The Vibration of the Perishable Minute (Classics of Literary Criticism Revisited II)
Jean Starobinski: Enchantment: The Seductress in Opera. [New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.] One can imagine a certain immobile time, a time of eternal present.In such a time there are no battles or notions of property. No death, only easy sleep. There are free moments of song and dance, music rather than work. Men and beasts understand each other perfectly—in music and in melody. The eternal present moves out and back on itself in sinuous folds of flowing arcs and circles. Becoming for each creature is a light movement in this present, a fluid élan. Only an interval is sometimes required in order to renew such moments of plenitude and felicity. But such a golden age is only the retrospective consolation of an unhappy humanity. Jean Starobinski begins his remarkable tour de force on operatic synesthesia by wondering whether human beings tried enacting such brief rest periods through their festivities right from the outset of community life. But will that not be a mere echo, a ritualized commemoration, a souvenir of some fabulous origin? Or are there also moments of the body and voice in such reenactments which might help cross the threshold of the realm of the dead? Is the moment of performance also a moment to witness the abolishment of the mortal consequences of time? Perhaps the performance that reconquers a parcel of eternity also witnesses its own duration measured. Is it that the poet and the musician who have relived the atemporal plenitude of the origin only turn and fall back into time and death? Surely, they must at first hold onto the temporal space and build their fable there. But they must also know how to close off such enactments, with a final cadence and a lifting of the masks—a salute to the public. The spectators applaud the enchantment that was, the very exploit of art. Ulysses has strapped himself to the mast of his ship to resist such an experience. What is so dangerous about this song, for one who has succeeded to resist the temptations of immortality? The Sirens, triply perfect epic minstrels, companions of Persephone, would live as long as they could stop every passer-by, but as soon as one passed without stopping, they would perish. The enchantment was so complete that the travelers would be bewitched, and forgetting their homelands, oblivious to food and drink, they would die from starvation: “Come here, renowned Ulysses, honour to the Achaenean name, and listen to our two voices. No one ever sailed past us without staying to hear the enchanting sweetness of our song—and he who listens will go his way not only charmed, but wiser, for we know all the ills that the gods laid upon the Argives and Trojans before Troy, and can tell you everything that is going to happen over the whole world.” (The Odyssey, Book XII). If Ulysses had listened to the Sirens, he would have encountered the image of his own past transfigured by music. He would have believed that his life to be forever saved from oblivion, and he would have forgotten to live—like all other travelers whose white bones litter the Sirens’ shore. Here is a fascinating music that develops another relationship to time outside of the one that emanates from the golden age, a music linked to narrating speech that can only deploy itself within a succession of temporal events: a happy fluidification, in Starobinski’s words. This is the music of becoming, a music that elevates to the perfection of song, bloody entanglements and heroic patience and suffering. We now enter into a time that will be transmitted to future generations by enacting the glorious immortality of the hero who has gone through the test of time and whose existence is saved by song. For having accepted death, he will live eternally in and through speech. But Ulysses is also bitter since he is stripped and solitary. The pleading castaway and the hero in the minstrel Demodocos are there the same: “His glorious song celebrates a past action, and the surviving hero, if he is to avoid demeaning himself, must take the place of the minstrel and become the narrator of his own miseries…and elevate them to the plane of musical immortality, just as the minstrel did for his military services.” Here is a particular mode of deliverance, of spirit rendered in and through an immaterial sonorous condition. Time is simultaneously imagined as the age of heroes, subsisting in our past as sheer memory and yet it destroys all our illusions by asserting its own dominance only through lived temporality.There is an interior historicity to the operatic time. This is the most sensual and fragile of durations: the vibration of the perishable minute. Indeed singing and seducing are intimately related. To seduce, etymologically, means to lead aside. What is the force that attracts one away from the straight and narrow? There emerges a fatal creature of shattering beauty, speaking in silken voice and offering unknown pleasures. You should have listened and avoided its glance. One step off the sure road leads to another and suddenly you find yourself wandering in a state of perdition. At the end a kind of dizziness sets in—a concoction arising out of ecstasy, enthusiasm and intoxication.When the hero travels by road, through the wilds or by sea, the enchantress watches for him by the side of the road or haunts him, lurking over the island when he comes ashore. One can also see that sometimes the reverse happens and vulnerable heroines are seduced by wicked suitors. This has been the fate of the girls who listened to Don Juan’s compliments or those who had accepted Faust’s gifts. To be enchanted is to give in to a strange foreignness. But it would be erroneous to describe it through drives and beliefs and phobias. Nor are these moments’ anxiety dreams. Such moments of foreignness of a legendary past are transformed into a present enchantment in the opera—as one sees action
All Flesh is Grass (Classics of Literary Criticism Revisited)
Classics of Literary Criticism Revisited All Flesh is Grass Harold Bloom: The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of King James Bible [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011] How does an engaged work transcend skepticism and faith alike? There is only one way—by immersing itself in the eloquence and beauty of the subject. Literary appreciation is foremost this act of immersion, especially if you value discrimination and judgment. The King James Bible (henceforth, KJB) is an adroitly woven revisionist tapestry and Harold Bloom has taken it upon himself to probe into a blessing called literature by digging into its innards, which might also be a way of confronting the fullness of our lives. Originally the culmination of one strand of Renaissance English culture, the KJB is a fundamental source for Whitman and Melville, Emily Dickinson, Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy, Milton, William Blake, Henry James, Joyce and Atwood among others. It is important to state right at the outset that a literary appreciation of the Bible does not seek faith and revelation. For the faithful, a literary appreciation is redundant. But a literary scholar enters the terrain of the Bible as a pilgrim, seeking to unearth sublime fiction. But even as we begin to appreciate the narrative tropes, the rhetorical strategies, the lyrical ardour, the fiery prophecies and the pungent proverbs in the text, the problem of its spiritual codes lurks and abides. Literary criticism cannot be made into religion and yet all of Shakespeare and Dante constitute Bloom’s guiding set of Gnostic scriptures. The belief lies in the resurrectionist powers of the arts. Historically speaking, the KJB (also called the Authorized Version) is an English Protestant disputation against contemporary Catholic and Jew alike.It is an English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England, begun in 1604 and completed in 1611.The KJB includes the 39 books of the Old Testament, an intertestamental section containing 14 books of the Apocrypha and the 27 books of the New Testament. King James had expressly instructed the translators that the new version ought to conform to the ecclesiology and reflect the Episcopal structure of the Church of England and its belief in an ordained clergy. This instructed piety recedes as we immerse ourselves in the narrative and the poetry within. The translation was done by 47 scholars, all of whom were members of the Church of England. Bloom has delved into those which have the strongest literary possibilities. Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) and KJB are for Bloom rival aesthetic eminences, even as he constantly compares and contrasts the language and individual thrusts of four other versions: the Greek New Testament, the Tyndale, the Geneva and the Myles Coverdale translation. The breathtaking erudition of Bloom apart, much of the charm for the readers is to share with him the realization that KJB was a culmination of two millennia of collective work done by writers, composers, redactors and editors, and yet the result has been surprisingly aesthetic, and its power original. Blessing is an eloquent concept in the Torah—the first five books of the Old Testament, from Genesis through Deuteronomy. There are at least four voices in the Torah: the Yahvist who tells us remarkable stories of a wondering people—the Jews, as they try to become Hebrews through their journey towards the Promised Land. The Priestly voice, on the other hand is about wisdom, restraint and genealogy. The other two are the Elohist and the Deuteronomist. The idea of the blessing for the Priestly writer is “be fruitful and multiply.” In the Yahvist writer—blessing is “more life into a time without boundaries.” Your name will not be scattered if you have blessing. To this end Bloom nominates Jacob to be the symbol of Jewish consciousness proper, more than Moses or David, archetype of Freud, Kafka and Einstein. Jacob is a survivor who becomes Israel—both a nation and a people of survivors. In Thomas Mann’s narrative tetralogy, Joseph and his Brothers, written between 1926 and 1942, Bloom discovers the best interpretation, the reincarnated spirit of the Yahvist writer. Terror and comedy mingle in Jacob, who passed on the blessing both to his fourth son, Judah, and in a literary sense to Paul. Mann’s Jacob, increasingly as he ages, ponders his own stories, seeking to gain power over their elucidation. In both Mann and the Yahvist, ironies flourish, usurpations are rampant and cunning rather than sanctity is the pragmatic qualification for election: “If Israel is the alternative name of the nameless angel, then Jacob has usurped the identity of what, following Wallace Stevens and Freud, could be called the angel of reality,” says Bloom. The Blessing means survival—though Jacob shall limp for the rest of his life after a fatal embrace with Yahweh. Does Yahweh play the role of the Angel of Death? Perhaps Jacob has made allies of what Freud regarded as reality-testing. This brings us to the second serious question that the book probes: what might luck be? Oscar Wilde nominated Jesus as the Supreme aesthete and Bloom assigns Yahweh the role of the notorious narcissist playing favourites—the creator-by-catastrophe. Much of Exodus, and all of Numbers after it, is a recurrent juxtaposition between revelation and wilderness. Bloom ponders: “Since my long-ago childhood, I have wondered at a forty years’ wandering back and forth in the Sinai, between the symbolic extremes of Egypt and Canaan. The outrageousness of what Yahweh imposes upon his wretched chosen people somehow has escaped commentary, ancient and modern, rabbinical and scholarly. Who can journey forty years in the waste lands without anguish and discontent? Is that part of the Blessing?” For a book that is supposed to be garnering wisdom and poise, the KJB iterates that we are far from dealing in exemplary characters. But we are witnessing the journey of people who are confronting the fullness of life and its many shades. Deceit and shrewdness, jealousy and back-stabbing, revenge and lust continuously make this a supremely human tale. And circumscribing ritual markers leading to the formation of a commune—painstakingly, is also a way of confronting