Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory

“Why Must It Always End This Way?” Narrative Poetry and Its (Dis)contents

103 “Why Must It Always End This Way?” Narrative Poetry and Its (Dis)contents There are four modes of poetry—story (narrative), song (lyric), description, and argument. We know that individual poems may combine these modes. An epic narrative, for example, contains description, and a lyric refrain may have an embedded argument . And yet it seems that poets have placed narrative in binary opposition to lyric—or at least they have for the past thirty years or so in the United States. Moreover, like most binary oppositions , the opposition of narrative to lyric is politically charged. It’s important that both the contemporary poet and the reader of poetry understand why this is so. But before we can even begin to understand the argument against narrative in poetry, we need to understand what narrative is. A narrative structure can occur in any literary genre, including poetry. Again, etymology points us in the right direction. “Narrative” has its roots in an ancient word meaning “to know.” Narrators tell us what they know, an obvious insight that signals the limitations of any story. Another way to define narrative is through change: when a situation changes, it creates a plot. As the French literary theorist Gérard Genette tells us, there is story “as soon as there is an action or an event, even a single one,” the reason being that “there is a transformation, a transition from an earlier state to a later and resultant state.”1 In other words, “story” refers to the totality of narrated events, while “narrative” is the discourse—oral or written—that narrates the events. In the French the distinction is made with the terms histoire and récit. Theorist J. Hillis Miller defines narrative as having three elements : personification, plot, and patterning.2 Personification 104 involves a protagonist (who wants something), an antagonist (who prevents the protagonist from getting what he wants), and a witness who learns. In a poem, it may be that one character may serve all three of these elements. For example, in Elizabeth Bishop ’s “The Fish,”3 we can say that the speaker is the protagonist (who wants the fish), and the antagonist (who wants to let it go), and the witness who learns. We know that many satisfying stories result from a protagonist/antagonist with an internal struggle— two forces “warring” within one character. The second element—plot—also consists of three parts: an initial situation, followed by a sequence leading to a change or reversal of that situation, and a revelation made possible by the change. If we look again at Bishop’s “The Fish,” we can say that the initial situation is that the speaker has caught a big fish, and that the sequence leading to a change is the speaker’s examination of (and growing respect for) the body of the fish— including the hooks in his mouth and wallpaper-like skin and barnacles—all of which results in her throwing the fish back. Finally we can say that the revelation of the poem is expressed in the penultimate line, “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow”—the beauty of respect, even awe, for another species. It is important to note that these first two elements, personification and plot, are connected. In The Nature of Narrative, Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg point out that the eighteenthcentury novels of Laurence Sterne demonstrate a way that character becomes plot—in other words, the initial situation and sequence leading to a change can be an “internal” one, a shift in the character’s thinking.4 We can see that this psychological focus, already present in the eighteenth-century novels of Sterne, became popular in twentieth-century novels. When we turn to contemporary poetry, we see that same psychological focus . Thus, although we use the term “lyric” for poems in which nothing changes (in which the speaker is repeating the same emotion or observation down the lines), we find that even a lyric can signal change—even a lyric can shift into narrative mode. In Elizabeth Bishop’s villanelle “One Art,” for example, the speaker keeps losing bigger and bigger things, until in the last stanza she announces that she has lost the person who meant the most to her. 105 Patterning—the third element of narrative—involves repetition . Patterning can be linguistic or thematic, involving figurative language, an image system, rhetorical devices, formal elements , or rhythm. In “The Fish,” we find much...