Who can resist the anecdote told of John Skelton’s presentation of his new-born son to his congregation at Diss in the waning days of Roman Catholicism’s hegemony in Britain? Understanding that some parishioners had complained about him to the Bishop of Norwich that “he kept a fair wench” who had just borne a child, he told his wife to bring the baby forward. Displaying it naked, he asked, “How say you, neighbors all? Is not this child as fair as is the best of yours? It hath nose, eyes, hands, feet, as well as any of yours: it is not like a pig, nor a calf nor like no fowl nor no monstrous beast. If I had brought forth this child without arms or legs, or that it were deformed, being a monstrous thing, I would never have blamed you to have complained to the bishop of me; but, to complain without a cause, I say, as I said before in my anthem, vos estis, you be, and have been, and will and shall be knaves, to complain of me without a cause reasonable.”
Whether it is true or not, this story expresses the poet’s qualities of wit, his broad humanity, and his sense of the dramatic. Skelton was a scholar; a number of his Latin poems are extant. He was made “laureate” through his rhetorical degrees at both Oxford and Cambridge and he tutored Prince Henry (later Henry VIII). “Regius orator” and poet-laureate to the court, he knew his Greek and Latin and was adept at the fashionably elaborate ornamentation that later came to be called Euphuism. His translation of Diodorus Siculus is called by its editors “the most extravagant specimen of aureation in our language.”
Yet he is remembered less for his for his classicism and his artifice than for poems notably vulgar in theme, unconventional in form, and colloquial in diction, with short lines and rhymes tumbling over each other in a way that seems akin to some of today’s performance poetry. The sound of a Skelton poem is unmistakable. Here are the opening lines of “The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng,” a portrait of the slattern who runs a public house. Skelton opens with paean to her ugliness, an inversion of the courtly blazon of the beloved.
TELL you I chyll,
If that ye wyll
A whyle be styll,
Of a comely gyll
That dwelt on a hyll :
But she is not gryll,
For she is somwhat sage
And well worne in age ;
For her vysage
It would aswage
A mannes courage.
Her lothely lere
Is nothynge clere,
But vgly of chere,
Droupy and drowsy,
Scuruy and lowsy ;
Her face all bowsy, . . .
There is a good deal more. Her patrons are of a piece with the good landlady in their inattention to grooming.
Some wenches come vnlased,
Some huswyues come vnbrased,
Wyth theyr naked pappes,
That flyppes and flappes ;
It wygges and it wagges,
Lyke tawny saffron bagges ;
A sorte of foule drabbes
All scuruy with scabbes :
Some be flybytten,
Some skewed as a kytten ;
Some wyth a sho clout
Bynde theyr heddes about ;
Some haue no herelace,
Theyr lockes about theyr face,
Theyr tresses vntrust,
All full of vnlust ;
Some loke strawry,
Some cawry mawry ;
Full vntydy tegges.
In another of Skelton’s poems one witnesses a micro-drama on a stage of twenty-eight lines. “Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale” looks a clever male female dialogue like Johnny Cash and June Carter’s “Jackson” or Frank Loesser’s “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” until one pays attention to its dark scenario. In this reworking of the pastourelle it is a cleric rather than a knight who importunes the country girl who prudently tries to send him on his way. In the chorus lines one hears the lady indignantly prodding her horses onward, but the last verse makes it clear that he has had his way and afterwards expresses only contempt for her.
Ay, beshrew you! by my fay,
These wanton clerks be nice alway!
Avaunt, avaunt, my popinjay!
What, will ye do nothing but play?
Tilly, vally, straw, let be I say!
Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale!
With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.
By God, ye be a pretty pode,
And I love you an whole cart-load.
Straw, James Foder, ye play the fode,
I am no hackney for your rod:
Go watch a bull, your back is broad!
Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale!
With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.
Ywis ye deal uncourteously;
What, would ye frumple me? now fy!
What, and ye shall be my pigesnye?
By Christ, ye shall not, no hardely:
I will not be japèd bodily!
Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale!
With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.
Walk forth your way, ye cost me nought;
Now have I found that I have sought:
The best cheap flesh that I ever bought.
Yet, for his love that all hath wrought,
Wed me, or else I die for thought.
Gup, Christian Clout, your breath is stale!
Go, Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale!
Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale!
With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.
Such vigorous vernacular serves well not only for the genre portrait of Elynour, “woundersly wrynkled,/ Lyke a rost pygges eare.” In “Mannerly Margery” the lady’s words sound like transcriptions of cries from the street: “Ay, beshrew you,” “Gup,” “now fy.” It is as real and immediate as can be, though written in imitation of centuries of literary models.
Skelton was capable of other tones: the awe-struck tremendum of “woefully Arrayed” or the richly fanciful yet fiercely satirical allegory of “The Bowge of Court.” While others were as capable of solemnity, classicizing periods and high artificiality, Skelton distinguishes himself with a jumping, squirming, sneering, joking, speedy popular rhetoric that insists on being read out loud. He was not always highly regarded. To Pope, for instance, he was “beastly,” a writers with work “consisting almost wholly of Ribaldry, Obscenity, and Billingsgate Language.” Yet today’s readers are likely to receive more kindly the style for which In Colin Clout he offers a sort of defense.
For though my rhyme be ragged,
Tattered and jagged,
Rudely rain beaten,
Rusty and moth eaten,
If ye take well therewith,
It hath in it some pith.
Tuesday, March 1, 2016
Monday, February 1, 2016
The Role of Wine in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca
I have here used the same forms of Greek names as Rouse’s Loeb Library edition of the Dionysiaca (thus Nonnus. Dionysus, etc., but Ampelos).
The sprawling and ornately decorated hexameters of what is perhaps the greatest little-read book of antiquity, Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, [1] detail the adventures of Dionysus with many narrations of sexuality and violence (sometimes violent sexuality) as well as ecstasy and intoxication. In the first third of the over 20,000 line poem one encounters monsters like Typhon and Ares’ dragon, murders such as Zagreus’ death, the derangement of Ino, Themisto, and Athamas, while numerous characters are bewitched by love. At the outset the author invokes not only the Muses but also Proteus of many turns (polytropon) to guide the poem’s composition as a manifold or richly-wrought song (poikilon hymnon). (I, 14) Some find it difficult to reconcile this massive and disorderly work which goes far to define “decadent” to the same author’s grave paraphrase of the gospel of John. [2] Their styles may differ widely, but there is little in the epic celebration of the unruly god that would ill-fit a Christian believer.
Dizzyingly extravagant in content and style, Nonnus’ poem concerns the deity known in antiquity for his followers’ transports of enthusiasm and specifically identified with the grape, with wine, and drunkenness. It is true that the verse gains some stability with its quite regular clopping hexameters (written when quantitative verse was already being abandoned) and its archaic Homeric dialect (itself freshened with a great many neologisms), but the themes themselves are ultimately a safe distance from the transgressive.
The role of wine itself is a case in point. Though used in small quantities ritually by many groups including ancient Chinese, Jews, and Christians and more generously in observances by groups including ancient Egyptians, old Norsemen, and, surprisingly, early Mormons, alcohol has proven a far poorer alternative than many other psychoactive drugs for religious inspiration. Even the Greek Dionysia is distinguished more by the dithyrambic (and later theatrical) contests and by the processions of phalluses than by drunkenness. (If one believes Livy, the Roman Bacchanalia was a far more licentious festival, in need of civic regulation since 186 C.E.)
Surprisingly, wine appears in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca not as a gateway to altered consciousness but only as an amelioration of suffering, a simple anodyne. Indeed, the poem’s Book VII prophesies that Dionysus’ advent will ease the trials of human life as Semele is told “You have conceived a son who will make mortals forget their troubles.” (367) Her offspring will not cause their suffering to vanish nor will she grant a transcendental wisdom from the height of which suffering will seem trivial; rather, he will allow them to temporarily escape the woes inevitable in life.
Dionysus, who was often depicted as a beardless youth and was ridiculed as effeminate by Pentheus, falls in love with “the rosy form of a young comrade” Ampelos (X, 175) and takes him as his “playmate” (homepsion). (X, 193) Like many Greek men the god delights in the boy’s dancing (X, 240) and fears rivals of his beloved’s own age. (X, 248) Indeed Ampelos inspires the love of a satyr (X, 278). Dionysus begs Zeus to be allowed to possess Ampelos’ love exclusively, saying that his favorite outshines even Zeus’ choice Ganymede. (X, 317) Ampelos and his divine lover enjoy each other’s company, joining, for instance, in “honey-sweet wrestling” (X, 345) and other athletic contests.
Ate interferes then in their idyllic relationship, suggesting to Ampelos that he has received insufficient favors from his lover (XI, 113) and raising again the comparison to Ganymede: “The Trojan wine-pourer had the better of you -- he is at home in the court of Zeus.” (XI, 138) Ampelos allows himself to be persuaded to ride a bull, presumably to impress Dionysus, but he is thrown from the animal’s back, breaking his neck. (XI, 217)
Thrown into uncharacteristic mourning, Dionysus hears Atropos telling him that Ampelos lives yet in the wine (XII, 142) in which form he will be worshiped with song and dance and the triumphant cries of the Muses. (XII, 152) Wine is called “the heavenly nectar, comfort of the human race.” (XII, 152) Wine is contrasted with war, its red juice a pleasure utterly unlike the blood of battle. (XII, 164) [3] Dionysus’ suffering is nearly Christ-like, though his wounds are those of the lovelorn rather than the victim of judicial torture: “Lord Bacchus has wept tears, that he may wipe away tears.” (XII, 171)
The virtue of this ability of wine to overcome suffering is sufficient that the grape becomes the chief plant of all, receiving the homage of lesser greenery. [4] Its divine qualities betray the fact that it grew from ichor. (XII, 295) But is it not expecting very little of god to provide some temporary surcease of sorrow and grief? Drunkenness is a modest compensation for mortality, more like the psalmist noting that wine “gladdens men’s hearts,” Christ’s miracle at Cana, [5] or the wine promised in Paradise in the Koran [6 ] than like Jesus Christ, "the true vine" or the grapes borne on a staff later identified with the savior. [7] On the Greek tragic stage Euripedes declared in The Bacchae “When we pour libations out, it is the god himself we pour out, and by this bring blessings on mankind.”
If there is less of the tremendum of the Grail symbols, there is more of the usable in everyday life. In Nonnus wine is well represented in the repeated image of Ganymede offering a glass. (XII, 40; XII 105) That convivial drink promises no enlightenment or even transport, but it does provide a reliable anaesthetic, an insulation against the harsher of life’s blows as well as a positive source of pleasure in better times (though neither use would be sanctioned by modern psychologists). If one thinks with the Living Theatre that Dionysus should be in a more ambitious business, at least this more modest one possesses the convenience of remaining still within reach.
1. The 1940 Loeb Library edition was translated by W. H. D. Rouse. The entire text of Northrup Frye’s copy with his marginalia is conveniently available at archive.org.
2. Though some readers choose to think the apparently pagan work was written before the writer’s conversion, I prefer to think of Nonnus as a figure like Snorri Sturluson, a good Christian but an antiquarian as well who saw value in the old beliefs and the art to which they had given rise.
3. See also line 252 which again contrasts the blood offered to Ares to the grape juice which is Dionysus’.
4. XII, 273 ff.
5. See Psalm 104:15 and John II, 1-11.
6. Surah XLVII, 15 promises wine in paradise Quran, XVI, 67 recommends it.
7. See John 15:1 and Numbers 13:23.
The Socialist Martin Luther King
Last month’s Martin Luther King holiday is significant for all Americans, but the Rev. King’s elevation to the status of a national icon (with the accompanying grumbling by a few hard-core racists) risks losing the man’s central message. His celebration in elementary schools, churches, and civic plazas always omits any mention of the antipathy he provoked in the ruling class of his own era or the controversies about his ideas and methods in the Movement itself. Least likely to receive any attention is his lifelong socialist ideology.
I had myself believed that King came to socialism only as the sixties wore on and a left alternative became more widely discussed in these United States. I recall being cheered by the critiques of capitalism that I heard with increasing frequency in his speeches. Yet a bit of study revealed to me that his politics were decades-old, though he kept prudentially mum about his radicalism until opposition to an imperialist war and the rise of a strengthened American left emboldened him to publically state the convictions he had long held. J. Edgar Hoover’s grumpy rumblings referring to King as “the most dangerous Negro” and “the most notorious liar in the country,” and his attempt to blackmail King while suggesting suicide as an escape, while bizarre and extreme, are also part of the repressive anticommunist hysteria of the era.
The socialist movement had had long ties to the struggle against racism. Early revolutionary unionists such as the I.W.W. welcomed immigrants and non-whites as fellow-workers. Many of the founders of the N. A. A. C. P. such as suffragist Mary Ovington White, journalists William English Walling and Charles Edward Russell, and W. E. B. Dubois were explicit radicals. In the early twentieth century such prominent black ministers as the Rev. George Washington Woodbey, the Rev. Richard Euell, and the Rev. George Slater Jr. were socialist activists as well as Christian ministers. During King’s youth the left, including the Communist Party, other anti-capitalist formations, and progressive elements of the labor movement, stood virtually alone in white America in their opposition to racism.
In his university training, King was heir to the particularly pointed social justice teaching of the African-American church [1] as well as being influenced by leftist thinkers such as Walter Rauschenbusch, the religious thinker most often cited by King throughout his career. Rauschenbusch explicitly supported what he in 1907 called communism. [2] In 1950 as a young divinity student King himself described his views as “anti-capitalistic.” [3]
King wrote in a letter to his fiancée Coretta Scott before their marriage “I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic… [Capitalism] started out with a noble and high motive… but like most human systems it fell victim to the very thing it was revolting against. So today capitalism has out-lived its usefulness.” [4]
Many if King’s allies, especially in the earlier days of the modern Movement were committed socialists, among them planners of the August 1963 March on Washington such as Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph.
He had always known that oppression was at its base a class issue, though it often manifested in association with race, religion, or national origin, yet he tread very carefully. Due to the unique conditions of American anti-communism for many years King was careful to obscure his economic views. Even as late as 1968, while speaking to members of Operation Breadbasket he said of his socialist ideology “I can’t say this publicly and if you say I said it I’m not gonna admit it.” [5] Several years earlier he had warned his staff about the hazards of challenging the fat cats, “You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism.” [6]
Yet he continued to clearly identify the necessary linkage of the political, the economic, and the social struggles for equality. “We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed. America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order.” “The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism.” [7]
Thus, King realized that, while reforms might bring amelioration of injustice, the definitive way to combat racism, war, and exploitation was through radical change – the end of capitalism. Reluctant, unable to quite speak the truth without two opening qualifiers, he admitted to a reporter, “In a sense, you could say we’re involved in the class struggle.” [8] He realized that “the evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism. [9] For this reason he called himself a socialist and even a Marxist [10], declaring that “something is wrong with capitalism” and that “America must move toward democratic socialism.” [11] Thus he died supporting a labor struggle in the midst of planning the Poor People’s Campaign, a fight based in economics rather than race.
King’s socialism is part of the hidden history of America, the story of how nineteenth century communards sought to formulate a new society, radical abolitionists fought slavery, left-wing trade unionists brought better conditions to all, and progressive students helped end the war in Vietnam. Every step forward socially has come from the left. King was one of those people who concluded that social justice and an end to racism and other forms of bigotry, peace and a more reasonable deployment of the planet’s resources, responsibilities, and rewards can only come through the end of production for private profit. The commonwealth of the future he envisioned remains the goal of many around the world, and the struggle that continues today is the truest tribute, the living legacy of Martin Luther King.
1. Even before his university years, his family numbered among their friends the Baptist minister and activist J. Pius Barbour who cited Marx with approval.
2. Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis, p. 398. Among numerous other influences from this era, his undergraduate advisor was sociologist Walter Chivers who believed capitalism gave birth to racism.
3. Douglas Sturm, “Martin Luther King, Jr., as Democratic Socialist,” The Journal of Religious Ethics, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Fall, 1990), p. 80. This article is perhaps the best general survey of King’s socialism. Apart from this reference, it has provided me with many useful sources. See also Cornel West’s annotated anthology The Radical King.
4. Letter to Coretta Scott, July 18, 1952.
5. See Sturm who notes that King was afraid that his radicalism could alienate liberals and perhaps confuse his followers.” Sturm also relates C. L. R. James’ recollection that during their 1964 meeting King agreed entirely with his Marxist analysis, but was unable to make his ideas known because of “anti-communist hysteria” in the United States.
6. Speech to staff, November 14, 1966. See also Michael Harrington, Fragments of a Century: A Social Biography, p. 114-5 and David Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King: From “Solo” to Memphis, p. 213-214.
7. Speech to SCLC Board, March 30, 1967.
8. New York Times, October 16, 1968, story by José Iglesias.
9. Speech to SCLC Board, March 30, 1967.
10. DaGarrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Council, p. 537.
Does Crabbe Look Forward or Back?
I read the Penguin Classics Selected Poems volume edited by Gavin Edwards. Page numbers in parentheses are references to this edition. Endnotes are in brackets.
A typical characterization of George Crabbe concludes “The characteristics of his expression single him out as the last of the classical writers; but there is also in his poetry the suggestion of a virtual Romanticism.” The author finds him “a suffering sensibility,” “an imagination resolutely bent under the yoke of the real.” [1] This sense of Crabbe as a sort of Janus, pointing at once toward the past and the future, has become something of a received idea. Just what he is glancing toward, in views both beyond and back, is not always detailed. To exploit this notion in understanding Crabbe, it remains to specify more precisely just what are the old-fashioned and innovative elements within his unique body of work.
Though he published largely in the nineteenth century and socialized with the Lake Poets, George Crabbe with his heroic couplets and sententiae seems to many the last of the Augustans, and he was applauded by Doctor Johnson (in a letter to Reynolds) as “original, vigorous, and elegant.” [2] On the other hand his content focusing on lower-class figures and village life is more consistent with Romantic predilections. His reputation for focusing on realistic portrayals of recognizable life casts him as a herald of realism and naturalism in fiction. Yet his falling between these literary various models, each of which continues to have enthusiastic readers, is perhaps less a reason for his present lack of popularity as his status as one of the last poets to use a metrical line as the natural medium for uses that after his time were more commonly treated in prose: narrative, description, and moralizing. His poetry is less dense and, closer to everyday speech than that of many of his contemporaries. The recent popularity of “poetry” which is colloquial to a fault has not benefited the writer whom the great Hazlitt called the most prosaic of poets whose work resembled “a dull leaden cloud” hanging over the earth. Worse, to Hazlitt his work is even “repulsive.” Yet Hazlitt also called this surgeon, entomologist, priest, and addict “one of the most popular and admired of our living authors.” [3]
As fond of artificial conventions as any poet, Crabbe was, however, notoriously innovative in his inclusion of the middle class and the poor in stories relating what he calls “the follies and crimes of persons in lower life.” [4] In Book I of “The Village” he ridicules earlier pastoralists for idealizing rural life, insisting “I will paint the cot./ As truth will paint it, and as bards will not.” The novelty of such subject matter is difficult for moderns to understand, but the fact is that most literature had once been concerned primarily with the ruling class, including workers as villainous or comic figures. Fiction began early to include those in lower social strata with Nashe and then Defoe and picaresques in the following centuries, but drama and poetry were slower to follow suit. It is not until Büchner and, much later, Hauptmann that dramatists (who had paid attention to bourgeois life earlier) used proletarians.
Still Crabbe was not alone in his use of the lower reaches of the social scale, especially as the nineteenth century dawned. In poetry Burns was “the ploughman poet” and the milkmaid Ann Yearsley wrote “the touch of Ecstasy, which strikes/ Most pow'rful on defenceless, untaught Minds.” [5] Among those who defined Romanticism, Wordsworth had favored focusing on the lowly, saying that among the humble “the essential passions of the heart find a better soil” and thus the feelings common to all may “be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated.” [6]
There is little, in fact, in Crabbe’s stories that recalls his anti-pastoral prefaced to “The Village” (I, 63-78) with its catalogue of weeds and picture of privation, “the village life a life of pain.” (II, 1-2) The inherent hardships of working life occupy him far less than love-relations and religious questions. To some extent Crabbe recognizes the gap between lived experience and his narrations when he speaks of the persona as an “ideal” friend. [7]
Elsewhere Crabbe himself seems defensive about his practice. In the Preface to his “Tales” Crabbe notes that realism is an admired end in painting and should be in poetry as well, only to instantly concede with the decisive witness of Shakespeare the sublimity of idealizing verse with the ability to “body forth” “the forms of things unknown.” [8] Agreeing on the lofty value of such work, he then asks that room be allowed the more modest work of “those who address their productions to the plain sense and sober judgment of their Readers, rather than on their fancy and imagination.” (469) He bases a good share of his claim on the fact that his stories “are founded on real events,” (470) that they represent “a faithful delineation of those painful realities, those every-day concerns, and those perpetually-occurring vexations” which the reader is likely to have personally experienced. (471)
Many critics have taken him at his word, ever since the perspicacious Hazlitt, despite his having so little taste for Crabbe, allowed that “individuality is, in his theory, the only definition of poetry. Whatever is, he hitches into rhyme. Whoever makes an exact image of any thing on the earth, however deformed or insignificant, according to him, must succeed — and he himself has succeeded.” [9]
But it is hardly an “exact image” that one finds in the poet’s verse. Far from realistically depicting the life of the poor, Crabbe specialized in dramatizing the retributive justice visited on those who stray from the straight and narrow in belief and behavior. Though writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, his work harks back to the seventeenth, to Everyman in the fifteenth and to even earlier saints’ lives and medieval allegories, and to Piers Ploughman. Though his characters resemble those of the everyday world in their ordinariness, even the ordinariness of their sins (with the exception of some lurid, if sordid, cases), their fates are far more predictable and the cause and effect of their lives more lucid than what we observe in our lived experience.
The narratives of “The Poor of the Borough” pass for realistic simply because they largely ignore the upper class. Still, most modern readers will experience them not as slices of life but rather as straightforwardly moralistic tales in which deviation from conventional piety and behavior proves not only ruinous but regretted in a way far from consistently observed in lived experience. Crabbe’s language is not only close to Pope’s in its significant rhymes and its personifications, it harks back to the Bible in many of the names and to Chaucer in the use of obsolete words such as “hight” and “churl.”
The life of each is measured in a rather medieval way by death. Thus the parish clerk, Abel Keene, and Peter Grimes end their lives in wretched despair, while Ellen Orford, who has all along been more a victim than a sinner, enters a penitential redemptive life of service.
Prior to the retributive justice of their ends, though, each manifests faults more banal than demonic. The parish clerk who steals from the offerings resembles those one reads of in the morning newspaper who have helped themselves to funds of scouts or volunteer fire outfits or local political campaigns. Ellen Orford’s cruel stepfather, her unfortunate seduction and later mésalliance are unfortunately too commonplace even to make the paper.
Crabbe did employ Romantic aesthetic values in, for instance, his admiration of picturesque ruins, [10] his cultivation of a sort of mean antihero such as Peter Grimes, [11] and his interest in dreams and in mental illness (still in his day often called melancholy). Both “The World of Dreams” and “Sir Eustace Grey” exploit the opportunity these themes offer to fly above the notoriously prosaic ground he had marked out for himself. Yet both poems very likely owe their visions not to Romantic conceptions of Genius than to his involvement in another proclivity of the Romantics, the use of psychoactive drugs.
The extreme joys and woes in “The World of Dreams” have little in common with an ordinary night’s sleep and are likely to represent a coded way of describing the poet’s experience of opium addiction. Indeed, the persona specifically contrasts himself to the reader and calls his own dream-state an “ideal World.” (l. 16) He is the unsleeping one. (l. 96)
The deranged visions of the mad protagonist of “Sir Eustace Grey” include a frozen landscape of Grey’s imagination is reminiscent of both the arctic scene in Frankenstein and Burroughs’ passage beginning “Junkies always beef about The Cold. . . life in The Old Ice House.” [12] But even in this sensational piece which is set in a madhouse and in which Crabbe allows himself unusually disjointed syntax, the verse form is a fast-moving tetrameter and the linked rhyme scheme unforgiving.
Further, in this poem built in the boundary-land between neo-classicism and Romanticism, madness is no grand Romantic frenzy implying greater insight akin to the poetic. Grey is not magnificently mad but rather the victim of the gathering force of his initial religious doubts that lead him to neglect his soul’s tending (92 ff.) combined with his wife’s infidelity and the shock of killing her lover, [13] once his best friend. The insane anti-hero’s fate is softened at the end when he accepts a “methodistic call” and finds some peace. The story’s arc is determined by his divine punishment for apostasy, though then his affliction is lessened with his relative improvement in theology, though his pathology leads to his selecting a nonconforming sect.
It is a telling index of Crabbe’s conservatism both in style and in theme that “The Family of Love,” the lengthy tale which is very likely his last opus, looks clearly backward. The title may well recall Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison where the phrase is used straightforwardly in praise of the title character and his two sisters. [14] Although contemporary history is acknowledged in some of the details of the poem, this final work, with its leisurely exposition, in a sense the same plot as the story of Roger Cuff from “The Parish Register”, seems to assert all the more aggressively the practices Crabbe had established in early work.
“The Family of Love” could very nearly be a medieval exemplum illustrating hypocrisy were it not wrapped in a comforting sort of belittlement of the sin. After he has penetrated the façade of familial harmony and caught out his relatives for greedy self-interest, the returned Captain Elliot graciously allows, “If as frail mortals you, my Friends appear,/ I looked for no angelic beings here.” (1035-6) Presumably everyone will gladly decide to try to do better next time and that will, it seems, settle the matter.
In fact in many ways, Crabbe is less an anticipation of Romantic trends and tastes than he is a reminiscence of an immensely popular 17th century writer John Bunyan. In his bourgeois vision, his decorous plain style rooted in familiar objects, his moralistic themes, and his allegorical figures Crabbe is a sort of Bunyan redivivus. For all Crabbe’s Anglicanism and service to aristocrats, his poetic lines are prosaic in the way that a Friends’ meeting housed is plain, with a sort of wholesome elegance, implying that things themselves are sufficient marvels needing no elaboration from the fancy. As fiction writers like Sarah Orne Jewett and poets like Edgar Lee Masters were to recognize in the century following Crabbe the ordinary struggles of villagers contain drama as moving as the fortunes of princes and magnates, but Bunyan too had a bourgeois hero. The comparison is all the more compelling when the reader considers the many plots in which orthodox belief is critical, such works as “The Dumb Orators,” “The Gentleman Farmer,” “Edward Shore,” “The Struggles of Conscience,” “The Convert,” and “The Leaned Boy.” In each of these free-thinking or heterodox ideas lead to moral and worldly disaster while conventional piety provides the likeliest route to peace and satisfaction, if not happiness.
Crabbe’s immense popularity, his reputation with Byron and others, arose more from his being a throwback than an innovator. What strikes the contemporary reader as most modern in Crabbe is his neurotic complex, his tendency to depression, his fascination with wrong-doing, guilt, and madness, and – in style -- his pared-down rhetoric, even when expressed in the previous century’s heroic couplets. Though just when the reader feels he has adequately characterized Crabbe’s Protestant gravitas, his assumptions are tossed by the conclusion to his preface to “Tales of the Hall” in which he self-deprecatingly offers a defense of his work as the product of otherwise idle hours that might have been “lost in the indulgence of unregistered thoughts and fancies, that melt away in the instant they are conceived, and ‘leave not a wreck behind.’” (478) [15] Though he escapes the accusation of the “indulgence” of doing nothing, he substitutes the construction of durable specters in words and accounts as a more worthy pastime on this earth, forever regreening as we age and grow ever more justly anxious. Suddenly he sounds less like a purveyor of pious dogma than like a dilettante or a lost modern.
1. Émile Legouis and Louis Cazamian, A History of English Literature, p. 970. I find this old book translated from French in the 1920s peerless, the best guide to the whole range of its subject I have encountered.
2. T. E. Kebble, Life of Crabbe, p. 45.
3. William Hazlitt, in "Mr. Campbell and Mr. Crabbe," The Spirit of the Age: or Contemporary Portraits (1825), 194-205.
4. P. 461 in Crabbe’s preface to "The Borough."
5. “To Mr. — — — , an Unlettered Poet, on Genius Unimproved.”
6. Preface to Lyrical Ballads.
7. Preface to “The Borough,” 460.
8. Quoting Midsummer Night’s Dream V, i.
9. “Mr. Campbell and Mr. Crabbe.”
10. “Sir Eustace Grey,” 209.
11. In the Preface to “The Borough” Crabbe describes Grimes, with simultaneous fascination and apology, as “the victim of a distempered and horror-stricken fancy.” Just as with Sir Eustace the madness is in no sense associated with access to a higher truth. It is instead purely a curiosity with the appeal of exotic horror. The reader recalls the 18th century vogue for touristic visits to the psychiatric wards of Bethlem Royal Hospital.
12. Crabbe used opium habitually, having begun as a treatment for indigestion under a doctor’s care. See Opium and the Romantic Imagination by Alethea Hayter and M. H. Abrams The Milk of Paradise. The poet Edward Fitzgerald, a good friend of Crabbe’s son, originally suggested the connection between "Sir Eustace Grey" and opium. Apart from his yen for opium, Crabbe was an active participant in Sir Humphry Davy’s experiments with nitrous oxide and other psychoactive substances. The Burroughs reference is to the introduction of Naked Lunch.
13. A modern analogue of this scenario occurs In Bobby Marchan’s “There’s Something on Your Mind.” When the persona discovers his beloved having an affair with his “very best friend,” he shoots him only to find “here come another one of your best friends through the door” which “really makes you blows your top.”
14. Richardson aimed in this book to feature a moral leading man and, in particular, to counter the pernicious influence of writers like Fielding with his Tom Jones, virtually a libertine.
15. This phrase from The Tempest is carved on Shakespeare’s Westminster Abbey memorial.
Friday, January 1, 2016
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
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.”
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.”
Notes on Recent Reading 27 (Forster, Sackville-West, Capote)
Howard’s End (Forster)
I had thought it seemed a lot of fussing around in the secondary elaboration of values expressed in the troubled relations of the upper-class intellectual Schlegels and the bourgeois Wilcoxes. Their initial bridling at each other was amusing, but it had then no sooner begun to seem to me unnecessarily strung out that I began to think that there was something in it, and I found myself wondering if I myself may have taken artistic and progressive values a bit for granted and that there might be something valuable in those of straight people (by which I mean not heterosexual but unhip). Hmm.
The opening of Chapter XX is a magnificent piece of rhetoric, itself sufficient reason to read the book. I can do no better than to quote. The disturbances due to love are in fact “welcoming the new generation, and chafing against the ultimate Fate, who holds all the seas in the palm of her hand. But Love cannot understand this. He cannot comprehend another's infinity; he is conscious only of his own--flying sunbeam, falling rose, pebble that asks for one quiet plunge below the fretting interplay of space and time. He knows that he will survive at the end of things, and be gathered by Fate as a jewel from the slime, and be handed with admiration round the assembly of the gods.”
All Passion Spent (Sackville-West)
Sackville-West’s novel is a very pleasant book full of wit and satisfaction. The satire is bracing; the eccentrics (Bucktrout, Gosheron, and FitzGeorge) not only amusing but individually characterized. Sackville-West mounts a few lovely rhetorical flights, though perhaps it is significant that one of the grandest, the notable butterfly passage, is meant to convey precisely the sort of instinctual flurry of mind the author presumably recommends. The theme is only too comforting, a bit overdetermined and then slightly problematized by the author’s and the main character’s insistence that they are by no means feminists. How nice to think that “once common sense rarely laid its fingers” her, all went well. And how unexpected and apt to introduce the implication of romantic feelings to the superannuated matriarch.
I must be especially liable to swooning over style this season, because I will also quote this breath-taking passage which may seem rather long, but which I have cut off with half the single sentence still to come.
"She remembered how, crossing the Persian Desert with Henry, their cart had been escorted by flocks of butterflies, white and yellow, which danced on either side and overhead and all around them, now flying ahead in a concerted movement, now returning to accompany them, amused as it were to restrain their swift frivolity to a flitting round this lumbering conveyance, but still unable to suit their pace to such sobriety, so, to relieve their impatience, soaring up into the air or dipping between the very axles, coming out on the other side before the horses had time to put down another hoof; making, all the while, little smuts of shadow on the sand, like little black anchors dropped, tethering them by invisible cables to earth, but dragged about with the same capricious swiftness, obliged to follow; and she remembered thinking, lulled by the monotonous progression that trailed after the sun from dawn to dusk, like a plough that should pursue the sun in one straight slow furrow round and round the world – she remembered thinking that this was something like her own life . . ."
Whew! More succinctly, in Twelve Days she remarks of keeping a travel journal, “How else, indeed, to clasp the net over the butterfly of the moment?” And at that Virginia Woolf could do no better a job, either in the superabundantly exuberant style or the laconic.
The Grass Harp (Capote)
Those who enjoy Capote’s “A Christmas Memory” (and they are many) will like The Grass Harp yet more. It is equally quirky and sweet and has, after all, more pages, more Southern oddballs, and a more casual structure -- Ida Honey intrudes and lingers for a surprisingly lengthy spell. The minor characters earn their way: Morris Ritz, Riley Henderson, the courageous Judge Cool who is cool indeed. The sentiment is unapologetic and mixed with sufficient humor and darkness to be digestible. The reader feels immense sympathy for Catherine, for example, while accepting the fact that she was difficult indeed for anyone on earth with the exception of Dolly. Strange to say, much of the unlikely machinery of the story is more or less factual. The oddly mismatched sisters and the grand treehouse are well-documented from the author’s childhood even if one suspects that his character Collin is a bit more a regular boy than Truman may have been. One need not speculate about what he and Sooky or he and Harper Lee may have spoken of while up among the green of tree-leaves. This book is doubtless better, though the plot is hardly credible. The thought of the bumbling vigilantes defeated by a cascade of rocks from the Honey family above seems entirely fabulous, but so do a good many actual events.
A Trip to India
Whether it is discernible to readers or not, I generally edit a bit before posting even in material drawn from my travel journals. Below, though, I have transcribed my notes from a few weeks in India complete with lists of monuments, complaints about hotels, and descriptions of a meal or two with no attempt to shape a coherent essay. In spite of the often casual nature of the blog genre and the frequently discursive quality of travel writing, I don't plan to repeat this practice, which was suggested to me solely by the time pressure of two weeks of travel followed by the holiday season. The observations below were written in Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Ranthambore Park, Udaipur, and Mumbai. Six years ago we toured India independently after intentionally devising an itinerary that avoided the touristic Golden Triangle. This time we went with a group -- this explains the relatively plush accommodations, the elephant ride, tiger-spotting (unsuccessful), and the like.
Photograph by Patricia Seaton
12/2 Wed.
Upon disembarking in Delhi the traveler feels the eye-burn of acrid air and smells the faint but pervasive foulness of the Industrial Revolution's decay. Ah Delhi! What promises might this stink of acquisitive desire first make and then frustrate or keep before the return home?
As we were staying at the Holiday Inn, we found ourselves in one of those peculiarly uncongenial locations only money can buy. Such structures are grand and self-sufficient. Guests are meant to venture out only by taxi, But I did have a look around the neighborhood that seems so little like a neighborhood. Homeless people had built a fire right by the road beneath the elevated highway (here called a flyover). A wandering cow stared blankly at a few off-kilter feral dogs. Dusty boys playing cricket in a grass less field paused in their game to watch me pass. Seeking a place for supper I walked to a mall only to find that most of its shops were liquor stores though it did boast a Domino's Pizza and a Chinese restaurant. Street vendors offered momos for 20 rupees and "famous Kolkata egg rolls."
We headed then together across a broad canal on a bridge without a real sidewalk. In the dark a mad maelstrom of traffic rushed by, half the drivers honking repeatedly. The headlights of the cars, many ignoring lanes and passing too close to ignore combined with the noise and what seemed real danger of being struck to create a temporary nightmare. Once over the canal, crossing the next street with continuous traffic but no signals seemed simple. Fortunately almost at once we found a modest place beneath the metro station where we shared a creamy paneer dish, garlic nan, jeera rice, raita, small whole onions that had been marinating in red vinegar (beet juice?), along with the lime and soda water so popular here.
12/3 Thurs.
We visited again the Jama Masjid built by Shah Jahan with its huge courtyard and exceedingly shallow interior. They say that 25,000 believers can all salaam at once in this outdoor space with its two auxiliary pulpits for relaying the imam's words to the masses. Somehow, when we entered no other visitors were present, just a dozen of the pious praying, doing ablutions at the central pool, and reading the Koran. A white shrine in one corner is thought by the credulous to hold a hair from the prophet's beard and other relics. The massive domes are top heavy though the minarets in every corner strive to balance the composition.
We rode a cycle rickshaw through the lanes of old Delhi and then turned onto the Chandni Chowk near the Red Fort and the Jain bird hospital. A zebu pulling a cart, its hump slanted rakishly to the side, turned its head my way as though sharing a secret.
A government-sponsored Disability Day was being held near India Gate. Walking through a crowd of people conversing with each other in highly animated sign language felt oddly like flying through viscous air.
We visited the Gandhi Smirti where the leader spent his last days trying to halt the communal violence that followed Partition. Here the skinny old man wrapped in a white cloth was assassinated. His politics and personality contained great contradictions which were then multiplied by those of this vast land. He put his mission before his personal life, yet, unlike Ho, he had a family. His use of the sadhu tradition led him to ascetic practices such as celibacy and fasting. Nonviolent satyagraha may have succeeded in the independence struggle only because the British, who had imprisoned him several times, were ready to abandon their empire due to other historical forces. (Armed struggle was unnecessary in Africa.). Yet in the end Gandhi remains an immensely moving and impressive figure, that rarest of things, a political actor with principle.
The Laxmi Narayan Mandir, extremely popular with visitors, was built in the 30s by the Birlas, a wealthy industrialist family, and has the extravagant imagery in which Hinduism is so rich, including a number of representations of Buddha and a baroquely decorated chapel for Krishna. The Birlas had supported the self-rule and self-sufficiency movement and thus Gandhi participated at the temple’s dedication. The garish figure of Laxmi at the altar is associated with money, so it is clear why the Birlas and the general public might adore her, yet more uncertain how the great preacher of the extinguishment of desire would react to his inclusion. The temple was built with modern materials and includes such showy features as artificial waterfalls.
The Qtub Minar complex with its enormous but bulbous and ugly minaret was built at the beginning of the 13th century by Qutb-ud-Din after wrecking some twenty-seven Hindu and Jain temples that once stood on the spot. Should there be any doubt, the mosque beneath was called Quwwat-ul-Islam or "the might of Islam." When one wishes really to conquer a people, it is doubtless good policy to conquer their gods as well. Now, apart from the slightly absurd tower, many of the victor's buildings, the Khalji Madrasa for example, are likewise ruins. Strolling among the remains of once mighty contenders induces an elegiac mood. Ozymandias again!
12/4 Fri.
The Akshardham Mandir is very modern, constructed only a bit over ten years ago, but it is extraordinary in a manner as arrogant as the Qtub minaret with as little true spirituality. While the medieval minaret was meant to awe the defeated with a display of temporal power to which religion was attached almost incidentally, this twenty-first century structure has a pushy sort of vulgar ambition that tastes foully of capitalist conspicuous consumption. Much more than the Birla temple built seventy years earlier, its ambitions toward grandeur are expressed in insistent artificial excess somewhat like Las Vegas or Dubai. It is described by its promoters as though by a real estate sales agent: seventy thousand figures carved during three hundred million man hours, as though such numbers could generate greatness. I did not witness the attractions that have led more than one observer to call it a Disneyland-style temple: the son et lumiere show, the animatronics. I suspect the Hindu nationalists of the BJP were critical to the grant of land for its creation, though its guru Swami Narayan lived what was probably a very holy life two hundred years ago. Yet it does bludgeon its way to the visitors' attention and even to a sort of admiration akin to that one feels for art brut builders or kitschy fifties formica.
We drove then to Agra, first passing through endless miles of high rise apartments and a great many more under construction, the cancer-like growth of the modern metropolis, before emerging to fields including patches of mustard grown more for oil and greens than for the seed, past beehives and small-scale brick kilns.
On the outskirts of Agra, we stopped at the tomb of Jahangir's vizier Mirza Ghiyas Beg, the onetime refugee who managed to be named "the pillar of the nation,’ Itimad-ud-daulah. The so-called Baby Taj struck me as elegant (though not sublime). The two mausoleums have in common the white marble facing and the striking petra dura work with Persian motifs of vases, flowers, and trees.
In Agra we stayed at the Agra Trident.
12/5 Sat.
Though we arrived at the Taj Mahal quite early crowds had come yet earlier. The dreadful smelly smog, only marginally less intense than in Delhi, here made the iconic structure appear as a dream or a vision. What can one say about such a sight? Like the Eiffel Tower, Machu Picchu, or the Great Wall it is so familiar from images that it can scarcely be seen in person. Still, it is evidence of the refined aestheticism of the Mughal court, reflecting that of Persia. I suppose it is cheering in a way that this beauty is not confined to a small circle of aristocrats, but is available to the mob daily, including myself. Though popular opinion would like to view the structure as a testament of love, it is doubtless still another statement of arrogant power, eloquent long after its builder was ousted and confined by his own son (who murdered his brothers as well). At least that ruling class valued cultivation of the sensibilities as a sign of their nobility, just as the courtly Elizabethan sonneteers did. In these latter days hustling photographers pose couples in Bollywood postures and the glorious building has been reduced to mere backdrop.
The red sandstone fort in Agra is protected by two and a half kilometers of ramparts. Furnished with high walls, drawbridges, moats, and a zig-zag main entrance to prevent a rapid rush of invaders and the use of battering rams, it looks virtually impregnable. The larger part is still a military base. This is where Shah Jahan served his house arrest. When not killing family members or other foes, this brutal bunch enjoyed such refined pastimes as bathing with concubines in a porphyry tub amid flower petals.
12/6 Sunday
Today's drive was lengthy, broken only by a stop at the Abhanagari step well (or baori), a huge hole dug in the 9th century or so with geometric patterns of rock descending in a sort of dizzy op art pattern. Next to it are the ruins of a large temple where local residents lounge and chat and goats leap, perhaps imagining themselves in the mountains. Today the village of Abhaneri is small and humble, but a thousand years ago it must have been a center of regional power. Some sort of harvest festival was in progress, heralded by a sound truck bearing more passengers than one would have thought possible riding along with the companionable gods and blasting music with a heavy beat. Behind followed a procession of women, many balancing tall terra cotta urns on their heads topped with sprigs of greenery. Some merely walked along while a considerable knot gyrated ecstatically. Patricia joined the dancers, imitating their moves expertly and swinging more rhythmically then many of the Indians. They seemed delighted with her and grins spread all around while small children strove to touch the foreigner who had mysteriously materialized to grace their celebration.
A short time later we encountered a funeral with the somber line headed by pall-bearers carrying a body in a white winding sheet on a board. They were making their way to the crematorium. So life inevitably evokes death and it is surely salutary to avoid lingering too long amid the joys of food and children and love and all the affairs of life lest one deceive oneself and entertain the thought that Yama has been outdistanced.
After nine hours on the road we pulled off onto a one lane dirt track, then a smaller one, bumpier yet and arrived at the Pugmark just past the village of Sawai Madhopur outside the Ranthambore National Park.
12/7 Mon.
As the park is a former maharaja's hunting grounds, there is a large fort on the hilltop in the park with temples and a mosque as well as occasional lodges, tombs, and shrines on the grounds. Pilgrims visiting the temple give food to the local monkeys so they congregate along the road in trees waiting for likely patrons, rather like the vendors that rush to the side of the paused vehicle at the park's entrance offering Chinese-made tee shirts and stocking caps.
We failed to sight a tiger during our morning and afternoon drives through different areas of the park, though we saw tracks and heard the monkey's danger calls when they, with better vantage point than ours, spotted their antagonist sleeping or creeping through the high grasses. They, the jungle cats, leopards, and the hyenas had sense enough to dodge the attention of the visitors though we carried cameras rather than firearms.
We did, however, see plenty of fallow deer, sambar, blue bull antelope, wild boar, black-faced langur, macaque, crocodile, and countless birds including egret, ibis, teal, cormorant, red wattle lapwing, woolly-neck stork, snakebird, whistling duck, tree partridge, parakeet, various herons, jungle crow, weaver bird (with nests), and bulbul. There were a great many wandering peacocks, and the tree pies came begging for handouts.
The ride was a bit rough and dusty, yet glorious as every beast has its virtue, and the alarmed cry of the monkey is no less a marvel than the tiger's roar, and though Blake wrote of the latter, it was only to combat the prejudice born of fear. We were told that the Ranthambore tigers have killed not only livestock but a good half dozen of our own species as well in recent years, so the hostility of villagers who live nearby is judicious and well-founded.
12/8 Tues.
On the way to Jaipur we stopped at a small government school and witnessed the students' routine for opening the day. Lined up in size order and in classes, they executed a few moves reminiscent of military drill and sang the national anthem. Holding their hands in prayer position they then chanted petitions to Sarasvati for educational success. An older girl then read headlines from the newspaper and "thoughts for the day" along the lines of "do not spit or use tobacco" and "mind your parents."
In Jaipur we are told that over half the population of something over four million are employed in the gem trade. The astrologers tell people what stones are beneficial for them, so this metaphysical benefit coincides with the Indian taste for conspicuous consumption and gaudy over-the-top decoration.
After a lassi served in a disposable pottery cup we entered the Raj Mandir movie house to see a Hindi film with the usual sharply drawn heroes and villains and nonstop alternation of thrilling action, song and dance, romance and comedy. Not knowing the language was no impediment to following the story. The place was not old but was vulgarly opulent with more levels of ticket price than a Broadway theater. Why is it that in this land where arranged marriages are still the rule, all the films are about romance?
We ate perhaps the best Indian meal of the trip ever had at Tulsi, a small vegetarian restaurant located, surprisingly, in the Ramada hotel where we were staying. I had strolled the nearby streets without finding a likelier place, but I am glad that this time I did not follow my preference for a hole-in-the-wall. Sharing a thali we had more than we cared to eat. We particularly enjoyed ker sangria a combination of "desert beans," which look rather like strands of seaweed or long evergreen needles prepared with fresh capers and a good deal of oil.
12/9 Wed.
We engaged in the most touristic of experiences riding a painted and gaily draped elephant to Jai Singh's Amber Fort with its lengthy fortifications snaking over the hills to protect a luxurious palace. The visitor heard flute music and came upon a snake charmer with two cobras. Then the gauntlet of the undiscourageable hawkers begins
. The City Palace, one-third of which is still occupied by the family of the last maharaja, had some marvelous gates, each with different decoration. The so-called museums here displayed little more than the remains of royal wardrobes and paintings of some of the men who wore them. One could see as well the huge silver urns which the ruler in 1901 brought with him when visiting Britain. He had thought it prudent to carry his own water, unsure of the safety of what would be available in the West and probably thinking his own had curative powers.
The complex of eighteen large devices built by Jai Singh for astrological calculations (the Jantar Mantar) is an abstract spectacle apart from its intended use. A very large sundial here (the Samrat Yantra) can indicate the time correct within two seconds while the complementary marble hemispheres in holes in the ground can indicate an individual's horoscope. This meticulous observation and ingenious invention in the service of superstition recalls to me the Chinese invention of the compass which was used not for navigation but for Germany and of gunpowder, the use of which was confined for centuries to fireworks.
12/10 Thurs.
We drove to Jodhpur and encountered numerous military convoys coming from the posts along the border with Pakistan.
We visited first the fifteenth century Meherangarh Fort (the Sun Fort), one of the grandest fortified palaces in the world. In order to build here, on the hill called Bhaurcheeria (the mountain of birds), Rao Jodha evicted a sadhu known as Cheeria Nathji (the lord of birds), constructing a dwelling and temple for him on the grounds. He then sought to ensure his security on the spot by burying a man alive in the foundation. The man’s family still occupies a home in Raj Bagh (Raj’s Garden) provided them in compensation four hundred and fifty years ago. Entering the gates one may see the damage left by cannonballs and the handprints of the maharajah's wives made before they committed suttee in 1843. At a temple dedicated to Chamundi, in 2008 249 people were killed in a panicked stampede during the Navratri festival. The goddess is depicted as aged and skeletal, wearing a garland of human skulls (mundamala). Liquor and animal sacrifices are offered (and, in the past, human sacrifices) to this fearsome one-time tribal goddess.
Apart from the associations with class and gender exploitation, war and ferocious religious imagery, the fort as a whole is a magnificent witness to human engineering, aestheticism , and ingenuity. Pleasingly asymmetrical and endlessly various, it offers new marvels around every turn and on every level. At the present time there is also an exhibit of miniatures which mostly feature goddesses, though there is one of a polo game, and several of maharajas. Among the breathtaking rooms are the Flower Palace or Phool Mahal, used by the ruler for his private recreation with its stained glass and gold-decorated ceiling, the Takhat Vilas with its European Christmas tree balls hanging from above, and the Pearl Palace (Moti Mahal) whose walls are covered with some sea-shell preparation. The stone lattices or jali are intricate and elegant, though testifying to the system of purdah which the Rajputs adopted from their Muslim enemies.
We then checked into the Ranbanka Palace Hotel, a "heritage" hotel in what had been the palace of Maharajadhiraj Sir Ajit Singh ji, a prince in 1927 when the structure went up. Apart from the Ottoman Legacy in Istanbul this is surely the grandest place in which I have ever stayed. Our accommodations consisted of a sitting room with marble floor and fine carpet separated from the spacious bedroom by columns and drapes, again with fine carpets, then another room holding two large wardrobes and little else, and an unnecessarily spacious bathroom. Excess, but a pleasant surprise for a single night.
12/11 Fri.
The Jaswant Thada is an early twentieth century marble memorial to Jaswant Singhi II and subsequent maharajas by the Dev Kund used for ritual bathing after cremations. As it was only just opening time, the only shoes outside were the pointed ones from the attendant who lit incense before the altar which had no deity but only a photograph of the big man. He then assumed a stylized posture and began playing a flute, though I am not sure whether his aim was to offer the melody as he had done the incense or to elicit a tip. Perhaps both.
On the way to Udaipur we stopped at the fourteenth century Ranakpur Jain temple and meet the weirdly fascinating gaze of Adinath and the other tirthankaras. Though many describe Jainism as a religion without a god, the temple designers were not inhibited from including numerous Hindu deities as well as worshiping the fully realized beings, the last of whom lived over two and a half centuries ago. Not only did the visitor have to shed all leather including wallets; in addition drinking water and menstruating women were forbidden. We were most interested in the reliefs on the way in illustrating a variety of sexual practices. Like many other moralistic works, these conveniently managed to titillate while condemning.
We arrived at the so-called Royal Retreat outside Udaipur. Though the scenery was fine, the place was a four-star prison in that it lacked even gardens or walking paths. Above, on a high cliff a resort made to resemble a fort was under construction. We were a half hour outside of town and the nearest village seemed to lack a restaurant. As it turned out the place (about which we had already complained -- the original hotel was on the shore of Lake Pichola) was disastrous. I can scarcely begin to enumerate the complaints which every traveler there seemed to have. Among them though was service in the overpriced restaurant so very slow that one was advised to order at least forty-five minutes in advance (though this led to cold plates being brought to the table), lack of hot water or, in some cases, of water at all, failure to clean the rooms or replace towels during the day, exile to the chilly verandah restaurant for breakfast while Indians there for a wedding party and an anniversary celebration ate in comfort indoors. We were stuck, our only compensation being accommodation in a separate cottage-like room off by itself near an imposing Jaganath cart, though to reach it we had to pass the swimming pool area by the side of which many men seemed to have a habit of peeing. We grumped over a shared dish of grisly mutton bones in a tepid sauce of cashew and rosewater. So close to one of the most picturesque cities of India and yet be confined to this sorry place.
12/12 Sat.
Udaipur is certainly beautiful at least on the lake or on its shores. Pichola and the smaller lakes, all joined by canals, were created in the fourteenth century by a gypsy Banjara tribal chief and expanded by generations of maharanas. The view includes three royal mansions as well as numerous somewhat less lavish havelis once occupied by aristocrats. One grand residence, the Jag Niwas, was built on an island as a summer palace though unfortunately today it is a hotel, while on another island is the Jag Mandir, likewise today a private hotel. Thus the Rajput warrior aristocrats of the past have yielded to the plutocrats of today.
Even today in hot weather the visitor can appreciate the luxury of the eighteenth century "garden of the maids of honor," the Sahellion-ki-Bari with its shady lanes, its flowers and palms, and its later fountains,one of which features four monolithic elephants in marble. With an almost Heian refinement, these fountains are designed to generate different sounds, a powerful monsoon or a gentle forest rain.
We took a boat around the lake from which none of the funky cluttered streets were visible, but only the grand homes of the nobility and the equally grand landscape beyond. We paused on the island of the Lake Garden Palace, the Jag Mandir where the reigning Maharana had sheltered Europeans during the Mutiny of 1857 and admired the frescoes in the Gol Mahal.
Not far from the City Palace, the Jagdish temple, built in 1652, enshrines the black stone image of Jagannath an irregular deity considered by some an avatar of Vishnu (replacing Buddha) though not included in the standard Dashavatara. The primary association of this deity for nonbelievers is the Ratha yatra or chariot festival in which high carts bearing his image are pulled through the streets be devotees with speed and force that are implied by the word juggernaut. He is often depicted in idols carved of tree stumps, featuring huge eyes and no legs and looking archaic indeed flanked by similar figures of his brother and sister Balabhadra and Subhadra.
In the evening we were not inclined to make the hour-long round trip to town, leaving us no option other than to eat in the restaurant. At first we were told that we could not enter the restaurant which had been reserved for the parties but when we objected we were then allowed a table. Looking for something modest and bland, she ordered a lamb burger which arrived looking quite nice with tomato, lettuce, and egg, but which proved to lack lamb. When she questioned the waiter, he shook his head enigmatically, saying, "Yes, no lamb, ma'am, correct." After another fifteen minutes, she received a separate plate with pieces of lamb.
We sought sleep as the parties continued into the night, culminating with midnight fireworks.
12/13 Sun.
We arose at 3:45 for the flight to Mumbai about which we had been reading in Suketi Mehta's overpraised book Maximum City. In spite of its prizes, I consider it indifferently written and poorly edited. Many specific ideas are repeated again and again and anecdotes illustrating them are piled up till they become tiresome indeed. When the author strives for rhetorical drama, the result is almost always second-rate. Still, it provides information on the underside of the city unavailable elsewhere. Mehta may be unique in his acquaintance with the metropolis' gangsters, bar dancers, and general corruption.
The Mahalakshmi dhobi ghats are visible from a bridge above. This slum in the middle of expensive real estate includes a large number of concrete sinks into which water is diverted, this had been the center of the city's dhobi-wallahs, but, since the advent of the washing machine, it is less essential to many whose parents sent their laundry. To compensate, some of the neighborhood's residents have solicited "first wash" work, especially for makers of school uniforms. The collection of discarded clothing for resale is another means of livelihood. Still, those who live here tenaciously hold on to their rights -- the land is not privately owned but rather city property --and have sued to provide their ouster. Given what Mehta says about the interminable unfolding of court cases, reminiscent of Bleak House, they may have a good while yet before being moved. In spite of the miserable shanty-town construction, every hovel had something I do not, a satellite dish.
In the Maru Bhavan Gandhi Museum, once the home of a friend and supporter who offered Gandhi a room when he was in Mumbai, one can see odd little dioramas depicting critical moments in the leader's life. His room is preserved complete with spinning wheels, bed, and bookstand and nothing else. There is a small balcony where he spoke to visitors. The photographs on display include scenes with Tagore, several with British Quakers, and a delightful one with Charlie Chaplin in which both are grinning widely. Among the letters displayed are notes to both Adolf Hitler and FDR seeking to forestall war.
The Oval Maidan was filled with white-clad cricketers and lined with British buildings reminding me again of Malcolm Muggeridge’s comment that the last true Englishman would be an Indian.
From our twenty-first floor room at the Trident one could see the water and the cityscape, including the Rajabhai clock tower, while wheeling birds circled and dived. At one point a wedding party below drummed and danced and marched.
12/14 Mon.
The Chhatrapatra Shivaji Museum, once the Prince of Wales Museum before its rechristening by the reactionary Shiv Sena party, is fronted by a handsome garden and crowned with a fine dome. It was designed by George Wittet (who also did the Gateway of India) in a mixture of Gujarati, Islamic, and British styles. Though the building lacks air conditioning, the collection is excellent, including a fine sculpture hall which includes a good share of Gandharan Buddhist work and first-rate Hindu sculptures. I particularly liked the dramatic representations of Durga killing the bull, a motif called mahisasuramardini. On the next floor are examples of many schools of miniature painting and a hall of works featuring Krishna. The cafe in a shady courtyard full of plants had a full "special lunch" for 90 rupees, but the hour was too late, and we made do with hearty a pair of samosas for 35.
On the way back to the hotel we got peanuts from a street vendor while another whacked at a coconut and inserted a straw. As evening fell, we drove out to the airport to begin the thirty-some hour trip back home.
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