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to College Literature
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Ethics and the Lyric:
Form, Dialogue, Answerability
Mara Scanlon
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2 College Literature 34.1[Winter 2007]
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Mara Scanlon 3
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4 College Literature 34.1 [Winter 2007]
parties are potentially changed. Adam Zachary Newton's Narrative Ethics also
considers not the moral content of a work but ethics as an "intersubjective
relation accomplished through story," "narrative as relationship and human
connectivity" (1995, 7).3 Indeed, foundational works in ethics and literature
like Wayne Booth's 1988 book The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction
revitalize the metaphor of book as friend in arguing for the reader's ethical
obligation to the author and text to "give [one]self generously" to their
reading and not remain passive in that encounter (1988, 135).4The trend
toward figuring the ethics of reading and writing as active dialogue
between self and textual other (or, as Buell discusses, sometimes reaching
to the author behind the text as well [1999, 12]) underscores the need for
thoughtful engagement with Bakhtin, arguably the most important theo
rist of dialogue in the last century.5
But as critics and thinkers turn increasingly to Bakhtin's untiring discus
sions of the dialogic in interpersonal encounters and in literature as repre
sentations of those encounters, his genre theory could be in danger of being
simultaneously codified. Will poetry, then, be seen as at best no longer rele
vant, at worst as an oppressive and unethical genre, wielded only by totali
tarian lyricists? Clearly this proposition is in its own right as absurd as
Bakhtin's own overstatements. But what is the poetry critic and Bakhtinian
scholar to do? Accept that poetry is inherently unethical? Read schizo
phrenically, concealing the love of rhythm, metaphor, line from the part of
the brain that seeks an ethical encounter with the other through the act of
reading?indeed, even accept that those desires must be separate?
Bakhtinian scholars have handled the thinker's foreclosure on poetry in
various ways, from suggesting that "poetry" is a code word for socialist real
ism, literature he could not openly attack in Stalinist Russia, to using
Bakhtin's own footnote in "Discourse in the Novel"?"It goes without say
ing that we continually advance as typical the extremes to which poetic gen
res aspire" (1981a, 287)?as a sufficient apology for what seems otherwise to
be a particularly reductive and stubborn genre theory. It is treated with
humor (as when Gary Saul Morson suggests that Bakhtin's essay "Epic and
Novel" might better be called "The Novel and Every Other Genre" [1981,
13]) or, quite commonly, really, simply ignored if a literary critic wants to
pick up some bit of the Bakhtinian philosophy (e.g., the carnivalesque) and
apply it to a given work. In his recent study Bakhtin and the Social Moorings of
Poetry, Donald Wesling helpfully historicizes the writings, suggesting that
"the poetry-over-prose prejudice was a notably Russian one that still haunts
the minds of critics and writers on that territory, because it is rooted in the
Russian Orthodox trust in the Word" (2003, 21), so Bakhtin took aim at a
distinctly hierarchical set of generic assumptions; David Richter also con
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Mara Scanlon 5
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6 College Literature 34.1 [Winter 2007]
answerable for every element of the act of his poetic utterance" (2000,387).
And while the author of the polyphonic novel may distance himself from any
criticism or subversion of those in power, the poet "has no such alibi. . . .
Bakhtin . . . now points to the 'courage of the poet, who, in his own name,
criticizes the princes,' a possibility unattainable for the polyphonic novelist"
(387). Eskin's careful, interesting reading of Bakhtin offers one possibility to
the otherwise seemingly impossible marriage of ethics and poetry.10 Because
I am persuaded by Nealon and others, however, that dialogue must be con
sidered a, or the, primary contemporary ethical model, I still want to add mine
to the voices claiming the possibility of a dialogic poem.
Finally, I think, to use Bakhtin's theories of dialogicity in discussing a
genre for which he sometimes vehemently denied dialogic potential is not
to contradict or forcibly mutate Bakhtin's own philosophy but to embrace it.
In the last writings of his life, notes jotted in 1974 just months before his
death, Bakhtin clung resolutely to the idea of unfinaUzability, to the always
becoming quality that marks life and literature: "Nothing is absolutely dead:
every meaning will have its homecoming festival. The problem of great time9'
(1986, 170). Bakhtin's fundamental belief in dialogism and change?his
steadfast belief that nothing is steadfast, that nothing is "absolutely dead"?
counters the dichotomy of poetry and novel that is at the heart of his liter
ary studies. In the last century poetic forms?such as the collage poem?
have emerged that boldly challenge the novel's proprietary hold on het
eroglossia.11 Such examples must be placed in dialogue with Bakhtin's own
assertions, which?in great time, as they come into dialogue with the poems
of the twentieth century for which his contemporary models never
account?are challenged and changed. Like Wesling, I say that "we can apply
[Bakhtin's] most powerful ideas to poetic texts, to find them differently dia
logic from the novel, but nonetheless dialogic" (2003,10).
I cast my work, then, as a "homecoming festival" for Bakhtin's concept
of poetry, an exploitation of the potential for other genres inherent in
Bakhtin's theory of the novel. As Morson and Emerson explain, "Stated sim
ply, a work's potential is its capacity to grow in unforeseeable circumstances"
(1990, 286). Critics of Bakhtin have rightly argued that the formal methods
of modern and postmodern literature should have been much less than
"unforeseeable" for their contemporary Bakhtin, and the question of why
Bakhtin chose to concentrate his literary study on previous centuries remains
an interesting and pressing one worthy of further consideration. Whatever his
awareness of twentieth-century literature and reasons for largely ignoring it,
Bakhtin clearly forecloses on the potential for poetry, denying the genre its
right to grow and change in the future. I do not want to make the same fore
closure on Bakhtin's own thought. "Even past meanings," Bakhtin asserts,
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Mara Scanlon 7
"that is, those born in the dialogue of past centuries, can never be stable
(finalized, ended once and for all)?they will always change (be renewed) in
the process of subsequent, future development of the dialogue" (1986,170).
By setting Bakhtin's linguistic and genre theories in dialogue with the poet
ry of the twentieth century and beyond, I see myself fulfilling his potential
as a theorist for poetry as well as the novel. As Bakhtin himself wrote, "The
author is a captive of his epoch, of his own present. Subsequent times liber
ate him from this captivity, and literary scholarship is called upon to assist in
this liberation" (5).
But, of course, even if I find that in great time Bakhtin, as a primary the
orist of dialogism, might admit the possibility even of dialogic poetry, such
presumptions about the genre do not begin and end with Bakhtin; we can
"liberate" Bakhtinian genre theory and still encounter resistance to the idea
of a dialogic poem. Such resistance can be found powerfully, of course, in the
basic assumptions of our twenty-first century students in the classroom, espe
cially when they encounter lyric poetry, which, despite the inadequate but
drilled terminology of "the speaker," they often want to read biographically,
as a personal, confessional, nonpolitical utterance. This is not merely a lack of
readerly sophistication; it resonates powerfully with definitions of lyricness
like that of John Stuart Mill, who wrote that "the peculiarity of poetry
appears to us to lie in the poet's utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is
feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude" (1976, 12), what
Batstone calls a "self-sufficient isolation" (2002, 101). Indeed, although
Bakhtin himself reserves particular attacks for the "congealed and half-mori
bund" genre of the epic (1981b, 14), in fact, epic is poetry that, in its attempt
to speak to or for a tribe and to establish and reflect communal values, real
ly presumes an ethical response (usually in the form of imitation) in a way
that lyric poetry, at least in the last two hundred years, has traditionally not
been seen to do.12 Such it is, to use an easy example, that Walt Whitman's
epic Song of Myself, despite its titular egotism and the inclusion of biograph
ical details and personal emotions, has been read as a cry for American
democracy and equality and an appreciation for the natural wonder of our
wide nation, while Emily Dickinson's lyrics attacking hierarchy and
hypocrisy and detailing the wonders of nature have been scoured for refer
ences to specific historical objects of desire or read as "miniature" portraits of
her own garden.13
That is to say, a common working concept of the post-Romantic lyric
as a vehicle for self-expression is not finally that far from Bakhtin's model of
the monologic, singular speech act:
The poet must assume a complete single-personed hegemony over his
own language, he must assume equal responsibility for each one of its
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8 College Literature 34.1[Winter 2007]
aspects and subordinate them to his own, and only his own, intentions.
Each word must express the poet's meaning directly and without media
tion. (Bakhtin 1981a, 297)
Indeed, in The Columbia History of American Poetry, Orr identifies the "post
confessional lyric," a genre which "has come into its own in the second half
of the twentieth century" in which "[m]any of the best and strongest
American poems" are written, as "a variant on the autobiographical dramat
ic lyric," where speech "emanates out from ... [the] self" (1993, 650). Nobel
winner Seamus Heaney also describes the necessity of the poet's finding his
authorial voice, one which is not far in intonation, accent, and rhythm from
"the poet's natural voice, the voice that he hears as the ideal speaker of the
lines he is making up" (2003, 1098). Collapsing even the pretense of "the
speaker," Heaney draws on a naturalized, singular concept of poetic voice
in his discussion of lyric, one that I suggest here even anecdotally is rela
tively widespread.
Therefore, while my work challenges Bakhtin's limiting models of the
poem, it simultaneously finds his theories enormously provocative and help
ful in providing a paradigm and terminology for discussing alternatives to the
implicit model of lyric as singular and monologic, in suggesting ways that we
might see the lyric representing and participating in dialogic exchange.
Which brings me to this point: if dialogue is a primary mode of ethical rela
tion and I want to reserve the possibility that poetry may also be an ethical
genre in that mode, then the question that I ask is: what might a dialogic
poem look like? What does it ask of us?
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Mara Scanlon 9
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10 College Literature 34.1 [Winter 2007]
meanings created by the internal dialogism of a text, and that also insists
upon the reader's ethical dialogue with the poem. It is by Robert Hayden
(1913-1980), an African American poet whose work is critically underexam
ined, as it was also marginalized by various political forces during his life
time.15 The lyric is "Night, Death, Mississippi," a stunning poem first includ
ed in Hay den's Selected Poems in 1966. Through the formal strategies of his
dialogic lyric, Hayden insists on the reader's active, ethical relating, what
Lawrence Buell calls "conscienceful listening," if listening is understood as
a reciprocal, creative process (1999, 12). The title of Haydens haunting
poem "Night, Death, Mississippi" signals at once its setting and theme. It is
a lynching poem, articulating a horror that much more intense for being
not only real but common in the lives of African American men in peri
ods of the last century.
Haydens poems frequently employ persona, a technique like dramatic
monologue that could also be productively examined, for example, for the
implicit dialogic tension between the lyric poet's formal, syntactic, and other
control and the personae's "voice" (or, to use the terminology of Herbert
Tucker's very interesting essay on Browning's "My Last Duchess," the "choral
dissolution that lurks in lyric voice" [1985,235]). Hayden also, in poems such
as the modernist "Middle Passage," uses the techniques of multivocal collage
texts, like those of Pound and Eliot discussed above, in a shorter poetic form.
But the lyric "Night, Death, Mississippi" is of particular interest in that it
gives voice to at least four or five distinct speakers without the intense frag
mentation and juxtaposition frequent in collage, adhering to a more unified
form frequently seen as typical of lyric poems. Furthermore, though
Hayden s poetry is best known for its attempts to animate black artists, lead
ers, or historical figures, at least three of the poem's major voices appear to
be those of white Mississippians?indeed, and more to the point, of racists.
The lyric is divided into two sections, the first comprised of six quatrains and
the second of three quatrains with italicized single lines interspersed. The
major voices of the first section are those of an omniscient narrator and an
old white man. The voices of the second section are those of the narrator
(minimally here), the older man's son Boy, Boy's wife, and the speaker(s) of
the italicized Unes, whose identity I will discuss later in more detail.
On a simple level, then, Hayden's poem is multivocalic because it con
tains several speakers and voices, and the characters speak to one another and
to the reader/listener. But to be truly dialogic, heteroglossic, in Bakhtin's
terms, the poem must also articulate multiple worldviews, more than one
ideology. A work may have several speakers, in other words, but if they all
mouth one doctrine, it is not heteroglossic or dialogic. Hayden's lyric is dia
logic because, on several levels, the poem performs an exchange between
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Mara Scanlon il
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12 College Literature 34.1 [Winter 2007]
ing but repellant to him. Bakhtin explores polyphony of this type most clear
ly in his work Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, in which he explains of the
novelist Dostoevsky, his ultimate test case for polyphony, "The character is
treated as ideologically authoritative and independent; he is perceived as the
author of a fully weighted ideological conception of his own_[T]he direct
and fully weighted signifying power of the characters' words destroys the
monologic plane of the novel" (1984, 5). In a polyphonic novel, Bakhtin
argues that characters are 'free people, capable of standing alongside their cre
ator, capable of not agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him" (5
6). The complexity of the many voices in Hayden's poem complicates any
easy categorization of it as, say, a persona poem, dramatic monologue (though
"dramatic dialogue" offers interesting possibilities), or what Richter discusses
as a "mask lyric," in which the authorial self is projected into an other who may
be distant in time and space but is nonetheless consistent (1990, 23).The free
speech and fullness granted these characters, however odious to Hayden him
self, is better understood as a poetic mobilization of polyphony, especially as the
voices in the poem interact dialogically themselves.
A second example of self-conscious dialogism is the explicit commen
tary within the poem about human understanding; relating with fervor the
excitement of the lynching from which he has just returned, Boy says:
Christ, it was better
Unlike the bear (which nevertheless earns the pronoun "him," the animal
and human blurred further by this choice), the black man knows why they
want him dead?as we know. Within the poem human understanding
becomes a site of absolute horror (the black man's anticipatory fear, the dev
astating knowledge of hatred). And it is also a site of resistance, since the
man's knowing "why / you want him dead" is a simultaneous subversion of
the dehumanization that allows such violence against him. The lines barely
contain the paradoxical tension; perhaps, in truth, it springs forth in the sor
rowful voice that breaks out of the tight quatrain immediately following this:
"O night, rawhead and bloodybones night9' (1. 40), a powerful, keening line that
Hayden insistently foregrounds by its placement on the page, its italics, its
powerfully defamiliarized compound words, and the fact that it has as many
as seven stresses in its mere nine syllables. The dialogism of these lines?the
paradox at the heart of racist violence that establishes human knowledge or
understanding as the ultimate suffering and as the capability that undercuts
the sadist's fundamental ideology; the articulation of hatred and then howl
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Mara Scanlon 13
ing protest that responds to it?also demands that the reader, too, enter that
dialogue. If Boy's desire to see the black man as inhuman and irrevocably
other is undercut by his own sadistic pleasure in the mental anguish of his
victim, then likewise my or our own desire (if we are readers to whom Boy's
prejudice and violence are repugnant) to see Boy himself in the same terms
is also subverted by the central importance Hayden gives to human under
standing. The lynched man is not finally utterly unlike Boy Terrifyingly, Boy
is not finally utterly unlike us.
Here, of course, I begin to slide into a consideration of the dialogue
between reader and text and the answerability it commands. No text,
Bakhtin might argue, is complete without its reader: "The event of the life
of the text, that is, its true essence, always develops on the boundary between two
consciousnesses, two subjects99 (1986, 106). Hayden's poem is particularly inter
esting for what I read as its specific thematization and provocation of the
reader's dialogic response. I find several points of entry for the reader in
Hayden's multivocal lyric, points which we may even want to bypass because
of the nature of what we see and feel when we enter. First is the immedia
cy of the colloquial dialogue, the mimesis over diegesis that invites us to lis
ten or participate. In the first movement of the lyric, for instance, the old man
has no clearly positioned listener within the poem. He himself "limp [s] to the
porch to listen" (1985,1.7), straining to decipher the pained cry of the lynch
ing's brutalized victim from that of a wild bird: "A quavering cry. Screech
owl? / Or one of them" (11.1-2)? But when he speaks, it only highlights the
fact that, though he aches for the mob violence with a "feverQ" likened to
sexual desire (1.20), he waits on the porch alone. "Be there with Boy and the
rest / if I was well again" (11. 9-10), he says, and plans what he will do when
Boy returns again:
Have us a bottle,
Boy and me?
he's earned him a bottle?
when he gets home. (Hayden 1985,11. 21-24)
Arguably, then, we readers are his primary listeners, those to whom he directs
his speech.
Michael Dean discusses the ambiguity of the speech acts in this section
of "Night, Death, Mississippi" in his close reading of the lyric. He reads, for
instance, the fines "Time was. A cry? / A cry all right" (Hayden 1985,11.17
18) as opening in the old Klansman's voice but possibly sliding in line 18 into
"the anguished voice of the narrator confirming the suffering of the Klan's
present victim while alluding to more widespread suffering, that is, the suf
fering endured on the victim's behalf by people of compassion everywhere"
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14 College Literature 34.1 [Winter 2007]
The enunciation of violence is not itself innocent. As I have just argued, in the
lyric's first section, Hayden manipulates the reader's positioning through the
use of free indirect discourse, omitting all speech tags. Here he uses a differ
ent strategy. Interestingly, in the much shorter second section Hayden uses
speech tags twice ("he said," "she said" [11. 25, 38]), each time at a line's end
for extra emphasis. Also unlike the first section, where a narrative voice pro
vides description (e.g., "He hawks and spits" [1. 19]), these two speech tags
comprise the entirety of the narrator's contribution to part II, so the reader
is thrust more forcefully, without mediation, into the characters' utterances.
And in a poem with no other notable end rhymes, Hayden concludes the
three quatrains of part II in "Night, Death, Mississippi" with the strong
rhymes "red," "dead," and "said." The color of blood (red), the murdered
man's loss of life (dead), and speech (said) are aligned closely by the poetic
strategy, subtly reminding us both of the potential power of a poem, of what
is said, and of our own closeness to the violent act. We may not have com
mitted physical murder, but we are a part of the dialogic speech acts sur
rounding that killing.
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Mara Scanlon 15
Our positioning, as readers, within the family's home and even as part of
the family is accomplished most clearly in the final stanza's direct address to
"you kids" by the poem's female voice:
You kids fetch Paw
some water now so's he
can wash that blood
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16 College Literature 34.1 [Winter 2007]
out against it. The second is a dialogic relationship to the reader herself; that
is, I argue that Hayden's formal choices?especially the use of free indirect
discourse, the second-person address and, as I will discuss now in more detail,
the unassigned lament of part II?refuse to allow the reader a distance from
the poem from which she may comfortably deny culpability or responsibil
ity. Hayden's poem illustrates the situation of dialogue about which Bakhtin
writes that "[t]he word ... is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future
answer-word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the
answer's direction" (1981a, 280).The reader's dialogic response is asked by the
poem itself, I believe, to go beyond the cognitive acts of reading and com
prehending?that is, the ongoing dialogue between writer, text, and reader
by which meaning is constructed. It requests or requires an ethical stance,
answerability. As Nealon states plainly of the dialogic, "Perhaps ethical
responsibility is first and foremost the ability to respond" (1997,131).
A striking thing about Hayden's heteroglossic lyric is that it prompts or
may even perform the reader's answerability through the voice that has the
last word in the poetic text?the truly disembodied, prayerful, soulful refrain
in italics. The utterances of this voice occupy only three of the 39 lines in the
poem, but by their elevated poetic quality (especially in comparison to the
colloquial speech of the other speakers), their length (nine or ten syllables in
a poem where no other line is longer than seven and most are closer to five),
their italicization, and their freedom from the otherwise regular quatrain
form, they speak powerfully:" O Jesus burning on the lily cross. ... O night, raw
head and bloodybones night. ... O night betrayed by darkness not its own99 (11. 29,
34, 39). A question haunts the lyric: whose voice is it? Most obviously, of
course, this is the voice of the beaten, mutilated, or murdered African
American man, who squeals "bloody Jesus," we are told, but here pleads and
mourns most sorrowfully, a connection that my close reading above supports.
Without an articulate voice in the racist's narrative or an authoritative one in
society, the violated man's voice floats hauntingly within the poem's final
movement, unanchored but given enormous power and eloquence.
Interestingly, as an African American poet writing about violent racism,
Hayden seems to be drawing on African American traditions of call and
response, a form insisting on interaction or dialogue, in his use of the itali
cized voice as a counterpoint to the white speakers' conversation. This is
important not only for its validation of black forms of discourse, prayer, or
song as they erupt into and disrupt the racists' narrative but also because it
increases the probability that the keening voice is not simply that of the
lynched man but of a wider community, words spoken in a tradition both
formal and ideological. The form of the poem invites us to hear those words
as more than a singular prayerful cry?it is surely too communal mourning,
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Mara Scanion 17
humanity's voice or maybe God's, the poet's, the readers', answering mighti
ly the narrative of the old man and his son. In its intense beauty and sorrow,
it prompts us not to betray, not to cleanse Paw. As seen on the page, the voice
enacts, performs, and comments upon our response?its letters are shivery
with italics, ungrounded without punctuation, external to the poem but inti
mately part of it, powerful. The necessary horror of the voice is our own hor
ror. Hayden has insisted on the humanity of the lynched man by comment
ing upon his human understanding.Yet, socially and politically, we know, the
lynched man has no authority. As his voice through that call and response
potentially fuses with the reader's "voice," the performance of an ethical rela
tion to the other-poem even within that poem, we are asked to bear witness,
to mourn where he cannot. As I discuss the formal mastery of Hayden's pow
erful poem and the ethics of form, I am reminded of something Booth said of
the novelist D. H. Lawrence: "It is a mistake ... to talk of Lawrence's delib
erately blurred handling of point of view as 'simply' a technical innovation:
it is a powerful ethical intervention" (1988, 450).
Hayden's poem ends without a punctuation mark, refusing easy closure.
If the dialogic nature of the poem not only sets its own voices in play but
also, as I would argue, insists that the reader too must answer to and for it,
then it is not yet complete, unwilling to be finalized. The italicized voice
prompts or performs our first response?prayer, mourning, despair ?and its
last words call for more.The poem's final word is "own": "O night betrayed by
darkness not its own!9 If the treacherous darkness is not of the night, not of
nature, but human, we must own it. We must claim ownership of the poem
and answer. As Bakhtin says, "For the word (and, consequently, for a human
being) there is nothing more terrible than a lack of response" (1986,127).
Critic John S. Wright says of Hayden's portraits of heroic figures that
they portray "the possibilities for heroic action in the face of even the most
murderous and dispiriting forces" (1982, 907). Does Hayden ask less of the
reader? His lyric insists that we read ethically, dialogically, with answerability.
And the subject of his poem forces us to confront a sociopolitical situation,
to ask, is this right? can I change it? Nussbaum has written that literary the
ory must engage with the question, "How should one live?" (1990, 23). In
the face of the racism and violence of Hayden's lyric, we must respond to
"Night, Death, Mississippi," a lyric that radically challenges prevalent and
limiting mischaracterizations of the genre, as if we are the only ones who
fully hear and understand it (we might say the Bakhtinian superaddressees)
and as if a life depended on it?indeed, as if it were our own.
Hayden's poem, with a subject so very abhorrent as lynching, provides a
test case for the dialogic lyric and its participation in the forms and discourses
of ethics that is both powerful and deceptively simple. As I anticipate my own
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18 College Literature 34.1 [Winter 2007]
reader, I actively hope and even expect that I address those whose outrage at
racial violence is profound. And so the necessary answerability of the reader
to a poem that voices prejudice and violence seems self-evident, whatever
emotional, pedagogic, or sociopolitical form that answer takes. But "Night,
Death, Mississippi" is a fertile site for this exploration not only because its
content is provocative but because its formal methods?such as employing
free indirect discourse and second person address; engaging with a call-and
response tradition; unfastening the italicized voice from the quatrains,
rhythms, and diction of the overall poem; clearly distancing authorial from
lyric speaker, to name only some?suggest, through a lyric self-conscious
about its dialogism, poetic strategies worthy of much further probing and
exploration as we continue to struggle with the place of poetry in Bakhtin's
theory and the ethical exchanges of our world.
Notes
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Mara Scanlon 19
7 See, for example, Bakhtin's essay "Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for
the Study of the Novel."
8 Hirschkop provides provocative and insightful commentary on this seeming
contradiction, arguing that we must see monologism as itself a strategy of response,
one which ignores or restricts its opposite (1981, 75). Like Hirschkop, I have ques
tioned Bakhtin's faith in the necessarily freeing nature of dialogue, its ability to defeat
or transcend oppression and inequality. See also Scanlon (2000), and Fogel (1989)
See also Dana Polan (1989) on the implications for poetry of the underlying dialo
gism of all language.
9 See also Marianne and Michael Shapiro on the dialogic "I" for whom the
superaddressee is another phase of the self (1992).
10 Like Wesling, Eskin believes that scholars have overprivileged Bakhtin's
attacks on monologic poetry and tended to ignore the few places where he
acknowledges the "historical facticity of poetry which does not reduce its 'verbal
material to a common denominator'" (2000, 382).
11 In fact, poetry has existed throughout the ages that does so, but certainly it is
an essential and clear element of poetry from Modernism onward. In their essay
"Dialogism and the Lyric Addressee" (1992), for instance, Shapiro and Shapiro
deeply engage Bakhtinian theory in discussing traditions such as the Japanese renga
and troubadour poetry.
12 Though Herbert Tucker, in his study of the dramatic monologue, does not
explicitly consider the ethics of the form he examines, his work provides an inter
esting example of a reexaminaci?n of the private, overheard lyric.
13 Such readings of Whitman and Dickinson also expose, of course, the gen
dered tendencies of literary criticism and the powerful gendering of genre.
14 Clearly, the more pressing debate about Pound's text and its Fascist, anti
Semitic passages in particular is, if it is heteroglossic, what challenge does it pose to
Bakhtin's seemingly unshakeable belief in the subversive, equalizing power of het
eroglossia? Or does Pound's famed inability to "make it cohere" suggest that
Bakhtinian heteroglossic forces in fact undermine the potentially oppressive agenda
of Pound's epic?
15 Though Hayden accrued numerous honors, including four honorary doctor
ates, twice acting as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (1976-77 and
1977-78), and fellowship in the Academy of American Poets, his reputation was
severely diminished when he came under attack by Black Arts and black nationalist
advocates for, among other things, his refusal to be categorized as a "black poet" and
the unifying humanism of his Baha'i faith. For a fuller discussion of Hayden's poet
ic achievement and career, see PontheollaT.William or Fred Fetrow.
16 Kinzie argues of enjambed lines that the "radical splitting apart of phrases [by
line] creates provisional meanings in the orphaned lines.These momentary meanings
may counteract or clash with the meaning of the sentence?once the sentence has
been pieced back together" (1999,59). Kinzie's helpful discussion of half-meaning is
worth further examination as another formal poetic method that allows for internal
dialogism.
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20 College Literature 34.1[Winter 2007]
17 Dean's interest is in reading the poem as a ballad, which admits several speak
ers and allows the narrator to "distance himself from the characters and events of the
ballad; that is, the narrator stands back and makes comments that are, at the same
time, both calm and emotional" (1986, 2). Obviously my argument about the abili
ty to distance the voices or one's own response from the text asserts instead that such
detachment is impossible because of the lyric's dialogism.
18 I deliberately use Mill's concept of "overhearing" here, in which the lyric is
so private that the reader/listener can only be at a distance to it, a fugitive eaves
dropper. Instead, I argue that the way in which Hayden positions us to overhear the
old Klansman insists on our intimacy, our insideness, to the poem.
19 Waters is also deeply concerned about answerability to the poem, about "the
written word's demand for encounter, for real relationship,, presence, even intimacy"
(1996, 147), saying of the "you" address, "I wish to contend that this positioning of
ourselves as readers is a question of responsiveness, of conduct, even of obligation"
(130). I see my interest in heteroglossic, dialogic lyric and answerability as being
highly compatible with Waters' work on lyric, for which I have great respect. See also
Sara Guyer's excellent reconsideration of apostrophe, as in her essay "Wordsworthian
Wakefulness," which engages, among other theories, Barbara Johnson's work on
apostrophe as a ventriloquism that animates the mute addressee and Levinas's writ
ings on vigilance and witness in reading Wordsworth's sonnets "To Sleep."
Works Cited
Altieri, Charles. 1990. Canons and Consequences: Reflections on the Ethical Force of
Imaginative Ideas. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Attridge, Derek. 1999. "Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other." PMLA
114.1:20-31.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 198la."Discourse in the Novel." In The Dialogic Imagination, ed.
Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
-. 1981b. "Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the
Novel." In The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson
and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-. 1981c. "From a Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse." In The Dialogic
Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
-. 1984. Problems of Dostoevskfs Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
-. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael
Holquist. Trans. VernW. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-. 1990. "Art and Answerability." In Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical
Essays, ed. Michael Holquist andVadim Liapunov, trans.Vadim Liapunov. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
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Mara Scanlon 21
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22 College Literature 34.1[Winter 2007]
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