The faraway king of all the birds, the Simurgh, lets fall a magnificent feather in the center of China: tired of their age-old anarchy, the birds resolve to go in search of him. They know that their king’s name means thirty birds; they know his palace is located on the Kaf, the circular mountain that surrounds the earth.
They embark upon the nearly infinite adventure. They pass through seven valleys or seas; the name of the penultimate is Vertigo; the last, Annihilation. Many pilgrims give up; others perish. Thirty, purified by their efforts, set foot on the mountain of the Simurgh. At last they gaze upon it: they perceive that they are the Simurgh and that the Simurgh is each one of them and all of them. In the Simurgh are the thirty birds and in each bird is the Simurgh.63 (Plotinus, too—The Enneads V, 8-4—asserts a paradisiacal extension of the principle of identity: “Everywhere in the intelligible heaven is all, and all is all and each all. The sun, there, is all the stars; and every star, again, is all the stars and sun.”)
The disparity between the Eagle and the Simurgh is no less obvious than their resemblance. The Eagle is merely implausible; the Simurgh, impossible. The individuals who make up the Eagle are not lost in it (David serves as the pupil of one eye; Trajan, Ezekiel, and Constantine as brows); the birds that gaze upon the Simurgh are at the same time the Simurgh. The Eagle is a transitory symbol, as were the letters before it; those who form its shape with their bodies do not cease to be who they are: the ubiquitous Simurgh is inextricable. Behind the Eagle is the personal God of Israel and Rome; behind the magical Simurgh is pantheism.
A final observation. The imaginative power of the legend of the Simurgh is apparent to all; less pronounced, but no less real, is its rigor and economy. The pilgrims go forth in search of an unknown goal; this goal, which will be revealed only at the end, must arouse wonder and not be or appear to be merely added on. The author finds his way out of this difficulty with classical elegance; adroitly, the searchers are what they seek. In identical fashion, David is the secret protagonist of the story told him by Nathan (II Samuel 12); in identical fashion, De Quincey has proposed that the individual man Oedipus, and not man in general, is the profound solution to the riddle of the Theban Sphinx.
[1948] —Translated by Esther Allen
A History of the Echoes of a Name
Isolated in time and space, a god, a dream, and a man who is insane and aware of the fact repeat an obscure statement. Those words, and their two echoes, are the subject of these pages.
The first example is well known. It is recorded in the third chapter of the second book of Moses, called Exodus. We read there that Moses, pastor of sheep, author and protagonist of the book, asks God what His name is, and God replies: “I Am That I Am.” Before examining these mysterious words, it is perhaps worth recalling that in primitive or magical thought, names are not arbitrary symbols but a vital part of what they define.64 Thus, the Australian aborigines receive secret names that the members of the neighboring tribe are not allowed to hear. Among the ancient Egyptians, a similar custom prevailed: each person received two names, the “little” name that was known to all and the true or “great” name that was kept hidden. According to the funerary literature, the soul runs many risks after death, and forgetting one’s name (losing one’s personal identity) is perhaps the greatest. It is also important to know the true names of the gods, demons, and gates to the other world.65 Jacques Vandier writes: “It is enough to know the name of a god or of a divine creature in order to have it in one’s power” (La Religion égyptienne, 1949). Similarly, De Quincey reminds us that the true name of Rome was also secret: in the last days of the Republic, Quintus Valerius Sorano committed the sacrilege of revealing it, and was executed. . . .
The savage hides his name so that it will not be used in magical practices that may kill, drive insane, or enslave its owner. This superstition survives in the ideas of slander and insult; we cannot tolerate our names being tied to certain words. Mauthner has analyzed and censured this mental habit.
Moses asks God what His name is: this is not, as we have seen, a curiosity of a philological nature, but rather an attempt to ascertain who God is, or more precisely, what He is. (In the ninth century, John Scotus Erigena would write that God does not know who or what He is, because He is not a who or a what.)
What interpretations have been made of the tremendous answer Moses heard? According to Christian theology, “I Am That I Am” declares that only God truly exists, or, as the Maggid of Mesritch taught, that only God can say the word “I.” The doctrine of Spinoza, which makes all thoughts and applications the mere attributes of an eternal substance which is God, could well be an amplification of this idea. “God exists; we are the ones who do not exist,” a Mexican has similarly written.
According to this first interpretation, “I Am That I Am” is an ontological affirmation. Others have believed that the answer avoids the question: God does not say who He is because it would exceed the comprehension of his human interlocutor. Martin Buber points out that “Ehyeh asher ehyeh” may also be translated as “I Am What I Will Be” or “I Will Be Where I Will Be.” Had Moses, in the manner of Egyptian magic, asked God His name in order to have Him in his power, God would have answered: “Today I am talking with you, but tomorrow I may take on another form, including the forms of oppression, injustice, and adversity.” We read this in Gog and Magog.66
Multiplied into the human languages—Ich Bin Der Ich Bin, Ego Sum Qui Sum, Soy El Que Soy—the sententious name of God, the name that, in spite of having many words, is more solid and impenetrable than if it were only one word, grew and reverberated through the centuries, to 1602, when Shakespeare wrote a comedy. In this comedy we glimpse, almost sideways, a cowardly and swaggering soldier who has managed, because of some scheme, to be promoted to the rank of captain. The ruse is discovered, the man is publicly disgraced, and then Shakespeare intervenes and puts in his mouth some words that reflect, as though in a broken mirror, those that the god spoke on the mountain:
Captain I’ll be no more,
But I will eat and drink and sleep as soft
As captain shall. Simply the thing I am
Shall make me live.
Thus Parolles speaks, and suddenly ceases to be a conventional character in a comic farce and becomes a man and all mankind.
The last version was produced in the 1740s, in one of the years when Swift was slowly dying, years that were perhaps for him a single unbearable moment, a form of the eternity of hell. With glacial intelligence and glacial hatred, Swift (like Flaubert) had always been fascinated by madness, perhaps because he knew that, at the end, insanity was waiting for him. In the third part of Gulliver’s Travels, he imagined with meticulous loathing a race of decrepit and immoral men, given over to weak appetites they cannot satisfy; incapable of conversing with their kind, because the course of time had changed their language; or of reading, because their memories could not carry from one line to the next. One suspects that Swift imagined this horror because he feared it, or perhaps to magically exorcise it. In 1717, he said to Young, the author of Night Thoughts, “I am like that tree; I will begin to die at the top.” Those years survive for us in a few terrifying sentences. His sententious and grim character sometimes extends to what was said about him, as if those who judged him did not want to become less than he. Thackeray wrote: “To think on him is to think on the ruin of a great empire.” There was nothing, however, so touching as his application of God’s mysterious words.
Deafness, dizziness, and the fear of madness leading to idiocy aggravated and deepened Swift’s melancholy. He began to lose his memory. He didn’t want to use glasses; he couldn’t read, and he was incapable of writing. He prayed to God every day to send him death. And one evening, old and mad and wasted, he was heard repeating, we don’t know whether in resignation or desperation or as one affirms or anchors oneself in one’s own invulnerable personal essence: “I am that I am, I am that I am. . . .”
He may have f
elt, I will be miserable, but I am, and I am a part of the universe, as inevitable and necessary as the others, and I am what God wants me to be, I am what the universal laws have made of me, and perhaps To be is to be all.
Here ends the history of the sentence; I need only add, as a sort of epilogue, the words that Schopenhauer said, near death, to Eduard Grisebach:
If at times I have thought myself misfortunate, it is because of a confusion, an error. I have mistaken myself for someone else; for example, a deputy who cannot achieve a noble title, or the accused in a case of defamation, or a lover whom the girl disdains, or a sick man who cannot leave his house, or others who suffer similar miseries. I have not been those persons; it, in sum, has been the cloth of the clothes I have worn and thrown off. Who am I really? I am the author of The World as Will and Representation, I am the one who has given an answer to the mystery of Being that will occupy the thinkers of future centuries. That is what I am, and who can dispute it in the years of life that still remain for me?
Precisely because he had written The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer knew very well that to be a thinker is as illusory as being a sick man or a misfortunate man, and that he was profoundly something else. Something else: the will, the dark root of Parolles, the thing that Swift was.
[1955] —Translated by Eliot Weinberger
Narrative Art and Magic
The techniques of the novel have not, I believe, been analyzed exhaustively. A historical reason for this continued neglect may be the greater antiquity of other genres, but a more fundamental reason is that the novel’s many complexities are not easily disentangled from the techniques of plot. Analysis of a short story or an elegy is served by a specialized vocabulary and facilitated by the pertinent quotation of brief passages; the study of the novel, how ever, lacks such established terms, and the critic is hard put to find examples that immediately illustrate his arguments. I therefore beg indulgence for the documentation that follows.
I shall first consider the narrative features we find in William Morris’ The Life and Death of Jason (1867). My aim is literary, not historical; I deliberately exclude any study of the poem’s Hellenic affiliation. I shall observe, however, that the ancients-including Apollonius of Rhodes-had long since set the Argonauts’ deeds to verse; there is an intermediate version dating from 1474, Les Faits et prouesses du noble et vaillant chevalier Jason, not to be found in Buenos Aires, of course, but which scholars may readily consult in English.
Morris’ difficult task was the realistic narration of the fabulous adventures of Jason, king of Iolchos. Line-by-line virtuosity, common in lyrical poetry, was impossible in a narrative of over ten thousand lines. The fable required, above all, a strong appearance of factual truth, in order to achieve that willing suspension of disbelief which, for Coleridge, is the essence of poetic faith. Morris succeeded, and I would like to determine how.
Take this example from Book I: Aeson, the old king of Iolchos, gives his son over to the charge of Chiron the centaur. The problem lies in making the centaur believable, and Morris solves it almost unwittingly: mentioning this mythical race, at the outset, among the names of other strange wild beasts, he states flatly, “Where bears and wolves the centaurs’ arrows find.” This first incident is followed some thirty lines later by another reference that precedes any actual description. The old king orders a slave to take the child to the forest at the foot of the mountains, and to blow on an ivory horn to call forth the centaur—who will be, he says, “grave of face and large of limb”—and to fall upon his knees before him. He continues issuing commands until we come to a third and somewhat negative mention of the centaur, whom the king bids the slave not to fear. Then, troubled by the fate of the son he is about to lose, Aeson tries to imagine the boy’s future life in the forests among the “quick-eyed centaurs”—an epithet that brings them to life and is justified by their widespread fame as archers.67 The slave rides off with the son, and comes to the edge of a forest at dawn. He dismounts, carrying the child, and makes his way on foot among the oaks. There he blows the horn and waits. A blackbird is singing that morning, but the man can already make out the sound of approaching hoofs; the fear in his heart distracts him from the child, who has been trying to grab hold of the glittering horn. Chiron appears. We are told that he was a mighty horse, once roan but now almost white, with long grey locks on his head and a wreath of oak leaves where man was joined to beast. The slave falls to his knees. We note, in passing, that Morris need not impart to the reader his image of the centaur, nor even invite us to have our own. What is required is that we believe in his words, as we do the real world.
We find the same persuasive method employed in the episode of the sirens, in Book XIV, though in a more gradual fashion. A series of sweet images precedes the actual appearance of these divinities: a gentle sea, an orangescented breeze, the insidious music first recognized by the sorceress Medea and reflected in the sailors’ happy faces before any of them becomes fully conscious of what they hear, the true-to-life detail of their barely perceiving the words, expressed indirectly:
And by their faces could the queen behold
How sweet it was, although no tale it told,
To those worn toilers o’er the bitter sea.
The sirens, finally glimpsed by the oarsmen, still keep their distance, as these lines imply:
. . . for they were near enow
To see the gusty wind of evening blow
Long locks of hair across those bodies white,
With golden spray hiding some dear delight.
This last detail, the “golden spray”—from their wild locks of hair, the waves, either or both—”hiding some dear delight” serves another intent as well: signifying the sirens’ erotic allure. This twofold meaning returns a few lines later, when their bodies are hidden by the tears of longing that cloud the men’s eyes. (Both artifices belong to the same order as the wreath of leaves in the depiction of the centaur.) Driven to raging despair, Jason calls the sirens “sea-witches” and prompts sweet-voiced Orpheus to sing.68 A contest of song ensues, and with striking honesty Morris forewarns us that the songs he attributes to the unkissed mouths of the sirens and to Orpheus are no more than a transfigured memory of those remote melodies. The very precision of Morris’ colors—the yellow rims of the shore, the golden spray, the grey cliffs—moves us, for they seem salvaged intact from that ancient evening. The sirens sing seductively of a bliss as vague as the waves: “Such bodies garlanded with gold,/So faint, so fair, shall ye behold . . .” Orpheus counters, singing the joys of terra firma. The sirens promise a languid undersea heaven, “roofed over by the changeful sea,” as (2,500 years later, or only 50?) Paul Valéry would reiterate. They sing on, and Orpheus’ corrective song is faintly contaminated by their deadly sweetness. At last the Argonauts slip out of danger, the contest is over, and a long wake lies behind the ship; but one tall Athenian dashes back between the rows of oarsmen to the poop and dives into the waters.
Now to another work of fiction: Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). This novel’s secret theme is the terror and vilification of whiteness. Poe invents tribes who live near the Antarctic Circle, neighbors of an inexhaustible white continent who, for generations, have been exposed to the terrible visitations of men and driving white storms. White is anathema to these natives, and I must admit that by the last lines of the last chapter it is also anathema to the appreciative reader. This novel has two plots: the highseas adventure is more immediate, while the other, inexorable and secretive, expands until revealed at the very end. “Naming an object,” Mallarmé is said to have said, “is to suppress three-fourths of the joy of reading a poem, which resides in the pleasure of anticipation, as a dream lies in its suggestion.” I refuse to believe that such a scrupulous writer would have composed the numerical frivolity of “three-fourths,” but the general idea suits Mallarmé, as he illustrated in his two-line ellipse on a sunset:
Victorieusement fu
t le suicide beau
Tison de gloire, sangpar ecume, or, tempête!
[Victorious was the beautiful suicide / Firebrand of glory, bloodorange foam, gold, tempest! ]
It was inspired, no doubt, by the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. The impersonal color white itself—is it not utterly Mallarmé? (I feel that Poe chose this color intuitively, or for the same reasons later given by Melville in the chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale” of his equally brilliant and hallucinatory Moby-Dick.) It is impossible to illustrate or analyze here Poe’s whole novel; let me merely cite a single feature (subordinate, like all its details, to the covert theme), related to the dark tribesmen mentioned above and the streams found on their island. To have specified that these waters were red or blue would have been to deny too openly any image of whiteness. With his resolution of the problem, Poe enriches us:
On account of the singular character of the water, we refused to taste it, supposing it to be polluted. . . . I am at loss to give a distinct idea of the nature of this liquid, and cannot do so without many words. Although it flowed with rapidity in all declivities where common water would do so, yet never, except when falling in a cascade, had it the customary appearance of limpidity. It was, nevertheless, in point of fact, as perfectly limpid as any limestone water in existence, the difference being only in appearance. At first sight, and especially in cases where little declivity was found, it bore resemblance, as regards consistency, to a thick infusion of gum-arabic in common water. But this was only the least remarkable of its extraordinary qualities. It was not colorless, nor was it of any one uniform color-presenting to the eye, as it flowed, every possible shade of purple, like the hues of a changeable silk. . . . Upon collecting a basinful, and allowing it to settle thoroughly, we perceived that the whole mass of liquid was made up of a number of distinct veins, each of a distinct hue; that these veins did not commingle; and that their cohesion was perfect in regard to their own particles among themselves, and imperfect in regard to neighboring veins. Upon passing the blade of a knife athwart the veins, the water closed over it immediately, as with us, and also, in withdrawing it, all traces of the passage of the knife were instantly obliterated. If, however, the blade was passed down accurately between the two veins, a perfect separation was effected, which the power of cohesion did not immediately rectify.
Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952 Page 27
