Australian Catholic University (Melbourne) National School of Arts “THE IMAGING OF THE INVISIBLE”: NARRATIVE, PILGRIMAGE AND “THE METAPHYSICS OF THE QUOTIDIAN” IN CHARLES WRIGHT’S POETRY PhD Thesis Submitted 5 August 2014 SARAH DOWLING BA (HONS) Graduate Research Office Level 5, 250 Victoria Parade East Melbourne VIC 3000 Copyright by Sarah Dowling 2014 All rights reserved Declaration of Originality This thesis contains no material published elsewhere or extracted in whole or in part from a thesis by which I have qualified for or been awarded another degree or diploma. No parts of this thesis have been submitted towards the award of any other degree or diploma in any other tertiary institution. No other person’s work has been used without due acknowledgment in the main text of the thesis. All research procedures reported in the thesis received the approval of the relevant Ethics/Safety Committees (where required). Signed: Sarah Dowling Date: iii iv Acknowledgements I wish to offer my sincerest thanks to my supervisor Dr Carolyn Masel for the time, support, passion and expertise she has contributed to my research. I am also grateful to my co-supervisor Prof. Margot Hillel, OAM for her critical eye and judicious advice throughout my candidature. I am forever indebted to my “postgraduate posse”—Ros Almond, Laura Saxton and Christin Quirk—for being unfailingly sympathetic counsellors, close readers, motivators and very dear friends. I’d like to acknowledge my family for their love and support, and my friend Bernadette Carroll for never doubting that I could do this. My love and endless gratitude go to Adam Smith, who saw me through my lowest moments and who believes in me. Thank you again to Ros and Adam for voluntarily taking on the considerable task of proof-reading this thesis in its final stages. Your sharp eyes were invaluable and I appreciate your help very much. Pa Brian and Aunty Kate, you always showed an interest in all my endeavours. I miss you, but your encouragement and influence have been with me even in your absence. I dedicate this thesis especially to you. v Table of Contents List of Tables vii Abstract vii List of Abbreviations x A Note on the Text xi Introduction: “Pity the Poor Pilgrim” 3 Chapter 1: “The Unsayable Has Its Say”: Wright’s Symbols and Metaphors for the Invisible 35 The Invisible as Absolute 40 God 42 Blue 52 Light 54 The Invisible as Underlying Order 60 The Centre 60 Form and Structure 63 Mechanism 67 Music 68 Painting 75 Text and Language 84 The Invisible as Absence 106 “Like a Narrative for Whatever Comes” 112 Chapter 2: “The Southern Cross” and the Search for Places of Origin 115 “That Irreconcilable City”: The Ideal Past and the Diminished Present 124 Chaos and the Irretrievable Origin 143 Why “The Past is Never the Past” 152 “You Can’t Go Back” 156 Chapter 3: Pilgrimage and Time in A Journal of the Year of the Ox 163 The Circular Pilgrimage 169 “Time, the Engenderer of Entropy and Decay” 190 Crystallised Time: “That Point Where All Things Meet” 209 vi Chapter 4: “The End or Non-end”: Salvation, Annihilation, Transformation and Return in Wright’s Appalachian Book of the Dead 223 Part One: The End “Through the Red Sea, Toward the Promised Land”: Crossing Over and the Afterlife 231 “Just That Dust, and Just Its Going Away”: Entropy, Old Age and the Irrevocable End from The Voyage to the Sestets 264 Part Two: The Non-end “Your Body Becoming a Foreign Tongue”: (After)Life After Entropy 282 “There Comes Another End”: Repetition and Return 300 Conclusion: “And What Does It Come To, Pilgrim?” 307 Works Cited 313 * * * List of Tables Table 1: A Guide to Wright’s Publications xii Table 2: Four Versions of the End in Charles Wright’s Poetry 227 vii Abstract This dissertation presents an analysis of the whole body of poetry by contemporary American poet Charles Wright to date. Building on existing scholarship, I argue that his poetry can be read as having a single focus, which I label “the invisible” (a term from Wright’s poems) and which represents the object of Wright’s pilgrim’s metaphysical longings. The invisible names a multifaceted sense of something ultimate, ungraspable and often absent. It is commensurate with what Wright calls “the metaphysics of the quotidian”—the otherworldly quality of the mundane material world—and “the idea of God”, an agnostic sense of ultimate realities that remains half-begrudgingly reliant on religious terms. To reveal the centrality of the invisible to Wright’s poems I present an analysis of their recurrent symbols and metaphors, demonstrating that visions of the invisible are ubiquitous and consistent throughout his oeuvre. I also argue that an implicit, repeating narrative of “pilgrimage” persists all the way through Wright’s body of work. This pilgrimage is an ongoing quest of spiritual aspiration towards the invisible. It amounts to the kind of concealed storyline that Wright calls “undernarrative”. As I make clear, the pilgrimage constitutes the paradigmatic pattern of Wright’s poetry, a sequence of drawing near and falling back that recurs in an almost fractal manner in every part of his oeuvre. I trace this undernarrative within Wright’s whole body of poetry, not just his famous “trilogy of trilogies”, to reveal how his recurrent themes produce an implicit, repeated movement towards and then away from transcendence. From a perspective informed by Derrida’s deconstruction of Western logocentrism, I focus on Wright’s many meditations on the past, contemplations of the present and speculations on death. I consider the way that Wright entertains a particularly Southern, place-bound sense of origins, even while confounding that prioritisation of origins with a motif of rise-and-fall that destabilises “place”. The fluidity of memory reflected in tumultuous landscapes, as exemplified by the poem “The Southern Cross”, challenges the ideal of origins by revealing viii them to be elusive, uncovering a lack of consistency between the past and the present and rendering the past irretrievable. I explore Wright’s sense of being in time in relation to his poem The Journal of the Year of the Ox. This poem demonstrates two key patterns in Wright’s poetry: the perpetual renewal embodied in the cycle of seasons and the tragic fact of decay and rising entropy evinced by the poet-figure’s experience of ageing. Both concepts of time attest to the inapprehensible nature of the invisible, which is envisioned as an elusive eternal instant of time. Furthermore, the conflation of the idyllic origin with heaven in Wright’s poetry means that his pilgrim’s journey towards transcendence has a unique direction. Passing time both drags him away from paradise and conveys him back to his birthplace. Finally, I consider Wright’s multiple visions of death, which are variously, I suggest, redemptive, entropic, decompositional and cyclical. I consider the implications of these different “ends” for the preceding life narrative and for narrative closure in general. As obvious fictions, Wright’s endings draw attention to the fictiveness of all ideals of closure and completion. Ultimately, I argue that Wright’s modernist undernarrative of seeking wholeness demonstrates the appeal of dominant narrative paradigms even while subverting them and bringing the ideal of fundamental truth into question. ix List of Abbreviations AP Appalachia (1998)* BL Bloodlines (1975)* BY Buffalo Yoga (2004) BZ Black Zodiac (1997) CH Chickamauga (1995)* CT China Trace (1977) DA The Dream Animal (1968) GRH The Grave of the Right Hand (1970) HF Hard Freight (1973) HL Halflife: Improvisations and Interviews, 1977-87 (1988)* LF Littlefoot (2007)* NB Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems (2000) OT Outtakes / Sestets (2010)** OSR The Other Side of the River (1984) QN Quarter Notes: Improvisations and Interviews (1995) SC The Southern Cross (1981) SHS A Short History of the Shadow (2002) SP Six Poems (1964)** SS Sestets: Poems (2009)** ST Scar Tissue (2006) VG The Voyage (1963) XA Xionia (1990)* ZJ Zone Journals (1988) x A Note on the Text Many of the abbreviations listed here are borrowed from Robert Denham (see The Early Poetry; Charles Wright In Conversation; Charles Wright: A Companion). For the sake of clarity, I have elected to use abbreviations of two letters or more throughout; those of my abbreviations that differ from Denham’s are marked with an asterisk (*). Those marked with a two asterisks (**) are books not cited by Denham, in which case the abbreviations are my own invention. There is a convention in Charles Wright scholarship of citing excerpts of poems according to page number rather than the more typical line number. Because Wright’s distinctive “broken” lines (QN 79)—also called “lowriders” and “dropped lines” (Wright, “Bar Giamaica” 208)—confuse the issue of lineation, I have chosen to follow this convention when citing his poems, deeming it the clearest way of locating the passages in question. Given that some of Wright’s rarer works are unpaginated—the most substantial of which is Outtakes / Sestets (2010)—poems that have not been collected into any paginated volume will be identified by poem title as well as book title (for example, “Hemlock” OT). When citing Wright’s poems in-text I have followed the trend established by Calvin Bedient of using a tilde (~) to indicate occurrences of the “broken” line (“Tracing Charles Wright” 22), rather than the double virgule (//) Denham uses. The double virgule traditionally designates the beginning of a new stanza or verse paragraph (as it does in this thesis) and thus suggests a more profound discontinuity than is implied by a “dropped” line, which Wright maintains is still a single line, albeit one that incorporates “a rather pronounced caesura” (Interview by Spiegelman 108).