Notes on Recent Reading 18 [Radcliffe, Stendhal, Erasmus]

Romance of the Forest (Radcliffe)

     Radcliffe’s novel has plenty of romance, raised to a high pitch the first half by Adeline’s distress at unwilling confinement and the threat of sexual exploitation. This exquisite but frustrated affection continues in the second as the true love that arises in the midst of her perils is then transformed into anxiety over the fate of her champion, unfairly condemned to death. Throughout the narrative, she has ample motive to weep and to swoon. The language, especially between lovers, is stilted and highly artificial – though I do recall an article demonstrating that actual fainting was apparently common during the age of the “man of sensibility,” so perhaps the delicate circumlocutions are all drawn from life. There are plenty of rhapsodic descriptions of wild landscape as well as Gothic ruins with endless rooms upon room, secret passages and all the machinery of the late eighteenth century thriller. A good number of the poetic quotations that head each chapter are drawn from Collins. The word “romance” is used often in a self-conscious reflex.
     Yet the warm glow of Enlightenment confidence plays over the Romantic landscapes, and La Luc, Radcliffe’s philosopher, reminds the reader of Rasselas or Candide with his wise moderation.
Coleridge developed his notions on the “willing suspension of disbelief” specifically to defend artificial “romance” settings and plots, and to advocate for the free use of the supernatural in literature. This narrative, while it only plays with the metaphysical, pays scant heed to realism or even plausibility. Radcliffe did not even attempt to make the scene convincingly French, but then, millions are about to relish the concluding episode of the television series Breaking Bad which, its gritty detail notwithstanding, is altogether fantastic.


The Red and the Black (Stendhal)

     Stendhal managed to make of Sorel a complex and satisfying antihero. He seems at first an absurdly mistaken provincial Napoleon, seeking advancement through his wits while pretending piety and love without any authentic feelings whatsoever. Utterly cynical and self-interested, interested only in self-advancement, still he regards himself as a person of the highest honor and standards. He wonders in prison whether he has acted the egotist and concludes “I abandoned a simple and modest merit for what was brilliant.” Thinking “I have loved the Truth,” this most hypocritical of men laments that he could find only hypocrisy in the wider world, little suspecting that each of the others who strike him as so fraudulent, may seem, no less than our hero, subjectively a wronged lover of the truth.
     Whereas Samuel Richardson would have seen no moral ambiguity in the case of this ruiner of two women, their will no match for their passions, Stendhal constructs a more radical vision in which no one stands outside corruption. The epigraphs from Don Juan encourage a comedic/satiric reading until the sudden attack on Madame de la Renal, so injurious to Sorel’s own interests, irresistible and foolish as anything that those he felt so far above had done. Human character is finally revealed, not as wickedly duplicitous and cunning, but as blundering, absurd, and blind.


Colloquies (Erasmus)

     Ordinarily, the most literary quality of the compositions written for language learners is a certain oddity. Yet the Colloquies, written at first simply for teaching Latin, are perhaps the best introduction to Erasmus’ work. In the fifteenth century, the great Christian humanist demonstrated that orthodoxy may coexist with tolerance rather in the style of the current pope. This benign regard for the follies of humanity extends in fact to such church-sanctioned activities as pilgrimages, exorcisms, and elaborate funerals. Erasmus regularly discerns the truly spiritual, at least what works for those of an intellectual cast of mind, and the polish of his Latinity signifies the high standard of his character.
     The Colloquies are incidentally valuable as vignettes of sixteenth century life. In his piece on “Inns,” he describes the world of the Renaissance hospitality industry with color and humor. His piece on pilgrimage includes a catalogue of marvelous and magical stones as well as detail on religious practice. His anti-war “Charon” at once reflects its historic origins and speaks eloquently to today.
     But the appeal of the collection is its free-ranging variety from a highly original takes on courtly love (“The Wooer and the Maiden”) and the pastoral with his servant playing Cyclops (“Cyclops, or the Gospel Bearer”) to a house party at the most civilized country estate ornamented with both nature and art (“The Godly Feast”). It is difficult to escape the conviction that Erasmus sought salvation from his sense of beauty as well as from his sense of the divine.

Documents of the third Surreal Cabaret

The third Surreal Cabaret was presented at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, August 23 at the Seligmann Center for the Arts, 23 White Oak Drive in Sugar Loaf.

The program

1. Steve Roe performed Museum Piece, a monologue describing a bizarre museum treating the relationship of art to commerce, science, and violence.
Roe is founder of COPE, the Council of (Poetic) Experimentation, a performance group dedicated to performing classic and original multimedia experimental works. Roe was Associate Producer and acted in the prize-winning film Under Jakob's Ladder.

2. Jennifer Kraus did Mirror, mirror, mirror, mirror which through video, movement and voice searches for redeeming vulnerability behind the current "selfie" culture.
Kraus, a Warwick native, is a dance teacher and choreographer. She most recently worked at HERE Arts Center in NYC as an Assistant Director. She has formed a theatrical production company, HUGE CUP Productions, through which she develops original dance theater work.

3. Michael Sean Collins delivered Igor’s Revenge, or The Black Dog Takes Another Bite, a macabre surreal existential monologue representing a conversation between a man and his unconscious.
Collins is an actor, poet, magician, photographer and former 22-year resident of New York City. He has performed in television, film, theater, cafes, night clubs circuses and alternative performance venues across the United States and Canada.

4. Chloe Roe sang Aria, John Cage’s composition which requires a single performer to vocalize in five languages using ten vocal styles.
Roe is a professional actress and singer. She appears as the lead in the feature film Feral Child and as Francis in The Library. She is also a member of The Manhattan Girls Chorus. But most of all she likes to rock out with her band.

5. William Seaton enacted The Debate of Thaumastes and Panurge, a disputation conducted entirely in gestures.
Seaton conceived the Surreal Cabaret. He also produces the Poetry on the Loose Reading/Performance Series and teaches workshops at the Northeast Poetry Center’s College of Poetry.

6. ArtCrime with John Korchok provided opening and incidental music and performed a unique version of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.
ArtCrime is a cell of committed aesthetic hackers devoted to the overthrow of musical expectations. Using jazz, classical, and rock idioms, we make music that is reminiscent of the future. We sleep in the daytime, we work in the nighttime. We might not ever get home.


The poster by David Horton

[I haven't succeeded in reproducing the excellent poster by David Horton. Blogger doesn't seem to like the pdf format. Perhaps it will appear here soon.]


The benediction by the Lama Swine Toil

Good evening and welcome to the Surreal Cabaret at the Seligmann Studio, the staging area for advanced artistic research in Orange County. I am the Lama Swine Toil, Surrealist Chaplain, midwife to your imaginative endeavors for the next few hours. Allow me to bestow the special benediction of the unordained and to share a few words of scripture.
I am bedazzled to gaze upon you and to behold radiant perfect Buddhas enjoying the endless unemployment of Eternity. But in this quantum universe we find ourselves like Schrödinger’s cat in two states at once. I see as well as Buddhas small caged and pacing beasts like those in the Humane Society, motherless, anxious, and feeling alien indeed. Suspended between these realities, I invite you to make of yourself tonight a young child with no responsibilities beyond observing and playing.
And now a few words from our scriptures. Remember always the rule of the Abbey of Theleme which existed never and always: “Do as thou wouldst.” In different words the rural Midwestern prophet Ezekiel Cole expressed the same timeless thought “If thou hast eyes, go thy way.” Allow me to conclude with the glad exclamations of Lord Buckley’s Nazz, “Oh great swingin’ flowers of the fields! And the Nazz say “Dig Infinity!”

Gascoigne’s “Notes of Instruction”

     Between Wyatt and Surrey, George Gascoigne is probably England’s most significant poet. His historical position is unassailable. According to Legouis’ thorough A History of English Literature Gascoigne wrote the first “prose story taken from real life, the first prose comedy, the first tragedy translated from Italian, the first masque, the first regular satire, and the first treatise on English prosody.” He was perhaps only too prolific; he is little read today. In his pursuit of a career as soldier, courtier, and poet, he never measured up to the high standard Sidney would achieve in each of these realms after him. 

      Though workmanlike with considerable ingenuity and occasional wit, his poetry has only flashes of memorable phrase. His alexandrines and fourteeners sound all but interminable to today’s ears. He is capable of sounding very like the rustics of Midsummer Night’s Dream: “My liking lust, my lucklesse love,” “My secrete partes are so with secret sorrowe soken.” Still, the conceit of his “Lullaby of a Lover” is striking “Full many wanton babes have I,/ Which must be stilled with lullaby.” He is good with proverbial expressions: “every bullet hath a lighting place” “mo the merrier” “castels buylt above in lofty skies,/ Which never yet had good foundation.” Other folk-like materials sound fresh and lively: “There's nobody at home/ But Jumping Joan,/ And father and mother and I.” He can have a spurt of Renaissance freshness: for him, the devil must be killed “with gonshote of beleefe.”
     His pioneering poetics, called “Certayne Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse or Ryme in English” appeared in The Posies in 1575. His terminology and habits of thought are Aristotelian and rhetorical. His ideas arise from induction, not a priori, and seek to account for his own experience in poetry. Gascoigne betrays no belief in inspiration of either the Platonic or the Christian varieties. [1] Influenced by authors like Castiglione and by his own position, seeking patronage at court, he portrays poetry as a refined accomplishment like skill at arms, horsemanship, or love-making.
     Like most pre-modern literary theorists, Gascoigne’s analysis is centered on the use of the conceptual framework and terminology of the rhetorical tradition. [2] Gascoigne’s rhetorical orientation is evident in his stress on invention and on propriety. To him a work must be both “good” (appealing in concept or content) and “fine” (that is, well-executed or stylish).
     In invention the poet can display his “the quick capacity,” a quality that might be equated today with originality. Each work has its own unique character which must be consistently maintained. The reader may relish the wit of the author’s ideas independent of their validity.
     The interest in propriety is another rhetorical trait. Meter must be consistent. Each metrical form implies a certain appropriate subject matter. The tradition allows the artist to convey more semantic data when his audience is familiar with a set of conventions and expectations.
     Further, Gascoigne, as a writer in an age when Latin composition still made the vernacular seem to many second-rate, insists on the value of natural colloquial language in poetry. Metric stress should correspond to stress in spoken usage [3]; iambic is the ordinary meter of the English language; words of one syllable are more English than polysyllabics. Obsolete and foreign or learned words are generally undesirable.
     Gascoigne says nothing about morality, or instruction. Art is wholly aesthetic; a good poem is “delectable,” [4] To please readers, authors must avoid trite expressions, avoiding the “uncomely customes of common writers,” and expressing ideas obliquely through tropes, allegory, or allusion, or some other novel presentation. Thus the aesthetic text affords the pleasures of a riddle or crossword. It must be soluble but not obvious, in Gascoigne’s terms “frame your stile to perpiscuity and to be sensible,” neither too obscure nor too “easie.”
     His stress is on ingenuity or wit in a context of shared convention. The poet is in fact, quite similar to a skilled raconteur or a clever party guest. Art is a display of well-wrought words, clearly within a tradition, yet defining its own sophistication through moves that cannot be wholly anticipated. This sort of dance of expectations between the writer and the audience requires considerable shared education and culture. Such poetry works most efficiently with the most homogenous readership.
     Gascoigne insists on this familiar yet refined milieu when he places his essay in an upper-class familiar social context, addressing it to an Italian friend in fulfillment of a personal promise. Thus his formulas of humility – he calls his own ideas “simple” at the outset and concludes saying “I doubt my own ignorance” – reinforce the genteel amateur’s love of art that was part of upper-class identity. Far from defining his profession, Gascoigne’s poems, like those of the other chief poets of his age, are an decorative ornament, a flower of chivalry which, when combined with his other elegant accomplishments and his martial valor, characterize him as one of “the best,” that is to say, an aristocrat. Though his ideas are neither as well-worked-out as Sidney’s nor as original as Dr. Johnson’s, he provides a reliable view of the ideas current in his time and social milieu.


1. I am using the Collected Works of George Gascoigne edited by John W. Cunliffe, a 1969 Greenwood Press reprint of the 1907 Cambridge University Press edition.

2. Some decades after Gascoigne rhetoric received its definitive Elizabethan treatment in George Puttenham’s Art of English Poesie (1589). This topic in general has been too little appreciated. Rhetoric has too often been abandoned to those interested in “public speaking.”

3. The discussion of meter is complicated by the fact that Gascoigne conflates Classical quantitative meters with accentual English ones.

4. He does make a formulaic gesture toward Christianity in his “Advertisement” to the reader that prefaces The Posies.

Two Exemplary Anecdotes from the Sixties Student Movement

     Most movements for social change are generated among the oppressed and aggrieved: women demonstrated for suffrage and workers for unions. Local homeowners get together to declare “not in my back yard” or to campaign for a stoplight. The student and youth movements of the 1960s are unusual in that those who took up the cause of African-Americans and of the Vietnamese people were relatively privileged members of the crest of the great American middle class, created largely by the labor movement of the thirties and the GI Bill of the forties. As white college students they enjoyed comforts and expectations rather greater than the norm even for their own affluent postwar country.
     People speak loosely about “the sixties” as an era of psychedelics and political protest. As a ’67 graduate of the University of Illinois, I can testify that protestors (and dopers) were a marginal group throughout my undergraduate years. When I manned the Students Against the War table in the student union, I could count on arguing with fellow students all day long. My wife was called a dyke for marching in a demonstration against parietal hours for women. I felt I knew all the people in the small coterie involved with leftist protest.
     The fact is that when I arrived at the University of Illinois in the fall of 1963 the Old Left groups had vanished. I believe the only progressive group on the Champaign-Urbana campus of tens of thousands of students was the NAACP, to be followed later by a Friends of SNCC chapter. The Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in 1964 inspired Students for Free Speech and Student Committee on Political Expression.
     About this time several others and I – I believe it was perhaps six students that one needed to create an official organization – started an Independent Socialist Club. Like the Port Huron authors, we wanted to avoid the historic entanglements of the Stalinists, Trotskyites, and followers of Norman Thomas (who spoke at the U. of I. in the spring of ’65). We could be punctilious if we liked as there were so few of us and we did no organizing, no demonstrations, indeed, no political work at all. Our meetings were as good as private though a few drifters passed through.
     Inconsequential as we were, we found we constituted a tempting bait for the very groups of which we had been wary. An older Communist, a YSA rep from miles away, and a local Socialist each in turn asked us to affiliate. Even as a discussion group we meandered. One of our original crew began pushing SWP tapes of Raya Dunayevskaya. Another thought we could best contribute to progress by intensive discussions of What is to be Done?
     Mercifully, in the fall of 1965, Students for a Democratic Society organized. At that point SDS was a broad popular front organization with many Democratic Party activists as well as socialists, anarchists, and wholly non-ideological individualists, perhaps even a stray liberal Republican or two. The Independent Socialist Club disbanded after a scant year of existence.
     The New Left Movement is often said to have begun with the February 1960 Woolworth’s sit-in in Greensboro and the subsequent founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, but until SDS there was no large and inclusive student organization pressing for social justice and peace. Veterans of the Southern Movement, both white and black, were influential leaders in the years that followed as were the “red diaper” babies whose families had been socialist in earlier decades, but each of these groups was small in numbers. The increasingly massive numbers of people willing to stand up against the system arose from the “youth revolution” element which grew exponentially following the Haight-Ashbury Summer of 1967 and the continuing threat of the draft which affected most men (though virtually all those who sought to wiggle out of the military obligation were able to do so).
     My second anecdote concerns a friend I will identify only as D-------- K------ as we have been out of touch for some time, and I have not discussed my account with him. It is, however, simple and sketchy enough that I am confident of its accuracy and, I hope, significant enough to warrant telling.
     In the junior year of his studies at a prestigious private university K------, who had considerable personal charm, a gift for rabble-rousing, and a highly developed sense of the ridiculous, moved to establish a DuBois Club on his campus. The DuBois Clubs were in fact essentially the youth group of the American Communist Party, as the Young Communist League had been (and would again be – the old name came back in 1984). Universities often found such groups unpalatable, particularly schools with endowments that count on the continuing patronage of wealthy alumni. Many in higher education doubtless feared publicity arising from even the smallest of revolutionary contingents and tried to ban such clubs.
     The membership of a DuBois Club might have been little larger and its impact little greater than my Independent Socialist Club had it been permitted, but it was not. Virtually all the students agreed that this decision was undemocratic, and they rallied energetically against it. My friend K------ had the opportunity to exercise his considerable abilities as a debater, entertainer, and wit in an ongoing series of demonstrations that attracted ever-increasing crowds. The celebrity he won in this cause led to his election as student body president the following year (1967-8). I doubt that the DuBois Club ever had a real meeting. K------‘s psychic jiu-jitsu had caused the university administration to defeat itself and elevate him to prominence. As a result of their bungling and the movement of history, the critical mass of participants for truly disruptive sit-ins and rallies had arrived. Though most of the students were simply believers in what K------ might have called bourgeois democracy, that alone was enough to set them on his side against the powers that be.
     A revealing sequel occurred the following spring. As K------ tells it, he was delivering a rousing anti-war speech on campus when he was interrupted by cries of “Talk is bullshit!” We want action, not talk!” and eventually, “To the ROTC Building!” He was left standing at the podium with a mere remnant of his audience. When those who had left destroyed the ROTC Building, he was charged with having incited a riot, though the claim was sufficiently absurd that it was later dropped.
     These experiences suggest, first, the simple truth that political protests of the sixties occurred, for the most part, during the last few years of that decade (and the first months of 1970). When students did become active, they were often moved by non-political motives. When political, their values were generally not radical and, indeed, rarely went beyond the guarantees of the Bill of Rights. The most dramatic actions were generally not the result of traditional labor union-style organizing and careful planning, but rather were spontaneous, sharing as much of the character of post-football disorders as of sit-down strikes. When the draft no longer threatened most young men, they ceased protesting. There were from the start dedicated advocates for social justice who sought to question America’s foreign and domestic policies and to suggest radical alternatives, but their numbers were never great. Both those who would trivialize the movement of the sixties and those who would idealize it might well recall these home truths.

Sir Thomas North’s The Moral Philosophy of Doni

     Though every inhabited area of the earth has produced indigenous narratives, storytellers have also enthusiastically borrowed the narratives of others as well, altering freely to their own taste. While Celtic lore contributed significantly to the European inventory of plotlines as did Classical and Biblical sources, many stories in European languages derive ultimately from much further afield. Narratives from South Asia often reached Europe after having passed through a series of intermediary translation into Persian, Arabic, and a variety of other languages.
     One of the most extraordinary instances of this cultural dissemination is the Panchatantra which, according to its translator Ryder, contains “the most widely known stories in the world,” [1]. Compiled from older sources in the third century BCE and reaching something like its current form perhaps five hundred years later, this work was enlarged and translated from Sanskrit to Pahlevi by the scholar Sir Thomas North called Berozias. The book subsequently appeared in versions in Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, then Spanish, and from Spanish into a broad range of other languages including a dozen European tongues as well as Turkish, Malay, and other unlikely tongues. It is therefore a veritable literary palimpsest in which the exotic and the familiar collide. Every story tells its own tale of significant reflections and refractions. [2]
     The most widespread English version on this cosmopolitan family tree is North’s The Moral Philosophy of Doni, a translation of an Italian rendering, itself translated from Spanish from a Latin version which derived from a Hebrew one, a translation of the Arabic of Al-Moqaffa, bringing one back to only a few removes from the original. Apart from this complexity, the text also employs frame-stories sufficiently elaborately that at times one is reading stories within stories, five or six removes from the initial narration.
     Sir Thomas North is a master stylist and rhetorician best known for his version of Plutarch (for which he worked from a French translation). [3] His prose, at times colloquial and natural, more often hypotactic and architectural, is regularly mellifluous and seasoned with obsolete, obscure, foreign, and half-Anglicized words, selected for the pleasure they give the cognoscenti. At times these learned usages appear side by side with vernacular, even slang, expressions.
     The title is altogether a misnomer, as moral philosophy is rather an excuse than the central point of the stories. They are told as entertainment, and the themes vary from moral to strategic to romantic. What sententiae do emerge are often ironic or conflicted. When the text is like wisdom literature it is ordinarily prudential rather than prescriptive, describing gambits that will work in the real world as opposed to idealistic principles.
     Beginning with classic folk-tales, nearly all of which boast numerous analogues in the Stith-Thompson Motif-Index, the complex history of transmission these stories have undergone and the framing patterns into which they have been ingeniously fitted make interpretation unusually subtle. Further, the inclusion of wood-cut illustrations, sometimes not created for the purpose of illustrating the story, contributes yet another layer of significance that enriches and alters what came before. A few brief examples of the issues raised by the first of these factors alone will provide some sense of the rich semiotic density of North’s text.
     I have earlier discussed the dramatic image of the human being suspended over the abyss from the Mahabharata (see my essay on the appearance of this image in Barlaam and Ioasaph). Though facing imminent death, the person enjoys the indulgence of honey that happens to be dripping nearby. In the Mahabharata the honey’s appeal is illusory or puerile, a simple function of the veil of maya; “though sweet to all creatures [it can], however, attract children only.” This Hindu attitude is echoed by a Christian one in Barlaam where it is the “deceptive” sweetness of the delights of this world that distract the individual from thoughts of eternity. Ignoring for a moment the unbearably harsh terms of existence, the human consciousness can experience a brief respite during which he can forget “quite in what terms of life he [and all the rest of us] stood,” until “sorrow struck him on the neck.” In North’s version, [4] the implication is altogether secular and yet at the same time even more sympathetic to suffering humanity. In the Moral Philosophy the honey is almost a merciful balm which “retaineth us and suffereth us not to know the dangers and troubles of this most miserable world and of our thrall and troubled life.” Though its basic distracting character reappears, here it functions not as a fraud to divert the person from more productive thoughts, but rather as a palliative to an otherwise intolerable life.
     Details are highlighted by their appearance and disappearance in successive versions of these stories, gaining additional suggestive power from the fact that some writer has felt the text improved by adding or removing them. For instance, in North’s “The Fox’s Tale of the Paragon of India and the Crab” [5] the crab is romantically motivated; she questions the bird’s motives to protect “a Tench that she loved well,” whereas in the Sanskrit source, the crab acts when she sees heaps of discarded bones from previous meals. There is no question of interspecies affection in India. Is North’s addition a remote reflection of the poetry of amour courtois?
     In the story of “The Ape Meddling in That He had no Skill” [6], the monkey pays the price for his presumption when his leg is caught in the log, and he is summarily dispatched by the woodcutter, a “churlish clown,” who “pash[es] his brains a-pieces” with a bat. In the far briefer telling of the Panchatantra, the simian catches his privates in the cleft of the log, and this is considered enough of a punchline. What happened next the reader does not learn.
     And so it goes. This book in its first incarnation was an encyclopedia of narrative purporting to some system, seeking to cover all significant situations of life through metaphoric fables. The successive transformations of the text through several millennia, across thousands of miles of widely varying languages and cultures, has only refined it and enhanced its inclusiveness. One of the most subtle and intricately coded books we have, I am delighted to say, is made up of stories most of which would delight any sensible three-year-old.




1. p. 3 in the University of Chicago edition. Ryder goes on to say that, were the book called “the best collection of stories in the world, the assertion could hardly be disproved.”

2. This remarkable history led Theodor Benfey to compose one of the pioneering works of comparative literature in his 1859 edition.

3. He also translated Guevara's Reloj de Principes. North’s elegant periods influenced Lyly and other practitioners of Euphuism. Shakespeare’a debt to North’s Plutarch for his plays set in ancient Rome extends beyond information to copying phrases verbatim.

4. p, 241 “An Allegory of the World.”

5. p. 294 in Moral Philosophy, corresponding to Panchantantra I, 8.

6. p. 253.

Transformation of Convention

This is the beginning of my Transformation of Convention in the Medieval European Love Lyric. I hope to shed light on the problem of literary novelty by demonstrating that literary convention is used equally by those who employ recognizable convention and by those who defy, twist, or alter them. The establishment of a convention creates an instant potential for its repetition, but also for its inversion or twisting or omission. Two hundred years of Romantic criticism has obscured the fact that it is through convention and play with reader expectations that the semantic density of the literary text is enhanced.

Though this introduction is almost wholly theoretical, I am posting at the same time an example of the transformation I describe in the discussion of the English folk song “The Three Ravens.”


The dialectic between tradition and innovation in literature is little understood, though it stands at the heart of many critical disputes of the present day and has often been similarly important in past centuries. Very frequently the staging ground for the erection of literary barricades, the consistent centrality of the question is indeed more revealing than many of the positions partisans have taken up around it.

Harold Bloom when he speaks of the "anxiety of influence" as the major generative force as well as the major blocking force in literary production is unusually subtle in recognizing the complementary attraction and repulsion of the past, though the emotional weight which he assigns to either may be more historically or idiosyncratically limited than he admits. Such effective associations, though, are virtually universal when discussing literary convention. Critics, poets, and reading audiences have typically chosen a single alternative, championing either tradition or innovation with a passion that has been fruitful in terms of poetry, practical criticism, and connoisseurship, but which has shed little light finally on the construction of sound principles of literary theory. With sometimes eloquent error or partial vision, readers and writers have devalued one end or the other of the spectrum of conventionality and in doing so have misrepresented the text.

Highly conventional texts are demanded by the audiences for oral and popular genres. Whether one thinks of the preliterate forms of epic poetry or of the mystery or “romance” novel of modern mass culture (not to mention non-literary forms such as African sculpture or Christmas tree decoration), highly conventional adherence to tradition is demanded of the artist. One may trace the theoretical justification for such an insistence in “high art” through critics such as Pope, Arnold, and Curtius.
However, since Romanticism, the impulse to privilege the new has been dominant in educated circles. Writers otherwise as different as Wordsworth, Pound, and Shklovsky have elaborated both theory and practice around this preference.

While the contention has produced a healthy polemicism (it is, after all, the original “battle of the books”) and has formalized a convention of literary history itself manifested in concepts like the canon and the avant-garde, it has led also to distortions. While it has opened the possibility for new modes of reading and writing, it has also created confusion about the very nature of the aesthetic text.

Meanwhile, in critical discussion in general, where theoretical distinctions are often not finely drawn or closely examined, certain elements from each party's attitude may be conjoined in an unselfconscious manner. Thus, a critic may seek initially for sources and influences with the assumption that these provide the credentials for "importance" and the encoding of meaning, and then in direct commentary on the text write as though what really distinguishes a major work is originality, irony, and innovation. Such habits of critical reading can never address such fundamental questions as how to deal with partially conventional ideas and verbal patterns which twist and play upon familiar models without reproducing them; what links exist between convention and genre or convention and literary value; and what, in the end, constitutes a distinctly literary convention.

The mélange of theories and non-theories around the question of the aesthetics of convention has shaped the evaluation of entire genres and periods. For instance, Manly's celebrated essay on “Chaucer and the Rhetoricians” not only determined several generations’ view of the Latin rhetoricians but also did much to set the terms for the appreciation and evaluation of Chaucer’s poetry. The common dismissal of most Middle English romances as poor and derivative work in spite of their demonstrable popularity and cultural significance is only a particularly clear case of the usual treatment accorded oral and popular genres. The prejudice against highly conventional works, though, extends as well to certain highly learned forms such as neo-Latin and Hellenistic poetry.

The taste for convention as a self-justifying value is similarly strangely split between the most vulgar and the most sophisticated. Thus a reader of limericks will insist to the same extent as fanciers of fugues on a predetermined pattern and tone, and the writers of bumper stickers as more constrained than Elizabethan sonneteers in their choice of patterns for their wit.

In the realm of academic scholarship, a commentator may do nothing more than point out analogues, parallels, precedents, and imitations, especially in the more abstruse disciplines such as classics. An unreflecting mixture of attitudes is evident in a fine practical critic such as Peter Dronke when he first dignifies a text with a traditional background in order to obtain it a hearing and then insists on the free and spontaneous play discernible within the apparently highly determined form without sorting out what effects either sort of relation to tradition might have or examining how adherences and departures from audience expectations function and interrelate.
The fact is, of course, that every instance of language and certainly every literary artifact is at once conformist and nonconformist. If an utterance did not conform to prior patterns at all it would be incomprehensible, or — more likely -- it would be interpreted by readers who perceived a pattern of their own invention. The fact that every context
and occasion is different guarantees that there can be no two wholly identical utterances. But this does not eliminate the questions under discussion by putting all verbal texts into a single homogeneous category. Both relatively familiar and relatively unfamiliar language are forms of verbal technology which have been exploited in different ways by their practitioners and consumers. Some of the functions for texts require material closer to one end of the spectrum and some to the other.

To move toward a more precise definition of these mechanisms is the object of this study, but some outlines of the uses of the two extremes are well-known. The concept of verbal economy as used by Lord and Parry could be applied as well to eighteenth century nature poetry, say, though this genre is certainly not oral. (See Alfred Lord, The Singer of Tales, Chapter 4.) Nonetheless, if formulae and repeated phrases reoccur with lesser frequency in James Thomson than in the epic texts, they are considerably more common than in some other genres. Pattern-shattering individualist visions have gained greater currency since the eighteenth century, and today every poet is expected to speak with a unique voice. Even this recent emphasis on self-conscious rebellion, however is rendered problematic as the gestures of surrealism rapidly become clichés, and the new theory which had arisen on the cutting edge of critical thought degenerates or matures into a predictable reflex (the received, “right” reading).

The theory and practice of literature in the European Middle Ages provides particularly useful material for the investigation of the problem of convention. Although the frequently expressed respect for “auctoritas” is consistent with the assumption that medieval literature is predominantly stereotyped and thus most often of little literary value (a claim made with audacious irony by Eco in The Role of the Reader). it has also long been a received idea that modern lyric poetry may be traced back through the dolce stil novisti and the Minnesänger to the troubadours. Medieval vernacular love poetry is surely one of the most highly conventional bodies of texts imaginable with its limited lyrical and melodic repertoire and its frequently recurring dramatic scenarios and sentiments. Even the idea of romantic love which is sometimes described as an invention of the Old Occitanian poets has been amply shown by Lewis and Dronke and others to have world-wide distribution as well as classical and Christian antecedents in the European cultural sphere.

Nevertheless, there is also a strain of radical formal experimentation through its history which attracted Pound to Arnaut and Walther von der Vogelweide and which led Paul Blackburn to translate the Provençal verse into emphatically colloquial and loosely structured American idiom, indeed, the poets themselves often speak of singing “a new song” or of the need to say something never before said and all but inaccessible to language. It is the contention of this study that the conservative and revolutionary elements of early vernacular lyric poetry are not simultaneously present by chance. Rather, each enables the other.

The apparent contradiction is mediated by the peculiar nature of literary intertextuality. The relations between a given poetic line and other lines that resemble it (which may come either before or after it in time) are invariably productive of meaning, resulting in a greater capacity for information in each phrase as the words bear not only their immediate “literal” meaning, but also their meaning in relation to other similar passages. The significance the text would convey in isolation (in practice an impossibility) is compounded and enriched by its connections with other words, sentiments, movements, and eras. Such intertextuality is inevitably present, but it is even more prominent when poets learn from the masters of a previous generation, from canonical texts digested in school, or from a particular model adopted by the young artist.

A strong tradition, then, cannot fail to make the semantic code denser, more conflicted, and ambiguous, more interesting and poetically “true.” It “thickens the plot,” and the verbal play that results is a highly important aspect of poetic practice, often recognized and elucidated in specific passages, but rarely investigated in theory. As well as foregrounding the formal aspects of poetic language (as, in the simplest case, certain locutions will immediately signal the competent audience that a given text is, in fact, poetry), intertextuality allows for the expression of content which would otherwise be inexpressible. Were this not the case, literature would be indistinguishable from non-aesthetic texts in terms of semantic efficiency, and it would be justifiable only as entertainment. The creation of meaning that is not susceptible to prose paraphrase has characteristics of a game, but the object is neither simple mystification nor ornamentation. Rather, it is the only means of formulating specifically literary statements whose unique capabilities justify literature's claim to cognitive utility.

This is, of course, far from an original view. Indeed, if it is substantially correct, it could not be wholly original, any more than the figures of the poets. Concepts very close to those suggested above are prescribed in the major works of the leading literary theoreticians around the time of the first European vernacular love lyrics to have survived. These were the Latin rhetoricians, notably Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Matthew of Vendome, and John of Garland. Though sometimes maligned as authors of recipe-books for hacks, as guides for those whose poetry aspired only to be acceptable, they were, in fact, quite conscious that to genuinely cultivate the tradition it was necessary to prescribe both tradition and innovation. Their techniques for thus increasing the efficiency of the verbal code include the catalogues of tropes and recommended descriptive and narrative practices derived from respected ancient authorities, but, at the same time, they advised using these with changes, tricks, deviations, with the end in view of “rejuvenating” language (though the term is Geoffrey’s, the concept is common to all three). Even in the lists of tropes, which seemed to grow with each compilation and which became truly unwieldy by the Renaissance, even there, where the charge of empty decoration is most close to valid, they were attempting the systematization of poetry's technical toolchest. For the most part, their strategies required words to bear new shades of meaning and old formulae were turned to new uses.

A closer examination of their work will establish the basis for an accurate understanding of the nature of convention in the Middle Ages, an understanding that will elucidate many of the questions commonly debated in critical discussion today. The practice they suggest is fully realized in the work of writers such as William IX and the early Minnesänger. It is no less evident in the medieval practice of prosody, in the use of such tropes as hyperbole, and in such topoi as the Natureingang. A rudimentary scheme of possible variations on the reverdie, for instance, might include these:


Spring is here, and I am in love.
Spring is here, and my love is even grander than nature.
Spring is here, yet I am loveless.
It is winter, yet my love keeps me warm.
It is winter, but I am chilled by lovelessness.


In fact, these formulae are highly simplified. The medieval poems provide all these options and a good many more with subtle elaborations, allusions, and contradictions, and the literary lineage continues through Eliot’s cruel April to the present. Each of those employing a convention do so not to replicate an earlier author, but to add a new layer of meaning to the palimpsest of language and to further refine the representation in words of human consciousness.

The Three Ravens

     “The Three Ravens” is one of the most well-known ballads in English tradition. The oldest text was published in 1611 in Melismata, Thomas Ravenscroft’s collection that preserved many otherwise ephemeral songs, where it is included in the “Country Pastimes” section next to a version of “Froggy Went A’Courtin’.” [1] The song is doubtless far older, however, and includes patently non-Christian elements. Its age is not its only mystery. One can only guess to what extent Ravenscroft may have, like Burns and Grimm, altered his informant’s text. The haunting charm the poem elicits in listeners and readers is in part due to a calculated semantic indeterminacy.

There were three rauens sat on a tree,
downe a downe, hay downe, hay downe,
There were three rauens sat on a tree,
with a downe,
There were three rauens sat on a tree,
They were as blacke as they might be.
With a downe, derrie, derrie, derrie, downe, downe.

The one of them said to his mate,
Where shall we our breakfast take?

Downe in yonder greene field,
There lies a Knight slain under his shield,

His hounds they lie downe at his feete,
So well they can their Master keepe,

His Hawkes they flie so eagerly,
There's no fowle dare him come nie

Downe there comes a fallow Doe,
As great with yong as she might goe,

She lift up his bloudy head,
And kist his wounds that were so red,

She got him up upon her backe,
And carried him to earthen lake,

She buried him before the prime,
She was dead her self ere euen-song time.

God send euery gentleman,
Such haukes, such hounds, and such a Leman.


     The ravens loom darkly over the opening scene. Though crows and ravens have acquired various associations, they belong most commonly and intimately to the battlefield and to death. The opening words of the Iliad evoke the horror of human suffering through the birds that feed on corpses. The Hindu Shani whose vehicle is a raven is younger brother of Yama, god of death. The birds are a momento mori, reminding all of a common end in dissolution, yet in this song they are unable to eat the flesh of the fallen knight. His hounds and hawks act as protective spirits, guarding his body until it can be safely removed [2] by the principal agent of his salvation, the faithful, pregnant doe. A good deal of discussion has centered on whether the doe, hounds, and hawks are pre-Christian deities, enchanted humans, or simply symbolic representation of a man’s lover and friends or underlings, but the question is immaterial. The poem is a poignant wish-fulfillment which presents ideals of love and devotion, suggesting that these ideals may ameliorate or even – as in Christian readings – transfigure the hard facts of mortality with which the scene opened. The closing lines imply both the desirability of such a victory over death and its uncertainty. Within the brief compass of the aesthetic text, the order of nature, the necessary linkage of death with life, of being eaten with eating, is suspended. The diner’s pleasure and satisfaction require the prey’s fear and horror, but within the poem the reader, in a simple instance of sympathetic magic, can feel, like the knight, exempted from death’s horrors, particularly if the song is done to a fetching melody.
     Scott, in his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, reprints “The Three Ravens” noting as “a singular circumstance, that it should coincide so very nearly” with a song he had collected in his own day called “The Twa Corbies.” He describes it as, not a “copy,” but a “counterpart” of the older song.

The Twa Corbies
As I was walking all alane,
I heard twa corbies making a mane;
The tane unto the t'other say,
“Where sall we gang and dine to-day?”
“In behint yon auld fail dyke,
“I wot there lies a new slain knight;
“And nae body kens that he lies there,
“But his hawk, his hound, and lady fair.
“His hound is to the hunting gane,
“His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
“His lady's ta'en another mate,
“So we may mak our dinner sweet.
“Ye'll sit on his white hause bane,
“And I'll pike out his bonny blue een:
"Wi' ae lock o' his gowden hair,
“We'll theek our nest when it grows bare.
“Mony a one for him makes mane,
“But nane sall ken whare he is gane:
“O'er his white banes, when they are bare,
“The wind sall blaw for evermair.”

     “The Twa Corbies” clearly plays on the expectations created by “The Three Ravens.” The knight’s allies – hound, hawk, and lover – have abandoned his body, allowing access for the birds to enjoy a “dinner sweet.” While his life may be over, they are busy with their own domestic arrangements, and anticipate ornamenting their nest with his blond hair. Whereas the knight in the earlier poem was laid to rest in a reassuring ceremony, this one will lie alone, unknown, the wind whistling through his skeleton.
     This cynical, ironic puncturing of the sweet solace delivered in the “Ravens” version suggests an entirely harsh and materialistic world with no saving grace whatsoever. The mention of “hause bane,” a survival in dialect of the Old English banhus, evokes that earlier era’s stern stoicism in facing straight-on the all-but-unendurable facts of life. As Bryhtnoth says in the "Battle of Maldon," “Resolve be the firmer, heart more ardent, and spirit stronger, as our strength fails!” Here it is fortitude and a wry acceptance that redeems the human in the face of the ultimate certainty of defeat.
     Such a reversal is, however, by no means the only possible variation spawned by the song. In 1930 in Avery County, North Carolina Mellinger Edward Henry recorded Mary Franklin singing “The Three Black Crows.” [3]

There were three crows sat on a tree, Old Billy McGaw McGee!
There were three crows sat on a tree,
Old Billy McGaw McGee!
There were three crows sat on a tree,
And they were black as crows could be,
And they all flapped their wings and cried,
“Caw! Caw! Caw!”
And they all flapped their wings and cried,
“Caw! Caw! Caw!”
“What shall we have for bread to eat?” Old Billy McGaw McGee!
“On yonders hill there lies a horse.”
Old Billy McGaw McGee!
“We'll perch ourselves on his backbone,
And pick his eyes out one by one;"
And they all clapped their wings and cried,
“Caw! Caw! Caw!”
And they all clapped their wings and cried,
“Caw! Caw! Caw!”

     In this song the motif has become burlesque. [4] Though the birds still perch on the bones and pick out the eyes, the knight and his aides are absent. With their repeated caws and their manic wing-flapping, they seem slightly absurd. If the scene is still somewhat macabre, it is in the ridiculous manner of Addams or Gorey, more Bride of Frankenstein than the original. Mockery and laughter and averting the gaze from the more painful eventualities here provide relief from life’s pain. Considered in connection to the two earlier texts, the knight might be thought to be more powerfully present by being unmentioned, as though a human casualty would be too painful an image to evoke. In a sense, the knight’s disappearance is the most potent sign of how disturbing a specter he is. The silly nonsense song may bear the heaviest emotional freight. Is there not something chilling about that final “caw”?
     All these songs in their different ways testify to the human yearning for a peace all-but-unattainable in this world. Each with a distinctive tone and theme represents an aesthetic strategy to salve the psychic sores while providing entertainment to beguile the hour. Each employs the same conventional representation of the tragedy of mortality: a knight cut down in his prime, lying exposed and helpless in the first two, and conspicuously missing in the third.




1. “Three Blind Mice” may also owe its survival to its inclusion in this section of Ravenscroft’s book.

2. Similar to, for instance, the torngak of the Greenland Inuit.

3. Later published in Henry’s Folk Songs of the Southern Highlands.

4. Albert B. Friedman in his The Viking Book of Folk Ballads of the English-Speaking World attributes this song to the minstrel stage, but gives no details.