Persona, Trauma and Survival in Louise Glück’s Postmodern, Mythic, Twenty-First-Century ‘October’

Abstract

The six-part poem ‘October’ (2002)¹ — from Louise Glück’s (2006) collection Averno — begins in autumn, the inception of the dying season. The poem’s speaker traverses between the hybrid persona of Glück and the mythic goddesses Persephone and Demeter and the voices of the individual women. These women exist in a liminal landscape after the violence and destruction of the twenty-first-century’s reality of terrorism and war. In the poem’s central argument, Glück questions — via an aporetic dialogue² — whether or not to continue existence as the existential-humanist writer,³ pondering the consequences of living or dying in the postmodern-classical⁴ wasteland, either a place to end in the apocalypse or a place to recreate ‘everything that was taken away —’ (Glück, 2006, p. 7).⁵ She uses mythology, persona,⁶ prosopopeia, and silence to explore past and present trauma in the postmodern void. This void is such as Jean Baudrillard observed and prophesied — a place where America has ‘come to the end’ (Baudrillard, 1988, p. 98), and where Glück questions her role in recreating the myth and representing the historical. She tells us, ‘This is the present, an allegory of waste’ (p. 11).