Semantic Instability in Manon Lescaut

 

Quoted passages are my own translations with the original French provided in endnotes.

 

     The Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut has proven a popular favorite.  Reprinted hundreds of times, Manon is as well the subject of no less than six operas, three of which (Auber, Puccini, Massenet) remain in the repertoire.  Once sufficiently transgressive to be censored, the text is now taught as an exemplar of classic prose style. 

     Surely the principal appeal of the story is the emotional intensity of its characters.  The narrative’s energy derives from the immoderate love of the Chevalier de Grieux, conceived at first seeing his beloved  and never thereafter flagging and the attachment of Manon to a life of luxury which she pursues constantly, only to die when it seems beyond her reach.  Today readers are likely to interpret their behavior as self-destructively addictive.  Yet such a reading is surely at least in part anachronistic.  Though this sort of psychological analysis is not directly derived from the text, several inconsistent interpretations of their affair are suggested, leaving the question of the meaning of the sad story of the Chevalier de Grieux and his beloved Manon at once overdetermined (with multiple explanations) and underdetermined (with none clearly victorious over the others).  At different points in the narration the action is variously described in terms of Christian morality, a question of sensibility, a predetermined fate, and a matter of social class.

     The author as well as his main character being clerics, it is unsurprising that Christian morality plays a role.  To encourage improvements in morals had been a standard justification for literature for centuries.   The frame narrator justifies his story in the “Avis de l’Auteur” as “a terrifying example of the force of the passions” [1].  He hopes his work will serve for the purpose of “moral instruction” [2].  Furthermore, the narration ends with the Chevalier’s apparent reform and return to his family and to a more regular life in less ethically perilous waters.  After that, presumably, nothing happens worthy of note.  One might read all the novel’s suffering as the consequence of moral lapses.  Manon is consistently a loose woman, albeit one with considerable good-natured charm and, apparently, a certain genuine attachment to the Chevalier, while he, by cohabiting with her while unmarried, brings disaster after disaster upon himself and falls into not only defying his father and lying, but theft as well and even murder.

     This didacticism, though, is no stronger than either the Abbé’s or the Chevalier’s consistency to their vows.  In fact, Manon Lescaut is a novel of sensibility, a genre that generally celebrates access to emotions and the development of strong feelings.  Though fainting is more characteristic of women than men in late eighteenth century life and literature, the Chevalier’s swoon when he hears of Manon’s faithlessness from his father is testament to his emotional sensitivity.  He thinks well of himself and even Manon, with her thoroughly predictable disappearances and betrayals, seems more absurd and childish than malicious.  To her sexuality is natural and its use inevitable.  For him reform, dull and eventless in  comparison to the wild swings of fortune during his affair with Manon, is still possible, while she must die.  The author’s protestations of moral purpose resemble those of Defoe and Richardson and even the medieval Pearl-poet who in Cleanness who provides a lurid account of goings-on in Sodom likewise in the service of moral instruction.

     An even broader, though shallower, approach is suggested by the Chevalier himself when he reflects on his problems and decides all is due to fate, to “those specific blows of fate attached to the ruin of a wretch from which virtue cannot defend a person and which wisdom cannot foresee.” [3]  The only response is then passivity.  “Let us leave our fortune in the care of heaven” [4].  This serves primarily as an excuse when the Chevalier feels like dodging a sense of his own responsibility for his difficulties.  It is as well the attitude Manon expresses when she first enters the story and says of her plight, “It seems to have been the will of Heaven, since there was no way to avoid it.” [5] 

     Quite often his decision-making is governed neither by Christian dictates nor some irresistible ἀνάγκη, but rather by the standards of aristocratic behavior, the prizing of honor that results from good breeding.  Class is linked to morality at the outset when the frame narrator notes that he addresses people “of a certain order of spirit and good breeding” [6].  Tiberge appeals to his honor in attempting to reform him [7].  He sees Manon’s brother as “a brutal man with no principles of honor” [7], and the Chevalier regularly evaluates his own behavior by considering what is expected of members of his class. 

     Should one’s acts be governed by Christian (or secular) moral dictates?  Is extravagant love a sign of a noble sensitivity?  Is every event inevitable and predetermined?  Each of these options is raised but not settled in the novel.  This shifting among interpretations of behavior arises not from sloppiness, however, but from precision.   Since the Chevalier himself (and some might suspect also his creator) vacillated among the alternatives of simple resignation, Christian ambitions, and the desire to act honorably, all the while drawn ever further downstream by an overwhelming erotic passion, it is surely right to include all these elements in his representation.  There is no more certainty in the world of the Chevalier de Grieux than in that of his author or one of his readers.  Just like the fictional character, all people respond to a variety of registers of value, acting now for an ethical reason, then in an effort to impress, again with religious principles in mind, and sometimes – not necessarily due to weakness or foolishness -- simply submitting to experience.  The Chevalier is no more inconsistent than we are.

 

 

 

1.  “Un exemple terrible de la force des passions,” page 32, line 17 in the 2016 Flammarion edition edited by Hélêne Bernard.  Other references to destiny are found on pages 18, 45, 82, 100, 221.

2.  “Instruction des mœrs” p. 32, ll. 30-31.

3.  “Je la lui représentai comme un de ces coups particuliers du destin qui s’attache a la ruine d’un misérable, et dont il est aussi impossible a la vertu de se défendre qu’il l’a été a la sagesse de les prévoir.” p. 82, ll.  1306-1309.

4.  “Laissons au ciel le soin de notre fortune.” P. 198, ll. 1912-1913. 

5.  “C’était apparemment la volonté de Ciel, puisqu’il ne lui laissait nul moyen de l’éviter” p. 44, ll. 244-245.

6.  “Personnes d’un certain ordre d’esprit et de politesse,” p. 32, ll. 37-38. 

7.  P. 86, l. 1427.

8.  “C’était un homme brutale et sans principes d’honneur,” p. 74, l. 1077.

Hazard Yet Forward

 

 

Seton arms, originally only the tressured crescents, is here quartered to include alliances through marriage

 

     I have little enthusiasm for tracing genealogy.  Back four or five generations, the research becomes ever more challenging, yet the rewards shrink since the findings have little discernable relation to one’s own life.  Our ancestors multiply by the factor of two (that is, doubling) every generation.  Everyone has heard the story first told in the thirteenth century by Ibn Khallikan of how the inventor of chess asked as his reward to be given one grain of rice for the first square on the game board, two for the second, four for the third, then eight and so on, resulting, to the king’s surprise in a greater quantity than the entire world produces. 

     The same mathematics, of course, apply to everyone’s number of direct ancestors.  This means that, were one to look a thousand years in the past, estimating three generations per century, we each are descended from a number of people that can be calculated by raising two to the thirtieth power, a number over a billion, over a  thousand times the earth’s population at the time.  Now, this number is not in fact accurate due to the fact that people have very often, particularly in the past, married first cousins with shared grandparents, thereby obliging some individuals to fill multiple slots in the family tree, but the general point is clear.   Tracing only direct patrilineal descent simplifies the matter immensely, though, of course, one is equally closely related to the great crowds of their spouses and their spouses’ families. 

     I have several relatives intrigued by family history who have told me that people with my surname have passed in and out of Scots history for centuries some of whom were given a tartan and a coat of arms.  Now I know that a few generations back, my patrilineal ancestors were homesteaders and I rather suspect that the Seatons (or Setons, Seytons, Seetons) who came to America in the seventeenth century left more memories of want than castles behind in the old country.  There can be little doubt that, going back several hundred years, most everyone’s forebears were for the most part peasants or farm laborers. 

     Yet I rather like the doughty fire-spouting wyvern that tops the ducal coronet on the Seton arms and I find the slogan attached to the coat of arms suggestive and appealing.  “Hazard yet forward,” though certainly a war cry in origin, and likely originally meant to indicate enthusiastic support for the king, expresses a sentiment sufficiently general to provide buoyant encouragement in many settings more pleasant than the battlefield.  I like the airy sound of it, the spirit willingly accepting an uncertain outcome, the progress into an uncharted future, the greeny optimism.  It reminds me of the Yiddish paper, the Forward, and of the use of “Adelante!” in Cuba and other Latin countries. 

     In these cases the anticipated future is a positive change, but of course we hazard yet forward every day without the pleasant expectation of likely progress in the long term.  After all, we are all riding time’s conveyor belt, though for us the end is not manufacture but instead deterioration and eventual disassembly.  This fact cannot be changed, only one’s attitude is in part voluntary.  So, if a wistful feeling of regret at the transitory character of things of this world is unavoidable, it is fruitless (and seems in fact ridiculous when not pitiful) to lament the universal limits of human life.  Every morning when a person rises, it is to “hazard yet forward,” and a failure of this spirit is what the medieval church condemned as acedia, condemned by Aquinas as a flight from God.  Today it would be labeled depression, the psychiatric epidemic of our time.   

     The word hazard, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was originally used in Spain and may well have Arabic antecedents.  It was the name of a game played with dice which has survived into modern times but was first recorded in English in 1300.  Within a hundred years the meaning had expanded to apply to any risk or chance, and by the time of the Renaissance the word implied a negative outcome: “risk of loss or harm, peril, jeopardy.”    

     Shakespeare regularly employs the word hazard in the second of these senses, referring not to a danger but to any chance, a meaning that now sounds slightly literary, perhaps its most dramatic use leans toward the third.  Richard III, when he sees he is doomed at the Battle of Bosworth Field, yet remains resolute, declaring to Catesby, “Slave, I have set my life upon a cast,/ And I will stand the hazard of the die.”

     “Hazard yet forward” as the motto of evolution reverts to more positive expectations both within and beyond the human sphere.  While evolution need not move toward greater complexity, it always serves to better equip an organism for survival and reproduction.  Always striving to pursue incremental improvements seems the habit of our DNA.  Random variation through natural selection is responsible for the magnificent perfection of all organisms, including humanity.  One present product of this immense and fabulously complex process is, of course, our present speculations, these words materializing on my screen. 

     Even more fundamentally, there is chance in all things, even, as the quantum physicists tell us, at the very base of material existence.   Without this unpredictability, we would inhabit an entirely mechanistic universe in which all of history was implied by circumstances at the time of the Big Bang.  When Einstein wrote to Max Born that “the Old One” does not play at dice, he did not consider the possibility that God is dice, that his nature is a wide-open roll, realized and refigured as every instant passes.  Indeed, dice have been used by people since prehistoric times and their first use was not gambling and recreation but divination, like other chance operations: the flight of birds, the cracking of a tortoise shell, the reading of entrails, the I Ching and the Ifa oracle. 

     Perhaps we might all become devotees of a neo-pagan cult of Tyche (Τύχη), called Fortuna by the Romans, the goddess of chance.  In his description of Argos Pausanias notes a temple of Fortuna in which he says Palamedes dedicated the dice he had invented.  Originally associated chiefly with good luck, Tyche was depicted with a cornucopia and often a gubernaculum or ship’s rudder, which might suggest either a hope for safety in sea voyages or perhaps simply the steering of events.  By Hellenistic times her governance had spread to all events, both welcome and feared, and Polybius at the outset of his histories concedes control of all men’s affairs to her.  In spite of his sympathy for Christianity, Constantine built a temple to Tyche (which Julian later spurned) in Constantinople.  Have we today any better understanding of our destiny?  Any better way to predict the future?  Her rule, it seems, continues.

     We cannot foresee a single day, but, whatever our experiences, we are each likely to find ourselves eventually in the position of Byrhtwold in “The Battle of Maldon,” aware of a bitter doom that cannot be dodged.  May we at that time be as unbowed as that antique hero who declared, “the mind must be tougher, keener the heart, the spirit stronger, as our strength fades.”  When only self-possession remains, fortitude is the sole dignity left us, a final challenge to hazard yet forward. 

 

 

The family history research has been conducted by my sister Mary Frances Wallner and my cousin Carol  Ann Seaton. 

The passage from Pausanias is found his Description of Greece (or Traveling Around Greece, Ἑλλάδος Περιήγησις) 2.20.3.

Polybius’ comment is found in his Histories (Ἱστορίαι) 1.4.

In the original Old English the quotation from the ”Battle of Maldon” reads "Hiġe sceal þē heardra,     heorte þē cēnre,/  mōd sceal þē māre     þē ūre mæġen lȳtlað.”

 

Theory and Practice in Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money

 

 

     Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money is often regarded as the exemplary proletarian novel due to its author’s lifelong loyalty to the American Communist Party and his theoretical manifesto “Toward Proletarian Art” [1].  He receives thereby a secure place in literary history, but one little valued or dismissed altogether by many critics.  He is often blamed but sometimes praised for non-literary factors, the fellow travelers of the ‘thirties and since admiring him for his politics while anti-Communists are all but certain to denounce him for the same reason.  Discernment of the true merits of his work is ill-served by such a non-aesthetic and  reductive standard [2].   

     Those who think little of Gold’s fiction and regard it as mere agitprop without aesthetic value are influenced, of course, of the practice of what was officially recognized as “socialist realism” by the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 which required that fiction must be proletarian, typical, realistic, and partisan.  The policy was reinforced and tightened in the 1946 Zhdanov Doctrine which dominated Soviet culture until the fall of the USSR, resulting in the government’s acceptance of much art of a pedestrian character and suppression of more nonconformist work.

     This rigid management of the arts was far from inevitable after the Bolshevik victory.  In 1920 Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner published "The Realist Manifesto," arguing for artistic freedom and some prominent Bolsheviks, notably Trotsky, always maintained that writers should have a free hand [3].  The blossoming of certain arts, particularly poetry, film, and graphic design, before Stalin’s assumption of power implies an alternative development that might have been possible under a government calling itself communist. 

     Well before the narrow mandates that dominated Soviet art for decades, Gold published his theoretical essay “Toward Proletarian Art.”  His ideas are best understood in their original context, as a reaction to his mentor Max Eastman whose collection Colors of Life (1918) opened with a prefatory  essay on “American Ideals of Poetry.” 

     Eastman, an editor of The Masses which had declared itself an unreservedly revolutionary journal,  felt he ought to apologize for writing personal rather than political poems, acknowledging with some diffidence the “crimsoned waves” of protest against the capitalist system.  For him “the essence of life” can be found only in the personal, not in “monotonous consecration to a general principle.”  Noting the conflict between a formalist tradition in American literature descending from Poe which aims at crafting beautiful art objects and a more expressive lineage from  Whitman which for him encourages “the free expression of emotion,” he advocates for “a certain adjudication between them which a perfectly impersonal science might propose.” 

     Gold, too, in “Toward Proletarian Art,” in spite of the title, expresses an ambivalence toward explicitly political writing, unwilling to abandon either the goal of a socially revelatory literature or artistic independence.  He is able to articulate the juncture more adeptly than Eastman, however, due to his undeniably working-class origins in the tenements of the Lower East Side, which Jews Without Money describes so unforgettably. 

     Wishing no less than Eastman to strive toward the presentation of a realism of consciousness, he insists that “only through the symbolism of the world around us and manifest in us can we draw near the fierce, deadly flame.  The things of the world are all portals to eternity ”  For each individual “Life’s meaning was to be found only in the great or mean days between each man’s birth and death, and in the mystery and terror hovering over every human head.”  For him that nexus of experience out of which artist creation arises is centered in the circumstances of his childhood.  “All that I know of Life I learned in the tenement.”

     Thus for him there is no contradiction between the personal and the political.  His own solution is authentically individual, true to his own history while at the same time it is collective, reflecting the experience of his whole generation of immigrants.  “I would show only, if I can, what manner of vision Life has vouchsafed me, what word has descended on me in the midst of this dark pit of experience, what forms my says and nights might have taken, as they proceed in strange nebular turning towards new worlds of art.”  For him there is no gap between realism, his autobiography, and propagandizing: each requires the others.  “Only through the symbolism of the world around us and manifest in us can we draw near the fierce, deadly flame. The things of the world are all portals to eternity.”

     The limits of his position are clear in the fact that he is loath to prescribe to others.  After all, he admits that everyone has a story to tell: “Life burns in both camps, in the tenements and in the palaces, but can we understand that which is not our very own?”  To Gold each artist can only offer “the special revelation Life has given them.  I respect the suffering and creations of all artists” which are bound to be “deeper than theories.” 

     There are indications that Gold’s Communist orthodoxy was hardly absolute.  Jews Without Money in fact received a negative review from The Daily Worker which complained about the cover price and called the novel only “semi-proletarian.”  He was according to some sources an “indifferent” party member who rarely appeared at meetings and complained about their “tedium.”  He differed with colleagues who did not wish to include sports coverage in the paper, and, after denouncing swing music in accordance with the approved line, he reversed himself when many jazz fans wrote to object. 

     He is even willing to use the quasi-religious language more characteristic of mystics, Symbolists, and Aesthetes.  “Only an artist understands art,” and for that reason “to censor the poor brute’s murmurings would be sacrilege. Whatever they are, they are significant and precious, and to stifle the meanest of Life’s moods taking form in the artist would be death.”  He speaks of “holy passion” and “artist-saints” and maintains that “the Social Revolution” is “Life at its fullest and noblest,” indeed, it is “the religion of the masses.” 

     Like Eastman he pays homage to Whitman, with the sole reservation that America’s national poet saw no development beyond bourgeois democracy.  This accusation of failure to glimpse the possibility of a socialist future is, of course, accurate, and, while it makes little sense to complain of Whitman for this reason, it does indicate Gold’s values [5]. 

     “Toward Proletarian Art” opens with a description of the contemporary social turmoil as “The Apocalypse” and argues that, since “the old economic order is dying,” surely innovative forms” of art will accompany the new age.  Gold was notoriously critical of other contemporary movements, attacking not only Surrealism and the likes of Gertrude Stein but also the more manifestly humanist writing of Thorton Wilder.  Since the Romantic Era, critics had particularly praised works of introspection and experimentation, but Gold labels all such artists “self-absorbed.”  They are for him The Hollow Men [6].  Such writers, he feels “have all been sick,” as they lack “roots in the people.”  “The art ideals of the capitalistic world,” he goes on, “isolated each artist as in a solitary cell, there to brood and suffer silently and go mad. We artists of the people will not face Life and Eternity alone. We will face it from among the people. We must lose ourselves again in their sanity.” 

     In practice this meant providing a vivid account of life in the tenements, just as Upton Sinclair and Frank Norris had done earlier for other settings.  Some critics have belittled Jews Without Money as a casual unselfconscious memoir, while its admirers have often celebrated it for much the same reason.  The original review in  the New York Times described the novel as having “no story but a stirring panorama of the east side of his childhood.   with a hand as unerring as truth itself . . .  Mr. Gold has captured all of this life with its radii within the net of his words.  It has the deep shadows of a Rembrandt picture, and the high challenge of a Whitman poem.” [6]  The verisimilitude of his depiction of life on the Lower East Side is uncompromising, including its gangs and prostitutes, its anti-Semites and Jewish villains.  Social injustice is countered by the narrator’s mother’s quiet dedication to her family’s survival, while his father never loses his conviction that he can make it in America.  The story is never overdetermined.  There are no heroic radicals, no caricatured bosses, simply a life remembered, and the reader needs no more explicit justification to understand why the working poor might turn from childhood illusions like Buffalo Bill and adult ones like an imminent Messiah toward the redemptive promise of  socialism.

     Yet the books ends with a strident call for revolution in a tone different from anything which has come before. 

     O workers’ Revolution, you brought hope to me, a lonely suicidal boy.  You are the true Messiah.  You will destroy the East Side when you come, and build there a garden for the human spirit.

     O Revolution, that forced me to think, to struggle and to love.

     O great Beginning! 

     A paperback edition of Jews Without Money was published by Avon in 1965 omitted the call for revolution with which Gold concluded his novel.  The fact that this was a blatant example of censorship does not alter the fact that the book loses little without those last five sentences.  If the revolutionary imperative is not implied by the entire narration, it is an aesthetic misstep.

     Just as the conclusion of Jews Without Money seems abrupt, Gold’s theory and practice remain imperfectly harmonized.  He clearly calls for innovative artistic work to match contemporary social changes: “I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past under opposite influences.”  Like Trotsky, though, he shrinks from mandating just what new standards would look like.  Both the commitment to change and the disjunction between ideology and fiction are significant, the first to indicate the author’s passionately held values and the second to remind readers that the political and the aesthetic occupy different realms of culture and neither can dictate to the other. 

 

 

1.  Originally published in The Liberator, vol. 4,no. 2 (February, 1921).

2.  Foe an exception, see Richard Tuerk, "’Jews Without Money’ as a Work of Art,” Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981-), Vol. 7, No. 1 (Spring 1988).

2.  For Trotsky, see his book Literature and Revolution.  My essay “Marxism’s Limits” discusses Trotsky’s attitude.

3.  J. Hoberman, “Mike Gold, Avant-Garde Bard of Proletarian New York,” The Nation, May 12, 2021.

4.  This sort of criticism is all to common in recent years.  See the devastating critique of the Norton edition of Emma in James Seaton’s From Plato to Post-Modernism.in which Seaton quotes a feminist criticism of Austen for failing to demonstrate that “impoverished middle-class women are victims of a capitalist system.”

5.  This title of one of Gold’s collections of essays turns Eliot’s phrase against itself. 

6.  March 23, 1930, “Boyhood on the Old East Side; Michael Gold Puts Down His Memories of Tenement Life, Pushcart Peddlers and Gang Wars in a Vivid Autobiography.”

Sulpicia

 

     Sulpicia’s poems may be read in the original with English translation and notes on the Perseus site at https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0071.  Other translations are available at https://people.uncw.edu/deagona/lit/Sulpicia.pdf (by Lee Pearcy) and https://www.classicscorner.org/translation (by seventeen-year-old Sarah Freeman).

 

 

     When discussing Sulpicia, consideration of her gender is inescapable due to the simple fact that very little survives of women’s writing from the ancient Roman world.  A good many texts which we know once existed have vanished: Cornelia’s letters, Agrippina’s memoirs, Hortensia’s speeches, poems by Catullus’ Clodia, even a later Sulpicia whom Martial praised, all these are lost [1].  It is therefore no wonder that the mere fact of a competent female Latin poet has attracted considerable interest, particularly in recent decades. 

     Her obscurity was long compounded by the fact that her elegies were folded into the Corpus Tibullianum, which includes texts by poets other than Tibullus [2].  The six poems now considered to be Sulpicia’s follow a group of five on the same love relationship called the “Garland of Sulpicia” or the Cerinthus-Sulpicia cycle, the authorship of which is uncertain.  One might write a meaningful study of the interference of non-aesthetic elements into literary evaluation by charting critics’ reactions to the Sulpicia poems once their female authorship had been accepted.  Some critics found the poems weak, with sexist critics using terms with gender associations such as naïve and emotional, while feminist readers found the poems asserting their own feminism.  Those who, consciously or not, think little of female writers are slow to recognize Sulpicia’s debts to earlier elegiac conventions while more sympathetic readers consider her allusions and literary debts substantial and sophisticated.  The present intention is largely descriptive, acknowledging the issue of gender in a context of Roman patriarchy but then proceeding without value assumptions either positive or negative from a woman as writer.

    Most love poetry – one need only think of the blues – deals with difficulties or disappointment in romance.  The first of the poems attributed to Sulpicia (Tibullus 3.13) instead expresses fulfilment.  In the opening phrase “love has finally come” (Tandem venit amor) the relationship seems accomplished and mutually satisfying.  The poet has, it seems, like Sappho, invoked the goddess of love, but here her success seems explicit.  The obstacle is only others, those who might not approve of the couple, the sort of meddlers called “serveriorum” and “malus” in Catullus 5 and “curioso” in Catullus 7, like unsympathetic parents in New Comedy and Romeo and Juliet or the “jealous ones” of Occitanian verse. 

     The tension of individual desire in a context of social conventions is present throughout this verse from the first line’s mention of pudor to her later concern at busybodies reading her love notes and the final declaration that she is glad to sin (pecasse), having found a satisfyingly mutual relationship signified by the closing phrase suggesting both lovers are worthy (“cum digno digna fuisse ferar”).  Poetry and the goddess have contributed to the temporary triumph at least of a personal love which brings an island of joy in a less than ideal world.

     The threats to a love relationship become specific in the second lyric 3.14 (or Sulpicia 2) in which the lover’s uncle insists she spend her birthday on his country estate when she would prefer to be with her beloved in Rome.  While the birthday poem (or γενεθλιακόν) was a recognized genre [3], it is here, rather than a celebration, a lament about the interfering uncle [4]. 

   In this case the poet’s intrusive relative is a prominent Roman, Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, a general and author (whose works are lost) and a significant patron of the arts like Maecenas.  He was particularly close with Tibullus and the poet known as Lygdamus, though he knew Horace and Ovid as well.  A powerful man, his authority over Sulpicia is unquestioned.  Yet she resists the excursion, preferring Cerinthus’ company and saying that the country estate Is cold (frigidus) and too rural (agro), unfit for a girl (puella).  The more conventional Latin praise of the rural life evident in, for instance, Martial 10.47 or Horace’s  Epode 2, is altogether lacking;  Sulpicia’s preference is for the city.

     The third poem, a pendant to the second,  indicates that Sulpicia’s wishes prevailed and she is able to observe her birthday with her lover.  The tone is especially intimate as the elegy is cast in the form of a letter to Cerinthus.

     The fourth reveals a different obstacle to love: Cerinthus is spending time with a courtesan.  The ambiguities about propriety in the first poem return here to describe a frivolous infidelity on the part of her beloved.  She pretends it is her family’s concern about reputation rather than her own jealousy that makes her angry.  She suggests that she deserves better as the daughter (filia Servi) of Servius Sulpicius Rufus the distinguished jurist, a student of Cicero when young and consul in maturity.  Invective similar to that used in iambic poems appears here in phrases like “obscure bed” (ignoto toro)  and “whore” (scortum), yet Sulpicia maintains her pose of superior composure, resisting being put into an absurd (inepta) situation.  Her anger nonetheless betrays her passion.

     In the fifth poem Sulpicia is ailing and wonders whether recovery would be worth it, since Cerinthus is behaving in a thoughtless manner.  Thoughts of suicide enter her mind as lovesickness complicates a physical illness.  She appeals to her lover as a petitioner, just as countless courtly love poems address the woman in a similar manner.

     The final poem associated with Sulpicia finds her again complaining of inattention, but blaming herself, suggesting the ruminations occasioned by the anxiety of love.  She regrets having pressed Cerinthus, fearing that she has alienated his affection further in taking a standoffish approach, what the troubadours were to call daunger.

     Considered together, Sulpicia’s poems present the reader with a picture of a love relationship consistent with elegiac conventions which anticipates the love poetry of the High Middle Ages.  While one of her poems seems to celebrate love’s fulfilment, frustration -- with her uncle, her lover, and herself -- is the more common theme.  Far from writing about lust, Sulpicia is primarily concerned with a mutually affectionate relationship, and repeatedly expresses anxiety about her lover’s emotional commitment, only to question her own gambits in trying to retain his devotion.  Some would regard this delicacy, along with the social limitations suggested by her uncle’s authority over her and her lover’s option of a purchased sexual partner, as indicative of her femininity, but such judgements have no effect on evaluation nor do they constitute a protest against ancient Roman patriarchal values. 

     If the judgement of Kirby Flower Smith in calling her an “amateur” whose primary gift is “simplicity” and who “writes from a full heart” is prejudiced, Ezra Pound’s claim that to translate her forty lines would be worth ten years of one’s life is at least hyperbolic [5].  As a woman writer of love elegies, she is neither a naïve imitator of male models nor is she a standard bearer for women’s rights.  The six poems attributed to Sulpicia constitute a satisfying pocket drama, complicated by the tensions between insistent passionate love on the one hand and limitations in one’s society and in one’s partner or oneself on the other. 

 

 

 

 

1.  They are known only because they are mentioned in other people’s writing: see Cicero Brutus 58.211,  Tacitus (Annals 4.53.3) and Pliny (Naturalis historia 7.46) for Agrippina, Valerius Maximus (8.3.3) and Quintilian (De institutione oratorio 1.1.4-8) for Hortensia.  A scholiast quotes two iambic lines of the later Sulpicia (sometimes called the satirist) in a manuscript known only from a citation in a fifteenth century edition of Juvenal.  Martial praises her in 10.35.

 

2.  They had long been known as Tibullus 3.13-3.18, but are today  sometimes identified as Sulpicia 1-6. 

 

3.  Among Latin examples of the genre are Tibullus 1.7, and 2.2, Propertius 3.10, Ovid, Prop. III 10, Ov. Tr. III 13, V 5, Pers. 2, Mart. VII 21, 22, 23, IX 52, 53, and X 24.

 

4.  An uncle is similarly an obstacle to love in Horace Odes 3.12.

 

5.  For Smith, see The Elegies of Albius Tibullus (1913). Pound’s comment is in “Horace,” in The Criterion 9 (1929-1930), reprinted in Arion 9 (1970). 

Those Curious Collective Nouns

 

     The examples here are largely, but not entirely, included in Lipton’s An Exaltation of Larks.  Like Lipton, I do not use the Middle English since entertainment rather than philology or literary criticism is my goal. 

 

     We commonly use collective nouns: a bunch of keys, a row of houses, a group of lakes.  The majority of such terms are readily transferable in reference; one might equally speak of a bunch of flowers, a row of beans, or a group of actors.  Some are narrower in usage, including many which have to do with animals: a herd of cattle, a pack of wolves, a pride of lions.   There are herds of various beasts, but all are plant-eating mammals.  Pack may be used of other animals, but is strongly associated with wolves, and pride is used exclusively of lions.  Certain of the collective nouns are similarly specific to a certain species, but in addition seem unusually artful, sometimes a bit precious.  The best-known of this class is probably “a murder of crows,” which seems quaint enough to be suspicious.

     Many of these collective nouns refer to animals, and they strike the reader as self-consciously clever because many were indeed invented as a special fanciful vocabulary in the late Middle Ages.  Familiarity with these neologisms was then an index of how au courant a courtly pretender might prove to be.  Though all words have a sort of poetry, especially for readers who know their etymologies, these terms, mostly to do with hunting, were from the first showpieces, meant to impress and amuse.

     James Lipton’s book An Exaltation of Larks (1968) listed many of this special variety of collective nouns, bringing widespread publicity to a somewhat obscure linguistic phenomenon and demonstrating that the imaginative appeal of these neologisms had survived the centuries.  Though I saw the book everywhere back then, I never read it, taking it for a novelty gift, presenting these overly cutesy terms with quaintly old-fashioned illustrations.  I thereby missed until today reading Lipton’s well-informed introduction which provides a satisfying explanatory background.

     Often applying a new meaning to an existing word (“a prickle of porcupines” or “a skulk of foxes”), these morsels of wit were recorded in “courtesy books,” manuals laying down the rules for genteel behavior and sometimes in specific lists of “terms of venery,” a word rarely used today and easily confuised with its exact homograph which in fact has an altogether different meaning and origin.  One “venery” is derived from Latin venari, “to hunt,” the source as well of the English term venison, which once referred to the flesh of any large animal.  (The other venery, with roots in Venus, the goddess of love is the one Benjamin Franklin had in mind when he advised his [illegitimate] son, “rarely use venery but for health or offspring.”)

     Since the reliefs of royal hunts in Assyria and Egypt, nobles whose business was war had whiled away months of peace by practicing their equestrian and archery skills in hunting.  (Compare the brandishing of firearms by today's neo-fascists.)  Killing beasts is a mark of power as is killing people, but in time the bloody pastime of hunting had acquired an aesthetic dimension.  One was to behave with savoir faire even in butchery.  In Gottfried’s Tristan when King Mark first encounters the hero, he is impressed by two of Tristan’s accomplishments.  He notes that Tristan uses “words polished and well-chosen,” and is besides such a skilled and innovative practitioner in cutting up a deer that the king immediately offers to make him master of the hunt.  Both skills prove him “courtois.”

     Manuals began to appear to teach aristocrats and those who wished to be aristocratic the prized qualities of cultivation, elegance, and sophistication.  Best-known of such volumes was Castiglione’s The Courtier (1528) which defined the ideals of behavior that marked a true nobleman, including skill at loving women, playing music, making witty conversation, dressing well, and a host of other “aesthetic” accomplishments.  Castiglione was far from the first to compose such a self-help guide.  The earliest in England is the Book of the Civilized Man by Daniel of Beccles, also known as the Liber Urbani, which appeared circa 1200.  The “terms of venery,” of which a few, including a special vocabulary for animal droppings, had been printed earlier, for instance in William Twiti’s L'Art de vénerie (1328), gained popularity with The Book of St Albans (ca. 1452).  This volume, which contained essays on hawking and heraldry as well as hunting, included seventy collective nouns.  This book anticipated Emily Post in that it was written by a woman, Dame Juliana Berners.  Later writers copied and expanded her list and in 1595 Gervase Markham republished the St. Albans book with his own comments as The Gentleman's Academie, in 1595, bringing its content a new audience.

     The terms of venery and associated collective nouns illustrate several significant aspects of what might be called linguistic sociology.  They exemplify the employment of words not in common usage to establish a subculture, in this case the feudal ruling class, the nobility.  Just as inner city youth use a distinctive jargon, scholars ornament their monographs with currently fashionable academic jargon, and military people signal their vocation with a special argot, courtiers made lexical choices that testified to their identity as cultivated members of the ruling class.

     Apart from this social function, the terms are witty after the manner of other artful uses of language, such as riddles, jokes, and poetry.  Some suggest similes.  A pod of seals is so named due to the resemblance between a group of animals, especially when slumbering on the beach, and a pod of peas.  A group of whales is a gam, the word used as well for a social encounter of two ships in the open sea.  A “siege of herons” is so named because of the animals’ patient observation of shallow waters watching for prey.

     Many sorts of metonymy are represented.  A “slate of candidates” is current yet today, though few are aware that it was first used because of politicians’ names being displayed on slates in front of town halls. 

     Some are so familiar that they make little impression.  We know a “swarm of bees” “host of angels.”  Mysteries may yet linger about even well-known expressions.  “Bevy” is first recorded in the fifteenth century describing either quails or women, apparently derived from French bevée, perhaps from the birds frequenting ponds and the ladies drinking parties.  A "school of fish” may be a corruption of “shoal” (=shallows) or may have independently arisen from school meaning classroom.   

     Sometimes the word has shifted in sound or become obsolete so that its origin is not evident, as in “a clowder of cats” said to derive from the word cluster.  “A singular of boars” oddly contradicts itself, as the French sanglier is derived from Latin singularis porcus, a lone hog, used for a solitary individual wild boar.  A “kindle of kittens” sounds very cute with its source in the Middle English kindlen, to give birth and “covey of partridges” from the Latin cubare, to lie down, describing nesting habits. 

     The sound of doves strikes many as sounding sad.  This is the source not only of the name “mourning dove” but of the collective “a dule of doves” from the French deuil (lamenting).  Similarly, a “murmuration of starlings” refers to the sound made by the swarming of the birds.  Hair-splitting definitions were sometimes propounded.  While a “committee of vultures” is at rest, a “kettle” of them is in flight, and a “wake” of them is feeding. 

     Among the amusing social terms, describing people rather than animals, are the unimaginative doctrine of doctors and school of clerks and the somewhat more amusing “sentence of judges” and “draught of bottlers.”  Others are more pointedly satirical: a “superfluity of nuns," an “impatience of wives,” and a “disworship of Scots,” not to mention the strong but clumsy “abominable sight of monks.”  One might speak also of “a riffraff of knaves,” “a squat of daubers” (those who repair hedgerows and fences), a “diligence of messengers” (from which the coach called a diligence derives its name), and a “skulk of thieves” (a collective they share with foxes).  Perhaps the funniest, though it is somewhat obscure is an “incredibility of cuckolds.”

     Lipton quotes an exchange from Sir Nigel, a novel by Arthur Conan Doyle set in the fourteenth century that imagines the social context in which these terms of venery were significant.  A certain experienced knight, Sir John, quizzes Nigel on his knowledge of this special vocabulary, telling him that “no man of gentle birth” would fail to know these terms, but that “none can say that they know [them] all.”

      Finally, the modern enjoyment in resurrecting these words indicates a taste for the curious and antiquarian similar to that of over-educated Victorian clergymen, people who do rubbings of old gravestones, even the proprietor who calls his store Ye Olde Something Shoppe. The popularity of Lipton’s book in the ‘sixties suggests that era’s sympathy for unfettered imagination.  And what other motive might there be for you, dear reader, to have spent a few moments with this brief disquisition?  The wits of over half a millennium ago are, it seems, entertaining still. 

Sins Against Love in Horace Odes 3.11

 

 

 

 

A new translation of Horace Odes 3.11:

 

 

 

O Mercury, from whom Amphion learned his skill

to build Thebes’ walls with stones by music moved,

from lyre of tortoise shell let songs sound forth

through strumming well-tuned strings.

 

Once silent and unwanted but now dear

to holy shrines and rich men’s groaning boards –

sing forth your song till Lyde’s stubborn ear

will turn this way and hear

 

who like a mare of three years old will play

and frisk on open plains and take no part

in mating, up to now she boldly thinks

herself too young for love.

 

You lead the tiger and the woods themselves.

swift rivers halt their flow for you,

Cerberus, monstrous Underworld guard,

will yield to your sweet song.

 

Tityos and Ixion brightened then.

The urns of the Danaean girls

stood dry, their watery load had had drained away,

their holders held by verse.

 

May Lyde contemplate the virgins’ crime,

their guilt there marked by all their urns,

whose water drained as fast as it went in.

This was their punishment

 

and thus the guilty after death still pay.

Those sinners (how could they have been more vile?)

who with sharp iron blades did take

the lives of their own mates.

 

Just one of many honored marriage vows,

proved false to her own father’s treachery

and won acclaim, a faithful bride renowned

for ages yet to come.

 

“Get up!” she told her youthful mate,

“Get up or else you’ll sleep a lengthy sleep

you don’t see coming.  Flee my sire

and sisters who mean ill,

 

and who like lions seizing calves – alas! –

one at a time while I, more mild in heart,

will neither wound you nor will I aim

to hold you in durance.

 

My father may confine me with cruel chains

for mercifully having spared my mate

or he may banish me and make my home

remote Numidia.

 

Run off as far as feet and winds can carry you

while night and Venus aid your flight.  Run off

while still you can and see my sorry fate’s

recorded on my tomb."

 

 

 

     Reading certain Horatian odes resembles contemplating a box by Joseph Cornell.  One sees in his Ode 3.11, for example, a meticulously constructed elegant little arrangement of objects or images attractive in itself but elusive in meaning with the context enhancing the connotative tendency of each element.  Part of what lends Horace’s references their rich suggestiveness is the fact that, apart from the mentions of Lyde, apparently a friend of the poet, the ode takes place entirely in the mythic realm.

    The poem is curiously doubled and self-reflexive.  The author seems to have intentionally introduced obscurities and contradictions.  To begin with, the poem has two themes, each accorded roughly equal space.  The first is self-reflective, the enchanting power of song, illustrated by Amphion’s music with which he razed the walls of Thebes, by the social prestige of poetry in religion and symposia, and by mythic references to the power of Orpheus’ playing to charm not only nature but even Cerberus and the sufferers in the underworld.  In a form of sympathetic magic, by claiming supernatural power for poetry the writer thereby predicts the success of this particular verse. 

     The claim of art’s persuasiveness provides a bridge to the second theme, the proper management of erotic energy.  The poet condemns mythic figures that offended against love –Ixion, and Tityos and, most prominently, the Danaean women who killed their spouses, all toward the end of convincing Lyde of the value of marriage and a conventional family life.  Horace provides a little horror show to reinforce poetry’s teaching by indicating the penalties for spurning the natural destiny of maturation in married love.  Stanza five, which would be a digitally animated sequence in a film, presents a luridly threatening Cerberus, a shocker itself, but also a reinforcement of the poet’s admonitions later.  The reader then is introduced to the theme of proper love relations with glimpses of the punishment in Hades of two others who had offended against marriage, Ixion by attempting adultery with the worst of all possible choices, the wife of the king of the gods, and Tityos for having attempted to rape Leto at the behest of that same goddess. 

     This theme is supported as well by the story of the Danaïdes and of Hypermnestra’s saving her husband Lynceus.  There could scarcely be a less dutiful wife than one who murders her mate, and the reference seem overdone for the speaker’s message to the young Lyde.  The poem, though a sort of love advice, is more concerned with propriety than with eros, but even in this simple normative recommendation of marriage, it is hardly straightforward.  To begin with, the name of Lyde, the woman to whom the ode is addressed, has confused some readers.  The name is used for a ἑταίρα by several poets.  It is the name of Antimachos’ mistress and the title of his elegiac poem upon her death.  Athenaeus 13.597 mentions another courtesan of the same name and Horace himself mentions a ἑταίρα of the name in 2.11.  (Another reference in 1.23 is less certainly a courtesan, but there Lyde’s characterization in part resembles that in 3.11.)  Considering that the lesson the poet implores her to hear is to prepare for a respectable marriage and the role of a dutiful wife, this could hardly be a message for a courtesan.  The use of Hypermnestra as his exemplum is problematic in any event, though she was a spouse to Lynceus and with him founded the Danaid line that led to Perseus.  Having been coerced unwillingly  into marriage, she is inappropriate as a model bride, however loyal a wife she proved to be.    

     Horace’s Lyde is said to behave like a young filly playing in a field, active and healthy, while resisting the subjugation to a husband that would come with marriage.  This characterization makes inevitable the picture of her as a teen-aged girl, wholly inexperienced in love and dubious about relationships, perhaps the daughter of a friend.  She sounds very like Daphne in Ovid who (in Golding’s translation) hated “as a haynous crime the bonde of bridely bed,” but instead enjoyed sporting about the wild mountains: “unwedded Phebe doth she haunt and follow as hir guide,” but, of course, her lack of interest in men is there caused by Cupid’s intervention.  Daphne has been struck by his anaphrodisiac iron arrow, while Apollo’s desire has been enflamed by a golden one.

    For all the structural play, irony, and semantic disjunctions, the thematics of the ode persist.  Horace’s boasts about the power of poetry resemble the claims of poets from the revelations of shamans in archaic times to Wallace Stevens “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” but here they are hobbled as it were by the incongruities of the poetic argument.  Lyde is a misleading name and Hypermnestra an ill-fitting example of ideal marriage.  Such slippage renders the poet’s claims faintly ironic, while the hellish horrors seem exaggerated and out of place.  Naive and shy, Lyde is even less likely than the average wife to commit murder as the Danaïdes had done  

     Still at base the ode does represent a social consensus endorsing monogamous marriage as the fundamental building block of society.  Without such stabilizing institutions, violence and force would prevail, suggested by the multiple murders of Aegyptus’ sons  and the apparition of Cerberus.  Attitudes in support of marriage include the notions of respectability and propriety added to the age-old advice govern by an elder generation to the younger one just coming of age, “It is time to grow up now and act like an adult.”  The frightening pictures of the hellish dog and the torments of the condemned are nothing but the superego of a patriarchal system enforcing order through terror.

     These meanings are present in the ode, but they jostle one another uneasily.  Self-questioning, they feature cracks and flaws.  Yet the structure of the whole, the arrangement of symbolic objects from the world of myth, placed precisely to react against one another, is well-balanced so that all the elements of the problem of married love are included: not just the young woman’s reluctance to form a household, but also coercion from parents (Danaus and Aegyptus) and uncontrolled lust (in the figures of Ixion and Tityos).  The entire system of the universe, it is suggested, supports the marriage institution, assuring a sorry fate for those who defy their proper role and destiny.  Horace’s essentially poetic gifts are fully displayed as he renders what amounts to an admonition to behave in a dynamic field of competing demands of the ego: Amphion’s drive for power, Lyde’s desire to cling to childhood, the destructive lust of Ixion and Tityos, the coercive parental demands, the murderous potential of the reluctant wives, and the fidelity of Hypermnestra.  All these passions are on full display, while the reader hears nothing whatever of the joys of either nuptial or illicit love-making.  Who but Horace could build such a dynamic semantic field while simply recommending the most ordinary behavior?