The Knot of Dialectic in “Bryd one brere”

 

The Middle English poem and a version in modern English follow the essay.

 

     In a typical example of the chance survival of such poems, around the turn of the fourteenth century the three stanzas of “Bryd one brere” (“Bird on a Briar”) were written on the back of a papal bull.  The words of Innocent III had been promulgated a century earlier and the document archived since then.  What might the writer have been thinking?  The circumstance associates an appropriate quality of immediacy with the lyric.  It may be that a zephyr had reminded a monk in his cell at the Priory of St. James near Exeter of a song he had heard in the marketplace.  Perhaps writing it was meant as an aid to memory or, on the other hand, the writer may have meant to banish it from his meditations by leaving it on the parchment page.  These circumstances nicely spotlight the poem’s polysemy, poised between heaven and earth, suspended in the tensions inherent in the human condition, caught in a tight knot of dialectic.     

     “Bryd one brere” is as well an excellent example, though only one among many, of the fruitful ambiguity cultivated by the poets of the period.  The opening phrase invites multiple readings.  Joined phonetically by alliteration, its terms are semantically opposed.  A bird and its song, especially appearing in lyric poetry, are associated with grace and beauty, while a briar or thorn has a threatening, potentially painful aspect.  The complex affective fluctuations of human experience, ranging from bliss to misery, might be figured as “between the bird and the briar.”  

     Yet the opening word is ambiguous even in isolation.  In fact, nothing that follows requires that it refer to an animal.  As the lyric was originally sung, the bird would certainly suggest the poet.  “Bryd” also can mean a woman or a bride, and, with only a slight phonetic stretch of the sort routine in the era, it might be read as the past participle “buried” or as a reference to St. Brigid. In this way the poem opens by confronting the reader with a series of dualities: pain and pleasure, life and death, earth and heaven.  The image cast by the first three words constitutes a balanced mandala-like concept characterizing the contradictions out of which the phenomenal world is generated.  One knows the joy of a songbird by contrast with the pain of an injury, the pleasures of life are the more acute with the sight of the grave just beyond the horizon ahead.

     The next phrase “kynd is come of love” makes the point explicit with another emphatic alliteration.  It is through the separation and attraction of opposites that nature, the most common meaning of “kynd,” has arisen, both in the biological sense of sexual reproduction and in the grand sense in Genesis of things coming into being through the generation of dualities like light and dark or land and sea.  “Kynd” may also mean something close to what the word means today, “beneficence” or “good will,” implying, as courtly love does, the derivation of moral nobility through love.  In the loose semantic web of these verses, associations with kindling a flame (in some forms “kinde”) and children (“kindle”) are also relevant, as erotic heat and thus children are the consequence of love. 

     Bu the general principle upon which the world moves forward, whether figured as fire, love, reproduction, or birdsong, is deficient in the case of the speaker.  The phrase “love to crave” indicates a state of love-longing, of unsatisfied desire that contrasts with the full-throated bird on the briar.  The bird is blithe (the consonantal music never stops) either because it is so beautiful, which is to say so in tune with its world, a harmony signaled by the fecundity of nature.

     The bird is, in fact, so joyful that it seems supernatural.  Addressing the animal as though it were a god, the persona poses another opposition, in prayer-like supplication asking the bird either to have pity on him or to “dig him his grave.”  The most archaic associations accompany the name of St. Brigid (spelled in a variety of ways, including Brid); indeed, the very existence of Brigid of Kildare is open to question.  What is certain is that a good many of the Christian saint’s characteristics duplicate those of her pagan predecessor.  Her feast-day is on February 1, the day of the pre-Christian Imbolc holiday marking the beginning of spring, so the connotations of both saint and goddess include the fertility of the earth.    

     Without love, there is no life, so the speaker asks directly that his grave be dug if lovelessness is to be his portion.  Though mortality had been hovering in the background in earlier lines, death is evoked here directly in the double mention of digging (evoking successive shovelfuls of earth) and then of the grave itself, all beginning with the growling sound gr-. 

     With the opening words of the second stanza, the poet leaps from the burying ground to the sublime empyrean when the persona recalls a glimpse of his human beloved, now distinguished from her bird-totem. [1]  This visitation enables his own soul to be called “blithe” just as the bird had been.  The appearance of the beloved is little short of a theophany.  She appears numinous, perfect, purely white, so “fair” she is “the flower of all.” [2] The language and the emotion might equally apply to an observer wonderstruck with the beauty of nature, a lover enthralled by a woman’s charms, or a spiritual seeker who has experienced an access to what feels like the divine.

     Yet the delight in merely seeing the beloved is short-lived.  The persona must have her love in return, and his anxiety about achieving this goal leads him to possessive rhetoric.  “Might she only do as I want” the third stanza begins, and prove “steadfast, lovely, and true.”  The speaker might then be “saved” from sorrow as sinners are from Hell, and be instead renewed and clothed in angelic “joy and bliss.”  

     The poem is an extraordinary incantation expressing the deepest human needs for pleasure, sex, love, and the divine, in its first portion a medieval version of “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” but ending in an ecstatic vision of possibility, though the speaker’s reward of love remains conditional: she “may” save him.  The last line is subjunctive.  So the poem relates only a potential deliverance from the suffering of desire; the persona remains subject to the ordinary pains of life just as the reader is.  The construction of an image of totally satisfying love only highlights how far short of that ideal his lived experience remains.

     Frustration, however, only exacerbates appetite.  The longing for sexual satisfaction and for truly fulfilling love, the pursuit of a closer relationship with the divine may neither be extinguished nor entirely satisfied.  In the contemplation of the figure of the bird, the most commonplace of sights, seen and heard daily, the poet has expressed the tensions of the human condition.  The poem ends, as life does, in uncertainty.

 

 1.  See the works of Marija Gimbutas for the widespread early European bird-goddesses.

 

2.  A figure of great antiquity, popular in the Middle Ages.  Cf. Anacreon 55.  See the excellent “Excursus” on the topic by Peter Dronke in Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-lyric I, 181-192.

 

 

Bryd one brere, brid, brid one brere,
Kynd is come of love, love to crave
Blythful biryd, on me thu rewe
Or greyth, lef, greith thu me my grave.

Hic am so blithe, so bryhit, brid on brere,
Quan I se that hende in halle:
Yhe is whit of lime, loveli, trewe
Yhe is fayr and flur of alle.
 

Mikte ic hire at wille haven,
Stedefast of love, loveli, trewe,
Of mi sorwe yhe may me saven
Ioye and blisse were were me newe.
 

 

modernization:
 

Bird on a briar, bird, bird on a briar,
We come from love, and love we crave,
Blissful bird, have pity on me,
Or dig, love, dig for me my grave. 

I am so blithe, so bright, bird on briar
When I see that handmaid in the hall:
She is white-limbed, lovely, true,
She is fair, and the flower of all.

Might I have her at my will,
Steadfast of love, lovely, true,
She may save me from my sorrow;
Joy and bliss would wear me new.

Formal Play in a Canso by Cercamon

Though the reader without Old Occitanian may wish to consult a more literal version in connection with this essay, the finest translation is probably Ezra Pound’s which he regarded as the most successful in his “Langue d’Oc” sequence. Typically, Pound makes quite free with his original, not only placing the stanzas in a sequence different from all the manuscripts, but contributing as well a novel spelling of his author’s name, evidently with the aim of pointing toward its etymology. See “Descant on a Theme by Cerclamon” in The Little Review vol. 15, no. 1 (which bears on its cover the slogan “Making no compromise with the Public Taste”).


     Cercamon in “Quant l’aura doussa s’amarzis” (“When the sweet breeze sours”) announces his theme unambiguously at the outset as “Amor” (“love”), but what follows is more a formal unfolding of the theme in the manner of a fugue than it is an emotional outpouring. The polarity of the very first line is expressed using terms of weather, animal behavior, and then the persona’s experience in turn. The opposition implied in the rhythmic alternation of the seasons carries affective associations for the sensitive human consciousness which finds springtime delightful in the spring while the fall is unwelcome. From the start the grand, purely abstract music of the cosmos is complicated by the emotion of a human subject for whom the most emphatic form of passion is surely Amor.

     The energy of the emotional struggle for love is the dynamo that sustains the entire poem, but the turnings of amorous fortune are played out against a grand pattern unsusceptible to sentiment. Like most love songs in troubadour times and today in popular culture, this is largely a lack-of-love song, but it oscillates. Every verse contains references to the potential both of suffering and joy that desire entails. There is no progress, no narrative; the poem ends where it began. Cercamon’s focus is the tension itself rather than any fulfilment or other resolution. Rather than satisfy desire or, in the manner of the birds, fall silent, the poet makes a poem of his own frustration, turning pain into the stuff of beauty.

After establishing the polarity with a simple twist of the reverdie introduction that presents the reader with a symbolic paradox. With the coming of autumn, harbinger of the year’s death, though the birds cease their singing, his own song rises in place of theirs, but his is a radically ambivalent melody, one in which the passion of the original is transmuted into a beautiful formal pattern like his rhyme scheme.

     When considered not as sympathetic emotional states but rather as abstract signs, the alternation between the joy of love and the suffering of rejection becomes a dance, beautiful for its own sake. It is peculiarly appropriate to love, in which desire is often intensified and prolonged by denial of satisfaction. Troubadour poetry is capable of considerable coarseness, but in this poem the pressure is raised to such an extent that a single metaphor such as “joja” (“jewel”) becomes highly erotic and the poet thrills to such kinky imagery as to imagine himself “lassat e pres” (“tied up and taken”); he is excited to thinks of himself spending two or three years in her service before receiving any recognition.

     Rhymes always call attention to themselves. Often a poem may be traced through its rhyming words alone. Elaborate rhyme patterns were cultivated in the rhyme rich language of Old Occitan which can rapidly waylay the translator in this age in which poetic sound effects in the far less hospitable American English are rarely the writer's focus. Though Troubadour forms were highly demanding, they were endlessly flexible at the same time. Troubadours prided themselves on their originality and novelty and were able to freely tailor new patterns to suit the material at hand.

     Listeners were capable of perceiving even distant or subtle sound relationships, and, in the absence of the music, in “Quant l’aura doussa s’amarzis” the rhymes are the most prominent structuring device. The poem as a whole rhymes ababcd with a double tornada cd cd. The same rhyme sounds are sustained throughout the poem’s fifty-eight lines, a virtually impossible task to duplicate in English in which chiming rhymes would sound childish in any event.

     All the stanzas with the exception of seven end on a note of hope, using words such as “plazer” (“pleasure”), “lezer” (“leisure”), “ver” (“truth”), and even an image of her going to bed (“anar jazer”), thus sustaining the poet’s quest in spite of the lady’s showing no apparent receptiveness to his advances. In the double tornada the signals are balanced, reasserting uncertainty.

     In the opening stanza all the rhyme words have associations of coercion and rejection except two which have to do with singing, a negative use (the birds’ ceasing their song) and a positive one (the poet’s beginning his). Thus the problem of the poem is posed and the solution in art suggested. More subtly, in the eight remaining stanzas, the rhyme words in the quatrains are consonant in nine instances (five good and four bad), contrasting in two, and neutral in six (a neutral word is associated with a good one three times and with a word with bad connotations three times).

     This level of symmetry indicates not planning but a highly sensitive intuition about constructing a poem. The writer applies rhetorical figures like dabs of paint in an abstract composition, seeing to it that looks or sounds right without having to specify a reason. Art excels at expressing the often deeply ambivalent feelings that accumulate around themes such as love. The aim is not to say that love is this or that but most often some form of both and neither. Love may be quite different person to person or day by day.

     The texture of sound patterns with rhyme at the fore constitutes then both a formal pattern with an appeal of its own and a reinforcement of the poem’s self-contradictory investigation of the experience of love. As in tragedy the structural design of the poetry’s melody is a redemption, with its artistic control exerting a power over circumstances over which humankind has no other power. The poet sings his way melodiously through self-declared suffering and thus maintains dignity and pride in spite of helplessness. Desire becomes nearly a force of nature coming and going like the tide or the daylight, but, like Venus, rising and falling with rhythmic regularity.




Appendix: Rhyme Words

The patterns of rhyme words may be traced in this list in which b indicates a negative association, implying constraint or frustration, g means a good one, n is neutral, and s reference to song. Translations of the rhyme words themselves follow.

1-6
bs
ns
b
b

7-12
gg
bg
n
g

13-18
gg
gg
n
g

19-24
nb
ng
n
g

25-30
bb
gn
n
g

31-36
gg
gn
g
b

37-42
bb
bb
g
g

43-48
bb
bn
b
g

49-54
gg
gb
g
g

55-56
b
g

56-57
g
b







1-6
becomes bitter/ language
branch/ sing
taken
power

7-12
won/ acquire
suffering/ desire
thing
have

13-18
rejoice/ dumbfounded
so much/ desire
it [seems]
know

19-24
saw/ darkens
glove/ shines
might have
go to bed

25-30
tremble/ might die
awake/ ask
three
truth

31-36
healed/ figure out
great/ when
mercy
fall down

37-42
maddens/ mocks
mute/ behind
good
pleasure

43-48
die/ killed
command/ semblance
ought, must
to see

49-54
enjoy/ fine, true
make love/ deception
courtly
leisure

55-56
annoys
retain

56-57
court
despairs

A Structural View of the Ephesiaca

     The Ephesiaca by Xenophon of Ephesus [1] has been long considered inferior to other Hellenistic novels or romances. In fact, early editors speculated that the extant text is not a finished work but a summary of a superior longer version. One critic arguing that main characters display significant growth and maturation [2] stands apart from the majority who find the chief interest of the work to be its action. Even those who translate Xenophon are tempted to condescension. One characterizes the book as "a specimen of penny dreadful literature” and another calls it the ancient version of a "rip-roaring action film." [3] They at least make it sound entertaining.
     The fact is that ancient Greek prose fiction in general tends like folk tales to focus with single-minded concern on a narrative thread, with little description of settings and virtually no analysis or development of character. In the Ephesiaca the incidents are implausible and repetitive, the characters flat and unchanging, and the narration generally spare. The story does include an elaborate rhetorical show-piece: the wonderful ekphrasis on the canopy above the lovers’ marriage bed. The lush and luxurious texture of this passage, lit with an erotic glow, very like the art object it describes, only emphasizes the plainness of much of the story's prose.
     For the most part the narration is unadorned and simple, proceeding rapidly from one incident to the next. Like Lazarillo de Tormes or the Chinese Water Margin it is episodic and paratactic in structure. Very little builds on what comes before or prepares for what follows. The story could be lengthened or shortened without damaging its pattern or meaning.
     This is far, of course, from the qualities prized in modern novels. Yet these very attributes that underlie the book’s lack of appeal to many moderns may also be the basis for the pleasure its original audience felt when reading it. The primary motive for such a plot is aesthetic, the purely formal appeal of the pattern, similar to the pleasure the listener has in a Bach fugue or in certain works of abstract visual art. Even when viewing natural objects, such as the silhouettes of trees or the colors of a sunset, the human sensibility seeks satisfying unintentional structures. The author has set in motion a number of psychologically potent elements which then mutate and repeat in striking formal patterns. [4]
     The entire plot might be schematically represented, but perhaps it will be sufficient to describe the first two books to establish the structure which remains largely fixed throughout. The hero of the Ephesiaca is introduced less as an individual than as a paragon of masculine excellence, extraordinary in beauty and character, justified in his arrogance. He is Man writ large. Almost like Gilgamesh whose powers required the counterbalance of Enkidu, Anthia then appears as his female counterpart, exemplifying the qualities most prized in women. The single cell has divided in two.
     The two then lose their peace and happiness and fall into the hands of pirates upon which each receives an unwanted lover, their evil Doppelgängers in a sense, Corymbos for Habrocomes and Euxinos for Anthia. Ease has been replaced by its polar opposite suffering and the two leading protagonists has each attracted an antagonist.
     In Book II a secondary doubling occurs on the axis of social class. The hero and heroine each receive a counterpart on a lower social level in Leucon and Rhode whose adventures parallel and support those of the leading players. Apsyrtos, the leader of the pirate gang, then provides a synthesis that envelops the pattern by taking Habrocomes, Anthia, Leucon, and Rhode into his custody. A new threat then appears as Aspyrtos’ iniquitous male authority is matched by his daughter Manto. Infatuated with Habrocomes, she denounces him when he fails to return her affection. Not only is he then tortured; Anthia is given to the same Manto who has her married to a poor goatherd.
     Soon both escape their perils, but only temporarily, and so the story goes with further variations, playing with the author’s set of bipolar oppositions – male/female, pleasure/suffering, rich/poor – which proceed in a regular stylized pattern reminiscent of fractals until the happy conclusion. Yet since the incidents of the story do refer to recognizable human experience, they possess thematic resonance as well. In a work of art nothing is unintentional. The novel does present themes: in the most general way the culture’s male and female ideals, the instability of fortune, and the mysterious mixture of aggression and compassion that characterizes sexual relations. In Greek mythological terms, the story relays the chastening of arrogance by Eros, and the celebration of Isis, the embodiment of the Great Goddess.
     The play of transformation in the Ephesiaca collects around several foci of the sort that Freud might have called cathexes. The anxiety and desire that enwraps love and death, pleasure and suffering renders these topics endlessly interesting to our species. This narrative allows the reader to contemplate the mutations of fortune in wonder and amazement. Individualized psychological studies or social analyses are not the only functions of fiction, nor are they necessarily the most sublime. Perhaps modern critics no longer share the taste that allowed earlier readers to relish formal play in fiction as they did in poetic meter. It may be that the sense of an orderly world that underlies the pleasure of viewing human experience as a delightfully kaleidoscopic marvel is rare in this belated age.


1. In English sometimes called the An Ephesian Tale. The author is, of course, to be distinguished from Socrates’ student, Xenophon of Athens. The question of the text being an epitome remains controversial today.

2. See Aldo Tagliabue, “The Ephesiaca as a Bildungsroman,” in Ancient Narrative, Vol. 10, 17–462.

3. Graham Anderson and Stephen Trzaskoma.

4. I am not wholly original in this reading. Earlier critics who have made structural analyses of the Ephesiaca include R. W. Garson (“The Faces of Love in Ephesiaca or Anthia and Habrocomes,” Museum Africum, 7, 47-55), David Konstan (Sexual Symmetry: Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres, Princeton U.P., Princeton), and J. R. Morgan in several studies, but especially “Travel in the Greek Novel: Function and Interpretation” in C. Adams and J. Roy’s Travel, Geography, and Culture in Ancient Greece, Egypt, and the Near East, Leicester-Nottingham Studies in Ancient Society 10, Oxford, 139-160.

A Structural View of Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel

     Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel has much to recommend it: a compelling plot that reserves its most dramatic turn for the end, figurative rhetoric that can mount and build like banks of clouds, and layers of irony highlighted by the constant choric commentary and wit of the mordant observations of The Pilgrim’s Scrip and Adrian’s sybaritic musings. Further, these thematic and stylistic qualities appear in a novel structured according to an elaborate design of bipolar oppositions which may be read as a great formal pattern unfolding in time rather like a fugue. This structure, implied by the references to “Magian” or Manichaean conflict, governs the entire work.
     It is far from clear just what the ordeal of the title might be. The word is used repeatedly with different implications throughout the text. It sometimes means Richard’s upbringing under his father’s notorious System, which would seem an appropriate focus, but in other passages it signifies simply his initiation into love (or adulthood more generally). Toward the conclusion the word is used (and capitalized) to refer to Richard’s confession of his infidelity to Lucy. Then, too, the reader thinks of his self-imposed ordeals of separation from her and his acceptance of the duel, an “ordeal” in almost the old technical sense of a sort of trial with God as judge. Over all, of course, hovers the legitimate sense of life as a whole constituting an ordeal. Over this most fundamental subject matter, in effect a story of Everyman in spite of Sir Austin’s singular notions (for Everyman is more peculiar than he may think), Meredith spins an elaborate interwoven texture in which warp is as significant as woof.
     This ironic ambiguity which critics take to be distinctly modern characterizes the entire novel. The book reads like a comedy throughout yet ends in pathos if not tragedy. Richard, the “Hero,” is often decidedly unheroic. Sir Austin, the philosopher, is far less philosophic than he thinks. On the other hand Austin Wentworth, who appears only now and then, is the sensible Austin, though he can do little to aid the others. Adrian, who is in truth only as much the “Wise Youth” as Richard is the “Hero” or Sir Austin the Philosopher, is in fact shallow and detached, passing his time in self-amusement spouting trifling witticisms each laden with further layers of irony. Lucy Desborough, nearly the only character other than Austin Wentworth to be presented in an altogether positive light, benefits from the lingering idealized convention of the irresistible love-object, a woman altogether virtuous, modest, and lovely. Still, she has her counterpart in Mrs. Berry who plays Emilia to her Desdemona. If Sir Austin is the man betrayed by trying to live too wholly in his brain, Hippias does little but complain of the burden of his body. For every type there is a countertype, for every assertion, its equally valid contradiction.
     The thematic pattern of the book is scrupulously dialectic. The opposition between science and philosophy on the one hand and human nature and common sense on the other is sustained throughout at a high state of tension. The author’s own experience of a faithless wife and his authorship of a volume titled The Pilgrim’s Scrip are two among many correspondences that would support the notion that Sir Austin in some sense represents the author. Yet he is regularly depicted as no less deluded, egotistical, and misguided for all his high principles. His “System” is the error that sets the plot in motion.
     Likewise, the epicurean wisecracks and arch rhetorical turns which constitute Adrian’s every speech seem at least as close to Meredith’s own convictions as Wilde’s were to his, but Adrian is characterized as shallow and incapable of either deep thought or feeling. In this way most every line that might seem an assertion of the author is no sooner uttered than the ground is cut from under it. The book is a series of mistaken or partial propositions, a catalogue of humors and of error.
     Clear as the point may be in the work as a whole, it is more precisely demonstrated in close reading. Though one might almost open to the book at random for evidence, I will cite only two passages, chosen very nearly at random.
     Chapter 29 begins with what Meredith terms a “necessary” prelude to Richard’s move toward decisive action. “Let it be some apology for the damage caused by the careering hero, and a consolation to the quiet wretches dragged along with him at his chariot-wheels, that he is generally the last to know when he has made an actual start.” Whereas one might expect a hero to be fully conscious and deliberate, to Meredith he is blundering as blindly as everyone else. Though much of the novel implies the impotence of science in the face of human nature and mere chance, he employs the language of the science of his day: “He may be compared to one to whom, in an electric circle, it is given to carry the battery.” The fact that the séance-like gatherings called electric circles or circuits since the eighteenth century, then popularized by Mesmer, would today be called pseudo-science only strengthens the point. According to Meredith, power is “all Fortune’s,” and humans can only caper comically and helplessly, the victims of ineluctable fate. The Pilgrim’s Scrip reinforces this idea, saying that to be “intent upon his own business” is “with men to be valued equal to that force which in water makes a stream.”
     This brief paragraph first evokes the traditional concept of a hero, then denies it by suggesting Richard’s lack of control over the consequences of his actions, describing him as no more the agent of his own life than is an electric current or the onward push of a river. There is of course a strong convention of heroes from Achilles to the Existential “man of action” who are ultimately unable to alter their fate, but whose nobility consists of their persistence, as they go down to defeat with courage, looking at reality without illusion. Richard on the contrary vainly imagines that he is captain of his destiny. Yet, as critically flawed as Meredith’s hero may be in his vanity and selfishness, most readers would sympathize with his romance across class boundaries. If to be a force of nature like that of electricity or flowing water is to be a hero, is not everyone likewise heroic? So in this opening paragraph, one can trace the hero made non-hero and back again multiple times, resulting in a rich ambiguity, a tense contradiction that flickers from one valid evaluation to its opposite, equally valid.
     The same paradoxical alternation of judgments is illustrated by Lady Blandish’s attitude toward Wordsworth in Chapter 26. She is discussing literature in a letter to Sir Austin after having, with some misgivings, assisted him in his plan to separate Lucy from Richard. Having said that she is repelled by Gibbon’s cynicism and impiety, she continues, “How different it is with Wordsworth!” Though this line might seem to introduce an enthusiastic endorsement, she follows immediately with, “And yet I cannot escape the thought that he is always solemnly thinking of himself.” Seeking to regain balance, perhaps, this line is succeeded by the defensive ejaculation, “but I do reverence him!” A few lines later he has become “a donkey,” though (we remain on a tightrope with the pole extending equally to the right and left) “a very superior donkey” whose most impressive quality is “stubbornness” as he is incapable of “sublimity. “I love Wordsworth best,” the paragraph concludes, “and yet Byron has the greater power over me. How is that?”
     This entire complex system is then itself ironized. To Sir Austin her confusion is explained, not by her humanity, but by her sex. “Women are cowards, and succumb to Irony and Passion, rather than yield their hearts [as he presumably believes he and Wordsworth do] to Excellence and Nature’s Inspiration.”
     Many students, and not a few of their professors as well, cherish the notion that one may apprehend truths about lived experience through reading literature, but the fact is that writers are not experts in philosophy, psychology, or science. Their skill is in writing. But, if they cannot prescribe answers, they can precisely and passionately, point to the questions most important to our species. They can then create the most affecting symphonies out of these very mysteries and ambivalences. A claim to solve the great issues that engage us all is in fact a confession of arrogance and reductionism. The great writers leave us always in suspense.

Bernart and the Music of Ideas

     Bernart de Ventadorn’s songs deploy most of the more widely used troubadour conventions in a way that is masterly, while not strikingly original. [1] Many of his cansos are elaborately organized structures of words which can be understood almost abstractly regardless of their explicit themes. The reader or listener can relish the repetitions, marvel at bipolar oppositions balancing like aerialists, and admire tightly wound contradictions, all couched in the most melodious and graceful language. Some critics, failing to appreciate this artful poetic technique and seeking for prose inside the exquisite poetry, have quarreled over the insoluble question of what Bernart himself thought. From the structuralist point of view, the dance of conventions (which prove far more alive than they were once thought to be) are the most significant element in a poem like “Lo tems vai e ven e vire” (“Time comes and turns and goes”).
     That very opening phrase presents a mystery. Does it mean that the flow of time (or “seasons”) simply approaches from the future, “turns” as it is experienced, and then goes or recedes into the past? But why use “turn” for the middle term? The apparent reversal between coming and going suggests a more subtle idea of the relativity of time, its subjective quality which might make it seem dynamic and mutable. Further, every line of verse, of which this clause is the first, “turns” at the end to become the next verse.
     But as soon as the initial proposition has been declared, a suggestive set of oppositions that generates speculation about time’s river and poetry’s flow, the already rich set of concepts is suddenly thrown into doubt: “no n sai que dire” (“I don’t know what to say”). Of course, this statement is itself paradoxical, since it appears in a poem, the most deliberate form of speech. [2]
     Having first suggested that time’s arrow may be ambiguous, though somehow analogous to the loom-like weaving of lines of verse, Bernart then opposes statement and silence. This may seem the ultimate term for a sung utterance, but the poet tops this tense and dizzying series of polarities with a monad of absolute love. Yet in this dialectical environment every term summons its contrary, so Bernart’s next move is to posit an absolutely unresponsive beloved. [3] While he represents himself as the extreme of devotion in love-service, she is the exact opposite, altogether aloof. This makes his love a sort of absurdity, for which the poet censures himself in the third stanza, calling himself a fool.
     These antinomies – the love which is not love and the speech which constantly threatens to descend into silence – continue in a symphonic play of concepts. In spite of the poem’s highly formal schematic matrix, the system is not in the end symmetrical. Though the poet threatens in the fourth stanza to cease his writing which, he says, cannot bring him joy, yet we see the text before us, decisive proof that he did indeed, after wavering, write. He presumably glimpses some possibility that the lady may ultimately be persuaded, or, by his own standards, he would have fallen silent.
     Indeed, though he protests that his beloved is impossibly obdurate, in stanza six he declares that his suffering is only a prelude to his joy. Slyly, he cites scriptural authority suggesting a happier denouement, “a single day” that is “worth more than a hundred.” [4] Just past the poem’s midpoint the possibility of sexual love displaces the idealized love service that never requires a reward. What had seemed an ethereal “courtly” relation analogous to feudal vassalage becomes suddenly an arduous and demanding seduction strategy.
     The seventh stanza reflects both sides of this new opposition. After saying that his devotion can never flag and comparing himself to a hollow straw in the wind, he grandly declares that he will not criticize her for her coldness, but the last line qualifies his submission: he expects that she will stop rejecting him in the future. This line leads to his first meditation on her body (“be faihz, delgatz e plas”) and the poem concludes with his prayer that God help him obtain the joy for which he has been waiting. The Biblical reference emphasizes the poet’s nearly blasphemous conflation of his sensual desire with the divine plan.
     The formal play is so central to the piece, as formal play would be in a Bach fugue or a Kandinsky composition, that the thematic focus is blurred. Is the writer a faithful Christian or a libertine? A courtly lover under amorous discipline or a self-seeking cynic? Is poetry worth the utterance? These and other issues hover unresolved, not because the poet cannot be decisive, but because human consciousness is suspended between the carnal and the spiritual, between the ego and the other, between dominance and submission. The text’s consumer can hearken to the dynamic dialectic of such oppositions in Bernart and feel a resonance of similar tensions in all human consciousness, including those in other written texts and in the reader’s own mind.




1. In this he resembles Sonny Boy Williamson’s use of the conventions of the blues.

2. Of course, among the most time-honored rhetorical figures are those in which the writer claims not to know what to say. This includes the claim that one is incompetent at expression (such as “unaccustomed as I am to public speaking . . .”) or the claim that the topic is beyond language (“her beauty cannot be expressed”). These are varieties of ignoratio. Another related figure is the interruption of the flow of speech through uncontrollable emotion (such as “let me pause a moment, I can’t go on.”) This is called aposiopesis.


3. Schematically the reasoning is rather like the Buddhist sages analyzing the reality of the phenomenal world which, to simplify considerably, many deemed to both exist and not exist.

4. Apparently the poet had Psalm 84:10 in mind.

Hell’s House

Last night I watched a 1932 B movie directed by Howard Higgin called Hell’s House, notable primarily for early performances by Bette Davis and Pat O’Brien. When it was first released, the New York Times’ Mordaunt Hall found it “hardly adult” despite a few “moderately interesting interludes.” Its very ordinariness, though, is central to its popular character. In spite of what might seem to some elitist, intellectual, and counter-cultural tendencies (I don’t care to watch most contemporary popular films), my pleasure in watching such a narrative doubtless derives from the same source as its original broad audience. The specific “popular” character of such works may thus transcend the decades in the same way that today’s mass market movies leap across seas both physical and cultural to claim the international audiences that American films have enjoyed since Hollywood’s founding.

In its themes popular art undeniably tends to reinforce attitudes which are socially normative, the sort their critics might call idées reçues. On the other hand “high art,” especially since the Romantic Movement, has sought especially to suggest problems, contradictions, and tensions in established ideas, if not to challenge or replace them altogether. Every work may be located somewhere along this continuum.

Hell’s House, like many popular works, is lavish with sentiment, melodrama, and shocking horror. At the outset our young hero Jimmy’s mother dies in his arms; the reformatory where he finds himself practices harsh discipline that borders on the absurd. Boys work like slaves in a brickyard are subjected to such punishments as standing toes to a line staring at a point on the wall and being sent to solitary confinement so neglectful it can be lethal. Once the hapless Jimmy’s own suffering is relieved (in a typical happy ending), the film-maker inserts then a recollection of the deceased Shorty to allow a wallow of emotion and send viewers out of the theater with a tear in the eye.

But such recreational indulgence in excessive pity and fear cannot itself explain my affection for Hell’s House and the success, not just of American films worldwide, but also of such different genres as Bollywood musical productions and Hong Kong martial arts films, suggests that their appeal is not exclusively thematic, though they do comfort the consumer by reaffirming his community’s specific preexisting attitudes. There is in addition a formal, structural delight in seeing oppositions raised and then dissolved that more resembles the patterning of a musical piece than it does other sorts of less predictable stories.
As the movie is presently little-remembered by either critics or cultists, it is doubtless necessary to explain the plot. I hope the parallels with a thousand other works will suggest themselves.

The film opens with an idyll of country life. Jimmy appears as consistently virtuous and naïve, a model of filial piety despite what the viewer imagines to be his wholesome and active boy-life. Suddenly, without reason or warning, the calamity of his mother’s death strikes. Dissolved in tears, he cradles her lifeless body.

The specter of mortality itself is here multiplied by the distress of the boy, the more shocking since it was caused by a callous hit-and-run driver. Yet, in the film, this problem is rapidly resolved. Jimmy travels to the city where a kindly Uncle Henry and aunt Emma Clark take him in. Lingering mourning, a unqualified or uninterested relative, a host of possible complications are all ignored to introduce the next opposition: honesty and dishonesty.

It seems a certain Matt Kelly (played by Pat O’Brien) boards with the Clarks. A boastful but amiable fellow, he claims to have high-level connections, though in fact he is a low-level bootlegger. Bette Davis plays his girlfriend Peggy Gardner, a character who consorts with petty crooks, yet seems altogether decent herself, if a bit street-smart.

Impressed by Kelly’s blather and exceedingly naïve, Jimmy becomes entangled in his business and gets arrested and sent to a reformatory while the real criminal remains free. Here the story’s central theme is established: an exposé of the juvenile justice system. The time-serving superintendent of the institution is not so much vicious as opportunistic. He would like to have the resources to run the place responsibly, but, failing that, he conceals its cruelty, presumably protecting the politicians who gave him his position. He acts as though he will assist campaigning newspaperman Frank Gebhardt, but conceals his institution’s failings. Despite its reformist theme, Hell’s House fails to evoke even a hint of the drama and pathos of Ford’s Grapes of Wrath or even Mervyn LeRoy’s I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.

In the reform school, Jimmy meets his bunkmate, Shorty, who is not only small of stature but has a bad heart. At their first encounter, Shorty proactively knocks him down, suggesting the place’s pervasive brutality, but they soon become friends. Taking a rap for Jimmy, Shorty ends up in an isolation cell where his illness becomes critical. Desperate to assist him, Jimmy finds a way to escape and enlists Peggy’s help. They contact the crusading writer who is able gather from Jimmy the facts he needs to enlighten the public about the school’s shortcomings. Matt is pressured by his concerned girlfriend to confess his own role, exonerating Jimmy, but it too late for Shorty who dies, alone and ignored. The senseless death of Jimmy’s mother at the hands of an irresponsible driver is echoed in a nice unifying touch by Shorty’s death in a society that shirks responsibility for its “delinquent” youth.

Just as Jimmy’s orphan status was relieved by the generosity of his kindly uncle and aunt, Matt Kelly’s criminal habits are erased. Due to beneficent female influence, he is willing to abandon his lying and bootlegging, do his time, and presumably return to society prepared to marry Peggy and live as an upright citizen. It seems the newspaper’s coverage will be sufficient to produce more humane and effective juvenile facilities, and all is well in the world again, as in the opening rural idyll. Mortality itself, individual immorality, and social injustice are all resolved, though the closing scene milks poor Shorty’s memory for just a bit more pathos.

Like one of Dickens’ individual philanthropists saving a suffering poor boy from the dog-eat-dog lower depths, Gebhardt’s intervention magically settles the social question. This maneuver is no more convincing on the realistic level than the swift replacement of Jimmy’s mother or Matt’s moral awakening, but it doesn’t matter. Even on the thematic level, such stories are a sort of sympathetic magic. By such “happy endings” popular culture reassures its audience that all is well, that life is livable, people may stray but are all right in the end, and society is in fact operating smoothly -- any problems require nothing more than the spotlight of publicity.

Even apart, though, from the satisfaction derived from such exemplary unknotting of contradictions, there is surely an abstract pleasure in the pattern of thesis, antithesis, synthesis that goes beyond specific cultural data. This is one reason that widely divergent audiences in different lands who share few values may enjoy the same stories, and a critic who believes little of the moral, psychological, or social implications such a film presents about lived experience can still watch an inconsequential film with satisfaction. Such a narrative generates complacency beyond any ideology, reassuring the viewer that, despite difficulties and even traumas, all will come right in the end.

Lady Maisry

     In language, theme, and style, “Lady Maisry” is representative of the ballad tradition. Though much literary criticism, even of oral materials, privileges innovation and individuality while minimizing the value of similarities between a text and others, such common elements may be centrally important, particularly in the case of popular genres. This may be exemplified by a consideration of this classic song, in many ways a typical border ballad.
     Since the text was first transcribed from oral performance in 1799 “for his own amusement” by a Greek professor with antiquarian tastes, it has proven quite popular. It appears not only as Childs ballad 65 and in Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s 1910 Oxford Book of Ballads, but in such non-scholarly journals as Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine. [1] In academic circles it has acquired variations, sources, and influences while, ever since the sixties, it has never lacked interpreters among modern folk-style performers. [2]
     The emotional focus is one of the most popular world-wide, evoking an exceedingly old gender stereotype: the persecuted lady, familiar from Greek tragedy, Yuan dynasty plays, and The Perils of Pauline. Just as the favorite theme of lyric is romantic love, commonly obstructed or unrequited, in the sentimental and melodramatic ballad genre, love frequently inspires a tragedy marked by a loss of sexual purity. In the classic dodge used by Andreas Capellanus and the Pearl-Poet (in Cleanness) as well as by many exploitation filmmakers, one can describe every sort of immorality if one simply concludes by drawing a cautionary moral. Thus the listener is free to savor Lady Maisry’s grand affair and then to shiver in horror at the violence that follows.
     A certain ambiguity is established at the outset as the Lady spurns the honorable suits of her fellow-countrymen who approached in a respectable manner through her family and gave her gifts. While her rejection of the “young lords o’ the north country” could signify arrogance, it might also be construed as indicating the purity of her love, independent of family or local ties. It is, at any rate, tempting fate, as the sequel demonstrates.
     Indeed, she not only has chosen an English lover; she openly declares as much to the local lads, and this ill-advised candor sets the narrative in motion. A low menial, a “kitchy-boy,” relays the information that she is pregnant to her brother to whom the news is an intolerable disgrace requiring immediate and extreme action, an “honor killing” much like that expected of families in some contemporary Muslim cultures. He confronts his sister, threatening her with death unless she forsakes her lover.
     In this dilemma, she calls on the aid of her lover Lord William through the agency of a loyal servant, but he arrives too late. She has been burned to death, and he resolves to burn her kin in revenge, and finally, unable to go on without her, to cast himself into the flames. The song ends with a thrill of horror and this vision of general conflagration.
     The thematic emphasis falls heavily on the competing demands of the morality of love, where the lady and her William defy social convention yet behave in a romantically noble fashion, sacrificing all for passion. A possible patriotic theme vanishes as the English lord acquits himself well, sealing his tragic valor with a pledge of suicide. The representative of traditional values, the brother, concerned for the honor of the family, is portrayed in a wholly unattractive way, so harsh and unfeeling that his moral position is undermined. He threatens her with immediate death the moment he confronts her. [3] Similarly, the class issue is raised by the low status of the treacherous kitchen worker, ignoble in deeds as in birth, only to be canceled by the readiness of the “bonny boy,” certainly a servant or dependent, who carries her message to her champion. With these bipolar oppositions nicely balanced, the story of star-crossed love may play out.
     The song thus insists on the primacy of desire – there is no denying the lady’s willful love-death. The issues of nationalism, morality, and class do not vanish but are subsumed in the ungovernable passion that drives the story. Received ideas govern: ladies are passive (if stubborn), males active to the point of violence. The manor-house setting raises interest in the story, as people today take a lively interest in the affairs of British royalty and Hollywood celebrities. Like viewers of many a modern movie, the listener to “Lady Maisry” can enjoy the second-hand experience of what must be understood as a story of sexual misconduct – after all, the lady’s liaison is secret and violates her obligations to Christian morality, family and community – without violating any norms. In fact, the song could pass for an object lesson in the damage potential of unloosed sexuality.
     The charm of this particular song, I think, is that it provides all the reassuring affirmation of popular art while retaining knots of ambiguity. The simpler art will portray one hundred per cent heroes and villains. Here one can only react with some ambivalence to each of the three main characters. The lady who loves so well might seem a trifle stand-offish to her local suitors, what the troubadours called daungereux (not far from what a more modern idiom would condemn as “hincty”), while engaging in a secret and forbidden premarital liaison. The brother who represents the conventional morality that governs most listeners’ lives is cold and brutal. The lordly lover, while valiant and loyal, having failed to sweep her off to safety at his own estate, comes, in the end, only tardily to her aid. In spite of the formulaic plot, the song hints at the complexities of lived experience.
     Further, while acknowledging the contradictions of gender, ethnicity, and class, the song spotlights desire as the primary motive force for life, the principal cause of conflict and drama. The governing opposition of the song is the lady’s reckless search for love and her brother’s conviction that he must control eros in the name of honor, however harsh the means. In the world of the ballad as in the Eden story and the real world, people suffer because if desire. The individual who has experienced this in life may, upon hearing the song, enjoy the role of spectator, relishing like the viewer of tragedy the fact that it is others who suffer this time while knowing that similar, if less lurid, calamities occur regularly.
     While, like other popular and oral texts, “Lady Maisry” reinforces received ideas and accepted behavior, it also illustrates literature’s particular ability to reflect the contradiction, ambivalence, and mystery of lived experience. The listener is able at once to take pleasure in the sensationalism of an illicit affair and a gruesome denouement while feeling some kinship with the passionate lady, the moralistic brother, and the lover who fails to save his lady. Issues of gender, class, nationalism, family, and sexual purity fade, leaving the listener to reflect on the turbulence stirred by irresistible desire.


1. For January 1845.

2. John Jacob Niles collected it in 1934 in the Appalachians and vividly recreates the scene in his Ballad Book. A contemporary U.K. group not only recorded the song but calls itself Lady Maisery.

3. In an odd detail, he threatens to kill the messenger if the bad news he brings be a lie, yet also promises a “malison” or curse should the information be accurate.


I

THE YOUNG lords o’ the north country
Have all a-wooing gone,
To win the love of Lady Maisry,
But o’ them she wou’d hae none.

II

O they hae courted Lady Maisry 5
Wi’ a’ kin kind of things;
An’ they hae sought her Lady Maisry
Wi’ brooches an’ wi’ rings.

III

An’ they ha’ sought her Lady Maisry
Frae father and frae mother; 10
An’ they ha’ sought her Lady Maisry
Frae sister an’ frae brother.

IV

An’ they ha’ follow’d her Lady Maisry
Thro’ chamber an’ thro’ ha’;
But a’ that they cou’d say to her, 15
Her answer still was Na.

V

‘O haud your tongues, young men,’ she says,
‘An’ think nae mair o’ me;
For I’ve gi’en my love to an English lord,
An’ think nae mair o’ me.’ 20

VI

Her father’s kitchy-boy heard that,
An ill death may he dee!
An’ he is on to her brother,
As fast as gang cou’d he.

VII

‘O is my father an’ my mother well, 25
But an’ my brothers three?
Gin my sister Lady Maisry be well,
There’s naething can ail me.’—

VIII

‘Your father an’ your mother is well,
But an’ your brothers three; 30
Your sister Lady Maisry ’s well,
So big wi’ bairn gangs she.’

IX

‘Gin this be true you tell to me,
My malison light on thee!
But gin it be a lie you tell, 35
You sal be hangit hie.’

X

He ’s done him to his sister’s bow’r,
Wi’ meikle doole an’ care;
An’ there he saw her Lady Maisry
Kaiming her yellow hair. 40

XI

‘O wha is aught that bairn,’ he says,
‘That ye sae big are wi’?
And gin ye winna own the truth,
This moment ye sall dee.’

XII

She turn’d her right and roun’ about, 45
An’ the kame fell frae her han’;
A trembling seiz’d her fair body,
An’ her rosy cheek grew wan.

XIII

‘O pardon me, my brother dear,
An’ the truth I’ll tell to thee; 50
My bairn it is to Lord William,
An’ he is betroth’d to me.’—

XIV

‘O cou’d na ye gotten dukes, or lords,
Intill your ain country,
That ye draw up wi’ an English dog, 55
To bring this shame on me?

XV

‘But ye maun gi’ up the English lord,
Whan your young babe is born;
For, gin you keep by him an hour langer,
Your life sall be forlorn.’— 60

XVI

‘I will gi’ up this English blood,
Till my young babe be born;
But the never a day nor hour langer,
Tho’ my life should be forlorn.’—

XVII

‘O whare is a’ my merry young men, 65
Whom I gi’ meat and fee,
To pu’ the thistle and the thorn,
To burn this woman wi’?’—

XVIII

She turn’d her head on her left shoulder,
Saw her girdle hang on a tree; 70
‘O God bless them wha gave me that,
They’ll never give more to me.

XIX

‘O whare will I get a bonny boy,
To help me in my need,
To rin wi’ haste to Lord William, 75
And bid him come wi’ speed?’—

XX

O out it spake a bonny boy,
Stood by her brother’s side:
‘O I would run your errand, lady,
O’er a’ the world sae wide. 80

XXI

‘Aft have I run your errands, lady,
Whan blawn baith win’ and weet;
But now I’ll rin your errand, lady,
Wi’ saut tears on my cheek.’

XXII

O whan he came to broken briggs, 85
He bent his bow and swam,
An’ whan he came to the green grass growin
He slack’d his shoone and ran.

XXIII

O whan he came to Lord William’s gates,
He baed na to chap or ca’, 90
But set his bent bow till his breast,
An’ lightly lap’ the wa’;
An’, or the porter was at the gate,
The boy was i’ the ha’.

XXIV

‘O is my biggins broken, boy? 95
Or is my towers won?
Or is my lady lighter yet,
Of a dear daughter or son?’—

XXV

‘Your biggin is na broken, sir,
Nor is your towers won; 100
But the fairest lady in a’ the land
For you this day maun burn.’—

XXVI

‘O saddle me the black, the black,
Or saddle me the brown;
O saddle me the swiftest steed 105
That ever rade frae a town!’

XXVII

Or he was near a mile awa’,
She heard his wild horse sneeze:
‘Mend up the fire, my false brother,
It’s na come to my knees.’ 110

XXVIII

O whan he lighted at the gate,
She heard his bridle ring;
‘Mend up the fire, my false brother,
It’s far yet frae my chin.

XXIX

‘Mend up the fire to me, brother, 115
Mend up the fire to me;
For I see him comin’ hard an’ fast,
Will soon mend it up to thee.

XXX

‘O gin my hands had been loose, Willy,
Sae hard as they are boun’, 120
I would have turn’d me frae the gleed,
And casten out your young son.’—

XXXI

‘O I’ll gar burn for you, Maisry,
Your father an’ your mother;
An’ I’ll gar burn for you, Maisry, 125
Your sister an’ your brother.

XXXII

‘An’ I’ll gar burn for you, Maisry,
The chief of a’ your kin;
An’ the last bonfire that I come to,
Mysel’ I will cast in.’ 130

Thoughts on Mythology

These are notes from my recent talk on mythology at the Seligmann Center. I pass on my ideas in this raw form, without any attempt to work up an essay, in the belief that some of the ideas may be useful.


1
     The Greek word muthos in Homer has a broad meaning, fundamentally, anything delivered by word of mouth. The term came later to indicate conversation, counsel, the subject of speech, the matter, a purpose, a saying, a rumor; then a fiction or legend.

2
     In contemporary literary use, it is a story not tied to an individual text. Mythology arises as a sort of collective narrative: a body of linked and particularly significant stories that express in symbolic order the world-view of a community. Myth is deeply involved not only with the earliest poetry, but also science, philosophy, religion, and history, in fact all the intellectual disciplines. The definitive authority myths claim is evident in the fact that they often concern the gods or other spiritual beings. Myths are often taken as literal history, though they are also used by writers in self-consciously symbolic ways. Myth fades into legend and other cultural material.

3
     Not every collective narrative is mythic. Historical events are shared by large numbers of people. They may resonate in mythic ways, but the presumptive loyalty is to real events. Jokes lack the vast implications of myths.

4
     I continue to find Northrup Frye’s classification useful.

1) superior in kind to people and to their environment: mythic
2) superior in degree to people and environment: romance
3) superior in degree to people but not to environment: high mimetic (a hero of epic or tragedy, Aristotle’s hero)
4) inferior to the reader or equal: low-mimetic, ironic (realism, comedy)

     Frye notes, “Looking over this table, we see that European fiction, over the last fifteen centuries has moved steadily down this list . . . Something of the same progression can be traced in Classical literature, too.”

5
     In The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art David Lewis-Williams analyzes cave paintings and posits a simultaneous birth of language, art, and religion. With the birth of signs came the ability to lie.

6
      Mythic references may be traditional (Homeric hymns, Elder Edda, anthropological texts), literary (Ovid, Shakespeare, Rothenburg), modern (Superman, cowboy hero, Jewish blood guilt, Lincoln), or idiosyncratic (Blake, Yeats, outsider art).

7
     In poetry mythological references may serve to universalize or create group identity (as in the many medieval romances which wither begin or end by invoking the blessing of Christ), to compress (as in Raleigh’s reference to Philomel implying a world of violence in a word), to ironize, (as in Joyce’s Ulysses or the Coens’ O Brother Where Art Thou), or to decorate (as in Herrick’s “Parcae” where Atropos charms rather than frightens).

8
     Approaches to the understanding of myth include:

1) Euhemerism regards myths as distorted accounts of real historical events. Herodotus in his reasonable way, has recourse to this explanation. (On the other hand some ritual theorists would agree with Frye (above), and hold the opposite view: that gods degenerate over the years into myth, then legend (with supernatural apparatus), appearing next as history and finally as comedy.

2) Mythology has often been viewed as a sort of allegory with the gods representing either natural phenomena or concepts. The 19th century Sanskritist Max Müller supported an allegorical theory of myth. Modern variations of this theme include Freudian, Jungian, or other psychological theories.

3) Myths have been viewed as solely functional, often a form of social control. A simple form of this approach would be the vulgar Marxist analyst to whom every myth comments on class relations, but Malinowski took much the same approach.

4) The structural theory states that myths are patterned after the human mind as well as human nature. Claude Levi-Strauss, makes the claim that “myth is language,” and stresses formal play with meaning arising only from contrasts within a pattern, not from individual elements.

5) According to the myth-ritual theory, the existence of myth is tied to ritual. In its most extreme form, this theory claims that myths arose to explain rituals. I am myself fond on the work of James Frazer and the Cambridge School.

6) Myth has been considered the human language for investigating the metaphysical. In this sense myth is much like religion, providing human’s most profound analysis of the cosmos.

7) Myth is a symbolic statement about reality. Each culture defines and defends its assumptions with myth. Myth tends toward the encyclopedic, offering seamless explanations and prescriptions for the significant passages of life.

9
     To test these ideas with texts, I followed with this brief anthology of poem’s mentioning Aphrodite.

from Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (my translation)

She went to Paphos -- Cyprus -- where her
aromatic altar and her temple stood,
and she went in and shut the shining doors. 60
The graces then anointed her with oil
such as blooms on bodies of the gods.
(The oil was sweet, ambrosial, smelled so fine!)
Then laughter-loving Aphrodite donned
fine clothes of golden fabric on her flesh. 65
She left sweet-smelling Cyprus then for Troy
(fast she flew and high, the clouds her road),
to spring-rich Ida, beast-land, came she then,
she went through hills right to his home and after her
came bright-eyed lions, fawning grey-furred wolves 70
and bears, fast leopards ravenous for deer,
and then her heart rejoiced at seeing them
and to their hearts she tossed hot lust; they paired
in twos and mated in the shade,


Thomas Wyatt (the first stanza of an untitled poem)

Though this port : and I thy servaunt true,
And thou thy self doist cast thy bemes from hye
From thy chieff howse, promising to renew
Both Joye and eke delite, behold yet how that I,
Bannisshed from my blisse, carefully do crye,
"Helpe now, Citherea, my lady dere,
"My ferefull trust," en vogant la galere.


from Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis

Over one arm the lusty courser's rein
Under her other was the tender boy, 32
Who blush'd and pouted in a dull disdain,
With leaden appetite, unapt to toy;
She red and hot as coals of glowing fire
He red for shame, but frosty in desire. 36

The studded bridle on a ragged bough
Nimbly she fastens;—O! how quick is love:—
The steed is stalled up, and even now
To tie the rider she begins to prove: 40
Backward she push'd him, as she would be thrust,
And govern'd him in strength, though not in lust . . .

'Fondling,' she saith, 'since I have hemm'd thee here
Within the circuit of this ivory pale,
I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale: 232
Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

'Within this limit is relief enough,
Sweet bottom-grass and high delightful plain, 236
Round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough,
To shelter thee from tempest and from rain:
Then be my deer, since I am such a park; 239
No dog shall rouse thee, though a thousand bark.'


A Hymn to Venus and Cupid (Herrick)

SEA-BORN goddess, let me be
By thy son thus grac'd and thee;
That whene'er I woo, I find
Virgins coy but not unkind.
Let me when I kiss a maid
Taste her lips so overlaid
With love's syrup, that I may,
In your temple when I pray,
Kiss the altar and confess
There's in love no bitterness.

Final stanza from Un Voyage à Cythère (Baudelaire)
On your isle, O Venus! I found upright only
A symbolic gallows from which hung my image...
O! Lord! give me the strength and the courage
To contemplate my body and soul without loathing!
Dans ton île, ô Vénus! je n'ai trouvé debout
Qu'un gibet symbolique où pendait mon image...
— Ah! Seigneur! donnez-moi la force et le courage
De contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans dégoût!

Venus Anadyomène (Rimbaud)

As from a green zinc coffin, a woman’s
Head with brown hair heavily pomaded
Emerges slowly and stupidly from an old bathtub,
With bald patches rather badly hidden;

Then the fat gray neck, broad shoulder-blades
Sticking out; a short back which curves in and bulges;
Then the roundness of the buttocks seems to take off;
The fat under the skin appears in slabs:

The spine is a bit red; and the whole thing has a smell
Strangely horrible; you notice especially
Odd details you’d have to see with a magnifying glass…

The buttocks bear two engraved words: CLARA VENUS;
—And that whole body moves and extends its broad rump
Hideously beautiful with an ulcer on the anus.

Comme d’un cercueil vert en fer blanc, une tête
De femme à cheveux bruns fortement pommadés
D’une vieille baignoire émerge, lente et bête,
Avec des déficits assez mal ravaudés;

Puis le col gras et gris, les larges omoplates
Qui saillent; le dos court qui rentre et qui ressort;
Puis les rondeurs des reins semblent prendre l’essor;
La graisse sous la peau paraît en feuilles plates:

L’échine est un peu rouge, et le tout sent un goût
Horrible étrangement; on remarque surtout
Des singularités qu’il faut voir à la loupe…

Les reins portent deux mots gravés: CLARA VENUS;
—Et tout ce corps remue et tend sa large croupe
Belle hideusement d’un ulcère à l’anus.


An autumn morning in Shokoku-ji (Snyder)

Last night watching the Pleiades,
Breath smoking in the moonlight,
Bitter memory like vomit
Choked my throat.
I unrolled a sleeping bag
On mats on the porch
Under thick autumn stars.
In dream you appeared
(Three times in nine years)
Wild, cold, and accusing.
I woke shamed and angry:
The pointless wars of the heart.
Almost dawn. Venus and Jupiter.
The first time I have
Ever seen them close.


Birth of Eventually Venus (MacLeish)

Cast up by the sea
By the seventh wave
Beyond the sea reach
In the rubble of weed and
Wet twig
The not yet amphibious
Animalcula
Gasps and wiggles on the beach
Gathering her long gold hair about her
And gazing with pure eyes
Upon the unknown world.

Venus Over the Desert (Williams)

If I do not sin, she said, you shall not
walk in long gowns down stone corridors.
There is no reprieve where there is no fall-
ing off. I lie in your beds all night, from
me you wake and go about your tasks. My flesh
clings to your bones. What use is holiness
unless it affirms my perfections, my breasts,
my thighs which you part, shaking, and my lips
the door to my pleasures? Sin, you call it,
but there cannot be cold unless the heat
has bred it, how can you know otherwise? Love
comfort me in the face of my defeats! Poor
monks, you think you are gentle but I tell you
you kill as sure as shot kills a bird flying.

The Death of Venus (also titled the Birth of Venus) (Creeley)

I dreamt her sensual proportions
had suffered sea-change,

that she was a porpoise
a sea-beast rising lucid from the mist.

The sound of waves killed speech
But there were gestures –

of my own, it was to call her closer,
of hers, she snorted and filled her lungs with water,

then sank, to the bottom,
and, looking down, clear it was, like crystal,

there I saw her.

Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" as Structuralist Charm

“All the world know the beauty of the beautiful and in doing this they have [the idea of] what ugliness is ... so it is that existence and non-existence give birth the one to [the idea of] the other." (from Legge's old version of ch. 2 of the author he called Lao Tzŭ)


     As a metaphysical principle, of course, Lao Tzu's proposition may be tested against any phenomenon, but it has special relevance to the examination of literary texts. Literature has always excelled in dialectic. Often poetry arises in the tension between true and not true, between sweet and bitter. Metaphor always declares that the tenor both is and is not the vehicle (to use I. A. Richards’ terms). In a relatively recent restatement of this principle, Paul de Man identifies, as an essential characteristic of literature, “the self-reflecting mirror effect by means of which a work of fiction asserts, by its very existence, its separation from empirical reality.” Later, he suggests that even a critic structures his work “in terms of a series of dramatic events: reversals, repetitions, about-faces, and resolutions.”
     These considerations illuminate a reading of Shelley in particularly useful ways — Shelley is, after all, a definitive type of the alienated self-conscious modern artist. His “Ode to the West Wind” is a programmatic statement and self-portrait, and both the program and the portrait are projected in antinomies so dynamic as to resemble an engine’s pulsing pistons, or, more accurately, the turning of a gyroscope.
     One may begin to examine the oscillations with a common initial response to the poem’s tensions: the recognition of the wind as a quasi-divine animating pneuma which revivifies the poet and promises a future bloom of his faculties. To this system one may associate the suggestions of hymn-like entreaty (for the poet’s ego-driven desires), of revolution (for the fulfillment of society), and of apocalypse (for the collapse of dualities, a state beyond enlightenment).
     Not far behind this reading, though, lurks its sinister counterpart: if spring is near, then a following winter is equally implied with every contrary discomfort and threat. Apart from the threats to the poet’s comfort from a winter of depression, suffering, repression, and ignorance (to follow the thematic registers noted above), the whole progression assumes a static cyclic quality against which the poet’s emotions, while poignant, are absurd. His descent is merely the low point on a psychic roll which, like the year and Sisyphus, will meaninglessly rise and fall. Similarly, in the Purana with which Zimmer begins his Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, Indra, the old divine monarch, is humbled and taught detachment by the vision of universes coming and going, “an innumerable host,” out of every pore of the body of Vishnu. How then to assert the self?
     One may step one stage further back (the poem itself rings all these changes) and regard the repetitive ups and downs as exemplifying the soul of vitality itself, its rhythm or heartbeat, hence rendering any intensely experienced moments on its course self-validating. Then, however, the reader recalls that the poem's starting point is negative and, while balance is apparently present, autumn and sorrow are more potently present than their contraries, destroyer is mentioned before preserver, the seablooms tremble, etc.
     To take this dance only one step further, the sense of exalted energy is undeniable. The wind is wakening. Pleasure is seen as torpor. Indeed, the poem itself is evidence of Shelley's poetic vitality, the gift for which he was praying. Thus the victory is inherent in the words on the page. As we hear in Oedipus (l. 896) the dancing of the chorus is itself evidence that the land is well-regulated.
     The rhyme scheme and stanzaic organization support this movement as each tercet contains its own successor and opposite, unstable, impelling progress, and yet each stanza is finished off by a couplet which suggests settled balance. One feels neither the forward linear movement of a wholly stichic form nor the rounded volumes of a stanza’s completion. By almost being sonnets, yet not quite, the parts of the poem tease the reader and resist definition.
     On a smaller scale the same dialectical cunning is apparent. Note, for instance, the pairing of ashes and sparks as an image, or of chained and tameless. Note the provocative “if” in the last line.
     Acoustic elements are likewise active in structuring Shelley's engine of contraries. Initial “w” is a key sound, announced in the title and the strident first lines. These “w”s embody the wind and increase through the poem (as a matter of fact, the tabulator of lines with w’s in each ten lines of text will discover the following pattern: 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5). Thus they first appear to represent a passage in time, a phenomenon with a distinct beginning and end, an entity free from the eternal recurrence. The words are carefully selected, though and strengthen the overall structure at the same time as they cast doubt on it. The next occurrences of the sound after the opening line are in “wintry” and “winged,” the first implying death and the second new life. The pair after these is “will” [“be a sepulcher”] and “waken,” again two wholly opposed aspects of the action of the wind.
     The wind is the opposition, the tension, but in no harmonious sense. The dialectic is never resolved. Shelley experiences no place where the joy and pain of interpenetration cease; rather, by imagining such a place, he renders both joy and pain more acute. What might have been a lament on the conditions of human life or a panegyric to the cosmic design, becomes, though its beauty, a bit of magic warding off despair and psychic dissolution. The order of words, though only intensifying the agony of existence, strikes a redemptive pose. The tension of bipolar oppositions is at once foregrounded and ameliorated.

The Role of Rhetoric in Theocritus' Idyll V

     The studies of rhetoric and poetics have closely interrelated histories. In antiquity the distinction between verse and prose was often far from rigid, and the early composition of rhetorical technai and their inclusion in the educational trivium led to their often assuming the role of real general theories of literature. [1] The process was continuous and cumulative throughout European history until a few centuries ago. Indeed, the chief medieval critical theorists (like Geoffrey of Vinsauf and Matthew of Vendôme) write wholly about poetry but with an agenda, a vocabulary, and a conceptual foundation all borrowed directly from rhetorical thought. Even among the Greeks themselves, there is no clear line to distinguish the two fields: examples meant to serve the needs of orators are frequently drawn from Homer or other poets (the so-called “Gorgianic figures” have an explicitly poetic origin, for example) and, on the other hand, poets borrowed back from the exhaustive inventories of literary devices compiled by authors who were primarily concerned to meet the needs of speech-makers,
     This interdependence of rhetoric and poetry is not the product only of the historical circumstance that rhetorical handbooks were written before poetry as such received much speculative attention: it is also the outgrowth of specifically Greek poetic practice. Beyond the fact that self-consciously cadenced prose was much admired, thus compromising the main criterion marking it off from verse, the ancient (and medieval) poets had a view of their art that caused it to be amenable to approaching rhetorical guidelines. The overriding concern for the reader (related to persuasion as a goal in properly rhetorical texts and to communication -- often of pathos -- for the poetic) [2] and the conviction that the job of the poet is to sway and instruct as well as to delight caused the two to coalesce more naturally in antiquity than they may seem to do for readers who are under the influence of romantic ideas that deny the importance of the artist's relation to his audience.
     Beyond this, the ancients also held a highly conventionalized view of literature that stressed the importance of intertextuality and the significance of topoi and genre for the understanding of any single text. Inasmuch as rhetorical handbooks set down formal expectations and catalogued acceptable figures of speech and thought they tended to create their own anticipatory hermeneutic apparatus. Although their formulations were originally drawn from inductive examination of existing admired texts, they were then applied in new writing by authors bearing prior commentaries in mind in ways that would be unintelligible without the reader's being privy to the convention involved. It is this very heavy conventionality that makes much ancient and medieval poetry difficult to read and understand today, and it is specifically the task of rhetorical studies to illuminate that particularly troublesome blind spot. I regard Theocritus as one of those poets who wrote what might be called meta-rhetorical poetry, poetry in which --the devices and conventions of writing become more than ornamental or supportive of a theme; they become the theme itself.
     This rhetorical rereading of a Theocritean idyll is today all the more necessary in light of the general revaluation of rhetoric which might be regarded as having begun with the work of Curtius and Zumthor in the 1940s and which has continued through Barthes’ rhetoric course at the College de France and other contemporaries who have perceived a deep affinity between the way that rhetoric has traditionally viewed linguistic artifacts and the newly evolving attitudes of today's critical avant-garde. A grand succession of theorists, the high road really of European tradition, has consistently viewed literature as a self-contained object, primarily referring to other texts, highly artificial and only in ways that are either playfully trivial or highly conflicted and ambiguous attempting to “imitate” nature. Recovery of the implications of rhetoric for poetry will shed light on this theoretical question and on Theocritus’ position on the issue as it was posed in his day: in the Callimachus versus Apollonius controversy. [3]
     I have selected Theocritus' Idyll V for examination with a certain arbitrariness -- any of his works or of those other poems associated with his name would do equally well. I believe that an analysis of the rhetorical code expressed in that poem will reveal that that code coexists with the semantic and acoustic codes, and, further, that the rhetorical code is the most significant of the three, [4] although it is the one most easily discounted or ignored completely. The choice of Theocritus is not, however, arbitrary. He is one of the Greek poets in need of resuscitation today. Though his name is secure thanks to the genre that he seems to have fathered, he is rarely read with pleasure and more rarely with understanding. As an Alexandrian poet he was highly self-conscious about his work and was probably familiar with much other poetry as well as literary theory and school-knowledge. His dramatic Idylls might very well be analyzed as little epideictic set-pieces, but in this paper I intend to concentrate on his tropes, figures of speech and thought. Though the whole procedure for planning discourse was adopted from rhetoric to poetry, it was the figures that are most relevant to this poetry. Rather than draw up a complete list of the rhetorical figures in Idyll V, I intend to isolate those few which seem to me most significant for defining the theme of the poem, for it is these which are most relevant to all poems which are similarly saturated with rhetorical learning.
     Before turning to these figures, though, it is necessary to briefly sketch the general character of the poem. It describes an amoebaean competition between Comatas, a goatherd, and Lacon, a shepherd. As fictional speech put into the mouths of conventional characters it reminds one of the practice of writing epideictic showpieces in fictional personae. As a contest in language between two rivals complete with a judge and a decision, it places their use of words squarely in the agonistic atmosphere appropriate to the assembly or the courtroom in which rhetoric was so much at home. I will concentrate my attention on the words of this singing-match itself.
     The very first pair of couplets Comatas and Lacon exchange constructs a conceptual pattern highly typical of rhetoric yet never analyzed by writers on poetry. Here it is clear that the argument does not proceed in either a logical or narrative straight line with a conclusion that follows from, and marks an advance over what had preceded. Rather, Theocritus is concerned only with the relationship between the parts — truly a case of a structuralist poem. It is purely formal, like the technopaignia so closely associated with pastoralism (poems in the shape of a wing, an egg, a pipe, altar, etc.). The purpose of these opening couplets is to build a pattern with an almost geometric sense of elaboration. The first few words set up the initial terms of an analogy: the Muses are said to stand in a certain relation to the author. But the reader feels as though the specific content is only secondarily significant. The fact that the sentence describes a love-relation is decorative, although it accumulates over the poem as a whole to the point that it constitutes an insistent recurrence which assumes importance by determining the limits of the whole rather like the border on a piece of fabric or pottery.
     Just past the end of the first line the first full statement of relationship is established.

(ll. 80-81) Muses : Comatas :: Muses: Daphnis (Comatas claims superiority)

     The poet reinforces this simple assertion with another relation that contributes the whole coercive force of sympathetic magic.

(ll. 82-83) Apollo: Lacon:: poetry: goat sacrifice (Lacon claims superiority)

     Comatas’ response is to brag that he is rich in both goods and love.

(ll. 84-85) many goats: Comatas:: maiden’s love: Comatas (Comatas claims superiority)

     Not to be outdone, Lacon claims equal ego-success.

(ll.86-87) much cheese: Lacon:: boy’s love: Lacon (Lacon claims superiority)

     Lines 88-89 expand on the previous claims of sexual attractiveness, the one to a woman, the other to a man. The two herdsmen then go on to compete mentioning particular objects, beasts, plants, and acts of love-making in an effort to bolster their cases. It is a lush texture of rhythms, images, and ideas.
     What is the point of such a passage as this? It clearly has no real narrative or descriptive viability; the scene and the language are altogether artificial and convention-bound. The implication of contractual arrangements with the deities and the chain of equivalences “excellence=love=wealth=sex=divine favor=poetry” are established, but these were commonplaces in the poet’s culture. Here surely is the "incantatory" magic-like development of repetition for its own sake that led to both the fascination and the suspicion rhetoric attracted. Formal play leads the composition here as in a fugue. What is the status of the category of truth in this fragment of poetry? Is there any significance to Comatas’ eventual victory? Are their claims true? Might either exist apart from the other? This poetry seems to me imperiously indifferent to content and concerned primarily with the melodious possibilities of mental play itself.
     It is my contention that these structural relationships are the poem's subject. The aesthetic appeal (for those to whom it appeals) is based on the symmetries and surprises of a system of formal play maintained through a complex series of metamorphoses through the entire poem. To refer to this sort of poetry as play, however, does not exhaust its potential. In poetry such play is often anathematized as decadent, but in the case of Theocritus it is subtle and coherent enough to support semiotic analysis as a series of codes open to bearing any number of messages though tinted with their own thematic coloration and quite demanding in their internal formal requirements. Besides, the thematic always lingers on: the preoccupations of pastoral — otium, the locus amoenus, the problematic sexuality of the livestock juxtaposed with the often conflicted relations among the shepherds – these concerns do not vanish altogether, even the difference between heterosexual and homosexual love. All these values and tensions are manifested in a well-designed pattern which itself affirms the “natural” values that correspond to the natural landscape.
     Once such exacting symmetries are developed in the content of the poem, the prosodic form itself assumes a new significance. The nice antiphonal balance of concepts corresponds to the precisely predictable units of language allowed by the meter. For the remainder of the singing-match the momentum of these analogies in which the relations are almost too exact will be maintained and supported by the elegiac couplets. [10]
     Another instance of form becoming content, of the rhetorical color itself emerging into the foreground through the play of its internal system of relationships, may be traced through the poem’s use of hyperbole. Now a certain provocative hyperbole is latent in the whole situation. The pretense of super-attractive, poeticizing rustics is the poem's ubiquitous invitation to “pretend” by idealizing, enhancing, formulating a pleasing reality that can be made only of words, but which as words possesses unlimited potential. The stanzas I have already considered clearly partake of hyperbole since, in the spirit of what the Occitanian writers would have called a gab (and which shares its basic antiphonal form with Bo Diddley’s “Say Man”), the speakers claim extraordinary relations with divinity, art, and lovers, as well as animal husbandry.
     The device is exploited, in fact, throughout. For example, lines such as 124-127 are balanced as ostentatiously as those opening the singing-match, but they more obviously appeal to a taste for witty and extravagant exaggeration. Indeed, here there can be no question of hyperbole arising naturally from the exuberance of language under certain emotional occasions as it does in everyday experience — for Theocritus this systematic hyperbole is a major recurrent signifier of his whole system. The smooth texture of the verse, the obtrusively recondite character of his lexical choices, the blessedness of the pastoral hillside in so many ways correspond to the hyperbolic quality of the poetic assertions.
     Another direct analogue for this hyperbole is the extraordinary plenitude of images. Whether one views this specifically as expolitio or simply as amplificatio with a vengeance, it is clearly an integral part of Theocritus' world. One may note, for instance, lines 92-97 in which ten different plants are named. Each has a role in fleshing out a series of ephemeral sign systems which arise and instantly recede under the pressure of new terms arriving in the following lines, leaving only the impression of perfect accord and a setting so fertile and full that its flora and fauna come to the lines teeming with tropical growth. [12] Here once again, a rhetorical figure has assumed such
prominence in the text that it has become the content. More important than the specific plants which are mentioned in these lines cited above is the fact that a great many are named and that each fills a pigeon-hole in the abstract scheme that provides the framework and the excuse for the passage.
     Before commenting on what seems to me the raison d'etre for this poetic practice, I wish to indicate one further dimension of the penetration of the Theocritean poetic corpus with rhetorical devices. His language is “artificial,” a strange Dorian dialect that has occasioned much scholarly discussion. Further, the text foregrounds its own surface through an exceedingly free use of musical acoustic devices. One critic has described the poet's “very marked preference for alliteration and assonance” citing also the testimony of Hermogenes and Demetrius to the same effect. [13] The point is sufficiently obvious that a few examples will serve to illustrate what sort of effects Theocritus chooses. Homoeoptoton and homoeoteleuton are common [14] especially in certain locations: thus, for instance, they may reinforce the enjambment between lines (note the pattern of short and long o sounds at the end of line 82 and the beginning of 83). Like vowel sounds may also bind a couplet into a more tangible unit by reproducing at its end the same sound with which it began (as in lines 88-89, 128-129, and others), or they may simply accumulate within a line with a force approaching that of the Old English alliterative pattern (see, for instance, 1. 96 which is spoken by Comatas — the very same sound pattern is repeated for Lacon in 122).
     There are many other rhetorical figures in Theocritus' poem, but my concern is less with their description and isolation than with their interpretation. What is the reader to make of these preferences already discernible in Idyll V for unreal symmetry in collatio comparison, a fantastic fondness for hyperbole, a tendency to uncontrolled amplificatio in the enumeration of parallel evidence, and at the same time a rich concentration of purely acoustic musical effects? To think one may dismiss this poetry with the label of “art for art's sake” is, I think, mistaken. What, then, do these habits of composition do other than the admittedly important end of amusement?
     As I have suggested, this use of rhetorical devices in pastoral poetry renders the verse unusually open in a calculated way, polysemous by design as it is interested in depicting relationships, structure, and patterns rather than things. This receptivity to multiple interpretation is clear in the varied interpretive possibilities critics have advanced in discussing Theocritus. Many readings may be roughly classified by their tendency to use either form or content as primary data: content-based readings include those that think of the pastoral as Utopia (Marxist and Freudian readings are subvarieties here), and for form those that view the pastoral as the archliterary artificial set-piece. I believe a new possibility more in keeping with everything in Theocritus is available to the critic who can unite the two directions through a revaluation of the role of rhetorical figures which will also foreground the relevance of the pastoral to current critical debate. It would be a reading that takes semiotics into account in understanding Theocritus’ elevation of form to the level of content (cf. Eco's notion of the aesthetic text’s “semiotic redemption of its basic matter” [15]). 

      The fact that the herdsmen are poets should be enough to justify this sort of view of pastoral as literary criticism, but the case is strengthened by the prominence of rhetorical figures I have been discussing. It is this striking density of figures in the text that has caused its pejorative characterization as derivative, effete, epigonistic scholarly dilettantism, but which in this new light allows these formal characteristics to become content. If the narrative line contains, not events or ideas, but relations and patterns of figures, then the meaning of the entire hypersign (to use Corti’s term) must refer to these figures as well. Although the text does develop thematic concerns which are altogether real (about love and work and death and nature, for instance) these are highly refracted, indirect, and problematized. They are not nearly so prominent as the essential implication of the poem which implies a claim for the possibilities of language for resolving or mediating contradictions in general, a possibility most nakedly apparent when the language is mercilessly self-focusing, when its powers are directed toward self-commentary and self-praise, at constructing what may be called a myth of literature, a myth of language. This poetry inclines decisively away from any sort of Platonic mimesis: thus the futility of polemicizing over whether the herdsmen are in any sense like real ones or whether they are Alexandrian snobs pretending. It tends rather toward a more Gorgianic concept of producing effective discourse which will attain its ends without claiming any correspondence between its data and lived experience.
     The same opposition exists on the level of language. Again Theocritus is consistent with modern semiotics as well as with Gorgias in his implicit assumption that the association between signifier and signified is never wholly adequate, but rather is always arbitrary. In this self-reflexive reading of Theocritus, it becomes apparent at what end all the hyperbole is really aimed, and what cosmos possesses the incredible symmetries projected onto the verse. These apply primarily to language and to literature. It is there that all things are possible and the restrictions that so stubbornly adhere to the material creation no longer apply. Apart from the fact that this view of his poetry allows us to understand better, I think, what Theocritus was writing about, it also illuminates his position in the famous contention between Callimachus and Apollonius over the proper length of a “modern” poem. The fact that Theocritus is the most prominent of the exemplars of the school that advocated shorter poems has led many to take Idyll VII, line 45-47 as his poetic credo.

ὥς μοι καὶ τέκτων μέγ᾽ ἀπέχθεται, ὅστις ἐρευνῇ
ἶσον ὄρευς κορυφᾷ τελέσαι δόμον εὐρυμέδοντος,
καὶ Μοισᾶν ὄρνιχες, ὅσοι ποτὶ Χῖον ἀοιδὸν

(For much I hate the builder who seeks to raise his house as high as the peak of mount Oromedon, and much those cocks of the Muse who with the Chian bard [would contend])

     One must question, however, on the basis of the foregoing discussion whether it is solely out of deference to the unrivalable example of Homer that Theocritus takes his position. [17] Rather his compass has shrunken precisely because the generous “realism” of epic in which everything is transparently meaningful is inappropriate to a language grown conscious of itself which tends to rely instead on internal interrelationships and self-reflexive meditation to generate meaning. The fact that Apollonius’ epic has come down to us with a reputation for learned over-refinement not so very different from Theocritus’ may itself suggest which of the two poets more accurately recognized the sort of discourse he was producing.





1. Often rhetorical concepts dominate even those treatises in which they do not have total hegemony, e.g. On the Sublime which claims (Ch. 17) that rhetorical devices are themselves inherently conducive to sublimity.

2. A mediating, transitional category is, of course, epideictic oratory.

3. In spite of his willfully obtuse comments about medieval literature in The Role of the Reader, Eco has a most illuminating discussion of the general rhetorical procedure in the European tradition in Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), p. 276-288.

4. The three codes with very little adjustment might be accommodated to those of Pound's ABC of Reading: melopoeia, phanopoeia, logopoeia.

5. A search of the last twenty-five years in L'Annee Philologique reveals not a single article on the role of rhetoric in Theocritus.

6. Indeed, this particular idyll has not only a contest, but a judge and a decision, thus approximating a judicial setting quite closely, though the content fits more closely the epideictic “laudes — vituperations” as the participants praise themselves.

7. It is one of the special attributes of this idyll that those “golden age” pastoral assumptions are not only evoked but also questioned by the violence of the earlier sexual encounter between Lacon and Comatas which assumes the form of a prefiguration of the current sublimated contest.

8. In this it resembles those long series of almost identical poems in the Greek Anthology in which one poet after another tried to perfect the statement of certain popular topoi by altering only a few words of earlier versions.

9. The entire poem lends itself very tidily to analysis as Levi-Straussian antinomies.

10. Another example of the almost incredible Greek openness to an appreciation of symmetry for its own sake is the correspondences of strophe and antistrophe in the choruses of tragedy most of the effects of which are entirely lost on modern listeners no matter how fluent their Greek.

11. These three objects of their attention may be conflated by those readers who view the whole poem as a description of the process of sublimation of sexuality resulting in song.

12. I am reminded of the catalogues of the voice from the whirlwind in Job where the world of nature is emphatically not purely verbal, but rather is a second-hand representation of the grandeur of God.

13. Steven Walker, Theocritus (Boston: Twayne), p. 131.

14. Alliteration is quite common as well. One notable example is line 110 in which the t-sounds refer to each other and to the sound of cicadas.

15. Eco, p. 268.

16. This was the occasion for Callimachus' memorable comment “A big book is
a big evil.”

17. Feigned modesty, of course, is itself a topos. It appears, for example, in lines 39-41 of the same poem.

18. I am thinking of something close to the concept of epic realism in Lukacs, though I do not mean by this reference to imply that I subscribe to his methodology.