“Nottamun Town” is a song of undoubted antiquity, dating at least from the late Middle Ages. With explicitly self-contradictory content, the lyrics challenge listeners’ assumptions in the most fundamental way. The surface it constructs, a shimmering blend of reality and unreality, is mirrored in the song’s elusive transformations over time. The available evidence suggests that the song had all but vanished in England by the eighteenth century, but it had crossed the Atlantic in the century before where it become established in a half dozen Southern states. Several broadside versions were published in New York in the nineteenth century, but the tune was not recorded until Cecil Sharp collected it from Jean Ritchie’s sister Una and cousin Sabrina in 1917. Ritchie later sang the song on many albums and through her renditions and those of other performers who had learned it through her (notably the Fairport Convention) it became reestablished in the U.K. Those influenced included some who deviated from the folk tradition. Dylan used Ritchie’s tune for “Masters of War.” Furthermore, on the holograph of “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” just below the line “I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken” Dylan wrote “Nottamun Town,” a clear reference to the line in Ritchie’s song “Ten thousand stood round me but I was alone.” [1] Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter recalled that the song’s underdetermination inspired them to use similarly mysterious imagery. [2]
Just what does that imagery signify? “Nottamun Town” may easily be characterized as nonsense poetry, but the term is imprecise. What is called nonsense poetry may be of three types. The words may follow the phonological and syntactic rules of a language yet introduce new, more or less suggestive, coinages in a generally intelligible setting. This is the sort well-known from “Jabberwocky” or “The Pobble Who Has No Toes.” Further dislocation from linguistic norms leads to a more radical form of nonsense verse that may approach gibberish such as one sees in magical formulae, Sioux lyric, scat-singing, and speaking in tongues. Some texts, however, including this song, include no neologisms, but rather employ ordinary language to subvert everyday logic. [3]
The theme of “Nottamun Town” is neither love nor death, but rather the nature of reality itself, or, at any rate, the capacity of language to describe it adequately. The paradoxical content of the song has struck many listeners as puzzling in spite of its resemblance to “O! Susannah,” Stephen Foster’s composed song, and nineteenth century children’s poems such as those by Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll.
The sociological bias common to folklorists has led many critics, baffled by the song’s illogic, to suggest the relevance of a variety of historical circumstances. Among the ingenious proposals are the conventions of mummers’ performances, the turmoil of the English Civil War, and outbreaks of plague or ergotism. The very breadth of these suggestions indicates the slender evidence for any. The fact is that even if some social cataclysm accompanied the song’s composition, that event would shed little light on its continuing popularity over centuries in the American colonies among people lacking contact with Great Britain.
The theory concerning the song’s meaning that I find most useful is, oddly, the least likely of all. Charles Upton, a poet associated with the Beats who became a Sufi, maintains [3] that the song is a coded guide to the spiritual path he regards as sophia perennis. For him each of the specific figures is allegorical, each color is meaningful, and the whole is coherent and complete. This excerpt will be sufficient to direct those who, like me, find Upton’s hermeneutics provocative and ingenious though far from compelling as a whole.
“Nottamun” or “Nottingham” Town is the place of “naughting,” the town where we travel to become “not.” It thus corresponds with the Sufi fana, or self-annihilation. It is the town of the dead—not necessarily the physically dead, but those who are dead in this life—who, in the words of Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) have “died before they are made to die.” As Omar Khayyam said, “Dawn is breaking and the caravan/ Starts for the Dawn of Nothing —O make haste!” But it is also, on the negative side, the land of those who are dead to the Spirit, the living dead who make up sense-bound “normal” humanity, now seen as they really are from the vantage point of that other world: hylic (material) man as witnessed from a psychic and potentially pneumatic standpoint.
Each of the seven stations of the spiritual Path is rendered, in “Nottamun Town,” as a polar opposition, whose synthesis opens the door to the next level. . .
I follow Upton only in part. Though his elaborate gloss on a simple song is admirably clever and almost justifiable, it is far too specific, tailored in detail to fit Upton’s largely preconceived vision. While it is true that the song triggers questions about fundamental assumptions taken for granted in everyday thought (for instance, it implies suspicion of dualism), only the enthusiast will find a detailed and specific spiritual ladder for the aspirant to ascend.
The song in fact belongs to a considerable tradition of nonsense literature, once directed toward a general audience, but which, in recent times has become associated in particular with children’s poetry. In “Farai un vers de dreit nien,” for example, William IX explicitly declares he will write about “nothing.” He explodes dualities by insisting he is neither happy nor sad, neither stranger nor native.
One function of such texts is to affirm the fundamentally irrational, ambiguous, or mysterious character of human thought processes, in William’s lyric illustrated by his love dilemma. There is a frisson of delight felt often by the very young in seeing self-contradictions and impossibilities boldly set forth; a similar pleasure, I suspect, underlies the popularity of magicians and, in American culture, special effects in films. Apart from this function as entertainment on the thematic level such celebration of paradox reminds the listener of how fragile the human cause-and-effect understanding of our lives can seem in the light of such consciousness-altering catalysts as art (including religion). Just as the viewer of a suspense film or a Greek tragedy enjoys imagining being in peril while safely enjoying an entertaining narrative (while knowing in the back of the mind that one is at all times in mortal peril) [4], the audience for “Nottamun Town” enjoys playing with epistemological doubt while to some degree recognizing its reality.
1. https://newtonexcelbach.com/2016/06/10/various-routes-to-and-from-nottamun-town/
2. See Blair Jackson's "An Interview About Songwriting and Inspiration," in Goin' Down The Road: A Grateful Dead Traveling Companion, 208-209.
3. I would not consider nonsense statements that seem to ignore natural law, such as one finds in myth, fairy tales, science fiction, “magic realism,” and elsewhere. The worlds imagined in such texts operate by laws, though they may differ from those of everyday lived reality.
3. In Folk Metaphysics. The relevant passage is available as well at www.sophiaperennis.com/discussion-forums/traditionalism-and-folklore/fair-nottamun-town-mystical-and-alchemical-symbolism-in-an-appalachian-folk-song/.
4. Behind this fear is the likelihood that the more or less enlightened viewer of Oedipus Rex, King Lear, or Silence of the Lambs realizes that in the end all is well because, in Pope’s words “Whatever is, is right.”
Nottamun Town as sung by Jean Ritchie
In fair Nottamun town, not a soul would look up,
Not a soul would look up, not a soul would look down,
Not a soul would look up, not a soul would look down,
To show me the way to fair Nottamun town.
I rode a grey horse, a mule roany mare,
Grey mane and grey tail, a green stripe down her back,
Grey mane and grey tail, a green stripe down her back,
There wa'nt a hair on her be-what was coal black.
She stood so still, she threw me to the dirt,
She tore -a my hide and she bruised my shirt.
From saddle to stirrup I mounted again,
And on my ten toes I rode over the plain.
Met the King and the Queen and a company more,
A-riding behind and a-marching before
Came a stark-naked drummer a-beating a drum
With his heels in his bosom come marching along.
They laughed and they smiled, not a soul did look gay,
They talked all the while, not a word they did say,
I bought me a quart to drive gladness away
And to stifle the dust, for it rained the whole day.
Sat down on a hard, hot cold frozen stone,
Ten thousand stood round me, and yet I's alone.
Took my hat in my hand for to keep my head warm,
Ten thousand got drownded that never was born.
Sunday, April 1, 2018
Thursday, March 1, 2018
False and Homophonic Translation
This piece, prepared for a Megaphone Series event at the Seligmann Center for the Arts, is an expanded version of "False Translations" which I posted almost two years ago.
There are endless challenges for the literary translator apart from the certainty that the product will never be flawless. [1] Some versions strive for literal precision while others seek more freely to capture an effect analogous to that of the original. The extreme of the first sort is the Loeb Library’s facing translations which, for all the Victorian fustian of the older volumes, serve well as a crib of the original. The second sort might be represented by Pound’s versions of Li Bai or Robert Lowell’s “imitations.” Most literary translators situate themselves somewhere between.
Some works presented as translations, however, present an entirely different set of questions. One sort of false translation is the poem presented as a translation for which no original exists. In the trans-European trading about of narratives during the Middle Ages, a text not infrequently claims to be a translation of an earlier poem. If that source is unknown, it can be impossible to determine what, if anything, the present work owes to prior models. At times the assertion that the poet is merely transmitting an older story rather than composing altogether afresh is designed to enhance the received value of the work (though for moderns a claim to originality is privileged). Joseph Smith, for example, claimed to have “translated” the Book of Mormon.
In order to attach bardic significance to his work in the proto-Romantic moment James Macpherson published what purported to be the works of the legendary Ossian yet which was largely original. Since exoticism served the emerging Romantic sensibility as well as antiquity, William Thomas Beckford’s claimed his Vathek to be translated from an unpublished Arabic manuscript. Whether readers did or did not believe the source was other than English scarcely matters: the same semantic implications exist in either case.
Ezra Pound’s “Papyrus,” while shaped by scholarly publication of finds such as the Oxyrhynchus papyri, also valorizes the Modernist qualities of fragmentation.
Spring…
Too long…
Gongula…
Though evoking antiquity and Sappho in particular (who mentions a Gongula), Pound’s one syllable first line implies the entire reverdie tradition of the Middle Ages. The two-syllables that follow echo the complaint continuous in poetry from the Bible [2] to the “Hesitation Blues,” and the three-syllable final line (drawn out in languid longing) is a name liquid on the tongue. The pretense of translation justifies the elliptical syntax and places the object of desire impossibly distant in time and place.
Doubtless the grandest monument on the shelf of translations without originals is Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets which purports to be a translation with commentary by a “Scholar-Translator” from ancient Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform. Rather like Carlyle had done in Sartor Resartus or Nabokov in Pale Fire this strategy purchases ironic distance and indicts the authority of the single authorial subject, refracting a multiplicity of possible attitudes and interpretations of experience. This is hardly the place for an exposition of this ambitious poem which, according to those who saw him, remains far less marvelous on the page than when performed by the author.
A second variety of false translation, unknown to me before the twentieth century except in brief, usually jocular, phrases is the type called "allographic translation", "transphonation" (in French) "traducson," or, most commonly “homophonic translation.” In this process the “translator” renders the sounds of a poem’s language in something close to the same sounds in a target language with no regard for the original meaning. Such “translations” have appeared for the last sixty years. The tradition is generally dated from the versions of Catullus published by Louis and Celia Zukofsky between 1958 and 1966 and collected by Cape Goliard in 1969, though these in fact represent a compromise between a reliance on sound alone and a conventional translation.
A few examples will suffice to illustrate the Zukofskys’ method. Here is the Latin followed by Celia Zukofsky’s literal translation and then the semi-homophonic version in their collection.
Catullus 112
Multus home es, Naso, neque tecum multus homost qui
descendit: Naso, multus es et pathicus.
Much a man you are, Naso, and that you much a man it is who
comes down: Naso, much you are and pathetic/lascivious.
Mool ’tis homos,’ Naso, ’n’ queer take ’im mool ’tis ho most he
descended: Naso, mool ’tis – is it pathic, cuss.
A Latin-derived word like “descend” passes between the languages with at least some semantic relevance (including useful hints of obscenity), but most words are not similarly accommodating . Even were it lacking the enigmatic “mool,” this translation clearly veers in the direction of gibberish. For instance, the concluding “cuss” seems wholly reliant on sound. Yet, for the reader familiar with the original and perhaps for others as well, the Zukofsky rendering can seem oddly effective. The slangy tone of the Zukofsky certainly mirrors the colloquialism of the original, and even its sniggering indecency seems to have a place.
A slightly longer piece may provide a better measure. Here the Latin is followed first by a plain prose translation by Leonard C. Smithers (1894) and then the joint Zukofsky rendering.
Catullus 70
Nulli se dicit mulier mea nubere malle
quam mihi, non si se Iuppiter ipse petat.
dicit: sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti,
in vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua.
No one, says my lady, would she rather wed than myself, not even if Jupiter himself sought her. Thus she says! but what a woman says to a desirous lover ought fitly to be written on the breezes and in running waters.
Newly say dickered my love air my own would marry me all
whom but me, none see say Jupiter if she petted.
Dickered: said my love air could be o could dickered a man too
in wind o wet rapid a scribble reported in water.
Here again the anchorage in meaning the Zukofskys retained affords their verse a weird aptness, with new elements added through the “mistranslation.” For instance the repeated use of “dickered” in the place of forms of dicere suggests the repeated if minor squabbles of a couple and the transformation of a form of petere (to ask, seek, pursue) as petted suggests intimacy. The garbled syntax could be thought to represent the addled lover’s mind.
Yet the choices seem sometimes almost arbitrary. In accordance with their mixed mode of work the Zukofskys were satisfied to begin with “newly” solely because it sounds like “nulli” and to end by simply translating Catullus’ final acqua as water, there neglecting the sound altogether.
Since the Zukofskys’ Catullus was published, it has received negative reviews from Classicists and markedly mixed reviews from poetry journals. Paul Mann undertakes to speak for the majority when he says, “For most translators, the name Zukofsky represents a scandal. It is a name better left unspoken, and when it is spoken, it signifies grotesque infidelity, gratuitous distortion, the deliberate abuse of a poem for the translator’s own aesthetic satisfaction.” According to his account the “only” readers who “respond sympathetically” to Zukofsky’s book are those “devoted” to his “overwhelmingly difficult” poetry in general. [3]
On the other hand, to Curtis Faville “Louis Zukofsky's Catullus stands as one of the major works of literature of the 20th Century, right alongside Ulysses, “The Waste Land,” Mrs. Dalloway, Spring & All, Harmonium, The Naked Lunch, Light in August; in other words, in the company of those works which propose revolutionary, new paradigmatic conceptions of form and method.” [4] With only a bit more modesty on behalf of his poet, Peter Quartermain calls the book “one of the most imaginative and resourceful texts produced in English in the last half of the twentieth century.” [5]
To my knowledge no one has followed the Zukofskys’ method since. Yet a more extreme if less demanding procedure of homophonic translation which wholly ignores the signification of the original text, following only its sound, has become nearly commonplace. In Charles Bernstein’s widely used The Practice of Poetry, he recommends so “translating” a work from a language of which one is ignorant. Bernstein has himself essayed homophonic translation in his “From the Basque” and “me Transform – O!” [6]
Not surprisingly, others among the so-called Language poets, whose goal seems at times to make poetry as boring as possible, have taken a fancy to this procedure. Among the more widely known examples of homophonic translation is David Melnick's treatment of the opening of the Iliad in which Homer’s first words μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ become "Men in Aida” (the title of the 1983 book). [7] Ron Silliman composed a new Duino Elegy under the title “Do we know Ella Cheese?” that opens
Where
when itch scree
hurt as much
Then how's their angle
or known gun?
Honky sets selves,
his name a eye nor much.
Plows lick answers . . . [8]
In these examples sound is not only foregrounded; it is given unlimited license. Thus the author may arrive at a text through a process little different from free association. The words of an original in a different language serve as a basis for generating random meaning amid a constantly changing vortex of half-meaning, mistaken meaning, and willful defiance of meaning.
Homophonic translation spread into popular culture briefly with the 1956 publication of James L. Chace’s Anguish Languish (English Language) which was read on television by Arthur Godfrey and published in several daily newspapers as well as in Sports Illustrated. Most of Chace’s pieces were English-to-English (called by some “homophonic transformations) such as his retellings of “Ladle Rat Rotten Hut,” “Guilty Looks Enter Tree Beers,” and “Oiled Murder Harbored.” He does, however, also offer two French songs: “Freyer Jerker” and “Alley Wetter”:
Fryer Jerker, Fryer Jerker,
Dormer-view? Dormer-view?
Sunny lay martini!
Sunny lay martini!
Drink, drank, drunk.
Drink, drank, drunk.
Alley wetter,
jaunty alley wetter,
Alley wetter, shutter plumber ray.
Shutter plumber railer tat
Shutter plumber railer tat
Ale a tat, ale a tat
Ale a tat, ale a tat
O,
Alley wetter, jaunty alley wetter,
Alley wetter, shutter plumber ray.
With a similar emphasis on humor and ingenuity, Luis d'Antin van Rooten published one of the most striking tours de force of homophonic translation, a sizable Mother Goose collection titled Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames: The D'Antin Manuscript. It is clear that van Rooten, unlike Chace, sought to maintain some syntactic plausibility in his version. [9]
Humpty Dumpty
Sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty
Had a great fall.
All the king's horses
And all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty
Together again.
Un petit d'un petit
S'étonne aux Halles
Un petit d'un petit
Ah! degrés te fallent
Indolent qui ne sort cesse
Indolent qui ne se mène
Qu'importe un petit
Tout gai de Reguennes.
A child of a child
Is surprised at the Market
A child of a child
Oh, degrees you needed!
Lazy is he who never goes out
Lazy is he who is not led
Who cares about a little one
All happy with Reguennes
The most accomplished works of homophonic translation seem clearly limited to the realm of novelty, seeking to impress the reader with their wit and ingenuity and, in fact, with their oddity more than any other characteristic. The difference in literary value between Zukofsky’s Catullus or Pound’s “Papyrus” and the mass of utterly forgettable compositions by so-called experimental writers who keep pursuing the same, now traditional, avant-garde techniques is unmistakable. In spite of the mysteriously compelling appeal of dreams to the dreamer, they seem to be, alas, composed for an audience of one, for very little is as boring as another person’s dream. Elementary school students now compose exquisite corpses (after their unit on haiku, perhaps) which have precisely the appeal of those by celebrated poets who write in French. Tzara’s “Dada Manifesto on Feeble & Bitter Love," which prescribes the cut-up method for generating text, is itself a satisfactory poem. What results from following its instructions will, unfortunately, not be. Does anyone feel pleasure at the prospect of a half hour of Jackson MacLow? Does even Gary Sullivan read flarf? Is it produced only to annoy others?
The fundamental problem of all aleatory methods is that they remove intention from composition. Intention may be mistaken or twisted or self-deceiving or vicious, but it must be present to generate meaning. A sunset may be beautiful, but it is not a work of art because it lacks intention. Significance arises only in the interpretations of nature, not in its creation. I am not thinking here of authorial intention as the “correct” reading of a poem or story. [10] As Blake knew, the author may not know a new work’s potential. In fact the writer makes many revelations to readers without knowing what is going on. Yet there is some impulse of desire, some feeling of a moment, some shade of affect preserved in every work of art. The arts’ unique role arises from their ability, unshared with other artifacts, to render the evanescent gossamer of human consciousness in permanent form. The random generation of words can produce only an arid sham, what a cheeky child might call “the Avant-garde Emperor’s New Clothes.”
One might proceed further yet afield from literary translation as it is generally understood. What implications might lurk in Borges’ discussion of translations from Tlön, in my friend Bob Lundy’s painstaking and elegant transcriptions of glyphs of his own invention, or in Christian Vander’s lyrics for the French rock band Magma couched in the non-terrestrial language of Kobaïan.
A few conclusions are available, though, concerning the value and the limits on value of pretended translation and homophonic translation. Pretending a work is translated even when it is not is a specific move to add semantic elements to the field including associations with the supposed original. This move is neither more nor less valid than many other means of thickening meaning in the aesthetic text. The practice of homophonic translation, on the other hand, is capable of little beyond a few comic touches and an opportunity to display cleverness. [11] Both share with conventional translation the potential to stimulate the writer to move in directions otherwise unlikely.
1. This is only a more pointed version of the imperfection of all texts. See my “Sweet Treason” in Dada Poetry: An Introduction or on this website for a fuller treatment of conventional translation.
2. See Habakkuk 1:2, Psalms 13 and 35, Revelations 6:10, etc.
3. Translation Review, Volume 21-22, Issue 1, 1986, “Translating Zukofsky's Catullus” pp. 3-9.
4. http://compassrosebooks.blogspot.com/2009/02/louis-zukofskys-catullus-new-york.html
5. Stubborn Poetries: Poetic Facticity and the Avant-Garde, University of Alabama,p. 60.
6. The influential journal of translation Circumference features such homophonic translations regularly. See Horáček, J. "Pedantry and Play: The Zukofsky Catullus." Comparative Literature Studies 51.1 (2014): 106-131. Bernstein also composes in semi-gibberish, notably in “Johnny Cake Hollow.”
7. The opening scene is in a gay bathhouse. Melnick’s version of the first three books of the epic were published under the title of Men in Aida by Uitgeverij (The Hague and Tirana 2015).
8. First published in Roof V in 1978. The German is “Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel/ Ordnungen? und gesetzt selbst, es nähme/ einer mich plötzlich ans Herz.”
9. Among the work’s admirers was Marcel Duchamp. The success of Mots D'Heures spawned first a later volume using different rhymes by Ormonde de Kay titled N'Heures Souris Rames (Nursery Rhymes), published in 1980 which includes “Signe, garçon. Neuf Sikhs se pansent” (“Sing a Song of Sixpence”) and “Hâte, carrosse bonzes” (“Hot Cross Buns”). The next year Mörder Guss Reims: The Gustav Leberwurst Manuscript by John Hulme appeared.
10. With the publication of their influential essay “The Intentional Fallacy” in The Sewanee Review in 1946, authors W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley questioned further the value of searching for authorial intention while others, while such a search is essential for others, such as E.D. Hirsch and M. A. Abrams.
11. In this they resemble other “constrained writing” techniques such as those favored by the Oulipo group. One work of this sort is Georges Perec ‘s full-length novel La Disparition (The Disappearance) which nowhere contains the letter e.
Erotic Old English Riddles
The numbers assigned below are those of the chief editions of the 10th century Codex Exoniensis.
Muir, Bernard J., ed. (2000). The Exeter anthology of Old English poetry: an edition of Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501 (2nd ed.). Exeter: University of Exeter Press. ISBN 0-85989-630-7.
Krapp, George Philip; Dobbie, Elliot Van Kirk, eds. (1936). The Exeter Book. The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. III. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-08767-5.
Riddles are very close to the wellsprings of poetry; art is play, after all, and figurative language a sort of riddling, while the pursuit of mysteries is commonly the business of literature. Though one sees few explicit riddles in contemporary poetry, quasi-riddling processes involving puns, double meanings, and ambiguity are common.
Among the body of extant Old English riddles are a group with sexual themes. Since erotic topics are often described with euphemisms and indirection, their association with riddles seems altogether natural. Whereas early editors like Frederick Tupper and Alfred J. Wyatt found these texts to be an embarrassment evidencing “low” folk origins, many moderns find these pieces among the more entertaining and revealing of the hundred or so riddles extant in the Old English corpus. These poems afford rich data for the diachronic study of human social relations as well as the synchronic study of psychology. Here, however, I will provide only translations, limiting my comment to a few incidental notes. As these poems, like the others in the codex vary considerably in quality, and some bring significant textual problems, I will translate only a few of what seem to me the best.
Modern readers may find it odd that Leofric, Exeter’s first bishop, would have donated to the cathedral library a manuscript containing poems with sexual content. Of course, the fact is that without the intentional though often idle notations of non-religious poems by those in religious life, we would lose much secular medieval poetry. While moderns are prone to consider censorship of sexual materials to be most likely, authorities have shifted their attention over the centuries. In early times religious heterodoxy was most often suppressed, whereas later political dissent became the primary target. Primarily in modern times has sexual and scatological material attracted the surveillance of church and state.
These poems seem struck with amazement at the energy and power of sexuality. The authors ponder the marvel in particular of the male organ's erection. This simple wonder seems to me the essential theme of the poems. Poetry can often renew one’s view, providing a fresh take on a familiar sight. Here is perhaps a particular case, the easier to execute because of the powerful hold that sexuality has on the mind of our species.
In the main I have striven to maintain something close to the Old English pattern of an alliterative three stress line with variable numbers of syllables, but these versions are rough and lack, I am afraid, the propulsive swing of the originals.
Riddle 74 (K & D 25)
I am a wonderful whatsit, bringing women such joy!
Serving all hereabout, I harm no one
in the city except a certain slayer.
Based in a high bed, my bend is up,
somewhere below I seem shaggy. Sometimes
a delightful daughter dares to seize,
licentious lady lays hold of me,
rushes my red self, wrings my head
Fixes me fast till she feels me for sure.
The wavy-haired woman, her eye grows wet.
The ordinary view of this poem is as a double entendre, meant to suggest an obscene answer while also fitting a proper one. The latter in this case is an onion, growing planted in a bed, upward, sometimes red, and causing tears when cut. In this view the poem resembles the child’s riddle of our own time: “What does a woman do sitting down, a man does standing up, and a dog on three legs, for which the “innocent” answer is “shaking hands.” A similar contemporary riddle is “what goes in hard and dry and comes out soft and wet” for which various innocent answers – chewing gum, pasta, a sponge – are available. Some analysts argue, however, that the poem allows only the sexual answer. For me the conflation of vegetative and human fertility suggested by the possibility of the plant as an answer is attractive.
75 (K & D 44)
Sublime it swings by some man’s thigh,
covered by cloak, cloth cut in front,
rigid and robust it rests in good spot
When the youth his own tunic hoists,
lifts over his knee while that known hole
he seeks to find with the head of what hangs,
the hole has often filled with his long length.
Here one finds bravado of “The Big Bamboo” variety. The adjective wrætlic in the opening phrase is defined as “artistic, ornamental, curious, wondrous, rare.” The figure is paralleled in a number of blues songs, including Clara Smith’s “Mean Papa, Turn in Your Key.”
76 (K & D 45)
I’ve thought of some thing that thickens in its spot,
swelling and stretching and growing so great!
When a lady lays hold of the boneless bit
with her proud hands, that prince’s daughter,
the sight of its swelling she covers with her skirt.
Sleepy John Estes sings “Now what you going to do babe : your dough-roller gone/ Go in your kitchen/ Lord and cook until she come home.” (from “The Girl I Love, She Got Long Curly Hair”)
80 (K & D 37)
I beheld the thing, its belly was in back,
filled out so full, some fellow served it,
a powerful person, and much it passed,
when what filled it flew from its eye.
It need not die, when it has nothing left,
When it gives to another, it comes right back.
Happy to its heart, its spirit recurs.
It makes a son it is its own father.
Muir 74 (Krapp and Dobbie 25) proposed non-sexual answer: onion
Muir 75 (Krapp and Dobbie 44) proposed non-sexual answer: key
Muir 76 (Krapp and Dobbie 45) proposed non-sexual answer: bread dough
Muir 80(Krapp and Dobbie 37) proposed non-sexual answer: poker
See also Muir 77 (Krapp and Dobbie 545) proposed non-sexual answer: churn and Muir 81 (Krapp and Dobbie 87) proposed non-sexual answer: borer.
Norris’s Visionary
Page numbers refer to the Riverside edition from Houghton Mifflin.
Theoretical statements of naturalism tend, like those of other schools, to overstate their innovations for polemical reasons. Thus Zola’s novels are in general more conventional than the reader of his essay on “The Experimental Novel” might expect. Americans influenced by Zola, such as Hamlin Garland and Frank Norris, enlarged on certain openings in their master’s original concepts, justifying new narratives shaped by realism, romanticism, and local color, as well as by naturalism. While to some extent this “softening” of naturalism was an inevitable response to the nature of the aesthetic text and the demands of readers, such a mixture also sometimes produced anomalies and dissonance. In Norris's The Octopus the character of Vanamee neatly epitomizes this contradiction which weakens rather than strengthens verisimilitude and the construction of theme.
Zola’s 1893 essay “The Experimental Novel” [1] outlines what the author claims to establish “a literature governed by science” (similar to the “higher critics” treatment of Biblical studies or Marx’s aim of rendering history). According to Zola naturalism “is an inevitable evolution” which “replaces purely imaginary novels by novels of observation and experiment.” The author confidently declares his new “experimental novel” to be “a consequence of the scientific evolution of the century.” He there maintains that the new type of fiction resembles “experimental medicine” in that it “adheres to no . . . doctrine nor any philosophical system.” To him “naturalism is not a personal fantasy, but . . . the intellectual movement of the century.” He insists “there is an absolute determinism in the existing conditions of natural phenomena” and objects to “imbecile arguments, about the impossibility of being strictly true, about the necessity of arranging facts to produce a work of art of any kind.”
He claims for literature a role precisely parallel to that of science. “The intellectual conquest of man consists in diminishing and driving back indeterminism, and so, gradually, by the aid of the experimental method, gaining ground for determinism.” For him “idealistic novelists deliberately remain in the unknown, through all sorts of religious and philosophical prejudices.” All such ideas are equally juvenile wish-fulfilment based on “the astounding pretense that the unknown is nobler and more beautiful than the known.” Thus romanticism is merely “ravings,” and “our age of lyricism” a “romantic disease.” A writer who does not rely on the scientific experimental method just as it is practiced in a laboratory inevitably finds himself among “the follies of the poets and the philosophers,” one of “the idealistic writers, who rely upon the irrational and the supernatural.”
Yet Zola is aware that the analogy between experimental science and fiction is imperfect. He must acknowledge that literature is in part an individual expression of a specific author. He defensively claims that literature “does not depend merely upon the author,” as “the personal feeling is but the first impulse.” Style, the unique fingerprint of each author is discounted. “Rhetoric, for the moment, has no place here. Let us first fix upon the method, on which there should be agreement, and after that accept all the different styles in letters which may be produced, looking upon them as the expressions of the literary temperament of the writers.” Again, Zola concedes aesthetic values, but only in a subordinate, in fact adventitious, role far from his view of narrative as a laboratory experiment.
The very starting point of Zola’s theory is the attempt to assimilate art to science. For this reason his naturalism ignores the definitive traits of the aesthetic text, among them the valorization of beauty (and its “lesser” cousins entertainment, sentiment, humor and thrills). Acknowledging the individuality of form and style, he regards these as trivial. While admitting that, traditionally, “form is sufficient to immortalize a work,” he reduces this effect to mere display: “the spectacle of a powerful individuality reproducing nature in superb language will interest all ages.” He associates a nebulous “genius” with all the elements of a novel that do not exist in his scientific model: affect, theme, and form. “Not only is a writer’s genius to be found in the feeling and in the idea a priori but also in the form and style. ”For his naturalistic novel, the writer’s desiderata are those of most non-aesthetic texts. “The excellence of a style depends upon its logic and clearness.” (How could any reader of Shakespeare persuade himself of such a formula?)
Hamlin Garland ‘s version of naturalism, which he called “veritism,” was far more nebulous. He defined his own practice of “realism (or veritism)” as “the truthful statement of an individual impression corrected by reference to the fact." [2] The new element is the term “impression,” influenced by painters of the day. Years later he described his notion of “veritism” as distinguishing him from the followers of Zola. Again calling himself an “impressionist,” he noted that imitation of reality required “verification,” obtainable by “comparing impressions” over a period of time. He was at pains to call for a wholesome, Whitmanic” “normalcy and decorum,” distinguished from the depictions of the underclass associated with “Zola and certain of the German novelists.” [3]
Frank Norris made his eclecticism explicit. He wrote, in fact, “A Plea for Romantic Fiction” [4] calling for “romanticism and not sentimentalism.” With a sneer at popular novelists, he says that while “sentiment will be handed down the scullery stairs” romance can be more than “a conjurer’s trick-box, full of flimsy quackeries;” it can be “an instrument” by which one may penetrate “down deep, into the red, living heart of things.” He maintains his loyalty to his master by asserting that Zola is “the very head of the Romanticists.” Pure realism is “harsh, loveless, colourless, and blunt,” capturing “only the surface of things.” To him romance is required for both emotion and themes in literature. Nature itself is unfeeling, very likely absurd. Only with the human connection, with “Romance” can the reader receive “a complete revelation of my neighbor’s secretest life,” dealing with “hopes and fears,” “joys and sorrows.” Romance “can teach you” “a nobler purpose and a mightier than mere amusement.” “To Romance belongs the wide world for range, and the unplumbed depths of the human heart, and the mystery of sex, and the problems of life, and the black, unsearched penetralia of the soul of man.” The terms “black” and “unsearched” indicate that this realm is a mystery, presenting the sort of material the aesthetic text is uniquely fit to interrogate.
For all of his gestures of obeisance toward Zola, Norris mixed romance, realism, and naturalism with considerable abandon. The Octopus, the first volume of a projected Epic of Wheat, unfinished at Norris’ death, certainly exhibits grand ambitions. Norris aimed at producing what his poetical character Presley could not -- the epic of the West, spectacular as the landscape, inscribed with all the tumultuous history of the region. For all the well-defined, idiosyncratic characters, his use of capitalized words -- Wheat, the People, and others -- implies the aim of writing something transcending individuality, and anticipates, for instance, Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.
Norris recurs to the theme of his characters’ passivity, their thorough subjugation to fate. Not only the trains and the harvesting equipment, but the very process of economic production itself is figured as a monster, barely controllable, as likely to threaten its human managers as to reward them. Even the fields of cultivated wheat are imbued with animation and even with a sort of enlightenment for Norris: what was “these heated, tiny squabbles, this feverish small bustle of mankind, this minute swarming of the human insect , to the great, majestic, silent ocean of the Wheat itself!” Men are “mere gnats in the sunshine,” while the Wheat is “wrapped in Nirvanic calm . . .alone with the stars and with God.” (307)
When Presley has an audience with the rail executive Shelgrim, the business man disclaims all personal responsibility for his actions and for those of his corporation. He insists that “railroads build themselves . . . The Wheat grows itself . . . You are dealing with forces, young man, when you speak of Wheat and Railroads, not with men.” (395) and admits that he could declare bankruptcy, give up business, but even that drastic action would have no effect as another man would instantly arise to take his place and his profits.
Here the book's political theme collapses. Though the entire story is built of details that demonstrate the viciously rapacious nature of capitalism, and the utterly amoral behavior of businessmen, Shelgrim is here allowed to get himself off scot-free. In fact his plot is sentimental and sensational in its indictment of the corporation, with such passages as Hilda’s descent into prostitution and her mother’s starvation presented in a chapter which alternates sketches of her agony with Presley’s experience of a lavish dinner filled with exquisite plates and precious remarks. The rough and ready honor of the ranchers of which Magnus Derrick is the most pronounced example contrasts dramatically with the lack of scruples of Behrman, Shelgrim, and their henchmen.
Yet Norris’s hero is staggered and silent upon being told by a CEO that that the evil-doing of the ruling class is as inevitable as the movements of the heavenly spheres. Of course, no radical challenge is represented in the novel apart from the ranchers’ ill-organized vigilantism and the ultra-left anarchist Calaher, the bar-owner. The farmers are hoodwinked in their amateurish attempt at working corruption for their own benefit and they then fail in their first and only armed confrontation, and the anarchist is condemned outright.
I need not detail other factors that weaken the political-economic theme of the novel such as the use of an anti-Semitic stereotype in the villainous S. Behrman. [5] Further, many plot details in this novel, generally considered to be realistic or naturalistic are overdetermined by the political theme or implausible. How could the ranchers think that their nomination of Lyman Derrick, son of a prominent anti-railroad activist, would evade notice from the trust? It is a remarkable coincidence, even in the smaller society of turn-of-the-century San Francisco, that Presley knows socially the very people who are stealing from the ranchers with whom he is staying. Shelgrim’s ironic death, buried under wheat in the ship’s hold, is unlikely, but so is the whole notion that this particular ship, the very crop over which the principals have been contending, is being sent by the vacuous charity ladies to India.
The problem is epitomized in the character of Vanamee, a mystic figure without parallel in Norris’s other work. Vanamee is gifted with extrasensory powers. Further, he seeks and achieves a visionary state on which Norris leverages the entire thematic weight of his epic of the West. Vanamee blunts the social theme of the plot by assimilating the injustices of society (which are presumably, in theory at least, soluble through collective action) to those which are inevitable for every individual: mortality and the loss of love. When Vanamee manages to coax forth, in imagination at least, a reunion with his lost beloved or at any rate a glimpse of her daughter (her offspring, her karma, her immortality) in the growing wheat, he is vouchsafed an answer satisfying to his quest. His ultimate success is foreshadowed early in the book when her memory conjures up an officially capitalized (so the reader knows it is real) “Something.” (109) He need only recognize that he has already conquered “Death.”
As the ranchers’ case seems less and less viable, and their dispossession approaches inexorably, Vanamee finds peace again through his magical experiences. In “The Wheat! The Wheat!” he feels the mighty potency of a vegetative élan vital sufficient to sustain him. “Life out of death, eternity arising from out dissolution. There was the lesson. Angéle was not the symbol, but the proof of immortality. The seed, dying, rotting and corrupting in the earth, rising again in life unconquerable, and in immaculate purity. – Angéle dying as she gave birth to her little daughter, life springing from her death.” Death is swallowed up in Victory.” (269)
It is only this supernatural revelation that governs the book’s conclusion. Contrary to all the data of the sprawling Western story, flying in the face of the ruination of all the good and the system’s consistent favoring of the prosperity of the wicked, Norris is yet capable of telling the reader as the book closes, “truth,” it seems, “will, in the end, prevail, and all things surely, inevitably, resistlessly work together for good.” (448) It is difficult to see how this sentiment would prove much succor to the evicted farmers and their families. The fact that Norris, lacking a socialist alternative, was obliged to turn to metaphysics for optimism itself indicates the desperation of his case. His inclusion of a character with extra-sensory powers is, in a way, a poignant proof of the failure of the real world to offer much hope.
Norris is a powerful realistic writer. His association with muckrakers and his research into actual history of the San Joaquin Valley and the grand Cinerama-like scope of his Western epic command attention. His stories, while often overdrawn, are engaging. For me, his combination of naturalism and romance in The Octopus results in weakness both in the historical anti-monopoly theme and in the metaphysical one.
1. I quote from Belle M. Sherman’s translation published by Haskell House, New York, 1964 which is available online at Marxists.org. While the reader unfamiliar with naturalism might take the word “experimental” in Zola’s title to refer to literary innovation in general, in fact Zola meant to establish fiction on a specifically scientific basis, similar to medical experiments. His model is not a novel or earlier work of literary theory, but rather an exposition of scientific method, Claude Bernard’s Introduction à l'Étude de la Médecine Experimentale.
2. See “Productive Conditions of American Literature," Forum 27 [Aug. 1894] and “Local Color in Art” from Crumbling Idols.
3. Letter of February 14 1939 to Eldon Hill in the Hamlin Garland Papers, the Doheny Library, University of Southern California.
4. In The Responsibilities of the Novelist and other literary essays (NYC Doubleday) 1903.
5. None of the historical persons suggested as models for Behrman were Jewish. Doubtless Norris’s most egregious character of the sort was Zerkow in McTeague. Norris was influenced by Darwin and Spencer and his professor Joseph LeConte, the theistic evolutionist. His racist views, not only on Jews, but also regarding “darker” races, are offensively evident today. It is significant that such gross stereotyping was sufficiently normative when the book was published that years passed before the author’s anti-Semitism attracted comment.
6. Similarly in Chapter 19 of Grapes of Wrath Ma Joad offers a hopeful note. "Why, Tom - us people will go on livin' when all them people is gone. Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why, we're the people - we go on." Surely there is no sense apart from wish-fulfilment in which “them people” (the oppressors) will vanish while “the people” will finally enjoy their long-delayed victory. For the Steinbeck of that era, though, signs of political progress were apparent in spite of a system of oppression.
Theoretical statements of naturalism tend, like those of other schools, to overstate their innovations for polemical reasons. Thus Zola’s novels are in general more conventional than the reader of his essay on “The Experimental Novel” might expect. Americans influenced by Zola, such as Hamlin Garland and Frank Norris, enlarged on certain openings in their master’s original concepts, justifying new narratives shaped by realism, romanticism, and local color, as well as by naturalism. While to some extent this “softening” of naturalism was an inevitable response to the nature of the aesthetic text and the demands of readers, such a mixture also sometimes produced anomalies and dissonance. In Norris's The Octopus the character of Vanamee neatly epitomizes this contradiction which weakens rather than strengthens verisimilitude and the construction of theme.
Zola’s 1893 essay “The Experimental Novel” [1] outlines what the author claims to establish “a literature governed by science” (similar to the “higher critics” treatment of Biblical studies or Marx’s aim of rendering history). According to Zola naturalism “is an inevitable evolution” which “replaces purely imaginary novels by novels of observation and experiment.” The author confidently declares his new “experimental novel” to be “a consequence of the scientific evolution of the century.” He there maintains that the new type of fiction resembles “experimental medicine” in that it “adheres to no . . . doctrine nor any philosophical system.” To him “naturalism is not a personal fantasy, but . . . the intellectual movement of the century.” He insists “there is an absolute determinism in the existing conditions of natural phenomena” and objects to “imbecile arguments, about the impossibility of being strictly true, about the necessity of arranging facts to produce a work of art of any kind.”
He claims for literature a role precisely parallel to that of science. “The intellectual conquest of man consists in diminishing and driving back indeterminism, and so, gradually, by the aid of the experimental method, gaining ground for determinism.” For him “idealistic novelists deliberately remain in the unknown, through all sorts of religious and philosophical prejudices.” All such ideas are equally juvenile wish-fulfilment based on “the astounding pretense that the unknown is nobler and more beautiful than the known.” Thus romanticism is merely “ravings,” and “our age of lyricism” a “romantic disease.” A writer who does not rely on the scientific experimental method just as it is practiced in a laboratory inevitably finds himself among “the follies of the poets and the philosophers,” one of “the idealistic writers, who rely upon the irrational and the supernatural.”
Yet Zola is aware that the analogy between experimental science and fiction is imperfect. He must acknowledge that literature is in part an individual expression of a specific author. He defensively claims that literature “does not depend merely upon the author,” as “the personal feeling is but the first impulse.” Style, the unique fingerprint of each author is discounted. “Rhetoric, for the moment, has no place here. Let us first fix upon the method, on which there should be agreement, and after that accept all the different styles in letters which may be produced, looking upon them as the expressions of the literary temperament of the writers.” Again, Zola concedes aesthetic values, but only in a subordinate, in fact adventitious, role far from his view of narrative as a laboratory experiment.
The very starting point of Zola’s theory is the attempt to assimilate art to science. For this reason his naturalism ignores the definitive traits of the aesthetic text, among them the valorization of beauty (and its “lesser” cousins entertainment, sentiment, humor and thrills). Acknowledging the individuality of form and style, he regards these as trivial. While admitting that, traditionally, “form is sufficient to immortalize a work,” he reduces this effect to mere display: “the spectacle of a powerful individuality reproducing nature in superb language will interest all ages.” He associates a nebulous “genius” with all the elements of a novel that do not exist in his scientific model: affect, theme, and form. “Not only is a writer’s genius to be found in the feeling and in the idea a priori but also in the form and style. ”For his naturalistic novel, the writer’s desiderata are those of most non-aesthetic texts. “The excellence of a style depends upon its logic and clearness.” (How could any reader of Shakespeare persuade himself of such a formula?)
Hamlin Garland ‘s version of naturalism, which he called “veritism,” was far more nebulous. He defined his own practice of “realism (or veritism)” as “the truthful statement of an individual impression corrected by reference to the fact." [2] The new element is the term “impression,” influenced by painters of the day. Years later he described his notion of “veritism” as distinguishing him from the followers of Zola. Again calling himself an “impressionist,” he noted that imitation of reality required “verification,” obtainable by “comparing impressions” over a period of time. He was at pains to call for a wholesome, Whitmanic” “normalcy and decorum,” distinguished from the depictions of the underclass associated with “Zola and certain of the German novelists.” [3]
Frank Norris made his eclecticism explicit. He wrote, in fact, “A Plea for Romantic Fiction” [4] calling for “romanticism and not sentimentalism.” With a sneer at popular novelists, he says that while “sentiment will be handed down the scullery stairs” romance can be more than “a conjurer’s trick-box, full of flimsy quackeries;” it can be “an instrument” by which one may penetrate “down deep, into the red, living heart of things.” He maintains his loyalty to his master by asserting that Zola is “the very head of the Romanticists.” Pure realism is “harsh, loveless, colourless, and blunt,” capturing “only the surface of things.” To him romance is required for both emotion and themes in literature. Nature itself is unfeeling, very likely absurd. Only with the human connection, with “Romance” can the reader receive “a complete revelation of my neighbor’s secretest life,” dealing with “hopes and fears,” “joys and sorrows.” Romance “can teach you” “a nobler purpose and a mightier than mere amusement.” “To Romance belongs the wide world for range, and the unplumbed depths of the human heart, and the mystery of sex, and the problems of life, and the black, unsearched penetralia of the soul of man.” The terms “black” and “unsearched” indicate that this realm is a mystery, presenting the sort of material the aesthetic text is uniquely fit to interrogate.
For all of his gestures of obeisance toward Zola, Norris mixed romance, realism, and naturalism with considerable abandon. The Octopus, the first volume of a projected Epic of Wheat, unfinished at Norris’ death, certainly exhibits grand ambitions. Norris aimed at producing what his poetical character Presley could not -- the epic of the West, spectacular as the landscape, inscribed with all the tumultuous history of the region. For all the well-defined, idiosyncratic characters, his use of capitalized words -- Wheat, the People, and others -- implies the aim of writing something transcending individuality, and anticipates, for instance, Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.
Norris recurs to the theme of his characters’ passivity, their thorough subjugation to fate. Not only the trains and the harvesting equipment, but the very process of economic production itself is figured as a monster, barely controllable, as likely to threaten its human managers as to reward them. Even the fields of cultivated wheat are imbued with animation and even with a sort of enlightenment for Norris: what was “these heated, tiny squabbles, this feverish small bustle of mankind, this minute swarming of the human insect , to the great, majestic, silent ocean of the Wheat itself!” Men are “mere gnats in the sunshine,” while the Wheat is “wrapped in Nirvanic calm . . .alone with the stars and with God.” (307)
When Presley has an audience with the rail executive Shelgrim, the business man disclaims all personal responsibility for his actions and for those of his corporation. He insists that “railroads build themselves . . . The Wheat grows itself . . . You are dealing with forces, young man, when you speak of Wheat and Railroads, not with men.” (395) and admits that he could declare bankruptcy, give up business, but even that drastic action would have no effect as another man would instantly arise to take his place and his profits.
Here the book's political theme collapses. Though the entire story is built of details that demonstrate the viciously rapacious nature of capitalism, and the utterly amoral behavior of businessmen, Shelgrim is here allowed to get himself off scot-free. In fact his plot is sentimental and sensational in its indictment of the corporation, with such passages as Hilda’s descent into prostitution and her mother’s starvation presented in a chapter which alternates sketches of her agony with Presley’s experience of a lavish dinner filled with exquisite plates and precious remarks. The rough and ready honor of the ranchers of which Magnus Derrick is the most pronounced example contrasts dramatically with the lack of scruples of Behrman, Shelgrim, and their henchmen.
Yet Norris’s hero is staggered and silent upon being told by a CEO that that the evil-doing of the ruling class is as inevitable as the movements of the heavenly spheres. Of course, no radical challenge is represented in the novel apart from the ranchers’ ill-organized vigilantism and the ultra-left anarchist Calaher, the bar-owner. The farmers are hoodwinked in their amateurish attempt at working corruption for their own benefit and they then fail in their first and only armed confrontation, and the anarchist is condemned outright.
I need not detail other factors that weaken the political-economic theme of the novel such as the use of an anti-Semitic stereotype in the villainous S. Behrman. [5] Further, many plot details in this novel, generally considered to be realistic or naturalistic are overdetermined by the political theme or implausible. How could the ranchers think that their nomination of Lyman Derrick, son of a prominent anti-railroad activist, would evade notice from the trust? It is a remarkable coincidence, even in the smaller society of turn-of-the-century San Francisco, that Presley knows socially the very people who are stealing from the ranchers with whom he is staying. Shelgrim’s ironic death, buried under wheat in the ship’s hold, is unlikely, but so is the whole notion that this particular ship, the very crop over which the principals have been contending, is being sent by the vacuous charity ladies to India.
The problem is epitomized in the character of Vanamee, a mystic figure without parallel in Norris’s other work. Vanamee is gifted with extrasensory powers. Further, he seeks and achieves a visionary state on which Norris leverages the entire thematic weight of his epic of the West. Vanamee blunts the social theme of the plot by assimilating the injustices of society (which are presumably, in theory at least, soluble through collective action) to those which are inevitable for every individual: mortality and the loss of love. When Vanamee manages to coax forth, in imagination at least, a reunion with his lost beloved or at any rate a glimpse of her daughter (her offspring, her karma, her immortality) in the growing wheat, he is vouchsafed an answer satisfying to his quest. His ultimate success is foreshadowed early in the book when her memory conjures up an officially capitalized (so the reader knows it is real) “Something.” (109) He need only recognize that he has already conquered “Death.”
As the ranchers’ case seems less and less viable, and their dispossession approaches inexorably, Vanamee finds peace again through his magical experiences. In “The Wheat! The Wheat!” he feels the mighty potency of a vegetative élan vital sufficient to sustain him. “Life out of death, eternity arising from out dissolution. There was the lesson. Angéle was not the symbol, but the proof of immortality. The seed, dying, rotting and corrupting in the earth, rising again in life unconquerable, and in immaculate purity. – Angéle dying as she gave birth to her little daughter, life springing from her death.” Death is swallowed up in Victory.” (269)
It is only this supernatural revelation that governs the book’s conclusion. Contrary to all the data of the sprawling Western story, flying in the face of the ruination of all the good and the system’s consistent favoring of the prosperity of the wicked, Norris is yet capable of telling the reader as the book closes, “truth,” it seems, “will, in the end, prevail, and all things surely, inevitably, resistlessly work together for good.” (448) It is difficult to see how this sentiment would prove much succor to the evicted farmers and their families. The fact that Norris, lacking a socialist alternative, was obliged to turn to metaphysics for optimism itself indicates the desperation of his case. His inclusion of a character with extra-sensory powers is, in a way, a poignant proof of the failure of the real world to offer much hope.
Norris is a powerful realistic writer. His association with muckrakers and his research into actual history of the San Joaquin Valley and the grand Cinerama-like scope of his Western epic command attention. His stories, while often overdrawn, are engaging. For me, his combination of naturalism and romance in The Octopus results in weakness both in the historical anti-monopoly theme and in the metaphysical one.
1. I quote from Belle M. Sherman’s translation published by Haskell House, New York, 1964 which is available online at Marxists.org. While the reader unfamiliar with naturalism might take the word “experimental” in Zola’s title to refer to literary innovation in general, in fact Zola meant to establish fiction on a specifically scientific basis, similar to medical experiments. His model is not a novel or earlier work of literary theory, but rather an exposition of scientific method, Claude Bernard’s Introduction à l'Étude de la Médecine Experimentale.
2. See “Productive Conditions of American Literature," Forum 27 [Aug. 1894] and “Local Color in Art” from Crumbling Idols.
3. Letter of February 14 1939 to Eldon Hill in the Hamlin Garland Papers, the Doheny Library, University of Southern California.
4. In The Responsibilities of the Novelist and other literary essays (NYC Doubleday) 1903.
5. None of the historical persons suggested as models for Behrman were Jewish. Doubtless Norris’s most egregious character of the sort was Zerkow in McTeague. Norris was influenced by Darwin and Spencer and his professor Joseph LeConte, the theistic evolutionist. His racist views, not only on Jews, but also regarding “darker” races, are offensively evident today. It is significant that such gross stereotyping was sufficiently normative when the book was published that years passed before the author’s anti-Semitism attracted comment.
6. Similarly in Chapter 19 of Grapes of Wrath Ma Joad offers a hopeful note. "Why, Tom - us people will go on livin' when all them people is gone. Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why, we're the people - we go on." Surely there is no sense apart from wish-fulfilment in which “them people” (the oppressors) will vanish while “the people” will finally enjoy their long-delayed victory. For the Steinbeck of that era, though, signs of political progress were apparent in spite of a system of oppression.
Thursday, February 1, 2018
The View from a Ten-Foot-Square Hut
The title of Kano-no-Chomei’s Hojoki, an early thirteenth century work in cadenced prose rich in figures of speech, might be translated "writings from a ten foot square hut.” It belongs to the genre zuihitsu or "pen at will," suggesting something of an informal subjective essayistic sketchbook. The profound sonority of the opening words survives in the translation by Yasushiko Moriguchi and David Jenkins.
The flowing river
never stops
and yet the water
never stays
the same.
Foam floats
upon the pools
scattering, reforming,
never lingering long.
So it is with man
and all his dwelling places
here on earth.
The rest is an explication, providing vivid images to reinforce this generalization. First, the author recounts numerous disasters that befell Kyoto during his lifetime: fire, flood, hurricane, disease, earthquake, and the human upheaval caused by the relocation of the capital to Fukuyama (now part of Kobe). The implication is that such cataclysms are particularly dramatic incidents of the constant instability that Buddhism teaches characterizes all things. Though Chomei had been a prominent official from an important family and had achieved success, for instance in placing his poems in the collection issued by the emperor himself, he had also suffered the sort of reversals common to the less aggressive or less fortunate in the highly competitive courtly society of Heian Japan. In his fifties, he became a monk and retired to a hermitage, eventually occupying the "ten foot square hut" of the title. Remarkably, his consciousness continued to turn upon itself, and even in the first portion of the essay, he looks directly at our common human portion, devoid of supernatural consolation, and at himself, and declares his uncertainty with candor, noting in an early passage:.
People die
and are born –
whenc e they came
and where they go,
I do not know.
More dramatically, at the very conclusion, rather than suggesting his sage serenity, Chomei radically questions the trajectory of his life. He contemplates his own attachment to his shack and even asks himself, “Has your discerning mind/ just served to drive you mad." Suddenly this medieval East Asian writer seems very intimate and modern.
In Moriguchi and Jenkins’ edition Chomei's prose has been broken up into scattered free verse phrases which seem almost justified by the ephemeral impressionistic tone of the content. Less happy, though less important, are Michael Hoffmann's illustrations meant to be reminiscent of sume-i. I confess, though, that these, as well as the wide open poetic style, seem designed to appeal to today's Western quasi-Buddhists and to me as one of them and thus I suppose it is that I write this essay. One may suspect, though, that both the editorially introduced verse form and the washy illustrations evolved at editorial meetings with the primary purpose of plumping the insubstantial book up to the point it could be perfect bound.
In the moralizing middle portion the writer wonders how and where to live if one wishes peace. Here is the same philosophic ideal pursued in ancient Greece, wisdom defined as how to live a good life. The point about time’s unceasing Heraclitean flow is simple and straightforward, one of the most familiar topoi in East Asia as in Europe. The opening of the roughly contemporaneous Heike Monogatari which traces the warfare of the Taira and Minamoto clans, the very sort of struggle that upended Chomei’s world, uses a four-character expression from the (apparently Chinese) Humane King Sutra that became proverbial and which applies well: "the prosperous inevitably decline,”
In this same section Chomei raises political complaints on behalf of the poor but his motive may be more personal disappointment than compassion for all sentient beings. His own career frustrations doubtless influenced his views which often seem to reflect more the jaundiced view of the disillusioned member of the higher echelons than a righteous crusader for justice. The author does not suggest any possible reform or solution. The ruling class’s oppression of the less powerful is merely an example of how life is fundamentally unfair, all but unlivable. Here is less a radical social justice critique than a recognition of suffering that leads as it did for Buddha to the quest for enlightenment
Yet the author remains, after decades of meditation, suspended over the existential abyss. Among his dark thoughts, he declares his "heart is soaked in sin." In what way does he differ from a seventeenth century Puritan agonizing over the uncertain state of his soul? Perhaps less than we expect. If it seems less profound and poignant to imagine Jonathan Edwards wondering if he had lived a good life and admitting, "To these questions of mind/ there is no answer," it may be that we are selling Jonathan Edwards short.
At any rate Hojoki provides contact with a view with which many today are sympathetic, though I have yet to hear of members of the ruling class living in a single room with a dirt floor. The fact that such renunciation did happen in China and in Japan is one measure of the sophistication of those cultures, and the fact that one such moderate ascetic felt no more confident about his pursuit of enlightenment than the reader may indicate that certain human problems are insoluble, though they reward such precise exploration as Chomei has left us. In his Hosshinshu, a book of stories of recluses, Chomei distinguishes the hijiri, the true holy men, from tonsiesha, those who aspire but in some degree fall short, as well as from the inja who withdraw from society but pursue art as semi-secular aesthetes rather than single-mindedly seeking enlightenment. If this last category proved to be the highest the author reached, surely the vast majority of his readers will be, if anything, even less ambitious, yet even a dilettante at both poetry and meditation may still admire the beauty and drama of the record of Chomei’s life.
Walking the Via Negativa
The believer in nothing may find that nothing can be as substantial a deity as old Jehovah or bright Apollo. Though many sensibilities seek the warm (but sometimes frightening) anthropomorphic god provided by myth, others, miraculously, perhaps, find a secure foundation in a lack.
For the spiritually inclined unbeliever to whom the deity of childhood is inconceivable and indeed who cannot even understand how any contemporary educated person can continue loyal to institutional religion, the data reporting mystical experience retain a different sort of truth value. There can be no denying experiences of unity with the divine throughout history and around the world. Apart from the mystics, some theologians have laid out a theoretical basis for a faithless faith. The skeptic will take particular interest in the apophatic tradition, the via negativa, which eschews positive assertions about god, describing the divine in terms of what the godhead is not and basing an authentic spirituality in what we do not know.
Hinduism and Buddhism have been more hospitable to apophatic theology than Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. In Asia the phrase “neti, neti” (“not this or that”) is the definition of Brahman in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad and the Avadhuta Gita. [1] For the eighth century philosopher Adi Shankara the highest concept of the divine was Nirguna Brahma, a Brahma without qualities. In general Advaita (non-dualistic) schools of Vedanta and Jnana Yoga employ such language. Jainism, Buddhism, and Daoism, have in fact no god, though devotees have not been slow to invent quasi-divine figures such as the Jain Tirthankaras and the many godlings of popular Buddhism and Daoism. Though the Abrahamic religions are by comparison resistant to a truly agnostic theology, their more philosophic and mystical practitioners have regularly condemned anthropomorphism.
Buddhism is notoriously receptive to agnostic or atheist ideas. When the Buddha was asked about the nature of the divine and the afterlife, he responded that one should attend no more to such matters than a man injured by a poisoned arrow need learn all the details about his attacker before tending to his wound.
And why are they undeclared by me? Because they are not connected with the goal, are not fundamental to the holy life. They do not lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation, calming, direct knowledge, self-awakening, Unbinding. That's why they are undeclared by me. [2]
Likewise in the works of Nagarjuna, founder of the Madhyamika school of Buddhism, all phenomena, including acts of cognition, are empty. Even the deity is a sort of Kantian noumenon inaccessible to the human mind. The Aïguttara Nikàya and the Jataka stories both deny a personal all-powerful god. [3]
Buddhism regularly teaches, in contrast to the notion of a savior, that one must not look for aid from some supernatural being. In the pursuit of Ultimate Reality one can depend only on individual effort.
By ourselves is evil done,
By ourselves we pain endure,
By ourselves we cease from wrong,
By ourselves become we pure.
No one saves us but ourselves.
No one can and no one may.
We ourselves must walk the path:
Buddhas only show the way. [4]
For Buddhism what is significant is ridding oneself (and for Mahayanists other sentient beings as well) of suffering. Inquiries about the afterlife, the eternity and infinity of the creation and other issues are dismissed as “the fourteen unanswerable questions” (though the numbers differs in different texts) which are fruitless to pursue. [5]
The most significant source of apophatic theology in Christianity is pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, in particular his Divine Names and Mystical Theology. Dionysius built on his Platonic and neo-Platonic predecessors [6] when he concluded that the description of Ultimate Reality is impossible. For Dionysius the contemplation of God leads to “a divine silence, darkness, and unknowing.” The truths about God are "unspeakable and unknowable,” they surpass "our logical and intellective power and activity" Thus one may not predicate anything whatever of the deity without falling into error. Dionysius did make allowances for some scripturally based epithets and nodded to tradition, saying "we must praise the providence of divine dominion, the source of goods, [in terms taken] from all the things that are caused.” According to Dionysius human reasoning which takes place in time cannot access the divine, while what he called our “intellective” faculty can grasp truth in an instant. This sort of knowledge, similar to what Augustine called illumination and Boethius “intelligence” is capable of a vision of God.
The notion that God may be apprehended in a transformative realization leads naturally to an openness to the experiential data of mystics: those who enter into union with it [God], "according to the ceasing of all intellectual activity, . . . praise it best of all by denying all beings of it.” [7]
For Gregory of Nyssa, the fourth century bishop, a necessary consequence of the infinity of God is his belief that God, as limitless, is essentially incomprehensible to the limited minds of created beings. To him “every concept that comes from some comprehensible image, by an approximate understanding and by guessing at the Divine nature, constitutes a idol of God and does not proclaim God."
This concept of the divine, with its close links to Plato and Proclus, was brought forward in a tradition including Maximus the Confessor and Johannes Scotus Eriugena to the high Middle Ages when it proved fundamental to the mystics of the fourteenth century such as Richard Rolle and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing. Later Meister Eckhart declared, citing Dionysius, “God is naught. Meaning that God is as incomprehensible as naught.” For him “the height of gnosis is to know in agnosia.” [9]
Likewise, while popular Judaism can be thoroughly anthropomorphic, more sophisticated thinkers have outlined an apophatic deity as well. To Philo Judaeus the anthropomorphism of a literal reading of the Bible was impious as well as mistaken. He considered it manifestly absurd to ascribe to God purely human attributes. [10] His most distinguished successor was Maimonides who in his Guide for the Perplexed insists that “the negative attributes of God are the true attributes.” [11]
This smattering of theologians of widely varying views is hardly meant to indicate that I accept the view of godhead proposed by any one of them or even that I fully understand their positions. Rather it is excellent evidence that I and perhaps you are not wholly idiosyncratic in the attempt to save spirituality from the supernatural. The experience of people as far back as records exist has included experiences of what Romain Rolland in a 1927 letter to Freud, called "oceanic feeling." [12] Whatever one may make of it, the records of such sensation s are clear and consistent throughout human culture. There can be no doubt that people, often using one of a variety of mind-altering techniques such as fasting and meditation, have through the cultivation of cosmos-connected consciousness, achieved an enviable level of serenity and satisfaction. These empirical data carry far more weight than the theories of thinkers seeking to justify such spiritual endeavors, yet they imply the need for each individual to pursue enlightenment anew. The words, even of Gautama Buddha, are, "like a man pointing a finger at the moon to show it to others who should follow the direction of the finger to look at the moon. If they look at the finger and mistake it for the moon, they lose sight of both the moon and the finger." [13] And this orientation to the lunar sphere, which is to say to the sublime, persists in spite of the fact that the liberated mind perceives the hollowness of all phenomena, “all construings, all excogitations, all I-making & mine-making & obsessions with conceit.” [14]
1. See the Avadhuta Gita 1.25 and the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 2.3.6.
2. Majjhima Nikaya 63 MN 63, called the Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta.
3. Aïguttara Nikàya A.I.174, Jataka VI,208.
4. Dhammapada 165, here in Paul Carus’ translation.
5. Of course, many Buddhists reverted to the Hindu belief in reincarnation as well as to the apotheosis of Buddha and other figures.
6. See Timaeus 28c.
7. All references to pseudo-Dionysius may be found in Mystical Theology I, 1-3 and Divine Names cols. 585-588, and 593 and in Harrington and Corrigan’s article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
8. The Life of Moses; translation, intro. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson ; pref. by John Meyendorff , p. 81.
9. The Divine Being, Sermon XV.
10. De Confusione Linguarum, 27 [i. 425].
11. In Chapter 58.
12. Discussed by Freud in Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1929).
13. Surangama Sutra trans. by Charles Luk.
14. Aggi-Vacchagotta Sutta: To Vacchagotta on Fire, translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.
Tristan Tzara, Poet of Manifestos
Numbers in parentheses refer to Tzara’s manifestos listed just following the essay. I used Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries translated by Barbara Wright from Riverrun Press, New York to avoid quoting in French and including translations. The originals are readily available.
Numbers in brackets indicate endnotes.
Tristan Tzara pioneered the development of the manifesto as a literary form, [1] a movement across movements that persisted throughout the twentieth century and, in a quieter form, into the present. To me his poetry and drama generally work best in performance. While on the printed page the appeal of much of his work is less apparent, his manifestos retain their lively and likable energy.
The invention of this new genre, as well as the reinvention of performance poetry, was, perhaps, natural given Dada’s profound and polemical skepticism. For Tzara, Arp, and others a fiercely radical questioning approaches nihilism like an asymptote, yet their political, aesthetic, and spiritual idealism remains always a flicker, peyrceptible to the discerning reader. In the realms of conceptual art, chance, and the privileged valuation of the ephemeral, Tzara’s early twentieth century pronouncements are groundbreaking.
To be sure, Tzara could not have been clearer about his manifestos being anti-manifestos. In his seminal “Dada Manifesto” he notes the paradox and readily admits his self-contradiction: “I am writing a manifesto and there is nothing I want, and yet I’m saying certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am against principles.” He later writes under the guise of Monsieur AA, the Antiphilosopher. Dada, he says, “doubts everything.” “Everything we look at,” he insists, “is false.” “We don’t accept any theories.” Dada is “a word that throws up ideas so they can be shot down.” (2)
Playing up the destructive potential of his position in dramatic form, he proclaims ”there is great negative, destructive work to be done.” Dada is “like a raging wind that rips up the clothes of clouds and prayers, we are preparing for the great spectacle of disaster, conflagration, and decomposition.” (2) Anticipating Jimi Hendrix, he calls for musicians to smash their instruments on stage. (3)[2] “Every act,” according to him, “is a cerebral revolver shot.” (6)
If nothing whatever can be known, making everyone an "idiot,” as Tzara calls himself and his readers alike (5), what then? If the poet is a mere “fart in a steam engine,” (7) what more can be said? Avoiding as Gorgias had done millennia before, the desolate and boring aporia that might result from a conviction that Truth is altogether inaccessible, Tzara turns to his own subjectivity. This is essential because, “a work of art is never beautiful, by decree, objectively, for everyone.” (3) Since every consciousness is unique, the individual must shed “the pursuit of I worship you.” (4) Authority, including Tzara’s authority, is illusory. Thus the manifesto reader must not be “led astray by Aaism,” (4) that is to say, by the very document he is reading. Tzara rejects the very possibility of discursive thought. Some explain, he says, while others learn, but both deceive themselves. Abolish both the teacher and the learner and you have dada. (7) He calls, in fact, for “NO MORE WORDS,” though he cannot avoid using words as he does so. (5)
Only by entering into his own mind can the poet make progress: “With the words I put down on paper I enter, solemnly, into myself” (6) Tzara refers to this inward turning as “selfkleptomania.” (7) To him he is simply making explicit what is inevitable in any case. As he says, one may try to write a manifesto, but “it’s your autobiography that you’re hatching under the belly of the flowering cerebellum.” (7)
The dominant result of this introspection is an extraordinary ebullience, irrational exuberance and high spirits arising from some unquestioned, unquestionable base in a pyrotechnic display of excited language. Delightful little verbal displays pop off here and there. He maintains, for example that art is to be identified not only with Dada, but equally with plesiosaurus or handkerchief. (3) He renews the reader’s subscription to “the celluloid love that creaks/ like metal gates” (4) The phrase “for the saxophone wears like a rose the assassination of the visceral car driver” occurs in the middle of a passage as scintillating and fast-moving as the world of subatomic particles. That passage ends “thus drummed the maize, the alarm and pellagra where the matches grow.” (6) At times, Tzara’s manifestos are so rich in this pure poetry that one feels as though one is eating bonbons. “Dada is a dog – a compass –the lining of the stomach – neither new nor a nude Japanese girl – a gasometer of jangled feelings.” (7) And so it goes, infused with wild unpredictable imagination and passionate enthusiasm.
In the end, “Dada is our intensity.” Spectacle rules: “We are circus ringmasters.” “It’s still shit, but from now on we want to shit in different colors” (6) the cosmos then becomes a marvel, “the spermatozoon ballet” (4), at which one can only look on in wonder.
Yet, Tzara sounds a word of warning. Significance is lurking in the shadows. “While we put on a show of being facile, we are actually seeking for the secret essence of things.” (1) Tzara’s pseudonym on top of a pseudonym for several of his manifestos is M. Antipyrine, a name suggesting a healing nostrum. The psycho-aesthetic-spiritual solution suggested by Tzara (and other Dada artists) has much in common with Zen Buddhism. [3]
Tzara’s pseudonym with its associations with the French word triste draws attention to the universal suffering that motivates the Buddhist search for enlightenment. [4] He repeats the line “You’re all going to die,” (7) as if this fact poses the essential problem of life. The solution to this problem is in both cases experiential rather than logical. Tzara insists that “logic is always false,” (2) a contention that, were it not so baldly stated, could be a portion of a Zen sutra. He speaks nearly explicitly about enlightenment: “We really know what we are talking about, because we have experienced the trembling and the awakening.” (7) Dada arises not from intellection but from living: Dada, Tzara says, is “the roar of contorted pains, the interweaving of contraries and of all contradictions, freaks, and irrelevancies: LIFE.”(3) The twentieth century artist recalls Nagarjuna and Advaitist Vedanta when he proclaims that dualities are a fraud, specifying “order=disorder; ego=non-ego; affirmation=negation.” (2) [5]
Finally, and most dramatically, Tzara agrees with the sages that we are really liberated all along, though unconscious of the fact. Nothing really changes with sublime knowledge. One returns at last to the point one had occupied all along. The “three laws” of God are “eating, making love, and shitting.” (6) The story is told of Baizhang Huaihai among others that, when asked how he pursued enlightenment, replied “When hungry, I eat; when tired, sleep.” Yet somehow, in both cases, everything is transfigured.
1. Monsieur Antipyrine’s Manifesto 1916
2. Dada Manifesto 1918
3. Unpretentious Proclamation 1919
4. Manifesto of Monsieur AA the Antiphilosopher
5. Tristan Tzara
6. Monsieur AA the Antiphilosopher Sends Us this Manifesto
7. Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love
Endnotes
1. The word manifesto had earlier been used for many political declarations such as Bolivar’s “Cartagena Manifesto,” Peel’s “Tamworth Manifesto,” and, most notably, Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century several anarchist manifestos appeared. Very likely the move from the social realm to the aesthetic was facilitated by the military analogy suggested by the term avant-garde.
2. Hendrix did this at Monterey in 1967, but he had been preceded by Jerry Lee Lewis destroying pianos in the 1950s as wel l as by Pete Townshend, Jeff Beck and others. In the realm of avant-garde art, Nam June Paik smashed a violin in 1962 as part of his "One for Violin Solo" and the gesture had become enough of a convention that a Destruction in Art Symposium was held in London in 1966 which involved a number of “destruction events.” Two years later a similar event was held in New York City. Oddly, Townshend had studied with Gustav Metzger who was the central figure in the London symposium.
3. I am hardly the first to note the similarities. See, for instance, Won Ko’s Buddhist Elements in Dada: A Comparison of Tristan Tzara, Takahashi Shinkichi and Their Fellow Poets.
4. In fact the name Tristan is Celtic meaning noise, and is not derived from the Latin tristis, though the association is prominent in Tristan and Iseult as well as with Tzara, who, according to Paul Cernat’s Avangarda românească și complexul periferiei: primul val, said that it was meant to recall the French phrase “triste âne tzara” ("sad donkey Tzara"). According to Serge Fauchereau's report (also recorded in Cernat), Colomba Voronca recalled Tzara’s explaining it as a play on the Romanian phrase trist în țară, meaning "sad in the country." In 1925 he legally changed his name from Samy Rosenstock to Tristan Tzara.
5. Tzara reinforces the point while incidentally anticipating Derridean deconstruction in section IV of 7.
Numbers in brackets indicate endnotes.
Tristan Tzara pioneered the development of the manifesto as a literary form, [1] a movement across movements that persisted throughout the twentieth century and, in a quieter form, into the present. To me his poetry and drama generally work best in performance. While on the printed page the appeal of much of his work is less apparent, his manifestos retain their lively and likable energy.
The invention of this new genre, as well as the reinvention of performance poetry, was, perhaps, natural given Dada’s profound and polemical skepticism. For Tzara, Arp, and others a fiercely radical questioning approaches nihilism like an asymptote, yet their political, aesthetic, and spiritual idealism remains always a flicker, peyrceptible to the discerning reader. In the realms of conceptual art, chance, and the privileged valuation of the ephemeral, Tzara’s early twentieth century pronouncements are groundbreaking.
To be sure, Tzara could not have been clearer about his manifestos being anti-manifestos. In his seminal “Dada Manifesto” he notes the paradox and readily admits his self-contradiction: “I am writing a manifesto and there is nothing I want, and yet I’m saying certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am against principles.” He later writes under the guise of Monsieur AA, the Antiphilosopher. Dada, he says, “doubts everything.” “Everything we look at,” he insists, “is false.” “We don’t accept any theories.” Dada is “a word that throws up ideas so they can be shot down.” (2)
Playing up the destructive potential of his position in dramatic form, he proclaims ”there is great negative, destructive work to be done.” Dada is “like a raging wind that rips up the clothes of clouds and prayers, we are preparing for the great spectacle of disaster, conflagration, and decomposition.” (2) Anticipating Jimi Hendrix, he calls for musicians to smash their instruments on stage. (3)[2] “Every act,” according to him, “is a cerebral revolver shot.” (6)
If nothing whatever can be known, making everyone an "idiot,” as Tzara calls himself and his readers alike (5), what then? If the poet is a mere “fart in a steam engine,” (7) what more can be said? Avoiding as Gorgias had done millennia before, the desolate and boring aporia that might result from a conviction that Truth is altogether inaccessible, Tzara turns to his own subjectivity. This is essential because, “a work of art is never beautiful, by decree, objectively, for everyone.” (3) Since every consciousness is unique, the individual must shed “the pursuit of I worship you.” (4) Authority, including Tzara’s authority, is illusory. Thus the manifesto reader must not be “led astray by Aaism,” (4) that is to say, by the very document he is reading. Tzara rejects the very possibility of discursive thought. Some explain, he says, while others learn, but both deceive themselves. Abolish both the teacher and the learner and you have dada. (7) He calls, in fact, for “NO MORE WORDS,” though he cannot avoid using words as he does so. (5)
Only by entering into his own mind can the poet make progress: “With the words I put down on paper I enter, solemnly, into myself” (6) Tzara refers to this inward turning as “selfkleptomania.” (7) To him he is simply making explicit what is inevitable in any case. As he says, one may try to write a manifesto, but “it’s your autobiography that you’re hatching under the belly of the flowering cerebellum.” (7)
The dominant result of this introspection is an extraordinary ebullience, irrational exuberance and high spirits arising from some unquestioned, unquestionable base in a pyrotechnic display of excited language. Delightful little verbal displays pop off here and there. He maintains, for example that art is to be identified not only with Dada, but equally with plesiosaurus or handkerchief. (3) He renews the reader’s subscription to “the celluloid love that creaks/ like metal gates” (4) The phrase “for the saxophone wears like a rose the assassination of the visceral car driver” occurs in the middle of a passage as scintillating and fast-moving as the world of subatomic particles. That passage ends “thus drummed the maize, the alarm and pellagra where the matches grow.” (6) At times, Tzara’s manifestos are so rich in this pure poetry that one feels as though one is eating bonbons. “Dada is a dog – a compass –the lining of the stomach – neither new nor a nude Japanese girl – a gasometer of jangled feelings.” (7) And so it goes, infused with wild unpredictable imagination and passionate enthusiasm.
In the end, “Dada is our intensity.” Spectacle rules: “We are circus ringmasters.” “It’s still shit, but from now on we want to shit in different colors” (6) the cosmos then becomes a marvel, “the spermatozoon ballet” (4), at which one can only look on in wonder.
Yet, Tzara sounds a word of warning. Significance is lurking in the shadows. “While we put on a show of being facile, we are actually seeking for the secret essence of things.” (1) Tzara’s pseudonym on top of a pseudonym for several of his manifestos is M. Antipyrine, a name suggesting a healing nostrum. The psycho-aesthetic-spiritual solution suggested by Tzara (and other Dada artists) has much in common with Zen Buddhism. [3]
Tzara’s pseudonym with its associations with the French word triste draws attention to the universal suffering that motivates the Buddhist search for enlightenment. [4] He repeats the line “You’re all going to die,” (7) as if this fact poses the essential problem of life. The solution to this problem is in both cases experiential rather than logical. Tzara insists that “logic is always false,” (2) a contention that, were it not so baldly stated, could be a portion of a Zen sutra. He speaks nearly explicitly about enlightenment: “We really know what we are talking about, because we have experienced the trembling and the awakening.” (7) Dada arises not from intellection but from living: Dada, Tzara says, is “the roar of contorted pains, the interweaving of contraries and of all contradictions, freaks, and irrelevancies: LIFE.”(3) The twentieth century artist recalls Nagarjuna and Advaitist Vedanta when he proclaims that dualities are a fraud, specifying “order=disorder; ego=non-ego; affirmation=negation.” (2) [5]
Finally, and most dramatically, Tzara agrees with the sages that we are really liberated all along, though unconscious of the fact. Nothing really changes with sublime knowledge. One returns at last to the point one had occupied all along. The “three laws” of God are “eating, making love, and shitting.” (6) The story is told of Baizhang Huaihai among others that, when asked how he pursued enlightenment, replied “When hungry, I eat; when tired, sleep.” Yet somehow, in both cases, everything is transfigured.
1. Monsieur Antipyrine’s Manifesto 1916
2. Dada Manifesto 1918
3. Unpretentious Proclamation 1919
4. Manifesto of Monsieur AA the Antiphilosopher
5. Tristan Tzara
6. Monsieur AA the Antiphilosopher Sends Us this Manifesto
7. Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love
Endnotes
1. The word manifesto had earlier been used for many political declarations such as Bolivar’s “Cartagena Manifesto,” Peel’s “Tamworth Manifesto,” and, most notably, Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century several anarchist manifestos appeared. Very likely the move from the social realm to the aesthetic was facilitated by the military analogy suggested by the term avant-garde.
2. Hendrix did this at Monterey in 1967, but he had been preceded by Jerry Lee Lewis destroying pianos in the 1950s as wel l as by Pete Townshend, Jeff Beck and others. In the realm of avant-garde art, Nam June Paik smashed a violin in 1962 as part of his "One for Violin Solo" and the gesture had become enough of a convention that a Destruction in Art Symposium was held in London in 1966 which involved a number of “destruction events.” Two years later a similar event was held in New York City. Oddly, Townshend had studied with Gustav Metzger who was the central figure in the London symposium.
3. I am hardly the first to note the similarities. See, for instance, Won Ko’s Buddhist Elements in Dada: A Comparison of Tristan Tzara, Takahashi Shinkichi and Their Fellow Poets.
4. In fact the name Tristan is Celtic meaning noise, and is not derived from the Latin tristis, though the association is prominent in Tristan and Iseult as well as with Tzara, who, according to Paul Cernat’s Avangarda românească și complexul periferiei: primul val, said that it was meant to recall the French phrase “triste âne tzara” ("sad donkey Tzara"). According to Serge Fauchereau's report (also recorded in Cernat), Colomba Voronca recalled Tzara’s explaining it as a play on the Romanian phrase trist în țară, meaning "sad in the country." In 1925 he legally changed his name from Samy Rosenstock to Tristan Tzara.
5. Tzara reinforces the point while incidentally anticipating Derridean deconstruction in section IV of 7.
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