Corpse Poem
by Diana Fuss
At first glance, "Stillborn" does not appear to be a
corpse poem at
all, at least as I have defined it in this essay, for it does not
directly employ the first-person voice of the speaking cadaver. And yet
Plath speaks in the first person through the poem itself, through the
agency of the dead fetus that she mourns. By the end of the poem, poet
and poem, mother and fetus, living and dead have effectively changed
places:
They are not pigs,
they are not even fish,
Though they have a
piggy and
a fishy air- It would be better if they were alive, and that's what
they were. But they are dead, and their mother near dead with
distraction, And they stupidly stare, and do not speak of her.
Plath's
"I" becomes "their mother" and her "me" becomes a "her,"
grammatically reversing the poem's subject-object positions. In a
subtle chiasmatic reversal, the fetus lends voice to the now muted
poet. Plath's poems do not speak "of her," but they are the only things
speaking for her. Ironically, Plath can speak in the poem only through
the agency of the dead words she memorializes. Here we find the deepest
and most disturbing connection between corpses and poems. Strictly
speaking, it may not in fact be the case that the poet, through
language, animates the dead. More accurately, it appears that it is the
stillborn words of poetry that animate the poet. Poets are not serving
as mediums for the dead; they are themselves dead without the poem to
give them voice. Death thus animates the living, not the other way
around, which is why a poet inhabiting the role of the speaking cadaver
may not, in the end, be such a paradox after all.
The corpse poem as a specific poetic type tells us
something important
about literature as a whole: poetry can ventriloquize the dead because
literature, as a medium, already incorporates death. The individual
corpse poems I have examined in this essay collectively pose a larger
question about the status of all literature. Is not every literary
utterance a speaking corpse, a disembodied voice detached from a
living, breathing body? Literature that immortalizes voice also entombs
it, which is why every poem can be broadly understood as a corpse poem.
The speaking corpse names not just a particular kind of literary
persona but a general attribute of all lyric poems, verse suspended
between the animated voice of the speaker and the frozen form of the
poem that preserves it.
Lyric poetry has always been one of the preeminent
cultural mediums for
the resuscitation of the dead. Yet in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, sound and sight technologies like the photograph,
gramophone, telephone, radio, and film can each legitimately claim to
revive the dead more effectively than the poem. Where the cultural work
of reanimation is concerned, poetry has become in the past two hundred
years a dead medium, superseded and displaced by far more powerful
technologies of resurrection. The trope of the speaking corpse is thus
for poetry, and perhaps for all literature, an entirely self-reflexive
one. In the final analysis, the speaking corpse operates as a figure
for poetry itself, a dead voice that refuses to remain silent, a
spectral genre that continues to speak and walk abroad.
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