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Narrative Strategies in the Dream Songs Cooper Childers Marshall University Marshall Digital Scholar Theses, Dissertations and Capstones 1-1-2009 "A Long Wonder the World Can Bear & Be" : Narrative Strategies in The Dream Songs Cooper Childers Follow this and additional works at: http://mds.marshall.edu/etd Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons, and the Poetry Commons Recommended Citation Childers, Cooper, ""A Long Wonder the World Can Bear & Be" : Narrative Strategies in The Dream Songs" (2009). Theses, Dissertations and Capstones. Paper 531. This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Marshall Digital Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses, Dissertations and Capstones by an authorized administrator of Marshall Digital Scholar. For more information, please contact [email protected]. "A Long Wonder the World Can Bear & Be": Narrative Strategies in The Dream Songs Thesis Submitted to the Graduate College of Marshall University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English by Cooper Childers Dr. Mary B. Moore, Ph.D., Committee Chairperson Dr. Chris Green, Ph.D. Dr. Janet Badia, Ph.D. May 2009 ABSTRACT This thesis examines the narrative development of The Dream Songs while viewing Henry as the locus and the impetus of the various narrative strategies deployed therein. Through the abundance of generic and literary allusions present in The Dream Songs, Berryman's sequence functions both to engage and to interact with the Western literary canon. The first chapter of this thesis locates The Dream Songs within Petrarchan sequences. The second chapter treats Henry's and the unnamed speaker's local language and shows how their competing speech genres inform the sequence's modes. The third chapter examines the role of epic codes in creating the text's generic expectations and the generic modulations unique to the Songs. Though the narrative development of The Dream Songs functions to appropriate canonical texts ofthe Western literary tradition, the sequence refuses to adhere to generic expectations evoked by the texts appropriated and ultimately is revealed to be an inter-text. ii I TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Introduction 1 Chapter One . 7 Chapter Two. ......................................................... .. 41 Chapter Three 89 Conclusion 130 Notes 137 Works Cited 155 iii Introduction: The Field of The Dream Songs, Form, and the "Author Function" "I will not come again Or not come with this style." (The Dream Songs 379.17-8) The relatively recent publication of the collection of essays, "After Thirty Falls, "I indicates a renewal of critical interest in Berryman studies after a considerable lull following the poet's death in 1972. John Berryman, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for 77 Dream Songs and the National Book Award for His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, can be seen as a continuation of the American tradition of the long poem initiated by Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself' and Emily Dickinson's fascicles-a tradition which dominates twentieth-century American poetics. Pound's Cantos, Eliot's The Waste Land, Williams' Paterson, H. D.'s Helen in Egypt, Hart Crane's The Bridge, and, more contemporary to Berryman writing in the 1950s and 1960s, Lowell's Notebook and Charles Olson's Maximus Poems are just a few of the many sequences and long poems that characterize American Modernism. Berryman's The Dream Songs shares much in common with these texts. The endless quality of Berryman's sequence bears resemblances to the lack of closure found in the Cantos, in Paterson, and the Maximus cycle; his tightly controlled, eighteen-line "Songs" evoke e. e. cummings' experiments with the sonnet in Tulips & Chimneys and Lowell's sonnets in Notebook. And the central character of The Dream Songs, Henry, grapples with the crises of modernity in a similar fashion as does Tiresias in The Waste Land, Maximus in Olson's sequence, the poet speaking for the city of Paterson in Williams' text, the poet-figure of The Bridge, and the wide historical cast of the Cantos. Berryman contributes to the chorus of voices dominating American poetry for most ofthe last century, and the affinities his sequence shares with his immediate precursors as well as his contemporaries highlight the common cultural concern of defining the poetic vision of America and its people. One of the features of The Dream Songs that distinguishes Berryman's text among other extended American sequences is the tight construction of the "Songs" on the local and cross­ textual levels. Encompassing 385 individual "Songs" and internally divided into the three sections of 77 Dream Songs and the four sections of His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, the single­ volume edition of The Dream Songs (1969) possesses a length comparable to Pound's Cantos and Olson's Maximus Poems. Though the scale of The Dream Songs is massive, Berryman does not choose to write in free verse and so differentiates his sequence from Pound's and Olson's. With a few exceptions,2 each "Song" of Berryman's sequence contains eighteen lines divided into three, six-line stanzas, and, internal to each stanza, Berryman employs a beat of 5-5-3-5-5-3. Though Berryman exercises considerable control over the metrics and, occasionally, the rhyme3 of each "Song," the narrative structure of The Dream Songs remains organic and open-ended. The narrative of the "Songs" can best be described as constructed through the process of accretion. Like the Cantos, Paterson, and the Maximus Poems, sequences that do not find conclusion or closure and to which their respective authors continuously returned to increase the scale, the 385 individual lyrics contained in The Dream Songs are the result of continuous addition over the roughly two decades of the "Songs'" composition. Part of this compositional strategy is the result of Berryman's choice to organize his sequence around the figure of Henry with whom, as Berryman's notes and letters indicate,4 Berryman personally identified. And by choosing to incorporate personal (autobiographical) experiences as raw material for the "Songs,"S Berryman's sequence, while maintaining the limitation of metrical control on the local, lyrical level, achieves the ability to continue ad infinitum. As Thornbury observes in his 2 introduction to Berryman's collected poetry: "While the rhythms of The Dream Songs ebb and flow, they may be more accurately characterized as a series of Henry's departures and returns, his deaths and rebirths" (xxxii). The continuity created by the cycle of Henry's "deaths" and "rebirths" shows The Dream Songs as following the basic pattern of more limited sequences within the larger sequence that characteristic of a number of American Modernist texts such as the Cantos. However, a great deal of contemporary Berryman criticism still reads Henry's character and, thus, the narrative of the "Songs" as a whole, as an extension of Berryman's own personality due in large part to the considerable amount of autobiographical detail found in connection with Henry. The label of "confessional poet" follows Berryman like a tin can tied to his tail, and such a reading impedes a larger appreciation of Henry's character and Berryman's text. The fashion of biographical positivism is making a resurgence in literary studies after falling out of favor with New Critical/Formalist attempts to remove the "author" from the consideration of the text as well as the efforts of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida to reduce the "author" to a "function" (Foucault) and to consider the "author" as "dead" (Barthes) at a time contemporary with the composition of the "Songs." New Historicism is reviving the corpse of the "author," and though there is merit in contextualizing "authors" within their respective historical worlds, such contextualizing carries with it the power to shift agency away from the text and back to an "author" representing a cross-roads of history and culture. I have avoided, as much as is practicable, considering The Dream Songs in terms of Berryman as an "author." In the present study, Berryman is viewed as making conscientious choices: words, metrics, allusions, attempted structures. But to see Henry or the "Songs" as autobiographical recordings 3 or reflexes of the poet's psychology greatly narrows the richness of the sequence and limits the repercussions of the multiplicity of the text's language. On the local level of the text of The Dream Songs as well as the many intra-poetic relationships serving to blur the boundaries of that text, the fourth characteristic of the "author function" as defined by Foucault best serves to illuminate Berryman's role in the context of his sequence: [The author function] does not refer purely and simply to a real individual, since it can give rise simultaneously to several selves, to several subjects-positions that can be occupied by different classes of individuals. (113) The Berryman who makes extra-textual statements in public in the form of letters, interviews, etc. is differentiated from the figure who composes the "Note" preceding The Dream Songs that states "[the] poem then, whatever its wide cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry [...]" (vi). This "author" of the "Note" is differentiated further from the speaking "I" of the "Songs," a figure who remains highly complex, ambiguous, and unstable. The location of Berryman-as-"author" is never betrayed in the (at least) three "I"s associated with the text of the "Songs"; Berryman-as-"function," however, informs and colors all aspects of the text. The "function" of Berryman informing the various aspects of the text ofthe "Songs" through the exercise of aesthetic choice does not, as Eliot identifies in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," operate in a vacuum; Berryman, in part, gains his "significance, his appreciation [in] his relation to the dead poets and artists.,,6 Following Foucault's analysis of the "author function," he identifies what he terms "founders of discursivity," those "author"-as­ "functions" that are "unique": 4 [Founders of discursivity] are unique in that they are not just the authors of their own works.
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