That the story of Narcissus has proposed itself as a focus of contemporary meditation owes something to its concerns and something to its nature: like much contemporary fiction, it is all psychology, no narrative. Impossible to film. As a static image, it encourages projections of the kind narrative limits or interrupts. As an image concerned with the self’s engagement with the self, it falls quite naturally in line with one of our century’s engrossing discoveries, psychoanalysis. Further, it adopts and extends Romanticism’s attentiveness to the soul, or the inward.
The soul, here, is entirely hostage to the body. In Ovid’s telling, the beautiful cold boy, whom love never moves, sees in the pond what others see, the depth of the water compensating for the superficiality of the reflection. His punishment is to suffer what has been suffered in his name: he also falls in love, his love as conscious and as doomed as Echo’s. He knows what he’s looking at: “Alas! I am myself the boy I see. I know it … I am on fire with love for my own self.” He endures, until grief claims him, the knowledge of his passion’s impossibility.
Still, this is for Narcissus the discovery of love, of feeling. Yet within the strict parabolic shape of the story, an end, a constriction as well as a beginning. Echo, spurned, is deprived of her body; Narcissus loses his life. Although the punishment devised by Nemesis initiates lucid apprehension, it is the sense of constriction, the dead-endedness of the myth, I have in mind in my use of terminology derived from the tale. That, not the birth of knowledge. Narcissism, in what follows, means to suggest transfixed infatuation, that overwhelmed awe that admits no secondary response.
The allure of the self, in this image, is fortified by the self’s perpetual elusiveness: “Only a little water keeps us apart; my love … desires to be reached…” When Narcissus bends forward toward his image, the image manifests corresponding ardor. And the meticulousness of the correspondence illuminates the impossibility of the hunger: the self cannot be the object of its own exclusive desire. Narcissus never leaves the pool; he pines away “consumed by hidden fire.”
Romanticism began as a corrective to more abstract, potentially sterile practice. Its insistence on the personal was, for the most part, eager, open, innocent. It made the soul an object of proper study. Study, but not, interestingly, narcissistic homage. The Romantic poet tended to seek release from limitation: through nature, through love, through timeless art. And the Romantic imagination, projected onto the myth of Narcissus, more naturally mirrors Echo, the pursuer, than Narcissus himself. The static, transfixed quality seems utterly lacking.
That quality has emerged in our century, a curious hybrid of Romanticism and psychiatry, a mutation cooler, with notable exceptions, than either Keats or Freud. Every period has its manners, its signatures, and, by extension, its limitations and blindness. And it is particularly difficult, from the inside, to recognize such characteristics: omnipresence makes them invisible. If they are noticed at all, they are taken as marks of progress; the limitations we have been trained to see as limitations are no longer evident.
Contemporary literature is, to a marked degree, a literature of the self examining its responses. Focus varies; likewise (obviously) talent. The focus can be political (as in Forché’s best work), or moral/psychological, as memorably practiced by Bidart and McMichael. Or it can be aesthetic, as in the work of Strand. These categories are not pure: they are introduced to sketch in a territory. And similar examples exist in prose, beginning with James’s elaborate scrutinies. The self, in this sense, was the nineteenth century’s discovery, an object, for a time, of rich curiosity, its structure, its responses, endlessly absorbing. And as long as it was watched in this spirit of curiosity and openness, it functioned as an other; the art arising from such openness is an art of inquiry, not conclusion, dynamic rather than static.
Narcissistic practice, no matter what ruse it appropriates, no matter what ostensible subject, is static, in that its position vis-à-vis the self is fixed: it expects, moreover, that the world will enter into its obsession. A first, an easy assumption would be that such practice derives, in the United States certainly, from Whitman’s exhibitionism and bravura.
I think otherwise. Whitman’s gesture, the exemplary self, differs profoundly from the insular, superior self posited by Narcissus. Like a child playing “Simon Says,” Whitman demands to be followed. Or replicated, a brilliant compensation (possibly) for procreative limitation. Underlying narcissism is a tacit hierarchy: the only visible other is the self. Whereas the sweep of Whitman’s categories and generalizations (like the casting call of an epic director: seven beautiful men, four pregnant women), while hardly convincing as portraiture, in its democratic stubbornness dissolves hierarchy. The marvel of Whitman is his inspired conviction regarding the elasticity of the form—his sense of what a line could be, what a poem could be. The lines themselves, their very shapes and sounds, their intent to include (think how they resist enjambment) are at odds with narcissism’s restricted gaze. Narcissus’s plight arises from his disdain for others, for those whose love he neither returned nor honored. His fate is punishment, not accident: Nemesis’s deft response. And whether or not Whitman moves us, it is hard to make a case for such disdain: he never contrasts his own responses to the responses of others; in a fundamental sense, he never cultivates the reader’s addictions to his interventions. What he celebrates in himself is what is average, common (and in all likelihood he was amazed at such characteristics, as the eccentric is always amazed to discover himself like others in some respect, or as the hypochondriac marvels at his body’s simulation of normal healthy response).
Nor do the two qualities that correspond, in our art, to Narcissus’s beauty have any place in Whitman’s work. Contemporary art prizes the fastidious aesthetic response; it also places high value on the exposure of the secret. And in the latter sense it has, I believe, an antecedent or stimulus not in Whitman but in Dickinson, though she is, herself, never guilty of narcissism’s superficiality and self-aggrandizement. Her periodic hermetic coyness is like a spinster’s sad stab at grooming: an attempt to attract love. But Dickinson introduces a type of veiled disclosure that will found whole schools of poetry, disclosure so charged, so encoded, so intent on limited selective revelation as to privilege the reader. Dickinson isn’t narcissistic because the other postulated by the poems cannot, in its function, become an aspect of the self, though this is exactly, I believe, what happens later.
It is important, here, to distinguish between narcissism and exhibitionism. When narcissistic reverie converts to public form (as in literature), something like exhibitionism results. Like, but not an exact copy of. Literary narcissism, in its exclusive ardor, often suggests obliviousness: it sees no particular difference between private reverie and public display, so devoid of independent reality is the world. The world, it is assumed, will duplicate the narcissist’s fascination with himself, since what else could possibly be of equal interest? In the sense of this opacity, narcissism is inviolable. Whereas exhibition solicits interest, narcissism presumes it. (In the soliciting of interest, the exhibitionist is capable of being wounded, which is to say, changed.)
If Dickinson does not, for all her secrecies, take secret pleasure in the production of her intensities, if her need for confidence, her unvarying need to be heard, make it impossible for her to preempt the role of the other, the obvious questions remain as to the origins of these habits, the model for the poetry that prizes its own perception. Narcissism, as a literary gesture, cannot be utterly new. But it does seem that the unmemorable work of other periods was bad in other ways: wooden, sententious, sentimental. The eye was not, I think, quite so explicitly trained on the self. This is not to say the cure for narcissism is the outward gaze. Social agenda, concerns outside the specific self, are not in themselves protection: one of the more appalling forms of narcissism is the appropriation of or annexing of a real other (as opposed to preempting the role of the hypothetical other or confidante). Whole nations, whole torn civilizations turn out to be waiting to be given voice: what occurs, in such work, isn’t the poet seeing the world but rather the poet projecting himself outward so that he returns to us on the page, in costume and in multiple.
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If it is difficult to say when exactly the habits that evolve into narcissism began, it is surprisingly easy to say when they begin to seem rife. By the mid-seventies, poets looking inward have begun, simultaneously, to watch themselves looking inward; the poet splits, regularly, into two figures (though not, as in true detachment, two perspectives); the dominant pronoun, the pronoun guaranteed to confer stylish distance, is no longer the intimate, collusive first person of, say, Eliot, or the tightrope-walking first person of Plath; the dominant pronoun is “you,” the elegant everyman of the French “on,” perhaps, but refocused. Mark Strand made this move his signature (though he had, from the beginning, defenses against what came to be its dangers). What begins to characterize American poetry around this period is a voyeuristic relation to the self. If our present taste for the divulging of the carefully guarded secret can be traced to Dickinson, our equally common preoccupation with the perceptive self, our taste for the pronoun that encourages or supports such preoccupation, is rooted in other literatures, in Rilke’s tendency to elegize the present, for example, to infuse the moment with all the characteristics of remote time. And the figure of the speaker, viewed through this lens, separates from the voice of the poet. Perhaps Rilke is ill-served by his translations; nevertheless, most of the American poets profoundly influenced by his art read him in translation. And the influence does not vary, though the translations do.
Rilke’s impact, which shows no sign of abating, owes in part to the confluence, in his work, of what would be major aesthetic preoccupations. With the possible exception of religious poetry, which treats the “I” as an abyss, a hunger, by turns patient and insatiable, but always waiting, always dependent, Rilke’s was the first significant body of work to elaborate an aesthetic that would come to be called female. In place of the will or appetite imposing itself on the world, or (as in Keats) the soul seeking, Rilke postulated a void, an absence into which the world flooded. The self was entirely reactive, so intensely so as to be exhausted by what, to a less scrupulous sensibility, would hardly be noticed. Out of such helpless receptivity, such contempt for the initiating will, he carved a kind of poem, a kind of pacing utterly unique—a pacing that simulates, in its sudden stops and starts, the irregular rhythms of outside stimuli, a tree, a sunset, a human face, washing against, assaulting the soul. These poems seemed the opposite of sonnets even when they were sonnets, in that they ended open, their vastness the vastness of limitless vacancy. And yet, interestingly, the human world (insofar as it is represented as being in conflict with the self, or other than the self) is largely absent. For the world, we have memories, ghosts, signs, in which the poet sees a past or imminent self. The selflessness, the receptivity, which are, formally, the inventions of this art, are, if one reads closely, slightly tainted by an overriding impression of the autocratic or controlling. The poet lets in what allows his projections, or cannot impede them, but he calls this other.
No matter whose English version I read, I cannot rid myself of the impression, in “Requiem,” that this is neither a meditation on a specific human life nor a poem of mourning: I keep thinking it suits Rilke exactly that Paula Becker died; dead she is his creature, a mirror of, or adjunct of, the self. (By way of comparison, think of W. C. Williams’s English grandmother, all vigorous distinctness, a being plainly not the poet nor, for that matter, implicit in the reader.) Rilke doesn’t mean to be looking outward in this way. The present, with its huge cast of living creatures, was of limited use to his art. His subject was longing, his natural tone lament: he required those separations that precede or guarantee longing. And part of his genius was his perception of the way we transform what is at hand into something sufficiently remote, immaterial, to be re-created as the focus of longing. That the world is transient suffices; the present, treated in this manner, immediately becomes the past and the living other is, to a striking degree, erased in being memorialized.
When the poet says, in Stephen Mitchell’s translation, “if you are still here with me,” I cannot help but feel that Paula Becker is far more eagerly admitted into the poet’s soul dead than she would have been alive: alive she was volatile, unreliable, separate in her will. Nor am I persuaded by “in this one man I accuse: all men,” by the ready identification of the poet with the woman now conveniently absent. It is too easy to identify with what cannot, in behavior, repudiate identification. And when Rilke, in the famous lines, urges, “we need, in love, to practice only this: / letting each other go. For holding on / comes easily; we do not need to learn it,” I cannot help but believe that, for Rilke, letting go was in fact remarkably easy, that holding on, whatever might force engagement with the unmanageable other, was alien. Rilke tends to reserve his most passionate admiration for two states: death and childhood, in each case a mirror, an icon of purity, a blankness onto which the self can be projected. To the extent that self is formed in opposition to the world, the self disappears. The seduction of this poetry is in part that nothing is not the self. If Rilke’s aim is to divest himself of the earthly, the temporal, the aim of this desire is not, as in Eliot, union with a higher other (Eliot craves the immutable but there is in his work none of Rilke’s hungering after either death or childish innocence): the aim, in Rilke, seems to be reunion with a deeper self, and Rilke’s astonishing images (which survive in English, in all translations I have ever read) and his hypnotic music both offer metaphors for this reunion. Great art. But art in which the seeds of far more superficial reunions are visible. For me, Rilke is at his greatest in short forms that contain his rhapsodic yearnings; the longer poems, like “Requiem,” always seem oddly masturbatory, the poet constantly fanning himself into exaltations and excitements.
Rilke’s other major insight was the extent to which the present could be treated as a subject for elegy. The future had begun to disappear, and would continue—terrifyingly—to do so. The old postulates and images, both heaven and the ongoing physical earth, were giving way: erosion made a natural metaphor. Rilke saw, among other things, the ways in which erosion touched even the present, in that all figures for continuity and trajectory began to seem false. Looked at in the absence of a future, the present began to unravel. Rilke’s vocation for mourning (as a tonal gesture rather than as immediate human response) instinctively maps out a spiritual terrain never before visible or audible, never before necessary. He made an art that placed the self, actually or emblematically, at the center of lost time (the moment, the instant, just past); once the self is convincingly lost—as, by definition, it is in a present so elegized—it becomes the beloved. Airbrushed, a creation of the poet’s will.
Are there, objectively (if such a term is possible), benign and dangerous influences? If there are, I believe that good influences, or wholesome influences, generate variety and energy. Rilke’s genius, echoing in other minds, degenerates rapidly into mannerism, rue like Spanish moss hung over the landscape. His genius was tone: in the absence of what must be (since it survives in translation) lexical and tonal brilliance (matched, curiously, in English most closely by Dickinson), his luminous meditations become solipsistic hymns of preening disappointment. Whereas the poetry stimulated by Williams retains, even when conspicuously lesser, interest and substance.
We cannot choose our influences: these are rooted in those responses we cannot (and would not wish to) control. But we can recognize the grip of unproductive influence as we recognize dangerous seductions. And we can study those strategies that seem to discourage entrapment, specifically (in regard to narcissism) modesty, detachment, and humor.
It isn’t difficult to conceive of modesty as a check on narcissism. The poet represents his concerns as local, domestic, filled with the noises and distractions of actual life. The key is that these concerns are not immediately transformed into metaphors for large spiritual (or political) matters. Nor are they pretexts for philosophical meditations. When the occasion is a ruse or pretext, we know it instantly: we feel, instantly, the poet’s true agenda. The ostensible occasion is, therefore, doubly slighted, subordinated to what is held to be of larger import. Modesty is not the dutiful mention of the daily. If transformations of its plainspoken materials occur, they occur so subtly, so impermanently, we cannot be sure what has transpired. And, as a rule, they don’t occur at the poem’s end. The problem with true modesty is that it may remain forever in the realm of anecdote. If Jane Kenyon’s lesser poems suffer in this way, the body of her work provides rare examples of something else: steady interaction with the literal seems, to Kenyon, the source of insight. But insight does not permanently transfigure earth. The earth, and the poet, stay stubbornly accurate, still in the process of being formed. The speaker isn’t looking for reflection but for wisdom, which reposes in the outward. Because the world is never transformed, and because it consistently prompts vision, we are persuaded of both its reality and its necessity.
Kenyon’s passivity may derive from Rilke; her permeability, which is more genuine, does not. Rilke claims for himself the attributes of non-being, space flooded by impressions (hence the identification with the female). But in fact he monitors quite assiduously what floods in. Kenyon is less dramatic, not the site of a flood. Her world is small, anyone’s world: a dog, a garden. Friends coming and going, neighbors. And her husband, the events of life. Nor do the poems ever culminate in that tiresome Now I see of transfigured experience. If the dog and the garden are not changed permanently by perception, to what end, for what reason, are they watched so carefully? They are watched, I think, because for Kenyon they are all potentially teachers. Her modesty is the modesty of the good student, who sees how shortsighted it would be to cut herself off from resources. There is nothing here of the cloying sycophant. In this system, everything teaches, but not everyone is capable of learning.
Modesty checks narcissism by deflecting attention from the self. It has a native suspicion of the apocalyptic, a distaste for both the podium and the stage, all of which dispose it (tonally and literally) to the matter-of-fact. Detachment and humor operate in another way: though different in their advantages and effects, each works because each implicitly posits alternative, or conflicting, views.
Detachment splits the speaker from the self that acts in the world. Nor is self simply multiplied; the separation prompts debate. The acting self here is Everyman in the Darwinian sense: perverse, intent on domination or control. Or, alternatively, ruled by atavistic need. Detachment, by divorcing this self from the meditative speaker, diminishes the identification on which narcissism depends. That odd person doing those incomprehensible things is hardly the lucid person who speaks. I am thinking of C. K. Williams’s dazzling anatomies of jealousy. They are utterly remote from narcissism’s stupor not simply because they refuse self-love but because they refuse all fixed attitudes toward the self (systematic self-hatred is a familiar pole of narcissistic absorption). In Williams’s art, truth and beauty are displaced by a hunger to contain as many alternatives as possible. Opposites are not reconciled; the point is to entertain them simultaneously and, in so doing, comprehend increasingly complex realities. And the poems have more other hands than a Hindu god. It may be possible to say that for Williams it is not enough to be possessed—one must also be interested. Narcissus at the pond saw self-evident and sufficient fact: an image that stopped (or started) even his undeveloped heart. When tears blurred the image, he felt the terror of loss. The static has no place in Williams, nor does detachment permit narcissistic bonding. The self is too guileful, too contradictory, too mobile, to produce stable reflection.
Curiously, these contemporary methods of retaining focus on the self, or on the soul, while protecting against the dead-endedness of narcissism, often occur in pairs or trios—modesty does not obviate humor, nor does detachment. Mark Strand’s ironies, evident from the first, seem a species of detachment, but what has reliably checked his early taste for the static has been his developing humor. Meanwhile, imitations of his early work have swelled the archives of the narcissistic, imitations that manage to duplicate (to some extent) the wry, languid poses while entirely missing the poems’ intellectual subtlety. Strand seemed, on the surface, a breeze to copy: he has always played with poses (taunting the reader faintly), always sounded, as he chose, the limpid and stately chords of rue. But as his work has evolved, the humor incipient in the early poems (which imitation, in its zeal to simulate manner, largely overlooked) has developed into a wildly supple instrument. Who would have thought “wild” in connection with Strand? And yet, the sections of Dark Harbor turn on a dime, the ravishing/ecstatic displaced by the laugh-out-loud funny. Strand’s malicious tenderness is apparent in the early poetry, but so too are other dispositions. This is not to say he has turned himself into a comedian. The development of what is flexible in his work, as opposed to the reiterating of the stationary beautiful, has allowed him a range the early poems didn’t predict. He was, in the beginning, the quintessential poet of Rilkean lost time: always, tonally, his work suggested the regret of late middle age. In actual middle age, he has discovered a range of notes memorably wider.
Like detachment, humor divides perception. But detachment is entirely preoccupied with the self, bent on understanding the self: it recognizes that the outside world is perceived through a lens; its aim is to understand, as fully as possible, the manner in which a specific lens distorts; it wishes, likewise, to see the ways in which such distortion has impact on the world. The temperament of humor seems to me less specifically inquiring, more social (or worldly) than scientific. The split it presumes is the division between the self that feels and the world that interprets: it recognizes, in all transactions, the gap between individual sensation and appearance; it sees, for example, that its genuine suffering may look, from the outside, trivial. In its ability to postulate an outside, a reality larger than but not eclipsing the self, it generates vast tonal possibilities and, ideally, sophistication of insight. Its danger lies in its tendency to treat the no-longer-pivotal self as a static, marginal construct: it can, in heavy hands, by deliberately impoverishing the self, create worlds as stationary as Rilke’s. The great humorists never fail to see, and sympathize with, the soul’s longings and confusions: for humor to work as a great instrument, the earnest soul must adequately balance the easier-to-imitate appearance of its foolishness.
* * *
Narcissus staring into the water is paralyzed by passion and regret; like Rilke, he loves and mourns simultaneously. He is trying to love a temporal image as one would love an eternal image. Because he cannot move, he explores fairly quickly all the ramifications of his situation; he reaches the end of insight. Which has never stopped writers from writing.
Nor, in a way, should it. Henry James was among the first to note, and dramatize, the relation between American independence and American narrowness. It is a great inheritance, that independence: the presumption, the energy, the stubborn self-sufficiency—these are all tools any artist will need, over time. But the vanity that attends these gifts, the sense that no one else is necessary, that the self is of limitless interest, makes American writers particularly prone to any version of the narcissistic. Our journals are full of these poems, poems in which secrets are disclosed with athletic avidity, and now, more regularly, poems of ravishing perception, poems at once formulaic and incoherent: formulaic because all world event directly sponsors a net of associations and memories, in which the poet’s learning and humanity are offered up like prize essays in grade school; and incoherent because, though the poems go on at great length, the overall impression is that there is no plausible self generating them. This is not to argue that all poems must accumulate into a self-portrait, or an account of an emotional state. The problem of this art is that it lacks meaning, vision, direction. Which is to say, lacking self, it lacks context. And in the absence of context, fragments, no matter how independently beautiful, grow rapidly tedious: they do not automatically constitute an insight regarding the arbitrary.
The effect of such poems is that they disappear or evaporate, like the famous effect (benefit, in some sense) of a Japanese dinner. Except it is no benefit for the poem to disappear. A strange hopefulness communicates itself in this work, born of a profound despair, the hope that, in another mind if not one’s own, these images will indeed cohere, that a self will, in that other mind, materialize; the hope that if one has enough memories, enough responses, one exists. Rilke’s voids and vacuums are, as paradigms, seductive and misleading: always an agenda underlies them. But ours is a poetry in which narcissism achieves its most terrifying definition: it is not an extension of the self but a substitute for the self, as though the lifeless mirror had somehow survived the famished boy. Everything outside the self has become the self; the longer the gesture fails, the more determined the poet becomes. The world, in such poems, is like the image Narcissus gave his heart to. “The thing you are seeing does not exist,” Ovid tells him, “only turn aside and you will lose what you love.”
1998