The Role of Narrative in Milton’s Lycidas

Abstract

This paper is going to explore the role of narrative in the funeral elegy, especially in John Milton’s Lycidas and argue that the elegy is supposed to be a public address; it is a mourning, which should be distinguishing from grieving.

The writer uses the following point to support the idea - the elegy Lycidas is a case of poetic genre in which public discourse intersects with private monologue based on the concept of narratee by Gerald Prince. This concept is also to so a formation of dissonance created out of the distance between the speaker and the audience. The traditional level, Lycidas is called a monody, or a dirge sung by a single, is misleading and should be reconsidered as there is a narrator who addresses several audiences and the shapes from narratee to narratee signals that the poem is not a monological discourse that Bakhtinian theory of writing presumes. The multiple addresses complicate any effort to pin point a single narratee. In Lycidas, the narratee is, to a large extent, “thankless muse”, the infanticidal mother of Orpheus who kills her son by ignoring him as he is the unrecognized prodigal son. Due to the reversal of role the discourse is both a lament and a threat.

Thus, the paper concludes that the relationship between the narrator and narrate gives us a political and ideological dimensions of the elegy, a public discourse that deal with more than a communal contemplation of death.

Introduction

This paper focuses on the role of the narrative in the funeral elegy. To start, the concept of the narratee has been most deeply explored by Gerald Prince from a narratological perspective. Narratology is primary concerned with narrative patterns in fiction. In this regard, any attempt to apply the terminology commonly used in reference to fiction (and prose) to poetry seems problematic. One has to account for the differences or the similarities between the genres in order to put the discussion of the narratee in the elegy into its proper perspective.

The current trend leans heavily on Bakhtin's study of the structure of the novel. In the Dialogical Imagination, Bakhtin created a sort of dichotomy between the monologic (poetry) and the dialogic. The novel becomes the site of dialogical discourse par excellence. But how valid is a wholesome distinction between genres within which there is so much diversity? Doesn't Bakhtin create a dichotomy which pays little consideration to the possibility of polyphony in specific texts regardless of formal classification?

It may be time to consider a literary work not as a predetermined product cast in a deterministic mold, but as a dynamic system that transcends the prevailing assumptions that are supposed to define its identity. The formal definitions can be just external to the composition of the text since we cannot expect the reader to know exactly what the author intended to write without falling into the trap of intentional fallacy.

To be sure, readers from different backgrounds can 'hear' different voices in a text. Readers who are initiated in a particular literary environment may find the prosodic features they have been trained to recognize and detect. In this respect, how do Bakhtin-influenced readers (in the current academia) relate to a variety of voices in a poem, having somehow accepted that it is monologic by nature? Can we really persuade them that there is more than one voice in a poem?

Certainly, a discussion of the Bakhtinian theory of narrative is not the actual focus of this paper. In effect, I am referring to Bakhtin here more as a point of reference for the dichotomy between fiction and poetry – so he may be a sort of excuse for entering the debate about genre boundaries. The goal is not to make difference in form absolutely relative but to challenge the notion that narrative is essentially a feature of fiction, that the dialogic and the imaginative are somehow correlates. The real task is to show that the elegy is a case of poetic genre in which public discourse intersects with private monologue. In fact, by its nature, the elegy is supposed to be a public address. It is mourning, which should be distinguished from grieving.

Milton's 'Lycidas' is a case in point. As a piece of civic protocol it expresses a profound philosophical attitude towards death-humans share a common bond in facing the eventuality of death. Yet as a personal statement of heartfelt grieving, it is not convincing. The distance between the speaker and the audience is such that it creates a form of dissonance. The implied audience seems peripheral to the discourse running through the text. Perhaps the (pastoral) floweriness of the poem masks an anxiety rooted in the disconnection of the speaker and the audience. Then, who is the speaker addressing? The time has come to put the traditional notions of speaker and audience in a different perspective. What do these concepts entail for the discussion of narrative elements? This question is altogether important if we consider the heavy New Critical use of the speaker-audience phraseology in reference to poetic analysis.

At this level it is useful to bring in the study of Gerald Prince's concept of the narratee in order to examine how applicable it is to the elegy. Prince starts with the relationship between the author and the reader. He refers to three common categories of reader: the real reader, the virtual (implied) reader, and the ideal reader. The intriguing idea is the distinction between the virtual reader and the ideal reader. The way Prince puts it, the idea reader is a mirror-image of the writer: 'one who would understand perfectly and approve entirely the least of his words, the most subtle of his intentions'. So, there would not be any risk of intentional fallacy if we could communicate with the idea reader. On the other hand, the virtual reader resides outside of the writer's narcissistic drive. The writer conceptualizes this reader as the other who has the skills to read the text, a presence out there, a potential reader and critic. This distinction is far from clear, and Prince adds to the ambiguity: 'the virtual reader and a narratee can be alike, but once again it would be an exception'.

This narratee is an even more striking concept. Prince himself acknowledges that 'few critics have dealt with the narratee and none to date has undertaken an in-depth study'. He goes on to say that the 'advanced' stage of narrative awareness makes it necessary now to go beyond the basic concept of authorship. Readers generally know that the author of a novel is not the same as the narrator. However, the receptive dimension of the novel is rarely discussed. Prince attributes this absence of curiosity over the 'person' addressed to the subtle or ambiguous nature of the narratee. The narratee is not likely to be a hero, 'unless one includes narrators who constitute their own narratee'. In a word, the action belongs to the narrator, so is the discursive line. Then what is the role of the narratee? Does it determine the structure or content of the narrative in any way?

As said earlier, the narratee seems to be more on the receptive end; its moves often result from the narrator's act s or words. The narrator usually has his or her way, at least from what we hear. But this relation does not always mean unilateral determinism. Prince precise that, 'after all, the individual who relates a story and the person to whom the story is told are more or less interdependent in any narration'. In some interesting cases the narratee can determine the outcome of the narrative by imposing his or her expectations on the narrator. The story of Scheherazade highlights this aspect: 'Scheherazade must exercise her talent as a storyteller or die, for as long as she is able to retain the attention of the caliph with her stories, she will not be executed.' But is this apparent reversal of roles typical? How is it relevant to the elegy?

To return to 'Lycidas,' the poem is called a monody, or a 'dirge sung by a single'. This traditional label is misleading and should be reconsidered. There is a narrator who addresses several audiences. The shift from narratee to narratee signals that the poem is not the linear, monologic discourse that Bakhtinian theory of writing presumes. This alternation of audiences brings a multitude of personae into the observation of the occasion. In a way, the poem is no longer a dirge, but a social and political event that concerns not only the human condition a philosophical debate but also the state of human affairs. As Sacks remarks, the 'conventional questioning is in large designed not only to avert potential self-accusation but also to create the fictive addresses, substituting the pretence of temporary absence for the suspicion of nonexistence or permanent neglect'.

This fictionalization can help us cast the elegy in a narratological frame without forcing the relativistic formula that all genres operate in the same way. Sacks argue that Milton basically weaves a dream that will be fulfilled at the end of the poem. The journey across the various picaresque scenes frames the mourning into a quixotic quest that amounts to a 'wish-fulfilling dream'. The ending of the poem clearly illustrates this point:

And now the sun has stretched out all the hills,

And now was dropped into the western bay.

At last he rose, and twisted his mantle blue:

Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.

The anaphora in the first lines indicates the public setting of the delivery of this funeral oration. But, as the shepherd's lay, this passage is supposed to be an insert within the narrator's discourse. Nonetheless, it has a fictive air around it: without being the resurrection of Lycidas per se, it implies the possibility of such an event. Sacks refers to this conclusion as the way which the idyll concludes the 'larger narrative'. The poem is populated with shepherds, mythological places, satyrs and fauns a scene 'illuminated by the light of unreality.' To Sacks, this fictionalization is a way of 'both indulging and distancing one's recollections of the past and of the death.'

So, the multiple addresses complicate any effort to pinpoint a single narratee that is, a person who is consistently told the story. This difficulty persists as long as we continue to consider the poem as a self- contained text that virtually stands on its own regardless of the ambitions and designs of the author. This (essentially) New Critical approach limits the analysis to the speaker and audience. Where is the person talked to in these lines?

Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more,

Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,

I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude.

And with forced fingers rude

Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. 

Is it enough to call this trope a personalization by which nature receives human qualities? Is there someone who is supposed to overhear this lament? Would that person be supernatural or human?

Grappling with the receptor of this address begins the quest for the narratee, which can bring us beyond the self-contained nature of the poem. In this regard, Prince observes that narratees have characteristics like everybody else in terms of physical, moral, intellectual profile. In the case of Scheherazade alluded to earlier, the narratee is a temperamental and autocratic overlord who has infinite control over the life of the narrator. In 'Lycidas,' the narratee is, to a large extent, the 'thankless Muse,' the infanticidal mother of Orpheus who kills her son by ignoring him. Lycidas is the unrecognized prodigal son. Sacks interpret Milton's conceptualization of the persona (subject) this way: 'The poem has to mourn the loss of Lycidas and his own loss of belief in the Muses' protection, in particular that of Calliope, the mother of Orpheus'. Orpheus's tragedy results in part from the lack of concern of Calliope.

Since the narratee is the negligent protector, the narrator identifies with Lycidas because he seems to risk the same fate. Sacks point out that the 'cruel cutting short of a career arouses the poet to question his own defense against mortality and to redefine the possible regard, if any, for his own ascetic pursuits'. Accordingly, Milton reconsiders his asceticism with second thoughts about the sublimated eroticism of his lifestyle. This question of (im) mortality is a correlate of the 'pleasure principle' (as Eagleton puts it) the postponement of self-indulgence. The wait eroticizes the source of pleasure, which becomes an unavoidable point of reference (in recursive reveries and fantasies). Milton's design in writing 'Lycidas' was almost a 'carpe diem' gesture. In his letter to Diodata, (apparently a frequent reference), he reflected on his purpose in writing the elegy: 'You ask me what I am thinking of? So may the Deity help me, of immortality?'. This covert openness about personal ambition, narcissism, and opportunism makes the notion of narratee even more intriguing. Can we go beyond the mythic muse to find a more probable narratee to whom Milton directs the narrator's lament? The line, 'Such, Lycidas, thy loss to shepherd's ear' clearly puts the death of Lycidas in terms of his loss to the listener. Or the speaker, for that matter: the shepherd is the solitary man brooding over the news of the day, the desolation in nature.

In light of Milton's own expectation as to what the poem would mean to his career. If the shepherd is the listener, then the narrator impresses on him the implications of the poet's death for the mood of the community. The narratee would lose the privilege of having access to the manifestation of poetic genius. The shepherd will live an art-deprived life in the absence of the muse's son. The negligent shepherd will contemplate this larger loss at their own expense, without the comfort of tears (as Richard Wright said with regard to the bankers' daughters who would read his Native Son):

Now, Lycidas, the shepherds weep no more;

Henceforth thou art the Genius of the shore,

In thy large recompense, and shalt be good

To all that wander in that perilous flood. 

The roles are thus reversed. Even though the shepherds have the power to ignore and neglect Lycidas, they are the ones who stand to lose more in the aftermath of his death. So, the discourse is both a lament and a threat. Thus the relationship between the narrator and the narratee gives us an insight into the political and ideological dimensions of the elegy, a public discourse that deals with more than a communal contemplation of death. In 'Lycidas,' the narratee controls the present with the power to recognize or ignore the budding genius. There is an element of superstition in this elegy as it draws on the lot of popular beliefs about the bristleness of the prodigal son and the necessity to provide them with care. From the loss of Lycidas to the 'shepherd's ear' to his anointment as the 'Genius' of the shore,' the narrator pokes the dynamics of anxiety and public display of remorse.

The address is extended to a nation in a 'carpe diem' quest to make the people aware of the present needs of the genius. The death of Lycidas becomes a 'national' tragedy. The principle of substitution works here: the poet who reminds his countrymen of the previous life of a dead poet also pleads for himself, seeks visibility through public discourse. In the context of the scarcity of patronage for poets in the seventeenth-century, a poet like Milton had reason to make such a plea by appealing to the puritanical instincts of an audience that would identify with a chaste genius who died in his integrity. The convoluted metaphor of purity is indeed a 'wish-fulfilling dream' as Sacks points out.

Works Cited

• Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: U of Texas P, 1992. Prince, Gerald. 'Introduction to the Study of the Narratee.' Poetique 14 (1973): 177-96 (reprinted in English). Sacks, Peter M. The English Elegy. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1985.
• Milton, John. Lycidas.