Lipogrammatical translation

Down To What’s Low, Canto 1

Just halfway through my own trip in our living

Provisional, short world, I found that I

Had lost my path in dark woods, unforgiving.

It is so hard a thing that I must sigh

If I would say how brutal was that wood,

To think on which will always horrify.

If anything, it’s only dying could

Outdo that acrid wood’s malignity.

But I will turn from horror, towards that good

Which also on that pathway, luckily,

I found, though I can’t say what hid all truth

Away in total blank stupidity.

I cannot work out how it was, in sooth,

That in that  gloom awaking, full of stupor,

I’d lost that saving road I took in youth.

I got at last to what you’d call a croup or

Boundary of that dark and dismal hollow,

A bank of rocks which from a mountain do pour,

To that bluff’s scapula my look did follow

Upwards still that guiding morning glow,

Bright from that star so holy to Apollo.

Thus did that anxious horror, which had so

Brought churning with it, all that awful night,

To my soul’s pool, diminish, calm its flow.

And as a man who pants hard, still in sight

Of billows which, almost, brought him to sink,

From land looks back on that main, full of fright,

So did my spirit, panicking, still think

On that grim pass no mortal human can

Go out of without passing living’s brink. 

At last my body pausing for a span

Until invigoration from that stop

Could now allow it motion, though no plan

Could show it how to go, with constant prop

On foot in back and downwards, sought to gain,

By climbing always upwards, that mount’s top.  

And lo! A cougar stood stock still, though plain

Its quick and light agility.  No turning

Could pass it by.  Upon its skin a rain

Of spots, which I, that bright and airy morning

(As sun and star-companions Loving God 

Had first spun, still did spin) saw as adorning

That cat, a sign of succor I might laud,

During that blissful dawn, but not so bright

That I did not start shaking, on that road,

At what was now arising in my sight:

A lion, drawn up high, intimidating,

So much that air and I, both full of fright,

About how it its stomach might start sating,

Must stop — for what? A wolf, and I was pavid,

So skinny was it, though anticipating

It would sup soon on anything, for avid

It was for food: though lank it was full too:

That wolf so ruinous to man was gravid!

And I was too — with fright! I could not do

What I was hoping for — to climb that hill.

Alas, I found no pathway round nor through.

And as a man who’d got just what his will

Saw as most worth wishing of all things,

Now gasps on losing it, a poignant thrill

Of brutal pain, transfixing with its stings

From that wolf, did I sob at, and I shrank

Darkwards, away from Sol’s loud blazonings.

Back did I go, back to that lowland dank;

Abruptly in my sight shows up a man,

Who, dumb so long, I thought would sound as blank,

As our surround was. Straight to him I ran,

Still crying “Pity!” to him, “Man or shadow

Of a man!”  “Not a man, but Mantuan,  

By birth” was his account, “Born Sub Julio,

But it was good Augustus, though his gods

Did not say truth nor know your Christian Trio,

Who was my king.  My song got many nods,

All praising it as Roman history,

From Trojan loss to gain, against all odds, 

From burning Ilion to victory.

But why do you avoid that joyous mountain,

As though to climb you’d no ability?” 

“Now art thou Virgil? That riparian fountain,”

All blushingly I said, within his sight,

“Of words that all who follow find a sound in

Which our own songs would sing with.  If I might,

I’ll say how much I honor you, what study

I sanctify with loving to your light.

But now look on that animal so bloody,

To you I turn for aid, to you I’m flying.

O horror!” “You must go this path, though muddy,”

Did Virgil say, to try to hush my crying,

“If you would from this dark wood find a way.

For past that wolf can no amount of trying

Attain that goal; whoso will try will pay

With his annihilation; hungrily,

Voraciously that wolf puts him away.

Marrying many animals bodily,

It looks to go on doing so, until

A Grayhound, coming with finality,

Shall bring its pain to culmination, kill

That awful wolf, who did not pity show.  

That hound, consuming not, such is its will,

Things of this world, but only what would go

With wisdom — loving all morality —

In fabrics of Franciscan monks will know

His nation.  Savior of low Italy,

That hound: our land for which Camilla, dying

A maid, and Nisus, and his loving ally

And Turnus, all lay down for good.  Now plying

Its way through any town that it might harry,

That wolf cannot avoid damnation, buying,

Through vicious rivalry, its day to tarry,

So soon to finish. So I think it right

That I conduct you, and that you stay wary.

As onwards through this aways-lasting night

You go, with sounds of always-lasting sorrow

Imploring total dying, not this blight.

But going through, I’ll bring you tomorrow

To souls who though in pain stay happy with it,

Hoping to pay back soon what sin did borrow

And climb salvation’s mount to that first orbit,

To which I must not go. But if you will

You’ll find at that hill’s top a worthy spirit,

Which I am not, as I did not fulfill

Writs laid down by that all-causing King,

Combatting what was law. His codicil

About my task thus says: I may not bring

A pilgrim to his city.  Though his might’s

Ubiquitous, from that city starts its ring

Circling all worlds.  O, happy, any sights

Of Him; most so, who in that city strong

Find bright salvation in its million lights.” 

And I to him: “I pray, by your high song — 

And by that God you did not know, I pray—

That you will as conductor, for as long

As you can do so, bring us on that way

Of pain, at last to portals which saints hallow,

And far from this soil’s sorrow.” With no stay

On did Virgil go, downwards did I follow.

David Lewis, uses fictional worlds as a way of exploring the idea of the proximity of possible worlds, but confesses he's not quite sure what to do with fictions within fictions.

One thing some writers have done is to write the actual (our-word) fictional work that some fictional work only mentions.  They give it to us for our use.  (This is the converse of the sort of thing that Borges and Lem do.)

A few such useful texts spring to mind right away, in chronological order:

Prencipe Galeotto: Dante has Francesca say of the book she and Paolo are reading together when they stop reading, "Galeotto fu 'l libro e chi lo scrisse."  So Galeotto -- Prince Galahad (perhaps; it's not clear whether Dante identified Galeotto and Galahad), vicariously catalyzing their mutual seduction -- is both the author and the book itself. Boccaccio gives the Decameron the sub- or alternative title Prencipe Galeotto, making it into the book that Paolo and Francesca were reading, and promising it as a conversation piece for later lovers to seduce each other with.

Spenser completes one of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Squire's, in Book IV of The Faerie Queene.  (Spenser takes it as complete -- a real thing that Chaucer mentions, but that we don't have.

"Where is the Life that Late I Led?"  Petruchio interrupts himself after he starts singing this song in Taming of the Shrew.  Cole Porter gives us the whole song (with a bridge and a slight modification of Petruchio's second line).

"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came": Browning writes the poem that Edgar quotes in King Lear.

The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: From Muriel Spark's Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the book that Sandy Stranger writes when she becomes a nun (Sister Helena). Arthur Danto (not Dante!) then wrote a book about the philosophy of art with that title.

The Secret Goldfish: D.B.'s "terrific book of short stories" in Catcher in the Rye, and the title of a book of short stories by David Means.

Can you think of others? 

A Comedy Romance in Pantomime

City Lights is a sound movie in pantomime.  There's a synchronized sound-track with many sound-effects, most obviously the kazoo-speech of the worthy's dedicating the statue at the beginning of the picture, the bells ringing in the boxing-match sequence, and the shots fired in the Millionaire's house.  These are examples of what's come to be called (wrongly but almost universally) diagetic sound, sound common to the world of the fiction and the world of the audience.  Non-diagetic sound (now) designates sound that only we hear: scary mood music when someone is exploring a haunted house that seems (to them) completely silent, for example, swelling strings when two lovers are about to kiss.

In some movies we can't tell whether the sound we're hearing is part of the fictional world: usually the surprise will be that it is, that music that we think is only for us turns out to be coming from a radio or a performer we hadn't seen.  And sometimes -- maybe most famously in the 1946 version of The Killers -- there's an interplay between the diagetic and non-diagetic music, so that the Green Cat piano-player's performance of Flight of the Bumblebee strikingly interacts with the Killers-leitmotif when they enter the bar.

But (as I noticed the other day) the opposite sort of thing happens in City Lights.  As with the three-decades of silent films it mimics and closes, there's plenty of sound in the world of the film that we in the real world don't hear.  Sound movies invert the relationship of sound to world that we find in silent movies.  Not quite -- while in silent movies all we can hear is non-diagetic sound, it is true that the silent characters don't hear that sound at all.  All they hear is diagetic sound -- to use a double solecism because this is sound we don't hear.

City Lights is the real inverse, though.  We and the boxers both hear the bell; we and the robbers both hear the gun go off.  And of course we hear all the non-diagetic music that we learned to listen for from silents, if not from opera and ballet, which the characters don't.

But the Blind Girl: what she hears we don't.  She plays a record on the phonograph, but the soundtrack music doesn't change.  More significantly, in the intensely reworked scene in which the Tramp, and the audience, come to realize that she's blind, we see her respond to the slamming of a car door that we don't hear, at about 8:35 into the movie (there doesn't seem to be a good way to start just at that point in this post but you can click on this link to start it at just the right place: https://youtu.be/TkF1we_DeCQ?t=8m35s )

You'll see her react to the slamming door, but we don't hear it slam: we just see it.

I think it's important that we never hear what she's hearing.  The Tramp can see but he can also hear and we can hear with him, just as we can hear with everyone else.  We can see that she can hear but we never hear what she's hearing, which means that we focus on her bodily relation to the world, on her touch.

At the end of the movie, when she sees the Tramp for the first time, there's no reason for her to recognize him.  But she would be able to recognize his voice, and that would be the natural recognition scene. And it wouldn't work.

What matters is that she should recognize him through touch, when unknowingly she gives him the change that she failed to give him before.  Now she can see, and the days of touch are over: we can see them touch for the last time.  All of this requires that the movie be silent, be a pantomime, so that the self-presence of sound doesn't enter into it.

It's another version of Orpheus and Eurydice, that central myth in which sight overwhelms sound -- the song that Orpheus sings -- with the result that touch is banished forever.    He looks back at her and loses her forever, sees her going but will never touch her again.  The happiest version is in Purgatorio: Dante looks back at Virgil, and he's gone, and so are his sweet songs; but he can truly see Beatrice now, though touch is no longer a relevant sense in the Comedy.  City Lights isn't the saddest version, but it is an exceptionally clear exposition of that moment when the pantomime has ended.

Eros, Dantesque and Freudian

When I was younger, in college and grad school, I'd read that someone my current age had won the lottery, and it just seemed so pointless. What would they do with twenty years of money coming in that could possibly make their, or anyone's, life better? There they would be, beaming out of the front pages of the New York Post, their slovenly decrepitude accentuated by the big checks and grins so appropriately transfigured into the harsh half-tone dots of the giant photo.

This was part of a larger combination of fear and hope: fear for what I would be like at my current age, how I would cope with being this old, with having no prospects before me except the dead end one. Hope that by that time I would no longer be myself, but some other person, an older one, who could have nothing to do with the younger me. (Cf. Hazlitt's Essay on the Principles of Human Action.) That unimaginable person really didn't have to be imagined, since he'd be "one of them," those others who belonged to a different time, to a different attitude towards time. I could see that I wasn't one of them, part of that older generation.

At some point I really started liking, because it made life so much more luminous, books by the very old that were written in the voice of the young. In particular, as I've mentioned before, Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire, one of the four or five greatest non-fiction books I have ever read. I mention it here, because I think that's when that category occurred to me. (I'd felt the same, I think, about Joseph Mitchell, though I didn't quite put it to myself that way. And of course that's the surprise in Proust: the extreme old age of the narrator, which we discover only at the end.)

I think this seemed luminous to me because it meant the possibility of communication on equal terms with people much older than I was -- it meant I could be friends with them. Those friendships, not many, but real friendships among equals, have mattered a great deal to me. Imperceptibly -- with the same imperceptibility of time passing -- I became aware that older generations were no different. They were neither more nor less insightful than we were. And I'd wanted them to be both.

What I had once imagined was that that difference would reside in a difference in what mattered to them. What matters to the old? Not the love that mattered to us. No: Cranky issues about health, money, rudeness, insult, etc., instead. That's what I thought. So I was not that person, and my fear of becoming that person (as I have said) also brought the reassurance that that person would no longer be me.

But it turns out that (I began to discover from my conversations with my old friends) and is turning out that what matters all the way through is love. ("Love of the real," the pretty old Stevens put it.) That was somehow Dante's insight, and if Freud said the poets were there before him (did he? That's for another post), then Dante did indeed anticipate Freud's most important insight: that our involvement in the world is always driven by, always troubled by, always channeled through love.

That is becoming more and more to me to seem an amazing insight of Freud's: the thing I could not bear to think -- that the relation of the old to the world is the same as that of the young -- turns out to be true. At this age, I'm glad it is; and it's the reason that I'm glad it is.

This probably sounds more sentimental than I meant it to: it's really Freud's insight that's been really striking me.  Dante's version of it can be seen in these lines, I think:

Tu lascerai ogne cosa diletta
più caramente; e questo è quello strale
che l'arco de lo essilio pria saetta.

Tu proverai sì come sa di sale
lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle
lo scendere e 'l salir per l'altrui scale.
                                                      --Paradiso 17:55-60

You will abandon* all things whose delight
is dearest to you: this is the first arrow
that from the bow of exile takes its flight.

Thenceforth the taste of others' bread will harrow
your tongue with salt, and you will have to labor
on others' stairways, hard and steep and narrow.

[More literally: You will abandon* everything most dearly delightful: and this is that arrow which the bow of exile will first shoot. You will experience how salty is the savor of the bread of others, and how how hard a path is the descent and ascent on others' stairways.

-----

*"lascerai," as in "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate": "Abandon all hope, you who enter here," inscribed on the gates of hell. Hope, yes, but not love.]

This is almost the exact center of Paradiso. Dante's twelfth century ancestor Cacciaguida, is prophesying his life back down on the farm, even after he's seen Paradise. Now we know that love moves the sun and other stars in Dante, but the thing that's deepest, that always deepest, is not the love of God (everyone since Plotinus or Plato knows about that) but the love of matter (Philip Pullman) and the material world that represents something different from the love of God.

Where Dante seems to anticipate Freud is the idea that everything is driven by love. Love isn't one principle among others: it's the principle. And the wrong way to read this (the sentimental way I was trying to abjure), is as the apotheosis of love. (It occurs to me that this fits in with stuff I've written about the personification of love.) Love belongs to all: no less to those in the Inferno who love their sins than to those in the highest reaches of Paradise who love their inscrutable God. Yes, those in the Inferno love God too: the point is that even there, everywhere, everyone loves. Love's not an apotheosis because it makes no moral distinctions: the fact that you love isn't a saving feature about you.

Not in real life, anyhow. It is saving as a literary fact: Gatsby and Ugolino alike are great because they love. That's what I like about it: it's a literary virtue, a virtue in fiction. That's why it's not an apotheosis, as Dante and Freud both see. Cacciaguida's speech has always struck me as amazing because of the way it sends Dante back to real life: the exile in which he's writing this poem. Here he's been in Paradise, and he 's been promised that that's where he'll return.  But what presses upon him, more grim than any Purgatory, is exile in this world.  Even in a world with heaven to follow, maybe particularly in a world with heaven to follow, the stops are more poignant than endings.

In our lives, this world is all you get, and its vicissitudes, even terrible ones like exile, are just part of what life is. But in a universe with an eternal afterlife in prospect -- I think this is what's so amazing about Dante -- this life, this brief vigil of the senses -- is all the more precious, since all the rest of it won't be on this earth which is the only place for earthly love, the love that is not apotheosis but fictional (sub specie aeternitatis).  Love up there will be completely secure. But that won't be human experience any more.  The love that is human experience, the earthly love that is the totality of being human, for as long and only for as long as we are human: Earth's, if not the right, at least the only place for that. And Dante, like Freud, sees it as the totaliy of human experience.

The distinction I used to make, between my adolescent concerns for love and the old folks' different ways of being, becomes in Dante a distinction between the real and mortal love of this life, from first to last, young and old, and whatever transcends, and so fails to belong to, this life.  That other love, which moves the sun and other stars, will come when it comes.  But it makes our precarious and mortal love, our precarious and mortal relation to the world, all the more its own, all the more what it means to be in the world, all one's life. All one's life.

That other world is the Truth, and therefore can have nothing to do with the fictional, unreal, real world (whose substance is cathexis alone) which is the only world we live in, and which is utterly and irretrievably bounded and limited by the truth it does not belong to, as all fictions are utterly and irretrievably bounded and limited by the truth to which they do not belong.  The sublunary world we live in, our world, is only here, and being in it is being with what we can only love here, and what we do love here. That's how Dante anticipated Freud.

Punishment and resentment

Nevertheless, despair is veritably a self-consuming, but an impotent self-consuming that cannot do what it wants to do.  What it wants to do is to consume itself, something it cannot do, and this impotence is a new form of self-consuming, in which despair is once again unable to do what it wants to do, to consume itself; this is an intensification, or the law of intensification. --Kierkegaard [Hong translation of The Sickness Unto Death, p. 18]

Kierkegaard is interested in the disanalogy that the analogy between despair and vertigo suggests:

Upon [the spirit] rests the responsibility for all despair at every moment of its existence, however much the despairing person speaks of his despair as a misfortune and however ingeniously he deceives himself and others, confusing it with [the] case of dizziness, with which despair, although qualitatively different, has much in common, since dizziness corresponds, in the category of the psychical, to what despair is in the category of the spirit, and it lends itself to numerous analogies to despair. [p. 16]

Robert Frank, in Passion within Reason, discusses some aversive experiments with rats.  Cause them pain when you give them a certain food, and they'll stop eating that food, of course.  But you can reverse this experience by reversing the modalities.  If you cause them pleasure, later, when they are forced to eat that food, they'll unlearn their avoidance.  On the other hand, if you cause them nausea when they eat a certain food (even several hours later), they'll never unlearn their aversion.

Nausea (which Derrida points out is a central affect for the purposes of judgment [as Freud suggests in his great essay "Negation"], but one that Kant fails to discuss in the Critique of Judgment) and vertigo are differently aversive from pain.  How?  Well, for one thing, they are somehow totalizing.  Pain is something that just happens to one, and in most cases it is possible to sustain some clarity of thought even in pain - clarity of thought about the pain it may be (as I know from having had a kidney stone), but still clarity of thought.  Nausea and dizziness are different, all-engrossing, panic-inducing, mind-eroding.

Now it seems to me that our fantasies of revenge (and people's actual acts of revenge) are massively more about causing pain (including the psychic pain of grief, whose analogy to physical pain J.B. Pontalis has brilliantly defended) than about causing nausea or vertigo.  It's not that pain is worse (though of course it may be).  It's that pain is more in tune with the idea of punishment than nausea or vertigo are.

I think that this is because punishment is not so much about the gratification of seeing someone else suffer as it is about making that person understand why he or she is justly suffering.  Resentment is about making those you resent see why you resent them, where that "why" has the full force of justice behind it (cf. P.F. Strawson's great essay on "Freedom and Resentment").  Pain is external, or feels external.  (Elaine Scarry points out that the vocabulary for pain is always instrumental: burning, stabbing, piercing, even throbbing, as though being squeezed.)  Pain speaks to a relation to the outside world, to external things that injure us.  So injuring another is being in a relationship to them.  In French injurier means insult; etymologically injury (from injuria) means counter to the law, so counter to justice: injustice or wrong.  So injury in English suggests one person doing something to another: causing them pain and the damage that pain represents.  It attacks their bodily integrity (or the integrity of their world), but leaves their mind whole.

And so too does punishment.  Thomas Harris's fantasy of Mason Verger's fantasy of revenge on Hannibal Lecter would have Hannibal watching himself being eaten alive by hogs, kept alive and alert to his own consumption.  I think punishment can go only a little farther (as it does in ancient mythology): being forced to eat yourself (or your children), not because the idea is nauseating but because it brings the externalized destruction of body integrity to its zenith, while preserving the mind whole.  (Harris probably goes a little to far and loses a bit of his force when Clarice and Hannibal eat the brain of the conscious Paul Krendler from his open skull, carpaccio by carpaccio.  Here though we might have a fantasied rediscovery of Leibniz's view that all is surface, that the stripping away of each surface of the brain still constitutes and act of bodily harm and can still be perceived by the mind facing its own imminent death.  But I don't think Harris sells it, and the scene is nauseating rather than gratifying.  Though that may be the point; but still it doesn't feel like punishment.)

So why do we want to keep the mind whole?  For the same reason that we fantasize our enemies in  hell knowing their own sinfulness, knowing what they've done to deserve this.  It's because punishment aims at teaching -- this is what's crucial to the idea of altruistic punishment, even though not spelled out in most of its analysts -- at reform and correction, and so there's an acknowledgement in punishment of the humanity of its objects.  That's why Ugolino is conscious and aware of what he's doing in eating Ruggieri's head: Ugolino is still human, and his punishment is also a means of communication.  The communication is two-way: punishment communicates his crime to him, and makes him feel it; he can describe how he feels to the rest of us, because punishment is still a way of keeping others in the nexus of the human. Causing nausea or vertigo lacks that essential criterion for punishment.

So what about despair then?  Despair, we could say, is something like the successful vector towards correction that punishment aims at.  It affects the soul even as it keeps it whole, mindful of its sins and conscious of them.  Despair is the the borderline between punishment and aversiveness which no longer belongs to the ethical world of punishment.  If we can get someone to despair, we've succeeded. Punishment has had a moral success.  Anything more, like vertigo or nausea, has nothing to do with punishment, and becomes pointlessly dreadful.  Pain always seems structured as though it has a point.  (Obviously I'm talking about how we meditate or fantasize about these things, not about the truth of real pain.)  Despair is where that point or purpose disappears: it is a vanishing point or moment of transition.

It's not that pain causes despair directly (though it can cause despair, it can't cause what Kierkegaard means by despair directly).  It's that pain can remind you of what you've done to others, and that can bring home to you a reason for remorse (etymologically: eating yourself up alive!) and despair.

(Although I'm not so sure that this connection works elegantly, what's important about it is how it helps distinguish despair from vertigo.)

Dante, quotation, rhyme (more on time and the other)

A quick note on Dante and his rhyming: I've been interested for a long time in poems that quote other poems, importing lines into a prosodical context different from the context of their origin.

Importing lines this way, quoting them, concentrates the effect of all quotation: it puts the quoted words into a context provided by the quoter; it frames the quotation as the quoter wishes to frame it, against a sometimes contrasting background different from the ground the words originally belonged to (whether as figure or ground or both: reading is the progressive shifting of the figure of the phrase being read against the semi-opaque anticipation of words to come and the less vague but still simplified and abstracted memories of phrases already read: we are always cresting into the present in a standing wave of arrival, as Ashbery puts it).

In Canto XXX of Purgatorio, Beatrice arrives and Virgil disappears. Her arrival is heralded by the singing of a hundred ministers and messengers of eternal life, who quote the Vulgate, as it has been quoted throughout Purgatorio, beginning with the beatitudes that the repentant sinners chant on every terrace.  On each terrace two allegorical narratives present themselves, one from Scripture, a parallel one from classical mythology, in conformity with Dante's reconciliation of his classical and his Christian forebears (whom Virgil, misspelled in the tendentious medieval way with an i, as in Virgin, embodies in the Pisgah sight given to him in his Fourth Eclogue, read by his Christian interpreters as prophesying the virgin birth of Christ.) Those earlier Biblical quotations have always seemed uncontroversially apposite, but here things are somewhat different:

Quali i beati al novissimo bando
surgeran presti ognun di sua caverna,
la revestita voce alleluiando,

cotali in su la divina basterna
si levar cento, ad vocem tanti senis,
ministri e messaggier di vita etterna.

Tutti dicean: "Benedictus qui venis!"
e fior gittando e di sopra e dintorno,
"Manibus, oh, date lilia plenis!"  (XXX, 13-21)

----------

As all the blessed, when the trumpet sounds,
will rise up singing, ready, near or far,
to "Hallelujah!" their return to bodies' bounds,


reclad in flesh: so in that sacred car
a hundred angles, ad vocem tanti senis,
rose: ministers of things that ever are.


All said together: "Benedictus qui venis!"
and, strewing flowers high up and all around,
"Manibus, oh, date lilia plenis!"

The Latin phrases may be respectively translated: "At the voice of so venerable a man" (someone has just been singing from "Song of Songs"); "Blessed are you who come"; and "Give lilies with full hands."

The first phrase is not a quotation at all; it's Dante setting up rhyme and context for the two quotations to follow.  As Singleton suggests, no Italian words rhyme with "venis" and "plenis," so Dante prepares the Latin rhymes by giving them a Latin context: the voice of the old man  makes rhyme possible: to refer to him (as senis) is to structure the rhymes.

The next Latin line is a near-quotation of Matthew: "Benedictus qui venit," blessed is he who comes.  Although it transpires that the singers are praising the arrival of Beatrice, they use the masculine form appropriate to Christ, not to Beatrice.  That's to be expected: the line is too much associated with Christ to bear a change in grammatical gender.  But Dante does change its person, from third- to second-person singular: "Blessed are you who come."  Why does he make the change?

He does this, it must be, for the rhyme, so that he can rhyme it with another line which he wishes to quote with verbatim accuracy.  That's what I want to note here: the hierarchy of rhyming in these lines.  The last line -- "Manibus, oh, date lilia plenis!" -- is the line that controls the other two and dictates what they will be: the unprecedented Latin description of the old man's voice in the first of the three rhyming lines, and the alteration in the second of the three of the Biblical verse to make it second person.  The unaltered last line is from Vergil: it is nearly the very last line that Anchises speaks to Aeneas among the dead, and here (as Singleton points out) its true meaning, beyond its manifest content, is a similar farewell to Virgil whom Dante the pilgrim is about to lose forever.

Anchises's last lines in the Aeneid were added after the early death of Octavia's son (Augustus's nephew) Marcellus, and it is this that Anchises laments to Aeneas in lines that Vergil read aloud to her brother Augustus and Octavia, lines which made her collapse with intolerable grief. Anchises calls for lilies to mourn the death he foresees: it is under the sign of the death of the child that the father and son separate in the Aeneid, and the perfect accuracy of the quotation of that lament confirms Singleton's characterization of "This most remarkable farewell verse....  It bears the haunting sadness of its context in the Aeneid and functions as a climax to the whole strain of pathos that has attached to the figure of the 'sweet father,' as he will now be called when suddenly he is no longer by Dante's side."

It is remarkable.  Literary quotation is what happens when what's left are the words which once made the other present (the writer as a psyche, as someone alive in our life, someone we can interact with, even bargain with), words now elevated (in a Hegelian -- better, in a Longinian sense), decontextualized and purified into the intensity of their own self-reference, hermetic but all the more generous for being so.  They don't do anything but quote themselves, exist like a motto or epigraph or quotation out of context, abbreviating, not their original context, but its loss, the loss of the psyche behind them, the psyche now absorbed and condensed into only the words themselves, the written words of one who has become at last a writer only.

The remembered voice of the parent, remembered as quotation: this is what you get in Proust too, in the great passage in which he remembers as a talisman or token of his long-dead father how he had relented from his usual strict refusal to cater to his son's neediness:

«Mais va donc avec lui, puisque tu disais justement que tu n’as pas envie de dormir, reste un peu dans sa chambre, moi je n’ai besoin de rien.» «Mais, mon ami, répondit timidement ma mère, que j’aie envie ou non de dormir, ne change rien à la chose, on ne peut pas habituer cet enfant...» «Mais il ne s’agit pas d’habituer, dit mon père en haussant les épaules, tu vois bien que ce petit a du chagrin, il a l’air désolé, cet enfant; voyons, nous ne sommes pas des bourreaux! Quand tu l’auras rendu malade, tu seras bien avancée! Puisqu’il y a deux lits dans sa chambre, dis donc à Françoise de te préparer le grand lit et couche pour cette nuit auprès de lui. Allons, bonsoir, moi qui ne suis pas si nerveux que vous, je vais me coucher.»

On ne pouvait pas remercier mon père; on l’eût agacé par ce qu’il appelait des sensibleries. Je restai sans oser faire un mouvement; il était encore devant nous, grand, dans sa robe de nuit blanche sous le cachemire de l’Inde violet et rose qu’il nouait autour de sa tête depuis qu’il avait des névralgies, avec le geste d’Abraham dans la gravure d’après Benozzo Gozzoli que m’avait donnée M. Swann, disant à Sarah qu’elle a à se départir du côté d’Ïsaac. Il y a bien des années de cela. La muraille de l’escalier, où je vis monter le reflet de sa bougie n’existe plus depuis longtemps. En moi aussi bien des choses ont été détruites que je croyais devoir durer toujours et de nouvelles se sont édifiées donnant naissance à des peines et à des joies nouvelles que je n’aurais pu prévoir alors, de même que les anciennes me sont devenues difficiles à comprendre. Il y a bien longtemps aussi que mon père a cessé de pouvoir dire à maman: «Va avec le petit.» La possibilité de telles heures ne renaîtra jamais pour moi. Mais depuis peu de temps, je recommence à très bien percevoir si je prête l’oreille, les sanglots que j’eus la force de contenir devant mon père et qui n’éclatèrent que quand je me retrouvai seul avec maman. En réalité ils n’ont jamais cessé; et c’est seulement parce que la vie se tait maintenant davantage autour de moi que je les entends de nouveau, comme ces cloches de couvents que couvrent si bien les bruits de la ville pendant le jour qu’on les croirait arrêtées mais qui se remettent à sonner dans le silence du soir.

-----------

“Go along with him, then; you said just now that you didn’t feel like sleep, so stay in his room for a little. I don’t need anything.”

“But dear,” my mother answered timidly, “whether or not I feel like sleep is not the point; we must not make the child accustomed...”

“There’s no question of making him accustomed,” said my father, with a shrug of the shoulders; “you can see quite well that the child is unhappy. After all, we aren’t gaolers. You’ll end by making him ill, and a lot of good that will do. There are two beds in his room; tell Françoise to make up the big one for you, and stay beside him for the rest of the night. I’m off to bed, anyhow; I’m not nervous like you. Good night.”

It was impossible for me to thank my father; what he called my sentimentality would have exasperated him. I stood there, not daring to move; he was still confronting us, an immense figure in his white nightshirt, crowned with the pink and violet scarf of Indian cashmere in which, since he had begun to suffer from neuralgia, he used to tie up his head, standing like Abraham in the engraving after Benozzo Gozzoli which M. Swann had given me, telling Sarah that she must tear herself away from Isaac. Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase, up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb, was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of comprehension. It is a long time, too, since my father has been able to tell Mamma to “Go with the child.” Never again will such hours be possible for me. But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to control in my father’s presence, and which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma. Actually, their echo has never ceased: it is only because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me that I hear them afresh, like those convent bells which are so effectively drowned during the day by the noises of the streets that one would suppose them to have been stopped for ever, until they sound out again through the silent evening air.  (This is Moncrieff's translation, which I have come to prefer, if you need to read Proust in English, even to Lydia Davis's.)

He quotes his father at some length, and then quotes him again saying words he never said: "Va avec le petit."  This isn't verbatim, but his father wasn't a poet.  This is rather the poeticizing quotation or quotational poeticizing of what his father had said (closest in fictional fact was "Va donc avec lui").  These words are the words of the father becoming lost, giving up patriarchal omnipotence (as Virgil has, as Abraham has in a scene, a painting that Proust has invented for his purposes), the father's first step towards mortality in the eyes of the child.  The child sobs and that's one reason why he sobs, and why he can hear those sobs even now ("near or far, cry is cry" is Beckett's version of this).  Longtemps since he went to bed late that night, and longtemps since his father could say those words that he remembers still as a line nearly of verse, as Dante remembers Virgil, remembers the dead Anchises's words to Aeneas.

And that "oh," is amazing: it fills out the meter, sure, but it's the breath of the speaking voice, the lamenting and quoting voice, that we hear in it, the breath that breaths the life it desperately needs into the words it quote.  That desperation is itself the life it seeks.

More Purgatorio

The fire of the terrace of the lustful reverses the fires of earthly lust, purifying and undoing the sins with which those lower fires raged. Apparently, the reverse sexuality of Dante's entrance into the fire has not been noted (according to my desultory research into various commentaries, anyhow), which gives me a chance to quote and translate some more. Dante, having a body (hence still subject to bodily desire), hesitates to breach the surface of the refining fires from which the love poets have spoken to him, Arnault Daniel most recently. In Canto 27 Virgil urges him to enter into the fire, despite his physical body:

"Pon giù omai, pon giù ogne temenza;
volgiti in qua e vieni: entra sicuro!".
E io pur fermo e contra coscïenza.

Quando mi vide star pur fermo e duro,
turbato un poco disse: "Or vedi, figlio:
tra Bëatrice e te è questo muro".

Come al nome di Tisbe aperse il ciglio
Piramo in su la morte, e riguardolla,
allor che ’l gelso diventò vermiglio;

così, la mia durezza fatta solla,
mi volsi al savio duca, udendo il nome
che ne la mente sempre mi rampolla.

Ond’ei crollò la fronte e disse: "Come!
volenci star di qua?"; indi sorrise
come al fanciul si fa ch’è vinto al pome. (Purgatorio XXVII, 31-45)

"Now put away, now put away all fear:
and come this way, with trust in your safeguard"
And me just standing firm, conscience unclear.


And when he saw me standing firm and hard,
a little vexed he said, "Look here, my son,
by this sole wall from Beatrice are you barred."


As at the name of Thisbe, his life done,
Pyramus looked up at her, his body sloughed,
his blood too, the red mulberries begun;


Just so, my hardness instantly made soft,
I turned to my wise leader, my mind's chapel
a source whence always that name wells aloft.


He shook indulgent brows, and feigned to grapple
with the question: "Standing pat then, are we?"
then smiled, as at a boy won with an apple.

This is Virgil already mothering him, teasing him affectionately rather than commanding him, and the same little boy ("fanciul") will turn to Virgil as to his mother later -- to Virgil who is gone.

But here I want to note the sexuality of the lines.  Dante won't enter the fire, he feels in some sense impotent to do so: impotent with lust, paradoxically, because the lust that brought him here in Beatrice's pursuit makes him inappropriately firm and hard -- he has a human body, and so human appetites, and the fire will burn him, punish him with physical pain, as it won't the pure images who are its denizens and who love the fire and who disappear into its depths.  His conscience is unclear: he feels bodily desire.  But Virgil assures him that it's this wall that separates him from Beatrice -- and that wall is hymenal.  It's as though crossing the never broken wall of flame is to suffer the pain of regaining virginity, a shared virginity with her, the wall between them no longer an issue.  That regaining virginity means suffering a wound that reverses the loss of virginity, means suffering an anti-wound as it were, is clear in the reference to Pyramus and Thisbe.  The wall separated them, and now Pyramus stabs himself, undergoes symbolically what in the more standard, reversed course of events Thisbe would undergo.  "The wall is down" that parted them, and the result of this is not their sexual union but their union in death, which is the painful guarantee of their virginity.

Virgil sees that Beatrice will win Dante to this anti-sexuality: the reversal now is that he can only enter the fire when his hardness is made soft ("la mia durezza fatta solla"), and the sound of Beatrice's name is like an easy bribe to an innocent boy, won with an apple - not the apple of the tree of sexual knowledge and original sin, but the apple that tempts him back to childish sexual innocence, painful as that might be.

Purgatorio XXVI: His body's not fictitious!

The terrace of the lustful - the last and least blameworthy of the sinners are near the top of Purgatory, just as the lustful have been near the top of Inferno.  After all, their crime is love!  So of course is everyone's, at every level, but the lustful love others, not themselves, and love those others to get what they conceive of as good: love the others to have the experience of love as well.  Lust is for Dante the most generous, the least perverted of sins.

So it's appropriate that among the lustful, Dante's living body becomes an issue again.  (This after Statius's long and fascinating lesson in Purgatorio XXV about the meaning of the spectral bodies of the dead, the forms infused into the intellectual soul by the nature they once inhabited and absorbed and refined.)  Here are the lustful, and here is a man with a sexual body, not the mere shades who kiss each other turn by turn, in chaste conformity with Paul's rule in Romans, as they do their endless contra-dance.  A real body, and the lustful in their counterlustful flames can see him:

feriami il sole in su l'omero destro,
che già, raggiando, tutto l'occidente
mutava in bianco aspetto di cilestro;

e io facea con l'ombra più rovente
parer la fiamma; e pur a tanto indizio
vidi molt'ombre, andando, poner mente.

Questa fu la cagion che diede inizio
loro a parlar di me; e cominciarsi
a dir: «Colui non par corpo fittizio»;

poi verso me, quanto potean farsi,
certi si fero, sempre con riguardo
di non uscir dove non fosser arsi.  (XXVI. 4-15)

My shoulder stung by sunshine on the right,
I saw those rays already change the West,
its azure aspect now transformed to white;

my shadow caused strange glowing, for the crest
of flames shone brighter in the shade I cast --
those Shades to this strange sign their minds addressed.

So was it that they spoke to me; first massed
together they said, at this strange sight,
"His body's not fictitious!" From the blast

were certain who approached, as close as might
comport with keeping wholly to the fire:
nor for a moment sought they to take flight.

At the height of Purgatory the difference between allopathic punishment (the correcting "contrapasso" or counter-suffering by which Purgatory purifies you for heaven) and the Inferno's homeopathic punishment (you wanted this? You'll have it in spades, you'll have it to the nth degree), begins to vanish.  Heaven, like hell, gives its denizens what they always wanted in the way they wanted it.  At the end of Purgatory, the flames of purification and the flames of love become one (as do gay and straight: Dante is very clear about this).  And in those flames they burn to know more about Dante, whose real presence (in the theological sense too: "Colui non par corpo fittizio!") is what makes this frankly fictitious word one that matters.  It's no wonder that Dante is about to name himself.

The other to all worlds, says Blanchot about literary space.  And to that fictional world comes this non-fictitious person, like K. to the bleak world of the Castle ("what but the desire to stay here could have brought me to this desolate place?") and in it, in exile, he can find a home.  The love here is the love of the real for the fictional, which when strong enough is self-requiting.

(Of course this will interfere with the theology, so alas Virgil, fictional being and real purveyor of fictions, and who loves him most, is about to disappear, in favor of the Christian Beatrice, in the realm where there are no bodies, fictional or otherwise.)

Ghost stories

"Récit de fantôme où meme le fantôme est absent...."  --Blanchot ("Ghost story where even the ghost is absent")

"Schreiben aber heißt, sich vor den Gespenstern entblößen" --Kafka ("Writing means, denuding yourself before the ghosts")

"Frate, / non far, ché tu se' ombra e ombra vedi." --Dante (Virgil to Statius: "Brother, / don't [try to embrace my legs], for you are a shade, and are seeing a shade.")

As one of those quick heuristic claims, I found myself saying the other day that every good short story is a ghost story.  We'd done Turn of the Screw, so that was the context: ghost story or not, it's a ghost story.  So we quickly went through the syllabus of stories we'd read, proving the point and identifying the ghost.

"Hills Like White Elephants"? The fetus. Their love. Their past. Their future. (Of course: since the fetus represents all those things.)

"A Day's Wait": The boy. (His mother too: what do you say about two people and two ghosts?)

"Gift of the Magi": The hair, the watch.

"Miss Lonelyhearts": Miss Lonelyhearts, Shrike.  "They were not worldly men." Sick-of-it-all's mother.  Mrs. Shrike's mother. Any of the letter writers. Christ.

"Slave on the Block" (Langston Hughes): The "wonderful colored cook and maid" who sleeps in the basement and takes sick and dies.

"Wash," Faulkner's short story version of the death of Sutpen: Sutpen himself, riding home from the War.  The past.  The missing daughter, the dead son.  And much, much more.

Kate Chopin's "Story of an Hour": The dead husband.  Who turns out not to be dead.

Hammett's great pair of stories: "The Big Knockover" and "$106,000 Blood Money": Papadapolous.  The Old Man.

"The Swimmer"?  The swimmer.

Anything by Alice Munro: what more needs to be said?  Anything by Dennis Johnson: likewise.  Ditto Javier Marías.  And Bolaño.  Hawthorne.  Melville. Carver. Alistair Macleod, Borges.  Flaubert.  Chekhov.  Tolstoy.  Megadittoes to Isaac Babel. No need to mention Duras or Blanchot.

I wondered a little about comic stories - farce, really - but all you have to do is read "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty."  Or Saki.

Salinger: "See more glass" could be the epigraph to this entry.

Listing it like this makes the game too easy, maybe, but it shouldn't be quite that easy. The ghosts haunt the stories, come to haunt them, make the stories haunting.

That's as far as we got in class, but later I found myself trying to think in a literal-minded way. The lesson I thought this game taught me was that stories play off of an interesting juxtaposition of anecdotal specificity and the generic world.  Novels have time to invent their world, invent background and context for their characters. Unhappy families are represented as unhappy families in an unhappy world, in a world which reflects and explains their unhappiness.  But in stories, everyone else is just "reasonably waiting for the train."  So the juxtaposition between the characters and the generic world always, in one way or another makes the characters into survivors.

Survivors: those who outlive a world or space or time or community or family or love or hope in which they're in sync with the world.  The story begins when they're no longer in sync.  This idea is generically related (how else should it be related?) to Warshow's description of "the gangster as tragic hero":

Thrown into the crowd without background or advantages, with only those ambiguous skills which the rest of us—the real people of the real city—can only pretend to have, the gangster is required to make his way, to make his life and impose it on others. Usually, when we come upon him, he has already made his choice or the choice has already been made for him, it doesn't matter which: we are not permitted to ask whether at some point he could have chosen to be something else than what he is.

The short story character is faced with a generic world: a world become generic for him and her, however rich and specific it is for everyone else.  The rich and specific have become generic, and the character doesn't belong to that generic world.  It's a ghost for her or him, or the character is a ghost in that world.  Those two ideas are the same: the character's relation to the world is what's ghostly.  The ghost is the relationship, and whoever represents that relationship in the story: fetus or husband or dead first wife (Edith Wharton's "Pomegranate Seed") or Shrike or Mr. Sappleton ("The Open Window) or Billie, the Oiler (Crane's "Open Boat"), or the child in the dream of the burning child reported to Freud is the ghost.

Anyhow, I was wondering whether this was fair and accurate.  Is that what a real ghost is like?

What a question!

Why would I even ask it?  Why would I think I could think about a real ghost? And the answer that came to me was that it's in stories that you interact with ghosts. These characters you interact with: they don't stay. And unlike lyric poetry, they don't repeat themselves either, in endless songs of love or longing or farewell.  Lyric is about the generic as the place we can continue to live, interact with, belong to, take comfort in.  But the stories are not our stories.  They're ghost stories.

Poetry and the contagion of affect

Balaustion (Browning's Balaustion) prefaces her by-heart recital of Euripides' Hecuba with these words, which can form a kind of motto for the practice of rapturous quotation:

                                 no one of all the words
O' the play but is grown part now of my soul,
Since the adventure. 'T is the poet speaks:
But if I, too, should try and speak at times,
Leading your love to where my love, perchance,
Climbed earlier, found a nest before you knew —
Why, bear with the poor climber, for love's sake!

I think Browning is remembering -- and so he, too, is speaking -- the words that end Shelley's "When the Lamp is Shattered":

When hearts have once mingled,
Love first leaves the well-built nest;
The weak one is singled
To endure what it once possessed.
O Love! who bewailest
The frailty of all things here,
Why choose you the frailest
For your cradle, your home, and your bier?

Its passions will rock thee,
As the storms rock the ravens on high;
Bright reason will mock thee,
Like the sun from a wintry sky.
From thy nest every rafter
Will rot, and thine eagle home
Leave thee naked to laughter,
When leaves fall and cold winds come.

These lines have occasioned much unnecessary confusion.  What Shelley meant, and what Browning saw, was that the personification of Love ("thee") opens it to the experience of all human beings: abandonment by love.  Love itself experiences the loss of love.  (Personifications of love, from the Symposium onwards, will often have this strange effect; it may indeed be in view of this effect that love is so often personified, standing on the burning deck reciting "Casabianca", hiding his face among a crowd of stars.) Balaustion's beautiful inversion of this fate leads us back to love's nest: her love for Euripides encouraging our own.

It may be too that in remembering Shelley Browning is remembering Dante, and the strange affection between shades that Statius and Virgil feel for each other.  In Purgatory the saved Statius tries to embrace the unsaved Virgil's feet, but Virgil reminds him that they are shades that that they are seeing shades.  Statius replies that his love for Virgil was so great that he forgot this unforgettable fact: that they are dead.

Virgil returns the compliment at the beginning of the next Canto (Purgatorio 22):

                                          "Amore
acceso di virtù, sempre altro accese,
pur che la fiamma sua paresse fore;

onde da l’ora che tra noi discese
nel limbo de lo ’nferno Giovenale,
che la tua affezion mi fé palese,

mia benvoglienza inverso te fu quale
più strinse mai di non vista persona,
sì ch’or mi parran corte queste scale.

-----

                                              Love,
Ignited by some power, spreads its flame
to others, if its fire flares above

The surface, vividly. When, Hellwards, came
Juvenal to Limbo, joined us there, and
made me know your love, I felt your claim

On my benevolence, by far more fair
Than any had yet felt for unseen persons,
so now it seems with ease I climb this stair.

Virgil loves Statius because Statius loves Virgil's poetry, loves it right, loves it deeply, loves it as should be loved: loves a shade.  There is nothing remotely self-absorbed about Virgil's love for Statius. Rather the poetry he wrote is, like all poems, an invitation to loving something together: something, to put it in the most banal and yet the deepest terms, quotable.

And indeed that's what Statius is about to to do: he quotes from the Aeneid to explain his own salvation.  Virgil's bitter critique of the corruption that gold produces among all humans wakens Statius to clearer thinking about avarice and prodigality, and he narrowly escapes hell, thanks to his master, who does not.  The words have a life of their own, like Love.

Shakespeare and Milton

I think a lot about both Shakespeare and Milton, and about the Keatsian question: What makes them so different? One thing that does, that differentiates Shakespeare from Dante as well, is the way the tradition of Shakespearean criticism adds almost nothing to our sense of his depth.  There are agreed on versions of Milton and Dante, and woe betide the person who doesn't see a large and always accreting set of truths that have been won from the void and formless puzzlement of their first readers.  They're like Joyce that way: every insight is a piece of the puzzle put down for good and all.  Even when there's disagreement, as between Empson and Lewis, the disagreement takes the form of moral surprise that the other side should so refuse established insight.

I think we could call this accretion of insight about the Dantesque writers (to give them a useful epithet) the establishment of a kind of anthology of florilegium. By anthology I mean that what critics have done is produced a hierarchy of passages which serve as foci and thematic centers of the work.  A new reader might be moved by Paolo and Francesca, but the experienced Danteist will be able to quote those passages of rebuke that apply to any great sympathy for them.  We might be astonished by Satan's grandeur, but the keepers of Paradise Lost will know what later moments show astonishment to be a sign of the very sin the poem seeks to cure. I might like Shem too much, or not enough, but the community of scholars knows how to weigh his actions and intentions.

These Dantesque works are then either the triumphs or the prisoners of their interpreters.  It's not that there aren't major disagreements about them -- I've already instanced Empson vs. C.S. Lewis.  It's that what the disagreements are about has been almost entirely stipulated.  These things change too, of course.  I'm giving a synchronic snapshot, but the point is that at every point there's an agreed agenda that the critics of whatever day debate.

But this is not true of Shakespeare.  We have better texts (or did for a while) than they had before the last century's revolution in textual scholarship; and we also have better glosses on Shakespeare's vocabulary.  What we don't have is better criticism, nor even anything like general agreement on what the issues are.  Sure, there are plenty of issues you can apply to Shakespeare: feminism, absolutism, theatricality, the coming of capitalism, imperialism, anti-semitism, racism.  But none of those things really get you into the plays in any way that makes it possible to have new insights into Shakespeare.  The idea of Shakespeare as author-function, as site for the circulation of social energy, is a kind of tribute to his non-accretive genius.  This is the odd commonality between skeptical attitudes towards Shakespeare in people as otherwise different as Wittgenstein, de Man, Greenblatt, and even Freud.

What I mean by that is that Shakespeare has been seeming to me, over the last couple of decades, more and more amazing, in ways that no theoretical or philosophical approach can capture or systematize.  He's amazing on the level of craft: he makes craft something transcendent, so that he's understanding of the experience of a play, of characters, of language, of communication becomes the real locus of his power: because these experiences -- of human interaction, of their language, of their communication with each other (and with us) -- are the deepest experiences of human life.  Craft of his order just is as complete an understanding of "this complicated form of life" (LW) as there can be.

I don't mean to sound smarmy.  I was thinking of this because I was thinking of an interesting error that it struck me Garry Wills was making in a review of Kenji Yoshino's book on Shakespeare and the law, A Thousand Times More Fair.  Wills takes issue with Yoshino's defense of Shylock, citing an essay by Anthony Hecht:

As Anthony Hecht points out in the most profound essay on “Merchant” (in ­“Obbligati”), modern actors omit (as Olivier did) or play down the most naked expression of hate in the drama, Shylock’s “I hate him for he is a Christian” — a line not quoted by Yoshino. The second most hateful speech declares Shylock’s motive for going to dinner with Antonio: “But yet I’ll go in hate, to feed upon / The prodigal Christian.” Shylock should not be seen as EveryJew. Not all Jews hate Christians — his daughter, Jessica, loves them. Hecht points out that Shylock also hates music — never a good sign in Shakespeare — and Belmont is the land of music, where Jessica is welcomed.

While Wills exaggerates Hecht's focus on hatred in The Merchant of Venice, it's also interesting that Hecht himself is trying to read the play as though it were by Dante: his scholarship reads like Singleton's footnotes, and in fact he ends the piece with a direct comparison to Dante (Merchant of Venice is a comedy in the same way that Dante's is).

But what struck me, and the point of this entry, is that Wills makes a great deal of a word that it's striking, once you notice it, Shakespeare never makes very much of.  It's a powerful rhetorical move to quote Shylock on hatred, and even more effective to repeat the word out of quotation marks (I've bolded those unquoted repetitions).  Will's use of the word, especially his phrases "hateful" and "naked expression of hate," gives it a good Dantesque resonance, as echoed in Shelley's account of Dante returning "to tell, / In words of hate and awe the wondrous story / How all things are transfigured except Love."  It's also Miltonic: "Heav'nly love oudoing hellish hate."

But in Shakespeare the word is strikingly milder.  Even in Merchant, Portia assures Bassanio she's on his side (as he's thinking about the caskets): "Hate counsels not in such a quality."  "Hate" there means "dislike," as it does in Sonnet 145.  Yes, hate will rise to Miltonic or Dantesque viciousness in Shakespeare, but not very often.  Even in King Lear, where Gloucester "callst on him that hates thee," Kent says that to try to save Lear's life at the end is showing a misapprehension of what Lear needs: "Vex not his ghost: O, let him pass! he hates him much / That would upon the rack of this tough world / Stretch him out longer."

In fact in Shakespeare "hate" tends to mean something like indifference to the good of someone.  And the same mildness to be found in Shakespeare's use of hate is to be found in his use of love as well.  There's very little of the extravagant (Heavenly Love, Love that moves the Sun and other stars) in Shakespeare.  Love and hate are among the social emotions in Shakespeare: they show how it is we are with other people.  And as long as we are with other people, we're in the realm of real life, and not that of the transcendent embodiment of primal principles.


So the interesting thing is that the two most central of literary words, love and hate, are just not central to Shakespeare.  They can be misleading, people can make too much of them (like Lear), but they're part of our give and take with each other.  What is central to Shakespeare is time and loss and commitment. "Love" and "hate" are highly attractive words for the rhetorician, for writers (like Wills) who plays their cards in order to use them as trumps.  Shakespeare never trumps with them: it's amazing.


So imagine that: the greatest of all writers is really not interested in depicting love and hate, and the reason for this is that he's not interested in depicting principles at all.  He's interested in depicting people.  And the result is that criticism can't really get us very far with Shakespeare.  The thing is he knows an amazing number of people: his characters and also his audience.  He describes them amazingly well.  He sees how they interact, and he sees what gives pleasure in that interaction.  He sees too what they need.

And what they mainly need is time with each other.  It's almost impossible to ruin Shakespeare if you don't cut the apparently extraneous scenes of nothing happening for a long time -- Lear, Kent and the Fool just talking, As You Like It in the forest of Arden, Act IV of The Winter's Tale, and so on.  This is time we can spend with them too.  Burgeoning critical consensus is not going to get you to understand Shakespeare's characters, and their interactions, better.  Spending time with them will, and the trick is to avoid turning them into the representatives of some critical argument as long as possible.  Unlike Dante or Milton, Shakespeare never did.

How literary transference ends

Reading a great note of Jeff Nunokawa's (you may have to friend him on Facebook to read it) -- two notes, actually -- got me thinking about the moment when, seeing Beatrice's presence flame up before him, Dante attains to the full sublimity of the earthly Paradise that Eve has lost and turns to share the transport with Virgil, who's been silent these last cantos, lost in his own awe and wonder. (The higher they go in Purgatory, the more Virgil's authority reduces to his still-parental capacity to ask intelligent questions of the guides they meet and to interpret their answers, even if he can't answer those questions himself as he'd done below.)  She's not only a counter-Eve; she's a counter-Dido too, meeting him "vestita di color di fiamma viva," dressed in the color of living flame, in contrast with the flames of Dido's funeral pyre which Aeneas sees as he abandons Carthage.

This is indeed a return to Eden for Dante: Beatrice has been dead for ten years now, and it's ten years since he felt the awe that now overcomes him again in her presence.  Virgil has seen him through the lowest depths of hell and to this glory, and so now:

Tosto che ne la vista mi percosse
l'alta virtù che già m'avea trafitto
prima ch'io fuor di püerizia fosse,

volsimi a la sinistra col respitto
col quale il fantolin corre a la mamma
quando ha paura o quando elli è afflitto,

per dicere a Virgilio: 'Men che dramma
di sangue m'è rimaso che non tremi:
conosco i segni de l'antica fiamma'.

Ma Virgilio n'avea lasciati scemi
di sé, Virgilio dolcissimo patre,
Virgilio a cui per mia salute die'mi;

né quantunque perdeo l'antica matre,
valse a le guance nette di rugiada,
che, lagrimando, non tornasser atre.  (Purgatorio 30, 40-54)

----

As soon as all my sight was driven wild
by that same force which, timelessly archaic,
transfixed me then while I was yet a child,

I turned back to the left, with hopes as quick
as when a little boy runs to his mama
if he's afraid of something or is sick,

To say to Virgil, "No drop of blood is calm: a
trembling has rapt me: I see all about
the returning fire of that blazing drama."

But Virgil was not there. We were without
him now. O Virgil! sweetest father,
to whom my soul I'd trusted without doubt!

Nor could the world, recovered, our first mother
lost once in Eden keep my dew-cleansed cheeks
unstained by tears I now wept for the other.

Dante lost his mother when he was five years old, and he has already seen that Beatrice must have taken her place in his soul, especially once she too has died. But Virgil has been so tender, and it's to Virgil he turns, as to a mother, as to his childhood, away for a moment from the Godlike blaze of Beatrice.  It's to Virgil that he entrusts his own wondrous and direct acknowledgment that he recognizes the archaic feeling he'd once felt in Beatrice's presence on earth: "conosco i segni de l'antica fiamma," I recognize the signs of that ancient flame (my translation above sacrificed the directness of this line for the even more important rhyme on mama) -- words which directly translate Virgil's Dido -  "Adgnosco veteris vestigia flammae".  Her ancient flame had been for her husband Sichaeus, now dead, and now she fears (accurately) that she will betray his memory and turn from him to Aeneas.

So for a moment Virgil and Dante take on the rolls of women, of Dante's mother and of Dido, while Beatrice takes the role of Aeneas. Since Dante will follow her, he abandons Virgil, perforce, and so he disappears, another abandoning himself before he is abandoned for Beatrice's living flame.  Over now, the fictive world that returned Dante to childhood, and gave him back a mother in Virgil.

If Dante is thinking of the Aeneid he must also be thinking of the binding of Isaac, the moment John Limon aptly describes as Isaac's adulthood.  For Abraham leads him to this terrible pass, seemingly knowing what he's doing but hiding his own terror and bewilderment.  We know this because Isaac asks his what's going on:

And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?

And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together.

He doesn't trust Isaac with (what he thinks is) the truth.  (Note that his intended lie isn't going to turn out to be the truth either, since it's a ram, not a lamb, that God provides, falsifying the inadvertent prophecy.)  But then he binds Isaac.  After this episode (as is notorious) Isaac disappears for several years, and we see him again only as an adult, after his mother dies.  The binding of Isaac is the end of his childhood: he has turned to his father in anxiety and trust, and his father has betrayed him.  God intervenes, but that's hardly recompense for the loss he indemnifies.

I don't mean to suggest the Virgil should be equated with Abraham, only to say that Dante is underlining the terrible moment when the child turns to the parent to find that the parent cannot help.  That's in Eden too.

As I say, I was thinking about this because I'd put together the moment in Dante with that in the frame to Turn of the Screw, the story of Griffin's ghost which is about

an appearance, of a dreadful kind, to a little boy sleeping in the room with his mother and waking her up in the terror of it; waking her not to dissipate his dread and soothe him to sleep again, but to encounter also, herself, before she had succeeded in doing so, the same sight that had shaken him.

He turns to her and she can't help him.  What scene more archaic than the child turning to a parent when haunted by ghosts? What comfort more primal than that which the parent gives? And when she can't -- that's the failure of Abraham, of Virgil, of Wordsworth in "Surprised by Joy" ("I turned to share the transport, O with whom, / But  thee, deep-buried in the silent tomb"), of the mother in Griffin's story (and of the Governess), of the father dreaming of his burning child whose story Freud reports (how often Abraham must have had this same dream, on his way to Moriah, and on his way home too!), and indeed of Gertrude, that inaugurates adulthood and its ultimate failure to be able to lay the ghosts of mortality that haunt our children.