Raminagrobis

Fish on goat action

2009-05-14T23:30:00.007+01:00

I’m off fishin’ in Norfolk in a couple of weeks, so I thought I’d consult a guide. What better place to start than the greatest fishing manual ever written, Isaak Walton’s Compleat Angler (1653/1676)?

There I found this intriguing piece of information about a fish called the ‘sargus’:

The adult’rous Sargus doth not only change
Wives every day, in the deep streams, but (strange)
As if the hony of Sea-love delight
Could not suffice his ranging appetite,
Goes courting she-Goats on the grassie shore,
Horning their husbands that had horns before.

This sargus is variously taken to be the sea-bream or bass, or, in Cotgrave’s definition of the French ‘sargon’, ‘the Gilthead, or Goldeney; as some hold; howsoever, it is a verie lecherous fish’. Walton has evidently taken some liberties in translating his source Du Bartas (that horny witticism was too much of a temptation), who does not go so far as to suggest a successful congress between fish and goat:

L’adultere Sargon ne change seulement
De feme chaque iour sous l’ondeus Element:
Ains, come si le miel des voluptés des ondes
Ne pouvoient assouvir ses amours vagabondes,
Les Chevres il courtise, et sur les bors herbus
Veut goûter les plaisirs qu’ont leurs maris barbus.

La Semaine ou Création du monde (1581)

Du Bartas’s source, a second-century poem on fishing by Oppian of Corycus, gave a fuller account of the hirco-piscine intercourse in question:

The Sargo scorns the natural Embrace,
Admires the Goat, and courts the bearded Race,
The scented Females of the Mountains craves,
Himself a Native of th’inconstant Waves.
Strange that the Hills and briny Seas should share
A Lover in a kind consenting Pair!
[…]
With eager Hast th’unwieldy Sargo’s move,
By Nature slow, but swift to meet their Love.
With wanton Gambols greet the horned Fair,
Vault o’er the Waves, and flutter in the Air:
Tumultuous round the rival Lovers throng,
Display the Finn, and roll the busy Tongue.
Intent the Shepherds view th’unusual Sight,
Surpriz’d at once with Wonder and Delight.
The willing Goats receive the soft Address,
While those repeat the Bliss, and unfatigu’d caress.
Thus when their Dams return at Close of Day
From distant Meads, their bearded Wantons play
Within their Folds, vocal they frisk around,
And crooked Vales repeat the bleating Sound.
Joyous the Shepherds gaze, in gentle Tides
Along their Hearts the silent Transport glides.
But not the Kids nor Shepherds Pleasures rise
To equal half the finny Lovers Joys.

Oppian’s Halieuticks, trans. John Jones (1722)

So in Oppian, successful congress does indeed take place, and it would appear that the fish, at least, achieves orgasm; whether the she-goat does too is left ambiguous.

Apparently fishermen used to disguise themselves as she-goats and give the come-on to the finny lovers. There’s an image of this in Alciato’s Emblems, the moral of the story being that ‘the she-goat represents the whore, the sargue is like the lover, who perishes, wretched fellow, in the toils of unwholesome love.’

Aelian gave a similar account of the phenomenon; but he altered one crucial detail, so that the amorous advances of the sargus result not in an inter-species orgy but a meal for the goats. The Neapolitan natural philosopher Giambattista della Porta followed this version:

The Sargi love Goats immeasurably. And they are so mad after them, that when so much as the shadow of a Goat, that feeds near the shore, shall appear to them, they presently leap for joy, and swim to it in haste, and they imitate the Goats, though they are not fit to leap. And thus they delight to come unto them. They are therefore caught by those things they so much desire.

Magiae naturalis (1584); English translation 1658

A more probable conclusion, to be sure, but one that lacks the complex eroticism of the original.

Lacépède debunked the legend in his Histoire des poissons (1798): ‘We may find the origin of this ridiculous belief in a few tales clumsily substituted in ignorance for an opinion which was itself probably false’, namely that the sargus had relations with another fish, the female of which species was popularly known by the same word in Greek as the she-goat.

I find in a nineteenth-century edition of The Compleat Angler a different explanation:

The notion was derived probably from the fish crowding round the goats to feed on the vermin, &c., which fell from them.

Such is the difference between the poetic and the scientific worldview.

Youdunnit I

2009-04-02T23:51:00.005+01:00

The postmodern detective story may be a more or less straightforward pastiche of style and plot conventions; or it may be a narrative that ironizes the form, imitating its structures but subverting and distorting them.

The most obvious way of subverting a form that is geared towards the solution of a mystery is to absent or defer the denouement. Thus the postmodern detective narrative is constructed around an absent centre (absence of a crime, absence of a solution); the detective narrative, insofar as the solution of the crime stands for the production of meaning itself, invites the application of poststructuralist theories of différance.

An example: a man reading a pulp detective novel borrowed from a library becomes dangerously obsessed with the narrative, to the extent that his life is consumed by the desire to know the solution. His prurient interest in the sexual dimension of the crimes described mounts to the point where the act of reaching the last page becomes for him a promise of orgasmic release. But the last page is missing, torn out. He complains at the library, but there are no other copies. He approaches the publisher, but the book is out of print. He attempts to visit the author, but he is dead. Finally he obtains a copy from the legal deposit library, and on turning the last page finds a publisher’s note informing the reader that the novel was left unfinished at the time of the author’s death. He will never know.

Alright, I’ll come clean: that was the plot of an episode of the popular BBC sitcom Hancock’s Half-Hour (1960).

In that episode, Hancock is shown in one sense to be the ideal reader of a detective novel, because he identifies with the detective so completely that he not only attempts to do the detective’s work in finding the solution to the crime (and these sequences are very funny), but also turns detective himself in finding the solution of the solution. This he does successfully, and even if the result is for him unsatisfying, for the viewer it is a perfect comedic pay-off.

However, in another way Hancock gets it wrong: the ideal reader of a detective novel should not identify completely with the detective; he should keep his distance, play the game. The reader’s true adversary is not the murderer, but the author. Gilbert Adair gives an insightful account of this here.

Pastiche of detective stories is a tricky balancing act, because the genre itself has a recuperative power and even in its classical form can accommodate self-referential games. I mentioned in the previous post the chapter in John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man (1935), in which the detective tips a theatrical wink to the reader:

‘But […]’, interrupted Pettis, ‘why discuss detective fiction?’
‘Because’, said the doctor frankly, ‘we’re in a detective story and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not. Let’s not invent elaborate excuses to drag in a discussion of detective stories. Let’s candidly glory in the noblest pursuits possible to characters in a book.’

Such explicit self-referentiality may be rare in the classic detective novel, but there are gestures towards it also in Conan Doyle and Christie where the detective’s fame (which is of course really a literary fame) always precedes him; or in Chesterton, where Father Brown is asked to compare his methods of detection with those of other fictional sleuths.

Gilbert Adair’s Agatha Christie pastiches came in for some bad reviews for their irritatingly knowing tone and self-referential clowning. Myself, I rather enjoyed the one I read (A Mysterious Affair of Style), because Adair is clearly quite aware (as he shows in the above article) that the classic detective story is not itself ‘innocent’: it is a game between a knowing author and a knowing reader.

A Christie parody of a different sort, The Prismatic Bezel by Sebastian Knight, was published in 1925 (the same year as Christie’s third Poirot story The Mysterious Affair at Styles); already by that date the murder mystery had become a moribund form, a thing ‘shamming life, painted and repainted, continuing to be accepted by lazy minds serenely unaware of the fraud.’ Knight’s story places a corpse in a boarding house and populates it with the usual cast of suspects. Then the distortions begin: the detective character is called in but fails to arrive; the configurations of the story shift ‘with a quick sliding motion’ and all of the suspects are revealed to be connected with each other; the boarding house setting melts away and is replaced by a country-house; the crime plot fades out and the story takes on the contours of an entirely different type of novel. But then the detective arrives and we are back in the mystery plot. The corpse is revealed to have vanished. Finally the chief suspect (suspected by the reader from the start for being the most conspicuously innocent-looking character) is unmasked: not as the murderer, but as the victim. ‘You see, one dislikes being murdered’.

Knight’s story is of course the invention of Vladimir Nabokov, in whose 1941 novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight the above description appears. Around the same time, Raymond Chandler, who also thought that classic detective fiction had exhausted itself as a form, was busy writing the books that would in large part define a new genre: the hard-boiled thriller.

(Part 2) (Part 3)

Youdunnit II

2009-04-02T23:50:00.008+01:00

(Part 1)

Tzvetan Todorov’s seminal ‘Typology of Detective Fiction’ clarifies the distinction between mystery and thriller. (Although it seems to me that the dominant form today, in British detective fiction at least, does not quite fit either of these genres, being perhaps closer to the ‘police procedural’.) Todorov makes the starting point of his analysis this extract from Michel Butor’s L’emploi du temps (1956):

Every crime novel is constructed around two murders: the first, committed by the killer, is merely the pretext for the second in which he is the victim of the true murderer, the immune murderer – the detective who puts him to death, not by one of the vulgar methods was himself reduced to using, poison, dagger, silenced pistol, or silk stocking garrote, but by the explosion of the truth.

This neat formulation is often quoted approvingly as an apt description of the way crime narratives work. But Butor’s novel itself does something much more interesting, and this explanation is nothing but a lure, a paper-thin construct that the centripetal narrative strains against and destroys.

In some ways such a sophisticated postmodern gesture is in fact an idiotic literalism, an inverse-quixotic way of reading narrative conventions: not the desire to make real life like a novel, but the desire to make novels more like ‘real life’:

In the crime novel the narrative gradually explores events prior to its beginning […] in reality, all too often, it is only when our lives are suddenly disrupted by the explosion of a tragedy that we rouse ourselves and try to find its origins

The postmodern crime novel continually frustrates attempts to impose order and meaning; its clues resist interpretation, events get distorted by the very act of investigating them. The narrative involves the reader in ever more labyrinthine twists, and increasingly indistinguishable temporal layers. There is no ‘explosion of truth’, only the explosion of meaning into fragments.

Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos (1964) takes further the idea of detection as a descent into madness. Paul Auster’s City of Glass and Ghosts (1986) do something similar, in subverting the conventions of the hard-boiled detective narrative, and tipping in a large dose of metafictional whimsy to further confuse matters. If I sound dismissive, I don’t mean to: I loved the New York Trilogy when I first read it, and I even made it the subject of a tedious postgraduate essay I wrote for a module on the impenetrable French theorist Maurice Blanchot. The NYT attracted many imitators, none of whom added much to the mix. Sam Taylor’s The Amnesiac (2007) is the most recent one that I’ve read; it wears its debt to Auster on its sleeve, and isn’t very good.

Novels like Butor’s, Gombrowicz’s and Auster’s function according to a logic that does not merely foreclose the possibility of a solution to the mystery, but ultimately reveals there never was any mystery to solve in the first place. The founding event of the detective narrative has been whipped out from under it, and if its attendant devices remain (clues, suspects, surveillance), they point only to an absent centre. The story of the investigation is no longer underpinned by the story of the crime. Todorov noted that in the generic detective narrative the story of the crime is the story of an absence in that it cannot be immediately present in the book; the difference here is that the story of the crime is an absence made pervasively present in the book. Clues become freely-circulating signifiers, leads become aporias, the lure of a solution becomes the endless deferral of meaning.

These kind of novels often get called ‘metaphysical detective stories’. It would probably be better to call them postmodern or poststructuralist, and reserve the ‘metaphysical’ label for the work of a Borges, or, at a stretch, of a Chesterton.

Umberto Eco’s historical mysteries represent a different type again, I think, because even if they load elements of the story with semiological significance, they do not violate the structural logic of the genre: both The Name of the Rose and Baudolino have murder mysteries and solutions that are recognizably classical in their form.

(Part 3)

Youdunnit III

2009-04-02T23:49:00.010+01:00

(Part 1) (Part 2)

In any case, the genre-defying twist is in many ways invited by the very conventions of the genre, as if distortion of the form were built into the form itself, and some of the most 'unconventional' solutions are actually found in the most classic and even genre-defining stories. Even discounting ‘unusual’ solutions that are nevertheless perfectly permissible in the ‘classic’ canon (suicide disguised as murder, etc), the genre has from the get-go been corrupted by every manner of perversion. Unclassical solutions in ‘classic’ stories (Christie, Dickson Carr, Chesterton, Poe, Collins) include the following: the narrator did it; the victim did it (not suicide); everyone did it; no-one did it (there was no crime); a non-human animal did it; the criminal doesn't know he did it (but it wasn’t an accident); etc.

The Oulipopo (note that reduplicated syllable: Ouvroir de Littérature Policière Potentielle) was founded in 1973 as a sub-commission of the College of 'Pataphysics. François Le Lionnais had in 1971 written the founding text of the ‘analytical’ wing of the movement (the other being the ‘synthetic’, concerned with the composition of detective stories under various constraints), a study entitled ‘Who is Guilty?’, in which he attempted to outline all the possible solutions to a murder mystery narrative. (My information here all comes from the excellent Oulipo compendium, ed. Harry Matthews.)

Le Lionnais, who had clearly read many more crime stories than I have, even knew of examples of the following: the detective did it; the author (who is not the narrator) did it; the publisher did it. There are even apparently instances of the most genre-defying and perverse solution of all, that is, the absence of any solution (‘we can never know’) which ramifies, in Le Lionnais’s scheme, into three distinct types.

It is one of the most widely-acknowledged rules of the genre that the detective cannot be the culprit (Van Dine reserved particular scorn for this gimmick). I don’t know which story Le Lionnais had in mind here; but I know of one interesting example of the detective-as-culprit: G. K. Chesterton’s ‘The Secret of Father Brown’ (‘You see, it was I who killed all those people’) – where the guilt, however, is moral and spiritual rather than legal.

Clearly some of the instances mentioned here are not properly speaking canonical representatives of the genre, but parodies (for example, the one in which the criminal is the publisher is a ‘humorous story by P. G. Wodehouse’). Still, it is clear that the mystery genre has always clamoured to violate its own generic conventions. Like all genres in fact.

The only twist that had never been done, to Le Lionnais's knowledge was: the reader did it. The Oulipo Compendium duly supplies an example of just that, in Jean-Louis Bailly’s La Dispersion des cendres (1990). (Although it has to be said that this cheats a bit by being merely a description of such a novel and not the novel itself; and by really being a case of ‘the purchaser of the book did it’ rather than the reader.) There are other examples, the internet tells me (pdf), and I’m disappointed – if unsurprised – to see that I’m not the first to think such stories should be categorized as ‘youdunnits’. It appears that the examples mentioned in that link adopt the expedient of the second person narrator. That may seem like a cheap trick, reminiscent of those ‘choose your own adventure’ books we used to read as children, but Michel Butor’s 1957 novel La modification (although not itself a murder mystery) proves that it can be done well.

Incidentally, I have arranged it so that the email notification for one randomly selected comment on this post will remotely trigger a mechanism causing a hammer to smash a flask of poisonous gas concealed in my enemy’s bedroom. You have been warned…

Whodunnits and howdunnits

2009-03-28T01:58:00.000Z

I’m a sucker for detective fiction, even bad detective fiction. When I start a crime novel, I’ll always persist with it, heroically, until the bitter end, suffering abominable writing and gappy plotting, wading through the longueurs and plumbing the depths, taking on the nose insults to my intelligence and assaults on my taste. I wouldn’t bother to do this with any other type of novel, or any other art form come to that. Life’s too short. But with crime novels, giving up feels too much like admitting defeat. I know the rules of the game; the author knows them too; and if either one of us cheats, we make a mockery of the whole thing.

I do occasionally read thrillers, but it’s the classic ‘golden-age’ detective story that really gets me, because the conventions are better defined: the rules are clearer, and I stand a chance of winning.

Apparently it’s generally thought that European detective fiction is enjoying something of a golden age of its own at the moment. It seems otherwise to me, based on my reading of (among others) Henning Mankell’s The Fifth Woman, which was a tedious slog, and even if the leaden style can charitably be blamed on the translator, the author must take all the blame for the clunkiness of the deductions. For instance, in order to bring the detective up to speed with what reader and author already know – that the killer is a woman – Mankell contrives to strike him with the insight that the contents of a suitcase are disposed in a certain way, such that only a woman could have packed it. This makes several errors, not the least of which is that the reader has been allowed to know more than the detective, and so is in a position to see his deduction for the absurd contrivance it is. Second, it places undue demands on the reader, because it does not specify exactly how a woman’s packing technique might universally differ from a man’s (in a way that takes account of the possibility of a particularly fastidious man or a particularly slovenly woman). The best detective fiction must specify every plot point. And thirdly, it plays on gender markers which in classic detective fiction are usually only there to set up a bluff or a double-bluff: if poison is used, the murderer is probably (gender stereotype principle) a woman, and therefore (principle of misdirection), probably a man, and so therefore (double-bluff principle), probably a woman… and so on. Gilbert Adair’s very enjoyable Agatha Christie pastiches get quite a bit of play out of this game of cache-cache between author and reader.

I’ve also recently read a couple of Fred Vargas novels (one in French, one in English translation), which, though they are more lively that the Mankell, are equally irritating in the fudging of plot points. Now, I’m told that the USP of this detective is that he proceeds not by rational deduction but by intuition and flashes of psychological insight; but it is not admissible to have the detective arrive at these pseudo-Freudian insights by the same process as the author presumably did in the first place– that is, by pulling them out of thin air. This is the problem also with the ‘psychological profiling’ sections of serial killer movies: that the process of deduction moves the wrong way, making of a contingent cause a necessary one, so that the procedure resembles less the reconstruction of the motivations of a real person than the supplying of motivations to a fictional one.

Agatha Christie’s Poirot himself liked to tell us that his insights rely not only on the cold rationality of a Sherlock Holmes but on a profound understanding of human psychology; and her plots are satisfying because they do supply plausible motives that always end up having the semblance of necessary and sufficient causes. This is the difference between a psychology that is ‘scientific’, in that it assigns motives to its actors that are ultimately explicable and comprehensible, precisely where they seemed inexplicable and incomprehensible – and a post-Freudian psychology that assigns nebulous, contingent ones. Freudian psychology, whose deductions appear largely subjective and whose conclusions are unfalsifiable, should have no role in detective fiction, whose solutions can only satisfy if the clues can ultimately be shown to point in one direction only.

But my favourite kind of detective fiction in the classic mould is one that generally eschews the problem of motive. It is the ‘howdunnit’ style, best exemplified in the short fiction of G. K. Chesterton, and taken further (some would say exhausted) in the novels of John Dickson Carr. The purest form of this subgenre is the ‘locked room’ mystery. No need to go to Todorov for a typology of this: the best place to look is Chapter 17 of The Hollow Man, where Dickson’s Chestertonian detective Dr Gideon Fell takes a metafictional leap and analyses the conventions of the genre.

I remember reading somewhere the opinion that Chesterton’s stories impatiently dispose of the opening and middle-game phases of the usual type of detective fiction, and present us only with the endgame. (Actually, I don’t think the chess metaphor was used, but I reckon it figures it quite well.) That’s a bit unfair, I think: it’s true that the Father Brown stories don’t really bother much with characterization, or the pacing out of clues, or any of that stuff; but that’s because the form does not require them. Chesterton’s stories don’t even pretend to try to give the reader a chance to catch up with the detective: they simply present an impossible situation, and then a few pages later explain how it happened. It’s clear from his other work (The Man Who Knew Too Much, Manalive) that for Chesterton the appearance of the impossible, the miraculous and the paradoxical had an ethical and religious significance: it is meant to jolt us out of the complacency of reason.

But of course, Chesterton’s solutions are always completely rational, in the how, if not in the who. We don’t expect to beat the detective to the unmasking of the killer, because the motive is rarely a puzzle – it is mere sinfulness, human evil; but we may, if we have read enough of the stories, beat the detective to the solution of how the murder was done (or rather, how the crime scene came to present the appearance it did).

The Chesterton stories, written at the height of modernism (an artistic movement to which Chesterton emphatically did not belong), present some similarities with the games of a Joyce or an Eliot. They are zero-sum games between author and reader. There is little on offer to compensate the inattentive or lazy reader, who wants to be presented with some easy truth about the human condition, and does not delight in ingenious puzzles. But I like puzzles, and paradoxes; and as Schlegel said, ‘all great truths are basically trivial, and so we have to find new ways, preferably paradoxical ways, of expressing them, in order to keep them from falling into oblivion.’

Mobile vulgus

2009-02-16T21:54:00.002Z

Here’s something that really gets my goat: imagine you’re having a conversation with someone, perhaps discussing military strategies in the second Peloponnesian war, or merely batting phatic trivialities back and forth, and your interlocutor breaks off mid-sentence, reaches into his pocket and, making some vaguely apologetic gesture, takes out a mobile and starts replying to the text he’s just received. Or worse: answers a call and starts chatting, directing his conversational attentions away from their rightful beneficiary and onto an unseen other. Away from the one who, according to every principle of laws canon and civil, has the first claim on them, by dint of priority and physical proximity (a prioritate atque a proximitate corporis, as it is no doubt written in the Pandects of Justinian).

I know I’m not alone in this. I know I’m not the first to make this complaint. And I know I risk coming across as exactly the sort of person I don’t want to be in making it. I’m not a reactionary technophobe, and I don’t want to be one of those people who lament the decline of good manners or the collapse of society. But god damn, it’s annoying.

People didn’t act like this a hundred years ago. I know this because they didn’t have mobile phones. However, they did have telegrams, and if this excerpt from Chesterton’s The Club of Queer Trades is anything to go by, that technology had a similarly deleterious effect on morals:

Grant, in particular, seemed so dreamy at table that he scarcely saw the pile of letters by his plate, and I doubt if he would have opened any of them if there had not lain on the top that one thing which has succeeded amid modern carelessness in being really urgent and coercive – a telegram.

Letters do not impose on the modern mind this insistent demand for attention. Where a text or a telegram command the immediate breaking off of a conversation or a leisurely breakfast, the reading of a letter may be deferred.

People didn’t act like this four hundred years ago. They didn’t have mobiles or even telegrams then, I am reliably informed. But the relatively old technology of the handwritten letter still had an aura of urgency about it, and Montaigne writes of:

cette passion avide et gourmande de nouvelles, qui nous fait avec tant d'indiscretion et d'impatience abandonner toutes choses, pour entretenir un nouveau venu, et perdre tout respect et contenance, pour crocheter soudain, où que nous soyons, les lettres qu'on nous apporte

(that eager passion for news, which makes us with so much indiscretion and impatience leave all to entertain a newcomer, and without any manner of respect or outcry, tear open on a sudden, in what company soever, the letters that are delivered to us)

[trans. Charles Cotton]

Fifteen centuries before Montaigne, Plutarch was already bemoaning such indiscretions:

And therefore we must by little and little accustom ourselves to this, that when there be any letters brought unto us, we do not open them presently and in great haste, as many do, who if their hands be not quick enough to do the feat, set their teeth to, and gnaw in sunder the threads that sewed them up fast. Also, if there be a messenger coming toward us from a place with any tidings, that we run not to meet him, nor so much as once rise and stir for the matter

[trans. Philemon Holland]

Montaigne, of course, knew his Plutarch, and he approvingly cites the civility and courtesy of one Rusticus, who, ‘being present at a declamation of his [Plutrach’s] at Rome, there received a packet from the emperor, and deferred to open it till all was done: for which all the company highly applauded the gravity of this person.’ But Montaigne sensibly condemns the opposite vice of imprudent negligence, since an unexpected letter from an emperor probably deserves immediate attention, if one has any instinct for self-preservation. (Rusticus was afterwards put to death by Domitian.)

But what lesson can we learn from this about modern manners? I think the etiquette must be that texts and calls received during conversations or meals should not normally be answered, except when they come from an emperor, or person of equivalent rank.

Codes, and literature

2008-12-19T22:32:00.002Z

Reading John B’s post on Number Stations yesterday got me thinking about the tangentially related subject of literary codes. I’m not thinking specifically of narratological theories of the codification of narrative, of the kind associated primarily with Roland Barthes, but of the ways literary texts have been put to use as second-level codes.

I remembered reading about the wartime use as a code of this beautiful poem by Verlaine:

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l’automne
Blessent mon cœur
D’une langueur
Monotone.

Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l’heure,
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens
Et je pleure

Et je m’en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m’emporte
Deçà, delà,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.

(Various translations here.)

To me, Verlaine is the greatest modern practitioner of the chanson form, which combines simplicity of form and matter in a way that attains the most perfect expression of melancholy moods. Another beautiful example of the form is his perhaps equally famous poem Il pleure dans mon coeur.

It seems that the Allies transmitted the first part of the first stanza of the poem to the Resistance to warn of the imminent Normandy Landings. The operation would take place immediately after the transmission of the second part of the stanza. Strange that the phrase ‘blessent mon cœur’ (wound my heart) was wrongly reproduced as ‘bercent mon cœur’ (rock/soothe my heart)…

Another famous example of a wartime poem code is this one, composed specifically for that purpose, by Leo Marks:

The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours

The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours

A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause

For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours
And yours.

This also is a very beautiful poem, I think.

Literary texts have been used variously for transmission of what I’m calling secondary coded messages (no doubt there is a better term). Not codes written into the text by some steganographical operation, such as those (supposedly) put into books like the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili by Francesco Colonna, or the Gargantua by Rabelais, or the Bible by…er, God. Rather, the use of literary texts as the base material to which a previously agreed-upon cipher is applied. There was an example of this in the recent movie The Baader-Meinhof Complex, in which the eponymous members of the Red Army Faction transmitted coded messages to each other in their jail cells using an edition of Moby-Dick as their base text.

This method is much more likely to be effective within closed communities that have their own markers of inclusion and literary shibboleths. Perhaps, because of the wider range of texts to which we have access today – paradoxically – there are fewer markers of this type available to us than there were for the literary communities of past times. For the members of the international Republic of Letters during the Renaissance, the boundaries of the common cultural property were more clearly demarcated; and the personal or familiar letter, being pretty much the only private communication technology available, could be used as a mechanism for the transmission of coded information.

I remember reading that the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives recommended, somewhere in one of his epistolographical works, that the ‘familiar’ letter should be used to transmit secret information intended only for a particular reader. This should be done by encoding in the text allusions to myth, to history, to proverbs, and quotations from the classical authors whose meaning will not be noticed by a secondary reader (the letter was never exactly a private mode of communication – especially if you were writing it with a eye on a future print publication), but will be easily decoded by the intended recipient.

This sort of erudite game-playing is right on the boundary between the use of literary texts as the raw material for ciphers, and the more usual kind of decoding we are always doing to texts when we read them as educated members of a common culture.

Other-striving

2008-12-08T23:10:00.001Z

In a 1926 monograph on a little-read French rhétoriqueur poet, Jean Lemaire de Belges, Paul Spaak made in passing the following remarkable claim:

The trends in different art forms in any given period are in fact always identical, and nothing resembles more closely the painting of an age than its poetry or its music

Perhaps this claim is in fact not at all remarkable to anyone who’s been paying attention, or who reads German; but to me, who have not, and do not, it was like a thunderbolt from the blue. Actually more like a theatrical simulation of a thunderbolt manufactured with magnesium flash and kettle drum, because if it struck me, it struck me as completely false.

Lately I’ve been reading Bruno Schulz, one of the most astonishing prose artists produced in that amazingly fertile period between the wars. More on Schulz in my next post, I hope, but I mention him here because of a back-cover quote that caught my eye: Schulz’s writing, one critic pronounces, is (somehow) just like the painting of Chagall.

It is hard for me to see the point of this comparison. It seems to me that Schulz, despite the strong presence of elements of the visual arts in his work, is interested in making everything – not like a picture – but like a book. And if his writing does often reach for synaesthetic heights, what is pervasively clear and true in it still is that such effects are achievable only through writing, that there is something irreducibly written about the written word.

But to see an equivalence between the different art forms of an age is not just pseudo-profundity, it is not only the meaningless shorthand of lazy literary criticism. It is built into literature itself, the drive to transcend the form and aspire to the condition of other forms, beyond the written.

Everybody knows that all art aspires to the condition of music. But in the essay from which this aphorism is taken, Walter Pater begins by saying: ‘It is the mistake of much popular criticism to regard poetry, music, and painting – all the various products of art – as but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought.’

It is ‘the beginning of all true aesthetic criticism’ to recognize that the ‘sensuous material of each art brings with it a special phase or quality of beauty, untranslatable into the forms of any other’.

I suppose this does not quite directly contradict the claim I quoted at the top of the page – which itself, taken in context, was really meant to say not much more than that the techniques of late-medieval Flemish painting are reflected in the writings of Burgundian court poets of that age. But it does make me wonder how useful it can really be to talk about one art form in terms of another.

Pater himself writes so wonderfully that I can easily see how all art aspires to the perfect interpenetration of form and content that is the condition of music. And he pinpoints an exact truth, which is not that art forms all resemble one another, but that they appear constantly to be striving to become other than they are. This Anders-streben (a Hegelian-looking term if ever there was one, but not in fact one of Hegel’s, it seems) I think expresses perfectly a very basic truth about art.

Artists and writers – especially writers – have always tried to express their own art in terms of other forms. ut pictura poesis. enargeia: the word-picture. In the work of Ovid this transformative tendency is distilled and is itself transformed into theme and structural principle. Ovid not only represents bodies changed into new forms, but transforms his own art into different arts: into sculpture, into picture, into music. Pygmalion, Arachne, Orpheus stand as figures for the poet; and in turn their arts are translated back into the poetry of Ovid’s text. They were always bounded by textuality, which constitutes the supreme Ovidian illusion. Ovid’s book has furnished the material for new transformations, in Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, in Titian’s Actaeon, or in any of the innumerable Renaissance ‘figurations’ of the work.

Schulz (to come back to him, if I may) is a true successor to Ovid in that his art represents the inner tendency of things to strive to become unlike themselves – or rather, to become more like themselves by becoming other. This tendency is I think what becomes manifest through the transformative power of the poetic word.

Reading Pater and Schulz in parallel is a rewarding experience. Where Pater writes that ‘in its primary aspect, a great picture has no more definite message for us than an accidental play of sunlight and shadow for a few moments on the wall or floor’, it can be read as a anticipatory gloss on Schulz’s ‘squares of brightness dreaming their intense dreams on the floor’.

Schulz writes of the life of things: an anthropomorphism not only of animals and objects, but of a square of light, a stretch of time, the wind. Of transformations that go beyond even Ovid’s metamorphoses: a man into an electric doorbell, a woman into paper and ash, the world into a book.

It is clear to me that Schulz, no less than the man of whom Pater wrote these words, could discern the correspondences between things and between words and things, the correspondences ‘through which, to eyes opened, they interpret each other’; and it may well be that ‘he seemed to those about him as one listening to a voice, silent for other men.’

Paris with a Baedeker

2008-09-23T22:44:00.001+01:00

In preparation for a month long working visit to Paris in July (yes I know, it’s a hard life), I did what any self-respecting tourist would have done a century ago, and snaffled up a Baedeker. There are loads of these old travel guides floating about, and I acquired my 1898 edition of Baedeker’s Paris and Environs for about six quid.

Paris has not changed so much since 1898 to render Baedeker’s street maps obsolete, and I found them very useful (despite the absence of any Metro stations). It would have been a different story, of course, if I’d been dealing with a guide to pre-Haussmann Paris. But I like causing difficulties for myself, so I also took along a print-out of the 1552 ‘Plan de Bâle’. Despite the name, this is in fact a map of Paris. It might as well have been a map of the town in Switzerland though, and my attempts to walk the medieval streets of Paris in the modern city were not very successful – even when I tried to triangulate by means of a copy of Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris.

You can read a good account of the history and mythos of the Baedeker guides here. It recounts the no doubt apocryphal but appealing tale of Kaiser Bill taking pains to time his public appearances so as not to disappoint Baedeker’s eager readers. It also relates the less palatable but probably equally apocryphal story that the Nazis relied on Baedeker’s maps for their invasion of Norway, and that Hitler commanded the Luftwaffe on bombing missions in Britain to ‘flatten everything to which Baedeker gives two stars’.

It appears Baedeker did not much like France or the French, and that this is the reason why he delayed so long in publishing the Paris guide. This dislike seldom comes through in the text, but Baedeker (and here I use the name to refer both to the man himself and to the subsequent updaters of his handbooks) is a discriminating guide who has little time for anything that does not meet his exacting standards. Here, for example, he advises travellers to avoid the towns of Northern France, whose scenery is ‘seldom so attractive as to induce a prolonged stay’ and whose identikit collections of boulevards, jardins des plantes and cafés are ‘feeble reproductions’ of their Parisian models, making them ‘mere repetitions of the metropolis on a small scale’.

I think Baedeker is right to say that the architecture that resulted from the ‘vast schemes of improvement carried out in our own days’ (the old Paris was still a recent memory), though imposing, ‘exhibit[s] an almost wearisome uniformity of style’. But I’m not entirely sure that I agree with his estimation of the French character, when he says that the Parisian, ‘accustomed by long usage to [the presence of tourists], is skillful in catering for their wants, and recommends himself to them by his politeness and complaisance.’

Baedeker complains that the tranquillity of the central quarters of the city is often rudely interrupted by the discordant cries of the ‘“old clothes” men’, the ‘crockery-menders’, and the ‘dog-barbers’. Fortunately, these persons are for the most part ‘self-respecting and devoid of the squalor and ruffianism which too often characterise their class’. I was however compelled to disallow the female members of my entourage to accompany me on a stroll around Montmartre, since Baedeker explicitly states that the establishments to be found there are not suitable for ladies.

But my purpose is not to point and laugh at the quirks of our forebears, naïve children that they were and ignorant of the lessons of maturity to be learned by their future and our present. (As if.)

I love the fact that among the many charts and lists included at the back of the book is a lengthy index listing ‘the most important Artists mentioned in the Handbook, with a note of the schools to which they belong.’ You don’t get that in Lonely Planet. And in spite of the desuetude of some of the practical information, one sometimes chances upon pointers in the guidebook that appear to have swung full circle through irrelevancy and back again: for example the instruction that ‘smoking is generally prohibited at the cafés unless there be chairs outside’. (Since the introduction of the smoking ban last year, Parisian café culture now seems to take place more outside than in.)

Included also, in a section entitled ‘Distribution of Time’, is a fiendishly complex table whose calculations derive from arcane algorithms which take into account length of visit, days and times of opening for the various attractions, and estimated expenditure. This was clearly of great use to Baedeker’s readers, and in my edition (whose past owners include a certain K. F. Robinson, and a G. J. Ingles of Whiteladies Road, Clifton) there are marks by two different hands to show which attractions the users intended to visit. These are the only marginalia to be found in the book, unfortunately.

Baedeker will tolerate no half measures, as is apparent from his advice to theatregoers: ‘An intimate acquaintance with colloquial French, such as can be acquired only by prolonged residence in the country, is absolutely necessary for the thorough appreciation of the acting; visitors are therefore strongly recommended to purchase the play to be performed, and peruse it beforehand.’

The Baedeker ethos is pretty far removed from the attitude prevalent among today’s Lonely Planet travellers, whose badge of honour is awarded for having ‘done’ as many countries as possible, as quickly as possible. There is an intensity of purpose that may seem strange to us in Baedeker’s insistence that tourists have a sort of moral obligation not to passively enjoy mere superficial pleasures, but to invest all of their intellectual energies in their experiences.

Speaking of which, I’m reading the great Patrick Leigh Fermor’s travel books on Greece at the moment. I’m sure I’ll have something to say about them in due course, if anyone’s interested.

Unwritten posts

2008-09-08T22:23:00.002+01:00

Since this blog has in recent times stalled, stuttered, and stagnated, I thought I might get things flowing again by dredging up the skeletons of some posts I intended to flesh out but never got around to, for one reason or another… Wait, who am I kidding? The reason’s plain enough: laziness – that sin which opposes not just one, but all of the seven cardinal virtues (writes Badius in 1492), which you might know as desidia, or as pigricies, or segnicies, or acedia or inertia, or ignavia, and which causes the ultimate destruction of all that is good. Haec Badius. (In the Middle Ages they had more names for this sin than any other, I think.) So, looking listlessly from this sterile promontory, I take my lead from George Steiner, whose idea of putting out a collection of half-arsed essays (but that’s unfair: some of them are really quite good) under the title My Unwritten Books so dazzled his publishers that they saw fit to market it as a ‘fiercely original and audacious work’.

I worry that this here post won’t be as stimulating as Steiner’s book – for one thing, you won’t find here any discussion of translinguistic euphemisms for ‘a gentle, somewhat respectful anal access’. But as Steiner once said elsewhere (in another book that he did, in fact, write), were our language deprived of conditional and subjunctive moods ‘our posture would be static and we would choke on disappointed dreams’; ‘we would turn forever on the treadmill of the present’. And blog posts such as this would never be written, an unimaginably grave prospect for humanity to contemplate, I’m sure you’ll agree. So, here:

Item, A comparison of novels about amnesia and existential solitude I happen to have read recently, which are, in descending order of notability: Thomas Glavinic’s Night Work, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, Sam Taylor’s The Amnesiac, Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts and Alex Bell’s The Ninth Circle (the list descends quite far down, unfortunately – all the way down, in fact, to the Ninth Circle where readers are punished for authors’ sins against literature).

Item, A reading of James Marsh’s documentary Man on Wire in the light of a passage from near the beginning of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra about a wirewalker and a fool on a tightrope ‘which was stretched between two towers and thus hung over the people and the market square’. The tightrope is usually a metaphor for the precariousness of human existence – but it is not quite this in Nietzsche, and it is not this in the film, whose very form (the reconstruction of the event in interviews and dramatizations recorded thirty years later) plays down the danger and relaxes the dramatic tension: Petit obviously survived. The dramatizations are strewn liberally with ‘reality effects’ – a part of the action is captioned as taking place on 8 August at 4.47am (why not 5am? or 4.40am?) – which only enhance the awareness, on the part of the viewer, that he is watching a reconstruction. The reconstruction procedure is here not a mere framing device for the dramatic centre of the film (the act itself in any case is not shown in filmed footage but in still images). The dramatic centre of the film is not the act, but the remembering and reconstruction of the act. The overwhelming emotion is not one of exhilaration, but of sadness.

Item, A consideration of the absolute, inhumane nihilism of There Will Be Blood, which gives us a picture of misanthropy unmoored from any moral origin. Misanthropes, like Molière’s Alceste, are very often quite right about things. Plainview’s hatred is not traceable back to any cause, no early formative trauma or bereavement; it is not righteous anger in the face of hypocrisy; it is not even the human will corrupted by greed and power.

Item, A compte-rendu of an uninspiring novel about Rabelais (Michel Ragon’s Le roman de Rabelais), which I picked up in some second-hand bookshop for €1, whose premise appears to be that Rabelais was not Rabelaisian.

Item, An abortive essay about David Lynch’s Inland Empire. The less said about this, the better.

Item, A trivial interpretation of the illustrations depicting grammar, logic and rhetoric in Gregor Reisch’s Margarita philosophica (1503).

Item, A discussion of madness, religion and the pursuit of beauty in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. In particular the scene in which a mob of pilgrims and journalists and rubberneckers is led in all directions by the whim of a child. There is an obvious link between the crowd’s obsession with celebrity – the photographers’ single-minded pursuit that aims to make everything into an image detached from meaning, to achieve the apotheosis of the spectacle – and a certain obsessive religious belief which no longer has an object to attach itself to, and so stampedes in confusion, in the dark and in the rain, in pursuit of a vision, a false miracle. This thematic strand is woven into the main fibre of the narrative, which concerns the obsessive but despairing pursuit of beauty and pleasure, without object and without end; the desire to ‘stand outside of time’ and exist in harmony, as a work of art. This is the obsession of Steiner, who realizes it by killing himself and his two young children. And the film ends with Marcelo on the beach, the swell of the ocean drowning out the words spoken by the beautiful young girl whom he met earlier but seems not to recognize.

Item, ‘Paris by Baedeker’. Come to think of it, I may yet write this one.

Mensa, mensam, mensae

2008-06-28T19:02:00.006+01:00

Writes Françoise Waquet:

How can one fail to notice, on opening a Latin primer, that the paradigm for the first declension is not always and everywhere the famous rosa, adopted in France not so very long ago to replace the traditional musa? Although Italy and Spain use rosa too, in the United States and Canada pupils practise on puella, in England and Holland on mensa; in Germany, where schoolchildren use agricola, the textbook for medical students at Göttingen had vena as its model, while the one used at Münster gives lingua as its archetype.

Latin, or The Empire of a Sign

Isn’t it remarkable that something as notionally universal as the teaching of Latin grammar has diversified into such culturally specific forms, to flatter our prejudices and affirm national stereotypes? Imagine French, Spanish and Italian schoolchildren practising grammar drills on the word ‘rose’, and understand the florid and fragrant sensibilities and melancholy romanticism of those peoples. See how American culture oscillates between the twin poles of sexualization and infantilization (‘puella’ in love poetry is a mistress or courtesan, as well as being simply a ‘girl’). Observe that the empirical and resolutely anti-idealist mind of the Englishman has been subjected to the repetition of the word ‘table’. And the industrious German has had the word ‘farmer’ drilled into him from an early age.

The reason I say that the teaching of Latin grammar might be thought of as ‘universal’ is because it was for a long time singular in method; and the reason that musa (‘a song’, or else ‘a Muse’) was for so long the 'traditional' paradigm for first declension nouns is that it is in Donatus, whose fourth-century Latin grammar was the basis for all grammars that came after. In the middle ages it was a by-word for elementary grammar study, and it has even been argued that an edition of it was the first ever printed book to issue from Gutenberg’s press.

A century after Donatus, Priscian’s grammar became part of the pedagogical tradition. As examples of feminine first declension nouns Priscian also gives ‘musa’, and, more patriotically (since ‘musa’ is really a Greek word) ‘Roma’. He adds examples of masculine first declension nouns (‘scriba’, ‘poeta’), of nouns that can be either gender (‘advena’), and of proper names (‘Aeneas’, ‘Anchises’). These would be the core standard examples in grammar textbooks for centuries to come.

Some, like the early humanist grammars of Perotti and Sulpizio, evidently had good reasons for favouring ‘poeta’ as the main paradigm: their interests were in the promotion of fine Latin style, and the elevation of the (masculine) figure of the creator-poet. Badius Ascensius, also part of this tradition, uses ‘poeta’, ‘musa’, ‘conviva’, and ‘talpa’. These examples are obviously selected to give a range of grammatical genders: ‘poet’ is masculine, ‘Muse’ feminine, and ‘guest’ and ‘mole’ may be either. ‘talpa’ (‘mole’) seems somewhat less dignified than the other examples, and it does not appear in many later grammars.

From the thirteenth century, by far the most widely used school grammar textbook was the Doctrinale of Alexandre de Villedieu. The section on first declension nouns in the Doctrinale offers no examples (the commentary in humanist editions offers ‘musa’ and ‘poeta’), and is written in an abominable and near-incomprehensible Latin verse that so offended the humanists. Nevertheless, it continued to be widely used, in the North at least, well into the sixteenth century (largely thanks to the efforts of the afore-mentioned Badius). Here’s the start of the section on the first declension:

Rectis as es a dat declinatio prima,
Atque per am propria quaedam ponuntur hebraea,
Dans ae diphthongum gentivis atque dativis.
Am servat quartus; tamen an aut en reperimus,
Cum rectus fit in es vel in as, vel cum dat a Graecus.

[First declension nouns end in as, es, a in the nominative
and some Hebrew proper nouns end in am,
In the genitive and dative taking the diphthong ae.
The accusative has am; but we also find an or en,
And the Greek nominative is constructed with es, or as, or sometimes a]

Which, considering it’s meant to be a mnemonic verse, reminds me of the pointlessly convoluted mnemonics that used to appear in the Viz Top Tips page (I seem to recall one on traffic signals that went something like: ‘When the light red does show / Then take care you must not go…’).

The Doctrinale was long the stuff of schoolboys’ nightmares, as this extract from Folengo’s grammatically unconventional – to say the least – macaronic masterpiece ‘Baldus’ shows:

Nonne caro carnem facit, attestante pedanto
Doctrinale meo, declinans nomina terzae?
Nonne flagellabat mihi saepe culamina propter
“rectis as es a"? qui mattus nascitur, unquam
non guarrire potest, etiam medegante Galeno.

[Does not flesh make flesh, as my schoolmaster the Doctrinale proves, declining nouns of the third declension? Didn’t I get my arse whipped often enough over ‘rectis as es a: he who is born a fool, can never be cured, even if Galen himself treats him.’]

The whipping obviously didn’t take, since Boccalus here completely mangles the mnemonic verse, and even makes the mistake of thinking it’s for nouns of the third rather than the first declension.

Waquet tells us that Burnouf was responsible for replacing ‘musa’ with ‘rosa’, because he thought the use of the same paradigm for learning both Greek and Latin was causing confusion. You can consult Burnouf’s Méthode pour étudier la langue latine on Google Books. To exemplify the different Latin cases, Burnouf gives these French sentences:

La rose est une belle fleur
O rose! ton éclat ne dure qu’un instant
L’odeur de la rose est douce
Dieu a donné à la rose une couleur agréable
L’enfant cueille la rose
On extrait de la rose une essence précieuse

Beautiful. Look at that example for the vocative. It’s even an alexandrine! Surely a grammarian with such a poetic soul could only come from France, the country of Ronsard. (OK, I admit that ‘God made roses a nice colour’ isn’t quite the most poetic sentiment ever set down on paper, but still.)

I note that ‘mensa’, which Waquet says is the paradigm most often used in English schools, features in Kennedy’s Latin Primer – perhaps this is the origin of that pedagogical tradition? I note also in passing that certain claims have been made to suggest that Kennedy’s Primer is not quite as dull as the ‘table’ paradigm suggests (see The sex secrets of Kennedy’s Latin Primer for details).

Also on Google Books I find a little volume published in 1840, entitled The Comic Latin Grammar: A New and Facetious Introduction to the Latin Tongue. As if the title weren’t enough to tell you how painful the thing is likely to be, here’s a sample (using, of course, the traditional ‘Musa’):

Musa musae,
The Gods were at tea,
Musae musam,
Eating rasperry jam,
Musa musâ,
Made by Cupid’s mamma.
Musae musarum,
Thou ‘Diva Dearum.’
Musis musas,
Said Jove to the lass.
Musae musis,
Can ambrosia beat this?

Which is, even as these things go, excruciatingly unfunny (unless that peculiar brand of English public schoolboy humour appeals to you). It’s also very lazy: what, they couldn’t have come up with an English word to rhyme with ‘musarum’, so they cop-out with Latin? They could have had ‘alarum’, for one.

I note also that the The Rudiments of Latin Grammar by Alexander Adam and Ebenezer Fitch (1814) (also available on Google Books) boringly uses for its first declension paradigm ‘penna’, ‘a pen’. Now, recall Burnouf’s example for the vocative case ‘O rose! ton éclat ne dure qu’un instant’, and compare it with the one given by Adam and Fitch: Vocative: ‘penna’, O pen!

Addendum: I notice that Waquet also mentions a song about the 'rosa' declension by Jacques Brel. Listen to it, and see the video, here.

On decorum

2008-06-16T23:34:00.003+01:00

In my last post I posed a question, and that question – what moral function does literature have? – was clearly the wrong one. Literature, when framed in terms of intentionality, is obviously no more or less limited than the human mind itself in its capacity for goodness or nefariousness. The value of literature is clearly a matter of disposition, of the situatedness of the reader at the point of reception, within the multiple and shifting constellations of culture. So: literature must fit into a moral universe, but of itself need not have any moral status; there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so?

Well, maybe not exactly. It seems to me that the point I want to make about the situatedness of literary response is well illustrated by the concept of decorum: the point at which stylistic considerations take on moral significance and moral considerations take on stylistic significance.

Decorum designates the fitness of language to matter. It will be necessary to disentangle it at least partially from the more recent notion of decorum as it applies to social and personal morality. Classical decorum does not necessarily speak of moderation and politesse: if you are writing invective, it may be entirely decorous to use obscene language. If you write comedy, coarse language put in the mouth of a soldier or a slave will conform to the rule of decorum. If writing satire, it may be seemly to write in a chatty or ungrammatical register (Persius’s ‘language of the toga’).

Richard A. Lanham writes that ‘decorum as a stylistic criterion finally locates itself entirely in the beholder and not the speech or text’. Not a postmodern notion this, but one acknowledged by, for example, George Puttenham, who wrote in his Arte of English Poesie (1589):

[S]ince the actions of man with their circumstances be infinite, and the world likewise replenished with many iudgements, it may be a question who shal haue the determination of such controuersie as may arise whether this or that action or speach be decent or indecent: and verely it seemes to go all by discretion, not perchaunce of euery one, but by a learned and experienced discretion.

Puttenham further points out that some grammarians would consider figures such as metaphor, allegory, irony and so on, to be abusive since they are deceptive and duplicitous. But, he continues:

the matter resteth much in the definition and acceptance of this word decorum, for whatsoeuer is so, cannot iustly be misliked. In which respect it may come to passe that what the Grammarian setteth downe for a viciositee in speach may become a vertue and no vice, contrariwise his commended figure may fall into a reprochfull fault.

Stylistic vices may become virtues, as long as moderation is observed, and ‘a speciall regard to all circumstances of the person, place, time, cause and purpose’.

It is in this ‘speciall regard’ that decorum differs from linguistic prescriptivism – arguments about which are constantly being rehearsed in the part of the blogosphere that revolves around Language Log. (I think it’s worth linking here to Conrad’s post on prescriptivism as a kind of etiquette.) The mistake the prescriptivists make is to disregard the decorum of an utterance: they frequently make what translators would call errors of register. Decorum is a sensitivity to context, the fitness of language to time, place and person.

Now I can see that I’m about to run up against a problem here. The examples I gave above clearly reveal how closely related linguistic decorum has always been to class distinctions. Classical notions of artistic beauty are hopelessly bound up with moral judgements. In Latin ‘decorum’ may designate a rhetorical or ethical principle, but its adjectival form can also mean more straightforwardly ‘beautiful, elegant’. And of course, the sense in which decorum prohibits not just inappropriateness of language but also the depiction of shocking or ugly behaviour was there in its first theorists – and it became much more dominant in post-Renaissance classicism. The noun ‘decor’ means ‘charm’ or ‘taste’ – and as we know, judgements of what is charming or tasteful are never far removed from moral or class distinctions. Decorum is a matter of taste, and so it can hardly be said to represent freedom from prescriptive judgements. Aristotle in the Nichomachean Ethics writes of the decorum (or the ‘prepon’) of humour: ‘there are some things that it befits [a good and well-bred] man to say and to hear by way of jest, and the well-bred man's jesting differs from that of a vulgar man, and the joking of an educated man from that of an uneducated.’

I might add that although humour very often operates by breaking of the rule of decorum, there is also a sense in which it affirms the rules it ostensibly violates, since to laugh at an incongruity is to recognize the rule which makes it laughable: it is to be complicit with the joker in mastery of the rules that are being violated. And once the laughter stops, the rule persists.

(Puttenham gives examples of obscene jests uttered in the presence of Kings and Princes, which were in principle violations of decorum but are presented as acceptable purely because they were taken in good part by the man in power. Where the obscenities did cause offence to the King, they were considered for that reason indecorous. Humour is used in these cases as a means to test and delimit the boundaries of acceptable conduct – which all goes to prove that humour often affirms rather than subverts the workings of power. Decorum, like ideology, is good at recuperating utterances and gestures that threaten to break free of its dominion.)

Like all appropriative concepts, decorum is cunning: it does not only reflect a given reality, but is constitutive of it. Lanham calls it ‘a pious fraud, the “social trick” par excellence’. ‘Rhetorical theory has spent endless time discussing how to adjust utterance to [a] preexistent social reality without reflecting on how that reality has been constituted by the idea of decorum.’

But since I’m trying to make a case for decorum, let me say a few word in its defence. Decorum stands for the virtues of adaptability, flexibility, a willingness to judge things according to circumstance and context rather than accept or reject them on the basis of their conformity to preordained categories. It perhaps became so important to neoclassical theory because of the need to accommodate the values and practices of an alien culture to a very different culture in the another time and place. On this reading, decorum is not a set of rigid rules promoting stylistic and social conservatism, but a necessary term in transactions between times, places, people. Decorum accommodates through the exercise of reason and judgement.

Puttenham recognized that decorum (which he translates variously as ‘decencie’, ‘seemelynesse’, ‘comelynesse’, or else his own favoured term ‘pleasant approch’) has no fixed rules, but is a matter of flexibility of judgement and discretion:

The case then standing that discretion must chiefly guide all those business, since there be sundry sortes of discretion all unlike, euen as there be men of action or art, I see no way so fit to enable a man truly to estimate of decencie as example, by whose veritie we may deeme the differences of things and their proportions, and by particular discussions come at length to sentence of it generally, and also in our behauiours the more easily to put it in execution. But by reason of the sundry circumstances, that mans affaires are as it were wrapt in, this decencie comes to be very much alterable and subiect to varietie.

Decorum is itself an infinitely extensible and adaptable concept: as it was seen with the classical genres, breaking the rule of decorum may result in new possibilities of genre formation. A violation of decorum may be the gesture that founds a new rule of decorum. The transgressive text of one age has become normalized for the next: it is a standard against which to measure the fitness of new texts. Ovid broke the rule of decorum by applying the low or middle style to the matter and persons of epic and tragedy. What resulted, the heroical epistle, ended up becoming a form with certain standards of decorum of its own. Classical satire was a violation of certain literary standards – to the extent that classicizing theorists doubted whether it could be called poetry at all: it was not inspired, it did not invoke the Muses, it did not enhance the dignity of the poet. But it emerged as a form with a language of its own.

The case of classical satire may be instructive here, because it is one of the most obviously ‘moral’ forms of writing. At its worst it is conservative, petty, snobbish. At its best it challenges conventional morality with a coherent moral vision of its own. Roman satire derived its coherence from the observing persona, a single position from which to judge the follies of the world. It was, however, not singular in method: in Scaliger’s formulation, ‘Juvenalis ardet, instat, jugulat; Persius insultat; Horatius irridet’ (Juvenal fulminates, pesters, goes for the jugular; Persius taunts; Horace laughs).

Where satire offers a revitalizing critique the outworn conventions of moral life, it brings also often a challenge to decorum of language. The best satire is involved as much a war against cliché as in the war against moral complacency.

Irony is an important tool for any writer, since it opens up a space for the reader to exercise his own moral judgement. The Horatian mode of satire was the most ironic of the Roman types, and that is why the best moral writers of the modern era were more likely to take Horace as a model than Juvenal.

I have not spoken of Menippean satire, which really does breaks the rule of decorum, joining a man’s head to a horse’s neck. The influence of Roman satire on the modern novel is dwarfed in comparison with the influence of Menippean satire, the heteroglossic, ironic mode par excellence. But it too can be brought back into line – and if Rabelais and Sterne and Swift couldn’t quite stand to be decorous – nevertheless a subsequent tradition built on the values and conventions set forth in their work may well be said to obey a new rule of decorum.

We can speak about these works in terms of decorum: they had something to work against. In the twentieth century, with the erosion of generic and stylistic boundaries in literature, the concept ceases to be as powerfully recuperative. Is it even possible to speak about literature after Joyce in terms of decorum? Probably yes, but only with a very weak version of the concept. As Lanham says, conspicuous stylistic self-consciousness is not compatible with decorum, since one of the conditions of decorum is that we don’t notice it (another, I would add, is that we do notice it).

But the concept has remained influential, just beneath the surface. Perhaps Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language – even though it is closely bound up with a rejection of rhetoric and its unscientific basis – could be said to be in part a philosophy of decorum: to attempt to apply an inappropriate language to a realm to which it is not suited – to violate decorum – is to become bogged in the mire of meaninglessness.

So decorum still has its place, I think: finding a way to speak meaningfully and truthfully about art and about life is largely a matter of finding the right critical vocabulary, the right style; of fitting words to matter; of finding ways of joining ideas together so that they have the appearance of truth, are seemly. As Quintilian emphasizes, the aim of rhetoric is not to get at truth, but to express things that are true-seeming.

The moral of literature

2008-04-03T23:25:00.003+01:00

We are, if we are thinking people, always engaged in the honing of our moral judgement. But it seems in many spheres of human activity, and not least in discussions about literature, that it is not really the done thing to speak clearly and unambiguously about morality.

Hardly anybody—even if they believe it to be true—acts as if Nietzsche was right to say that our morality is a slave morality, mired in ressentiment, and so must be done away with. But there is a reluctance to talk seriously about moral issues.

The Latinate sense of the word ‘moral’, meaning ‘relating to manners and custom’, is more or less lost to the English language. What we hear most strongly in the word today is a tone of overbearing disapproval. The reluctance to speak of things moral is probably to do with the desire to avoid associating too closely with socially conservative values. Morality was for too long the domain of the Church, and under its tutelage one tiny subcategory, sexual morality, took on a hugely disproportionate importance. Of course we today know full well that morality has absolutely nothing to do with an outmoded institution’s censorious (and prurient) interest in the sexual conduct of its members, but it’s difficult to shake off the association.

The moral function has always been central to literature, or at any rate to the theorization of literature. Few theorists, from the Renaissance on, have neglected to take account of the judgement of Horace:

Aut prodesse uolunt aut delectare poetae
aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere uitae

Poets wish either to profit or to delight; or to say things both enjoyable and useful for life at the same time.

and:

Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci,
lectorem delectando pariterque monendo

He has won every vote who has mingled the useful with the pleasant, in equal measure delighting and instructing the reader.

Horace’s ‘profit’ and ‘utility’ were understood for much of the modern era in terms of a quite narrowly defined kind of moral instruction.

The medieval accesus ad auctores, whose underlying schemes persisted into the Renaissance and beyond, with classical notions (such as those found in Horace) bolted on, drew on a very powerful moral resource. They could understand the content of any text in moral-ethical terms, by framing it in terms of example and negative example. This is a powerful scheme because it is very difficult to imagine any utterance that would not fit: all literature is edifying, even the apparently scabrous stuff, if we understand it to be furnishing examples (of behaviour, ways of thinking, uses of language) to be followed or avoided. If an author writes something abhorrent to our sensibilities, he intended it as a kind of aversion therapy. All that’s required is to posit a serious moral intention on the part of the author, even where there appears to be none.

This seems to be a very crude method, but in fact it enabled (in some medieval commentators, at any rate) remarkable displays of subtlety and agility of mind.

Many Renaissance thinkers didn’t appreciate the ‘unsophisticated’ medieval way of reading texts, so they tricked it out with rhetorical theory. But the framework of exemplarity persisted. Now imaginative literature was understood primarily in the epideictic mode. This was really just a different way of saying much the same thing: that the author wants us to admire some things, and despise other things, and to this end he uses more or less veiled strategies of language.

bonae litterae cum bonis moribus, ‘good letters and good morals’: these two concepts were hopelessly intertwined. By the time they began to unravel, the notion of ‘good letters’ had been so long wrapped around the form of the moral that its own shape was irrevocably warped. Good literature had taken on the contours of good morals, and no matter how much one tried to straighten it out, it always snapped back to its accustomed form.

Today we don’t tend to look to imaginative literature as a source for moral instruction: we don’t tend to compile commonplace books of moral sentences, organized according to schemes of example and negative example. We tend to minimize or skirt around the role of morality in literature—and where we acknowledge it, we call it by other names.

Today it is customary to uphold the weak version of the thesis that literature has a moral function. The weak version says: reading books makes you a better person (somehow). We can probably accept this as axiomatic, but it does not follow that everything deriving from it is true.

For example: some people think that reading literature is all about arriving, through sympathy, at a better understanding of human experience in all its varieties. This is contingent upon the privilege granted to the portrayal of character in the modern novel, particularly the realist novel in the nineteenth-century tradition. But this is just one of a range of possible ways of reading—and, it seems to me, quite a feeble one. If your moral universe is bounded by the ability to identify with fictional characters, it is unlikely that reading will do anything to challenge your moral judgements. Sympathy is a selfish emotion. If your enjoyment of books is dependent on your capacity to identify with the characters they portray, reading will tend to be a mere exercise in affirming your preconceptions.

At this point we can take a longer view, and look beyond what literature is supposed to do, to what we do when we read literature. From this perspective, the account of literature I just outlined (the ‘pathetic’ version) is, along with all the others, seen to be contained within a larger moral sphere. To prize characterization so highly is to value certain moral concepts masquerading as artistic ones: sincerity, complexity, subtlety, etc. —or as ‘readerly’ ones: empathy, understanding, compassion.

Value judgements about literature always conceal an unspoken major premise that is moral. Northrop Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism, makes some penetrating remarks about how the hierarchies of literary value have always masked socio-cultural values. He makes the point that the concept of literary decorum relies on the class distinction between high, middle, and low. Frye says:

Rhetorical value-judgements are closely related to social values, and are usually cleared through a customs-house of moral metaphors: sincerity, economy, subtlety, simplicity, and the like.

Certain modes of reading (which may be called ‘formalist’) propose to exclude moral considerations: but they are not themselves without moral force. The elitism implied in these approaches (l’art pour l’art, but not l’art pour le vulgaire) may conceal a sense of social and moral distinction.

To take this to its absurd conclusion: any theory, form of ideas, speech act, implies a moral choice, since to take any position is to tacitly assume that it is more effective, instructive, edifying, virtuous than other possible positions.

I think—and perhaps here I part company with Frye—that this state of affairs is healthy: it is morally good. To want to do away with distinctions between high and low culture merely because they have a basis in moral assumptions is to beg the question. Criticism (good criticism anyway) should be about trying to discover why certain forms of culture are morally better than other forms: in other words, it should be about the cultivation of judgement. In this sense, the exercise of discrimination is necessary, and good.

Perhaps we can rehabilitate the moral component of literature, and restore it to its rightful place at the centre of our concern. Exposing hypocrisy, blasting complacency and pusillanimity, exploding falsehoods, examining unexamined habits of thought, sweeping away banalities and shallow ideas; and promoting elegancies of language, prizing imagination, complexity and depth of thought, deploying hard-won truths with force and conviction—or with quiet dignity: these are functions of great moral importance.

Oh, and puncturing pomposity of course.

More news from nowhere

2008-03-29T00:01:00.008Z

I never write anything about music on this blog – and the reasons for this may become clear to the reader over the next few paragraphs. (They include, but are not limited to: a tin ear, an ignorance of musical terminology, an obstinate compulsion to try and understand one art form in terms of another, and a conviction that most writing about music, or about popular music at any rate, suffers from a complete lack of well-defined evaluative criteria.) Anyway I’ve been listening to Nick Cave’s new album Dig Lazarus Dig!!! a lot over the last few days, and since I’ve long been a huge fan of the Bad Seeds, and I’m going to see them live at the Hammersmith Apollo next month, I thought I might as well make them the subject of my first ‘music’ post.

Nick Cave, it has often been said, is one of the most ‘literary’ rock lyricists working today. Now, I generally think that literariness and rock music do not make for mutually satisfying bedfellows: they are not what we would call considerate lovers. It is wrong to try to read popular music in literary terms: it simply doesn’t work. Wrenching lines out of the proper context of the song, taking no account of intonation and prosody, not to mention their fit with the music itself, can only be a fruitless exercise. For that reason, I shall now proceed to read Cave's œuvre in precisely those terms. No Youtube or mp3 links to be found here.

In the song ‘Green Eyes’ (which is, in truth, one of the weakest on that brilliant album The Boatman’s Call) Cave pastiched a sonnet by the sixteenth-century poet Louise Labé (or not by her, if you go by Mireille Huchon’s recent study Louise Labé: une créature de papier): a line from Labé’s sonnet ‘Baise m’encor, rebaise moy et baise’ became ‘Kiss me again, rekiss me and kiss me’ – and I won’t quote the rest of the verse, in the interest of keeping this blog family-friendly. The reason why the song itself is so mediocre (at least by the standards of that album) is perhaps not directly related to its literariness. But overt or over-elaborate erudition and poetic allusion certainly do not sit comfortably in the four-minute rock song.

In one song on a later album, The Lyre of Orpheus, Cave managed to reference John Wilmot, Vladimir Nabokov and St John of the Cross, all in one verse. Sounds faintly absurd, and indeed, in context, the effect (which is, I trust, intentional) prompts amusement rather than admiration.

Here’s why: Cave’s musical sensibility is resistant to the lyricism (in the proper sense) that his songs try to accommodate. He knows it, too. Here’s a verse from the track ‘More News from Nowhere’, on the latest album:

I said the sun rises and falls with you
and various things about love
but a rising violence in me
cut all my circuits off

The music has a tendency to stall poetic flights while they’re still taxiing on the runway. Even though Cave would much rather his lyrics be associated with the actual lyric poets (he is much more likely to approve Sappho as an influence than Bukowski: Sappho is perhaps the poet most often referenced in his songs, and anyway, Bukowski ‘was a jerk’), he seems to be aware that there’s something there that’s not going to fly.

That is not to say that literary references cannot work in the context of the rock song. The new album Dig Lazarus Dig!!! appears to have been in part modelled on episodes from the Odyssey: nothing unusual in that, the Odyssey has been fair game in popular culture for a long time now. The fourth track on the album, ‘Night of the Lotus Eaters’, flags up the Homeric subtext, but it’s in the final ‘More News from Nowhere’ that Cave packs in the allusions. The interesting thing about this track is in its back-references to Cave’s earlier work, with the ironic appearance of Deanna, once a muse, here distinctly unimpressed by Cave’s lyricism (and a ‘Miss Polly’ makes an appearance in the third verse…): it’s like a rock version of Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium – except nowhere near as ponderous and tediously self-regarding. It’s not hard to uncover the Homeric references in the song: Nausicaa, Polyphemus, Circe, the Sirens, Calypso, there’s even a mention of the ‘wine dark sea’.

But none of this is particularly heavy-handed, and it certainly doesn’t overwhelm the song (which is great, I think). It even manages some pretty nice poetry of its own, for example in this evocative image:

Betty X says: the light ain’t yours,
And so much wind blew through her words
That I went rolling down the hall
For more news from nowhere…

The album’s title track, powered by a Stones-like riff, is a kind of modern take on the biblical story of the raising of Lazarus (as if you couldn’t have guessed that from the title). Here’s a sample (transcribing the orthography of the printed booklet):

i can hear chants & incantations
& some guy is mentioning me in his prayers!!!!!
I don’t know what it is
but there is definitely something going on upstairs
dig yourself, LAZARUS!!!!!
I!!!! WANT!!!!! Y/!!!!!! TO!!!!!!! DIG!!!!!!!!!!
well NEW YORK CITY, man
SAN FRANCISCO, LA (I don’t know)
Larry grew increasingly neurotic & obscene!!!!!!!
HE NEVER ASKED TO BE RAISED UP FROM THE TOMB!!!
no one ever actually asked him to forsake his DREAMS!!!

These last two lines caused me to wonder whether the song had been distantly inspired by this passage in Samuel Beckett’s Murphy (which I discussed in another context here):

The melancholic’s melancholy, the manic’s fits of fury, the paranoid’s despair, were no doubt as little autonomous as the long fat face of a mute. Left in peace they would have been as happy as Larry, short for Lazarus, whose raising seemed to Murphy perhaps the one occasion on which the Messiah had overstepped the mark.

Whether or not we’re giving Cave too much (or too little?) credit in imagining the song took its inspiration from a minor passage in an early Beckett work, we can at least say that the sentiment is the same.

In any case Cave, despite his reputation as a lyricist, has no shame in writing trashy, sing-along refrains that say nothing more than ‘Lie down here (and be my girl)’ or ‘We’re gonna have a real cool time tonight’.

But that’s OK: pop songs aren’t classical poetry, they have different lyrical demands. A writer of pop lyrics can’t really be accused of dealing in banalities and clichés, because, well, that’s what pop songs are supposed to deal in. The popular lyricists who are usually held up as the best (Cohen, Dylan) in my opinion wrote many more clunkers than good lines. Nobody can possibly convince me that ‘Go away now from my window/Leave at your own chosen speed’ has any other reason for existing than to accommodate a simplistic rhyme. Like so many of Dylan’s lines, it certainly has no poetic value in itself.

Try this one for size, from the excellent ‘Into my Arms’, the first track on The Boatman’s Call:

I don’t believe in an interventionist God
But I know, darling, that you do
But if I did I would kneel down and ask Him
Not to intervene when it came to you

Which, let’s face it, is crap, but it really does work perfectly in the song itself.

As a counter example, consider this, from the (significantly less good) song ‘Nature Boy’:

I was just a boy when I sat down
To watch the news on TV
I saw some ordinary slaughter
I saw some routine atrocity

Those lines still have the ability to surprise me, even divorced from the context of their musical backing.

Names, of Trees (again)

2008-03-28T22:15:00.003Z

There’s a great dendro-ontologico-onomastical shaggy-dog story in this week’s TLS, a piece by one Abraham Socher on ‘Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem and the stones of Sinai’. My previous discussions about the naming and being of trees have tended to hover around the question of what happens when we (as we inhabitants of language habitually do) mistake something for something else. Such mistakes are easily made, especially in this age of mechanical reproduction of works of art.

The article doesn’t appear to be up on the TLS website, so no link yet, but here’s a brief summary. Benjamin, who liked to give his ideas at least an aura (if you will) of Kabbalistic thinking, wrote in an ‘Epistemo-Critical Prologue’ to his Origin of German Tragic Drama of his conviction that the philosopher’s task must be to ‘restore, by representation, the primacy of the symbolic character of the word’. (Again, the idea, frequent in mystical – and rationalist – writers throughout the centuries, that the symbolic or ‘secondary’ sense of a word actually precedes its proper sense.) He related a story about the stones found at the foot of Mount Sinai, which ‘have impressed upon them the pattern of a tree whose peculiar nature consists in the fact that it reproduces itself immediately on every single piece of stone that has broken off from a stone block, and this into infinity.’

Trees impressed in stones! What a fine parable for the truth of the great book of nature, what a compelling proof for the existence of an Adamic language of essences! Only… that’s not quite what it was.

Socher demonstrates that Benjamin wholly misunderstood the stones of Sinai: not only were they a phenomenon with an entirely natural explanation, they had even been understood in such naturalistic terms by the philosophers of Jewish mysticism. (Benjamin, it seems, had got the story from the eighteenth-century philosopher Salomon Maimon.) Apparently, you can still go to the foot of Mount Sinai and find such dendrite stones.

What to make of all this? Well, on the one hand, it seems to be another example of the human mind over-intellectualizing natural phenomena (‘A thrush, because I’d been wrong,/ Burst rightly into song’). At the same time, though, this seems to me to be moving towards some truth about language and myth.

Language seeks resemblances between things, imperfectly replicates the truths it finds, and engraves those truths on the world around it. Arab and Jewish thinkers of the middle ages, Socher tells us, had linked the phenomenon of the stones with the etymological tradition that makes ‘Sinai’ mean ‘tree’. The markings on the stones are not actually fossilized trees, but ‘pseudo-fossils’. It’s not too much of a stretch to link them with the pseudo-etymologies that have been so productive in the language arts, mistaken ways of understanding the world that have histories and truths of their own.

It also tells us something about the origins of myths. Myth-making is not the preserve of pre-scientific cultures guilty of fundamentally misreading phenomena that resist easy conceptualization. Myths can arise from modern misinterpretations of the interpretations pre-modern thinkers put on the natural world. Modern myth-making is still possible: but it is not, perhaps, so much a matter of deriving fantastical explanations directly from the worlds of nature and human interaction; instead, it can be a case of mistaking past ways of conceptualizing the world as being fundamentally different from our own. There is a danger (and, to be sure, an indirect benefit) in being too ready to believe in the otherness of past and alien cultures, in striving at all costs to understand pre-modern thinkers ‘on their own terms’, on what we might imagine those terms to be: magical thinking, mysticism, and pre-scientific irrationalism. After all, euhemeristic rationalism is almost as old as (literary) classical myth itself. We might, in our earnest attempts to restore and revivify older ways of conceptualizing the world, move away from the hard-won truths of tradition, and ourselves create mutant strains of thought, hybrid ideas that would be unrecognizable even to the minds whose originators we imagine they were.

Many of the greatest and most novel ideas in the history of human intellectual endeavour perhaps originated precisely in this way: in a wrong-headed overestimation of the differences between our own ways of thinking and the mentalities of the past.

Duplexity

2008-03-25T23:22:00.002Z

I believe in my conscience I intercept many a thought which heaven intended for another man.

—Sterne

So runs the epigraph to José Saramago’s The Double, a novel I read recently, and rather enjoyed (though it seems many did not, to go by a google search of press reviews at the time of release).

The epigraph gives the measure of the thing—as well-chosen epigraphs should. Our thoughts often arise unbidden, they do not fully belong to us; our minds have a mind of their own, in spite of our bodies; and the imagination summons into being selves which are not quite identical with the thinking subject. The writer of imaginative literature is a creator of duplicate selves: a fictional character is always in some sense an alter ego.

Don’t misunderstand me: it is not my intention here to paddle in the shallows of the biographical fallacy. The creator of fictional characters is not alone in being able to breathe life into golem-like alter egos. (It is only my sense of decorum that restrains me from writing ‘alteri nos’ here.) Borges had the sense that it was the other Borges, not himself, that things happened to; and knew that the written word ‘no longer belongs to any individual, not even to that other man, but rather to language itself, or to tradition.’ He recognized himself less in his own books than in those of others—‘or in the tedious strumming of a guitar’.

In first person narratives, a doubling is operative at the level of language, since the ‘I’ of the enunciation is not identical with the ‘I’ of the utterance. There is both an internal and an external perspective to any narrative, an intra- and an extra-diegetic dimension, and the gap between the two is most prominent when it is bridged or concealed, for example in free indirect style.

When Borges writes, ‘I am not sure which of us it is that’s writing this page’, the split in subjectivity makes itself felt at the level of the referentiality of the pronoun: as Ovid’s Narcissus had it, ‘iste ego sum’, or, in Rimbaud’s formulation, ‘Je est un autre’.

Doubled selves are a part of literature from the very beginning: Odysseus is noted for his duplicity. To speak more properly of doubles, it was Ovid who did the most to explore the complications of the doubled self: the Metamorphoses is peopled with doubles of all kinds.

In ancient literature there is, I think, always an explanation for the appearance of a double, whether it be a naturalistic or a divine one (or both, as myth is rarely resistant to double, triple, four-fold interpretations). Plenty of gods can take on the exact appearance of humans: Morpheus as Ceyx in book 11 of the Met., Cupid as Ascanius in book 1 of the Aeneid, Mercury as Sosia in the Amphitryon of Plautus. This last example is notable because it has made its way, via Molière, into the most literary modern language, French, in the form of the everyday word ‘sosie’ (look-alike).

Each of these examples has its explanation in the natural order of things, too: dreams, love, deception. And there is the most naturalistic of explanations for the doubling of Narcissus, the most famous of Ovid’s doubles: it is simply a matter of mistaking a reflection for another self. There is also, naturally, a psychological explanation: already there in Ovid, and later seized upon and greatly expanded by Freud.

The appearance of the inexplicable double in literature is, as far as I know, more modern: it is a creation of the Romantic imagination, and we understand it best under the sign of the ghost story. It has more to do with the doppelgänger or fetch of folklore than with the divine doubles of classical myth. Examples are too numerous to list; Poe’s William Wilson is one of the best known. A more complex treatment of the theme is to be found in James Hogg’s brilliantly deranged Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

Dostoevsky’s The Double is perhaps a more obviously psychologizing treatment of the theme; but of course, the inexplicable phenomena of ghost stories are always in fact profoundly explicable at the level of the unconscious.

Saramago’s novel, then, is elbowing in on pretty crowded territory. But as Schlegel said (Saramago tells us), ‘all great truths are basically trivial, and so we have to find new ways, preferably paradoxical ways, of expressing them, in order to keep them from falling into oblivion.’

We all experience a doubling of the self at the level of internal dialogue; we might even hazard a basic definition of fiction—or indeed, of all writing—as the playing out of internal dialogues. Saramago’s narrator worries that this may in fact be the case, and he exhibits concern that his own ideas and feelings should not impinge on the autonomy of the character. The voice of the narrator should not speak over the voice of the character. Identity of appearance is one thing, but identity of voice goes much deeper. The human voice has a unique ability to unsettle us, since it is imagined to emanate not from the body exactly, but from the profoundest recesses of the unique self.

The holding apart of narrator and character, Saramago claims, is a matter of the ‘laws of good writing’ (laws that are regularly violated by the worst postmodern novelists). In an attempt to avoid calling undue attention to duplicity at the heart of his fiction, the writer substitutes the (not entirely satisfactory) device of dialogues between the protagonist and the voice of ‘common sense’, reminiscent of those between the narrator in Flann O’ Brien’s The Third Policeman and his soul, to which he gives the name ‘Joe’.

The names we give things (and people) are a part of their identity. The protagonist of the novel is in flight from ‘the authentic name, the real name’ (the name which, in his case, can prompt no other reaction but spontaneous laughter), and is striving to inhabit those temporary names that are ‘as necessary in life as in fiction’. A need to become as empty as words themselves, to live, disembodied, in language. Actors take on disguises, different roles, different names – that is why Camus saw the actor as one of the ideal types of the absurd man. A disguise can make us feel more authentic, more like ourselves.

One of the anxieties bound up with the fantasy of the double is the idea that we ourselves might be the duplicate, the inauthentic copy of an original that preceded us. This is closely related to the fear of usurpation. Such anxieties more commonly affect interactions with others, as is the case with sufferers of Capgras syndrome, or with those subject to the adolescent fantasy that one’s real parents have been replaced by impostors who are outwardly identical to them.

The primordial self-recognition, the moment when the infant child first sees its reflection in the mirror and thinks ‘that’s me’, is the first stage in the formation of a sense of identity. How profoundly troubling, then, to be confronted with an image of oneself and to think ‘that’s not me’. This is not just Narcissus’s problem. Tragedy, to put it crude terms, is the narrative of what happens when men fail to recognize themselves. Part of the modern sense of alienation is the nagging feeling that the one having the experiences, feeling, consuming, and enjoying, is not me: it is someone else.

But the fantasy of the double can also be a comforting one. The flipside of the fear of usurpation is the desire to be an impostor oneself, to live the life of someone else. Fiction is a way of vicariously inhabiting this fantasy. As perversions go, it is a relatively widespread, and perhaps not an immediately dangerous one.

Lest I be thought asymbolic…

2008-02-20T12:09:00.004Z

I recently came across the word ‘asymbolus’, an adjective for someone who ‘contributes nothing to an entertainment’, who gets off ‘scot-free’. How on earth did it come to mean that, I idly wondered to myself. A few days later, I was flicking through an edition of the works of Filippo Beroaldo the Elder, a Bolognese humanist of the fifteenth century, and I found an answer.

Beroaldo’s work on the Symbola Pythagorae, which appears to have been first printed in 1503, has the following discussion of the word ‘symbol’.

‘Symbolum’ is a word that is polysemous, the grammarians tell us: that is, it has many meanings. First of all, a symbol is a bringing together (‘collatio’), as when many things unite into one (‘quod plures in unum conferunt’ – this definition is taken from Rufinus). Deriving from this meaning, gluttons and belly-gods (‘gulones et ventricolae’) are said to have given their ‘symbol’ for the party, when they all club together their share of money, or fine dishes of food, to provide for a sumptuous feast.

In translating this I wondered about a quibble on the first line (‘Symbolum vocabulum est, ut grammatici docent, polysemon’), which can be read either as a remark about the variety of meanings the word ‘symbolum’ may have, or a preliminary definition of the word ‘symbol’, i. e. a sign that has many meanings. I would lean towards the first interpretation, chiefly because symbols are not usually defined by the quality of having many different meanings: indeed often they are imagined to have one true meaning (though not necessarily an obvious one). This is the way Renaissance mystics used the word (e.g. the Egyptian hieroglyphs were ‘symbola’ that concealed a secret knowledge), and also the way Saussure used it – a signifier that has some kind of ‘natural’ relation to what it signifies (as opposed to a sign, which is arbitrary). In On Grammatology Derrida took Saussure to task over this perplexing definition.

Beroaldo goes on to adduce examples of usage from Terence and Plautus, then says:

On the other hand someone who brings nothing to the party or to the meal, and comes to the table without contributing (‘immunis’), and who arrives akletos, which means uninvited, is called ‘asymbolos’, a nice Greek word that is also common in our language…Among the Greeks, ‘asymbolos’ is a very fine word for a parasite, who always comes uninvited to lavish parties without contributing, and without a ‘symbolum’.

It’s interesting that Beroaldo dwells so long on this aspect of the word. ‘Symbolon’ had quite a broad range of meanings in Greek (a token, proof of identity, passport, contract, warrant, receipt, secret code, omen, portent, symptom, watchword), and a much narrower one when it came into Latin: Lewis & Short make the distinction (not always made by Renaissance writers) between the neuter ‘symbolum’ (mark, token) and the feminine ‘symbola’ (‘a contribution of money to a feast, a share of a reckoning, one’s scot, shot’). In the Latin of the Church Fathers it took on the primary meaning of ‘confession’, ‘creed’, because it was the name given to the Apostles’ Creed.

Beroaldo refers us to Rufinus, who says that the Apostolic ‘symbolum’ was called by this name because they 'put together', in conference, whatever opinions they each held about the Faith. This is not correct: Isidore of Seville advances the much more sensible explanation that the ‘symbolum’ was the ‘distinctive mark’ by which Christians could be recognized – and the OED agrees.

Beroaldo’s discussion trawls through a few more meanings for the word: most interestingly, the word ‘symbolum’ is sometimes used to mean ‘etymology’…

Aulus Gellius, from whom Beroaldo lifts some of his discussion, suggests that the ‘symbol’ you bring to a party need not be a share of money or food, but may instead be a gift of language.

…when he invited us to his home, so as not to come wholly scot-free (immunes) and without a contribution (asymboli), we brought (coniectabamus – note that ‘conjecture’ and ‘symbol’ both mean ‘a throwing together’) to this small meal not dainty dishes of food, but lively points for discussion (Attic Nights, 7.13)

The ‘symbol’, then, points towards that time-honoured link between feasting and language, exemplified by the Greek philosophers’ symposium, or by the Renaissance obsession with mets et mots, the Rabelaisian banquet of words. (Incidentally, Beroaldo’s ‘ventricola’ (belly-worshipper) sounds like an anticipatory plagiarism from Rabelais: it’s as early as Augustine.)

Beroaldo seems to connect the generous polysemousness of symbols (or of the word ‘symbol’) with the generosity of spirit associated with sociable dining. The word ‘symbol’ itself is equivalent to ‘collation’ (a bringing together, a comparison, but also a meal). But on closer inspection, his emphasis is on gluttony more than on generosity: the symbol, as a contribution to a party, is the concern of gannets and belly-gods. It is associated with the idea of being greedy for meaning.

On the other hand, one who is asymbolic is greedy for food and entertainment, but is a parasite, an uninvited guest. He contributes no symbol to offset his consumption. A symbol does not consume more than it contributes, so speak: it gives back a plurality of meaning, but does not get bloated with significance itself. Symbolism puts things all in proportion: it orders the world; asymbolism gets things out of proportion: it is disruptive. In the absence of symbols, all we’re left with is an uninvited guest, a boorish gatecrasher who eats all the peanuts and vomits in the CD player.

I like the link between the notion of being ‘immune’ (in-munus – giving no presents, not participating) and being ‘asymbolic’. Perhaps we could say that engaging in commerce with symbols always leaves meaning open to the risk of infection?

A symbol is something that stands for something else – by convention (convention, like the symbol, designates a ‘coming together’). Symbols are sociable, convivial, the condition for a coming together of minds and bodies.

Convention, collation, conjecture – all words that could stand for ‘symbol’, since they all mean a ‘coming together’, a ‘throwing together’.

Here’s C. S. Peirce, on the sociability of symbols:

Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs, particularly from likenesses or from mixed signs partaking of the nature of likenesses and symbols. We think only in signs. These mental signs are of mixed nature; the symbol-parts of them are called concepts. If a man makes a new symbol, it is by thoughts involving concepts. So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow. Omne symbolum de symbolo

Anyway I ought to stop at this point, lest I start to resemble that uninvited guest who overstays his welcome. There’s always a risk of contagion in these matters: as Peirce had it, ‘The word symbol has so many meanings that it would be an injury to the language to add a new one.’

Meditations on the Untimely in 'No Country for Old Men'

2008-01-27T13:16:00.000Z

Let’s call this post a late start to 2008.

Last year I wrote a few things on the subject of belatedness, on the ways we retroactively construct our self-experience, as we rub our eyes asking, ‘What time is it? What was that we just experienced?’

I was set off thinking about this theme again when I saw a film this weekend that seemed to me to be all about belatedness: the Cohen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, which has just hit cinemas here, a few months later than in the US. Tread carefully if you haven’t seen it, or read the book, there might be spoilers in here.

The plot is set in motion by a belated encounter: an encounter with the aftermath of a drug-deal gone wrong. It is a chaotic aftermath, but what we are presented with is not at all confusing: we recognize it without having to do too much work to fit all the pieces together; we recognize the all-too familiar idioms of the language of cinema. Llewelyn, our proxy, recognizes it too: ‘Where’s the last man standing?’, he asks, with weary certainty; and when he discovers the inevitable bag of cash, he acknowledges its inevitability with a murmured ‘Hm’. He, like us, the cinema-literate viewer, knows that this is the MacGuffin: everything is in its place for the wheels of plot to grind into motion.

What follows is the unfolding of a narrative, or overlaid series of narratives, conforming to the rule of the pursuit movie. A killer tracks the ‘wrong man’. The police track the killer (always belatedly, always one step, or a few, behind). A mysterious body hires a man to track killer, victim, and money. Transmissions are received and signals tracked. Trails of blood are followed, repeatedly. Llewelyn’s tracking of a wounded animal had led him to the first aftermath (an animal wounded accidentally, in hunting another animal). A killer follows a trail of blood leading to his victim: the victim in turn follows a trail of blood that leads to the killer.

Pursuit narratives, like detective narratives, are all about following trails, discovering clues, interpreting signs, figuring out how things fit together. The detective, always a late arrival, is locked in pursuit of the ever-receding primordial scene. He must follow in the footsteps of the murderer, think like the murderer, be the murderer. ‘He’s seen the same things I’ve seen, and it’s certainly made an impression on me’, says Tommy Lee Jones’s world-weary sheriff, once again arriving late on the scene. In this movie, when characters arrive late on the scene, it’s too late to catch up with events, too late to be able to do anything but follow the trail to where it leads: to another aftermath, another scene already over and done with.

When Llewelyn’s death is revealed to us, it too is in the aftermath: we arrive, with the police, late on the scene. One aftermath leading to another: and nothing in between stands still.

Chigurh has it the other way around: he is not behind events, he is ahead of them. But like the Olympian gods in thrall to the Fates, though he is ahead of events, he cannot influence the final outcome. He wants his victim to call it: ‘I didn’t put nothin’ up’ -- ‘Yes, you did. You’ve been putting it up your whole life you just didn’t know it.’ The coin’s been travelling twenty two years to get here, to arrive opportunely at this moment, the fated moment. In Chigurh’s world, nothing is belated: there is no making of narrative, there is no imposition of meaningful stories onto the senseless violence of the world. There is only violence: senseless, yes, but necessary. Isn’t this what it means to be a psychopath: to be unable or unwilling to see that actions have consequences, to see how consequences beget other consequences and cohere into stories? To see that man has made the world, because man has made history.

A psychopath doesn’t know this:

‘This country’s hard on people, you can’t stop what’s coming, it ain’t all waiting on you’

The realization that it ain’t all waiting on you defines the transition from infancy to personhood, the coming into being of the subject. To make that transition is to fall immediately behind things, to fall out of synch with the world by coming into the world.

We’re behind things in other ways too: what we perceive is necessarily already in the past, and our neuronal processes are always ahead of us. Our minds, it appears, lag behind our brains by half a second: our brains make decisions for us before we are consciously aware that we are making decisions. It ain’t all waiting on you, that’s for sure.

Even when we do see what’s coming, we can’t stop it. We can’t alter the course of events with the flip of a coin, because we always arrive too late, and the coin’s already up in the air, spinning.

A question is posed at the start of the film: ‘Where’s the last man?’ And the film provides an answer: the Tommy Lee Jones sheriff character is the last man: old, older even than his own father, always following on behind, hiding behind, never able to catch up with things and gain a perspective, an overview. And we’re with him, on the long slide, endlessly.

On his own immaturity (and that of many others)

2007-11-23T16:57:00.000Z

Ces nymphes, je les veux perpétuer.
Si clair,
Leur incarnat léger, qu'il voltige dans l'air
Assoupi de sommeils touffus.
Aimai-je un rêve?
Mon doute, amas de nuit ancienne, s'achève
En maint rameau subtil, qui, demeuré les vrais
Bois même, prouve, hélas! que bien seul je m'offrais
Pour triomphe la faute idéale de roses.
Réfléchissons...

What is the aesthetic experience? What is it like? What is the ineffable quale of it? (Not to mention its quid, its quare, and its quamobrem.) I ask these questions not because I wish to articulate a response, but because I’m not at all sure I’ve ever had such an experience.

Stendhal was so overcome by transports of delight when he encountered the sublime beauty of the artworks in Florence that they named a syndrome after him. Other people speak of quasi-mystical states experienced when contemplating a painting, a poem, or a piece of music. They seem to have a transcendent sense of Beauty; they live Platonic frenzies and Dionysian ecstasies. What is this sacred experience? And how does it relate to the intellectual (culturally constructed) experience of art – the one with which I am personally more familiar?

There are many orders of rational and emotional response to art, but it seems possible (and necessary) to articulate them formally: this poem delights with its delicate play of antitheses, the composition of this painting permits us to perceive its object in new ways, this piece of music provokes an emotional response with its [insert technical explanation here – I’m a dunce when it comes to music], etc.

Books I’ve read on the subject of aesthetics have never entirely satisfied me. I appreciate formalist approaches and close readings of texts. I get something out of abstract theorizing and metaphysical speculation. I can even tolerate imaginative and emotional responses to texts. But the ‘aesthetic’ approach (the Kantian flavour of it at least), which I understand to be situated somewhere in the no-man’s-land between these extremes, says nothing to me. As far as I can understand it (according to my cursory reading of Charles Martindale’s Aesthetics and the Judgement of Taste), the aesthetic approach is all about attending to both content and form, and is an individual, particular, contextualized response that can also be said in some way to be universal. Well, O. K. I think even the most extreme proponent of formalism wouldn’t have much of a problem with that. But what else is it? What differentiates it from the sort of reading we normally do anyway?

My incomprehension no doubt derives from an experience of art appreciation that is basically deficient and incomplete. I don’t find myself carried away by transports of delight or wonder when I read a book or look at a painting. I like to think that I have worked at cultivating a sense of artistic beauty, but this sense does not touch me to the very core of my being. It remains on the surface: it is an intellectual response (which can be pleasurable too, if not orgasmic), not a visceral one. It is refined appreciation, distilled out of a muddy admixture of sense and memory. Surely it is appropriate that what results from this process of refinement and distillation is in a very real sense, superficial, on the surface?

Omne supervacuum plena de pectore manat

Whatever is distilled from the fullness of the heart is superfluous, says the poet. Well I disagree.

A solipsistic arrogance naturally leads me to assume that if I do not experience any kind of visceral heartfelt response to the beautiful, then nobody does. I call bullshit! Let us do away with these Platonic absurdities! Never underestimate the self-justificatory force of philistinism! I have started reading Gombrowicz recently, and something I came across in his (brilliant) novel Ferdydurke, struck a chord with me.

In the part of that book (O accursed parts!) which introduces the chapter entitled ‘Philifor Honeycombed with Childishness’, Gombrowicz has a go at the artistic pretensions of his culture (inter-war Poland), and wonders about the extent to which responses to art (and responses of any kind) are determined by what he calls ‘form’.

When a concert pianist plays Chopin, for instance, you say: The audience was roused and carried away by a brilliant interpretation of the master’s music. But it is possible that not a single member of the audience was carried away; it is perfectly possible that, if they had not known that Chopin was a great master and the virtuoso a great pianist, they might have received the performance with less enthusiasm. It is also possible that the reason why everyone applauded so enthusiastically, their faces distraught with emotion, was that everyone else was doing the same.

--trans. Eric Mosbacher

Well, I’m not sure how far the ‘emperor’s new clothes’ approach to art can be taken before it shades into full-blown philistinism, but there’s something in it. Gombrowicz, as it happens, takes it in a different direction: he wants us to be alert to the vital role of form in our everyday lives, not just in the rarefied realm of art.

Have done, then, with your aesthetic transports, stop being artists, for heaven’s sake drop your way of talking about art, its syntheses, analysis, subtleties, profundities, the whole inflated apparatus; and instead of imposing myths, model yourselves on facts […] The real situation is this: a human being does not externalize himself directly and immediately in conformity with his own nature; he invariably does so by way of some definite form; and that form, style, way of speaking and responding, do not derive solely from him, but are imposed on him from without.

My friend Conrad, in a fairly recent post, said some admirable things about the humanist notion of maturity, as exemplified in the Erasmian adage ‘Festina lente’. In Ferdydurke, Gombrowicz’s laughter targets maturity and delights in immaturity. His laughing immaturity has some things in common with the mature laughter of the humanists, but it is ultimately something else, I think.

See how different would be the attitude of a man who, instead of saturating himself with the phraseology of a million conceptualist metaphysician-aestheticians, looked at the world with new eyes and allowed himself to feel the enormous influence which form has on human life. […]
He would no longer write pretentiously, to educate, to elevate, to guide, to moralize, and to edify his fellow-men; his aim would be his own elevation and his own progress; and he would write, not because he was mature and had found his form, but because he was still immature and in his efforts to attain form was humiliating himself, making a fool of himself, and sweating like a climber still struggling towards the mountain-top, being a man still on the way to self-fulfilment.

It’s an attractive notion, but I’m still not sure it’s one I can fully subscribe to myself. Too many bad habits of thought, too deeply ingrained – just look at the pretentious quote with which I began this post!

Into the memoried day

2007-11-15T21:31:00.000Z

We remain unknown to ourselves, we seekers after knowledge, even to ourselves: and with good reason… Our eternal sentence reads: ‘Everyone is furthest from himself’ – of ourselves, we have no knowledge.

I have always had a certain grudging respect for scholars who really are capable of devoting themselves mind and body, lovelessly, without genius, to their subject of study: editors and annotators, ‘bald heads, forgetful of their sins, old, learned, respectable bald heads’. A Nietzsche or a Montaigne could scorn the grinding lucubrations of the pedants: they had their genius. What do we have? Long live the pedants, I say! I would be one myself: I lack only the work ethic.

Imagine someone who, when woken suddenly from divine distraction and self-absorption by the twelve loud strokes of the noon bell, asks himself: ‘What time is it?’ In much the same way, we rub our ears after the fact and ask in complete surprise and embarrassment: ‘What was that we just experienced?’, or even ‘Who are we really? Then we count back over in retrospect, as I said, every one of the twelve trembling strokes of our experience, our life, our being - and alas! lose our count in the process…

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith

I sometimes wonder if I have ever really experienced anything. My life is not lived ‘narratively’, in a diachronic fashion. Memory does not place me into the thick of the lived moment. I recently read Terence Cave’s new book on Montaigne, and in it there is a reference to an article published a few years ago in the TLS, by one Galen Strawson. Its title is ‘A Fallacy of Our Age: Not Every Life is a Narrative’ – you can find it in the online archive, if you have a subscription. In it, the author refutes the widely accepted idea that we each of us understand our lives, our selves, by shaping our experiences into stories, that our identity is at base narrative in nature. Some people do not feel that there is a fundamental ontological continuity between past selves and the self of the present moment. Some people do not have the ‘narrative’, form-finding impulse. Are their lives somehow impoverished by this?

…dans mon misérable cerveau, toujours occupé à chercher midi à quatorze heures (de quelle fatigante faculté la nature m’a fait cadeau!)…

Baudelaire, ‘La Fausse monnaie’

We are all looking for noon at two o’ clock: we live our lives backwards, our consciousness of self extends into the past, not into the future, and it has no present reality. We know our experiences, sensations and ideas, retroactively, we must fit them to the Procrustean bed of Form so as to make them comprehensible.

It is as if we were looking for complications, for midi à quatorze heures as we say in French, literally, for noon at two o’ clock, and as if we wanted to show that we were given to, and even gifted at, tracking the impossible.

Derrida, Given Time I: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf

There is something basically inhuman about the idea of experiencing the present moment wholeheartedly, sensually, unselfconsciously (‘authentically’). Why do we want to achieve this animalistic state of immediacy, without thought, without death?

Better to turn back ‘into the memoried day’.

But the special quality of this city for the man who arrives there on a September evening, when the days are growing shorter and the multicolored lamps are lighted all at once at the doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a woman’s voice cries ah!, is that he feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver

Decline and Fall

2007-10-15T22:14:00.000+01:00

And I shall not mention here the excellence of antiquity, and just as Homer lamented that bodies in his time were too small, say that modern minds cannot compare with ancient minds.

Thus Du Bellay, in the Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse. Neither shall I mention the fact that several times in the Iliad, Homer had his heroes perform feats of strength that would be beyond the capabilities of even two men in his time. Nor that it was believed, throughout most of history, that the ancient world had been more populous, more prosperous, culturally superior, and better in pretty much every way than the modern world.

Montesquieu, writing about 160 years after Du Bellay, was particularly anxious about population decline. In the Lettres Persanes, the Persian tourists Rhedi and Usbek investigated the reasons for the perceived drop in world population.

Usbek put it down to sociological causes. The Islamic practice of polygamy, and the Christian prohibition on divorce and obsession with chastity, had both, for different reasons, resulted in declining birth rates. The law of primogeniture, too, had ravaged the population, since it focused all parental attention on the first born son, and what is more, destroyed ‘equality among citizens, which constitutes all their wealth’. Along with this went a pre-Malthusian conviction that rapid population growth would be the remedy for most of society’s ills. Would that this were the case.

Of course, today no educated person could believe for one minute that the population of the ancient world (or indeed that of any period of history) was greater than ours. Estimated at 6,753,339,100 at the time of writing, but chances are it’s gone up a bit since then. And indeed, nobody today would assume that the world population at any time in antiquity exceeded the world population at any time in modernity.

The Plague of Justinian probably did mean that the transition from antiquity to modernity saw a decline in the world population. And the fourteenth century put another bump in the curve. So did the seventeenth. And at the time Montesquieu was writing there was a very real concern that the latest epidemic, syphilis, might spell the end of the human race. But it is manifestly not the case that there were more people in the world at any point in antiquity than at any point in the modern era.

Rhedi and Usbek observed that the cities of Italy were thinly peopled, and drew from this the conclusion that world population was in decline. If Rome, the eternal city, the fount and well-spring of Western culture, was in decline, then what fate awaited the lesser nations that were at one time under her dominion?

I read somewhere recently that in the late fifteenth century, the population of Rome was around fifty thousand. (I also recall the additional interesting fact that prostitutes made up about fifteen percent of this number.) Fifty thousand! This is unquestionably a mere fraction of the population at the time of the Late Republic and the early Empire. How could any sensitive soul look upon the ruins of that once great city and not conclude that it represented the final stage in the decline of man’s mastery over the world? Certainly Du Bellay, after Janus Vitalis, could find nothing of Rome in Rome, for Rome now of Rome was the sole monument, and Rome alone Rome had subdued.

Usbek wrote: ‘In Catholic countries, not only is agriculture abandoned, but even industry is pernicious: it consists in nothing other than learning five or six words of a dead language.’

So the decline in population must have something to do with a decline in learning. The more civilized men become, the greater their numbers: as learning declines, so do prosperity and population.

How great our civilization must be today! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!

The Ideal Reader

2007-09-02T21:56:00.001+01:00

Some time ago, I concluded a post on Bartleby & co, Enrique Vila Matas’s novel about not writing, by quoting these lines by Derek Walcott:

One could abandon writing
for the slow-burning signals
of the great, to be, instead,
their ideal reader, ruminative,
voracious, making the love of masterpieces
superior to attempting
to repeat or outdo them,
and be the greatest reader in the world.

And so, from a book about not writing to a book about not reading, Pierre Bayard’s Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? You’ve probably heard of it: the review of the book in the TLS last month prompted a flurry of linking on all the usual blogs (Boing Boing, 3 Quarks Daily, Arts & Letters Daily, etc.). It immediately struck me how delightfully witty it would be to write a blog entry on the book without having read it; but then I came to my senses and realized that not only would such an undertaking be completely unoriginal, it would also risk being, in the hands of a mediocre writer, not at all witty – as this silly article, also published in the Times back in February, abundantly proves (it is one thing not to have read Proust, but to think that a madeleine is some kind of biscuit is unforgivable).

So I read it.

It is true that we lie to others, and also to ourselves about the books we read, and that this may give rise to a whole complex of anxieties. So much of cultural discourse is mired in hypocrisy, guilt and bad faith. Bayard wants us to liberate ourselves from the system of obligations and prohibitions that constrains the ways we allow ourselves to talk about books. What he is arguing for is nothing less than the ‘desacralization’ of the realm of literary discourse.

As a psychoanalyst Bayard is good on the scrappiness and unevenness of our experience with books, and on the mechanisms of displacement and condensation, selection and repression that intrude to disrupt our understanding of it. He coins the apposite term ‘screen book’ (after Freud’s ‘screen memory’) for the images we tend to substitute for the ‘real book’, as the basis for our interactions with others, and with ourselves.

To understand how to talk about books, it is necessary first to understand what reading is – and this is no simple matter. There is no such thing as mere ‘reading’: there is reading into, out of, up on, through, against, off, at odd and even. Indeed, Bayard’s typology of non-reading (livres inconnus, livres parcourus, livres évoqués, livres oubliés) might have been enriched had the French language access to the panoply of phrasal verbs available in English.

Bayard provides some notes towards a general theory of reading, but studiously avoids engaging with the many theorists that have thought long and hard about it already, the likes of Barthes, Iser, Gadamer. Indeed the only literary theorists that get a look-in here are, so to speak, zero-degree theorists of reading and writing: Paul Valéry, who wanted the theory without bothering with the books themselves, and Oscar Wilde, who believed that reading tended towards perfection in the degree it could detach itself from its object. Despite his claim that he is interested in the real practices of reading and talking about books, Bayard in these chapters seems to be less concerned with the phenomenology of reading than with its abstractions.

Defining just what it is we do when we read a book is no easy matter: we are engaged in a silent dialogue, in the moment but extending over time, with something that is simultaneously a material and an immaterial object. Texts are mobile, fluid things, and our relation to them changes over time and according to the contexts in which we read, think and talk about them. Perhaps, then, Valéry was onto something when he decided that what was important in a book was not its individuality or particularity, but it ‘idea’, its ‘poetics’: only by evacuating the phenomenon can there be any kind purified aesthetic of reading.

To go beyond mere reading, and to get down to the serious business of reading, demands an effort of willed distraction. There is a danger of being too good a reader, of reading too carefully and attentively: we must will ourselves to turn away from books, doubly, beyond them to their wider context and inwardly, towards ourselves.

Montaigne knew all about this. Bayard quotes this passage from ‘De la praesumption’:

I turne and tosse over bookes, but do not studie them; what of them remaines in me is a thing which I no longer acknowledge to be any bodies else. Onely by that hath my judgement profited: and the discourses and imaginations wherewith it is instructed and trained up.

(Essais II.17 ---Florio’s translation)

Or how about this, a passage I am fond of quoting, from the essay ‘De l’institution des enfants’:

Truth and reason are common to all, and are no more proper unto him that spake them heretofore, than unto him that shall speake them hereafter. And it is no more according to Platoes opinion than to mine, since both he and I understand and see alike. The Bees do here and there sticke this and cull that flower, but afterward they produce the hony, which is peculiarly their owne, then is it no more Thyme or Majoram. So of peeces borrowed of others, he may lawfully alter, transforme, and confound them, to shape out of them a perfect peece of worke, altogether his owne; alwaies provided his judgement, his travell, studie, and institution tend to nothing, but to frame the same perfect.

And how did Montaigne manage to invent such an admirable system of reading? By cultivating a really terrible memory:

The authours, the place, the words; and other circumstances, I sodainly forget: and am so excellent in forgetting, that as much as any thing else I forget mine owne writings and compositions.

Excellence in forgetting is a means to improve the faculty of judgement. We are constantly appropriating and transforming the words of others, whether by blanking out the author or title of the book in which we read them, or, better, by forgetting that we did in fact read them, that the memories we hold are not simply our own. The limit case of this is forgetting one’s own writings, and so being doomed to repeat them; but repetition with variation is a generative mechanism, perhaps the foundation of all human creativity.

Forgetting also allows us to re-invent the books with which we claim acquaintance or even intimacy. In this is it is very like (not) reading, since it can engage us creatively. Lying about books one hasn’t read is a creative enterprise, of the same order as the lying that is at the basis of all writing – I speak not just of composing fictions, but of withholding information, manufacturing ambiguity, twisting language to our own ends. To invent, to weave texts into the fabric of one’s own experience and thereby to give substance to one’s own ideas, is to cultivate an independence of mind and to transcend the parasitism of merely ‘reading’.

The ability to forget is a precondition of comprehension. Bayard coins the useful term ‘délecture’: a word that might mean ‘un-reading’, but also has pleasing associations (‘dé-lire’, ‘dé-lectation’) with delirium and delight – as if the pleasure of the text resided in its expropriation, its unreading, its decontextualization.

At the other end of the non-reading spectrum is absolute contextualization, full participation in the cultural discourse. This we aspire to mainly via the expedient of the appeal to authority – it is often sufficient, as Valéry did for his eulogy to Proust, to rely on other people’s opinions about a book for us to judge it. In fact, the ability to derive one’s own position from the constellations of others’ stated opinions is an essential skill we must cultivate.

The subject of one of Bayard’s chapters, the librarian in Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (a book I’ve heard good things about, but never opened), takes this to its extreme conclusion. Like Bartleby, who ‘would prefer not to’, the librarian never reads any books; but he has a reason for this: he fears it might disrupt his sense of how they all fit together, his cultural overview. What matters for him is the relations between elements in a structure, not the elements themselves.

The downside of this is the traffic in empty signifiers that constitutes much of high- and middle-brow cultural – not to mention academic – discourse. Bayard mounts a defence of this kind of thing, taking as his source texts Graham Greene’s The Third Man (the scene where Rollo Martins is compelled to speak authoritatively on the modern novel, despite knowing nothing about it) and David Lodge’s Changing Places (in which a Professor of English shoots himself in the foot by admitting, in a dinner-party game of one-downmanship, that he has not read Hamlet). Often in such situations, the content of our utterances matters less than their orientation, and the respective positions of the interlocutors in the cultural hierarchy. In this part of the book the discussion suffers, ironically enough, from a lack of orientation: for example Pierre Bourdieu, who has written extensively on the social dimension of our cultural interactions, does not get a mention; and I couldn’t help but think that Bayard’s concept of an ‘inner book’ – the sum of collective or individual representations that interposes itself between reader and book – is merely a warmed-over version of the familiar ‘horizon of expectations’. Perhaps the author made a conscious decision to exclude hermeneutics, reception theory, etc. from this study. Or maybe he simply hasn’t read Jauss.

Bayard makes the strong point that the ‘virtual library’ in which these discussions take place is primarily a ludic space, and that often to speak sincerely or with too much conviction is tantamount to a breach of the rules. What matters more, he concludes, than the truths we present to others is the truth we know to be our own. Well and good, but is it really possible to extricate the one from the other?

#@£*%!!

2007-08-17T20:50:00.000+01:00

Joachim Du Bellay, when he passed through Geneva on his way back from Rome, was surprised to observe that the inhabitants of the city never used swearwords. Henri Chamard locates a record of the laws that governed Geneva in 1560, in MS Dupuy 415 held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France:

Item: Des Jurements. Que nul ne soit si osé ne si hardi de jurer le Nom de Dieu, sur peine pour la première fois de baiser terre: & pour la seconde, de baiser terre & de trois sols: pour la troisieme, de soixante sols & trois jours en prison, en pain & eau: & pour la quatrieme, d’estre privé de la ville pour an & jour

Cursing: Let no man be so impertinent and so bold as to take God’s name in vain: the punishment for a first offence is to kiss the ground; for a second offence, to kiss the ground and pay a fine of three sols; for a third, a fine of sixty sols and three days in prison, on bread and water; and for a fourth, banishment from the city for a year and a day.

This is just for swearing; the punishments for blasphemy are even more severe! Du Bellay, who was used to the anything-goes attitude of the Parisians, and the anything-goes-as-long-as-you-know-the-right-people attitude of the Romans, was quite taken aback by all this. Still, he also records that he had never seen so much greed and envy and anger and recrimination – and binge-drinking – as he saw in Calvinist Geneva.

Sinthome/Sindone

2007-07-31T23:08:00.000+01:00

John Banville is an author I came to late, prompted by the award of the 2005 Booker to his latest novel The Sea. This he accepted with characteristic doesn’t-suffer-fools-gladly aplomb: ‘It is nice to see a work of art win the Booker prize’, he said, and he was right. His writing, like his acceptance speeches, is conceited, lapidary, to the point. And better: as a writer he is a careful stylist (isn’t this the very least we can expect from any writer?): he will always turn a phrase until it catches the light.

[Incidentally, I cannot take credit for this brilliant formulation: I lifted it from Clive James, another writer whose work I unjustly neglected and have been enjoying recently.]

Spurred on by the notices Banville regularly gets in one of the blogs I read on occasion, and enjoy, The Elegant Variation, I went on to investigate a few more of his books, visiting first the Revolutions trilogy (into which I failed to make sufficient inroads before the library fines prohibited further advances), and then attacking his retelling of the Faust myth, Mefisto, in the course of reading which, a strange, hypnotic compulsion drew me on to the end, despite myself. After that I went to Shroud, mostly on the strength of Banville’s own opinion on the book. Usually authors’ judgements of their own works are to be held in the utmost suspicion, but in this case I can happily report that this is, indeed, a great book.

Whether Shroud is some kind of roman à clef – it isn’t, really – and who might be the targets of Banville’s opprobrium, I am by no means equipped to judge; nor am I particularly interested. Is it worth remarking the fact that Louis Althusser and Paul de Man, those bogeymen of mauvaise foi, exemplary livers of lives at odds with their intellectual convictions (or those associated with them by their followers), are both mentioned in the acknowledgements, since Banville reframed episodes from their writing to flesh out the persona of his novel’s narrator, Axel Vander? Persona is a word that recurs in this novel: for where does a person begin and end if not with masks: the veteran actor of the Attic drama whose mask is ‘more like his face than his face is’; Harlequin’s mask; the executioner’s mask?

‘Man and mask are one.’

*
The main setting of the novel is Turin, a town that resonates with legends: there is the famously fraudulent Shroud, which reveals an imprint, on the winding sheet that serves to wrap or conceal a body, of the image of a real body – a work of art, perhaps; and of Nietzsche, who spent his last, crazed days there.

What sets the narrative in motion is the receipt of a letter, which threatens to bring down the carefully constructed edifice of the self Vander presents to the world:

Now I was cloven in two more thoroughly than ever, I who was always more than myself. On the one side there was the I I had been before the letter arrived, and now there was this new I, a singular capital standing at a tilt to all the known things that had suddenly become unfamiliar.

The I on the page always is more than itself: ‘the I I had been’, doubling the vertical stroke, setting the I of the enunciation apart from the enunciated I; and then I, the operation of italicization defamiliarizing, setting the letter at odds with its upright counterparts.

Later Vander will describe the sensation of having left something behind, when, looking back to where one has been sitting, one imagines to see an obscene replica of oneself, ‘a limp, life-sized marionette, hands hanging and jointed limbs all awry, grinning woodenly at the ceiling’.

Cass Cleave, the writer of the letter, is in the thrall of the mysterious Mandelbaum syndrome, which condemns the sufferer to perceive byzantine patterns in the fabric of reality, to be constantly on the alert to the strangeness of how things ‘strike echoes everywhere’:

In her version of the world everything was connected; she could trace the dissolution of empires to the bending of a blade of grass, with herself as the fulcrum of the process. All things attended her.

This is very like the madness of the artist. Vander jokingly proposes that Cass write his biography: ‘You could write it in the first person […] Pretend that you are me. I give you full permission.’ But she comes to believe that her role is ‘simply [to] perform the rites in the way that was required.’ The solution to the mystery is not something she is able to pry into; she is content merely to perform, to voice the catechism, to prophesy without understanding or being understood, like Cassandra.

Banville has Vander sprinkle his prose with moments of precarious self-disclosure reminiscent of Nabokov’s best delusionally knowing narrators, like this, a suitably twentieth-century updating of the elegiac paraclausithyron topos:

Yes, you, my most assiduous reader, will recognise the moment and its image, for I have employed it in many contexts, as a mocking emblem of the human condition: two people standing on either side of a locked door, one shut out and the other listening from inside, each trying to divine the other’s identity and intentions.

‘Professor Vander’, insinuates Bartoli, a Clare Quilty to Vander’s Humbert Humbert, ‘holds that every text conceals a shameful secret, the hidden understains left behind by the author in his necessarily bad faith, and which it is the critic’s task to nose out.’

This is a book about bad faith, and the ways language conspires against us to thwart our attempts at self-disclosure. Writing in the confessional mode is especially subject to this bad faith, because there is, ‘in the very act of confession, an obscene self-congratulation for the virtue required to see your mistake and own up to it’, writes Tobias Wolff. There is a double intention behind every utterance, to withdraw even as we set forth, to conceal even as we reveal. And at the centre of it all is the masked figure of Harlequin, whose obscene laughter mocks our every attempt to fix our self in its essence.

Bicyclette!

2007-07-30T23:45:00.000+01:00

What is the connection between literary avant-gardism, and bicycles?

It is surely no coincidence that the front covers of two books on my shelf, Flann O’ Brien’s The Third Policeman and volume II of Samuel Beckett’s novels in the Grove centenary edition, both feature bicycle wheels.

Then you have Marcel Duchamp’s Readymade sculpture Bicycle wheel.

And what of the fact that the cyclist Paul Fournel is not only ‘provisionally definitive secretary’ but also the current President of the Oulipo?

Add that everyone knows Alfred Jarry was an obsessive cyclist, and his ‘pataphysical classic The Crucifixion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race is a fine example of cycling reportage.

Since that link also reproduces J. G. Ballard’s imitation ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’, I must say that despite the killer first line ‘Oswald was the starter’ it doesn’t quite have the same panache as Jarry’s original.
As these things go I much prefer his ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ short.
Have I mentioned before that I’m a big fan of Ballard’s, especially his short stories and early sci-fi stuff? I find myself slightly uncomfortable admitting that, ever since I slogged my way through his latest Kingdom Come, which really is unremittingly bad. The thing about it is, the reviews at the time of publication were all pretty much the standard reaction to Ballard, not great, not terrible, all hedging with the old ‘he’s doing something no-one else is doing’ schtick. Of course, Ballard’s made a career out of writing the same novel again and again (and why not? It worked for Beckett), but for me his latest just seemed out of joint. Ballard’s style, if it can be called a style, hasn’t really changed much since he started writing novels. ‘Kingdom Come’, for all its shock-value – consumerism as fascism? you don’t say! – just seems very old-fashioned, an attempt to say something that didn’t really need to be said.
I suppose avant-gardism in all its forms dates very quickly. But something like ‘High Rise’ is still worth reading, and still relevant today, even if it is pretty much the same novel wrapped up in a slightly different premise.
I myself am merely an amateur cyclist, and share little of Jarry’s enthusiasm for the velocipedal art.

Nested digression aside, let me get back to my topic, which was Beckett’s Molloy. Here is a short essay on Beckett’s bicycles. See also this, on The Joys of Cycling with Beckett.

Molloy says:

So I got up, adjusted my crutches and went down to the road, where I found my bicycle (I didn’t know I had one) in the same place I must have left it. […] It was a chainless bicycle, with a free-wheel, if such a bicycle exists. Dear bicycle, I shall not call you bike, you were green, like so many of your generation, I don’t know why. […] This should all be rewritten in the pluperfect. What a rest to speak of bicycles and horns. Unfortunately it is not of them I have to speak, but of her who brought me into the world, through the hole in her arse if my memory is correct. First taste of the shit.

Here the bicycle is an alien object, like all objects for Molloy, but it is one that transcends. It exists not as a possession or as a memory (‘I didn’t know I had one’), nor in the particular (‘if such a bicycle exists’), nor even in the present tense (‘This should all be rewritten in the pluperfect’). But what it offers is a temporary reprieve from the shit and the way of all flesh.

The appeal of the bicycle resides in that strange hybridization of man and machine, which combine to produce an aesthetically pure and fluid mode of locomotion. Flann O’ Brien’s The Third Policeman is clearly not about the main character’s experience of hell, as some have claimed, but about the fundamentally strange object that is the bicycle: once we understand that the whole novel is from bicycle’s point of view, all becomes clear.

The simple but precise engineering of a bicycle (I shall not call it a bike!) can cause ontological confusion, as with Moran: ‘I forget which wheel it was. As soon as two things are nearly identical I am lost.’ This speaks of philosophy’s and literature’s obsession with dualities and with cyclical forms, from Dante, through . . . Bruno, and . Vico, to . . Joyce.

The links between the cycle and the psyche are well established, and the velocipedal art is rich in cycle-logical archetypes: from the great chain of being to the wheel of fortune, the dérailleur is de rigueur. The problem of the bicycle has exercised the greatest minds, from Empedalcles through Sir Walter Raleigh to Mikhail Bike-tin. But now, to brake this never-ending cycle of tire-ing puns, with apologies for saddling myself with more than I can handle – bar the occasions when I mis-spoke – I am geared up to take a stand and e-clips this freewheeling reflection on biking.

Gras c’est, d’or c’est

2007-07-27T01:51:00.001+01:00

In the prologue to his Gargantua, Rabelais states:

[E]n icelle bien aultre goust trouverez, & doctrine plus absconce que vous revelera de tresaultz sacremens & mystères horrificques, tant en ce que concerne nostre religion, que aussi l’estat politicq & vie oeconomicque.

[In the perusal of this treatise you shall find another kind of taste, and a doctrine of a more profound and abstruse consideration, which will disclose unto you the most glorious sacraments and dreadful mysteries, as well in what concerneth your religion, as matters of the public state, and life economical. – trans. Urquhart]

Readers of Rabelais have over the centuries been fascinated with the idea that the linguistic exuberance of his text encodes secrets to be read only by an initiated élite. The above passage seems to offer a justification for such an approach, which became particularly widespread in the nineteenth century, an age obsessed with the occult, with secret histories and with mystical claptrap of all kinds. One such interpreter, the much and justly maligned Claude-Sosthène Grasset d’Orcet (1828-1900), went further than most.

I was put onto the works of Grasset d’Orcet some time ago by an online acquaintance; I had never heard his name mentioned in an academic context, and was entirely unfamiliar with this particular mode of reading Rabelais. But it so happens that his complete works are even now being edited and republished, and I was quite easily able to pick up volume I of his Oeuvres décryptées, which contains his work on Rabelais and on the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, or rather, Béroalde de Verville’s translation of it, Le Songe de Poliphile.

It’s quite a read.

Grasset d’Orcet’s method in decoding what he calls ‘la langue des oiseaux’ consists in breaking French words and phrases down into their constituent phonemes, then recombining them to form new words and phrases. It is basically a variation on the rebuses or blasons used in devices, in heraldry, and in cathedral decorations. Indeed, Grasset d’Orcet confidently claims that Rabelais’s texts are constructed exactly like Gothic cathedrals.

There are a few different subdialects of this language (bear with me here): the ‘grimoire blanc’ is the blason properly speaking: these must form eight syllable lines in French, which must always end with an ‘L’ sound (Grasset d’Orcet entirely spuriously derives ‘blasonner’ from ‘bé [bien] L assoner’). Then there’s the ‘grimoire noir’, which admits Latin, Greek and Hebrew also. ‘Patelinage’ is a method of expressing the blason with actions instead of words or images. ‘Lanternois’ (‘Lanternish’) does not require the ‘L’ rhymes, and is the most common language Rabelais uses to encode his writing. We are told us as much in Pantagruel Ch 9, when Panurge is asked by Epistemon (in Urquhart’s translation): ‘Do you speak Christian, or the buffoon language, otherwise called Patelinois? Nay, it is the puzlatory tongue, said another, which some call Lanternois.’ Lanternois must be the language spoken in the ‘pays Lanternois’, which makes an appearance in the Quart livre.

So why is Lanternois so similar to middle French (albeit a version with very loose grammar)? Well might you ask, since Grasset d’Orcet contends that it is not just texts written in French that should be decoded in this way but also the symbolism of the visual arts and architecture. And Latin texts also render into French in this way: Louis XIV was the unwitting target of satire when he adopted ‘Nec pluribus impar’ as his device; for in Lanternois, this reads ‘Ne que plus ribaud, sans pair insolence’ [‘There is none more ribald or more insolent’]. The reason is quite simple: it is because French is the language of Freemasonry, and has been since the sixth century, although the ‘langue du blason’ was only widely adopted in the eleventh...

Rabelais’s works are vehicles for the transmission of messages between those initiated into the secrets of freemasonry. Insofar as they deal with ‘l’estat politicq & vie oeconomicque’, they are mainly concerned with the machinations of several prominent court women during the reigns of François I and Henri II – notably Catherine de’ Medici and Diane de Poitiers – and their efforts to take control of the destiny of the French monarchy and Catholicism. Often the historical facts must be manipulated to square with the phonetic constraints of the method. Quite a lot of significance, for example, is given to the fact that Eleanor of Habsburg (second wife of François I) had a particular taste for lobster (homard), sometimes indulging in it to excess.

What I have described as Grasset d’Orcet’s method might appear not dissimilar to another, more everyday linguistic operation, namely, punning. And indeed, that’s pretty much what it is. This page gives a psychoanalytical account of the ‘langue des oiseaux’. Lacan was an inveterate punster in the best Rabelaisian tradition: consider his ‘le nom du père’/’le non du père’/’les non-dupes errent’. Same thing. Grasset d’Orcet’s madness is not so far removed from the post-structuralist manias of the late twentieth century.

The way this all actually works with Rabelais’s texts can be seen from the following example, Grasset d’Orcet’s decoding of the genealogy of Gargantua (Ch 1). Grasset d’Orcet takes a section of text, picks out certain words of significance using some sort of ‘grid’ (whose underlying algorithms are not revealed), then shuffles them around a bit until they form eight-syllable lines all ending (more or less) in ‘L’ sounds (again, according to some mysterious algorithm to which we are not a party); he then smooshes the words together phonetically and ‘translates’ them into French by resolving the sounds differently and altering the vowels.

Retournant à nos moutons, ie vous diz que par un don souverain de dieu nous a esté reservée l’antiquité & genealogie de Gargantua, plus entière que nulle aultre, de dieu ie ne parle, car il ne me appartient, aussy les diables (ce sont les caffars) se y opposent. Et fut trouvée par Iean Audeau, en un pré qu’il avoit près l’arceau gualeau au dessoubz de l’Olive, tirant à Marsay. Duquel faisant lever les fossez, touchèrent les piocheurs de leurs marres, un grand tombeau de bronze long sans mesure: car oncques n’en trouvèrent le bout, parce qu’il entroit trop avant les escluses de Vienne. Icelluy ouvrans en certain lieu signé au dessus d’un goubelet, à l’entour du quel estoit escript en lettres Ethrusques, HIC BIBITUR, trouvèrent neuf flaccons en tel ordre qu’on assiet les quilles en Guascoigne. Des quelz celluy qu’on my lieu estoit, couvroit un gros, gras, grand, gris, ioly, petit, moisy, livret, plus mais non mieux sentent que roses.

Using the grid method, this gives:

Jean Audeau, pré arceau gualeau,
Sous olive, Narsay tirant. airain sépulcre.
Signé Goubelet. Ci l’on boit, latin.
Neuf flacons quillés, mi base livret
Gros, gras, grand, gris, joli,
Petit, moysi, sentant plus ne mieux roses.

Which in Lanternois means:

Janus, dieu pairé arche Gaule,
Seul vénère Saturne, Touraine sépulcre.
Signe: Goubelet, Colon boit, loi tient.
Haine au Faulcon! colombe ose lève haste.
Guerre, gare, Guérin, doit grege loup.
Petit musicien, tient Apollon, marsye.

Which, roughly translated, gives:

‘Janus, double god of the kingdom of the Gauls, the sepulchre of Touraine, reveres none but Saturn, under the sign of the dove that drinks from a goblet. It has this law: hatred of the falcon! May the dove dare to raise its standard, the wolf must keep his flock from war with Guérin. Marsyas takes Apollo for a little musician.’

A further translative operation is required to correctly decode the symbolism of this little message. I choose not to reveal it to you now, since I’m not sure that you’re ready for it yet (Odi profanum vulgus et arceo!). Also, I’m not really sure I have the slightest idea what the bloody hell Grasset d’Orcet’s on about half the time.

The names of Rabelais’s characters are duly decoded for us – but, as with all good systems of symbolization, they do not necessarily always denote the same thing. The name Panurge derives from the Greek ‘panourgos’, or ‘factotum’. But, asserts Grasset d’Orcet, Rabelais only gave the names of his characters the appearance of a Greek derivation, in order to set the pedants on the wrong track. In fact, Panurge in Lanternois signifies simply ‘peint rouge’, and therefore designates the mannerist painter Rosso. Later in the course of his interpretation, Grasset has cause to modify this reading somewhat: after the death of Rosso, Rabelais made Panurge represent Philibert Delorme instead. Later still, in the third and fourth books, Panurge came to designate Henri II (‘pas n’urge’: because he couldn’t get it up). Even later still, we are told that Panurge was a stand in for the printer Sebastian Gryphius. It seems Panurge was made to do quite a bit of semiotic work: ‘factotum’, indeed.

As for Pantagruel, that name designates none other than François I himself (‘Paix ne te guère vale’ or ‘peace avails you nothing’). Gargantua, it follows, was Louis XII, and the name translates as ‘Guère gain tu as’ (‘you win little’, a reference to his not entirely successful Italian campaigns).

Anyway, that will give you some idea of the complexity and rigour of Rabelais’s steganographical technique. But it is not primarily the linguistic part of Rabelais’s text that interests Grasset.

In chapter 20 of Pantagruel, after Panurge ‘argues by signs’ with the Englishman Thaumaste, the author informs us that he is refraining from giving us the full interpretation of the argument, because Thaumaste has already produced and published a volume in which he explains all. Grasset d’Orcet is convinced that this volume is none other than the Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel (Paris: Richard Breton, 1565), which you can persuse online here. This book is a collection of remarkable Boschian images, none of which seems to bear much of a relation to Rabelais’s work. BibliOdyssey has a post about the woodcuts here. Grasset, who is under the impression that Rabelais himself drew these pictures (after all, if he was trained in the traditions of freemasonry then he must have been a competent draftsman, right?), finds more to decode in them than he does in the good doctor’s writings. Perhaps this is because one has a bit more wriggle room with the translation of images than one does with the translation of words? Who knows?

One example will suffice to give you a sense of the messages encoded in these images. Consider this rum looking fellow:

What we have here is a ‘pot de terre’ (earthenware pot) ‘à deux anses’ (with two handles), wearing a ‘bare’ (flat bonnet) which is tied to the ground with a string (‘relié à terre par un fil’). This gives us: ‘fil lie bare’: Philibert [Delorme, the architect]; and ‘deux anses, pot de terre’: Diane de Poitiers [mistress of Henri II]. The image was therefore intended by Rabelais as a message to Diane, warning her that Philibert had betrayed her by going over to the side of Catherine de’ Medici (who is, incidentally, represented by this nice looking chap).

On the other hand, I’m not so sceptical about Grasset’s identification of this prognathous person with Charles V, since, well, there’s an unmistakable Habsburg family resemblance about her.

Grasset d’Orcet’s madness is quite clearly inflected by a strong nostalgia for the ancien régime and an utter contempt for the ideals of the Enlightenment and the French revolution. It’s an aristocratic kind of madness. Rabelais, G.-d’O. helpfully informs us, was no champion of universal human rights. He would have been as disgusted as Balzac was by the advent of democracy and the encroachments of the bourgeoisie on the birthright of the nobility. He had no time for the pedantry of Italian humanism. He rejected classical learning, and hated republicanism. He was unswervingly pro-monarchy. His Catholicism was perfectly orthodox. He was, in short, an arch-conservative: just like Grasset d’Orcet. Funny, that.

Letter of complaint

2007-07-27T01:03:00.000+01:00

XX XXXXXXX XXXX
XXXXXXXX
XXX XXX

26 March 2007

Virgin Atlantic Customer Relations
PO Box 747
Dunstable
LU6 9AH

File Reference: XXXXXXXXXX

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am writing to inform you of a matter that has caused me to suffer some vexation, a certain degree of irritation, and a not insignificant measure of discombobulation. This weekend just past, I underwent a terrible ordeal, and, like the mariner that stoppeth one of three, I feel I must unburden my soul to you. On Saturday evening I flew American Airlines from MIA to JFK to connect with the Virgin Atlantic flight VS 26 to LHR, which took off at 0730 on Sunday 25 March. When I got to Heathrow, your staff informed me that my bag had been lost in New York.

Now, at this point I had already been travelling for around twenty-four hours, and I had thought the worst was over. As you will appreciate, I felt exactly like Xenophon, who, after the defeat of Artaxerxes at the battle of Cunaxa, found himself and his ten thousand troops abandoned in the enemy territory of central Persia, and was forced to march overland the hundreds of miles back to the Black Sea.

Why? Well, the bag had in it my Heathrow Express return ticket, which had set me back no less than 29 quid. Now, the Heathrow Express, as you may know, is the most expensive train journey in the world. If you didn’t know that, perhaps you could make a note of it and pass it on to Richard Branson at the next business meeting. The bag also contained my keys, and my National Railcard.

Not wanting to shell out a second time for the most expensive train journey in the world, I took the tube to King’s Cross. Naturally, the train only managed to get me as far as Northfields, at which point, owing to some unexplained fault, I was abruptly vomited out onto the platform, where I was forced to wait in the bitter cold, coatless (where was my coat? In NYC!), a full twenty-five minutes for the next one. Don’t worry, I’m not about to blame you for the parlous state of TfL. Nor would I blame you for the fact that, once I got to King’s Cross, I had to wait another hour for a train to take me to Cambridge, which train only limped as far as Stevenage, where I had to transfer to a bus, which bus laboured up the A505 to Royston, at which station I boarded another train to Cambridge, my destination; no, I would not blame you for this, were it not for the fact that I had to pay the full fare of eighteen-odd quid for my ticket. Why? Because my railcard was in my bag and my bag was in New York City. That really sticks in my craw.

Happily, the bag was finally returned to me today. But even Odysseus, when he arrived back at Ithaca after ten years’ peregrinations, had still to defeat the suitors; so I too met with further misfortune: the key to my office had been in that bag, and it had arrived too late in the day for me to go in. I had been compelled to take the day off work. O blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks! As I am by nature – like Sir Richard himself – an industrious and conscientious worker, this enforced indolence pained me greatly.

In conclusion, please send me some cash or vouchers or something in compensation for my emotional distress and pecuniary privation, and we’ll say no more about it.

Yours faithfully,

XXXX X XXXXX

---------------------------

Still haven't got a reply...

Remainder

2007-07-25T21:26:00.001+01:00

It would seem, in the current book publishing climate, to be an act of unexampled folly and hubris to challenge the Fates of the Marketplace by giving one’s debut novel the title ‘Remainder’. But Clive James tempted fate in this way when he wittily, and wittingly, chose to call a collection of his poems The Book of my Enemy has been Remaindered (after this poem). Of course, the book itself duly ended up in the remainder pile – not a judgement of its merits, you understand; more likely owing to ‘a miscalculated print run, a marketing error’.

But Tom McCarthy, undaunted by this precedent, did just that. Not that the novel’s path to publication was entirely smooth – it apparently only found publishers in the UK and US after having been given a small print run by a Parisian independent (no shame in that, of course: same thing happened with Ulysses). And, although it caused a minor sensation in the book pages when it was published here last year, I was able last week to pick it up for less than half the cover price in a branch of a well-known high street book chain.

Not that we should imagine that the vagaries of the market have any positive correlation with the literary merits of the products it spews out for consumption; indeed, the correlation is more often a negative one. That being the case, I can categorically state that Remainder has deserved none of the success that has accrued to it: this is a remarkable book.

McCarthy, author of the Tintin book I blogged about here (which I still haven’t got around to reading, alas) and sometime member of the avant-gardist International Necronautical Society, has written a novel that situates itself firmly in the best traditions of experimental literature. Echoes of the novels of Beckett, of the nouveaux romanciers (McCarthy must be a fan, as I am, of the works of Michel Butor), of Perec’s La Vie Mode d’Emploi, abound.

I won’t summarize the plot. If you’re curious you can find a synopsis here – it’s one of those book reviews that devotes more words to recounting every element of the story in meticulous detail (and spoiling it) than it does to, y’know, actually reviewing it.

The ‘remainder’ of the title has nothing to do with piles of unsold books, of course: it refers to that troubling residue or excess in our representations and self-representations, that ‘little bit repeating’. This is a novel about trauma – not necessarily the traumatic event suffered by the main character that sets the narrative into its (slow, repetitively hypnotic) motion, but the primordial trauma of the entry of the self into the symbolic order. We do not naturally know how to be in the world: we must learn how to do it. McCarthy’s protagonist is reset to this zero point, to the point of entry into the world, and he must relearn the ways we order memory and reality.

There is a discrepancy in the ‘fit’ of the self to the real: we have all experienced it, if we have ever thought about the authenticity of our actions. We have all, I’m sure, experienced that moment of extreme self-consciousness described by the novel’s narrator, when, walking down the street, it occurs to us that we must for some reason turn around and retrace our steps, and we stand there hesitant, taking care to put on a dumb-show of authentic hesitancy and decisiveness – finger in the air, nod or shake of the head, careful composition of our features into expressions of consternation or haste – for the benefit of whoever might be watching, to prove to them, to the symbolic order, that we are, in fact, acting natural. We want to replicate the naturalness and unselfconsciousness of gesture and speech that we see in the best film-actors; but acting without appearing to act takes many years of intense training.

On this point, I read an excellent article in the LRB last week on Marlon Brando. Brando, writes the reviewer, ‘didn’t believe in acting, except in real life’, and ‘for much of the time he performed on screen like a person who didn’t believe in acting’. ‘But’, he goes on ‘he also believed in acting more than he said he did, and perhaps more than he thought he did, and he occasionally worked very hard at it.’ Camus’s ideal absurd man, perhaps…

The narrative drive of the novel derives from the repetition compulsion: when the mind suppresses a traumatic event it is compelled to return to and repeat elements contiguous with it in space and time, without allowing the subject to speak of the event itself. In this case, the subject is literally forbidden to the speak of the event, according the terms of the ‘Settlement’ he has agreed with the mysterious body responsible for the accident.

Instead he strives to reach a point at which his actions, and every aspect of the relation he has with his environment, might attain to an absolute, zero-degree passivity, not ‘doing’ but ‘being done’. This may be possible by slowing down time and halting it, by extending the infinitesimal moment and fully inhabiting it; by bringing to bear on the real an artist’s eye, a meticulous focus, an expansive attentiveness to detail. This is what organizes the narrator's perspective, manifesting itself in the return of the refrain ‘as I mentioned earlier’. But the narrator in Remainder misunderstands the role of the artist, mistakes representation for re-enactment, and fails to take into account the small, excessive element (that ‘little bit repeating) that makes every iteration into something more that itself. This is the paradox of memory: there is always more in our memory of events than in the events themselves, and our representations are always bigger on the inside than on the outside.

The narrator comes to understand this, that his quest for perfection in re-enactment is a striving for something else, and that the ultimate apotheosis of the mimetic art takes place nowhere else than in death.

‘The street around me deafening screamed’

2007-06-30T16:44:00.000+01:00

A une passante

La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.
Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,
Une femme passa, d’une main fastueuse
Soulevant, balançant le feston et l’ourlet;

Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.
Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant,
Dans son oeil, ciel livide où germe l’ouragan,
La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.

Un éclair... puis la nuit! — Fugitive beauté
Dont le regard m’a fait soudainement renaître,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l’éternité?

Ailleurs, bien loin d’ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être!
Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,
O toi que j’eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!

A Passing Glance

In the midst of a deafening roar, svelte
And tall, and dressed in black from head to toe,
She passed me, wreathed in majestic sorrow,
Jewelled hand lifting the hem of her skirt,

Ladylike, and graceful, and statuesque.
I shook like a fool, drinking from those eyes
Tempestuous as ashen, angry skies
A deadly joy, a sweetness full of risk.

Lightning – gone dark! Slipping away from me,
Beauty that offered life in one quick glance –
Life seen no more, before Eternity?

Elsewhere…too far! too late! Never, perchance…
For you ignored me – or pretended to –
Who could have won your love, as you well knew!

--Walter Martin (2007).

Three more versions

Baudelaire has over the years attracted many English translators, and I’m not about to attempt a comprehensive survey of them (especially since he’s the sort of poet that often attracts bad translators). But I’ve been casting my eye over a few different versions of the ‘A une passante’ sonnet from Les Fleurs du Mal, prompted by the recent publication in paperback of a new translation by Walter Martin (Fyfield, 2007).

Martin substitutes decasyllabic lines for Baudelaire's alexandrines, and preserves the rhyme scheme – an impressive feat, I must say, although he does have recourse to some pretty off-rhymes to do it: ‘svelte’ with ‘skirt’? Natural stress displaces the voulu rhyme of ‘head to toe’ with ‘sorrow’, and it is completely unlike the rime riche in ‘majestueuse’/’fastueuse’. I’m nitpicking. I like translations of poetry that actually observe formal constraints, and from what I have seen, these do the job very nicely.

Roy Campbell’s 1954 translation, which is handily reproduced at fleursdumal.org, had also stuck to decasyllables and observed a rhyme-scheme (though not Baudelaire’s), and so to me – but not only for that reason – it seems the best of the three versions given on that site.

The opening line poses quite a few problems: ‘La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait’, with its double hiatus and preponderance of that French ‘u’ sound, is extremely difficult to english. None of the translations here quite manages it.

‘The street about me roared with a deafening sound’ is too prosaic; ‘The deafening street roared on’ is truncated to accommodate the run-on into the next line and the rhyme, and it seems to come from nowhere (why ‘roared on’?). You can see what the translator was trying to do with ‘The deafening road around me roared’, but… well, it just doesn’t work, does it? Why didn’t he just go the whole hog and make it ‘the rumbling road around me roared’? It’s awful, yes, but at least it’s unashamed about its awfulness.

Martin’s translation is workmanlike, but it makes a sentence into a clause ‘In the midst of a deafening roar’, and that clause is made to modify the wrong subject (‘In the midst of a deafening roar…She‘; whereas: ‘autour de moi‘).

Here’s a truly awful version of the second line of the second quatrain: ‘as for me, I drank, twitching like an old roué’ (G. Wagner, 1974). Quite apart from the translationese of ‘as for me’ to render the disjunctive ‘moi’, the version diminishes the force of ‘crispé comme un extavagant’ to conjure the image of a dirty old man masturbating onto the polythene-covered seat of a porno cinema.

Martin fragments the syntax in the second part, and the multiplication of commas in the first five lines seems appropriate. By far the most infelicitous of the choices he has made comes in the final couplet – first with the penultimate line, inexplicably rendered as ‘For you ignored me – or pretended to’. ‘Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais’ cannot possibly mean this, and even allowing for some degree of compensation or semantic overspill from the following line, there is no justification at all for it. Having said that, this is a deceptively simple line, and it’s very difficult to put into a natural sounding English rhythm. What about rejigging it like this: ‘For what draws you on escapes me, my path eludes you’? Not entirely satisfactory.

Keith Waldrop’s translation (2006) is a pretty literal version, in a weird kind of poetic prose – but is quite successful for that, I think. Only one major problem with it: ‘a woman passed me, one hand ostentatiously lifting in balance her scalloped hem.’ – she’s lifting and swinging her hem (‘soulevant, balançant’), not balancing it. ‘Nevermore’ is appropriate enough, I suppose, given Baudelaire’s (inexplicable) admiration for Poe.

The deafening street roared about me. Tall, slender, in deep mourning, majestically sad, a woman passed me, one hand ostentatiously lifting in balance her scalloped hem.

lithe, noble, legs statuesque. Absurdly on edge, I drank in from her eye – that livid, hurricane-weather sky – a fascinating tenderness, a murderous pleasure.

A flash of lightning…then night! Fugitive beauty, in whose glance I was suddenly reborn, will I see you nevermore, save in eternity?

Elsewhere! far from here! too late! perhaps never! As where you went I don’t know; so you don’t know where I go. You whom I would have loved. You who knew it!

All of which proves that the only difference between poetry and prose is, as they say, that with poetry the author decides where the line-breaks go; with prose the typesetter does.

A translation of a different order, if such it can be called, might be furnished by Ezra Pound’s poem ‘The Garden’, which substitutes London for Paris and translates Baudelaire’s urban Romantic aesthetic into a very different idiom, as the flâneur’s sigh becomes a modernist sneer:

Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anaemia.

And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.

In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.

On not being born at all

2007-06-29T15:50:00.003+01:00

Here’s something to cheer you up for a Friday: a few instances I’ve come across of the ‘better off dead’ topos.

I read this the other day:

Better on your arse than on your feet,
Flat on your back than either, dead than the lot.

…which is Beckett’s version of this, by the eighteenth-century aphorist Chamfort:

Quand on soutient que les gens les moins sensibles sont, à tout prendre, les plus heureux, je me rappelle le proverbe indien «Il vaut mieux être assis que debout, être couché qu’assis; mais il vaut mieux être mort que tout cela.»

An Indian proverb, then, though I can’t help wondering if Beckett’s rendering was influenced too by a memory of these lines by Heine:

Gut ist der Schlaf, der Tod ist besser — freilich
Das beste wäre, nie geboren sein.

where Heine takes it one step further: sleep is good, death is better, but quite frankly the best thing of all is never to have been born.

Difficult for an ear attuned to the Christian tradition not to catch an echo of Jesus’s words at Mark 14:21 and Matthew 26:24 ‘it had been good for that man if he had not been born’ – but the subject there is of course Judas, and it is certainly not predicated of the human condition in general.

And the topos goes further back than that, in any case: to Sophocles, who has the Chorus express this gloomy sentiment in Oedipus at Colonus.

Here it is in Loebese:

Not to be born at all
Is best, far best that can befall,
Next best, when born, with least delay
To trace the backward way.

Have a good weekend everybody!

Late edit -- I can't believe I missed this at the time: this quote from everybody's favourite clinically depressed prophet, Ecclesiastes:

Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive. Yea, better is he than both they, which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun.

Quam longe absis intelligo

2007-05-26T16:50:00.000+01:00

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

2007-05-03T00:07:00.000+01:00

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.

Beeing and Nothingness

2007-04-17T20:02:00.000+01:00

On Sunday, the Independent posed a terrifying question: Are mobile phones wiping out our bees? [Article includes, in the penultimate sentence, the most perplexing use of the phrase ‘more prosaically’ I’ve seen in a while (is there anything poetic about reduced sperm counts?).] Look on this, and despair:

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.

How apt an allegory for the alienating effects of technologies designed to aid communication, for our increasing isolation from familial and social contacts, and for the desertification of modern life!

Well, not just an allegory, since every schoolchild knows (as the article linked to reminds us) that bees actually are necessary for the survival of the human race. Who could doubt it? When Aristaeus lost his bees, he was so traumatized by this catastrophe that he saw fit to curse his gods and to pray for death and destruction. And appropriately, the loss of the bees on that occasion was down to Orpheus, whose lyre was undoubtedly the earliest prototype of the Nokia Communicator (OK, a bit of a stretch, I admit).

So easily do we slip back into metaphor and allegory, when we attempt to talk about bees! Bees cannot help but be allegorical, even when they’re getting lost.

Book IV of the Georgics has a lot to answer for, of course, whether we’re considering the beehive as a model society, or imagining that bees are endowed with some kind of divine intelligence. They’re there to show us the moral value of hard work (*shudder*), the rule of law, and an orderly political system. Homer in the second Iliad had had the Greek armies swarming like bees; Virgil goes on to apply the simile, in the first Aeneid, to the Tyrians as they labour to build the city that will become Carthage; Milton will imitate it in comparing the assembly of demons at Pandemonium to bees (insects which, apparently, can, round Milton’s way, be observed to ‘expatiate, and confer / Their State affairs’).

That the bee simile keeps getting recycled like this is appropriate, since the activity of bees has long been used to figure the practice of literary imitatio. It all begins with Seneca’s famous letter on the art of reading (Ep. mor. 84), and takes off from there. By the Middle Ages and Renaissance, everyone’s buzzing with bee analogies. G. W. Pigman’s article on ‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance’ [JSTOR] lists a whole swarm of ‘em. The bee is either a paradigm for ‘transformative imitation’, since it gathers pollen from flowers and by some sort of ‘digestive’ process converts it into honey, a completely different product; or else it represents a kind of literary eclecticism, because it gathers its honey from diverse sources (the ‘florilegium’ thing). There is some confusion here, because the ancients weren’t sure exactly how bees made honey. Seneca pleads ignorance on the matter. He seems to favour the ‘digestive’ explanation (otherwise how could his analogy work?), but does mention that ‘some authorities believe that bees do not possess the art of making honey, but only of gathering it’. Pliny the Elder thought so, anyway. I think the persistence of both versions, although they seem to contradict each other, is important for the aesthetic of imitation generally, with its paradoxical insistence on difference in sameness and identity in otherness: ‘…ut etiam si apparuerit unde sumptum sit, aliud tamen esse quam unde sumptum est appareat’ [‘so that even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came’]. Now that we know more about apian physiology (or rather, now that knowledge of bee physiology is a matter for scientists rather than natural philosophers), the productive tension that is integral to the imitative aesthetic can no longer be supported.

Of course, the fact that modern communications technology is killing all the bees will serve as a compelling argument for the decline of art in an age of mechanical reproduction and the deadening effects of the culture industry. The ideal that the mobile phone represents, which is the ideal of noiseless, loss-free communication, has given rise to a complex of anxieties surrounding notions of originality, authorship, and intellectual property. This commodification of culture is incompatible with the poetics of imitation, the generative dynamic that produced the world’s great literature, which is now obsolete. And so the bees must die, and all beauty and truth must die with them.

The bee has proved an all-purpose insect, ever apt for analogy, always ready to service any allegorical needs you may have. Its very ubiquity can be annoying, though. Kind of makes you wish it would just buzz off. It so happens that I’m reading Our Mutual Friend at the moment, and, although I usually find Dickens’s facetiousness quite irritating (look who’s talking!), I must say that I found this passage very amusing (I’ll quote at length, because paraphrase won’t do it justice):

'And how do YOU like the law?'
'A—not particularly,' returned Eugene.
'Too dry for you, eh? Well, I suppose it wants some years of sticking to, before you master it. But there's nothing like work. Look at the bees.'
'I beg your pardon,' returned Eugene, with a reluctant smile, 'but will you excuse my mentioning that I always protest against being referred to the bees?'
'Do you!' said Mr Boffin.
'I object on principle,' said Eugene, 'as a biped—'
'As a what?' asked Mr Boffin.
'As a two-footed creature;—I object on principle, as a two-footed creature, to being constantly referred to insects and four-footed creatures. I object to being required to model my proceedings according to the proceedings of the bee, or the dog, or the spider, or the camel. I fully admit that the camel, for instance, is an excessively temperate person; but he has several stomachs to entertain himself with, and I have only one. Besides, I am not fitted up with a convenient cool cellar to keep my drink in.'
'But I said, you know,' urged Mr Boffin, rather at a loss for an answer, 'the bee.'
'Exactly. And may I represent to you that it's injudicious to say the bee? For the whole case is assumed. Conceding for a moment that there is any analogy between a bee, and a man in a shirt and pantaloons (which I deny), and that it is settled that the man is to learn from the bee (which I also deny), the question still remains, what is he to learn? To imitate? Or to avoid? When your friends the bees worry themselves to that highly fluttered extent about their sovereign, and become perfectly distracted touching the slightest monarchical movement, are we men to learn the greatness of Tuft-hunting, or the littleness of the Court Circular? I am not clear, Mr Boffin, but that the hive may be satirical.'
'At all events, they work,' said Mr Boffin.
'Ye-es,' returned Eugene, disparagingly, 'they work; but don't you think they overdo it? They work so much more than they need—they make so much more than they can eat—they are so incessantly boring and buzzing at their one idea till Death comes upon them—that don't you think they overdo it? And are human labourers to have no holidays, because of the bees? And am I never to have change of air, because the bees don't? Mr Boffin, I think honey excellent at breakfast; but, regarded in the light of my conventional schoolmaster and moralist, I protest against the tyrannical humbug of your friend the bee. With the highest respect for you.'

On not knowing the names of trees IV

2007-04-14T02:26:00.000+01:00

In the 1833 préface testamentaire to his monumental Mémoires d’Outre-tombe, Chateaubriand leaves the reader in no doubt that this is an encounter with a truly universal soul, that here is a mind of such multifarious magnificence, here a life experience of such profundity that it might be called unsoundable were it not for the author’s infinitely extensible eloquence.

I have, he assures the reader, personally met every man of note that my age has produced, from Napoleon to George Washington, ‘depuis Louis XVIII jusqu'à Alexandre, depuis Pie VII jusqu'à Grégoire XVI, depuis Fox, Burke, Pitt, Sheridan, Londonderry, Capo-d'Istrias, jusqu'à Malesherbes, Mirabeau, etc.; depuis Nelson, Bolivar, Méhémet, pacha d'Égypte jusqu'à Suffren, Bougainville, Lapeyrouse, Moreau…’ and so on. I have travelled the full extent of the Old World and the New. I have been a diplomat and a soldier, an explorer and a poet. I have dined at the tables of kings, and lived through poverty and incarceration. In short: ‘J'ai fait de l'histoire, et je pouvais l'écrire’: I have made history, and I was able to write it.

That richness of a life lived in times of unimaginable upheaval is beautifully distilled, in the opening paragraphs of the first book of the memoirs, in the author’s musings on his relationship with trees. There Chateaubriand modestly (modestly!) describes his small house close to the hamlet of Aulnay near Châtenay and Sceaux, where, like Horace to his Sabine farm, he might withdraw to spend his time in the inquiry of what life has made of him. The trees there, which he himself planted four years previously, are still small enough to be overshadowed by him; but he hopes that one day those same trees will offer shade to him in his old age, just as he tended them as saplings.

Je les ai choisis autant que je l'ai pu des divers climats où j'ai erré, ils rappellent mes voyages et nourrissent au fond de mon cœur d'autres illusions.

I have selected them as far as I was able from the different climes through which I have wandered; they remind me of my travels and nurture yet more illusions in my inmost heart.

Chateaubriand’s trees carry within them a memory of places they have never been, of times they have never known. Those trees, for all their solid now-ness, cast shadows in which are perceived the chimerical forms of memory and fame, the illusory persistence of past experience and future hopes.

Aristocratic soul that he is, Chateaubriand goes on to pledge that if ever the Bourbons are restored to the throne, the only reward he will expect for his unfailing loyalty to the ancien régime will be this: to be given sufficient cash to buy up all the woods that surround his estate, and so to extend the range of his daily stroll around the grounds by a few paltry acres. Chateaubriand was writing this in 1811, but it seems unlikely that this wish was granted him under the Restoration, which was not as kind to him as he had hoped. Either way, he certainly did not die a happy man, finally meeting his end in 1848 during the July revolution.

He writes lyrically of his love for his pines and firs, his larches and cedars (mélèze is such a beautiful name, as is the English ‘larch’, but to my mind’s eye the two cannot possibly designate the same thing). It is with the proceeds of his literary efforts that he has been able to buy this small estate; and Chateaubriand even has a lyrical way of talking about royalty cheques: ‘je l'ai payé du produit de mes rêves et de mes veilles.’

He continues in this vein:

Je suis attaché à mes arbres; je leur ai adressé des élégies, des sonnets, des odes. Il n'y a pas un seul d'entre eux que je n'aie soigné de mes propres mains, que je n'aie délivré du ver attaché à sa racine, de la chenille collée à sa feuille; je les connais tous par leurs noms, comme mes enfants: c'est ma famille, je n'en ai pas d'autre, j'espère mourir auprès d'elle.

I am attached to my trees; to them I have dedicated elegies, sonnets, odes. There is not a single one among them that I have not cared for with my own hands, that I have not rescued from the worm that clings to the root, from the caterpillar that sticks to the leaf; I know them all by name, as if they were my children: they are my family, I have no other. I hope to die close to them.

A passage I would have found quite touching, had it not subsided into sentimentality in the final part. I love the idea of dedicating elegies, sonnets, odes to a tree: but on the condition that the romantic tree-ly anthropomorphism be avoided at all costs. I can think of at least one poem addressed to a tree that does not rely on such an animistic view: it belongs to a much earlier tradition of French poetry – indeed it stands almost at the very source of the French poetic tradition into which Chateaubriand so forcefully inserts himself. I’m thinking of Ronsard’s ‘Bel aubepin verdissant’. It’s an ode, a sing-along – and the particular heterometric stanza Ronsard chooses here, one which the Pléiade poets found various uses for, doesn’t skimp on the rhymes. Just listen to it – in fact, you can listen to it if you wish, on the page I linked to (although the recording omits the first two stanzas for some reason). I have a soft spot for the word ‘lambrunche’ at the end of the first stanza (it designates a ‘wild grape-bearing vine’, says Cotgrave); but there are so many piquant details, like the garrison of ants that defends the hawthorn, or the bees that live in its half-eaten trunk, or the nightingale whose eggs are about to be stolen by the hand of the poet…

Supervacuous supellectiles

2007-03-17T17:06:00.000Z

I’m sure you all saw this last week: the books people buy but never read.

Fifty-five per cent of those polled for the survey, commissioned by Teletext, said they buy books for decoration, and have no intention of actually reading them. Rachel Cugnoni, from the publisher Vintage, said the apparent unpopularity of tough literary texts like Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment - all voted in the top 10 - suggests readers are purchasing ‘intellectual credibility for the bookshelf’ rather than books they actually want to read.

Which reminded me of Seneca’s po-faced but rather amusing rant against people who buy books just for show. ‘Since you cannot read all the books which you may possess,’ he intones self-righteously, ‘it is enough to possess only as many books as you can read’ (Ep. Mor. 2).

He goes further than this though: Seneca has a problem not only with people who buy lots of books and don’t read them, but also with people who buy lots of books and do read them:

“But it is a pleasure to be acquainted with many arts.” Therefore let us keep only as much of them as is essential. Do you regard that man as blameworthy who puts superfluous things on the same footing with useful things, and in his house makes a lavish display of costly objects, but do not deem him blameworthy who has allowed himself to become engrossed with the useless furniture of learning? This desire to know more than is sufficient is a sort of intemperance. Why? Because this unseemly pursuit of the liberal arts makes men troublesome, wordy, tactless, self- satisfied bores, who fail to learn the essentials just because they have learned the non-essentials. Didymus the scholar wrote four thousand books. I should feel pity for him if he had only read the same number of superfluous volumes.

(Ep. Mor. 88)

On not knowing the names of trees III

2007-03-07T19:07:00.000Z

The third instalment in my occasional series of posts on…well, not knowing the names of trees.

Tit for Tat

I often pass a gracious tree
Whose name I can't identify,
But still I bow, in courtesy
It waves a bough, in kind reply.

I do not know your name, O tree
(Are you a hemlock or a pine?)
But why should that embarrass me?
Quite probably you don't know mine.

--Christopher Morley

But trees know more than Morley gives them credit for, and there is a rich history in myth of trees endowed, in one way or another, with the capacity of knowing and the ability to respond. The tree Erisychthon was about to cut down presumably did know his name when it spoke to him, and the dryads who witnessed his crime, and reported him to the relevant authorities, certainly did. The almond tree into which Phyllis was transformed, Boccaccio tells us, recognized her former lover Demophoon when he returned, and sprouted leaves—leaves that also bear the traces of knowing a name, for the Greek word φυλλον, says Servius, remembers Phyllis.

Baucis and Philemon, as they were being transformed into trees, still retained enough of a voice to call out to each other: ‘vale, o coniunx’. Ovid’s account of the metamorphosis of Baucis and Philemon into trees may be related to the widespread cult of vegetation worship in Asia Minor. I mention this because I find the concept of ‘vegetation worship’ to be inexplicably hilarious. In fact tree-worship was common in many ancient cultures—naturally enough, I suppose, although I do find this remark of Frazer’s somewhat alarming: ‘Sacred groves were common among the ancient Germans, and tree-worship is hardly extinct amongst their descendants at the present day.’ I pencilled a discreet (!) in the margin of my edition when I read that.

Trees can be made to give a response when there is none forthcoming, as Frazer relates:

The durian-tree of the East Indies, whose smooth stem often shoots up to a height of eighty or ninety feet without sending out a branch, bears a fruit of the most delicious flavour and the most disgusting stench. The Malays cultivate the tree for the sake of its fruit, and have been known to resort to a peculiar ceremony for the purpose of stimulating its fertility. Near Jugra in Selangor there is a small grove of durian-trees, and on a specially chosen day the villagers used to assemble in it. Thereupon one of the local sorcerers would take a hatchet and deliver several shrewd blows on the trunk of the most barren of the trees, saying, “Will you now bear fruit or not? If you do not, I shall fell you.” To this the tree replied through the mouth of another man who had climbed a mangostin-tree hard by (the durian-tree being unclimbable), “Yes, I will now bear fruit; I beg of you not to fell me.”

The vestige of a belief in tree-spirits is what animates the tree in first stanza of that silly poem (a bough answering a bow), and it is also what underwrites the long tradition of the arboreal pathetic fallacy: trees waving their arms, shedding leaves, or falling down in response to some human emotion; or else just swaying to the music—trees are big music fans, apparently.

In a passage that parodies those epic sequences following the routes of gods as they gather to attend a council, Ovid describes the gathering of the trees to hear Orpheus sing. In Macbeth, when the adunaton figure of Birnam wood coming to Dunsinane is weirdly realized, the sight of trees moving en masse is a terrifying presage of doom. In Ovid, it is delightfully silly: Orpheus sings in a pleasant rustic setting, but there is no shade for his audience; his audience arrives, and as luck would have it, they’ve brought the shade (they are the shade):

Collis erat collemque super planissima campi
area, quam viridem faciebant graminis herbae:
umbra loco deerat; qua postquam parte resedit
dis genitus vates et fila sonantia movit,
umbra loco venit: non Chaonis afuit arbor,
non nemus Heliadum, non frondibus aesculus altis,
nec tiliae molles, nec fagus et innuba laurus,
et coryli fragiles et fraxinus utilis hastis
enodisque abies curvataque glandibus ilex
et platanus genialis acerque coloribus inpar
amnicolaeque simul salices et aquatica lotos
perpetuoque virens buxum tenuesque myricae
et bicolor myrtus et bacis caerula tinus.
vos quoque, flexipedes hederae, venistis et una
pampineae vites et amictae vitibus ulmi
ornique et piceae pomoque onerata rubenti
arbutus et lentae, victoris praemia, palmae
et succincta comas hirsutaque vertice pinus,
grata deum matri, siquidem Cybeleius Attis
exuit hac hominem truncoque induruit illo.

Golding’s version:

There was a hyll, and on the hyll a verie levell plot,
Fayre greene with grasse. But as for shade or covert was there not.
As soone as that this Poet borne of Goddes, in that same place
Sate downe and toucht his tuned strings, a shadow came apace.
There wanted neyther Chaons tree, nor yit the trees to which
Fresh Phaetons susters turned were, not Beeche, nor Holme, nor Wich,
Not gentle Asp, nor wyvelesse Bay, nor lofty Chestnutttree.
Nor Hazle spalt, nor Ash wherof the Shafts of speares made bee. ...
Nor knotlesse Firre, nor cheerfull Plane, nor Maple flecked grayne.
Nor Lote, nor Sallow which delights by waters to remayne.
Nor slender twigged Tamarisk, nor Box ay greene of hew.
Nor Figtrees loden with theyr frute of colours browne and blew.
Nor double colourd Myrtletrees. Moreover thither came
The wrything Ivye, and the Vyne that runnes uppon a frame,
Elmes clad with Vynes, and Ashes wyld and Pitchtrees blacke as cole,
And full of trees with goodly frute red stryped, Ortyards whole.
And Palmetrees lythe which in reward of conquest men doo beare,
And Pynapple with tufted top and harsh and prickling heare, ...
The tree to Cybele, mother of the Goddes, most deere. For why?
Her minion Atys putting off the shape of man, did dye,
And hardened into this same tree.

Golding elaborates and embroiders Ovid’s catalogue: he chooses to up the mythological ante in rendering the antonomasia for the poplars as ‘the trees to which Fresh Phaetons susters turned were’, rather than simply ‘the grove of the daughters of the Sun’; the order of trees has been shuffled: the beech jumps the queue to appear before the holm-oak—which itself replaces Ovid’s Italian oak, ‘aesculus’—and certain peculiar English-sounding trees surreptitiously tag along. A ‘wich’ is, according to the OED, a mountain ash—not in Ovid’s catalogue at this point, but it may correspond to the ‘ornus’ bringing up the rear—and the ‘asp’ (some sort of poplar) replaces the ‘tilia’ or linden tree. Oddly, Golding eye has skipped over the oak bending under the weight of its acorns (curvataque glandibus ilex)—perhaps precisely because it is so familiar? The laurel is, bizarrely, ‘wyvelesse’—bizarrely because the laurel is quite obviously gendered feminine (not just grammatically—as are all trees in Latin—but in person too), described here by Ovid as ‘innuba’, virginal, in reference to the story told in book one of Daphne’s resistance to Apollo’s advances. The OED catches this sense of ‘wifeless’: ‘Catachrestically used of a woman: That is not a wife; unmarried’, but they are missing the Golding quotation, locating as they do the earliest usage in the nineteenth century. Golding’s ‘lofty Chestnutttree’ has no counterpart in Ovid’s version—surely it’s not only there for the metre/rhyme? Golding’s often needs to cut a bit of fresh lumber to ballast his lumbering fourteeners.

Again I have very little idea what these trees actually look like, but perhaps it’s enough for the moment to appreciate the chewiness of ‘fraxinus utilis hastis’, the treacly gloopiness of ‘amnicolae salices’ alongside ‘aquatica lotos’ and the intertwining of ‘Ashes wyld, the wrything Ivye, and the Vyne’…

Edit: One-hundredth post!

(!)

2007-03-02T17:26:00.000Z

An Ode to Modesty

Talking of successful rackets
modesty deserves a mention.
Exclamation marks in brackets
never fail to draw attention.

--Piet Hein

Theory of Budapest

2007-02-21T19:14:00.001Z

Montano, the second novel by the Spanish author Enrique Vila-Matas, was recently published in English translation. Longtime readers will remember that I read and enjoyed his first, Bartleby & Co., a couple of years ago—August 2004 in fact! my God, was it really that long?

Ahem.

Montano charts a movement towards what Blanchot called the ‘impersonal’. It posits that to write is in some way ‘to recall with a memory that is not our own’; this is allegorized in Montano’s version of literary history as a transmigration of memories. To write is to take over another’s words; to intuit the words of the future poet; to create one’s precursors. A writer must strive to disappear in his work, ‘to act namelessly and not just be an idle name’—perhaps by constructing it from fragments, from other voices.

Montano’s malady (the Spanish title of the book is, in fact, El mal de Montano) is ‘literature-sickness’, whose diagnosis is continually elaborated and redefined as the narrative progresses. Writing is curative, therapeutic, and poisonous, pathological: it is Plato’s pharmakon. Montano’s malady manifests itself as a kind of writer’s block, a paralysis, anxiety of influence; but it is also a logorrheic excess of words, or a fault of vision by which one sees everything through the lens of the literary. It is, above all, a hypochondriacal obsession with the symptoms themselves.

A person with such an obsession might well be the sort you would cross the street to avoid, in the same way you might cross the library to avoid tediously self-referential novels that are obsessed with their own literariness. Fortunately, the narrator in Montano recognizes and acknowledges the problem: that kind of playful, hyper-ironic autoficition can end up delighting too much in its own disingenuousness, to the exasperation of the reader. The narrator sets his sights instead on Truthfulness: not sincerity, necessarily, or simplicity, or heartfelt authenticity (Romantic fictions all); but truth arrived at through a fragmentary, appropriative method, which aims at meaning by means of quotation. Because the truth is also invented—and I use that word advisedly.

Borges, who ‘acted as if people were only interested in literature’, that connoisseur of ‘second-hand writing’, was an expert at this, the elaboration of an ‘ethics of subordination’. Montaigne was, too, of course, but he doesn’t get a mention in this connection (the one word you omit from the riddle is the solution). Kafka, Gombrowicz, Pessoa, Benjamin, Gide. The form of the novel again and again reconfigures itself to accommodate fragments from these writers; and shifts in perspective are attendant upon shifts into different modes of writing: the diary, the confession, the lecture, the catalogue, the list. The facts of the narrative, the raw material of the fiction, are apt to be ‘revalued’ in the course of these reconfigurations; but what else is writing but an endless reconfiguration of the material of existence? The narrator’s friend and enemy, his grotesque double Tongoy (M. Teste to his Valéry) takes on many different forms—as befits a vampire—and eventually comes to stand for something like ‘the writing self’, that impersonal voice that compels the writer to speak.

One of the most interesting aspects of the journal form is this peculiar dialectical feature: that as the writer writes himself, the present of his writing is in continual dialogue with the past of the narration, and meaning emerges from the play of the writing I and the written I. The confessional mode thus is particularly well suited to bringing out the performances of the divided self. That is why Montaigne’s form is his writing. That is why literary diaries are peopled by doppelgangers, imposters, doublings. That is why, in Montano, the interruption of the narrative is simultaneously the continuation of the narrative, and there is a constant double movement of writing and stopping writing (writing about stopping writing).

Nabokov, writes Montano’s narrator, in a section of the novel in which the narrative shifts entirely into the second person (shades of Butor’s La Modification here), once wrote that ‘the soul is but a manner of being—not a constant state—that any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations’; and that ‘the hereafter may be the full ability of consciously living in any number of souls, all of them unconscious of their interchangeable burden.’

The ability to quote Nabokov appositely might serve as a badge of cultural superiority, and Montano imagines a ‘password’ that might be exchanged by those defenders of the text who share a certain regard for literature. Such a password, gesture, or signal alludes to the existence of a shared literary experience. But reading literature, even though it may teach us the better to become ‘involved in humanity’, is essentially isolating. My reading in sum can never amount to your reading, can never shift into congruency with yours. The literary experience is essentially solitary. A shared experience would be a threat to the solitude that Rilke writes of, that must be held carefully away from the solitude of the other. The password is therefore Kafka’s message to Max Brod: ‘You mustn’t say you understand me’.

One caveat: either the translation (by Jonathan Dunne) is no good, or the thing itself is quite badly written. Not having looked myself at the Spanish source text I am no position to judge which—but I suspect the stylistic awkwardness is a feature of the original. We are presented here with a writing style that is often clumsily unidiomatic, generally heavy-handed in its manipulation of imagery and rhetorical effects, and at times ridiculously pompous. (If I tell you that a description in Kafka’s diaries of people gathering to rubberneck a traffic accident ‘foreshadow[s] Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle’, you will get a sense of how crowbarred-in the ideas often are. And you are still yet to suffer the narrator’s extremely irritating and pointless remarks on September 11.) This may well be an intended effect, and the bad writing may be attributable more to the first-person narrator that to the actual author—but that doesn’t make it any easier to get through the damn thing. Admittely, it doesn’t help that at the same time I was reading this, I started on W. G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn (which is, incidentally, referenced in Montano), a book that is so well written and so elegantly translated that Vila-Matas/Dunne cannot possibly come out well by comparison.

Cranes

2007-02-17T11:21:00.000Z

My intellectual life is shaped by the blogs I read. When I saw Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow in Vienna last weekend, I couldn’t help but think of recent discussion and analysis (or anti-analysis) of the painting on Blog Meridian, and over at Conrad’s place. In particular I remembered something Conrad had written in the comments section of John B’s blog about the silhouetted bird in flight being what makes the painting.Walter de la Mare, in a poem which Conrad glances at here, thinks that the bird is a crow (though I suspect that identification was forced upon him by the easy rhyme with ‘snow’). But I believe it to be a crane—not for any kind of ornithological reason, you understand (indeed, I ornithiconiclastically fly in the face of all ornithological reason), but merely because I wish to constrain the artwork to my own limited and limiting reading. Consider: ‘Palamedes invented the letters of the alphabet by watching noisy cranes in flight’ (this I read in a review of Richard Powers’s latest, The Echo Maker, in the current LRB). Now, most likely Palamedes distinguished his letter shapes in the formations that flocks of cranes adopt (and perhaps the sounds to go with them from the calls of the cranes?), but I like to think that Bruegel’s crane, that dark letter X slashed across the landscape, just on the horizon, stitching together and tearing apart mountain and sky, stands at the origin of human subjectivity (a Christological reading is also possible here, I suppose); and, sayeth Wikipedia, the crane ‘is the Egyptian hieroglyphic symbol for the letter “B”’—Bruegel’s way of signing himself, surely!

I never knew the old Vienna…

2007-02-15T14:42:00.000Z

Some nugatory musings on Vienna, a city I visited for the first time last weekend.

Vienna is to my mind an oppressively orderly and artful city. I dislike French gardens, baroque architecture and fountains in the middle of empty squares. But even though I tell myself my tastes are not well served by this city, I cannot remain unmoved by its beauty.

◊

Vermeer’s Artist’s Studio (or ‘Allegory of Painting’, if you prefer) hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum. A visual essay on truth and representation, it has a simpler formal composition than Velázquez's Las Meninas, but is richer in its symbolism and more pleasing in its light and textures. The curtain drawn back to reveal the scene invites us to watch a performance. The mask lying on the table gestures towards the death-bound nature of this performance. Eyes and faces are averted or downcast. Clio, the Muse of history, is blind to the attentions of the artist, even as she poses in entirely soignée fashion. The painter begins with her laurel wreath – she is nothing but a laurel, a synecdoche at one remove, a symbol standing for a symbol. The map hanging on the wall: we do not make out the territory represented, we merely register the creases and textures of the hanging, just as the eye is drawn back and involved in the folds of the subjects’ clothing. Surfaces matter. But empty space matters too, and light gives depth to the scene.

◊

Strolling through the Augarten in the city’s second district, a sprawling park peopled by vast hordes of joggers and dogs, one’s path is darkened by the shadows cast by two massive flak towers. Constructed during the war and apparently now unable to be demolished, the towers are stupifyingly ugly and stand as a grand monument to the inhumanity of man.

◊

Here’s a tip: when you pay 9 euros for tickets to the Staatsoper to see Bryn Terfel sing Verdi’s Falstaff, don’t expect to be able to see anything from your seat, which will exist in some sort of non-Euclidean topology where the above and in-front of the stage is also, somehow, simultaneously behind and underneath it.

◊

This looks a bit like the closing scene to The Third Man, one of my favourite films. I don’t think it is, though.

On Unseemliness

2007-02-04T11:34:00.000Z

Some notes and addenda to a couple of previous posts, on literary suisimilarity and on literary lying.

One aspect of sui-similitude in literary discourse that I failed to mention is the notion that there is something called ‘individual style’, that is consubstantial with its author. I am reminded of a quotation, from Henri Michaux, which I found in Montano by Enrique Vila-Matas (the subject of my next entry, no doubt): ‘Va suffisament loin en toi pour que ton style ne puisse pas suivre’ [Go so far into yourself that your style will not be able to follow]. Not particularly good advice, admittedly, but a nice turn of phrase.

The tragedian Agathon (he of Symposium fame), when asked by friends to tone down the rhetorical excesses of his work by editing out some of the more eyebrow-raising verses, answered them: ‘Would you purge Agathon of Agathon?’ This led me back (again) to Ovid, surely a poet ‘too much like himself’. Seneca Rhetor tells the story (Cont. 2.2.1.12) of Ovid being asked by some friends to expunge from his work three lines that they considered de trop; Ovid agreed to do so, but only on condition that he could choose three lines to retain at all costs. Of course, the lines chosen by his friends, it turned out, were exactly those three that Ovid wanted to keep. One of them, Seneca tells us, was this famous verse from the Ars:

semibovemque virum semivirumque bovem

The half-bull man, the half-man bull

—a line trying pretty damn hard to be unlike itself, and one which, I think, could most appropriately be described as ‘unseemly’. But if a poet is too much like himself in a work, that might even be grounds to dismiss the work as interpolation, imposture or forgery; and textual critics over the years have often attempted to expunge from Ovid those elements that are most like Ovid, for that very reason.

In other matters, last week I had my attention drawn to More’s Utopia, and specifically to the dedicatory epistles that preface that work. More, you will remember, gets his mate Peter Giles in on the act, and the two exchange letters corroborating the truth of Raphael Hythloday’s account of the fictional island, confabulating, bandying about ‘reality effects’, pretending not to remember specific details of the account, making up true-seeming reasons for gaps in their knowledge, and generally taking the piss out of the reader who doesn’t ‘get it’.

At one point, More claims that in comparing versions he found that his servant John Clement disagreed with him on one particularly trivial point, whether the length of some bridge or other was five hundred yards or three hundred. More himself cannot remember, but decides to retain the detail, on the basis that ‘potius mendacium dicam quam mentiar, quod malim bonus esse quam prudens’ [I should rather tell a lie than lie, because I’d rather be good than clever]. What, then, is the distinction between ‘mendacium dicere’ [to tell a lie] and ‘mentiri’ [to lie]? Well, according to the marginal note (which may have been inserted by Erasmus) there is a ‘theological distinction’ between the two. Amusingly, the footnote to this note in the CUP edition informs us that ‘this distinction has not been located in the theological literature’ (love the use of the passive voice there); but it does direct the reader to Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, XI.XI. Looking at the Gellius passage, it seems obvious that it is this and not some spurious theological text that More has in mind. Aulus Gellius, citing one Publius Nigidius, offers the following information:

Qui mentitur, fallit, quantum in se est; at qui mendacium dicit, ipse
non fallit, quantum in se est.

He who lies, deceives, to the extent that he can ['quantum in se est': lit. 'as much as he is in himself']; and he who tells an untruth, does not himself deceive, to the extent that he can help it ['quantum in se est'].

So, the distinction is simple enough; indeed it is the same one Plato makes in the Hippias minor, between lying deliberately (mentiri) and lying unwittingly (mendacium dicere). Of course, this doesn’t really cut much mustard in the context of the work as a whole, since More has made up the whole thing, and on purpose too. In fact, it is the intent behind the lie, and not the absence of intention, that makes it justifiable: More stresses the point that you’d have to be pretty stupid (read: unversed in Greek) not to pick up on all the clues he planted to let you know that the whole thing’s a fiction. When it comes to literature, More might have been saying, the distinction drawn by Nigidius breaks down: the writer of a literary text is not ‘in himself’: he is writing from a point outside of himself, where like and unlike converge.

From verisimilitude to suisimilitude

2007-01-26T14:53:00.000Z

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

2007-01-23T11:09:00.000Z

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

2007-01-16T14:06:00.000Z

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

2007-01-10T15:12:00.000Z

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.

Raminagrobis’s Straight Tip to All Cross Coves

2006-12-08T12:37:00.000Z

So I was wondering about words for tipping in different languages (that is, for the act of giving a present of money in recognition of a service or to obtain an extra service). Many languages seem to go with the idea of a tip being drinking money (pourboire, propina, Trinkgeld, etc.), and the drink is by implication alcoholic, except in the case of the Hindi language, where the money is specifically for tea. For some reason that display of temperance does not surprise me, but the Russians, of all people, also call it ‘tea-money’! The Italian is slightly different: ‘mancia’, as fearful_syzygy informed me some time ago, derives from a medieval Latin word for ‘glove’, ‘manicia’ (and so isn’t, as I would have guessed, anything to do with the Spanish ‘mancha’, as if being given a tip leaves a stain on one’s character that can only be cleansed by reciprocating the gift with improved services). So it seems – and here I quote the learned f_s: ‘leaving a tip in Italy is tantamount to throwing down the gauntlet.’

There might even be an element of truth in that witticism, because tips, being a sort of social obligation – or in origin, probably something like the ‘gifts’ exchanged in patron-client relationships – are not really ‘gratuities’ at all. That English word is not only the least evocative, it’s also plain misleading.

In early modern France, tipping was much more closely associated with the drinking of wine, and tips might be paid in actual wine rather than money. In her book on The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France, Natalie Zemon Davis informs us that there were different words for a tip given to a man (‘le vin des garçons’, ‘le vin des serviteurs’) and one given to a woman (‘les épeigles’ [épingles] – pin-money, a term we still use today). Cotgrave has also ‘vin de clers’, and ‘vin des valets’: ‘spending pence, extraordinarie vayles or gifts; odde money bestowed on a mans ordinarie servants, over and above the summe due, or agreed on.’

On a side-note, under ‘vin de porceau’, Cotgrave has ‘[wine] which makes the drunkard to sleepe, vomit, and tumble him in his vomit.’ It’s good that they had a specific term for that. In fact, there are a whole range of different inflections and nuances of meaning in the ‘vin’ entry: ‘vin de regnard’ is ‘The wine that sharpens, or sets an edge on, the drunkards spirit, making him more subtill, or cunning, then he is, at any time, sober’. ‘Vin de singe’ is ‘Wine which makes the drinker (or drunkard) pleasant, wanton, or toyish’. As a typology of drunkenness, this is all very useful. I love the way the attributes of the boozer are metonymically transferred onto the booze itself. ‘Last night I passed out, threw up, and tumbled me in my own sick. Must have accidentally had a glass of that damned pig-wine in with the seven bottles of fox-wine I polished off.’

For philological purposes it is also worth noting Cotgrave’s explanation of the expression ‘Elles ont eu leur vin’: ‘Those wenches have had it to a haire; viz. a full tast of the sap which they most hold savorie; (for the bestowing of wine being a principall coutesie in intertainments betweene man and man, is fittest to expresse the other liquor which in courtesie a man giveth a woman.)’ Does that mean what I think it means? Er…OK. And there was me thinking the wenches only liked hairpins.

The English word ‘tip’ (the verb meaning ‘to give’) comes from Rogues' Cant, and is ‘of obscure origin’, earliest attestation by the OED is 1610, in a slangy work on thievery by Samuel Rowlands. In that work the verb is used transitively, taking the money given as direct object, but the intransitive usage (to give a gratuity [to somebody]) and the noun (a gratuity) are not recorded until the eighteenth century. On the subject of cant, cf. ‘Villon’s Straight Tip to all Cross Coves’, which I first came across a few years ago when I read Douglas Hofstadter’s brilliantly entertaining, if flawed, book on translation Le Ton beau de Marot. The OED suggests that a ‘tip’ in the sense of a piece of advice or insider information is much later than the ‘gratuity’ sense (it is no earlier than the nineteenth century).

While googling for the Straight Tip I came across this posting from 2002 of ‘a mixylinguistic staggerpoem’, by a certain John Cowan, who I suspect might be none other than the same jessamy cove who occasionally posts comments here.

Anyway, that’s all I have to say on the matter. Bene Darkmans, ye haberdashers of pronouns, bene feakers of gybes, ye quidnuncs with your quirks and quillets, ye goosebury-eyed gluepots that grabble the bit, conycatchers all.

On the Divinity of the Lie

2006-12-05T15:09:00.000Z

Over at Varieties of Unreligious Experience, Conrad H. Roth has written a short series of posts—well worth reading, if for some reason you haven't already—on the subject of 'The Unknown Object', in the third of which, among other things, he discusses Plato's Theaetetus, mentions Odysseus panourgos, and laments that ‘the world has grown increasingly unknown, hazier and hazier behind a gauze of language.’ This post is not exactly a response to that, more of a congeries of disorderly thoughts on the subject of lying that I had floating around various notepad files on my computer, which I decided to cut&paste together, paper over the gaps, think up a suitably Nietzschean-sounding title for, and then write this introductory paragraph in the hope that it would conjure the illusion of dialogue and engagement, and thus confer some sense of intellectual legitimacy upon the whole sorry business.

The other week I was reading George Steiner’s wonderful paean to lying in the third chapter of After Babel (‘Word Against Object’), and it struck me that many of the ideas I have touched upon in previous posts here had already been articulated with much greater clarity and scrutinized with a much more penetrating gaze in that book. Steiner adjusts Aristotle’s definition of man to the ‘mammal who can bear false witness’; ‘Falsity’ he insists, ‘is not…a mere miscorrespondence with a fact. It is itself an active, creative agent.’ (Incidentally, Harold Bloom’s ‘misprision’ as the act of literary creation, is something like a lie.) ‘It may be that ‘truth’ is the more limited, the more special of the two conditions [that is, of truth and falsity].’ ‘Hypotheticals, ‘imaginaries’, conditionals, the syntax of counter-factuality and contingency may well be the generative centres of human speech.’ ‘Language is the main instrument of man’s refusal to accept the world as it is.’ ‘Natural selection, as it were, favoured the subjunctive.’

The conceptual terrain mapped by lies and truth has shifted its boundaries at different cultural moments, and what ψεῦδος meant to an archaic Greek mind won’t be the same as what a ‘mendacium’ conjured to a medieval scholastic theologian, which in turn won’t correspond exactly to what a ‘mensonge’ was to the seventeenth-century précieux; and none of those folks would be likely to understand exactly what we mean when we speak about ‘lies’—and nor do we among ourselves, exactly, since the truth/lies axis, set awobble by the ‘language turn’, continues to oscillate alarmingly.

But as usual I won’t let any of that stop me riding roughshod over such irrelevant niceties as historical accuracy, philosophical rigour and respect for cultural context.

The Muses at the start Hesiod’s Theogony don’t only lie, they tell the truth too: ‘we know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we will, to utter true things’. But the Platonic concept that poets only lie and their speech is never true, just true-seeming, suited Christian-era thinkers just fine. ‘non verum, sed verisimile’: if not exactly true, then at least very similar (sorry). This notion of truthiness developed more subtle tones as literary theory began to elaborate its own justifications. To Abelard’s ‘non verum, sed verisimile’ (says François Rigolot) the Renaissance humanists added their own ‘non credendum, sed mirandum’; Rigolot quotes Jean Bouchet: ‘les poëtes chantent choses de admiration, mais non pas à croire’. There are distinctions to be drawn between different kind of lies, and different kinds of truth. The poets sing lies, because they sing of things that never really happened; but they sing truth, because they inspire wonder. This is poetic truth as gnosis, something akin to the revealed truth of mystics.

But Plato did not grant that poets’ lies could attain unto that truth: only a philosopher’s lies could do that. Plato is generally thought not to have been too keen on lying, but Louise H. Pratt, in her excellent book on Lying and Poetry from Homer to Pindar (from which I pinched the Hesiod reference), reminds us of the often-overlooked fact that Plato ‘attacks the poets not for lying, for poetic fictionality, but for not knowing how to lie, for not lying well’.

There is, of course, a difference between lying and not telling the truth: if the other person knows you are not telling the truth, and you know they know, or if you are doing it unintentionally, then you are not really lying, and so not blameworthy…are you? Well, in one early dialogue, the Hippias minor, Plato seems to—seems to—have Socrates argue that lying with the full intention of deceiving the other person is morally better than lying involuntarily. The Hippias minor begins with the question of whether the Iliad is better than the Odyssey. In much the same way that people will argue over whether The Terminator is better than Terminator 2, the question hinges on the nature of the main character, and how believable we find him. (In the Renaissance, incidentally, this was a no-brainer for humanists: the Iliad was definitely better. Their opinions on the films of Arnold Schwarzenegger, alas, have not survived.) Aristotle didn’t think much of Plato's conclusion that not only is lying a lot of fun, it’s morally good too:

A false account is the account of non-existent objects, in so far as it is false. Hence every account is false when applied to something other than that of which it is true [No shit! Aristotle, eh? Sorry to interrupt, please, continue.] A false man is one who is ready at and fond of such accounts, not for any other reason but for their own sake, and one who is good at impressing such accounts on other people, just as we say things are which produce a false appearance. This is why the proof in the Hippias that the same man is false and true is misleading. For it assumes that he is false who can deceive (i.e. the man who knows and is wise); and further that he who is willingly bad is better. This is a false result of induction-for a man who limps willingly is better than one who does so unwillingly-by 'limping' Plato means 'mimicking a limp', for if the man were lame willingly, he would presumably be worse in this case as in the corresponding case of moral character.

(Aristotle, Metaphysics IV, trans. Ross)

A false man tells lies ‘not for any other reason but for their own sake’ – what better description for the writer of imaginative literature? (for this unremittingly formalist-aesthetic conception of what literature is and is for, I make no apology). But then Aristotle, if I have correctly understood the ‘limping’ analogy, is also drawing a distinction between intentionally lying, and intentionally pretending to lie: a baffling distinction, if not an entirely meaningless one. I can think of no better example of a person pretending to lie (and not for any reason but for its own sake) than the writer of literature. Aristotle surely did not mean this, but it is a conclusion I like: and it fits in with those familiar justificatory topoi that fill so many prefaces to literary works: what I have written is all lies, but it is true nonetheless, because I am not lying, I am only pretending to lie in order to tell the truth—which is also the justificatory basis for irony, a trope Socrates himself was quite keen on. Maybe that’s why, at the end of the dialogue, when Hippias flat out refuses to be led by the nose in the usual Socratic way, saying: ‘I simply cannot agree with you in this’. Socrates replies: ‘Nor even I with myself, Hippias.’

Oscar Wilde in his own Platonic dialogue pastiche, ‘The Decay of Lying’, seems to agree—unwittingly?—on many points with the Socrates of the Hippias minor, although he feels a lot less uneasy about his conclusions than Socrates had felt about his: ‘The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is lying for its own sake, and the highest development of this is, as we have already pointed out, Lying in Art. […] Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art’.

‘The Hippias minor’, writes R. E. Allen, in his introduction in vol. 3 of The Dialogues of Plato, ‘because it is an informal reductio ad absurdum, requires a taste for validity as distinct from truth.’ I am no logician, but I like to think I have a taste for ‘validity as distinct from truth’, if not quite on the level of Oscar Wilde. Art is lying, true, but it is lying with consent.

A different claim—or is it a different version of the same claim?—would be that all of language is indeed a lie, and one that nobody consented to. All writing, and all language, is mendacious, because it falsifies particularity for the sake of generality. But, as Terry Eagleton pointed out in an amusing review in the LRB last week, ‘the generic nature of language is no more a deficiency than buttonholes are a flaw in a jacket.’ We do consent to this falsification, because it is useful.

But, again: if we admit (with Rousseau!) that all language is at origin metaphorical, if the tropical sense precedes the proper, and the figurative the literal, then we might be forced to concede that all human language is indeed based on a lie (the gauze of language conceals nothing) and we might find ourselves agreeing with Nietzsche when he writes:

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

Or, better:

We have need of lies in order to conquer this reality, this ‘truth’, that is, in order to live—That lies are necessary in order to live is itself part of the terrifying and questionable character of existence…To solve it, man must be a liar by nature, he must be above all an artist…In those moments in which man was deceived, in which he duped himself, in which he believes in life: oh how enraptured he feels! What delight! What a feeling of power! How much artists triumph in the feeling of power!—Man has once again become master of material—master of truth!—And whenever man rejoices, he is always the same in his rejoicing: he rejoices as an artist, he enjoys himself as power, he enjoys the lie as his form of power…But truth does not count as the supreme value, even less as the supreme power. The will to appearance, to illusion, to deception, to becoming and change (to objectified deception) here counts as more profound, primeval, ‘metaphysical’ than the will to truth, to reality…that if there is anything that is to be worshipped it is appearance that must be worshipped, that the lie—and not the truth—is divine!’

laus in amore mori

2006-11-17T17:47:00.000Z

Last Saturday the Guardian published in their review section an extract from On Love and Death by Patrick Süskind. Those of you hoping, like me, for a treatise on the brilliant Woody Allen movie of that name will be disappointed. Instead what we have is a rather lacunose and peremptory treatment of a theme or combination of themes which, after all, is written into all of literature, ever written, anywhere.

Here’s a particularly egregious specimen:

This unfortunate liaison - as we learn from Philippe Ariès's The Hour of Our Death - began as early as the beginning of the 16th century. At this date the visual arts first turn the medieval, dark but chaste danse macabre into a lascivious danse érotique. Later the phenomenon takes on necrophiliac features, followed by sadistic aspects even before de Sade, and makes its way into literature.

I’m becoming increasingly aware that just about any claim about beginnings in the history of literature can easily be countered with a ‘but what about…?’ My ‘but what about…?’ here will be Propertius. I would say the point when ‘Eros throws himself violently into the arms of Thanatos as if to merge with him, when love seeks to find its highest and purest form, indeed its fulfilment, in death’ has been reached in literature long before the period where Süskind locates it. It has been reached already in that most death-obsessed of the Roman elegists, Sextus Propertius.

The fantasy of the death that perfects and eternalizes the lovers’ union, or the moment of orgasm, is nothing unusual in poetry. So when Propertius concludes elegy 2.15, a poem suffused with post-coital languor, with the words: ‘perhaps tomorrow will bring death for us’ (‘forsitan includet crastina fata dies’), though it seems almost a wish, it is entirely conventional. Love and death converge on the ‘carpe diem’ topos. (One of the finest examples of which—‘soles occidere et redire possunt:/ nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux,/ nox est perpetua una dormienda’—I quote here only so that I can reproduce Walter Ralegh’s beautiful version of it: ‘The Sunne may set and rise:/ But we contrariwise/ Sleepe after our short light/ One everlasting night’).

But the long habit of loving (to paraphrase Thomas Browne) indisposeth us for dying, and love poets generally tend to weight their emphasis more towards the vivamus atque amemus component than to dwell on the fact that death is coming, and soon.

Not so Propertius. He imagines the lover’s death far more thoroughly, and with a kind of sustained perversity that is far removed from either the ‘death comes to all, therefore: love’ conceit, or the languid death-in-life of the typical elegiac lover. It seems I’m not saying anything new here, since one Theodore D. Papanghelis has already written a book on this (Propertius: A Hellenistic Poet on Love and Death), in which comparisons are drawn between the elegist and the French symbolists, especially Baudelaire, and sundry nineteenth-century decadents. I can’t help wondering if the reason why it was the French that made the most of the love-death nexus is traceable to the phonetic similarity of the two words in that language. But that doesn’t explain it: la mort is blunter, less sensual than l’amour and (to my ear, at least) it doesn’t sound anywhere near as desirable. Incidentally, Papanghelis discusses at some length the line that provides the title for this post, ‘laus in amore mori’ (‘To die in love is glory’), arguing that in the wordplay there is a point being made about the common etymology of the two words, a counter to Lucretius’s explanation of ‘amor’ as ‘umor’.

Propertius fantasizes his own death in 2.13, complete with an intriguing necrophiliac element (‘tu vero nudum pectus lacerata sequeris […] osculaque in gelidis pones suprema labellis’ – ‘And you will follow and lash your naked breast, and press kisses on my frozen lips for the last time’). He also fantasizes the death of his beloved (2.26). Then Cynthia really does die (really?), and the poet dreams her as a revenant. Cynthia’s shade closes her speech to the poet with the words: ‘nunc te possideant aliae: mox sola tenebo: / mecum eris, et mixtis ossibus ossa teram.’ (‘Though other women possess you now, soon I alone will hold you: and you will be with me, and I will grind against your bones and unite them with mine.’) Sounds pretty unpleasant. Maybe we should see other people?

Propertius is perhaps more influential on Renaissance poetry than he is generally given credit for. Perhaps not so much on someone like Donne (who investigated the paradoxes of love and death in a different way), but certainly on neo-Latin poets. The Neo-Platonism of Ficino gave point to the by then conventional Petrarchan paradoxes: the lovers literally exchanged souls, dying as the soul left the body and being revived as a living corpse by the soul of the beloved. Johannes Secundus has a particularly bizarre exploration of this conceit (Basium 13): dying a death (that is to say, knackered after sex), the poet wishes for his beloved to act as a kind of erotic life-support machine for him, by sharing her soul in a perpetual kiss of life. Some of Secundus’s sex/death conceits certainly draw directly on Propertius (his and Neaera’s imagined death in Basium 2 certainly has a model in Propertius 2.28); and his death-tinged fantasies generally seem very Propertian in spirit.

[By the way, nothing to do with death, but this virtuoso translation of one of Secundus’s poems deserves to be read by all.]

One thing to add: it’s worth remarking that in French poetry the unattractive sounding ‘mort’ can be avoided in favour of the more euphonious subjunctive mood of the verb. Samuel Beckett does it here, and succeeds in making death sound much preferable to love:

je voudrais que mon amour meure
qu’il pleuve sur le cimetière
et les ruelles où je vais
pleurant celle qui crut m’aimer

In the TLS a couple of weeks ago there was an excellent article on Beckett’s poetry, which includes his English version of this piece.

Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of human kind

2006-11-09T19:19:00.000Z

Idly browsing in the bookshop today I chanced upon a copy of the new Robert Fagles Aeneid translation (in truth it was pretty hard to miss: there was a great big stack of ‘em on the shelf; and it’s a pretty bulky hardback tome, printed as it is in the same format as his Homer translations, that is to say, making free and easy with the line breaks (what is with that? y’know, inserting a line-break every ten-or-so-words don’t make it poetry), with not much ink covering a lot of paper, and generally taking a devil-may-care rape-the-rainforests approach to paper conservation). Now, it just so happens that I really like the Homer translations he did: they’re robust, readable, they don’t sound too much like translations, and occasionally they even sound quite poetic – perhaps they don’t quite attain unto the sublime, but we can forgive them that.

This, coupled with the fact that the other day I read the generous write-up they gave him in the New York Times, made me want to check out this new translation (the product of ten years’ lucubrations, apparently). So, I pick up the book, flick through to the first line, and what do I read? ‘Wars and a man I sing’. ‘Wars and a man I sing’. ‘Wars and a man I sing.’ Nah, I don’t like that at all. It’s ‘Arms and the man I sing’, or it’s nothing. (At least Fagles didn’t feel the need to naturalize the word order too. I’ve seen translations that begin with ‘I sing of…’, which is surely nonsense. The first word must be ‘arms’, just as the first word of the Iliad must be ‘rage’.)

So anyway, I’m riffling through the pages, trying to get a general sense of what Fagles has done with (to?) Virgil, and it occurs to me to check out his rendering of that famously untranslatable line: line 462 of the first book. You know the one: sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

Here’s what Fagles makes of it:

Even here, the world is a world of tears, / and the burdens of mortality touch the heart.

Which, it seems to me, isn’t too bad, as vague approximations go. But wait, what’s this? A certain R. D. Williams, who wrote the commentary to the edition I have to hand, wishes to make the following point:

Line 462 is often detached from its context and quoted to summarise the note of pathos in the Aeneid; there is no harm in this provided that it is understood that the meaning is ‘people are sympathetic’, not ‘the world is full of sorrows, is a vale of tears’.

Thanks for that, R. D. Like all good classicists, you do a nice line in superciliousness.

Here is the crib suggested by Williams:

here, too, there are tears for human happenings and mortal sufferings touch the heart

happenings for ‘res’? Better than ‘things’ I suppose.

Speaking of which:

[we find] tears in the nature of things, hearts touched by human transience
(C. Day Lewis)

[T]hey weep for things, their hearts are touched by the dying.
(Edward McCrorie)

Just what are these ‘things’ that keep cropping up? Who ever shed a tear for things? Things are not really for shedding tears over. But both of these versions are surpassed by Allen Mandelbaum, who sees fit to incorporate no less than two lots of ‘things’:

...and there are tears for passing things; here, too, / things mortal touch the mind.

May the the Lord God Lucretius preserve us from ‘things’.

There are tears for suffering, and men’s hearts are touched by what man has to bear.
(D. West)

Too wordy. As is this:

Here also there be tears for what men bear, and mortal creatures feel each other's sorrow.
(Theodore C. Williams)

Sidgwick has much the same thing, but simplified:

There are tears for trouble, and human sorrows touch the heart.

This version’s pretty economical too:

Here are the tears of the ages, and minds touched / By human suffering.
(Stanley Lombardo)

As for this:

…there is pity for a world’s distress, and a sympathy for short-lived humanity
(W. F. Jackson Knight)

A world’s distress? What world’s that then? And a ‘sympathy’ for humanity just sounds weak: Thinking of you, humanity. Get well soon. Kindest regards, Aeneas.

Speaking of dying relatives:

…here are tears over fortune and mortal estate touches the soul.
(J.W. Mackail)

Fortune? Estate? Sounds like the reading of a will. The will of a family member you never particularly liked, but there was a slight chance they might leave you some money, so you had to put on a show of grief when they kicked the bucket. That’s what it sounds like to me.

Earlier translators mostly read it along the lines of Williams’ ‘people are sympathetic’, and kept it specific to the context. So Annibal Caro: ‘ché ferità non regna /  là 've umana miseria si compiagne.’ Dryden deflates it still more, and ends up with: ‘And Trojan griefs the Tyrians' pity claim.’

Anyway, if I’m reading my notes correctly, it seems Fagles (and a fair few of these others) have got the sense pretty much wrong. However. The problem with the Williams view, and what it misses, is that the meaning of the line is bound up with what it has come to mean. It’s all very well to insist that the context demands that Aeneas respond to a specific thing (being touched that the Carthaginians should be sympathetic to the plight of a people they had never met); but another context has its own demands, and that is the context formed by the accretion of readings and uses of the line over the centuries. Perhaps to some of Virgil’s first readers the line meant ‘[Carthaginian] people can be sympathetic too’, but does it mean the same thing to a Christian-era reader, one who has read Ecclesiastes, and fine-tuned his Romantic sensibilities, and who has heard and read that very line quoted again and again in certain contexts and with certain associations?

Well, perhaps it’s a bit much to expect a translator to cram all that into his version of one line of poetry. The awareness of this same problem of the specific versus the commonplace, the immediate context versus the literary-historical context, is what motivated my protest against Fagles’ version of the first line. It may well be the case that Virgil is not making a claim to be singing of the human condition, and so to speak of ‘a man’ is perfectly correct: he sings the story of one man. But Aeneas is not just ‘a man’; he is ‘the man’, he is ‘man’. Maybe Fagles thinks of Aeneas as merely ‘a man’ because he’d already called Odysseus ‘the man’ in the first line of his translation of that work…?

Anyway, here’s my favourite version of the line. Perhaps it’s not as economical as some of the others, but it combines the two contexts very well: it sticks to the specific (the sympathy of the Carthaginians), but also sounds that note of pathos, the lament for transience and the vanity of human concerns.

They weep here
For how the world goes, and our life that passes
Touches their hearts.
(R. Fitzgerald)

Blinded by the Light

2006-11-04T15:41:00.000Z

In an idle hour one afternoon last week I bethought myself to wander over to the National Gallery and take a look at the Velásquez exhibition they’re putting on at the moment. I turned up an hour or so before the doors closed and, predictably enough, they sent me away with a flea in my ear, being all sold out for the day. So I thought I might as well kill a couple of hours in the main gallery.

Whenever I go to the National Gallery I always end up looking at the same things; so this time I thought I’d take a different route through, bypassing the Cinquecento Italians and avoiding the magnetic pull of that damn Holbein, and heading straight into the seventeenth century instead.

In the Rembrandt room there are two paintings hanging side by side, one by the man himself and another not (or rather no longer) considered worthy of his brush. These are: 'Anna and the Blind Tobit'; and the snappily-titled 'A Man Seated Reading at a Table in a Lofty Room'. It’s easy to see why the curators set them next to one another like this: they are pretty similar in composition and tone. But what interested me were less the visual and more the thematic similarities and contrasts between the two pieces.

Considered as two texts to be read in parallel (though they were almost certainly never intended to be), the paintings say something about reading and writing. Blindness adopts the same pose as reading. The light streams from behind and above; the seated figure is engulfed by solitude.

Solitude is the unifying theme of these two paintings. Tobit's blindness isolates him from his wife Anna, and he prays for death ("for it is profitable for me to die rather than to live […] turn not thy face away from me." Tobit 3:6). The reader (or is he a writer? Is that a pen in his left hand?) hunched over his desk, withdrawn fully within the ‘little world’ oblivious to those symbols of the ‘big world’ on the right: what looks like two globes, barely visible in the gloom. The function of the light here, it seems to me, is paradoxically not to draw the eye ‘outside’, but to involve it more deeply in the darkness.

Where there is but the merest suggestion of a ‘seeing hand’ in the Reader painting, the Tobit scene features hands prominently. Hands are the focal point of the composition. The hand of the blind man, unfailingly, suggests the hand of the artist, the hand of the writer. Tobit gazes unseeingly at his hands while Anna busies hers with work. Derrida, in his Mémoires d’aveugle – though he does not discuss this painting – writes at length on the significance of hands and eyes in the Tobit story, and in its representation in visual art. Tobias will cure his father’s blindness by laying hands on his eyes, his hands guided in turn by the hand of the angel Raphael.

And Tobit will become a writer. Once his sight is restored Tobit will write the first-person account of his blindness and solitude. As Derrida emphasizes, this act of writing is an act of acknowledgement, the repaying of a debt that is unpayable; Tobit’s story is of the ‘seeing of sight itself’. Derrida goes on to write of the impossibility of the self-portrait (the draftsman draws without seeing – he cannot see himself as he draws – just as our Reader writes without seeing, in the dark); here Rembrandt, the self-portraitist par excellence, makes Tobit into a writer who is not yet a writer, and portrays the impossibility of writing.

Maybe next week I’ll get to the Velásquez…

Contra illos qui bonas litteras colunt

2006-11-02T19:38:00.000Z

People of this sort think that philosophy is a kind of book like the Aeneid or the Odyssey, and that the truth is to be sought, not in the universe, not in nature, but (I use their own words) by comparing texts!

--Galileo, Letter to Kepler, 1610

Well, that us told...

The Rebuke

2006-09-30T00:37:00.001+01:00

I can't resist posting a link to this, silly though it is: Julian Barnes's suitably bathetic rewriting of the end of Madame Bovary. Sample:

That man who told you my story did not really understand me, you see. He did not like me. He told one of his friends he thought me a vulgar little woman. He said my story made him want to throw up. He thought himself more important than me. In the eyes of the world, no doubt he was.

I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles...

2006-09-29T23:04:00.000+01:00

It occurs to me that I never write anything about the visual arts in this blog. This is certainly not through lack of interest. Perhaps it is a matter of inclination (if I might abuse that word): I want always to escape to the higher ground of language, the rarefied air of the word, and not to risk descending the subterranean depths of the image. Perhaps the topographical figure is misleading. I prefer the comfortable plasticity of words to the hard-edged impenetrability of the image.

Anyway, I was in the Fitzwilliam Museum today, and I had another chance to take a look at a painting which has intrigued me in the past, Salvator Rosa's L'Umana Fragilita (Human Frailty), c.1656. It isn't particularly good, as you can see. In fact it's pretty nasty, a treatment of the vanitas topos that is at once tasteless and pedantic. Take a look at the walkthrough on the museum website if you like: it doesn't make the painting any more palatable, though.

The aspect of this composition that fascinates most is the fact that the infant child is writing: at first glance perhaps we see his mother's hand guiding the child's movements; but then it is clear that his wrist is being held by the angel, by Death. The justification for the inclusion of the writing motif seems to be that the words on the page express familiar commonplaces of the memento mori type ("Conception is a sin", "Birth is pain", "Life is toil", "Death a necessity"). So runs the explanation on the website. But isn't there something more to it than that? One possible reading, perhaps an over-literal one, might have the child signing his own death warrant. Another might posit the signing of a name, the first entry into the symbolic order, the barring of the subject, as the mark of death. The antinomies of the written word: deathless, changeless, and so dangerous—according to Plato; vital, life-giving, expressive of the soul (and so dangerous) —according to the poets. Naming an object brings it into being, but naming an object also annihilates it: 'I name "This woman"', writes Blanchot, 'and real death has been announced, is already present in my language.' And then: to write is to turn one's self inside out, to commit one's subjective interiority to the horrifyingly alien blackness of the ink on the page. (And language, I think, might well have evolved first as a private, autochthonous mechanism and not as a facilitator of social communication.) The written word confers death upon the writing subject; writing is self-annihilation.

It's not all doom and gloom though. In the bottom left corner of the painting we have a delightful vignette: a happy putto blows bubbles, as if to suggest the insouciance of childhood. It doesn't symbolize this at all, of course: bubbles are almost always meant to signify transience, as the website blurb tells us: this suggests 'the brevity of human existence. "Homo est bulla"—"man is but a bubble"—was a well known phrase of the day.' Fair enough. But it did put me in mind of a certain poem I came across fairly recently: Richard Crashaw's 1646 Bulla ('The Bubble'), which is a sort of hallucinogenic fugue, a study in the emptiness of words: I present below my own terribly inadequate (and quite possibly incorrect in places) translation of the closing lines, spoken in the person of the bubble herself:

Sum venti ingenium breve
Flos sum, scilicet, aeris,
Sidus scilicet aequoris;
Naturae iocus aureus,
Naturae vaga fabula,
Naturae breve somnium.
Nugarum decus & dolor;
Dulcis, doctaque vanitas.
Aurae filia perfidiae;
Et risus facilis parens.
Tantum gutta superbior,
Fortunatius & lutum.
Sum fluxae pretium spei;
Una ex Hesperidum insulis.
Formae pyxis, amantium
Clare caecus ocellulus;
Vanae & cor leve gloriae.
Sum caecae speculum Deae.
Sum fortunae ego tessera,
Quam dat militibus suis;
Sum fortunae ego symbolum,
Quo sancit fragilem fidem
Cum mortalibus Ebriis
Obsignatque tabellulas.
Sum blandum, petulans, vagum,
Pulchrum, purpureum, et decens,
Comptum, floridulum, et recens,
Distinctum nivibus, rosis,
Undis, ignibus, aere,
Pictum, gemmeum, & aureum,
O sum, (scilicet, O nihil.)

I am the short-lived spirit of the wind
I am, that is, the flower of the air,
That is, the star of the sea,
The golden joke of Nature
The wandering tale of Nature
The brief dream of Nature.
The glory of small things, and grief.
Sweet and learned futility.
The daughter of golden treachery;
And the mother of the easy smile.
Only a droplet is prouder,
Dirt more blessed.
I am the prize of fleeting hope;
One of the isles of the Hesperides.
The casket of beauty, the blind little eye
Of lovers, to be sure;
And the fickle heart of false glory.
I am the mirror of the blind goddess.
I am the password of Fortune,
That she gives to her soldiers;
I am the warrant of Fortune,
With which she consecrates frail hope
When for drunken mortals
She seals her documents.
I am charming, wanton, inconstant,
Beautiful, glowing and graceful,
Elegant, bright and fresh,
Not like unto snow, roses,
Water, fire and air,
Painted, bejeweled, and golden,
O I am (that is, O nothing).

So there we have it: this blog's first entry on the subject of painting. Kind of got away from me there, didn't she?

"We want the poetry of life"

2006-09-16T19:57:00.000+01:00

Flicking through Amiel's Journal intime I chanced upon this fittingly autumnal entry:

September 22, 1871. Charnex.—Gray sky—a melancholy day. A friend has left me, the sun is unkind and capricious. Everything passes away, everything forsakes us. And in place of all we have lost, age and gray hairs! ... After dinner I walked to Chailly between two showers. A rainy landscape has a great charm for me; the dark tints become more velvety, the softer tones more ethereal. The country in rain is like a face with traces of tears upon it—less beautiful no doubt, but more expressive.

Behind the beauty which is superficial, gladsome, radiant, and palpable, the aesthetic sense discovers another order of beauty altogether, hidden, veiled, secret and mysterious, akin to moral beauty. This sort of beauty only reveals itself to the initiated, and is all the more exquisite for that. It is a little like the refined joy of sacrifice, like the madness of faith, like the luxury of grief; it is not within the reach of all the world. Its attraction is peculiar, and affects one like some strange perfume, or bizarre melody. When once the taste for it is set up the mind takes a special and keen delight in it, for one finds in it

"Son bien premièrement, puis le dédain d'autrui,"

and it is pleasant to one's vanity not to be of the same opinion as the common herd. This, however, is not possible with things which are evident, and beauty which is incontestable. Charm, perhaps, is a better name for the esoteric and paradoxical beauty, which escapes the vulgar, and appeals to our dreamy, meditative side. Classical beauty belongs, so to speak, to all eyes; it has ceased to belong to itself. Esoteric beauty is shy and retiring. It only unveils itself to unsealed eyes, and bestows its favors only upon love.

[trans. Mary Augusta Ward]

Pseudodoxia

2006-09-13T19:53:00.000+01:00

A couple of posts back, Andrew Simone made some comments in response to my Antal Szerb entry about what he calls the 'paradox of the disingenuous'. I'd like to be able to say something novel and profound about that particular problem of logic, but, for I cannot, I'll knock out a few half-formed ideas and half-witted comments here instead. I shy from the abstract, and generally respond better to particular instances; so accept, please, these few lines of Ovid:

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.'

Walks Through The Woods II

2006-09-08T15:42:00.000+01:00

"It is true that those who do not seek [knowledge] have more wealth than those who do. The doctors who sit by the stove wear chains and silk, those who travel can barely afford a smock. Those who sit by the stove eat partridges and those who follow after knowledge eat milk-soup. Although they have nothing, they know that as Juvenal says, 'He only travels happily who has nothing.' I think it is to my praise and not to my shame that I have accomplished my travelling at little cost. And I testify that this is true concerning Nature: whoever wishes to know her must tread her books on their feet. Writing is understood by its letters, Nature by land after land, for every land is a book. Such is the Codex Naturae and so must a man turn over her pages."

--Paracelsus, Fourth Defence [trans. Anna M Stoddart]

How to gain the reader’s goodwill by threatening him

2006-09-02T21:02:00.000+01:00

[The second instalment in an occasional series on the subtle art of captatio benevolentiae.]

"TO THE READER WHO EMPLOYS HIS LEISURE ILL

Whoever you may be, I caution you against rashly defaming the author of this work, or cavilling in jest against him. Nay, do not silently reproach him in consequence of others’ censure, nor employ your wit in foolish disapproval or false accusation. For, should Democritus Junior prove to be what he professes, even a kinsman of his elder namesake, or be ever so little of the same kidney, it is all up with you: he will become both accuser and judge of you in his petulant spleen, will dissipate you in jests, pulverize you with witticisms, and sacrifice you, I can promise you, to the God of Mirth.

Again I warn you against cavilling, lest, while you calumniate or disgracefully disparage Democritus Junior, who has no animosity against you, you should hear from some judicious friend the very words the people of Abdera heard of old from Hippocrates, when they held their well-deserving and popular fellow-citizen to be a madman: 'Truly, it is you, Democritus, that are wise, while the people of Abdera are fools and madmen.'

You have no more sense than the people of Abdera.

Having given you this warning in a few words, O reader who employ your leisure ill, farewell."

--Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy [trans. Holbrook Jackson]

You Must Change Your Life

2006-08-27T22:58:00.000+01:00

Whenever I travel abroad, I like to tailor my reading to the destination. So, as I prepared for my recent trip to Budapest, I resolved to familiarize myself with the greats of modern Hungarian literature. Realizing that this was something of an ambitious project to complete in a week, I decided to limit myself to a couple of novels only. And as luck would have it, two works by the celebrated scholar, poet and novelist Antal Szerb have recently been published in new English translations (done by Len Rix): Szerb's first novel, The Pendragon Legend (1934), and his greatest work Journey by Moonlight (1937), apparently every cultivated Hungarian's favourite book.

My idea of matching book to destination didn't quite work out, since neither of these novels is actually set in Budapest, nor even in Hungary: The Pendragon Legend is a sort of Gothic-adventure pastiche set in Wales and England, and Journey by Moonlight follows the peregrinations of the main character, Mihály, as he wanders Italy in search of his past (or perhaps of a past that never existed).

This is a novel of nostalgia; of nostalgia for the void of memory, for death. But that's not quite it. Rather, this is a nostalgia for a richer kind of nostalgia, a feeling once experienced but not fully identified, of a sensual longing for oblivion. Emotion is experienced always at one remove: a yearning for a sense of yearning you imagine you once had, as a child. A yearning to be able to yearn for the present moment, in the memory of your future self. Nothing more than an adolescent fantasy, perhaps. But the performances of adolescence are often played out in memory with a strange force of feeling that has become, or always was, entirely alien to us.

It is difficult to convey a sense of the novel's tone, its irony, now gentle, now mordant; the deadly serious and profound treated always with a certain playful humour and lightness of touch; or to convey the impression one gets of the main character, by turns self-pitying and philosophical, a man of conviction and of cowardice, his words wheedling at times, at times almost wise. Mihály is, to be sure, naïve, emotionally illiterate, unable to face the realities of adulthood; but he also sees that the knowledge of what it means to live life is not easily won, that there is always something missing from a life traded out in the economies of marriage, work and happiness, that knowing how to live is in large part learning how to die.

Mihály's opinions about the bourgeois life he never quite brings himself to reject are often amusing, sometimes true. His thoughts on the 'great abstract mythology' of money, and its religious rites, for example. Often his voice is indistinguishable from the drily acerbic voice of the narrator, as here:

Work was the promised reward for a young man setting out, for completing his studies, and work was the penitential act and punishment for those who met with failure.

And then there are his thoughts on love, often shot through with an adolescent cynicism we most of us hope to outgrow, but just as often speaking of emotions I recognize: the polarities of love, the necessity of distance, and the illusion of closeness. Or, when sitting down to dinner with his wife, 'he could already, a little, look upon her as a lovely fragment of his past, and he was filled with solemn emotion.' 'He loved to relocate himself in his past, at one precise point, and from that perspective re-assemble his present life...and this re-ordering would always give the present moment a richer charge of feeling'; or else 'converting the present into a past': '"what will such memories hold, what associations of feeling?"' This compulsion to aestheticize the moment lived, to commit it proleptically to the memory of a future self, is surely shared by anyone who reads literature, and is influenced by it. It can diminish the experience itself, of course – but every aesthete knows that the cultivation of the memory is far more important than the living of the experience.

Mihály's religious historian friend Waldheim explains to him that death is an erotic instinct, and that all ancient cultures were drawn to the seductive force of the death-hetaira. Christianity, once the darkest of death-cults, says Waldheim, later 'succeeded in sublimating and rationalising the yearning for death, or, in plain language, they watered down the desire for death into desire for the next world, they translated the terrifying sex-appeal of the death-sirens into the heavenly choirs and rows of angels singing praises.' The death instinct, though, persists as an unconscious drive, as Freud tells us – or is this, too, a modern delusion, part of some atavistic fantasy, a yearning after some ancient, elemental 'charge of feeling'?

How do we distinguish between the games we play with memory and history, and the tricks memory and history play on us? How is it possible for any gesture, any act – even suicide – to be anything other than disingenuous? And is it possible, when it cannot be said without quoting Rilke, to say with genuine feeling:

"'If this landscape is reality....if this beauty really exists, then everything I have done in my life has been a lie. But this landscape is reality.'"

Et mihi res, non me rebus, subiungere conor

2006-08-19T23:05:00.000+01:00

Strange to think that the reading of literature was not always the preserve of the harmless drudge, nor was it always a mere divertissement for the leisure classes, nor always a pleasant occupation meant to bridge the time spent not doing stuff. Strange to think that people used to take poetry so seriously that they would even use it to guide their lives. Strange to think that literature at one time had the power to destroy kings and cities – et reges prius et beatas perdidit urbes.

And yet it is the case. This is why I am fascinated by the sortes Vigilianae and Homericae, a method of divination apparently widespread in antiquity, and yet more widespread in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The method consists in the random selection of a line or sentence from Homer or Virgil, usually done by opening one's book at random and then letting a staff fall on the page; or else by throwing dice. The persistence of this rite into the Renaissance and beyond seems to me to be one of those cases where refinement and learning, far from edging out superstition, depend on it for their very survival. Erudite rationalism and dumb superstition are shown to be two sides of the same coin.

Such methods of divination have long been applied to sacred texts. They still are, no doubt; but there can't be many people today who use the pagan classics in this way. Still, every reader of Dante knows that Virgil, the poet's guide to the ins and outs of sin and redemption, was a proselytizing Christian avant la lettre. And Virgil's books, in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, were sacred texts, a reputation that relied mostly on people's appreciation of the Messianic flavour of the fourth eclogue. In the Purgatorio, Dante meets the ancient Roman poet Statius, who explains how he became Christian after reading this very poem (a poem written before the birth of Christ, don't forget).

Homeric lots had a long history in antiquity: Socrates in prison used them to determine the day on which he was to die. The Roman emperor Marcus Opellius Macrinus fell upon a line in the Iliad that told him his time in the top job would not last long: sure enough, he was deposed and executed by a rival within fourteen months. Homeric lots told Brutus that Pompey would lose the battle of Pharsalus. One wonders why he didn't switch sides there and then, instead of waiting to do it after the inevitable defeat.

Plenty of emperors used Virgilian lots to figure out their fate (among them Alexander Severus, Hadrian, Gordian II, and Claudius II), but, in contrast to those that diced with Homer, these seem almost always to have got a positive response: your reign will be long, you will defeat the enemies of Rome, you know the drill. I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that the Iliad (much more popular than the Odyssey for this sort of thing) is all about war and slaughter and being killed in imaginatively brutal ways, whereas the Aeneid tempers that stuff with a fair bit of the old 'Rome is great, Empire's definitely the way to go' (pace, of course, the revisionist readers of Virgil's epic who see it as essentially antagonistic to Augustan ideology).

Using Homer and Virgil to determine their fate didn't seem to do much good for any of these people, since they had no choice but to fulfil the prophecy and get on with things. The destinies predicted by Homeric and Virgilian lots – at least, those recorded by history – are suspiciously self-fulfilling, almost as if the historical instance has been chosen retroactively to match the verse. Funny, that: destiny's a rum old deal.

Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica (about which I made some nugatory remarks here) has a whole section devoted to the debunking of beliefs in the efficacy of Virgilian lots. There is a footnote to this section, a late addition by another hand, which is worth quoting in full, if only for the deliciously laconic conclusion:

King Charles I. tried the sortes Virgilianæ, as is related by Wellwood in the following passage: —

"The King being at Oxford during the civil wars, went one day to see the public library, where he was showed among other books, a Virgil nobly printed, and exquisitely bound. The Lord Falkland, to divert the king, would have his majesty make a trial of his fortune by the sortes Virgilianæ, which every body knows was an usual kind of augury some ages past. Whereupon the king opening the book, the period which happened to come up, was that part of Dido's imprecation against Æneas; which Mr. Dryden translates thus:

Yet let a race untam'd, and haughty foes,
His peaceful entrance with dire arms oppose.
Oppress'd with numbers in th'unequal field,
His men discourag'd and himself expell'd,
Let him for succour sue from place to place,
Torn from his subjects, and his son's embrace,
First let him see his friends in battle slain,
And their untimely fate lament in vain:
And when at length the cruel war shall cease,
On hard conditions may he buy his peace;
Nor let him then enjoy supreme command,
But fall untimely by some hostile hand,
And lie unburied in the common sand.

"It is said that King Charles seemed concerned at this accident...."

Most of the above examples I lifted from Rabelais, in whose Tiers Livre there is a rather amusing treatment of the Virgilian lots phenomenon. Panurge wants to use them to determine whether or not he should marry (in fact, the whole book is taken up with his attempts to find an answer to that question). Pantagruel, ever the voice of reason (well, almost), counsels Panurge thus:

Aussi (respondit Pantagruel) en vos propositions tant y a de si et de mais, que je n'y sçaurois rien fonder ne rien resouldre. N'estez vous asceuré de vostre vouloir? Le point principal y gist: tout le reste est fortuit, et dependent des fatales dispositions du ciel.

Likewise, (replied Pantagruel) your proposals are so full of ifs and buts that I wouldn't know where to begin, or how to resolve anything. Are you not assured of your own will? That's the main thing in all this: the rest is a matter of chance, and all depends on the fatal dispositions of the heavens.

In other words, know your own mind before you start trifling with matters beyond your control. Nice advice, but even the most rational among us know that our decisions are not made by reason alone; and our 'decision procedures' (to borrow a term from computing) are not entirely calculable. We do very often require some arbitrary determining factor in order to pass from thought to the act. And if we're going to act irrationally, better to do it on the basis of a beautiful line of poetry than the flip of a coin or a badly-written horoscope.

With this in mind, I decided to give the Virgilian lots a go myself. Naturally, I carefully replicated the method set out by Rabelais in the Tiers Livre (well, not quite: I used a random number generator on the web). I have a two-volume edition of the Aeneid, so the rite proceeded in three stages: first, a number between 1 and 2 (result: 1); second, a number between 1 and 153 (excluding the commentary pages; result: 41); third, a number between 1 and 32 (the number of lines on the page; result: 25).

Now, I did say earlier that the Aeneid probably gave more positive auguries than the Iliad because it's less preoccupied with violent death than with the glorification of the Roman race. Here's what I ended up with (honest!):

ut tandem ante oculos evasit et ora parentum,
concidit ac multo vitam cum sanguine fudit.

Which gives something like:

When at last he came within sight of his parents,
He fell and poured out his life in a torrent of blood.

Ah well. I'll let you know how that works out for me.

Dangerous books

2006-08-17T21:17:00.000+01:00

"Now hear the story of how that man of whom I had begun to speak, Cicero, always so dear and beloved to me since childhood, made a fool of me. I own a huge volume of his letters, which I wrote out myself in my own hand, because the copy was a problem for the scribes; at that time I was in ill health, but my great love of the work, my delight in it, and my desire to have it, won out over the physical difficulty and effort. You have seen that that this book used to stand in the door to my library, leaning on the doorpost, so that it would always be close at hand. So, I come in the room, thinking about something else, and it so happens that the fringe of my robe accidentally caught on the book; which fell on my left leg just above the heel and gave it a slight knock. I pick it up and jokingly say: ‘What’s the matter, my dear Cicero, why do you strike me?’ He says nothing. But the next day as I’m coming in he strikes me again, and again I pick him up and, with a laugh, put him back in his place. To cut a long story short: having been injured by him several times, I come to my senses and put him up on the shelf, as if he didn’t deserve to be on the floor."

Petrarch, Epistolae familiares XXI.10; Latin here (sections 15-17).

Quis erudiet ipsos eruditos?

2006-08-16T18:18:00.000+01:00

This story ran on the front page of today's Grauniad. It is reported that the Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman will next Tuesday refuse to accept the Fields Medal (the "maths Nobel", apparently), along with the $1m prize that goes with it. I particularly liked this paragraph:

He has also refused a major European maths prize, supposedly on the grounds that he did not believe the committee awarding the prize was sufficiently qualified to judge his work.

All of which raises the question: who will be the arbiters of the limits of knowledge? What is the role of institutions of learning when the great advances in human knowledge, both in the sciences and in the humanities, so often come from outside of the confines of the academy, or even in opposition to it – and when the established arbiters of culture are seen to be in no position to judge of their validity?

These questions have relevance, also, to the domain of literature and its reception. If our 'horizon of expectations' is ultimately defined and determined by the culture in which we operate, how do ideas 'from outside' penetrate and redefine those horizons? Is the myth of change, of novelty, just that: a myth; part of a self-regulating discourse of Truth according to which ideas are always susceptible to absorption into the great tentacular body of institutionalized knowledge? The 'catastrophe model' of knowledge, of the maverick thinker whose ideas oppose and disrupt existing structures of thought, is perhaps nothing more than a construct necessary to maintain the illusion of progress in an unchanging world.

Another aspect of this problem is pointed up in the part of the article that states that the Poincaré conjecture 'is difficult for most non-mathematicians even to understand' – a familiar journalistic side-step. This is quite typical of the way modern scientific thought makes its way into the popular consciousness. The problem, it seems to me, is not just that complex ideas cannot be expressed in simple language (although that is certainly true); but that the whole of the scientific discourse, in the domain of mathematics and physics in particular, is so detached from everyday experience that our encounter with knowledge must be based exclusively in trust. Our relationship to human knowledge has become one of fundamental alienation.

Slightly related, I do like this quotation, from Bertrand Russell, on the [non-]relation of mathematical truths to the world of empirical reality:

Pure mathematics consists entirely of such asseverations as that, if such and such a proposition is true of anything, then such and such another proposition is true of that thing. It is essential not to discuss whether the proposition is really true, and not to mention what the anything is of which it is supposed to be true... If our hypothesis is about anything and not about some one or more particular things, then our deductions constitute mathematics. Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

Bit of a disjointed post there. Ho hum.

esse est percipi

2006-08-15T00:19:00.000+01:00

Over at Blog Meridian, John B. has written a very nice post on aspects of desire and voyeurism in Hitchcock's Rear Window.

To this I should like to add a few observations of my own, mostly prompted by my perception, upon re-viewing the film, of a resemblance between a certain scene towards the end, and a scene from another film to do with watching and being watched. I speak of Samuel Beckett's 1965 Film. It was at one time available for download from the thoroughly brilliant UbuWeb, but I can't seem to find the direct link right now; it's well worth tracking down if you have a spare 22 minutes.

For those who haven't seen Beckett's Film, the gist of it is this: a camera, shooting always at an oblique angle from behind his back, pursues Buster Keaton as he makes increasingly desperate attempts to avoid being seen. He hides from the gaze of other people who look upon him with horrified expressions; he finds himself in a barely furnished room, from which he strives to remove all traces of the other's gaze (this part includes a very funny scene with a cat and a dog). He eventually settles in a rocking-chair, where he is finally confronted by the eye of the camera itself.

There is a striking resemblance between this final confrontation and the scene in Rear Window in which Jeff is confronted by Thorwald. Up until the point at which Thorwald notices Lisa's signal to Jeff and looks directly into the lens of the camera, he has been the object, seen but not able to see. At that moment the polarities reverse and Thorwald becomes the viewer, Jeff the object of his threatening gaze. Thorwald enters Jeff's room, and the two face each other directly, both of their faces obscured in shadow. This sequence is filmed in a shot/counter-shot alternation, exactly as the final section of Beckett's film, in which Buster Keaton's "O" (the object of the camera's gaze) faces "E" (the camera's 'eye', manifested as the double of Keaton himself).

There are several points of similarity: before Thorwald enters the room, Jeff struggles to rise from his wheelchair, but is unable to move further because of his broken leg; Buster Keaton's character half-rises from the rocking chair but falls back, apparently paralysed by fear. Keaton wears an eye-patch on his left eye, both as "O" and in his manifestation as "E"; the eyes of Thorwald and Jeff are concealed behind a veil of shadow. In the shot/counter-shot sequence there is a close-up shot of the eyes of "E", which has its counterpart in the close-up on the bespectacled Thorwald. As Thorwald advances, Jeff uses the flash-bulb three times to blind him; there is a tight close-up on Thorwald's eyes, to which he raises his hands; Keaton's "O" repeatedly closes his eyes and raises his hands to cover them, apparently in terror at the sight of "E".

The reversal of viewer-object roles at this point in the narrative of Rear Window is figured in the relative positions of the characters: Thorwald stands, towering over Jeff, who is forced to remain seated in his wheelchair (previously Jeff's position had been 'above', his window being on a slightly higher level than the one opposite), just as "E" stands over "O", who sits back in his rocking-chair. It is interesting that Thorwald's first words to Jeff are "What do you want from me?", emphasizing the ambivalence of aggressor and victim, viewer and object.

The philosophical underpinnings of Beckett's Film (see, for example, this blog post) are to be found in Berkeley's formulation esse est percipi: 'to be is to be perceived'. (And this is the crux of Murphy's dilemma, too.) My understanding of this, in the light of the comparison to Rear Window, is that there is no act – of viewing or of performance – that is free of consciousness on some level, whether it be self-consciousness (as is obviously the case in Film), or the consciousness of some other. All actions are performed for the benefit of the gaze of the other, of the symbolic order which structures every aspect of our self-experience – including (or especially) the erotic act.

Which brings me to certain issues raised in the post I linked to at the start of this entry. I agree with John B's observation that the tenants of the other apartments figure just as importantly in the film as Thorwald, thematically speaking. The occupants of the apartments are actors, performers: the ballet dancer, the musician, even the 'Lonely Hearts' woman, who acts out the fantasy of a romantic encounter with an imaginary suitor. For whom is this fantasy played out? Not for herself exactly, but for the gaze of the other, in which her enjoyment, her pleasure is located. It is not enough to dream: she must go through the motions of the idealized encounter in order to experience her own desire as such. And of course, Jeff, in his voyeurism, is only acting out a part too – whether of the amateur sleuth of detective stories or of the Peeping Tom of sexual fantasy; for whose gaze if not the gaze of the other through which we order and experience our desire?

This brings me to another observation made by John B, about the framed negative image of Lisa which Jeff keeps in his apartment. He is surely right to point out that this signifies that their relationship is not yet 'developed'; but there is something else, I think. The negative portrays the face of the object of desire in a monstrous light: she appears almost inhuman. (This relates, I am sure, to Vertigo, in which Judy is the obscene negative of Madeleine, and is portrayed as such in the shot of her profile in grotesque green light.) In the great scene at the start of the movie, in which an ominous shadow falls across Jeff's sleeping face – Lisa, who wakes him with a kiss – he playfully asks her: 'Who are you?'. His uneasiness around her cannot be reduced to anything so banal as 'fear of commitment'; rather he fears that she is something entirely other, that there is something in her that is more than herself: the obscene object of desire. 'To be is to be perceived'; and just as it is terrifying to be confronted with the inescapable 'there-ness' of consciousness, it is also terrifying to contemplate the loss of the illusion of our own autonomy, to open up to the other and to involve ourselves in them completely. No, the other's gaze must always be kept at a certain distance for desire to continue to function, and for the fantasy of romantic love, like the fantasy of 'Miss Lonely Hearts', to continue to be played out.

Budapest

2006-08-13T20:34:00.002+01:00

I have just got back from Budapest, where I spent the last seven days attending a conference at which I presented a research paper (it went very well, thanks for asking). My flight into the Boschian nightmare that is Heathrow airport was delayed by several hours, enabling me to get myself disgracefully drunk before braving the chaos.

The time spent not confined in conference rooms in the oppressively classical Academy of Sciences I devoted mostly to sleeping, but I managed to skive off enough throughout the week to see a fair bit of the city.

And Budapest is one beautiful city. It is impossible not to delight in its neo-classical neo-Gothic neo-baroque splendour; in the tranquil beauty of the broad, noble Danube; and in the city's essentially nineteenth-century aesthetic: composed, measured, sometimes exorbitant, but exactly comme il faut.

Its structures are not particularly old: more or less everything is neo-this or neo-that, the city having been flattened by the Turks in the sixteenth century before its recapture by the Habsburgs a century or so later, and then largely destroyed again in the Second World War, and by the Soviet invasion. Not much survives of the city known to the 15th-century king Matthias Corvinus, who (point of national pride) brought the Italian Renaissance to Hungary long before it came to Northern Europe.

On the left bank of the Danube (rien à voir avec la rive gauche de Paris!) is the city of Buda, by turns grandiose — the imposingly classical Royal Palace dominates the city from its place on the hill, and the Matthias Church (Gothic- baroque, self- conscious, pedantic) soars skyward from amidst the throng of camera-brandishing pilgrims — and chocolate-box pretty (witness, for example, the silly confection that is the Fisherman's Bastion, the folly of some crazed fin-de-siècle architect, which is, perhaps, supposed to hark back to some non-existent Middle-European past).

The city of Pest, on the right bank, is the business end of things, but it is nevertheless throughout unrelentingly elegant in the nineteenth-century finery of its buildings and their ornaments. The Parliament building and the Saint Istvan Basilica dominate the Pest skyline, and the view from Castle Hill or the Chain Bridge can be exhilarating, even when le ciel bas et lourd pèse comme un couvercle...

One of the stranger tourist attractions is the Szoborpark (Statue Park) just south of the city, an open-air museum filled with monuments from the time of the Communist dictatorship. Lenin, Marx and Engels preside over the entrance to the park, whose ticket office and gift shop are designed, with bizarre self-conscious humour, to simulate a warped time-warp. A 1950s radio blares out Soviet marching music alongside a sales display filled with crappy souvenirs and commie kitsch.

It is hard to believe that these statues once stood in the streets and squares of Budapest — an affront to the gentility of the city's aesthetic, as much as anything else...

The monuments in Heroes Square are much more in fitting with their surroundings, although they too, like so much else in Budapest, have a sense of somewhat overwrought artifice to them — but are no worse for that.

In fact, perhaps the overwhelming impression I took from Budapest was the sense that here was a city built with the express purpose of being breathtakingly beautiful. Here is nothing like the dirty grandeur of London's organic sprawl, nor yet the geometrical sensuality in old and new one finds in Paris. Not that there is anything 'fake' in it — far too elegant for that — but the city seems to have been created to delight the eye and ravish the senses.

By the way, my half-arsed attempt to learn Hungarian, reported on here a while back, eventually amounted to nothing more than the rote memorization of a few set phrases. I didn't brave morphology: the language has more than twenty noun cases, fer Christ's sake!

Translatio studii

2006-08-02T10:07:00.000+01:00

Mirabile dictu, this blog has migrated here from http://raminagrobis.livejournal.com/

Majority rule

2006-07-29T12:05:00.000+01:00

In the last post, I quoted a passage from Thomas Browne's Urne Buriall in which the author alluded to that ancient euphemism for dying, 'to go unto the greater number' (abiit ad plures: 'he went over to the majority').

'To go to the greater number' is an expression whose antiquity stretches at least as far back as (or 'as high as', to use the formulation favoured by Browne – interesting, isn't it, how time is conceptualized differently depending on one's perspective: the Renaissance man's modest deference to the greatness of the past, versus our own arrogant belief that we live at the vanguard of history) Plautus, whose play Trinummus, written in the third or second century BCE has the line 'quin prius me ad plures penetravi?' ('Why haven't I yet gone over to the greater number?'). Apparently Homer uses a similar expression in the Odyssey, but I haven't been able to track down the reference.

Now, I'm slightly embarrassed to confess this, but I did vaguely believe something I remember reading (a claim I have tentatively repeated to others) that there are as many people living today as have ever lived. This is the sort of thing that sounds so implausible, such a violation of common-sense assumptions, that we half-believe it might be true. It's not, of course.

But that said, I don't find it remotely plausible that the world population has grown from around 1.7 billion to around 6.5 billion (or 'billions' if you prefer the Gordon Brown method of reckoning) within the last hundred years; and yet it is the case. There are people alive today who have seen in their lifetime an ear-bleedingly rapid multiplication of human lives on a scale unimaginable to those that lived in the forty-odd centuries since the first work of literature (we might as well postulate that as a pis aller starting point for human civilization). We certainly seem to live in 'interesting times', as the old Chinese curse had it (or didn't have it, as the case may be; I personally doubt that this was ever a popular saying: it's too witty for that).

We've all seen versions of that minimalist artwork that shows the rate of change in the world population since the beginnings of humanity. And a mind-boggling sight it is too: witness, for example, this graph of world population growth between 10000BCE and 2000CE. That diagram, as a visual representation of the way we live now, is a more appalling monument to human folly than any Bosch painting or Hogarth print.

Browne says that for the ancients, the idea that the dead outnumbered the living might have been, for them, a misinterpretation of the facts. This is, of course, a literary conceit (and a very nice one at that); but it cannot possibly be true. The ancients surely shared with the rest of humanity the strong conviction that their population did not exceed that of the realm of Pluto (who was, after all the god of wealth and plenty, and who got the lion's share of things when they were divided three ways between him, Jupiter and Neptune). And they probably didn't give much thought to the notion (not being a forward-thinking bunch, as a rule) that more people might live in the future than had lived in the past. The Romans, it is clear (or, at least, the official discourse of the Empire), had little regard for the future except in terms of their own persistence: they couldn't really imagine a time when their dominion would end, when other peoples would overwhelm their civilization, and bring it to naught. But the end was not long in coming, and things escalated from there.

The Romans, being a superstitious lot, didn't like to say 'he is dead', preferring instead the euphemistic periphrasis 'he has lived' ('vixit'). I think I read that in Montaigne, or somewhere. This is quite nice; although I would guess that it's more of a grammatical peculiarity than a matter of cultural sensibilities: after all, the Romans also liked to say 'he has spoken' ('dixit') when they really meant 'he's finally shut the fuck up'. The way we're going now, won't the greatest distinction be due to those of whom we might say 'he has died', rather than 'he has lived'? After all, any old idiot can live: it's dying that's a rarity these days.

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant

2006-07-28T12:03:00.000+01:00

I've been dipping in and out of Thomas Browne's brilliant Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), a copious repository of received ideas, false beliefs, and unaccountable enormities duly catalogued and debunked by this great explorer of the 'untravelled parts of Truth'. Herein we may learn, inter alia, that, contrary to the teachings of Avicenna, it is not in fact good practice to get drunk to the point of vomiting at least once a month; that, pace Pliny the Elder, diamonds cannot be softened by goat's blood; and that (amazingly) it is not the case that storks only live in Republics. Moreover, it is false that beavers gnaw off their own testicles in order to escape their predators. Why they would do this I cannot imagine, except perhaps as a bizarre diversionary tactic. (Browne, come to think of it, does compare it to Medea's murder and dismemberment of her brother, whose limbs she scattered to detain her father in pursuit.) According to the author, this belief was, in ancient times, 'experimentally refuted by one Sestius, a Physitian'. One dreads to think how...

I found particularly interesting Browne's assessment of the apparently widely held belief that it is possible to have sex remotely: ''Tis a new and unseconded way in History to fornicate at a distance, and much offendeth the rules of Physick, which say, there is no generation without a joynt emission, not only, a virtual but corporal and carnal contaction.' Well, quite.

Thomas Browne isn't an author I was that familiar with (despite having read – and, to my shame, repeated – the claim, which I now believe to be erroneous, that his Religio medici is some kind of 'fake'), but the other day I happened to read an excellent short novel by the Brazilian author Luis Fernando Verissimo, entitled Borges and the Eternal Orang-Utans. It's a sort of intertextual detective story (I won't say a 'metaphysical detective story', because I find that description unhelpful: all detective stories are metaphysical), in which Borges himself features heavily as a solver of abstract mysteries in a fictional universe that looks very like his own (or at least that of an obsessive reader of his books). And the key to the intrigue, it becomes apparent to the attentive reader, is to be found in a throwaway paragraph at the beginning of one of Borges' own stories (I won't say which one, for fear of spoiling the dénouement) – which, like the word in the riddle whose answer is 'chess', is never mentioned in the novel. There are plenty more references to Borges' stories (and to Poe's) – as well as to the kabbalistic magus John Dee – to keep you guessing anyway, so chances are you won't untangle the intrigue before 'Borges' himself does.

Anyway, in that novel, the character Borges might be observed to remark upon 'Sir Thomas Browne, that magnificent seventeenth-century madman, and one of my favourite authors'. It is said, also, that Browne 'wrote a treatise on the X, which he saw as the union of temporal knowledge and magical knowledge.' This must refer to Browne's Garden of Cyrus, which is a discourse on the quincunx. Incidentally, 'quincunx' is a brilliant word not used often enough in English; whereas in French 'quinconce' is relatively current – perhaps because of traditional French predilection for geometrical gardens?

Published at the same time as that work, in 1658, was an essay on the recent discovery of some ancient funeral urns in Norfolk, entitled Hydriotaphia, or Urne Buriall. This is a wonderful little book, and as a 'consideration of times before you, when even living men were Antiquities, when the living might exceed the dead, and to depart this world, could not be properly said “to go unto the greater number”.', a musing upon those 'sad and sepulchral Pitchers, which have no joyful voices; silently expressing old mortality, the ruines of forgotten times', it surely has no equal. So much in this short work is supremely affecting, like this, for example:

Darkness and Light divide the course of Time, and Oblivion shares with memory a great part even of our living Beings; we slightly remember our Felicities, and the smartest stroaks of Affliction leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremities, and Sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into Stones are Fables. Afflictions induce callosities, Miseries are slippery, or fall like Snow upon us, which notwithstanding is no Stupidity. To be ignorant of evils to come, and forgetfull of evils past, is a mercifull provision in Nature, whereby we digest the mixture of our few and evil days, and our delivered Senses not relapsing into cutting remembrances, our Sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of repetitions.

Or this:

'Tis opportune to look back upon old Times, and contemplate our Forefathers. Great examples grow thin, and are to be fetched from the passed world. Simplicity flies away, and Iniquity comes at long strides upon us. We have enough to doe to make up our selves from present and passed Times, and the whole stage of things scarce serveth for our instruction. A compleat piece of Vertue must be made up from the Centos of all ages; as all the beauties of Greece could make but one handsome Venus.

Anyway, having read the Verissimo novel, I betook myself to my Borges, and hastily re-read the story 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' which opens the English collection Labyrinths. The story, of course, ends, wonderfully, like this:

I pay no attention to all this and go on revising, in the still days at the Adrogué hotel, an uncertain Quevedian translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Browne's Urn Burial.

By the way, there is a fantastic Thomas Browne site here. Well worth a look (but beware errors of transcription, not to say typos reproduced from the original editions – in the two short passages I copied above, there were two glaring errors).

Addendum:

Given Browne's own careful analysis of the means by which Error encroaches upon Truth (whether by 'Misapprehension, Fallacy, or false deduction, Credulity, Supinity, adherence unto Antiquity, Tradition and Authority'), it is appropriate, in a perverse way, that the typographical errors I mentioned above have already insinuated themselves into this great Internet of ours. In particular, the passage transcribed on that University of Chicago site as: 'Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion snares with memory, a great part even of our living beings' (which is nonsense) has made it onto a list of Thomas Browne quotes here, not to mention a GCSE/A Level EngLit site here. Of course 'shares' should be read for 'snares', and we could afford to lose that comma, too (although it does, admittedly, appear in the 1658 text). Proof, "if proof be need be", of the insidious power of that invisible agent Error.

Happy as Larry

2006-07-13T12:01:00.000+01:00

I have been moved to write this post by a 'a kind of mental tic douloureux sufficient for [my] parody of rational behaviour', which, upon my reading of this post in the journal of the august John B., caused me to perceive a compelling point of resemblance between the excerpt he quotes from Flannery O'Connor, and a passage I read in Samuel Beckett's novel Murphy; which passage follows.

The melancholic's melancholy, the manic's fits of fury, the paranoid's despair, were no doubt as little autonomous as the long fat face of a mute. Left in peace they would have been as happy as Larry, short for Lazarus, whose raising seemed to Murphy perhaps the one occasion on which the Messiah had overstepped the mark.

This is quite funny (in the typical Beckettian way), but what (you may well ask) has this to do with the dilemma formulated by the 'Misfit', between on the one hand the idea that the miracle truly happened, which would demand a faith in Christ, and on the other, the conviction that it did not happen, which leaves us with no moral responsibility except to the primacy of the will?

Well, not that much, to be honest. But the novel as a whole has many interesting things to say about the philosophical possibility of a life of the mind detached from the 'colossal fiasco' of reality, or an 'authentic consciousness' if you prefer (I demur).

I certainly do not agree with the claim, made in the post linked to by the post to which the post linked above links (clunk!), that an atheist position which fails to pursue the Tyler Durden philosophy jusqu'au bout is fundamentally hypocritical or inauthentic. There is, still, the possibility (I should say, the demand) for an authentic philosophy of life without a belief in a power that transcends the self: humanism is one option, though it is not entirely (philosophically) satisfactory; another is the cultivation of an Epicurean or Stoic ataraxia; or perhaps of Neary's Apmonia (αρμονία?), the mediation between the extremes of frenetic action and the calm of the rocking-chair.

Elsewhere in the novel, Murphy speaks of 'the Belacqua bliss', the state of mind proper to the 'half-light' between the apprehension of the bright forms of the physical world and the obscure flux of preconscious thought (in which the self is 'but a mote in the dark of absolute freedom'). Belacqua, you will remember, appears in the Purgatorio lounging in the shade of a rock halfway up the mountain, in no hurry to get to Purgatory. It is not that the life of sensual self-indulgence is a life worth living; no, rather it points to the possibility of a withdrawal into the mind, for a period of respite from desire (as long as a lifetime), in the realm of dreams, between life and its expiation.

Later, working in the sanatorium, Murphy comes to envy the patients their absolute commitment to the inner life, the 'little world' divested of the importunate demands of empirical reality and the gravamina of the body.

The issue therefore, as lovingly simplified and perverted by Murphy, lay between nothing less fundamental than the big world and the little world, decided by the patients in favour of the latter, revived by the psychiatrists on behalf of the former, in his own case unresolved. In fact, it was unresolved, only in fact. His vote was cast. "I am not of the big world, I am of the little world" was an old refrain with Murphy, and a conviction, two convictions, the negative first. How should he tolerate, let alone cultivate, the occasions of fiasco, having once beheld the beatific idols of his cave? In the beautiful Belgo-Latin of Arnold Geulincx: Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis.

The patients have definitively decided the matter in favour of the little world, the Microcosm. Murphy himself is suspended between the two, unable to commit absolutely to the life of the mind, to withdraw from the empirical world, despite willing it. He is unable to attain to what might elsewhere be called the religious, the transcendent experience; perhaps something like what John B. calls the authentic 'embracing of the not-empirical'.

But is not the realization of this suspension of the point of mediation, this ephectic stance between the two worlds, in fact a viable way of living? Can there not be a commitment to the inner life, purified of the impedimenta of the self and its desires, that does not nevertheless deny our involvement in self-experience and empirical reality? Murphy's failure argues that there cannot.

Is it not possible to live on the basis of a provisional commitment to the 'little world'? Can we not rehabilitate those 'beatific idols of the cave' so unjustly impugned by Plato? To maintain a silence, 'that frail partition between the ill-concealed and the ill-revealed, the clumsily false and the unavoidably so'? And, if we cannot, is it not worth living as though we might?

Saperlipopette!

2006-07-08T11:31:00.000+01:00

I happened to read a piece in the Guardian Review last week, entitled 'From Zero to Hero' (cover splash: 'Why Tintin is as good as Proust'). Apparently it's an extract from Tom McCarthy's new book, Tintin and the Secret of Literature (which despite my misgivings, I'm itching to read; the reviews are intriguing). The extract in question is a fine example of academic silliness, contriving as it does to make comparisons between the Tintin œuvre and (deep breath) Jane Austen, Henry James, Molière, Dumas, Conrad, Rabelais, Faulkner, the Brontës, Stendhal, George Eliot and Thomas Pynchon -- all in the space of two short paragraphs! Most of those comparisons have not a shred of substance to them (and I half-believe that the author had his tongue slightly in cheek when he made them), but some of them -- and some of the names that get dropped elsewhere in the article (Balzac, Dickens) -- as they thunder by do seem to bear a slight trace of the merest hint of a brush with meaningfulness. I say all this not as one of those sneery types (the sort that write dismissive letters to the Guardian Review whenever someone has the temerity to think about something *shock* in terms of something else), but as one who firmly believes that the Tintin books are great literature.

Before I forget, let me just say that one of the things in that article that irritated me unduly was the repetition of the claim (which I have read elsewhere more than once) that in The Castafiore Emerald, 'nothing whatsoever happens'. This is plainly false: plenty happens in the book; it's just that no crime happens. Even in detective literature it is not uncommon for there to be an intrigue with all the appearance of a crime but which transpires to be nothing of the sort: see, for example, the Sherlock Holmes story The Man With The Twisted Lip, among others. In The Castafiore Emerald the story of the not-crime is managed expertly with suspense and irony (as you will remember, the magpie that turns out to have been the perpetrator of the theft is subtly drawn into the first frame and then again in the last); but stuff does happen. Still, it would have been nice to be able to say, as of Waiting for Godot where, famously, 'nothing happens...twice', that in The Castafiore Emerald, 'nothing happens sixty-two times.' Missed a trick there.

Come to think of it, I would say perhaps that the basic approach of the critic here is wrong not because the comparisons are overstretched between high and low, between sublime and ridiculous; rather they fail because the Tintin books are not novels, and the collapsing together of two genres, the novel and the BD, for the purposes of criticism does neither any favours. Although certain aspects of the BD are undoubtedly modelled on novelistic techniques (as the author of the piece points out), there are (obviously) basic formal differences between the two media that demand different approaches to the portrayal of the passage of time and the unfolding of events (along with all that other stuff that goes with, like characterization and suspense and peripeteia and the interiority/exteriority interface and all that jazz).

Anyway, don't want to get into that here (I can't do narratology), so I shall proceed instead to talk about one particular aspect of the Tintin books that seems to me one of the many things that make them 'great': that is the portrayal of madness and disturbed psychological states.

Perhaps the comparison to Pynchon is not without merit: the peculiar brand of obscene surrealism that marks the Pynchonian fantasy is not so far away from certain hallucinatory sequences in Tintin. In The Crab With The Golden Claws the alcoholic Captain Haddock fantasizes that Tintin is a wine bottle and attempts to 'uncork' him -- a comical fantasy (it seems, indeed, according to one internet reviewer, to have been modelled on a scene from Chaplin's The Gold Rush), but one that is not without a sense of violent threat.

Indeed, the uneasy mix of the comedy of madness and the terror of madness (which is very like dream logic) is a defining characteristic of Hergé's particular vision. Very often comedic elements rely for their effectiveness on an underlying threat: the threat of physical harm, or more often, that of psychological harm.

This threat materializes at certain points and even, on occasion, involves our hero himself: in The Cigars of the Pharaoh, Tintin attempts to commit Philémon Siclone to an insane asylum, but instead finds himself locked up in a cell, having been taken for a madman. This particular episode made a strong impression on me when I first read it as a child; it seems to touch upon some primal terror, a terror which never becomes manifest, which is not pursued to its conclusion. And indeed, when I came to re-read the sequence later, it was of course nothing like what my memory had made it into: Tintin is only locked up for the duration of a few panels, and he escapes with his usual (very sane) aplomb and resourcefulness. The threat never escalates to the point of horror, but is suggestive enough to make an impression that is perhaps stronger and more lasting.

I can think of one episode in the Tintin books where the threat does approach horror, and that is the strange nightmare sequence in The Cigars of the Pharaoh. Tintin, having just discovered an empty sarcophagus marked with his own name, is drugged and abducted by (and this is presumably his own hallucination) bizarre Egyptian figures whose heads have been replaced by those of certain characters in the story. Tintin even sees himself as a crying baby. In the same volume, a poison dart is enough to bring on insanity in the victim -- and Hergé's peculiar vision of madness is uniquely disturbing.

In The Blue Lotus, Mr Wang's son, another victim of 'le poison qui rend fou', cheerfully informs those he meets that it will be necessary for him to chop off their heads in order for them to find the path to truth. The sense of threat here is difficult to define: the madman is at the same time a murderous religious fanatic and an exuberant, child-like player of games.

And Hergé's madman are a cheery lot: they are often portrayed dancing, skipping and singing songs. The function of songs in the Tintin œuvre might, indeed, be fruitfully compared to Pynchon; I'm thinking in particular of the popular, often obscene, songs that keep intruding on the narrative in Gravity's Rainbow.

Another point of reference that comes to mind is Hoffman's Der Sandmann (a story with which no student of psychoanalysis is unfamiliar): Philémon Siclone attempts to murder Tintin (the attack is carried out in that same childlike way as the one in The Blue Lotus), and, having been disarmed by our hero, protests that it was 'the eyes, the eyes' that made him do it. Those eyes, it turns out, belong to the hypnotist Fakir, the same one who later in the story conspires to get Tintin committed to the insane asylum.

Speaking of Tintin and Proust, for a long time I was labouring under the misapprehension that the twee-est of twee swearwords, 'saperlipopette', was a hapax of Hergé's, since I had only ever come across it in Tintin books. I was disabused of this belief when some time later I stumbled upon a second example of this ejaculation (so to speak), in Proust of all places. Perhaps they're not so far apart after all...which is just as well, I suppose, since having claimed at the start that the Tintin books ought not to be compared to novels at all, I went on to, erm, compare the Tintin books to a bunch of novels. Ah well.

Toads

2006-07-07T11:30:00.000+01:00

After several months of trying to 'use my wit as a pitchfork, and drive the brute off', I have finally got a job.

'Ever since June', he said, 'it has been job, job, job, nothing but job. Nothing happens in the world but is specially designed to exalt me into a job. I say a job is the end of us both, or at least of me. You say no, but the beginning. I am to be a new man, you are to be a new woman, the entire sublunary excrement will turn to civet, there will be more joy in heaven over Murphy finding a job than over the billions of leather-bums that never had anything else. I need you, you only want me, you have the whip, you win.'

Beckett, Murphy

A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work. Blind and finite men, they have wished to be wiser than their God; weak and contemptible men, they have presumed to rehabilitate what their God had cursed. I, who do not profess to be a Christian, an economist or a moralist, I appeal from their judgement to that of their God; from the preachings of their religious, economics or free thought ethics, to the frightful consequences of work in capitalist society.
[...]
Jesus, in his sermon on the Mount, preached idleness: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” Jehovah the bearded and angry god, gave his worshipers the supreme example of ideal laziness; after six days of work, he rests for all eternity.

Paul Lafargue, The Right to be Lazy

NE TRAVAILLEZ JAMAIS

Mai '68 graffiti

How to do the 'modesty topos' without looking like you really mean it

2006-06-18T11:29:00.000+01:00

"For my part I am one of the number, nos numerus sumus, (we are mere ciphers): I do not deny it, I have only this of Macrobius to say for myself, Omne meum, nihil meum, 'tis all mine, and none mine. As a good housewife out of divers fleeces weaves one piece of cloth, a bee gathers wax and honey out of many flowers, and makes a new bundle of all, Floriferis ut apes in saltibus omnia libant, I have laboriously collected this cento out of divers writers, and that sine injuria, I have wronged no authors, but given every man his own.
[...]
I solve it thus. And for those other faults of barbarism, Doric dialect, extemporanean style, tautologies, apish imitation, a rhapsody of rags gathered together from several dunghills, excrements of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled out, without art, invention, judgment, wit, learning, harsh, raw, rude, fantastical, absurd, insolent, indiscreet, ill-composed, indigested, vain, scurrile, idle, dull, and dry; I confess all ('tis partly affected), thou canst not think worse of me than I do of myself. 'Tis not worth the reading, I yield it, I desire thee not to lose time in perusing so vain a subject, I should be peradventure loath myself to read him or thee so writing; 'tis not operae, pretium. All I say is this, that I have precedents for it, which Isocrates calls perfugium iis qui peccant, others as absurd, vain, idle, illiterate, &c. Nonnulli alii idem fecerunt; others have done as much, it may be more, and perhaps thou thyself, Novimus et qui te, &c. We have all our faults; scimus, et hanc, veniaim, &c.; thou censurest me, so have I done others, and may do thee, Cedimus inque vicem, &c., 'tis lex talionis, quid pro quo. Go now, censure, criticise, scoff, and rail."

--Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy ('Democritus Junior to the Reader')

They Live By Night

2006-06-13T11:29:00.000+01:00

The other night, towards the witching hour, as I sat in the drawing room idly leafing through a monograph on the naval engagements of the Second Peloponnesian War and sipping a postprandial sherry, I happened to glance up from the page to catch, out of the corner of my eye, a dark shadow moving in the area of the staircase. 'My word!' I exclaimed aloud, 'What an unusually large moth!'

I put down my pipe and took up my cane and quizzing glass, eager as I was to investigate further, and even perhaps to be able to present my findings at the next congress of the Royal Society of Lepidopterists.

I peered into the darkness of the stairwell. No moth nor winged insect of any cast could be seen to emerge from the gloom. I proceeded to mount the stair.

I barely evaded the attack. The creature swooped silently towards me with uncanny speed and manifest malevolence.

'That's no moth!' I could be heard to exclaim, 'It's a fucking bat!'

And it was: A. Fucking. Bat. I'm not making this up.

Cursing at the top of my voice, I looked around for my trusty bat-net. Remembering that I owned no such implement, I grabbed the laundry basket and made a series of flailing attempts to capture the evil thing. Bats can fly pretty fast, and they're not easy to catch when they don't want to be caught. So I ran upstairs and barricaded myself in the bedroom where I cowered in wait of the bat-banishing dawn.

Baudelaire in one of the Spleen poems compared Hope to a bat bumping her head against the ceiling and brushing against the walls with her wings. One wonders if Baudelaire had ever actually seen a bat, since in my experience they don't tend to bump into things much, having fairly well-developed spatial awareness.

The symbolism of bats relies heavily on their being nocturnal and demonic (and vampiric), of course, but another more interesting aspect of bats -- their perceived dual nature -- also comes up a lot in poetry. La Fontaine (after Aesop) uses this to amusing effect in his poem about the bat and the two weasels, in which the bat extricates herself from two sticky situations (one weasel hates mice, the other hates birds) by protesting her absolute allegiance to the one nature and her hatred of the other. The moral: wise men know to switch their allegiance when necessary.

There is, in Ovid, the association of bats with crimes against the cult of Dionysus, but also (strangely) with the spinning of wool and the spinning of stories (in Book 4 of the Metamorphoses the Minyeids get turned into bats as punishment for working on the feast day of the god). Dual nature comes into this too, since Alcithoë's story is about Salmacis and Hermaphroditus. Bacchus, angered at the Minyeids' shunning of his feast day, transforms their woven cloths into vines and the storytellers into bats. Bacchus here seems to represent the forces of madness and indistinction and unreason (posing as lawful authority) against intellect and reason. The transformation of the cloths into vines on the one hand could be said to 'bring the artwork to life', but on the other it is surely the destruction of art, the transmutation of delicate artifice into brute nature. And the bat thing? Is the punishment based on the idea that as bats, the Minyeids will no longer be able to pursue the creative arts (bats, unlike spiders, are not renowned for their technical skill); or are bats somehow signifiers for the artistic impulse that escapes the rule of authority (even that of the dark god himself)?

I also find it interesting that there seem to be unusual discrepancies in the names for bats in different languages. Flutter-mouse, bald-mouse, blind-mouse, evening-thing, leather-wing, &c. The English word 'bat', perplexingly, seems to derive from 'bacon'. See here, for example. Generally, there doesn't seem to be much agreement about what bats mean, and why: they are, to say the least, flitting signifiers.

Anyway, for all I know, the bat is still in the house. I'm hoping that next time it chooses to attack, it'll go for the flat-mate and not me.