'In paradise alone' : textual strategies of occurrence in Andrew Marvell

Abstract

Andrew Marvell' s reputation as an elusive poet is investigated in this thesis from a predominantly textual viewpoint. Marvell's elusiveness is traced to an underlying structure which is perceptible in the recurrent instances of dissatisfaction that instruct his work. The main forms this underlying structure inhabits in Miscellaneous Poems are the soul's terrestrial dissatisfaction at its loss of divine communion, and the lover's frustrated desire at the lack of communion with his beloved. This permeating structure is considered in the thesis as an 'unpresentable' in resisting unproblematic representation in Marvell' s texts. The thesis suggests that what provokes Marvell' s elusiveness is his problematic adoption of received conventions (mostly pastoral) in a way that alludes to an unpresentable (hence underlying) structure in the strategic failure to represent the same. Marvell's elusiveness is thus viewed as informed by the allusive mode which his revaluation of textual devices adopts. In following the dynamics of a loss of an originating contact with the divine and a longing for reunion with that original state, the structure that instructs Marvell' s unpresentable is termed 'Eden'. Marvell's version of Eden is located in a primordial stage that predates Adam's desire for a mate; it is hence a solitary and fulfilling Eden in which the human is physically and spiritually at one with God, the environment, and the self. The thesis locates Marvell' s underlying structure of Eden in the neoplatonic and hermetic discourses available in the seventeenth century. Accordingly, Marvell's poems are analysed from this perspective. The term 'textual strategies of occurrence' is applied to mark Marvell's experimentation with textual devices that strategically allude to the structure of Eden in his work. Jean-Francois Lyotard's postmodern notion of occurrence is adapted to mark Marvell's reworking of pre-formulated rules. It is also applied to mark the occurrence of an event, the Fall in Eden, after which nothing could be the same again. The thesis's adaptation of Lyotard's concept of the unpresentable that is alluded to in works that belong to an aesthetics of the sublime, is informed by Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic narrative of the human being's process of signification. The principal aims which this thesis addresses are, thus, (i) the identification of an underlying structure in Miscellaneous Poems in an analysis of Marvell's strategic handling of textual devices; (ii) the implications for a study of seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry; and (iii) the adaptation of Lyotard for a critical practice.