Something I Read #15 -- Eugenio Montale

Something I came across last night; one of those moments of someone stating things in terms not thought before. From the Introduction to the Everyman's Library edition of the Mandelbaum translation of the Divine Comedy (12-13); originally the final address delivered April, 24, 1965, at the International Congress of Dante Studies in Florence, held to mark the 700th anniversary of Dante's birth..

My conviction, however -- and I state it for what it is worth -- is that Dante is not a modern in any of these respects: which does not prevent us from understanding him at least partially, nor from feeling that he is strangely close to us. But for this to happen we must also come to another conclusion: that we no longer live in a modern era, but in a new Middle Ages whose characteristics we cannot yet make out. Since this is a personal conviction of mine, I shall refrain from discussing the reasons for it here, where it serves only as an hypothesis. The era which lies before us does not allow for short-term predictions, and to speak of a new Middle Ages is to speak equivocally at best. If the future sees the ultimate triumph of techno-scientific reason, even accompanied by the weak correctives which sociology can devise, the new Middle Ages will be nothing but a new barbarousness. But in such a case it would be wrong to speak of them as 'medieval,' for the Middle Ages were not merely barbarous, nor were they bereft of science or devoid of art. To speak of a new Middle Ages, then, could seem a far from pessimistic hypothesis to the man who does not believe that the thread of reason can unwind ad infinitum; and yet an entirely new barbarousness is possible, a stifling and distortion of the very idea of civilization and culture.

To understand this, you have understand the term "barbarous" (which he uses in a normal, historical sense). It is an interesting idea, one which I grasp through seeing the modernist period (and post-structuralist philosophy, philosophy always lagging behind art) as the climax of an aesthetic discourse that began with the Romantics and (and German Idealism); through seeing that that aesthetic impulse gave way, finally, to the more dominant current of what is here called a rising Middle Ages (whose origins lie as far back as the Enlightenment era). The question, though, one that is more narrow geopolitically, and more focused upon the idea of barbarousness, is this:

Can it be said that US, except for very localized moments that lasted only very short periods of time, has ever climbed out of barbarousness?

Something I Read #14 – Edmund Wilson

Read in the wonderful collection The Permanence of Yeats (1950). Originally from the also wonderful Axel's Castle (1931).

"And in spite of the immense amount of poetry published and read to-day, the personality truly and naturally poetic seems to be becoming rarer and rarer. It may be true that the kind of dignity and distinction which have been characteristic of the poet in the past are becoming more and more impossible in our modern democratic society and during a period when the ascendancy of scientific ideas has made man conscious of his kinship with the other animals and of his subjection to biological and physical laws rather than of this relation to the gods. It was easy for the lyric poet, from Wyatt's age to Waller's, to express himself both directly and elegantly, because he was a courtier, or, in any case, a member of a comparatively small educated class, whose speech combined the candor and naturalness of conversation among equals with the grace of a courtly society. It was possible for him honestly to take up a residence in an intellectual world where poetic images stood for actualities because the scientific language and technique for dealing with these actualities had not yet come to permeate thought. But themodern poet who would follow this tradition, and who would yet deal with life in any large way, must create for himself a special personality, must maintain a state of mind which shall shut out or remain indifferent to many aspects of the contemporary world. This necessity accounts partly, I suppose, for Yeats's preoccupation in his prose writings, with what he calls the Mask or Anti-Self, a sort of imaginary personality, quite antagonistic to other elements of one's nature, which the poet must impose upon himself. It is hard to imagine a seventeenth-century poet being driven to such a theory -- a theory which makes one's poetic self figure as one of the halves of a split personality [. . . .]."

Something I Read #13 – Bernard Benstock

I have been brought back into the dreamworld of Finnegans Wake. These from Bernard Benstock's Joyce-Again's Wake:

 
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It logically then follows that the sons in the Wake are at various instnaces unified into a single figure, are themselves as a pair, and are multiplied by Joyce's "inflationary" process into a trio. In the last group they are most often the Three Soldiers, therefore Tim, Dick, and Harry (an obvious threesome in "thump, kick and hurry" [285.6], but disguised as two in "tomthick and tarry" — 291.7); Shem, Ham, and Japhet ("shame, humbug and profit" — 582.10); the Roman triumverate ("Oxthevious, Lapidous and Malthouse Anthemy" — 271.5-6); the three "musketeers" (64.22); the brothers in Swift's Tale of a Tub ("padderjagmartin" — 86.2); perhaps Pegger Festy, Festy Kind, and the Wet Pinter; or just A.B.C. ("Arty, Bert or possibly Charley Chance" — 65.16). As two they are the well-defined pair of hostile opposites, too long considered to be always in opposition, whereas there are many instances in which they are not in conflict necessarily, nor even distinguishable from each other. Horsa and Hengest have already been mentioned in this context, and so might be: Time and Tom; Olaf and Ivor ("an Ivor the Boneless or an Olaf the Hide" — 100.25-26; with Sitric they form a threesome: "Olaf's on the rise and Ivor's on the lift and Sitric's place's between them" — 12.31-32); Romulus and Remus ("rebulous rebus" — 12.34); and Saints Peter and Paul ("Sinner Pitre and Sinner Poule" — 192.13). On the individual level, they unify harmoniously for a jount purpose (usually the same one that creates three out of two: to plague the father) as Buckley, Tristram, St. Patrick, St. Kevin, Hosty, and the Cad. A single-minded view of Shem and Shaun exclusively as antagonists, therefore, dismisses various important ,ayters of significance in Joyce's scheme in the Wake, two of which are probably as significant as the Bruno theme: the overthrow of the father figure and the cyclical evolution of historical patterns. In all, the problem of identifying a Wake character by his associated historical or mythical prototype is often oversimplified and can be rather misleading. (19-21)

Something I Read #12 – A.D. Hope

From A.D. Hope's "'Tamburlaine': The Argument of Arms" as found in Christopher Marlowe: Modern Critical Views (ed. Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers: NY, 1986; pp 53-54); also found in A.D. Hope's collection of essays The Cave and the Spring. (The essay can be found online.)

In one sense the coherence of the play [Tamburlaine Pts I and II] resides in its poetry. Taken in terms of the action alone the play is not free of absurdity. If Tamburlaine were merely a supreme military genius, the argument which asserts his total superiority and perfection would be unconvincing. But Tamburlaine is a poet. He conceives poetry as concentrating in its highest conceivable form, the whole of beauty, imagination and music into 'one poem's period', just as he concentrates all power in himself. It is in this alliance of the poetic imagination with temporal power, in a sense of their identity, that the magnanimity of Tamburlaine consists. Poetry is his medium, as power is his nature and his genius. Poetry shares the supremacy of nature, for it is the natural language of beauty, of intellect and of power, the three perfect things. It is poetry alone which makes all three comprehensible: Wherein as in a mirror we perceive The highest reaches of a human wit— The poetry of Tamburlaine is indeed the poetry of power, and the absolute morality of power which the play exemplifies is allied to the absolute standards of poetry, which it recognizes. For poetry accepts only success, and grants lasting life only to absolute success. It recognizes no gradations and no second best. What Hazlitt, in a very curious passage for an avowed republican, says of Coriolanus, is even more apt of the poetry of Tamburlaine: The language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power.