Mind you, you would have to look very hard indeed between the lines to detect their masked presence.
However, it’s my own Theory of Palimpsestic Texts I wish to put to the test on this occasion.
My theory proposes that, despite the most rigorous scholarship, the critic can never be sure that an ur-text is not waiting to be excavated that prefigures the literary effusion under review, whose uniqueness had seemed at first reading so promisingly sui generis.
Yes. So often when the Enchanted Reader peels away the palimpsests, the Disenchanted Reader finds older writings still legible beneath.
Take, for instance, the love English poets have for shopping lists...
The Lure of the List.
Consider the poem, In the Valley of the Elwy, by Manley Hopkins (whom Kingsley Amis bibulously considered a neurasthenic whose spirituality was crippled by an ‘obsessive affectation of singularity’, and who should have drowned in the wreck of the Deutschland) ...
Lovely the woods, waters, meadows, combes, vales,
All the air things wear that build this world of Wales.
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
But do these cadences derive from a work even earlier in the century of their youth?
Look at Wordsworth’s Composed upon Westminster Bridge of 1802 to see the lure of the list assert itself ...
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
(... although, as has been pointed out, you could also see Croydon from that point of vantage).
... Nor, I belatedly add, should we ignore the potency of this effect when observed in Milton’s Paradise Lost ...
Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Vertues, Powers . . .
. . . Princes, Potentates, Warriors,
. . . Princes, Potentates, Warriors,
or
Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death . . .
or. yet again,
Alice Through the Looking-Glass
Alice Through the Looking-Glass
To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —.
Of cabbages — and kings —.
compare with Richard II
Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs; . . .
Liverpudlian Precursor.
There must be a passion akin to a cataloguer’s or indexer’s or, in the case of John Lennon, aged thirteen, a nascent lyricist’s, to see a tabulated itemisation metamorphose into art; see Lennon’s Met Office Weather Report in Eskimonisian from the witty schoolboy magazine he edited, The Daily Howl (C1953) ...Weather Report. Tomorrow will be muggy, followed by tuggy and weggy. The rest follows. ‘Ǫoglé hînķle wýrtle fóò.’ You may have noticed that it is written in Eskimonisian, especially for our Eskimonisian readers.
Yet, that power of rhythmic memorization, which drove the precocious John Lennon to his garbled rendering of ‘Dogger, Humber, Wight, Rockall, Faeroes’ is also found in a frequently cited work by a fellow Liverpudlian (by culture not birth), the poet Carol Ann Duffy.
Her Prayer, 40 years later than Lennon’s, concludes with the moral relativist’s lines:
Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer —
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.
 |
| Carol Ann Duffy John Lennon |
The Sisyphean Task of the Ur-Textualist.
So, in this special case of the Shipping Report, where does the ur-textualist begin an excavation?Maybe this comparison only goes to prove that the lyric voice of an idiot savant (a possessed tongue, in general, I mean, though the voices of John Lennon, Dylan Thomas and Arthur Rimbaud spring to mind) is likely to defeat the ur-textualist in search of the buried remains of a causality that could predate what is claimed to be a first occurrence.
Take a look at another poet, Philip Larkin, to test the Palimpsestic Effect.
See, for instance, the end of the penultimate stanza of his magnificent Whitsun Weddings (1958) ...
I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:
Then refer to the opening lines of W. H. Auden’s As I walked out one evening (1937) ...
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
And compare Larkin’s ultimate line – Sent out of sight – with Sassoon’s on; on; and out of sight (Everyone Sang).
Who, then, are the precursors?
Are they, I wonder, my old friends Mr and Mrs Anon? See
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/commoners-rights-to-heroic-quatrain.html
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/mr-and-mrs-anon.html
Here are some of the most beautiful words in the English language (Thomas Nashe’s In Time of Pestilence, 1593) ...
Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.
I am sick, I must die:
Lord, have mercy on us.
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.
I am sick, I must die:
Lord, have mercy on us.
And yet.
And yet, the oldest hand-book of English Proverbs, one that harks back to paraemiographia and Adagia collected before Thomas Nashe lived, records an English saw from the lips of the ‘inglorious’ ignoramuses (as Kingsley Amis would have it), citing this old saying ...
Fair fall truth and daylight.
The ‘Here is Where’ Formula.
However, I will sign off this posting with the reluctant acknowledgement that Kingsley Amis in his own poems could nail with savagery the egregiously unoriginal in poetry, satirizing the earnestness of those poets unblessed by a lyric tongue.
Here, in Here Is Where (from A Case of Samples, 1956), he damns the insipidness of certain versifiers (just open the pages of the New Yorker from any issue in the last four decades and you’ll find any number of such formulaic constructions).
Is twilled and spun over
Pebbles backed like beetles,
Bright as beer-bottles,
Bits of it like snow beaten,
Or milk boiling in saucepan ...
Going well so far, eh?
Ah.
When things start writing themselves you should know that it’s truly time to stop.
