[ Music ]
This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
[ Music ]
[ Speaking in Spanish ]
Let us go then you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky,
like a patient etherealized upon a table.
Let us go through certain half-deserted streets,
the muttering retreats of restless nights in one night cheap hotels,
and saw dust restaurants with oyster shells.
Streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent
to lead you to an overwhelming question.
Oh, do not ask what is it.
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window panes,
the yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window panes,
licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
let fall upon its back the suit that falls from chimneys,
slipped by the terrace made a sudden leap,
and seeing that it was a soft October night,
curled once about the house and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time for the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
rubbing its back upon the window panes.
There will be time, there will be time,
to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.
There will be time to murder and create,
and time for all the works and days of hands that lift
and drop a question on your plate.
Time for you and time for me,
and time yet for a hundred indecisions,
and for a hundred visions and revisions
before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time to wonder, do I dare,
and do I dare.
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
with a bald spot in the middle of my hair.
They will say, how his hair is growing thin.
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
my neck tie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin,
they will say, but how his arms and legs are thin.
Do I dare disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions,
which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all,
have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life, and I have known them all
about my life with coffee spoons.
I know the voices dying with a dying fall beneath the music
from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all,
the eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
and when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
when I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, then how should I begin
to spin out all the but ends of my days and ways,
and how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all,
arms that are bracelet-ed and white and bare,
but in the lamplight down with light brown hair,
is it perfume from a dress that makes me so digress,
arms that lie along a table or wrap about a shawl,
and should I then presume, and how should I begin?
Shall I say I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
and watched the smoke that rises from the pipes of lonely men
in shirt sleeves, leaning out of windows?
I should have been a pair of ragged claws,
scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
And the afternoon, the evening, sleep so peacefully,
smooth by long fingers, a sleep, tired,
or at malingers stretched on the floor,
here beside you and me,
should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted,
wept and preyed, though I have seen my head,
grown slightly bald, brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet, and here's no great matter.
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
and I have seen the eternal foot man hold my coat and snicker,
and in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it after all,
after the cups the marmalade, the tea among the porcelain,
among some talk of you and me, would it have been worthwhile
to have bitten off the matter with a smile,
to have squeezed the universe into a ball
to roll it towards some overwhelming question to say,
"I am Lazarus, come from the dead.
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all."
If one settling a pillow by her head should say,
"That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it at all."
And would it have been worth it after all?
Would it have been worthwhile,
after the sunsets and the doryards and the sprinkled streets,
after the novels, after the tea cups,
after the skirts that trail along the floor,
and this, and so much more,
it is impossible to say just what I mean.
But as if a magic lantern through the nerves
and patterns on a screen,
would it have been worthwhile if one settling a pillow
or throwing off a shawl and turning toward the window
should say, "That is not it at all.
That is not what I meant at all."
No.
I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be,
I am a attendant Lord, one that will do,
to swell a progress,
start a scene or two,
advise the prince,
no doubt an easy tool,
deferential, glad to be of use,
the politic, cautious, and meticulous,
full of high sentence but a bit of juice,
at times indeed almost ridiculous,
almost at times the fool.
I grow old, I grow old,
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I park my hair behind?
Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaid singing,
each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves,
combing the white hair of the waves,
blown back when the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
by sea girls wreath with seaweed red and brown,
till human voices wake us and we drown.
Love song of J. Alfred Proufrock,
one of my favorite poems for a host of reasons.
Maybe the first reason is because
the first experience of teaching I ever had
was the love song of J. Alfred Proufrock
in Rome, Italy, where I had gone to high school at the oversee school of Rome
studied with the likes of Desmonaux Grady,
the Irish poet Tony Brophy,
teacher of English, Greek tragedy,
and other courses of literature.
Tony Brophy, this is after I graduated from college,
I had not yet become a graduate student, Tony Brophy asked me one day if I would substitute for him
for his classes, three of which were on English literature,
and they were reading the love song of J. Alfred Proufrock.
So I read and re-read and re-read again that poem
and devised various methods by which I thought I would
communicate what I thought was the fascination of its meaning,
as well as its poetics, the use of rhyme, for example.
At the time my stepbrother was in town, Claude Aleuti was living in Australia,
not a literary person as such,
and I had him read that poem which was unknown to him at the time,
and he spent a day or two on it and they came back and he said,
"I reckon Proufrock's a waiter, a waiter."
I said, "What do you mean, Claude?"
We went through the poem and lo and behold, all that imagery,
sawdust restaurants, oyster shells,
the women coming and going, teas, cakes, marmalades and ices,
and all of a sudden I said, "This could well be the case that J. Alfred Proufrock,
one of the great heroes or anti-heroes of modernism,
may well indeed be a waiter, or perhaps even a metra-d,
at some high-end restaurant or tea house, salah, whatever you have it."
And he's fallen in love with a woman beyond his station,
and is rather terrified of setting out to make a declaration of love to her.
It actually takes courage, would take courage under those circumstances.
Hence we have this extraordinary saliloquy,
a man who rightly would be suffering from a series of insecurities,
if that were indeed the case.
So I went to the overseas school of Rome, and I had to teach three different classes on the same poem,
began very seriously in the first, and the second relaxed a little bit,
by the third class I said, "Let me try out the thesis of Proufrock as a waiter."
And the next day, Brophy calls me up and says, "Here's a new shite.
You have all my students saying that Proufrock is a waiter. This is outrageous."
I said, "But Tony, look at the poem. It's not an outrageous season. They actually quite plausible.
He didn't want to hear any of it."
When I was preparing those classes, I tried to recall some lessons that I had learned from some of my teachers' poetry,
in particular of one.
This was a high school teacher who said, "If you really want to get to the heart of a poem,
there's a very simple method going about it. You count the number of lines a poem has,
and then you divide it by two and you find what is the middle verse of the poem.
No matter how short or how long a poem is, there's something about the central verse that will reveal to you what the entire poem is all about."
And he meant that mathematically. And I tried that method several times for a few years until I realized that it actually really doesn't work.
The concept is very beautiful, however. I looked at Proufrock, what does Proufrock have?
Something like 131 lines, so already that's good news because it can divide and it will have a central verse.
Some poems actually don't have a central verse.
So it's 131 lines and all, but you go and try to find the central one that says,
"That makes me so digress." Is it perfume from a dress that makes me so digress?
You're not going to get very far with that, I think.
So I modified that theory when it came to teaching poems.
And I said, rather than look for the mathematical center of the poem,
try to identify one line that you think encapsulates or recapitulates the core of the poem.
So I went through the Proufrock poem and it was a toss-up between two different lines.
First, it is impossible to say just what I mean.
I think that's Proufrock's problem ultimately.
Another strong contender is verse 86, in short, I was afraid.
I'm going to talk about the poetics of La Psoner, J. Alfred, for Rockin' an Instant, but let me tell you why I think those two verses are strong candidates for
the central verses of the poem.
To begin with, we've all been taught, every time I asked freshman,
have they read the love song of J. Alfred, Proufrock, there's about 80% of the students among the
freshmen that raise their hands.
It means that this poem is highly read in high schools.
I'm sure that most of those students have been told that this is a modernist manifesto
or a manifesto of modernist stream of consciousness literature,
where we have a central speaking voice, a soliloquy of someone speaking to himself.
If you look under the term modernism in a glossary of literary terms, for example, M-H Abrams has a highly used one,
he states that modernist literature "subverts basic conventions by breaking up the narrative continuity,
departing from the standard way of representing characters and violating the traditional syntax and coherence of narrative language."
You turn to the Proufrock poem and you find that it exemplifies this modernist technique very faithfully.
The whole technique of this stream of consciousness is one where you've entered into the intimacy of a person's thinking
and you follow that process as it devigates digresses, meanders, wanders,
and certainly there's a way in which Proufrock sets out through various streets we presume of London.
On his way to a destination and as he is wandering through those streets, his mind is also wandering,
we're on a path, we're on a mental pathway that correlates with the cityscape,
the rather infernal cityscape that the poem takes us through.
So we have a character who is fraught with insecurities, suffers from various afflictions that we have all been told, represent the afflictions of the modern era.
We are also told that the poem draws us into a special intimacy with the speaker, namely the reader and the speaker, become bonded
as if they are the same person, let us go then, you and I, and therefore Proufrock's stream of consciousness is somehow reflective of or revelatory of our own modernist consciousness.
All that's fine, but it doesn't tell us what this poem is really about beyond the very self-evident fact that Proufrock is unable finally to go and sing the love song that he was intending to sing when he sets out.
It tells us that something about his fears and insecurities gets in the way.
It doesn't really tell us what the source of those fears are, but he tells himself it is impossible to say just what I mean.
Now, one ask oneself, is that really the case?
Is it really impossible for Proufrock to say what he means?
Is it that language itself cannot really communicate our inner intention?
Is it a failure on the part of this instrument that we call language, or is it actually failing in Proufrock's what we would have called in an earlier era, his moral character?
I tend to favor an interpretation that looks in the direction of the latter, precisely because there is this other strong contender for the central line where he says,
I have seen the eternal footman hold my coat and snicker and in short I was afraid.
The eternal footman, I suppose, is uncontroversial to say that he is a figure for death, that he has seen death and in short I was afraid.
I shrank back from an authentic confrontation with my own mortality and finitude.
And because I was afraid of taking that leap into authenticity, I do not know how to say what I mean or mean what I say.
The condition for being able to say what you mean is authenticity.
The Proufrock poem, one of the wonders of the poem is that it follows Proufrock to the very edge, the very fringe of this abyss into which you have to take a leap.
And we watch him tautter at that edge and then shrink back away from it in fear.
And this is a very common moral failing this fear.
But what it means is that he can't go on and make a love declaration.
I don't know if it's because the woman is maybe a higher social standing, whether he is afraid that the inauthentic world to which she belongs where people come and go and talk of Michelangelo and superficial chatter among ice and teas and marmalade and porcelain.
That she would say that's not what I had in mind at all. I don't want to know anything about authenticity, finitude, death.
But can one really make a declaration of love in an authentic mode and to Proufrock's credit? He doesn't believe that he can and he's right.
But if we cannot speak our death to one another, there's no way we're going to say anything meaningful when it comes to a declaration of love.
And I happen to think that it's his despair that more. Let me put it this way. His assumption that he would not have been understood had he tried to raise a number of people.
To raise the overwhelming question.
He's obviously self-excuse.
And it's another way in which his deeper underwriting fear is causing him to deceive himself.
And here's where I want to get to what I take to be the essence of Proufrock's psychology.
Name me his capacity for bad faith.
Now what is bad faith? Or moviz fua as they call it in French?
Jean Paul Saffre made that concept very well known in existentialism when he speaks about moviz fua in his book, "Let Re l'Uneo" being a nothingness.
He doesn't just find it in precisely these terms, but let me propose my own definition of it.
Bad faith is a person's capacity to make himself or herself believe something that he or she knows is not true.
This is an extraordinary capacity that some of us have. Some of us, all of us, is there anyone out there who believes that he or she is not.
Please raise your hands.
Assuming there are some hands raised out there, then I would say you're the first one to be self-deceived if you believe that you're not self-deceived.
But this capacity to make ourselves believe something that we know is not true is not necessarily a universal human capacity.
It's something that requires a specific kind of consciousness which has become inward, which has interiorized itself, which is acutely self-conscious, where a self is divided against itself,
through an exasperated or aggravated self-consciousness, and therefore one part of the self can believe one thing while another part of the self can know that is actually not true.
I believe that bad faith is a particularly Western, what would I call it, pathology?
And I think that it's possibility is predicated upon too millennia of Christianity, or too millennia of a religion whose very foundation is that of faith.
A religion which puts all of the burden upon a believer's ability to believe certain doctrines which otherwise might be totally unbelievable.
That Christ, that Jesus died, entered the tomb and was resurrected on the third day, for example.
This call to faith and a multi-millennear tradition that is founded on faith, I think is the matrix out of which our modern capacity for bad faith is born.
And that proof for rock therefore is a latter-day Christian psychology living in an era after the end of Christianity,
where if we cannot really believe in something positively, we will make believe in other ways.
And this brings me to what I take to be the all-important epigraph to the love song of J. Alfred Proufrock, which comes from our friend Danthe.
Say, "Yoke de des Sique m'eris post staphos se personic in my tornes el mondeau."
That's an Italian.
It's not a, we tend to call it the epigraph to the poem, but I think it's more rightly considered the beginning of the poem.
The poem actually begins with those words from Danthe.
And what does Danthe have to do with proof-rock?
Or, or precisely, what does Guido de Monte Feilthro, who is one of the characters in the Divine Comedy in Hell?
What does Guido de Monte Feilthro have to do with proof-rock?
Well, it turns out quite a bit, quite astonishingly so.
Let's take a step back and find out who is this guy, Guido de Monte Feilthro.
Danthe meets the shade of Guido in the eighth ring of the eighth circle of Hell.
Fraud is the eighth circle of Hell.
And the sinners here are each one of them is enveloped in a flame.
Danthe calls it a tongue of fire through which he or she speaks, and which many critics,
I think rightfully take to be a symbol of these sinners abuse of the Pentecostal gift of truthful speech.
You remember it, the Pentecost is when the Holy Spirit rained down in tongues of flame upon the apostle,
so that they may communicate the Gospel of God truthfully to speak truthfully.
The fraudulent counselors of which Guido is one are enveloped in a kind of parody of the Pentecostal flame.
And Guido actually inhabits his moral zone of Inferno alongside the epic hero Eulisis.
And he's juxtaposed to Eulisis in ways that set up very explicitly the terms for historical,
rhetorical, and also moral comparison between the two characters.
Now the fact that Danthe devoted an entire contour of both Eulisis and the Guido-Emente Feddro,
whose sins are presumably identical, indicates the importance that Danthe gave to the issues that are raised in this particular region of Hell.
We spoke with Rachel Jakeoff about how Danthe is in Feddro abounds with paired sinners.
You have Paolo and Francesca Fatimat and Cabav County, Uglino and Vujeti.
We spoke about all three of those.
But this is the only case where you have a pair of sinners who are separated by a contour.
Now, I think Danthe had a very deliberate reason for pairing Eulisis,
a classical hero with Guido who was Danthe's own contemporary.
And I think this is the only place in the entire divine comedy where Danthe is explicitly reflecting on what distinguishes his own modern era from the pre-modern, let's say pre-Christian, classical era.
And the way he does that is by juxtaposing and differentiating the psychology of Eulisis, if one can even speak of a psychology of Eulisis.
I don't even think Eulisis as an inward self, as we'll see.
And juxtaposing Eulisis with a very, very different kind of mentality and psychology that we have in Guido.
Eulisis is an hell for his fraudulent counsel presumably because he used his clever speech, powers of rhetoric to seduce his men into wrongdoing.
And when Danthe sees him, he's very anxious to hear him speak.
And Virgil says, "Don't do not you address him because he may hold your modern provincial speech and disdain.
And let me address this guy."
And so Virgil identifies himself as the author of this high tragedy of the Aniad, and he says, "If I was worthy of you when I wrote my high tragedy and so forth, please, will you please tell us how you met your end?
How did you come? No one knows how you died? Will you please tell us that story?"
And here is what Eulisis answers. Virgil, I'll read the Italian verse.
The name of the past is the "Pudunanola" of the "Primakesi" in the "Alanumas" series, with "Cedadifilio" and "Eulapieta" of "Vicupadre".
When I had departed in the past, I had been a little bit older than the "Pudunanola" of the "Pudunanola" series.
But I was very happy to be here with the "Pudunanola" series.
And I was very happy to be here with the "Pudunanola" series.
When I had departed from Chirshu held me more than a year near Gaieta before, and Nia named it so, neither fondness for son nor pity for my old father, nor the love I owed Panello-pay to make her happy, could conquer within me the burning urge I had to gain experience of the world, and a few devices in valor.
But I set out upon the high sea with just one boat and those few companions by whom I had not been deserted.
Dante's revising the traditional story of Ulysses here for reasons quite unknown.
Dante would have known that Ulysses was the figure of the nostalgic of the home-comer, of the one who wandered for ten years trying to get back to Ithaca.
Here in Dante's retelling of the story, Ulysses is someone who is motivated by the urge for more and more knowledge of new places, unpeople places, and rather than go home.
He decides to continue his journey.
So, as he says, "Neither fondness for son, the future, nor pity for my old father, the past, nor the love I owed for his own, nor the love I owed for his own."
Nor the love I owed Panello-pay, the present, could conquer within me the burning urge I had to gain experience.
So, Ulysses and his men set sail westward, and in their old age they reached the Straits of Gibraltar, which in Dante's time was the very edge of the known world, where the pillars of Hercules signal to men to venture no further.
Because Malakudyozita, bad curiosity, was a sin and a vice in Dante's time.
So, when they get to the Straits of Gibraltar, Ulysses uses his powers of speech and his rhetorical resources in order to persuade his men to continue the westward course into the unpealed world.
He literally seduces them through his tongue to keep on forging ahead.
"Oh, brothers, I said who have passed through a hundred thousand dangers to reach the west, do not deny to the short vigil that remains of our senses the experience of the unpealed world behind the sun, consider your natures you were not made to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge."
inflamed by this Odatsion pitula, as Ulysses calls it, the mayorner set out on a southwest course into the southern hemisphere, and after five months they approach a superhuman mountain, huge mountain that they see in the distance.
It turns out it's actually the mountain of purgatory in the southern hemisphere.
"We rejoiced," says Ulysses' diverge, and "arcjoy quickly turned to grief."
A storm rises from the mountain and sinks the ship.
"We rejoiced and our joy quickly turned to grief."
In one verse, Dantas recapitulated the standard definition of tragedy, as something that begins in happiness and ends in grief.
What we have here in the Ulysses' soliloquy is a classical tragedy.
And it's also tragic in its style.
It's delivered in the high style as it fits a very lofty epic subject matter.
Its narrative contains a decisive beginning, the departure westward, a middle, the decision at Gibraltar to continue and an end, the shipwreck.
Very orthodox, Aristotelian kind of story.
And as Aristotle had recommended, the narrative is articulated according to a series of actions.
Actions that occur, by the way, in purely external settings, Gaiaeta, the Straits of Gibraltar, the Open Sea, the mountain, and so forth.
Ulysses doesn't interrupt the sequence of events, nor does he trouble it with narrative qualifications in the first person.
And in that brilliant little Orazion Pichela, that little speech he gives to his men at the Straits of Gibraltar, he displays a mastery of the rules of classical rhetoric.
He artfully employs conventions like the captatiobenivolencia, ampeagatio hyperbole, and so forth.
In short, the formal resolution of the speech, as a whole, represents a rhetorical, called "adequation to the moral magnitude of this tragic epic hero."
Now, all this tragic grandeur of Ulysses gives way in the next contour to the small, contemporary stature of Guido de Monte Féddo.
Here, too, let's look at the Guido's monologue.
Guido gives us a monologue.
And let's look at it.
It's stylistic features, and then we'll see what the style reveals about the moral portrait of Guido.
Okay, but first a little bit of context.
Guido was an ex-Gibberling general, and he's actually overheard the exchange.
He calls out to Virgil asking him whether his native land of Romagna, which is a province in Italy, is still fraught with civil strife.
Virgil tells Dante to answer this voice.
He'll answer this guy who speaks in a modern and provincial language.
So whereas Virgil addresses Ulysses in contour 26, it's Dante who will speak with Guido in 27.
So the Dante informs Guido of the ongoing conflicts between the petty lords of his region, and then he besetches this flame to identify himself,
so that news of him may reach the world of the living when Dante returns there.
And that's where Guido hesitates.
And that's where T.S. Eliot gets the two tercents of his epigraph.
Because his monologue, Guido's monologue, begins with this preamble in two tercents, in which he says
that if he thought that anyone would get out of hell alive, he would, this flame would not shake because it was through the shaking of the flame, the trembling of the flame that the voice is heard.
He has heard it said that no one gets out of here alive.
And he is willing to believe what he heard in order not to believe that he is telling the story to someone who indeed is going to make it out of hell.
So already in his preamble, Guido is signaling the fact that he has a market singular capacity for bad faith.
In other words, to make himself believe something that he knows is not true for ulterior motives.
So, Guido proceeds to describe the circumstances of his life and death.
He tells how in his old age he repented for his sins, his gibberling general,
and he decided to become a Franciscan friar.
But then Pope Boniface VIII later came to him after his conversion for advice on how to destroy the town of Penistrino, promising him
"Apsolution in advance for the sin that this counsel, this fraudulent counsel, would entail."
It is fear of boniface, it is fear of the Pope that leads Guido to provide this counsel.
But this "Apsolution" that is promised by the Pope turns out to be a false promise.
Because, as soon as he dies, the devil comes to claim Guido's soul from St. Francis with an irrefutable logic about free will and repentance.
You cannot "will" and "repent" in the same gesture because the law of contradiction does not allow it.
The devil is perfectly logical.
This is Dante's way of saying, perhaps there is also something diabolical about logic itself.
But you cannot argue with the logic.
You cannot "will" and "repent" at the same moment.
But this is what bad faith likes to do.
So, therefore, Guido finds himself in the 8th ring of the Malabolge, enveloped in a frame.
So, let's read a few verses from his speech and see how different it is from Ulysses.
An Italian first.
So, I am going to read a few verses from the Old Testament, and I am going to read a few verses from the Old Testament.
I was a man of arms, then I was a friar.
But that is not the way Christian conversion is supposed to work.
And who is read Augustine's Confessions knows that the moment of conversion is an earth-shattering moment of rupture,
the death of the Old Self and the birth of a new Self, and henceforth those two selves have nothing in common.
It is a radical discontinuity that inserts itself between the Old and the New, between the pre-converted Self and the post-converted Self.
But not so in Guido's case, the very verse, Eofu Wandaar, m' poy f'u Ecolidir, this little comma, shows that there is a complete continuity between the two stages of life.
And that he's actually just traded in the soldier's uniform for the Franciscan robe.
Let's go on. I was a man of arms, then I was a friar, believing that so girt I would make amends, and surely my belief would have worked out, had it not been for the great priest, may he be damned, who drew me back into my former sins.
And how and why I want you to hear.
When I had the form of flesh and bones given me by my mother, my deeds were not lionlike but like the fox.
The wiles and covert paths I knew them all, and so mastered their art, that the rumors reached the ends of the earth.
When I saw myself arrive at that age, when each should drop the sails and gather in the shrouds, that which used to please me now grieve me.
So can trite. And confessant I gave myself up to God, oh miserable me, and it would have availed.
So stylistically these two soliloquies could not be a more different one from the other.
We saw how Eulis' gay plasticity to his narrative through a series of logically ordered actions, lodge and purely external settings.
With Guido on the other hand, we immediately move into a landscape of interiority, along the biways of a soul that's written with anxieties.
This is a psychological landscape.
The dramatic events are strictly psychological, conversion, repentance, bzikomakya regret, self justification and so forth.
No external setting organizes the soliloquy. It's only the drama of self consciousness fraught with fears and misgivings.
Now unlike the Eulis' speech, we have in this monologue a central psychological subject, where the narrative follows the same, reflexive motion of subjective self consciousness that defines it.
In other words, we are talking about the stream of consciousness already in 1307, presumably 700 years before the stream of consciousness was born in modernism.
Look at how Guido's monologue begins with the event of conversion or pseudo-conversion, retreats into a description of Guido's prior life as a man of arms, and then once again comes around to the conversion.
The monologue's fraught with interruptions, parenthetical clauses, and surely my belief would have worked out, "Oh, miserable me, and it would have availed."
It has infectives, or not for the great priests may he be damned, and hypothetical constructions, if I believe that my response were to want, if what I hear is true, etc.
So it follows that stream of consciousness that continuously turns back upon itself in a series of self reflexive qualifications.
And what would you call them, "fragmentation's"? That not only remind us of modernist techniques of memetic disorganization, but which are already modernist techniques of memetic disorganization.
If modernist literature breaks up the narrative continuity and violates the traditional syntax and coherence of narrative language as Abrams defined it, then Guido's speech plays conspicuously alongside Ulysses' classical performance, represents precisely such a subversion of standard literary conventions, which in the middle ages would have been known as a rhetorical "con-tami-nats."
But one has to go further and say that these stylistic features are in dissociably linked to a psychology that is no less modern in nature, especially if we are Hegelian enough or neo-higalian enough to believe that consciousness becomes increasingly reflexive and interiorized through the succession of epochs.
Ulysses clearly has no eye for that inward gaze that sees the self in its intangible interiority.
It seems even out of place to speak of Ulysses in terms of self, as I mentioned.
Because the concept of a self implies a self-conscious subject inherently split and objectified unto itself with all those attendant alienations that go with this split.
Guido, on the other hand, reveals in his anxieties a consciousness that has turned in on itself in an almost exasperated reflexivity of conscience and guilt.
In short, Guido draws us into the same psychological horizon of subjectivity in which proof-rock sets out to make his visit.
The unhappy consciousness belongs equally to both Guido and proof-rock.
And in both their silo-equis, we were meant to follow the inner coils of a self that is at odds with itself.
And we were talking earlier about bad faith.
The ability to make oneself believe what one knows is not true.
Dante gives us a clinical case study of it here in the silo-equi of Guido de Montefélido.
How could this fox and master of wiles, this man of strategy, who was so clever that even the Pope comes to him for his vice, how could this fox allow himself to be deceived by a Pope who needs his superior counsel?
No, it seems rather that Guido's fear of bonaface triggers the mechanism of self-deception, whereby Guido falls for the very trick he recommends to his tricks.
For in effect, I didn't read this part of the silo-equi-guido prescribes to bonaface, a strategy of which he himself is the master and of which he will become the victim, namely a strategy of bad faith.
But Guido provides this counsel on the basis of bonaface's own long promise to him, the long promise of everlasting life among the blessed through his own promise.
Through absolution. But again, it's not bonaface who can deceive Guido.
This master of deceit can be deceived only by his own willful self-deception, motivated by fear.
In short, I was afraid.
The symmetry of that verse and the continuity between its two terms and the poi already be like Guido's conversion as a conversion in bad faith.
But Guido believed that a gesture in bad faith could make amends for he as this peculiar capacity of believing what's most convenient for him.
In fact, the verb "crede" that it punctuates Guido's monologue, and in each case it has a very ironic resonance.
I think it occurs some four or five times within the space of just a few lines, beginning with the epigraphy proof-rock.
See, you're "credes" is "sekimiris poste", and so forth.
Where does this leave us with respect to the poem of Eliot?
Well, a number of conclusions to be drawn.
One, it leads us to suspect that literary history does not follow the rules of history.
Or let's say it does not follow the law of chronology.
I'm not sure that T.S. Eliot was aware when he chose his epigraph from Kanto 27 of the Inferno.
I'm not sure that he was aware that this is the one and only place in Dante's poem where Dante is reflecting on what it means to be a modern consciousness.
But that would make it all the more uncanny that Eliot would have gone there for his epigraph.
What it also means is that Guido de Montythelta is proof-rock's grandfather, and he is a modern.
Not even I've only let. He's just a modern to cool.
It also makes one wonder.
I use that term in the most aggressive possible meaning I can give it.
I bought the authorship of a poem like the Divine Comedy.
The more one lives with that poem, the more one understands how the numerology of it, the extraordinary subterranean links between the canticles, the way in which there are so many things that come together in a way that no human consciousness could possibly be in control of.
The more one comes to suspect that the Divine Comedy had a superhuman authorship.
I've said that in classes before, and then students go out saying, "Professor Harrison doesn't believe that Dante was human."
That's not what I mean.
I do believe that Dante was human. In fact, that he was very profoundly human, and the Divine Comedy would be an unreadable poem if it's author, as Pilgrim, presumed to have any superiority, moral or otherwise over us.
The only virtue that Dante claims for himself in abundance, as Rachel Jacobs said, is hope.
Nevertheless, Dante can be fully human as the author of the poem, and yet that poem can still have a superhuman authorship.
I don't know how else to account for the fact that proofrock exists, and, in Kantot 27, 700 years before he's actually born.
One of countless enigmas in the Divine Comedy.
The other thing I wanted to say about proofrock before closing is how Elliot manages to write a very modern poem that is so heavily reliant on rhyme.
I'm coming to new Appreciations of rhyme. I'm wondering whether one of the misfortunes to have befallen modern poetry is the abandonment of rhyme.
And there are some examples. This is maybe the prime example of poems that can use rhyme in a way that doesn't compromise the modernity of the idiot.
But on the contrary, actually accentuate it.
That's why I think so noradie and poetry of enchantment is finally never going to go away no matter how much certain modern poets, language poets above all believe that poetry's vocation, modern vocation is that of a systematic disenchantment.
I think the three great modernist Elliot Yates Pound have shown otherwise.
Not by chance at all three of them were venerators of the Divine Comedy and of Dante's earlier poems as well.
Another poet that I really admire in that regard is Dylan Thomas.
Somewhat despise these days by language poets. I remember, well, I won't go into it.
Marjorie Perlov certainly remembers a very interesting evening at her house.
I mentioned how I thought Dylan Thomas was going to be around in 50 or 100 years while most of the language poets that were under discussion that evening would have been long forgotten and never had some people present at that dinner party, been so horrified that someone would dare say that Dylan Thomas
was going to survive and others not.
But here's what I think a poem can really do.
The seed at zero shall not storm that town of ghosts, the trodden womb with her rampart to his tapping, no god in hero tumbled down like a tower on the town, dumbly and divinely stumbling over the man waging line.
The seed at zero shall not storm that town of ghosts, the man waged womb with her rampart to his tapping, no god in hero tumbled down like a tower on the town, dumbly and divinely leaping over the war-bearing line.
Through the rampart of the sky shall the star flank seed be riddled, manna for the rumbling ground, quickening for the riddled sea.
Settled on a virgin stronghold he shall grapple with the guard and the keeper of the key.
Through the rampart of the sky shall the star flank seed be riddled, manna for the guarded ground, quickening for the virgin sea, settling on a riddled stronghold he shall grapple with the guard and the loser of the key.
The humble village labor and a continent deny, a hemisphere may scold him and a green inch be his bearer, let the hero seed find harbor, seaports by a drunken shore have their thirsty sailors hide him.
They humble planet labor and a continent deny, a village green may scold him in a high sphere be his bearer, let the hero seed find harbor,
seaports by a thirsty shore have their drunken sailors hide him.
Man in seed in seed at zero from the foreign fields of space shall not thunder on the town with a star-flanked garrison nor the cannons of his kingdom shall the hero in tomorrow range on the sky scraping place.
Man in seed in seed at zero from the star-flanked fields of space thunders on the foreign town with a sand-bagged garrison nor the cannons of his kingdom shall the hero in tomorrow range from grave groping place.
That's the kind of poem that is an excellent antidote to our bad faith.
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