Literature and the Gods

VIII. Absolute Literature

Absolute Literature

W hat are writers talking about when they name the gods? If those names are not part of a cult — not even the metaphorical cult that is rhetoric — what is their mode of being? “The gods have become diseases,” wrote Jung with illuminating brutality. Like so many refugees from time, they have all taken shelter together in the amorphous psychic mass. But does this diminish them? Mightn’t it rather be considered a return to the original state of things — or at least a withdrawal to that enclosed space, to that témenos. whence the gods have always sprung? For whatever they may be, the gods manifest themselves above all as mental events. Yet, contrary to the modern illusion, it is the psychic powers that are fragments of the gods, not the gods that are fragments of the psychic powers. If they are thought of as no more than that, the impact can be violent, something we don’t know how to speak about except by resorting to the degrading lexicon of pathology. And that’s precisely the moment when literature can become an effective stratagem for sneaking the gods out of the universal clinic and getting them back into the world, scattered across its surface where they have always dwelt, since, as the Neoplatonist Salustius wrote, “the world itself can be considered a myth.” In these circumstances they may even travel incognito, indistinguishable from anyone else entering or leaving a cosmic Hôtel du Libre Échange: or they may show themselves in their ancient robes in hyper-real decal images. But one way or another the world will go on being the place of epiphanies. And, to travel among them, literature will be the last surviving Pausanias. But are we quite sure we know what “literature” means? When we pronounce the word today, we are immediately aware that it is immeasurably distant from anything an eighteenth-century writer might have meant by it, while at the beginning of the nineteenth century it was already taking on connotations we quickly recognize: notably the most audacious and demanding, those that leave the ancient pattern of genres and prescribed styles far behind, like some kind of kindergarten forever abandoned in a flight towards a knowledge grounded only in itself and expanding everywhere like a cloud, cloaking every shape, overstepping every boundary. This new creature that appeared we don’t know quite when and that still lives among us may be defined as “absolute literature.” “Literature” because it is a knowledge that claims to be accessible only and exclusively by way of literary composition; “absolute” because it is a knowledge that one assimilates while in search of an absolute, and that thus draws in no less than everything; and at the same time it is something absolution, unbound, freed from any duty or common cause, from any social utility. Sometimes proclaimed with arrogance, elsewhere practiced in secret and with subtle cunning, this knowledge first becomes perceptible in literature, as presence or premonition, in the early days of German Romanticism, and seems destined never to leave it. Like a sort of irreversible mutation, you can celebrate it, you can loathe it, but either way it now belongs to the very physiology of writing.

Resorting to the useful superstition of dates, we could say that the heroic age of absolute literature begins in 1798 with a review, the Athenaeum, mostly put together anonymously by a few young men in their early twenties—“proud seraphs,” Wieland called them — among whom the names of Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis catch the eye, and ends in 1898 with the death of Mallarmé in Valvins. A century to the year, during which all the decisive traits of absolute literature had occasion to manifest themselves. Which is to say that what came afterwards — embarrassingly labeled as “modernism” or “the avant-garde”—had already lost its auroral brightness, a fact that partly explains why it was so fond of aggressive, disruptive forms, first and foremost of which was the manifesto. By the end of the nineteenth century the essential features of the obscure process were in place. Then came the ramifications, the interfacings, a century of innumerable hybrids, repercussions, invasions of new territories. But how to explain the origins of the process? Certainly not via some historical or sociological approach. For one can’t help feeling that the entire phenomenon amounts to the most radical apostasy from history and society. It’s as if, exactly as the mesh of society tightened, so as to block out the whole sky, exactly as it clamored ever more loudly for a cult of its own, so the recruitment of a band of recalcitrants began, some of them discreet, some rowdy, some quite unassailable in their rejection — not because they felt duty-bound to other cults, but because possessed by a sense of divinity so intense it had no need to give itself a name, and at the same time so precise as to impose immediate rejection of that poisonous counterfeit that the Great Animal of society (the definition is Plato’s) was putting together with such tremendous power and zeal. From Hölderlin to the present day, nothing essential has changed in this regard, except perhaps that society’s dominion has become so pervasive as to coincide with the obvious. And this is its supreme triumph, as the supreme aspiration of the Devil is to convince everyone that he doesn’t exist.

In a century as wracked by upheavals as was the nineteenth, the event that in fact summed up all the others was to pass unobserved: the pseudomorphism between religious and social. It all came together not so much in Durkheim’s claim that “the religious is the social,” but in the fact that suddenly such a claim sounded natural. And as the century grew old, it certainly wasn’t religion that was conquering new territories, beyond liturgy and cult, as Victor Hugo and many who followed him imagined, but the social that was gradually invading and annexing vast tracts of the religious, first by superimposing itself on it, then by infiltrating it in an unhealthy amalgamation until finally it had incorporated the whole of the religious in itself. What was left in the end was naked society, but invested now with all the powers inherited, or rather burgled, from religion. The twentieth century would see its triumph. The theology of society severed every tie, renounced all dependence, and flaunted its distinguishing feature: the tautological, the self-advertising. The power and impact of totalitarian regimes cannot be explained unless we accept that the very notion of society has appropriated an unprecedented power, one previously the preserve of religion. The results were not long in coming: the liturgies in the stadiums, the positive heroes, the fecund women, the massacres. Being antisocial would become the equivalent of sinning against the Holy Ghost. Whether the pretexts spoke of race or class, the one sufficient reason for killing your enemies was always the same: these people were harmful to society. Society becomes the subject above all subjects, for whose sake everything is justified. At first with recourse to a grandiloquent rhetoric brutally wrenched from religion (the sacrifice for the fatherland), but later in the name of the mere functioning of society itself, which demands the removal of every obstacle.

For that hardly numerous and variously scattered sect who wouldn’t have anything to do with this, mostly out of a purely physiological incompatibility, the only sign of mutual recognition left was “that very word literature, a word without honor, a belated arrival, useful above all for manuals,” a word that stands out all the more, alone and unscathed, when “the genres break up and the forms melt away, when on the one hand the world has no more need for literature and on the other every book seems alien to all the others and indifferent to the reality of the genres.” And here we are bound to acknowledge an extraordinary phenomenon: that to follow the chequered and tortuous history of absolute literature we will have to rely almost exclusively on the writers themselves. Certainly not on the historians, who have still to appreciate what has happened; and only rarely on those who are exclusively critics; while those other disciplines that claimed to have a role to play — semiology, for example — have turned out to be superfluous, or irksome. Only the writers are able to open up their secret laboratories for us. Capricious and elusive guides as they are, they are the only ones who know the territory well: when we read the essays of Baudelaire or Proust, of Hofmannsthal or Benn, Valéry or Auden, Brodsky or Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetayeva or Karl Kraus, Yeats or Montale, Borges or Nabokov, Manganelli, Calvino, Canetti, Kundera, we immediately sense — even though each may have hated, or ignored, or even opposed the other — that they are all talking about the same thing. Which doesn’t mean they are eager to put a name to it. Protected by a variety of masks, they know that the literature they’re talking about is not to be recognized by its observance of any theory, but rather by a certain vibration or luminescence of the sentence (or paragraph, or page, or chapter, or whole book even). This kind of literature is a creature that is sufficient unto itself. But that doesn’t mean that it is merely self-referential, as a new species of bigots would have it. These new bigots are in fact a mirror image of the ingenuous realists, who were demolished in a single remark of Nabokov’s when he spoke of the “reality” that can only be named between inverted commas. And on another occasion he observed how those commas dig their claws into it. There is no doubt of course that literature is self-referential: how can any form not be so? But at the same time it is omnivorous, like the stomachs of those animals that are found to contain nails, pot shards, and handkerchiefs — sometimes intact too, insolent reminders that something did happen down there, in that place made up of multiple, divergent, and poorly defined realia, which is the riverbed of all literature. But likewise of life in general.

We shall have to resign ourselves to this: that literature offers no signs, has never offered any signs, by which it can immediately be identified. The best, if not the only, test that we can apply is that suggested by Housman: check if a sequence of words, silently pronounced as the razor glides across our skin of a morning, sets the hairs of the beard on end, while a “shiver” goes “down the spine.” Nor is this mere physiological reductionism. He who recalls a line of verse while shaving experiences that shiver, that , or “horripilation,” that befalls Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gītā when overwhelmed by the epiphany of . And perhaps would better be translated as “happiness of the hairs,” because harm means “happiness,” as well as “erection,” including the sexual variety. This is typical of a language like Sanskrit that does not love the explicit, but hints that everything is sexual. As for Baudelaire, he was proud that Hugo had sensed, on reading his verses, a “new shiver.” How else could we recognize poetry — and its departure from what came before? Something happens, something Coomaraswamy defined as “the aesthetic shock.” Whether prompted by the apparition of a god or a sequence of words, the nature of that shock doesn’t change. And this is what poetry does: it makes us see what otherwise we wouldn’t have seen, through a sound that was never heard before.

But what did the writers I’ve mentioned mean when they said or thought of something, “It’s literature”? Allergic to the idea of belonging to anything, honorable members, no less than Groucho Marx, of the club of those who would never join a club that accepted them as members, they used that word to refer to the only landscape where they felt alive: a sort of second reality that opens out beyond the cracks of that other reality where everyone has agreed on the conventions that make the world machine go round. That these cracks exist is itself a metaphysical proposition — and not all of these writers were interested in practicing philosophy. Yet that is how they behaved, as if literature were a sort of natural metaphysics, irrepressible, based not on a chain of concepts but rather on irregular entities — scraps of images, assonance, rhythms, gestures, forms of whatever kind. Perhaps this is the crucial word: “form.” Repeated for centuries, for all kinds of reasons and in all kinds of guises, it still seems to be the base beneath all bases when one speaks of literature. An elusive base too, intrinsically incapable of being translated into some definition. For one can speak convincingly of form only by resorting to other forms. There is no language of a higher order than form which might explain it, or make it functional to something else — just as there is no language of a higher order than myth. Yet the notion that there is such a superordinate language has been the premise of entire disciplines and schools of thought that have swept over the world in swarm after swarm without ever so much as scratching the surface of what continues to be, in Goethe’s words, the “open mystery” of every form.

Looking back at this long process, one asks oneself: when is it that its distinctive and unmistakable timbre is heard for the first time? When is it that, reading this page or that, we feel sure we have found a foretaste of the extraordinary story to come, still unaware of itself, yet at the same time unassimilable to any previous story? Reading the “Monologue” of Novalis perhaps:

In speaking and in writing something mad occurs: the true conversation is a pure play of words. What’s amazing, in fact, is that people should make such a ridiculous mistake as to imagine they are speaking of things. Precisely what is most characteristic of language — that it attends only to itself — everybody ignores. As a result it is a wondrous and fruitful mystery — to the point that, if one speaks purely for the sake of speaking, one expresses the most splendid, the most original truths. But if a person wishes to speak of some particular thing, that capricious creature language has him say the most ridiculous and muddle-headed of stuff. Which explains the hatred some serious people have for language. They see its mischievousness, but they don’t see that contemptible chatter is the infinitely serious side of language. If only one could have people understand that what applies to mathematical formulas applies to language too. They form a world apart, they play with each other, expressing only their own prodigious nature, which is precisely why they are so expressive — precisely why the strange play of relationships between things finds its reflection in them. Only by means of their freedom are they members of nature, and only in their free movements does the spirit of the world manifest itself and make itself the delicate measure and pattern of things. The same is true of language: he who has a subtle sense of its fingering, its timing, its musical spirit, he who intuits the delicate operation of its intimate nature, moving tongue or hand to it as he follows, he will be a prophet; conversely, he who knows this, but does not have the ear or the ability to write truths like these, will be mocked by language itself and derided by men, as was Cassandra by the Trojans. If in saying this I believe I have shown, in the clearest way possible, the essence and office of poetry, all the same I know that no one will be able to understand me and I will have said something foolish precisely because I wanted to say it, so that no poetry has come out of it at all. But what if I felt compelled to speak? what if this linguistic impulse to speak were the hallmark of the inspiration of language, of the operation of language, in me? what if my will wanted only what I am compelled to do? might not this, in the end, without my realizing or imagining it, be poetry and make a mystery of language comprehensible? and would I then be a writer by vocation, since a writer can only be someone who is possessed by language?

Without equal either in the other writings of Novalis or indeed in Romantic literature in general, this page has to be quoted in full. It’s not an argument, or a series of arguments, but a continuous flow of words about language, where one has the impression that it is the language itself that is speaking. Never before had language and reflection on language come so close together. They skim over each other without coinciding. And that they don’t quite coincide is only a heightened pleasure added to the text, as if they might coincide at any moment, but instead leave open a tiny gap, to breathe through. Heidegger, who revered this text, nevertheless objected to the way it conceives language “dialectically, within the perspective of absolute idealism, on the basis of subjectivity.” A specious objection: there is no trace of dialectical machinery in the “Monologue.” Nor does one sense any need to resort to something called “subjectivity.” What disturbed Heidegger here, one suspects, was something else altogether: the volatile, even flighty nature of the passage, its strenuous resistance to conceptualization, the effrontery with which it offers, as “contemptible chatter” about chatter, unfathomable speculations that take us as close as possible to the wellspring of the word. This is the characteristic gesture of absolute literature. And it is this that worries Heidegger; he senses it is uncontrollable, even with all his powerful strategic apparatus. In this passage, then, which bears no signature, an acephalous text, a sheet of paper mislaid perhaps, hard to date — though quite likely written in 1798, a year of important beginnings — in these few lines quickly whispered like some demonic presto, absolute literature presents itself in all its recklessness: irresponsible, metamorphic, carrying no identity card that a desk sergeant might examine, deceptive in its tone (so much so that some germanists bereft of irony would imagine that the “Monologue” itself was ironic in intent), and, finally, subject to no authority, whether it be venerable rhetoric or metaphysics, or even a system of thought like Heidegger’s that claimed to be beyond metaphysics. Because committed only to its own elaboration, like a child playing alone, absorbed in his game. “Monological art,” Gottfried Benn would one day call it, Benn who was himself to formulate the most corrosive and impudent version of this mutation of literature that the twentieth century would witness. Exhausted, his work still banned, Berlin in ruins round his clinic for syphilitics, he wrote the following letter to Dieter Wellershoff:

You speak of styles: the penetrating style, the lean style, the musical style, the intimate style — all excellent points of view, but don’t forget: the expressive style, where the only thing that counts is the seduction and the imprint of the expression, where the contents are only euphorizations for artistic exercises … In this regard, take a look at the novels and verse of the second half of the nineteenth century. The period has good intentions, it is upright, sincere (in the old-fashioned sense), certainly not without its attractions, but it depicts, states of mind, relationships, situations, it transmits experiences and knowledge, but here the language is not the essential creative power, it is not itself. And then along comes Nietzsche and the language begins, and all it wants to do, all it can do, is phosphoresce, flash, ravish, amaze. It celebrates itself, it draws everything human into its slight but powerful organism, becomes monological, even monomaniacal. A tragic style, a crisis style, hybrid, final …

A hundred and fifty years on and from behind a heap of rubble it’s as if the “Monologue” of Novalis were still going on. The tone is different now, of course. Abandoning the angelic, it inclines to the poisonous. But the voices are recognizably similar; they call to each other, twine together. Heidegger was right not to trust that page of Novalis. It announced a knowledge that refused to be subject to any other, and at the same time would seep into the cracks of all others. Literature grows like the grass between the heavy gray paving stones of thought. “And then along comes Nietzsche …”: but why should such a drastic leap in the evolution of literature appear in the writings of a philosopher? Yet we feel Benn couldn’t have chosen anyone else for the role. Why? Despite Heidegger’s grandiose determination to demonstrate the contrary in two volumes and a thousand pages, Nietzsche was the first attempt to escape from a cage of categories whose origin we find in Plato and Aristotle. What may or may not lie beyond that cage has not yet been established. But many travelers have reported that literature is the passport most readily accepted in that terra incognita where — so one hears tell — all the mythologies now pass a largely indolent life in a no-man’s-land haunted by gods and vagrant simulacra, by ghosts and Gypsy caravans in constant movement. All these beings are ever issuing from the cave of the past. They yearn only to tell their stories again, as the shades of the underworld yearned only for blood. But how can we reach them? Culture, in the most recent sense of the word, should imply the ability to celebrate, invisibly, the rites that open the way to this kingdom, which is also the kingdom of the dead. Yet it is precisely this ability that is so obviously lacking in the world around us. Behind the trembling curtains of what passes for “reality,” the voices throng. If no one listens, they steal the costume of the first person they can grab and burst onto the stage in ways that can be devastating. Violence is the expedient of whatever has been refused an audience.

This is the country that Nietzsche set out to explore, the country that swallowed him up. The country of “truth and untruth in an extra-moral he put it in the title of a brief text that dates back to the period of The Birth of Tragedy and shares with it its farsightedness and white heat, albeit with a different stylistic gesture — deft, light, digressive, as if the healthier Nietzsche of The Gay Science were here making his first outing. But from the opening lines it’s clear that what is to be at stake in these pages is nothing less than everything. At once Nietzsche sets out to tell us a story that has to do with a single minute in the history of the cosmos: “In a remote corner of the sparkling universe that stretches away across infinite solar systems, there was once a star where some clever animals invented knowledge. It was the most arrogant and deceitful minute in the ‘history of the world’: but it lasted only a minute. Nature breathed in and out just a few times, then the star hardened and the clever animals had to die.” The crucial point in this fable cornes when it says that knowledge is something invented. If one doesn’t discover knowledge, but invents it, the implication is that it involves a powerful element of simulation. And Nietzsche goes so far as to claim that it is precisely in simulation that “the intellect unleashes its principal strengths.” This would already be enough to undermine every previous edifice of knowledge. But with sovereign dispatch Nietzsche goes straight to the consequences and in just a few lines is posing the ultimate question: “What is the truth? A mobile army of metaphors.” That does it. All at once “the huge scaffolding and support structures of the concepts” collapse: metaphor no longer signifies an ornament that doesn’t bind, something only acceptable in the inconsistent world of the poets. On the contrary: if “man’s fundamental instinct” is precisely “the instinct to form metaphors,” and if concepts are no more or less than bleached and ossified metaphors, worn-out coinage, as Nietzsche dared to claim, then this instinct that is not placated in the “columbarium of concepts” will seek “another channel to flow in.” Where? “In myth, and in general in art.” With one quick thrust Nietzsche has attributed to art a supreme gnoseological quality. Knowledge and simulation are no longer enemies but accomplices. And if every kind of knowledge is a form of simulation, art is if nothing else the most immediate and the most vibrant. What’s more: if metaphor is the normal and primordial vehicle of knowledge, then man’s relationship with the gods and their myths will appear as something obvious and self-evident: “When once every tree can speak as a Nymph or when a god in the form of a bull can carry off a virgin, when the goddess Athena herself is to be seen beside Pisistratus crossing Athens on a fine chariot — and the honest Athenian believed as much — then, as in a dream, everything is possible at any moment, and all nature swarms around man, as though no less than the masquerade of the gods who play at deceiving us by taking on all sorts of shapes.” Here, more than anywhere else, Nietzsche is wielding the “magic of the extreme,” his greatest and most reckless virtue. So one might imagine that he had been left in glorious isolation, the only one to have situated the workings of art on such a tall gnoseological pinnacle. But not long after him we find the young Proust approaching the same position. Often depicted fatuous snob waiting to be struck by literary revelation, Proust actually looks forward to that revelation as something inevitable even before taking his first steps in society. And no sooner does he speak of literature and what it is than we note a certain toughness, an intransigence in his voice. Immediately he speaks about it in terms of knowledge.

Few words chime with more obsessive regularity in the Recherche than the word “laws,” and this every time that appearances are torn open and a dark or dazzling background is glimpsed beyond. One is tempted to say that Proust’s main concern was establishing laws, as if — rather than a novelist — it were a physicist writing. And this isn’t a gambit he uses only in the Recherche, as a sort of personal gnoseological seal. In a fragment we can date back to the period of Jean Santeuil, and hence to a time of apparent worldly indulgence, Proust gives us, almost in passing, a definition of literature that goes so far as to have it coincide with its lawmaking function, beginning with the vision of the poet who “stands still before whatever does not deserve the attention of the sedate man, so much so that one wonders whether he might be a lover or a spy, or again, after it seems he’s been looking at a tree for a long time, what in reality he is looking at.” At this point one asks oneself, as in some Zen story, what there might be “beyond the tree.” And here Proust offers us one of his wonderfully undulatory sentences and, set right in the middle, the formula we were looking for:

But the poet, who cheerfully senses the beauty of all things once he has gathered it into the mysterious laws he carries about within him, and who will soon have us rediscovering it in his charm, showing it to us through a hem of those mysterious laws, that hem that joins with them, that hem that he will also depict at the same time as he depicts things themselves, in touching their feet or starting from their brow, the poet feels and causes us cheerfully to know the beauty of all things, of a glass of water no less than of diamonds, but also of diamonds no less than of a glass of water, of a field as much as of a statue, but also of a statue as much as of a field.

It is not feelings, then, but laws that we find at the center of that perception which distinguishes the writer from every other being — and that causes him to observe the things of the world with the maniacal concentration that has us thinking of spies and lovers. The whole of the Recherche was to be woven out of these “mysterious laws” (which in the meantime had lost their adjective), but it seems clear that as far as Proust was concerned all literature must be woven from them. So much so that in the same text we find him using these laws to suggest a biological-metaphysical explanation of the work:

The poet’s mind is full of manifestations of the mysterious laws and, when these manifestations appear, they grow more vigorous, they detach themselves vigorously on the mind’s deep bed, they aspire to come out from him, because everything that must last aspires to come out from everything that is fragile, short-lived, and that could perish the very same evening or no longer be able to bring them to the light. So at every moment, whenever it feels strong enough and has an outlet, the human species tends to come out from itself, in a complete sperm, that contains the whole of it, of today’s man who may die as we said this very evening, or who perhaps will no longer contain it in its wholeness, or in whom (since it depends on him so long as it is his prisoner) it will never be so strong again. Thus the thought of the mysterious laws, or poetry, when it feels strong enough, aspires to come out from the short-lived man who perhaps this evening will be dead or in whom (since it depends on him so long as it is his prisoner, and he could get sick, or be distracted, or grow worldly, less strong, squander in pleasure the treasure he carries within him and that decays if he chooses to live in a certain way, since its destiny is still tied to him) it will no longer have that mysterious energy that allows it to open out in its fullness, it aspires to come out from the man in the form of the work.

Behind the mixture, here particularly crude, of positivist physiology and Platonism — a mixture typical of Proust — we sense that something unchanging and essential has crystallized in these convoluted lines: above all the idea of poetry as “thought of the mysterious laws,” while the work’s necessity is seen as the transmigration of an immortal body that uses the writer’s body as a temporary shell only to abandon it as soon as possible for fear of being suffocated. The following hypothesis thus presents itself: that it is precisely this process of osmotic transmission, from one work to the next, that, whenever the rash gesture that is absolute literature begins to take shape, renders every other connotation, whether of school, national tradition, or historical moment, inconsistent and secondary. The writers who in some way engage in that bold gesture will thus tend to form a sort of communion of saints, where the same fluid circulates from work to work, page to page, and each calls to the other from an affinity that is far stronger than any that might tie them to their time, or to some trend — or even to their own physiology and taste. This too is the “mystery in Literature” that declares itself, in its blazing obscurity, from the years of the Athenaeum review on — and which is still with us today, if only we care to notice. Any direct relationship is superfluous. But the affinity and the element of consequence between one link in the chain and the next make themselves felt most powerfully, as if in some renewed aurea catena Homeri.

The best analogy might be that of two mathematicians who, though unaware of each other and working thousands of miles apart, both feel an urgent need to solve some particular equation, something their colleagues pass by without even being aware of. One day the two mathematicians’ notes may be juxtaposed, superimposed, to the point that we might think they were written by the same person, were it not for some different manner of procedure or exposition, since in the end each person always bears a trace of the “mysterious being we are, who possessed that gift of giving to everything a certain form that belongs only to ourselves.” And if one day the mathematicians’ paths should cross, they may well walk by each other without a word, like those priests of the god Hölderlin speaks of “who moved from country to country through the holy night.”

We began with Homer; we have ended in a place that is the Elsewhere of every other. In between lies a path that is a weave of variants. Yet we know that behind every movement and tremor, the scene is always the same. It greets us from an Attic cup that dates back to the Wars of the Peloponnese and is now in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Three figures: To the left, sitting on a rock, a young man writes on a tablet, a díptychon, that looks very like a laptop. From beneath, a severed head watches as he writes. To the right, standing up, is Apollo: one hand grasps a laurel rod, while the other stretches out towards the young man writing.

What is going on? The way it is most frequently represented, Orpheus had his throat cut by a Maenad who held his hair tight from behind while plunging a sword into his neck. To defend himself, the poet brandished his lyre like a weapon, and sang. But the vis carminum could do no more than briefly hold back, suspended in the air, the stones hurled at him by other Maenads. Then a clash of arms drowned his voice and it could charm no longer. His head was cut off with a sickle. Tossed into the river Evros, it drifted with the current. Singing and bleeding. It was ever fresh, ever flourishing. It reached the sea, crossed a vast tract of the Aegean, and was washed up on Lesbos. Here, we presume, the scene depicted on the Attic kýlix took place. It is the primordial scene of all literature, composed of its irreducible elements.

Literature is never the product of a single subject. There are always at least three actors: the hand that writes, the voice that speaks, the god who watches over and compels. Not that they look very different: all three are young; all have thick, snaky hair. They might easily be taken for three manifestations of the same person. But that is hardly the point. What matters is the division into three self-sufficient beings. We could call them the I, the Self, and the Divine. A continuous process of triangulation is at work between them. Every sentence, every form, is a variation within that force field. Hence the ambiguity of literature: because its point of view is incessantly shifting between these three extremes, without warning us, and sometimes without warning the author. The young man writing is absorbed at his tablet; it’s as if he didn’t see anything of what is around him. And perhaps he doesn’t. Perhaps he has no idea who is beside him. The stylus that etches the letters demands all his attention. The head that drifts on the waters sings and bleeds. Every vibration of the word presupposes something violent, a palaiòn pénthos, an “ancient grief.” Was it a murder? Was it a sacrifice? It isn’t clear, but the word will never cease to tell of it. Apollo grasps his laurel rod, his other arm stretching out to hint at something. Is he compelling? forbidding? protecting? We will never know. But that outstretched arm, like the arm of the Apollo of the Master of Olympia, a motionless axis in the center of a vortex, invests and sustains the whole scene — and all literature.