O. Henry’s Novel Novel

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes; those in parentheses to page numbers in the Penguin edition with introduction and notes by Guy Davenport.


     Cabbages and Kings, O. Henry’s only novel, is hardly a novel at all, but then his short stories are hardly short stories, either. Far from the “realism” widely practiced during his lifetime, O. Henry composed his work according to a structural standard which owes a debt to Edgar Allen Poe’s use of abstraction and rhetoric more than to Flaubert's realism. Thus, his trademark surprise endings ignore plausibility, preferring the formal maneuver of an ironic reversal. His themes are trivial, often commonplaces or forgettable sentimental emotion, often nothing more than the most available idées reçues, yet his work is entertaining, carefully crafted, and presents a consistent and original vision.
     Cabbages and Kings is a collection of short stories, presented as narrations by various characters who play a role in the story. Their tales are bound not just by a common cast, setting, and narrative frame; the central issue, more a mental puzzle than a dramatic conflict, is resolved only at the end, when the medium changes from raconteur story-telling suddenly to motion pictures, at that time nearly new. Just to require more ingenuity of himself and his clever readers, the author has added an apparently adventitious correspondence to Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” Every addition is not so much part of a solution as it is a retarding of any solution at all. The author is a juggler whose audience gasps as he puts yet another object into the air.
     In the work as a whole one is never engaged by a central problem more momentous than a challenging crossword. One looks often in vain for psychological insight, absorbing specific detail, or moving emotion in O. Henry’s novel, often finding instead the most available and conventional thought. The same sort of patterning is observable on the smaller scale of the sentence. O. Henry’s favorite rhetorical device, the use of ironic semi-comic periphrasis, evident on every page of the novel, does not so much provide information useful for understanding as it makes wisecracks, abstracting the reader, making emotional identification unlikely, but allowing the intellectual delight of the author’s formal play. In both the work as a whole and a good many of its subsidiary units, the author is delaying the action, as one after another of the oddball characters take a turn, as throw-away one-liners fall this way and that from a marvelous almost hypnotic sparkler.
     It was such techniques that endeared the popular American author with the most advanced Russian Formalists. To critics such as Viktor Shklovsky and Boris Eichenbaum [1], William Sydney Porter, who churned out stories for the market, almost four hundred before his death at forty-seven, who published a story a week in the New York World’s spectacularly illustrated Sunday Magazine for over a year, was a literary avant-gardist. The theorists of the revolutionary Soviet Union applauded a writer who used racist expression less for promulgating white supremacy than for simple convenience.
     Abstraction is characteristic of much comedy, in which the protagonist is viewed as flawed by the normative reader. Characters reduced to a single trait in the Theophrastian sense are familiar from Menander through Jonson to Neil Simon, and Cabbages and Kings can boast no psychological development or complexity. The authorial tone is consistently acceptance and warm amusement. The general run of locals are terminally soporific in the most familiar sort of tropical stereotype, [2] though their leaders combine a similar idleness with rapacious avarice and the capacity for violence. The expatriates of Anchuria are likewise capable of combining phenomenal laziness with terrific greed, but as outsiders they are a bit more cautious about hedging their bets.
     Every now and then what seems a point of principle intrudes, though it may in fact be nothing more than the occasional absurd demands of ego. Such “actions generated by core beliefs” such as “Beelzebub” Blythe’s conscientious refusal to blackmail someone who is standing him drinks or Carolus White’s inability to do a portrait to order that falls short of his artistic ideals are likely to seem more peculiar than principled. In general, though, this is a land in which everyone is out for number one. Their selfishness is a fact of nature, like the Vesuvio Fruit Company’s exploitative domination of the land.
     In a comedy like Cabbages and Kings no real harm can come to anyone, so the reader may simply relax and make the most of the passing drolleries. Though occasionally a death may be mentioned, the reader’s sympathy is never engaged in the least. The linkages of the various narratives only emerge in the conclusion, the reader having been pleasantly suspended until that point (stymied perhaps more by the unlikeliness of the plot as by its brilliance). As in a whodunit mystery, the point of the plot is to remain concealed until the conclusion.
     Apart from the broad and comely design of the whole, the strongest element in O. Henry’s novel is the wit and ingenuity of his richly comic periphrases. The prose regularly erupts in jokes released like a string of slightly damp firecrackers. Yet none of the jokes advances the story. Each acts to delay and distract the reader, passing time, running out the clock, until the final curtain.
     For example, the story proper begins by setting the scene, yet it is less a scene from nature than it seems a motif of a tropical shirt or perhaps a neon barroom fantasy. “Coralio reclined, in the mid-day heat, like some vacuous beauty lounging in a guarded harem.” With details like “vacuous” and “guarded” irrelevant except to underline misogynistic conventions, O. Henry entertains his readers while they await anything likely to launch a storyline. In this Margaritaville “the palms waved their limber fronds foolishly like an awkward chorus at the prima donna’s cue to enter.” (9) Since this world is satirical, the dancers must be “awkward” and the prima donna doubtless acts the role of a comically temperamental diva of the sort portrayed in Mozart’s Der Shauspieldirektor.
     In his role as consul John Atwood discusses with a pair of entrepreneurs their plan to introduce the phonograph to Anchuria. He warns them that the locals, being “simple-hearted children of nature” (73) might react in one of two ways. “They may become inebriated with attention, like an Atlanta colonel listening to ‘Marching Through Georgia,’ or they will get excited and transpose the key of the music with an axe and yourselves into a dungeon.” (74) The series of moves, from the unlikely lexical choice of “inebriated” to the image of the Confederate officer, presumably apoplectic at hearing the Union anthem, then to the musical metaphor and the sudden rather Gothic axe and dungeon. It makes little sense – after all, both alternatives are hostile -- but it maintains an effervescent string of phrases, keeping the reader slightly off balance while suggesting the unpredictability of the plan.
     His method reliance on received ideas, in common with most comedy, is manifest. When Henry Horsecollar runs interference to free his own private co-conspirators from the threatening crowd of local conspirators by whom they are outnumbered, the rhetoric rises in a pyrotechnic display of racism.


"Then that cultured Red Man exhaled an arrangement of sounds with his mouth that made the Latin aggregation pause, with thoughtfulness and hesitations. The matter of his proclamation seemed to be a cooperation of the Carlisle war-whoop with the Cherokee college yell. He went at the chocolate team like a bean out of a little boy's nigger shooter. His right elbow laid out the governor man on the gridiron, and he made a lane the length of the crowd so wide that a woman could have carried a stepladder through it without striking against anything." (83)


     Even the very opening term here is twisted to the point of dizziness. Horsecollar, who has seemed as sensible as anyone else in the story and more admirable than many, had been introduced to Mellinger as an “Injun. Tame Injun” (75) to indicate that his presence would be inoffensive. Yet in this critical moment the success of this “cultured Red Man” does not depend on his social suavity but rather on an altogether savage utterance wild enough to paralyze his antagonists. It is yet unclear to what extent their craven abashment is due to their being not quite white themselves, but a “Latin aggregation.”
     Racist bomblets continue to detonate in the following phrases. A Carlisle war whoop is a ironic reference to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the federal government’s most important Native American educational institution for forty years, whose goal was total assimilation to mainstream American culture under founder Richard Henry Pratt’s slogan "Kill the Indian: Save the Man." Then, in a reverse use of racist stereotypes, the “Cherokee college yell” makes an ironic comparison between an indigenous barbarian and an American college football fan. Somehow the careless use of racial pejoratives proceeds to proliferate out of control. The Latin Americans are christened “the chocolate team,” a belittling tag predicting their lack of resistance in the face of the masterful Horsecollar who himself is oddly equated to “a bean out of a little boy's nigger shooter,” a phrase opening a nasty glimpse into nineteenth century Southern life (and into O. Henry’s readiness to make use of racist jocularity).
     O. Henry’s deft ear is attracted to such clichés and seeks sometimes to redeem them in better coin. To start the spin, a centuries-old proverb is put to the service of the most mercenary of interests: the Anchurian bureaucrats. “Spilled milk draws few tears from an Anchurian administration. Many are its lacteal sources; and the clocks’ hand forever point to milking time. Even the rich cream skimmed from the treasury by the bewitched Miraflores did not cause the newly installed patriots to waste time in unprofitable regrets.” (97) The reader can only sit back and watch as the author rings his changes on the topic of milk from the opening twist and the slyly pedantic slightly evasive “lacteal” through the effective image of graft and corruption as “milking time” to the dramatic climactic mention of “rich cream.”
     The national characteristics of Anchuria, while resting securely in racist stereotype, do convey some information about the Honduras that Porter came to know during his year residence there. The filibustering of private citizens and the neo-colonialism of the Vesuvio Fruit Company are indeed drawn from life. [4] The rapacious opportunism of individuals, institutions, and governments is a given, a subset really of the readiness of everyone in this fictional world to grab at the main chance. Meanwhile, though, until that big score arrives, all are satisfied with indolence, their ambitions daily delayed to make time for a drink and a sunset and some diverting conversation. In the last analysis, O. Henry’s theme is simple: “There is nothing doing now, let us tell a few stories before night falls.”
     Cabbages and Kings, indeed, may be said to be made up of such chatting. The experience of reading it offers pleasures not unlike those of the oysters as they enjoyed “a pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,/ Along the briny beach.”


The time has come,' the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot —
And whether pigs have wings.'
   

     If the reader has been beguiled by the many conversations by the Coralian shore, as entertained, perhaps as the ingenuous mollusks, the denouement upon reaching the last page is not so final as theirs. To be devoured by O. Henry means no more than to relish passing a bit of time absorbed by the Vitagraphoscope [3] of his imagination.




1. See in particular the latter’s “O. Henry and the Theory of the Short Story.”

2. Stereotypes may have their claims, of course. I recall entering more than one Nigerian office during the heat of the afternoon and finding half the workers dozing, heads on their desks.

3. The word Vitagraphoscope seems to be a neologism, perhaps compounding Vitascope, an early film projector first demonstrated in 1895 by Charles Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat and sold by the Edison Manufacturing Company, and Biograph, a film production and exhibition company founded by William Kennedy Dickson also in 1895. Dickson had broken from Edison.

4. Included in the long list of individual Americans (apart from U. S. military forces) who have meddled militarily in Latin America are William S. Smith, William Walker, William A. Chanler, Gregor MacGregor, and James Long. The Vesuvio corporation, of course, represents the United Fruit Company, which once dominated Honduras, Costa Rica, and Guatemala, leading to dictatorships of collaborators throughout the region and to such events as the violent repression of striking workers in Colombia in December of 1928 in which three thousand workers are thought to have been massacred.

Conservatism and Popular Art

     Popular art, which belongs to the masses either as oral literature and folklore or as mass commodified culture such as movies and television shows, might seem likely, to one who has not studied such work, to suggest progressive themes, voicing social protest and proposing reforms that would benefit most people. This is hardly the case. Indeed, popular art is most often quite conservative, siding with the status quo or with reactionary alternatives.
     Indeed, literature can sometimes encourage critical thinking about one’s preconceptions and can introduce or spread new ideas. To some the artist is thought even to occupy a privileged viewpoint, from which literary works may enrich their consumers’ knowledge of any subject, be it psychology, politics, indeed even theology. Yet surely the only field in which writers excel others is in the use of words. Further, when poems or stories do foreground their themes, by which I mean what they suggest is true about lived reality, they seek to reinforce the views readers already hold more often than they introduce new ones.
     Unsurprisingly the works that reinforce preexisting prejudices are in general not only more common but more popular (which comes to much the same thing) than those which challenge them. Traditional oral literature and modern works directed at a mass audience teach for the most part what is already accepted in a given culture while those which emphasize new ideas, ambiguity, and mystery, those which violate conventional thought, are characteristic of elite art consumed by only a few. This distinction by no means implies a value judgement. Beautiful poems and stories occur at either extreme of the spectrum and at any point along it, and the same may be said of failures.
     While it may be impractical as to provide adequate definitive support for such a grand generalization, evidence is ample. In the first place in traditional societies, in which all art is “popular,” which is to say, consumed by all people alike, the role of song and story is primarily and explicitly dogmatic. Rituals, folk-tales, indeed all genres, tend to transmit the assumptions of the past to each generation. The young are systematically taught how a man should behave, or a woman, or a child, what priests are capable of, what the animals have to tell people, and the secret meaning of the stars. Each young person learns the culture’s cosmology and ethics, not systematically but anecdotally, as it were, through the accumulation of lyrics and stories, forming in the end a coherent pattern.
     It is only in belated societies like our own that the artist is seen as a rebellious outsider, and people look to works of art for new ideas rather than those which have been accepted and validated over a long period of use.
     What is true of oral literature is largely duplicated by recent mass culture. Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart were quite right to label Donald Duck a tool of imperialism. [1] Plots of the family situation comedies of the nineteen-fifties, shows such as Make Room for Daddy, Ozzie and Harriet, and Leave it to Beaver, are regularly based on minor conflicts or misunderstandings that test the strength of connubial love, parental authority, or other accepted norms, only to be resolved after twenty-two minutes of action with an emphatic reinforcement of social convention. In very much the same way, police and detective stories always concluded with retributive justice that reassures the viewer that all is basically right, the police do what they should, malefactors are punished, and, though a few bodies of the upright may fall in sacrifice along the way, the most important good people prosper in the end.
     With widespread literacy and the rise of middle-class leisure and lending libraries, Victorian fiction provides a useful field of data. Among those who enjoyed genuine popularity as well as critical acclaim during this period were Scott, Dickens, and Trollope. Each was prolific enough to record a detailed image of the society of his day. (It matters little that Scott wrote about earlier periods. The politics in his novels is always far more reflective of his own present time.) Each is profoundly conservative. While they were able to perceive social injustices in their own times, and to urge some measure of relief, none was able to imagine a systematic response to the evils of early capitalism.
     Sir Walter Scott was clear and consistent about his support for the status quo and his opposition to the reform movements of his day. He endorsed what E. P. Thompson called the myth of paternalism, trusting in the landed gentry to be the most wise and secure governing class. These would, due to their upbringing, recognize their obligations under the principle of noblesse oblige. Though more often in financial straits than comfortable affluence, he as a baronet was an active participant in local government as well as serving as Clerk of Session and Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire. To him the country gentleman is, as a part of the order of nature, "the natural protector and referee of the farmer and the peasant." [1] He considered that the Scots suffered less privation because of their benevolent landlords looked after them than laborers in the south where “accursed poor-rates” in fact oppressed those they aimed to assist. He blamed poverty and want not on an exploitative economic system, just then shifting from a feudal land-based aristocracy to an urban capitalist one, but rather to the loss of old ideals in a welter of “reforming mania.” [2]
     When his Toryism conflicted with his Scots nationalism, he chose conservatism over regional pride. In Old Mortality, for instance, the struggle of the Covenanters is represented as in part justified by the high-handed actions of rogue dragoons and by the claims of religious conscience, but he satirizes mercilessly the more militant leaders such as the fanatic preacher Habbakuk Mucklewraith and the violent John Balfour. Henry Morton is depicted as the reasonable moderate whose good will and common sense is far preferable to the extremists’ ideology and zeal. In fact, Morton has no quarrel with the better representatives of the crown. Conflict appears to be generated not by the order of society, but by its abuse, caused by bad actors in both parties.
     Scott’s most explicit comments on current events are perhaps in the anonymous pieces titled The Visionary (1819) in which he calls for a sort of reactionary popular front in which all patriots belong, all Britishers, in fact, but the wicked radicals. “All must unite now . . .in support of our existing laws and constitution, or all will be swallowed up in a ruthless despotism – a despotism that would soon crush all useful spirit.” He calls for all people of good will to “put a bridle on the jaws of the Leviathan multitude.” Rob Radical appears in a dream to destroy a noble house which, admittedly imperfect, was, like the system, yet grand and well worth preserving. To Scott radicals are “the wildest of untamed animals,” their representative a “half naked ruffian,” “rather brutal than human.” Though the poor are kindly offered makework by their benevolent betters, they remain ungrateful and unsatisfied until they have entirely ruined economic production through agrarian reform. The result is that “we have stirred up the cauldron so efficiently, that the dregs are now uppermost,” and the ignorant masses end by crowning an emperor.” Raising the specter of Napoleon seals Scott’s case.
     Dickens, the only one of the three who could be said to have endured at least some of the trials of the underclass, is generous with charitable feeling, to the deserving poor, at least. In fiction the convention of retributive justice guarantees that all will come out right in the end. Yet he portrays a revolution as a terrifying mob in Tale of Two Cities and the opportunities that magically open up for long-suffering lads such as Pip in Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, and David Copperfield come by way of private charity: from Magwitch, Mr. Brownlow and Rose Maylie, and Betsey Trotwood. While well aware of the horrors of the life of the poor in Victorian England, he was never receptive toward any of the numerous schemes to uplift them other than the benevolence attentions of the comfortable. The novel that most directly engages the working class movement is Hard Times in which all Dickens’ sympathy for the exploited workers, exemplified by the upright but tragically doomed Stephen Blackpool [3], does not lead to his sympathy for their cause. Blackpool’s antagonist in fact is the mendacious union organizer Slackbridge.
     Though never in danger of the factory work in which Dickens found himself at the age of twelve, Trollope, descended from landed gentry with a title of baronet descending to his cousins, felt himself in straitened circumstances until elevated by his popular success as an author. Yet never a hint enters his novels, many of them directly concerned with politics, that society would be well-served by fundamental changes. His model for social intervention in his own private practice of charity was Urania House, a “Home for Homeless Women” funded by heiress Angela Burdett Coutts. Though the institution, in which Dickens took a direct management role, was certainly more humane than the alternatives offered by the church and the state to assist “fallen women,” it today seems fatally paternalistic, with its emphasis on sewing and laundering, system of points and demerits, and the ultimate goal of the women’s emigration and marriage abroad. Urania House sought to ameliorate the harshest conditions for the most virtuous but never otherwise challenged society’s assumptions.
     When he stood for Parliament, it was as a Liberal, but in a district in which corruption so governed the outcome that he had no hope of winning, but only of proving his opponents’ criminality. Perhaps the clearest expression of Trollope’s political views is to be found in his account of this political foray in his Autobiography.in which, while conceding what he calls “terrible inequalities,” he still fears any “sudden disruption of society in quest of some Utopian blessedness.” He is obliged to take shelter behind the unassailable walls of religion, which one might here call the very last refuge of a scoundrel, saying that, while certain “enthusiastic but unbalanced minds” have been so bold as to imagine equality, they prove only by their efforts “how powerless they are in opposing the ordinances of the Creator.” Trollope’s conscientious Conservative, “being surely convinced that such inequalities are of divine origin, tells himself that it is his duty to preserve them.” After all “We do not understand the operations of Almighty wisdom” and are thus unable to understand “why so many, should have so little to make life enjoyable, so much to make it painful, while a few others, not through their own merit, have had gifts poured out to them from a full hand.” [4] Radical social reform was to him tantamount to blasphemy, and this conviction justifies his resistance to change while admitting the evils of pocket boroughs and all the other defenses of the old ruling class.
     It is precisely this sort of certainty that defines an ideal allowing popular writers to note the extent of people’s falling short. Often such a model rests more securely in the imagined past than a hypothetical future. Further, a work is more like to reach a mass audience if it may be rapidly understood with unambiguous meaning; such themes typically rely on fully formed codes of conduct. Because of the privileging of innovation, not to say idiosyncrasy, since the Romantics, it is necessary again to stress that popularity does not imply lesser value. The business of literature has always been equally to affirm preconceptions and to challenge them, often simultaneously.
     Such affinity of art with ambiguity reminds the critic that the rule associating popularity with conservative views is by no means absolute. Exceptions abound, in particular those cases in which what is accepted by a subculture is rejected by a majority. Thus bebop, rap music and the poetry of Allen Ginsberg may be both transgressive and “popular” with a well-defined audience. The ambivalence so frequently highlighted by art may at times make judgements less than straightforward. What effect do the words of the deceased Achilles in the Odyssey have on the valor of the hero in the Iliad when alive? Does Falstaff’s dismissive “there’s honour for you” make the honor of Hotspur and Henry IV (and the V) meaningless? Though popular art may be in intention conservative its reception and use may point in the opposite direction.
     The fact remains, however, that, though the more sophisticated of our own era make a hero of the rebel and the outsider, every society prescribes, indeed, enforces norms of behavior. The works which appeal to the greatest number will be quite naturally those representing a common denominator of belief, by definition then “conservative” in the fundamental sense of seeking to preserve and transmit standards. The system would be static, however, were it not that inscribed within every conclusion is a nagging doubt and within every daring proposal a warning against change.



1. See How to Read Donald Duck. Compare Shaan Amin’s “The Dark Side of the Comics that Redefined Hinduism” s in The Atlantic for Dec. 30, 2017. Amin details the racist and classist Hindu nationalism taught by popular Indian comic books.

2. Life of Napoleon.

3. Andrew Lincoln, Walter Scott and Modernity, 68.

4. See in particular the chapter titled “Men and Brothers.”

5. Chapter XVI “Beverley.”

The Elasticity of Myth in “La Llorona”

The texts of “La Llorona” in versions sung by Chavela Vargas and Angela Anguilar follow the essay.


     In Guadalalajara a week ago, enjoying the Day of the Dead festivities which included numerous stages in the plazas with a variety of musical, dance, and theatrical productions, often featuring local amateurs, I halted my promenade at the sound of a young girl, perhaps eleven or twelve, with a big voice, singing a powerful and passionate version of the classic “La Llorona.” Dressed casually, without makeup of either the glamour or skull-face variety, she captured her audience with the power of the old familiar song.
     The ranchera “La Llorona” is extremely popular in Mexico. It has been recorded many times by popular singers and continues to circulate in folk performance. Also widely known in the American Southwest, its soulful tune is as well perhaps the Spanish-language song most familiar to English speakers after “La Cucaracha” and “Cielito Lindo.” Those innocent of its language may have heard the tune in Julie Taymor’s popular film Frida and their children will remember it from the Disney studio’s Coco.
     A dramatic performance enacting La Llorona is annually presented on Mexico City’s Lake Xochimilco in a production that advertises itself with the line “our nation was born from the tears of La Llorona.” [1] In Paz’s seminal The Labyrinth of Solitude La Llorona is an intermediate figure between the perfection of Mary, the immaculate mater dolorosa, and the treachery of la Malinche, Cortés’ Aztec mistress and translator. In the first identity she is the “long-suffering” Mexican mother celebrated on Mother’s Day, while in the second she is not so much wicked as chingata, “screwed.” Paz declares that all Mexicans are “hijos de la Chingada,” adding “when we shout this cry on the fifteenth of September, the anniversary of our independence, we affirm ourselves in front of, against and in spite of the ‘others.’”
     The story of La Ilorona appears in many forms and with widely varying implications. Its roots in pre-Columbian legend and its parallels around the world are extensive and significant, but not the present focus. The plot elements most commonly included may be briefly summarized. La Llorona is fundamentally the woman who has had the worst experience imaginable. Her lover, with whom she has borne children, is unfaithful to her. Often the two are racially distinguishable, with the woman an india or mestiza and the man whiter. In fury, the woman drowns her children and then, falling into despair at this act, she compounds her sin by committing suicide. She has lost salvation as well as romantic and maternal love. For her monstrous crimes, she is condemned to weep and search for her children, often snatching those who are not her own. If she is a bogeyman to the little ones, she is said also to be a siren who exacts her insatiable revenge against men by luring them to destruction through her beauty and pitiable cries.
     Even that basic narrative, which is subject to a great deal of variation in the songs, stories, poems, plays, and films of La LLorona, may generate a markedly broad range of thematic territory. A simple list of those most prominent tensions and conflicts her story evokes would have to include the following.


1. maternal love
2. male/female power relations in general
3. sexual love
4. fidelity to the church
5. racial inequality
6. national identity
7. the use of violence
8. fear of the female


     Other possibilities lurk within the same material. For instance in recent decades horror movies such as American Michael Chaves' The Curse of La Llorona have reduced La Llorona to a monster ultimately destroyed by the hero. [2] While the popular cinema represented one group of reactions to the story, scholarly journals produced another, often featuring feminist revisions. [3]
     Yet surely the context in which the story most belongs is neither the movie theater nor the university library, but within the family, either as a cautionary figure with which to frighten (and thrill) the young or in songs, either on recordings or performed by amateurs influenced by those same recordings. An examination of two versions of the song, one by senior diva Chavela Vargas, originally from Costa Rica, a longtime street singer and reputed lover of Frida Kahlo and the second by Angela Anguilar, a teenager born in Los Angeles, will suggest the elasticity of the La Llorona myth and a remarkable thematic elasticity born of underdetermination.
     As in most original texts bearing mythic material, “La Llorona” in both Vargas’ and Anguilar’s versions proceeds with oblique references rather than a linear narrative. Vargas opens by intensifying the complaint of betrayal by adding the issue of racial identity to that of gender. In a turn reminiscent of the Song of Solomon, [4] she says she is called “el negro,” while she herself adds “negro pero cariñoso,” thus projecting a suspicious or hostile social set [5] and asserting her own value. (The word “pero,” of course, acknowledges that a swarthy complexion is regarded as a deficiency.) With the liquid sounds of her name ringing in the background like the continuous soft wail of suffering humanity, La Llorona is pitched on the restless seas of love, her position imperiled by the envy of others and her vulnerable position as a woman and as a person (in some sense) of color.
     She lingers luxuriously, the listener may think, even seductively, on her appeal in the second verse in which a parallel self-description; she is “picante pero sabroso” “como el chile verde.” Here the woman draws on the archaic association of females with the vegetative earth, identifying herself with a favored New World food. The definitions of picante range from a simple “tasty,” through “hot spicy,” to “racy” and “naughty,” adding a note of adventure and danger, deepened as before, by the plangent word “Llorona,” breaking repeatedly on the shore of every verse.
     Verse three delivers on that promise of danger with an opening cri de coeur from the depths “ay de mí,” succeeded by the liquid sounds of the river water washing over a sinking object “llorona, llorona, llorona,” and then the chilling request, “lévame al río.” No longer offering herself as an exotic love object, she is consumed with sorrow and either seeking her drowned children in the river or wishing to end her own days there. On the other hand, though, she may, like the Sirens, a number of medieval faeries, or the faux-folk Lorelei be luring some man to his doom in the waters of dissolution.
     The speaker has turned suddenly from seduction to pathetic appeal. Her spectral cold intensifies her despair and devastation as she pitiably requests the favor of a blanket as though just a bit of warmth could relieve her. ”Tapame con tu rebozo, llorona,/ porque me muero de frío.” Having by her acts exiled herself from romantic, parental, and divine love, she can do little but wail.
     This touching plea is then reinforced by the central image of the song. The singer cannot say why, but the very flowers of the cemetery seem to be weeping with her as they sway in the breeze. The entire world is mourning.


No sé qué tienen las flores, llorona
Las flores del campo santo
No sé qué tienen las flores, llorona
Las flores del campo santo

Que cuando las mueve el viento, llorona
Parecen que están llorando
Que cuando las mueve el viento, llorona
Parecen que están llorando


     Following this poignant example of the pathetic fallacy which enwraps everything in the singer’s grief, Vargas then decrescendos with the repetition of the verses about the river and the rebozo. In the whole of the song the listener has heard nothing about any of the events of the story: the unfaithfulness of the lover, the death of the children, and the suicide of the mother. The emotion itself is foregrounded, naked of circumstance, yet traces remain, for those competent in the myth, of each of the themes inherent in the plot.
     A generation of two later Anguilar’s recording of “La Llorona” provides evidence of the song’s perennial popularity, and its words are largely, though not wholly, the same as Vargas’s. Her youthful voice, like that of the child I heard in the Guadalajara plaza, suggests that the harrowing experience of La Llorona is part of the prudential instruction that women must understand as they attain maturity. While Vargas’s version is, except for the repeated “llorona,” spoken by La Llorona herself, Anguilar’s assumes the voice of the man, admiring the lady as she leaves church. His appreciation for her beauty, amounting almost to the glory of the Virgin, is, with delicate taste, attributed to her huipil (the use of the indigenous term for the garment emphasizes the woman’s identity as an Indio). The association with the divine is reinforced by his confidence that “la virgen te creí,” (“the Virgin believes you”) and the need for the Virgin’s sympathy – the horrific murders of her children – is only heightened in drama for being unstated.
     With the heartfelt exclamation “ay de mí” Anguilar then evokes the weeping flowers, in her lyrics, not said to be in the churchyard, but rather “campo lirio” (“a field of lilies”) again recalling the Song of Songs. [6] In the tones of a Troubadour declaring the laws of love, the next verse equates love and suffering, paradoxically suggesting by the use of the term “martirio” (“martyrdom”) that her passion and pain have a penitential or redemptive quality.
     The description of the flowers which seem to weep as they are blown in the wind of fate and the request to go to the river and to be covered by a rebozo follow in very nearly the same words as in the earlier version of the song. Yet in a curious oscillation, since the persona had been the man from the start of Anguilar’s rendition, it seems now unclear who is suffering the cold and seeking as a last resort the waters of dissolution. The rebozo is, after all, a woman’s garment. Is the man villain or victim? Is the woman a traitor or the one betrayed? The formal dance of the figuration makes all of these possibilities available without insisting on any.
     More broadly, the performed versions support all the potential themes, and their signification is the more exact and precise for its economy. The mention of a few concrete specifics, when delivered with the power and depth of Vargas, Anguilar, or the anonymous young heiress of tradition I heard in Guadalajara, is sufficient to trigger access to profound emotion with psychological, religious, and political reverberations spreading ever outward.
     The glimpse of a woman’s garment, the swaying of flowers in a breeze, such details are here not atoms in the random drift of quotidian life, but rather the entry points into a mythic and visionary system built to order and interpret experience. On this framework are displayed and tested such axes of struggle as that between lovers or between an individual and the state. The story of La Llorona reflects the capacity for violence in humankind. But the most enduringly memorable sound of all is the sobbing of La Llorona, a lament at once for self, for family, for community, a complaint in the end at the all-but-impossible demands of simply being alive. We all weep together.



1. Though the phrase is quoted a good many times on the internet, I was unable to locate its source prior to the History Today article titled “The Wailing Woman” by Amy Fuller dated October 31, 2017.

2. This describes the treatment in the American film The Terror of La Llorona by Eric Elias Flores, released in 2019. Other film versions include Peón’s 1933 Mexican version La LLorona, the 1961 Mexican film The Curse of the Crying Woman by Rafael Baledón, and a Guatemalan La Llorona in 2019 by Jayro Bustamante.

3. One sample of such work is Jacqueline Doyle, “Haunting the Borderlands: La Llorona in Sandra Cisneros's ‘Woman Hollering Creek,’" Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1996), pp. 53-70.

4. “I am black, but comely.” Song of Songs I:5. In the thicket of Jewish and Christian commentary on this passage, the color is sometimes thought to suggest that the bride is Pharoah’s daughter or, alternatively and in contrast, that she has rustic origins. Symbolically the darkness has been associated with sin or physicality and with Israel’s condition in the wilderness.

5. Similar to Catullus 5 with the censure expected from the “senum severiorum” or Troubadour songs with their hostile and gossipy “jealous ones.”

6. Song of Songs, 2, 1–2. The plant in the second verse, is rendered as “lily” in many translations, including the King James, though the identification of the plant, which here seems to be red, has been disputed. Due to a close association with Mary, the white lily, the Lilium candidum has since the Middle Ages been popularly known as the Madonna lily.



Chavela Vargas 1961

Todos me dicen el negro, llorona
Negro pero cariñoso
Todos me dicen el negro, llorona
Negro pero cariñoso

Yo soy como el chile verde, llorona
Picante pero sabroso
Yo soy como el chile verde, llorona
Picante pero sabroso

Ay de mí, llorona, llorona, llorona
Llévame al río
Ay de mí, llorona, llorona, llorona
Llévame al río

Tapame con tu rebozo, llorona
Porque me muero de frío
Tapame con tu rebozo, llorona
Porque me muero de frío

No sé qué tienen las flores, llorona
Las flores del campo santo
No sé qué tienen las flores, llorona
Las flores del campo santo

Que cuando las mueve el viento, llorona
Parecen que están llorando
Que cuando las mueve el viento, llorona
Parecen que están llorando

Ay de mí, llorona, llorona, llorona
Llévame al río
Ay de mí, llorona, llorona, llorona
Llévame al río

Tapame con tu rebozo, llorona
Porque me muero de frío
Tapame con tu rebozo, llorona
Porque me muero de frío


Angela Anguilar 2018

Salías de un templo un día, Llorona,
cuando al pasar yo te vi.
Salías de un templo un día, Llorona,
cuando al pasar yo te vi.

Hermoso huipil llevabas, Llorona,
que la virgen te creí.
Hermoso huipil llevabas, Llorona,
que la virgen te creí.

Ay de mí Llorona, Llorona,
Llorona de un campo lirio.
Ay de mí Llorona, Llorona,
Llorona de un campo lirio.

El que no sabe de amores, Llorona,
no sabe lo que es martirio.
El que no sabe de amores, Llorona,
no sabe lo que es martirio.

No sé qué tienen las flores, Llorona,
las flores de un camposanto.
No sé qué tienen las flores, Llorona,
las flores de un camposanto.

Que cuando las mueve el viento, Llorona,
parece que están llorando.
Que cuando las mueve el viento, Llorona,
parece que están llorando.

Ay de mí Llorona, Llorona
Llorona llévame al río.
Ay de mí Llorona, Llorona
Llorona llévame al río.

Tápame con tu rebozo, Llorona,
porque me muero de frío.
Tápame con tu rebozo, Llorona,
porque me muero de frío.

Sincerity and the Other Virtues in Poetry

     One of the oldest clichés of rhetoric is the modesty topos, [1] a convention so familiar that it must constantly assume new forms, mutating to make a fresh impact. If the old classic exordium beginning “Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking . . .” is rarely heard in quite that form, it flourishes in a good many other incarnations.
     Ordinarily, one would hardly attempt to impress an audience by denying one’s own ability at what one has set out to do. Yet the speaker quite often opens by claiming to be incompetent at speechmaking hoping to gain thereby his listeners’ conviction that he will say nothing but the unvarnished truth. Socrates’ address to the jury in Plato’s Apology is one example among a great many.

They have hardly uttered a word, or not more than a word, of truth; but you shall hear from me the whole truth: not, however, delivered after their manner, in No indeed! but I shall use the words and arguments which occur to me at the moment; for I am certain that this is right, and that at my time of life I ought not to be appearing before you, O men of Athens, in the character of a juvenile orator - let no one expect this of me.

     Socrates characterizes his accusers not merely as liars but as accomplished speakers capable of delivering professionally smooth and richly figured orations while he himself will simply speak extemporaneously and thus more honestly. Though we cannot know except from his general reputation how skilled the philosopher was at public speaking, it is clear that he knew at least that the pose of modesty might be useful for his defense.
     In poetry one of the loci classici for this convention is the first poem in Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella.

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain,—
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,—
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe;
Studying inventions fine her wits to entertain,
Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburn'd brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting invention's stay;
Invention, Nature's child, fled step-dame Study's blows;
And others' feet still seem'd but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speak and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
"Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write."

     The last line suggests that to this Muse pure self-expression is the sole end of poetry, a view which neglects other goals such as melodious beauty, didacticism, and entertainment while suggesting that the unselfconscious transcription of consciousness (what is “in thy heart”) is the route to poetry. This contention is patently indefensible in itself, but it may succeed in gaining the writer a reputation for direct and ingenuous self-expression.
     What can sincerity or honesty mean in a work of art? Whatever else it may be a poem is an artifice, a composed object. Sidney’s sonnet is black marks on a white page or certain patterns in sound. It is a play of fancy, framed by a story such as this: “Imagine that a person were one day to say these words . . .”
     There can be no question of facts. Art works through images and indirections, affect and associations in a manner entirely different from a scientist or a historian. It means nothing to ask whether Botticelli’s Primavera is sincere or insincere or, indeed, in some sense “true.” However, just as it is possible for a painter to depict a scene “realistically,’ though his product be but daubs on a canvas, a writer may create in the reader a sense that he is straightforward and sincere.
     In fact Sidney’s whole poem is steeped in the very sort of sophisticated rhetorical figures he claims to eschew. The sonnet form itself and the sonnet sequence this poem opens are highly conventional literary choices (though Sidney does use hexameters). The word invention bears a technical meaning in the world of oratory since the earliest manuals of rhetoric. The modesty topos is only one of a series of rhetorical pyrotechnics with antecedents going back to the ancients by which Sidney seeks to impress his readers. The anadiplosis of lines 3 and 4 and the references to allusion with its implication of art inspired by art rather than personal experience are among many other signs of the calculated design behind the poet’s pretense to simple sincerity.
     Still, many critics have valued what seems to be poetic honesty what seems to be poetic honesty. Matthew Arnold argued that “charlatanism” has no place in poetry and that the best poetry possesses a “high seriousness” that arises uniquely from “absolute sincerity.” [4] With his classical training he could not but be aware of the rhetorical sophistication of his favorite poets and he thus claimed that “the superior character of truth and seriousness, in the matter and substance of the best poetry, is inseparable from the superiority of diction and movement marking its style and manner.”
     The criterion of sincerity clearly has a lengthy history in European criticism associated with generally positive values. Its similitude at least may be shown to be inscribed within characteristics of the text itself. With far less theoretic ground but greater fervor some readers have considered moral characteristics that leave no trace whatever in the written word to be nonetheless relevant to its evaluation.
     In part as a testament to poetry’s role in transmitting culture from one generation to the next and a reaction to puritanical criticism from religion and philosophy, poetry has, since the earliest times, claimed to inculcate morality. Thus, an upright life or at any rate the inclusion of generally accepted morality in literary texts might seem to imply a good writer. The arts have repeatedly been condemned as immoral through the centuries, and their partisans have not been satisfied to deny that accusation; they have generally sought to maintain that the arts are a positive moral influence. [5]
     Often such discussion is sufficiently confused as to jumble the separate categories of an artist’s own personal morality and that represented in an artistic work. Politics, which in the aesthetic realm is presented primarily as moral questions, and religion, judged by the standards of beauty, provide ample territory for the erroneous judgement of art.
     This is obvious when dealing with comments from those who know nothing whatever of art. The Catholic Church had such great authors as on its Index librorum prohibitorum which was maintained from the sixteenth until past the middle of the twentieth century. When it was discontinued in 1966 Cardinal Ottaviani declared that its end was not due to liberalizing but rather to the fact that modern times had produced such a quantity of sacrilegious writing that the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith could not monitor it all. [6]
     When NEA and NEH funding was drastically cut in the nineties, the assault was led by Jesse Helms, whose political career was founded in racist bigotry. One of the chief targets of the philistines was Andre Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” It became perhaps the most popular objet d’art among evangelical Christians in modern times -- reproductions of it appeared in right-wing Christian publications for years afterwards. Needless to say, Mr. Helms had probably not set foot in a gallery or museum in his entire adult life, and the same may be safely assumed of the outraged Christians. The very same silly drama was reenacted around Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” made in part of elephant dung, but also, since one must always up the ante, with cutouts of pudenda from pornographic materials. (Such controversy has always been good for business. Ofili’s “Mary” resold in 2015 for just short of three million pounds.)
     The very same erroneous standards appeared in Nazi Germany with the condemnation of “degenerate” and Jewish art and in the Stalinist Soviet Union after the imposition of a radically reductive “socialist realism” in 1932. Each of these represented an attempt by the state to restrict art to a simple-minded statement of the most basic socially approved values.
    Nor are all such critics know-nothing yahoos. The sensitive have questioned the stature of authors with fascist sympathies, such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline or Ezra Pound. Thoughtful people have expressed reservations about appreciating the films of Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, not because of any shortcomings in the work itself, but rather what they view as unpardonable acts by the artists.
     Such criteria can create fans as well as critics. At one of his readings, archived now on tape, Charles Bukowski entered to great applause carrying a six-pack of beer. The excitement audibly heightened as he opened a can and proceeded to drain it. Waves of applause. Bukowski leaned toward the microphone confidentially, and emitted a loud belch. The hall went wild, not because of the poet’s very real verbal art, but because he was mocking bourgeois morality and decorum.
     The opponents of oppression may also rely on non-aesthetic standards. Recently, while visiting a museum in Warsaw, we saw a work by contemporary artist Zbigniew Libera titled "Lego Concentration Camp" [7] containing neat little Lego block constructions of the familiar watchtowers and barracks. In his image Nazi guards (slightly modified figures from the Lego Police Station set) stood among and grinning skeletal inmates some of whom were placing others in the oven. (The skeletons were from the Pirate set.) To me the picture was indeed jarring with its conflation of innocence and the deepest guilt. Such a work stirs some thoughts in most viewers, including regular calls for it not to be exhibited.
     Non-aesthetic criteria may intrude from any directions. A jazz fan might have a semi-conscious preferential option for musicians who are also junkies, while some readers of Orwell are put off by his late role as a government informant on those he considered Communists or fellow travelers. A parent may approve of Narnia books because their author is a good Christian. Those fascinated by suicide may become devotees or Sylvia Plath or Kurt Cobain. Though Sir Thomas Malory’s arrests for rape and theft are mere footnotes today, surely many people would find themselves unable to stomach Lolita, one of the most beautiful books of its era, were it known that Nabokov was in fact a pedophile. (He was, of course, not.)
     In modern times advocates of art for art’s sake have often cooperated with their foes by ostentatiously behaving in ways meant to épater les bourgeoisie. Since the Romantic era, the bohemian antics of those in particular who identified themselves with the avant-garde embodied the same standards as those bourgeoises who did not understand them.
     The examples might be multiplied indefinitely, but the phenomenon is sufficiently familiar that further illustration would be redundant. Clearly art must be judged as art. Poets are experts in the use of words, not in optimum social arrangements or morality. Just as history has its own standards (in which the aesthetic plays at best a secondary role) as does physics and every other field, literature must be granted its own standards. Justice and goodness and truth are all compelling qualities in certain arenas, but not when evaluating a work of art.




1. See Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, “Affected Modesty,” p. 83-5 for a survey.

2. Jowett’s translation.

3. Astrophil and Stella 1

4. In “the Study of Poetry,” originally published as the introduction to T. H. Ward’s anthology, The English Poets (1880) and later in Arnold’s Essays in Criticism, Second Series. In Arnold’s time related views were espoused by John Ruskin and George Macdonald. Since that time, among the more significant critics who have sought to analyze the notion of literary sincerity are M. H. Abrams who in “Poetic Truth and Sincerity,” in The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition argued that sincerity was “the primary criterion, if not the sine qua non, of excellence in poetry” during the nineteenth century. Later studies include Lionel Trilling’s Poetry and Sincerity and Susan B. Rosenbaum’s Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading. On the other hand, critics such as T. S. Eliot made “impersonal” a word of praise.

5. Sir Philip Sidney’s A Defence of Poetry is one prominent example.

6. L'Osservatore della Domenica, April 24, 1966. The Index had included such authors as Montaigne, Descartes, Galileo, Pascal, de Beauvoir and Sartre.

7. The Lego company, unaware of the artist’s design, had originally cooperated, donating the blocks, but, when they learned Libera’s theme, they tried to block him from showing it, but eventually conceded. Hence each box in the installation bears the line "This work of Zbigniew Libera has been sponsored by Lego." The work was banned by bureaucrats from the Polish of the Venice Bienniale in 1997. Lego later refused a request for their blocks from Ai Weiwei.

Euphemism as Metaphor

This piece is neither scholarly nor exhaustive. It aims rather to be familiar and recreational after the fashion of Isaac D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature.



     As the name suggests, the point of a euphemism to substitute a more safe or decorous word for one too charged with anxiety or desire. Inevitably, every euphemism is a sort of figure of speech, a variety of allegory in the broader etymological sense of “saying something other” than what is meant. Thus euphemisms share with other figures the pleasure of wit and surprise that accompanies all such doublings as well as their semantic extension. The euphemistic expression does not merely occlude or replace the avoided one; it adds new elements of meaning as well, beginning with the charge of energy that accompanies entering a restricted zone of language or approaching taboos. Each example provides a model, often simple, of how poetic language in colloquial usage enriches and condenses meaning.
     Euphemisms, like jokes, collect about nodes of human insecurity such as the divine, the ego, death, intoxication, sex, and scatology. Every euphemism by its very nature bears the nervous energy of treading in a no man’s land in inadequate disguise. Even empty sounds like “blankety-blank” or television’s bleep that masks improper language make all listeners ears prick up the with the conviction that what is being said must be of unusual interest. The visual cue of a series of symbols in a comic strip indicating profanity (called a grawlix [1]) draws attention to the utterance and intensifies it. The effect of substituting a harmless term for one in some way emotionally charged is, in fact, always paradoxical. While avoiding a tabooed usage the euphemism inevitably draws attention to the altered word, introducing a tone suggesting nervousness or a wink and a nod which in fact highlights the usage dramatically. [2]
     The most ancient use of euphemisms may have arisen from wariness over using god’s name or the names of dead ancestors, or, indeed, one’s own name. The archaic identification of signifier and signified suggested that naming the supernatural might attract unwelcome attention from the divine and the deceased, unless strict ritual rules were observed. In many cultures a conjuring may be regarded as effective if the magician knows the name of person at whom a charm is directed.
     The Cretan king Rhadamanthus was said to have forbidden swearing by the gods, mandating that people swear instead by animals. [3] To avoid exciting their unwanted attention, the chthonic deities governing vengeance retribution, the Erinyes (Furies) were called Eumenides (or the Benevolent Ones). They often were invoked in association with oath-taking, for they punished those who swore to a lie. Aeschylus tells in The Eumenides how they were tamed by Athena and called thereafter the Venerable Ones or Semnai.
      Jews, Muslims, and Christians are well aware of the ancient Hebrew use of bynames to substitute for the deity’s name. Thus in the secular love poetry of the Song of Songs the repeated phrases by the roes, and by the hinds of the field are euphemistic forms of Hebrew oaths. God’s bynames are chosen with the greatest care. Phonically each resembles a conventional divine appellation. [4] Further, worship of animals (such as the golden calf) was common in the ancient Near East. One scholar at least thinks that these expressions are genuine pagan oaths to nature deities. [5]
     The Orthodox today avoid writing or saying God’s proper name, the tetragrammaton, using a wide variety of euphemisms, most of which specify god’s nature, such as Almighty (El Shaddai) or Lord of Hosts (Adonai Tzva'ot, suggesting military leadership). At times they simply write G-d, a curious example of writing a word while simultaneously canceling it.
     Of course, the most common euphemisms for God today, called minced oaths, arise from phonetic similarity and contribute no semantic information: gee, gosh, and the like. Even in the twenty-first century the magical belief that hearing oaths is somehow deleterious to children remains all but universal. Vestiges linger of the notion that women, too, must never hear such expressions.
     The anxiety produced by thoughts of mortality is ameliorated sometimes by euphemisms expressing religious faith and the confident expectation of an afterlife: meeting one’s maker, to go to one’s reward. Some churches call funerals a homecoming. Other expressions by their levity represent a kind of whistling in the dark: kick the bucket, bite the dust, [6], buy the farm, and the like. Cockney rhyming slang is, as usual, more oblique, offering the mildly comforting brown bread for dead.
     In modern times we associate euphemisms with sexual and excretory activities. A word directly naming the place we excrete (such as defecation room) almost never appears, nor does the term describing the apparatus most commonly used today, the water closet. Though today it may seem an unpleasant word because of its association, the word toilet was in origin a diminutive of toile and referred to a small cloth on which grooming tools were laid out. Powder room likewise suggests primping rather than peeing. [7] Similarly, latrine may bring to mind a reeking hole in the dirt, but it at first (like lavatory or, of course, washroom or bathroom) signified a place to clean oneself. Such terms reinforce the sense of purgation and purity that may follow excretion. In rest room the semantic element of relaxation following what might be called doing one’s business has become so generalized as to retain little force. Others, such as privy and the Spanish necessario, are even more oblique. More concrete are the associations of the British term bog referring at first to an open cess-pit.
     The delicate education of children about reproductive activities may be simply called the facts of life, which washes the topic of social hazard, or the birds and the bees, suggesting the continuity of all life. Since France is considered sexually naughty, saying au naturel clothes nakedness in the discreet tones of another language while genteelly retaining its sauciness.
     Vague words such as thing, stuff, or it and nonsense words can serve as general, all-purpose euphemisms. In a curious example of a euphemism recrossing into proscribed language a drug user who might refer to his stash as his shit, while an artist might use the same term to refer to his recent works. Presumably the high, whether aesthetically or chemically induced, is particularly charged for the junkie or the painter, both of whom are likely to be contemptuous of bourgeois standards. A bumper sticker reading stuff happens is understood as meaning shit happens, in which shit represents all possible undesirable events. Clara Bow was the It Girl whose film It appeared in 1927, and a teenager today might ask a friend, “Did you do it?” The 1928 song “Makin’ Whoopee” popularized by Eddie Cantor and “My Dingaling,” a hit for Chuck Berry in 1972 are examples of the use of neologisms to suggest sexual meanings, though they are not quite arbitrary. Whoopee with its insistent doubled vowels, certainly suggests the rush of joy that might accompany sex, while the jocular dingaling is comically associated with the dangling male genitalia.
     The socially dangerous condition of intoxication is likewise hedged about by a rich growth of euphemism. Blasted and bombed acknowledge the destructive loss of function that accompanies drunkenness, while buzzed suggests the quickened hum in the inner ear associated with a lesser chemical alteration of consciousness. Cockneys nod ironically to high culture with Brahms and Liszt, which rhymes with pissed. Many other areas of life, money, for instance, disability, and aging, also attract euphemistic usages.
     Steven Pinker coined the term euphemism treadmill [8] to describe the succession of terms that result when a once proper term has come to seem inadequate or offensive. Americans of a certain age saw the polite usage turn from colored to Negro, and then to black (sometimes Black), and finally African-American. Notoriously, terms like idiot, moron, and imbecile were once clinical terms designating degrees of cognitive limitation more scientifically (it seemed) than the generic feeble-minded of an earlier era only to be replaced in the middle of the twentieth century by retarded, then developmentally disabled. The DSM-5 uses intellectual disability. The hospital psychiatric department where my wife worked changed from Mental Health Unit to Behavioral Health Unit as though behavior defined the problem for depressive and psychotic alike. It must have sounded more polite to somebody.
     In their most efficient uses, euphemisms have a spark of wit and a flowering of suggestive imagery. For instance, an American might tell a man whose trouser fly is unzipped, “Uh-oh, the barn door is open.” This form communicates the information while adding the amusement of a sort of riddle, the levity of humor, to defuse the topic’s awkwardness while retaining an implication of the power of Eros which, it suggests, is bestial and only in part controllable.
     It may seem a rebuke to the pretentions of language itself that among the ancient Greek meanings of the word euphemism, along with the use of words of good omen and abstention from those of bad and praise-singing, is the solemn silence during religious rites, as though stillness might well displace our endless flow of verbiage. Euphemism, though, far from simply blocking verbal signification, heightens meaning and increases semantic precision, transmitting values and entertaining at the same time.



1. The term was coined by Beetle Bailey artist Mort Walker in 1964. They are also called jams and nittles. Such symbols had been used, however, at least since December 14, 1902 in Rudolf Dirks’ Katzenjammer Kids strip. In the grawlixes of sailors Uncle Heinle and John Silver, anchors are featured.
Walker named a number of other comic conventions as well in his book Lexicon of Comicana (1980). For instance, he called the visible cloud of dust generated by a character’s departure a briffit and plewds for the nimbus of sweat around an anxious character.

2. Words that do bear specific meanings may be eroded through vulgar usage to the same status or even less. With occasional use the word “fucking” may function as an intensifier, but in the discourse of a person whose every sentence includes several uses of the word even that is lost and the word, originally so potent, comes to mean nothing more than a pause during which “uh” escapes from the throat.

3. Porphyry, De Abstinentia III.16. For Porphyry this law suggests arguments in favor of vegetarianism. Divine animals and semi-bestial deities are, of course, common in archaic times. Rhadamanthus became proverbial for wisdom and later was described as one of the judges of the dead.

4. This occurs first in verses 2.7 and 3.5. The sound of the Hebrew for “roes” is similar to either (’elohey) ṣᵉba’ot '(God of) Hosts' or (YHWH) ṣᵉba’ot '(Jehovah is) Armies' and that for “hinds” to ’el šadday 'El Shaddai'. The association is explicit in the Targum.

5. See David McLain Carr’s “Rethinking Sex and Spirituality: The Song of Songs and Its Readings,” in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 81, No. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 1998), pp. 413-435.

6. This idiom, with its American Old West associations, is curiously similar to the Homeric expression that might be translated as “bite the earth.”

7. Pee itself is a euphemism to avoid saying piss.

8. “The Name of the Game,” in the New York Times for April 4, 2005.

Tarkington’s Vulgarian Hero [The Plutocrat]

I would perhaps never have read this had I not come upon a copy of the 1927 Doubleday first edition in a Salvation Army store. The title (with “The” alone oddly italicized) is pasted with a graphic of travel decals to the front and the spine and the endpapers are marbled. A discreet label in the back identifies it as having been originally purchased at the Washington, D. C. Brentano’s. Successive penciled used bookstore notations record prices of two dollars and one dollar before the volume ended up as a donation.

The few page numbers in parentheses refer to this edition. Numbers in brackets are endnotes.

I. a philistine paragon

     Virtually all those who have commented on Tarkington during the last few decades have begun by noting the extraordinary decline in his literary reputation since his death and I shall be no different. In the early twentieth century Tarkington was immensely popular. His books regularly lingered on the best-seller lists, and many were made into films, including the Welles classic The Magnificent Ambersons. The film version of The Plutocrat (called Business for Pleasure) starred the beloved Will Rogers as Tinker. Tarkington received the Pulitzer Prize twice. His Penrod was once as popular as Huckleberry Finn. In his youth he successfully sought election to the Indiana legislature considering such service part of a wealthy family’s responsibilities. Curiously, the author who had once been so thoroughly mainstream as to be celebrated by critics and a mass audience alike now appears as something of an outlier.
     Were one to see a novel titled The Plutocrat by Jack London or George Norris or Upton Sinclair, one would expect a muckraking expose of the fat cats’ misdeeds. Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald would be expected to satirize the subject more or less broadly. Who but Booth Tarkington, though, would have actually made the vulgar rich man his hero, and this on the cusp of the Great Depression? In politics he was staunchly conservative, not to say reactionary. He not only supported Prohibition and opposed the New Deal; he never could quite accept the advent of the automobile.
     Tarkington was by no means unconscious of the conundrum of artistic success in the early twentieth century; he was defensively anxious to secure his place in the spectrum of American literature. The issue of artistic prominence is a central theme of The Plutocrat. To Ogle’s artistic associates Jones and Macklyn the playwright’s appeal to the “Many” as opposed to the “Few” is a mark of aesthetic mediocrity. The poet and the painter who consider popularity a sign the artist has given in to “the mob” are portrayed with a kind of explicit brittle snobbery every bit as much a caricature as that of the Midwestern businessman. The thematic thrust of the novel, though, is not symmetrical. The satire of the artists is validated while the philistine turns out to be in fact admirable. The reader is brought around to the position of the mediating figure of his daughter Olivia who appreciates her father’s heroic qualities while remaining quite aware of his absurdity.
     There can be no suspicion of ambiguity or irony in the book’s theme. It was published shortly after Babbitt and looked very much like a riposte, though Tarkington (perhaps looking down his nose) claimed he had never read Lewis’s novel. The comparison was not lost on the New York Times reviewer whose article was headlined “Booth Tarkington Draws A Heroic Babbitt.” [1]
     Much of the book is less about Tinker’s greatness than about Ogle’s shortcoming in being unable to perceive it. When Ogle finds himself “the only person of the whole ship’s company who went about Gibraltar alone,” he questions his own standards. “He could almost have wished that nature had made him a little less exclusive.” Tarkington suggests that this fault of character had been produced by Ogle’s “lonely and satiric father” who believed in a small band of elect distinguished by superior culture. Thus he had no fellow-feeling with others, seeing them rather as caricatures while he could not see himself in that light. (182-183) After a couple of hundred pages of shallow but merciless satire of all characters, including Olivia, who proves ultimately insightful, the reader might be forgiven for taking Tarkington’s description of Ogle as a self-portrait.
     Ogle is obliged to question his own habitual value judgements in the face of Mme. Momoro’s apparent fondness for the loud Mr. Tinker, and then by Dr. Medjila’s apparently more disinterested appreciation. From that latter scholar comes the suggestion that this man whom he had instantly despised was in fact “the new Roman.” (473) [2] He comes to accept this and the reader can hardly disagree when the narrator informs the reader explicitly that Ogle by story’s end “had suffered some enlightenments and improved his knowledge of himself.” (534)
     Ogle, of course, had the inducement of the allure of Tinker’s daughter Olivia to persuade him that there may be more to her father than he had at first expected. It is true that the businessman is idealistically depicted as fascinated by urban planning, water systems and the like associated with general social improvement rather than projects valued for their money-making potential. If one is to admire Tinker, one must assume that advancing the interests of the plutocrats is equivalent to advancing society itself, a conviction that ignores that brutality of capitalism, more nakedly undeniable in those days before the New Deal. Working people and the poor make no appearance in the story, except in the nameless North Africans, portrayed as sulking and silent except when uncontrollably animated. Olivia twits Ogle about his resemblance to these less-than-human figures, but, as we know, he recovers his cordiality when he learns to admire the rich.
     Vernon L. Parrington, a few years before the publication of The Plutocrat, called Tarkington “the great failure in contemporary literature.” “His art,” wrote Parrington, was “destroyed by love of popularity.” Tarkington for him is “a perennial sophomore” who sought only to gratify his “middle-class” readers at whom Parrington looked down his nose and called “lovers of comfortable literature.” [3] Is this the voice of the supercilious snobs Jones and Macklyn? If so, it is also my voice and not so different from the voices of most knowledgeable critics. Though it is generally more enlightening and lively as well to overturn expectations and to move against the current, when the aesthetes and the philistines are choosing up sides, it is difficult to be a contrarian.


1. New York Times, January 9, 1927. The piece went on to define the novel’s theme in confusing if semi-Tarkingtonian terms: “Mr. Tarkington has put his pen at the service of an ideal -- the ideal of an American cosmopolitanism as opposed to a parochial sophistication.”

2. It would have been considerably more difficult to pass off Mr. Tinker as a “new Greek,” of course.

3. Vernon L. Parrington, Maincurrents in American Thought, "Addenda 1917-1924." P. 375.




II. a Tarkington fan

I quote here from Smith’s remarks as recorded in volume 25 of the Proceedings of the Indiana Bar Association, p. 65.

     That final paragraph suggests that my own notions and those of the academy (and whatever other literati might be said to exist in this belated period) were as much in peril of being caricatures as those of Jones, Macklyn, and the brittle Ogle that preceded his enlightenment. Like it or not, we were enacting the role of elitist aesthetes. Given pause, we might then wonder, if Tarkington did not write for literary specialists, to whom would Tinker seem appealing? Surely working people are an unlikely audience. The current president is a genuine crass businessman, but his ego is too colossal to admit any object but itself. We have, however, the recorded comments of a somewhat lesser Midwest grandee. Perhaps the praise of one who appreciates Tarkington will reveal something of the source of his appeal.
    Consider whether the encomium of Tarkington from a prominent judge whose very name sounds like a fictional creation does not sound very much like Earl Tinker. F. Dumont Smith addressed the Joint Illinois and Indiana Bar Associations:

Undoubtedly, today, the consensus of opinion in the literary world of America, is that Booth Tarkington is the dean of American letters, and unquestionably he is the greatest fiction writer in America, today. I think that would be conceded by almost anyone. But I go further than that – I say he is the greatest fiction writer that America has ever produced.

     Smith is here complimenting his hosts on a native son, but the tone of boosterism is evident in his extravagant final statement. Should anyone doubt Smith’s ability to make such grand literary judgements, he offers his bona fides:

I have written a couple of books, myself, and many magazine articles, and when they built the great Kansas City Club, at an expenditure of one and a half million dollars, they came out to Hutchinson, Kansas, and selected me as chairman of the Library Committee.

     His claim to himself an author is quite true, but what is revealing is that he uses that as a mere prelude to the real source of his pride, his role in a very expensive businessman’s club. He boasted as well of being a Knight Templar Mason, a member of the Mystic Shrine, as well as of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, the Knights of Pythias, the Ancient Order of United Workmen, and the Woodmen of the World.
     After these pleasantries, Smith went on to his more serious business, praising recent Kansas legislation outlawing strikes.

The Apotropaic Priapos and Male Sexuality

     Priapos is a deity who rarely appeared in literature. A latecomer to the Greek pantheon, with his exaggerated phallus, his place in Hellenistic times is surely a concession to the archaic practices honoring the earth goddess and other forces of fertility and generation displaced by the Olympians. Imperfectly fitting into the new order, Priapos assumed a role on the sidelines, providing a rustic air and did comic turns, becoming an odd sort of scarecrow while continuing to offer himself as an intercessor generally friendly to human interests. Many later depictions of the god cast a stark light on the use of male sexuality in aggression, assault, and violence.
     Strabo notes that Hesiod did not mention Priapos. Doubtless an Eastern importation, like Dionysos, sometimes named as his father, the worship of Priapos was considered by the ancients to have arisen around Lampsakos in the area of the Hellespont where, according to Pausanias, he was “more revered than any other god.” [1] His significance in this era is clearly marked though broad. As Diodorus Siculus puts it, “the generative member, since it is the cause of the reproduction of human beings and of their continued existence through all time, became the object of immortal honour.” [2] People’s “continued existence” is dependent, of course, not only on human reproduction, but also the productive fertility of the soil and the flourishing of wild and domestic animals. Priapos’ figure is represented in a second century stature with an overflowing basket of produce at his crotch. [3]
     In the most remote rural areas Priapos maintained this function most fully. With an aristocrat’s romanticism reminiscent of Yeats’ longing for Innisfree Catullus sketches a “turf cottage” roofed with “osier-twigs” in which Priapus receives honors and in return brings prosperity to his poor devotees. [4] Priapos’ general beneficent associations take the form of patronage of fishermen for those living by the sea [5] to whom he ensured a good catch as well as protection from sudden death. For centuries sailors carried small phallic charms as amulets against shipwreck.
     With sexual power comes sexual anxiety. His originary myth itself is radically ambivalent. His prodigious penis is no gift but rather inconvenient and impotent, due to Hera’s jealous curse. [6] in spite of his imposing outsize member, Priapos had a poor reputation as a lover. He is generally described as ill-favored in appearance and many Priapic legends such as those in Ovid narrate tales of unsuccessful sexual assault. [7] In a number of the poems of the Priapeia the god complains of impotence. Tibullus has Priapos deliver an instructive lecture on the seduction of youths only to end by declaring that his own erotic desire has brought him nothing but suffering and failure, exposing him to ridicule as an absurd instructor in love. [8]
     Priapos’ sexuality, then, could be represented as a generative dynamo, an expression of the vitality of nature itself, but he also could self-reflectively doubt his virility. Yet this does not exhaust the modes of male sexuality he embodies. Classical eros, not to speak of modern, allowed another, and darker, form of desire. The Classical lover may be the stricken victim of passion one finds in in a good deal of Ovid, or he may be the pleasure-loving sybarite of many lyrics in the Anthology. In a third alternative, less commonly recognized, he is an aggressive delighter in sexual assault against those of lower status: slaves, prisoners, common prostitutes.
     We are by now familiar with the assertion that rape is a crime of power and domination rather than ordinary sexual pleasure, yet the role of a similar dynamic in many other relationships is often underestimated. In contemporary language such aggression is explicit in the common use of terms as “fuck you,” “up yours,” “you suck” and the like. They are the modern forms of the notorious opening line of Catullus Pēdīcābō ego vōs et irrumābō ("I will sodomize you and face-fuck you") [10]
     A phallus to assure fertility seems natural enough, but in what way does a man with an erection serve as an effective guardian? The poems of the Priapeia (and other similar poems) leave no doubt. Priapos’ prodigious member is frightening because he threatens to sexually attack the trespasser, male or female indifferently. Priapos’ role as guardian of gardens may have gained popularity because the deity seemed a quaint and semi-comic rustic to sophisticated urbanites, but it rests on the male member’s potential as a weapon capable of inflicting suffering. Indeed, many Priapic poems suggest that the statue’s huge member might be used as a club with which to beat intruders.
     While Priapos does epitomize male sexual desire with its impetuous mandates and at times identifies this drive with the fundamental motive power of nature visible in both wilderness and cultivated land, he also represents male vulnerability. With few exceptions, of which Priapos is the most prominent, the ancient Greeks and Romans preferred to minimize male genitals in statues and drawings of naked men. Though ithyphallic figures of Shiva and of the Egyptian god Min and other divinities are not unusual, to the Greeks and Romans there was something vulnerable, absurd, and comic about going around with an erection. Finally, the male member was also commonly used as an emblem of power. There could be no clearer sign of patriarchy than the penis associated not with love but with physical punishment.



1. Pausanias 9.31.2 The earliest systematic study of Priapos, Richard Payne Knight’s fascinating Discourse on the Worship of Priapus A discourse on the worship of Priapus, and its connection with the mystic theology of the ancients, focuses on this aspect of the god. As an eighteenth century rationalist to Payne the phallus was “a very natural symbol of a very natural and philosophical system of religion.” He wrote that the ancient “mystics” using such imagery promulgated a religion free from “vulgar superstition,” an accusation he is too restrained to make explicitly against his Established Church. In spite of this discretion he suppressed the book and it was not publicly published for decades.

2. Diodorus Siculus 4.6.1-4 “laughter and sport”

3. In the Cortile de Belvedere, Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican Museums.

4. Carmina 19.

5. The Greek Anthology contains four dedications to Priapos of gardens and six for Priapos of the beach.

6. The curse is said to be in revenge for Paris’ preference of Aphrodite. I have found no earlier authority for this that the scholiast on Apollonius of Rhodes 1.932, and Kerenyi sniffs at the story as "a cheap theme, and certainly not an ancient one" in The Mythology of the Greeks, vol. 1 Gods of the Greeks.

7. For instance in 75 his penis is “exanimis” and “inutile.”

6. Fasti 1.6 and 1.9. Some of the finest English poems on impotence are from more or less libertine writers such as Rochester and Carew.

9. Elegies 1.4.

10. Carmina 16. The poet directs his invective at his friends Furius and Aurelius who had apparently called his lyrics -- with likely particular reference to Carmina 5 -- molliculi (“soft” or perhaps “effeminate”). In turn he accuses them of passive “feminine” sexual roles. His threat to sexually penetrate them is to him evidence not of homosexuality but of masculine power.

Vignettes of the Sixties

1. a raid

     In the late sixties they lived in an old building in Chicago close enough to Lake Michigan that the sound of the water lapping on the shore was audible at night. Except for the front apartment on each floor, the building was made up of studios with little kitchenettes and Murphy beds in the closets. The elderly widows who occupied most of the units sometimes would call on him for aid with such chores as replacing lightbulbs. He and his wife were there largely because it was cheap and the management allowed their cat.
     A few other tenants of their own generation lived there with whom they soon became acquainted. The first-floor front apartment, right by the building’s entrance, was occupied by two young women of spirits so buoyant and innocent that they drove a Volkswagen Beetle covered with hearts and daisies and slogans such as “make love not war” and “smoke pot.” No one could have been more amiable, and the two were masseuses as well, though the car in the street did seem rather uncool. After all, in those days really substantial penalties were exacted for simple possession, though in this particular city, cash could resolve most cases.
     They also met Gino, a flamboyant hair stylist who also lived on the first floor. Something of an interior decorator as well as a coiffeur, he had covered all his walls with metal foil. Serious about his profession, he designed original looks and hairdressing magazines were scattered about his place along with gay pornography. They had some pleasant sociable evenings with these three.
     But, one night came a knock that somehow sounded troubled even before they had opened the door. It was Gino who breathlessly informed them that the police were raiding the women’s place at that very moment. He had managed to slip down to the end of the hall where there was a small closet with a garbage chute near which he had concealed his stash before coming like Paul Revere to alert them on the fourth floor.
     As it happened at that moment they had a miscellany of minor contraband: half an ounce of decent pot, a bit of a better variety, a chunk of hash, a few psychedelics and amphetamines for a rainy day, nothing big, but enough to be very expensive in the corrupt city in which they lived. He wasn’t sure what to do. He knew he did not want to lose his little collection. Or get busted. The garbage room seemed risky, especially if the cops had managed to turn up Gino’s stuff. With the foolish bravado of youth, he strode to his back stairway and descended decisively into the alley’s welcoming darkness.
     Of course, had it been a serious police operation the back door would have been the most obvious place to keep an eye on, but as it happened he walked on unimpeded to the home of nearby friends where he left his stash for safekeeping.
     Upon his return he found that the poor women had been arrested. The officers had visited Gino as well, but his place was clean by then and the putatively straight cops had such a rollicking time examining his gay oriented magazines that they had no wish to hassle him further.
     He was not surprised, upon recovering his stuff from its guardians, to find that the pot had palpably diminished.


2. a demonstration

     My friend’s parents in some ways typified their generation. His father, whose own parents were urban and working class, flew in World War II and came home from a German POW camp to the possibilities suggested by the GI Bill. He acquired some college, then a white collar job with a major corporation and, after a bit, a substantial brick home in a prestigious suburb.
     He must have felt that America was working out pretty well for him. He was a purchaser, a position which by his own account consisted largely of three-martini lunches with salesmen who had long been suppliers and then renewing or signing a deal. His work consisted largely of socializing, of which he was naturally fond, and of which he became fonder.
     He and his wife were easy-going people, unfailingly pleasant and hospitable, but, as the sixties wore on, it seemed that something was not right. The war in Vietnam was expanding in an alarming way, dominating the news, and threatening the comfortable security of their son. Somehow it seemed very different from the war of their youth. And people’s reactions seemed different, sometimes difficult to understand, especially the attitudes of the youth.
     I and my friends had gathered at their house from our various colleges on Friday night, March 24, 1967. We had come to our parental homes in the suburbs for this weekend because the following day an antiwar march was planned for Chicago. As it turned out, it attracted about 5000 people which was a good crowd in those days, doubtless boosted in this case by Martin Luther King’s leading the parade and then speaking at the Coliseum. He had spent the previous summer in Chicago working for open housing.
     That is, however, only background for Ben’s story. Maybe a dozen of us were lounging about our friend’s TV room when his parents returned home in high spirits after a night out. They courteously came in to chat with us before retiring. After we had exchanged a few pleasantries, though, a frown crossed the woman’s face.
     “What is going on, that’s what I’d like to know. You’re all a bunch of good kids, but you want to go ‘round looking like bums. I don’t get it.”
     She paused, ruefully looking across the room. Her eyes lit on Ben, the only one of the group who wore short hair and a preppy sport coat. “Look at Ben,” she said. “Why can’t you all take care of yourself like Ben does. Anyone can tell he’s a good boy.”
     This kind of talk, while common in those days, had a certain irony to my ear. We all knew, while she did not, that Ben was so well-groomed because he was a member of the Communist Party, USA which has never much cared for bohemians, though some bohemians have cared a good deal for the Party. His appearance was meant to facilitate his organizing efforts. The Maoists in Progressive Labor were similarly distinguishable in youth movement circles due to their effort to be indistinguishable from the mainstream.


3. a work of art

     After I finished my B.A. in 1967 I skipped the graduation ceremonies and drove nonstop in a driveaway car (does anyone do that today? do the youth even know what that is?) with four friends to the Haight-Ashbury where, sure enough, at the moment of our breathless arrival, the Diggers were serving food in the park and we found we had arrived just in time to dine.
     Dine we did. We were crashing with a onetime classmate who had left before finishing his degree. He was very proud of his cat. He had been listening to KMPX (at the time so very freeform that it seemed one could wander in off the street and take the microphone). The station had received word that Grace Slick’s cat had had kittens and they were being offered to good homes. He ran the few blocks over, knocked on her door, and, sure enough, was given a cat.
     We petted the cat and ate short-grain brown rice and vegetables. Our host’s girlfriend made jewelry which she sold to a store on Haight Street. Most of the people about had even less visible form of support. They had, however, in compensation, many ideas. We heard that we should look in on a guy named Raphael whose art was said to be mind-blowing. Though we did not know anyone in the building, we went to call on him. Without hesitation we were conducted to his home and gallery, though in fact it was little like either a home or a gallery. Raphael slept in a storage closet on the landing of a Victorian home’s stairway, an oddly shaped space in which the roof met the floor and one could not stand upright. It was an imaginative person’s idea of a sublet. Though three in his space made a tiught squeeze, Raphael received us graciously.
     His art was all about. His sole oeuvre. He had hung hundreds of small objects – pieces of mechanical watches, transistors, indescribable bits of tiny and delicate debris – from his low ceiling with fine filaments. They were arranged in careful patterns to state a theme, repeat it, vary it. It was as though one found oneself inside a concrete representation of a Brandenburg Concerto. Raphael gently blew and it seemed the whole environment was jiving. We were now in an Ub Iwerks cartoon, though Bach’s soundtrack continued. The entire Haight-Ashbury neighborhood surely pulsed in harmonic sympathy. The new America and a new art were, it seemed at that moment, unquestionably emerging. New possibilities were daily blooming. Raphael and his art have never been mentioned until now.

Sir Isumbras and the Functions of the Fabulous

     As soon as language appeared, it became possible to describe things contrary to reality, facilitating lying and allowing the emergence of religion and literature. The appetite of the pious for marvels knows no boundaries in space or time; supernatural events provide marvelous entertainment and add the simplest seal of authenticity for every sadhu, faith healer, priest and shaman. Miracles continue to occur regularly if one believes the tales of the faithful.
     There is, however, no controversy over the unreality of all imaginative literature. Every story is made up, in this sense a “lie;” it makes no claim to have actually happened and thus be “true.” Every poem is also a little work of fiction, with a persona saying things the author imagined might be said. As Aristotle knew, literature provides quite a different sort of truth. In fact, both verisimilitude and fabulation are rhetorical figures, the former suggesting a complex of attitudes arising from an apparently plausible plot and the latter making use of a story’s improbability .
     Those utterly unsophisticated in visual art sometimes tend to think that the best painting is the most real-looking. (Naïve as it is, this notion has a continuous history reaching back to antiquity.) By a similar standard of judgment, verisimilitude would be the mark of the best writing. One might using this criterion criticize a novel’s conclusion as implausible, the description of a city as quite unlike the original, or dialogue as stilted. Such points are indeed salient, but only if the narrative had already established an expectation of realism making the offending passage dissonant.
     In fact a great deal of literature employs unrealistic turns of plot altogether appropriate, indeed necessary, for the effects and themes of a given work. The myths by which humans structure and understand their world include none of the restraints of lived experience. Heroes and villains die and are reborn, they possess the power of invisibility, heal the sick and raise the dead. Their reality is symbolic and not literal. Similarly, the conventions of romance involve the most incredible coincidences and pairings, the most improbable reappearances and denouements. Folk tales, too, are often utterly supernatural from the start, though many rely on spirits and goblins rather than deities.
     Verisimilitude and its opposite both make an impression on the reader. The many critics who have pondered whether Sir Isumbras is a courtly romance or a religious quasi-hagiography neglect to observe what the two genres have in common: both saints’ lives and chivalric narrative allow themselves conventions that stray far from realism.
     The sort of entertainment Sir Isumbras offers may seem in little demand today. in the narration of a medieval Job [1], whose travails mount until he accepts his guilt and, having performed extravagant penance, finds his material as well as spiritual well-being restored as a result. As a tail-rhyme romance, the account is clearly meant for popular amusement rather than for catechism; the poem certainly arose and circulated apart from any ecclesiastical imprimatur, yet is was an age when the canonical saints themselves had careers recorded as rather more lively with miraculous manifestations than the readers’ lived experience.
     The boldly dramatic turns in Sir Isumbras’ life are told with little concern for verisimilitude. After the talking bird sent by Christ sets the plot in motion, a reader or listener not swept along by the story might wonder at the lion, leopard, and unicorn that carry off his sons with such regularity, or at their miraculous reappearance in his hour of need without any explanation of what had happened in the meantime. His wife’s failure to recognize him after his long service as an ironworker is likewise implausible (as his her treatment by her captor and her immediate ascendance to rule in his absence). Sir Isumbras’ restoration to prosperity with which the tale ends is as flat and simple as the end of the book of Job. A griffin’s steals his gold, but then it fortuitously reappears. Anything can happen, it seems, that the narrator wishes to propose.
     All these extraordinary events are far from random. They serve the ends of the romance just as similar improbabilities fill other romances from Daphnis and Chloe to The Winter’s Tale. In the first place, use of the fabulous is a sign of the aesthetic text. Though marvels and the supernatural appear as well in texts centered on history, travel, or even science, as well as religion, such showy violations of natural law are characteristic of imaginative literature. The reader accepts with relish the fact that fictions have no limits as surely as did those who were listening to the Wife of Bath when she began “In th' olde dayes of the kyng arthour . . .”
     The fabulous plot elements also provide a measure of structural symmetry, marking off the central portion of the tale with its action from the backstory, the long central portion of penitential labor in the ironworks, and the denouement. Rather like the working out of a well-designed farce, every element – in this case, the wife, the three sons, and the throne – returns with a satisfying inevitability once the pattern is set into motion.
     The chief appeal of the fantastic is surely, though, the timeless pleasure of recreationally contemplating the amazing and the impossible. Indeed, England no less than India, enjoyed stories featuring marvels of all sorts [2] and a good many religious narratives as well as heroic battle narratives catered to a taste akin to that of lovers of science fiction and fantasy. Miracles in art and in language were the equivalent of the special effects so prominent in films today, relished for their very improbability. The world of superheroes in comics and films is part of a lineage that includes such varied texts as Jataka Buddha stories and Sir John Mandeville.
     Virtually all the romances include religious formulae and Sir Isumbras is not unique among them in its foregrounding of the theme of salvation. [3] The presence of miraculous events is a universal sign of divine activity, so the episodes related of the penitential knight might be considered to bolster the Gospel stories of Christ walking on water and raising the dead. The small bird that posed Sir Isumbras the question of whether he preferred happiness at the beginning or the end of his life was the direct agent of Jesus Christ. The whole story is a dramatic enactment of Providence modeling original sin, repentance and penitence, and the felicity that accompanies acceptance of God’s grace. Though the narrated events are sensational, they reflect thereby only the more strongly the culture’s hegemonic ideology about the course of every Christian life.
     Yet there lurks a contradiction in that Christian confidence. Sir Isumbras is not susceptible to the sort of programmatic allegorical reading applicable to, say, The Faery Queen or Pilgrim’s Progress. The story cannot be read purely as an ingenious thematic statement, and for that reason its realism cannot be wholly dismissed as an issue. The gap between the reader and the hero is yawning wide. Though one might call Sir Isumbras an everyman in his sin, repentance, and salvation, he is unlike anyone’s lived experience in his having lived so high, sunk so low, and endured such extraordinary suffering before his marvelous deliverance. The inexorable retributive justice which first condemns the hero to prolonged suffering and humiliation and later restores him to prosperity seems to belong to a world apart from that of lived experience just as Christ’s miracles and the supernatural events of the Hebrew scriptures are remote in time and place. After appreciating the justice meted out to Sir Isumbras, after all, the reader or listener returns to a far less visibly just world. The church would maintain that all accounts are balanced in the afterlife, but this assurance has not always determined the behavior of those who identify as believers. In a way Sir Isumbras is a poignant wish, reflecting more how the world lacks justice than solid confidence that all will be right in the end.
     The rhetoric of fancy in which anything can happen is exhilarating. The poet, like a magician, can attract a considerable audience by making rabbits appear out of hats or sawing attractive assistants in two. This entertainment value may indeed be its formal cause in the Aristotelean sense, but the role of the fabulous is significant in what a medieval churchman would have considered the poem’s central purpose to be its teaching of Christian precepts. Even dealing with dogma, however, art is subtle enough to introduce contradictions, tensions, and uncertainties into the narrative by use of the very same “unrealistic” incidents which at the same time hammer home central points of doctrine.



1. Sir Isumbras elides the central issue of Job by the knight’s clear sin of pride before his fall.

2. See, for instance my “Sacred Space as Sideshow” (http://williamseaton.blogspot.com/2010/02/sacred-space-as-sideshow.html).

3. Dieter Mehl’s The Middle English Romances of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries proposes a subgenre of “homiletic romances” which includes Sir Isumbras as well as The King of Tars, Robert of Sicily, Sir Gowther, Emaré, Le Bone Florence of Rome, Athelston, The Sege of Melayne, and Cheuelere Assigne.