The poetics of drowning: Readings in the poetry of Hoelderlin, Wordsworth, Shelley, Mallarme, and Stevens.

Abstract

Though drowning is thematized in western poetry long before the Commedia, Dante transforms drowning and, with it, the definition of the lyric. The shipwreck metaphor that sets into motion the journey of the Commedia joins the epic assumption of the shaping power of the past with the typically lyric notion of survival as an act of bearing witness. In poetry from Dante to Wallace Stevens and beyond, drowning is the site at which the poetic subject is said to be dissolved. Once believed to pre-exist signification, the subject is revealed to be a product of a set of signifying practices. His disappearance is, in effect, his being revealed in the text as a linguistic construct. The dissolution of the subject is a rhetorical device by which the poet sustains his poetic authority. In Holderlin's "Dichtermuth," the speaker is endangered by a central metaphor that links the poets of the people with a swimmer amid the ocean's waves. In The Prelude, Wordsworth constructs his poetic persona through the boat voyage of Book IV and drownings of Book V. Drowning in Shelley's Alastor and Adonais results from the blurring of the distinction between self and other, putting into question the very possibility of identification. In three sonnets and Un Coup de Des, Mallarme's protagonists are transformed into figurative language at the meeting of two unspeakable extremes, water and death, where the subject's drowning only momentarily conceals his presence. In Stevens' late poetry, metaphor places the one who engages in it "at a point of central arrival" that, figured as a shipwreck and drowning, brings about a Ulyssean "discovery" of the self. Drowning in the romantic and post-romantic lyric involves either confronting or denying the historical events that subvert a single, privileged representation of the past. If drowning means turning history into a settled, closed account, then contemporary theoretical approaches to literature provide instruments that unsettle or open that account, thereby raising the drowned man. One such approach is feminist criticism, in which the drowned man becomes a woman whose absence in the narrative of history can be transformed, by an underwater journey, into presence. As Adrienne Rich suggests in "Diving Into the Wreck," to be drowned is to liberate history from the drownings that attempt to confine it. Her revisionist view of drowning defines it as the literary effort to fulfill and clarify the past; as such, feminist drowning takes on an ethical dimension. Drowning, then, is a search for truth, not as a single story but as a method of integrating the multiplicity of stories whose interrelationships have yet to be written.