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"


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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


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           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


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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.

[iii][iii] 3

[iv][iv] 4

[v][v] 5

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[vii][vii] 7

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[xiii][xiii] 13

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[xvii][xvii] 17

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[xx][xx] 20

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[xxii][xxii] 22

[xxiii][xxiii] 23

[xxiv][xxiv] 24

[xxv][xxv] 25

[xxvi][xxvi] 26

[xxvii][xxvii] 27

[xxviii][xxviii] 28

[xxix][xxix] 29

[xxx][xxx] 30

[xxxi][xxxi] 31

[xxxii][xxxii] 32

[xxxiii][xxxiii] 33

[xxxiv][xxxiv] 34

[xxxv][xxxv] 35

[xxxvi][xxxvi] 36

[xxxvii][xxxvii] 37

[xxxviii][xxxviii] 38

[xxxix][xxxix] 39

[xl][xl] 40

[xli][xli] 41

[xlii][xlii] 42

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[xliv][xliv] 44

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[xlvi][xlvi] 46

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[lxxxiii][lxxxiii] 37

[lxxxiv][lxxxiv] 38

[lxxxv][lxxxv] 39

[lxxxvi][lxxxvi] 40

[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.