nothing were, / As shadow, a light and body must be here" ("A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day," lines 35–36). And in this case, the ordinary nothingness of shadow is plainly the product of a peculiar relation between two prominent somethings: a body, a physical substance, and a light source. I suppose that just as pointed a baroque quibble might have been made, in a very different poem, on the notion that shadow couldn't be a nothing, ordinary or not, in that it derived from just those two somethings.
Absent/present; nothing/something; a nothing-like something gradually contracting into pure or even original something — these oppositions and the verbal paradoxes they rapidly generate are immediately enlisted in an analogy, as the first stanza comes to an end:
So, whilst our infant love did grow,
Disguises did, and shadows, flow
From us, and our care; but now 'tis not so.
But, and most importantly, we notice here that the "disguises" and "shadows" flowing from the lovers and their cares are figurative, cast by them in the growing light of their crescent love. (Care, or cares, casting a shadow is a bit more complex than a more literal likening in a simile of care and shadow, as in the lines by Queen Elizabeth I [ca. 1582] that Donne most likely knew:
My care is like my shadow in the sun,
Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,
Stands and lies by me, doth what I have done.
His too familiar care doth make me rue it.
["On Monsieur's Departure," lines 7–10])
In Donne's lines, the shadows are at once tropes and the literal objects of vision. (That these are doubled in the rhetoric — visible shadows shadowed by speech, as Donne himself elsewhere might have put it — should be remarked now, because in that regard this poem is paradigmatic of many subsequent ones we shall be considering.) There is a sort of motto isolated in the couplet — rather like that in an emblem, but here with respect not to a pictured object or fable, but to the scene of the lovers and their shadows both optical and tropical:
That love hath not attain'd the high'st degree,
Which is still diligent lest others see.
"Diligent" equals wary. The lovers' disguises and shadows, seen in retrospect, had compromised the brave clearness of their love itself.
The second stanza sees another problem in prospect:
Except our love at this noon stay,
We shall new shadows make the other way.
As the first were made to blind
Others, these which come behind
Will work upon ourselves, and blind our eyes.
If once love faint, and westwardly decline,
To me thou, falsely, thine,
And I to thee mine actions shall disguise.
The morning shadows wear away,
But these grow longer all the day, —
But oh, love's day is short, if love decay.
Love is a growing, or full constant light;
And his first minute, after noon, is night.
And again, as with the changes in position and length of the optical shadows, so with the figurative ones, the disguises and misrepresentations — in the afternoon, they become dangerous to their love, instead of perhaps protecting it as during its morning of development. These which "come behind" (either spatially or temporally) are those of mutual deception and perhaps self-deception, and they can only grow and darken the love itself. As the late Rosalie Colie put it, "A Lecture upon the Shadow" is "a lecture upon the visibility, the sharpness, the depth, and the transiency of love itself: the shadow, an impalpable accidental record of human presence, is made the image of the nothingness of both love and the living, breathing lovers."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Substance of Shadow by John Hollander, Kenneth Gross. Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface1. A Lecture upon the Shadow
2. Shadows and Shades
3. Shadowes Light
4. A Shadow Different from Either
5. Fragments of Shadow: Manuscript Extracts
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index