From verisimilitude to suisimilitude

In reading something the other day I was struck by an unusual wording I hadn’t often come across previously. The context was literary criticism, the author was Mantuan, and the phrase in question was ‘sui simile’.

‘sui similis’, meaning ‘like itself’, is used in Latin to suggest either that some aspect or feature of something is entirely characteristic of it, or that something taken as a whole is in accordance with what is assumed to be its own character or nature. The OLD reckons that ‘similis sui’ means ‘constant, unchanged’, and so is simply a measure of the continuity of an entity in time (and indeed the first references given are to philosophical works: an excerpt from the Timaeus saying that things are, Lucretius saying things ain’t). It seems often to mean something along the lines of: ‘Oh, that’s just like him!’ Incidentally, the OED does indeed list ‘sui-similar’ as a nonce-word, a coinage of Hilaire Belloc, who wrote in his 1902 work The Path to Rome, possibly in one of his more ‘las de ce monde ancien’ moods, of ‘this very repetitive and sui-similar world’.

Mantuan, following the precepts of decorum given by Horace at the start of the Ars poetica, writes: ‘opus poeticum erit ubique sui simile consonum.’ [the poetic work shall be harmonious and completely like itself]. This is further explained later: ‘Necesse enim est ut totum opus poeticum sit compossibile et quadrans et ubique sui simile, licet varias res contineat.’ [For the whole of a poetic work must be compossible, and must fit neatly together, and be completely like itself, though it encompasses a diversity of material]. So the notion of suisimilarity turns on the relationship of part to whole, that perennially vexing problem of ontology.

Of course things can very well be unlike themselves, and usually are, as Ovid comprehensibly demonstrated in his epic-that-is-very-unlike-an-epic, the Metamorphoses. Ovid’s characters are constantly on the verge of becoming unlike themselves, of arriving at that point of self-recognition Narcissus reaches when he exclaims ‘iste ego sum’ [that man am I], and that grammatical disjunction (almost a syllepsis, Ovid’s favourite trope) pre-echoes Rimbaud’s ‘Je est un autre’. When Marsyas is being flayed alive as a punishment for having rivalled Apollo in artistry, he screams: ‘Quid me mihi detrahis?’ [why are you tearing me away from myself?]; and when Actaeon, no longer himself but somehow still himself, is mutilated by his hounds, we read: ‘vellet abesse quidem, sed adest’ [well might he wish to be absent, but he is present]. Reflexives, disjunctives, the play of prepositions and pronouns, all features of Ovid’s exploration of the dissuisimilitude of language and of the world.

For Renaissance man, the fact that things are like other things didn’t have to mean that things were unlike themselves. One assumes that the idea of something being like itself is somehow linked philosophically to that scholastic notion of ‘final causes’. God ordained that all things be like unto their own nature. Prodigies, freaks, chimeras (like Horace’s feathered equino-human hybrid) are not like themselves, and therefore must be shunned. Montaigne, as usual, saw it differently: ‘La dissimilitude s'ingere d'elle-mesme en nos ouvrages, nul art peut arriver à la similitude […] La ressemblance ne faict pas tant un, comme la difference faict autre. Nature s'est obligée à ne rien faire autre, qui ne fust dissemblable’ [Dissimilarity of itself intrudes into our works, no art can achieve similarity…Resemblance does not so much make one as difference makes other. Nature is bound to make nothing else, that would not be dissimilar]. Montaigne in that Essay explores that most problematical dimension of identity, time, which makes identity unidentical, and confuses us by ensuring that the same person is more unlike at different times than different people are at the same time.

Now that we all accept (well, provisionally) that the unified self is an illusion, no longer believe in any such thing as ‘human nature’, and no longer lend much credence to essence as such (if essence didn’t exist, someone would have to invent it; and indeed someone did, whatever crackpot theologian first recognised the need for a present participle of the verb ‘esse’, which classical Latin did not require), the very concept of suisimilitude seems strange. To say something is ‘like itself’ is either tautological, or paradoxical. The statement is disjunctive, since it presupposes a separation, whether of parts and whole or of an essence that precedes its instantiation in a time-bound context. To say something is ‘unlike itself’ is much more easy to understand, for those of us versed in différance and the paradoxes of identity and repetition. Likeness does not so much make one as unlikeness makes other.

Harping on Homer

Now, every schoolboy knows that Pigres of Halicarnassus turned the Iliad into elegiacs by inserting a pentameter of his own composition in between each of Homer’s hexameters. But did you also know that Tryphiodorus rewrote the Odyssey into a lipogram by banishing the letter α from the first book, β from book two, γ from book three, and so on for each of the twenty-four books?

You did? Oh well. Anyway, while googling for info I came across this delightful chapter from Isaac D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature—with which I’m sure many of my readers are already familiar, since it appears to issue from the vicinity of the excellent Giornale nuovo blog.

To seek a newer world

It's always exciting to discover something new under the sun. Well, just recently my girlfriend, who is from Crete, put me onto her compatriot Nikos Kazantzakis (he of Zorba and Last Temptation of Christ fame), and specifically his continuation of the Odyssey. I had never heard of it before, and wasn't immediately moved to read it: after all, modern retellings of ancient myths...meh. (Lately I had the misfortune to witness a truly execrable performance of Sophocles's Antigone (not Anouilh's version, mind you) in modern dress and bewildering regional accents: not recommended.) But read it I did (well, I started: it's nearly twice as long as Homer's epic), in Kimon Friar's magisterial translation, and very impressed I was.

Kazantzakis's Odysseus is a Nietzschean hero in a state of constant revolt. The first word of the epic is, of course 'And...'; and it begins with our hero, his body black with the blood of the suitors (we're at the end of book 22 of Homer's version, the last two books having been lost in transit), coming to realize he has nothing but contempt for his wife, for his family, for his home, for Ithaca, and resolving to leave again, to go beyond, to 'fling off Necessity's firm yoke' and to know Freedom. As he later tells Idomeneus, the old king of Crete who still clings to belief in the gods and the old moral values of a sick civilization, man's only duty is:

[...] to fight his fate,
to give no quarter and blot out his written doom.
This is how mortal man may even surpass his god!

The epic (and the diction is truly epic; excerpting lines from a text always risks misrepresentation, but it is especially perfidious here, since the style builds up cumulatively and sustains its own momentum; the epithets of Odysseus are particularly grand: 'the mind-spinner'; 'the seven-souled man'; 'the god-slayer'; 'the world-destroyer'; and my personal favourite: 'the mind-archer') frames many set-pieces that disorient and disturb the reader, poised as they are in a space between the radically unfamiliar world of bronze-age myth and the radically enstranged world of twentieth-century man. The episode of Odysseus dancing with the corpses of his ancestors is one such piece:

As though it lived, he touched the earth with quivering feet
and slowly on Death's threshing floor began to dance.
[...]
"Never before, I swear, have I wished to praise the tombs,
but now, for your sakes only, I'll adorn them richly.
O tombstones, wings, O brooding wings spread on the ground
to hatch your huge eggs and to warm your sturdy eaglets,
ah mother eagles, all of your eggs hatch in my mind!"
Thus the soul-snatcher danced and woke his great forefathers;
some seized him by the arm, some grasped his dancing feet,
others, like falcon-bells, hung round his swinging throat,
and thus for hours he danced with his ancestral ghosts,
swift in the lead sometimes or at the tail's slow end,
bursting with song like swallows that return in April.

The exuberant joy in life and nature (here Odysseus is Zorba dancing on the shore) , and in freedom from human concerns, combines strangely with the cult of ancestor worship, the ties that bind us to mortality and morality. Later, as Odysseus stands between his father Laertes and his son Telemachus he feels his body being pulled in two directions, on the one side rotting away, on the other revivified and strong: just as he stands between two ages, the bronze and the iron. We no longer know what it means for our bodies and minds to be so much a part of the world.

In the second book Odysseus describes his experiences with Calypso, Circe and Nausicaa as three 'masks of death'; and he comes to realize that return to Ithaca is the worst of the masks of death. His time with Calypso made him forget what it is to be human:

The world then seemed a legend, life a passing dream,
the soul of man a spiraling smoke that rose in air:
in my clear head gods suddenly were born, blazed up,
as suddenly were lost, and others rose instead
like clouds and fell in raindrops on my sun-scorched mind.

Then he finds an unknown object on the shore ('bone of a monstrous fish, leg of a mammoth bird, or staff of some sea demon, branch of a huge sea tree?') which he comes gradually to recognize: it is an oar. Immediately he remembers that he is mortal: 'I quaked in fear of being made a deathless god.'

[Incidentally I had a recognition moment of my own when reading this, since I remembered having seen the accompanying drawing (by Ghika) before; and sure enough, John B. had used it to illustrate this post on the 'death of epic'. I don't know if he knew that the illustration is from Kazantzakis's epic.]

There are also moments of a strange, melancholic grandeur, as when Death comes to lie alongside his old friend Odysseus, falls asleep, and dreams:

Death slept and dreamt that man indeed, perhaps, existed,
that houses rose on earth, perhaps, kingdoms and castles.
He dreamt there was a sun that rose, a moon that shone,
a wheel of earth that turned and every season brought,
perhaps...

But Death smiles and knows his dream is false; still, 'for a brief moment Death had fallen asleep and dreamt of life.'

And this, just before the death of Odysseus:

They played with the earth's and the mind's seeds at odd and even,
sometimes they merged and turned to a forked flame in sun,
sometimes the great world-mockers parted and laughed slyly.
At length the myth grew drowsy, curled by the hearth asleep,
and the world folded its vast wings and dropped its head;
then the great hybrid mind cast tongues of flame and light,
soared high and plunged, rushed through the crossroads of the flesh,
and sat, almighty, on the body's fivefold roads.

* * *
I never much liked Tennyson, but then I received for Christmas the gift of a very fine edition of his poems, and was forced to reconsider my position. His Ulysses is a very great poem, I think. It takes as its premise one very similar to the starting point of Kazantzakis's epic, which goes back to Dante, Inferno 26.90-124, where Ulysses describes his second journey and his death. This Ulysses is the great-souled traveller who pushes the bounds of human experience and cannot rest from the pursuit of knowledge: 'yearning in desire / To follow knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.'

I am part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.

Comœdia Diuina latina

If Dante had written the Divine Comedy in Latin, this is what it would have sounded like:

Ultima regna canam, fluido contermina mundo
spiritibus quae lata patent, quae premia solvunt
pro meritis cuicumque suis…

The final realm shall I sing,
nigh the ever-changing world,
that gapes wide to swallow souls
and metes out the just rewards
That each deserves…

Thanks to Boccaccio for making me aware of this.