Estranging lyric: Postwar aggression and the task of poetry

Brecht and Adorno, theorizing the role of art in working through the past after World Wars I and II, both turned to lyric poetry. This choice reflects their common concern to connect the characteristic ambiguity of the poetic speaker with the ambiguity of civilian guilt, the feeling of frustration over not having taken action during wartime.In European history, "postwar" refers to the period following World War II, but to explore civilian guilt, I extend the term to periods beyond and before it---to the aftermaths of World War I and the Cold War. In science fiction poetry of the late twentieth century, as in Brecht's poetry of exile, the impossibility of returning to a world not at war invites critical investigation of the gray zones of postwar culture. In these gray zones, characterized by figures of resurrection and thaw, the benefits of self-preservation seem newly justified in light of past repression. The logic of aggressive self-preservation is implicitly challenged by the ambiguity of poetic speakers who experience the postwar negatively. Through readings of poetry by Brecht, Ingeborg Bachmann, Durs Grunbein, Darko Suvin, and Ann K. Schwader, I explore an alternative process of working-through in art, one that departs from the model of mourning often employed to think about recovering from the past. I trace environments of poetic rearrangement that take place through estrangement and the silence of white space, allowing for the reorganization of moral and critical choices as a response to the problems of postwar life.Working-through, as I describe it, is derived theoretically from D.W. Winnicott's postwar meditations on the role of aggressive impulses in the growth of the individual. Like psychological notions of rearrangement, postwar poetic form accomplishes its tasks by setting mood, drawing distinctions, and regulating tensions in a way that allows for ambivalence. Against the facile exchange of evil for good in the postwar, lyric poetry counts negative forms of affective experience as the beginning, rather than the end, of activity.