 |
Representations 7
(Summer 1984)
. . .
Speaking
very generally, it is fair to say that this is the regular force of visual
imagery in the tradition of the literature or poetry of praise—a tradition that
goes back to the praise of love in the Symposium or Phaedrus, but
one that is especially vital in the particular literary genre of the sonnet,
where it goes without saying that the poet is a lover who desires only that
which he admires. With regard to poetic procedure or, rather, with regard to
what is the common and long-standing understanding of poetic procedure, this is
a tradition of specifically visionary poetic likeness, either mimetic likeness,
whereby poetry is the simulating representation of that which it presents—“ut
pictura poesis,” speaking picture—or figural likeness, as when Aristotle
defines metaphor (whether based on analogy or commutative proportion) as the
capacity “to see the same” (theōrein homoion), metaphor being for
Aristotle, as for the tradition of rhetorical theory that derives from him, an
activity of speculative likening that, quite literally, “theorizes sameness.”
Correspondingly, with regard to poetic subjectivity, this is a literary
tradition in which the poet is a panegyric vates or seer who, at least
ideally, is the same as that which he sees (e.g. Dante’s reflexively reflective
“effige”), just as, with regard to poetic semiosis, poetic language, as eīkon,
speculum, imago, eidōlon, etc., is Cratylitically the same as that of
which it speaks, for example, the way Dante identifies his own “beautitude”
with “those whose words that praise my Lady,” his “lodano” with “la donna,” or
the way Petrarch puns on “Laura,” “laud,” and “laurel.” These are general
themes and motifs by reference to which the poetry of praise characteristically
becomes a praise of poetry itself.
It is possible to
get some sense of how very familiar, over-familiar, this received literary
tradition is to Shakespeare if we register the formulaic way the young man’s
poet in sonnet 105 identifies, one with the others, his “love,” his “beloved,”
and his “songs and praises”:
Let not
my love be called idolatry,
Nor my
beloved as an idol show,
Since
all alike my songs and praises be.
What joins these three together
is the ideality they share, an ideality that establishes a three-term
correspondence between the speaking, the spoken, and the speech of praise. “
‘Fair,’ ‘kind,’ and ‘true’ is all my argument,” says the poet in sonnet 105,
and these “Three themes in one, which wondrous scope affords” (“Three themes”
that sonnet 105 repeats three times) amount to a phenomenological summary, an
eidetic reduction, of a Petrarchist metaphysical, erotic, and poetic Ideal:
“Fair” identifies the visibility, the Sichtigkeit, of an ideal sight (idein,
“to see”); “kind” identifies the homogenous categoriality, the formal
elementality, of an ideal essence (Platonic eidos); “true” identifies
the coincidence of ideal knowledge and knowing (oida, which is also from
idein). It is by reference to such precisely conceived and conceited
ideality, an ideality that in effect recapitulates the history of ideas up
through the Renaissance, that sonnet 105 manages to identify “my love,” “my
beloved,” and “my songs and praises,” each one of these being “‘Fair,’ ‘kind,’
and ‘true,’ ” and therefore, by commutation, each one of these being the same
and truthful mirror-image of the other two. In the same idealizing way, this is
how sonnets 46 and 47 manage to eliminate the difference between their eye and
heart, and thereby manage, despite the difference with which they begin, to say
the same thing. More generally, we can say that this is how Shakespeare’s
poetry of visionary praise, because it is a “wondrous scope” and because it is
addressed to a “wondrous scope,” is always, as sonnet 105 puts it,
monotheistically, monogamously, monosyllabically, and monotonously “To one, of
one, still such, and ever so.” This is an ideological poetry, as sonnet 105
seems almost to complain, whose virtue consists in the way its copiousness
always copies the same ideal sameness—“Since all alike my songs and praises
be”—a universal and uni-versing poetic and erotic practice whose very ideality
is what renders it incapable of manifesting difference, for, as the poet puts
it in sonnet 105:
Kind is
my love to-day, to-morrow kind,
Still
constant in a wondrous excellence,
Therefore
my verse, to constancy confin’d,
One
thing expressing, leaves out difference.
However,
as the palpable claustrophobia of sonnet 105 suggests, it would be possible to
look more closely at the sonnets addressed to the young man so as to see the
way they characteristically resist and conflictedly inflect their most ideal
expressions of visionary unity, the way they chafe against the “constancy” to
which they are “confin’d,” the way that they implicitly “express” the
“difference” that they explicitly “leave out.” If, as Murray Krieger has
suggested, we are supposed to hear the “one” in sonnet 105’s “wondrous
scope,” then so too do we also hear the two in ins “T(w)o one, of one, still
such, and ever so.” So, too, the entire sonnet is colored by the ambiguous
logic of its opening “Since”—“Since all alike my songs and praises be”—since
this concessive particle explains both why the young man is an idol as well as
why he is not. Such complications, though they are implicit, have their effect.
As complications, they add a reservation or a wrinkle to the poet’s otherwise
straightforward rhetoric of compliment. In such oblique, yet obvious, ways the
young man sonnets will regularly situate themselves and their admiration at one
affective and temporal remove from the ideality that they repeatedly and
repetitiously invoke, with the peculiar result that in these sonnets an apparently
traditionary poetics of ideal light comes regularly to seem what sonnet 123
calls “The dressings of a former sight.”
This peculiar
retrospection is a consistent aspect of the young man sonnets’ imagery of the
visual and the visible, imagery that is characteristically presented in the
young man sonnets as though it were so tarnished with age that its very
reiteration is what interferes with the poet’s scopic or specular
identification of his poetic “I” and the ideal “eye” of the young man: “For as
you were when first your eye I eye’d” (104). In general, the young man’s poet, as
a visionary poet, seems capable of expressing only a love at second sight; his
identification of his ego with his ego-ideal seems worn out by repetition, as
though it were the very practice by the poet of an old-fashioned poetry of
visionary praise that effectively differentiates the poet as a panegyricizing
subject from what he takes to be his ideal and his praiseworthy object. . . .
In this context, we
can recall the fact that Shakespeare writes his sonnet sequence, for the most
part, after the Elizabethan sonnet sequence vogue has passed, in what we might
call the literary aftermath of the poetry of praise, when such Petrarchist
panegyric has come to seem, to some extent, passé. This is the
historical literary context within which the sonnets addressed to the young
man—which are conceived long after what even Sidney, at the inaugural moment of
the Elizabethan sonnet sequence, called “Poor Petrarch’s long-deceased
woes”—make a personal issue out of their self-remarked literary belatedness,
regularly associating what they themselves characterize as their old-fashioned
literary matter and manner with their poet’s sense of his senescence. In sonnet
76, for example, the poet asks:
Why is
my verse so barren of new pride?
So far
from variation or quick change?
Why
with the time do I not glance aside
To
new-found methods and to compounds strange?
As the poet first poses them,
these are rhetorical questions, questions about rhetoric, but these questions
then will press themselves upon the poet’s person; they define for him his
sense of the superannuated self:
Why
write I still all one, ever the same,
And
keep invention in the noted weed,
That
every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing
their birth and where they did proceed?
A good many young man sonnets
are concerned with just this kind of literary question and, as in sonnet 76, in
these sonnets it appears as though it is the very asking of the question that
turns out to empty the poet’s praising self. Is is as though, because he is
committed to an ancient poetry of praise, the poet feels himself obliged to pay
the debts incurred by a bankrupt literary tradition—as though the poet, as a
person, is himself entropically exhausted by the tired tropes with which,
according to an old poetic custom, he ornaments himself:
So all
my best is dressing old words new,
Spending
again what is already spent:
For as
the sun is daily new and old,
So is
my love still telling what is told. (76)
This is
significant because it introduces a new kind of self-consciousness into the
already highly self-conscious tradition of the Renaissance sonnet. In familiar
ways, the poet in sonnet 76 identifies himself with his own literariness. At
the same time, however, it is in an unfamiliar way that the poet’s subjectivity
here seems worn out by the heavy burden of the literary history that his
literariness both examples and extends. For what is novel in a sonnet such as
76 is not so much the way the visionary poet takes the ever re-newed sameness
of the sun, its perennially revivified vivacity, as a dead metaphor for the
animating energeia and enargia of an ideal metaphoricity. Rather,
what is striking, and what is genuinely novel, is the way the visionary poet
takes this faded brightness personally, the way he identifies his own poetic
person, his own poetic identity, with the after-light of this dead metaphoric
sun. Identifying himself with an aged eternality—which is itself the image of
an ideal and an unchanging identity—the young man’s poet is like a bleached
Dante: he is a visionary poet, but he is so, as it were, after the visionary
fact, a seer who now sees in a too-frequently reiterated “luce etterna” a vivid
image, an effige or an eidōlon, of the death of both his
light and life, as in sonnet 73: “In me though seest the twilight of such day /
As after sunset fadeth in the west, / Which by and by black night doth take
away, / Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.” This is the peculiarly
inflected imagery of light with which the young man’s poet assimilates to his
own poetic psychology the self-consuming logic of “Spending again what is
already spent,” for it is with this imagery of after-light that the poet makes
his own poetic introspection into something retrospective:
In me
thou seest the glowing of such fire,
That on
the ashes of his youth doth lie
As the
death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum’d
with that which it was nourish’d by. (73)
In terms of what we can think
of as the conventional visual imagery of the poetry of praise, it is as though
in Shakespeare’s sonnets to the young man Ideas Mirrour had now become
the “glass” of sonnet 62, a “glass,” however, that rather horrifyingly “shows
me myself indeed, / Beated and chopp’d with tann’d antiquity,” with the
subjective consequence of this for the poet being that, as sonnet 62 goes on to
say, “Mine own self-love quite contrary I read.”
There is much more
that might be said about this imagery of tired light, or tired imagery of
light, for it can be argued that such imagery not only determined the young
man’s poet’s sense of space and time, but also his erotic sensibility as well
(consider, for example, “A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass” [5]). As it
is, however, it seems clear that we cannot overlook—as sentimental readings
often do—the novel coloring that Shakespeare’s young man sonnets give to their
visual imagery, to their imagery of the visual, for this is responsible,
to a considerable degree, for the pathos of poetic persona that these sonnets
regularly exhibit. By the same token, however, it would be a mistake to
overemphasize this darkness that informs these sonnets’ literary, visionary
light. If the young man sonnets are suspicious of their visual imagery, this is
not a suspicion that they put directly into words. Quite the contrary, whatever
reservations attach to the young man sonnets’ imagery of vision, these
reservations, like those that shade the poet’s various characterizations of the
ideality of the young man, are implicit rather than explicit, something we read
between what the young man sonnets call their “eternal lines to time” (18).
. . .
I stress the
vestigial power of such visual ideality in the young man sonnets, its
“present-absent” (45) presence, because this both measures and prepares for the
difference between the sonnets addressed to the young man and those addressed
to the dark lady. As is well known, in the subsequence of sonnets addressed to
the dark lady such ideal imagery of light is explicitly—Shakespeare’s word here
is important—“forsworn” (152). What gives this “foreswearing” its power,
however, and what distinguishes it, tonally as well as thematically, from the
implicit visual reservations informing the sonnets addressed to the young man,
is the way the dark lady’s poet puts these heretofore unspoken visionary
suspicions directly into words. In the young man sonnets, the young man,
whatever his faults, is an “image” whose idealization effectively can represent
an ideal that is lost, as in sonnet 31: “Their images I lov’d I view in thee, /
And thou (all they) hast all the all of me,” or the young man is a “shadow” who
to the poet’s “imaginary sight . . . makes black night beauteous, and her old
face new” (27). In contrast, in the dark lady sonnets, though as something that
is more complicated and unsettling than a simple opposition, the dark lady has
the “power,” as in sonnet 149, “To make me give the lie to my true sight, / And
swear that brightness doth not grace the day.”
We broach here what
is often called the anti-Petrarchism of the sonnets to the dark lady, and it is
certainly the case that the dark lady sonnets regularly characterize their
literary peculiarity and novelty in terms of the way they differ from the
specular ideality of a previous Petrarchist poetics. When the poet looks at the
young man, he sees “That sun, thine eye” (49). In contrast, when he looks at
the dark lady, what he sees is the way she is unlike the ideal brightness of
the young man: “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” (130). On the face
of it, this amounts to a straightforward difference, for, on the one hand,
there is brightness, whereas on the other, there is darkness. What makes this
difference complicated, however, is that when the poet makes an issue of it,
when he gives explicit expression to it, he presents the darkness of the lady
as itself the image of this difference, as an image, precisely, of the
difference between the black that it is and the light that it is not.
This is why the
difference between the lady’s stressedly unconventional darkness and the young
man’s emphatically conventional brightness produces something that is both more
and less than a straightforward black and white antithesis of the kind
suggested by the “anti-” of anti-Petrarchism. On the one hand, there is
brightness, but on the other, is a darkness that, in a peculiar or what Troilus
calls a “bi-fold” way, is both these hands together both at once. Such is the
strangeness of a lady whom the poet alternately praises and blames for being
other than what at first sight she appears. As an image of that which she is
not, the lady is presented as the likeness of a difference, at once a version
of, but at the same time a perversion of, that to which she is, on the one
hand, both positively and negatively compared, and that to which she is, on the
other, both positively and negatively opposed. For this reason, as she is
presented, the lady is, strictly speaking, beyond both comparison and
opposition. The lady both is and is not what she is, and because she is in this
way, in herself, something double, the lady cannot be comprehended by a
poetics of “To one, of one, still such, and ever so.” As the poet puts it in
sonnet 130—this the consequence of the fact that his “mistress’ eyes are
nothing like the sun”—the lady is a “love,” just as she inspires a “love,” that
is “as rare, / As any she belied with false compare.” The irrational ratio of
the formula defines the peculiarity of the lady. She is a “she” who is
logically, as well as grammatically, both subject and object of “belied with
false compare,” comparable, therefore, only to the way comparison has failed.
From the beginning,
this effective doubleness of the lady, defined in specifically literary terms,
i.e., in terms of a new kind of poetics, is what the poet finds distinctive
about her, as in the first sonnet he addresses to her:
In the
old age black was not counted fair,
Or if
it were it bore not beauty’s name;
But now
is black beauty’s successive heir,
And
beauty slander’d with a bastard shame. (127)
What we are supposed to
recognize here as officially surprising is that the lady’s traditional foul is
now characterized as something that is fair, just as in later sonnets this
novel fair will be yet more surprisingly foul: “For I have sworn thee fair, and
thought thee bright, / Who art as black as hell, as dark as night” (147). In
either case, however, whether fair or foul, it is always as images of that
which they are not, as something double, fair and foul, as something
duplicitous and heterogeneous, that the lady and her darkness acquire their
erotic and their literary charge.
Thus “black” is
“now” “beauty’s successive heir,” now that “beauty” is “slander’d with a
bastard shame.” In the context of the sequence as a whole, the force of this
unconventional “succession” is that it repeats, but with a difference, the
themes of reiterated and legitimately procreated likeness with reference to
which the young man at the opening of his subsequence is supposed, as an imago,
to “prove his beauty by succession thine” (2): “Die single, and thine image
dies with thee” (3). Instead of the ideal multiplication of kind with kind, the
ongoing reproduction of the visual same, by means of which the young man is
supposed to “breed another thee” (6)—a breeding implicitly associated in the
young man sonnets with a kind of homosexual usury: “that use is not forbidden
usury” (6)—the novel beauty of the lady instead exemplifies a novelly
miscegenating “successivity”—novel because successive to such Platonized
“succession”—whereby black becomes the differential substitute, the unkind
“heir,” of what is “fair.” So too with the blackness of the lady’s “raven”
eyes, a darkness that replaces at the same time as it thus displaces the
brightness it sequentially succeeds:
Therefore
my mistress’ eyes are raven black,
Her
eyes so suited and they mourners seem
At such
who, not born fair, no beauty lack,
Slandering
creation with a false esteem. (127)
This, in little,
defines the structural and temporal relationship of the dark lady sonnets to
the young man sonnets. The second subsequence is a repetition of the first, but
it is a discordant and a disturbing repetition because the latter subsequence,
stressing itself as a repetition, represents the former (as also the former’s
themes of visionary presence—“So either by thy picture or my love / Thyself
away are present still with me” [47]—in such a way that its memorial repetition
explicitly calls up the poignant absence of that which it recalls. To the
degree that this articulates the silent reservations that darken the idealism
of the young man sonnets, to this extent we register the way in which the
“black” of the second subsequence is continuous with the elegaically
retrospective visuality of the first. Yet there is also an emphatic difference
between the two, a difference that derives precisely from the fact that the
dark lady’s poet expresses what the young man’s poet preferred to leave
implicit. For what the dark lady’s poet sees in the darkness of the lady’s
mourning eyes is the death of ideal visionary presence; her darkness is for him
an image or imago of the loss of vision. But, according to the poet, it
is this very vision of the loss of vision that now thrusts him into novel
speech—the discourse of “black beauty”—making him now no longer a poet of the
eye, but, instead, a poet of the tongue: “Yet so they mourn, becoming their
woe, / That every tongue says beauty should look so” (127).
As Ulysses says of
wanton Cressida, therefore, “There’s language in her eye.” But what is odd
about this language is what is odd about the lady’s eye, namely, that it is
opposed to vision. The difference between this and the way that language is
characterized in the young man sonnets is, of course, considerable, and we may
say that this difference at once examples and defines the novelty of the way a
poet speaks in a post-Petrarchist poetics. In the young man sonnets the poet
ideally speaks a visionary speech, and therefore, when he speaks about this
speech he speaks of it as something of the eye: “O, learn to read what silent
love hath writ: / To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit” (23). In
contrast, but again as something that is more complicated than a simple
opposition, the poet in the dark lady subsequence will speak about his speech as
speech, and as something that, for just this very reason, is different from a
visual ideal. It is in this “foreswearing” way that the dark lady, with the
“pow’r” of her “insufficiency,” will “make me give lie to my true sight, / And
swear that brightness doth not grace the day” (150). The double way the lady
looks is like the double way that language speaks, which is why, for example,
when the poet looks at the lady’s far too common “common place” (137), a place
that is at once erotic and poetic, he tells us how “mine eyes seeing this, say
this is not” (137).
Thematized in this
way, as something radically discrepant to the truth of ideal vision, as the voice
of “eyes . . . which have no correspondence with true sight” (148), language is
regularly presented in the dark lady sonnets as something whose truth consists
not only in saying, but in being, something false: “My thoughts and my
discourse as madman’s are, / At random from the truth vainly express’d: / For I
have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, / Who art as black as hell, as
dark as night” (147). Correspondingly, because no longer something visual,
because no longer the iconic likeness or the eidōlon of what it
speaks about, verbal language now defines itself as its forswearing difference
from what is “ ‘Fair,’ ‘kind,’ and ‘true’ ”: “For I have sworn deep oaths of
thy deep kindness, / Oaths of thy love, thy truth, thy constancy, / And to
enlighten thee gave eyes to blindness, / Or made them swear against the thing
they see” (152). And, as a further and more personal result, the poet now
identifies himself with the difference that his language thus bespeaks. He is
no longer a visionary poet who identifies his “I” and “eye.” Instead, because
he speaks, the poet comes to inhabit the space of difference between poetic
language and poetic vision, a difference generated by the speech he
speaks. The poet’s subjectivity, his “I,” is precipitated in or as the slippage
between his eye and tongue. The poet becomes, in the phrase I take as the title
for this paper, the subject of a “perjur’d eye”: “For I have sworn thee fair:
more perjur’d eye, / To swear against the truth so foul a lie!” (152).
It is fair to say,
therefore, that in the dark lady sonnets we encounter a poetics in which true
vision is captured by false language, and that the conflict thus
engendered—between sight and word, between being and meaning, between poetic
presentation and poetic representation—in turn determines specific variations
on, or mutations of, traditionary sonneteering claims and motifs. A poetics of
verbal re-presentation, stressing the repetition of the re-, spells the
end of the poetics of visual representation, thereby constituting the Idea of
poetic presence as something that is lost. To the extent that this is the case,
Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence marks a decisive moment in the history of the
lyric, for when the dark lady sonnets foreswear the ideally visionary poetics
of the young man sonnets, when poetic language comes in this way to be
characterized as something verbal, not visual, we see what happens to poetry
when it gives over a perennial poetics of ut pictura poeisis for
(literally, so as to speak) a poetics of ut poeisis poesis, a
transition that writes itself out in Shakespeare’s sonnets as an unhappy
progress from a poetry based on visual likeness—whose adequation to that which
it admires is figured by a “wondrous scope” by means of which “One thing
expressing, leaves out difference” (105)—to a poetry based on verbal
difference—whose inadequate relation to that which it bespeaks is figured by an
“insufficiency” that “make(s) me give the lie to my true sight” (150). In the
sequence as a whole, this progress from a homogenous poetics of vision to a
heterogeneous poetics of language is fleshed out as a progress from an ideally
homosexual desire, however conflicted, for what is “‘Fair,’ ‘kind,’ and ‘true,’
” to a frankly misogynistic, heterosexual desire for what is fair and
unfair, kind and unkind, true and false—a progress, in other
words, from man to woman. Here again, however, it is explicitly and literally
as a figure of speech that the lady becomes the novel “hetero-“ opposed
as such to an ideal and familiar Neo-Platonic “homo-,” as when: “When my love
swears that she is made of truth, / I do believe her though I know she lies”
(138). It is in this way, by making each the figure of the other, that the poet
collates his corrupting Eros with his corrupting Logos. When the poet
“credit[s] her false-speaking tongue,” the result is that “On both sides thus
is simple truth suppress’d” (138). But the consequence of this false
correspondence, of this traducement of the Cratylism of the poetry of
praise—e.g., of the “beatitudinizing” power of Dante’s “Beatrice,” or of the
self-applauding circularities of Petrarch’s puns on “Laura,” “laud,” and
“laurel”—is that the poet comes to express, in terms of a specific desire of
language, the novel duplicity of a specifically linguistic language of desire:
“Therefore I lie with her, and she with me, / And in our faults by lies we
flattered be” (138).
|
|
