Philosophiae Doctores Books of this series are listed in the back
Rita Horváth Never Asking Why Build Only Asking Which Tools : Confessional Poetry and the Construction of the Self AKADÉMIAI KIADÓ, BUDAPEST
From The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton. Copyright 1981 by Linda G. Sexton and Loring Conant, Jr., executors of the will of Anne Sexton. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. From The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes. Copyright 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981 by the Estate of Sylvia Plath. Editorial material copyright 1981 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC: The Ball Poem from Collected Poems: 1937 1971 by John Berryman. Copyright 1989 by Kate Donahue Berryman. Excerpts from Note and Dream Song # 101 A Shallow Lake from The Dream Songs by John Berryman. Copyright 1969 by John Berryman. Copyright renewed 1997 by Kate Donahue Berryman. Excerpts from Collected Poems by Robert Lowell. Copyright 2003 by Harriet Lowell and Sheridan Lowell. Rita Horváth, 2005 Published by Akadémiai Kiadó Member of Wolters Kluwer Group P.O. Box 245, H-1519 Budapest, Hungary www.akkrt.hu All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means or transmitted or translated into machine language without the written permission of the publisher.
CONTENTS Acknowledgements.................................................. 7 Introduction....................................................... 9 Chapter I What Is the Boy Now : John Berryman s The Ball Poem............ 19 Chapter II Much Against My Will I Left the City of God : Robert Lowell's Life Studies........................................ 29 Chapter III An Engine, an Engine : The Mythological Machinery of Self-destruction in Sylvia Plath s Works............................ 55 Chapter IV My Business Is Words : The Poetry of Anne Sexton................... 81 Chapter V Your Hurt Invades My Calm White Skin : Trauma and Holocaust Images in Confessional Poetry.................. 105 Conclusion......................................................... 123 Works Cited........................................................125 5
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank Dr. Rachel Salmon Deshen (Bar-Ilan University, Israel) for her inspiring supervision of my thesis and for her encouragement, patience, and support. I also thank Dr. Alan Rosen for deepening my knowledge of Holocaust literature and for the unlimited time and attention he devoted to my work. I am deeply indebted to Dr. Gyõzõ Ferencz, Dr. Kinereth Meyer, Professor Jeffrey M. Perl, Professor Murray Roston, Professor Aladár Sarbu, Professor Ellen Spolsky, and Professor Hanna Yaoz for the warm, helping care with which they promoted my scholarly development. I am also grateful to my dear friends and colleagues, Kinga Frojimovics, Laura Major, Edna G. Rosenthal, and Bea Sándor, for their moral support and for the many stimulating hours of discussion we had at various stages of my work. Without the nurturing and support of my family, my work would never have come about. 7
INTRODUCTION The Confessionals created a body of writings chiefly poetry, but also such prose pieces as Sylvia Plath s The Bell Jar and Robert Lowell s 91 Revere Street which even the most enthusiastic critics have approached with grave apprehension. A disregard for the sort of New Critical decorum taken for granted when the Confessional school was developing in the late 1950 s accounts for the hostility of most of the early critical responses. The highly personal poetry of the Confessionals seemed to deny the touchstone of the New Critical and High Modernist value system, the aesthetic distance separating the poetic I from the author. By filling their poems with minutely accurate or only slightly distorted autobiographical details, the Confessional poets undermined the key New Critical-High Modernist concept of the persona. In addition, their direct treatment of shameful and taboo subjects mental illnesses, violence, divorce, masturbation, operations, alcoholism, incest forced readers to witness the revelation of scandalous secrets, which, as a prominent critic of the school declared, one is honor-bound not to reveal (Rosenthal 1960, 231). 1 Even after the initial shock subsided and the Confessional school together with other contemporaneous approaches such as that of the Beat, Black Mountain, Deep Image, and New York poets had changed critical and public taste, Confessionalism still remained controversial. Devastated by mental breakdowns, the Confessionals invented a new mode of writing in the hope of self-cure. None of them succeeded. Their failures materialized dramatically in the suicides of three major Confessional poets: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman. 2 Although Lowell did not actually kill himself, his resignation and selfdestructive behavior was clearly discernible to friends and family members. 3 Confessional poetry thus failed in its therapeutic aim of creating integrated, unified selves. Nevertheless, it attracted a wide audience. Unable to forge stable selves, the Confessional poets did manage to create original, unique, and integrated poetic 1 Macha Louis Rosenthal already used the phrase: one is honor-bound not to reveal (Rosenthal 1999, 64) in his famous review of Lowell s Life Studies: Poetry as Confession. The Nation 189 (19 September 1959) 154 155. Reprinted in The Critical Response to Robert Lowell, ed. Steven Gould Axelrod (Westport: Greenwood, 1999) 64 68. Later, feminist critics, such as Joanna Russ, Enikõ Bollobás, Jane McCabe, Catherine Georgoudaki, celebrated precisely the breaking of many gender taboos by the female Confessionals. 2 Plath at the age of 30 kneeled down in front of an oven and gassed herself on 11 February 1963. Sexton also gassed herself in a closed garage at the age of 45 on 4 October 1974, and Berryman leapt to his death from a bridge at the age of 57 on 7 January 1972. 3 Lowell s wife, Caroline Blackwood, called his death a suicide of wish. (Hamilton 473) 9
styles/voices, which could be used to unify their poetic worlds. 4 A personal poetic style may be experienced for a while as the manifestation of an integrated self. 5 However, despite their unique and integrated poetic styles, the Confessionals could not generate such selves. Thus we find that the aesthetic concept of style/voice and the psychological concept of self is partially confused in Confessional poetics, because of the Confessionals double aim to create both therapeutic and aesthetically valuable poetry. I have chosen to attend as closely to the psychological concept of the self as to the aesthetic concept of style/voice, because the Confessionals themselves assign great importance to the therapeutic value of their writing. Not only did the Confessionals invent this mode in the hope of self-cure, but Lowell and Sexton even tried to abandon Confessional writing for another mode when it proved to be therapeutically impotent, although they were writing magnificent poetry according to aesthetic criteria. Plath killed herself at the height of her poetic powers, perhaps having lost faith in the efficiency of poetry as therapy. The overwhelming majority of the critics read Confessional poems merely as the merciless, and at times excessively exhibitionist, revelations of the poet s suffering self. A. R. Jones typically defines the lyric I of Confessional poetry as a naked ego involved in a very personal world and with particular, private experiences (Jones 14). 6 This mimetic/essentialist view postulates a self which pre-exists any awareness of it. By contrast, I claim that Confessional writing does not aim at representing an already existent self, but strives to create a new one. I see Confessional poetry as an attempt at self-construction rather than at self-exposure. The concept of construction rather than representation is particularly apt because the Confessionals repeatedly suffered the dissolution of self during their spells of mental breakdown. Those self-shattering experiences left them little choice but to attempt to construct/reconstruct selves. Thus, while critics look upon the Confessional project in terms of a past-oriented mimesis, I view it as a tool for selfconstruction, which should thus be oriented towards the future. Limiting myself to the study of those poets who are routinely discussed by the critics as Confessionals, 7 I shall reconceptualize the field of Confessional poetry. Through an analysis of the writings of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton and John 4 Gyõzõ Ferencz concludes his dissertation on John Berryman by asserting that the poet s styleidentity was powerful enough to unify his late poetry. (Ferencz 1981, 123) 5 As Terri Witek demonstrates, Lowell equated myself with style : I think I was a professional who was forced, who forced myself, into a revolutionary style in writing Life Studies, the biggest change in myself perhaps I ever made or will. (Witek 5) Witek, relying on Katharine Wallingford s research, shows how the connection between self and style/language usage, remained important for Lowell. (Witek 5 6) In For John Berryman I, for example, Lowell asserts that both he and his dead friend are words. (Lowell 2003, 600) 6 Strongly influenced by New Criticism, A. R. Jones clings to the notion of the persona, although he sees it mainly in terms of the poet s autobiography. (Jones 14 15) 7 Even those critics who oppose the term Confessional poetry, first state that these poets are categorized as such, and only then can proceed to re-categorize them. The list of poets who are called Confessionals varies from critic to critic. In order not to dilute the term Confessional as a heuristic device by including too many barely related poets, such as Randall Jarrell, Weldon Kees, Richard Hugo, James Merrill, Theodore Roethke and Delmore Schwartz, some scholars categorize 10
Berryman, in passing I have set out to identify the source of deep anxiety that informs scholarly literature on the Confessionals. To study the work of other poets especially that of Snodgrass, whose Heart s Needle Lowell and Sexton regarded as a major influence upon their own Confessional poetry 8 would undoubtedly refine and enrich the picture of the genre I am delineating, but would not fundamentally change it. Because the cure of the poet was a primary goal of Confessional poetry, many critics associated it with the Romantic expressive theory of art. According to M. H. Abrams who has distinguished four types of critical theories according to their focus on universe (mimetic), audience (pragmatic), artist (expressive), work (objective) expressive theories focus on the relationship of the work to its creator, who becomes the major element generating both the artistic product and the criteria by which it is to be judged. (Abrams 22) In my opinion, it is anachronistic to approach Confessional poetics as a continuation of Romanticism, since from the High Modernist movement on, the poet s self, the focus of expressive theories, has become thoroughly problematic. High Modernist artists and New Critics introduced the concept of the persona to deal with the dissolution of the traditional notions of the self. I shall demonstrate, especially in Sexton s poetry, how the Confessional experiment undermined the High Modernist and New Critical solution by showing that once the concept of a given real self dissolves, its supposed binary opposite, the persona, dissolves along with it. For the Confessionals the dissolution of unequivocal, traditional notions of the self was a personal as well as a cultural crisis. Following their mental breakdowns, they had to attempt the construction of new selves without being able to take for granted any given theoretical basis. Therefore, they had to find and adopt a hermeneutics that could provide them with a viable theory of the self, or attempt to forge such a theory on their own. The range of the intellectually/culturally available hermeneutic systems, such as psychoanalysis, mythical structures, and various literary genres, constitute a crucial part of what Abrams called the universe. The other significant aspect of that universe is the Confessionals awareness of their historical and literary positioning vis-à-vis the traumas of the twentieth century and High Modernism. In the literature dealing with the Confessionals, the terms confessional and autobi- individual poems as Confessional. Allen Ginsberg s Kaddish, for instance, is widely considered a Confessional poem, whereas the poet himself is usually thought of as the quintessential Beat poet. Although this critical strategy may be useful in some cases, I believe that it is most fruitful, both theoretically and historically to regard Confessionalism as a distinct post-modern literary phenomenon/poetic school. 8 Snodgrass poem-sequence, Heart s Needle, does not have a privileged position among the Confessional works, because Confessional poetry was simultaneously invented over a period of time in the 1950 s by its various practitioners. Nevertheless, Lowell Snodgrass teacher and Sexton Snodgrass student expressed admiration for Snodgrass book and acknowledged his influence upon them. (Seidel 270 271; Sexton Ames 62 63) The Confessional poets developed close personal ties with each other: they influenced each other both directly, as mentors, teachers, students, friends, close acquaintances, and through their works. They were keenly aware of each other s goals, achievements, risks, and they also shared strikingly similar social backgrounds. Jeffrey Meyers in Manic Power: Robert Lowell and his Circle traces the complex relationships of many of the Confessional artists. 11
ographical are applied more or less as synonyms to the works of the four poets under consideration. The poets themselves usually preferred the term autobiographical, while critics tend to employ the word Confessional. 9 The reason for the poets preference is the negative value judgment adhering to the term Confessional, as coined by M. L. Rosenthal to convey his shock over Lowell s disclosure of intensely personal material in Life Studies. 10 Setting aside evaluative connotations, I shall regard Confessional poetry as a sub-genre of autobiography that emerged in a specific time period and in a specific cultural milieu. A dense web of cultural, social, historical and legal associations was responsible for the rapid incorporation of the term Confessional poetry into critical consciousness, despite Rosenthal s narrow and derogatory initial usage. 11 Although many of these associations led critics to focus upon the revelation of something already existent namely, a guilty self the term itself can just as easily direct our thoughts towards the future-oriented notion of self-construction. Confession always requires a listener; traditionally it functions in respect to a community. Confessors of guilt seek forgiveness and readmission to society, while confessors of faith aim at gaining or reaffirming membership in a community, and setting an example for others. Since confession is a performative speech act, 12 Confessional poems are addressed more overtly to an audience than is common in autobiography. According to Wolfgang Iser, performance subverts the classical concept of mimesis, replacing it with the notion of construction. 13 Thus, a confessional narrative would not merely represent 9 Lowell himself usually used the term autobiographical to describe his own poetry and confessional to describe the works of others, chiefly his students, in order to discredit them mildly. See for example, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: The Artist and Her Critics, ed. J. D. McClatchy (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978) 71. Confessional poets sometimes furiously rejected identification as such. Asked: You, along with Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and several others, have been called a confessional poet. How do you react to that label? Berryman answered: With rage and contempt! Next question. (Stitt 299) 10 Macha Louis Rosenthal, Poetry as Confession. The Nation 189 (19 September 1959) 154 155. Reprinted in The Critical Response to Robert Lowell, ed. Steven Gould Axelrod (Westport: Greenwood, 1999) 64 68. 11 Later M. L. Rosenthal, himself, frequently re-addressed and expanded his view of Confessional poetry, most notably in his The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction (New York: Oxford UP, 1960); The New Poets: American and British Poetry Since World War II (New York: Oxford UP, 1967); and Macha Louis Rosenthal, and Sally M. Gall, The Modern Poetic Sequence: The Genius of Modern Poetry (New York: Oxford UP, 1983). 12 Confession is always an act of performance. For the early American Puritans, for instance, confession was a public, performative speech act. The performative rather than the referential function of language has been brought to the fore by Speech Act Theory. John Austin in How to Do Things with Words, distinguished constatives and performatives. Constatives are true or false statements of facts. Performatives are actions which accomplish something, like promising, betting, praising and confessing. (Austin 3 7) 13 The traditional notion of representation assumes that mimesis entails reference to a pregiven reality that is meant to be represented in the text. However, Iser asserts that there has been a clearly discernible tendency toward privileging the performative aspect of the author-text-reader relationship, whereby the pre-given is no longer viewed as an object of representation but rather as material from which something new is fashioned. (Iser 249) 12
an already existent self, but would act to create a new one, undermining the traditional view of autobiography as the most mimetic of the literary genres. It also renders questionable the traditional assumption that autobiography cannot be written in verse, because the verse-form itself destroys one of the basic conditions of the genre: verisimilitude (Szávai 207). 14 As a consequence of its teleological nature, confession is more obviously oriented toward the future than is autobiography. As confessors, these poets were more interested in their audience s immediate response than writers of other forms of autobiography, and they therefore aimed at being easily understood. In their search for acceptance and/or forgiveness, they themselves took the performative connotations of the term Confessional in a literal sense, working out their poetics to suit the requirements of actual performances, poetry readings. 15 In contrast to the obscurity and erudition of High Modernist poetry, Confessional poems seek immediate apprehension. Lowell went so far as to claim that he embraced the principle of immediate apprehension during a reading of his early poems, when he sensed that nobody, including himself, could understand them. 16 The syntax of Confessional poems is rarely convoluted; their patterns of allusion are not excessively cryptic; the poems tend to be less condensed and more repetitive than High Modernist poems; and they manifest carefully worked out sound effects. In contrast to the short, compact, lyrical poems laid out on a page favored by the New Critics, Confessional poems are narrations or processes evolving in time and carrying with them the dramatic sense of realization through performance. These poems construct themselves as time-bound, rather than as the eternal verbal icons of William K. Wimsatt s and Cleanth Brooks famous definition. Lowell s reply to Sexton s application for his creative writing seminar, however, reveals an additional reason for the Confessionals interest in transparency, the always already frustrated desire to get to and communicate the truth about oneself. Of course your poems qualify. They move with ease and are filled with experience, like good prose. I am not very familiar with them yet, but have been reading them with a good deal of 14 Paul de Man called attention to the widespread critical assumption that autobiography cannot be written in verse, asserting that critics who hold this opinion usually do not give reasons for it. (De Man 1984, 68) The Hungarian critic János Szávai, while repeating the traditional view, did formulate a reason: It is inconceivable that there could be a variant of autobiography that is written in verse, since the verse-form itself destroys one of the basic conditions of the genre: verisimilitude. (Szávai 207) [My translation] 15 All of the Confessionals were very much involved in poetry readings. Sexton, for instance, developed a provocative, spectacular, nearly ritual performance style: Anne Sexton liked to arrive about ten minutes late for her own performances: let the crowd work up a little anticipation. She would saunter to the podium, light a cigarette, kick off her shoes, and in a throaty voice say, I m going to read a poem that tells you what kind of a poet I am, what kind of a woman I am, so if you don t like it you can leave. Then she would launch into her signature poem: Her Kind. (Middlebrook 1992, XIX) 16 Lowell explained: I d been doing a lot of reading aloud. I went on a trip to the West Coast and read at least once a day and sometimes twice for fourteen days, and more and more I found that I was simplifying my poems. If I had a Latin quotation I d translate it into English. If adding a couple of syllables in a line made it clearer I d add them, and I d make little changes just impromptu as I read. That seemed to improve the reading. (Seidel 268) 13
admiration and envy this morning after combing through pages of fragments of my own unfinished stuff [Life Studies]. You stick to truth and the simple expression of very difficult feelings, and this is the line in poetry that I am most interested in. (Middlebrook 1992, 91) 17 [Italics mine] More overtly than other narratives, literary confessions, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau s Confessions [1781 1788] and Thomas De Quincey s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater [1822], enthrall both their creators and their audience by continually holding out the promise of revealed truth. 18 Confessional poetry operates similarly in this respect: Lowell promises an undistorted expression of very difficult feelings, by stick[ing] to truth. Paul de Man s analysis of the episode of Marion and the stolen ribbon in both Rousseau s Confessions and in his Fourth Reverie challenges any such promise. In order to reveal the complete truth, the confessor has to expose not merely what happened but also his/her inner motivation (De Man 1979, 279 280). This is impossible, because there are always unconscious motives unknown to the subject, as well as the sinner s conscious, self-interested attempt to exonerate himself/herself. According to de Man: Excuse occurs within an epistemological twilight zone between knowing and notknowing (De Man 1979, 286), making neither closure nor unequivocal naming of the sin possible. 19 Confessional poets share with other literary confessors both the desire to reveal their personal truths and the constant failure to do so. Thus, while the Confessionals emphasize the easy accessibility of their writings, readers actually experience most of their poems as perplexing and excessively opaque, although the difficulties are very different from those of High Modernist works of art. In Confessional poetry the complications arise from private associations aimed towards, but also frustrating, the drive to communicate an exact personal truth. The major goal of the Confessionals was to confess/specify/name not a sin, but, in Lowell s formulation, those very difficult feelings best designated, in the language of psychology, as traumas. 20 The Confessionals felt that unhealed psychological wounds dominated their lives and actions and played a central role in their breakdowns. Actually, Confessional writings cover the entire range of trauma-definitions employed in psychol- 17 Lowell sent the manuscript of Life Studies to his publisher only seven weeks later on 31 October. (Middlebrook 1992, 91) 18 For an analysis of this phenomenon see Dennis A. Foster, Confession and Complicity in Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987) 1 19. 19 Dennis A. Foster was strongly influenced by the deconstructive argument that the attempt to master/control a text s meanings is not only doomed to failure, but is also immoral. He suggests that the genre of guilt confessions can help us explore writers motivation to continue to produce narratives, even though their claim to master the meanings of their texts has been undermined by literary theory. Foster chose literary confessions of guilt to stand for narratives in general, because in them the emotional obligation of both writers and readers/listeners to understand the text is most pronounced. He concludes that unresolved feelings of power, desire, guilt, obligation, and fear set in motion by literary confessions and by narratives in general are carried over to subsequent narratives, which accounts for both the lengthening of individual narratives and the production of new ones. (Foster 7) 20 The word trauma means wound in Greek. 14
ogy: the intensive traumatic event, a series of events, or long-term situations which completely overwhelm a person and remain unassimilated with continuing negative effects. Freud, himself, differentiated two main types of traumas. One is universal: no human individual is spared such traumatic experiences; none escapes the repressions to which they give rise. This kind of trauma occurs in early childhood, up to the age of six. The helpless ego fends them [they can be both instinctual demands from within and excitations from the external world ] off by means of attempts at flight (repressions), which later turn out to be inefficient and which involve permanent restrictions on further development. The second trauma type, which is due to excessive fright or severe somatic shocks, such as railway collisions, burial under falls of earth, and so on, is not a universal human experience and, most likely, the traumatic neurosis it gives rise to has no roots in childhood. (Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis 184 185) When the attempt at mastery through such pathological defences as repression breaks down, anxiety surfaces, causing long-lasting distress. Thus we can say that, for instance, fixation at the normal developmental Oedipal stage a crucial theme of the Confessionals becomes traumatic. Confessional writing is suffused not only with an overpowering aura of loss and selfestrangement, but often with a pervasive, sometimes unbearable, sense of guilt as well. The common element in sin and trauma is that both engender a sense of loss and isolation so powerful that the self not only becomes solitary, but becomes estranged even from itself. That Berryman, Lowell, Plath, and Sexton were often overcome by guilt and remorse to the point of suicidal self-hatred and self-disgust brings their confessions of trauma deceptively close to the genre of confessions of guilt. In their self-hatred and need for some kind of punishment, together with their firm belief that agonizing pain alone can draw one close to psychological truths, the writings of the Confessionals manifest an unusually intense self-directed violence and dwell upon the disgusting, degrading nature of their suffering during episodes of mental derangement. While adopting many Freudian concepts, the Confessionals ignored some keystones of psychoanalytical theory and practice. Most notably, they did not use the distancing devices built into the analyst-analysand relationship that can transform repetition into recognition and reenactment into memory. Analysts enable analysands to break the vicious circle of repetitive reenactments of trauma both by interpreting their lives and by offering themselves as objects of transference. Through transference, the analysand can act out past conflicts and traumas with a difference. By offering transference-interpretations, and by refusing to comply with the analysand s expectations, the analyst opens an experiential gap that enables understanding to emerge. According to Freud, the worst scenario is to be caught up in a process of endless reenactment. The analyst s interpretations act as a distancing devise; they provide a degree of abstraction which can interrupt the process of repetition. The Confessionals understanding of Freudian theory led them to believe that the exact identification of their traumas was a necessary step towards overcoming them. However, they failed to perceive the vital role of the analyst in providing enough distance to negotiate change. The Confessionals ended up reliving their respective traumas, trying to name them not symbolically, but through the recreation of their traumatic conflicts in poetry. Here they re-introduced the past-oriented notion of mimesis alongside the futureoriented thrust of self-construction. Not only did the Confessionals fail to employ 15
Freudian distancing devices, they also rejected the protection of the High Modernist and New Critical distancing technique of the persona or mask. As a consequence of this, the Confessionals tended to experience their lives/selves in essentialist terms. If, as a subgenre of autobiography, Confessional poetry should be oriented primarily towards selfconstruction, the poets keen awareness of the unhealed psychological wounds dominating their lives urged them to attempt to master their traumas directly. I suggest that this residual mimetic/essentialist thinking is responsible for blocking the process of self-construction towards which the entire Confessional self-cure project was directed. Thus, Confessional writing did not facilitate therapeutic processes of self-construction; rather, it gave rise to contradictory processes of the construction, dismantling, and disintegration of selves. Another hazard of writing in the Confessional mode is getting tied up in the always already lost battle to take control over one s text and life. The self-constructive potential of autobiographical writing evokes a possible correspondence between controlling one s text and controlling one s life. However, a deconstructive reading strategy demonstrates how the numerous textual figures such as tropes, gaps, repetitions, aporias, and elisions compel writing to open up to unconscious material. All texts are thus multiple, potentially infinite, and can never be subjected to the control of writer or reader. In addition to the disruptive textual figures, authorial mastery in Confessional poetry is further threatened by the main subject of the poems: trauma. Representations of its workings challenge all of the hermeneutic systems summoned to explain the experience and meaning of trauma in a unilateral way. The Confessionals dealt with the dangers built into their project in different ways. In the following chapters I shall focus upon trauma in order to examine how Lowell, Plath, and Sexton individually struggled with the problems of self-creation, and the kinds of solutions that they tested. 21 Their painful individual failures deserve close attention. After a brief look at a Berryman poem which can serve as a general introduction to the Confessionals world of trauma, I shall turn to an exploration of what happens in Lowell s Confessional poetry as he tries to exercise tight control over his autobiographical text, by strictly employing the early theories of Freud. This hermeneutics unequivocally names his central trauma as an unresolved Oedipus complex. However, a trauma or trauma-complex, which refuses to be identified as the Oedipus complex, surfaces in his writings in repetitions, and disrupts the unity of interpretation upon which Lowell attempted to base his self-cure. The third chapter is devoted to Plath. In contrast to Lowell and Berryman, who arrived at their Confessional poetics by forcefully breaking off from High Modernism, Plath continued the High Modernist tradition, especially in regard to its interest in myths. In her attempt to find a hermeneutics to identify and interpret her psychic wounds, she drew upon a large variety of myths and mythical structures. Whereas the other Confessionals at least for a time wholeheartedly believed in the psychoanalytical hermeneutics they 21 I shall not follow Berryman s struggle extensively. However, Baechler s assertion that Berryman s obsessive awareness of trauma led him to the frenetic, nervous, fragmented qualities of both his language and life [and] his resistance to closure and resolution, indicates that trauma engendered disruptive textual forces in his poetry as well. (Baechler 629) 16
employed, Plath viewed psychoanalysis as a twentieth century myth, belonging organically to the earlier mythological systems. She thus demoted psychoanalysis from its central interpretative status and constructed her own hermeneutic schema by combining various mythologies and mythological structures. The ease with which Plath substitutes one myth for another implies that no sense of belief is involved in her hermeneutics, except belief in the aesthetic beauty of an intricate system. That the artificially constructed nature of her hermeneutics draws attention to itself, does not mean that she employed her system any less strictly to the selection, organization, and interpretation of the facts of her life than Lowell employed his. Drawing upon mythology, psychoanalytic and otherwise, as a metaphoric rather than as an essentialist hermeneutics, enabled Plath to focus upon its underlying structure. As a result, a mythological machine emerges in Plath s works, which simultaneously generates and destroys selves, thus making it impossible for her to create a stable self through writing. The fourth chapter takes up Anne Sexton s poetry. In contrast to Lowell, Plath and Berryman who received a splendid education and who had strong academic and critical backgrounds Sexton did not have much formal education. Nevertheless, she is the Confessional most interested in the theory of Confessional poetics. She reflects upon the aims and methods of Confessional poetry, and explores the relationship between psychoanalysis and art. For this reason I devote much attention to the analysis of her Confessional ars poetica: For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further. Less concerned than her co-confessionals with controlling her text and more fascinated by the possibilities opened up by Confessional poetry, Sexton did not employ a single selfenclosed thought system, but instead fused elements of psychoanalysis with smaller, specifically literary narrative structures, such as fairy tales. Her poems often undermine essentialist language and well-established binary oppositions. However, precisely because she exercised much less control over her autobiographical texts than the other Confessionals, a trauma that of childhood sexual abuse emerges in her writing and traumatizes/re-traumatizes her. Besides sin and trauma, the third completely isolating experience is madness, which all the Confessionals experienced repeatedly. Doubly marginalized as both women and as mad, Plath and Sexton were especially sensitive to any kind of discrimination. In their writings they concerned themselves with many problems which later became central issues of political feminism. In the fifth chapter I shall explore how the female Confessionals dealt with their other socially excluding stigma: madness. Plath and Sexton tried to overcome their traumatic experience of exclusion by constructing an identity that could link them to the Jewish experience of the Holocaust. Tracing the angle constituted by the intersection of the Confessionals desire to name their personal traumas and their historical position vis-à-vis the collective historical trauma of the Holocaust will enable me to draw a much more coherent picture of Confessional poetics than critics have so far constructed. Both self-construction and the dismantling of selves are processes that can go on as long as Confessional works provide a fluid environment for them. When the writings freeze (we will see this especially in Plath s last poems), either because of the dangers of repetition and reenactment built into the Confessional undertaking, or the over-intensification or over-relaxation of authorial control, readers will be affected in one of two ways. Either the poetry overwhelms the reader along with its creator and traps them both 17
together, or the reader can withdraw his/her emotional investment from the poetry. By thoroughly exploring ways of dealing with trauma unsuccessful as they have proven the Confessionals prepared the ground for new artistic and theoretical approaches. By the turn of the millennium, a massive body of both literature and scholarly work concerning trauma has emerged showing that traumatization plays a central role in contemporary culture. Confessional poetry has forcefully shaped our awareness of this phenomenon, and of its dangers on both a personal an communal level. 18
Chapter I WHAT IS THE BOY NOW : JOHN BERRYMAN S THE BALL POEM An early poem by Berryman can guide us into the traumatic world of Confessional poetry: The Ball Poem What is the boy now, who has lost his ball, What, what is he to do? I saw it go Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then Merrily over there it is in the water! No use to say O there are other balls : An ultimate shaking grief fixes the boy As he stands rigid, trembling, staring down All his young days into the harbour where His ball went. I would not intrude on him, A dime, another ball, is worthless. Now He senses first responsibility In a world of possessions. People will take balls, Balls will be lost always, little boy, And no one buys a ball back. Money is external. He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes, The epistemology of loss, how to stand up Knowing what every man must one day know And most know many days, how to stand up. And gradually light returns to the street, A whistle blows, the ball is out of sight, Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark Floor of the harbour. I am everywhere, I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move With all that move me, under the water Or whistling, I am not a little boy. (Berryman 1989, 11) The boy s sudden loss of a loved object can symbolize, epitomize, and anticipate all traumatic losses in life. 22 Losing a ball in deep water is an archetypal image of loss, as 22 In psychoanalytical literature the term object-loss refers to the loss of a good external object, where object usually signifies either people, parts of people, or symbols of both to which the subject relates. 19
we see also in Sexton s transformation of The Frog Prince, one of the Grimm fairy tales. The golden ball, which the princess lost by accidentally dropping it into a well, symbolizes traumatic loss: A loss has taken place. The ball has sunk like a cast-iron pot into the bottom of the well. [ ] 23 Obviously it was more than a ball. [ ] and now it is gone and I am lost forever. 24 (Sexton 1981, 283) [Italics mine] For John Berryman, the archetypal lost ball in water image can be interpreted as bearing especially upon the poet s traumatic loss: at the age of 12 his father shot himself because of a marital crisis. 25 Biographer Paul Mariani writes that before the actual suicide, the poet s depressed father took long walks on the beach carrying a pistol, and often swam out into the gulf as his older boy [John, himself] anxiously watched him disappear (Mariani 11). Berryman s father even threatened to drown himself together with one of his sons. 26 Berryman subtly connects the trauma of losing the ball to his own gaping personal psychological wound by placing The Ball Poem (in his first major collection of poems: The Dispossessed) just before Fare Well, a poem addressed to a father s ghost. He thus implies a personal traumatic loss, without unequivocally identifying it. These poems close the first section of The Dispossessed, connecting return and the impossibility of return to traumatic loss. Such a juxtaposition of the archetypal and the personal, as manifested in these two poems, is one of the most characteristic features of Confessional poetry. Although The Ball Poem parades as an encounter with an original trauma, the loss of the boy s ball can be read as a symbol a symbolic repetition of an original loss that has already been deferred. Employing a symbol for the original traumatic loss instead of setting out to specify it which many later, more pronouncedly Confessional poems of Berryman strive to do The Ball Poem can stand for trauma in general and make a self-reflexive personal statement at the same time. 27 23 Since the Confessionals frequently employed three dots to indicate ellipsis, in works concerned with them it is customary to indicate by three dots enclosed in square parentheses that the critic has left out parts of a quotation. I shall follow this procedure. 24 Sexton in Transformations retold seventeen of the Grimms fairy tales. The motif of a child losing his ball as a prelude to irreversible changes in his life informs another Grimm fairy tale, which Sexton also transformed: Iron Hans. (Sexton 1981, 249 255) 25 He was not called Berryman yet. His father s name was John Allyn Smith. Berryman was the name of his mother s second husband. 26 William J. Martz reports that the father repeatedly threatened to drown himself and John with him (Martz 6), while Paul Mariani relates that once the father swam out dangerously far with his six-year-old son, Robert, tied to a rope in front of him. (Mariani 11) 27 Berryman wrote The Ball Poem quite early in his career when his Confessional poetics was 20
The loss of the ball fits Freud s formulation of the notion of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where the utter lack of preparation is a precondition for traumatization. The word merrily, which appears twice, conveys the boy s total unpreparedness for what is about to happen: Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then / Merrily over. The adjective merry, attached to the ball, can characterize the boy in his identification with the loved object. This easy sense of unity is contrasted, then, with the violent experience of sudden separation. The happy boy does not anticipate any kind of loss, even at the last moment as the ball bounces merrily over the edge. The boy s immediate response to the psychological trauma is shock: An ultimate shaking grief fixes the boy / As he stands rigid, trembling, staring down. [Italics mine] He enters a kind of catatonic state in which he stares without seeing anything. Everything takes place well behind his desperate eyes. We learn from the poem that after such an experience, the regaining of normal consciousness is a slow process, the senses of sight and hearing return only gradually: And gradually light returns to the street, / A whistle blows. A distressing experience is called traumatic if it has lasting effects: the boy is learning, well behind his desperate eyes, / The epistemology of loss. Moreover, that He senses first responsibility / In a world of possessions signifies not only the loss of a loved object, but also that he will be possessed forever by the sense of loss and the knowledge it engenders. The world of trauma is a world of possessions, in which loss and estrangement possess what can no longer be unequivocally called the self. 28 The lasting effect of trauma is the fragmentation of the coherent pre-traumatic self. 29 I am not a little boy anymore, the mutilated survivor self acknowledges with sorrow. 30 The loss is irreversible, and it engenders further losses: of the sense of a unified self, of happiness, of voice, etc. Apparently, the poem itself is intended to stand in the place of the lost love-object; its title announces it as The Ball Poem. Perhaps it can provide a substitute for the irrecoverable. The fragmentation of the self, however, is an unstoppable process: the speaker of the poem partly boy and partly not knows that Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark / Floor of the harbour where his ball went in an endless but futile attempt at recovery. still far from being fully formed. Critics usually assign The Ball Poem to the poet s so-called academic poetry, which preceded and coexisted with his Confessional poetry. However, Charles Thornbury and Gyõzõ Ferencz call attention to the fact that there are poems even among Berryman s academic works that point towards Confessional poetry (Thornbury XVIII), and Ferencz points out the thematic links between the two types of poetry by highlighting the theme of loss, especially the loss of self and style. (Ferencz 1984, 385 386) In my opinion The Ball Poem, especially if we read it together with Fare Well, exhibits many of the crucial Confessional qualities. That Berryman devised a mini sequence in itself points to a Confessional trend, since sequences and long poems are very frequent in Confessional poetry. 28 Caruth calls the effects of trauma a singular possession by the past, in which the overwhelming events of the past repeatedly possess, in intrusive images and thoughts, the one who has lived through them. (Caruth 1995, 151) 29 According to Freud, fragmentation and rupture are pathological defences generated in an attempt to master the traumatic experience. 30 Culbertson claims that a truncated survivor self emerges during the traumatic event as a response to it. Her aim is to show how one may reestablish a fuller self over the survivor self through constructing a narrative. (Culbertson 172) 21
The Ball Poem performs/enacts trauma by drawing upon literary conventions usually assigned to mystical experiences. Berryman, deeply influenced by William Butler Yeats, both adopted and inverted his way of recording mystical experiences in a poem. Combining two of the basic models of mystical thought in Western spiritual tradition the unio mystica of Plotinus and St. Augustine s contemplative vision Yeats usually drew sharp boundaries around a mystical experience. 31 In The Second Coming, for example, the words: The darkness drops again (Yeats 187) end the central vision of the poem. In The Ball Poem, by contrast, the gradual, rather than sudden, return of light marks the end of the primary experience, both likening the experience of trauma to, and keeping it apart from mystical visions. Trauma, often associated with a feeling of transcendence, 32 also unsettles the self, causing it to lose its strict boundaries. Thus, the poetic I in The Ball Poem can declare that I am everywhere, / I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move / With all that move me, under the water / Or whistling. The rhythmic movement of water, or of whistling, creates an ambiance for crossing boundaries. Only one border cannot be repassed, the boundary cutting off the boy s pre-trauma wholeness from the present fragmented self. 33 This notion is strengthened by the juxtaposition of continuous whistling with the single sharp sound of the whistle that signaled the regaining of consciousness and sealed the traumatic event. The fictional situation of the poem is ambiguous. It is possible that the speaker of the poem re-lives, sleeping or awake, a childhood experience of loss, probably in a distorted/symbolic form; it is equally possible that he actually sees an event, a boy losing his ball, which evokes his own traumatic loss. While the I of the poem identifies with the boy s experience, he asserts at the end of the poem that I am not a little boy. The opening question, What is the boy now [ ]?, clearly indicates that the boyhood self is also lost as a consequence of the experienced loss of a love-object. The lyric I differs from the boy of the poem in that that it certainly experiences some kind of a repetition recorded in and/or brought about by the poem. What kind of repetition is this which informs the poem? The formulation of the 31 In his mystical poems, Yeats usually precedes and follows moments of intense revelation by periods of contemplation, which prepare the consciousness for the Plotinian raptus, and consolidate the experience. Meditations in Time of Civil War, for example, clearly manifests these separate mystical and profoundly intellectual moments. 32 Culbertson points out that undergoing and relating a traumatic event is significantly similar to undergoing and relating a mystical experience. (Culbertson 176 178) During the construction of narratives, both mystical and traumatic experiences lose vital aspects that were encoded in disjointed body memories and transcendental sensory memories. (Culbertson 178 180) Caruth recognizes these losses: To cure oneself whether by drugs or the telling of one s story or both seems to many survivors to imply the giving-up of an important reality, or the dilution of a special truth into the reassuring terms of therapy. Therefore, she calls for a new way to listen to the truths of trauma. (Caruth 1995, VIII) 33 Plath, who like Berryman lost her father as a child, wrote about this impenetrable boundary in an 1962 essay titled Ocean 1212-W : And this is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My father died, we moved inland. Whereon those nine first years of my life sealed off like a ship in a bottle beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth. (Plath 1979, 26) [Italics mine] 22
hypothesis of a compulsion to repeat, which can over-ride the pleasure principle, is Freud s starting point in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, Pleasure Principle 22 23). Identifying this phenomenon in the dreams of shell-shock victims and survivors of life-threatening accidents; in neurotics experiencing transference during therapy; in children s play (the famous fort-da game of Freud s grandson); and in the life stories of individuals who give the impression of being pursued by a malignant fate or possessed by some daemonic power (Freud, Pleasure Principle 21), Freud came to the conclusion that one repeats in dreams, in specific actions, and in patterns of life a traumatic event in order to overcome the unexpectedness of the event, to relieve the fright caused by a lack of anticipation. The I of the poem clearly has not yet overcome that paralyzing feeling. Not only does he report the ball s inevitable fall as merry bouncing, but his words for the loss of the ball themselves bounce merrily through playful alliterations: People will take balls, / Balls will be lost always, little boy, / And no one buys a ball back. 34 The poem can be read as a compulsive repetition of the original trauma, which will have to be repeated again, because this repetition also fails to provide the understanding that can relieve fright. However, although the poetic I has not overcome the feeling of fright, the fact that the I differs from the boy by being dragged through an additional repetition indicates that something indeed happens via repetition. Freud differentiated two types of repetitive fates: in the first the perpetual recurrence of the same thing causes us no astonishment, because it relates to active behaviour on the part of the person concerned and [ ] we can discern in him an essential character-trait which always remains the same and which is compelled to find expression in a repetition of the same experiences (Freud, Pleasure Principle 22). 35 The second type, however, is truly startling. Here the subject appears to have a passive experience, over which he has no influence, but in which he meets with a repetition of the same fatality. (Freud, Pleasure Principle 22) Freud offers a literary example, Tasso s Gerusalemme Liberata, to demonstrate this kind of fate. He summarizes Tasso s romantic epic as follows: Its hero, Tancred, unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel while she is disguised in the armour of an enemy knight. After her burial he makes his way into a strange magic forest which strikes the Crusaders army with terror. He slashes with his sword at a tall tree; but blood streams from the cut and the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in the tree, is heard complaining that he has wounded his beloved once again. (Freud, Pleasure Principle 22) In her analysis of Tasso s story, Cathy Caruth focuses upon the moving and sorrowful voice that cries out, a voice that is paradoxically released through the wound (Caruth 34 Conarroe identifies these lines as some bouncy alternative wisdom spoken by a sympathetic but playful avuncular speaker. (Conarroe 36 37) Conarroe dislikes the poem because in his view it has serious tonal problems. (Conarroe 36) 35 Freud offers examples of people whose human relationships have the same outcome: such as the benefactor who is abandoned in anger after a time by each of his protégés, however much they otherwise differ from one another, and who thus seems doomed to taste all the bitterness of ingratitude; or the man whose friendships all end in betrayal by his friend etc. (Freud, Pleasure Principle 22) 23