Coleridge’s Dialectic of Art

Unattributed quotations are from Coleridge’s essay “On Poesy or Art.”


     Art has been variously conceived as entirely self-justifying, as a tool for the cultivation of a more refined sensibility, as a source of specific truths leading to greater insight or ethical standards, and as pure pleasure, either through the contemplation of aesthetic forms or through the experience of emotion. Coleridge in his essay “On Poesy or Art” proposes several of these possibilities, but then proceeds to outline a dialectic view of art’s potential that goes beyond art for art’s sake, delight, and instruction, which aims in fact at nothing less than enlightenment. [1] His theory, while striking, is muddled, in particular by the intrusion of religious doctrines suggested not by his topic but by the norms of his day.
     Coleridge uses the term “poesy” to refer to all the arts, not just verse or literature. Without considering the complicating cases of music or the abstract elements of plastic art, he accepts, though only as a starting point, the traditional definition of art as imitation. For him no simple imitation, regardless of how perfect it might be, could suffice for art. In fact he concludes that the failures of imitation are in a sense more significant than its successes.
     A pure mimesis in Coleridge’s terminology, adapted most directly from Spinoza, [2] would be natura naturata, “nature natured,” the creation considered as a passive finished product. He contrasts this inferior product to true art, natura naturans, “nature naturing.” This expression well summarizes Coleridge’s view of the role of art, but his usage allows no simple paraphrase.
     Art for him “is the mediatress between, and reconciler of nature and man” since it “humanizes” nature “infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything.” “It avails itself of the forms of nature to recall, to express, and to modify the thoughts and feelings of the mind.” What is added, then, to nature itself is the maker’s affect and inferences so that the art object registers not the external in itself, but always refracted through the consciousness of the poet or painter. As “Frost at Midnight” makes clear, nature is for Coleridge altogether passive in this communion with the individual. [3]
     Yet the artist does not merely represent the data of the world as lived experience, inspirited by human desire and intuition. The chaos of sense data is ordered to be beautiful and, as the cosmos becomes more patterned, significant, and intelligible, beauty, value, truth, and meaning arise. “While it recalls the sights and sounds that had accompanied the occasions of the original passions, poetry impregnates them with an interest not their own by means of the passions, and yet tempers the passion by the calming power which all distinct images exert on the human soul.”
     The relation was sufficiently distinctive for Coleridge to generate the neologism eisemplasy (or esemplasy) and to revive the rare coadunation. [4] Throughout the essay the point is repeated in various forms. Art “is the mediatress between, and reconciler of nature and man.” “In every work of art there is a reconcilement of the external with the internal.” “This unity in multeity I have elsewhere stated as the principle of beauty.” “The mystery of genius in the fine arts” is “to make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature.”
     Since the two individuals, the creator and the consumer of art actively seek to make sense of the phenomenological world, while they employ images recorded by their perception, which provide the raw material and the occasion for their, still their conclusions are their own. Preferring a divine origin for his impressions, Wordsworth had maintained in “Intimations of Immortality” following older Platonic and neo-Platonic writers, that one’s highest wisdom, one’s connection to the cosmos, is originally inborn. Coleridge maintains the same access to a prenatal Truth for his own insights. “I seem rather to be seeking, as it were, asking, a symbolical language for something within me, that already and forever exists, than observing anything new.” [5] The use of the word “asking” reveals the author’s awareness that this inborn wisdom of surpassing importance is based on his desire rather than any evidence.
     That “something within” is neither more nor less than the mystical correspondence, amounting almost to identity, between inner and outer, idem et alter, psyche and world, mortal and divine. Pursuit of that goal requires that the passions, rather than being suppressed, be cultivated. Only through the individual consciousness can the greater be accessed. Rather than striving to reproduce a second-rate reality (as Plato had it) the artist in fact delineates the gap or difference between what one might very nearly call the atman and the Atman. Paradoxically, according to Coleridge’s schema, it is by spotlighting the very limitations of humanity’s perceptive organs and the insufficiency of the mind as it tries to grasp the nut of reality that the individual may solve the dilemma of dualities and mend the divided consciousness.
     The element of order may be clear in the aesthetic object, while the events of everyday life may seem to proceed chaotically or randomly. Art makes the order of the cosmos perceptible. “Hence nature itself would give us the impression of a work of art, if we could see the thought which is present at once in the whole and in every part; and a work of art will be just in proportion as it adequately conveys the thought, and rich in proportion to the variety of parts which it holds in unity.” [6]
     Art operates, then, through difference and dialectic, playing what is seen without against what is felt within. “Philosophically we understand that in all imitation two elements must coexist, and not only coexist, but must be perceived as coexisting. These two constituent elements are likeness and unlikeness, or sameness and difference, and in all genuine creations of art there must be a union of these disparates.” This relation is inevitable since, when Coleridge says, “the primary art is writing,” he does not mean to privilege verbal art over others. What he means by “writing” is sign-making. Coleridge recognizes the gap between signifier and signified that is present in all representations of reality, though it is obvious in the difference between inked words on a paper page representing certain sounds and the objects to which these symbols correspond.
      The novelty of Coleridge’s rhetoric lies in his insistence on denying strict mimesis. “Art would or should be the abridgment of nature. Now the fullness of nature is without character, as water is purest when without taste, smell, or color; but this is the highest, the apex only—it is not the whole. The object of art is to give the whole ad hominem; hence each step of nature hath its ideal, and hence the possibility of a climax up to the perfect form of a harmonized chaos.” For him the highest revelation would be clear as water or air, empty as a void. By including human desire one muddies but thereby enriches the water, churning up ideas images, attitudes, fears, and hopes that would resolve into nothingness from the eternal viewpoint.
     Coleridge belies the pellucid nature of Reality which he correctly notes must lack all attributes through his prejudice in favor of a moral order. Art he claims not only resolves the multifarious elements of the observed world into a single coherent system, it also “stamps them into unity in the mould of a moral idea.” The skeptic might wonder from whence arose this morality, but for Coleridge “the fundamental principle of all this is undoubtedly the horror of falsehood and the love of truth inherent in the human breast.” For him the contemplation of beauty involves the processing of “images, totalized and fitted to the limits of the human mind, [so] as to elicit from, and to superinduce upon, the forms themselves the moral reflections to which they approximate.”
     The idea that the moral sense is entangled with the idea of beauty is, like Coleridge’s Christianity as a whole, a matter of faith. (Within the churches, this is, of course an orthodox position.) For him, “to the idea of life victory or strife is necessary; as virtue consists not simply in the absence of vices, but in the overcoming of them. So it is in beauty.” The moral element is not, however, in reality essential to every case of the dialectic of art. Just as life is struggle, drama requires conflict, and we become ourselves through work and struggle, learning through suffering, art, too is generated in conflict but morality may or may not play a role.
     At times Coleridge defines the tension required for art in a formal, structural way that seems quite independent of ethics. “The sight of what is subordinated and conquered heightens the strength and the pleasure; and this should be exhibited by the artist either inclusively in his figure, or else out of it, and beside it to act by way of supplement and contrast.”
     Apart from the miraculous appearance of morality in the soul and the art, Coleridge’s theory is limited by its reductiveness. There may be countless ways for the work to imply the sort of denial of duality that for Coleridge constitutes a window into profundity, but the result is always much the same. While this may be quite true, it views all great art as essentially similar and all themes as one. Particularities of form or image may play a role in this omnipresent idea, but their specific implications are lost in taking the grandest view, which, though it may not be wrong, necessarily ignores all the others.
     Coleridge was motivated by his sense of mortality, poignantly suggested by the dramatically eloquent closing passage on the unavoidable physical decline of the individual. “And with a view to this, remark the seeming identity of body and mind in infants, and thence the loveliness of the former; the commencing separation in boyhood, and the struggle of equilibrium in youth: thence onward the body is first simply indifferent; then demanding the translucency of the mind not to be worse than indifferent; and finally all that presents the body as body becoming almost of an excremental nature.“ The use of the word “excremental,” when speaking of the flesh, sounds almost monk-like.
     He devised an escape route from this inevitable decay of the flesh in the pursuit of beauty. The faith that art can vault the spirit into the empyrean provided an alternative to nihilism that bolstered Coleridge’s troubled Christianity. Yet he sought to root this doctrine in Plato rather than Christ. “The life which is in us is in them likewise; and that to know is to resemble, when we speak of objects out of ourselves, even as within ourselves to learn is, according to Plato, only to recollect.”
     A personal god is necessary if one is to see intelligence and intentionality in nature as he did. Man’s creativity and god’s are much the same for him. “The wisdom in nature is distinguished from that in man by the co-instantaneity of the plan and the execution.” God is equally required for his belief in some sort of inborn conscience. Though he roamed about the heights of German philosophy and flirted with atheism before conducting an affair with Unitarianism, he settled down with a sort of liberal Anglicanism. He often preferred to sound Platonic as in this passage. “What is beauty? It is, in the abstract, the unity of the manifold, the coalescence of the diverse; in the concrete, it is the union of the shapely (formosum) with the vital.” Never quite comfortable with conventional religion, yet unable to do without it, Christianity often appears as here as an implicit subtext.
     Coleridge’s essay claims that the knowledge one gains from art is not dependent on the specific data used in a picture or poem, or even in the new perspective that understanding another’s vision can bring. For him the principal value of the beautiful is that it can resolve contradictions and thus bring a person to enlightenment through realizing the identity of inward and outward, divine and human. He means something very close to the Vedantic “Tat tvam asi” though the concept exists in a number of traditions. This is the bold portion of his thesis. These provocative speculations on art’s power to effect a dramatic alteration of consciousness are weakened by his wish to cling to an anthropomorphic deity who like an artist designed the universe and instilled in humanity a conscience. Through his own polemics with himself, through the contradictions he felt in his own life and thought, through mental wandering, he proposed an aesthetic that can enrich our own semi-blinded blundering in the direction of what seems to be truth.






1. The influence of German philosophy on these thoughts has been, it seems, more studied than the thoughts themselves. My intention here is to consider only Coleridge’s assertions, ignoring sources and influences, though Schelling’s lectures on The Philosophy of Art before and certain recent strains of postmodernism after are clearly related.

2. The expression was originally used by the medieval Scholastics. For Spinoza nature is substantially equivalent to god (Deus sive Natura). See Ethic, Proposition 29, scholium to Part I.

3. Even in the first published text, Coleridge calls the idea that nature is actively “giving” its sympathy to the individual an “idle thought.” In his later revision he is more insistent yet that “the idling Spirit” seeking “an echo or a mirror” of itself is making “a toy of Thought.”

4. The first was his own coining, the second, though rare, is recorded by the OED since 1558. Esemplasy was a translation of Schelling’s own neologism “Ineinsbildung.”

5. Notebooks ii.2546

6. This quantitative stress at the end, which makes the artist sound like a juggler trying to keep a large number of objects in the air at once, is misplaced.

Sontag's "Against Interpretation"

     When Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” was first printed, I was highly sympathetic. With an anti-academic literary heritage I regarded as descending from Pound to Rexroth to me, I used to ridicule the PMLA and declare that my only interest was poetry, not literary criticism. Yet a good share of my favorite books had been critical: Pound’s ABC of Reading, Zukofsky’s A Test of Poetry, Miller on Rimbaud, and Nabokov on Gogol. I loved the very different oeuvres of Edmund Wilson and Northrup Frye and learned from Blackmur and Brooks. In addition I particularly fancied essayists from the past including classic critical statements from the likes of Plato, Longinus, Sidney, and Shelley. I was not, I suppose, as much concerned with consistency as I was an admirer of Sontag’s originality, passionate engagement, and scintillating insights. And how could I resist a writer who calls for an “erotics of art”?
     Recently rereading the essay for the first time in a half century, I felt again admiration for her insightful comments and her bravura rhetoric, even as I demurred from what still seem to me her polemic overstatements. She makes no secret of her partisan attitude and feels little need to justify her use of words like “obtuse,” “onerous,” and “insensitive” to characterize her antagonists.
     Her basic point is a familiar one and one dear to Romantic suppositions: that criticism is a lesser parasite on the body of literature. Sontag points out quite correctly “to interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world,” and then proceeds into metaphorical territory, adding that, apart from being “reactionary” and “stifling,” it “poisons the sensibility” rather like “the fumes of the automobile and heavy industry.” She evokes rape by calling interpretation an “assault” which “violates” art. Worst of all (in the eyes of the aesthete, at any rate), it is “philistine.” When I first read her argument, I greeted it with pleasure as a challenge to the academic mandarins and, at the least, as a passionate cri de coeur from the radical caucus.
     Yet the essay has the typical polemic’s flaw of rhetorical hyperbole. The fundamental logical problem is that Sontag fails to take into account that every written text, indeed, every perception, is similarly a reductive interpretation. If deconstruction has left no other useful lessons, it has revealed the inevitable inadequacy of language with high ambitions. Even Shakespeare must always settle for a part of the truth about love or government or death or god or the bird in the tree. Yet this does not mean that one should remain silent. The viewers of Macbeth appreciate not that its author has settled all questions but that he has enriched their partial vision with his own. Sontag indicates her awareness of this when she declares that Nietzsche was correct when he said “There are no facts, only interpretations,” and she promises to focus more clearly on a particularly pernicious form of interpretation, but after suggesting that she cares little for allegory (surely a rare bird these days), she tends to return repeatedly to the condemnation of any discussion of literary theme.
     Furthermore, she takes no account – though she herself is surely making aesthetic decisions while writing a theoretical essay – of the potential for beauty, for literary quality, in works that might be called interpretative. Who would deny the place in the canon of Johnson’s or Hazlitt’s essays on the English poets, or of Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, or Woolf’s The Common Reader. Interpretive and critical writing may rarely achieve Parnassos, but probably no more rarely than works of poetry, fiction, or drama. Undeniably, in the same way that a critic may be a poet as well, interpretation may be at the same time literature.
     That imperfect link between lived experience and the writer’s words never vanishes. Literature, while far from simple mimesis, always retains a relation, however tenuous, symbolic, transformed, and refracted, of what seems the experience of the external world. No single text, not even the accumulation of all texts, can be adequate to fully describe reality, yet each written record contains shards of truth. Criticism is simply literature primarily concerned with the author’s reading experience, no more different in theory from other forms of literature than stories about the sea or about love.
     However I may demur from some of her sweeping conclusions, it also seems to me that Sontag was prescient (she does call art “magical”) in even an error. She thought that cinema, along with Pop and abstract art, were more or less immune to criticism, an error arising from perspective, as recent trends would have inevitably been the focus of fewer commentators. Sontag was incorrect, of course. University students who enroll in film courses thinking they will be easy find themselves buried under post-structural rhetoric and blinded by obscurantist terminology. Sontag must have observed in her later years that the “cultural criticism” so widespread today, though eager to analyze the least of cultural phenomena, seeks to discount aesthetic and appreciative considerations, what Sontag called “really accurate, sharp, loving description” in favor of a hunt after themes, for meanings, for “allegory” in Sontag’s usage. Among the most reductive of readings, those that truly impoverish the text, are produced by gender critics, new historicists, and soi-disant Marxists who approach quite closely the sort of simple-minded “decoding” she was attacking. Her call for an “erotics of art” looks in a way more attractive and necessary today than it did a half century ago, if only as a corrective.
     If that judgement is also an interpretation, then the reader must take Sontag’s essay as an interpretation as well, and applaud not her quasi-scientific “research” but instead her creation of a memorable work of art strong enough to elicit a passionate response more than fifty years after its composition. Better evidence could not be adduced for the vigor of the characteristically human habit of interpretation.

Every Reader’s Shelley

This is the first of a series of essays meant to engage non-specialists, indeed, non-English majors, with the work of important poets. In spite of my own inclination toward the abstruse I mean to limit my focus to the discussion of only three or four of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography. I vow to avoid tempting byways and to include no footnotes whatsoever.


     Shelley was a poetic bad boy, sharing something of the notoriety of latter day rock and rollers. Denounced, often with good grounds, for subversive and irreligious opinions and for practicing an immoral lifestyle to match, Shelley was a counter-cultural campaigner since his youthful expulsion from Oxford for his pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism. He attacked monarchy, meat-eating, and pollution, and his active support for Irish independence brought him to the attention of royal investigators. He called for sexual freedom and acted on his convictions. Yet in his work this hostility toward much of what the world believes is overwhelmed by the enthusiastic afflatus of his neo-Platonism, capable of carrying readers aloft to dizzying heights. When he is not ecstatic, however, he can be subject to self-pity as in the exclamation “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” Such language set an influential pattern for histrionic poetry whose continuing sway is evident in coffee house readings yet today.
     Still “Ode to the West Wind,” the poem in which these lines appear, is powerful indeed, addressing the wind as a deity, both “Destroyer and Preserver.” Rather than viewing the autumn foliage as merely picturesque, like “leaf-peepers” who peer out the windows of New England tour buses, Shelley sees instead “pestilence-stricken multitudes.” As the lines tumble over each other in expert terza rima, he welcomes the tumultuous change of season as a Romantic visionary, not with fear or an unrealistic desire to halt time, but with exhilarated exultation, as a dazzling display of energy, awesome as a cataract, grand as a rugged peak, inspiring uneasy awe.
     He then enlarges his view from the leaves themselves to storms, violent yet surpassingly beautiful, “angels of rain and lightning, “bright hair uplifted from the head/Of some fierce Mænad.” The past year is being most grandly buried in a “vaulted” and “vast sepulcher,” which inspires the poet’s awe. He imagines the wind sweeping over the ancient resort of Baiæ where with the almost neurasthenic sensibility he cultivated, he says the flowers are "so sweet, the sense faints picturing them.” (One might imagine the secondary school scenes the young poet endured in which -- while gaining an excellent classical education -- he suffered the brutality of the British public school system with corporal punishment from the faculty and “fagging” by older students, in his case intensified into daily bullying his school-mates called “Shelley-bashing.”)
     Identifying with the wind as one inherently “tameless, and swift, and proud,” the poet feels “chain'd and bow'd” by “a heavy weight of hours” to the point that he can only envy the uncontained force of nature. His neo-Platonic impetus toward the ideal abstract, toward a sort of ill-defined yet numinous impersonal divinity is marked by his use of that ugly word he so favored “skiey.” Like an ancient invocation, the poem ends with his prayer to the wind to be his spirit as well. Magical incantation as well as prayer, serving not only a mystical longing but poetic ambition as well, he asks that his words be the cause of “a new birth,” prophetic “ashes and sparks” “to quicken” the world in the continuing cosmic cycle.
     Shelley’s radicalism is foregrounded in “England in 1819,” surely one of the fiercest sonnets ever composed. What can be said after the unforgettable first line: “An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King”? George III, by this time in his eighties and eight years into the regency of his reasonably sane yet irresponsible son, serves as an excellent, if cruel, image for the superannuated feudal system. To Shelley aristocrats are parasites, “leeches” as the poem says, consuming the people’s blood. Yet the poem ends, as does the Ode to the West Wind” with a prophetic expectation of an apocalypse to come, bringing out of “graves” a new and more enlightened order of society. Ferment was certainly in the air. Eighteen-nineteen was the year of the Peterloo Massacre in which the cavalry charged a demonstration of sixty to eighty thousand citizens who had gathered in Manchester to demand some reform in the direction of universal suffrage. The current assumption that most poets, artists, and intellectuals are likely to take a radical position dates from the period of Romantics like Shelley and, indeed, to my mind, there is far too contemporary a sound to his denunciation of the ruling class. The leaders are out of touch; the people are betrayed and suffer from want; the army is an instrument of oppression; the church itself “Christless, Godless.” Blake had expressed a similar protest in his “London” in 1794.
     “Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni” is a rather grand articulation of Shelley’s views on nature, poetry, and the divine. With Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads clearly in mind, he described the poem as having come to him “under the immediate impression of the deep and powerful feelings excited by the objects which it attempts to describe: and as an undisciplined Overflowing of the soul, rests its claim to approbation on an attempt to imitate the untamable wildness and inaccessible solemnity from which those feelings sprang." To the poet the river Arve which begins mysteriously deep in the high peaks and then rolls ever stronger downward resembles his own ever-changing consciousness through which flows “the everlasting universe of things.”
     In conscious contrast to Coleridge whose "Hymn before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni” in which the same view inspires “prayer” and “worship of “the Invisible alone,” and which concludes "Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God,” to Shelley the spectacle is unsettling. He uses adjectives like “wandering,” “unfathomable,” “hideous,” “rude,” and “awful.” It is populated by predators like wolves and eagles, yet it induces a “trance sublime and strange.” The closest approach to resolution is his claim that “Poesy” is a “witch” who seeks in these “wild thoughts” some “ghost” of truth.
Human senses mediate reality such that even direct experience can provide only a phantasmagoria of phenomena, “many-colored, many-voicéd” (the reader recalls the characterization in “Adonais” of life as “a dome of many-coloured glass,/ [which] Stains the white radiance of Eternity). The glacier and the river suggest some grand Truth. Magnificent though they are, their significance arrives only with the engaged human eye of the observer.


The secret Strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind's imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?


     Shelley shaped generations of poetry since his day with his philosophic flights to the sublime, his passion for social justice, and his self-dramatizing poses. In his influential “Defence of Poetry” he elaborates on Aristotle with his claim that the poet records “actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all other minds.” If Shelley lacks the sweet concreteness of Keats, the plain language of Wordsworth, and the wit of Byron, he provides instead ample passion, verbal dexterity and lofty themes to engage virtually all readers.

Eisenstein's Strike and the Problem of Realism

Most people in most times and places, have derived their identity from their agreements with others. This is the case with church-goers and patriots. Others create a sort of artificial fraternity with sports loyalties or ethnic identity. It is only in our belated post-Romantic era that differences tend to be more highly prized. In the eighties I knew a critic who championed Night of the Living Dead as the greatest modern movie, proud of his choice for its singularity. Even a conspicuously individualist twentieth century critic, however, can enjoy assenting in a common judgment. With just such a pleasure in aligning myself with a widespread opinion, I regard Sergei Eisenstein as a very great filmmaker indeed. The work of this intensely original and idiosyncratic artist under a system where the collective received official endorsement when opposed to the individual poses aesthetic problems as well as the personal ones Eisenstein spent his life negotiating.

I recently watched Strike for the first time in decades and found it as rewarding, frame by frame, as I had in the past. Above all else, Eisenstein is a great master of montage, the most purely cinematic of techniques. His dazzling sense of composition satisfies the viewer in nearly every shot. What other director provides his audience with such an array of fascinating faces, each photographed with light and angle cunningly arranged to display every expressive irregularity? If Ivan the Terrible is operatic in its grand spectacle, Strike is a dramatic, intricately worked sonata, in which waves of formal beauty succeed each other one after another.

Curiously, Eisenstein’s formalism, which has brought such delight to cinephiles, would have been proof of its degenerate corruption for the Stalinist enforcers of Zhdanov-style socialist realism who oversaw his projects. Finding himself in the position of a medieval stained glass artist confined to Christian motifs, he, like they, produced work of captivating power. Though forbidden the pursuit of themes other than those prescribed by bureaucrats, he worked out his own dialectic between the generalizations of a vulgar Marxist vision and the myriad and unpredictable details of observed reality. The tension is encoded in the film’s casting, plotting, and montage.

The idea of “socialist realism,” while based in the precise and nuanced realism of Flaubert, Zola, and Balzac, avoided the chaos, ambiguity, and obscurity of experience in favor of simple didacticism. Thus, while insisting that the work was true to life in a way unprecedented in earlier art, Eisenstein substituted a flat morality tale for the complexity of life, all the while claiming to be more “real.” While the result is considerably more palatable than the brilliant Nazi films of Leni Riefenstahl, its plot-lines are as unconvincing as the “eight model plays” of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

For instance, Eisenstein’s fondness for selecting non-actors for many roles might seem to narrow the gap between the art work and observed reality. Instead of Hollywood-style stars, one sees “real people.” In practice, though, the director selected people who most strongly suggested stereotypes -- the strong young worker, the capitalist, the priest – as little “real” as glamorous actors. Again, the pretense of heightened realism leads in fact to stylized convention as tight as that of the commedia dell’arte.

The concluding massacre of the workers, unforgettably presented with slaughterhouse images, belies the “optimism” that was prescribed for socialist realism. The intertitle listing places where such repression had in fact occurred reinforces the fidelity to lived experience. Yet the viewer experiences the denouement as a tragic ritual, a sacrifice which expands the worker’s suicide earlier in the story and presents death as redemptive ritual, very much resembling the passion of Christ.

Is Strike realistic? Of course, a film is a series of images on cellulose acetate with virtually no resemblance to life, just as a novel is ink marks on two-dimensional pages. The degree of realistic illusion differs from one work to another, but it is always dialectic, conflicted, and ambiguous. In Eisenstein’s great film, the pretense of reproducing data from lived experience allowed the artist to produce great formalist works. (His colleague Dziga Vertov, with his kino pravda, illustrates one further possibility of the aesthetics, less monumental and dramatic, more lyrical and loose, of claiming to reproduce reality.) At the same time in America, one might note Dos Passos’ USA trilogy for its combination of modernist technique and representation of documentary truth. Art is always art; reality, reality. The implicit claim of realism is simply one of a variety of artistic techniques. The difference between realists and formalists resembles the medieval one between Realists and Nominalists, or one might trace it back to Plato and Aristotle. In the end, surely, both and neither are correct. Struggling with these oppositions is our truth. In Eisenstein’s case, the contradictions between style and content, worked out by an individual artist operating under a murderous philistine tyranny resulted in some of the world’s most memorable movies

Notes on Recent Reading 16 [Howells, Ford, Mann]

Literature and Life (Howells)

     I have a fondness for essays, the wandering of familiar pieces and the rhetoric of formal ones. I know, as Montaigne did, that every essay, whatever the topic, must express the consciousness of the author. Burton, Bacon, and Browne; Cowley, Addison and Steele, Hazlitt and the endearing Lamb, Pater, Pound, Woolf, Orwell, each has its charm. I had never before encountered, however, the essays of arch-Realist William Dean Howells.
     His travel writing resembles that of his friend Mark Twain, in its arch wit. Visiting Bermuda, he notes that the presence of those of African descent “burden” the whites with a “conundrum” and proceeds to exemplify this principle with an anecdote of three tourist ladies tormenting a gardener with their curious attentions. There is an essay on a dime museum and the show performed inside which is a marvel of weirdness in which a short drama involving dance is succeeded by a blackface performer who “went from one wild gayety to another,” followed by contortionists. We learn of this exhibition at second-hand – the author himself was too genteel to venture into such a place -- but his informant declares “Aren’t the arts one? How can you say that any art is higher than the others?” His essay on Spanish prisoners of war is a strong bit of anti-imperialist journalism. There is good criticism and a great deal of information about American taste and publishing by one of its most influential figures.
     My own copy of the book, one discarded from a university library, is a first edition including photographic and watercolor illustrations. One can see perhaps why it was culled – the pages were uncut until my reading. The writing is far fresher than the Victorian lettering on the cover.


The Fifth Queen (Ford)

     For most readers, Ford is known for his influence in Modernism through The English Review and as the author of the Parade’s End tetralogy. The Fifth Queen was followed by two sequels, Privy Seal and The Fifth Queen Crowned, portraying an almost suffocating atmosphere in the court of Henry VIII through the career of Katharine Howard. The intrigue rising from both personal and party maneuvering is constant and grave in its effects. Two parties struggle for influence – an old order aligned with Catholicism and the traditional learning the heroine has mastered opposed to a new and uncertain Renaissance alternative.
     Ford, who took style seriously indeed, chose to use a curious diction sprinkled with archaisms. Perhaps I have a high tolerance for affectation, but the language enhanced the novel for me. Though the work was called by Ford’s friend Conrad, “the swan song of historical romance,” its experimentalism may be suggested by the fact that William Gass is one of its fans.


Man of Straw (Der Untertan) Heinrich Mann

     It is difficult to avoid reading this book as prescient. Written in 1914, its hero is a perfect pre-Nazi Nazi. Seeking to submerge his wretched character in a great man, Diederich adores the Kaiser fully as much as the next generation was to idolize der Führer. The loutish young manufacturer is nasty in his anti-Semitism, if not yet violent and he tells his wife to follow the Kaiser’s formula and to restrict herself to “Kinder, Küche, Kirche.” His cowardice, selfishness, and hypocrisy are so consistent that the story makes salutary propaganda but thin fiction.
     Even the appreciative reader will understand why this commendable anti-fascist lives under the shadow of his brother’s reputation. Apart from this book, his novel Professor Unrat is the basis for von Sternberg’s great film The Blue Angel.

Hermes and the Art of Poetry

Having quoted Greek on these pages in characters that do not transfer to the blog and in distracting transliterations, I have decided this time to simply quote from the close if old-fashioned Loeb’s Library version by Hugh G. Evelyn-White. My references to line numbers are, of course, to the Greek. I would have preferred to use my own translation, but my version of the poem is as yet incomplete.




     Along with Homer and Hesiod, the so-called Homeric Hymns provide the earliest information about the literary theory of ancient Greece. These poems exemplify the role of poetry in providing access to the astonishingly efficient mythic system by which the Greeks understood the world. The Hymn to Hermes is the primary source for an aetiological myth of the origin of lyric poetry, a sort of back-story to the shining Olympian, Apollo who is commonly associated with the art. With the attribution of the lyre to Hermes comes a more dialectic complex picture of artistic signification, portrayed prior to the unadulterated Apollonian light, as a necessary duality of lie and truth.
     Most will recall the charming "Hymn to Hermes" an infant trickster story, something like Krishna the butter thief. The baby’s cheeky mendacity and his comically ingenious stratagems are undeniably entertaining, but in the hymn’s plot-line, they serve in the end simply to bring Hermes together with Apollo to allow the gift of the tortoise-shell lyre. Hermes had invented the instrument that very morning, but he gives it up to resolve strife he has himself created, a peace offering to the god who is to govern poetry for the next thousand years and more. [1]
     Hermes’ very first act is to seize the tortoise in his courtyard. With a lie, using his characteristic wile, he tells the animal it is dangerous outside (37), and a moment later, he kills it and fashions the lyre. His emphasis is wholly upon pleasure, for him it is a “comrade of the feast” (31), inspirer of joy (32). In a rush of invention, he conceives the instrument “as a swift thought darts through the heart of man when thronging cares haunt him, or as bright glances flash from the eye.” (43-45) He sang on it “sweet random snatches, even as youths bandy taunts at festivals,” (55-56) sliding into a celebration of his own birth and of the muses. The creative process is described as a delight in itself, the exercise of the forebrain damping pain and providing pleasure in itself, as well as enabling future art. After this mental work in done, the god’s attention turns to his belly. Motivated by a desire for meat (unsatisfied apparently with the prospect of nectar and ambrosia), his mind turns then to his larcenous plot, a design of “sheer trickery” such as “knavish folk pursue.” (66-67).
     Poetry appears then at first as a pure party pastime, whether it is casual improvisation or theogonies. It seems in this way on a par with other desires, such as a wish for a satisfying meal. Yet its unique characteristic is the unpredictable glancing energy of creative human thought which, through its potent symbolic manipulation, can design a new and useful object or compose a song.
     When Apollo first hears the lyre, his reaction is upwelling laughter. (420) Hermes sings again the story of the gods, first among them Mnemosyne “for the son of Maia was among her following,” (430) inspiring in Apollo a “longing” (eros) ”not to be allayed.” (434) He finds it in particular a “path” to remedy “desperate (or “irremediable”) “cares” (or “suffering”). (447) In his speech (436-463) Apollo praises the invention as a “marvel,” “noble,” “heavenly,” “wonderful, “sweet,” and “glorious,” while calling Hermes a “trickster” and “thievish.” He concludes by promising not to “deceive” Hermes, the habitual deceiver who does not shrink from bald-faced lies even before all-knowing Zeus.
     Instructing Apollo, Hermes advises him to give himself to “merriment” (or “triumphal display”[2]) The emphasis remains solidly on convivial dinners, “rich feast and lovely dance and glorious revel.” (480-481) According to Hermes, the lyre rewards the listener who is susceptible to “delight” (484) while bringing “the ignorant” only “vanity and foolishness.” (488) He proceeds to consider his theft repaid, though he asks to be caretaker for the herd, prophesying abundant offspring and assuming co-ownership. Apollo is so taken with the music he accepts with pleasure. (493-494)
     Through the hymn poetry, the lyric art, is consistently identified with pleasure, whether on the occasion of casual party verses or solemn hymns to the divine. Both offer necessary relief: the symbolic manipulations of art are essential to both passing the time with friends and reflecting on first principles and final things. The disquiet that awakes in the reader when the tortoise is tricked into death, by nature, one might say, at the outset can be salved only by verbal art. Redemptive song compensates for the distressing void of mortality, providing both “entertainment” and supernatural explanations in a pre-Horatian version of “teach and delight.”
     Little, however, in the character of Apollo matches the subversive, all-too-human character of Hermes. He is a con man because of his own selfish interests. He cancels out his own assertions by declaring his undependability. In this poem Hermes provides Apollo with a gift beyond the lyre: dissimulation.
     After the settlement between the Olympians, all seems harmonious, but Apollo’s nervousness about being again tricked leads him to elicit from Hermes a solemn vow not to steal from him. With this renewed settlement comes the acid test of the value of poetry: prophecy. Apollo says that only he can be confidant of Zeus with reference to the future, yet he prevaricates about the value of omens, claiming sometimes to tell the truth through signs and sometimes to deceive. This ambiguity is very broadly true, as he says also that he bedevils men as well as blessing them. He illustrates this very contradictory revelation – the truth that is untrue – by telling Hermes of the mysterious bee-like Thriae whose oracular reputation for speaking the truth (561) is tempered by the fact that they also lie (563). (We might all make the same claim for our prophecies.) Another analogue concludes the poem when Hermes is said to “profit” some and “cozen” others. (577-578)
     One would then have to qualify the marvelous image Nietzsche imagined, doubtless aware that he had heightened the contrast: “In an eccentric way one might say of Apollo what Schopenhauer says, in the first part of The World as Will and Representation [I:1, 3], of man caught in the veil of Maya: ‘Even as on an immense, raging sea, assailed by huge wave crests, a man sits in a little rowboat trusting his frail craft, so, amidst the furious torments of this world, the individual sits tranquilly, supported by the principium individuationis [principle of individuation] and relying on it.’ [The World as Will and Representation, I:4, 63] One might say that the unshakable confidence in that principium has received its most magnificent expression in Apollo, and that Apollo himself may be regarded as the marvelous divine image of the principium individuationis, whose looks and gestures radiate the full delight, wisdom, and beauty of ‘illusion.’” [3]
     The author of the "Hymn to Hermes" would have agreed with Nietzsche when he said, “Much will have been gained for aesthetics once we have succeeded in apprehending directly-rather than merely ascertaining-that art owes its continuous evolution to the Apollinian-Dionysian [sic] duality, even as the propagation of the species depends on the duality of the sexes, their constant conflicts and periodic acts of reconciliation.” He surely had in mind just such a conflict and reconciliation as that narrated in the  'Hymn to Hermes. '


1. Since writing this piece I have been told of an admirable treatment along similar lines in Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art.

2. Aglaia is also one of the Graces according to Hesiod.

3. Both quotations are from The Birth of Tragedy in Francis Golfing’s translation.

Trollope's Appeal

Page numbers refer to the Oxford World's Classics paperback edition.

     Traveling, I find myself indulging again in Trollope. Such a habit can last a lifetime. The man was prodigiously prolific, and most of his work occupies a reasonable plateau of quality. (Truth be told, his very best is little better than his worst.) As a popular novelist, his political views, conservative enough to be properly termed reactionary, were yet purged of unpleasantness apart from the wickedness of certain people who are unlike you or me. Decorated then with the mostly amiable eccentricities of us all, and even more with ladies both lovely and virtuous, his work confirmed the assumptions of a mainstream audience of middle and upper-class readers. And I venture to say that he remains so reassuring today because of the same utter conviction of the basic rightness of things.
     He is not so much a real partisan of the traditional, land-based England of old as he is given to nostalgia for it. A descendent of the eighteenth-century man of sensibility, he relishes a sweet, sad, “noble” feeling, though he is himself bourgeois and his heroes must be “manly,” however tender their relations to women, children, and the degraded poor. In Doctor Thorne, the narrator interjects a passionate claim that the nation is not fundamentally commercial, that trade cannot be a matter for pride or even real excellence (12-13) Rather, he celebrates an explicitly “feudal” system in which the landed aristocracy can be trusted to be sufficiently high-minded to rule in the interests of all. At the same time, he satirizes the de Courcys, recognizing every absurdity of a hereditary gentry.
     In Trollope one encounters complete a small, self-contained world, all the more perfect for its provincialism. Things come right in the end, though a weak character or two may be sacrificed to sentiment; the good are blessed and the vicious ruined. All received ideas are accepted and reinforced. A fellow like Doctor Thorne, though he may display excessive pride or obduracy, has a heart of gold, so he must prosper in the end. Part of the Doctor’s worth is that he possesses not only ethical integrity but also a belief in family and descent. Indeed, without this loyalty to a class to which he has only a tenuous claim, he would not seem quite moral in the world of the novel.
     Similarly, though Mary is a bastard, a status which has only recently lost its obloquy, she is also related to the house of Ullathorne and thus enabled to be refined and womanly. It is curious, and likely a reason Trollope, who defended psychological rather than plot-driven novels, himself did not care for this book, is that the narrative device of Mary’s inheritance, suggested by his brother, though it is held suspended for six hundred pages, easily guessed by the reader from the start. Mary is so nice; she must win out and marry joyfully in the end.
     As few of us, his readers, find ourselves at the top of the social pyramid, Trollope makes good fun of aristocrats. He may support a sort of feudal paternalism, but he satirizes its representatives regularly. The Duke of Omnium is such a very lofty nabob that he is treated at a distance, but the de Courcys are consistent figures of fun. Still, everyone’s worth is realized by their proper playing of a social role.
     Trollope’s treatment of his transgressive characters, those whose actions the reader can not applaud, those that go beyond idiosyncrasy, silliness, or a bit too much of a good thing, indicate the dangers of violating social norms.
     Scatcherd is the prime example of someone who has wandered from his place in the social structure. This upstart capitalist, having left his proper station, finds himself suffering. The uncouth tradesman, who represents the upward mobility possible in capitalism, is an errant alcoholic; in fact, his ascent to wealth and international stature is rather incredible, given his youth as a mason and a convict and his all-but-uninterrupted drunkenness. His unlikely success is marred not only by his own pathological drinking but also by a no-good son who shares none of his virtues while magnifying his every vice. Scatcherd himself reflects that he would have been more blessed had he remained a stonemason. As it is, he gains immense wealth only to have it revert to the local embarrassed squire who can, of course, make much better use of it. His wife gracefully retires from Boxall Hill, knowing that she never really belonged there.
     If the reprehensible tycoon is the book’s primary illustration of the frightful monstrosity of people’s rising above their stations, he has his junior partner in Moffatt. This low-born capitalist acts as a blackguard in jilting Augusta. His advocacy of extending the franchise and admitting Jews to Parliament is portrayed as disreputable vote-pandering as well as making him a “muff.” (207)
     In a turn typical of Trollope’s middle-class partisanship for the wealthy, Amelia finds Mortimer Gazebee altogether too low-born for Augusta to consider as a husband, and Augusta herself admits that such an alliance would be “derogatory.” (496). They consider nothing but class in their calculations and pose the frightening question: “If we were to act that way, what would the world come to?” she asks. When Amelia herself violates the class barrier by marrying the affluent attorney, this turn exposes the hypocrisy of the aristocracy without vitiating Amelia’s point. It is, after all, her failure to accept such a marriage. While well-born, she must be less than altogether noble.
     At times Trollope’s social ideal seems to veer backward even further than feudalism. Scatcherd’s murder of Henry Thorpe (who had seduced his sister) is all but approved by the narrator and by the authorities. As a more civilized citizen of higher rank (semi-civilized at any rate) Frank takes similar action against Moffat who has jilted his sister (but without having had sex with her) by horsewhipping him outside his club. Moffat, of course, being a bounder, folds without resistance, and the police, though they take Frank into custody, soon realize that he was doing what they consider the right thing. The proper social order, it seems, must be maintained by individuals taking “manly” action, ignoring the police, courts, and laws.
     Trollope opposes the modern wholesale, including science and technology. He often directly addresses the presumably bourgeois reader but, at a critical moment, he enlists an ostler as spokesman. This character, a sort of Victorian British Stepin Fetchit, whose quaint deficiencies are evident in his comic dialect and his lameness, remembers most fondly the old “duik” and doochess” and laments the loss of importance of the feudal seat, commenting, “the money did fly in them days!” (200) as though his sort would be much better off were it not for social progress.
     In the end it may be Trollope’s conservatism more than his great love for humanity that makes the work warm and comforting even to the more misanthropic. All literature both affirms and questions, reinforces and challenges our received ideas. While some works tend toward the critical side of the continuum, others, in particular popular works like Trollope, tend toward the affirmative, pleasing the reader with the sense that his beliefs are correct and the world is a basically benign place where things run on as best they may. People in Trollope are rarely troubled about their values or decisions. They may be discomfited by circumstance or by narrow-minded antagonists, but they muddle on in a fundamentally lovable manner that makes a narrative world like that of Doctor Thorne a singularly comfortable place to linger.

Three Horatian Odes

Horace is the great technician of Latin poetry. The critic can always examine more closely and find more cunning and subtlety. Like the Chinese, so humane and yet so sophisticated. Yet his excellence does not transfer well to twenty-first century America. The pacing, word order, and figures of speech appeal to tastes that exist today only if consciously cultivated. The allusions snag readers into footnotes rather than delighting them. Still, with my poor Latin, I have tried to do a few.

Horace lives, like all of us, in sadness and fear. The intimate conviction of art protects him against such assaults as history, in the person of Tiridates, the sometime tyrant who eventually took refuge under Augustus, might offer. His immunity is the result of his aesthetic control which produces grace and clarity. This offering of beauty is conflated with the love (or friendship) between the persona and Lamia. An amicus of the muse, he can order up a garland celebrating the human relation enjoys, and this fructifying creative motive inspires the importation of new meters which are presented not as a refinement for aesthetes but as running down with the energy of “mountain creeks.”


Odes I, 26

Oh, I'm the muses' friend. Let wild winds blow
my sadness and my fear to Crete's far side.
I’m cool, whatever people fear from northern kings
of icy lands. Let Tiridates shake.

And let the one who loves the clearest stream,
let the Pierian weave sun-
grown blossoms, weave a crown for my dear friend,
Lamia, weave it, muse, and now!

Without you all my honors just stand mute.
I’ll take my Lesbian lyre and sing new tunes.
Let poetry run down like mountain creeks!
I weave a crown of flowered words for him.

Though Horace’ most famous tag occurs in the following piece, familiarity has not emptied the words of their Epicurean poise. It’s Ram Dass’ “Be Here Now” but lacking the portentous machinery. For Horace there’s just the coastal landscape and the wine and his friend’s company. He has found it vain to entertain himself with supernatural prophecy or other illusion. Just to pass the time is surely enough.

Odes I, 11

Don’t ask, Leukonoe, it is taboo to know
what fate I’ve got and what’s awaiting you.
Forget the Tarot reader. It is best to tough
it out. Know Jupiter may give us many years
or this may be the last we see the Tuscan sea
come break against the rocks. Be wise; strain wine;
don’t hold great long-term hopes. We talk and jealous time
runs on. Just seize this day, think nothing of the next.

This last is in a similar vein, but finished off with a marvelous series of images suggesting the joys of flirtatious dalliance. I've been so reckless as to introduce rhyme here.

Odes I, 9.

Look! There Soracte stands topped with deep snow,
the hard-put trees in agony to hold it all.
The penetrating frost has frozen firm,
each river’s resting deep in ice’s thrall.

Dispel the cold and pile the logs up high
in your warm hearth and pour my favorite drug,
pour it high, that wine that’s aged four years,
o, party-master, from the Sabine jug.

Leave all else to the gods. As soon as they
have quieted -- the winds now fighting hard
with high-tossed seas -- the cypress trees won’t shake
nor will the ancient ashes in the yard.

O, don’t ask what tomorrow may produce.
Every day’s an answer to a prayer.
Don’t neglect when you have youth to dance,
and don’t think you’re too good for love affairs

As long as you’re still green, not peevish grey,
then think of nothing else in dusky light
but rendezvous around the fields and squares
and whispers soft as the approaching night.

Now too’s the time for her sweet laugh to give
a girl away in her dark hiding spot.
She makes a show, objecting when a tease
will grab her ring or bracelet that she’s got.

Notes on Recent Reading 12 [Huxley, Norris, Dōgen]

Crome Yellow [Huxley]

     I should confess at the outset a weakness, for Saki’s Clovis and even -- dare I confess it? -- for Ronald Firbank. In Huxley’s novel, the same aestheticism verging into camp appears in somewhat diluted, digested, and intellectualized form. This roman-à-clef of the scene at Lady Ottiline Morrill’s might be a grandchild of Thomas Love Peacock and a child (on the other side perhaps) of Oscar Wilde.
     The fashions of the advanced thinkers of the time are naturally for the most part altogether absurd, though Mr. Barbecue-Smith’s salable profundities would probably rank as high today on the best-seller list as they did in his own. With becoming self-mockery, the author himself is represented by the ineffectual poet Denis Stone.
     Modern readers are likely to be particularly interested in the utopian schemes of Mr. Scogan. Surely the most quoted passage in the novel is Scogan’s description of a future generation spawned in state incubators, initiating a time when “Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world.”


The Pit [Norris]

     Norris’ novel of the futures markets in Chicago, one of his three part wheat series, is very much au courant in its depiction of the addictive psychology of speculation. The ego-foolery of high finance is reminiscent of Wolfe’s “Masters of the Universe” in Bonfire of the Vanities.
     Apart from the unusual interest in economic forces, though, the novel is quite conventional. Though Laura is, at first, rather flippant and self-absorbed, a bit of a rebel, she ends up as traditional a good wife as one could imagine. And a male with aesthetic interests like Sheldon Corthell can never hope to gain such a love.
  Every now and then Norris deploys a rhetorical flurry on “the pit,” implying people’s helplessness in the face of fate or some such “naturalist” lesson from our “American Zola,” and Curtis Jadwin would like to think his addiction something quite beyond his control, but these notions seem adventitious. The true characters here are motivated just as in the age’s popular stories
     McTeague and The Octopus seemed more absorbing as stories, though The Pit was popular enough when new to have been serialized in the Saturday Evening Post.


Shobogenzo [Dōgen]

     Neither a Japanese scholar nor a practitioner of zazen, I nonetheless fancy that I read Buddhist texts both to ameliorate my Eurocentric education and to pursue enlightenment. If Dōgen is correct that anything less than total commitment is fruitless, my remarks may only, I suppose, mislead, but I stubbornly offer them regardless.
     Dōgen, the thirteenth century Zen master, founded the Soto school, sometimes insulted as “farmer Zen” by Rinzai adherents because of its popularity. Though Shunryu Suzuki taught Soto at the San Francisco Zen Center and reached many more through his Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, many Americans with a literary connection to Buddhism will be attracted to the more dramatic style of Rinzai.
     How to Raise an Ox is a partial translation of Dōgen’s Shobogenzo with a substantial introduction by Francis Dojun Cook. These editorial materials and the selections from Dōgen stress practice, while keeping a clarified eye on the most basic facts: the paramount importance of meditation, the illusory conundrum of ego (here magically solved by the bodhisattva’s pledge to await the enlightenment of all sentient beings before accepting his own).
     Prof. Cook is an academic as well as a Zen adept, so one can only appreciate it if he sounds a bit preachy in his introductory remarks. He does, after all, want to bring us all to nirvana. It is not surprising and a sign of the best intentions if the strain shows just a bit.

A Note on Dryden and "Dramatick Poesy"

     One of the most significant attempts to pursue literary theory between Sidney and Peacock, Dryden’s Essay of Dramatick Poesy provides a thoughtful, if not systematic, account of neo-classical ideas. The frame of Dryden’s dialogue describes the party of four discussing literature while on a pleasure excursion as the British battle the Dutch at the mouth of the Thames. This dramatic situation not only emphasizes the provisional character of the “essay” form emphasizing relativism, dynamic truth, and a social nexus; it also introduces the patriotic motif that will be significant to Neander’s value judgments.
     Dryden’s fundamental error is his acceptance from his classical antecedents of the notion that art is imitation. He links his literary values to this unconvincing basic concept. Now even in common sense terms there would be little point in seeking to imitate a reality which is itself fully manifest always. Were art mimesis alone, it would never have taken such a central role in human culture. Plato would have been quite right in maintaining that art could only be second-rate were the imitation of lived reality its goal. He might have thought, though, that just as his form or idea of a chair or of love is related to, but not identical with, the chair in my living room, a chair or an affection represented in art will be similarly different from their kin in lived experience, though art’s image is richer in information. Whereas Plato’s “ideas” are simply generalizations, though weighted in the end with the burden of ultimate reality, art’s images suggest at once an individual object and the sum of its occurrences in the reader’s experience, as well as a host of implied, allusive, and symbolic associations.
     The representation of art not as imitation (a mirror in Abrams’ terms) but as creation (a lamp) is a Romantic one. As most of our assumptions remain Romantic today, Dryden’s ideas will find little sympathy from the modern reader. The very idea of “decorum,” which he assumes, has hardly survived into our time in which attempts to violate decorum are part of the stock in trade of the off-Broadway theater. As he finds the French style, so admired by Lisideius, “icy” with the beauty of a “statue” not a play (as though a statue could not be moving), we suspect that Dryden may have the same intuitive reactions as we, though he is bound to express them in terms acceptable to his theory. This assumption is strengthened by Dryden’s insightful analysis of The Silent Woman and his preference for Shakespeare over the more academic Jonson in contrast to many of his generation.
     Yet he then uses this same measure of faithfulness to nature and realism to justify what seem to us moderns as assertively artificial conventions. The notion of the “unities” figures prominently in the discussion, though the author is aware that its strict observance is based neither on Classical precept nor example. Indeed, he finds the French playwrights often violating the rules. What will strike the contemporary reader as odd is that to Dryden, the unities are good because they enhance verisimilitude: one place need not change into another, nor need time be manipulated. The very conventions that would seem to signal a highly conventionalized, unrealistic style are for him the opposite. Now, of course, no one could mistake the doings of actors on a stage for anything other than “fictional,” and the same is true a fortiori for words on a page. Neither competes with lived experience. The observer evaluates each in entirely different terms. When plays or poems are composed according to rule or convention, the first bit of information the consumer receives from the rule is in fact the work’s artificiality, its fictional character.
     Lisideius’ definition of drama, later adopted in shorter form by Neander is “a just and lively Image of Humane Nature, representing its Passions and Humours, and the Changes of Fortune to which it is subject; for the Delight and Instruction of Mankind.” Yet Dryden knows no likelier source for pleasure than plausibility, as though we do not also find entertainment in the unexpected, the wholly fantastic, in formal patterns and a host of other sources. While discussing the propriety of fights and “tumult” on stage, Neander sensibly comments that, if he can accept that the figures before him are kings and princes, he can equally accept that they strike blows in earnest, not to mention the supernatural pagan deities in Corneille. Where, then, is the boundary of the suspension of disbelief?
     Just as there is an inevitable relation but no direct correspondence between the literary description and the thing described, there can be no point before unintelligibility at which the gap between the two is too large.
     Dryden does no better with the other Horatian end of poetry: instruction. In his reductive view, this involves setting out the morally, perhaps in the end religiously, proper behavior for the benefit of the reader. His faith in the standard of imitation blinds him to any notion of art’s unique ability to investigate contradictions, ambiguities, ambivalences, and the unknown.
     Yet, in spite of our dissent from his conclusions, he has in this dialogue created a memorable scene in which the cultivated idlers toss ideas between them on a lazy afternoon, leaving sea battles to others, however satisfying one’s own nation’s victory may be. What better use for the human consciousness? And surely Britain’s rule on the waters must have seemed to reinforce the claims of her poets. One may regret the erosion of ancient authority whose decline has been more rapid than that of the British Navy in the years since Dryden, but perhaps critics have approached a bit closer to the grand and chryselephantine image of the muse herself in the sancta sanctorum of the reader’s mind.

Notes on Recent Reading 11 [Wright, Kerouac & Burroughs, Gilbert]

The Long Dream [Wright]

     Wright’s last novel, another coming-of-age account from The Jim Crow South, is rich in factual detail and convincing dialect. Fortunately, it has become necessary for Americans to acquire from written records a knowledge of what the relation between the races was like in the days before the sixties. Wright delineates the Southern variant of this fundamental American ratio with subtlety and accuracy. Like Mailer, he points his finger on the sexual element in American racism.
     Though dreams, visions, and fantasies are most often the heart of the stories in which they appear, I found the dream sequences of Wright’s novel distracting ornamentation reflecting little beyond the decay of Freudianism. Further, the conclusion of the plot is unlikely, loosing the thematic knots with Fish’s sudden flight to France (he would surely have had no passport), but then all is redeemed with a final sentence nothing short of luxurious.


And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks [Kerouac and Burroughs]

     This fictionalized account of the New York Beat scene in the middle forties including Lucien Carr’s killing of David Kammerer remained unpublished at Carr’s request until his death in 2005. Literary judgment might, however, have concurred. It’s loose as can be, but much of the book is dialogue, doubtless preserving the tone of conversation of that earlier time in this particular subculture. It has the same fascination of the tape transcript in Visions of Cody. It’s striking how much the people drink. Fancy drinks, often, like Pernod. Somehow I would have imagined this bunch, even with Carr among them, as more bookish than the story suggests. But maybe I’m thinking of me. The book is an entertainment, though it may have been an exorcism of the horrific incident for the people involved.
     Other versions of the murder appear in Kerouac’s The Town and the Country and Vanity of Duluoz as well as in Holmes’ Go, in Edie Parker’s memoir, a number of biographies, a much-read 1976 New Yorker article by Aaron Latham, and a story by John Hollander.


H. M. S. Pinafore [Gilbert]

     Reading Gilbert’s libretto for H. M. S. Pinafore I felt even more strongly than when I see the work performed that its pleasures are largely formal. What one enjoys are the Gilbertian chops that had been evident in the Bab Ballads, the marvelous melodious play of sound that all relish in nursery school, (but so many neglect afterwards) and the romance plot, proceeding so delightfully, seeming inevitable like a fugue.
     The social themes reflect upper middle-class concerns, but rarely do they imply political positions. For all the stress on marriages impossible because of the social hierarchy, it turns out that Ralph Rackstraw, the ideal of the British sailor, is such an impressive figure because he is, in fact, of upper class birth. His marriage is conventional after all. The enthusiastic nationalism that has led to so much suffering is celebrated every bit as much as it is mocked. Some things cannot be exaggerated. The unusually pointed song about the “ruler of the Queen’s Na-vee” is devastating and clearly directed at First Lord of the Admirality W. H. Smith despite Gilbert’s disclaimer, but, then, in the play at any rate, he doesn’t seem somehow to do much harm.
     And meanwhile the plot proceeds like very satisfying clockwork.

Rereading the Classics [Gogol]

     One comes upon Gogol at a considerable distance from the metaphysical rumination of Dostoyevsky, the grand plenitude of Tolstoy, or the reserve of Chekhov. Though his reach may be not so high as the one, as broad as the other, or as tight as the third, though he exiled himself for years and eventually recoiled from his own vision and, under the influence of Father Matthew Konstantinovsky, burned his continuation of Dead Souls, his narratives remain potent in this twenty-first century. Yet, from the very start, his plots are seem either all-but-nonexistent or impossibly bizarre. His characters are often formulaic, like those of Theophrastus or Ben Jonson. It is little wonder that he has been misread so often, not least of all by himself.
     Categorized as a regional writer after Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka and Taras Bulba, he was later regarded as a realist. Soviet critics liked to claim him as a satirist of decadent Czarist society in spite of his reactionary views in support of the serf system, paternalistic landowners, and an all-knowing Orthodox Church. In fact his portrait of Russian bureaucracy has more in common with Kafka’s metaphysical uses of the Austro-Hungarian administration than with, say, Trollope on what seem in his novels the victimless foibles of the Church of England and the parliamentary system. Gogol’s characters suffer.
     Yet his sentimental love for Russia is manifest. Those who call Gogol’s rhapsodies to Russia ironic or burlesque are quite right, yet they miss the genuine enthusiasm, the afflatus that launched his paragraphs to soaring heights. In fact his backward political views reflect the conviction that the system is perfect, however often its agents fail. That passionate love of his country lies beneath his work with Ukrainian materials and his later exploration of the underside of Russia, where most estates are seedy and most landowners twisted enough with self-interest to see neither themselves nor their surroundings. Both within and apart from the text he refers to the novel as a poem and an epic. Belated it may be, but very deeply Russian. The weak and flawed, often morally diseased characters are the rotted fruit, the bitter, ironic reflection of the highest aspirations to spirituality. Gogol is altogether sincere in both his love and his denunciation when he releases a marvelous montage, an out-the-coach-window series of sights, and then declares, “Russia! Russia! I see you, from my wondrous beautiful afar: I see you now. Everything in you is poor, straggling, and uncomfortable . . .” [231]
     At pains to define Chichikov as altogether ordinary at the outset of Dead Souls, our hero turns out to be vain, selfish, dishonest, cowardly, a virtual catalogue of weakness and sin. Yet he blends in well -- so very unremarkable is he that that he produces no reaction when he appears in a remote provincial town. His semi-respectable Civil Service title, his acceptable clothing, all the social clues lead to his acceptance, particularly when he plays to the worse instincts of those he meets.
     Though they do not share his shifty character, the feckless heroes of “The Overcoat” and “The Nose” are equally anonymous. They are the invisible people of the modern age. Most are vitally concerned about their reception by others, so the category of poshlust (which might most succinctly be translated “false taste” though it extends even to morality) of which Nabokov makes so much in his excellent book on Gogol. A pioneer of the modern age, he writes “The Diary of a Madman” with total the assumption that we are better than half mad already. When he tries to portray a virtuous character in Murazov, he seems lost, out-of-place, ineffectual.
     Gogol practices the low-mimetic as its lover, conveying the secret inner marvels of the ephemeral in spite of its sordidness and arbitrariness. He is himself his “twenty-year-old youth returning from the theatre with his head full of a street in Spain,” who hears vulgar quarrels in the street and “sees that he is back on earth, and even in the haymarket and near a pub, and once more life in its workaday clothes goes flaunting itself before him.” [140] Note that the everyday has spirit enough to “flaunt,” and so it does in these pages. Gogol ironically praises the traveler who “after a long and wearisome journey with its cold and slush and mud, sleepy station-masters, jingling bells, repairs, altercations, drivers, blacksmiths, and all sorts of villains of the road, at last beholds the familiar roof and the lights rushing to meet him.” [142], but this is not our author. To him such a sense of secure grounding in place is elusive. It reminds him of those who are praised for their descriptions of moral exemplars, while less successful authors, he among them, dare to “bring into the open everything that is every moment before men’s eyes and that remains unseen by unobservant eyes – all the terrible shocking morass of trivial things in which our life is entangled.” He declares that he is “destined by the mysterious powers to walk hand in hand with my strange heroes, viewing life in all its immensity as it rushes past me, viewing it through laughter seen by the world and tears unseen and unknown by it.” “Let us plunge all at once into life with all its muffled rattle and jingling bells.” [142-3]
     The plunge can be exhilarating. Studying the garden of the hoarder Plyushkin, he observes “In short, it was all beautiful, as neither nature nor art could contrive, but as only happens when they unite together, when nature’s chisel puts its final touch to the often unintelligently heaped up labour of man, relieves the heavy masses, destroys the all to crudely palpable symmetry and the clumsily conceived gaps through which the unconcealed plan reveals itself so nakedly, and imparts a wonderful warmth to everything that has been created by the cold and carefully measured neatness and accuracy of human reason.” [122]
     Gogol’s natural ebullience, his celebration of the world, is expressed in his catalogues. His description of the various voices of the village dogs mounts to a grand height, only toward the end to sprout a simile of human singers which gains sudden details only to conclude with an earth-shaking crescendo. [53]
     Such rhetorical thrills can sneak up upon the reader. One is told that a crowd of “black frock-coats” resembles “so many flies,” a potent suggestive image already, but immensely enriched by the set-piece that follows in which figure an “old housekeeper,” a swarm of children, and the flies themselves “already satiated” but unable to resist pestering the servant over the sugar and preening themselves only to exit, “fly out again,, and again fly in with new tiresome squadrons.” [24] It is no less than a poem embedded in prose.
     But, of course, the appeal of Plyushkin’s estate is nothing but the bizarre “beauty” of the individual personality, just as in general, the real delight of the strange spectacle of the world is regularly its characters, however briefly glimpsed: “Before, long ago, in the days of my childhood, which have passed away like a dream never to return, I felt happy whenever I happened to drive up for the first time to an unfamiliar place . . . I stared, too, at some infantry officer, walking by himself, who had been cast into this dull provincial hole from goodness knows what province or at a merchant in his close-fitting, pleated Siberian coat . . . and I was carried away in my thoughts after them, into their poor lives.” [119]
     The intoxication with the ordinary, even the somewhat substandard, is capable of achieving a sort of Zen-like fugue state in Chichikov. When he is unexpectedly delayed due to damage to his carriage “he had the satisfaction of experiencing those agreeable moments which are so well known to every traveler,” and the reader is off considering rubbish on the floor and the stupid curiosity of passers-by. He is sickened, but transfixed. He focuses on killing a fly, and the spell is soon past.
     Well aware of the inadequacy of even language, our most subtle instrument, Gogol knows that he, like Sobakevich praising the [112] powers of his deceased serfs, addresses his reader indirectly. Communication is always under suspicion, and the sense of being slightly pixilated and very likely misled is pervasive. When the whole town is on to Chichikov accusing him of deeds of their own invention as well as those he did indeed cook up, they resemble “a schoolboy who wakes up to find that his classmates, who were awake before him, have stuffed a hussar, a piece of paper filled with snuff, into his nose while he was asleep. Having inhaled the snuff with all the force of a sleeping person, he wakes, jumps out of bed, looks round him like a fool with eyes popping out of his head, and cannot grasp where he is or what has happened to him.” [198] Gogol’s readers may know the feeling.
     After reading him, step into the streets of your neighborhood. “ Seeing the whirligig of men – say what you like, it’s like a living book, a second science.” [II, 309, repeated at 348] You are less susceptible than I if everyone, not to mention the plants and paving stones, doesn’t look both exceedingly odd and ruinously mundane.

Notes on Recent Reading 10 [Voltaire, France, Dryden]

Philosophical Letters [Voltaire]

     Why is Voltaire considered a philosopher? He seems clearly a littérateur whose comments on politics and religion are no more systematic than those of his friend Benjamin Franklin. The eighteenth century civic-minded French intellectuals who called themselves philosophes had indeed a preference for reason over mindless faith as well as curiosity about many fields but their thinking was loose and metaphorical, motivated more by a guiding sense of potential human decency than by a show of rigor or a pursuit of metaphysical truth.
     What we call his Philosophical Letters was originally more accurately titled Letters concerning the English nation. Writing after a three-year exile following his imprisonment through a letter de cachet, Voltaire comments on a variety of English phenomena, often to the disadvantage of his native land.
     He is most concerned with the progressive advance of the middle class against the aristocratic privileges of feudalism and the consequent progress of civil and religious liberties. The modern reader is struck with Voltaire’s praise of the London Stock Exchange as a place where “representatives of all the nations” gather “for the profit of mankind.”
     He writes on inoculation, on Newton’s optics and physics and on Locke, celebrating the advance of science. To Voltaire such writers were assisting in the overdue demolition of superstition, contributing toward the development of a “natural philosophy.” (Of course, to Blake, “Newton's Particles of Light” were “sands upon the Red Sea shore,/ Where Israel's tents do shine so bright,” and Voltaire a mere “mocker.”)
     Among the other pleasure of the volume are Voltaire’s wit, reminiscent of Mark Twain, in his characterization of Quakers who had his admiration in spite of their enthusiasm. It is more salutary to read his criticism of Shakespeare (indeed his preference for Addison’s Cato) than a dozen third-hand praises by less original critics.


Penguin Island [France]

     Anatole France is certainly Voltaire’s literary and intellectual descendent. It is little wonder that France’s literary stock has declined since he received the Nobel prize in 1921. What the Swedish committee called his “nobility of style” and “true Gallic character” seemed to others to be heavy-handed thematic development ornamented only by dry wit and old-fashioned rhetorical turns. His rationality does not appeal to the modern infatuation with passion and the unconscious.
     Penguin Island presents a parody history of France from prehistory to a collapse following anarchist assaults. is clever in ideas and turns of phrase. One finds satiric accounts of European history including figures resembling Charlemagne, Napoleon, and such a detailed account of a Dreyfus-like controversy that all but experts will go running for footnotes.


Annus Mirabilis [Dryden]

     Sometimes I find that reading a poet for whom I feel I have little inclination is more productive than reading a settled favorite. Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis is fascinating simply for its implications about the role of poetry in the structure of culture. A verse account of striking recent news or a poetic tribute to a ruler and his generals would be unlikely in any country today yet was perfectly ordinary in the seventeenth century.
     The specific appeal of Dryden’s work, though, is technical. The repeated rhythm of each quatrain as it sets up and delivers again and again becomes hypnotic as a tide on a shore, and his confident and clever diction eventually acquires an almost “swinging” dance-like quality.

Notes on Recent Reading 9 [Plutarch, Tacitus, Williams]

Parallel Lives [Plutarch]

     Though his purpose was to praise and blame, Plutarch, like an old history book, is heavy with wars and politics and not so good on culture and thought. His Lives would be improved with fewer accounts of battles, but the stories never fail to engage the reader. It is fascinating to see how Athens and Rome, even in their days of power, were like small towns in that everyone knew everyone and historic changes might be initiated on a street-corner after a chance meeting.
     Though the so-called Dryden edition was not exactly translated by Dryden it is accurate enough and readable. I haven’t seen Sir John North’s version of Amyot’s French translation; perhaps it is more appealing.


Agricola and Germania [Tacitus]

     Tacitus’ praise of the work of his father-in-law Agricola in subduing the Britons serves as a vehicle for his expression of the old Roman values. His straightforward style is nonetheless susceptible to irony, archness, and some good set-pieces. The Agricola describes the assimilation of such “demoralizing temptations” as Roman “arcades, baths, and banquets,” saying that the “unsuspecting Britons” regarded these as “civilization” whereas they were more accurately enslavement. In the Germania he notes with approval the northerners disregard for gold and silver, their hardihood, and their strict sexual morality. “No one in Germany finds vice amusing, or calls it ‘up-to-date’ to seduce and be seduced.”
     His account of Boudica is sympathetic. The report of Calgacus’ speech rallying Rome’s enemies is eloquent, damning the imperial power for bringing “robbery, butchery, and rapine” while calling it government. His passionate cry of liberty or death must surely be a coded lament for the loss of the Roman Republic whose ineffectual Senate could only ratify the madness of one emperor after another. He goes so far as to implies that Domitian, whom he says had a “hatred of merit,” killed Agricola.
     In Tacitus one sees the dilemma of a man of principle seeking to take an honorable role in a tyrannical state. He is surely offering his own apologia when he says in the Agricola that “even under bad emperors men can be great,” and, through “a decent regard for authority” may attain “distinction,” whereas opposing even a wicked monarch can bring only an unseemly and “ostentatious self-martyrdom.”
     A modern reader of the Germania can hardly avoid reflecting on recent history when reading of the northern tribes passions for racial purity and for war. My old copy of the Penguin translation by Harold Mattingly from 1948 makes a number of contemporary references. Whether or not Tacitus was mistaken on the first point, the Nazis were only too glad to appropriate his words. As for the latter, Tacitus considers them a bit mad on their eagerness for battle and their scorn of farming. According to his account, when not fighting, they spend their time in idleness. The book includes solid anthropological information on governance, divination, and human sacrifice.


White Mule [Williams]

     William Carlos Williams’ novel (1937) is narrated in a pure distilled straightforward American idiom that moves fatalistically from each word to the next. Much of the book is colloquial, reproducing American working class accents of African Americans, Irish, German, and Norwegian immigrants will such precision the good doctor must surely have kept a notebook handy for years, making memoranda of expressions he heard in his daily life.
     The fact that the novel’s first reviewers (Alfred Kazin in the New York Times and N. L. Rothman in the Saturday Review) compared the book to Joyce only shows us what conventional narratives they expected. The stream of consciousness is mild indeed, though the figure of the infant Flossie, bearing the name of the author’s beloved wife on whose family the story is based, is original and unsentimental. The Stecher family’s further experiences are detailed in the sequels In the Money and The Build Up.

The Web of Myth in the Story of Heracles

     A myth is a symbolic narrative current throughout an entire community. Myths tend to grow and link to form all-but-endless comprehensive webs whose warp and woof define the world-view of a culture (or subculture). One figure leads to another and then to others without limit. Mythic texts are often difficult for readers outside the originating culture because, far from telling their tales in a linear and direct manner, they typically assume the audience’s familiarity with the myth and mention details in telegraphic, even sometimes oblique or ironic references.
     Heracles is admittedly an odd case: a hero who acceded to divinity and won a place among the Olympians according to Hesiod by his sheer effort and ability. Herodotus thought there must be two Heracles: one mortal and one divine. Though not only pagan, but often something of an uncontrollable thug or an appetitive clod to judge by his actions, he became an emblem for moral striving in Christianity.
     His epithet in the Homeric Hymn “lion-hearted” [1] is totemic, rich with magical associations. The hero has incorporated the power of the great cats that were once the predators most likely to threaten humanity. He embodies the traits most identified with males in the animal kingdom and, since archaic times, among people as well: virility, courage, and power. The first of Heracles’ penitential labors is combat with the Nemaean lion and he is customarily depicted wearing a lion-skin in token of this victory. [2]
     Two-thirds of his celebrated labors consist of his repeatedly reproving his strength by overcoming such monstrous beasts in battle. [3] The motif of the great man’s taming the wild earth to make it safe for human life is typical of culture heroes. Even the cleaning of the Augean stables, which strikes some as less than heroic, doubtless also relates to the civilizing influence of water-management in earliest civilizations.
     Surely his reputation as a defender of humanity against the indignity of unwelcome death in part derives from his position between human and divine. Like Christ (and Dionysos, Tammuz, Adonis, Osiris, Dionysus, and Odin) he is linked to mankind through this common experience of humanity’s trying experiences including death prior to his apotheosis. Surely this explains the friendly intimacy with which he was approached in popular cult.
     Though Hera tried to prevent his birth and bedeviled him afterwards, his name likely signifies “Hera’s glory,” (though some once traced it to the word hero). She may have been his cruel stepmother, but his father was generally said to be Zeus. Due to Heracles’ position as both human and divine, one finds a variety of opinion among the ancients about his human father Amphitryon. This odd double status is defined as early as Homer when his shade appears to Odysseus and is said to be a mere eidolon or phantom while “he himself is feasting with the immortal gods.” (Even this statement is somewhat ambiguous since the same term is sometimes used for ordinary run-of-the-mill deceased spirits.)
     Heracles’ adversarial relationship with Hera, the threatening stepmother, is one of a series of gender-defining episodes in the hero’s career. Even this original conflict is ambiguous and nuanced. Heracles is often depicted on pottery sucking at Hera’s breast. His theft of the Amazon Hippolyte’s belt of authority indicates victory of patriarchal authority and thus of the individual son and husband in Greek society. The ambiguity of male dominance, though, is suggested by the fact that Heracles’ task is undertaken at the urging of Admeta, Eurystheus’ daughter, and that Hippolyte is usually represented as giving in voluntarily, though Hera stirs up war with malicious rumors, and some tellings have Heracles kill Hippolyte in error, regretting it later. Heracles is also said to have made off with either Hippolyte herself or her sister Antiope.
     The eleventh labor, the theft of the golden apples of the Hesperides again involves defeating women. Heracles frustrates Hera’s will and outwits the Hesperides in the enchanted garden of the west with its apples of immortality. The fact that Heracles is depicted in harmonious converse with these mymphs in Classic Attic pottery again implies the ambivalence of gender relations.
     Heracles’ marriages provide a broad spectrum of outcomes: his first alliance to Creon’s daughter Megara ends in horror as he kills their children (and her as well in Euripedes) in a fit of madness induced by Hera. He later married Omphale (a name meaning “navel,” as Delphi was called the omphalos of the world), the Lydian queen whom he had served for a year as a slave in penance for killing Iphitus. He is depicted in a Roman mosaic from Lliria in drag. While Heracles is dressed in women’s clothes and holds the spindle, Omphale wears his lion-skin and carries his club. In order to marry his third mate, Deianira, he had to fight Achelous who assumed the forms of a bull, a river, and a snake (a veritable catalogue of important early fertility images) first when asking for Deianira’s hand and again while fighting Heracles. She inadvertently brought about his death when she became suspicious he was having an affair with Iole by unwittingly sending a garment tainted by the Hydra’s blood. In Olympus he married the “beautiful-ankled Hebe” with whom his relationship seems to have been excellent.
     As a goddess primarily of youth Hebe is a guarantor of Heracles’ immortality. As cupbearer for the gods, she is also a model of the serviceable wife, providing an ample table, in which role she is sometimes known as Ganymeda by analogy with Ganymede.
     Heracles’ gargantuan characteristics include his violence such as the offhand murders of Linus while yet a young child and of his guest Iphitus as well as of his own children while possessed by madness. The first tablet of the epic of Gilgamesh tells us (in Maureen Gallery Kovacs’ translation) how an earlier hero is too strong too live in the world without doing damage. He needs a balancing force.


   You have indeed brought into being a mighty wild bull, head raised!
   There is no rival who can raise a weapon against him.
   His fellows stand (at the alert), attentive to his (orders !),
   Gilgamesh does not leave a son to his father,
   day and night he arrogantly ...
   Is he the shepherd of Uruk-Haven,
   is he their shepherd...
   bold, eminent, knowing, and wise,
   Gilgamesh does not leave a girl to her mother(?)!"


     As a sexual being Heracles is even more titanic in his appetites. He made love to the fifty daughters of Thespiae in one night, making all pregnant (hence the royal families of Sparta and Macedon). A researcher who listed his heterosexual affairs from all sources, (rather as Leporello had done with Don Giovanni’s), counted forty lovers and well over a hundred children. In addition there are stories of twenty or so homosexual affairs. Plutarch, in his Eroticos says he had “countless” male lovers and tell us that male lovers would swear loyalty to each other at the tomb of Heracles’ lover Iolaus. As for his appetite for food one need look no further than Aristophanes The Frogs for the gourmandizing Heracles of satyr plays and comedies. In Euripedes’ Alcestis he becomes drunk and obstreperous.
     For all this Heracles could be viewed as possessing a kind of charmed innocence. Like Parsifal he had a child-like quality. According to Aelian and Euripedes he was fond of play. [4] Further his great sinning seemed matched by great virtue. Having committed one of the greatest imaginable crimes in killing his children, he then did such prodigious penance that he redeemed himself. In the story of the choice of Heracles in Prodicus’ speech reported by Xenophon, he selects the difficult path of virtue over vice and immediate pleasure, allowing him to be viewed as a moral exemplar and even in the Renaissance in particular as a pagan premonition of Christ. [5] Can one read his cry of despair in his death agony “And there are men who can believe in gods!” [6] without thinking of Christ’s “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Over time this characteristic became diluted to a sort of vague beneficence. Aelian notes that Hercules had cleared the Sea and Land, and beyond all question shewed much kindness to men.” [7] As Heracles Alexikakos he averted evils and was often invoked in apotropaic charms. This is his role in the once-famous statue by Hageladas. Similarly, his image appeared as a guardian over tombs and doorways. He was a specific opponent of the keres, the spirits of the dead, conceived as posing a threat to the living. [8] In some contexts these spirits are identified with fate, and fate is most universally and plaintively associated with mortality. An Orphic Hymn calls to Heracles:


   Brandishing thy club
   Drive forth the baleful fates; with poisoned shafts
   Banish the noisome Keres far away.


     In one vase painting Heracles holds his club high, about to strike down a grotesque figure with a cane, labeled Old Age. He, after all, not only conquered death himself by attaining immortality; he also wrestled successfully with Death to save Alcestis.
     Apart from aiding people to avoid baleful influences, he attracts good ones as well. He betrays vestiges of the archaic fertility role as wild man, or lord of the wild beasts. He is often depicted with a cornucopia made of the horn of Acheloos in the form of a bull, neatly signifying the production of human food from untamed nature.
     Perhaps the most generalized referent for his divinity is suggested by Pausanias who refers to his image “in ancient fashion, as an unwrought stone.” (Ex. 20, 25) One may compare the pseudo-Dionysius, the Cloud of Unknowing or the Daoist idea of pu which might be translated “uncarved block” or “uncut log.”
     Fragmentary though it is, this is a mere excursion into the forest of myth. I have briefly reviewed Heracles’ roles as a culture hero, as a masculine role model, a jouster, though not a clear victor in the gender wars, a magnification of human, all-too-human traits, a vicious or deranged destroyer, a moral paragon, a friend of humanity, a dying and reborn god, a fertility emblem, an archaic human, a beneficent friend, and as ineffable and absolute divinity. This is hardly more than the beginning of his story. Through close family connections, not to mention structural parallels, Heracles is linked to many of Greece’s central myth: Perseus, Oedipus, Helen, Agamemnon. Zeus’ own parents and grandparents, not to mention their siblings, descendents, and ancestors bring other tales. The process of semeiosis is, in fact, unlimited. One must chop the sprig useful for an immediate purpose.




1. The title may be late, even Byzantine.

2. Prehistoric felids seem likely to have been the animals most likely to prey on early humans. On the other hand, recent evidence has indicated that, at least on a few occasions, people dined on cave lions.

3. I am reminded of Vishnu’s various incarnations, becoming progressively human.

4. According to Thomas Stanley’s 1665 version titled Various Histories, “They say that Hercules alleviated the trouble of his Labours by play. The Son of Jupiter and Alcmena sported much with Children ; which Euripides hints to us, making the God say, I play to intermit my Toils.”

5. In 1709 Addison translated this passage for the Tatler 97 in hopes of curing the “endemic Idleness” he found afflicting Londoners. He wrote, “I have translated this Allegory for the Benefit of the Youth of Great Britain; and particularly of those who are still in the deplorable State of Non-Existence, and whom I most earnestly entreat to come into the World.”

6. Metamorphoses IX, 200

7. III, 5.

8. See Jane Harrison’s Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 165-75.