Mapping the mind and the body: on W.H. Auden's personifications - Critical Essay

Style, Fall, 2002 by Craig A. Hamilton

Part I depicts the world after the Holocaust as a "Post-Vergilian City / Where our past is a chaos of graves and the barbed wire stretches ahead / Into our future till it is lost to sight" (Collected 592). Part II recounts nearly nine hundred years of revolutionary history (from 1075 to 1917) involving cities like Rome, Paris, and Moscow. The chronology lends the part a teleological structure before the action "returns to the present" (Fuller 420) in part III. (4) By the time readers get to part III, the "abolished City" (Collected 594) is hopelessly divided by barbed wire. Auden writes that even "our Image," which is to say the body made in God's image, "has no image to admire, / No age, no sex, no memory, no creed, no name" (Collected 595). When readers get to part IV, this is what they find in the opening lines:

Without me Adam would have fallen irrecovably with Lucifer; he never
 would have been able to cry O felix culpa.
It was I who suggested his theft to Prometheus; my frailty cost Adonis
 his life.
I heard Orpheus sing; I was not quite as moved as they say.
I was not taken in by the sheep's-eyes of Narcissus; I was angry with
 Psyche when she struck a light.
                                                       (Collected 595)

These are the first four lines of an eighteen-line monologue spoken "in riddling terms" (Fuller 420) by a peculiar persona. Since part III ends with the command, "Let Our Weakness speak," Auden provides a name for the persona--the unnamed "image" mentioned earlier in part III--but then leaves the rest to us. Edward Mendelson, the great Auden critic, says all the lines in part IV are "spoken by the body in language it might use if it were autonomous" (322). And yet, how do we understand the monologue here? If the body is speaking in its own terms, then it must be construed as autonomous when we personify it. In other words, Mendelson's "if" is superfluous since autonomy is presupposed by the personification mapping. Still, the riddle is intriguing. On the one hand, since we know that answers to riddles cannot be obvious, we know that "Our Weakness" is not specific enough to answer the riddle's implicit question: who is speaking? Despite the definite article in the poem's title, "the City" that Auden memorializ es is never truly specified as one single city in the poem. On the other hand, Auden's catalog of at least twenty-three allusions in the monologue's eighteen lines gradually moves from the general to the specific and elaborates our mappings.

Throughout part IV, Auden alludes to Adam, Lucifer, Prometheus, Adonis, Orpheus, Narcissus, Psyche, Hector, Oedipus, Orestes, Diotima, St. Anthony, Tristan and Isolde, Galahad, Faustus and Helen, Hamlet, Don Quixote, Don Giovanni, Figaro, Prince Tamino, the Ancient Mariner, Captain Ahab, and a city he calls "Metropolis." These allusions fall into two categories: (1) Ancient and Christian, (2) Medieval and Modern. Ancient allusions in the first eight lines refer to ancient Greek or Roman literature, while three Christian allusions are made to Adam, Christ, and Saint Anthony. The first category of allusions occupies roughly the first half of part IV. The second category of allusions, from medieval and modern literature and opera, takes up the next ten lines of the poem. The allusions reinforce the personification of Our Weakness--the body as narrating persona--although they are so wide and inconclusive in range that the only unifying presence for each allusion is the omnipresent human body, the "I" of nearly ev ery line. The body is that which accompanies all the characters referred to in the course of their actions. In this manner, what some see as "allusion as a technique of exclusion in Auden's work (Smith 318) does not apply here. We need not know what all the allusions mean so as to personify Our Weakness. At some point readers will decide that "the city" that Auden memorializes is in fact the human body. As a body that seems to contradict the anonymous and a historical status suggested for it in part III of the poem, Our Weakness then becomes less generic and more specific with each passing allusion in part IV. It is a multifaceted agent present at a range of specific fictional and historical events, an agent taking part in those events alongside the personalities involved. And yet, this explanation does not answer the lingering question: how do readers cognitively build such an elaborate metaphor, a metaphor which posits a counterfactual body possessing agency (it speaks intelligently), ontology (it feels not hing by various speeches), and intentionality (it will return for the city's judgment)?