Complacencies of the Peignoir: Literature, Poetics, Music, Film

New Poem

2011-01-13T14:05:00.004-06:00

THE ARTIST

—for Jim Tompkins

With paint and clay he invites the drala to stay.
He feels the precise curve of the real,
the empty space changing and charging the seen with
new breath, a pulse, a vigor, now, now…

His work reminds us that real work
is the diligent engrossed gamesmanship of the child at play,
a dot of attention effortlessly right on the spot.

The artist embraces the most difficult discipline of rediscovering
the child’s eye: to see again the wonder,
its bright colors, its languorous shades,
the delightful shock of its shape,
the texture of magic that is
the visceral feel of each unique thing,
its cosmic signature:

Luminescent lines lingering
to caress the soft flesh of the visible.

The artist’s heart
in his fingertips’ touch
imprints his work with a secret code.
We are inspired to look, and look again

to see

an infinite and unexpected fiesta:

the blueness of blue
the yellowness of yellow
the redness of red—

Colors whirl and pierce the eye
with a strange familiarity.

The painting and the ceramic bowl whisper
with the breath that blows in the wind.

Sibilant silences sound us
to be where and how and as we are.

By Request: A Close Reading of "An Old Man Asleep" (Lifted from the Diss)

2010-07-12T22:45:00.005-05:00

The opening poem of Wallace Stevens's The Rock, “An Old Man Asleep,” is a short poem of three two-line stanzas:

The two worlds are asleep, are sleeping, now.
A dumb sense possesses them in a kind of solemnity.

The self and the earth—your thoughts, your feelings,
Your beliefs and disbeliefs, your whole peculiar plot;

The redness of your reddish chestnut trees,
The river motion, the drowsy motion of the river R.

In this compact, exquisitely constructed opening to the volume, the rhythm of the verse reinforces formally the main thematic drama of the poem: a dichotomy—the “two worlds” of line one, further specified in the first line of the second stanza to be the “self” and the “earth”—drowsily transforms into a mysterious unity both subjective and objective, cosmic and worldly. The rhythm of the first line encapsulates this overall formal effect, as the initial caesura enacts on the level of temporal sound the sense of a dichotomy between two remarkably similar but nevertheless distinct verbal entities, “are asleep” and “are sleeping,” while the second caesura literally creates a temporal space in which the collapsing of this dichotomy—rhythmic and verbal at once—can take place in the present “now” of the poem. Additionally, the movement from “asleep” to “sleeping,” from an adjective—a settled state—to a participle—a verb-form inflected with motion—evokes in this very first line of the poem what the poem as a whole is most deeply “about.” By the end of the poem, “The river motion, the drowsy motion of the river R,” a line that simultaneously concludes and tropes the poem in its entirety, has disrupted any settled state comfortable with resting in dichotomies like self and earth (imagination and reality), replacing it with a mysterious motion that, though at best fleetingly grasped only through the remnants of the previously secure dichotomy, manages to point to an elusive cosmic presence at the heart of being.

The most surprising moment in the poem, a poetic act that encapsulates the mysterious disruption of habitual awareness that the poem achieves, is the sudden jump to the second-person mode of address after the dramatically appositive caesura brought about by the dash in the first line of the second stanza. With the “your,” all the more surprising because of the third-person orientation of the poem’s title, the poem and its readers overtly interpenetrate as readers are nudged out of the false conviction, reinforced by the sleepy dumb solemnity of the opening two-and-a-half lines, that they were witnessing the poem’s events from the outside as purely objective observers. Though readers are directly plunged inside the poem by the second-person “your,” where precisely they locate themselves within the poem’s terms is a complex matter. It does not appear that readers can simply identify their presence in the poem with the “self,” for it is precisely the self and the earth that are (is) equated with the various nouns associated with the “your.” A further complication: the self and the earth, the two interpenetrating worlds whose sleeping constitutes the primary action of the poem, somehow issue in both the most seemingly personal, “subjective” aspects of readers’ waking lives—thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and disbeliefs—and the apparently “objective” reddish chestnut trees. Strikingly, since they are also modified by the adjective “your,” the chestnut trees appear to be an aspect of personal possession every bit as intimate as thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and disbeliefs [I am indebted to B. J. Leggett for this insight, and in fact my overall reading of the poem borrows much from Leggett's fine study of late Stevens] . In short, the “your” is inserted into the poem in an in-motion verbal space that is neither subjective nor objective, but both. The word “plot,” which is the final word of the second stanza, vibrates with a double meaning and thereby condenses within a single word this complex motion of the poem’s merging worlds, for a “plot” can be a place where both the “objective” chestnut trees and the “subjective” thoughts, feelings, beliefs and disbeliefs are “planted.” In other words, the plot—the story—of readers’ emotional and intellectual lives is irretrievably punned with a plot of ineffable ground that is composed of both the self and the earth. In the volume as a whole, Stevens figures this ineffable ground in the image of the Rock; as the present study will claim, such a metaphorical, yet real, ground is described by many ancient and modern thinkers as the soul -- "soul" being understood in this case not as an immortal, individual, and ultimately otherworldly substance but as a tropological process inseparable from the natural world.

The two worlds, the self and the earth, the “your” and its interconnected plot of attributes, and the evocative rhythm of the poem that sets these entities in motion, all flow into the poem’s final line, which uses effects of sound to move beyond denotative logic altogether so as to evoke a cosmic presence flowing through both mind and world. As Charles Altieri writes about this final line, “Here I have to admit that the distinction [between river motion and drowsy motion] is mostly on the level of sound, since the ow sound in ‘drowsy’ so picks up and extends the o’s in the line that it takes the line itself beyond description to an affirmation of peculiar presence” (166). The peculiar flowing presence of the final line, and indeed of the poem as a whole, is enigmatically contained in the poem’s closing gesture, the “R” that undeniably puns “are” and thereby equates the poem’s mysteriously flowing river with being itself, and that perhaps serves as an emblem for Rock, thus pointing to both the volume as a whole and its overarching organizational metaphor. In its total effect, the final line makes explicit the central transformation brought about by the poem. The difficulty readers face in imagining their own presence within the poem—are they inside the poem’s two worlds or are the two worlds inside of them, and how do they and the two worlds relate to the old man whose sleep apparently encompasses all of the entities named in the poem?—leads in the final line to the dawning possibility that the “your” may point not to the reader, but to the river, the flowing mystery that both possesses and generates the various nouns of the poem. And yet, it remains difficult, when looking upstream, as it were, at the repeated appearances of “your,” not to feel personally implicated by such a term. The final line thus merges the “your” and its plot with the river R, which drops readers through to the “recognition that the mind imagining is itself being imagined” (Hillman), the preeminent recognition that Hillman’s writings about the soul seek to foster. The “your” of “An Old Man Asleep” is both an intensely personal and a mysteriously cosmic presence, both the reader of the poem and the Rock—a transpersonal psychological reality—that is inseparable from the flowing reality of the poem, the autonomous activity of the psyche that creates reality every day by means of fantasy.

A Newly Revised Poem

2010-01-26T08:37:00.003-06:00

IN THE WORLD

“Poetry has to be something more than
a conception of the mind. It has to be a
revelation of nature. Conceptions are
artificial. Perceptions are essential.”
–- Wallace Stevens

The shadowed silk of the sky
shifts into a blue that is the quintessence
of freshness, and the world, the actual living
world, is suddenly awash in meta-
phor...

The Sweet Perceptual is fully found,
not transplanted by senses apart,
for nature’s heart beats in the eyes’ throbbing core.

Space itself senses its suchness through eye
and ear, nosily circulating through blood
and cell and lung stalk, the “inner” a tissue
of wind and rain and sun and leaf…

Take me back, my green lover, my immortal soil,
for Walt Whitman loafs ahead with leaves
of grass that dance, and spark, and flame,
bright words breathing a blue freedom newly come,
the sweet merge with comrades:
river, beak, storm, root, lotus-flower cave.

My heart beats in time with the pulse of the
world, branching limbs of affection
holding me to the actual landscape:
this home, the only one I’ll ever need.

Derrida, Limited Inc., and the Rhetorical Tradition

2010-01-13T14:19:00.007-06:00

(The following essay, like my review of the Ekaterina Haskins book below, was originally composed for a graduate-school seminar presentation, and I have chosen not to revise it for its appearance here in the blogosphere. As such, it maintains both a "context specific" status (e.g., its references to the seminar as a whole) and the rhetorical strategies characteristic of a seminar presentation. Despite this, I hope the essay may be of direct interest to readers of Derrida: philosophers, literary critics, Francophiles, insomniacs.)

As came out in our discussion several weeks ago involving Wayne Booth (in which we heard from several Wayne Booths, really, and therefore examined several versions of Wayne Booth’s rhetoric of fiction), all literary criticism always already involves rhetorical moves [now, with that phrase “always already” you are hereby put on notice that we’ve entered the hall of mirrors that is postmodernism]. We discovered that any particular rhetoric of fiction is simultaneously a fiction of rhetoric. As Dr. Dupree described it, the rhetoric of literary criticism (and indeed the rhetoric of rhetoric) involves defining oneself or one’s arguments by opposing them to particular versions, or appropriations, of other thinkers and writers and their ideas. Thus, by portraying the op-position in a particular way one allows one’s own position to come into view in a persuasive manner. Far from dangerously duplicitous, this operation is simply what goes on in these larger fictions we call literary criticism and rhetorical studies – fictions that disguise themselves as meta-fictions. Readers understand theorists, and presumably theorists understand themselves, by understanding their own understanding of other people’s understanding. The ground of knowledge is therefore endlessly strewn with thinkers standing under each other.

Another way of saying this is that meaning exists in context, or that meaning arises from the rhetorical move of placing ideas in a particular context, a “context” being a matrix of interrelationships in which things (or “texts”) mean due to each other’s reflection. But how describe the meaning of this particular operation, this fiction of rhetoric that seems to involve both finding and creating contexts in which to make persuasive arguments? In other words, how get out of the chain of oppositions, of fictional appropriations, and thus somehow reveal the context of context? Do rhetors engage in a self-conscious form of rhetorical contextualizing in and through which their ideas meaningfully persuade (i.e., rhetoric as a kind of constructionism)? Or are they rather involved in a bi-directional appropriation and interpretation in which they define themselves and are defined within an endless chain of contextual moves (i.e., rhetoric as a complex blend of essentialism and constructionism)? Or to put it another way: how is it that language allows us simultaneously to find meaning by creating it and create meaning by finding it, and all of this through a signification that results from difference – from oppositions and endless interrelationships rather than static individual positivisms?

Tackling these questions is what Jacques Derrida is up to; or at least, this is my own way of putting Derrida himself in context, of making/finding meaning in Derrida’s texts, particularly in Limited Inc., the text with which I struggled. Limited Inc. is a key text in Derrida’s general program of deconstructing the metaphysics of presence upon which western thought is founded (according to Derrida). By “presence,” I am referring to what Derrida also calls logocentrism, which Jonathan Culler describes as “the orientation of philosophy toward an order of meaning – thought, truth, reason, logic, the Word – conceived as existing in itself, as foundation” (92). Derrida believes that these principles (thought, reason, the Word, etc.) are assumptions or constructs that lead to an entire edifice of oppositions through which western philosophy philosophizes. Derrida seeks to displace this foundational hierarchical opposition of presence-absence and in its place reveal the notion of differance (a Derrida-ism that encompasses difference, differing, and deferral). For Derrida, meaning results from the play of differential relations, and signification is possible because any act of language contains a kind of split self-identity that allows it to signify in a variety of contexts: language is iterable, as Derrida terms it, meaning that any act of language can be cited, parodied, imitated, in short, placed in an illimitable number of contexts regardless of the intention of the writer/speaker or the position of the reader/listener. Derrida’s somewhat paradoxical assertion is that a given instance of language is able to mean something in a particular context only because it carries within itself, due to its nature as an iterable grapheme, the possibility of additional meanings in different contexts: in other words, a multiplicity of meaning does not contradict the possibility of a particular meaning but is the very ground of this possibility. To place this idea itself in context (and Jonathan Culler again helps me here), Derrida seems to be exploring with the greatest possible rigor the structuralist principle that in the linguistic system there are only differences, without positive individual terms.

In “Signature, Event, Context,” the first essay collected in Limited Inc., this mind-bending thrust of deconstruction is brought to bear upon Austin’s theory of speech acts. Derrida uses Austin – and later Searle – as a foil through which to deconstruct intentionality as the determinative agent in the communicative act (intentionality being the present-to-itself intention of a human being to communicate a meaning). Because deconstruction involves working within the terms of a given argument and revealing the manner in which those terms contain contradictions in the very places where they confer meaning, Derrida uses Austin’s own distinction between performative and constantive utterances to demonstrate the way in which Austin ostensibly limits the role of human intentionality only to let it slip back in and retain its place as the final arbiter of meaning in communication. For Derrida, the communicative power of language results not only from the human intent to communicate but from the inherent iterability of language, the ability of any act of language to be repeated in innumerable contexts. Context thus comes largely to determine meaning, an idea that Austin also espouses. However, whereas Austin would make a given context fully knowable and manipulatable vis-à-vis human intentionality, and therefore construe the meaning of a speech act as unequivocal, Derrida views context as boundless, as incapable of being fully manipulated or mastered by human consciousness; the meaning of a communication is thus inevitably equivocal, though this should not prevent efforts to discover what Derrida calls the “differential typology of forms of iteration” – in other words, the many-sided approximations of meaning involved in a communicative act.

This engagement with speech-act theory leads Derrida to undermine the traditional distinction between written and spoken discourse, a distinction at the root of logocentrism. Derrida construes all communication (written and spoken), and indeed all experience, as reducible to iterable graphemes of experience:

Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written… can be cited, put between quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable. This does not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center or absolute anchoring. This citationality, this duplication or duplicity, this iterability of the mark is neither an accident nor an anomaly, it is that… without which a mark could not even have a function called “normal.” (12)

Communication communicates because of language’s self-differentiating identity, not because humans have a firm grasp of fully constituted meanings existing outside of language.

At first glance, the project attempted in Limited Inc. may appear gleefully to undermine the entire western rhetorical tradition. By proposing the existence of mechanisms influencing meaning that go beyond the human intention to communicate meaning, Derrida certainly complicates an art of rhetoric that, in Aristotle’s terms, involves “the faculty of discovering in the particular case the available means of persuasion.” If rhetoric seeks to understand the persuasive communication of meaning, how proceed when meaning is construed as context-bound, as forever evading the attempts of human consciousness to master it? Derrida’s insights indeed demand a radical re-visioning of the art of rhetoric. However, the death of the rhetorical tradition at Derrida’s hands has been greatly exaggerated. Derrida attempts a collapsing of sorts between the “faculty of discovering” and “the particular case.” This requires intentionality to move away from the human and become located in the art of rhetoric itself as it acts through (persuades) both rhetor(s) and audience(s). The means of meaningful persuasion reside in language; and human consciousness itself is embedded in language, from which it can never escape, even when it attempts to reflect upon itself.

Rather than being antithetical to the rhetorical tradition, Derrida’s focus in Limited Inc. can be seen as building upon Aristotle’s effort to move the art of rhetoric away from a rhetor-driven cultivation of persuasive means (seen by both Plato and Aristotle as the aim of the Sophists) to a systematic study of the manner in which persuasive means work. To the reflective, ethical endeavor initiated by Aristotle, Derrida adds a subtle analysis of the assumptions by which the western tradition communicates about communication, in other words, the means by which the field of rhetoric theorizes about the means of persuasion. To put it most strikingly: if Aristotle does not so much examine the means of persuasion as the means of the means of persuasion, Derrida opens up an investigation of the means of the means of the means of persuasion. This move adds to the art of rhetoric the importance of accounting for the differance that complicates any given event of communication and makes meaning an in-flux rather than a fixed phenomenon. For Derrida, the focus of the rhetorical enterprise shifts from a self-consciously constructing orator to a deconstructing reader-writer/listener-speaker embracing the twists and turns of language as it plays through human communication and creates ever-shifting meanings.

In reading Derrida, one can’t help but feel a bit like Lou Costello, who, upon finally grasping that who’s on first, what’s on second, and I-don’t-know’s on third, throws up his hands and admits: “I don’t even know what I’m talkin’ about!” Though we laugh at this, part of Derrida’s project is to highlight an inevitable amount of unknowingness tied to one’s discourse, and indeed tied to the very qualities of one’s discourse that persuade. By deconstructing the oppositions at the basis of western thought, Derrida seeks to shine light on the structural unconsciousness of any act of language – even as he realizes that such a deconstructive light relies on its own dark places and hidden assumptions for its illuminating power.

A New Poem

2010-01-09T15:54:00.005-06:00

VISITING THE OLD BUDDHIST TEACHER

Tracing the stone steps’
dream of the depths
of the moon,

I tucked myself in
to the warmth
of an ancient mystery:

The World.

Asleep in solitude
I awoke
to a community
of sounds
rippling with the music
of the senses:
the body’s
electric, tingling,
ineffable home.

Let the breath go,
he said.
Dissolve into open space.
Become the becoming
that you are
when you stop
trying to become.

Sacrifice is the
ultimate truth,
he said. But truth itself
must be sacrificed…

We drank tea and talked about women.

Tall and short
and young and old,
women of the sea
and women of the rose.

He confessed
a ferocious passion,
during his younger years,
for a woman
with a delicate
mole on her
lower right buttock:
like a warm chocolate flake,
he said, resting on a small hill
of silken snow.

Tea over,
we studied the Flower Sermon,
and I pondered
the muddy roots
of the lotus.

Tathata, or Suchness:
Just so. Just so.

Lawrence Durrell's "Echo"

2010-01-02T14:01:00.011-06:00

Below is one of my favorite Durrell poems, the fragile and gorgeous "Echo," which opens the 1956 edition of Durrell's Selected Poems. Read the poem out loud and notice its use of echo (rhyme), which builds to a crescendo in the final line, especially in the exquisite "unbeckonable," which overtly echoes "echo" in the very spine of the word, and in the final "bird," which nicely re-sounds the "b" from the prior word at the same time that it picks up the "word-heard" rhyme from lines 3 and 4, respectively. The poem manages to echo the ultimately inaudible ground from which language arises and to which it beautifully strains to return.

ECHO

Nothing is lost, sweet self,

Nothing is ever lost.
The unspoken word
Is not exhausted but can be heard.
Music that stains
The silence remains
O echo is everywhere, the unbeckonable bird!

A Review of Ekaterina Haskins's 'Logos and Power in Isocrates and Aristotle'

2009-12-04T18:41:00.008-06:00

[Note: the following essay was presented some years ago for a graduate course in classical rhetoric. Overcome this evening by an acute sense of nostalgia for the relatively carefree pre-dissertation days of graduate work, I've decided to post the essay on this blog. I don't have the time or energy to revise it, so it should be kept in mind that the essay was written specifically for the purpose of a class presentation, and it thus retains certain rhetorical strategies perhaps more appropriate to oral delivery than to a written essay.]

Tonight I am going to introduce to our discussion of Isocrates and of the rhetorical tradition in general some words about a chapter from Logos and Power in Isocrates and Aristotle by Ekaterina Haskins. Now, being myself an avowed Gorgianic believer in the sensual power of language, I must admit that, for me, this author’s name – Ekaterina Haskins – irresistibly conjures visions of a glamorous tennis star or perhaps even a Nabokovian nymphet. Despite this, though, Ekaterina Haskins is in fact a professor at Boston College and is one of a group of scholars whose work has facilitated what has been called a “social turn” in rhetorical studies. So, I think it is important at the outset to characterize, however broadly and imperfectly, some of the basic assumptions, the first principles, of scholars who, starting in the ‘70s and up to the present day, embrace a rhetoric of social constructionism both in their methodology and in the content of their work – the content being the view that they offer of some of the ancient rhetoricians. I turn to another scholar, Bruce McComiskey, who sums up the basic assumptions of what he calls the “new sophistic rhetoric”: “first, knowledge can only be understood within the defining context of particular cultures; second, rhetorical methods rely, at least in part, on probability, affect, and kairos; and third, this relativistic rhetoric of the right moment supports democratic power formations that depend on the invention of ethical arguments.” [notice, by the way, that last part, which is important: invention of ethical arguments, not the discovery of so-called moral truths]. For scholars accepting such basic assumptions, writing about figures from the ancient world is an activity in which the line between historical interpretation and historical appropriation not only is blurred but is in fact theoretically untenable. So, I place Haskins in this post-modern tradition in that she very self-consciously is attempting in her book to rehabilitate Isocrates and debilitate Aristotle and Plato, because she believes that re-visioning the rhetorical tradition in such a way benefits our contemporary cultural and pedagogical discourse. Like many of these scholars, she wants to have her cake (or her fruit, to be consistent with Isocrates’s metaphor for his own discourse) and eat it too in that she argues that Isocrates himself would agree that the art of rhetoric is a self-conscious process of appropriation and reinterpretation of prior discourses carried out in an effort to affect public, political discourse (Haskins will argue that what I’ve just called a process of appropriation and reinterpretation of prior discourse is, for Isocrates, an activity that is simultaneously taught and carried out by means of mimetic imitation, but I’m getting ahead of myself). I should allow Haskins to speak in her own words as to her overall purpose in the book. On page 3 of her introduction she writes:

My purpose… is not simply to reevaluate Isocrates’ contribution to the history of rhetoric. I provide a reading that compares and contrasts the texts of Isocrates and Aristotle in order to describe a more performatively grounded notion of human agency and a more socially productive approach to rhetoric than can be supported by Aristotle’s writings alone. My argument, then, promotes a historically grounded yet noncanonical conception of human agency and rhetorical performance more associated with Isocrates than Aristotle.

Now, hopefully to help us grasp what on earth this actually means – “a more performatively grounded notion of human agency and a more socially productive approach to rhetoric” – I am going to talk about the book’s second chapter, entitled “Between Poetics and Rhetoric.” I selected this chapter because, for one thing, it offers a detailed account of Antidosis, and also it deals with Plato quite extensively, and not just Aristotle (since we haven’t yet started with Aristotle, I thought that was important); also, of course, I am interested in thinking about poetics and the nature of mimesis.

As a whole, chapter 2 can be said to compare and contrast Plato/Aristotle and Isocrates in terms of their respective attitudes toward mimesis, or, to put it another way, their respective attitudes toward the Greek poetic tradition and its role in philosophical education. By making this comparison vis-à-vis mimesis, Haskins is ultimately comparing the differing views that these thinkers hold about philosophy and rhetoric. Isocrates, Haskins points out, pointedly avoids the term rhetoric, and for him philosophia seems to be synonymous with rhetoric understood in the postmodern sense as the creation of discourse. Regardless, Haskins begins with Plato, and outlines various descriptions of mimesis that Plato offers in the Republic. First off, she claims, Plato refers to mimesis as a kind of dramatic impersonation: Plato mentions the way that a rhapsode, rather than simply narrating the words of a character within a poetic fiction, speaks the words as if he were the character; Plato also suggests that anyone, not just a rhapsode, who speaks in the voice of another person imitates that person and takes on his or her character in the act of imitation. Later, in his discussion of the proper education for the guardians of the city, Plato describes mimesis as a kind of learning by imitation of behavior (so, imitation of behavior not just speech). Lastly, in Book 10, Plato appears to conceive of mimesis as two distinct phenomena: on the one hand, he refers to mimesis as the act of poetic representation in general, so, mimesis in a broad sense as the fundamental representational activity of poetry; and on the other hand, he refers to mimesis as the audience’s emotional identification with the performance. Haskins points out that this latter sense of mimesis – mimesis as the audience’s emotional identification with the performance – incorporates the earlier descriptions of mimesis as a kind of fundamental identification with the speech and behavior of another person. Further, Haskins claims that by splitting mimesis into two different entities – poetic representation, on the one hand, and audience identification, on the other – Plato splits apart poetic content and poetic style. The content, Plato implies, is presented through the poetic representation, which in theory can be apprehended purely intellectually; and the style – the use of meter and metaphor and music and dance – is solely responsible for the emotive power of poetry, poetry’s ability to put an audience in a spell so as to identify emotionally with characters. Haskins will later argue that it is Aristotle who brings this Platonic splitting apart of mimesis to its quite literally logical conclusion. Haskin claims that Aristotle, following Plato in rigidly separating poetry’s representational content from its emotive power, will both elevate the status of poetry – specifically tragedy – by making its content susceptible to purely rational apprehension, and lower the status of rhetoric by associating it with all the stylistic manipulation of human emotion formerly associated with poetry.

All this may sound terribly complicated, but fundamentally what is at issue is the way that mimesis, the way that poetry, actually works – and related to this the way that education actually works. Think of the difference between the predominantly logical apprehension and then logical re-articulation of the action imitated by a poetic work (in other words, a course taught by Dr. ------), and the act of emotionally entering into a poetic work and intellectually reflecting upon one’s own emotional involvement (a course taught by Dr. Cowan), and then, finally, consider the mimetic educational act in which I am now engaged (pretending, for not too much longer, I hope, to be a professor): in this course, we are learning what Haskins would describe as a basic Isocratean principle, the principle that teaching and learning take place not through studying some unchanging, pre-established “content” but through continual, rather unpredictable acts of imitation. Haskins argues that Platonic and, later, Aristotelian philosophy strategically privilege the first, Dr. ------ sense of mimesis so as to make mimesis purely a contemplative act removed from practical ethical deliberation within a political community – the kind of deliberation that is irretrievably an emotional, give-and-take, performative process. Haskins will argue that Isocrates does not split apart mimesis in this manner because he takes for granted the “mutually enriching relationship between nonrational identification and self-conscious reflection.” For Isocrates, according to Haskins, the representation and imitative properties of mimesis are not separable but mutually dependent and even ultimately indistinguishable. (I love Dr. ------ courses, by the way, but I think it’s undeniable that in his courses emotive response, even if it is of a fist-pounding variety, only occurs in the service of defending highly rational interpretations).

Turning finally, and before I get myself into severe trouble, to Haskins’ reading of Isocrates’s Antidosis: Haskins claims that Antidosis is a manifesto proclaiming Isocrates’s educational philosophy, an educational philosophy that views mimesis as the means and end of education, and therefore as constitutive of political identity. As Haskins writes, “Antidosis is mimetic in itself: Isocrates sets up the account of his career and his pedagogical views as a speech of self-defense in the Athenian court. Although the title and the procedure of this fictional ‘trial’ give an impression that litigation is over a property exchange, Isocrates deliberately resorts to the language of another well-publicized self-defense – Socratic Apology.” According to Haskins, Isocrates intentionally invites comparisons with Plato because one of the central purposes of Antidosis is to espouse an alternative view of philosophia quite distinct from the philosophy taught at Plato’s Academy. Isocrates not only turns the hierarchy of knowledge espoused by Plato and Aristotle on its head – for Isocrates, geometry and astrology do not constitute philosophical study but are a preparation for it – but also proposes a definition of philosophia that in effect makes it inseparable from rhetoric. Haskins quotes this passage in detail:

[T]hose whose concern is philosophy pass on to their pupils all the structures which speech (logos) employs. When they have given them experience and detailed knowledge of these, they again exercise the students and make them accustomed to hard work, and then force them to synthesize everything they have learned in order that they may have a more secure understanding and their views (doxai) may be better adapted to the right moments (kairoi). It is not possible to learn this through study, since in all activities, these opportune moments elude exact knowledge (episteme), but in general those who are particularly attentive and can understand the consequences most often apprehend them.

Philosophia for Isocrates does not involve learning timeless truths but rather learning the various structures that speech employs so that these structures can be applied to the always contingent moments that define political discourse. Put another way: for Isocrates (as Haskins sees him) so-called timeless truths are created, not discovered, by the forms of logos. Haskins argues that for Isocrates the various structures of logos are best learned through the kind of mimetic imitation that characterized traditional Greek poetic education: “A student coming to Isocrates for instruction should expect not only to memorize poetry and prose for the sake of gaining facility in speech but also to gradually become a public person whose actions are worthy of being praised in similar discourses.” For Haskins, Isocrates accepts the basic assumption of traditional poetic education (mousike) that speaking well and acting well are inseparable – by the way, assumptions also shared by the Homeric characters within traditional Greek poetry. In addition, Isocrates embraces the multiplicitous aspect of poetry, its ability to expose students to a variety of viewpoints, character types, and problematic human situations. Haskins goes on to point out that Isocrates, unlike Plato and Aristotle, does not believe that self-control and justice can be taught to someone not already possessing such qualities. However, the Isocratean mimetic practice of philosophia can foster the attempt to seek praise and honor (advantage, as Isocrates puts it) in the context of political discourse, logos politicos. By speaking/acting in an honorable manner, students of Isocrates can promote pan-Hellenic unity, and, more specifically, ensure that Athens plays a leading role in the cultivation of such Greek unity. For Isocrates, honorable or gentlemanly discourse is inherently more poetic than the kind of forensic oratory present in the courts and the assembly – thus, as Haskins puts it, Isocrates aestheticizes public address by drawing on older Greek cultural discourses (poetry and drama), and in doing so he promotes a version of philosophia in which education and civic life are inseparable. In Antidosis, Isocrates offers samples of his own discourses, which he describes as fruits, simultaneously to fashion his own identity as a writer of political discourse and to reveal what promoting pan-hellenic unity through discourse actually looks like. In sum, then, Haskins argues that unlike Plato and Aristotle, who split apart the representational and imitative aspects of mimesis so as to propagate a form of philosophical contemplation removed from the contingencies of public, political life, Isocrates reveals that the imitative aspect of mimesis is in effect the very content that is represented by mimesis in the first place: mimetic poetry involves the imitation of imitation, as it were, and thus the fostering of a knowledge of the inevitable “acting” (in both senses) involved in human life.

As someone who believes that poetry teaches us about human nature, in all its complexity, and that this knowledge is crucial for political life; and further, as someone who believes that the power of logos is not a neutral tool for cultural discourse but rather creates cultural discourse, I find Haskins’s portrayal of Isocrates compelling. Nevertheless, and as paradoxical as it may seem, I find her reading of Plato and Aristotle, a reading that negatively establishes the positive identity of Haskins’s Isocrates, to be undeniably partial. Plato’s supposed views about mimesis are entirely abstracted from the Republic. What would happen if Haskins took into account the Phaedrus, for example, where it is after all a glorious act of mythic, poetic mimesis that allows Plato to define a philosophical rhetoric? Regardless, it does seem that the view Haskins offers of Plato and Aristotle is at the very least accurate vis-à-vis the way that Plato and Aristotle are frequently interpreted. As such, her rehabilitation of the so-called Isocratean philosophia over the so-called Platonic/Aristotelian approach perhaps also pushes readers to discover the inherent Isocrateanism in Plato and Aristotle themselves.

Intellectual and Erotic Adventures

2009-10-07T11:40:00.007-05:00

INTELLECTUAL AND EROTIC ADVENTURES

A poem in honor of Leonard Cohen

“We are the order
of style, we are pure
style called to delight
a fold of the sky.”
Do you hear those I’s
dismissing themselves
in the sleek stylis-
tics of sound, the calm
matrices of un-
naming, the wild free-
dom of excessive
solitude, a bro-
ken sandal strap, a
warm guitar, and wine?

Intellectual
and erotic ad-
ventures, rise from your
hiding places in
the bare rooms of past
diligence, of craft
married to longing,
of the occult rites
of love cried away
with a smile. Then, give
over, gently, the
freedom of your pain,
the temptation of
your honor. Sing me,
L. Cohen, that song,
the one that re-sounds
“the eyes and hidden
mouths of stone and light
and water.” Thank you.

This poem has been published in Leonard Cohen You're Our Man: 75 Poets Reflect on the Poetry of Leonard Cohen. If you like this poem, please order the volume in its entirety (http://publicpoetry.wordpress.com/)

Herrick's Wild Civility

2009-09-10T20:02:00.005-05:00

I suddenly have the urge to share for no good reason one of my favorite poems from one of my favorite 17th-century poets: "Delight in Disorder" by Robert Herrick. I'm not sure how anyone can resist Herrick's poems, which repeatedly flaunt his playfully inventive praise of the manifold delights of feminine style and verve. In this particular poem, Herrick celebrates the patterned spontaneity of deliberate wildness that simultaneously characterizes both a woman's style and the poetic talent used to describe it. The most difficult kind of precision to "pull off" (pun intended, since we're talking about both poetry and female clothes) is the kind that disguises its own effortfulness by precisely positioning some imprecisions into the mix -- sprezzatura, the Italians called this kind of effortful effortlessness. Here's the poem:

A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness:
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction:
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher:
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbands to flow confusedly:
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat:
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility:
Do more bewitch me than when art
Is too precise in every part.

Whitman's Poetics of Memory in "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"

2009-08-02T12:09:00.003-05:00

“Recalling now the obscure shapes, the echoes, the sounds and sights after their sorts”:

Whitman’s Poetics of Memory in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"

As readers and critics have long intuited, Walt Whitman fancies himself the poet of the future. Eerily yet matter-of-factly, entreatingly yet confidently, Whitman’s multivalent, polymorphically-perverse poetic “I” often looks forward by employing a poetic fiction of looking backward. In other words, Whitman’s poetic voice has a tendency to speak from out of a liminal, immemorial “space” that is always already anticipating the reader. Among all of his real and imagined orientations, then, Whitman is generally future oriented – the later Whitman even exaggeratedly so.1 Perhaps because of this undeniable forward thrust of Whitman’s poetry, few critics have noted the richness with which some of Whitman’s poems – the Sea-Drift poems in particular – explore the complex workings of human memory. In “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” the human act of re-membering, of putting back together the “thousand warbling echoes” (392) of the lived-in past, merges with the self-reflective poetic act. Whitman’s poem thus offers readers a poetics of memory, one that remembers the act of remembering, as it were, and in so doing reveals memory itself to be an inherently poetic activity: memory as poiesis. If the late Whitman views the future as an abstract locus of poetic and democratic revolutions, the earlier Whitman sees the past as an imaginative topos where loss and desire come together to form the poetic impulse. To sing the poet’s memorial engagement with the past, Whitman’s poem implies, is to confront the “pains and joys” (388) of Love and Death, those two ultimately inseparable primal realities at the heart of the human condition.

Edward Hirsch insightfully claims that “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” formally creates the “very rhythm of a singular reminiscence emerging out of the depths of mind… Whitman creates through the rhetorical rhythm of these lines the very urgency of fundamental memory triggered and issuing forth” (22). Hirsch does not specifically name the prosodic techniques in Whitman’s poem that “loosen the intellect for reverie” (Hirsch 22), that rhythmically rock the reader back and forth into a kind of active dream state that is the sine qua non of memory as poiesis, but some of these techniques can indeed be made explicit. Rhythm in free verse, though subtle and seemingly immune to formal analysis, nevertheless results from precise poetic effects. The anaphora of the first three lines (“Out of”) combines with internal metrical echoes – note the dactyl plus trochee pattern that splits the ten-syllable first line into two echoing, mirroring halves, thus creating in effect the ghost of a caesura in the medial position ("Out of the cradle endlessly rocking"); the dactyl-trochee pattern recurs at the end of the second line (“musical shuttle”) – to create a sense of regularity within difference that immediately evokes in the first three lines the calm movement, the dreamy activity that the poem as a whole describes. Additionally the rapid flights of human memory, which proceed not logically but “[a]s a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing” (388), are imitated by an incredible prepositional energy released by the first word of consecutive lines: Out, Over, Down, Up, and From variously flitter about as the opening words of the first fifteen lines. As James Hillman claims in his psycho-linguistic analysis of the poetic imagination, prepositions both precisely position the reader in an imaginative scene and make propositions about the relational matrices at work within (or alongside, or underneath…) that scene. Hillman writes: “So, we never seem to catch imagination operating on its own and we never can circumscribe its place because it works through, behind, within, upon, below our faculties. An overtone and undersense: is imagination prepositional?” (175) The prepositions in Whitman’s poem indirectly suggest through the poem’s manner of proceeding that memory is fundamentally imaginative movement, imagination rhythmically rocking back and forth so that it can prepositionally dart where its memorial whims take it.

If the formal aspects of “Out of the Cradle” imitate the ebb and flow of memory’s imaginative flights in general, the content of the poem directly recounts a specific act of memory that is complexly doubled back upon itself. The poetic voice revisits a childhood scene in which “the child / leaving his bed wander’d alone” (388) down to the sea, where he heard the mockingbird’s mournful song. The poetic voice thus conjures up his reminiscence

From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,
From your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings I heard,
From under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with tears,
From those beginning notes of yearning and love there in the mist. (388)

In the line “From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,” “memories” functions in an ambiguous, double sense: on the one hand, it refers to the poetic voice’s memories of the bird that he heard as a child down by the sea; on the other hand, though, the “memories of the bird” must be taken as the bird’s own memories of his vanished loved one, the content of the bird’s song. The poet is therefore remembering the bird’s memories, turning memory upon itself so that its imaginal ground can be recovered and re-membered. In the last four lines of the first stanza, memory’s double movement is so successful that the poetic voice becomes indistinguishable from his childhood past. In the hands of the poet, memory unites dream and action so as to bring the past directly into the present of the poem:

A man, yet by these tears a little boy again,
Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves,
I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter,
Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them,
A reminiscence sing. (388)

Note that the past and present are united by the poet “by these tears,” as if memory remembered itself only by recollecting the timeless ache in its heart. The above final lines of the first stanza also initiate a process in which the poet’s own song merges with the song of the bird. From the “beginning notes of yearning and love” sung by the bird in memorial longing for his mate, the poet sings the “pains and joys” of memory writ large. For the rest of the poem, the poet and the bird, the rememberer and the memory, remain virtually indistinguishable.

As absorbed and translated by the poet, the song of the bird expresses yearning for the bird’s mate, now vanished. Because of the present absence of the beloved, the past becomes the “object” of the bird’s loss and desire, the place simultaneously out of which and to which his mournful memory sings. In an apostrophe that contains one of the most stunning uses of epizeuxis ever utilized by a bird (much less a poet), Whitman’s bird addresses the past directly:

O past! O happy life! O song of joy!
In the air, in the woods, over fields,
Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved!
But my mate no more, no more with me!
We two together no more. (392)

The haunting past participle “Loved!” reveals the interrelationship between loss and desire as the fundamental ground of memory. The bird desires a lost object, and the loss of the object issues in the bird’s desire – from this irresolvable tension memory attempts to recreate the past in the present. Strikingly, while the bird’s song directly embodies this movement of memory through the circuits of loss-desire, the poet’s attempt to remember the bird’s song and re-create it in the present of the poem indirectly communicates such a movement of memory – in this regard, the poet’s skillful use of onomatopoeia serves not only as a poetic technique but also as a metaphor for an act of memory that seeks in essence to imitate the past and thereby re-call it in the present. Readers thus experience the act of memory in both the content and the process of the poem.

The act of remembering appears successful for the poet, who again becomes exultingly inseparable from the boyhood self who directly witnessed the bird’s memorial “aria”:

The boy ecstatic, with his bare feet the waves, with his hair the atmosphere dallying.
The love in the heart long pent, now loose, now at last tumultuously bursting,
The aria’s meaning, the ears, the soul, swiftly depositing,
The strange tears down the cheeks coursing,
The colloquy there, the trio, each uttering,
The undertone, the savage old mother incessantly crying,
To the boy’s soul’s questions sullenly timing, some drown’d secret hissing,
To the outsetting bard.

In his ability in and through language to articulate the stirring of memory, or, better put, in his ability to singmemory, the poet discovers a sense of poetic vocation: “Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake… A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die” (392). The ancient connection between poetry, particularly oral poetry, and memory – Mnemosyne is, after all, the mother of the Muses – is remembered by the poetic voice in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.”

In the latter stages of the poem, the sea, implicit throughout the poem as its guiding image, as indeed the “cradle endlessly rocking,” emerges explicitly as a complex trope that manages to locate within the same poetic image both the workings of memory and the work of poetic craft. The sea is both memory poeticized and poetry remembered. Mimetic of the mockingbird’s direct address to the past as the locus of loss and desire, the poet addresses the sea as the ineffable reality in which the interrelated mysteries of both poetry and memory resound:

O give me the clew! (it lurks in the night here somewhere,)
O if I am to have so much, let me have more!
…Are you whispering it, and have been all the time, you sea-waves?
Is that it from your liquid rims and wet sands? (393)

The sea responds with the “delicious word death,” expressing it using epizeuxis – which inevitably ties the sea’s “Death” to the bird’s “Loved!”:

Death, death, death, death, death. (393)

The poet directly connects – or fuses, as he puts it – the bird’s song with the sea’s delicious utterance, as well as with his “own songs awaked from that hour” (393). Love and death, loss and desire are the prima materia of both memory and poetry, and the sea is their imagistic “place” – a paradoxical place out of which memory and language attempt to satisfy a never-to-be-satisfied desire, whose hidden face is loss. Yet only the poet can fuse all of these realities into one delicious word, Death, a word whispered by the sea. The poetic voice in “Out of the Cradle” finally exults in the ability of poetry to name, to absorb and to translate both the workings of human memory and indeed its own workings. Where memory ends and poetry begins, however, remains an open question. Hints and indirections are no doubt whispered, now and then, by that Whitmanian trope of tropes: the sea.

1 As Roy Harvey Pearce persuasively argues, the later Whitman seeks rather unsuccessfully to transform his poetry from “archetypal autobiography” into literal prophesy. See Pearce’s “Whitman Justified: The Poet in 1860,” as reprinted in Walt Whitman: Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom.

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. Walt Whitman: Modern Critical Views. NY: Chelsea House, 1985.

Hillman, James. “Image-Sense.” In Working with Images: The Theoretical Base of
Archetypal Psychology, ed. Benjamin Sells. Connecticut: Spring Publications, 2000.

Hirsch, Edward. How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry. NY: Harvest, 1999.

Whitman, Walt. Poetry and Prose. Library of America Edition, 1996.

The Truth of Metaphor in Nietzsche and Gorgias

2009-06-01T12:19:00.000-05:00

Between Never-Never Land and the Essence of Things:

The Truth of Metaphor in Nietzsche and Gorgias

In the Western intellectual life, few figures inspire as much controversy as Gorgias of Leontini and Friedrich Nietzsche (unhappily, as he often claims) of Germany, two master stylists forever resisting fixedly falling into the categories – philosophy, poetry, sophistry – thrown at them by a Western tradition unsettled by their playfully serious provocations. Nietzsche himself directly links his work to Gorgias by claiming that, after all, the sophists, Gorgias included, were right. When Nietzsche writes that “[e]very advance in epistemology and moral knowledge has reinstated the Sophists” (The Will to Power, 233), he of course implies that his own anti-metaphysical move beyond good and evil, as the major advance in epistemology and moral knowledge, is in a fundamental sense in line with the work of the sophists.1 The precise nature of Nietzsche’s reinstatement of sophism, however, remains a matter of debate.2 Engaging in just such a debate is perhaps one way – a compelling one, I believe – to characterize and contextualize contemporary conversations and contentions in many fields of intellectual endeavor. Between the increasingly merely playful dance of differance carried out by gleefully-postmodern academics, on one side, and the increasingly reactionary and dogmatic assertions of anti-anti-foundationalists, on the other, figures such as Gorgias and Nietzsche are points of contention, usually claimed as heroes of multiplicitous invention by postmodern theorists and vilified as enemies of the good by critics of postmodernism. Perhaps, though, Gorgias and Nietzsche actually, and maybe even most radically, offer a middle way, an alternative between meaningless play and falsely-secure seriousness. This paper, in examining Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense”3 and Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen,4 seeks to trace a suggestive though by no means complete sketch of such a Nietzschean-Gorgianic middle way, a middle way that can most succinctly be described as the way of metaphor.5 Both Gorgias and Nietzsche assert the fundamentally tropological nature of human language and perception, and they thereby affirm that fitting or “true” logos is a logos that is self-aware of its non-absolute status and that, in and through this self-awareness and its concomitant “danger,” combines play and seriousness in a discourse that can serve the human good.

While Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense” utilizes imagistic and metaphorical means6 so as to disclose the unavoidably metaphorical nature of human discourse, Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen functions as a kind of praxis, a metaphor-in-action illustrating how a discourse that makes its own metaphoricity thematic can uniquely serve the human good. As such, the two texts are here treated in reverse chronological order, Nietzsche’s more theoretical text grounding the reading of Gorgias’s Helen. Such an approach overtly seeks to interpret Gorgias’s text through a Nietzschean lens; nevertheless, it certainly cannot be denied that this Nietzschean lens itself draws on and is partially constituted by the insights that Gorgias’s text makes possible. Suffice it to say, both Gorgias and Nietzsche would be at home with, and no doubt delight in, such interpretive circularity.

In “On Truth and Lying,” Nietzsche claims that, at each stage of human perception and communication, the fundamental material of perception – for Nietzsche, nerve stimuli – is translated from one medium to another, just as in metaphor two distinct entities are “falsely” – in other words, metaphorically – equated. As Nietzsche writes: “First, he [a human being] translates a nerve stimulus into an image! That is the first metaphor. Then, the image must be reshaped into a sound!7 The second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overlapping of spheres” (“Truth and Lying,” 248-249). For Nietzsche, the metaphorical activity of perception and communication necessitates that all communication, and thus all language, is always already rhetorical, for humans do not communicate reality itself but rather the relational ground in which reality is apprehended in a metaphorical manner. 8 Persuasive metaphors, and not facts, are the true unit of exchange in the human realm. “What is truth?” Nietzsche writes in a passage that deserves to be cited in full. It is

a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adorned, and after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation. Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions, worn-out metaphors without sensory impact, coins which have lost their image and now can be used only as metal, and no longer as coins. (“Truth and Lying,” 250)

Note Nietzsche’s use of metaphor – truth is “a mobile army of metaphors,” truths are “coins” – to describe the metaphorical nature of truth. Such metaphors of metaphor – Gorgias’s “Speech is a powerful lord” (Helen, 52) is another example – are true to the metaphoricity that, for Nietzsche, is unavoidable in human formulations of the truth, a metaphoricity that is apt to be forgotten when truths become “solid,” “canonical,” and “binding.” To forget the metaphoricity of truth – its poetic, rhetorical, and relational nature – requires a “lie,” one that, in taking truth not as metaphorical but as absolute, makes of truth itself an illusory kind of anti-metaphor that does not recognize its own metaphoricity and thus lies about its own truthful untruth, as it were. The seemingly paradoxical jumbling of “truth” and “lies”/“untruth” in the preceding sentence, as well as in “On Truth and Lying” itself, is purposeful, for in effect Nietzsche plays with these terms, in the process transforming them into metaphors of one another. His ultimate aim in this most Odyssean of endeavors is to illustrate that human speech is most true when it does not attempt to extricate itself from the non-absolute intersecting gradations of similarity and difference in which it is by its very nature fastened. In sum, then, despite the undeniable polemicism of both Nietzsche’s argument and the mobile army of metaphors of metaphor used to carry it out, Nietzsche does not here claim that human truths are mere fabrications and thus absolutely not true. Rather, Nietzsche suggests that truth taken absolutely is untrue insofar as it forgets or denies its ground in the “primeval faculty of human fantasy” (252).

“On Truth and Lying” goes on to argue that the human intellect – prone to arrogance and self-delusion – fashions the original intuitive metaphors of perception into concepts, those “worn-out metaphors” that “after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation” (250). Precisely because the intellect “forgets that the original intuitive metaphors are indeed metaphors and takes them for the things themselves” (252), it can build overarching conceptual structures that allow the human being to put “his actions under the rule of abstractions” (252). Such conceptual structures, though they help bring about a distinctively human world, do not ultimately satisfy what Nietzsche calls the “drive to form metaphors, that fundamental desire in man, which cannot be discounted for one moment, because that would amount to ignoring man himself” (254). The drive to form metaphors, which “rational man” both utilizes and stifles so as to form conceptual abstractions, eventually “seeks a new province for its activities… and generally finds it in myth and in art” (254). The “intuitive man,” as exemplified by the artist and the mythmaker, “constantly confuses the categories… [thus] showing the desire to shape the existing world of the wideawake person to be variegatedly irregular and disinterestedly incoherent, exciting, and eternally new, as is the world of dreams” (254). In self-consciously working with intuitive metaphors, the intuitive man rediscovers his inventive capacity and the inherent flexibility of the human world. In putting himself “under the rue of abstractions” that results when human concepts are not themselves recognized as metaphors, the rational man denies his inventive capacity and essentially severs the basis of his connection to the world.9

Because Nietzsche frequently describes the conceptual order of the rational man in undoubtedly negative terms – for example, as “a prison fortress” (254) – many a postmodern theorist has taken Nietzsche to be wholeheartedly urging the endless deconstruction of meaning, the creative artist’s inspired assault against the conceptual order propagated by the falsely secure rational man. To read Nietzsche as univocally championing intuitive man, however, is, just like reading Nietzsche as simply declaring that truth of any kind does not in fact exist, to mistake Nietzsche’s polemicism for absolutism – a move that Nietzsche himself warns against by questioning absolutist readings, even absolutist readings of non-absolutism. As Nietzsche writes when attacking rigid conceptual assumptions:

[E]ven our distinction between individual and species is anthropomorphic and does not stem from the essence of things, although we also do not dare to say that it does not correspond to it. For that would be a dogmatic assertion, and as such just as unprovable as its opposite. (249-250)

For Nietzsche, the dogmatic assertions of delusional absolutism are best combated by situating one’s discourse within a middle position that cannot run for cover toward either absolute truth or absolute meaninglessness. In the end, “On Truth and Lying” suggests that human beings, in order to rise above pure animality, cannot avoid building with concepts. Nietzsche cautions, however, that “the building must be light as gossamer” (252). Rather than taking their conceptual structures as absolute truths, conceptual artists of a Nietzschean bent remain aware of the non-absolute metaphorical base of all their concepts, remembering that “the origin of language is not a logical process, and the whole material in and with which the man of truth, the scientist, the philosopher, works and builds, stems, if not from a never-never land, in any case not from the essence of things” (249).10 Maneuvering between these two “nots” – the absolute freedom of a never-never land and the absolute truth of the essence of things – the speech-artist Gorgias demonstrates with his Encomium of Helen that a speech that makes its own metaphoricity thematic can serve the human good by experientially provoking the realization that the human truths crafted in speech can never obtain an absolute status that makes them canonical and binding in every particular situation. If, then, Nietzsche’s text points the way to how truth can be told in an extra-moral sense, Gorgias’s text exemplifies such truth-telling.

Gorgias’s ostensible task in the Encomium is “to refute those who rebuke Helen… to free the accused of blame and, having reproved her detractors as prevaricators and proved the truth, to free her from their ignorance” (50), a task that Gorgias carries out by arguing that, whether persuaded by fate, force, logos, or love, Helen possessed zero freedom and therefore deserves zero blame. However, the stated task of proving “the truth” proves problematic because, from the Encomium’s opening lines, the Gorgianic notion of truth is anything but straightforward. Though Gorgias claims that truth is becoming to a speech (50), the overall category of the “becoming” – fitting, ordered, cosmic (class lecture) – is primary, while truth, as in essence a species of the larger genus “becoming,” is secondary. Further, Gorgias almost immediately revises his initially stated goal of proving the truth: “I shall go on to the beginning of my future speech, and I shall set forth the causes through which it was likely that Helen’s voyage to Troy should take place” (51). In a Gorgianic cosmos in which absolute knowledge is not possible – “it is not easy for [humans] to recall the past nor to consider the present nor to predict the future” (52) – the very idea of the truth, it seems, is supplanted by the likely. Even more than the slippery nature of the Gorgianic conception of truth, though, the following statement calls into question Gorgias’s stated purpose in the Encomium: “All who have and do persuade people of things do so by molding a false argument” (52). The inclusion of both past and present verb tenses suggests that, even as Gorgias argues that Alexander used a false argument to persuade Helen to accompany him to Troy, Gorgias himself acknowledges that this very argument taking place in theEncomium is itself false! No wonder that Gorgias’s claim in the Encomium’s final line that it is a “diversion” is often taken as an acknowledgment that Gorgias, as a precursor to postmodernism, realizes that his discourse inevitably contradicts itself and in effect unsays the very possibility of its own saying.

Does Gorgias really want to persuade his audience to believe that Helen is innocent of all blame – in other words, is Gorgias being serious? Or, is the Encomium a mere diversion and therefore not really concerned with persuading the audience of anything – in other words, is Gorgias being playful? The additional possibility that Gorgias’s Encomium enacts a serious form of play from a Nietzschean middle position arises upon considering that by not believing Gorgias his audience experientially discovers the following: speech may indeed be “a powerful lord” (52), but it is not all-powerful. The freedom to disbelieve even the most incantatory, spellbinding speech is directly provoked by Gorgias’s hard-to-believe, though powerfully rendered, argument. To not believe Gorgias’s stated argument is to recognize that the Encomium is most fundamentally a speech about speech in which Gorgias highlights the metaphorical nature of speech. Like Nietzsche, Gorgias most effectively demonstrates the tropological nature of speech when speaking about speech itself in metaphorical terms. After metaphorically defining speech as a “powerful lord” (52), Gorgias goes on to equate speech’s power with, in turn, poetry and sacred incantations. As he remarks upon making these metaphorical shifts, “But come, I shall turn from one argument [logos] to another” (52). Indeed, Gorgias in effect turns the metaphorical power of speech upon itself, trying to capture the ever-flowing creativity of speech within specific moments of creative verbal expression. For Gorgias, as for Nietzsche,logos is metaphor, and thus perhaps Gorgias’s seemingly contradictory claim that all persuasion involves “molding a false argument” is not that contradictory after all. For what else is metaphor but a “false argument,” one that, as Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying” points out, is all-too-often taken as a literal truth. In such a reading, Gorgias’s argument as a whole, precisely in its falseness, serves as an overarching metaphor of metaphor. By disclosing persuasion as metaphorical, Gorgias does not claim that, because of its failure to anchor itself within absolute truth, human discourse is therefore meaningless. He does, however, imply that by seeing that the nature of speech is metaphorical and not absolute, an audience experiences the freedom to evaluate human speech as more or less “becoming” for particular human communities and particular occasions. By not believing that Helen was persuaded by all-powerful speech, Gorgias’s audience comes to believe in their own freedom to avoid “unbecoming” persuasions.

In conclusion, the Nietzschean and Gorgianic texts discussed above reveal that working with intuitive metaphors recognized as metaphors allows humans to rediscover the inventive capacity at the root of their most fundamental linguistic and perceptual interactions with the world. Such a rediscovery promotes an increased sensitivity to the possibilities inherent in any particular human situation, and thus increases human freedom. Even the most buttressed conceptual fortresses, and even the most incantatory speeches seeking to force one into unbecoming belief, cannot enjoy absolute rule when their own ground is disclosed to be the ever-shifting ground – the human ground – of metaphor.

Work Cited

Consigny, Scott. Gorgias: Sophist and Artist. Columbia, South Carolina: University of
South Carolina Press, 2001.

de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1979.

Gorgias. Encomium of Helen. In The Older Sophists. Ed. Rosamond Kent Sprague. Columbia,
South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1972.

Grassi, Ernesto. Rhetoric as Philosophy. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University
Press, 2001.

Heller, Erich. The Importance of Nietzsche. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press,
1988.

Krell, David Farrell. Infectious Nietzsche. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1996.

Magnus, Bernd., and Kathleen M. Higgins. “Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to
Nietzsche.” The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche. Eds. Bernd Magnus and Kathleen
Higgins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

McComiskey, Bruce. Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern
Illinois University Press, 2002.

Nehamas, Alexander. Nietzsche: Life As Literature. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1985.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense.” In Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language. Ed. and Trans. Sander Gilman, Carole Blair, and David Parent.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. 246-258.
---The Will to Power. Tr. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage
Books, 1968.

Sallis, John. Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy. Chicago, Illinois: University of
Chicago Press, 1991.

Thomas, Douglas. Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically. New York, NY: The Guilford Press, 1999.

White, Alan. Within Nietzsche’s Labyrinth. New York, NY: Routledge, 1990.

Notes

1 For a helpful discussion of sophism as it relates to Nietzsche’s work, see Douglas Thomas’s Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically (especially 51-93). Thomas writes of sophism that it “marks an important transformation from the study of rhetoric as techne, the fairly straightforward study of particular structures and aspects of argument, to the study of rhetoric as imitation or style. Sophistic rhetoric became a means of imparting a style of rhetoric that challenged both long-held beliefs about the nature of the world, the physis, and challenged the moral foundations of Greek culture” (53).

2 A debate, moreover, that essentially takes place on two fronts: scholarship (usually occurring in philosophy departments) concerning Nietzsche’s work per se, particularly his perspectivism; and scholarship (usually taking place in English and communications departments) directly involving the sophists. Regarding the former, Nehamas goes so far as to claim that the problem of Nietzsche’s perspectivism is essentially the challenge confronting all readers of Nietzsche’s work (see Nehamas, 1). In one way or another, determining whether or not Nietzsche is an utter relativist or a relative relativist – and therefore what the nature of Nietzsche’s reinstatemet of the sophists might be – requires grappling with his perspectivism. In claiming that Nietzsche’s perspectivism maintains both that no single perspective is absolute and that nevertheless some perspectives are better than others, Alan White maintains a middle position (Nietzschean that he is, he calls it a Dionysian affirmation of this world) similar to the one attributed to Nietzsche in this paper (see White, especially 3-14). White nicely characterizes the two positions that he seeks to avoid: “I attribute to Nietzsche a perspectivism that avoids both the metaphysical extreme of objectivism or positivism – the insistence that we make epistemic progress by relying on facts while avoiding interpretations – and the postmetaphysical alternative of relativism or idealism – the claim that there are no facts, there are only interpretations” (11). On the other front, debate about the sophists has raged within the humanities ever since the social turn in rhetorical studies, “a turn toward social constructionism and (social) epistemic rhetoric” (McComiskey, 5), took place in the 1970s and 1980s. As McComiskey puts it, “The political commitments that… scholars brought to their disciplines, as well as their concern for recovering marginalized voices in the history of rhetoric, made the sophists an obvious and rich object of analysis… In what had come to be known as ‘the sophists’ – those ancient antifoundationalists, champions of democracy, teachers of rhetoric – many scholars found a friend in the fray, ancient validation for the arguments they wanted to make about contemporary rhetoric” (5). Scholars championing the sophists as anti-foundationalists remarkably similar to many contemporary intellectuals include John Poulakos, Sharon Crowley, Susan Jarratt, and Victor Vitanza. While these (and other) scholars self-consciously blur the line between historical interpretation and historical appropriation – a line that they may indeed argue does not actually exist – Edward Schiappa, among others, argues that sophistic rhetoric as many scholars understand it is actually a “mirage—something we see because we want and need to see it – which vaporizes once carefully scutinized” (5). Regardless of whether or not its historical validity is interrogated, a “new sophistic rhetoric” has been embraced by many scholars. McComiskey succinctly summarizes three essential assumptions of the new sophistic rhetoric: “first, knowledge(s) (that is, epistemologies) can only be understood within the defining context of particular cultures; second, rhetorical methods rely, at least in part, on probability, affect, and kairos; and third, this relativistic rhetoric of the right moment supports democratic power formations that depend on the invention of ethical arguments” (13). For a more detailed discussion of controversies within Gorgianic studies specifically, see below.

3 Of Nietzsche’s posthumously-published manuscripts from the period 1872-74, “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense” is the most well-known and influential. As Magnus and Higgins point out, “The stock of “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” has risen in the eyes of many scholars over the past few decades, primarily because it analyzes truth in terms of metaphor… The essay’s striking images have also inspired reflection and commentary from contemporary literary critics” (30). Unconcerned as it is with the later Nietzschean notions of will to power and eternal return, though, “On Truth and Lying” by no means exemplifies all the twists and turns of Nietzsche’s thought in toto; nevertheless, it undeniably sums up Nietzsche’s specific ideas about rhetoric and the nature of language. As such, it proves ideal for the present inquiry, not only because the topic of rhetoric overtly brings Nietzsche into an implicit dialogue with Gorgias, but also because “rhetoric” is in many ways the nexus of contemporary academic debate about the nature of ethics, truth, language, and culture: if postmodern theorists celebrate a “new sophistic rhetoric” in which linguistic inventiveness can hail culture into being, foundationalist reactionaries hearken back to Plato’s sentiments in such dialogues as Gorgias and The Sophist as a means of claiming that rhetoric, and hence postmodernism, is nothing more than relativistic opportunism.
4 It should be noted that Gorgianic interpretation is an especially problematic endeavor because the surviving texts of Gorgias are fragmentary at best and are often transcriptions, citations, or paraphrases written by later commentators. Scott Consigny, in Gorgias: Sophist and Artist, claims that two distinct modes of reading Gorgias have arisen in response to the particular hermeneutical aporia presented by the problematic status of Gorgias’s surviving texts (see especially the chapter “Seeking the Sophist,” 1-35). On the one hand, the “subjectivist” or rhapsodic interpreters such as Eric White argue that “Gorgias sees reality as a Heraclitean flux in which every unprecedented kairotic moment is apprehensible only through subjective intuition” (Consigny, 27). Objectivist interpreters, on the other hand, argue that Gorgias most fundamentally espouses rational argumentation and the development of a scientific approach to logos. In the objectivist view, Gorgias works against traditional associations of logos with magic and witchcraft. Consigny, influenced particularly by contemporary postmodern pragmatists such as Rorty and Fish, proposes a third interpretive approach: “In order to avoid the Scylla of objectivism and the Charybdis of rhapsodism in our attempt to escape the hermeneutic aporia that we face in seeking Gorgias, I suggest that we adopt a model of interpretation that may be characterized as pragmatic, conventionalist, or ‘communitarian’ – a model adumbrated by Protagoras and developed more recently by such scholars as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Kenneth Burke, Richard Rorty, and Stanley Fish… In this model of interpretation, there is no original and determinate text to be discovered, for texts themselves are fabrications made available through the use of hermeneutic conventions. That is, there are no ‘uninterpreted texts’ that exist apart from, and prior to, interpretations. Since the texts themselves are available only through the conventions and procedures of the interpretive community, it is only within these interpretations that an author’s thought becomes available, and there is no external entity or meaning that the interpretations represent” (17-18). Consigny’s approach, which articulates the necessity of grounding one’s arguments within a specific interpretive community, undoubtedly has affinities with the “middle way” I trace in this paper. However, whereas my middle way relies heavily on a “tropist” approach to philosophical rhetoric, Consigny, Rotry et al. tend to rely more on an argumentative approach to rhetoric (for the “tropist”- “argumentative” split, see endnote number four below). By emphasizing image and metaphor, a tropist approach ultimately claims that the tropological nature of discourse exists even prior to its embodiment within particular interpretive communities. In other words, a tropist approach emphasizes the individual process of ingenious discovery arising out of the fundamentally metaphorical ground of human existence, thus claiming that particular discourses are “discovered” within the metaphorical dynamics of the world per se rather than “thought up” within the logical repartee of intellectual communities.
5 The Nietzschean/Gorgianic middle way as I present it here has strong affinities with what Timothy W. Crusius, in his Forward to Ernesto Grassi’s Rhetoric as Philosophy, calls the tropist approach, as opposed to the rhetoric-as-argument approach, to philosophical rhetoric. Crusius helpfully outlines these two “paths” characterizing rhetorical studies: “Philosophical rhetoric has taken and continues to take one of two paths, already well worn by the time the Sophists were contending with Plato and Aristotle. On the one hand, we have rhetoric as argument, represented in recent thought by Chaim Perelman, Stephen Toulmin, Wayne Booth, and James Crosswhite, among many others. For them, rhetoric is informal reasoning about issues that arise in a radically contingent and uncertain world, especially public issues, where, if sweet reason fails to address difference, contention translates all too readily into power politics and the use of force. In a world armed to the teeth and always at war or on the edge of war, one need not strain to defend a rhetoric of reason. On the other hand, we have the “tropists” of modern rhetorical theory, who see the power of language as residing more in image and metaphor than in argument. Were it not for Kenneth Burke, whose thinking is tropist…Grassi would have no serious competitor on the ingenium side of recent rhetorical thought. As it is, the two must share the stage and continue to inspire resistance to the seductive narrowing of rhetoric to informal reasoning. Rhetoric is much more than a rhetoric of good reasons; if formal reasoning depends on ingenium for its beginning points, informal reasoning surely depends on ingenium no less” (xvii-xviii). As is evident from Crusius’s discussion, Grassi locates image and metaphor as primary for the inventive faculty of ingenium (for Grassi’s discussion of the notion of ingenium as it derives from Cicero, see Grassi 8-10; for his discussion of metaphor as the basis of rhetoric and philosophy, see especially 32-34). Without ever explicitly mentioning Nietzsche, Grassi throughout his Rhetoric as Philosophy articulates a tropological conception of human perception and communication that is remarkably similar to Nietzsche’s claims in “On Truth and Lying” (see, for example, Grassi, xv, 33, 61, 65, and 89). What Grassi’s amazing little book does so successfully is trace the intellectual genealogy of the placement of metaphor at the center of human life from Cicero and Quintilian through the Italian Humanists (Pico, Bruni, and others) to Vico. All of these thinkers, according to Grassi, view metaphor not as secondary or added to a non-metaphorical primary reality, but as constituting the human reality of life in the world. Rather than serving as a possible embellishing tool of reason, metaphor as conceived by the line of thinkers Grassi discusses is actually the fundamental ground of reason. Grassi argues that without the inevitably metaphorical first principles (for the claim that all first principles are metaphorical in nature, see 33) that rational thought needs to carry out logical demonstrations (proofs) – first principles that are ingeniously “discovered” rather than rationally proven – rational thought could not do its work (see especially 21, 44, 62).

6 For a provocative discussion of Nietzsche’s style, which, in its reliance on images and metaphor, is described as “the grand style… of creative self-affirmation and world-affirmation” (60), see David Farrell Krell’s Infectious Nietzsche, particularly 56-82.

7 Two fruitful discussions of Nietzsche’s conception of language occur in Erich Heller’s “Wittgenstein and Nietzsche” (in his The Importance of Nietzsche, 141-157) and in Paul de Man’s “Rhetoric of Tropes” (in hisAllegories of Reading, 103-119).

8 In unpunlished lecture notes contemporaneous with “On Truth and Lying,” Nietzsche explicitly claims that all language is both rhetorical and metaphorical (poetic): “language is rhetoric, because it desires to convey only a doxa [opinion], not an episteme [knowledge]” (23, brackets Gilman, Blair, and Parent); “What is usually called language is actually all figuration… the tropes are not just occasionally added to words but constitute their most proper nature” (25).

9 John Sallis’s Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy, especially 9-42, investigates in the context of a detailed analysis of The Birth of Tragedy the way that, for Nietzsche, images possess the ability to open up the specificity of the world in a particularly human manner.

10 In a similar fashion, Grassi points out the disguised metaphoricity operative in the ostensibly purely rational realm of logic (i.e., the realm of the scientist and many a philosopher): “One problem, however, seems yet unsolved, namely, that an essential moment of rhetorical speech is metaphor. Can we claim that the original, archaic assertions on which rational proofs depend have a metaphorical character? Can we maintain the thesis that the archai have any connection with images as the subject of a ‘transferred’ meaning? Surprisingly enough, perhaps, we can speak about first principles only though metaphors; we speak of them as ‘premises,’ as ‘grounds,’ as ‘foundations,’ as ‘axioms.’ Even logical language must resort to metaphors, involving a transposition from the empirical realm of senses, in which ‘seeing’ and the ‘pictorial’ move to the foreground: to ‘clarify,’ to ‘gain insight,’ to ‘found,’ to ‘conclude,’ to ‘deduce.’ We also must not forget that the term ‘metaphor’ is itself a metaphor; it is derived from the verb metapherein ‘to transfer,’ which originally described a concrete activity” (33).

Seamus Heaney's 'Death of a Naturalist'

2009-05-31T17:32:00.006-05:00

Question(s): Is digging possible for a dead-naturalist?; or: How to dig from above the ground?; or: How can Antaeus best avoid his “elevation, [his] fall”?; or: Can the work of poetry (“I rhyme / To see myself, to set the darkness echoing”) turn up an imaginal ground when the poet himself is a physically ungrounded, struggling Antaeus?; or: Can poetry catch the fleeting sound of a mythical landscape (“the squelch and slap / Of soggy peat”) when the poet’s ears are plugged by a map of sociopolitical categories?; or: How does poetry proceed in/respond to a climate of what Yeats calls “intellectual violence”?

Despite its ostensible status as primarily a volume of ars poetica – a kind of imaginative excavation that simultaneously investigates and demonstrates the craft of poetry – Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist reverberates with the above variously articulated question. Though the violence in Northern Ireland to which Heaney would overtly respond in North was still a few years away when Heaney wrote Death of a Naturalist, latent political tension and a history of cultural dislocation were present in the soil worked in Heaney’s first volume of poetry. To put it another way: In Death of a Naturalist, Heaney is digging imaginary gardens of peat with real explosives in them. In response to a potentially volatile political situation, Heaney uses his squat pen to “dig” through personal and collective layers of memory in service of uncovering/creating a “personal Helicon,” a mythical Ireland that can serve as an imaginative ground for wandering – and increasingly threatened – Antaeuses: those for whom the oppositional, absolutist, grid-like logic of political ideology is not adequate for responsibly negotiating the contingencies of human life. As such, Death of a Naturalist reveals a characteristic of poetry missed by those critics who charge Heaney with irresponsibly shirking the political realm in some of his work: namely that, by creating

an order… true to the impact of external reality and… sensitive to the inner laws of the poet’s being… An order where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. An order which satisfies all that is appetitive in the intelligence and prehensile in the affections (From “Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture, in Opened Ground, pg. 417),

poetry touches upon a fundamental human activity – imagining reality – antithetical to violent political movements that require fixed views of reality in order to proceed with their bloody work. In short, poetry redresses the falsely narrow vision of political ideologies that view the world in static us-them/right-wrong terms.

Many of the poems in Death of a Naturalist both affirm the poetic vocation and express doubts as to its efficacy in a non-literary, gun-filled world. In “Digging,” even as the poet’s pen powerfully evokes three overlapping layers of time, bringing together in a single lyric moment three generations of diggers in the Heaney line (pardon the pun); and even amid the stunning onomatopoeia of “the squelch and slap / Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge” (note the placement of “edge” at the end (edge) of the slightly enjambed line), the poet hints that his work with words comes out of a felt lack, as if digging with a pen is somehow less “manly” than digging with a spade – “But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.”[1] The crisis of the poem turns upon the spade-less poet’s endeavor to find a way to “follow” ancestors at once personal and collective, ancestors who by digging into peat and bog are working a pre-political landscape, a mythical Ireland, an imaginal terrain. The final stanza provides an affirmation of the poet’s ability to work this terrain with his pen so as to unearth images of sensual specificity that nourish the collective inhabitants of a landscape. The poet discovers that joining his ancestors in digging occurs precisely through his ability to commemorate their – and his – activity: the poet digs by digging into the process of digging. The last three lines of the poem echo the opening stanza, with one change: “snug as a gun” in the first stanza gives way to “I’ll dig with it.” Thus at its end the poem both echoes its beginning and responds to it in such a way as to bring about a sense of resolution. One wonders: what else could the poet have done with his pen besides dig, and does the alternative to digging relate to the gun-like quality of the pen? In other words, is the declaration that “I’ll dig with it” a decision necessitated because the opening stanza obliquely raises a more violent alternative?

“Digging,” like Death of a Naturalist as a whole, poetically renders poetic craft. Part of this poetic rendering involves making thematic a tension concerning the role the poet can (should? must?) play when confronted with the threat of a form of violence that seeks to circumscribe personal memory and mythical landscape within reductive, factional categories. A distinction between, on the one hand, the attempt to dig into the reality-constructing wellsprings of the imagination, and on the other, the attempt to map reality rationally in the service of hierarchical sociopolitical projects (is this what a gun-like pen does?), is tentatively represented in Death of a Naturalist.[2]

[1] Granted, this line could be read in other ways. Instead of revealing an insecurity, or at least an uncertainty, in relation to poetry’s role(s) in the world, it may display the opposite sentiment. Much depends on how one reads the phrase, “men like them.” Based on the poem as a whole, which appears to express a sense of awe toward these digging men, I reject a reading that would see a derogatory quality to the poet’s assessment of his digging predecessors.

[2] In order to develop this notion I would need to spend more time with the poem “Death of a Naturalist” in particular. Violence – both in the forced dislocation of the frogspawn and in the resulting vengeful response of the frogs – plays a more overt role in this poem. Removing the frogspawn into a classroom to observe the burgeoning tadpoles echoes the violence of constructing/ manipulating sociopolitical categories. Also, “Antaeus” appears to touch upon the incipient violence involved in the abstracting, lifting-off-the-ground movement of “map thinking.”

Blogging the Bible

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Largely inspired by David Plotz's Blogging the Bible series for Slate.com, I recently decided to do what I've somehow never managed to do: pick up and actually read this mammoth book at the center of Western Culture. It's a book we all know, even if we've never deeply read it, as it willy-nilly comprises much of the intellectual, mythological, and philosophical furniture in the rooms of Western discourse. Because my primary interest is in the Bible as literature, I chose the King James Version, which, in addition to being a major poetic achievement in its own right, has been immeasurably influential in the history of literature -- from Milton to Whitman and beyond.

Below is the first installment of my reflections on the "Good Book."

Notes on the King James Version of the Bible: Genesis

Getting Started: Joseph and the Story of Interpretation

In the beginning, of course, is Genesis. How begin to characterize this unremittingly fascinating and, I must say, strange first book of the Bible? How begin to beget an interpretation of The Book that, more than any other, begat contemporary Western culture’s understanding of itself? I do not really know, and I thus admit defeat at the very start. All that I do know is this: after spending time with Genesis, I find myself caught up in its story, or rather, its stories. One of its stories, interestingly, involves a character who acknowledges that he himself is caught up in a story. I speak of Joseph, that wily, emotional, and ultimately visionary oneiric exegete. If Joseph’s initial dreams and interpretations get him into trouble with his brothers and thereby set in motion the story of his enslaved departure to Egypt, his later interpretive feats gain him his freedom and eventually pave the way for both a peaceful, mutually beneficial coexistence between the Hebrews and the Egyptians and, eventually, the joyful reconciliation of Joseph’s family. In the climactic moments of Genesis, Joseph interprets for his brothers not dreams but the events of his life – the very story that readers have been reading – in light of an overarching, divinely-wrought meta-story apprehensible primarily to him, Joseph, and secondarily to readers who have the benefit of this most ambitious of Joseph’s interpretations.

All of this is to say: When embarking upon the activity of interpreting Genesis, one must acknowledge that the very act of interpretation is thematic in the book itself. As Joseph’s story and his story about his story demonstrate, in the world of Genesis the act of interpretation is fraught with dangerous possibilities, tangled up with intersecting vicissitudes of happiness and despair, reconciliation and estrangement. Within Genesis, and for many readers outside of it, the act of interpretation inevitably constellates the most pressing and, certainly in the case of Joseph, the most poignant questions about God and human beings, and the relationship between the two. One thus embarks upon the adventure of reading and interpreting Genesis, and the Bible as a whole, with baited breath, even if, like the current reader, one goes along with William Blake and sees the history of religion as a process of “choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.”

“Do not interpretations belong to God? tell me them, I pray you” (40:8), Joseph says to his fellow prisoners, the butler and the baker, respectively, of Pharaoh. These lines deserve some thought. Joseph affirms that interpretations belong to God, but then he proceeds eagerly to render some astonishingly prophetic interpretations – the goodness or badness thereof no doubt depending upon whether one takes the perspective of the butler or the baker. Does God himself, then, interpret the dreams through Joseph? Or is Joseph’s attribution of God’s hermeneutical supremacy itself a part of Joseph’s overarching interpretive strategy? Further: Does the “them” that Joseph wants the butler and baker to tell him refer to the dreams or to their interpretations, and what is the difference between the two? The initial description of the butler’s and baker’s dreams overwhelmingly complicates the relation between dream and interpretation, suggesting that the interpretations of dreams somehow guide dreams before any post-dream interpretation has been offered, as if dreams are always already interpretations: “And they dreamed a dream both of them, each man his dream in one night, each man according to the interpretation of his dream” (40:5). However we grapple with this prismatic interpretive quagmire, it construes the interpretive act as foundational, as somehow at the center of the entire divine-human relationship that Genesis figures in complex ways.

So, here I go, my King James Version in hand, aware as a result of the above comments that the Bible I am interpreting may largely be already conditioned by my interpretations, and that I should thus attempt not only to interpret the text but, perhaps like Joseph, to interpret my own interpretations. Could it be that, despite vast evidence to the contrary, the Bible thus actually fosters interpretive humility? Maybe, but the humility that results from the notion that “interpretations belong to God” seems inevitably coupled with the possibility of limitless inflation. I shall try to steer a middle course between the two, hoping as well to achieve what Joseph apparently – and, in the context of the opening books of the Old Testament, unusually – achieved: a happy ending.

In the Beginning… God did What, Exactly? The Dualism of Genesis

The most immediate puzzle in Genesis involves making sense of the ambiguously distinct creation stories that are told in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2-3, respectively. In Genesis 1, God begins by creating the heaven and the earth, and ends by making man in his image. This last creation is described using the first burst of undeniably poetic language in the book: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (1:27). The tricolon parallelism of this passage, with its three syntactical units related to one another in a mirroring fashion, poetically emphasizes the mutuality of the God-man relationship, as if three separate but interconnected mirrors allow God to see his own reflection and call it “Man.” More specifically, the chiasm or antimetabole between the first and second units – “…in his own image, in the image of God…” – and the anastrophe of “created he him” powerfully enact the complex interpenetration that occurs in the creative imagistic transmission between God and man. The passage also notably implies that God’s image, and thus presumably God himself, is both “male and female,” and that “man” is then from the beginning man and woman. Indeed, in the previous verse God uses plural pronouns to refer both to himself and to his impending creation – “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” (1:26, italics mine). In this creation story, man – a “them” that is both “male and female” – is unquestionably the crown of creation, possessing over all other created life a dominion that mirrors God’s own dominion over his – or his and her, or simply their – creation. In sum, then, Genesis 1 presents a God whose multifaceted nature (or natures) cannot be pinned down, and whose supreme creation, a male-and-female, also avoids straightforward presentation.

Rather than clearing up the complexities of Genesis 1, Genesis 2-3 further complicates matters. From the outset, the creation account initiated in Genesis 2 seems to be a re-visioning rather than a continuation of Genesis 1. If in Genesis 1 God’s creative generations reach their fulfillment on day six with the creation of man, in Genesis 2 it appears that, after six days, God has created everything except the animals, including man: “And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground” (2:5, italics mine). In apparent contradiction of the Genesis 1 account, Genesis 2 seems to imply that it is only after resting on the seventh day that “the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (2:7). The apparent alteration, compared with Genesis 1, of the Genesis 2 placement of the temporal occurrence of man’s creation carries with it an implicit negative valence: if in 1 man was the crown of creation upon whom dominion was bestowed, in 2 he is almost an afterthought, and one who, as chapter 3 moves along, does not turn out so well – if at the end of chapter 1 God says of his creation in toto that it is very good, at the end of 3 he has punished the human component of his creation (plus the serpent) for being decidedly not so good. Further, man’s creation as portrayed in Genesis 2 – man as formed from the dust, with the breath of life breathed into his nostrils – implicates a much more material, even lugubrious kind of creation than man as created through the ineffability of the quite literally imaginative transformation of Genesis 1. And the “man” created in Genesis 2, unlike the man who is a “them” of Genesis 1, is decidedly alone, and male. In search for a proper help meet for this first man, God creates the various beasts of the field and the fowls of the air – in Genesis 1, of course, man was created after animals, not vice versa – and, eventually, after all of these have proved insufficient as a help meet and Adam names them (note: Adam himself seems to be named for the first time in this scene in which he names the animals), he creates Eve from Adam’s rib. In sum, the primordial, gendered, and apparently plural creation and creator of Genesis 1 are transformed in Genesis 2 into singular, and rather lonely, men – the term for God has changed from “God” in 1 to “LORD God” in 2-3, a translation by which the King James translators perhaps attempted to diminish the radical difference between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2-3 in regard to the conception of God (the difference in striking in the Hebrew, in which the Elohim of Genesis 1 – a plural term – is transformed into the Yahweh – a singular form – of Genesis 2-3). And if in Genesis 1 a kind of primordial harmony and trust exists between God and his image-based creation, in Genesis 2-3 the human-divine relationship is undeniably more distant, boiling over amid eruptions of punitive retribution and out-and-out mistrust. Notably, at the end of chapter 3 the LORD God banishes Adam and Eve from Eden not primarily to punish them (the punishment, involving labor pains, mortality, and other all-too-human downers, has already taken place), but to reassure himself that these untrustworthy humans will not eat of the tree of life and thus, undoing their punishment, become like Him: “And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever… Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken” (4:22-23). Note that in this passage the LORD God again refers to himself as “us,” thus echoing Genesis 1. Such echoes fade amid loud dissonance, however: in chapter 1, the “them” created by God were clearly already, and from the beginning, like God; in chapter 2-3, they move toward becoming like God by eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and they are punished for it. It almost seems as if they are being punished for trying to erase the odd contradictory revision to their story that the opening of Genesis 2 begat.

I find the various Genesis puzzles outlined above endlessly provocative. Undeniably, the opening books of Genesis leave readers wondering about the nature of God and man, and about the nature of God’s begetting. I have long pondered God’s gender, or lack thereof. More specifically, I have wondered just how a creator God, a God the Father, can create while apparently lacking, unlike any creator God before or since, mature genitalia. There are indeed, though, enticing hints that the nature of God’s cosmic creation may be sexual: “These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens” (2:4), which links up thematically with Adam’s own mode of generating – “This is the book of the generations of Adam” (5:1).[1] As Kermode and Alter put it:

2:4a raises the radical question whether heaven and earth may be the objects of God’s begetting. The word toledot is… a metaphor which, approaching the boundaries of the taboo in Israel’s strict sexual morals, carries the oblique suggestion that the cosmos may have originated in a sexual act of God. It becomes evident how daring a game the writer is playing when we consider the world from which Israelite belief wished to dissociate itself: a world characterized by natural religion, fertility rites, cyclic thinking, and sacred prostitution; a world in which the idea of creation as the product of divine intercourse was a commonplace. (41)

How striking, considering the ever-festering debates of sexual politics that are often carried out in God’s name, that God’s own sexuality should prove so problematic.

Above and beyond gender concerns, though, my overriding point of fascination with the opening of Genesis centers upon the dual creation stories that conjoin in Genesis 1-3. How reconcile God with LORD God, the created “them” with the created “man,” trusted dominion with mistrustful punishment? Put another way: How reconcile harmony and mutuality (Genesis 1) with discord and hostility (Genesis 1-3)?[2] At first, I sought help from Biblical scholarship. Unless I view Genesis as nothing more than an assemblage of irreconcilable parts, however, it does not help me much to know that the first book of the Bible is likely the work of several authors: the Jahwist (900-850 BCE) writing those sections that refer to God as YHWH; the Elohist (750-700 BCE) writing those parts when God is referred to as Elohim; and an editorial Redactor who at some point put the two – and the Hebrew Bible as a whole – together. After repeated readings, I have come to believe that the above questions are in fact engaged within the text of Genesis itself by the multiple generations of Adam, the various characters of the book – Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and many others – whose lives seem centered upon trying to solve, or at least live with, the riddle of God’s relationship to man, and the dilemma of how this relationship speaks to the purpose and meaning of harmony and discord in human life. Divinely sanctioned, indeed divinely created duality appears again and again in Genesis, each time cycling through patterns of harmony and discord, reconciliation and destruction – all within the overriding context of the similarly cycling God-human duality first expressed both explicitly and structurally in Genesis 1-3. I have in mind these dualistic pairs, especially, though there are no doubt many others: Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, the Hebrews and the Egyptians (this last duality plays out not only collectively [a collective relationship that reaches its climax, of course, in Exodus] but individually as well, often in striking instances: Sarah-Hagar [with the result: Isaac-Ishmael], Joseph-Pharaoh, Moses-his foster mother, an Egyptian princess). In each case, as in, say, the Iliad, it is difficult to disentangle human and divine will, human versus cosmic cause and effect. Is Cain naturally murderous, or did God purposely set the whole topos of brotherly tension in motion by negatively responding to Cain’s initial ritualistic offering (see 4:5)? Is Jacob’s trickery, in the first case, and his post-transformational-wrestling humility, in the second, responsible for his hostility and reconciliation, respectively, with Esau, or is God behind it all (after all, at 25:23 God prophesizes the entire situation, including its far-reaching consequences: “And the LORD said unto her [Rebekah], Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels; and the one people shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger”). Does it make sense, in these instances, to speak of a natural versus divine will or cause, or are the two one and the same? Certainly at times God’s human creatures seem to act contrary to God’s wishes (Lot’s wife, Onan, Aaron and sons [in Exodus] immediately come to mind), even if their contrariness arises from qualities inseparable from those parts of their personalities that allow them to act in ways that seem to serve God’s plans; and this suggests that a certain amount of freedom is apparently granted to humans. But where human freedom starts and divine will ends is a riddled question. In the case of Joseph and his brothers, of course, Joseph himself claims that God is the ultimate plot-maker of human life, a plot-maker mysteriously utilizing the cruelty of Joseph’s brothers to bring about a harmonious relationship between the Hebrews and Egypt and, eventually, between Joseph and his brothers themselves. In all of the above examples, then, it would appear that human fellowship (conflict between brothers being metonymic of human relationship in general) is governed by a guiding image of coexisting contradictoriness – harmony and discord, trust and mistrust – that is presented by Genesis 1-3 as a whole. Taking Genesis on its own terms, it appears that this dualistic image must be the very image of God, the image in which human beings are made and which they continue to generate anew in their relationships with one another and with God. For Joseph, at the end of Genesis, the story has ended decidedly within one spectrum of the divine duality: harmony, reconciliation, trust, and joy. Because this happy ending coincides with Joseph’s full awareness and articulation of God as the Writer of History, it provides an affirmation of God’s ultimate goodness – put another way, the end of Genesis circles back and resonates with Genesis 1. The story does not end with Joseph and with Genesis, though, but moves along. And in moving along, Exodus seemingly hearkens back to the discord, tension, and mistrust of Genesis 2-3. Throughout – and this is what I find most extraordinary – the characters appear to be not only living the story, with all its inscrutable ups and downs and twists and turns, but trying to figure it out. Perhaps God himself, if he is indeed the primary shaper of the story, is, in and through his shaping of the story, also trying to figure out just who he is. The story of God’s storytelling is thus self-reflective and self-reflexive, and this is a big part of the story. I best stop before I plunge into further heretical musings, Gnostic or otherwise.

One last caveat: as with all texts, Genesis can of course be grasped historically – in other words, as a text written in response to particular historical contingencies. Thus, and again to quote the Kermode and Alter volume, “On a deep symbolic level, this theme of the necessary triumph of the younger over the older represents, as has long been noted, one aspect of Israel’s self-awareness as the people chosen by God in preference to the older and more powerful cultures around them” (72). I have largely ignored this particular fiction of history – history as literal history – focusing instead on what I take to be the history that is most consistently figured in the Bible – mythic history, history as myth, the literalization of myth within history.

The Comedy of Genesis and Beyond

I am out of time and energy, but I include this heading in passing because I find the comic moments in Genesis exhilarating, and I look forward to more as my reading continues. I have in mind, especially: Abraham’s bargaining with God about the impending fate of Sodom and Gomorra – darkly comic, based on the content (human destruction), but infectiously exuberant on the part of Abraham, who seems to be engaging in such banter primarily for the joy of verbal repartee with God and only secondarily for concern about the folks of Sodom; Sarah’s irrepressible laughter when told by God (in the puzzling form of three men/angels – are two of the angels the same two who show up to destroy Sodom?) that she will give birth despite her old age; Moses’s fecklessness – exasperating for God – when confronting the prospect of speaking to his people on behalf of God. I say nothing for now about God himself, though there are moments that make me regard him as one of the greatest comic, or at least tragicomic, literary characters of all time. I agree with Harold Bloom, who, when discussing the all-too-human offense that God (Yahweh) appears to take in response to Sarah’s above-mentioned laughter, writes: “Who would give up this Yahweh, despite all the wailings of theologians and scholars, since they desire a less human God?” And thus, about the writer(s) of the text, I also agree with Bloom: “The Yahwist is a comic genius, working in an area where we least expect comedy” (115).

[1] Note also that Adam’s ability to beget a son “in his own likeness, after his image” (5:3) implies a similarity between Adam’s own, undeniably sexual mode of generation and God’s similarly image-reproducing act of generation.

[2] One can of course treat these questions with greater or lesser cynicism, resistance, and indignation. Here, I try to move within the text and indeed to keep an open mind. But so as cathartically to express my own habitual resistance, at least in a footnote, I quote from Christine Downing (a former professor from my days in the field of depth psychology), who writes this about the fundamental tension or duality at the heart of Christianity: “Though often angry and sometimes vindictive, this God is nevertheless said to be so unequivocally good that all evil and suffering are ascribed to human sin and failure. The way these views have supported ecological devastation, misogyny, racism, and a culture of guilt are to my mind obvious.”

Li-Young Lee's "This Room and Everything in It"

2007-12-18T17:53:00.004-06:00

“it had something to do / with death… it had something / to do with love”: The Eroticism of Memory in “This Room and Everything in It”

Li-Young Lee’s “This Room and Everything in It” explores human memory as inherently erotic, in other words, as grounded in the restless vicissitudes of human desire. The act of memory figured in Lee’s poem involves the desire to transcend desire so as to reach a state of perfection in which the fundamental connection between love and death can be remembered. In the end, though, desire slips through memory’s fragile constructions and resumes its pre-rational primacy in the “room” that is human life.

The principal trope at work in “This Room and Everything in It” centers upon the ancient art of memory, the practice of utilizing a multifaceted, imaginatively complex topos in which to store various items or facts wished to be remembered. The memorial topos, in addition to featuring a “room” of some sort – an internal dwelling through which the person practicing the art of memory could move in imagination, associating the items to be remembered with the unchanging characteristics of the room – also commonly involved a fully developed cosmology in which various divine figures were utilized as mnemonic objects. This ancient art reveals the inherent bi-directional connection between imagination and memory: humans imagine so as to remember and remember so as to imagine. In Lee’s poem, however, the art of memory, “the one thing I learned / of all the things my father tried to teach me” (49), proceeds in a seemingly inverse manner. Rather than starting with the general and unchanging, and imaginatively associating concrete particulars with it, the speaker in the poem starts with fleeting, individual erotic moments – the very moments that one would think would need to be remembered rather than would serve as the imaginative ground for an art of memory! When the speaker proclaims that “I am letting this room / and everything in it / stand for my ideas about love / and its difficulties” (49), the room and everything in it is not an architectural but an erotic space:

I’ll let your love-cries,

those spacious notes

of a moment ago,

stand for distance.

Your scent,

that scent

of spice and a wound,

I’ll let stand for mystery.

Your sunken belly

is the daily cup

of milk I drank

as a boy before morning prayer. (49)

In the traditional art of memory, various “ideas about love,” personified as gods or goddesses, would often serve as mnemonic devices; in Lee’s poem, though, ideas about love are the items that the poet wishes to remember: specifically, “distance,” “mystery,” and some idea figured in “the daily cup / of milk I drank / as a boy before morning prayer.” By reversing the associative direction of the art of memory, Lee’s poem seems to suggest that if memory itself arises out of desire, then desire can only be remembered in the form of “ideas” that allow memory the means of getting beyond its own ground so as to articulate it.

The speaker’s art of memory ostensibly comes about so that “one day, when I need / to tell myself something intelligent / about love, / I’ll close my eyes / and recall this room and everything in it” (50). On a deeper level, though, the speaker’s activity seems to be in service of fixing (i.e., making permanent) the exultation of desire that is possible in physical love: “My body is estrangement. / This desire, perfection.” In other words, the speaker marshals various “ideas about love” so as to remember the longed-for self-oblivion of physical love: the speaker longs to remember that at times of physical passion he is capable of forgetting himself. This is the “greater idea” that the speaker seeks to inscribe in and through his various ideas of love. If memory succeeds for a moment in remembering the mystery of physical passion – a mystery that “ha[s] something to do / with death… something / to do with love” – soon enough the memory is gone and must be re-discovered. This necessity of re-membering physical passion stems, according to the insight offered by Lee’s poem, from the inherent eroticism of memory, from its inseparability from human desire.

Now I’ve forgotten my

idea. The book

on the windowsill, riffled by wind…

the even-numbered pages are

the past, the odd-

numbered pages, the future.

The sun is

God, your body is milk…

useless, useless…

your cries are song, my body’s not me…

no good… my idea

has evaporated… your hair is time, your thighs are song…

it had something to do

with death… it had something

to do with love.

By the poem’s end, memory appears scattered, forgetful of or at least blurring its prior associations: both the lover’s cries and thighs become song. Desire seems to have collapsed the formerly clear ideational associations that memory had made vis-à-vis physical passion, and thus desire must in a sense remember itself anew.

Poetry Sunday

2007-12-16T14:56:00.006-06:00

Today I'd like to honor the great Lawrence Durrell, that mercurial "assassin of polish," by sharing two of his better poems. "Bitter Lemons" speaks for itself, while "Style," which I've often used in my teaching to introduce freshman to the study of poetry, is a delightful bit of ars poetica.

BITTER LEMONS

In an island of bitter lemons

Where the moon's cool fevers burn

From the dark globes of the fruit,

And the dry grass underfoot

Tortures memory and revises

Habits half a lifetime dead

Better leave the rest unsaid,

Beauty, darkness, vehemence

Let the old sea-nurses keep

Their memorials of sleep

And the Greek sea's curly head

Keep its calms like tears unshed

Keep its calms like tears unshed.

STYLE

Something like the sea,

Unlaboured momentum of water

But going somewhere,

Building and subsiding,

The busy one, the loveless.

Or the wind that slits

Forests from end to end,

Inspiriting vast audiences,

Ovations of leafy hands,

Accepting, accepting.

But neither is yet

Fine enough for the line I hunt.

The dry bony blade of the

Sword-grass might suit me

Better: an assassin of polish.

Such a bite of perfect temper

As unwary fingers provoke,

Not to be felt till later,

Turning away, to notice the thread

Of blood from its unfelt stroke.

The Return of Led Zeppelin

2007-12-13T10:37:00.005-06:00

Critics and fans alike are universally praising as a rousing success the most anticipated reunion gig in rock history, Led Zeppelin's ostensibly one-off performance Monday night at the O2 in London. Joined by the son of deceased drummer John Bonham, the three surviving members of the original quartet romped through a two-hour set and miraculously managed to live up to the mythic expectations of both aged Zep-head baby boomers and youthful converts. In an age dominated by bubble-gum pop and innocuous computer-manufactured sound -- three-minute shots of catchy mediocrity to import into one's iPod -- there's undoubtedly something exhilarating about the Robert-Johnson-on-acid primal thunder of Jimmy Page (it's easy to forget, when marveling at the sheer muscularity of Zep's recorded output, that the band features only one lead/rhythm guitar player!) and the libido-unloosed pomp of Robert Plant. And face it, for sheer spectacle value, a Zeppelin gig at this stage of the game is hard to beat: Can Robert Plant, now a grandfather, still pull off wailing about giving every inch of his love? Can Zeppelin, the band whose mammoth popularity paved the way for every Spinal-Tap rock-band cliche, overcome the seemingly inevitable fate of self-parody? (That the Led Zeppelin mythos has reached absurdly large proportions, observe that Wikipedia has an entire entry devoted to the infamous shark episode).

Apparently the answer to both questions is yes, as "Whole Lotta Love" exhilaratingly exploded from the stage during the band's first encore, and "Stairway to Heaven" -- a song whose hyper-overexposure has transformed it from mystical ineffability to pretentious comedy -- actually somehow sounded fresh. I can comment on all this because, like an estimated half a million other people, I watched the morning-after fan-filmed clips that dutifully appeared on YouTube -- only to be removed by Warner music group, then placed back on, then removed again, ad infinitum. And this brings me to the real crux of what I want to say about Zeppelin. In the wake of this overwhelmingly successful return, as they face immense pressure from fans and critics alike to take the show on the road for a world tour that industry execs estimate would be the biggest tour in rock history (the band would reportedly earn a minimum of 300 million dollars), Plant, Page, and Jones once again confront the paradox of Led Zeppelin: from the beginning of their fame in the late sixties, the band's explosive popular success has been both a response to and a perversion of what is truly special about Led Zeppelin.

In the midst of the psychedelic late sixties and early seventies, drug-drenched hippie self-exploration and social activism merged with a sudden pastoral fantasy of return -- decidedly not a Rockwellian return to conventional values and comforting archetypes, but a mystical and myth-soaked longing to uncover the hidden roots of culture in the marginal, the problematic, the strange (what Greil Marcus, writing about Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, calls "the old, weird America"). Bob Dylan likely set this pastoral turn in motion, rebelling against the prescribed role of social savior with scandalously-plugged-in high modernism (Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde), and then, as if rebelling against his own rebelling, secluding himself in rural upstate New York with his touring band (the band that would later become The Band) and plunging into obscure blues and folk material, and the Bible. A critique of a psychedelic hippie culture that itself was becoming conventional, the music that Dylan and The Band made in the basement of Big Pink (among other places) sounded as scratchy and strange as the mysterious, remarkably influential six-album Anthology of American Folk Music put together by Harry Smith in 1952 (Smith, by the way, whose parents read Madame Blavatsky and described themselves as pantheist theosophists, was a lifelong occultist, and his work as an ethnomusicologist attempted to locate within forgotten American folk and blues recordings a nascent mystical spirituality). Out of the occult laboratory of that Big Pink basement ultimately came The Band's debut, Music From Big Pink, one of the greatest albums of the sixties, an album -- along with the bootlegged Basement Tapes -- that was heard by British folk-rock groups and in turn inspired their own culture-specific pastoral creations: most notably Fairport Convention's Liege and Lief and the Kink's Village Green Preservation Society. Taken as a whole, the pastoral turn that arose out of and to some extent in rebellion against psychedelia (nota bene: drugs still played a decided role in various bands' pastoral explorations -- witness The Band's Robbie Robertson describing the Basement recordings as "a period of reefer run amok") led to some of the most moving, inventive music of the period, even if the pastoral turn itself would inevitably become all-too-conventional and hackneyed (two words: The Eagles).

Tracing lines of musical influence is of course a critical abstraction, as is naming as "pastoral" a no-doubt multifaceted phenomenon in late-sixties music. But, since every perception and insight in the world at large is made possible only by perceptual/intellectual "fictions," so an engagement with music history must proceed by means of critical fictions. Regardless, the above digression was necessary because I believe that Led Zeppelin is indeed most fruitfully appreciated when located within such a pastoral line. "Led Zeppelin" is what happens when American folk and blues influences (Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, etc., etc.) are blended with hippie psychedelic sensibilities, British/Celtic pastoral mysticism, rockabilly, classical music, and 1970's excess. There is thus a cultural and imaginative depth to Led Zeppelin that highbrow rock critics of the 70's frequently overlooked precisely because the band was so annoyingly popular (nothing bothers highbrow critics -- this one included -- like commercial success). Of course, Led Zeppelin's depth is not primarily a lyrical depth -- one does not find much sophisticated verbal wit in Zeppelin -- but neither is the strange, mystical allure of early American blues and folk recordings -- an allure codified by the likes of Harry Smith -- based on intellectual verbal sophistication. Indeed, the best of American rhythm and blues is decidedly a folk phenomenon, exuding a carnivalesque melange of coarse sexual innuendo, earthy imagery, and common-man idioms that intellectualists of all periods seem irresistibly drawn toward. Led Zeppelin, like the American folk-blues tradition as a whole, appeals to the thinking man by offering a non-verbal poetry that is based on an energy -- primarily of the earth, of the body -- that points to the same pre-linguistic mystery that, paradoxically, language both arises from and reaches toward. Pushed to the limit, thinking turns into poetry, which turns into music, which, if expressing both the roots and wings of human yearning, rocks.

Pre-linguistic mystery is of course the traditional concern of religion, and, interestingly enough, a common characteristic of the musical strand I am here outlining is its reliance upon spiritual traditions of anti-tradition. If Christianity is after all based on the Word, in other words, on the attempt to spiritualize linguistic appropriation of mystery, the marginal, heterodox spiritual influences at work in the blues-folk-rock tradition tend to the hermetic, the alchemical, the gnostic -- the attempt to use the raw materials of the imagination and the world itself to reveal the hidden spiritual depths that transcend language (including the generative language of the Master Linguist, the All-Good Creator God). Lest you think this far-fetched, as if I'm here artificially importing a scholar's interest in the occult into rock history, consider the fact that, in the early 70's, Jimmy Page, the mastermind behind Led Zeppelin, owned an occult bookshop and publishing house in London -- Equinox Booksellers and Publishers -- that specialized in alchemical lore and the Kabbalah. Furthermore, according to Wikipedia, "Page owned the Boleskine House, the former residence of occultist Aleister Crowley." In other words, Page, whose guitar mastery has frequently been associated with black magic, demonstrated during the peak of Led Zeppelin a more than passing interest in the occult.

All of these facets of Page, Plant and company tend to get obscured and even perverted by Zeppelin's massive popularity: the blues tradition of graphic sexual innuendo becomes a crude expression of adolescent, misogynistic machismo; a legitimate interest in the occult becomes easily-parodied airy (empty) mysticism; the energizing depth of the music is flattened out because of excessive airplay. Page and Plant themselves seem aware of this. Indeed, check out the various interviews of Page and Plant available on YouTube (e.g., Plant on Charlie Rose). If anything can dispel the tendency to reduce Zeppelin to the challenged mental capacities of many of their stoner, head-banging fans, it's the shocking articulateness of the two men at the center of the band: these are wise men who would make fascinating dinner companions. So, would a massive world tour further pervert what is special about Led Zeppelin, or somehow clarify it? I suspect the former, and it would seem so does Robert Plant. When asked shortly before the big reunion concert about the prospects of cashing-in with a world tour, Plant remarked: "The whole idea of being on a cavalcade of merciless repetition is not what it's all about."

One thing is certain: If Led Zeppelin's mass popularity remains a misunderstanding and perversion of the band's actual complexity, the group's enduring appeal after all these years results because there is more to Zeppelin than proto-heavy-metal screeching.

On an internet forum that I happened upon, a voice of caution spoke up to calm the frenzy of enthusiasm being expressed in the wake of the Zeppelin reunion concert. "Sorry, people, but it's not possible to go back home," the voice soberly warned. "I used to like Led Zeppelin, but then I grew up. You should too." This warning is to the point, though it misses something. It of course isn't possible to make it back home, and part of one's maturity is to recognize this hard existential fact. Nevertheless, if the recent return of Led Zeppelin proves anything, it's that home, even if forever unreachable, is still there -- an English castle shimmering in the mist, full of "fairy-goddess devil women" (to quote the recent LA Times piece about Zeppelin), wailing blues guitar, and the primal energy of sexual and spiritual mysteries. If you squint really hard, and remain open to the occasional "bustle in your hedgerow," you can see it.

Incomplete Transactions: Marianne Moore's "When I Buy Pictures"

2007-12-09T17:43:00.008-06:00

Incomplete Transactions: The Meditative Gaze in “When I Buy Pictures”

In Poetry and Criticism, Marianne Moore borrows from Joseph Conrad in an attempt to articulate the complex matrix of language, perception, and imagination that constitutes the human soul as an inherently creative reality inventing fictions in and through which to recognize both the world and itself:

“Seeing, and saying;—language is a special extension of the power of seeing, inasmuch as it can make visible not only the already visible world; but through it the invisible world of relations and affinities.” The world of the soul? Deficient as it is to define the soul, “creativeness” is perhaps as near a definition as we can get. (in Costello, 137)

For Moore, seeing and saying are part of one indissoluble imaginative act; rather than language functioning to report upon an already constituted experience, language exists as the experiential ground of the ever-circulating “relations and affinities” beneath all human fashionings of the “real.” Objectivity and subjectivity merge, for Moore, as saying it as one sees it becomes inseparable from seeing it as one says it. Language thus serves as the means of connection to oneself, others, and the world, even while it prohibits, due to its intermediary status, any direct, univocal, static knowledge.

The creative base of perception finds expression not only in the meta-poetic musings of Moore’s critical essays but also in her overall poetic project. Indeed, that prefix meta- becomes redundant, as Moore’s poetry is always simultaneously reflecting and reflecting upon its reflecting. An example of this self-reflexivity is Moore’s “When I Buy Pictures,” a poem that in its form and content demonstrates the doubleness, duplicity, and “creativeness” inherent in perception.

In the context of “When I Buy Pictures,” the concrete act of buying a picture becomes a trope for the act of perception itself. More specifically: the notion of buying a picture as a means of owning it functions as an analogue for a certain kind of perception in which appropriation of the thing perceived is the ultimate goal of the perceiver. The quest to master a concrete object through the human act of perception is, for Moore, not close enough to the ambiguous truth of the actual transaction between self and world. Instead, the opening lines of the poem serve as a foil for the notion of ownership implied in buying pictures:

or what is closer to the truth,

when I look at that of which I may regard myself as the

imaginary possessor,

Being an “imaginary possessor” of a picture – a perception – is quite different from literally possessing it; it implies an unavoidable go-between separating self and world, so that imaginary possession (possession of something by or through the imagination) becomes the most complete act of possession/perception possible. Though an object can be approached, approximated, and enjoyed in its unmasterable otherness, it can never be fully owned by the human subject who buys it. Also important in these opening lines are the two simultaneous forms of looking presented by the speaker of the poem. The speaker describes both looking at an object and looking at herself looking at it: “when I look at that of which I may regard myself as the / imaginary possessor…” In these lines “look” and “regard” occur as two parts of one complex act of seeing in which the speaker discovers both herself and an object – discovers them not in their separateness but in the mysterious place where they collude and collide. Of course, a third form of looking going on in the poem involves the reader’s gaze into the language that, through its simultaneous mirroring and projecting, contains the other forms of looking and makes imaginary possession a “visible” reality.

Does this imply a Romantic form of solipsism in which the human self swallows up the outer world in the act of perception (buying and eating both at once in a kind of capitalistic cannibalism)? The speaker of the poem, in elaborating the nature of her looking, appears to suggest this:

I fix upon what would give me pleasure in my average moments:

the satire upon curiosity in which no more is discernible

than the intensity of the mood,

The “intensity of the mood,” the flights and fancies of the speaker’s subjectivity, constitutes the limits of the discernible. However, this Romantic form of vision is immediately contradicted in the lines that follow, thus subtly bringing into question the precise location of subjectivity. Is mood a quality of a person or of a thing? Does the speaker fix upon the intensity of the mood

or quite the opposite – the old thing, the medieval decorated

hat-box

in which there are hounds with waists diminishing like the

waist of the hour-glass,

and deer and birds and seated people;

The speaker of the poem moves from regarding herself looking to examining the thing itself looked at, in this case the “medieval decorated / hat-box.” This quick, somewhat contradictory movement from one form of looking to another is common in Moore’s poetry. The move from the intensity of the mood to the “old thing” presents a shift that resists easy accommodation (appropriation) by the reader eager to understand the poem’s twistings and turnings in a logical manner. The poem presents two contrasting ways of seeing seeing that nevertheless cannot be torn asunder. To put this within the content of the poem: the speaker can only perceive herself seeing, and experience the mood attendant upon this act of seeing, in and through the concrete hat-box that she sees; and vice versa: the hat-box is only seen because she can regard herself looking at it. The intensity of the mood thus resides both in the speaker and in the hat-box itself. But there is more to the hat-box, and more to the poem, than mere epistemological musing.

Unlike the formal syllabic structure of many of Moore’s poems, “When I Buy Pictures” features unstructured free-verse that approaches prose. Also, unlike Moore’s best known poems, her complex meditations upon various animals (sleekly subtle ones like the jerboa and the plummet basilisk), “When I Buy Pictures” appears to focus more overtly on perception itself as the object of the poem. Due to these characteristics of structure and content, it is tempting to take “When I Buy Pictures” as a kind of philosophical treatise, as poetic theory thinly disguised as poetry. However, the odd list of things that follows the intrusion of the hat-box into the poem works against abstraction and creates the pleasure of bafflement that Moore prizes: the bafflement of the reader confronting the enigmatic movement of the mind amid the things of the world:

it may be no more than a square of parquetry; the literal

biography perhaps,

in letters standing well apart upon a parchment-like expanse;

an artichoke in six varieties of blue; the snipe-legged

hieroglyphic in three parts;

the silver fence protecting Adam’s grave, or Michael taking

Adam by the wrist.

Alas, Moore’s bestiary steps into this poem as well – from the earlier-mentioned hounds, deer, and birds to the description of the hieroglyphic as “snipe-legged”; and the “literal biography” is written on a parchment-like expanse – parchment originally refers to the skin of a sheep, goat, or other animal, prepared for writing on. For Moore the animals of the imagination figure into so-called literal life, and perhaps the imagination itself can be figured as a subtle animal leaping and bounding amid the interstices of human perception and language. And then comes Adam, the first human charged with bringing language to bear (so to speak) on his perception of the animals.

This complex list, introduced after the dash following “or quite the opposite,” serves as an antidote dashing the subjective mind’s illusion of mastery over the things it perceives. The list of things demands of the mind numerous associative leaps to make sense of it. As described above, the list can lead to considerations regarding the relationship of the literal and the figurative; in addition, Adam’s grave and “Michael taking / Adam by the wrist” introduces an allegorical dimension relating to the fall and to Adam viewing the history – the “literal biography” – of humanity. How exactly, though, does all this relate to “an artichoke in six varieties of blue”? Here the poem frustrates intellectual maneuvering. The meanings circulating around the list of things are potentially inexhaustible and the associations forever incomplete, though at the same time they are precisely delimited by the things found in the list. In the end, the reader is left with the things staring back at him, aware of the inherent double vision that constitutes human perception. The blue artichoke, the snipe-legged hieroglyphic, and the silver fence prohibit the poem from being reducible to diagrammatical philosophical assumptions; indeed, their insistent stare makes the poem itself a totem object provoking questions rather than answers to the enigma of human perception. No single meaning or conclusion inheres in the poem, though it appears to urge readers to look and look again, to look into one’s looking so as to see one’s reflection in the things of the world. It does this through language, which serves as a medium for seeing into seeing without disrupting the puzzling and provocative fluidity of perception.

In line with all this, the poem continues:

Too stern an intellectual emphasis upon this quality or that

detracts from one’s enjoyment.

It must not wish to disarm anything; nor may the approved

triumph easily be honored –

that which is great because something else is small.

Here Moore grounds perception (or picture looking/buying) not in understanding but in enjoyment: the eye responds to beauty rather than logical consistency. Further, Moore implies that the ultimate failure of intellectual understanding provides the enjoyment inherent in the act of looking (and reading). The elusiveness of the things of the world creates the enjoyment that sparks the interest to look at them and formulate this looking in language. In addition, Moore anticipates deconstruction by at least thirty years in seeking to displace any standard interpretation (“the approved / triumph”) invisibly based on hierarchical ordering (“that which is great because something else is small”).

The final lines of the poem brilliantly embody the quiddity of poetic looking and the double-gaze inherent in perception:

It comes to this: of whatever sort it is,

it must be “lit with piercing glances into the life of things”;

it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.

If the perception that Moore favors is “‘lit with piercing glances into the life of things,’” it therefore involves looking at an object while simultaneously seeing the object looking back. This double look in turn involves the imagination, which provides associations and fills in the gaps between the always elusive, never-finally-graspable things of the world. This process of imaginative vision is revealed in content and process in Moore’s pithy line: though the quotation marks enclosing it mark it as a source lifted from another context (Moore’s notes confirm this), they also mark the line itself as double, capable of existing in this context even while it can be lifted into another one. In other words, the line itself looks back at the poem, and therefore the reader, through its quotation marks.

“When I Buy Pictures” is a tour de force enactment of the kind of vision Moore is engaged in repeatedly throughout her poetry. Perhaps more overtly than in other poems, however, it also demonstrates the similarity between the poet’s project and the reader’s reading of it. Language as an organ of perception connects both writer and reader as they seek to glimpse the movement of the mind in its engagement with an ever-fleeting world in which it is always immersed. This act of imaginative perception through language involves a spiritual dimension – “it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.” Looking into the things of the world to glimpse the fleeting sparks of spirit that animate them and mysteriously connect them to the human requires a meditative gaze content with partial knowing. Moore contrasts this meditative approach to the world with the hard, level gaze of ownership that is blind to the piercing glance of its own subjective fantasy of objectivity looking back at it from the uncontainable things of the world.

Works Cited

Costello, Bonnie. Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1981

A Dirty Saint

2007-12-07T02:23:00.003-06:00

I've just stumbled upon an astonishing eulogy that Leonard Cohen delivered upon David Blue's untimely death in 1982. For those of you who don't know, by the way, Blue, whom I've been listening to recently, was a folkie who came of age in the same Greenwich Village scene that spawned Bob Dylan. Though typically viewed as a mere Dylan wannabe (Blue's albums in the sixties undeniably sound like they're trying to sound like Blonde on Blonde), Blue is somewhat more complicated than that -- if Blue is indeed imitating Dylan, his peer and friend, he's after all imitating a master imitator. Regardless, for an introduction to Blue, check out the title cut from his These 23 Days in September (1968), a song that masterfully utilizes a strategically-placed sitar part to evoke in words and music an occult-reading, candle-lighting Durrellian heroine (troubled and sexy, and no doubt smelling slightly of patchouli).

Cohen's eulogy, as a eulogy, stuns me. I'll certainly be writing more about Cohen in this blog, but for now this unexpected find serves as a fitting introduction. Here is a part of it:

David Blue was the peer of any singer in this country, and he knew it, and he coveted their audiences and their power, he claimed them as his rightful due. And when he could not have them, his disappointment became so dazzling, his greed assumed such purity, his appetite such honesty, and he stretched his arms so wide, that we were all able to recognize ourselves, and we fell in love with him. And as we grew older, as something in the public realm corrupted itself into irrelevance, the integrity of his ambition, the integrity of his failure, became for those who knew him, increasingly appealing, and he moved swiftly, with effortless intimacy, into the private life of anyone who recognized him, and our private lives became for him the theaters that no one would book for him, and he sang for us in hotel rooms and kitchens, and he became that poet and that gambler, and he established a defiant style to revive those soiled archetypes.

What a thrill to read a eulogy that, rather than relying on saccharine-drenched platitudes, evokes a flesh-and-blood human being striving for a little bit of complicated transcendence. Granted, an artist is here writing about another artist (and thus inevitably also about himself), but we are all of us artists of a sort, and covetousness, disappointment, greed, appetite, ambition, failure, defiance -- this is the stuff of the human condition when looked at unflinchingly, the prima materia inseparable from purity, honesty, integrity, intimacy. (I'm getting these interrelated sets of terms straight from Cohen's words.) This is not Bill Bennett elegizing a puritanical conception of virtue that cuts the latter set of highly ethical attributes away from the former set of problematic qualities, for, in Cohen's book of virtues, greed and appetite can never be wrested away from purity and integrity. As Cohen's lyrics do so well, this little eulogy plays a serious game with language so as to open up an experience of the amoral, ever-shifting ground of human gravitas. One comes away feeling a bit more alive, which, paradoxically, also means a bit closer to death. Indeed, it is of special note that Cohen's words come in response to the death of a friend. In a culture that treats death either as a dark enemy to be exercised or medicalized away, or as a dogmatically understood otherworldly highway to eternal bliss, it's no doubt important to remember that "death is the mother of beauty," an un-deconstructable mystery much larger than any system of thought that seeks to contain it. To walk around with one's eyes and entire body and brain open to death -- one's own and the person's across the room -- may be the major means of approach to all that can be momentarily majestic about human nature. It may be, as Cohen's words imply, a significant way of falling in love, and of recognizing oneself in the process. And if we never, while alive, escape the painful struggle with the tension that Cohen finds in David Blue, perhaps an ethically responsible life manages to embrace such a complicated alchemy of human desire, an existence on the front lines of one's own life. Anyway, there's some comfort in knowing that, in death, one's own greedy, defiant purity can be seen, precisely in its reckless failure, as a kind of nobility.

Here's Cohen these days, in two pictures I've pilfered from a blog created by some young admirers wishing to memorialize an evening with the man and his current muse, the singer/songwriter Anjani (seen in the second picture). Need I mention that, where Thanatos goes, Eros is never far behind.

Some Delightful Late Stevens

2007-10-31T17:24:00.002-05:00

I just discovered two late, relatively unknown Stevens poems that I've never really read before. Both manage to figure the desire I feel this evening for a clear, cool freshness, for an unexpected delight in the spontaneities of change that, if one is open to them, occur in "an element that is free" -- in other words, a desire for a vibrancy discovered rather than imposed, since

. . . to impose is not

To discover. To discover an order as of

A season, to discover summer and know it,

To discover winter and know it well, to find,

Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all,

Out of nothing to have come on major weather...

These lines are from "Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction," major Stevens, but again, these two "minor" poems that I've just found (not imposed) are slight, late -- and a Friday afternoon gift. The first, featuring a title striking even by the standards of Stevens's quirky titles, is a short, eight-line (four couplets), single sentence:

The Desire to Make Love in a Pagoda

Among the second selves, sailor, observe

The rioter that appears when things are changed,

Asserting itself in an element that is free,

In the alien freedom that such selves degustate:

In the first inch of night, the stellar summering

At three-quarters gone, the morning's prescience,

As if, alone on a mountain, it saw far-off

An innocence approaching toward its peak.

And the second:

Nuns Painting Water-Lilies

These pods are part of the growth of life within life:

Part of the unpredictable sproutings, as of

The youngest, the still fuzz-eyed, odd fleurettes,

That could come in a slight lurching of the scene,

A swerving, a tilting, a little lengthening,

A few hours more of day, the unravelling

Of a ruddier summer, a birth that fetched along

The supernatural of its origin.

Inside our queer chapeaux, we seem, on this bank,

To be part of a tissue, a clearness of the air,

That matches, today, a clearness of the mind.

It is a special day. We mumble the words

Of saints not heard until now, unnamed,

In aureoles that are over-dazzling crests. . .

We are part of a fraicheur, inaccessible

Or accessible only in the most furtive fiction.

Here's to a happy weekend for one and all! May you indulge your second selves and be open to the discovery of a few furtive fictions.

The Morality of Immorality in 'The Satanic Verses'

2007-08-03T12:17:00.000-05:00

Confronting the Great Verities of Love and Death:

The Morality of Immorality in The Satanic Verses

Rarely does a fictional character articulate a rhetorical question that interrogates not only his own narrative-specific situation but also, indirectly, the fate of the very novel in which he lives and breathes; Saladin Chamcha – recently re-humanized and thus sans hoofs, horns, and sulfurous breath – manages such a prophetic metafictional feat vis-à-vis The Satanic Verses: “‘When you’ve fallen from the sky, been abandoned by your friend, suffered police brutality, metamorphosed into a goat, lost your work as well as your wife, learned the power of hatred and regained human shape, what is there left to do but… demand your rights?’” (Rushdie, Satanic Verses 416). Saladin’s improbable catalogue, highlighted by gravity-defying survival and inter-species transmogrification, reminds one of the improbable transmutation of The Satanic Verses into the Satanic Verses Affair. In the wake of murders, a death threat, and worldwide protests, Salman Rushdie found himself demanding the rights of his novel as a novel:

At the center of the storm stands a novel, a work of fiction, one that aspires to the condition of literature. It has often seemed to me that people on all sides of the argument have lost sight of this simple fact. The Satanic Verses has been described, and treated, as a work of bad history, as an anti-religious pamphlet, as the product of an international capitalist-Jewish conspiracy, as an act of murder… as the product of a person comparable to Hitler and Attila the Hun. It felt impossible, amid such a hubbub, to insist on the fictionality of fiction. (Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands 393)

Rushdie does not deny that his novel is controversial and intentionally provocative. Fiction – especially in the case of The Satanic Verses – is far from being just fiction. Indeed, Rushdie’s fiction tends to make thematic the dialectic between imaginative ways of knowing/speaking and those discourses that posit themselves as univocally non-fictional. In Rushdie’s hands, the former typically deconstruct the latter by making them radically new, in other words, by demonstrating the metaphorical potentiality of various “truths” often taken to be anything but metaphorical. Rushdie’s fiction thus “opens new doors in our minds” (Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands 423), doors that often lead into succulent, hybridized rooms whose very existence is denied by absolutist orthodoxies. Therefore, as Rushdie suggests in the above passage, to ignore the fictional status of The Satanic Verses leads to a kind of de-contextualization in which the novel becomes equated with the very discourses – religious, political, social – whose taken-for-granted status it seeks to call into question. In other words, to ignore The Satanic Verses as a novel is at once to literalize Rushdie’s imaginative questioning into an “act of murder” (one that requires a concomitant murderous response) and also to miss the architectonically radical implications of a fictional work that attempts to interrogate the solidity of the supposedly non-fictional ground from which the violent objections to the novel arise. In sum, fully to understand what is at stake in the Satanic Verses Affair would seem to require grappling with Rushdie’s text first and foremost as a novel. As Rushdie himself urged upon the novel’s paperback publication: “The Satanic Verses must be freely available and easily affordable, if only because if it is notread and studied, then these years will have no meaning” (Rushdie, “One Thousand Days” B-8). However, such an approach – reading and studying the text as a story rather than purely a sociopolitical event – is the exception rather than the rule in Rushdie criticism.

M. Keith Booker sums up the critical milieu of Rushdie studies in general and of The Satanic Verses in particular:

Astonishingly, more than 60 books have now been published, in various languages, dealing in whole or in a large measure with the Satanic Verses affair and the issues it raised. In comparison, approximately half a dozen book-length critical discussions of Rushdie’s fiction have appeared worldwide, which gives some indication of the extent to which traditional literary scholarship on Rushdie’s work has been dwarfed by the controversy surrounding The Satanic Verses and the Islamic reaction to it. (6)1

There are good reasons, of course, for focusing on the Satanic Verses Affair as a cultural phenomenon in which the intercultural encounters prompted by reactions to the novel raise concerns about cultural stereotypes and deep-seated biases within Western discourse – concerns central not only to postcolonial theory but also to Rushdie’s novel itself. In the aftermath of the fatwa, the death-sentence pronounced upon Rushdie by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, much of the support offered to Rushdie in both the popular and the scholarly press showed, as Booker puts it, “a disturbingly blatant tendency to employ Orientalist stereotypes in describing Rushdie’s condemnation as evidence of the savagery and brutality of Khomeini in particular and Islam in general” (5). Hence, it is understandable that the Satanic Verses Affair became a “text” in its own right to which postcolonial critics could turn their attention, one that went beyond Rushdie’s text even as it intersected with it. Essays such as Anouar Majid’s “Can the Postcolonial Critic Speak?: Orientalism and the Rushdie Affair” discuss the witting and unwitting orientalism present in the discourse surrounding the Rushdie controversy. Nevertheless, salutary as it may be, much of this type of postcolonial criticism obscures the possibilities for human affirmation that are present within Rushdie’s novel as it exists as a story. Few critics have noted that, in addition to its sharp-edged, provocative flights of fancy, and alongside its undeniably dark portrait of madness, violence, and perversity, The Satanic Verses offers a story of human triumph and love grounded in a complex vision of morality.

Timothy Brennan, in a remarkable overview of the “cultural politics” of Rushdie criticism, argues that the majority of critical approaches to The Satanic Verses and its resulting Affair tend to obscure a crucial aspect of Rushdie’s authorial project. Brennan describes an authorial “persona” that runs throughout Rushdie’s fiction but has been obscured post-fatwa: “the venerable, new, proudly old-fashioned defender of the novel as a form, of the beneficent state, of tolerant public opinion, and of ethnic cross-dressing” (110). Brennan thus sees Rushdie less as a neo-liberal exhibiting a desire for “inclusion in a broadly accessible Western public sphere but wearing the mantle of filiative authenticity” (110), and more as an old-fashioned liberal pushing for “affiliation rather than filiation,” for tolerance facilitated by a beneficent state. Similarly, despite the fact that The Satanic Verses is often claimed to be postmodern fiction par excellence2, Brennan believes that Rushdie’s novel goes beyond postmodern pastiche:

We are dealing, in other words, with a metafictional compendium that unlike many of its contemporary counterparts… was resolutely nonpostmodern. Rushdie’s discovery of the world of the heart, of intimacy and conversation, is surprisingly evident and unapologetic in the 1990s. He found this intimacy first, after all, in the closing passages of The Satanic Verses. (115)

Using Brennan’s comments as a springboard, this paper attempts to locate the “world of the heart” of Rushdie’s novel within the vicissitudes of the life of Saladin Chamcha, particularly in his entanglements with love and death, eros and thanatos – entanglements that are not separate from but rather intertwined with Saladin’s ongoing negotiation with cultural identity/identities. As Rushdie writes in an essay: “Chamcha survives. He makes himself whole by returning to his roots and, more importantly, by facing up to, and learning to deal with, the great verities of love and death” (Imaginary Homelands 398). In facing up to and dealing with the great verities of love and death, Saladin achieves a relationship with himself, others, and the world at large that is supportive rather than destructive, life-affirming rather than life-denying. As such, Saladin arrives at a mode of being in the world that can best be described as “moral”; however, Saladin’s morality cannot be located in conventional notions that seek strictly to locate the moral within orthodox, dogmatic codes prescribing certain parameters of moral behavior. As Rushdie puts it, The Satanic Versesexplores a form of morality that is “internal and shifting… rather than external, divinely sanctioned, absolute” (Homelands 403). Such morality is located not within religious dogma but rather within what Rushdie calls a “secular definition of transcendence” (Homelands 420).

Saladin’s moral vision, powerfully evident in the latter parts of The Satanic Verses, is inseparable from the particular kind of morality offered by the novel (in general terms) as a literary form, as an imaginative way of engaging human life in the world. The novel’s morality, and also Saladin’s, involves a suspension of moral judgment as it is usually understood. As Milan Kundera succinctly expresses it in a discussion of the art of the novel as a literary form:

Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the viewpoint of the novel’s wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil. (7)

In the course of The Satanic Verses, Saladin Chamcha comes to recognize this morality of what is ostensibly immorality, in other words, the morality that comes with suspending the “fervid readiness to judge.” In addition to offering a “migrant’s-eye view of the world” (Homelands 394), or rather precisely in and through offering a migrant’s-eye view of the world, The Satanic Verses thus offers insight into the complex morality that arises out of a confrontation with the universally human experiences of love and death. Rushdie’s book does this most powerfully when it is read not as a multifaceted cultural event but as what it after all gloriously is – a novel.

“It all boiled down to love, reflected Saladin Chamcha in his den” (411), the narrator tells readers at the outset of Part VII of The Satanic Verses. In the passages that follow, it becomes clear that this all-important entity, love, is a polymorphous, hard-to-pin-down, primarily imaginative reality. Love is the “refractory bird of Meilhac and Halevy’s libretto for Carmen” (411), and as such it is one of the “prize specimens” in Chamcha’s Allegorical Aviary. In fact, all of the “winged metaphors” dutifully catalogued by Chamcha – “the Sweet (of youth), the Yellow (more lucky than me), Khayyam-FitzGerald’s adjectiveless Bird of Time (which has but a little way to fly, and lo! is on the Wing), and the Obscene,” the latter stemming from a delightful letter of Henry James, Sr. in which the patriarch discloses to his sons that the “‘natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters’”(411) – all of these flighty images appear to be different faces of the prism of love, “a zone in which nobody desirous of compiling a human (as opposed to robotic, Skinnerian-android) body of experience could afford to shut down operations” (411). Chamcha’s life, at least at this stage in the novel, has involved a fourfold love: “Of the things of the mind, he had most loved the protean, inexhaustible culture of the English-speaking peoples… Of material things, he had given his love to this city, London, preferring it to the city of his birth or to any other… And of human beings, Pamela, I loved you” (414). A fourth, final, and secret love involves the “love of a dream”: specifically, a recurring oneiric image in which Saladin teaches a grateful son to ride a bicycle. Taken as a whole, Saladin’s love as here described is adislocated love, a love grounded in a dream-like desire for purity – a purity of culture (Western, English-speaking), a purity of place (Ellowen Deeowen: Proper London), and a purity of relationship (an eternally grateful son, an eternally proud father) – that is disconnected from the inevitable impurity of the actual world. Pamela Lovelace, with her artificial smile – “her too-bright brightness, her face like a saintly mask behind which who knows what worms feasted on rotting meat” (417) – is fittingly the person in whom Saladin’s love of purity finds an ideal object, a nexus in which his dislocated love can find a tenuous location. By the end of the novel, however, Saladin has transformed (back) into Salahuddin, and his love, too, has undergone a transformation: its ideal object is no longer that paragon of false purity, Pamela Lovelace, but Saladin’s “very own djinn” (548), that all-too-human prophetess of hybridity, that cannibalistically intense lover whose tears have the color and consistency of buffalo milk, that art critic/doctor/political activist: yes, Zeeny Vakil.

It is no accident that Zeeny Vakil’s book concerns itself with the “confining myth of authenticity, that folkloristic straitjacket which she sought to replace by an ethic of historically validated eclecticism” (52), for, upon barging back into Saladin’s life on his theatrical return to Bombay, she begins “‘[t]he reclamation of’” (53) Saladin from his self-imposed straitjacket of Englishized pseudo-authenticity. Zeeny perceives that Saladin’s efforts to achieve an artificial form of purity – an imperially univocal Britishness – have resulted in a blank state of soul, a quality that, soon enough, will lead to Saladin’s Kafkaesque transformation into a goatish devil. As Zeeny tells Saladin: “‘Sometimes, when you’re quiet… when you aren’t doing funny voices or acting grand, and when you forget people are watching, you look just like a blank. You know? An empty slate, nobody home. It makes me mad, sometimes, I want to slap you. To sting you back into life’” (62). In the effort to sting Saladin back into life, Zeeny aims to restore him to the Bombay roots from which he has torn himself. These roots, in stark contrast to Saladin’s purified fantasy of Proper London, are inherently impure. Witness: the ten-volume set of the Richard Burton translation of the Arabian Nights lying unread in Changez Chamchawala’s library – a compendium if there ever was one of the Western Orientalist fantasy of inscribing its own fetish for the exotic upon the East as such. Saladin, upon his initial return to Bombay, has therefore returned to an impure father, an impure city: “Bombay was a culture of re-makes” (64). And according to the gist of Zeeny’s book: “…for was not the entire national culture based on the principle of borrowing whatever clothes seemed to fit, Aryan, Mughal, British, take-the-best-and-leave-the-rest?” (52)

Zeeny embodies the eros of hybridity and/or the hybridity of eros found in The Satanic Verses, and she seeks to call Saladin home to her – and Rushdie’s – brand of “historically validated eclecticism.” As Rushdie writes in “In Good Faith”:

The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Melange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that ishow newness enters the world. (Homelands 394)3

Strikingly, though, Saladin at first resists the old self to whom Zeeny calls him back: “She was a vortex, a siren, tempting him back to his old self. But it was a dead self, a shadow, a ghost, and he would not become a phantom. There was a return ticket to London in his wallet, and he was going to use it” (59). If Saladin’s new, Londonized self appears empty to Zeeny, for Saladin the prospect of the old hybridity – a hybridity he had rebelled against since childhood – appears equally vacuous. Saladin is thus a man caught in a zone of in-betweenness surrounded on all sides by what feels like an abyss. Another way to express this condition: he is a man in love.

Zeeny is simply and not so simply a woman with whom Saladin falls in love – that most common of occurrences. Yet, in all of her multifaceted specificity, and in the apparent “banalities” (60) of her tryst with Saladin, Zeeny reveals something universal about falling in love: love involves one in the desire for another person who is undeniably other, another person who in turn responds to the otherness in one’s own precarious self-identity – as deconstructionists have long pointed out, self-identity can be defined in a positive sense of “presence” only because it is never actually identical with itself; in other words, forging an identity can occur only by foregrounding certain qualities of presence that must rely on a hidden background of absence, or otherness, in order to articulate themselves. In the experience of love, self-identity does not involve a univocal demarcation but rather a fragile intermingling of selves, a hybridity, a constant adventure of newness. Love, by facilitating a mutual commingling in which the categories of sameness and difference blur in an ever-shifting, never-fully-achieved-but-ever-desired union, makes one experientially aware of the inherent hybridity of the self. In dramatizing Chamcha’s complex negotiation of cultural identity within the locus of an ordinary love affair, Rushdie offers the “world of the heart, of intimacy and conversation” (Brennan 115), in other words, the immemorial verity of love, as both a way of understanding and a means of rectifying the tangled sociopolitical struggles in which an individual life is inevitably immersed. On the one hand, resistance to the uncertainty and open-ended newness of a relationship with the other leads to defensive violence – either explicit or passive-aggressive – that can wreak havoc either in an inter-cultural dialogue or in an individual love relationship; on the other hand, openness to the challenge of unhindered intermingling, of “historically validated eclecticism,” can help repair and foster relationships, whether sociopolitical or individual. Further, Rushdie reveals that cultural identity, like the tenuous identity of a lover in the grip of desire, is inherently hybridized. There is no pure culture that exists primary to the complex borrowings and interminglings involved in forging an ever-developing cultural identity. Chamcha, in his insistence upon judging hybridity based on an artificial dream of purity, falsely experiences Bombay and everything associated with it – his father, his childhood – as a lack that can only be overcome by the dream of purity. Nevertheless, in succumbing to the wiles of Zeeny Vakil, a character who figures the enlivening potential of hybridity, Saladin reveals a crack in his dream of Proper London Purity.

In the course of the novel, Saladin exhibits two radically different reactions to Zeeny’s powerful eros, both of which figure his overall relation to Bombay and its inherent hybridity. First:

He had worked so hard and come so close to convincing himself of the truth of these paltry fictions [of his love for Pamela, for London] that when he went to bed with Zeeny Vakil within forty-eight hours of arriving in Bombay, the first thing he did, even before they made love, was to faint, to pass out cold, because the messages reaching his brain were in such serious disagreement with one another, as if his right eye saw the world moving to the left while his left eye saw it sliding to the right. (52)

Even though Zeeny’s irrepressible naturalness and carnivorous sexuality reveal Pamela’s artificial smile to be part of a paltry fiction created by Saladin’s own fantasy of British purity, Saladin’s “fervid readiness to judge” everything Indian, everything related to his father, prevents him from fully taking on the challenge of Zeeny’s otherness. Later, however, when Saladin returns to Bombay to reunite with his dying father, it becomes clear that the challenge of Zeeny is one he has not put aside. Saladin

found his thoughts straying, no matter how hard he tried to fix them on his father, towards the question of Miss Zeenat Vakil. He had wired ahead, informing her of his arrival; would she meet the flight? What might or might not happen between them?... what did he really want? I’ll know when I see her, he thought. (534)

And indeed, upon her djinn-like appearance, and as vivaciously hybridized as ever – “immersed in life up to her neck, combining occasional art lectures at the university with her medical practice and her political activities” (548) – Zeeny provokes in Saladin a spontaneous admission of love in which his fervent readiness to judge is at last tossed aside: “This was a generous woman, the most generous he’d known.When you see her, you’ll know, he had promised himself, and it turned out to be true. ‘I love you,’ he heard himself saying, stopping her in her tracks” (548). In proclaiming his love for Zeeny, Saladin simultaneously accepts his own impure, hybridized self. After the accumulated horrors of the novel, which partly serve to figure Saladin’s resistance to and eventual acceptance of hybridity, “Zeeny’s re-entry into [Saladin’s] life completed [a] process of renewal, of regeneration” (548) that is the heart of Rushdie’s novel. Nevertheless, Saladin’s acceptance of Zeeny/hybridity can only be understood in the context of his face-to-face involvement with his father’s death. In witnessing his father confront the most universal of human destinations, Saladin falls back in love with his father and thereby renews his own ability fully to love. Further: the verities of love and death, as encountered by Saladin in his reconciliation with his father, bring about a change in moral vision that allows Saladin to embrace the impurities not only in his father’s life but also in his own desire and, indeed, in his own hybrid identity.

That a book entitled The Satanic Verses problematizes conventional notions of morality perhaps goes without saying. That it offers alternative versions of what constitutes the “moral,” however, is not as readily acknowledged. Regardless, Saladin’s relationship with his father is the container in which Rushdie’s novel explores the contours of morality. Upon returning home to confront his father, with Zeeny Vakil in tow, Saladin is horrified at the odd domestic arrangement he encounters in his father’s home: Changez Chamchawala, married to Nasreen II and spending five days a week with her in a “high-walled compound nicknamed the Red Fort” (65), returns home to the old house at Scandal point to spend the weekends in quasi-divine homage to Nasreen I, Saladin’s mother. Not only has the house itself been “mummified” and preserved as it was on the day of Nasreen’s death, but also Nasreen herself has been resurrected, as it were, in the form of Kasturba, the wife of Changa’s long-time servant. So successful is Kasturba’s attempt to resemble Nasreen that Saladin himself thinks he sees the ghost of his dead mother in the figure of Kasturba. Already with emotions running high – in confronting his father, after all, Saladin is facing the personification of all he sought to escape from in Proper London – and undeniably off-balance from his own problematic entanglement with Zeeny Vakil, Saladin reacts to his father’s unconventional arrangement with haughty moral outrage:

I did not come to fight him. Look, the old goat. I mustn’t fight. But this, this is intolerable. “In my mother’s house,” Chamcha cried melodramatically, losing his battle with himself. “The state thinks your business is corrupt, and here is the corruption of your soul. Look what you’ve done to them. Vallabh and Kasturba. With your money. How much did it take? To poison their lives. You’re a sick man.” He stood before his father, blazing with righteous rage. (68)

What Saladin judges to be profane, Changez, and indeed Vallabh and Kasturba, view as sacred. “‘And you,’ Changez Chamchawala spoke as softly as his servant, ‘you come here to this temple. With your unbelief. Mister, you’ve got a nerve’” (69). This scene, clearly an instance of Rushdie’s sharp-witted and seemingly inveterate tendency to conflate the sacred and the profane, offers an emblematic example of Saladin’s fervid readiness to judge his father. Saladin’s ostensibly moral response is portrayed as a “losing battle”: in defensively asserting a strict dichotomy of moral-immoral behavior, Saladin misses the human specificity, the genuine, albeit ineradicably impure, feelings shared between the various players in this domestic arrangement. And further: since Changa’s odd, undeniably unnatural attempt to immortalize his dead wife can also be seen as a simulacrum of Saladin’s own quest for purity, Saladin’s strong reaction demonstrates the inevitable hypocrisy that characterizes a defensively judgmental response cloaking itself in so-called morality.

Late in the novel, under the influence of his father’s imminent death, Saladin is able to perceive the underlying love that exists within his father’s ostensibly immoral domestic life:

Nasreen II embraced Kasturba; each woman rested her head on the other’s shoulder. The intimacy between the two women was spontaneous and untarnished by resentments; as if the proximity of death had washed away the quarrels and jealousies of life. The two old ladies comforted one another in the garden, each consoling the other for the imminent loss of the most precious of things: love. Or, rather: the beloved. (536)

And later:

In the morning, Nasreen and Kasturba arrived in clean saris, looking rested and complaining, “It was so terrible sleeping away from him that we didn’t sleep one wink.” They fell upon Changez, and so tender were their caresses that Salahuddin had the same sense of spying on a private moment that he’d had at the wedding of Mishal Sufyan. He left the room quietly while the three lovers embraced, kissed and wept. (541)

If “the proximity of death had washed away the quarrels and jealousies of life” in the relations between Nasreen and Kasturba, in the case of Saladin it had washed away his former moralistic response and brought about a truly moral understanding of the impure complexities of human love. Similarly, Changez’s proximity to death transforms Saladin’s overall dream of purity in which he had grounded his own desire and deepest identity. In witnessing his father nobly confront death, Saladin appears to see Changez ashuman, in all of his impure hybridity, for the first time. In this act of vision, Saladin’s own “old self,” the same self he had formerly found to be threateningly empty, transforms itself into a vibrancy of possibilities:

To fall in love with one’s father after the long angry decades was a serene and beautiful feeling; a renewing, life-giving thing… Saladin felt hourly closer to many old, rejected selves, many alternative Saladins – or rather Salahuddins – which had split off from himself as he made his various life choices, but which had apparently continued to exist. (538)

In opening himself up to a relationship with his father, Saladin opens himself up as well to a relationship with the mystery of death. “What did he see? Salahuddin kept thinking” in the aftermath of witnessing his father’s death in all of its mysterious actuality. “Why the horror? And, whence that final smile?” (546). Changez bequeaths to Saladin a “life illuminated by a strangely radiant death, which continued to glow, in his mind’s eye, like a sort of magic lamp” (549). With transformed vision, free from the narrowly judgmental morality that comes when the inherent impurity of life is viewed from an imperial fantasy of purity, Saladin is now capable of giving himself over to his own status as a hybrid being. He is able to embark upon the adventure of newness that commences when he spontaneously tells Zeeny Vakil that he loves her.

Out of his confrontation with the great verities of love and death, Saladin is able to transcend, albeit guardedly, the myriad horrors that he had undergone throughout the novel: an airplane disaster, a goatish transformation, a self-perpetuated act of Iagoesque treachery, the death of his wife, the suicide of Gibreel, and the list could perhaps go on. At the end of the novel, Saladin, now fully accepting his hybrid cultural identity, has learned that “this, too, was what human beings were like: considerate, loving, even noble. We are still capable of exaltation, he thought in celebratory mood; in spite of everything, we can still transcend” (542). This affirming insight is the rarely acknowledged positive message of The Satanic Verses in toto. Amid all the controversy generated by Rushdie’s book, it is important to realize that The Satanic Verses, in quietly affirming the morality of the seemingly immoral world of the heart – a world irretrievably connected to the mystery of death – offers a guarded sense of hope in the face of the precise kind of violence in which it has come to be embroiled. It offers this guarded sense of hope not as a political treatise or a religious manifesto, but as a novel, that unique form of art that suspends the insatiable human urge to judge so as to promote an imaginative, humane approach to life in the world.

Works Cited

Booker, M. Keith. “Salman Rushdie: The Development of a Literary Reputation.” Critical
Essays on Salman Rushdie. Ed. M. Keith Booker. New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1999.
1-16.

Brennan, Timothy. “The Cultural Politics of Rushdie Criticism: All or Nothing.” Critical
Essays on Salman Rushdie. Ed. M. Keith Booker. New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1999.
107-129.

Clark, Roger Y. Stranger Gods: Salman Rushdie’s Other Worlds. London: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2001.

Kundera, Milan. Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts. New York: HarperPerennial,
1996.

Majid, Anouar. “Can the Postcolonial Critic Speak?: Orientalism and the Rushdie Affair.”
Cultural Critique 32 (Winter 1995-1996): 5-42.

Pipes, Daniel. The Rushdie Affair. London: Transaction Publishers, 1990.

Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands. New York: Penguin, 1992.

---. “One Thousand Days in a Balloon.” New York times 12 December 1991, B-8.

---. The Satanic Verses. New York: Picador, 1988.

Sanga, Jaina. Salman Rushdie’s Postcolonial Metaphors: Migration, Translation, Hybridity,
Blasphemy, and Globalization. London: Greenwood Press, 2001.

1 Two excellent examples of book-length critical discussions of Rushdie’s fiction are Roger Y. Clark’sStranger Gods: Salman Rushdie’s Other Worlds, and Jaina C. Sanga’s Salman Rushdie’s Postcolonial Metaphors: Migration, Translation, Hybridity, Blasphemy, and Globalization. Clark’s overall thesis is that Rushdie utilizes cosmology, mythology, and mysticism to structure otherworldly dramas that are “fascinating in their own right, as well as crucial to the more worldly points Rushdie makes about literary tradition, history, ethnicity, and the politics of religion.” Sanga seeks to illustrate the manner in which various overarching metaphors within Rushdie’s fiction represent history, language, and textuality in such a way as directly or indirectly to resist colonial constructions.
2 As Booker writes, “many critics [have] made him [Rushdie] a paragon of postmodernism” (2).
3 As Booker notes, Rushdie’s writing has been “particularly attractive to postcolonial critics, such as Homi Bhabha and Sara Suleri, for whom cultural hybridity is a crucial critical category. On the other hand, the very hybridity of Rushdie’s work has been controversial as well, and many Indian critics have rejected his work as representative of Indian literature because Rushdie’s work (like Rushdie himself) is so extensively rooted in Western literary traditions” (3).

Rabelais' Ultimate Arse-Wiper

2007-06-10T20:01:00.001-05:00

Really, has the novel as a genre ever done justice to its inspired, rambunctious beginnings? Certainly the below riff from Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel reveals just how lacking in verbal wit the contemporary novel is compared to Rabelais' 16th-century proto-novel masterpiece. Enjoy! (The translation is by J. M. Cohen)

"After that," said Gargantua, "I wiped myself with a kerchief, with a pillow, with a slipper, with a game-bag, with a basket--but what an unpleasant arse-wiper that was!--then with a hat. And note that some hats are smooth, some shaggy, some velvety, some of taffeta, and some of satin. The best of all are the shaggy ones, for they make a very good abstersion of the faecal matter. Then I wiped myself with a hen, a cock, and a chicken, with a calf's skin, a hare, a pigeon, and a cormorant, with a lawyer's bag, with a penitent's hood, with a coif, with an otter. But to conclude, I say and maintain that there is no arse-wiper like a well-downed goose, if you hold her neck between your legs. You must take my word for it, you really must. You get a miraculous sensation in your arse-hole, both from the softness of the down and from the temperate heat of the goose herself; and this is easily communicated to the bum-gut and the rest of the intestines, from which it reaches the heart and the brain. Do not imagine that the felicity of the heroes and demigods in the Elysian Fields arises from their asphodel, their ambrosia, or their nectar, as those ancients say. It comes, in my opinion, from their wiping their arses with the neck of a goose....

Frost's Emblematic Imagination

2007-05-02T12:21:00.001-05:00

The World Speaks: Frost's Emblematic Imagination

Robert Frost’s very name evokes the milieu in which his poems live and breathe: chilly New England snow versed and traversed by a lone traveler stopping by woods, wood-piles, barns, tufts of flowers, birches, brooks, nests, walls, graveyards, woodchucks – the innumerable country things in and through which Frost’s poetic imagination probes the meditation of nature and the nature of meditation. Far more complex than simple nature poetry, Frost’s poetic project is in line with a meditative tradition in American poetry harkening back to the seventeenth-century poetic practice of meditating upon the book of nature and thereby disclosing the spiritual values implicit in the physical world. The American meditative tradition in poetry – running through Edwards, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, Williams, and onwards; and in the large and small collective movements of symbolism, imagism, and modernism itself – seeks spiritual insight in a world where the direct path to spiritual certainty has turned into a hall of mirrors: poetic meditation in modernity must grope vertiginously in a vortex of oppositions confronting the mind at every turn – inner-outer, spiritual-physical, mind-matter, self-other, culture-nature, to name but a few (the post-modern attempt to deconstruct these dialectical oppositions by which the western mind thinks had yet to occur, though much modernist poetry anticipated this deconstructionist move). Somewhere between the Romantic attempt to merge with nature and the modern scientific effort to master it, poets of the meditative tradition involve themselves in examining the spiritual matrices of the human encounter with the natural world. The poetry of Robert Frost explicitly dramatizes this encounter; in the process, Frost appropriates various strands of the meditative tradition of which he is a part.

Frost’s best poetry contains an elusive complexity that combines the spiritual import of Emersonian transcendentalism with the faithfulness to the physical world (the natural image or object) that began with Thoreau and became doctrine for the Imagist poets. Samuel Coale, paraphrasing M. H. Abrams, sums up this quality of Frost’s poetry: “[For Frost] …the illuminated phenomenal object… is as opaque as the image of the Imagists and yet as significant of something beyond itself, although not transparently so, as the symbol of the Symbolists” (6). If for Williams there are “no ideas but in things,” Frost’s poetic aesthetic is even more straightforward: the thing is the idea. However, in much of Frost’s poetry the search for the quiddity of a natural object occurs simultaneously with a subtle examination of the interior movements of the mind as it carries out the search; perception and reflection-on-perception occur in one and the same act poetically rendered as a precise description of the natural world. Yet unlike Romantics such as Wordsworth, who often sees a direct correspondence between mind and world (so that world gradually melts into mind/imagination), Frost maintains a separateness that makes an ecstatic mind-world union impossible. Indeed, Frost’s poetry suggests that it is in the moments of encountering the physical world as insurmountably other that the human self recognizes its own reality and involvement in a world saturated with hints of a larger spiritual order. Frost thus prefers immanent mystery to explanatory transcendentalism, embodied spirit to spiritual abstraction.

The trope by which Frost himself explains what his poetry is doing is that of emblemism: “Symbolism is all too likely to clog up and kill a poem – symbolism can be as bad as an embolism. If my poetry has to have a name, I’d prefer to call it Emblemism – it’s the viable emblem of things I’m after” (quoted in Coale, 5). For Frost the movement of the human mind in its unavoidable encounter with the facts of nature inheres in the natural object when it is poetically examined not symbolically but emblematically – as a worldly incarnation of mystery rather than a sign (or type) pointing to a mystery housed in another ontological realm. A close reading of a particular Frost poem – treating the poem itself as an emblem – increases the possibility of getting a handle on these slippery propositions concerning Frost’s poetic art.

Frost’s “The Most of It” overtly dramatizes the human encounter with the natural world as a medium through which the human being attempts to uncover the mystery of self, world, and how the two fit (or do not fit) together in a larger whole. The first four lines reveal the “he” of the poem attempting a dialogue with the universe that turns into a monologue indicative of the solipsism characteristic of the Romantic approach to encountering the outside world. The abab rhyme scheme of these four lines helps create in the sound of the language the “mocking echo” of which the lines speak: “He thought he kept the universe alone; / For all the voice in answer he could wake / Was but the mocking echo of his own / From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.” As the following four lines make clear, this Romantic approach to self-world dialogue is unsatisfying because nothing is ultimately learned about either the voice of the world or one’s own voice (to stay with the metaphor): “Some morning from the boulder-broken beach / He would cry out on life, that what it wants / Is not its own love back in copy speech, / But counter-love, original response” (significantly this end rhyme of the eighth line, “response,” is a change to a feminine two-syllable rhyme from the masculine “wants,” the end rhyme of the sixth line – by departing slightly from the rhyme scheme of the first four lines, the prosody of the poem itself offers an “original response” at this juncture; notice also the enjambment between the sixth and seventh lines that increases the intensity of what life “wants”). This crying out from the “boulder-broken beach” of modernity, the condemnation of the Romantic effort to overcome the anxiety of the human encounter with the natural world, brings about a complex epiphanic phenomenon with which the rest of the poem deals:

And nothing ever came of what he cried / Unless it was the embodiment that crashed / In the cliff’s talus on the other side, / And then in the far distant water splashed, / But after a time allowed for it to swim, / Instead of proving human when it neared / And someone else additional to him, / As a great buck it powerfully appeared, / Pushing the crumpled water up ahead, / And landed pouring like a waterfall, / And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread, / And forced the underbrush – and that was all.

In an unexpected, seemingly unlooked-for response to the human agent in the poem, the world offers up an embodiment that crashes, splashes, swims, stumbles, and forces its way into human consciousness. This embodiment “… crashed / In the cliff’s talus on the other side…” The cliff, formerly “tree-hidden” and issuing forth mocking echoes, now is seen to be covered with rock debris (talus) in which the mysterious embodiment crashes (“talus” also means “the slope of the face of a work,” which evokes the slant of the book-mountain in Frost’s “Time Out”; does the emblematic imagination require a sloping, slanted vision?). The unseen mystery of the world which the Romantic voice filled up and thus obscured with its megalomania births a captivating emblem when the human encounter with nature assumes an “original response.” The captivating emblem is in this case a great buck, and Frost’s descriptive language moves to the figurative to allow the buck “powerfully” to appear in the poem: “And landed pouring like a waterfall…” With this analogy Frost’s description merges with the action, is the action of the poem: this is the emblematic mode, meditation as perception and perception as meditation. And when the buck stumbles through the rocks and forces the underbrush, “and that was all,” the reader feels that this is indeed “the most of it.”

As an emblem of what comes out of the human encounter with the natural world, the great buck possesses a mystery at once captivating and unsettling. Did the buck come in response to the human entreaty, the crying out? Or did the buck appear due to a rare confluence of human and non-human epiphanies? Is the buck concerned with his human interlocutor (does he even notice the human?), and if so, is this a hostile or benign interest? Another way of asking these questions is: what relationship does the “he” of the poem have with the buck, an embodiment that as a poetic image captures all of the pulse, movement, and spectacle of the natural world?

Frost does not answer these questions any more than does the buck, for the great buck is himself an enigmatic/emblematic answer that allows the above questions (and others) to be asked, to be felt, rather than sidestepped and avoided in Romanticism or over-eager transcendentalism. Frost’s emblematic imagination, his own manner of stopping in the field of American meditative poetry, urges above all an openness to the epiphanic mode – especially the non-human forms of epiphany that embody the mystery of human being-in-the-world. Furthermore, Frost has rendered this emblematic epiphany through a complex prosody that creates in the reader a meditative state that functions in the same manner as “reverie” in the conception of the philosopher of imagination Gaston Bachelard: “…through reverie, we can discover within a word the act which names” (Bachelard, 48). Frost’s poetry ultimately allows the meditative reader to intuit the mystery involved in the “act which names,” an intuition that requires listening for the echoes of the more-than-human word as it sounds forth in the language of original response to the natural world. The poetic meditative voice and the natural emblem (can the two be separated?) give witness to a felt spiritual reality that only appears in impressionistic snatches.

Work Cited

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Reverie. Boston: Beacon, 1971.

Coale, Samuel. “The Emblematic Encounter of Robert Frost.” Frost: Centennial
Essays. Ed. Committee on the Frost Centennial of the University of
Southern Mississippi (Jackson: U of Mississippi, 1974. 89-107).

Poetry Sunday

2007-04-09T18:41:00.000-05:00

I hereby designate Sunday as the day on which I'll post favorite poems -- with or without commentary.

Fittingly, we begin these Poetry Sunday posts with Wallace Stevens, a poet likely to be the primary focus of my upcoming Ph.D. dissertation (and a poet whose famous first line of "Sunday Morning" is responsible for the title of this blog).

This little-known, rarely-commented-upon poem comes from The Rock, Stevens's final volume of poetry, first published in 1954 as the concluding section of his Collected Poems. As in The Rock as a whole, Stevens in this poem is at his most meditative, the luxuriant gusto of early Stevens transmuted into a more sober investigation of liminal spiritual yearning -- late in his poetic enterprise, Stevens's poetic imagination fluctuates at the edge, ready to plunge into an intermediate space in which poetic figuration and ontological mystery merge. In other words, the Stevens of The Rock engages in a Bachelardian meditation upon the matter of metaphor and the metaphor of matter, revealing that the ultimate satisfactions of poetry are satisfactions of the spirit.

Here is the poem, followed by an image I tracked down of the Cliffs of Moher. Enjoy.

THE IRISH CLIFFS OF MOHER

Who is my father in this world, in this house,

At the spirit's base?

My father's father, his father's father, his--

Shadows like winds

Go back to a parent before thought, before speech,

At the head of the past.

They go to the cliffs of Moher rising out of the mist,

Above the real,

Rising out of present time and place, above

The wet, green grass.

This is not landscape, full of the somnambulations

Of poetry

And the sea. This is my father or, maybe,

It is as he was,

A likeness, one of the race of fathers: earth

And sea and air.