Made Flesh. Kimberly Johnson
the absence, among other things, of the signified):
The visibility of words
as a precondition of reading
necessitates that words obtrude impermeably into
the world…. The thickness
of words ensures that whatever
of their physicality is erased, or engulfed, in
the process of semantic projection,
a residue
tenaciously in-
heres that will not be sublimated
away.48
Moreover, as Bernstein goes on to suggest, as poetic utterance both invites an encounter with semantic absorption and frustrates that encounter by dint of its opaque objecthood, the intersection of those registers of textual experience “is precisely / flesh,”—or, more precisely, it is “the flesh of the word”:
The tenacity of
writing’s thickness, like the body’s
flesh, is
ineradicable….
The thickness of writing between
the reader & the poem is constitutive for the poem
of its visibility & for the reader
of the outer limit of his or her absorption
in the poem; it is not an obstacle
between them, it is their means
of communication.49
Those features that prevent readerly absorption into a poem, that prevent the poetic text from yielding transparently to “meaning,” do not prevent the matter of the poem, as Bernstein observes here; they constitute the matter of the poem.
In the lyric mode, this general poetic investment in presencing capacities of language extends to the manifestation of the lyric subject or “I,” the speaker who functions in the poem as the principle of aesthetic presence. That is, in the lyric poem, the speaker serves as an embodiment of the concern with making present to the senses that which is phenomenally absent. Susan Stewart connects the speaker’s position with the significative operation of language explicitly. The central concern of the lyric, she argues, is “to make visible, tangible, and audible the figures of persons” as a strategy against what she identifies as the central crisis of the lyric: “the fading of the referent.” In this light, those poetic devices of prosody, form, sound, and so forth become strategies of recuperation as well as presence, lineamenting an otherwise perceptually absent speaker in perceptible structures. Stewart calls these elements “The poet’s recompense” because the sense impressions they produce ensure that the poetic encounter is an essentially material one; this material encounter is not limited to the matter of the book with its pages and ink (though these qualities certainly shape a literary encounter) but extends to include these strategies by which the signs of language are concrete and perceptible manifestations of the imperceptible.50 On this point, Stewart’s argument is indebted to Allen Grossman’s Summa Lyrica, whose foundational claim is that “Poetry is language in which the eidetic function is prior to all other functions. Indeed, the meaning of most claims for poetic language (that it is ‘divine,’ ‘primordial,’ etc.) is that poetic language, by contrast to other kinds of language, has no other function than the eidetic function.”51 As Grossman articulates it, all the tools of poetic language serve to manifest presence, the presence of the poem itself, and of the speaker whose presence is co-terminous with the poem’s. Working to this end, the nonreferential components of poetic speech—again, rhyme, meter, structure, figure, and so forth—become epiphanic instruments in that they constitute and reveal the poem, making it present to the reader.
The lyric’s fundamental concern with what Grossman calls “the presence of presence” produces a state of affairs in which the assertively nonreferential mechanisms of poetic devices define the text’s substantial form. The principle of presence in the lyric thus is delineated within the energetic exchange between the semantic impulse toward the signified and the irrepressible materiality of the sign. The similarities between the priorities of the lyric poem and the notion of a Real Presence in the sacrament are clear. For the Eucharist too is primarily concerned with “the presence of presence,” and with the capacities of material figures to present presence, as it were, in recompense for the promised but ultimately imperceptible reality of Christ’s physical body.52 Indeed, following Grossman and Stewart, it might be said that this sacrament is a ritual in which the eidetic function is prior to all other functions. The eucharistic event, at its most basic level, involves the worshipper’s encounter with material signs for the substance of the body of Christ. The body of the communicant becomes an apparatus by which Christ’s body can be both affirmed and meaningfully manifest, a site wherein presence matters. Again, this relational corporeality is reflected in the lyric, in which the structural investments of poetic language mandate a particularly bodily mode of engagement with the text on the part of the reader. Since presence is effected in the poem by means of sensorily apprehensible structures, the reader’s body is enlisted as a device for registering that presence. In lyric poetry, as in the Eucharist, corporeality is an intrinsic component of the system of representation. It is, as Bernstein says, “their means / of communication.”
Reformation-era sparring over the operation of the Eucharist offers, as we have seen, a range of opinions regarding the status of signs and, by implication, the role of the material in sacramental worship. But as reformers diverge from the Lateran dogma of the Eucharist, it is precisely the mode by which “the presence of presence” is achieved that becomes destabilized. By calling into question the manner of sacramental presence, the eucharistic debates of the early modern period disclose the ontological disjunction between sacramental signs and their divine referents. And while sixteenth-century exegetes were not unaware of what we would now call the semiotic consequences of their controversy (even this chapter’s cursory survey of Reformation writings on the Eucharist reads like a veritable primer in semiotics!), it is in the poetry of the post-Reformation period that these consequences are most fully registered. For in their fixation on the perceptual absence of Christ’s body and on the mechanisms by which that absence is redressed, and in their reimagining of the Eucharist’s underlying assumptions regarding the capacity of signs to manifest corporeal presence, reformers interrogate the very phenomena that animate lyric poetry.
Lyric poetry in early modern England begins to exhibit a suite of characteristics that can only be understood as a direct response to Reformation controversies over the Eucharist. And while the effects of this reaction can be felt in sacred and secular poetry alike, they are most pointedly evident in the devotional lyric, which not coincidentally emerges in English poetry in an extraordinary efflorescence during the early seventeenth century. Certainly, a number of factors contributed to the development of such a strong tradition of devotional poetry, including the availability of the Bible as both a generic sourcebook and a common storehouse of phrases and stories, and the humanist revitalization of the idea that the poet is a kind of inspired prophet, uniquely qualified to address divine things.53 Such cultural conditions doubtless go some way toward explaining the predominance of devotional writing in the period, but they do not account for the startling development, in the seventeenth-century English lyric, of poetic strategies that simultaneously assert the linguistic sign as an intractable and unsublimable object and the central role of the body as a communicative and a perceptual instrument.54 The persistence of this trend over the course of the seventeenth century and across confessional divides argues against attributing this development to a broadly defined tradition of Protestant poetics; neither can we align it with some generalized nostalgia for the theological certainties of pre-Reformation religion. Rather, the Reformation’s long dispute about the mechanics of sacramental worship catalyzes a poetics that foregrounds the ritual’s inherent tensions between material surface and imperceptible substance, between sign and signified, between flesh and spirit, a poetics remarkably attuned to the complicated interdependence of the body and the word.
The phenomenon I wish to address here is, again, not some preponderance of talk about the body in