On the Apotropaic Element in Poetry

Traditions East and West have for millennia sustained through various transformations the notion of the poet as a teacher. In relatively illiterate societies, even, epic, elegy, eclogue or lyric brought news about gods and agriculture, love and loathing, civic virtues, a people's history, marine navigation, coastal topography, and models of endurance. Oral traditions provided, in a way, digests or encyclopaedias: scalds composed grand instruments of instruction for kings or cowherds. Rumi still teaches the generations how to let go and love Creation. Troubadours taught high love, and the Countess de Die the tone in which to abuse a neglectful lover.

Even today, for all their supposed autonomy, poems not in the least didactic may retain an aura, if no more, of the old notion. Yet, while reading this or that poem, you hardly ask what 'lesson' it secretes, or what it is 'for'. We have our stock of learning instruments elsewhere. But then, struck by the singular quality of language in a specific poem, you might well ask how it is procured, ask in what direction it might be pointing as regards the evolution of mind. Then you'll perhaps wonder, all over again, that infinitesimal nuances should so accrue to notable refinements of mind, and of sensibility; wonder about relations between aesthetic and moral values. In the history of our species, does this poem serve any purpose? Did it make you, there and then, a slightly more perceptive, more discriminating person, a less atrophied person? And you might ask: Are these real questions at all? Can there be real questions that cannot be answered, just as there are splendid poems suggestive of something nobody could put a finger on or reduce to any finite sense? When all is said and done the authorised text alone is the key to an author's intentions; and alas for that, considering that the text can provide a horizon of meanings vaster, if not other, than the author's ascertainable ken:

About the best poetry, and not only the best, there floats an atmosphere of infinite suggestion. The poet speaks to us of one thing, but in this one thing there seems to lurk the secret of all... which, we feel, would satisfy not only the imagination, but the whole of us.¹

Even at ground level, questions now multiply, regarding the secretion of moral in aesthetic values, and vice versa, regarding, too, moral damage for which works of art may or may not be held responsible; regarding, no less, the persecution, in nervous but philistine totalitarian states, of poets as creative and subversive thinkers. There has been such a long, dizzying history of the debate, and of certain resolutions to it, from The Republic and The Garland of Letters to Kierkegaard and Bakhtin, or from Aristotle to Adorno. More recent thinking on the subject has perhaps not been troubled enough by what Hermann Broch long ago called 'Das Böse im Wertsystem der Kunst'.

Through a maze like that, only an unexcitable and toughminded theoretician could guide you among the monuments and bloodstains. One or two precious clearings may appear. I heaved a sigh of relief when finding, a while ago, a way up and out rather than through, in a statement from a scientist, Albert Jacquard, in his essay 'Demain dépend de nous' (1994). The statement is that of a humanistic geneticist and it appeals - by synopsis on an exalted level, rather than by empirical scrutiny:

The most revolutionary characteristic of homo sapiens has been his capacity to weave incomparably rich fibres (liens) between members of the species: thanks to language, to writing, to all the shared means of expression such as music, painting, poetry, he has given to the human group the power - against all expectation (le pouvoir inattendu), - to transform every human individual into a person. The individual then [as person] supports a consciousness (conscience) not to be defined in limitation to this or that individual: this consciousness exists only in the fibres that are woven together among the others. I is the fibres I weave.²

So the arts arrive like guardian angels to pick out from the crowd not anybody, not somebody, but everybody. Then everybody reconfigures as a group of persons, each a distinctive fibre in a pattern woven through and for intro- and inter-personal mind. Art serves no purpose here but an illumination of being, if not the fullness of being, then a spending and storage of consciousness (which may remind us of Yeats' 'Great Memory')³

And does Jacquard defer, here, to Spinoza? Is this conscience a pseudonym for Deus sive Natura? Possibly Vedic theogonies also come to mind. Some ancient paradigms do not fade away. Doctrinal questions aside, Jacquard's organistic model attracts: an immense and variegated human carpet flies through its universe, the weaving of which is ongoing, sustained principally by such means of expression as attain their optimum in the arts of language, of image, and of music. The person is no mere societal construct, but a constructor, weaver and carpet in one. Variegation is subsumed, allowed for at least, in the metaphor of fibres that are 'incomparably rich'.

But what if the terms are reversed to become 'richly incomparable'? Then, perhaps, we'd better look none too closely at the implications. We might anyway detect in the statement a characteristically French (thus culture-specific) but here tacit figure of theatre: each individual, by cultural expression turned into a person, recites a part inscribed by intro- and inter-personal conscience, a playwright for whom the persons go in search, whose script is still in circulatory progress.

Does this definitive statement, however, hark back to an old monist metaphysical model, in which organicity is paramount? Even if it proposes an open cosmos, not a closed one, does it turn a blind eye on difference, the sombre demiurge who crossbreeds, to our confusion, codes of good and evil? For difference does engender conflicts that can rip the carpet to pieces (without necessarily invalidating the textile metaphor). Does such a statement even, for all the science and sensibility that support it, overlook awful defects (commercial, ideological) which infest our orbits of expression? Just think of the ordeals undergone by many artists who have worked against the grain. Think also of our agonised human dissatisfaction with the very illusions and delusions to which any person is prone, mass delusions included. Sound as it might be in principle, is the statement not somewhat starry-eyed? The jump from 'individual' to 'person', how high is it, and where is the terra firma for a vaulting pole? I suspect that it was deliberately formulated in atmospheric terms, so as to give rise to doubts which, though quite average, are justified: the wording does not compel assent, does not enchant, it advises and it provokes.

The adverb 'incomparably' might be rhetorical. But it directs attention to the underside of the carpet. Conscience - the French does not tread heavily on those moral organ pedals to which English assigns the same word - encompasses a lacuna: the space of unconsciousness, including ignorance as to origins and ends, a haunted hiatus upon which literary, visual, and musical cultures float and into which, with the passing of time, they disintegrate. For might not even the Great Memory lapse, on occasion, into amnesia?

I want now to suggest that works of art, as which good poems, however little, must be recognised, do remain purposeless, as play - radiant ludic phenomena, singular even as they enter history and stay there, corpuscles that no wave can digest; and that, notwithstanding, certain works of art - variously paradoxical as they are - do, in a sense, purpose something. Or no. I should rephrase this: Independently of its author, a work of verbal art, if animated by a certain element, is primed to avert evil. Intangible, indefinable as any purpose may be, that work of art is apotropaic.

This feature is one among others, but, latent or paramount, it is what we, as persons, intuit when we enjoy the exuberance, livingness, lifelikeness, the forbiddingness, truth, even 'moral' sense, of the imaginary, articulated in a book, a picture, an octet, and so on. The articulated imaginary is primed to disperse evil spirits (such, I should add, as Melancholia).

Then a host of poems, pictures, octets, and novels suddenly gaze blankly at you and slink away: 'Oh no, apotropaic we are not!' Others protest that they domesticate evil spirits, including the Persecutions and the Sneers: Yet if you stretch imagination, exercised by memory, back a long way, you might agree that magic, sorcery, charm (in the French sense) did belong in archaic modes of art; and that certain medicinal qualities latent in language are still fresh, still tonic. Still to be actualised are tonic secretions in areas of verbal sound. Charm (in the non-trivial French sense) was a poetic element, too, that poets as different as Hölderlin and in later years Paul Valéry contemplated rather devoutly - Valéry with his powers of acute analysis, Hölderlin in his furnace of neural strife. Poetry as reportage, which has a wide currency nowadays, seldom hosts such an element, rarely raises into hearing the latent tonic. But you may notice even there, now and then, a vestige of its potency. Perhaps a phrase will stand out, a line, as an aural event, with unique resonance.

In older poems the gnomic phrase, calling a momentary halt in the poem's emergence, had such resonance. In fact, until quite recently, readers and listeners expected gnomic phrases as part of a decorum. Anywhere between Chaucer and Auden you can find them. Everybody knows Rilke's 'Du müßt dein Leben ändern', Eliot's 'I will show you fear in a handful of dust,' and Yeats' 'That dolphin-torn, that gongtormented sea'. Two from Henry Vaughan recently leaped from the page for me: 'For man is such a marigold' and 'ostrich-man / That feeds on steel and bullets'. Experts in French lyrical phonetics still credit, I believe, Valéry's isolation of the master-phrase in the history of French verse (and it isn't a complete sentence or a perfect Alexandrine); - 'La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaë'. As a matter of detail, this finality of a saying, this calling of a halt (or better, perhaps: raising a fanfare) seldom occurs, but is not anomalous, in the 'unrestful, ungraspable poetry of the sheer present, poetry whose very permanence lies in its wind-like transit...'⁴

Such phrases, even before they were parroted in schools and on the streets, had a density that suggests an origin in archaic clairaudience, or in rites that induced a feeling that voices of the spirits speak thus, voices of the dead with whom good wizards, in ecstasy, could sometimes commune. Dialogue with the dead, mutatis mutandis, has certainly continued into our time. Transformations of it are central to the work of David Jones, Paul Celan, Günter Eich, and Geoffrey Hill, .not to mention their scoring for large orchestra in The Cantos. (Mallarmé's memorial sonnets gave the dialogue vertiginous new turns.) Prototypical is the episode in The Odyssey where Odysseus communes with spirits and eventually hurries out of Erebos, in terror, for what is this mass congealing among the shades, ready to approach? It is the Gorgon itself.

In some special instances we may hear a spirit-voice that is anything but toothless. Otherwise, the aural event articulated in the phrase results probably when a poet's 'excursive imagination' (Wordsworth, prompted by Coleridge) has picked up and mimed the sound-signature of a body, an animated body active in a natural world or a spirit-world. The lexical development may have precious little resemblance to its point of origin as ordinarily experienced: Vaughan's botanical marigold has been metamorphosed, and so has Yeats' Sea of Marmara. But the aural and prosodic outcome does resonate with the perceptible, or with some perceptible features of its source. Aural mimetism of this sort is called 'orphic' in some critical parlance. It can hardly be willed. It seems to be a present offered to its poet - the donnée becomes a don.

For verification, here is a poem about a wren. It shows how far from such popular displays as onomatopoiea this aural event is, how singular in its mobilisation of wordsound latent in English:

Wren (Troglodytes Troglodytes)

What poetry? Wired up out of light and dark,
At the mercy of seasons, genie or Houdini,
No respecter of persons: a wing and a prayer,
Seat of your pants kind of affair? Uncrowned king
Of obscurity, your music as pungent as ivy?
No fear of those great shades whose project is
To float off cathedrals and symphonies
Over the abyss and limbo there for eternity,
Consoling, constellation beyond constellation of loss,
In your little local speech of stars
And saplings and crepuscular melancholy,
A line of solder silver between sky and holly?
A tin-pot holding operation, a quick fix?
My little winter communard, sleeping how many to a bed?

            (Andrew McNeillie, from 'Plato's Aviary')⁵

The wren is not naturalistically represented. It is charmed out, enacted: brisk cascade of calls, quick feathered movements, its essential gesture voiced in the phrase 'In your little local speech of stars'. And the questions: With ingenuity the tiny upright tail feathers of the wren are transposed into the interrogatory grammar - a speaking voice, too, rises in question, doesn't it? This vocal aspect is finely tensed against figures, negative or positive, gargoyle or communard, for the wren's flight - always hugging the ground.

You may have to have watched wrens before you can fully respond to this articulation of one of their kind, in hopping English. Yet hereafter, remembering the poem, you will not only watch and listen, you are enabled to commune with a wren of your choice, present or absent. So much for the 'lesson', even if you may never be the wren's choice.

A clue, here, to what apotropaic charm may promise: the poem unfolds, all of a piece, apparently from inside its subject. (An 'inside' as mobile as 'presence' is between near and far.) Excursive imagination participates in its objects, much as historic imagination in Vico 'enters into' past lives, ancient structures of belief and behaviour. It does not report on retrieved signals from a fixed or mobile point of view external to the signal: It wanders out, sensuously, from its vehicle, projective mind, feeling, prosody and all in play, and it enters into an object which, on contact, 'on being wanderingly entered, ceases to be an object, becomes itself, verging now on language, a co-existing, self-articulating subject, a thou, not an it, and remits to its initiator the imagination regaled with the word: a poem, a gift, maybe goods purloined from out there, transgressively, Promethean fire, a medicine, a fibre, at least, for Jacquard's universal carpet. Promissorily, if for a moment, the world's opacity, its inscrutability, has been mitigated, not to say overcome. Its gravity, challenged by an alternative creation - that of the word, relents.

Josef von Eichendorff epitomised such a levitation of things in lines too sweetly quaint to seem true: 'Und die Welt hebt an zu singen,/Triffst du nur das Zauberwort.' Not so long after Eichendorff, but under distinctly French conditions, Baudelaire writes grandly of 'sorcellerie évocatoire' over which imagination presides as Queen of the Faculties. In the aftermath, born again during his crisis of 1866-7, Mallarmé takes up the task of sorcerer whose parole essentielle assays, from far beyond person or individual, the sidereal patternings, infinite reflection in the frame of death, a cosmic design. There is, of course, a chain of poets whose work extends this arcane tradition into our time, each with his own crises, problems to live with, and disasters to endure.

I would like not to be misleading, not to be wrong, in my account of apotropaic process entailed in such a tradition. But I take to heart Thackeray's sardony: 'Always to be right, always to trample forward and never to doubt, are not these the great qualities with which dullness takes the lead in the world?'⁶ And I hope that my generalization is not extravagant. Andrew McNeillie's poem is a limited case. But it does show how, in what I'm calling an apotropaic process, an actual other (the wren) has not been homologised into one of us, rather a little work of art has been heterologised (by 'charm') out of one of us. We glance into a domain of absolute alterity without colonializing it. Might there be here a clue to the substance of 'lyric'? Socratic or Dionysian, it is a liminal art, impinging on all sorts of discourse, while sustaining its own transitive otherness. It plays around a nucleus that retains its secret. The nucleus itself may move with the times, as different patterns are projected out of it; but the secret, called 'lyric,' is at once so dense and so intense that no degree of openness can let it out.

Under and above each party in the apotropaic process, the lacuna remains open, a lacuna over which reportage flits blindly. So any 'lesson' - in the invention of reality, of solitude, of relation - can imply a firm acknowledgement, cordial recognition perhaps, possibly a celebration, of difference. For here difference spans a chasm of unknowns and reveals itself as the human plight. The bridges spanning different alterities are now not so dependable as we once dared to believe; this one is imaginative and fragile. But the plight? Yes, it denotes a difficult situation, even a dangerous one. But it also denotes leverage. A pledge is given, as when one 'plights one's troth'. One and many deliver a pledge of commitment. For an instant, apotropaic charm working, evil averted, the fibres are loosened; then the shuttle slides back in, the weaving continues. Whether any evil is diminished, as Erasmus hoped, there is no telling.

Imponderable the charm may be, but it is not nebulous. It has a place, modest enough, among sustained, vigilant, and reasoned critiques such as do, on occasion, infiltrate governments with values more beneficent than policies believed expedient. And I mean values wrung at unspeakable cost from the processes of power, brighter shores of history - even though the discourse of intellectuals, as voices of conscience, often runs at cross-purposes with that of rhinoceroi, whose sole concern is hanging on to power at any price. Receptivity, among the latter, to massive popular critique, with fanfares of slogans, is one thing: another the sensitising of centres of power in democracies. Apotropaic charm is yet another, a thing remote if ever there was, and small because remote. But amplified, drawn closer, harnessed?


Notes

1. A.C. Bradley, quoted by Walter de la Mare, in 'Poetry in Prose,' Pleasures and Speculations (London: Faber, 1940), p.157.
   
   
2. In Science et Croyances (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994).
   
   
3. One difference between the Great Memory and WWW would be that, in the latter, day-to-day mutable information is globally accessible at a click, whereas, in the former, epistemes cyclically recurrent over a very long haul are condensed and stored. In the matter of selection and activation, the WWW logger-on takes the initiative; when the Great Memory activates itself, a hitherto unmarked culture-hero springs to the fore.
   
   
4. D.H. Lawrence, 'Preface to New Poems' (1920), reprinted in the Penguin Selected Essays (1950), p.288.
   
   
5. In McNeillie's collection Nevermore, (Manchester, Carcanet, 2001), p.19.
   
   
6. W.M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair. Everyman ed. [1908] 1919, p.355.