Yes, the lyrical implies deep historical sensibility, particularly in relation to trauma and loss. The lyrical is not merely personal expression; it is a way of sensing history—not as a grand narrative, but as rupture, disappearance, and fleeting traces.
1. The Lyrical as Witness to Trauma and Loss
• The epic records victories and monuments; the lyrical records absences and ghosts.
• Lyrical figures often exist in the aftermath of destruction or in the twilight of disappearing worlds.
• They do not celebrate history as progress but instead mourn what has been lost, often without resolution.
Examples of the Lyrical as Historical Sensibility
• Nagai Kafū – Walks through Tokyo, recording the fading echoes of Edo, sensing the loss of the floating world.
• Walter Benjamin – Writes about history as a ruin, where the past is only visible in broken fragments.
• Osip Mandelstam – Writes lyrical poetry under Stalinism, knowing his words will disappear into silence.
• Du Fu – Wanders a China shattered by war, writing about the small, human details of survival rather than the epic battles.
• Bashō – Walks through Japan, recording not its political changes but its seasons, its vanishing traces of everyday life.
2. The Lyrical Exists in the Shadow of the Epic
• History moves forward, but the lyrical dwells on what is left behind.
• Trauma is historical time breaking down—it creates a moment where past and present collapse into each other, which is the perfect space for the lyrical to emerge.
• The lyrical does not try to restore history, nor does it seek total rupture—it simply registers loss in a way the epic cannot.
Epic vs. Lyrical Responses to History
|
Epic Mode |
Lyrical Mode |
|
Sees history as grand events, victories, movements |
Sees history as fragments, disappearances, traces |
|
Seeks continuity (even through destruction) |
Seeks rupture (acknowledging what is lost) |
|
Produces official records, memorials, ideology |
Produces private notebooks, haiku, quiet testimony |
|
Thinks in terms of collectives and leaders |
Thinks in terms of the individual and the overlooked |
|
Aims to construct meaning |
Aims to preserve impermanence |
3. The Lyrical as a Way of Living With History
• Trauma disrupts time, and the lyrical exists in disrupted time.
• The lyrical is often found in people who wander, linger, and refuse to “move on” from history’s losses.
• The haiku, the melancholic novel, the nighttime walk through an old city—these are all ways of living within historical wounds.
Lyrical Figures Who Walk in History’s Twilight
• Zatoichi – A wandering blind man in the late Edo period, when the samurai order is fading.
• Scudder – A detective who walks Manhattan, where morality and justice have collapsed.
• Nagai Kafū – A writer who lingers in Tokyo’s disappearing past.
• Benjamin – A thinker who walks through Paris arcades, seeing them as ruins of the 19th century.
Conclusion: The Lyrical Is the Sensibility of Those Who Cannot Forget
• The lyrical does not fight history like the revolutionary, nor does it preserve history like the historian.
• Instead, it inhabits history’s losses—through small details, ephemeral moments, the things that are not in textbooks.
• To be lyrical is to be haunted, to know that something was lost and that even memory cannot fully retrieve it.
Would you say, then, that to be lyrical is to refuse amnesia, to keep walking even when history has moved on?
