The Appeal of Stevenson’s Master of Ballantrae

 

     I had just come to the end of reading two rather long and complex books simultaneously.  One was Melville’s The Confidence Man, with its shape-shifting hero and its dense and ceaseless verbal play.  I had H. Bruce Franklin’s Library of Literature (Bobbs-Merrill) paperback edition which goes far to explicate the book’s allusions, particularly to current events and popular culture.  Melville is a lover pf polysemy and his ironies are multi-layered and glorious, but this reader, at least, sometimes felt fatigued in following his labyrinthine moves.  At the same time I was reading Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed in Constance Garnett’s old Modern Library translation (called in other English versions The Devils or Demons), that immense satire on provincial benightedness.  With this worthy volume, too, I felt on occasion saturated with the author’s lugubrious philosophy, his weakness for a mystified Russian history and religion (as charged today as ever), and his merciless compounding of detail.

     I sought then a lighter, more refreshing, breezy narrative, something to clear the mental palate, the sort of relief dependably available in Sir Walter Scott, Trollope, or Chester Himes, and I picked up my 1902 A. L. Burt edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae [1].  I was not disappointed.  Stevenson, who had a considerable name in his own day, has come to be considered a writer for children, what with Kidnapped, and Treasure Island, and Dr. Jekyll, not to mention the really charming Child’s Garden of Verses; his appeal to an adult literary audience might seem to some less than obvious. 

     In fact, though, the question of taste might well be reversed.  The most appreciated works have never had much in common with novels celebrated by the literati such as Joyce’s Ulysses.  Folk stories and songs, bestsellers, and art for the masses such as television shows have always maintained different standards from those of courtly or academic poetry and, in modern times, “high art” in general.  Though many such works are not tended and transmitted as a cultural patrimony and most may be soon forgotten, popular art may be every bit as beautiful and moving as the “high art” most often praised by elites. [2]

     All art is dialectical: in varying degrees, every work will confirm some of the consumer’s preconceptions.  (Were this not so, the work would be incomprehensible.)  Yet, just as everyone’s physical vision is largely shared, but never identical, so each view of the world must differ.  Art serves the double-edged purpose of, on the one hand, preserving and transmitting ideology through generations and, on the other, opening new possibilities for a critical view of one’s own ideas.  While oral and popular stories tend to systematically inculcate the values of the group, elite art is more likely to point toward contradictions, problems, complexities, and alternatives.  This is true to some extent of work created in a courtly setting, but much more characteristic of more recent consciously “high art,” which may even spurn a mass audience.  Popular art in general satisfies expectations; elite art twists, or surprises, or plays with them.

     No work can be wholly on one side of the spectrum.  Indeed, it is only in their tension that meaning arises.  One is the more reassured of a comforting truth if one is aware that deniers exist.  And the most strident experimentalist must depend on conventions or no one would know they are being violated.  To determine where a given work of fiction falls between these extremes is not only sociologically useful in explaining the writer’s audience, but also intellectually significant for understanding thematic concerns, and aesthetically central for determining the structural patterns experienced as beauty.

     The same tension is enacted in every aspect of a novel.  A plot may be highly conventional with a hero of unalloyed heroism and a leading lady who is always charming.  It may follow a design of retributive justice so the reader may conclude the book with the reassurance that all is right with the world, that everything gets sorted out in the end.  Individual lines and incidents may become so hackneyed as to attract both criticism from those who wish for something new and appreciation from those comforted by the familiar. 

     Narratives may also convey meaning through twisting expectation.  The recurrences in myth and folktales are so regular that they have been systematized by scholars like Stith Thompson, Vladimir Propp, and Joseph Campbell, but reliance on convention of all sorts is a matter of degree.   The white hat/ black hat cowboy movies of early days did not vanish, but they were joined in the 1950s by more ambiguous “psychological” Westerns and then by outlaw protagonists.  In Don Quixote and, centuries later in Madame Bovary Romanticism is ironized.

     In The Master of Ballantrae Stevenson's adherence to the conventions of popular literature is less rigid than in Treasure Island, The Black Arrow, or Kidnapped.  While the two brothers are clearly established as a reliably moral wronged hero and an immoral scoundrel, their roles are not entirely stable.  Toward the end of the novel, for instance, while traveling with Mr. Mackellar, James betrays some pleasanter behavior, while Henry, in the latter episodes, is clearly gripped by obsession and arrogance, necessitating his death not long after his brother’s.  He has indeed been driven to this state of mind, but he is thoughtless and self-absorbed. 

    Some have found the book’s use of supposed documents to be in a way “post-modern” and “de-centering.” [3]  The reader is in fact separated from the events by their retelling by the old retainer and further uncertainty arises since some stretches are told by the presumably less honest Chevalier de Burke or by the Master himself or by Mackellar’s darker counterpart Secundra Dass.  The fact is, of course, that early novels regularly relied on putatively documentary evidence to create the illusion of their “truth;” indeed, before the nineteenth century a great many works of fiction strive to appear to be records of lived experience.  Examples include the common omission of dates and personal names as though to protect living reputations, Robinson Crusoe’s journal, and the consistent stream of epistolary works of fiction beginning with Diego de San Pedro’s Carvel de Amor and continuing to Samuel Richardson’s popular and influential stories of hard-pressed maidens.

     Stevenson’s language is slightly elevated, but not distantly above the speech of educated, enough to convey gravitas and authority, but never reaching into the realm of extravagant rhetorical display.  the degree if his flourishes is evident in  Mr. Mackellar’s description of his trek through the wild American forest with the Master. 

The labors of Hercules, so finely described by Homer were a trifle to what we now underwent.   Sime parts of the forest were perfectly dense down to the ground, so that we must cut our way like mites in a cheese.

 The learned classical reference seems a bit off the mark when the reader reflects that the Iliad and Odyssey, though they contain scattered references to Herakles, do not, in  fact, describe the twelve labors. [4]  Thus the mention of Homer is merely decorative, suggesting that Mr. Mackellar, and perhaps the reader as well, has a unsure grasp of Greek literature.  Similarly, when a simile emerges in the next sentence, it is a rather homespun figure of speech, relating to the ordinary lived experience of all.  Likewise the diction and syntax are lifted slightly above everyday conversation, but they never slow the reader’s rapid pace through the story. 

     The thematics provide yet another example of largely conventional patterns.  The story is normative in spite of Stevenson’s own transgressive bohemianism and rejection of Christianity.  The faithful servant Mackellar, who might seem just a bit of a prig, is the index to morality within the narrative, while James is quite monstrously evil and Henry is, for a long time, better than most of us.  Honor and gentlemanliness, the most commonplace of Victorian idées reçues, govern the reader’s view of both brothers.  In a popular work the author’s assumptions typically vary little from the reader’s.  Henry’s descent into neurosis is presented as the result of intolerable pressure from his brother.  Since the primary focus is the drama (or melodrama), enacted against a background of common opinion.  Stevenson’s acceptance of social norms in this fiction is the more significant, since he was in fact irreligious, signing a letter to his friend Charles Baxter “Ever your affectionate and horrible Atheist, R. L. Stevenson, C. I. [Careless Infidel], H. A. [Horrible Atheist], S. B. [Son of Belial], etc.” [5]  He wore velveteen jackets like Oscar Wilde, grew his hair, and frequented low dives, but his fiction betrayed little of his deviations from accepted bourgeois taste. 

     Stevenson’s plot is, for the most part, plausible, though it is tinged with the fabulous and the contrived.  For him “lively literature” is not born of the accumulation of realistic detail alone, but requires artifice as well. “All representative art,” he says, “is both realistic and ideal.” [6]  The proportions are carefully managed in Ballantrae.  Henry, for instance, is at first an utterly innocent victim, a wronged hero whose virtue seems extraordinary, but he becomes something rather less as his arrogance increases with his accession to money and title and the growth of his obsession about his brother.  For his part, the scoundrel James, whose wickedness had seemed almost unlimited, is humanized as he travels with Mackellar. 

     The very conventional conflicts around inheritance and sibling rivalry are not only heightened to an extreme; they are also colored with the supernatural, as James seems to reappear almost like a spirit, most dramatically in his apparent reanimation in the novel’s climax.

     To Stevenson the turns of a well-constructed plot provide the principal pleasure of fiction.  Describing how an experience of reading might be “absorbing and voluptuous,” he says that style, psychology, and theme are all subordinate to the reader’s digging “for a certain sort of incident, like a pig for truffles.”  To him “drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance.”  He criticizes social or thematic preoccupations, what he calls “the clink of teaspoons and the accents of the curate.”   His model is Sir Walter Scott, “king of the romantics,” though he recognizes Scott’s unevenness, attributing it to the fact that “as his books are play to the reader, so were they play to him.”  Of course, incident is the chief element in myth and in folk stories, as it is in such popular novelists as Scott, and the incidents are never merely “realistic.”  According to Stevenson, when a story “pleases [the reader] with every turn, when he loves to recall it and dwells upon its recollection with entire delight, fiction is called romance.” [7]

     He describes the advent of realism as “the great change of the past century.”  To him Zola with his “extreme of detail,” builds only feux-de-joie of literary tricking.”  He realizes, furthermore, that verisimilitude is a literary rhetorical effect just as fancy is, and that “realism” has not to do with “fundamental truth” but is itself “a technical method.”  He insists in the end that the reader should “begin no work that is not philosophical, passionate, dignified, happily mirthful, or, at the last and least, romantic in design.”  This catalogue of qualities seems carelessly tossed together, really suggesting little more than a good story, a page-turner with the qualities that have always characterized popular fiction. [8]

     Stevenson’s taste is clear, though many readers may dissent, preferring novels in which style or realistic detail or theme are foregrounded.  Yet his standards are those that have underlay the most popular of works from oral fireside folktales to today’s bestsellers.  Stevenson need not be relegated to the juvenile shelves of the library.  Literature equally confirms readers’ expectations and questions them.  Neither is the more beautiful or true; they are complementary.  Yet it is always true that the radical, the innovative, the work that challenges, will require more work to consume and is unlikely to find as large an audience as fiction that, for the most part, observes convention, using variations as a seasoning rather than a program.  Many readers are likely to share my own inclination for a varied textual diet, mixing the popular now and then with the elite “high art” that prejudice would assign a more prestigious place in literature.  In fact both the high and the low have their excellences, their masterpieces, and their failures.  Each may have as well a place in the individual’s appreciation, just as most people would not wish to be confined to only sweets or only savory foods, or to vacation only in sites of natural beauty or only in densely occupied cities.  Ovid was quite right to note "there is no single sort of [hair]style alone;" one chooses what one wishes and that choice may vary from day to day. [9]  Absolute value judgements are as elusive in fiction as in clothing or coiffure.  

 

1.  The book appeared in 2002 on a shelf at the Salvation Army.  The A. L. Burt company began reprinting reference works, moving then to popular literature such as Zane Gray and Horatio Alger.  They came to specialize in juvenile series such as the twenty-four volumes in The Boy Allies adventures during WWI.  They did publish some classics as well, including the Burt’s Home Library,” which touted itself as “popular literature for the masses . . . the treasures of the world’s knowledge.” 

2.  This has altered in recent years due to the salutary appreciation of the beauty of many forms of popular and mass culture as well as the less wholesome but newly fashionable attitude that artistic value judgements are meaningless, that study of any committee-written situation comedy is precisely as rewarding as devotion to Dante. 

3.  Two critics taking this approach, one more popular and one more scholarly will serve as examples.  In his article “Meet the Master of Ballantrae” in the August 10, 2009 issue of The Guardian, calls The Master of Ballantrae, “a postmodernist pastiche of his [Stevenson’s earlier] novels and notes in  prase that “in its discontinuous structure it looks forward to the contemporary novel.“  Nels C. Pearson, in “The Moment of Modernism: Schopenhauer’s ‘Unstable Phantom’ in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae (in Studies in Scottish Literature, vol. 31, no. 1 [1999]) waxes more florid, claiming that the novel “demonstrates the deconstructive relationship between an arbitrary essence and a narrative that desperately tries to unveil it.” 

4.  Several early epics on Herakles by Creophylus, Peisander and Panyassis of Halicarnassus are known, though only by reputation or a few fragments.  The Argonautica contains some brief references to the labors, and a listing occurs in Euripedes’ The Madness of Heracles, but a full account is set down only by Diodorus Siculus and later by the Pseudo-Apollodorus. 

5.  Letter of February 2, 1873. 

6.  The line occurs in his essay “A Note on Realism.”

7.  The quotations in this paragraph are from Stevenson’s essay “A Gossip on Romance.”

8.  The quotations in this paragraph are from Stevenson’s essay “A Note on Realism.”

9.  “Nec genus ornatus unun est,” Art of Love III, 135.

“Preachin’ the Blues” (Son House)

I discuss here House’s 1930 recording, the text of which is appended. I have added also for comparison his 1965 version.


     Literature, indeed, art in general, is particularly effective in dealing with thematic material which is conflicted, ambivalent, paradoxical, and mysterious. This characteristic of poetic truth arises not from a valuation of obscurity for its own sake, but rather from the complexity of people’s own attitudes, particularly toward the subjects that matter most: love, death, and the divine. Self-contradictory codes flourish in poetry because binary oppositions are often reductive or false. An accurate answer is often "neither and both."
     Son House exemplifies in his life as well as his work the tension between the sacred and the secular in early Delta blues singers and in African-American culture more generally. Though in his youth he was a regular church-goer and generally an enthusiastic Christian, his ambivalence toward religion and its associated codes of morality emerged in periodic heavy drinking which resulted in his leaving the church for a time, though he later returned to become a deacon and then a preacher for several years. At the age of twenty-five, he was captivated upon hearing a friend play slide guitar, and, in what has been called a reverse conversion, he returned to the blues. [1] The lifestyle that resulted from his commitment to secular music led to his involvement in periodic fights and twice to his arrest for murder. [2]
     One of his most well-known tunes, “Preachin’ the Blues,” recorded for Paramount in two parts in 1930, expresses the bipolar opposition of sacred and secular in its paradoxical title as well as in House’s intense, strained vocal quality and the driving, if simple, accompaniment. The pressured vocalizations of the performance push against the limits of the artist’s virtuosity, piercing the border of intelligibility to heighten the tone and leaping thereby into the sublime beginning with the very first syllable, an extended “ohhh” that seems to rise from the depths.
     The pattern of these apparently “spontaneous overflows of powerful emotion” is highly symmetrical. The afflatus above the register of words is maintained through the second verse’s “mmm” sound, the heart-felt “yeah” of verses six and seven which links the last verse on side one and the first of side two, the first of which is supported by an “oh” and the second by a “whoa.” The final verse brings a unifying return to the “oh” from the abyss which opened the song.
     Similarly, House’s exclamations, replicating those that would arise from a Pentecostal congregation, “Lord God almighty” and “praise God almighty,” indicate a level of emotional excitement, though their piety is radically ambivalent, caught on the ridgepole of doubt that supports the entire song.
     The song opens with what might sound like a declaration of faith in church, the commitment of a sinner coming forward to be saved: “Oh, I'm gon' get me religion I'm gon' join the baptist church.” Yet ambiguity emerges immediately as the rhyme line turns to satire emphasized by the vocal waver about the word “have to” in the line “so I won’t have to work.” House thus ridicules the most respected member of the community at the same time as he implicitly rejects the work ethic embraced by “respectable” blacks. His listeners were familiar with jokes and stories based on men of the cloth whose minds were less on things of the spirit than on chicken dinners from the parishioners, if not the church ladies’ beds. [3]
     He then tightly conflates the sacred and the secular by announcing “Oh, I’m gonna preach these blues now“ and asking “I want everybody to shout,” as though they were in a church rather than a juke joint, the likely venue for the song’s performance. Just after saying he would accept religion, he begins to preach, but not from a gospel perspective, rather “I'm gonna preach these blues now,” suggesting the music might prove for him a sort of religion. He continues “I want everybody to shout” as though leading a fundamentalist worship service where the congregation is anything but passive.
     While this may seem to continue the mocking of men of the cloth by conducting a sort of black Protestant equivalent of a Black Mass, celebrating the opposite of Christian values, the last line of the second verse disappoints that expectation with an apparently sincere search for spiritual release, just as the rhyme-line of the first stanza upset the rhetoric of the very first verse. The poignant longing of the line is unmistakable, “I'm gonna do like a prisoner, I'm gon' roll my time on out.”
     The word prisoner here is profoundly ambiguous. On the one hand, an irreligious person might regard the rules of the church as a “prison.” For the observant when House compares himself to a prisoner, the term may recall St. Paul’s references to himself as “a prisoner of Jesus Christ.” [4] Paul was speaking of his being made a literal prisoner because of his righteousness alone, but also of his submissive commitment to Christian morality and values. Finally, behind these associations is the old sense of the body itself as a prison and life as a long incarceration. [5]
     “I'm gon' roll my time on out” surely means that the speaker will live his life, with all its restrictions and suffering, in such a way as to make it as easy as possible, while maintaining a neutrality about Christianity or loose living will be the greater aid toward that end.
     In the third verse the ambiguities continue as the singer, having resolved to “do his time” on earth as easily as possible, commences to seek the consolation of religion in an altogether conventional way. “In my room I bowed down to pray,” but his intentions are short-lived since “the blues come along and they blowed my spirit away.” The speaker is apparently passive, he is trying to do right, but the blues rear up, actively curtailing his devotions. The personification anticipates the phrase that occurs later: “the blues came walking like a man.” [6] What could he do with his spirit involuntarily dissipated and his soul in the grip of the blues?
     Simply to reinforce his case, the speaker goes on to insist “I'd'a had religion, Lord, this very day/ But the womens and the whiskey, well, they would not let me pray.” Again he blames an outside agency for overwhelming his good faith attempts to lead a Christian life. He proceeds to yearn for heaven and, for good measure, praises “God almighty,” but then reveals that his own paradise would be “a long, long happy home” populated by “all my women,” implying that eternal love-making rather than choral song would occupy his black angels. [7] He is holding tightly to both sides of the bipolar opposition, seeking salvation (which one might also call liberation or enlightenment) while at the same time affirming his incorrigible pursuit of pleasure.
     The singer readily confesses the egocentric basis of his earthly love, noting in the sixth verse, after a passionate “yeah,” an enthusiastic affirmation: “I love my baby just like I love myself.” Christ after all, asked neither more nor less. [8] House, however, is swift to add the aggressively possessive and quite unchristian sentiment: “if she don't have me she won't have nobody else.”
     On the second side of the record, “Preachin’ the Blues, Part 2” House elaborates the synthesis of the sacred and the secular, implying a new sort of blues which provides a vision entire and specific of blues as an experience potentially as profound and soul-satisfying as the church. As before, he begins by sounding as though he is conventionally pious: “I'm gon' fold my arms , I'm gonna kneel down in prayer.” The rhyme-line, though recoils on this meaning: “when I get up I'm gonna leave my preachin blues laying there.” Though the precise implication of this statement is mysterious, House again beings into creation through naming that odd hybrid, the preaching blues.
     A sort of theophany follows with the devotee’s communion with the supernatural. “I met the blues this morning, walking just like a man,” human because, of course, only sentient beings can get the blues. Rather than fleeing, the persona reaches out in fellowship to embrace his own suffering, saying “give me you right hand.”
     The knotty problem that motivates both the devout and those dedicated to the blues, the dilemma of suffering, is then resolved. The singer confidently states “there aint nothing now baby, Lord that's gon' worry my mind,” placing his lover and his god paratactically next to each other, as though he is addressing both at the same time. In a new state of blessedness, he says all is well, “I'm satisfied I got the longest line.”
     The last two stanzas, punctuated by the call to “praise God,” are filled with the resolution to continue in his practice of refusing to select either the sacred or the secular, but rather combining them into a synthesis better suited to his sensibility. Vowing “to stay on the job” and “preach these gospel blues,” he can not only lift up his own soul but can inspire a similar excited joy in his listeners.


Whoa, I'm gonna preach these blues now and choose my seat and sit down
When the spirit comes, I want you to jump straight up and down


     A primary weakness of the church is its hypocrisy. Believers and men of the cloth alike are expected to deny their own essential nature in order to be holy. The singer seeks to integrate spiritual growth with a more realistic assessment of what it is to be human in which both religion and sensuality have a part. Son House in this song testifies to the spiritual power of the blues, a power felt by many practitioners and listeners through the life of the genre. [9] The gravitas and passion he brings to the song lifts it far above satire of the failings of the church and its adherents into a search after a new synthesis of the sacred and the secular which might provide the individual with purpose and peace of mind more attuned to human nature than fundamentalist Christianity. If the tension is never resolved between sacred and secular that, too, reflects the singer’s (and perhaps the listener’s) lived experience.



1. Further biographical details may be found in Daniel Beaumont’s Preachin' the Blues; The Life and Times of Son House (Oxford, Oxford University Press: 2011).

2. He served several years at Parchman Farm the first time, but the second time, twenty-five years later, the charges were dropped.

3. In The ground-breaking Deep Down in the Jungle (p. 199) Roger D. Abrahams notes a precedent in Boccaccio when introducing jokes, which he describes as “legion,” on “the sexual promiscuity of the clergy”.

4. See Philemon I,9, Ephesians 4:1, etc. See also “slaves of God” (Romans 6:22). In the Eastern Orthodox Church, this term is used to refer to any Eastern Orthodox Christian. The Arabic name Abdullah (from عبد الله, ʿAbd Allāh) means "slave of God," as do the Hebrew name Obadiah (עובדיה), the German name Gottschalk, and the Sanskrit name Devadasa.

5. The trope appears around the world. See, for instance, Plato, Cratylus, 400c, Phaedo, 61e-62c, Gorgias, 493a, Phaedrus 250c, and Republic IX 586a. Leo III’s De Miseria Condicionis Humane (XIX) says straightforwardly “the body is the prison of the soul.”

6. These same words also appear in Robert Johnson’s song titled “Preachin’ Blues.”

7. Cf. Robert Nighthawk’s “Sweet Black Angel.” Or Lucille Bogan’s version “Black Angel Blues” Louis Lasky (“Teasin’ Brown Blues”), Charlie McCoy (“Last Time Blues”), and Blind Willie McTell (“Talking to Myself” and “Ticket Agent Blues”) are among those whose songs ask God to “send me an angel down.”

8. See Matthew 22:39, Mark 12:31, and Luke 12:27.

9. There are at least two albums titled Blues are my Religion (by Eric Culberson and Sonny Rhodes). For a scholarly iteration, see Jon Michael Spencer’s Blues and Evil. Cf. Ted Joans’ poem “Jazz is my Religion.”


This site includes a good many other essays treating blues songs as poetry. To see the others open the Index under the current month in the archive and consult section 5D “songs.”


Preachin’ the Blues
part 1 1930 version

Oh, I'm gon' get me religion I'm gon' join the baptist church
Oh, I'm gon' get me religion I'm gon' join the baptist church
I'm gon' be a baptist preacher and I sure won't have to work

Oh, I'm gonna preach these blues now, and I want everybody to shout
Mmm-mmm, I want everybody to shout
I'm gonna do like a prisoner, I'm gon' roll my time on out

Oh, in my room I bowed down to pray
Oh, up in my room I bowed down to pray
Then the blues come along and they blowed my spirit away

Oh, I'd'a had religion, Lord, this very day
Oh, I'd'a had religion, Lord, this very day
But the womens and whiskey, well, they would not let me pray

Oh, I wish I had me a heaven of my own,
(praise God almighty)
Yeah, heaven of my own,
Then I'd give all my women a long, long happy home

Yeah, I love my baby just like I love myself
Oh, just like I love myself
But if she don't have me she won't have nobody else.


part 2

Yeah, I'm gon' fold my arms , I'm gonna kneel down in prayer
Whoa, I fold my arms, gonna kneel down in prayer
When I get up I'm gonna leave my preachin blues laying there

Now I met the blues this morning, walking just like a man
Oh, walking just like a man
I said good morning blues, now give me you right hand

Now there aint nothing now baby, Lord that's gon' worry my mind
Oh, Lord that's gon' worry my mind
I'm satisfied I got the longest line

I got to stay on the job,I aint got no time to lose
Yeah, I aint got no time to lose
I swear to God, I got to preach these gospel blues

(Praise God almighty)

Oh, I'm gonna preach these blues and choose my seat and sit down
Whoa, I'm gonna preach these blues now and choose my seat and sit down
When the spirit comes, I want you to jump straight up and down



Preachin’ Blues (1965)

Yes, I'm gonna get me religion, I'm gonna join the Baptist Church.
Yes, I'm gonna get me religion, I'm gonna join the Baptist Church.
You know I wanna be a Baptist preacher, just so I won't have to work.

One deacon jumped up, and he began to grin.
One deacon jumped up, and he began to grin.
You know he said, "One thing, elder. I believe I'll go back to barrelhousin again."

One sister jumped up, and she began to shout.
One sister jumped up, and she began to shout.
"You know I'm glad this corn liquor's goin out."

Another deacon jumped up and said, "Why don't ya hush?"
Another deacon jumped up and said, "Why don't ya hush?"
"You know you drink corn liquor and your lie's a horrible stink."

One sister jumped up and she began to shout.
One sister jumped up and she began to shout.
"I believe I can tell ya'll what it's all about."

Another sister jumped up, she said, "Why don't ya hush?"
Another sister jumped up, she said, "Why don't ya hush?"
"You know he's abandoned, and you outta hush your fuss."

I was in the pulpit, I's jumpin up and down.
I was in the pulpit, I's jumpin up and down.
My sisters in the corner, they're hollerin Alabama bound.

Grabbed up my suitcase and I took off down the road.
Grabbed up my suitcase and I took off down the road.
I said, "Farewell church, may the good Lord bless your soul."
You know I wish I had a heaven of my own.
You know I wish I had a heaven of my own.
I'd give all my women a good ole happy home.

I'm gonna preach these blues and I'm gonna choose my seat and sit down.
I'm gonna preach these blues and I'm gonna choose my seat and sit down.
But, when the Spirit comes, I want you to

Poetry on the Loose

This is my first gesture toward setting down an account of Poetry on the Loose which has presented hundreds of programs since its first show in 1993. Those who recall other information that ought to be included are welcome to contact me.


     A week after I moved from Brooklyn to Orange County, New York, in December of 1991, I was pleased to see a notice for a reading featuring Mikhail Horowitz and Edward Sanders at the local community college. The English Department there was also at the time advertising for an English professor. Temporarily convinced of the wisdom of residing in the exurbs, I later found that poetry events were few and far between (and I didn’t get the job). Having spent my life in big cities and university towns, I missed the density of cultural life that is sustainable in America only in those environments.
     Patricia was working in a psychiatric inpatient unit and came home one day with a leaflet for a new gallery a psychotic artist had given her. Before the universality of personal computers, this document was typed and pasted up and looked tossed together, full of messiness, misspellings, and extravagant artistic claims. The place seemed, in short, ideal for a poetry series. I contacted the gallery operator, Steve Clair, to propose doing poetry and found him receptive. Clair was an active, imaginative fellow with energetic eyes who worked in some dismal factory during the day and devoted himself to art the rest of the time.
     During this era, Middletown, New York had been convinced that they could rejuvenate the city by attracting artists. The city offered to subsidize the rental of the many abandoned factories in town for tenants who wanted to establish studios or galleries, even advertising in The Village Voice. Clair had secured a huge old furniture factory for a few hundred dollars a month and named it Zukabee. The place was vast, a grand wandering brick Leviathan where hall led on to hall with surprising bits of debris around every corner and great quantities of unused furniture – more upholstered chairs and sofas than we could use. A magnificent spot, it had a clandestine ambiance and the industrial chic was undeniably authentic.
     I posted notices of the first show which featured me (in fact, the only talent of which I was then aware) in December of 1993 on telephone poles and trees. Fifty-four people attended, virtually none of whom I had known before. I booked the next three or four shows that evening. Poetry on the Loose was under way.
     Though oddly magnificent, one drawback of the space was its lack of a working heating system. I believe some sort of furnace existed somewhere on the premises, but it functioned only marginally. When there was no heat at all, the tenants were obliged to do without water as well to avoid freezing the pipes. As it happened, Clair had rented some of his space – he had plenty – to an acquaintance of irregular habits. I believe his tenant had turned on the water with the modest hope of flushing a toilet, but then had never turned it off, and the pipes, never slow in administering retributive justice, burst. There was now no running water at all.
     Those who attended the poetry were discomfited, perhaps, by the lack of an operating bathroom, but Clair and his roommate had to actually live there. During this frozen period of the series, while male art-lovers had to piss in the parking lot snow and the females did I know not what, we decided to try to warm the atmosphere by lighting a pot-belly stove in a room next door to the performance space. It seemed to be more or less intact and was visibly vented to the wall. We had been collecting firewood for some time, not always simple in the middle of town, but had a sufficient stockpile, we thought, to provide significant warmth. When the audience was assembled, we set it alight only to discover that the stovepipe must have been blocked as black smoke billowed into the room. We hung a curtain to try to contain the noxious gases and, throughout the entire evening, now and then a draft or wayward gust would move the curtain aside and send a fresh effusion into the crowd. It was like the special effects of a grandstand heavy metal show.
     Clair eventually suspended industrial space heaters resembling jet engines that sent forth great tongues of flame and made everything toasty. How he obtained them I cannot imagine. His art was on the very edge of the American scene, itself marginalized. Finding his gallery on the other end of the block of a Salvation Army drop-box that was invariably overflowing with largely valueless donations, he did a good deal of work with found materials.
     For his Disgust-o-tronic show, in May of that year, the gallery was filled with works constructed from found materials, each cleverly outfitted with little motors and pumps so that every work of art could be set in motion by the viewer. It would have been every child’s favorite exhibition. One piece, titled “Skinny Boy” represented a typical American living room with a television in place of honor, snacks stacked about a figure resting in an easy chair, a figure made by wiring together the bones of a deer skeleton the artist had found. When the button was pushed, the television would crackle with threat and the skinny boy would, rattling, lift his soda can to his lips.
     For the gala opening, Clair eschewed the customary white wine, cheese, and crackers of countless openings, offering instead chitterlings, chicken gizzards, and pigs' feet. I believe very little was consumed.
     Clair later moved his gallery to a downtown storefront. Here we were visible from the street and enjoyed good and unpredictable crowds. The gallery, of course, was not self-sustaining and eventually Clair moved on to other scenes. After one event in Middletown’s skyscraper (is it 26 North Street?) and series of four in the Art Center building, we made an agreement with the Unitarian Universalist Church and, between 1995 and 2008, this was the Poetry on the Loose venue. What had once been the Universalist Church is a fine old building from the turn of the twentieth century, including Tiffany windows and a very staid layout, remarkably High Church for a Unitarian hall, though the wall did bear colored felt symbols of the religions of the world. In February of 2008, the series moved to Warwick, in Steve Calitri’s old brick building by the Wawayanda where, a year or so later, Calitri led the establishment of the College of Poetry which was incorporated as the Northeast Poetry Center.
I chose the name Poetry on the Loose because my idea was to stress performance. I was thinking of Dada as well as the happenings, Cloud House events, and other manifestations in galleries and public spaces with which I had been involved. We have featured slam performers [1], numerous bands [2], aleatory and collective compositions [3], and such performance events as a mock funeral complete with coffin and prayer cards and a site-specific reading in a tepee. We have arranged social galas such as the Beaux Arts Ball and the Skull Beneath the Skin Ball. Themed events have included readings for the Dog Days and Valentine’s Day. Several programs of “spirit voices” featured recordings of poets of the past. Readers have included the broadest spectrum of the population from high school age to a Holocaust survivor in his nineties, drop-outs to university professors, blacks, Asians and Hispanics, gay and straight. Many readers have been local, but some have come from Texas, Hawaii, California, Colorado, Nepal, and the United Kingdom. [4]
     A few readers have gone on too long; one dropped his pants on stage; one saw her jealous ex-boyfriend invade the space from the rear and begin challenging the view of their history the reader was presenting. Dozens have enacted their visions and neuroses. The slogan was always, “The door is open wide.”




1. The national slam winners from Austin, Texas and the second-place team from NYC both performed the same evening.

2. These include Rick Pernod’s House of Pernod and James Antonie’s Utopian Direction Band. Among the artists who used music have been the July Church (with Manuel Ayala’s guitar), Oliver Grech, Word of Mouth Burning Art Theatre (Liz Gottlieb and Joe Karpienia), Ramesh Laihiri and his ensemble, Clint Partridge, Mikhail Horowitz and Gilles Malkine, and violinist T. G. Vanini.

3. Experiments like the Pomomat Collective Composition event and the pas de deux flyting.

4. Long-time attenders will remember Tim Wells and Salena Saliva from London. More recently, Yuyutsu Ram Dass Sharma from Kathmandu read.

Placing the Popular in the Structure of Literature

     As one currently undergoing a dissertation in medieval lyrics, I may risk arriving at this topic as an intruder if not simply as a lost wanderer. I'll readily confess I share with most of you the comparatist's pleasure in leaping disciplinary boundaries, but in this case the initial impression of bridging two radically different bodies of knowledge, not to mention sensibilities, is misleading.
     It is a fact rarely acknowledged, and more rarely given its full theoretical due when fundamental critical issues are discussed that the vast majority of human cultural production is in a very real sense popular. I am not thinking only of the fact that Louis L'Amour outsells Ezra Pound or of the unthinkably enormous audience for television. Diachronically as well and over the face of the earth, those art works which are "popular" in the sense that they are accessible to every member of a given society or subculture and which are, in fact, consumed virtually universally dominate the field without any doubt. The Enuma Elish, Greek tragedy, European mystery plays, the contemporary dramatic cycles of the Urhobo people of Nigeria: each of these performances consists of a poetic verbal text and a public spectacle witnessed by the community as a whole. Today we have football rituals, television, and background music in the supermarket, but we also have a category of high art, elite art, serious art, art-art.
     This division is perceived by some with pride and by others with pain. Among those hurt by the withering or diversion of the mass audience are Flaubert who lamented "We all lack a basis," Artaud who was sufficiently infuriated by the alienation of art from society as a whole that he idealized the Tarahumara and the Balinese and, for Europe, proclaimed first "no more masterpieces," and, later, "all writing is pigshit." Most attempts to address this split have been sociological, focusing on conditions of production or reception to distinguish one type of art from the other.
     This is not, however, the only division I mean to examine. Popular culture has very often been regarded as primarily as “mass culture,” the art produced as a commodity under modern capitalism. Only occasionally do articles on oral literature (what used to be called primitive or tribal literature) appear in the pages of the Journal of Popular Culture. Nonetheless, few critics who have expertise on science fiction also discuss Homer or materials gathered by anthropologists. Indeed, the problems of definition can be vexing. Is the popular identical with the oral? What place do both occupy in the corpus of literature as a whole? Surely answers to these questions will go far to defining the role of popular literature in the academic world.
     This project was originally motivated by the observation that, while oral literature and popular literature seem to have a great deal in common, critics show great respect for Homer and civility at least for texts gathered by anthropologists, but often dismiss popular texts about which they have thought very little. These attitudes are triggered by the use of sociological criteria for the definition of popular culture. The result is either the old elitism (which has no difficulty considering thinking the popular as that which doesn't measure up) or a contemporary enthusiasm equally unbased in theory. I mean to critically examine some of the ways in which the popular has been defined and then to seek non-sociological criteria by which to define the place of the popular in the structure of literature. These criteria will indicate the close relation between popular and oral literature. I shall then suggest what implications popular texts have for our general speculations about the nature of literature. I shall be speaking very generally and tossing out references to a great variety of texts, many of which would not normally be classified as popular. Nonetheless, by the end of my remarks, I hope to have corralled all of the reluctant data into coherent regions mf not satisfying pigeonholes.
     I shall first justify my project by pointing out difficulties inherent in some of the criteria for definition that have been commonly used in the past. First, in defining popular or oral literature literacy has often been used as the essential threshold from one to another. While this notion had some credibility at a time when the majority of most populations was illiterate, it is untenable today when a great many people practicing traditional oral art are also literate. Even Parry and Lord found a fluid interplay between oral performers and published versions of their songs. It will never be possible to determine whether Homer could read or not; it is enough to know his texts were generated by a system that works for the illiterate. The makers of medieval romances may well have translated written texts, but they often performed before largely illiterate audiences. Onitsha market literature and turn-of-the-century Midwestern newspaper verse, while produced by individual authors who were literate, clearly have "popular" and even "oral" characteristics.
     Further, social class has often been used to identify popular from what in this context might be called courtly literature. But the oldest examples, from tribal texts to Aeschylus were performed before general audiences, while today rock and roll and television are consumed with equal satisfaction in slums and suburbs. Clearly a better definition of the relation between popular and high art is needed. If the distinction between high and popular art is unclear, that between the oral and the popular is even more problematical. I have been collapsing the two, accurate enough on the basis of accessibility to all, this is, but they are far from identical. Did McKinley Morganfield, upon leaving Stovall's Plantation to become Muddy Waters in Chicago pass from one genre to another? If so, why are the recordings made by Alan Lomax so strikingly similar to those on Aristocrat and Chess?
     With the passing of old notions of Volksdichtung arising spontaneously from the masses (and Parry to assure us that some singers were very good indeed and others altogether mediocre), individual authorship seems invalid. Pay can hardly work either, as all societies compensate their artists to one extent or another. Political criteria would obscure the likeness between Chinese revolutionary opera and Broadway shows.
     Is there any way to bring the rich but confused series of examples I have compiled into orderly relation? To answer this question, I think a brief excursus is necessary about the poles around which much discussion of literature has revolved since Romanticism. Many critics and theorists, and not a few poets, have built their barricades around positions basically defined by the continuum of tradition and innovation. Some have aligned themselves with the romantic impulse to privilege the novel (Wordsworth when young, Pound, Shklovsky, Artaud) or the "neo-classical" emphasis on tradition (Pope, Arnold, Curtius, Leavis).
     Similar polemical positions characterize the popular/elite art controversy. Some celebrate what they perceive as popular specifically as tradition-challenging (Bakhtin, Leslie Fiedler) while others attack it as destructive of all culture (Max Horkheimer or Leo Lowenthal for whom popular culture is a useful source of information but which in itself is spurious, the very counter-concept of art).
     The simple fact is that these disputes dissolve when one realizes that every instance of language and certainly every literary artifact is at once conformist and nonconformist — if it were not the former it would be incomprehensible and the latter is necessitated by the fact that every context and occasion is different so no utterances can be exactly equivalent. This does not deny the reality of the two poles: the most ordinary of good mornings can approach total repetition while Lautgedichte and John Cage's random compositions approach total unpredictability.
     The fact that theories of art have been built about each end of the opposition, though, is suggestive. Even though the most self-conscious claims for the innovative are fairly recent, an injunction like that in Geoffrey of Vinsauf that the poet must "rejuvenate" the language indicates the antiquity of the idea. The reason that plausible and impassioned cases have been made for both tradition and innovation in literature is that each is necessary. Defamiliarization can only occur on a background of familiarization. The sonneteer must have an audience with a set of assumptions before he can manipulate those assumptions.
     None of these remarks, though, alters the fact that certain genres are more highly conventional than others. There can be little doubt that popular literature (and I understand the oral literature here as well) is more predictable. This has been frequently noted and, indeed, constitutes the grounds for most of the attacks leveled against the popular for being boring, repetitive, artless hackwork. In fact, those who champion certain works of popular culture often try to demonstrate that their choices are acceptable by standards of irony, innovation, and the like.
     I would claim an equal aesthetic function for highly iterative patterns. Repetitiveness, or reliance on extreme conventionalization, produces a familiarity to the words in precisely the Shkloskian sense of automized or algebrized language. The forms of popular literature clearly use the same linguistic formulae repeatedly (they are thus particularly easy to parody), television programs possess a discourse quite their own; many traditional mysteries, romance novels, and pornographic texts clearly use and reuse verbal material with obsessive regularity. This is, of course, the very characteristic on which Parry, Lord and their followers founded the notion of the oral. The principle of "economy" provided the criterion for discerning what is oral from what is not, and economy relies on a fund of formulae recognizable.
     The child obviously learns the verbal cues which identify the genre of fairy tales at a very early age. An oral literature sort of economy is characteristic of medieval romance regardless of the degree of "orality" or literariness of conditions of its production or consumption. Extreme forms of this conventional repetitiveness include the many Native American Indian songs from the Plains groups which consist of the sane brief phrase (often meaningless) repeated for hours or church liturgy which is enacted weekly for centuries without change.
     This familiarization which, it seems to me, has a claim equal to that of defamiliarization as a basis for the aesthetic text, appears not merely in aesthetic discourse. It is evident also in larger descriptive clichés, in turns of plot, in the thematic materials retailed through the work. This point is so obvious it scarcely bears documentation, but, contrary to Shklosky’s claims, here it is quite clear that the repeated structures do not fade and disappear due to their automization, rather they are underlined again and again specifically to imprint them in the mental programs of their consumers.
     Probably the most persistent repetitions in Homer are the descriptions of battle and sacrifice, obviously central cultural components for the Greeks. In medieval romance the Christians defeat the Saracens in order to validate the dominant ideology just as on television Jackie Gleason used to embrace Audrey Meadows and their differences dissolved at the end of their half hour, and motion picture and television alike regulations required that the police must get their man. In this way both marriage and the social order will be perpetuated.
     Apart from situation comedies, similar highly conventionalized patterns occur in romance novels, pornographic texts, and fairy tales. Liturgy represents an extreme example. The repetition of comforting codes is surely a more common pattern in imaginative production than the more familiar Romantic concept that art brings a critical perspective, pointing out contradictions, tensions, and problems.
     Much myth of considerably greater antiquity uses a very similar sort of sympathetic magic leading to happy endings through narration — this is, for instance a common method of shamanistic healing, and one practiced no less in our own society than among the Crow Indians. Certain critical discussions of popular culture under capitalism have centered on this function of culture as a replicator of ideological givens (for instance, Dorfman and Kattelarts How to Read Donald Duck or Eco’s discussion of Superman in The Role of the Reader).
But these partisan views are questionable before the example of tribal societies which inculcate ideology even more rigorously but toward ends more easily romanticized (as in recent mythologizing about Native American Indian). The critics of direct cultural transmission generally take little notice of the official art produced in socialist countries which seeks to fulfill the same function. Indeed the classical Chinese opera and the modern revolutionary opera are at one in the formal sense of using strict and highly repetitive conventions to teach and reinforce ideology. This is, indeed, the old Horatian ideal, upheld by E.D. Hirsch in our day of instruction as a function of literature. We can glorify the ideals taught in Balinese shadow theater, appreciate those of Homer, but rarely have sympathy for the ones that arrive daily on our television sets. Be that as it may, the fact must be recognized that the formal method practiced in each case is the same.
     Once it is granted that these carefully designed highly repetitive structures do not disappear, it remains to describe what they do. For one thing, they construct myths. Eco speaks of the myth of Superman in a way that is formally correct according to Levi-Strauss’s notions of myth. That myth exists extra-textually in that it is derived from a group of texts and is not confined to any single one among them. The mythic character comes not from specific similarities with Oedipus or any other model but from the formal structural repetition which creates a body of expectations and which expresses a set of values. Thus, every television show is susceptible to reading as myth. Viewers vary rarely treasure the memory of an individual show, and stations almost never rebroadcast great shows from a series (as distinct from random reruns); rather what is enjoyed is the myth generated by many shows. What Eco calls the iterative scheme in Superman is according to him "that on which most famous authors have founded their fortunes” (he mentions mystery writers), and this is only partly because audiences enjoy having their preconceptions confirmed, and are comforted when told that all that they had believe about men and women, about parents and children is true.
     Beyond this ideological message, there is clearly a pleasure in encountering the same ideas, the same words, the same characters again and again. The consumer delights in his own initiation just as academics at scholarly meetings enjoy hearing certain terms, certain names. This recognition reinforces our own sense of belonging, entirely apart from whether we agree with the utility of the concepts or with the authors cited. It is quite clear then that this pleasure in repetition is not peculiarly the property of the naive — it is the same when we enjoy our own competence whether to converse in French, to spot typologies in a Biblical text, or to discuss the merits of a new shortstop.
     This sameness has a further function as well. As Shklovsky seems inadequately to have realized, familiarization is what allows the possibility of defamiliarization. Alteration of convention is an essential part of convention itself. Information may be more densely packed into a text when there is a highly regular structure so that a mere mention of a single word can trigger reference to a whole body of earlier texts. This is similar to the way in which Pindar uses myth and also to the way in which school students communicate with single slang words or even raised eyebrows which carry abundant meaning based on previously established codes.
Whenever a convention appears, it is instantly subject to numerous tropes: it is reversed, used ironically, turned upside down, and inside out. Each of these may then become a model which the next writer will twist about another turn until often the origin of the convention is lost, in the way that the origin of Bob Dylan in Dylan Thomas has vanished for most. To select one point along this path of transformation and to applaud its “originality” is to ignore the larger pattern that provides context. In fact every detail is preceded and followed by greater or lesser variations, for only in this way does human culture develop.
     In spite of the fact that this simple descriptive fact confounds the very opposition of innovation to convention, it is nonetheless true that texts vary along a considerable spectrum of predictability. Great works and worthless ones occupy every stage of this continuum, so convention can be no criterion for value. The worth of the conventional, however, has been so neglected these last few hundred years, that their use is obscure to many modern readers.
     First of all, conventions and readers’ expectations play an essential role that in all language (indeed in all cognitive processes), allowing an increase in semiotic density by making more details significant. Just as a code of sound changes in prefixes and suffixes adds meaning to nouns and verbs, a code of variation in convention allows a greater quantity of data to be expressed in every word. Then, there is the simple pleasure of repetition itself, familiar to every parent who reads to toddlers, but equally a factor in the universal popularity of mindless television. The highly conventionalized forms of writing have distinct characteristics: they tend to express themes that transmit received ideas, they are generally very clear and readily accessible, and they are likely to use paratactic structures. The function of such texts, often written off in this era of the Romantic individual genius, deserves further investigation.
     Any reading of literature that fails to consider the highly conventionalized forms in oral, popular, and mass culture will be willfully ignoring the vast majority of human artistic production.