Metaphor in poem the newcomer
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Nathaniel Farrell’s book-length poem, Newcomer (Ugly Duckling, 2014), from which these excerpts originate, could be read as a genealogy of the political self. Threading himself through the pastoral landscapes that have for background an unnamed and intemporal war, the likewise unnamed speaker seems to traverse the boundary between symbol and thing as he travels between the things that cannot be said and the things that get said instead of them. Denied the origin of the narrator’s wanderings, we never do get to parse between war as a contingent and destructive force, and war as the experience of being born in a world in which we must die. Instead, it is the impossibility of making the distinction that gives Newcomer its force.
The speaker seems to accept this interregnum between the thing and the symbol that grows from out of it. Often, in Newcomer, experience seems to just elude the speaker, as he attempts to tell it, leaving us with the sense that something that could have been told was not lived enough to be able to tell it. Sometimes the poems are infused with the smell of the earth, and with the warmth of light, but with a lacuna nonetheless in the experience of it: The same sun shines in a land that’s not mine anymore / But I can’t see it shining. I see it going home instead / To loved ones…(62). It is at moments like these that the speaker appeals to an imagined reader to see it, who then becomes the real reader, recruited now, to traverse with the author the distance between thing and symbol, between being in oneself and seeing oneself, and between civic blindness and civic duty.
At other times, the speaker reverts into a child-world that is less the past than another possible now: a now in which the subject takes the world as its familiar, as if the childlike absorption were a force that affects the balance of the world: On Sundays the children will play in the yard, the fence bowing under the littlest watching. (44). Underlying this is the "adult" context: the soldierly being-subject to the world. So that moments such as when the speaker says, I'm holding my battery between two pennies / to warm my fingers up / to do the laces, create an echo for these childlike moments of connectivity. In this iteration, however, they propel the speaker back into his place in the configuration that was assigned to him, leaving a smaller field of play, perhaps a microcosm of the expansive, childlike world, a world where the frames can be seen, but which still offers no more answer to the question of where we are.
We might think, in Newcomer, of Nathaniel Hawthorne's character, Wakefield, a man who, in the short story of the same name, walked out of his home one day, and returned one rainy evening twenty years later, after having lived during this time on the next street over, where he could see into the window of his own house. "Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world," Hawthorne writes, "individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another, and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever." Newcomer seems to reveal the dangerous distance between a system so attuned to itself that it has lost all sense of that which lies outside it, and the horror that happens when one finds oneself outside.
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