Juxtaposition of lyric and politics in Audenesque

Abstract

This paper aims to loosen the established taxonomy of Auden’s political works. We will see that in the sustained attempt to engage with each lyric, we cannot confine our discussion to the level of content alone. This is the central tenet of my approach to the political Auden. I will demonstrate that the content of political argument in a given work can only be meaningfully explained if we understand the basis on which the lyric finds its voicing. The peculiar kind of magnetism of Auden’s political lyrics in which, I include earlier works such as “Control of the Passes” and “Get there if you can”. Keywords— Juxtaposition, Audenesque, lyric. INTRODUCTION What relationship can we ascertain between the nature of modern politics and the workings of the lyric in Auden’s hands? If the lyric is so opportunely placed as to realise decisive moments in thinking, on what kind of basis would we describe a given moment as political? The reconstructive, ideational approach can encourage us to regard his works as itemisations of political trends, with an unreflective equation made between poet and belief. This risks the critical ossification of Auden’s works, fixing them as part of a historical narrative first and foremost, their generative power as art coming a distant and unsatisfactory second. Here our revised definition of lyric begins to demonstrate its value. We are licensed to liberate the lyric from its traditional moorings in intimacy and subjectivity by the compound of private and public, social and political which, together, comprise the experience of life in mass society. THE NATURE OF THE POLITICAL IN AUDEN’S WORK Lyric’s privilege of the speaking voice – the way that, through its vocality, lyric fosters the colloquy between reader and imagined speaker – amounts to a proxy rehearsal of kind of interlocution upon which politics depends. The quality of outward projection that inheres in Auden’s lyric voice has an appreciable contiguity with political action. If (authentic) politics is configured as speaking in public about public affairs, and is a kind of performance, then it is necessarily finite. It needs protection, needs a sphere in which it can be recognised and remembered. Arguing against the totalitarian monolith, only the continuation of a public realm built upon the recognition of human plurality can safeguard political speaking. As before, it is the element of temporality in lyric which helps us to explicate this common sense of finitude. Throughout the following selection of poems, Auden’s speakers are exercised, as they have been previously, by the confusion between the public and private realms. More specifically, the removal or loss of a stable public realm in the modern age is the source of an anxiety for permanence (in its own way a conditioning factor in the rise of totalitarianism in the late twenties and thirties), which in turn animates the lyric speaker to evoke a greater, and greatly dislocating, sense of finitude. So the practice of reading these poems prefigures Arendt’s point: It is the publicity of the public realm which can absorb and make shine through the centuries whatever men may want to save from the natural ruin of time. Through many ages before us – but now not any more – men entered the public realm because they wanted something of their own or something they had in common with others to be more permanent than their earthly lives....There is perhaps no clearer testimony to the loss of the public realm in the modern age than the almost complete loss of authentic concern with immortality,... The modern political moment, as attested in lyric, is the cogent expression of such finitude. What we see in Auden’s political lyrics, predictably given the time of their composition, is the vestigial ethos of Enlightenment optimism regarding the sanctity of the public realm and the instructive purpose of history effectively facing the sunset of its truth value. Crucially, the temporal element of lyric vocality – the sense we have of an unfolding utterance which we in turn speak for ourselves – secures our understanding of the experience of this tectonic shift, making our involvement active rather than passive. The speakers of the poems (and this is why a critical approach based exclusively on Auden himself might be too selective) each inhabit a singular, finite moment in the International Journal of English, Literature and Social Sciences (IJELS) Vol-4, Issue-6, Nov – Dec 2019 https://dx.doi.org/10.22161/ijels.46.67 ISSN: 2456-7620 www.ijels.com Page | 2057 process of confronting the collapse, or perhaps, mutation, of the public realm. They might, as in “Control of the passes”, render this confrontation in a third person minor narrative, a quasi-dramatic account that manipulates the poetics of the sonnet; they might, as in “Get there if you can”, perform a kind of imaginative osmosis, the speaker himself becoming the recipient of a dissipated cultural energy. Focusing on the vocality of lyric in this wider political context means allows us to expand our sense of what constitutes the political in Auden’s work. Where the mode of a lyric is transparently argumentative, or seems to exposit a point of view that we could classify according to political dogma, then a critical response is self explanatory. Auden’s early thematic preoccupation with the silent coercion of a faceless majority, and the catastrophic consequences for the inner life, demonstrate eloquently enough how alive is his work to the conditioning factors of thinking. But the matter becomes more complex when we consider the political in the Arendtian sense, of what modes of coexistence are made available at a given historical point. In some examples such as “Get there if you can” the polemical thrust that powers the lyric aims directly at this question. But the real value of Auden’s lyrics (and my close readings have been selected because of this) lies in their continual ability to show the thinking process behind the utterance: the background of thought, the accretions of historical modes of thinking and living, and their collisions with newer modes, which together amount to their manner of perception. This philosophical lexicon ought not to detract from the poems themselves, and it is clear that Auden’s is not an art which turns away from human affairs, in order to better record their nature: quite the contrary. His political poems are valuable because they are frequently pitched into the breach between that which is historically inherited or conditioned and what is within the realm of the speaker’s agency, in the very entanglements of the world. In their vocal, finite quality they describe the beginnings of the political moment; in their ideas and argument they address how it can be manifested. It is this, their three hundredand-sixty-degree aspect, their glance backwards and forwards, which we can call Heideggerian because it is redolent of the breadth that Heidegger sees in the realisation of the finite moment of thinking. The spoken lyric is the artistic realisation of the contingency of thought, and Auden’s political lyrics explore this in significant depth. The political moment, we will see, takes account of the expanse of its conditioning factors, and according to the conventions of lyric, this expanse is compressed. It is here that I invoke Adorno’s conceptual framework, again with a number of caveats. I follow Adorno’s thesis that lyric instates a truth that is supra-subjective. The measure of its objectivity lies in precisely the manner that it recounts its conditioning factors: how the objective has been submerged, and is processed by the subjective. Furthermore, although my readings are concerned to describe the historical milieu in which the lyrics were created, Adorno’s arguments are instructive for their neat balance between the singular and the historical, a balance which is salutary in the context of political poetry, where the historical threatens to dominate: Lyric poetry is not to be deduced from society; its social content is precisely its spontaneity, which does not follow from the conditions of the moment. But philosophy (again that of Hegel) knows the speculative proposition that the individual is rendered through the general and vice versa. This can only mean here that resistance to social pressure is not something absolutely individual. Peter Porter reminded us earlier that the question of what belongs to history and what belongs to the poem is misleading, and Adorno’s position reserves a place within the experience of lyric where the reductive historical approach cannot intrude: this is the mark of art’s singularity. His move is to claim this place as evidence of art’s resistance to “social pressure”. Where Adorno sees a representative spontaneity – an expression of opposition in lyric that, ipso facto, must be general – we can divine another way of involving the activity of reading lyric poetry in a context that exceeds the aesthetic. The spontaneity that excites Adorno is activated in speaking the lyric, and by configuring the lyric as being spoken to us. Here Adorno’s critique and Arendt’s authentic politics coincide. Whether the poem is monodic or choral, the colloquy installed has symbolic value as an emblem of the speaking, which amounts to what MacNeice called in 1938 “a tiny measure of contribution” in Modern Poetry; a gesture of communication sometimes compromised between poem and reader. From this basis, the life of each lyric and their respective political natures can be better conveyed.