Enoch Arden as Popular Literature

 

 

     In his own day, the prestige of Alfred, Lord Tennyson was immense.  He was the longest-serving Poet Laureate in British history and to many embodied Victorian values in his very skillful, high-minded, and stately works.  A reviewer spoke for a great many, critics as well as the general population, when in the middle of the poet’s career he declared unreservedly “We have no great living poet but Alfred Tennyson.” [1]  His reputation remained potent enough that my generation still read Idylls of the King in junior high where a common curriculum made it many American students’ first substantial poetic text (as well as, perhaps, for many their last). 

     In the 1860s Tennyson was clearly the most prominent of British poets, and Enoch Arden was one of his most popular works, selling 17,000 copies on the day of publication and over 60,000 the first year.  Fancy illustrated gift editions and translations then appeared, both authorized and pirated. [2]  A reviewer hailed the poem as “the most popular poem since the days of Byron.” [3]  The initial review in the New York Times put the author’s name in all capitals, lauding “TENNYSON” as “the poet of the age, whose song reflects faithfully the movement, the intellectual tendencies, the moral conflict, and all that goes to make up the complex sum of our civilization.” [4]  a recent scholar notes that in America editions of Enoch Arden ”were too numerous and their sale too rapid for accurate recording.” [5]

  The poem’s appeal persisted.  In 1897 Richard Strauss wrote a piano composition to be performed along with a dramatic reading of the poem, indicating the poem’s success among Continental readers. [6]   Three stage versions and four silent movie treatments were produced, including a 1922 version by D. W. Griffith. 

     Yet in the marketplace of literature Tennyson’s stock was falling.  Already in 1926 a judicious critic noted “Tennyson pre-eminently represents Victorian literature, a privilege which to-day is in the eyes of many one of his shortcomings.” [6]  Literary judgments of Tennyson’s reputation had dramatically slumped, with writers leading critics in revising their parents’ literary judgement.  Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus, for instance, dismissed the poet, remarking, "Tennyson a poet? Why, he’s only a rhymester," [7] and in Ulysses he is called “Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet.” [8]  Hardy’s late (1922) poem “An Ancient to Ancients” describes the decay of the laureate’s appeal mercilessly yet with a powerful sense of longing, nostalgia, and loss, noting that "The bower we shrined to Tennyson" . . ."is roof-wrecked . . "damps there drip upon/ Sagged seats, the creeper-nails are rust,/ The spider is sole denizen."    

                  The very reasons that made Enoch Arden so popular in its on day limited its long-term literary reputation.  There is no question of Tennyson’s skill and craft.  The greatest master of sound in English poetry since Pope, his melodies are regularly precise and satisfying.  The opening of Enoch Arden has sharp and well-formulated images, with a painterly depiction of the scene.  

                                               a hazelwood,

By autumn nutters haunted, flourishes

Green in a cuplike hollow of the down. 

This opening sketch concludes with the three principals as children making sand castles on the shore, an effective symbolic premonition of their ill-starred plans. 

     Soon, however, qualities emerge that might ultimately prove Tennyson’s aesthetic vulnerabilities.  The vigorous Enoch sometimes bests Philip in a fight, causing his friend to declare, “I hate you, Enoch!”  

                                                          at this

The little wife would weep for company,

And pray them not to quarrel for her sake,

And say she would be little wife to both. (33-36) 

This is surely by most any standards “twee.”  The “little” before “wife” insists on the already cloying cuteness even further.  Tennyson may be salvaged by admirers who could maintain that this prettiness is only a set-up for the cruel caricature that life makes of the “wife to both” notion, [9] but through the rest of the poem he consciously aims at highly-colored sentimental effects emphasizing the cute and the pathetic. 

     The reader of the poem’s latter scenes may think as Enoch wastes away in sickly virtue of Wilde’s well-known line “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.” [10]  Wilde went for aphoristic reversals, but his play was rarely verbal alone.  He justifies his witticism elsewhere, noting “a sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.” [11]   

     From the start a taste for the sentimental found both ardent admirers and mockers.  The earliest citation of the word in the OED is from a 1749 letter which indicates both the term’s novelty and ambiguity, yet also indicates its vogue. "What, in your opinion,” Lady Bradshagel asked Samuel Richardson whose novels were thought to contain fine feelings indeed, “is the meaning of the word sentimental, so much in vogue among the polite...Everything clever and agreeable is comprehended in that word...such a one is a sentimental man; we were a sentimental party; I have been taking a sentimental walk." [12]  Not only “everything clever and agreeable,” that is to say, what is socially attractive, but aesthetic and moral excellence as well were implied by eighteenth century notions of sensibility. [13]  A popular example, albeit using the term “sensibility” rather than “sentimentalism,” indicates the claims of the partisans of feeling.

 

Sweet Sensibility! Thou keen delight!

Thou hasty moral! Sudden sense of right!

Thou untaught goodness! Virtue's precious seed!

Thou sweet precursor of the gen'rous deed!

[14] 

In his History of England (1771) Oliver Goldsmith noted the “refinements” brought to Britain through Roman occupation, but noted “They were only incapable of sentimental pleasure” [15] as though that were the crowning attribute of a sophisticated society. 

     Yet from the time of its birth, the eighteenth-century concept of the “sentimental” also attracted satirists.  Whereas Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) popularized a hero whose sensibilities and the sympathetic bonds with others they inspire form the basis for both a model of a harmonious society and a genuine individual moral virtue, Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (1768) is decidedly more ambivalent.  Yorick is often absurd and misguided when he feels uplifted by lofty sentiments.  In 1784 a poet pointedly associated “mischief” with “your dying sentimentals,” [16] referring to the habit of fainting by men and women of sensitivity in novels and, apparently, in person.  An anonymous Veronese painting from 1750 depicts “A Lady Fainting During a Party.”  So many fictional protagonists were prone to such incidents that Jane Austen in her juvenile novel Love and Freindship [sic] (1790), imitating but also reacting against Samuel Richardson, a character prudently provides advice to another: “Beware of swoon, dear Laura . . . Run mad as often as you chuse, but do not faint.”

     In 1797 Coleridge published a set of sonnets attributed to Nehemiah Higginbottom satirizing the vogue of sensibility, what he called in Biographia Literaria “the spirit of doleful egotism.” [17]  The appeal of sentiment was not in fact vanishing, though.  It was probably increasing, becoming perhaps less prominent among poets and the upper reaches of the beau-monde but more popular among the less well-to-do and less educated.  As late as 1899 an article in a popular magazine celebrated "The Decay of Sensibility" but demonstrated its persistence as well by saying “the modern young woman does not swoon promiscuously.”  She no longer “at the slightest shock shuts up into a pink, formless pulp.” [18]

     Fainting, however, was just one of the more dramatic representations of vulnerability to feelings.  Though in Enoch Arden no one faints, it seems to the modern taste far too sentimental.  Sentimentality describes excessive emotion (clearly a matter subject to taste and judgement) or the unseemly enjoyment of the spectacle of a character’s emotions unjustified by sufficient artistic or thematic role.   

        But “excessive” and “unseemly” are value judgements from which the masses may dissent.  Sentimentality has always been popular because of its simplicity.  It is straightforward, unambiguous, luxurious, and easily understood.  Charles Cary Rumsey’s sculpture of a “Dying Indian” is sentimental because it invites the viewer to feel a sweet sadness about the displacement of native Americans “free of charge” to use the imagery of Wilde and Joyce, that is, in a reductive and facile view. [19]  Similarly Enoch Arden posits an unusual hero.  While most heroes exemplify characteristics prized in their culture and inspire people to imitation, Enoch is specifically meant to elicit strong emotions in the sensitive reader by his passive submission.  The reader’s pleasure is directly inspired by Enoch’s suffering. 

     Though all overdone pathos might be in questionable taste, the poem’s climactic focus on death in the nearly hagiographical Enoch Arden heightens Tennyson’s aesthetic risk, though it clearly increases as well his demands on the reader’s sentiment.  Such pleasures do not suit the modern taste.  Even those who relish the works of Edgar Allen Poe are likely to hesitate before his celebrated dictum declaring the death of a beautiful woman “the most poetical topic in the world.”  “Beauty,” Poe continues, “of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.”

     The emotional appeal to the picturesque, the sentimental, the easy laugh or tear is part of what allows a work to be popular.  It must be assimilable at first scan, avoiding the complexities of character in works considered “high art.”  A parallel relation exists between the themes of popular art and “high” art.   Popular works, including orally transmitted material and commercial popular art of either “folk” or mass culture provenance tend necessarily to reinforce received ideas, reassuring the audience of the correctness of the community’s consensus, transmitting values to the young, celebrating a culture’s (or subculture’s) values.  In contrast, elite, academic, and learned art is likely to point out the lapses or contradictions of social and intellectual norms, to challenge readers’ expectations, and to develop innovative forms.  Such poetry foregrounds ambiguities, ambivalences, contradictions, and mysteries, causing readers to question what is accepted.  

     Tennyson wishes to approve the institution of faithful marriage, yet the life of an honest and hard-working fisherman would, however desirable in a citizen, have little to recommend it to a reader.  A harmonious marriage, though it be a practical and moral ideal, would make an uneventful love story.  How many pop songs celebrate a happy marriage?  Tennyson seeks to regain the excitement that he loses by being so proper by exaggerating his emotional scenes and indulging in overdone pathos, in a word, by his practice of sentimentalism.

     He also, for all the Crabbe-like “realism” of the setting [21], did not hesitate to include unlikely, all-but-fairytale elements. Enoch’s prolonged disappearance as a castaway, his glimpse of the domestic scene of Annie and Philip, and his subsequent wasting away, all the while unknown to the happy couple need not be plausible. Their goal is to render possible not the happy ending so common in popular art, but the more intense option, a lugubrious one, lifted to sublimity by affording Enoch the opportunity to act with wholly selfless great-heartedness. He pauses then beyond the virtue of the monogamous spouse to the altruism of the saintly. This extreme, while it exalts the hero, removes him safely from the realm of daily lived experience. 

     The poem’s concluding lines have been a subject of considerable discussion. 

            And when they buried him the little port

Had seldom seen a costlier funeral.

 The contrast between Philip’s affluence and Enoch’s poverty had been a theme from the start.   Enoch only went to sea in order to provide for his family, though his more sensitive wife could see the ominous future.  Part of his reluctance to disturb Annie and Philip upon his return is because they have such a comfortable and secure life.  Just as Philip had had to bear the cost of educating Enoch’s children, so he also pays for Enoch’s funeral.  We resist the assumption that a lavish ceremony is something grand and good.  But there can be little doubt that for Tennyson the line was straightforward. The expenditure was a tribute to the “brave heroic soul” who had passed away.  The laureate unquestioningly participates in bourgeois values, improving his chances of a large readership but damaging his name among the cognoscenti.

     Unsurprisingly, some recent critics has sought to rehabilitate “Enoch Arden,” not by the intriguing route of recovering sentimentalism itself, but by pointing to the fissures and contradictions in his text as evidence of irony in order to make the tale acceptable to moderns. [22]   Both approaches are likely fruitful.  Just as other genres from the early Chinese novel to American comic strip art, once ignored by the literati, have received fruitful attention, as we have become more accepting of outsider art, the camp, and the kitsch, perhaps the sentimental is due for a re-evaluation.  Yet wherever one assigns value, whatever one’s taste, the generic characteristics of the popular and the sophisticated will remain distinct, each pursuing different goals by the most appropriate methods.  The very qualities that made Enoch Arden a roaring success with some audiences have also made it wholly ignored or disdained in others. 

 

 

 1.     The North American Review (vol. 100, p. 305) notes the publication of illustrated editions which “meet the demand of the general public for ornamental books which may serve as pretty gifts.”

 2.      The Union Review, vol. 3 (1865), p. 132.

 3.      New York Times, August 10, 1864.  The writer went continued, “Readers full of strong sympathetic admiration trace in TENNYSON the poet of the age, whose song reflects faithfully the movement, the intellectual tendencies, the moral conflict, and all that goes to make up the complex sum of our civilization.”

 4.      In 1962 Strauss’ Enoch Arden was recorded by Claude Rains and Glenn Gould and, the following year, received a Grammy nomination in the category of Best Documentary or Spoken Word Recording. in 1962.

 5.      Norman Page, “Tennyson’s Sense of an Ending: the Problem of ‘Enoch Arden’,” Tennyson Research Bulletin, Vol. 10, No. 3 (November 2014), pp. 219-235.

 6.      Émile Legouis and Louis Cazamian. A History of English Literature. London: J. M. Dent.  1169.

 7.      A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, chapter 2.

 8.      Ulysses, 3.492.  Lawn tennis was considered a particularly genteel game.  The satirical nickname for Tennyson had been used in Punch and other humor magazines since the 1870s, so by Joyce’s time even the humor must have had a musty air about it. 

 9.      Indeed, the processes of taste are dynamic.  Since the seminal work by Susan Sontag in Notes on “Camp,” many have sought to recover the aesthetic value by revaluing rejected materials, sometimes with humorous or ironic intent.  To mention only a few phenomena among many, see Odd Nerdrum’s theory of kitsch, scan James Parker “The Twee Revolution,” in the Atlantic, July-August 2014, or survey the pervasive Japanese fascination with what they call kawaii. 

 10.   Ada Leverson, Letters to the Sphinx.  Wilde, who claimed to prefer Disraeli’s novels, doubtless envied Dickens’ immense popularity.

 11.   De profundis.

 12.   Lady Bradshagel (Balfour) to Samuel Richardson, published in his Correspondance (1804) IV. 282.  See also Allen Sprague, “The Date of Sentimental and its Derivatives,” PMLA vol. 48 (1933), 303-307.

 13.   See, for instance, Adam Smith’s The Theory Of Moral Sentiments.

 14.   Lines 337–340 of Hannah More’s “Sensibility: An Epistle to the Honourable Mrs. Boscawen.”  More was a prominent social reformer and religious thinker as well as being a poet, playwright, and a leading Bluestocking.

 15.   Oliver Goldsmith, History of England, 28.

 16.   Unfortunate Sensibility; or the Life of Mrs. L-, Written by herself. In a Series of sentimental Letters, dedicated to Mr. Yorick in the Elysian Fields. 2 Vols. 6s. Richardson and Urquhart.

 17.   Ch. 1.  Coleridge makers it clear that he was parodying himself as well as Southey, Lamb, and Lloyd.

18.   The Cornhill Magazine, July 1899.

 19.   Rumsey’s work is from the first decade of the twentieth century.  A good many similar works were produced, among them “The Wounded Indian” (anonymous 1848), Ferdinand Pettrich’s “The Dying Tecumseh” (1856), and Thomas Crawford’s “The Dying Chief” (1875).  The stricken Indian shares with the cheerful Black jockey hitching posts an utterly non-threatening view of the Other.

 20.   “The Philosophy of Composition,” Graham’s Magazine, vol. XXVIII, no. 4, April 1846.

 21.   One of Tennyson’s influences was Crabbe’s “The Parting Hour.”

 22.   See, for instance, James R. Kincaid, Tennyson’s Major Poems: the Comic and Ironic Pattern.  Kincaid describes the ironic view, but then adds, “Everyone recognizes, though, that this is a wild misreading.”

Loving Lists in The Greek Anthology

 

This is not scholarly, but purely appreciative.  My modest goal is to direct a few readers to unfamiliar territory.  W. R. Paton’s 1916 edition with translations in the Loeb Library series is perhaps the only complete version of the Anthology in English.  All poems quoted are from Book VI, included in the first Loeb volume.  Though Paton’s renderings are not only prose but also fusty in style, I believe they adequately serve the purpose of this essay. 

 

     The pre-eminent genre of Hellenistic poetry was the epigram, though epics were still written and pastoral was shaped during the era.  The huge collection of collections that is called The Greek Anthology preserves a good deal of this poetic production, but most modern readers including many scholars focus very narrowly on a few poems.  Certain post-Classical Greek attitudes are resonant in our own post-Decadent time.  Modern poets are fond of the wistful, elegiac epitaphs and the passionate, sometimes scurrilous erotic verses, but, often for adequate reasons, they neglect the bulk of the collection.  Even a brilliant rendering into English would attract few readers to the volume of verses describing the bronze statues in a Theban gymnasium [1].  Later books include such materials as metrical oddities (Book XIII) and puzzles (Book XIV) that could only interest specialists, but wandering in these little-visited volumes can have its rewards for the general reader.  Book IX, for instance, made up of declamatory epigrams, basically a catalogue of variations on rhetorical figures, many of which circle about metaphor’s core, playing with proverbial wisdom, almost at times riddling, contains a good many verses worth reading.

     Book VI, the dedicatory epigrams, is among those rarely translated today.  In it are preserved literary examples of votive inscriptions, versions of a genre well-known in the lived experience of antiquity, polished into lapidary works of art.  Countless such dedications, similar though anonymous, are known from inscriptions associated with actual cult offerings with an implied end little different from that of people who buy classified advertisements containing prayers “never known to fail,” published in fulfillment of a vow to the Virgin Mary. 

     In the Anthology some dedications seem to be simple formulaic statements of this sort. 

             6.  Philip of Thessalonica

Amphitryon dedicated me, having won me from the Teleboi. 

Such a votive dedication may be of interest to philologists or historians, but it offers little to readers of poetry.

     In other poems, the focus seems to be on the virtuoso display of minute variations in phrasing and rhythm.  Sometimes a long series of poems which are almost identical are ranged next to each other for the comparison of connoisseurs.  For instance, poems 11-16 as well as 179-187 all describe the same three brothers, one a fisherman, one a fowler, and one a hunter dedicating their implements to Pan. [2]

             11. Satyrius

The three brothers, skilled in three crafts, dedicate to Pan, Damis the huntsman this long net, Pigres his light-meshed fowling net, and Clitor, the night-rower, his tunic for red mullet. Look kindly on the pious brethren, O Pan, and grant them gain from fowl, fish and venison. 

The poems on this theme, often with the smallest of variations, are by different authors, indicating that the original readership appreciated subtleties of rhythm and phrasing of which most modern readers would be wholly unaware, even in their own language.  In an inversion of the Romantic and modern assumption that associates literary value with originality and self-expression, these poets prize technical mastery and imitation of worthy models. 

     In the sixth century C. E., about a century before the Rashidun Caliphate conquered Egypt, a Roman official there felt sufficiently connected to Classical Greece to write a variation on an old poem attributed to Plato the Philosopher. 

   20.  Julianus, Prefect of Egypt

Lais took captive by her beauty Greece, which had laid in the dust the proud shield of Persia.  Only old age conquered her, and the proof of her fall, the friend of her youth, she dedicates to thee, Cypris.  She hates to see even the shadowy image of those grey hairs, whose actual sight she cannot bear. 

Here the woman’s hair is more a pretext than a plausible offering, especially when presented with bitterness.  Rather than thanks to the divine, it is a complaint, the more eloquent for understatement.  Erotic appeal illustrates its power as the conquerer of the country that conquered proud Persia.  The final line heightens the intensity of regret, the characteristically Greek attitude in which the joyful and exuberant sensuality celebrating sex and drinking is linked with a concomitant melancholy, born of the consciousness of inevitable old age and death.  The hair, at one time a “friend” as an emblem of Lais’ glorious physicality, now suggests only ugliness, feebleness, and the grave. 

     The following is another “imitation,” following very closely an earlier poem by Leonidas, again illustrating the writer’s preference for tradition and technical skill over the pose of literary “sincerity.”  The details up to the five grapes and the recovery from illness are identical. 

190. Gaetulicus

Take, honoured Cythereia, these poor gifts from poor Leonidas the poet, a bunch of five fine grapes, an early fig, sweet as honey, from the leafy branches, this leafless olive that swam in brine, a little handful of frugal barley-cake, and the libation that ever accompanies sacrifice, a small drop of wine, lurking in the bottom of the tiny cup. But if, as you have driven away the disease that weighed sore on me, so you do drive away my poverty, I will give you a fat goat. 

The catalogue of products – grapes, a fig, an olive, a barley-cake, and a few drops of wine – present in miniature the basics of the Greek diet.  Even the poet’s cup is small (like traditional Chinese wine cups), perhaps to allow the ceremonious drinking of many servings.  The shameless bargaining with divinity promises a rich blood sacrifice in return for prosperity, but the prosperity presumably must perforce come first.

     Coming of age is also the occasion for dedications. 

309. Leonidas

To Hermes Philocles here hangs up these toys of his boyhood: his noiseless ball, this lively boxwood rattle, his knuckle-bones he had such a mania for, and his spinning-top. 

Though achieving maturity is the occasion for celebration, the verse has still about it the slow and melancholy music of the passing of time, the end of innocence, the arrival of adult responsibilities. 

     The poems often record significant “objective” depictions of material culture, but never without the addition of considerable subjective value.  

174. Antipater

The three girls all of an age, as clever as the spider at weaving delicate webs, dedicated here to Pallas, Demo her well-plaited basket, Arsinoe her spindle that produces the fine thread, and Bacchylis her well-wrought comb, the weaver's nightingale, with the skilled stroke of which she deftly parted the threads. For each of them, stranger, willed to live without reproach, gaining her living by her hands. 

Here the characteristically female work with textiles, producing work as lovely as its makers, is dedicated to Athena who, like the three “girls,” is a virgin.  The products of each is a testament to their femininity, skill, and proper modesty with the final line assuring the reader that they each earned an honest living.  The poem is a lovely little tribute to a trio of respectable young women, but the opening simile likening them to spiders implies several ironies.  Apart from the wiliness suggested by “weaving a web” which for the spider is deadly trap, there is the mythological association with Arachne who was ruined by the very same goddess due to her extraordinary skill at weaving.

     War, the occupation most identified with masculinity, is also represented.  

81. Paulus Silentarius

Lysimachus, who has now exchanged his armour for an old man’s staff, presents to Ares his oxhide shield, the protector of his body, his spear that often tasted, his coat of mail that warded off missiles from his breast, and his helmet with thick horse-hair plume. 

Here the only pathos is the mention of “an old man’s staff,” yet the image of a laconic aging warrior is compelling.  The details of his gear make the action of ancient warfare dramatic whether the author had ever fought or not.  The reader is brought into the (imaginative) thick of the battle with the ferocity of the spear “that tasted the entrails of his foes,” the rain of stones and darts on his body, and the defiant towering helmet.

     Other professions are also defined by their characteristic tools.  

38. Philippus of Thessalonica

To you Poseidon, Lord of the sea, did Amyntichus give these his last gifts, when he ceased from his toil on the deep - his nets edged with lead that plunge into the sea, his oar still drunk with the brine, his spear for killing sea-monsters, strong lance of the waters, his weel ever betrayed by floats, his anchor, firm hand of his boat, and the flint, dear to sailors, that has the art of guarding the seed of fire. 

Here again is an elegiac poem upon retirement, this time from a fisherman.  The list of the tools of his trade would make a fine material culture exhibit (a “weel” is a trap), and the unexpected mention of a flint brings to mind the value of fire on a long wet and windy voyage. 

     Another epigram provides a list of a scribe’s tools, to be dedicated to Hermes. 

62. Philippus of Thessalonica

Callimenes, on giving up his work, now old age has veiled his eyes, dedicates to the Muses his circular lead which marks off the margin of the pages, and the knife that sharpens his pointed pens, his longest ruler, and the pumice from the beach, the dry porous stone of the sea. 

     A number of the dedications commemorate the speaker’s miraculous escape from wild beasts in one case slightly lengthened to a bit of a short story with an exotic protagonist.  

220. Dioscorides

Chaste Atys, the gelded servant of Cybele, in frenzy giving his wild hair to the wind, wished to reach Sardis from Phrygian Pessinus ; but when the dark of evening fell upon him in his course, the fierce fervour of his bitter ecstasy was cooled and he took shelter in a descending cavern, turning aside a little from the road. But a lion came swiftly on his track, a terror to brave men and to him an inexpressible woe. He stood speechless from fear and by some divine inspiration put his hand to his sounding tambour. At its deep roar the most courageous of beasts ran off quicker than a deer, unable to bear the deep note in its ears, and he cried out, "Great Mother, by the banks of the Sangarius I dedicate to you, in thanks for my life, my holy cell [the thalame or receptacle into which the organs of these castrated priests were deposited] and this noisy instrument that caused the lion to fly." 

The Phrygian cult of Cybele with its self-castrated priesthood had been familiar in Greece since pre-Classical times, sometimes as a simple protective Mother Goddess figure, sometimes as the center of a mystery cult.  During her rites described in the poem as “wild” and “ecstatic,” the most prominent instrument was the τυμπανον, a small hand drum, such as here saves the speaker.  In dramatic fashion the poem expresses what everyone, perhaps, has felt on occasion: the redemption by grace, unexpected, sudden, unaccountable.    

     In this intimate little poem on love through calling the oil lamp his “play-fellow” and love-making a “night festival” the poet constructs what might be called a wholly celebrative attitude toward sexuality while maintaining some sense of social taboo by saying that these must be “secret.”  Of course, this also suggests that Aphrodite may be a sort of mystery cult.  Since these tended to be salvationist, the implication can only be that participation in sex provides a sort of immortality, if only because time vanishes during love-making.  

162. Meleagar

Meleager dedicates to you, dear Cypris, the lamp his play-fellow, that is initiated into the secrets of your night festival. 

One could scarcely better the economy and the poignance of this epigram on a peasant. 

226. Leonidas

This is Cleiton's little cottage, this his little strip of land to sow, and the scanty vineyard hard by, this is his patch of brushwood, but here Cleiton passed eighty years. 

     Book VI of The Greek Anthology has a great variety of other poems, but the special charm of the dedicatory epigram (and a good number of the poems in the book are not in fact dedicatory) is best displayed in poems in which a list of objects that might remind a twenty-first century reader of the prose poems of Gertrude Stein and Francis Ponge is lent a human significance.  In these highly conventionalized works, the minimalist eloquence of simple naming can sound almost incantatory.  The gesture of a sacrifice to a god uplifts the poet’s world and all sorts of objects are thereby invested with potent meaning and emotion.  If few today can appreciate the metrical music of the epigrammatists’ language, the images speak to all.  Sappho and Pindar are in little danger of losing their pre-eminence in ancient Greek poetry, but the myriad epigrammatists of the Anthology add masterful polished little works on the great themes of love and god and death.

 

  

1.      1. Such poems with their tiresomely repetitive amazement at the statues’ realism constitute Book II of the Anthology.  Similar ekphrastic poems fill Book III. 

2.      2. The familiarity of listeners or readers with such poems is then the basis for an obscene play on the theme in poem 17, attributed to Lucian. 

3.      3. One thinks of Villon’s several poems which expatiate at greater length on the theme.

Situationism Remembered

 

 

     The nostalgia I feel thinking about Situationism from the perspective of this twenty-first century is unfortunately a function of how these United States and France and much of the world has backslid since the movement’s glory days in 1968.  In America we have just eluded a fascist takeover by an utterly self-interested would-be tyrant.  In the sixties we told each other that Republicans were passé, that big business had learned how to work in concert with government, making the principal danger corporate liberalism.  Many spoke of ‘the post-industrial society,” and believed (as I do yet) that technology has produced a state of affairs in which all reasonable needs could be satisfied with very little work.  Much of the motive of the New Left was not material want as it had been when “Solidarity Forever” described labor as “outcast and starving,”  The Port Huron Statement founding SDS said American youth were “bred in at least modest comfort” and “housed now in universities,” but nonetheless felt alienated.  Yet at the same time Utopia seemed possible.  We little imagined that over fifty years later the ugly specters of overt racism, Nazism, unashamed sexism, and predatory capitalism would re-emerge as strong as ever and that the old working-class anxieties could once more be directed against scapegoats instead of bosses. 

     History has kept grinding on at the usual inexorable pace, but at a moment when all dreams were allowed, many, and among them the Situationists, imagined a modern Abbey of Thélème with its single rule: “Do as thou wouldst.”  The role of Situationists who in the uprisings of May of 1968, in particular their influence in the Atelier Populaire, which produced hundreds of posters and leaflets and gave Situationism very likely the greatest visibility of any artistic movement in social upheaval since the origin of capitalism. 

     Situationism was always a minute coterie, a splinter of a splinter.  The group was sparked by the encounter between avant-garde artistic formations and left-wing politics. [1]  In spite of the writers’ intentions, tendentiously radical literature has had negligible discernable influence on social change [2], yet the Dadaists and Surrealists, for example, felt a warmth (not always returned) toward revolutionary socialism.  In 1946 a Romanian émigré, Isidore Isou, made his place in the Modernist lineage clear when, in Lettrisme’s first public manifestation, he disrupted a performance of Tristan Tzara’s La Fuit, shouting "Dada is dead! Lettrism has taken its place!"  Guy Debord, the central figure of Situationism, joined in 1951, espousing a more radical Marxist position. 

     Through street art the Lettrists spread slogans such as “Never work!”  Debord led demonstrators who in October 1952 interrupted Charlie Chaplin’s press conference for his new film Limelight, and published a leaflet defending their action “Finis les pieds plats” (“No More Flat Feet!”) [3], causing a break with Isou.  In 1957 Debord and others announced the Situationist International.

     A few years later the “Situationist Manifesto” appeared [4] noting “the irresistible development of technology and the dissatisfaction of its possible uses in our senseless social life. “a lack of satisfaction in our senseless social lives” and calling for a “new human force,” totally rejecting “alienation and oppression” in “the current multiform crisis.”  The Situationist alternative is “a society which authentically ‘reorganizes production on the basis of the free and equal association of the producers’" in which everyone would be freed from work, assuring the “complete liberty to the individual.”  The guarantee of the liberty of each and of all is in the value of the game, of life freely constructed. The exercise of this ludic recreation is the framework of the only guaranteed equality with non-exploitation of man by man. The liberation of the game, its creative autonomy, supersedes the ancient division between imposed work and passive leisure.”  “Everyone will become an artist.”

    This utopian economic perspective is the true heart of Situationism, the intoxicating lure of total freedom, yet it manifests symbolically, its own art challenging the rituals of late capitalism, “the miserable pseudo-games of non-participation” and proposing “a better game, which more exactly is provoked by the human presence.”

     What such a liberating art would look like is not clear.  From Lettrisme the Situationists inherited a fondness for the abstract, but the left-wing elements of the formation staged a celebrated event when, on Easter Sunday of 1950, during a televised High Mass in Notre Dame Michel Mourre mounted the pulpit in Dominican robes and preached a sermon maintaining that God was dead and that the church was a “running sore on the decomposed body of the West.” [7]  Debord made several films with differing content.  His first film Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howls for Sade) (1952) includes no images whatsoever.  His second Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time) (1959) juxtaposes images of Debord and his associates with scenes from mass culture. 

     Much of Situationist statements focus on social relations more than aesthetics, insisting that pre-revolutionary art must be subversive to be genuine.  Whereas the ruling class seeks to pacify the masses with “spectacle,” which signifies an altogether passive experience which displaces the individuals’ real lived experience.  Though posters and graffiti were surely their most influential media, the specific techniques most identified with Situationism are détournement (diversion) and dérive (drift).

     Détournement seeks to expose and overturn the ruling class’s mind control through, "turning expressions of the capitalist system against itself."  Though the device is an old one – the I. W. W. parodies of revival songs is just one example – the most familiar example associated with Situationism is the use of hyper-conventional images from old advertisements and comic strip panels, often from romance titles, with new text. [6]  One might view Abbie Hoffman as a master of the improvisatory détournement, applaud Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos (the Yes Men), and ask whether Sacha Baron Cohen is the form’s genius or its commodifier.      

     Debord defined the dérive as the art of wandering through urban space.  “In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” [8]  The dérive was an effort to experience one’s environment freshly without the blinders imposed by capitalist culture.

     The Situationist International was always very small, and their concepts would linger in obscure footnotes were it not for the energetic French movement of workers as well as intellectuals in 1968, during which what had been an obscure clique became widely influential.  Debord was perhaps exaggerating, but he had reason to boast that “the disorder that overtook the world in 1968 had its source at a few café tables, where, in 1952, a handful of somewhat strayed young people calling themselves the Letterist International used to drink too much and plan systematic rambles they called dérives.” [9]

    In 1966 the Strasbourg chapter of the French student union, the U. N. E. F., published a manifesto explicitly employing Situationist analysis “On the Poverty of Student Life: considered in its economic, political, psychological, sexual, and particularly intellectual aspects, and a modest proposal for its remedy.”  In politics, the students condemned the “licensed and impotent” left; in art they declared

“art is dead, but the student is necrophiliac.”   They point toward the possibility of liberation.  “The only poetry . . . is the creativity released in the making of history, the free invention of each moment and each event: Lautréamont's poésie faite par tous -- the beginning of the revolutionary celebration. For proletarian revolt is a festival or it is nothing; in revolution the road of excess leads once and for all to the palace of wisdom. A palace which knows only one rationality: the game. The rules are simple: to live instead of devising a lingering death, and to indulge untrammelled desire.”

     Similar ideas swept through French campuses and in the spring of 1968 Situationists dominated the Occupation Committee of the Sorbonne and went on to establish The Council for the Maintenance of the Occupations (CMDO) which sought to bring workers into the movement for total liberation.  This group lasted only a very short time.  In 1972, reduced to two members, the Situationiste International dissolved itself.  [10]

     The “Situationist Manifesto” sounds something like a Bodhisattva when it says, “We await the turning point which is the inevitable liquidation of the world of privation, in all its forms. Such are our goals, and these will be the future goals of humanity."  The Situationists remind us that artists can influence history and that no demand is excessive.  Ask for everything.  We deserve it. 

 

 

1.      1. Even the exceptions tend to be not apolitical or centrist, but rather, like Pound, Marinetti, and Céline, to adopt extreme fascist views.

 2.  Reformist writing has sometimes attracted considerable readership.  The best American example is Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

3. The leaflet called for “the destruction of idols” and accused Chaplin’s admirers of “a unanimous, servile enthusiasm" while calling the actor himself an "emotional blackmailer, master-singer of misfortune.”

4.      In Internationale Situationniste #4 (June 1960).  The French text is available at https://www.ubu.com/media/text/si/Internationale_situationniste_4.pdf and the English translation I have used by Fabian Thompsett at https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/manifesto.html. 

 5.      See Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967).

 6.      Now that one commonly sees such “turned” images in merchandise like tee shirts and coffee cups, one must ponder whether critics such as Naomi Klein and Slavoj Žižek may be correct in arguing that such play with images might reinforce rather than reveal oppression.  It is doubtless significant that the comic panels of Roy Lichtenstein never alter the original text as the Situationists did.

 7.      Mourre, who had, when younger, been a Dominican, in this way recalled the intrusions of the young Blanquistes who interrupted mass in Notre Dame March 22, 1892, shouting “Long live the Republic!  Long live the Commune!  Down with the Church,” as well as when on November 17, 1918, Oberdada Johannes Baader declared that “Christ is a sausage” from the pulpit of the Berlin Cathedral.   The tradition continues with the performance by Pussy Riot inside Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior on February 21, 2012.

8.      Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” 1958.  Despite the language of “psychogeography,” the procedure sounds rather similar to the recreational strolls people have taken for many  years after using cannabis.

 9.      Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord.

 10.   The work of Situationist artists did not end.  In 1975 Gianfranco Sanguinetti working with Debord published a pamphlet titled Rapporto veridico sulle ultime opportunità di salvare il capitalismo in Italia (The Real Report on the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy) [57].  Claiming to be written by a major capitalist, the pamphlet made outlandish and satirical claims, such as that the ruling class was in fact responsible for ultra-left violence as part of a strategy to prevent communism.  The text was taken to be genuine, and, when the deception was revealed, Sanguinetti was obliged to flee Italy.

 

 

 

Situationist and situationist-influenced slogans of Paris in May of 1968

 

The collection below is available at http://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/graffiti.htm. 

These graffiti are drawn primarily from Julien Besançon’s Les murs ont la parole (Tchou, 1968), Walter Lewino’s L’imagination au pouvoir (Losfeld, 1968), Marc Rohan’s Paris ’68 (Impact, 1968), René Viénet’s Enragés et situationnistes dans le mouvement des occupations (Gallimard, 1968), Maurice Brinton’s Paris: May 1968 (Solidarity, 1968), and Gérard Lambert’s Mai 1968: brûlante nostalgie (Pied de nez, 1988).

     This translation by Ken Knabb is from the Situationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006). No copyright.

B U R E A U   O F   P U B L I C   S E C R E T S

 MAY 1968 GRAFFITI

  

In the decor of the spectacle, the eye meets only things and their prices.

Commute, work, commute, sleep . . .

Meanwhile everyone wants to breathe and nobody can and many say, “We will breathe later.”

And most of them don’t die because they are already dead.

Boredom is counterrevolutionary.

 

We don’t want a world where the guarantee of not dying of starvation brings the risk of dying of boredom.

 

We want to live.

 

Don’t beg for the right to live — take it.

 

In a society that has abolished every kind of adventure the only adventure that remains is to abolish the society.

 

The liberation of humanity is all or nothing.

 

Those who make revolutions half way only dig their own graves.

 

No replastering, the structure is rotten.

 

Masochism today takes the form of reformism.

 

Reform my ass.

 

The revolution is incredible because it’s really happening.

 

I came, I saw, I was won over.

 

Run, comrade, the old world is behind you!

 

Quick!

 

If we only have enough time . . .

 

In any case, no regrets!

 

Already ten days of happiness.

 

At every moment something is happening.

 

Live in the moment.

 

Comrades, if everyone did like us . . .

 

We will ask nothing. We will demand nothing. We will take, occupy.

 

Down with the state.

 

When the National Assembly becomes a bourgeois theater, all the bourgeois theaters should be turned into national assemblies.  [Written above the entrance of the occupied Odéon Theater]

 

Referendum: whether we vote yes or no, it turns us into suckers.

 

It’s painful to submit to our bosses; it’s even more stupid to choose them.

 

Let’s not change bosses, let’s change life.

 

Don’t liberate me — I’ll take care of that.

 

I’m not a servant of the people (much less of their self-appointed leaders).  Let the people serve themselves.

 

Abolish class society.

 

Nature created neither servants nor masters. I want neither to rule nor to be ruled.

 

We will have good masters as soon as everyone is their own.

 

“In revolution there are two types of people: those who make it and those who profit from it.” (Napoleon)

 

Warning: ambitious careerists may now be disguised as “progressives.”

 

Don’t be taken in by the politicos and their filthy demagogy. We must rely on ourselves.

Socialism without freedom is a barracks.

 

All power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

 

We want structures that serve people, not people serving structures.

 

The revolution doesn’t belong to the committees, it’s yours.

 

Politics is in the streets.

 

Barricades close the streets but open the way.

 

Our hope can come only from the hopeless.

 

A proletarian is someone who has no power over his life and knows it.

 

Never work.

 

People who work get bored when they don’t work.  People who don’t work never get bored.

 

Workers of all countries, enjoy!

 

Since 1936 I have fought for wage increases.  My father before me fought for wage increases.  Now I have a TV, a fridge, a Volkswagen.  Yet my whole life has been a drag.  Don’t negotiate with the bosses. Abolish them.

 

The boss needs you, you don’t need the boss.

 

By stopping our machines together we will demonstrate their weakness.

 

Occupy the factories.

 

Power to the workers councils. (an enragé)

 

Power to the enragés councils. (a worker)

 

Worker: You may be only 25 years old, but your union dates from the last century.

 

Labor unions are whorehouses.

 

Comrades, let’s lynch Séguy!  [Georges Séguy: head bureaucrat of the Communist Party-dominated labor union]

 

Please leave the Communist Party as clean on leaving it as you would like to find it on entering.

 

Stalinists, your children are with us!

 

Man is neither Rousseau’s noble savage nor the Church’s or La Rochefoucauld’s depraved sinner.  He is violent when oppressed, gentle when free.

 

Conflict is the origin of everything.

(Heraclitus)

 

If we have to resort to force, don’t sit on the fence.

 

Be cruel.

 

Humanity won’t be happy till the last capitalist is hung with the guts of the last bureaucrat.

 

When the last sociologist has been hung with the guts of the last bureaucrat, will we still have “problems”?

 

The passion of destruction is a creative joy. (Bakunin)

 

A single nonrevolutionary weekend is infinitely more bloody than a month of total revolution.

 

The tears of philistines are the nectar of the gods.

 

This concerns everyone.

 

We are all German Jews.

 

We refuse to be highrised, diplomaed, licensed, inventoried, registered, indoctrinated, suburbanized, sermonized, beaten, telemanipulated, gassed, booked.

 

We are all “undesirables.”

 

We must remain “unadapted.”

 

The forest precedes man, the desert follows him.

 

Under the paving stones, the beach.

 

Concrete breeds apathy.

 

Coming soon to this location: charming ruins.

 

Beautiful, maybe not, but O how charming: life versus survival.

 

“My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I’m not selling bread, I’m selling yeast.” (Unamuno)

 

Conservatism is a synonym for rottenness and ugliness.

 

You are hollow.

 

You will end up dying of comfort.

 

Hide yourself, object!

 

No to coat-and-tie revolution.

 

A revolution that requires us to sacrifice ourselves for it is Papa’s revolution.

 

Revolution ceases to be the moment it calls for self-sacrifice.

 

The prospect of finding pleasure tomorrow will never compensate for today’s boredom.

 

When people notice they are bored, they stop being bored.

 

Happiness is a new idea.

 

Live without dead time.

 

Those who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring

to everyday reality have a corpse in their mouth.

 

Culture is an inversion of life.

 

Poetry is in the streets.

 

The most beautiful sculpture is a paving stone thrown at a cop’s head.

 

Art is dead, don’t consume its corpse.

 

Art is dead, let’s liberate our everyday life.

 

Art is dead, Godard can’t change that.

 

Godard: the supreme Swiss Maoist jerk.

 

Permanent cultural vibration.

 

We want a wild and ephemeral music. We propose a fundamental regeneration: concert strikes, sound gatherings with collective investigation. Abolish copyrights: sound structures belong to everyone.

 

Anarchy is me.

 

Revolution, I love you.

 

Down with the abstract, long live the ephemeral. (Marxist-Pessimist Youth)

 

Don’t consume Marx, live him.

 

I’m a Groucho Marxist.

 

I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires.

 

Desiring reality is great! Realizing your desires is even better!

 

Practice wishful thinking.

 

I declare a permanent state of happiness.

 

Be realistic, demand the impossible.

 

Power to the imagination.

 

Those who lack imagination cannot imagine what is lacking.

 

Imagination is not a gift, it must be conquered.

(Breton)

 

Action must not be a reaction, but a creation.

 

Action enables us to overcome divisions and find solutions.

 

Exaggeration is the beginning of invention.

 

The enemy of movement is skepticism. Everything that has been realized comes from dynamism, which comes from spontaneity.

 

Here, we spontane.

 

“You must bear a chaos inside you to give birth to a dancing star.”  (Nietzsche)

 

Chance must be systematically explored.

 

Alcohol kills. Take LSD.

 

Unbutton your mind as often as your fly.

 

“Every view of things that is not strange is false.”  (Valéry)

 

Life is elsewhere.

 

Forget everything you’ve been taught. Start by dreaming.

 

Form dream committees.

 

Revolution is the active passage from dream to reality.

 

Dare! This word contains all the politics of the present moment.  (Saint-Just)

 

Arise, ye wretched of the university.

 

Students are jerks.

 

The student’s susceptibility to recruitment as a militant for any cause is a sufficient demonstration of his real impotence.  (enragé women)

 

Professors, you make us grow old.

 

Terminate the university.

 

Rape your Alma Mater.

 

What if we burned the Sorbonne?

 

Professors, you are as senile as your culture, your modernism is nothing but the modernization of the police.

 

We refuse the role assigned to us: we will not be trained as police dogs.

 

We don’t want to be the watchdogs or servants of capitalism.

 

Exams = servility, social promotion, hierarchical society.

 

When examined, answer with questions.

 

Insolence is the new revolutionary weapon.

 

Every teacher is taught, everyone taught teaches.

 

The Old Mole of history seems to be splendidly undermining the Sorbonne.  (telegram from Marx, 13 May 1968)

 

Thought that stagnates rots.

 

To call in question the society you “live” in, you must first be capable of calling yourself in question.

 

Take revolution seriously, but don’t take yourself seriously.

 

The walls have ears. Your ears have walls.

 

Making revolution also means breaking our internal chains.

 

A cop sleeps inside each one of us. We must kill him.

 

Drive the cop out of your head.

 

Religion is the ultimate con.

 

Neither God nor master.

 

If God existed it would be necessary to abolish him.

 

Can you believe that some people are still Christians?

 

Down with the toad of Nazareth.

 

How can you think freely in the shadow of a chapel?

 

We want a place to piss, not a place to pray.

 

I suspect God of being a leftist intellectual.

 

The bourgeoisie has no other pleasure than to degrade all pleasures.

 

Going through the motions kills the emotions.

 

Struggle against the emotional fixations that paralyze our potentials.  (Committee of Women on the Path of Liberation)

 

Constraints imposed on pleasure incite the pleasure of living without constraints.

 

The more I make love, the more I want to make revolution.  The more I make revolution, the more I want to make love.

 

SEX: It’s okay, says Mao, as long as you don’t do it too often.

 

Comrades, 5 hours of sleep a day is indispensable: we need you for the revolution.

 

Embrace your love without dropping your guard.

 

I love you!!! Oh, say it with paving stones!!!

 

I’m coming in the paving stones.

 

Total orgasm.

 

Comrades, people are making love in the Poli Sci classrooms, not only in the fields.

 

Revolutionary women are more beautiful.

 

Gilda, I love you! Down with work!

 

The young make love, the old make obscene gestures.

 

Make love, not war.

 

Whoever speaks of love destroys love.

 

Down with consumer society.

 

The more you consume, the less you live.

 

Commodities are the opium of the people.

 

Burn commodities.

 

You can’t buy happiness. Steal it.

 

See Nanterre and live. Die in Naples with Club Med.

 

Are you a consumer or a participant?

 

To be free in 1968 means to participate.

 

I participate.

You participate.

He participates.

We participate.

They profit.

 

The golden age was the age when gold didn’t reign.

 

“The cause of all wars, riots and injustices is the existence of property.”  (St. Augustine)

 

Happiness is hanging your landlord.

 

Millionaires of the world unite. The wind is turning.

 

The economy is wounded — I hope it dies!

 

How sad to love money.

 

You too can steal.

 

“Amnesty: An act in which the rulers pardon the injustices they have committed.”  (Ambrose Bierce)

[The definition in Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary is actually: “Amnesty: The state’s magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.”]

 

Abolish alienation.

 

Obedience begins with consciousness; consciousness begins with disobedience.

 

First, disobey; then write on the walls. 

(Law of 10 May 1968) 

I don’t like to write on walls.

 

Write everywhere.

 

Before writing, learn to think.

 

I don’t know how to write but I would like to say beautiful things and I don’t know how.

 

I don’t have time to write!!!

 

I have something to say but I don’t know what.

 

Freedom is the right to silence.

 

Long live communication, down with telecommunication.

 

You, my comrade, you whom I was unaware of amid the tumult, you who are throttled, afraid, suffocated — come, talk to us.

 

Talk to your neighbors.

 

Yell.

 

Create.

 

Look in front of you!!!

 

Help with cleanup, there are no maids here.

 

Revolution is an INITIATIVE.

 

Speechmaking is counterrevolutionary.

 

Comrades, stop applauding, the spectacle is everywhere.

 

Don’t get caught up in the spectacle of opposition. Oppose the spectacle.

 

Down with spectacle-commodity society.

 

Down with journalists and those who cater to them.

 

Only the truth is revolutionary.

 

No forbidding allowed.

 

Freedom is the crime that contains all crimes. It is our ultimate weapon.

 

The freedom of others extends mine infinitely.

 

No freedom for the enemies of freedom.

 

Free our comrades.

 

Open the gates of the asylums, prisons and other faculties.

 

Open the windows of your heart.

 

To hell with boundaries.

 

You can no longer sleep quietly once you’ve suddenly opened your eyes.

 

The future will only contain what we put into it now.