The Interplay of Narrative and Lyric: Competition, Cooperation, and the Case of the Anticipatory Amalgam

I

Even when representing other issues with the precise detail and complex coloration of Mughal painting at its best, many studies adopt the bold gestural strokes of Franz Kline to discuss the relationship between lyric and narrative.¹ Lyric is static and narrative committed to change, lyric is internalized whereas narrative evokes an externally realized situation, lyric attempts to impede the forward thrust of narrative, and so on. Offering a more theorized but still diametrical contrast, Jonathan Culler posits the narrative and the apostrophic as the two poles for poetry, with lyric typically "the triumph of the apostrophic" (149).² Such contrasts too often become even bolder—and even balder—when students of lyric generalize about narrative, and vice versa. But what happens if one plays such commonplaces about the two modes against the complexities of a text that not only participates in but also thematizes them?

Sir Thomas Wyatt's "My lute, awake!" defamiliarizes putative generic norms and thus invites us to rethink the relationship between lyric and narrative. In the sixth stanza of Wyatt's lyric, the speaker is continuing to assert—or is he continuing to threaten?—the ending of his relationship with his lady, a declaration that is at once intensified and undermined by the refrain's repetition of "I have done." Participating in, even exemplifying, the carpe diem tradition, the passage in question anticipates the lady's loss of beauty: "Perchaunce the lye wethered and old, / The wynter nyghtes that are so cold, / Playning in vain unto the mone; / Thy wisshes then dare not be told; / Care then who lyst, for I have done" (26–30). On one level this is clearly narrative: a story about what will happen to the woman in the future that at once invokes and explicitly addresses the sequential temporality conventionally associated with that mode through its emphasis on the ravages of time. Repeated twice (29, 30), Wyatt's "then" apparently exemplifies the narrative use of deictics that Roland Greene has acutely traced when distinguishing that mode from lyric (19–20, 22–62). So one might entertain the hypothesis that here, as at a few other points in the text, a lyric encases a narrative, a reversal of but not a radical challenge to the more common models of narrative incorporating but ultimately rejecting lyric.

Yet, as we will see throughout this essay, even, or especially, metalyric and metanarrative do not necessarily firmly establish, let alone triumphantly celebrate, the power or even the presence of the mode they concern. In fact, by this point the poem as a whole has complicated our attempts to ascribe narrativity to it, and lines 26–30 exemplify Gerald Prince's concept of the "disnarrated," events to which the text refers but that do not occur, a category to which I will return. If so, the wishes that dare not be and are not told mirror the ontological status of a stanza about events that have not occurred. (Arguably, however, that categorization of the stanza as referring to a disnarrated happening that has not happened is further complicated. Whereas on one level the "Perchaunce" [26] certainly governs the whole stanza and the auxiliary "will" is understood, might the omission of that verb form and the enargia of the description tempt us to read "Thy wisshes then dare not be told" [29] as something more than mere possibility?)

In any event, the repetitions of "I have done" throughout the text paradoxically imply the speaker may be protesting too much that he is saying farewell to love and his lover (an implication emphasized when one acknowledges the possibility of a spondaic stress on both the auxiliary and final verb in "have done"). The termination of the relationship is less a story he is recounting than one he is trying to effect, or, to put it another way, it is a story he is telling himself he is...