But when we say that poetry is strange, we mean not that it is less than intelligible, but exactly the opposite: poetry is intelligibility heightened, strengthened, distilled to the point of astounding us; and also made manifold. Metaphor is intelligibility’s great imperative, its engine of radical amazement.
What is strange about poetry is what is most manifest: not so much the unpredictable surge of its music as the words of which it is made. Everyone uses words; from minute to minute, from a million million larynxes, a deluge of words falls on the air. And every word, spoken or written, has its own history, and is a magnet for cultural accretion. A poet has the same access to the language-pool as a tailor, an archaeologist, or a felon. How strange that, scooping up words from the selfsame pool that everyone else draws from, a poet will reconfigure, startle, and restart those words! How strange that what we call the norms of life—the findings of sociology, of anthropology, the common sense of common observations of nature: call it whatever you like—how strange that all these habits and pursuits poetry is said to be irrelevant to are precisely what poetry has the magisterial will and the intimate attentiveness to decode!
Let us come back to pots. I read, the other day, an essay on translation of the Analects of Confucius. One of these is recorded as follows: “A gentleman is not a pot.” Other renderings are: “A gentleman is not a utensil,” “A gentleman is not an implement.” This is taken to be a declaration on behalf of a generalized cultivation of insight as opposed to the specialist’s performance of a narrow concrete task. To those who insist that poetry is irrelevant to our common preoccupations, or that it contributes nothing “real” to society, one can only reply: Poetry is not a pot.
And poetry, because it is timeless, takes time. Let W. H. Auden have the last word on the things both infinite and infinitesimal that poetry is about:
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
A Swedish Novel
A confession of omission: The Christmas Oratorio, by Sweden’s celebrated Göran Tunström, is only the second Swedish novel I have ever read—the first was Pår Lagerkvist’s The Sibyl—and this alone is an anomaly, or possibly an indictment. Where, on my American bookshelves, are the Swedish novels? On the other hand, is it at all proper (I mean proper in a purely literary sense) to think of any novel as a work of national expression? A novel, after all, is one of the two blessèd forms (poetry is the other) that stand in opposition to generalization or co-optation. In a novel we encounter this woman, this child, this man. We are also led to this place: but place, though it may shape a human being, is almost always—for a novel—less than a human being. If I am enthralled by Moscow and Dublin, it is because that is where I have met Anna Karenina and Molly Bloom.
And so the question is inescapable: is there really such a thing as a “Swedish” novel, a “Russian” novel, an “American” novel? Is Göran Tunström a sort of summary or repository of the Swedish sensibility? Does national temperament inevitably inform a writer, or is every writer sui generis, an unduplicatable fingerprint, a unique force never to be replicated? In short: when I read The Christmas Oratorio, am I reading representative Swedish fiction, or—the difference counts—am I simply reading Göran Tunström?
The Christmas Oratorio (translated by Paul Hoover) is a lyrical novel; it instantly put me in mind of D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, another work of unashamedly high romantic song.
It was very still. The tree was tall and straggling. It had thrown its briers over a hawthorne-bush, and its long streamers trailed thick, right down to the grass, splashing the darkness everywhere with great spilt stars, pure white. In bosses of ivory and in large splashed stars the roses gleamed on the darkness of foliage and stems and grass. Paul and Miriam stood there together, silent, and watched. Point after point the steady roses shone out to them, seeming to kindle something in their souls.
That is Lawrence. Now here is a passage from Tunström.
He wanders over the field of oats, through the pasture land. Ends up standing, looking at something which, after a while, reveals itself as a stone, a cowpile, a dried branch. Slowly, if it happens at all, the properties glide out of the object, take form, put themselves in proper order, become one with their name. Often there is a white moment just before, which can last minutes, when the stone refuses to be a stone, when the hand refuses to be a hand, when one cannot die since one is not alive.
The difference between these scenes (read in or out of context) is self-evident. The first describes nature’s beauty made still more beautiful by the sensations of the two young lovers observing it. The second presents the natural world, lovely and innocently steadfast in itself, made strange and unreliable by the grief of a husband whose young wife has died in an accident.
But there is a difference far more crucial than any superficial disparity of narrative circumstance: what do we mean when we speak of a “poetic novel”? Lawrence’s poetry is a novelist’s poetry—it may be ripe, it may be voluptuous, but it is never phantasmagorical, it never flies off into an independent reverie, it is grounded at every moment in the reality and need of the scene in hand. (Seamus Heaney: “A grounded strength as well as a perfect tact.”) Tunström’s poetry, in contrast, almost instantly departs from the narrative center to sail upward to the meta-metaphorical: a “white moment” perforates reality, and through that hole in the curtain of our five senses “the properties glide out of the object.”
In The Christmas Oratorio Platonism rules, and the properties glide out of their objects again and again. The narrative is strong, the visionary flights have their gauzy beauty; but it is a beauty stripped of strength, furred by mist. A free-floating lyricism fogs over the palpable bodies and burning minds of the human actors in the tale, so that we can see them only dimly, as through a blemished window, and are shut off from their mental cues. Now and then the poetry settles, like crystal deposits, and the fog clears; and then we know what is there.
And what is there is a series of country tragedies that spread to the other side of the planet, entangling three idiosyncratic generations. Sidner, an inward and precocious farm boy, gives his mother’s bicycle a push as she heads downhill to the church to rehearse Bach; the bicycle crashes into a cow and Solveig is killed. Aron, Sidner’s father, is inconsolable, and moves his orphaned family into town to take a job in a hotel. The town seethes with strangeness: a child named Splendid, a genial type of Huck Finn; the hotel’s Sauce Queen; and even an imaginary and forlorn Selma Lagerlöf, riding a raft. Sidner, who loves books and music, is seduced in his teens by an eccentric older woman; she gives birth to his son. And meanwhile Aron, in a hallucinatory overseas correspondence, comes to believe that Solveig has been returned to him in the form of an odd young woman in far-off New Zealand. On the ship carrying him there, Aron throws himself overboard and drowns. Sidner, yearning to know his little son and kept away, falls into temporary madness; ultimately he follows his father’s track across the sea. The novel ends in the voice of Sidner’s grown son. Ordinary life is extraordinary, and hard.
All this is the spine, so to speak, of The Christmas Oratorio—and by “spine” nothing remotely like plot is intended. There is no plot, but there is something eerier: call it destiny. Or call it teleology: a sense of universal purpose to which mortals are blind. Events fall out as naturally and arbitrarily, and yet as astonishingly, as leaves from a tree in autumn. Göran Tunström is a master of earthly truths.
But he is a writer powerfully tempted by the unearthly: “And unseen I went by, inside a huge scream.… Someone had lost a mirror in the moss by the shore. My eye was caught by it, deep down I saw how my tears fell upward toward me.” And: “What flickering flames we are. How easily darkness washes over us, extinguishing our lives. It is a wonder that we exist at all.” And: “As soon as I turn my dwarfish eyes to God, trying to define him, he disa
ppears, becoming manifest everywhere he is not. His absence is the prerequisite for his existence.” And, to cap the rest: “You wanted to know what it’s like to write a book. It’s exhausting! It’s like forcing yourself over a desert.… But then you come to an oasis: words pour out, every leaf opens, everything wants to become poetry.”
And just here is the difficulty: in a novel not everything wants to become poetry. Nor does a novel’s everything want to be coated with the silvery blur of the unearthly, the magical, the legendary, the wistful, the dreamlike. A novel—any novel, Swedish, English, French, Russian, Italian, American, Japanese—cries out for structure: the structure, one might venture, of society itself. The novel, after all, was born out of societal experience. Modernism turned it subjective, introspective. But introspection let loose into the purely visionary is in danger of losing so much perspective that it will become indistinguishable from sentimentality. What I miss in The Christmas Oratorio is social bite, something more stringent than the merely bizarre; irony, one of the deep gifts of the Western mind; and finally the sense that, often enough, a stone is really a stone and a hand no more than a hand. Too much metaphor overloads us with softness. And Göran Tunström, in all the wisdom of his hard lives, knows profoundly that the human condition is anything but soft.
She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body
An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion in it, you need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay has no educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play. Though it is written in prose, it is closer in kind to poetry than to any other form. Like a poem, a genuine essay is made out of language and character and mood and temperament and pluck and chance.
And if I speak of a genuine essay, it is because fakes abound. Here the old-fashioned term poetaster may apply, if only obliquely. As the poetaster is to the poet—a lesser aspirant—so the article is to the essay: a look-alike knockoff guaranteed not to wear well. An article is gossip. An essay is reflection and insight. An article has the temporary advantage of social heat—what’s hot out there right now. An essay’s heat is interior. An article is timely, topical, engaged in the issues and personalities of the moment; it is likely to be stale within the month. In five years it will have acquired the quaint aura of a rotary phone. An article is Siamese-twinned to its date of birth. An essay defies its date of birth, and ours too. (A necessary caveat: some genuine essays are popularly called “articles”—but this is no more than an idle, though persistent, habit of speech. What’s in a name? The ephemeral is the ephemeral. The enduring is the enduring.)
A small historical experiment. Who are the classical essayists that come at once to mind? Montaigne, obviously. Among the nineteenth-century English masters, the long row of Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, Stevenson, Carlyle, Ruskin, Newman, Arnold, Harriet Martineau. Of the Americans, Emerson. It may be argued that nowadays these are read only by specialists and literature majors, and by the latter only when they are compelled to. However accurate the claim, it is irrelevant to the experiment, which has to do with beginnings and their disclosures. Here, then, are some introductory passages:
One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I like to go by myself. I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when alone.
—William Hazlitt, “On Going a Journey”
To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature”
I have often been asked how I first came to be a regular opium eater; and have suffered, very unjustly, in the opinion of my acquaintance, from being reputed to have brought upon myself all the sufferings which I shall have to record, by a long course of indulgence in this practice purely for the sake of creating an artificial state of pleasurable excitement. This, however, is a misrepresentation of my case.
—Thomas De Quincey, “Confessions of an English Opium Eater”
The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow, and the men who lend.
—Charles Lamb, “The Two Races of Men”
I saw two hareems in the East; and it would be wrong to pass them over in an account of my travels; though the subject is as little agreeable as any I can have to treat. I cannot now think of the two mornings thus employed without a heaviness of heart greater than I have ever brought away from Deaf and Dumb Schools, Lunatic Asylums, or even Prisons.
—Harriet Martineau, “From Eastern Life”
The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve.… But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion.
—Matthew Arnold, “The Study of Poetry”
The changes wrought by death are in themselves so sharp and final, and so terrible and melancholy in their consequences, that the thing stands alone in man’s experience, and has no parallel upon earth. It outdoes all other accidents because it is the last of them. Sometimes it leaps suddenly upon its victims, like a Thug; sometimes it lays a regular siege and creeps upon their citadel during a score of years. And when the business is done, there is a sore havoc made in other people’s lives, and a pin knocked out by which many subsidiary friendships hung together.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, “Aes Triplex”
It is recorded of some people, as of Alexander the Great, that their sweat, in consequence of some rare and extraordinary constitution, emitted a sweet odor, the cause of which Plutarch and others investigated. But the nature of most bodies is the opposite, and at their best they are free from smell. Even the purest breath has nothing more excellent than to be without offensive odor, like that of very healthy children.
—Michel de Montaigne, “Of Smells”
What might such a little anthology of beginnings reveal? First, that language differs from one era to the next: there are touches of archaism here, if only in punctuation and cadence. Second, that splendid minds may contradict each other (outdoors, Hazlitt never feels alone; Emerson urges the opposite). Third, that the theme of an essay can be anything under the sun, however trivial (the smell of sweat) or crushing (the thought that we must die). Fourth, that the essay is a consistently recognizable and venerable—or call it ancient—form. In English: Addison and Steele in the eighteenth century, Bacon and Browne in the seventeenth, Lyly in the sixteenth, Bede in the eighth. And what of the biblical Koheleth—Ecclesiastes—who may be the oldest essayist reflecting on one of the oldest subjects: world-weariness?
So the essay is ancient and various: but this is a commonplace. There is something else, and it is more striking yet—the essay’s power. By “power” I mean precisely the capacity to do what force always does: coerce assent. Never mind that the shape and inclination of any essay is against coercion or suasion, or that the essay neither proposes nor purposes to get you to think like its author—at least not overtly. If an essay has a “motive,” it is linked more to happenstance and opportunity than to the driven will. A genuine essay is not a doctrinaire tract or a propaganda effort or a broadside. Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” and Emile Zola’s “J’accuse” are heroic landmark writings; but to call them essays, though they may resemble the form, is to misunderstand. The essay is not meant for the barricades; it is a stroll through someone’s mazy mind. Yet this is not to say that there has never been an essayist morally intent on making an argument, however obliquely—George Orwell is a case in point. At the end of the day, the essay turns out to be a force
for agreement. It co-opts agreement; it courts agreement; it seduces agreement. For the brief hour we give to it, we are sure to fall into surrender and conviction. And this will occur even if we are intrinsically roused to resistance.
To illustrate: I may not be persuaded by Emersonianism as an ideology, but Emerson—his voice, his language, his music—persuades me. When we look for superlatives, not for nothing do we speak of “commanding” or “compelling” prose. If I am a skeptical rationalist or an advanced biochemist, I may regard (or discard) the idea of the soul as no better than a puff of warm vapor. But here is Emerson on the soul: “when it breathes through [man’s] intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love.” And then—well, I am in thrall, I am possessed; I believe.
The novel has its own claims on surrender. It suspends our participation in the society we ordinarily live in, so that—for the time we are reading—we forget it utterly. But the essay does not allow us to forget our usual sensations and opinions; it does something even more potent: it makes us deny them. The authority of a masterly essayist—the authority of sublime language and intimate observation—is absolute. When I am with Hazlitt, I know no greater companion than nature. When I am with Emerson, I know no greater solitude than nature.
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