The Poetics of Double-Talk: John Berryman’s Dream Songs as Cold War Testimonials

Abstract

This chapter examines John Berryman’s Dream Songs as documents that position their speaker as a witness to, and often subject of, Cold War biopolitics. Taking Whitman’s Song of Myself as their model, The Dream Songs sing the American spirit from a mid-twentieth-century perspective that replaces Whitman’s harmony with a rancorous vision of socio-political and psychological cacophony. By arguing that personal turmoil is linked directly to the rise of surveillance culture, the chapter reveals the relationship between political repression and the socialization of sentience in Cold War America. It looks at key Dream Songs that dramatize acts of torture and interrogation against a docile subject. By evoking these violent scenes Berryman acts as a sort of secret agent; his poems use pain to symbolize the toll taken by Cold War regimes of discipline. The relationship between personal suffering and Cold War biopower, leaves Henry, the protagonist of Berryman’s poems, seeking a subject position unconditioned by political ideals. While the identification of a core of ontological being ultimately eludes Henry, Berryman’s emphasis on the suffering body places selfhood outside of the ideological construct of US democracy and reframes it in terms that are aa intractable as the desire for material survival.