Archaic art, then, was springtime art in any culture. We can now see how Pound proceeded to study and imitate the earliest Greek poetry, the earliest Italian, the earliest Chinese. Pound culminated his long career by translating the Chinese Book of Odes, the first poems of which are archaic folksongs collected by Confucius.
And look at Canto I. It is a translation of the most archaic part of the Odyssey: the descent of Odysseus into Hades, a motif that goes all the way back to the Gilgamesh epic. And how does Pound translate it? Not from the Greek, but from the Latin of Andreas Divus, the first Renaissance translator of Homer, thereby working another archaic fact into his symbol. And into what kind of English does he translate it? Into the rhythms and diction of The Seafarer and The Wanderer: archaic English.
The modern grasp of the archaic happened first not in the appreciation of modern art but in the attempt to recover the archaic genius of the language itself: in the sense William Barnes and Frederick James Furnivall developed of a pure, mother English which would eschew Latinisms and Renaissance coinages — a kind of linguistic Pre-Raphaelitism that wanted to circumvent the Europeanization of English.
The first fruits of this enthusiasm were Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose English is purer even than Spenser’s, and the great unknown of English letters, Charles Montagu Doughty, who suspected all writers after Chaucer of whoring after strange dictionaries, who went into the Arabian desert (or “Garden of God”) — the most archaic act of modern literature — to save, as he said, the English language.
That salvation is still one of the best of books, the Travels in Arabia Deserta, though we have neglected his masterpiece, The Dawn in Britain, with its archaic theme and its archaic English.
When in Ulysses Joyce writes a chapter in English that evolves from its most archaic to the most modern and slangy styles, he conceals in his parody of Carlyle, the Victorian archaicist, the phrase “A doughty deed, Purefoy!” to let us know that he is keeping the faith. Joyce’s rigorous sense of correspondences places him foremost, or at least alongside Picasso, in the century’s equation of archaic and modern. Like Pound and Kazantzakis he wrote his epic across the most ancient pages of Western literature, the Odyssey, and in Finnegans Wake writes across the fact of the Indo-European origin of European languages, seeing in the kinship of tongues the great archeological midden of history, the tragic incomprehensibility of which provides him with a picture of the funeral of Western culture.
One sure principle of Finnegans Wake is that it always holds in its puns the modern and the archaic. A street full of traffic is also a panorama of prehistoric places and animals: “. . . the wallhall’s horrors of rollsrights, carhacks, stonengens, kisstvanes, tramtrees, fargobawlers, autokinotons, hippohobbilies, streetfleets, tournintaxes, megaphoggs, circuses and wardsmoats and basilikerks and aeropagods. . . .”
While Joyce was discovering how to make a Heraclitean circle of the modern and the archaic, joining the end to the beginning, Velimir Khlebnikov in Russia was making a similar fusion of old and new, opening words etymologically, reviving Old Russian, and treating themes from folklore, all in the name of the most revolutionary modernity. His friend Vladimir Tatlin, who liked to call himself the Khlebnikov of constructivist art, spent thirty years trying to build and fly Leonardo da Vinci’s ornithopter. And what is the only surviving example of Russian Futurism, Lenin’s tomb, but the tumulus of a Scythian king combined with an Egyptian mastaba, complete with mummy?
Behind all this passion for the archaic, which is far more pervasive in the arts of our time than can be suggested here, is a longing for something lost, for energies, values, and certainties unwisely abandoned by an industrial age. Things, Proust says, are gods, and one way our arts seem to regard our world is to question what gods have come to dwell among us in the internal combustion engine, the cash register, and the computer.
One answer to this question lies in a single rich symbol which is of such ambiguity that we can read only part of its meaning. It is an elusive symbol, to be traced on the wing. We can begin with the mysterious painting Hide and Seek by the Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew. This enormous painting (now in the Museum of Modern Art) is a pictorial equivalent of the method of Finnegans Wake. All of its images are puns which resolve into yet other punning images. First of all, it is a great oak tree against which a girl presses herself: she is the it in a game of hide-and-seek. The hiders are concealed in the tree itself, so many children, who are arranged like the cycle of the seasons, winter children, summer children.
These children, seen a few paces back, become landscapes, and eventually two folded arms, as the tree itself resolves into a foot and hand; and, further back, the face of a Russian demon, mustached and squint-eyed. Further back, the whole picture resolves into a drop of water — Leeuwenhoek’s drop of water under the microscope in which he discovered a new world of little animals; the drop of crystal dew on a leaf at morning which acts like Borges’s aleph or Blake’s grain of sand or any Leibnizean monad mirroring the whole world around it; Niels Bohr’s drop of water the surface tension of which led him to explain the structure of the atom.
This is a very modern picture, then, a kind of metaphysical poem about our non-Euclidean, indeterminate world. But at its center there is the one opaque detail in the painting: the girl in a pinafore hiding her face against the tree.
She is, let us say, the same girl who as Alice went into the Freudian dark called Wonderland and through the looking glass into the reflected, dimensionless realm of word and picture. She is Undine, Ciceley Alexander, Rima, Clara d’Ellébeuse, Grigia, Ada. She is Anna Livia Plurabelle, the Persephone of Pound’s Cantos, Brancusi’s “Maiastra” birds, the women in Antonioni’s films. She is a symbolic figure who serves in the imagery of modern art as the figure of Koré in the rites of Demeter of the ancient world.
A catalogue of her appearances will disclose that she emerges in Romantic literature toward the beginning of the nineteenth century. If we say that she is a symbol of the soul, we do not mean that she is consciously so except in the imagination of writers who, like Dino Campana, Proust, Joyce, and Pound, were aware of her persistence and pervasiveness. She appears as a half-acknowledged ghost in Poe, who knew that she came from the ancient world and named her Ligeia and Helen. She is all but wholly disguised in Ruskin, where her name is Rose and where her new Hades, the industrial world, is accurately identified.
Picasso depicts her with proper iconography, a girl carrying a dove — the Sicilian Persephone — and places her near a Minotaur, his symbol for a world half brutal. She is a constant figure in the fiction of Eudora Welty, who is aware of her transformation into Eurydice, Helen, Pandora, Aphrodite, Danaë, Psyche. She is the magic female phantom in Jules Laforgue and Gérard de Nerval, in Rilke and Leopardi.
An ambiguous symbol of life and death, she is Odette de Crécy as Swann imagines her in love: a girl from Botticelli, a lyrical phrase in Vinteuil’s sonata, a flower. But she is also the depraved Odette whose music is not Vinteuil but Offenbach’s Orfée aux enfers, a witch of sensuality and deception, a fleur du mal.
In an age when the human spirit is depressed and constrained, this symbol of the soul is a depiction of Persephone or Eurydice in Hades. In a euphoric or confident time, she is above-ground: a Beatrice, an Aphrodite. Knowing this, we can read Rossetti’s paintings and Swinburne’s poems as hymns to the soul underground, the soul sunk in ungrowing matter, allied with sterile gold and crystal, but itself, like Persephone, a seed with the power to reach upward to the light.
This light is the principle counter to dark, the sun, Demeter’s torch, Orpheus’s lyre, man’s regard for the earth’s resources and the Themis of heaven. Where the soul is depressed beyond hope, we have a Poe writing a black parody of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice: Roderick Usher with his hypersensitive lute and his schizophrenic, Hamlet-like indecision, whose will is rotten and perverse, who is terrified by existence itself and diabolically puts his Eurydice in Hades and spinelessly leaves her
there.
In Roderick Usher we see the emergence of the symbolic gear of the complementary myth which runs alongside that of Persephone-Eurydice in modern art. That lute will turn up on the Cubist table-top, in the iconography of Cocteau and Apollinaire, in Rilke and de Nerval.
It will, with idiotic faithfulness, turn up on the study table of Sherlock Holmes, along with Usher’s opium and erudite books about subterranean journeys. But then we remember that Holmes is Roderick Usher all over again, with Auguste Dupin thrown in (Dupin, who could not find a Persephone named Marie Roget, but could identify the dark power which raped the ladies on the Rue Morgue), and that Holmes is also derived from the man who drew the gaudiest picture of subterranean Persephone in the nineteenth century, saying that she is older than the rocks among which she sits, that like the vampire she has been dead many times and learned the secrets of the grave: the man who retold the myth of Cupid and Psyche for the nineteenth century, Walter Pater.
Orpheus, then, is one archaic ghost we have revived and put to work bringing us out of the sterile dark; and Persephone in many disguises is our way of seeing the soul lost and in trouble.
Persephone’s most powerful evocations are in Joyce and Pound, as Molly Bloom and Anna Livia, and as Pound’s Homeric array of women, Pre-Raphaelite of beauty and Pre-Raphaelite of distress. For Pound these women are symbols of the power of regeneration. Lucrezia Borgia is among them, a literal queen of death who had her springtime at the end of her life, the reformed Este Borgia. Madame Hylé, Pound calls her: Lady Nature, who takes the shape of tree or animal only through a cooperation with light.
For Joyce the regeneration of the spirit is a cyclic female process, like the self-purifying motion of a river. One of Joyce’s strong themes is the human paralysis of will that stubbornly resists regeneration, and Anna Livia at the end of Finnegans Wake is resisting her plunge into the sea much as Eveline in Dubliners balks at changing her life, though the triumphant Molly Bloom, Demeter and Persephone together, cries out at one point to her creator, “O jamesy let me up out of this!”
Once this theory is sorted out and anatomized, we shall see that the artists for whom the soul in plight can be symbolized as Persephone surround her with an imagery of green nature, especially the flowering tree which was one of her forms in the ancient Mediterranean world. Joyce, Tchelitchew, and Pound are clear examples of this correspondence of tree and maiden; so are Ruskin and Lewis Carroll, Francis Jammes and Proust, Yeats and Jules Supervielle.
The poets who replace Persephone with Eurydice work under the sign of the lute of Orpheus: Laforgue, Rilke, Poe, and we should not hesitate to add Braque, Orff, and Picasso.
And if we ask why our artists have reached back to such archaic symbols to interpret the distress of mind and soul in our time, there are partial but not comprehensive answers. One reason, I suggest, is the radical change in our sense of what is alive and what isn’t. We have recovered in anthropology and archeology the truth that primitive man lives in a world totally alive, a world in which one talks to bears and reindeer, like the Laplanders, or to Coyote, the sun and moon, like the plains Indians.
In the seventeenth century we discovered that a drop of water is alive, in the eighteenth century that all of nature is alive in its discrete particles, in the nineteenth century that these particles are all dancing a constant dance (the Brownian movement), and the twentieth century discovered that nothing at all is dead, that the material of existence is so many little solar systems of light mush, or as Einstein said, “. . . every clod of earth, every feather, every speck of dust is a prodigious reservoir of entrapped energy.”
We had a new vision that death and life are a complementary pattern. Darwin and Wallace demonstrated this, but in ways that were more disturbing than enlightening, and Darwin’s vision seemed destitute of a moral life. The nearest model for a world totally alive was the archaic era of our own culture, pre-Aristotelian Greece and Rome. From that world we began to feel terribly alienated, as the railroad tracks went down and the factories up, as our sciences began to explain the mechanics of everything and the nature of nothing.
The first voices of protest which cried that man is primarily a spirit, the voices of Blake, Shelley, and Leopardi, sounded sufficiently deranged, and we had to hear the equally dubious voices of Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung before we could begin seriously to listen.
It was, however, the artists who were performing the great feat of awakening an archaic sense of the world. The first effort was a clear outgrowth of Renaissance neoclassicism and led to a revolution in which the themes were subversively rejuvenated: Shelley’s Platonism, for instance, and Blake’s kitchen-forged mythology, the metacultural visions of a Novalis or Baudelaire.
The second effort can be called the Renaissance of 1910, which recognized the archaic. Hilda Doolittle, Pound, and Williams could catalyze poetry by returning to the Greek fragment, to archaic simplicity, to a sense of reality that was fresh because it had been so long neglected. Brancusi, Gaudier-Brzeska, Modigliani, Picasso turned to the energy and liveliness of primitive art. The piano, Stravinsky announced, was a percussion instrument, like a drum from the jungle. The artist Wyndham Lewis said, looking at prehistoric paintings that seemed to be excused from the ravages of time, the artist goes back to the fish.
Whether, indeed, the century’s sense of the archaic served to alleviate our alienation from what was once most familiar, or whether it put our alienation into even starker contrast to ages in which we romantically suppose man to have lived more harmoniously and congenially with his gods and with nature, it is too early to say. Certainly it has deepened our tragic sense of the world, and set us on a search to know what the beginnings of our culture were. Only our age has prepared itself to feel the significance of an engraved ox rib 230,000 years old, or to create and respond to a painting like Picasso’s Guernica, executed in allusion to the style of Aurignacian reindeer hunters of 50,000 years ago.
On the other hand, our search for the archaic may have contributed to our being even more lost. For the search is for the moment now over in the arts, and our poets are gypsies camping in ruins once again. Persephone and Orpheus have reverted to footnotes in anthologies. The classic sense of the city perished rather than revived in the Renaissance of 1910, which had spent its initial energies by 1914, and was exhausted by 1939, the year of the publication of Finnegans Wake and of the beginning of the second destruction of the world in twenty-five years.
Some of the masters lived on. Pound wrote two more masterpieces. Picasso continued, filling eighty years of his life with work, completing a painting every seventy-two hours of that time.
Men have walked on the moon, stirring dust that had not moved since millennia before the archaic hand carved the images on the Sarlat bone which mean nothing to our eyes. The world that drove Ruskin and Pound mad has worsened in precisely the ways they said it would. Eliot’s wasteland has extended its borders; Rilke’s freak-show outside which the barker invites us to come in and see the genitals of money is a feature of every street. Never has an age had more accurate prophets in its writers and painters.
The donation remains, to be assessed and understood, and the discovery, or invention, of the archaic is as splendid a donation as that of Hellenism to the Renaissance. We are just now seeing, amidst the fads and distractions, the strange fact that what has been most modern in our time was what was most archaic, and that the impulse to recover beginnings and primal energies grew out of a feeling that man in his alienation was drifting tragically away from what he had first made as poetry and design and as an understanding of the world.
Here are Ezra Pound’s last lines:
Poetry speaks phallic direction
Song keeps the word forever
Sound is moulded to mean this
And the measure moulds sound.iii
This is a translation from an archaic Chinese text, explaining that poetry is a voice out of nature which must be rendered humanly intelligible, so that people ca
n know how to live.
i. In 1970. See Francois Bordes, A Tale of Two Caves (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 62.
ii. That UNESCO thought Lascaux a hoax was conveyed to me by Mr. Lester Little-field, who was an official there at the time of the Abbé Breuil’s request.
iii. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California , 1971), p. 104
Finding
EVERY SUNDAY AFTERNOON OF MY CHILDHOOD, ONCE THE TEDIOUSNESS of Sunday school and the appalling boredom of church were over with, corrosions of the spirit easily salved by the roast beef, macaroni pie, and peach cobbler that followed them, my father loaded us all into the Essex, later the Packard, and headed out to look for Indian arrows. That was the phrase, “to look for Indian arrows.” Children detect nothing different in their own families: I can’t remember noticing anything extraordinary in our family being the only one I knew of that devoted every Sunday afternoon to amateur archaeology.
We took along, from time to time, those people who expressed an interest in finding Indian arrows. Most of them, I expect, wanted an excuse for an outing. We thought of all neighbors, friends, and business associates in terms of whether they were good company or utter nuisances on our expeditions. Surely all of my attitudes toward people were shaped here, all unknowing. I learned that there are people who see nothing, who would not have noticed the splendidest of tomahawks if they had stepped on it, who could not tell a worked stone from a shard of flint or quartz, people who did not feel the excitement of the whoop we all let out when we found an arrowhead or rim of pottery with painting or incised border on it, a pot leg, or those major discoveries which we remembered and could recite forever afterward, the finding of an intact pipe, perfect celt, or unbroken spearhead elegantly core-chipped, crenulated and notched as if finished yesterday. “I’ve found one!” the cry would go up from the slope of a knoll, from the reaches of a plowed field, a gully. One never ran over; that was bad form. One kept looking with feigned nonchalance, and if one’s search drew nigh the finder, it was permissible to ask to see. Daddy never looked at what other people found until we were back at the car. “Nice.” he would say, or “That’s really something.” Usually he grunted, for my sister and I would have a fistful of tacky quartz arrowheads, lumpish and halfheartedly worked. Or we would have a dubious pointed rock which we had made out to be an arrowhead and which Daddy would extract from our plunder and toss out the car window.
The Guy Davenport Reader Page 26