"Cruel remembrance!" Clarissa writes to rewrite memory, to cover over
the trace of "swift misfortunes" with a new, deliriously metered
experience. The
trauma of the past, however, occasionally erupts, breaking the lines on the
page and bruising the shape of her verse. She tries to confound death
and experience in a discourse of multiple division; the body is the cage
and the soul a bird trapped within. Clarissa's soul differs from
Sterne's starling precisely because the cry of "I can't get out-I can't
get out," is informed by memory, fed by the past. Death itself becomes
divided, its bugbear's face a mask on a friend (we remember that Lovelace
is the natural bear, or a young lion, I forget which). The farthest
textual intrusion angles in from outside, sloping into the text from
above: "I could a tale unfold--Would harrow up thy soul!" If the note
comes first, it establishes the quality of what's to come; if it comes
last it defers indefinitely painful remembrance. She forgets as she
writes only to remember.