Artists and Eccentricity

 

    In our day people associate artistic ability with eccentricity.  Research has indicated that people value art more highly if they are told the creator is unconventional in behavior {1].  Yet the association may not be unfounded.  According to another recent study truly creative people are indeed more likely to flout social expectations [2].  Yet this idea is far from universal.  In many cultures such as Heian Japan and Renaissance England poetry has been among the accomplishments expected of courtiers at the center of power.  For Pope, the poet, far from being a transgressive personality, is a skilled technician capable of eloquently expressing normative sentiments: “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed” [3]. 

     The fact is that, though contradictory, both notions are valid, indeed complementary.  Just as every work of art reflects lived experience with a twist, never exactly duplicating it, and every phrase rests to some extent upon remembered language, every work in part affirms consumers’ expectations and in part twists or disappoints them.  In this way art transmits accumulated cultural data to every new generation yet avoids stagnating, always potentially admitting new data.  Folk, mass, and popular art are all more likely to tend toward the side of the continuum that confirms received ideas, while avant-garde art, including much contemporary work, is by definition more unpredictable. 

     Each tendency in fact has an archaic lineage, the first from shamans inspired by ecstatic experiences and the second from ritual priests capable of performing rites according to tradition.  The shaman’s vocation is by definition idiosyncratic, though his role is wholly traditional.  The distinguishing characteristic of his practice is a journey alone into spiritual realms inaccessible to others, often with the aid of those psychoactive substances called entheogens by their advocates [4].  Eliade’s classic study says that shamans are generally considered likely to display “aberrant psychic behavior patterns” if not outright “mental disease,” though he demurs in  part from this judgement, preferring to say simply that “they are separated from the rest of the community by the intensity of their own religious experience, "and that that break from the group begins the practitioner’s “true life” [5].

     On the other hand, priests are, even in pro-literate cultures, fundamentally learned men who are educated in the proper performance of ritual duties such as sacrifice.  In ancient Jewish, Hindu, and Classical Greek and Roman culture, the role of the priest is essential if one wishes one’s ceremonies to be efficacious.  His job, like that of a Roman Catholic priest administering sacraments, is in no way dependent on his individual spiritual character but rather on his knowing the prescribed procedures and the correct magic formulae.  Whereas the shaman may go into trance and otherwise act in extravagant or mysterious ways, the priest probably will present as a sober and respectable individual.  This function is as prevalent in oral cultures as in those with writing.  Thus an African anthropologist notes that only priests can offer “major sacrifices” and reliably transmit tribal lore.  According to an observer long resident among the Tiv of Nigeria, their priests were “grave” and “dignified” men [6].

     The same division is apparent in urbanized societies.  According to Plato, “just as they [Korybantian revelers] do not dance while in their right mind, thus the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they compose heir beautiful melodies” [7].  Yet the very fact that such celebrants were collectively enacting a social ritual indicates their normative role.  Moralizing poets like Theognis and the composers of Doric choral poems reinforced values shared by their community, while monodists might  express more idiosyncratic attitudes.  Thus Tyrtaios regularly praised valor in war, whereas Arkhílokhos expressed a more individualistic sentiment, and in  the nineteenth century Rimbaud’s transgression may be measured against the regularities of Claudel. 

     Genres may cluster toward one end or another of this spectrum.  Popular, folk, and mass literature all tend to reinforce pre-existing ideas, while experimental and avant-garde texts will overturn them.  A good deal of extremely sentimental, patriotic, and pious material is churned out to strengthen the status quo, while works more radical in form are likely to be cast in novel forms as well as are works of art brut.  One might contrast even within a single author’s oeuvre Christopher Smart’s craftsmanlike and orthodox Song to David with his unpredictable and verbally pyrotechnic Jubilate Agno.  In the twentieth century,  T. S. Eliot also illustrates both sides of the polarity, with his early poetry free and fragmented in form, disillusioned in vision, and quite novel in style and his later work in regular cadences as well as exemplifying his self-consciously reactionary formula (in “For Lancelot Andrewes”) "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic [sic] in religion.” 

     Earlier literature had been largely sponsored by either the court or the church, guaranteeing a more or less conventional ideology and well as stimulating fulsome dedications in the hope of patronage, the equivalent of what would today be a grant or a commission.  With the coming of capitalism and the spread of literacy accompanying an increase in the middle class, not only the authors of best-sellers, but also such accomplished writers as Dickens and Mark Twain sought middle-brow audiences while others like Baudelaire and Stephen Crane scorned the bourgeoisie, creating counter-cultural or otherwise elitist bohemias.  Today a career as any sort of artist (the case is particularly obvious for poets) is so marginal that one may be considered a bit eccentric even to consider such an impractical ambition. 

     This dialectic has been obscured by the principle critical tradition (including Plato, Sidney, Puttenham, and Matthew Arnold) which has, often defending art against those to whom it seemed frivolous and moral, always maintained that the poet’s task is to define and reinforce his society’s ethical rules.  This millennia-long public relations campaign has obscured the extent to which certain writers, and portions of the work of others, have criticized or flouted accepted norms.  Ben Shahn notes that many people who would be glad to have a Van Gogh on their wall would be discomfited to find Van Gogh himself in their living room [8]. 

     The indices of aesthetic and social conformity often coincide, though they need not.  One can imagine, of course, an individual of thoroughly irregular life who nonetheless writes in quite regular meters or, on the other hand, a pillar of bourgeois respectability whose work is wholly experimental.  Most works and most artists will prove somewhat elusive, occupy shifting yet meaningful positions in the spectrum of possibilities.  Identification neither as traditionalist nor radical indicates value.  Bohemianism associated with high spirits and extravagance in one person may manifest as cruelty and self-destruction in another.  Likewise, of a hundred new expressive novelties only a few will suggest fruitful avenues for continued work. (the percentage may be similar for scientific researcher proposing hypotheses in a laboratory.)

     Still, locating an author or a poem along the continuum of conventionality yields information about the theme and about the place of a given text in  the society of its day.  Surely Villon’s life among thieves influenced his innovations far beyond his use of underworld slang and Allen Ginsberg’s enthusiasm for flamboyant transgression was of a piece with the originality of Howl.  On the other hand the decorum of John Milton and Alfred, Lord Tennyson is consistent with their influential roles as Cromwell’s Latin Secretary and as Poet Laureate. 

     So the historic association between artists and eccentricity is neither baseless nor universal.  The two are articulated in a way meaningful for the expression of theme and style and indicative as well of the place of the arts in a given context.  The beards and berets that signify an artist in Bushmiller’s Nancy comic strip may be in part a silly Philistine invention, but such symbols are also indicators of a genuine social tendency.  Art is aways simultaneously conforming and nonconforming to the expectations of those who receive it.  It confirms and also challenges preconceived ideas, and, depending on which end of the spectrum of predictability a given work occupies, the artist may seem a pillar of the establishment or a revolutionary.

 

 

1.  Wijnand Adriaan Peter Van Tilburg and Eric Raymond Igou, “From Van Gogh to Lady Gaga: Artist eccentricity increases perceived artistic skill and art appreciation” in the European Journal of Social Psychology vol. 44 no. 2.

2.  Shelley Carson, “The Unleashed Mind: Why Creative People Are Eccentric,” Scientific American, May 1, 2011.

3.  Essay on Criticism, 97.

4.  The term was introduced in 1976 by a group of ethnobotanists including Jonathan Ott and R. Gordon Wasson.

5.  Mircea Eliade, Shamanism : archaic techniques of ecstasy.  See pages xi , 8, and 13. 

6.  According to Return to Laughter by Elenore Smith Bowen (pen name of Laura Bohannon).

7.  Ion.  534a. οὐκ ἔμφρονες ὄντες ὀρχοῦνται, οὕτω καὶ οἱ μελοποιοὶ οὐκ ἔμφρονες ὄντες τὰ καλὰ μέλη ταῦτα ποιοῦσιν.

8.  In “On Nonconformity.”

Rilke’s Dubious Advice to a Young Poet

 

The first few phrases quoted from Rilke’s letters are followed by the English in parentheses.  Subsequent references in the body of the essay quote my rendering in English with the original German relegated to endnotes.  

 

     Can advice benefit a poet’s practice?  When writers speak or read their work or appear at signings, they often entertain questions from less accomplished authors seeking clues to literary success. Do you write at set hours daily?  Should I pursue an M F. A.?  Do you discuss unfinished works?  Since writing, like weight-lifting, is a performance activity, probably the most reliably useful counsel anyone could hear is simply to write and write some more.  Beyond that writers at all levels of experience must shape their work habits not by reasoning but by productivity.  What proves useful for one young writer may be harmful to another. 

     Most such guidance is ephemeral.  Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet is an exception, though it was the recipient, and not the writer, who chose to preserve and publish the letters. [1]  The book is regularly called a classic and Penguin, publisher of an English translation, describes the book as “arguably the most famous and beloved letters of the twentieth century.”  This opinion is not universal.  To poet J. D. McClatchy, for instance, the letters are nothing but “sententious twaddle” by a “selfish poseur.” [2]  Whatever value critics have found in the book, most have approached the letters as a source of biographical and psychological understanding of Rilke rather than for their value to aspiring authors or as literary theory.  

     While adopting a grand magisterial tone, Rilke himself casts doubt on the value of his teaching by cloaking his subject in mystification.  In the first paragraph of the first letter Rilke establishes his identity as the custodian of the holy unknown by cautioning that poetry’s truth cannot be known, and, if it were known, could not be expressed.  At the very outset the poet assures his young correspondent that most experiences of all sorts are “full of mysteries” (“geheimnisvolle”) and “ineffable” (“unsagbarer”).  The very possibility of meaningful advice is all but denied.  “I can say virtually nothing that might help, that might be useful.” (“Ich fast nicht sagen kann, was hilfreich ist, kaum etwas Nützliches.”)  The poet’s chief concern, he says, is to encounter what is “strangest” (“Seltsamsten”) and “most inexplicable” (“Unaufklärbarsten”) in experience [3].

     Having established that he possesses esoteric secrets, Rilke challenges Kappus to match his own dramatically heroic (if soi-disant) commitment to art, telling him that, unless the younger man feels he cannot live without writing, he should not write at all [4].  If he proceeds in art, according to Rilke “a particularly blessed and pure way of living” [5], he may aspire to create something “very big and infinitely important.” [6]

     Grand this is, if not grandiose, but impossibly vague.  Why should the writer be “purer” than others?  In what way is his work so very important?  This looks suspiciously like self-puffing, unashamedly camouflaged by obscurantism.  The writer works always “in the dark, the ineffable, the unconscious.” [7]  It is fruitless to search for answers [8].  If only one cleaves always to the difficult, our dragons will turn to princesses, since “everything horrible” is likely to be in fact “something helpless that needs our help.”  Apart from this mythic reassurance, the writer should not inquire.  “Why do you want to bother with questions of “where it all comes from and where it is headed.” [9]  One should, it seems, simply live the mystery and seek no explanations.

     Apart from all this self-important sublime ambition cloaked in a smokescreen of obscurity, Rilke does offer a suggestive analogy for the creative process.  Doubtless influenced by Freud, Rilke likens the creation of art to the sexual act, a comparison that in his use sheds little light on either.  His rhetoric resembles that of D. H. Lawrence when he says that in “its pain and its pleasure” the making of art is “unbelievably close” to a sexual experience [10]. 

     Rilke presents a view of sex as a mystical dynamo, distilled and ennobled in an artful thought and serving as well as a wellspring for writers of the future.     

In a single creative thought live a thousand forgotten nights of love, filling it with loftiness and sublimity.  And those who come together in the night, who embrace in swaying pleasure, they perform an earnest labor and accumulate sweetnesses, depth, and power for the lyric of a future poet, who will appear, to say the unsayable bliss.

For Rilke, lovers must “undergo in common, simply, seriously and patiently, the weight [responsibility?] of sex that is put upon them.” [11]

     The comparison is applicable as long as his only meaning is to foreground the urgency and profundity of both aesthetic and sexual experiences, and their link to pleasure.  Where the correspondence breaks down reveals Rilke’s theoretical weakness (and, arguably, the weakness of much of his verse).  For sex is likely to have more to do with desire than with beauty.  In spite of centuries of female nudes in art that conflate appetite and aesthetics, in the end pictures must be judged by the latter.  To a starving person an advertising picture of a pizza may seem the most beautiful thing in the world, but such judgements are not applicable in the realm of art.

     Furthermore, the act of love-making is altogether mutual, whereas the artist makes an object which a reader receives.  The lover has little regard for prior models, while the writer’s work will generally imply the digestion of earlier works in search of significant influence, models, and allusions.  Perhaps most decisively, the lover has no wish to create a lasting object to preserve the passionate night or the entire relationships.  Rilke’s use of the sexual analogy is primarily affective, conveying little more than the emotional intensity he feels proper to art.    

     The sexual image is incongruous with the letters’ insistence on the poet’s lofty solitude.  It is all very well to suggest that Kappus avoid reading the critics, but Rilke categorically advocates a more general isolation to the point that he begins to sound neurotic.  “You are looking outside yourself, and that of all things you must not do now.”  “Dig into yourself.” [12]  What is valid is only that which “comes out of your own will, out of some need of your own self.” [13]  His suggestion is unequivocal: the writer should seek solitude, great inner solitude, going-into-oneself and for long periods never encountering another.” [14]

     While no one will deny that reflective periods are conducive to artistic productivity, this isolation is valuable in combination with the communion with earlier writers implied by influence and the need to communicate with readers.  In particular for a novice, the study of masters and the imitation of great predecessors is valuable in any field.  The complete artistic autonomy on which Rilke insists from the start surely can be justified only with maturity. 

     Some have wondered why Rilke took the time to correspond with this youth, and persisted for years in maintaining their connection, though the poet himself did not envision publishing their correspondence.  Surely the simplest answer is that Rilke was flattered by adulation and welcomed a disciple.  His picture of the grand spiritual mission of the writer and of the deep mysteries in which he deals is surely meant to impress his young admirer.  His conjuring about poetry and sexuality is likely to be just the thing to awe the inexperienced, and his insistence on a heroic aloneness makes him sound like a very belated Byronic hero.  Virtually nothing Rilke says amounts to useful guidance; it seems all designed to promote himself in the role of divine poet.  

     Rilke wholly neglects the roles of craft, convention, and tradition, all critical to a writer’s training.  He implies in fact that enlightenment will descend on the poet is he remains quiet, alone, and attentive.  “All that is necessary,” he says, is “that we are in circumstances that from time to time confront us with great natural things.” [15]  This is hardly a formulation that would serve a learner well. 

     The present focus is on the celebrated letters themselves.  His biographers have recorded a less than flattering portrait of the artist, but that is irrelevant in the face of great poems.  Yet the defects evident from a serious acceptance of the letters on their own terms as advice to a younger artist may appear to the reader of Rilke’s poetry as well: a vague and self-important spirituality, a greater attention to the drama of his own sensibility than to the specifics of a single poem, a privileging of the vaguest of themes over craft, and an exaggerated gravity in which pleasure and beauty, though the motive of every poem, find little place. 

 

  

 

1.  These. letters, written to Franz Xaver Kappus who had first contacted Rilke while still a military academy student, continued until 1928 and were published by Kappus three years after Rilke’s death with the title Briefe an einen jungen Dichter (Letters to a Young Poet) and frequently reprinted since.  In 2017, the German scholar Erich Unglaub discovered that Kappus’s letters had been stored in the Rilke family archive all along. In 2019, he published both sides of the correspondence for the first time. Last fall, an English translation by Damion Searls appeared.

2.  J. D. McClatchy, “Antagonism: Rainier Maria Rilke,” Poetry, October 2004.

3.  August 12, 1904.

4.  "Es genügt, wie gesagt, zu fühlen  dass man ohne zu schreiben leben könnte, um es überhaupt nicht zu dürfen." August 12, 1904.

5.  “Eine besonders selige und reine Art des Lebens,” July 16, 1903.

6.  “Sehr gross und unendlich wichtig,”  April 23, 1903.

7.  “Im Dunkel, im Unsagbaren, Unbewussten,” April 23, 1903.

8.  “Forschen Sie jetzt nicht nach Antworten,” July 16, 1903.

9.  “Alles schreckliche . . . im tiefsten Grinde das Hilflose, das von uns Hilfe will,” “Wir uns immer an das Schwere halten müssen,”  “Warum wollen Sie sich mit der Fragen verfolgen, woher das alle kommen mag und wohin es will,” August 12, 1904.

10.  “Seinem Weh und seiner Lust,” “unglaublich nahe”  April 23, 1903.  These phrases are followed by a passage remarkable for its time, though having little to do with poetry, in which Rilke denounces selfish, male-centered lovemaking. 

11.  “In einen Schöpfergedanken leben tausand vergessene Liebesnächte auf und erfüllen ihn mit Hoheit und Höhe.  Und die in den Nächten zusammenkommen und verflochten sind in wiegender Wollust tun eine ernste Arbeit und sammelt Süssigkeiten an, Tiefe und Kraft für das Lied irgendeines kommenden Dichters, der aufstehn wird, um unsägliche Wommen zu sagen.”

“Um einfach, ernst und geduldig das schwere Geschlecht, das ihnen auferlegt ist, gemainsam zu tragen.”

12.  In the letter of April 23, 1903, Rilke writes “Read aesthetic and critical essays as little as possible.” (“Lesen Sie möglichst wenig äesthetisch-kritische Dinge.”)  “Sie sehen nach aussen, und das vor allem dürften Sie night tun.”

13. July 16, 1903: “Nehmen Sie das was kommt in grossem Vertauen hin, und wenn es nur aus Ihren Willen kommt, aus irgendeiner Not Ihres Innern, so nehmen Sie es aus sich.”

14.  December 23, 1903 “Einsamkeit, grosses innere Einsamkeit.  In-sich-Gehen und stundenlang niemandem begegnen.”

15.  December 24, 1908  “Und, das wir in Vernhältnissen sind, die uns vor grosse natürliche Dinge stellen von Zeit zu Zeit, das ist alles, was not tut.” 

On Alexander Pope’s “Art of Sinking”

 with reflections on the abundance of bathos in our own time

 

 

I.

     Alexander Pope’s “Peri Bathous or the Art of Sinking in Poetry” [1] satirizes contemporary poets, in particular for what Pope (in a new application of the word) terms bathos, a mingling of the commonplace and the sublime that violates decorum.  While Pope’s title plays on the treatise On the Sublime attributed to Longinus, the piece is targeted at his poetic rivals, Ambrose Philips and a long list of others identified only by initials.  Pope was an active controversialist on the side of neo-Classicism and Tory rule, though personal rather than ideological motives seem at the base of many of his polemics.  In “Peri Bathous,” for instance, he is less concerned with setting forth literary principles than he is with criticizing others’ poor taste.  While the essay might disappoint the theorist, it is filled with Pope’s incisive wit, and accurately predicts a trajectory of modern poetry which, for better or for worse, has continued to pursue the “Art of Sinking.”

         In what might be called a comic apocalyptic reflex, Pope’s essay calls for an inversion of conventional values of literary judgement.  The fact is that there is little to differentiate the satirist from the objects of his ridicule in theory.  They all participate in the assumptions of neo-Classicism, yet in Pope’s view, his rivals are utterly incompetent.  Apart from ridiculing the absurdity of the “sinking” poetry they produce, Pope attacks hacks who write to order for pay in spite of the fact that he himself actively and successfully pursued a career as a professional writer.  

     Pope and the targets of his satire share their age’s stress on the value of models and in ornamentation through a generous use of rhetorical figures.   Thus, he declares, with the essay’s pervasive irony, that it is a “grievous errour” that “the rules of the ancients were equally necessary to the moderns” (I)  The tropes and figures he examines in some technical detail (X-XI) had been received ideas as the basis for the construction of aesthetic texts from the Rhetorica ad Herennium through Puttenham and into Pope’s day.

     The expressions Pope ridicules are not in form wrong; their absurdity arises through loss of decorum.   Pope’s central model of bathos is a figure in which one element is discordant with the next, the sort of ill-fitting parts that Horace figures at the outset of the “Art of Poetry” as monstrous chimerical creatures, for instance, part horse and part man, or woman and fish.  His rivals, he suggests, are unable to exercise taste enough to make the elements of their images match.  They work the same vein as he, but cannot perform up to his standard. 

     The poor taste of the poets Pope ridicules has, he believes, a material base: they write for money and thus will shape their efforts toward the most widespread popularity rather than the greatest beauty.  Rather than speaking of inspiration or genius, he focuses on the business of poetry, speaking of the “trade” and “manufacture” of literature.  (XIII)  Using the “Golden Rule of Transformation,” one may generate absurdities freely and reduce any object to the ridiculous by the simple technique of examining it through “the wrong end of a Perspective Glass, by which all the Objects of Nature are lessen’d.” (V)  This is in fact only an example of the departure from common sense and the acceptance of truth in nature which Pope decries.  In a way not wholly unlike the “commodity fetishization” Marx and his followers regarded as obscuring economic relations, this false view blocks the creation and appreciation of the sublime for Pope. [2] 

     Britain was moving already toward industrial capitalism during Pope’s time from the feudal agriculture-based economy, so the arbiter of aesthetic decision was becoming ever less the nobility and their toadies and becoming the literate bourgeoisie.  With even greater plausibility than those in the eighteenth century who doubted the judgement of the public in making political decisions, Pope’s persona neatly finesses his replacement of the Horatian formula by arguing that “if the intent of all poetry be to divert and instruct, certainly that kind, which diverts and instructs the greatest number, is to be preferred.”  The effect is to abandon any attempt to impress the cultivated, “men of a nice and foppish gusto, whom after all it is almost impossible to please,” or “to write for posterity of whose taste we cannot make any judgment,” and to make “gain the principal end of our art.” (II)  Though ironically expressed, these views echo Boileau who insists that the poet must write with “immortal Fame” in mind, that abject dedication to  patrons leads to work unbecomingly “fill'd with fulsome flatteries.”  The author must never choose “Gold for the object of a gen'erous Muse,” yet with “the Stars propitious Influence” a poet may yet hope “a sharp-sighted Prince, by early Grants/ Rewards your Merits, and prevents your Wants.” [3] 

     Therefore, one need have no particular training, background, or apprenticeship to be poetic; it is rather within reach of everyman.  In fact, Pope playfully suggests that certain low persons might prove especially gifted.  Since “nothing is more evident than that divers persons, no other way remarkable, have each a strong disposition to the formation of some particular trope or figure,” the production of poetry could be done collectively by these specialists. (XIII)  Thus fishmongers might compose epithets, since “epithets may be found in great plenty at Billingsgate,” anadiplosis may be trusted to “common criers and hawkers, who by redoubling the same words persuade people to buy their oysters, green hastings, or new ballads,” and “the ellipsis, or speech by half-words” entrusted to “ministers and politicians.”

     In what now seems a striking anticipation of both assembly line production and the capitalist creation of imaginative works by committee in film and television designed to appeal to the largest demographics.  In the early days of the Industrial Revolution Pope had in this essay invented the English use of the term bathos as though it were necessary to define a new phenomenon, but, in the centuries since, bathos has flourished to such an extent and readers have, during the last century, proven so fond on “low” imagery that the bathetic has proven dominant.

     In his own view, Pope was nothing but normative.  It is he who imitates nature and they who are “anti-natural.” (V)  To him he is the reasonable man calling attention to the failings of the unreasonable.  He considers himself a member not so much of a partisan group as of the party of the correct.  In terms of his condemnation of writing for money, his own practice had been mixed and transitional like his age.  While constantly seeking highly placed supporters, Pope had no illusions about patronage and in the Dunciad satirizes those who value the most extravagant praise from their poets over the most competent verse.  “He wins this Patron who can tickle best” (II 198)  Pope’s own competence, allowing him to build his villa in Twickenham, was made by the sales of his translations of Homer and then his edition of Shakespeare.  He also cultivated patrons such as Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington and Allen Bathurst, Baron and later 1st Earl Bathurst.  Yet the transitional character of the age is clear in the fact the popularity and patronage were by no means mutually exclusive.  Pope and others published sometimes by subscription and one noble title on the list will attract others as well as those on lower rungs of the social ladder.

     The reader may look to Pope for superb craft and brilliant wit.  He excels at formulating “what oft was Thought, but ne'er so well Exprest,” but he does not strive after original ideas, nor is he really a man of ideas at all.  He is nonetheless an outstanding poet, and it is his poetic gift that illuminates “The Art of Sinking.”  In it the reader may see art questioning its own ability to survive the coming of the age of crass capitalist philistinism.  

 

 

II.

     Though the modern reader may suspect that Pope was not in the end arguing on behalf of anything more than his own superior practice, he was quite right about the shift in the business of literature.  With the hegemony of monopoly and finance capitalism in the centuries since has come likewise a further “sinking.”  The eighteenth century could scarcely have imagined the depths to which modern artists have sunk during an age in which popularity is virtually uncontested as an index of excellence, and even the educated discuss television shows and rock bands and know nothing further of the arts.  These commodified commercial forms, of course, for the most part assume the predominant values of their society just as all popular genres will tend to do. 

     The hierarchical structure which enables Pope’s complaint of mixing low and high is explicitly opposed by many modern poets.  The tendency is commonplace since Wordsworth was attacked for his

language “which is coarse, inelegant or infantine,” betraying “perverseness and bad taste.”  The influential Lord Jeffrey, with assumptions little changed from Pope’s found in Wordsworth the fault “of connecting his most lofty, tender, or impassioned conceptions, with objects and incidents, which the greater part of his readers will probably persist in thinking low, silly, or uninteresting.     All the world laughs at Elegiac stanzas to a sucking-pig — a Hymn on Washing-day — Sonnets to one's grandmother — or Pindarics on gooseberry-pye.” [4]

     Since that rear-guard assault by a traditionalist over two hundred years ago, the parameters of poetry have shifted dramatically and bathos has, proven if not a clear victor, the stronger contender.  Readers will require no evidence on this score as most of the innovative currents since the Romantics have justified the use of the banal, the vulgar, and the colloquial and have often intentionally linked low and high. [5]  A brief survey of such practices might include Whitmanic, Cubist, Imagist, Objectivist, and Socialist Realist poetry which each of which in its own way values the “low.”  Vorticism, Aleatory, and Language poetry privilege discontinuities. [6]  Surely Pope would have thought quite preposterous the ironic modes of aesthetic appreciation that have developed in the last hundred years: the kitsch, the camp, the hip all intentionally appreciate what a traditionalist would find ugly.  Great work has been done even by the extreme practitioners in this mode; one need think only of Gertrude Stein and Francis Ponge, but their achievements would have only bewildered a critic of Pope’s sensibilities. 

     The causes of this evolution may be various, but the most significant is surely that named by Pope – the substitution of an undiscriminating public for a smaller but more cultivated audience.  The analysis of audience is turned upon Pope himself by Christopher Caudwell, in his classic of ‘thirties vulgar Marxist literary history.  With the pose of certainty associated with “scientific” socialism, Caudwell asserts that Alexander Pope “perfectly expresses the ideals of the bourgeois class in alliance with a bourgeoisified aristocracy in the epoch of manufacture.”  [7]  Dependent on patrons, poets of his day were obliged “to To him “Pope’s poetry and his ‘reason’” are “a reflection of that stage of the bourgeois illusion where freedom for the bourgeoisie can only be ‘limited.’”  Introducing a surprisingly affective term Caudwell says that in the eighteenth century “the imposition of outward forms on the heart is necessary and accepted.”

    While true, these statements are not far from being simple truisms and thus of little probative value.  Every poet, even the avant-garde and the counter-cultural, must “speak the language of his paymasters.”  And surely freedom is always limited, the living heart cannot be entirely liberated.  Out of tension and contradiction arise history, consciousness, and poetry, charged always with unsatisfied desire.  Perfect satisfaction, total enlightenment is silent. Absence of form is chaos.  Human ideas are defined by the specific forms thought assumes under multiple determinants. 

     A siren in the form of the mirage of a coherent chain of being sang to Pope.  He saw his place beneath a proper king atop a structure that included enlightened patrons.  Aristocrats might demonstrate their nobility by refined taste in this scheme while less sensitive readers gulp down bad verse.  The more common modern illusion collapses the old value distinctions and eliminates the standard of decorum.  Yet the modern idea of the poet justifies itself by a kind of democracy of things, a notion developing from Donne through Wordsworth and Whitman, in which a bedbug may be as grand as a mountain and form is infinitely variable.  We look back on Pope, then, with nostalgia, as one who lived during those when one could imagine a bedrock of established truth beneath his feet.      

 

 

1.  the essay was published under the name Martinus Scriblerus in “The Last Volume” of Motte’s Miscellanies in  Prose and Verse March 8, 1727/8   The authorship is still contested by some scholars, with Arbuthnot and Swift the other candidates, but contemporary opinion favors Pope.  For a discussion of the issue in a complete critical edition see Edna Leake Steeves’ The Art of Sinking in Poetry (1952).

2.  Cf. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935).

3.  Art of Poetry, translated by William Soames and revised by John Dryden, Canto IV, lines 100, 138, 143, and 155-159.

4.  Francis Jeffrey, Review of Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes; Edinburgh Review 11 (October 1807) 214-31.

5.  Even trends like the Symbolists and later prophetic and “deep image” practitioners which aspire to sublimity do so often through unassuming or unlikely imagery. 

6.  Charles Bernstein says in “Semblance”: “Textures, vocabularies, discourses, constructivist modes of radically different character are not integrated into a field as part of a predetermined planar architecture; the gaps and jumps compose a space with shifting parameters, types and styles of discourse constantly crisscrossing, interacting, creating new gels."

7.  Illusion and Reality, 86.

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.

Longinus’ Sublime

(I here avoid Greek, using instead T. S. Dorsch's translation, readily available in the Penguin Classical Literary Criticism.)

     I have yet to hear a convincing case for assigning literary value. To argue that one poem is “better” than another – or “more beautiful” or “greater” – one must adopt an empirical approach: some texts have in the past produced richer, stronger, more sublime reactions in more readers. It is likely that new readers will find the same rewards, though in every age they will, of course, discard some classics and adopt new ones.
     Apart from distinctions among individual works, of course, art’s value has been questioned since Greek antiquity. To Plato the transports of art are highly suspect. Either as author or reader, he considered seizure by poetry as risky as seizure by love or by any of the gods. His idea of imitation dooms art from the start to a position subsidiary both to ordinary perceived reality and to the loftier philosophic forms. Aristotle’s celebrated assertion of the superiority of poetry to history reduces the poet’s achievement to the ability to penetrate to broader generalizations than most observers, a sort of generalized “science” or predicting. Aristotle treats poetry as simply one of the artifact-generating activities of humankind, subject to analysis and description like species of fish. Most other ancient writers on the topic specialize in composing effective oratory.
     And then this mysterious essay On the Sublime drifts into view. Its author never questions art’s positive value. His date, indeed one might almost say his era, is in doubt. His name is a mere convenience. Though a tenth century manuscript is headed with the names Longinus and Dionysius, the essay seems to belong to neither of the known figures with those names. There are no references to the work by any other author of antiquity. Its singular character is suggested by the fact that Longinus cites an ode by Sappho and the opening of Genesis with equal admiration.
     Longinus’ essay, far more than most criticism of any age, focuses on the reader’s reaction more than on “truth,” expressive content or formal beauty. Though it is undoubtedly true that people learn from the poetry and plays they consume and all respond to intentional patterns, the primary motive of literary consumers is surely pleasure. Santayana’s celebrated axiom “Beauty is pleasure objectified – pleasure regarded as the quality of an object” restores pleasure to the foreground (while attempting to resist its subjectivity by the repetition of the word “object”).
     Admittedly, Longinus’ pleasure principle is concealed behind the word “sublime,” an old-fashioned term about which we hear little these days. As the very use of the word indicates a value judgment, to approve the sublime would seem tautological, but Longinus uses the concept to put the spotlight on his subjective impressions. To him the sublime is what “entrances,” what the reader or listener finds “irresistible.” [Ch. 1] Sublimity seems in the end to mean simply excellence or distinction of a certain high-flown sort.
     Sublimity is generated by the use of rhetorical figures (which are, after all, one of the primary markers of the literary text). According to Longinus, “rhetorical figures reinforce the sublime.” [Ch. 17] Too much, however is a bad thing. Though an “accumulation of figures” can have a moving effect, [Ch. 20] an excess is as pathological as a swelling in the body. [Ch. 3] Longinus understands that literary success and failure both stem from deviation from ordinary language – only taste can discern the right use of rhetoric. [Ch. 5]
     Accustomed for several hundred years to the aesthetics of the sordid and the mean we might be puzzled by Longinus’ exclusive preference for the “noble,” “uplifting,” grand style is based an assumption unlikely to find many advocates today: “Sublimity is the echo of a noble mind.” [Ch. 9] Modern readers would not be inclined to make “character” an issue for authors as is has become for politicians. Since the Romantic glorification of the outsider and the anti-hero, conventional morality is required neither of protagonists nor of their creators. For Longinus rhetoric has decayed with the loss of democracy: “no slave ever becomes an orator.” [Ch. 44] He conflates aesthetic and moral/spiritual categories, thinking high-mindedness most attractive and literature a sort of pleasurable training program for self-improvement. For him literary acumen is not a specialized branch of knowledge but the measure of the whole man. “The ability to judge literature is the crowning achievement of long experience.” [Ch. 6]
     Like Plato’s use of the dialogue form, Longinus’ epistolary pretense suggests a living human nexus and the pleasure and affection people experience in the exchange of ideas. At the outset he proposes setting forth his views to Terentianus at his friend’s prompting so they might together pursue truth.
     Longinus’ praise of the author of Genesis provides thematic reinforcement of this sense of dignity. Whether or not he is a Hellenized Jew, he is impressed with the philosophical sophistication of the concept of the divine expressed in the creation by fiat. He contrasts it to Homeric passages in which the gods play a less dignified role. He says nothing about the Hebrew author’s stately monumental hieratic rhetoric describing the “unfolding” of reality in the establishment of binary oppositions: light/dark, heaven/earth, sea/land, and the rest. Surely not every statement of an absolute divine would win his praise, and indeed he finds excuses for the dubious Homeric material which, he says, must be “taken as allegory.” His subjectivity is in the lead.
     Likewise a few pages later when he praises Sappho’s poem “Equal to the gods he seems to me . . .” he uses entirely impressionistic language, both positively (“Are you not astonished”) and negatively (“it is obvious to anyone” “he has made it trivial and elegant instead of terrifying”). [Ch. 10]
     The fact is that each of us similarly makes intuitive value judgments about art. The ingenious can then invent rationalizations for them, some of which might prove useful in looking at other works. One’s unanalytical first reactions, though, like one’s sense impressions in daily life, provide the data with which everyone works. My strongest impression of the great critics, like Longinus, William Hazlitt, and Northrup Frye, are less their theoretical assumptions than the dependable accuracy of their value judgments. Longinus may annoy the modern reader with his lengthy discussions of figures of speech and thought bearing lengthy Greek names, most familiar only to a few specialists today, but he knows what is good. Further, the fact is that rhetoric, really the study of how aesthetic language differs from other discourses, long formed the base of literary theory and remains largely neglected today. ( I, for one, would welcome its revival, and one could do worse than to begin with Longinus on metaphor. [Ch. 32]) Another stylist, Edward Gibbon, justly said of Longinus, “He tells me his own feelings upon reading it, and tells them with such energy that he communicates them.”

Idea of Comedy

     Unable after searching to recover my notes for a course I taught during the eighties on the idea of comedy, I have here attempted to set down my views in summary. Though these notes lack much in the way of illustrations, authorities, and documentation, they represent my current thinking.



     All art brings beauty and pleasure, but comedy brings gaiety and joy as well. Thematically, in the broadest sense, comedy represents a positive response to life, an affirmation, a celebration, a delight. This is neither more nor less accurate (that is, true to experience) than the pity and fear of tragedy or the simpler sympathy of sentiment and melodrama; it is their complementary counterpart. At the conclusion of the Symposium, when the partiers are for the most part, passed out, Socrates is maintaining the equivalence of the two [1].  Don Quixote, Pantagruel, and Falstaff are certainly as profound to readers as Agamemnon or Hamlet, and likely to be more moving than any hero in Racine. When we momentarily feel successful (or even indifferent) in dealing with the terms of existence, or when we choose to play at feeling such victory, we laugh.
     Aristotle tells us that tragedy provides catharsis through pity of the other (compounded, I would add, of charitable love for fellow humans and Schadenfreude at witnessing someone else’s misfortunes). Fear arises since every member of the audience is aware that the fate of every individual is inevitably tragic. Looking at life straight on with open eyes may naturally elicit a tragic response. But a later ancient text which may preserve Aristotelian theory says that comedy “through pleasure and laughter” effects “the purgation of like emotions” [2].  In other words, ultimately the functions of tragedy and comedy are precisely parallel; both enable one to go on in spite of the intolerable conditions of life.
     In comedy, the self is generally normative, observing with a critical eye the foolishness of those on every side. Thus humor requires a butt and comedy is often quite aggressive [3]. The characters in American half-hour comedy television shows pass their lives insulting those around them; in Oscar Wilde, the benighted Philistine is put down; in Huckleberry Finn America is lacerated without mercy. Here comedy is close to its roots in the ancient κῶμος, Old Comedy, and the modern Carnival with ridicule of prominent people, a trend that continues unbroken into the present [4].
      At the same time, though, comedy can seem amoral, when it tends to view faults abstractly as incongruity, as oddly amusing grotesque distortions in a formal pattern rather than as the source of pain and suffering. In caricature the lovesick youth, the miser, the braggart, the macho man and all other endless varieties of human folly appear as sideshow attractions rather than psychological, spiritual, or social pathologies causing real harm. Bergson insists on “the absence of feeling,” what he calls “a momentary anesthesia of the heart” required for comedy, itself “wholly intellectual” [5].  According to Aristotle, the ridiculous must never be “painful nor destructive.” Of course, Wile E. Coyote is never injured, though he may be smashed like a pancake or blown into the sky, he returns ever undiminished. So the whole competition between him and the Roadrunner, between the Signifying Monkey and the lion, between Chaplin and the bushy-browed Eric Campbell, all contention seen through a comic lens is finally a game, a pretense, a sport to while away at least a portion of a lifetime.
     Paradoxically, though, comedy does in the end care a great deal about consequences, for every comedy must end happily. Every situation comedy ends in the restoration of a harmonious family, every romantic comedy ends in marriage. Human beings are such social animals that the endangerment of the social group by an individual’s violations of convention is seriously disturbing. Harmony must be reconstituted, if only through the sympathetic magic of drama.
     Aristotle notes that comedy is “an imitation of characters of a lower type,” portraying as “ludicrous” “some defect or ugliness” [6].  The viewer will feel superior to the comic figures (though suspecting that the difference may be uncomfortably small) just as he feels inferior to the heroes of tragedy (while knowing that their fate is his in the end).  Comedy finds amusement in every vice and failing – selfishness, libertinism, paranoia, vanity most all. Every fault is in fact a sort of vanity and ignorance – with a clear and objective view (like the reader) one would never behave in a ludicrous fashion [7].    By defining lapses, one defines norms. Comedy has been considered fundamentally conservative by some and inherently subversive by others because it is equally likely to criticize a present offender by calling for a return to earlier ideals or by denouncing the outdated values of the present and proposing radical new ones.
     Apart from character faults, comedy exploits our physicality. Faults which are body-based such as gluttony and lust are a rich source of laughter, but moral failing need not come into the picture -- perfectly ordinary facts will work as well: sex, excretion, farts, belches, sleepiness, sweating, slipping on a banana peel. In fact, commonality lies behind the comic impetus to deflate the pompous with such expressions as “he thinks his shit don’t smell” or “he puts on his pants like the rest of us, one leg at a time.” However, this basis for universal sympathy can equally serve to stigmatize individuals. Any anomaly, including physical defects or simply unusual characteristics such as short stature, red hair, or minority racial identity, can be fair game, as every elementary school child knows [8].
     The incongruity that inspires laughter may be of any sort, in Aristotle’s language “that which is out of time and place, without danger.” It may arise from exaggeration or disproportion [9], indeed from any difference. A phrase whose meaning shifts between two possibilities, a sucking puppy among the piglets, a soldier out of step, an Amish rap singer, the possibilities are endless. According to Emerson [10] “The balking of the intellect, the frustrated expectation, the break of continuity in the intellect is comedy.”
     Comedy is clearly associated in particular with topics about which people are anxious, such as sex, drunkenness, and social propriety in general. Laughter brings a simultaneous physical relief of tension and restraints and the intellectual assurance that reassurance that our own trials may, like those of comic characters, be overcome. Laughter has a social function [11], chastening nonconformists and creating a sense of shared values and feelings in the audience.
     The deepest roots of comedy are surely in the rituals of springtime, the joy of the earth’s regreening, the acceptance that welcomes the replacement of the old with the new. The promise of the spring and the reappearance of fresh produce must have been associated with high spirits [12].
     There is finally a sort of cosmic comedy, reflected in the daily laughter among Tibetan monks, or that of altogether mythic figures as Durga who roars with laughter as she decapitates Mahishasura. Nietzsche provides a secular analogue in his story about Zarathustra coming across a shepherd with a snake in his throat. Horrified, Zarathustra urges the man to bite the serpent’s head off. When the shepherd does, he suddenly becomes “changed, radiant, laughing.” “Never yet on earth has a human being laughed as he laughed. Oh my brothers, I heard a laughter that was no human laughter; and now a thirst gnaws at me, a longing that never grows still. MY longing for this laughter gnaws at me.” [13] This is nothing less than the laughter in reaction to the absurdity of existence. “The deeply wounded have Olympian laughter; one has only what one needs to have.” [14]
     Emerson makes a similar point sparing the symbolic apparatus. “The whole of nature is agreeable to the whole of thought, or to the Reason; but separate any part of nature and attempt to look at it as a whole by itself, and the feeling of the ridiculous begins. The perpetual game of humor is to look with considerate good nature at every object in existence, aloof as a man might look at a mouse, comparing it with the eternal Whole; enjoying the figure which each self-satisfied particular creature cuts in the unrespecting All, and dismissing it with a benison. Separate any object, as a particular bodily man, a horse, a turnip, a flour-barrel, an umbrella, from the connection of things, and contemplate it alone, standing there in absolute nature, it becomes at once comic; no useful, no respectable qualities can rescue it from the ludicrous.” [15]


1. More precisely, he claims that at a gifted tragedian should also be able to write comedy.

2. From the Coislinian Tractate, an anonymous condensation of a work from the first century B.C.E. Proclus and Iamblichus also treat comedy as catharsis. In the twentieth century Elder Olson revived the term katastasis as a comic analogue to catharsis, defining it as the “restoration of the mind to a pleasant, or euphoric, condition of freedom from desires and emotions; conversion of the grounds of concern into nothing.”

3. See the Philebus, particularly 48-50. To Plato, comedy works through phthonos or malice, "being pleased at the misfortunes of our neighbor" (Philebus 48a).

4. The same principle occurs worldwide. For instance, the ancient Irish kings feared being lampooned in a glam dicenn (satire-poem). Of course, in the Middle Ages poets were considered so close a thing to magicians that they were also believed to be able to bring real boils to the face of a victim. In West Africa, the Ibo “moon-songs” sometimes ridicule individuals who have violated group norms.

5. In “Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of Comic,” translated by Cloudesley Brereton L. es L. (Paris), M.A. (Cantab) and Fred Rothwell B.A. (London). Bergson says, “It seems as though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion.” Also, “to produce the whole of its effect . . . the comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple.”

6. Chapter V of the Poetics, Butcher’s translation. He is followed by the Coislinian Tractate and by Cicero who, in “On the Character of the Orator,” says “turpitudine.” In the twentieth century Northrup Frye used Aristotle as the basis of his analysis of the “low mimetic mode” in Anatomy of Criticism.

7. Plato says comedy springs from “ignorance of self.”

8. There is a reference to a dancing dwarf in the court of Neferkere during the Sixth Dynasty of Egypt (Third Millennium B.C.E.).

9. Cicero in On the Character of the Orator uses the term “deformitate.”

10. In “The Comic.”

11. This is Bergson’s third principal point.

12. Some authorities would link the customs associated with All Fool’s Day with the old medieval New Year just before.

13. Emphasis in the original from Walter Kaufmann’s translation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 3rd Part, “On the Vision and the Riddle.”

14. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, fragment 1040.

15. From “The Comic.”

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.