|
Article Excerpt
You too will say: here--here here is my finishing line.
--Aleksander Wat
In sixteenth-century England, literature in the graveyard--epitaphs--became literature of the graveyard. That is, writing that began insistently "here," as inscriptions on tombstones, often appeared as citations within other texts. Epitaphs, or references to them, emerge with increasing frequency in a number of Tudor and Stuart discourses, arising in part as a textual response to the dissolution of Catholic memorial practices. Epitaphs are replaced, or re-cited, in a striking range of contexts, from Elizabeth I's first speech to Parliament (in which she avows her virginity with a proleptic tombstone inscription) to Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy (whose last word is an epitaph-less curse) to Shakespeare's Timon of Athens (where an apparently double epitaph has long been cause for editorial puzzlement). By the early seventeenth century, "epitaph" gets invoked figuratively, with no correlative text whatsoever (John Donne was particularly ingenious in his use of this word--he calls himself an epitaph in both "The Paradox" and "Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day" [18, 9]).
I stick quite closely to the locative etymology (strictly, [writing] on a tomb) of the epitaph, treating it as a subgenre of the epigram. For the purposes of my argument, what counts as an "epitaph" must be either a text declared as such, or a text that invokes a spatial gesture towards the tombstone, most commonly employing the phrase "here lies." "Epitaphic," as a qualifier, is not sufficient to describe the many interesting, contiguous, yet nonetheless distinct forms of eulogy, epicede (funeral ode), famous last words, and so forth. Thus Raphael Holinshed's term "funeral epigram" might be one of the most appropriate descriptions of an epitaph along the dual dimensions of theme and mode that Gerard Genette offers for classifying genres (3.57). (2) Contemplating the apparently simple "here" of the epitaph necessarily entails contentious debates surrounding the presence or absence of substance in the early modern period (two notable instances include "Here is my body," (3) or, "'Tis here." / "'Tis here." / "'Tis gone." [Hamlet 1.123-24]). Despite the apparently grounded and immovable nature of the epitaphic here, this form becomes surprisingly amenable to transposition as we reach the end of the sixteenth century.
One kind of text in which the epitaph was frequently recited was the elegy. Ben Jonson's poem "On My First Son" is a paradigmatic instance, as the early, mournful address to the deceased child eventually shifts to a terminal epitaph, which announces "here doth lie / Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry" (48). Many such epitaphs were never inscribed, "with no intentions that they should ever come under the mason's chisel" (Moore 2). What, then, was the non-funerary function of epitaphs in these elegies? Closure is a typical response, yet the closure that the epitaph apparently provides for the elegy remains a subject for critical inquiry. This is especially the case if one considers the possibility that epitaphic closure became an early modern convention (if not an innovation) that marked a shift from medieval notions of time and composition via emerging patterns of textual quotation that are still recognizable to us today.
CLOSURE
What remains most intriguing about the early modern epitaph (and has been heretofore "strangely neglected"--a familiar critical gesture (4)) is its re-citation. Thus I am primarily interested in examining the epitaph not as a generic tradition unto itself but rather as a citational move within a whole range of English Renaissance contexts. Most non-"poetic" epitaphs do not merit the close reading that we normally associate with great lyric poetry--in fact, there might be nothing more to read beyond the word "epitaph." But the placement of these epitaphs matters and is almost invariably significant. That the analysis of the epitaph's conceptual import and situational use beyond the anthologized standards can be rewarding in itself confirms the richness of "epitaph"s in the period. The most enduring and familiar inheritance of epitaphic re-citation can be found in its suggestive troping of closure. By turns elemental and superfluous, poetic and prosaic, closure with an epitaph is probably the most frequently applied mode of epitaphic re-citation, yet at the same time the least theorized, in part because it appears so obvious: of course you would end a life's account with an epitaph.
Yet ending, as J. L. Austin coyly put it, is a characteristically "difficult act to perform, being the cessation of acting" (65). (5) Coming to a "close" remains even more problematic, because it presumably implies not only an ending, but also a kind of "integral design" to an experience, "both dynamic and whole," as Barbara Herrnstein Smith puts it in Poetic Closure (36). Even within the comparatively delimited realm of literary study, closure has long proved a thorny issue to address, and the fact that Smith's 1968 book remains the standard work on the subject can be taken as confirmation of the topic's enduringly problematic nature.
Writers attempting to articulate a formal theory of closure themselves regularly resort to tautological or even organic circularities, from Aristotle's vague statements about beginnings, middles, and ends, to Coleridge's image of a snake with a tail in its mouth. (6) While there are a number of studies on closure in narrative, (7) it seems to pose a particularly troubling problem for poetics, usually leading either to gnomic assertions ("a poem begins by creating a linguistic problem whose solution by language will be the attainment of its end" [Richards 168]) or else to elaborate attempts at subverting the concept of ending itself ("Lyric poems begin and end, but by their end they have inverted the end into its opposite, a nonend" [Bahti 13]). (8)
The difficulty of poetic closure becomes acutely foregrounded in the funeral elegy. Here we find a need to bring to a conclusion the work of mourning that has given the rest of the poem its tension. That is to say, if we concur with Peter Sacks's largely Freudian analysis of the elegy as an "experience of loss and search for consolation," then the closure of this particular form will demand not only a formal resolution but also a thematic and psychological one as well (1). The end of the elegy must be the end of loss, ideally with the achievement of some kind of coming to the terms with the loss--replacing mourning with resignation. Dynamic ritual movement might even be said to require a "static" termination, as described of literary forms in general by the Russian Formalist Boris Tomashevsky: "The later harmonious situation, which does not require further development, will neither evoke nor arouse the reader's anticipation. That is why the condition at the end of the work is so static. This static condition is called the ending" (71). Thus we might say: the end of the elegy paradoxically cannot be elegiac (that is to say, "elegiac" in the modern, grief-oriented sense, rather than the classical, metrically oriented sense).
This presents a special case of Giorgio Agamben's (initially counterintuitive) claim that "the last verse of a poem is not a verse" (112). Following closely Valery's definition of a poem as "a prolonged hesitation between sound and sense," Agamben determines that the possibility of enjambment (a stark tension between sound and sense) "constitutes the only criterion for distinguishing poetry from prose" (109). Because a last line cannot be enjambed--cannot play with this disjunction between sound and sense--it presents a kind of "decisive crisis" for the rest of the poem:
Suddenly it is possible to see the inner necessity of those poetic institutions, like the tornada or the envoi, that seem solely destined to announce and almost declare the end of the poem, as if the end needed these institutions, as if for poetry the end implied a catastrophe and loss of identity so irreparable as to demand the deployment of very special metrical and semantic means. (112)
There is thus a self-renunciatory quality to the end of the poem, in that it no longer carries out its self-determined task; this "cessation of acting" must give up the act in a manner that turns away from its previous employment. What, then, is the "declaration, so to speak, of the state of poetic emergency" that characterizes the end of the elegy (113)?
CONVENTION
Not surprisingly, it has become conventional to close the elegy with a form that suggests an apparently mimetic relationship between its conclusive content and placement, and, moreover, that closely approximates a static form in its inscriptional premise: the epitaph. Even on a verbal level, the epitaph is replete with what Smith identifies as closural allusion "words and phrases such as 'last,' 'finished,' 'end,' 'rest,' 'peace,' or 'no more,'.... events such as sleep, death, dusk" (172, 176). In this respect it stands as something like an inversion of the elegy, for "'the epitaphic moment'" can occur in the elegy only when "a mourner fully recognizes the reality of loss'--a recognition resisted throughout the rest of the poem (Gilbert 282). We even critique an epitaph, such as Milton's Epitaphium Damonis, that "reveals a troubled, disunited mind" as an elegy normally does. (9) That the epitaph seems to fulfill the need for closure can be evidenced by numerous non-Renaissance examples of the brief poetic epitaph concluding the longer lament, many of which have an autobiographical element to them (whether explicit or implicit); the most canonical of these would be Thomas...
|
.%20%20&position=1)