Fabled by the Daughters of Memory — Part Five
‘And after that now in the future, please God, after nonpenal start, all repeating ourselves, in medios loquos, from where he got a useful arm busy on the touchline, due south of her western shoulder down to death and the love embrace, with an interesting tallow complexion and all now united, sansfamillias, let us ran on to say oremus prayer and homeysweet homely, after fully realising the gratifying experiences of highly continental evenments, for meter and peter to temple an eslaap, for auld acquaintance, to Peregrine and Michael and Farfassa and Peregrine, for navigants et peregrinantibus, in all the old imperisl and Fionnachan sea and for vogue awallow to a Miss Yiss, you fascinator, you, sing a lovasteamadorion to Ladyseyes … ’
– James Joyce, ‘Finnegans Wake’
The Wake contains a few allusions to ‘The Erotic Motive in Literature’, 1919, by Albert Mordell, (1885–1965), wherein he tries to apply some of the methods of psychoanalysis to literature. Had he read Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, (1770–1831), he may have been alerted to the pitfalls of such an approach. Philosophy itself is mediated by its own history as a condition of its possibility, according to Hegel, and there can be no interchangeable method because method always entails a content. One cannot separate the method of science, for instance, from its content. There are in general two kinds of method: positivism, as it is now called, which abstracts the method of science from its content, the natural world, and reapplies it, and transcendentalism, after Immanuel Kant, (1724–1804), which engages in argument concerning form independently of content. But philosophy in particular cannot presuppose a criterion of truth agreed upon by its immediate audience.
But leaving that aside let us see how Mordell gets on. His approach is to trace a writer’s work back to the outward and inner events of their life and what it reveal of their unconscious, an unconscious that is largely identical with the mental love fantasies in one’s present and past life, and given that the terms unconscious and erotic are nearly synonymous then any serious study of literature which is concerned with the unconscious has to deal impartially with eroticism. In the passage from the Wake given above ‘due south of her western shoulder down to death and the love embrace…’ alludes to Mordell’s comments concerning ‘The Song of Songs’:
‘The part played by symbolism in love poetry is seen especially in The Song of Songs. To us moderns and occidentals many of the comparisons and symbolical representations seem very strange, but they had their origin not in the poet’s own conceits but in a historic use of the language. This most celebrated of all love poems fairly swarms with sensuous symbolic images. It proves that early man saw lascivious suggestions everywhere in the landscapes, in flowers, rocks, trees, country, city, animals. The speech of our ancestors was sexualised. The beloved in the poem, which is a dialogue between her and her lover, is like a wall with towers (the breasts); she is a vineyard; she is in the clefts of the rock and the hidden hollow of the cliff. She has eyes like doves, her hair is like a flock of straying goats, her teeth like a flock of washed ewes, her lips like a scarlet thread …. The lover is like an apple tree among the trees of the wood; he is a young hart … The embrace of the lovers is described symbolically by means of the tree symbol. It is known that the tree was formerly used to represent both sexes’.
‘The bisexual symbolic character of the tree’, said Carl Jung, (1875–1961), ‘is intimated by the fact that in Latin trees have a masculine termination and a feminine gender’
Mordell continues:
‘The lover in the Song of Songs calls his beloved a tree and says he will climb up to the palm tree and take hold of the branches; his beloved’s breasts will be as clusters of the vine and the smell of her countenance like apples. Students of anthropology will recognise all the sex symbols in this poem and will find analogies in other literatures. This great love poem is regarded by many, curiously enough, as a religious allegory. The chapter headings in the King James version of the Bible represent Christ and the Church as symbols of the lovers. Higher criticism has recognised the fact that the poem is a love poem. This is also proved by the fact that from time immemorial it has been the practice of orthodox Hebrews to read it on the Sabbath eve, which is the time for love embrace among them’.
Erato is the Muse of lyric poetry and in particularly erotic poetry. If her name is derived from the same root as Eros it would mean lovely or the awakening of desire.
‘Orphic Hymn to the Muses’
Daughters of Jove (Zeus and Mnemosyne), dire-sounding and divine, renown’d Pierian, sweetly speaking Nine;
To those whose breasts your sacred furies fire much-form’d, the objects of supreme desire:
Sources of blameless virtue to mankind, who form to excellence the youthful mind;
Who nurse the soul, and give her to descry the paths of right with Reason’s steady eye.
Commanding queens who lead to sacred light the intellect refin’d from Error’s night;
And to mankind each holy rite disclose, for mystic knowledge from your nature flows.
Clio, and Erato, who charms the sight, with thee Euterpe minist’ring delight:
Thalia flourishing, Polymina fam’d, Melpomene from skill in music nam’d:
Terpischore, Urania heav’nly bright, with thee who gav’st me to behold the light.
Come, venerable, various, pow’rs divine, with fav’ring aspect on your mystics shine;
Bring glorious, ardent, lovely, fam’d desire, and warm my bosom with your sacred fire.
— — — — — — — — — — —
So Erato is one ‘who charms the sight’.
‘I can savour a work’, said Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, (1804–1869), ‘but it is difficult for me to judge it independently from the author, and I would gladly say, as is the tree, so is the fruit’. And according to Mordell: ‘One of the great factors in helping us understand literary works is an acquaintance with some of the episodes of the author’s life. Sainte-Beuve revolutionised literary criticism by his dictum that the knowledge of an author’s life helps us to follow his work the better. Dr. Johnson once said that he liked the biographical side of literature. Isaac D’Israeli, before Sainte-Beuve, showed in his Literary Character that he grasped the nature of the intimate relationship between an author and his work’.
I could not disagree more. An author’s biography is of little interest to me, and reading Mordell was a complete waste of my time, I learnt so little from it. Were we to speculate about what a writer’s work reveals about their ‘unconscious’ it is more likely to reveal what is going on in our own unconscious never mind the writer’s. This is evident from what Mordell says about William Shakespeare, (1564–1616), about whom thankfully we know very little. We know that in his will he scarcely mentions his wife, Anne Hathaway, (1556–1623), but he did make a point of leaving her ‘my second best bed’. A purposeful affront to his wife? Or the second-best bed being the matrimonial bed a gesture replete with import? Take your pick.
Mordell writes:
‘Idealism in literature is the selection for description of only those features of life that please the fancy of the author. People are described not as they are but as the author would like them to be; events are narrated not as they occur in life but as the writer would wish them to happen. The dream of the author is given instead of an actual picture of reality. When Shakespeare grew weary of London life, he drew a picture of life in the forest of Arden in his As You Like It such as he would have liked to have enjoyed. Idealistic literature hence gives us an insight into the nature of the author’s unconscious. His constructed air castles show us where reality has been harsh with him. It is true all literature must to some extent be idealistic, as the author must always do some selecting. Idealism will never die out in literature. Man is an idealist by nature; every man who has day dreams is reconstructing life in accordance with his desires’.
What do we learn from such waffle? What does throwing in the word ‘unconscious’ add to it? Who is there for whom reality has not been harsh? Though we know so little about the life of the Bard we can at least be sure that reality was harsh with him. His son Hamnet died at the age of 11. And of course there has been much speculation about the influence his son’s death had on his writing. With little profit with regard to deepening our understanding of it.
‘When that I was and a little tiny boy’
(‘Twelfth Night’, Act 5, Scene 1)
When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came to man’s estate,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
‘Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came, alas! to wive,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
By swaggering could I never thrive,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came unto my beds,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
With toss-pots still had drunken heads,
For the rain it raineth every day.
A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that’s all one, our play is done,
And we’ll strive to please you every day.
Let us try another tack. Plato, (429–347 BCE), who thought of poetry as a kind of rhetoric, asserts in the Republic that ‘there is an old quarrel between philosophy and poetry’, but then his critique of poetry centres upon mimesis understood as representation. The basic point is that poets misrepresent the nature of the subjects about which they write, the gods for instance. With Socrates, (470–399 BCE), as his mouthpiece, Plato claims that all of poetry that was imitative is to be banished from his ideal republic, although there is some inconsistency in the text, only some of it as it turns out is to be banished. The turnaround comes after the introduction of the theory of Forms. The chief defect of the poets, Plato informs us, is that their products ‘maim the thought of those who hear them’. Poets hardly know what it is they are discoursing upon. For instance, there are Forms, Ideas, of beds and tables, the creator of which is God. There are imitations of the Forms, actual beds and tables, the Forms being akin to the blueprints for the craftsman who create the imitations. And there are imitators of the products of the craftsmen, who, like painters, create a sort of image of these objects in the world of becoming. And while Plato is not suggesting that poets literally paint verbal pictures of beds and tables, at least one hopes not, the poets are ‘at the third generation from nature’ or at a third place removed from the truth.
This does raise the question that, while poetry has been esteemed as a source of insight and knowledge, insight into what? Knowledge of what? And why should poetry and philosophy be at odds, as Plato claims? Poetic meaning certainly seems to be of a rather different sort than that which is discoverable in science, in ordinary language, and indeed in prose. From a philosophical point of view theories of poetry tend to assume one of two forms. On the one hand there is a denial of the assumption with the implication that poetry has merely senseless or non-figurative meaning. On the other hand the poetry is subjected to a cognitive analysis whereby its meaning is distinguished from that of prose. Hegel opted for the latter alternative, but one must also establish what the content of poetry is in order to theorize about what or rather how it means, as he explains in his Aesthetics:
‘It is … the pre-eminent task of poetry to bring before our vision the energies of the life of Spirit, all that surges to and fro in human passion and emotion, or passes in tranquillity across the mind, that is the all-embracing realm of human idea, action, exploit, fatality, the affairs of this world and the divine Providence. It has been the most universal and cosmopolitan instructor of the human race and is so still. Instruction and learning are together the knowledge and experience of what is. Stars, animals and plants are ignorant of their law — it does not come into their experience; but man only then exists conformably to the principle of his being when he knows what he is and by what he is surrounded. He must recognize the powers by which he is driven or influenced; and it is just such a knowledge which poetry, in its original and vital form, supplies’.
I do not know if Percy Bysshe Shelley, (1792–1822), had read Hegel but that remark about how poetry ‘has been the most universal and cosmopolitan instructor of the human race and is so still’ puts me in mind of Shelley’s remark about how ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’.
Clearly a poet’s biography, which is grounded in contingency, is of little use in helping us follow his or her works better, on the contrary, it is more likely to hinder it.
Poetry is an expression of the human and Absolute, or Divine, Spirit and the form of knowledge of it is dialectical, which may sound rather abstract but it will assume concrete meaning once the essential forms, aspects, expressions, and historical varieties of poetry are explained in that light. Like music it is an art of sound, that is to say sound understood as the sign of ideas and inner representations, sound as speech. This is the art of poetry in its most general sense and for Hegel poetry is the ‘most perfect art’, in virtue of the fact that it delivers the richest and most concrete expression of spiritual freedom. Poetry has the capability of displaying spiritual freedom in the form of its concentrated inwardness and in the form of action in space and time. whether in symbolic, classical and romantic art it is equally at home and is therefore the ‘most unrestricted of the arts’.
Poetry is not merely the structured presentation of ideas but the articulation of ideas in language, both spoken and written, for an important aspect of the art of poetry, that which clearly distinguishes it from prose, is the musical ordering of words themselves, that is, versification. In this respect there are significant differences between classical and romantic art. Whereas the Ancients placed more emphasis upon rhythmic structure in their verse, in Christendom, and in particular in France and Italy, greater use is made of rhyme. The three basic forms of poetry are epic, lyric and dramatic. The subject of lyric poetry, unlike the hero of an epic poem (to be discussed in the next part of this series) does not undertake ordeals, odysseys or adventures in the world but merely gives expression, in hymns, odes or songs, to the self’s ideas and inner feelings. This can be achieved directly or through the poetic description of something else, for instance a rose, a skylark, a beloved. The lyric poem that is to say is an individual, subjective expression lacking the expansiveness and range of an epic, and yet its imaginative structure is a variation upon the same theme.
The lyrical demeanour is one of a reflective mind that has become detached from an external world that is exceedingly regularized, and now assimilates that world through the capacity of its own expression. The lyric itself involves a clash between this individual expression and the subject matter, the diversity of which is endless, this subject matter that is to be assimilated. Yet again however this division is not a fixed one:
‘… it is just the personal life of the poet himself and its greatness which he seeks to express and make real on its own account. As for the object itself, it is that whereof he makes himself master; he assimilates this in his own life, expresses himself in and through this. By so doing he freely and without reserve breaks up the more positive course of his subject with his own emotion or reflection; he illuminates it from within; he changes it; and the final result is that it is not so much the subject, but rather the personal enthusiasm in which it has steeped him, which is most effective. In this connection, however, we have two distinct aspects to consider. First, there is the compelling force of the subject-matter; secondly, we have that independent freedom of the poet which flashes into view in its conflict with that which would otherwise master it. It is above all the stress of this opposition, which renders inevitable the swing and the boldness of utterance and image, the apparent absence of order in the ideal construction and course of the poem, its digressions, lacunae, and sudden transitions, and which preserves the ideal elevation of the poet, by means of the mastery with which he is enabled, through the artistic perfection of his work, to overcome this disunion, and to produce an essentially harmonious whole, which places him, as his work, in relief above the greatness of his subject’.
The burden of the lyric is this clash between ‘the compelling force of the subject matter’ and the ‘independent freedom of the poet’. This Hegelian understanding of the meaning of poetry has been thought to suggest that because it takes place in the imagination there is a requirement for a feeling of shock or randomness in the texture of the poem itself, that there is no deduction or justification offered concerning the specific nature of this clash, that it is a consequence of such a theory theory that such characteristics are necessarily contingent, that insofar as the theory is deductive at all it is so not in its attempt to determine concrete details but only in its insistence that it is part of the idea of the poem that there be striking features of it which present themselves as random, indeterminate, or chaotic. But such an interpretation of Hegel’s point here merely highlights the need for a knowledge and understanding of his system at all, which is why it is so difficult to provide an adequate exegesis for his proposals.
In the Phenomenology of Spirit an undertaking is embarked upon whereby there is a transformation of one’s understanding of that which prima facie appears to be simply coincidental or contingent to that of something which can be recognised in its necessity, ‘the rational element and the rhythm of the organic whole’, as he puts it. That which philosophy performs in hindsight, transforming something that was contingent that now because of being actual is understood as being necessary. When one falls in love for instance the initial meeting of the lovers may well be an encounter grounded in total contingency, meeting at a party for instance, or attending the same college together, but once the falling in love has transpired one’s entire past life is then seen as leading up to that very moment, a moment for which one feels one has waited one’s entire life, and that which was contingent is transformed into that which makes sense, as if the event were a conclusion of logic.
‘The necessary progression and interconnection of the forms of the unreal consciousness will by itself bring to pass the completion of the series’. That is to say, sense can be made of events by understanding the dynamic necessity in the context of an organic whole, for the life of the whole has a certain poetic rhythm of a certain progress. Necessity, the word Hegel uses for that is notwendigkeit. Not, meaning need. Wendig, meaning flexible enough to react appropriately to a situation, or to turn around. In the Hegelian system necessity therefore suggests a need for a crucial turnaround for the resolution a critical moment, for to understand why something is necessary is to understand why something is critical in a given situation. The objective is to understand how every moment in the life of the whole is critical to the whole, and in the Phenomenology the whole history of Spirit is reconstructed in the course of which the significance of every critical moment in history is understood. And for an individual this amounts to understanding the critical points in one’s own individual development that contribute to the person that one now is.
Philosophy and poetry most certainly are not at odds. One may well ask what is the difference between what a literary person and a philosophical person are about once the literary person is being philosophical or the philosophical person is being poetical. Is philosophy itself as a form of poetry? Is Hegel’s own philosophy merely an arcane and cryptic poem of some kind? Unsympathetic critics have suggested that Hegelian philosophy is merely poetry, that is to say, at best it a lyrical expression of an individual perspective with no more general validify than a Shakespearean sonnet. Slightly more sympathetic critics have suggested that the Phenomenology is an epic, drama, or bildungsroman of the world Spirit, and that it offers insights into the history of human thought that are as profound as those that we find in Shakespeare.
The difference however is in the form in which poetical and philosophical expression is articulated. The poet employs imagery, his or her distinctive activity is the expression of the human Spirit through imagination. But images, pictures, representations are not the reality, they are ideas that stand for the reality. The philosopher employs the pure Notion as a form of expression, thereby eschewing metaphor in the analysis of concepts, and barring the employment of imagery as he or she conceptualises in a non-sensory manner. There is a distinction to be made between the imaginative and the thinking comprehension of the dialectic of Spirit. Poetic genres are tied to the immediate and specific because they present dialectical ideas in imaginative form. The specific emotional unity of the reflective individual which characterizes the lyric, one may suppose, is not present in the Hegelian system, given the breadth of the subject matter, the changes of perspective at the critical moments, the aim at a universality transcending the comparatively limited perspective that lyrical poetry offers.
Now compare that with what we find in Mordell, what he has to say about Paul Verlaine, (1844–1896), for instance, bringing in biographical details about the poet. Experience is self-knowledge, a knowledge only one who has had the experience can know, no one else. How can Mordell know that Verlaine ‘unconsciously’ craved for the love of his mother? Indeed, not even Verlaine could know if he did or not, because it is an ‘unconscious’ craving. Furthermore, what kind of poet is it that is unaware of the uses of the symbols that he or she is putting them to? And does any of this tedious drivel enrich our understanding and deepen our appreciation and enjoyment of the poetry?:
‘A modern critic has divined the significance of the worship of the Virgin in so fine a poet as Verlaine, who, while he embraced Catholicism, was not a churchman in the strict acceptance of the word. In his French Literary Studies, Professor T. B. Rudmose-Brown says of Verlaine: ‘It is his intense need of a love that will not return upon itself that makes Verlaine turn to Christ’s Virgin Mother — the Rosa Mystica in whom he found all the qualities he looked for in vain in his cruelly divine child-wife and his many ‘amies’ of later life — and crouch like a weary child beneath her wondrous mantle’. Verlaine used the Virgin as a symbolic emblem. He unconsciously craved for the love of his mother since in later life he was divorced by his wife. The symbol then often becomes under our new science the means of recovering the love one felt as a child for one’s own mother. The author may not be aware that this use of the symbol is being made by him. He uses the earth to-day, as man from time immemorial has used it, as a symbol of the mother, when he exclaims he wants to die and go back to mother earth’.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
‘A Poor Young Shepherd’
by Paul Verlaine
J’ai peur d’un baiser
Comme d’une abeille.
Je souffre et je veille
Sans me reposer :
J’ai peur d’un baiser !
Pourtant j’aime Kate
Et ses yeux jolis.
Elle est délicate,
Aux longs traits pâlis.
Oh ! que j’aime Kate !
C’est Saint-Valentin !
Je dois et je n’ose
Lui dire au matin …
La terrible chose
Que Saint-Valentin !
Elle m’est promise,
Fort heureusement !
Mais quelle entreprise
Que d’être un amant
Près d’une promise !
J’ai peur d’un baiser
Comme d’une abeille.
Je souffre et je veille
Sans me reposer :
J’ai peur d’un baiser !
I am afraid of a kiss
As of a bee.
I suffer and I stay awake
Without resting:
I am afraid of a kiss!
Yet I love Kate
And her lovely eyes.
She is delicate
In her long, faded features.
Oh! how I love Kate!
It is Valentine’s Day!
I must and I do not dare
Tell her in the morning…
What a terrible thing,
Valentine’s Day!
She is promised to me,
Very happily!
But what enterprise
To be a lover
Near one who is betrothed!
I am afraid of a kiss
As of a bee.
I suffer and I stay awake
Without resting:
I am afraid of a kiss!
Coming up next:
Calliope, muse of epic poetry.
Notes to ‘Finnegans Wake’ quotation:
1. in medios locos (Latin), into the middle of places; and loquor (Latin), to to speak; and ‘no medius locus for children’, The Catholic Encyclopedia ‘Pelagius and Pelagianism’: ‘Some codices contain a ninth canon… Children dying without baptism do not go to a ‘middle place’ (medius locus), since the non reception of baptism excludes both from the ‘kingdom of heaven’ and from ‘eternal life’’.
2. get busy: O. Henry: The Four Million 236: ‘By Courier’: ‘She says yer better git busy, and make a sneak for de train’; and ‘useful arm’, arm motif.
3. touchline: Geometry. A straight line that touches a curve; a tangent (obs.)
4. due: ‘With reference to the points of the compass: Properly, right, straight, directly.
5. love embrace: Mordell: The Erotic Motive in Literature: ‘the Song of Songs… This great love poem is regarded by many, curiously enough, as a religious allegory… Higher criticism has recognised the fact that the poem is a love poem. This is also proved by the fact that from time immemorial it has been the practice of orthodox Hebrews to read it on the Sabbath eve, which is the time for love embrace among them’; and Wagner: Tristan und Isolde: Liebestod (‘love-death’ aria).
6. tallow: white nearly tasteless solid rendered fat of cattle and sheep used chiefly in soap, candles, and lubricant; and sallow, a sickly yellowish skin colour.
7. united.
8. sans famille (French): without family.
9. oremus: a liturgical prayer introduced by the word oremus (in the service of the R.C. Church); and oremus (Latin), let us pray.
10. homey: an Englishman; a British immigrant, esp. one newly arrived; Home Sweet Home (J. H. Payne song), There was the band playing ‘Home, Sweet Home’.
11. gratifying: affording pleasure, pleasing, satisfying.
12. evenement: an occurrence, event; an issue, result.
13. meter (Greek), mother; and meter (Dutch), godmother.
14. pater (Greek), father; and peter (Dutch), godfather.
15. tumble
16. slaap (Dutch), sleep; temple (part of head).
17. peregrine, a pilgrim; a traveller in a foreign land (obsolete).
18. Fear-feasa (farfase) (Gaelic), Man of knowledge; Fearfeasa O’Maolchonaire, anglic. Farfassa O Mulconry, one of the Four Masters; and Verfasser (German), author; and Annals of the Four Masters by Michael O’Clery, Farfassa O’Mulconry, Morris O’Mulconry, Peregrine O’Clery, Peregrine O’Duignan and Conary O’Clery.
19. Navigant: a navigator or voyager; and pro navigantibus et peregrinantibus (Latin), for sailors and for pilgrims, for travelers by sea and travelers to remote places (a prayer).
20. empire: The Encyclopædia Britannica vol. XXVIII, ‘Vico, Giovanni Batista’: ‘Democratic excesses cause the rise of an empire, which, becoming corrupt, declines into barbarism, and, again emerging from it, retraces the same course’.
21. fionnachán (Irish), diminutive of fionn (‘fair’).
22, faugh a ballagh (Anglo-Irish): clear the way!
23. fascinator : a charming or attractive person.
24. adorion (Latin and Greek): a little thing that is adored; and dory (Greek), ship.
25. Thomas Moore: Irish Melodies, song: To Ladies’ Eyes.
To Ladies’ eyes a round, boy,
We can’t refuse, we can’t refuse;
Though bright eyes so abound, boy,
’Tis hard to choose, ’tis hard to choose.
For thick as stars that lighten
Yon airy bowers, yon airy bowers,
The countless eyes that brighten
This earth of ours, this earth of ours.
But fill the cup — where’er, boy,
Our choice may fall, our choice may fall,
We’re sure to find Love there, boy,
So drink them all! so drink them all!
Some looks there are so holy,
They seem but given, they seem but given,
As shining beacons, solely,
To light to heaven, to light to heaven,
While some — oh! ne’er believe them —
With tempting ray, with tempting ray,
Would lead us (God forgive them!)
The other way, the other way.
But fill the cup — where’er, boy,
Our choice may fall, our choice may fall,
We’re sure to find Love there, boy;
So drink them all! so drink them all!
In some, as in a mirror,
Love seems pourtray’d, Love seems pourtray’d,
But shun the flattering error,
’Tis but his shade, ’tis but his shade.
Himself has fix’d his dwelling
In eyes we know, in eyes we know,
And lips — but this is telling —
So here they go! so here they go!
Fill up, fill up — where’er, boy,
Our choice may fall, our choice may fall,
We’re sure to find Love there, boy;
So drink them all ! so drink them all!
