Sculpture

Je voulus voir si les races vivantes m'offriraient plus de vertus ou moins de malheurs que les races évanouies. Comme je me promenais un jour dans une grande cité, en passant derrière un palais, dans une cour retirée et déserte, j'aperçus une statue qui indiquait du doigt un lieu fameux par un sacrifice. Je fus frappé du silence de ces lieux ; le vent seul gémissait autour du marbre tragique. Des manœuvres étaient couchés avec indifférence au pied de la statue ou taillaient des pierres en sifflant. Je leur demandai ce que signifiait ce monument : les uns purent à peine me le dire, les autres ignoraient la catastrophe qu'il retraçait. Rien ne m'a plus donné la juste mesure des événements de la vie et du peu que nous sommes. Que sont devenus ces personnages qui firent tant de bruit ? Le temps a fait un pas, et la face de la terre a été renouvelée.

I wished to see if the living races would offer me more virtues or less misfortunes than the vanished ones. As I was strolling one day through a great city, while passing behind a palace, in a secluded and deserted courtyard, I noticed a statue that indicated with its finger a place famous for a sacrifice. I was struck by the silence of the surroundings; only the wind moaned around the tragic marble. Some labourers were lying indifferently at the base of the statue, chipping stones and whistling. I asked them what this monument signified: some could hardly tell me, others had not heard of the catastrophe it recorded. Nothing has given me a juster measure of the events of life and of the little that we are. What has become of these personages who made so much noise? Time takes just a step, and the face of the earth has been renewed.

(from Chateaubriand's René (1802). Complete text: https://fr.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9 .)

A note in my copy says:

A Londres, derrière White-Hall, la statue de Charles II.

In fact, Chateaubriand must have seen the 1686 statue of James II by Peter Van Dievoet and Laurence Vandermeulen (workshop of Grinling Gibbons), now outside the National Gallery but then in the Pebble Court just off the Privy Gardens of the Palace of Whitehall. We can imagine his fictional narrator René as having seen it a few years before his arrival in Louisiana in 1725 (this date comes from the earlier story Atala).

The monarch, in classical garb, originally carried a baton in his right hand. The baton was still there in 1790, then disappeared for a few years (if early 19th-century engravings can be trusted), then reappeared and now seems to be lost for good. But with or without baton, James does seem to be pointing to the ground (a gesture that puzzled some critics at the time).

[Image source: Wikipedia .]

Chateaubriand drew the conclusion that the statue was indicating the place where James's father had been "sacrificed" in 1649. Which was indeed at Whitehall, outside the Banqueting House.

I'm not sure if anyone else thought this, or whether Chateaubriand had transferred the idea from another statue that is very definitely a pointing finger, metaphorically speaking.

This is the equestrian statue of Charles I at Charing Cross. Horse and rider were positioned to look towards Whitehall, as if triumphing over the rider's future fate.

Yet the statue dates from Charles I's own lifetime. It was made by Hubert Le Sueur in 1630-33 for Richard Weston , Lord High Treasurer, for his house in Roehampton, Surrey. During the Commonwealth the statue was supposed to have been melted down, but someone was canny enough to deceive the authorities. After the restoration it was purchased by Charles II and placed in its current significant position, on an elevated plinth.

[Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/locosteve/42239649752 . Photo by Loco Steve.]

I was so sensitively aware, indeed, of being younger than I could have wished, that for some time I could not make up my mind to pass her at all, under the ignoble circumstances of the case; but, hearing her there with a broom, stood peeping out of window at King Charles on horseback, surrounded by a maze of hackney-coaches, and looking anything but regal in a drizzling rain and a dark-brown fog ...

(David Copperfield, Ch. 20: young David shy of the chambermaid at the Golden Cross Inn.)

Apart from its motion towards Whitehall, the statue's placement in Charing Cross had additional meaning. It was here that eight of the regicides were executed in 1660, six months after Charles II's return.

And monumental sculpture was itself a statement. In 1643 the Parliamentarians had passed the Bill "An Ordinance for the utter demolishing, removing and taking away of all Monuments of Superstition or Idolatry", which led to the destruction, four years later, of the medieval Eleanor Cross that gave Charing Cross its name.

Public sculpture, then as now, was highly contested. For Chateaubriand, Romantic, Royalist and Catholic, the destruction, decay and neglect of old sculptures could only be a subject for melancholy.

Quelquefois une haute colonne se montrait seule debout dans un désert, comme une grande pensée s'élève, par intervalles, dans une âme que le temps et le malheur ont dévastée.

Shelley, sixteen years later, didn't see it quite the same way.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

For I take "Ozymandias" to be a revolutionary poem.

The difficult 8th line provokes the question, whose hand and whose heart? The two most common interpretations are A. The hand and heart are both Ozymandias'. B. The hand is the sculptor's and the heart is Ozymandias'. I take A to be impossible, as it requires "them" to mean the tyrant's subjects, but the poem has not mentioned the subjects. B is possible, taking "them" to mean Ozymandias' passions; but it's awkward to have the first half of the line talk about the sculptor and the second half about Ozymandias. And to say that the sculptor's delineation survives his and Ozymandias' lives is to say what is hardly very remarkable.

The remarkable thing, evidently, is that the sculptor's delineation survives even the destruction of the colossus. So my theory (though surely I'm not the first to think it) is that line 8 refers to the unnamed agent of the destruction. It's this agent's hand that mocks "them" (meaning the "lifeless things", the fragments of the colossus); it's this agent's heart that is fed by the act of demolition.

And who was this agent? Shelley is being obliquely discreet. Perhaps, with reference to Prometheus Unbound, we might call it Demogorgon.  As in that poem, it's possible to conceive the nemesis of tyranny as simply the grand passage of Time or the processes of Nature. But it's also possible, as Paul Foot argued in Red Shelley, to conceive Demogorgon as the spirit of revolution, and the poem as a call to action.

The Younger Memnon (Ramesses II) in the British Museum

[Image source: Wikipedia . This is the colossal figure, then being transported to Britain, that inspired the composition of "Ozymandias". Shelley had heard about it but he never saw it.]

[Since writing this, I've come to question my own reading. The little word "yet", in line 7, could perhaps take the weight of remarkableness. And I sense a pejorative tone in "the heart that fed", perhaps more appropriate to the original tyrant than the later agent of demolition.]

Meaning wears constantly away; nothing on this earth is supposed to last forever, the process of change is what allows new life to be lived. A statue, like the mortal it figures, has decay encoded in it. Now and then people want change so badly that they smash the plates.

my haul

Comfortably secured from anything like real poverty, the extreme parsimony of one who has merely over-extended himself is more of a luxury than a constraint. While my friend at work treated himself to a shotgun, ninety quid's worth of cartridges, an iPod Nano G3 and a KFC Variety Bucket, we window-shopped for a bar of chocolate.

So there was a book sale in the reference library near where I work. There is something pleasing about the mere act of taking books away from a reference library, but in my present state of indigence I did not indulge myself very much. I bought, for 20p, a book about Henri Michaux which abundantly conveyed (or rather, reiterated) the author's enthusiasm for Michaux, and there matters stayed. It seemed that the book sale was not a great success. These, of course, are the books that no-one wants to read any more, but that doesn't bother me much, a lot of my lifelong tastes (e.g. for Scott) have been determined by what I could pick up for almost nothing. A few weeks went by, and then appeared an offer that I really couldn't refuse. For the last few days of the sale, we were encouraged to fill an ample plastic bag to the brim and to pay only a pound for the whole lot.

So vast an influx of literature could not, of course, be entirely read through, and perhaps I scarcely intended it. What follows therefore is in the spirit of Pierre Bayard, the result as much of surveying as of reading.

The Oxford Book of Verse 1945-1980, Chosen by D.J. Enright. "For reasons hinted at above, the anthology may be considered reactionary. It could with equal justice be reckoned revolutionary - and with equal senselessness, since neither adjective has any certain or central place in this domain" (from the editor's introduction). In other words, he knew it would be called reactionary and no-one would ever dream of calling it revolutionary - I'm quite impressed by the underlying attempt, hopeless as it is, to taint the former charge with the evident absurdity of the latter. I've yet to hit on a poem I liked, though I know there are some.

Shelley's Literary and Philosophical Criticism ed. John Shawcross, 1909. The editor had no excessive admiration for Shelley's prose, but felt compelled to issue a selection that expurgated his political and atheistic work - the mature Shelley was not even very interested in politics, Shawcross claims. Here's something I just read in Saarikoski's Edge of Europe (a fantastic book, which I'll review as soon as I can get it together): "I went to Helsinki, spent three days there and met a lot of people, but none of them said anything memorable because all the people I met were intellectuals, and intellectuals always say what they mean without meaning what they say, and this makes it hard to have conversations with them." Shelley in his prose, the poems I'm not sure about, but what appeals in the prose is a willingness to stand by what he says. You think of Shelley as idealistic, but he's more dangerous than that. He says of Jesus Christ and of Rousseau (this is the Essay on Christianity) that they didn't really mean that one should literally give away all one's possessions or return to nature: "Nothing is more obviously false than that the remedy for the inequality among men consists in their return to the condition of savages and beasts". Most poets of a radical type would be tempted to assert the doctrines in their literal form - it would come over a lot sexier. But Shelley was political in his very bones; he was interested in the implementation of justice. So of the idealistic early church in the first generation after Jesus, "It was a circumstance of no moment that the first adherents of the system of Jesus Christ cast their property into a common stock. The same degree of community of property could have subsisted without this formality, which served only to extend a temptation of dishonesty to the treasurers..." This formality - that's where I hear the Shelley that takes my breath away. This could be misconstrued perhaps as timidly prudential or self-serving - not at all. Shelley believes in a distinct path to equality: the spread of knowledge brings individuals to moral maturity and results in a just society which results in equality. The final sentence of the Defence of Poetry is there not for the glory of poetry but to concentrate attention on effecting material change.



Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classic). I never get very far with his poetry, but I really enjoyed the early and unfinished Platonic dialogue about the leaf of the horse-chestnut tree, which involves itself ever deeper in imponderable difficulties.

Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Różewicz - two volumes of selected poems in English translation. I've only glanced at the introductions - these two poets who came of age during the German occupation and who drew from it such different ideas for their art. This reminds me that Enright wrote scornfully of the dire influence of all such translations of foreign poetry into English, with the sole exception of Cavafy. I like translationese. Reading it certainly breaks you out of that sad conception of "verse". It probably doesn't even matter much whether the poetry being translated is "good" or not. Venuti and all those currently fashionable protestations about allowing the foreignness to come through are just variations of Enright. As if you could possibly prevent it! As if you are even in a position to know what is foreign!

Phaedrus - like the Hopkins, this is a book I've owned and read once or twice before. I don't hold on to these kind of books, I let them go knowing they'll come by again. "It's lucky I came out without shoes. You, of course, never wear them. Our easiest way is to get our feet wet and walk in the stream" - this walk by the Ilissus might contribute unduly to my fondness for this dialogue - though Socrates is shown as a thorough urbanite. It's only quite recently that I've understood that both Plato and Aristotle represent quite a conservative line within the broader context of Athenian culture.

The Rise of the Greek Epic, by Gilbert Murray. This irresistible book would have helped with that. (This was the one book in my haul that I immediately read from cover to cover.) It was mostly written around 1906, and gives the most comprehensive explanation I've ever seen of what "Homer" is (and by the way of the conditions of Athenian Tragedy). The subsequent history of these theories I do not know - to what extent later scholars have rejected or accepted them. What's enthralling is the quality of the searching questions that are addressed here - Murray begins with the uniqueness of the Homeric poems as a datum and as something that demands explanation; he ends up with a detailed image of the "ancient book" as a collaborative evolution that is even more unique than we supposed - it was fascinating to read this back to back with

Teach Yourself Postmodernism, by Glenn Ward (1997). I suppose a lot of people get their postmodernism from primers rather than primary sources; I certainly do, and even so these contacts are fleeting, I remain quite ignorant. It seems that my conception of Baudrillard's hyperreality (drawn as I recall from another primer) was largely mistaken, if this one is to be believed. Now I have two conceptions, both with explanatory potential, and I'm not really bothered about resolving them. It's sobering to find that a lot of what I imagined to be my more original ideas are in fact just part of the zeitgeist, the kind of things that everyone is thinking these days.

Romeo and Juliet, Arden 2nd Series, ed. Brian Gibbons, 1980. Is it e'en so? Then I defy you, stars! There is a tragic point at which all common sense says: it's a million to one against, so you might as well give up. This is the moment when love has to depart from common sense, whose negative conclusions are death warrants. When only a miracle can restore what you love, it becomes necessary to set about creating the conditions for a miracle. And "Nede hath no lawe".

Two hundred poems from the Greek Anthology, trans. Robin Skelton (1971). This selection mainly represents (in spicy tetrameters) the gentlemen-authors among the whores and boys, giving vent to every fantasy in prospect and every cynicism in retrospect.

I wish I were a nodding rose
for you to watch me bud and blow,
and pluck me with that slender hand
and press me to your breasts of snow.

Balzac's Comédie Humaine, by Herbert J. Hunt, 1959. Balzac's work is so vast that being a Balzacian scholar is necessarily a way of life - Hunt has absorbed certain qualities of Balzac's aesthetic into his prose style, where they do more harm than good; it's rough going, (tougher still if your French isn't perfect, books on French Lit were at this time language-mosaics; it was then assumed that the reader of literature knew a basic toolkit of four or five languages), - and Hunt doesn't seem to want to think very much about what he is reading (contrast Gilbert Murray, above) - "Grandmother Tonsard is one of Balzac's most colourful old hags..." etc. Clearly the book contains a vast quantity of information, but it strikes me the only way to know what this information means is to read the whole of the Comédie humaine first. Balzac is one of my very favourite writers, but the idea of ever doing that is monstrous, it would be suicide.

Sir Walter Scott on novelists and fiction, ed. Ioan Williams, 1968. And here's another favourite author, but I would rather die than read through these 500-odd pages; obviously, this compilation was intended solely for ease of scholarly reference. Scott's review of his own Old Mortality (published anonymously) is an uncomfortable performance; and getting chunks of the Prefaces without the accompanying novels leaves me feeling horribly cheated. Still, I suppose I'll withhold it from the charity shop for a while. It could just possibly be that one evening I'll like to immerse in one of Scott's long reviews of, say, Richard Cumberland or The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan.

The Plays of Roswitha, trans. Christopher St. John (1923). More commonly known as Hroswitha, she was a tenth-century nun in the convent of Gandersheim in Saxony. These are quite exciting. Hroswitha is an auteur who loves the quick dissolve, chiaroscuro, multiple viewpoints and 30-year jump-cuts. She knew the Roman dramatists, but she didn't find any of this in Terence. What she did find, and systematically inverted, were plays in which women were compliant: her own plays are fierce celebrations of militant chastity. DIOCLETIAN. Enough of this presumptuous chatter. The rack shall put an end to it. IRENA. That is what we desire. We ask nothing better than to suffer the most cruel tortures for the love of Christ. ..... CHIONIA. Your Emperor has ordered you to put us to death, and you must obey, as we scorn his decree. If you were to spare us out of pity, you also would die.

This takes me to nearly the bottom of my first shopping-bag. Oh, didn't I mention? - on the last day of the sale I went and filled up another one. More to follow when the feast of gloating has finally calmed down.