Sylvia Plath – where the truth lies (6/7): truth and poetry (a)

Given that my examination of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land drags me into déjà vu in terms of modernist fragmentation and obscurity, it seemed appropriate to share again the following sequence about Sylvia Plath. 

Now for the most difficult task of all so far. When we look at Plath’s poetry through Hayden’s lens what do we eventually find?

In a journey of at least two stages, I’m starting with the poem that gave her posthumous collection its title.

Ariel

Ariel

Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.

God’s lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks—

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else

Hauls me through air—
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.

White
Godiva, I unpeel—
Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child’s cry

Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

Apart from the insensitive use of the ‘n’ word, what other problems does this poem present.

Well, for a start, until I realized that Ariel was the name of her horse, I had been struggling to make sense of the poem in terms of the character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Unsurprisingly I had made no progress whatsoever, as an analysis of the poem on the web acknowledges right from the start:

It is important to note a piece of background information before attempting to understand what this piece is about. In an interview after her death, Ted Hughes, Plath’s husband, explained that Ariel was the name of her horse. Without this information, understanding this poem is almost impossible.

Once that Beecher’s Brook has been successfully negotiated, a significant problem remains, at least for me. Is all the remaining interpretative effort sufficiently rewarded by the insights gained or experiences conveyed?

For me, I’m afraid the answer to that question is no. The obscurity created by the poem’s fragmented self-absorbed intensity seems disproportionate and simply not worth decoding. For me it carries all the signs of what Iain McGilchrist describes as being the bizarre distortions that one would expect to find when the left-hemisphere escapes the holistic influence of an impaired right-hemisphere. McGilchrist wrote[1] that:

. . . there is the confusing fact that taste in modern art is more receptive than usual to elements that are visuo-spatially bizarre or distorted, something far more likely after a right hemisphere stroke, and may even celebrate such elements as signs of ‘creativity’.

The illustrations he provides indicate a high degree of fragmentation. Is it possible that modernism’s preference for this kind of style is masking too many critics’ perception of other more troubling possible sources of fragmentation in Plath’s poetry, and leading instead to uncritical adulation?

Many have fought strongly to defend Plath against those who feel her mind was significantly unbalanced: I am reluctant to even begin to attempt to diagnose anyone at such a distance in time and place, but do feel that some of her late poetry is more symptomatic than creative, though of exactly what it is probably impossible to say with any degree of certainty.

McGilchrist  also contends that the evidence suggests that one of the predominant emotions of someone experiencing this hemispheric imbalance will be anger:[2] ‘Anger . . . is one of the most strongly lateralised of all emotions, and it lateralises to the left.’

An intensity of anger is something we need to move onto considering soon.

Why this poem?

Before doing so, perhaps I need to explain exactly why I am bringing this poem into the mix at this point or even at all?

First of all, because it is considered by some critics to be one of her greatest poems, it seemed worth testing out before tackling the main focus, Daddy. Perloff, for example, includes it in her list:

Very few of the poems in Crossing the Water have the oracular, transfiguring vision of Sylvia Plath’s best poems: “Ariel,” “Words,” “Little Fugue,” “Fever 103.”

More importantly, perhaps, is the sense it gives me of Plath’s tendency in her later poems, the ones that have received the highest accolades, to go to extremes for no good reason. I completely fail to find this poem ‘oracular’ or ‘transfiguring.’ In its attempts to convey a terrifying experience, it exploits fragmentation to an extreme that effectively denies the reader experiential access to the terror, in my case at least: its cryptic crossword complexity turns it into an armchair puzzle instead. This is not the rewarding challenge of solving for the sublime unknown, which the best poetry requires of us, as we explored last time.

Now Daddy

What happens when this dramatizing intensity is mobilised to convey her feelings about her father? The fragmentation is still there but to a far less disruptive degree, the level of intensity is about the same and the poem as a whole is far more easily intelligible, but a different problem seems to me to have taken precedence, something that her use in Ariel of the ‘n’ word may be hinting at.

It would be impossible to combine here a detailed examination of the poem along with a clear explanation of what many regard as its main deficiencies. I’ve posted a copy of the full poem prior to this post appearing (see link). Please check what I am about to convey against the content of the poem itself. As a brief assist in understanding what I am about to discuss, here are some of the problematic expressions she uses in the poem (with similar ones in other poems): you’ll need to check the context to get all the implications.

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
(lines 32-35)

I have always been scared of you
With your Luftwaffe . . .
(lines 41-42)

A man in black with a Meinkampf look
(line 65)

Even as references to or symbols of patriarchy at that post-war point in UK/US history when the poem was written, they seem excessive.

A relatively moderate take on Plath’s poetry can be found in Michael Hamburger’s The Truth of Poetry. In the context of Hughes’ ‘nature poems’ of the post Auschwitz, post Hiroshima era, Hamburger refers to[3] the instances of the ‘extremist art’ which A. Alvarez has found in the work of Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton,’ and explains[4]‘extremist art – and all art informed by an intense awareness is extremist in our time – need not take the form of personal confession, as in . . . Sylvia Plath’s Ariel.’

My go-to critic, as a frequent reference I use to any poet I need to check out, has a more negative take. Michael Schmidt states:[5]

Plath places at the control-panels of her art a treacherous instability licensed to do what it likes not only with language but with fact.

He feels that[6] ‘in the wake of Ariel . . . Her use of metaphors [is] so strong that they displace what they set out to define. . . . By means of such metaphors she seeks to generalise her experience, to step outside it, to render impersonal the (apparently) intensely personal. Yet it is hard to imagine a poetry more forcefully stamped with a personality and voice. . . It is the passionate love and anger we remember, so disproportionate that they adhere uniquely to the allegorical figures she has created of ‘him’ and of ‘herself’ . . .’

He concludes:[7]  ‘That is what the poems do, “act out the awful little allegory”, exorcise rather than confess,’ adding that:[8]‘When she uses Hiroshima and Dachau it is in part to borrow a horror, to increase the volume of her poem’ something he defends up to a point while admitting some find it offensive.

Elaine Feinstein flags up how negative the poem seems:[9]

. . . the sheer theatricality of the poem (‘Daddy’], and the throwaway, colloquial tone of many of the crucial lines, work against a sense of transcendence. These are poems which invoke the power to avenge.

She feels Plath took it too far:[10] ‘what she wrote exposed too much, both of her need and of her hatred.’ This had potentially damaging consequences. She refers to Holbrook quoting psychotherapists:[11] ‘they related how often they were fighting to enable a patient to go on living – when some cultural work was pushing them over the edge. Sylvia Plath’s poetry especially, they said, tended to do this.’

In the age of the internet we are very aware of how powerful and toxic communications can tip vulnerable people over the edge into serious self-harm or suicide. Plath’s impact suggests this has had a longer history than I realised. This also implies that the pointer her analysts gave Plath towards the demonisation of her parents may have reached beyond her own suicide.

Jonathan Bate is aware of the link:[12] ‘Daddy is a poem that yokes father and husband, under the influence of Sylvia’s psychoanalytic journey.’

In describing Al Alvarez’s comment in the Observer about Ariel, based on a BBC broadcast, Bate uses very strong terminology:[13]

. . . The poems written in her last months tapped the ‘roots of her own inner violence’ (‘violence’, that word which was so often applied to Ted’s work). ‘Poetry of this order’, he had ended a talk, ‘is a murderous art.’

Adding that:

. . . The first American edition appeared in the summer of 1966, with the forward in which Plath’s genius was hailed by no less a figure than Lowell himself. ‘Her art’s immortality is life’s disintegration,’ he wrote.

The link with her subsequent reputation is clear:[14] ‘It was this image [of her suicide] combined with the venom of Daddy that laid the ground for the cult of Plath, what Ted call the Sylvia Plath fantasia.’

Collecting these words together – ‘venom’, ‘disintegration’, ‘murderous art’, ‘violence’ ‘hatred’, ‘avenge’, ‘horror’ and ‘anger’ – make it impossible to deny that the cumulative effect of this and other poems is destructively negative, and, when tied to the element of disproportion, it begins to seem indefensible.

Anne Stevenson feels[15] that she is ‘adapting immediate experience to her self-destructive perspective.’

Her conclusions are worth quoting at some length:[16]

As absorbed and intent as a cartographer, Sylvia reported in her poems on the weather of her inner universe . . . her recent furies were transmuted . . becoming indistinguishable from her old buried rages that were now at last fully and freely available to her.

. . .  the voice is finally that of a revengeful, bitterly hurt child storming against a beloved parent.

. . . On ethical grounds only a desperate bid for life and psychic health can even begin to excuse this and several other of the Ariel poems . .

. . .  it is possible, of course, that in some strange way Sylvia couldn’t imagine the targets of such poems as being harmed or hurt by them or that she thought the confessional mode commanded understanding on a different level from mere real-life human relationships, but if this was her a view it was clearly mistaken: such poems have caused enormous pain to the innocent victims of her pen.

Not everyone is so damning though.

In her attempt to defend Plath’s use of holocaust imagery Jacqueline Rose cites the conclusions of her critics as a matter of necessity. Referring to ‘Plath’s failure to recognise the “incommensurability of her experience of what took place she goes on to write:[17]

Joyce Carol Oates objects to Plath ‘snatching . . . metaphors for her predicament from the newspaper headlines’; Seamus Heaney argues that in poems like ‘Lady Lazarus’, Plath harnesses the wider cultural reference to a ‘vehemently self-justifying purpose’; Irving Howe describes the link as ‘monstrous, utterly disproportionate’; and Marjorie Perloff describe Plath’s references to the Nazis as ‘empty’ and ‘histrionic’, ‘cheap shots’, ‘topical trappings’, ‘devices’ which ‘camouflage’ the true personal meaning of the poems in which they appear.

Rose, in her defence of Plath, seems to equate some higher cultural standard, against which she feels Plath is being unfairly measured, with a patriarchal orthodoxy, and may be correct under some circumstances. However, this seems no justification for manufacturing a standard that makes all ‘subliminal uprush’, no matter how extreme and chaotic, equal to great art. Nor can we dismiss from the necessary mix counter balancing positives such as spirituality either. More on that later.

As part of her psychoanalytically-based defence of the poem[18] she quotes George Steiner’s praise of it as the ‘Guernica of modern poetry,’ claiming that ‘perhaps it is only those who had no part in the events who can focus on them rationally and imaginatively.’ Given my unqualified admiration of Picasso’s masterpiece, this seems grossly misplaced. Picasso is giving powerful expression to the grief and horror experienced in response to an atrocity, not misappropriating a crime against humanity to give vent to an histrionically exaggerated sense of personal injury.

Later Rose goes on to assert[19] that the argument that Plath ‘simply uses the Holocaust to aggrandise her personal difficulties seems completely beside the point. Who can say that these were not difficulties which she experienced in her very person?’ Given what we know to be the facts of her childhood, for example that her father, whatever his faults, did not abandon her but died of late-treated diabetes when she was eight years old, what Plath writes is clearly and unarguably a self-serving escalation of the truth. In my view, in the final analysis, Rose’s defence simply does not work.

It seems therefore clear to me that Daddy cannot be a poem leading us to a higher level of understanding of objective reality, or truth we might term it. It simply does not bear comparison with the best of Emily Dickinson, no matter what her husband thought (see link for an example of her poetry, describing a dark experience in a far more effective fashion). It’s only possible justification is that it might succeed in effectively conveying her intensely subjective state of mind. Does that make it a great poem, in effect the ‘Guernica of modern poetry’?

Or is the legacy of Plath a post-modern nightmare where there is no ‘truth’ to discover, just a clash of different but supposedly equally valuable meanings, some of which her poetry powerfully reproduces?

This is where we need to take use Hatcher’s perspective on Hayden’s poetry as a lens to evaluate Plath’s oeuvre.

More of that next time.

References:

[1]. The Matter with Things – page 261.
[2]. Op. cit. – page 197.
[3]. The Truth of Poetry – page 282.
[4]. Op. cit. – page 290.
[5]. Lives of the Poets – page 793.
[6]. Op. cit. – page 796.
[7]. Op. cit. – page 797.
[8]. Op. cit. – page 799.
[9]. Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet – page 133).
[10]. Op. cit. – page 146.
[11]. Op. cit. – page 185.
[12]. Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – page 189.
[13]. Op. cit. – page 239.
[14]. Op. cit. – page 240.
[15]. Bitter Fame – page 244.
[16]. Op. cit. – pages 262-66.
[17]. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath  — page 206.
[18]. Op. cit – page 214.
[19]. Op. cit. – page 229.

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