Hope I’m doing this right.
As we are charged with extrapolating a moment from one of the texts, I considered each and came to the conclusion that Robert Frost was worth examining in the context of the Abbott chapters we’re reading this week. I’m not choosing any one poem to look at because it’s my opinion that having been held in such high esteem for decades upon decades, Frost’s individual poems are not what people think of when they discuss him. Sure, maybe there’s a line from this one, a line from that one. But in conversation (at least in my experience) people say “this is like a Robert Frost poem,” rather than “this is like that specific Robert Frost poem.” That is to say the poems tend to possess a certain character that remains somewhat homogeneous. And this character, the character of a fictional Robert Frost, whom for simplicity’s sake I will dub ‘Bob Chill,’ tends to exist within a rather narrow spectrum of narrativity.
Bob Chill loves to go for walks. Sometimes around the quaint village where he lives, sometimes in the bucolic, autumnal paradise of trees, bushes, and shrubs populated with all manner of bugs and critters. That seems to be the extent of his narrative. However, the limited nature (excuse the pun) of his narrative is not a problem. According to everything we’ve read, that is indeed enough for a narrative to have taken place. “I walked past a bush and saw a bug” is, by some manner of measurement, a far more complicated narrative than our theoretical frameworks require. And, since this is the entirety of the narrative, I guess every Robert Frost poem is already an exploded moment. He has already done the hard work of unpacking a smaller moment, which seems to be what the assignment requires. So instead of doing that, which Frost has already done, I guess I’ll go over what I was thinking as I read this, the many chapters of the odyssey of Bob Chill (significantly less interesting than the odyssey of “The Odyssey,” I’m afraid) in conjunction with the Abbott chapters for this week.
I thought about the idea of the ‘implied author’ and realized how closely this aligns with the public narrative of Robert Frost. One would think by reading his poems that Robert Frost is, in fact, Bob Chill. There is nothing to suggest otherwise, as the ‘I’ who appears in the poems is never identified. Who but Frost himself could it be? Well, by most accounts the real Robert Frost was a total asshole. Maybe he did like walking in the woods, maybe he did like sitting on the trunk of a chopped-down tree to contemplate ‘stuff.’ But since he is composing these poems, creating these small narratives and constructing this myth about himself, then he is in charge of giving birth to Bob Chill, a heavily idealized version of Frost. After all, when writing a work that melts into Americana under the assumption of being semi-autobiographical (that was always my assumption when I had to read this crap in middle school, anyway), who among us could resist the temptation of making our asshole selves not look like assholes? Is Frost’s poetry all a sort of performativity? We are, after all, talking about the guy who would go to readings given by other poets and heckle them. Does that sounds like something Bob Chill would do? No, of course not. And I should know, because I know Bob Chill very well.
Bob Chill is the implied author, and I have filled in the ‘gaps’ in his character and narrative. If I may…
Bob Chill wears a straw hat at all times, as well as slacks and moccasins. He has a corn cob pipe in his mouth (largely as an accessory) and wears a brown coat that may or may not be made of burlap. He is old, but not too old, with a completely white beard and white hair that is only beginning to thin. Maybe Bob Chill has a wife, but probably not. Bob Chill doesn’t want to be tied down. That’s not Bob Chill’s style anymore. He’s been there and done that. When he walks down the street, always through a fine, pure white mist early in the morning, the few neighbors who are awake at that time wave hello and Bob tips his hat politely. But Bob Chill never stays long enough to chat. There are woods to be walked, bugs to be spotted, tree trunks to be sat upon and ‘stuff’ to be contemplated. This gives Bob Chill a reputation with the neighborhood kids as the village kook but all the adults agree he’s a really deep guy. He moves with purpose. The lines on his face convey wisdom. Bob Chill himself takes it all in stride with a slight smile and a wink. Then he disappears into the woods.
Your version of the implied author in Frost’s poems may differ, but I doubt it does by much.
Bob Chill is a pretty cool guy, I think. As a fellow left-leaning white man born and raised in America, I could kind of see myself growing into Bob Chill. After all, I do like going to the woods, staring at bugs, and sitting on tree trunks to contemplate stuff. However, like many other people, I don’t get anywhere near enough time to do this as I would like. Is this the appeal of the narrative, then? That this idealized implied author is free to do what people like me want to? Is this pastoral, idyllic porn? Is Bob Chill the idealized white American male for everyone on the left? Is Bob Chill really Frank Serpico after he disappeared into upstate New York? Why does Bob Chill actually look like Walt Whitman instead of Robert Frost? I don’t know. This, for me, is the crux of Robert Frost’s work.
Regarding his appearance, it occurs to me that I don’t know what Robert Frost actually looks like. Pardon me while I look it up.
Ah. As we can see, Bob Chill and Robert Frost are vastly different people. Robert Frost looks like an incredibly uptight person. He probably was. That clinches it for me. Bob Chill is not just the idealized version of myself and every other white American male as an old man. Bob Chill is Frost’s idealized version of himself. Someone who knows more than he does and only lets slip bits and pieces of his accumulated knowledge, thereby creating a sense of mystique.
Anyway, other thoughts in conjunction with the Abbott readings. Underreading and overreading. I have tended to do both with Robert Frost every time I read his stuff. Underreading because I have always thought of his work as contrived, cloying, twee, etc. The repetition, the themes and motifs become grating after a while. This is a strange position to find myself in since I so desperately want to have more time to look at bugs in bushes. Because of my position as a literary critic in training, I also tend to overread his stuff because it’s my job to come to some sort of conclusion about his work, and obviously I have a conclusion. And that conclusion is based on my interpretation of his work as cloying and twee. Perhaps that has to do with the primacy effect that Abbott mentions. When I was first exposed to ‘beloved American poet’ Robert Frost in middle school, I had long since devoted myself to Poe and all things spooky and dark. Robert Frost is the exact opposite of that, and the many adventures of Bob Chill are the opposite of being buried alive or suffering some other macabre fate. All of this leads me to wonder to what extent the new narratives we encounter are mentally stacked up against the ones we’ve already encountered and come to prefer. And to what extent this leads us to a symptomatic reading of any given work.
For what reason do we engage in a symptomatic reading of a narrative, anyway? For purely rhetorical reasons, right? I believe that my interpretation of Robert Frost’s work is the correct one, and in order to prove it, I have to pick out the parts that support my thesis. I would hope that I am considering the work in its entirety and that I’m not simply cherry-picking, which would lead to a thesis that falls apart under almost any scrutiny.
Hm. I’m still trying to reconcile my dislike for Frost with the attraction to Bob Chill’s lifestyle. Do I really want to be Bob Chill? What is it that bugs (in bushes, wink wink) me about this? Is it that Frost made the act of quiet contemplation so public, and how all of his poems read like that one guy you work with who wants to move to England because they just ‘get it’ over there, not like America does, and repeatedly suggests that you meditate, although this suggestion is really just him bragging how he meditates and is therefore more enlightened than you (thereby making him a ‘flat’ character desperate to appear ’round’)? After all, the action of walking through the woods does hold some cultural cache, does it not? It is indeed an activity of refreshment, enlightenment, attenuation, etc. And that this action, this narrative, holds such connotations creates a broad implication about the character of one who indulges in this action.
And, perhaps even more horrifyingly than finding myself lusting after Bob Chill’s life, Abbott’s chapter 10 has me agreeing with Henry James, master of the turgid. There can be no separation of character and action, at least not in the study of narrative theory. In real life we can know someone in almost all of their complexity. In a narrative, what’s the point? We’re engaging with the narrative to see some action, you know? And by that token, we want to see characters doing stuff. Rarely in a narrative are we given the space to know a character outside their actions. Therefore, it would seem the best narratives are often the ones in which character and action are intertwined.
Bob Chill does not exist outside of his daily, early morning pilgrimages to the woods. In his case, the narrative is the sum of his character. It’s not just the farce of placing Bob Chill in the work of another author. Imagine, if you will, Bob Chill in a Poe story, being buried alive or suffering some other macabre fate. It’s that Bob Chill can only exist in this tiny world Robert Frost has constructed, and nowhere else. He can only carry out the extremely limited actions that his character permits. Imagine Bob Chill standing in line at the DMV. Imagine him opening a jar of pickles but the lid is on too tight. Imagine him taking his daily, early morning pilgrimage and there’s a trail of toilet paper stuck to his shoe which he doesn’t see but the neighbors do. These are not narratives that he can exist in because they obliterate his character. And as such, the narrative and the character here are the same thing.
Ah, I can see I’ve written too much.