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Canada '. GUY DAVENPORT'S LITERARY PRIMITIVISM

séan A. Q'Reilly Department of English McGill University, Montréal May 1995

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts

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ISBN 0-612-12066-X

Canada • ii

~bstract

This thesis shows how literary primitivism is the pivot around which Davenport's literary designs spin. Thematically as well as technically the material in his first four collections of short stories is all derived from a desire to explore the beginnings, or the primitive wellsprings, of writing and art. The collage-like construction of picture and sentence will be shown to evolve from a knowledge of palaeolithic cave painting, humanity's first writing system, while Davenport's use of cataloguing and paratactic systems will be shown to evolve from ancient Greek. His primitivism also reveals itself in a Rousseau-like concern to highlight the advantages of primitive civilization on a modern industrial one and how the lessons learned from that are invaluable for present-day society•

• • Hi

Résumé

Cette thèse démontre comment le primitivisme littéraire est le pivot autour duquel évoluent les projets littéraires de Davenport. Tant sur le plan thématique que technique, la substance de ses quatre premières séries de nouvelles procède d'une volonté d'explorer le commencement ou la source primitive de l'écriture et de l'art. La construction en collage des images et des phrases dérive d'une connaissance des peintures rupestres paléolithiques, premier système d'écriture de l'humanité, alors que Davenport emprunte à la Grèce antique les systèmes de catalogage et parataxiques. Son primitivisme se révèle également comme une préoccupation rousseauiste de mise en valeur de la supériorité de la civilisation primitive sur la civilisation moderne industrielle et de démonstration du caractère essentiel des leçons que nous avons à en tirer pour la société contemporaine•

• • iv

Acknowledgements

The impetus and inspiration for this thesis grew out of a course given by Peter Quartermain at the University of British Columbia entitled Literary Primitivism. As such chapter One is largely indebted to him as is the section on parataxis in chapter Two. l would also like to thank my thesis supervisor at McGill, William Wees, who provided support and encouragement throughout the project•

• • v

Contents

Abstract ii Résumé iii Acknowledgements iv Contents . . .. v List of Abbreviations vi Introduction . .. 2 chapter One The Construction of the Text: Guy Davenport's Assemblage 10 Chapter Two The Influence of Primitive Modes of Communication • •• 30

Chapter Three Cultural Failure 52 Bibliography 81

• • vi

List of Abbreviations

b & P: booles and Pears. San Francisco: North Point, 1984. DaV's B: pa Yinci's Bicycle. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979. ~: Eclogues. San Francisco: North Point, 1981. Force: Eyery Force Evolves a Form. San Francisco: North Point, 1987. Geog: Geograohy of the Imagination. San Francisco: North Point, 1981. Tat!: Tatlin! Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982 •

• • Introduction

In order to reach far, one must first return to first principles Apollinaire1

According to Guy Davenport the creative triumph in the arts of the modernist movement was due to a "renaissance of the archaic" (Geog 20) in which "the twentieth century••. looked back to a deeper past in which it••. imagined it sees the very beginnings of civilization" (Geog 21). For Davenport, this means the impulse in the modernists to evoke the past as inspiration for the present and as a way of creating order and meaning in a century devoid of a teleological centre, be it Joyce's use of the Odyssey as a structural device, Hilda Doolittle's adaptation of archaic Greek fragments, Yeats' mythopoetics, or Picasso's use of primitive African fetishes. This "passion for the archaic••• is a longing for something lost, for energies,

'This quote oriqinates in a letter written to Breton on March 10, 1916. Quoted in Katie Samaltanos' Apollinaire: Catalyst for Primitivism. • Picabia, and Quchamp. 3 • values, and certainties unwisely abandoned by an industrial age" (~ 24) and expresses the idea, found often in Davenport's short stories, that "primitivism is a mode cf sentience, a creed springing inevitably from a state of cultural failure" (Baird 3) that was manifest as a reaction against the failure of scientific rationalism whose "sciences began to explain the mechanics of everything and the nature of nothing" (Geog 27). In Davenport "the idea of the modern age as a return to the primitive--to the 'Palaeolithic Vortex'--is••• central to Chis] philosophy" (Bawer 10) and represents a "return to first principles" as advocated by Apollinaire. Like his modernist precursors Davenport utilizes primitivism as a way of voicing displeasure with the present state of culture and society which he believes has fundamentally failed in its attempts to be a civilizing force and has left "us all gypsies and barbarians camping in the ruins" (Geog 19). The immediate consequence of this belief is apparent in his short fiction where literary primitivism is the overarching and uniting method which evolves from a belief that, what has been most modern in our time was what was most archaic, and that the impulse to recover beginnings grew out of a feeling that man in his alienation was • drifting tragically away from what he had first made as 4 • pcetry and design and as an understanding of the world. (QgQg 28) This method has lead to Davenport's classification as "the last modernist" by John Barth (quoted in Olsen 148) and a "lateborn modarnist" (87) by Alan Williamson, indicating hi!! essentially modernist stance as reflected by his concern with primitivism, along with "the modernist belief. in a transcendental signified of fragments shored against the ruins, in the omnipotence of language, in the :'lrchaic" (Olsen 149). Davenport's literary purpose is to unearth the vitality and essence of the past to find "an idyllic world in the deep archaic past which rests on attention, alertness, and unselfconsciousness" (Quartermain 175). The term literary primitivism as applied to Davenport's work reveals itself thematically and technically, manifesting itself through the conscious philosophical and aesthetic practice of his stories which work to evoke a complex of images positing the values and creativity of the primitive over that of the present era with its "murderous, despairing, narcotic way" (Geog 382). Previous studies have touched upon primitivism in literature2 and various critics

Iprimarily in Michael Bell'e Primitivism, on D.H. Lawrence and Herman Melville; James Baird's Isbmael on Melville. Marianna Torgovnich'. ~ Primitive, and James F. Knapp's "Not Wholeness but Multiplicity. Th. • Primitivism of william Carlos Williams." 5 3 • have considered it in the visual arts , but in a study of Davenport one needs to consider both approaches in order to adequately gauge how primitivism is an aspect of his discursive strategies. Attempts to define literary primitivism place it into two categories: cultural primitivism and chronological primitivism. chronological primitivism asserts that the past is superior to the present and future and that the further one recedes in time the more likely that humanity lived a harmonious existence. Examples of this are Christianity with its prelapsian state of innocence or the Greek idea of a Golden Age. Later examples would include Rousseau's noble savage. Cultural primitivism asserts that the 'progress'

that has been gener~ted by increased mechanization, industrial and scientific advances has alienated humanity from nature and a freedom to act on intuitive and instinctual urges. Davenport's primitivism is a blending of the models. He looks to the past for the archaic origins of humanity and sees in them a vital thread to lead us out of what he believes is a time of cultural crisis. Essentially, his primitivism combines the experimental collage techniques of the cubists who incorporated a range of materials in an attempt to dissolve a linear plane of

'see William Rubin'e "Primitivism" in Twentieth Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, Robert Goldwater'e Primitivism in Modern ~, Charles Wentinck's Modern and Primitive Art, and Charles Harrison, Francis Francina, and Gill Perry's Primitivism. Cubism. Abstraction: The • Early Iwentieth Century, to name but a few. 6 • reference and to make the viewer aware of the object as a 'made' work, with the archaic roots of the technique which was a result of the rediscovery at the end of the nineteenth century of prehistoric and primitive art works. Davenport's collage (which he calls assemblage) technique is created through his juxtaposition of drawings with his narrative and the disjunction of his paragraph blocks. From literature he adopts the same techniques as the modernists who allude or refer to archaic figures or ideas as an alternative to the scientific rationalism of an inherited nineteenth century sensibility. Chapter One will examine Davenport's use of assemblage in adapting primitivistic aesthetic practices. Like palaeolithic cave painting which is disjunctive, overlapping and lacking any known coherent logical narrative function, the majority of Davenport's stories reject a linear cause and effect narration. While this disjunction is partially a result of his fascination with cave painting, (mentioned often in his essays) it is also indebted to cubism and the collage method which emphasize the 'made' aspect of the work and engender in Davenport's mind a feeling that "finishing involves a stupidity of perception" and that "perspective

commits itself to one point of view" (~ 312). Linking modernism to primitivism, Davenport has said "CUbism••• was essentially the return to an archaic mode that understands • painting to be the same thing as writing" (~ 312). 7 • Consequently, Davenport juxtaposes his drawings (often of primitive objects or paintings from prehistoric caves) with hiE: narrative. This is the technique he employs in "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier" where "the sixteen drawings that are meant to be integral with the prose of this story (one hears a lot of the logos with one's eyes) turn the text into a graph ('to write' and 'to draw' being the same Greek verb)" (Geog 380). Hence, the initial sense one receives from reading sorne of Davenport's short stories is one of fragmentation like that produced by Pound's ideogrammatic method: "the text of a story is••• a continuous graph, kin to the imagist poem, to a collage••• a page of Pound, a Brakhage film" (Geog 375). chapter Two will focus on the impact of archaic writing upon Da-renport's narrative strategies in which he mimics the conventions of ancient Greek lyric by utilizing cataloguing techniques and favouring paratactic over hypotactic syntax. This style is one more way to juxtapose images (as in assemblage) without creating a hierarchy of meaning through the use of subordinate clauses, a way of escaping from cause and effect logic and uniting the senses so as to perceive anew: "careful juxtaposition making comparison possible" (Quartermain 169). Implicit in this writing style is an archaic mix of thinking and feeling based on instinct and • intuition rather than the c~mpartmentalizationof life 8 • experience that, Davenport be1ieves, is a resu1t of Aristote1ian 10gic and rationa1ism. This resistance to rationa1ism is best expressed by Davenport's Tat1in, the Russian constructivist who says "we must shatter the glass wall that Socrates and Aristot1e p1aced between nature and the sweet 1echery of the mind"

(~3). Here, Davenport ce1ebrates the modernity of the pre-Socratic physicists, where science and poetry are still the same thing and where the modern mind fee1s a kinship it no longer has with Aquinas or even Newton. (Geog 21) 50 it is with most of Davenport's characters who are 'out of time' with their rationa1istic industria1ized societies, who embody primitive aspects of humanity from a time when there was, as Davenport be1ieves, a who1eness of feeling and living in the wor1d. The style of ear1y Greek writing a1so provides for Davenport a chance to he an encyc10pedist for our society and as a way to preserve know1edge which he be1ieves is necessary for our cultural surviva1. These characters, who reject scientific rationa1ism and the repression of prima1 drives and desires which, Davenport be1ieves, is a resu1t "of the restrictions and evasions of 'civi1ization' (Fourier's name for what we ca11

the Enlightenment and industrial revolution)" (~ 381), reflect Davenport's sense of cultural failure and the • pastoral utopian existence he prescribes as a remedy for 9 • this failure. That failure and possible remedy will be the subject of Chapter Three, in which Davenport's allusions to Virgil's Eclogues, Samuel Butler's Erewhon, Charles Fourier and tribal wisdom such as that of the Dogon will be treated in detail as the conceptual grounds of his vision of humanity. All the components that l have described as linking Davenport to literary primitivism are active in his assemblages to a varying degree. In sorne stories all are present while in others maybe only one or two are. with this in mind l have limited myself to examining only the first four collections of his stories where all the elements come into play•

• • 10

Chapter One The Construction of the Text: Guy Davenport's Assemblage Primitive means complex.4 In "The Critic as Artist" Guy Davenport attempts to explain the reason behind the intricacy of the modern text: "Everywhere we look in modernist writing, we can see the writer trying to get us to pay attention, to wake us from sorne sleep into which literacy itself has lulled us" (Force 102). The highly problematic and disjunctive nature of Davenport's short stories attempts to do the same thing as the modernist writers he discusses, that is, to force the reader into an active and participating engagement with the text: to make the construction of the text obvious and to subvert the traditional notion of narrative transparency. He labels his technique "assemblage" " ••• a term in art history [that] was devised by Jean Dubuffet in August 1953 to distinguish this kind of art, which fits together parts and

'A etatement made by Jerome Rothenberg in hie ethnopoetic. anthology Technicians of the Sacred intended to dieplace the notion of primitive people. a. being rude, elementary, or eomehow inferior. Davenport a1.0 acknowledgee this when he mentions "the German anthropologi.t Leo Frobenius, who ••• argue[d] that African art was neither primitive nor • naive; it wa. eimply the African .tyle" (Q22g 22). 11 • pieces, from collage (literaJly pasting, sticking, gluing)" (Quartermain 180). Parts and pieces is exactly what Davenport's stories ar9, for in them his paragraphs rarely follow one another in terms of narrative consistency and often jostle each other by lacking an obvious connection to the paragraphs before or after them. Additionally, many stories include drawings either interspaced between the paragraph blocks, on pages of their own, or joined in collage fashion. Initial readings of Davenport's fiction, then, present the reader with a challenge to find a connecting pattern amongst the antique curio shop of Davenport's mind whose stories "resemble a pictorial collage, a juxtaposition of seemingly meaningless objets d'art and trivial objets trouvés which the cunning

craftsman assembles" (Schopp 129). Indeed, the initial sense one receives upon encountering a Davenport story is of its fragmentary nature which denies conventional narrative strategies and proceeds, instead, ideogrammatically. Typically, this style renders the text difficult in the way that a Picasso is difficult in relation to a Canneletto; that is the typical reading pattern is torn asunder for a dp.piction of reality that is not representational. It is analogous to the technique of the cubists who did away with the picture plane in visual arts and the illusion that • printing was three-dimensional • 12 Davenport's assemblage, then, is a way of shattering • our usual perceptions of reality, confronting the reader and making us renew our relationship to the text: "He has a keen eye for the incongruous and an uncanny ability to shake us out of our accustomed patterns of thought and out of our passive, virtually drugged acceptance of the world around us" (Morace 76). His agenda then is to sound a wake up calI to readers and their acceptance and complacency of the world of perception for "he is determined to resist any stasis of a systemic or more importantly a systematic articulation" (Quartermain 174). The constant juxtaposition of disparate thematic material and the inclusion of Davenport's drawing as an integral element of the stories could find no more • fitting form than that of collage/assemblage, for collage resists finality, resists categories and the notion of completeness, it resists that is to say,

any theory that does not keep open the possibilitie~ of meaning, and always keeps a firm eye on the world of perception before it heeds the erring brain. (Quartermain 173-74) Davenport's style then is similar to "Eliot, Joyce, Pound, cummings, Marianne Moore, Ionesco, and other writers whose modernism corresponds to that of contemporary painting and sculpture" (Seitz 17), and whose agenda was to create a new format for modern writing that would overturn or challenge • the previous formally accepted modes. "The twentieth-century 13 experimenters," Davenport tells us "wanted to learn how to • syncopate, hyphenate, get the essence with a gist: to draw as much of the tarpan as would interplay with intelligence"

(~312). This is similar to Pound's adaptation of the ideogramatic method from Chinese written characters or Zukofsky's abbreviated horses which take the form of work barricades in the long poem A, where images are meant to stimulate more thought rather than complete it by providing finished figures or ideas. The impetus for his assemblage style derives from his study of modernist and prehistoric art, with the latter providing inspiration for the former, and from artists such as Apollinaire and Picasso who started to view primitive fetishes not as anthropological curiosities but as art in • 5 their own right. Peter Quartermain tells us that: the discovery of palaeolithic cave paintings at Altamira in 1879 and at Pair-non-pair and La Mouthe in the last decade of the nineteenth century, when such paintings (and thousands of them were discovered) gradually led to the recognition of archaic or palaeolithic man as intelligent, artistic, and possessed of a culture. The study of these paintings and of aboriginal art from Africa, the Americas, and

"Davenport date. thi. moment in hi.tory a. 1910 "when Guillaume Apollinaire placed a Benin mask on hi. wall. Suddenly an image both ugly and di.tqrbing, still bearing the name fetish which they, the Portuguese exploiter. of Africa had given it, became a work of art which could hang • in a mu.eum be.ide a Hogarth or Rembrandt" (~22). 14 • Australasia contributed at the turn of the century to a fragmenting of perspective, breakdown of verisimilitude and the picture-plane in painting, and to the legitimation of alternative modes. (Quartermain 5) In "On Some Lines of Virgil" Davenport shows the reader that indeed the palaeolithic and primitive have contributed to a rebirth in art due to the inspiration it provides in revealing methods that had been hidden from us for thousands of years: "Rosa Bonheur's Horse Fair is a continuation of

the frieze of bovids and tarpans in Lascaux" (.EQ..l 160) and "The Bulls of Bordeaux etchings unconsciously rhyme with the Lascaux hunter and his disembowelled bison. Picasso's Guernica fuses the cave paintings and Goya" (161). Two strands then, one braided with the other, are the genesis of Davenport's syncopated narrative style. In several of the essays that comprise Geog Davenport makes the connection between the experimental artists of the early twentieth century and their prehistoric forbearers: Only our age has prepared itself to feel the significance of an engraved ox rib 230,000 years old, or to create and respond to a painting like Picasso's Guernica, executed in allusion to the style of Aurignacian reindeer hunters of 50,000 years ago. (28)

Davenport mentions in ~ that the impulse for his first book Tatlin! evolved "out of a backtracking study in search • of the origins of modernism in painting and sculpture" and 15 • that Tatlin! developed from studies of Kafka, prehistoric painting, early Greek writing, and Poe which exist in other

forms (essays, critical studies, translation)" (~ 382). Through the corpus of Davenport's writing the impulse to link his art to the modernists and their primitive influences is explicit in his style and subject matter. Davenport also tells us that despite his attempt to model his prose on "my literary models (Kafka, Joyce, Flaubert, Welty)" the more permanent influences are "my pictorial models [which] are more deeply integrated, and perhaps more of an instigation than literary ones" (Geoq 375). Yet, despite this the two subjects are deeply ingrained in his writings: "As a scholar l have always kept literature and painting together as a compound subject, the one

complementing the other" (~375). Hence, he strives in his stories to create a world which dislocates our skilled, habitual reading of phenomena, awakening childish wonder, metaphysical dread, engaging us in a rp.lationship with the world that forces us to confront a Heraclitean logos (what nature, desire, design and God are saying) which we are free to ignore, 'like men in a stupor', or to work with. (Geoq 378) His mission being then, like that of his modernist forbearers, to wake us from that sleep into which a • literature of realism and verisimilitude has lulled us, by 16 • reverting to modes of representation that were rediscovered in the early twentieth century. His statement that "my writing is primitive and contrived" (~ 374) reflects this concern by being modelled on abstract and prehistoric art where images overlap and the usual logical modes of perception have to reevaluate their relationship to the work. This technique finds ample articulation in "The Bowman of Shu" (A & Pl where the reader finds "forty-two paragraphs--none of which is connected by either time, setting, perspective, or logic to its neighbours, and many of which are only a line long" (Bawer 9). It also contains thirteen drawings which are copies of Gaudier-Brzeska's sculpture or drawings. The story recounts the life of Henry Gaudier-Brzeska, a sculptor whose work issues from the palaeolithic vortex, and who died during World War One fighting in the trenches. The assemblage of discreet unconnected paragraphs highlights Gaudier-Brzeska's life from childhood until death (yet not in a linear fashionl and the influence of primitive and archaic art upon his sculpture. With the resultant theme being the paradoxical revelation that while the discovery of the primitive has been beneficial to art, the world with all of its technological development is a more barbarie place. Gaudier-Brzeska's friend De Launay makes the comparison when • he says: 17 • Yet, Henri, he says, we are learning the Palaeolithic in a way that was closed to us as savant and sculpteur.

His smile is deliciously ironie in a face freckled ~ith mud spatter, his eyes lively under the brim of his helmet. (5) The irony here is that technological advancement has created a world that is far more brutish and barbarie than that of the palaeolithic which provided the grist for an artistic revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century. The assemblage works ideogrammatically to reveal this theme in the story. Gaudier-Brzeska's life is juxtaposed with drawings of his sculpture, which show the influence of the primitive upon his artistic development as beneficial to the rebirth of art. Also present are the voices of other early twentieth century artistic pioneers whose art derives from the primitive: Davenport makes the connection clear when his narrator Gaudier Brzeska gives us: VORTEX From Rodin, passion. From John Cournos, courage. From Alfred Wolmark, spontaneity of execution. From Epstein, the stone, direct cutting. From Brancusi, purity of form. From Modigliani, the irony of grace. From Africa, the compression of form into minimal volume. From Lewis, the geometric. From Horace Brodsky, camaraderie • de la caserne. From Ezra Pound, archaic China, the 18 medieval, Dante, recognition. From Sophie, love, • abrasion, doubt, the sweetness of an hour. (A & P 15) with the exception of several of his short stories which are Kafkaesque, his stories abandon the idea of narrative realism and present instead stories that have to lObe perceived and received accordingly, that is, simultaneously rather than successively" (Schopp 130). This is where the primitive impulse asserts itself by presenting an assemblage that denies linear progression and derives from cubism and studies of prehistoric art. Davenport's doubts about the value of his technique surface in an essay on his writing style entitled "Max Ernst Ernst Mach" (in reference to two pioneers in challenging perceived modes of • perception) in which he says: "1 do not know that this continuing of a theme through pictures and word 'works'; it is perhaps a skill of reading that has been abandoned for so long that we cannot accept it. The method is implicit in Ernst (whose picture are all texts to be read) and in the history of art: the prancing tarpan in Lascaux which l use as the first sentence of 'Robot' has a glyph above it that clearly says 'horse'." (Geoq 380, myemphasis) This statement is made tongue in cheek as the average reader would not 'qet it' quite so easily or at least might not • suppose that the qlyph is supposed to be read• 19 • The vanished "skill of reading" that Davenport laments is from a time when, he believes, picture and word were one. Hence, the referral to palaeolithic cave painting, supposedly a time when linearity of perception was not the norm and when 'meaning' was not dictated. His inclusion of drawings with his narrative, then, are meant to be integral 'sentences' for, as he tells us, "when language emerges, the verb to draw is the same as to write" (Geog 64). His philosophy follows then that: A page, which l think of as a picture, is essentially a texture of images. In the stories 'Tatlin' and 'Robot' drawings appear as integral parts of the text: sculpture by Tatlin that no longer exists, drawn from poor photographs in bad reproduction; icons of Lenin and stalin; quotation from Lascaux. (Geog 374-75) The quotations from Lascaux are, of course, not quotes in the way we normally perceive them but are the representations of the drawings and etchings themselves. "Robot" is the story of the discovery of the caves at Lascaux during the Vichy period in southern France by a group of boys and their dog, Robot, that subsequently, was brought to the attention of the noted Abbé Breuil who had been sketchinq and cataloquing similar caves full of prehistoric art for years. In this work five of Davenport's drawings appear amongst the text, all of which are copies of • actual paintinqs or etchings from Lascaux and, as at 20 • Lascaux, appear to have no apparent order apropos of each other, which follows Davenport's idea that his writing is an assemblage and so should be viewed as a Cubist work and "include visual information which would require several points of view" (~ 312). The story also connects the influence of primitive cave paintings to the modernist art movement when the character Breuil mentions his meeting with Picasso deep in the caves of Altamira, both laid out, sketching on their backs: "picasso. He did not forget Altamira. His eye has never forgotten anything. The bison at Altamira was to him très moderne. l have always thought of him as a Cro-Magnon painter out of time" (Tat! 99). Breuil then goes on to relate to his listeners the connection between the disjunctive and superimposed figures created by palaeolithic artists and the stylistic and thematic reemergence in modernist art: This man Picasso is a painter from the Reindeer Age. The Guernica with is wounded horse, its hieratic bull, its placing of images over images, is a prehistoric painting•••• But perhaps the Guernica l see is not the one everybody sees. The painting l see is as old as Lascaux. (Tat! 99-100) Here, Davenport clearly equates the modern with the primitive and implies that Picasso was deeply influenced by • 21 the recovery of the archaic. 6 The assemblage technique here • works thematically by juxtaposing the drawings of prehistoric caves and their impact upon the arts of the twentieth century. In the text Davenport is providing a visual text to accompany the verbal one. The story brings together many of the names of the pioneers who discovered the caves' artworks and worked to have them accepted as actual production from the palaeolithic with the artists who were influenced by them. "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier" (DaV's B) likewise includes a panoply of drawings and disjunctive paragraphs which work ideogrammatically to constitute the underlying 'meaning' of the story. Here we have paragraphs that are • four lines long and that are seemingly incongruous with its neighbours in theme. Some of the subjects covered are Gertrude Stein, wilbur Wright, the Dogon, Charles Fourier, Joyce, Beckett, wasps and a host of others, who, in an ideogrammatic way are to reveal the central theme of the story which "is a translation of the childhood need to

'Linking Picasso to the rediscovery of the archaic and its application to the modernist art scene occurs over and over in Davenport's writing. this from "Tatlin", "Picasso's hands were square, Catalan, aa modern and KybiBt aB the motor of a Packard. He drew fram the ahoulder outwarda. the lins commencing daep in his back. He drew like the cave paintere from whom he was descended, he was a Cro-Magnon. he was the child of the Aurignacian bull draughtsmen who painted with the whols body, lunging by rushlight at thsir magic picturss, rsd bison. bistre cows, ideograma in tan black of thsir aoula' thatched houses by Celtic rivera ailver with salmon apawn" • (35) • 22 • forage into the adult work" (Olsen 155). As Davenport himself relates: "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier," isolates this theme of foraging and proceeds like an Ernst collage to involve seven themes, or involucra, which when opened disclose the theme of foraging in various senses (Gertrude Stein and the cubistsj wasps; the Dogon and their forager god Ogo; Charles Fourier and his utopian New Harmony; the flying machine, a bionic wasp developed by Blériot and the Wrights; the French photographer Lartigue••• and myself. (Geog 379-80) The idea of foraging is central to this story and provides the pivot around which the fragments of the story revolve. Foraging is the link because it implies the imagination searching for an order to the universe, whether it is Fourier wanting to reorganize society into wasp like phalanxes or the Cubists who wanted to revisualize society: "Davenport's characters find themselves in a world of randomness and set themselves the task of finding order-­ that is, of inventing it, discovering it, imagining it" (Morace 75). Yet, the casual reader who is used to a linear narrative would be hard pressed to find this pattern for amongst the paragraphs "one text merges with another in no identifiably causative way" (Quartermain 178). In this sense then Davenport's fiction could be said to require students • rather than readers in the same way as Pound's Cantos, 23 • Zukofsky' s ~" or Olson's Maximus poems do, for in Davenport's stories "the meaning shapes into a web, or globe, rather than along a line" (~ 318) and challenges habituaI, traditional reading patterns. As Alain Arias­ Misson has stated about the relationship of the reader to Davenport's stories: "the reader must become an active collaborator, an intellectual energy is needed to correlate these juxtaposed objects; to tie the knots of their contiguities" (68). Amongst the pen and ink drawings in "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier" as weIl as in numerous other stories many of his drawings are reproductions or imitations of palaeolithic cave art meant to alert the reader to its influence upon Davenport's disjunctive style. While the cave paintings of prehistory were judged to be childish and hence of little artistic merit Davenport resurrects that style in his writing to challenge our presuppositions. The disjunctive style of cave art with its overlapping images appears to have no meaning from one image to the next and to have in fact been executed with little regard to its neighbours. Davenport wouId obviously disagree with this analysis as his reviews on the research of cave art suggests. Speaking of Leroi-Gourhan he says, He began to see patterns in the grouping of the animaIs: if a horse here, then a cow there. Human • figures are aIways at the entrance or deepest part of 24 • the caves. Breuil had established the vocabulary of the images; Leroi-Gourhan gives us a coherent theory of the

grammar. (~ 65) Davenport adopts the belief of Leroi-Gourhan who found that there is indeed a grammar to be revealed in those displaced images which discounts the notion of our ancestors being rude and simple and rather asserts that "the high technical achievements of the Lascaux artists and of those of some of the sculpted or painted ensembles (Altamira, Ekain, Niaux,

~es Trois-Frères) is obvious" (Leroi-Gourhan). Leroi-Gourhan goes on to discuss the difficulties of explaining cave art using accepted modes of communication: "It is not easy to mould languages, an essentially linear process, to the expression of the many dimensions of visual perception" (14). Davenport attempts to destroy the linear process of narrative and manipulate it in order to challenge his readers to 'read' in a different pattern. This is similar then to the cave artists whose art works were texts that were not constrained by a rationalistic grammar. Davenport's aesthetic seeks to portray a similar hidden meaning amongst disparate and seemingly random groupings of images that conventional linear thought no longer has the ability to locate. In Davenport's world it is an harmonium reflective of minds that have not been constrained by cause and effect logic. "Composition as l understand it" he tells • us, "must be both a·concrete and abstract continuum. It is 25 • not enough in a work of art to narrate; the narration must be made of words that constitute an inner and invisible harmony" (~ 379). Davenport's invisible harmonies are his adaptation of the ideogrammatic method which attempts to engage the reader by leaving intentional gaps in the text in the hope that intelligent readers will see the intended design without having to be lead by the hand. That is, by refusing to create verisimilitude he is stimulating thought and rejecting Aristotelian logic which categorizes, preferring instead instinctual response over rational response. Davenport's ideogrammatic method works so that "it is between the texts, in the interstices, that the reader's imagination is activated" (Schopp 137). It is a method he learned through the study of Pound whose collage like Cantos often worked ideogrammatically. In Davenport's study of -. Pound he says this of the method: "The components of an ideogram cohere as particles in a magnetic field, independent of each other but not of the pattern in which they figure" (Cities on Hills 74). The methods in Davenport's assemblages are the same. Through following several juxtaposing strands in his work and being forced in the disjunction of the text to attempt connections, the textbook involucra, fragmentary and opaque at first, eventually unfold their coherence and gain a clarity through the recurrent motifs and analogies that • the text employs as unifying devices and signposts for 26 • the reader. Through these devices it gradually takes shape and leads the reader, if he is only patient enough, to the 'rich moment of calm and anticipation' when relationships begin to cohere and the allusions, all of a sudden, come together. (Schopp 138) The primitiveness he seeks is in line with those modernist pioneers who, like the Gertrude stein of "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier," refuse "to pretend that we see with our heads in a clamp" (DaV's B 67) or whose style in writing rejects the previously accepted standards. Hence, Davenport's stories proceed by finding a harmony in syncopated rhythms. 7 In "Narrative Tone and Form" he discusses what could be the method of his own stories when he says: The architectonics of a narrative are emphasized and given a role to play in dramatic effect when novelists become cubists; that is, when they see the possibilities of making a hieroglyph, a coherent symbol, an ideogram of the total work. A syrnbol cornes

'Even Davenport'B taBte in mUBic reflectB hiB deBire for forma that are diBjunctive; in hiB eBBaYB he faveurB the rhythmB ef Charl•• Iv•• and • stravinBky. 27 • into beinq when an artist sees that it is the only way to qet all the meaninq in. {Geog 312)8 Many of Davenport's stories function in this hieroqlyphic manner by omittinq a hierarchical narrative structure and relyinq instead upon the reader's intuition to create a meaninq from the fragments believinq "that quotation can be eleqant beyond its oriqinal statement, and can release meaninqs concealed in the oriqinal" (Geog 377). As Davenport's Robert Walser realizes in "A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberq" the world is more meaninqful in discrete elements as "it says in the paqes of Mach that the mind is nothinq but a continuity of consciousness. It is not itself a thinq, it is its contents, like an eye and what it sees, a hand and what it holds" (DaV's B 180). Here then is a sheer deliqht in the polyvalent possibilities of meaninq in the world that ouqht not to be bound up and parcelled out by reason. As Walser says at the conclusion of his story: "But let us desist, lest quite by accident we be so unlucky as to put these thinqs in order" (185). Davenport's literary aqenda, as embodied by his short stories and his own critical writinq is to disrupt our usual readinq patterns in the way the modernist artists and

"Thi8 rhyme8 nicely with Pound'8 method of 8haping hi8 poetry: "Art quit. po88ibly ought to be the 8upreme achievement of the 'accompli8hed', but ther. ia the other 8ati8factory effect, that of a man hurling him8elf at an indomitabl. chao8, and yanking and hauling a8 much of it a8 po88ible into 80me 80rt of order • (or beauty), aware of it a8 chao8 and a8 potential" (Literary Eesay. 396). 28 • palaeolithic artists did, that is, by creating texts freed from hierarchical structure which would dictate meaning based on reason and linear logic, thereby ignoring the possibilities of intuitive and open-ended meaning. It is a technique often seen in modernist art, as Rene Magritte has said: People who look for symbolic meanings fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the image. No doubt they sense this mystery, but they wish to qet rid of it. They are afraid. By askinq 'what does this mean?' they express a wish that everything is understandable. But if one does not reject the mystery, one has quite a different response. One asks other things. (Rene Magritte, qtd. in Perloff 44) In the imaginary world as created by Davenport the emphasis is placed on dislocating the usual sense of perception so that a plurality of meaning can be garnered; such as in "Apples and Pears" where the narrator tells us that "we hnagine reality to be of a piece, whereas every evidence that can be tested shows it to be discontinuous and incomplete" (A & P 94). Davenport's assemblages then are an attempt to Act as a crystal which refracts light into all its glorious varieties, Davenport believing that the "most beautiful order of the world is still a random gathering of things insignificant in themselves" (ïstl 110). Davenport's • assemblages subvert easy readings in order to allow a 29 • plurality of views. In speaking of Balthus he makes a remark which can be applied to his own work: A work of art, like a foreign language, is closed to us until we learn how to read it. Meaning is latent, seemingly hidden. There is also the illusion that the meaning is concealed. A work of art is a structure of signs, each meaningful. It follows that a work of art has one meaning only. For an explicator to blur an artist's meaning, or to be blind to his achievement, is a kind of treason, a betrayal. The arrogance of insisting that a work of art means what you think it means is a mistake that closes off curiosity, perception, the adventure of discovery. (Balthus 39) Indeed, Davenport's assemblages actively work to dissuade the reader from reductivist readings, preferring instead to allow a free play of the mind to keep curiosity and intelligence alive. His art follows the rules of the Formalists then, who "felt that art served a purpose by 'making the familiar strange'" leading to "a process of regeneration (of attention, of curiosity, of intelligence) the opposite of narcosis" (Geog 382). Indeed, leading readers to forage on their own and to form their own conclusions• • • JO

ChapterTwo The Influence of Primitive Modes of Communication

Amongst the scholarly work undertaken over th~ years by Davenport are his translations of archaic fragments of Greek lyrics into English. He has translated Sappho, Archilochous, Herondas, and Alkman as well as producing study guides to the Iliad and the Odyssev. As has been mentioned in the previous chapter one of the influences upon his prose style is his study of early Greek writing. The impact of this upon his writing has been profound, as this comment to Peter Quartermain suggests: "Guy Davenport went round in a dream the day he learned the Greek alphabet.,,9 Such fascination with the language has made a marked impact upon his writing, a style that in certain instances attempts to mimic the conventions of pre-Socratic poetry. Ancient Greek writing evolved from the transcription of oral tales to an alphabetical form, from one mode of thinking to another, and is, hence, primitive in time and provides for Davenport a

'Quoted in Dis1unctive Poetics. From Gertrude Stein to Loui. Zykofsky and Susan Howe. This is from a 1etter of Davenport'. to Quartermain dated • 8 January 1979. 31 • chance to reclaim it and incorporate its conventions in his own work. Davenport's adaptation of Greek lyric is, like his adaptation of palaeolithic cave art, influenced from nearby modern examples such as Joyce and Pound. During the revitalization of literature during the modern period (Davenport's "renaissance of the archaic") certain writers looked to primitive forms of writing as a way not only of expressing a feeling of cultural failure and, hence, rejecting the values of their societies; but also as a way to reinvigorate writing. As Davenport tells us, "the modern grasp of the archaic happened first not in the appreciation of modern art but in the attempt to recover the archaic

genius of the language itself" (~23). During this period, investigations of Homer and oral poetry began to undermine notions of orthodox grammar and conventional verbal logic by recognising paratactic syntax as a legitimate structure for the sentence. This undermined the predilection for hypotactic subordination and social hierarchy built into such linguistic proprieties as style, grammar, and spelling. (Quartermain 5)

Davenport allude'" '0 the same movement in time when he mentions the revitalization that occurred in poetry during the modern period: "Hilda Doolittle, Pound, and Williams • could catalyze poetry by returning to the Greek fragment, to •

32 • archaic simplicity, to a sense of reality that was fresh because it had been so long rejected" (~27). A devoted poundian'O Davenport could not have failed to notice in the Cantos Pound's choice of syntax and the issue of translation. In fact, Davenport admonishes the reader in "The Symbol of the Archaic" to " ••• look at Canto 1" which ••• is a translation of the most archaic part of the Odyssey•••• And how does Pound translate it? Not from the Greek, but from the Latin of Andreas Divus, the first Renaissance translator of Homer, thereby working another archaic fact into his symbol. (Geog 23) Nor could Davenport fail to notice the use of-parataxis in Joyce who "we find••• invented••• for the modern novel the use of parataxis as a structural and formal principle" (Hayman 156). This has also been noticed by Notopoulis in his article on Homer's use of parataxis where he mentions its modern equivalents in Joyce and Hemingway (21). As we saw in the preceding chapter Davenport seeks to displace our accepted notions of reality by subverting traditional narrative frameworks. In promoting a state of mind that seeks to escape conventional Aristotelian logic, it is fitting that portions of his short stories attempt to mimic the style of the pre-Socratic writers that Plato

'ODavenport wrote citiee on Hille on Pound's Cantos I-XXX and also vieited him at St. Elizabeth's and later at Rapallo (the subject for • Davenport's short story "Ithaka"). 33 • attacked in his Republic, for Davenport sees in them a type of mind liberated from the stratification of experience. Eric Havelock has pointed out the reasons for Plato's vitriolic condemnation of Homer when he tells us there was a state of mind which we shall conveniently label the 'poetic' or 'Homeric' or 'oral' state of mind, which constituted the chief obstacle to

scientific rati~~alism, to the use of analysis, to the classification of experience, to its rearrangement in a sequence of cause and effect. (47) The Homeric state of mind then was one that had to be done away with in order to further the goals of the philosophical school that wanted to establish a hierarchy of experience in order to fit into a system of logic. In order to do this the predominant mode of composition or recitation had to be rendered so that all could be reduced to causal relationships. Hence, the poets whose works proceeded paratactically were a danger to the hierarchical agenda Plato wanted to impose: For Plato, reality is rational, scientific and logical, or it is nothing. The poetic medium, so far from disclosing the true relations of things or the true definitions of the moral virtues, forms a kind of refracting sereen which disguises and distorts • reality•••• (Havelock 26) 34 • The type of literature that was posited as desirable by Plato was that which exhibited an organic unity where the parts are related to the whole and which show evidence of cause and effect. Unlike the method preferred by Davenport who likes to leave things to work in a free association with each other, closer then to the pre-Socratic state of mind or the "paratactic mind which can jump undisturbedly from an episode to a choral passage or a parabasis which often has little or no connection with.••organic unity" (Notopoulis 11) • Davenport's stories typically defy the PlatonJ.c concept of organic unity by the abrupt juxtaposition of events and the inclusion of drawings that are to be read. This is Davenport's attempt to mimic "the primitive mind [where] the interest is in the particular first and foremost instead of the whole" (Notopoulis 14). organic literature attempts to impose a rigidity in the process of dispensing the story, as Notopoulis tells us: Organic literature is the result of a disciplined artistic mentality which plans the architecture of a work of art•••• The relation of the parts to the whole, carefully worked out by the leisurely method of composition with the written word, looking both fore and after, excluding the audience from immediate participation in the artistic illusion, is the modus • operandi of organic literature••• in sharp contrast to 35 • this, paratactic literature is the result of a flexibility of mind •••• (Notopoulis 13-14) Davenport's writing is aIl about a flexibility of the senses so that relationships of parts can be reordered again and again evoking a variety of responses. As a character in "App1es and Pears" is described, "Sander howls that he grew up in houses with doors closed, too many walls. He wants to see in aIl directions" (A & P 192). The desire to resist limitations of sense is one of the reasons Davenport mimics the Greeks for "in Greek writing you always find a running account of aIl the senses in intimate contact with the world" (Force 113). For this reason Davenport consciously employs characters who reject cause and effect logic and revert to, or act like, people who are not constrained by the compartmentalization of experience and knowledge. This is a bias seen also in Charles OIson" who, like Davenport, disliked the reductive nature of logic: (I am flatly taking Socrates as the progenitor, his methodology still the RULE: "l'Il stick my logic up, and classify, boy, classify you right out of existence.") (Human Universe 17) Davenport's characters reject the simple classifications of experience and hence embody a philosophy that is pre­ Socratic. In the title story from TatIin! we have the

" one of the writere that Davenport favours and writes about fram the • Objectivist/Projectivist. canon. See "OIson" (Qggg aD). 36 • Russian Konstructovist making the case for a flux of experience: "We must shatter the glass wall that Socrates

and Aristotle placed between nature and the sweet leche~y of the mind" (3). And in "The Death of Picasso" (Etl) we are introduced to the young man Sander and his guardian who are setting a balance between the propriety of a sexually repressed society and the instinctual and intuitive forces of sensuality and nature. Of the meandering strands of philosophical sentiments woven into the assemblage, Davenport purposely connects this couple with Itard's attempt to civilize the wolf boy victor and posits that Itard, and hence van Hovendaal, should rather learn from the natural: Itard failed with victor (assuming that victor was not an idiot, which no evidence indicates) because he was trying to teach him manners. He should have allowed himself to be taught by victor, as the cat teaches us the rules of companionship, as Griaule learned from the Dogon. Teacher as student, an inside-out idea, useful when applicable. (23) It is an intimate contact with the world that Davenport's characters want, one that disregards the classification of logic, for as the Adriaan van Hovendaal of • "The Dawn in Erewhon" (Tatl) reveals to us, 37 • "Logic goes for the jugular. But this is logic as a picture of the world, a system and a system. That there is a brown chair rules out the proposition that there are no brown chairs, a statement not offensive to logic, but (we suspect) is not a picture of reality, where brown chairs occur. Logic looks after itself, hostile and indifferent to reality." (142) Rather Davenport prefers the romantic idea of a world in which the body is not separate from the mind: The mind of the body is unconscious. The mind of the brain is conscious. Before the invention of intellect in the western Mediterranean, along the Nile and the Euphrates, on the Hwang Ho, man distributed his mind throughout his body,

thinking ~ith his lungs, gathering courage from his great knees and testicles, seeing with his hands and lips and phallus as much as with his eyes, sensing eternity in the marrow of his bones, moral rectitude in shoulders like a god's. ("The Dawn in Erewhon," Tat!

199) Similar then to the state of mind found in early Greek writing where "the Homeric state of mind was ••• something like a total state of mind" (Havelock 134) that is, that the process of the mind was connected to the physical rather • than divorced from it• 38 • One of the reasons for Davenport's highly elliptical style and constant referencing of names and places is his desire to rescue "history's hostages" (Morace 79), that is to forage amongst the cultural and intellectual artifacts of our civilization as a teaching aid and to save them for posterity as an important yet overlooked part of our culture: "to restore what has been forgotten, to join what has been divided. To teach" (Quartermain 174). One of his methods for doing this is to adapt the Greek epic catalogue for his own purposes, to make his work an encyclopedia for future generations as Homer did for his. In an extract of Homer we may have instructions for the launching and sailing of ships or for the proper way to make a sacrifice to the Gods. It is a record for not forgetting the important things that made Homer's world revolve. Similarly Davenport lists the names of people, ideas, and events which he believes are important to our culture. often, in order ta understand his work, to gain a feel for his stories, one must research the dropped names and allusions in order to flesh out the ideogram. Like Homer, Davenport's work attempts to "provide a massive repository of useful knowledge, a sort of encyclopedia of ethics, politics, history and technology which the effective citizen was required to learn as the core of his educational equipment" (Havelock 27). Davenport's lament for the twentieth century and its • educational apparatus is the driving force behind his many 39 • allusions, it is a way of providing an education for his readers "in an age when a college degree is becoming a certificate of illiteracy" (Geog 317). Davenport's stories are essentially a Guide to Kulchur with the intention of providing a periploi to what Davenport feels is important to the life of the body and soul. An example of this is Davenport's Adriaan van Hovendaal discussing Pythagoras' lists for how to behave, for, as Davenport tells us, "philosopher first meant pythagorean" ("The Dawn in Erewhon" Tat! 210): These are his teachings. Pray for others, never for yourself. Eat frugally, drink sparingly, fuck most in the winter, less in spring and autumn, never in the summer. A friend is another self. Only friends are equals. Friends own all things in common. Animals have souls: do not eat them. It is best to eat uncooked fruit and vegetables and to drink water only. The evening and the morning stars are the same. (209) Three more paragraphs go on in a similar tone acting ostensibly as a lecture on Pythagoras but also doing double dutY by showing how a life can be ordered in a fragmentary twentieth century. Hence, like Homer and Pound, Davenport attempts to tell the "tale of the tribe," that is to provide however seriously or satirically a list for living based on a collective assumption. His method is similar to Pound's in • the constant referral to names and events that are either 40 • meant to be direct references in order to spur a reader on to further research or to act like Pound's "luminous details" (Bernstein 36) which are "a way to whet the reader's appetite to learn more about a particular topic" (Bernstein 146). His stories then are not merely intended for entertainment but also as a way of instructing us in the important cultural forces and events which have shaped our history. Another role Davenport plays in his paralleling of Greek literature is that of mythologist. As he tells us "myth is a tale anyone can tell" (Geog 255) and Davenport freely mixes historical fact and supposition to create a myth for an age that is sorely lacking in them. Referring to the title story in Tatlin! he has said, by ironically handling the Revolution l hoped to have the purchase to sustain a mythologizing of events, in order to have the advantage of storytelling••• of the high hand that qualifies as "an excess of historie intelligibility." (Geog 383) The outcome of the story is that of a combination of the few facts actually known about Tatlin mixed with Davenport's vision of him as a modern Daedelus. The match is an apt one for the historical Tatlin designed incredibly intricate inventions amongst which is a flying machine resembling a "fossil skeleton of a pterodactyl" (Tat! 1). The connection • is strengthened later when we are given this exchange: 41 How very lovely and strange, Kazantzakis said, that l • should come from Crete where the birdman Daedelus made his flying machine to Russian only to find you, Comrade Tatlin, dreaming again that archaic dream. (Tat! 47) Thus, the story revolves around the life of Tatlin and the fantastic dreams for designs he had that are all archetypal motifs dating back to archaic origins. For the primitivist Davenport this is the link he seeks to mythologize: "All l have done in Tatlin! is to forage among certain events with multiple cause and effects, and to mythologize them as Max Ernst pictured the world in temporary agnosis, to induce a stutter of recognition" (Geoq 384). This recognition of the importance of certain cultural figures is the reason for his • mythopoea. Speaking of another Davenport myth Peter Quartermain reminds us that "The Trees at Lystra" (Ecl) "recounts the story••• of Paul and Barnabas, taking part in a myth before it was a myth, while it was still going on and hence before either of them was anybody" (171). As such the characters are described entirely without pretension, wholly unself- consciously••• and we are reminded through such fiction of the factual everyday world out of which myths arose, and in which their material originated. such stories (and indeed much of Davenport's fiction) work like • little essays that reintroduce to us the familiar and 42 • taken-for-granted world of cultural beliefs, and make us see it new. (Quartermain 171) The mythologizing of events occurs often in Davenport's stories in his attempt to mould some sort of meaningful cultural centre for our time. Take, for instance, "The

Aeroplanes at Brescia" (~) where he has Franz Kafka and Ludwig wittgenstein appear at the same time. (Ironically this story is told in a comparatively "normal" narrative tone, avoiding the disjunctive nature of some stories and the parataxis of other) despite the fact that wittgenstein might not have been there. But for Davenport's supposition this is relatively unimportant: "The likelihood of Wittgenstein's being there is simply a guess," he tells us in an interview with Barry Alperti "It stands to reason that in september of 1904 he would have been either at the Berlin air show where the Wright brothers flew, or at Brescia" (Vort 9). The factuality of this meeting is relatively unimportant for Davenport's purposes though as it is the imagination he is championing. For him, "historical fact is always a point of departure••• never a thing in itself worth verifying" (Morace 75). Davenport's myth-making extends also to the basis for his assemblage style. In asserting that Picasso met Abbe Breuil at Altamira he is overstepping historical factuality, for in the dozens of biographies of Picasso l have • encountered it is nowhere mentioned that this event actually 43 • occurred, or indeed that Picasso was ever influenced by cave art. However, it does work nicely as a myth for Davenport to incorporate into his own work as a way to link the modern to the primitive. The blurring of fact and fiction is something Davenport likes to keep alive in his assemblages because it enables a multitude of possibilities. One instance of this is his equivocal position on certain factual items in his stories. For instance he tells us that "there is no biography of Adriaan van Hovendaal, who l think l saw one morning in Amsterdam fifteen years ago" (Geog 376) in reference to a character who inhabits three of his short stories, yet in an

interview in ~ he says to this question of Barry Alpert "How long have you been familiar with the work of Adriaan van Hovendaal?" he responds, "There is no such person" (10). And in a decidedly post-modern move includes in the appendix material from the fictional van Hovendaal entitled Het Erewhonisch Schetsboek and Higgs Reizen in Erewhonland (n.p.). This exchange shows how convincing, or misleading, is Davenport's blending of fact and fiction in his desire to create a new mythology that incorporates what he feels is valuable to the world in an entertaining format. Hugh Kenner has said, in discussing Davenport's poem "Flowero and Leaves", that "flower-litanies are an English mode of the paratactic" CYQrt 34) and in Davenport's stories • we are given dozens of examples of flower lists, plant lists 44 • etc. Lists of things or nouns which eschew connecting clauses that would impose a subordinating or hypotactic structure to the sentence. This mode of writing imposes an "objecthood••• a fiction of nouns, while most contemporary writing is all verb, event as verb not noun, collecting no moss of existence, pure transiency" (Arias-Misson 68) and therefore leaves the information in a free flow. The following short paragraphs from "Apples and Pears" give an idea of how his technique works: LILLY, Rossini contralto, dove or egret, monarch butterfly, spinning, virginity, Raphael, white, longing, anarchy, girlhood of the Virgin, Joan of Arc.

SUNFLOWER, trumpet, lion, wasp, the smithy, moral grandeur, Vincent, yellow, male orgasm after fugal intensity, monarchy, Sparta, Alexander. (A & P 78-9).

Four similar paragraphs of assorted lists follow the ones l have quoted above until we get to what sounds like Davenport's rationalization for the technique: To Fourier's grave, through Celine territory to get there. si la série distribute les harmonies, et les attractions sont proportionelles aux destinées, some genius of poetic justice must establish the harmonies, or some mathematician find them and show how they • generate (like the other Fourier's series), and a more 45 • open awareness of attraction and destiny must become a social commonplace. It is a metaphysical intuition that can be traced either to Heraklitus or to the structure of primitive thought as Lévi-strauss has anatomized it: a symbolic language preferred by children, illiterate societies, and artists•••• (79) For Davenport the people able to discern the similarities and attractions of the series are those who understand the world in a way foreign to that proposed by logics and a hierarchilization of experience: Hence children who have not been indoctrinated, primitive societies, and the artists who refuse a perspective dictated by rationalism. This is also Homer's method where the images worked in the verbs and in the nouns succeed each other paratacticallYi each unit of meaning is self-subsistenti the linkage is essentially that which is rendered possible by adding fresh words which exploit or vary associations already present in previous words. (Havelock 184) Nonetheless we can see several correspondences in the lists he gives us. In the first, white predominates with its iconographie meaning related to the saint and purity. The seeond elusters around the eolour yellow with the referenees to Van Gogh and Sunflowers. This is what Davenport would eall "unity of tone" (Cities on Hills 64) in that the • tonality of the items in the list aIl eohere. And in between 46 • the nouns with obvious ideogrammatic connections are others with an elusive nature. These lists all convey Davenport's belief in the hidden harmonies and attractions of disparate objects and reflects his writing style on the whole. Havelock and Notopoulis have discussed the predominance of paratactic syntax in the pre-Socratic writers and the subsidence of this after the injunctions in Plato's Republic and the ascendance of a literate class. In following the style of oral poetry Davenport also mimics a similar syntax, that is to write paratactically rather than hypotactically, to avoid syntax that dictates meaning to the reader by imposing an order upon it. Davenport's prose attempts to recapture the polyvalent nature of writing and to de­ classify the reception of the experiences of the text by generating a text that attempts to be neutral and to avoid creating conclusions for the reader. This occurs "for parataxis forces the reader to build hierarchies on no authority other than her or his own" (Quartermain 20). While this can be noted most prominently in his litanies it is also attempted in his more 'conventional' sentences. This, from "C. Musonius Rufus" is narrated by the spirit of the emperor Balbinus: THISTLE, GOLDFINCH, STAR. A star in its eye, the goldfinch pecks a blue thistle with pert bill. Cricket chitter charms the air. Anna Perenna! sings the finch• • Anna Perenna! 47 • l am, or l think l am. l know l was. l and the bee, we are, l and the bee and the flower. And now we all three are, somewhere. (paY's B 30) Here, there is a distinct attempt to avoid clauses which would impose a hierarchy upon the information presented. Instead, information is left in a parallel series and connections are uncertain. similarly the opening of the same story proceeds thus: Who, seeing a mother on her knees before the mamilliary of cybebe, the Arvals flouring a calf for the knife, the standards of Quirinus in white mist around the watchfires, could believe that the gods are as indifferent as gravity? (DaV's B 10) This is an extended example of his paratactic technique where the main clause is delayed until the end of the sentence while the subordinating information is packed in between and thus holds equal weight to the main subject of the sentence. A similar construction is found in the opening sentence of "A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg" which Peter Quartermain has ably interpreted in terms of its structure noting that its "overall syntactic effect is paratactic: the syntax of juxtaposition" (Quartermain 177). The sentence follows thus: FOR A MAN who had seen a candle serenely burning inside a beaker filled with water, a fine spawn of bubbles • streaming upward from its flame, who had been present 48 • in Munich when Lenin with closed eyes and his thumbs hooked in the armholes of his waistcoat listened to the baritone Gusev singing on his knees Dargomyzhsky's, In Church We Were Not Wed, who had conversed one melancholy afternoon with Manet's Olympia speaking trom a cheap print l'd thumbtacked to the wall between a depraved adolescent girl by Egon Schiele and an oval mezzotint of Novalis, and who, as l had, Robert Walser of Biel in the canton of Bern, seen Professor William James talk so long with his necktie in his soup that it functioned as a wick to soak his collar red and caused a woman at the next table to press her knuclcles into her cheeks ar... 'oream, a voyage in a hot-air balloon at the mercy of tne winds from the lignite-rich hills of Saxony Anhalt to the desolate sand3 of the Baltic could precipitate no new shiver from my paraphenomal and kithless epistemology except the vastation of brooding on the sweep of inconcinnity displayed below me like a map and perhaps acrophobiao (DaV's B 149) As Quartermain points out "the suburdinated matter is as important as the main clause, if not more, and thus ceases

to be subordinate" (177}. The long list of subordinate clauses "are held in the mind in an equivalence of value; the relations of cause and effect are suspended, replaced by

the experience of addition" (Quartermain 177). In this type • of temporal-dynamic sentence, reminiscent of Homer and the 49 • oral tradition, the sentence proceeds as a recollection of an event told as it happens without the reordering that occurs in the composition of a periodical sentence in which effect is the most important element. In short, "the parts of the episode are greater than the whole. The many predominate over the one" (Havelock 185). The narrative thus proceeds paratactically with no valuation of one component over another that would dictate a causal order of meaning to the reader. Yet another example of this cornes from "The Dawn in Erewhon" where van Hovendaal is portrayed in a reflective moment: Lute, figleaves, cutglass, a Piperbuch page of Bach. The afternoon was old. The street was grey and rippled through windows newly washed. Adriaan had seen a cat carrying a kitten from the restaurant to the bookstore, a herring boat by Seurat on the canal in the tinted mist of later afternoon rain, an old woman with a Calvin's Institutes of a face redeemed by periwinkle eyes, an ancient bargeman grizzled of beard treading the catwalk to his coffee and pipe watching a stand of white-breeched sailors from the Naval Polytechnic as windblown, thinlegged and bunched of shoulder as gulls,

collars whipping about their cheeks. (~229) In this visually evocative passage we once again have all the components of sensory experience held in an equivalence • of value with no heirarchalization of one component over the 50 • other, operating rather as a kind of stream of consciousness, where the ordering process is withheld, aloof. The paratactic nature of many of Davenport's sentences are a way of presenting phenomena the way it is perceived, that is simultaneously. Hence the use of parataxis and assemblage mesh well together in providing a means of representing this type of reality. In the following sentence the two modes of construction are blended showing the link: A boy leading a horse, an old woman who looked like a Pestalozzi drinking wine as black as ink, an adagio of nuns on a bridge, partridges flecked with blood hanging outside a trattoria, melons golden in a basket, an orange and blue poster of an aeroplane pasted beside a board that gave in baroque and gilt lettering the times of the masses at San Procolo, goats, with eyes of the Devil wearing long bronze bells as a bass to their bleats, their herdsman talking socialist theory with a tall girl out of the Book of Ruth who was carrying a lute, a baby, a jug, and a parasol with a scarlet fimbria. (Ecl 129) Here, the overall effect of the parataxis is to create a collage effect of experience: relating things as they happen rather than with the benefit of hindsight. This is his assemblage style rendered even into the smallest components • of his stories--the sentence. 51 • The lack of hierarchy in Davenport's writing reflects the influence that Greek writing has had upon his narrative strategies as well as the disjunctive nature of collage. It is also a function that emanates from his habit of writing which is the construction of discrete elements from his notebook: "My writing unit is such that l start literally with scraps of paper and pages from notebooks. Every sentence is written by itself; there are very few consecutive sentences in my work. people feel the non­ sequence" (Vort 5). This writing style reflects Davenport's concerns with the origin of primitive writing styles and the type of mind which finds a hidden harmony in long strings of unconnected phenomena. It also reflects the belief of Davenport's Robert Walser who suggests that "the mind is nothing but a continuity of consciousness" (180), the type of continuity rendered by the use of parataxis•

• • 52

Chapter Three Cultural Failure

We have come so far that aIl th~ old stories whisper once more. (Robert Duncan, qtd. in Robert Creeley's Collected Essays 95)

In our time we long not for a lost past but for a lost

future. (A & P 63)

Davenport's employment of primitive modes of communication such as archaic Greek and cave painting collage technique goes hand in hand with the subject matter of his short stories which dwell on previous modes of existence and civilization and those people who used the past as a model for the present. This stems from Davenport's basic dissatisfaction with the outcome of the twentieth century, a century, he believes, that is flawed and fractious. His primitivism marks him as "one of the late outriders of classical humanism [who] dreams the dream of cultural development and inherent rationality that once • animated Western society" (Olsen 149). The marker that 53 connotes the present state of cultural failure is World War • One: "What we called the twentieth century ended in 1915." Davenport tells us "those artists who survived the collapse of civilization at that point completed the work they had planned before then, when they looked forward to a century

of completely different character" (~ 166). The cultural rebirth in the arts of the early twentieth century was indeed fettered by the barbarity of the war--whether it was the actual deaths of leading artists such as Apollinaire or Gaudier-Brzeska or the spiritual abnegation of society immediately afterwards. Seemingly Davenport believes that the wound has never healed and so avers that "we do not••• live in an epochi we live between epochs" (Geoq 309). It is • because of the lack of any centre to hold on to that Davenport looks to the past as a way out of the present darkness. It is through the overlooked and the forgotten that he hopes to reclaim a future for us. This impulse to seek order and meaning by romantically or symbolically returning to an earlier age or its customs, designs, or myths is a recurrent theme throughout history, evolving as it does from a sense of cultural failure, that the existing system is somehow flawed and the answers lie in the pasto This feeling can be witnessed as early as the ancient Greeks and their lamentation for a lost Golden Age, or Rousseau with his idea of the noble savage and the belief • in a better past: 54 • Unhappy in your present state through reasons which announce to your unhappy posterity even greater unhappiness, perhaps you will wish to go backward; and this feeling must induce praise of your first

ances~ors, criticism of your contemporaries, and terror for those who will have the misfortune of living after you. (9) The privileging of the primitive past over our scientifically and technologically progressing present surfaces also in the Romantics where "emphasis [is] on the sub-rational, intuitive and instinctive aspects of personality" (Bell 57) in preference to the prudery and self-restraint of the times. Davenport is well aware of this backward yearning in the history of the arts (indeed the predominant theme echoing in Geog is the rediscovery of the primitive) and, given his modernist stance, it is little wonder that the idea of cultural failure figures prominently in his work. He details the connection when he explains that Joyce found in vico cause to believe that Western civilization is at an end. Olson felt with Mao Tse Tung that the new vitality will come from the East. Pound considered us to be in a blank hiatus between cultures. 50 did Yeats, and perhaps Eliot. D.H. Lawrence looked • for restorative forces deep in blood and genitals, 55 longing for the colour and robustness of the Etruscans.

• (~ 20) As for Davenport, his affinities lie, l suspect, with the most primitive of people, the prehistoric cave painters and modern primitives such as the Dogon, for as he tells us: The historical sciences do not so obviously stave off death, but it seems to me that searching for man in his past and finding him not brutal and inarticulate but a creature of accomplished sensitivity and order, sane and perhaps more alive than we, is a shield against the forces among us that stave off life. and: "I would swap eyes, were it possible, with an Aurignacian hunter; l suspect his of being sharper, better

in every sense" (~ 67). Davenport then, wishes to find and resurroct primitive ideas that have been forgotten or waylaid and to rehabilitate them for inclusion in our own cultural milieu. "Acceleration in culture is demonic," he tells us, "and there ought to be periodic recesses to look back and reclaim elements that were ditched along the way" (Force 158). This desire follows from what he believes is wrong with our society, and like his master Pound before him, he finds an abundance. In Davenport's two collections

of essays and eve~fWhere in his short stories there is a multitude of social criticism ranging to almost every form of social institution. The pivotal point around which his • criticism spins is the destruction of the city, a place he 56 • believes should function like the earliest primitive designs because "the unit of civilization is the city" where ancient men thought of the city as the culmination of a process that began among the cityless hunters who learned to pen cattle and live in the enclosure with them, who developed agriculture (the goddess's second gift, after the bounty of the animals) and made the city a focus of farms and roads. (~19) Essentially he envisions the city as place where living is congenial and all the components forro a harmonious whole; unfortunately, however, what he sees is a sprawling metropolis dominated by the reason for the decline, the automobile: with the automobile there was no longer any need for cities. The city grew up from ancientest times as a cluster of people who could serve each other by being within walking distance. Ideally, a society owning automobiles ought to live distributed over many plowlands and parasangs distance. This discrepancy in mode was a mere paradox except that the automobile in the city made it a place of terror, the automobiles crashing into each other with great ferocity, the fumes of its engine poisoning the air, the need for parking space gutting the centers of towns at first and then block by block chewing away any building or park or • garden that could be tarred over to accommodate the 57 • machines, the noise of their backfiring, whining tires, impatient accelerations, frantic brakings, drove the people mad. (1Atl 217) What emerges in the modern city as Davenport sees it is a place inimical to the welfare of its citizens and the free flow of ideas such as he believes was the norm in the early Greek cities, which provided a space in which a citizen could do the day's business within walking distance of his/her house, "where in the congenial life of the street leisure and conversation would invent philosophy and

mathematics, jurisprudence and history" (~251). A persistent symbol in Davenport's attempt to illustrate the cultural failure of our times is his use of the myth of Persephone. This metaphor for cultural decline is, once again, a modernist symbol that can be traced to Pound. As Davenport tells us, "everywhere we turn in his poetry there is the clear emergence of Persephone and her springtime as a persistent image and symbol" (Geog 145). Not only Pound though, as Davenport explicates the works of other writers of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries he sees this myth operating in their works as well: "Lewis Carrol's Alice is a kind of persephone. There is Tennyson's sombre, Virgilian 'Demeter and Persephone,' Swinburne's 'The Garden of Proserpine' and 'Hymn to Proserpine'" (Geog 147): • "She is a constant figure in the fiction of Eudora Welty•••• 58 • She is the magic female phantom in Jules Laforge and Gerard de Nerval, in Rilke and Leopardi" (~ 25). Davenport utilizes the myth of Persephone as an image of the human condition: "In an age when the human spirit is depressed and constraincd, this symbol of the soul is a depiction of Persephone or Eurydice in Hades. In a euphorie

or confident time, she is above-ground" (~25). While elements of the Persephone myth show up throughout Davenport's work it is most persistent in "The Dawn of Erewhon" (TatI). Here the symbolizing of the myth is interwoven with the reflections, thoughts, and physical surroundings of a Dutch philosopher, Adriaan van Hovendaal, and his proteges. If Persephone's link is to the natural and bountiful world of springtime then the modern world is naturally a type of artificial, sterile region which figures as the underworld. Speaking of this story in particular Davenport has said "'The Dawn of Erewhon' ••• is set in the Netherlands (the nether land, Hades), and the recurring images of the moon, where Plutarch and apparently the pythagoreans thought Hades was, supply visions of a wasteland" (Geog 381). In this milieu van Hovendaal acts as one who is trying to create a bulwark against the destructive forces of the time. As his name pronounces he is "Adriaan van Hovendaal (Hadrian, the garden keeper" Le., Epikouros)" (Geog 381) the "the Orphie Noah who understands • what to save, the searcher for that elusive girlish spirit 59 • which is the time's Persephone" (~258). Fittingly, Davenport's philosopher likes to garden when not in attendance at the university and the description of him at this activity whilst in a dream connects him strongly to the protector of Persephone: The steps down to the garden were worn and covered with leaves. A herm of Priapus guarded one stone bannister, Demeter the other. Faunus and Ceres. He, watchman of gardens, keeps evil away with his mentula up, warding off blight and thieves, garlanded with figs and grapes. She broods in ancient grace, the decorous consonance of her stone peplon, the animal dignity of her eyes.

(~ 251) '. Just what it is that van Hovendaal is protecting or resurrecting is quite similar to Davenport's conception of what should be recovered from our past, seeing the harmonious in disparate items. More importantly though, he is against the stultifying influences of a civilization that has gone rotten in the teeth and hides behind a false

modesty with a screen of prudery and ~epression. This, combined with the image of Persephone's fertility ensure that Davenport's philosopher and cohorts eschew moral restraints when it comes to sexuality. Hence we are given dozens of instances in the one hundred and thirty pages of this story of sexual encounters which are performed for the • fun of it, in a celebration of the body that is closely 60 • linked with the intellect: In asserting this connection rather than a Descartes-like split he is again promoting the same kind of paganism exhibited by his mentor Pound who also made this connection between sexuality and intellect. Corresponding to the inclusion of the Persephone myth with its imagery of spring and winter, natural and unnatural is the symbolic presence of light and dark. As Davenport pointed out in commenting on Pound's Cantos "an imagery of light accompanies the subject of moral splendour, political order, and heroic achievement, it follows that the decline of any of these can be symbolized by fading light" (Cities on Hills 17). So it is in "The Dawn in Erewhon" that the ideals of van Hovendaal are aligned with sunshine, light, and the earth against a spiritually bankrupt world whose imagery is that of darkness and the moon. Throughout the story the moon plays a prominent role constantly being juxtaposed against the intellectual and sensual playfulness and imagination of van Hovendaal. For example Adriaan gives his Persephone flowers: "In the tall Chinese vase he had placed for Kaatji gorgeous profusion of zinnias, dahlias, chrysanthemums, marigolds, nicotiana, gentians, larkspur, hollyhocks, moss roses, cyclamen" (Tat! 135). And the colours present are always of a many-hued profusion because the sun's light makes colour possible: "Nature is a mirror. • AlI we see is a reflection of the sun" (:I:!!ll 174) says 61 • Adriaan. Contrasted with this throughout the story is the description of a coId and sterile lunar landscape: The eastern walls of the craters Oken, Marinus, Phillips, Hekataeus, Cleomedes, Geminus, and Messala take the titan light of the sun and aIl the other stars in turn, a fIat dead light defining without the blue of an atmosphere or a mirror of river, cloud, or snow an Arabia of dust, wrinkled basaIt, ochre cliffs, silver hills. (ïs1l 136) And: "Light with the dead gleam of stannum pushes its riled edge across the black floor of Petavius, the volcanic cone of Gutenberg, Pickering, Messier, Condoret, Gauss" (138). The imagery here aIl meshes neatly with the description of the underworld provided later in the story of Dionysus and Orpheus' chthonic experience: "Red temples sat on hills of feldspar the avenues to which, rotten with time and lost in an eternal light of perpetuaI afternoon, were guarded by stone greyhounds seated on plinths as old as the world" (Tat! 196). This is plainly Pluto's kingdom and is meant to alert the reader to its similarities with the moon, the opposite of the sun, harvest, Persephone: "Persephone's hell is one of nature's modes--the dwarf world, as folklorists know it, a world with phosphorous for light, with strange parodies of growing nature--geode for fig, gems for flowers, crystal for water" (Geoq 161). The point being for Davenport • that Adriaan's worship of light and nature is a way out of 62 • an unnatural, false, and desiccated world: "0rpheus, then, is one archaic ghost we have revived and put to work bringing us out of the sterile dark" (~ 26).

Naturally, the man who sees ~he cultural failure of his civilization feels the need to invent or recall a type whose values supersede the present ones. So it is with Davenport, who along with his critique of civilization proposes ones which he feels are more congenial to our intellectually vibrant yet physically restrained time. To this end he refers constantly to either the Greek pastoral ideal or its modern apparition in the utopias of Charles Fourier, the fictional Erewhon or the tribal Dogon. While Davenport doesn't seem to he calling for an actual physical return to these modes of life he does seem to be saying that the ideas embodied in them are valuable for the collective good of our communities and the culture that ought to rise from them. It is no accident that Davcnport's fourth collection of short stories is entitled Ecloques deriving as it does from Virgil's idyllic description of pastoral life. Thematically, each story is connected more or less to finding or creating a personal paradise. Several of the stories are situations describing ancient Greek and Latin scenarios while three are the modern reinterpretation of the possibilities of recreating the peace, friendship, and purpose of pastoral • life amidst the bustle of the industrial world• 63 • Typically, Adriaan van Hovendaal, the philosopher­ gardener of two other Davenport stories, is a shepherd-like figure who finds sanctuary and repose on a North Sea island with his companion Sander in "The Death of Picasso." Here the sexual and intellectual commingle harmoniously amidst a naturalized modern Arcadia where the two can read, write, work out, row, paint the cabin, or engage in a tryst.

~~venport makes the analogy that this is a modern idyll often: van Hovendaal tells Sander " •••you have beguiled all our time here into a kind of ancient ambience, Damon the old shepherd l, Mopsus the young shepherd you, full of piss and

vinegar" ("The Death of Picasso" ~ 33). The uninhibited sexuality depicted in pastoral life is thus transposed upon the modern world and despite the fact that van Hovendaal is writing about the classical world he isn't constrained by the moral rectitude of the modern. He sees the sensuality of the pastoral in Picasso: "Cézanne comes from Virgil, Picasso takes up the classical just when it was most anaemic, academic, and bleached of eroticism" (Ec130). The second last story of ,Egl, "Idyll," continues the theme of "The Death of Picasso" that of camaraderie, sexuality and intellect unburdened by self-reflection and restraint. In this story Davenport transports us back to the Mediterranean of classical times and shows us the friendship of a goatherd and a shepherd who engage each other in a • ribald contest of poetry and swapping insults to settle a 64 • dispute. What prevails here is the oneness with nature shown by the rustics prevalent in Davenport's description as well as the role nature plays in their poetry contest: On easy ferns and pennyroyal we lie here, Goats and herdsmen together, fellows all. Sleek and smooth, a nanny's flank, nicer

By far than the wadded crumps of a sheep. (~139) This couple meshes well with van Hovendaal in "The Death of Picasso" reflecting perhaps, Davenport's idea that "history is not linear" (Geog 67) and so, therefore, neither are certain modes of behaviour despite the alienation created by a technologically advanced society. Davenport is careful to contrast this story with the one that blends into it near the end. In the latter segment we are placed in an encampment of Union soldiers during the civil War and shown another shepherd, Old Grizzle (Walt Whitman) who looks after his young charges, but this story does not end idyllically for the young soldiers finish the story by marching away to fight the enemy. The final story in the collection "On some Lines of Virgil" is, once again, a modern setting for primitive behaviour. In order to find minds unsullied by modern cultural restraints his main characters are two young brothers, Joliet and victor, and Joliet's girlfriend. Due in

part to some engagingly liberal parents the children e~thibit • all the openness and awe of the physical, sensual, and 65 • natural world that is apparent in early bucolic literature. In contrast to the openness of the children is their uncle Jacques who lives in a wall in the house. He represents the stuffy conventionality of the nineteenth century and is, therefore, forever disapproving of his nephews' behaviour. As the children's father says of Uncle Jacques' self-imposed

exile: "He lives in mortal fear of letting himself out" (~ 156)ithat is, his physical imprisonment mirrors the spiritual imprisonment of someone cut off from nature and the world of the physical. The neo-utopias that Davenport creates in his fictitious world are drawn from literary or socialist designs from the pasto Many of Davenport's modernist precursors also had a disdain for the society of the twentieth century: Yeats' model was for a beneficent gentry class that r.ule a noble peasantry. Davenport, however, is

unique in pick~.ng a socialist thinker to provide a blueprint

for a more congenial way of llfe. Hen~e, the French idealist Charles Fourier is a continuous pervasive presence in Davenport's catalogue of famous thinkers for the sheer imaginative force behind his fantastic des19ns. His importance in Oavenport's thought is clear: l think Fourier is the greatest mind of the nineteenth century, and that one of the tragedies of modern times is that he was not paid attention to. As an American, l • feel very much the idealism of the spirit of Fourier in 66 • transcendentalism and in the American Fourieriste communities. It seems to me to be part of the present mess that we didn't allow some of these to mature.

(:ll2D< 6) The introduction, in Davenport's work, of Fourier and his ideology is in the "The Dawn of Erewhon" (:rsll) where Fourier, who is called "the philosopher of happiness" (260) dreams the utopian dream of a harmonious existence. Like Davenport this stems from an awareness of the pastoral: "Extremes can claim kin. l and Virgil have a distinction: he is the greatest of poets and l am the worst of prose

writers" (~235). The ghost of Fourier haunts many of Davenport's stories like a benign intellectual grandfather; but it is in the van Hovendaal stories where the application of his ideas are firmly entrenched aG one of the main pivots around which the collage proceeds. Davenport's vision of Fourierist society would be a mix of Virgil and Marx: Fourier's architecture begins in the country house of the landed gentry, to be lived in and played in by the Harmonian phalanstery. That's the beauty of his imagination. Shepherds, having foldad the sheep, bathed and spiced themselves, come into the grande salon, curls oiled, leggings and smock exchanged for alpaca jacket, with decorations and Turkish trousers. Here they mifigle and chat with blacksmith, mathematician, • turnip farmer, and historian. They ait on silk divans 67 • to read the evening paper" Fourier has moved the neighbourhood brasserie into a Parc Monceau drawing room, exactly as Henry Kousseau would have done if he had painted a citizen's Ideal World. (A & P 163) In this description all work is considered equal for the importance it has for the good of the community, there is no distinction or heirarchilization of one job over another which would promote one individual over another. It is Davenport's vision (following Fourier) to return to a primitive, simpler way of existence away from the mechanical and anonymous civilization imagined in Eliot's nightmarish The Wasteland. In the following passage Davenport's emphasis on the word "return" stresses this desire: To return movement to walking, horseback riding, and the true dance. To return music to the instrument and occasion. To return the casual to the deliberate, the

planned, the ~xpected. To return reading to daylight and the lamp. To return love to passion as it arises. To return work to communal duty, to the sense of usefu)ness. To have the beginning and end of everything kept in sight and in the discourse of the whole phalanstery. To take happiness from money and restore it to the harmony of work and its reward, ambition, anè its achievement. To put mind and hand in concert. To reorganize society after its disastrous dispersal by • train, automobile, airplane. (A & P 163) 68 • The opposition to the love of money is always present in the assemblages as it represents a type of sterility and paralysis. The industrial revolution then is one of his foes that he sees as being a cause for the downfall of any utopia: •••the industrial revolution, which in a sense his [Fourier's] phalansteries would have prevented was the end of his hopes. It was humanity moving into a new serfdom to the machine and to the monotony of treadmill regularity that he was calling to in his books, without knowing what he was warning them away from. He was inviting us back onto the land, bringing the city with us in small neighbourhoods, to a future of eccentric, local imaginative city-farms incapable of warfare and intent on being rich in the necessities, opulently luxurious in the passions, in the arts, in civilization, just when mankind was being drawn into the siums of cities and the hell of factories. CA & P 163) The archaic thread which Davenport sees in Fourier's system is his wanting to recrete society into small towns or phalanstcries which would be as congenial to its citizens as the first towns which arose. Fourier's grand vision of a harmonious society was fuelled in part by "the elimination of the tensions that destroy human society." The way to do • this is by freeing "our various passions--sexual attraction 69 being the primary one--and indulge them fully, all those • tensions would vanish, and life would be a dream" (Bawer 13). This is when Davenport blends the Virgilian and Fourier worlds so that everyone in "Apples and Pears" is constantly engaged in sexual groupings. Adriaan van Hovendaal is the overseer of the frequent couplings of the libidinous population of his remote island where sexuality is practised in a myriad of forms. What this means is that in the search for a utopian existence sexuality must be innocent rather than prurient and reflect the uninhibited desires of the protagonists. In the first van Hovendaal story he couples with his girlfriend Kaatji, watches his friend Bruno do likewise, and then engages in oral sex with Bruno throughout the course of the story. In "Apples and Pears" and "The Death of Picasso" the exuberant displays of 'free love' continue but become more controversial as they become paedophiliac in nature. Arias-Mission sees this as a desire to create "child sexuality emblematic of a prelapsarian (or a super postlapsarianl) innocence" (70) which in reality is just an extension of "Fourier's utopian wet-dream swarming .,ith his childish hordes" (69). In "Apples and Pears" the inclusion of children into the sexual world of adulte picks up pace as the üdults, Adriaan, Grietje and sander initiate children into the pleasure of sexual pursuits bolstered by the philosophy of a Dr. Godfried who says "Our alienation of • the animals is like our alienation of children from the 70 • characteristic events of human fate. Both are a gratuitous cruelty, the result of timidity and fears of smallness" (243). While the scenarios created by Davenport, which allows the sexuality of children to emerge in a natural way, sounds as if it emerges from an archaic thread, which it does, contemporary society might not agree with the sentiments presented: "The vision fails [says Arias-Misson) not because the supramundane, luminous language is inadequate, but because the (a)moral weight of its utopian didactics bursts the elasticity of its fiction. Intromission of the adult eye shatters the truly mythical crystal-world of childish sexuality" (71). While Davenport would like to see a world of sensuality unburdened of restraint and following a natural evolution, it seems quite impossible with the presence of the adult characters who destroy the innocence of these childhood sexual encounters. The utopian designs of Fourier find a thematic ally in Davenport's adaption of Samuel Butler's Erewhon. As Davenport has said, "Butler is an intellectual cousin of Fourier" (Tat! 227) and, as Davenport has created it, the two non-realized worlds do share a common philosophical thread. In "The Dawn in Erewhon" the reader is presented the story of Adriaan van Hovendaal whose doings are interspersed with excerpts from his notebooks which reflect on Fourier, Erewhon, painting, philosophy, history, and sexuality, all • presented collage-style keeping the ideogrammatic thread 71 always elusive and hidden. Part of this story presents us • with the utopian philosophies that mark Butler as one of the tribe of Fourier. As in Samuel Johnson's "The Happy Valley" the Erewhonians are sheltered away from the rest of the of the world by a natural setting that prohibits any intrusion. Like the rest of Davenport's van Hovendaal stories, the major tenets here are the freedom of sensuality, intellect, and an abiding distrust of mechanization. In creating a perfect society for his neo-Erewhonians

(for this is van Hovendaal's ve~sion of Butler's novel) Davenport mixes and matches the ideals he has promoted before, most of which resemble primitive times. Their style of dress for instance, reminds us of the Greeks Davenport admires so much: "Like stalks of celery the lords of Erewhon stood in their Ionie grace, their togas fluted and grooved, arms folded, chins superior, barefoot" (Tat! 216). Their religious beliefs are also pagan requiring a pantheon of gods rather than a single one: By the old swayback wall of crushed feldspar and hornblende thrawn out of plumb, flowered and greensilver with moss, the road to Cold Harbour wound through orchards and wheatfields with menhirs, past round country houses with conical red roofs, and promontories scarlet with poppies from which you can see in the northwest the blue mountains where the • Erewhonians believe the ennead of the windwardens 72 dwell, Bals the god of beauty and intelligence, a • calisthenic pentathlete stereodidymous and epidictic of genitalia; On the djinn of love and architecture, a slender ephebic winged watcher who cycles souls, whelms bodies with lust, and presides over the sense of home and enclosed space; stitch the holpstay of righteousness assailed by ill tempers, misanthropy, stupidity, ugliness, neuralgia, the hump, migraine, boils, gripe, catarrh, the squint, clubfoot and warts, a hale old elver kingish god; Nyssus the affrit of ebullience, the scuppernong and yeast, crowblack of hair and eye with a lot of leaves and a leopardpelt

mantle. (~219) This therefore is a society grounded in nature that attributes everything to naturalistic phenomena. As such it blends well with Davenport's vision of an ideal society that is rooted in nature, is uninhibited and therefore of a more creative artistic temperament. To this end he has the professors of this system preach outlandish yet beautiful poetic ideas, such as: "The sun and the moon are exactly the same size to the eyes, that cats sleep in different parts of the house and the garden according to the position of the planet pikk, and that fieldmice dance in circles when the wind is from the east" (~221). Their philosophers meditate on such things as "winter light on rocks in remote • and unfrequented places" or the description of a "pet snake 73

asleep in a box of moss on a table" (~ 223). And, in a • typical Davenport move reminiscent of Joyce and Pound he tells us "that the essence of being an Erewhonian is to believe in the reversibility of history" (Tat! 222). Naturally, this poetic and Arcadian life can only be achieved through the banishment of machines, the Erewhonian anathema, who "ate forests, mountains, combustible rocks and their juice, the air, the rivers. And none gave a useful manure. They gave nothing but motion, and motion rots" (Tat! 223). The interesting thing about these utopias that Davenport explores through van Hovendaal is that in their attempt to create an alternative society they are both • extremely repressive in the demands that they would lay upon their citizens. The Fourier model for instance, despite the visions of brightly-clad youngsters mounted on quagga, sets up a political structure that must be ruled by an autocratie government, for who else could control those who rebel against the impossible rules and strict regime of daily control. Imagining Fourier dividing up the day Davenport comes up with this: At three we rise, bathe, comb our hair•••• At four we sally out with our lovers and neighbours•••• At half past four, breakfast with our peers•••• At half past five, we join a group of hunters, at seven a party of • fishers•••• 74 • At seven, lunch, a~ which we read the newspapers•••• At nine we repair to the tents to hear lectures on Homer and viticulture, abstract art and psychology. At ten, Mass. At half past ten, we visit the pheasant house. At eleven, the library. Dinner is at one••• At five we visit the aquarium. At six there is a snack.... At nine we take supper••••

J.~ half past ten, to bed. We fall into the sleep of the frge and the just. (ïstl 233-34) Quite a schedule--but certainly lacking in the uninhibited

freedom p~oposed in the pastoral references and stories. One can imagine that the reason the nineteenth century American Fourieristic communities failed is for its members being utterly exhausted and suffering from sleep deprivation. Similarly disconcerting in its utopian design is the Erewhonian system of punishment, where one is sentenced for failures of a physical nature: "'My longest jail sentence,' the mehmandar said confidentially, leaning forward, 'was for heat stroke when l was fifteen"' (Tat! 186). Or as the Traveller sees "[a] young man ••• yoked and manacled. A sign in faded lettering••• identified his crime as melancholia, • second offence" (Tat! 222) • 75 The authoritarian and repressive demands of the • Erewhonians upon their citizens for physical shortcomings reveals that Davenport is aware of the satire involved in Butler's account, yet chooses to include it for the same reason that Butler did, in order to "give us a new perspective on the world in which we must live, one which helps us to recognize its foibles and inconsistencies" (Remington lOS). Closer to the mark of what Davenport is after in a better society is one that has survived intact and virtually unchanged from the past: one that combines the pastoral, sensual and intellectual in one seemingly harmonious whole. Seeking that, Davenport was influenced by the French anthropologist Marcel Griaule who studied the

Dogon people of West Africa. In reading le Renard p~ (~ 62) l think that Davenport could not have helped but see a kindred spirit; for the opening lines of Griaule's account sound like they were inspired by a cubist painter: picking one's way along its narrow streets of ligot and shade, between the truncated pyramids, prisms, cubes or cylinders of the granaries and houses, the rectangular porticoes, the red or white altars shaped like umbilical hernias, one felt like a dwarf lost in a maze. (11) And, in another instance, Griaule associates the Dogon with light and Europeans with darkness: "Africans were • creatures of light emanating fram the fullness of the sun, 76 Europeans were cultures of the moonlight" (17). Once again, • meshing nicely with Davenport's idea that we live in a dark time and that the light to lead us out of the dark emanates from the primitive. Davenport's inclusion of the Dogon material in his stories stems from his search for a society that is rich in being without being caught up in a technological race that desensitizes its participants from nature and a sane way of life. 50 it is that he adapts the Dogon as an example of a primitive group who, despite Western concepts, are not backward but rather advanced for retaining an age-old way of life. The glue which holds this all together is their belief that the physical and spiritual world are interconnected, that the everyday events and undertakings are of a spiritual nature. In "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier" for the Dogon simply sitting under a tree engaged in conversation is a form of interacting with the metaphysical: A woman with many beads of cowries and beaten gold nummo put a gourd of cool beer into his long fingers. Elders with staves came gravely to the tree, talking of other times in other days, holding cups to the calabash. This too, said Ogotemmêli, is worship. (DaV's..,R 77) It is an interaction with the divine brought about by a close relationship to natur~. Also surviving in these • primitive people is a link to our own prehistory and for 77 • Davenport a way to con"3ct back to a richer time. The proof of this is in his comments regarding the understanding of cave paintings: It is among primitive metaphors that the symbolic grammar of palaeolithic signs will have survived, if it has survived•••• If the master Dogon metaphysician ogotemmêli, the blind old wizard who explained the

earth, fate, and the stars (star ~y star) to the French ethnologist Marcel Griaule, could have been enticed into an aliplani (as he called it) and taken to the caves of Dordogne, God knows what he could have explained. (Geog 64) The complex system devised by the Dogon is another reason for seeing in them a society preferable to the current Western model. In their cosmology one of the primary concepts is that of a chaotic universe due to the impish behaviour of Ogo, the desert fox, who ruined the order sought after by the creator Amma. Ogo is the sourc= of chaos and mischief responsible for life's misfortunes as Davenport's paratactic sentence shows: You clabber the milk, mother the beer, wart the hand, trip the runner, burn the roast, lame the goat, blister the heel, pip the hen, crack the cistsrn, botch the millet, scald the baby, sour the stew, knock stars from • the sky, and all for fun, all for fun. (DaV's B 86) 78 • The responsibility for the Dogon and their metaphysicians is to find an order to the chaos wrought by Ogo. As the voice of Ogotemmêli tells us: "The unshown things will be revealed too slowJy at first, and dimly, as in a mist at dawn, an awakening and a coming" but suddenly and swiftly at the last, like a loud stormwind and rain" (pav's B 106). Rather like Davenport's ideogrammatic assemblage method which he tells us, "the reader can frequently perceive the context before he has understood the exact significance of every part" (Cities on Hills 62). The importance of the Dogon system for Davenport lies in the comp),exity of their cosmological system and their communal mode of life; one of great invention and learning, yet not alienated from its members' daily interactions with nature. This is the reason for his privileging of the Fourier and Dogon utopias, in that they promote an imaginative and inventive society, but not one that would divorce its citizens from the natural world around them, in fact having the natural world as resource and ins,iration for the human mind. It is a world "not as we know it, but as Davenport would like it to be" (Bawer 13). Or as one of Davenport's characters puts it after listening to van Hovendaal speak of the dictates of Fourier and Butler:

"Impossibly idealistic! ••• But you're right, you know" (1L.i • ~ 163) • 79

In pursuing a modernist aesth~tic Davenport has seized

• ~s upon the primitive the major component for his fiction. Viewing collage as the latent offspring of palaeolithic cave art and the impetus for the disjunctive nature of modernist literature Davenport has included the convention in his own oeuvre. Guided by artists such as Füund he has come to see "progress" as an oxymoron that tak..s us :f.urther away from what is vital to a healthy culture and civilization. 50 it is that technically as well as thematically Davenport's first four volumes of fiction are concerned to a large degree with the beginnings of culture; the first flowerings of systems reflective of the inventive imaginings of humanity, systems which benefit rather than hinder. Hence the adaption of disjunctive cave art, the miming of archaic Greek writing, the valorization of pastoral and agrarian communal systems, and the utopian thinkers who promoted the natural world over the industrial. Davenport's primitivism seeks the earliest roots of humanity and sa goes back farther than his mentor Pound who "was never able to get back earlier than the Early Bronze Age" (Snyder viii). Writing upon Alexander Marshack's The Roots of civilization: The Cognitive Beginnings of Man's First Art. symbol and Notation Davenport supports the supposition that

as far back as 230,000 years ago humanity was well developed, intelligent, and leading a complex life in • contrast to th6 .;implistic notions of primitive man, as a 80 "shaggy, cow-browed, club wielding lout dragging his wife

• (~62). behind him" Davenport's final sentence in this essay could easily be applied to his own writing: "The real meaning••• of such a book as this, is not what we have grown

from as men living together, but what we have lost" (~ 67). In Davenport's short stories the lesson he wishes the reader to depart with is the same, to look to the past for the significa,lce it holds for us today, and a reminder of what we have lost•

• • 81

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