Networks with Benefits

A network may be any system in which "connective configurations follow knowable rules and patterns" (Levine 2015, 112). Yet the term tends to be used, these days, in the study of literature and culture, for systems that have no single, controlling center, and no unchanging, obvious outer bounds: instead, to quote Caroline Levine, networks tend to reveal nodes of varying centrality, "hubs" with "a role in more than one cluster of nodes; and hinges, nodes that connect otherwise separate groups" (216). Persons, places, offices, literary works, and parts of those works—as well as traffic signals, scientific hypotheses, tubes of lipstick and games of basketball—may play roles in "multiple networks, which is a far more ordinary fact of social life—and a more unsettled and unsettling one—than literary and cultural studies has recognized" (217).

Drawing on terms imported from sociology, social theory, biology, and philosophy (among them the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour), many literary critics have now examined the overlapping and heterogeneous networks—and the circulation through them of money, prestige, affection, and technique—that link writers, editors, publishers, works, and the institutions that enable, or impede, their circulation. Critics of modern and Victorian novels (Levine among them) have shown how networks of character and influence run throughout, and change over the course of, crowded large-scale novels such as Bleak House, Middlemarch or Infinite Jest.

Less attention has been paid, so far, to the way that models of networks—multiple, heterogeneous networks, with nodes, hinges, hubs and overlaps of their own—emerge within poems, where (more than in other literary genres) their nodes may be characters, ideas, forms, sounds, phrases, or individual words. At a sufficient level of generality, of course, we can find some notion of network in any text at all: it almost follows from the meaning of "text." Yet if we are interested not in what all texts share, but in what sets some texts apart, we can learn a great deal about networks—and about certain modern poets, and about their identities, and (as it turns out) about sexuality and family and commitment—by following particular heterogeneous, overlapping networks through a handful of stellar recent poems.

During the life of James Merrill (1926–1995) his reputation as a creator of perfect or masterful lyric poems was gradually overshadowed, in the academy, by the demands of his long poem The Changing Light at Sandover (1976–1982), whose three books (plus an epilogue) record the communications that Merrill and his partner David Jack-son ("JM" and "DJ") received, via Ouija board, from dead friends, from the classical past, and from ancient, bat-like quasi-demonic entities. The Book of Ephraim, the first—and least science-fictional—part of that trilogy, has recently appeared in a newly edited and annotated edition from one of Merrill's literary executors, Stephen Yenser, who emphasizes not only the poem's craft and finish, but also its heterogeneous networks. Chapters, entitled (after the letters of the alphabet, the letters on a Ouija board) "A" through "Z," record events in Merrill and Jackson's life, events in Merrill's lost, unfinished novel, and dictates from the spirit world.

In consequence, as Yenser writes, "events do not follow chronologically but rather have a serendipitous presentation," as in "a network such that the poet could begin and end a section at any point" (Merrill 2018, 10). "The fabric is a mesh, a network made to a great extent of details," assembled (the poem insists) not by Merrill alone but by their congeries of real-life friends and by Merrill and Jackson "as the cup moved … under their two hands" (19). Links among personages, events, and phrases come from the linguistic forms (couplets, sonnets, terza rima, prose collage, puns) adopted and repeated in one or another chapter, and from the ties of friendship, sex, and blood that bind together the many people in Merrill's poem.

How does it feel to read a long poem that presents itself, not as a unified narrative, nor as a species of modernist collage, but as a network, or a congeries of networks? For...