A Unique Oeuvre (Like Everyone Else’s)

 

     Poetry on the Loose, the name of my poetry and performance series and of this site, may seem somewhat foggy in meaning, but that is precisely the point.  “On the loose” is meant to imply an overstepping of boundaries, a flouting of restrictions, a phrase meant to describe my writing, my taste, my sensibility, perhaps my life. 

    My poetry reading series have had always an open door to writers of every sort and style.  My main goal was to bring something new every time, and thus I never repeated a feature.  People of all backgrounds were equally welcome, and I specifically sought performers who would stretch the listeners’ expectations.  Every personality has a certain beauty, and one may sometimes learn more from a writer who does not at first seem particularly appealing.

     As a critic, I cultivated similarly broad interests.  Whereas scholars generally specialize in a single author or, at most, an era, I have been willing to contemplate literature of all ages and all cultures.  Recognizing that I lack the depth of an academic mandarin, I claim in compensation a Gargantuan all-devouring breadth.  While professors treat texts they have been rereading repeatedly for years, I typically write about something I have just finished, sometimes for the first time.  I write even about works I can read only in translation, a taboo in the Comparative Literature discipline in which I was educated.  (A well-published friend, with books from Yale and Cambridge, once said to me, ”You know the unspoken rule, ‘it’s okay to read in translation, if you quote in the original.’”)  Yet, like academic papers, my essays usually seek to demonstrate something new about the topic.  When I write about a Tibetan novel, my ignorance, if it does not allow a novel insight, at least reproduces the average reader’s equal lack of knowledge and thus may be useful in ways a professional monograph may not.  Yet I differ as well from journalistic reviewers who assume little if any prior knowledge and assume the task of either praising or panning as a guide to readers’ choices, with analysis subjugated to the aim of recommendation.  The scholar creates new knowledge; the reviewer basically advises potential readers.  I find myself aiming toward the liminal space, halfway between.

     My poetry betrays a weakness for the recondite, and does not shrink, now and then, from using as seasoning a word that might send readers to a dictionary.  A town at the end of a dusty foreign road is a likelier source of inspiration for me than the walls of my study, for I am a poor meditator.  My poems are for the most part, I believe, lucid, though with a hermetic residue to thicken the plot.

     In literary essays I often treat somewhat obscure books, and I do not shrink from the use of technical terms, even deploying a bit of jargon at times.  While regularly providing evidence and citing sources in notes, I violate academic standards with informal usages, personal references, and casual organization.  Since virtually no one apart from professors will care to read about Praxilla, or Matthew of Vendôme, and the academicians will look only at peer-reviewed professional journals, I have reduced my readership to a minimum, though I like to think of them as a kind of saving remnant, preserving culture in a philistine era.

     Far from cultivating a limited field until I make it my own, I wander from one author to another, “floating on the ocean of words.”  Having little system may disable some investigations, but it opens unsuspected possibilities in others.  I am aligned thereby with the common reader who like me reads for pleasure, though I cannot doubt that long years in graduate school have left their mark.  Further, the more fundamental and theoretical a question may be, the less the choice of a specific text matters.  My dissertation dealt with medieval European love poetry, but its thesis, about the transformation of convention, might equally have been demonstrated by a study of television situation comedies or, for that matter, literary research papers themselves.  People are everywhere and in all times in most important respects the same; their literature reflects this commonality, so any reader is entitled to have a look at any text.

     Though I shy away from confessional poetry, I foreground the role of delectation.  The subjective, in which the strongest impulse is erotic, has more influence in the consciousness than any product of ratiocination or article of faith.  My poems do not presume to retail eternal verities, but only to reflect the rapidly shifting ripples in the mind.

     In criticism as well, I privilege pleasure.  Art provides, I believe, the most densely signifying symbolic system our species has devised, and stories, poems, and dramas do accurately express states of consciousness, but the lure of the aesthetic is invariably the promise of pleasure.  Beauty, as Santayana said in The Sense of Beauty, is "pleasure objectified" or "pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing."  In spite of being the leading human motive for consuming art, pleasure is notoriously resistant to analysis, stubbornly subjective, and thus often ignored or discounted in discussions of art.  The pursuit of pleasure in one form or another must be the fundamental motive for reading literature; indeed, it is the fundamental motive for all action.

     In my critical oeuvre, I not only readily grant pleasure its primacy in the experience of art.  I most commonly address topics linked to sexual love, the jouissance outstripping other human experiences yet which is familiar to everyone.  This embraces, yet is not limited to, orgasm, romantic attachments, courtly love, marriage conventions, loveless laments, and ribald transgressive verse.  Mystical love of the divine, misogyny and other aggression, fetishism, and a whole panoply of phenomena arise from the same energies, if in  errant or tangential directions.  Erotic energy generalized to tint all life experience manifests as the carnivalesque as we see in its physical aspect in Rabelais and in its spiritual in Gerard Manley Hopkins.

     I confess to a fondness for the recondite.  Apart from the novelty of little-studied texts, I fancy the reader will more easily come upon novel insights traversing fresh territory than when trekking more frequented paths.  Thus I write about remote places I have visited and odd characters I have encountered.  I relish as well a bit of the grotesque and the eccentric in Gogol, Poe, and Céline and of the aesthete in Wilde, Dowson, and Firbank.  My philosophy tends toward the skeptical and I appreciate Gorgias, Sextus Empiricus, and Nagarjuna.  Quite intentionally, I have pursued a largely counter-cultural career, such as it is, and I am fascinated with the avant-garde: Dadaists, Surrealists, and Beats. 

     These elements interchange and mingle and, in part, account for my fondness for Sappho, Jaufre Rudel, Christopher Smart, Kleist, Pound, and Nabokov.  My love of essays has led to my reading and rereading Montaigne, Burton, Browne, Addison and Steele, Hazlitt, and Lamb.  Just as I can scarcely imagine a better way to spend an hour than in conversation, offering opinions on anything under the sun,  I continue to contribute to the ongoing discussions of all things in written form.

     All these characteristics of my oeuvre are reflected as well in my personality and thus in my life.  Yet this fact is quite ordinary.  Any body of work of any size will similarly reflect (sometimes refract) its author.  Every writer seeks readers, yet each is self-conscious about being read, since one cannot help setting down one’s nature on the black and white page.  Whereas it may or may not possess beauty, every text embodies its creator in detail and thus each is as unique as a profile or a handwriting sample.  One writer will hew to the punctilios of convention with reserve to spare like T. S. Eliot’s suits while another will slash those same expectations like an apache and run for a getaway.  One will luxuriate in lush descriptions like a canvas by Boucher while another will be ascetic like St. Anthony.  Existential edginess or pious confidence.  Melodious song or the croaking of frogs.  Comradely chatter or magisterial pronouncement.  Each has a place.  Each may succeed or fail in the reading, but all are in the running.  The reader will return to revisit those texts which have been catalyst to the most satisfying reactions when first read, but every literary work bears the imprint of a human mind and thus must be fascinating and complex and subtle. 

     The beauty of art requires both the skill of the artist and the taste of the consumer; beauty is not demonstrably inherent – it manifests only in art’s reception, and art cannot, alas, bring those who experience it to every enlightened realization, but it does reliably delver one truth.  Every work of art embodies a take on reality, either copied from life or compounded in imagination or, most often, midway between.  The artifacts a person makes indicate with considerable precision how one might have viewed the world at a moment in time.  This, I submit, is as close to Truth as any of us will approach. 

The "Divine Chit-Chat" of Cowper’s The Task

  

William Cowper by George Romney

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes; citations of The Task enclose book and line number in parentheses.

 

 

     R. W. had been at the center of the New York City artistic avant-garde since the ‘sixties.  When I knew him decades later, he habitually referred to the ground-breaking work he and others had produced in the most emphatically casual terms.  “We were just playing around.”  “Professors come asking me questions, but the main thing I remember is how drunk we were.”  “We did things just for the hell of it.”  Though earlier versions of Romanticism had exalted the artist as a visionary, a prophet, at least an “unacknowledged legislator,” the hip poets and painters and devisers of “happenings” took a cooler approach, as though art were simply an entertaining game.

     One effect of this pose is to foreground the value of the aesthetic.  If a work of art has no other value, no purpose, other than to be beautiful (or – expressing the same value in  milder terms --  amusing, or stimulating, or simply diverting), all the old excuses, most prominently to instruct, become incidental or irrelevant.  The poem or play or picture is justified if it allows one to pass some time in a pleasant manner.

      This stance is by no means novel.  Catullus calls his verses “nugae,” which Lewis’s dictionary defines as “jests, idle speeches, trifles” and Oscar Wilde ends his preface to Dorian Gray with the assertion “all art is quite useless.”  A few generations later Cage was maintaining “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry” and “The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all” n[1] while Frank O’Hara was touting his Personism, born, according to his account, when he realized a poem of his might just as well have been a telephone call to a friend.

     The eighteenth century is known for neo-Classicism, artificial language, and imitation of the greats of antiquity.  The era celebrated the imitation of Latin models (the Romantics in general favored the Greeks) many of which are highly conventional and structured , but which also include more relaxed occasional pieces and verse letters which prefigure Wordsworth’s advocacy of the “real language of men” in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads and Coleridge’s conversation poems.  The fashion of posing as natural and casual had been growing through the eighteenth century in conjunction with the foregrounding of nature and emotional expression in content and a loosening of form, a trend apparent in the popularity of the ode, conceived since Cowley as allowing irregularity. [2]  The turn away from grand themes and settings is apparent in the popularity of topographical poems, both urban (such as Gay’s “Trivia, or The Art of Walking the Streets of London” and Swift’s “A Description of a City Shower”) and rural (such as Pope’s Windsor-Forest and a number of poems detailing agricultural operations including John Philips’ Cyder and Smart’s The Hop-Garden).  Each of these is structured with a casual colloquialism, as though in conversation. 

     William Cowper’s The Task,  called “the most popular poem of the late eighteenth century,” [3] was described by Burns as “glorious” [4] and by an admiring Coleridge as “divine Chit-Chat” [5], a term that highlights its wandering informality, and indeed the poem slips from one topic to another as freely as subjects might over a dinner table.  The poem’s occasion is social and its subject arbitrary as the poet explains in a prefatory note. 

 

[“The history of the following production is briefly this:—A lady, fond of blank verse, demanded a poem of that kind from the author, and gave him the Sofa for a subject.  He obeyed, and having much leisure, connected another subject with it; and, pursuing the train of thought to which his situation and turn of mind led him, brought forth, at length, instead of the trifle which he at first intended, a serious affair—a volume.”]

 

The Task is then a kind of courtly display, brought off with sprezzatura to impress a lady, much as one might display elegant dress or a competence at dancing, music, or witty repartee.  While Cowper’s assigned “task,” indeed, as he says, turned somewhat “serious,” for instance when he started pitching his evangelical Anglicanism [6] and ventured on political topics such as opposition to slavery, imperialism, and France, its structure remains assertively casual, wandering from one subject to the next with no appearance of design. 

     The author’s intentionality is evident in the prominent use of the word “wandering” and words of similar import in the poem [7].  For instance, apart from calling himself a “wand’rer (I, 761) and describing himself as “wand’ring” (III, 692), Cowper says he is taking a “ramble” (I, 115) and speaks of “roaming” (IV, 232) and having “stray’d” (IV, 697).  So, apart from the arbitrary challenge that set the poet to composing, he developed the entire poem as an extended ad libitum discourse meant to give the impression that the poet is freestyling, to use a contemporary term.

    in a maneuver that recalls Sidney’s first sonnet in Astrophil and Stella ("’Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart, and write.’"), Cowper’s construction of what seems like spontaneity is, he asserts, the proof of his sincerity, directly expressing thoughts and feelings. 

 

Thou know'st my praise of nature most sincere,

And that my raptures are not conjured up

To serve occasions of poetic pomp,

But genuine, and art partner of them all.

 (I, 150-153) 

.     The first transition following the opening history of sofas is as playful and arbitrary as its selection of  topic.  The only link is negative. why, in fact, the writer is not associated with sofas.  That article of furniture, the poet says, is for the indolent, whereas he and the woman he addresses are physically active. 

 

The SOFA suits

The gouty limb, 'tis true; but gouty limb

Though on a SOFA, may I never feel:

For I have loved the rural walk through lanes . . .

(I, 106-110)

 

     After a lengthy survey of the pleasures of hiking in the countryside “where peace for ever reigns,” (208) he pivots then on the excuse of the single word to wish “Peace” to the artist who fashioned a certain “ingenious” (I, 210) weather toy, in which the male figure (presumably triggered by low air pressure) is “an emblem of myself,” (I, 213) willing to venture out in harsher weather than his more “tim’rous” (I, 214) friend.  Though it is unclear how the discovery is linked to bad weather, he describes then a locus amoenus, a cottage he calls “the peasant’s nest” (I, 227), remote, wild, and beautiful, where he  might find “the poet’s treasure, silence” (I, 235) and cultivate “the dreams of fancy” (I, 236). 

     This particular dream is short-lived, however, for the poet realizing that the home belongs to a poor

“wretch” (I, 239) whose hardships would outbalance his pleasures, turns on his praise of nature and exclaims “Society for me!” (I, 249).  Returning then to his country surroundings, he notes a nearby allée or “colonade” of chestnuts and the verbs shift from past to present only for the verse paragraph to conclude with and obscure reference to the landowner John Courtney Throckmorton of Weston Underwood and a line so tangled its very syntactical knottiness becomes ornamental.

 

Thanks to Benevolus — he spares me yet

These chesnuts ranged in corresponding lines,

And though himself so polish'd, still reprieves

The obsolete prolixity of shade.

 (262-265)

 

The final line is surely justifiable only as a kind of jeu d’esprit, a delight in words themselves as all-but-palpable objects, a pleasure to handle for their own sake prior to any consideration of meaning, reminiscent of Wallace Stevens.

     Rambling on in the present tense, he then happens upon a molehill which suggest people’s mines in that it “disfigures earth” (I, 275), leaving a visual record of “the mischief he has done.”  (I, 277)  This he then associates with the vandalism of some “clown” (I, 288) who carved his names on a tree motivated by “the zeal t’immortalize himself” (I, 284).  The faintly self-mocking parallel with the poet himself, recording his own bucolic strolls in words he might hope would be remembered is unmistakable.

     Still, Cowper’s pleasure in rural rambles as well as in words is displayed.  The joy he expresses when seeing the light scattered by tree branches anticipates the dance of Wordsworth’s daffodils. 

 

So sportive is the light

Shot through the boughs, it dances as they dance,

Shadow and sunshine intermingling quick,

And darkning and enlightning, as the leaves

Play wanton, ev'ry moment, ev'ry spot.

                                                            (345-349)

 

      Though this survey has covered only half the first book of The Task, the pattern is clear and does not change.  To continue detailing his divagations would be to belabor the point.  Cowper goes on to consider wide range of aesthetic, political, and religious ideas in the same desultory manner, reproducing his rural strolls in equally meandering mental associative streams.  Like a scintillating conversationalist, he has an observation for every occasion, and he drifts freely from one to the next.  His many serious opinions are stated in an entirely unstructured manner. 

     This offhand procedure is not itself vacant of meaning.  By suggesting that anything, even a sofa, can be made an aesthetic object, Cowper allows for the possibility of a generally illuminated consciousness in which every experience is equally profound.  If he risks the appearance of a slovenly formlessness, he also opens the potential for all life to be poetry.  His assertively non-functional discourse foregrounds the value of signification itself, that distinctly human trait, and its purely recreational value.  Cowper does have preferences and values, and he never shrinks from expressing them, but after doing so he moves on to another topic, and his path remains a self-justifying promenade.

 

  

 

1.  Silence.

 

2.  Cowley was followed in this practice by Dryden Behn, and Pope, later by Gray, Collins, Thomson, and Cowper and then by Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Coleridge.  Aiming for the sublime, many of these authors adopted an excited tone to dramatize their release from rigorous formal conventions. 

 

3.  Peter Leithart “The Task” Presidential essays, Theopolis Institute, available online at https://theopolisinstitute.com/leithart_post/the-task/.

 

4. Letter to Mrs. Dunlop of December 25, 1795.

 

5.  Rosemary Ashton in The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (p. 30) quotes Lamb’s repetition of Coleridge’s phrase.

 

6.  Cowper was a close friend of John Newton, author of “Amazing Grace.”

 

7.  For details, see Raymond Bentman, “Robert Burns's Declining Fame,” Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Summer, 1972).  Bentman traces a similar use of “wandering” in Thomson’s The Seasons.

The Phantom of Artistic Truth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

The Pose of Naturalism in Zola’s Germinal

 

     Germinal remains, after over a hundred years, strong stuff.  Zola’s prose continues to deploy the luxurious richness of concrete specific detail found in Flaubert and Balzac, but here the facts alone are merciless and painful.  The excruciating miners’ lives, the consequence of an oppressive economic system, only seem the more miserably unjust when set off by a few scenes of the bourgeois comfort of their bosses.  The book seems in many ways tragic.  The workers, after suffering terrible privations and numerous casualties, gain nothing from their strike.  The unmerited suffering of the poor, rather than being (as in Christianity) redemptive, only degrades and brutalizes them further.   Yet the title is clearly hopeful with its reference to the 1789 Revolution and to germination, here referring to the coming of radical change, an implication made explicit in the final passage.

 

Men were springing up, a black avenging host was slowly germinating in the furrows, thrusting upwards for the harvests of future ages.  And very soon they would crack the earth asunder.  (trans. By L. W. Tancock)

 

Des hommes poussaient, une armée noire, vengeresse, qui germait lentement dans les sillons, grandissant pour les récoltes du siècle futur, et dont la germination allait faire bientôt éclater la terre. 

 This incongruity between the ugliness of the miners’ degradation and the beauty of the utopian vision of a better economic order represents a more general tension informing the work as a whole.  While claiming to construct narratives out of lived experience alone, Zola consistently allowed observed facts to be overruled by his thematic enthusiasm as well as by emotion, literary convention, and allusion.   

     Zola’s Naturalism was for him a “scientific” method which he regarded as uniquely appropriate for his day.  In The Experimental Novel (1893) he explains that his approach to writing fiction is based on the rigorous research principles of Claude Bernard, the physiologist.  Quoting with approval Bernard’s characterization of the scientist as “the photographer of phenomena,” Zola notes that for the novelist no less than the biologist “his observation should be an exact representation of nature... He listens to nature and he writes under its dictation.”  Just as in the laboratory the scientist forms hypotheses first suggested and then tested by empirical facts, Zola maintains that the writer must survey the scene and formulate possible explanations for events, while remaining, like other researchers, ready to follow the data wherever they may lead.  For him this is possible because in his view human actions are the inevitable result of heredity and environment, just as evolutionary changes proceed independent of any creature’s choices and, in pre-Einsteinian physics, a mechanistic view is possible in which every event is theoretically predictable.  As Zola puts it, “There is an absolute determinism for alI human phenomena.”

     He rejects “the work of the idealistic writers, who rely upon the irrational and the supernatural,” and declares “The metaphysical man is dead; our whole territory is transformed by the advent of the physiological man . . .. This view of the matter is a new one; we have become experimentalists instead of philosophers.”

     Zola went to some pains in pursuit of this goal of scientific objectivity.  In researching Germinal he visited northern French mining towns at least one of which had recently been through a strike and even descended into the pits under the pretense that he was a government representative.  He had set himself the ambitious goal in his twenty-novel Rougon-Macquart cycle of providing a comprehensive vision of Second Empire France recording not only its nature but also the process of historical change.  Such a picture could, he thought, only be generated through an accumulation of facts.

     Yet the author’s own emotions and the usages of literary convention often take precedence over the data of lived experience.  Though he conceived his project as dispassionate -- he uses the word “impersonal” and insists that “naturalism is not a personal fantasy” -- he nonetheless did not hesitate to include tendentious, melodramatic, and sensational material, elements that in fact made his work moving and popular even as it deviated from his theory. 

     Each of these thematic or affective aspects of his fiction is complicated by a certain ambivalence.  For instance, the most straightforward theme of Germinal, shaping much of the story, is certainly the denunciation of capitalism and the promise of socialism.  While this novel is one of the very best of tendentious revolutionary narratives, arousing sympathy for the exploited and anger against their callous masters, it avoids a reductive cast of heroes and villains while maintaining an unqualified support for socialism.  The miners and their families are not idealized.  All, including Étienne, the outsider, are flawed.  A few, like Jeanlin, can even kill without reason.  Some, like Catherine or old Bonnemort, are so victimized that they possess little other identity.  Many are subject to the temptations of the pleasures available to the poor, principally sex and drinking.  

     Meanwhile, the advocates of change are likewise imperfect tribunes of the people.  Étienne is capable of being seduced by his new celebrity as well as by the whims of an excited mob.  Meanwhile, Pluchart is a professional activist who seems more anxious to promote his own career in the Socialist International than to put himself on the line with the workers, and Souvarine is a Russian anarchist so seduced by violence that he holds himself aloof for much of the action and then sabotages the mine elevator, causing unnecessary workers’ deaths.  

     Rasseneur, the one-time miner who operates a tavern, supports the workers, but feels rivalry with Étienne’s more radical leadership.  Maigrat, the owner of the village shop, offers credit but also sexually exploits his customers.  Even higher on the economic ladder, Zola finds mixed characters.  M. Hennebeau, manager of the mine, is so miserable in his marriage that he fancies he would rather be one of his workers.  His nephew Négrel is already affluent, and is in addition engaged to Cécile Gregoire, the owner’s daughter, yet in the end this capitalist works tirelessly to save the trapped workers and embraces Étienne as a brother.  Deneulin, owner of a smaller nearby mine, tries to act in a responsible fashion, modernizing his operation even though he thereby reduces his profits, and for his pains he is gobbled up by his richer competitor. 

     The contradiction that exists between Zola’s straightforward view of a socialist solution which one might with justice term “idealist” and his more nuanced “realistic” depiction of the actors involved is not the only compromise of the “scientific” Naturalist theory  in the novel.  Lurid, sensational stories in fiction may indeed be equaled by lived experience, but such material is often emphasized in popular works like ‘thirties pulp fiction or Tarantino’s movies from the ‘nineties.  Incidents in Germinal like the women’s bacchante-like mutilation of Maigrat after his death, Bonnemort’s sudden murder of Cécile, and the underground consummation of love between Étienne and Catharine are possible but unlikely, included in order to heighten the story’s impact and to attract readers. 

     Each of these incidents is only barely plausible.  Maigrat’s end seems to owe a good deal to Euripedes.  Bonnemort’s act expresses, as Zola tells the reader, a lifetime of suppressed resentment.  A physician might find his act improbable for a stroke victim, but it is a powerful symbol of the potential explosive energy inherent in every worker.  While it is difficult to conceive of people near death as Étienne and Catharine are when trapped underground as inclined toward or even capable of sexual activity, their love it makes a touching, even sentimental, scene with the two characters with whom  the reader has been most in sympathy, forming a kind of denouement that, amid the ruination of the end, prefigures the novel’s hopeful final words.

     Clearly only literary convenience makes Étienne the tenuous connection of the miners’ saga with the larger Rougon-Macquart cycle.  Though a few references appear relating to other novels, such as the protagonist’s hereditary vulnerability to alcohol, no knowledge of other works is necessary for the reader of Germinal.  The entire encyclopedic concept is entirely artificial in spite of the pretension to scientific objectivity.  Zola’s ambition to render his times in such precise detail that he would be a dispassionate scientific observer, exhibiting neither abstract principles nor personal traits, but simply copying with accuracy the world around him can scarcely overcome one insuperable obstacle.  Every turn of Zola’s plot is the result of his own conscious decision.  His choices are surely based on his own life experience but they  are far from inevitable; the author’s claim to objectivity is untenable.

       Zola clearly distinguished his Naturalism from Balzac’s Realism in his essay Différences entre Balzac et moi (1869), saying “My work is less social than scientific.”  (“Mon oeuvre sera moins sociale que scientifique.)  in his view Balzac’s aim was to be wholly descriptive, simply to illustrate that “there are lawyers, idlers, etc. just as there are dogs, wolves, etc.  In a word, his work seeks to be a mirror of contemporary society.”  (“Il y a des avocats, des oisifs etc. comme il y a des chiens, des loups etc. En un mot, son oeuvre veut être le miroir de la société contemporaine.”)  In contrast for him “My great project is to be purely a naturalist, a physiologist.  In place of social concepts like royalty or Catholicism he meant to substitute scientific laws such as those of heredity” (“Ma grande affaire est d'être purement naturaliste, purement physiologiste. Au lieu d'avoir des principes (la royauté, le catholicisme) j'aurais des lois (I'hérédité.”).  He here disclaims any intention of suggesting themes, whether “political, philosophical, or moral.” For him his story is “the simple relation of the facts of a family, showing the internal mechanism that makes it act.  I accept even anomalies.”  (“Un simple exposé des faits d'une famille, en montrant le mécanisme intérieur qui la fait agir. J'accepte même l'exception.”)

     That last phrase provides the author a useful wild card.   In fact Germinal and Zola’s other novels are shaped by literary convention, as well as by ideology, taste, and a host of elements.  Zola outlines not a new, more scientific form of literature but rather a new posture meant to enhance the reader’s impression of  verisimilitude.  The Naturalist method, rather than delivering art over to science, constructs a new novelistic artifice.  By the profession of objectivity Zola advances his own thematic interest in asserting that the actions of individuals are the foreseeable result of their heredity and environment.  The claim that he is merely transcribing data from life is a rhetorical device to convince the reader that the novelist has been faithful to lived reality.  It is the nineteenth century version of the eighteenth-century writers who presented works of fiction as authentic letters or otherwise reflecting real events. 

     One’s critical estimation of Zola is in no way diminished by the idea that his Naturalism is a calculated effect rather than some new sort of objectivity.  Writing, after all, can be nothing but marks on a page which makes at best a highly selective and refracted use of the sense data of experience.  The literary devices used by writers can only be judged by  their effectiveness in context, and Zola in Germinal has told a dramatic, significant, and well-crafted story.  While the claim of Naturalism is a pose, it is neither more nor less “false” than the pretensions of some writers to relate the doings of divinities.  Everything in art is symbolic.  Whereas Bernard in studying the liver quite properly sought results “objective” enough to be replicated by other researchers, Zola’s view of the miners arose from his passion and the narrative in which it is contained owes more to literary tradition and to the author’s own imagination than to transparent, quasi-scientific reportage.  

Scholarship as Recreation in Aulus Gellius

 

As this essay is in part intended to acquaint readers with the Attic Nights, I include several fairly long passages from it.  Quotations from Gellius are from the translation of J. C. Rolfe in the Loeb Library edition of Attic Nights (1927), which the reader may conveniently consult online at https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/gellius/home.html.   

 

     Surely the most critical adaptation of our species is our facility at manipulating symbols.  The evolution then of language enabled surely the more effective pursuit of prey but all subsequent thought, science, and culture as well.  Just as we perceive that cats relish stalking and imagine that orb-weaving spiders must take pleasure in a fine web, people enjoy practicing their most highly developed skill, sometimes simply as recreation in such verbal forms as jokes, songs, stories, and flights of conversation.  Since the Palaeolithic era people’s verbal play has constituted their primary form of entertainment.

     A taste for such semiotic dancing in both composer and consumer is the initial motive for all literature.  In certain written works, however, the human fondness for symbolic play is more highlighted, more naked, more joyously enthusiastic.  In journals, notebooks, and commonplace books, the jottings and sketchings of the mind may rarely rise to the level of the sublime, but they directly indicate our human pleasure in symbolic play, creating, carving, juggling, forming ever-new patterns in the immense catalogue of possibilities generated by grammar.  Among the greatest of such works are surely The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists, and the Noctes Atticae (Attic Nights) of Aulus Gellius.

     I have lately been reading in Aulus Gellius.  It is not a volume to read through one page after another, beginning to end.  I am opening the Loeb Library volumes at random and reading ten or twelve pages at a stretch.  The work invites that sort of approach.  It is a miscellany, an omnium gatherum, a rag-bag, and the author readily admits that the book lacks structure; its construction follows no discernable order but the wanderings of a human mind, all digressions and no central path.  The very title seems to hint at something torrid and tropical, warm zephyrs playing over a bare torso under loose robes, a cool glass of retsina at hand, and the book does indeed pursue a sort of hedonism.  For the author, though, some of the greatest pleasures are intellectual, undiminished in intensity by the fact that the fox his mind was hunting may bd either grand, such as the question of whether the phenomenal world be real, or minute, such as an obscure linguistic detail or an odd shred of natural history.  The primary association of the title for a Roman would have been its invocation of the revered Greek rhetorical and poetic traditions, inviting the reader for a bit of play in the realm of the recondite.

     The book is a collection of short comments and narrations, a paragraph or two or three on every sort of topic, but frequently concerning language or history.  As a result of this form Gellius is less often read for his style or for the impact of the book as a whole than remembered for the many fragments of lost writings he preserves which scholars may mine for historic and linguistic details.  Considered in itself the Attic Nights is a charming example of cognition as recreation, intellectual riffing as play.  The book’s unstructured form, its interest in oddities and details invites the reader to turn a curious imaginative gaze as the author points out the dramatic trees, pretty scenes, and unlikely hillocks of a great variety of scenes, whether encountered in lived experience or in books.  Gellius’ aesthetic intention is unmistakable.  He explicitly defines his aim as to be “entertaining,” that “recreation might be provided for my children, when they should have some respite from business affairs and could unbend and divert their minds.”  He describes his method as “haphazard,” “without order or arrangement,” “off-hand, without premeditation” (Praefatio).  Such randomness is appropriate since the free process of ratiocination and the play of imagination are the goal more than any apodictic conclusion.

     Gellius displays his rhetorical sophistication even as he disclaims it, deploying the humility topos as he claims to write “almost in rustic fashion.”  While “bearing in mind my limitations,” he says he falls as far “short of all other writers in the dignity too even of my title, as I do in care and in elegance of style.”  Yet he goes on to define an ambitious goal, promising his book might be “a kind of foretaste of the liberal arts,” offering “the germs and the quality to make men's minds grow more vigorous, their memory more trustworthy, their eloquence more effective, their diction purer, or the pleasures of their hours of leisure and recreation more refined.”  For Gellius verbal facility is a source of pleasure as well as the chief means of cultivating the mind and, most importantly, the fountainhead of all intellectual work. 

     He goes so far as to warn off potential readers who do not delight in language, those “who have never found pleasure nor busied themselves in reading, inquiring, writing and taking notes, who have never spent wakeful nights in such employments, who have never improved themselves by discussion and debate with rival followers of the same Muse.”  Such people prefer to waste their time, he suggests, “in the turmoil of business affairs.”  Without criticizing earning a living, Gellius suggests that people do not become fully human until their time is their own. 

     A passage in Attic Nights (III, 1) provides a nearly cinematic enactment of what he is talking about.

 

     When winter was already waning, we were walking with the philosopher Favorinus in the court of the Titian baths, enjoying the mild warmth of the sun; and there, as we walked, Sallust's Catiline was being read, a book which Favorinus had seen in the hands of a friend and had asked him to read.  The following passage from that book had been recited: "Avarice implies a desire for money, which no wise man covets; steeped as it were with noxious poisons, it renders the most manly body and soul effeminate; it is ever unbounded, nor can either plenty or want make it less."  Then Favorinus looked at me and said: "How does avarice make a man's body effeminate? For I seem to grasp in general the meaning of his statement that it has that effect on a manly soul, but how also it makes his body effeminate I do not yet comprehend."  "I too," said I, "have for a long time been putting myself that question, and if you had not anticipated me, I should of my own accord have asked you to answer it."

     Scarcely had I said this with some hesitation, when one of the disciples of Favorinus, who seemed to be an old hand in the study of literature, broke in: "I once heard Valerius Probus say that Sallust here used a kind of poetic circumlocution, and meaning to say that a man was corrupted by avarice, spoke of his body and soul, the two factors which indicate a man; for man is made up of body and soul."  "Never," replied Favorinus, "at least, so far as I know, was our Probus guilty of such impertinent and bold subtlety as to say that Sallust, a most skilful artist in conciseness, used poetic paraphrases."

     There was with us at the time in the same promenade a man of considerable learning.  He too, on being asked by Favorinus whether he had anything to say on the subject, answered to this effect: "We observe that almost all those whose minds are possessed and corrupted by avarice and who have devoted themselves to the acquisition of money from any and every source, so regulate their lives, that compared with money they neglect manly toil and attention to bodily exercise, as they do everything else.  For they are commonly intent upon indoor and sedentary pursuits, in which all their vigoor of mind and body is enfeebled and, as Sallust says, ‘rendered effeminate.'”

     Then Favorinus again asked to have the same words of Sallust read again, and when they had been read, he said: "How then are we to explain the fact, that it is possible to find many men who are greedy for money, but nevertheless have strong and active bodies?"  To this the man replied thus: "Your answer is certainly to the point. Whoever," said he, "is greedy for money, but nevertheless has a body that is strong and in good condition, must necessarily be possessed either by an interest in, or devotion to, other things as well, and cannot be equally niggardly in his care of himself.  For if extreme avarice, to the exclusion of everything else, lay hold upon all a man's actions and desires, and if it extend even to neglect of his body, so that because of that one passion he has regard neither for virtue nor physical strength, nor body, nor soul — then, and then only, can that vice truly be said to cause effeminacy both of body and soul, since such men care neither for themselves nor for anything else except money."  Then said Favorinus: "Either what you have said is reasonable, or Sallust, through hatred of avarice, brought against it a heavier charge than he could justify."

 

     As the anecdote opens, a group of friends appears at leisure, enjoying a stroll as the last days of winter give way to early spring “in the court of the Titian baths, enjoying the mild warmth of the sun.”  Among the party is the philosopher Favorinus, an Academic Skeptic and Gellius’ teacher.  One of the party carries a copy of Sallust's Conspiracy of Catiline and reads aloud as they walk.  The modern reader is struck by the depiction of a culture in which a promenade might be accompanied by reading aloud, and abstract questions are discussed for the sheer joy of debate more than in the interest of problem solving or academic rivalry.  Thinkers naturally lead the group, here the center is Favorinus, advocate of a strict skepticism and, incidentally, described as a born eunuch, yet celebrated for his philosophic powers.  Favorinus became sufficiently controversial not because of his ambiguous sexuality but due to Hadrian’s arbitrary disfavor that Corinth tore down the statue the city had erected in his honor, causing him to remark drily that it was a pity that had Socrates had such statue to serve as his proxy, he might have been saved from execution.

     Here, however, Favorinus is simply moderator of a discussion to which all present are welcome to contribute.  The coterie is preselected; one participant is identified as “a man of considerable learning” and another as “an old hand in the study of literature,” giving their remarks depth and weight, and instructing the less experienced by their tone and manner more than by their opinions.  A modern American reader is likely to be struck by the issue they consider: whether avarice saps one’s strength, rendering a person effeminate.  This idea recalls the preface’s contemptuous dismissal of those who devote themselves to “business affairs,” a refreshing attitude to those of us who inhabit a culture in which making money is considered the hallmark of manly vigor. 

     For this party of leisured ancient Romans, though, the question in the end is left open.  Sallust may or may not be correct or he may be correct in part; he may have expressed himself accurately or perhaps in a misleading, “over-artful” fashion.  There is no certainty, only inquiry, the Greek meaning, in fact, of the word skepticism.  These Romans revel in practicing cognition, in juggling ideas, and in the social contact with other thinking beings capable of the same amusement, Plato’s clique freed from great ideas and allowed the smallest of small talk for the simple fun of it, just passing the time on a warming afternoon.

     Though Gellius’ entries are more often presented as third-hand accounts of opinions than in dialogue dramas like this, in each the author carries on a colloquy with acquaintances, writers of the past, and inevitably with the presumed reader.  Gellius interests himself, it seems, equally in every topic.  He discusses the smallest details of language and usage or of history with the same absorbed interest that he accords major issues of epistemology.  Always animated by the spirit of disinterested inquiry, pure self-justifying research, ludic thought, the weight of each section of text is equal to any other.  A review of a few passages, chosen as randomly as my desultory reading of Attic Nights, illustrates the author’s sensibility.

          This Favorinus who asked that Sallust be read aloud was an Academic Skeptic in the tradition of Arcesilaus.  At one point in the Attic Nights Gellius defines their position.

 

Those whom we call the Pyrronian philosophers are designated by the Greek name σκεπτικοί, or "sceptics," which means about the same as "inquirers" and "investigators."  For they decide nothing and determine nothing, but are always engaged in inquiring and considering what there is in all nature concerning which it is possible to decide and determine.  And moreover they believe that they do not see or hear anything clearly, but that they undergo and experience something like seeing and hearing; but they are in doubt as of that nature and character of those very things which cause them those experiences, and they deliberate about them; and they declare that in everything assurance and absolute truth seem so beyond our grasp, owing to the mingling and confusing of the indications of truth and falsehood, that any man who is not rash and precipitate in his judgment ought to use the language which they say was used by Pyrro, the founder of that philosophy: "Does not this matter stand so, rather than so, or is it neither?" For they deny that proofs of anything and its real qualities can be known and understood, and they try in many ways to point this out and demonstrate it.   On this subject Favorinus too with great keenness and subtlety has composed ten books, which he entitled Πυρρωνεῖοι Τρόποι, or The Pyrronian Principles.                                  (XI, 5)

 

     The following section of this entry goes on to emphasize the absolute skepticism of the Pyrrhonians who in contrast to the Academic Skeptics question even the certainty of uncertainty.  The schools are so similar that he says they are often confused.  Both base their inquiries into the meaning of appearances (φαντασίαι) which both Pyrrhonians and Academics regard as reflecting not “the nature of the objects themselves,” but rather “the condition of mind or body of those to whom these appearances come.”  These data are unreliable since they consider “all things that affect men's sense” to be “τὰ πρός τι,” that is, "things relative to something else," a notion resembling the Buddhist “pratītyasamutpāda,” or dependent origination.  For this reason everything possesses only a qualified and ambiguous reality.

     Accepting that nothing can be finally verified might seem to disable research before it begins, but the skeptic is an inquirer.  The denial of a dogmatic conclusion need not halt the process of seeking truth.  The assumption of the tight web of causality apparently linking every element in what seems the phenomenal world endows every bit of information with a gleam as numinous as the next bit.  A sensibility like that reflected in this book will look with interest on any information at all, but, as a homo sapiens, with a particular fancy for the play of signification in language.  The meaning may hold secondary importance of none at all.  Gellius can manipulate abstractions based on observation like a painter imagining the design of a picture while observing decorative fountains.  He elevates what might be an idle fondness for trivia into a philosophic enterprise by celebrating the pure play of thought.  Though Gellius exhibits no piety as such, his relish for every detail illuminates his inquiry like an interior lit by stained glass windows; his book is a lengthy series of tiny side chapels in the cranium.

     Modern readers who are not specialists in historical philology may have little sympathy for the appeal of a topic like the question of “Whether affatim, like admodum, should be pronounced with an acute accent on the first syllable; with some painstaking observations on the accents of other words.” (VI, 7)  In Gellius’ circles, however, such minutiae engaged many.  He records, for instance, that when he wrote a friend, noting that he had written twice before, making this the third time (tertium), his correspondent raises an issue of usage, asking why he had written tertium and not tertio and going on to inquire whether “one should say tertium consul, meaning "consul for the third time," and quartum, or tertio and quarto.” (X, 1)  Is the author a tiresome pedant or a crusader for precise language?  I suggest he is neither as much as he is simply a denizen of a semiotic realm, enjoying his environment, swimming in an ocean of words as the shark glides through the sea, in his case by making conversation with a friend.  The topic of their talk is of little moment.

     Even the most sympathetic reader would concede that a good deal of Gellius’ book consists of matter that looks rather like abstruse nit-picking.  At times the Attic Nights seems a monument of pedantic minutiae like those grand tomes of Chandler on accents or Denniston on Greek particles with the difference that Gellius’ work has less practical use.  While those works were composed to aid the reader of Classical texts, only by unlikely coincidence might a topic Gellius addresses be useful in reading a text or solving a problem.  The only excuse for reading Gellius is to pass the time pleasantly, but any human end higher than this must rest on shaky ground. 

     Gellius’ imagination possesses not only a microscope to examine with detail and precision the niceties of language; he had as well a telescope capable of a focus far beyond the horizon.  His grand topics enter through the same intimate social context he uses for what seem more trivial issues.  His approach to basic issues of semiotics and epistemology goes far to account for his sensibility and the character of the book that preserves, as though in amber, indications of his consciousness.

 

     Chrysippus asserts that every word is by nature ambiguous, since two or more things may be understood from the same word. But Diodorus, surnamed Cronus, says: "No word is ambiguous, and no one speaks or receives a word in two senses; and it ought not to seem to be said in any other sense than that which the speaker feels that he is giving it. But when I," said he, "meant one thing and you have understood another, it may seem that I have spoken obscurely rather than ambiguously; for the nature of an ambiguous word should be such that he who speaks it expresses two or more meanings. But no man expresses two meanings who has felt that he is expressing but one."                            (XI, 12)

 

     The Stoic Chrysippus, (who may have been acting the provocateur) argues that all utterance is ambiguous and indeterminate in meaning.  He here approaches the position of Gorgias and, a few generations later, Pyrrho that communication is impossible.   His interlocutor objects that every speaker has a meaning in mind which must then be considered the single correct meaning.  Such meaning is unchanged even if one’s audience misunderstands.  As always, Gellius simply presents both sides of a question (just as Diogenes Laertius [VII, 7, 183] says that Chrysippus would do), and Diodorus’ confidence is unpersuasive since intentions may be far from clear even to the individual, and language that may sometimes convey signification accurately is little better than language that always fails.  For Gellius there is always more to talk about tomorrow.  

     His anecdote of the Greek Cynic Peregrinus Proteus introduces a character more intriguing perhaps than his teaching. 

 

     When I was at Athens, I met a philosopher named Peregrinus, who was later surnamed Proteus, a man of dignity and fortitude, living in a hut outside the city. And visiting him frequently, I heard him say many things that were in truth helpful and noble. Among these I particularly recall the following:

     He used to say that a wise man would not commit a sin, even if he knew that neither gods nor men would know it; for he thought that one ought to refrain from sin, not through fear of punishment or disgrace, but from love of justice and honesty and from a sense of duty.  If, however, there were any who were neither so endowed by nature nor so well disciplined that they could easily keep themselves from sinning by their own will power, he thought that such men would all be more inclined to sin whenever they thought that their guilt could be concealed and when they had hope of impunity because of such concealment.  "But," said he, "if men know that nothing at all can be hidden for very long, they will sin more reluctantly and more secretly."  Therefore he said that one should have on his lips these verses of Sophocles, the wisest of poets:

See to it lest you try aught to conceal;

Time sees and hears all, and will all reveal.

     Another one of the old poets, whose name has escaped my memory at present, called Truth the daughter of Time.

 

    In the opening of the story, the reader glimpses once more the social context for Gellius’ sensibility.  He and others knew Peregrinus personally, a man not only with opinions, but with a distinct lifestyle as well, living in a “hut” outside of town in imitation of Diogenes to indicate his contempt for worldly values.  Peregrinus had, like Augustine, passed through phases in his spirituality, having for some years practiced Christianity in Palestine.  In the end he announced his intention to commit suicide go demonstrate his indifference to death and carried out this intention during the Olympics when crowds might appreciate his gesture.  Lucian who witnessed the event described his motive.

 

He said that he wanted to put a tip of gold on a golden life; for one who had lived as Heracles should die like Heracles and be commingled with the aether. And I wish, said he, to benefit mankind by showing them the way in which one should disregard death.                                                             (De Morte Peregrini, 33)

 

In Gellius’ story, the philosopher himself cites a line from a tragedian as support for his ideas and this line reminds Gellius of another passage which he cites, though unsure of its author.  The fact that the source of his phrase has slipped his mind only emphasizes the casual quotidian character of his inquiries.  They are like his breathing a matter of daily experience. 

     Many of Gellius’ anecdotes reflect the social world of his day, in which it seems everyone (among the elite) was a verbal artist and everyone a philosopher.  One story relates how a student risked death in order to hear Socrates speak, in contrast to the dissipated youth of the present generation.

 

The philosopher Taurus, a celebrated Platonist of my time, used to urge the study of philosophy by many other good and wholesome examples and in particular stimulated the minds of the young by what he said that Euclides the Socratic used to do.  "The Athenians," said he, "had provided in one of their decrees that any citizen of Megara who should be found to have set foot in Athens should for that suffer death; so great," says he, "was the hatred of the neighbouring men of Megara with which the Athenians were inflamed.  Then Euclides, who was from that very town of Megara and before the passage of that decree had been accustomed to come to Athens and to listen to Socrates, after the enactment of that measure, at nightfall, as darkness was coming on, clad in a woman's long tunic, wrapped in a parti-coloured mantle, and with veiled head, used to walk from his home in Megara to Athens, to visit Socrates, in order that he might at least for some part of the night share in the master's teaching and discourse. And just before dawn he went back again, a distance of somewhat over twenty miles, disguised in that same garb.  But nowadays," said Taurus, "we may see the philosophers themselves running to the doors of rich young men, to give them instruction, and there they sit and wait until nearly noonday, for their pupils to sleep off all last night's wine."                          (VII 10)

 

Taurus had been, in fact, Gellius’ own teacher, so this note likely records an actual lecture.  Euclides of Megara went on to write dialogues and commentaries himself (though very little remains) maintaining a monistic view still based on his master’s teachings, a kind of revival of Parmenides’ non-dualistic thought.  According to Diogenes Laertius (II, 6, 106) “he held the supreme good to be really one, though called by many names, sometimes wisdom, sometimes God, and again Mind, and so forth. But all that is contradictory of the good he used to reject, declaring that it had no existence.”  Apart from this simple yet radical view Euclides was receptive to rhetoric and eristics, attracting criticism from Socrates himself who preferred the pose of a disinterested pursuit of truth.

     Gellius would have stood with Euclides in his extravagant use of regardless of truth-claims.  Specific teachings are hardly an issue in Attic Nights.  Whatever the theme or the conclusion, what is important here is the process, the social dialectics, people tossing ideas about in public and at dinner parties, recreational discussion, playful inquiry, and artful use of words, people acting people-like.   

     The taste for linguistic discernment and verbal play evident in Gellius animates as well the world of Petronius’ Satyricon, for instance, which antedated Attic Nights by about a hundred years.  The characters depicted by the arbiter elegantiae play with words as often as they play with each other’s bodies.  They debate the merits of teachers of rhetoric, spout poetry to make a point, play word games, refer to Homer, and discuss issues of no immediate relevance.  Today, a not dissimilar taste is evident in contemporary bumper stickers, graffiti, advertising slogans, and internet memes as well as in popular music and drama.  The character of some of the earliest human burials indicates that this taste for the symbolic has existed since prehistoric times.

     Wherever the reader opens the Attic Nights, there is Gellius exercising his gratuitous ingenuity, a kind of joyously superfluous symbolic manipulation, semiotic fooling for its own sake, toward no end whatever but the celebration of our oh-so-human minds.  And the reader may perform the part of silent dance partner, relishing the grace notes, the subtleties, the fine texture of another’s consciousness as though it were an abstract pattern.  Here is the very fountainhead of art, science, and philosophy.  Arguments about the origin of language may be always unresolved, but perhaps our species began communicating simply because it was so much fun.  If the hunters bagged more game that way, they also afforded themselves greater leisure to talk away the long evenings of their days.  And Gellius was doing much the same in antiquity as I do now, reading Gellius on my computer screen as he read from  manuscripts, and you the reader have joined as well, an equal partner in the endless conversation.