Moréas’ Symbolism

 

Translations from Moréas are my own.  See endnotes for the original French.

 

     Like most of the manifestoes written during the great procession of modern art movements, Jean Moréas’ “Le Symbolisme” [1] is stronger when treated as an imaginative text than as a theoretical statement.  There was no stable and organized Symbolist group though Moréas did publish a short-lived journal called Le Symboliste; some of his ideas were shared with others often identified as Symbolists, others are his alone.  Indeed, the essay imagines Symbolism as not quite realized.  “the Supreme Enchantment has not yet come: a stubborn and jealous job of work awaits newcomers.” [2]  Far from setting out a coherent program, the essay sails on the high winds of the author’s animated spirits, charged with polemical energy, expressing total confidence against the background of a dazzling display of pyrotechnic rhetoric. 

     Moréas opens with an idea that implies no stable set of literary recommendations.  He proposes a cyclic and organic concept of art in which each movement is born, ages, and then declines as the next arises. [3]  The sole imperative is that proclaimed by Ezra Pound: “Make it new.” [4]  Culture follows an inexorable recurring pattern in which “that which had been novel and spontaneous turns cliched and commonplace.”  Thus “after the classical cliché, there came the romantic cliché.” [5] 

     Such ideas are widespread – one thinks of the neoterics of the first century C. E. or Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Nova Poetria of the early thirteenth, but they are hardly universal.  Defenders of imitation of the masters and strict adherence to convention are always available to assert an opposite tendency, thus creating a dynamic tension on both sides.  In “Le Symbolisme” this role is filled by the Intermezzo character called “un détracteur” who is prone to such utterances as “but the caesura, the caesura! They violate the caesura!!” and “Horrors!  Not to respect the alternation of rhymes!” [6] 

     Moréas proceeds to the alternatives to Symbolism as the mode of the coming generation.   He concedes Naturalism a certain value as novelty as a counterweight to the banality of a Romanticism “sunk in senility.”  Such innovation, while “legitimate” is “ill-considered” and “naïve.”  “One can,” he sniffs, “only seriously value the work of the Naturalist writer as a cry of protest.” [7]  The basis for his reaction against Naturalism is his rejection of the Platonic concept of art as imitation.  According to Moréas, his “simple and exceedingly succinct point of departure” is the principle that “art cannot be faithful to the objective”.  [8]  There could scarcely be a more energetic challenge to any realistic style that aims at imitating lived experience.  While language cannot reproduce reality for Moréas, it can reflect subjectivity.

     Another competitor for the leading role in art is the school identified as Decadent.  Having asserted that impressions are all that exist, it is unsurprising that Moréas’ strictures on the Decadents are unashamedly subjective.  Such writers are “tough and stringy” like an ill-prepared beefsteak, as well as “frightened and groveling” like despicable weaklings. [9]  The reader can only speculate about just what he means.  There is little clue to the specific characteristics of the Decadent group or to Moréas’ objections, but it makes for lively reading. 

     He does propose Symbolism as the “reasonable” alternative corresponding to “the actual spirit of the creator in art” [10], and he does sketch out some characteristics of the sort of new writing he would approve.  He energetically defends obscurity and ambiguity and declares Symbolism the “enemy of didacticism, declamation, false sensibility, and,” Moréas concludes climactically, “objective description.”  He declares that “the essential character of symbolist art consists in never aiming at the conception of the idea in itself,” but rather in assuring that the idea “never lets itself be seen without the sumptuous gowns of extraneous associations.” [11]  A certain extravagance is implied by the adjectives “sumptuous” and “extraneous.”  The delight in verbal collage, in resonant if in part arbitrary and improvisatory imagery, is implied by the sentiment and reinforced by the out-of-the-way choice of “simarre” rather than “manteau” or “robe” for “gown.”  The Symbolist will make use of “perceivable appearances” not to reconstruct reality on the page, but to suggest “esoteric affinities with primordial ideas,” [12] though just what those ideas are remains intentionally enigmatic.

     Moréas offers to provide an “exact translation“ of just what his theory means in  practice: “unpolluted words,” “arching and periodic phrases intermixed with waves of its absence,” “meaningful pleonasms,” “mysterious omissions,” “anaculothia held in suspense,” indeed “all bold and polysemous tropes.”  His emphasis here, far from prescribing a particular style, is to endorse enthusiasm and showy rhetoric.  The passage itself goes on to recommend language that is “good and luxuriant and frisky” and ends with a delicious and gratuitous reference to certain archers of antiquity: “free writers who let fly their barbed language much like the sinuous arrows of the Toxotes of Thrace.” [10]  

          Moréas lets the cat altogether out of the bag eventually when he imagines this art of the future inn this bravura passage, replete like Rabelais’ catalogues, as decadent as Huysmans on Silver Latin, as crankishly bookish as Baron Corvo.

 

At times mythic phantasms are evoked from old Demogorgon to Belial, from the Cabeiris to the nigromantes [necromancers] lavishly turned out on Caliban’s rock or by Titania’s forest to the mixolydian music of barbitons and octochords. [11]

 

One could disentangle some of the elements so gleefully thrown together here beginning perhaps with the echoes of the demiurge in neo-Platonism, Spenser, and Shelley (who associated it with the French Revolution).  The reader, though, has hardly a moment to consider before this initial figure is succeeded by another and then another.  After half a dozen allusions, Moréas concludes the display with three rare ancient Greek words. 

     Surely this is recreational language, meant less to be understood than to create a tone, a mood, a curious symbolic pattern that involves the reader in an experience rather than inviting exegesis.  Far from a meticulous structure where every mot is juste, this is a bricolage, looking as though it has been constructed from whatever happened to be at hand.   

     Summing up the characteristics of Symbolist writing, Moréas notes, “The very truth of lyric poetry is found in seeming disorder, luminous madness, and passionate grandiloquence.”  He advocates running the risk of an “excess of rhetorical figures and colorful expressions.” [12] 

     With such energy and improvisatory enthusiasm, Moréas’ reader feels at some distance from the Symbolism of Mallarmé and Valéry whose magisterial, even still-Parnassian, tone suggested a cool composure as opposed to Moréas’ excitement.  Their thoughtful lexical precision contrasts with his eruptions of exuberant words.  Though Moréas insisted that his images would aim at “primordial ideas,” in practice he cares little for such moorings, letting his words float freely like a skyful of clouds. While both Mallarmé and Valéry stuck to alexandrines and sonnets until the very end, Moréas recommended a looser prosody which in his description sounds rather like syncopated jazz.  “An alexandrine with multiple and mobile caesurae, the primary task of certain numbers -- seven, nine, eleven, thirteen – resolute in many rhythmic permutations of which they are the sum.” 

     Moréas then might be considered less as the inspiration of the French poets generally identified as Symbolist and of their American cousins Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, perhaps in more recent years, than he is of freer word-slinging rhetoricians from Apollinaire to Gregory Corso.  Though Moréas had posed as the herald of the new Symbolist movement, a few years later he had changed direction and began to advocate neo-Classicism,  the “école romane,” a taste that persisted to the end of the poet’s life.   This group became associated with nationalism, reactionary views, anti-Semitism, and, through Maurras, the formation of the fascist Action Française.  In this way a writer who had been a young radical came in time to be a monarchist, a writer who had shouted for novelty came to idealize past masters, and a rebel became a defender of privilege.  The scheme of generational evolution Moréas had outlined gained, at least in his own case, a sort of ironic truth as he abandoned the provocative and exhilarating coruscations of “Le Symbolisme.”

 

  

1.      Published in Le Figaro for December 18, 1886.  A twenty-first century American can only feel nostalgia for those long-ago days when a newspaper of general circulation would publish aesthetic polemics and people would discuss such issues in the cafes.

 

2.      “Cependant le Suprême Enchantement n'est pas encore consommé : un labeur opiniâtre et jaloux sollicite les nouveaux venus.”  The extravagance of the capitalized “Supreme Enchantment” is a giveaway of the self-indulgences to come.

 

3.      Darwin was surely an influence in Moréas’ time.  Similar ideas have been advanced by Vico in the eighteenth century and in the twentieth by Harold Bloom with the addition of an overlay of neurotic guilt in descriptions of the “anxiety of influence.” 

 

4.     Make it New was the title of Pound’s 1934 book of essays, but he had earlier used the phrase, in fact a translation of M. G. Pauthier’s French version of the Chinese, in his 1928 translation of the Confucian text he titled Ta Hio: The Great Learning.  

 

5.      “ce qui fut le neuf et le spontané devient le poncif et le lieu-commun.” “et qu'après les poncifs classiques, il y a eu des poncifs romantiques.”

 

6.      In the original “Mais la césure, la césure! On viole la césure!!” and “Horreur! Ne pas respecter l'alternance des rimes!”

 

7.      In the French “tombé en enfance,” “légitime mais mal avisée,” “la méthode puérile du naturalisme,” “on ne peut accorder sérieusement qu'une valeur de protestation.”  Moréas exempts Zola who was miraculously “saved by his wonderful writer’s instinct” (“sauvé par un merveilleux instinct d'écrivain”).

 

8.      In the original “un simple point de départ extrêmement succinct”  “l'art ne saurait chercher en l'objectif.”

 

9.      “Les littératures décadentes se révèlent essentiellement coriaces, filandreuses, timorées et serviles.”

 

10.   “Nous avons déjà proposé la dénomination de Symbolisme comme la seule capable de désigner raisonnablement la tendance actuelle de l'esprit créateur en art.”

 

11.   “ennemie de "l'enseignement, la déclamation, la fausse sensibilité, la description objective" “le caractère essentiel de l'art symbolique consiste à ne jamais aller jusqu'à la conception de l'Idée en soi.” “L'Idée, à son tour, ne doit point se laisser voir privée des somptueuses simarres des analogies extérieures.”

 

12.   “des apparences sensibles destinées à représenter leurs affinités ésotériques avec des Idées primordiales”

 

13.   I left “sinueuse” as “sinuous” to preserve its oddity.  The entire passage in French: Pour la traduction exacte de sa synthèse, il faut au symbolisme un style archétype et complexe : d'impollués vocables, la période qui s'arcboute alternant avec la période aux défaillances ondulées, les pléonasmes significatifs, les mystérieuses ellipses, l'anacoluthe en suspens, tout trope hardi et multiforme ; enfin la bonne langue – instaurée et modernisée – la bonne et luxuriante et fringante langue française d'avant les Vaugelas et les Boileau-Despréaux, la langue de François Rabelais et de Philippe de Commines, de Villon, de Rutebœuf et de tant d'autres écrivains libres et dardant le terme acut du langage, tels des toxotes de Thrace leurs flèches sinueuses.

 

14.   “Tantôt de mythiques phantasmes évoqués, depuis l'antique Démogorgôn jusques à Bélial, depuis les Kabires jusques aux Nigromans, apparaissent fastueusement atournés sur le roc de Caliban ou par la forêt de Titania aux modes mixolydiens des barbitons et des octocordes.”

 

15.   “Le désordre apparent, la démence éclatante, l'emphase passionnée sont la vérité même de la poésie lyrique. Tomber dans l'excès des figures et de la couleur, le mal n'est pas grand et ce n'est pas par là que périra notre littérature.”   

 

16.   “l'alexandrin à arrêts multiples et mobiles ; l'emploi de certains nombres premiers – sept, neuf, onze, treize – résolus en les diverses combinaisons rythmiques dont ils sont les sommes.”es sommes.”

The Comic World of Flip the Frog

 

    Long recognized as one of the greatest animators of American film during a time when movie theaters typically showed a program including cartoon, newsreel, and perhaps other short subjects as well as one or two feature films, Ub Iwerks created a marvelous comic world within the conventions of his form.  Doubtless best-known for his work with Disney – they had worked together since both were teenagers -- he was the first artist to draw Mickey Mouse and went on to make significant contributions to many Disney cartoons, as well as drawing for Leon Schlesinger’s Looney Tunes and Columbia’s Screen Gems. [1]  Yet he resented Disney’s dominance and for a time headed his own studio making Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper features among others in which he was able to develop his own vision during an era when animated shorts were made to appeal not to children alone, but to audiences of all ages.

     Flip the Frog first appeared in Fiddlesticks (1930), the first color animation with sound.  The sound is significant as many cartoons of the period foregrounded music while neglecting plot.  The Disney studio had produced a number of Silly Symphonies shorts providing fanciful visual accompaniment to pieces of music and for this series, Iwerks produced Autumn and Springtime. [1]

     Flip appears on the initial title holding a single-stringed instrument, a buoyant troubadour with a huge smile.  On the soundtrack one hears Gounod’s Funeral March of a Marionette, to become familiar to many several decades later as the theme music for the Alfred Hitchcock television show.   The sinister tone of this melody may seem discordant, its solemnity and melancholy the opposite pole of the vivacious frog.  In fact, the macabre occupies a significant space in the cartoons of the era, those by Ub Iwerks among them, yet it is always a comic, fundamentally joyous fear like that evoked in celebrations for Hallowe’en and the Day of the Dead as well as in the devils and death figures that often feature in Carnival celebrations. 

     More froglike than he will become in later cartoons in spite of four-fingered cartoon white gloves, a smart bowtie, and a few buttons on his ventral side, Flip leaps from one sylvan lily pad to another and then begins dancing like a trouper with theatrical high spirits.  He grins and faces the audience; his ebullience becomes the viewer’s.  He punctuates his movements with an odd squawk, more like a duck than a frog, eventually dancing atop the shell of an annoyed turtle who ejects him into the water.   

     Temporarily shaken, he soon resumes his merry dance until he comes upon a scene to rival Breughel’s peasant festivals: a group of small animals, mostly insects, but including mice and other creatures, several of whom are drinking while many play musical instruments.  There is, in fact, a sort of symphony orchestra in these woods which Flip enthusiastically joins.  They play the local version, one can only assume, of the music of the spheres, the dance of earthly life.   Upon his arrival, Flip seizes center stage on a stump and bows with every ego’s vainglory, then dancing with abandon until a second hint of the sinister aspect of life appears.    Ready for anything, Flip climbs a line that suddenly appears next to him only to discover that it descends from the web of a threatening spider from whom he retreats in fear and, a moment later, resumes his vaudeville-style dance.  The music varies, but the frog is always euphoric, sometimes closing his eyes in bliss.  When he takes a bow, all the animals, including the once malevolent-looking spider, unite in appreciative applause. 

     A piano has now appeared on the stump-stage and Flip begins to play along with a mouse violinist (who resembles the earliest Mickeys).  They play for a time in harmony but before long Flip has taken a direction of his own, picking out “Ach du Lieber Augustine” until the mouse bops him with his violin.  Though briefly interrupted by a tobacco spitting bird above, they resume playing to such effect that not only they but the piano and itself bench as well are soon capering in a chorus line.  The music takes a sad turn and before long all are weeping at the tragic spectacle of life which had earlier seemed so worthy of exuberant affirmation.  

     Flip loses himself in delicious melancholy, miming violin movements until the annoyed piano kicks him.  This drives the frog into a Jerry Lee Lewis-style performance aggressively banging the piano keys with fists and feet until the instrument explodes into the air and a rain of ivories descends on the bemused frog. 

     The film then depicts a harmonious world in which all sentient beings are united in celebration to the rhythms of time.  This melodious affirmation is punctuated by reminders of aggression and suffering.  The turtle’s hostility, the spider’s predatory threat, the mouse’s rivalry, even the piano’s frustration provide the counterweight to the choral singing, producing a tense energetic dialectic of disorder and order.  The collapsed piano of the conclusion represents the dissolution of familiar reality into chaos.  This bipolar opposition structures the life of Flip the Frog and the lives of his viewers as well.

     While all of Iwerks cartoons are meant to be funny, the malevolent aspect of life is foregrounded in many as well as in those from other studios. [2]  The embrace of life and flight from death are both reflected as clearly as in the pairs of benevolent and malevolent aspects of deity in Hinduism.  Indeed, in  the fifth Flip the Frog cartoon, The Cuckoo Murder Case, the cat is out of the bag and mortality itself is Flip’s antagonist. 

     For the opening credits sequence Flip has acquired a pair of shorts as well as white gloves and plays a kind of ragtime piano behind the title card.  Though his tune is sprightly, this story highlights the mixture of comedy and horror that characterizes so many cartoons of the period.  A sleepy cuckoo occupies a clock in a shabby home.  The bird is humanized; it is so sleepy it must be repeatedly poked by the clock to call out the hour.  Death itself enters as a robed skeleton and shoots the cuckoo bird whereupon Flip as a private detective is summoned by the clock itself to investigate. [3]

     Once more, the entire world is animated, acting as a great orchestral company cooperating in producing the grand pageant of phenomenal events.  Flip’s car pauses to tiptoe through a puddle.  Storm clouds and lightning flashes are playing portentous games in the sky.  The very house grimaces menacingly as the frog approaches, but, when he tries to retreat, an irresistible karmic wind drives him back toward it.  A crew of police arrives as well while Flip is sneaking about the house.  Eventually Flip comes upon the robed skeleton representing mortality studying the book of life on a table with an hourglass.  He stamps “out” on a page bearing the cuckoo’s name, then turns the page to reveal that Flip is next on his list.  Flip makes a mad dash to escape, overturning furniture and finally dives through a set of double doors into what looks like a great abyss.  Surely he has made his appointment in Samarra, though he is resurrected for a good many later features. 

      In Spooks (1932) Iwerks avoided that sort of conclusive denouement.  During a storm a less frog-like Flip approaches a remote house occupied by sinister skeletal characters similar to the one in The Cuckoo Murder Case.  A band of such figures then plays a danse macabre like those depicted in art as well as enacted in village rituals and court masques from the fifteenth century on. [4]  Oblivious to his danger, Flip happily dances in the arms of a female skeleton until she falls to pieces, signifying the transience of love.  At this point his host assumes a wicked expression and clearly plots to add a frog skeleton  to his collection.  The cuckoo even reappears in skeletal form.  When it is time to go to bed, Flip asks for the bathroom and is directed to a dark space where he is ambushed.  He next appears tied to a table as his host sharpens a knife.  Flip manages to take off, smashing his antagonists’ bones on every side until he lands out of doors on the back of his trusty horse.  He apparently makes his escape but, just when he feels he is in the clear, his mount suddenly turns to bones at which point he leaps off and dashes into the distance.  For the moment, he has successfully dodged death, but the viewer knows that his victory is only temporary.

     Flip lives in a world that pulses with life.  All creatures enthusiastically participate in the rhythmic celebration of their own existence, so brimming with the elemental joy of life that they sing and sway.  Flip’s irrepressible optimism is temporarily jolted by conflicts arising from appetite and ego, but he rapidly recovers.  Like his viewers, he is pursued by death, but he reacts as though engaged in a playful game until either a sudden descent when he is swallowed by darkness or a narrow escape.  Just as the makers of medieval cathedrals designed them to emphasize the supernal promise of salvation yet included frightening representations of death and of demons, sometimes including actual bones in the crypt, the movie audience, basically there for a good time, is not allowed to forget conflict, aggression, and the ultimate dissolution of the flesh.  In fact, by playing with the fearful recognition of frailty and in the end of mortality, though it may amount to whistling in the dark, the doughty frog may be a role model for his viewers, whose specters are formed not by the cartoonist’s pen, but by pain, suffering, illness, and violence. 

 

 

 1.      The film was simultaneously released with King of Jazz, a musical revue featuring Paul Whiteman, which included a Walter Lantz cartoon depicting how Paul Whiteman, the music director of the film, "became the King of Jazz."

2.      Notable examples include Iwerks’ film for Disney The Skeleton Dance (1929) and the Fleischer Studio’s I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You 1932 in which Betty Boop appears with Louis Armstrong.

3.      An indication of the adult audience for such cartoons is the telephone’s frustrated "damn!" in the detective office says when it fails to wake up Flip.  In later films he tries to peep on a showering young woman and then to run out on a hotel bill (in Room Runners 1932), while in A Chinaman's Chance (1933), Flip smokes opium. 

4.      Similarly jocular presentations of death not only influence practices for Mardi Gras and All Souls Day, but also countless comedy horror movies.  Many critics think Whale’s sequel Bride of Frankenstein superior to the original film primarily because added considerable humor.

Parmenides and the Perennial Philosophy

Numbers in parentheses refer to the standard listing of Parmenides’ fragments.  Those in brackets are endnotes.

    Parmenides was my favorite when as a student I first read the pre-Socratic philosophers.  I was, I imagine, attracted by his dramatically startling claims.  The paradoxes of his disciple Zeno delight everyone with a taste for tossing concepts about.  A generation or two later Socrates’ dialectics, Aristotle’s ratiocination, and the theatrical gestures of Diogenes would open up philosophy in other directions, but the fundamental challenge of Parmenides’ thought remained unchanged, as immovable as the plenum he imagined.

     Paradoxically, though Parmenides’ conclusions seem outlandish from the perspective of everyday reality, they are peculiarly reasonable to a skeptical modern sensibility.  To me he represents the most profound ancient Greek statement of a perennial philosophy in the classic modern form represented by Transcendentalism and, in the twentieth century, Neo-Vedanta.  Parmenides has in common with Huxley (and mystics in different parts of the globe throughout the centuries) the apprehension of an ultimate reality underlying sense experience which is, to use Parmenides’ language “unitary, unmoving and without end” (μουνογενές τε καὶ ἀτρεμὲς ἠδ᾽ ἀτέλεστον). (347)

     After millennia in which our species had used the poetic devices of analogy and metaphor in religion, magic, ritual, and mythological thought, Parmenides proposed using only the mind.  From the simple proposition that one can say nothing about the nonexistent or “what is not,” Parmenides developed provocative and astonishing conclusions.  The phenomenal world is in some sense “unreal;” motion and change are impossible as the cosmos is monistic, the only thing that exists. 

     He arrives at such a strikingly counterintuitive position by significant rhetorical and dialectical routes.  The title of his principal work Περὶ Φύσεως is sometimes translated On Nature but its concerns are so fundamental that it might have been called On What Exists.  A dramatic proem sets the angle of Parmenides’ approach.  The philosopher’s insight is attributed to his having been taken on a journey by the maiden daughters of the sun, arriving at a gate in the borderland between Night and Day at which point he encounters a goddess [1] who delivers to him the knowledge he conveys to the reader.  Though the location signifies the duality that constitutes the ordinary experience of reality, [2] she offers a route to a unified vision.  

     The divinity would seem to be Night herself: Parmenides goes to “the halls of Night,” and the goddess who greets him welcomes him to “our home” (1).  The goddess Night serves as counselor to Zeus in some of the major Orphic texts, including the Derveni cosmology. In the closely related Orphic Rhapsodies, Night instructs Zeus on how to preserve the unity produced by his absorption of all things into himself as he sets about initiating a new cosmogonic phase. It is thus appropriate that Night should be the source of Parmenides’ revelation, for Parmenidean metaphysics is very much concerned with the principle of unity in the cosmos.

     This deity’s specific identity, though, is less important than the fact that the mythological language implies that Parmenides’ ideas are not as attributable to rigorous ratiocination as to revelation or intuitive insight.  The goddess promises to reveal to him “well-rounded truth” (aληθείης εὐκυκλέος) [3] in contrast to the “opinions of people, in which there is nothing true at all” (βροτῶν δόξας͵ ταῖς οὐκ ἔνι πίστις ἀληθής). (fr. 342, stressed again in 346)

     In the voice of this goddess, Parmenides proceeds, arguing that, as no one can meaningfully conceive of what does not exist, human thoughts must concern only “what is.”  (2)  His language here outpaces his reasoning which has been criticized as specious by modern scholars who note his conflation of the existential and predicative uses of the verb “to be.” [4]  The criticism will carry little weight for readers who have accepted the introduction with its mystic quasi-shamanic flight, suggesting that the philosopher’s vision rests on experience and intuition, on meditation perhaps, rather than on logic. 

     He argues that most people conveniently ignore logic when they treat what is and what is not sometimes as the same and sometimes as differing.  They are “two-headed,” helpless in their ignorance. (6)  Yet this error is the basis for the conventional way of seeing the world, what Parmenides calls the “way of appearances” [5](or seeming or opinion).  (See 1 and 8)

     “What is” is a kind of universal substance that must be “unitary, unmoving and without end.”  There is no void or emptiness since a plenum fills all of existence.  Contrary to appearances, there is no growth, there is no change, there is no beginning or end.  Reality cannot be divided, for it is alike everywhere (οὐδέ τι τῇ μᾶλλον, τό κεν εἴργοι μιν συνέχεσθαι).  Like Einstein’s universe, it is finite, though without beginning or end.  It may best be imagined as a sphere. (8)

     I am not concerned with tracing sources, among which others have noted Xenophanes, Pythagoras, and others, nor do I wish to detail influences, through neo-Platonism, Epicureanism, Pyrrhonisn Skepticism, pseudo-Dionysius, certain medieval mystics and Spinoza.  My point is quite simply the fundamental similarity of Parmenides’ monism and the tradition some have called the perennial philosophy.  Perhaps the most significant and concise statement of this view is the Advaita Vedanta teaching grounded in the Chāndogya Upanişad.  In the seminal sixth book Uddalaka explains to his son Śvetaketu that a single substance underlies all phenomena including themselves.  “Tat tvam asi.” (“That art thou!”) he declares.  There is no other -- the fabric of reality is continuous.  According to Advaita Vedanta, the individual and the deity or cosmos are identical: atman = Atman. 

     Parmenides goes on to relate what he calls the “way of opinion” providing an elaborate cosmology that once occupied the greater part of his book, but which is largely lost.  Though this portion of his work more closely parallels the speculation of earlier philosophers, it was less distinctive as well as being undercut by the author’s repeated assurances that his assertions in this section refer to appearances only, the way things seem, and not their real nature, rather like the Hindu concept of maya.  

     Parmenides is associated by Strabo with the cult of Apollo Oulios, an epithet usually rendered as the Healer, though the primary meaning of the word in Liddell and Scott is “pestilential” suggesting the hand of the Far-darter in plague and disease. [6]  Apollo is then defined, in sum at least, as indifferent to human desire just as the Hindu deities often have beneficent and malign manifestations.  Apollo and the cosmos as a whole are not so much ambivalent or unpredictable as utterly beyond good and evil.  For Parmenides would deny the final validity of disease and health, pain and joy, indeed of all dualities.  For him such contraries are the illusion from which arises the “way of appearances” as opposed to the “way of truth.” 

     Such insights have rarely attracted many disciples.  Whatever heights Hindu philosophers achieved, the average Indian is satisfied with customary sacrifices and other forms of formulaic worship.  In ancient Greece Pythagoreans and other mystery religions (including eventually Christianity) gained many followers with the promise that the individual soul was immortal and only the cult could provide supposed means to improve well-being after death.  Conventional religion has often displayed little patience with the monistic assertions: Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, and Spinoza were all indicted by their communities for expressing European versions of the Upanishad’s “tat tvam asi.”

     Specifically because their conclusions are experiential, attempts to rationalize the revelations of mystical flights like that Parmenides relates at the outset of his work, such thinkers are as immune to logical refutation as to proof.  They can only record their own insights (or seeming insights) and point a way for others seeking the “way of truth.”  Side-stepping the slipperiness of language and the dubious claims of syllogisms, they present a spirituality independent of supernaturalism, authority, and tradition.

    

 

1.      1.  Identified variously as night, Nature, Wisdom, Necessity or Themis.

 

2.      2.  Thus the account in Genesis describes creation of material reality through a series of oppositions: light and dark, earth and sky, water and land.

 

3.      3.  Compare this usage to the description of the cosmos as spherical in Plato, Timaeus 32c-34b.

 

4.      4.  See, for instance, G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers, p. 269-70.

 

5.      5.  Parmenides’ word δόξα might also be translated as “seeming” or “opinion.”

 

6.      6.  The pattern is the same with φάρμακον, meaning both medicine and poison, a circumstance of which Derrida made a great deal in “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Dissemination.

John Brown Speaks to Us

 John Brown, W. E. B. Du Bois

      W. E. B. Du Bois’ biography of John Brown, though it relies on first-hand and documentary sources, is less a work of historical scholarship than a passionate polemic first published at a critical moment in American history.  Even as the mythic Lost Cause ideology was developing and the United Daughters of the Confederacy was erecting monuments in courthouse squares and city parks throughout the South, the NAACP was formed and Du Bois published this biography. [1]

      The book contains a detailed and sympathetic account of Brown’s career and includes lengthy quotation from writings by his family members and associates.  The reader can see not only the vicious motives and tactics of the slave-owners, but also the fragmented rivalry of those on the side of freedom.  In Du Bois’ account it is clear that Brown’s moral clarity, couched throughout his life in the rhetoric of the Separate Baptist Church in which he had been raised, was shared by very few Americans before the Civil War.  The greater part of those who opposed the expansion of slavery did so because they wished to avoid the competition of slave labor with free or because they supported the political sway of the North over the South.  Even among those who argued against slavery itself, a good many benevolent souls such as those in the American Colonization Society supported not integration but the return of slaves to Africa or their settlement in a new country in Central America. 

     One reason that few shared the “clear, white light” of Brown’s moral certainty is that, for all their charitable feeling, most white Americans kept their Black brethren at arm’s length.  Brown recalled from his childhood an incident in which he received hospitality in a householder’s home as he drove his father’s cattle to market.  There he met a Black slave of his own age who impressed him as “fully if not more than his equal,” yet who was treated harshly by his owner.  This personal acceptance was apparent in Brown’s adult life as he consistently practiced social equality, inviting Blacks into his home and visiting in theirs, informally adopting a Black son, and seeking to include Black collaborators in his work. 

     Brown is an excellent example of a man who sought progressive change, not out of pity but because he considered their freedom a necessary precondition for his own.  His education had been primarily from the Bible, and Biblical values and language were woven throughout his own thinking.  This orientation was not only in tune with broadly shared American standards at the time, but religion’s claim to universal authority is appropriate since slavery, like murder and the oppression of women, is condemned by virtually all modern moral standards.  Brown’s prophetic voice, while thoroughly Christian, can still appeal to all.

    For those who contemplate a life like Brown’s, historical fact and partisan view may be considerably entangled.  Du Bois clearly has an interest in maintaining not only that Brown was sane (if fiercely single-minded) but also that his plan to attack the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry had a reasonable prospect of success. [2]  Whether this point of the plot’s practicality is so or not must remain controversial and speculative, but for the modern reader the point is that Brown’s opposition to slavery was exemplary and his zeal cannot be faulted. 

     John Brown tells us that the price of repression is greater than the price of freedom, that violence is far more pernicious when it is institutional and habitual than when it is a matter of an evil-tempered individual.  Every day that the slave system persisted people became inured to its crimes against humanity, more accepting of its outrages, and thus more brutalized.  A more or less benevolent master remains a master.  In Brown’s opinion the solution must lie, not in the reformation of individuals as John Woolman had attempted in the eighteenth century, but in the alteration of society.  To allow an exploitative system like slavery, or, one might add, colonialism or capitalism, to continue is to sanction violence whether or not one is personally wielding the whip.  Lincoln eloquently argued in his Second Inaugural that the moral debt of slavery was always increasing and, painful though it be, must in the end be paid.  “If God wills that [the war] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’"  Now, long after the Civil War, after the attempts by racists to perpetuate injustice have produced a hundred and fifty years of violence, lynchings, Jim Crow, and daily exploitation and repression, the cost is evident to all, and still rising. 

     Brown tells us, then, that the time to act is now.  Hesitation is complicity.  No shrewd calculation of odds can alter the facts that racism is wrong, that its ill effects consistently harden and deepen, and that it entails consequences that spare no one. [4]  Others may be depended upon to criticize, to temporize, to offer only financial support, but some feel called to take action.  Further, Brown speaks for the harder truth of his own day, that slavery’s foes must use “any means necessary,” and the price it seemed could be payable only in blood. [5]  He had abandoned the faith in political pressure and moral suasion to which his friend and associate Frederick Douglass still clung.  He sought to have a wider effect than Harriet Tubman had managed with her daring raids. (Tubman, in fact, supported Brown, joined with him in planning the assault on Harpers Ferry, and during the war served in the Union army.)   

     Du Bois seems to be straining just a bit when he enumerates the positive effects of the raid in spite of its military defeat.  He quotes Douglass: “If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he at least began the war that ended slavery.”  Du Bois argues that his raid aroused the slave population leading to incidents of rebellion and presaging the hundreds of thousands of Black recruits that served in the United States Army.  The fear of insurrection from within and the conviction that Brown had brought a mere taste of the potential for armed Northern intervention created a sense of crisis that, Du Bois argues, hastened the conflict.  Finally, he says, Brown presented a moral dilemma to Americans in the most fundamental terms.  People heard of a good, indeed a Christian man, who sacrificed himself out of love for others, killed by the advocates of a system built on the sins of greed, cruelty, and lust. [6]       Few would question that Brown’s actions shifted the political parameters in his day.  Whereas anti-slavery propagandists had seemed the South’s chief antagonists, they now had to deal with the fact of armed opposition.  Just as the rise of Black power advocates like Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) and H. Rap Brown (later Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin) made the nonviolent activism of Martin Luther King seem suddenly more acceptable, even those who did not approve of Brown’s actions became more sympathetic to the abolitionist cause, so his actions had a clear effect of hastening the end of slavery.

     Though many moderns may lack the fire and the courage of “the old man,” as he was often called in the days of his greatest action, he clearly advanced the cause of freedom.  Brown’s passion for justice is inspiring, and much of his analysis remains viable today.   Today, no less than in his era, racism remains a great evil, the pursuit of racial justice continues, and the movement’s most vigorous partisans feel as he did that action is imperative regardless of short-term consequences, whether for the nation or for the activist.  One need not share the rhetoric of Brown’s Calvinist theology to applaud his militance.  Right is right.

 

1.      1.  The book was published in 1909.  My copy is an International Press edition from 1962 including comments by Du Bois indicating his view of the book’s relevance after almost half a century.  It remains no less useful now when the work is more than twice as old. 

 

2.      2.  He claims that the primary reason for the defeat of Brown’s party, small though it was, was the failure of the timely arrival of supplies from the farm a few miles distant.

 

3.      3.  Lincoln had long been a supporter of such plans.  One hears little these days about his plan to establish Lincolnia, an African-American colony in the Chiriquí Province of Panama which foundered in the face of opposition by Panama, Nicaragua, and Honduras.

 

4.      4.  The murder rate among both white and Black remains highest in the states of the Deep South, for instance, where slavery was most brutal.

 

 5.     5.  I am reminded of the turn from its fifty years of pacifism taken by the African National Congress in 1960.

 

6.      6.  I find a parallel in the effect of photographs of early civil rights demonstrations in journals like Life and Look.

Notes on Recent Reading 42 (Bulgakov, Tedlock, Williams)

 

The Master and Margarita (Bulgakov) 

     A symphonic and sustained phantasmagoria, the novel has attracted considerable political comment because of the author’s difficulties under Stalin’s rule. Yet this reader suspects Bulgakov would have been ill at ease even under less despotic rule. His sense of the absurd, his social satire stretched to universals, his dazed reaction to the procession of experience, all make him a worthy successor to Gogol. 

      In their objective particularizing, the Pilate sections reminded me of Flaubert’s Salammbo, though I remain puzzled over thematic aspects of these passages which Bulgakov seems to wish to affirm as authentic by draining them of their supernaturalism, an odd compensation for the constant supernatural characters and sudden scene-shifting throughout. Perhaps the reader is meant to be caught off-balance. 

  Rabinal Achi (Tedlock) 

      One expects, I suppose, too much from an artifact like this, a vestige of pre-Columbian drama preserved in what looks like good condition by the merest chance.  

      It is many years since Sir John Eric Sidney Thompson’s picture of the Mayans as peaceful gentlemanly scholars has been devastated by decoding of the glyphs, most of which turn out to be records of the power of rulers proven by their military victories very like those found in Egypt or Babylon. So here the drama centers on the same sort of theme, the ritual submission and sacrifice of a conquered nobleman, performed in a highly ritualized atmosphere and bedecked with luxurious mythological context.

      Tedlock, a participatory anthropologist (he prefers the term “dialogic” anthropologist) who had himself initiated as a shaman, a poet and founder along with Jerome Rothenberg of the influential Alcheringa, is surely the ideal guide for a work of this sort.  His edition of the Popul Vuh is probably the best both for artistic and scientific reasons, but this work left me disappointed.  While the Popul Vuh provides a fascinating, provocative, and dramatic creation story, the Rabinal Achi offers mainly aggression, though clothed in stately and operatic mythological and rhetorical finery.  

A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (Williams) 

     This late play, first staged in its final form in 1979, is theatrical and entertaining with considerable comedy as well as the author’s characteristic pathos. The reader may sit back and enjoy the lines of the extravagant Dorothea, her Teutonically weighty roommate Bodey, and her waspish coworker Helena. Often richly comic but sympathetic nonetheless, each is defined by the blinders they wear. The trajectory of the plot is clear from the outset, lending dark shadows to the scene, heightened by the presence of Sophie Gluck, a frantic, grieving, and mentally ill neighbor. The conclusion of the play, in which Dottie decides to join the picnic excursion, accepting the presence of Bodey’s brother in spite of his poor taste, beer, and cigars, indicates that she will survive despite her lover’s betrayal, though with radically reduced expectations. 

     The stage set is unusually significant in this play. The discordant and shabby décor of the ladies’ apartment is the occasion for humor, not squalor or real despair. If this play never reaches the heights or depths of Williams’ masterpieces, it is funnier than most, and the characters, though recognizable, are sufficiently individualized to engage the audience for the hour and a half of this extended single act. Williams was a master of the stage, and these four women, though quite unlike one another, are all quite amusing to those of us in the audience as they all do their best to pursue happiness, through frustration, poor judgement, and repeated defeat. There is, perhaps, a sort of courage, if not good taste, in the “fierce purple carpet.”

The Belated Eroticism of Agathias Scholasticus

Numbers in parentheses refer to poems in Book 5 of the Greek Anthology. The Greek original and a new translation of 5.294 follow the discussion. 

     In the sixth century of the Christian era Agathias Scholasticus produced a new edition of the Greek Anthology, taking the editor’s privilege of including a generous share of his own epigrams. His period marked the transition from Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages. During his lifetime the eastern emperor Justinian required citizens to profess Christianity, suppressed the pagan rhetors, and ended government support for the neo-Platonic Academy. Agathias himself was steeped in pre-Christian tradition; many readers suspect he had only a veneer of Christianity. He was a substantial historian, continuing Procopius’ History of Justinian, while practicing as well as a lawyer and civic activist. As pater civitatis he assumed the management of the renovation of the public latrines in Smyrna, inspiring him to write epigrams celebrating the salutary improvement he had brought, but also moralizing: “All the extravagance of mortals and their expensive dishes excreted here have lost their previous charm.” (GA 9.662 and 642) 

      The fifth book of the Anthology, titled "Amatory Epigrams” contains twenty-three poems by Agathias, virtually none of which expresses simple, straightforward passion. The poet himself problematizes his erotics in an epigram lamenting the unsuitability of each option for love object. (302) Every choice, he laments, is accompanied by inconvenience. Neither courtesans, nor virgins, nor wife, nor other men’s wives, nor widows, nor serving maids will do. One might as well, he concludes, imitate Diogenes and choose masturbation. 

      Though that conclusion hardly sounds romantic, Agathias is nonetheless capable of deploying certain familiar romantic tropes: the complaint of a watchful duenna (289), the lover’s subjugation by the beloved (299) or suffering a sleepless night and hoping for a dream, at least, of love. (237) 

      Other epigrams cover a surprisingly broad range. They include conversational pieces such as a graduate student’s letter home missing his girlfriend and male friend (292), a comment on the isolation of women (297), and a simple declaration of heterosexuality. (278) Though considering age in general the enemy of desire (273), he appreciates the sexiness of an old lady. (282) 

      A group of his epigrams depend upon word games and jeux d’esprit. In one (218) he describes what seems to be an adulterous intrigue using names adapted from contemporary drama, while in another he plays on the mythological associations of the name of Ariadne. (222) 

      Another group of Agathias’ poems testify to the power of symbolically displaced, or fetishized eroticism. For instance, in one (285) he kisses her “girdle” instead of her flesh, while in another he relishes the cup that has touched her lips. (261) In others he addresses the lamp that has overseen his amours (263), and describes the gift of a “coif” that can becomingly bind her midriff. (276) 

      In general the poets of the Anthology are as likely to speak of one night stands with prostitutes or men as of enduring affairs of the heart. Thus Agathias’ casual and worldly persona is likely less a reflection of his own emotional sensibility as of the norms of his age. In the proem to his edition of the collection as a whole he suggests that poetry is primarily a source if pleasure for the surfeited or jaded appetites of his listeners. This pose is explicit in the introductory verses which take the form of an address to his audience, a cultivated company headed by the leading local cavalry officer. They would have enjoyed a dinner as lavish as the host could make it. Wine was certainly flowing. Perhaps it was before the flute-girls that Agathias would have been asked to present some elegant epigrams, the best of earlier times mixed with a number of the new.  

     This dramatic setting is useful reinforcement to Agathias’ opening image. Agathias declares that he means to spread a verbal πανδαισία, for which Liddell and Scott offer the glorious if slightly mystifying definition “a complete banquet, a banquet at which nothing fails.” He fears that the guests may be already sated (ἐμπεπλησμένους) with literature, stuffed, indeed, to belching (τὰ σιτία προσκόρως ἐρυγγάνειν) with the magnificent and varied board of poetry already available from earlier eras. 

     The weight of the greatness of Greek tradition is evident in the poet’s heavy use of convention in metrics, imagery, and theme. Yet, after a rhetorical claim that he expects a reader to be indulgent toward his work out of courtesy alone, he promises to provide novelty. (l. 20) The poem has little to say about love itself and a good deal about barriers to love. While it is true that most love literature from all ages is concerned with overcoming such obstacles, their description is usually accompanied by considerable praise of the beloved. Agathias’ poem takes the passion for granted and speaks only of impediments.

    The poem appeals to me for its decadence. Reminiscent of the great Pervigilium Veneris, the poem implies a refined pleasure in simply contemplating the barriers to satisfaction, maintaining the lover’s sustained pre-orgasmic condition. I am reminded of the Daoist sexual regimen which eschewed completion of the sexual act in an effort to build qi. One might consider Agathias’ poem and others like it as the product of a hedonism for which simple love has gone flat or, whether alternatively or simultaneously, as a contemplative exercise, a kind of meditation on desire. 

translation note 

     Believing the modern ear to be deaf to the ancient meters, even apart from the change from quantitative to accentual/syllabic prosody, I have not attempted to duplicate the elegiac couplets characteristic of the epigram form. Instead the whole thing is basically in iambic hexameter, a rare choice in English. There is most often a line by line correspondence between Greek and English. An extra syllable hangs on the end like a prolonged sigh. 

Greek Anthology 5.294 

The envious old woman lay next to the young, 

fixed crosswise over all the broad expanse of bed, 

extended like a bastion to block invaders there. 

My lady’s veiled by ample folds of sheets and quilts. 

Her so conceited handmaid barred the entry door.

She lies asleep, weighed down with too much unmixed wine. 

Still unafraid, I reached out with my hand to lift 

 and open up the bar that latched the door. The draft 

from one quick wave of cloak then quenched each fiery torch. 

I slinked through crosswise softly through the room, 

Avoiding then the sleeping guard I pulled myself 

in further, underneath the bed frame, lying prone 

 I pulled myself up just a bit to lean against 

the wall and propped up there I then did face my love. 

Caressing both her breasts I lightly kissed her face. 

My lips played all about and felt her softness there. 

The only prize I captured was her lovely mouth.

The only sign I had of my advance that night 

I haven’t breached the walls of her virginity. 

That still remains untouched. For now I will not try. 

The ramparts will not stop me. Should all go my way, 

I’ll weave a wreath for you, o Cypris of love’s spoils. 

 ἡ γραῦς ἡ φθονερὴ παρεκέκλιτο γείτονι κούρῃ 

δόχμιον ἐν λέκτρῳ νῶτον ἐρεισαμένη, 

προβλὴς ὥς τις ἔπαλξις ἀνέμβατος: οἷα δὲ πύργος 

ἔσκεπε τὴν κούρην ἁπλοῒς ἐκταδίη: 

καὶ σοβαρὴ θεράπαινα πύλας σφίγξασα μελάθρου 

κεῖτο χαλικρήτῳ νάματι βριθομένη. 

ἔμπης οὔ μ᾽ ἐφόβησαν ἐπεὶ στρεπτῆρα θυρέτρου 

χερσὶν ἀδουπήτοις βαιὸν ἀειράμενος, 

φρυκτοὺς αἰθαλόεντας ἐμῆς ῥιπίσμασι λώπης 

ἔσβεσα: καὶ διαδὺς λέχριος ἐν θαλάμῳ 

τὴν φύλακα κνώσσουσαν ὑπέκφυγον ἦκα δὲ λέκτρου 

νέρθεν ὑπὸ σχοίνοις γαστέρι συρόμενος, 

ὠρθούμην κατὰ βαιόν, ὅπη βατὸν ἔπλετο τεῖχος: 

ἄγχι δὲ τῆς κούρης στέρνον ἐρεισάμενος, 

μαζοὺς μὲν κρατέεσκον: ὑπεθρύφθην δὲ προσώπῳ, 

μάστακα πιαίνων χείλεος εὐαφίῃ. 

ἦν δ᾽ ἄρα μοι τὰ λάφυρα καλὸν στόμα, καὶ τὸ φίλημα 

σύμβολον ἐννυχίης εἶχον ἀεθλοσύνης. 

οὔπω δ᾽ ἐξαλάπαξα φίλης πύργωμα κορείης, 

ἀλλ᾽ ἔτ᾽ ἀδηρίτῳ σφίγγεται ἀμβολίῃ. 

ἔμπης ἢν ἑτέροιο μόθου στήσωμεν ἀγῶνα, 

ναὶ τάχα πορθήσω τείχεα παρθενίης, 

οὐ δ᾽ ἔτι με σχήσουσιν ἐπάλξιες. ἢν δὲ τυχήσω, 

στέμματα σοὶ πλέξω, Κύπρι τροπαιοφόρε.

Kleist’s “A Poet’s Letter to Another”

 

A new translation of Kleist’s “Brief eines Dichters an einen anderen” precedes a discussion of the author’s poetics. 

1.      A Poet’s Letter to Another

 Recently, when I found you reading my poetry, you went on with extraordinary eloquence about form and applauded me using the terms of the school where, you like to presume, I was educated.  You praised me in a way that made me feel ashamed, dwelling on the appropriateness of the underlying meter, of the rhythm, of the charm of melody and the purity and correctness of expression and the language in general.  Please allow me to say your mind lingers on those topics by your own choice.  It would have proven the greatest worth, had you not noticed these characteristics at all.  If I could grasp my heart while composing, detach my thoughts and present them to you without any further elaboration, you too, friend, it seems to me, would find nothing then lacking.  A thirsty person cares little about the bowl but rather is concerned with the fruits that are brought to him in it.   It is only because the thought, like certain evanescent, unrepresentable, chemical substances, must be linked with something more coarse and physical in order to appear visible that I use such devices when I write to you, and you then go looking for speech, language, cadence, and musicality.  Delightful as these things may be to the extent that they reveal the spirit, still, in and of themselves, when observed from this higher point of view, they are nothing but a genuine, if understandable and necessary, evil.  With reference to such things, art can only strive to conceal them as much as possible.  I take pains to do my best to give my expressions clarity, the verse form significance, and to lend grace and life to the sound of the words.  My goal is that the art should not appear at all but rather the thought alone which the words embody.  For it is a characteristic of all correct form to express the spirit instantly and without mediation while a deficient form, like a bad mirror, is constricting and can bring nothing to mind but itself.   If as your first impression, you praise the formal qualities of my little unpretentious literary works, you arouse in me quite naturally a concern that my poems possess altogether false rhythmic and prosodic associations and that your consciousness fastens on the melody or the pattern of the verses matters entirely removed from what had I had really cared about.  Otherwise why would you fail to respond to the spirit I took pains to put into words just as one would do in conversation, when I had hoped to encounter your spirit with my own without attention to the clothing of my thought?  Your insensitivity to the heart and essence of poetry and your highly developed responsiveness for form and the accidental (amounting nearly to disease) dominates your judgement as a result, I would say, of the school of thought from which you come.  Doubtless this is not the intention of that school which is as clever as any that has appeared among us, though not entirely without fault, considering the paradoxical mischief of its teachings.  But this insensitivity to the essence and core of poetry, with the irritability developed up to the point of illness, for the accidental and the formal, is a habit of your mind in general due to the school from which you come.   I have noticed that, when reading the work of writers altogether different from me, your eye cannot, to use a proverbial expression, see the forest for the trees.  When we take Shakespeare in hand, how unproductive are the interests to which your taste leads you in comparison to the great, sublime, cosmopolitan resonances this splendid poet should awaken in your heart!  How could I be concerned about repartee and witty wordplay on the bloody field of Agincourt?  Or when Ophelia says of Hamlet “O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!”  Or Macduff of Macbeth “He has no children.”  What value then remains to the iambs, rhymes, assonances and such devices, to which your ear is always attuned as if nothing else mattered? - Farewell!

 

 

2.       

     Heinrich von Kleist’s “Brief eines Dichters an einen anderen” is a manifesto of hyper-Romanticism, fetishizing the value of imaginative production and suggesting that artistic works carry content that is miraculously beyond language, though necessarily expressed in inadequate words.   With a kind of belated neo-Platonic weakness for the abstract, Kleist, a writer whose works consist of words and words alone, insists that the materiality of his discourse, the ink on the page or sounds in the air, is an unfortunate concomitant of its more essential ethereal message.  This latter and more significant burden of his poetry proves, however, ineffable. 

     What makes this claim all the more Romantic is the heightened value attributed to poetry when properly understood which for Kleist borders on religious revelation.  For him the thoughts welling from his heart are paramount.  Just what these are he does not say, but he boldly maintains that that his poetry is required for life, like fruit to a thirsty man.  Ideally, he notes, the reception of poetry might resemble a conversation in which the mind of the reader engages that of the writer, but such an encounter is precluded by the reader’s obsession with literariness itself which blocks the vision of the reality beyond the page the writer seeks to project.  Kleist’s correspondent, he complains, cannot properly appreciate poetry due to his allegiance to a particular misguided “school” with presumably some variety of an academic or neo-Classical view of art as craft.  Such a view, Kleist maintains, misses the poetry, perceiving only the poetic usages.

      He makes, then, two claims.  First, endows the aesthetic product with immense if ill-defined potential and second, he insists that literary reception must be unselfconscious and, in a sense, preverbal, a matter of mind meeting mind in which words are potentially obstacles.  Such claims might seem both arrogant and obscurantist.  Kleist certainly conveys no interest in the other poet’s work, yet the reader has only Kleist’s passion to certify that his vision and his poetry are at all superior to those of his correspondent.  These grand claims are as well undermined in part by Kleist’s concession that his work is weighed down from the first by the “coarse” material of language.

     This posture could be taken as an index of the poet’s enthusiasm.  Like a shaman he assumes the role of messenger delivering revelations from beyond, and, like the shaman, he depends largely on faith.  In a more modest way writers today assert similar authority when they say that a poem “just came to me,” that “I couldn’t help writing it.”   

      Many people, of course, apart from critics, consume art with a minimum of analytic attention to its machinery.  For centuries the art that conceals art has been praised, but that is a refinement of craftsmanship, the polishing that erases the marks of the constructor’s hand, the final flourish of skill.  Kleist’s disavowal of literary professionalism is something else altogether, more a matter of mysticism or spirituality than of art alone.  In the Platonic hierarchy philosophy always trumps poetry.

      Yet Kleist’s importunate assertion of the importance of his utterance, his desire to silence competing poets and hold the stage alone, does not really differ from what any artist must do, seeking to attract attention to a single voice in a vast cacophony of voices.  Whether the maker is modest or not personally, on the page or on the gallery wall each can only scream for attention just as we all did as infants.  And as for the literary devices, those are like to magician’s (and the shaman’s) bag of tricks, and the show would be ruined were all its secrets out. 

      Kleist’s letter could be read as well as a lament for the inadequacy of signifiers, a frustrated struggle to escape the fabric of discourse.  Since, even with the substantial enhancements of rhetoric, signifier is always to some extent incongruent with signified, the writer is condemned to a kind of eternal failure, never quite able to embody his consciousness fully and precisely in words, unable to program every reader with precisely the desired algorithm. 

     Kleist’s letter dramatically articulates the Romantic elevation of art to a virtually religious significance while at the same time undercutting itself by describing the artist’s failure to communicate his mental concept to his friend and fellow poet.  He balances this ambivalence by an homage to Shakespeare’s success, implying that his own effusions have something at least in common with that author’s sublime genius than with mere earth-bound literary theory. 

      I have always considered that in literary theory (as in politics) he who acknowledges a partisan position is more reliable than one claiming objectivity, for such a claim means only that the critic either does not recognize or does not care to admit bias.  Kleist’s idea that art is above calculation and craft is less a critical principle than a rhetorical figure similar to the love poem that says “words cannot describe her beauty.”  Surely he was himself conscious of the labor and skill required to construct literary works.  Thus this letter has more in common with twentieth century literary manifestoes, meant to provoke and attract attention more than to set forth and defend a set of contentions about the aesthetic text.

      In “Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden” (“On the Gradual Construction of Thoughts While Speaking”) Kleist explicitly recommends emptying the mind as a strategy not merely for the proper reception of poetry, but for problem-solving in general.  He says that simply to begin speaking on a topic, without prior plan, will produce new insights and solutions.  Troping on “l'appetit vient en mangeant,” he says, “l’idee vient en parlant.”

      These ideas are presented more artfully and suggestively in the better-known essay “Über das Marionettentheater” (“On the Marionette Theater”).  There the acting of the puppets is praised over that of humans specifically because a pesky human consciousness will cloud the waters by introducing “affectation” (“Ziererei”).  The fifteen-year-old whose beauty captured a stranger’s attention in the baths can no longer maintain his charm once he is aware he is being observed.  Self- consciousness is the curse of the exile from Eden.  Here Kleist explicitly claims that thought leads not to wisdom and beauty but to their loss.  Enlightenment can only arise in its absence. 

      Kleist here provides a specific quasi-scientific image to illustrate his vision. 

  

We can see how in the organic world as reflection lessens and darkens, grace emerges and comes to the fore more brightly.  It is just like passing through the intersection of two lines to come out on the other side of that point after passing through infinity or the image in a concave mirror which, after vanishing into the distance, suddenly appears again right in front of us.  In this same way grace emerges when understanding has passed through infinity.  Grace will appear most purely in a human form with either an infinite consciousness or none at all.  That is, either in the puppet or in the god. [1]

 

 Whether there is any topographical meaning to Kleist’s figure I cannot say, but the question seems moot since the meaning is clearly that bipolar oppositions are ultimately unified as the extreme of one is transformed into its contrary.  The use of similar structures is common in mystical and apocalyptic thought and familiar in such Christian concepts as the mortal deity, the virgin mother, leaving the father to join the father, and death made eternal life.

   The reader of Kleist’s letter might then assume that the heart’s truth the writer is so anxious to deliver is simply that the individual might ideally attain through poetry a position of sublime wisdom from which one can see that, in the last analysis, contraries are illusory and one may in contemplation unite with the cosmos.  In art such an alteration of consciousness does not follow from systematic reasoning.  On the contrary, it arrives when one forgets oneself.  The vanishing ego suddenly is succeeded by an oceanic feeling. [2]  Kleist’s examples from Shakespeare demonstrate that, far from arising from philosophic disputation, this enlightened state of mind may be inspired by the sympathetic experience of strong, even tragic experience which he says creates in the soul “great, sublime, cosmopolitan resonances.”

 

 

1.  The passage is sufficiently opaque that I include here the original German and an alternative translation. 

Wir sehen, daß in dem Maße, als, in der organischen Welt, die Reflexion dunkler und schwächer wird, die Grazie darin immer strahlender und herrschender hervortritt. - Doch so, wie sich der Durchschnitt zweier Linien, auf der einen Seite eines Punkts, nach dem Durchgang durch das Unendliche, plötzlich wieder auf der andern Seite einfindet, oder das Bild des Hohlspiegels, nachdem es sich in das Unendliche entfernt hat, plötzlich wieder dicht vor uns tritt: so findet sich auch, wenn die Erkenntnis gleichsam durch ein Unendliches gegangen ist, die Grazie wieder ein; so, daß sie, zu gleicher Zeit, in demjenigen menschlichen Körperbau am reinsten erscheint, der entweder gar keins, oder ein unendliches Bewußtsein hat, d. h. in dem Gliedermann, oder in dem Gott.

This is the rendering of Idris Parry published in the Southern Cross Review #9: "We see that in the organic world, as thought grows dimmer and weaker, grace emerges more brilliantly and decisively. But just as a section drawn through two lines suddenly reappears on the other side after passing through infinity, or as the image in a concave mirror turns up again right in front of us after dwindling into the distance, so grace itself returns when knowledge has as it were gone through an infinity. Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god."

 

2.      Kleist is much closer to Romain Rolland’s original usage of the term than to Freud’s diminished meaning, though even for Freud this feeling fades as the separate ego develops at the end of breast-feeding.