Certainly there is no future for the genre except as a metaphor within some other work. By now the whole complex of ideas has passed so into the general culture that it is conceivable in art only as lyric imagery or as affectionate reminiscence. In fact, the vampire tradition has hardly been used in lyric verse—I can only remember one poem in Fantasy and Science Fiction. I always thought Italian directors would do very well with vampires as cultural symbols for the rotten rich—many of the traditions about the vampire are close to the atmosphere of films like La Notte or La Dolce Vita.
Lyric writing (verse or other) is a graveyard of dead narrative—events, dramas, personages once used in narrative in their own right. Certainly lyric verse is generally in advance of prose fiction, both in style and matter. It is the first to adapt to shifts of sensibility because it has already digested everything the general cultural context has to offer, while fiction and drama lag behind, their sources being everything that is produced as reportage, chronicle, history, sociological analysis, etc. The lyric mode must, I think, work with well-digested material, since the central organizing impulse of the lyric is a collecting of imagery around some emotional or other center. The combination is therefore what counts—fresh material would prove too centrifugal, too distracting.
The emotional or other center of the lyric, however, may very well turn out to be new itself—thus the stage gets to Samuel Beckett's Endgame long after the publication of Eliot's Waste Land. The emotional center of the poem becomes the big scene / high point / emotional weight of the play. But the poem can produce the X without surrounding material, without chronology, without explanation, without plausibility, without leading-up-to. The play—even Beckett's play—must wait until the central image can somehow be set in chronology, in dramatic progression, in some kind of plausibility, in some kind of explanation.
Posted 19 days ago.
