Crede mihi, distant mores a carmine nostro
____(uita uerecunda est, Musa iocosa mea)
magnaque pars mendax operum est et ficta meorum:
____plus sibi permisit compositore suo.
Nec liber indicium est animi, sed honesta uoluntas
____plurima mulcendis auribus apta ferens.
[Tristia 2.353-8]
Believe me, the way I live has nothing to do with my poetry (my life is modest, my Muse playful). Most of my work is lies, and fictions: it is more responsible to itself than to its author. A book is not the index of its author's mind, but a sincere impulse bearing very many things to flatter the ear.
I love this. The injunction 'crede mihi', 'believe me', is undercut by the admission that the body of work (which is, in the final analysis, all we have of the author) is composed of lies and fictions. And that line 'plus sibi permisit compositore suo': in the first place 'it has allowed more to itself than to its author' – stressing the claim that an author's life can be chaste even if his poems are filthy (an invocation of the lex Catulliana) – but then again: 'it has more to do with itself than with its maker' – detaching work from author, destabilizing the notion of author as originating source (another fiction, but a persistent one). This word 'compositor' casts the poet simply as an arranger of material, a mere function of dispositio (and this, of course, is exactly what a poet was at one time: a manipulator of rhetorical phrases, a processor of commonplaces); and to a modern ear the word cannot help but suggest a connection with the technology of printing: the role of the compositor is that of formatting, the arrangement of type on the galley trays. What does it mean to make the author into the function of a largely mechanistic process?
Writing is lying: that much we know. Sincerity is a pose, truthfulness a strategy. There are many different ways to gain the trust of the reader, and most of them involve us in the paradoxes of persuasion: 'believe me, I tell lies'; 'don't believe me, but pay attention'; 'I don't care if you believe me, but truths are hidden among the lies'. Rabelais wrote that his writing should be treated as a Silenus box, valueless and false-seeming on the surface, but concealing some precious truth; he also encouraged his readers to get as drunk as possible before considering believing such a fantastical lie. And just as the supposed truths of myth are allegorically cloaked in a fabuleux manteau of lies, so literature is no 'indicium animi' but an 'honesta voluntas', a 'truthful impulse' expressing itself, like the Cretan liar, only in falsehoods and untruths. It is only by struggling through the double bind of the problem of authorship that we attain unto that 'honesta voluntas' untouched by paradox. Believe that if you will: it's all lies, though.
A few thoughts on that line from Hamlet ('We are arrant knaves all, believe none of us'). It brings to mind some of the things Christopher Prendergast has to say on Flaubert's citational technique in his excellent book The Order of Mimesis. Given the impossibility of transcending the position from which we make and judge the truth-value of utterances, where is the point from which an earnest critique of stupid irony might be possible? Can a text 'be ironic about irony, and thus entertain the possibility of non-ironic readings?' It's an amusing problem, especially in the light of this:
'[...] as the classicists have pointed out, it is not the least of the paradoxes that para-dox is in fact subsumed under the general class of the doxa.'
And Hamlet here is effectively doing what all good authors do, 'quoting without quotation marks', saying something that every reader knows to be 'true' (for we are all stupid), and thus destabilizing the position from which doxa makes its utterances (the position of doxa is precisely that of bêtise or of madness). It is a literary commonplace that women should not believe men. Most Renaissance readers knew that Catullus, through Ariadne, advised 'let no woman believe a man's oath, let none believe that a man's speeches can be trustworthy.' To repeat the commonplace, as a way of persuading a woman to believe, is madness; and perhaps Hamlet's madness, feigned or otherwise, is the same as the madness of the mind that writes only in quotations to ridicule common knowledge, that ironizes about irony and catches itself up in the aporia of sincerity, and that composes lies and fictions in order to tell the truth.
To conclude, allow me to quote a line Prendergast quotes from Flaubert:
'La bêtise consiste à vouloir conclure.'
6 comments:
This is good on some many meta-levels. I don't know if I could parse it all.
What was it Monsignor Darcy said in This side of Paradise? "Sometimes not posing is the greatest pose of all"
Well, it was nearly that, anyway.
Also, I was thinking about Hamlet on a meta-level. While Hamlet does "author" the words are also the Authors. Hence, an even further meaning of "We are errant knaves, etc." could be describing the actors qua actors as if from the mouth of the Shakespeare himself. It certainly would be the only time he did this if we consider Prospero in The Tempest.
One last thing, I read an article discussing 'satire' (amoung other things) in the NYT and thought that perhaps that it also falls on the species of 'doxa' but as a close cousin of 'paradoxa.'
Incidentally, do you know if the Greek and Latin words pronounce 'doxa' have a relationship?
As far as I can tell, the have very different semantic ranges.
The word 'doxa' does not exist in Latin, as far as I am aware. Perhaps you're referring to its uses in ecclesiastical contexts? In which case you'd certainly know more than I do about it. Checking a Greek dictionary I see that 'doxa' in the Greek of the New Testament, came to mean 'glory, splendour' – this would translate into Latin as 'gloria'. It occurs to me that the development of this range of meaning in the Greek 'doxa' ('opinion', but also 'high opinion') is reflected in the range of the Latin word 'fama': 'rumour' (negatively valorized), but also 'fame', 'renown'. But I was, of course, using the word in the Aristotelian sense, to denote something like 'the expression in language of the commonly held set of beliefs and opinions'
Speaking of satire, I find it pertinent that the older sense of the word paradoxa is something like 'opinions contrary to what is generally believed' (which may or may not be true). The word does not necessarily denote 'paradox' in the philosophical sense. In fact, as luck would have it, Hamlet uses the word in this very sense immediately before the 'arrant knaves' line in Act 3 Scene 1, when he says to Ophelia, of the difficulty of honesty 'translating beauty into his likeness': 'This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof.' He doesn't mean a logical paradox, simply that it's contrary to what most people naturally think, or thought.
Here is, I think, the intersection with satire: satire being generally concerned with finding ways to write against common opinion. I'm not sure if the word 'paradoxes' was ever systematically used to denote 'satire', but I do remember coming across a work on Juvenal's satires by the fifteenth-century humanist Angelus Sabinus to which he gave the title 'Paradoxa in iuvenalem'. So the connection is definitely there.
“Hence, an even further meaning of "We are errant knaves, etc." could be describing the actors qua actors as if from the mouth of the Shakespeare himself.”
Yes, good point, I think that's definitely an aspect of it too. I can just imagine that line being performed with a nod and a wink to the audience.
I am nearly certain I have it seen it in eccelesatical context, but perhaps it was a transliteration of the Greek, but now you (rightfully) have me second guessing myself.
Also, I made mention of you on my blog and, as you will see I am in the middle of crafting something in response.
I'll post a link in this thread when I finish it.
The paper is becoming wildly more complicated than I orginally thought. Admist my other academic responibilities, it may take awhile. This may become a term paper for my religious epistemology class.
Hoo-boy, I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
"I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust." --Genly Ai (in Ursula K. LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness, 1969)
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