Recovering the Language of Lament: Modernism, Catastrophe, and Exile

Abstract

This dissertation examines lament as a distinct poetic mode or form in the twentieth century, in the works of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), Gershom Scholem (1897-1982), Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), and Varlam Shalamov (1907-1982). As theorized by Benjamin and Scholem during the First World War, lament is as an attack upon language itself, devolving it into a prelinguistic moan or cry. At stake in the conversation between these thinkers is an implicit debate on lament as impotent, ineffective, and mute, on the one hand, or as an anarchic, poetic, redemptive, and restorative “language,” on the other. After drawing upon Benjamin and Scholem’s disagreement on lament (Chapter One), this dissertation turns to how certain modernist poets of mourning—Thomas Hardy (Chapter Two), Rainer Maria Rilke (Chapter Three), and Varlam Shalamov (Chapter Four)—employ and adapt a biblical or lost tradition of lament, making it either central to their elegiac experiments (Hardy and Rilke), or treating it as an alternative form to the elegy entirely (Shalamov). The relationship between lament and elegy in modernist prose and poetry may be characterized as mutually assured destruction (as in the case of Hardy); at other times, mutual recognition and even eventual peace (as in that of Rilke); and finally, outright divorce, rupture, or schism (as in that of Shalamov). All these authors turn to ancient and biblical sources in order to develop lament as a distinct poetic mode in modernism, one that emphasizes the importance not of the surviving poet, but instead of the recently departed dead.