Poetry of Lost Loss: a Study of the Modern Anti-Consolatory Elegy by Toshiaki Komura
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Poetry of Lost Loss: a Study of the Modern Anti-Consolatory Elegy by Toshiaki Komura A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in The University of Michigan 2011 Doctoral Committee: Professor Laurence A. Goldstein, Chair Professor Adela N. Pinch Professor Johanna H. Prins Associate Professor John A. Whittier-Ferguson © Toshiaki Komura ______________________________________________________________________ 2011 Acknowledgments I am grateful to the members of my dissertation committee, Laurence Goldstein, Adela Pinch, Yopie Prins, and John Whittier-Ferguson, for their generous guidance and instruction. I would also like to thank my parents, Heijiro and Yoshiko Komura, and my fiancée, Kelly Roy, for their invaluable encouragement and support. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgments................................................................................................... ii Abstract ....................................................................................................................v Chapter Introduction ..............................................................................................................1 Critical Tradition and the Intervention of this Dissertation ..................................5 Elegy as a Fictive Narrative: Elegiac Cognitive Dissonance ...............................9 Theorization of How a Loss of Loss Surfaces as a “Phantom” ..........................13 The Lost Loss in Individual Works (Chapter Outline) .......................................17 Anti-Elegy as Transitional Object ......................................................................28 Preliminary Conclusion ......................................................................................30 Chapter 1 – Consolatory Fiction as a Transitional Object in William Wordsworth’s Epitaphic Writings ..............................................................................................37 Essays upon Epitaphs and a Theory of Fiction-Belief ........................................40 Romantic Irony and a Theory of Consolation as a Transitional Object in The Prelude ................................................................................................................................54 The “Peele Castle” Elegy – Oblique Elegy as a Trace of Lost Loss ..................76 Chapter 2 – The Fiction and Creation of Loss: Wallace Stevens’s “The Owl in the Sarcophagus” and Later Elegies .........................................................................97 Creation of Loss in “The Owl in the Sarcophagus” ..........................................100 Fiction of Loss as a Screen for a Loss of Loss .................................................130 Chapter 3 – Confessionals and Their Narratives of Lost Loss ............................155 Roethke’s Phantom Loss and Abraham’s and Torok’s Theorization of Lost Loss ..............................................................................................................................158 Berryman’s “Op. posth.”: Self-Loss as a Form of Lost Loss ..........................184 Plath’s Poems of 1962-1963: a Hypothetical Third Book as a Fictive Construct ..............................................................................................................................203 iii Chapter 4 – Elizabeth Bishop and Anxiety of Lost Loss: Covert-, Non-, Anti- Elegies in Bishop’s Later Works .......................................................................................232 “First Death in Nova Scotia” and the Space Between Remembering and Forgetting ..............................................................................................................................234 “Crusoe in England” and the Benjaminian Collector .......................................242 “Poem” and Others: Third Space, Collector, and Bishop’s Sublimational Poetics ..............................................................................................................................259 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................273 Bibliography ........................................................................................................287 iv Abstract Poetry of Lost Loss: a Study of the Modern Anti-Consolatory Elegy by Toshiaki Komura Chair: Laurence A. Goldstein Bypassing the current theory that attributes the absence of consolation in modern elegies to melancholic mourning and skepticism about elegiac conventions, this dissertation interprets such disconsolation through the phenomenon of “lost loss”: a feeling that a specific loss is either absent, ineffectual, or itself lost, or has become a stand-in or screen for something else. Poetry of lost loss simulates a mood more aptly described as one of a subdued, causeless, chronic “dysthymia”: when the loss is itself lost and is felt only as a dysthymic trace, the notion of mourning becomes obsolete, since there is nothing left to be mourned for except a faint echo of undefined dispossession. To investigate the origin of this obsolescence, Chapter 1 studies how William Wordsworth’s later poems and Essays upon Epitaphs regard elegies as necessary fictions. Chapter 2 hypothesizes that Wallace Stevens’s creation of the fictive “mythology” in his allegorical elegies unveils the loss of loss, and suggests that the function of elegy is less to mourn and console than to attempt to locate an unplaced feeling of equivocal loss through its exploratory utterances. Using these core concepts—how the loss of loss leads to a creation of a fictive, makeshift expressive medium similar to what Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok call a “phantom” in The Shell and the Kernel—Chapter 3 surveys various forms of lost loss in Theodore Roethke’s generic elegies, John Berryman’s Dream Songs, and Sylvia Plath’s poems of 1963. Chapter 4 reads Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III as a case of an anxiety over the prospect of lost loss. In conclusion, the dissertation observes that, in the dysthymia of lost loss, a loss would be left unrecognized until the elegy constructs the fact of the loss and adds a linguistic shape to it. To capture such elusive traces of privation, elegists create phantoms—like Stevens’s sarcophagus allegory or Roethke’s imaginary Aunt Tilly—to forge figurations for vague dejections. In the dismal catastrophe of reality, one finds a way to live in the world of imagination: the poetic forgery of loss is a product of this dysthymic lost loss. v Introduction Near the conclusion of H. Anno’s apocalyptic film, “Evangelion,” a scientist destroys her lifework project amidst the losses that continue to mount as the world heads toward its demise. In one of the climactic scenes, the scientist is asked why she did what she did. She answers: My cats died. I had left them at my grandmother’s. I hadn’t seen them in a long time. All of a sudden, I won’t be able to see them again. While pet loss can devastate some pet-owners, the death of her cats is not the cause of the overwhelming sense of loss that prompts the scientist to sabotage the project on which she had devoted her lifetime; if that were the case, the magnitude of the action would seem disproportionate to the cause. The cats had already been in some sense “lost” to the scientist before their actual death; she “hadn’t seen them in a long time.” For this reason, the death of her cats becomes a partial metonym for the larger whole of an underlying sense of loss in which all smaller, individual losses are subsumed and obliterated. The scientist, not possessing the language to capture the depth of loss that is too overwhelming to be made into words, uses the more visible, proximate death of the cats as a makeshift figure to represent the overarching loss, which has been lost or made inaccessible to her psyche, either through incomprehension or inexpression. In this dissertation, I collect and investigate instances of such elusive feelings of semi-, half-, sub-, or un-conscious losses and their resistance to verbalization, which are 1 at the heart of many of the nineteenth and twentieth century anti-consolatory elegies. Such equivocal losses take many different forms: subtle losses hidden beneath more apparent and visible losses; proleptic losses, a kind that has not yet come to actuality; losses in the long-gone past that have left the surface, but continue to remain in the recesses of our consciousness; distant or imagined losses; or losses too overwhelming to be conceptualized, like the sun too blinding for us to see with our own eyes. These vague or figurative losses differentiate themselves from those of the expressly lamentative elegies—a target of much of the previous elegy scholarship—in that they express themselves as a sense of dysthymia: a type of less acute but chronic melancholia that persistently remains in the background of one’s psyche. In the chronicity of dysthymia, the losses express themselves so faintly, as mere traces, as to elude our linguistic and cognitive apparatus and resist facile closures; the ambiguity or disappearance of the lost object makes the cognitions or resolutions of the loss problematic. This phenomenon is what this dissertation calls the “loss of loss.” This elusive dysthymia of equivocal loss surfaces most frequently in the anti- consolatory elegy, or what elegy scholars customarily refer to as the “anti-elegy”—a subset of elegies that do not conform to the conventional