Art as Play

 

     A dramatic performance is aptly called a play, though a sonnet or a sonata might deserve the name no less.  All art is a form of play, though not all play is art.  When goat kids tussle and cats knock a ball around, they are playing.  Their end is amusement, just as opera-goers and sonnet-readers are pleasantly passing the time, though art aficionados might call what they are seeking beauty.  All are enjoying recreation in a diversion from the pursuit of practical goals.  The dog slavering while pursuing a stick and the gallery visitor cocking a discerning eye have a good deal in common. 

     Play might be defined as activity done for its own sake without any function other than the satisfaction arising from the act itself.  Throughout the centuries those defending the arts from moralists who regarded aesthetic pursuits as frivolous or hedonistic have maintained that exposure to aesthetic objects makes the consumer more noble and more moral, but, should it ever happen, this effect is incidental.  The same is true of more modest claims that art increases sympathy or sensitivity, or, indeed, that its study benefits general intelligence.  While it is true that art encodes and transmits cultural values and spiritual convictions, this function, too, is nonessential.  Pleasure is the chief and essential end of art, though critics yet today, in an odd vestige of moralism, shrink from admitting it.

     This week’s New York Times Opinion section, for instance, includes the promise that the study of art will “improve your taste, your judgements, your conduct.” [1]  The notion that culture will sharpen both cognitive and moral discernment, while broad and unqualified, seems modest when juxtaposed to the article’s extravagant title “How to Save a Sad, Lonely, Angry and Mean Society,”  Such claims are likely to be in part defensive, reacting to today’s educational stress on science and devaluation of humanities.

     For centuries of European criticism had accepted a compromise in the authoritative formula “delight and instruct,” with the second term justifying and diluting the first.  Yet recognition of people’s fondness for symbolic  representation goes back to Aristotle who recognized this distinctive human taste, saying “from childhood to imitate is inborn in people and in  this they differ from other animals,” since “by nature we have an instinct for representation.”  The contemplation of such symbols or representations or “imitations” in Aristotle’s term, brings us “pleasure.”  [2]  in the Politics Aristotle is quite clear about the uselessness of art, saying that the young must not be taught skills that are merely functional (he uses the term χρήσιμος, useful or serviceable), as his activities should not be corrupted by what is “not free” (ἀνελεύθερος),  This is, of course the basis for the value long placed on the “liberal arts,” those of free men, unbound by compulsion, wages, or practical ends. [3]  This sort of disinterested pastime is a self-justifying activity, the highest human occupation.  For the ancients this noble purposelessness characterized not art alone, but all intellectual activities. 

     For Schiller more than two millennia later human beings are motivated by both a constantly mutating sensuous drive (sinnliche Trieb) arising from physical stimuli and an unchanging structural drive (Formtrieb) which, like mathematics, leads toward the rational. [4]  For him the dialectic of these opposing tendencies is resolved through the play drive (der Spieltrieb), which mediates between the world of phenomena and that of ideas. 

     The sensuous drive excludes all independent activity and freedom from its subject, the passive receiver of sense data, while the structural drive, situated in the conceptual realm, excludes all dependence and all pain from its purely formal values.  The exclusion of freedom reflects a physical reality, while the exclusion of suffering is a spiritual inspiration. Both drives therefore involve the mind, the one through natural laws, the other through cognitive operations.  In the play instinct both work together, and, when one is led both by inclination and by reason to love another individual (or, likewise, an objet d’art) the synthesis generates a playful attachment in which coercion has no part.

     Building on these conclusions in the twentieth century Johan Huizinga in his Homo Ludens derives art from play while accepting the biological origins of a play instinct in “the habitual tendency of every living creature to leap; and the human creature, by acquiring, as we said, a sense of rhythm, generated and brought forth dancing ; and since the rhythm is suggested and awakened by the tune, the union of these.” For Huizinga “rhythm and harmony,” surely mathematical elements Schiller would have considered “formal,” are “invariably accompanied by pleasure.” (263)  

     He usefully defines the nature of play, listing five distinguishing characteristics.

 

1.  “Play is free, it is in fact freedom.” (8)

2.  Play is separated from the rest of experience.  It is a wholly voluntary activity.

3.  Play is isolated from other activities both in duration and location.

4.  Play “creates order; it is order.”  “It is invested with the noblest qualities we are capable of perceiving in things: rhythm and harmony.” (10)  “All play has its rules.” (11)

5.  Play is connected with no functional end whatsoever beyond recreation.  “It interrupts the appetitive process.” (9)

 

     On this basis he concludes that  Poetry “is born in and as play – sacred play, no doubt, but always, even in its sanctity, verging on gay abandon, mirth and jollity.”  (122)  He proceeds to provide anthropological data to support the conclusion that myth, art, and religion are all founded in play.   While “Poiesis is, in fact, a play function,” (119), he notes that poetry sometimes rises to the level of  “ideation and judgment,” but “music never leaves the play sphere.” (158)

     Though the similarity is profound, distinctions remain between the frisking lamb and the balletomane, the Superbowl fan and the cinemaphile.  All may be said to be playing, but only the film and dance aficionados are engaged with art.  The unique aspect of art is that its play involves manipulating symbols and patterns rather than objects or other creatures.  In this way art is distinguished from such human activities with no end other than pleasure, such as travel, gourmet dining, and certain sexual encounters, each of which depends on stimuli more substantial than the play of images and ideas in the mind.  In most music and much dance and abstract painting the gap is even greater, as the formal design of the work dominates while reference to the world of lived reality is absent or slight.

     Further, whereas in play one amuses oneself and only possibly fellow players or perhaps a bemused parent, art is typically made by one individual (in a process that may or may not be subjectively pleasant) and then consumed  by others.  Play is open-ended while art aims at a coherent unified object, finished in some sense and an artifact thereafter whereas non-aesthetic play is generally forgotten after it is enacted.  Finally, the rules for art are remade with every work, while those of chess or a game of catch are unchanging. 

     Art, then, is a recreational amusement, a way to pass the time while waiting to die.  Its primary end is always pleasure.  In this a play by Sophocles and the “playing” of a violin resemble the “play” of bridge players or that of frisking kids in a meadow of sweet grass. The painter may wish to make money and the gallery goer may consider his purchase an investment, but art is in its essence free of motive outside itself.  It is born of the exhilarating exercise of the human expertise at the manipulation of symbols when done for its own sake, or rather purely for fun and, with the more sublime works, perhaps some moments of that satisfying (if mysterious) sort of fun experienced as mental equipoise. 

     Artists build symbolic structures in the chambers of the imagination.  Beyond giving pleasure the works they create can, though their beauty and their order, serve as a “supreme fiction” (in Stevens’ term) redeeming a world known imperfectly, in fragments, and too often laden with suffering.  Art may realize that grand ambition or it may simply serve as diversion (doubtless itself a useful goal).  In a dark theater members of the audience amuse themselves with the play of entering another consciousness.  In an easy chair one reads a sonnet of Shakespeare and enjoys playing that, one day someone may spoken such lines direct from the heart, though the reader knows it is all make-believe.  The universality of both play and the entire spectrum of art – poetry, drama, music, sculpture, dance, and painting – throughout the world and in all ages, among hunter-gatherers and among urbanites, demonstrates the critical value of such activities in making human life livable.

 

 

 

1.  David Brooks, “How to Save a Sad, Lonely, Angry and Mean Society,” New York Times January 28, 2024.  Note the.  Brooks, a Yale professor but not a literary scholar, would have agreed for the most part with James Seaton’s Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism (2016), the most compelling exposition of the humanistic value of literature in recent years.

2.  Poetics 1448b μιμεῖσθαι σύμφυτον τοῖς ἀνθρώποις, ἐκ παίδων  ἐστὶ καὶ τούτῳ διαφέρουσι τῶν ἄλλων ζῴων and “κατὰ φύσιν δὲ ὄντος ἡμῖν τοῦ μιμεῖσθαι.” The word for pleasure, which appears in this passage in several forms, is “ἡδύς.”

3.  Politics 1337b.  Note also the origin of school in σχολή, meaning “leisure” or “that in which leisure is employed.”  Such men could, of course, attain freedom only by depending on slaves to perform the labor to support them.

4. Friedrich Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man), letters twelve through Fourteen.  The quoted lines are in letter fourteen.

The Phantom of Artistic Truth

     Artists have no privileged access to truth.  This qualification in no way diminishes their expertise in their own métiers.  They are specialists in the making of beautiful objects only and are no more likely than anyone else to have accurate ideas about other topics.  While this proposition may seem self-evident, it nonetheless contradicts assumptions accepted from archaic times until quite recently.  Further, it also challenges the intuitions of many readers who feel they find in works of literature, for instance, a depth of understanding of not only grand themes such as philosophy, divinity, mortality, but also usable lessons in human psychology and the ordering of society. 

     The origins of this idea are ancient indeed.  Though decorative art existed in prehistoric times, much sculpture, poetry, and dance of oral cultures is religious or magical, promising rewards beyond the aesthetic, including otherwise unavailable truths.  The conflation in the roles of poet with wise man and priest is universal at that stage and appears in Classical antiquity as inspiration by the gods or the Muses reflected in the Latin use of “vates” (prophet) for poet. [1]  The archaic kinship of special poetic knowledge with shamanistic trance is evident in the etymology of that Latin word for priest which has been traced to Proto-Indo-European *weh₂t- (“excited, possessed”), the same root that gave rise to Old and Middle English wod meaning mad or frenzied.  In Asia, Africa, and America as well as in Europe, artists were thought to benefit the community by providing the insights they gained from their special insight.  The evidence from modern hunter-gatherer cultures is quite clear.  Artists were considered capable of traveling in supernatural realms and then returning with more authoritative truth than was available to others.  They certainly provided spectacle and entertainment, but they were also considered to be the source of functional answers to the profoundest questions.  What is real?  From where does the rain come?  How should people behave?  What should we do next?

     By historical times a bifurcation had occurring, separating the delivery of messages from higher entities from the pursuit of beauty for its own sake, what the Romans called “nugae” (trifles) meant for amusement.  With the coming of Christianity the source of prophetic wisdom moved from the Muses to the Holy Spirit as Bede’s story of Caedmon‘s inspiration in the field makes clear.  Bede says explicitly that he was given the gift of song “not from people or through people,” but rather, like the apostle Paul, by God himself. [2] 

     In spite of his reaction against a youthful taste for the theater, Augustine had come to allow a place for art if it facilitated access to religious truth and thus promoted salvation.  Due to the authority of the church, the poet no longer needed no longer to communicate directly with deities, allowing others at least vicariously to experience the divine; poets might adopt the more modest expectation of reformulating accepted teaching.  This didactic role is prominent in Philip Sidney for whom “virtuous action” is “the end of all earthly learning,” and poetry, as the likeliest method to “bring forth” virtue, has the “most just title” of prince of all pursuits.  Similarly, even for the atheist Shelley, poets are not merely “the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society.”

      The association of poetry with truth likewise is central to Matthew Arnold’s view that only culture could, by influencing people’s behavior, save society from anarchy, and Eliot’s wish to link his art with his Christianity, just as Ginsberg and Kerouac among the mid-twentieth century Beats, who reacted against Eliot, sought to proselytize Buddhism or to reinvent prehistoric spirituality like Snyder and Rothenburg.  All regarded poetry as a unique medium for conveying the highest truth.  

     The same assumption of art as a source of truth is evident in most middlebrow discussion of books (especially in today’s group discussions) which address “issues” raised in reading and insights offered by the author.  Pedagogical practice likewise generally centers on theme.  Teachers will deploy the dreadful expression ”What is the author trying to say?” as though that answer will sum up the reading.  Encouraging students to “learn something” from the text is far more conveniently handled in class than attempting to cultivate a taste for beauty or an understanding of artistic practice. 

     Indeed, through the years, probably the most consistent justification for literature is the claim that it reveals a truth otherwise unavailable.  Yet how might artists attain this privileged access to truth?  They have no unique source of knowledge and must depend like all others, on their own all-too-fallible judgement, sensibility, and experience.  Judging from artists’ biographies and English Department faculty gossip, neither the writing nor the reading of quantities of poetry seems to produce people of extraordinary good sense or exceptional morality. 

     The truth of art does indeed exist, though, in spite of the artist’s knowing no more than anyone else.  It is precisely because no one has privileged knowledge yet everyone is intimately familiar with one version of subjectivity.  Whatever medium might be used, the artist constructs in durable form a work that reflects an individual take on reality, a plausible representation of consciousness, not imitating experience but twisting, altering, and refracting it in ways that paradoxically make it more real.  What art records may not always look sublime, but that is because human experience is not regularly conducted in the empyrean.  Art records human consciousness, drawing on all the objects and events that compose a life, and making concrete not merely an impression of a physical milieu and a set of actions, but adding as well the elements that make life meaningful to our species.  Unlike other fields of intellectual work, the artist’s product incorporates the affective tone which with endless variety accompanies our every moment.  The retreat from pain and pursuit of pleasure that characterizes all conscious life is incorporated into every objet d’art.  The aesthetic imagination is, like our ordinary consciousness, more likely to be directed by irrational motives than by logic, Art can precisely express the contradictions, ambiguities, and mysteries everyone experiences but which resist the reductive simplicity of most propositions. 

     In all these ways art delivers the “truth” of human experience far more meaningfully and, indeed, accurately than other modes of discourse.  These very same factors that make human accounts of events significant also differentiate the stories that art tells from those that science relates.  The scientist describes what happens in the laboratory and seeks results that others can replicate, whereas in life every event is experienced differently by each person present and that singularity is as significant as any common ground. 

     Thus art thrives within the limits of subjectivity.  Yet even there its truth is problematic.  From the start it is already at one remove from lived experience.  Rather than trying to reconstruct a photo-realist rendering of memory, the author builds a new one, making aesthetic choices at every word.  Every poem or novel might begin with the words, “This is how someone, sometime, might have thinking; this is what that someone might have seen.”  The reader may then experience, not so much another’s vision of truth as a simulacrum of reality, constructed in imagination, though using, of course, materials derived from the writer’s past.  Using different language, Aristotle described the same contrast when he says poetry is more “true” than history. [4]  

     Artists have no particular grasp on truth other than their skill in putting together what looks to their fellows like a vision frozen in words, sometimes flamboyantly idiosyncratic, sometimes accepted by others who see in it their own humanity in a novel form.  We know nothing but our precious subjectivity and it is there that art makes its stage, there where all that matters most to our species is transacted, there where desire’s imperatives are acknowledged.  In that territory a claim to objective truth seems not so much fraudulent as irrelevant.     

     When Emily Dickinson wrote “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant,“ she implied the same superiority of artistic imaginative truth over mere observed facts.  The obliqueness of poetry arises from the techniques that have been found to be effective in infusing a wholly synthetic representation of experience with those subjective elements ordinarily absent from discourse and in this way lending life and a profounder sort of truth to a fantasy.  Like mythology and religion, art is truer than true, yet the artist crafts a creation without access to any knowledge beyond that possessed by others.  The strength of art lies in fact specifically in the fact that a mediated, obstructed, partially invisible truth is in its very deficiencies a human truth; certainty is unavailable to anyone.  The artist embraces this limitation and proceeds to make something beautiful, meaningful, and moving.  Because the artist is “whistling in the dark,” proceeding with no reassuring foundation of verities, that art is poignant and appealing and human and as true as anything can be on the surface of this dark earth.

 

 

1.  See Vergil, Eclogue 9.34 and Ovid Amores 3.9 and a great many other passages. 

2.  Ecclesiastical History IV, 24.  Bede alludes to Galatians 1:1 which notes in the Vulgate that Paul’s authority came “nōn ab hominibus neque per hominem, sed per Jesum Christum, et Deum Patrem.”

3.  Sidney’s emphasis was surely influenced by the fact that his essay was a response to Stephen Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse, containing a pleasant invective against Poets, Pipers, Plaiers, Jesters and such like Caterpillars of the Commonwealth (1579) which was provocatively addressed to him.

4.  Generally translated “more philosophical,” the word φιλοσοφώτερον is rendered “more scientific” in in Poetics 1451b by W.H. Fyfe.  Surely what Aristotle meant was simply “truer.”

The Primacy of Poetry in Sidney’s Defence

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


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


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




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

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

3. Nicomachean Ethics I.2.

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

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

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

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

Hesiod’s Muses: A Study in Polysemy

Theogony 26-28
ποιμένες ἄγραυλοι, κάκ᾽ ἐλέγχεα, γαστέρες οἶον,
ἴδμεν ψεύδεα πολλὰ λέγειν ἐτύμοισιν ὁμοῖα,
ἴδμεν δ᾽, εὖτ᾽ ἐθέλωμεν, ἀληθέα γηρύσασθαι.


     The Theogony tells us that when the Muses appeared to Hesiod they told him, “we know how to say many false things seeming true, but we also know, when we like, to sing the truth.” Being divine, and artistic and female to boot, even in this personal epiphany, they are likely to have intended multiple meanings and to have implied more than they said. Sketching out the semantic field defined by these few lines is a task without the closure of a single direct answer. As in poetry in general, the reader or listener constructs meaning from data less prescriptive than suggestive.


1.
     Considering the insults in the line preceding the Muses’ statement in which they address the poet and his fellow workers with the words “shepherds of the fields, miserable disgraces, nothing but bellies,” they may seem to be simply teasing the wretched ground-grubbing human with his limitations. Able to do nothing but stuff his mouth, he cannot hope to discern truth from lie. Any revelations they may make are then of no use to him, mingled as they are with misleading falsehoods. Though one might take their appearance as a seal of authenticity, an assertion of the authority of revelation, coming as they do from “aegis-holding Zeus,” this warning undercuts the guarantee as soon as it is delivered. The theme would then be one familiar to readers of Works and Days which admits humankind’s wretchedness and ignorance.
     In Plato’s Laws a similar sentiment appears. “Let us suppose that each of us living creatures is an ingenious puppet of the gods, whether contrived by way of a toy of theirs or for some serious purpose—for as to that we know nothing.” (R. G. Bury’s translation, I 644d) Later Plato elaborates this notion, adding that, rather than feel despair over the darkness in which we must live, we should rather emulate the divine practice of play. “Man is contrived, as we said above, to be a plaything of God, and the best part of him is really just that; and thus I say that every man and woman ought to pass through life in accordance with this character, playing at the noblest of pastimes, being otherwise minded than they now are.” (VII 803c) Art, of course, is the most sophisticated form of play.


2.
     An element of poetic play entailed in every performance or publication is the author’s demand for attention. Anyone seeking an audience cannot avoid the arrogance inherent in the writer’s position. The implicit call of every text is in the first instance, “Give me a hearing. Dismiss all other voices from your mind and listen only to mine.” All writers are in fact saying what the poet of the medieval romnce Octavian says at the outset.


Lytyll and mykyll, olde and yonge,
Lystenyth now to my talking.


     In support of this claim on the attention of others, Hesiod’s Muses pointedly describe some poetry as false and by this warning imply that their own revelations bear the imprimatur of heaven.
     This universal poetic pretension may also bear traces of its immediate history. It may be that the specific circumstances surrounding this poem include a conscious campaign to reconcile the myriad alternatives and contradictions in Greek religion to establish a canonical version of the mythological system which must replace all competing versions. The authority of Hesiod’s version depends on denying all the others. The success of an all-Hellenic theogony requires condemning other poets whose versions may feature regional forms of deity and local patrons. Having experienced a theophany, Hesiod is presumably on good terms with the Muses, his work authenticated by his divine encounter, while only deceit is associated with authors lacking such a benediction.


3.
     The text is often taken to mean that some poetry contains truth while some expresses specious lies, an idea easily assimilated to familiar aesthetic value judgements. If discerning the one from the other were a simple matter of checking the data of poetry against the reader’s lived experience, everyone would be a competent critic, but the Muses suggest that distinguishing true from false may be elusive.
     This is, of course, the very issue that problematized poetry for Plato. While conceding the divine inspiration of some poetry and acknowledging the power of art, whether fostering truth or delusion, Plato takes the safer option of forbidding poetry altogether in his Republic rather than risking that the wrong sort might gain influence. (He seems to have entertained no such fear of erring philosophers.)
     A similar view of poetry might be taken by less sophisticated Roman Catholics to whom accordance with church dogma is a precondition of good literature or vulgar Marxists who insist on working class heroes. Indeed, every reviewer who finds a book does not correspond to preconceptions might consider it to be lies, a retrograde standard indeed. The same criterion is implied when a work is praised as insightful or true-to-life.
     Complicating this sort of judgement is the fact that every text contains countless details and thus innumerable links to lived experience. Must every one of these prove accurate for the work to be deemed true? What about ambivalent relationships between the text and perceived reality: could a poetic line be partially true? Both true and false or neither? Who is able to determine an accurate measurement of truth? Short of revealed scripture (and then only for the fundamentalist believer) surely every text occupies an indeterminate middle ground.


4.
     Given the difficulty of assigning a poem a truth value that will be accepted by all informed readers, it may be that the Muses had in mind a more modest assertion and meant to claim only that some texts seem real, while others seem to lie. In this case they simply distinguish between imaginative works that possess verisimilitude, whether in details of setting, psychology, or theme from those constructed with the use of other conventions. Sidney’s Arcadia could hardly be taken for the record of actual events, nor could Barthelme’s Snow White, but this is not because the authors were incapable of representing plausible events, but because their projects were altogether different. The Muses might in this sense be thought to be boasting about the range of effects of which they are capable.
     The writer’s choice is not binary. Often poetry is found in the borderline territory between apparent truth and seeming fantasy. In their division of labor for Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth was to find the extraordinary in the mundane while Coleridge was to work on the recognizable within the exotic, but for both it is the contrast, the mixture that generates poetry. Though such a systematically self-conscious approach is exceptional, any number of combinations of the convincingly realistic and the conspicuously fabulous may be effectively used construct aesthetic texts.


5.
     The Muses’ formula may also be taken as a definition of literature, described with the unique quality of being at once both true and false. Every fictional story is, of course, false in the sense that it did not literally happen. Every poem as well might be read as fiction, as though prefaced with the words, “Imagine that a person were to say this . . .” Paradoxically, literature acquires its general truth, what critics call its theme, its application to lived experience, by avoiding faithfulness to the mere details of what has actually happened.
     Hesiod’s theme would then be similar to Aristotle’s distinction between history and poetry in the Poetics), though Aristotle mentions only the use of typical or most likely human behavior, saying “By a ‘general truth’ I mean the sort of thing that a certain type of man will do or say either probably or necessarily.” (W. H. Fyfe’s translation ix 1451b6-7) Due probably to his focus on drama, Aristotle omits therefore the poet’s depiction of non-psychological themes based on what seems likely, typical, or general. Aristotle here fails to comment on perhaps the most assertive form of rhetorical lying, the use of figures of speech such as metaphor which signify something other from what they say on the surface. Yet these, too, are aimed at shadowing forth a greater truth beyond mere facts.
     By facilitating lying and in general the ability to speak of things unseen, the development of language forty some thousand years ago fostered not only better organized hunting but gave birth to art and religion as well. (See David Lewis-Williams’ The Mind in the Cave) A recent scholar has suggested that the Muses mean to say not that their propositions might be falsely taken for truth, but rather that poetry is, in fact, a quasi-truth. “Seeming true” is then misleading; a better rendering would be “in a certain way equivalent to truth.” (See Bruce Heiden, “The Muses' Uncanny Lies: Hesiod, "Theogony" 27 and Its Translators,” The American Journal of Philology, vol. 128, no. 2 [Summer, 2007].)


6
     The perverse coyness of Hesiod’s muses will perhaps recall to the contemporary reader certain French theorists of the later twentieth century. The denial of straightforward signification, the questioning of the subject and mystification of the object may have startled Of Grammatology’s early readers, but such gestures became not only conventional, they became clichés in major literary conferences by the ‘eighties.
     The muses themselves are presumably as authoritative even as a Sorbonne professor when they cast doubt on the reliability of poetic truth. The ambiguity upon which they insist sounds altogether consistent with différance, and their magisterial attitude has a good deal in common with the mandarins of Paris and New Haven.
     Enough! The webs of signification have no end, but must be cut, like the threads in Atropos’ hand. The possibilities here outlined are sufficient to indicate some of their trajectories. As well as describing poetry, the Muses’ declaration embodies it. Aesthetic language differs from other discourses by its exploitation of polysemy. Each of the options outlined above is plausible. Each is founded on the text and on the characteristics of poetry. None is the whole truth, though each is true.

Shakuntala

     When I was hired as an adjunct to teach a course called World Drama at a large and respectable university, I found that the anthology that had been in use, though indeed titled World Drama, contained nothing but European plays. I added a paperback of Chinese works from the Yuan Dynasty, and cautioned the students that I was not pretending to cover the territory promised by the course title, but only aimed to remind them of what was omitted.
     Such compromises are unavoidable. The reader who wishes truly to know literature, unrestricted by a single national tradition, must accept the impossibility of wholly realizing such an ambition. Though some scholars have achieved dazzling breadth in linguistic study, one can learn only a limited number of languages, especially considering the depth of knowledge required to handle aesthetic texts. Exploring the literary expanse, the curious will repeatedly encounter vistas startling and grand that reveal vast and previously unknown regions. [1]
     Without knowledge of Sanskrit or expertise in Indian literature in any language, I make bold to present a few comments on the comparison of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, generally considered one of the finest plays of ancient Sanskrit drama. I beg the same indulgence from the well-disposed reader offered by a professor who finds that the necessarily fresh readings of inexperienced students, while generally repeating the dullest old errors, occasionally offer a window to an illuminating insight.
     A striking contrast with European drama is the insistence of Indian playwrights on a happy ending. This contrast is particularly problematic for Westerners since a naïve prejudice favors tragedy as more serious. [2] This may be due to the fact that the drama in India remained under religious auspices while it was secularized in the European Renaissance. Optimistic conclusions may be an implied consequence of the deities’ mastery of human affairs, though such considerations did not ameliorate the Greeks sense of tragic horror or Christian claims of tragedy in the fall of Satan or the passion of Christ. One expects similarly positive outcomes from popular and mass culture, reassuring the audience that all is fundamentally right in their assumptions about the world, but Kalidasa’s theater was courtly.
     Though action does occur in the story, the primary focus of the play is clearly lyrical. Poems succeed poems, some of them almost set pieces that could stand alone. The work’s courtly character is clear from the fact that Kalidasa displays erudition in his familiarity not only with the great Indian epics – the plot is drawn from a passage in the Mahabharata – but also by his adherence to the conventions set forth in such theoretical authorities as the third century Natya Shastra attributed to Bharata Muni..
     The courtly performance setting, the artificiality of the form and the concentration on highly conventional forms of aesthetic refinement suggest affinities to the masque, though there are critical differences. The allegorical figures typical of the masque offer even less plot and character, substituting an extravagant fondness for spectacle. The slow pageantry of the masque inspires first of all the appreciation of beauty and secondly seeks to enact general truths, while in both theory and practice ancient Sanskrit drama is centered around emotional affect, called rasa. Though the word in older texts may be defined as “juice,” “essence,” or “taste,” by the time of the Natya Shastra, it means the “flavor” of a scene, conceived as eight or nine possibilities: love, hilarity, pathos (or disgust), anger, compassion, bravery, horror, and astonishment. [3] Later writers added the serenity of enlightenment.
     In the context of the Hindu (and Buddhist) philosophic system the intentional excitation of passion may seem incongruous. Yet according to the Natya Shastra drama arose as a fifth Veda with the same goals as the first four: to teach truth (I.14-16) for people in some measure seduced by their senses. (I.12, 108-9) Though in a sense the gods have nothing to do with drama (I.22), which occurs not in the divine realm but in “the three worlds” (I.106), its sacred character is affirmed by the fact that the first play was presented at a festival for Indra (I. 55) and that puja must be offered before performances. (I.125)
     Though plays are a mimicry of human actions (I. 111 ff.), plausibility is inconsequential. The author’s goal is to evoke from the audience a series of related “flavors,” [4] or emotions. Initially, the Western reader may wonder why, in a meditative system aimed at freeing individuals from passion and attachment, the intentional generation of such feelings would be desirable. Fiction in general and plays in particular may be considered a form of upaya or “skillful means” by which the consciousness tricks itself into greater enlightenment. [5]
     The dramatist seeks to involve the viewer in an encyclopedic range of the varieties of a given human passion, for Shakuntala the erotic, not simply to experience the emotions for their own sake, but as the basis for meditation. If one feels every variety of love in a wholly artificial situation, only to be returned in the end from the setting of the drama to the real world of the playhouse, the result should be a certain detachment from the erotic.
     In a comparable conflict between the claims of art and religion, St. Augustine laments his youthful attachment to reading fiction and watching tragedies, thus immersing himself in “false” suffering while ignoring his own sin and indeed the entire suffering world. To him such taste came to seem perverse. [6] For Augustine verbal beauty is justified only when it has the object of furthering salvation. In a similar way, the Indian sages admitted drama as a route to enlightenment.
     Even the specific mechanism in which plays serve wisdom differs little from India to Europe. Of course, in the first instance, the play should have some instructive theme. Beyond that however, plays are said to perform a sort of alchemical metamorphosis of human emotion, transmuting potentially destructive feelings into something redemptive.
     In Aristotelean tragedy, the viewer will experience the emotions of pity and fear, leading to a salutary catharsis. Critics have differed over whether this describes a purgation in the sense of clearing away the troublesome passions altogether, a sort of flushing out of feelings better done without, or some sort of heightening that replaces the limiting emotions of everyday life with a profounder, nobler, and wiser version that allows the play-goer to sustain life in a more enlightened manner after leaving the world of the stage.
     The same dilemma is present in ancient Sanskrit drama. If such entertainments are to serve as a “fifth Veda,” is the mechanism through the elimination of passion or its objectification? Is such emotional expense present in all humans? In what way does consciousness of one’s own emotional susceptibility lead toward enlightenment? The rasas have a long critical history of analysis by learned pandits, so I do not doubt that such questions have been investigated, but I am here concerned only with the most immediate comparisons.
     In any event it is clear that both Western and South Asian dramatic systems rely on emotions, the determining factor in human decision-making, often occluded by the desire to consider ourselves rational, as the dynamo for generating changes in consciousness. Both employ recognizable (if unlikely) “imitations” of human action, but operate in a world of assumed universals rather than the incidental particularities of an individual’s fate. Both make use of legendary material couched in rhetorically elaborate language to indicate the gap between their truth and that of mere everyday life.
     Kalidasa’s Shakuntala opens with a prologue with what seems like modern self-referentiality. After a pious Shaivite benediction the stage manager interrupts with a blustery “Enough of that!” to introduce a singer. Her song transports him with its beauty to the extent that he forgets the night’s production. In an analogous way the author hopes his audience will be transported by the imagined emotions of the play. The last lines of the prologue provide a transition to the action of the play with the reference to the deer leading the king to his destiny unawares. Thus, the song, the play as a whole, and, within the play, the deer all provide the “cunning means,” or upaya that abstracts the season individual from the mundane and allows access to a more sublime realization of reality. The audience is drawn by the beauty of the play as King Dushyanta is by Shakuntala’s. Through the paradoxical operation of art, the fictional, the artful, and the imaginative allows the consciousness to focus not on the inconsequential details that absorb our daily attention, but on the longer view, of which the horizon is liberation, enlightenment, or, as Kālidāsa would say, moksha.


1. For instance, oral literature, which dominated human culture for most of the history of our species, is still largely neglected or ceded to anthropologists, whose concern is not with the beauty of the texts they collect.

2. Thus Hollywood movies for decades adapted literary classics, both novels and plays, by making their ambiguous or unhappy endings into happy ones. Popular culture tends to affirm received ideas.

3. This system is further rationalized in the Natya Shastra which, with an almost scientific impulse toward economy, maintains that the comic rasa arises from erotic, the pathetic from the furious, the marvelous from the heroic, and the terrible from the odious. (I.39)

4. The rasas are specifically likened to tastes in cooking in I.31.

5. The term (and kaushalya “cleverness”) is more commonly associated with Buddhism, it is used in Hinduism as well and is relevant here.

6. See his Confessions (III, 1-4). Augustine argues that a fondness for tragedy cultivated an absurd “love of suffering.” Elaborating this idea Augustine uses the language of bondage and masochism, recalling tragic stories that "scratched" his soul and became "inflamed spots, pus, and repulsive sores" according to God's justice ("you beat me with heavy punishments"). The bishop did not apparently see any similar sado-masochistic aspect to meditation on the passion of Christ or ascetic practices.
Augustine did find a place for art if it could aid a soul toward salvation. In On Christian Doctrine, Bk. IV, ch 12 to engage the faculty of eloquence on the side of truth to combat those who employ it to further error.

7. Satya Shastra, I.108-9.

On the Proper Ends of Literary Study

I would hardly pretend to objectivity while commenting on my brother’s book, my older brother who with grace and love taught me so much about literature and life. Still, the situation to which he responds and his own position should be of interest to everyone who cares about higher education and the humanities. I refer to him as I would any other author by his surname in spite of the fact that it is identical to my own.

Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism: the Humanistic Alternative, James Seaton, Cambridge University Press.

     We can only welcome the grand synthesizers who are willing to survey the greater range of a topic and audacious enough to draw conclusions from a bigger mass of data than any individual could fully digest. For without such ambition we would lack Gibbon, Vico, Marx, Frazer and Spengler. In Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism: the Humanistic Alternative, Seaton considers the entire history of literary criticism in English as well as its sources in Greek antiquity. He proposes a new analysis and argues passionately and cogently for his own approach to literature. In doing so, he reminds those of us outside the halls of academia of the current state of the discipline in our better universities.
      Apart from the grand scope of his project and his style -- clear, readable, learned, often passionate or drily witty -- Seaton is to be applauded for fighting the good fight on behalf of literature itself, though by his account he is engaged in something of a rearguard action. Those outside the profession as practiced in major research universities are likely to be unaware of the extent to which contemporary literary studies are dominated what is called “cultural criticism” and other forms of “Theory.” Seaton devastatingly demonstrates the derangement produced by the rise of this vogue, now perhaps just past its crest, in his analysis of two books presently used as college texts, but his savage indictment is better understood once one is acquainted with his idea of the proper uses of literature, what he calls “the humanistic alternative.”
     According to Seaton literary critics fall into one of three schools: Platonists, neoplatonists, and Aristotelians. For him the last of these options is the most fruitful and correct, the one he also calls “humanistic.” Other analysts have divided the world into Platonists and Aristotelians, but here these terms are redefined . For Seaton a Platonist is one who, like Plato in the Republic, is suspicious of the appeal of literature because stories and poetry may encourage erroneous ideas. While for Plato, correct ideas are those derived from philosophic reflection and discussion, other “Platonists” in this sense might look to other sources of truth such as religious revelation or some variety of Marxist doctrine.
     A neo-Platonist, in this framework, is any reader who regards the author (most commonly, a poet) as the purveyor of truth due to privileged access to some higher reality. The idea Socrates articulates in the Ion that a poet is given divine inspiration reappears powerfully among the Romantics and more modern aesthetic cultists. Whereas for the Platonist literary truth was undependable, the neoplatonist regards the poet as a prophet indeed whose words arrive from some higher realm, be it the divine, the unconscious, or simply the imagination. [1]
     The third alternative, labeled humanistic by Seaton is based on the comment in Aristotle’s Poetics that literature can teach how a certain sort of person is likely to behave. In other words, literature teaches us about other people in terms not of certainties, but of probabilities. “The humanistic tradition in literary criticism remains Aristotelian both in its view of literature as a source of insight about human life and in its willingness to judge grand theory by the norms of common sense.” (73) In its simpler forms, this is likely to seem familiar to most students including university graduates in majors other than English. After all, most often classroom discussion is largely centered on thematics, the text’s relation to lived experience, whether the characters behave in ways that illuminate life outside the page. Furthermore, though “the humanist tradition . . .turns to works of literature for insight into human life” (176), its exposition is always tentative, conditional, subject to qualification and change, part of a continuing reflection on human life by humans, each with a limited view.
     According to Seaton’s account this apparently unexceptionable approach to literature is very nearly passé, barely represented in the academic discussions of today in which a variety of poststructuralists and cultural critics now possess all but hegemonic power. I can myself recall from decades in the past research papers by soi-disant Derrideans who exercised prodigious ingenuity before pulling the predictable rabbit from the hat and demonstrating that the author was in fact saying the opposite of what seemed to be the point. One might learn something from a subtle exercise of this sort, but, like any inquiry which leads always to an identical result, its charms wear rapidly thin. Seaton most directly engages this sort of shallow “Theory” in his devastating analysis of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism and a casebook on Austen’s Emma.
     I will leave readers to savor Seaton’s assault on the NATC in full and will summarize only his treatment of the second of these books. Alistair Duckworth’s edition of Emma provides ten essays to accompany the novel: five commenting on Austen’s book itself as well as an essay on each of the approaches included. These are Gender criticism, Marxist criticism, cultural criticism, New Historicism, and Feminist Criticism. The gender critic criticizes the ideal of manhood represented in the novel, praising it for rejecting the contemporary fashion, but condemning it for reverting to an old-fashioned formula in its place, presumably in this way failing to anticipate the critic’s own ideal. In a similarly half-hearted manner, the feminist concedes Austen’s mild assertion of the rights of women while castigating her for, believe it or not, her “failure to envisage a female community across social barriers.” (63-4) The Marxist is disappointed that Austen “fails to admit to admit that ‘impoverished middle-class women are victims of a capitalist system’” (64) You get the idea. Each of these essays basically seeks to prove that the novel portrays unequal relations between sexes, classes, and other groups. This is hardly surprising since the story is set in a society where such differences are highly significant. One might well criticize a work that somehow avoided reflecting society in such a fundamental way.
     Apart from the fact that the critics’ findings are trivial and miss the many possible fruitful readings of the novel; they are also all much of a piece. One could have objected to the pigeon-holes in an older volume of this sort which might have featured a New Critic, a Marxist, a Freudian, and a Jungian, but at least there would have been some variety. Such tiresome sameness is particularly pernicious in a textbook directed at students who might be persuaded that this sort of vapid play represents the entire range of possible literary studies. But what value is there is lamenting Austen’s lack of twenty-first century political correctness even once? [2] The Marxist (and his colleagues) seem to differ from Engels who condemned ideologically driven fiction, what he called the Tendenzroman, while noting that the novels of the royalist Balzac contain more data on French society than “all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of the period.” [3]
     While applauding this first-rate book for its polemic purposes as well as its own sound ideas and well-wrought style, I have my own strictures. This book treats only literature, intentionally eschewing the other arts. This may be linked to Seaton’s scant consideration of form. Though form has been a constituent element of literature since the days when it all was oral, both as a signifying code and for its own beauty, we would suspect Seaton reads only to educate himself about human affairs were it not that he makes so many casual yet appreciative comments on the writers he discusses. The inclusion of visual art or music would have made it much more difficult to keep form in the background.
     Form is deeply related to beauty, the sensation of pleasure which has always been considered an end of art. One may avoid fetishizing beauty without neglecting it. Surely if we pick up War and Peace for another go-round, our own motive has much in common with that of the Ibo women who gather about open fires in the evening to compose “moon songs.” We, like Shakespeare’s audience and those who habitually watch Breaking Bad, seek primarily pleasure, entertainment, an agreeable way to pass the time. We have evolved to excel in symbolic manipulation; it is little wonder that we find recreation in practicing our greatest skill.
     For some works of art pleasure, whether formal beauty or amusement, may be the chief end at which the artist aims. Others may foreground description, either human or landscape. Some may primarily seek to move the reader to tears or laughter or some more complex emotion. If the writer or reader wishes to privilege theme, the result will be didacticism in some form, however indirect. (Actually, all popular and oral forms lend themselves to this sort of approach and the Horatian formula grants it importance equal to pleasure.)
     Seaton’s discussion of moral imagination in Trilling (113-115) seems to suggest that the end of literary consumption should be a heightened sense of right and wrong within oneself and in society at large such that one would be more likely to discern the specious from the true in social schemes. Does anyone really think that literature professors, those of the old school at any rate, are equipped to lead more moral lives than other people? A good deal of our impression of the authors of great works is that their lives are as messy of not a bit more than most peoples’. The notion that the literati, if only they were to read in a humanistic manner, would be more politically sophisticated than their neighbors’ seems not only unlikely, but it sounds dangerously close to the sort of elitism Seaton consistently deplores.
     He argues that the greatness of Trilling and Edmund Wilson rests on their ability to bring “insights gleaned from fiction, poetry, and plays to bear on moral, cultural, and social issues.” (143) This view would suggest that literature is a sort of educational aid to the understanding of other things. If Arnold was right in declaring that the critic must “see the object as it really is,” (144) how does that lead to the apparently more important secondary revelations outside the text? He rightly points out that just as researchers in the natural sciences can claim no particular qualification when commenting on moral or political issues, those in the humanities have no authority in questions of chemistry or physics. (175) It remains to be demonstrated that experts in literature have special access to the truth about morality or politics. Surely they are expert in the treatment of aesthetic texts and in that field alone just as the creators’ expertise is solely as artists.
     In any event, information that can inform judgments about human affairs both individual and social is available from a number of sources, both in direct experience and in non-literary texts. Literature in my opinion differs from other forms of discourse in that it more accurately represents human consciousness in a rich range of ways: by recognizing the drive for pleasure that animates all living things, by admitting the irrational, conflicted, and unknown motives that often govern behavior, by foregrounding sense impressions, which is the principal way in which we enlarge our knowledge, and finally, by its capacity for investigating unanswerable questions, mysteries like love and sex, death and aggression, and ultimate reality. (Seaton is very suspicious of granting significance to metaphysical claims by writers in spite of the fact that religion in a broad sense is one of the most common and enduring themes.) Only works of art can imply an entire world-view. We do not find the depth and meaning in these areas from theologians or psychologists or medical doctors or encyclopedists that is available from Homer and Dante and Cervantes.
     Somehow I think Seaton would largely agree. I know that we read in much the same manner. His own analysis stresses that a critic need not be always correct or even consistent to make meaningful comments on literature. In this volume he has not only set forth an original and useful description of literary history. He demonstrates in his own sensibility the humanistic values that have been traditionally associated with literary study while doing battle against those who would dismantle the discipline. The book is at once a pleasure to read and a record of the author's own pleasures in reading. No better authority is needed to demonstrate the value of a lifetime of treating literature as something that really matters.
     The book, incidentally, sells for $90. Why can print-on-demand service produce equally handsome volumes for five percent of that price? It is certainly not due to royalties or advertising budget. Ask your library (a university library would be the best bet) to buy a copy.

 

1. Recall the situationist slogan from Paris 1968: L’imagination au pouvoir!

2. Seaton says that this expression was originally used solemnly and now “half-ironically.” [192] I believe that I first heard it used in a self-mocking manner about 1971 by leftists and only later -- from those with little actual experience in the movements of the sixties -- in more serious usage as a real standard of behavior.

3. Letter to Margaret Harkness. In an earlier letter to Laura Lafargue, Engels expresses the same admiration for Balzac referring to the conservative author’s “revolutionary dialectic,”, in contrast to the consciously leftist writers: “all the Vaulabelles, Capefigues, Louis Blancs, et tutti quanti.” Both letters are included in Marx and Engels On Literature and Art ( Moscow: Progress, 1976. P. 93). Marx, too, thought Balzac, with Cervantes, the greatest of novelists and planned to write a book on him. Fielding was another of his favorites. (Marx and Engels On Literature and Art, p. 439)

Idea of Comedy

     Unable after searching to recover my notes for a course I taught during the eighties on the idea of comedy, I have here attempted to set down my views in summary. Though these notes lack much in the way of illustrations, authorities, and documentation, they represent my current thinking.



     All art brings beauty and pleasure, but comedy brings gaiety and joy as well. Thematically, in the broadest sense, comedy represents a positive response to life, an affirmation, a celebration, a delight. This is neither more nor less accurate (that is, true to experience) than the pity and fear of tragedy or the simpler sympathy of sentiment and melodrama; it is their complementary counterpart. At the conclusion of the Symposium, when the partiers are for the most part, passed out, Socrates is maintaining the equivalence of the two [1].  Don Quixote, Pantagruel, and Falstaff are certainly as profound to readers as Agamemnon or Hamlet, and likely to be more moving than any hero in Racine. When we momentarily feel successful (or even indifferent) in dealing with the terms of existence, or when we choose to play at feeling such victory, we laugh.
     Aristotle tells us that tragedy provides catharsis through pity of the other (compounded, I would add, of charitable love for fellow humans and Schadenfreude at witnessing someone else’s misfortunes). Fear arises since every member of the audience is aware that the fate of every individual is inevitably tragic. Looking at life straight on with open eyes may naturally elicit a tragic response. But a later ancient text which may preserve Aristotelian theory says that comedy “through pleasure and laughter” effects “the purgation of like emotions” [2].  In other words, ultimately the functions of tragedy and comedy are precisely parallel; both enable one to go on in spite of the intolerable conditions of life.
     In comedy, the self is generally normative, observing with a critical eye the foolishness of those on every side. Thus humor requires a butt and comedy is often quite aggressive [3]. The characters in American half-hour comedy television shows pass their lives insulting those around them; in Oscar Wilde, the benighted Philistine is put down; in Huckleberry Finn America is lacerated without mercy. Here comedy is close to its roots in the ancient κῶμος, Old Comedy, and the modern Carnival with ridicule of prominent people, a trend that continues unbroken into the present [4].
      At the same time, though, comedy can seem amoral, when it tends to view faults abstractly as incongruity, as oddly amusing grotesque distortions in a formal pattern rather than as the source of pain and suffering. In caricature the lovesick youth, the miser, the braggart, the macho man and all other endless varieties of human folly appear as sideshow attractions rather than psychological, spiritual, or social pathologies causing real harm. Bergson insists on “the absence of feeling,” what he calls “a momentary anesthesia of the heart” required for comedy, itself “wholly intellectual” [5].  According to Aristotle, the ridiculous must never be “painful nor destructive.” Of course, Wile E. Coyote is never injured, though he may be smashed like a pancake or blown into the sky, he returns ever undiminished. So the whole competition between him and the Roadrunner, between the Signifying Monkey and the lion, between Chaplin and the bushy-browed Eric Campbell, all contention seen through a comic lens is finally a game, a pretense, a sport to while away at least a portion of a lifetime.
     Paradoxically, though, comedy does in the end care a great deal about consequences, for every comedy must end happily. Every situation comedy ends in the restoration of a harmonious family, every romantic comedy ends in marriage. Human beings are such social animals that the endangerment of the social group by an individual’s violations of convention is seriously disturbing. Harmony must be reconstituted, if only through the sympathetic magic of drama.
     Aristotle notes that comedy is “an imitation of characters of a lower type,” portraying as “ludicrous” “some defect or ugliness” [6].  The viewer will feel superior to the comic figures (though suspecting that the difference may be uncomfortably small) just as he feels inferior to the heroes of tragedy (while knowing that their fate is his in the end).  Comedy finds amusement in every vice and failing – selfishness, libertinism, paranoia, vanity most all. Every fault is in fact a sort of vanity and ignorance – with a clear and objective view (like the reader) one would never behave in a ludicrous fashion [7].    By defining lapses, one defines norms. Comedy has been considered fundamentally conservative by some and inherently subversive by others because it is equally likely to criticize a present offender by calling for a return to earlier ideals or by denouncing the outdated values of the present and proposing radical new ones.
     Apart from character faults, comedy exploits our physicality. Faults which are body-based such as gluttony and lust are a rich source of laughter, but moral failing need not come into the picture -- perfectly ordinary facts will work as well: sex, excretion, farts, belches, sleepiness, sweating, slipping on a banana peel. In fact, commonality lies behind the comic impetus to deflate the pompous with such expressions as “he thinks his shit don’t smell” or “he puts on his pants like the rest of us, one leg at a time.” However, this basis for universal sympathy can equally serve to stigmatize individuals. Any anomaly, including physical defects or simply unusual characteristics such as short stature, red hair, or minority racial identity, can be fair game, as every elementary school child knows [8].
     The incongruity that inspires laughter may be of any sort, in Aristotle’s language “that which is out of time and place, without danger.” It may arise from exaggeration or disproportion [9], indeed from any difference. A phrase whose meaning shifts between two possibilities, a sucking puppy among the piglets, a soldier out of step, an Amish rap singer, the possibilities are endless. According to Emerson [10] “The balking of the intellect, the frustrated expectation, the break of continuity in the intellect is comedy.”
     Comedy is clearly associated in particular with topics about which people are anxious, such as sex, drunkenness, and social propriety in general. Laughter brings a simultaneous physical relief of tension and restraints and the intellectual assurance that reassurance that our own trials may, like those of comic characters, be overcome. Laughter has a social function [11], chastening nonconformists and creating a sense of shared values and feelings in the audience.
     The deepest roots of comedy are surely in the rituals of springtime, the joy of the earth’s regreening, the acceptance that welcomes the replacement of the old with the new. The promise of the spring and the reappearance of fresh produce must have been associated with high spirits [12].
     There is finally a sort of cosmic comedy, reflected in the daily laughter among Tibetan monks, or that of altogether mythic figures as Durga who roars with laughter as she decapitates Mahishasura. Nietzsche provides a secular analogue in his story about Zarathustra coming across a shepherd with a snake in his throat. Horrified, Zarathustra urges the man to bite the serpent’s head off. When the shepherd does, he suddenly becomes “changed, radiant, laughing.” “Never yet on earth has a human being laughed as he laughed. Oh my brothers, I heard a laughter that was no human laughter; and now a thirst gnaws at me, a longing that never grows still. MY longing for this laughter gnaws at me.” [13] This is nothing less than the laughter in reaction to the absurdity of existence. “The deeply wounded have Olympian laughter; one has only what one needs to have.” [14]
     Emerson makes a similar point sparing the symbolic apparatus. “The whole of nature is agreeable to the whole of thought, or to the Reason; but separate any part of nature and attempt to look at it as a whole by itself, and the feeling of the ridiculous begins. The perpetual game of humor is to look with considerate good nature at every object in existence, aloof as a man might look at a mouse, comparing it with the eternal Whole; enjoying the figure which each self-satisfied particular creature cuts in the unrespecting All, and dismissing it with a benison. Separate any object, as a particular bodily man, a horse, a turnip, a flour-barrel, an umbrella, from the connection of things, and contemplate it alone, standing there in absolute nature, it becomes at once comic; no useful, no respectable qualities can rescue it from the ludicrous.” [15]


1. More precisely, he claims that at a gifted tragedian should also be able to write comedy.

2. From the Coislinian Tractate, an anonymous condensation of a work from the first century B.C.E. Proclus and Iamblichus also treat comedy as catharsis. In the twentieth century Elder Olson revived the term katastasis as a comic analogue to catharsis, defining it as the “restoration of the mind to a pleasant, or euphoric, condition of freedom from desires and emotions; conversion of the grounds of concern into nothing.”

3. See the Philebus, particularly 48-50. To Plato, comedy works through phthonos or malice, "being pleased at the misfortunes of our neighbor" (Philebus 48a).

4. The same principle occurs worldwide. For instance, the ancient Irish kings feared being lampooned in a glam dicenn (satire-poem). Of course, in the Middle Ages poets were considered so close a thing to magicians that they were also believed to be able to bring real boils to the face of a victim. In West Africa, the Ibo “moon-songs” sometimes ridicule individuals who have violated group norms.

5. In “Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of Comic,” translated by Cloudesley Brereton L. es L. (Paris), M.A. (Cantab) and Fred Rothwell B.A. (London). Bergson says, “It seems as though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion.” Also, “to produce the whole of its effect . . . the comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple.”

6. Chapter V of the Poetics, Butcher’s translation. He is followed by the Coislinian Tractate and by Cicero who, in “On the Character of the Orator,” says “turpitudine.” In the twentieth century Northrup Frye used Aristotle as the basis of his analysis of the “low mimetic mode” in Anatomy of Criticism.

7. Plato says comedy springs from “ignorance of self.”

8. There is a reference to a dancing dwarf in the court of Neferkere during the Sixth Dynasty of Egypt (Third Millennium B.C.E.).

9. Cicero in On the Character of the Orator uses the term “deformitate.”

10. In “The Comic.”

11. This is Bergson’s third principal point.

12. Some authorities would link the customs associated with All Fool’s Day with the old medieval New Year just before.

13. Emphasis in the original from Walter Kaufmann’s translation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 3rd Part, “On the Vision and the Riddle.”

14. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, fragment 1040.

15. From “The Comic.”