Volume 1
No. 1
Winter 2011
 D u rham E ng lish R e v iew 
An Und ergraduate Journal
Editor: Michael Plygawko
The Language of Architecture and the Architecture of Language:
the Dynamic Relationship between Character and Setting in Charles
Dickens´s Bleak House
Alexandra Hay, Princeton University
The Emptiest Vessel Makes the Greatest Sound: Falstaff as
Theatrical Cipher in Shakespeare´s Henry IV through Henry V
Lauren E Mueller, University of California, Berkeley
A Poetics of Cultural Exchange: Language, Form and Canonical
Construction of Early Modern Irish Poetry
Lee Vahey, National University of Ireland, Galway
Inescapable Perception: Imaginative Possibility and Limit in the
Odes of John Keats
Michael Plygawko, University of Durham
Classics, Contrapasso and the Christian Epic: Comparing the
Serpent Transformation Scenes in Dante Alighieri´s Inferno
and John Milton´s Paradise Lost
Elizabeth Wilkinson, Princeton University
African Myth alongside Western Conventions in Toni Morrisson´s
Song of Solomon
James O‘Sullivan, University College Cork

D u r h am E ng li s h R e v i ew
An Undergraduat e Journal

Editor
Michael Plygawko
Advisory Editor
Professor Stephen Regan
Editorial Board – Academic and Postgraduate Members
Professor Ewan Fernie
Professor Terry Gunnell
Professor Joseph C Harris
Professor Jonathan Hart
Professor Neil Lazarus
Professor Michael O’Neill
Professor Patricia Waugh
Dr David Ashurst
Dr Madeleine Callaghan
Dr Neil Cartlidge
Dr Ann-Marie Einhaus
Dr Katherine Heavey
Dr Simon James
Dr Jennifer Terry
Dr Samuel Thomas
Dr Paige Tovey
Dr Laura Varnam
Dr Sarah Wootton
Miss Anna Camilleri
Mr Paul Hamilton
Mr Luke John Murphy
The Shakespeare Institute
University of Iceland
University of Harvard
University of Durham
University of Warwick
University of Durham
University of Durham
University of Durham
University of Sheffield
University of Durham
University of Durham
Newcastle University
University of Durham
University of Durham
University of Durham
University of Durham
University of Oxford
University of Durham
University of Oxford
University of Birmingham
University of Iceland
Editorial Board – Undergraduate and Graduate Members
Mr Jonathan Armoza
Miss Chloe Barrowman
Miss Charlie Bindels
Miss Melissa Chaplin
Mr Jack Gamble
Miss Eden Glasman
Mr Brian C Hardison
University of Washington
University of Durham
University of Cambridge
University of Durham
University of Cambridge
University of Durham
University of Washington
Miss Koren Kuntz
Miss Anna Millward
Miss Anna Moss
Miss Sara Noor
Miss Youngjoo Park
Mr Johannes Woolf
E
D
R
englishreview
(Some members of the editorial board are present in an advisory
and/or honorary capacity)
www.dur.ac.uk/durham.
University of Durham
University of Cambridge
University of Durham
University of Durham
Princeton University
University of Oxford
Special thanks to Miss Sabine Schneider for her help with, and advice on, the typesetting and design for
this issue – in particular for her front-page and inside cover design.
DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW
AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
VOL. 1, NO. 1
Endorsement
1
Editor’s Introduction
2
The Language of Architecture and the Architecture of
Language: the Dynamic Relationship between Character
and Setting in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House
Alexandra Hay
4
The Emptiest Vessel Makes the Greatest Sound: Falstaff
as Theatrical Cipher in Shakespeare’s Henry IV through
Henry V
Lauren E Mueller
22
A Poetics of Cultural Exchange: Language, Form and
Canonical Construction in Early Modern Irish Poetry
Lee Vahey
41
Inescapable Perception: Imaginative Possibility and Limit
in the Odes of John Keats
Michael Plygawko
60
Classics, Contrapasso and the Christian Epic: Comparing
the Serpent Transformation Scenes in Dante Alighieri’s
Inferno and John Milton’s Paradise Lost
Elizabeth Wilkinson
81
African Myth alongside Western Conventions in Toni
Morrison’s Song of Solomon
James O’Sullivan
109
Published by the Department of English Studies, University of Durham
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First published 2011
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© University of Durham
STEPHEN REGAN AND CORINNE SAUNDERS
Endorsement
I
t gives us great pleasure to celebrate the publication of this first issue of the
Durham English Review. As far as we are aware, this is the only
undergraduate journal of its kind, dedicated to the pursuit of research
excellence in English. In university and college English departments throughout
the world, research and teaching go hand in hand, though research is often
presented as an activity undertaken mainly by lecturers and postgraduates. At
Durham, we hold fast to an ideal of research-led teaching, believing that excellent
research enhances teaching, but also that teaching, at its very best, enlivens and
sustains research. We encourage research and nurture research skills among our
undergraduate students, many of whom remain with us as research students at
MA and PhD level. One of the great virtues of the Durham English Review is that
it clearly demonstrates undergraduate research as a major part of the discipline
and profession of English. It approaches English in a wide-ranging historical and
international context, soliciting articles on all aspects of the subject, from
undergraduate students all over the world. We are very proud that Michael
Plygawko, one of our final-year undergraduate students at Durham, has launched
the Review with such ambition and determination. We wish him well in his
endeavours as editor, and we encourage readers everywhere to support the Review
and contribute to its lasting success.
Professor Stephen Regan (Advisory Editor)
Professor Corinne Saunders (Head of Department)
Department of English Studies, University of Durham
-1-
MICHAEL PLYGAWKO
Editor’s Introduction
T
his issue marks the culmination of a six-month project to form a new,
international journal for undergraduate literary theory and criticism.
The aim of the Durham English Review is to provide a platform on
which undergraduates with a focus in English literature can publish their work
and, if accepted for publication, receive feedback. The papers contained in this
document are those that, after a process of double blind review, are deemed
suitable for publication in a periodical that aspires to the highest degree of
undergraduate excellence.
The periodical has received an overwhelming number of submissions,
some of which are now under consideration for the second issue. Included in
these submissions are works from Princeton, Johns Hopkins, California Berkeley
and universities from mainland Europe. Such a range of articles I believe
indicates that the Review has succeeded in one of its most important aims: the
ability to achieve a meritocratic review process, governed by a thematic interest
in English and its related languages. The trans-national authorship of this first
issue demonstrates the editor’s attempts to situate the journal epistemologically in
relation to the global study of English rather than geographically in any one
country. Our decision not to Anglicise the spellings of authors whose forms of
English contain regional variations reflects this commitment.
Each of the articles in Vol. 1, No. 1 were in some way believed by the
reviewers to be examples of clearly excellent undergraduate work, in most cases
containing elements of originality and in all cases containing unusual insights or
views. Whilst groundbreaking originality is admittedly rare in undergraduate
work, knowledge still seems to advance through a dialectically driven synthesis of
old and new; paradigm-shifting research may be driven by professional critics,
-2-
DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL but if the work selected by the Durham English Review can help in the
dissemination of revised ways of thinking about literature whilst offering modest
refinements, then the journal will also have achieved its aims as an academic
medium and a platform to showcase academic training at undergraduate level.
University of Durham
-3-
ALEXANDRA HAY
The Language of Architecture and the
Architecture of Language:
the Dynamic Relationship between Character and Setting in
Charles Dickens’s Bleak House
O
ne might expect to find chapter titles like ‘The Grammar of Antiquity’
and ‘Sixteenth-Century Linguistics’ in a work on language, but these
are in fact taken from architectural historian John Summerson’s book,
The Classical Language of Architecture.1 Summerson begins by stating that he
will be ‘talking about architecture as a language’ and goes on to discuss the five
orders of architecture (Doric, Tuscan, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite) as
‘elements in the architectural grammar of Antiquity’ and parts of a ‘linguistic
formula.’2 Since the Renaissance, language and architecture have been intimately
linked. Just as Summerson investigates the ‘grammatical workings’ of
architecture, one might also examine the architectural workings of language.
Charles Dickens’s Bleak House is especially appropriate for such a study.
It is a novel in which language—from dialogue, letters, documents, and
handwriting to names and aliases—plays a crucial role. It is also remarkable how
much architectural imagery and metaphors abound in Bleak House.3 The narrator
refers to the ‘walls of words’ endlessly built up in the Court of Chancery (14).
Mrs. Jellyby’s dress, held together with a ‘lattice-work of stay-lace’ is compared
with the open lattices of a summerhouse (53). Mr. Chadband piles ‘verbose flights
1
John Summerson, The Classical Language of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T.
Press, 1963).
2
Ibid. 7, 12-13.
3
Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed. Nicola Bradbury (1853; repr., London: Penguin
Books, 2003). All further references to the novel will be to this edition with page numbers
noted parenthetically.
-4-
THE LANGUAGE OF ARCHITECTURE AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF LANGUAGE of stairs, one upon another’ in his lengthy speeches (307). When Mrs. Snagsby
scrutinizes her husband, her sharp gaze ‘enters at his eyes, the windows of his
soul, and searches the whole tenement’ (414). This idea of equating a person with
a building, whether a summerhouse or a tenement, can be taken a step further by
comparing a person’s language with the architectural features of their home. As
John Jarndyce says of a friend, ‘you shall see him in his own home, and then
you’ll understand him better’ (672). In Bleak House, the characters are
simultaneously shaped by and shapers of the places they call home.
The ‘walls of words’ built by the characters in a novel often mirror their
own homes in revealing ways. By looking at Dickens’s descriptions of places
alongside the language and speaking habits of their respective inhabitants,
insights into the construction of his characters, settings, and the novel as a whole
can be gleaned. Critics have noted how Bleak House organizes itself by analogy
to the home,4 but the relationship between the language of the novel and the
architecture and atmosphere of its settings has yet to be fully explored.
In their introduction to Architecture and Language, Paul Crossley and
Georgia Clarke note how architects created a ‘grammar of ornament’ and a
‘syntax’ for architecture.5 Crossley and Clarke observe how:
the style of individual architects was likened to literary styles;
architecture was compared to eloquence, as an art both useful
(communicative) and pleasing (emotionally powerful), the evolution of
architectural style was likened to the slow growth of a ‘natural
language,’ and the nature of architectural composition came to be
related to linguistic structures: the elements or parts of the buildings
4
Kevin McLaughlin, ‘Losing One's Place: Displacement and Domesticity in Dickens's
Bleak House,’ Modern Language Notes 108 (December, 1993) 884.
5
Georgia Clarke and Paul Crossley, eds. Architecture and Language: Constructing
Identity in European Architecture c. 1000-c. 1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000) 1.
-5-
DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL (profiles, mouldings, etc.) were to architecture what words were to
sentences.6
It is the constitutive elements and parts—the details of a structure—that
determine the style of the whole. Summerson points out how the decoration on
the tops of columns, a seemingly subtle detail, actually plays an enormous role in
defining a building’s overall ‘mood.’7 Like the use of ornamentation or the layout
of the rooms in a house, Dickens’s style, tone, and diction all contribute to the
distinctive atmospheres of his various settings, from the urban hell that is Tomall-Alone’s to the picturesque charms of Bleak House.
‘So vile a wonder as Tom:’ Jo & Tom-all-Alone’s
Jo, a ‘common creature of the common streets’ (724), is forced out of poverty to
make his home in the fantastic London neighborhood known as Tom-all-Alone’s.
Allan Pritchard asserts that this is an example of the ‘new urban Gothic setting.’
According to Pritchard, the ‘real locale of Gothic horror is no longer to be found
in the country mansion, but rather in the midst of the city.’8 Although setting in
Bleak House plays a prominent role, a key feature of Gothic fiction, Tom-allAlone’s is about much more than Gothic horror. The significance of Tom-allAlone’s is shown in part by how closely connected the place is to the larger plot
of Bleak House—that of the Jarndyce case in Chancery. The name of the
neighborhood might refer to Tom Jarndyce, the present Mr. Jarndyce’s great
uncle, who ‘blew his brains out,’ as the narrator so delicately puts it, out of
despair over his never-ending case (16). But the fact that no one knows the
identity of the Tom who gave the area its name for certain (257) is an anomaly in
a novel where names, real and assumed, play such a notable role, as pointed out
6
Ibid.
Summerson, The Classical Language of Architecture 13.
8
Allan Pritchard, ‘The Urban Gothic of Bleak House,’ Nineteenth-Century Literature 45
(March, 1991) 437.
-67
THE LANGUAGE OF ARCHITECTURE AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF LANGUAGE by J. Hillis Miller.9
Most of the residents of Tom-all-Alone’s are known by a variety of
nicknames, like Carrots, Gallows, Lanky, and the Brick (358-359). Jo himself
goes by Toughy or the Tough Subject (359), seemingly inappropriate labels for a
character described as anything but tough. Esther Summerson, one of the two
narrators of Bleak House, also possesses several nicknames: Old Woman, Little
Old Woman, Mother Hubbard, and Dame Durden are but a few. She feels that her
‘own name soon became quite lost among them’ (121). Such an effect is similar
to that of living in Tom-all-Alone’s—all sense of identity, personal history, and
individuality is lost. The people who live in this place of ‘crazy houses’ and
‘tumbling tenements’ are reduced to an amorphous ‘crowd of foul existence’
(256). Even the name ‘Jo,’ truncated to as short and simple a word as possible,
seems more a nickname than a proper name.
Dickens goes to great lengths to emphasize the benighted nature of Jo’s
world. He knows no more of himself than that his name is Jo, has never been to
school, has no family or friends, and knows nothing of religion (177). Jo is
compared with a ‘growth of fungus’ born out of ‘neglect and impurity’ (714-715).
The narrator remarks how ‘wonderfully strange’ it must be to be Jo, who in his
lack of education and understanding is ‘scarcely human’ and should be included
among the ‘lower animals’ (258). Jo is a true denizen of the ‘great wilderness of
London’ (748).
This motif of the poor being reduced to almost the level of animals is
continued in the verbs of motion that are used. Amidst the ‘wretched hovels’ of
the brickmakers in St. Albans, the people ‘prowled about’ (129-130). Jo, a
‘slouching figure’ (180), ‘shuffles’ along (178, 409, 415). Even walking has
degenerated into prowling and shuffling. In contrast, Lady Dedlock ‘flits’ (256)
from Chesney Wold, to London, to Paris, and back again, as freely and easily as a
9
J. Hillis Miller, ‘The Interpretive Dance in Bleak House,’ in Modern Critical
Interpretations: Charles Dickens's Bleak House, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea
House Publishers, 1987) 24-25.
-7-
DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL bird. But in Tom-all-Alone’s, the crowd skulks like ‘imprisoned demons’ (362).
Almost overcome by fever, Jo ‘goes shrinking and creeping on’ down the filthy
streets of London (713). Slow, awkward, avoiding light and the contact of others,
Jo comes across more like some nocturnal creature caught out in the daytime than
a young man living in London, one of the great cities of the world.
Darkness and dirtiness are other noteworthy aspects of life in Tom-allAlone’s. As a street sweeper, Jo deals on a daily basis with the ‘street mud,’
which the narrator calls a ‘mystery,’ ‘made of nobody knows what’ and coming
from ‘nobody knows whence’ (163), much like Jo himself. The main
thoroughfare of Tom-all-Alone’s is nothing more than a ‘stagnant channel of
mud’ (711). Corruption seeps upward from the very ground Jo walks on. The
streets are ‘undrained, unventilated, deep in black mud and corrupt water’ (358).
The grimy squalor of Tom-all-Alone’s manifests itself in Jo’s unenlightened
worldview. He can scarcely raise his eyes or mind above the filthy level of the
street. As Mr. Chadband states, Jo lives in ‘a state of darkness’ (314).
Jo sums up his own ‘mental condition’ with the oft-repeated phrase: ‘I
don’t know nothink about nothink at all’ (256, 257, 260, 264, 416). This spelling
of ‘nothing’ as ‘nothink’ may point to the core of the issue: Jo is deprived of the
freedom to think, and he cannot even use his imagination to escape his miserable
existence. Thinking is a luxury the residents of Tom-all-Alone’s simply cannot
afford. The narrator observes of the neighborhood: ‘no part of it left to the
imagination is at all likely to be made so bad as the reality’ (710). The deplorable
condition in which Jo lives robs imagination of its power—the reality of Tom-allAlone’s is worse than anything the mind can possibly create.
This state of ‘nothink’ is further illustrated in Jo’s use of language. Jo’s
vocabulary is limited and his speech repetitive. At the inquest for Captain
Hawdon’s death, Jo’s remark that ‘He was wery good to me’ (178, 181) is
repeated several times, as if he has reached the limits of his descriptive abilities
with this simple phrase. Written words ‘mean nothing’ to Jo and street signs are
-8-
THE LANGUAGE OF ARCHITECTURE AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF LANGUAGE just ‘mysterious symbols’ (257). The labyrinthine streets of London, filled with
incomprehensible signs, must be a puzzle to Jo. The following excerpt, in which
Jo recounts his meeting with the mysteriously veiled Lady Dedlock, illustrates the
mixture of vernacular, idiosyncratic pronunciation, and ungrammatical sentences
that make up Jo’s speech:
‘They're wot's left, Mr. Snagsby,’ says Jo, ‘out of a sov-ring as wos give
me by a lady in a wale as sed she wos a servant and as come to my
crossin one night and asked to be showd this 'ere ouse and the ouse wot
him as you giv the writin to died at, and the berrin-ground wot he's
berrid in. She ses to me she ses “are you the boy at the inkwhich?” she
ses. I ses “yes” I ses. She ses to me she ses “can you show me all them
places?” I ses “yes I can” I ses. And she ses to me “do it” and I dun it
and she giv me a sov'ring and hooked it’ (310).
It is difficult not to picture the ‘crazy houses’ and tumbling ruins of Tom-allAlone’s upon reading Jo’s words, a seemingly crazy, garbled version of English.
How other characters respond to and attempt to understand Jo is also
revealing. Lady Dedlock can scarcely tolerate talking to him for more than a few
moments (261). Jo’s unusual pronunciation and use of slang renders some of his
speech almost incomprehensible: ‘I am fly,’ ‘But fen larks,’ ‘Stow hooking it,’
and ‘Stow cutting away’ are a few examples (261). In the end, Jo resorts to
nodding and pointing with his broom to make himself ‘intelligible’ to Lady
Dedlock (264). When Jo is weakened by fever, ‘few but an experienced and
attentive listener could hear, or, hearing, understand him’ (733). It is almost as if
Jo speaks a language of his own, comprehensible only to those familiar with the
London slums.
To Esther, who usually feels sympathy for whomever she meets, Jo is a
‘wretched boy’ (489) and even Dr. Woodcourt, who has experience working with
the poor, shrinks back from Jo ‘with a sudden horror’ upon realizing that it was Jo
-9-
DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL who spread the terrible fever from Tom-all-Alone’s (715). Filth and poverty make
Tom-all-Alone’s a fertile breeding ground for all kinds of noxious diseases. The
‘nauseous air...propagates infection and contagion’ (709-710) and ‘every door
might be Death’s Door’ (120). Even a native Londoner is shocked by the smell
that pervades the area and ‘can scarce believe his senses’ (358). Tom-all-Alone’s
includes London’s infamous fever-houses, in which the sick die ‘in heaps’ (492)
and are carted out ‘like sheep with the rot’ (358). To Jo, the people ‘dies more
than they lives’ (492). Death has the upper hand over life, and it is miraculous
that anyone survives at all in this ‘desert region unfit for life’ (708).
Michael Gurney notes the importance of communicability in Bleak House
as a means of emphasizing the connections between the horrific slums of London
and people of all classes all over England, susceptible to the same diseases as
those rampant in the slums.10 The infectiousness of Jo’s disease, passing from him
to Charley and then to Esther, evinces how the corruption of Tom-all-Alone’s can
affect anyone and everyone, even those distant from the source of the contagion.
It is Jo who starts the chain reaction of contagion that eventually leaves Esther’s
beauty ‘very much changed’ (572).
But something more than fever spreads from Jo. His very manner of
speaking seems to be contagious. In describing his words, though not in directly
quoted dialogue, the narrator adopts Jo’s vernacular (177, 415, 716, 730).
Sometimes, it is the spelling of a single word, like ‘sich’ instead of ‘such’ (730).
Other times, it is entire sentences and paragraphs. Borrowing from Jo’s
vocabulary, the narrator states: ‘he won’t never know nothink’ (415). The narrator
uses Jo’s distinctive style of speaking when describing Jo and his world: ‘he
would sooner have hurt his own self, that he’d sooner have had his unfortnet ed
chopped off...that she wos wery good to him, she wos’ (716-717). It is a
fascinating example of language imitating setting. Jo and the traces of Tom-all-
10
Michael S. Gurney, ‘Disease as Device: The Role of Smallpox in Bleak House,’
Literature and Medicine 9 (1990) 82-83.
- 10 -
THE LANGUAGE OF ARCHITECTURE AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF LANGUAGE Alone’s that he carries with him wherever he goes, infect the narrator’s prose just
as Esther is infected with Jo’s fever.
‘Fairy-land to visit, but a desert to live in’: Lady Dedlock & Chesney Wold
In passing from the squalor of Tom-all-Alone’s to the stately pomp of Chesney
Wold, we seem to be shifting from one extreme to its polar opposite. But
Pritchard notes that they are in fact two sides of the same coin, representing ‘rural
and urban Gothic.’ Pritchard sees Chesney Wold as embodying a more
‘conventional Gothic gloom’ in comparison to Tom-all-Alone’s.11 This does
indeed seem the case when Chesney Wold first appears, and the ‘waters are out in
Lincolnshire’ (20). Whereas London’s predominant features are mud, fog, and
darkness, Chesney Wold is overwhelmingly wet—the ‘heavy drops fall, drip,
drip, drip’ upon the Ghost’s Walk (21). Chesney Wold is as saturated with history
and memories as it is with water. It is an ‘old echoing place’ of ‘ghosts and
mystery’ (105) where the damp brings out a ‘smell and taste as of the ancient
Dedlocks in their graves’ (21). Portraits of the Dedlocks, a family ‘as old as the
hills,’ fill the house (21). But it is one portrait in particular, prominently placed
above the fireplace in the long drawing room, that is especially important. The
striking painting of Lady Dedlock, ‘considered a perfect likeness’ (110), has a
fantastic element to it curiously similar to that of the picture of Dorian Gray.
Early in the novel, the sun ‘throws a broad bend-sinister of light’ across the
painting and ‘seems to rend it’ (182). This ‘bend-sinister’ may simply mean that
the light falls on the left-hand side of the painting, but the fact that the light
appears to ‘rend’ the picture gives the description a far more ominous air, hinting
at the fall from grace to come.
Although the dismal weather and lifelike paintings seem to put Chesney
Wold firmly in the Gothic category, there is much more to be said of Lady
Dedlock and the Dedlock family home. The hyperbolically argumentative
11
Pritchard, ‘The Urban Gothic of Bleak House’ 441.
- 11 -
DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL Lawrence Boythorn at one point states that he would not give in to Sir Leicester
Dedlock’s demands if there were ‘a hundred Chesney Wolds, one within another,
like the ivory balls in a Chinese carving’ (145). Putting Mr. Boythorn’s property
disputes aside, this comment is an excellent illustration of Chesney Wold’s
multiple guises, all very different but nested within the same home.
Chesney Wold changes dramatically with the seasons. Its countless
rooms, halls, stairs, and passages are ‘very brilliant in the season and very dismal
out of it—Fairy-land to visit, but a desert to live in’ (23).12 With Sir Leicester and
Lady Dedlock away, ‘solitude, with dusky wings, sits brooding upon Chesney
Wold’ (103). It is the ‘brilliant and distinguished circle’ of the visiting elite that
finally gives Chesney Wold ‘an inhabited expression’ (185). When the Dedlocks
arrive with all their sparkling guests, all ‘the mirrors of the house are brought into
action’ and Chesney Wold ‘is all alive’ once more (188). For a time, the ‘general
flavour of the Dedlock dust is quenched in delicate perfumes’ (188).
This perpetual oscillation between a show of brilliant vitality and
deathlike solitude is echoed in the cold façade Lady Dedlock presents in public.
Like Mr. Turveydrop, who feels obligated to ‘show [him]self, as usual, about
town’ to maintain his reputation of possessing great Deportment (229), Lady
Dedlock dwells ‘[w]here the throng is thickest, where the lights are brightest’
(734). As Inspector Bucket puts it, she is ‘so handsome and so graceful and so
elegant’ that she is ‘like a fresh lemon on a dinner-table, ornamental wherever she
goes’ (812-813). But what does it mean to be an ornament, all pretty
decorativeness and no substance? Lady Dedlock herself notes how she lives upon
a ‘gaudy platform,’ perpetually admired and scrutinized by the fashionable set
(659). But there is an advantage in being ‘ornamental wherever she goes.’ Doing
so allows her to maintain her reputation among the elite as being ‘perfectly well
bred,’ perfectly fashionable, and perfectly unreadable (22).
12
Tom-all-Alone’s is also called a ‘desert’ (708), and Pritchard discusses the various
other connections that exist between Tom-all-Alone’s and Chesney Wold.
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THE LANGUAGE OF ARCHITECTURE AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF LANGUAGE In her speech and conduct, Lady Dedlock comes across as extremely
guarded. She almost always speaks in an ‘indifferent manner,’ and acts detached
even when matters close to her heart are touched upon (297). When Mr.
Tulkinghorn reveals her secret history, Lady Dedlock remains ‘perfectly still,’ as
unfeeling as stone (650). Lady Dedlock possesses an extraordinary amount of
restraint and self-control. Tulkinghorn himself is moved to remark: ‘What power
this woman has, to keep these raging passions down!’ (653). The true
‘complexion of her thoughts’ is perpetually masked (534) and even her sighs are
‘noiseless’ to hide her boredom (449). A similarly sharp divide between public
and private can be found at Chesney Wold. The old mansion is something of a
tourist attraction and the housekeeper, Mrs. Rouncewell, is responsible for
showing the house to visitors. While the long drawing room and the countless
Dedlock portraits are included in the tour, other items of a more personal nature
are left out. This includes the secret of the Ghost’s Walk, which is strictly a
‘family anecdote’ (111). Even in a show-house, everything is not put on display.
It is not in Lady Dedlock’s nature, ‘when envious eyes are looking on, to
yield or droop’ (735). But what happens when all the guests have gone and there
are no ‘envious eyes’ to scrutinize her? In the privacy of her room, Lady Dedlock
may let her emotions show. Alone, she cries, a ‘wild figure on its knees,’ (469,
660). In the brief moments when she is reunited with her daughter, her perfect
calm momentarily fails—she repeats over and over again ‘O my child, my child’
(579, 582). Lady Dedlock is finally shocked and is ‘for the moment, dead’ (466).
Her ‘dead condition’ lasts for only an instant, but it immediately recalls the close
tie between her, Chesney Wold, and its ghosts. There is a strange sense of
deadness about Lady Dedlock, and Esther notes the ‘deadly coldness’ of her hand
(578). In stifling all her emotions so completely, it is as if part of Lady Dedlock
has died.
Like Chesney Wold and its mausoleum in the park, Lady Dedlock has
smothered her passions and emotions to death and locked them away within
- 13 -
DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL herself. The few minutes she spends alone with Esther are ‘the only natural
moments of her life’ (580). After this brief outburst, Lady Dedlock once more
‘drew her habitual air of proud indifference about her like a veil’ (579). But this
veil of indifference does more harm than good. As the narrator makes clear
toward the novel’s end, Lady Dedlock is ‘not a hard lady naturally’ (851). She
must force herself to suppress all emotion and to shut ‘up the natural feelings of
the heart, like flies in amber’ (851). Lady Dedlock ‘supposes herself to be an
inscrutable Being, quite out of the reach and ken of ordinary mortals’ (24). In
becoming an ‘inscrutable Being,’ Lady Dedlock stifles her own humanity,
pushing her toward the coldness of Chesney Wold and away from love and
warmth.
How Esther views her mother’s home offers a strong contrast to Lady
Dedlock’s indifference. Her initial impressions are of picturesqueness and beauty.
The house, with its gables, chimneys, towers, turrets, and broad terrace, ‘seemed
scarcely real in its light solidity’ (287) and Lady Dedlock’s carriage standing at
the door looks ‘like a fairy carriage made of silver’ (300). But this fantastic fairy
palace transforms into something much darker, taking us back to Pritchard’s idea
of the Gothicism of the setting, when Esther realizes how deeply unhappy her
mother is, living beneath a mask. Chesney Wold is no longer a place of peace but
‘the obdurate and unpitying watcher of [her] mother’s misery’ (582). The once
tranquil house suddenly becomes a nightmare of ‘dark windows,’ ‘old stone
lions,’ and ‘grotesque monsters’ snarling at the surrounding gloom (584).
Interestingly, it is a ‘printed description’ of Chesney Wold that is used for
wadding in the pistol with which Mr. Tulkinghorn, the keeper of secrets who
threatens Lady Dedlock with exposure, is killed (835). This detail makes it seem
as if the house itself exercises some agency of its own. Tulkinghorn challenges
Chesney Wold and the noble family it represents, and so Chesney Wold takes
action to silence that threat. Not surprisingly, it is an architectural image that
illustrates this event. Lady Dedlock sees Tulkinghorn’s death as ‘the key-stone of
- 14 -
THE LANGUAGE OF ARCHITECTURE AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF LANGUAGE a gloomy arch removed’—this removal results in the whole archway tumbling
down ‘in a thousand fragments’ (855). Whereas Chesney Wold might represent
the past, broken down by the ravages of time, Bleak House may offer some
promise of the future.
Esther Summerson & Bleak House(s)
Compared with the cool and collected Lady Dedlock, Esther Summerson
possesses a completely different sense of herself. Gone are the ‘inscrutable Being’
and the ‘exhausted deity’ of Chesney Wold (196). Esther begins her narrative by
emphasizing the ‘great deal of difficulty’ with which she writes and her lack of
cleverness (27). Despite her faults, she is quick to mention her ‘silent way of
noticing’ all that passes before her (28). Although a significant portion of Bleak
House consists nominally of Esther’s narrative, and eleven chapters are even
entitled ‘Esther’s Narrative,’ these sections nonetheless consist of a hodgepodge
of voices. In addition to dutifully recording the conversations she hears, Esther
also works the words of others into her own prose. For example, in her
description of Mrs. Jellyby she borrows a few phrases from her friend, Richard
Carstone, and notes parenthetically ‘I am quoting Richard again’ (52). Even when
we think we are listening to Esther, we may in fact be reading the words of
someone else.
This mixture of voices, or ‘polyphony’ as Norman Page terms it,13 is
embodied in the hodgepodge nature of Bleak House itself.
It was one of those delightfully irregular houses where you go up and
down steps out of one room into another, and where you come upon
more rooms when you think you have seen all there are, and where there
is a bountiful provision of little halls and passages, and where you find
13
Norman Page, Bleak House: A Novel of Connections (Boston: Twayne Publishers,
1990) 79.
- 15 -
DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL still older cottage-rooms in unexpected places, with lattice windows and
green growth pressing through them. (85)
Bleak House is filled with strangely shaped rooms, odd corners, and
miscellaneous furniture and objects scattered throughout its twisting corridors. In
such a place, it is easy to lose ‘yourself in passages’ (86). There is a diverse array
of styles present, from the charming coziness of Esther and Ada’s rooms to
Richard’s library/sitting-room/bedroom, a ‘comfortable compound of many
rooms’ (86). Bleak House represents what architect Robert Venturi might call
‘nonstraightforward architecture.’ As opposed to obeying the strict, puritanical
rules of a single architectural style, Bleak House possesses its own ‘messy
vitality.’14 This messiness and complexity is echoed in the construction of the
novel itself, with its intricate inter-weaving of various plots, subplots, and
voices—the two narrators and the large cast of characters provides an even
greater variety of voices and perspectives. Esther at one point bemoans the
complicated progress of her narrative: ‘I am getting on irregularly as it is’ (769).
But just as Bleak House’s irregularity is ‘delightful’ and ‘pleasant’ (85-86), the
non-uniformity and complexity of the narrative is what makes it so exciting and
surprising to read.
Richard Lettis mentions how Dickens included ‘irregularities’ in the
construction of his own house at Gad’s Hill,15 and John Carey notes that Dickens
was attracted to the juxtaposition between disparate exteriors and interiors and
between the very different rooms a single building can contain. Such surprising
juxtapositions ‘provided tangible evidence for Dickens’s favourite theory about
the smallness of the world’ and about how seemingly unconnected people and
events can in fact be intimately related to one another.16 Connections are a
14
Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1977; repr., New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 2008) 16.
15
Richard Lettis, The Dickens Aesthetic (New York: AMS Press, 1989) 91.
16
John Carey, The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens’s Imagination (London: Faber and
Faber, 1973) 113.
- 16 -
THE LANGUAGE OF ARCHITECTURE AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF LANGUAGE significant component of Bleak House, and Esther is at the heart of this theme.
While Lady Dedlock insists that she must go down her chosen path alone (582),
Esther is all about connecting with other people. Page also points out how Esther
allows her telling of the narrative to be ‘colored by her awareness of what lies in
the future,’ which results in the subtle foreshadowing that enables the reader to
draw connections between past, present, and future events.17
Filled with unexpected connections and juxtapositions, Bleak House has a
messy but ‘homely, comfortable, welcoming look’ (116) that corresponds with
the tone of Esther’s narration, which Page describes as ‘informal and
confidential.’18 Esther often acts as confidante in the novel, to Caddy Jellyby,
Ada, and others, and Bleak House is just as welcoming as its mistress. It is a far
cry from the cold stateliness of Chesney Wold. Whereas Lady Dedlock and the
old family mansion are wrapped up in secrets and mysteries from the past, Esther
is much more concerned with the present. When her thoughts momentarily
wander back to her childhood, she swiftly reprimands herself: ‘It was not for me
to muse over bygones, but to act with a cheerful spirit and a grateful heart’ (103).
Despite this, when Esther dreams, it is of her days in her godmother’s house
(147). But as soon as she leaves this cold, lonely life behind and heads off to
school, her ‘old life’ seems to have been a dream (39).
Bleak House’s former state of decay and dilapidation seems just as unreal
given its present vitality and warmth. As Mr. Kenge remarks, even with its dreary
name, Bleak House is far from ‘a dreary place at present’ (45). In the past, Bleak
House ‘was bleak, indeed’ and had ‘the signs of [Tom Jarndyce’s] misery upon it’
(119). Under Tom’s negligent hand, Bleak House became ‘dilapidated,’ its walls
‘cracked,’ and the whole building was ‘shattered and ruined’ when the present
Mr. Jarndyce inherited it (119). Tom-all-Alone’s is in fact Jarndyce property, and
as Mr. Jarndyce points out, ‘is much at this day what Bleak House was then’
17
18
Page, Bleak House: A Novel of Connections 61.
Page, Bleak House: A Novel of Connections 55.
- 17 -
DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL (119). Perhaps the present, much improved state of Bleak House holds out a ray
of hope. Pritchard puts forth a similar idea when he claims that Dickens uses
Bleak House to show how a place that once belonged to ‘the realm of horror
Gothic’
that
transformed.’
19
still
envelopes
Tom-all-Alone’s
can
be
‘reclaimed
and
The rehabilitation of Bleak House proves that reform is possible
‘on a private level.’20
Through the work of industrious individuals like Esther, places like Bleak
House may be rescued from ruin. Esther is incredibly diligent and she is most
dedicated to the fulfillment of all the ‘obligations of home’ (83). She is endowed
with the housekeeping keys of Bleak House almost immediately upon arriving
there, as if this was the job she was destined to do (88). As Harold Skimpole puts
it, Esther is always ‘intent upon the perfect working of the whole little orderly
system of which [she] is the centre’ (603). The whole universe of Bleak House
revolves around Esther. McLaughlin describes her position as governess of Bleak
House as ‘highly ambiguous’—she is neither wife, nor daughter, nor hired
housekeeper.21 Esther must juggle all of these positions, and in doing so creates
her own distinct position.
According to Inspector Bucket, there is ‘no young woman in any station
of society’ quite like Esther: ‘You’re a pattern, you know, that’s what you
are...you’re a pattern’ (902). This idea of Esther as a pattern encapsulates her
relationship to Bleak House. While embroidering a table cover, Esther explains
how ‘all the great effects’ of the pattern would ‘come out by-and-by’ (919). Just
as Bleak House is discovered room by room, so too does Esther undergo a
process of self-exploration. Frances Armstrong comments that Bleak House is
‘physically right as a place of self-exploration and growth, full of interesting
19
Pritchard, ‘The Urban Gothic of Bleak House’ 437.
Ibid.
21
McLaughlin, ‘Losing One's Place: Displacement and Domesticity in Dickens's Bleak
House’ 877.
- 18 20
THE LANGUAGE OF ARCHITECTURE AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF LANGUAGE passages and corners.’22 Although she begins her narrative with difficulty and
trepidation (27), Esther nonetheless successfully brings the story to a close.
Concurrent with Esther’s development is the progression of the plot from
seemingly unrelated individual characters and episodes to something more
complex and complete. All the intertwining subplots in Bleak House are gradually
unraveled, with the final conclusion of the book becoming apparent ‘by-and-by,’
like a pattern slowly appearing out of separate threads brought together.
It is not surprising, given how attached she is to the house, when Mr.
Jarndyce asks Esther to be ‘mistress of Bleak House’ (690). But this does not
occur as one might expect. Bleak House, like Esther, acts as a pattern for the
creation of a new Bleak House.23 The gardens are laid out just like the ones at the
original Bleak House (962). The house itself is a ‘rustic cottage of doll’s rooms’
garlanded all over with flowers (962-963). Esther falls in love with her new
home: ‘I saw, in the papering on the walls, in the colours of the furniture, in the
arrangement of all the pretty objects, my little tastes and fancies, my little methods
and inventions...my odd ways everywhere’ (963). The new Bleak House
represents not just the colors and décor that most suits Esther, but embodies all
the little oddities that make her who she is. The cozy ‘doll’s rooms’ call to mind
Esther’s first companion, the ‘faithful Dolly’ that kept her going through the
lonely years she spent in her frigid godmother’s home (28). Through her
narrative—through language—Esther completes her journey from isolated
childhood, when her own identity was hidden from herself, to mature woman and
mistress of her own home, the ‘happiest of the happy’ (986).
Even the most casual of readers can enjoy Bleak House, with its diverse
array of characters and satisfying ending. However, those who delve more deeply
into Dickens are generously rewarded. A close study of the novel allows
22
Frances Armstrong, Dickens and the Concept of Home (Ann Arbor: UMI Research
Press, 1990) 105.
23
The repetition of names is echoed in the children born toward the end of the novel:
Caddy Jellyby’s daughter is named Esther (768) in honor of her best friend and Ada
names her son Richard in memory of her husband (985).
- 19 -
DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL connections to be drawn to a wide variety of subjects that one might not expect,
including architecture. By studying the language used by Jo, Lady Dedlock, and
Esther, the relationship between language and setting can be clearly outlined. Just
as Summerson’s orders and grammar of architecture determine a building’s
‘mood,’24 so too does the language of a character influence and is influenced by
the portrayal of their home. Through a dual close reading of a character’s
language and the architecture of their home, a more thorough understanding of
the interactions between the two and their relation to the overall arc of the novel
can be reached.
Princeton University
Works Cited
Primary Sources
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Ed. Nicola Bradbury. 1853. Reprint, London:
Penguin Books. 2003.
Secondary Sources
Armstrong, Frances. Dickens and the Concept of Home. Ann Arbor: UMI
Research Press. 1990.
Carey, John. The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens’s Imagination. London:
Faber and Faber. 1973.
Clarke, Georgia, and Paul Crossley, eds. Architecture and Language:
Constructing Identity in European Architecture c. 1000-c. 1650.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2000.
Gurney, Michael S. ‘Disease as Device: The Role of Smallpox in Bleak House.’
Literature and Medicine 9 (1990): 79-92.
Lettis, Richard. The Dickens Aesthetic. New York: AMS Press. 1989.
24
Summerson, The Classical Language of Architecture 13.
- 20 -
THE LANGUAGE OF ARCHITECTURE AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF LANGUAGE McLaughlin, Kevin. ‘Losing One's Place: Displacement and Domesticity in
Dickens's Bleak House.’ Modern Language Notes 108 (December 1993):
875-890.
Miller, J. Hillis. ‘The Interpretive Dance in Bleak House.’ In Modern Critical
Interpretations: Charles Dickens's Bleak House, ed. Harold Bloom, 1336. New York: Chelsea House Publishers. 1987.
Page, Norman. Bleak House: A Novel of Connections. Boston: Twayne
Publishers. 1990.
Pritchard, Allan. ‘The Urban Gothic of Bleak House.’ Nineteenth-Century
Literature 45 (March 1991): 432-452.
Summerson, John. The Classical Language of Architecture. Cambridge, MA: The
M.I.T. Press. 1963.
Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. 1977. Reprint,
New York: Museum of Modern Art. 2008.
- 21 -
LAUREN E MUELLER
The Emptiest Vessel Makes the Greatest
Sound:
Falstaff as Theatrical Cipher in Shakespeare’s Henry IV
through Henry V
W
hen Will Kemp left the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in the early
months of 1599,1 many a London theatergoer may have refused to
believe it. If Kemp was gone, then his character Falstaff was gone,
and such a reality was surely impossible. After all, in his epilogue to Henry IV
part 2 Shakespeare had guaranteed Sir John’s return in the forthcoming Henry V.
Even when Henry V opened later that same year and Mistress Quickly entered the
second act woefully confirming Sir John’s death, many in the audience may have
responded in denial.
During the 15th and 16th centuries Falstaff was certainly one of the most
popular characters of Shakespeare’s creation. There were more quarto editions of
Henry the Fourth part 1 published between 1598 and 1623 than any other of
Shakespeare’s plays.2 The Shakespeare Allusion Book, originally compiled by
C.M. Ingelby, and others in 1874, lists 80 allusions to Falstaff (the character)
between 1591 and 1700. This number is only topped by allusions to Hamlet (both
the character and the play) at a total of 95.3 The earliest direct allusion to Falstaff
listed in this anthology is from a Sr. Tobie Matthews in 1600. In it Matthews
seems to refer to Shakespeare himself under Falstaff’s name: ‘For I mu∫t tell you I
never dealt so freelie with you, in anie; and, (as that excellent author, Sr. John
1
James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (New York: Harper Collins,
2005) 36.
2
Ace G. Pilkington, ‘The John Falstaff of The Merry Wives of Windsor’, Midsummer
Magazine (Summer 1992) 1.
3
Ingleby, C. M. et al, The Shakespeare Allusion Book (London: Oxford University Press,
1932) 5.540.
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THE EMPTIEST VESSEL MAKES THE GREATEST SOUND Fal∫taff ∫ayes,) what for your bu∫ine∫∫e, news, device, foolerie, and libertie, I
never dealt better, ∫ince I was a man’ (Ingleby 1.88). This conflation of the
playwright Shakespeare with his beloved character would seem to attest most
strongly to Falstaff’s popularity. Moreover, Samuel Johnson famously speculated
it was Queen Elizabeth’s disappointment at Falstaff’s death that ‘inclined’ her to
‘command the poet to produce him again, and to shew him in love or courtship’.4
While there is no real evidence to support such a speculation, given Falstaff’s
evident popularity among theatergoers both during Shakespeare’s time and after,
it is not so improbable that his death would have been met with some significant
disappointment. ‘How could Falstaff really be dead?’ audiences might have
wondered. Was it possible for such a giant of a character to simply cease to exist?
After all, Falstaff had already ‘died’ once, and risen up again at the battle of
Shrewsbury: certainly this second death could be no more real than the first. Even
more significantly, how could the story in which Falstaff was arguably the
starring character possibly go on without him?
The absence of Falstaff in Henry V has proven disquieting to a number of
scholars, many of whom argue the last play of the Henriad ‘is clearly a lesser
drama than the two parts of Henry IV’,5 ‘qualifying splendidly as epic but weakly
as drama’6 in part because of the absence of Falstaff. These critics seem to view
this absence of Falstaff as an unfortunate omission motivated by the departure of
the actor who probably played him. However, this assessment of Henry V is too
strongly preferential, and leaves little room to consider Falstaff’s absence as the
product of deliberate authorial strategy. In fact it seems that Henry V is, and
continues to be among most audiences, one of the most dramatic and theatrical
plays of the Henriad. It enkindles the most ‘imaginary puissance’ (H5 Prologue
4
Brian Vickers (ed.), Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1979) 5.126.
5
Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books,
1998) 319.
6
Kenneth Rothwell, A History of Shakespeare On Screen (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999) 50.
- 23 -
DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL 25)7 out of all of Shakespeare’s English History plays. Yet this is not to belittle
the role played by Falstaff throughout what this essay will be terming the ‘Hal
Trilogy,’— the three plays of the Henriad involving Hal: 1H4, 2H4, H5— but to
suggest it is indeed Falstaff’s absence from Henry V that gives the play its
potency. Throughout the progression of the Hal Trilogy, the character of Falstaff
emerges as an infinitely swelling figure, too vast to remain within the bounds of
theatrical representation. He exerts such a potent influence on the people around
him and on the theatricality of the Hal Trilogy itself that by the end of Henry IV
part 2, it would almost seem impossible for such a vibrant character to simply
disappear. And yet, somehow he does, and his theatrical banishment appears to
amplify the potency of the play in which he is absent rather than diminish it. Even
more notable is the seemingly insistent portrayal of Falstaff throughout the Hal
Trilogy as a character full of nothingness, as a worthless fraud. That is,
Shakespeare throughout the Hal Trilogy characterizes Falstaff as full of
nothingness, as, among other things, ‘a tun,’ a ‘swollen parcel of dropsies,’ a
‘bombard of sack’ (1H4 2.5.407), a ‘quilt’ (1H4 4.3.43), and as a man ‘worthy but
in nothing’ (1H4 2.5.418). The main concern of this analysis is therefore to
reconcile Falstaff’s characteristic nothingness with his contrastingly potent
influence and to consider how this nothingness colors the power and operation of
imagination and theatricality throughout the Hal Trilogy as a whole.
In the following analysis this essay will suggest that Falstaff seems to
gain his theatrical power when acting upon entities that are ‘full of conceptual
potential’. This means entities with identities that are conceptually linked to other
tangential identities.8 This absorption of theatrical power by Falstaff, occurs in
much the way the mathematical cipher or zero in the early modern period
subsumed the value of the entire number system when it was elevated from
7
H5 Prologue 25. For all textual citations in this analysis I use The Norton Shakespeare,
Second Edition, ed. Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 2008).
8
For example: a woman can have the tangential identities of daughter, granddaughter,
mother, wife, and so forth.
- 24 -
THE EMPTIEST VESSEL MAKES THE GREATEST SOUND numerical placeholder9 to number. This essay will trace this change in
mathematics in the early modern period by examining how the Hindu numeral
system replaced the abacus-based Roman numeral system in Europe in the mid to
late 1500s. This revolutionary change in mathematics, as shall be illustrated, sent
ripples through the realms of trade, business, and even education. Schoolboys like
Shakespeare were introduced to the cipher in Robert Recorde’s mathematics
textbook The Ground of Arts (see below). At any rate, by subsuming the value of
other characters’ conceptual potential, and by increasing his ‘nothingness’
through his own death in Henry V, Falstaff becomes not only a simultaneously
worthless and infinite entity that parallels the mathematical cipher, but also gains
creative power through this parallelism. By thematically comparing the character
and development of Falstaff with the character and development of the Early
Modern cipher, the Hal Trilogy harnesses the creative power of zero to produce
the ‘imaginary puissance’ of Henry V. In other words, by operating through his
absence, Falstaff amplifies the theatricality of Henry V to make it the most
‘puissant’ play of the Hal Trilogy. He does so by becoming an abstract ‘cipher’ or
‘empty vessel’ (H5 4.4.61), gaining the power to pull together all the potentially
tangential identities within a single identity and creating value from within the
vacuum of theatrical representation.
Surfeit Swelled and Signifying Nothing
It is midway through Henry IV part 1 when Falstaff’s status as an entity of
‘nothingness’ becomes particularly evident. Hal figures Falstaff as a vessel
holding worthless or insignificant substances. According to Hal, who mocks
Falstaff in the tavern after the attempted Gads Hill robbery in Henry IV part 1,
Falstaff is ‘a tun’ (or large barrel), a ‘trunk of humors,’ a’ bolting-hutch of
beastliness,’ a ‘swollen parcel of dropsies,’ a ‘bombard of sack,’ and a ‘cloak-bag
9
That is, ‘0’ at this time was merely the place-value symbol denoting different orders of
magnitude. This is distinguished from other positional notation systems such as that used
in Roman numerals.
- 25 -
DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL of guts’ (1H4 2.5.407-10). When Hal and Westmorland chance upon Falstaff and
his soldiers in act four Hal even calls Falstaff a ‘quilt’ (1H4 4.2.43) and ‘blown’
(1H4 4.2.43). Moreover, Hal earlier admonished Falstaff in the scene where
Falstaff accuses the Hostess for picking his pocket saying, ‘there’s no room for
faith, truth, nor honesty in this bosom of thine; it is all filled up with guts and
midriff’ (1H4 3.3.14). At first glance these characterizations may seem to
associate Falstaff with copiousness; certainly Falstaff seems to epitomize fullness
and excess. Yet all the vessels of comparison contain substances that are
worthless or insignificant. That is, the ‘tun’ is full of air, the ‘trunk’ of ‘humors,’
the ‘bolting-hutch’ of ‘beastliness,’ the ‘parcel’ of ‘dropsies,’ the ‘bombard’ of
‘sack,’ the ‘cloak bag’ of ‘guts’, and the ‘quilt’ presumably of quilt feathers. With
the exception of the ‘tun’ and ‘quilt,’ Falstaff is compared to vessels that contain
essentially worthless substances. In the case of the tun and quilt, and Hal’s
characterization of Falstaff as ‘blown,’ the substances that the respective vessels
hold (i.e. air and feathers) are insignificant, or of ‘little strength or importance’
(OED ‘feather’ 10b). It follows then that not only is Falstaff a ‘full’ character, he
is a character full of good-for-nothingness, or correspondingly full-of-nothing10.
Perhaps it is in acknowledgment of Falstaff’s nullity that the play figures Falstaff
as ‘worthy but in nothing (1H4 2.5.418), a ‘jack’ (or knave) (1H4 5.5.134), and a
‘counterfeit’ (1H4 5.5.113). Not only is Sir John full of nothing, but this quality
of nothingness also casts him as worthless (‘worthy’-less), without honesty, and
ultimately deceptive, and thereby places him in a distinctly theatrical context.
By way of his worthlessness and deceptiveness, Falstaff in the Hal
Trilogy becomes a figure of theatricality, gaining dramatic power despite (or even
because of) his emptiness. One textual link between Falstaff and theatricality can
be observed in the use of the word ‘swell’ by Hal in Henry IV part two and by the
Chorus in Henry V. While banishing Falstaff at the end of Henry IV part two, Hal
10
This reading was inspired by the title to Michele Sharon Jaffe’s book The Story of O:
Prostitutes and Other Good-for-Nothings in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1999).
- 26 -
THE EMPTIEST VESSEL MAKES THE GREATEST SOUND describes Falstaff as ‘surfeit-swell’d’ (2H4 5.5.50) seeming to mock Sir John’s
bulbous figure. However, this use of the word ‘swell’ gains new meaning in
Henry V when the Chorus wishes for ‘monarchs to behold the swelling scene’
(H5 Prologue 4). In this prologue, the Chorus argues that the ‘wooden O’ of the
theatre as well as the ‘flat unraised spirits’ who act within it are powerless to
recreate Harry’s ‘swelling scene’ without the help of a ‘Muse of fire.’ It then
concludes that the lack of a ‘Muse’ must be substituted by the audience’s
collective imagination. So while still denoting expansiveness, ‘swelling’ in the
Henry V Prologue has become a state of illusion or theatricality. Yet Falstaff is
analogous to that ‘swelling scene’ of Henry V: he is a character full of both
deception and play, beheld and loved by monarchs, but in the end essentially fullof-nothing, like that ‘wooden O’ in which ‘flat, unraised spirits’ dwell (H5
Prologue 9). He is a character whom Hal has merely ‘dreamt of’ (2H4 5.5.47), a
theatrical entity like the vision Shakespeare presents in A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, which is ‘no more yielding but a dream’ (MND 5.2.5-6), or like
Macbeth’s ‘poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is
heard no more,’ ‘signifying nothing’ (Mac. 5.5.23-5, 26-7). In many of
Shakespeare’s plays, characters seem to argue that theatre is a kind of void, a
‘dream’ into which people can venture, but which in the end remains a mere
illusion having no effect on reality: a form of nothingness. Falstaff is a
representation of this theatrical illusion. Within his company hierarchical order is
muddied, identity becomes a matter of performance, truth becomes a matter of
invention, and history becomes a product of imagination. Nothing about Falstaff
is based in reality, he is essentially a shadow of reality, an impotent figure full of
nothingness. Yet given the Hal Triolgy’s vacuous characterization of Falstaff and
the theatricality he embodies, it becomes necessary to reconcile this
characterization with how Sir John nevertheless exerts such a potent influence on
the audience, the characters around him, and on the power of the Hal Trilogy
itself. How an entity of nothingness can effect any sort of influence at all becomes
- 27 -
DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL a central question in these plays. That is, how does ‘the empty vessel make the
greatest sound’ (H5 4.4.61-2)? It is questions such as these that Shakespeare
seems to be grappling with throughout the Hal Trilogy. It is through close
examination of Falstaff’s character, a character that embodies this paradox of
theater’s simultaneous qualities of vacuity and power, that the answers to these
questions can be ascertained.
‘Like the voice and echo’ (2H4 3.1.92-4)
In much the way an empty vessel gains its vastly expansive power from a
harmonic string, Falstaff gains his power by acting in relation to entities with
expansive conceptual potential. The word ‘potential’ is not used here in the
generic sense as the term could be too broadly applied to capacity as well as
identity. Rather it is used to refer to a kind of potential in identity, the expansive
nature of a single identity that comprises multiple alternative identities. For
example, Hal is one such character of potential. As a prince, and royal heir, his
identity and body is conceptually linked to the thousands of subjects who
comprise his and his father’s ‘body politic.’ Though in a physical sense Hal is one
person and one person only, in an imaginative and metaphysical sense, he is
thousands. It is no wonder then that Falstaff’s intuitive multiplication of persons
in his imagination often involves the prince. For example, in Falstaff’s retelling of
the Gads Hill robbery, ‘eleven buckram men [are] grown out of two’ (1H4 2.5.24). It is not distinctly clear who between Hal and Poins was wearing the buckram,
and who the Kendal green. But the buckram man fights Falstaff first and longest,
so it may be admissible to assume the buckram man was Hal. At any rate, in
Falstaff’s imaginative retelling of the event, as he fights with the buckram man,
the singularity of the man becomes nebulous. That is, it becomes unclear to
Falstaff how many men he is fighting, and his confusion during the fight causes
him to multiply the number each time he tries to remember and retell it
afterwards. The number of multiplications culminates in ‘eleven,’ a number
- 28 -
THE EMPTIEST VESSEL MAKES THE GREATEST SOUND visually representing repetition. It is no accident that Falstaff’s multiplying tale
involves Hal as a character. While Falstaff’s story is impossible in a literal sense,
it is accurate in a metaphysical sense. By interpreting the person of Hal as an
entity of repetition, Falstaff is simply registering Hal’s synecdochic potential to
represent the ‘body politic.’11 As the Prince of Wales, Hal represents (albeit
indirectly) two, four, seven, nine, eleven, even a thousand men.
Falstaff again registers Hal’s expansive potential when he soliloquizes
after the battle of Gaultree Forest in Henry IV part two. Falstaff praises Hal’s
drinking habits, contrasting the prince’s ‘hot’ and ‘valiant’ blood to the ‘cold
blood he did naturally inherit from his father’ (2H4 4.3.105-9). He then declares,
‘If I had a thousand sons, the first human principle I would teach them would be
to . . . addict themselves to sack’ (2H4 4.3.9-11). It is notable in this passage how
Falstaff first condemns Hal’s natural lineage, and then immediately juxtaposes
that condemnation with the image of a thousand of his own offspring.
Considering the famous father-son relationship cultivated by Falstaff and Hal in
Henry IV, it seems only natural for Falstaff to move from thinking about Hal’s
identity as a royal sack-drinking son, to thinking about his own imagined identity
as a potential father to the sack-drinking Hal. However, not only does Falstaff
think of himself as a father in indirect reference to Hal, he also imagines himself
the father to a thousand sons. It is as if by imagining himself as Hal’s father,
Falstaff expands the image to incorporate Hal’s conceptual potential, forming the
image of an entire body politic comprised of a thousand sack-drinking sons: a
thousand sack-drinking Hals. In other words, by exercising his imaginative
powers in reference to Hal, Falstaff seems somehow to once again register Hal’s
expansive identity as a princely body politic so as to father a thousand sack11
According to one A.D. Harvy, in 1413 Jean Gerson (the Chancellor of the University of
Paris) interpreted the golden head, in the Bible, of the statue in Nebuchadnezzer's dream
as the ‘king and royal family’. Thus, the ‘head’ of the body politic is not only the king, but
also his immediate family, and would therefore include Hal even before he was king. A.
D. Harvey, Body Politic: Political Metaphor and Political Violence. (Newcastle:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007).
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL drinking sons, and by association, a thousand sack-drinking Hals. In the
forthcoming pages the primary goal will be to ascertain the process whereby
Falstaff harnesses this multiplicative power, somehow gaining his ‘imaginary
puissance’ from the entities full of potential that he engages.
However, first it is pertinent to point to another character of ‘potential’ in
the Hal Trilogy: Falstaff himself. When Falstaff encounters the knight Coleville
during the battle of Gaultree Forest, he finds that his reputation has preceded him
and betrayed his identity. Yet the self-characterization he makes at this moment
showcases both his own conceptual potential, and also his ability to harness the
power of that potential to enact multiplication. Falstaff exclaims, ‘I have a whole
school of tongues in this belly of mine, and not a tongue of them all speaks any
other word but my name. An had I but a belly of any indifferency, I were simply
the most active fellow in Europe. My womb, my womb, my womb undoes me’
(2H4 4.2.16-20). This ‘school of tongues,’ as James L. Calderwood aptly
observes,12 casts Falstaff in the image of the Prologue’s ‘Rumor’ who wears a
robe ‘painted full of tongues (2H4 Prologue SD). However, this association
between Falstaff and Rumor also foregrounds Falstaff’s multiplicity. As a figure
of theatricality, Falstaff’s ‘school of tongues’ represents all modes and forms of
fictional narrative including rumors, lies, and boasts. He is, like Rumor, a sign for
fiction itself. Also notably like ‘Rumor’ he ‘doth double, like the voice and echo /
The numbers of the feared,’ as in the Gads Hill incident (2H4 3.1.92-4). But
perhaps more importantly, as it is described in this scene, Falstaff’s ‘school of
tongues’ does not go about disseminating rumors, or telling stories. Rather those
tongues multiply ‘Falstaffs.’ Naturally this is not to say Falstaff literally gives
birth to other Falstaffs, but that his many tongues pronounce a multiplicity of
‘Falstaffs’ into conceptual existence. It would seem that by using his own
multiplicity of theatrical potential, Falstaff has managed to multiply himself. It is
12
James L. Calderwood, Metadrama in Shakespeare’s Henriad: Richard II to Henry V
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979) 124.
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THE EMPTIEST VESSEL MAKES THE GREATEST SOUND not surprising then that Falstaff calls his belly of tongues ‘my womb’13: his
procreative belly conceptually gives birth to a whole school of Falstaffs thereby
intimidating Coleville into surrendering without a fight. But while it is suggested
that Falstaff seems to gain his creative power throughout the Hal Trilogy
whenever his imagination acts upon characters of conceptual potential such as
monarchs or father figures, we cannot disregard the play’s depiction of Falstaff as
a character full of nothingness. The hypothesis this analysis will attempt to
construct in answer to this seeming contradiction is that Falstaff is linked to that
famous ‘cipher’ mentioned in the Prologue to Henry V: ‘Let us ciphers to this
great account on your imaginary forces work’ (H5 Prologue 17-18).
However, in turning to that curious ‘cipher’ in the Prologue to Henry V, it is
suitable to first return to the play’s physical characterization of Falstaff. Not only
does the play seem to stress his ‘nothingness’ but also his rotundity, thereby
implicitly constructing a link between his physical characteristics and the physical
image of Henry V’s ‘cipher.’ That is, Falstaff is a ‘globe of sinful continents’
(2H4 2.4.257), the ‘nave of a wheel’ (2H4 2.4.228), a ‘whoreson round man’
(1H4 2.5.127) and somewhat linked to the ‘compass’ (1H4 3.3.19). Evidently
Falstaff is a spherical figure, an ‘O’ figure, like a globe, wheel, and a compass.
Few other characters in Shakespeare seem to have such a clear physicality
associated with them as Falstaff does, and it is suggested this O-like quality of
Falstaff elevates him to the status of sign when one considers this quality
alongside the depiction and influence of Falstaff within the plays themselves.
In addition to his physical O-ness Falstaff’s crooked character as a liar,
cheat, and a fraud seems to prefigure the ‘crooked figure’ of the Prologue to
Henry V. This ‘crooked figure’ ‘attest[s] in little place a million’ (H5 Prologue
15-16). For the observer the identity of the ‘crooked figure’ in the Prologue is not
immediately clear. Only when the Chorus explains that by ‘crooked figure’ he
13
Joseph Ring has responded to the argument here with the further observation that
Falstaff even linguistically multiplies the number of his ‘wombs’ when he says ‘my
womb, my womb, my womb’.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL means a ‘cipher’ we see he is referring to the curved shape of a physical zero.
However, before this revelation is made, an observer may very well have
imagined the other most obvious ‘crooked figure’ who often may ‘attest’ (or
testify) ‘in little place’ to ‘a million.’ That imagined figure could conceivably be
the man the audience has all been waiting for, Falstaff: that ‘crook’ or ‘crooked
figure’ who swears he has fought against ‘eleven buckram men’ (1H4 2.5.2),
‘foundered nine score horses’ (2H4 4.2.33) and claims Hal owes him ‘a million’
pounds worth in love (1H4 3.3.125). This ‘crooked figure,’ Falstaff, also attests to
‘a million’. The multiplying as well as diminutive capacities shared by both
Falstaff and the ‘cipher’ of Henry V’s Prologue identifies further the association
the Hal Trilogy seems to draw between Falstaff’s creative power and the creative
power of zero.
However, it would seem Falstaff’s creative power is only effective in the
realm of imagination. His numerical multiplications only seem to manifest
themselves in his stories, not in his physical reality; in much the same way the
zero or cipher only increases value within the conceptual world of mathematics
(for example, 1 ÷ 0 = infinity) but certainly has no real multiplicative powers in
the physical world ($1 ÷ nothing/nobody = $1). In fact, Falstaff’s effect on the
physical realm is quite the opposite of his effect in the realm of imagination. In
the world of reality Falstaff operates on numbers (such as the numbers of his
troops) in a nullifying fashion. If he enacts a multiplication of anything, it is a
multiplication of nothingness. At the battle of Shrewsbury in Henry IV part 1
Falstaff explains ‘I have led my ragamuffins where they are peppered; there’s not
three of my hundred and fifty left alive’ (1H4 5.3.35-6), figuring his troops as if
they have become ‘peppered’ food whose lives he has swallowed, and therefore
nullified. Moreover, not only does Falstaff multiply good-for-nothingness within
himself as has been explained, he also affects this multiplication-of-nothing upon
abstractions such as honor or kingship. For example, when Falstaff impersonates
Henry IV to admonish Hal for being a wayward prince, he makes a cushion his
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THE EMPTIEST VESSEL MAKES THE GREATEST SOUND crown (1H4 2.5.344). This displacement of the English crown by a cushion
registers on a symbolic level. Falstaff essentially nullifies the importance of the
crown, itself a physical ‘O’, multiplying its insignificance by symbolically
‘filling’ it with feathers, or things of ‘little strength or importance’ (OED ‘feather’
10b). Furthermore, when Falstaff exercises his mental powers on the concept of
honor, this supposed virtue emerges looking utterly vacuous: ‘What is in that
word ‘honour’? What is that ‘honour’? Air. A trim reckoning!’ (1H4 5.1.133).
Falstaff trimly reckons the value of honor, trimming away bits and pieces of its
illusory façade and multiplying its nothingness until he calculates its value and
equates it to ‘air.’ Air, or more specifically the West Wind, has been known in
Greco-Roman circles as ‘Zephyrus,’ a word forming the etymological root for
both ‘cipher’—from zyphr— and ‘zero’.14 Thus it may be observed that Falstaff is
not only depicting honor as air, but also as zero. By multiplying ‘nothingness’
within honor Falstaff nullifies its significance, just as he nullifies the significance
of kingship by filling it with insignificant feathers. In this way Falstaff seems to
‘swallow’ up much of the play, both literally and metaphorically. It would seem
he does so in very much the way a cipher can be observed to swallow up other
numbers when it is multiplied against them since all numbers multiplied by 0 also
become 0. Thus, it is this cipher-like quality of Falstaff that will take center stage
for the remainder of this analysis, for which purpose it will be necessary to turn to
the pages of history. This essay will be considering the revolutionary historical
transformation undergone by the mathematical cipher during the early modern
period. It will then juxtapose this event against Falstaff’s similar transformation in
the Hal Trilogy. Ultimately the aim will be to determine through the history of the
cipher how Falstaff gains his literary power when acting upon entities of potential
and how the infinitive power of these entities of potential is transferred to him.
14
Miriam Jacobson, ‘The Elizabethan Cipher in Shakespeare’s Lucrece’, Studies in
Philology, 107. 3 (Summer, 2010) 343.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL ‘The wide vessel of the universe’ (H5 4.4.61)
As Brian Rotman argues in Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero, the
meaning of the mathematical ‘cipher’ or numeral zero underwent a
metamorphosis during the early modern period. Rotman traces the origin of this
change to the Dutch mathematician Simon Stevin (1548-1620) who ‘expressed
great wonderment’ at the expansive and generative quality of zero calling it ‘the
true and natural beginning’ to all numbers.15 Essentially this historical shift in the
understanding of zero involved the displacement of the abacus-based Roman
numeral system by the Hindu numeral system in Western mathematics and
accounting (Rotman 78). This is not to say the figure for zero did not exist in the
west before Italian merchants imported the Hindu system from Persia in the late
Renaissance (Jacobson 340). In fact, as Charles Seife explains in Zero: The
Biography of a Dangerous Idea, the figure ‘O,’ which surfaced in Europe around
the fourteenth century (Rotman 7), was used in Renaissance accounting merely to
represent the empty space on an abacus when all the stones were at the bottom.16
That is, it was merely a placeholder rather than a number. In this way, before
Shakespeare’s time, the cipher in Europe never operated as anything more than a
valueless symbol, functioning only to ensure correct place notation (Seife 15).
Yet the cipher had a very different significance in the Hindu system in
which numbers were no longer limited to the realm of physical geometry and
were liberated into the realm of abstraction and theory. With the introduction of
the Hindu system of mathematics, Seife explains, ‘Mathematicians no longer had
to worry about mathematical operations making geometric sense’ (Seife 70). In
other words, something that cannot exist in natural reality, namely absence, was
now a conceptual possibility in the West, as was the possibility of dividing by
zero. In this way by shedding its geometrical and physical associations the cipher
in the early modern period was amplified from placeholder to number: it became
15
Brian Rotman, The Semiotics of Zero (London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1987) 28.
Charles Seife, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (New York: Penguin, 2000)
15.
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16
THE EMPTIEST VESSEL MAKES THE GREATEST SOUND a metaphysical entity instead of a physical one. This was an explosive event: as
Michelle Sharon Jaffe observes, this ‘complete sublimation of substance into
form on even the most basic digital level forces changes that reach well beyond
the field of mathematics’.17
There can be little doubt that the ‘reach’ of this explosive phenomenon,
which caused repercussions in social spheres ranging from commerce to religion,
extended into the realm of literature too. In fact, it is quite likely Shakespeare was
aware of this mathematical event. As Rotman observes, he and his
contemporaries comprised the first generation of English schoolchildren
introduced to the cipher through Robert Recorde’s mathematics textbook The
Ground of Artes (Rotman 78). In his pedagogical dialectic, Recorde describes the
cipher as a figure that ‘doth signifie nothing, which is made lyke an, O, and is
called privately a cipher, though all the other sometyme be lykewyse named’.18
As Jaffe observes, Recorde registers the unique status of the cipher in
pointing to the ambiguity of the word itself. ‘Cipher’ was used in English and
other languages both to denote zero, but also for all numerals, and even as a verb
denoting calculation (Jaffe 40). This expansive quality of ‘cipher’ is evident in its
ability to stand both for nothing, and for all calculation and all numbers, all value,
all infinity. The transformation of the cipher from placeholder to number thus
linked the concept of nullity to infinity. It is as if the cipher, which was once a
‘flat’ and ‘unraised’ (H5 Prologue 9) meaningless disk of nothingness, standing
merely for the absence of a stone in an abacus, transformed in Shakespeare’s time
into an expansive ‘empty vessel’ with the ability to signify infinite empty space,
to produce infinite echo from infinite void.
Given his chronological placement within the history of European
mathematics, it is no wonder that Shakespeare seems to have been one of the first
17
Michele Sharon Jaffe, The Story of O: Prostitutes and other Good-For-Nothings in the
Renaissance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999) 28.
18
Robert Record, The Ground of Artes (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Ltd, 1969)
9.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL authors in the Western canon to register the simultaneous vacuity and creative
power of the cipher. While most scholars usually point to Shakespeare’s use and
examination of the concept of ‘nothing’ in plays such as King Lear, Much Ado
about Nothing, and Macbeth, it is suggested his use of the ‘cipher’ (in contrast to
the use of the word ‘nothing’) in plays such as Henry V is somewhat different. As
Rotman argues, ‘zero and “nothing” are manifestly separate, moving in different
historical and linguistic terrains . . . zero, represented by the symbol “0” has a
physical shape, a graphic presence independent of particular languages, with its
own iconography’ (Rotman 58). While the concept of ‘nothing’ is nihilistic, the
concept of zero, or the cipher, registers both diminutive and amplifying qualities.
It is, to quote Stevin again, ‘the true and natural beginning’ to all numbers.
‘He’s an infinitive thing upon my score’ (2H4 2.1.21)
The transformation of the mathematical cipher in the early modern period serves
to illuminate Falstaff’s operation in the Hal Trilogy. This mathematical
revolution, which amplified the value of nullity and linked nothingness to infinity,
elucidates how Falstaff’s similar self-liberation (through death) into the realm of
abstraction imbues him with an infinite power of amplification through absence.
That is, through his death Falstaff gains his power in the Hal Trilogy by divorcing
his inherent ability to signify from his physical existence. He does so through his
increasing retreat into the realm of imagination, a retreat that ultimately
culminates in the death of his physical body.
The gradual dissipation of Falstaff as a corporeal being can be observed
from as early on as the first part of Henry IV. As is often observed, after the battle
of Shrewsbury Falstaff enacts his own death and then rises up again seeming to
defy the laws of physical existence. It is also suggested that from this point on,
Falstaff’s presence in Hal’s life begins to dissipate. His own scenes begin to
acquire an increased otherworldly and dream-like quality, filled with bizarre
encounters with an aging prostitute, pastoral simpletons, and a shallow
- 36 -
THE EMPTIEST VESSEL MAKES THE GREATEST SOUND clergyman. In Henry IV part 2 Falstaff is almost completely absent from Hal’s
life: only making real contact with the prince in a scene early in act 2, a reunion
cut short by Hal’s conscience-stricken return to duty. Furthermore, as the play
progresses, more and more of Falstaff’s presence in the play is represented
through his imagination. For example, the number of Falstaff’s imaginative
soliloquies increase, as do his imaginative multiplications. Instead of just ‘eleven’
buckram men, he brings to imaginative life ‘a thousand sons’ (2H4 4.3.9-11), ‘a
school of tongues’ (2H4 4.2.16), and ‘nine score horses’ (2H4 4.2.33). Moreover,
by the end of Henry IV part 2, Falstaff has become no more than a ‘dream’ to Hal
who tells him, ‘I have long dreamed of such a kind of man / So surfeit swelled, so
old and so profane’ (2H4 5.5. 48-9). It is as if Falstaff has ‘swelled’ beyond ‘all
reasonable compass’ (1H4 3.3.19) even to the point of vanishing entirely from the
physical world. As he ‘grow[s] great’ he ‘grow[s] less’ (1H4 5.5.156), becoming
an infinite figure while his nullity expands.
This is why Falstaff does not seem to completely vanish from the Hal
Trilogy when he dies. In fact his self-liberation from the bonds of physical
existence in order to occupy the realm of imagination causes him to become the
driving force of theatrical power hovering over Henry V. That is, it is impossible
for Falstaff to be completely banished from the Hal Trilogy since he must be ever
present in the imaginations of his disappointed audience. He becomes the very
‘swelling scene’ of Henry V, in whose ‘crooked’ ‘O’-like womb an excess of
‘unraised spirits’ ‘attest in little place a million’ (H5 Prologue 15, 13, 9, 16). It is
primarily through the voice of the Chorus that Falstaff returns to the stage in
Henry V. We hear Falstaff’s voice when the Chorus likens Hal to ‘Mars’ and
when he opens our minds to the ‘wide vessel of the universe’ (H5 4.0.1-3). We
feel his discomfort in having been ‘cram[med]’ (H5 Prologue12) into the
confining ‘belt’ (2H4 1.2.127) of ‘This wooden O,’ ‘this cock-pit’ (H5 Prologue
13, 11): too ‘little room confining mighty men’ (H5 Epilogue 3). We also see him
in his ‘ensign’ Pistol (2H4 2.4.70).), the ‘empty vessel [who] makes the greatest
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL sound’ (H54.4.61-2). We sense him in Hal’s nullification of ceremony (H5 4.1.
212-266), which echoes Falstaff’s nullification of honor (1H4 5.1.133), and
Williams’ similar condemnation of war and kingship (H5 4.1.128-138) whose
‘reproof’ to Harry, incidentally, ‘is something too round’ (H5 4.1.188). The point
is, no matter how weak Falstaff’s presence in Henry V may seem to anyone
merely reading the play out of the context of the Hal Trilogy, to the audience who
expected him, who wished for him, who felt his absence, he must always be
present in the imagination.
When Falstaff returns to Henry V as a purely imagined entity he
harnesses the creative power of the mathematical cipher—which he has come to
parallel through his emptiness, multiplicative potential, and expansiveness—by
absorbing the cipher’s resonance with infinity. That is, as a purely imagined
figure in Henry V, Falstaff becomes such an extreme representation of physical
nullity that his nothingness becomes infinite, thereby providing him with the
associative power of infinity. Through his physical and representational link with
the mathematical cipher Falstaff becomes both a figure of nothingness as well as
infinity. Through the infinite associative power of the cipher and its link to
infinity, Falstaff gains the literary power to amplify the value and significance
belonging to entities of conceptual potential such as princes, father figures, actors,
and even theater itself. In other words, through his link to the mathematical
cipher, Falstaff absorbs the cipher’s power to amplify value. Through his absence
in Henry V he uses this power to amplify the value of the audience’s collective
imagination, as well as the value of those ‘flat unraised spirits,’ to ultimately
spark that play’s imaginary puissance. This infinite resonance of his functions like
a wide empty vessel to the theatre full of individuals: all of whom are full of
potential, and all of whom are thinking about his absence. Thus Falstaff is the
source of the imaginary puissance in Henry V by way of his cipheric power to
increase value by bringing together all numbers of people, and their conceptual
potential, into communal imaginative creation. Through his absence, and
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THE EMPTIEST VESSEL MAKES THE GREATEST SOUND communally imagined presence, Falstaff’s cipheric power is the main force
behind the play’s creation of the theatre-wide ‘band of brothers’ (H5 4.3.60). He
is, to put it reductively, the ‘O’ representing Henry V’s ‘Muse of fire.’
***
This examination has attempted to explicate the way Falstaff operates as a cipherlike theatrical force that, through his absence, engenders the ‘imaginary
puissance’ of Henry V. It has illustrated how Falstaff obtains his imaginative
potency by acting on entities full of conceptual potential and through his physical
and thematic link to the history of the mathematical cipher. By increasing his
‘nothingness’ and becoming more and more like the cipher, Falstaff links himself
through nullity with infinity, thereby making himself an amplifying sounding
board, or empty vessel, for the imaginative creations of an entire audience: an
audience united in their imaginative resurrection of his character. Through
Falstaff this nullity and emptiness of one expansive character becomes a
microcosm for theatre and artistic representation as a whole, suggesting, as Jaffe
observes, ‘something need not have matter to matter’ (Jaffe 43). Thus in an
increasingly materialistic and cynical world, the Hal Trilogy through Falstaff
becomes a defense of the power of imagination and art. Through Falstaff, and
Falstaff’s engagement with the Hal Trilogy, Shakespeare brings to light the power
of the emptiest vessel to bring minds together in egalitarian creation to make the
greatest ‘sound’.
University of California, Berkeley
Written under the tutelage of Dr Joseph Ring, UCB
Works Cited
Primary Sources
Ingleby, C.M. et al. The Shakespeare Allusion Book, rev. ed., 2 vols. London:
- 39 -
DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL Oxford University Press. 1932.
Record, Robert. The Ground of Artes. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Ltd.
1969.
Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare, Second Edition. Ed Greenblatt et
al. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 2008.
Vickers, Brian, ed. Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. 6 vols. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1974-81.
Secondary Sources
Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead
Books. 1998.
Calderwood, James L. Metadrama in Shakespeare’s Henriad: Richard II to
Henry V. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1979.
Harvey, A.D. Body Politic: Political Metaphor and Political Violence.
Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2007.
Jacobson, Miriam. ‘The Elizabethan Cipher in Shakespeare’s Lucrece.’ Studies
in Philology. 107. 3 (Summer 2010): 336-369.
Jaffe, Michele Sharon. The Story of O: Prostitutes and other Good-For-Nothings
in the Renaissance. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1999.
Pilkington, Ace G. ‘The John Falstaff of The Merry Wives of Windsor.’
Midsummer Magazine. (Summer 1992).
Rothwell, Kenneth. A History of Shakespeare On Screen. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. 1999.
Rotman, Brian. The Semiotics of Zero. London: Macmillan Press Ltd. 1987.
Shapiro, James. A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. New York: Harper
Collins. 2005.
Seife, Charles. Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea. New York: Viking
Penguin Group. 2000.
- 40 -
LEE VAHEY
A Poetics of Cultural Exchange:
Language, Form and Canonical Construction of Early
Modern Irish Poetry
O
scar Wilde opined in his aesthetic preface to The Picture of Dorian
Gray, that ‘[the] critic is he who can translate into another manner or
a new material his impression of beautiful things’.1 One then assumes
that the function of the critic is that of translator, and his criticism, his translation
attends to a re-rendering of an original meaning. Approaching reconciliatory
theory, which is only what criticism may provide, often proffers a problem of
categorisation; critical translation, as it were, seems to serve theorisation rather
than contextualisation. This is a major concern in approaching the poetry and
indeed poetics of, what I categorise, the Hiberno-Anglophone Canon of the Early
Modern Ireland.2 This ‘canon’, having been sparse in publication,3 is often
obfuscated by both a cultural dissonance and simultaneity. A conflation of this
variety may be speculatively classified as cultural exchange.
In speaking of cultural exchange in literature, I am referring to an
exchange and interaction of literary concerns of language and form. The stance is
grounded in a specific poetry and poetics of a specified period. Many poems of
the period present linguistic exchanges. Some present lexical borrowings from the
Irish language with a subsequent anglicisation. Others, admittedly few, bear
traces of Irish language metric or meadaracht. There are also instances in which
1
‘The Preface’, Preface, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Complete Illustrated Works of
Oscar Wilde (London: Bounty Books, 2004) 3.
2
Andrew Carpenter’s edition Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland (Cork: Cork
UP, 2003) is, at present, the single and best collection of this problematic canon. Future
references shall be parenthetically cited thus: Verse.
3
See Andrew Carpenter, Introduction, Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland 1–
32.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL the Irish language attempts to recapitulate and reform itself into English language
patterns and forms. In essence, this is a form of cultural simultaneity; a Gaelic
mode finding expression in an English expression. There is a simultaneous
exchange between linguistic and formal media.
There appears to be an indecisive criterion for categorising these
exchanges. Is it a matter of choosing to base categorisation of the bases of literal
identity, for instance Old English, New English, and the Native Irish?4 Or, should
their categorisation be based on a formal and more literary issue? The former
accommodates the historian rather than the critic. Consequently, a minor
concession must be made; Andrew Carpenter notes that few of the collected
writes would have considered themselves ‘poets’ (Verse 1). The concession that
the poetry under scrutiny would not have regarded itself as literature poses little
threat and relevance. It forces one to indulge in the question of ‘what is
literature?’ Literature, by its essence, reflects an impression; these poems reflect
the impression of their place and period. Therefore, the poems in their collection
function as an anthological and perspective canon. The poems, collected by
Carpenter, only feel their literary inefficacy, as was perhaps felt by their authors,
in viewing themselves in singularity.
Dealing with the literary concern of categorisation, poems thus engaging
in cultural simultaneity and exchange fundamentally present problematics of form
and versification. They assume a categorical and critical ambiguity by way of the
simultaneous tension of their linguistic and formal medium. By examining this
dichotic stress, I hope to explicate the ways in which this simultaneity is exerted
and how this both effects and affects the method of positioning such literature in
the Hiberno-Anglophone canon. It also may shed light on how the canon may
define itself.
In generic terms, a canon can only be imagined as a recapitulation of
difference and dissonance. Indeed, in asking the question of what makes an author
4
See Verse 5–6.
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A POETICS OF CULTURAL EXCHANGE or work canonical, Harold Bloom suggests that the ‘answer, more often than not,
has turned out to be strangeness, a mode of originality that either cannot be
assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange’.5 Bloom’s
suggestion, I believe, is an essential elucidation. When basing the construction of
a canon on the bases of cultural exchange, his suggestion becomes quite
problematic. Exchanges of cultural modes imply a tension or tensions between
fixated and interchangeable norms. The tensions may also problematically imply
that there is no founding norm; if a tension successfully exerts itself upon a
conceived fixated structure, then it is no longer or never was fixated. The tensions
now imply that exchange is rooted in or surrounded by a relationship between a
diluted, changeable or appropriating norm. The dichotomic tension is essential in
the construction of the canon.6
The canon I am proposing is admittedly a ‘minor’ arguably insular one. It
is for this reason, and the reasons outlined above, that one cannot use Bloom’s
aforementioned elucidation of originality. There is insufficient scope here to
‘construct’ a Hiberno-Anglophone canon based on superlatives and originality;
there is merely a proposal toward classifying and interpretative methods. Thus the
proposal concerns itself with superlative illustrations rather than superlative
originality. One can, however, emphasise the final suggestion of interchangeable
assimilation: ‘that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange’.7
To adapt and paraphrase Bloom, a canon based on the principle of
cultural formal exchange ‘means that there are no texts, but only relationships
between texts’.8 Language and cultural modes now may be categorised as formal
5
Harold Bloom, ‘Preface and Prelude’, Preface, The Western Canon: the Books and
School of the Ages (London: Macmillan, 1994) 3.
6
This relates only to the reconciliatory process of this essay; the terms that Bloom offers
argue that the canon is not an occurrence of construction, but an occurrence of excellence
and originality. Its defence, however, is only achieved through a deconstructive process.
7
Bloom, The Western Canon 3.
8
Harold Bloom, ‘Introduction: a Meditation upon Misreading’, Introduction, A Map of
Misreading (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980) 3. Bloom’s discourse is based solely on matters of
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL precursors;9 the precursor informs the process of composition. If one imagines
language as both a marker of formal and literary identity, the conflation of the
canon may become clearer. Where textual relationships depend on a critical act,
the critical act is misreading or misprision.10 Both of these are revisionist in their
terms. My adaptation is thus in its goal revisionist, but it is importantly also
reconciliatory. It attends, perhaps ironically, to deconstruction. The ultimate aim
becomes reconstruction and revaluation. This is necessary to recapitulating and
reconciling the canon. Frank Kermode suggests, somewhat opaquely, that canons
are by necessity deconstructive. ‘Canons, which negate the distinction between
knowledge and opinion, which are instruments of survival built to be time-proof
not reason-proof, are of course deconstructible’.11 The revisionist process, Bloom
argues, strives ‘to see again, so as to esteem and estimate differently, so as then to
aim “correctively”’; consequently, ‘re-seeing is a limitation, re-estimating is a
substitution, and re-aiming is a representation’.12 My terms, while recognising
Bloom’s, suggest three dialectics or poetics for the Hiberno-Anglophone context:
devolution, appropriation and assimilation.
John Kerrigan espouses the contextual importance and necessity of
devolution in regard to the Anglophone literature of the period.
poetic influence and the manner in which one can correctly read a poem, which he argues
is ‘misreading’.
9
This is another adaptation of Bloom; he suggests that all great poets must wrestle with
their poetic precursors in order to achieve independence and individuate themselves
creatively. At the same time, no one can ever ‘read’ a poem, one can only misread a
poem. Great poets achieve their ‘greatness’ as a result of their misreading. Their poetry is
their creative response to their precursor. The response is the process of individuation.
The process, Bloom asserts, is not always voluntary or conscious. To be crude, the
process might be likened to the way in which we are never able to choose our parents;
great poets are rarely able to choose their precursors. See The Anxiety of Influence: A
Theory of Poetry (New York, Oxford UP, 1973). I am suggesting that language and
cultural identity may act as a summarising precursor, which enables categorisation.
10
Bloom, A Map of Misreading 3. Misprision is Bloom’s term for an unconscious
misreading or misinterpretation of the text. See The Anxiety of Influence 14.
11
Frank Kermode qtd in The Western Canon 4.
12
Bloom, A Map of Misreading 4.
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A POETICS OF CULTURAL EXCHANGE [A
devolutionary
approach]
can
strip
from
seventeenth-century
formulations – always infected by gender, status, region, age-related and
other factors – the accretions which built up later as England became the
centre of an international empire […]. The potency of English identities,
and their expansive influence around the archipelago [of England,
Scotland, Wales and Ireland], can be critically represented without the
overall perspective becoming Anglocentric.13
Devolution,14 thus having the greatest scope, may be defined by two postulates.
Devolution exerts itself when the creative personality or form of the text transfers
its formal medium and/or linguistic medium to a lower level. The text expresses
itself in a medium which appears to hinder its creative expression in both terms of
form and of meaning. The text, or poem, comparatively devolves as its creative
expression would have benefited from a different/original form or language. The
different/original media are considered the base media. This is the fundamental
language and cultural mode of the poet. For example, the base media in the native
Irish poetic sense are Gaeilge and meadaracht. It cannot evolve as its terms are
always considered in comparison to the medium or media of the higher level. The
first postulate is a conscious process in the sense of endeavour; there is sometimes
intent of improvement, of evolution, in the media of the lower level. The
consciousness of recognising the efficacy of the endeavour may or may not be
self-consciously understood. The intent is never of case of improvement and thus
the text is a devolution, remaining always in comparative terms.
13
Introduction, English: Literature, History, and Politics, 1601–1707 (Oxford and New
York: Oxford UP, 2008) 12. Kerrigan’s devolutionary approach is concerned with
reconciling the disproportion of scholarly activity on his ‘archipelagic’ subject. Its aim is
to establish a general approach to Anglophone literature of the period rather than the
canonical and theoretical concerns I have proposed. ‘To devolve is to shift power in
politics or scholarly analysis form a locus that has been disproportionately endowed with
influence and documentation to sites that are dispersed and more skeletally understood’
80.
14
Robert Crawford has examined the idea of devolution in both different terms and
contexts. See Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992).
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL The second postulate is more liminal. The text finds simultaneity of
media; there is a sense of general competency in the basic media and the
secondary media. The consciousness is undefined; there is a sense of
subconscious reconciliation. As a result, the categorisation of media is
obfuscated. This postulate differs, as I outline later, from assimilation; the
conflation does not aim at creative effect or nuance; it is an occurrence of chance
rather than poetic ingenuity. For matters of theory alone, it thus fails to represent
a lucid or effective Wildean ‘translation’ of its two or more linguistic media. It is
important to note that it is not necessary for both media, language and form, to
devolve. While the two are intrinsically related, and act as precursors, in the
Bloom theoretical scheme, one may effect the other’s ‘misreading’. The
‘misreading’ of media essentially means an interactive imbalance. The chosen
language may not cohere with the form or the form with the language. It is seen
as a categorical circumscription due to the simultaneity.
Assimilation here bears little variation of its basic meaning; it absorbs the
media into new ones. It shares the simultaneity of media proposed by the second
postulate of devolution. The difference is the basis for the simultaneity. The
conflation is attempted and achieved for poetic effect. The base media cohere and
are integrated with the secondary media. Either may be of comparative efficacy to
one of the base media. Only one of the base media of form or language needs to
cohere with one of the secondary media. In antithesis to devolutionary postulate
two, the media, as precursors, evolve the ‘misreading’. In this manner,
assimilation can be understood from a reconciliatory perspective. It can function
as a means for the bilingual and multicultural perspective or creative voice of the
poet to reconcile their dichotic state. It could be suggested as a form of selftranslation; the ‘translation’ is then essentially effective; it attends to the creative
energies of the artist. This is not a reflection of perceptive ‘success’. That is
matter for taste which is grounded in terms not at all theoretical; its terms are
speculative and perhaps pejorative to classification. Assimilation provides the
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A POETICS OF CULTURAL EXCHANGE greatest difficulty in native singular categorisation. However, it is easily located
and constructed within an exchangeable, or as Kerrigan calls it, an ‘archipelagic’
canon.
Appropriation is the simplest of the three dialectics as it is almost selfdefining. It appropriates elements of devolution and assimilation. As a process it
is at once conscious and self-conscious. Both or one of the basic media are placed
in the structures of the secondary media. The placement is intentionally
incohering rather cohering. There is little attempt at integration; the enterprise is
more of a forced disintegration. The purpose is for derisive effect. The creative
media and text consciously devolve in order to assert the inefficacy of the
secondary medium in comparison to their basic medium or media. It serves the
purposes of caricature, satire, and lampoon. Appropriation shares the exact
categorical implications of assimilation in regards to the canon. It also presents
the greatest analytical difficulty. Appropriation requires both dialectical and
contextual theorisation. To register appropriation one must question the creative
and situating context of the text. Appropriation is a product of its text’s intention;
therefore the content is solely dependent on its context. One must be thus prudent
in examining appropriation; it is subject to anachronistic tendencies.
The precursor supposition of the basic media is vital regarding the cases
in which the poetics above are unconscious processes. They too are subject to
contextualisation. The context surrounding a post-devolution and postassimilation analysis is more useful in categorising a place in the canon rather
than a conjectural speculation. Similarly, these poetics develop the historian’s
approach, rather then being impeded by it. The canon is only reconciled and
constructed by theory’s reflection and development of context. While the two
often facilitate one another, it is also important that theory informs context. Thus
one can place the poetry of the Hiberno-Anglophone canon in three subcategories of poetics: devolutionary poetry, assimilating poetry and appropriating
poetry. All three interpretative and categorical methods serve the dichotomies of
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL the texts occupying the canon. Kerrigan appropriately notes that analysis may
only be useful and discussion can only be complete ‘when fully polyglot because
important controls, perspectives, and elements of inter-ethnic dialogue lie in the
Celtic tongues’.15 Vincent Carey is similarly on point; ‘[scholars] interested in
questions of identity and literature in early modern Ireland must begin to equip
themselves with all the languages of literary expression on the island’.16
Devolution is most aptly reflected in ‘A kind of Ballad’, attributed to
Cornelius Mahony. Intriguingly, the poem is exemplary of a cumbersome attempt
of appropriation as it clearly attempts to attacks the composer’s secondary
medium. It attacks the English in the English language; however the poet is
clearly an Irish speaker not at all comfortable in the secondary medium. While the
poem is a conscious endeavour, it evades appropriation. The grounds upon which
appropriation is located designate an awareness of both base and secondary
media, form and language. There is a distinct ignorance of the inadequacy of
language in the self-translation as Carpenter has noted (Verse 238, fn. 1, 25). The
opening line, ‘The mother of your evils’, has been documented as a
misinterpreted and literal translation of máthair an oilc, or translated literally
from the English máthair d’olc. Máthair, in basic meaning, is ‘mother’ in
English, but also in context may mean ‘source’. The basic meaning of olc is
‘evil’. It is, however, an extremely interchangeable noun and may range from
meaning something that is inherently bad to ‘harm’. In this way the phrase in Irish
means the source of something bad or the source of harm. The poet might have
translated the phrase, máthair as ‘source’, or an equivalent. Similarly the
transliteration
may
also
be
a
crude
mistake: a
poorly
transliterated
aphorism. Máthair an oilc as an aphorism native to the Irish language may be a
reference to The Fall. Cleverly punned, in the Irish, the aphorism might be
15
Kerrigan 60.
Vincent Carey, ‘‘Neither good English nor good Irish’: Bi-lingualism and Identity
Formation in Sixteenth Century Ireland’, Political Ideology in Ireland: 1541-1641,
(Dublin: Four Courts, 1999) 60–61.
- 48 -
16
A POETICS OF CULTURAL EXCHANGE considered to refer to both Eve and the episode itself; her very act and behaviour,
and the episode itself is the very birthing of original sin. Fittingly, she and the
episode are simultaneously the mother and source of all evils. Regardless of the
speculation, one still is faced with a poor translation/transliteration; one is merely
enabled to add more credence to the devolutionary postulate. The devolutionary
aspect is evident in both these inadequacies.
The adverbial confusion of ‘soonly’ (l. 4) is suggestive of an Irish
primacy. Irish adverbs are designated by the prepositional element go prefacing
an adjective. The go is comparable to the ‘ly’ suffix of English; ‘objectively’
would read go hoibiachtúil in Irish; oibiachtúil alone is the adjective ‘objective’.
The poet seems to be aware of this difference but is too inadequately versed to
realise that ‘soon’ is an adverb, not requiring the suffix. More Irish syntactical
issues become evident in the poem; the element affects and arguably effects parts
of the rhyming scheme. In certain areas of the poem the end-rhyme is established
by a verbal element: ‘Hither you came, surely us poore to deceive’ (l. 2); ‘That
soonly will teach you your lives to amend’ (l. 4); ‘Your deeds in despaire: I need
not to tell’ (l. 11) ‘Why for ’t our Dermon, you make me to fret’ (l. 55) ‘But
whether to kill them tis doubtful to say’ (l. 78). It is reminiscent of the verbal
noun in Irish. In instances where two nouns present themselves in a sentence, the
second noun is rendered a verbal noun. For example, ‘I must do something’
would translate as caithfidh mé rud a dhéanamh, literally meaning ‘I must
something to do’. The verbal noun is placed as the final particle of the sentence
and is preceded by a meaning ‘to’. I propose that this is largely a confusion and
literal translation. This evidenced by many of the nonsensical and incongruent
lines of verse which follow many of the aforementioned examples. The prime
example is the couplet preceding line seventy-eight, ‘Your fashions are
handsome, compleat I confesse, / But being all curious, your fayth did oppresse’.
However, the adherence of these syntactical translations does imply an endeavour
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL of form as the end rhyme is in total adherence, regardless of the linguistic
clumsiness.
Problematically, the text initially suggests a total engagement in
devolution. The text is conscious of its aim and is impeded by its interaction of
media. There is no intent of improvement and or exchange. Literal translation
prevents this; it registers an incapacity of reconciliation whether it is based on a
capacity of media or unconsciousness. The text does not create or engage in a
reconciled identity; it blatantly recapitulates itself in its inadequacy. Extending
the problematic tendency further, the text at one point consciously affirms this for
effect in parodying the speech of a native Irishman beseeching his master: ‘In
troth good master of help is no way’ (l. 53). This is a word for word translation of
an Irish sentence I bhfírinne a Mháistir mhaith de chabhair níl aon tslí (Verse
240, fn. 25). The effect is lost as a result of the poet’s own formal and linguistic
transgressions. Ironically, it humorously reflects the devolution of the poem and
detracts from the intended appropriation; were the line to appear by itself it
would indeed be appropriation. The medium affirms itself rather strongly as
‘Gael’. It devolves itself in order to reassert itself in a different and alien schema:
the schema or terms of the secondary media. The endeavour of the medium in
espousing the message of the poem is to assimilate the secondary schema. This
permits it to temporarily operate within its terms. Its failure, while initially hinting
at the possibility of postulate two, refers it to postulate one. Thus the result is the
schema has reflected, unbeknownst to the media and authors of the text, its
‘strangeness’.
Surprisingly, the poem’s categorisation within the canon presents a more
optimistic picture. The failed assimilation has asserted itself as extraneous to an
exclusive Hiberno-canon. While much of it is only comprehensible in exclusively
Irish terms, its translation loses much of its meaning; it retracts its original intent
as it is neither focused nor placed in its desired terms. It deteleologises the
efficacy of its base media by confounding the secondary media. It eludes an
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A POETICS OF CULTURAL EXCHANGE Anglophone canon for a similar reason; it can only be viewed in the terms of both
of its attempted positions, but cannot be grounded in either. The expression in
secondary media confirms this. The issue of translation has suggested a move
from both Anglo and Hiberno-categories. Walter Benjamin asserted that
‘[translation] passes through the continua of transformation, not abstract ideas of
identity and similarity’.17 This statement is rather reductive of my discourse at
large; it is however efficacious to the canon’s processes as identity is more of an
extraneous afterthought once the dialectics have served their purpose. Therefore
to view the translation issue, as Benjamin and I have posited as a clarification of
the text’s dissonance in both mediums, the Hiberno-Anglophone canon may take
‘A kind of Ballad’ for its own. It has now defined its categorical movement as
transformative. The only category into which it can transform is the liminal
simultaneity offered by the canon. The comparative problematic has actually
assimilated itself into a liminality of the secondary and basic media. It thus
teleologises itself where the canon is concerned. It is now recognisable in only
comparative terms, thus tautologically excluding itself from the exclusivity of the
two separate canons.
A prime example of assimilation is the anonymous hunting song ‘Ye
merry Boyes all that live in Fingaule’ (Verse 210–211). The positions of
assonantal emphases in place of end-rhymes suggest the influence and
assimilation of Irish language media in certain areas of the poem. The song
generally employs the traditional end-rhyme scheme. The end-rhyming scheme is
primarily based on assonantal agreement.
Last out of some Bryars, they got their Desires,
They started a hare that runned most rare
Which set ’em barking with all their train,
17
Walter Benjamin qtd. in Homi Bhabha, ‘How Newness Enters the World: Postmodern
Space, Postcolonial Times and the Trials of Cultural Translation’, The Location of Culture
(London and New York: Routledge, 1994) 212.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL Till the merry light Hare was very ny Slain. (ll. 19–22)
Old, Middle and Classical Irish metrics concerned themselves with strict
assonantal, metrical, syllabic, and alliterative versification.18 In cases where
syllables or rhyme were wanting, rare as they were, compensation was achieved
by assonantal, vowel and/or alliterative agreement. The scope in Irish is greater
due to the natural elongation of vowels (á, é, í, ó, ú); the prominence of the broad
assonance above somewhat subordinates the basic rhyme, emphasising the
performative qualities of the song. Performativity is often the concern of Irish
composition and, indeed in general song. The extent to which the song attends to
formative reconciliation nods more toward Irish versification concerns rather than
English song. The assimilatory concerns of the song seem to exert a preference of
formal reconciliation, which implies a sense of construction of media. As the
form is fundamentally performance, one can, in Homi Bhabha’s terms, definitely
understand the media in terms of cultural exchange and assimilation; ‘[terms] of
cultural
engagement,
whether
antagonistic
or
affiliative,
are
produced
performatively. The representation of difference must not be hastily read as the
reflection of the pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of
tradition’.19
There
are
reconciliatory
enterprises
of
form
where
metrical
inconsistencies occur. Where end-rhymes are in syllabic disagreement, a
dissyllabic word, with an accentuated second syllable, precedes or follows the
addition of a syllable to the metre of corresponding line. This serves to reconcile
the monosyllable of the end-rhyme. ‘Ye merry Boyes all that live in Fingaule / I
will tell you a Tale, how a Hare catch’t a fall’ (ll. 1–2,); ‘But in a fine Mead, she
being almost spent / She made her last Will, ay and Testament’ (ll. 23–24). This is
18
See Eleanor Knott, An Introduction to Irish Syllabic poetry of the Period 1200-1600:
with Selections, Notes and Glossary (Cork: Cork UP, 1934), and Irish Classical Poetry,
Commonly Called Bardic Poetry (Dublin: Colm Ó Lochlainn, 1957).
19
Homi Bhabha, ‘Introduction: Locations of Culture’, The Location of Culture 2.
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A POETICS OF CULTURAL EXCHANGE not specific to or explicitly demanded by any form of Irish language metric.
However, the reconciliation of metre and rhyme through accentual syllables or
emphasised assonance was not traditionally uncommon either.
In certain Old Irish metres, the broken rhyme of two words was
reconciled by the syllabic and vowel agreement, rather than consideration of
rhyme.20 ‘Ye merry Boyes’ also presents instances of this. An alliterative ‘g’,
assonantal emphasis, and syllabic agreement are all present in the lines ‘With
Robbin Hilliard (with his gay little Grey) / And Stephen Ash-pole, a gay merry
Boy’ (ll. 5–6, my emphasis). This integration does not suggest that the author
consciously attempted Old Irish meadaracht. What it does suggest however, that
features of Irish meadaracht cohere with and add to aspects of the poem’s
performative qualities. The assimilation, while interfering with the metre, gives
the sound a more aural and sonorous rhythm and also provides a more euphonic
quality. The Irish musicality adds to the more playful and active tone of the song
by providing a dichotomic movement; the short and concise alliteration, ‘cropt
curryd’ ‘cropt curr’ (Verse l. 12, 25) forces the song to move between swift
melody and the slow-moving assonance.
The emphasised assonance of the end rhyme to reconcile the meter is not
alien to the practices noted by Kuno Meyer. In a totally dissimilar context, Meyer
notes that quantitative assonance was a method of syllabising Old and MiddleIrish poetry;21 if this were not favourable one could achieve compensation by
specific alliteration.22 I am not positing that the composition of this song is
informed by mutations of Old and Middle-Irish prosody. I am merely stating the
occasionally experimental and compromising nature of Irish language poetry
when still constricted by strict metrics. Dialectic such as assimilation is based
upon compromise.
20
O’Molloy qtd. in Kuno Meyer ‘The Rules of Assonance in Irish Poetry’, Ériu 6 (1912).
Kuno Meyer, ‘The Rules of Assonance in Irish Poetry’, Ériu 6 (1912) 106.
22
Kuno Meyer, ‘Quantitative Assonance’, Ériu 6 (1912) 155.
- 53 21
DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL The context surrounding the poem also advances the notion of
assimilation. Fingall’s dialect and demographic became a mixture of Old English
and Irish.23 The area itself was an exemplar of cultural assimilation, having a
somewhat liminal identity. What the exchange of media propose is the song is
neither singularly Irish/ Gaelic, nor singularly English. While my discourse has
focused more on the Irish assimilation, the linguistic medium is equally
expressive of the antithetical media to which the song endeavours to cohere. The
form of the text and its borrowings are somewhat reflective of Bloom’s
‘misreading’. From the theoretical perspective, it individuates itself by means of
reconciling two formal and linguistic media; its ‘misreading’ has identified itself
as something both unoriginal and original. It is unoriginal as it draws and adds at
least two media together to individuate itself; it may not be considered original as
its foundation is inherently comparative. The mode is also original because it has
constructed itself as antithetical to its base and secondary media. In this way it is
liminal. ‘Ye merry Boyes all that live in Fingaule’ leans more to the unoriginal as
its identity is dominated by what appears to be one of its present basic medium:
English. It escapes devolution but positions itself in the canon on a basis of form.
This way it can neither belong to a singular Hiberno-canon nor Anglophone
canon. However, the method and context I have presented displaces or transports
it from an Anglophone canon situated in Ireland to a Hiberno-Anglophone canon
situated in a conflated ‘archipelago’ of Ireland and England.
‘The Irish Exile’s Song’ (Verse 202–3), attributed to John Shank, adheres
to the poetic of appropriation. The song shares with ‘Ye merry Boyes all that live
in Fingaule’ the prominence of assonantal and internal lineal rhyme. The poem is
a performative piece, portraying a native Irish speaker attempting to speak in
English. The effect is largely derisive, integrating the Irish syntactical structure
23
See Alan Bliss, Spoken English in Ireland 1600-1740 (Dolmen Press, Dublin, 1979),
Alan Bliss ‘The English Language in Modern Ireland’, A New History of Ireland 1534–
1691, Vol. III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) 546–60; from the same volume, Brian Ó
Cuív, ‘The Irish Language in the Early Modern Period’ 509–45.
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A POETICS OF CULTURAL EXCHANGE into English to portray an exaggerated Hiberno-English. The punctuation of the
poem fragments the movement and speech pattern of the song. It portrays the
impossibility of a complete sentence or thought, perhaps suggesting the secondary
media it satirises is incapable of such:
Master to find, loving and kind, but Shone to his mindem ne’er the near,
Shone can find none here, which makes [him] cry for fear a hone, a hone.
Shone being poor, his feate being sore, for which he’le noe more
Trott about to find a master out; fait, he’le rather goe without a hone, a
hone. (ll. 3–6)
It is interesting that ‘a hone, a hone’ is the only phrase capable of giving a
punctuated finality to any of the poem’s lines. It almost implies that the only
tangibility is found in self-pity and consequently self-indulgence. Thus, the
anglicisation of ochón, meaning ‘alas’ or ‘sorrow’, features prominently
throughout as ‘a hone, a hone’. Ochón and its derivatives were oft-invoked
phrases in the amhráin (Irish songs) of the period also realised later in the
caoineadh24 (lament) tradition. The anglicised phonetic suggests a parody and
lampoon of the extent to which this was used in the Irish tradition. The repeated
use borders on summarising tautology; the sentiment and tone of the line tone are
often disruptively summarised: ‘For Laydes sake, some pity take, a hone, a hone’
(l. 7). The poem resembles more of the amhrán meter than English song. The
manner in which the poem’s assonance is almost accentual reveals the skilful
appropriation of secondary form in a basic media or the reverse, depending on the
identity of the author, which is not a certainty.
The metre appropriates amhrán in the accentuation of assonance; amhrán
was normally founded on accentual verse, where its composition would be based
24
Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire (The Lament of Art O’Leary), although predated by the
song, is a good comparative example of this invocation. See Seán Ó Tuama (ed.),
Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire (Dublin: An Clóchomar Tta., 1994).
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL on a specific number of syllabic emphases in each line. The form of punctuated
listing above is also common to Irish song. The language’s syntactical and
grammatical structures facilitate such a form. Where disyllabic words are
accentuated, they are often balanced by an equal counterpart: ‘Rounde about, the
towne throughout, is poor Shone gone’ (l. 2, my emphasis). The song makes a
blatant and conscious affirmation of its appropriation of media and context:
‘None English could [I] speake, my mind for to break, / And many laught to heare
the moan I made’ (ll. 15–16). Carpenter provides the contextual appropriation,
suggesting that Skank adds to the overall joke by including these line forty years
after ‘military defeats and wholesale confiscations had made the Irish far less of
threat to the English in Ireland’ (Verse 11). The appropriation also elucidates the
capacity of Hiberno-English to assimilate and thus devolve English as a base
medium.
‘The Irish Exile’s Song’ establishes itself, however irreverently, into the
reconciliatory canon. Its appropriation activates an afterthought of assimilation.
Contextually and formally it emphasises the absorbency of Hiberno-English and
its capacity to ‘enrich or contaminate Anglo-English’.25 Rather than falling into
the terms of liminality as a result of comparative afterthought, the text is placed in
those terms immediately. Its dichotomic stress between both base and secondary
media and canonical categories evades reconciliation. It recapitulates itself in
opposition to a post-recapitulation; the song is transparently placed in comparison
to and defines itself in the terms of the Hiberno-canon and Anglophone canon; it
attends to and appropriates the ‘conditions’ of the Hiberno-canon but chooses to
redact them by synthesising these terms with the terms of the Anglophone canon.
It summarily devolves and assimilates the secondary media; it therefore
dichotomically enters the canon. This position is inherently circular and
somewhat convoluted. But these appear to be the conditions of the integrated
canon.
25
Kerrigan 64.
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A POETICS OF CULTURAL EXCHANGE Above I posited, with three brief primary examples, methods of
recapitulating what I have tentatively called the Hiberno-Anglophone canon. This
is merely a proposed critical and theoretical framework; there is not enough scope
in a restricted paper to elucidate the Verse anthology in its entirety. A great deal
of scholarship remains to be done. The essential construction of the canon I have
proposed is appositely summarised by Bhaba:
What is theoretically innovative […] is the need to think beyond
narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those
moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural
differences. These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for
elaborating strategies of selfhood – singular or communal – that initiate
new signs of identity, and innovative sides of collaboration and
contestation, in the act of defining the society itself. […] The borderline
engagements of cultural difference may as often be consensual as
conflictual; they may confound our definitions of tradition and
modernity; realign the customary boundaries between the private and
the public, high and low; and challenge normative expectations of
development and progress.26
Literary cultural exchange in the Hiberno-Anglophone is thus, in its concerns,
inherently devolutionary and revisionist. It places itself upon a locus, or within in
a canon, in which it is reductive of two separate media. It is defined in terms of its
inadequacy and polarises the terms, contexts and media to which it is basically
comparable. In terms of categorisation, a devolved, assimilated, or appropriated
work defines itself in its basic or conclusive liminality. This re-imagines the terms
in which the canon may imagine and define itself; the canon does anticipate a
liminal devolution but installs a master trope of reconciliatory revisionism.
26
Bhabha 1–2.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL Kerrigan argues against the installation of a master trope,27 but the dialectics I
have recommended identify themselves in conceptual schemes. The master trope
moves from an overall contextual generality to a specific interactive devolution.
However, as Kerrigan suggestively and correctly intimates, the main problem of a
master tope is that it ‘smuggles in assumptions about literary value’.28 Again these
are issues of taste, issues upon which canons generally base themselves. For this
reason the canon is somewhat devolutionary; the canon’s dialectics of definition
endeavour to collectively reconcile its hybridity and liminality by placing itself in
its own boundary. This in afterthought is reconciliatory. Structurally, the canon
and its notions of cultural, or media, exchange represents itself anew. I feel
Heidegger most appositely concludes this: ‘A boundary is not that at which
something stops, but as the Greeks recognize, the boundary is that from which
something begins its presencing’.29
National University of Ireland, Galway
Works Cited
Primary Sources
Carpenter, Andrew (ed.). Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland. Cork:
Cork UP. 2003.
Ó Tuama, Seán (ed.). Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire. Dublin: An Clóchomar Tta.
1994.
Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Illustrated Works of Oscar Wilde. London: Bounty
Books. 2004.
Secondary Sources
27
Kerrigan 82.
Ibid. 83.
29
Martin Heidegger qtd. Bhabha 1.
28
- 58 -
A POETICS OF CULTURAL EXCHANGE Bhaba, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge.
1994.
Bliss, Alan. Spoken English in Ireland, 1600-1740: Twenty-seven Representative
Texts. Dublin: Dolmen Pres. 1979.
—. ‘The English Language in Early Modern Ireland’. A New History of Ireland:
Early Modern Ireland 1534–1691. Eds. T.W. Moody, F.X. Martin and F.J.
Bynre. Vol. III. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1991. 546–560.
Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: the Books and School of the Ages. London:
Macmillan. 1994.
—. A Map of Misreading. Oxford: Oxford UP. 1980.
—. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford UP. 1973.
Carey, Vincent. ‘“Neither good English nor good Irish”: Bi-lingualism and
Identity Formation in Sixteenth Century Ireland’. Ed. Hiram Morgan.
Political Ideology in Ireland: 1541-1641, Dublin: Four Courts. 1999. 45–
61.
Crawford, Robert. Devolving English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon. 1992.
Kerrigan, John. Introduction. Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and
Politics, 1601–1707. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2008. 1–90.
Knot, Eleanor. An Introduction to Irish Syllabic poetry of the Period 1200-1600:
with Selections, Notes and Glossary Cork: Cork UP. 1934.
—. Irish Classical Poetry, Commonly Called Bardic Poetry. Dublin: Colm Ó
Lochlainn. 1957.
Meyer, Kuno. ‘The Rules of Assonance in Irish Poetry’, Ériu 6 (1912): 103–11 .
JSTOR. Web. 1 Apr. 2011.
—. ‘Quantitative Assonance’. Ériu 6 (1912): 154–56. JSTOR. Web. 1 Apr. 2011
Ó Cúiv, Brian. ‘The Irish Language in the Early Modern Period’. A New History
of Ireland Vol III Early Modern Ireland 1534 – 1691. Eds. T.W. Moody,
F.X.
Martin
and
F.J.
Bynre.
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Oxford:
Clarendon
Press.
1991.
MICHAEL PLYGAWKO
Inescapable Perception:
Imaginative Possibility and Limit in the Odes of John Keats
K
I
eats’s Odes, by their very status as lyric apostrophes,1 dramatise
imaginatively an implied speaker’s projection of meaning onto an
object, season, concept or being. In each of the Spring Odes of 1819,
the speaker attempts not to describe mimetically the world as it is but to test their
imaginative understanding of that world in order to trigger a revelation of truth
regarding the self. The Odes in a deep sense are a testing of Keats’s earlier view,
expressed in his famous letter to Benjamin Bailey in 1817, that ‘I am certain of
nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of the
Imagination – What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it
existed before or not.’2 Present in ‘Ode to Psyche’, the poetic imagination
develops in a linguistic direction through the ‘Forlorn’3 words of ‘Ode to a
Nightingale’ and ‘my demon Poesy’ (I,30) in ‘Ode on Indolence’. Keats links this
testing of the imagination to poetic identity and beauty. Yet at times he doubts
genuinely the ability of the imagination to bridge the gap between aesthetic truth
and a sensuous reality of ‘Beauty that must die’ (I,21). For Keats, the strength of
poetry is its negative capability, ‘when man is capable of being in uncertainties,
Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’.4 But if
1
For an analysis of the dialectic between the ‘I’ and the ‘Other’ in lyric invocation, see
John Barnard, John Keats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) 98.
2
John Keats, The Letters of John Keats 1814-1821: Volume 1, ed. H. E. Rollins
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1958) 184.
3
John Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, l. 71, The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger
(London: Heinemann, 1978) 369. All subsequent quotations from Keats’s poetry taken
from this edition.
4
Keats, Letters 1 193.
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INESCAPABLE PERCEPTION negative capability is poetry’s imaginative strength then what Paul de Man might
term its painful irreducibility or resistance to a ‘totalizing’5 whole might be its
limitation also. Most pivotal to Keats’s anxious testings are ‘Ode to Psyche’, ‘Ode
to a Nightingale’, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and the later ode ‘To Autumn’, in
which the imagination is inescapable even whilst it is limited. One cannot know
that Keats the individual truly enacted an increasing commitment to ‘a Life of
Sensations rather than of Thoughts’6 as some critical narratives posit.7 The Odes,
however, do move collectively from a longing for the possibility of historical
transcendence performed by the imagination to an acceptance of the real limits
posed by the cycles of existence. It is this attempt to wrestle with the tension
between the ideal and the real that characterises the unique progressiveness that is
played out on the level of perception within the Odes.
The ‘Ode to Psyche’ is explicitly obsessed by the speaker’s imaginative
potential – the ability of a narrative voice to ‘build’ (P,50) the goddess ‘a fane/ In
some untrodden region of my mind’ (P,50-1). As Stuart Sperry points out, the
poem dramatises a movement from a mythological imagination of Hellenic
imagery that was to be adopted ‘thoughtlessly’ (P,7), to an age that denies the
force of imaginative myth.8 The opening three verse stanzas9 refer to ‘Olympus’
faded hierarchy!’ (P,25; emphasis added) and cling to the phrase ‘Too late […]
Too, too late’ (P,36-7), by implication figuring the present state of the
imagination as fallen. Echoes of Milton’s ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’
(see below) lament the loss of a history in which imagination equated to reality,
5
Paul de Man, ‘The Epistemology of Metaphor’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Autumn,
1978) 29.
6
Keats, Letters 1 185.
7
See Helen Vendler’s belief that ‘Keats […] used every new ode as a way of commenting
on earlier ones.’ Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Belknap Harvard, 2001) 6.
8
Stuart Sperry, Keats the Poet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) 252.
9
Verse stanzas taken from 1820 text, rather than Keats’s letter to George and Georgiana
Keats, 14 February – 3 May 1819, which had only three ‘stanzas.’
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL with ‘pale-mouth’d prophet[s] dreaming’ (P,35).10 A mythopoetic, almost preLapsarian power of the imagination dominates the first half of Keats’s poem, but
it is an imagination limited by its time-locked distance, abandoned by the passage
of culture. The concept that the imagination’s power is determined by readerly
willingness to suspend disbelief taps into a deep concern of Romantic thinkers,
made explicit by Hegel and Schiller.11 On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, for
instance, explores how without the centre of institutionalised religion a shadow
can fall between the mind and any form of belief.12 Negation of dogma in this ode
destroys relentlessly the conditions necessary for any culture that equates the
imagination with truth: ‘No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet’ (P,32) are
able to act as emblems of a society that worships imaginative possibility.13 ‘No
oracle’ (P,34) and the gerunds ‘teeming’ (P,33) and ‘dreaming’ (P,35) recall a
Miltonic, cultural fall in which ‘the oracles are dumb’ (O,173), the imagination is
‘words deceiving’ (O,179), and no ‘breathèd spell’ (O,179) can equate the
imaginative with the prophetic.
Yet the Ode undergoes a volta, line 43, where the mythically inspired past
is revealed to be kept alive in a dream-like state of the speaker’s imagination. ‘I
see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired’ (P,43) enacts a sense of the poetic self
and the role of the poet in a post-Enlightenment age. ‘So let me be thy choir […]
Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe’ (P,44,46) asserts the autonomy of the imagination as
10
John Milton, ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, ll.173-80, The Norton Anthology of
English Literature: Volume I, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al (New York: Norton, 2006)
1789. All subsequent quotations from ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ taken from
this edition.
11
For strong views on the relation of Hegel and Schiller to Nietzsche and Derrida, and the
relation of all these thinkers to the Romantic period, see Tilottama Rajan, Dark
Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986) 3234. N.B. Whether or not Keats had read On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry is unclear,
though to Rajan partially unimportant.
12
Friedrich Schiller, On The Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, trans. Helen WatanabeO’Kelly (Manchester [Greater Manchester]: Carcanet New Press, 1981).
13
The Morgan Library draft of ‘Ode to Psyche’ reads ‘nor’, but the anaphoric negatives
and similar image clusters are still analogous to the ‘no’ used by Milton, and to the 1820
published version of the Ode.
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INESCAPABLE PERCEPTION a type of understanding capable of imposing meaning upon and controlling the
material world. The speaker’s own ‘prophet[ic] dreaming’ (P,49) can harness a
form of visionary experience to rival the imagination’s supremacy in a mythical
age. This vision is the poem’s central obsession: the Ode’s narrative of seeing
‘two fair creatures, couchèd side by side’ (P,9) is more concerned with the poet’s
imaginings than the nature of the figures, as seen by the poet’s centrality in his
own, self-reflexive subject matter from the volta onwards. ‘Yes, I will be thy
priest’ (P,50) widens the imaginative role into a public sphere. Keats explores the
poet’s powers to inspire in the modern age – in Derridean terms to replace a
centre lost by the wane of myth, ‘transcendentality, consciousness, God, […] and
so forth.’14 In this sense Keats comes close to implying that the imagination
becomes its own centre when one chooses to grant it a power over the self. And
yet Keats’s negatively capable explorations hover ambivalently between
logocentric affirmation and a form of proto-deconstructive doubt. If the
imagination’s power over the individual and their wider culture is determined by
the self then the imagination contains power only when it is perceived as
valuable. The speaker constructs a psychoscape for the goddess to inhabit, but
paranomasia casts doubt ironically over whether this construct is a ‘fane’ (P,50)
or the homophonous and limited ‘feign’ (P,62) of ‘Fancy’ (P,62). Both utterances
occupy painfully the space of imaginative activity and are lent power by
paradoxical and conflicting language. ‘Branchèd thoughts’ (P,52) both beautiful
and dangerous are produced through the oxymoronic ‘pleasant pain’ (P,52) and
‘murmur in the wind’ (P,53); but simultaneously the imagination is eerily muted
by a ‘wide quietness’ (P,58). ‘Sleep’ (P,57) and its peacefulness must be ‘lull’d’
(P,57) unwillingly and the ‘bright torch’ (P,66) is just one creation of an
otherwise ‘shadowy thought’ (P,65) from a ‘dark-cluster’d’ (P,54) imagination.
Even the outcome, ‘A rosy sanctuary’ (P,59) for Psyche that allows her to ‘let the
14
Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’,
Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh (New York:
Hodder Arnold, 2001) 197.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL warm Love in’ (P,67), must be sustained arduously by a ‘working brain’ (P,60).
To create still, ‘soft delight’ (P,64), the mind must create an anaphora of
appendices (‘with’[P,60,61,62]) and still the ‘brain’ (P,60) associates itself
through rhyme with a creation that is wild to human perception: ‘stars without a
name’ (P,61).
‘Ode to Psyche’, though, is never reductively negative: negatively
capable, rather, the Ode derives its emotive strength from the dialectics between
imagination and reality, thought and experience. ‘To let the warm Love in!’
(P,67) allows the poem, having explored the ability of the mind, to open out to a
world around – a world of tactile heat beyond the ‘pale-mouth’d prophet’ (P,49).
In the words of Helen Vendler, ‘Psyche’s restoration, for Keats, must be not only
the restoration of her cult […] but also the restoration of her atmosphere and
presence.’15 Keats inverts the Lockean concept of an imagination influenced by
the senses, ‘by my own eyes inspired’ (P,43), and in achieving imaginative
autonomy allows his creations to dictate the sense-world that his mind creates.
This reading is lent hermeneutic weight by the epic invocation of the ‘Goddess!’
(P,1) muse in the opening lines. Unlike his classical sources, Keats does not
invoke the muse to ‘Rage – Goddess, sing the rage’16 or to ‘teach me the story of
a hero’17 but instructs her to ‘hear these tuneless numbers’ (P,1).18 Even as he
deflates the quality of his verse, he instructs her of the hard-won but original
nature of his imagination: ‘wrung,/ By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear’
(P,1-2). This act of creation might be costly, ‘dear’ (P,2), but read in terms of this
invocation the line ‘by my own eyes inspired’ (P,43) becomes an affirmation of
15
Vendler 61.
Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1990) 77. Emphasis
added.
17
Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Walter Shewring (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
1.
18
Closest to human affirmation seems The Aeneid, which opens ‘arma virumque cano’ (‘I
sing of arms and of the man’), though within the first 10 lines the speaker utters ‘Tell me,
Muse, the causes of her anger’. See Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. David West (London:
Penguin, 2003) 3.
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INESCAPABLE PERCEPTION the self as source of imagination. The poet’s mind is its own inspiration for the
surroundings that he sees. John Jones, then, is entirely justified when he states
that it is wrong to ‘read Coleridge’s distinction between Imagination and Fancy
into the usage of contemporaries, and to assume a light-toned, playful sense for
Fancy whenever they meet the word.’19 The negative capability of this ode is
almost insufficient, but it never moves beyond its careful placing on the threshold
between possibility and limitation.
II
‘Ode to a Nightingale’ extends logically this testing of the imagination but
performs it explicitly in terms of language. Rather than questioning the decline of
mythological imaginings, Keats here challenges the mind’s ability to construct an
escapist fantasy free from the shadow of human death: ‘Fade far away, dissolve
and quite forget/ What thou among the leaves hast never known’ (N,21-23).
Death and life deadlock each other in the speaker’s imagination. He calls ‘for a
draught of vintage’ (N,11) so that he might ‘quite forget’ (N,21) the foresight of
oblivion; but the linguistic vibrancy and sophisticated verse form cling to a joie
de vivre and structure that the imagination provides and that he is terrified to lose.
Six monosyllables and three chains of assonance stress deeply the luxuriance of
wine ‘Cool’d a long age in the deep-delvèd earth’ (N,12). Even those New Critics
who universalise their readings, claiming ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ to be an
imaginative struggle against death, can miss the central obsession: how
specifically the poet copes with death as the ultimate backdrop and limit to all
imaginative affirmations, and how the poet clings to these affirmations
nonetheless. On the poem’s deepest structural levels, trochees substitute
themselves subtly into the otherwise-prominent iambics, lending a telling force to
the speaker’s craving for oblivion:
19
John Jones, John Keats’s Dream of Truth (London: Chatto and Windus, 1980) 165.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL / ˘
˘ /
˘
/
˘ ˘
/
/
O for a beaker full of the warm South, (N,15)
The interlocking trochee and iamb that begin the line imbue the invocation ‘O’
(N,15) with a meaningful pull and surround the already plosive allure of ‘beaker’
with unstressed syllables; the stress on ‘full’ (N,15) escalates the metonymic
resonance of the line, and the pyrrhic, ‘of the’ (N,15), diminuendos in preparation
for the luxuriant relish of the spondee, ‘warm South’ (N,15). Repetition of ‘full’
(N,16) and synaesthetic ‘Tasting’ (N,13) of all these delights, revelling in the
senses of the immediate, depict a speaker obsessed with the world of imagination
and understanding from which this wine paradoxically would transport him.
Self-consciousness, a prerequisite of poetic imagination, prevents
ignorance of human transience, and is therefore the imagination’s greatest limit.
The Nightingale, the imaginative symbol of a universal aesthetic free from death,
can never be emulated by self-reflexive human imagining because the speaker
knows that ‘Youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies’ (N,26).20 Genesis is
bound in his perceptions to destruction, the alpha feeding constantly into the
omega. And this idea that limitation is necessary to the existence of possibility is
one that saturates the odes. ‘Thy plaintive anthem’ (N,75) is only poignant for its
existence beyond pain because the speaker’s ‘heart aches’ (N,1). Similarly, ‘Ode
to Melancholy’ hinges on the thought that ‘in the very temple of Delight/ Veil’d
Melancholy has her Sovran shrine’ (M,25-6). Painful knowledge in the Odes
hinges on self-conscious imagination, ‘Where but to think is to be full of sorrow’
(N,27). But the referent of the anaphora of ‘Where[s]’ (N,25-7,29) is ‘Here’
20
This knowledge is as historically specific to Keats and his experiences of reality as it
would have seemed universal. A trained apothecary and surgeon’s assistant, Keats had
seen the realities of unsuccessful medical procedures. Whichever order in which the Odes
were first composed, the dates of composition are close to the death of Keats’s brother,
Tom Keats, of tuberculosis (1 December 1818). Mortality also impacted on Keats’s
childhood: his father died when Keats was only eight years old (1804) and his mother died
only six years later. See Barnard, Keats 2.
- 66 -
INESCAPABLE PERCEPTION (N,24) and the speaker can never escape ‘Here’ (N,24) because ‘Here’ (N,24) is a
state of imaginative knowledge: there is no spatial or temporal ‘there’ to which he
can escape because throughout the ages ‘men sit and hear each other groan’
(N,24). In the fourth stanza the speaker tests the imagination’s possibility to find
its escape ‘on the viewless wings of Poesy’ (N,33). The imagination, however, is
limited by human mortality and by physical realities. The transcendental langue
‘mind’ may be limitless, but the parole is bound by real limitations: ‘the dull
brain perplexes and retards’ (N,34). The imaginative vision is immediate,
‘Already with thee!’ (N,35), and sensory, ‘tender is the night’ (N,35), though
Keats questions the truth of this vision. ‘Here there is no light’ (N,38) and ‘I
cannot see what flowers are at my feet’ (N,41) is cognate, if less explicit, to the
mind’s imaginative brightness in ‘Ode to Psyche’. The existence of these flowers
creates a form of imaginative paralipsis - that is to say, the flowers must be
imagined in order for the speaker to claim that he cannot imagine them fully. But
the speaker occupies subtly the space between possibilities and limits: the test is
to see the flowers as the Nightingale sees them. If the flowers stand
metaphorically for the Nightingale’s aesthetic freedom then the speaker uses the
full imaginative range of his empathy to try even to ‘guess’ (N,43) how the bower
of innocence might present itself.
And yet innocence cannot be understood by experience because
innocence is in itself a lack of understanding – a state to which the imagination is
unable to regress. As Milton narrates of the fall in Paradise Lost, ‘innocence, that
as a veil/ Had shadowed them from knowing ill, was gone.’21 Any imaginative
attempts to preserve temporality and transience in ‘embalmèd darkness’ (N,43)
are undercut by the speaker’s understandings of ending, ‘Fast fading violets’
(N,47), and genesis, ‘coming-musk-rose’ – the cycles of nature that the
imagination cannot overcome. ‘Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!’
(N,61) resonates with the implicit antithesis that ‘Humanity, therefore is born for
21
John Milton, Paradise Lost, IX.1053-5, ed. John Leonard (London: Penguin, 2003).
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL death’. The Nightingale’s song is a nexus of innocent bliss and beauty craved for
by limited imaginings throughout ‘hungry generations’ (N,62): ‘The voice I hear
this passing night was heard/ In ancient days by emperor and clown’ (N,63-4).
Even as the speaker praises the Nightingale’s escape from conscious temporality,
the speaker’s own time-bound condition pushes forward at two paces – the slow
intergenerational progression through the ages (ll.63-4) and the ‘passing’ (N,63)
time that slips by the speaker despite his attempts to arrest imaginatively what he
sees to be the universality of transience. As the owner of a transcendental but lost
world of beauty, then, the Nightingale’s status comes close to the aesthetic
fragility of poetry: ‘Forlorn’ (N,70), one of the words necessary to construct this
poetic fantasy, also destroys his imaginings and tolls him ‘back from thee’ (N,72).
Linguistic self-consciousness seems equally capable of destroying the
transcendentalism of its own imaginings – another indication of Keats’s obsession
not primarily with transience but with the imagination. Yet as the Ode’s ending
casts doubt over the speaker’s ability to generate fantasies that are real (N,80) the
dream has nonetheless succeeded in imagining a state beyond death in order to
create aesthetic beauty.
Moreover, the Nightingale’s aesthetic status is present only in the human
imagination, much in the same way that the ‘little town’ (U,38) of the ‘Ode on a
Grecian Urn’ cannot gain beauty from its ‘silent’ (U,39) streets of immortality
that have ‘not a soul to tell/ Why they are desolate’ (U,39,40). ‘Melodies’ (U,11)
piped ‘to the spirit’ (U,14), for example, require an imaginative input in order to
generate aesthetic value out of sensual silence. As James O’Rourke articulates
well, the form of ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is at odds with the transcendent
optimism it at first propounds:
The phonic redundancy of ‘no tone’ is only the slightest shift from the
rich melody of ‘slow time,’ but the clunkiness of ‘no tone’ illustrates the
dangers of aspiring to a beau ideal that would leave behind the ‘sensual
ear.’ The semantic and phonic values of the words are in conflict; the
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INESCAPABLE PERCEPTION speaker tells us that sounds do not matter, but the sensual ear says
otherwise.’22
Yet the danger of the beau ideal, when read in light of the fourth stanza, is that it
tricks the imagination into constructing a value-judgement of an object – reliant
on the imagination for its meaning – that then fools the speaker into imagining the
object as separate from, and more powerful than, his imagination. Some studies of
Romantic Hellenism read this ode as constructing a de-politicised, aesthetic world
poised between classical hopes of a transcendental imagination and a modernity
in which the imagination has little power.23 Regardless of the motives of Keats or
his speaker in seeing the urn as they appear to do, however, the key point is
dramatic. Keats dramatises a conflict between transcendental imaginings on the
one hand and a more realistic but still powerful conception of the imagination on
the other. Rather than just a coded warning against the beau ideal, the disrupted
discourse of the second stanza dramatises the speaker’s slow realisation that the
urn’s static immortality is inadequate; that is to say, the imagination is unable to
allow an object simultaneously to transcend human life and to remain meaningful.
The internal assonance in ‘Ditties’ (U,14) binds to both utterances of ‘trees’
(U,15,16), slowing the speaker’s pace through the stasis of inaction. The inability
to ‘fade’ (U,19) may seem positive, but as ‘never, never,’ (U,17) indicates, even a
positive ‘kiss’ (U,17) is negated. Mortality, in other words, is kept at bay by a
locking down of possibility. If Keats retreats to antiquity then, regardless of
22
James O’Rourke, Keats’s Odes and Contemporary Criticism (Gainesville: University of
Florida Press, 1998) 66.
23
See Theresa M. Kelley’s statements that ‘by applying the historical method to Keats,
we discover just how much his poems seek to occupy a universal space outside history
and culture’ but that ‘the English acquisition of the Elgin Marbles at the beginning of
Keats’s career works against the lyric and ekphrastic impulse so evident in his poetics’.
Theresa M. Kelley, ‘Keats, ekphrasis, and history’ in Nicholas Roe (ed.), Keats and
History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 212, 214. See also the similar
conflict between classical transcendence and modern immediacy in ‘Ode to Psyche’.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL whether this attempt is conscious, he is aware of its futility. An imagined longing
for transcendence undermines itself as it realises its limitation.
The rejection of the transcendental, however, triggers an affirmation of
the imagination’s power to co-construct meaning. The urn ‘dost tease us’ (U,44)
out of its similarity to ‘eternity’ (U,45), but what teases the speaker away from
thinking about the transcendental is specifically the urn’s ‘silent form’ (U,44) that
cannot exist meaningfully without a mortal imagination. Even if meaning must
exist within the limits of transience, transcendence of the imagination results in
silence. Critical mileage can, and has, been gained from comparing this assertion
to, say, Mikhail Bakhtin’s statement that ‘the word in language is half someone
else’s’24
or
Hans-Georg
Gadamer’s
analysis
of
dialogic
systems
of
understanding.25 More historically consistent, however, is the partially formed
view of aesthetics in Keats’s letters, a view that had not yet progressed to
twentieth century conceptions of hermeneutics. In one of Keats’s letters to
Benjamin Bailey, dated 13 March 1818, Keats advances an incomplete theory in
which ‘Things semireal such as Love […] require a greeting of the Spirit to make
them wholly exist’.26 This letter indicates Keats’s capacity to conceive value and
meaning in terms of a relationship between the imagination and its object: ‘the
Spirit’ here stands metonymically for singular qualities of the self that are brought
to bear on the external world. At work is an early dialogic imagination, the
possibilities of which surpass the doomed search for a transcendental space.
The possibilities, in fact, even remove the need to stage a hermeneutic
intervention in order to resolve the paradox of the poem’s ending. Much scholarly
24
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1992) 294.
25
See Georgia Warnke, Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1987) 104. Warnke glosses Gadamer’s arguments for the
existence of a dialogic structure of understanding: ‘Hermeneutics involves mediation or,
in other words, a capacity to see the significance of a truth-claim for our own situation.
This means both that our situation circumscribes the meaning an object can have for us
and that its truth provokes us to reconsider that situation and move to a new understanding
of it’.
26
Keats, Letters 1 243
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INESCAPABLE PERCEPTION attention has centred on the final two lines of the Ode in order either to unlock a
totalising explanation for the poem’s tensions or to ascertain the level of irony
intended by the chiastic aphorism ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ (U,49).27
However, when viewed in the light of a non-transcendental category of
imagination, the irreducibility of the final two lines does not need a resolution:
just as important a consideration in terms of the imagination is why the speaker
labels the urn a ‘friend to man’ (U,48) immediately after the rebuke ‘Cold
Pastoral!’ (U,45). The favour the urn performs for man is to empower their sense
of a perceptive and pervasive imagination through the dubious honour of
demonstrating the imaginative limitations of transcendence. This friendship exists
whichever way the final two lines are punctuated and whoever utters them.
Whether the urn speaks the last line, whether the speaker addresses the urn or
implied reader, or whether Keats detaches himself from the irony of his speaker’s
belief, the utterance is still a product of the imagination. By reminding individuals
of limitation, the urn paradoxically reminds humanity of their own power to
confer meaning, beauty, and therefore truth. The speaker may not be overjoyed by
his realisation, but he acknowledges it nonetheless. Even objects of seeminglytranscendental beauty, Keats declares, have their value projected onto them by
perceiving minds that are aware that ‘old age shall this generation waste’ (U,45).
Mortal imagination perceives value in that which can achieve unimaginative
ignorance of mortality. This perception must, though, be inescapably imaginative
because the urn cannot alone communicate meaning and has ‘not a soul to tell/
Why thou art desolate’ (U,39-40).
III
If ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ are obsessed with the
imagination’s ability to conceive of a symbol beyond human transience, then ‘To
27
For an overview of debates regarding the final lines and their punctuation, see
O’Rourke 46-47.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL Autumn’ is most striking for its lack of imaginative transcendence. Whilst it
would be reductive to label ‘To Autumn’ primarily a response to the Spring Odes,
this later Ode does seem to enact the closing imperative of ‘Ode to Indolence’ to
‘Vanish, ye phantoms [Love, Ambition and Poesy], from my idle spright,/ Into
the clouds, and never more return!’ (I,59-60). Satisfied with description of the
physical landscape, ‘With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run’ (A,3), the
Ode seems initially to be obsessed with a humanist acceptance of imaginative
limits. Jerome McGann, Nicholas Roe and Paul Fry posit notable and differing
obsessions for this ode. In response to McGann’s statement that Keats tests the
imagination to create ‘a charmed world far removed from […] the dangerous
political tensions of [his] society’,28 Roe closes down the poem’s interpretative
resonances to a single obsession with ‘contemporary discourses of political and
social conflict’.29 Yet the ability of the poem to support variant readings is a
denial of its own attempts at referentiality – of its attempts to limit the
imagination. ‘Thou hast thy music too’ (A,24), although referring to literal
‘whistles’ (A,32) and natural sounds, has rhetorical resonances of beauty and
‘soft’ (A,31) poignancy that cannot be contained. In this sense, Paul Fry comes
closest to the Ode’s primary obsession when he claims, ‘“To Autumn” is […] so
clearly an encounter with death itself.’30
But if death hovers on the borders of this poem, dominating the lacunae
in imaginative expression, then all these readings agree implicitly that the Ode is
obsessed with that which it seeks actively to avoid. Whilst not confronted
directly, death infiltrates this seemingly-literal discourse in ‘soft-dying day’
(A,25) and gnats that ‘mourn’ (A,27) in ‘wailful choir’ (A,27). The Ode therefore
acknowledges its limits: it cannot avoid its encounter with human transience
28
Jerome J McGann, ‘Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism’, MLN, Vol.
94, No. 5, Comparative Literature (December, 1979) 1021. N.B. This interpretation comes
initially from Hartman.
29
Nicholas Roe, ‘Keats’s Commonwealth’, in Roe 198.
30
Paul Fry, A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1995) 211.
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INESCAPABLE PERCEPTION because the threat of death is poised on the edge of signification. But at the same
time the Ode’s core obsession is in dramatising the inability of the imagination to
deny its own possibilities. In a proto-Heideggerian sense, the poem cannot escape
its own anthropocentric view of reality. Heidegger articulates clearly Keats’s
embryonic idea here that to understand the material world is to imagine reality
‘as’31 something. Both for Keats and for Heidegger, it seems unrealistic to be free
from the imagination:
When we have to do with anything, the mere seeing of the Things
which are closest to us bears in itself the structure of interpretation, and
in so primordial a manner that just to grasp something free, as it were,
of the ‘as’, requires a certain readjustment. When we merely stare at
something, our just-having-it-before-us lies before us as a failure to
understand it anymore. The grasping which is free of the ‘as’, is a
privation of the kind of seeing in which one merely understands.32
This inseparability of perception and imaginative understanding has a strong
presence in ‘To Autumn’. In such phrases as ‘Full-grown lambs’ (A,30), the
Keats of this poem understands the environment in terms of his transience-bound
existence rather than the less-temporal signifier ‘sheep.’ Pastoral imagery of ‘fruit
with ripeness to the core’ (A,4) cannot escape human imagining because nature is
mediated through the human presence implied by the ‘thatch-eves’ (A,4) and
‘cottage-trees’ (A,5). When Helen Vendler subtly points out that ‘To Autumn’
has ‘no social language’ – and that ‘if we see at all, it is through the eyes of Keats
that we see’ – she signals only one symptom of a perception that is absorbed into
a limited but inescapable imagination.33
31
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) 190.
32
Heidegger 190.
33
Vendler 246.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL However much agency Autumn seems initially to have, personifications
such as the ‘Season […] Conspiring’ (A,1,3) are still the products of a projecting
mind. Equally, in the context of the poem’s ending, the phrase ‘Until they think
warm days will never cease’ (A,10) is more an imaginative unveiling of the self
than a description of the concerns of ‘bees’ (A,9). Autumn’s importance unveils
the human mind that experiences her, framing the season in terms of human
perception – ‘Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store’ (A,12; emphasis added).
Moreover, the rendering of time in synchronic cross-sections gives primacy to the
mediated perceptions of that moment rather than any chronological happenings.
Moments linger then give way to subsequent moments in ‘To Autumn’, and yet
the speaker’s present participles, each creating a temporal as well as linguistic
pause in tenselessness, serve a dual purpose. When Keats changes ‘Then
Gathering’ in his draft to ‘And gathering’ (A,33) in his final copy, the effect is to
render the simultaneous events of reality as they are perceived. But the change
from ‘oozing’ (A,22) to ‘oozings’ (A,22) also indicates with its plurality the
existence of many synchronic moments, each lingering in sensuous, internal
assonance. Simultaneity in discourse, in other words, reflects Keats’s wider desire
for language, through a poetic imagination, to accommodate the irreducibility of a
complex, material world that is nonetheless granted meaning through the act of
perception.
The imagination in ‘To Autumn’ is used therefore in order to understand
rather than relegate a force beyond its limits. Keats’s attempt is signalled in
simple ways, such as when the speaker imagines himself to perceive Autumn as
she gazes in on his world of transience and mutability. Keats acknowledges a
force outside the final ending of death – a force that, whilst personified,
‘watchest’ (A,22) these endings ‘hours by hours’ (A,22). This lack of human
transcendence, however, is hardly negative. The discourse of the poet’s own
imagination displays a conception of the world that incorporates limitation even
as it affirms possibility. As Tilottama Rajan observers:
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INESCAPABLE PERCEPTION Romantic literature is better seen as a literature involved in the restless
process of self-examination, and in search of a model of discourse
which accommodates rather than simplifies its ambivalence toward the
inherited equation of art with idealization.34
Although Rajan leaves her analysis of Keats intentionally underdeveloped,35 this
search seems precisely the process at work in ‘To Autumn’. The poem aligns the
imagination with perception rather than an autonomous realm of art beyond
external matter. In favouring the phenomenological, the discourse swerves, in a
Bloomian sense, the mistakes and crises of trying to reach the transcendental
dramatised in the earlier Odes. ‘Thou hast thy music too’ (A,24), for instance,
establishes aesthetic status as a value-judgement of objective events when
perceived by the imagination. In ‘To Autumn’, as in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’,
sound becomes song partly when it evinces aesthetic limit, ‘Darkling I listen’
(N,51; emphasis added). Beauty can only be conferred, though, because the
imagination is capable of infiltrating perception and projecting onto it its own
concerns. By creating a discourse that celebrates the interdependent relationship
of imaginative possibility and limit in the real world, therefore, the discourse
creates its own form of aesthetic beauty – and, in a Heideggerian sense,
phenomenological ‘truth’.36
Whilst discourse that accommodates limit in this way is progressive,
however, the idea of a limited imagination might be viewed initially as an
intellectually conservative retreat to Enlightenment and eighteenth century
aesthetics. Some similarities can certainly be drawn between the imagination in
‘To Autumn’ and the imagination as theorised by John Locke and Joseph
34
Rajan 25.
See Rajan’s comment that, ‘I have attempted to be illustrative and not exhaustive.’
Rajan 25.
36
Keats, Letters 1 184.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL Addison.37 Addison, for example, cites Locke’s well-known theory ‘that Light
and Colours, as apprehended by the Imagination, are only Ideas in the Mind, and
not Qualities that have any Existence in Matter.’38 But Addison also states that
when the apparitions of the imagination break up, the imaginer finds themself
transported from a ‘pleasing Delusion’ of ‘Romance’ to ‘a solitary Desart’.39
Whilst this metaphor might work as a gloss on ‘Ode to Psyche’, ‘Ode to a
Nightingale’, and even ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, ‘To Autumn’ is more
progressive than to separate cognition from the perception of matter. As
suggested, the type of imaginative perception dramatised in ‘To Autumn’ seems
inescapable from the comprehension, and even apprehension, of the matter itself
(l. 13). Compared to the Spring Odes, the speaker has awoken from the idealising
world of Romance and, rather than a barren landscape, finds the imagination
inseparable from perception. Insofar as the speaker cannot separate the
imagination from the process of understanding the material world, the
imagination thus either takes on a degree of substance linked to that material
world, or at the very least is stronger than Addison theorises. Limit is clearly
present in the final stanza, triggered by the modifier ‘Last’ (A,22). Optimistic,
though unreachable ‘skies’ (A,33) may chime with ‘dies’ (A,29), and the uplifting
‘aloft’ (A,28) may ‘[sink]’ (A,29) then diminuendo with ‘soft’ (A,31). But the
landscape gains its beauty and truth through the imaginative intervention that
negotiates the binary ‘lives or dies’ (A,29) and that understands the landscape
‘as’40 a conflict of possibility and mortality – that, in other words, is ultimately
inseparable from the speaker’s perceptions. When Keats declares poetry to be
37
Addison is just one example of the general thrust of aesthetics in the early eighteenth
century. The extent of Keats’s knowledge of Addison is unclear. However, there is no
causal link needed specifically between Addison and Keats in order to argue that Keats,
intentionally or not, progresses intellectually rather than falling back on general views of
imaginative limits held during the previous century.
38
James Sambrook, The Eighteenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of
English Literature 1700-1789 (London: Longman, 1993) 132.
39
Sambrook 132.
40
Heidegger 190.
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INESCAPABLE PERCEPTION capable of ‘making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close
relationship with Beauty & Truth’,41 he houses irreconcilably, but not reductively,
the disagreeables of Lockean limit and post-Enlightenment possibility. The poem
becomes, to borrow a phrase from T. S. Eliot, an ‘objective correlative’42 for the
imagination’s reaction to its limits, and this objective correlative is intellectually
progressive precisely because it accommodates the borderland of poetic potential.
Even, then, in ‘To Autumn’, an Ode that attempts to value reality over a
limited imagination, Keats’s drama hinges on the inescapability of human
imaginings. Whilst the imagination lies implicit in this final Ode’s subject matter,
the poem joins the Spring Odes in dramatising the speaker’s imaginative abilities.
Throughout his Odes, Keats seeks to recreate that which has died, or to craft an
imaginative artefact capable of surpassing death and the knowledge of mortality.
It is this drive that lends the Odes their power and to which their lyric forms are
most suited. Running right through these works, though, negative capability is
limited by its own awareness of negativity: without mapping reductively a
deconstructive obsession onto the Odes, each are in some way obsessed with
systemic truths. Although the imagination clearly has the power of ‘All breathing
human passion’ (U,28), its limitation is one of ‘uncertainties’.43 In an 1819 letter
to his brother, Keats states that Byron ‘describes what he sees – I describe what I
imagine – Mine is the hardest task.’44 Keats perhaps sees his task as harder
precisely because of its attempts to accommodate the complex, inconsistent but
inescapable locus of possibility and limitation that characterises his view of the
imagination. The Keats of each of these Odes is unable to discover whether the
sense of logocentric truth that poetry generates is real. Yet, fused far more with
post-Enlightenment optimism than either fully formed Derridean deconstruction
or Lockean weakness, the imagination enables perception and emotion to create
41
Keats, Letters 1 193.
T. S. Eliot, ‘Hamlet and His Problems’, The Sacred Wood (London: Routledge, 1989)
100.
43
Keats, Letters 1 193.
44
Keats, Letters 2 200.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL beauty. To his poet figures, Keats states that imaginative ‘“Beauty is truth, truth
beauty” – that is all/ [They] know on earth’ (U,49-50); but, though limited, such
is the force of that imagination that that is ‘all [they] need to know’ (U,50).
University of Durham
The author would like to thank Professor Michael O’Neill of the University of
Durham
Works Cited
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Volume I. New York: Norton. 2006.
Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Robert Fagles. Hammondsworth: Penguin. 1990.
—. The Odyssey. Trans. Walter Shewring. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Keats, John. The Letters of John Keats 1814-1821: Volume 1. Ed. H. E. Rollins.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1958.
—. The Letters of John Keats 1814-1821: Volume 2. Ed. H. E. Rollins.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1958.
—. The Poems of John Keats. Ed. Jack Stillinger. London: Heinemann. 1978.
—. John Keats: The Complete Poems. Ed. John Barnard. London: Penguin. 2006.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. John Leonard. London: Penguin. 2003.
Schiller, Friedrich. On The Naïve and Sentimental in Literature. Trans. Helen
Watanabe-O’Kelly. Manchester [Greater Manchester]: Carcanet New
Press. 1981.
Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. David West. London: Penguin. 2003.
- 78 -
INESCAPABLE PERCEPTION Secondary Sources
Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic
Literature. New York: Norton. 1973.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of
Texas Press. 1992.
Barnard, John. John Keats. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1987.
Bowie, Andrew. From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of
German Literary Theory. London: Routledge. 1996.
Bradford, Richard. Stylistics. London: Routledge. 1997.
de Man, Paul. ‘The Epistemology of Metaphor’. Critical Inquiry. Vol. 5, No. 1.
Autumn, 1978.
Derrida, Jacques. ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences’. Modern Literary Theory: A Reader. Ed. Philip Rice and
Patricia Waugh. London: Arnold. 2001.
Eliot, T. S. ‘Hamlet and His Problems’. The Sacred Wood. London: Routledge.
1989.
Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. London: Penguin. 1995.
Fry, Paul. A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing. Stanford:
Stanford University Press. 1995.
—. ‘History, Existence, and “To Autumn”’. Studies in Romanticism. Vol. 25,
No. 2. Summer, 1986.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell. 2005.
Jones, John. John Keats’s Dream of Truth. London: Chatto and Windus. 1980.
McGann, Jerome J. ‘Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism’.
MLN. Vol. 94, No. 5. Comparative Literature. Dec. 1979.
O’Neill, Michael. Keats: Bicentenary Readings. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press for The University of Durham. 1997.
—. Ed. The Cambridge History of English Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL University Press. 2010.
—. Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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O’Rourke, James. Keats’s Odes and Contemporary Criticism. Gainesville:
University of Florida, 1998.
Rajan, Tilottama. Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press. 1986.
Roe, Nicholas. Keats and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1995.
Sambrook, James. The Eighteenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context
of English Literature 1700-1789. London: Longman. 1993.
Sperry, Stuart M. Keats the Poet. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1994.
Vendler, Helen. The Odes of John Keats. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap
Harvard. 2001.
Warnke, Georgia. Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason. Stanford:
Stanford University Press. 1987.
Wasserman, Earl R. The Finer Tone: Keats’s Major Poems. Baltimore: The Johns
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Watson, J. R. English Poetry of the Romantic Period 1789-1830. London:
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- 80 -
ELIZABETH WILKINSON
Classics, Contrapasso and the Christian Epic:
Comparing the Serpent Transformation Scenes in Dante
Alighieri’s Inferno and John Milton’s Paradise Lost
A
I. ‘Glad to go for a feast’:
Milton’s Familiarity with Italy and Dante
common view of Dante and Milton’s similarities has been
demonstrated by Italian critic Ettore Allodoli, who ‘notes the apparent
kinship between the two works’ but then concludes that he would be
‘hard-pressed to come up with any actual points of contact between them’.1 F.T.
Prince concurs, stating that there is ‘no evidence’ that Milton preferred Dante’s
style ‘to that of the other Tuscan poets,’ such as Petrarch (Hollander 3). This
article aims to show that Milton did indeed draw particularly on Dante to write
Paradise Lost.
First, it must be acknowledged that Dante and Milton shared similar
values. As critic Oscar Kuhns points out, both were ‘scholars, versed deeply in all
the learning of their day; both were profoundly religious, stern and severe in their
condemnation of sin, and indignant at the corruption of the church.’2 Scholar
Irene Samuel also observes that Dante could have acted as a role model for
Milton, with his early imitation of Latin poets and his belief in the ‘high office of
poetry.’3 Perhaps Milton recognized the similarities he shared with Dante and
thus felt motivated to familiarize himself with this little-known Italian’s work. His
interest would have been ‘early and exceptional’ because Dante was largely
1
Robert Hollander, ‘Milton’s Elusive Response to Dante’s Comedy in Paradise Lost’,
Milton Quarterly 45.1 (2011) 3. Wiley Online Library. Web. 24 Mar. 2011.
2
Oscar Kuhns, ‘Dante's Influence on Milton,’ Modern Language Notes 13.1 (1898) 1-6,
at 1.
3
Irene Samuel, qtd. in Catherine G. Martin, ‘Italy,’ Milton in Context, ed. Stephen B.
Dobranski (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010) 318-27.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL ignored in Italy and rarely named in England in the 17th century,4 yet several
scholars, including George Butler and Samuel, believe that Milton came to know
Dante’s work during his youth.5 Kuhns goes so far as to assert that there he
‘began the study of Italian in 1632 and…[was] saturated with [Italian poets]
Dante, Petrarch, Tasso and Ariosto.’6 Other scholars, such as Catherine Martin,
suggest that Milton’s close friendship with the Anglo-Italian Diodati family led
him to begin studying Italian and reading Dante and other Italian poets earlier
than 1632.7 Although the extent to which Milton was familiar with Dante during
his youth is unknown, scholars generally agree that Milton travelled to Italy in
1638, which would have allowed him the opportunity to get to know Dante’s
work in literary discussions in the academies of Florence.
As Barbara Lewalski admits in her biography of John Milton, ‘Writing
[about] Milton’s life involves treading a fine line between judicious speculation
and unwarranted guesses.’8 Milton’s Defensio Secunda is the main source
providing scholars with a general outline of his travels, supplemented with
information from other prose tracts, Italian records, and letters that Milton
exchanged with Italian friends.9 According to Milton’s own account, he traveled
Europe for ‘a year and three months, more or less,’ from 1638 to 1639.10 It is
estimated that he stayed in Florence for two months in the middle of 1638, then
returned to Florence for another two months on his way home in 1639.11 There,
Milton ‘became the friend of many gentlemen eminent in rank and learning,
whose private academies [he] frequented’ (Milton, qtd. in Lewalski 91). Among
4
George F. Butler, ‘Giants and Fallen Angels in Dante and Milton: The Commedia and
the Gigantomachy in Paradise Lost,’ Modern Philology 95.3 (1998) 352-63, at 352.
5
Butler 352 and Samuel, qtd. in Robert Hollander, ‘Milton's Elusive Response to Dante's
Comedy in Paradise Lost,’ Milton Quarterly 45.1 (2011) 1-24, at 3.
6
Kuhns 1.
7
Catherine G. Martin, ‘Italy,’ Milton in Context, ed. Stephen B. Dobranski (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2010) 318-27, at 319.
8
Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000) 88.
9
Lewalski 88.
10
Milton, qtd. in Lewalski 87.
11
Lewalski 90.
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CLASSICS, CONTRAPASSO AND THE CHRISTIAN EPIC these men was Benedetto Buonmattei, who, in addition to being a priest, scholar,
and professor at Pisa, was a Dante enthusiast who had written a commentary on
the Divina Commedia (Lewalski 92). Scholars often reason that Buonmattei must
have had some influence on Milton, and perhaps introduced him to several other
important Dantists of the century, including Carlo Roberto Dati and Agostino
Coltellini (Hollander 4). In fact, Milton referred openly to his knowledge of Dante
in a note written to Buonmattei about his tract, Della Lingua Toscana (1633):
‘Certainly I, who have not merely wet my lips in these [classical] Languages but
have drunk deeper drafts—as much as anyone of my years, am nevertheless glad
to go for a feast to Dante and Petrarch, and to a good many of your other authors’
(Milton, qtd. in Lewalski 93). Although Dante was not widely read in Italy nor in
England until the Romantic era, nearly 100 years after Paradise Lost was
published, Buonmattei seems to have introduced Milton to the Italian poet, if
Milton had not already known him from studying Italian language and literature.
Throughout his life and his work, Milton referred to Dante and his Divina
Commedia. Of Reformation (1641) contains a reference to Dante’s Paradiso and
provides an English poetic translation of Inferno IX.115-17, while in Apology for
Smectymnuus (1642), Milton expresses his admiration of Dante and Petrarch,
saying that above all artful but licentious authors he ‘preferr’d the two famous
renowners of Beatrice and Laura’ (Milton, qtd. in Butler 352-3). He knew of
Dante’s Monarchia, owned a third (1529) edition of the Convivio and was
familiar with the first (1576) edition of Vita nuova published with Boccaccio’s
Tratatello in laude di Dante (Butler 353; Martin 326). He also refers to the
Commedia in his Commonplace Book (Butler 353-4). Under the entry titled
‘Death Self-Inflicted’ in his Commonplace Book, Milton expresses his interest in
the Dantesque contrappasso exhibited in Inferno XIII, which describes how the
sin of suicide is punished, observing that ‘Dante’s Inferno most skillfully
describes the punishments of those people among the inhabitants of the infernal
regions’ (Milton, qtd. in Butler 354). Perhaps this hints at Milton’s later usage of
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL Dante’s contrappasso in Paradise Lost X. Indeed, it has been argued that Milton
continued to consult the Divina Commedia as he wrote Paradise Lost. James
Holly Hanford asserts that the passage on ‘religion’ in Milton’s Commonplace
Book, which cites Dante’s Purgatorio 16, was written after 1650 and in the same
hand as the extant manuscript of the first book of Paradise Lost (Butler 353).
Hanford’s claim provides persuasive evidence that Milton’s interest in Dante
among other poets continued into his later years, when he was composing
Paradise Lost.
II. Serpents and Sinners:
Comparing Dante’s Inferno XXIV, XXV and Milton’s Paradise Lost X
If Milton knew about Dante and his Commedia, and recognized their similar
backgrounds and goals, he may have relied upon some of Dante’s writing to help
him imagine parts of his Paradise Lost. One such part could be the fallen angels’
transformation into serpents in Book X. Returning triumphant after having
successfully tempted Adam and Eve to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge,
Satan boastfully recounts his actions in Eden to his followers (X.460-503).
Instead of receiving the expected applause, Satan hears hissing after he finishes
his account (X.506-9) and realizes that he and the other fallen angels are changing
into serpents (X.509-21). Once the transformations finish, Satan and the rest of
his cronies swarm towards a grove of trees that suddenly appears in Hell (X.54760). Driven by hunger and thirst, they continuously slither up the trees and
attempt to eat the fruit, which turns to bitter ashes in their mouths (X.564-7).
This moment in Paradise Lost greatly resembles Dante’s description of
the punishment endured by the thieves in the seventh bolgia of the eighth circle of
the Hell, which occurs in Canti XXIV and XXV of the Inferno. In Dante’s
conception of Hell, thieves are punished by eternally oscillating between their
own human bodies and those of reptiles and serpents (XXIV.81-118). Dante
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CLASSICS, CONTRAPASSO AND THE CHRISTIAN EPIC describes three transformations over the course of two chapters. In Canto XXIV, a
serpent bites a sinner named Vanni Fucci, causing him to burst into flame and
burn to ash (XXIV.97-105). After a few moments, Vanni Fucci’s human body
reforms from the ash. Canto XXV presents two other serpent metamorphoses,
each more extreme than the last. In the first transformation, a thief named Agnello
fuses with a six-legged reptile named Cianfa and becomes a bizarre hybrid
creature (XXV.61-78). After Agnello-Cianfa lumbers off, another reptile lands in
front of the sinner Buoso, who has smoke pouring from a wound. The reptile
likewise breathes smoke from its mouth (XXV.92-93). As their smoke mingles,
man and reptile slowly exchange forms; one becomes the other (XXV.101-35).
According to Irene Samuel, Dante and Milton ‘had an extraordinary
familiarity with many of the same books: Virgil, Ovid, Statius, the Psalms, the
Gospels, the Book of Revelation were absorbed into the very workings of their
minds.’12 Both Dante and Milton seem to rely heavily upon preceding literature,
largely classical literature and epic poems, to add authority to their transformation
scenes. Among their sources, Lucan’s catalog of the serpents rising from
Medusa’s spilled blood in Pharsalia IX and Ovid’s description of Cadmus’
transformation in Metamorphoses IV stand out as the most applicable and
influential passages from classical literature that were available to the poets to
describe the serpent transformations. Consequently it could be argued that the two
poets’ imaginings of the transformations resemble each other because they both
took inspiration from the same sources—not because Milton read and imitated
Dante. However, the poets do not only allude to Lucan and Ovid as authorities; I
intend to argue that they also challenge them as pagan sources, affirming the
superiority of their Christian narratives. A close reading of the two scenes proves
that Milton did indeed rely upon Dante as an example of how to challenge and
12
Irene Samuel, Dante and Milton: The Commedia and Paradise Lost (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1966) 69.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL change the work of these two great Roman predecessors, particularly through his
use of Dante’s contrappasso technique.
The Pharsalia (also known as De Bello Civili, ‘On the Civil War,’ or
simply Bellum Civile ‘The Civil War’), is a Roman epic poem written by the poet
Lucan that tells of the civil war between Julius Caesar and the forces of the
Roman Senate. In Book IX, Cato, a politician and leader of the republic’s army,
leads the Senate soldiers across Africa. As the army marches, Lucan references
the myth of Perseus and Medusa and describes the various serpents that rose from
the blood that dripped from Medusa’s severed head onto the desert sand. These
include Cenchris, ‘whose belly is ‘tinged / With various spots unnumbered’;
Scytale, who ‘shed[s] / In vernal frosts his slough’; ‘thirsty Dipsas’; ‘[d]read
Amphisbaena and his double head’; and ‘[s]wift Jaculus.’13 These same creatures
appear in Dante’s Inferno XXIV.82-90:
…e vividi entro terribile stipa
di serpenti, e di sì diversa mena
che la memoria il sangue ancor mi scipa.
Più non si vanti Libia con sua rena;
ché se chelidri, iaculi e faree
produce, e cencri con anfisbena,
né tante pestilenzie né sì ree
mostrò già mai con tutta l’Etïopia
né con ciò che di sopra al Mar Rosso èe.14
In it I saw a dreadful swarm of serpents, / of so strange a kind that even
now / when I remember them it chills my blood. / Let Libya with all her
sands no longer boast, / for though she fosters chelydri, jaculi, / phareae,
cenchres, and amphisbaena, / she never reared so many venomous pests,
13
M. Annaeus Lucanus, Pharsalia, trans. Sir Edward Ridley (London: Longmans, Green,
and Co., 1905) IX.712-20.
14
Dante Alighieri, La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. Giorgio Petrocchi
(Firenze: Le Lettere, 1994) XXIV.82-90.
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CLASSICS, CONTRAPASSO AND THE CHRISTIAN EPIC / nor so appalling—not with all of Ethiopia / and the lands that lie along
the Red Sea coast.15
This passage captures Dante’s first glimpse of the eighth circle, a pit filled with
writhing serpents. Dante explicitly references Lucan’s catalog of serpents,
mentioning jaculi, cenchres, and amphisbaena among others. The nod to the
Roman poet serves as an acknowledgement of his esteemed predecessor but also
as proof of his own literary prowess and knowledge of the classical works. Dante
then dares to supersede Lucan, claiming that the venomous pests of the Inferno
are much more appalling than Lucan’s Libyan serpents. Obviously, ‘Libya with
all her sands [can] no longer boast’ (XXIV.85) in comparison to the horrors of
Hell, yet here Dante also takes the opportunity to prove the superiority of his own
text in comparison to his predecessor’s work.
Like Dante, Milton alludes to Lucan’s catalog of serpents in his own
serpent transformation scene and then tops it. Following Satan’s rapid
metamorphosis, the other fallen angels quickly find themselves transforming into
snakes:
...now were all transformed
Alike, to serpents all as accessories
To his bold riot: dreadful was the din
Of hissing through the hall, thick swarming now
With complicated monsters, head and tail,
Scorpion and asp, and amphisbaena dire,
Cerastes horned, hydrus, and ellops drear,
And dipsas (not so thick swarmed once the soil
Bedropped with blood of Gorgon, or the isle
Ophiusa) but still greatest he the midst. (PL ed. Fowler X.51928)
15
Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. Robert and Jean Hollander (New York: Doubleday,
2000) XXIV.82-90.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL In what seems to be an attempt to represent the overwhelmingly grand scope of
the sudden serpentine invasion, Milton names several kinds of ‘complicated
monsters’ that now populate Hell. There are conventional creatures such as the
scorpion and asp, but then, following Lucan’s list and perhaps Dante’s example as
well, Milton names the ‘amphisbaena dire,’ ‘[c]erastes horned,’ ‘hydrus,’ ‘ellops
drear,’ and ‘dipsas,’ which appear in both Lucan’s Pharsalia IX and Dante’s
Inferno XXIV. Finally, Milton pronounces his swarm of serpents more terrible
than those described in Lucan or other myths, insisting that the soil ‘[b]edropped
with blood of Gorgon’ did not have a swarm so ‘thick’ as the one in Hell after
Satan and his followers were transformed. Of course, to a Christian poet like
Milton or Dante, it is obvious that serpents in Hell would be much more horrific
than mythological serpents rising from the desert. Yet both poets felt the need to
qualify their allusions to the pagan Lucan by immediately following with an
exaltation of Christian narrative’s superiority. The similarity of these two
passages, both in their imagery and treatment of Lucan, suggests that Milton read
Dante and drew inspiration from his example.
Scholar
Alastair
Fowler
also
cites
the
Roman
poet
Ovid’s
Metamorphoses IV.617-20 as a source for Dante and Milton’s references to
Libya’s Medusa-born serpents.16 Yet allusions to other parts of the
Metamorphoses abound in Dante and Milton’s poems. According to scholars
Umberto Bosco and Giovanni Reggio, Ovid’s recounting of Cadmus’
transformation into a serpent (Met. IV.563-89) appears to have inspired Dante’s
descriptions of the serpent transformations, particularly that of the sinner Buoso.17
After killing a sacred dragon, Cadmus, a Phoenician prince, is beset with
misfortune and pleads the gods to transform him into a snake, reasoning that if
they revere a serpent so much, he may as well wish that life for himself. Ovid
provides a detailed description of his metamorphosis:
16
Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Fowler, Note X.511-14
La Divina Commedia a cura di Umberto Bosco e Giovanni Reggio, ed. Margherita
Frankel (Florence: Le Monnier, 1979) Note XXV.97.
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17
CLASSICS, CONTRAPASSO AND THE CHRISTIAN EPIC [H]e saw and felt himself increase in length.
His body coiled into a serpent’s form;
bright scales enveloped his indurate skin,
and azure macules in speckled pride
enriched his glowing folds; and as he fell
supinely on his breast, his legs were joined,
and gradually tapered as a serpent’s tail.—
Some time his arms remained, which stretching forth
while tears rolled down his human face, not changed
as yet, he said; ‘Hither, O hapless one!
Come hither my unhappy wife, while aught
is left of manhood; touch me, take my hand,
unchanged as yet—ah, soon this serpent-form
will cover me!’
So did he speak, nor thought
to make an end; but suddenly his tongue
became twin-forked. As often as he tried,
a hissing sound escaped; the only voice
that Nature left him.— (Met. IV.563-89)18
Cadmus prays to be changed into a serpent, and the gods grant his request. His
transformation follows a specific process: first the skin changes, then the legs
blend together to become a tail, and finally he loses speech, the last vestige of his
humanity. Dante adheres to a similar pattern in his depiction of the sinner Buoso’s
transformation. As with Cadmus, Buoso’s legs first begin to ‘appiccar,’ or knit
18
Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Brookes More (Boston: Cornhill Publishing Co., 1922)
IV.563-89.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL together, and his skin ‘si facea…dura,’ hardens.19 His arms shorten
(‘accorciavan’)20 and he falls to the ground. His tongue, which once was ‘fit for
speech’21 (‘ch’avëa unita e presta / prima a parlar’)22 divides and becomes forked,
leaving Buoso only able to hiss. By imitating the description of Cadmus’
metamorphosis, Dante pays homage to Ovid through subtle allusion. Yet he also
changes the meaning of the imagery appropriated from his predecessor. While
Ovid attaches no particular moral lesson to Cadmus’ story (besides, perhaps, the
idea that you must be careful about what you wish), Dante’s depiction of Buoso’s
infernal transformation carries a strong message about Christian divine justice. In
Dante’s conception of Hell, every sinner is punished according to the worst sins
he committed during his lifetime. Buoso was a thief; thus, in Hell, he loses his
most precious possessions to make up for what he stole from others: his voice and
his human form, which symbolize, more broadly, his humanity. The phenomenon
by which the sinner’s punishment perfectly fits his crime appears in every circle
of Dante’s Hell and has been christened, in Italian, ‘contrappasso.' Dante’s use of
contrappasso to imagine Buoso’s transformation infuses Ovid’s imagery with
Christian meaning, graphically illustrating the power of God’s divine justice.
It is likely that Dante’s contrappasso technique subsequently inspired
Milton’s own treatment of Ovid in his depiction of Satan and his followers’
change into serpents. After having described his successful temptation of Eve and
Adam in Eden, Satan stands before his fellow fallen angels, expecting
Their universal shout and high applause
To fill his ear, when contrary he hears
On all sides, form innumerable tongues
As dismal universal hiss, the sound
Of public scorn: he wondered, but not long
19
Alighieri, La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. Petrocchi XXV.106-7, 111.
Alighieri, La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. Petrocchi XXV.114.
21
Alighieri, Inferno, trans. Hollander XXV.134.
22
Alighieri, La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. Petrocchi XXV.133-4.
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CLASSICS, CONTRAPASSO AND THE CHRISTIAN EPIC Had leisure, wondering at himself now more;
His visage drawn he felt to sharp and spare,
His arms clung to his ribs, his legs entwining
Each other, till supplanted down he fell
A monstrous serpent on his belly prone,
Reluctant, but in vain, a greater power
Now ruled him, punished in the shape he sinned,
According to his doom: he would have spoke,
But hiss for hiss returned with forkèd tongue
To forkèd tongue, for now were all transformed
Alike, to serpents all as accessories
To his bold riot. (PL X.504-21)23
Milton follows the process of transformation established in Ovid and Dante. Satan
first falls ‘on his belly prone’ (similar to how Cadmus ‘[i]n pectusque cadit
pronus,’ in the original Latin)24 after his legs become entwined. He also loses his
ability to speak, as Milton notes: ‘he would have spoke, / But hiss for hiss
returned with forkèd tongue / To forkèd tongue.’ Just like Cadmus and Buoso,
Satan loses his ability to stand upright and to speak. Yet while Ovid contents
himself with describing the logical progression of Cadmus’ metamorphosis,
Milton, like Dante, infuses his transformation scene with a sense of divine justice
illustrated by contrappasso. Cadmus voluntarily opts to be transformed; when he
finds himself unable to speak except by hissing, he realizes that this is the ‘only
voice / that Nature left him,’25 a physiological result of his transformation into a
serpent. Satan, however, is completely ‘[r]eluctant’ to be transformed and finds
that a ‘greater power [begins to rule] him’ so that he may be ‘punished in the
shape he sinned’ (PL X.515-16). Both characters realize that they are in the power
23
Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Fowler X.504-21.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. Hugo Magnus (Gotha, Germany: Friedrich Andreas Perthes
1892) IV.568.
25
Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. More IV.588-9.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL of something mightier than themselves; for Cadmus, this is Nature (Met. IV.89),
but for Satan it is God’s supreme power and divine justice (PL X.15). Like
Dante’s Buoso, Satan’s punishment fits his crime. His involuntary transformation
into a serpent forces him to acquire the shape he used to accomplish his sinful
deeds. Thus, while Milton appropriates details from Ovid’s account of Cadmus’
transformation as an acknowledgment of his literary authority, he also uses
Dante’s contrappasso technique to infuse Christian meaning into the classical
allusion and thereby illustrate the power of Christian divine justice being enacted
upon Satan, the worst sinner.
Milton and Dante clearly rely upon the same epic sources in their
imagining of the serpent transformation scenes. Both include serpents identified
in Lucan’s catalog in Pharsalia IX, and follow the same process of
metamorphosis described in Ovid’s depiction of Cadmus’ transformation in
Metamorphoses IV. Yet Milton seems to mimic Dante’s example in not only
taking inspiration and authority from preceding epic works, but in challenging
and changing them. Using contrappasso, Dante alters Cadmus’ transformation in
order to show that the metamorphosis from man to serpent is not merely
misfortune, but a divine punishment for sinful behavior. This idea of
contrappasso also appears in Milton’s account of Satan’s transformation, who
finds himself ‘punished in the shape he sinned, / According to his doom’ (PL
X.16-7) unable to stand erect nor speak because he is at the mercy of a ‘greater
power.’ It may be concluded, then, that Milton did indeed recognize that he and
Dante had similar goals in composing an epic poem about Christian divine
justice, and, accordingly, incorporated some of Dante’s images and ideas,
particularly his contrappasso, into his own work. The next questions to ask, then,
are: Why did Dante and Milton feel the need to challenge and transform
preceding epic and classical works, and what aesthetic did they achieve using
contrappasso?
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CLASSICS, CONTRAPASSO AND THE CHRISTIAN EPIC 3. Transforming Serpents, Transforming Sources:
Dante & Milton’s Christian Epics
While Dante and Milton evoke Lucan’s Pharsalia and Ovid’s Metamorphoses,
they also challenge and transform them. Before proceeding further, however, I
must address a potential counterargument. Some may argue that challenging
literary predecessors is in fact a classical convention; thus, Dante and Milton
would actually be working in accordance with the epic tradition rather than
against it. In her Italian commentary on Dante’s Inferno, Anna Maria Chiavacci
Leonardi asserts that the ‘vanto letterario iperbolico,’ or literary hyperbolic boast,
by which poets claim to ‘supera[re] in bravura anche i più grandi autori
precedenti’ (‘exceed the greatest preceding authors in skill or cleverness’) is in
fact a typical feature of epic tradition.26 This vanto, Leonardi says, gives the
newer work an ‘acutoritas’ and a sense of ‘eccezionalità,’ or uniqueness, which
then allows the poet to stake his claim amid older classical texts (Leonardi
XXV.Nota). While Dante and Milton certainly want their poems to be considered
epics, their unique goal to compose Christian poems requires that they define
themselves apart from this tradition, which largely features pagan gods and
heroes. Examining the serpent transformation scenes in Inferno XXIV and XXV
and Paradise Lost X reveals how Dante and Milton rely upon but also depart
from the conventions established by preceding sources. While on the one hand
Dante and Milton’s departure from the classical epic tradition seems to be an
attempt to minimize the anxiety resulting from appropriating the ideas of
predecessors, on the other it may be interpreted as Dante and Milton’s way of
asserting the authority and originality of their religious epic poems. The use of
Dantesque contrappasso captures the Christian aesthetic that both Dante and
Milton strove to achieve in their poems, revealing the divine potency of God’s
26
Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi, qtd. in La Divina Commedia a cura di Anna Maria
Chiavacci Leonardi, ed. Stephen Cambell, Robert Hollander, and Massimilliano
Chiamenti (Milano: Arnoldo Mondatori Editore, S.p.A.) Note XXV.94.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL justice while simultaneously modifying the ideas of pagan predecessors for
incorporation into a Christian work.
In the previous section, it was argued that Dante and Milton challenge
Lucan by claiming that their imaginings of infernal serpents in Hell are much
more horrifying than Lucan’s depiction of the serpents in the Libyan desert, and
twist Ovid’s descriptions of Cadmus’ metamorphoses by adding the concept of
Christian contrappasso to them. Now I would like to point out that Dante
explicitly challenges to Lucan and Ovid in Inferno XXV, after Agnello’s
transformation and before Buoso and Cianfa enter the scene:
Taccia Lucano omai là dov’ e’ tocca
del misero Sabello e di Nasidio,
e attenda a udir quell ch’or si scocca.
Taccia di Cadmo e d’Aretusa Ovidio,
ché se quello in serpente e quella in fonte
converte poetando, io non lo ’nvidio;
ché due nature mai a fronte a fronte
non trasmutò sì ch’amendue le forme
a cambiar lor matera fosser pronte.27
Let Lucan now fall silent where he tells / of poor Sabellus and Nasidius,
/ and let him wait to hear what comes forth now! / Let Ovid not speak of
Cadmus or Arethusa, / for if his poem turns him into a serpent / and her
into a fountain, I grudge it not, / for never did he change two natures,
face to face, in such a way that both their forms / were quite so quick
exchanging substance. (97-102)28
Here Dante refers directly to specific tales in the Pharsalia and the
Metamorphoses. Sabellus and Nasidius were two men in the Roman leader Cato’s
27
28
Alighieri, La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. Petrocchi XXV.97-102.
Alighieri, Inferno, trans. Hollander XXV.97-102.
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CLASSICS, CONTRAPASSO AND THE CHRISTIAN EPIC army who died in the Libyan desert; one suffocated and one exploded as a result
of the Libyan snakes’ deadly bites, according to Lucan’s account. Cadmus and
Arethusa both appear in the Metamorphoses; Cadmus transformed into a serpent,
as discussed in the previous section, and Arethusa became a fountain (Met.V.4151). Dante evokes these stories yet also claims to surpass them, requesting that his
two Latin predecessors ‘fall silent’ (XXV.97) in anticipation of his final
transformation, the double metamorphoses of Buoso and Cianfa, which Dante
believes will be more horrible than Sabellus and Nasidius’ deaths and more
strange than either Cadmus’ or Arethusa’s metamorphoses.
Why does Dante do this? At first, his challenge seems to be consistent
with the classical topos of outdoing preceding models, but most scholars believe
it is much more complicated. Some theorize that Dante explicitly acknowledges
Lucan and Ovid in Inferno XXV to alleviate his anxiety about imitating these
eminent classical predecessors—which could be construed as committing a type
of literary theft. Scholar Caron Ann Cioffi believes that this moment explicitly
invites the reader to ‘view poetic influence itself as thievery, the taking of another
poet’s property.’29 In Cioffi’s opinion, this notion is encouraged by Dante’s
naming of Lucan, who apparently took the account of Libya’s snake-infested
desert from Ovid’s Metamorphoses IV.30 Dante, Cioffi concludes, confronts his
anxiety about imitating Lucan and Ovid head-on, and points out that other poets
commit literary theft as well.31 Scholar Joan Ferrante, however, believes that
Dante draws a distinction between good and bad thieves. The ‘bad thieves’ are the
sinners in Hell who took others’ possessions for their own gain, but Dante is a
‘good thief’ because he appropriates ideas and images from other writers for his
culture’s enrichment. Finally, some scholars, like Robert Ellrich, think that
29
Caron Ann Cioffi, ‘The Anxieties of Ovidian Influence: Theft in Inferno XXIV and
XXV,’ Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the Dante Society 112 (1994) 77-100, at
80.
30
Cioffi 80.
31
Cioffi 80.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL ‘[w]ith the appropriate motivation…poetic appropriation is no theft’ at all.32 In
bidding Ovid and Lucan to be silent, Dante does not censor his predecessors, but
‘celebrat[es] his own historical good fortune at having at his disposal a poetic
invention’ based on Christianity.33
Indeed, it could be argued that Dante manages to avoid being accused of
committing literary theft precisely because he is writing a Christian epic poem.
Italian commentator Nicola Fosca observes that Dante ‘evita l’accusa’ because he
claims he is ‘ispirato dall’amore divino’—inspired by his divine love of God.34
Therefore, he could not possibly be committing theft. From this perspective,
Dante’s challenge to Lucan and Ovid is not so much an expression of ‘vanità
letteraria’ but rather, as Fosca believes, a celebration of the ‘religiosa conscienza’
that led him to penetrate the ‘modi occulti’ of divine justice.35 Specifically, Dante
vaunts his understanding of Christian contrappasso, which can be seen, as
discussed in section two, by comparing the transformation of Buoso from Inferno
XXV to that of Cadmus from Metamorphoses IV. On the surface, the two men’s
metamorphoses into serpents seem very similar, as both proceed in the same way:
after their legs become entwined, they fall to the ground on their bellies, attempt
to speak, and find they can only hiss (Inf. XXV.103-38; Met. IV.563-89). The
underlying messages of the stories differ greatly, however. While Ovid uses
metamorphosis as a ‘non-tragic alternative to paternal grief’ and a way to ‘play
with the theme of marital devotion,’ as Cioffi writes, Dante stresses the religious
meaning of Buoso’s transformation (Cioffi 91). Unlike Cadmus, who remains a
snake permanently, Buoso continually shifts between human and serpent form,
condemned to ‘suffer repeated moments of metamorphic dying’ for eternity
(Cioffi 92).
32
Robert J. Ellrich, ‘Envy, Identity, and Creativity: Inferno XXIV-XXV,’ Dante Studies,
with the Annual Report of the Dante Society 102 (1984) 61-80, at 76.
33
Ellrich 76.
34
Nicola Fosca, La Divina Commedia a cura di Nicola Fosca, ed. Nicola Fosca and
Robert Hollander (Dartmouth Dante Project, 2003) Note XXV.100-2.
35
Fosca Note XXV.100-2.
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CLASSICS, CONTRAPASSO AND THE CHRISTIAN EPIC As Dante was a Catholic, the serpent transformations in Inferno XXIV
and XXV certainly contain religious meaning. Some scholars, such as Ellrich,
believe that the Buoso’s transformation is a parody of the holy Trinity that is
central to Christian belief: the Father, the Son, and from the ‘spiration of love’
between the two, the Holy Spirit (Ellrich 72). Dante presents an ‘infernal
reflection,’ a ‘travestimento’ of this Trinity, with the reptile thief who grips the
human thief and, out of violent aggression rather than divine love, exhales smoke
that transforms them (Ellrich 72; Fosca Note XXV.100-2). As Ellrich observes,
Dante evokes ‘the highest model of love, in which a sharing of identities
generates a third identity, the product of love’ and twists it, creating a
transformation that is a ‘grotesque, inverted denial of the generative divine
sharing’ that neither Lucan nor Ovid, as pagan poets, could never have imagined
(Ellrich 72). Additionally, because the sinners in Inferno XXV transform into
serpents specifically, there is also the obvious link to Satan’s serpentine form in
Genesis. Cioffi points out that the thieves literally pervert themselves into images
of Satan, an inversion of Genesis 1:26 stating that man is made in the likeness of
God.36 Through their sin, the thieves become deformed, twisted in the likeness of
the devil rather than God. Their eternal metamorphoses from man to serpent and
vice versa represent the perfect example of Dantesque contrappasso, which
infuses Christian meaning into images from classical literature.
Milton seems to have taken inspiration from the Christian contrappasso
exhibited in Dante’s Inferno. As Dante plays on the idea of the Trinity, so does
Milton appropriate ideas from Christian doctrine and apply them to his serpent
transformation scene, alluding even to specific verses rather than general
ideology. Genesis 3:14 seems to have been particularly influential, as Milton
paraphrases in Book X:
36
Cioffi 82. Genesis 1:26 information from James T. Chiampi, ‘The Fate of Writing: The
Punishment of Thieves in the Inferno,’ Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the
Dante Society 102 (1984) 51-60.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL Because thou hast done this, thou art accursed
Above all cattle, each beast of the field;
Upon thy belly groveling thou shalt go,
And dust shalt eat all the days of thy life,
Between thee and the woman I will put
Enmity, and between thine and her seed;
Her seed shall bruise thy head, thou bruise his heel.37
The curse becomes literally enacted upon Satan when he is ‘punished in the shape
he sinned’ and involuntarily forced to become a ‘monstrous serpent on his belly
prone’ (PL X.516; 514). Milton also compares Satan to the apocalyptic dragon
from Revelations 12:9—‘the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the
devil, and Satan’—when he describes him as ‘dragon grown’ (X.329).38 The
‘dust’ that Satan is sentenced to eat ‘all the days of [his] life’ may be embodied in
the cindery apples that he devours and spits out while he is a serpent; they may
also be a reference to Deuteronomy 32:32: ‘Their vine is of the vine of
Sodom…Their wine is the poison of dragons, and the cruel venom of asps.’39 The
‘vine of Sodom’ image is usually taken to mean that the Israelities had become
degenerate and rotten to the core.40 Satan and his followers, ‘parched with
scalding thirst and hunger fierce’ (X.556), climb up trees laden with ‘fruitage fair
to sight, like that which grew / Near that bituminous lake where Sodom flamed’
(X.561-2) and find themselves ‘deceived’ when they find they are chewing ‘bitter
ashes’ (X.566). Like the Israelites, Satan and the fallen angels are degenerate.
They are punished with their own poison, falling into the ‘same illusion’ (X.571)
that tricked Adam and Eve to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge. Milton
outlines their eternal punishment: ‘Thus were they plagued…Till their lost shape,
permitted, they resumed, / Yearly enjoined some say, to undergo / This annual
37
Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Fowler X.175-81.
Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Fowler, Note X.329.
39
Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Fowler, Note X.572-7.
40
Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Fowler, Note. X.572-7.
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CLASSICS, CONTRAPASSO AND THE CHRISTIAN EPIC humbling certain numbered days, / To dash their pride’ (X.572-77). The
inspiration for the imagery of Satan’s transformation can certainly be traced to
Biblical sources; however, Milton’s idea of punishment is extremely Dantesque.
Punishing Satan and his followers by transforming them all into snakes and
compelling them to devour fruit from mock trees of knowledge is much like
Dante’s contrappasso. As Samuel writes, ‘Only Dante could have suggested to
Milton that the scene represent the penalty exacted by divine justice, that the
criminal must go on being and doing involuntarily what he had formerly been and
done by choice.’41 It seems as if Milton admired Dante’s view of divine justice
and sought to include it in his own work.
Like Dante, Milton also seeks to challenge and change his classical
predecessors. He is less combative than Dante, who explicitly tells Lucan and
Ovid to be silent, but he does firmly announce his intentions at the beginning of
Paradise Lost:
Sing heavenly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed,
In the beginning how the heavens and earth
Rose out of chaos: or if Sion hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flowed
Fast by the oracle of God [,] I thence
Invoke thy aid to my advent’rous song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.42
41
Irene Samuel, ‘The Valley of Serpents: Inferno XXIV-XXV and Paradise Lost X,’
PMLA 78.4 (1963) 449-51, at 449.
42
Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Fowler I.6-16.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL With his epic poem, Milton intends to ‘soar / Above the Aonian mount,’ which
represents Mount Olympus, where the pagan gods resided in Greek and Roman
mythology. Literally, Milton intends to exceed the works of previous Greek and
Roman poets, such as Lucan and Ovid, with his ‘advent’rous’ song (I.13), and
will accomplish ‘[t]hings unattempted yet in prose or rhyme’ (I.16). While Milton
does begin with an invocation to the Muse, an epic convention, this too illustrates
how Milton changes classical tradition to fit the goals of his Christian work: he
invokes a ‘heavenly’ Muse (I.6), not a pagan Muse. Milton intends to Christianize
the traditionally pagan epic conventions to create a new kind of epic, one with a
strong Christian aesthetic. This is apparent throughout the work, including Satan’s
serpent transformation in Book X. As discussed previously, Milton insists that the
tangle of serpents in Hell is much worse than Lucan could have ever imagined,
thus challenging one of the main sources of inspiration for the scene. As for Ovid,
Milton, like Dante, appropriates the imagery from the Metamorphoses but then
adds the element of Christian contrappasso to the scene, creating a moment that
illustrates Satan’s grotesque sin and the fitting punishment he receives at the
hands of God’s divine justice. In Paradise Lost Milton ‘at once heightens epic
conventions and values and utterly transforms them,’ composing the ‘epic to end
all epics.’43 He could not have accomplished this feat without Dante, whose
Inferno showed him how the contrappasso technique could be used to transform
preceding classical texts in order to create an aesthetically Christian work.
If, as I have attempted to prove, Milton relied as much upon Dante as
upon Lucan and Ovid to compose Satan’s transformation scene, this also means
that Milton also had to contend with Dante as a predecessor if he truly desired to
create a unique Christian epic poem. In ‘The Argument,’ a brief summary of
Paradise Lost’s contents before the first verse, Milton implicitly corrects Dante’s
imagining of Satan’s fall into Hell, insisting that Hell was not ‘in the centre’ of
43
John Milton, Paradise Lost, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The
Sixteenth Century / The Early Seventeenth Century, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, 8th ed. Vol. B
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2006) 1830.
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CLASSICS, CONTRAPASSO AND THE CHRISTIAN EPIC the earth for ‘heaven and earth may be supposed as yet not made, certainly not yet
accursed.’44 Dante’s account, however, states that the devil fell from heaven
headfirst into the ground, creating all the rings of Hell and finally stopping right
in the center of the earth. Milton, then, first challenges Dante’s ideology by
establishing his own conception of Hell. He next refers to Dante in ‘The Verse,’ a
section preceding the beginning of the poem, which was added in 1668 to the
fourth issue of the first edition of Paradise Lost.45 In this section, Milton seeks to
explain the stylistic choices he made in writing the poem. The measure, Milton
writes, is ‘English heroic verse without rhyme,’ in accordance with Homer and
Virgil, his inspirational examples of unrhymed poetry.46 Rhyme, according to
Milton, is ‘no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in
longer works especially,’ and he critiques poets who delight in creating the
‘jingling sound of like endings’ and ignore the example of the ‘learned ancients
both in poetry and all good oratory.’47 Unlike Milton, Dante uses a particular
rhyming style, known as terza rima; each line is eleven syllables long and
conforms to the rhyming scheme aba, cdc, ded, etc. Dante’s poetry certainly
contains the ‘jingling sound of like endings’ that Milton deplores. Thus, in
addition to Dante’s imagining of Hell, Milton indirectly acknowledges his
predecessor’s writing style and corrects it, claiming that his is superior.
Despite Milton’s critique of Dante’s imagining of Hell and his rhyming
verse, the two poets’ goals were the same. Milton claims that Paradise Lost must
be ‘esteemed an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to a
heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming.’48 Similarly,
Dante created the first poem in the Italian vulgate, specifically the Tuscan dialect.
Additionally, as this essay has shown, Milton certainly took inspiration from
Dante’s example in creating Paradise Lost. The serpent transformation scenes in
44
Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Fowler 55.
Fowler, qtd. in Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Fowler 54.
46
Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Fowler 54.
47
Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Fowler 54-55.
48
Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Fowler 55.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL the Inferno and Paradise Lost reveal that Milton alludes to the same passages
from Lucan’s Pharsalia and Ovid’s Metamorphoses as Dante does, representing
the desire to create a poem that will be added to the epic canon. Yet both
challenge and transform Lucan and Ovid with the addition of Dantesque
contrappasso. Despite the obvious reverence that the two poets hold for their
classical predecessors, both Dante and Milton claim to surpass them in order to
assert the superiority and originality of their Christian poems.
The challenging of preceding sources is necessary for all authors, it
seems, but a unique paradox presents itself to authors of Christian epics. In order
for the poem to qualify as an epic, it must obey the main conventions of the
classical—and largely pagan—tradition of epic poetry, but at the same time refute
the pagan elements and exalt Christianity. Dante and Milton manage to
compromise by simultaneously evoking and transforming the classical works to
which they allude in their serpent transformation scenes. Milton had the
additional duty to engage with Dante’s Inferno, which set the precedent as an epic
poem dealing with Hell and Christian divine justice. Like Dante, Milton wanted
to write about Satan, Hell, and divine punishment, yet he also wanted to establish
his work as unique. His correction of Dante in the beginning of the work allows
him to claim originality, leaving him free to then appropriate Dante’s ideas—most
notably his conception of contrappasso. While Milton could not have written
Paradise Lost without Dante’s example, he also needed to define himself as apart
from him, just as Dante needed to silence such preceding poets as Lucan and
Ovid.
No poem is better than another, however. As John of Salisbury wrote in
his Metalogicon in 1159, 150 years before Dante wrote the Inferno:
Bernard of Chartres used to compare us to [puny] dwarfs perched on the
shoulders of giants. He pointed out that we see more and farther than
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CLASSICS, CONTRAPASSO AND THE CHRISTIAN EPIC our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height,
but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.49
This phrase was later echoed by Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy
around the time that Milton was writing Paradise Lost (and, ironically,
misattributed to Lucan).50 Dante and Milton were like dwarves standing on the
shoulders of giants: while their vision was not any sharper than that of Lucan,
Ovid, or other classical poets, they were able to create wholly original, inventive
epic poetry by being ‘lifted and borne aloft’ by these literary giants, which in turn
brought them to new heights.
Princeton University
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—. La Divina Commedia a cura di Natalino Sapegno. Ed. Antonia Rossi.
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Press, 1955) 167.
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J. Cuthell; J. Sewell; J. Walker; Lackington, Allen, and Co.; Otridge and Son; and Ogilvy
and Son, 1800) 12.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL —. La Divina Commedia a cura di Nicola Fosca. Ed. Nicola Fosca and Robert
Hollander. 2003. Dartmouth Dante Project. 24 Mar. 2011.
—. La Divina Commedia a cura di Umberto Bosco e Giovanni Reggio. Ed.
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—. La Divina Commedia: Inferno. Ed. S. Jacomuzzi, A. Dughera, G. Ioli, and V.
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—. La Divina Commedia: Inferno a cura di Robert Hollander. Trans. Simone
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Century / The Early Seventeenth Century. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. 8th ed.
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—. Metamorphoses. Trans. Brookes More. Boston: Cornhill Publishing Co.,
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Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. London: J. Cundee, for Vernor and
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Otridge and Son; and Oglivy and Son, 1800. Google Books. 1 Apr. 2011.
Butler, George F. ‘Giants and Fallen Angels in Dante and Milton: The Commedia
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—. ‘Satan and Briareos in Vida’s Christiad and Milton’s Paradise Lost.’ ANQ: A
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL Ferrante, Joan M. ‘Good Thieves and Bad Thieves: A Reading of Inferno XXIV.’
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL Villani, F. Milton tra riforma e controriforma: L'ideale pedagogico e la poetica
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JAMES O’SULLIVAN
African Myth alongside Western Conventions
in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon
T
hroughout her novel, Song of Solomon, Morrison uses the Western
form of magic realism as a mechanism through which she can jolt the
reader, blending the fantastic with the expected as a means of
interrupting the realistic discourse of the novel. However, Song of Solomon does
not owe its mastery to its form alone, but also to its content, and the African myth
upon which the author draws. While many scholars and schools of thought within
literary criticism have a tendency to privilege either form or content, I suggest
that Morrison's novel would suffer greatly from such a separation: the folklore
that feeds the narrative is reliant on the approach of the magic realist for its effect,
while the form itself serves a significant purpose in the dramatisation of those
traumatic and complex histories to which the novel alludes, but for this is
dependent on suitable content, provided by such mythological inspirations.
Essentially, the form and content displayed in Song of Solomon share a symbiotic
relationship through which Morrison can represent the thematic core of her work.
However, if one is to insist on such a separation, if only as a tool of literary
criticism, it is the author's use of African myth that allows her to pursue the
narrative's attempt to re-problematise the burning issue of black civil rights in
America – essentially, achieving re-problematisation through de-familiarisation.
As a result, the ethical purpose of the text is considerably more reliant on the
ethnic origins from which the author draws. While this lends itself to the
argument that it is the content which holds greater importance to the novel, I find
it would be an error to pursue a complete separation of the novel’s form and
content. Instead, throughout this examination, without dismissing the content as
the more critical aspect of the text, I will work towards outlining why it is that
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL sufficient recognition must be given to the importance of the hybrid relationship
that these two facets hold.
First consideration will be given to the form, and why it is that Morrison
chose this particular discourse. From here, I will quickly move toward an
illustration of how that form lends itself to the novel’s content, using similar
examples from other texts where necessary. Jasmina Murad, in her essay on the
use of magic realism in the work of Morrison and Ana Castillo, comments that
‘[magic] realism realizes the hybridization of the natural and the supernatural by
focusing on specific historical moments in order to problematize present-day
disjunctive realities’1. This definition offers some insight into why it is that
Morrison makes use of such a convention. As already noted, magic realism
facilitates a more dramatised depiction of people's experiences. There is a purpose
to approaching a narrative in such a way, and that purpose is to ensure the reader's
full attention is given to the event that is being problematised. While the
importance of those complex histories that Song of Solomon describes is as
significant today as it has ever been, it is an unfortunate characteristic of human
nature that we tend to become acclimatised to such issues when they are so
frequently presented to us. By availing of the magic realist approach, Morrison
ensures that the reader's focus is not lost in relation to those aspects of the novel
that have long been examined, specifically, the American civil rights movement.
By problematising such an issue in a way that draws attention to the text, an act
facilitated through the form's tendency to break from reality, the reader is lured
into reflection in a way that is similar to how Salman Rushdie ensures that his
readers give sufficient thought to the struggles that exist across Indian society in
Midnight's Children. This is achieved in Rushdie’s text through the extraordinary
powers that the author attributes to a number of characters, brought together by
1
Jasmina Murad, Magical Realism in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Ana Castillo's So Far
from God (Munich: GRIN Verlag, 2009) 3.
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AFRICAN MYTH ALONGSIDE WESTERN CONVENTIONS IN TONI MORRISON the protagonist’s telepathy, allowing him ‘intimate access’ to ‘many worlds’2. An
example of this technique in Song of Solomon is the novel's portrayal of flight. As
will be examined later, Morrison plays with the symbolic nature of flight as a
means of escape in the latter stages of the novel. However, as already noted, the
author does not present flight in a metaphorical sense, but rather, as an actual
occurrence that is physically achieved by one of her characters. The reader is
induced into giving renewed consideration to the act of flight, an event that often
carries much symbolism in literature. This renewed consideration stems from the
literal inclusion of flight within the narrative, rather than the common
metaphorical usage. There are plentiful examples with which to conceptualise the
aforementioned difference. In Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
this popular flight motif is present. However, in contrast to Morrison’s work, it is
rendered symbolically, representing Stephen’s ‘flight into artisthood’3 – his
personal maturing and intellectual awakening. The bird-girl in Joyce’s narrative is
teeming with symbolism, her beauty acting as the inspiration which defines
Stephen’s decision to follow a life of artistic rather than religious devotion, yet
she is no more than a spectral figure, a concoction of Stephen’s own imagination,
a ‘wild angel [that] appeared to him’4. Having approached this apparition, ‘there
was no human figure near him nor any sound borne to him over the air’5. In
Morrison’s text, Stephen’s idealised bird-girl is replaced by the figure of
Solomon, whose elation and escape through flight is equally symbolic, but in
contrast, portrayed in the narrative as being a literal occurrence. The purpose of
this content, and the folklore from which it is drawn, will be later examined; at
this point it is sufficient to note the contrast.
2
Neil Ten Kortenaar and Kam Louie, Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s
Children’ (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press - MQUP, 2005) 146.
3
David Hayman, ‘James Joyce, Paratactitian,’ Contemporary Literature 26.2 (1985) 155178, at 156.
4
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Penguin Classics, 2007)
196.
5
Joyce 196.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL In addition to acting as a means through which Morrison can ensure the
problematisation of her novel's content, the style that she adopts is in itself a very
powerful statement in relation to the author's intent. Morrison uses a romantic
western form, focused primarily on the notion of quest, to weave a narrative that
takes much of its content from outside of Western tradition. In ‘Myth as Structure
in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon’, A. Leslie Harris states:
In Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, we have genuine mythopoesis,
the mythic impulse shaped and translated into symbolic art.
Morrison fuses Afro-American myth with the cultural, moral, and
religious beliefs of both the Judeo-Christian and the Greco-Roman
heritages to fashion her own myth.6
By doing this, she is using one western construct to break down another western
construct, that being the skewed definition of blackness that pollutes society.
Morrison refuses to reserve such forms for the telling of America's white history,
and instead elects to blend them with black social conflicts and cultural
influences, in the same way as Claude McKay does with his poetry throughout the
1920s, erasing the distinction that exists between the two. To expand on this:
McKay, in ‘The Harlem Dancer’, elects the antiquated traditional western form of
the Shakespearean sonnet. There are several theories as to why the poet chose this
particular form. Some critics contend that it was an effort by McKay to satisfy the
cultural consumption by white Americans of black culture, though others
maintain that the sonnet represents a mask behind which the poet hides, not unlike
the mask worn by the Harlem dancer herself, which McKay describes as her
‘falsely-smiling face’.7
I would suggest that McKay, like Morrison, chooses this form as a
statement in protest of such distinctions being made. His subject matter is that of
a Negro whose ‘self was not in that strange place’, while his form is anything but
6
A. Leslie Harris, ‘Myth as Structure in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon,’ Melus 7.3
(1980) 69-76, at 69-70.
7
Claude McKay, Harlem Shadows (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922) 42.
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AFRICAN MYTH ALONGSIDE WESTERN CONVENTIONS IN TONI MORRISON strange in the traditions of western literature. The protestation that one finds in
McKay’s merger of seemingly opposing content and form is the same as one
finds in Morrison’s novel. They are protesting the association of such forms as
being predominantly white – they are protesting the very distinction upon which
this paper is based. Shakespearian sonnets, like magic realism, are not out of
place when used to form the content of their work, as this content holds just as
important a place amongst the western canon as any. This notion is supported by
Linden Peach:
As an African-American with a long standing interest in
deconstructing the white frame of reference by which black people
have been defined, it is not surprising that in Song of Solomon
Morrison should appropriate the archetype of white American
literature [...].8
Morrison herself, in an interview that appeared in the Guardian on January 29th,
1992, commented: ‘In this country American means white. Everybody else has to
hyphenate.’9 By using what is essentially a white form to deliver a narrative
focused on the fears of black Americans, the author is making a political
statement in relation to the alienation of her race in their own country; that
statement is underlined by her mixing of form and content in a way that society
should attempt to replicate.
The use of magic realism allows Morrison to jolt the reader, as well as
deconstruct the damaging notion of blackness that existed, and still exists to some
extent, throughout America for a lengthy period of the nation's history. The
particularly exotic content, coupled with the necessity of such folklore in the
successful examination of the novel's motifs, leads me to attribute the greater
8
Linden Peach, Toni Morrison (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995) 55.
Geoffrey Hughes, Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture
(Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 2009) 150.
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9
DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL significance to the African myth that we encounter throughout Song of Solomon.
In everything that she chooses to examine, Morrison draws heavily on her own
cultural background. She emphasises the importance of naming and ancestry, the
fears of black America and escapism. Even the narrator is modelled on the griot10,
a figure in African culture associated with the telling of history and stories. When
one begins to examine each of these central themes, the importance of African
folklore becomes increasingly apparent. However, that is not to say the form
through which the narrative is shaped loses all importance. Rather, as I have
already outlined, the two are symbiotic.
The notion of escapism that we see throughout the novel is the clearest
example of this symbiotic relationship. In Song of Solomon, flight is the primary
means of escape. Again, this reflects a contrast with the metaphorical nature of
Joyce’s work, in which Stephen hopes to ‘fly by those nets’11 – nationality,
language and religion – that have held back his soul. Milkman's realisation of the
power of flight as a vehicle of escape, identified through his final revelation that
‘if you surrendered to the air, you could ride it’12, effectively marks the end of his
quest. In the novel, through the recitation of the story of Solomon, flight is
portrayed to us in the literal sense:
‘ […] The baby and the wife were right next to him when he flew
off.’
‘When you say 'flew off' you mean he ran away, don't you?
Escaped?’
‘No, I mean flew.[...] He was flying. He flew. You know, like a bird.
Just stood up in the fields on day, ran up some hill, spun around a
couple of times, and was lifted up in the air.’13
10
Justine Tally, The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison 1st ed. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007) 28.
11
Joyce 231.
12
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (London: Vintage, 1998) 337.
13
Morrison 322-323.
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AFRICAN MYTH ALONGSIDE WESTERN CONVENTIONS IN TONI MORRISON The two elements of this discussion, the form of the text and the content drawn
from African myth, combine in this passage to achieve the author's thematic
ambitions. The form is based in the conventions of magic realism, as the reader is
left in little doubt that Solomon’s flight is intended to be literal rather than
metaphorical. The content, the flight of the African, has its roots in black folklore,
as will be discussed shortly. In this passage, Morrison is achieving that which she
sets out to achieve – a merger of the two strands: western and African. This
merger; the author’s intentions to achieve such, are evident from the very
beginning of the novel, in Morrison’s earliest allusion to flight: in Robert Smith’s
failed attempt to fly from the Mercy rooftop, we see a stark contrast with the
description of Solomon’s flight. Flight has a particular significance within
African culture. The notion of the ‘flying African’ – the belief that all Negroes fly
back to Africa after their death – reserves a place within most of the Continent’s
varied mythologies: ‘Flying African stories were tales shared among enslaved
people on plantations that draw on African spiritual beliefs to give the enslaved
people hope that they could escape bondage and return to their African
homeland.’14 It is Solomon’s grounding in his heritage that allows him to achieve
his escape, becoming the flying African fabled in his ancestral lore. Smith’s
failure to achieve flight at the beginning of the novel15 marks the start of
Milkman’s quest, and Solomon’s success16 marks the conclusion, as well as
Milkman’s progression towards his heritage. The notion of regaining a connection
to one’s ethnicity and heritage as a means of escape is further alluded to in the
character of Pilate, who could fly, ‘without ever leaving the ground’17, a
realisation that is tied to the discovery of Milkman’s origins. Pilate’s accepts her
origins with question, without ‘leaving the ground’, whereas Milkman must
14
Leslie M. Alexander and Walter C. Rucker, Encyclopedia of African American History
(Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2010) 198.
15
Morrison 9.
16
Morrison 322-323.
17
Morrison 336.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL embark on this quest of discovery before he can achieve the same acceptance,
before he too can fly. Peach also offers a useful comment on Pilate’s role in the
portrayal of flight and connection to one’s cultural origins, stating: ‘Song of
Solomon is framed by the African-American vernacular tradition of the flying
African. The song which Pilate sings […] is a variant of this Gullah folktale of the
ancestor who flew back to Africa to escape the trap of slavery and Milkman's leap
at the end of the novel aligns him with Solomon’18. The peril in separating the
form and the content of this novel is highlighted through the novel's portrayal of
flight as a means of escape. Had Morrison elected to make use of the realist
discourse, then her problematisation of the African-American struggle might not
have been so effective in the sense that she would not have been able to draw her
reader's attention through such fantastical events. In essence, she uses this
folklore, as well as those other African traditions which appear in the novel, as a
tool through which she can question ‘the imposed values and perceptions of the
dominant culture’19. Had she not drawn so heavily on African myth, again she
would have lost the greater part of the novel's themes and emphases, such as the
struggle to escape from slavery and bondage, and the means through which this
escape can be achieved.
Morrison repeatedly uses African myth to represent escapism in Song of
Solomon. To further examine whether it is this cultural influence that is of
greatest importance to the novel, let us look beyond the representation of flight to
those other examinations that are facilitated through the use of African folklore.
As will be examined in due course, Morrison examines issues of ancestry and
naming, emphasising the importance and politics of each. Each examination is
influenced by the traditions that one would find in African culture, where there is
particular focus on these critical strands of an individual’s heritage. Here, the
form works with the content in the sense that Morrison, as previously mentioned,
18
Peach 62.
Gay Wilentz, ‘Civilizations Underneath: African Heritage as Cultural Discourse in Toni
Morrison’s Song of Solomon.’ African American Review 26.1 (1992) 61-76, at 63.
- 116 -
19
AFRICAN MYTH ALONGSIDE WESTERN CONVENTIONS IN TONI MORRISON uses a romantic form that centres on the concept of quest. In Song of Solomon,
Milkman has a very distinct quest, and while this is key to the novel in that it
shapes the narrative, the outcome of that quest, and the events that he endures on
the way to this outcome, are of far greater importance. Furthermore, they are
mythologically guided, as Morrison achieves the aforementioned by drawing on
the Mwindo and Kambili epics. To the Nyanga people of central Africa, the
Mwindo was a hero in possession of supernatural powers, while the Kambili Epic
featured the ambivalent hero figure that we see in Milkman. This ambivalence
manifests itself in Milkman’s selfish attitude towards Hagar, which is offset by
those elements in the narrative which establish the protagonist as a figure who the
reader wants to see succeed. In addition, in keeping with the aforementioned
African traditions, there is a sense of foreboding and personal trial reflected
throughout Song of Solomon. In addition to creating an ambivalent hero figure in
the form of Milkman, Song of Solomon, like the Kambili, focuses on notions of
ancestry, hunting and naming. The emphasis on naming, underlined by
Milkman’s journey of ancestral discovery, points to issues of lost African heritage
and the notion that ‘[w]hite people name Negroes like horses’20. The surname
‘Dead’ reiterates this aspect of the text, suggesting the death of the bearer’s
African identity. In opposition to this representation stands Pilate, whose name is
perhaps a pun on ‘pilot’, suggesting wisdom and an un-severed connection to
African culture in its allusion to flight. The novel’s focus on ancestry is
underlined right from the dedication, which simply reads: ‘Daddy’. It is also
significant that Morrison’s grandfather was named John Solomon. Morrison’s
disruption of western conventions is borne out of her use of the myth and ritual
that one finds in these epics of African origin. The Mwindo Epic is reflected in the
attempts of Macon Dead II to prevent the birth of his son, Milkman. Furthermore,
Mwindo, like Milkman, relies on the help of his maternal aunt to overcome the
trials set by his father, and he too is berated by those around him. Parallels can
20
Morrison 243.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL also be drawn between the novel and Br’er Rabbit, a story which was itself drawn
from elements of African culture, particularly that of the arachnid, Anansi. In
these tales, as in Song of Solomon, the journey of the protagonist is one of escape
– escape from the oppressive culture that dominates the society in which the
characters exist. Morrison’s encapsulation of African myth within western
conventions reinforces this notion of escape by blurring the distinction between
the two.
Some commentators, such as Nancy Cunard, have been critical of
African-Americans for the attitude of indifference that they have shown toward
African culture. In ‘Harlem Reviewed, Cunard claims that ‘the American Negroes
[…] are utterly uninterested in, callous to what Africa is, and to what it was’21.
Morrison may be reiterating this sentiment through the character of Milkman,
who only comes to appreciate his origins, which are greatly influenced by African
myth, when he embarks on a quest originally motivated by greed. While an
examination of this nature is helped by the form of the novel, based on
conventions from western romanticism that emphasise the notion of quest, the
mythology upon which Morrison draws is, to reiterate, of greater importance in
doing so. Morrison’s politics of form, her use of African myth alongside western
conventions, is a powerful example of how de-familiarisation can be deployed in
the pursuit of re-problematisation. Morrison forces us to re-address and re-assess
the African-American struggle, and to consider the importance of African
mythology and folklore. This is arguably a further instance of a trend that has
repeated itself throughout literary history: the attempted revival of a culture in the
hope of achieving a reassertion of that same culture. Wole Ogundele examines the
perceived role of such literature in ‘the necessary comprehensive redemption of
21
Nancy Cunard and Hugh D. Ford, Negro: An Anthology (London: Continuum
International Publishing Group, 1996) 49.
- 118 -
AFRICAN MYTH ALONGSIDE WESTERN CONVENTIONS IN TONI MORRISON black Africa after ignominies of the slave trades and colonialism’22. One could
categorise Morrison’s novel in such a fashion, but to do so would be to trivialise
her text. The author, in merging African myth with western conventions, is going
beyond a simple revival of one culture in an effort to achieve its re-assertion in
place of another. Rather, she is reiterating the sentiment that one finds in the
poetry of Langston Hughes, particularly ‘I, Too’, where the poet proclaims: ‘I,
too, am America.’23 My suggestion is that Morrison elects such literary
conventions as a means of demonstrating that her ethnic origins, too, can be
considered within the American literary canon, rather than the hyphenated subset
of African-American, and by extension, the race to which such folklore belongs.
My suggestion is that she merges African myth and western conventions because
she sees no reason why they should be treated as separate, not for the purpose of
literary analysis and criticism, but in terms of their cultural positioning. Milkman
and the ‘flying African’, like Hughes, are also to be considered American. Not
any hyphenated subset of American – simply American.
University College Cork
With thanks to Dr Alan Gibbs, Dr Lee Jenkins and Dr James Carney, School of
English, University College Cork
Works Cited
Primary Sources
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New Ed. London: Penguin
Classics. 2007.
McKay, Claude. Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude McKay. New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Company. 1922.
22
Wole Ogundele, ‘Devices of Evasion: The Mythic Versus the Historical Imagination in
the Postcolonial African Novel,’ Research in African Literatures 33.3 (2002) 125-139, at
125-126.
23
Langston Hughes, Vintage Hughes (New York: Vintage Books, 2004) 12.
- 119 -
DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New Edition. London: Vintage. 1998.
Secondary Sources
Alexander, Leslie M., and Walter C. Rucker. Encyclopedia of African American
history. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. 2010.
Cunard, Nancy, and Hugh D. Ford. Negro: An anthology. London: Continuum
International Publishing Group. 1996.
Harris, A. Leslie. “Myth as Structure in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.”
MELUS 7.3 (1980).
Hayman, David. “James Joyce, Paratactitian.” Contemporary Literature 26.2
(1985).
Hughes, Geoffrey. Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture.
Chichester: John Wiley and Sons. 2009.
Hughes, Langston. Vintage Hughes. New York: Vintage Books. 2004.
Kortenaar, Neil Ten, and Kam Louie. Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie’s
“Midnight’s Children.” Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press – MQUP. 2005.
Murad, Jasmina. Magical Realism in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Ana Castillo's
So Far from God. Munich: GRIN Verlag. 2009.
Ogundele, Wole. “Devices of Evasion: The Mythic Versus the Historical
Imagination in the Postcolonial African Novel.” Research in African
Literatures 33.3 (2002).
Peach, Linden. Toni Morrison. 1st ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 1995.
Tally, Justine. The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison. 1st ed. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. 2007.
Wilentz, Gay. “Civilizations Underneath: African Heritage as Cultural Discourse
in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.” African American Review 26.1
(1992). Web. 1 July 2011.
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