Longer Views (36 page)

To the extent that history is basically written in the detritus of things, maintenance of bourgeois order represents a constant and unflagging, if relatively low-level, destruction of history.

That is where the barbarism, as Benjamin originally spoke of it, comes from.

39. There are three things writers do not write about.

First, what everybody knows.

We all know fire engines are red. Thus, it is the mark of a bad writer to write “the red fire engine.” Should a green fire engine come by, then the writer might be justified in remarking it. But not otherwise. With this in mind, at London University (back in the midst of writing “Shadows”), I once got into an after-lecture argument with Saul Kripke, who maintained that we could know things for certain about imaginary objects. Kripke's cited example came from Lewis Carroll's “Jabberwocky.” Carroll had written:

Beware the jub-jub bird and shun

The frumious bandersnatch.

Claimed Kripke: We can know, therefrom, that “bandersnatches” are all, or are mostly, “frumious.”

Claimed I: We can assume it only if we decide Carroll was a bad writer.
If all, or even most, bandersnatches are frumious, then there is no need for the writer to say so. If we assume Carroll was a good writer, however, frumious bandersnatches are likely as rare as green fire engines.

What possibly neither of us realized at the time was that Kripke's argument really hinged on the previous line: The verbs “beware” and “shun,” set as they are in regular meter, evoke a discourse (and thus suggest a reading of the following line and its diction) that comes from an epoch before the modernist writing discourse my initial argument calls up, when, indeed, certain nouns were allowed “epithets”—an epithet being an adjective or set of modifiers that underline a self-evident quality that all acknowledge: the noble Brutus, the shining sun, the pitch-black night . . . Set by the formality of the diction of “beware,” “shun,” and the regularity of the meter, Kripke read “frumious” as an epithet for bandersnatch—whereas I chose to read it as an ordinary adjective. But “Jabberwocky” is a humorous poem. Who is to say where bathos, irony, and anachronism might not be read into its lines?

We can surmise many things about imaginary objects—more or less intelligently. But we can't
know
anything about them.

There is, indeed, an equally interesting argument to be formulated about imaginary aspects of actual objects. Are, for example, all birds “jub-jub”. . .?

The second thing that is not written about is that which we consider personally unimportant: for example, the true amount of muddle in the world. It was the Great God Muddle that some critic cited as the titular deity of Sterne's
Tristram Shandy
. But even there the fictive expression of muddle in no way reflects its real prevalence: this morning I got up and, still in my underwear, walked four times back and forth between the bedroom and the kitchen, looking for my coffee cup from yesterday, till, on a whim, I went into the study to find the cup sitting, where I had left it, beside my word processor. Yesterday, before going to my office at the university, I purchased a bagel and cream cheese, a glass bottle of cranberry juice, and a pecan square from the local bakery. Once in my office, I sat all the breakfast items on the edge of my crowded desk. Reaching for a pencil, I knocked the bottle of juice off the edge of the desk. Fortunately it hit the leg of my computer table, was deflected, so landed rolling and did not break. I dived to retrieve it, but the hand I grabbed the edge of the desk with moved a piece of paper, which the still paper-wrapped bagel was sitting on, so that it now fell to the floor. I put the juice on the desk and hurriedly turned to pick up the bagel, and my hand knocked the pecan square onto the floor—

All of them came up, went back on the desk, and I proceeded to eat my breakfast, trying not to dwell on the fact that I'd managed to knock
every bit of it over. In the course of working on the revisions to this piece here, this afternoon I consumed most of a meal in eight or nine desultory trips to the refrigerator, most to get a single salami slice from the brown rumple of butcher paper wedged on the side of the second shelf—and, in one case, a spoonful from the container of cottage cheese—each trip immediately all-but-forgotten once it was over and I'd returned to the word processor here, to continue typing.

The conceit of the literary is that such things happen only in comedy, and are otherwise rare. But the truth is, they make up a disturbing percentage of our lives. We choose to look at them only through the esthetic framing of the comedic, which, by that framing, reassures us such happenings are not of major import. The truth is, however, that a good percentage of our lives is not just comic; it's slapstick.

The third area that is not written about is simply the socially proscribed: To what great period of literary achievement could an alien turn to learn of the workings of human life and society—the age of Greek tragedy, Japanese Haiku, the 19th Century Russian Novel, Medieval Chinese court poetry, High Modernism, the Victorian Novel, or the English Romantic Poets?—to discover that, say, human beings are creatures who, all of them, male, female, and child, have to void their bowels once or twice a day and empty their bladders between three and ten times in every twenty-four-hour period?

What poems or stories tell us that, in any random American crowd, about a third, between once and three times a week, take a small wad of wet toilet paper or cleaning rag and vigorously and carefully wipe away the hair, body scalings, and dust from the porcelain span between the back of the commode seat and the flush tank—while the other two-thirds are largely oblivious that such a job ever has to be done at all?

Neither Swift's exclamations over Celia's excretory functions nor Joyce's narration of Bloom's bath conveys such fundamental human facts.

Speaking of Joyce, how many readers of
Ulysses
today, I wonder, recall that the center of the controversy over the novel's supposed obscenity was the end of the Lotus-Eaters (section five), in which Bloom, by himself, takes a bath and observes his own pubic hair and genitals breaking the surface of the soapy water (“. . . a languid, floating flower”)—a scene, that, when I first read it at sixteen, I found jarringly erotic?

40. A memory remains with me from a winter visit, some twenty-five or more years ago, to the reading room of the New York Public Library. The late afternoon dimmed outside the high windows above the wrought iron balcony circling the hall, while yellow light puddled the long wooden tables under the reading lamps' green glass shades. After waiting
on the pew-like bench before the barred window under the mechanical-electric call board, with its black frame and red numbers aglow behind the ground glass, I went to the wooden window when my red number lit to receive my volumes. Minutes later, at one of the tables, my coat shrugged over the chair-back behind me, I began reading over the works in various pamphlets and books of the poet Samuel Bernhard Greenberg (1893–1917), copying out vivid lines or striking stanzas into my spiral notebook, as, up in the little town of Woodstock, New York, in the last, chilly weeks of 1923, Hart Crane had made similar copies from the Greenberg manuscripts, then in the possession of William Murrell Fisher. My visit produced an epigraph to a chapter in a novel I finished perhaps two years later.

But a return visit to the library only this past June—the same mechanical callboard, though it may have been repaired, has not been replaced—netted me an interesting revelation. In the novel, where I quoted him at the head of the seventh chapter, Greenberg's name, I now find, was inadvertently spelled “Greenburg.” And in none of the books currently among the Public Library stacks can I find the poem I quoted a quarter of a century ago.

It's tempting, then, to imagine all these vanished texts, along with their writers, if not the libraries in which the texts are on store, as inhabiting an alternate city, distinctly separate from ours, yes—yet closer, distressingly closer, than any of us has hitherto imagined.

41. If rhetoric is ash, discourse is water . . .

After Odysseus recounts to Naussica's father King Alcinous how the crow-queen Circe, “dread goddess of human speech,” exhorted him to leave her isle of Aeaea—palindromal in English and near so (Aiaien) in Greek—to visit Theben Tiresias in hell to receive wisdom, Odysseus goes on to explain at the opening of book “Lambda” (that is, Book XI):

Autar epei r'epi katelthomen ede thalassan

nea men ar tamproton erussamen eis ala dian
,

en d'iston tithemestha kai histia nei melainie
,

en de ta mela labontes ebesamen, an de kai autoi

bainomen achnumenoi thaleron kata dakru cheontes
.

[“But when we had come down to the ship and to the sea, first of all we drew the ship down to the bright sea, and set the mast and the sail in the black
ship, and took the sheep and put them aboard, and ourselves embarked, sorrowing, and shedding big tears,” in A. T. Murray's translation.]

In 1900, Samuel Butler rendered this, “When we had got down to the seashore we drew our ship into the water and got her mast and sails into her; we also put the sheep on board and took our places, weeping and in great distress of mind . . .” three years after he published
The Authoress of the Odyssey
(1897), a book that influenced Joyce, and that Pound was likely familiar with. The opening of “Lambda” (often called The Book of the Dead) gives rise to two modernist traditions. For at the beginning of “Lambda” 's second verse paragraph, Odysseus tells how soon his ship

He d'es peirath' hikane bathurroou Okeanoio
.

entha de Kimmerion andron demos te

polis te, eeri kai nephele kekalummenoi
. . .

[“. . . came to the deep-flowing Oceanus, that bounds the Earth, where is the land and city of the Cimmerians, wrapped in mist and cloud . . .”—Murray.]

The story is well known how in 1906 (or '08, or '10), Ezra Pound, browsing through the book stalls along the Seine's quay, purchased in an octavo volume Andreas Divus Justinopolitano's “
ad verbum translata
”—word for word translation—of
The Odyssey
, published in Paris in 1538, as part of the rebirth of interest in classical learning that gave the Renaissance its name.

Likely following notions that went back at least to those F. A. Woolf had put forward in 1795 (
Prolegomena ad Homerum
), Pound saw “Homer” as an amalgam of tales from different times, cobbled together more or less elegantly, more or less invisibly, somewhere before the classical age. Among that varied material, Pound was fairly sure that “Lambda,” with its account of the calling up the dead, who come to drink the blood of the sacrifice—Elpinor, Anticleia, Tiresias, and high born Tyro—before speaking, followed by the parade of ghostly queens—Antiope, Alcmene, Megare, Jocasta, Chloris, Lede, Iphimedeia, Phaedra, Procris, Ariadne, Maera, Clymene, and Eriphyle . . .—represented the oldest material in
The Odyssey
. Using a set of principles for translation that sound like nothing so much as those Nabokov formulated to bring off his
Onegin
, certainly Divus had translated the opening more literally than most:

Ad postquam ad navem desaendimus, et mare
,

Navem quidem primum deduximus in mare divum
,

Et malu posuims et vela in navi nigra
. . .

Where the Greek begins “
Autar epei
. . .” (literally “But then,” instead of the “But when . . .” that A. T. Murray settled on for the 1919 standard Loeb translation [quoted below the Greek], or the “At length we were at the shore . . .” that T. E. Lawrence gives us in his 1935 translation), Divus wrote “
Ad postquam
. . .”—literally “But after-that. . .” The problem with the English is that “
Autar
” is not just any old “But.” For that, the Greeks used “
alla
.” Rather it is an emphatic “but”—a bit more like “but also.” Also, it has a bit of the thrust of the Italian “
pertanto
” (literally “but-so-much,” which usually comes out in English as “But of course”). This accounts for the “But's,” the “At long last's,” and the “Finally's” various translators have used to commence this passage.

Nevertheless, Pound was intrigued by the notion that what he took to be the most ancient poetic material in the poem (and thus some of the most ancient literary material in the West) began with a connective—and an emphatic connective at that—which might well be taken as joining it to prior material even older still, though now lost.

This, at any rate, was the spirit in which Pound began his own great serial composition poem,
The Cantos
, with his own translation of Divus's translation of Homer's account of Odysseus's trip to northern Cimmeria, where gaped the gate of hell:

And then went down to the ship,

Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and

We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,

Bore sheep aboard her, and our own bodies also,

Heavy with weeping . . .

But T. E. Lawrence had a different and deprecating view of “Lambda”: “Book XI, the Underworld, verges toward ‘terribilitá'—yet runs instead to the seed of pathos, that feeblest mode of writing. The author misses his every chance of greatness, as must all his faithful translators.” Yet Lawrence's Homer is one that most of us, scholar or general reader, probably have a bit of trouble recognizing, at least in some of its aspects: “a bookworm, no longer young, living far from home, a mainlander, city-bred and domestic. Married but not exclusively, a dog-lover, often hungry and thirsty, dark-haired. Fond of poetry, a great if uncritical reader of
The Iliad
, with limited sensuous range but an exact eyesight which gave him all his pictures. A lover of old bric-a-brac, though as muddled an antiquary as Walter Scott. . . He is all adrift when it comes to fighting and had not seen deaths in battle.” El 'Awrence had, of course, both seen and dealt out many.