Fiction, pretense, and narration - critique of 'The Logic of Literature'

Style, Spring, 1998 by David Gorman

Hamburger's attitude in the face of this dilemma, into which she has been led by her wish to posit a system of poetry, is ambiguous, and the section devoted to lyric poetry is incontestably the weakest (and least innovative) in the book. In it one can no doubt discern the result of a residuum of piety for the epic-dramatic-lyric triad, which leads to the implicit presupposition that the three terms could be incorporated into a single categorical unity (the system of Dichtung). All sorts of incoherencies follow. She begins by asserting that the single criterion which allows of a distinction between lyric poetry and other actual utterances is of a contextual order. The lyric form itself therefore is not determining: a sacred song by Novalis belongs to lyric poetry (and thus possesses a lyric utterance-subject) when it placed in a collection of poetry; on the contrary, when it is placed in a collection of prayers, it is no longer the utterance of a lyric I and thus ceases to be lyric poetry. Thus, "the lyrical genre becomes constituted through the so to speak 'announced' intention of the utterance-subject to posit itself as a lyric I, and this means by the context in which we encounter the poem" (241). If this is the case, it is hard to see how lyric poetry could form a system with fiction, which is categorically distinguished from actual utterance(5): according to this first definition, lyric poetry will rather tend in the direction of "special form."

However, Hamburger's later analyses all aim to establish, on the contrary, a structural criterion, allowing the opposition, in the interior of the field of actual utterances, of two sorts of utterances: the communicative utterance and the lyric utterance. Thus the communicative utterance is directed toward the object-pole, and lyric poetry is characterized, on the contrary, by the fact that utterances retreat from this pole: they "are not oriented toward an object-nexus, nor are they controlled and directed by it. They do not form any objective context, any context for communication; rather, they form something different, something which we shall call a sense-nexus [Sinnzusammenhang]" (249). The utterances are no longer in a vertical relation with the object-pole, but are structured horizontally by connection with each other and in relation to the lyric subject which they express: "the lyrical statement-subject does not render an object of experience, but the experience of the object" (278). In lyric poetry, the object has no pertinence except as an object subjectively tested, except as an object situated within the subject. Does this amount to a truly structural demarcation? We might try to raise it to a contextual criterion by postulating that it is not the opposition of two forms of utterance that are involved, but rather of two conditions [etats] of utterance - the communicative condition and the lyric condition. But this attempt would force us to consider as lyrical every utterance shorn of its communicative dimension, which seems to be an overly liberal proposition at best. Therefore let us admit that a structural criterion is involved, which is to say a criterion that has an effective, observable base. In this case, lyric poetry could truly form a system with fiction, since it would be categorically distinct from the communicative actual utterance. The "lyric subject," an indeterminate subject, would thus be the receptive hypostasis of the structural locus of the utterance-subject, left vacant by the withdrawal of the communicative subject. Yet this solution also poses its problems, this time at the level of general linguistic theory. In place of two categorical states [statuts] of language, three must be recognized: the communicative actual utterance, the noncommunicative actual utterance, and the fictional utterance.