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The Fiction of Coherence: George Herbert's “The Collar”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Barbara Leah Harman
Barbara Leah Harman*
Affiliation:
Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts
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Abstract

Uneasy with the forms of literary expression and its costs, the speakers of Herbert’s poems frequently bear disturbed relationships to their own accounts. An interesting version of the disturbance between storyteller and story occurs in “The Collar,” where present-tense speech is fenced off from, and framed by, the eroding influence of a retrospective narrative voice. The poem provides an occasion to study the motives for and virtues of storytelling, to examine the ways in which accounts are not only generated but preserved, and to explore those problems that arise when a fixed story must be reread and its boundaries changed. Because the speaker of “The Collar” both protects and dismantles his account, the poem also raises questions about the values we attach to narratives, the costs we are willing to support in order to maintain them, and the difficulties we undergo when stories fail to represent us in traditional ways.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 93 , Issue 5 , October 1978 , pp. 865 - 877
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1978

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References

Notes

1 The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941). Ail citations from Herbert are to this edition.

2 The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. John T. Shawcross (New York: Doubleday, 1967). All citations from Donne are to this edition.

3 The Human Condition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 176–77.

4 Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975), p. 24.

5 The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), p. 45.

6 Said, p. 76. I am indebted in this section to Edward W. Said's Beginnings, in particular to the second chapter, “A Meditation on Beginnings,” whose insights inform my own.

7 Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 208.

8 The Hudson Review, 28, No. 3 (1975), 342.

9 Starobinski's words are appropriate again: “In between the outside and the inside, the contact surface ... is alike the place of exchanges, of adjustments, of sensory signals, and the place of conflicts or wounds” (p. 342).

10 “Ariadne's Thread: Repetition and the Narrative Line,” Critical Inquiry, 3, No. 1 (1976), 66.

11 Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York: Harper, 1974), pp. 308–09.

12 Seventeenth-Century English Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. William R. Keast (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 251–52.

13 S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, 1974), p. 5.

14 Cf. Said, p. 205: “The text's preserving and obstructing and displacing functions are taken as resisting rewriting (which is what hermeneutical interpretation is at bottom), but the beginning premise of this rewriting is that the text's resistance is principally a formal matter.”

15 Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975), p. 247. Culler presents the work of Jacques Derrida.

16 George Herbert: His Religion and Art (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1954), p. 92.

17 The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), p. 133.

18 George Herbert's Lyrics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1968), p. 124.

19 The Poetry of George Herbert (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975), p. 135.

20 Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1972), p. 221.

21 If the language of contemporary criticism seems unusually appropriate to Herbert the reason is that the speaker of his poem finds himself in the critic's position: he doubles back upon his words as the interpreter doubles back upon the text, self-conscious about his production and sensitive to his lack of mastery over it.

22 In the scheme that Fish proposes, poems like “The Collar” instruct both speaker and reader in the insufficiency of their perspective and the inappropriateness of their self-respect. The emphasis of his view is on the devastation of the poems' endings as they “render superfluous the mode of discourse and knowing of which they themselves are examples” (p. 158). The model I propose is more interested in preserving the dialectic between the impulse toward self-representation and the eroding influence of the poem's conclusion.