Self, World, and Language: Robert Lowell's Life Studies
이홍필 (지은이)전남대학교출판부2010-02-25
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국내도서 > 대학교재/전문서적 > 어문학계열 > 영어영문학 > 영미작가론
책소개
로월의 작품들을 불란서 현대 철학자이자 심리학자인 메를로 뽕띠의 현상학을 통해서 접근, 분석한 로월 시 연구서.
목차
Preface ⅴ
Chapter 1. Introduction 1
1. Life Studies and Contemporary American Literature 1
2. Socio-Cultural Background of Mid-Century American Poetry 10
3. Theoretical Preparation 21
Chapter 2. From the “City of God” to the “City of Man” 35
Chapter 3. The Self Incarcerated in the Family 57
Chapter 4. The Self Remapped in the World 92
Chapter 5. Madness, Tranquilization, and the Self 122
Chapter 6. “Skunk Hour”: Completing Life Studies 152
Bibliography 162
책속에서
Introduction
1. Life Studies and Contemporary American Poetry
Robert Lowell’s Life Studies opens with the poet “On the train from Rome to Paris,” which implies Lowell’s metaphorical journey to locate his self in the world. The opening poem “Beyond the Alps” outlines the direction of that poetic tour: the quest for his suffering self---“the blear-eyed ego.” By putting his private situation into a broad historical and geographical context, Lowell seeks to investigate the perimeters of his life in self-revealed language. Put another way, Lowell explores his inner self by displaying his private experiences on to the external world. Lowell pushes his private past into these poems by unreservedly disclosing his family’s shame and humiliation as well as his own madness and imprisonment. In this confrontation with the demons of his life, Lowell relies exclusively upon his own perceptions, without recourse to any transcendental reality or to the concept of an intangible deity. Most important, such a downright engagement with autobiographical data shows that the poet intends to put his whole life into question, thereby identifying his presence in the world.
Such overt self-expression---placing the self in the center of poetry, as M. L. Rosenthal has suggested---was like a reformation in the history of American poetry. James E. Miller identifies “the two poles of American poetry” in Whitman and Eliot, and remarks that “the Eliot dominance” inaugurated by The Waste Land (1922) began to “wane by the late 1950s and continued to fade in the 1960s.” Indeed, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems (1956) offered American Poetry a new paradigm. In some sense, too, Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (1959) hastened the end of the Pound-Eliot era in terms of its poetic themes and styles. The revolutionary experiment of the mid-century poetry was undeniably against “an orthodoxy” which “derived from the authority of T. S. Eliot and the new critics.” Although many mid-century American poets were schooled under the influence of modernist poetics, later, when they came into their own, some of them fashioned an anti-modernist mode of poetics under which poems like The Waste Land or Cantos were inconceivable. Allen Tate’s comment on Life Studies (“. . . it’s not poetry”), for instance, draws a distinctive borderline between modernist poetry and the poetry since the 1950s.
What, then, was the modernism that contemporary American poets went against? To answer the question, it is necessary to take a brief look at the basic credo of the modernism which dominated literary movements in the first half of this century. Since the appearance of Eliot’s essays “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1917) and “Hamlet and His Problems” (1919), poetry as escape from personality became one primary element of the modernist poetic fashion. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot sets out an “impersonal theory of poetry” which emphasizes the importance of personality and emotions in the poet and yet argues for an escape from personality as the key prerequisite for poetry. The artist’s escape from personality is to be achieved through a process of transmutation. To explain how the poet’s mind works in the act of creation, Eliot uses a chemical analogy: if oxygen and sulphur dioxide are combined with platinum, they produce sulphurous acid; yet the platinum itself remains intact and the new gas does not contain any traces of platinum. That is, the good poet, through an artistic process, ought to conceal one’s personal voice or purely private impressions behind a poetic persona; likewise, the good critic must seek a certain objectivity by focusing on the work itself rather than on the poet. In his essay on Hamlet, Eliot speaks of the actual transformation of emotion:
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.
(original italics)
It is the objective correlative that alters personal emotion into “the form of art.” Thus, elements that can be identified with the artist’s biography get transmuted in the process of creation and emerge only as the personality of the work itself.
Similarly, Ezra Pound talks about the reductions of emotions in art in his formulation of the imagist project: “Emotion, seizing upon some external scene or action, carries it in fact to the mind; that vortex purges it of all save the essential dominant or dramatic qualities and it emerges like the external original.” For Pound, writing poetry is the process in which the poet, denying any kind of personal interpretation of the external object, creates a concrete language to represent the world through a linguistic technique. Take “In a Station of the Metro” for example; this poem purges all emotions from its denotative, succinct language. For modernist poets like Eliot and Pound, molding their personal experiences into objective language was the goal. The Eliot-Pound poetics firmly established the objectification of poetry in their reworking of personal experiences. Since they stressed impersonality and objectivity through a wide knowledge of classical literature and “high intelligence,” poetry tended to be intellectual, allusive and highly indirect. They turned to classical mythology for literary experience and looked to French Symbolist poetry and Metaphysical poetry for their use of irony, wit, and conceit. As a result, what readers of their poetry needed was not biographical knowledge of the poets but a sophisticated knowledge of classical literature and the literary conventions of previous ages.
As Robert Bly observes, modernist poets had “more trust in the objective, outer world than in the inner world.” Indeed, they projected their emotion or inner vision into the outer world by using external objects or events---Eliot’s “objective correlative.” Although to a lesser degree than Pound and Eliot, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens also avoided the direct involvement of their personal experience in their poems. Williams eradicates private experiences by projecting them into external objects, and Stevens fictionalizes himself in the working of the imagnation. Consequently, there remains only a very small amount of the poet’s autobiographical self in the poems.
Just as Pound and Eliot broke from Victorian modes of poetry in the early twentieth century, so poets in the 1950s fashioned a poetics that revolted against their predecessors. Their most conspicuous revolt consists in the direct treatment of their autobiographical facts and the explicit revelation of the self in their poetry. In Cry of the Human, Ralph J. Mills, Jr. observes the tendency toward self-creation in contemporary poetry:
The contemporary poet re-creates himself as a personality, an identifiable self within his poetry, that is, of course, a self who has been selected and heightened in the process, captured in essence, and so is not perhaps a full likeness of the author as a physical, workday person outside the poem yet could not be mistaken for someone else. . . . [w]e recognize a certain maganimous gesture in their acts of creation, a profoundly touching and human gesture through which the poet voluntarily stands exposed as “creation’s very self” before us. (ellipsis mine)
Unlike poets in the 1920s who hid themselves behind language and tradition, many poets since the fifties, preferring personal experiences to tradition, have embraced autobiography as a major theme in their poetry. Instead of relying on classical literature, contemporary poets have sought to build a mythology out of their own experiences in the world. As Marjorie Perloff remarks, Lowell “creates a mythology out of his own life and those of his friends, relatives, or historical counterparts.” Similarly, John Berryman, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath come closest to M. L. Rosenthal’s term “Confessional Poets” in that the poets themselves become the speakers in their poems, and their private experiences of madness, failure, and alienation become the subjects of their poetry.
As the mode of poetic themes altered, mid-century American poets adopted a technique different from the poets of the 1920s and 1930s. Unlike their predecessors, the poets in the 1950s tried to grasp the immediacy of daily experiences and transform them into art, a process that demanded a new creative apparatus. James E. B. Breslin, for example, elaborates on the radical change of theories and practices of poetic form the period saw:
During this time, in fact, the Beats, the Confessional poets, the Black Mountain, New York, and Deep Image groups proposed a range of alternatives to the established mode, and they provided the leading sources of the new paradigms for poetry that became visible in the late fifties and early sixties. These clusters of poets differed from each other in fundamental ways and in some instances were mutually antagonistic; but they agreed in their renunciation of the well-made symbolist poem and in their search for poetic forms that could capture temporal immediacy, for the language of a breakthrough back into life. (emphasis mine)
The demands of self-revelation and promptness of personal experience in the new poetry could not be met by the conventional poetic forms which stressed, among other things, precise prosody of rhyme and meter. Mid-century American poets had therefore to reject the complex techniques of modernist poetry in favor of themes and techniques which accommodated the self and private experience. In the formulation of this revolutionary poetics, Lowell’s Life Studies was an influential and pioneering text. Life Studies’ prose and poetry, expressing a variety of modes with the self as the work’s articulating center, was revolting less than revolutionary in the fifties and was hardly able to be written in the modernist poetics of Eliot, Pound, Tate and Ransom. 접기
저자 및 역자소개
이홍필 (지은이)
저자파일
신간알리미 신청
전남대학교 인문대학 영어영문학과 교수
최근작 : <Self, World, and Language: Robert Lowell's Life Studies>
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출판사 제공 책소개
로월의 『인생연구』는 여러 해에 걸쳐서 발표된 후 한권의 시집으로 묶어진 것이지만, 세계 속에서의 시인의 자아탐색이라는 시집 전권에 흐르는 주제를 기승전결에 가깝게 구조화 시키고 있다. 흥미로운 것은 『인생연구』에 수록된 작품들의 상당수가 개별 작품으로서도 형식과 주제 양면에서 완결을 성취하고 있을 뿐만 아니라, 그것들을 전체적으로 묶어서 조망할 때에도 구성과 주제의 교호성(交互性)이 돋보인다는 사실이다.
로월의 회고에 따르면 종전의 자신의 창작 스타일에 일대 전환점을 주고자 하는 의도에서 쓰여진 것으로 되어 있다. 그러나 분명한 것은 창작 스타일 전체의 변모를 선언했지만, 새로운 스타일을 이용하여 일정한 기획 하에서 특정 주제와 구조로 단일 시집을 출판하겠다고 처음부터 염두에 둔 것은 아니었다는 점이다. 『인생연구』에 수록된 작품의 절반은 1958에서 1959년에 걸쳐 서로 다른 문학잡지들을 통해서 발표되었고, 1959년 4월에 비로소 한 권의 시집으로 나타났다.
『인생연구』는 20세기 문명과 문화에 대한 연구인 동시에 로월 자신의 자아 표현이자 자신에 관한 연구였다는 것을 보여준다. 이 시집의 전 작품들은 시인 자신의 시간으로 판명되는 「스컹크 시간」이라는 한 편을 향해서 일견 관련이 없어 보이는 작품들을 치밀하게 구성·배치되었으며, 그 결과 훌륭한 한 편의 단편소설이 이루어 내는 듯한 구성상의 짜임새와 완결성을 성취하는데 성공하였다고 할 수 있다. 미국 시의 역사에 있어서 성취도가 높고, 획기적인 전기를 제시한 시집이지만 국내에서는 로월의 『인생연구』에 대한 집중적인 저술은 전무한 상태이다. 따라서 본 연구는 국내의 로월 시 연구에 기여할 수 있을 것이라 판단된다. 아울러 이 저술은 로월의 작품들을 불란서 현대 철학자이자 심리학자인 메를로 뽕띠의 현상학을 통해서 접근, 분석하고 있기 때문에 로월 시의 이해와 연구에 새로운 지평을 제시할 수 있다고 사료된다.
one of my mentors in the United States, as he left for a college in Los Angeles, gave me a copy of John Ashbery’s A Wave as a gift. On the inside cover he wrote a note saying that he hoped I would become “a passionate and eloquent teacher of poetry.” About twenty years have passed since I completed my doctoral dissertation on Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, but a question has haunted me for a long time: whether I have taught my students successfully and lived up to my mentor’s wish. The answer is easy and I have come to the conclusion that I fell short of becoming “a passionate and eloquent teacher of poetry.” My fifteen years of teaching have given me a strong sense that I need to better my earlier understanding of Robert Lowell. Teaching American poets, particularly whenever I have encountered Lowell, I found myself attracted to his way of “life studies,” and this has brought me to reflect upon my own “life studies.” One benefit from reading Lowell’s Life Studies was that it helped me to take a deeper look at my own past. I believe that Lowell’s “life studies” were very successful in that he could expand his self to the extent that he was able to reconstruct his relationship with the members of his family.
My understanding of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology has helped me read Lowell’s reconstruction and expansion of his own world. Although my original interpretation of Lowell’s Life Studies through Merleau- Ponty’s phenomenology was written some twenty years ago, this time span has not caused me to alter the initial combination or its interpretation; rather I find that it rings truer and truer as the years go by. This recognition has lessened my hesitation at publishing my dissertation and has led me to revise the chapters one by one.
This present volume adopts Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology and explores the self-investigation found in Robert Lowell’s Life Studies. It particularly seeks to explore the ways in which the poet arrived at a sense of identity through engaging the external forces of life such as family, society and culture. Merleau-Ponty’s ?tre-au-monde, a modification of Husserl’s intentionality, elaborates a theory of human communication which results from a complementary operation between the subject and the object. His thesis illustrates not only the possibility but the inevitability of the subject’s coexistence with others and with the external world. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology suggests a shared existence between the human subject and the world.
In Life Studies, Lowell places himself in the already- experienced world, i.e. the past. To position himself in the past is thus to re-experience and re-express his own self in language and to further question and seek out his identity in the world. I regard Lowell’s Life Studies as the poet’s personal perception of his past and as a journey toward an articulated discovery of his identity within the world of which Merleau-Ponty speaks. This book is a reading of Life Studies and focuses on the ways in which the poet examines the self by engaging himself with the external forces. These are the very forces, according to Merleau-Ponty, that the self must engage dialectically in order to come to a sense of its own subjectivity. The first chapter presents the theoretical background for a reading of Life Studies. In the second chapter, I examine the poet’s declaration of his journey as “down-to-earth,” which suggests his abandonment of his religion and reveals his view of human civilization. The third chapter deals with the fate of the poet’s self by situating his family in the context of American history and culture. Chapter Four addresses the self which grows through interacting with the world. I present the poet’s self in an ongoing dialogue with his family, especially treating the ways in which the poet comes to understand the world and forgives his parents and grandparents, with whom he once was strongly at odds. The fifth chapter seeks to explore how the poet’s self aggrandized itself through a re-experience of his personal afflictions. The final chapter, concentrating on “Skunk Hour,” examines how the poet created a reconciliation between the self and the tormenting world and how the poet’s perception of the world led to the expression and establishment of the self in the world. 접기
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