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2 Jove’s Daughter Dorothy Livesay’s Elegiac Daughteronomy Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament, and the restoration of mortality by autobiography (the prosopopeia of the voice and the name) deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores. Autobiography veils a defacement of the mind of which it is itself the cause. — Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement” Defacement and the Good Modernist Daughter Before looking at the paternal elegies that grew out of Dorothy Livesay’s struggle with her father’s critical and creative influence, I want to consider the autobiographical impulse in poetry and its place in the kind of political elegiac practice that is the subject of this volume. To acknowledge that the assumption of autobiography has often been the bane of women writers is to acknowledge the clingy film of cliché that sometimes causes readers and critics to dismiss elegy as too personal to study or too autobiographical to engage in any kind of political thought. This is indeed a danger that must be considered when reading elegies, and while I am loathe to suggest that any writer’s life (or any person’s life, for that matter) can or should be reduced to a series of facts, it is important to keep in mind that the movement towards and, subsequently, away from confessional poetry in the twentieth century means that poets, perhaps even more acutely than writers of other genres, are aware of the complexities of writing versions 5 5 5 6 Da u g h t e r s o f J o v e , Da u g h t e r s o f J o b of themselves into their poetry. Biographical criticism alone cannot be sufficient to unpack the power of paternal elegies, but neither should it be ignored. There is a balance to be maintained between assuming that biography is all and pretending that biography has no impact on the poem. The elegy occupies a specific position in this argument, and in this genre the circumstances of a writer’s life cannot quite be argued away by relying on Barthesian “death of the author” theories or on older “new critical” approaches that eschew all reference to biography. But the balance is delicate and must be acknowledged. Paul de Man’s discussion of the role of autobiography in poetry in “Autobiography as De-Facement” notes that autobiography reminds poets of their mortality and does so through a “convergence of aesthetics and history” (67). The elegy reworks personal history by turning to the convention of the lost beloved figure even as the invocation of a specific loss suggests individuation. Even more germane to the study of the elegy is de Man’s warning that readers should understand that even when poems begin from an autobiographical basis (like the death of a poet’s father), we should not expect that poem to reveal an autobiographical “truth,” but, rather, to offer an autobiographical “defacement” or significant alteration that is itself “veiled” by the impulse towards the portrayal of the poet’s mind. de Man’s metaphors of deprivation and disfigurement in poetry, and the role of the veiled version of the self, are particularly pertinent to the ways that Dorothy Livesay positions herself as the elegiac subject or mourning daughter in several short lyric poems that date from 1944 to 1979. In these poems, Livesay works intensely with autobiographical elements that she also explored in fiction, prose essays, and memoir, and my purpose here is less to “unveil” Livesay than to consider how her layers of veils serve her negotiations of inheritance and power through her decadeslong elegiac conversation with her father, John Frederick Bligh Livesay (or “JFBL,” as his daughter always refers to him in her writing). So de Man’s warning that poetry does not work towards self-knowledge in a therapeutic fashion comes as something of a relief. I would like to encourage readers to think about autobiographical elements in elegy for the ways that they “demonstrate in a striking way the impossibility of closure and totalization (that is the impossibility of coming into being) of all textual systems made up of tropological substitutions” (de Man 71). Substituting the individual father for the lost beloved or substituting the lost beloved for the Lacanian dead Father makes the paternal elegy a site of negotiations of power that exacerbate the elegy’s mournful tone. Death, as a “linguistic predicament,” may draw an autographical “veil” over a paternal...

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