Table of Contents (page numbers do not apply to web
version)
One: Some Theorists: Antiquity
and the Middle Ages…………………… 1
Two: Some Modern
Theorists………………………….…………………... 23
Three: Practitioners: From Ambrose to
Dante……………………………... 40
Four: Logos and Eros in the Early
Renaissance…………………………… 65
Five: Rabelais…………………………………………………………………83
Six: Seventeenth-Century
English Poetry: Milton………………………..100
Seven: Seventeenth-Century Poetry: The
Lyric……………………….……. 111
Eight: Clare and Shelley: Two Kinds
of Romantic Visionaries…………… 127
Nine: Emily
Dickinson………………………………………………………. 135
Ten: Victor Hugo: The
Revolutionary Logos……………………………... 151
Eleven: Baudelaire: The Limits of
Perversity………………………………... 183
Twelve: Rilke: Sonnets to Orpheus and
Duino Elegies…………………….…. 191
Thirteen: Wallace Stevens: The Aesthetic of
Incarnation……………………... 217
Fourteen: Early American Prose
Fiction………………………………………... 229
Fifteen: Hawthorne…………………………………………………………….. 242
Sixteen: Melville………………………………………………………………… 257
Seventeen: Modern English
Fiction………………………………………………. 281
Appendix: An Upanishad…………………………………………………………. 290
Footnotes……………………………………………………………………….. 293 – 317
Part
I: Some Theorists
Worrying
about words is like worrying about God, or, as Kenneth Burke writes: “statements that great theologians have made
about the nature of ‘God’ might be adapted mutatis mutandis for use as purely
secular observations on the nature of words.”[i][i]
Purely secular observations, however, tend to retain traces of sacred
impurities, and those traces often seem able to reproduce some of the
structures from which they have been drawn, occasionally becoming positively
virulent. When Greeks philosophers
tried to energize their vocabulary with terms and images borrowed from the
mystery cults, “the adoption of a ritual terminology to assist and incite the
exercise of intelligence proved exceedingly useful as a fiction, but ended, as
such fictions are likely to do, by betraying the late Platonists into a revival
of magic.”[ii][ii]
Figures
of speech, then, are dangerous necessities; the danger lies in the audience’s
(or reader’s) fallible powers of distinguishing the letter from the spirit, a
tendency that may spring from weakness of intellect, but may also spring from a
universally persistent desire to obliterate the distinction, in the hope of
achieving a condition variously described as logos, presence, or Dasein. In addition to the uncomfortable polarity
letter/spirit, polarities like word/thing, prose/poetry, and absence/presence
provide central anxieties for many writers.
Perhaps the most prolific antithesis with which grammarians,
rhetoricians (including poets, novelists, playwrights, and literary critics)
concern themselves is that of language and speech. This particular antithesis seems to have taken on the function of
a magical incantation in modern literature, although its roots may be found in
Plato, as well as in the Upanishads.
When
writers focus upon the hypothetical polarity of speech and writing, a
particular set of natural symbols recur persistently, even inevitably. In “La Pharmacie de Platon,” Jacques Derrida
isolates and analyzes this set, providing the basis for a study of what I shall
call the Incarnational Matrix. Derrida
uses, as a point of embarkation, a passage from the Phaedrus, in which
Socrates constructs an antithetical scheme out of mythic elements, to
articulate a paradox central to grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, myth, and
theology. In response to Phaedrus’
naïve enthusiasm for a text he has brought with him, Socrates tells him a
story:
I heard, then,
that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the
one whose sacred bird is called the ibis, and the name of the God himself was
Theuth. He it was who invented numbers
and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and most
important of all, letters. Now the king
of all Egypt at that time was the god Thamus, who lived in the great city of
the upper region, which the Greeks call the Egyptian Thebes, and they call the
god himself Ammon. To him came Theuth
to show his inventions, saying that they ought to be imparted to the other Egyptians. But Thamus asked what use there was in each,
and as Theuth enumerated their uses, expressed praise or blame, according as he
approved or disapproved. The story goes
that Thamus said many things to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts,
which would take too long to repeat; but when they came to the letters, “This
invention, O king,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wise and will improve
their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have
discovered.” But Thamus replied, “Most
ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to
judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and
now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by the affection to
ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce
forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not
practise their memory. Their trust in
writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will
discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and
you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will
read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many
things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with,
since they are not wise, but only appear wise.
They will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they
will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be
tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.[iii][iii]
Socrates goes on to insist upon the
superiority of the spoken to the written word, finally leading Phaedrus to
place his faith in, “the living and breathing word of him who knows, of which
the written word may justly be called the image.”[iv][iv]
On
the basis of this passage and a number of other passages from other works by
Plato, Derrida produces a ninety-five page meditation on the nature of language
as pharmakon, “à la fois remède et poision.”[v][v]
His insistence that, “Un texte n’est un texte que s’il cache au premier
vu, la loi de sa composition et la règle de son jeu,” seems roughly in accord
with the principle of decomposition or deconstruction advocated by Curtius, as
well as with the pre-Socratic fragment in which Heraclitus insists that, “an
unapparent connection is stronger than an apparent one.”[vi][vi]
The
pair of opposites that dictates the rules of the game for the texts of Plato
with which Derrida concerns himself is logos/écriture. Logos is a richly ambigious term,
comprehensive, provocative, and elusive.
It may designate speech, reality, immediate experience, unbearable
truth, a hidden order beneath the surface of things, presence as opposed to
absence, the thing in itself, divinity, or all of the above.[vii][vii]
In Derrida’s analysis of Plato, logos, symbolized by the sun,
represents the presence of unbearable, blinding, ungraspable truth. Live speech is the medium, or pharmakon,
by means of which truth may be reduced to bearable intensity. In a sense, then, language provides a
shelter from the sun; logos, however, is in danger of losing its wealth,
vitality, intensity, and breath (pneuma or spiritus) when it is
no longer “where speech most breathes, even in the mouths of men,” but instead
is frozen in letters, grammata, écriture. Writing is potentially murderous,
specifically parricidal according to Derrida’s reading of the text; Theuth, the
god of writing, is also, as Joyce reminds us in Ulysses, the god of
death. Theuth is also associated with
the moon; as the moon is either the opposite or the supplement of the sun, so l’écriture
can be either the opposite or the supplement of parole.
A
major term in Derrida’s lexicon is la differance, a word by means of
which he turns grammar into metaphysics:
“la differance, disparition de le présence originaire, est à la fois la
condition de la possibilité et la condition de la impossibilité de la verité.”[viii][viii]
For Derrida, following Plato, the grammarian performs the first incision
into the life of language, perceiving and imposing la differance on the
infinite flow of speech (logos), dividing sounds into words, words into
syllables, syllables into vowels and consonants. Every articulation, then, is a separation, an alienation, and, by
ultimate imaginative extension, a murder (“we murder to dissect”).[ix][ix]
If administered in
bearable form and quantity, as a result of this series of anatomies, logos
is necessarily reduced, and may ultimately, if handled by an incompetent
“pharmacist,” be destroyed. Such a
symbolic murder, Derrida suggests, is a parricidal act, since logos, the
sun, and the father are roughly equivalent terms in the myths that inform Plato’s
texts. Socrates himself, the source of
light and intellectual father of Athens, is murdered by his society as a
scapegoat (pharmakos). However,
the case for écriture is not entirely hopeless; the Phaedrus
concludes with a distinction between two kinds of writing, one of which, the
tilled field, is preferable to the other, elaborate, artificially forced Garden
of Adonis.[x][x]
Derrida reads
Plato in the presence of Saussure, Heidegger, Valery, Mallarmè, and a
constellation of post-war structuralists, among whom the necessity for some
kind of dialectical scheme (and in some cases for a theatrical expression of
the scheme) seems axiomatic. To
appreciate the peculiar nature of twentieth-century deployments of these
antitheses, a brief sketch of some of the ways in which Graeco-Roman
discussions of rhetorical decorum were adapted by Christian writers to help
them represent Christ, whom they perceived as the Logos, is imperative.
According to
Morris Croll, “The history of Greek and Roman style is chiefly the story of the
relations of the genus grande and the genus humile. Theoretically the two kinds are not hostile
or exclusive of each other… But in fact they almost always proved to be
rivals.”[xi][xi]
The antithesis used to distinguish between theses styles might also be
Asiatic/Attic, and were sometimes like those made between poetry and prose.[xii][xii] Much of the discussion of style in
antiquity centers upon diction, focusing upon levels of diction that seem to
reflect levels of social stature, as Erich Auerbach describes it:
…in the most
wide-spread view the low style implied sharp realism and homespun vigor. The style levels are particularly evident in
the ancient theatre; in comedy persons and events of daily life are treated in
the low, and occasionally in the intermediate, style; in tragedy, legendary
figures, princes and heroes in extraordinary situations are made to speak with
lofty dignity… Most educated pagans regarded the early Christian writings as
ludicrous, confused and abhorrent… The content struck them as childish and
absurd superstition, and the form as an affront to good taste.[xiii][xiii]
According to Auerbach, Augustine
eventually comes to understand that style of the Bible does not proceed from an
ignorance of rhetorical decorum, but rather from the necessity to find a medium
in which to offer an otherwise unrepresentable paradox: logos, by definition timeless and
boundless, at one point in time and space put in a flesh-and-blood appearance:
“…humilis
became the most important adjective characterizing the Incarnation…. The
humility of the Incarnation derives its full force from the contrast with
Christ’s divine nature: man and God,
lowly and subline, humilis et sublimes…. The lowly, or humble style is
the only medium in which such sublime mysteries can be brought within the reach
of men. It constitutes a parallel to
the Incarnation, which was also a humilitas in the same sense, for men
could not have endured the splendor of Christ’s divinity.[xiv][xiv]
Like the sun, then, the presence of
Christ is blindingly unbearable, and language must be both a shelter from the
sun, and an appropriate, decorous substitute for it. As Logos, and as pharmakos, Christ is appropriately
represented in sermo humilis; significantly, Socrates too, the Athenian pharmakos
and medium for the logos, speaks in ordinary language much of the
time. As Alcibiades describes the
technique in the Symposium, to understand Socrates’ meaning, we must
open, if not deconstruct the humble, vulgarly absurd surface of the text:
…his talk most of
all resembles the Silenuses that are made to open. If you chose to listen to Socrates’ discourses you would feel
them at first to be quite ridiculous; on the outside they are clothed with such
absurd words and phrases – all, of course, the hide of a mocking satyr. His talk is of pack-asses, smiths, cobblers,
and tanners, and he seems always to be using the same terms for the same
things; so that anyone inexpert and thoughtless might laugh his speeches to
scorn. But when they are opened, and
you obtain a fresh view of them by getting inside, first of all you will
discover that they are only speeches which have any sense in them; and
secondly, that none are so divine, so rich in images of virtue, so largely –
nay, so completely, intent on all things proper for the study of such as would
attain both grace and worth.[xv][xv]
Socrates, then, is the model for
delivering divine speech in sermo humilis; Christ, however, is
divine speech.
The
pattern of images deconstructed by Derrida in Plato’s texts combined with the
Christian reversal of Graeco-Roman notions of rhetorical decorum, provides most
of the elements and strategies of the Incarnational Matrix. Philo the Jew provides the remaining
elements, in his attempt to Platonize the Old Testament. Preparing the ground for Augustine, Philo
adds Sophia (Wisdom) as an equivalent of logos, thus making a
female figure possible as a symbol of ultimate truth (logos is masculine
in grammatical gender, sophia feminine); he associates logos/sophia
with a fountain (pêgê), and he identifies angels as logoi.[xvi][xvi]
The
interchangeability of logos and sophia will generate fruitful
confusions in later literature, since Philo is not fastidiously categorical in
his speculations. E.R. Goodenough
points out some of these dialectical violations:
…the logos can be
represented as derived from Sophia, or Sophia derivative from the logos, or the
two can be made completely identical…. Philo says that the logos is the source
of Sophia (De fuga et Inventione 97), and again that the logos flows
from Sophia, its source, like a river (De Somniis ii., 242).[xvii][xvii]
In his relentlessly allegorical
reading of Genesis, Philo provides even more elaborately paradoxical
erotic resonances for logos-sophia:
…in the amazing
allegory of Isaac the Self-Taught, who achieves the mystic marriage with Sophia
the ever Virgin, daughter of God, daughter of the logos, wife of God, mother of
the logos, scatterer of the seeds that ennoble man, man’s mother and man’s own
wife in mystic rapture. A greater
jumble of sexes and incests could not be imagined, for at the end it is evident
that Isaac has married his own mother.[xviii][xviii]
Associating logos, at least
in its meaning as speech or eloquence, with eros is not an original
contribution by Philo; as Pedro Lain-Entralgo has shown, peitho and eros
are linked by Aeschylus and earlier writers.[xix][xix]
Philo, however, makes a strikingly dramatic use of the connection.
Philo
also reinforces connections already made in Plato’s texts; for example, he asserts
explicitly that the sun is a figure for logos:
Why, then, do we
wonder any longer at His assuming the likeness of angels, seeing that for the
succour of those that are in need He assumes that of men? Accordinly, when He says “I am the God who
was seen of thee in the place of God” (Gen. xxxi. 13), understand that
He occupied the place of an angel only so far as appeared, without changing,
with a view to the profit of him who was not yet capable of seeing the true
God. For just as those whoa re unable to
see the sun itself see the gleam of the parhelion and take it for the sun, and
take the halo round the moon for that luminary itself, so some regard the image
of God, his angel the Word, as His very self.[xx][xx]
However, the sun is not limited to one
symbolic function; it may also symbolize the human mind, Philo tells us, in a
passage that also suggest that, under certain conditions, the absence of the
sun’s light can provoke a transcendent vision not possible in its presence:
“Sun” is his name
under a figure for our mind. For what
the reasoning faculty is in us, the sun is in the world, since both of them are
light-bringers, one sending forth the whole world the light which our sense
perceive, the other shedding mental rays upon ourselves the medium of
apprehension. So while the radiance of
the mind is still all around us, when it pours as it were a noonday beam into
the whole soul, we are self-contained, not possessed. But when it comes to its setting, naturally ecstasy and divine
possession and madness fall upon us.
For when the light of God shines, the human light sets; when the divine
light sets, the human dawns and rises.
This is what regularly befalls the fellowship of the prophets. The mind is evicted at the arrival of the
divine Spirit, but when that departs the mind returns to its tenancy. Mortal and immortal may not share the same
home. And therefore the setting of
reason and the darkness which surrounds it produce ecstasy and inspired frenzy.[xxi][xxi]
Sun, then, can be a figure for noûs
in its reasoning capacity; pneûma evicts noûs temporarily, in the
mantic fit, when the divine presence takes up temporary residence.
During
his exposition of Jacob’s dream, Philo modulates into a discussion of the
figural uses to which Moses puts the sun, including the use of sun as logos:
The third meaning
in which he employs the title sun is that of the divine Word, the pattern, as
has already been mentioned, of the sun which makes its circuit in the sky. It is of the divine Word that it is said, “The
sun went forth upon the earth, and Lot entered into Zoar, and the Lord rained
on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire” (Gen. xix. 23ff.). For the Word of God, when it arrives at our
earthly composition, in the case of those who are akin to virtue and turn away
to her, gives help and succour, thus affording them a refuge and safety, but
sends upon her adversaries irreparable ruin.[xxii][xxii]
The sun, then, can symbolize the
divine Word, which, like a pharmakon (though Philo does not use the
language of medicine in this passage), can have positive and negative effects
on men.
Language
as a shelter from the sun is a possible implication of the passage in which
Philo explicates Genesis xiii., 1–3, connecting house with logos,
suggesting moreover that speech is a paternal house:
And speech is our
“father’s house,” “father’s” because Mind is our father, sowing in each of the
parts of the body of the faculties that issue from itself, and assigning to
them their workings, being in control and charge of them all; house – because
mind has speech for its house or living-room, secluded from the rest of the
homestead…. And marvel not at Moses having given to speech the title of Mind’s
house in man; for indeed he says that God, the mind of the universe, has for
his house His own Word.[xxiii][xxiii]
Logos, then, functions as
father, house, and sower.
According
to Philo, it may also be a cutting instrument, although Philo, unlike Derrida,
does not see a melancholy polarity of absence and presence as the result of the
work of [word in Greek] commenting on Genesis xv, he remarks:
Then he
continues, “he divided them in the middle,” but he does not add who this “he”
is. He wishes you to think of God who
cannot be shown, as severing through the Severer of all things, that is his
Word, the whole succession of things material and immaterial whose natures
appear to us to be knitted together and united. That severing Word whetted to an edge of utmost sharpness never
ceases to divide. For when it has dealt
with all sensible objects down to the atoms and what we call “indivisibles,” it
passes on from them to the realm of reason’s observation and proceeds to divide
it into a vast and infinite number of parts.
It divides the “plates of gold,” as Moses tells us, “into hairs” (Ex.
xxxvii. 10), that is into length without breadth, like immaterial lines. So it divided each of the three in the
middle, the soul into rational and irrational, speech into true and false,
sense into presentations where the object is real and apprehended, and
presentations where it is not. These
sections He at once placed “opposite to each other,” rational to irrational,
true to false, apprehending to non-apprehending. The birds he left undivided, for incorporeal and divine forms of
knowledge cannot be divided into conflicting opposites.[xxiv][xxiv]
Splitting hairs, the logos
seems to behave like a conventional Greek philosopher, who finds antitheses
useful rather than threatening. As
Philo says elsewhere, “That is the nature of opposites, it is through the
existence of one that we chiefly recognize the existence of the other.”[xxv][xxv]
One
antithesis, however, is the basis of a mixing process that seems to anticipate
the central figure of the Eucharist, in a passage that describes the
pharmaceutical effet of a combination of liquid logos and pneûma:
He took, we read,
the half of the bloods and poured it into mixing bowls and the half he poured
upon the altar (Ex. xxiv. 6), to show us that sacred wisdom is of a
twofold kind, divine and human. The
divine kind is without a mixture or infusion and therefore is poured as an
offereing to God, who knows no mixture or infusion and is in his isolation a
unity. But the human is mixed with
infusion and thus is scattered abroad upon us, who are a mixed compounded
product of infusion, to create in us oneness of mind and fellowship, and in
fact a “mixing” of our various parts and ways of conduct. But the part of the soul which is free from
mixture and infusion is the mind in its perfect purit. This mind filled with the breath of
inspiration from heaven above is guarded from malady and injury, and then
reduced to a single element is fitly rendered in its entirety as a holy
libation to His who inspired it and guarded it from all evil that could harm
it. The mixed kind is the senses, and
for this nature has created the proper mixing-bowls. The eyes are the “bowls” of sight, the ears of hearing, the
nostrils of the sense of smell, and each of the others has its fitting vessel. On these bowls the holy Word pours of the
blood, desiring that our irrational part should be quickened and become in some
sense rational, following the divine courses of the mind, and purified from the
objects of sense, which lure it with all their deceitful and seductive force.[xxvi][xxvi]
Philo
also reads the story of Cain and Abel as a lesson in the uses of rhetoric,
incidentally fashioning a connection between logos and a spring; he
begins by explaining the significance of eulogia:
A third gift is
“blessing” or excellence of reason and speech, and apart from this it is not
possible to make the former gracious gifts secure. He says “And I will bless thee,” i.e. “I will endow thee with
excellent reason and speech.”
“Blessing” or “eulogy” is a word compounded of “well” and “logos.” Of these, “well” connotes nothing but excellence: “logos” has two aspects, one resembling a
spring, and is called “reason,” while utterance by mouth and tongue is like its
outflow, and is called “speech.”[xxvii][xxvii]
Next he, like Plato, associates logos
and wealth (ploutos):
That each species
of logos should be improved is vast wealth, the understanding having good
reasoning at its command for all things great and small, and utterance being
under the guidance of right training.[xxviii][xxviii]
Some men, however, are not trained correctly,
Philo continues, illustrating his proposition with the example of Cain and
Abel:
For perfection
depends, as we know, on both divisions of logos, the reason which suggests the
ideas with clearness, and the speech which gives unfailing expression to
them. Do you not notice Abel, whose
name stands for one to whom things mortal are a grief and things immortal are
full of happiness, how, though he has the advantage of a faultless
understanding, yet through lack of training in speaking he is worsted by Cain,
a clever wrestler able to prevail by skill rather than strength? Wherefore, admiring as I do his character
for its rich natural endowment, I find fault with him in so far as, when
challenged to a contest of words, he came forward to engage in it, whereas he
to have maintained his wonted quietude, totally disregarding his quarrelsome
brother; and if he was quite bent on fighting it out, not to have entered the
lists until he had some practice in scientific grips and tricks; for village
sages usually get the worst of it when they encounter those who have acquired
the cleverness of the town.[xxix][xxix]
After giving this practical advice
to Abel, Philo proceeds to ponder Aaron’s rod, equating it with God’s finger,
which in turn is analogous with “divine rescript,” since God’s finger wrote the
tables of the law.
Philo
offers many more illustrations of some of the ways in which the thought,
language, and imagery that penetrate Platonic, Neo-Platonic, and Stoic texts
can influence a reading of the Old Testament; certainly Augustine nodded when
he claimed that to read narrowly, according to the letter only, was to read more
judaico.[xxx][xxx]
However, Philo’s writings should not be seen as an exclusive source, but
rather as a significant, vivid manifestation of a matrix of images that had
become the common property of an entire literary culture. One might as easily use any number of
passages from the Corpus Hermeticum, for example, to illustrate these
patterns; when Poimandres asks for an explication of the radiant visionary
experience he has just undergone, his guide replies:
This light is me,
nôus, your God, he who exists before damp nature arose out of
darkness. As for the luminous Logos
born of nôus, it is God’s son.[xxxi][xxxi]
Christian theologians, then,
clearly had a rich thesaurus of images and strategies upon which to draw when
they began their attempts to describe the ineffable, to represent a presence
that is only bearable when absent, to square the circle.
The
first priority of the church fathers was to prevent literalists from mangling
the text of the Bible. Tertullian warns
us that, “prior est animus quam litera…. prior est sermo quam liber, prior
sensus quam stylus, et prior homo ipse quam philosophus et poeta.” (The spirit comes before the letter, speech
before the book, meaning before style, the man before the philosopher and
poet).[xxxii][xxxii]
Socrates’ distinction between the spoken and the written word, then,
becomes a central element in Christian thought. Taking issue with Ernst Curtius’ categorization of Christianity
as “the religion of the book,” Henri de Lubac insists that it is the religion
of the spoken word:
Aussi la loi
évangélique n’est-elle point une lex scripta. Le Christianisme n’est point à proprement parler une ‘religion du
livre:’ il est religion de la Parole, - mai non pas uniquement ni
principalement de la Parole sans sa forme écrite. Il est la religion du Verbe, - non d’un verbe écrit et muet, mais
d’un Verbe incarné et vivant.”[xxxiii][xxxiii]
In making the distinction between
the spirit and the letter, some theologians use a contrast between the Old and
New Testaments; as the incarnation of the Logos, the New Testament is
the sun, the Old Testament is the moon:
Vetus Testamentum
littera est; novum, spiritus… Vetus si litteram sequimur, nunc occidit; novum
vivificat… Sunt enim mysteria Christi, veritas et lux; mysteria Moysi, vestigia
et umbrae. Veritas semper manet; vestigium tollitur. Ideo de eminentia novi Testamenti supra vetus instruit Corinthios
Paulus… Litterae, nisi spiritibus, id est vocalibus informentur, vacuae sunt et
inutiles, ex nihil ex se possunt… Ita vetus Testamentum, nisi Spiritu Christi
animetur, nisi Evangelio informetur, vacuum est et inutile… Non alia luce quam
novae lex vetus micat, ut luna, non alia quam solis.[xxxiv][xxxiv]
(The Old
Testament is the letter, the new the script… If we follow the old letter, it
kills; if we follow the new, it revives… The mysteries of Christ are truth and
light; the mysteries of Moses are traces and shadows. Truth is eternal; traces are swept away. So Paul instructs the Corinthians on the
superiority of the New to the Old Testament… Unless they are filled with
breath, that is with spoken sounds, letters are empty and useless, and nothing
can come of them… So the Old Testament, unless filled with the breath of
Christ, is empty and useless… The old law shines with no other light than that
of the new, as the moon shines with no other light than that of the sun).
Luther
also argues for the historical priority of verbum dei non scriptum,
emphasizing the importance of viva vox:
In the New
Testament, the sermons are to be spoken aloud in public and to bring forth in
terms of speech and hearing what was formerly hidden in the letter and in
secret vision. Forasmuch as the New
Testament is nothing else but the unlocking and revealing of the Old Testament…
That, too, is why Christ himself did not write his teaching, as Moses did his,
but delivered it orally, also commanded to deliver it orally and gave no
command to write it… For that reason it is not at all the manner of the New
Testament to write works of Christian doctrine, but there should be everywhere,
without books, good, learned, spiritually minded, diligent preachers to draw
the living word from the ancient Scriptures and constantly bring it to life
before the people, as the apostles did.
For before ever they wrote, they had preached to and converted the
people by word of mouth, which also was their real apostolic and New Testament
work… That books had to be written, however, is at once a great failure and
weakness of spirit that was enforced by necessity and not by the manner of the
New Testament.[xxxv][xxxv]
For Luther, then, as well as for
Socrates, écriture is a secondary, untrustworthy, unfortunate activity.
Two
other Platonic patterns are of significant use to medieval theologians: the sun may symbolize Logos, and Logos
may function as pharmakon.
St.
Bonaventura provides the most extensive list of figurative uses of the sun;
among the sixteen senses, he includes:
Anagogie: aeterna Dei Trinitas, exemplaria sapientia,
Angelica sublimitas, Ecclesia triumphans.
Allegoria: Humanitas assumpta…
Mater Dei Maria, Ecclesia militans, Sacra Scriptura. Tropologie: spiritualis
gratia…, spiritualis vita,… spiritualis cathedra, spiritualis pugna.”[xxxvi][xxxvi]
Derivable from the sun, then, are écriture
(sacra scriptura), pneuma-spiritus (spiritualis…), and two kinds of
shelters from the sun (ecclesia, cathedra).
The
sun, however, can also be an ambiguous symbol, at times signifying Logos,
but at other times signifying persecutio, and at other times signifying
present time (an interesting variation on the notion of presence).[xxxvii][xxxvii]
Another
ambiguous term, pharmakon functions both positively and negatively for
Augustine. The wrong use of language is
like a bad drink, he tells us, condemning the pleasure to be found in perusing
pagan mythology:
Non accuso verba
quasi vasa lecta atque pretiosa, sed vinum erroris, quod in eis nobis
propinabatur ab ebriis doctoribus, et nisi biberemus, caedebamur nec appellare
ad aliquem iudicem sobrium licebat.
(I do not accuse
the words themselves, chosen, precious vessels, but the wine of error poured
into them by drunken men of learning; unless we drank, we were beaten, nor were
we allowed to appeal to a sober judge).[xxxviii][xxxviii]
Drunkenness, however, can also
represent a positive state, induced by an appropriate use of language, as
Augustine indicates in his celebration of the death of Nebridius, who may now
be said to be intoxicated by God’s Logos:
Ibi vivit, unde
me multa interrogabat homuncionem inexpertum.
Iam non ponit aurem ad os meum, sed spiritale os ad fontem tuum et
bibit, quantum potest, sapientiam pro aviditate sua sine fine felix. Nec eum sic arbitror inebriari ex ea, ut
obliviscatur mei, cum tu, domine, quem potat ille, nostri sis memor.
(He lives in the
place about which he used to ask so many questions of me, ignorant, mere
mortal. Now he does not place his ear
at my mouth, but he places a spiritual ear to your fountain, and drinks, as
much as he is able, of your wisdom, avidly, and endlessly happy. Nor do I think him so inebriated that he has
forgotten me, since you, O Lord, when he drinks of you, remind him of me).[xxxix][xxxix]
Augustine thus continues the
association of Logos, drink, and pêgê.
Less
dramatically, but more pharmaceutically, Evagrius and Bernard proclaim the
curative efficacy of Christ-Logos:
“Verbum breviatum faciet Deus in omni terra. Hoc est Verbum, quod verbera nostra sanavit…. Verbum abbreviatum
est abbrevians, salubre compendium!”[xl][xl]
Eventually,
Christian writers incorporated figurae from pagan mythology to help
represent some of the qualities of the logos. Alexander Neckam, for example, interprets Mercury’s rod as a
symbol of the negative and positive pharmaceutical qualities of speech:
Verba namque
penetrant usque ad penitiores partes animi, adeo ut nunc aculeo doloris animus
pungatur, nunc imagines laetitiae letus sibi depingat. Numquid enim frustra in virga ercurii
quaedam pars esse vivificans, quaedam esse mortifera, fingitur? Nonne in minibus linguae mors et vita?
(Words enter deep
within the soul, so that at times the soul is pierced by the sting of pain, at
times joyfully depicts for itself images of delight. Is the painting of the rod of Mercury pointless, that represents
on part as life-giving, and another part as deadly? Are not life and death in the power of the tongue?)[xli][xli]
In a commentary on Martianus
Capella’s De Nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae, possibly also by Alexander
Neckham, Mercury and Christ are interchangeable:
Et quod ubicumque
dignitas Mercurii Philologie dignitati proponitur in hoc loco. Mercurius Verbum, id est filius Dei
intelligitur. Aliter enim non
procederet cum rationem mentis sermone oris liqueat esse digniorem. Ei autem, id est filio Dei Philologia
coniungitur, id est homo qui duce ratione tendit ad suum principium. Quid ergo per Mercurium et Philologiam nisi
sponsum et sponsam, id est, Christum et Ecclesiam intelligimus?
(The fact that
the dignity of Mercury is everywhere preferred to that of Philologia is evident
here. Mercury is understood as the
Word, that is, the son of God.
Otherwise it would make no sense, since the disclosure of the mind is
nobler than the speech of the mouth. To
this, that is, to the son of God, is Philologia wedded, that is, the man, who
with reason as his guide, tends to his origin.
What then should be understood through Mercury and Philologia if not
husband and wife, that is Christ and the Church).[xlii][xlii]
Greek myth, then, as well as philosophy,
provides grist for the Christian exegetical mill.
Christian
writers, however, were not the sole medieval exploiters of the incarnational
matrix, as Gershon Scholem has demonstrated extensively in his writings on the
Kabbala. The Jews, however, do not show
great anxiety about écriture; in fact, they place their highest hopes in
it, associating light and breath with grammata. Scholem contrasts the attitude of the
philologist with that of the Kabbalist:
“Writing for the philologist is no more than a secondary and extremely
unmanageable image of real and effective speech; but for the Kabbalist it is
the real centre of the mysteries of speech.”[xliii][xliii]
Letters themselves take on the highest symbolic significance, replete
with pneuma and lux, if not with the sun itself:
The letters, which are configurations of the
divine creative force… represent the highest forms; and inasmuch as, in the
earthly realm, they take on visible forms, they have bodies and souls,
according to Isaac the Blind.
Consequently the soul of each letter is clearly that which lives in it
as a result of the divine Pneuma (Ruakh).[xliv][xliv]
Jacob ben Jacob Kohen of Soria goes even further:
Do not think that all the divine names, like
the name of 12 or 42 or 72 letters and all the other countless mystical names,
are merely unsubstantial words, for they all consist of letters which soar in
an upward direction. The masters of the
Kabbala have said of the letters relative to the name of 42 letters that they
soar up until they reach the Merkaba itself, where they become pillars of
light, which unite with one another in one great beam; and even the glory of
God unites with them and ascends and conceals itself in the infinitely sublime
and secret realm.[xlv][xlv]
Of the Kabbalist,
Scholem discusses, Abulafia offers the most extensive meditation on the nature
of the relationship between the spirit and the letter, offering a mystical
grammar, and replacing syllogistic with mystic “logic.” Paradise, in fact, is the world of letters:
The actual “future world,” the place of
bliss, as is illustrated by a bold play of words, is the “world of letters,”
which is disclosed to the mystic in the hohkmatseruf. The infinite wealth of this world of letters is evident: in fact we can even say that “each
individual letter in the Kabbala is a world unto itself.” In a world such as this the letters, which
in other respects are conceived of as forms and mysterious signs, form for
their part of the substance, which itself always remains the same throughout
the movements which inter-connect with one another. Here the forms are now the meanings – the former sense – which
the observer can attribute to these combinations in accordance with the degree
of his intellectual faculty of knowledge.
The letters are thus the substance and form of the intellectual world,
each one in accordance with the different perspectives in which it is regarded.[xlvi][xlvi]
Greek philosophers,
Christian theologians, and Jewish Kabbalists then, exploited, perpetuated, and
augmented the incarnational matrix, bequeathing its ambiguous, contradictory
powers to legatees with both sacred and secular uses for it.
Part One (B)
MODERN THEORISTS
Among
the many texts that illustrate the infectiousness and durability of the
incarnational matrix among modern theoreticians, Sir Philip Sidney’s Apology
for Poetry – the product of a Neo-Platonic training – offers two
particularly apposite passages. In the
first, Sidney acknowledges the potentially ambivalent qualities of logos
as expressed in poetry, implying, by his use of the word “infect,” that
language is a pharmakon:
For I will
not deny but that man’s wit may make Poesy, which should be eikastike, which
some learned have defined, figuring forth good things; to be phantastike,
which doth contrariwise infect the fancy with unworthy objects…. But what, shall the abuse of a thing make
the right use odious? Nay truly, though
I yield that Poesy may not only be abused, but that being abused by the reason
of his sweet charming force, it can do more hurt than any other army of words,
yet shall it be so far from concluding that the abuse should give reproach to
the abused, that contrariwise it is a good reason that what so ever, being
abused, doth most harm, being rightly used (and upon the right use each thing
conceiveth his title), and doth most good.[xlvii][xlvii]
Sidney then
goes on to offer an explicit analogy between medicine and rhetoric, followed by
a reference to patricide:
Do we not
see the skill of Physic (the best rampire to our often-assaulted bodies), being
abused, teach poison, the most violent destroyer?…. With a sword thou mayest
kill thy father, and with a sword thou mayest defend thy prince.[xlviii][xlviii]
As Shepherd
indicates, the example of the two uses of a sword comes from Quintillian, who,
however, mentions a thief, not a father, as his first term. Sidney’s substitution seems to proceed from
the pattern of solar, paternal logos.
Sidney also acknowledges the
power of sermo humilis, admiring the rude, rough verses of his
ancestors, although not without some wish to temper with them:
Certainly
I must confess my own barbarousness, I never heard the old song of Percy and
Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet; and yet is it
sung but by some blind crowder, with no rougher voice than rude style; which,
being so evil appareled in the dust and cobwebs of that uncivil age, what would
it work, trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar.[xlix][xlix]
The old
songs have rough power and vivid presence, but, of course, are in verse. In the next century, many writers focus
their longing for immediate, direct presence on prose, provoked perhaps
subliminally by the fact that one of the denotations of logos is
“prose,” but more strongly motivated by scientific aspirations and
language. As a result of their efforts,
writers seem to have believed that they might make words incarnate things, an
aspiration they would have been surprised to find that they shared with the
Kabbalists.
A frequently
cited passage from Bishop Sprat’s History of the Royal Society provides
a good example of the desire to abolish la différance, or as the
classical rhetorician might have said, to disguise art:
They have
exacted from all their members a close, naked, natural way of speaking;
positive expressions; clear sense; a native easiness; bringing all things as
near the Mathematical plainness as they can; and preferring the language of
Artisans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that of Wits, or Scholars.[l][l]
According to
Sprat, the members resolved, “to return back to the primitive purity, and
shortness, when men delivered so many things almost in an equal number of
words.”[li][li]
Such faith in the efficacy of stripping suggests the sensibility of an
ascetic mystic, and was not confined to aspiring scientists in the seventeenth
century.
Bishop
Fènèlon, for example, complaining to the French Academy of a loss of vitality
in the French language, recommends, “un terme simple et propre pour exprimer
chaque objet, chaque sentiment, chaque action.”[lii][lii]
Sprat and Fénelon seem to be performing unintentional variations on a
remark of Philo: “With Moses the names
assigned are manifest images of the things, so that name and thing are
inevitably the same from the first and the name and that to which the name is
given differ not a whit.”[liii][liii]
Swift probably
had Sprat and his colleagues, not Fénelon and Philo, in mind when he
deconstructed and demythologized their urge to incarnate things in words,
dreaming up Laputian linguistics in Book Three of Gulliver’s Travels:
An
expedient was therefore offered, that since words are only names for things,
it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things
as were necessary to express the particular business they are to discourse on…
many of the most learned and wise adhere to the new scheme of expressing
themselves by things, which hath only this inconvenience attending it,
that if a man’s business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be
obliged in proportion to carry a greater bundle of things on his back,
unless he can afford one or two strong servants to attend him. I have often beheld two of those sages
almost sinking under the weight of their packs, like pedlars among us; who when
they meet in the streets would lay down their loads, open their sacks and hold
conversation for an hour together; then put up their implements, help each
other to resume their burthens, and take their leave.[liv][liv]
Swift’s
parody seems to have repressed this form of the incarnational urge until the
twentieth century, although one or two outbursts do occur in the intervening
centuries.
Fénelon,
incidentally, provides a striking use of the incarnational matrix in his first Dialogue
on Eloquence. Like Socrates in the Phaedrus,
he begins by attacking a false, or wrong use of rhetoric. After demolishing an inept sermon, delivered
on Ash Wednesday, naively admired by another speaker in the dialogue, Fènèlon
provides an example of an appropriate sermon, dependent on pêgê, pharmakon,
and antithetical qualities of Christ-Logos, including humilis/sublimis:
Cette
cendre, dit-il, quoiqu’elle soit un signe de pénitence, est un principe de félicité;
quoiqu’elle semble nous humilier, elle est une source de gloire; quoiqu’elle
représente la mort, elle est un remède qui donne l’immortalité.
(Although
these ashes, he said, may be a symbol of punishment, they are a source of
congratulation. Although they may seem
to abase, they are a fountainhead of fame.
Although they may represent death, they are a medicine that brings
immortal life).[lv][lv]
Examples
like this are rare, however, in the eighteenth century, since most of the major
writers, until close to the end of the century, eschewed transcendent visions.
They did
continue to fret about style, of course, and to recognize the peculiar
attractiveness and difficulty of sermo humilis; a passage from one of
William Cowper’s letters illustrates some of the typical attitudes of the time,
anticipating as well, and perhaps preparing the ground for, Wordsworth’s more
transcendent vision of the possibilities for every-day language.
The
familiar style is of all the styles the most difficult to succeed in. To make verse speak the language of prose
without being prosaic – to marshall the words of it as they might naturally
take in falling from the lips of an extempore speaker, yet without meanness,
harmoniously, elegantly, and without seeming to displace a syllable for the
sake of rhyme, is one of the most arduous tasks a poet can undertake.[lvi][lvi]
Wordsworth’s
discussion of the possibilities of plain-speaking in poetry is far more
complex, and also permits many of the elements of the incarnational matrix to re-enter
the domain of literary theory. At one
point in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, he seems close to the aesthetic
principles of the Royal Society, explaining that he has chosen, “the plainer
and more emphatic language…[of] humble and rustic life,” because, “in that
situation our elementary feelings exist in a state of greater simplicity and
consequently may be more accurately contemplated and more forcibly
communicated.”[lvii][lvii]
Wordsworth, however, is not interested in accepting an unmediated flow
of rustic speech, but instead exercises a selectivity based on principles of
social acceptability and of rhetorical intensity:
The
language too of these men is adopted (purified indeed from what appears to be
its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike and disgust)
because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best
part of language is originally derived; and because of their rank in society
and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the
action of social vanity they express their feelings and notions in simple and
unelaborated expressions.[lviii][lviii]
Rustic
speech, then, edited by the urbane poet, may function as a purgative, or pharmakon,
battling infectious artifice, and acting as the least mediated medium through
which one may perceive immediate experience, or immediate feeling, if not the logos.
Artificial
figures of speech, however, may enter the text under conditions familiar to the
classical rhetorician; ordinary language serves for ordinary experiences, and
extraordinary language for extraordinary experience (although Wordsworth and
Aristotle might disagree as to which was which). In discussing personification, Wordsworth admits:
They are
indeed a figure of speech occasionally prompted by passion, and I have made use
of them as such; but I have endeavored utterly to reject them as a mechanical
device of style, as a family language which Writers in metre seem to lay claim
to by prescription.[lix][lix]
“Prescription”
shows at least a subliminal awareness of the negative, simply cosmetic aspect
of language as pharmakon, which he would like to avoid, he says, because
his particular poetic task involves establishing a sense of presence: “I have tried to keep my Reader in the
company of flesh and blood, persuaded that by doing so I shall interest him; I
am, however, well aware that others who pursue a different track may interest
him likewise.”[lx][lx]
Incarnate flesh and blood leads to a discussion of the compatibility of
poetry and prose, a subject on which Wordsworth seems to anticipate Ezra Pound
by more than a hundred years:
…not only
the language of a large portion of every good poem, even of the most elevated
character, must necessarily, expect with reference to the metre, in no respect
differ from that of good prose, but likewise… some of the most interesting
parts of the best poems will be found to be strictly the language of prose when
prose is well written.[lxi][lxi]
Wordsworth,
then, proposes to use rustic speech and the techniques of prose to keep his
readers, “in the company of flesh and blood,” although he also seems to believe
that mankind cannot bear too much reality.
To protect the fragile reader, meter is to provide a shelter (though not
specifically from the sun), or a valium-like pharmakon:
The
co-presence of something regular, something to which the mind has been
accustomed in various moods and in a less excited state, cannot but have great
efficacy in tempering and restraining the passion by an intertexture of
ordinary feelings, and of feeling not strictly and necessarily connected with
the passion. This is unquestionably
true; and hence, though the opinion will at first appear paradoxical, from the
tendency of meter to divest language, in a certain degree, of its reality, and
thus to throw a sort of half-consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the
whole composition, there can be but little doubt but that more pathetic
situations and sentiments, that is, those which have a greater proportion of
pain connected with them, may be endured in metrical composition, especially in
rhyme, than in prose.[lxii][lxii]
Prose
directness, then, may lead to unbearable intensity; metered verse may shelter
the reader, reducing the intensity to bearable proportions.
Clearly,
Wordsworth’s theorizing contains overtones of the sacred. He told DeQuincy, for example, that the
language of poetry should not be cosmetic “dress of thoughts,” but the
“incarnation of thoughts… the thought itself made concrete.”[lxiii][lxiii]
Coleridge, too, meditated on the aesthetic problem with intimations of
the divine, as well as of the Royal Scientific: “I would endeavor to destroy the old antithesis of Words and
Things: elevating, as it were, Words
into Things and living things too.”[lxiv][lxiv]
Later in the
nineteenth century, American writers produced extensive variations on the
incarnational matrix, in their theorizing on the nature of linguistic
decorum. Lowell seems close to Socrates
when he writes:
There is
death in the dictionary… No language after it has faded into dictum, none that
can suck up the feeding juices secreted for it in the rich mother-earth of
common fold can bring forth a sound and lusty book. True vigor and heartiness of phrase do not pass from page to
page, but from man to man.[lxv][lxv]
Emerson offers
some interesting modifications of the patterns generated by the incarnational
matrix. Instead of words/things, he
offers words/deeds: “Words and deeds
are quite indifferent modes of the divine energy. Words are also actions, and, actions are a kind of words.”[lxvi][lxvi]
He also thinks that écriture suffers by comparison with parole,
particularly the parole of the nineteenth century’s version of a truck
driver:
I confess
to some pleasure from the stinging rhetoric of a rattling oath in the mouth of
truckmen and teamsters. How laconic and
brisk it is by the side of a page of the North American Review. Cut these words and they would bleed; they
are vascular and alive; they walk and run… Give me initiative, spermatic,
prophesying, man-making words.[lxvii][lxvii]
The
teamsters’ words, then, are flesh; language ossifies in books, lives only into
the mouths of men, and then only in the mouths of humble men, as a sermo
humilis with the power of sublimity.
A passage in
Emerson’s Natural History of the Intellect seems to anticipate Derrida’s
use of la diffférance, as well as Rilke’s use of Zwiespalt;
Emerson’s word for these terms is “interval:”
The true
scholar is one who has the power to stand beside his thoughts or to hold off
his thoughts at arm’s length and give them perspective. It is not to be concealed that the gods have
guarded this privilege with costly penalty.
This alight discontinuity which perception effects between the mind and
the object paralyzes the will. If you
cut or break in two a block or stone and press the two parts closely together,
you can indeed bring the particles very near, but never again so very near that
they shall attract each other so that you can take up the block as one. That indescribably small interval is as good
as a thousand miles, and has forever severed the practical unity… The intellect
that sees the interval partakes of it, and the fact of intellectual perception
severs once for all the man from the things with which he converses. Affection blends, intellect disjoins subject
and object. For weal or woe we clear
ourselves from the thing we contemplate.[lxviii][lxviii]
The
“indescribably small interval,” roughly la différance, is a split that Emerson confines to the
scholarly mind, although such a split frequently becomes a major preoccupation
of modern poetry.
Emerson’s
friend Thoreau, concerned with a different interval, came to an entirely
different conclusion. Aware of “a
memorable interval between the spoken word and the written language,” Thoreau
prefers the “noble exercise of reading:
The noblest written words are commonly as
far behind or above the fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its
stars is behind the clouds… What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly
found to be rhetoric in the study. The
orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob
before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable
life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd
which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all
in any age who can understand him.
No wonder Alexander carried the Iliad with him on his
expeditions in a precious casket. A
written word is the choicest of relics… It is the work of art nearest to life
itself. It may be translated into every
language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; – not
be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of
life itself.[lxix][lxix]
Two
other passages in Walden contain the Platonic connection between the
proper use of écriture and the tilled field:
I did not
read books the first summer; I hoed beans…. [the farmer] wonders how the
student can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day with ennui and
“the blues!” but he does not realize that the student, though in the house, is
still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods, as the
farmer in his.[lxx][lxx]
On the basis
of the sharp contrast between Emerson’s preference for speech and Thoreau’s for
writing, one might suspect more than a merely aesthetic prejudice at work. Social judgments may also be implied;
Augustine, trained in classical rhetorical decorum, found the language of the
Vulgate uncomfortably like ordinary speech, until he accepted the paradox of
the Incarnation. Emerson certainly had
more hope for democratic principles, or at least more interest in them, than
did Thoreau. Victor Hugo will provide,
in a later chapter, a vivid illustration of the social and political uses to
which the incarnational matrix can be put.
In the twentieth century, Spengler and Levi-Strauss provide a clear
contrast.
Spengler
writes as though Thamus had remained silent in Thoth’s presence:
Writing is
an entirely new kind of language, and implies a complete change in the
relations of man’s waking consciousness, in that it liberates it from the
tyranny of the present (Gegenwart)…. Writing is the grand symbol of the
Far…. writing is above everything a matter of status and more particularly an
ancient privilege of priesthood. The
peasantry is without history and therefore without writing.[lxxi][lxxi]
Spengler
thus provides an excellent illustration of the attitude and consequent actions
that Levi-Strauss attacks in his assault on écriture:
The one phenomenon
which has invariably accompanied it [writing] is the formation of cities and
empires: the integration into a
political system, that is to say, of a considerable number of individuals, and
the distribution of those individuals into a hierarchy of castes and classes….
it seems to favor rather the exploitation than the enlightenment of mankind….
If my hypothesis is correct, the primary function of writing, as a means of
communication, is to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings…. The European-wide
movement towards compulsory education in the nineteenth century went
hand-in-hand with the extension of military service and the systematization of
the proletariat. The struggle against illiteracy
is indistinguishable, at times, from the increased powers exerted over the
individual citizen by the central authority.
For it is only when everyone can read that Authority can decree that
“ignorance of the law is no defense.[lxxii][lxxii]
We may
expect to find, then, in the twentieth century, that political motives give
additional impetus to the incarnational matrix.
Roland Barthes
probably provides the most glittering example of such a phenomenon, in the
series of Marxist variations which make up his Writing Degree Zero. In this early work, he denounces écriture
as both weapon and symptom of a reactionary literary, political, and economic
establishment. According to Barthes
scenario, the literary establishment has produced a body of classical and
romantic literature that represents an oppressive and repressive past. A writer today must discard the rhetorical
paraphernalia, including many of the grammatical conventions, of the coagulated
tradition, and draw upon the resources of language as actually (including its French
sense, actuellement, “now”) spoken.
To destroy the polarity of absence/presence, Barthes suggests a
strikingly literal-minded solution: use
the present tense:
When,
within the narration, the praeterite is replaced by less ornamental forms,
fresher, more full-blooded and nearer to speech (the present tense of the
present perfect), Literature becomes the receptacle of existence in all its
density and no longer of the meaning alone.
The acts it recounts are still separated from History, but no longer
from people.[lxxiii][lxxiii]
For
Spengler, the present (Gegenwart) is a source of tyranny (Zwang);
for Barthes it is the source of all vitality, while the past is potentially
suffocating.
One period of
French history (and therefore of literary history) is exempt; the writers of
the French Revolution receive a license which a Marxist could presumably accord
to no other group (since the Jacquerie produced no spokesman because, as
Spengler insists, “the peasantry is without history”):
The
Revolution was in the highest degree one of those great occasions when truth,
through the bloodshed that it costs, becomes so weighty that its expression
demands the very forms of theatrical amplification. Revolutionary writing was the one and only grand gesture
commensurate with the daily presence of the guillotine. What today seems turgid was then no more
than life-size.[lxxiv][lxxiv]
Like
Christ’s blood, then, the revolutionaries’ blood authenticates the logos. However, the revolutionaries did not
represent their experience in sermo humilis. Barthes’ justification of their style seems very much like a
reversion to classical decorum, requiring a high style for lofty and intensely
experienced subject matter. In this
respect, he seems very close to Henri Peyre’s politically non-partisan
description of Romantic rhetoric as an accurate reflection of an intense,
private, essentially subjective feeling:
Even when
they resorted to inflated language or to exclamatory rhetoric to convey an
experience they deemed unique, they were trying to render passionately and
exaltedly what they had experienced ardently…. Of one sin the romantics were
guilty – a sin against sincerity and against art. What they felt intensely had, they thought, to be expressed
powerfully; and power, for them, often lay in exclamations, interrogations,
cataracts of images, litanies of invocations, debauchery of sonorousness… Such
voracious explorers, who seek their own selves in the whole universe, may be
guilty of haste, of turgidness, of confusion between authentic voices and mere
echoes of their own sonorous class.[lxxv][lxxv]
Barthes’
description of Romantic rhetoric is less sophisticated than Peyre’s at least
partly because he is describing it only to dismiss it as no longer relevant.
According to
Barthes, whose title, Le Degré Zero de l’Écriture implies as much, exuberant
rhetoric is inappropriate for modern revolutionary writing, which must be
stripped, “zero to the bone.” In later
essays, he emerges as the champion of New Wave novelists; that he fixes his
attention upon writers of prose, in his attempt to preserve the intensity of
the logos, seems significant, partly because “prose” is a lexical
denotation of logos, and partly because of the mythic belief in the
pharmaceutical qualities of prose. A
passage in Writing Degree Zero anticipates Barthes’ advocacy of the New
Wave novelists:
What makes
writing the opposite of speech is that the former always appears symbolical,
introverted, ostensibly turned towards an occult side of language, whereas the
second is nothing but an empty flow of signs, the movement along of which is
significant.[lxxvi][lxxvi]
By
compelling the reader to determine the meaning from the movement of the
language, the writer attempts to circumvent the possibility of a merely
literal, deadly response to the text, which may consequently remain alive, out
of the hands of Thoth. Such a text also
will be a true text, because it fulfills Derrida’s Heraclitean requirement that
the laws of its composition and the rules of its game be not immediately
apparent.
Among the many
modern writers who express partisan feeling when faced with a choice between
writing and speech, none produces a more oddly paradoxical set of divagations
on the topic than an American in Paris, Gertrude Stein. More than a decade before Barthes’ proclamations,
she committed herself to Thoreau’s position on écriture, though
certainly not in Thoreau’s language:
The
Egyptians in the old days only had one language, that is to say everybody used
only a little of any language in the ordinary life but when they were in love
or talked to their hero or were moved or told tales then they spoke in an
exalted and fanciful language that has now become a written language because
nowadays in talking they are not exalted anymore and they use just ordinary
language all the time and so they have forgotten the language of exaltation and
that is now only written but never spoken.
That is
very interesting I said, now the English language I said has gone just the
other way, they always tried to write like anybody talked and it is only
comparatively lately that it is true that the written language knows that it is
of no interest and cannot be done that is to write as anybody talks because
everybody talks as the newspaper and movies and radios tell them to talk the
spoken language is no longer interesting and so gradually the written language
says something and says it differently than the spoken language. I was very much interested in what I said
when I gradually said these things, and it is very important all this is just now. So soon we will come to have a written
language that is a thing apart in English.
If you begin one place you always end at another. Let me tell you about my brother.[lxxvii][lxxvii]
Although she
advocates the written language as the more significant medium, Gertrude Stein’s
style represents a deliberate attempt to give écriture a strong dose of parole. Flexible syntax, diction taken from sermo
cottidianus, and minimal punctuation contribute to the illusion of spoken
writing.
Much of the
shock value of her writing depends on the existence in her readers’ minds of a
sharp polarity between written and spoken language, whose eradication she
pursues relentlessly. Of a lunch with
students at Berkeley she writes:
The only
thing I remember is their asking why I do not write as I talk and I said to
them if they had invited Keats to lunch and they asked him an ordinary question
would they expect him to answer with the Ode to the Nightingale…[lxxviii][lxxviii]
The language
she claims to prefer is silent, written:
in response to the French love of sonority (a reflection of the
pre-Ramus world, according to Walter J. Ong[lxxix][lxxix]), she comments:
In France
they always read everything aloud they read more with their ears than with
their eyes but in reading English we read more with our eyes than with our
ears. I am often wondering what is
going to happen now. I think what is
going to happen is that a written language is going to be existing like it did
in old civilizations where it is read with the eyes and then another language
which only says what everybody knows and therefore is not really interesting
which is read with the ears….. I like to read with my eyes and not with my
ears. I like to read inside and not
outside. However if you are going to
lecture and to write the lecture beforehand you have to read it out loud. And it is not possible not to write it
beforehand because in that case it is not written and what is spoken is never
written and as spoken it is not really interesting…. anything that is read is
understood that it is felt otherwise they would not go on reading but anything
heard is not felt because nobody, naturally nobody can stop listening and
therefore writing is the thing.[lxxx][lxxx]
Like the
classical rhetorician, she insists that what is spoken is ordinary, prosaic,
what is written must in some way be extraordinary, often poetic. Yet her style satisfies the criteria for
revolutionary rhetoric to be proposed in the next decade, by Barthes.
She shares
Barthes’ enthusiasm for the present tense; in Lectures in America, she
says, “the business of art is to live in the active present.”[lxxxi][lxxxi]
Most of her readers are all too aware of her love of present
participles, presumably used to create the illusion of a “present”
presence. In addition, as Richard
Bridgeman points out, by 1935 she claimed to see no difference between poetry
and prose.[lxxxii][lxxxii]
However, her involvement with most of the paraphernalia of the
incarnational matrix is not central to her work, since she has no transcendent
vision to which to devote her energies.
Although Ezra
Pound set himself the task of representing a transcendent vision, a
“bust-through from the quotidian,” his theoretical writings on poetry do not
rely upon, although they borrow from, the incarnational matrix. His major use of the matrix is to insist
upon the pharmaceutical potency of prose:
Poetry
must be as well written as prose… no man can now write really good verse unless
he knows Stendhal and Flaubert… [Yeats] has driven out the inversion and
written with prose directness.[lxxxiii][lxxxiii]
Among academic
critics, the incarnational matrix continues to flourish, with varying
results. J. Hillis Miller, for example,
invokes the matrix to help express his enthusiasm for William Carlos Williams:
Williams’
aim is precisely to make the world visible as a thing in itself… The poem
called ‘The Yellow Chimney’ demonstrates the way this technique can take on
substance and presence… the power to make the reader see that such words
(“that,” “at,” “not,” “of,” “but,” “the”) are as much things as nouns
and verbs is one of the supreme triumphs of Williams’ art…. Word as things
incarnating their meanings become a set of fluid energies whose life exists
only in the present… The major difficulty in reading Williams’ poetry is to
become accustomed to the ways in which he uses words not as names but as
things.[lxxxiv][lxxxiv]
Clearly,
Swift’s parody could not deter Miller, whose theological tendencies helped to
provide this outburst, from drawing upon incantatory material that had inflamed
Philo, the Kabbalists, Sprat, Fènèlon, Coleridge, and will undoubtedly continue
to provoke future writers.
The last
example provides a demonstration that the matrix penetrates beyond the borders
of literature with a capital L; in analyzing an advertisement for Sunkist
orange juice, Leo Spitzer correctly insists:
When
business becomes poetic for whatever reasons, it must subject itself to the
ancient laws of poetry.[lxxxv][lxxxv]
The
advertisement strongly suggests an identity shared by the orange and the sun;
Spitzer compares the representation of the orange juice to medieval
representations of Christ, as the copywriter tries to produce, “a dream-like
reality: the consumer may have the
illusion, for a moment, of drinking nectar at the source.”[lxxxvi][lxxxvi]
PRACTIONERS: FROM AMRBOSE TO DANTE
Had the
incarnational matrix fed theorists only, it certainly would not have survived
any length of time, since their attempts to reach the comparative calm of
comprehensive, abstract domain generally vitiate the imaginative appeal of the
material upon which they work. Poets,
writers of fiction, and dramatists, however, kept the matrix alive and working,
not only in the imaginations of their peers, but in the popular imagination as
well
The chronological
arrangement of this chapter, as well as of the previous one, is not intended to
imply that specific earlier writers categorically incited or influenced
specific later ones, although such transactions certainly occurred often. Instead, I suspect that the elements of the
incarnational matrix summon each other according to a process described by
Gaston Bachelard:
Metaphors are not
simple idealizations which take off like rockets only to display their
insignificance on bursting in the sky, but… on the contrary metaphors summon
one another and are more coordinated than sensations, so much so that a poetic
mind is purely and simple a syntax of metaphors… there can be no poetic
flowering without a certain synthesis of poetic images.[lxxxvii][lxxxvii]
For medieval exegetes and poets (the
same man often played both roles), logos regularly provokes a
significant series of syntheses of poetic images that feed upon the
incarnational matrix.
Although
the Latin translation of the Bible replaced logos with verbum at the opening of
the book of John, thereby losing more than 500 years of lexical accretions
(including that of “prose”), the Latin hymnodists proceeded to restore many of
the losses. Ambrose, for instance,
provides one of the earliest instances of such restoration. Significantly, he chooses iambics as the
meter for one of his most successful hymns, providing a form that would have
had some of the qualities of parole for a fourth-century Italian ear, trained
in classical Latin prosody. In the
following passage, Ambrose also manages to harmonize the Old and New
Testaments, compounding the harmony with pagan material:
Splendor paternae gloriae,
de luce lucem proferens,
lux lucis et fons liminis,
dies dierum inluminans,
verusque sol inlabere,
micans nitore perpeti,
iubarque sancti sensibus.
(Brightness of fatherly glory, proffering
light from light, light of light and fountain of the threshold, illuminating
day of days, and true sun, shining with perpetual brightness, glory of the Holy
Ghost, fall upon and pour into our hearts).[lxxxviii][lxxxviii]
In these two stanzas, Ambrose has associated the Gospel’s pneuma (spiritus) with a lyric passage from the thirty-fifth Psalm (apud te est fons vitae, et in lumine tuo
videbimus), as Walpole indicates,
thus connecting breath and pêgê, while compounding the mixture with the
light of the sun. Walpole also suggests
that line five echoes Aeneas’ prayer to Apollo: da pater augurium
atque animis inlabere nostris;
Ambrose thus manages to harmonize pagan and Christian metaphorical uses of the
sun, in a particularly elegant illustration of what Leo Spitzer calls an
inclusive sensibility.[lxxxix][lxxxix]
At the conclusion
of Splendor paternae gloriae, a series of images of light culminates in
an assertion of the categorical identity of father, son and light, producing a
paradigmatic model of the Christian transmission of the incarnational matrix:
laetus dies hic transeat,
pudor sit ut diluculum,
fides velut meridies,
crepusculum mens nesciat.
aurora cursus provehit,
aurora totus prodeat,
in Patre tutus Filius,
et totus in Verbo Pater.
(May the joyous day arrive, may modesty be
like the break of day, and faith like noon, may the mind know no twilight. Dawn begins its journey, may the dawn come
forth entirely, may the son come forth safely in the father, may the father
come forth entirely in the Word).[xc][xc]
In
another hymn, Ambrose contrasts literal seed with a simultaneously literally
and figurative breath; such pneuma he represents as capable of producing flesh
which is Word; the Word proceeds to grow in Mary’s womb (a figuratively as well
as literally “tilled field”), which in turn is thought of as an enclosure, a
temple, and as a shelter not from the sun, but for the son:
Non ex virile semine
Sed mystico spiramine
Verbum Dei factum est caro,
Fructusque ventris floruit.
Alvus tumescit virginis,
Claustrum pudoris permanet,
Vexilla virtutum micant
Versatur in temple Deus.
(Not out of the male seed, but out of
spiritual breath the word of God was made flesh, and the fruit of her womb
flourished. The virgin’s belly swells,
her hymen remains intact, the banners of virtue shine, God is at rest in his
temple).[xci][xci]
The elements of the
incarnational matrix that emerge and combine in Ambrose’s hymns become
commonplace in later hymns. The phrase,
fons luminis, for example, supplies a usefully mystical
synaesthesia by means of which to represent the doctrinally thorny concept of
grace. In sixth-century iambics,
Venantius Fortunatus writes of a liquid purgative, teaching his listeners that
the pharmakos offered by the Word of God made flesh is
grace:
accedite ergo digni
ad gratiam lavacri
quo fonte recreati
refulgeatis agni.
hic gurges est fidelis,
purgans liquore mentes:
dum rore corpus udat,
peccata tergit unda.
(Therefore, come, you who are worthy, to the
grace of baptism, by means of which fountain you may shine as born-again
lambs. Here is the faithful flood that
purifies minds with its liquor: while
it wets the body with its dew, the wave washes away sins).[xcii][xcii]
In a Pentecostal
hymn, the image of drinking provokes Adam of St. Victor to make some of the
same connections, and then to add the elements of language, pharmakon, and presence. First he
concentrates on the liquid nature of grace:
Utres novi, non vetusti,
sunt capaces novi musti,
vasa paret vidua,
liquorum dat Elisaeus,
nobis sacrum rorem Deus,
si corda sint congrua.
Non hoc musto vel liquore,
non hoc sumus digni rore,
Si discords moribus,
In obscures vel divisis
non potest haec paraclisis
Habitare cordibus.
(New bottles, not old ones, are capable of
holding fresh wine, the vessel seems empty, Elisha gives liquid, God gives us
the sacred gift of dew. We are not
worthy of the wine, or liquor, or dew, if we behave badly; the Holy Ghost
cannot inhabit dark or divided minds).[xciii][xciii]
Christ’s presence is a pharmakon against spiritual poisoning, a light as
well as a salve, a condiment with mysterious properties when introduced into
water:
Consolator alme, veni,
linguas rege, corda leni,
nihil fellis aut veneni
sub tua praesentia.
Nil jucundum, nil amoenum,
nil salubre, nil serenum,
nihil dulce, nihil plenum
sine tua gratia.
Tu lumen est et unguetum
tu caeleste condimentum,
aquae ditans elementum
virtute mysterii…[xciv][xciv]
(Come, loving consoler, control our tongues,
soften our hearts; in your presence there is no poison or venom. Nothing pleasant, beautiful, healthful,
plentiful, serene or sweet can exist without your grace. You are the light and the ointment, the
celestial condiment, enriching the element of water by the power of your
mystery).
Perhaps the strongest evidence of the
popularity and ubiquity of the elements of the incarnational matrix,
particularly those associated with drink, is the fact that they appear in the
best surviving medieval parodies of sacred song. For example, one of the most popular poems on the Annunciation
begins with an apostrophe to the Logos:
Verbum bonum et suave
personemus illud Ave,
per quod Christi fit conclave
virgo, mater, filia…
(Let us shout that good and pleasant word,
“Ave,” by means of which the virgin, mother, and daughter was made a chamber
for Christ).
The parody substitutes wine for Word, plays with coincidentia oppositorum, and evokes the incarnation by its use of presence:
vinum bonum et suave,
bonis bonum, pravis prave,
cunctis dulcis sapor, ave,
mundane laetitia.
Ave felix creatura,
quam produxit vitis pura,
omnis mensa fit secura
in tua praesentia.
(Hail, good and pleasant wine, good for the
good, bad for the bad, sweet taste for all, worldly joy. Hail, happy creature, whom the pure vine has
produced; in your presence every table becomes tranquil).[xcv][xcv]
The most masterful
game played with the elements of the incarnational matrix in medieval parody,
however, occurs in the most famous passage in the Confessio of the
Archpoet. Anticipating some of the
shenanigans Rabelais creates in the episode of the Dive Bouteille, the
Archpoet asks God’s grace for a potatori, “drinker,” that when the lamp of the soul
is lit by wine (and not, he insists, the wine of the Eucharist),
his nectar-soaked heart will transcend the phenomenal world:
Meum est propositum in taberna mori,
Ut sint vina proxima morietis ori.
Tunc cantabunt letius angelorum chori:
“sit deus propitius huic potatori.”
Poculis accenditur animi lucerna;
Cor inbutum nectare volat ad superna.
Mihi sapit dulcius vinum de taberna
Quam quod aqua miscuit presulis pincerna.
(I intend to die in a tavern, that wine may
be close to my dying mouth. Then the
chorus of angels will joyfully sing:
“May God be kind to this drinker.”
The lamp of the soul is kindled by drink; a heart imbued with nectar
flies to heaven. Wine from a tavern
tastes sweeter to me than that watery stuff the priest mixes for the Host).[xcvi][xcvi]
Although writing is a solar activity, the Archpoet continues, Bacchus
must precede Apollo, to assure the presence of pneuma:
Tales versus facio, quale vinum bibo,
Nihil possum facere nisi sumpto cibo;
nihil valent penitus que ieiunus scribo;
Nasonem post calicem carmine preibo.
Mihi numquam spiritus poetrie datur,
Nisi prius fuerit venter bene satur;
dum in arce cerebri Bachus dominatur,
in me Phebus irruit et miranda fatur.
(The quality of my verses corresponds to the
quality of the wine I drink; unless I have eaten, I can’t do a thing; nothing I
write when hungry is worth anything.
After a cup I shall surpass Ovid.
The spirit of poetry never visits me unless my stomach has been well
filled. Once my brain has been taken
over by Bacchus, Phoebus enters me and speaks wonders).[xcvii][xcvii]
Secularizing the
scared, and consequently profaning it, is the Archpoet’s favorite game, and
drinking is an activity which inspires him to play the game outrageously. At the conclusion of Fama tuba dante sonum, having portrayed himself as one prone to
satyriasis and dipsomania, he asks the Archbishop’s forgiveness, offering to
the branch for the Archbishop’s vine, in what would have been detected by many
members of his audience as a blatant allusion to the role John played for
Christ:
Quioquid in me malum scitis
Amputabo, si velitis.
Ne nos apprehendat sitis,
Ero palmes et tu vitis.
(If you wish, I shall cut off whatever
offends you. That we may not thirst, I
shall be the branch, and you the vine.)[xcviii][xcviii]
The poem ends with the Archpoet borrowing the speech of the Logos, as Heinrich Krefeld remarks, for a joke: “Wie das ganze Gedicht eine Parodie ist, so schliesst est mit der
Parodierung eines Herrenwortes.”[xcix][xcix]
The previous
examples in this section have been either in iambic or in accentual meters –
forms that carry with them some of the resonance of sermo cottidianus, or parole, the spoken rather than the written language. The twelfth-century satiric and allegorical
poet Alanus de Insulis supplies an example of the perpetuation of the
incarnational matrix in relatively “sublime” hexameters early in the Anticlandianus, representing himself in elaborately designed, consciously artificial êcriture as a man dipped in a pêgê properly tilling a field germinated by the
sun:
Autoris mendico stilum falerasque poete,
Ne mea segnicie Clio directa senescat,
Ne iacent calamus scabra rubigine torpens.
Scribendi novitate vetus invenescere carta
Gaudet, et antiques cupiens exire latebras
Ridet, et in tenui lascivit harundine musa.
Fonte tua sic, Phebe, tum perfunda poetam,
Ut compluta tuo mens arida flumine, germen
Donet, et in fructus concludat germinis
usum.
(Pen of an author I beg, and trappings of a
poet, lest my dispirited Muse, tardy, grow powerless, lest the reed lie in
rust-scabbed desuetude. With the
freshness of writing an old papyrus rejoices to be young again, and laughs,
being eager to come out of its ancient hiding-place; and in the thin reed the
Muse sings. In thy fount, Phoebus,
steep thy poet, that his parched soul, laved in thy stream, may give forth a
seed, and the cultivation of that seed may end in fruits).[c][c]
Even more
elaborate, complex, and extended are the variations Dante composes on the
incarnational matrix, as those familiar with the Commedia and with its most
convincing modern readings must certainly have anticipated. Charles Singleton has argued compellingly
that, “the allegory of the Divine
Comedy is grounded in the mystery
of the Incarnation.”[ci][ci]
To represent the mystery, Dante adopts a rhetorical strategy that
resembles that of Socrates as described by Alcibiades, and of the Bible as
Augustine and Auerbach read it. As
Marcia Colish describes the strategy, it reinforces the paradoxical dependence
of sublimity upon humility to represent the Logos:
The keynote in Dante’s figurative comparison
is always in the commonplace and the familiar.
Dante aims at expressing the strange and wondrous things which he
experiences in the other world of the spirit in terms of this world so that
they will be immediately and utterly recognizable to his audience. His motive is didactic, and the underlying
rationale of his imagery is Incarnational Typology.[cii][cii]
The same rationale underlies Dante’s choice of Italian, and not the
more universal Latin, as the language in which to write his major work; the
vulgar is the more noble tongue, as he asserts in De Vulgari Eloquentia:
Harum quoque duarum nobilior est vulgaris: tum quia
prima fuit humanis generi usitata; tum quia totus orbis ipsa perfruitur, licet
in diversas prolationes et vocabula sit divisa; tum quia naturalis est nobis,
cum illa potius artificialis existat.
(Of the two languages, the vulgar is more
noble: it is the first one human beings use, the entire world makes us of it,
although with different pronunciations and spellings; it is natural for us,
while the other is artificial).[ciii][ciii]
In describing his
own writings, Dante makes a striking analogy between his own activity as an
exegete, and Christ’s activity as the miracle-working Logos; he equates his own commentary with the sun:
This commentary shall be that bread with
which thousands shall be filled; and baskets full of it shall remain over… This
shall be a new light and a new sun, which shall rise when the old sun shall
set, and shall shine on those who are in darkness and mist because of the old
sun which gives no light to them.[civ][civ]
The sun is an appropriate figure for God, Dante agrees with St.
Bonaventure, Hrabanas Maurus and a host of other Christian exegetes:
Nullo sensibile in tutto lo mundo e più degno di
farsi essemplo di Dio ch’el sole; lo quale di sensibile luce se prima e poi
tutte le corpora celestiali e le elementali allumina; cosi Dio prima se con
luce intellecttuale allumina, e poi le [creature] celestiali l’altre
intelligibili.
(Nothing in the sensible world is worthier
to be made a figure for God than the sun, which illuminates first itself, then
all the celestial bodies and the elements; thus God first illuminates himself
with intellectual life, and then the celestial and other creatures perceivable
by the intellect.[cv][cv]
In the Inferno, where there is no sun, Dante the pilgrim meets two figures who
effectively point him towards the sun:
Virgil and Brunetto Latini.
Virgil brings a message from the sun (i.e., from Beatrice, whose place
is in the sun) to Dante, who recognizes him as a fonte, or pêgê of parole):
Or se’tu quell Virgilio e quella fonte
Che spandi di parlar si largo fiume?
(Are you, the, that Virgil, that fount which
pours forth so broad a stream of speech?)
I. 79 – 80.[cvi][cvi]
Dante also frequently calls Virgil “father,” and when he recalls the
place Brunetto holds in his memory, he refers to la cara e buona imagine paterna / di voi (XV. 83). For Dante, then, the
sun, speech, pêgê are elements of the incarnational matrix
provoked by the appearance of a paternal figure; in addition, the experience is
appropriately represented in the humble garb of the vulgar tongue.
Most of the
elements of the incarnational matrix cannot play a major role in Hell, the
domain of those who have denied the good of the intellect. One of the elements, however, puts in a
significant appearance at the end of Inferno XXI, when one devil salutes another by
making a trumpet of his anus, thereby profaning the sacred possibilities of pneuma. Most of the elements,
however, must wait for Dante to enter the Earthly Paradise.
Towards the end of Purgatorio, Dante provides his first elaborate attempt to represent the
unrepresentable logos; to perform the task, he chooses the figure
of a griffin, a significantly paradoxical beast, nowhere present in the
phenomenal world, who generates blinding intensity:
e la disposition ch’a veder èe
ne li occhi pur testé dal sol percossi,
sanza la vista alquanto esser mi fée.
(And the condition of the sight that is in
his eyes just smitten by the sun left me for a time without vision). XXXII. 10 – 12.
But the most elaborate series of attempts to represent the Logos, and, more important, the nature of possible human transactions with
the Logos, occurs in Paradiso, in the continual
presence of the sun.
Near the opening of
Paradiso, Dante, like Ambrose and Alanus before him,
calls upon Apollo, god of the sun, to grant pneuma to the words that
he as a poet is about to utter; unlike Ambrose and Alanus, however, Dante
reminds us of the destructive as well as the fructifying potentiality of the
force he is invoking:
O buono Appollo, a l’ultimo lavoro
fammi del tuo valor sì fatto vaso,
come dimandi a dar l’amato alloro.
Infirno a qui l’un giogo di Parnasso
assai mi fu; ma or con amendue
m’è uopo intrar ne l’aringo rimaso.
Entra nel petto mio, e spira tue
sì come quando Marsia traesti
de la vagina de la membra sue.
O divina virtù, se mi ti presti
tanto che l’ombra del beato regno
segnata nel mio capo io manifesti,
vedra’mi al pie del tuo diletto legno
venire, a coronarmi de le foglie
che la materia e tu mi farai degno.
Si rade, volte, padre, se ne coglie…
(O good Apollo, for this last labor make me
such a vessel of your worth as you require for granting of your beloved
laurel. Thus far the one peak of
Parnassus has sufficed me, but now I have need of both, as I enter the area
that remains. Enter into my breast and
breath there as when you drew Marsyas from the sheath of his limbs. O divine Power, if you do so lend yourself
to me that I may show forth the image of the blessed realm which is imprinted
in my mind, you shall see me come to your beloved tree and crown me with those
leaves of which the matter and you shall make me worthy. So rarely are they granted, father…) I. 13 – 28.
At the same time that he invokes the paternal benevolence and power of
the sun-logos, Dante reminds us, by his vivid allusion to
the horrible fate of Marsyas, another singer (whose competitive spirit may
remind Dante of himself), that Apollo the preserver is also Apollo the
destroyer. Like a pharmakon, solar force has equal and opposite potentialities.
However, under the
protection of Beatrice, herself a figure for sanctifying grace, Dante will
experience only the positive ones.[cvii][cvii]
As he gazes on the sun at noon, the pilgrim-poet exhibits his first
symptom of transcendence: the ability
to bear the sight of the physical sun:
…e fissi li occhi al sole oltre nostr’uso.
Molto è licito là, che qui non lece
a le nostre virtù, mercé del loco
fatto per proprio de l’umana spece.
Io nol soffersi molto, né sì poco,
ch’io nol vedessi sfavillar dintorno,
com’ferro che bolgliente esce del foco;
e di subito parve giorno a giorno
essere aggiunto, come quei che puoto
avesse il ciel d’un altro sole addorno.
Beatrice tutta ne l’etterne rote
fissa con li occhi stava; e io in lei
le luci fissi, di la su rimote.
Nel suo apsetto tal dentro mi fei,
qual si fe Glauco nel gustar de l’erba
che’l fe consorto in mar de li altri dei.
Trasumanar significar per verba
non si poria; però s’essemplo basti
a cui esperienza grazia serba.
(…and I fixed my eyes on the sun beyond our
wont. Much is granted to our faculties
there that is not granted here, by virtue of the place made for humankind as
its proper abode. I did not endure it
long, nor so little that I did not see it sparkle round about, like iron that
comes molten from the fire. And
suddenly day seemed added to day, as if He who has the power had adorned heaven
with another sun. Beatrice was standing
with her eyes all fixed upon the eternal wheels, and I fixed mine on her,
withdrawn from there above. Gazing upon
her I became within me such as Glaucus became on tasting of the grass that made
him sea-fellow of the other gods. The
passing beyond humanity may not be set forth in words; therefore let the example
suffice any for whom grace reserves that experience). I. 54 – 72.
If the condition could be described in
words, trasumanar would have
to do the job; but no words will do, as Dante continually reminds us. The powerful plan that Glaucus ate certainly
was an unusually potent pharmakon, bestowing an immortality beyond the
kind which poets conventionally claim language can bestow. By rhyming l’erba with verba
in this passage, Dante also forges a suggestive link between pharmakon and
logos.
Throughout
Paradiso, the figure of Beatrice glows with a solar, divine love,
scarcely bearable to the mortal eyes of Dante.
At the same time that she represents divine grace, she also radiates
some of the qualities of Logos, and of the sophia/sapientia
figures. Certainly her antecedents go
back at least as far as Philo, and the Gnostics, but more immediate antecedents
may be found both in sacred and in secular medieval lyric. The conventional erotic poet, after
expressing his suffering, addresses the object of his love with a string of
optical hyperboles:
Tui lucent oculi
sicut solis
radii,
sicut splendor
fulguris,
qui lucem donat
tenebris.[cviii][cviii]
Adam of Saint Victor, however,
resorts to the same figures to describe the Virgin Mary as, “sol luna lucidior,
/ et luna sideribus… lux eclipsum nesciens.”[cix][cix]
In the poems of Guido Guinizelli and of Lapo Gianni, the beloved lady’s
eyes are like the sun, and the lady herself like Christ.[cx][cx]
Dante, however, gathers the arsenal compiled by his predecessors to
storm the highest citadels.
In
the transition between the fourth and firth cantos of Paradiso, for
example, Beatrice explains to the dazzled Dante that his visual difficulties
are part of a metaphysical pattern:
Guardando nel suo
Figlio con l’Amore
che l’uno e
l’altro etternalmente spira,
lo primo ed
ineffabile Valore,
quanto per mente
e per loco si gira
con tant’ordine fé, ch’esser non puote
sanza gustar di lui chi ciò rimira.
(Looking upon his Son with the love which the One
and the Other eternally breathe forth, the primal and ineffable Power made
everything that revolves through the mind or through space with such order that
he who contemplates it cannot but taste of Him). X. 1 – 6.
Dante now further complexifies the adynaton
by adding the humility-topos and the incarnational paradox (basse/altezza),
while directing our attention once again to the sun-logos:
Perch’io
lo’ngengo e l’arte e l’uso chiami
sì nol direi, che
mai s’imaginasse;
ma creder puossi e
di veder sì brami.
E se le fantasie
nostre son basse
a tanta altezza,
non è maraviglia;
che sopra’l sol
non fu occhio ch’andasse.
(Though I should
call on genius, art, and practice, I could not tell it so that it could ever be
imagined; but one may believe it – and let him long to see it. And if our fantasies are low for such a
loftiness, it is no marvel, for our eyes never knew a light brighter than the
sun). X. 43 – 48.[cxi][cxi]
Nevertheless,
Dante continues to invent new ways to express what cannot be expressed. In the sphere of Mars, he sees a brilliant
star flaming with fatherly affection for him, provoking him to recall the
meeting in Elysium between the paradigmatic Roman father and his sons –
Aeneas and Anchises – who are, not at all incidentally, the sublime figments of
Dante’s own poetic father, Virgil:
né si partì la
gemma dal suo nastro,
ma per la lista
radial trascorse,
che pave foco
dietro ad alabastro:
sì pia l’ombra
d’Anchise si porse,
se fede merta
nostra maggior musa,
quando in Eliso
del figlio s’accorse.
(Nor did
the gem depart from its ribbon, but coursed along the radial strip, and seemed
like fire behind alabaster. With like
affection did the shape of Anchises stretch forward [if our greatest Muse
merits belief], when in Elysium he perceived his son). XV. 22 – 27.
As a radiant star, Dante’s
great-great grandfather Cacciaguida is the loftiest cara e buona imagine
paterna with whom the poet has come in contact. Since Cacciaguida is far closer to the source of the Logos
than the earlier figures, his presence is far more intense, and he must reduce
the tension to his burning bow for Dante to be able to bear, much less
comprehend his great-great grandfatherly parole. To mark the transition from unbearable
logos to bearable speech, Dante represents Cacciaguida first as speaking in
Latin, the formally sublime language, before modulating into the more bearable,
though also nobilior, vernacular:
“O sanguis meus,
o superinfusa
gratia Dei, sicut
tibi cui
bis umquam coeli
ianua reclusa?”
Così quell lume:
ond’io m’attesi a lui;
poscia rivolsi
alla mia donna il viso,
e quinci e quindi
stupefatto fui;
ché dentro alli
occhi suoi ardea un riso
tal, ch’io pensai
co’miei toccar lo fondo
della mia Gloria
e del mio paradiso.
Indi, a udire e a
veder giocondo,
giunse lo spirito
al suo principio cose
ch’io non
lo’ntesi, sì parlò profondo;
né per elezion me
si mascose,
ma per necessità,
ché’l suo concetto
al segno
de’mortal si soprapuose.
E quando l’arco
dell’ardente affetto
fu sì sfogato,
che’l parlar discese
inver lo segno
del nostro intelletto,
la prima cose che
per me s’intese,
“Benedetto sia
tu’fu,” trino e uno,
che nel mio seme
se’tanto cortese!”
(“O blood
of mine, O lavish grace of God! To whom
was heaven’s gate ever twice opened, as to thee?” Thus that light; wherefore I gave my heed to it, then I turned
back my sight to my lady, and on this side and on that I was amazed, for in her
eyes was blazing such a smile that I thought with mine I had touched the limit
both of my beatitude and of my paradise.
Then, a joy to hearing and to sight, the spirit added to his first words
things I did not comprehend, so deep was his speech; nor did he conceal himself
from me by choice, but of necessity, for his conception was set above the mark
of mortals. And when the bow of his
ardent affection was so relaxed that his speech descended toward the mark of
our intellect, the first thing I understood was, “Blessed be Thou, Three and
One, who show such favor to my seed.”)
XV. 28 – 48.
In
the course of Cacciaguida’s oration, Dante repeatedly emphasizes his
great-great grandfather’s logos-like radiance, and the impossibility of
representing their encounter adequately.
The poet’s first verbal response to his ancestor’s brilliant appearance
is an elaborately courteous request for the spirit to identify himself,
beginning with yet another adynaton based on the incomparable nature of
the sun (XV. 76 – 78), and concluding with an expression of gratitude for la
paterna festa, “the paternal welcome” (I. 84).
Dante
continues to invoke paternal and solar elements of the incarnational matrix at
the opening of Canto XVII, this time comparing himself to Phaeton, and
Cacciaguida to Phaeton’s father, the sun god Helios:
Qual venne a
Climenè, per accertarsi
di cìo ch’avea
incontro a sé udito,
quei ch’ancor fa
li padri ai figli scarsi;
Tal era io, e tal
era sentito
e da Beatrice e
dalla santa lampa
che pria per me
avea mutato sito.
(As he who
still makes fathers chary toward their sons came to Clymene to be reassured
about that which he had heard against himself, such was I, and such was I
perceived to be both by Beatrice and by the holy lamp which already, for my
sake, had changed its place). XVII. 1 –
6
Again, as in the comparisons with
Marsyas and with Aeneaas, Dante is in a more favorable position than his
classical analogues, because he lives after the coming of the light or true sun
of the New Testament, and has the assistance of consequent grace (represented
in this passage by Beatrice).
When
Cacciaguida speaks as the figure of the sun-father-logos, his words are
not elaborate and ambiguous, like those of a Graeco-Roman oracle, but chiare
and preciso, like Christ’s own parole:
Ne per ambage, in
che gente folle
gia s’inviscava
pria che fosse anciso
l’Agnel di Dio
che le peccata tolle,
ma per chiare
parole e con preciso
latin rispuose
quello amor paterno,
chiuso e parvente
del suo proprio riso.
(In no dark
sayings, such as those in which the foolish folk of old once ensnared
themselves, before the Lamb of God who takes away sins was slain, but in clear
words and with precise discourse that paternal love replied, hidden and
revealed by his own smile). XVII. 31 –
36.
Paradoxically, then, the divine pharmakos,
through amor paterno, reflects its unbearable complexity not “as in a
glass darkly,” but simply and directly, to coincide with the mysterious
humility of the Incarnation.[cxii][cxii]
That Cacciaguida’s language partakes of divine parole is also
suggested by Dante’s use, in the opening of the next canto (XVIII), of del
suo Verbo, a deliberate Latinism, to refer to Cacciaguida’s speech.[cxiii][cxiii]
Throughout
Paradiso, Logos remains unbearable, not only visually, but
aurally as well; in response to Dante’s surprise at the silence in the heaven
of Saturn, Peter Damian replies:
“Tu hai l’udir
mortal si come il viso;”
rispuose a me;
“onde qui non si canta
per quel che
Beatrice non ha riso.”
(“You have the
hearing as the sight of mortals,” it replied to me, “wherefore here is no song,
for that same reason for which Beatrice has not smiled.”) XXI. 61 – 63
At the end of this canto, Dante’s
abilities again cannot match his subject, as the saints cry out against the
sacerdotal corruption, generating an unbearable, indicating both that such
corruption is intolerable, and that the voice of judgment will be unbearable
(XXI. 136 – 142).
Light,
however, is the major unbearable element in Paradiso. Although Dante’s sight improves steadily as
he ascends, his human abilities are no match for divine lux. Furthermore, he must be blinded to see, in
keeping with Platonic notions, as well as with the conventions of the Christian
conversion-experience. When Dante the
pilgrim attempts to look directly into the light that represents John, he loses
his sight again:
Qual è colui
ch’adocchia e s’argomenta
Di vedere
eclissar lo sole un poco,
Che, per veder,
non vedente diventa;
Tal mi fec’io a
quall’ultimo foco…
(As is he who
gazes and strains to see the sun a little eclipsed, and who through seeing
becomes sightless, so did I become respect to that last fire). XXV. 118 – 121.
After John has upbraided him for
trying to see what has no place in Paradise (the physical body), Dante tries to
describe what his dark bliss was like, resorting to three major images of the
incarnational matrix: breath, light,
and water:
A questo voce
l’infiammato giro
si quietò con
esso il dolce mischio
che si facea nel
suon del trino spiro,
si come, per
cessar fatica o rischio,
li remi pria
nell’acqua ripercossi,
tutti si posano
al sonar d’un fischio.
Ahi quanto nella
mente mi commossi,
quando mi volsi
per veder Beatrice,
per non poter
veder, ben ché io fossi
presso di
lei, e nel mondo felice!
(At these words
the flaming circle fell silent, together with the sweet mingling made within
the sound of the trinal breath, even as, to avoid fatigue or danger, oars till
then struck through the water, stop all at once at the sound of a whistle. Ah! how greatly was I stirred in my mind
when I turned to see Beatrice, at not being able to see, although I was near
her, and in the world of bliss). XXV.
130 – 139
After John has administered the
catechism of love, Beatrice restores Dante’s sight, much improved.[cxiv][cxiv]
When
Beatrice and Dante enter the Empyrean, he is again blinded, though for a
shorter duration, and he again experiences an improvement in his vision. As a result, he can see a river of light,
whose sources, as Singleton notes, can be derived both from the Old and New
Testaments. Dante, however, has added
the flowers of heaven to the visionary river, describing them as a kind of
script:
E vidi lume in
forma di rivera
fulvido di
fulgore, intra due rive
dipinte di
mirabil primavera.
Di tal fiumana
uscian faville vive,
e d’ogni parte si
mettien nei fiori,
quasi rubin che
oro circumscrive.
(And I saw
a light in the form of a river glowing tawny between two banks painted with
marvelous spring. From out of this
river issued living sparks and dropped on every side into the blossoms, like
rubies set in gold). XXX. 66 – 67
By rhyming vive with circumscrive,
Dante suggests, perhaps subliminally, that this luminous pêgê contains
the possibilities of creating a vital, rather than deadening écriture.
In
the last canto of the Commedia, Dante performs a final set of variations
on the incarnational matrix. After
Bernard has delivered his prayer to Mary, Dante looks up at l’etterno lume,
gradually grows able to bear its intensity, and finds that his sight now
exceeds his speech: il mio veder fu
maggio / che’l parlar mostra (11. 55 – 56). Nevertheless, he continues to produce
comparisons. First he draws an analogy
between the effect of the sun on the snow and the inability of the human
imagination to preserve a permanent vision of Logos. Then he recollects the Sybil’s ineffective écriture,
scattered forever al vento, i.e., by a kind of arbitrary, purposeless pneuma:
Cosi la neve al
sole si disigilla;
Cosi al vento ne
le foglie levi
Si perdea la
sentenza di Sibilla.
(Thus is
the snow unsealed by the sun; thus in the wind, on the light leaves, the
Sibyl’s oracle was lost). XXXIII. 64 –
66
The
book which God puts together, however, has no problems with its binding. Having asked somma luce for
assistance in the face of the final intensity of his vision, Dante turns to the
task of describing what turns out to be a literally cosmic écriture: the world lovingly bound into one volume:
Nel suo profondo
vidi che s’interna
legato con amore
in un volume,
cio che per
l’universo si squanderna:
Sustanze e
accidenti e lor costume,
quasi
conflati insieme per tal modo
che cio I dico è un semplice lume.
La forma universal di questo nodo
credo ch’i’vidi, perche piu di largo,
Dicendo questo, mi sento ch’i’godo.
(In the depth I
saw ingathered, bound by love in one single volume, that which is dispersed in leaves
throughout the universe: substance and
accidents and their relations, as though fused together in such a way that what
I tell is but a simple light. The
universal form of this knot I believe that I saw, because, in telling this, I
feel my joy increase).
XXXIII. 85 – 93
God, then, has completed a task
analogous to the one Dante has set for himself, that of writing a book. God, however, truly il miglior fabbro,
is not restrained, as Dante was at the end of Purgatorio, by lo fren
de l’arte (XXXIII. 141).[cxv][cxv]
As
Dante girds his loins for a final assault on the task of representing the
unrepresentable, he finds his tongue as inarticulate as that of an infant:
Omai sara piu
corta mia favella,
pur a quel ch’io
ricordo, che d’un fante
che bagni ancor
la lingua e la mammella.
(Now will
my speech fall more short, even in respect to that which I remember, than that
of an infant who still bathes his tongue at the breast).
Verbum infans is, of course,
a conventional medieval locution for the Christ child, with poetic descendents
as late as the lines from Eliot’s Gerontion, “the word within a word,
unable to speak a word, / Swaddled in darkness.”[cxvi][cxvi]
Dante, then, seems to be drawing yet another correspondence between
himself and Christ, as well as between his text and the Logos.
Finally,
Dante the pilgrim recognizes the ultimate inadequacy of human attempts to
represent the Logos. Brilliant
and solipsistic in its self-centered revolutions, the eternal light alone may
know itself. The poet compares his attempt
to comprehend his vision with that of a geometer squaring the circle. At this point, however, a flash from above
strikes him, and he finds himself moving in harmony with the Paradisal
universe, silenced by the limits of his book, and of his vision, now truly a verbum
infans.
Logos and Eros in Early Renaissance
Provoked
by Dante, and by their elaborate readings of Plato, Renaissance writers
regularly to the incarnational matrix to represent transcendent visionary
experience. In the most widely quoted neo-Platonic text, Castiglione’s Bembo,
for example, develops the connections between eros and logos,
arguing that the courtier may attain a glimpse of the logos through the
love of a woman, although only after he has transcended sensual passion. He who
can achieve a blindness to earthly concerns may attain transcendent insight,
divine drunkenness, and an utterly spiritual conjugation:
Pero, divenuta cieca all cose terrene, si fa
oculatissima alle celesti; e talor quando le virtu motive del corpo si trovano
dalla assidua contemplazione astratte, ovvero dal sonno legate, non essendo da
quelle impedita, sente un certo odor nascoso della vera bellizza angelica; e
rapita dal splendor di quella luce comincia ad infiammarsi, e tanto avidamente
la seque, che quasi diviene ebria e for di se stessa, per desiderio d’unirsi
con quella, parendole aver trovato l’orma di Dio, nella contemplazione del
quale, come nel suo beato fine, cerca di riposarsi.
(Therefore waxed
blind about earthly matters, is made most quick of sight about heavenly. And
otherwhile when the stirring vertues of the bodie are withdrawn alone through
earnest beholding, either fast bound through sleepe, when she is not hindered
by them, she feeleth a certaine privie smell of the right Angelike beautie, and
ravished with the shining of that light, beginneth to be inflamed, and so
greedely followeth after, that [in a manner] she waxeth droken and beside her
self with it, having found [to her weening] the footsteps of God, in the
beholding of whom [as in her happie end] she seeketh to settle her selfe).[cxvii][cxvii]
A
few pages later, drunkenness combines with other figures from the incarnational
matrix; near the conclusion of what Bembo represents as a mantic fit, a
perpetual pêgê appears, with qualities and characteristics that strongly
resemble those attributed by Dante and his predecessors to Christian grace:
Inebriaci tu a quell fonte inesausto di contentezza
che sempre diletta e mai no sazia, e a che bee delle sue vive e limpide aque da
gusto di vera beatudine. (p.
436)
(Make us drunken
with the bottomlesse fountaine of contentation, that alwaies doth delight, and
never giveth fill, and that giveth a smacke of the right blisse unto who so
drinketh of the renuing and cleare water therof). (p. 322)
Next, Bembo conceives of light as a
pharmakon, praying that God accept our souls as pharmakoi:
purga tu coi raggi della tua luce gli occhi nostri
dalla caliginosa ignoranzia, accio che piú non apprenzzino bellezza mortale, e
conoscavo che le cose che prima veder lora parea, non sono, e quelle che non
vedeano, veramente sono; accetta l’anime nostre, che a te si offeriscono in
sacrificio; abbrusciale in quella viva fiamma che consuma ogni bruttezza
materiale, accio che in tutto separate dal corpo, con perpetuo e dolcissimo
legame s’uniscano con la bellezza divina. (pp.
436 – 437)
(Purge with the shining beams of thy light our eyes
from mistie ignorance, that they may be no more set by mortall beautie, and
well perceive that the thinges which at first they thought themselves to see,
by not in deede, and those that they saw not, to be in effect. Accept our
soules, that be offered unto thy for a sacrifice. Burne them in the lively
flame that wasteth all grosse filthinesse, that after they be cleane sundred
from the bodie, they may bee coupled with an everlasting and most sweete bond
to the heavenly beauty). (p. 372)
Finally, Castiglione’s Bembo
apprehends a noumenal world in which the self, successfully “alienated” from
itself, communes with the angels, undergoes a paradoxically “vital death,” and
unites with God:
e noi da no stessi alienati, come veri amanti, nello
amato possiam, trasformarsi, e levandone da terra esser ammessi al convivio
degli angeli, dove, pasciuti d’ambrosia e nettare immortale, in ultimo moriano
di felicissima e vital morte, come gia morirona quegli antichi padri, l’anime
dei quail tu con ardentissima virtu di contemplazione rapisti dal corpo e
congiungesti con Dio. (pp. 436 –
437)
(And we severed from ourselves, may bee changed like
right lovers into the beloved, and after we be drawn from the earth, admitted
to the feast of the angels, where fed with immortall ambrosia and nectar, in
the end we may dye a most happie and lively death, as in times past died the
fathers of olde time, whose soules with most fervent zeale of beholding, thou
didst hale from the bodie, and coupledst them with God). (p. 332)
Écriture is not
present as an explicit element in Castiglione’s text, although perhaps we may
assume that his Christian neo-Platonism maskes him unable to forget Verbum
Dei.
Many of the figures of visionary rhetoric present
in Bembo’s speech reappear in the secular erotic poetry of the next two
centuries, which also suppresses or eliminates écriture as an element in
the its game, until poets like Spenser and Jean de Boyssieres again change the
game’s rules to include the sacred once again. For example, Jean de Sponde
equates his nymph’s eyes with the sun, in a sonnet that includes a kind of
solar competition:
Nimphe, serois-tu point
ceste mesme lumiere
Qui laisses dans le Ciel ta course coustumiere
A quelque Phaëton que t’ait importuné?
Ou bien, le monde est-il de deux torches orné,
De Soleil la seconde, et
de toy la premiere?[cxviii][cxviii]
In the same mode, Philippe
Desportes represents himself as unable to bear the solar splendor of his lady’s
eyes, but also as a lovingly willing pharmakos, whose pain is a necessary,
almost Christ-like sacrifice, by means of which the lady’s beauty can be
mediated for human consumption:
D’où vient qu’un beau soleil, qui luit nouvellement,
Soit à tous favorable, et à moy si contraire?
Il m’esblouit la veuë au lieu qu’il leur éclaire,
Il échaufe les coeurs, et me va consumant.
L’autre Soliel du Ciel n’offense aucunement
Le lieux qui sont privez de sa flame ordinaire:
Mais ce nouveau Soleil me cuit plus vivement,
Quand loin de ses rayons je languis solitaire.
Je
t’accuse, Nature, et me plains justement:
Car, puis qu’il me devoit porter tant de nuisance,
Attizant en mon Coeur un feu si vehement,
Que n’as-tu pour mon bien retardé sa naissance?
Tourtesfois
no nostre age heureux par sa presence,
Ne pouvoit sans mon mal voir ses yeux clairement,
Je prens toute console ma mort en patience:
Qui meurt pour le public
meurt honorablement.[cxix][cxix]
Eventually, French erotic
poetry becomes rigidly stylized in its use of lady as logos; perhaps the
most extreme example is a sonnet by Abraham de Vermeil, distinguished only by
the fact that the poet manages to get at least one soleil into each of
the fourteen lines in which he matches his mistress against the sun. She, of
course, wins the competition:
Mais si vous desbattez,
Soleils, qui de vous deux
Est soleil plus luisant et plus puissant de feux,
Soleil tes jours sont
nuicts comparez à Madame.[cxx][cxx]
Religious poets, however, continue to use the
figure, together with other elements of the incarnational matrix, to produce a
meditative poetry of some complexity. A penitential internal colloquy by Habert
illustrates the continuation into the seventeeth century of patterns familiar
from medieval hymns:
Esleve toy mon ame, adore ton Soleil. . .
Maintenant il luy plaist
en ce sainct appareil
De descendre du Ciel pour laver ton offence
Et pour te substanter
d’une pure substance
Il se donne à toy mesme, ô done à nul pareil.
Ce vin realement en son sang propre il change,
Et ce pain en sa chair, boy donc mon ame et mange. .
.
Seingneur de ces douceurs
mon ame rassasie
Et me faits par ton corps vivre eternellement.[cxxi][cxxi]
In a poem on the Eucharist,
Jean de Boyssieres apostrophizes Christ-Logos as pharmakon,
implied pharmakos, pêgê, and lux:
O Clair Surgeon, vive fontaine,
Qui ruissellant habondammant,
Du corps du Roy du firmamant,
Me sauvas d’Eternelle peine.
Sang precieux, Onde Jourdaine,
Riviere d mon sauvement,
Faits moys reluire clairement,
Et rends mon ame toute saine.
Je te suplie, o! digne Sang,
De l’arroser dans ton estang,
Elle de maux toute poluë!
Pour moy, las! tu t’es respandu:
Aussi vers toy, me suis randu,
Et a genoux je te saluë.[cxxii][cxxii]
Elsewhere, de Boyssieres
addresses Christ’s blood as light, drink, and as the ink in which the poet
himself has been written, presumably as God’s écriture:
Precieuse et digne riviere,
Par qui nous sommes en lumiere,
Oste la soif a mon esprit.
R’afreschis mes debiles veines,
Que dans les clairtez souveraines,
De ton ancre, je sois escrit.[cxxiii][cxxiii]
English poets, too, invoke elements of the
incarnational matrix to represent their visions of sacred transcendence;
Protestants show no aversion to borrowing figures their Catholic predecessors
had borrowed from antiquity. When
Edmund Spenser, for example, attempts to describe an ultimate vision in “An
Hymme of Heavenly Beautie,” one of his earliest concerns in the poem is to
discriminate between the sun as a figure for logos and the Logos
itself:
For farre aboue these heauens which here we see,
Be others farre exceeding these in light,
Not bounded, not corrupt, as these same bee,
But infinite in largenesse and in hight,
Vnmouing, vncorrupt, and spotlesse bright,
That need no Sunne t’illuminate their spheres,
But their owne natiue light farre passing theirs. (11. 64—70)[cxxiv][cxxiv]
A few lines later, he
acknowledges his debt to Plato, who pointed him in the right direction:
Faire is the heauen, where happy soules haue place,
In full enioyment of felicitie,
Whence they doe still
behold the glorious face
Of the diuine eternall Maiestie;
Most faire is that, where those Idees on hie,
Enrauged be, where Plato so admired,
And pure Intelligences from God inspired. (11. 78—84)
Plato, however, had
underestimated the extent of the domain upon which he had focused; Spenser now
turns the tribute to Plato into only one of a cumulative series of adynata
designed to approach representing the ineffability of God. Born before Christ, Plato could not have
known of the ten celestial bands, whose lux is distributed according to
a precise hierarchy of fairness:
Yet fairer is that
heauen, in which doe raine
The soueraine Powres and mightie Potentates,
Which in their high
protections doe containe
All mortall Princes, and imperiall States;
And fayrer yet, whereas the royall Seates
And heauenly Dominations are set,
From whom all earthly gouernance is fet.
Yet farre more faire be those bright Cherubins,
Which all with golden wings are ouerdight,
And those eternall burning Seraphins,
Which from their faces darte out fierie light;
Yet fairer than they both,
and much more bright
Be th’Angels and Archangels, which attend
On Gods owne person, without rest or end. (11. 85—98)
The final fairness, of
course, rests with God, who is greater than the sum of all fairnesses:
These thus in faire each other farre excelling,
As to the Highest they approach more neare,
Yet is that Highest farre beyond all telling,
Fairer than all the rest which there appeare,
Though all their beauties ioynd together were:
How then can mortall tongue hope to expresse,
The image of such endless perfectnesse? (11. 99—106)
The question is not purely rhetorical, since
Spenser now proceeds to attempt an answer.
Unable to bear direct contact with the various abstract qualities of
divine Logos which he wishes to contemplate and to describe, he turns to
a mediating agent, or shelter from the sun.
Before doing so, however, he again insists upon the difficultly of the
task. God displays himself in the
world, “As in a looking glasse,” (1. 116), but even the “Angels selues can not
endure his sight (1. 120). What chance,
then, has frail man to perceive the nature of God?
But we fraile wights,
whose sight cannot sustaine
The suns bright beames, when he on vs doth shyne,
But that their points
rebutted backe againe
Are duld, how can we see with feeble eyne,
The glory of that Maiestie diuine,
In sight of whom both Sun and Moone are darke,
Compared to his least resplendent sparke? (11. 120—126)
The answer for Spenser, as
it was for many before and after him, is to look upon the world God made, a
kind of figurative écriture, or “brasen booke:”
The meanes therefore which vnto vs is lent,
Him to behold, is on his workes to looke,
Which he hath made in beauty excellent,
And in the same, as in a brasen book,
To read enrigistred in euery nooke
His goodnesse, which his beautie doth declare.
For all that’s good, is beautifull and faire. (11. 127—133)
Through heavenly
contemplation, Spenser continues, man may imitate the eagle and look upon “that
bright Sunne of glorie,” but with humility as well. Sublimity and humility merge in the unbearable presence of the Logos:
Humbled with feare and awfull reuerence,
Before the footestoole of his Maiestie,
Throw thy selfe downe with trembling innocence,
Ne dare looke vp with corruptible eye.
On the dred face of that great Deity,
For feare, lest if he chaunce to look on thee,
Thou turne to nought, and quite confounded be. (11. 134—40)
More adynata follow,
combined with reminders of the terrible nature of God’s wrath, until Spenser
returns to the impossible task of describing the brilliance of the logos,
discovering within the burning bosom of Truth the figure of a woman:
With the great glorie of that wondrous light,
His throne is all encompassed around,
And hid in his owne
brightness from the sight
Of all that looke theron with eyes vnsound:
And underneath his feet
are to be found
Thunder, and lightning, and tempestuous fyre,
The instruments of his auenging yre.
There in his bosom Sapience doth sit,
The soueraine dearling of the Deity,
Clad like a Queene in royall robes, most fit
For so great power and peerelesse maiesty.
And all with gemmes and
iewels gorgeously
Adornd, that brighter then the stares appeare,
And make her natiue brightness seem more cleare. (11. 162—185)
This figure resembles Sapientia,
Nous, Mary, and the Holy Ghost,[cxxv][cxxv] although through no single figura may
contain her, as Spenser insists in yet another adynaton:
The fairenesse of her face no tongue can tell,
For she the daughters of all wemens race,
And Angels eke, in beautie doth excel,
Sparkled on her from Gods own goodly grace,
That it doth farre exceed all humane thought,
Ne can on earth compared to be ought. (11. 204—210)
Spenser now permits an
explicitly erotic component to the enter the effictio, associating logos
with Aphrodite, as Dante, Castiglione, Philo, and others had before him. However, he uses the comparison more to
insist upon a difference than a likeness between the pagan representative of
transcendent sexuality and the Christian neo-Platonist figura. An English Puritan, Spenser insists upon the
superiority of the later creation:
Ne could that Painter (had he liued yet)
Which pictured Venus with so curious quill,
That all posteritie admyred it,
Haue purtrayd this, for all his maistring skill;
Ne she her selfe, had she remained still,
And were as faire, as fabling wits do fayne,
Could once come neare this beauty souerayne.
But had those wits the wonders of their dayes,
Or that sweete Teian
Poet which did spend
His plenteous vaine in setting forth her prayse,
Seene but a glims of this, which I pretend,
How wondrously would he her face commend,
Aboue that Idole of his fayning thought,
That all the world shold with his rimes be fraught? (11. 211—224)
Combining the humility-topos
with the impossibility-topos, Spenser now resigns the task of
describing Sapientia-logos to the angels, in a passage that reads like a
serious parody, in the tradition of the spoudogelaios, of erotic
panegyric:[cxxvi][cxxvi]
How then dare I, the nouice of his Art,
Presume to picture so diuine a wight,
Or hope t’expresse her least perfections part,
Whose beautie filles the earth with shadow of her
sight?
Ah gentle Muse thou art too weake and faint,
The pourtraict of so heauenly hew to paint.
Let Angels which her
goodly face behold
And see at will, her soveraigne praises sing,
And those most sacred mysteries vnfold,
Of that faire loue of mightie heauens king.
Enough is me t’admyre so heauenly thing,
And being thus with her huge loue possest,
In th’only wonder of her selfe to rest. (11. 225—238)
Clearly, the incarnational
matrix thoroughly penetrates Spenser’s “Hymn of Heavenly Beauty,” with
particular emphasis on elements also at work in conventional, secular, erotic
panegyric. A far more playful, no less
brilliant parody of this phenomenon occurs in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s
Lost.
Shakespeare makes use of the incarnational matrix
not as a visionary poet, but as a guardian of linguistic propriety. Pneuma as the source of the vitality
is clearly the provocation for the line, “Where speech most breathes, e’en in
the mouth of men.” When he adopts an
anti-Petrarchan posture, attacking the hyperboles of erotic panegyric, he
rejects the standard identification of the beloved woman with the logos,
insisting, “My mistresses’ eyes are nothing like the sun.” However, his most elaborate use of the
incarnational matrix is in dramatic form.
Much of the recent criticism of Love’s Labour’s
Lost revolves around the hypothesis that the play is, “a debate on the
right uses of rhetoric, poetry, and the imagination.”[cxxvii][cxxvii]
In fact, the debate depends for its movement as much on the elements of
the incarnational matrix as on the rules of syllogistic reasoning. The play contains not one, but two pendants
with an absurdly blind faith in écriture, as well as a woman who serves
as a figure for logos-Sapientia; in addition, the play offers frequent
contrasts of light and blindness, the fear of language as a kind of poisonous pharmakon,
and a playfully dramatic solution that compels Berowne, the male protagonist,
to find a more appropriate use for his rhetorical powers by offering them as a
curative pharmakon for those who are literally ill.
Early in the play, Berowne, “the truest Platonist
of the lot,”[cxxviii][cxxviii] delivers a series of exquisite
commonplaces on light and blindness, as part of his attack on devoting one’s
life to a study of écriture:
Why, all delights are
vain, but that most vain
Which, with pain purchased, doth inherit pain:
As, painfully to pore upon a book,
To seek the light of
truth, while truth the while
Doth falsely blind the eyesight of his look.
Light, seeking light doth light of light beguile;
So, ere you find where light in darkness lies,
Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes. (I.i. 72—79)[cxxix][cxxix]
The proper use of the eyes,
according to Berowne, is to direct them towards women:
Study me how to please
the eye indeed
By fixing it upon a fairer eye,
Who dazzling so, that eye shall be his heed
And give him light that it was blinded by. (I.i. 80—83)
Berowne now calls upon the
figure of sun-as-logos to emphasize the futility of attempting to
approach wisdom through grammata:
Study is like the heaven’s glorious sun,
That will not be deep-searched with saucy looks.
Small have continual
plodders ever won
Save base authority from others’ books. (I.i. 84—87)
The attack on écriture
provokes the king to an appreciative paradox (one that applies equally well to
many other writers): “How well he’s read to reason against reading!” (1.
94). Longville’s response to Berowne’s
performance draws upon yet another element of the incarnational matrix: the
user of language as a gardener. In this
case, Longville suggest that language is in need of protection from the one who
has set out ostensibly to care for it: “He weeds the corn and still lets grow
the weeding.” (1. 96).
The most extensive play on the elements of the
incarnational matrix occurs in Act Four, in the debate between the king and
Berowne on the subject of the comparative value of the women whom they
love. Like the sonneteers whose epitome
he is, Berowne compares Rosaline to the sun:
Who sees the heavenly Rosaline,
That, like a rude and savage man of Inde
At the first op’ning of the gorgeous East,
Bows not his vassal head and, strooken blind,
Kisses the base ground with obedient breast?
What peremptory eagle-sighted eye
Dares look upon the heaven of her brow
That is not blinded by her majesty? (IV.iii. 220—227)
The king’s reply, an attempt
to extend the figure proposed by Berowne, is relatively feeble:
My love, her mistress, is a gracious moon;
She, an attending star, scarce seen a light. (IV.iii.229—230)
Berowne does not accept the
king’s correction, insisting instead that his lady is the sun, staking his
identity on the proposition:
My eyes are then no eyes, nor I Berowne.
Oh, by for my love, day would turn to night! (IV.iii.231—232)
Warming to his task, Berowne now rejects, with an
elaborate flourish, any assistance “painted rhetoric” might give him in
describing Rosaline, while at the same time pulling the topos of
outdoing out of his rhetorical bag of tricks:
Lend me the flourish of all gentle tongues—
Fie, painted rhetoric! O, she needs it not!
To things of sale a seller’s praise belongs:
She passes praise; then praise too short doth blot. (IV.iii.237—240)
The next topos
Berowne imports is that of Natura; he offers Rosaline as a figure able
to reverse the process of time, even if only momentarily, and therefore able to
turn senex into puer:[cxxx][cxxx]
A withered hermit, five-score winters worn,
Might shake off fifty, looking in her eye.
Beauty doth varnish age as if new’born,
And gives the crutch of the cradle’s infancy.
O, ‘tis the sun that maketh all things sine. (IV.iii. 241—245)
Thus far in the debate,
then, the idealized female figure partakes of the qualities of the sun,
logos, and Natura. Berowne,
however, has only begun his task.
Reworking his earlier material, Berowne maintains
that the path to wisdom lies through the eyes of wisdom:
And where that you have vowed to study, lords,
In that each of you have forsworn his book,
Can you still dream and pore and thereon look?
For when would you, my lord, or you, or you,
Have found the ground of
study’s excellence
Without the beauty of a woman’s face? (IV.iii. 295—300)
Furthermore, women’s eyes
may replace books, teachers, and they are sources, if not precisely fountains,
of fire:
From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive:
They are the ground, the books, the academes,
From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire. (IV.iii. 301—303)
Dull, uninspired reading
works like a negative pharmakon:
Why, universal plodding poisons up
The nimble spirits in the arteries,
As motion and long-during action tires
The sinewy vigor of the traveler. (IV.iii. 304—307)
On the other hand, love
provides a negative pharmakon, improving human vision to a level of
ability superiority to that of the eagle himself, the only creature capable of
gazing equably upon the sun:
But love, first learned in a lady’s eyes,
Lives not alone immured in the brain,
But with the motion of all elements,
Courses as swift as thought in every power
Above their functions and their offices.
It adds a precious seeing to the eye:
A lover’s eyes will gaze an eagle blind. (IV.iii. 326—333)
Berowne, then, is a brilliant manipulator of
visionary rhetoric; however, in the last act of the play, the object of his
hyperbolic panegyric finds that he has improperly directed his use of
language. Taking on the role of
therapist herself, Rosaline prescribes a cure for Berowne’s frivolous
expenditure of his linguistic wealth:
Oft have I heard of you, my Lord Berowne,
Before I saw you, and
the world’s large tongue
Proclaims you for a man replete with mocks,
Full of comparisons and wounding flouts,
Which on you all estates will execute
That lie within the mercy of your wit.
To weed this wormwood from your fruitful brain
And therewithal to win me, if you please,
Without the which I am not to be won,
You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day
Visit the speechless
sick, and still converse
With groaning wretches; and your task shall be
With all the fierce
endeavor of your wit
To enforce the pained impotent to smile. (V.ii. 842—855)
In her role as Sapientia,
assigned rhetorically to her by Berowne, but now assumed substantively on her
own initiative, Rosaline recognizes Berowne’s own prowess, and, like an expert
gardener, directs his growth.[cxxxi][cxxxi]
No longer the narcissistic exhibitionist, Berowne will now direct his
energies towards altruistic ends, at least for the next year.
His first response to the new assignment is,
however, like that of many a beginning student, to declare it an impossibility:
To move wild laughter in the throat of death?
It cannot be; it is impossible;
Mirth cannot move a soul in agony. (V.ii. 856—858)
Rosaline then reveals the
deliberate, familiar paradox inherent in the assignment, which she has devised
as a lesson in linguistic decorum.
Humbled, Berowne may become a fit mate for a wise woman:
Why, that’s the way to choke a gibing spirit,
Whose influence is begot
of that loose grace
Which shallow laughing hearers give to fools.
A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear
Of him that hears it, never in the tongue
Of him that makes it. Then, if sickly ears,
Deafed with the clamor of their own dear groans,
Will hear your idle scorns, continue then,
And I will have you and that fault withal;
But if they will not, throw away that spirit,
And I shall find you empty of that fault,
Right joyful of your reformation. (V.ii. 859—870)
Obediently, Berowne agrees
to “jest a twelvemonth in a hospital.” (1.872), leading us to expect an
improvement in his character and in his prospects for matrimony.
No improvements, however, can be expected of the
stick-figure literalists of écriture in Love’s Labour’s Lost;
they can only become permanent models of rhetorical stupidity.
Sir Nathaniel, for instance, is an absurd
Christian exegete, “. . . devoted to the primacy of the Word, as expressed in
the words of Holy Writ and the writings of the Church Fathers.”[cxxxii][cxxxii]
For him, “the Word becomes only another collection of quotable words,
the Logos is evident mainly as logorrhea.”[cxxxiii][cxxxiii]
Another worshipper of grammata, Holofernes
recites an absurd alliterative poem, and later plays the part of Judas
in the pageant of the Nine Worthies; although he thinks of himself as Judas
Macabee, in the eyes of Dumaine and Berowne, he seems to be Judas Iscariot, the
betrayer of the Logos.
Dull seems the least malignant of the group, and
the fact that his riddle is solved by answering “the moon,” symbol of écriture,
may have some playful significance.
Armado produces a series of examples of
grotesquely inappropriate rhetorical extravagance, presumably to include
aristocrats among the abusers of language, whose company Berowne forswears. Promising to abandon the use of “speeches
penned,” and “taffeta phrases,” he decides to adhere to sermo humilis:
“Honest plain words best pierce the ear of grief.” (V.ii. 403, 407, 761)
Though good sense in respect to language wins out
in the end, at least one reader has been provoked to remark that, “the dominant
note in Shakespeare’s play is anti-spiritual.”[cxxxiv][cxxxiv]
Such a remark seems to proceed from the spirit of Holofernes; instead,
the play seems to call for a more accurate vision of the spiritual, and for a
more appropriate focus for spiritual impulses.
Such a lesson seems to have been one of Rabeleis’
objectives also, in the massive parody of écriture he produced, between
appointments with his patients, earlier in the Renaissance.
RABELAIS: GROTESQUE VARIATIONS ON THE INCARNATIONAL MATRIX
Rabelais plays explicitly, elaborately,
relentlessly, and immediately with the major elements of the incarnational
matrix. A doctor of medicine,
accustomed to dispensing literal drugs to his patients, he describes his
writings as a figurative extension of that activity:
C’est pourquoy
fault ouvrir le livre et soigneusement peser ce que y est déduict. Lors congnoistrez que la drogue dedans
contenu est bien d’aultre valeur que ne promettoit la boite, c’est à dire que
les matières icy traictées ne sont tant folastres comme le titre au’dessus prétendoit. (p.
26)
(You must open
this book, and carefully weight its contents.
You will discover then that the drug within is far more valuable than
the box promised). (p.
38)[cxxxv][cxxxv]
Even as Socrates’ ugly exterior
belied his soul’s immensity, concealing under an indecorous exterior, “une
celeste et impreciable drogue” (p. 25), which Rabelais identifies with divin
scavoir, so his own book conceals, beneath an absurd surface, true Sapientia,
a kind of liquid logos.
Like
the Arch-Poet, he defiantly declares himself a dedicated drinker, claiming the
great poets of the past as dedicated fellow-drinkers. Rabelais, however, outdoes the Arch-Poet in inventiveness, as
well as in sociability, asking his readers to join him in a drink. Throughout the text, drinking remains an
obsessive activity, culminating in the discovery of the oracle of the bottle,
an episode heavy with Bacchic, Kabbalistic, and Christian overtones, that
occurs during the possibly apocryphal fifth book.
Drinking
and speaking are almost always simultaneous activities in Rabelais’ world. In fact, the first extended conversation in
the first book is hardly a conversation at all, but rather a chaotic, obscene,
sacrilegious concatenation of words and phrases spewed out by drunkards,
producing what looks and sounds very much like a parody of the logos,
particularly as Boulenger describes its form: “(c’est) une conversation où
toute enchaine,” in which, “on ne séparait pas toutes ses répliques.”[cxxxvi][cxxxvi]
Gargantua’s
first words on entering en lumiere de ce monde are: “A boyre! a boyre! a
boyre!” (p. 46). His first tutor is “un
grand docteur sophiste,” whose name, Thubal Holofernes, Shakespeare will later
give to his own insufferable pedant.
Devoting more than five years to teaching his pupil the alphabet, and
more than thirteen to grammar and elementary text-books, Holofernes provides a
grotesque illustration of the lengths to which a worshipper of Thoth may
go. In obedience to his teacher,
Gargantua also carries around with him a writing-desk that weighs several tons,
on which he copies all his lessons in Gothic script, until the death of his
syphilitic teacher relieves him of the burden of learning according to the
letter.
Holofernes’
replacement is a true teacher, or philosopher, Ponocrates, whos first act is to
order a pharmakon administered to purge Gargantua’s brain of corrupt and
perverse notions engendered by the mind-numbing mnemonic exercises of the
Sophists. Ponocrates’ next prescription
is to order a liberal dose, to be administered daily, of la divine
Escripture:
Se esveilloit doncques Gargantua environ quatre
heures du matin. Cependant qu’on le
frotoit, lui estoit leue quelque pagine de la divine Escripture haultement et
clerement, avec pronunciation competente a la matiere, et a ce estoit commis un
jeune paige, natif de Bache, nomme Anangostes.
Selon le propos et argument de ceste lecon souventesfoys se adonnoit a
reverer, adorer, prier et supplier le bon Dieu, duquel la leture monstroit la
majeste et jugemens merveilleux. (p.
69)
(Gargantua now
woke about four o’clock in the morning and, whilst he was being rubbed down,
had some chapter of Holy Writ read to him loudly and clearly, with a
pronunciation befitting the matter; and this was the business of a young page
called Anangnostes, a native of Basche.
Moved by the subject and argument of that lesson, he often gave himself
up to worship and adoration, to prayers and entreaties, addressed to the good
God whose majesty and marvelous wisdom had been exemplified in that reading). (p. 87)
Contact with the Logos,
then, through the live voice of a competent young reader is the correct way to insure
that a pupil will begin his day correctly.
Towards
the end of the first book, Rabelais describes the imperative inscribed above
the great gate of Theleme; among them is an attack on the enemies of Logos,
with the clear implication that within Theleme men manufacture an antidote to
the poisonous pharmakon exuded by heretics and hypocrites:
Cy entrez, vous, qui le Sainct Évangile
En sens agile
annoncez, quoy qu’on gronde:
Céans aurez un
refuge et bastille
Contre l’hostile
erreur, qui tant postille
Par son faulx
stile empoizonner le monde:
Entrez, qu’on
fonde icy la foy profonde,
Puis qu’on
confonde, et par la voix et par rolle,
Les ennemys de la
saincte parolle.
La parolle
saincte
Ja ne soit
extaincte
En ce lieu tres
sainct;
Chascun en soit
ceinct;
Chascune ayt
enceincte
La parolle
saincte. (p.
176)
Enter in here,
you who preach with vigour,
Christ’s Holy
Gospel, never mind who scoffs,
Here you will find a refuge and a tower
Against the
foeman’s error, the picked arguments,
Which falsely
seek to spread about their poison.
Enter, here let
us found a faith profound,
And then let us
confound by speech and writing,
All that are the
foemen of the Holy Writ.
Our Holy Writ and Word
For ever shall
be heard
In this most
holy spot.
Each wears it on
his heart,
Each wears it as
a sword,
Our Holy Writ
and Word. (pp.
154—155)
Here in the ideal state, Rabelais
is able to unite opposites, accepting in this particular instance the
compatibility of voix and rolle, speech and writing, as the
weapons of those who have true understanding.
Rabelais
continues, in the prologue to his second book, to extend the range of the
incarnational matrix, by composing a panegyric of his first book, describing
its pharmaceutical effects on those suffering from pox and gout, diseases
considered for the most part venereal in origin. In their agony, Rabelais says, their only comfort was to hear Gargantua
read aloud to them:
Toute leur consolation n’estoit que de ouyr lire
quelque page dudict livre, et en avons veu qui se donnoyent à cent pipes de
vieulx diables en cas que ilz n’eussent senty allégement manifeste à la lecture
dudict livre, lorsqu’on les tenoit ès lymbes, ny plus ny moins que les femmes
estans en mal d’enfant quand on leurs leist la vie de saincte Marguerite. (p. 190)
(Their one
consolation was to have pages of this book read to them. And some of them we have seen who would have
given themselves to a hundred barrels-full of old devils if they had not felt a
perceptible alleviation of their pain from the reading of the said book, while
they were being kept in the sweat-room, exactly as women do in the pangs of
child-birth when the life of St. Margaret is read to them. (p. 168)
Rabelais’ book, then, performs
exactly the task Shakespeare’s Rosaline will assign to Berowne. In addition, Rabelais reworks the
incarnational connection between eros and peîtho, commented upon
by Lain-Entralgo, to produce a passage of remarkable complexity. Balancing, for a moment, grotesque images
drawn from an abhorrent vision of diseased sexuality against the stylized,
idealized asceticism of the saint’s life, Rabelais portrays antithetical
results of sexual activity: on the one hand, disease and death, on the other
hand, created life. Both are accompanied
by pain, whose intensity would be not merely unbearable, but soul-destroying,
were it not for the pharmakon offered by orally administered écriture.
In
the second book, Rabelais also continues to pursue the connections between
drinking and speaking begun in the first book.
The Limousin, for example, whose Latinized French represents an attempt
to strangle the spoken language by means of the ancient, written language,
provokes an appropriate response from Pantagruel, who seizes him by the
throat. The Limousin promptly proceeds
to die from thirst, proving, at least to Rabelais’ satisfaction, that men
should speak the language in common use (le langaige usité) (p. 215).
Panurge,
however, the man whom Gargantua loves all his life, provides even more
inventive, and grotesque variations on the incarnational matrix.[cxxxvii][cxxxvii]
In his first appearance in the book, he speaks all languages, including
gibberish. Later, he proves himself
equal to the greatest challenge a rhetorician can face: to argue without words,
by gesture only. His opponent,
Thaumaste, proclaims that he has come to Paris to dispute with Panurge on
matters so difficult that human words would not yield a satisfactory
explanation of them. Faced with the
problem of representing the unrepresentable, Panurge carries out the task—a
kind of ultimate adynaton—by performing a series of pantomime
transactions that culminate in a barrage of obscene gestures. Rabelais’ text looks like an extravagant
expansion of the profanation of language as pneuma acted out by Dante’s
devils greeting each other with anal trumpets; his excremental reduction of paroles
humaines begins with Thaumaste’s violent response to Panurge’s gnashing
teeth:
Thaumaste, de grand hahan, se leva, mais en se
levant fist un gros pet de boulangier, car le bran vint après, et pissa
vinaigre bien fort, et puoit comme tous les diables. Les assistans commencerent se estouper les nez, car il se
conchioit de angustie. Puis leva la main
dextra, la clouant en telle faczon qu’il assembloit les boutz de tous les doigts
ensemble, et la main gauche assist toute pleine sur la poictrine. (p. 278)
(Thaumaste got up
in great alarm, but as he did so let a great baker’s fart—for the bran followed
it—pissed very strong vinegar, and stank like all the devils. Upon which the spectators began to hold
their noses, since he was shitting himself with anguish. Then he raised his right hand, clenching it
in such a fashion as to bring the ends of all his fingers together, and placed
his left hand quite flat upon his chest.) (p.
236)
Not to be outdone, Panurge
manipulates his cod-piece through a series of elaborate gestures, provoking
Thaumaste to reply with yet another parodic burst of pnuema, only to be
outdone again by Panurge, the non-pareil of flatulence:
Apres cella,
Thaumaste commenca enfler les deux joues, comme un cornemuseur, et souffloit
comme se il enfloit une vessie de porc.
A quoy Panurge mist un doigt de la gausche on trou du cul, en escalle ou
quand on hume sa soupe; ce faict, ouvre quelque peu de la bouche, et avecques
le plat de la main dextre frappoit dessus, faisant en ce un grand son et
parfond comme s’il venoit de la superficie du diaphragme par la trachee artere,
et le feist par seize foys. Mais
Thaumaste souffloit tousjours comme une oye. (pp.
278—279)
(After this,
Thaumaste began to puff up both his cheeks like a bagpiper, and blew as if he
were blowing up a pig’s bladder.
Whereupon Panurge put one finger of his right hand up his arse-hole, and
sucked in air with his mouth as a man does when eating oysters in the shell or
supping broth. This done, he slightly
opened his mouth and struck it with the flat of his right hand, making a great
deep noise, which seemed to carry from the surface of the diaphragm by way of
the trachean artery; and this he did sixteen times. But Thaumaste kept on puffing like a goose). (pp. 236—237)
Anything
Rabelais finds worth doing once, he does at least twice. In the third book, at the conclusion of the
mute debate with Nazdecabre, Panurge again plays on his anal trumpet, “luy faisant
la petarrade” (p. 422), thus imitating with his mouth the sound he had produced
in the earlier debate with Thaumaste by means of the other end of his
alimentary canal.[cxxxviii][cxxxviii]
Much
of book three is devoted to an attack on women, as Panurge searches for an
answer to the question of whether or not he should marry. Among the experts he consults, only the
Sybil of Panzoust is female, and her qualifications for the role of logos-sapientia
figure are severely limited, to say the very least:
“La vielle estoit mal en poinct, mal vestue, mal
nourrie, edentee, chassieuse, courbassee, roupieuse, langoureuse” (p. 409)
(The old woman was grim to look at, ill-dressed,
ill-nourished, toothless, bleary-eyed, hunchbacked, snotty, and feeble). (p. 333)
Nevertheless, this
abhorrent woman produces a verbal product, which she, like the Sybil of Vergil
and Dante, scatters to the wind (pneuma), and which, like the logos,
proves invulnerable to definitive, categorical interpretation:
T’esgoussera
De renom.
Engroissera
De toy non.
Te sugsera
Le bon bout.
T’escorchera
Mais non tout. (p.
412)
(Of fame you’re shelled/ So, even so,/ and she with
child/ Of you, oh no./ Your good end/ Suck she will/ And flay you, friend,/ But
not all). (p.
335)
As a result of their
unsuccessful speculations on these verses, Pantagruel and Panurge decide to
seek the advice of one who cannot speak at all, but who communicates by signs
only, and they go to consult Nazdecabre.
Still another experct in words, Trouillogan
(“Word-spinner”) offers only perfectly symmetrical equivocations as answers for
every question put to him by on the subject of marriage, prompting Panurge to
offer a pre-Socratic analogy with pêgê, an element of the incarnational
matrix that receives much fuller treatment in book five. Here, however, Panurge is reminded
specifically of the fountain of hidden truth:
Vous dictez d’orgues (respondit Panurge). Mais je croy que je suis descendu on puiz
ténébreux, onquel disoit Héraclytus ester Verité cachée. (p. 478)
(“You talk like a book,” replied Panurge. “But I feel as if I were at the bottom of
the dark well where Heraclitus says truth is hidden.”) (p. 386)[cxxxix][cxxxix]
Perhaps
Rabelais’ error here, in attributing a saying of Democritus to Heraclitus, is
partly due to the association of Heraclitus and not Democritus with the use of
the term logos. In any case,
Panurge’s next words in response to Trouillogan’s equivocations suggest a
parody of the conventional response to direct contact with the logos (as
Plato and Dante, among others, represent it):
Je ne voy goutte, je n’entonds rich, je sens mes
sens tous hébétz et doubte grandement que je soye charmé. (p.
478)
(I can’t see a thing, I hear nothing, I felt my sense
all numbed, and I very much wonder whether I’m not bewitched). (p. 386)
Trouillogan is certainly a false representation of the
logos-speaker, but their experience with him does not divert Rabelais’
protagonists from their quest. As Alice
Berry describes the author’s intentions in the fourth book, Logos
occupies the center of the stage:
The writer-physician sets out to cure. . . massive
linguistic sickness by striving to emulate Moses’ achievement. In Chapter i. Of the Quart Livre,
Rabelais’ characters begin their quest for a word, a Hebrew word, “le mot de la
dive Bacbuc.” They too seek out the
Logos that will restore the fundamental relation that language must have with
reality and truth; the Word that will hea the world. . . . To hear the Word and
then to inscribe it, “sensiblement,” so that men, their language, their culture
may return to the origins of life and experience a renascence, a true second
chance—that is the deepest yearning of the Quart Livre and its most
tragic impossibility.[cxl][cxl]
At one point in the Quart
Livre, Berry suggests, the possibility of a truly successful connection
with the logos emerges:
. . . for one brief moment in the Frozen Sea,
Pantagruel allows himself to hope that he too has been called to Sinai and
Arafat, “manoir de Vérite,” where “les Parolles” exist in full and perfect
relation to “les Idées, les Exemplaires et protraictz de toutes choses passées
et futures” (Ch. 1v).[cxli][cxli]
The possibility of
transcendent contact, however, evaporates, when the paroles degelées (p.
714) produce battle-cries in tongues unknown to Pantagruel and Panurge.
Contact with the logos, or a reasonable
facsimile thereof, does finally occur in the fifth book. Although possibly not the work of Rabelais
himself, the fifth book nevertheless offers an extension and culmination not
only of the narrative of the previous book, but also of many of the themes,
images, motifs, and preoccupations of all the previous books, including most of
the elements of the incarnational matrix.
A major innovation of the fifth book is the appearance
of a significant woman, La Dame de La Quinte, who is, as A.J. Krailsheimer
points out, “the only female character who plays any important and credible
role in the five books, but she can hardly be counted as a woman.”[cxlii][cxlii]
She is more like a figure of Sapientia, with the usual attributes
of the puella/senex:
Early
American Prose
Fiction
229
To
discern in prose fiction mythic patterns that we have become accustomed to
expect in lyric and in epic poetry is a critical activity that no longer needs
strenuous defense. Jack Goody and Ian Watt suggest as much, when they assert
that, "the novel has replaced the collective representation of myth and
epic," and that, "there is a certain identity between the spirit of
the Platonic dialogue and of the novel."1 Even more forcefully, H. Bruce
Franklin insists upon the presence of mythic elements in the novel:
"Literary fiction must use the myths which surround its conception; it may
embrace or direct, assume or assault, but it cannot keep them from its
pages."Z
Since
the major English novels of the eighteenth‑century have little to do with
visionary experience, the incarnational matrix does not assert its patterns
with its customary vigor in the novels of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne,
and Snollett. They do, however, rely on parole as a method of breathing
life into a text, usually by placing their stories in the mouths of narrators
whose speech is lively, mixed with elements of colloquial language, and, to
judge merely by the length of many of the novels, practically inexhaustible. On
the other, hand, the general suspicion of poetic language, of "wanton and
extravagant imagination," and the ambition to remain, "within the
rules of credibility," tended to reduce the chances that many of the
elements of the incarnational matrix would come into play.3 After suggesting
connections between the suspicion of poetic language and some of the positions
taken by Locke and Hegel, Ian Watt suggests, "that the function of language
is much more largely referential in the novel than in other literary forms;
that the genre itself works by exhaustive presentation rather than by elegant
concentration." 4
Watts’ remarks on Richardson, perhaps
the most prosaic of the major
eighteenth‑century
novelists, suggest some of the ways in which such a writer might deal with the
project of creating a "live" text. Choosing to write an epistolary
novel, for example, gives Richardson an advantage, in that, "letters are
the most direct material evidence for the inner life of their writers that
exist. Even more than the memoir they are, to repeat Flaubert's phrase, le réel
écrit'."5 Even Richardson's prolixity, and lack of selectiveness,
"makes us feel that we are in contact not with literature but with the raw
materials of life itself." 6
However,
with the exception of the relatively self‑conscious use of the narrator's
voice, English fiction remains sensibly suspicious of the visionary apparatus
well into the nineteenth century, with the exception of minor genres, like the
Gothic novel.? American fiction, however, begins with an examination of the
visionary experience, and continues to breed plot and character out of the
incarnational matrix until Melville temporarily exhausts all possibilities in Moby
Dick.
The
first American novel, Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798) attacks the conventions of sentimental
fiction, converting the genre into, "a telling criticism of itself. ,8
Manifestations of the incarnational
matrix abound throughout this anti‑book, not merely as colorful figures
of speech, but as part of the plot, theme, and characterization as well. Early
in the book, Wieland, the father of the heroine narrator, is struck by a
mysterious, literally unbearable force, while meditating in a shelter from the
sun that he himself had built as, "the temple of his Deity."9 He dies
a few hours later, for reasons his daughter Clara cannot fathom, although
Brockden Brown suggests that Wieland was a victim of spontaneous combustion
(later in the century Dickens too will rely upon this pseudo‑scientific
factoid).
A
more significant reason, however, has been given to us earlier; Clara tells us
that her father's reading of the Bible has been perverted by the Camisards, a
sect of Protestants whose doctrine seemed to Wieland, "the fountain beyond
which it was unnecessary to trace the stream of religious truth." The
result of his reading the Bible from the perspective of the Camisards, Clara
tells us, is that, "his constructions of the text were hasty, and formed
on a narrow scale. Everything was viewed in a disconnected position" (p. 15).
Having drunk, then, from a poisonous pege,
bearing an intolerable
burden of guilt, Wieland is literally consumed in his temple by a logos for
which he had insufficiently prepared himself.
After
his father’s death, Clare's brother, also named Wieland, becomes, "an
indefatigable student" of literature, with Cicero as the "chief
object of his veneration" (p. 32). Young
Wieland proceeds to install a bust of Cicero in the temple his father had built
for a different veneration; father and son, then, attempting to fuse spirit and
letter, vision and rhetoric, go wrong in their pursuits. The son's error,
however, far exceeds that of the father, since Wieland film manages to
provoke an
access of theomanie that leads him to hear divine voices (counterfeit logos
as parole) ordering him to murder his wife and children. After
successfully murdering them, he turns his lethal intentions upon his sister,
the narrator, who manages a narrow escape.
Involved
in her escape is an unusual variation on the elements of the incarnational
matrix: ventriloquism. In the course of the novel written documents are shown
to be unreliable, but the spoken word is also potentially treacherous. The
apparent villain of the novel (who turns out to be more incompetent than evil),
Corwin has developed the ability to counterfeit speech, as well as to
"throw"
222
the imitated
voice a considerable distance. Having developed the ability to simulate logos,
Carwin submits to the temptation to play God, and proceeds to advise, to
interfere, and to test, with dangerous intermediate results, although with
relatively redemptive final results.
Clara
describes Carwin's rhetorical art as "exquisite" (p. 88); his behavior in the course of the novel
seems to be that of a follower of Gorgias rather than of Socrates, at least
until his reformation at the end. Significantly, his reformation is brought
about to a great extent by his response to Clara, who functions for him as a
kind of to os sapientia figure. When he confesses to her that he has
perused her journal, he describes the effect of her écriture on him in
the language of mystic vision (roughly reminiscent of Berowne praising
Rosaline, or Dante Beatrice):
I
cannot justify my conduct; yet my only crime was curiosity.
I
perused this volume with eagerness. The intellect which it
unveiled
was brighter than my limited and feeble organs
could bear. (p. 233)
The
most dramatic (indeed, melodramatic) use of the matrix occurs a few chapters
later, toward the end of the novel. Carwin saves Clara from having to murder
her brother in self‑defense, not by a hand to‑hand struggle, in
the usual manner of romance, but by counterfeiting a transcendent voice, as
part of the greatest performance of his career. Crazed Wieland takes the
product for the logos itself:
My right hand grasping the unseen
knife, was still disengaged. It was lifted to strike. All my strength was
exhausted but what was sufficient to the performance of this deed. Already was
the energy awakened and the impulse given that should bear the fatal steel to
his heart, when ‑‑ Wieland
233
shrunk
back; his hand was withdrawn. Breathless with affright and desperation, I
stood, freed from his grasp; unassailed; untouched.
Thus long had the power which
controlled the scene forborne to interfere: but nowhis might was irresistible;
and Wieland in a moment was disarmed of all his purposes. A voice, louder than
human organs could produce, shriller than language can depict, burst from the
ceiling and commanded him ‑‑ to hold! .... Carwin's agency was here
easily recognized. I had besought him to interpose in my defense. Be had
flown. I had imagined him deaf to my prayer, and resolute to see me perish;
yet he disappeared merely to devise and execute the means for my relief.
Why did he not forbear when this end
was accomplished? Why did his misjudging zeal and accursed precipitation overpass
that limit? Or meant he thus to crown the scene, and conduct his inscrutable
plots to this consummation? ...
... Silence took place for a moment: so
much as allowed the attention to recover its post. Then new sounds were uttered
from above: ‑‑
"Man of errors) cease to cherish
thy delusion; not heaven or hell, but thy senses, have misled thee to commit
these acts. Shake off thy frenzy, and ascend into rational and human. Be
lunatic no longer.
In
obedience to the ventriloquized logos, Wieland comes to his senses,
realizes the full import of what he has done, and is transformed into a bitter
analogue of Christ‑logos:
Fallen
from his lofty and heroic station; now finally re
stored
to the perception of truth; weighed to earth by the
234
recollection
of his own deeds; consoled no longer by a con
sciousness
of rectitude for the loss of offspring and wife,
‑‑
a loss for which he was indebted to his own misguided
hand,
‑‑ Wieland was transformed at once into the m=n of
sorrows. (p. 26o)
After a few
moments of "tempestuous but undesigning activity," Clara tells use
"a beam appeared to be darted into his mind," ‑ a figurative
version of the literal one that destroyed Wieland père ‑‑ and the wretched son kills himself with the
knife dropped a few pages earlier by Clara.
Although
Brockden Brown may be criticizing sentimental fiction, as Ziff argues, the book
seems more centrally concerned with the nature of visionary experience, a topic
more clearly at the center of novels by Hawthorne and Melville. However, even
authors without strong impulses to examine the nature of visionary experience
make suggestive use of elements of the incarnational matrix; Fenimore Cooper
and Mark Twain are two useful examples of such usage in nineteenth‑century
American writing.
Nature
and culture are steadily antithetical throughout The Last of the Mohicans,
with the contrast of the spoken and the written word as one of the supporting
schemes. Natty Bumpo shows a properly Socratic suspicion of the written word
early in the novel:
I
am willing to own that my people have many ways, of which,
as
an honest man, I can't approve. It is one of their customs
to
write in books what they have done and seen, instead of
telling
them in their villages, where the lie can be given
to
the face of a cowardly boaster, and the brave soldier can
call
on his comrades for the truth of his words. 10
Later in the book, the Indian Magua
becomes incensed at the lexical wealth of the paleface, offering parole and
live presence as far more preferable alternatives:
235
"Yes,"
muttered the Indian in his native tongue, "the
palefaces are prattling women! They
have two words for each
thing, while a redskin will make the
sound of his voice
speak for him." (p.
107)
When
Natty and the Psalmist David Gamut enter into a theological dispute about
whether pagans can be saved, Natty calls upon the same topos that
serves, inter alios, Dante, Spenser, and Hugo ‑‑ nature as écriture:
Your temple is reared on the sands, and the first
tempest will wash away its foundations. I demand your authorities for such an
uncharitable assertion .... Name chapter and verse; in which of the holy books
do you find language to support you?
"Book!" repeated Hawk‑eye,
with singular and ill‑conce;iled disdain. "Do you take me for a
whimpering boy at the apron string of one of your old gals; and this good rifle
on my knee for the feather of a goose's wing, my ox's horn for a bottle of ink,
and my leathern pouch for a crossbarred handkercher to carry my dinner? Bookf
What have such as I, who am a warrior of the wilderness, though a man without
a cross, to do with booksT I never read but in one, and the words that are written
there are too simple and too plain to need much schooling...
"What call you the volume,"
said David, misconceiving the other's meaning.
"'Tis open before your eyes,"
returned the scout, "and he who owns it is not a niggard of its use. I
have heard it said that there are men who read in books to convince themselves
there is a God. I know not but man may so deform his works in the settlements,
as to leave that which is clear is the wilderness a matter of doubt among
traders and priests.
If any such there be, and he will
follow me from sun to sun,
through the windings of the forest, he
shall see enough
to teach him that he is a fool, and
that the greatest of
his folly lies in striving to rise to
the level of One he
can never equal, be it in goodness, or
be it in power." (p.
138)
Although he rejects close reading of
books, Natty respects close
reading of
foot-prints, as he demonstrates in his lecture to Beyward:
"One
mocassin like another! You may as well say that one
foot
is like another .... One
mocassin is no more like another
than
one book is like another; though they who can read. in
one
are seldom able to tell the marks of the other. Which
is
all ordered for the best, giving to every man his natural
advantages.
Let me get down to it Uncas; neither book nor
mocassin
is the worse for having two opinions, instead of
one." (p. 220)
Natty also admires close reading of
scalps:
Now
to white eyes there is no difference between this bit
of
skin and that of any other Indian, and yet the Sagamore
declares
it came from the poll of a Mingo; nay, he even
names
the tribe of the poor devil with as much ease as if
the
scalp was the leaf of a book, and each hair a letter.
What
right have Christian whites to boast of their learning,
when
a savage can read a language that would prove too much
for
the wisest of them all (p. 232)
Cooper,
however, can approve of a rhetorically elaborate paleface, if, like David
Gamut, his presence is authoritative:
Though the figurative language of David was not
very intelligible, the sincere and steady expression in his eye, and the glow
of his honest countenance, were not easily mistaken.
237
Even
Natty Bunpo is capable of rhetorical excess, as Cooper playfully demonstrates when
Heywood must interrupt his companion in arms at the height of a fierce battle,
to suggest that they charge ahead (pp. 391‑392). Excessive rhetoric is not, however, as
much of a preoccupation for Cooper as it is for Mark Twain.
Like
Cooper, Twain shows a Socratic preference for the spoken rather than the
written word, although Twain shows far more self‑consciousness about the
difference between the two. In addition, Twain makes his preference a central
part of his strategy as a writer; Tony Tanner describes the process and the
result:
The naive‑vernacular character, when allowed
to speak from his own point of view, with an economic and blunt vocabulary and
an unsupervised, unrevised syntax, reveals himself as a new way of getting the
living world into words, as a new possible strategy of intimacy and inclusion.
11
Tanner
also speaks of Twain's "system of reduction," and his ambition to
"strip for inspection the thing itself," pointing out that these are
also the objectives of the Transcendentalists.
Huckleberry
Finn certainly shows the results of Twain's impulse to strip, even to
deconstruct, according to an antithesis between writing and speech established
in his Autobiography:
Written
things are not for speech; their form is literary;
they
are stiff, inflexible and will not lend themselves to
happy
and effective delivery with the tongue... they have to
be
limbered up, broken up, colloquialized and turned into the
common
forms of unpremeditated talk ‑‑ other wise they will
bore
the house, not entertain. 12
Closer to Lowell and to Emerson than to
Thoreau, Twain creates Huck Finn to act out his suspicion of the written
language; Huck speaks the story not simply in ordinary language, but in a kind
of sub‑sermo humilis, whose grammar and syntax are
deliberately "wrong." In a piece of inspired whimsy, Twain assigns
Huck the task of allaying the reader's suspicion of writers by making him
testify that Tom Sawyer, "was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told
the truth, mainly.”13
No
visionary, Huck speaks only lower‑case logos; the Bible is a book
of no interest to him, because it is in the realm of Thoth. When the widow
Douglas reveals that, "Moses had been dead a considerable long time,"
Huck loses all interest in him: "I don't take stock in dead
people."(p. 7)
Predictably,
Huck's opposite in the book, Tom Sawyer, proceeds from the letter, not the
spirit. In a conversation with Ben Rogers early in the book, Tom insists on
keeping the people he captures until they are ransomed; Ben replies,
"Ransomed? What's that?" Tom's answer is: "I don't know. But
that's what they do. I've seen it in books; and so of course that's what we ve
got to do" (p. 13). Tom's books are romances, from which he derives both
his notion that style is "a way that's twice as long" (p. 183), and
his taste for what is "gaudy" (p. 186). Tom would have been more
taken with Emily Dickinson's, "Success in Circuit lies," than Twain,
who nevertheless intends the boy's love of gaudy amplification to be comic and harmless.
Other characters in the novel abuse rhetoric in far more dangerous, potentially
malignant ways.
Among
the perverters of language and speech in the book, the Duke and the King are
the most nefarious; the Duke's fractured Shakespearian soliloquy (p. 110) is a
glowing instance of abused écriture, while the con games played by the
phony aristocrats are univocal instances of perverse speech.
But
Huck Finn is the central character in the book, and his rhetorical training is
the central linguistic as well as moral exercise to which Twain dedicates his
energies. When Huck comes upon a wrecked steamboat named Sir Walter Scott,
a reader might reasonably infer that the source of Tom's vision (romance) is
less reliable than Huck's (the river). Nevertheless, Huck's vision must be
trained, partly by the experiences
239
he undergoes,
and partly by his friend Jim, the run‑away slave who can also function as
Socratic mentor.
In
an absurd parody of syllogistic reasoning, significantly on the nature of
language, Jim defeats Huck,(as Socrates generally defeats his pupil), by
"proving" that a Frenchman doesn't speak like a man: "Is a cat a
man, Huck?" "No."
"Well,
den, day ain't no sense in a cat talk in' like a man. Is a cow a man? ‑‑
er is a cow a cat?" "No, she ain't either of them." "Well,
den, she ain' got no business to talk like either one er the yuther of 'em. Is
a Frenchman a man?" "Yes." "W‑1111, denl Dad blame
it, why doan' he talk like a man? You answer me datl" I see it
warn't no use wasting words ‑‑ you can't learn a nigger to argue.
So I quit. (p. 67)
Jim's next triumph over Huck is again
through speech, but this time the exchange is far more intense, emotionally and
morally. By concocting a fictitious dream, Huck has tried to confuse the real
and the imagined worlds, making Jim question his own vision. After Jim has
innocently interpreted the dream, Huck invites his friend to demonstrate his
oneirocritical powers further by "reading" the leaves, the rubbish,
and the smashed oar on the raft. Jim's response is a masterpiece of moral and
psychological semiology:
Jim
looked at the trash, and then looked at me, and back at the
trash
again. He had got the dream fixed so strong in his head
that
he couldn't seem to shake it loose and get the facts back
into
its place again, right away. But when he did pet the thing
straightened
around, he looked at me steady, without ever
240
smiling, and says:
"What
do day stan' for?.I 's gwyne to tell you. When I got
all
wore out wid work, en wid callin' for you, en,went to
sleep,
my heart wuz most broke bekase you wuz lost, en I
didn'
k'yer no mot what become er me en de raft. En when
I
wake up en fine you back agin', all safe en soun', de
tears
come en I could a got down on my knees en kiss' yo'
foot
I's so thankful. En all you wuz thinkin' 'bout wuz how
you
could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dab
is
trash‑, en trash is what people is dot puts dirt on de
head
er dey fren's en makes 'em ashamed."
(p.
71)
Shaken by Jim's analysis, Huck cannot
dismiss this syllogistic series.
Both
parole and écriture, then, can be mistreated. The only writing
Huck is tempted to perform in the book is connected, again, with betraying
Jim. When he tears up the letter to Miss Watson, telling her where Jim is, Huck
seems implicitly to be rejecting the notion that a human being can be private
property. Thus Huck intuitively anticipates Levi‑Strauss' assertion that
writing s primary function is to "facilitate the enslavement of other
human beings."
If
the written word is suspect for Huck, the spoken word is sacred, as he
demonstrates towards the end of the book, when Aunt Sally (who at this point
still thinks that he is Tom Sawyer) extracts his "word" from him: And
when she was going away, she looked down in my eyes, so steady and gentle, and
says: "The door ainIt going to be locked, Tom; and there 0a the window and
the rod; but you'll be good, won't you? And you won't go? For m sake."
Laws knows I wanted to go, bad enough, to see about Tom, and was all
intending to go; but after that, I wouldn't a went, not for kingdoms. (p. 218)
Hawthorne
242
Hawthorne
In
the light of the discussion so far, it can come as no great surprise that a
book entitled The Scarlet Letter should contain elements of the
incarnational matrix, or that at times such a book seems to present itself as
a strenuous semiological exercise. In his introduction to the novel, Hawthorne
suggests that the difficulties of writing may be partially alleviated if the
writer can imagine himself in the presence of a carefully chosen ear,
particularly if the writer s topic is him
self:
Some
authors, indeed... indulge themselves in such confident
-ial depths of revelation as could be fittingly addressed, only
and
exclusively, to the one heart and mind of perfect sympathy;
as
if the printed book, thrown at large on the wide world, were
certain
to find out the divided segment of the writer's own
nature,
and complete his circle of existence by bringing him
into
communion with it. It is scarcely decorous, however, to
speak
at all, even where we speak impersonally. Hut ‑‑ as
thoughts
are frozen and utterance benumbed, unless the speaker
stand
in some true relation with his audience ‑‑ it may be
pardonable
to imagine that a friend, a kind and apprehensive,
though
not the closest friend, is listening to our talk. 1
Hawthorne, then, seems to be offering
the preface as a piece of talk about what he is about to write, hoping to thaw les
mots gelés by establishing the illusion of dialogue, while composing what
is necessarily a monologue. In addition, he expresses a fear of parole,
as well as a fear of the kind of contact
that might be established with "the closest friend" by means of this
dangerously powerful parole 2
Insisting
that he is not really the author, but rather, "the editor, or very little
more," of the Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne proceeds to describe
at some length how he came upon the manuscript he is about to pass on to us.
The disclaimer of authorship looks very much like the humility‑topos,
with a nineteenth‑century New England flavor, as
243
Hawthorne
represents himself as a man trying to disarm ancestral ghosts, "those
stern and black‑browed Puritans" (p. 11), who would have disapproved
of one of their descendants becoming a story‑teller.3 To speak or to write, then, would be a crime, if not against the father, at least
against paternal figures. The purpose of the preface, then, is to exculpate
Hawthorne of the crime of parricide.
Before
discovering the manuscript, Hawthorne tells us that he found a "rag of
scarlet cloth," which, "on careful examination, assumed the shape of
a letter. It was the capital letter An (p. 27). Taking the proper posture for a
close reader of grammata, he asserts:
Certainly
there was some deep meaning in it, most worthy of
interpretation,
and which, as it were, streamed forth from
the
mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself to my sensib
ilities,
but evading the analysis of my mind.
Much of the Scarlet Letter will
be devoted to unraveling the significance of the letter, which will prove to be, like the logos, both in
exhaustible, and inscrutable.
Hawthorne
claims that the manuscript to which he is about to devote his editorial talents
comes from the pen of Mr. Surveyor Pue, a kind of Moses, delivering from beyond
the grave a paternal directive that the logos, albeit mouldy and moth‑eaten,
be promulgated:
It impressed me as if the ancient Surveyor, in his
garb of a hundred years gone by, and wearing his immortal wig, ‑‑
which was buried with him, but did not perish in the grave, ‑‑ had
met me in the deserted chamber of the Custom‑House. In his port was the
dignity of one who had borne his Majesty's commission, and who was therefore
illuminated by a ray of the splendour that shone so dazzlingly about the throne
.... With his own ghostly hand, the obscurely seen, but majestic, figure had
imparted to me the scarlet symbol, and the little role of ex‑planatory
manuscript. With his own ghostly voice, he had
exhorted me, or the sacred
consideration of my filial duty and
reverence towards him ... to bring
his mouldy and•moth-eaten lucubrations before the
public. (p.
29)
Death presides over the transmission of the manuscript
from this shabby Cacciaguida to the modern
Custom‑House employee. Thoth himself seems to lend his lunar presence to
the transaction, when Hawthorne talks about the conditions under which he
composed the story:
Moonlight,
in a familiar room, falling so white upon the
carpet,
and showing all its figures so distinctly, ‑‑ making
every
object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a morning or
noontide
visibility, ‑‑ is a medium the most suitable for a
romance‑writer
to get acquainted with his illusive guests. (p. 30)
Like language itself, the room is a
mediating space between formal opposites; within this lunar, mediating space,
every‑day objects receive an infusion of pneuma, i.e., they become
“spiritualized:"
There
is the little domestic scenery of the well‑known apart
ment;
the chairs, with each its separate individuality; the
centre‑table,
sustaining a work‑basket, a volume or two, and
an
extinguished lamp; the sofa; the book‑case; the picture on
the
wall; ‑‑ all these details, so completely seen, are so
spiritualized
by the unusual light, that they seem to lose their
actual
substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing is
too
small or trifling to undergo this change, and acquire dig
nity
thereby. A child's shoe; the doll, seated in her little
wicker
carriage; the hobby‑horse; ‑‑ whatever, in a word, has
been
used or played with, during the day, is now invested with
a
quality of strangeness and remoteness, though still almost as
vividly
present as by daylight. Thus, therefore, the floor of
245
our
familiar room has become a neutral territory, somewhere
between
the real world and fairy‑land, where the Actual and
the
Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature
of
the other. (p. 31)
In this passage,
humble objects become strange and remote, part of an imaginary world, but not
quite elements in a sublime domain. Unlike Hugo, Hawthorne cannot bring himself
to make an explicit claim that his art is
in direct competition with the Logos.
Nevertheless, the novel (or romance)
itself often seems designed as a semiological exercise designed for readers
trained in Christian rhetorical strategies. For example, the description of
Pearl, Hester Prynne's magical bastard, "the very brightest little jet of
flame that ever danced upon the earth," offers an explicit parallel between
the scarlet letter and the child's life:
But
it was a remarkable attribute of this garb, and, indeed, of the child's whole
appearance, that it irresistibly and inevitably reminded the beholder of the
token which Hester Prynne was doomed to wear upon her bosom. It was the scarlet
letter in another form; the scarlet letter endowed with life! The mother..
herself had carefully wrought out the similitude; lavishing many hours of
morbid ingenuity, to create an analogy between the object of her affection, and
the emblem of her guilt and torture. But, in truth, Pearl was the one, as well
as the other; and only in consequence of that identity had Hester contrived so
perfectly to represent the scarlet letter in her appearance. (p. 75)
Pearl, then,
is the incarnation of the letter, but certainly not of the Word.
Pearl's
father, Dimmesdale, is thought to be a "miracle of holiness" by his
congregation, none of whom suspects him of fathering Pearl. Hawthorne assigns
to him an imperfect spirituality, based upon the minister's rhetorical
limitations; Dimmeadale can never achieve the necessary fusion of sublimity and
humility:
There
were others again, true saintly fathers, whose faculties
had
been elaborated by weary toil among their books, and by
patient
thought, and etherialized, moresoever, by spiritual
communications
with the better world, into which their purity
of
life had almost introduced these holy personages, with their
garments
of mortality still clinging to them. All that they
lacked
was the gift that descended upon the chosen disciples,
at
Pentecost, in tongues of flame; symbolizing, it would seem,
not
the power of speech in foreign and unknown languages, but
that
of addressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart's
language
... they would have vainly sought ‑‑ had they ever
dreamed
of seeking ‑‑ to express the highest truths through
the
humblest medium of familiar words and images ... Not im
probably,
it was to this latter class of men that Mr. Dimmes
dale,
by many of his traits of character, naturally belonged. (P.103)
That the apostles received the gift of sermo humilis rather than the ability to speak in various
languages is an unusual, certainly unorthodox reading of the New Testament; presumably Hawthorne's imagination was
feeding less on orthodox
Christian doctrine, and more on the incarnational matrix.
Dimmesdale'a
confessional routines achieve a deeply paradoxical effect, since they are taken
as symptoms of his great piety by his flock, but as signs of profound hypocrisy
by their author:
"The
godly youthl" said they among themselves. "The saint on
earth!
Alas! if he discern such sinfulness in his own white
soul,
what horrid spectacle would he behold in thine or mine!"
The
minster well knew ‑‑ subtle, but remorseful hypocrite
that
he weal ‑‑ the light in which his vague confession would
be
viewed. He had striven tp put a cheat upon himself by making
the
avowal of a guilty conscience, but it had gained only one
247
other
sin, and a self‑acknowledged shame, without the mom
entary
relief of being self‑deceived. He had spoken the
veriest
truth, and transformed it into the veriest falsehood. (p. 105)
In this untenable
position, having utterly perverted Parole, Dimmesdale mounts at midnight the scaffold that Hester Prynne had
mounted at noon, and which he himself will later mount at noon (perhaps echoing
the midnight noon triad of Paradise Lost). Unable yet to make a public
acknowledgement of his relationship with Hester and Pearl, Dimmesdale nevertheless
prepares himself, on a cloudy night, stripped of his rhetoric, for his eventual
noon‑time disclosure, in the presence of his natural
family:
And
there stood the minster, with his hand over his heart;
and
Hester Prynne, with the embroidered letter glimmering on
her
bosom; and little Pearl, herself a symbol, and the connect
ing
link between these two. They stood in the noon of that
strange
and solemn splendor, as if it were the light that is
to
reveal all secrete, and the daybreak that shall unite all
who
belong to one another. (p. 112)
The light in which they stand, a kind
of noon at midnight, has been provided by the sudden appearance of a meteor;
such appearances, Hawthorns tells us, were commonly interpreted by early
Americans as, "awful hieroglyphics," which were "revelations
from a supernatural source," inscribed on the scroll of the sky:
A
scroll so wide might not be deemed too expansive for Providence
to
write a people's doom upon. The belief was a favorite one with
our
forefathers, as betokening that their infant commonwealth
was
under a celestial guardianship of peculiar intimacy and strict
ness.
Hut what shall we say, when an individual discovers a rev
elation,
addressed to himself alone, on the same vast sheet of record! (p.
113)
248
To describe Dimmesdale’e state of mind
here, Hawthorne calls upon the topos of world‑as‑book,
inscribed with God’s écriture, modifying the trope by adding a fiery comet as a
stylus; unlike Dante or Hugo, however, the agonized minister has appropriated
the public topos for a perversely private vision, in a gesture of
egocentricity that Hawthorne perceives as neurotic:
...
it could only be the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man,
rendered morbidly self‑contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain,
had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the firmament
itself should appear no more than a fitting page for his soul s history sad
fate.
We impute it, therefore, solely to the
disease in his own eye and heart, that the minister, looking upward to the
zenith, beheld there the appearance of an immense letter, ‑‑ the
letter A, ‑‑ marked out in lines of dull red light. Not but the
meteor may have shown itself at this point, burning busily through a veil of
cloud; but with no such shape as his guilty imagination gave it; or, at least,
with so little definiteness. that another’s guilt might have seen another
symbol in it.
The
letter, then, is a shape imposed on the streaking light by the mind of the viewer, whose response indicates the
state of his own spirit, not
the literal shape of the sign. Dimmesdale's semiology, then, is purely
personal, and therefore risks becoming a prostitution of the visionary
apparatus.
While Dimmesdale struggles towards full
confession, Hester has begun to alter the significance of her badge of shame,
by becoming a self‑ordained "Sister of Mercy:"
The letter was the symbol of her
calling. Such helpfulness was found is her, ‑‑ so much power to do,
and power to sympathize, ‑‑
that many people refused to interpret
the scarlet A by its
original signification. They said it
meant Able; so strong was
Hester Prynne, with a woman's strength.
(p. 117)' .
Her daughter Pearl is provoked by the
same letter "A" to a pre‑
cociously mimetic exercise in semiology:
As the last touch to the mermaid's garb, Pearl took some
eel‑graze,
and imitated, as beat she could, on her own bosom,
the
decoration with which she was so familiar on her mother's.
A
letter, ‑. the letter A, ‑‑ but freshly green, instead of
scarletl
The child bent her chin upon her breast, and contem
plated
this device with strange interest; even as if the only
thing
for which she had been sent into the world was to make
out its hidden import. (p. 128)
When Hester temporarily removes the
letter, in a gesture that anticipates her escape with Dimmesdale, she heaves a
"long, deep sigh," as if her action has released spiritus/pneuma,
immediately after which Hawthorne arranges for the sun to burst through the
forest, in a premature celebration of the victory of the spirit over the
letter:
All
at once, as with a sudden smile of heaven,
forth burst the
sunshine, pouring a very flood into
the obscure forest, glad-
dening
each green leaf, transmuting the yellow fallen ones to
gold,
and gleaming adown the gray trunks of the fallen trees. (p. 145)
Removing the letter, therefore, is an
act in harmony with the deepest natural
instincts, but cannot result in
permanent liberation at this point in the story; Pearl, "the living
hieroglyphic" (p. 148), reminds her mother of this inescapable fact by
refusing to acknowledge her identity until Hester has refastened the
"A" on her bosom.
When
Dimmesdale returns from the meeting in the forest with Hester and Pearl, and
with the witch‑lady subsequently, he comes face‑to‑face with
himself, and with his relationship as a writer to the Logos:
250
There
was the bible, in its rich old Hebrew, with hoses and
the
Prophets speaking to him, and God's voice through all! There
on
the table, with the inky pen beside it, was an unfinished
sermon,
with a sentence broken in the midst, where his thoughts
had
ceased to gush out upon the page two days before. He knew
that
it was himself, the thin and white‑cheeked minister, who
had
done and suffered these things, and written thus far into
the
Election Sermonl But he seemed to stand apart, and eye this
former
self with scornful, pitying, but half‑envious curiosity.
That
self was gone) Another man had returned out of the forest;
a
wiser one; with a knowledge of hidden mysteries which the sim
plicity
of the former never could have reached. (p.
159)
Transformed, then, by his encounters in
the selva oscura, Dimmesdale’s
new self looks upon the sermon that his
old self was in the process of
composing as a piece of false écriture.
Throwing the dead letters into
the fire, he sets about composing a new
sermon, in a fit of inspiration
that provokes him to a new perception
of the paradox of sublimity and
humility:
Then,
flinging the already written pages of the Election Ser
mon
into the fire, he forthwith began another, which he wrote
with
such an impulsive flow of thought and emotion, that he
fancied
himself inspired; and only wondered that Heaven should
see
fit to transmit the grand and solemn music of its oracles
through
so foul an argan‑pipe as be. (p.
160)
That the newly written pages are
authentic, vital écriture, a tilled
field rather than a garden of Adonis,
is made clear by the appearance
of the sun‑logos itself, which
touches the writing minister's eyes
with its own unbearable beams.
However,
leaving that mystery to solve itself, or go unsolved
forever,
he drove his task onward, with earnest haste and so‑
ataey.
Thus the night fled away, as it were a winged steed, and he careering on it;
morning came, and peeped blushing through the curtains; and at last sunrise
threw a golden beam into the study, and laid it right across the minster's
bedazzled eyes. There he was, with the
pen still between his fingers, and a vast, immeasurable tract of written space behind him. (p. 160)4
In
his preparations for the final dramatic scene, Hawthorne produces an
appropriate variation on the power of the letter to unite opposites; a bitter
paradox unites Hester and Dimmesdale:
While Hester stood in that magic circle
of ignominy, where the cunning cruelty of her sentence seemed to have fixed her
forever, the admirable preacher was looking down from the sacred pulpit upon an
audience, whose very inmost spirits had yielded to his control the sainted
minster in the church! The woman of the scarlet letter in the market‑place!
What imagination would have been irreverent
enough to surmise that the
same scorching stigma was on them both? (p.
175)
"Scorching" continues the
solar motif, which reappears yet again when Dimmesdale confesses in the market‑place,
with "the sun but a little past
its meridian," accompanying his verbal exposure with a physical
equivalent:
With
a convulsive motion he tore away the ministerial band
from
before his breast. It was revealed Hut it were irreverent
tc
describe that revelation. (p. 180)
Hawthorne refuses to let us know what
the crowd might have seen on Dimmesdale's breast, as he refused earlier to
reveal what Chillingworth had seen on the minister's breast (p. 101); like the
logos itself, ultimate vision is beyond description, ultimately unknowable.
By
the end of the novel, the scarlet letter's original significance has been
utterly reversed, because of the qualities of charity and compassion Hester
shows until the day she dies:
252
....
the scarlet letter ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world's scorn and
bitterness, and became a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked
upon with awe, yet with reverence too. (p.
185)
Like the crucifix, then, the symbol of
criminal shame has been transformed into a figure for sublime humility; Hester
has successfully imitated the Logos.
Although
elements of the incarnational myth do not proliferate in The House of the Seven
Gables as extensively as they do in The Scarlet Letter, nevertheless,
Hawthorne does invoke them at significant points in his later romance,
particularly to provide a means of establishing differences among three main
characters. Early in The House of
Seven Gables, Hawthorne
offers an apology for
presenting a character of such formal absurdity as Hepzibah, "a gaunt,
sallow, rusty‑jointed maiden, in a long‑waisted silk.gown, and with
the strange horror of a turban on a head " (p. 41). He goes on to assure
us that in all the struggles of mankind:
we
shall find this same entanglement of something mean and
trivial
with whatever is noblest in joy or sorrow. Life is
made
up of marble and mud .... What is called poetic insight
is
the gift of discerning, in this sphere of strangely mingled
elements,
the beauty and the majesty which are compelled to
assume
a garb so sordid. 5
Humility and sublimity, then, are once
again paradoxically and inextricably woven together.
When
Holgrave, the formal protagonist of the romance, describes what he does as a
daguerrotypist to Hepzibah, he playfully asserts that he misuses the sun:
"1 misuse Heaven's blessed sunshine by tracing out human features through
its agency" (p. 46). Daniel Hoffman has pointed out the analogy between
the activity of the photographer
253
and the activity of the writer:
"On the one hand his camera links him with all the magic portraits and
mirrors in Hawthorne’s Gothic repertoire. But on the other, the daguerrotype
signifies that Holgrave deals in representations of personal identity ‑‑
the portraits of persona."6 What seems to amuse Hawthorne, and Holgrave as
well, to
judge by his whimsical descriptions of
himself as a mock visionary, is the photographer's literal preoccupation with
vision. When Holgrave introduces himself to Phoebe, he again emphasizes the sun
as the primary element in his profession, in a passage in which he describes
himself as a tiller of fields, in language close to that of Thoreau. In
addition, he playfully derives his choice of a dark abode from a
natural hazard of his profession ‑‑
the risk of being dazzled or blinded:
"Yes,"
said Holgrave, "I dig and hoe, and weed, in this black
old
earth, for the sake of refreshing myself with what little
nature
and simplicity may be left in it, after men have so
long
sown and reaped here. I turn up the earth by way of pastime.
My
sober occupation, so far as I have any, is with a lighter mat
erial.
In short, I make pictures out of sunshine; and, not to
be
dazzled with my own trade, I have prevailed with Miss Hep
zibah
to let me lodge in one of these dusky gables. It is like
a
bandage over one's eyes, to come into. gyp.
91)
Phoebe,
too, is associated with the am; bearing the name of Apollo's
sister, the moon, she is endowed with
many solar traits, as Rudolph von
Abele has noticed:
She
is se "pleasant about the house as a gleam of sunshine fal
ling
on the floor." When she arrives she is wearing a yellow
straw
hat; she comes bringing country butter in gift; the wind
owe
of her room open on the east; she presides over the weekly
gathering
in the garden, which occurs on Sundays; the Indian
cakes
she prepares for Clifford are yellower than those made by
Hepzibah.
She dissipates "the shadows of gloomy events," and to
254
Holgrave
she confides that she dislikes moonlight, mystery,
riddles...
In fine, she is continually linked with that life
giving
thing, the sun, which is also responsible for the
"truthfulness"
of Holgrave's daguerrotypes.7
Phoebe clearly partakes of some of the
qualities of Sapientia, Nature,
and uell se‑ex; in addition, for
two of the characters, she functions
as a kind of écriture. For
Clifford, she is a character written in
sermo humilis:
He
read Phoebe, as he would a sweet and simple story; he list
ened
to her, as if she were a verse of household poetry, which
God,
in requital of his bleak and dismal lot, had permitted some
angel,
that most pitied him, to warble through the house. She
was
not an actual fact for him, but the interpretation of all
that
he had lacked on earth, brought warmly home to his concep
tion;
so that this mere symbol or lifelike picture had almost
the
comfort of reality. (p. 142)
Phoebe's presence, then, negates the
absence that has dominated Clifford's
life.
For Holgrave, she is a different kind
of écriture:
With
the insight on which he prided himself, he fancied that
he
could look through Phoebe, and all around her, and could
read
her off like a page of a child's story‑book. Hut these
transparent
natures are often deceptive in their depth; those
pebbles
at the bottom of the fountain are farther from us than
we
think. (p. 182).
Vaughan's fountain, too, had
"diverse stones," if not pebbles, to represent aspects of the logos, but Hawthorne’s Phoebe
is closer to the erotic than to the theological uses of these symbols. When
Holgrave "reads" her correctly,
since this is a romance, he will marry her.
Her association with pege in
this passage is also a reinforcement
255
of the same association presented more
elaborately when Hawthorne describes, in two earlier passages, Clifford's
response to Phoebe's presence:
Such
was the native gush and play of her spirit, that she was
seldom
perfectly quiet and undemonstrative, any more than a
fountain
ever ceases to dimple and warble with its flow ....
Her
eyes looked larger, and darker, and deeper; so deep at some
silent
moments, that they seemed like Artesian wells, down,
down,
into the infinite. (pp.
138, 175)
A figure of logos, of écriture,
a fountain of natural Sapientia, Phoebe also responds vigorously and
critically to inappropriate uses of language. Like a naive but powerful
Rosaline, she teaches Holgrave an important lesson in decorum, when she fears
that his literary impulses threaten to disconnect feeling from form. He has
permitted himself what she considers excessive literary license in describing
the painful history of the Pyheheons; she
calls for more directness and human feeling:
"I
wish you would speak more plainly," cried Phoebe, perplexed
and
displeased; ‑‑ "and, above all, that you would feel more
like
a christian and a human being! How is it possible to see
people
in distress, without desiring, more than anything else,
to
help and comfort them? You talk as if this old house were a
theatre;
and you seem to look at Hepzibah's and Clifford's mis
fortunes,
and those of generations before them, as a tragedy,
such
as I have seen acted in the hall of a country‑hotel; only
the
present one seems to be played exclusively for your amuse
ment!
I do not like this. The play costs the performers too
much
‑‑ and the audience is too cold‑hearted. (p. 217)
Phoebe, Apollo's
sister, reflects the judgment of the logos, in delivering to the artist a
prescription for plain‑speaking; that she associates plain‑speaking
with being a Christian suggests that the tradition initiated by Augustine, and
perpetuated by Dante and Herbert, among others, continues forcefully into the
nineteenth century.
[i][i] The Psychology of Fire, Boston, 1964, p. 109.
[ii][ii] A.S. Walpole, Early Latin Hymns, Cambridge, 1922 (1966 reprint), pp. 35 – 36; unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine.
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[lxxxvii][lxxxvii] The Psychology of Fire, Boston, 1964, p.109.
[lxxxviii][lxxxviii] A.S. Walpole, Early Latin Hymns, Cambridge, 1922 (1966 reprint), pp. 35 – 36; unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine.
[lxxxix][lxxxix] Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony, Baltimore, 1963.
[xc][xc] Walpole, op. cit., pp. 38 – 39.
[xci][xci] Ibid., pp. 53 – 54 (11. 9-16 of Intende, qui regis Israel).
[xcii][xcii] Ibid., p. 192 (11. 21-28 of 33-line Tibi laus perennius).
[xciii][xciii] G.M. Dreves, Ein Jahrtausend von Lateinischer Hymendichtung, Leipzig, 1909, vol. I, p. 267.
[xciv][xciv] Ibid.
[xcv][xcv] Paul Lehmann, Die Parodie in Mittelalter, Stuttgart, 1963, p. 124.
[xcvi][xcvi] Die Gedichte des Archipoeta, ed. by H. Wattenphul and H. Krefeld, Heidelberg, 1958, p. 56.
[xcvii][xcvii] Ibid.
[xcviii][xcviii] Ibid.; see John, 15.5.
[xcix][xcix] Ibid., p. 97.
[c][c] Anticlaudianus, ed. by R. Bossaut, Paris, 1955, p. 57; translation by W. Cornog, Philadelphia, 1935.
[ci][ci]Dante Studies #1, Cambridge, 1957, p. 93.
[cii][cii] Marcia Colish, The Mirror of Language, New Haven, 1968, p. 337.
[ciii][ciii] De Vulgari Eloquentia, ed. by A. Marigo, Florence, 1968, p. 8.
[civ][civ] Convivio XXXI.13, quoted in Colish, op. cit., p. 253.
[cv][cv] Il Convivio, ed. by Mario Simonelli, Bologna, 1966, p.111.
[cvi][cvi] All quotations and translations from the Commedia are from Charles’ Singleton’s edition, Princeton, 1970 – 1975, three volumes, each in two parts.
[cvii][cvii] See Singleton’s discussion of this passage in his edition.
[cviii][cviii] Carmina Burana #180, ed. by Meyers, Hilka and Schumann, Heidelberg, 1971, second edition, p. 301.
[cix][cix] Oxford Book of Medieval Verse, ed. by F.R. Raby, Oxford, 1959, p. 238.
[cx][cx] See F. Goldin, German and Italian Lyrics of the Middle Ages, New York, 1973, pp. 270, 336 – 338.
[cxi][cxi] “there never was an eye that could go beyond (or surpass) the sun,” is a more literal translation, and may bring into sharper relief Dante’s transcendent posture here.
[cxii][cxii] Here too, Dante’s choice of language reflects a secular debate about iscura parlatura (see Goldin, op. cit., p. 270).
[cxiii][cxiii] See André Pézard, Oeuvres Complètes de Dante, Paris, 1965 (Pléiade), p. 1526.
[cxiv][cxiv] For a lyrical version of these elements, see Verbi vere substantivi, a hymn to John, in Raby, op. cit., p.238.
[cxv][cxv] See Curtius, op. cit., pp. 319 ff., for the topos of world-as-book.
[cxvi][cxvi] See W.J. Ong, The Presence of the Word, New Haven, 1967, pp. 186 – 187.
[cxvii][cxvii] Baldessar Castiglione, Il Libro del Cortegiano, ed. M. Scherillo, Milan, 1928, p. 432; translation by Thomas Hoby, Everyman edition, pp. 318 ff.
[cxviii][cxviii] Poètes du XVI Siècle, ed. by Albert-Marie Schmidt, Paris, 1953, p. 922.
[cxix][cxix] Ibid., p. 801
[cxx][cxx] Henri LaFay, La poésie francaise du premier XVII siècle, Paris, 1975, p. 251; the tradition seems deathless—see Apollinaire’s “Lou Mon Étoile,” in his Oeuvres Complètes, Paris, 1956, p. 476.
[cxxi][cxxi] Terence C Cave, Devotional Poetry in France, Cambridge, 1969, p. 207..
[cxxii][cxxii] Ibid., p. 205.
[cxxiii][cxxiii] Ibid., p. 206.
[cxxiv][cxxiv] Spenser’s Minor Poems, ed. by E de Selincourt, Oxford, 1910, p. 466. For a variation on this passage, see Milton, Paradise Lost, III. 8—12.
[cxxv][cxxv] See pp. 558—664 of Spenser Variorum, vol. VII, for some of the possibilities.
[cxxvi][cxxvi] See my forthcoming “Wolfgang von Eschenbach: Homo Ludens,” in Viator, 1982.
[cxxvii][cxxvii] W.C. Carroll, The Great Feast of Language in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Princeton, 1976, p. 8. See also Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare’s Talking Animals, Totowa, 1974.
[cxxviii][cxxviii] Neal L. Goldstein, “Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Renaissance Vision of Love,” Shakespeare Quarterly XXV (1974), p. 341.
[cxxix][cxxix] Quotations are taken from the Signet edition by John Arthos, New York, 1965.
[cxxx][cxxx] On these figures, see Curtius, op. cit., pp. 98—105, and next chapter on Natura.
[cxxxi][cxxxi][cxxxi][cxxxi] As Bobby Ann Roesen remarks, “The voice of Reality speaks through the Princess and her retinue from the beginning;” (“Love’s Labour’s Lost, Shakespeare Quarterly IV (1953), pp. 411—426.
[cxxxii][cxxxii] Carroll, op. cit., pp. 39—40.
[cxxxiii][cxxxiii] Ibid.
[cxxxiv][cxxxiv] Goldstein, op. cit., p. 350.
[cxxxv][cxxxv] Page references are to Oeuvres Complètes, Paries, 1951; translation is by J.M. Cohen, Baltimore, 1955.
[cxxxvi][cxxxvi] Oeuvres Complètes, p. 16, note 3.
[cxxxvii][cxxxvii] By “grotesque,” I mean the sense developed in Michail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, Cambridge, 1968.
[cxxxviii][cxxxviii] See also Book IV, for Gaster, another silent, “sacred” source.
[cxxxix][cxxxix] To translate d’orgues as “like a book,” instead of “harmoniously,” is misleading, partly because it gives false support to the search for elements of the incarnational matrix. In addition, “harmoniously” supports the association with Heraclitus, and his faith in the “hidden connection (harmonia).”
[cxl][cxl] “Les Mithologies Pantagruelicques,” PMLA 92 (1977), p. 477.
[cxli][cxli] Ibid., p. 477.
[cxlii][cxlii] Rabelais and the Franciscans, Oxford, 1963, p. 256.