Knut & all,

And two more things I think of, reading your comments:

(1) In terms of time (maybe, better, Time), there are various subjective 
approaches to time that differ for the lyrical and the narrative 
experience. Reading poetry, I always find a conflict between my time, 
the time it takes to read the poem, the unknowable writer's time, the 
time it takes to write, then the poem's own experience of time (let's 
call it page time instead of stage time). Every aesthetic object exists 
in that phenomenal time (or those conflicting phenomenal times?), and 
because it's created and has its existence in that phenomenal world, it 
can do no more than /suggest/ another realm of existence, of 
transcendence. It can't exist as that transcendence itself because such 
a transcendence is impossible for phenomenal objects. If there is such 
an escape from willing, it is accessible only to the auditor. The poem 
itself is like a picture of a car: it's not the car itself. Time is 
still very much of a lyric poem's essence.

(2) Even a poem has a voice, which suggests a self, and since Pound (at 
least--the title of his first book was "Personae") and Stein that voice 
is linguistically constructed. Somebody's speaking "Tender Buttons," and 
it's a somebody that's constructed by the words and--more--by the spaces 
between those words, the empty space that ties them together. As you 
say, this "direct communication" from writer's self to reader's self is 
something of a fiction, appropriately enough. A dramatist deliberately 
produces a spectrum of these linguistic selves. We construct these 
Others as we construct ourselves, our own Other, which speaks to us and 
to our readership or our audience. Voices and bodies then become 
varieties of desires (at least according to Lacan) which can never be 
fully embodied because never complete. Expressions, then, become a form 
of reaching out for completeness, a desire for the pleasure of 
non-being-in-desire that Lacan called "jouissance".

Thanks for engendering these thoughts for me, which (though you won't 
believe this when I say it) clarifies my thinking.

Best,
George

Knut Mork Skagen wrote:
> I immediately think of two things when I read your examples and your 
> explanation of this extra dimension. The one of them you describe with 
> "spoken by the same actress within a 15 or 20 minute period" -- 
> stating the obvious, drama, unlike poetry, is a time-based artform. 
> Lyric poetry is perhaps the least time-based form of literature, which 
> strengthens its role as object-on-the-page. It exists, in a sense, 
> without a proper beginning, end, or sense of time having passed.
>
> I also think of how a dramatic text is meant to be inhabited and 
> embodied by a performer -- mentioned earlier in this thread -- and it 
> seems to me critical to that the performer is not performing his or 
> her own words but those of a "character." (Character, of course, in 
> the broadest possible sense, given that less traditional drama won't 
> have such  precise divisions). But still, the performative context of 
> a text is automatically a fictitious context. Even in performance art 
> where the performer is the writer is the character, the act of staging 
> produces an artificiality which enhances the impact of portions of the 
> text while reducing others.
>
> Contemporary lyric poetry isn't anywhere close to being staged, on the 
> contrary, it's often passed off as the opposite, some kind of "direct 
> communication." This may well be illusory, but is often an underlying 
> assumption on the part of the reader.
>
> There is a crossing somewhere. As drama approaches the purely literary 
> is enters the unperformable realm. Norway's own "national play" Peer 
> Gynt is meant to be read rather than staged; Goethe's Faustus; 
> Seneca's plays. And on the poetry end of things there is the point 
> where lyric crosses over into epic.
>
> --Knut
>
>

-- 

George Hunka
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