Quam longe absis intelligo

I understand how far away from me you are

Cicero, in section 120 of his Orator, memorably wrote that not to know what happened before you were born is to remain a child forever.

Nescire autem quid ante quam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum. Quid enim est aetas hominis, nisi ea memoria rerum veterum cum superiorum aetate contexitur?

[To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?]

But the neat interweaving of one’s own memories with the text of the past, if it seemed possible for Cicero, does not seem so for us.

Petrarch, one who was acutely aware of the pathos there is in our vain efforts ever to fully connect with the past, saw the vast deserts of time that separated him from his best friends, the classical authors he loved. He even wrote letters to those authors. They were published in the twenty-fourth book of his correspondence, or at least whatever of it survived the flames to which, in a dark mood one day, he consigned the vast bulk of his literary production. He tells us why in the prefatory epistle to the edition of his correspondence, which is addressed to Socrates. He first chose to write to Cicero, as if to a friend of his own time, with the same familiarity and intimacy we owe to our closest friends, to chastise him for his disastrous political decisions (only friends have the right to tell it like it is).

Petrarch later wrote a letter to Homer, in fact a reply to a letter Homer had addressed to him (P. had put one of his friends up to it). He begins it by expressing a concern about the ‘lack of a common language’ that made it so difficult to write the letter. This goes further than the plain fact that Homer wrote in Greek, a language of which Petrarch was, to his shame, almost entirely ignorant. It speaks of the estrangement of the past, and of our inability to converse with the fundamentally alien idioms of ancient literature.

Later in the same letter, Petrarch writes:

Multa dixi quasi ad praesentem; sed iam ab illa vehementissima imaginatione rediens, quam longe absis intelligo, vereorque ne tam multa in tenebris aegre legas, nisi quia multa mihi etiam scripsisse te video.

[For a long while I have been talking to you just as if you were present; but now the strong illusion fades away, and I realise how far you are from me. There comes over me a fear that you will scarcely care, down in the shades, to read the many things that I have written here. Yet I remember that you wrote freely to me.
trans. James Harvey Robinson]

The classical definition of letter writing held that its aim was to make absent people present, and to conjure the illusion of oral communication through the written word (‘absentis ad absentem sermo’). Homer is, for Petrarch, already a presence, although far away; he is writing to a dead man – but his fear is not that his letter cannot reach its addressee; it is that his addressee will not understand, or care to understand his anxieties. The lack of a common language may be an unbreachable barrier. What we understand of Homer may not mean anything to Homer.

There is a wonderfully poignant moment in Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Kaspar, played Bruno S., holds a baby in his arms, and a tear rolls down his cheek as he softly speaks the words: ‘Mutter, ich bin von allem abgetan’ (‘Mother, I am so far away from everything’). Kaspar, who has been brought up in isolation from language and society, identifies with the child in its pre-linguistic state; but he does have language, however fragmentary and partial, and so he may speak of an imaginary anxiety no child in fact possesses: that of being ‘not at home’ with language, of feeling the pain of distance not just from others but from what we are accustomed to call one’s self. He is the split subject suspended just at that point of traumatic entry into the symbolic order, unable to become properly socialized because he is forever unable fully to inhabit language. Language is a prison house, true, but what must it be to be the one locked outside of it, to catch a glimpse of shadows through the bars?

It is a brilliant film, but – incidentally – I do wish the distributors had not jettisoned the original title: ‘Every man for himself and God against all’ (Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle).

Distance is foundational to the self. At the mirror stage of development, the speechless infant has not emerged into selfhood. It is only in entering the symbolic order, in being torn away from the maternal embrace and thrown into language, that we become what we are, across the unbridgeable chasm that divides us from ourselves.

Just as absence is central to the lover’s discourse, and to speak of love the lover must be distant, far away, anywhere but here, so too to read a text, or rather, for the essential misprision that makes the texts of the past readable for us, there must be a rupture. To write something new is to see the old as something distant and other; otherwise there is nothing new, only an infinite complex of words and symbols existing in an eternal present, transparent as glass.

Today we prefer a historicizing approach to the past – the sort of philological method which in fact began with the humanists, the stirrings of which we perceive in Petrarch. We want to understand the past on its own terms, to be the archeologists of culture, to use the tools of philology and diachronic inquiry to reveal language and history. But we also want it to mean something for us. We want to bring text to reader, not reader to text; we want it to fit the procrustean bed of our understanding. How we do this, how we interleave the memories of history with our own memories – that is the question of interpretation, and the meaning of meaning.

In Praise of Bathos

In the hexameter rises the fountain’s silvery column,
In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.

The internet, in its asymptotically-approaching-infinite wisdom, sees fit to attribute these lines to Coleridge, but no less an authority than L. P. Wilkinson says they are by Tennyson. I can’t be bothered to verify, but for aesthetic reasons I would prefer to side with the latter (even though I suspect he may be wrong). Tennyson’s couplet, then, on the Ovidian elegiac metre, after Schiller (Im Hexameter steigt des Springquells flüssige Säule / Im Pentameter drauf fällt sie melodisch herab), is a fine example of imitative harmony, encapsulating as it does the delicate balance, the oddly even parallelism of the metre. There is something indefinably pleasing about the limping gait of the elegiac. But the pentameter, as it falls back, often merely recapitulates or rejigs the content of the hexameter, and I sometimes wonder what distinguishes it from…well, bad poetry.

Amores 1.9 opens with the couplet:

Militat omnis amans, et habet sua castra Cupido;
Attice, crede mihi, militat omnis amans

[I’ll give Marlowe’s translations here, why not?]

All lovers war, and Cupid hath his tent,
Attic, all lovers are to war far sent.

Here the pentameter does nothing but repeat an idea which had already been repeated once in the hexameter, as if the fountain’s silvery column had risen and fallen too quickly, leaving only a dribble.

Often when couplets like this occur in Ovid, there is a temptation to dismiss them as interpolation or accidentally copied-in manuscript glosses. Or else, well, quandoque bonus dormitat Ovidius. But the pentameter does not always rely on parallelism or repetition. The anticlimactic or understated conclusion to a couplet is also a characteristic feature of the Ovidian style, and it is often used to humorous effect, as here (Amores 2.7):

per Venerem iuro puerique volatilis arcus,

me non admissi criminis esse reum!

I swear by Venus, and the wing'd boy's bow,
My self unguilty of this crime I know,

where the passionate lover’s pledge builds up in the pentameter not to what you might expect – a strong denial of the faithlessness with which he is charged and a re-affirmation of his love for Corinna – but to the pretty weak-sounding conclusion: I won’t allow myself to be accused! The irony is compounded in the poem that follows, in which the elegist reveals himself to be not only guilty of schtupping the other girl, but guilty too of writing poems to her!

There is a fine line between an anticlimactic or repetitive ending and a sharp or subtle ending, a twist in the tail, the epigrammatic pointe. In the case of Martial, it’s not often easy to perceive the difference. If there ever was a point to the repetition in the second line of this one, it’s hard to see what it is now (unless it’s referencing Catullus 85):

Non amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere quare:
hoc tantum possum dicere, non amo te.

I do not love you, Sabidius, nor can I say why:
All I can say is, I do not love you.

And of the pentameter in this one, since it is surely implied in the first line, and making the demand explicit is anticlimactic to say the least:

Cum tua non edas, carpis mea carmina, Laeli.
Carpere uel noli nostra uel ede tua.

Because you do not publish your own poems, you carp at mine, Laelius.
Either stop carping, or publish your own.

None of the foregoing examples are properly ‘bathetic’, I hear you protest: they are merely repetitious, or flabby. It seems Alexander Pope coined the term ‘bathos’ in his work ‘On plumbing the depths’ (marking out the territory to contest Pseudo-Longinus ‘On the sublime’) And I see my friend Conrad has beaten me to the punch on this one.

What about Ovid’s wonderfully bathetic opening to his first book of Amores:

Arma gravi numero violentaque bella parabam
edere, materia conveniente modis.
par erat inferior versus—risisse Cupido
dicitur atque unum surripuisse pedem.

With Muse upreard I meant to sing of armes,
Choosing a subject fit for feirse alarmes:
Both verses were alike till Love (men say)
Began to smile and tooke one foote away.

It is as if the elegiac metre was programmed from the very beginning for bathos.

I often think that bathos, if it can be called a poetic effect, is put to its best use in English humorous verse. I am thinking in particular of forms like the Clerihew. In that case, the bathos is set off by the rhyme, which is so wittingly stupid, so clever in its blank-faced idiocy, that it attains unto the most perfect form of negligentia diligens.

The people of Spain think Cervantes
Equal to half-a-dozen Dantes;
An opinion resented most bitterly
By the people of Italy.

It is also important that the final line should scan badly, or not at all:

John Stuart Mill,
By a mighty effort of will,
Overcame his natural bonhomie
And wrote Principles of Political Economy.

The endings of clerihews are perhaps not properly speaking bathetic, and it might be argued that the pointe, whose humour derives from its unexpectedness, and depends on a sharpness of wit masquerading as a failure of taste, has more in common with the epigram than anything else. But that is precisely my point: what is it that distinguishes the epigrammatic from the bathetic conclusion?

But what set me thinking about this in the first place was a couplet by the 'worst poet in the English language', William McGonagall, which I saw in the blurb for a (serious) book on Shakespeare. It wasn’t written as a free-standing epigram – it is the opening of the monumentally awful Address to Shakespeare; but I think it stands up well on its own two feet, hideously deformed though they are. Dame Elegy, too, had one leg shorter than the other, but her defective posture was what made her graceful (‘et pedibus vitium causa decoris erat’). There’s nothing decorous about this couplet, but it has a certain idiotic charm:

Immortal! William Shakespeare, there's none can you excel,
You have drawn out your characters remarkably well.