Lands of All Play and No Work: Cockayne and the Abbey of Thélème

 

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes; those in parentheses either to lines of “the Land of Cockayne” or to chapters of Gargantua.   Translations from Rabelais are makeshift, but my own. 

 

      Eve and Adam were chagrined to discover that even in the Garden of Eden, there were rules, and in the twentieth century the Rolling Stones still complained “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”  St. John of the Cross adopted a contrarian approach, concluding that “In order to arrive at having pleasure in everything,/ Desire to have pleasure in nothing,” [1] but, several hundred years later, Freud treated the pleasure principle and its frustration as the most universal of motives.  People feel sufficient wistful longing for a world that never was, where limits no longer contain individual desire, that they have sometimes sketched dream-like pictures of impossible sensual utopias. 

     “The Land of Cockayne” (ca.1330) is contained in a book called the Kildare Lyrics which contains, for the most part, devotional and moralizing poems, an unsurprising subject matter as the collection was probably made by a Franciscan friar. Most are vigorous with vernacular and convey orthodox Christian sentiments, often in highly conventional treatments. [2]  The frolicking light-hearted tone of the first poem, “The Land of Cockayne,” is unique.  The poem is set “Fur in see bi west Spayngne,” perhaps in the neighborhood of the garden of the Hesperides, Hy-Brasil, or Tír na nÓg, the land of the ever-young.  In this land the residents enjoy uninterrupted pleasure (24), prominently including unlimited eating and drinking.  The catalogue of available culinary pleasures includes buildings made entirely of food and rivers of “oile, melk, honi and wine” (46).  A place of superabundant luxury, among the delights of Cockayne are precious gems on every side and the aromas of all the spices of the Orient. 

 

In the praer is a tre,

Swithe likful forto se.

The rote is gingeuir and galingale,

The siouns beth al sedwale,

Trie maces beth the flure,

The rind canel of swet odur,

The frute gilofre of gode smakke.

Of cucubes ther nis no lakke.  

                                                (71-78)

 What is more, fanciful whimsy is afforded free play.  There is no dirt, no flies, fleas, or lice (37).  In Cockayne the church windows are photochromic and adjust themselves to provide appropriate light.  The monks are so “heigh of mode” (125) that they flit about in the sky in play when they are not busy acting like stallions in teaching the nuns “a prayer,” “up and down” with “legs in the air” (165-167).

     In spite of the distractions, food is the primary appeal of the land.  In Cockayne cooked fowl fly to the diner to offer themselves.  Through the glorious plenitude of food in this land of wish-fulfillment one may glimpse the sometime rigors of a medieval diet.  The fascination with food is the obsession of the periodically deprived.  The dream of a full larder, often unrealized, had earlier found expression in the Classical cornucopia associated variously with Gaia, Plutus, Demeter, or Abundantia and the Dagda’s cauldron of plenty (the coire ansic) in Irish lore. 

     The speaker’s attitude toward this embarrassment of riches is unequivocal delight.  The monks flutter down from the sky for evensong, attracted by the exposed white buttocks of a “maidin,” (136) and the tone is altogether jolly.  Far from censorious, the poet’s attitude is “ribald,” with the sort of harmless innocence of adolescent fantasy difficult to imagine in the present era. 

     Though readers have sometimes taken the poem as a fiercely critical satire of clerical corruption, such a motive finds no support whatever in the text.  The poem opens with the speaker finding Cockayne so appealing, it is preferable even to Heaven.   

 

Þoȝ paradis be miri and briȝt.

Cokaygn is of fairir siȝt.

                                            (5-6)

(Though Paradise be merry and bright, Cockayne is a fairer sight.)

 And the poem ends with what looks very like instructions on how to “win” the prize of spending time in such a marvelous place.  One might atone for time in Cockayne by spending seven years wading in pig excrement but it sounds as though the author considers that a fair enough bargain.

 

Whose wl com þat lond to.

Ful grete penance he mot do.

Seue ȝere in swine-is dritte.

He mot wade, wol ȝe i-witte. ⁠

Al anon up to þe chynne.

So he schal þe lond[e] winne.

                                              (177-182)

(Whoever wishes to visit that land must perform a heavy penance.  Seven years in pigshit he must wade, up to his chin, you may well know, in order to win that land.)

 The poem ends with a prayer to God, not to protect Christians from worldly temptations, but rather kindly asking that the reader may one day enjoy the opportunity to experience Cockayne.

     Far from moralistic, the poem is an ebullient, light-hearted acknowledgement of the sensual inclinations of humans (indeed, of all organisms).  It no more implies acceptance of free love or gluttony than enjoyment of a Chaplin short requires endorsement of kicking people from behind.  Rather like the world of a silent film comic, the poet’s Cockayne is Carnivalesque; norms may be harmlessly transgressed in an interval of festive gaiety even if they revert to their default settings the next morning.  The low mimetic focus on appetite is far more conducive to comedy than to realism or idealizing, but the laughter is entirely hearty and sweet-tempered, far from the Swiftian “fierce indignation” of satire.. 

     The poem need not contradict the principles of a religious vocation.  Readers sometimes look for more consistency in literature than they do in life.  The same poet may write a tenderly respectful lyric and one of selfish lust, possibly even with the same evening in mind.  Both may be equally “true.”  The pious monk to whose book we owe the preservation of this poem may have seen no impropriety at all in having a wry laugh at the spectacle of human weakness.  “The Land of Cockayne” has preserved such a spell of sublime mirth in reaction to the human condition.  It is funny and warm and oh-so-human, the opposite pole from anything as serious as a polemic.     

     Two hundred years later, another presumably sincere monk, another Franciscan, in fact, at the beginning of his career, imagined an equally permissive territory, Gargantua’s Abbey of Thélème, where the sole rule of the order is notoriously “Do as you like” [3]  Far from being rooted in egoistic desire, this rule against rules expresses humility.  When Gargantua offers to reward his ally the valiant Friar John with the creation of a new and innovative religious establishment of his own design, the monk’s reply is charmingly modest: “But how” says the monk, might I be able to govern others when I am not able to govern myself?” [4]  Accordingly, Thélème invites both men and women to live together without any vows whatsoever. 

     Not only are the residents free from oppressive rules, they live in opulent luxury.  They go about in the finest clothes, covered with jewels.  Even their dressing is no chore, thanks to the attentions of their “masters of the wardrobe” [5].  They amuse themselves in a huge multi-story library.  Each is able to “read, write, sing, play musical instruments, and speak five or six languages” [6].  In addition, they enjoy the aristocratic amusements of hunting and hawking as well as agreeably passing time in each other’s society.  This is the greater pleasure, as they are all themselves beautiful people; neither men nor women may be admitted who are not “good-looking, well-built, and with a pleasant nature” [7].  The inscription over the abbey’s door invites “noble gentlemen” and “ladies of aristocratic birth” [8] while barring greedy professionals such as lawyers and usurers whose goal is the mean accumulation of wealth. Such mean money-grubbers are distasteful and likely to be ugly. 

     Moral excellence is bound up with intellectual achievements and aesthetic cultivation, indeed, with idleness, in this world in a fantasy of a sensitive and elegant ruling class, resembling nothing so much as the almost exactly contemporaneous world of Castiglione’s The Courtier.  It is as though Plato’s philosopher-kings did not have to bother with ruling, but could devote their entire lives to entertainments.  Contrary to history’s evidence, which has no lack or malicious and rapacious nobles, freedom makes them altogether virtuous.  “Because free people, well-born and educated, familiar with honest society, are by nature and impulse propelled always to virtuous acts and away from vice, by an impulse they call honor.“ [9]  The abbey is a post-industrial paradise in which people may develop their sensibility and, in fact, enjoy life without regard for the Reality Principle. 

     People in the “Land of Cockayne” found utter satisfaction in sensual delights of food and drink and love with only a few signifiers (like the beautiful tree, sweet odor, precious stones, and lovely birdsong   to betoken luxurious beauty. (67-100)  Placed in such a setting, with every appetite instantly satisfied, the reader might well imagine agreeing with the author’s encomium.

 

Þer n'is lond on erthe is pere.

Vnder heuen n'is lond iwisse.

Of so mochil ioi and blisse.

(21-⁠24)

            (No land on earth is its peer.  Under heaven there is no land, I                 know, of so much joy and bliss.)

      Since in Cockayne the only acknowledged human desires are physical, the tone is comic, in an ebullient Carnivalesque mode in which the human dependence on food and sex is ridiculous and insistent, but nonetheless endearing.  In the Abbey of Thélème the animal pleasures are taken for granted and the stress is on imaginative delights, culture, art, and civilized company, the sophisticated manipulative play with symbols that most distinguishes our species from the beasts.  Thus, while Rabelais’ tone is extravagant and fanciful, it contains as well a program for how to live life well that goes beyond a full belly, and among the fanciful and humorous elements notes of high seriousness are discernable. 

     While a dramatic contrast is evident between the riotous “low” aim of Cockayne’s utopia and the more “noble” and cerebral occupations of the Thélèmites, the two libidinal Edens have in common that each is enabled by the abolition of labor.  In Cockayne the unlimited availability of everything good means that competition need not exist.  There can be no motive for theft, no distinction between the industrious and the idle or, in the end, between the vicious and the virtuous when each individual is the recipient of superfluous unearned wealth.  The Abbey seems to be underwritten by Gargantua’s endless purse, so its residents need tend only to themselves.  The lifestyle of the inmates of Thélème is supported by an entire townful of workers: goldsmiths, jewelers, embroiderers, tailors, goldworkers, velvet-makers, tapestry makers, and upholsterers.” [10]  Of course, every high culture from ancient Athens through Heian Japan and Victorian England has been created by a leisure class of intellectuals and artists supported by the labor of others.

     Something not far from a land of “all play and no work” in which labor is pleasant and voluntary was conceived by William Morris in News from Nowhere and during the nineteen-sixties seemed actually possible to the theorists of “post-industrial society” [11], though working hours never shrank much and, in recent years, have been rising.  The work of Marshall Sahlins suggesting that hunter-gatherers who needed only to work fifteen to twenty hours a week to satisfy their needs were the original “affluent society” made the possibility of a largely work-free life more plausible.  

     In Genesis work seems to have arrived only to the fallen world where it seems very much like a punishment linked closely with mortality: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”  Perhaps the thrill of sexuality and the comfort of a good meal can only exist with the contrast of field-work or housework.  Even if pleasure cannot be experienced by one who does not feel pain as well, the thought of constant bliss (or at least well-being) is itself beguiling enough to inspire such dreams as the fabulous land of Cockayne and the wonderful Abbey of Thélème. 

 

  

1.  Ascent of Mt. Carmel 1.13.11.

 

2.  One poem “The Song of Michael of Kildare” identifies its author as "Frere Michel Kyldare,” and as a "frere menour."  Among the collection is a touching lullaby “Lollai, Lollai, litil child” and a verse reminiscent of Sei Shonagon “Five Hateful Things” beginning “Bissop lorles.”

 

3.  Ch 57 “Fay ce que vouldras.”

 

4.  Ch.  52  “Car comment (disait-il) pourrait-je gouverner autrui, qui moi-même gouverner ne saurrais?”

 

5.  Ch. 56 “Maîtres de garde-robes.”

 

6.  Ch. 57 “lire,  ecrire, chanter, jouer d’instruments harmonieux, parler de cinq et six langages.”

 

7.  Ch. 52 “belles, bien formées, et bien narturées.”

 

8.  Ch. 54 “Compagnons gentils” and “dames de haut parage.”

 

9.  Ch. 57 “Parce que gens libres, bien nés, bien instruits, conversant en compagnies honnêtes ont par nature un instinct, et aiguillon, qui toujours les pousse á faits vertueux, et retire de vice, lequel ils nommaient honneur.”

 

10.  Ch. 56 “orfèvres, lapidaires, brodeurs, tailleurs, tireurs d’or, veloutiers, tapissiers, et haut lissiers.”

 

11.  The term was popularized by Ivan Illich, Daniel Bell, and others after arising a few years earlier among the more utopian strains of leftists and cultural revolutionaries.  More recently, advocates of a guaranteed annual income have argued that not everyone need work.

Paradise Lost as Popular Culture

 

 

     One hardly thinks of Milton as a popular choice for recreational reading.  Yet his majestic Christian epic Paradise Lost has characteristics akin to those that bring mass audiences to today’s action films.  While even English majors may find the poem’s theology irrelevant and its learned and Latinate language artificial in the present day, to a receptive sensibility, the poem has sensational drama and an extraordinary pictorial, even cinematic, imagination.  The special effects of contemporary popular films, cars lurching through the air, people tossed through windows, buildings collapsing, while superheroes and the most vicious of villains work out the world’s destiny are paralleled on every page of Milton’s poem.

     The taste for Milton’s high-flying rhetoric, the greatest obstacle to modern enjoyment of the poem, is as old as language and only very recently decayed.  One may imagine Shakespeare’s audience brought to a pitch of excitement, cheering and applauding, when a purple passage was declaimed on stage.  Until a few generations ago both the educated and the illiterate regularly relished the oratory of politicians and the pulpit, and schoolchildren studied great speeches of the past and practiced debate and declamation.  At home people enjoyed the sonority of reading verse out loud in parlor poetry sessions.  Now and then a writer points out that Edward Everett spoke for over two hours at Gettysburg and Lincoln for less than two minutes.  Usually the point is that the president’s succinctness was an indicator of his greatness.  Rarely does anyone consider the fact that fifteen thousand people stood listening to such a lengthy previous oration and doubtless considered it a great pleasure to hear a celebrated speaker, an artist in words.  

     Indeed, the very artificiality of Milton’s rhetoric that puts off contemporary was just the sort of thing earlier readers had relished.  His distance from the ordinary spoken vernacular that today is the base of most poetry, created a general feel for the poem, a special grandeur, just as the art director creates a consistent overall tone for a film.  Similarly, Homeric Greek was composed of a dialect never spoken, making the reader immediately aware of inhabiting a world of the imagination, more portentous and beautiful than that of everyday transactions.  In the stately suspension of his iambic pentameters, gently rocking but endlessly varied, each line elongated slightly beyond the colloquial duration, the phrases follow one after another with no end stop in sight, the syntax branching and rebranching like a living thing.  This is a consistent pleasure, like a particularly mighty organ under the control of E. Power Biggs, quite independent of the qualities of the music being performed. 

     The opening sentence of Book IX which runs to forty-one lines (appended) is an admittedly extreme example enabled by numerous colons and semicolons.  The first five lines detail what Milton does not mean to describe: casual and cordial intercourse with heavenly beings.   The poet’s topic, he says, surpasses the themes of ancient epic, though he is pleased to pause for about a dozen lines for Homeric references (studding six lines with nine proper names from antiquity).  Then the final fourteen lines of the passage continue the exposition of what is not to be included, this time ordinary war stories, but detailed with such enthusiasm that it seems less an apology for what is left out than a miniature side-show exhibit, a model of generic war in a few tumultuous words.

     A generous use of what the rhetoricians call amplificatio, in Greek αὔξησις and in plain English redundancy, enriches the texture of the passage.  The Fall is said to be due to “foul distrust,” “breach Disloyal.” “revolt,” “And disobedience,” though a single term would have satisfied the sense.  Like the overelaboration of baroque decoration characteristic of a Mexican cathedral, more ornaments are considered superior to fewer.  This tendency affects the use of Classical references as well as they tumble over each other: nine proper names in only six lines (Achilles, Hector, Troy, Turnus, Lavinia Neptune, Juno, Eros, and a Muse in IX, 15-21).  

     Thus the very characteristics – lengthy periods, Latinate lexical choices and syntactic structures, numerous Classical allusions --  that many moderns might find irksome are those that would have given earlier readers delight.  The shift from ordinary experience accompanying the heightened language of art might be likened to that experienced by a movie-goer who enters a darkened hall and turns to face the enormous scintillating screen animated by larger-than-life characters.  One is transported to a different world.

     This parallel in mood or tone between the great Puritan epic and a superhero action movie suggested by style is true for the narrative as well.  For Jehovah like Superman is the good protagonist against the evil enemy.  In Milton each cosmic army has their legions, allowing epic scenes that resemble nothing so much as crowded Cinemascope war scenes.  (Uccello’s Battle of San Romano delivers similar thrills in two dimensions.)     

 

. . . whereat Michael bid sound

Th' Arch-Angel trumpet; through the vast of Heaven

It sounded, and the faithful Armies rung

Hosanna to the Highest: nor stood at gaze                        

The adverse Legions, nor less hideous joyn'd

The horrid shock: now storming furie rose,

And clamour such as heard in Heav'n till now

Was never, Arms on Armour clashing bray'd

Horrible discord, and the madding Wheeles                    

Of brazen Chariots rag'd; dire was the noise

Of conflict; over head the dismal hiss

Of fiery Darts in flaming volies flew,

And flying vaulted either Host with fire.

So under fierie Cope together rush'd                                

Both Battels maine, with ruinous assault

And inextinguishable rage; all Heav'n

Resounded, and had Earth bin then, all Earth

Had to her Center shook. What wonder? when

Millions of fierce encountring Angels fought                  

                                                                           (VI, 202-220)

 

As in a Western movie or a novel by Sir Walter Scott, all leading men are valorous, though some are outstanding.  Even on the side of the rebel angels, according to Raphael, there was never committed an “unbecoming deed” (VI, 237).

     The catalogue of fallen angels alone is a dazzling sequence, studded with exotic proper names that generates a portentous mood of wonder more significant than any particular meaning.

 

The pleasant Vally of Hinnom, Tophet thence

And black Gehenna call'd, the Type of Hell.

Next Chemos, th' obscene dread of Moabs Sons,

From Aroar to Nebo, and the wild

Of Southmost Abarim; in Hesebon

And Horonaim, Seons Realm, beyond

The flowry Dale of Sibma clad with Vines,

And Eleale to th' Asphaltick Pool.

                                                                           (I, 404-411)

 

The list proceeds like a horror movie montage: Moloch, Baal, Ashtaroth, Thammuz, Adom, Dagon, one succeeds another as though the successive monsters of nineteen-fifties Japanese popular movies all met in a sinister alliance. 

     The war scenes are filled with grand theatrical action as in this episode featuring giant flame-throwers. 

 

A triple mounted row of Pillars laid

On Wheels (for like to Pillars most they seem'd

Or hollow'd bodies made of Oak or Firr

With branches lopt, in Wood or Mountain fell'd)

Brass, Iron, Stonie mould, had not thir mouthes

With hideous orifice gap't on us wide,

Portending hollow truce; at each behind

A Seraph stood, and in his hand a Reed

Stood waving tipt with fire; while we suspense,

Collected stood within our thoughts amus'd,

Not long, for sudden all at once thir Reeds

Put forth, and to a narrow vent appli'd

With nicest touch. Immediate in a flame,

But soon obscur'd with smoak, all Heav'n appeerd,

From those deep throated Engins belcht, whose roar

Emboweld with outragious noise the Air,

And all her entrails tore, disgorging foule

Thir devilish glut, chaind Thunderbolts and Hail

Of Iron Globes, which on the Victor Host

Level'd, with such impetuous furie smote,

That whom they hit, none on thir feet might stand,

Though standing else as Rocks, but down they fell

By thousands, Angel on Arch-Angel rowl'd;

(VI, 572-594)

 

When combatants from either side traverse the celestial realms, the descriptions allow readers to imagine space travel. 

 

som times

He scours the right hand coast, som times the left,

Now shaves with level wing the Deep, then soares

Up to the fiery Concave touring high.

As when farr off at Sea a Fleet descri'd

Hangs in the Clouds, by Æquinoctial Winds

Close sailing from Bengala, or the Iles

Of Ternate and Tidore, whence Merchants bring

Thir spicie Drugs: they on the Trading Flood

Through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape

Ply stemming nightly toward the Pole

                                                            (II, 632-642)

 

Instead of pursuing direct description, Milton conveys its overwhelming power by introducing a Homeric simile as a sign that non-figurative language would be inadequate.  Like the earlier clots of mythological references, the geographical names come thick and fast: Bengala, Ternate, Tidore, Ethiopia, Cape of Good Hope, and the South Pole in five lines.  Just as the poem’s first readers did not need to recognize the place names, today’s reader can skip the footnotes.  The specific places mentioned mean little, the passage derives its impact from the recitation of a storm of mysterious words of power, rather like the invented technical jargon of a science fiction spaceship or a magic charm in a story of wizards and dragons.

      The affinities of Milton’s poem with Homeric epic are intentional, explicit, and well-studied.  Less obvious, but present nonetheless, are characteristics associated with science fiction and monster movies, and with superhero action films.  Though these genres did not exist in the seventeenth century, similar popular taste had long been served by romances, saints’ lives, and tales of unknown regions of the earth.  The Christian story of the Fall proved for Milton a rich source of action on a cosmically magnificent scale, including weird unearthly monsters, and a literally perfect hero, ultimately more undefeatable than Superman.  His readers were able to enjoy a rich feast of cheap thrills, all the while acquiring merit for studying Christ’s story.  Not even the films of The Ten Commandments or Ben-Hur could equal the appeal of Puritan poet’s version of scripture which combined the attractions of Dracula, Batman, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Samson and Delilah.  After the thrills of space travel, the horrors of confrontation with demonic fiends, and a hero with the mission not merely to save the world, but to save the reader as well along the way, righteousness is finally rewarded.  The bedazzled spectator knew it would happen all along but became nonetheless enfolded in the poem’s action.  Since every soul is in play until judgement, the reader is on the stage among the cast of larger-than-life characters and may well feel a bit of satisfaction in the thought that virtuous engagement with the poem has done no harm to one’s own likelihood of a happy ending.  Surely, though, the primary motive had to be the fun of the ride.

Towards a Typology of Collaborative Poetry

 

The poems by Marcabrun and Ugo Catola and the first verses of the Minase renga of Sogi, Shohaku, and Socho are appended in both the original and in translation.  

 

     The very idea of poems with more than one author radically challenges the Romantic notion of individual genius.  In spite of the fact that art has as often been shaped by the beliefs and values most members of a culture share, many readers remain Romantic enough to view proper poetry as the product of a single person’s vision.  The artist is often imagined as a hero, the possessor of a titanic sensibility, striking out alone, innovative, ignoring established norms, and such a concept seems inimical to the compromise and negotiation that collaboration would entail.  And yet one hears that the great mythic texts on which the Kalevala was based were regularly performed by two poets, taking turns (albeit one with a secondary role), often while facing each other astride a log.  Seventy-two scholars wrote the Septuagint and forty-seven the King James Bible.  Collaboration may, as these examples imply, be deeply traditional, but it is equally likely to appear radically innovative.  A good number of modern ventures in collaborative poetry have occurred more or less under the aegis of the avant-garde: the exquisite corpses of the Surrealists, Ralentir Travaux (1930) by André Breton, Paul Éluard and René Char, and the chainpoems of the Japanese Vou group and Charles Henri Ford [1]. 

     Practices can differ widely.  Sometimes two writers present debate, taking different sides of an issue; sometimes they reinforce each other.  Some seek to meld their imaginations so that a single text represents not either or both, but a unique synthetic writer, called into existence for the project.  In some the linkages are more complex; for instance, one contribution may relate only to contiguous passages or all contributors may follow a predetermined pattern. 

     The simplest relation between multiple authors is contention, either in the form of an insult war or a debate.  The first of these possibilities was formalized among Germanic and Celtic peoples as the flyting (in Irish immarbág or iomarbháigh).  In perhaps the best-known of such works “The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie” (ca. 1500) William Dunbar addresses his opponent with a veritable flood of invective, the direction of which is perfectly clear today on spite of archaic Scots dialect.

    

Mauch mutton, bit button, peeled glutton, heir to Hillhouse,

Rank beggar, oyster dredger, flay fleggar in the flet. flea                    catcher? in hall

Chitterling, rough rilling, lick shelling in the millhouse, rough            hide, husk-licker

Bard rehator, thief of nature, false traitor, fiend’s get,                         worthless poet

Filling of tauch, rak sauch, cry crauch, thou art o’erset! of                  tallow, stretched rope, surrender

Mutton driver, girnall ryver, yad swiver, foul fall thee! granary           robber, mare mounter

Heretic, lunatic, purspick, carling’s pett, old hag’s fart?

Rottin crok, dirtin dok, cry cok, or I shall quell thee! 

                                                                    (ll. 241-248)

 

Walter Kennedy responds in kind.

 

Dathan, devil’s son, and dragon despitous,

250 Abiron’s birth and bred with Belial,

Wod werewolf, worm, and scorpion venomous,

Lucifer’s lad, foul fiend’s face infernal,

Sodomite separate from saints celestial.

       (ll. 249-253)

 Very little distinguishes one stream of vituperation from the other.  Rather than an actual attack drawing attention to the opponent’s failings, the insults are generic, pure antagonistic energy, pyrotechnics, rhetoric for its own sake, enmity made recreation.  

     Though frequently scatological, such flytings amused the court of James IV.  Americans may well be reminded of the custom of playing the dozens. [2]  The game so permeated American culture that even in my benighted white suburb elementary school children used the line “your mother wears combat boots” with no suspicion of its origin or implications.  Like the flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy, the insults traded among dozens players have ordinarily no relation to actual weaknesses of the individuals involved; both contestants are indulging in a competitive verbal game, performed in a social setting and encouraged by onlookers.

     While the classic form of the dozens persists, other genres of Black vernacular insult wars have emerged.  Only a few weeks ago the New York Times Magazine [3] featured a story on “battle rap,” calling it “an art form and a sport, as well as an industry.”  One participant is given an extended opportunity for boasting and insults before the other responds, followed by further rounds.  Sexual themes remain common, including impugning the other’s masculinity and bragging of one’s own.  Here is a sample from Caustic vs. Rone, the latter speaking first.

  

Your baby mom looks like a drag queen, I'll get your queen             dragged

Rip his beard off, do his Adam's apple like a speed bag

I don't care if Soul's punch was softer than a fucking bean bag

You got slapped and just stood there just like that shit was             freeze tag

 

A portion of Caustic’s comeback.

 

You know, that's a hard thing to live up to

But he makes up for it with a strong back rub and a solid "I             love you."

He be kissing that bitch on the mouth like it's the love of his             life

But deep down he knows he just ain't fucking her right

She's got the Black Snake Moan she likes a little mud in her             pipes  [4]

 

     In  other genres the contention is more substantial, and actual views are exchanged as in a débat, called in Occitanian a tenso or partimen, like that between the twelfth century poets Marcabrun and Ugo Catola on the nature of love [5].  The discussion is highly organized.  First Ugo (also called Uc) states the topic -- ”un vers d’amor” -- to which Marcabrun answers with a condemnation of “false love” (“faus’amistat”) involving deceit citing the example of the Eve and the Fall.  Ugo will hear nothing negative about love since it is love alone that “bore him and nurtured him” (“que d’amor fui naz e noiriz”).  The argument continues until in the end Ugo presents his clinching image which bears the undeniable evidence of lived experience.  “Marcubrun, when I am worn out and feeling low and my good friend receives me and kisses me, and I undress, I go from her healthy and healed.” [6]  Unconvinced, Marcabrun calls him an addict, like a drunk or a spendthrift.

     They are both right.  The poem presents a three-dimensional ambivalent picture of love.  The vulnerability entailed in the commitment of oneself to the other means that love must always involve risk as well as pleasure.  The point that might be developed in another work through the modulation of a single relationship or through the contrast of two successive loves is here presented in two voices. 

     In another tenso weaving two points of view Giraut de Bornelh  and Raimbaut d”Aurenga argue whether the obscure style (trobar clus) or a more light and transparent treatment (trobar leu) is preferable.  Raimbaut defends difficult verse, saying that fools will never have the taste to appreciate fine things.   For his part Giraut cannot understand why anyone would write anything that is not “light and popular” (“levet e venersal”).  The contention collapses, though, as they both declare their helplessness in the face of love.  Both in the end note the utter confusion wrought by passionate love, for Raimbaut a natural and noble pleasure (“un fin joi natural”) that leaves him feeling “knocked about” (“torbatz”), for Giraut passion leads to his wishing to cry out “God help me” (“Qu'eu voill dir a Deu mi coman").  The poem concludes with their affection for each other, a fellow-feeling based on both experiencing the same tumult of love, though expressed in different styles.

     Whereas the flytings, dozens, and battle raps are displays of bravura fighting for the pleasure of making the sparks fly, the Occitanian poems actually present two sides of an issue.  Neither speaker is necessarily the winner, as both positions are in part correct.  The complex picture that might in a novel be represented by several characters or by a succession of time is here two authors.  The poem produced by juxtaposing two points of view has the liveliness that is characteristic of disputation. 

     Perhaps the most sophisticated and conventional collaborative form is the Japanese renga.  The practice arose of improvising or capping verses and developed into a collective writing technique with extremely elaborate rules. [7]  In the mature era of the renga, when organized competitions were common, a poet had perhaps three minutes to improvise a stanza appropriate to the preceding passage and well-integrated with the tradition. 

     Renga composition is shaped by system of intricate rules that here can only be suggested.  Indeed, an intimate acquaintance with Japanese poetry is required even to understand renga’s place.  The poets’ choice of words is restricted to the lexicon of the classical poetic tradition which stresses elegance and refinement (ga).  Thus each term carries significant literary associations, with the subtlest of variation and virtually no content arises directly from lived experience.  The genre is poetry about poetry. 

     The season must be established in the first verse while (In a hundred verse renga) one quarter of the following verses must have the word flower (hana) and one quarter the word moon (tsuki).  (In the flower verses writers often defer to their superiors.)  Topics are divided into seventeen categories (luminous things, living things, rising things, Buddhism, etc.) with some (such as mountains, shores, and dwellings) then further divided between essence (tai) and attribute (yū).  Certain words may be used only once in the hundred verses while others are restricted to a specific occurrence.  Usually, elements in common must be well separated; for instance, verses on human relations must be separated by two verses while those of reminiscences must have three.  Certain series, though, must be continued for three to five verses.   

     Of course, students of oral literature understand that such demanding requirements, while they seem to make the poet’s task more difficult, in fact enable improvisation.  The conventions are so rigorous that, even in the practice of experts, the verses are often imperfect and are edited by the poem’s recorder to conform to the rules.  The product is primarily structural in its appeal, rather like a Bach fugue, directing attention to the variegated play of the chain of verses, always unpredictable since each related only to the line immediately preceding and following.  Thus, with every new stanza a new linkage is established and an old one abandoned.

     According to Jin'Ichi this procedure renders the subject entirely irrelevant: “the essence of renga is the essentially meaningless pattern of images.” [8]  For one critic, this form is emptied of content and thus conveys a Buddhist sense of “impermanence” and “nonself.” [9]

     Among the most celebrated renga sequences is the fifteenth century Minase Sangin Hyakuin by Sogi, and his students Shohaku and Socho.  The master’s opening verses seem a sketch from nature, noting the early spring season with the mention of mist, while snow persists on the mountainside.   In fact even in this first few lines there is no solitary author; the entire project is bound in convention and intertextuality.  The poets are visiting the shrine for the twelfth century Emperor Gotoba and their renga is in fact an offering presented as part of the memorial observances on the anniversary of the death of this ruler who was also a poet. 

     The opening lines by Sogi quote one of Gotoba’s poems.

 

SogiI look over the misty base

of the mountain where

the Minase River runs through —

Why did they say the evening

was best in autumn?

 Sogi, then, was not merely describing the scene before his eyes.  Rather he was paying homage to a predecessor by assenting to Gotoba’s claim that nights are loveliest in autumn.  Even before the second voice the reader is in the midst of collaboration. 

     Shohaku’s lines abandon the allusion, but mention the river which Gotoba had not, and extend the reference of the world’s regreening by imagining the warmer downstream town where the plum blossoms are already blooming, again reinforcing the theme of springtime’s beauty. In the next link Socho picks up the reference to the river, adding the element of the willow branches stirred by the breeze.  Sogi’s next contribution adds the boat and the dawn of day; the evening with which the series opened is gone, as is the snow, the mountain, the village, and the plums.  

     Perhaps this superficial glance, founded on translations, can suggest something of the dynamism of the renga form.  Decentered, always shifting and changing, tracing the connections between all things while preserving the apparent randomness of phenomena, such poetry seems profoundly Buddhist.  For all its contrivance it reflects the elusiveness of mental life, the fluid characteristics of consciousness as experienced, and in this sense is more “realistic” than more straightforward utterances. 

     The permutations of authorship of collaborative works transform and proliferate as do all conventions.  The first authors in examples here cited, Dunbar, Kennedy, Caustic, and Rone followed a pattern of ludic mutual ridicule, a purely aesthetic simulation of a contest for dominance resembling the aggressive posturing of male sexual displays among many species. There followed Marcabrun and Ugo Catola who presented their topic dialectically, foregrounding the unique capacity of poetic discourse to accommodate ambiguity and self-contradiction.  Then in the renga of Sogi, Shohaku, and Socho a more complex use for collaboration emerged, the virtuoso construction of a tracery of cause and effect, the earlier portions of which fade to invisibility as each new link is added. 

     Numerous other possibilities exist either in fact or potentially.  The process of oral literature is particularly collective, but all literature has sources and influences.  Some modern authors have preferred to work as one with a unified product like Louis and Celia Zukowsky sometimes did or Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton have done in Exquisite Politics (1997), Oyl (2000) and Little Novels (2002) [10].  The contributions can be entirely separate as when a group of poets write on a given theme. 

     The Romantic view of composition led Edward Young to argue in the eighteenth century that “originals can arise from Genius only,” and the genius is not essentially a scholar, but rather a “divinely-inspired Enthusiast,” who may provide readers access to his own consciousness, “a fertile and pleasant field, pleasant as Elysium, and fertile as Tempe; it enjoys a perpetual Spring.”  Young finds allusive or learned poetry to be of only secondary value as it necessarily dilutes the power of individual vision.  Yet no work is independent of its predecessors, nor is any work univocal except the briefest and simplest.  There is even then an irreducible second layer as the persona is shaped by the author.  Further, poetry excels at conveying ambiguity and ambivalence.  To W. E. B. DuBois the Black writer was not confused by  “double consciousness,” but rather was allowed more insight and precision.  Collaboration is simply a technical means to guarantee that the incongruities and self-contradictions that we experience daily find concrete form on the written page.  In the end the various sorts of ways that writers interact in collaborative forms only foreground the tensions inherent in any human interaction, indeed, even within a single mind.

 

  

1.  John Berryman’s review in the Kenyon Review III, 3 (Summer 1941) found the “chainpoems” entirely unsuccessful, “excruciating” and “painful.”

 

2.  The pioneering study of the dozens was published by John Dollard, “The Dozens: dialectic of insult,” American Imago, 1(1), 1939.  An excellent later survey with a good sample of collected verses is found in Roger D. Abrahams, "Playing the Dozens" The Journal of American Folklore Vol. 75, No. 297, Symposium on Obscenity in Folklore (Jul. - Sep., 1962).  Amuzie Chimezie provides a convincing link to African practice as well as critiquing his predecessors with some asperity in “The Dozens: An African-Heritage Theory,” Journal of Black Studies Vol. 6, No. 4 (Jun., 1976).

 

3.  Ben Barzilai, “The Fierce, Flourishing World of Battle Rap,” New York Times Magazine, June 14, 2023.

 

4.  These and other lyrics are available at https://battlerap.com/lyrics/2016/09/28063-caustic-vs-rone.

 

5.  The poem acknowledges its genre by the use of the word tenson in l. 11, its occurrence presaged by the verb partiram in l. 3.

 

6.  Marcabrun, quant sui las e·m duoill,

E ma bon'amia m'acuoill

Ab un baisar, quant me despuoill,

M'en vau sans e saus e garitz. (ll. 49-52)

 

7.  Poetic improvisation has its own history.  Fude ( 賦得)or composition of poems on assigned topics was a recreation in China and became during the Tang Dynasty a part of the civil service examinations.

 

8.  See Konishi Jin'Ichi (tr. And introduced by Karen Brazell and Lewis Cook), “The Art of Renga,” The Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Autumn, 1975).  His exposition is the basis for this description. 

9.  David Landis Barnhill, “Renga: The Literary Embodiment of Impermanence and Nonself,” available at https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Literary-Embodiment-of-Impermanence-and-Nonself-Barnhill/4c618825d256d06d9a6a0685fc8aafc06565a6c0.

 

10.  See also the recent anthology edited by Dean Rader and Simone Muench They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing.  Parallels such as the work of Gilbert and George exist in visual art.

 

11.  Young, “Conjectures on Original Composition” (1759).

Amics Marchabrun, car digam

Un vers d'Amor, que per cor am

Q'a l'hora qe nos partiram

En sia loing lo chanz auziz.

 

Ugo Catola, er fazam,

Mas de faus' amistat me clam,

Q'anc pos la serps baisset lo ram

No foron tant enganairiz.                            8

 

Marcabrun, ço no m'es pas bon

Qe d'Amor digaz si ben non!

Per zo·us en mou e[u] la tenson,

Qe d'Amor fui naz e noiriz.

 

Catola, non entenz razon,

Non saps d'Amor cum trais Samson?

Vos cuidaz e'ill autre bricon

Qe tot sia vers quant vos diz.                    16

 

Marcabrun, no·s troban auctor

De Sanso·l fort e de sa'uxor

Q'ela n'avia ostat s'amor

A l'ora que ce fo deliz.

 

Catola, qar a sordejor

La det e la tolc al meillor,

Lo dia perdet sa valor,

Qe'l seus fo per l'estraing traiz.                 24

 

Marcabrun, si cum declinaz

Qu'Amors si' ab engan mesclaz,

Dunc es lo almosna pechaz,

La cima devers la raiz

 

Catola, l'Amors dont parlaz

Camja cubertament los daz,

Aprop lo bon lanz vos gardaz,

Co diz Salomons e Daviz.                             32

 

Marcabrun, amistaz dechai,

Car a trobat Joven savai!

Eu n'ai al cor ir' et esclai,

Qar l'en a levaz tan laiz criz.

 

Catola, Ovides mostra chai

E l'ambladura o retrai

Que non soana brun ni bai,

Anz se trai plus aus achaiz.                         40

 

Marchabrun, anc non cuit t'ames

L'Amors, ves cui es tant engres,

Ni no fo anc res meinz prezes

D'aitals joglars esbaluiz.

 

Catola, anc de ren non fo pres

Un pas, que tost no s'en loignes,

Et enquer s'en loingna ades,

E fera, tro seaz feniz.                                    44

 

Marcabrun, quant sui las e·m duoill,

E ma bon'amia m'acuoill

Ab un baisar, quant me despuoill,

M'en vau sans e saus e garitz.

 

Catola, per amor deu truoill

Tressaill l'avers al fol lo suoill,

E puois mostra la via a l'uoill

Aprop los autres escharniz.                           48

 

Marcabru, my friend, let's compose

a love poem, for I've set my heart to that,

by the time we part,

its tune be heard far away.

 

Uc Catola, let's do it

but I accuse you of false friendship

for, ever since the serpent lowered the branch [to Eve],

there haven't been as many deceitful women. 

 

Marcabru, it doesn't please me

that you say anything but good about Love!

I begin this tenso

because Love gave me life and raised me.

 

Catola, you don't listen to reason.

Don't you know how Love betrayed Samson?

You and the other suckers,

do you think that everything [love] tells you is true?

 

Marcabru, we do not find people who say,

about the strong Samson and his wife,

that she had removed her Love

at the time his life ran out.

 

Catola it's to the worst

she gave [her love] and took it away from the best

and lost her worth the day

her husband was betrayed for the foreigner.          

 

Marcabru, since you imply

that Love is mixed with deception,

is almsgiving sin

and the top below the root?

 

Catola, the Love you talk about

secretly changes the dice.

Stop after a good roll,

say Solomon and David.

 

Marcabru, Friendship decays

because it has found Youth uncouth!

I have anger and revulsion in my heart

because it has caused such ugly cries.

 

Catola, Ovid shows here,

and the look of things confirms it,

tha [Love] does not discriminate against brown or bay,

but appeals mostly to degenerates.

 

Marcabru, I do not think you ever loved

Love, towards which you are so vehement,

nor that it ever esteemed anything less

than certain brainless jesters.

 

Catola, Love never took

a step [towards me] without fleeing right away,

and it still tirelessly flees

and will do so till it is undone.

 

Marcabru when I'm tired and sad

and my good friend greets me

with a kiss while I take off my clothes,

I go away well, and safe, and cured.

 

Catola, out of love of the wine-press,

money makes the fool cross the threshold

and then shows the eye the way

towards the other laughable people.

 

 

  

The Minase Sangin Hyakuin by Sogi, Shohaku, and Socho

 

 

雪ながら山もとかすむ夕かな　　　　宗祇

Yuki nagara yama-moto kasumu yube kana

 

As it snows the base

of the mountain is misty

this evening (Sogi)

 

行く水とほく梅にほふ里　　　　　　肖柏

Yuku mizu toku ume niou sato

 

Far in the way the water goes

a plum-blossom-smelling hamlet (Shohaku)

 

川かぜに一むら柳春みえて　　　　　宗長

Kawakaze ni hitomura yanagi haru miete

 

The wind from the river

sways weeping willows

now it’s spring (Socho)

 

舟さすおとはしるき明がた　　　　　宗祇

Fune sasu oto wa shiruki akegata

 

The pole of a boat makes

a clear sound at dawn (Sogi)