My Hats

  (and several others)

 

     Hats can define a person’s role.  A crown is the sign of a king; a toque means a chef, a mortarboard a graduate; a montera a bullfighter; a kippah a Jew; while a pointy hat might be either a dunce or a wizard.  Many hats suggest nationality: woolen baglike barretinas indicate a Catalan, a skotthúfa or tail-cap an Icelander, and the tall, semi-transparent gat made of horsehair and bamboo a Korean.  Some suggest narratives.  At once time observers of the Soviet government noticed that Politburo members were more likely than others to appear in public ceremonies wearing the fur hat or karakul.  American publicity  about this trend created a small vogue for such hats among American business executives. 

     The so-called whoopee cap has a more complex history.  Once boys would often remodel men’s discarded felt hats by cutting the brims in a zig-zag pattern and turning them up, often then adding a personal choice of ornaments such as pins, political or advertising buttons, or bottle caps.   Classic whoopees are worn by several of the Dead End Kids in films of the ‘thirties.  Long past the time that boys really refashioned their elders’ outworn hats, the whoopee cap lived on, particularly in cartoons.  In Little Lulu, the boys are differentiated through hat style.  Tubby generally appears in a little white “Dixie Cup” sailor cap, while Willy is in a flat cloth cap, and Eddie wears a whoopee cap.  

     Surely the longest run for a whoopee wearer, though, is Archie’s friend Jughead who has worn such a cap since his first appearance in Pep Comics #22 in 1941.  The cap became yet more appropriate for Jughead’s character when it became obsolete even for children, implying that Jughead was a non-conformist willing to flout expected teen fashion standards.

     Something of a Jughead myself, I suppose, as a bookish preadolescent I realized I was incapable of being stylish and reacted by embracing a look of yesteryear.  I favored pocket watches and fancied vests instead of polos.  For sleeping I asked my parents for a nightshirt, but I never could abide the tasseled cap that came along.  While very likely necessary in the days before adequate heating, I did not find it  comfortable. 

     Though today relatively few men wear hats, even in inclement weather, three quarters of a century ago hats were a flourishing industry.  Separate shops were devoted to women’s and to men’s hats.  My father and every other executive suburbanite in my neighborhood took the train to the city in a white shirt under a brimmed hat, usually a fedora.   Made of felt, these required periodic cleaning and blocking, sometimes provided by shops in the lobbies of business towers, next door to the barber who could provide a weekly trim.   With many subtle variations of style, such hats allowed those in the know as good an estimator of personal wealth as the model of a man’s car.  Yet this high point of refinement was also the beginning of a rapid decline.  Most members if my generation have never worn such a hat.  Even in a Chicago winter most commuters these days go altogether hatless.

     As a teenager I conceived the tastes in headwear I still maintain, though whether my persistence implies sound early discernment, a decay of imagination, or simply inertia I cannot tell.  I am fondest I think of soft tweed caps with a snap visor, a top button, and eight cloth panels, sometimes called a newsboy cap, though I don’t care for that name.  The look is, I fancy, entirely different from the narrower and stiffer cap which lacks the top button, known in the ‘fifties as “ivy-league style” which sometimes had a small belt in the back to match the back-belted trousers of the day.  

     My weakness for an old-fashioned look in general may be the seedbed from which this taste grew, but it surely strengthened when I saw photographs of Jack Kerouac in similar caps.  Like Whitman’s open collared shirts the style signaled an identification with the working class.  I like the way they are made of suit-like fabrics like tweed, yet comport well with jeans.  They have enough semiotic imprecision to be suggestive rather than directive.

     The same cannot be said for berets, which I have worn since undergraduate days.  As unambiguous in its signification as a Sioux war bonnet, the beret in America is primarily associated with artists and intellectuals.  Its appeal arose as a result of its connotations of Continental sophistication enhanced by a particular association, centuries-old, with art.  Self-portraits by Rembrandt, Monet, Cézanne, and Rousseau lie behind cartoon portrayals of beret-wearing painters.  Through the examples of leading jazz musicians including Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, and Gene Krupa, the beret came to signify expertise in the hipper modern arts as well. 

     During World War II berets were among the articles which those who wished to join the Resistance were asked to bring, and the exploits of these courageous underground fighters added to the headwear’s positive image.  Berets in France were common enough at that time to attract no attention while uncommon enough to help to distinguish partisan fighters.  There is indeed an entirely military strain of beret history in which they are worn as part of the uniform of a good many nations.  In the U. S. Army berets were made standard wear army-wide in 2001.

     The Army was on my mind when I bought my first beret, but it was obvious to any observer that I was more likely a draft resister than an admirer of the Green Berets.  In the late ‘sixties people would mock the rebellious youth, saying, “They claim to be non-conformists, but they all dress alike.”  But of course, to wear clothing with no “meaning” would be as pointless as speaking gibberish.  (It is also all but  impossible, since the mind will strive to make sense of whatever it encounters.)  Furthermore, as I recall, the crowd up and down Haight Street in 1967 exhibited what could only be called an embarrassment of riches when it came to costume choices.  Still, the old Beat ensemble of shades, beret, turtleneck, and sandals was sufficiently persistent to render anyone displaying all these signifiers at once already passé as well as overdetermined in an unseemly way.

     At a distant third in my own portfolio of hats is the Panama straw hat.  With connections to the headwear of tropical farmworkers, this hat has a lineage altogether different from the straw boaters with a flat crown and brim worn in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  These were once so popular in America that many areas recognized a “straw hat day” when men shifted from felt to straw in the springtime, usually in May to be followed by “felt hat day” in September.  Young men began to amuse themselves by knocking the hats off anyone still wearing straw after the deadline.  The jokers sometimes assaulted their victims, particularly if they encountered resistance.  A 1910 editorial in The Pittsburg Press denounces such hooliganism, blaming it on Theodore Roosevelt’s “anarchistic” principles.

     The most extreme example of such behavior is the so-called “Straw Hat Riots” of 1922 New York City.  On the floor of the stock exchange, horseplay had developed in which brokers would intentionally wear hats past the deadline knowing that their hats would be grabbed and smashed by others, all in good fun.   Then more rowdy young men in the street, some carrying sticks with attached hooks, began to snag the hats of strangers.  In 1922 a group of youths in Lower Manhattan began such pranks a few days early on September 13, precipitating brawls that led to the blockage of the Manhattan Bridge and the intervention of police.  On September 16 the New York Times ran an excited headline: “CITY HAS WILD NIGHT OF STRAW HAT RIOTS; Gangs of Young Hoodlums With Spiked Sticks Terrorize Whole Blocks. VICTIMS RUN THE GAUNTLET Youths Line Car Tracks and Snatch -- Mob of 1,000 Dispersed on Amsterdam Avenue.”  Then followed eight days of disorders.

     Boaters have now disappeared for everyone except students at Harrow and Uppingham, but Panama hats continue to enjoy wide popularity.  Introduced in Europe at the 1855 Paris Exposition Universelle, they impressed Frenchman with their fine texture and were described in the catalogue as “straw cloth.”  When the United States assumed the Panama Canal project, more of the hats reached this country. 

     While everyone knows Van Gogh’s self-portraits wearing straw hats, many other artists wore the same style, but in this case the arty associations carry little weight.  The straw hat in my wardrobe is, like its Central American ancestors, meant to keep the sun  off.  It occupies a closet shelf next to another which has been demoted to service during lawn work.  Both are descendants of a hat I bought one once in Mérida in the Yucatán.  Patricia and I had just had lunch at a little Lebanese restaurant where I , with reckless abandon, had ordered kibbeh nayeh, which is to say, raw lamb.  We found our way then to a tiny hat shop, just past the row of sellers of hammocks, in a strip with a good many apparently identical competitors, each offering, it seemed, every style.   In addition, the vendedor de sombreros was capable, with a bit of water and some expert reshaping, of altering and customizing the form.  From this hat-master I obtained my first straw hat, and it served until it developed a prominent and growing hole at the very front of the crown, and I was obliged to locate its successor.    

     Though the cloth cap, beret, and Panama hat have been my lifelong mainstays, I am not averse to other possibilities.  Indoors as well as out, I am fond of a knit skullcap I bought from a vendor in the Jma el Fna of Marrakech.  When I put it on, I feel fresh regret for having bargained hard and succeeded in  paying the man a few dimes less than he was asking.  Partial to boots, I never wore a cowboy hat until I came upon a straw version in a Salvation Army store.  Recalling accounts of Charles Olson, a man of daunting presence already who often augmented his height with prominent Western-style hats, I bought it. 

     I have a brimmed rigid canvas hat specifically for wearing on rainy days while traveling, but it is so ugly In have worn it only a few times.  Next time I pass by the Salvation Army I shall donate it.  Its place has been taken by a bucket hat which is not quite so hard to look at and which can be jammed into a pocket or the bottom corner of a backpack.  While style always carries meaning, and clothing may be read like a code, it is sometimes trumped by function. 

     Some, though, damn practicality, give rein to the imagination, and make clothing a primary art form.  Beau Brummel proudly maintained that he took five hours a day to dress and washed his boots in champagne (a refinement more effective in the telling than in the doing) before he was cast into debtor’s prison and. ended his days in an asylum.  The Dadaist Elsa Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven went about hung with spoons and materials found in the street, wearing a tomato-can bra and a bird cage on her shaved and shellacked head.  Her clothing, though wild, made far more sense than her verse.  The Shaivite saddhus and Digambara or “sky-clad” Jains make their statement by wearing nothing at all.

     Were an archaeologist of the future to come upon my hats, they would tell a less dramatic story.  The portrait they imply is surely incomplete, even misleading, but this is what allows them to indicate aspirations and vanities, even blind spots, and to be thus at least as revealing as straight facts.  The old hats moldering in the closet shelf may take pride in the fact that they lie, and tell the truth, occasionally an extraordinary truth, in their humbler way but akin all the same to the magnificent machinations of art.  As with any cultural artifact, once one begins accounting for themes, beauty, context, influences, and sources, there is no end; interpretation may proceed at liberty and halt whenever the investigator is no longer amused.

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. 

The Primacy of Poetry in Sidney’s Defence

     The crisis in the prestige of poetry that occasioned Sir Philip Sidney’s The Defence of Poesie [1] is far more evident in contemporary society, Timely though his theme may be, his concept of poetry is an obstacle for modern readers’ sympathetic reception of his essay. To him a part of the grandeur of poetry is that the word may be stretched to embrace all work of imagination. His emphasis on art’s role in fostering morality, quite out-of-place for many modern readers, further raises the barrier. Though the author adopted the pose, fashionable in his day, of pitying “the evill luck” that might bring a reader “to read this inck-wasting toy of mine,” his essay contains an original and persuasive theory of verbal art featuring a sophisticated understanding of mimesis that goes beyond the ideas inherited from Plato and Aristotle to anticipate elements of semiotic theory.
     Sidney’s essay opens with a lament for the decline in poetry’s position. “Poetrie,” he complains “from almost the highest estimation of learning, is falne to be the laughing stocke of children.” Today poetry is generally ignored. Sidney’s own practice indicates that in his day, poetry retained sufficient cachet to be a required skill for courtiers, whereas today poetry has fallen further yet to the extent that competence in the art, even as a consumer and even among the educated, is rare today. [2] A poet-politician would in modern American society be a freak.
     Sidney describes accurately the paramount position of poetry in traditional societies. For him the ancient Greeks provide the most convincing evidence. He says that they considered poetry “above all names of learning.” In part this prestige is associated with the idea of poetic inspiration and poets’ “prophetic” role, but it also assumes an obsolete broad definition of poetry. To Sidney and to the ancients, poetry could mean all imaginative intellectual work, including not only prose works and philosophy but science as well. From poetry, he says, “other learnings have taken their beginnings.” Thus for him, not only is Homer a poet, so are Heliodorus the author of a prose romance, Herodotus the historian, and Manilius the astronomer.
     Sidney, however, distinguishes poetry from other forms of knowledge which have external objects, claiming that poetry is “directed to the highest end of the mistress-knowledge, by the Greeks called archetektonikē.” For Aristotle the coordinating “master art” is politics, because it orders the affairs of humans with artful design setting out social organization and ethical imperatives with the aim of the good of all. [3] Sidney, however, names the poet as “moderator” of “the school of learning.”
     Thus poetry holds the executive function overseeing all sorts of learning of which “the finall end is, to lead and draw us to as high a perfection, as our degenerate soules made worse by their clay-lodgings, can be capable of.” To Sidney both producing and consuming intellectual and artistic work make a person at once more human and more divine, more excellent in general, and certainly more moral.
     An authoritative reference work quotes Northrup Frye’s devastating judgement on literature’s ethical value. “Any attempt to align [art] with morality, otherwise called bowdlerizing, is intolerably vulgar” [4] though the same source calls the relevance of ethics to literary criticism the issue “with the most sustained written tradition” in all of literary history. [5] Sidney would have thought he was expressing a simple and generally accepted commonplace when he defined poetry by moral parameters, saying “that faining notable images of vertues, vices, or what els, with that delightfull teaching, which must be the right describing note to know a Poet by.”
     Indeed, the encouragement of morality can sound like the principal role of art.


“For these indeed do meerly make to imitate, and imitate both to delight & teach, and delight to move men to take that goodnesse in hand, which without delight they would flie as from a stranger; and teach to make them know that goodnesse whereunto they are moved: which being the noblest scope to which ever any learning was directed, yet want there not idle tongues to bark at them.”


     The proposition that literature fosters good behavior is not only uncongenial to modern critical thinking in theory; it is hardly supported by the irregular reputations of not a few poets or the simmering gossip in certain university English departments. [6]
     Sidney’s lofty principles were in part partisan, of course. He was writing in reply to Stephen Gosson's The Schoole of Abuse. Yet he seems to undercut his own claims about poetry’s ennobling effects with the opening in which he cites Pugliano‘s verbal praise of horsemanship as his model. [7] This inspiration may seem to trivialize poetry, reducing it to the status of a long list of other courtly accomplishments, but such a judgement is anachronistically anti-feudal. While the association seems to moderns to put poetry on a par with ruffled collars and the like, to Sidney (under the tutelage of Castiglione) the aristocrat sought to exemplify genuine excellence in every way. Just as a Victorian author implies a socio-aesthetic standard in calling ethical behavior “gentlemanly,” or, more simply, “manly,” to an Elizabethan high birth was associated with high-mindedness.
     Poetry is not, however, for Sidney purely didactic, a “medicine of cherries” in his phrase. Ironically, in part due to his being borne aloft by his Renaissance neo-Platonism, Sidney overcame the reductive identification of art with imitation that led Plato to belittle poetry as “an imitation of an imitation.” Declaring “Now for the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth,” Sidney discards any simple notion of mimesis, suggesting a more sophisticated semiosis, a refracted reality centered in the poet’s imagination which is, in fact, distinct from the world itself though always linked to it.
     In this way he finds Xenophon’s literary picture of Cyrus, a historical figure, while not “wholly imaginative” to be “another nature,” an original creation resembling divine creation. Deviations from perceived reality are no deficiency but rather poetry’s particular glory. Because of such non-imitative elements, the artist’s work is enabled to be “either better then nature bringeth foorth, or quite a new, formes such as never were in nature.” Escaping “the narrow warrant of her [Nature’s] gifts,” the poet is capable of “freely raunging within the Zodiack of his owne wit.”
     For Sidney, though, this increase in verbal power comes not from the generalizing of all Cyruses into a Platonic form of Cyrus, but in particularity of the artist’s design. “Let but Sophocles bring you Ajax on a stage, killing and whipping sheep and oxen, thinking them the army of Greeks, with their chieftains Agamemnon and Menelaus, and tell me if you have not a more familiar insight into anger, than finding in the schoolmen his genus and difference.”
     While not contradicting the mimetic principle he inherited, Sidney is careful to expand it for his own analysis. “Poesie therefore, is an Art of Imitation: for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth to speake Metaphorically.” Immediately after affirming his authority, he introduces new terms that suggest his view of poetry conceived in the poet’s imagination. A “re-presentation” goes beyond a “presentation,” a “counterfeit” is etymologically, something made “in opposition” to a model, and, most significantly, “to speake Metaphorically” is quite different from speaking literally. This non-imitative shift moves the poet’s image from realism to something greater. For Sidney, poetry is man’s distinctive capacity, the activity in which he displays his divinity more than in any other.
     The value of metaphor is that it can offer rich and precise objective correlatives for experiences, conveying them with far more information than other forms of discourse. One way in which poetry is distinguished from other forms of discourse is by its affective component. Poets are “Fathers in learning” generally, but they are alone in possessing “hart-ravishing knowledge.” While non-aesthetic texts usually allow scant expression of emotion, poetry often foregrounds feelings, and to Sidney, “moving is of a higher degree than teaching.”
     Sidney rejoins Aristotle in asserting poetry’s privilege over history, imagination over facts, metaphorical meaning over literal. The potential of poetry arises in the first place from the ability of the author to construct a work that reflects, not the appearance of things, but their meaning, their significance, including the associated emotions. This total picture untethered to observed facts corresponds to the true greater reality of human experience which includes not only subtle shades of insight that might escape the gross terms of literalism, but also allows the inclusion of self-reflection, ambivalence, contradiction, tension, and mystery as well as that unique variety of pleasure called beauty.




1. So-called in Posonby’s authorized first edition (1595). It had been titled An Apologie for Poetrie in Olney’s earlier printing. While I shall use the title Sidney apparently preferred, I recognize the advantage of Olney’s title because of its distinction from Shelley’s equally celebrated A Defence of Poetry.

2. Even in academic departments the study of relatively recent fiction has, to a unprecedented extent, displaced poetry.

3. Nicomachean Ethics I.2.

4. Frye was, of course, a devout Christian. Note how even his denunciation of morality’s claims on art is cast in aesthetic terms. The comment occurs in Fearful Symmetry, p. 121 in the Collected Works edition.

5. “Ethics and Criticism” in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.

6. It is likely true that literary critics and scholars are more righteous in that they are inclined to the left politically, but this is not likely due to their specific training, but rather is characteristic of all educated people.

7. Sidney’s Defence is itself cast in the most classical form of an oration. A detailed description of his debt to Quintilian and Cicero appeared in Kenneth O. Myrick’s Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman. A more recent study is John Webster’s “Oration and Method in Sidney's ‘Apology’: A Contemporary's Account,” Modern Philology 79.1 (Aug., 1981), 1-15.

Moby Dick and the Density of the Aesthetic Text

with a note of parallel passages

and a final note on the endlessness of interpretation


Chapters are named in the text and numbered in parentheses while numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.


     Poetry in the old broad sense, referring to all aesthetic or literary texts, shares with other works of art the distinction of being the densest information-bearing codes humans have devised. Other sorts of writing aim at transparency, allowing the reader to efficiently grasp the content without being distracted by sound or form or associations or paradoxes. The fact that poetry uses these resources and more allows it to embody simulacra of any variety of the immensely complex human consciousness and to convey not only information and ideas and opinions but also emotional states, ambivalences, contradictions, and mysteries far more precisely than other forms of discourse. The poet’s use of rhetorical figures of all sorts, connotations, verbal texture, melody, etymology, and a host of other elements which are not exploited in non-aesthetic writing allows the expression of subtle shades of thought and feeling that would be impossible for the author who aims at direct statement. In fact there is no end to the interpretation of a piece of writing as each image, sound, and theme generates an ever-expanding semantic field in which waves of signification react with other waves in patterns of subtle accuracy and, in the end, fabulous complexity. The critic must decide without prescription where to begin and end a reading of any poetic passage, for, just as in a larger philosophical sense all phenomena are interlinked and ultimately one, all writing is part of one immense book. The whole is deducible from every part. With the use of the resources of figures of speech and other literary devices, what passes for rationality expressed in the sort of unequivocal exposition freshmen learn to use for practical purposes is left far behind, stalled on the ground, while poetry mounts to the sublime and strives more or less successfully to embrace the cosmos.
     Melville’s Moby Dick has always seemed to me the one novel that might challenge Huckleberry Finn as the single greatest work of American fiction. Like Emerson and Thoreau Melville is a master stylist and rhetorician, a poetic thinker ideal for demonstrating the density of the aesthetic text. Rereading Moby Dick on a trip to India I focused on a single brief passage chosen very nearly at random as I trundled along on a bus from Jaipur to Jodhpur from the beginning of the “Sunset” chapter (37).

        I leave a white and turbid wake, pale waters, paler cheeks, wheree'er I sail.  The envious billows sidelong well to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.

     In my mind Melville excels as a philosophical writer, more an allegorist led by theme like a super-sophisticated Bunyan rather than a poet marking concrete particulars like Keats or constructing enigmatic symbols like Mallarmé. Melville’s indeterminancies are indeed present -- Pierre is rightly subtitled The Ambiguities – but intellectual, and thought takes the lead in the subtle yet sensual delight in the Confidence Man's playing hide-and-seek with the reader's consciousness. His rhetoric, the palpable syntactical architecture of his sentences, their music and design, I have always admired, and the dance of his phrases is as worthy of attention as the quality of his thoughts.
     The first thing the reader notices about this passage from the beginning of the "Sunset" chapter is the perfectly regular iambic pentameter. [1] The first "and" is semantically unnecessary but required for the meter and not distracting. This cadence forms the regular background beat, the rhythm section of the composition against which melodic and harmonic elements play. The ocean waves are embodied sonically and graphically in the repetition of the letter w in the first sentence. Before that pattern has faded the word "pale" is repeated, making a sort of ghostly whitecap on the sea. The phrase "where'er I sail" so liquid with vowels for eight of its twelve letters and its only consonants the smooth sounds of wh, r, s, and a concluding l, lacking a single plosive, further the replication of the ocean on the printed page. The rhyme of sail and pail brings the clause to an end like a couplet at the end of a scene of Shakespeare.
     The decisive monosyllables of the final two clauses with less differentiation in accent provide the steady footsteps along time's lane. A disturbance is signaled by the compression of "envious" to two syllables and the b sound, rougher than what had preceded it, and this is then resolved when it is succeeded by the alliteration in s, as the sea’s surface becomes smooth once more after the speaking subject moves on.
     In tone these lines suggest an elegiac and vulnerable resignation, a sort of soft lament for the human condition. The speaker proceeds through time without expectations or hopes, but also without hesitation, never slowed though always defeated. The final words “but first I pass” suggest a sort of self-assertion or, at any rate, a heroic existential acceptance.
     I approach theme with this characterization, since for Melville as for each of us in lived experience, ideas are less logical conclusions based on evidence than moods and subjective impressions, subject always to the flickering alteration of the moment, for which we then invent adequate reasons. Melville is by temperament a thinker, and I have often qualified his literary standing by thinking him more a philosopher than a poet. In this intellectual realm he is great indeed, primarily after the manner of Plato and Nietzsche, not for the rigor of his reasoning but for the resonant chords he sets to vibrating within the reader. He is not one to settle on a thought made attractive by succinctness or clarity, much less by authority or tradition. Rather one finds near as many enigmas, contradictions, and mysteries in him as in one's own observations, should one be in the mood to look closely enough and not to scant a telling detail for the sake of ease. In this way his ideas remain as fresh as the reader’s own morning musings.
     Among the reductive formulations of the thoughts set to mingle and struggle with each other in these twenty-nine words are the following.

      1. Life is a process, a pilgrimage, a journey, though one with neither destination or reward.

      2. The human being must contend constantly with everything else, an effort signaled by turbidity                yet followed by the blankness of entropy that erases all events. The pale seas are the source of                 the paler human cheeks because sailing (which is to say living) is so inevitably rigorous and our             tender human perspective sees ourselves as unique sufferers. Nature is not merely indifferent. It             is actively hostile.

      3. Nonetheless, one somehow goes on regardless, suggesting parallels with Camus and Sartre.

      4. A further heroic response to the recognition of the human predicament is evident in the  

          construction of lovely verbal patterns expressing our woe. Such artifacts prove in part

          redemptive, in part an all-too-human way of passing the time while awaiting death.

     I have not begun to explore the passage in terms of its associations within the novel, Melville’s other work, or links to earlier or later literature. I can only here offer a few signposts for fruitful exploration. Paleness, of course, is central to the book. Even before the first chapter the “pale Usher” associated with mortality opens the book. His “queer handkerchief queer, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world” signifies the veil of maya that obscures the appalling emptiness of Ultimate Reality.
     And who can forget the similar pattern of deceptive surface over terrifying whiteness in the magnificent crescendo that closes the chapter on “The Whiteness of the Whale” (42)?

      All deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the                 charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic                 which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or                 colourless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even             tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge--pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a         leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses                upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that            wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol.                    Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

     Moby Dick is a classic because it reproduces a convincing projection of human consciousness, complete with affect, taste and sensibility, Weltanschauung, and experience in the most densely significant symbolic code available to our species. One might continue its interpretation as endlessly onward as the sea-waves themselves, and, like the waves, such readings are dynamic and ever-evolving. I have treated only the tiniest fraction of the great novel. Fortunately, the consideration of the text can be at any moment truncated and whatever work has been done on it may result in a rich and satisfying share, leaving always appetite for more, but no necessity to say another word.




A Note on Verbal Parallels

     Even confining one’s attention to Moby Dick, there is no end to these internal clusters of images. For example, “envious goblins” appear in “The Funeral” (69), and the billows are “destroying” as the denouement approaches in “The Chase – Third Day” (135). Related images appear in Melville’s other works. Paleness is linked to whiteness and the word “whelm” and the entire complex to mortality as a green plant dies with the coming of cold in Pierre: “the drifting winter snows shall whelm it” and, in the same chapter the reader finds a reference to “pale cheeks” (Ch. 23). Life itself is “nobly envious” in Pierre, Chapter 12. “Evil- minded, envious goblins” emerge from the sea in Mardi, Chapter 69. But there is no point in cataloguing such associations without making something of the verbal recurrences. I mean only to suggest the unlimited process of semeiosis.
     The semantic field expands immensely when one considers works by other authors. Given the fact that Melville explicitly refers to his story as a tragedy and consciously models elements of it on Shakespeare the critic might pursue parallel usage in that writer such as Pistol’s curse “ocean whelm them all!” (Merry Wives of Windsor, II, 2) or Andromache’s vision of “bloody turbulence” (Troilus and Cressida, V, 3), not to mention the hundred and forty-eight occurrences of the term “pale” in his plays.
     Had Melville ever come across Robert English’s 1777 “Elegy” for Sir Charles Saunders that includes the line “in vain the envious billows round him beat”? (Note here that unlike in Melville the hero is stronger than the billows.) Or perhaps the line “The envious billows choak’d my struggling breath” in Charles Lloyd’s 1819 collection Nugæ Canoræ in which, on the other hand, the sea is altogether triumphant. He may even have happened upon Miss E. M. Allison’s poem on Columbus “The Genoese Immigrant” which includes a reference to “envious billows angry play” published in New York eight years before Moby Dick. Whether or not any of these played a role as a source, they cause Melville’s own usage to stand out in higher relief.
     Among the most obvious relevant routes for further analysis are image systems of whiteness, water, ships, and life as a journey. Nor have I touched on etymology or connotation. Nor on parallels with epic which Melville explicitly had in mind in his use, for instance, of Homeric similes or the Biblical references suggested by names such as Ishmael and Ahab. The reading of the few lines I have selected illustrates the rich stores of meaning borne by literary texts.



A Final Note on the Endlessness of Interpretation

     What is the meaning of Moby Dick? What Eco called “unlimited semiosis” (in A Theory of Semiotics) can be traced in all writing, but especially in poetry. Though generally applicable, some limited version of the idea is a commonplace in Melville commentaries. Thus Van Doren says “Ahab has a hundred symbolical or allegorical interpretations.” [2] Author David Gilbert notes, “It's been called a whaling yarn, a theodicy, a Shakespeare-styled political tragedy, an anatomy, a queer confessional, an environmentalist epic; because this novel seems to hold all the world, all these readings are compatible and true.” [3] In her introduction to an edition of the novel Elizabeth Renker observes “ascertaining the whale’s ultimate meaning is a project [one] could pursue forever.” To John Bryant readings of Moby Dick include an extraordinary range of “seemingly flat contradictions and simultaneously co-existing divergences.” [4]

     To D. H. Lawrence, speaking of the whale:

        Of course he is a symbol.
        Of what?
        I doubt if even Melville knew exactly. That's the best of it. [5]

The catalogue of such responses could be extended indefinitely.

The fact is that literary texts are peculiarly polysemous; it is one of their foremost characteristics in contradistinction to all other sorts of writing. The best of them are often the most underdetermined. Yet they not only bear multiple meanings, their decoding goes on and on indefinitely just as our experience of time, but, like a life, or like these remarks, it is initiated and terminated suddenly and arbitrarily.



1. Carl Van Doren found Melville’s tendency to fall into blank verse “irritating.” See his essay “Mr. Melville’s Moby Dick” in The Bookman for April 1924, pages 154-6.

2. Ibid.


3. “The Endless Depths of Moby Dick Symbolism,” The Atlantic, August 20, 2013.

4. in “The Versions of Moby Dick” in The Book as Artefact, Text and Border, edited by Anne Mette Hansen. p. 258.


5. In Studies in Classic American Literature. Among Lawrence’s other comments are the identification of Moby Dick with “the deepest blood-being of the [doomed] white race.” He found the book brilliant, though its author was “hopelessly au grand serieux.”

Hermes and the Art of Poetry

Having quoted Greek on these pages in characters that do not transfer to the blog and in distracting transliterations, I have decided this time to simply quote from the close if old-fashioned Loeb’s Library version by Hugh G. Evelyn-White. My references to line numbers are, of course, to the Greek. I would have preferred to use my own translation, but my version of the poem is as yet incomplete.




     Along with Homer and Hesiod, the so-called Homeric Hymns provide the earliest information about the literary theory of ancient Greece. These poems exemplify the role of poetry in providing access to the astonishingly efficient mythic system by which the Greeks understood the world. The Hymn to Hermes is the primary source for an aetiological myth of the origin of lyric poetry, a sort of back-story to the shining Olympian, Apollo who is commonly associated with the art. With the attribution of the lyre to Hermes comes a more dialectic complex picture of artistic signification, portrayed prior to the unadulterated Apollonian light, as a necessary duality of lie and truth.
     Most will recall the charming "Hymn to Hermes" an infant trickster story, something like Krishna the butter thief. The baby’s cheeky mendacity and his comically ingenious stratagems are undeniably entertaining, but in the hymn’s plot-line, they serve in the end simply to bring Hermes together with Apollo to allow the gift of the tortoise-shell lyre. Hermes had invented the instrument that very morning, but he gives it up to resolve strife he has himself created, a peace offering to the god who is to govern poetry for the next thousand years and more. [1]
     Hermes’ very first act is to seize the tortoise in his courtyard. With a lie, using his characteristic wile, he tells the animal it is dangerous outside (37), and a moment later, he kills it and fashions the lyre. His emphasis is wholly upon pleasure, for him it is a “comrade of the feast” (31), inspirer of joy (32). In a rush of invention, he conceives the instrument “as a swift thought darts through the heart of man when thronging cares haunt him, or as bright glances flash from the eye.” (43-45) He sang on it “sweet random snatches, even as youths bandy taunts at festivals,” (55-56) sliding into a celebration of his own birth and of the muses. The creative process is described as a delight in itself, the exercise of the forebrain damping pain and providing pleasure in itself, as well as enabling future art. After this mental work in done, the god’s attention turns to his belly. Motivated by a desire for meat (unsatisfied apparently with the prospect of nectar and ambrosia), his mind turns then to his larcenous plot, a design of “sheer trickery” such as “knavish folk pursue.” (66-67).
     Poetry appears then at first as a pure party pastime, whether it is casual improvisation or theogonies. It seems in this way on a par with other desires, such as a wish for a satisfying meal. Yet its unique characteristic is the unpredictable glancing energy of creative human thought which, through its potent symbolic manipulation, can design a new and useful object or compose a song.
     When Apollo first hears the lyre, his reaction is upwelling laughter. (420) Hermes sings again the story of the gods, first among them Mnemosyne “for the son of Maia was among her following,” (430) inspiring in Apollo a “longing” (eros) ”not to be allayed.” (434) He finds it in particular a “path” to remedy “desperate (or “irremediable”) “cares” (or “suffering”). (447) In his speech (436-463) Apollo praises the invention as a “marvel,” “noble,” “heavenly,” “wonderful, “sweet,” and “glorious,” while calling Hermes a “trickster” and “thievish.” He concludes by promising not to “deceive” Hermes, the habitual deceiver who does not shrink from bald-faced lies even before all-knowing Zeus.
     Instructing Apollo, Hermes advises him to give himself to “merriment” (or “triumphal display”[2]) The emphasis remains solidly on convivial dinners, “rich feast and lovely dance and glorious revel.” (480-481) According to Hermes, the lyre rewards the listener who is susceptible to “delight” (484) while bringing “the ignorant” only “vanity and foolishness.” (488) He proceeds to consider his theft repaid, though he asks to be caretaker for the herd, prophesying abundant offspring and assuming co-ownership. Apollo is so taken with the music he accepts with pleasure. (493-494)
     Through the hymn poetry, the lyric art, is consistently identified with pleasure, whether on the occasion of casual party verses or solemn hymns to the divine. Both offer necessary relief: the symbolic manipulations of art are essential to both passing the time with friends and reflecting on first principles and final things. The disquiet that awakes in the reader when the tortoise is tricked into death, by nature, one might say, at the outset can be salved only by verbal art. Redemptive song compensates for the distressing void of mortality, providing both “entertainment” and supernatural explanations in a pre-Horatian version of “teach and delight.”
     Little, however, in the character of Apollo matches the subversive, all-too-human character of Hermes. He is a con man because of his own selfish interests. He cancels out his own assertions by declaring his undependability. In this poem Hermes provides Apollo with a gift beyond the lyre: dissimulation.
     After the settlement between the Olympians, all seems harmonious, but Apollo’s nervousness about being again tricked leads him to elicit from Hermes a solemn vow not to steal from him. With this renewed settlement comes the acid test of the value of poetry: prophecy. Apollo says that only he can be confidant of Zeus with reference to the future, yet he prevaricates about the value of omens, claiming sometimes to tell the truth through signs and sometimes to deceive. This ambiguity is very broadly true, as he says also that he bedevils men as well as blessing them. He illustrates this very contradictory revelation – the truth that is untrue – by telling Hermes of the mysterious bee-like Thriae whose oracular reputation for speaking the truth (561) is tempered by the fact that they also lie (563). (We might all make the same claim for our prophecies.) Another analogue concludes the poem when Hermes is said to “profit” some and “cozen” others. (577-578)
     One would then have to qualify the marvelous image Nietzsche imagined, doubtless aware that he had heightened the contrast: “In an eccentric way one might say of Apollo what Schopenhauer says, in the first part of The World as Will and Representation [I:1, 3], of man caught in the veil of Maya: ‘Even as on an immense, raging sea, assailed by huge wave crests, a man sits in a little rowboat trusting his frail craft, so, amidst the furious torments of this world, the individual sits tranquilly, supported by the principium individuationis [principle of individuation] and relying on it.’ [The World as Will and Representation, I:4, 63] One might say that the unshakable confidence in that principium has received its most magnificent expression in Apollo, and that Apollo himself may be regarded as the marvelous divine image of the principium individuationis, whose looks and gestures radiate the full delight, wisdom, and beauty of ‘illusion.’” [3]
     The author of the "Hymn to Hermes" would have agreed with Nietzsche when he said, “Much will have been gained for aesthetics once we have succeeded in apprehending directly-rather than merely ascertaining-that art owes its continuous evolution to the Apollinian-Dionysian [sic] duality, even as the propagation of the species depends on the duality of the sexes, their constant conflicts and periodic acts of reconciliation.” He surely had in mind just such a conflict and reconciliation as that narrated in the  'Hymn to Hermes. '


1. Since writing this piece I have been told of an admirable treatment along similar lines in Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art.

2. Aglaia is also one of the Graces according to Hesiod.

3. Both quotations are from The Birth of Tragedy in Francis Golfing’s translation.