PRACTISING CLOSE READING IN CLASS
Giving pupils the reading skills to succeed!
Paddy Salmon MA PGCE
Head of English SIS (Sèvres)
1993-2012
paddysalmon.wix.com/english-courses
DIFFICULTY AND COMPLEXITY
Thinking About Difficulty
Perhaps we should avoid the word "difficult" and instead talk of complexity. We automatically tend to avoid “difficulty”. We would rather put our feet up, pour ourselves a glass or two of something nice and doze off in the sun.
Literature, however, because it focuses also on the harsher aspects of human life (as well as the comic, the ephemeral, the dreams, the banalities) is well equipped to meet “difficulty” head on. Nevertheless, complexity of subject matter is liable to entail complexity of response. And herein lies the rub!
Writers will inevitably respond to complex situations with complex expression. At a most basic level, nearly all human activity is grounded in irony. We build such high expectations, we have such high hopes, we aim for the stars, “per ardua ad astra”, but we are doomed equally to such disappointments, such frustrations, such comic or tragic setbacks, that life becomes far more complicated. Consequently, the utterance, the expression of all these “difficulties” itself becomes difficult.
One of the most problematic areas of human activity is that which gets referred to under the all-encompassing word “Love”. The source of so much enrichment, pleasure and stability in our lives, it is also the battleground for jealousy, frustration, heartache, despair, if not outright murder. We could do worse, in tackling the subject of “difficulty”, than to start by considering Love (III) by George Herbert.
At a simple level, this is an apparent dialogue between the “poet” and the personification of an abstract term, who is referred to as “Love”. To begin with, Love appears to be full of romantic possibilities. Without being gendered, which is problematic, perhaps, from the outset, Love “invites” the persona “in”, “sweetly questioning If I lacked anything”. This is the stuff of a conventional seduction scene, here, slightly unconventional as it appears that the feminine sounding “Love” is daringly making the first moves. “Love” is also “quick-eyed”, which ties in with conventional concepts of beauty and, dare one repeat it, seduction. The phrase: “grow slack from my first entrance in” only increases our sense that this invitation is full of sexual potential (though the word ”slack” suggests that there may be a psychological barrier or dysfunction somewhere, as far as the persona is concerned).
The word: “Lord” in the third stanza should come then as a complete surprise, for now Love is being gendered as indisputably male. Or possibly, Love is even equated now with God, Himself. After the confession, “I have marred them”, referring to his eyes, which suggests that the persona has been guilty of spoiling or wasting his eyesight (whatever that might add up to), Love reveals itself (Himself/Herself?) to be not only forgiving, but also to have shouldered the “blame” for this “sin”. “Who bore the blame” almost echoes a line from another of Herbert's poems, Easter: “Thy crosse taught all wood to resound his name, Who bore the same”.
It is only now, that we can begin to make sense of the last invitation: that the poet or persona must “sit” and “taste my meat” – we have to make an imaginative leap to realise that what is being referred to is the body of Christ in the bread broken and eaten at holy communion or mass.
The poem is intentionally difficult, I would suggest, because it is playing a very deliberate trick on us readers. We are all too ready to read “love” as being about secular or worldly love, because that is what we are more accustomed to and titillated by. We read the situation, therefore in conventional “seduction” terms and then have to be jolted out of our sense of the familiar in order to accommodate a much wider, much less gender-specific, more generous and ultimately a self-sacrificial idea of love, which is at last recognised in the context of the poem as an image of that divine love sought by George Herbert, who was himself a Christian minister and a man of God. Paradoxically, however, divine love is described here by using earthly, commonplace terms, pointing up the inherent paradox of Christianity, that God allowed Himself to become one with man.
An invitation, therefore, of simple hospitality, which might have been sensed to be full of “romantic” possibilities at the outset, becomes not just an invitation to a meal between “companions” breaking bread together, but a chance for forgiveness, redemption, renewal and the offer of a relationship of trust and humility along with the rediscovery of one’s worth as a human being. Whether the reader is a Christian or a religious believer of another faith, or an atheist, a close reading of the poem should engage with the poem in an open way, trying to understand and follow the way it was intended to be read at the time. The context of the poem’s place in its age needs therefore to be understood.
Taking all of these considerations into account the poem never could have been “simple” and we have to make the effort, as readers, to realise this discovery, just as the persona has been made to in the poem. This is another example of the disingenuousness or the "trickiness", the subversiveness, of literature.
The poem ends with the assertion that “The truth in a calm world…..Is the reader leaning late and reading there.” The poem concludes, therefore, with a link between “truth” (whatever that is) and the act or reading which establishes that truth, including, crucially, ourselves as readers of the poem and creating our own truth within the parameters of the poem. How we read the text is thus of the utmost importance, since we are linked to the key actor of the poem, the “reader”.
This poem, with its simple sounding words is deceptively easy to grasp at a first reading. “The house was quiet and the world was calm.” The opening line, a perfectly regular iambic pentameter, has a calm assurance about its declaration. The words are simple, almost too simple, and the syntax is also very straightforward. The second half of the line, however, could be read in at least two ways – does the “world” refer to the environment around the house, or does it refer to the rest of the planet, or could it even refer to the “world” of the text itself? The whole poem seems to be stating something fundamental about the experience of reading, and, as we become the readers of the poem, we, too, are involved in an experience, which started as an objective-sounding utterance, but which becomes a possibly far more subjective complexity by the end.
Finnegan’s Wake
One of the world’s classic novels which is perhaps the least read is James Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake”. While not advocating it necessarily as an easy read (though it is high on my list of "still to dos"), I would like to quote from Anthony Burgess’s powerful defence of it, of Joyce’s work generally and of difficult literature even more widely. Burgess was himself a novelist, whose novels are not always themselves easy to read (think of “A Clockwork Orange” for example) and his commentary on Joyce, in “Here Comes Everybody”, defends writers, who write at a complex level and in difficult ways.
From the final chapter: “In The End Is the Word”
A writer may be unintelligible when he is seeking a verbal equivalent for a state of mind not yet fully understood or a complex psychological experience that will not yield to ordinary language. He will be unintelligible when he is essaying extreme naturalism, trying, for example, to capture the quality of real-life language which is blurred through distance, drink, sleep, or madness. He will be unintelligible when he is deliberately separating language from its referents (the objects or concepts of real life to which language refers) in order to create a quasi-musical pattern. Finally, he may be unintelligible when he is so loading words with referents (usually a number of secondary associations that cluster round the denotation, or dictionary definition) that the reader becomes bewildered and does not see what the primary referent is.
Let's now consider a poem by Wallace Stevens, which is also difficult to read, although there is nothing difficult about the language of the poem. This poem has intrigued me for many years with its haunting serenity and (apparent) simplicity. Like Keats' poem “On Looking Into Chapman's Homer”, it takes as its subject the experience of reading.
THE HOUSE WAS QUIET AND THE WORLD WAS CALM
by Wallace Stevens
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
We note that the word “calm” is repeated five times. In itself, the word is a soft sound with a long syllable. There are many repetitions, of “reader”, “summer” and “night”, creating a dreamy, lulling sense of peace. Nothing happens in the poem to jar or shatter the serenity of what is being described. And yet, nothing is being described: neither house, night, scholar nor book: we know nothing of who, where or what, which turns the poem into a series of very general statements. We are given to understand that the experience of reading, in a quiet house on a summer’s night, is not only in itself a serene, calming experience, but also one where the reader’s imagination creates the “access of perfection to the page”. Something very positive, therefore, is on offer and within our grasp, apparently.
The poem is constructed of paired lines, as if pointing out the dual nature of the house and the world or perhaps the reader and the book. Although there are no rhymes as such, there is a strong rhythm, particularly at the end where there is a tripling of “itself is….”. Elsewhere there are repetitions of “lean” or “wanted”. Phrases like “conscious being”, “thought” and “mind” suggest (ambiguously because they could apply both to the reader and to what is read) that how we experience the world is through our perceptions, regulated by our minds, and that reading is an active event of interpretation and experience that has to be worked at (“leaned”), rather than a passive one – that of a reader simply receiving a pre-packaged experience.
Although this is a poem of ideas, there is a lot of feeling in the repetition of the reader who “wanted to lean, wanted much most”, as if reading has to be worked at with passion. There is an insistence on “calm” and “quiet” as if solitude and silence are necessary in order to create the “truth” that is imparted in the reading experience. It is interesting that “the words were spoken”, because in reading, we do have an impression that written words are spoken. Here there seems to be an almost incantatory element added, for the repetitions almost act as a spell, hypnotising us drowsily as we sink into the text of the poem itself.
One of the questions, which the poem sidesteps, is what is referred to by the word “truth”. Perhaps the poem is suggesting that in a world where “truth” is so hard to define, the only truth is the truth each one of us creates for ourselves. There is something very moving about the calm, reassuring assertions. “And the world was calm.” The triple ending completes this reassurance, but there might be a moment of potential horror at the end with the phrase “in a calm world In which there is no other meaning…”. Is the poem somehow suggesting that in the real world, there is no exterior meaning? That the universe is absurd and meaningless? If so, then the act of reading becomes of the utmost importance, for by doing so readers create meaning and sense in a meaningless world. It is a measure of the poem’s calm reassurance that this message is delivered with such serene authority, when the implications behind it are so potentially frightening.
It’s a truism that reading takes you out of yourself, and that you “become” part of what you are reading. Here, in this poem, that idea is given a sharper edge as we are encouraged to identify with the reader and become involved with the “world’, the “house” and the “book”: figments of our mind, perhaps, but also connected to the exterior world of experience.
EPIHANY
In the Bible, the original epiphany was the viewing of the baby Jesus by the Three Kings. In literature we use it to describe a climactic moment of revelation. It has spiritual connotations and is usually highly visual. A viewing of something has caused some deep, inner understanding.
Here is one of the most famous. Joyce describes a fictional encounter involving Stephen Dedalus. This causes him to realize that his destiny is to become an artist, a writer, and that he must achieve this overseas rather than in Ireland, his native country
From A Portait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
There was a long rivulet in the strand and, as he waded slowly up its course, he wondered at the endless drift of seaweed. Emerald and black and russet and olive, it moved beneath the current, swaying and turning. The water of the rivulet was dark with endless drift and mirrored the high-drifting clouds. The clouds were drifting above him silently and silently the seatangle was drifting below him and the grey warm air was still and a new wild life was singing in his veins.
Where was his boyhood now? Where was the soul that had hung back from her destiny, to brood alone upon the shame of her wounds and in her house of squalor and subterfuge to queen it in faded cerements and in wreaths that withered at the touch? Or where was he?
He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the sea-harvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight and gayclad lightclad figures of children and girls and voices childish and girlish in the air.
A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.
She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither; and a faint flame trembled on her cheek.
—Heavenly God! cried Stephen's soul, in an outburst of profane joy.
He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him.
MUSEE DES BEAUX ARTS
This is a difficult poem for students, but it helps a lot to have the painting by Brueghel which is being referred to in the poem. Students may need some help initially in working out what the phrase "old masters" (which we as teachers might assume to be common knowledge) refers to, as well as a certain tradition of Flemish and Dutch painting, which painted Christmas scenes set in Northern Europe, rather than Palestine. The phrase "miraculous birth" also cannot be taken for granted with pupils in an age where the christian tradition is no longer immediately apparent (see Section 12).
Here, anyway, is my own take on the poem, which I love, not least because it draws threads between art in different modes: painting and poetry.
MUSEE DES BEAUX ARTS by W.H.Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
This is a difficult passage for students to grasp but it repays close study.
Key words in the first paragraph are the repeated word "drift" and the word "wild" which is repeated elsewhere. What are the connotations of these words? Positive or negative? What does the colour "grey" signify? What sort of state of mind is shown in this opening paragraph?
More essentially, this is an encounter, which traditionally has sexual overtones. A strange and beautiful girl is met in a state of near undress (for the time, don't forget!). Yet the sexual possibilities surrounding this encounter are transformed into the language of nature, "sea bird", "crane's", 'feathering", "down", "bosom as a bird's". The girl thus appears not as a symbol of sexuality, so much as a bird of beauty. Thighs, bosom, legs are made less overtly seductive.
Look carefully at how the girl responds to his gaze. Staring and receiving stares is fundamental to the game of seduction. Here the way she receives his gaze and returns it before turning away could be interpreted as an invitation. Yet all has been transposed into the language of religious experience – particularly the word "dove". Stephen's reaction, however, which has been carefully prepared for by many references with religious connotations, is "profane joy". This is interesting because the word "advent" later makes us realize that there are nevertheless spiritual implications here.
The passage is finely and very ambiguously balanced between the language of the senses and the language of religion (eg. the "faint flame trembled on her cheek").
Look now at how the passage has been very artistically shaped and crafted.
CRITICAL ESSAY
Musée des Beaux Arts by WH Auden
“About suffering they were never wrong…”
The inversion at the start of the poem (because normally we would say "they were never wrong about suffering") gives a lot of emphasis to the word “suffering”, which turns out to be the theme of the whole poem. Reading to the end and considering the title, which gives us a clue, we realise that the poem is a meditation on human suffering as shown in the paintings of famous artists, the “Old Masters”, of which one painting, Icarus by Brueghel, is examined in some detail in the second section as an example of the ideas in the first section.
In this first section we are told that the “Old Masters” knew about “suffering” and its “human position”. Positions are obviously important in painting, but here the word “position” takes on an unusual and, perhaps, slightly ironic significance. This is because what the painters seem to have noticed, according to the poem, is that human suffering takes place in a world where many do not notice it, or if they do, they seem to be uncaring. Life seems to go on, unaffected by pain and disaster “while someone is eating or opening a window”. Position, therefore, seems to point to something like attitude.
The first section also refers to people waiting “for the miraculous birth”, by which perhaps we are to understand the nativity of Christ, always a popular subject with painters. But here, what the painter also notices is the indifference of some – in this case the children busy skating (with the possibility, perhaps of danger, even there, present?). The miraculous therefore exists side-by-side with the banal. The reference to “dreadful martyrdom” carries forward the idea of the nativity to the end of Christ’s life on the cross. The martyrdom is not particularised, which in fact, gives it even more horror, as we imagine somebody being tortured to death. The detail of the animals not caring suggests that we are no better than they are if we do not react. There is almost a note of comedy, grim humour, in the detail of the horse scratching its “innocent behind” on a tree.
This note of irony, which is grimly comic, is found elsewhere. The second part takes as an example Brueghel’s Icarus, which refers to the tragic and ironic story of Icarus, who in trying to master flight, flew too close to the sun and fell to his death when the wax of his wings melted. There is irony in the sun shining “as it had to” – a curious remark, which, taken with the martyrdom which “must run its course, seems to suggest that suffering is part of man’s destiny, but also that the painter is predetermined to paint his picture a certain way too. The ploughman’s reaction seems also ironically portrayed by the poet. He might have heard the cry, but because it was not an “important failure” he remains unmoved. An obvious question is “How could he have known whether it was important or not?” The answer might be that the interpretation of the event, something important to the artist, is what is needed for the ploughman, perhaps pointing here to an important role for art: the interpretation of the significant. There is also obvious irony in the “expensive and delicate” ship, that could have saved the “boy”, sailing on “calmly”. Words like “leisurely” and “calmly” suggest that individual tragic events have little impact on the wider world. They are usually positive words, but here they underline the very negative indifference of the spectators.
This indifference is, perhaps, reflected in the lay-out of the poem, which is deliberately informal: lines are of unequal length, with no metrical pattern evident. Nevertheless, there are rhymes throughout, though they seem randomly scattered. There, thus, seems to be a tension between formality and informality, care and carelessness, which is also mirrored in the language. The tone at times is prosaic and there is a lot of enjambement. This makes the utterance seem almost indifferent, as when the “white legs disappearing into the green Water” are reported without any comment. Yet, there are also repetitions of “How….”, which give the poem more dramatic emphasis. We have already noted the inversion in the first line. There is thus, in the end, quite a lot of care taken and attention to detail; this is perhaps a parallel with the Old Masters, who included contrasting details, assembled into an artistically balanced whole.
It is in contemplating the role of the artists (and in parallel, the role of the poet) that the full significance of the poem becomes apparent. Artists have to understand and interpret human events; here they are concentrating on human indifference in the face of suffering. But the title hints at a similar sort of indifference, as suffering is turned aesthetically into a beautiful painting and an “objet d’art” which can be viewed in a museum. Perhaps the most important words in the poem, given a lot of emphasis by their special position on the page, are in the shortest line of the poem: “They never forgot..” We as spectators (and art consumers) are in danger of forgetting and ignoring suffering, unless it is pointed out in an art, which can move us and allow us to remember better.
CRITICAL ESSAY
This poem starts with an immediate problem or tension. What can possibly be the link between Julius Caesar or Michaelangelo and a “long-legged fly”? The comparison at first glance seems absurd. The poem appears to take three moments, when three important people, Julius Caesar, Helen of Troy (inferred from "the topless towers" being "burnt") and Michaelangelo need silence and stillness to achieve whatever momentous things they have to achieve. We, the readers, are directly addressed and told to be quiet so that these famous people (though Helen of Troy is fictitious) can do what they have to do. And their minds, we are told, need to “move... upon silence”, in the same way as a long-legged fly does on a river. At first glance, this seems like a startling connection.
This is, however, a poem of great quiet and simplicity. It opens with simple commands (“Quiet the dog, tether the pony”) but we notice immediately that there is an inversion in the syntax, which reflects the importance of the command: “That civilisation may not sink..”. These are big stakes – if we do not obey the order, there is a danger that the civilised world will fall. Caesar, the great military leader, is in his tent, planning the invasion of Gaul or Britain, in order to further the aims of “civilisation”. The tension, and, indeed, the paradox here is that he is planning war, but needs peace and quiet in which to do it.
Here now is a poem by W.B. Yeats called "The Long-Legged Fly". For me, it is one of his most marvellous poems, but pupils will find it difficult unless they are in touch with the cultural reference points which the poem alludes to and depends upon.
Long-legged Fly
That civilisation may not sink,
Its great battle lost,
Quiet the dog, tether the pony
To a distant post;
Our master Caesar is in the tent
Where the maps are spread,
His eyes fixed upon nothing,
A hand under his head.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move most gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practise a tinker shuffle
Picked up on a street.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence.
That girls at puberty may find
The first Adam in their thought,
Shut the door of the Pope's chapel,
Keep those children out.
There on that scaffolding reclines
Michael Angelo.
With no more sound than the mice make
His hand moves to and fro.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
In the second stanza, Helen is described as “three parts a child” and is practising a “tinker’s shuffle”. The paradox, here, is that she is supposed to be the most beautiful, irresistible woman in the whole world, and yet she is childish and her little dance, the “tinker’shuffle” is downmarket, to say the least. And yet, that childishness and that earthy lowness may be what makes her so attractive, ultimately. There is another paradox in this stanza. Do we want the towers of Troy to be burnt and all that desperate bloodshed? Apparently, yes. Helen is destined to create the conditions which make the fall of Troy inevitable and thus give us the Iliad, one of the world’s great literary works (one might go further and say one of the cornerstones of western civilisation).
Lastly, we are told to be quiet, so that “girls at puberty may Find the first Adam in their thought”. Michaelangelo is here painting the Cistine Chapel with one of the greatest paintings the world has produced. The paradox, however, is that it is supposed to be a great religious painting, but in fact what it reminds girls of is their sexuality. If Eve had not tempted Adam, then civilisation really would not have got started. So, here, the importance of art in stirring feelings (and sexuality is at the heart of it as it was in stanza 2) is again being underlined. We started with power politics, then literature, then art. All are linked to the survival of western civilisation and all, the poem seems to suggest, need a certain meditative silence.
Each of the stanzas ends with the two-line refrain comparing each of these characters’ minds to a long-legged fly, which is an extraordinary image. And yet the fly summons up an idea of a hot summer’s day and the quiet of a river. The fly moves silently and naturally, though it also has the paradoxical quality of doing the impossible – walking on the water. It is gentle, too, and we are asked to move “gently” in the second stanza. We are asked to contribute our part to these great moments, to participate actively. We, as readers must try to share this mystical, creative silence, which nature seems to have and which human civilisation, even at its most destructive, must attempt to share and cultivate.
The poem is as simple as the movement of this fly. There are some rhymes (in lines 2&4 and 6&8), which make for a fluid, yet also jagged structure, and there is a rhythm, which is perhaps not so much metrical as created by the repetition of the simple commands and the two-line refrain. Each stanza begins with the inversion “That...”, emphasising thus the importance not only of the need for silence, but of the participation of the reader or onlooker. We, the audience, have our part to play.
Great art, the poem seems to be saying, can be profoundly destructive (and necessary); it may also be sexual, with all the problems that sexuality can bring; but this art is necessary for “civilisation” to continue. And linked to this great art (which includes the art of war), there is a need for stillness and silence, rooted in nature, in order to create it. To compare Caesar to a fly might seem at first to be an outrageous assertion and an utterly paradoxical comparison, and yet, the poem seems to be claiming that civilisation and humans are, indeed, paradoxical. And the poem seems to be claiming also that, no matter how complex civilisation and art may be, they must also be linked to the workings of nature, even at its most apparently insignificant level.
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LOVE III
Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked any thing.
A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.
"...things that have their origin in the imagination or in the emotions very often take on a form that is ambiguous or uncertain. It is not possible to attach a single, rational meaning to such things without destroying the imaginative or emotional ambiguity or uncertainty that is inherent in them and that is why poets do not like to explain. That the meanings given by others are sometimes meanings not intended by the poet or that were never present in his mind does not impair them as meanings." [ (Wallace Stevens)
Dollymount Strand
Our educational tradition, both in Britain and America, has conditioned us to look on words as mere counters, which, given a particular context, mean one thing and one thing only. This tradition, needless to say, is geared to the legalistic and commercial rather than to the aesthetic. When a word is ambiguous we are uneasy, and we are right to be uneasy when that word is set in a contract or directive. But the exploitation of the ambiguity of a word is… one of the joys of the literary art. Gerard Manley Hopkins says: “Brute beauty and valour and act… here Buckle”, and that word ‘buckle’ conveys two opposing notions – the sense of fastening a belt for action; the sense of becoming distorted and broken, as when we talk of the buckling of a bicycle wheel. Conflict is of the essence of Hopkins’s poems – glory and guilt, confidence and doubt – and in this other great Catholic writer (James Joyce), we have the same (though far more self-conscious) urge to convey opposed principles of life simultaneously, in one and the same word or expression. When life is freed from the restrictions of time and space, as it is in dreams, the mind makes less effort to sort out contradictions, or gentler ambiguities, and a word may ring freely, sounding all its harmonics. This free ringing, in a zone of psychological experience which has all the doors open, may well set jangling all the phonetic and etymological associations which the mind is capable of accommodating – foreign languages not taught in public schools, songs little known in the great world of singing, scraps of conversation almost forgotten, dead slogans, posters long torn from the walls. Joyce was psychologically right in refusing to limit the associations of dream-words to what some abstract image of a reader or critic could most easily take in. In throwing vocables of great, though arbitrary, complexity at us he was being true to his principle of artistic communication. Paradoxically, when an essential word or phrase in a book about a dream is least intelligible, then it may be most intelligible.
Waking literature (that is, literature that bows to time and space) is the exploitation of a single language. Dream-literature, breaking down all boundaries, may be more concerned with the phenomenon of language in general. … We can only learn about dreams by introspection. I do not see how Joyce could have made his great piece of dream-literature without looking into his own polyglot mind.
It is the wealth of this mind which is most persistently attacked. Joyce’s great crime, apparently, is to know too much. Blows against Finnegan’s Wake are often oblique thrusts at Ulysses, another monster of erudition. Erudition was once Eliot’s crime: since Wordsworth had done well enough without benefit of Sanskrit, it was unforgivable to make the thunder of The Waste Land say “Datta Dayadhvam Damyata”. But, as our world grows smaller, we become less satisfied with what an insular tradition can teach us. We are English-speaking first, but we ignore at our peril what is enshrined in the phonemes and rhythms of Europe and the great (mostly untranslatable) religious monuments of the East. Now, Eliot may be forgiven since his learning is apparently harnessed to an end of high seriousness; Joyce, on the other hand, seems to throw his library about to promote froth (which is all a dream is) or facetiousness (what the Irish call wit).It would appear that, obscure and lucid, he cannot win. We are still unwilling to concede profundity to the deeper places of the mind… We have a lot to learn.
Anthony Burgess
“Here Comes Everybody” Faber 1969
T.S. Eliot as a young man
W.B. Yeats
Anthony Burgess