A Poetics of "Nobody In Particular"

    According to Jonathan Lamb, the eighteenth century novel unified two representations of the subject: “the idea and function of the person,” one who is “always in a provisional state of being”’—“a subjunctive mode of self-identification”—and a figure with at least one shred of empirical connective tissue; a thing that is “neither a character nor a person, nor yet quite a nobody.”  (274) Fictional subjectivity of the novel, says Lamb, arose when the onset of rights discourse was synchronic with modern fiction.  Out of this synchrony emerged “strange alliances… [between] politics, property, and poetics.” (274)  Accordingly, person construction in the novel and “the radically new poetics of the subject and the state” engaged in a kind of symbiosis during the eighteenth century.  In reflecting upon this relationship, I want to pose the possibility that Lamb’s argument offers an entry point for thinking about poetry. That a poetics of identity in politics found its way into the aesthetics of 18^th century fiction, raises the question of how a referent of provisional becoming moves from some domain outside of poetry into the poem.

     The speaker of John Berryman's Dream Songs holds clear ties to real events experienced by the author and the eternally returning and developing figure of "Henry"who appears to share a strange space with the speaker's identity.  Clearly, the speaker of a confessional poem might be better thought of as a person than a character. For other kinds poetry, however, character—“a nobody in particular”—might serve as a more appropriate figure for the speaker.  Insofar as characterization, according to Catherine Gallagher and Deidre Lynch, can free up “the Cartesian unity of the self…and the experimental basis of knowledge,” perhaps poetry, when freed “from this kind of referentiality,” can and does “[strike] out on its own, exploiting a set of generic possibilities that enlarge the diversity of character by way of imaginative virtuosity, not empirical knowledge.” (273)  I suggest that Ben Lerner’s Mean Free Path performs this operation.  

   Lerner's speaker enjoys a kind of disembodied agency; a schizophrenia that works both for and against one supposed goal of the text--to make "a little path for Ari;" something "composed entirely of edges." (42)   For example:

The ode just visible beneath the elegy
The preemptive elegy composed entirely
This movement from the ground to cloud
Of waves decaying slowly on plucked strings
Is lightning.  I don't know how else to say it
I mean without writing.  Maybe if you let
The false starts stand, stand in for symbols
Near collapse, or let collapsing symbolize
The little clearing loving is.  Maybe then

    A distributed thing, the speaker shatters into fragments jutting at various angles.  Instead of unifying the concept of a "preemptive elegy" being "composed entirely.../of waves  decaying slowly on plucked strings"  we have another thought interposed: "This movement from ground to cloud."  This thought, however, is also interrupted before it can finish with "Is lighting."  The speaker divides into many.  As such, he or she fails to meet a necessary condition for personhood--unification of the subject. Unity of the "I," provides the person's boundaries for becoming.  The split personality, however, is a divided subject--two persons sharing a body.  If a person, as such, depends on unity, does a character also depend it?  Insofar as characters can be "creatures and things as well as invented stories of named but non-existent human beings," they need not follow same existential conditions of personhood.  But does it follow that nothing prevents a character from being massively distributed?  What about the weather, emotions, and atmosphere?--all have characterological roles in a variety of narratives.   Mean Free Path, then, raises an important question:  How stands the gap between the one and the multiple?