Rhapsody and death in John Burnside’s ‘The Hunt in the Forest’

In his essay ‘Ars Nova’ (1962), Maurice Blanchot presents an argument against a certain kind of ‘order’ in poetics by claiming that:

If the musician renounces with austere rigor the continuity of a unified work…, he does so not in order to deny all coherence or the value of form, or even to oppose the musical work considered as an organised whole [...]; on the contrary it is because he places himself beyond aesthetic totality.¹

Anarchism rejects the idea of an ordered world. Accordingly, Blanchot’s anarchism is nothing more than a staunch protection of poetics in the form of a reaction against all that reduces poetry to coarse dictum. Burnside seems to abide by Blanchot’s conception of poetry, and captures something essential with ‘The Hunt in the Forest’ by transcending the rules and releasing something that has a life of its own. The poem is stirred to life by its language – mostly expressive rather than descriptive – which lures the reader ‘far in the woods’ through the journey of life. Nonetheless, however far in the reader is drawn, the poem seems to resist a general categorisation or label. It resists being taken over or brought into line, and retains a certain distance, as it were, from total interpretation.

That the poem has a certain stubborn independence can be seen from the language used and its separation from ordinary usage. The subject of the poem is not easily distinguishable, and the reader has trouble identifying whether the poet is talking about the children’s or the adults’ passage through the forest of life from the very beginning, mostly because of his vague use of the pronoun ‘they’. One soon realises however, that the subject perhaps is not all that important; rather it is the text itself which invites and entertains a multitude of interpretative angles. The language has a certain urgency and significance to it which nevertheless remains obscure and not altogether accessible, and possibly willingly so.

‘The instance of death’, writes Blanchot, ‘is simultaneously – and yet without reconciliation or synthesis – the moment of life’s most extreme possibility and the site of its most intimate impossibility.’² Burnside is grappling with precisely the kind of notorious ambivalence which death elicits. The text’s ambiguous circular form is ultimately the interpretative key; whilst reading, one begins to understand that ‘death opens interminably onto the repetition of the beginning’.³ However unlike Blanchot who states clearly in various essays that death is something to be achieved,⁴ Burnside creates a distinctly negative aura around this ‘hiding place for everything the grown-ups cannot name’. Even though one still cannot rightly claim that the poet is writing about the despair that annihilation brings about, he certainly does hint at it when he writes that in the forest, ‘everything is altered by its own momentum’⁵ and adds, almost like an afterthought, ‘altered, though we say transformed’. The reader immediately picks up on the various possibilities that the different verb produces. To ‘alter’ is taken to mean a change in a somewhat unfavourable manner, whereas when something ‘transforms’, it gives the impression of becoming something else altogether, maybe even something worthier. Therefore Burnside plays with the dissimulation of language to suggest that we prefer to think of death as a kind of metamorphosis when in fact it is nothing of the sort.

The strangely concise phrase ‘greyhound to roebuck, laughter to skin and bone’ is a compact whirlwind of synaesthesia; a whole adventure is told in a couple of discreet, careful words. The reader sees the sharp, able-bodied dog, muscles rippling as it charges through the forest, and catches sight of a proud, startled deer. The reader is then quickly catapulted back into the human realm, realising how subject we are to mortality, how quickly mirth can expire into decay. The curtness of this phrase is another deft representation of how the illusory quality of language can play with the readers’ minds. A fleeting imaginative prompt is all the reader needs to be transported into a realm which deals with the earthly and the abstract simultaneously. This synergetic fusion of contradistinctive branches is one of the many difficult feats that only a certain kind of superior poetry can pull off – poetry which is capable of not only grasping the common qualities of the senses but which also has the power to use them in order to go over and above and into the outside limits of the metaphysical.

The reader is told that ‘no one survives the hunt’. The roebuck is killed, and the men-hunters ‘never quite arrive at what they seem’; a part of them has died alongside that which they have murdered. They have not achieved any sense of exhilaration by their sport, and there is no sign of triumph in the ‘return’. Their homecoming is, on the contrary, marred by the vivid recollection of their fresh butchery (evoked by a revoltingly accurate simile) while they were ‘bent to the juddering kill and waiting’. The term ‘waiting’ begs the question: waiting for what? Does this waiting mean an indifferent tranquillity in which death is seen as something certain and unavoidable, or are these men anxiously expectant, dreading their own impending mortality?

One way of approaching this enigmatic statement is by saying that in phenomenological terms, the experience of literature simply transcends our understanding. Like death, it is a passage that human consciousness can neither escape nor fully come to terms with; it remains an impossible contradiction that can never be resolved with any finality. ‘The Hunt in the Forest’ can be viewed as cryptic and inconclusive, however it also serves as a reminder that whatever apparent security we might believe we are surrounded by, our personal future is tenuous at best. Be that as it may, it is not only fruitless but also irrational to protest against death, even if it intrudes unfairly upon the ‘song[s] from childhood’ and interrupts them abruptly, for death is perhaps the fact of life. This poem is ultimately a fragmentary commentary, a clear and masterful example of how poetry is one of the most limpid of literary forms as it strives to give material form to the ineffable and says the unsayable without actually saying it at all.

Endnotes

¹ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Ars Nova’, in The sirens’ song: selected essays of Maurice Blanchot, ed. by Gabriel Josipovic (US: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 347.

² Carolyn Bailey Gill, Maurice Blanchot: The demand of writing (London; New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 2.

³ Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside (New York: Zone Books, 1987), p. 57.

⁴ Simon Critchley, Very little – almost nothing: death, philosophy and literature (UK: Routledge, 2004).

⁵ My emphasis.

References

Carolyn Bailey Gill, Maurice Blanchot: The demand of writing (London; New York: Routledge, 1996)

Gerald L. Bruns, Maurice Blanchot: the refusal of philosophy ([n.p.]: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005)

Maurice Blanchot, ‘Ars Nova’, in The sirens’ song: selected essays of Maurice Blanchot, ed. by Gabriel Josipovic (US: Indiana University Press, 1982)

Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside (New York: Zone Books, 1987)

Simon Critchley, Very little – almost nothing: death, philosophy and literature (UK: Routledge, 2004)

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