Covert narrativity in contemporary poetry: English and German examples

1. Paul Celan: “Corona” (1952)

Paul Celan’s poetry is known for its hermetic and fractured ductus and the elusiveness of its meaning. But in spite of this general impression, some of his poems, especially in his early phase, as the following example demonstrates, can be shown to employ narrative elements to organise the sequence of the poetic utterance.

Corona

1. Aus der Hand frißt der Herbst mir sein Blatt: wir sind Freunde.

2. Wir schälen die Zeit aus den Nüssen und lehren sie gehn:

3. die Zeit kehrt zurück in die Schale.

4. Im Spiegel ist Sonntag,

5. im Traum wird geschlafen,

6. der Mund redet wahr.

7. Mein Aug steigt hinab zum Geschlecht der Geliebten:

8. wir sehen uns an,

9. wir sagen uns Dunkles,

10. wir lieben einander wie Mohn und Gedächtnis,

11. wir schlafen wie Wein in den Muscheln,

12. wie das Meer im Blutstrahl des Mondes.

13. Wir stehen umschlungen im Fenster, sie sehen uns zu von der Straße:

14. es ist Zeit, daß man weiß!

15. Es ist Zeit, daß der Stein sich zu blühen bequemt,

16. daß der Unrast ein Herz schlägt.

17. Es ist Zeit, daß es Zeit wird.

18. Es ist Zeit. (Celan 2000: 37)^[5]

Corona

1. Autumn eats its leaf from my hand: we are friends.

2. We peel time from the nuts and teach it to walk:

3. time returns to the shell.

4. In the mirror it is Sunday,

5. in the dream there is sleep,

6. the mouth speaks true.

7. My eye descends to the sex of the beloved:

8. we look at each other,

9. we say dark things to each other,

10. we love one another like poppy and memory,

11. we sleep like wine in the shells,

12. like the sea in the moon's jet of blood.

13. We stand embraced in the window, they watch us from the street:

14. it is time to know!

15. It is time for the stone to blossom,

16. that a heart beats for the restlessness.

17. It is time that it becomes time.

18. It is time.^[6]

The main theme of “Corona”, inherent in most expressions, in most individual textual spans and their concatenation throughout the poem, is change. The term “Zeit” [“time”] is used as the abstract designation of the phenomenon of progression in several places. The various text spans in the poem indicating change are – often incongruously – connected and combined with other expressions and thus partly hidden or submerged.

In the first section, lines 1–3, change as the general (natural) manifestation of time, is introduced in the thematic context of seasonal and vegetational development: “Herbst” [“autumn”] and “Nüsse” [“nuts”] point to the progression of the vegetation in the course of the year. In being part of this development, the speaker personally experiences the general phenomenon of change – as the expression “wir sind Freunde” [“we are friends”] and the plural pronoun “wir” [“we”] emphasise. In other words, through the ripening of nuts the speaker perceives change, the general phenomenon of time, in himself as fruition: “Wir schälen die Zeit aus den Nüssen und lehren sie gehn” [“We peel time from the nuts and teach it to walk”]. Time appears here as a forward movement. The next line reverses the direction: “Die Zeit kehrt zurück in die Schale” [“time returns to the shell”]. The phenomenon of change is thus generally thematised in two directions: as progression (forward) and as regression (backward) or, in terms of human consciousness, as ongoing experience and as recollection and memory. Thus, the poem starts with stating the topic of change in very general, abstract terms.

The next three lines then view change in three different contexts: in the sequence of the week – Sunday as the concluding seventh day (line 4); in the sequence of the day – sleep as the act of rest and recreation after a day’s work (line 5); in the process of communication – what happened is afterwards truthfully reported (line 6). In each case the emphasis is on the eventful conclusion of a change, an event of sorts. All three particular types of change are partly obfuscated by the combination with heterogeneous terms such as “im Spiegel” [“in the mirror”, line 4] or “im Traum” [“in the dream”, line 5]. This phrase indicates a contortion of the phenomenon: Dreams occur in sleep and not sleep in dreams.

In both sections the various forms of change are presented as a general or pervasive phenomenon of human experience. And the emphasis is throughout on the positive development of change – fruition, regeneration, completion, conclusion. Positive evaluation also underlies the development described in the central six lines, a love experience (line 7–12), which form the exact centre of the poem, prepared for by the initial two three-line sections (lines 1–3 and 4–6) and concluded by the final six lines, mainly about time in general (lines 13–18). The central sequence openly traces the development of a love story, from the speaker’s initiating perception of the beloved (in her sexual quality, line 7) via the mutual act of love making (line 10) to the lovers’ subsequent sleep (lines 11–12), a personal joint experience as stressed by the repetition of the plural pronoun “wir” [“we”]. The temporal dimension of this experience, the quality as a process of change, is emphasised by several comparisons, by similes all introduced with “wie” [“like”, lines 10, 11, 12]. These comparisons seem to highlight the two contrary aspects of the love experience – the reassuringly emphatic, intoxicating quality (“Wein”, “Muscheln” [“wine”, “shells”]) and the painfully transient quality (“Blutstrahl des Mondes” [“moon’s jet of blood”]; the moon traditionally signifying changeability). The crucial description of the love experience as such is compared to “Mohn und Gedächtnis” [“poppy and memory”], two terms which apparently take up again the two directions of change as presented in lines 2 and 3, respectively: the forward and the backword movement. “Mohn” can be taken to refer to the intoxicating, rapturous experience of love as an ongoing process, whereas “Gedächtnis” indicates the backward movement, the mental recovery and retention of what went before, the later recollection of this experience. “Mohn” taken by itself does not specifically refer to living forward, but the conjunction with, and opposition to “memory” activates this directional force. These two (temporal) aspects of experience can be considered generally central to the phenomenon of change, and for that reason they are used by Celan as the title of the entire collection in which “Corona” was originally published: Mohn und Gedächtnis (1952).

The last part of the poem again widens the perspective, from the particular love experience to the general phenomenon of change, which is apparent in the generalising literal reference, as in the first part of the poem, to “Zeit” [“time”]. The first line of this section (line 13) shifts the perspective from the inside to the outside of love: “wir stehen umschlungen im Fenster” – “sie sehen uns zu von der Straße” [“We stand embraced in the window, they watch us from the street”]. The subsequent lines repeatedly demand a positive conclusive development in increasingly general (metaphorical) terms: knowledge (“daß man weiß” [“to know”], line 14), blossoming (“sich zu blühen bequemt” [“to blossom”], line 15), coming to life (“ein Herz schlägt” [“a heart beats”], line 16), reaching a desired conclusion (“es Zeit wird” [“it becomes time”], line 17) and, finally, having at last reached this end (“Es ist Zeit” [“it is time”], line 18). In each case the shift constitutes a conclusion, an event.

In so far as individual text spans as well as their concatenation refer to forms and stages of change, they may be termed rudimentary or condensed narratives. Narrative text spans in this sense occur in various types, arrangements and combinations: as statement and reversal (lines 1–3), as repetition and variation (lines 4–6, 14–18) and centrally as concatenation of variations (lines 7–13). Narrativity thus covertly informs the poem in its various parts. The central narrative is the personal love story, which is introduced and concluded by more abstract and more general brief narrative text spans. All of them have a positive direction, stressing completion and gratification. Thus, the basic motivation of narrativity in Celan’s poem can be called ethical in the general sense^[7] that the implied narrative development endorses a specific positive human value, the desire for fulfilment and fruition. This value is reflected also in the poem’s title “Corona” – traditionally, a crown is offered as a final eventful reward and sign of veneration, the public recognition of an achievement or of an elevated high status (such as a king, a victor, a revered poet).

To sum up the status and function of covert narrativity in Celan’s poem: certain signals in the cryptic, seemingly incoherent text (especially repeated references to “time”) invite the reader to perceive and extract connotative indications of change of state and narrativity in images, metaphors, compact phrases and sentences by tapping into familiar cognitive narrative scripts such as fruition, recollection and love-making. Such interpretative operations will enable the reader to actively uncover and establish the underlying semantic coherence of the text. The uncovering and clear perception of narrativity in recourse to those central narrative scripts finally result in a cognitive insight – an effect which is already predicted within the poem: “es ist Zeit, daß man weiß!” ([“it is time to know!”], line 14).

2. Simon Armitage: “The Making of the English Landscape” (2012)

In many of his poems Armitage employs narrative in a more or less recognisable, if elaborate manner. But sometimes, as in the following example, narrativity, though still evoked, is radically reduced or seemingly denied. While poems usually, like Celan’s “Corona”, focus on the position and perspective of an individual and present narratives of dealing with and overcoming personal problems, “The Making of the English Landscape” concerns a human collective, the state of the nation as a whole, its historical origins and its present state.

The Making of the English Landscape

1. It’s too late now to start collecting football shirts,

2. bringing them back from trips abroad as souvenirs:

3. the sun-struck God-given green and gold of Brazil;

4. Germany’s bold no-nonsense trademark monochrome;

5. the loud red of ‘emerging nation’ South Korea;

6. then hanging them framed, arms folded cross the chest

7. to show off the collars and cuffs and the piped sleeves

8. and the proud badges, shield-shaped, worn on the left breast,

9. embroidered with flags or mottos or mythical beasts.

10. So I’ll turn instead to matters closer to home,

11. to these charters, maps and aerial photographs

12. of double ditches and heaped walls and lynchet banks,

13. of sheep trails still visible below city parks,

14. of drove roads contradicting four-lane motorways,

15. of super-farms underwritten by patchwork fields,

16. of capped wells, earthworks, middens and burial mounds,

17. of skeleton seen through the flesh, an embedded

18. watermarked view of when we were nothing and few.

19. And from outer space this latest satellite image

20. taken just moments ago shows England at dusk,

21. its rivers cascading beyond its coast, the land

22. like a shipwreck’s carcass raised on a sea-crane’s hook,

23. nothing but keel, beams, spars, down to its bare bones. (Armitage 2017: 33)^[8]

The title announces the historical and geological or geographical formation of the English landscape, a change of state which implies a narrative development of sorts. The use of the word “making” emphasises the human contribution to this development. The body of the poem is then made up of three successive sub-sequences or extensive text spans, supposedly different approaches to describing the shaping of the landscape. The logical interconnection of these sub-sequences as equivalent narratives is made explicit at the beginning of each: The first sub-sequence (lines 1–9) is introduced by “it is too late now to start [...]” (line 1), the second (lines 10–18) by offering an alternative to this beginning: “So I’ll turn instead [...]” (line 10) and the third (lines 19–23) by concluding the enumeration as a continuation, by different means, of the second sequence: “And from outer space this latest satellite image / taken just moments ago shows England [...]” (lines 19–20).

But looked at more closely, the logical equivalence of the three sections as purportedly alternative narratives about the formation of the English landscape is undermined. This goes most blatantly for the first section, which in several respects disappoints the expectation of such a narrative. The story about collecting and bringing home foreign national football shirts and subsequently wearing them in a particular manner does not refer to the English landscape at all. In addition, the phrase “too late now” (line 1) indicates that even such a narrative is no longer possible: The reference to the habit of collecting national football shirts is an instance of disnarration,^[9] that is, an instance of narrating what does not happen. However, the introductory phrase in the second sub-sequence – “matters closer home” (10) – stresses that the focus now turns from collectors’ interest in foreign items (badges) to a national perspective: from foreign matters (foreign football shirts) to domestic, national matters – the spatial dimension of England as a nation. Thus, the basic point in the progression of the utterance from the first to the second sub-sequence is the shift of focus from a foreign to a national concern together with a shift from a non-narrative to an expected narrative.

The second sub-sequence then does indeed consist of a narrative enumeration of the traces of former features of the landscape of England, which in some cases are still visible beneath or behind the present shapes on maps and in aerial photographs. At the end of this section the focus briefly shifts from the landscape to the state of the people in the remote past: “when we were nothing and few” (line 18), implying the growth of the population since and the formation of the nation, with a slightly negative undertone.

The third sub-sequence increases the distance – the vantage point of the view – from “aerial photographs” (line 11) to “this latest satellite image” (line 19). Instead of referring to numerous details of the landmass as before, the speaker now captures the situation of the island comprehensively in two ways: describing the draining of rivers into the sea as a cascade (line 22) and visualising the appearance of the landscape by a simile: “like a shipwreck’s carcass” (line 22). Both images stress less the “making” of the landscape than its unmaking and disintegration, sounding a negative note, which continues the depreciation at the end of the second sub-sequence. This negative note becomes still more apparent when one takes into consideration that the title of the poem (and the descriptions in the second sub-sequence) is a literal and ironic allusion to the famous and popular book The Making of the English Landscape by the local historian William George Hoskins, first published in 1954 and frequently reprinted since, a grandly emotive homage to glorious old England.^[10]

So the implicitly narrative structuring of the utterance is highly ambiguous and multi-layered. At the outset, the title comprehensively announces the geographical history of England as the overall design of the poem, an expectation which is then surreptitiously disappointed in two respects and in two places. The initial section is the most obvious denial of such a narrative: it is indeed narrative in its presentation (if in the mode of disnarrating) but can in no way be construed as referring either to England or to landscape at all. What follows in the middle section is clearly a narrative of the formation of the English landscape, but the sequel in the third sub-sequence tends to emphasise not so much the making as the unmaking of the English landscape. These three diverse narratives in their sequence constitute a narrative progression of sorts on a higher level, the succession of three images of England. Ultimately, the function of the narrative design of the story told in this poem is ethical in the sense that the value of the nation’s stable and prosperous happy state is at question. As against the positive nostalgic evaluation of England in Hoskins’s book, Armitage’s poem shows a negative development, a process of dissipation and dissolution.

Furthermore, the mode of compact narrative progression is combined with one other (non-narrative) device of organising a sequence: repeated variation and enumeration of variants. This device is employed both in the first and, especially, in the second sub-sequence: the different national badges and the various details of the changing landscape. Such a mode of sequentialisation does not consist in the temporal (narrative) succession of elements, of changes of state, but rather in the (non-progressive) enumeration or collocation of equivalent items. This device functions as a local counter-force to narrative progression: by repeating similar items, movement and change are shifted from the syntagmatic to the paradigmatic axis, from the temporal to the spatial dimension.

To sum up: Armitage’s poem appears to be more openly narrative than Celan’s, since the title explicitly announces a particular narrative as its topic. But in the course of the text narrativity is then undermined and made ambivalent in two dimensions. On the one hand, the national narrative as announced by the title is deployed in the succession of three different and partly even incongruous sequences, of which the first neither refers to the nation at all nor constitutes a narrative in itself, the second in fact evokes a familiar positive narrative script, which in the third, however, is replaced with a negative counter-script. On the other hand, narrativity is reduced and obscured by interacting with the juxtaposition and enumeration of non-narrative, equivalent and collocative elements.

3 Glyn Maxwell: “The Byelaws” (2013)

Maxwell tends to complicate the organisation of his poems extensively by evoking and at the same time revoking, undermining, submerging or even denying narrativity and playing with it. The thematic frame of a great many of his poems is love, the emergence and the difficult continuation of a love-relationship. The treatment of love (in poetry) is almost necessarily narrative, inasmuch as it is concerned with the origin, the growth, the experience and the decline of a love relationship.

“The Byelaws” employs a playful and teasing approach to the presentation of love. The speaker sets out both to initiate and to define what is obviously meant to grow into an intimate relationship between himself and another person. This presumptive love-story is presented in the form of a continuous chain of short narrative text spans, which in their succession make up the entire poem. In this manner the speaker addresses his potential or desired beloved, presumably a woman, with a string of imperatives requesting her to behave in a specific way. In this manner, he intends to shape in advance their love relationship. The individual acts he commands her to perform constitute fragmentary components, brief episodes of their projected, future love story, thereby constituting a kind of prospective narrative.

The Byelaws

1. Never have met me, know me well,

2. tell all the world there was little to tell,

3. say I was heavenly, say I was hell,

4. harry me over the blasted moors

5. but come my way, go yours.

6. Never have touched me, take me apart,

7. trundle me through my town in a cart,

8. figure me out with the aid of a chart,

9. finally add to the feeble applause

10. and come my way, go yours.

11. Never have read me, look at me now,

12. get why I’m doing it, don’t get how,

13. other way round, have a rest, have a row,

14. have skirmishes with me, have wars,

15. O come my way, go yours.

16. Never have left me, never come back,’

17. mourn me in miniskirts, date me in black,

18. undress as I dress, when I unpack pack

19. yet pause for eternity on all fours

20. to come my way, go yours.

21. Never have met me, never do,

22. never be mine, never even be you,

23. approach from a point it’s impossible to

24. at a time you don’t have, and by these byelaws

25. come my way, go yours. (Maxwell 2013: 13)

The first line – “Never have met me, know me well” – appears to initiate a love relationship: having not met him before, the potential beloved is now told to know him thoroughly. The speaker then proceeds to sketch out the nature, the direction and the development of this relationship by naming heterogeneous fragmentary acts to be performed by the beloved. The last line of the first stanza as well as that of all other stanzas – “come my way, go yours” – summarily refers both to his and to her intentions, desires and habits or, more precisely, juxtaposes her (desired) acquiescence to his desires (“my way”) and her pursuance of her own (“your way”). The juxtaposition and succession of these two demands is ambiguous: It can be understood as postulating the compatibility, harmony and congruence of their respective personalities and desires: by coming to him she is to follow her own motives, under the presupposition that their desires will coincide. But this juxtaposition can also (and, presumably, more likely) be understood as indicating the essential discrepancy between their individual inclinations. In the penultimate line of the poem this mutual principle is declared to be their “byelaws” (line 24), i. e., the specific norm and principle under which the two of them exist and under which they may come together.

The imperatives in the rest of the first stanza and likewise in the first four lines of all other stanzas are highly heterogeneous. But instead of adumbrating compatibility, congruity, and harmony, these terms point to the opposite: divergence, incompatibility and quarrel. These disparities occur already in the first stanza: the initial demand to tell the world nothing about the speaker (line 2) is contradicted by the subsequent advice to divulge the speaker’s contradictory character of heavenly and hellish traits (line 3), followed by the request to expel him to “the blasted moors”, into the wilderness, as a consequence (line 4). The discrepancies change in nature and degree from stanza to stanza. In the second stanza the request to destroy or expose him (“take apart”, “trundle me”, lines 6–7) is weakly balanced by understanding (“figure me out with the aid of a chart”, line 8) and “feeble applause” (line 9). In the third stanza the renewed request to understand him (“look at me”, “get why I’m doing it”, “have a rest”, lines 11–13) is contradicted by aggression, by having a “row”, “skirmishes”, and “wars” (lines 13–14). This is followed in the fourth stanza by the contradiction of self-contradictions: “never have left” vs “never come back” (line 16), “mourn [...] in miniskirts” vs “date [...] in black” (line 17), and by directly opposed behaviour: “undress” vs “dress” (line 18), “unpack” vs “pack” (line 18) as well as “pause” vs “eternity” (line 19). The fifth stanza is even more radical and definitive in indicating discrepancy between them: “never have met me” vs “never do” (line 21), “never be mine” vs “never even be you” (line 22), “approach” vs “it’s impossible” (line 23), “at a time” vs “you don’t have” (line 24).

This inherent duplicity and opposition between them in their future relationship is reflected in the metrical structure of the individual lines of the poem: each line is syntactically divided into two parts. But this pervasive audible two-tact rhythm creates a musical flow, which is corroborated by repetitions throughout the poem: the beginning of the first lines of all stanzas with “never”, the identical concluding refrains of all stanzas as well as the rhyming schemes: The first three lines of each stanza are connected by rhymes which change from stanza to stanza, while the rhymes of the last two lines of each stanza run through the entire poem. The poem thus presents a light-hearted, conspicuously musical performance, assisted by the playful, witty, ironic note in some of the expressions, such as “mourn me in miniskirts, date me in black” (line 17).

In this manner the poem envisages a narrative of a personal relationship, as desired or to be initiated, and it does so by enumerating – in a continuous string of short narrative text spans – fragmentary bits, acts or phases, which in spite of their internal discrepancies can be combined to constitute a developing love story of sorts. The development of this love narrative is apparently motivated by a strong desire on the part of the speaker and the narrative can therefore, as in the case of Celan’s poem, be called ethical. The shape of this love story is ambiguous. On the one hand, the string of fragmentary disparities can be taken to suggest that the story of their relationship will consist of continuous quarrels and disagreements. On the other, this may be understood to indicate that in spite of temporary disagreements, quarrels and discrepancies, the overarching attitudes in their future lives, in their love for each other, will be mutuality, compatibility and unity. In other words: they belong together and are essentially oriented towards each other, in spite of intermittent phases of antagonism.

The string of these coupled contradictory or discrepant imperatives does not seem to undergo any progressive change in the course of the utterance. But at the very end, in the last stanza, a cognitive shift occurs in that the principle of the lovers’ mutual affinity and opposition is finally conceptualised as “these byelaws”, a term which also provides the title of the poem – that is, these oppositions constitute the very condition of their belonging to each other, the law of their mutual love for one another. This abstract recognition functions as a kind of insight, an eventful cognitive shift in the narrative presentation of their future love relationship.

To sum up: the poem lays out a string of contradictory minimal narrative units for readers to construct one extensive complex narrative sequence. The internal complexity of this envisaged love narrative is created by the combination of narrative progression, as implied in each minimal unit, with the continuous proliferation of variations of this minimal unit. The love story is both projected and hidden by this interaction between narrative and non-narrative elements.

4 Conclusion

The analyses of the poems by Paul Celan, Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell have demonstrated in detail the twofold function of covert narrativity. On the one hand, narrativity is pervasively as well as diversely employed to structure the sequentiality of the poems, to organise and shape the dynamic progression of the poetic utterance. Narrative text spans occur on various levels and in various concatenations, and their operation is to various degrees combined with or covered by other elements or materials. Differences concern, on the one hand, the motivation and, on the other, the complexity of narrativity. As to narrative motivation, in all three poems narrativity, in the development of human states of affairs and the sequence of human acts, are guided by ethical motives, by positive human values: love and desire for gratification in Celan’s and in Maxwell’s treatment of the love theme as well as stability and preservation in Armitage’s narrative about the state of the nation. As to the complexity of narrative, all three poets problematise and obfuscate the trajectory of the narrative by blending or linking various (heterogeneous) schemata. In these three examples narrativity shapes the progress of the poetic utterance in a covert manner, employing a wide spectrum of forms. In all cases an eventful shift in the course of the development is implied. The covertness of such narrativity, on the other hand, functions as a barrier to the spontaneous, easy consumption of the text and may – or is meant to – induce readers to actively puzzle out the underlying connections and intensively interact with the text to create for themselves the meaning of the poem.