title: The wounded male persona and the mysterious feminine in the poetry of James Wright: a study in the transformation of the self.
abstract: James Wright's work is multilayered. Taken as a whole, which Annie Wright's beautiful compilation, Above the River, allows one to do, Wright's poems (as well as his masterful "prose poems") have a pattern akin to a mythic cycle. "Mythemes" (Lévi-Strauss, 1979) recur as dialectic opposites from one poem to another, whether the abandoned male and mysterious woman, humankind and nature, blindness and seeing, secrets and revelation. Suggestive and symbolic forms such as birds, horses, earth, sky, the destitute, rivers, and adolescence weave themselves throughout in inner and outer "landscapes" of images and experiential moments. There is a frequent shift of "gestalts" between the inner world and external reality. Such a "blooming, buzzing confusion" of internal and external referents might appear to be psychotic and imply a loss of "reality testing." Chassaguet-Smirgel (1988), citing Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray as an example, contended that the artist narrowly averts psychosis by transforming it into a work of art. Surrealists, for whom the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was an important figure (cf. Sarup, 1992, pp. 17-27), elevated psychosis to the status of art, and Wright has been considered to be a surrealistic poet, although he himself denied such an affiliation. Hall (Wright, 1990, Introduction, pp. xxiii-xxxvii) suggests that Wright, in addition to an extensive history of alcoholism, from which he seemed to recover towards the end of his life, suffered from a major mental illness, which included episodes of severe depression, hospitalizations, and at least one suicide attempt. The severity of the asceticism and the extreme damage to the self in some Wright's work suggests their roots in early traumatic experiences. (A terribly damaged yet heroic personage, whose disfigurement perhaps symbolizes the poet's trauma, is "Hook" [ATR, pp. 315-316], about a man who gives his last few cents to the poet with a hook replacing his amputated hand.) Not enough is known about Wright's childhood to attempt to reconstruct such a trauma, and a definitive biography is long overdue. (Wright died in 1980). However, the concept of "soul murder" as used by Shengold (1989) with respect to psychological trauma does seem pertinent. For example, Wright's powerful identification with the downtrodden, and especially with certain murderers (Doty, Judas) echoes the paranoiac Schreber's identification with his abusive father as "soul murderer": "I, myself, have been 'represented' as the one who had committed soul murder" (Shengold, 1989, p. 22, quoting Schreber). Certainly, the theme of damage to the self is prominent in Wright, and the poet's striving for reparation, restitution, and the restoration of lost goodness is not only characteristic of Melanie Klein's "depressive position" (Segal, 1980, pp. 76-89), which she saw as a normal developmental process, but also of the character structures of profoundly traumatized individuals. In addition, the rapid, "leaping" shifts of imagery in Wright's poems bear some resemblance to the shifts in mood and the dissociated and "autohypnotic" states (Shengold, 1989, pp. 138-154) of posttraumatic stress and related disorders. However much that may be the case, Wright's work moves toward healing and integration, and forces us to reconsider the psychoanalytic shibboleth that all that represents a lack of distinctiveness between self and other is pathological. This assumption denies the richness of that part of the psyche which originates in the symbiotic union of mother and infant. Wright's work does not so much force us to doubt our own perceptions of reality as it gently yet forthrightly guides us into other realms where feeling and thought are in dialogue, where the uniquely human and the universal mythos converge, and where--perhaps most importantly--possibility and transformation are imminent. The abandoned male persona and the mysterious feminine are part of that world, that cosmos, that Wright has cr
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Graves
authors.forename: V L
authors.initials: VL
authors.lastname: Schermer
mesh_terms: D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008093:Literature, Modern; D008297:Male; D011037:Poetry as Topic; D011573:Psychoanalytic Interpretation; D012649:Self Concept; D012737:Sex Factors