Voluptuous Ascetics in Anatole France’s Thaïs

The translations of quoted French phrases are my own.

 

     The usefulness of distinguishing eras in literary history is indisputable, but they are never more than a convenience.  Anatole France, who wrote well into the twentieth century, turned not only from the schools of Realism and Naturalism, but from the preceding Romantic assumptions as well and wrote as an heir of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and, in particular, as a follower of Voltaire.  

     Heavy on theme as France typically is, the characters in Thaïs, even the central ones, are rather representative types or spokespersons for points of view than convincing personalities.  The two principals, Paphnutius and Thais, describe a narrative chiasmus as the monk realizes that beneath his pious reputation, he is in fact the slave of his desires while the abandoned Thais discovers her discipline and piety in spite of her once libertine lifestyle.  The formal symmetry of this movement is satisfying quite apart from the thematic implications, though the latter are in the foreground. 

     If the story is a sort of anti-clerical parable, an inverted saint’s life, Paphnutius is, of course, a negative exemplum.   Though France was an atheist, the novel can hardly be called anti-Christian.  Paphnutius’  co-religionists, from St. Anthony through Ahmes, Albina, and Palemon, and ultimately including Thaïs herself, are all depicted as sincere and benevolent, whether their beliefs are true or not.  Even asceticism, from which the author might be expected to recoil, is not confined to Christianity, but represented as well by Timocles the skeptic whom Paphnutius encounters meditating naked on the banks of the Nile like a saddhu (and indeed he is said to have visited India).   Timocles matches Paphnutius’ austerities without adopting any of his faith.  All decisions have become for Timocles a matter of indifference.  He reflexively responds to any question with the Skeptic’s ἐποχή (suspension of judgment, withholding of assent).  He may seem grotesque in his withdrawal from life, but he is not self-interested or hypocritical.  He declares quite simply that there is no certainty in the world and that impressions are always subjective.  “Les mêmes choses ont diverses apparences.” (“The same things have diverse appearances.”)

     The Banquet like the Symposia of Plato or Xenophon, like other dialogues, and like the novels of Thomas Love Peacock or Charles Erskine Scott Wood’s Heavenly Discourse, introduce characters who represent various points of view.   France conveniently labels each of his Hellenistic banqueters so there may be no confusion: thus Dorion is an Epicurean; Eucritus a Stoic, Zenothemis a Gnostic, Hermodorus a syncretist Serapian, and Marcus an Arian Christian.  They trade opinions not with the urgency of the true believer or the proselytizer, but with the casual detachment of people passing a pleasant afternoon together for whom the discussion is a worthy end in itself. 

     The likeliest spokesperson for France himself is, of course, none of these believers in religion or systematized philosophy.  He doubtless shares some of the attitudes of Cotta, the urbane Roman host to whom the civilized social order is the chief good, for whom the central role of religion is to define and reinforce a sense of community.  To him “il y a en tout dieu quelque chose de divin” (“every god has something divine in him”).  Yet the nation is what is important.  “La patrie doit être mise au-dessus de tout, et même des dieux, car elle les contient tous” (“fatherland must come first, even before the gods, for it contains them”).  His faith in stability and happiness rests on the strength of the imperial navy and army and the prosperity of the economy.  Open-minded about religion, he is no more dogmatic about politics.  Cotta says that he had in his youth sympathized with the Republic, but that he has come to believe that only a strong government can assure its citizens a peaceful and productive life.

     While Cotta is represented as a sensible man, the reader never doubts that the author’s heart is with Nicias.  Should this character be based on a historical figure, it would likely be Nicias of Miletus, a poet associated with Theocritus some of whose epigrams are extant.  It may be, too, that the character owes something to Nicias of Kos whom Cicero recalls as a witty raconteur who served an excellent mushroom dish at a dinner party.

     Possessing Cotta’s capacious broadmindedness while lacking his obtrusive patriotism, Nicias is the very soul of geniality.  When he speaks of the divine, it is often in a light and teasing manner, as though he and the gods are on familiar terms, such as his joking that if god loves, that is an imperfection or the more metaphysical claim that god is in “disgrace” due to the fact that “l'infini ressemble parfaitement au néant” (“the infinite is indistinguishable from nothingness”).

     He is perfectly at ease with the fact that “nous ne savons rien” (“we know nothing whatever”) we are unable even to distinguish between being and not being.  He approaches Gorgias in  his skepticism, declaring that, in  addition to the lack of any certain knowledge, “il est impossible aux hommes de s'entendre” (“people cannot [fully] understand each other”).

     For him, however, there is one element of life that evades Nicias’ otherwise universal Skeptic’s ἐποχή: eros.  The entire company enjoys the beauty of Philina and Drosea (whose looks are their only function in  the novel), and they all salute Thais with cries like “—Salut à la bien-aimée des dieux et des hommes!” (“Hail to the one beloved of both men and gods!”), but it is Nicias who cautions Paphnutius against offending love. 

     In fact Nicias is untroubled by the fact that we are unable even to distinguish being and not being.   Furthermore, “il est impossible aux hommes de s'entendre” (“people cannot ever [fully] understand each other”).  His equipoise in the face of the loss of any foundation for thought proves the success of his strategy of simply not caring about what he cannot change and passing his time in life in the most civilized and pleasant manner.  The company enjoys the beauty of Philina and Drosea (whose looks are their only function in the novel), they all salute Thais with cries like “—Salut à la bien-aimée des dieux et des hommes!” (“Hail to the one beloved of both men and gods!”), but it is Nicias who cautions Paphnutius against offending love. 

Je t'avais bien averti, mon frère, que Vénus était puissante. C'est elle dont la douce violence t'a amené ici malgré toi. Écoute, tu es un homme rempli de piété; mais, si tu ne reconnais pas qu'elle est la mère des dieux, ta ruine est certaine.

I have warned you, my friend that Venus is powerful.  It is she who has brought you here with gentle violence in spite of yourself.  Listen, you are a man full of piety, but, if you don’t recognize her as the mother of the gods, your ruin is certain. 

      When Cotta suggests that the tower on which Paphnutius sits is phallic, it is at once a nice turn of wit and a hint that Nicias’ respect for the goddess of love is shared by many like minds as well as suggesting the influence of Freud.  The centrality of sexual desire as the dynamo of human motivation is precisely what Paphnutius denies yet which entraps him in the end.  The anchorite with high ambitions and reputation turns out to be that most despised of moralists, the hypocrite, and the most dangerous of hypocrites: one who deceives himself as well.

     If philosophy is the pursuit of the good life, ideas must be judged by the lived experience of their advocates.  For France, the wisest people have no occult wisdom; they undergo no dramatic enlightenment.   For the most part they simply practice good will and enjoy each other’s company despite differences in creed and lifestyle.  They accept their human nature, looking with admiration on the opposite sex, dining together and conversing to further their intimacy while feeding their bodies.  Among this group are some, the wiser sort, it seems, who have less need of myth and ritual while remaining moral and philosophical.  For France, who was a materialist, the rational course is to recognize the prerogatives of the body with its desires for sex and food and the mind with its need for social interaction.  Rather than rejecting one’s natural qualities, France, like his Nicias, seeks to indulge all passions, but in a civilized manner unlikely to bring the ill consequences of dissipation.  While Paphnutius will seem misguided to all, and he is certainly unhappy in his fate, the self-abnegating life Thais chooses will also find few imitators.  The ascetic voluptuaries lose out to the practitioners of the Delphic slogan μηδὲν άγαν “nothing in excess.”  Most readers are likely to feel in concert with Anatole France that there could scarcely be a better way to spend an afternoon than at a banquet such as Cotta offers, enjoying visual, verbal, and gustatory pleasures as the sun descends toward dusk. 

Socialist Parties of the United States

 

     In spite of the obvious advantages of a popular front against exploitation the left has always been a fractious place.  What some participants and historians might see as the struggle to develop a correct “line” that will most effectively advance the people’s cause will seem to others internecine infighting. At times, activists were perhaps influenced by the temptation to defeat one’s comrades when capitalism seemed too big a bully to challenge.  Nonetheless, the history of American revolutionary groups is a rich one, full of heroism and critical to the reforms that have made our economic system more livable for more people over the last hundred and fifty years.  This survey is meant to pay tribute to the generations of activists who have moved the country forward, and socialists have been at the forefront of nearly every campaign for social progress from abolitionism, women’s suffrage, and labor rights, but it may also remind progressives of the energy lost to factionalism.

     I have sought to include in this list all parties explicitly calling for revolutionary change while excluding reformist or mixed groups like the Progressive Parties associated with Robert LaFollette and with Henry Wallace, or the Working Families or New York Liberal Party.  I have concentrated on groups that meant to initiate a mass electoral movement, however limited their success.  The Industrial Workers of the World is included due to its outsize role in American history though it was a union and not a political party.

     Though my arrangement is primarily chronological, some broad general groupings exist.  The early groups contributed to the formation of the Socialist Party which has been the top socialist vote-getter by far, having achieved totals little short of a million in 1912 and 1920 with Debs as candidate and in 1932 with Norman Thomas at the head of the ticket.  The formation of what came to be called the Old Left was inspired by the Bolshevik victory in Russia and the formation of the Comintern.  Though the Communist Party was America’s most organized and active left-wing group, its members were obliged to adopt the Soviet line and to suppress internal discussion.  Later, with the arrival of the New Left in the ‘sixties, others imitated the Maoist program while some sought to follow models from Cuba or Vietnam.   Since the collapse of the mass movements for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, many groups of the New Communist Movement, none very large, argued over correct policy while many other leftists worked in single-issue groups.

     The overwhelming positive implication of this simple listing is the evidence it provides of a grand tradition of workers, both native-born and immigrant, continuously agitating for a better society, thus illuminating a history often ignored.  It suggests as well several negative factors that have contributed to the relative weakness of socialist ideas in the American political forum. 

     First is factionalism itself.  Apart from dividing workers and thus diluting their interests, this tends to encourage the suppression of open discussion essential for a vigorous movement.  In politics, as in science and other arenas, the enforcement of orthodoxy deaden progress.  There can be no certainty that a given analysis or strategy is effective; a healthy organization will be always ready to consider opposing conclusions from the facts and to take new information into account.  For political purposes numbers are far more useful than a theoretically perfect program.

     The development of antidemocratic tendencies was further encouraged by the emulation of foreign regimes whether Soviet, Chinese, or Third World.  Just as the people’s victory in Russia was largekly subverted by the Leninist idea of a dictatorship euphemistically labeled “democratic centralism” and Stalin’s dictatorship.  Communist parties were until recent times intolerant of internal discussion.  The unfortunate effects of Americans “tailing” after other regimes rather than seeking appropriate American solutions include agitation against comrades such as Trotskyites and the artificial linking of the priorities of socialists in the United States with the practices in countries abroad with claims to be socialist.

     The hard fact is that the most disciplined parties, typified by the Communists of the ‘thirties, have been the most effective.   The same pattern emerged again in the ‘sixties as activists from Socialist Workers and Progressive Labor in gained outsize influence in contrast to the more casually organized members of SDS.  An openness to the free discussion of new ideas seems contrary to the unanimity useful for collective action.   This dialectic is evident today on the right wing as the Trumpite fascists have proven far more successful than the more reasonable traditional Republicans.

     Most Americans have a shallow involvement in politics and, unfortunately, little grasp of their own interests.  They have often been distracted and misled by racism, sexism, and xenophobia, but some in every generation have recognized that socialism offers the solution of social and economic problems.  The following list is a reminder of this ongoing struggle.  I am sure it is far from complete.

 

 

1876 The Socialist Labor Party (originally the Workingmen's Party of the United States) was the first socialist party in the United States.  Some elements broke to help form the Socialist Party.  

1898 the Social Democratic Party of America was founded which merged into the Socialist Party in 1901.

1901 the Socialist Party organized including elements of the Socialist Labor Party.  In 1971 the party changed its name to Social Democrats, USA which split in 1973 into two factions, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and the Socialist Party USA.

1905 Industrial Workers of the World as a union did not run candidates but included people from the Socialist Party and the Socialist Labor Party.

1919 Communist Party of the USA from a split in the Socialist Party.  Another splinter, the Communist Labor Party of America merged with the CPUSA in 1921.

1928 Communist League of America formed by Trotskyites after their expulsion from the CPUSA which in 1934 joined with the American Workers Party to establish the Workers Party of the United States which lasted until 1936 when its members joined the Socialist Party.

1934 Workers Party of the United States formed by the merger of the Trotskyist Communist League of America and A. J. Muste's American Workers Party.

1935 the Revolutionary Workers League split from the Workers Party of the United States, disbanded in 1946

1936 American Labor Party formed by members of the Socialist Party.

1937 Socialist Workers Party of Trotskyites expelled from the Socialist Party.

1938 the Leninist League broke from Trotsky and the Socialist Workers Party, In 1946 it was renamed the Workers League for a Revolutionary Party.

1959 Workers World Party split from SWP.

1962 Progressive Labor Movement formed by Maoists within the CPUSA renamed Progressive Labor Party in 1965.

1964 Spartacist League split from the Socialist Workers.

1966 Black Panther Party disbanded in 1982.

1966 Freedom Socialist Party feminist split from Socialist Workers, spawned the Radical Women activist group.

1967 Marxist-Leninist Party (USA), dissolved in 1973.

1967 Peace and Freedom Party.

1967 Youth International Party formed by hip radicals

1968 Young Lords, a Chicago gang, reformed as a political group.

1968 Young Patriots formed by white Southerners in Chicago along the model of the Black Panthers.

1968 White Panthers formed by hip white radicals along the model of the Black Panthers.

1970 Gray Panthers, old persons group along the model of the Black Panthers.

1971 People’s Party, a national grouping including the Peace and Freedom Party that functioned only in the 1972 election, reformed in 2017 by supporters of Bernie Sanders

1971 New American Movement, formed by SDS members, merged with DSOC in 1983 to establish the Democratic Socialists of America

1971 Communist Party (Marxist–Leninist) was formed from the October League (Marxist–Leninist), many of whose members had been SDS activists who followed a Maoist line.

1972 The African People's Socialist Party.

1973 Communist Workers' Party split from Progressive Labor, dissolved to join New Democratic Movement in 1985.

1975 Revolutionary Communist Party (originally the Revolutionary Union)  split from Progressive Labor.

1986 Labor Militant founded by Trotskyites, changed to Socialist Alternative (United States) in 1998.

1990 Green Party evolved from environmentally concerned Committees of Correspondence

1995 Socialist Equality Party (United States) formed by the Workers League, the US supporters of the ICFI. The Workers League had been founded in 1966 by the American Committee for the Fourth International (ACFI), which emerged out of a split with the Socialist Workers Party

2004 Party for Socialism and Liberation, split from Workers World

Death's Beauty in Tyrtaios

 

     Most twenty-first century readers remain belated Romantics, valuing individuality and self-expression in lyric poetry while depreciating received ideas.   Yet every work of art (like every utterance) contains elements adopted from the group as well as those peculiar to the maker.   This mixture may be unbalanced however, with some works primarily reproducing what everyone believes and others that open space for change by expressing doubt or deviance.  The former sort is dominant in oral and popular literature since the belief system is transmitted through stories, poems, and myths, enabling the reproduction of culture over generations, though the dissenting view of the latter is always present in embryo, enabling evolution and development over time. 

    The traditional distinction between monodic and choral poetry in ancient Greek lyric, though still in dispute, reflects that contrast.  Sappho and Archilochus, considered to write from an individual point of view, both cast doubt on the glories of combat, while, as a civic composer of choral song, Tyrtaios expresses patriotism and duty in a form\ familiar from nearly all times and places, most certainly including our own..  

     Tyrtaios begins with the beauty of the individual when he acts on behalf of the collective, his fate in battle unsettled but his role unclouded and admirable, contrasted with the poverty-stricken, alienated, and contemptible life of the cowardly exile.  Cheer-leading for the troops, he concludes with a call to hold steady on the front lines of battle.

     A similar sentiment appears in Book XXII of the Iliad when Priam attempts to dissuade Hector from fighting Achilles.  His appeal is to pathos.  As Hekuba cries in the background, he gives in to self-pity and raises the image of his own miserable death, eaten by dogs.  His sentiment is unworthy of a warrior; the scene recalls Book VI when Andromache tries to dissuade her husband from combat.  Yet this statement is in character, expressing not only father's love, but also the view of an old man whose years have brought him, not wisdom, but a fear unseemly in the young.  While the Iliad is encyclopedic, offering these moments among many other perspectives on war, Tyrtaios’ song is single-minded.  There is no tension, no contradiction. He delivers the social consensus: because war is noble, it is perforce beautiful. 

     Love and death, the two most elemental motivators for our species (and, indeed, all others) are mingled with a variety of meanings from the Wagnerian Liebestod to Poe’s notion that the death of a beautiful woman is “the most poetical topic in the world.”  Here the link is military and patriotic, with much in common with orations in a veteran’s cemetery today in spite of Tyrtaios’ air of Greek homoeroticism.

 

 

 

 

How fair to fall when fighting for one’s home!

A good man takes a stand In foremost ranks

whereas to leave the rich fields of one’s home

and set off begging is the worst of fates,

to wander with dear mother and old dad                      5

with little children and a wedded wife!

An exile is despised by all he meets –

he comes to them with only hateful want.

disgracing then his house and noble self.

Then every shame will follow after that.                       10

If no respect will go to vagrant men

and no esteem, no favor, and no care,

then let us fight with heart for land and blood

and let us die with no thought for our lives.

You youth must hold your ranks till death                   15

avoiding shameful flight and fear of death.

Make great and bold the will within your heart.

To fight the foe you must not love your life.

The older men, with legs no longer lithe,

must not run off and leave the fallen youth.               20

An older man should never fall and lie

among the youth who fight in vanguard ranks

with his white hair and venerable beard,

exhaling his brave soul into the dirt,

his hands might hold his bloody loins – a shame        25

to lookers-on, a frightful sight to see,

his body naked.  With a young man all is seemly

while he holds still the charm of blooming youth,

for men a wondrous sight, to women fair,

alive and fair too fallen in the front.                           30

So each must stand his ground both feet firm in place

Set upon earth biting his lip with his teeth.

 

 

τεθνάμεναι γὰρ καλὸν ἐνὶ προμάχοισι πεσόντα

ἄνδρ᾽ ἀγαθὸν περὶ ᾗ πατρίδι μαρνάμενον.

τὴν δ᾽ αὐτοῦ προλιπόντα πόλιν καὶ πίονας ἀγροὺς

πτωχεύειν πάντων ἔστ᾽ ἀνιηρότατον,

πλαζόμενον σὺν μητρὶ φίλῃ καὶ πατρὶ γέροντι             5

παισί τε σὺν μικροῖς κουριδίῃ τ᾽ ἀλόχῳ.

ἐχθρὸς μὲν γὰρ τοῖσι μετέσσεται, οὕς κεν ἵκηται

χρησμοσύνῃ τ᾽ εἴκων καὶ στυγερῇ πενίῃ,

αἰσχύνει τε γένος, κατὰ δ᾽ ἀγλαὸν εἶδος ἐλέγχει,

πᾶσα δ᾽ ἀτιμίη καὶ κακότης ἕπεται.                             10

εἰ δέ τοι οὕτως ἀνδρὸς ἀλωμένου οὐδεμἴ ὤρη

γίγνεται οὔτ᾽ αἰδὼς οὔτ᾽ ὄπις οὔτ᾽ ἔλεος,

θυμῷ γῆς περὶ τῆσδε μαχώμεθα καὶ περὶ παίδων

θνῄσκωμεν ψυχέων μηκέτι φειδόμενοι.

ὦ νέοι, ἀλλὰ μάχεσθε παρ᾽ ἀλλήλοισι μένοντες,     15

μηδὲ φυγῆς αἰσχρᾶς ἄρχετε μηδὲ φόβου,

ἀλλὰ μέγαν ποιεῖσθε καὶ ἄλκιμον ἐν φρεσὶ θυμόν,

μηδὲ φιλοψυχεῖτ᾽ ἀνδράσι μαρνάμενοι:

τοὺς δὲ παλαιοτέρους, ὧν οὐκέτι γούνατ᾽ ἐλαφρά,

μὴ καταλείποντες φεύγετε γηπετέας:                        20

αἰσχρὸν γὰρ δὴ τοῦτο, μετὰ προμάχοισι πεσόντα

κεῖσθαι πρόσθε νέων ἄνδρα παλαιότερον,

ἤδη λευκὸν ἔχοντα κάρη πολιόν τε γένειον,

θυμὸν ἀποπνείοντ᾽ ἄλκιμον ἐν κονίῃ,

αἱματόεντ᾽ αἰδοῖα φίλαις ἐν χερσὶν ἔχοντα -- αἰσχρὰ 25

τά γ᾽ ὀφθαλμοῖς καὶ νεμεσητὸν ἰδεῖν -- καὶ

χρόα γυμνωθέντα: νέῳ δέ τε πάντ᾽ ἐπέοικεν

ὄφρ᾽ ἐρατῆς ἥβης ἀγλαὸν ἄνθος ἔχῃ:

ἀνδράσι μὲν θηητὸς ἰδεῖν, ἐρατὸς δὲ γυναιξίν,

ζωὸς ἐών, καλὸς δ᾽ ἐν προμάχοισι πεσών.                30

ἀλλά τις εὖ διαβὰς μενέτω ποσὶν ἀμφοτέροισιν

στηριχθεὶς ἐπὶ γῆς, χεῖλος ὀδοῦσι δακών.

Uses for a Dead Child in Chaucer, Livy, and Ancient Israel

 

     Like most of his fellow-pilgrims’ narratives, the Physician’s contribution to the Canterbury Tales is a retelling based on a written source.  Far from simply repeating an earlier version, though, Chaucer’s revisions express meaning absent from his source.  The anecdote from Livy [1] the Physician relates has quite a different meaning on the road between London and Canterbury than it did in ancient Rome.  Much significance arises from context and explicit cues apart from the implications of the plot.  The incident is sensational enough to guarantee readers’ attention in any era: in mythic, elemental terms it tells of a loving father who kills his daughter to save her from sexual exploitation.  Yet the significance is altogether different in the two versions and these meanings are also at variance with an earlier story of a sacrificed daughter and with the contemporary reader’s likely reaction.

     The plot elements of the story follow closely the spirited account in Livy, seizing the reader’s attention with lurid sex and violence.  A father finds his lovely and virtuous fourteen-year-old daughter fraudulently claimed as a slave by a lecherous judge.  Rather than let his Virginia (with her sprechende Name) fall to Appius’ lust, the father kills her.  She is a virgin sacrifice, offered up for the ideal of female sexual purity and dependence.

     Yet the first reaction of the modern reader must be shock at Virginius’ filicide, an issue that does not exist in Livy but which by the Middle Ages had become sufficiently important that in Chaucer’s telling, unlike in the Latin, Virginia consents willingly to her own murder.  Thus her end approaches the hagiographic pattern set by the many female saints who are said to have died willingly rather than accept a pagan or otherwise unacceptable lover.  While embracing her own death, she asks only for a brief delay, referring to the respite given Jephthah’s daughter in the Hebrew scriptures. 

     What follows Virginia’s death in Chaucer’s account has no hint of criticism of her father’s brutal deed.  After she dies at his hands, an aroused mob exacts revenge, imprisoning Appius who then commits suicide, hanging his partisans, yet Virginius requests that Claudius, whose false testimony was the excuse for Virginia’s abduction, be only exiled.  The reader hears another Christian grace-note there, surely, in a glimpse of a divine glow of the about such compassionate mercy.

     The reaction to this story in Chaucer is dramatic and has nothing to do with either praising or blaming the father.  The host is overcome with pathos, with such strong feelings of indignation at the malefactor and sympathy for the poor daughter that he acts as though he were crazy (287).  So distressed by the “pitous” (302) narrative is he that he insists he must have a remedy, either medicine or “corny ale” or a “myrie tale.” (316)  The Pardoner, who is to go next, insists on the second of these alternatives, and they stop into a tavern for a drink.  The excuse is presumably welcomed by others among the travelers. 

     The father’s act is not questioned, but rather presented as an extreme example of paternal love, forced on Virginius, like Oedipus the victim of a terrible fate.  Appius is an obvious villain, by pagan or by Christian standards, and his wickedness makes Virginia and her father shine forth the more brightly with their virtue. In a brief coda (277-286) the physician glosses his own story, providing an unlikely version of the story’s instructive value.  Rather than, like the Host, considering Appius a model of extreme sin and Virgina exemplifying the polar opposite, an all-but-impossible saintliness, the Physician identifies with Appius as a fellow sinner and takes the tale as a warning to forsake sin while one still may, bearing in mind that none can tell when God might bring hidden deeds to light.  There is no mention of the evil-doer’s victims, only the pain of the “worm of conscience” and his constant fear, knowing that in the end there must inevitably be an accounting for sin. 

     Presented in the context of the pilgrimage the Physician’s Tale seems, in spite of its shocking content, a diverting tale, a potent emotional experience suited for passing an idle hour, the medieval version of a late show horror movie.  The motif of a lovely and innocent heroine in danger is universally popular, and here its sensationalism is heightened by the horrific act of the father.  In spite of this potent, highly-colored material, though, the stated theme is generic, the most commonplace of medieval Christian formulae, encouragement toward salvation, to avoid sin and embrace Jesus. 

     The primary source for the Physician’s Tale is Livy (III, 44ff.) who tells the story in a leisurely and lively manner, clearly exploiting the sex and violence that make the story of Appius and Verginia (Livy’s spelling) attractive to readers.  The context and the stated significance of the account in Livy, however, is quite distinct from those of Chaucer’s story.   The Roman historian’s goal was to trace the founding of his city and the tale of Verginius marks a transition from the second decemvirate to the second plebeian succession.  Even apart from the intrusion of legends like that of Verginius, Livy’s presentation of such change is often based as much on tradition and literary models as on historical fact.  For him Appius’ attempt to rape Verginia is representative of his generally vicious rule.  Thus Livy includes a lengthy explanation of the strengthening of plebian power in the aftermath of Appius’ crime.  For him the political issue was leading the people’s reaction.  “The people were excited partly by the atrocity of the deed, partly by the opportunity now offered of recovering their liberties.”  The ordinary Romans “talked of nothing but the abolition of the tribunitian power and the right of appeal and loudly expressed their indignation at the condition of public affairs.” 

     Livy emphasizes the role of sexual offenses against women as a sign of decadent leadership and the marker of institutional change by referring to the earlier rape and death of Lucretia which had preceded the overthrow of the monarchy and the original founding of the senate.   Clearly, violence to respectable women is the hallmark of misrule, allowing a political struggle to be accompanied (or, perhaps, masked) as moral outrage.  In Chaucer the sin is personal or spiritual whereas here it is socio-political.   

     In Chaucer’s version Virginia’s daughter refers to another story that in part resembles her own when she asks for some brief respite before her death like that afforded Jephthah’s daughter in the book of Judges.  Though she also is killed by a loving father, this ancient Hebrew episode includes no lascivious and unjust judge.  Jephthah, despite being the son of a “harlot” and practicing banditry, defeats the Ammonites as a Jewish general and becomes then a respected “judge,” ruling Israel for six years.  He finds himself sacrificing his own daughter as the result of a rash vow.  There is no question of his failing to carry out his contract with the divine.  His daughter was, like Agamemnon’s, the price of military victory.

     Once again female blood accompanies a regime change.  The putative theme is, as so often in the Hebrew scripture, the ups and downs of the Jews interpreted as the result of either cleaving to pious rules or flirting with non-Jewish practices.  Israel had been losing its battles because they “did evil again in the sight of the Lord, and served Baalim, and Ashtaroth, and the gods of Syria, and the gods of Zidon, and the gods of Moab, and the gods of the children of Ammon, and the gods of the Philistines, and forsook the Lord, and served not him.” (Judges 10)  Oddly, though, Israel’s champion Jephthah endears himself to God with a vow that echoes the human sacrifice of the Jews’ neighbors.  His prayer must have pleased Jehovah since victory in battle follows.  Far from deserving censure for killing his daughter, Jephthah was originally, like Abraham, whose case turned out somewhat differently, a type of the believer who demonstrates virtue by submitting his will to the divine.

     The archaic ritual character of this sacrifice is evident in the fact that Jephthah’s daughter’s death was remembered in an annual observance.  “And it was a custom in Israel, that the daughters of Israel went yearly to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite four days in a year. (Judges 11, 39-40)  This custom suggests that the story is a descent into legend of what was once a divine myth about a female vegetation spirit similar to Ishtar or Persephone.  Here the context is wholly mythic.  Such actions occur on a cosmic stage.  Jephthah’s actions have no moral content any more than those of Oedipus, though later priestly commentators including the Jewish B'reshith Rabba and (much later) Rashi and the Christians Ambrose and John Chrysostom made him an example of error for the same actions that had been consdiered praiseworthy.

     The righteous killing of one’s child so outrages ordinary expectations that stories of such deeds will excite interest in any human society.  Yet the themes implied by the stories of Jephthah and Verginius (and Virginius) vary widely.  The Hebrew version has origins in the cycle of the natural year and the observation that life lives only on life and the hard insistence that the life of the community supersedes personal grief.  Later, Livy’s Latin anecdote about another father’s sacrifice continues the notion that the father’s individual loss is justified by a social gain, in Jephthah’s case the military victory over the Ammonites and in Verginius’ the assertion of the power of the commons, but the mythic and ritualistic associations are muted in favor of proto-democratic political values and individual ethical choice.  Finally, in Chaucer, the story is told for the fun of it, and the putative theme urging the reader to gain salvation by avoiding annoying God seems tossed into the text as an afterthought.      

     Using the violation of the strongest taboos, with the shedding of female blood marking historical change, stories of this type exercise a strong narrative appeal.  The Verginius anecdote appeared in The Romance of the Rose, was depicted by Botticelli, and was retold by later authors, including John Webster and Thomas Heywood in Appius and Virginia and Thomas Babington Macaulay in Lays of Ancient Rome.  In every instance the story’s meaning is a unique compound of plot and context, complicated by what the text says about itself and what the reader makes of it.

 

 

The Meaning of Art for Art’s Sake

 

Numbers in brackets indicate endnotes; those in parentheses refer to page numbers or other divisions of quoted texts.

 

     The phrase “art for art’s sake” is so familiar that one may fail to notice that its accepted meaning is not explicit but rather is conveyed by indirect implication.  Art, after all, can scarcely be altogether autotelic since without human beings art can have no value or meaning whatever. [1]  It is absurd to imagine that a score of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony would serve any end at all were there no people to hear and appreciate it.  When a critical statement maintains the worth of “art for art’s sake,” it really means that art is justified, not for some abstract theoretical inherent worth, but because it provides pleasure to people. [2]  The very evasion of this direct statement looks like a kind of residual puritanical euphemism masking hedonism [3], though pleasure, of course, has many varieties, from simple entertainment through sensuality to experiences of the sublime.  The phrase implies as well a criterion for evaluating works of art that foregrounds form and style rather than content or theme. 

     The original occurrences of the expression, though, bore a rather different meaning.  Apparently, the phrase first appears in Benjamin Constant’s account of a visit with Schiller and English expatriate Henry Crabb Robinson (a student of Schelling) [4] whom he recorded as declaring directly that art could have no function or end outside itself without being deformed.  Constant specifically mentions the roots of the concept extending through Schelling to Kant.  Though pleasure does play a role in determinations of beauty, the German Idealist lineage would be unsatisfied with either pleasure alone as the raison d'être of art or the pursuit of purely abstract formal value.   Kant and Schelling would claim for art a truth, indeed a truth more profoundly true than most.  The phrase, once forged, was developed and mutated in subsequent authors.

    The phrase next appeared in print in an 1818 essay by Victor Cousin that insisted “We must have religion for religion’s sake, morality for morality’s sake, as with art for art’s sake...the beautiful cannot be the way to what is useful, or to what is good, or to what is holy; it leads only to itself.” [5]   Cousin’s  commonsense “Eclecticism” began from a material base.  “Man is sensible to pleasure and pain: he shuns the one and seeks the other.” (lecture 12)  He declared that “art is the free reproduction of the beautiful” with no other end in mind.  “The sole object of art is the beautiful.  Art abandons itself as soon as it shuns this.” (lec. 9)   While he recognized the autonomy of aesthetics in statements like these, his philosophy continued to link the beautiful to the good, the true, and the divine, so, unsurprisingly, ulterior considerations of morality and spirituality linger in spite of his formula “l’art pour l’art.”  

     Causin emphatically denies that beauty entails desire.  For his belated neo-Platonism aesthetic the experience of beauty is not limited to pleasure (which he trivializes by calling it “the agreeable”) or indeed to sensation or to sensual imagination at all.  It is rather based in reason and indeed for him ethics are likewise aesthetic, because the good, the true, and the beautiful are, on the most sublime level, all one. (lec. 6)

     It is in the cheeky preface of Gautier to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin that the line blossoms into its principal role as a controversialist slogan of the aesthetic party.  It is as a cri de coeur that it has survived to the present.  Its advocates have energetically opposed the traditional role of art in teaching morality (and the more subtle claims of humanists that art is uplifting or ennobling) and the complementary claims of reformers that art must subserve the goal of social justice. 

     Gautier there maintains categorically that “there is nothing really beautiful save what is of no possible use.” (9) With the bohemian impudence that endeared him to Pound, Gautier ridicules attention to “virtue,” calling her “a very pleasant grandmother, but a grandmother.” [10]  He would prefer to gaze with pleasure on Dorinne’s bosom (47) and in general recommends a hedonistic life devoted to the bottle, the pipe, and Pantagruel (48).  The contrast with Cousin’s discomfort around desire and pleasure could hardly be more marked.  He seeks to êpater la bourgeoisie as he cheerfully identifies himself as “the most enormously immoral individual in Europe or elsewhere.” (53)  He muses on the progress possible were a “large reward” provided for anyone who could invent a new pleasure.”  In sum, he declares, “to me enjoyment seems to be the end of life and the only useful thing on this earth.” (83)

    Whistler’s lecture “Ten O’Clock,” for which he sent formal invitations as though for a dinner party at an unusual hour, declared his artistic notions with similar high spirits.  For him art is “selfishly occupied with her own perfection only” (4), having nothing whatever to do with a benefit of any kind (5).  He will have nothing to do with any literary or narrative reading of paintings (16) or an educational end (21).  While he does pause to ridicule Oscar Wilde as a clotheshorse (23), for him the value of art is formal.  “The painter’s poetry,” for Whistler, consists of his arranging “form and colour into such perfect harmony, that exquisiteness is the result.”  With such creativity, or “invention,” and not from profound ideas or novel insights, the artist’s work gains a “dignity” and “nobility of thought.” (17)  He maintained in “The Red Rag” (reprinted in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies) “Art should be independent of all clap-trap—should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it; and that is why I insist on calling my works ‘arrangements’ and ‘harmonies.’”

     Whistler’s lecture, like Gautier’s preface is lit with high spirits and fleering if dry remarks.  He expresses discomfort at having to “appear in the role of the Preacher” (3) and imagines a scene in which “the Gods stand by and marvel, and perceive how far away more beautiful is the Venus of Melos was their own Eve.” (15)  Unabashedly elitist, he deplores that art has become of late “a sort of common topic for the tea-table” useful for signaling one’s “culture and refinement.” (3)  Yet he mocks art historians as well who “frequent museums and burrow in crypts,” seeking to “establish with due weight” unimportant reputations” and in the process reduce Art to statistics (18-19).  Far from hoping like William Morris to bring art to everyone, he wishes to “lift from their [the public’s] shoulders this incubus of Art.” (22) 

     In both Gautier and Whistler, the formal pleasures of art are its sole reward.  Their sassy tone is merely the seasoning indicating their dissent from the age-old formula naming delight and instruction as art’s goals.  That many thought this belief arose from an artistic milieu that not only considered immorality irrelevant to aesthetics, but was suspected of actually cultivating sin only attracted more attention to these writers.  Indeed, the poses of many among the decadents and aesthetes of the time often encouraged this view.

     So, far from being claiming that art is entirely autotelic, the phrase “art for art’s sake” was used to assert the value of the pleasure beauty inspires and the primacy of form over content.  What the expression most often signifies is that pleasure, whatever form it may take -- whether simple entertainment, inspiration, or spiritual afflatus, is the only “final cause” of art and that this value consists arises from purely abstract formal patterning.  An examination of nineteenth century uses of the phrase indicates that the line was employed as a provocation to the bourgeoisie by counter-cultural artists eager to disassociate themselves from conventional respectability.  Strong reactions condemned the notion.  For instance, an unsigned editorial in The Art World was titled “Art for Art's Sake: Its Fallacy and Viciousness.” [8]  This, of course, is precisely the reaction the artists were seeking. 

 

 

 

 

1.  Originally “l’art pour l’art,” in Stefan George “Kunst für die Kunst.”  The use of “ars gratia artis” in the MGM logo must strike the viewer as ironic in light of Hollywood cinema’s undisputed profit motives.  I ignore here a certain generic truth in the proposition in the sense that not only every creative or intellectual field, but indeed every technical skill, can be judged only by its own standards, applied by practitioners.  Thus only a carpenter may fully appreciate the skill of another carpenter and only a highly trained practicing musician can best evaluate another’s performance.

2.  In The Sense of Beauty Santayana defines beauty as “objectified pleasure.”

3.  In a seminar, with five or six other graduate students, all of whom had presumably pursued literary study because they love to read, I once ventured to suggest that pleasure was a motive for consuming art.  The professor drily responded, “Mr. Seaton, we don’t talk about our personal lives here.”

4.  Benjamin Constant, Journal intime, Jan. 1804.  “Art for art's sake, with no purpose, for any purpose perverts art. But art achieves a purpose which is not its own.”  (‘L'art pour l'art, sans but, car tout but dénature l'art. Mais l'art atteint au but qu'il n'a pas.”)  The same sentiment is recorded in Robinson’s own journals. 

5. Du Vrai, du beau, et du bien [Sorbonne lectures, 1818] (1853) pt. 2.   These talks had originally appeared as Cours de philosophie professé à la faculté des lettres pendant l'année 1818.

6.  Mademoiselle de Maupin, translated  by C. T.Brainard (1900), p. 82.

7.  James A. McNeil Whistler, Ten O’Clock, a Lecture, 1916, p. 4.

8.  Vol. 2, No. 2 (May, 1917).

Notes on Recent Reading 48 (Huxley, Cossery, de Maupassant)

 

Point Counter Point (Huxley)

     Huxley gets far less respect these days than he did in my youth.  His lack of engagement with the major trends of modernism combined with the intensification of his mystic inclinations toward the end of his career have diminished his importance for many readers in recent years.  He is left with those who are like him interested in cleansing their doors of perception as well as a remnant that relish the social novels of his early days: Crome Yellow, Antic Hay, and Point Counter Point. 

     Reading Point Counter Point one has the innocent amusement of a roman à clef including, by most accounts, characters based on D. H. Lawrence and Nancy Cunard, as well as a denatured and belated impression of Baudelaire.  There is an all-but-constant stream of weary Bloomsbury wit.  “My wife assures me that her underclothes are positively Phryean.”  “Quotations have something facetiously pedantic about them.” “He talks slang as though he were a foreigner with a perfect command of English.”  “[Marjorie] took such horribly small bites from a slice of bread and then chewed only with the front teeth, like a guinea pig – as though the process of eating were an indelicate and rather disgusting affair.”  These I found by opening the book at random; they constitute its most reliable reward.            

     I thought of Peacock through much of the book, as one character played off another, none more than two-dimensional, and then of Oscar Wilde and Saki.  Toward the end, when things other than repartee start to happen, the action seems incongruous and faintly disturbing, as though a Punch and Judy puppet were suddenly to express real pain.   Yet the novels are well worth reading, at least up through the ‘thirties.  I myself have a considerable tolerance as well for the Vedanta articles and the allied exploration of the value of psychedelics.  And I have a nostalgia as well, remembering how, as a teen-ager, I loved Texts and Pretexts, his poetry anthology with comments.  He wrote a very great deal, his own poetry, essays, travel pieces, stage plays and screenplays, supporting himself with his pen in a way all but unthinkable today.   

 

Men God Forgot (Cossery)

     Cossery was an Egyptian-born writer of Syrian Christian descent who, despite living in Paris for most of his life, continued to set his fiction in some version of his remembered Cairo childhood.  Though his own father was well off, Cossery found his themes in the slums, among the poor scrabbling to survive and smoking hashish to get through the day.  Men God Forgot, his first book, consists of five stories whose titles convey their tone: three are “The Girl and the Hashish Smoker,” “The Barber Has Killed his Wife,” and “The Hungry Dream Only of Bread.”  The ambiance is supported by the names of roads in his fictional city such as the Cul-de-sac of the Cripples, the Street of the Pregnant Woman, and the Lane of the Pissing Child. 

     Though his original inspiration was Balzac and he wrote only in French, his tales are sure to remind readers of Paul Bowles’ storytellers like Mohammed Mrabet as well as the sophisticated narratives of Naguib Mahfouz.  Cossery’s successful pursuit of lyricism in scenes of squalid ugliness is reminiscent as well of Céline.  

     In Egypt Cossery found allies in the Groupe Art et Liberté, a largely Surrealist and anti-fascist formation and associated as well with such writers as Lawrence Durrell, Jean Genet, and Henry Miller (who contributed a note for a later City Lights edition).  The book was translated by Harold Edwards, a professor at an Egyptian university and published by George Leite’s Circle Editions in Berkeley in 1946.  The many typos seem to testify to the book’s authenticity.  My own copy, from the University Avenue Goodwill store near the UC campus, has a penciled price inside the cover: 25¢.  Cossery would have particularly welcomed, I think, being read on the cheap.

 

Bel-Ami (de Maupassant)

     Georges Duroy is introduced as a man who attracts attention in public places due to his masterful military air and, more importantly, his striking good looks.   Before long the reader finds that he acquired his “swagger” during service in colonial North Africa where he not only indulged in incidents of gratuitous brutality, but then found lasting amusement in recalling them later.  Ego-driven and amoral, he improbably makes his way to wealth and an influential position in Paris journalism, his advancement spurred by his sexual conquests of a series of women.  Utterly cynical about the government and his profession as well as about romance, he rises irresistibly in Belle Époque France.  In the concluding scene, a glorious celebrity wedding, Duroy (or Du Roy de Cantel, as he now styles himself) the toast of the town, his ambition somehow satisfied, gazes out across the city, a master of the universe like Tom Wolfe’s Sherman McCoy, and his thoughts turn to his mistress’s hair, charmingly disordered in bed. 

     The combination of Duroy’s almost inhuman selfishness with his capacity for a nearly (but not quite) tender sensuality heightens the dramatic tension for the reader, while for the character there can be no doubt.  His crass material goals are the only real ends in life.  The story of his affairs plays out before the historical background of French colonial expansion in the Maghreb, a plotline of unbounded national greed to match the individual avarice of the novel’s hero.

     The book, like de Maupassant’s stories, is filled with telling specific details in every scene.  While the human landscape is bleak indeed – the characters generally act from the most venial motives – the context is described with vivid delight and rich plenitude, with scenes set in poverty and in wealth, in the city and in the countryside.  In part at least the reader is enabled, like Lear in the end, to look on fallen society with bemusement, to become one of “God’s spies” in a world that might sometimes seem altogether wicked were it not that we are inextricably tangled in it and we know, if we know nothing else, our own vulnerability.

Catullus’ Currency of Kisses: New translations of Catullus V, VII, and XLVIII

 

 The Latin texts of the poems are appended.

 

 

     Erotic relationships seem sometimes, to some lovers, reducible to the rules of accountancy: a bit of pleasure in return for a certain amount of trouble, a financial cost balanced against flights of delight.  When upbraiding Ameana for an excessive fee (41) or complaining of Aulifilena’s deception (110), Catullus displays the confident misogyny of a substantial citizen in a patriarchy.

     Yet with passionate attachments, the values shift dramatically.  One lover’s side, at least, of the exchange can balloon to virtually infinite value which may or may not be equaled by the love object.  Catullus expresses the degree of romantic love by a figure of speech, as innumerable kisses. [1]  The association of love and kisses is natural, of course, but, when the kisses become uncountable, the image signifies the power of eros.  Such lover’s desperation may lead either to love-sickness, depression, and the miserable conviction that one has been playing the fool or, for the more fortunate, to an ascent to Elysium. 

     In Catullus XLVIII the convention appears at its simplest in the context of gay relationship. 

 

Your honeyed eyes, Juventius,

if I could kiss them on and on,

three hundred thousand times would not

suffice.  I’d never have enough,

not if they numbered more than grains

could grow in fields of one estate.

 

     A hyperbolic compliment, but one fully intended in passionate moods, the hundreds of thousands of kisses remain still insufficient to express the lover’s emotion.  He cannot rest in languorous pleasure, but always wants more.  Love is measured by a currency of kisses, and the quantity must be countless to indicate the ineffable magnitude of the love. 

     The association here, first with honey and then with ears of cereal grain reinforces this indefinite and enthusiastic measure of love, and links the poem to archaic practices designed to foster fertility, human, animal, and vegetable alike. [2]  If, as Frazer reported, people would copulate in their fields in hopes of a good harvest, holding one’s lover may remain, in a vestigial way, a ritual of sympathetic magic to renew the world.  Such a link has at least an emotional reality, recorded in all the poems of spring’s regreening accompanying the blossoming of romance. 

     Catullus VII first extends the hyperbole, with an elaborate series of references at first geographical, then historic and cosmic. 

 

How many, Lesbia, kisses between us,

might be enough to surfeit me and more?

As many as the grains of Libyan sand

that lie in Cyrene where the silphium grows,

between the oracle of torrid Jove

and Battus’ old and holy sepulchre,

as many as the stars in silent night

that see all peoples’ secret love affairs.

So many kisses must the mad Catullus have

to be enough and then some, too,

so that the curious can never count

nor any tongue cast evil words our way.

 

This lyric reinforces the kisses’ meaning familiar from XLVIII and expandss it with concrete specifics, while also adding considerable semantic territory.  Extravagant love, measurable only by countless kisses, is associated with the exotic (Cyrene), the rare and precious (silphium or asafoetida), the sensual (“torrid”), and yet the venerable (the grave of the city’s founder) and indeed the universally human (“peoples’ secret love affairs”). 

     Rich in content if lacking the straightforward and spontaneous-seeming apparent speaking from the heart of XLVIII this poem suddenly turns in the final two lines to reveal a new aspect of the lovers’ situation.  Whereas the original referent of the currency of kisses had been erotic intensity, here they provide a mystical protection from hostile busybodies very like the “jealous ones” of Troubadour lyric over a millennium later.  As a subjective experience of the lovers from which all others are excluded, the kisses create a private utopian world, protected against all threats by the power of their affection.  These ill-wishers are the projection of the lovers’ fear that their bliss is endangered and perhaps cannot last.

     In V, likely the most familiar Catullan carmina, the motif of countless kisses is employed in service of the carpe diem topos.  Here it spotlights the contrast between the couple’s delirium of love-making and those disapproving superannuated meddlers. 

 

Oh, let us live, my Lesbia, let us love!

And any idle talk of crabbed old men

we’ll value at one pennyworth, no more.

The sun, we know, will set and rise again,

and yet, for us, when our brief light is gone,

what follows then will be an endless sleep. 

A thousand kisses and a hundred more I want,

another thousand, and a hundred yet,

and when the thousands upon thousands mount,

we’ll stir the pot and then we’ll never know

and those who envy us won’t know as well

how many kisses you and I enjoyed.

 

The seventh through the tenth lines simply juggle numbers, indicating the ineffable quality of a necessarily private erotic experience.  Like a jazz singer going into scatting the artist best approximates the joy of love by admitting its inexpressibility.  The two are so confidently in control that they, as though with a wave of a magic wand, can fling the scene into confusion and frustrate the hostile intentions of the envious while enjoying the marvels of each other’s bodies.   

     Catullus’ lyrics portray a range of lovers, some selfish, some selfless.  For him erotic play was could be simple recreation without emotional engagement, but other verses suggest a whole-hearted tumble into total commitment scarcely expressible in words.  Adopting the apparently natural association of love and kisses, he elaborates the imagery of a currency of kisses to signify a passion so great as to require a figure of speech, so great it may provide an apotropaic charm against the invidious. 

     A master of invective and insult and capable of plain-speaking to the point of outright vulgarity, Catullus was at the same time a virtuoso of love poetry whose elegant and original language might be either ardent or nasty.  His range is evident in another poem using the multitude of kisses topos.  In his most notorious poem (XVI) he complains that Aurelius and Furius have mistaken his romantic side for weakness, and the very image under discussion is to blame.   “Because I write of countless kisses, you think me as less a man?” Catullus defends his masculinity with the purest sexual aggression “I will fuck your ass and mouth”. [3]  That this verse is written by the same author who wrote as a devotee of true love only suggests the breadth and variety of the wild territory of eros. 

 

 

 

1.  Among others who use the same image is Baudelaire who in “Le Balcon” exclaims “ô baisers infinis!”

 

2.  Leah O’Hearn demonstrates the details of the implications of honey and of grain, particularly the latter’s association with the emergence of facial hair in Classical love poetry.   See “Title: Juventius and the Summer of Youth in Catullus 48,” Mnemosyne LXXIV, 1.

 

3.  “Vōs, quod mīlia multa bāsiōrum, lēgistis male mē marem putātis?” and (“Pēdīcābō ego vōs et irrumābō”. 

 

 

 

 

 

XLVII

Mellitos oculos tuos, Iuventi,

siquis me sinat usque basiare,

usque ad milia basiem trecenta,

nec unquam videar satur futurus,

non si densior aridis aristis

sit nostrae seges osculationis.

 

 

VII

Quaeris, quot mihi bāsiātiōnēs

tuae, Lesbia, sint satis superque.

Quam magnus numerus Libyssae harēnae

lasarpīciferīs iacet Cyrēnīs

ōrāclum Iovis inter aestuōsī

et Battī veteris sacrum sepulcrum;

aut quam sīdera multa, cum tacet nōx,

fūrtīvōs hominum vident amōrēs:

tam tē bāsia multa bāsiāre

vēsānō satis et super Catullō est,

quae nec pernumerāre cūriōsī

possint nec mala fascināre lingua.

 

 

V

Vivāmus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,

rumoresque senum severiorum

omnes unius aestimemus assis!

soles occidere et redire possunt;

nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux,

nox est perpetua una dormienda.

da mi basia mille, deinde centum,

dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,

deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum;

dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,

conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,

aut ne quis malus invidere possit,

cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

High Peaks of European Cuisine

 

     Growing up in a Midwestern suburb during the Eisenhower era, I came to feel that I lived in a cultural desert.  Not realizing then that everyone’s own culture tends to be invisible to the individual, I thought not only Chicago’s nearby Black neighborhoods, but also small Midwestern towns, not to mention every other country on earth, had more to engage the imagination than the trimmed lawns of my neighborhood where the height of aesthetic ambition seemed embodied in my parents’ artificial Christmas tree situated in the picture window and played upon by varicolored lights as it revolved.  The corresponding cuisine notoriously depended on ketchup, margarine, Wonder Bread, Jell-O salads, and casseroles using canned soups.  On the rare occasions that my family dined out, it was either for burgers or, for a fancy meal, steak or fried chicken.

     But I soon learned that other options existed and, in menus as in other matters, I became a dissenter.  My mother learned early that I preferred Oscar Mayer Smokey Links to hot dogs and Liederkranz to Velveeta and, as I reached high school age, I found access to lamb and eggplant from Diana’s on South Halsted, sausage with mumbo sauce from a stand beneath the 63^rd Street El, and pickled cabbage from the Assyrian-American Restaurant.  Now, of course, ethnic holes-in-the-wall are everyone’s favorites and salsa is America’s most popular condiment.  A combination of world travels and stacks of library cookbooks have given me some familiarity with what is done with food today.  I have learned that no other region produces such a grand variety of pickled foods as the Korean banchan, while Indian cooking excels in the harmonious orchestration of large numbers of aromatic herbs and spices.  At the same time, I came to reconsider white people’s food and to realize that the European continent has dramatically high peaks of its own culinary achievement.  Though I took a long way round, I had come to be able to appreciate the unique triumphs of white people’s cooking.    

     Bread is made in a good many parts of the world, but European wheat breads have been developed to a level of sophistication far outpacing other regions.  Most of the world’s breads are unleavened flatbreads like tortillas or chapattis, sometimes, like Ethiopian injera, fermented.  In the nineteenth century the first satisfactory chemical leavens became available, allowing the cook to make raised breads like biscuits, soda bread, coffee cake, and bannocks.  Oven-baked raised breads using barm, yeast, or sourdough starters include naan, Khamiri roti, and Arabic khubz, including pita, but in Europe an array of high-rising yeast breads unlike those known elsewhere arose.  Every region of Europe developed specialties: pain de mie, challah, pan gellego, ciabatta, pane Toscano, but the acknowledged masterpiece of European bread is the French baguette.  Countless excellent breads are made with whole wheat or with multiple grains, and I relish a sprinkling of sunflower, flax, and sesame seeds, yet for me as for most diners and bakers the acme of bread, the very best loaf, is a baguette.  (Baking all my life I continue to pursue the perfect baguette in my own kitchen.)  The contrast in texture between crust and interior and the pure and fresh wheaten taste, bland enough to complement any dinner made this the most common and iconic of French foodstuffs.  The very magic of the action of the yeast, creating bubbles and caverns, makes a light and variable loaf that is excellent with unsalted butter while not distracting from the other contents of a full plate.    

     People throughout the world, in the universal quest for intoxication, have made alcoholic drinks of whatever was hand: using the sap of palms to make wine in West Africa, agave for pulque in Mexico, rice for sake and mijiu in East Asia, even mare’s milk for Mongolian ayrag or kumis.  Each of these has its charms, particularly in its home territory with complementary climate and cuisine, yet the production of wine from grapes in Europe goes far beyond what was done elsewhere.  Surely the range is extraordinary from a dry and fine-bubbled sparkler, through the light fruit of Beaujolais, the grave and knotty flavor of pinot noir, the satin of Bordeaux, the musky hearth-like warmth of port, even the strong straw taste that lurks behind the sweetness of Tokay.  Surely for those who consume alcohol there is a wine for every taste and every moment.  The simple treatment of grape juice to preserve it and at the same time to induce inebriation became in Europe an elaborate aesthetic game, as any glance at wine literature will indicate, but one with resulting in dependable satisfaction.  

     Similarly, the cheese produced in Europe is far more varied than most of the world’s cheeses.  While fresh cheeses like the Indian panir or the Middle Eastern ackawi which are widespread are made also in  Europe: the familiar cottage cheese, German quark, and French fromage blanc.  The most distinctive European cheeses are, however, prepared with particular molds, fungi, and bacteria.  The litany of their names might suggest a cheese cantata: Brevibacterium linens is used in making Limburger, Penicillium glaucum for gorgonzola, Propionibacterium freundenreichii makes the holes in Swiss, and Penicillium camemberti and its cousin Penicillium roqueforti for camembert and roquefort.  The flavors may be mild or sharp, bland or salty, perhaps nutty or smoky, the textures light or dense soft or hard, smooth or grainy, a grand array of possibilities unequaled elsewhere in the globe. 

     Many foodstuffs are most appealing in natural form.  Fresh apricots can scarcely be improved, new peas and a beefsteak need only a bit of cooking and seasoning, while oysters and clams are best utterly au naturel.  The satisfaction of fresh milk, salted peanuts, tomatoes just plucked from the garden, and countless other foods is universal.  Cuisines differentiate, however, when more complex preparation is employed, often resulting in a product that could not really be foreseen in its raw materials.  Bread, wine, and cheese are all the result of fermentation, and the astonishing variety of each of these basic foods is a testament to our species’ ingenuity, demonstrating the power of art to transform nature.  These products are not simply foods; they are feats of imaginative and aesthetic judgement.

     They are, we may be glad, artistic creations with physical substance.  I sit this afternoon on my front porch in a soft breeze, hearing the birds of late summer.  With a piece of baguette, some thin slices of Gouda, and a glass of Chateau Garreau, I may partake of these pinnacles of European cuisine all at once and, to enjoy such a feast, one need not do any preparation whatever, though today’s bread is homemade.