Julius Caesar: History, heterogeneity. (A satire of criticism, c. 2007)

Caesar inspired Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’, a poem told by five voices, and throughout it is marked by heterogeneity of discourse important (I speculate) to represent in small the rich breadth of historical experience. History’s people were of course as diverse as today’s, but dramatic portrayal tends to shrink them as allegorical walnut, leeching individuality for compression’s sake. Thus, in obviation, Shakespeare heterogenises his characters’ language by subtle inflecting of syntax and lexis. To say so is nothing new, but my argument, in trying to differentiate itself from previous, should modify slightly the sense of ‘heterogeneity’. Shakespeare’s ‘heterogeneity’ is not just ‘variety’, not just ‘dissimilarity’. Shakespeare forges difference by recognition of sameness; in each heterogeneous discourse are incorporated elements of parity with others, so as greater to realise the truth of heterogeneity, which is that things differ in the ways they are the same. You could colloquially say this is like ‘sleeping with the enemy’. Once you’ve understood that sameness must be the bass note of difference, as dramatist you’re well on the way to characters vitally, rather than irritably (or indeed mechanically), heterogeneous. And vitality lasts.

Murellus:

And when you saw his chariot but appear,
Have you not made an universal shout,
That Tiber trembled underneath her banks
To hear the replication of your sounds
Made in her concave shores?

And do you now cull out a holiday?
And do you now strew flowers in his way,
That comes in triumph over Pompey’s blood?

Pray to the gods to intermit the plague
That needs must light on this ingratitude.

Flavius:

Draw them to the Tiber banks, and weep your tears
Into the channel, till the lowest stream
Do kiss the most exalted shores of all.

They vanish tongue-tied in their guiltiness.

These growing feathers plucked from Caesar’s wing
Will make him fly an ordinary pitch
Who else would soar above the view of men,
And keep us all in servile fearfulness.

These tribunes of the play’s first scene might be assumed twins in language, but such is Shakespeare’s historical sensitivity that he heterogenises even trivial roles, like a hendiadys. Their principal similarity is of political rhetoric—bombastic, grandstanding, rather theatrically redolent of apocalypse. But they differ here too. For where Flavius inflates his rhetoric with grandiose, fantastical imagery, Murellus is calmer measured, keeping to simpler, earthbound tropes; even when invoking god his language stays in realms of tangible consequence. We see the tribunes fall back on similar images of the river (Murellus’ Tiber trembles; Flavius’ floods) but, because they are not identical twins but friends, Shakespeare filters each image through a heterogeneous conception of mind: Flavius’ ‘exalted shores’ are kissed by streams, where Murellus’ ‘concave shores’ hear the replication of ‘an universal shout’. Flavius’ ‘tongue-tied’ quite histrionically, with rhetor’s hyperbole, ‘vanish’. ‘cull out’, a Murellian verb form, is wholly unhistrionic, like his soldierly ‘comes in triumph over Pompey’s blood’, describing Caesar, where Flavius swells, ‘Who else would soar above the views of men, / And keep us all in servile fearfulness.’ The most evocative word Murellus can think of to end on is ‘ingratitude’. I’d hazard ‘Let no images / Be hung with Caesar’s trophies’ is his philosophy—though spoken by Flavius, his heterogeneous counterpart. To end glibly myself, on a soundbite (as if there were better ways to end): Shakespeare’s heterogeneity of history is more mellow fruitfulness than season of mists.

Notes to Milton

‘The mind is a terrible master.’

If God is infinite where is evil but in God?
What is will if the choice is rigged?
Since before he’d created us he’d created us
he knew his creatures would freely choose to eat.
‘All-good’ by God’s standard of good?
He chose to set a test he knew we’d fail.
History to him is a static image:
results of a game whose rules you guess.
We should obey what our free will to determine
determines the scripture enjoins we obey.
You discuss God as though a person
by turns, by turns as impenetrable cloud;
by virtue, always, of election to interpret
a book where all is implicit.
You fatten on things you learn:
under trial of things you play in thoughts.

These actually originate in notes to Part V of Christopher Hill. The epigraph is Wallace, almost.

Occasional II

Behind the gleeclub-in-recording, on the pink lastness,
Wanes an unsudden moon,
Subtlety:
A tramp not trying to shelter from sleet.

Occasional

An April Fool a day late
wins cloture on the bill
against a global currency.

O they who might have yachtless tacked the foam,
O who might have retooled
without the dollar the boardroom chairs

consider Bachmann, who was once random and small as due.

Economics

Prices are low because spirits are, to make them high again we have to raise spirits by raising prices.

The bankers lost all our money buying worthless things for trillions, so the economy's shrinking and we're all upset. To fix the problem we as a state have to borrow our future money (and print money) to give the banks (and to ourselves directly) so we don't lose all our money and so we exchange it with one another. We can afford to borrow our future money because in the future the economy will be growing, so we will have more money, because we will have exchanged with one another our future money, therefore will be happy.

When, because we're feeling better, we have money again, we will all feel better, perhaps as good as before, when we felt so good we lost our money, and became sad.

Celan, some versions

IRIE

That I have time to walk
across the crop stair,
that I have time, into your sleep
to walk the sleepscree,
time to cut grass
low on the land of the heart,
in the morning


YOU WERE my life:
you I could let go of
when everything swam here


AT THE rained-on waymark
little silence soapbox-hoarse:

as if you’d remembered, 
as if I knew that you had

re William Logan responds: (December)

Editor:

I write with regard to William Logan’s letter of Vol. 193.3, and with no stake in the controversy, since I have never seriously read Hart Crane. In fact I found the letter accidentally—I was browsing the magazine shelves—and without the internet would not have been able to read the writings of which it is a defence.

The letter, it seems to me, confirms Marjorie Perloff’s accusation that ‘Logan’s method consists of giving a few quotes […] and then declaring the poem in question a “dreadful mess.”’ I thought I should communicate my reasons for this judgement.

Logan takes fragments of Crane’s poetry and applies to them adjectives of disapproval: he does not make arguments for his descriptions’ validity. Here is an example, a random one from Adam Kirsch (The Modern Element, pp. 162–3), of evaluation backed by argument. Kirsch quotes Anthony Hecht in ‘The Man Who Married Magdalene’:

I have been in this bar
For close to seven days.
The dark girl over there,
For a modest dollar, lays.

And you can get a blow-job
Where other men have pissed
In the little room that’s sacred
To the Evangelist.

And responds:

While there is a moment of genuine scabrousness in these lines—the fleeting suggestion that the prostitute’s mouth is ‘where other men have pissed’—the poem’s other elements work against the potential shock. There is the odd use of the word ‘lays’, which is usually not transitive; there is the far-fetched joke about the Evangelist (the ‘John’). These things conspire to separate the author of the poem—ill at ease with slang, but familiar with the Bible—from its degraded speaker.

Note that Kirsch explains his description ‘odd’ with reference to grammar.

Logan refuses to make arguments like this. Instead, part of ‘Chaplinesque’ is ‘hapless and tone deaf’ and other parts are ‘schmaltz’. The Bridge’s ‘Proem’ is ‘stuffed with excesses of detail’: ‘inviolate’ is ‘religious’ (Logan dislikes it), ‘flailing’ is ‘empty rhetoric’ (if it is empty, is it ‘detail’ too?), ‘silver-paced’ is over-rich, ‘shrill’ and ‘cloud-flown’ are ‘melodrama’, ‘speechless’ falsely pious and ‘A jest falls from the speechless caravan’ ‘slightly nonsensical’; ‘scuttle’ and ‘white rings of tumult’ are overegged, ‘rip-tooth’ and ‘acetylene’ exaggerated and ‘bedlamite’ ‘wretched’.

In the following paragraph, Crane’s ‘Dirigible’ is an ‘ungainly symbol’, ‘ludicrously addressed’. The terms of this description (‘Cetus-like’ etc.) are not ‘exactly’ ‘obscure’, but are ‘childish and extravagant’ ‘rhetoric’ and ‘romantic goofiness’. Logan closes with the news that—where before he did ‘like’ ‘chained bay waters’—he is ‘not even keen’ on Crane’s symbol of the bridge. No justification for either feeling is attempted.

My objection is twofold. One, Logan never once argues the case for an adjective’s application to a phrase: he just puts them in apposition. The result is that we could swap them around without much damage to his sense. We could even apply them to his own writing. (What if I said that ‘stuffed’ is over-rich rhetoric, or that ‘wretched’ is a false exaggeration?) Two, Logan never argues why the fact that an adjective is, say, religious, means it is excess, or why any of these overeggings and exaggerations (which redundantly-varied terms beg his question) are in excess. There is no argument for his ‘stuffed with […] excesses’ point, only, in proximity, assertion, quotation and name-calling. A single Kirsch-like explanation would have been worth the whole list; indeed, to humiliate me here, all that Logan needs to do is provide one.

Logan may be right that ‘Criticism is the exercise of taste under the guise of objectivity’ (his response to Crane is certainly that of a critic-poet, and betrays experience with a poet’s drafting-process in its inexplicitly reasoned, aestheticised elections and rejections). The performance of this letter shows that, in shedding this guise, Logan has also neglected the work of persuasion. Logan is therefore ‘solipsistic’ in the weak sense of the word.


Two further points. Logan should know that when he states, ‘I could not find that two critics I admire, Christopher Ricks and Geoffrey Hill, had written much or anything about Crane’, this can prove nothing, as it would prove nothing for me to state that, although I am a fascinated reader of Hill, I do not understand his poem well enough to extract an opinion from it or to know that ‘you screwed us’ is not the speaker’s phrase. I could quote a different phrase, one that seems to say that Crane is a ‘prodigal who reclaimed us’, with as much justice.

Last, Logan’s moralising Wintersian subtext should not go unmentioned. He says: ‘Crane was the architect of his own grand disaster. The disaster of the life didn’t ennoble the art—it was responsible for the failure of the art.’ The question is, could no ‘disaster of the life’ (as Logan, under or out of ‘the guise of objectivity’, defines it) have been ‘responsible for the’ success ‘of the art’ (as Logan, out of ‘the guise of objectivity’, defines it)? The answer is unknowable: ‘disaster’ could have been a condition of the art’s possibility; it could, success or failure, have fed into it. To me, it’s evident that Logan is reasoning, whether or not he realises it, from a general premise along something like these lines: ‘Unvoracious sexual appetites, no self-indulgence, no alcoholism and no mental illness—plus maybe decongestants—are generally “responsible for” success “of the art”, that is success in art.’ It remains only to wonder, recognising duly and again that Logan is a poet and critic, whether this formula for success has worked for Logan himself.

Ps. Two relevant links.