RE: Universitatlity

Mr. Kozusko writes:
<< [T]he notion of Holden's plight having a universal appeal will
incrementally become less and less tenable.
<< Shakespeare, too, will eventually be unseated as the primum mobile
immotum. All-seeing Shakespeare's universal appeal will fade--is
fading--and if we make it far enough, those exquisite iambs will some day be
irrelevant.
[. . .]
<< But how can we make appeals to human nature, when human nature itself
appears to change? [. . .] How universal could *Beowulf* be, given that our
understanding of it depends on a written text, which is different again from
the "original" performed versions? I think the fact that texts change
nicely demonstrates that they aren't universal. >>

I've just been reading Proust's wonderful description of the confused
out-of-placeness of having just woken from an unexpected dissolution into
sleep -- and I must admit to a similar sensation while following the list
today, where it seems hardly anyone blinks at assertions of the great
barrier of antiquity in a 20th century novel, beloved by fifteen-year-olds
everywhere, and the suggestion seems to float that Shakespeare is downright
archaic.

For what it's worth, I can vouch for the possibility of feeling quite as
much of whatever it is that one feels for Holden or Boo Boo or Falstaff or
Ophelia (call it sympathy or whatever else you like) while reading of
characters of incomparably greater antiquity. Surely one can bicker
endlessly about exactly what that sympathy (or whatever you prefer to call
it) IS, but that, it seems to me, is a different discussion.

Perhaps his remark will be lost on you illiterate bums, but even so,
Montaigne (I think it was Montaigne) wrote that poetry defies the way of
nature, since in all things the new is small and feeble and grows closer to
perfection, but that poetry was born perfect in Homer.

Montaigne didn't know it, of course, but if one is willing to break the line
of our cultural continuity, one can go back even further than Homer. The
Akkadian Gilgamesh epic and the Sumerian poems that predate it, for
instance, are certainly difficult in places (and in predictable places), and
they were in fact buried (literally), wholly unknown to the world, about
2,000 years ago, and only recovered in the last couple of centuries. The
Mesopotamian literary tradition ground to a halt and was gone, utterly
disconnected from the rest of the world, surviving in no other literature.
Sure enough, a sort of Semitic literary cousin got into our tradition by
means of the eventual influence of a certain messianic sect, but the
literature in question survived for nearly two millennia only on clay
tablets under ground. Forget about New York City in the 1930s, or England
in the 16th century. Next to those, we hardly have a common point of
departure with the Gilgamesh and Enkidu.

And as one might expect, this presents a certain obstacle in places,
particularly where a word is rare and the context ambiguous and a cultural
or other referent missing. But the poems are still unquestionably poems,
and they still possess great potency for those who care to listen. And in
the case of the oldest of the Gilgamesh poems, we're talking about years
close to 2,000(!) BCE. That's not 2,000 years ago, that's 2,000 before the
New Testament, as ancient to Jesus as Jesus is to you. Less cohesive
fragments exist from 500 to a 1,000 years prior to THAT.

And in the case of the Akkadian epic-proper (which dates ONLY to about 1,000
BCE, though this is present if less clear in the shorter poems much earlier
than that), the central struggle of the hero -- that of making a name for
himself, of finding some sort of immortality, literal or not, of becoming
unafraid of death -- is as familiar as anything today. And it seems to me
provacative that this literature, so concerned with surviving in several
meanings of the word, is written in cuneiform and is thus associated with
the invention of writing.

It seems to me that at least in that length of time (roughly 5,000 years)
since men first struggled to write, to preserve their thoughts, and with
startling quickness started to write poems and poems about death and their
unease with it, "human nature," though such a vague and difficult term, has
not changed in any way so appreciable that it concerns me. Sure, sure, one
group uses a hoe and the other uses a rake, some of the jokes become obscure
if we don't have the appropriate facts of lexicon and culture, but there's
enough that we haven't lost in 5,000 years that my view is a bit more
optimistic than most of what I've been reading on the list.

And Matt's remarks about Beowulf are not clear to me. It seems to me that
we have the written text that we have as an incidental fact, a historical
accident. In fact, I believe that we have only a single manuscript of that
particular poem (if I'm not associating this fact with the wrong epic) and
it is a simple stroke of luck that we know of Beowulf at all. If what we
had were the original performed versions, I am not sure that it would be any
less sensible to us than what we have at present. And the fact that texts
change seems to me to have less to do with an ever-shifting "human nature"
than with the eternal perfectionism of said nature, and the existence in
manuscript and clay tablets of several "drafts" of single poems, sometimes
spanning several centuries, seems to demonstrate this beyond my capacity for
skepticism.

-Robbie
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Received on Mon Dec 8 18:24:12 2003