Epic Logos: on First Looking Into Several Homers1
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Epic Logos: On First Looking into Several Homers1 Stan Smith I - Fealty John Keats’s sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” charts a key moment in the construction of the modern subject, making that identification between subjectivity and language, a Logos everywhere complicit with power, which has been a major feature of the western philosophical tradition: Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star’d at the Pacific - and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise - Silent, upon a peak in Darien. Keats’s “Much-travell’d” succinctly translates Chapman’s wordy characterisation of Odysseus as “The man … / That wandered wondrous far,” who “saw and knew,” in a phrase echoed in Keats’s second line, “The cities of a world of nations.” Keats, that is, implicitly identifies his own subjective travels with those of Homer’s warrior. Odysseus, however, comes home to Ithaca. Keats, by contrast, finds his temporary space in a text which, in imagination, leaves him stranded in wonder at the farthest limits of things, in that “wide expanse” which Cortez contemplates, or those even more sublime distances in the gulfs of space. The insistent first person singular which dominates Keats’s opening sentence suggests a subject effortlessly able to assert unchallenged hegemony over the text, containing within consciousness the vast extents of space and time it invokes. The grammatical subject - “I” reiterated six times in fourteen lines - seems to be the poem’s imperious, all-encompassing subjectivity, identifying itself with a political discourse of “realms,” “states and kingdoms,” “fealty,” “demesne,” ruled.” Yet it is also half aware of its secondariness and subjection to an external authority and power, its own “fealty,” in succession, to Chapman, Homer, and Apollo - the literary tradition. Keats’s political terminology harks back anachronistically to a feudal, medieval order, at the very moment that it celebrates the opening up of a new world which, less than fifty years before he wrote, had effected a radical break with all such autocratic forms of governance. And that moment which marks the inauguration of modernity in the opening up of a new geography becomes, even more significantly, the metaphor for the psychological, mental discovery of a new world which is actually the oldest one in the European heritage: archaic late Mycenaean Greece, itself long gone when these originary texts of the European tradition were composed. If Homer ruled this “one wide expanse” as his demesne, the political control here jostles with something more sublime. Apollo is the god of poetry, but he is also, in Homer, that fearful natural power, the sun, which strikes men dead on the plains of Troy. A “demesne” is marked out, mastered, but an “expanse” is, like the Pacific, uncharted, potentially infinite. The mind, even Homer’s, cannot 1. This paper is part of a research project supported by the Spanish Ministry of science and Technlogy (BFF 2002-02842), the Communidad Autónoma of La Rioja (ANGI-2002/05) and the University of La Rioja, Logroño, Spain (API-02-35). 2 Smith, Stan. “Epic Logos: On First Looking into Several Homers”. EREA 2.2 (automne 2004): 2-13.<www.e-rea.org> master the sublime infinitude of space that reduces the speaking subject to awestruck silence, the seeing subject to a “wild surmise” that threatens sanity. This “pure serene,” however, is not just external, bodied over against the subject. It also enters into its very heart, breathed in, inflating the self fit to burst with an internalised sublimity. If Chapman’s printed page may be said, like the bardic Homer, to “speak out loud and bold,” this loudness and boldness take on the power of those archaic warrior princes their texts extol. The Keatsian subject, for all the apparent empowerment induced by his reading, remains passively transfixed at the receiving end of discourse, “had I been told,” “Then felt I,” the syntactic inversions indicating the secondariness and subordination of the subject, a “quiet watcher” of a vastness that swims, at its own speed, into his ken. Ascending to the summit of the world of objects, these masterful Conquistadors are reduced to abjection, subdued by a new and hitherto unknown vastness which marginalises subjectivity. It doesn’t matter, it seems, that it was Balboa rather than Cortez who stood on that peak in Darien. Darien and the Pacific dictate the terms here: they rule. Cortez, Balboa, Chapman, Keats are all merely transitory subjects of that transcendent power. But their relation to this natural “expanse” reproduces their submission, as transient carriers, to the political “demesne” of an Imperium which determines their every breath. Keats’s sonnet compounds, from William Robertson's History of America (1777), which he had recently been reading, Balboa’s discovery of the Pacific in Book III and Cortez’ first view of Mexico City in Book V. But the latter offers the “prospect” not of a boundless, uninhabited natural expanse but of a populous civilisation, of “fertile and cultivated fields… a lake resembling the sea in extent, encompassed with large towns… the capital city rising upon an island in the middle, adorned with its temples and turrets,” so “exceed[ing] their imagination, that some believed the fanciful descriptions of romance were realized,” the “spectacle” of “a country …. rich beyond any conception which they had formed of it.” That word “rich” should remind us that when Keats speaks of “realms of gold” this is not simply an innocent allusion to the golden treasury of poetry. The Americas were a realm of gold in a more immediate mercenary sense to the Conquistadors, to be conquered and pillaged, stripped of their riches, in the service of imperial Spain. Within the unconscious of the text, that is, two quite disparate moments are recollected, one which contemplates the sublimity of nature, infinite space, as a metaphor for reading Homer, and another which records the destruction and plunder of a flourishing alien culture, in which the sacking of Troy by marauding Greeks prefigures all Europe’s subsequent centuries of rapine, plunder and genocide. If bards hold the world in fealty, they hold it in the end, like the Conquistadors, by violence and brute force, and it is the brutality of those conquerors that their poems celebrate. Keats’s language everywhere testifies to this integral relation. An ubiquitous political power and bottomless voracity co-exist with the vastness and sublimity of the poetic imagination. This compromising complicity taints the very core of the modern subject. The disturbance implicit in that “wild surmise” focuses a deeper unease. Keats”s mis-remembering is hardly innocent. As a radical and republican, he would have been well aware of the brutalities of the Spanish Bourbons, restored to their thrones in Old and New Worlds by the Congress of Vienna. Indeed, in his dying months he moved to Rome from Naples, because, as he wrote home in November 1820, “the continual visible tyranny of this government prevents me from having any peace of mind. … I will not leave even my bones in the midst of this despotism’ (Houghton, 262). Keats would have endorsed the sentiments of Chapman’s 1598 commentary, that “Homer’s poems were writ from a free furie, an absolute and full soule,” in contrast to the subaltern subjectivity of Virgil, the apologist for an empire coterminous with the known world, whose Aeneid was written “out of a cortly, laborious and altogether imitatorie spirit.” Yet if, in Chapman’s words, the Odyssey was an allegory of the “mind’s inward, constant and unconquerd Empire,” that last word cannot be detached from its worldly and external trappings. Far from being an innocent construct, Keats’s “inward empire” of the imagination is everywhere inscribed with the discourse of power, with that violence and oppression endemic to the European mind from Homer until now. The experiencing subject is the place where these discourses of power and wonderment converge in a sublime which is always already compromised. Here, in the merging of imperium and empyrean, the speaking subject falls silent. 3 Smith, Stan. “Epic Logos: On First Looking into Several Homers”. EREA 2.2 (automne 2004): 2-13.<www.e-rea.org> II - Changing Minds How the double meaning of “subject” emerged during the Renaissance, to be consolidated in the Enlightenment by Kant and his successors, can already be detected in the ambiguity, for example, in a founding text of that opening up of the New World. The first charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629 assured its inhabitants that they were to “have and enjoy all liberties and Immunities of free and naturall Subjects,” “as yf they and everie of them were borne within the Realme of England.” That this is a charter issued by the crown reinforces the point that these are subjects under political authority. “Immunities,” however, which in offering exemptions emphasises the same subordination, has, pulling against it, the boundless and unbounded scope of “all liberties,” while “free and naturall” as epithets of “Subjects” seems to point towards Rousseau rather than Hooker Already here, significantly in the context of a new-found-land where the monarch’s writ necessarily runs loose (the Governor of Massachusetts was not appointed by the King but chosen by a convocation of freemen, so that the colony was virtually self-governing from the start), “subjects” are becoming self-constituting, self-authorising, underwritten in their freedom by nature itself (Poore, 940, in Draper, 33).