The Demanding Goddess: Cybele in Catullus 63

 

Engraving by Giacomo Bossi

      Everyone with any interest in ancient Roman poetry is likely to know several of Catullus’ playful erotic carmina: probably the lament on Lesbia’s sparrow (3), the lyrics on counting kisses (5 and 7), or the invitation to a party at which one might wish to be all nose (13).  Those somewhat better acquainted with Latin are likely to be familiar with his extremely abusive poems of invective charged with obscene imagery such as 88 with its attack on Gallus for incest or the memorable Catullus 16 the opening line of which is “I will fuck your face and your ass.” [1]

     Less familiar, probably, are the poems which some in antiquity, perhaps even the author, may have considered the chef d’oeuvres of the collection, the so-called carmina maiora or carmina docta (61-69), the chief theme of which is marriage.  Now, though Catullus is best-known for the incidental expressions of sexuality associated with lust and indecent raillery, he recognized that, both biologically and socially, erotic desire aims ultimately at marriage, stable families, and offspring.  The poet was engaged with each of these three manifestations of desire, though the first two, the non-reproductive, uses of eroticism excite more modern interest than the recommendation of stable marriage and thus have dominated his reputation.  Number 63 demonstrates how, even as he recommends socially conservative behavior, he provides an altogether sensational exemplum, though accompanied by a moralizing theme.  

     The chief figure in Catullus 63 is Attis whose worship, in association with that of Cybele, had been imported from Phrygia into Greece in the fourth century B.C.E.   The cult spread to Rome where it was accepted as a part of government-endorsed religious practice in the early third century B. C.E. in obedience to a Sibylline oracle promising divine aid in the Second Punic War.  In spite of that official approval, however, Attis must have seemed to most Romans a foreigner, and the self-castration of her devotees, the Galli, a thoroughly barbaric custom.  Catullus’ account of Attis’ story, related the rare excited galliambic meter, is meant to seem exotic and thrilling, though owing more to the style of the Grand Guignol than the travelogue.  Just as Gothic novels were set in Italy (if not more distant lands), which seemed vaguely mysterious to many Britons, for Catullus the far-off origins of Cybele’s rites heightens the drama while reassuring the Roman reader such things were for civilized men a mere side-show.

     Cybele was far from alone among Near Eastern deities to obtain a following in Rome.  The patriotic and historic observances that constituted the mos maiorum, the way of the ancestors, involving worship of Jove and the Olympians principally through sacrifice, had come to seem unsatisfying to many.  Some sought spiritual sustenance through a variety of foreign divinities, such as the Celtic Epona, but by far the largest group of gods imported from other lands were from the Near East, including the Persian Mithras and the Syrian Sol Invictus.  Others include the original worship of Dionysos (and the related ceremonies of Zagreus and Orpheus), the Eleusinian mysteries (which feature a dying and reborn goddess instead of a god), the Pythagorean Mysteries (though Pythagoras was a Greek, many aspects of Pythagorean belief have been thought to be non-Greek), and Christianity, which in its early forms included mysteries from which the uninitiated were barred.  The most common pattern, though, the one on which Frazer constructed the magnificent volumes of The Golden Bough, featured myths of an earth goddess, a Magna Mater, and her consorts.  Surely extending back into the Neolithic Age, these couples include the Mesopotamian Tammuz and Inanna, the Levantine Adonis and Aphrodite, the Egyptian Osiris and Isis, and the Phrygian Cybele and Attis.

     The Great Mother embodying the fertility of the earth which meant so much to our archaic ancestors, meant less to the urban Romans of Catullus’ time.  He, and others of the poets called by Cicero neoteric, or new style, like poets in the last hundred years, abandoned a grand and lofty epic style to focus on personal life and varied the old myths to express what were to them more contemporary themes. 

     Thus Catullus 63, far from a conventional hymn, piously remembering and praising the goddess Cybele and her consort Attis, and then asking favors, is in fact, the opposite, a horrified rejection of her orgiastic rituals and, in particular, the self-castration of her ministrants [2].  This shifts the story’s significance from  a celebration of fertility and life, in effect a tribute to sexuality, to a tale of a “belle dame sans merci,” a cautionary tale about the hazards of ecstatic religious practice.  Cybele here resembles that negative feminine archetype of the lover to be feared, different aspects of which are exemplified in ancient Greece by the Sphinx, Pandora, Eos (as Tithonus’ lover), and, in the Odyssey, Circe and Calypso, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis.  The lovers of goddesses typically come to grief, and those associated with the cyclic turn of the agricultural year must die, since, for the farmer, death is fruition and ripeness [3].

     The mythic about-face is marked by the identification of Attis, not as a Phrygian, but as a Greek who had traveled to Asia Minor.  He has then from the start an identity in part as a mythic figure and in part as a Greek Everyman.  Once his furor departs and he realizes what he has done, he laments his rashness in joining in Cybele’s rituals in a foreign land and thus deserting his home, leaving behind such Hellenic institutions as “the market, the wrestling-place, the racecourse, the playground” [4]  His mistress Cybele is more tyrannical than loving, manifesting in a “fearsome” [5] aspect to Attis, since his emasculation a “sterile man,” a mere “serving-girl” held in thrall by “madness.” [6].  Thus the poem ends with the persona, not inviting the deity as in Sappho’s hymn to Aphrodite but rather praying “may all your madness be kept far from me” [7].

     Attis’ principal ἁμαρτία is not, as Cybele alleges, his disloyalty to her, but rather his unnatural hostility to love, his “overwhelming loathing of sex” (“Veneris nimio odio,” l. 17), an attitude shared by a variety of other religious enthusiasts to whom erotic energy was wasteful, an obstacle to salvation or enlightenment.  Though a world-wide commonplace of ascetic practice considers celibacy to intensify spiritual power, physical castration is nonetheless profoundly abhorrent to most, a radical and unreversible assault on the individual’s well-being, going beyond such measures as fasting and mortification of the flesh.  Whatever the effect on religiosity, emasculation is a deeply antisocial act, undertaken in the interest of one’s own soul, but hostile or, at any rate, indifferent to any civic role.  The foundation  of every social order is householders in stable family units who produce wealth, defend against enemies, and reproduce the next generation. 

     Indeed, as many critics have noted, the chief theme of the entire group of carmina maiora is marriage.  Numbers 61 and 62 are epithalamia, while 64 is about the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, and about Theseus breaking his promise of marrying Ariadne.  65 is an introduction to 66, which details the marital concord between Queen Berenice and her husband; 67 is about the failure of a marriage and 68 about Catullus' reflections on his own adulterous relationship.  Attis’ story in this context is a cautionary exemplum urging identification with the most conventional of virtues: social conservatism, orthodox religion, and patriotism.  That it accomplishes these anodyne ends by a lurid tale, related in a jangly meter describing weird sexual rituals and ecstatic states of possession is typical of that sort of moralizing which titillates by relating misconduct, at once relishing and condemning the violators of norms rather like an exploitation movie.  In a way the poem also resembles a horror film in which an average person is swept up in bizarre violent behavior to which the reader may vicariously thrill while safely out of danger.  Apart from its thematic emphasis on marriage which is never foregrounded, the poem is a sort of thriller with its breathless rush of tumbling lines leading to a fierce theophany.  The reader of the poem can experience enthusiastic excitement and its opposite, rueful depression while secure in the conviction that he would never be tempted to emulate Attis. 

 

1.  “Pēdīcābō ego vōs et irrumābō.”

2.  Among the countless parallels of this universal theme are Eve in  the Bible as well as Judith and Salome (one virtuous and one wicked beheader).  In English tradition the ambiguous figure of Mogan le Fay is relevant as are the numerous fairies who, in balladry, capture lovers to carry off to another world as captives.  The persecution of witches is a world-wide indication that the motif did not remain always in the realm of the imagination. 

3.  Self-castration is not, of course, a monopoly of Cybele’s devotees.  For a discussion of the practice in general, see, for instance, J. Wade, “The castrated gods and their castration cults: Revenge, punishment, and spiritual supremacy,” International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, vol. 38, no. 1 (2019).  Daniel F. Caner in “The Practice and Prohibition of Self-Castration in Early Christianity,” Vigiliae Christianae, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Nov., 1997) focuses on the early Christian church of whom the most notable example is Origen.  Cf. in more recent times the Russian Skoptsy and the Hindu hijra (whose act finds precedent in Shiva’s severing of his penis, described in the Mahabharata and which is echoed among the members of Dera Sacha Sauda in India today).  

4.  Ll. 50-73 the specifics are “foro, palaestra, stadioo, et guminasiis” l. 60.

5.  “Ferox,” l. 78.

6.  “Vir sterilis,” l. 69; “famula,” l. 90, “furoris”, l. 79.

7.  “Procul a mea tuus sit furor omnis,” l. 92.

Irony in Aucassin et Nicolette

 

 

 

     It may surprise the modern reader of Aucassin et Nicolette, the eight-hundred-year-old chantefable [1], to learn that it was long regarded as a straightforward story of two perfect partners, according to one scholar “the purest example imaginable of characters motivated by idyllic love” [2].  The modern age is admittedly suspicious of ideals and finds a particular appeal in paradox and irony.  Even those who would not label themselves post-structuralists are liable to see earlier authors burlesquing or otherwise undermining themselves.  Yet, quite apart from a modern taste for cynicism and iconoclasm, this particular tale of love’s overcoming obstacles seems at times explicit in its own self-satire [3].

     The episode of Torelore is the most undeniably comic passage.  In this up-side-down land, women fight by tossing foodstuffs while the king lies “en couvade,” as though in childbed.  There is surely caricature, too, in Aucassin’s declaration that he could never enjoy the afterlife without his beloved.  While the basic sentiment is more or less conventional, his depiction of heaven as boring, packed with tiresome old fogeys, in contrast to a hell populated by courtly sophisticates is certainly meant more to raise a smile at his silliness than to impress the reader with the depth of his devotion or to shock with his apparent irreligion. 

     Apart from these farcical passages, Aucassin is regularly presented as an incompetent hero.  Initially unwilling to fight at all, he is lost in a dream when he does enter the battlefield.  The reader sees him in  warrior mode only when he attacks the helpless Toreloreans including their feckless bed-ridden king.  Separated from his beloved, Aucassin makes no attempt to find her and he is, indeed, slow to recognize her in the end.  On the other hand, Nicolette is an unusually active heroine.  Her seeking out her lover while disguised is more often a man’s ploy (as in the case of Odysseus) than a woman’s.   

     Apart from the satirical comments on romance conventions and on the church, at the outset the poet makes an extravagant self-reflective claim. 

 

 

Nus hom n’est si esbahis,

Tant dolans ni entrepris,

de grant mal amaladis,

se il l’oit, ne soit garis,

et de joie resbaudis,

     tant par est douce.

 

There is no one so downcast, afflicted and in poor shape, so very ill that he would not, at hearing this [story] recover health, joy, and vigor, so sweet as it is.

(Lines 10-15)

 

     To what degree of irony is this assertion pitched?  Taking it as a direct assertion of truth may seem somewhat fanciful, but in fact the idea that poetry (or music or stories) might have healing power, though entirely magical, is widespread, indeed, all  but universal in human culture.  The Chinese character for medicine contains the sign for music (as well as a radical indicating herbs).  As it happens I can present more than one bit of contemporary evidence of this belief.  I was once acquainted with a Gnaoui musician from Marrakech who had not attended even a Koranic school.  He said that in his youth he was most often hired, not for weddings or parties, but to play by the bedside of sick people.  He had not the slightest doubt that his art was an agent of healing.  In modern American culture, my wife worked in an inpatient mental health unit that employed a full-time music therapist whose work was considered to contribute to effective treatment [4].    

     To most readers the author’s declaration of the healing powers of his composition seems satirical.  The primary object of the humor might be the literary conventions of the day, paralleling the lovers’ puffed-up professions of devotion, but it might also have seemed a burlesque of the spiritual rewards sometimes promised for the reading of religious texts like saints’ lives. 

     Those who wish to salvage some of the promised benefits of consuming such stories might respond to this ironic reading by insisting that while a poem cannot cure illness, it can improve life by heightening a person’s sensitivity.  Surely the catharsis Aristotle expected from tragedy was therapeutic.  The humanistic approach to literature, unfashionable in the twenty-first century, but dominant in various forms earlier, rests on the notion that literature in some way is “improving.”  

     The theoretical critic might answer that artists know no more than others about how properly to live the good life, that their particular skill lies instead on the artful arrangement of forms or words or sounds, and that it is thus futile to look to poets for wisdom. 

     This back-and-forth dialectic is generated by the special capacity of art to deal with ambiguities and contradictions.  Further elaboration is possible but would require ingenuity more than hermeneutics.  Fundamentally, the proposition is in a sense true and also false.  The oscillation between the possibilities creates a rich resonance and avoids reductive formulae.  This is one example of the transformation of convention characteristic of literature in which to employ a formula or repeat a phrase instantly enables variations and contradictions that render the idea more precise as well as thickening the plot of narrative.  Aucassin et Nicolette makes its parodic values clear to most contemporary readers, but the same phenomenon is traceable in less strident form in most aesthetic texts.

 

 

 

1.  While the combination of prose and verse exists elsewhere, under the name of prosimetrum in Latin literature (e.g. Petronius and Boethius) and (變) in Chinese tradition (e.g. Jiang Mo Bianwen [降魔變文], “Magical Combat”) as well as elsewhere, but Aucassin et Nicolette is unique among French narratives.  For a comparison of Aucassin et Nicolette with the biànwén form, see Li-Li Ch'en, “Wen Chantefable and Aucassin et Nicolette,” Comparative Literature, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Summer, 1971).

2.  Robert Harden, ‘"Aucassin et Nicolette’ as Parody,” Studies in Philology, Vol. 63, No. 1 (Jan., 1966). 

3.  Apart from the article already cited above, additional evidence is presented in Barbara Nelson Sargent, “Parody in Aucassin et Nicolette: Some Further Considerations,” The French Review, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Mar., 1970).

4.  In America this artist played with the likes of Don Cherry and Miles Davis and worked regularly here with three bands: one traditional, one jazz, and one rock.  Listening to his Arabic singing with the rock ensemble, I asked him to translate the lyrics.  They were all cliches of the Islamic shahada: Allah is great, there is one god, Allah determines all things.  “Of course,” he said, “music is always an offering to Allah.”  According to him, in Morocco they would often perform through the night, and generally found their patient better by daybreak. 

Ken Burns' American Revolution

 

     With The American Revolution everyone’s favorite documentary maker Ken Burns (aided by co-directors Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt) has done it again.  The series is entertaining and enlightening, using judiciously researched words, often from correspondence, and a wide variety of images to relate the story of this country’s struggle for independence.  The sound track is too often cloyingly nostalgic or elegiac (as it was in The Civil War) and might have used more eighteenth century tunes, and the visuals suffer from the fact that photography was yet in  the future, leading to the frequent repetition of certain portraits (such as Benedict Arnold’s) as well as an overuse of maps (though they are informative in reporting of battles).  In spite of such quibbles, the programs remain eminently watchable for their entire twelve hours. 

     And even the reasonably well-read non-historian will learn a few things.  Though every school child knows of loyalists, the traditional nationalist story of our origins is slow to admit to what an extent the Revolution was a civil war.  This has led to a vague but satisfying notion that the fight was us against them and to the suppression of incidents of vigilante action like the sadistic treatment of customs official John Malcolm who in 1774 was twice tarred and feathered.

     The most significant revelation was perhaps the fact that both enslaved Africans and native peoples had reason to expect better treatment from the British than from the colonists, leading some members of these groups to choose to fight on the side of George III.  For their own strategic reasons, even before the Americans had risen in arms, Britain had sought to minimize conflict with the indigenous tribes by forbidding settlers to cross the Appalachians.  On the other hand many Americans had significant interest in westward expansion, some in order to gain land of their own and some, who had been in a position to secure a claim to western lands, to realize huge profits.  George Washington was a leading example of this second group. 

     While the Southern colonies blocked early abolitionist attempts in the Constitutional Convention, and the issue was divisive even in the North, the British army offered freedom to enslaved persons who escaped to their lines and enlisted in their cause and a good many accepted the opportunity.  Both Indians and African-Americans pursued their own interests, just as colonists and English were doing, though both non-white groups were to suffer long past this country’s founding; indeed, neither has achieved equality yet today. 

     Further, Burns makes it clear that the rebels might never had won the war had it not been for the support of France and, to a far lesser extent, Spain.  Not because they supported the ideals of the revolution, but purely due to their centuries-old rivalry with Great Britain, these European powers played a significant role in convincing the English Parliament that they should settle this dispute in order to deploy their forces elsewhere to defend their expanding empire.   

     Some of our patriotic clichés survive.  The fact is that the American Revolution was the first major rejection of monarchy and feudalism, though the British king had lost significant authority in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.  In spite of baronial Southern planters, much of America’s leadership was in the hands of middle-class tradesmen -- a silversmith, a brewer, a printer.  As long as land remained available, if one does not consider the fate of its aboriginal inhabitants, a new arrival who had nothing in Europe might become a property holder here and, before long, could aspire to gentility.  Eliminating birthright aristocrats may have made America seem crude and vulgar to some two hundred and some years ago, but it was a step forward in human rights.

     The viewer gets a lively sense of the significance of George Washington’s contribution.  His demeanor alone impressed everyone as noble and dignified, encouraging all to defer to him.  His giving up first the supreme military authority and then the presidency, though it was only to return to trying to amass a greater fortune through business dealings, was rare and praiseworthy among revolutionary leaders. 

     And the rebellion of people, most of whom were in more or less adequate circumstances but who were inspired by a call to liberty indicates what power the concept had in those days when it was so exciting and new.  Ken Burns’ The American Revolution seems timely indeed at a time when many Americans seem to be turning toward authoritarianism and it is necessary once more to raise the banner militantly declaring that in America we want no kings.

Notes on Recent Reading 50 (Greene, de Sévigné, Cary)

 

The Potting Shed (Greene)

     Greene’s plays are little-known compared to his fiction which, in the case of The Potting Shed, is just as well.  He attempted to write a tendentious piece in support of old Jehovah using the plot structure of a mystery, but succeeded at inspiring neither faith nor suspense.  The plot, concerning a militant atheist and an alcoholic priest, requires not only the suspension of disbelief necessary for all fiction, but a rather idiosyncratic view of Christianity itself.  To accept the premise of the plot, one must accept the idea that God miraculously restored James’ life in trade for the priest William’s faith, leading the former to a fevered search for the resolution of his own dissatisfaction while the latter stews in even more miserable wretchedness.  Christian and non-Christian alike might wonder what sort of a God would participate in such a deal, but I suppose this is a sacred mystery.  As a play-goer (or reader), though, one expects a more solid foundation to a work’s themes.  The hero’s tragic anagnorisis is managed with appropriate drama as long as one does not think about it much.  The enormous lion that appears in the closing image must surely be a close relative of C. S. Lewis’s Aslan, though his appearance here seems an artificial graft.

 

 

Selected Letters (Mme. de Sévigné)

     Reading Mme. De Sévigné’s letters one is brought into the world of the seventeenth century French court, but not the court alone.  She was acquainted with the chief writers and intellectuals of the day and delivers opinions of plays by Molière, Racine, and Corneille when they were fresh.  She was a close friend of Rochefoucauld as well as of woman writers like Mme. de La Fayette and Madeleine de Scudéry.  Still, despite its vivid recreation of its time, I found this collection unsatisfying.  Though these are genuine letters, full of gossip and news and emotion, they are not very artful.  The author turns out a nice bit of wit now and then (often a catty sort of remark), but most of the writing is formless and very often pedestrian (the Penguin volume I read translated by Leonard Tancock contained perhaps one quarter of the extant correspondence and might have been cut further yet in my opinion.)  The lady never ventures an original opinion which makes her an excellent source for historians but sometimes dull for other readers.  Most of the letters are to her daughter, living far off in the South of France and her intense maternal concern for her child, for her health in particular, and her delicate management of her son-in-law M. de Grignan, a man with a weakness for gambling and little financial acumen are fascinating at first encounter, but very shortly a bore.  The glittering Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné who frequented the court of the Sun King, comes to seem like a guest who stayed too long, blathering about her offspring until one found one was no longer listening. 

 

 

Prisoner of Grace (Cary)

      Though the novel is explicitly engaged with politics, the real thematic center of Prisoner of Grace is psychological.  Chester Nimmo’s every position is presented as expedient, as his real passion, his most strongly felt “cause” is consistently his own career, from advocacy for the Boers through pacifism and then patriotic support for WWI.  Thus the actual validity of, for instance, his denunciation of “baby-starving landlords” is never an issue; the rhetoric is a means for him to the end of political success.  likewise, Jim Latter’s defense of the Luga tribespeople seems merely an aspect of the errant quirks of that rather shallow individual rather than as either vindication or condemnation of colonialism.  Likewise, the defenders of the status quo like Nina’s cousin Slapton seem to espouse the politics into which they were born with little regard for rightness or wrongness, while Chester’s class consciousness seems like simple resentment of a piece with his pettiness otherwise.

     Nina Woodville is not only the narrator; she is the center of the novel, though she reacts to others and allows herself to be swept along by the current of her life, taking no decisive action.  Though even her love-making, with both Jim and Chester, is altogether passive, she is a fascinating character, as little in control of her destiny at the end as at the start.

     Along the way the reader is exposed to a good deal of history (wars, change of government, social movements) as well as developments like the introduction of lipstick among respectable women, but these documentary elements are consistently secondary to the psychological portraits, principally of Nina, but also of Chester and Jim on down to lesser characters like Aunt Latter and Bootham.

Metrical Variation in a Lyric by Thomas Wyatt

 

 

Alas, Madam, for Stealing of a Kiss

Sir Thomas Wyatt

 

Alas, madam, for stealing of a kiss

Have I so much your mind there offended?

Have I then done so grievously amiss

That by no means it may be amended?

 

Then revenge you, and the next way is this:

Another kiss shall have my life ended,

For to my mouth the first my heart did suck;

The next shall clean out of my breast it pluck.

 

 

 

     The difference between vers libre and metered forms is often exaggerated; it is never more than a matter of degree.  The freest of free verse has inevitably in English stress accents which will sometimes affect the reader’s impression.  On the other hand, the most rigorous of prosodists cannot make a pentameter of perfectly matching iambs as both ictus and remiss may have several levels of stress.  Considerations of pitch, duration, alliteration, and assonance complicate the picture further. 

     The significant question for writers who adopt any level of sonic organization in poetry is whether the sound effects contribute to the poem’s effect, whatever that might be.  While readers would differ from one another only in detail in a line’s scansion, far less consensus is probable about aesthetic effects.  One critic’s account of reactions might be inconsistent with another’s, yet over time a degree of common responses is likely to emerge.

     Metrical effects range from undeniable to vanishingly subtle, but they constitute a major part of the music of poetry.  Even a brief and simple lyric with what seems a transparent theme can prove elusive under close reading.  A brief, song-like lyric by Thomas Wyatt “Alas, madam, for stealing of a kiss” may seem direct and explicit in form, its meter a straightforward iambic pentameter and its rhyme-scheme a simple abab abcc.  The alternate rhymes concluding with a couplet makes the poem resemble in part a truncated English sonnet.

     The first line establishes a clear pattern as it begins with three strong and clearly iambic feet.  Yet any reader will perceive that the “of” in the fourth foot receives less emphasis than the other stressed syllables (the second, fourth, sixth, and tenth), speeding the line’s conclusion and thus enacting the furtive and hasty theft of a kiss. 

     The same fourth foot is disturbed in the second line.  Whereas “of” in the first was weak enough to make “-ing of” a pyrrhic, this time the rhythm is reversed and the fourth foot (“there of-“) is a trochee, as is the fifth (“-fended”).  This arrangement not only continues the sense of something out of order, amiss, while drawing greater attention to the offense with the emphasis on the word “there” and the highlighting of the key syllable of “offended.”

     The same pattern of irregularity, sounding something like syncopation, recurs in the third line with the pyrrhic fourth foot, and then in the fourth where the reader finds yet another pyrrhic as the fourth foot (“be a-“) and a trochee as the fifth (“-mended”) as in line two.  Thus the stanza is tied into a tight package while at the same time the cadences indicate continued instability.

     The second stanza opens dramatically with a more irregular line which might be read as opening with two trochees (“Then revenge you”) followed by a pyrrhic (“and the”) only to recover the rhythm with two concluding iambs (“next way is this”).  The drumbeat continues for three more iambs in line 6 (“another kiss shall have my life”) which the ends in another reversal, the trochaic fifth foot (“ended”). 

     Resolution come with the final couplet.  The seventh line is a unambiguous iambic pentameter as though confidently setting forth a harmonization of the man’s and woman’s wishes (“For to my mouth the first my heart did suck”) with the new rhyme word, the harsh and unpleasant-sounding “suck.”  The final line begins with two regular feet followed by a pyrrhic (“out of”) which skips forward in a little rapid hop toward the two final iambs (“my breast it pluck”) and the grating final sound.  That concluding rhyme settles the matter but its croak suggests that all may not be solved. 

     The poem’s claim is clearly a rhetorical one, meant to impress the woman with a witty display indicating the author’s courtly savoir-faire, yet he dies in the end, victim of his heart’s exiting his body.  In literal terms, his second kiss would be his last, but it is unlikely that his ambitions were to halt so soon.  The ingenious verbal show is, of course, not for the lady alone, but for the court and today's reader as well, containing perhaps a bit of self-satire by the lover who does not realize he has promised his own extinction as a sign of devotion.  In the end it is a charming little game in which, at least in the seducer’s game book, she will grant a second kiss and a third and both can then wonder at his continued survival as love-making proceeds.

     This metrical variation is only a portion of the sonic structure of the poem, what Pound called melopoeia.  Apart from the metrical control suggested by this analysis, Wyatt also deploys rhyme to heighten both melody and meaning.  Thus “kiss” is paired with “amiss,” since the act is viewed as a trespass, and then settled by chiming with “this,” the proposed solution to the offense.  The rhyming of “offended” with “amended” imply a possible remedy to answer the complaint which is then resolved through the speaker’s theatrical pretense of a demise with “ended.”  He uses alliteration, for instance in the repeated uses of the letter m in the first four lines all associated with the  beloved (including the punning “amiss”). 

     In addition, apart from  the sound patterns, issues of source arise, first of all from the fact that the verse is based on Serafino Aquilano’s poem beginning “Incolpa donna amor se troppo io uolsi,” and instances of both Wyatt’s following his original and deviating from it are significant.  Petrarchans do not provide the sole influence.  The image of the heart rising during a kiss, for instance, is a trope familiar from the Greek Anthology.

     Even this small, apparently casual lyric, part of a sophisticated court’s play between the sexes, couched in a simple meter, not so distant from conversation, derives its effects from complex structures of sound, sense, and thought.  All must be unified or else, for good reason, jarring, with every element serving the reproduction of a moment of imagined consciousness: a person might have once felt this way.  Meter plays the role of a steady background beat against which every variation is perceptible and significant.  The poet need not, of course, be conscious of the means by which the poem works; an accomplished writer can often work from intuition like a skilled jazz soloist while for the reader or listener as well, the effects need not be understood to work well.

  

The Voluptuous Salammbô! With a Cast of Thousands!

 

 

poster for Grieco's The Loves of Salammbo (1960) 

     Flaubert’s Salammbô (1862) resembles nothing so much as a ‘fifties Biblical or Classical epic, amounting to the verbal equivalent of a Technicolor, wide-screen spectacular with a cast of thousands, exotic sets and costumes, and a good share of sex and violence [1].  Just as such films focused on characters dressed in elaborate and strange apparel set in scenes of faraway times and places, Flaubert’s historical novel offers the reader exceedingly detailed descriptions of exotic clothing, jewelry, and even cosmetics.  Like a Cecil B. DeMille feature, Salammbô alternates warfare and torture with erotic excitement and love-longing, so as never to lack some appeal to the back-brain. 

     The author’s habitual obsession with precise concrete delineation of every scene, his famous pursuit of le mot juste, here is combined with the prodigious research with which he prepared to write the novel.  The reader of Salammbô, even with a good knowledge of French, might likely be slowed by the vocabulary for military units, maneuvers, siege engines, and the like.  (Latin scholars may recall a similar demand on readers of Caesar’s Gallic Wars.)  This fact, as well as the occurrence of numerous out-of-the-way terms for gems, fabrics, and the like, can make the text difficult.  Footnotes would often help.  One suspects that Flaubert was loathe to waste a single fact from his notes, as though the use of many obsolete, foreign, or otherwise out-of-the-way words would strengthen the substance, gravitas, and beauty in his story.

     After Madame Bovary, which had been meant as an uncompromisingly realistic portrayal with verisimilitude as its chief value, but which brought the author an obscenity trial (at which he was acquitted), he chose to direct his gaze to the past.  Just as Hedy Lamarr could be sexy in DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (1949), under the protection of the story’s antiquity and, in that case, Biblical authority, Salammbô can fascinate men in the novel with less danger of legal action.  Such exotic women had been popular in Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) as well as in visual art.  Though putatively representing antiquity the rather languid view of the past seen in pre-Raphaelite paintings or those by Lawrence Alma-Tadema or John William Waterhouse has more of a scent of nineteenth century Romanticism and, ultimately, Decadence than their medieval and classical models.  Artists who depicted Flaubert’s own invention, Salammbô herself, included Victor Prové (1893), Alphonse Mucha (1896), Desiré Maurice Ferrary (1899), and Henri Adrien Tanoux (1921) [2].

     While erotic elements are surely critically important for the book’s popularity, violence, just as in the movies, runs a close second.  To some the most boring stretches of Flaubert’s narration, battle sequences stretch on for page after page with few single combats and a great many compilations of nations of mercenaries, units of various sorts, slingers, archers, cavalry and the like, as though the book might be used to train officers in strategy.  But while such large-scale violence might at times be tiresome, the periodic massacres of prisoners and the recurring scenes of torture and mutilation are more disturbing.  In fact both violence and steaming sexuality are more nakedly presented in than in Bovary, but in the later novel a wash of ancient history makes the sensational more acceptable.

     Though aesthetic value is unprovable, Flaubert’s reputation as a stylist, reinforced very likely by the reader’s own experience, is sufficient to suggest that each passage is cunningly crafted to accomplish its effects.  The cinematic parallel would be, perhaps, the mature Eisenstein of Ivan the Terrible in which every frame is artfully composed, a standard that few would suggest DeMille ever even sought to achieve.  The attention here is not to the actual complexity of a work of art, but the maker’s level of intention.  Whereas Flaubert was hoping to do something new and to  compose a novel of lasting value, based on its formal qualities alone, most Hollywood filmmakers seek to adhere to convention and have little ambition more far=reaching than to sell tickets upon the picture’s release. 

     Virtually all critics would agree that Flaubert’s prose is beautiful, and their expositions of this point are readily available.  In many passages the rhythm of Flaubert’s hypnotic periodic phrasing and the melodious sound of his descriptions is foregrounded even if a passage contains little specific information, like this.

 

     They were not Libyans from the area of Carthage who had long made up the third army, but rather nomads from the plateau of Barca, bandits from Cape Phiscus and the promontory of Derné, some from Phazzana and Marmarique.  They had gone over the desert drinking from brackish wells amid the bones of camels.  The Zuaèces, adorned with ostrich feathers, had come on quadrigæ, Garamantes, veiled with black masks, arrived on their painted mounts, others were riding asses, onagers, zebras, and buffalo.  Some among them pulled the rood of their boat-shaped with their families and their idols.  There were Ammonians with limbs wrinkled by the water of their hot springs, Atarantians who curse the sun, Troglodytes who inter their dead laughing under tree branches, and the hideous Ausians who eat grasshoppers; the Achyrmachides, who eat lice, and the Gysantes, painted with vermilion, who eat monkeys. [3]

 

     Surely there is meant to be something incantatory in this list of place names.  The exotic customs, none of which, of course, play any role in the plot, far from reinforcing the historic verisimilitude, are curiosities, reminiscent of the dog-headed men in Pliny or the immense aspidochelone of the Physiologus.  Whether or not the reader is susceptible to Flaubert’s calculated cadences, the list of nationalities, all of which are likely unknown to the reader, in fact makes the narration not more “real,” but considerably more fanciful.  Still Flaubert’s self-consciously meticulous style is undeniable, but here its appeal is based neither on authenticity nor on painting an imaginable picture, but rather on the appeal of the unfamiliar and the charm of sound alone, as in  magic formulae. 

     The other characteristic that most fundamentally marks the contrast between Salammbô and a spectacular Hollywood epic is more objectively demonstrable.  Mid-twentieth century American movies made for a mass audience will present an unambiguous moral universe, with clearly demarcated heroes and villains and a strong tendency toward retributive justice.  The audience is cheering for one side because it is represented as fundamentally right whereas its opponents are not.  There is no room for doubt. 

     In Salammbô on the other hand, while the reader identifies with the heroine emotionally, there seems little to choose between the rulers of Carthage and their barbarian mercenaries.  Each side is engaged in corrupt power struggles [4].  The motivation that stands apart is the erotic bond between Matho and Salammbô.  Even there Matho's passion seems a weakness, contributing to the great fighter’s downfall, and Salammbô’s death at the end makes her a pathetic rather than an admirable character.  The reader is impressed with the power of these portraits, but has no wish to emulate them. 

     This pose of thematic indifference, a reluctance to delineate moral judgements or other conclusions about lived experience, is axiomatic in Flaubert’s realism.  To impose value judgements would be for him to compromise the representation of reality itself.  As Flaubert put it “stupidity consists of wanting to come to conclusions” [5].  For him true realism must be, like science, objective. 

     Far from  accidental, this distinction illustrates one of the principal characteristics distinguishing popular from “high art,” called in various contexts elite, courtly, or learned.  Every imagined portrayal of reality satisfies some reader expectations while challenging or twisting others.  Works consumed by a mass audience, both tribal or folk art without a known creator and modern commercial productions like movies, television shows, and potboilers, tend to confirm consumers’ anticipations and artistic conventions, while those with a smaller yet more sophisticated readership will more often deny expected ideas and point out problems, contradictions, and  mysteries.  The former serves the social function of confirming and perpetuating group values and customs, whereas the latter opens the way for change and allows for uncertainty. 

     Thus Salammbô may be read, just as a DeMille epic would be viewed, for its more sensational elements of sex and violence; it may be considered for its success in creating a world of the past through the accumulation of detail, or it may be contemplated simply as an aesthetic object, a series of melodious sentences. 

 

 

1.  A number of films have, in fact, been based on Flaubert’s novel, including Arturo Ambrosio’s Salammbo (1911), Domenico Gaido’s Salambo (1914), Réda Ait’s Salambo (1916), Pierre Marodon’s  Salammbô (1925), Sergio Grieco’s The Loves of Salammbô (1960), and Jacques Perconte’s Salammbô (2022).  The predominance of early titles and the fact that all the cinematic versions were made in Europe suggests that the reputation of Flaubert’ novel lingered into the twentieth century.  There are in addition operas by y Modest Mussorgsky, (1865, unfinished), Ernest Reyer (1890), and Philippe Fénelon (1992).  More recently Barney B. Johnson composed an opera-ballet on the theme.

2.  An exhibition in the Musée des Beaux-arts in Rouen in 2021 collected many such works for an exhibit called "Salammbô: Fureurs! Passion! Éléphants!"  The costumes described in the novel are said to have influenced French fashion, particularly the use of veils, cloaks, and mantles.  In an odd legacy of the book the area, today a part of Tunis, called Le Kram in 1921 changed it s name to Salammbo after the discovery there of Carthaginian archaeological remains.

3.  Ce n'étaient pas les Libyens des environs de Carthage; depuis longtemps ils composaient la troisième armée; mais les nomades du plateau de Barca, les bandits du cap Phiscus et du promontoire de Derné, ceux du Phazzana et de la Marmarique. Ils avaient traversé le désert en buvant aux puits saumâtres maçonnés avec des ossements de chameau; les Zuaèces, couverts de plumes d'autruche, étaient venus sur des quadriges; les Garamantes, masqués d'un voile noir, assis en arrière sur leurs cavales peintes; d'autres sur des ânes, sur des onagres, sur des zèbres, sur des buffles; et quelques-uns traînaient, avec leurs familles et leurs idoles, le toit de leur cabane en forme de chaloupe. Il y avait des Ammoniens aux membres ridés par l'eau chaude des fontaines; des Atarantes, qui maudissent le soleil; des Troglodytes, qui enterrent en riant leurs morts sous des branches d'arbre; et les hideux Auséens, qui mangent des sauterelles; les Achyrmachides, qui mangent des poux, et les Gysantes, peints de vermillon, qui mangent des singes. (From Chapter 12)

4.  Some characters are more attractive than others.  Spendius, for instance, the former slave, is depicted as more venal than either Matho or Hamilcar.  Yet these distinctions do not guide the narrative or shape a definitive theme. 

5.  Letter to Louis Bouilhet of September 4,1850.  “L’ineptie consiste à vouloir conclure.”  Later in the letter the sentiment is repeated: “Oui, la bêtise consiste à vouloir conclure.”

War

 

 

     War –what is it good for?  Absolutely nothin’!

                                            The Temptations, 1969

      Somebody please stop that war now.

    Jimmy Cliff, 1969

 

     So then why is it that wars have never ceased throughout human history and around the world?  Every day brings news from Gaza and the Ukraine of the suffering and waste caused by war, the toll in pain disability, and dearth, the rapid senseless destruction of what had been built brick by brick, the reinforcement of the most ignorant prejudices and absurd rivalries.  We scarcely hear of other armed conflicts which just now include fighting in Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Myanmar, and Ethiopia.  For as long as written documents have existed, not only have people fought to the death, but valor in battle has been the most highly praised quality of men.  Patriotism has generally been lauded as a paramount value, its only competition being piety, with which it is often conflated.  I used to pass a Catholic school with the phrase “pro deo et patria” over the door, as though the young scholars were to absorb this lesson even before opening a book of grammar or mathematics.  To some it seems nationalism and piety are not merely compatible, but are virtually identical, as though Christ had not been undeniably and consistently pacifist.  Nationalism, by definition a tribal sort of sentiment dependent almost entirely on the chance of birth, is considered an absolute value.  Dissent during wartime is very nearly treason. 

     The acceptance and even more the celebration  of something as horrific as war implies deep-seated motives.  The aggression reflected in fighting is one of the most fundamental human drives, equal to sexuality in its power to influence action.  To kill another person is surely the most extreme way of exerting power, and the experience is applicable to nations as well as to individuals.  Whether Freud’s specific formulation of Eros and Thanatos is accurate in detail, one cannot deny that life is lived in the tension between love and hate, altruism and selfishness, cooperation and competition.

          In traditional societies the balance may be straightforward.  The individual must observe strict laws when dealing with an in-group while mandating no such standards in dealings with outsiders.  It is perhaps inevitable when resources are insufficient for people to fight over food, water, and land, but such conflict is today wholly unnecessary.  Current technology in both agriculture and manufacturing might afford everyone on earth a good standard of living were it  not for the selfishness that manifests in politics.  During the Irish potato famine, large amounts of food were still exported from the country as landlord’s profits took precedence over starving tenants.  Amartya Sen has demonstrated that all modern famines are caused not by limits in the food supply, as had happened regularly in the past, but are due to poor people’s inability to pay. 

     Violence itself will never vanish, but one would think that the large-scale savagery of war, in which an entire nation adopts the attack on others as its chief priority, might be eliminated.  After all, on the individual level, it is rare for a stronger neighbor to make off with a householder’s possessions, and, if such a thing occurs, the victim has legal recourse.  Since such arrangements have long been in place in civil societies, it is difficult to see why they would not be possible internationally.

     Should that criminal neighbor commit assault as well as theft, immediate resistance is justified.  Though Christ counseled turning the other cheek, people’s instincts urge them to fight, and such action would be all  but universally approved as moral.  If fighting in self-defense is acceptable, surely the same prerogative is available to nation states.  A similar rationale applies when a government is so exceedingly oppressive that its rule amounts to institutional violence.  The citizens of such a tyranny have the right to rise in revolution to overthrow their masters.  Invasion by another country, then, and extreme injustice in one’s own are the sole justifications for war. 

     Some combatants, whatever their ideology, are motivated by an attraction to the experience of deadly games.  The thrill of danger, the heightened nervous excitement of a frontline soldier, can be to some pleasurable and, indeed, even addictive.  Some find a sort of ecstasy in killing, a taste that might serve one well in a life and death struggle, but which is inappropriate in all other settings.

 

Some for love of slaughter in imagination,

learning later  . . .

some in fear, learning love of slaughter

                        Ezra Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”

 

Those who are conscripted have no choice but to defend themselves as best they can and, in the end, the reluctant combatant is as likely as a more enthusiastic comrade to behave bravely under fire.  Such conditions, by focusing the consciousness on survival, reduce other distinctions to triviality and foster the closest relationships among people thrown together in extreme conditions by chance.  Such experiences are often among the most profound of a person’s life and, when losg past, may be regarded with nostalgia.  Fifty years after his service in WWII my father maintained contact with men who had been in his unit in France and Germany.  The intensity of wartime experience burns its traces into the brain of veterans, creating bonds between comrades and eliciting acts of valor and sacrifice from many ordinary people.

     Apart from the bonds formed under fire, of course, even a strongly anti-war stance cannot in justice deny the altruism of all veterans and the particular admiration due to wartime acts of courage.  For anyone who is not inherently bloodthirsty, the prospect of spending long periods in harm’s way, of delaying whatever one’s life goals may have been, usually suffering grueling material conditions even apart from constant danger, represents considerable hardship.  Since the call to arms is socially generated, the recompense must also come from society at large, and soldiers have, since antiquity, been lauded by their communities and awarded pensions and other compensation. 

     This social gratitude does not alter the fact that war, particularly modern war, is in general destructive to all combatants.  Everyone suffers, but positive consequences may follow the pain: the American Revolution overthrew control by a feudal regime, the Civil War ended American slavery, WWII defeated fascist aggression, and the Vietnamese finally ousted their foreign invaders.  Yet none of these victories was absolute.  Free from King George, Americans oppressed slave and native people, more than a century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation, racism still permeates this country, Stalinist expansion replaced the Nazis in Eastern Europe, and North Vietnam gave little voice to the fighters of the National Liberation Front.  So who can do the moral accounting to determine whether a certain quantum of gain is worth the flow of blood?

     One cannot avoid attempting such calculation, inaccurate thought it may be.  All but pacifists accept that, unfortunate, even paradoxical, as it is, at times violence reduces violence.  The reckoning of when that is true is, however, a matter of opinion.  If a mass shooter is felled in the act of attacking others, who would criticize the gunman who brought an end to the killing with one final death?  A slave who turns on his tormentor and kills him would seem to most justified.  A Guatemalan who takes up arms against the massive institutional violence of an oppressive system has my support.  Yet, in dealings between nations, the imperative is rarely so clear.  I had no doubts, during the Vietnam War that the US had no right to be in Southeast Asia at all and that I would certainly not allow myself to be drafted.  On the other hand, I think that, had I been young in 1941, I would have felt that stopping fascism was imperative even if the cost be high.  Yet I will concede that thoughtful people differed about both these judgements, and I respect both those who conscientiously objected to military service in WWII and those who fought in Vietnam, believing themselves to be not imperialists, but defenders of the local population. 

     Neville Chamberlain is mentioned today most often to condemn his appeasement of Hitler but he spoke the truth when he said that “in war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.”  Still, this statement ignores the possibility that there are circumstances in which one would be an even greater loser by failing to fight.  All anyone can do is to treat war as a highly undesirable last resort, yet judging when a given war is a “good” one must remain controversial. 

    

     

Nie Wieder Krieg! (Never Again War!) Kaethe Kollwitz