Demonstrategy. H. L. Hix
may extend to others of Bishop’s poems what might be said of “One Art,” and to others’ poems what might be said of Bishop’s: disasters she could not right, she wrote.
2.2: Poetry For Justice
In its robust use of a craft technique I’ll call “critical third,” Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Lovers of the Poor” demonstrates that craft decisions are not merely decorative, not ex post facto flourishes tacked onto the surface of a structure that precedes them, but that, to the contrary, craft decisions determine the structure, influence the function, and participate in the political orientation of the work. Through craft decisions we shape our ideas and emotions, enhance our best understandings, and enact our ideals.
Adrienne Rich recommends reflection not only on the means of writing but also on its ends, “not how to write poetry, but wherefore.” Brooks’s “The Lovers of the Poor” depicts one way in which that how and wherefore join, a way in which craft decisions have ethical/political valence. It offers a case in point to second Audre Lorde’s declaration that poetry is a “vital necessity” because of these two truths: that “the quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives,” and that the craft decisions we make in our work influence “the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” Brooks’s poem shows one way in which a poem can change “the quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives.”
From what we see in popular culture (and from what some of us were taught in school), it would be easy to arrive at the notion that poetry is good only for registering intense private emotions: it’s a fit vehicle for declarations of love or outpourings of grief, but for little else. “The Lovers of the Poor,” though, offers one counterexample to such constriction. “The Lovers of the Poor” reminds us that, in addition to its capacity to record “emotion recollected in tranquility,” poetry can also depict and critique injustice, speak to matters of social welfare and public policy, and so on. It reminds us that even our seemingly most private emotions occur in, and are shaped by, a broader context. It gives one answer to the question “How can poetry serve the interest of social justice at least as robustly as it answers the impulse toward self-expression?” In 1960, the year “The Lovers of the Poor” was published in book form, even though she had won the Pulitzer Prize ten years before, Gwendolyn Brooks, had she lived in, say, Memphis, could not have married a white person or shared a meal at a restaurant with a white person or even drunk from the same water fountain as a white person. Where she did live, Chicago, her society did not allow her to make even mundane life choices without attention to pressing civic concerns such as racial inequalities; it would be most surprising if she wrote poetry that did not attend to such concerns. But how does it attend to such concerns? Critical third is one of its means.
In “The Lovers of the Poor,” the point of view appears at first to be an instance of “close third,” or what, in How Fiction Works, James Wood calls “free indirect style.” In close third, the narrator moves fluidly between looking at a character from outside and reporting that character’s thoughts and feelings from inside: the narrator can report things that the character could not know (just as an omniscient narrator would be able to), and also report the character’s internal state with full acquaintance (just as a first-person narrator would).
Imputing to close third much power, Wood offers an account of why it is so effective. According to Wood, in close third “the narrative seems to float away from the novelist and take on the properties of the character.” Wood makes up brief examples to contrast direct speech with indirect, and thus to show what makes “free indirect speech” free and indirect. Direct speech: “He looked over at his wife. ‘She looks so unhappy,’ he thought, ‘almost sick.’ He wondered what to say.” Indirect speech: “He looked at his wife. Yes, she was tiresomely unhappy again, almost sick. What the hell should he say?” In direct speech, quotation marks and other cues clearly differentiate the author’s perspective from the character’s. In indirect speech, the cues are removed, so the perspectives of author and character merge rather than remaining distinct. In the first case, the judgment that the character’s wife is unhappy is attributed clearly and exclusively to the character; in the second case, that judgment might have been made either by the character or by the author, or by both. The benefit of close third, on Wood’s view, is that readers see things through the character’s eyes and language and through those of the author. “We inhabit omniscience and partiality at once,” he says. Between author and character yawns a gap, and close third “simultaneously closes that gap and draws attention to it,” which makes close third a form of dramatic irony, a way “to see through a character’s eyes while being encouraged to see more than the character can see.”
The point of view in “The Lovers of the Poor,” though, seems to me to demonstrate a difference from close third as Wood describes it, a difference significant enough that the point of view in Brooks’s poem merits a new name: not “close third” but “critical third.” The advantage of close third, on Wood’s view, is that we “inhabit omniscience and partiality at once.” The advantage of critical third, I contend, is not that we inhabit at once partiality and omniscience but that we inhabit at once partiality and impartiality. If in close third the authorial perspective resembles that of God, in critical third the authorial perspective resembles that of an impartial spectator.
The impartial spectator is an imaginative construct introduced by Adam Smith, to explain how we come to regulate our passions and motives by ethical criteria rather than exclusively on the basis of perceived self-interest. Smith alleges that our sentiments “have always some secret reference either to what are, or to what upon a certain condition would be, or to what we imagine ought to be the sentiments of others. We examine [our conduct] as we imagine an impartial spectator would examine it.” Having entered into “all the passions and motives which influenced” that conduct, we either “approve of it by sympathy with the approbation of this supposed equitable judge” or else “we enter into his disapprobation and condemn it.” Smith considers the ability to imagine and enter into the perspective of the impartial spectator a necessary condition for moral self-awareness. His idea is simple: as long as I stay conceptually within my own subject position, only my self-interest participates in my judgment, so my decisions have prudential, but not ethical, character. Only by imaginatively occupying a hypothetical subject position, and judging as such a subject would judge, can I make ethical decisions. I become capable of equitable judgment only when I can see what an equitable judge would see, and as an equitable judge would see. Just as I can see myself only with the aid of a device such as a mirror or camera, so, according to Smith, I can think ethically only with the aid of a device, the impartial spectator.
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