Are de Maupassant’s Stories Realistic?

 

     Having found the total corpus of de Maupassant’s contes beyond my ambition for the present, I here consider evidence from thirty-four stories which are listed with their titles and possible English translations of the titles appended.  In a list appended to this essay I have numbered them in an alphabetical list and I generally refer to the title itself, but on two occasions, when citing a number of examples, I use the numbers I have assigned.

 

     Flaubert is justly called a Realist due to his meticulous and precisely detailed descriptions, sometimes only too full.  Balzac likewise justifies the label with the comprehensive, all-embracing scope of his Comédie Humaine.  Zola deserves the title of Naturalist for his quasi-scientific attention to hitherto neglected realms of life.  Yet Guy de Maupassant, who is often labeled both Realist and Naturalist, though the protégé of Flaubert, has always seemed to me to rely heavily on narrative formulae and conventions, notably in his most popular works, his short stories.  Indeed, his literary artifice is the basis for the popularity of the contes, both in his time and today.

     It is scarcely necessary to document Maupassant’s reputation as a Realist or as a Naturalist.  Thus the normative Cours de Civilisation Française de la Sorbonne titles his section “Portrait of a Master of Literary Realism.” For one critic he possesses “absolute truthfulness, the best test of realism,” while for another he “transcribed reality so objectively, so serenely, and so intensely, that, as Faguet remarks, " le lecteur ne sait pas, quand il lit Maupassant, si c'est de I'art de Maupassant, ou seulement de la réalité qu'il a le goȗt."  For these readers the implication is clear that he accurately records details of the lives of more or less ordinary people.   Yet Maupassant himself rejected the labels, saying to his friend Paul Alexis "Pourquoi se restreindre? . . . Le naturalisme est aussi limité que le fantastique"[1].  

     Of course, no story is ”realistic,” in the literal sense of corresponding to life itself.  A book is black marks on a page, a static artifact that bears only a highly mediated resemblance to anyone’s lived experience.  Yet some narratives are more likely to seem real to readers, a quality called verisimilitude.  Since Realism was first championed by Champfleury the word has been associated with various more specific literary practices – including Naturalism, Verismo, and Socialist Realism – but it has regularly been understood to mean characters who seem ordinary, usually of the middle and lower class and certainly not deities or monarchs.  The events of Realistic stories are mundane, a slice of life, rather than world-shaking or melodramatic.  Realist writers, while perhaps craftsmanlike, have typically adopted a writing style which does not call attention to itself, but rather seems transparent, a straightforward statement of facts.  Their narratives seem to resemble day-to-day lived experience rather than imitating earlier works or conforming to literary conventions.  Chekhov is an author who meets a great part of these specifications.  Joyce’s Dubliners illustrates how Realism need not interfere with a story’s sublimity. 

     Maupassant’s stories do indeed concern people of the middle and lower stations in society, and their language rarely calls attention to itself in the way that Proust’s sentences, which may go for a promenade before finding a conclusion, may do.  Maupassant ultimately developed an interest in the supernatural (a clear example is “The Horla”) but most of his stories are at least plausible.  Still, the great majority of his contes are narratives highly shaped by literary convention. 

      One of his favorite devices, used in nearly a third of the stories in my sample is the framing story [2].  This had originally been meant to enhance verisimilitude, since one may accept that the narrator was told even a fabulous story more readily than that the incidents might in fact have actually occurred.  Yet the frame, known since  antiquity in Egypt (in, for example, the “Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor,” and “The Eloquent Peasant” in the Papyrus Westcar) as well as in the Ramayana and Mahabharata, One Thousand and One Nights, the Decameron, and the Canterbury Tales, became so commonly used that it came to signify literariness rather than documentary truth.  In Maupassant the frames not only imply the character of the speaker; in addition, they generate a genial atmosphere of relaxed recreational social listening that spreads from the page to the solitary reader.

     Most of Maupassant’s stories fall into one of two types, both designed to make a dependable impact with maximum effect in the conclusions.  They conclude with either violence or heavy irony.  These simple appeals are the reason that Maupassant enjoys considerable popular favor even today.  Surely, for many people, “The Necklace” is one classroom assignment that the student relished and remembered.  Yet neither dramatic brutality nor obvious irony is consistent with the Realist story as a sample of everyday life. 

     Five of the stories (17, 19, 24, 25, and 26) depict incidents from the Franco-Prussian War from a nationalist point of view.  In each of these a canny French patriot exacts revenge against the invaders, though in three of the denouements the protagonist is caught and executed.  Here national feelings increase the thrill of the action.

     This motive is absent in other stories which portray gratuitous, almost sensational cruelty.  In “Le Gueux” a beggar dies after a vicious assault by barbaric country people.  Similarly, a fisherman prefers to sacrifice his brother’s arm rather than to lose his catch in “En mer.”  A wolf is cruelly punished in “Le loup.”  The same theme appears in humorous mode as two peasants in “Une vente” nearly kill the wife of one of them trying to measure her volume and in the two silly pranks recounted in “La farce.”  In a milder thriller mode is the ghost of “Apparition” and the elegiac remembrance of the “Miss Harriet” the pious suicide. 

      The violence or threat is compounded with irony in the wreck in “L’épave” in which the teller is rescued only to lose the love of his life, the woman with whom he had been in danger.    Likewise, the man who goes off to Africa after discovering his wife with an old general, run off  as much from chagrin at his wife’s taste as from any more substantial motive in “Une soirée.”  In “Petit soldat” the lover wins the lady only to drown soon after. 

     Whereas these stories tend to conclude with climactic violence (or its threat or a sudden rescue or at least drastic action), in these last three the effect is multiplied by the use of irony. De Maupassant developed the time-honored device of a concluding twist into a specialty, doubtless in large part responsible for his popularity with a general audience both in his own time and today. 

     Sometimes the irony is a simple surprise, as in “Un Lache” in which the accomplished swordsman turns out to be a coward, or in “Clair de lune” the moralistic abbe learns tolerance, while in “Mon oncle Sosthène” an unbeliever acquires a measure of faith and in “Yvette” the courtesan’s daughter turns out to be moral. In “La ficelle” what seems altogether trivial turns out to be life-altering.

     Irony may also occur in comic form as in the inappropriate insurance claim of “Le parapluie.”  In contrast to the implication of “La parure” that concern for the trappings of wealth may bring misery, “Le bonheur” is unusually optimistic in its depiction of a couple who truly find happiness by rejecting the affluence sought by others.  Other twists on the narrative of romance include “Le retour” in which a woman’s first husband, who had been lost at sea, returns looking like a vagabond only to find her remarried and “L’attente” in which a woman spends her life regretting the loss of her son who ran off when he saw her kissing a lover.  In “En voyage” an aristocratic lady saves a refugee who is afterwards devoted to her though apart.   “La Reine Hortense” a dying spinster imagines the joys of family while her own behaves coldly toward her.  In “La Confession” and “Le diable” unlikely unjust acts amounting to murder are admitted by the victims’ apparently loving companions, and in “Aux champs” a son the parents refused to give up for adoption complains that he was thereby mistreated. 

     The distance of plots such as these from Realism is obvious in the fact that each story turns out other than the reader probably expected, that is, other than lived experience would at first suggest.  The surprise generated by the gap between the reader’s usual “reality” and the author’s plan is in fact the source of de Maupassant’s effects.  “Solitude,” a sort of monologue on human separation even in the midst of society, casts doubt on the extent to which experience can be shared with others, while a good many of the other stories imply that things often turn out in surprising ways.  Far from presenting a sort of norm or typical incident, Maupassant deals in the extraordinary, the unexpected, indeed an outcome the very opposite of what the reader would anticipate in everyday life. 

     The stories then depend heavily either on such irony or else on the intrusion of traumatic action, including war and murder, to engage the readers’ interest.  The skillful use of literary devices is in fact the heart of verbal art, and the illusion of Realism is one significant technique.  Yet in his short stories de Maupassant regularly depends on effects other than verisimilitude.  It is the critics using the term Realist who misjudge, not the canny author whose stories have attracted readers for generations.

     If the stories are in this way deemed “artificial” (of course, all art is by definition artificial), this descriptor implies no value judgement.  Aesthetic reactions occur at the point of reception and most readers, even unsophisticated ones, are gratified by Maupassant’s artful manipulation of expectations.  The beauty of a Maupassant story may be often modest, but reading him is a highly reliable pleasure, perhaps even more reliable than if the stories were in fact Realistic.

 

 

1.  For the Cours, see https://www.ccfs-sorbonne.fr/en/guy-de-maupassant-portrait-of-a-master-of-literary-realism/.   The critics quoted are (in order) Charles Henry Conrad Wright in A History of French Literature, Kathleen Theresa Butler’s A History of French Literature, and Janneke van de Stadt, “Seeing “Amiss” or Misreading ‘A Miss’: Imperfect Vision in Maupassant's ‘Les Tombales,’” Dalhousie French Studies, Vol. 51 (Summer 2000).

 

2. In stories numbered 1, 2, 3, 10, 16, 20, 29, 30, 33, and 34.

Stories included in the study:

1   “Apparition” (“A Ghost”)

2   “L’attente” (“The Waiting”) 

3   “Le bonheur” (“Happiness”) 

4   “Aux champs”(“In the Country”) 

5   “Clair de Lune” (“Moonlight”) 

6   “La Confession” (“The Confession”) 

7   “Deux amis” (“Two Friends”) 

8   “Le diable” (“The Devil”) 

9   “Un duel” (“A Duel”) 

10   “Lépave” (“The Wreck”) 

11   “La farce” (“The Joke”)  

12   “La Ficelle” (“The Piece of String”) 

13   “Le Gueux” (“The Beggar”) 

14   “L’ivrogne” (“The Drunk”) 

15   “Un Lache” (“A Coward”) 

16   “Le Loup” (“The Wolf”) 

17   “Mademoiselle Fifi” (“Miss Fifi”) 

18   “En mer” (“At Sea”) 

19   “La Mère Sauvage” (“The Savage Mother”) 

20   “Miss Harriet” (“Miss Harriet”) 

21   “Mon oncle Sosthène” (“My Uncle Sosthenes”) 

22   “Le parapluie” (“The Umbrella”) 

23   “La Parure” (“The Necklace”) 

24   “Le père Milon” (“ Father Milon”) 

25   “Petit Soldat” (“Little Soldier”) 

26   “Les prisonniers” (“The Prisoners”) 

27   “La Reine Hortense” (“Queen Hortense”) 

28   “Le retour” (“The Return”) 

29   “Une ruse” (“A Ruse”) 

30   “Une soirée” (“One Evening”) 

31   “Solitude” (“Solitude”) 

32   “Une vente” (“A Sale”) 

33   “En voyage” (“On the Way”) 

34   “Yvette” (“Yvette”)

Fiction and Truth in Marie de France

 

Numbers in parentheses are lines of the text in Les Lais de Marie de France, ed. Jean Rychner (1966).  Translations of cited phrases are my own.  Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.

 

     Marie de France is an enigmatic figure in that virtually no biographical information about her is known.  Her name and a few scraps of information about where she lived are included in her lais and fables.   Nearly as obscure as the particulars of the author’s life is the issue of her narratives’ fictionality.  In what sense were the stories considered to be “true”?  What did narrative truth mean to her and her audience?

     The question must arise since the lais tell of many unlikely and impossible events, for instance a speaking deer (“Guigemar”), a man who tuns into a bird (“Yonec”), and another who becomes a werewolf (“Bisclavret”).  In spite of such fabulous incidents, a good number of the self-reflective comments that open and close certain of the lais specifically insist that they are veridical.  The epilogue to “Equitan” assures the reader “These things happened, as I have told you.” (“Issi avient, cum dit vus ai” [309]), adding that she is merely repeating an earlier version, thus providing a sort of reliable provenance.  At the end of “Bisclavret” one finds the same formula: “The adventure you have heard really happened, do not doubt me.”  (“L’aventure k’avez oïe/ Veraïe fu, n’en dutez mie” [315-316]), then noting that an earlier poem had been made of it to preserve and see that it is not forgotten.  “Lanval” opens with the statement that “the story of another lay I shall tell you as it happened.”  (“L’aventure d’un autre Lai/ Cum il avint vus cunterai.”[1-2])  “Les Deus Amanz” concludes in just the same way: “The things I have told you happened and the Bretons made of it a lay.”  (“Issi avint cum dit vus ai/ Li Bretun en firent un Lai. [241-242])

     In each case Marie is defending her story as true and pointing to the fact that it is a retelling and not her invention as support.  While since Romanticism originality has been celebrated, many medieval authors claim that repeating a narrative they have heard is a positive value adding the prestige of an earlier authority.  While this gesture can indicate evidence for the tale’s factual basis, in Marie its implication is broader: as “auctor” meant writer to Chaucer, “auctorite” was sometimes “writerliness.”  The word in this sense suggests propriety, a competently made poem, with conformity to accepted  standards of  beauty and elegance and reflection of earlier models providing its artistic credentials rather than facticity.

     The issue is further obscured by the fact that the European Middle Ages had different concepts of truth in written accounts.  One influential critic [1] argues that until the twelfth century advent of the Arthurian romance, stories were generally accepted as more or less factual, but that a concept of “truth in fiction” deriving from a kind of “higher truth” first appeared around the time of Marie in Chrétien’s Erec et Enide.

     The value Marie suggests for her stories is associated with the pleasure they give due to their beauty.  This pleasure is part of an elegant courtly complex of customs that for her is the highest expression of culture.  Her prologue calls skill at writing a God-given gift on a par with factual knowledge [2], since artistic ability brings pleasure to receptive readers.  Such value is described in aesthetic terms as a flower: “When something really good is heard by many people, it has its first bloom, but when it is praised by many people then it fully flowers.” [3] 

     The motive for her poems is to recast in more beautiful form “tales I have heard” [4] in order that they should not be forgotten [5].  Here the contrast is not a matter of verisimilitude, between narratives that seem “true” and those that seem “false,” but rather between those whose worth is associated with their having existed in the tradition, in the past, and not being simple innovations.  In this way the excellence of the ancestors as exemplary models will be preserved.  According to Marie the people of Brittany had been in the past “valiant and courtly and noble,” and among their achievements was to record the stories they heard in order that they never be forgotten [6].

     The novel element in her retellings is her refinement, her application of the polish of a fine style to a worthwhile pre-existing story.  “Anyone who wants to relate a tale must begin in an original way and proceed with words so well-chosen that the story will please people.” [7]  The added value is aesthetic, attracting readers or listeners through a heightened beauty such that “the sound is good to hear” [8].

     The “truth” of Marie’s lais resides in  their embodiment of ideals of behavior and social order.  Viewed as a method of preserving and perpetuating the courtly refinement assigned to the past, this “rightness” transcends the simple facts of historicity.  This is the reason that the characters are so outstanding, the women so lovely, and the men so valiant.  As a picture of what men and women might be, how “correct” their behavior, how dazzling their lifestyle, these stories are decidedly more "real" than the mere facts of the past.  Just as myth tells of events that are less incidents that once occurred than descriptions of the way things are, Marie’s noble lovers define the standards to which their listeners aspire in the very moment of their hearing.  The truths they convey are not like the incidents recorded in annals; rather they are what seemed the timeless truths of human life.  For her as for Aristotle, poetry is something more “philosophical,” that is, reaching toward the truth and thus more “serious” and more worthy of attention [9].  

 

 

 

1.  See Walter Haug, Vernacular Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: The German Tradition, 800–1300, in its European Context (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, Series Number 29) who says Chretien’s Erec et Enide is "the first vernacular romance of the Middle Ages which may be described as fictional" (p. 91), as earlier epics were presumed to be historical.  For other discussion of the issue see Hans Ulricht Gumbrecht, “Wie fictional war das höfische Roman?,” Heinrich and Iser, eds., Funktionen 433-40 and Klaus W. Hempfer, “Some Problems Concerning a Theory of Fiction(ality),” Style Vol. 38, No. 3, German Narratology II (Fall 2004).

2.  “Ki Deus ad dune escïence/ E de parler bone eloquence” (“He to whom  God has given knowledge and the ability to speak with skill” [1-2].) 

3.  Quant uns granz biens est mult oïz,

Dunc a primes est il fluriz

E quant loëz est de pluzurs,

Dunc ad espandues ses flurs. (5-8)

 

4.  Des lais pensai, k’oïz aveie. (33)  

 

5. Ke pur remembrance les firent/ Des aventures ki’l oïrent.” (35-6)

 

6.  Jadis suleient par pruësce,

Par couteisie e par noblesce,

Des aventures qu’il oient,

Ki a plusurs gens avenaient,

Fere les lais pur remembrance. (Equitan, 3-7)

 

7.  Ki divers cuntes veut traitier

Diversement deit comencier

E parler si rainablement

K’il seit pleisibles a la gent.   (Milum, 1-4)

 

8.  Bone e nest a oïr la note. (Guigemar, 886)

 

9.   “Poetry is thus more philosophical and more serious than history, since poetry is more concerned with the universal and history with the particular.”  (διὸ καὶ φιλοσοφώτερον καὶ σπουδαιότερον ποίησις ἱστορίας ἐστίν: ἡ μὲν γὰρ ποίησις μᾶλλον τὰ καθόλου, ἡ δ᾽ ἱστορία τὰ καθ᾽ ἕκαστον λέγει.)  (Poetics, Bk. IX.) 

The Phantom of Artistic Truth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

The Framing of Brontë’s The Professor

 

Endnotes are in brackets.  References in parentheses are page numbers is the readily accessible Penguin edition edited by Heather Glen.

 

     Charlotte Brontë’s earliest work for publication The Professor remained unpublished until after the author’s death.  Perhaps the most prominent difference between The Professor and Villette, which she wrote next using portions of the earlier story, is the shift from a male to a female narrator, but the two works begin with markedly different perspectives as well.  Whereas the later novel opens with Lucy Snow’s first-person adolescent reminiscences, the first chapter of the earlier work, titled “Introductory,” covers similar ground, but in the form of a letter.  Both novels, however, end using the device of a slip in the narrative voice from past to present tense.  The Professor has been taken by some critics to be a premature false start as Brontë developed her professional writing skills, and the unusual device employed in the first pages of the book has been called “clumsy and artificial” and “an early gaucherie” by critics. [1]

     The opening letter might seem a vestige of the epistolary practice of Richardson and Smollett.  In earlier novels the pretense of the letter form supports the historicity of the text, reinforced by the reduction of some place names to initials as though to protect the characters’ privacy.  While a few novels like Robinson Crusoe that adopted the pose of recording literal truth were actually accepted by some readers as fact, once the device became familiar, it had the dialectic effect of representing a known literary artifice depicting lived reality, thus suggesting truth and falsity at once. 

      Yet Brontë’s use of this device has peculiar characteristics.  She would have the reader believe that Crimsworth came across the copy of a letter when he simply “found” it in his desk, and that this discovery of an aborted memoir led him to complete the story. 

     The fact that the letter was written, not received, by the persona telling the story shifts the reader’s perception more directly on its author.  Few enough people maintain copies of their own correspondence that this presentation alone draws attention.  Charles, the intended recipient of the letter, never appears at all, and the letter was never delivered as thee writer’s old schoolmate had moved.  Why had the narrator felt drawn to send an account of his life to this long-ago “acquaintance,” as Crimsworth calls him?

     One effect of this device is to emphasize the focus on the protagonist whose ego is a primary theme Brontë is to develop.  The letter is a curious document.  Though the point of the letter is to renew a relationship with an old schoolmate, it opens by declaring that neither of the two had been popular, Charles “sarcastic and cold-blooded,” and William “not strikingly attractive.”  Though exclusion by others might make the basis for the two outsiders to ally, Crimsworth says he cannot understand what “animal magnetism” joined them.  What is more, he declares that he felt (and presumably feels) himself superior.  He has no interest in the affairs of his correspondent.  “What you have been doing I know not, but you shall hear “how the world has wagged with me” he says imperiously.  The solipsistic letter goes on to detail his rebellion against the injustice he suffered at the hands of his brother.

     He notes at the end of the “Introductory’ chapter that, having leisure in  retirement, he had, apparently motivated by generosity, intended to describe his life for the “private benefit” of his acquaintance Charles.  Frustrated in that goal, he determined that his tale would have value “for the public at large,” in particular for the use of other educators for whom his experience, he believes, will prove instructive.  The presumption is palpable.

     The persona considers the account of his career a sort of self-help book, inspiring others to rise through discipline and work to affluence.  In this partial truth the tale bears some resemblance to the stories of Horatio Alger heroes and the deserving waifs of Charles Dickens, though in these cases the heroes’ ascents often depend on providentially charitable patrons, while William Crimsworth has only his own ambition.  Thus he represents a model of a kind of Calvinist capitalist, prospering through self-denial and looking out for the main chance.  Though his story is in part a guide to overcoming obstacles and climbing the economic ladder, Crimsworth is, as a recent editor noted a “disquieting” hero. [2]  While his calculating moves do bring him success, he often appears as unattractive, selfish, or aggressive.

    He must, it seems, strive against the world to attain his own felicity, suppressing his own feelings in pursuit of his larger worldly ends.  This includes the rejection of his relatives who suggest for him a marriage and settled living, then after a time of his brother with whom his relations had always been prickly  but from whom he had accepted a position.  Seeking his fortune by himself in the world, he succeeds as a schoolteacher (in French a professeur) first with M. Pelet and then with Mlle. Reuter through his forceful manner with the students.  His “system” for instructing pupils he found to have “dense intelligence” and “feeble reflective powers” was to lower his expectations radically, but then, “having brought down my lesson to the lowest level of my slowest student’s capacity,” to become suddenly a “despot,” insisting on “submission and acknowledgement of error, or ignominious expulsion.” (98)

     Even his love affair with Frances Henri is described in the same manner.  He is the master; she the faithful server.  Even so, she is obliged sometimes to object, “Monsieur, vous me faites mal; de grâce lâchez un peu ma main droite.” She addresses him as Master.  To him “reproofs suited her best of all” (204).  He has no interest in her feelings; their relationship is plainly portrayed in physical terms of domination and submission.  “My arm, it is true, still detained her, but with a restraint that was gentle enough, as long as no opposition tightened it.”  His heart, he says, is wholly taken up with “its own content” which he finds “fathomless.”  (248-9)  The happy ending’s evidence of his success are the acquisition of a devoted wife and child, hard-earned, without a doubt. 

     The price, then of worldly success for this wronged orphan is to “resist” any “impulse” to be  “warmer” or “more expressive” (204), and to be governed instead by “perseverance and sense of duty.” (159)  The darker elements of his state of mind are suggested by Crimsworth’s xenophobia and contempt for Catholicism as well as, more deeply, his susceptibility to depression, or “Hypochondria” (254)    

     A similar tension is evident in the book’s other generic conventions.  The plot follows the form of classic comedy in that a couple overcome obstacles, marry, and find a settled and serene life.  Yet it is evident that the love portrayed in The Professor is flawed, though perhaps only because it is all too human.  From another angle, the story is about how to succeed in business, a story of a clever lad who through determined efforts of his own, accomplished much.  Yet the reader will wonder whether the stern pedagogy and cagey dealings with employers are really to be recommended.  An anodyne slogan like “Hope smiles on Effort!” elides the issue of what sort of effort. (206) 

     In spite of all the conventional paradigms of a hero’s path to love and worldly prosperity, Brontë claims that her book is straightforward, unadorned realism.   She opens a chapter with a declaration that could open a manifesto.  “Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of everyday life.” (186)  In the novel’s preface Charlotte, writing under her pseudonym Currer Bell claims, “I said to myself that my hero should work his way through life as I had seen real living men work theirs.” (37)  In the preface of 1851, she says, as an explanation of the sobriety of the story: “In many a crude effort destroyed almost as soon as composed, I had got over any such taste as I might once have had for ornamented and redundant composition, and come to prefer what was plain and homely.”  The spare style of realism established in the opening letter asserts the book’s veracity. 

     The slide into the present tense in the last  pages (from 288) has the effect of casting the concluding scene as constant, a “happy ever after,” as though nothing of significance would later occur. Such a coda resembles the way some pop songs, instead of ending with an appropriate musical phrase, simply fade to silence or a final movie shot that rises into the air over the last scene.  While marking the end of the work in a conventional and recognizable way, at the same time the concluding present tense adopts the pose of portraying a scene immediately before the observer’s eyes, leaving the reader poised in the end as in the beginning between realism and convention, symbolic commentary and bare facts.

     Both opening and closing of The Professor indicate the tension between natural and artificial.  The reader must wonder whether Crimsworth is seeking to “live his dream,” as a modern idiom would have it, to fully become himself and escape from the limitations of his birth, or whether his ambition has led him to make a tortured topiary of his soul, in the effort losing real love, and perhaps a genuinely successful classroom as well. 

     The framing of the story in fact highlights its difference from Villette.  The opening pages reveal a far less attractive protagonist than Lucy Snow.  Crimsworth’s asperities reappear in Villette, though transferred to M. Emanuel.  Though Lucy may seem more deserving, her love affair ends, at best, in separation and ambiguity.  The Professor concludes with images of connubial bliss (though the reader may suspect that the real picture is more complex), while Villette ends in a note of sinister foreboding with howling banshees signaling lethal storms.  In spite of the common ground of the plots and even of the language, the first two novels Charlotte Brontë completed are for the reader independent of each other in direction and theme, though, had The Professor been published, Villette would never  have been written.

  

 

1.  Carl Plasa,  “Charlotte Brontë's Foreign Bodies: Slavery and Sexuality in ‘The Professor,’” Journal of Narrative Theory, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Winter, 2000), pp. 1-28  “For many critics, the epistolary manoeuvre with which Brontë begins The Professor is both clumsy and artificial.”

2. Heather Glen in her introduction to the Penguin Classic edition.  Glen provides as well useful background on early nineteenth century self-help books.  

Sir Isumbras and the Functions of the Fabulous

     As soon as language appeared, it became possible to describe things contrary to reality, facilitating lying and allowing the emergence of religion and literature. The appetite of the pious for marvels knows no boundaries in space or time; supernatural events provide marvelous entertainment and add the simplest seal of authenticity for every sadhu, faith healer, priest and shaman. Miracles continue to occur regularly if one believes the tales of the faithful.
     There is, however, no controversy over the unreality of all imaginative literature. Every story is made up, in this sense a “lie;” it makes no claim to have actually happened and thus be “true.” Every poem is also a little work of fiction, with a persona saying things the author imagined might be said. As Aristotle knew, literature provides quite a different sort of truth. In fact, both verisimilitude and fabulation are rhetorical figures, the former suggesting a complex of attitudes arising from an apparently plausible plot and the latter making use of a story’s improbability .
     Those utterly unsophisticated in visual art sometimes tend to think that the best painting is the most real-looking. (Naïve as it is, this notion has a continuous history reaching back to antiquity.) By a similar standard of judgment, verisimilitude would be the mark of the best writing. One might using this criterion criticize a novel’s conclusion as implausible, the description of a city as quite unlike the original, or dialogue as stilted. Such points are indeed salient, but only if the narrative had already established an expectation of realism making the offending passage dissonant.
     In fact a great deal of literature employs unrealistic turns of plot altogether appropriate, indeed necessary, for the effects and themes of a given work. The myths by which humans structure and understand their world include none of the restraints of lived experience. Heroes and villains die and are reborn, they possess the power of invisibility, heal the sick and raise the dead. Their reality is symbolic and not literal. Similarly, the conventions of romance involve the most incredible coincidences and pairings, the most improbable reappearances and denouements. Folk tales, too, are often utterly supernatural from the start, though many rely on spirits and goblins rather than deities.
     Verisimilitude and its opposite both make an impression on the reader. The many critics who have pondered whether Sir Isumbras is a courtly romance or a religious quasi-hagiography neglect to observe what the two genres have in common: both saints’ lives and chivalric narrative allow themselves conventions that stray far from realism.
     The sort of entertainment Sir Isumbras offers may seem in little demand today. in the narration of a medieval Job [1], whose travails mount until he accepts his guilt and, having performed extravagant penance, finds his material as well as spiritual well-being restored as a result. As a tail-rhyme romance, the account is clearly meant for popular amusement rather than for catechism; the poem certainly arose and circulated apart from any ecclesiastical imprimatur, yet is was an age when the canonical saints themselves had careers recorded as rather more lively with miraculous manifestations than the readers’ lived experience.
     The boldly dramatic turns in Sir Isumbras’ life are told with little concern for verisimilitude. After the talking bird sent by Christ sets the plot in motion, a reader or listener not swept along by the story might wonder at the lion, leopard, and unicorn that carry off his sons with such regularity, or at their miraculous reappearance in his hour of need without any explanation of what had happened in the meantime. His wife’s failure to recognize him after his long service as an ironworker is likewise implausible (as his her treatment by her captor and her immediate ascendance to rule in his absence). Sir Isumbras’ restoration to prosperity with which the tale ends is as flat and simple as the end of the book of Job. A griffin’s steals his gold, but then it fortuitously reappears. Anything can happen, it seems, that the narrator wishes to propose.
     All these extraordinary events are far from random. They serve the ends of the romance just as similar improbabilities fill other romances from Daphnis and Chloe to The Winter’s Tale. In the first place, use of the fabulous is a sign of the aesthetic text. Though marvels and the supernatural appear as well in texts centered on history, travel, or even science, as well as religion, such showy violations of natural law are characteristic of imaginative literature. The reader accepts with relish the fact that fictions have no limits as surely as did those who were listening to the Wife of Bath when she began “In th' olde dayes of the kyng arthour . . .”
     The fabulous plot elements also provide a measure of structural symmetry, marking off the central portion of the tale with its action from the backstory, the long central portion of penitential labor in the ironworks, and the denouement. Rather like the working out of a well-designed farce, every element – in this case, the wife, the three sons, and the throne – returns with a satisfying inevitability once the pattern is set into motion.
     The chief appeal of the fantastic is surely, though, the timeless pleasure of recreationally contemplating the amazing and the impossible. Indeed, England no less than India, enjoyed stories featuring marvels of all sorts [2] and a good many religious narratives as well as heroic battle narratives catered to a taste akin to that of lovers of science fiction and fantasy. Miracles in art and in language were the equivalent of the special effects so prominent in films today, relished for their very improbability. The world of superheroes in comics and films is part of a lineage that includes such varied texts as Jataka Buddha stories and Sir John Mandeville.
     Virtually all the romances include religious formulae and Sir Isumbras is not unique among them in its foregrounding of the theme of salvation. [3] The presence of miraculous events is a universal sign of divine activity, so the episodes related of the penitential knight might be considered to bolster the Gospel stories of Christ walking on water and raising the dead. The small bird that posed Sir Isumbras the question of whether he preferred happiness at the beginning or the end of his life was the direct agent of Jesus Christ. The whole story is a dramatic enactment of Providence modeling original sin, repentance and penitence, and the felicity that accompanies acceptance of God’s grace. Though the narrated events are sensational, they reflect thereby only the more strongly the culture’s hegemonic ideology about the course of every Christian life.
     Yet there lurks a contradiction in that Christian confidence. Sir Isumbras is not susceptible to the sort of programmatic allegorical reading applicable to, say, The Faery Queen or Pilgrim’s Progress. The story cannot be read purely as an ingenious thematic statement, and for that reason its realism cannot be wholly dismissed as an issue. The gap between the reader and the hero is yawning wide. Though one might call Sir Isumbras an everyman in his sin, repentance, and salvation, he is unlike anyone’s lived experience in his having lived so high, sunk so low, and endured such extraordinary suffering before his marvelous deliverance. The inexorable retributive justice which first condemns the hero to prolonged suffering and humiliation and later restores him to prosperity seems to belong to a world apart from that of lived experience just as Christ’s miracles and the supernatural events of the Hebrew scriptures are remote in time and place. After appreciating the justice meted out to Sir Isumbras, after all, the reader or listener returns to a far less visibly just world. The church would maintain that all accounts are balanced in the afterlife, but this assurance has not always determined the behavior of those who identify as believers. In a way Sir Isumbras is a poignant wish, reflecting more how the world lacks justice than solid confidence that all will be right in the end.
     The rhetoric of fancy in which anything can happen is exhilarating. The poet, like a magician, can attract a considerable audience by making rabbits appear out of hats or sawing attractive assistants in two. This entertainment value may indeed be its formal cause in the Aristotelean sense, but the role of the fabulous is significant in what a medieval churchman would have considered the poem’s central purpose to be its teaching of Christian precepts. Even dealing with dogma, however, art is subtle enough to introduce contradictions, tensions, and uncertainties into the narrative by use of the very same “unrealistic” incidents which at the same time hammer home central points of doctrine.



1. Sir Isumbras elides the central issue of Job by the knight’s clear sin of pride before his fall.

2. See, for instance my “Sacred Space as Sideshow” (http://williamseaton.blogspot.com/2010/02/sacred-space-as-sideshow.html).

3. Dieter Mehl’s The Middle English Romances of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries proposes a subgenre of “homiletic romances” which includes Sir Isumbras as well as The King of Tars, Robert of Sicily, Sir Gowther, Emaré, Le Bone Florence of Rome, Athelston, The Sege of Melayne, and Cheuelere Assigne.

Hesiod’s Muses: A Study in Polysemy

Theogony 26-28
ποιμένες ἄγραυλοι, κάκ᾽ ἐλέγχεα, γαστέρες οἶον,
ἴδμεν ψεύδεα πολλὰ λέγειν ἐτύμοισιν ὁμοῖα,
ἴδμεν δ᾽, εὖτ᾽ ἐθέλωμεν, ἀληθέα γηρύσασθαι.


     The Theogony tells us that when the Muses appeared to Hesiod they told him, “we know how to say many false things seeming true, but we also know, when we like, to sing the truth.” Being divine, and artistic and female to boot, even in this personal epiphany, they are likely to have intended multiple meanings and to have implied more than they said. Sketching out the semantic field defined by these few lines is a task without the closure of a single direct answer. As in poetry in general, the reader or listener constructs meaning from data less prescriptive than suggestive.


1.
     Considering the insults in the line preceding the Muses’ statement in which they address the poet and his fellow workers with the words “shepherds of the fields, miserable disgraces, nothing but bellies,” they may seem to be simply teasing the wretched ground-grubbing human with his limitations. Able to do nothing but stuff his mouth, he cannot hope to discern truth from lie. Any revelations they may make are then of no use to him, mingled as they are with misleading falsehoods. Though one might take their appearance as a seal of authenticity, an assertion of the authority of revelation, coming as they do from “aegis-holding Zeus,” this warning undercuts the guarantee as soon as it is delivered. The theme would then be one familiar to readers of Works and Days which admits humankind’s wretchedness and ignorance.
     In Plato’s Laws a similar sentiment appears. “Let us suppose that each of us living creatures is an ingenious puppet of the gods, whether contrived by way of a toy of theirs or for some serious purpose—for as to that we know nothing.” (R. G. Bury’s translation, I 644d) Later Plato elaborates this notion, adding that, rather than feel despair over the darkness in which we must live, we should rather emulate the divine practice of play. “Man is contrived, as we said above, to be a plaything of God, and the best part of him is really just that; and thus I say that every man and woman ought to pass through life in accordance with this character, playing at the noblest of pastimes, being otherwise minded than they now are.” (VII 803c) Art, of course, is the most sophisticated form of play.


2.
     An element of poetic play entailed in every performance or publication is the author’s demand for attention. Anyone seeking an audience cannot avoid the arrogance inherent in the writer’s position. The implicit call of every text is in the first instance, “Give me a hearing. Dismiss all other voices from your mind and listen only to mine.” All writers are in fact saying what the poet of the medieval romnce Octavian says at the outset.


Lytyll and mykyll, olde and yonge,
Lystenyth now to my talking.


     In support of this claim on the attention of others, Hesiod’s Muses pointedly describe some poetry as false and by this warning imply that their own revelations bear the imprimatur of heaven.
     This universal poetic pretension may also bear traces of its immediate history. It may be that the specific circumstances surrounding this poem include a conscious campaign to reconcile the myriad alternatives and contradictions in Greek religion to establish a canonical version of the mythological system which must replace all competing versions. The authority of Hesiod’s version depends on denying all the others. The success of an all-Hellenic theogony requires condemning other poets whose versions may feature regional forms of deity and local patrons. Having experienced a theophany, Hesiod is presumably on good terms with the Muses, his work authenticated by his divine encounter, while only deceit is associated with authors lacking such a benediction.


3.
     The text is often taken to mean that some poetry contains truth while some expresses specious lies, an idea easily assimilated to familiar aesthetic value judgements. If discerning the one from the other were a simple matter of checking the data of poetry against the reader’s lived experience, everyone would be a competent critic, but the Muses suggest that distinguishing true from false may be elusive.
     This is, of course, the very issue that problematized poetry for Plato. While conceding the divine inspiration of some poetry and acknowledging the power of art, whether fostering truth or delusion, Plato takes the safer option of forbidding poetry altogether in his Republic rather than risking that the wrong sort might gain influence. (He seems to have entertained no such fear of erring philosophers.)
     A similar view of poetry might be taken by less sophisticated Roman Catholics to whom accordance with church dogma is a precondition of good literature or vulgar Marxists who insist on working class heroes. Indeed, every reviewer who finds a book does not correspond to preconceptions might consider it to be lies, a retrograde standard indeed. The same criterion is implied when a work is praised as insightful or true-to-life.
     Complicating this sort of judgement is the fact that every text contains countless details and thus innumerable links to lived experience. Must every one of these prove accurate for the work to be deemed true? What about ambivalent relationships between the text and perceived reality: could a poetic line be partially true? Both true and false or neither? Who is able to determine an accurate measurement of truth? Short of revealed scripture (and then only for the fundamentalist believer) surely every text occupies an indeterminate middle ground.


4.
     Given the difficulty of assigning a poem a truth value that will be accepted by all informed readers, it may be that the Muses had in mind a more modest assertion and meant to claim only that some texts seem real, while others seem to lie. In this case they simply distinguish between imaginative works that possess verisimilitude, whether in details of setting, psychology, or theme from those constructed with the use of other conventions. Sidney’s Arcadia could hardly be taken for the record of actual events, nor could Barthelme’s Snow White, but this is not because the authors were incapable of representing plausible events, but because their projects were altogether different. The Muses might in this sense be thought to be boasting about the range of effects of which they are capable.
     The writer’s choice is not binary. Often poetry is found in the borderline territory between apparent truth and seeming fantasy. In their division of labor for Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth was to find the extraordinary in the mundane while Coleridge was to work on the recognizable within the exotic, but for both it is the contrast, the mixture that generates poetry. Though such a systematically self-conscious approach is exceptional, any number of combinations of the convincingly realistic and the conspicuously fabulous may be effectively used construct aesthetic texts.


5.
     The Muses’ formula may also be taken as a definition of literature, described with the unique quality of being at once both true and false. Every fictional story is, of course, false in the sense that it did not literally happen. Every poem as well might be read as fiction, as though prefaced with the words, “Imagine that a person were to say this . . .” Paradoxically, literature acquires its general truth, what critics call its theme, its application to lived experience, by avoiding faithfulness to the mere details of what has actually happened.
     Hesiod’s theme would then be similar to Aristotle’s distinction between history and poetry in the Poetics), though Aristotle mentions only the use of typical or most likely human behavior, saying “By a ‘general truth’ I mean the sort of thing that a certain type of man will do or say either probably or necessarily.” (W. H. Fyfe’s translation ix 1451b6-7) Due probably to his focus on drama, Aristotle omits therefore the poet’s depiction of non-psychological themes based on what seems likely, typical, or general. Aristotle here fails to comment on perhaps the most assertive form of rhetorical lying, the use of figures of speech such as metaphor which signify something other from what they say on the surface. Yet these, too, are aimed at shadowing forth a greater truth beyond mere facts.
     By facilitating lying and in general the ability to speak of things unseen, the development of language forty some thousand years ago fostered not only better organized hunting but gave birth to art and religion as well. (See David Lewis-Williams’ The Mind in the Cave) A recent scholar has suggested that the Muses mean to say not that their propositions might be falsely taken for truth, but rather that poetry is, in fact, a quasi-truth. “Seeming true” is then misleading; a better rendering would be “in a certain way equivalent to truth.” (See Bruce Heiden, “The Muses' Uncanny Lies: Hesiod, "Theogony" 27 and Its Translators,” The American Journal of Philology, vol. 128, no. 2 [Summer, 2007].)


6
     The perverse coyness of Hesiod’s muses will perhaps recall to the contemporary reader certain French theorists of the later twentieth century. The denial of straightforward signification, the questioning of the subject and mystification of the object may have startled Of Grammatology’s early readers, but such gestures became not only conventional, they became clichés in major literary conferences by the ‘eighties.
     The muses themselves are presumably as authoritative even as a Sorbonne professor when they cast doubt on the reliability of poetic truth. The ambiguity upon which they insist sounds altogether consistent with différance, and their magisterial attitude has a good deal in common with the mandarins of Paris and New Haven.
     Enough! The webs of signification have no end, but must be cut, like the threads in Atropos’ hand. The possibilities here outlined are sufficient to indicate some of their trajectories. As well as describing poetry, the Muses’ declaration embodies it. Aesthetic language differs from other discourses by its exploitation of polysemy. Each of the options outlined above is plausible. Each is founded on the text and on the characteristics of poetry. None is the whole truth, though each is true.

The Familiar Note in Poetry

     Reading Scott’s Marmion, I found the poetry thin and shallow, though fluent. While a Romantic in his involvement with love and the past, in his nationalism and use of folk materials, Scott was uninventive (if competent) in his handling of verse. Yet I found the dedicatory excurses that begin every canto refreshing, fresh, and entertaining. Their casual evocation of deep friendship and their informal commentary on history and the contemporary scene contrast with the highly conventionalized and nearly mythic plot line of the main narrative, rendering these passages, which some have found intrusive and inappropriate, more lively and convincing than the main body of the poem.
     I thought of other great poems which purport to be addressed to a specific individual and thus deal with what might seem to be private matters. Since all literature as such is circulated to a general readership, this pretense is a rhetorical pose, yet, like all rhetorical figures, it ideally contributes to the poem’s beauty, meaning, and effectiveness.
     When Sappho writes of love, it is rarely in the abstract. If not addressing Aphrodite, whom she conceives anthropomorphically, she writes a letter to Atthis or an intimate note to Anaktoria. Yet she performed these compositions at least semi-publically, and they were circulated and recorded by others who may well have known none of the principals in person. Similarly, we all have taken an interest in Horace’s best wishes for a safe voyage of his friend Vergil and Catullus’ invitation to Fabullus for a dinner, promising rewards beyond food. An illusion of intimacy arises from the poet’s familiar tone.
     The lineage of use of this device extends worldwide through history. Among its practitioners are such Tang Dynasty poets as Du Fu (for instance, for his “To Han the Censor” and “On Waiting for my Friend Ting”), troubadours employing such forms as the partimen and the tenso (such as the exchange between Marcabru and Uc Catola), Gay’s Epistles, Goldsmith’s “Verses in Reply to Dr. Baker’s Invitation” or his “Letter in Prose and Verse to Mrs. Bunbury.” The increasingly demotic idiom of modern poetry is congenial to this phenomenon. Though examples abound, I will mention only Elizabeth Bishop’s “Letter to N.Y.," Frank O’Hara’s “To the Harbormaster,” and Anne Waldman “A Phone Call from Frank O’Hara.”
     To present a poem as a note between friends suggests its “reality,” implying that it arose, not as an intentionally designed aesthetic object, a “thing made,” or poem, but rather as a natural byproduct of everyday life. This pretense of authenticity resembles that of early novelists who encoded their imaginative productions as journals or letters arising directly from lived experience. The familiar text thus playfully asserts its character as a private utterance at the same time as its writer and every reader know that it is not, creating a sort of shimmering illusory simulacrum of experience.
     Unreal as its consumers know it to be, this pose nonetheless dramatically supports a claim of sincerity. A note to a friend is assumed to be spontaneous and natural. The poet is using a version of the same device familiar from Sir Philip Sidney’s first sonnet in Astrophil and Stella which ends “’Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart, and write.’" This could be considered, of course, entirely a matter of convention, a literary pose with no implication of straightforwardness in the author’s lived experience. [1]
     Apart from sincerity, addressing a friend in poetry focuses on the value of love and comradeship, especially an affection heightened by a mutual verbal sophistication, a capacity for delight in words. Friendship is a major theme in poetry and rises to prominence in Chinese and late Latin lyrics, though less prominent today. The poems then remain in a realm lit by human affection. If it is not the fevered heat of romantic love, it signals what is perhaps a steadier, more sustainable flame, promising a potential of companionship and mutual support.
     By collapsing in the gap between the artistic and the natural, by acting as though poetic language is used in everyday exchanges, that a persona is identical with a historical individual, the writer is playfully suggesting the primacy of the cultivated poetic sensibility. The implication in the end is that life itself is aestheticized and unfolds in a realm of pattern, beauty, and significance. [2] In this sense the composition and consumption of aesthetic texts can be seen as a sort of sympathetic magic which strives by its verbal spells to impose order, grace, and meaning on the chaos of observed reality. In a sort of stealth technique, poets sometimes employ the most casual and unpretentious forms of discourse, words that present themselves as having little more weight than the trivia of daily conversation, hoping thereby to assure a life made livable by love and beauty.
     The playful uses to which words are put in poetry are the most sophisticated use of the distinctively human capacity to manipulate symbols. Like other forms of art, poetry is, among other things, a pastime: people, in part for the fun of it, practicing their greatest skill, enjoying the companionship of others who enjoy the same game, and thus passing the time as the sun declines in the heavens.

 

1. Important as it may be to the Romantic for whom art is self-expression, the issue can hardly exist for those to whom another’s subjectivity must remain forever unknown to the observer.

2. Ironically, taking the artificial to its limit as in a Renaissance dream vision such as Lydgate’s Temple of Glas has much the same effect. One might compare the division of labor in Lyrical Ballads, with Wordsworth striving to illuminate the hidden depths of the quotidian and Coleridge seeking what is significant to all in the exotic and remote. Both aimed by such a contrast to point readers’ minds in new directions.