On Imagination and Lyric Voice

The position I will be trying to outline here is one that honours (unfashionably perhaps) imagination and lyric voice: lyric as an aural phenomenon, and imagery living in the mind. 'Not a single word is there, but the poem sounds already. The internal image sounds, touched by the poet's hearing.' Thus Osip Mandelstam in 1913. And Hugo Ball in 1917: 'The will to image. Morality detaches itself from convention and works toward one end: to hone the sense of measure and weight.' My theme, so it might be supposed, is anxiety about the activity of 'spirit' in a poem; but that theme is so volatile that it must be adumbrated rather than spelled out. These ruminations alternate between the secrecy to which Mandelstam alludes and the openness to which Ball attends, despite his (Nietzschean) disclaiming of morality in the diary entry quoted.

Through all its formally modulated vocal varieties across twenty-six centuries, lyric in the Western world has persisted as a shining access to spiritual insight, on lower as well as higher levels. Now, often enough, and not for the first time, the element is being obstructed by slaggy accretions, residual stuff. The power of lyric to voice, from generation to generation, a bold, inquiring, and sensitive lucidity against surrounding darkness, our fathomless habitat, seems to be at a low ebb. This has come about, I conjecture, because a principle is eluding us: poiesis does not mean a negative moulding of experience turned opaque, but positive creation. Laforgue himself thought as much: the slightest poem can be thrilling with the breath of life itself (Hebrew ruach). Here, then, is how I - partially - see it: tonally and semiotically, as a sign having its own 'measure and weight', a poem can be of the spirit without being 'in' or 'with' any secured prescript as to belief about spirit. The least poem should ring true. Of the poet as artificer, even if dejection and doubt haunt his every move, a listener or reader expects the poem that has a singular vibrance. Lightly but willingly a spirit is hatching that poem - no cosmic egg, no doctrinally complex 'spiritual' directive grounded in authority and tradition, but airy, spinning in the thick of trouble, the oval of a gyroscope, perhaps, but of a gyroscope that has traction. It has traction insofar as its grip on the mundane, however fierce, does not reduce mundanity to mush, and however light, does not slip into the self-referential nullity that Witold Gombrowicz pilloried in his 1950s essay 'Against Poets'.

Even if lyric has at times been viewed as heaven's orphan child which a cruel history has adopted, the child is no angel. Its reasonings and timings can be so conflictual as to gainsay its own subtle bodyguard of attributes. Of course, imagination must be under suspicion, lyric imagination too, considering how tormented the present century has been by the decay of imagination into paranoia and mass hysteria. Western tradition has been shaped by long argument between dividers and joiners of 'imagination' and 'reason'. William Hazlitt (in his Coriolanus essay) warned that poetry 'gives a bias to imagination often inconsistent with the greatest good', for it 'bribes the passions to make a sacrifice of common humanity'. Ominous words, but less so in context: Hazlitt heard in poetry at its imaginative utmost a 'preternatural' voice that reveals 'as with a flash of lightning, the inmost recesses of thought, and penetrates our whole being' (Lectures, 1819).

As for voice, given the semantic turbulence in the midst of which, ordinarily, words are nowadays spoken, I invoke the lyric word in its bare bones, unsupported: no surround of music, event, or film to lubricate or subordinate it. Mind you, the surround has always been the case, and I do not go so far as to dismiss all attendant ceremonies. Yet, when lyric voice is there, it has to speak (singing no more, except that it has to 'sing out') in its naked actuality. The voiced lyric word profects a complex turbulence of its own.

As for imagination, Baudelaire's 'queen of the faculties', it needs no regalia and may appear, I surmise, as a golden jackdaw (or jilldaw), cawing who knows where and for what reason: an anomalous bird. To change the figure: people speak of 'unbridled' imagination, but the cliché - for all its being apt - must be broken down. Is an imagination 'unbridled like a mustang, or like a horse, trained, which has thrown its bridle off in a fit of outrage? A mustang in the wild knows where it is going and it does not go wrong. A horse, broken in, having cast its bridle off, can get confused and hurtle into a ditch. The wild horse startled by a magnetic storm and incorporating the storm is one thing, quite another the tamed horse, the runaway disoriented. But no, the analogy cannot be carried too far. We live scattered over a planet on which ferocity and high culture meet nose to nose - colliding, fusing, or fighting. Under such conditions one can still conceive of a bare-bones lyric poetry in which a sheer 'exorbitance' (of which Gottfried Benn spoke in 1953) colludes with the cultivated lyric word and testifies to the pain and disenchantment that experience brings and history hardly troubles with. During the past two decades, pioneering in the arts generally has taken such a downturn that we might, without lapsing into apathy or reaction, suspect that experiment by now has mapped certain limits. Possibly our arts are signing to us, even if the signals are inadvertent, that like the hard sciences, like the most refined technologies, they might be due for a change of function. Rather than transgressing ad libitum, they could reinstate reticence as an abiding cultural value. Might the discovery of new secrets inhibit now the envelopment, by commerce and ideology, of our imaginative potential? At least as premonitory instruments the arts might avert consequences of imaginings that threaten to amplify the harm already done by our species and to it. Here I hesitate - 'The wind has dropped and we have lost our public.'

If collapsed (or diseased) imagination has been in our time a destructive agent, its cure can only come from tissues interior to it that are still sound, still restistant enough to generate and antidote. Yet Jacques Lacan's widely influential analytic solution seems to me adequate neither to the historical movement that old quarrels always reflected, nor to the confusion of categories that has come to vex us. His analysis is haunted by a genre-determinant theatre, which pervades French behaviour and language - not only Paris. Even the backstage areas become theatre. Masks and mirrors: the contentious households of society and personality are a show, a spectacle; even the uterine psyche is rehearsing a role. Be that as it may, Lacanian mirror-theory seems remote from worlds of lyric voice, remote from the barricades that creative imagination (as opposed to certain automatic functions of it) can erect against miasmas that exude from barrack-brains and other desolating mind-sets. There does exist an imagination continuous with reasoning and with reasoned behaviour. It is that imagination from which reasoning takes on intense life; upon it, too, human constructs are mounted to uphold a sky of'symbolic values', values which, however, profit-driven motors of history set back: the sky darkens, the rain-forests burn, animula vagula scents corruption and savours it.

Undeniably some varieties of make-believe foster pretence, and pretence in turn activates Satanic energies which warp the kinds of imagining that are exploited by ever-busy agencies of coercion, ideological, military, and commercial. Yet imagination is also a source of well-being and as 'art' it constitutes a channel of feeling, fraught with memory and desire, without which a well-being in the very nature of things would not be conceivable - call it bonheur, call it mercy, transcendence, or birdsong in the universe. Even if you think that history must be a medium of real social progress (the alleviation, at least, however piecemeal or sporadic, of social evils), it is also an incubator of atavisms. Once hatched, the atavisms, regulated by reductive thinking, establish exclusionary systems such as now float like scum on the tide of intolerance rising in Asia and North America. Everywhere, too, people will be found, as spiritual and material resources shrink, who are fundamentally loath to open and diversify their minds, if only by reading diversely unsacred books and living undeceived in the 'divided and distinguished worlds', where Thomas Browne situated 'the great and true Amphibium' - human kind.

Even then, emphatically human imagination, as Coleridge and Delacroix conceived of it, neural source and receptor of 'every combination of shapes and forms' (Delacroix), thus also mother of memory, has a dialectic of its own in the workings of history, and in art a deep horizon of efficacy. It can decongeal stereotypes and uncover the ruses of power that literalize all texts and experience. It can even levitate the 'drive to knowledge' when that is poised to fathom the chemistry of consciousness in order to mechanise it. It can foment resistance to conformity. So much the better if, in the long haul, it can make less virulent the manias which, harping on exclusion, warping desire for legitimacy, disconcert the checkered quest for identity on which individuals and communities are apt to fall apart.

Much more than a critique of ideological saturants in imagination is entailed in the aesthetics of Theodor Adorno. Yet somehow Adorno does generalise 'art' to excess, tending to ascribe to it powers of atonement, as if it were a Hesperidean Apple of Reason. Intent as he is on revising the Enlightenment, he disavows (or else discredits) irrational factors that have richly animated human craving for integration (as well as impregnating curiosity with monsters). His conceptual system seems to encompass everything, but, like Dino Buzzati's fortress in the desert (except that the barbarians did come), it exists to house despair, not to defeat it. If Adorno had ever cast about and enjoyed, let's say, Adrian Stokes' insight into the play of artworks upon secrets of the nervous system, he might after all have arbitrated otherwise over the contest for truth between poetry and politics.

Such speculation may sound more like Polonius than Hamlet, but it is not empty. At issue near the close of this century are two areas of trouble for the tiny fraction of humanity that looks to the arts for vision; care about either stretches to outer limits the cognitive range of any critic. First: by postmodern agitation divested of every last clout of contrariety, doctored by yet another internationale of functionaries, the arts are being minced up by the amusement industries. The bitter old anti-bourgeois complaint that business (neg-otium) enslaves art (signifying the soul at leisure) is silenced by the neo-bourgeois banality: Forget value, count the price. Second: if imagination, in its alterity and variety, its worlds 'divided and distinguished', is realised as an armature of the pleasure principle, with aesthetics as its curious science, then its influence must be both rare and warped as long as suffering, monstrous and regulated suffering, afflicts people the world over. If numb bigots (of God or Mammon) continuously segregate other people in dismal systems of exclusion, must then the erstwhile beneficially free play of imagination in the workings of the world be drained of actual value? Or, if the value is local only, what has become of imagination's ability to profect sublime objects for social life, such as the dream of a 'just society'? As for the mind-expanding antics of art, what use now whistling into the pragmatical hurricane that blows them away? The divine-human 'Imagination' as Blake conceived of it, a visionary power born of cosmic and eternal 'Joy', which erupts in a shrunken world to displace, then transfigure, material appearances, does that have anything at all to do with Milena Jesenska writing her defiant newspaper articles in Prague during the Spring and Summer 1939, with her being arrested, her being sent to her death in Ravensbrück in October 1940? Some things being more equal than others, it is to be doubted if lyric voice, as heard hitherto, might hatch with such troubling incongruity the kind of quarrel that resolves itself not in resignation but in unforeseen symmetries.

Even the best-kept metaphysical proposition, the hoariest universal, with the ghost of an optative mood, as ever, haunting it, looms now like a ruin in the storm of fresh facts surging onward in their ever-present indicative. Discrepancy grindingly disconcerts orders and discourses among which one does one's vital dance, one's 'jive' (from Sanskrit jiva). By way of comment, then, on my irksome essay 'Surface and Depth' (PNR 108, 1996), I might ask: Who would not be worried if the current context of poetry really is a rush of matter to the cultural epidermis? The purity of line and plenitude of sense that singularise language in a poem, compounding what Philip Wheelwright called 'an eccentric and adventuring style of universality', once gave voice to the poem's opening deep mental vistas. Language, its subtlest essentials being articulated, came to be revealed as an atlas for a 'spiritual quest' and the atlas was scored with the tracks of this or that exemplary imagination, on the move, as agent of the quest. Perish the thought that poetry shrivels outside that dynamic of ontological tensions; but, the quest forgotten, its perilous stages reduced to smatterings of reportage, to 'negative mould' confession (Eliot's 'mechanised caravans'), a poem will end up spinning its wheels, not a word going to the quick, all energy 'flipped' into passive gesture. Then the text is just a vehicle to 'get us there', it is not a creation which, as Thomas Frick has observed à propos reading in an age of sweeping cybernetic transformations, can 'place us here'. Mere outcry gives only a mirage of motion.

A labyrinthine sentence of Henry James comes back to make us vigilant too, rather less apt as we now are to be shocked when times which favoured the secret work of creation are remembered amid terrible consequences:

The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness by the wanton feat of those two infamous autocrats is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for words (Letter to Howard Sturgis, 5 August 1914)

The treacherous years? Even if any one of the towering writers, artists, thinkers, scientists of the Belle Epoque could have imaginatively foreseen catastrophe, the political imagination of the time was powerless to avert it, and finally events transpiring at a velocity quite new to the world took the trustees of civilisation off-guard. This was only the start of a multiple rupture between 'creative' and 'political' reaches of imagination which left jagged cracks across the century.

Currently in the English-speaking world, lyrical imagination and lyrical voice are, to my thinking, in an analeptic or reactive phase - between extremes of introversion and stridency - and for decades they have meant little or nothing to public persons. Meanwhile the proleptic or active reaches seem to have been annexed by forms of expression that are not dependent on language alone. Still, it is not for me to play Jeremiah: and possibly it is only the sheer numbers of poets on the ground that make the poets of rare distinction hard to pick out. Even then, some exacting critical criteria must have been forgotten, when loquacious vers de société (of the gutter or middle of the road) or simply strident poems are celebrated, for a thematic interest alone, and when a poem with the luminosity and magnitude of Marius Kociejowski's 'Doctor Honoris Causa' is disregarded or found unintelligible.

At its purest and most vigorous, as source and receptor of every 'combination of shapes and forms', imagination integrates in a luminous presence infinitely various figurations of time past and prefigurations of time to come. It integrates them, however, in such a manner as to realise, as vocal modulation in our senses and alleviated of accidental trappings, fugitive figures of the extratemporal, figures which undergo metamorphoses by immersion in time, in mundane experience, but retain their pristine flush, whether in full cry, or, like Beckett's derelicts, on their beam ends. Once bereft of this proleptic function and become reactive only, lyrical imagination no longer has the outrageous individual voice - and the teeth - to tell of the here-and-now as time's renewal, to promise more than recurrence of the same, to decipher signs of life in time to come. To pronounce some such voice afresh, whether or not any 'preternatural' voice speaks in it, remains the challenge: to pronounce it in truth, freed from the stranglehold of the nondescript, individuated against collectives which have smothered it, vividly diverse against abstractions which have desiccated it. That said, I hope that some of these ruminations will strike the reader as being not altogether ghostly.