Textual Confessions: Narcissism in Anne Sexton's early poetry

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2004 by Jo Gill

The seeds of this interest in the fertile and discursive possibilities of narcissism--understood as a purposive textual strategy rather than as a symptom of debilitating self-absorption--are apparent in one of Sexton's earliest and uncollected poems. "An Obsessive Combination of Ontological Inscape, Trickery and Love" was drafted in 1958 and first published in Voices: A Journal of Poetry in 1959. The poem is striking for the way in which it anticipates, and makes explicit, concerns that are developed subsequently in her writing. For example, we see here the roots of a sustained interest in the function and fallibility of language, expressed later in poems such as "Is It True?" and "Hurry Up Please It's Time" (1972?) and throughout the posthumous volume The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975). "An Obsessive Combination," although described by Diane Wood Middlebrook as "an awkward little exercise" (124), is paradigmatic of Sexton's poetics in its determined and self-conscious exploration of its own linguistic and representational status.

"An Obsessive Combination" is narcissistic in the sense that in it "process [is] made visible" (Hutcheon, Narcissistic 6). It exemplifies what Hutcheon defines as a characteristically postmodern interest in "how art is created, not just in what is created" (8). Arguably, of course, such self-consciousness has a long literary history. For Hutcheon, however (and Sexton's writing, I would contend, sustains this reading), "the more modern textual self-preoccupation differs mostly in its explicitness, its intensity, and its own critical self-awareness," and this is a consequence of a post-Saussurian "change in the concept of language" (18).

To look first at the title of the poem, the adjective "obsessive" seems to lay itself open to typical accusations of confessional compulsion and self-absorption. However, it transpires that the obsession is not with the self but with writing, with the linguistic strategies by which meaning is generated and shared. "Ontological" shifts attention away from direct, lived, "raw" (to use Robert Lowell's term [qtd. in Hamilton 277]) experience to a more abstract, impersonal consideration of the condition of being. "Combination," too, has considerable resonance in the context of Sexton's poetics, signifying the combination or meeting of minds, the discursive relationship between speaker and reader required for the confession successfully to be created and disseminated.

Gerard Manley Hopkins's notion of "inscape" is the lodestone of the poem and plays a key role in disclosing Sexton's larger poetics. It is explained by Webster's Third New International Dictionary as

       Inward significant character or quality belonging uniquely to
       objects or events in nature and human experience esp. as
       perceived by the blended observation and introspection of the
       poet and in turn embodied in patterns of such specific poetic
       elements as imagery, rhythm, rhyme, assonance, sound symbolism,
       and allusion.