These Shining Themes the Use and Effects of Figurative Language in the Poetry and Prose of Anne Michaels

These Shining Themes The Use and Effects of Figurative Language in the Poetry and Prose of Anne Michaels Danya Ristić Submitted in (partial) fulfilment of the requirements for the degree D. Litt. in the Faculty of Humanities in the Department of English at the University of Pretoria Supervisor: Prof A Wessels January 2011 © University of Pretoria Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge with thanks and gratitude my parents, Andries and Eloise Wessels, Rico Schacherl and everyone else who accompanied me in the process of writing this thesis. I also wish to acknowledge the American author Henry James as a source of inspiration for the title of this doctoral thesis, and the University of Pretoria for financial support. Abstract This study explores the manner in which Anne Michaels uses figurative language, particularly metaphor, in her poetry and prose. In her first novel, Fugitive Pieces, and in certain of her poems, Michaels demonstrates the powers of language to destroy and to recuperate. For her, metaphor is not simply a literary device; it is an essential mechanism in the creation of an authentic story or poem. Moreover, in contrast to other figurative language such as euphemism, which she feels can be used to conceal the truth and make moral that which is immoral, metaphor in her view can be used to gain access to the truth and is therefore moral. Thus, as this study demonstrates, Michaels proposes as well as utilises the moral power of language. The ideas of four language theorists provide the basis of this study, and prove highly useful in application to Michaels’s work. With the aid of Certeau and Bourdieu, we examine Michaels’s participation in and literary presentation of the relationship of domination and subordination in which people seem to interact and which takes place partly through language. In the light of Ricoeur’s explication of the precise functions of metaphor, we discuss Fugitive Pieces as a novel whose engagement with the topic of the Holocaust in intensely emotive and figurative language makes it controversial in terms of what may or may not constitute the appropriate manner of Holocaust literary representation. Klemperer’s meticulous, first-hand study of the Nazis’ use of the German language during the period of the Third Reich proves illuminating in our exploration of the works of Michaels that feature themes of oppression and dispossession. In certain of her poems, Michaels stands in for real people and speaks in their voices. This is also a form of metaphor, this study suggests, as for the duration of each poem Michaels requires us to imagine that she is the real-life person who expresses him- or herself in the first person singular, which she patently is not. We could see this as appropriation and misrepresentation of those people’s lives and thoughts; however, with the aid of the notion of empathic identification we learn that Michaels’s approach is always empathic – she imaginatively places herself in various situations and people’s positions without ever losing her sense of individuality and separate identity, and her portrayal of their stories is always respectful and carefully considered. Keywords Anne Michaels Michel de Certeau Paul Ricoeur Pierre Bourdieu Victor Klemperer language theory figurative language metaphor metaphorical truth domination oppression symbolic violence legitimate language Holocaust literary representation empathic identification corpse poetry destructive language recuperative language moral language The metaphor guides the poet down the twisting and sudden neural paths between conscious and unconscious, between personal and social, between memory and meaning. (Michaels 1992: 96) I don’t think we take in ideas unless they’re attached to an emotion, and I believe that images are the best, richest conduits for emotions that we have. (Michaels, in Crown 2009) Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 The theorists – thinking about language 15 Certeau – how we behave 15 Ricoeur – how we use metaphor 24 Bourdieu – how we communicate 33 Klemperer – how the Nazis manipulated the German language 44 Chapter 2 Michaels’s figurative language – applying the theory 64 Certeau – the practices of writing and reading 64 Certeau – the practice of walking 69 Ricoeur – metaphor to work 72 Bourdieu – domination, and the bodily hexis 90 Gubar – empathic identification 100 Fuss – corpse poetry 102 Michaels – living-poems 110 Chapter 3 The triple powers of language – destroying, recovering, enacting good 113 The destructive power of language 114 The recuperative power of language 128 The moral power of language 143 Chapter 4 Michaels’s poem ‘What the Light Teaches’ – learning the lesson of the light 162 Paul Celan – the foil 163 Celan – the corpse poet 167 ‘What the Light Teaches’ – real-life subjects 177 ‘What the Light Teaches’ – a close reading 180 Conclusion 195 Works cited 202 Appendix 1 210 Appendix 2 211 Introduction Knowing something’s made up while thinking that it matters is what all fiction insists on. (Gopnik 2006: 158) Contemporary Canadian author and poet Anne Michaels gave courses in Creative Writing at the University of Toronto before the commercial success of her own fiction and poetry allowed her to stop teaching full-time (Crown 2009). If we were to go back in time and attend one of those courses we would have a better than usual chance of writing a decent piece of literature using the information that we receive from her there. We return to the significance of the term ‘decent’ in this context in the Conclusion of this doctoral thesis. The instructions Michaels provided in these classes were clear and precise, and they constitute indications of the ways in which she herself went about writing at the time, and continues to go about writing to this day. In our hands their implications would be potentially profound; in Michaels’s hands the potential is realised. ‘Don’t be in a hurry to start writing’; forbid ‘self-indulgent’ prose, ‘each fact must have its necessity’;1 ‘allow your characters a certain amount of freedom’; to circumvent a ‘brick wall’, simply ‘start from a different place’; avoid plotline chronology – ‘start not necessarily at the beginning’; failure can be useful if it has you ‘pushing and exceeding your own boundaries’ (Michaels, in Ogden 2004). These are some of Michaels’s suggestions for would-be authors, which she follows as well. Two other pieces of her advice serve as significant pointers to the discussions that ensue in this doctoral thesis. First, ‘pick a major historical event that will shape your characters and their relationship to the world around them’, Michaels (in Ogden 2004) counsels. The Second World War informs the stories of the two narrators in Michaels’s first novel, Fugitive Pieces (1996), while her more recently published second novel, The Winter Vault (2009), features the relocation of the Abu Simbel temple necessitated by the Aswan Dam construction of the 1960s, linked with the reconstruction of Warsaw following the war and the building of the St Lawrence Seaway in Canada in the late 1950s. Nazi and Soviet oppression are historical events that also feature in some of the poems in Michaels’s three volumes of poetry – The Weight of Oranges (1986), Miner’s Pond (1991) and Skin Divers (1999), published together in the book Poems (2001) – as do her considerations of the lives of certain real people who contributed significantly to the development of the world in their chosen fields, including art, literature and science. Kepler’s astronomical discoveries, the Curies’ investigations in physics and chemistry, and Modersohn-Becker’s innovative paintings, for example, can thus be seen as ‘major historical event[s]’ (Michaels) in their own right (see further below). Second, Michaels (in Ogden 2004) suggests that students need to ‘decide on a series of persistent motifs that will run through [their] novel’ – such as ‘geology, history, poetry, music [and] language’. This idea may seem to relate to the form of a text, but for Michaels (in Ogden 2004) the motifs are ‘more than mere literary devices’ – as ‘metaphorical tools’, they can ‘give [the 1 Michaels (in Ogden 2004) also seems to suggest that the practice of poetry writing could usefully precede the writing of a novel. Poetry ‘is such a good discipline for a novelist: it makes you aware that even if you have four or five hundred pages to play with, you mustn’t waste a single word’, she explains (Michaels, in Ogden 2004). 1 students’] characters depth’. In other words, Michaels believes that the motifs play a significant role in the content of a text as well. In this way they can also, and in Michaels’s case they do, serve as vehicles for conveying philosophical, sociological and ethical conclusions that stand to enhance our understanding of ourselves as living, interacting and dying human beings. There is another element relating to Michaels’s motifs and metaphorical language that she upholds as equally significant. She demonstrates the precise way in which metaphor works most successfully. While many authors can dazzle us with wordplay and original imagery, these figures of language may simply exist in a text for their own sake – they might not further a character’s argument, develop the plot, flesh out the characters themselves or present us with reflections of our own behaviour and meditations on the consequences thereof. For Michaels (1994: 14), each component of a metaphor must make sense within its context in order for all of them to work, authentically, as a whole. Thus, for example, she sees any landscape as a story, and any story or poem (any poetic story) as a landscape: both are ‘cross-section[s]’, ‘archaeological/geological slice[s]’ whose density ‘reflect layers of time as well as meaning’ (Michaels 1992: 96). In keeping with her ‘sense of the poem as a slice of time’, for Michaels (1992: 98) the abovementioned poems about real-life subjects are ‘biographical “monologues”’, demonstrations of the ways in which she explores how ‘a life can embody an age, historically and geologically’.

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