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.

Hazlitt on the Nature of Poetry

Quotations without references are from the first chapter of Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets, “Introductory: On Poetry in General.”


     Hazlitt is for me one of the most reliable of practical critics. His comments are virtually always revealing, strongly felt, and very often sufficiently in accord with my own taste to seem incisive. He is far from assertive about theory, suggesting that his reactions are impressionistic, that he seeks merely “to feel what is good.” He explicitly discounts theoretical aesthetics which would have been of limited use in any event to his productive career as a periodical journalist, reviewer, and popular lecturer, though in his day the general public was at least literate enough to attend a series of talks on poetry. “You decide from feeling and not from reason; that is, from the impression of a number of things in the mind . . . though you may not able to analyze or account for it in the several particulars.” [1]
     Impressionistic criticism, apart from some forms of reader response theory, is little valued today, but it was positively encouraged by Romantic ideology valuing the individual and the irrational. It also received a certain authority by association with Longinus’ “On the Sublime” in contrast to the prescriptive principles of Aristotle, especially in Boileau’s version which appealed to neo-classicists. [2] Hazlitt was in fact labeled “the Longinus of the Cockneys” by a scornful critic [3], though the writer wished probably more to ridicule his lack of academic education than to point out actual similarities with Longinus. The very concept of the sublime is itself subjective, dependent on a sort of readerly enthusiasm altogether resistant to system.
     Impressionistic criticism is natural as well to an author who defined the familiar style. “To write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as anyone would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.” [3] Though he defended the use of rhetorical flourished in poetry, attacking “frigid and pedantic critics, for reducing the language of poetry to the standard of common sense and reason,” his ideal in writing prose for the general reader was an appearance of colloquial spontaneity.
     Still, Hazlitt’s statement that one’s general assumptions “may” not be evident provides a prudent conditional, admitting the possibility that the critic’s impressions may willy-nilly fall into patterns that suggest a theoretical foundation, as indeed I believe they do for all thoughtful readers. Hazlitt in fact had a taste for philosophy. He was familiar with the principal thinkers of his day and was early influenced by Coleridge who did not shrink from philosophizing.
     The first of his Lectures on the English Poets concerns “Poetry in General,” and there Hazlitt states some general principles that he considers to have guided his judgments. Hazlitt’s resistance to any intellectual or analytical approach to poetry is evident in his opening sentence which defines a poem as “the natural impression of any object or event, by its vividness exciting an involuntary movement of imagination and passion, and producing, by sympathy, a certain modulation of the voice, or sounds, expressing it.” He emphasizes with the words “natural” and “involuntary” the nearly autonomic operation of art in its record and communication of states of consciousness and locates the aesthetic event in the consumer’s mind, or, as his era would have said, in the imagination.
     The mind, as psychologists have demonstrated through the last hundred and more years, is far from ruled by reason. Hazlitt was well aware that every subjectivity is unique: “the imagination will distort or magnify the object, and convert it into the likeness of whatever is most proper to encourage the fear [or other strong emotion]. 'Our eyes are made the fools' of our other faculties. This is the universal law of imagination.” Passion is part of human vision.
     Hazlitt quite accurately notes that poetry gives recognition to the fundamental role of emotion when he says, “poetry then is an imitation of nature, but the imagination and the passions are a part of man's nature.” For him “poetry is the high-wrought enthusiasm of fancy and feeling.” This is no distortion or displacement of truth, but rather its approximation since “If poetry is a dream, the business of life is much the same.” It is the non-dreamlike characterization that would be false, and the poet is the truest reporter of consciousness. “All live in a world of their own making; and the poet does no more than describe what all the others think and act.”
     Demonstrating his own “high-wrought enthusiasm,” Hazlitt pushes this notion, though, much too far. One can accept his assertion that “The child is a poet in fact, when he first plays at hide-and-seek, or repeats the story of Jack the Giant-killer; the shepherd-boy is a poet, when he first crowns his mistress with a garland of flowers.” These are, after all, little dramas involving the illumination and animation of reality with play. But Hazlitt includes as well under his capacious rubric of poetry “the miser, when he hugs his gold” and “the tyrant, who fancies himself a god.” Poetry would then be found whenever one finds meaning or emotion in the details of the environment. The two actors -- poet and reader -- are no longer necessary in this view. Apparently, anyone who experiences emotion is a solitary and perhaps a mute poet through the very fact of subjectivity.
     For Hazlitt the desire for pleasure and the sensations of strong emotion are the wellsprings of poetry. “Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions.” “It is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have.” “It relates to whatever gives immediate pleasure or pain to the human mind.” Yet these characterizations discount the appeal of ingenuity, subtlety, and the appearance of truth, all of which are as likely to distinguish a poem as melodic beauty or the expression of powerful feelings. Pleasure and pain and rationality and emotion are not the only dualities people seek to bridge with art.
     Hazlitt’s essential definition of the poem emphasizes the Romantic values of naturalness, subjectivism, fancy, and passion, and the words “natural” and “involuntary” suggest an almost automatic writing. It is as though the poem emerges spontaneously like a sudden geyser, art generated by sympathetic magic rather than craft. The feeling that had simply appeared in the author is then elicited automatically from the reader by the little machine of words. “The natural impression of any object or event, by its vividness exciting an involuntary movement of imagination and passion, and producing, by sympathy, a certain modulation of the voice, or sounds, expressing it.”
     Hazlitt is elsewhere more succinct: “It is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have.” Similarly, “Poetry in its matter and form is natural imagery or feeling, combined with passion and fancy.” The only concession to the role of craft is the word “perfect.” Though he does admit that “There is a near connexion between music and deep-rooted passion,” the association of form and content sounds accidental. The sounds simply accompany the ideas. “As there are certain sounds that excite certain movements, and the song and dance go together, so there are, no doubt, certain thoughts that lead to certain tones of voice, or modulations of sound, and change 'the words of Mercury into the songs of Apollo'.”
     Literature and art in general do foreground emotion, pleasure, and the irrational in a way that more closely reflects the actual operations of human consciousness than do such discourses as science and mathematics, yet few would agree that every subjective experience of any power is poetry. Hazlitt’s view of the sublime, which he shared with many of his age, encourages such a broad definition of poetry.
     Though for Longinus the sublime is associated only with eloquent and powerful language, likely to express grand and lofty thoughts, in the eighteenth-century Edmund Burke declared terror the “ruling principle of the sublime." He noted the unique power of fear to induce “astonishment,” “that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other." For Wordsworth existential contemplation induces an “aspect more sublime; that blessed mood” [5] in which one apprehends the mysterium tremendum of the cosmos and yet feels intimately connected.
     For Hazlitt the reward need not be so profound. For him passion of any sort is a dynamo that “shows us the rich depths of the human soul: the whole of our existence, the sum total of our passions and pursuits.” It would be difficult to distinguish Aeschylus from Elmore Leonard in Hazlitt’s formulation: “The pleasure, however, derived from tragic poetry . . .has its source and groundwork in the common love of strong excitement.” By imagining “that which we desire and that which we dread” we are made to “drink deeper of the cup of human life.”

Further, as poetry, unlike the data of everyday experience, is ordered, it facilitates a wish fulfilment through symbolic manipulation. Poetry “raises the mind and hurries it into sublimity, by conforming the shows of things to the desires of the soul, instead of subjecting the soul to external things as reason and history do.” Poetry is able “to take the language of the imagination from off the ground, and enable it to spread its wings where it may indulge its own impulses ‘Sailing with supreme dominion/Through the azure deep of air –‘”
     Consistent with the skepticism implied by an impressionism that feels more powerfully than it knows, Hazlitt questions the representational potential of words in terms that resemble those of semioticians and post-structuralists. According to Hazlitt “Poetry represents forms chiefly as they suggest other forms; feelings, as they suggest forms or other feelings.” What Hazlitt maintains for the aesthetic text, for poetry, Saussure had claimed for all signification, that signs are relational and can refer only to other signs.
     Like Saussure, [6] Hazlitt also stresses the arbitrariness of linguistic signs. For him “the ordinary construction of language” is a thing “altogether arbitrary and conventional. Neither in the sounds themselves, which are the voluntary signs of certain ideas, nor in their grammatical arrangements in common speech, is there any principle of natural imitation, or correspondence to the individual ideas, or to the tone of feeling with which they are conveyed to others.”
     Though he carried forward the latest intellectual trends of his day, Hazlitt’s conclusion is elegiac and backward-looking, almost as if he foresaw the decline of poetry as a popular art. To him science will inevitably assimilate the role of art as knowledge increases. “The progress of knowledge and refinement has a tendency, to circumscribe the limits of the imagination, and to clip the wings of poetry. The province of the imagination is principally visionary the unknown and undefined: the understanding restores things to their natural boundaries and strips them of their fanciful pretensions.” At the end of the essay, Hazlitt illustrates his concepts by examining four of the “principal works” of poetry. Most contemporary readers will accept his judgement that Homer, the Bible, and Dante belong in that category, but his fourth choice is Ossian. His attention to the nostalgia for a one-time poetic vigor imagined among the primitive is familiar also in Blake, Keats, and, indeed, in the general vogue for Macpherson’s Ossian long after his historicity had been questioned.
     While Hazlitt’s views have affinities with such twentieth century trends as deconstruction and reader response theory, his rhetoric is firmly founded in the values of Romanticism. These have led him to speak as though all experiences of emotion, all sensations of pleasure and pain are within the ambit of art, though these broad gestures weaken neither his other theoretical statements nor his practical criticism. Both the strengths and weaknesses of his essay are apparent in the following single sentence which might serve as an epitome of his approach. “Impassioned poetry is an emanation of the moral and intellectual part of our nature, as well as of the sensitive -- of the desire to know, the will to act, and the power to feel; and ought to appeal to these different, parts of our constitution, in order to be perfect.” To Hazlitt poetry was the highest expression of the complete human consciousness, an exalted vision, but one worth recalling in this belated age.



1. See “On Genius and Common Sense.” Later in the nineteenth century Pater provided further support for a similar approach. In the Introduction to The Renaissance, he says “The first step toward seeing one’s subject as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly.”

2. Though Longinus had been translated into English earlier, William Smith's version, published in 1739 proved particularly widely read and influential. Boileau had published a French translation in 1674.

3. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Review vol. 16 “Cockney Contributions for the First of April” July 1824.

4. Burke, On the Sublime (1757), ed. J. T. Bolton. 58. To Burke the beautiful and the sublime are complementary. His emphasis on terror provided the theoretical base for the Gothic novel.

5. "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey," 37-8.

6. See Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics.

Tristan Tzara, Poet of Manifestos

Numbers in parentheses refer to Tzara’s manifestos listed just following the essay. I used Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries translated by Barbara Wright from Riverrun Press, New York to avoid quoting in French and including translations. The originals are readily available.
Numbers in brackets indicate endnotes.


Tristan Tzara pioneered the development of the manifesto as a literary form, [1] a movement across movements that persisted throughout the twentieth century and, in a quieter form, into the present. To me his poetry and drama generally work best in performance. While on the printed page the appeal of much of his work is less apparent, his manifestos retain their lively and likable energy.

The invention of this new genre, as well as the reinvention of performance poetry, was, perhaps, natural given Dada’s profound and polemical skepticism. For Tzara, Arp, and others a fiercely radical questioning approaches nihilism like an asymptote, yet their political, aesthetic, and spiritual idealism remains always a flicker, peyrceptible to the discerning reader. In the realms of conceptual art, chance, and the privileged valuation of the ephemeral, Tzara’s early twentieth century pronouncements are groundbreaking.

To be sure, Tzara could not have been clearer about his manifestos being anti-manifestos. In his seminal “Dada Manifesto” he notes the paradox and readily admits his self-contradiction: “I am writing a manifesto and there is nothing I want, and yet I’m saying certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am against principles.” He later writes under the guise of Monsieur AA, the Antiphilosopher. Dada, he says, “doubts everything.” “Everything we look at,” he insists, “is false.” “We don’t accept any theories.” Dada is “a word that throws up ideas so they can be shot down.” (2)

Playing up the destructive potential of his position in dramatic form, he proclaims ”there is great negative, destructive work to be done.” Dada is “like a raging wind that rips up the clothes of clouds and prayers, we are preparing for the great spectacle of disaster, conflagration, and decomposition.” (2) Anticipating Jimi Hendrix, he calls for musicians to smash their instruments on stage. (3)[2] “Every act,” according to him, “is a cerebral revolver shot.” (6)

If nothing whatever can be known, making everyone an "idiot,” as Tzara calls himself and his readers alike (5), what then? If the poet is a mere “fart in a steam engine,” (7) what more can be said? Avoiding as Gorgias had done millennia before, the desolate and boring aporia that might result from a conviction that Truth is altogether inaccessible, Tzara turns to his own subjectivity. This is essential because, “a work of art is never beautiful, by decree, objectively, for everyone.” (3) Since every consciousness is unique, the individual must shed “the pursuit of I worship you.” (4) Authority, including Tzara’s authority, is illusory. Thus the manifesto reader must not be “led astray by Aaism,” (4) that is to say, by the very document he is reading. Tzara rejects the very possibility of discursive thought. Some explain, he says, while others learn, but both deceive themselves. Abolish both the teacher and the learner and you have dada. (7) He calls, in fact, for “NO MORE WORDS,” though he cannot avoid using words as he does so. (5)

Only by entering into his own mind can the poet make progress: “With the words I put down on paper I enter, solemnly, into myself” (6) Tzara refers to this inward turning as “selfkleptomania.” (7) To him he is simply making explicit what is inevitable in any case. As he says, one may try to write a manifesto, but “it’s your autobiography that you’re hatching under the belly of the flowering cerebellum.” (7)

The dominant result of this introspection is an extraordinary ebullience, irrational exuberance and high spirits arising from some unquestioned, unquestionable base in a pyrotechnic display of excited language. Delightful little verbal displays pop off here and there. He maintains, for example that art is to be identified not only with Dada, but equally with plesiosaurus or handkerchief. (3) He renews the reader’s subscription to “the celluloid love that creaks/ like metal gates” (4) The phrase “for the saxophone wears like a rose the assassination of the visceral car driver” occurs in the middle of a passage as scintillating and fast-moving as the world of subatomic particles. That passage ends “thus drummed the maize, the alarm and pellagra where the matches grow.” (6) At times, Tzara’s manifestos are so rich in this pure poetry that one feels as though one is eating bonbons. “Dada is a dog – a compass –the lining of the stomach – neither new nor a nude Japanese girl – a gasometer of jangled feelings.” (7) And so it goes, infused with wild unpredictable imagination and passionate enthusiasm.

In the end, “Dada is our intensity.” Spectacle rules: “We are circus ringmasters.” “It’s still shit, but from now on we want to shit in different colors” (6) the cosmos then becomes a marvel, “the spermatozoon ballet” (4), at which one can only look on in wonder.

Yet, Tzara sounds a word of warning. Significance is lurking in the shadows. “While we put on a show of being facile, we are actually seeking for the secret essence of things.” (1) Tzara’s pseudonym on top of a pseudonym for several of his manifestos is M. Antipyrine, a name suggesting a healing nostrum. The psycho-aesthetic-spiritual solution suggested by Tzara (and other Dada artists) has much in common with Zen Buddhism. [3]

Tzara’s pseudonym with its associations with the French word triste draws attention to the universal suffering that motivates the Buddhist search for enlightenment. [4] He repeats the line “You’re all going to die,” (7) as if this fact poses the essential problem of life. The solution to this problem is in both cases experiential rather than logical. Tzara insists that “logic is always false,” (2) a contention that, were it not so baldly stated, could be a portion of a Zen sutra. He speaks nearly explicitly about enlightenment: “We really know what we are talking about, because we have experienced the trembling and the awakening.” (7) Dada arises not from intellection but from living: Dada, Tzara says, is “the roar of contorted pains, the interweaving of contraries and of all contradictions, freaks, and irrelevancies: LIFE.”(3) The twentieth century artist recalls Nagarjuna and Advaitist Vedanta when he proclaims that dualities are a fraud, specifying “order=disorder; ego=non-ego; affirmation=negation.” (2) [5]

Finally, and most dramatically, Tzara agrees with the sages that we are really liberated all along, though unconscious of the fact. Nothing really changes with sublime knowledge. One returns at last to the point one had occupied all along. The “three laws” of God are “eating, making love, and shitting.” (6) The story is told of Baizhang Huaihai among others that, when asked how he pursued enlightenment, replied “When hungry, I eat; when tired, sleep.” Yet somehow, in both cases, everything is transfigured.


1. Monsieur Antipyrine’s Manifesto 1916
2. Dada Manifesto 1918
3. Unpretentious Proclamation 1919
4. Manifesto of Monsieur AA the Antiphilosopher
5. Tristan Tzara
6. Monsieur AA the Antiphilosopher Sends Us this Manifesto
7. Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love


Endnotes

1. The word manifesto had earlier been used for many political declarations such as Bolivar’s “Cartagena Manifesto,” Peel’s “Tamworth Manifesto,” and, most notably, Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century several anarchist manifestos appeared. Very likely the move from the social realm to the aesthetic was facilitated by the military analogy suggested by the term avant-garde.

2. Hendrix did this at Monterey in 1967, but he had been preceded by Jerry Lee Lewis destroying pianos in the 1950s as wel l as by Pete Townshend, Jeff Beck and others. In the realm of avant-garde art, Nam June Paik smashed a violin in 1962 as part of his "One for Violin Solo" and the gesture had become enough of a convention that a Destruction in Art Symposium was held in London in 1966 which involved a number of “destruction events.” Two years later a similar event was held in New York City. Oddly, Townshend had studied with Gustav Metzger who was the central figure in the London symposium.

3. I am hardly the first to note the similarities. See, for instance, Won Ko’s Buddhist Elements in Dada: A Comparison of Tristan Tzara, Takahashi Shinkichi and Their Fellow Poets.

4. In fact the name Tristan is Celtic meaning noise, and is not derived from the Latin tristis, though the association is prominent in Tristan and Iseult as well as with Tzara, who, according to Paul Cernat’s Avangarda românească și complexul periferiei: primul val, said that it was meant to recall the French phrase “triste âne tzara” ("sad donkey Tzara"). According to Serge Fauchereau's report (also recorded in Cernat), Colomba Voronca recalled Tzara’s explaining it as a play on the Romanian phrase trist în țară, meaning "sad in the country." In 1925 he legally changed his name from Samy Rosenstock to Tristan Tzara.

5. Tzara reinforces the point while incidentally anticipating Derridean deconstruction in section IV of 7.

Afloat on the Ocean of Words

     Every artist in every medium is in effect shouting out “Look at me! Turn to me from all other phenomena!” And consumers of art collaborate with the considerable ego implied by this cry. Certainly in literature, whatever the theme, the author is always the hero. The critics, indeed, all readers, acknowledge sufficient value in the writer’s moves to follow every decision recorded on the page with careful attention. The creative artist’s abilities are fetishized, often considered mystically resistant to analysis and attributed to talent or inspiration. Yet at times the figure of the author can seem suddenly a specter, an insubstantial illusion shimmering even as it threatens to vanish altogether.
     If the proposition sounds incredible, that is because one if the most persistent of our Romantic received values is the celebration of individual Genius. Though that word is not attested in the sense of exalted intellectual power until the late eighteenth century this use seems now only natural. The nascent Romantic Edward Young celebrates the “man of genius” for his originality, comparing him to the less impressive imitator. According to Young only such an innovator “raises his structure by means invisible.” For him and for many today the genius “partakes of something divine” since “genius is the god within.” [1] In his best-seller titled Genius Harold Bloom refers with approval to Emerson’s description of genius using the very same phrase “the god within.” Bloom begins his book with the “unique” “supreme” genius of Shakespeare which he defines as evident from the poet’s “universality,” “the pervasive illusion (is it illusion?) that he has peopled a world, remarkably like what we take to be our own, with men, women, and children preternaturally natural.” The concluding oxymoron epitomizes the broader paradox that the individual most marked off from the rest of us has somehow earned that singularity by his ability to represent the lives of all.
     Yet prior to the Romantic era the successful artist was more often regarded as the best trained, likely the one who had spent an apprenticeship emulating the work if a master and the models of earlier eras. Thus according to Winckelmann “the only way for us to become great, and indeed, inimitable – if this is possible – is by imitating the ancients.” [2] Here again the neat confidence of the formulation is offset by the self-contradiction. Only by imitation do we get free of imitation, that is, become inimitable. Little wonder that the great art historian felt moved to include the qualification “if this is possible.”
     In more recent decades advanced thinkers have questioned the concept of the autonomous god-like creative author. A couple of generations ago Barthes declared “The Death of the Author” [3], citing Mallarmé as a predecessor and claiming that every "text is a tissue [or fabric] of quotations," that every work is "eternally written here and now," and that the “meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader,” and not the writer at all. At about the same time, Foucault asked “What is an Author?,” [4] noting, as though it were an established fact, that “criticism and philosophy took note of the disappearance –or death - of the author some time ago” and concluding with the question “what difference does it make who is speaking?” The case against what might be called the authority of the author by these two and their fellow travelers is weakened by the fact that they mean to displace the artist as the creative fountainhead only to step into the same role themselves as enlightened post-modern critics, juggling conundrums for the amusement of their less celebrated peers or cracking the whip and exasperating their more commonsensical critics into growls and roars. Few readers are likely to be willing to trade Shakespeare for Derrida.
     Long before the rise of deconstruction and allied theories, though, the artist’s status had been discounted or questioned. Most early poets and sculptors were anonymous. Homer does not emerge as an individual. Only after a certain date do we begin to see ancient Greek ceramic artists sign their work. We have no clue as to exactly which caryatids of the Erechtheum were crafted by Socrates’ father. Even in the Middle Ages anonymity is the rule in early lyrics and stained glass. In traditional societies the local carver is rarely celebrated as a “genius,” but rather is regarded as a craftsman like a carpenter or a potter. Folk songs and fairy tales are generally not attributed as original work by the person from whom they are collected. After all, according to the Grimm brothers’ dictum, the people as a whole compose (“das Volk dichtet”).
     Indeed, who can name the author of the myth of Oedipus? Sophocles certainly, though Aeschylus and Euripedes both wrote lost plays on the same theme. But Oedipus appears as well in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Homer and as the tragedians had doubtless learned the story orally in childhood. It was the common possession of the Greek people. Though the view that authorship of folk works was in some mysterious way “collective” was championed by Francis Gummere among others, it had steadily lost favor and was finally supplanted by the careful and innovative work of Milman Parry and his student Albert Lord. [5]
     What Parry and Lord found was that the singers of epics in the Balkans in the 1930s were able to improvise oral poetry by using a set inventory of phrases, formulae, and lines, most of which were common to many “authors,” but that their performances varied widely in quality and content, even between successive recitations of the same piece by the same singer. The poet might say, and might in fact think that he is exactly reproducing his own version or the version of his mentor, but the texts invariably showed pervasive and significant differences. Though working in a genre in a way collective, some performers were talented and others pedestrian. The audience and the occasion always influenced the poem.
    The insights of Parry and Lord allowed for the first time an understanding of previously obscure characteristics of Homer as well as proving useful in the study of Beowulf, Pentecostal preachers, blues, and other oral forms. These works are demonstrably shaped by an entire community and a tradition though any individual work is also the product of the skill and vision of an individual. Just as art regularly both questions and affirms received ideas, it can only arise from a social consensus but through a single subjectivity.
     That dialectic is evident though less marked in non-oral work as well. Every writer shapes work in part with audience in mind. Each uses phrases, images, and conventions (sometimes twisting or altering them) learned from earlier texts. The concepts that populate a particular vision of reality are based on those borrowed from others. Even opposing sides of issues in a given era are generally founded on the same basic vocabulary and assumptions. The assumptions of one’s own era are virtually invisible, while those of earlier periods are more easily discerned. [6]
     The notion of genius is fostered by the supposed opposition of tradition and innovation in literary production. In all periods art is produced by crafting altered versions of the inherited templates. While during many earlier eras past masterpieces provided the model the artist could aspire to equal, for two hundred years novelty has been privileged. The radical has been admired. Yet in fact the author who defies, opposes, or omits a recognizable convention makes use of it just as much as the one who repeats it. Each use of convention – in any of these ways -- allows for the more efficient expression of information. A writer who rebels against an established trope or other device by defying it is governed by the same code as the writer who employs it. No inherent value accompanies either use of conventions or defiance of them.
     The themes in literature and the language people use to express them evolve over the centuries with their own dynamic, finding expression through the agency of people active in each era. Thus one might say that Doctor Johnson, rather than being the author of his poetry, is himself written by the eighteenth century English Zeitgeist while James Joyce is an inevitable product of the altered intellectual atmosphere over a hundred and fifty years later. Just as the leopard’s fur appears in a spotted pattern without conscious planning and the clouds assume a particular aspect in every moment of the day, people’s writing is generated by the entire population of thinking humans in a grand polyphonic symphony continuing now for thousands of years. [7]
     Of course, the secondary symbolic elaboration of literature only intensifies the opposition inherent in all language. One can only make use of words and phrases which a listener or reader can understand. Every utterance is based on earlier listening experiences, yet each combines the pre-existing elements in a new way. A wholly original composition could only be meaningless gibberish. On the other hand a work that exactly repeats an earlier one like Borges’ Pierre Menard whose “translation” of Don Quixote exactly reproduces the original might seem equally otiose, but Borges insists to his readers that Menard’s Quixote is “almost infinitely richer” as it includes the new author’s own experiences. Surely he was only saying in a whimsical way that meaning accumulates, that a Horatian ode today is more meaningful than when it was written, though its increase in significance has nothing to do with Horace.
    Borges’ playful fancy resembles T. S. Eliot’s celebrated insight about the whole of literary history changing with every new work. To Eliot “what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it . . .the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted.” After complaining about the modern tendency to privilege “those aspects of [the poet’s] work in which he least resembles anyone else,” he insists on the contrary that “no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone,” but rather that “his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.” [8]
     Finally, and perhaps most destructive to the myth of the semi-divine author, literature cannot be said to occur until the text is received by a listener or reader. Barthes was quite right in locating the consumer’s interaction with the text as the moment when significance arises. Thus the reader may well be said to be the actual composer of the work. Though some texts are comparatively rich in possibilities or may arrive already well-plowed with a history of past readings, the mere words are barren until they are read. In a sense they provide only potential arenas for constructing meaning; they cannot deliver it ready-made.
     The problematics of authorship are then rather complex. The causes of literary works must be shared it seems by the writer (who might be called the “efficient cause”) with the uses of language that the writer has heard or read, the assumptions of the era of its composition, and the literary tradition preceding (and, later, following) its date. Add to these the interpretations, reactions, and allusions of others, all dynamically evolving from the work’s first appearance onwards, inevitably compounded by misunderstandings, the imprecision inherent in all language, and the data lost to noise in every transmission. Where then can the author be located?
     Perhaps the choice between the multiple authors responsible for the text is a problem better transcended than solved. The identity in Buddhism between viewing the world as reality and as illusion or in Hinduism between the individual and the Whole may provide a model for that between the writer and the entire corpus of human words. [9] This link may provide the base for the scent of the divine which underlay the intuition of Young and Bloom when they imagine “the god within.” Hovering above the alternatives, the reader may embrace both or neither or may select the one with the greatest heuristic value in a given analysis.
     As readers we float atop the ocean of words, each text a whitecap, briefly rising and then sinking into the vast body of language beneath, leaving it ever so slightly changed. From the perspective of an individual the whole is never in sight and one cannot even take exhaustive account of the waters in which one paddles, yet in every human society people engage artful language in a vigorous and ever-new interchange which by dint of constant effort keeps us for a time buoyant. Our babble goes on, though we know in the end that we and our words with us will fail and fall into the general ferment not to vanish but to suffer a sea change and later return reshuffled and refreshed.




1. Conjectures on Original Composition (1759).

2. Thoughts on the Imitation of the Painting and the Sculpture of the Greeks (1755).

3. Originally published as “La mort de l'auteur” (punning on Le Morte d'Arthur) in Aspen 5-6, 1967, reprinted in Image-Music-Text in 1977.

4. A talk originally given in 1969, the essay appears in Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977. pp. 124-127.

5. See Milman Parry, "The Making of Homeric Verse." The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, ed. Adam Parry, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971 and Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960.

6. The forgeries of Han van Meegeren, for instance, which fooled many connoisseurs and experts when they were new now can be seen to have obvious affinities with the styles of the nineteen-thirties.

7. A clear parallel exists with certain technological developments, such as the invention of automobiles, motion pictures, or nuclear weapons in which a number of researchers all but simultaneously develop what is fundamentally the same idea. The invention of the electric light need be attributed neither to the inexorable processes of impersonal history nor to Edison’s singular genius.

8. The concept of a sort of super-organism of literature resembles the Gaia hypothesis advanced during the 1970s. See James Lovelock’s popularization Gaia: A new look at life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3rd edition, 2005) and Lynn Margulis’ The Symbiotic Planet (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

9. Perhaps the best initial texts for these views are Nagarjuna for Buddhism and Gaudapada for Hinduism.

The Early English Carol and the Play of Convention

     Most literary criticism remains highly Romantic, not least that which sets out to be anti-Romantic. The underlying suppositions are not often argued or even stated. Indeed, it is the fact of their being taken for granted that renders them both significant and dangerous. We habitually oppose the individual genius to the merely conventional writer and celebrate the innovative over the traditional. Among the relatively modern formulations of the antinomy are the ironic, the ambiguous, and the paradoxical which are privileged over the straightforward. The code-breaker has precedence over the conformer, the scriptible over the lisible, and so forth.
     The metaphysical pitfalls that surround this faith in what still passes for Modernism are evident on occasion: for instance, when Culler remarks that only literature of the sort associated with the first of these terms allows “expansion of self.” [1] Whatever this phrase may mean, it illustrates the predatory hunger of critical ingenuity, always ready to pounce on the flanks of the preceding beast before it has had a chance to enjoy its own repast. Thus Paul de Man in his lecture “Lyric and Modernity” evokes the value-laden polarity of the automatized and the defamiliarized (for him between a slavish mimesis and an autonomous obscurity) only to note slyly that “in theory the question of modernity could not therefore be asked of any literature of any time, contemporaneous or not.” [2] For him the categories are finally rhetorical and heuristic. By the lecture’s end, they have been quietly exploded.
     The question of lyric modernity is most radically pursued by interrogating poems whose genre is generally considered to be formally and semantically conventional to an unusually high degree such as those medieval English texts gathered by Greene in his book of carols. [3] Twentieth century rereadings of a variety of medieval texts have made the discovery of their “modernity” no surprise, perhaps, but what is more significant is that poems such as these carols prove to be “modern” not in spite of their conventions, but through them. Their intertextual connections generate a greater semantic density and precision while, at the same time, creating a radically unstable ambiguity. The opposition between the conventional and the unconventional, between the referential and the formal as an index to modernity, or to literary value, is misleading as practical criticism and mistaken as theory.
     The misconception is reinforced rather than questioned by the reconstruction of a selected revisionist canon of the past, appropriating certain works only as approved in terms of the current critical vocabulary. Rather my present object is to examine works that few would regard as outstanding in order to demonstrate something of what constitutes literariness, no less for the carols’ original audiences than for ourselves. What seems at first glance to be “merely” conventional is often ain fact a play of signifiers which, whatever else it may be, represents an end in itself, a formal value intrinsic to all literature, just as certain musical forms delight the listener by elaborating recognizable variations, inversions, and reversals of topoi or themes or melody.
     My reading of some carols points to just such verbal calisthenics, [4] but it does not collapse literature’s claim to referentiality. Far from being a wholly self-contained system, verbal art, when clearly distinguished from other forms of semantic data, retains a conflicted but inevitable reference to lived experience. This is true of religious texts no less than secular ones, though the former, by invoking the original “transcendent signified,” God, make a gesture that might seem to banish uncertainty. [5]
     It is manifestly true that all language, and thus all literary uses of language, is intertextual and every text a revision of earlier texts. The levels of revisionary irony reach back indefinitely in a process graphically evident in strings of bathroom graffiti and at times in another of today’s lapidary genres, the automobile bumper sticker. There is thus no necessarily correct place to initiate investigation. To interpret Greene’s carol 448, a poem on the theme of the holly and the ivy, for instance, it would be legitimate to consider the use of these plants in folklore and ritual of pagan England and elsewhere. To clip the otherwise unlimited semiotic strain, I note only the obvious as an artificial point of origination: that the two plants, by remaining green and visibly alive at a time when many other plants wither to brown, naturally become associated with immortality and the promise of renewed fertility, and thus washed in the color of divinity.
     These connotations were appropriated by Christians who linked the plants particularly with Christ and the Christmas holiday. This poem, though, reads like a courtly love lyric:


Grene growth the holy,
So doth the iue,
Thow winter blastys blow neuer so hye,
Grene growth the holy.

As the holy grouth grene
And neuer chaungyth hew,
So I am, euer hath bene,
Vnto my lady trew.

A[s] the holy grouth grene
With iue all alone
When flowerys cannot be sene,
And grenewode leuys be gone.

Now vnto my lady
Promyse to her I make
Frome all other only
To her I me betake.

Adew, myne owne lady,
Adew, my specyall,
Who hath my hart trewly,
Be suere, and euer shall. [6]


     Here the symbolic force of the holly and the ivy may seem at first to be wholly comprehended in the cluster of meanings special/permanent/love. As such it is implicitly opposed to the flowers and trees so often surrounding other conventional love bowers, but which here are apparently dead. This meaning is so overdetermined that, in fact, the first distich of the burden is a proverbial expression meaning “forever.” [7]
     The hard fact is, of course, that neither holly nor ivy nor human love is really eternal. There are internal revelations or, at any rate, hints of the rhetorical nature of that claim. Apart from the listener’s knowledge of the ultimate death of actual botanical specimens, the poet claims fidelity with the words “I am, euer hath bene,” yet promises in the third stanza to forsake the company of other women. His promise is itselkf the originating proposal for an exclusive relationship rather than evidence of its achievement. The longevity he praises is, at best, potential. Whether the whole idea is to be read as sincere or as a decoratively hyperbolic form of flirtation, the poem’s narrative movement directly contradicts the claim to stability as the speaker bids his lady “adew” in the last stanza.
     The images of the holly and the ivy, which on the surface promised permanence, are further problematized by their intertextual relations. As Volosinov says, signs are without exception social, and exist in “interindividual territory,” [7] and the connections are especially insistent in the case of highly conventional texts. The other texts relevant to the poem’s interpretation, however, do not decode it in any simple way, providing unequivocal meanings to be inserted automatically once the key is known. Rather, as is typical of literary convention, interpretation becomes more complicated and polysemic as more texts are taken into account.
     One willing to venture into the dubious realm of authorial intention would be rewarded to find that this poem is attributed to Henry VIII, but, without straying from the purely textual, the holly and the ivy are inescapably and deeply ambiguous. Among the other poems that Greene prints that use the motif of the holly and the ivy, the two plants are never equivalent or even harmoniously complementary. Among their common conventional significations is the male/female polarity apparent in “as the holy grouth grene,” but it more often appears in poetry (and in ritual) as a conflict or a tension than as a straight love story. The refrain of one carol says:


Nay, iuy, nay, hyt shal not be, iwys;
Let holy hafe the maystery, as the manner ys. [8]


This poem goes on to associate the holly with warmth, health, joy, and maleness, while the ivy is assigned cold, illness, sorrow, and femaleness.
     In “here commys Holly, that is so gent” [9] holly has in fact gained the mastery called for in the previous poem to such an extent that the ivy has vanished altogether. What remains is a vaunt of holly from within the hall, still identified with maleness and power. This tendency is carried to the point of caricature in the version in Sharp’s English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians where the lovers have become a married couple, and the husband, finding “all my pleasure turned to woe,” cuts a switch of greenery with which to beat his wife into submission. [10]
Thus real stable domesticity transforms the lyric longing of the older text into ironic burlesque. The familiar Christmas carol “The Holy and the Ivy,” which, though not printed until the early 18th century, doubtless has roots in the Middle Ages, belongs to a different branch of the same tradition. Declaring that “the holly bears the crown,” it marshals all the machinery of supernatural divinity to bolster the claim. [11]
     On the other hand, Greene prints three poems which celebrate the ivy and exclude the holly. [12] In the first two the ivy is identified with the semi-deified figure of Mary, and in the third it is praised for its more natural attributes as a medicine, an aid against soil erosion, and the like.
     The meaning of the holly-ivy complex is thus clearly not reducible to specific substitutable terms. It is closer to the sort of structure Riffaterre calls a “geometry of extremes” and an “abstract dialectic.” [13] The polarities available from the handful of texts already surveyed would look something like this:


immortal/mortal
↓
male/female
↓
source of pleasure/source of pain


     The terms are only partially unpacked by this schema, but the point should be clear that poetic convention has vastly thickened the plot, that the systems of signification between one poem and another serve to refine and sharpen the meaning. Poetic convention is a conceptual tool that enables the perception and expression of a continuously bifurcating systematization of reality. From the initial oppositions of nonexistence/existence, light/ darkness, water/land, by ever mores subtle gradation, the world is apprehended in all its complexity.
     One function of presenting the world of love in highly symmetrical and patterned oppositions is simply to advance the intertextual series as a self-sustained play of signifying, in the spirit of the ecstasy (jouissance?) of intelligible but detached variation with the same sort of freedom from thematic harness that must inhere in the endless hallelujah of the heavenly chorus and in its earthly incarnation as a Bach fugue or a handsome porcelain teacup. Medieval commentary on the reputations of the troubadours and Minnesinger makes it clear that improvisation within the bounds of convention was admired: the poet strove for originality by producing endless variations using the same generative formulae. The cognoscenti appreciated and cultivated this practice, enjoying the abstract play of form just as any musical phrase or prosodic pattern may be savored as an abstract pattern. [14] Indeed, it is only the ancient insistence, upheld in various forms yet today, that the study of literature is essentially a moral and ethical activity, that makes such a viewpoint sound frivolous or trivial.
     A brief example from a very well-known lyric convention will perhaps clarify the point. Assume, rather arbitrarily, that the genesis of the “nature introduction” in poetry is the reverdie. It is easy to establish that, from the earliest date, a host of variations occur many of which are formal patterns, uninformative either about love or nature. The permutations proceed according to the same principle of bifurcation and continued division already observed. An elementary array of some common nature introduction possibilities (all of which occur) might look something like this:


Nature greens and I, too, am warmed by love.
Nature greens yet I suffer my lover’s coldness.
Nature grows cold and I, too, suffer my lover’s coldness.
Nature grows cold yet I am warmed by love.


     Now, whatever else is happening in these poems, the poets are certainly playing games with the audience’s expectations. Whether the extrapolation of the audience is likely to make with the data initially given is fulfilled or frustrated or twisted in some manner, the same sort of game is enacted. The spirit of joy in free but patterned play that informs the fugue and the jazz solo alike is surely also one element constitutive of literature. Just as children arrange objects in groupings of hermetic meaning, artists construct artificial languages and audiences take pleasure in their own competence at following the formal action regardless of any referential content.
     It is nonetheless true that, more clearly than in music or visual art, language always bears a relation, however mediated, to a non-textual reality of lived experience. The forms of patterning may depend on connections that arise prior to the encounter with the text. It is neither metaphysical nor willfully perverse to maintain that love contains latent aggression. Such phenomena as pornography and domestic violence are among the insistent testimonies to the reality of this particular paradox.
What is true of the male/female and love/hate polarities is no less true of the divine/human one. The notion of god is dependent on that of the mortal. Many hymns to god imply a hymn to secular love (as the only fitting model for the mystical experience), while, at the same time, insisting on an erasure of that limited terrestrial eros in favor of a greater. Every song of human love, likewise, is conditioned by the awareness of temporality, of the ephemeral nature of human life that makes pleasure at once more piquant and ultimately, as Ecclesiastes would have it, vain.
     The balanced contradictions that can so richly convey dialectical information about the romantic lives of people can also express the same theme from the other side in the desire for the obliteration of all dualities and the yearning for a perfect (or at least perfectly simple) world. The oppositions are never wholly absent; they are frequently quite palpably absent by being explicitly said to be lacking. The explosion of opposites in religious discourse is a theme distributed world-wide [15], forming a poignant if inverted testament to the tensions present in the only life that people really know.
     In the holly and the ivy poems that address religious themes, the polarities are evoked implicitly even if only one element, that is to say, one of the two plants, is mentioned. To listeners familiar with the pairing, absence is as significant as inclusion. In one of the Mary-ivy poems a mysterious lady who visits the speaker in bed turns out to be the Holy Virgin. [16] Here there can be no dilemma such as that presented to Sir Gawain in a similar situation – rather the scene represents perfect resolution of conflict. The poem’s persona is wholly passive. In an infantile way he receives the benefits of Mary’s presence. The real-life problematics of male/female relations associated with the arena of the bed only emphasize the transcendent otherness of this divine caller.
     Another literary formulation of divine/human love is exemplified in the same poem. “Moder sche ys and maydyn trewe” is a cliché for a good reason. In the spirit of Tertullian’s famous dictum, the riddle-like paradox is highlighted and made the authenticating seal of a mystery rather than in any way undermining it. Real mothers, real virgins, and real lovers participate in the Virgin’s glory through their devotion while at the same time they are set well apart from it. In poem 261 the conventional theme of the lament of the abandoned woman who finds herself pregnant is placed in the mouth of Mary for whom, of course, the pregnancy is the occasion of unmitigated joy. [17] With a host of parallel texts in their minds, including other ivy poems, the audience can, in a way, share in the Virgin’s divine nature while appreciating the gap between her unique position and their own more worldly nature.
     A final example of the fruitful intertwining of divine and human strands is the familiar Corpus Christi carol [18] in which the description of a courtly human setting is, by the concluding line, vaulted into the divine realm transforming an earlier vague sense of mystery into a great tremendum.
     The function of convention, then, is not to repeat an automatized expression until is retains little meaning and no power, but rather to trope on it, to turn it, and one of the subtler twists may be to leave it as it is, since the context will unavoidably differentiate every instance. Conventions tend to appear in regularly patterned clusters. The antinomies in a simple holly/ivy text proved to be far from arbitrary. It is relevant to comment on the alienness of one sex to the other and the extraordinary dissolution of the difference in love, or on other themes suggested by the conventional manipulation of the holly and the ivy, but, in the end, if paraphrase at whatever length were adequate to reproduce the significance of the poem, poetry would be redundant. The meaning of the text, unlike all other (non-aesthetic) forms of discourse, is not susceptible to exhaustive paraphrase. This is not, however, due to its information lying in some metaphysical or esoteric realm “beyond words,” but, on the contrary, because of the peculiarly word-based, or literary, sort of message it brings.
     This principle may have seemed a few decades ago very much a la mode, but the fact is that it forms the basis for the precepts of classical and medieval rhetorical treatises like those of Matthew of Vendome, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and John of Garland. These documents of literary theory are sytill sometimes regarded (in the manner of Manly’s famous article [19] of several generations ago), as stereotyped and hackneyed formulae for sterile repetitive poetry. In fact their technical recommendations, especially the whole maligned system of tropes and figures, all foster an increase in semiotic density, a linguistic “thickening of the plot.” Far from cultivating willful obscurity, these devices move toward greater precision, an enrichment and sharpening of the poetic language leading toward inclusion of a greater amount of data in the coding. Through troping and other techniques, through twisting recognizable expressions, ideas, sentiments, and even narrative flow in unexpectable ways, they realized what Geoffrey called the “rejuvenation” [20] of language.
     The patterning of literary conventions makes them intelligible just as paradigms of verb conjugations make small phonetic variation meaningful. These patterns, while exemplifying the literary quality of formal play as a self-fulfilling value, also transmit information about lived experience. Poetry is a unique technology of consciousness in that it never presents its data straight. This constant refraction underlies the ancient association of literature with lying and of the literary text with irony, ambiguity, and the like, as well as illuminating the claims of deconstruction.
     In discussing the intractable problematics of human experience, literary texts evoke relevant oppositions, tensions, and contradictions. They may or may not privilege one of the terms, but they always contain or imply both, suggesting that the dance of life is a formal exuberance that can be read only throiugh a dialectical approach to the structure of semantic content.
     Religious texts affirm the same facts from the far side of the margin of reality. There the opposing terms are adduced only to be shunted aside in the denial of duality or exacty balanced in a formula that encodes true Presence in encyclopedic inclusivity which either contains or banishes all antinomies. Apparently stereotyped linguistic usage is in fact the very freshest, because it is the most belated, a rehashing of old images toward new ends; it is always beyond and in reaction to the prior processed data; it is always hermeneia.
     Speaking of Hermes or Thoth, the signifier god, the trickster (in the vernacular of black American street narrative, the signifying monkey) Derrida says, “This messenger-god is truly a god of the absolute passage between opposites. If he has any identity – but he is precisely the god of non-identity – he would be that coincidentia oppositorum to which we will have recourse again. In distinguishing himself from his opposite, Thoth also imitates it, becomes its sign and representative, obeys it and conforms to it, replaces it, by violence if need be . . .a sort of joker, a floating signifier, a wild card, one who puts play into play.” [21]




1. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 129.

2. In Rueben A. Brower, Forms of Lyric (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1970), p. 151.

3. R. L. Greene, The Early English Carols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).

4. The term is derived from Michael Riffaterre. See his Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 78.

5. The question is raised by Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 20.

6. Greene, p. 273.

7. V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (New York and London: Seminar, 1973), p. 12.

8. Greene, poem 136, p. 82.

9. Greene, poem 137, p. 83.

10. Cecil Sharp, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 341.

11. Included in The Oxford Book of Carols (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), p. 80.

12. Greene, poems, 138, 139, and 139.1, pp. 83-4.

13. Riffaterre, pp. 44 and 46.

14. See, for instance, the mercurial, never-repeating stanza form of the well-known Harley lyric “When the nightegale singes.”

15. Examples of the praise of a primeval undifferentiation include Lao Tzu or even the Golden Age depicted in the Metamorphoses of Ovid or in Vergil’s Georgics.

16. Greene, p. 164.

17. Greene, p. 195.

18. Greene, poem 332, p. 195.

19. 19. John M. Manly, “Chaucer and the Rhetoricians,” Warton Lecture on English Poetry, Publications of the British Academy (London: Oxford University Press, 1926).

20. Ernest Gallo ed. And trans., The Poetria Nova and its Sources in Early Rhetorical Doctrine (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), line 769.

21. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 93.