James Merrill’s Embodied Memory

Abstract

In his mature poem Verse for Urania, James Merrill addresses his infant goddaughter on the day of her baptism. The aging poet observes Urania's staggering growth light of his own putative mental decline; the waters of the baptismal font suggest to him the waters of Lethe threatening to erase the mental record of his life. Even Urania's name, inherited from the Greek muse of astronomy, evokes the image of a spray of stars blinking out, for Merrill associates stellar fire with the transient biological fire that courses through neurons--the Electric currents [that] quicken brain and (Changing 380). Throughout Verse for Urania, fact, Merrill consistently translates the lived experience of forgetting into recognizably terms: Where has time flown? Since I began [writing this poem] You've learned to stand for seconds, balancing, And look away at my approach, coyly. My braincells continue to snuff out like sparks At the average rate of 100,000 a day-- The intellect suspiciously resembling Eddington's universe headlong flight From itself. (Poems 388) The poet draws a facetious but fretful analogy between the expanding void of his aging intellect and the expanding universe, both of which he identifies with innumerable, but ultimately fragile, units of matter dynamic (chemical or gravitational) interaction. (1) The lines demonstrate Merrill's close identification of mental losses with material ones, and reveal a rather minimal but clear form Merrill's absorption of language and imagery from the sciences of the mind. Less clear is what to make of that absorption--whence it arises, how it announces itself elsewhere more furtive, conceptually nuanced ways, and what its broader significance might be within Merrill's oeuvre, where he often uses empirical terms to frame his accounts of mental experience. A question that ought to precede all these, however, is why those of us who are interested literature written since the so seldom ask such questions--why we have largely neglected contemporary literature's ambitious and self-conscious representations of the embodied mind. From his perspective within the study of Romantic aesthetics, M. H. Abrams generalizes that in any period, the theory of mind and the theory of art tend to be integrally related and to turn upon similar analogues, explicit or submerged (69). While the impact of the revolution upon art produced since the mid-twentieth century largely awaits investigation, the significance of our conception of the mind for our ideas about what art does and how it works are at the heart of recent approaches to literature. Regrettably, the forms that cognitive literary criticism has come to take since its emergence the 1980s has led those critics and theorists who are vitally concerned with the bearing of the brain sciences upon the production and interpretation of literary texts away from those artists who explicitly share their interests. These critics have favored using the discoveries of the many empirical and speculative disciplines identified with the investigation of the mind (cognitive, evolutionary, and developmental psychology; neuroscience, linguistics, computer science, philosophy, and anthropology) to diagnose universals of literary production and reception. The result has been a tendency for such approaches to overlook the conscious, specific uses to which writers have put the sciences to individuate their works of art. (2) Mary Crane's and Alan Richardson's cognitive historicism and Lisa Zunshine's cognitive cultural are among recent critical endeavors that aim to redress the bias toward the universal and the acontextual that has left approaches to literature--however innovative from an interdisciplinary standpoint--open to censure from within literary studies for indifference to the cultural and historical embeddedness of literary texts. …