Let Omeros be what it is, the masterwork, and let Homer serve.
--C.L. Nepaulsingh
That the work called Omeros by Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, is a work of genius is not debatable; however, that the work offers a theory, or rather a framework (private and public space) on how to be and remain relevant is. This brief paper will examine such broad themes as memory, exile and hell and ironically attempt to contradict what Walcott himself has stated: “I find theory exasperating. And I find a confident theory even more exasperating.” Especially, as I will argue, how Walcott’s Omeros functions within such a self-assuring exercise in memory and/or craft re-telling. Like Dante’s Virgil then, Omeros will be my guide, my pseudo-Muse and my judge.
To begin, Omeros is a rather lengthy poem compartmentalized into seven books. Within each book are further sections compartmentalized into their respective chapters and sub-sections per chapter labeled via roman numerals. Moreover, Omeros is structured into tercets, which resemble the terzina used by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) though Walcott uses the hexameter rhythm of classical epic. The point here is that Walcott recognizes the classical past, but is a master of the free verse form. The poem opens like one recalling a far-off event with the aid of language. This can be considered a type of craft telling via the use of memory, that romantic agent of history that engages both the past and present and relies on the rhizomporphic to tell its tale. After all, the poet’s language is anything but linear and static; his work then, is itself polysemic. For instance, take the following passage from Omeros Book One, Chapter I, sub-section I:
“This is how, one sunrise, we cut down them canoes.”
Philoctete smiles for the tourists, who try taking
his soul with their cameras. “Once wind bring the news
to the laurier-cannelles, their leaves start shaking
the minute the axe of sunlight hit the cedars,
because they could see the axes in our own eyes.
[…] I lift the axe and pray for strength in my hands
to wound the first cedar. Dew was filling my eyes,
but I fire one more white rum. Then we advance.” (3)
The word play of “axe” and “axes” alone is enough to keep the critic busy turning and folding the word and its meaning and its [con]text on itself. Moreover, reading the “x” from a creolized language set offers an increase in the semantic circle of “axe” as “ask” and “axes” as “access”. Movement is also evident in these few opening lines: sunrise, wind bring, leaves…shaking, and of course, then we advance. To complete the circuit and cycle of progression from sunrise and sunlight, Walcott’s final lines at the end of the poem offer us the darkness, the shadow. This is the opposite from where we began our reading odyssey. In Book Seven, Chapter LXIV, sub-section III:
[…] The nets were closing their eyes,
sagging on bamboo poles near the concrete depot.
In the standpipe’s sandy trough aching Achilles
washed sand from his heels, then tightened the brass spigot
to its last drop. An immense lilac emptiness
settled the sea. He sniffed his name in one armpit.
He scraped dry scales off his hands.
[…] Night was fanning its coalpot
from one catching star. The No Pain lit its doors
in the village. Achille put the wedge of dolphin
that he’d saved for Helen in Hector’s rusty tin.
A full moon shone like a slice of raw onion.
When he left the beach the sea was still going on. (324-25)
Of interest here, is not only how the “Night” and “full moon” contrast the earlier “sunrise” and “sunlight,” but how “axes in our own eyes” have become “The nets were closing their eyes” (324). What better way to convey the circular and spiraling dynamism of the poem, its non-static language and secondary epic framework than “the sea was still going on” (325). Moreover, the poem which opens in media res is reminiscent of Dante’s fourteenth century Commedia. We note:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
che la diritta via era smarrita. (Canto I: 1-3)
Dante here recalls a time, a place and space where reflection, much like a dark forest, is best represented as middle age; i.e. Dante is re-telling via craft how his memory, a personal and private entity made public, is relevant as well as immortal. Otherwise, his tale is merely, at best, a glorified mid-life crisis in print taking on secondary epic characteristics. Neither Walcott nor Dante are doing this. In both cases, the craft is genius—period. For instance, note how the subject of woods as a dark, public space is privileged in both, but reaffirms Walcott’s play mechanism throughout Omeros. Our analysis of the poem’s rich language and progressive movement, arguably, is best reflected in Achille’s hallucinatory [re]turn to an Africa from memory, from exile and descends much like Dante and Virgil did in Il Inferno.
Walcott begins Achille’s journey to his ancestral home by [re-]writing the epic motif of journeying toward the underworld in classic mythlore fashion. The narrative, the story-telling begins in Book Three, Chapter XXV where: “Mangroves, their ankles in water, walked with the canoe. / The swift, racing its browner shadow, screeched, then veered / into a dark inlet. It was the last sound Achille knew” (I.133). Achille continues to float in this manner until: “He saw the first signs of men, tall sapling fishing-stakes; / he came into his own beginning and end, / for the swiftness of a second is all that memory takes” (I.134). Achille, attempting to make carnal sense of a rather spiritual experience, once more relies on memory, what I have called earlier in this paper as that romantic agent of history that engages both the past and present. Walcott pens, in answer to the naming ceremony and an exilic identity, or misnaming, the following from Achille:
What would it be? I can only tell you what I believe,
or had to believe. It was prediction, and memory,
to bear myself back, to be carried here by a swift,
or the shadow of a swift making its cross on water,
with the same sign I was blessed with, with the gift
of this sound whose meaning I still do not care to know.
(Chapter XXV.III.138)
If sound is lost to Achille, and Walcott’s Afolabe asks: “And therefore, Achille, if I pointed and I said, There / is the name of that man, that tree, and this father, / would every sound be a shadow that crossed your ear” (III.138) how can his response be anything other than what he mentions. One could argue that Walcott, who held confident theorists, those agents who argue concrete points with the mixing materials of mist, air and liquid vocabulary, in some ill repute is demonstrating the fickleness of meaning, of understanding even one’s identity. For Achille, there is no mask to hide behind and we get his rather in your face response: “…I still do not care to know” (138). Forget the question: why not? Of stronger interest is the how of his arrival. That is, his floating and drifting and recalling of events that cater to his frame, his person is solely centered on two things: “prediction” and “memory,” respectively. Ah, but herein lies the rub. Walcott, who has been crafting a genuine secondary epic as well as not constructing a secondary epic has given Afolabe the unifying voice and strand, which unifies this paper and the poem at large. As Walcott “can only tell” us what he believes, and confidently so, his theory of epic/non-epic is Omeros. In other words, it is and is not Homer; Philoctete is and is not Philoctetes; Helen is and is not Helen; Achille is and is not Achilles. From the rising of the sun, until the going down of the same—the name of Omeros is to be praised. Put another way, what began in sunrise and sunlight and moved toward Night and full moon has not lost its identity, but has remained. After theory has had its say then, Omeros still remains; Achille still remains. Like memory, they exist in fragments that at once demand a fitting, but not a classification; a borrowed taxonomy for the moment of a moment. They live out in the shadows of mimetic use manipulated by like or as. In the words of Afolabe then:
No man loses his shadow except it is in the night,
and even then his shadow is hidden, not lost. At the glow
of sunrise, he stands on his own name in that light.
[…] and you look through
my body as the light looks through a leaf. I am not here
or a shadow. And you, nameless son, are only the ghost
of a name. Why did I never miss you until you returned?
Why haven’t I missed you, my son, until you were lost?
Are you the smoke from a fire that never burned?
There was no answer to this, as in life. Achille nodded,
the tears glazing his eyes, where the past was reflected
as well as the future. The white foam lowered its head. (XXV.III.138-39)
Walcott has tied together in the afore state passage the elements of memory, exilic identity and the loss of self as perhaps Dantean concentric circles of hell. As Dante and Virgil travel the nine or so rings, likewise Achille travels, with Walcott as Narrator, down similar circles, or layers of memory via “eyes, where the past was reflected as well as the future” (139).
Raoul Granqvist, in his essay “Does It Matter Why Walcott Received the Prize?” positions the poet Walcott in terms of a “slippery and disobedient postcolonial writer” (151). His description of Walcott is further problematized by James V. Morrison’s “Homer Travels to the Caribbean: Teaching Walcott’s Omeros,” which looks to teach the work and the poet under the tag of mythologist. This shift within some critical circles to catalog and classify Derek Walcott, and in this case, his Omeros, under a conventional banner proves just how unattainable such exercises prove to be. That is, Walcott will remain relevant because he is not easily labeled—period. At the onset of this paper, I mentioned the position of Walcott’s Omeros as a work on relevance. In the words of Morrison who teaches Omeros in a mythology college class:
My goal is to encourage others to consider the possibility of introducing this work into a variety of Classics in Translation courses, most easily those dealing with
epic, mythology, the Trojan War, or the classical tradition. Omeros not only offers
a valuable study in literary and mythological allusion, but also provides
discussion regarding the persistence of the classical tradition and the relevance of
the classical world today. (83)
This point on relevance comes full circle when the author of this present paper is himself part St. Lucian, who grew up on an island called St. Croix in the West Indies and is studying and publishing in the field(s) of Medieval Studies Literature. As I continue to discover my craft, whether it is literary critic or literary theorist, I hope to be labeled amongst those who defy classification, who defy category. For Walcott, Omeros has kept him relevant to the Classics world and beyond, and in doing so, continues to exasperate present and future critics.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Cadence, [In]Appropriate Laughter in Sir Orfeo
The role of music is benign, its ability to present an abridgment between different races, different worlds is anything but; i.e. music actively seeks out in rather outrageous forms no less, an order and a structure. If music is the medium, then perhaps its best genre is poetry; specifically, the re-written myth of Orpheus in the Middle English Breton Lai, Sir Orfeo. Indeed, the monstrous presents itself in the abduction of a queen figure named Dame Herodis, and at the playing of music by a skilled interpreter of such a force, a re-capturing, or a series of “taken moments” take place. That is, Dame Herodis as both female property and female submission is taken from king Orfeo, and taken to become the property of the King of the Faeries; then, through weeping, wilderness exile and bold music playing, she is taken by, and returned to, her original master, Orfeo. As lays often end in a happy-go-lucky sensibility, this poem falls in line, but at what costs; i.e. what atrocities are laid bare between the worlds, the middles of Orfeo’s realm and Faerie-land.
The fourteenth century Middle English Breton Lai known as Sir Orfeo presents such ideas and events, which are surrounded by music and its (un)willing players. In this short analysis paper, I hope to suggest that music underscores much of the events and acts as a catalyst to the poem’s narrative technique; further, and as an aside, the role of misplaced laughter presents the differences of faerie-land and this world (wild-erness vs. seigniorial civilization and standard), thereby suggesting a necessary medium to bridge the two. Moreover, M/music does this, and Orfeo’s famed harp-playing reaffirms this: no matter the circumstance or unrest, music brings about a re-ordering, a need for established normativities (whatever these may be). What follows then are some selections from the text taken from the South-east poem (around the London area) with warranted commentary throughout. Because of the nature of the text itself, poetic selections are lengthy, but are not gratuitously-used; i.e. all selections are necessary, though non-exhaustive.
To begin, the poem opens with introductory matter concerning music and the lays that are composed from them. We read its learned genesis in the first ten lines as:
We redeth oft and findeth y-write,
And this clerkes wele it wite,
Layes that ben in harping
Ben y-founde of ferli thing:
Sum bethe of wer and sum of wo,
And sum of joie and mirthe also,
And sum of trecherie and of gile,
Of old aventours that fel while;
And sum of bourdes and ribaudy,
And mani ther beth of fairy.
These lines tell of themes and the impact such lays may have had on the listener, the participant at large; still, they offer more than this when music as a medium of “civil” negotiations is layered within. And of such binary themes as: “wer and … wo,” “of joie and mirthe,” and even “of trecherie and … of gile” music seamlessly intermingles, interferes and brings about a resolution, a civil decree when love is in[ter]jected. Take lines 11 and 12, respectively. It follows that: “Of al thinges that men seth, / Mest o love, forsothe, they beth,” and again of this we cry, indeed! That Orfeo is a king and a skilled harpist, we are made aware rather quickly. As the narrative continues, he exchanges his kingly estate for a time and goes into exile. Yet, how does this come about exactly? We pick up the selection here, with following commentary:
Bifel so in the comessing of May
When miri and hot is the day,
And oway beth winter schours,
And everi feld is ful of flours,
And blosme breme on everi bough
Over al wexeth miri anought,
This ich quen, Dame Heurodis
Tok to maidens of priis,
And went in an undrentide
To play bi an orchardside,
To se the floures sprede and spring
And to here the foules sing.
Thai sett hem doun al thre
Under a fair ympe-tre,
And wel sone this fair quene
Fel on slepe opon the grene. (lines 57-72)
The poet sets up a rather pleasant scene with seemingly innocent motives “To play bi an orchardside,” and again, “To se the floures sprede and spring,” and once more, “to here the foules sing” (66-8). A trinitarian motif can be recognized here, in conjunction with, the pleasure(s) the natural senses afford; i.e. Dame Herodis is seeking an experience that comes with the “comessing of May”; and, to “play,” to “se,” and to “here” she feels this can be brought about. Of interest, is though her rhetoric embodies an active resolve, her body seeks, or rather turns to idleness. She sleeps, never fulfilling her desires (at least not on this side of the world, the English realm side). The “orchardside” is still within the borderlines of English rule, and moreover under her king’s command. Yet, with her “to maidens of priis,” Dame Herodis, “this ich quen,” looks for rest to fulfill her idle wishes. The narrative suggests: “Thai sett hem doun al thre / Under a fair ympe-tre” (70). Now, before we ask what exactly is an “ympe-tre,” a better inquiry might be what exactly is a “fair ympe-tre”? Is it possible that the manuscript suggested that it was a “fairy ympe-tree”? I am not sure, but I find it rather interesting that even J. R. R. Tolkien’s translation of “ympe-tre” as “grafted tree,” is not a sufficient substitute. Recall, this point of sleep under some sort of tree presents the king of England with his exilic terms and specific forest wanderings, which lasted ten years. How can the “quen” be innocent as she sometimes is held? She who sat down to listen to a natural chorus, the “foules sing” a melody pleasing to her desires and her senses, is to blame for her own abduction because of her idle tendency. Arguably, there is more to it than this, but this present project does not take up such arms. Instead, let us shift into what happened to the “quen” when she awoke. The implications of falling asleep in this world and wandering in the other, only to arise with a strong malady of madness is provocative and sets up an aggressive need for restoration, for order. This is a restoration that only music can accomplish, and more so—one that its greatest wielder can only perform.
The rhetoric of the “comessing May / When miri and hot is the day” quickly turns into an idleness that offers a “quen” who: So sche slepe til after none, / That undertide was al y-done” (75-6). As Herodis comes to, she awakens only to offer her readers, her interpreters no means to decipher her plight. She now offers anxiety to a world that has no way to interact with her, and this anxiety, this (dis)ease will spread and metastasize to include the entire kingdom once Sir Orfeo departs. We follow the malignant text of Herdois’s nightmare here:
Ac, as sone as sche gan awake,
Sche crid, and lothli bere gan make;
Sche froted hir honden and hir fete,
And crached hir visage - it bled wete -
Hir riche robe hye al to-rett
And was reveyd out of hir wit. (77-82)
Dame Herodis in a panicked state cannot function within normal parameters in the English realm. Why? She has visited another world and cannot articulate, or rather translate such an experience into her awakened state. She in part, has become a member of the other realm, the other world, and as such proceeds to disfigure her frame with a shredded face and equally torn clothes. Simply, she is unfit for this world and has become monstrous. Put another way, to be “out of hir wit,” suggests that she is fitted elsewhere, and the conventions of this (England) realm, she can no longer follow. The news of her malady travels to Sir Orfeo who is told by Herodis of her inevitable “taking,” or capture. Orfeo, thinking like one who does “fit” within his realm proceeds to defend his property, his “quen” from any and all abductions. The harpist-king then replies as follows:
"O we!" quath he, "Allas, allas!
Lever me were to lete mi liif
Than thus to lese the quen, mi wiif!"
He asked conseyl at ich man,
Ac no man him help no can.
Amorwe the undertide is come
And Orfeo hath his armes y-nome,
And wele ten hundred knightes with him,
Ich y-armed, stout and grim;
And with the quen wenten he
Right unto that ympe-tre.
Thai made scheltrom in ich a side
And sayd thai wold there abide
And dye ther everichon,
Er the quen schuld fram hem gon. (176-90)
As we know it is to no avail, and as the “quen” is taken from their fortified midst, it is accomplished via unconventional means to the English realm; namely, it is done “With fairi forth y-nome” (l. 193). Yes, magique of the faeries is used, and like music is tangible to no one, it too slips through from one world to the next. This event precipitates the mimicked loss of mind and masculine stature privy to king Orfeo; i.e. he loses his identity because the woman, who was not only “quen,” also made him king; moreover, her absence creates a loss that Orfeo cannot take or interpret. The poem presents the following narrative:
The king into his chaumber is go,
And oft swoned opon the ston,
And made swiche diol and swiche mon
That neighe his liif was y-spent -
Ther was non amendement. (196-200)
Exile is the only choice left to Orfeo, and the wilderness becomes his space for harp-playing, for music practice. I will not take the time here to describe some provocative themes associated with this exile per se; i.e. the hierarchy that exists within the English realm and the Faerie-way are not so different even though their geo-political space is altered, different and middled into distinctions of high and low. Still, of interest is how the faerie-men who go hunting with their King Fearie, do so—but do not kill. In some capacity, it is nothing more than a mock-hunt. Orfeo, now living in the forest for some time and playing his harp (when the weather suits him), observes the faerie king’s hunting behavior. The narrative does not privilege an emotional response from the exilic monarch until he looks onto the faerie-women who go “a-hawkin” and actually kill. The poem offers, and I quote it here at length:
Lord! who may telle the sore
This king sufferd ten yere and more?
His here of his berd, blac and rowe,
To his girdel-stede was growe.
His harp, whereon was al his gle,
He hidde in an holwe tre;
And when the weder was clere and bright,
He toke his harp to him wel right
And harped at his owhen wille.
Into alle the wode the soun gan schille,
That alle the wilde bestes that ther beth
For joie abouten him thai teth,
And alle the foules that ther were
Come and sete on ich a brere
To here his harping a-fine -
So miche melody was therin;
And when he his harping lete wold,
No best bi him abide nold. (263-80)
And on a day he seighe him biside
Sexti levedis on hors ride,
Gentil and jolif as brid on ris;
Nought o man amonges hem ther nis;
And ich a faucoun on hond bere,
And riden on haukin bi o rivere.
Of game thai founde wel gode haunt -
Maulardes, hayroun, and cormeraunt;
The foules of the water ariseth,
The faucouns hem wele deviseth;
Ich faucoun his pray slough -
That seigh Orfeo, and lough:
"Parfay!" quath he, "ther is fair game; (303-15)
Combined, the selections privileged above, examine the role of a suffering king, exile as an answer to such suffering and in an other world—women, who behave like men and follow through with their hunt. Orfeo does not understand this, and recall—he has been in this exilic estate, in this wilderness through hardship after hardship; loss after loss; and even reflects, a disfigured self. Arguably, it is not until he appears as monstrous, disfigured that he then “sees” the “playing” of the faeries and “hears” the minstrelsy, the music. What is his response to all of this: “That seigh Orfeo, and lough: / "Parfay!" quath he, "ther is fair game” (314-15). The role of laughter is anything but funny and humorous here. What exactly is the position of laughter here? Why laugh exactly? If laughter, like music is a type of force, expelled from the self and brought to public awareness, what then does it reveal about its wielder, and how can laughter explain such a scene? Admittedly, the inquiries I raise here act as a congeries on the emotional appeal offered by the text, but also by a modern interpreter of such a text. Yet, and more importantly, women who hunt and kill and men who hunt, but do not kill presents a level of anxiety where roles are in reverse—if not entirely backward. Is this a place then where magic can be used? Yes. Orfeo’s laughter makes sense to him only; it does not make sense to the reader, the interpreter of the text. Still, he has caught site of this “weird” event and follows the female retinue to the land of the faeries, the flat-lands equipped with bright and shiny things: gold, red gold, et cetera. Orfeo makes a crucial and bold observation: in a land where Faerie magic and its inhabitants differ from the English realm, music is common to both. Orfeo notices:
And otherwile he seighe other thing:
Knightes and levedis com daunceing
In queynt atire, gisely,
Queynt pas and softly;
Tabours and trunpes yede hem bi,
And al maner menstraci. (297-303)
This is still, in many respects, a place, a space—where he may indeed still fit. His approach into the castle where King Faerie abides produces one of the more intriguing dialogues of “keeping one’s word,” or oath-telling as well as the ultimate privilege and power of music, and of its wielder. Music as a force to rival difference(s) of race (English and Faerie), of opinion, of custom, and to some extent of control can be seen here. This will be our final commentary, but it is our strongest claim: music is not benign, and its wielder—a force, to be reckoned with on matters of order, of re-capture and of re-ordering. The text offers:
When he was in the roche y-go,
Wele thre mile other mo,
He com into a fair cuntray
As bright so sonne on somers day,
Smothe and plain and al grene -
Hille no dale nas ther non y-sene.
Amidde the lond a castel he sighe,
Riche and real and wonder heighe. (349-356)
And when he hadde bihold this mervails alle,
He went into the kinges halle.
Than seighe he ther a semly sight,
A tabernacle blisseful and bright,
Therin her maister king sete
And her quen, fair and swete.
Her crounes, her clothes schine so bright
That unnethe bihold he him might.
When he hadde biholden al that thing,
He kneled adoun bifor the king:
"O lord," he seyd, "yif it thi wille were,
Mi menstraci thou schust y-here."
The king answered, "What man artow,
That art hider y-comen now?
Ich, no non that is with me,
No sent never after the.
Sethen that ich here regni gan,
Y no fond never so folehardi man
That hider to ous durst wende
Bot that ic him wald ofsende."
"Lord," quath he, "trowe ful wel,
Y nam bot a pover menstrel;
And, sir, it is the maner of ous
To seche mani a lordes hous -
Thei we nought welcom no be,
Yete we mot proferi forth our gle."
Bifor the king he sat adoun
And tok his harp so miri of soun,
And tempreth his harp, as he wele can,
And blisseful notes he ther gan,
That al that in the palays were
Com to him forto here,
And liggeth adoun to his fete -
Hem thenketh his melody so swete.
The king herkneth and sitt ful stille;
To here his gle he hath gode wille.
Gode bourde he hadde of his gle;
The riche quen also hadde he.
When he hadde stint his harping,
Than seyd to him the king,
"Menstrel, me liketh wel thi gle.
Now aske of me what it be,
Largelich ichil the pay; (409-51)
With such a position of favor, Orfeo in playing his harp soothes not only beasts of the field and animals, but even the King Faerie himself, and gets to choose a gift to boot! This can only happen because of music and the skilled music player. The re-ordering taking place here suggests that Herodis is both prize and fault. That is, she is to blame for her idleness and the king’s exilic wandering(s), but she is also part of the solution. What then is lost, is now found and taken back. The Faerie King reluctantly gives her up, and the story is to end in a happier state with all things returned. This presents an argument for music-playing and music-listening (i.e. those who appreciate and know good music when they hear it) as an instrument for expressed normativity. Yet, even this is ordered through the medium of harp-playing, of music wielded by a master. It is Orfeo who sets about to prove he is indeed just that—Orfeo, the harp-king:
And Orfeo sat stille in the halle
And herkneth; when thai ben al stille,
He toke his harp and tempred schille;
The blissefulest notes he harped there
That ever ani man y-herd with ere -
Ich man liked wele his gle.
The steward biheld and gan y-se,
And knewe the harp als blive. (524-531)
Tho all tho that therin sete
That it was King Orfeo underyete,
And the steward him wele knewe -
Over and over the bord he threwe,
And fel adoun to his fet;
So dede everich lord that ther sete,
And all thai seyd at o criing:
"Ye beth our lord, sir, and our king!"
Glad thai were of his live; (575-83)
Now King Orfeo newe coround is,
And his quen, Dame Heurodis,
And lived long afterward,
And sethen was king the steward.
Harpours in Bretaine after than
Herd hou this mervaile bigan,
And made herof a lay of gode likeing,
And nempned it after the king.
That lay "Orfeo" is y-hote;
Gode is the lay, swete is the note.
Thus com Sir Orfeo out of his care:
God graunt ous alle wele to fare! Amen! (593-604)
And as Breton Lais are short and sweet, the poem Sir Orfeo conforms to this appellation quite well. Sir Orfeo as conductor of symphonic ordering uses music to bring about the structure and the fitting of an English realm, troubled by the difference faeries present. In the end, however, such an ordering does not only take place, it showcases the very privilege of music as common structure and scaffold building to otherwise, disruptive and perhaps competing realms. Music truly offers the playing, the seeing and the hearing, and now the re-ordering of disparate tastes and sensibilities where theft and transgression of boundaries are no longer necessary. Exile, that agent of space displacement, and laughter, that agent of (in)appropriate response, when middled with music offers provocative and aggressive readings as I have argued in a non-exhaustive manner here. Sir Orfeo, at best then, offers as exemplum the critic such interpretive activities.
The fourteenth century Middle English Breton Lai known as Sir Orfeo presents such ideas and events, which are surrounded by music and its (un)willing players. In this short analysis paper, I hope to suggest that music underscores much of the events and acts as a catalyst to the poem’s narrative technique; further, and as an aside, the role of misplaced laughter presents the differences of faerie-land and this world (wild-erness vs. seigniorial civilization and standard), thereby suggesting a necessary medium to bridge the two. Moreover, M/music does this, and Orfeo’s famed harp-playing reaffirms this: no matter the circumstance or unrest, music brings about a re-ordering, a need for established normativities (whatever these may be). What follows then are some selections from the text taken from the South-east poem (around the London area) with warranted commentary throughout. Because of the nature of the text itself, poetic selections are lengthy, but are not gratuitously-used; i.e. all selections are necessary, though non-exhaustive.
To begin, the poem opens with introductory matter concerning music and the lays that are composed from them. We read its learned genesis in the first ten lines as:
We redeth oft and findeth y-write,
And this clerkes wele it wite,
Layes that ben in harping
Ben y-founde of ferli thing:
Sum bethe of wer and sum of wo,
And sum of joie and mirthe also,
And sum of trecherie and of gile,
Of old aventours that fel while;
And sum of bourdes and ribaudy,
And mani ther beth of fairy.
These lines tell of themes and the impact such lays may have had on the listener, the participant at large; still, they offer more than this when music as a medium of “civil” negotiations is layered within. And of such binary themes as: “wer and … wo,” “of joie and mirthe,” and even “of trecherie and … of gile” music seamlessly intermingles, interferes and brings about a resolution, a civil decree when love is in[ter]jected. Take lines 11 and 12, respectively. It follows that: “Of al thinges that men seth, / Mest o love, forsothe, they beth,” and again of this we cry, indeed! That Orfeo is a king and a skilled harpist, we are made aware rather quickly. As the narrative continues, he exchanges his kingly estate for a time and goes into exile. Yet, how does this come about exactly? We pick up the selection here, with following commentary:
Bifel so in the comessing of May
When miri and hot is the day,
And oway beth winter schours,
And everi feld is ful of flours,
And blosme breme on everi bough
Over al wexeth miri anought,
This ich quen, Dame Heurodis
Tok to maidens of priis,
And went in an undrentide
To play bi an orchardside,
To se the floures sprede and spring
And to here the foules sing.
Thai sett hem doun al thre
Under a fair ympe-tre,
And wel sone this fair quene
Fel on slepe opon the grene. (lines 57-72)
The poet sets up a rather pleasant scene with seemingly innocent motives “To play bi an orchardside,” and again, “To se the floures sprede and spring,” and once more, “to here the foules sing” (66-8). A trinitarian motif can be recognized here, in conjunction with, the pleasure(s) the natural senses afford; i.e. Dame Herodis is seeking an experience that comes with the “comessing of May”; and, to “play,” to “se,” and to “here” she feels this can be brought about. Of interest, is though her rhetoric embodies an active resolve, her body seeks, or rather turns to idleness. She sleeps, never fulfilling her desires (at least not on this side of the world, the English realm side). The “orchardside” is still within the borderlines of English rule, and moreover under her king’s command. Yet, with her “to maidens of priis,” Dame Herodis, “this ich quen,” looks for rest to fulfill her idle wishes. The narrative suggests: “Thai sett hem doun al thre / Under a fair ympe-tre” (70). Now, before we ask what exactly is an “ympe-tre,” a better inquiry might be what exactly is a “fair ympe-tre”? Is it possible that the manuscript suggested that it was a “fairy ympe-tree”? I am not sure, but I find it rather interesting that even J. R. R. Tolkien’s translation of “ympe-tre” as “grafted tree,” is not a sufficient substitute. Recall, this point of sleep under some sort of tree presents the king of England with his exilic terms and specific forest wanderings, which lasted ten years. How can the “quen” be innocent as she sometimes is held? She who sat down to listen to a natural chorus, the “foules sing” a melody pleasing to her desires and her senses, is to blame for her own abduction because of her idle tendency. Arguably, there is more to it than this, but this present project does not take up such arms. Instead, let us shift into what happened to the “quen” when she awoke. The implications of falling asleep in this world and wandering in the other, only to arise with a strong malady of madness is provocative and sets up an aggressive need for restoration, for order. This is a restoration that only music can accomplish, and more so—one that its greatest wielder can only perform.
The rhetoric of the “comessing May / When miri and hot is the day” quickly turns into an idleness that offers a “quen” who: So sche slepe til after none, / That undertide was al y-done” (75-6). As Herodis comes to, she awakens only to offer her readers, her interpreters no means to decipher her plight. She now offers anxiety to a world that has no way to interact with her, and this anxiety, this (dis)ease will spread and metastasize to include the entire kingdom once Sir Orfeo departs. We follow the malignant text of Herdois’s nightmare here:
Ac, as sone as sche gan awake,
Sche crid, and lothli bere gan make;
Sche froted hir honden and hir fete,
And crached hir visage - it bled wete -
Hir riche robe hye al to-rett
And was reveyd out of hir wit. (77-82)
Dame Herodis in a panicked state cannot function within normal parameters in the English realm. Why? She has visited another world and cannot articulate, or rather translate such an experience into her awakened state. She in part, has become a member of the other realm, the other world, and as such proceeds to disfigure her frame with a shredded face and equally torn clothes. Simply, she is unfit for this world and has become monstrous. Put another way, to be “out of hir wit,” suggests that she is fitted elsewhere, and the conventions of this (England) realm, she can no longer follow. The news of her malady travels to Sir Orfeo who is told by Herodis of her inevitable “taking,” or capture. Orfeo, thinking like one who does “fit” within his realm proceeds to defend his property, his “quen” from any and all abductions. The harpist-king then replies as follows:
"O we!" quath he, "Allas, allas!
Lever me were to lete mi liif
Than thus to lese the quen, mi wiif!"
He asked conseyl at ich man,
Ac no man him help no can.
Amorwe the undertide is come
And Orfeo hath his armes y-nome,
And wele ten hundred knightes with him,
Ich y-armed, stout and grim;
And with the quen wenten he
Right unto that ympe-tre.
Thai made scheltrom in ich a side
And sayd thai wold there abide
And dye ther everichon,
Er the quen schuld fram hem gon. (176-90)
As we know it is to no avail, and as the “quen” is taken from their fortified midst, it is accomplished via unconventional means to the English realm; namely, it is done “With fairi forth y-nome” (l. 193). Yes, magique of the faeries is used, and like music is tangible to no one, it too slips through from one world to the next. This event precipitates the mimicked loss of mind and masculine stature privy to king Orfeo; i.e. he loses his identity because the woman, who was not only “quen,” also made him king; moreover, her absence creates a loss that Orfeo cannot take or interpret. The poem presents the following narrative:
The king into his chaumber is go,
And oft swoned opon the ston,
And made swiche diol and swiche mon
That neighe his liif was y-spent -
Ther was non amendement. (196-200)
Exile is the only choice left to Orfeo, and the wilderness becomes his space for harp-playing, for music practice. I will not take the time here to describe some provocative themes associated with this exile per se; i.e. the hierarchy that exists within the English realm and the Faerie-way are not so different even though their geo-political space is altered, different and middled into distinctions of high and low. Still, of interest is how the faerie-men who go hunting with their King Fearie, do so—but do not kill. In some capacity, it is nothing more than a mock-hunt. Orfeo, now living in the forest for some time and playing his harp (when the weather suits him), observes the faerie king’s hunting behavior. The narrative does not privilege an emotional response from the exilic monarch until he looks onto the faerie-women who go “a-hawkin” and actually kill. The poem offers, and I quote it here at length:
Lord! who may telle the sore
This king sufferd ten yere and more?
His here of his berd, blac and rowe,
To his girdel-stede was growe.
His harp, whereon was al his gle,
He hidde in an holwe tre;
And when the weder was clere and bright,
He toke his harp to him wel right
And harped at his owhen wille.
Into alle the wode the soun gan schille,
That alle the wilde bestes that ther beth
For joie abouten him thai teth,
And alle the foules that ther were
Come and sete on ich a brere
To here his harping a-fine -
So miche melody was therin;
And when he his harping lete wold,
No best bi him abide nold. (263-80)
And on a day he seighe him biside
Sexti levedis on hors ride,
Gentil and jolif as brid on ris;
Nought o man amonges hem ther nis;
And ich a faucoun on hond bere,
And riden on haukin bi o rivere.
Of game thai founde wel gode haunt -
Maulardes, hayroun, and cormeraunt;
The foules of the water ariseth,
The faucouns hem wele deviseth;
Ich faucoun his pray slough -
That seigh Orfeo, and lough:
"Parfay!" quath he, "ther is fair game; (303-15)
Combined, the selections privileged above, examine the role of a suffering king, exile as an answer to such suffering and in an other world—women, who behave like men and follow through with their hunt. Orfeo does not understand this, and recall—he has been in this exilic estate, in this wilderness through hardship after hardship; loss after loss; and even reflects, a disfigured self. Arguably, it is not until he appears as monstrous, disfigured that he then “sees” the “playing” of the faeries and “hears” the minstrelsy, the music. What is his response to all of this: “That seigh Orfeo, and lough: / "Parfay!" quath he, "ther is fair game” (314-15). The role of laughter is anything but funny and humorous here. What exactly is the position of laughter here? Why laugh exactly? If laughter, like music is a type of force, expelled from the self and brought to public awareness, what then does it reveal about its wielder, and how can laughter explain such a scene? Admittedly, the inquiries I raise here act as a congeries on the emotional appeal offered by the text, but also by a modern interpreter of such a text. Yet, and more importantly, women who hunt and kill and men who hunt, but do not kill presents a level of anxiety where roles are in reverse—if not entirely backward. Is this a place then where magic can be used? Yes. Orfeo’s laughter makes sense to him only; it does not make sense to the reader, the interpreter of the text. Still, he has caught site of this “weird” event and follows the female retinue to the land of the faeries, the flat-lands equipped with bright and shiny things: gold, red gold, et cetera. Orfeo makes a crucial and bold observation: in a land where Faerie magic and its inhabitants differ from the English realm, music is common to both. Orfeo notices:
And otherwile he seighe other thing:
Knightes and levedis com daunceing
In queynt atire, gisely,
Queynt pas and softly;
Tabours and trunpes yede hem bi,
And al maner menstraci. (297-303)
This is still, in many respects, a place, a space—where he may indeed still fit. His approach into the castle where King Faerie abides produces one of the more intriguing dialogues of “keeping one’s word,” or oath-telling as well as the ultimate privilege and power of music, and of its wielder. Music as a force to rival difference(s) of race (English and Faerie), of opinion, of custom, and to some extent of control can be seen here. This will be our final commentary, but it is our strongest claim: music is not benign, and its wielder—a force, to be reckoned with on matters of order, of re-capture and of re-ordering. The text offers:
When he was in the roche y-go,
Wele thre mile other mo,
He com into a fair cuntray
As bright so sonne on somers day,
Smothe and plain and al grene -
Hille no dale nas ther non y-sene.
Amidde the lond a castel he sighe,
Riche and real and wonder heighe. (349-356)
And when he hadde bihold this mervails alle,
He went into the kinges halle.
Than seighe he ther a semly sight,
A tabernacle blisseful and bright,
Therin her maister king sete
And her quen, fair and swete.
Her crounes, her clothes schine so bright
That unnethe bihold he him might.
When he hadde biholden al that thing,
He kneled adoun bifor the king:
"O lord," he seyd, "yif it thi wille were,
Mi menstraci thou schust y-here."
The king answered, "What man artow,
That art hider y-comen now?
Ich, no non that is with me,
No sent never after the.
Sethen that ich here regni gan,
Y no fond never so folehardi man
That hider to ous durst wende
Bot that ic him wald ofsende."
"Lord," quath he, "trowe ful wel,
Y nam bot a pover menstrel;
And, sir, it is the maner of ous
To seche mani a lordes hous -
Thei we nought welcom no be,
Yete we mot proferi forth our gle."
Bifor the king he sat adoun
And tok his harp so miri of soun,
And tempreth his harp, as he wele can,
And blisseful notes he ther gan,
That al that in the palays were
Com to him forto here,
And liggeth adoun to his fete -
Hem thenketh his melody so swete.
The king herkneth and sitt ful stille;
To here his gle he hath gode wille.
Gode bourde he hadde of his gle;
The riche quen also hadde he.
When he hadde stint his harping,
Than seyd to him the king,
"Menstrel, me liketh wel thi gle.
Now aske of me what it be,
Largelich ichil the pay; (409-51)
With such a position of favor, Orfeo in playing his harp soothes not only beasts of the field and animals, but even the King Faerie himself, and gets to choose a gift to boot! This can only happen because of music and the skilled music player. The re-ordering taking place here suggests that Herodis is both prize and fault. That is, she is to blame for her idleness and the king’s exilic wandering(s), but she is also part of the solution. What then is lost, is now found and taken back. The Faerie King reluctantly gives her up, and the story is to end in a happier state with all things returned. This presents an argument for music-playing and music-listening (i.e. those who appreciate and know good music when they hear it) as an instrument for expressed normativity. Yet, even this is ordered through the medium of harp-playing, of music wielded by a master. It is Orfeo who sets about to prove he is indeed just that—Orfeo, the harp-king:
And Orfeo sat stille in the halle
And herkneth; when thai ben al stille,
He toke his harp and tempred schille;
The blissefulest notes he harped there
That ever ani man y-herd with ere -
Ich man liked wele his gle.
The steward biheld and gan y-se,
And knewe the harp als blive. (524-531)
Tho all tho that therin sete
That it was King Orfeo underyete,
And the steward him wele knewe -
Over and over the bord he threwe,
And fel adoun to his fet;
So dede everich lord that ther sete,
And all thai seyd at o criing:
"Ye beth our lord, sir, and our king!"
Glad thai were of his live; (575-83)
Now King Orfeo newe coround is,
And his quen, Dame Heurodis,
And lived long afterward,
And sethen was king the steward.
Harpours in Bretaine after than
Herd hou this mervaile bigan,
And made herof a lay of gode likeing,
And nempned it after the king.
That lay "Orfeo" is y-hote;
Gode is the lay, swete is the note.
Thus com Sir Orfeo out of his care:
God graunt ous alle wele to fare! Amen! (593-604)
And as Breton Lais are short and sweet, the poem Sir Orfeo conforms to this appellation quite well. Sir Orfeo as conductor of symphonic ordering uses music to bring about the structure and the fitting of an English realm, troubled by the difference faeries present. In the end, however, such an ordering does not only take place, it showcases the very privilege of music as common structure and scaffold building to otherwise, disruptive and perhaps competing realms. Music truly offers the playing, the seeing and the hearing, and now the re-ordering of disparate tastes and sensibilities where theft and transgression of boundaries are no longer necessary. Exile, that agent of space displacement, and laughter, that agent of (in)appropriate response, when middled with music offers provocative and aggressive readings as I have argued in a non-exhaustive manner here. Sir Orfeo, at best then, offers as exemplum the critic such interpretive activities.
Salvador Dalí: Un Experimento in ars Capacity
There are few who have “lived” and existed beyond that cursory existence of: awake, dream, consume, shit, die a little, then a lot, delay, sleep, sex, masturbate both mind and body (as if there is a difference, no) and enter through the gates of obscurity until a hope for a phoenix resurrection is available. The phenomena of beyond genius, or beyond gradated multi-brilliance in the capacity of the human exists in the limits of Salvador Dalí—painter, essayist, poet, artist and novelist. The scope of this paper is not to entertain the well known and documented history of Dalí’s vast contributions to the surrealist school of art or the criticism of the Art Nouveau models, but to simply apply an experiment in criticism and theory, and experiment in non-fiction, or what Wole Soyinka has claimed as faction.
It is the intention of this a/Author to examine and perhaps alleviate the tension and aura that surrounds Salvador Dalí through his writings, specifically his novel—Rostros Ocultos [Hidden Faces] and other, limp works which ejaculate his perversions into the public bowl of our minds. After all, it was Dalí who suggested, and I quote in full and without apology:
Sooner or later everyone is bound to come to me! Some, untouched by my
painting, concede that I draw like Leonardo. Others, who quarrel with my
aesthetics, agree in considering my autobiography one of the “human documents”
of the period […] Also, those that detest my painting, my drawings, my literature,
my jewels, my surrealist objects, etc., etc., proclaim that I do have a unique gift
for the theater and that my last setting was one of the most exciting that had ever
been seen on the Metropolitan stage…Thus it is difficult to avoid coming under
my sway in one way or another.
There are two ways to read such a claim: to reaffirm or rather to reflect in the speculum the suggestion of truth and falsity. The former offers a reading of sheer bravado and uncouth boast; the latter, a progression, via rhetorical means, of inevitable madness and perhaps the scant scent of Erasmian folly. Arguably, it is both, and this is why, in like vein, Dalí could be construed to be in some manner to exist in the venerable spirit of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche who once declared:
I know my destiny. Someday my name will be associated with the memory of
something tremendous, a crisis like no other on earth, the profoundest collision of
conscience, a decision conjured up against everything that had been believed,
required, and held sacred up to that time. I am not human; I am dynamite.
And so what is it exactly about such men, who according to Freud desire to kill their fathers and sleep with their mothers. Further, how is it that such men, specifically Dalí can still continue to shock while remaining lodged in the capacity or the subjective frame of lasting signification? Such an inquiry need not be addressed at this time, but it is of some import to the overall present project, and will be addressed throughout.
The structure of this essay began as an ambitious event. What do I mean exactly? To begin, it was to be a triptych in design, wherein the first third was to be about Salvador Dalí: a vita nuova. This section detailed Dalí’s controversial beginnings and his relationship with long-time friend—Federico Garcia Lorca, a gifted poet in his own right. Second, the middle third was to be an examination of several works in multiple genre frames, wherein Dalí’s expressive genius could be lysed and a deconstructive approach utilized. This was to accompany my own sketches on the a/Artist known as Salvador Dalí, wherein I privilege two images following the surrealist model of the 1930s. Lastly, I wanted to experiment and construct a theoretical model, which incorporated the works of Saussere, Lacan, Freud, Foucault alongside the criticism and work of Jonathan Culler’s Framing The Sign, Blasé Pascal’s Pensées, Timothy Chappell’s The Inescapable Self, Sade’s The Misfortunes of Virtue, Iragaray’s The Sex Which Is Not One, and of course Reinhold Niehbuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society. The work was to be of considerable length—130 pages, but alas as the readings increased, the work shortened, and time was the enemy. Still, I have constructed here a formidable, yet shorter version of the afore stated. What follows then is diminutive, but only in page length—the ideas and the examination are still focused on discovering the limits of human capacity and (ir)reverent appreciation, which I shall here note as the phenomenology of Dalí’s ars.
According to Jonathan Culler’s Framing of the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions, “In the 1960s and 1970s, literary studies seemed in the business of importing theoretical models, questions and perspectives from fields such as linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, the history of ideas and psychoanalysis” (xii). This way of thinking has considerably altered and more recent commentary by Fred Rush (Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory; Introduction) has asserted:
Critical Theory was born in the trauma of the Weimar Republic, grew to maturity
in expatriation, and achieved cultural currency on its return from exile. Passed on
from its founding first generation—among others Max Horkheimer, Friedrich
Pollock, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno—to the leader of its second,
Jürgen Habermas, Critical Theory remained central to European philosophical,
social, and political thought throughout the Cold War period […]Along with
phenomenology in its various forms and the philosophy and social theory
gathered loosely under the headings of structuralism and poststructuralism,
Critical Theory is a preeminent voice in twentieth-century continental thought. (1)
In short then, contemporary Critical Theory is necessary and offers the potential for “new” readings taken from the old wine skins of text and illuminates the intent of the respective a/Author function[s] in the semblance of what I call genre confessions. Such admissions can take the form of the written, oral and other expressionist codes that reveal on some level the [semiotic] intent of the responsible wielder in question. In Salvador Dalí’s case, such a “genre confession” spans, to this day, the spectrum of ars, or art; i.e. his work is at once [sur]real and not [su]real. I echo therefore the beginning lines of Rush in which, pertaining to a Dalí understanding, “The complexity that results from the requirement that this plurality not be swept aside is especially daunting to one seeking to orient oneself for the first time,” (1-2) but we shall try nonetheless.
Michel Foucault in his “What Is An Author” de-centers the assignation of such a title and looks to examine, somewhat like Nietzsche in his Genealogy of Morals, the emergence and perhaps classification of such a term as a/Author. At one point Foucault recounts:
The proper name and the name of an author oscillate between the poles of
description and designation, and granting that they are linked to what they name, they are not totally determined either by their descriptive or designative functions […] These differences indicate that an author’s name is not simply an element of speech (as a subject, a complement, or an element that could be replaced by a pronoun or other parts of speech). Its presence is functional in that it serves as a means of classification. (1626-627)
Foucault’s ideation is commendable, but this paper will not examine the subject of intentionalism; however, of interest is a quote I came across by James Downey in his article, “A Fallacy in the Intentional Fallacy” (Philosophy and Literature, 2007). I quote it here at length:
According to a famous argument by W.K. Wimstatt and Monroe Beardsley, the
intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard by which to
judge the success of a work of literary art […] The author’s intention is not
available as a standard by which to judge a work’s success, it is argued, because
“If the poet succeeded in doing it [the intention], then the poem itself shows what
he was trying to do. And if the poet did not succeed, ten the poem is not adequate
evidence, and the critic must go outside the poem.” (149)
Of interest is Downey’s concern with author intent, or function with regards to the genre of poetry, and it is indeed here where we shall also launch into Dalí’s minor work. An oeuvre by which his poetry limps in comparison to his stiff and stubbly nouvelle. The works of this nature fall under the keyword headings: sexual perversion, confession, love, masturbation and memory.
Salvador Dalí’s Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution, or “Daydream,” L’Amour et la mémoire (Paris: Éditions surrealistes à Paris, 1931), “Le Grand masturbator,” taken from his La femme visible (Paris: Éditions surrealists, 1930) collectively showcase a brilliant, yet disturbed mind. These selections are taken from Haim Finkelstein’s The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí (herein, Collected Dalí; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and are edited and translated by Finkelstein aussi. That noted, what follows are vignettes of Dalí’s poetic mind in full with commentary and theoretical applications (or do I really mean allusions here—Freud would both know and not know; I consider Dalí, a remote father figure to my exilic childish mannerisms, and so if he dies in this paper, you know why).
We begin, with commentary from Haim Finkelstein’s Collected Dalí as it pertains to an understanding or coming to terms with Dalian poetics. Dalí’s poetry, specifically his “Daydream” and “Love and Memory,” asserts Finkelstein, “are more directly personal in their attempt to reveal, in the most intimate detail, the workings of Dalí’s fantasy life,” and what is more “They also express the feelings and attitudes reflecting his frame of mind in the beginning of his relationship with Gala at the time he had already been banished from his father’s house” (146). One could find less reason for a critique on Dalí’s life armed with Freudian, Lacanian and Jungian machinery. That Dalí is hedonistic—is beyond mere row; by which he is beyond the limits of capacity and explanation, to some degree—intriguingly pleasurable. Dalí engages in what I termed earlier as a “genre confession” in his “masturbatory” writing titled, “Daydream.” According to Finkelstein, “[it] epitomizes the pursuit of libidinal pleasure, unchecked by the limitations and interdictions imposed by reality, that increasingly gains in prominence in his writings of the early 1930s” (147). Moreover, the tone of the work pays particular attention to the subject of memory and the need to concretize one’s pleasure. Why? Perhaps, Dalí is interested in a mimetic retrieval, in which masturbation, a repetitive ideal form of pleasure, is consistent with uprooting the reality of end result. This masturbatory principle is not so far estranged from Sigmund Freud’s views on both the pleasure principle and the reality principle, but first a necessary and relevant quote from Freud’s essay—“The Uncanny,” wherein the “good” doctor dictates:
It is only rarely that a psych-analyst feels impelled to investigate the subject of
aesthetics, even when aesthetics is understood to mean not merely the theory of
beauty but the theory of the qualities of feeling. He works in other strata of mental life and has little to do with the subdued emotional impulses which, inhibited in their aims and dependent on a host of concurrent factors, usually furnish the material for the study of aesthetics. (929-30)
Dalí’s interest in what Finkelstein asserts as “scrupulous attention to detail” is at once a telling and re-inventing of the poet; i.e. as the mind is unstable and is dynamic in its [re]creations—all fingers, like Dalí’s “The Myth of Narcissus,” are [non]real, or a simulacra of the surrealist in nature. Dali explores his boundaries and like that famous text by Churchill, explores the inside of the cup, where the cup represents the capacity, the rim to invoke what the mind is wayward and adamant to suppress. We turn to Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: Norton, 1961) in which the psychoanalyst suggests:
We have decided to relate pleasure and unpleasure to the quantity of excitation
that is present in the mind but is not in any way ‘bound’; and to relate them in
such a manner that unpleasure corresponds to an increase in the quantity of
excitation and pleasure to a diminution. (4)
Perhaps then, Freud provides the reader with an initial awareness of the mind’s plaisir and a further anticipatory footnote into lasting excitation. For Dalí, what better medium to generate such machinery if not in the symbolism of his “Daydream,” a Freudian attempt to reaffirm the doctor’s ideation on “the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure” (7). This is further fleshed out in the [re]birthing attempt by Dalí’s fiction. Finkelstein states it best:
Thus, Dalí assumes in his fantasy a state of willed regression in early childhood,
with its sexual researches and theories; in particular, those concerning parental
intercourse and the begetting of children. Indeed, he [Dalí] recreates the scene of
his own begetting. (Collected Dalí, 149)
The subject of fantasy, or that which pertains to the fantastic is not examined in detail here, but it does provide the reader with an armed awareness regarding Dalí’s “genre confession” to re-li(e)ve his begotten state. Some lines from Dalí’s “Daydream are in order here, and with this accomplished through the repetition of repressed material as a “contemporary experience,” one can begin to assess the masturbatory principle at work—guised and couched, or rather implanted in the soft, rotting parts of two-lipped hedonism. My selections for the “Daydream” are lengthy, but pertinent quotes that reaffirm my earlier observations on Dalí’s capacity and the limits of his perverse oeuvre.
To begin, the “Daydream” opens with the detail of place, date and time: “Port-Lligat, 17 October 1931, 3 o’clock in the afternoon” (Collected Dalí, 150). This is then followed by a seemingly mundane prescription, which states:
I have just finished eating and I am going to stretch out on the couch, as I must do
every day for an hour and a half, following which, for the rest of the afternoon, I
intend to write a section of a very long study of Böcklin, a study which has
preoccupied me greatly for some time now. (150)
Even at a cursory reading one can already begin to construct Dalí’s usage of a Freudian and Foucauldian semantic; the first with regards to the “couch,” and the latter with regards to “intent.” What is more, Dalí’s early suggestion of feasting and resting, followed by the dual activity of desiring to write, then writing all culminate with his [pre]occupation—a study on Böcklin, the Swiss symbolist painter. A deconstructive study on the “order” of things, to echo Foucualt, but more precisely Derrida might be in order here, but I will leave that task to a more deserving scholar. Suffice it to state that the prescription precedes the perversion, and we are, as readers, being set up; i.e. if we open with a genesis, or a begetting of Dalí at the onset of the “Daydream,” then by the time we are brought to his “preoccupied” moment on Böcklin, who is responsible for his painting, Die Toteninsel, it is no far stretch to note that we have indeed traveled from birth to death in just the opening paragraph. Again, we—as readers—have been set up. As Dalí continues to lie on the couch, a Sausserian symbol of Freudian implication[s] and non-Freudian implication[s], we are to note the following strange, but uncanny reflection:
I forbid bringing the mail over to me. I am going to urinate, and yet I feel
impatient to sprawl out on the couch. I get then a very specific notion of the pleasure awaiting me in my bedroom, a sense that appears to me to be in contrast to the rather painful awareness of the contradictions I shall have to overcome. Thus I hasten to my bedroom, and while I’m on my way there I experience a very hard erection accompanied by great pleasure and hilarity. (151)
Recall, that in Foucault’s Madness & Civilization the subject of “laughter” is anything but benign, and moreover in an essay by Henri Bergson (An Essay on Laughter), it is ever-present in the form of an echo. The implications of Dalí’s laughter moment are what I have called elsewhere “the mirth supremacy.” I have often wondered if “hilarity” serves a dual purpose in the singular motive of hedonism; i.e. it is at once pleasurable to know ones intended action[s] as well as to be surprised on the journey to that intended action. Dalí moves the reader from the cursory to the shocking back to the ritual involved in an effective masturbatory release. He confesses: “Then, having hardly lain down on the couch, I immediately get up again to close the curtain in order to leave the room in semi-darkness” (151). One might suggest this to be nervous tension, or nervous disorder, but it could very well be the manifestation of the tension that exists between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. Because of the time factor and scope of this present project I have decided to fast-forward toward the end where Dalí’s perversions are in full bloom and his genitalia erect and willing to penetrate the soft parts of the reader’s mind. The activity takes effect on a seemingly sacred day—Sunday to be exact. Dalí records:
The following day is Sunday. I should quickly make the most of the fact that,
close to four o’clock, everybody goes to the village. I await for a sign from Matilde in the meadow and I hurry, wrapped up in my only burnous, first into the room where the ear of corn is found, and then to the first floor. I find Dulita, Gallo and Matilde there, all three completely naked. In no time, Dulita masturbates me, but very clumsily, and this greatly arouses me. The three women go across the courtyard and into the cowshed. During that time I rush to the fountain of the cypresses and sit down no the wet stone of the bench. I hold up my penis with all my strength with my two hands, and then head for the cowshed where Dulita and the two women are lying down naked among the droppings and the rotten straw. I take off my burnous and throw myself on Dulita, but Matilde and Gallo have disappeared all of a sudden and Dulita is transformed into the woman I love, and my daydream ends with the same images as those I remember from my dream. (“Daydream,” 161)
The “Daydream” captures the perversion of a mind “awakened” to the dream-like sequence of postponed pleasure. Further, it is Dalí’s writing that the reader has to trust in order to make a decision to continue a “reading” on the masturbatory principle. The language here, more than the mere sexual description is what is important; i.e. the semantic of masculine awareness in a thrice-explored sexual fantasy is what Luce Irigaray may suggest as “obliging prop” (This Sex Which Is Not One, 25). Specifically, she claims:
Woman, in this sexual imaginary, is only a more or less obliging prop for the
enactment of man’s fantasies. That she may find pleasure in that role, by proxy, is
possible, even certain. But such pleasure is above all a masochistic prostitution of
her body to a desire that is not her own, and it leaves her in a familiar state of
dependency on man. (25)
Of interest is Irigaray’s ideation that “Woman […] is only a more or less obliging prop” (25). This thinking fits rather well to the above sample of the “Daydream” and Dalí serves as its chief masculine dominant, fantasy architect. Granted, there is something to be said about having one’s own dream regardless of gender, but that is for another project by another scholar for another audience. Dalí’s singularity and multiplicity trump the female voice. Moreover, though the “Daydream may suggest these misogynistic semantics—the dual poems—“The Great Masturbator” and “Love and Memory,” certainly reinforce it.
The concept of mimesis as it pertains to the genre of poetry intrigued Salvador Dalí immensely. The idea of repetition in his written ars is at points congruous to that of the prose of the Marquis de Sade. Specifically, Sade’s collection of writings in his The Misfortunes of Virtue parallels the perverse and the absence of benevolence—divine or human in Dalí’s “The Great Masturbator.” One might add to this Bataille’s Story of the Eye or the multi-volume work—The Accursed Share, but I leave that aside for now and tackle a more prescient and disturbing work—Dalí’s “The Great Masturbator” (herein, “The Great M”).
The commentary afforded by Finkelstein suggests that Dalí was concerned with multiplicity in the form of “mimetic confounding” (Finkelstein 175). He asserts:
Another concern of Dalí’s, to which he alludes frequently in the poem [“The
Great M”], refers to the concept of “mimetic confounding” and the playing with
notions concerning the false or counterfeit and the real…(175)
Recall, I had suggested in an earlier entry to this essay, Dalí’s participation with truth and falsity; the real and non-real; and of course the dynamism of the [sur]real and the non-[sur]real. Dalí is interested in self-discovery, and the stakes are high because of how far back he plans to retrieve such information. In a manner of noting—one could argue that Dalí’s interest in the begetting of himself is equal parts rhizome and stop game (or, might the reader allow me an intolerable pause instead). In short then the reader finds Dalí teetering on the lip of the cup, or what he notes to be the “phenomenology of repugnance” (175). And now, selections of the work itself are in order.
Dalí opens the “The Great M” with a similar time and season stamp we noted in the “Daydream.” He states:
The summer was in its last death throes behind the palisade
westward rose the principal edifice of the town
constructed of false red bricks
one could hear dimly the sounds of the town
some wayfarers among which swarmed peasants
thronged the road connecting the humble village of Hunt with the haughty
Kistern.
To the left meandered another road
humbler and narrower
a small road
melan-cholic
along whose edge were strewn
stacks of hay and shit
to serve as manure for the neighboring fields.
This first section is to be read in light of the next, and so we continue with the reading of the more shocking parts that pay homage to Dalí’s desire toward the scatological. In a medallion description he invokes a trinity of sorts to reaffirm his critical analysis of the Art Nouveau model. Dalí asserts:
There was also a medallion
bearing the three following
words
abuse
agriculture
imperialism.
And still
another
that preserved in perpetuity
three other inscriptions
crown
false gold
great shit.
These extremely interesting lines taken together place Dalí’s desire between the amorous imagination and the scatological simulacra, wherein perversion and vice, like Sade and Bataille, suggest one’s lot in life. The vision may be pessimistic in nature, but it at least affords a viable reading into the pleasure principle and mankind’s capacity for aura expression. Dalí of course did more than just list perverse words in frames of “genre confession,” and by so doing constantly shocked his viewers, his critics and his admirers. To complement “The Great M” Dalí’s “Love and Memory” re-connect the Irigarian notions of womanhood alongside Freudian desire regarding the death of the father and a misplaced wish for his sister (at once an archetype of the mother and the sustaining of the Oedipal construct). The following lines blur these distinctions and then re-focus them with alarming clarity. Dalí states:
My sister’s image
the anus red
with bloody shit
the cock
half erect
elegantly propped up
against
a huge
personal
and colonial
lyre
the left testicle
partially dipped
in a glass
of tepid milk
the glass with milk
placed
inside
a woman’s shoe
my sister’s image
the two external lips
of her sex
each one
respectively
suspended
ready to touch
the two compartments
of a case made of straw
one containing flour
and the other
grains of corn
Dalí continues in this seemingly disarming manner asking the reader for apology and non-apology—he is at once repeating his desires and at the same time stopping them; i.e. no two frames are alike, but both are the same in the concept or construct of distinction. This example and others like it has stayed “true” to its intended attempt—to quantify the limits of Dalí’s capacious genius in ars. As Dalí himself was an ambitious man with desire to complete, to finish the daunting undertaking of composing an opera, I too have constructed a small opera in the original Italian sense of work; like Dalí then, I too was unable to finish the task I intended, but I am pleased with its recorded journey.
It is the intention of this a/Author to examine and perhaps alleviate the tension and aura that surrounds Salvador Dalí through his writings, specifically his novel—Rostros Ocultos [Hidden Faces] and other, limp works which ejaculate his perversions into the public bowl of our minds. After all, it was Dalí who suggested, and I quote in full and without apology:
Sooner or later everyone is bound to come to me! Some, untouched by my
painting, concede that I draw like Leonardo. Others, who quarrel with my
aesthetics, agree in considering my autobiography one of the “human documents”
of the period […] Also, those that detest my painting, my drawings, my literature,
my jewels, my surrealist objects, etc., etc., proclaim that I do have a unique gift
for the theater and that my last setting was one of the most exciting that had ever
been seen on the Metropolitan stage…Thus it is difficult to avoid coming under
my sway in one way or another.
There are two ways to read such a claim: to reaffirm or rather to reflect in the speculum the suggestion of truth and falsity. The former offers a reading of sheer bravado and uncouth boast; the latter, a progression, via rhetorical means, of inevitable madness and perhaps the scant scent of Erasmian folly. Arguably, it is both, and this is why, in like vein, Dalí could be construed to be in some manner to exist in the venerable spirit of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche who once declared:
I know my destiny. Someday my name will be associated with the memory of
something tremendous, a crisis like no other on earth, the profoundest collision of
conscience, a decision conjured up against everything that had been believed,
required, and held sacred up to that time. I am not human; I am dynamite.
And so what is it exactly about such men, who according to Freud desire to kill their fathers and sleep with their mothers. Further, how is it that such men, specifically Dalí can still continue to shock while remaining lodged in the capacity or the subjective frame of lasting signification? Such an inquiry need not be addressed at this time, but it is of some import to the overall present project, and will be addressed throughout.
The structure of this essay began as an ambitious event. What do I mean exactly? To begin, it was to be a triptych in design, wherein the first third was to be about Salvador Dalí: a vita nuova. This section detailed Dalí’s controversial beginnings and his relationship with long-time friend—Federico Garcia Lorca, a gifted poet in his own right. Second, the middle third was to be an examination of several works in multiple genre frames, wherein Dalí’s expressive genius could be lysed and a deconstructive approach utilized. This was to accompany my own sketches on the a/Artist known as Salvador Dalí, wherein I privilege two images following the surrealist model of the 1930s. Lastly, I wanted to experiment and construct a theoretical model, which incorporated the works of Saussere, Lacan, Freud, Foucault alongside the criticism and work of Jonathan Culler’s Framing The Sign, Blasé Pascal’s Pensées, Timothy Chappell’s The Inescapable Self, Sade’s The Misfortunes of Virtue, Iragaray’s The Sex Which Is Not One, and of course Reinhold Niehbuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society. The work was to be of considerable length—130 pages, but alas as the readings increased, the work shortened, and time was the enemy. Still, I have constructed here a formidable, yet shorter version of the afore stated. What follows then is diminutive, but only in page length—the ideas and the examination are still focused on discovering the limits of human capacity and (ir)reverent appreciation, which I shall here note as the phenomenology of Dalí’s ars.
According to Jonathan Culler’s Framing of the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions, “In the 1960s and 1970s, literary studies seemed in the business of importing theoretical models, questions and perspectives from fields such as linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, the history of ideas and psychoanalysis” (xii). This way of thinking has considerably altered and more recent commentary by Fred Rush (Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory; Introduction) has asserted:
Critical Theory was born in the trauma of the Weimar Republic, grew to maturity
in expatriation, and achieved cultural currency on its return from exile. Passed on
from its founding first generation—among others Max Horkheimer, Friedrich
Pollock, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno—to the leader of its second,
Jürgen Habermas, Critical Theory remained central to European philosophical,
social, and political thought throughout the Cold War period […]Along with
phenomenology in its various forms and the philosophy and social theory
gathered loosely under the headings of structuralism and poststructuralism,
Critical Theory is a preeminent voice in twentieth-century continental thought. (1)
In short then, contemporary Critical Theory is necessary and offers the potential for “new” readings taken from the old wine skins of text and illuminates the intent of the respective a/Author function[s] in the semblance of what I call genre confessions. Such admissions can take the form of the written, oral and other expressionist codes that reveal on some level the [semiotic] intent of the responsible wielder in question. In Salvador Dalí’s case, such a “genre confession” spans, to this day, the spectrum of ars, or art; i.e. his work is at once [sur]real and not [su]real. I echo therefore the beginning lines of Rush in which, pertaining to a Dalí understanding, “The complexity that results from the requirement that this plurality not be swept aside is especially daunting to one seeking to orient oneself for the first time,” (1-2) but we shall try nonetheless.
Michel Foucault in his “What Is An Author” de-centers the assignation of such a title and looks to examine, somewhat like Nietzsche in his Genealogy of Morals, the emergence and perhaps classification of such a term as a/Author. At one point Foucault recounts:
The proper name and the name of an author oscillate between the poles of
description and designation, and granting that they are linked to what they name, they are not totally determined either by their descriptive or designative functions […] These differences indicate that an author’s name is not simply an element of speech (as a subject, a complement, or an element that could be replaced by a pronoun or other parts of speech). Its presence is functional in that it serves as a means of classification. (1626-627)
Foucault’s ideation is commendable, but this paper will not examine the subject of intentionalism; however, of interest is a quote I came across by James Downey in his article, “A Fallacy in the Intentional Fallacy” (Philosophy and Literature, 2007). I quote it here at length:
According to a famous argument by W.K. Wimstatt and Monroe Beardsley, the
intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard by which to
judge the success of a work of literary art […] The author’s intention is not
available as a standard by which to judge a work’s success, it is argued, because
“If the poet succeeded in doing it [the intention], then the poem itself shows what
he was trying to do. And if the poet did not succeed, ten the poem is not adequate
evidence, and the critic must go outside the poem.” (149)
Of interest is Downey’s concern with author intent, or function with regards to the genre of poetry, and it is indeed here where we shall also launch into Dalí’s minor work. An oeuvre by which his poetry limps in comparison to his stiff and stubbly nouvelle. The works of this nature fall under the keyword headings: sexual perversion, confession, love, masturbation and memory.
Salvador Dalí’s Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution, or “Daydream,” L’Amour et la mémoire (Paris: Éditions surrealistes à Paris, 1931), “Le Grand masturbator,” taken from his La femme visible (Paris: Éditions surrealists, 1930) collectively showcase a brilliant, yet disturbed mind. These selections are taken from Haim Finkelstein’s The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí (herein, Collected Dalí; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and are edited and translated by Finkelstein aussi. That noted, what follows are vignettes of Dalí’s poetic mind in full with commentary and theoretical applications (or do I really mean allusions here—Freud would both know and not know; I consider Dalí, a remote father figure to my exilic childish mannerisms, and so if he dies in this paper, you know why).
We begin, with commentary from Haim Finkelstein’s Collected Dalí as it pertains to an understanding or coming to terms with Dalian poetics. Dalí’s poetry, specifically his “Daydream” and “Love and Memory,” asserts Finkelstein, “are more directly personal in their attempt to reveal, in the most intimate detail, the workings of Dalí’s fantasy life,” and what is more “They also express the feelings and attitudes reflecting his frame of mind in the beginning of his relationship with Gala at the time he had already been banished from his father’s house” (146). One could find less reason for a critique on Dalí’s life armed with Freudian, Lacanian and Jungian machinery. That Dalí is hedonistic—is beyond mere row; by which he is beyond the limits of capacity and explanation, to some degree—intriguingly pleasurable. Dalí engages in what I termed earlier as a “genre confession” in his “masturbatory” writing titled, “Daydream.” According to Finkelstein, “[it] epitomizes the pursuit of libidinal pleasure, unchecked by the limitations and interdictions imposed by reality, that increasingly gains in prominence in his writings of the early 1930s” (147). Moreover, the tone of the work pays particular attention to the subject of memory and the need to concretize one’s pleasure. Why? Perhaps, Dalí is interested in a mimetic retrieval, in which masturbation, a repetitive ideal form of pleasure, is consistent with uprooting the reality of end result. This masturbatory principle is not so far estranged from Sigmund Freud’s views on both the pleasure principle and the reality principle, but first a necessary and relevant quote from Freud’s essay—“The Uncanny,” wherein the “good” doctor dictates:
It is only rarely that a psych-analyst feels impelled to investigate the subject of
aesthetics, even when aesthetics is understood to mean not merely the theory of
beauty but the theory of the qualities of feeling. He works in other strata of mental life and has little to do with the subdued emotional impulses which, inhibited in their aims and dependent on a host of concurrent factors, usually furnish the material for the study of aesthetics. (929-30)
Dalí’s interest in what Finkelstein asserts as “scrupulous attention to detail” is at once a telling and re-inventing of the poet; i.e. as the mind is unstable and is dynamic in its [re]creations—all fingers, like Dalí’s “The Myth of Narcissus,” are [non]real, or a simulacra of the surrealist in nature. Dali explores his boundaries and like that famous text by Churchill, explores the inside of the cup, where the cup represents the capacity, the rim to invoke what the mind is wayward and adamant to suppress. We turn to Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: Norton, 1961) in which the psychoanalyst suggests:
We have decided to relate pleasure and unpleasure to the quantity of excitation
that is present in the mind but is not in any way ‘bound’; and to relate them in
such a manner that unpleasure corresponds to an increase in the quantity of
excitation and pleasure to a diminution. (4)
Perhaps then, Freud provides the reader with an initial awareness of the mind’s plaisir and a further anticipatory footnote into lasting excitation. For Dalí, what better medium to generate such machinery if not in the symbolism of his “Daydream,” a Freudian attempt to reaffirm the doctor’s ideation on “the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure” (7). This is further fleshed out in the [re]birthing attempt by Dalí’s fiction. Finkelstein states it best:
Thus, Dalí assumes in his fantasy a state of willed regression in early childhood,
with its sexual researches and theories; in particular, those concerning parental
intercourse and the begetting of children. Indeed, he [Dalí] recreates the scene of
his own begetting. (Collected Dalí, 149)
The subject of fantasy, or that which pertains to the fantastic is not examined in detail here, but it does provide the reader with an armed awareness regarding Dalí’s “genre confession” to re-li(e)ve his begotten state. Some lines from Dalí’s “Daydream are in order here, and with this accomplished through the repetition of repressed material as a “contemporary experience,” one can begin to assess the masturbatory principle at work—guised and couched, or rather implanted in the soft, rotting parts of two-lipped hedonism. My selections for the “Daydream” are lengthy, but pertinent quotes that reaffirm my earlier observations on Dalí’s capacity and the limits of his perverse oeuvre.
To begin, the “Daydream” opens with the detail of place, date and time: “Port-Lligat, 17 October 1931, 3 o’clock in the afternoon” (Collected Dalí, 150). This is then followed by a seemingly mundane prescription, which states:
I have just finished eating and I am going to stretch out on the couch, as I must do
every day for an hour and a half, following which, for the rest of the afternoon, I
intend to write a section of a very long study of Böcklin, a study which has
preoccupied me greatly for some time now. (150)
Even at a cursory reading one can already begin to construct Dalí’s usage of a Freudian and Foucauldian semantic; the first with regards to the “couch,” and the latter with regards to “intent.” What is more, Dalí’s early suggestion of feasting and resting, followed by the dual activity of desiring to write, then writing all culminate with his [pre]occupation—a study on Böcklin, the Swiss symbolist painter. A deconstructive study on the “order” of things, to echo Foucualt, but more precisely Derrida might be in order here, but I will leave that task to a more deserving scholar. Suffice it to state that the prescription precedes the perversion, and we are, as readers, being set up; i.e. if we open with a genesis, or a begetting of Dalí at the onset of the “Daydream,” then by the time we are brought to his “preoccupied” moment on Böcklin, who is responsible for his painting, Die Toteninsel, it is no far stretch to note that we have indeed traveled from birth to death in just the opening paragraph. Again, we—as readers—have been set up. As Dalí continues to lie on the couch, a Sausserian symbol of Freudian implication[s] and non-Freudian implication[s], we are to note the following strange, but uncanny reflection:
I forbid bringing the mail over to me. I am going to urinate, and yet I feel
impatient to sprawl out on the couch. I get then a very specific notion of the pleasure awaiting me in my bedroom, a sense that appears to me to be in contrast to the rather painful awareness of the contradictions I shall have to overcome. Thus I hasten to my bedroom, and while I’m on my way there I experience a very hard erection accompanied by great pleasure and hilarity. (151)
Recall, that in Foucault’s Madness & Civilization the subject of “laughter” is anything but benign, and moreover in an essay by Henri Bergson (An Essay on Laughter), it is ever-present in the form of an echo. The implications of Dalí’s laughter moment are what I have called elsewhere “the mirth supremacy.” I have often wondered if “hilarity” serves a dual purpose in the singular motive of hedonism; i.e. it is at once pleasurable to know ones intended action[s] as well as to be surprised on the journey to that intended action. Dalí moves the reader from the cursory to the shocking back to the ritual involved in an effective masturbatory release. He confesses: “Then, having hardly lain down on the couch, I immediately get up again to close the curtain in order to leave the room in semi-darkness” (151). One might suggest this to be nervous tension, or nervous disorder, but it could very well be the manifestation of the tension that exists between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. Because of the time factor and scope of this present project I have decided to fast-forward toward the end where Dalí’s perversions are in full bloom and his genitalia erect and willing to penetrate the soft parts of the reader’s mind. The activity takes effect on a seemingly sacred day—Sunday to be exact. Dalí records:
The following day is Sunday. I should quickly make the most of the fact that,
close to four o’clock, everybody goes to the village. I await for a sign from Matilde in the meadow and I hurry, wrapped up in my only burnous, first into the room where the ear of corn is found, and then to the first floor. I find Dulita, Gallo and Matilde there, all three completely naked. In no time, Dulita masturbates me, but very clumsily, and this greatly arouses me. The three women go across the courtyard and into the cowshed. During that time I rush to the fountain of the cypresses and sit down no the wet stone of the bench. I hold up my penis with all my strength with my two hands, and then head for the cowshed where Dulita and the two women are lying down naked among the droppings and the rotten straw. I take off my burnous and throw myself on Dulita, but Matilde and Gallo have disappeared all of a sudden and Dulita is transformed into the woman I love, and my daydream ends with the same images as those I remember from my dream. (“Daydream,” 161)
The “Daydream” captures the perversion of a mind “awakened” to the dream-like sequence of postponed pleasure. Further, it is Dalí’s writing that the reader has to trust in order to make a decision to continue a “reading” on the masturbatory principle. The language here, more than the mere sexual description is what is important; i.e. the semantic of masculine awareness in a thrice-explored sexual fantasy is what Luce Irigaray may suggest as “obliging prop” (This Sex Which Is Not One, 25). Specifically, she claims:
Woman, in this sexual imaginary, is only a more or less obliging prop for the
enactment of man’s fantasies. That she may find pleasure in that role, by proxy, is
possible, even certain. But such pleasure is above all a masochistic prostitution of
her body to a desire that is not her own, and it leaves her in a familiar state of
dependency on man. (25)
Of interest is Irigaray’s ideation that “Woman […] is only a more or less obliging prop” (25). This thinking fits rather well to the above sample of the “Daydream” and Dalí serves as its chief masculine dominant, fantasy architect. Granted, there is something to be said about having one’s own dream regardless of gender, but that is for another project by another scholar for another audience. Dalí’s singularity and multiplicity trump the female voice. Moreover, though the “Daydream may suggest these misogynistic semantics—the dual poems—“The Great Masturbator” and “Love and Memory,” certainly reinforce it.
The concept of mimesis as it pertains to the genre of poetry intrigued Salvador Dalí immensely. The idea of repetition in his written ars is at points congruous to that of the prose of the Marquis de Sade. Specifically, Sade’s collection of writings in his The Misfortunes of Virtue parallels the perverse and the absence of benevolence—divine or human in Dalí’s “The Great Masturbator.” One might add to this Bataille’s Story of the Eye or the multi-volume work—The Accursed Share, but I leave that aside for now and tackle a more prescient and disturbing work—Dalí’s “The Great Masturbator” (herein, “The Great M”).
The commentary afforded by Finkelstein suggests that Dalí was concerned with multiplicity in the form of “mimetic confounding” (Finkelstein 175). He asserts:
Another concern of Dalí’s, to which he alludes frequently in the poem [“The
Great M”], refers to the concept of “mimetic confounding” and the playing with
notions concerning the false or counterfeit and the real…(175)
Recall, I had suggested in an earlier entry to this essay, Dalí’s participation with truth and falsity; the real and non-real; and of course the dynamism of the [sur]real and the non-[sur]real. Dalí is interested in self-discovery, and the stakes are high because of how far back he plans to retrieve such information. In a manner of noting—one could argue that Dalí’s interest in the begetting of himself is equal parts rhizome and stop game (or, might the reader allow me an intolerable pause instead). In short then the reader finds Dalí teetering on the lip of the cup, or what he notes to be the “phenomenology of repugnance” (175). And now, selections of the work itself are in order.
Dalí opens the “The Great M” with a similar time and season stamp we noted in the “Daydream.” He states:
The summer was in its last death throes behind the palisade
westward rose the principal edifice of the town
constructed of false red bricks
one could hear dimly the sounds of the town
some wayfarers among which swarmed peasants
thronged the road connecting the humble village of Hunt with the haughty
Kistern.
To the left meandered another road
humbler and narrower
a small road
melan-cholic
along whose edge were strewn
stacks of hay and shit
to serve as manure for the neighboring fields.
This first section is to be read in light of the next, and so we continue with the reading of the more shocking parts that pay homage to Dalí’s desire toward the scatological. In a medallion description he invokes a trinity of sorts to reaffirm his critical analysis of the Art Nouveau model. Dalí asserts:
There was also a medallion
bearing the three following
words
abuse
agriculture
imperialism.
And still
another
that preserved in perpetuity
three other inscriptions
crown
false gold
great shit.
These extremely interesting lines taken together place Dalí’s desire between the amorous imagination and the scatological simulacra, wherein perversion and vice, like Sade and Bataille, suggest one’s lot in life. The vision may be pessimistic in nature, but it at least affords a viable reading into the pleasure principle and mankind’s capacity for aura expression. Dalí of course did more than just list perverse words in frames of “genre confession,” and by so doing constantly shocked his viewers, his critics and his admirers. To complement “The Great M” Dalí’s “Love and Memory” re-connect the Irigarian notions of womanhood alongside Freudian desire regarding the death of the father and a misplaced wish for his sister (at once an archetype of the mother and the sustaining of the Oedipal construct). The following lines blur these distinctions and then re-focus them with alarming clarity. Dalí states:
My sister’s image
the anus red
with bloody shit
the cock
half erect
elegantly propped up
against
a huge
personal
and colonial
lyre
the left testicle
partially dipped
in a glass
of tepid milk
the glass with milk
placed
inside
a woman’s shoe
my sister’s image
the two external lips
of her sex
each one
respectively
suspended
ready to touch
the two compartments
of a case made of straw
one containing flour
and the other
grains of corn
Dalí continues in this seemingly disarming manner asking the reader for apology and non-apology—he is at once repeating his desires and at the same time stopping them; i.e. no two frames are alike, but both are the same in the concept or construct of distinction. This example and others like it has stayed “true” to its intended attempt—to quantify the limits of Dalí’s capacious genius in ars. As Dalí himself was an ambitious man with desire to complete, to finish the daunting undertaking of composing an opera, I too have constructed a small opera in the original Italian sense of work; like Dalí then, I too was unable to finish the task I intended, but I am pleased with its recorded journey.
Non Aggiungere
I have heard of a place, high and pure,
Where the Spirit and the bride say, Come.
Where angels dare to tread, to endure,
And warnings to add, to lie are from.
You shall find dogs there as well as Pavlov,
One testifies, one chirps, another sings.
The flapping wing of the waves of love,
Seething, it middles; nettling, it stings.
What are we to dream in this clear as crystal pool;
A life-tree, edible leaves that burn, then smoke;
Her fruit, she yields and heals the fool,
But I fell down, down, down as the angel spoke.
To me was told, as servants face and candles melt,
How worship and shadows evangelize;
And music syncs like drops, and are whispered felt,
A cadence neither red, nor the bluest sighs.
Still, we are not to seal the prophecy of the book,
Of things heard, things seen, and then AWESOME!
And once more, in whispers that mistook
Your Spirit missing, my bride says, come, come, come.
Where the Spirit and the bride say, Come.
Where angels dare to tread, to endure,
And warnings to add, to lie are from.
You shall find dogs there as well as Pavlov,
One testifies, one chirps, another sings.
The flapping wing of the waves of love,
Seething, it middles; nettling, it stings.
What are we to dream in this clear as crystal pool;
A life-tree, edible leaves that burn, then smoke;
Her fruit, she yields and heals the fool,
But I fell down, down, down as the angel spoke.
To me was told, as servants face and candles melt,
How worship and shadows evangelize;
And music syncs like drops, and are whispered felt,
A cadence neither red, nor the bluest sighs.
Still, we are not to seal the prophecy of the book,
Of things heard, things seen, and then AWESOME!
And once more, in whispers that mistook
Your Spirit missing, my bride says, come, come, come.
Five Spirits: Gawain's Pentangle
I. In
The brevity of the tree is the root
Where God made and the deep faced;
Where division from itself imploded,
And ex nihilo means something,
Or does it?
II. The
The circus of event is tangible, wobbly.
The firmament for fancy, and heaven’s
Sake—I’ll drink to that!
Let the things develop into more things,
And man create taxonomy.
III. Beginning
One by one they marched until disobedience,
Wrought with a rather painful knowing, conjugated
Into Edenic simulacra, repeat?
Yes, into the image;
They tilled and became mortal and boring.
IV. Was
Who was Enoch’s knocking?
At least I knew my Eve, my leafy slut.
The shame that darkened my hammish hue;
Of giants I shall tame with pen and ink;
Perhaps even let my semen spill.
V. …
In genesis I finished in apocalypse;
When can I get that promised rest?
Where can I look for the mist to spring up,
Out, out and into? Ha! Ha!
The worms are tickling.
The brevity of the tree is the root
Where God made and the deep faced;
Where division from itself imploded,
And ex nihilo means something,
Or does it?
II. The
The circus of event is tangible, wobbly.
The firmament for fancy, and heaven’s
Sake—I’ll drink to that!
Let the things develop into more things,
And man create taxonomy.
III. Beginning
One by one they marched until disobedience,
Wrought with a rather painful knowing, conjugated
Into Edenic simulacra, repeat?
Yes, into the image;
They tilled and became mortal and boring.
IV. Was
Who was Enoch’s knocking?
At least I knew my Eve, my leafy slut.
The shame that darkened my hammish hue;
Of giants I shall tame with pen and ink;
Perhaps even let my semen spill.
V. …
In genesis I finished in apocalypse;
When can I get that promised rest?
Where can I look for the mist to spring up,
Out, out and into? Ha! Ha!
The worms are tickling.
Knight Vision: A Templar’s Faith
Listen, for I too will tell my tale for the best of visions.
It is a tale told by one, two, and three nails in telling it.
It came to us thrice as strong in the middle of the night.
Please beware and prepare yourself.
The blacksmith used only the finest metals,
who then, with vehement flame and shadow, created
the finest of nails. Today, the nails were made extra special.
The messenger had brought word earlier of a Messiah, a
Prophet King they called him.
The nails needed to be strong.
Strong enough to hold, in place, and for a span of time,
the Son of God and of Man. They called Him Yeshua, or Jesus. His birth, ordained,
proved simple enough-nothing more about the carpenter from Galilee.
It is not written in the book of books.
How ironic that one who worked with wood, saw, and nails
would be attached to such devices; itself, an almost engineered trinity.
Hammered they were, and water-cooled in liquid steam.
Upon the anvil were the three beaten, beaten, beaten.
At first, their shape no more than thin,
nine-inch cubes of solid metal. The smith, in persistence and possession,
hammered on and on and on until the end began to take a spikèd look.
The three, gleaming in the heat from both the flame and the hammers blow,
would prove their creator just.
Now finished, the smith began to place each nail
in a leathered pouch, reserved for only his best metal. What caution in placing them inside the pouch. What fear and reverence for this work.
He had done his part, in humility and, in obedient submission.
His life would change.
The on-lookers now took on the shape of spirits plenty, holy
and unholy throughout. Demons snarled in misguided approbation.
The angels stood still, a quiet calm resting upon their golden brows.
Their wings, lined with gold, were white and puffed to reflect
the beauty of the Holy One, that Ancient of Days, that Creator of good and woe.
Nevertheless, the nails perceiving their calling,
though with much intended sadness, would yield, in the end,
with hope-a result of cataclysmic proportion! What joy
ensues after the pain of loss, is an act that will be considered Christian
for the ages to come.
Many have been the afflictions of humanity
at the turn of misunderstandings. The nails, in hope and awe,
understood. They too relied on grace to be forgiven,
and to have the crimson stain of humanity’s blight,
be upon their metallic frame. What washing could take and restore the hue of their metal? What true spike was ever deemed worthy to be restored?
Many, upon that hillside have been the cruelties of destiny.
Many have blamed a faulty providence. Yet, on that day I beheld the Son of the God-Man, laid out and stretched. The clouds stood still
as if to wait upon command from their Creator.
The winds blew, forgetting their boundaries, upon that hill top.
The soldiers gathered round, with crowds, marveling at the spectacle. What had He done? Why is He here? Questions appeared and dissipated, like the very whispers of shadow and dark. Yet, no one dared to respond!
At last each arm and leg was laid upon the rood.
The rood too has a story I am told, but it will not be mentioned here.
For now, it is a vision of three nails all told and agreed by them.
The smith was called forth, his face and hands darkened,
yet himself quickly noticeable in such a lighted crowd. The soldier
took the first nail from the leathered pouch.
His hands, though scarred and responsible
for many a blow upon the enemy, now shook.
Still trembling he looked upon his target,
sweat beading upon his forehead, betrayed his resolve.
He stood up, wiping away a stray trickle of sweat from his left brow.
He blew out a sigh and then knelt to give the blow to God’s Crisis.
The nail, a metal spike glowing in the sun, bowed to the Son and struck
flesh and ligament and blood and through bone into wood. I have heard the cry of the God--Man, and no it is not pleasant nor soothing!
Creation groans and is still groaning? There is no comparison.
The blows came slowly at first upon the first nail,
Picking up speed upon the second spike until, from pity or fear,
the third spear was given the quickest blow to pierce through ankle bone
and ligamented flesh. A tattered mess, a ragged look, and all sensed—
It was finished.
Many will come to place value upon us three, for indeed we were there who held
the Son in place. We ask that those who would know about this vision be told
about its end. We became part of the rood, we three held it all.
We kept the second Adam in place of the first.
We ensured hope for mankind, our initial blight removed.
‘Tis pity if the story would end here, but the Lord, that Godson, rose
Again to life, His angels bearing witness to the event.
He appeared to the disciples in mourning, giving hope to blinded Thomas.
For was it not him who said, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails,
and put my finger into the print of the nails,…I will not believe.
To which our Lord did appear, removing doubt, and state-“Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands,…and be not faithless, but believing.
Such is the rebuke for the ages to come and
Behold the nails of love, faith and hope,
We three, we three spears are the greatest of these.
It is a tale told by one, two, and three nails in telling it.
It came to us thrice as strong in the middle of the night.
Please beware and prepare yourself.
The blacksmith used only the finest metals,
who then, with vehement flame and shadow, created
the finest of nails. Today, the nails were made extra special.
The messenger had brought word earlier of a Messiah, a
Prophet King they called him.
The nails needed to be strong.
Strong enough to hold, in place, and for a span of time,
the Son of God and of Man. They called Him Yeshua, or Jesus. His birth, ordained,
proved simple enough-nothing more about the carpenter from Galilee.
It is not written in the book of books.
How ironic that one who worked with wood, saw, and nails
would be attached to such devices; itself, an almost engineered trinity.
Hammered they were, and water-cooled in liquid steam.
Upon the anvil were the three beaten, beaten, beaten.
At first, their shape no more than thin,
nine-inch cubes of solid metal. The smith, in persistence and possession,
hammered on and on and on until the end began to take a spikèd look.
The three, gleaming in the heat from both the flame and the hammers blow,
would prove their creator just.
Now finished, the smith began to place each nail
in a leathered pouch, reserved for only his best metal. What caution in placing them inside the pouch. What fear and reverence for this work.
He had done his part, in humility and, in obedient submission.
His life would change.
The on-lookers now took on the shape of spirits plenty, holy
and unholy throughout. Demons snarled in misguided approbation.
The angels stood still, a quiet calm resting upon their golden brows.
Their wings, lined with gold, were white and puffed to reflect
the beauty of the Holy One, that Ancient of Days, that Creator of good and woe.
Nevertheless, the nails perceiving their calling,
though with much intended sadness, would yield, in the end,
with hope-a result of cataclysmic proportion! What joy
ensues after the pain of loss, is an act that will be considered Christian
for the ages to come.
Many have been the afflictions of humanity
at the turn of misunderstandings. The nails, in hope and awe,
understood. They too relied on grace to be forgiven,
and to have the crimson stain of humanity’s blight,
be upon their metallic frame. What washing could take and restore the hue of their metal? What true spike was ever deemed worthy to be restored?
Many, upon that hillside have been the cruelties of destiny.
Many have blamed a faulty providence. Yet, on that day I beheld the Son of the God-Man, laid out and stretched. The clouds stood still
as if to wait upon command from their Creator.
The winds blew, forgetting their boundaries, upon that hill top.
The soldiers gathered round, with crowds, marveling at the spectacle. What had He done? Why is He here? Questions appeared and dissipated, like the very whispers of shadow and dark. Yet, no one dared to respond!
At last each arm and leg was laid upon the rood.
The rood too has a story I am told, but it will not be mentioned here.
For now, it is a vision of three nails all told and agreed by them.
The smith was called forth, his face and hands darkened,
yet himself quickly noticeable in such a lighted crowd. The soldier
took the first nail from the leathered pouch.
His hands, though scarred and responsible
for many a blow upon the enemy, now shook.
Still trembling he looked upon his target,
sweat beading upon his forehead, betrayed his resolve.
He stood up, wiping away a stray trickle of sweat from his left brow.
He blew out a sigh and then knelt to give the blow to God’s Crisis.
The nail, a metal spike glowing in the sun, bowed to the Son and struck
flesh and ligament and blood and through bone into wood. I have heard the cry of the God--Man, and no it is not pleasant nor soothing!
Creation groans and is still groaning? There is no comparison.
The blows came slowly at first upon the first nail,
Picking up speed upon the second spike until, from pity or fear,
the third spear was given the quickest blow to pierce through ankle bone
and ligamented flesh. A tattered mess, a ragged look, and all sensed—
It was finished.
Many will come to place value upon us three, for indeed we were there who held
the Son in place. We ask that those who would know about this vision be told
about its end. We became part of the rood, we three held it all.
We kept the second Adam in place of the first.
We ensured hope for mankind, our initial blight removed.
‘Tis pity if the story would end here, but the Lord, that Godson, rose
Again to life, His angels bearing witness to the event.
He appeared to the disciples in mourning, giving hope to blinded Thomas.
For was it not him who said, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails,
and put my finger into the print of the nails,…I will not believe.
To which our Lord did appear, removing doubt, and state-“Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands,…and be not faithless, but believing.
Such is the rebuke for the ages to come and
Behold the nails of love, faith and hope,
We three, we three spears are the greatest of these.
a new home, a new space
My relocation to St Petersburg, Florida has been nothing shy of perfect. I am finishing up my Ph.D. in Medieval Studies Literature, getting ready to purchase a home, will be teaching as an Adjunct Professor, working on my second book, planning a wedding with my beloved fiance and enjoying the good Lord's sun and rain.
I am also closer to my home, St. Croix and to my familia. By way of a welcoming committee, my fiance and I went to a reggae-playing bar and beach area yesterday. The water was simply beautiful and the people quite friendly. In fact, I came across two islanders that just happened to be from St. Croix, from my city...Christiansted. Unbelievable!
I have enjoyed a nice Chilean wine (2006) and have yet to uncork my Florence-purchased Castello Di Monterinaldi(Chianti Classico, 2004). Don't worry, I have two bottles and will have dual reasons to drink them in the near future.
The blog will continue to be somewhat academic, but will now describe the life of an academic in a southern state surrounded by the Gulf, sun and the occasional hurricane warning, or two. If you are ever in the St Petersburg area, let me be a guide, a light.
I am also closer to my home, St. Croix and to my familia. By way of a welcoming committee, my fiance and I went to a reggae-playing bar and beach area yesterday. The water was simply beautiful and the people quite friendly. In fact, I came across two islanders that just happened to be from St. Croix, from my city...Christiansted. Unbelievable!
I have enjoyed a nice Chilean wine (2006) and have yet to uncork my Florence-purchased Castello Di Monterinaldi(Chianti Classico, 2004). Don't worry, I have two bottles and will have dual reasons to drink them in the near future.
The blog will continue to be somewhat academic, but will now describe the life of an academic in a southern state surrounded by the Gulf, sun and the occasional hurricane warning, or two. If you are ever in the St Petersburg area, let me be a guide, a light.
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