Misdirection & Excess in Ginsberg, Larkin, and Berryman
by Matt Stoltz, 2005
Contemporary comic poetry draws on certain strategies in order to achieve some of its effects, two of which can be described as misdirection and excess. Among those contemporary poets who employ these strategies are Ginsberg, Larkin, and Berryman. The aim of this discussion will be to explore the different ways in which these three poets use misdirection and/or excess in their work. However, before I start I want to foreground the discussion with two conceptually helpful Greek gods, Eiron and Alazon, who have come to personify these strategies in our class. Eiron personifies the ironical man who downplays himself and pretends to be less than what he is, while Alazon personifies the blustering fool who makes himself out to be more than that which he truly is. I will at times refer to these figures as a way in which to describe certain moments in each of the poets work.
Ginsberg's Howl is a good place to find this strategy of excess. One of the more interesting qualities of the poem is the speed at which the language presents itself. It would prove to be a great injustice if read slowly, but if read at the painfully frantic speed of a bizarre kind of howl the poem's strategy should register as containing this quality of excess. Consider the following excerpt:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night...
Clearly the language is moving rapidly here, almost as if it were one continual breath. Not only does the speed of the language mark this quality of excess but so does the content. One of Ginsberg's subjects in Howl is American culture, and more specifically he shows a deep concern for its well being. For Ginsberg, America's culture is not healthy but is 'starving hysterical naked' and desperately searching, it would seem, for some kind of 'ancient heavenly connection' or spiritual/quasi-religious comfort, idol, etc. Well, a culture's health is an enormous subject and if Ginsberg aims at providing some of this comfort himself (and I suspect he does) then that becomes a huge project, yet what greater strategy to employ than an excessive Alazon voice that can freely probe and experiment with such a subject. One of the most liberating products of this strategy, as I see it, is that it allows the speaker to stick his neck out and become a fool. An important question emerging from this is: what is lost and what is gained from this strategy? Perhaps the author forfeits some of his legitimacy (by playing the fool), but that seems wholly necessary in order to approach such a large subject. By legitimacy I am talking about to what extent a reader can take this voice, or at least what it says, seriously. That is not to say that we come away unmoved by the speaker, for this is certainly not the case. In effect, the voice strikes us as frantic, tortured, and mad ultimately disturbing us and perhaps making us sympathize by wanting to reach out and help the howling voice. In the end, I think what is gained far outweighs what is lost because Ginsberg still manages to arrest our attention and we will at least continue to listen to whatever this Alazon-like voice has to say. To offer a sense of the Alazon figure in the poet himself, Ginsberg was asked in an interview 'Do you feel you're in command when you're writing?' And his response was, "No [I feel] a sense of being self-prophetic master of the universe." Ginsberg's response contains the nature of this idea of excess because he makes himself out to be quite a bit more than he actually is.
Larkin's poetry represents more so than Ginsberg's that strategy in comic poetry we have been calling misdirection. Some of Larkin's poems clearly illustrate how the author takes us one way and then causes us to somehow pivot, leading us in an altogether different direction. It is difficult to select just a couple moments in Larkin's work where he employs this strategy of misdirection because it is so often the case. Nevertheless, I will begin with a poem from The Whitsun Weddings called "Water" where the strategy is hard to miss. In it the speaker creates a hypothetical scenario that is initially presented in kind of a jocular vein, but by the end we sense how fully invested, emotionally and intellectually, the speaker is in this thought experiment and it transforms into something other than humorous.
If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.
Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;
My liturgy would employ
Images of sousing,
A Furious devout drench,
And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.
Notice how capricious the proposition of the first stanza is. Who in their right mind thinks that people get 'called in to construct a religion?' Moreover, even if one did, making use of water is certainly not the most authentic starting point. So the first stanza immediately puts the reader into a certain kind of conceptual space where we perhaps question the speaker's sincerity. Larkin's move here seems to be very closely allied with the Eiron figure who by downplaying himself opens up the possibility for misdirection to occur, and misdirection does gradually occur. As the poem develops, the first stanza matters less and less because we grow with the speaker, as if his idea becomes ours too, and this might be one of the vital qualities of misdirection. By this I mean, in order for this strategy to work it would seem that a reader must grow with the speaker, must walk where he walks, or must think what he thinks so that when the pivot or turn does occur a reader can feel it. Misdirection becomes most obvious in the last stanza because we recognize that the speaker is not going to take off the mask that we might have imagined him to be wearing in the first stanza. It is as if we are waiting for that pivot to occur and never does, at least not in the way we might have imagined it. In effect, I find this oddly to be a kind of misdirection in itself, when we expect the speaker's thoughts to pivot and they never do is precisely the moment in which we have been mislead. We discover that perhaps the speaker desperately wants this thought to become a reality, and we end up in a different conceptual space than where we began the poem. At this point, who care's if the speaker's proposition is capricious? By the end, we feel how the speaker truly wants this to happen and we become, to a certain extent, just as invested in the idea. In fact, I almost feel bad for laughing at or questioning the sincerity of the first stanza once I get to that final stanza.
As you can see, the strategies used by Larkin and Ginsberg appear to be going in opposite directions where one poet's style moves more toward misdirection and the other excess, but for Berryman this is not the case. At moments in Berryman's Dream Songs, a reader gets to experience what happens when both strategies come together and interact. The minstrel show context of the Dream Songs fundamentally helps to make this interaction between excess and misdirection successful because it forces the strategies to respond and react to one another on an imaginary stage. The interlocutor plays the Eiron role, whereas Henry plays the Alazon role. Resulting from this is a kind of performative quality in which one strategy reinforces the other. The strategies reinforce each other through a process of negotiation, where the interlocutor is in charge of the negotiations based entirely upon Henry's state of mind. We discover how the interlocutor's job becomes a kind of mediator who inflates Henry when he sinks down into despair, and who deflates him when he becomes too pretentious. Consider Dream Song #4:
Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken páprika, she glanced at me
twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact of her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her
or falling at her little feet and crying
'You are the hottest one for years of night
Henry's dazed eyes
have enjoyed, Brilliance.' I advanced upon
(despairing) my spumoni. -Sir Bones is stuffed,
de world wif feeding girls.
-Black hair, complexion Latin, jeweled eyes
downcast...The slob beside her feasts...What wonders is
she sitting on, over there?
The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.
Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
-Mr. Bones: there is.
Notice how Henry plays the Alazon role in this dream song, grounding his entire line of reasoning on the fact that a black haired woman sitting in a restaurant looked at him twice. Henry has, very early on, slipped into the role of the fool, and the poet puts emphasis on this by giving the word 'twice' a whole line unto itself. Clearly, being looked at twice by a woman dining in the same restaurant does not seem like cause enough for Henry's reaction. The middle stanza is a moment where I think both strategies come together producing an interesting effect. It seems both comic and tragic when Henry sputters, "I advanced upon (despairing) my spumoni" because, like the above Larkin poem, the speaker really wants this to become a reality and we cannot deny him that; Henry wants to spring or advance upon this woman but he cannot and thus despairs. At the same time, it becomes comical by the fact that he does advance upon something, namely, his spumoni. Furthermore, the interlocutor shows up in blackface at the end of this stanza wearing the Eiron mask. As I mentioned before, the interlocutor makes his negotiations based on Henry's state of mind and his sardonic response seems to deflate Henry and send him off in a different direction. Henry appears to sink further into despair after the interlocutor's remark because we no longer find him "fainting with interest" but rather asking "where did it all go wrong?" However, this is not to say that Henry ever removes his Alazon mask. Even if Henry did undergo some transformation from hope to despair in the middle stanza, he still retains a quality of excess by becoming jealous of the 'slob that feasts' and outraged by his blighted interests, "she might as well be on Mars." Moreover, we know that Henry is still in the Alazon mode by the final jab he gets from the interlocutor, who essentially says 'get over yourself there is a law against you Henry.' If Henry were sincerely pained, then the interlocutor's negotiation would have been altogether different.
Another dream song worth considering is # 76 titled "Henry's Confession," where Henry is sincerely pained and we can sense how the interlocutor's negotiation is much different than before. In this poem the interlocutor desperately tries to inflate Henry, who confesses that he is tottering on the idea of suicide:
Nothin very bad happen to me lately.
How you explain that? -I explain that, Mr Bones,
terms o' your baffling odd sobriety.
Sober as man can get, no girls, no telephones,
what could happen bad to Mr Bones?
-If life is a handkerchief sandwich,
in a modesty of death I join my father
who dared so long agone leave me.
A bullet on a concrete stoop
close by a smothering southern sea
spreadeagled on an island, by my knee.
-You is from hunger, Mr Bones,
I offers you this handkerchief, now set
your left foot by my right foot,
shoulder to shoulder, all that jazz,
arm in arm, by the beautiful sea,
hum a little, Mr Bones.
-I saw nobody coming, so I went instead.
Here, Henry is not as pretentious as before, instead he strikes me as being afflicted by a sense of loss which is ultimately unintelligible to him. Henry begins by posing a question to the interlocutor, "Nothin very bad happen to me lately. How you explain that?" Something is not right with Henry; he, unsuccessfully, tries to recall anything that might make his anguished state of mind intelligible. Finding nothing, Henry turns it over to the interlocutor who immediately tries to inflate him. In his response, we see the blackfaced interlocutor reach for laughter as a means to lift Henry out of despair by fancying, in jest, that Henry cannot expect anything bad to happen if he is sober. Clearly, the interlocutor is no longer jabbing at Henry this time, instead he sides with Henry. However, the interlocutor's response does not at all appear to comfort Henry based on the middle stanza, where the severity of Henry's state of mind comes into focus. After the middle stanza, it is as though the interlocutor renegotiates his strategy by strengthening it and taking on a much more proactive role. This time the interlocutor's response is not as jocular; he drops the blackface, gives him a handkerchief, and physically tries to dance Henry back into a healthier state of mind.
Hopefully, this paper has accurately gestured at how Ginsberg, Larkin, and Berryman draw on these two strategies of excess and misdirection. As I see it, Ginsberg depends most on the strategy of excess, Larking misdirection, and Berryman both. I sought to put emphasis on the interlocutor of Berryman's Dream Songs because he represents a quality of misdirection, and plays an important role through his negotiations with the strategy of excess represented in Henry.