Notes on Recent Reading 42 (Bulgakov, Tedlock, Williams)

 

The Master and Margarita (Bulgakov) 

     A symphonic and sustained phantasmagoria, the novel has attracted considerable political comment because of the author’s difficulties under Stalin’s rule. Yet this reader suspects Bulgakov would have been ill at ease even under less despotic rule. His sense of the absurd, his social satire stretched to universals, his dazed reaction to the procession of experience, all make him a worthy successor to Gogol. 

      In their objective particularizing, the Pilate sections reminded me of Flaubert’s Salammbo, though I remain puzzled over thematic aspects of these passages which Bulgakov seems to wish to affirm as authentic by draining them of their supernaturalism, an odd compensation for the constant supernatural characters and sudden scene-shifting throughout. Perhaps the reader is meant to be caught off-balance. 

  Rabinal Achi (Tedlock) 

      One expects, I suppose, too much from an artifact like this, a vestige of pre-Columbian drama preserved in what looks like good condition by the merest chance.  

      It is many years since Sir John Eric Sidney Thompson’s picture of the Mayans as peaceful gentlemanly scholars has been devastated by decoding of the glyphs, most of which turn out to be records of the power of rulers proven by their military victories very like those found in Egypt or Babylon. So here the drama centers on the same sort of theme, the ritual submission and sacrifice of a conquered nobleman, performed in a highly ritualized atmosphere and bedecked with luxurious mythological context.

      Tedlock, a participatory anthropologist (he prefers the term “dialogic” anthropologist) who had himself initiated as a shaman, a poet and founder along with Jerome Rothenberg of the influential Alcheringa, is surely the ideal guide for a work of this sort.  His edition of the Popul Vuh is probably the best both for artistic and scientific reasons, but this work left me disappointed.  While the Popul Vuh provides a fascinating, provocative, and dramatic creation story, the Rabinal Achi offers mainly aggression, though clothed in stately and operatic mythological and rhetorical finery.  

A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (Williams) 

     This late play, first staged in its final form in 1979, is theatrical and entertaining with considerable comedy as well as the author’s characteristic pathos. The reader may sit back and enjoy the lines of the extravagant Dorothea, her Teutonically weighty roommate Bodey, and her waspish coworker Helena. Often richly comic but sympathetic nonetheless, each is defined by the blinders they wear. The trajectory of the plot is clear from the outset, lending dark shadows to the scene, heightened by the presence of Sophie Gluck, a frantic, grieving, and mentally ill neighbor. The conclusion of the play, in which Dottie decides to join the picnic excursion, accepting the presence of Bodey’s brother in spite of his poor taste, beer, and cigars, indicates that she will survive despite her lover’s betrayal, though with radically reduced expectations. 

     The stage set is unusually significant in this play. The discordant and shabby décor of the ladies’ apartment is the occasion for humor, not squalor or real despair. If this play never reaches the heights or depths of Williams’ masterpieces, it is funnier than most, and the characters, though recognizable, are sufficiently individualized to engage the audience for the hour and a half of this extended single act. Williams was a master of the stage, and these four women, though quite unlike one another, are all quite amusing to those of us in the audience as they all do their best to pursue happiness, through frustration, poor judgement, and repeated defeat. There is, perhaps, a sort of courage, if not good taste, in the “fierce purple carpet.”

The Belated Eroticism of Agathias Scholasticus

Numbers in parentheses refer to poems in Book 5 of the Greek Anthology. The Greek original and a new translation of 5.294 follow the discussion. 

     In the sixth century of the Christian era Agathias Scholasticus produced a new edition of the Greek Anthology, taking the editor’s privilege of including a generous share of his own epigrams. His period marked the transition from Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages. During his lifetime the eastern emperor Justinian required citizens to profess Christianity, suppressed the pagan rhetors, and ended government support for the neo-Platonic Academy. Agathias himself was steeped in pre-Christian tradition; many readers suspect he had only a veneer of Christianity. He was a substantial historian, continuing Procopius’ History of Justinian, while practicing as well as a lawyer and civic activist. As pater civitatis he assumed the management of the renovation of the public latrines in Smyrna, inspiring him to write epigrams celebrating the salutary improvement he had brought, but also moralizing: “All the extravagance of mortals and their expensive dishes excreted here have lost their previous charm.” (GA 9.662 and 642) 

      The fifth book of the Anthology, titled "Amatory Epigrams” contains twenty-three poems by Agathias, virtually none of which expresses simple, straightforward passion. The poet himself problematizes his erotics in an epigram lamenting the unsuitability of each option for love object. (302) Every choice, he laments, is accompanied by inconvenience. Neither courtesans, nor virgins, nor wife, nor other men’s wives, nor widows, nor serving maids will do. One might as well, he concludes, imitate Diogenes and choose masturbation. 

      Though that conclusion hardly sounds romantic, Agathias is nonetheless capable of deploying certain familiar romantic tropes: the complaint of a watchful duenna (289), the lover’s subjugation by the beloved (299) or suffering a sleepless night and hoping for a dream, at least, of love. (237) 

      Other epigrams cover a surprisingly broad range. They include conversational pieces such as a graduate student’s letter home missing his girlfriend and male friend (292), a comment on the isolation of women (297), and a simple declaration of heterosexuality. (278) Though considering age in general the enemy of desire (273), he appreciates the sexiness of an old lady. (282) 

      A group of his epigrams depend upon word games and jeux d’esprit. In one (218) he describes what seems to be an adulterous intrigue using names adapted from contemporary drama, while in another he plays on the mythological associations of the name of Ariadne. (222) 

      Another group of Agathias’ poems testify to the power of symbolically displaced, or fetishized eroticism. For instance, in one (285) he kisses her “girdle” instead of her flesh, while in another he relishes the cup that has touched her lips. (261) In others he addresses the lamp that has overseen his amours (263), and describes the gift of a “coif” that can becomingly bind her midriff. (276) 

      In general the poets of the Anthology are as likely to speak of one night stands with prostitutes or men as of enduring affairs of the heart. Thus Agathias’ casual and worldly persona is likely less a reflection of his own emotional sensibility as of the norms of his age. In the proem to his edition of the collection as a whole he suggests that poetry is primarily a source if pleasure for the surfeited or jaded appetites of his listeners. This pose is explicit in the introductory verses which take the form of an address to his audience, a cultivated company headed by the leading local cavalry officer. They would have enjoyed a dinner as lavish as the host could make it. Wine was certainly flowing. Perhaps it was before the flute-girls that Agathias would have been asked to present some elegant epigrams, the best of earlier times mixed with a number of the new.  

     This dramatic setting is useful reinforcement to Agathias’ opening image. Agathias declares that he means to spread a verbal πανδαισία, for which Liddell and Scott offer the glorious if slightly mystifying definition “a complete banquet, a banquet at which nothing fails.” He fears that the guests may be already sated (ἐμπεπλησμένους) with literature, stuffed, indeed, to belching (τὰ σιτία προσκόρως ἐρυγγάνειν) with the magnificent and varied board of poetry already available from earlier eras. 

     The weight of the greatness of Greek tradition is evident in the poet’s heavy use of convention in metrics, imagery, and theme. Yet, after a rhetorical claim that he expects a reader to be indulgent toward his work out of courtesy alone, he promises to provide novelty. (l. 20) The poem has little to say about love itself and a good deal about barriers to love. While it is true that most love literature from all ages is concerned with overcoming such obstacles, their description is usually accompanied by considerable praise of the beloved. Agathias’ poem takes the passion for granted and speaks only of impediments.

    The poem appeals to me for its decadence. Reminiscent of the great Pervigilium Veneris, the poem implies a refined pleasure in simply contemplating the barriers to satisfaction, maintaining the lover’s sustained pre-orgasmic condition. I am reminded of the Daoist sexual regimen which eschewed completion of the sexual act in an effort to build qi. One might consider Agathias’ poem and others like it as the product of a hedonism for which simple love has gone flat or, whether alternatively or simultaneously, as a contemplative exercise, a kind of meditation on desire. 

translation note 

     Believing the modern ear to be deaf to the ancient meters, even apart from the change from quantitative to accentual/syllabic prosody, I have not attempted to duplicate the elegiac couplets characteristic of the epigram form. Instead the whole thing is basically in iambic hexameter, a rare choice in English. There is most often a line by line correspondence between Greek and English. An extra syllable hangs on the end like a prolonged sigh. 

Greek Anthology 5.294 

The envious old woman lay next to the young, 

fixed crosswise over all the broad expanse of bed, 

extended like a bastion to block invaders there. 

My lady’s veiled by ample folds of sheets and quilts. 

Her so conceited handmaid barred the entry door.

She lies asleep, weighed down with too much unmixed wine. 

Still unafraid, I reached out with my hand to lift 

 and open up the bar that latched the door. The draft 

from one quick wave of cloak then quenched each fiery torch. 

I slinked through crosswise softly through the room, 

Avoiding then the sleeping guard I pulled myself 

in further, underneath the bed frame, lying prone 

 I pulled myself up just a bit to lean against 

the wall and propped up there I then did face my love. 

Caressing both her breasts I lightly kissed her face. 

My lips played all about and felt her softness there. 

The only prize I captured was her lovely mouth.

The only sign I had of my advance that night 

I haven’t breached the walls of her virginity. 

That still remains untouched. For now I will not try. 

The ramparts will not stop me. Should all go my way, 

I’ll weave a wreath for you, o Cypris of love’s spoils. 

 ἡ γραῦς ἡ φθονερὴ παρεκέκλιτο γείτονι κούρῃ 

δόχμιον ἐν λέκτρῳ νῶτον ἐρεισαμένη, 

προβλὴς ὥς τις ἔπαλξις ἀνέμβατος: οἷα δὲ πύργος 

ἔσκεπε τὴν κούρην ἁπλοῒς ἐκταδίη: 

καὶ σοβαρὴ θεράπαινα πύλας σφίγξασα μελάθρου 

κεῖτο χαλικρήτῳ νάματι βριθομένη. 

ἔμπης οὔ μ᾽ ἐφόβησαν ἐπεὶ στρεπτῆρα θυρέτρου 

χερσὶν ἀδουπήτοις βαιὸν ἀειράμενος, 

φρυκτοὺς αἰθαλόεντας ἐμῆς ῥιπίσμασι λώπης 

ἔσβεσα: καὶ διαδὺς λέχριος ἐν θαλάμῳ 

τὴν φύλακα κνώσσουσαν ὑπέκφυγον ἦκα δὲ λέκτρου 

νέρθεν ὑπὸ σχοίνοις γαστέρι συρόμενος, 

ὠρθούμην κατὰ βαιόν, ὅπη βατὸν ἔπλετο τεῖχος: 

ἄγχι δὲ τῆς κούρης στέρνον ἐρεισάμενος, 

μαζοὺς μὲν κρατέεσκον: ὑπεθρύφθην δὲ προσώπῳ, 

μάστακα πιαίνων χείλεος εὐαφίῃ. 

ἦν δ᾽ ἄρα μοι τὰ λάφυρα καλὸν στόμα, καὶ τὸ φίλημα 

σύμβολον ἐννυχίης εἶχον ἀεθλοσύνης. 

οὔπω δ᾽ ἐξαλάπαξα φίλης πύργωμα κορείης, 

ἀλλ᾽ ἔτ᾽ ἀδηρίτῳ σφίγγεται ἀμβολίῃ. 

ἔμπης ἢν ἑτέροιο μόθου στήσωμεν ἀγῶνα, 

ναὶ τάχα πορθήσω τείχεα παρθενίης, 

οὐ δ᾽ ἔτι με σχήσουσιν ἐπάλξιες. ἢν δὲ τυχήσω, 

στέμματα σοὶ πλέξω, Κύπρι τροπαιοφόρε.

Kleist’s “A Poet’s Letter to Another”

 

A new translation of Kleist’s “Brief eines Dichters an einen anderen” precedes a discussion of the author’s poetics. 

1.      A Poet’s Letter to Another

 Recently, when I found you reading my poetry, you went on with extraordinary eloquence about form and applauded me using the terms of the school where, you like to presume, I was educated.  You praised me in a way that made me feel ashamed, dwelling on the appropriateness of the underlying meter, of the rhythm, of the charm of melody and the purity and correctness of expression and the language in general.  Please allow me to say your mind lingers on those topics by your own choice.  It would have proven the greatest worth, had you not noticed these characteristics at all.  If I could grasp my heart while composing, detach my thoughts and present them to you without any further elaboration, you too, friend, it seems to me, would find nothing then lacking.  A thirsty person cares little about the bowl but rather is concerned with the fruits that are brought to him in it.   It is only because the thought, like certain evanescent, unrepresentable, chemical substances, must be linked with something more coarse and physical in order to appear visible that I use such devices when I write to you, and you then go looking for speech, language, cadence, and musicality.  Delightful as these things may be to the extent that they reveal the spirit, still, in and of themselves, when observed from this higher point of view, they are nothing but a genuine, if understandable and necessary, evil.  With reference to such things, art can only strive to conceal them as much as possible.  I take pains to do my best to give my expressions clarity, the verse form significance, and to lend grace and life to the sound of the words.  My goal is that the art should not appear at all but rather the thought alone which the words embody.  For it is a characteristic of all correct form to express the spirit instantly and without mediation while a deficient form, like a bad mirror, is constricting and can bring nothing to mind but itself.   If as your first impression, you praise the formal qualities of my little unpretentious literary works, you arouse in me quite naturally a concern that my poems possess altogether false rhythmic and prosodic associations and that your consciousness fastens on the melody or the pattern of the verses matters entirely removed from what had I had really cared about.  Otherwise why would you fail to respond to the spirit I took pains to put into words just as one would do in conversation, when I had hoped to encounter your spirit with my own without attention to the clothing of my thought?  Your insensitivity to the heart and essence of poetry and your highly developed responsiveness for form and the accidental (amounting nearly to disease) dominates your judgement as a result, I would say, of the school of thought from which you come.  Doubtless this is not the intention of that school which is as clever as any that has appeared among us, though not entirely without fault, considering the paradoxical mischief of its teachings.  But this insensitivity to the essence and core of poetry, with the irritability developed up to the point of illness, for the accidental and the formal, is a habit of your mind in general due to the school from which you come.   I have noticed that, when reading the work of writers altogether different from me, your eye cannot, to use a proverbial expression, see the forest for the trees.  When we take Shakespeare in hand, how unproductive are the interests to which your taste leads you in comparison to the great, sublime, cosmopolitan resonances this splendid poet should awaken in your heart!  How could I be concerned about repartee and witty wordplay on the bloody field of Agincourt?  Or when Ophelia says of Hamlet “O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!”  Or Macduff of Macbeth “He has no children.”  What value then remains to the iambs, rhymes, assonances and such devices, to which your ear is always attuned as if nothing else mattered? - Farewell!

 

 

2.       

     Heinrich von Kleist’s “Brief eines Dichters an einen anderen” is a manifesto of hyper-Romanticism, fetishizing the value of imaginative production and suggesting that artistic works carry content that is miraculously beyond language, though necessarily expressed in inadequate words.   With a kind of belated neo-Platonic weakness for the abstract, Kleist, a writer whose works consist of words and words alone, insists that the materiality of his discourse, the ink on the page or sounds in the air, is an unfortunate concomitant of its more essential ethereal message.  This latter and more significant burden of his poetry proves, however, ineffable. 

     What makes this claim all the more Romantic is the heightened value attributed to poetry when properly understood which for Kleist borders on religious revelation.  For him the thoughts welling from his heart are paramount.  Just what these are he does not say, but he boldly maintains that that his poetry is required for life, like fruit to a thirsty man.  Ideally, he notes, the reception of poetry might resemble a conversation in which the mind of the reader engages that of the writer, but such an encounter is precluded by the reader’s obsession with literariness itself which blocks the vision of the reality beyond the page the writer seeks to project.  Kleist’s correspondent, he complains, cannot properly appreciate poetry due to his allegiance to a particular misguided “school” with presumably some variety of an academic or neo-Classical view of art as craft.  Such a view, Kleist maintains, misses the poetry, perceiving only the poetic usages.

      He makes, then, two claims.  First, endows the aesthetic product with immense if ill-defined potential and second, he insists that literary reception must be unselfconscious and, in a sense, preverbal, a matter of mind meeting mind in which words are potentially obstacles.  Such claims might seem both arrogant and obscurantist.  Kleist certainly conveys no interest in the other poet’s work, yet the reader has only Kleist’s passion to certify that his vision and his poetry are at all superior to those of his correspondent.  These grand claims are as well undermined in part by Kleist’s concession that his work is weighed down from the first by the “coarse” material of language.

     This posture could be taken as an index of the poet’s enthusiasm.  Like a shaman he assumes the role of messenger delivering revelations from beyond, and, like the shaman, he depends largely on faith.  In a more modest way writers today assert similar authority when they say that a poem “just came to me,” that “I couldn’t help writing it.”   

      Many people, of course, apart from critics, consume art with a minimum of analytic attention to its machinery.  For centuries the art that conceals art has been praised, but that is a refinement of craftsmanship, the polishing that erases the marks of the constructor’s hand, the final flourish of skill.  Kleist’s disavowal of literary professionalism is something else altogether, more a matter of mysticism or spirituality than of art alone.  In the Platonic hierarchy philosophy always trumps poetry.

      Yet Kleist’s importunate assertion of the importance of his utterance, his desire to silence competing poets and hold the stage alone, does not really differ from what any artist must do, seeking to attract attention to a single voice in a vast cacophony of voices.  Whether the maker is modest or not personally, on the page or on the gallery wall each can only scream for attention just as we all did as infants.  And as for the literary devices, those are like to magician’s (and the shaman’s) bag of tricks, and the show would be ruined were all its secrets out. 

      Kleist’s letter could be read as well as a lament for the inadequacy of signifiers, a frustrated struggle to escape the fabric of discourse.  Since, even with the substantial enhancements of rhetoric, signifier is always to some extent incongruent with signified, the writer is condemned to a kind of eternal failure, never quite able to embody his consciousness fully and precisely in words, unable to program every reader with precisely the desired algorithm. 

     Kleist’s letter dramatically articulates the Romantic elevation of art to a virtually religious significance while at the same time undercutting itself by describing the artist’s failure to communicate his mental concept to his friend and fellow poet.  He balances this ambivalence by an homage to Shakespeare’s success, implying that his own effusions have something at least in common with that author’s sublime genius than with mere earth-bound literary theory. 

      I have always considered that in literary theory (as in politics) he who acknowledges a partisan position is more reliable than one claiming objectivity, for such a claim means only that the critic either does not recognize or does not care to admit bias.  Kleist’s idea that art is above calculation and craft is less a critical principle than a rhetorical figure similar to the love poem that says “words cannot describe her beauty.”  Surely he was himself conscious of the labor and skill required to construct literary works.  Thus this letter has more in common with twentieth century literary manifestoes, meant to provoke and attract attention more than to set forth and defend a set of contentions about the aesthetic text.

      In “Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden” (“On the Gradual Construction of Thoughts While Speaking”) Kleist explicitly recommends emptying the mind as a strategy not merely for the proper reception of poetry, but for problem-solving in general.  He says that simply to begin speaking on a topic, without prior plan, will produce new insights and solutions.  Troping on “l'appetit vient en mangeant,” he says, “l’idee vient en parlant.”

      These ideas are presented more artfully and suggestively in the better-known essay “Über das Marionettentheater” (“On the Marionette Theater”).  There the acting of the puppets is praised over that of humans specifically because a pesky human consciousness will cloud the waters by introducing “affectation” (“Ziererei”).  The fifteen-year-old whose beauty captured a stranger’s attention in the baths can no longer maintain his charm once he is aware he is being observed.  Self- consciousness is the curse of the exile from Eden.  Here Kleist explicitly claims that thought leads not to wisdom and beauty but to their loss.  Enlightenment can only arise in its absence. 

      Kleist here provides a specific quasi-scientific image to illustrate his vision. 

  

We can see how in the organic world as reflection lessens and darkens, grace emerges and comes to the fore more brightly.  It is just like passing through the intersection of two lines to come out on the other side of that point after passing through infinity or the image in a concave mirror which, after vanishing into the distance, suddenly appears again right in front of us.  In this same way grace emerges when understanding has passed through infinity.  Grace will appear most purely in a human form with either an infinite consciousness or none at all.  That is, either in the puppet or in the god. [1]

 

 Whether there is any topographical meaning to Kleist’s figure I cannot say, but the question seems moot since the meaning is clearly that bipolar oppositions are ultimately unified as the extreme of one is transformed into its contrary.  The use of similar structures is common in mystical and apocalyptic thought and familiar in such Christian concepts as the mortal deity, the virgin mother, leaving the father to join the father, and death made eternal life.

   The reader of Kleist’s letter might then assume that the heart’s truth the writer is so anxious to deliver is simply that the individual might ideally attain through poetry a position of sublime wisdom from which one can see that, in the last analysis, contraries are illusory and one may in contemplation unite with the cosmos.  In art such an alteration of consciousness does not follow from systematic reasoning.  On the contrary, it arrives when one forgets oneself.  The vanishing ego suddenly is succeeded by an oceanic feeling. [2]  Kleist’s examples from Shakespeare demonstrate that, far from arising from philosophic disputation, this enlightened state of mind may be inspired by the sympathetic experience of strong, even tragic experience which he says creates in the soul “great, sublime, cosmopolitan resonances.”

 

 

1.  The passage is sufficiently opaque that I include here the original German and an alternative translation. 

Wir sehen, daß in dem Maße, als, in der organischen Welt, die Reflexion dunkler und schwächer wird, die Grazie darin immer strahlender und herrschender hervortritt. - Doch so, wie sich der Durchschnitt zweier Linien, auf der einen Seite eines Punkts, nach dem Durchgang durch das Unendliche, plötzlich wieder auf der andern Seite einfindet, oder das Bild des Hohlspiegels, nachdem es sich in das Unendliche entfernt hat, plötzlich wieder dicht vor uns tritt: so findet sich auch, wenn die Erkenntnis gleichsam durch ein Unendliches gegangen ist, die Grazie wieder ein; so, daß sie, zu gleicher Zeit, in demjenigen menschlichen Körperbau am reinsten erscheint, der entweder gar keins, oder ein unendliches Bewußtsein hat, d. h. in dem Gliedermann, oder in dem Gott.

This is the rendering of Idris Parry published in the Southern Cross Review #9: "We see that in the organic world, as thought grows dimmer and weaker, grace emerges more brilliantly and decisively. But just as a section drawn through two lines suddenly reappears on the other side after passing through infinity, or as the image in a concave mirror turns up again right in front of us after dwindling into the distance, so grace itself returns when knowledge has as it were gone through an infinity. Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god."

 

2.      Kleist is much closer to Romain Rolland’s original usage of the term than to Freud’s diminished meaning, though even for Freud this feeling fades as the separate ego develops at the end of breast-feeding.