Literature and the Gods

I. The Pagan School

T he gods are fugitive guests of literature. They cross it with the trail of their names and are soon gone. Every time the writer sets down a word, he must fight to win them back. The mercurial quality that heralds their appearance is token also of their evanescence. It wasn’t always thus. At least not so long as we had a liturgy. That weave of word and gesture, that aura of controlled destruction, that use of certain materials rather than others: this gratified the gods, so long as men chose to turn to them. After which, like windblown scraps in an abandoned encampment, all that was left were the stories that every ritual gesture implied. Uprooted from their soil and exposed, in the vibration of the word, to the harsh light of day, they frequently seemed idle and impudent. Everything ends up as history of literature.

So it would be a dull business indeed just to list the times the Greek gods turn up in modern poetry from the early Romantics on. Almost all the poets of the nineteenth century, from the most mediocre to the sublime, wrote a line or two in which the gods are mentioned. And the same is true of most of the poets of the twentieth century. Why? For all kinds of reasons: out of established scholastic habit — or to sound noble, or exotic, or pagan, or erotic, or erudite. Or — most frequently and tautologically — to sound poetic. But whether a poem chooses to name Apollo, or maybe an oak tree, or the ocean’s foam, doesn’t make much difference and can hardly be very meaningful: they are all terms from the literary lexicon, worn smooth by use.

Yet there was a time when the gods were not just a literary cliché, but an event, a sudden apparition, an encounter with bandits perhaps, or the sighting of a ship. And it didn’t even have to be a vision of the whole. Ajax Oileus recognized Poseidon disguised as Calchas from his gait. He saw him walking from behind and knew it was Poseidon “from his feet, his legs.”

Since for us everything begins with Homer, we can ask ourselves: which words did he use for such events? By the time the Trojan War broke out, the gods were already coming to earth less frequently than in an earlier age. Only a generation before, Zeus had fathered Sarpedon on a mortal woman. All the gods had turned up for the marriage of Peleus and Thetis. But now Zeus no longer showed himself to men; he sent other Olympians along to do his exploring for him: Hermes, Athena, Apollo. And it was getting harder to see them. Odysseus admits as much to Athena: “Arduous it is, oh goddess, to recognize you, even for one who knows much.” The Hymn to Demeter offers the plainest comment: “Difficult are the gods for men to see.” Every primordial age is one in which it is said that the gods have almost disappeared. Only to the select few, chosen by divine will, do they show themselves: “The gods do not appear to everyone in all their fullness [enargeîs],” the Odyssey tells us. is the terminus technicus for divine epiphany: an adjective that contains the dazzle of “white,” argós, but which ultimately comes to designate a pure and unquestionable “conspicuousness.” It’s the kind of “conspicuousness” that will later be inherited by poetry, thus becoming perhaps the characteristic that distinguishes poetry from every other form.

But how does a god make himself manifest? In the Greek language the word theós, “god,” has no vocative case, observed the illustrious linguist Jakob Wackernagel. Theós has a predicative function: it designates something that happens. There is a wonderful example of this in Euripides’ Helen: “ theoí. theòs gàr kaì tò phílous”—“O gods: recognizing the beloved is god.” Kerényi thought that the distinguishing quality of the Greek world was this habit of “saying of an event: ‘It is theós.’” And an event referred to as being theós could easily become Zeus, the most vast and all-inclusive of gods, the god who is the background noise of the divine. So when Aratus set out to describe the phenomena of the cosmos, he began his poem thus: “From Zeus let our beginning be, from he whom men never leave unnamed. Full of Zeus are the paths and the places where men meet, full of Zeus the sea and the seaports. Every one of us and in every way has need of Zeus. Indeed we are his offspring.”

“Iovis omnia plena,” Virgil would later write, and in these words we hear his assurance that this was a presence to be found everywhere in the world, in the multiplicity of its events, in the intertwining of its forms. And we also hear a great familiarity, almost a recklessness, in the way the divine is mentioned, as though to encounter divinity was hardly unusual, but rather something that could be expected, or provoked. The word átheos, on the other hand, was only rarely used to refer to those who didn’t believe in the gods. More often it meant to be abandoned by the gods, meant that they had chosen to withdraw from all commerce with men. Aratus was writing in the third century B.C., but what became of this experience that for him was so obvious and all-pervasive in the centuries that followed? How did time affect it? Did it dissolve it, destroy it, alter and empty it beyond recognition? Or is it something that still reaches out to us, whole and unscathed? And if so, where, how?

One morning in 1851, Baudelaire tells us, Paris awoke with the feeling that “something important” had happened: something new, something “symptomatic,” yet something that nevertheless presented itself as merely another fait divers. A word had been buzzing insistently in everybody’s head: revolution. Now it so happened that, at a dinner party in honor of the revolution of February 1848, a young intellectual had proposed a toast to the god Pan. “But what has Pan got to do with the revolution?” Baudelaire asked the young intellectual. “Don’t you know?” came the answer: “It’s Pan who starts revolutions. He is the revolution.” Baudelaire didn’t leave it at that: “So it’s not true that he’s been dead for ages? I thought a loud voice had been heard drifting across the Mediterranean and that this mysterious voice that rang out from the Columns of Hercules as far as the shores of Asia had announced to the old world: THE GOD PAN IS DEAD.” The young intellectual didn’t seem worried. “It’s just a rumor,” he said. “Scandal mongers, nothing in it. No, the god Pan is not dead! The god Pan lives on,” he insisted, lifting his eye to the heavens with quite bizarre tenderness: “He will return.” Baudelaire glosses: “He was talking about the god Pan as if he were the prisoner of Saint Helena.” But the exchange wasn’t over; Baudelaire had another question: “So can we presume that you are pagan?” The young intellectual was positively disdainful: “Of course I am; don’t you know that only paganism, if properly understood, that is, can save the world? We must go back to the true doctrines that were eclipsed, but only for an instant, by the infamous Galilean. And then, Juno has looked favorably on me, a look that went right to my soul. I was sad and miserable, watching the procession go by; I implored that beautiful divinity, my eyes were full of love, and she sent one of her looks, a profound and benevolent look, to cheer me up and give me courage.” Baudelaire comments: “Juno threw him one of her regards de vache, Bôôpis Êré. Possibly the poor fellow is mad.” This last joking remark is addressed to an anonymous third person, so far a silent observer, who now dismisses the affair thus: “Can’t you see he’s talking about the ceremony of the fatted calf? He was looking at all those rosy women with their pagan eyes, and Ernestine, who works at the Hippodrome and was playing Juno, tipped him an allusive wink, a really sluttish stare.” By this time what had started out as the most magniloquent and visionary of exchanges has become pure Offenbach, an example of boulevardier wit that actually predates the boulevards themselves, albeit by very little. And the young intellectual winds up the conversation with the same ambiguous mix of registers: “Call her Ernestine all you like,” said the young pagan. “You want to disappoint me. But the effect on my morale was the same — and think of that look good omen.”

So with the regard de vache of a Juno of the Hippodrome — which, as we remember, was a circus near the Arc de Triomphe that had burned down a few months previously — the gods of Olympus announced their return to the Parisian theatre circuit. And, as is so often the way in Paris, the Parisians announced as news — or at least as only really counting as news once it happened in Paris — something that actually had already manifested itself elsewhere and quite some time ago, in the Germany of Hölderlin and Novalis, for example, a good fifty years before: the reawakening and return of the gods. Yet Parisians had had the privilege of being introduced to that Germany by an illustrious explorer. When Madame de Staël began to travel the highways and byways of Germany like some journalist in search of the flavor of the day, the country was still very much the enchanted forest at the heart of Europe. No sooner were its leaves rustled than they stirred the chords of the Romantic piano. Madame de Staël didn’t notice this, of course, her ears being attuned only to the ideas all around her — which she wielded like blunt instruments. Traveling beneath the huge open skies of a country where to her amazement she was seeing “traces of a nature uninhabited by man,” her immediate response was one of discouragement: “Something oddly silent in both the landscape and its inhabitants saddens one at first.”

Between the pert and ruthless chitter-chatter of Parisian society and this deep, brooding silence lay a distance more speculative than spatial. So the first odd thing this journalist observed was that on German soil “the empire of taste and the weapon of ridicule have no influence.” Hence when the gods returned to manifest themselves here, they would not be immediately corroded by irony and sarcasm as in Paris. On the contrary, the danger here was that their appearance would be overwhelming. As indeed was the case for Hölderlin, dazzled by Apollo on his way home from Bordeaux: “As they tell of the heroes, I can say Apollo struck me down,” he wrote to Böhlendorff. But in order for Apollo, “he who strikes from afar,” to thrust himself with such violence on a German poet wandering through western France, “constantly moved by the celestial fire and the silence of men,” and in order for “the celestial fire” actually to mean something frightening and enchanting again, rather than be just another ornamental flourish in a pompous tragédie classique, something had to happen that really was a “revolution,” a powerful shaking of earth and sky. Which brings us back to the young Parisian intellectual whom Baudelaire obviously was mocking and who raised his glass to the god Pan, for the god Pan “is the revolution.” And we note that Baudelaire wrote L’École païenne in 1852 while Hölderlin’s letter to Böhlendorff is dated November 1802, exactly fifty years before. So what Baudelaire is talking about here was a case of involuntary parody, on the part of the young man, of an extreme experience — Hölderlin’s in the period immediately preceding his madness. An experience that was quite unknown in France and hadn’t even percolated through in Germany, if only because of the sacred terror it aroused. But events live on, have their meaning and do their work on their own, even when not immediately noticed. To understand how that incongruous toast to Pan could happen in Paris in 1851, one cannot avoid going back to Hölderlin on his way from Bordeaux. Fortunately there are some stepping stones in between. The first comes courtesy of Heinrich Heine, the only ambassador that Romantic Germany would send to Paris. And it is Baudelaire himself who brings in Heine for us when commenting on his dialogue with the young intellectual and devotee of Pan: “It seems to me,” he remarks, “that such immoderate paganism is typical of a man who has read too much and understood too little of Heinrich Heine and that literature of his rotten with materialistic sentimentalism.” The harshness of the remark might lead you to suppose that Baudelaire loathes Heine. Quite the contrary. Shortly afterwards he was to speak of him as “this enchanting mind who would be a genius if only he would address himself more often to the divine.” And when, in 1865, Jules Janin published a feuilleton scornful of Heine, Baudelaire was seized by “a tremendous rage,” as if the article had somehow touched a raw nerve. At once he set about writing a vehement defense of Heine, a poet, he announced, “whom no Frenchman can equal.” But the matter got no further than this sudden fury. Later he would write to Michel Lévy: “Then, as soon as I’d written it, and was happy I had, I kept the letter and didn’t send it to any of the papers.” Fortunately, though, we still have his notes — where one is struck by a sentence that will remain forever the ultimate dismissal of the irritating cult of bonheur in all its manifestations: “Je vous plains, monsieur, d’être si facilement heureux”—“I feel sorry for you, monsieur, that you are so easily happy.” Attacking Heine, Janin had attacked the whole band of “melancholy and mocking” poets to which, of course, Baudelaire knew he belonged. Hence the strident, exasperated tone of the poet’s response, which reads like an act of urgent self-defense. But if Baudelaire’s admiration of Heine was such and so great that he actually identified with the German, it follows that the disparaging remarks on Heine in the École païenne are not really representative of the poet’s mind. And this is the telltale sign that confirms a growing suspicion: Baudelaire is writing the whole piece as if from the point of view of his enemies. From start to finish the thing is tongue-in-cheek. Not only that, but in assuming his enemies’ point of view, Baudelaire actually seems to be offering them arguments against himself that are far more effective and biting than any they would have been able to dream up themselves. Only when we have grasped this does the last section of the piece, after the aside on Heine, make sense. Suddenly the spirit is pure Offenbach again: “Let’s go back to Olympus. For a while now I’ve had the whole of Olympus hard at my heels, something that bothers me a great deal; gods are falling on my head like chimney pots. It’s like a bad dream, as if I were plunging down into the void and a host of wooden, iron, golden, and silver idols along with me, all chasing after me as I plummet, all shoving me and digging me in the ribs and whacking me over the head.” This comic if calamitous vision might well be seen as the final galop of the first half of the nineteenth century, a period which had seen not only the Greek gods invade the psyche once again, but also and following hard after them another huge procession of idols too, their names often quite unpronounceable. This was the so-called renaissance orientale, a process that came out of the work of philologists, who for the first time were translating texts of the greatest importance, while statues, reliefs, and amulets went on and on multiplying in the vast crypts of the museums. The idols were back at last and Europe was under siege, and this at precisely the moment when everyone was singing the praises of Progress and the clarifying powers of Reason. There is thus a wonderfully theatrical timing to the fact that only a few months after Baudelaire’s École païenne, the Revue des deux mondes should publish Heine’s Les Dieux en exil, which almost amounts to a counter-melody to Baudelaire’s piece. Heine explains how, before coming back to invade the scene, the pagan gods would have to lead a long and grueling life in hiding, as exiles, “among the owls and toads in the dark hovels of their past splendor.” Much of what the world now calls “satanic,” he added, was once blessedly pagan. But what happens when the gods come back and show themselves in all the fullness of their sorcery, when Venus once again seduces a mortal man — Tannhäuser, to be precise? We can hardly, as once in the past, say incessu patuit dea, and we won’t even be able to recognize in the goddess a “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur,” as Winckelmann dictates. Rather, Venus will come to meet us as a “demon, that she-devil of a woman who, beneath all her Olympian arrogance and the magnificence of her passion allows us to glimpse la dame galante; she’s a celestial courtesan perfumed with ambrosia, a divinity aux camélias, or as one might say a déesse entretenue.” In short, the real news is this: the Olympian gods are back and in business, but they live in the demi-monde. Complicitous as a pair of jugglers, Baudelaire and Heine conjure together in irreversible combination the reawakening of the gods and the spirit of parody. In so doing they look forward to a state of affairs which is still very much our own today.

But another surprise awaits us in the last paragraphs of the École païenne. First there is a blank space, then a brusque change of tone. Suddenly the voice is grave and austere, as if Baudelaire were assuming the attitude of a baroque preacher, an Abraham a Santa Clara raging against the wiles of this world: “To send passion and reason packing,” he announces,

is to do literature to death. To repudiate the efforts of the society that came before us, its philosophy and Christianity, would be to commit suicide, to reject the impulse and tools of improvement. To surround oneself exclusively with the seductions of physical art would mean in all probability to lose oneself. In the long run, the very long run, you will see, love, feel only what is beautiful, you will be unable to see anything but beauty. I use the word in its narrow sense. The world will appear to you as merely material. The mechanisms that govern its movement will long remain hidden.

May religion and philosophy return one day, forced into being by the cry of the desperate man. Such will ever be the destiny of those fools who see nothing in nature but rhythms and shapes. Yet at first philosophy will appear to them as no more than an interesting game, an amusing form of gymnastics, a fencing in the void. But how they will be punished for that! Every child whose poetic spirit is overexcited and who is not immediately presented with the stimulating spectacle of a healthy, industrious way of life, who constantly hears tell of glory and of sensual pleasure, whose senses are every day caressed, inflamed, frightened, aroused, and satisfied by works of art, will become the unhappiest of men and make others unhappy too. At twelve he will be pulling up his nanny’s skirts, and if some special skill in crime or art doesn’t raise him above the crowd, by thirty he will be dying in hospital. Forever inflamed and dissatisfied, his spirit will go abroad in the world, the busy industrious world; it will go abroad, I tell you, like a whore, yelling: Plasticity! Plasticity! Plasticity, that horrible word makes my flesh creep, plasticity has poisoned him, yet he can’t live without his poison now. He has banished reason from his heart and, as a just punishment for his crime, reason refuses to return. The happiest thing that can happen to him is that nature strike him with a terrifying call to order. And such, in fact, is the law of life: he who refuses the pure joys of honest activity can feel nothing but the terrible joys of vice. Sin contains its own hell, and from time to time nature says to pain and misery: go and destroy those rebels!

The useful, the true, the good, all that is really lovable, these things will be unknown to him. Infatuated by his exhausting dream, he will seek to infatuate and exhaust others with it. He will have no time for his mother, his nanny; he will pull his friends to pieces or love them only for their form; his wife too, if he has one, he will despise and debase.

The immoderate pleasure he takes in form will drive him to monstrous and unprecedented excesses. Swallowed up by this ferocious passion for the beautiful and the bizarre, the pretty and the picturesque, for the gradations are many, the notions of the true and the just will disappear. The frenetic passion for art is a cancer that eats up everything else; and since the drastic absence of the true and the just in art is tantamount to the absence of art, man in his entirety will disappear; excessive specialization in a single faculty can only end in emptiness … Literature must go back and temper itself once again in a more healthy atmosphere. All too soon it will become clear that a literature that refuses to develop in harmony with science and philosophy is a homicidal and indeed suicidal literature.

The passage is quite astonishing in its ambiguity. It’s as though Baudelaire were seeking to couple up his own deepest convictions to the arguments of his most implacable enemies like so many links in the same chain. Reading the piece, one is struck by a suspicion that undermines every word. The overriding impression is that of listening to some theological opponent of Baudelaire’s who has somehow been endowed with the poet’s own sharp-witted eloquence and deep sense of pathos. Not to mention his irrepressible penchant for the grotesque, evident, for example, where we have the satanic child aesthete pulling up his nanny’s skirts. Or where, like some early Monsieur Prudhomme, he appeals to the notion of “a healthy, industrious way of life,” and again to “the pure joys of honest activity.” It’s as if Baudelaire had dropped these hints on purpose to betray what is in fact a perverse game of role reversal. And yet one has to concede that where the text is not playful, its tone austere and stern, the reasoning does carry a grim conviction. It’s as if Baudelaire were evoking the figure of some Grand Inquisitor, looking ahead to the pathetic prosecutor who would seek to have Fleurs du mal condemned, and transforming him into a literary Joseph de Maistre.

But why resort to such solemn tones? Clearly something extremely menacing was going on — or rather, no, had already happened: the pagan gods had escaped from those niches in literary rhetoric where many presumed they would be forever confined. Now those niches were just empty graves while a group of noble fugitives mingled mockingly with the city crowds. It was Verlaine who would tell us the strange story, and tell it with disarming naturalness, in a juvenile sonnet entitled “Les Dieux”:

Vaincus, mais non domptés, exilés mais vivants Et malgré les édits de l’Homme et ses menaces, Ils n’ont point abdiqué, crispant leurs mains tenaces Sur des tronçons de sceptre, et rôdent dans les vents

Beaten, but not tamed, exiled but alive, Notwithstanding the edicts of man and his threats, They have not abdicated, their stubborn hands grip Stumps of scepters, and they wander in the wind.

It’s a gloomy vision. The enchanter gods wander like “rapacious ghosts” in a desolate world. The time has come for them to sound their “rebellion against Man,” represented, as it turns out, by the eternal pharmacist Homais, who is still “amazed” that he managed to chase the gods off in the first place while presently preparing to burden Humanity with the awkward weight of a capital letter. The sonnet closes with a warning:

Du Coran, des Védas et du Deutéronome,

De tous les dogmes, pleins de rage, tous les dieux

Sont sortis en campagne: Alerte! et veillons mieux.

From the Koran, from the Vedas and from Deuteronomy,

From every dogma, full of fury, all the gods Have come out into the open: Look out! and keep a better watch.

It seems that this business of the pagan gods’ return oscillates with disturbing ease between vaudeville and gothic novel. But behind these colorful scenes, Baudelaire’s unnamed Inquisitor had got wind of a more subtle danger: the emancipation of the aesthetic. It is as if he had foreseen that aesthetic justification of the world that only Nietzsche, some years later, would have the temerity to vindicate. The danger he senses lies in the possibility that the category of the Beautiful will free itself from the canonical superiors it has hitherto obeyed: the True and the Good. If this were to happen — and here our Inquisitor is enlightening—“an immoderate pleasure … in form” will develop and the “frenetic passion for art” will “eat up everything else,” so that in the end nothing will be left, not even art itself. Or, rather, what’s left is a merely aesthetic backdrop through which nonetheless (as Valéry put it) “nothingness seeps through.” But isn’t this the main criticism that has been leveled against the new literature — or at least against great literature — ever since, and starting with Baudelaire himself? The central formulations of the passage — the “immoderate pleasure … in form,” the “ferocious passion for the beautiful,” “frenetic passion for art”—will soon become Nietzsche’s “magic of the extreme” and Gottfried Benn’s fanaticism for form, which are direct and splendid descendants of Baudelaire himself. We are bound to admit, that is, that the Grand Inquisitor’s denunciation casts a long shadow. Edgar Wind was right to sense the presageful signs in his masterful Art and Anarchy.

Baudelaire’s article on the école païenne is unique in that in just a few pages of what disguises itself as lively journalism he manages to bring together three elements that had never previously been thought of as inextricably connected: the reawakening of the gods, parody, and what I will be calling “absolute literature,” by which I mean literature at its most piercing, its most intolerant of any social trappings. Now let’s turn from that to the scenario as it presents itself today. First and most obviously, the gods are still among us. But they are no longer made up of just the one family, however complicated, residing in their vast homes on the slopes of a single mountain. No, now they are multitudes, a teeming crowd in an endless metropolis. It hardly matters that their names are often exotic and unpronounceable, like the names one reads on the doorbells of families of immigrants. The power of their stories is still at work. Yet there is something new and unusual about the situation: this composite tribe of gods now lives only in its stories and scattered idols. The way of cult and ritual is barred, either because there is no longer a group of devotees who carry out the ritual gestures, or because even when someone does perform these gestures they stop short. The statues of Śiva and Viu still drip with offerings, but is a remote and shapeless entity to the Indian of today, while Prajāpati is only to be found in books. And this, one might say, has become the natural condition of the gods: to appear in books — and often in books that few will ever open. Is this the prelude to extinction? Only to the superficial observer. For in the meantime all the powers of the cult of the gods have migrated into a single, immobile and solitary act: that of reading. In the delirium of their love affair with the microchip, people insist on asking tedious questions about the survival of the printed word. While the truly extraordinary phenomenon that is everywhere before us is never even mentioned: the vertiginous and unprecedented concentration of power that has gathered and is gathering in the pure act of reading. That we may be gazing at a screen rather than a page, that the numbers, formulas, and words appear on liquid crystal rather than paper, changes nothing at all: it is still reading. The theatre of the mind seems to have expanded to include rank upon teeming rank of patient signs, all incorporated in this prosthesis which is the computer. Meanwhile, with superstitious confidence, all the sorcery and powers at play are attributed to what appears on the screen, not to the mind that elaborates it — and above all reads. Yet what could be more technologically advanced than a transformation that takes place in a totally invisible way, within the mind? The development is dense with hidden consequences. By uniting with the screen the mind, trained or untrained, creates a new kind of Centaur, grows used to seeing itself as an unlimited theatre. Boundless as it is, this apparently new scene resembles nothing more than the vibrant oceanic expanse that the Vedic seers thought of as the mind itself, manas. And already in the interstices of that great theatre vast caverns are opening up before our eyes, whence as ever echo the names of the gods.

The world — the time has come to say it, though the news will not be welcome to everyone — has no intention of abandoning enchantment altogether, if only because, even if it could, it would get bored. In the meantime, parody has become a subtle film that has wrapped itself round everything. What in Baudelaire and Heine was just a poisoned splinter of Offenbach has now become the characterizing feature of our age. Today, everything, in whatever form it comes, appears first and foremost as parody. Nature itself is parody. Only afterwards, with great effort and subtlety, it may be that something manages to go beyond parody. But it will always be necessary to measure it against its original parodic appearance. And finally: absolute literature. What, as Baudelaire’s Grand Inquisitor saw it, was still only the menace in the wings, a serpentine threat, a possible degeneration, has turned out after all to be literature itself. Or at least, the only kind of literature that I have come here to talk to you about.