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COPYRIGHT 2005 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)
At least since Coleridge, critics have understood the elegiac mode as a central lyric genre for calling forth poetic subjectivity. Coleridge writes that "elegy is the form of poetry natural to the reflective mind.... It must treat of no subject for itself; but always and exclusively with reference to the poet himself." (1) Accordingly, recent criticism of Lycidas (so often the paradigmatic example of elegy) tends to focus on the individual subjective voice, whether it reads the poem as exemplifying, calling into question, struggling against, or failing to pull off its emergence. (2) These concerns with individualist subjectivity inform the three major clusters of modern writing about Lycidas. Psychologically oriented analyses highlight the subject's psychic responses to loss; the ego has to be "freed" from its investments in the psychic "objects" of mourning in order to move on. (3) Historically oriented readings of the poem (including literary-historical ones) look for ways that the poem's individual voice can transcend such limitations as censorship, occasional constraint, or poetic inexperience in order to autonomously speak truth. (4) Generically and vocationally oriented readings also focus on the individual poetic voice's telic negotiations with pastoral convention, with the Miltonic voice either succeeding or failing in its bid to "emerge and gain strength in the course of the poem." (5)
Lycidas certainly calls attention to the activity of the elegizing subject, perhaps most obviously by way of the final framing move of the outer narrator. But the Coleridgean model of a transcendentally self-reflective subject cannot account very well for the poetic activity Lycidas foregrounds. I shall argue that Lycidas offers two distinct models of poetic subjectivity. One model does indeed advance the kind of emergent, autonomously human voice taken up in previous critical discussions. The other model, however, is entangled with objects--with inanimate, nonhuman "things"--to such an extent that objects actually seem to cosponsor the poetic utterance. Lycidas presents itself, after all, as a co-production of the assertive subject come to seize unripe vegetation ("I com to pluck your berries harsh and crude" [3]) and of the berries and leaves themselves, which the speaker--"compelled" to harvest (7)--requires in order to produce his song. (6) Interjecting the question of objects into the received notion of elegy as a profoundly subjective genre offers ways to think about several traditional cruxes in Lycidas that remain tellingly resistant to subject-centered readings. These include the discontinuity among voices in the poem, the sequence of false endings, and the asymmetrical frame that closes the narrative.
I would not claim that Lycidas is anomalous in intermingling subjects and objects. Rather, the conventions of pastoral lyric themselves might be understood to create paradigms of voice and agency that the dominant, Coleridgean model cannot accommodate. In fact, the subjective orientation of the ways we usually read the genre misses a characteristic pastoral ambiguity in the constitution of subjects and objects. In contrast to the tendency in Renaissance studies to "proceed ... as if it were both possible and desirable for subjects to cut themselves off from objects," pastoral demands analytic models that attend to the genre's characteristic exchanges between subject and object because pastoral itself speaks a flexible and mutual language of subjects and objects. (7) Pastoral "objects" are partially produced by subjects (insofar as they are conventional, poetic, and rhetorically invested). Conversely, pastoral "subjects" thematize questions of their own agency by entering into a convention that predetermines many of their performative choices. "Subjective" critical models have taken this flexibility to signal that pastoral's objects are not really objects: that they merely figure, displace, or cathect subjectivity. To give both of Lycidas's models of agency their due, however, we need to imagine objects that can exercise agency without thereby collapsing into subjects.
Recent inquiries into alternative ways to think about subjects and objects have demonstrated the analytic usefulness of decentering the subject--of thinking outside the Cartesian moment--in disciplines as diverse as sociology (Bruno Latour), philosophy of science (Michel Serres), and literary criticism (Julian Yates). (8) With such inquiries in view, the present essay takes up the invitation recently extended in Subjects and Objects in Renaissance Culture to explore the "new configurations [that] will emerge when subject and object are kept in relation" by experimentally reading pastoral elegy as the literary mode of Serres's "parasite." (9) Serres proposes a model of "things in the center and us at the periphery, or better still, things all around and us within them like parasites." (10) Thinking about pastoral in company with Serres's Parasite illuminates a world of autonomous, nonhuman, material things hosting pastoral subjectivity. Parasitically, pastoral poetry cannot survive without objects, and pastoral agency only can come about when nourished by the agency of objects.
Analyzing Lycidas in this light reveals two incompatible models of poetic subjectivity coexisting throughout the poem. Whereas Lycidas criticism is often at pains to reconcile what it takes as the poem's dialectical contradictions (whether pastoral versus prophetic, convention versus innovation, classical versus Christian, denial versus acceptance, or innocence versus experience), my reading suggests that the poem's two ways to conceive of agency cannot be reconciled. (11) Critics have struggled with the poem's series of false endings (St. Peter's denunciation, Lycidas's ascension to the "other groves," Lycidas's apotheosis as the Genius of the shore, the final ottava), and the question of whether the poem integrates these strands likewise has occasioned disagreement. I suggest that the poem's two models of voice account for the variety of "endings." One of the models operative in the poem, collective subjectivity, illustrates Yates's notion of agency as a "complex division of labor between humans and nonhumans ... that produces the fiction of phenomenologically distinct categories that enables our use of the world." (12) Lycidas's other model, transcendent subjectivity, believes in precisely those distinct categories of subject-agents on the one hand, objects on the other. Transcendent models take the pastoral mode to self-consciously (performatively, often playfully) endow objects with subjectivity in a way that actually retains all agency for the subject. Such lyric voice is so surfeit with subjectivity that its affect spills over to speak through fictive objects (pensive cowslips, mourning daffodils). Collective models, by contrast, take pastoral to show poetic subjectivity in constant negotiation with objects: coming out of objects, returning to objects, acquiring voice only when subject and object conjoin. Collective moments shift emphasis, that is, from "fictive [made] objects" to "fictive objects." Transcendent subjectivity has been the only kind recognizable to Romantics or Moderns--indeed, the Milton of the pamphlets and the major poems underwrites the ascendancy of the "modern" subjective models that erase collective subjectivity. But Lycidas suggests that pastoral elegy is one way seventeenth-century culture thinks about objects, and the poem demonstrates a mid-seventeenth-century multiplicity of ways to understand them. (13)
Lycidas inaugurates the collective model of agency when it begins with the swain conventionally addressing the laurels and myrtles in preparation for singing elegy. The poem foregrounds the question of agency with the word "forc't" ("with forc't fingers rude" [4]); Amy Boesky asks, "who has forced them? Or is it the fingers that do the forcing?" (14) The line raises additional, generic questions of agency if we read "rude" as "rustic": if we take the "forc't fingers rude" as fingers forced into pastoral. Mourning forces the poet into pastoral in part because pastoral convention offers a venue for "things" to act and speak--a pressing problem for mourners meditating on the quasi-subjects, quasi-objects of the dead. Not only the object of mourning but also the rude fingers that generate the voice of mourning, then, here inhabit the blurry realm between agency and instrumentality.
The fingers stand out in this passage as the unconventional...
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