On the art of medieval Arabic literature

P r in c e t o n E ssays i n

L it e r a t u r e

A dvisory Committee-. Joseph Bauke, Robert Fagles, Claudio G uillén, Robert Maguire (F o r a lis t o f the other titles in this series, see page fo llo w in g index.)

O N T H E A R T O F M E D IE V A L A r a b ic

L it e r a t u r e

Andras H a m o ri

PRINCETON U N IVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, N E W JERSEY

Copyright © 1974 by Princeton University Press A ll Rights Reserved Publication o f this book has been aided by the A ndrew W . M ellon Foundation and the Department o f Near Eastern Studies o f Princeton University L ibra ry o f Congress Cataloging in Publication inform ation w ill be found on the last printed page o f this book. P R IN TE D I N T H E U N IT E D STATES OF A M E R IC A BY P R IN C E TO N U N IV E R S IT Y PRESS P R IN C E T O N , N E W

JERSEY

To my mother and father

Preface

T his book was w ritte n fo r the student o f literature as w ell as

fo r the specialist in Arabic. Its m ain concern is w ith the three aspects o f medieval A rabic literature that appear most alien to modern Western taste: the lim ita tio n o f themes, the sedi­ m entation w ith conventions, and the use o f redcent patterns o f composition. There are three parts and three approaches. T he first part (Chapters i-m ) is historical: i t takes fo r its theme the trans­ form ations in poetic genres and poetic attitudes (towards tim e and society) in the period beginning w ith the sixth cen­ tury

a .d

.

and ending w ith the tenth. T he second part (iv-v)

concentrates on some problems o f poetic technique: how poems were made to hang together, how conventions were handled. T he th ird part (vi-vn ) deals w ith methods of com­ position in prose, exam ining the orders and disorders in tw o tales fro m the Arabian N ights. T o help the non-specialist, there is a chronological table in the back. T he analysis o f literary works resembles linguistic analysis in one respect that some people fin d unpleasant: a single problem can often be solved in a num ber o f ways, and some riva l solutions cannot be ranked u n til a ll solutions to all prob­ lems are in —in other words, never. T he elim ination o f flaws that render a piece o f criticism triv ia l or in va lid —provincial psychology, anachronistic sociology— does not spell the end of m ultiple explanations. B ut such is the relation o f criticism to the m eaning o f the w ork,1 and certainly criticism is the more enjoyable fo r its p artial character. 1 Let me quote, as something of a motto, a passage o f M . Dufrenne’s, Esthétique et philosophie (Paris, 1967), 141: “ I l n ’y a pas une vérité de Racine, telle qu’à l’explorer le critique soit assujetti à la lo i du tout v ii

PREFACE

Parts o f this book have been published in the fo rm o f jou r­ nal articles. Chapter v i is based on an essay in BSOAS, x x x iv (1971); an essay in Studia īslamica, x x x (1969) is u tilize d in Chapter iv and in the last fe w pages o f Chapter 11; the m iddle secdon o f Chapter v is a new treatment o f a subject I wrote about in JSS,

x ii

(1967). I am grateful to the editors o f these

journals fo r permission to include in the book versions of w o rk that they first printed. I w ou ld like to thank Princeton U niversity, the Princeton U niversity Council on Regional Studies, and the Departm ent and Program in Near Eastern Studies fo r their financial sup­ port. I am also obliged to Princeton U niversity and to the D e­ partm ent o f N ear Eastern Studies fo r having generously grant­ ed the leaves d u rin g w hich m uch o f this book was w ritten. I w ish that m y own powers had been sufficient to keep me clear o f the many quicksands of sense and style fro m w hich m y friends and w ife had to p u ll me. F or such rescue opera­ tions—always time-consuming, often tedious, and at times conducted fo r the benefit o f one fla ilin g at his rescuers—as w ell as fo r m any helpful suggestions, I am grateful to Lewis Fleischner, Roy ' Mottahedeh, and Paul Oppenheimer, and most of a ll to R uth H am ori. W ith o u t her surveillance o f this w ork, I w ou ld have fared no better than E d m un d W a lle r’s poor son Benjamin, w ho (as Samuel Johnson relates) was dis­ inherited and sent to N e w

Jersey, as w a n tin g common

understanding. a

. h .,

N ovem ber 1 ^ 2 , Princeton, N.J.

ou rien; mais Racine est principe de vérité, i l rend vrais les S ur Racine les plus divers. Mais n’y en a-t-il po in t qu’il rende faux? Oui, tous ceux q u i ne sont pas vraim ent sur Racine, q u i ne procèdent point d’une lecture véritable; et peut-être apparaît-il du même coup que la diversité des autres est plus apparente que réelle, parce que c’est vers un même noyau inentamable de sens que convergent, sans jamais l ’investir dé­ finitivem ent, tous les itinéraires.”

Contents

Preface v ii N ote on Translation and T ransliteration xi

Genres and. the Transform ation of Genres ONE

T he Pre-Islamic Qasīda : T he Poet as H ero 3 TW O

Ghazal and K h am riya : T he Poet as R itu a l C low n 31 THREE

W asf: T w o Views o f T im e 78

Technique FOUR

T he Poem and Its Parts 101 FIVE

A m biguities 119

The Construction of Tales six A n A llegory fro m the Arabian N ig h ts : T he C ity o f Brass I 45 SEVEN

The M usic of the Spheres : T he Porter and the Three Ladies o f Baghdad 164

Chronology o f People and Events 181

Bibliography 183 Index 195

x

Note on Translation and Transliteration

U nless otherw ise indicated, the translations are m y ow n .

The non-specialist can fo rm an approximate idea o f the transliterated sounds by consulting the fo llo w in g paragraph. T he vowels o f A rabic are approximately as in pat, pit, and put. Each vowel can be long or short. Dots under consonants (w h ich indicate pharyngealized pronunciation) may be dis­ regarded. /’ has its English sound; ‘ is a pharyngeal fricative, and ’ is a glottal stop. ’ is heard in German ge-antwortet, beobachten, etc. N o European language has

b u t since histori­

cally many Semitic languages have reduced this sound to

the

reader can afford to do likewise, q is a [ k ] sound made far back. \h , th, and dh stand fo r one sound each: counterparts are ch in Scottish loch, th in thin, and th in w ither. W here assimilation of the definite article occurs, I tran­ scribe the resulting sound. I do not use an apostrophe to m ark the hamzat al-wasl in bābu l-bayti, and the lik e : it is cum ­ bersome, confusing, and historically indefensible.1 W hen par­ ticles o f one consonant precede morphs that are never found after juncture, I use no hyphen: bil-, bihā, etc.; elsewhere I use one : bi-abl, etc. Orthography rather than sound is represented in tw o cases where the contrary practice confuses me, and I

suppose

others too. W h e n a fin a l long vowel is follow ed by a conso­ nant cluster, the vowel is shortened, b ut this sandhi remains nnmarked in the A ra bic orthography as w ell as in m y trans­ literation. In turn, at the end of a line o f verse, all vowels are sounded long, b ut I m arked this only when i t is signaled by 1 C f. T . O. Lam bdin, “ T he Junctural O rig in o f the W est Sem itic D efinite A rtic le ,” N ear Eastern Studies in H o n o r o f W. F . A lb rig h t, cd. H . Goedicke (B altim ore and London, 1971), 315-33. XI

NO TE O N TR A N S LA TIO N AND TR AN SLITER A TIO N

the orthography in the original. Anceps vowels I m arked as the prosody required. Classical prose is transliterated w ith case endings, modern w ithout. In transliterating H ebrew passages, I did not m ark the spirantization o f the letters b-g-d-\-p-t. T he

distribution o f

spirantized and unspirantized form s is nearly complementary, and such ambiguities as m ig h t occur are made up fo r by the corresponding d im in u tio n o f typographic clutter. T he trans­ literation o f H ebrew vowels is fa irly true to the orthography, b ut a fe w distinctions (segol/hatef segol, fo r example) remain unm arked. In transliterating poetry, I d id not transcribe fin a l -h used as a m ater lectionis. W ith no better justification than that o f convenience, in speech we usually deprive A ra b authors o f the articles pre­ fixed to their nisba names. I fo llo w this practice whenever the nisba alone appears, since to the non-Arabist the articles are so many exotic adjuncts. O n the other hand, many Am erican Arabists m ig h t say M ubarrad b ut none Khansa-, consequent­ ly, I kept articles before other than nisba names. T o make names less form idable looking, certain construct chains are transliterated as single units: ‘A bdalqāhir, Sayfaddawla, etc.

g e n re s

<§■

A N D T H E T R A N S F O R M A T IO N O F GENRES

one T he P re-Islam ic Qasīda :

The Poet as H ero

1 A rabic literature begins w ith the poetry o f the century or so

before the coming o f Islam. T he voice belongs to nomads o f the desert, b ut i t is neither h alting nor unsophisticated. W h a t trad ition ascribes to the oldest recorded poets is no p rim itive song, but verse in complex meters, w ith a polished rhetoric and a precise, carefully managed vocabulary.1 T he develop­ m ent that led to this fluency and mastery o f craft is obscure: the span o f the pre-Islamic poetry handed dow n to us is too brief. None o f the texts we now have are like ly to antedate the early five hundreds. In the pre-Islamic age, poems were orally transm itted and m uch previous m aterial m ust have been lost or absorbed in to the w o rk of later poets. In themes and imagery there are scattered lin ks w ith the older traditions o f the N ear East,2 b u t the earliest Arabic po­ etry has a flavor that is distinctly its own. In form , the use of rhym e and strict meter is radically new. N either technique is regularly employed in the other N ear Eastern traditions, such as the Egyptian, Babylonian, or H ebrew . A single rhym e 1 Cf. R. Jacobi, Studien z u r P o e ti\ der altarabischen Qaside (W ies­ baden, 1971), Chapter in , especially the section D e r rhetorische S lil. 2 Cf. G. Jacob, Studien in arabischen D ichtern , rv (Berlin, 1897) and two articles by C. Lyall, “ The Pictorial Aspects o f Ancient Arabian Poetry,” JRAS,

x l iv

(19x2), 133-52 and “ The Relation of the Old

Arabian Poetry to the Hebrew Literature o f the O ld Testament,” JRAS, x lv i (1914), 253-66.

3

GENRES

runs through the entire poem, whether it has five lines or eighty; the structure o f A ra bic w ord form ation is such that this can be achieved w ith o u t poetic acrobatics. T he meters are quantitative, being based on various sequences of long and short syllables, as in L a tin or Greek. In the Arabian peninsula, urbanized commercial centers existed, and at its edge A ra b vassals o f the Sassanids held court at H īra near the Euphrates. Nonetheless, the desert was the true stage fo r poetry in the pre-Islamic period, and the life o f the beduin tribe supplied the subject matter. A poet was the pride and ornam ent o f his people, fo r he alone would perpetuate the fame o f th eir noble deeds, d ig n ify the memory of their dead, and trap their enemies in songs of mockery. These functions of poetry determine the m ajor genres. Profes­ sional transmitters had the job o f m em orizing and dissemi­ n atin g great quantities o f verse. In some cases at least, the transm itter seems to have been a k in d o f apprentice to the poet, learning the craft o f verse-making in a master’s w ork­ shop, and later becoming a poet in his own rig h t. I t is difficult to say how m uch the o rigin al poem may have changed at the transm itter’s hands. Some degree o f touching up was no doubt considered acceptable.8 A fe w modern scholars have thought that practically all allegedly pre-Islamic verse is the result o f s k illfu l forgery by medieval philologists. In view o f the distinctly oral character o f the ancient poetry, the accusation is untenable, b ut i t is not easy to te ll w hich of the compositions attributed to early au­ thors are in fact genuine.4 3 W e fin d out in al-Jāhiz, K itā b al-hayawān (Cairo, 1966), 1, 41, that the poet D h ū r-Rumma preferred w ritten versions o f his w ork, being w ary o f the changes that must occur in oral transmission. 4 Form ulaic diction as the typical technique o f oral tradition is discussed in J. D . Hyde, “ A Study o f the Poetry o f M aym ūn ibn Qays al-A‘shā”

(unpublished Princeton University dissertation, 1970), 95-

4

T H E POET AS HERO

There were numerous motives fo r forgery. The resettle­ m ent o f the conquering M u slim tribesmen in Syria and Ira k brought about trib a l realignments and sparked constant po­ litica l struggles among factions, in w hich poetry, especially in the tw in form s o f panegyric and satire, was a weapon. For greater impact, contemporary propaganda must frequently have been cast in the m old o f a judgm ent handed dow n by the ancients. Some pieces o f d ifficu lt verse may sim ply be the w o rk of philologists who had despaired o f authentic citations to clarify an odd, rare word, b ut w ho were nevertheless re­ solved never to say die. The collector’s pride too must not be underestimated. I t indicates the state of affairs that a great collector of ancient verse, al-M ufaddal (died ca. 790), com­ plained that after H am m ād, a colleague o f prodigious mem­ ory and obviously great if unscrupulous talents, no one could any longer distinguish old pieces fro m freshly forged ones. Obvious anachronisms give away verses here and there, but other criteria fo r establishing authenticity seem arbitrary. I t is tem pdng to accept compositions whose contents accord w ell w ith w hat we kn o w of the poet’s environment, and to re­ ject poems that appear chiefly a lexicographer’s delight. But we can never be quite sure. In any event, whatever forgeries the eighth-century collec­ tors managed to foist upon their public, i t is quite impossible that they produced a body o f verse that is significantly differ­ ent fro m the poetry o f their ow n period, w ith o u t having a considerable am ount o f authentic m aterial available to them.5 124. See also J. T . Monroe, “ Oral Composition in Pre-Islamic Poetry,” Journal o f A rabic Lite rature , 111 (1972), 1-53. 5

Compare the opinion of R. Blachère, who, i f anything, is hyper­

critical on the point o f authenticity (H is to ire de la litté ra tu re arabe, 1 [Paris, 1952], 186): “ Rapprochés des oeuvres composées en la seconde m oitié du I er/ V I I e siècle, comme celles de JARĪR ou d’A L-F A R A Z D A Q ,

5

GENRES

Consequently, an in q u iry directed at the relations among conventions in the old poetry, at the p rincipal stylistic fea­ tures, and at the transformations o f the d riv in g sp irit of A ra bic verse after Islam cannot be m uch endangered by the cunning pranks of medieval scholars. Besides, some o f the great collections were thought quite trustw orthy in the M id ­ dle Ages, and there is little reason to doubt th eir basic au­ thenticity now. C hief among these is al-M ufaddal’s anthology, the M ufaddalīyāt. A recent study o f the collection kn ow n as the M u a lla q ā t has im proved its claim to legitim ate descent.6 In this chapter, I w ill rely m ainly on these sources.

2 Pre-Islamic poetry in A rabic can be reasonably divided in to tw o groups: poems that focus on a single subject; and others that jo in together a num ber o f ostensibly disparate, loosely connected m otifs. T he complex poem—the qasīda—is usually more mannered, descriptive, and predictable than the simple composition. T he simple poem often alludes to or narrates specific events; the qasīda, w ith w hich I shall be dealing, tends to employ a sequence o f set pieces picked fro m a rather small inventory of themes. The variability o f m otifs w ill be fo un d very lo w even when compared w ith such a set-piece genre as the pastoral. Size has m uch to do w ith this u n ifo rm ­ ity : few qasīdas ru n over a hundred lines. T he success en­ joyed by such a predictable genre is in trig u in g . In the West,

les pastiches nous paraissent de fidèles produits de la tradition poétique avant l’Islam. Q u’ils accentuent certaines tendances, qu’ils marquent une prédilection pour quelque thèmes et quelque clichés, nous n’en doutons pas. Mais dans l ’ensemble, ils ne faussent n i l’allure de leurs modèles, n i les sentiments que célèbrent les vieux poètes.” 6 M . J. Kister, “ The Seven Odes,” RSO, 6

x l iv

(1969), 27-36.

T H E POET AS HERO

a good deal o f modern poetry has embraced the shock value o f unpredictability w ith such ardor that a large segment o f our audience now sim ply confuses unpredictability and ardor; all the more reason then to try to understand the vita lity, in other times and places, of unusually conventional genres. I t is impossible to draw up a blu ep rin t o f themes and se­ quences that w ill account fo r all qasīdas. They are poems that make constant use of a common stock; nonetheless, they are w orks o f in d ivid u a l poets. B u t an outline may be pieced to­ gether—fa irly rig id fo r the first h a lf o f the qasīda, more flexi­ ble fo r the second—that can be observed in most texts. T he composite poem, unless i t is a w o rk o f commemoration, begins w ith an elegiac section in w hich a broken-off love af­ fa ir is recalled. T he lady may just be departing w ith her tribe, the wom en’s camel-litters sdll visible on the horizon, or else she may have le ft the poet years ago. In the latter case, the qasīda is likely to open w ith the recognition o f a place in the desert, where vestiges o f hum an habitation rem ain despite a return to wilderness and desolation. I t is the site o f an encamp­ m ent where the lady’s tribe once lived near the poet’s. These scenes are sentimental but not factitious. D u rin g the dry season, the tribes had to stay at th eir permanent sources o f water, but when, after the autum nal equinox, the rains had assured ample pasturage and an adequate water supply, they could freely roam the desert w ith their camels. Thus, d u rin g w inte r and spring, people from different tribes m ig h t meet, only to separate as summer and drought returned. T he poet conjures up pleasurable or melancholy moments o f the past love affair. T he lady’s beauty is often set fo rth in a detailed catalogue. A t last the poet decides to stop brood­ in g ; he mounts his camel and rides away. The camel too is often m ethodically

described, and there are cases where

there is no transition at all between the departure or camp­ site scene and the camel section.

7

GENRES

T he second part of the qasīda gets to the p o in t: the virtues and memorable exploits o f the poet, his tribe, or his patron are vaunted; or else a base lineage and contemptible deeds are th ro w n in the face of an antagonist. T he life depicted in sections that celebrate noble qualities is in some ways rem i­ niscent of w hat Gibbon tells us, via Tacitus, o f the Germanic tribes in a n tiq u ity: valor in battle and lavish generosity are coupled w ith prowess at d rin k in g and readiness to gamble. Backdrops vary, but there is a u n ify in g mood. W hether the scene is o f w ar or of a pleasant indolence, in the wings death is crouching. Beliefs

in

an

afterlife

have

frequently

brought more

anguish than joy, and the absence o f religious prescriptions does not unavoidably lead to g lu m preoccupation w ith a hap­ hazard and meaningless death. B u t m orta lity is the nourish­ m ent o f art, and facing death head-on the firs t task o f the qasīda. T h is task emerges perhaps most clearly fro m the fact that in the old poetry heroic recklessness often gets the better of the reasoned social norm . In beduin society, bloodshed is usu­ ally follow ed by an arbitrated payment o f compensation.7 Therefore, it is im p orta nt to notice that pre-Islamic poetry was interested in cases where arbitration failed or was re­ jected out o f hand, and that, aside fro m the pool o f conven­ tional themes, its favorite subject matter was supplied by feuds in w hich some crooked sp irit had turned k in or allies into

m orta l enemies. Such enm ity m arked

the wars o f

al-H uraqa, o f Dāhis, o f Basūs.8 As one poet says (M u fa d ­ dalīyāt, 12:6 al-Husayn ib n al-H um ām ) : 7 Cf. A. M usil, The M anners and Customs o f the Rw ala Bedouins (N e w Y ork, 1928), Ch. xx. 8 F or the histories o f these wars, see Lyall, M ufaddaīiyāt, n (O xford, 1918), 288-90 (o f Dāhis) and 33-35 (o f al-Huraqa), and Lyall, Transla­ tions o f A ncien t Arabian Poetry (N e w York, 1930) (o f Basūs).

T H E POET AS HERO

yufalliqna haman m in rija lin a'izzatin ‘alaynā wa-hum kānū a'aqqa wa-azlamā O u r swords sp lit the heads of men who were once very dear to us, but who acted perversely and unjustly. A t bottom, the crooked sp irit is an aspect of heroic character: it is the hero’s need to play his match w ith death, never to miss a move in w hich he can expose him self to danger. F ro m the very earliest poems on, we often meet the figure of an anonymous blamer who reproves the poet-protagonist fo r reckless behavior. In reply the poet speaks of the inescapability o f death, o f the manāyā w ho fin d one when the hour is ripe. Such is Tarafa’s answer ( m u allaqa, 44) : alā ayyuhādhā 1-lā’im ī ahduru 1-waghā wa-an ashhada 1-ladhdhāti hal anta m u k h lid l O you who reproach me because I am fo u n d in the m idst o f w ar as w ell as o f pleasure, can you m a \e me endure forever? There are poems in w hich war is so m uch a mere m edium fo r tem pting death that we are left in the dark as to causes, fac­ tions, and fortunes. In such works in the heroic mode, the antagonist is draw n noble and intre pid

(A n ta ra , m u a l-

laqa, 51) : fa-shakaktu b ir-ru m h i 1-asammi thiyābahū laysa 1-karīmu ‘alā 1-qanā bi-m uharram i / pierced his arm or w ith the solid spear; no sanction keeps the spear away from the noble. In line 53, A n ta ra describes the dispatched enemy as hām i lhaqīqati m u 'lim i, one w ho protects w hat he ought to protect,

9

GENRES

and w ho displays upon him self a m ark to signal that he is a bold champion, eager to be challenged. H ā m i l-haqīqati is a cliché, and its connotation is more im p orta nt than its precise meaning, because it is a cliché proper to the heroic dirge, m arthiya.9 T o tem pt death is the hero’s destiny. T he crucial th ing fo r the heroic sp irit is not so m uch to go down fig h tin g , as to have a tincture o f w ill in one’s death, to see i t through and be its master. B u t a poetry in w hich poet and hero are a single per­ son w ill have to deal w ith a dram aturgical problem : the same person cannot experience death and then ta lk about it. T o put i t in another way: having seen something through to the end implies, emotionally i f n ot logically, that you can reflect upon it;

and to a poetic statement o f mastery over one’s actions

such afterthought is most im p orta nt o f all. Posthumous fame means that the survivors do the reflecting instead o f the hero, b ut this is solving the problem by sleight o f hand. A n ticipa ­ tio n o f death or buria l w orks by a sim ilar trick, and it can be very effective

(M ufaddaīiyāt, 9:31-33, M u ta m m im

ibn

N u w a yra ) : yā lahfa m in ‘arfā’a dhāti fa līla tin jā ’at ilayya ‘alā thalāthin takhm a'u zallat turāsidunī w a-tanzuru hawlahā w a-yurībuha ram aqun w a-inn l m u tm i'u wa-tazallu tanshitunī w a-tu lh im u ajriyan wasta l-‘a rīn i wa-laysa hayyun yadfa u 9

Translation

o f hām i l-h a q iq a ti follows

T ib rīz ī,

Zawzanī, etc.

A rberry, The Seven Odes (London, 1957), 182, has “ a defender o f the rig h t,” w hich is fluent but misleading. For examples o f the phrase in the m arthiya, cf. A nīs al-julasā’ f ī sharh diw ān al-Khansâ’, ed. L. Cheikho (Beirut, 1895), 2, n , 104. Several fine verses honoring a k ille d enemy are cited in A l ī Ah. Sa‘īd, M uqaddim a lish-shi‘r al‘arabī (Beirut, 1971), 17 and 35.

IO

T H E POET AS HERO

O the p ity o f i t ! The shaggy-maned hyena came towards me, w ith that lim p in g w a l\ o f hers, as i f on three legs. / A l l day she sat loo king about her, w a itin g to pounce. I draw a last breath; it disquiets her, because I have aroused her greed. / She w ill be rip p in g me apart to offer m y flesh to her cubs in their covert/ no one alive w ill drive them bac\. B u t in the qasīda the standard answer to the problem is different. The protagonist engages in actions that are fe lt to be analogous to heroic death in that they are instances o f re­ linquishm ent and voluntary loss. U n lim ite d generosity is one o f these, generosity that goes beyond kindness and social bonding value and becomes a destruction o f what one may need fo r sustenance tom orrow. T he reprover is shocked (M u f. i :2i, T a ’abbata Sharran) : ahlafya mālan law daninta bihī, “ You have destroyed your property! I f only you had held on to i t ! ” 10 T he d rin k in g scenes also belong here. They are not content to record moments of pleasure; equally essential is their testimony to the speaker’s reckless willingness

to

spend: fa-idhā

sharibtu

fa-innanī

m u sta h li\u n m ālī, “ Whenever I d rin k, I b rin g ru in to m y wealth.” 11 Potlatch— “ k illin g property,” as the T lin g it call i t 12 —is celebrated in these poems, b ut it is cut loose from its so­ cial moorings. T o count no odds, to w alk the b rin k and th ro w caution to the w inds: these are the principles of the old po­ etry that must be remembered when its transformations after Islam are traced. Relinquishm ent that can be reflected upon brings about a balance between spending and seizing, tw o poles w ell de10 Reading daninta w ith A nb ārī and Lyall. 11 ‘Antara, m u'allaqa, 40. 12 M . Mauss, The G ift, transi, by I. Cunnison (N e w Y ork, 1967), 102, note 122. II

GENRES

scribed by the terms Gaster chose fo r seasonal rites o f lean and plenty: \enosis (em ptyin g) and plerosis ( fillin g ) .13 The Stoic, although unable to w ith d ra w fro m physically register­ in g pain and pleasure, attains an e qu ilibrium by not perm it­ tin g him self to become engaged and caught up in these sensa­ tions. T he heroic m odel is o f an e qu ilibrium produced by the only other possible means: the w ill to be caught up in all en­ counters, jo y fu l and lethal alike.14 In the poems, the reach fo r balance has a technical coun­ terpart in the deployment o f adjacent units o f verse w hich together make up a thematic symmetry. T h is often happens w ith the large, traditional themes: w ar and peace, w ant and abundance, etc. I t is more s trik in g at the next level o f organ­ ization. So ash-Shanfarā speaks in the poem kn ow n as L ām īyat al-arab o f the hardships o f w inte r and summer. Im ra ’alqays recalls the short final portion o f a n ig h t spent in deligh tfu l company, and im m ediately afterwards speaks o f the apparent endlessness o f a n ig h t spent alone. The cheery experience took place ( mu'allaqa, 25) : idhā mā th-thurayyā f ī s-samā’i ta'arradat ta'arruda athnā’i 1-wishāhi 1-mufassali When the Pleiades, about to set, are seen sideways in the s \y , l i\ e the looped p ortion of an ornamental belt of cowries separated by gems. T he long n ig h t gave this impression (vs. 48) : 18 T h. Gaster, Thespis (Garden City, N.Y., 1961), 23. 14

F or the pre-Islamic hero’s equal welcome to pleasurable and pain­

fu l experiences, cf. M . N uw ayhī, A sh -sh ïr a l-jā h ilt (Cairo, w ith ou t date), 1, 419: a l-in d ifā ‘ cd-hisūrī f i ta ta llu b m aladhdàtihâ [o f life ] watta rh ib bi-alam iha ‘alā hadd saw tf. 12

T H E POET AS HERO

ka’anna th-thurayya ‘u lliq a t f ī masamiha bi-amrāsi ka ttā nin ilā summi jandali A s i f the Pleiades were hung, in th e ir station, from solid ro c\s by ropes o f flax. W ith in the same section of a poem, adjacent lines may be made to balance. T h is is how Im ra ’alqays concludes his pic­ ture o f a flashflood (m u allaqa, 81-82) : k a ’anna m akākīya 1-jiwā’i ghudayyatan subihna sulāfan m in ra h īq in m u fa lfa li ka’anna s-sibā‘a fīh i gharqā ‘ashīyatan bi-arjā’ih i 1-quswā anābīshu ‘unsuli I t is as i f the birds w histling early m ornin g in the valley had been given an excellent wine of a lively, tinglish quality to d r in \ ; / as if, at its extremities, the beasts drowned in the late evening were w ild lee\s plucked from the ground. W e may tu rn now to the question of the relation between the tableaux o f the first and second halves o f the poem. Is it fortuitous that these set pieces are a standard component o f the qasīda? P ut starkly: should we assume that the inventory o f the composite poem evolved and flourished by a survival of the structurally neatest sequences of m otifs ? Since the question has to do w ith evolution, some historical remarks are in order. T a k in g a large body o f ancient Arabic poetry, such as the M ufaddalīyāt, we fin d that in many o f the complex poems w hich open w ith a nasīb (the amorous open­ in g scene), that section is follow ed by a detailed camel de­ scription, b ut only some o f these poems contain a distinct block o f verses devoted to the poet’s journey through the des­

13

GENRES

ert.15 In later times, when the qasīda was chiefly a panegyric to one’s patron, the standard sequence had become nasīb— journey

through

perilous

deserts

to

the

patron’s seat—

praise. Such is Ibn Qutayba’s recipe, in the n in th century.16 T h e idea o f journeying is present in the camel sections o f the old poems, b ut it is frequently dependent on, or im p lie d by, the camel (or horse) description; it is rarely autonomous and possessed o f a specific goal.17 T he transition fro m nasīb to camel section in tw o poems w ith o u t specific journeys w ill i l ­ lustrate this. M ufaddalīyāt, 38 :^-6 (R abī‘a ibn M a q rū m ) : fa-fādat dum u ī fa-nahnahtuhā ‘alā lih ya tī wa-ridā’ī sujūmā fa-‘addaytu admā’a ‘ayrānatan ‘udhāfiratan lā tam allu r-rasīmā M y tears overflowed, p o u rin g down over m y beard and clothes, although I trie d to hold them bac\. / Then l tu rn ed a w hite she-camel away from there, one s w ift as a w ild ass, large, never exhausted by traveling at a b ris \ pace . . . M ufaddalīyāt, 24:6-8 (T h a ia b a ibn S u a yr) : 15 A different sampling o f ancient poetry gives the same result in Jacobi, Studien, 12-13. 16 Ibn Qutayba, K itā b ash-shīr wash-shu'arā’ (Beirut, 1964), 20-21. 17 A Rwala poet’s camel description is an allusion to his desire to leave his uncle (M usil, Rw ala, 362): “ O uncle mine, ah, I long to saddle a thoroughbred camel on which, crossing m y legs, I would go far in a day; / W hen I bid her d rin k she w ill d rin k the last drop from a small bucket, while, all around, rid in g camels crowd together rub­ bing the leather covers o f their saddles. / She shies on hearing a sw ift flig h t in the hills, the flig h t o f the \a td birds, who as they rise set their eggs m oving.” The background story is related by Musil.

14

T H E POET AS HERO

wa-idhā k h a līlu k a lam yadum laka wasluhū fa-qta‘ lubānatahū b i-harfin dām iri wajnā’a m u jfa ra ti d-dulu i ra jīla tin walaqā 1-hawājiri dhāti kh a lq in hādiri tu d h ī idhā daqqa 1-matīyu . . . I f ybur frie n d ’s ties to you do not endure, p u t an end to your need o f h im w ith a strong, trim she-camel, / solid, large in the m iddle ribs, f it fo r long treks, rapid in the m idday heat, b u l\y ; / one that continues to travel in the forenoon when the other rid in g beasts are weary . . . I t also occurs that the landscape through w hich the poet and his camel proceed receives a good b it o f attention, but no des­ tination is named; as in M ufaddalīyāt, 26:13-19 ( ‘Abda ibn at-Tabīb) : idhā tajāhada sayru 1-qawmi f ī sharakin ka ’annahū shatabun bis-sarwi m arm ūlu n ah jin tarā haw lahū bayda 1-qatā qubasan ka ’annahū bil-afāhīsi 1-hawājīlu haw ājilun m u li’at zaytan m ujarradatun laysat ‘alayhinna m in khūsin sawājīlu wa-qalla mā f ī asāqī 1-qawmi fa-njaradū w a-fī 1-adāwā baqīyātun salāsīlu wal-‘īsu tu dla ku dalkan ‘an dhakhā’irih ā yunhazna m in bayni m a h jū n in w a-m arkūli w a-m uzjayātin bi-akw ārin m uham m alatin shawāruhunna kh ilā la 1-qawmi m ahm ūlu tahdī r-rikāba salūfun ghayru ghāfilatin idhā tawaqqadati 1-hizzānu w al-m īlu When the company’s journey grows arduous along the beaten tracl{, w hich resembles a palm branch stripped

15

GENRES

of leaves, the k in d woven in to mats in Yem en; / along a distinct road on either side o f which you can see handfuls o f eggs that look li\ e glass phials in the hollows the qatā-birds have dug fo r them, / glass phials fille d w ith o il and w ith o u t any palm-leaf cover on them ; / when, after a long journey o f much exertion and no rest, little is le ft in the big com m unal water-bags and only residual moisture in the men’s private water-skins, / w hile the last drop o f stored-up strength is squeezed out o f the w hite camels, some prodded by sticks or by the riders’ heels, / some urged on gently, a little at a time, th e ir saddles loaded on other beasts and the removable appurtenances carried by the travelers, / then a shecamel that is accustomed to being first leads the caravan, m in d fu l o f the road even as the rugged and rocky g ro un d and the milestones grow b u rnin g h o t}* T h e tableaux m ust have developed something lik e this: at an early period, the nasīb was customarily— although not al­ ways—followed, by a camel description that celebrated such qualities as endurance and speed, and naturally enough con­ tained flashes of desert journeys. T he movement thus repre­ sented was not oriented towards a goal. Some poems— besides panegyrics—had fā \h a ra

autonomous sections in

(praise o f oneself or one’s tribe)

the m u-

about crossing

deserts; these too had no interest in the traveler’s destina­ tion. T o specify and stress the goal was appropriate to the panegyric. W h ile various goals do on occasion appear in old poems (e.g. M u f. 47 and M u f. 120, where the poet travels to meet the lady), orientation towards a goal becomes standard 18

A n b ā rī comments {M u f. 1, 274) : a l-m īlu m ina l-a rd i m addu l-ba-

sar, “ m il, referring to land, means as fa r as the eye can see." Lya ll (M u f. 11, 94) translates m ile-pillars, which I fo llo w because Anbārī’s interpretation is harder on the gram m ar o f the original. 16

T H E POET AS HERO

only w ith the emergence o f the panegyric as the dom inant type o f qasīda. N o such dominance can be found in the early corpus.19 T he history o f the nasīb is also problematic. In medieval Islam ic times, poets and philologists fe lt that the desolate campsite m o tif was and always had been the proper introduc­ tio n to a nasīb. In the pre-Islamic period, however, such was not yet the case. In al-M ufaddal’s collection, there are 53 composite poems beginning w ith the theme o f a past love af­ fair, but o f these only 23 contain the campsite m o tif ( a tlāl) .20 Even so, the atlāl m o tif is present in nearly h a lf our sample. A m o ng the seven m u allaqāt, there are five w ith and only tw o w ithout, b ut there is just a chance that the m u allaqāt are not rather extraordinary

pre-Islamic works, b ut b rillia n t fo r­

geries that stress some theatrical features in the ancient po­ etry. I t can be safely said that the a tlāl m o tif is the most dramatic among the various nasīb-themes—such as the descrip­ tion o f parting, or a dream-visit by the lady’s phantom— in that i t contrasts the irreversible tim e o f hum an experience w ith the recurrences possible in nature. T he master subject o f the nasīb is the flo w o f tim e that w ill not be dammed fo r affection; contrasting presentations of hum an and cyclical times set this subject in relief. Thus, in L a b ld ’s mu'allaqa, w hat is a scene of desolation fo r man is also the tra n q u il id y ll o f a retu rning season (verses 6-7) : 19 The view that the specific desert journey entered the standard qasīda-sequence when the panegyric came to pre-eminence has been already developed in Jacobi, Studien, 4 and 106. 20 There seems to be no correlation between the frequency o f the campsite m o tif and the relative chronology o f the 53 qasidas. O f the 23 w ith campsites, 6 are by poets w ho lived in to the Islamic period ( m u\ha drim s)

or

were bom

Muslims.

T h is

proportion

is

not

significantly different from the overall ratio, in the anthology, o f 47 pre-Islamic poets to 20 tn u \h a d rim s and born Muslims.

17

GENRES

fa-‘alā fu rū 'u 1-ayhuqāni wa-atfalat bil-jalhatayni zibā’uhā wa-na‘āmuhā w al-‘īn u sākinatun ‘alā atlā’ihā ‘ūdhan ta’ajjalu bil-fadā’i bihāmuhā The ayhuqān-branches have shot up. Antelopes and ostriches have given b irth at the borders of the valley. / The big-eyed w ild cows are relaxed about th e ir newborn calves, which roam about the plain in sm all herds?1 Moreover, the abandoned campsite is an embodiment of the nomadism that dictates the meedngs and partings w hich the nasīb deals w ith . W hen we consider that the poets never w rite nasībs about their wives, but (no t so m uch by loathing o f m atrim ony as by convention of the genre) always choose women fro m w hom they m ust be separated at last, we see w ha t a very suitable scenario the atlāl made fo r a p arting that the need to sustain life rendered certain. W hen the atlāl-m o tif is present, it emphasizes the temporal and spatial relations in the opening tableaux, b ut these rela­ tions are-there in any case. Basically, the nasīb's involuntary temporal movement towards \enosis is paralleled by the vol­ untary movement w ith o u t a destination, w hich the camelsection contains. In poems w ith atlāl this parallelism is staged and set out in a particularly neat manner. In the atlāl-scene, tim e present has no effective contents to speak of. The past has a specific burden; the present is indeterm inate except by reference to a mem ory. T he speaker arrives at a desolate but fa m ilia r spot; we are not told w hat business led h im there. W e never learn how he has spent his life since he last saw the 21

bihām uhā m ust refer to the calves; cf. Lane sub voce, w ith refer­

ences to Jawharl and to the T āj al-arūs. I t is badal fo r atlā’ihā. The translation “ lambs,” w hich is sometimes found, seems to me awkward in both gram mar and meaning. 18

T H E POET AS HERO

place. In this way, the emptiness at the conclusion of the af­ fa ir is given a depth in time. O n the other hand, the location tends to be very determ i­ nate indeed. Place names are often mentioned. As a result, the m ovement w ith o u t goal im plied by the camel-section is the more strikin g fo r having a specific place o f origin. More than th at: the atlāl are the p o in t where the temporal and spatial coordinates meet, p ro vid ing a clear focus fo r the relations set up in the tableaux. I t is not accidental that the transition fro m the campsite theme to the camel theme tends to emphasize re­ nunciation as an act of w ill. The voluntary re-experience, spa­ tially, of the temporal \enosis in w hich the w ill can have no role presents a k in d of supporting paradigm to the scheme whose terms are death and voluntary loss. Lady and camel—icons o f the nasīb and o f the camelsection—-play significant roles, the contrasts between them pointin g up the tw o principles o f organization in the qasīda. First, they illustrate metaphorical re-enactment: the lady is an emblem o f involuntary movement towards emptiness through time, the camel o f voluntary movement towards emptiness through space. Second, they illustrate the attaining o f an e q u ilib riu m by the use of contrasting pairs: the lady stands fo r a life o f ease, the camel fo r stress and exertion; the one is deliciously plum p, the other hard and gaunt. Plerosis and kenosis. 3 T he camel description has tw o fa irly common satellite topoi that are introduced under the guise o f comparisons. T he ani­ m al’s tenacity and speed rem ind the poet o f a w ild ass or o f an oryx, and he w ill often derail the sim ile to compose a de­ tailed id y ll about one or the other o f these creatures. T he w ild ass is seen u rg in g his mate up in to the hills towards a

19

GENRES

privacy appropriate to the m ating season. T he oryx is spotted by a hunter who lets loose his hounds; they give chase; at bay the oryx turns, and gores and k ills its pursuers. In some cases (e.g. M u f., 40) the hounds are wary o f closing in and the oryx outruns them. N o doubt, ass and oryx demonstrate vaunted excellencies o f the poet’s camel. T he tableaux in w hich they play their role also exhibit moods that are alien to the heroic gesture. T he w ild ass mates fo r good, in contrast w ith the fo r­ tuitous meetings and partings that fo rm the theme o f the nasīb; the hunted o ryx’s escape fro m a violent death is a re­ versal o f the heroic seeking out o f danger. In fo lk tales, the hero eludes the predatory ogre and gets m arried. In the qasīda, matters tu rn out so w ell only among animals in a state o f nature. The w ild ass and oryx scenes reveal, by way o f con­ trast, the more severe fabric of the heroic model. A t the same time, by establishing an opposition between the natural life o f these animals and the ordered life o f the hero, the qasīda im p lic itly confesses that the model is not a spontaneous th ing b u t a conscious logical construct.

4 R. P. Blackm ur wrote that a m in d furnished only w ith convic­ tions w ould be like a room furnished only w ith light, the brighter the more barren.22 I t is a fundam ental characteristic o f m any literary works, and even o f whole genres, that they play a dialectic m atch w ith an ostensibly stable conception o f life. In such masterpieces of medieval E nglish romance as the M orte d’A rth u r and Chaucer’s Troilus, the mood is ironic and elegiac at the same tim e : the characters fa ll short o f their own emotional models; the authors sympathize, smile, and w ith 22 R. P. Blackmur, Form and Value in M odern Poetry (Garden City, N.Y., 1957), 137. 20

T H E POET AS HERO

hold judgm ent as to whether it is not the models that m ust in the end fa il the characters. In our qasīdas, a simple conception is often allowed to be wrecked by a simple fact. A violent death can be accommo­ dated, b ut when the speaker chooses the mask of an old m an looking back over his life, the organization o f death and life falls apart. O ld age and youth make a pair o f opposites whose negative term cannot be drawn in to the voluntary-loss para­ digm . T he peculiar poignancy of these poems stems not only fro m their melancholy tone, b ut also fro m the simultaneity of the elegiac and the equipoised. T he w o rld ly philosopher is pleased by his theory o f equi­ lib riu m in the universe, and feels pretty sure about it : “ some lik e i t hot, some lik e i t cold.” B u t sublime scenes too can em­ ploy such principles o f organization. A t the tranquil end o f Plato’s Apology, Socrates thinks i t fair, metrios, that the calumniators should live wickedly and be rewarded by shame w hile he dies innocent and is regarded as wise. T his notion is meant to state an e q u ilib riu m ; i t is not m audlin resignation. Yet, here too, in the last clause, the balanced view lays itself open to question: “ I t is tim e to depart; fo r me w ho w ill die and fo r you w ho w ill live. W h ic h o f us w ill be better o ff is kn o w n to none except God.”

5 T he extreme conventionality, repetitiousness, and thematic lim ita tio n of the qasīda need not astonish us. T o be sure, the fact that we are dealing w ith an oral tra d itio n does not in it ­ self supply adequate explanation: H om er is not so circum ­ scribed. Other reasons m ust be sought fo r the repetitive tend­ ency o f the qasīda, and ritu a l is the one w ord that properly sums them up. H . A . R. Gibb remarked on the hieratic q uality 21

GENRES

o f the qasīda in the Islam ic period,23 when the genre had be­ come, among other things, an instrum ent fo r sum m oning up the desert life of w hat was by then a tim e of origins, an illu d tempus. B ut already in the sixth century, before the coming o f Islam, these poems, rather than m yths or religious rituals, served as the vehicle fo r the conception that sorted out the em otionally incoherent facts o f life and death, and by the sorting set them at the bearable remove o f contemplation. Qasīda poets spoke in affirm ation o f a m odel they shared; their poetry tended to become a shared experience, a ll the more as the affirm ation was through the replay o f prototypal events w hich the m odel so successfully charted.24 T he in d i­ vid u a l poet had considerable latitude, b u t in d iv id u a l state­ ments were always secured by being sunk in to common ground. T he common ground is not a m atter o f conventional mood, rhetoric, or literary reminiscence, w hich crop up in m uch o f European poetry too; it is the stock o f specific events to w hich poet after poet offers him self.25 23 H . A. R. Gibb, “ Arab Poet and Arabic Philologist,” BSOAS, x n (1948), 577. 24 The notion that the qasīda grows out o f collective experience is not, o f course, new. Cf. Jacobi, Studien, -2,10-11. See also the fo llow ing note. 25 T his requires amplification. Specific occurrences have become con­ ventions in other literatures also. So fo r instance the Chinese poet loses his hat to the w in d in poems about the Double N in th festival, cf. A . R. Davis, “ The Double N in th Festival in Chinese Poetry: a Study o f Variations upon a Theme,” W en-lin; Studies in the Chinese H um anities, ed. by Chow Tse-tsung (Madison, Milwaukee, and Lon­ don, 1968), 45-64. T he difference is one of quantity and complexity. The qasīda is a series o f independent conventional occurrences. I t is because the qasīda is a coherent complex o f conventional acts that in their relationships embody the model o f an order in the w o rld that we can properly speak o f ritu a l behavior in pre-Islamic poetry, and not be g u ilty o f overextension. W e are dealing w ith a particular type of ritu a l: i t aims at affirmation and not at effecting a change, such as 22

T H E POET AS HERO

T he organization o f m aterial w ith in the qasīda too has a ritua listic aspect: the series that links the tem pting o f death and the acts of voluntary loss consists o f terms that are homological—they all have the form , or comm on denominator, o f em ptying—b ut not tru ly analogical since the terms do n ot all share the function o f affording reflection after the act is com­ pleted. Such is the nature o f w hat Frazer called homeopathic magic. T he wooden doll and the victim share the common de­ nom inator of hum an shape, and the sorcerer concludes fro m this homology that the p in p rick w ill b rin g about the desired analogical result. I f the victim too is persuaded of this, he is lost. T he logical leap is made convincing in the forge o f ritua l, or, fo r the pre-Islamic hero, of poetic form . The specifically ritualistic character of the qasīda explains the curious fact that in poems composed in praise of a donor the donor’s generosity is often p u t form ulaically.26 W e m ust recall the verses in w hich w ar is a ll im portant, but w hich lack a ll historical particulars because w ar taken generically is the m edium in w hich the heroic taken generically manifests itself. Panegyrists can apply the same fo rm u la to benefactor after benefactor, b u t we should be o ff the m a rk i f we therefore thought all poets dissemblers and all patrons fools. T he W est­ ern scholar’s m in d boggles at the donor’s failure to be out­ raged upon being described by a cliche, b u t this is not so sur­ prising i f we consider that, according to the poem at any rate, donor and recipient engage in a ritua listic performance, act­ in g out a segment o f the total organization o f experience ac­ stopping a toothache or a drought. That the qafida is ritualistic is readily felt—cf. ‘A. A h Sa*īd, M uqaddim a, 31: fa-\alām uhu 'alā mā ya\hussuhu taqs nafst wa-hayaū wa-ta‘b īrī m in ta b ī'a tih i an yatakarrara dctim an— the purpose o f this chapter is to examine w hy the impression is sound. 26

Several examples in Hyde, al-A'shā, 112, w ith references to 4:36-

39; 5:55-58; 12:55-57 ‘n

Cairo, 1951, edition of al-A‘shā’s poems.

23

GENRES

cording to the heroic m odel. As long as the m odel holds, the donor is delighted to be moved fro m reality directly in to the poetic rituals o f heroic generosity. T he poetry o f modern beduins s till testifies to the donor’s need fo r a recipient. A R w e ili poem ends w ith the curse: “ Oh, may he w ho reviles h im be parted fro m a ll that he longs fo r and / O n festive days may no one accept g ifts fro m h im .” 27

6 T he quasi-ritualistic function o f the pre-Islamic qasīda ac­ counts fo r an in trig u in g peculiarity o f ancient A rabic poetics: the frequent occurrence o f crowded descriptive passages. T he descriptions are generally

(a )

static,

(b)

exhaustive, and

(c ) predictable. T he modern reader is likely to fin d any one o f these aspects a b it queer in serious verse, subscribing to Lessing’s judgm ent that poetry has no business being pic­ torial. A ll those adjectives are fine in A n n ie Laurie, but H om er does not describe H elen.28 ( a )

A detailed description is static in the absence o f action,

and i t remains static i f it includes only such actions as serve to embody a quality that is being described. Thus, i f in a cata­ logue o f qualities the poet compares the lady’s w alk to the movement of a cloud, the result is very pretty, b ut not partic­ u la rly dynamic. Auerbach has given an excellent example of the tw o types o f description by p u ttin g V ir g il’s C am illa next to the same lady’s incarnation in the O ld French Eneas.29 F ro m V ir g il (vii, 803-17), we learn that C am illa on foot can outstrip the winds, w ith a step so lig h t that she m ig h t run over field or sea and not touch an ear o f grain or a drop o f a wave. H e r royal attire is also taken care of, in a few glimpses. 27 M usil, Rwala, 153-54. 28 La o\oo n, Ch. xx. 29 E. Auerbach, Literatursprache und P u b li\u m in der lateinischen Spatantike und im M itte la lte r (Bern, 1958), 135-42. 24

T H E POET AS HERO

A ll o f these descriptions are w orked in to the movement of C am illa’s arrival, past a crowd of spectators, among T u rn u s ’ allies; there is only so m uch portrayal as the event invites or requires. The Eneas poet is more than w illin g to stop and give us a catalogue o f C am ille’s charms. She has a w hite and w ell-form ed forehead, her head is held upright, the eyebrows are black and fine, the eyes are laughing and gay, the nose is beautiful, the face w hiter than snow or ice, etc., etc. Leaving aside the question, w hich Auerbach is after, of the disparate expressive capabilities in Augustan L a tin and early Romance vernacular, we observe that the tw o audiences m ust have placed themselves at different distances fro m the works they were offered. I f V ir g il’s C am illa is perceived by the eye, the Cam ille o f the Eneas poet is caressed— caressed w ith a great deal o f respect, w ith grace, but caressed nonetheless. Static description—the temporary suppression o f transitive action on the object’s part—turns the public not into a witness (w h ich it is in classical literature) b u t in to a participant. I t does not necessarily reduce its object into something possessible. In the In dia n Saundaryalahari, the goddess D evi is de­ scribed statically, catalogue style; b ut in her presence the public takes up a devotional attitude. Provisionally, let us say that static description sets o ff something dynamic on the part o f your body: you may caress, kneel or huddle, but you do not simply look on. (b)

T he descriptions tend to be exhaustive: we have cata­

logues o f characteristics. T o be sure, catalogues do not all w o rk alike. There are menus, laundry lists, catalogues of ships, as w ell as lists of temples in Sumerian lamentations fo r destroyed cities and lists o f gods, sins, and the like, in ancient incantation texts. A useful, i f somewhat simpleminded, dis­ tin ction can be made. A laundry list records how many of your shirts were sent out to be cleaned; a menu tells you whether there is any hope o f your being served langoustines

25

GENRES

in garlic sauce. Langoustines in garlic sauce undoubtedly exist, b ut the menu is a restrictive catalogue, and i f the lan­ goustines happen to be in that subset o f the totality o f dishes that the catalogue excludes, you are out o f luck. A n incanta­ tion, on the other hand, wants to be comprehensive. Even i f n ot every last member o f the catalogued set receives mention, affectively such catalogues refer to a totality. T o be released fro m suffering brought on by an u nkn ow n sin, the sufferer m ust go through an exhaustive enumeration of possible sins. T o experience fu lly the p ity and grief fo r a city razed by the enemy, the m ourner composes a litan y o f ruined temples. M any catalogues are m ixed: the H om eric listin g o f ships is a restrictive record as w e ll as a source o f m agnitude and affec­ tive power fo r the poem. T he qasīda catalogues are u n like menus: they serve to ren­ der the described objects in such a way that they may be ex­ perienced

exhaustively.

P ro fitin g

by

the

ta n g ib ility

that

results fro m the static nature o f description, the catalogues tu rn the objects into icons o f the abstract relations in the model. T he chief objects o f description, lady and camel, through their iconic properties reinforce belief in the system o f w hich they are a part. A n im portant part too: we have seen that they enter both the plum p/lean order, and, by the kinds o f movement they summon up, the analogical voluntary-relinquishm ent paradigm . Mauss mentions that the T robriand Islanders like to gaze at and stroke the objects o f ritualized exchange, not so m uch fo r their in trin sic w o rth as fo r the value they derive fro m being tangible manifestations o f the exchange system, a system o f harmony.30 Lady and camel are prized fo r their own sake, but in the qasīda their iconic func­ tio n endows them w ith an aura. 30

Mauss, Gift, 22. The inform ation ultim ately comes from M alinow­

ski. 26

T H E POET AS HERO

(c )

A s fo r the th ird characteristic, the hig h degree o f pre­

dictability in the descriptions is quite w hat we should expect, precisely because each lady and each m ou nt is a ritu a l object necessarily shaped to fit the g rip o f every member o f the com m unity. T he view that objects of detailed description function as quasi-ritualistic tokens in

the qasīda gains support fro m

a comparison o f tw o poles o f poetry in the pre-Islamic period. Poems that tu rn on specific events display far less static de­ scription and are fa r less inclined to the catalogue style than those poems w hich are p rim a rily concerned w ith the model and w hich therefore refrain fro m specifics.31 Qasīdas fa irly often move fro m a non-specific first h a lf to a conclusion that deals w ith a historical event; in such cases the descriptions are distributed over the halves accordingly. I t may be added that descriptive verses that occur in a specific context are lik e ­ ly to be dynamic, being tributary to a plot. M ufaddalīyāt, 7 :$-6, M u n q id h ibn at-Tam m āh: law khāfakum kh ālidu bnu nadlata najjathu sabūhun ‘inānuhā khadhim u jardā’u kas-sa‘dati 1-muqāmati lā q u rru n zawā matnahā wa-lā harim u H a d K h ā lid ibn N adia feared you, he w ould have been saved by a mare that at a gallop stretches her forelegs fo rth like a swimm er, faster than any other in the re in ; / short-haired, one li\ e a straightened spear ( i.e. stretching out her n e c\ at a fu ll gallop), one in whose bac\ cold weather never caused any cramps (i.e. was carefully tended) and who never suffered hunger. 31

Already noted in Lyall, Translations, xx; Jacobi, Studien, 172,

remarks on the lo w incidence o f rhetorical devices in qasīda episodes w ith dramatic plots. 27

GENRES

I t is crucial to the p lo t that on such a m agnificent animal K h ā lid could easily have gotten away i f he had wished to flee. A s like ly as not, at this p o in t the reader w ill recall A n nie Lau rie and the fact that obviously n ot a ll descriptive blocks o f verse have to do w ith ritua listic structures. Indeed not; and having presented m y case about description in the qasīda, I m ust now m odify m y suggestions somewhat and grope to­ wards a more general statement. D etailed conventional description, i f one is engaged neither in ritu a l nor in auctioneering, implies the absence of its ob­ ject. E\phrasis, a m in ute and exact portrayal— whether o f a m osquito or of the Moselle river—is one thing, b u t the re­ touching o f the specific in to the ideal is absurd i f the specific happens to be w a lk in g by your side. A n d indeed, in many cases the k in d o f movement such description triggers in the m in d is an outw ard journey, towards a remote object. T his sense o f distance hangs over A n n ie L au rie ; i t is the very ex­ p lic it distance o f banishment that requires the lovin g descrip­ tions in Kalidasa’s Cloud Messenger.32 T he object is rendered palpable; it is placed at a distance. T w o contradictory movements: tw o sides o f the same coin. T he tw o can be kept apart, b ut they can also become con­ fused. T he

palpable

and

the

utterly

remote

seem tw o

coexistent modes in those w orks about a N ever Never Land o f rom antic chivalry, in w hich the Eneas poet, Spenser, and the slyer Ariosto ( in Lessing’s example) embraced the heresy o f descriptive style.33 T he conventional description o f objects that embody and express a m odel o f relations provides a presence. Yet, w ith re­ spect to the qasīda, we m ust remember the undercurrent, poems o f decrepitude or captivity, in w hich the m odel seems called in to doubt, and in w hich so m uch is spoken fro m a dis32 Stanza 78, etc.

33 Laohoon, loc. cit. 28

T H E POET AS HERO

tance (o f space or tim e) that the nostalgic effect o f descrip­ tio n works side by side w ith the sum m oning power. T h is is not unduly astonishing: poetry, being a hum an affair, should not be furnished w ith certainties alone.

7 F riedrich Schlegel wrote in an early w o rk : “ Bei rohen wie bei verfeinerten Nichtgriechen ist die K u n st n u r eine Sklavin der S innlichkeit oder der V e rn u n ft.” 34 As a judgm ent, this w ill not bear scrutiny; b u t it sets up a useful p o in t o f view. T he old A rabic qasīda was both sensuous and logical as i t faced dahr, tim e and m uta bility, which, unconcerned w ith hum an con­ duct and hum an reason, govern the w orld. In a m orally ca­ pricious universe, the heroic m odel allowed a view o f the totality o f experience as balanced and coherent. T o achieve balance, the speaker o f the qasīda offers him self to the vo lu n ­ tary experience o f fullness as w ell as emptiness, of gain as w ell as loss. Since the experience o f voluntary loss, i f it is to be loss, m ust go beyond the socially useful, the poet who builds a model o f e qu ilibrium is compelled to represent his actions as blam eworthy according to the spokesmen o f the norm . I t is hardly an accident that one o f the consummate w orks o f the ancient period, the L ā m īya t al-'arab, was com­ posed by an outlaw or that, i f the poem is a forgery o f genius, the forger ascribed it to one. So the m ethod fo r constructing an e q u ilib riu m was some­ w hat roundabout, and the gate w ould not always be shut upon elegiac doubt. B u t the qasīda form , having evolved its sequence of benchmark situations, the logical relations among 34

“ With, the exception, o f the Greeks all nations, barbarous or

refined, treat art as a slave of either sensuousness or reason.” F. Schlegel, Ūber das Studium. der griechischen Poesie (Godesberg,

1947). i° 729

GENRES

them and their sensuous emblems, gave the model power of address. w a-kharqin ka-zahri t-tursi q afrin qata'tuhu bi-‘ām ilatayni zahruhū laysa yu'm alu wa-alhaqtu ūlāhū bi-ukhrāhu m ūfiyan ‘alā qunnatin u q ‘ī marāran w a-am thulu tarūdu 1-arāwī s-suhmu h a w ll ka’annahā ‘adhārin ‘alayhinna 1-mulā’u 1-mudhayyalu wa-yarkudna bil-āsāli h a w lī ka’annanī m ina l-‘usmi adfā yantahī 1-kīha a'qalu35 I have crossed deserts bare as the b ac\ o f a shield, where no traveler’s beast sets foot. / 1 tied one end o f the waste to the other, squatting or standing on a p e a \ / w hile the d a r \ yellow m ountain goats come and go about me l i \ e maidens in tra ilin g garments, / u n til at d u s \ they stand about me, motionless, as i f l were a white-legged, croo\-horned one, w ith a tw is t in the legs, a scaler o f summits. T he old poets saw the w orld, even in the m idst o f the world, as fro m a m ountain peak, in a glance that calm ly joined shadow and ligh t. 35 Lâm ïyat al-arab, end.

30

f& > 0

Ghazal and K ham nya: The Poet as Ritual Clown 1 A şma‘ī , the great eighth-century, philologist, is reported to have declared that poetry goes soft when brought into line with the Good.1 This generalization, which springs from a discussion of the merits in Hassān ibn Thābit’s pagan and Muslim poems, gives expression to a very sound piece of criti­ cal intuition; for Islam changed the foundations of Arabic poetry and turned the old world so thoroughly upside down that poetry was never again the same. The change is not immediately obvious. There are many poems that clearly must have been written in the Islamic pe­ riod, but hardly differ in style and spirit from works of the pre-Islamic age.2 Still, the old conception was losing ground, however imperceptibly. A glance at the major poets of the Umayyad period is enough to persuade us that a decisive change had taken place in the poetic ethos. Social change had much to do with this: plunder and fixed stipends which the treasury paid to the conquering tribesmen at least tempo­ rarily relieved the economic insecurity that had contributed essential motifs to the old poetry. Political organization grew more complex; the sovereign importance of the individual grew more tenuous. The economic and social upheavals at­ tendant upon successful conquest made the old beduin con1 See Marzubāni, al-Mutvashshah> ed. ‘A ll Muh. al-Bajāwi (Cairo, I9 65), 75­

2 Cf. MufaddaViyât, n, xxii-xxiii.

GENRES

ception unconvincing, or at least cast doubt upon its universality. Even aside from such matters, it is easily seen that, on the whole, heroic verse in the old style should have come to ring false. If Muslims who die in holy war are at once conveyed to Paradise and its beckoning sweets, the facing of death is no longer quite so dreadful and the challenging of it no long­ er quite so heroic as they had been when there was no hope of palpable reward. In short, the heroic life ceased to be a model of coherent and balanced human experience. In the re­ lation between life and death far too radical a displacement had occurred: life and death had been two terms in opposi­ tion; they were now successive stations along a straight track to heaven or hell. The ground was cut from under the preIslamic qaşīda.3 Both heroic qaşīda and qit’a (simple poem) endured be­ cause the molds were there, but their energies were ebbing.* It is not surprising that the three chief qaşīda-poets of the Umayyad century—Jarīr, al-Farazdaq, and al-Akhtal—put their best into a round robin of insults. Increasingly available 3 This displacement is witnessed by the Islamic prohibition of bewailing the dead (niyaha), and of other ancient rites of mourning. Cf. I. Goldziher, Muhammedanische Studien, i (Halle, 1889), 251-63. Niyūha, performed by the women, had been the total release of a single emotion: a complement to the ordering of emotions in the heroic model. Both niyāha and heroic commemoration had now become meaningless for the Muslim, since death was no longer the end of existence, but only the end of the works for which man would be held responsible. After death the matter of Paradise or H ell was entirely in God’s hands. Excessive mourning—as well as any purely human audit—was therefore a kind of impious meddling where the proper feeling was awe. 4 For a nostalgia for the desert and the poetry associated w ith the desert, among the beduins who moved to Syria, see C. Nallino, La littérature arabe des origines à l'époque de la dynastie Vmayyade, transi. C. Pellat (Paris, 1950), 110-15.

32

TH E POET AS R ITU A L CLOW N

patronage required and received panegyrics, often with a po­ litical edge, but more than anything else vicious satire seems to have suited the conflicts o£ the day. There was no lack of conflicts, whether they lined up Arab against Arab in a strug­ gle for power and for such benefits as would accrue to those who managed to gain important posts for their candidates, or, somewhat later, brought into the open the clash of inter­ ests between Arab Muslims and non-Arab newcomers in the Islamic community. There are enough prose descriptions of battle and of individual heroism to persuade us that a poetry with a tragic sense could have found themes in the century of civil wars.5 Why such a poetry did not arise is not ade­ quately accounted for by the changing attitude towards death: the qaştda proper would not work, but why did it fail to change and get a second wind? The dialectics of literary history cannot explain a non-event, and the social forces that may have inhibited the development of a tragic poetry are not immediately evident. One literary fact, though, is of ob­ vious importance. The old heroic poetry was written in the first person singular or plural. Elegies for fallen heroes used the second or third person, to be sure, but these were not nar­ rative poems: they aimed at ritual statement rather than the telling of a man’s story. When the heroic mode of life broke up—or perhaps better, when the mode of life that allowed for a heroic image of it broke up—heroic narrative was not taken up by poetry. The heroic had been a self-image of the com­ munity; an occasional individual’s fate would not now do. Such was die hold of the pre-Islamic model, and soon there was no need for a change in the treatment of heroic acts, for prose narrative jumped into the breach. Of the conflicts of the age, billingsgate in qaşida form became the proper poetic expression. 5 Cf. the fine siory of Mu$‘ab ibn az-Zubayr’s death in Abū 1-Faraj al-Işbahānl, Kitāb abaghani (Būlāq, 1868), xvn, 164.

33

GENRES

It is symptomatic of the literary history of early Islam that the old heroic inspiration survived longest in the body of verse attributed to the Khārijites. This sect seems to have originated, around 657, among those early settlers of the Irakian garrison city of Kūfa (founded by the Arabs in or around the eighteenth Islamic year) who, lacking strong tribal affiliations, had begun rapidly to lose political and eco­ nomic ground.6 The Khārijites envisioned a puritanical, utopian theocracy that would allow the degree of anarchy— and sense of equality—available to the beduin. Their piety was real, but it was no doubt fired by the social changes that they considered a distortion of the old Muslim order. It is not at all improbable that the poetic conservatism of the Khārijites went hand in hand with their political conserv­ atism. But there is another matter. By the time the Khārijite poetry we still have was being written, the Khārijites had seen their religious and political hopes dissolve. Their opin­ ions had hardened into fanaticism, and they waged holy war against one and all. Their passionate oratory was admired as much as their implacable ferocity was loathed by their fellow Muslims—whom the Khārijites refused to consider Muslims at all. Towards death the Khārijites acquired an attitude of their own. In the early days of expansion muhājara (emigra­ tion in order to take part in the fighdng) was more or less expected of any able-bodied Muslim, but death could be re­ garded as a means to Paradise that was not necessarily im­ mediately desirable. The Khārijites., on the other hand, were in the grip of a death wish : to wipe out opponents was their duty, but to attain martyrdom was their only prize.7 Even an apparently inactive Khārijite speaks this way: 6 Cf. M. Hinds, “ Kufan political alignments and their background in the mid-seventh century A.D.,” IJMES, 11 (1971), 346-67, and Nallino, Littératurey 182. 7 For the Khārijite view of success and failure, cf. J. Wellhausen,

34

TH E POET AS R IT U A L CLO W N

uhādhiru an amuta ‘alā firāshī wa-arjū 1-mawta tahta dhurā l-‘awālī I fear that l might die in bed, and hope for a death under the points of tall spears.8 The heroic mode, whose Muse is death, subsisted among the Khārijites because among them alone death was something people chose and, in fact, lived for. They called themselves shurāty “ those who have sold themselves [to God],” and they kept their half of the bargain. As we have seen, the pre-Islamic poetic manner also sur­ vived into the second Islamic century by way of forgery. It must be admitted that besides the back-door motives for such work—the antiquarian caterpillar’s desire to turn into a but­ terfly, the preoccupation of rival tribesmen in the garrison cities with ancestral glory, and the like—the forger’s art flour­ ished because an audience for the old world-view remained. This was not necessarily an audience that harbored nostalgia for pagan conceptions; certainly it was an audience that sensed that the grasp of the old poets was more extensive and their vision nobler than anything contemporary poets could supply. The Arab Kingdom and Its Fall, transi. M. Graham. Weir (Calcutta, 1927), 65. For muhājara with material rather rhan spiritual aims, com­ pare the line, referred to by Wellhausen (p. 25), from Abū Tammām’s Hamāsa, ed. G. G. Freytag (Bonn, 1828), 792, vs. 3: fa-mā jannata l-firdawsi hājarta tabtaghī wa lākin da‘āka 1-khubzu ahsabu wat-tamru You emigrated, not because you were seeding Paradise, but, as l reckon, because bread and dates were inviting to you. A father is reproaching a son who has forsaken him in his old age. 8 The poet is Tmrān ibn Hittān. Shi'r al-\haw ârij, ed. I. ‘Abbās (Beirut, 1963), 16.

35

GENRES

The new genres that developed in the eighth century sig­ naled that there was an inadequacy in all the aliases of the old, but also that something in the driving power of preIslamic verse had found a trick of metamorphosing itself. The new poetry was not religious. In some way, Moham­ med’s distrust of poets—propagandists of a rival model of life—may have contributed to this. But the main reason for the voluntary exile, in this period, of poetry from religion probably lies in the comparative lack of opacity in Islam. For example, the paradoxes of Christianity were weeded out: Jesus is revered as a great prophet, but incarnation and cruci­ fixion had to go. W ith religious opacity went the kind of po­ etic impulse that paradoxes create, and that produced some of the finest religious poetry in the European Middle Ages. Paradox jubilates in the two great hymns by Venantius Fortunatus.9 Cosmas of Maiouma is forced by paradox into punning: Se ton epi hudatōn \remasanta pasan ten gēn askhetōs hë ktisis katidousa en tō kraniō ^remamenon thambētikōs suneikheto . . .10 Apart from morose, ashen, memento-mori verses, in Islam poetic response to religion belonged to the mystic. There is 9 Pange, lingua, gloriosi proelium certaminis, and Vexilla regis prodeunt, The Oxford Boo\ of Medieval Latin Verse, cd. F. J. E. Raby (Oxford, 1959), 74-75. 10 Text in the Penguin Boo\ of Gree\ Verse, ed. and transi. C. A. Trypanis (Harmondsworth, 1971), 432. “The Universe saw you, who without hindrance hung the whole earth on the waters, hanging upon Golgotha, and it was filled w ith wonder . . (Trypanis’ translation).

TH E POET AS R IT U A L CLOW N

plenty of mystical verse, but its vigor comes after the growth, flowering, and decadence of two secular genres: the love poem and the drinking song,11 The molds for such poems were present in the pre-Islamic qaşīda: in the nasīb, and in the often encountered drinking scene. As independent genres, love poems and drinking songs came into their own only in the Islamic period. The social causes of the birth of these genres have often been discussed: the sudden rise of a somewhat languorous elegance in Mecca and Medina, cities that had grown rich with the Islamic conquests, but that lost their political weight when the Umayyad rulers shifted the center of empire to Syria; and, in the eighth century, the emergence in Basra and Bagh­ dad of frivolous literary bohemians living ofī patronage and cultivating the novel temptations of urban life. But quite as important as social conditions are the literary conditions that furthered the development of the new genres and shaped the poets’ attitudes and interests. Literary change, like linguistic change, is triggered by a variety of events—some clear, many obscure—but it follows such open lines as the original struc­ ture makes available. If the pre-Islamic qaşīda viewed human experience as absurd but coherent, the new poetry of the Islamic age —which did not choose religion for its vantage point—was forced to see human experience as meaningful under God but necessarily incoherent at the purely human level. Life had been half-mistress, half-ogre, but in poetry it had been taken as it was, and taken in its entirety. The balanced coherence 11 For the Sh!‘a, the murder of ‘A lī and the tragedy at Karbalā’ put paradox very much back into religion. N ot surprisingly, the ShFa also acquired true religious drama. On the other hand, early ShIT poetry (such as the Hāshimlyāt of al-Kumayt) is political rather than religious.

37

GENRES

of the old model had been achieved by a willingness to take risks, to be liberal with life as well as with money, and by a refusal to hold back. This attitude could not be shaken off, but what had been a matter of action was now translated into emotion, and a poetry of passionate but unfulfilled love—pas­ sionate inaction—was born. It was understood to be a pernicious aflcction: debilitating, anti-social. This much is in the poetry. In the prose romances about great lovers—which we know from later redactions but whose growth may well have begun in the Umayyad period— the lovers pine, and pine, and in the end give up the rarefied ghost. Some go mad first. It is noteworthy that many of them are poets: the poet is still the tale’s protagonist. Lovers from the Yemenite tribe of ‘Udhra were said to be particularly given to such gloomy attachments, which are therefore known as ‘Udhrī love. In the ‘UdhrT love poem (whose au­ thorship is by no means limited to Yemenites) everything in life is given up except the one destructive emotion: a new form of the w ill to \e nosis. In the pre-Islamic period, the poet’s role was to flout norms of caution and reasonable self-interest, and through such recklessness to fashion a model for the balanced life. Under Islam, the community lived the balanced life, which Koran, prophetic tradition, and religious law mapped out between the permissible and the forbidden. The poet moved out into the margin. He was still the reckless character of the old tra­ dition, but his function had changed. He used to provide the structure; now he evaded it. He became an actor whose best role was some form of institutionalized disorder. For this role society had a ready slot, and there we very likely have a more important social cause for the flourishing of love song and drinking song than either in the new elegance of Mecca and Medina or in the luxurious solicitations of the Irakian cities. 38

TH E POET AS R IT U A L CLOW N

2

That very much of the old endures in new guises is obvious from a look at the stock vocabulary that is common to qaşīda, gliazal (love poem), and \hamrīya (wine song). The familiar figure of the blamer appears in Jamil:12 wa-‘ādhilūna (sic) lahawnī fl mawaddatihā yā laytahum wajadū mithla 1-ladhI ajidu lammā atālū ‘itābī fīki qultu lahum lā tufritū ba‘da hādhā 1-lawmi wa-qtaşidū13 Blamers toot{ me to tas\ (lit. excoriated me) because of my love for her. If only they suffered as I sufferl / When they \ept on reproaching me on account of you, I said to them: “ Do not exceed the proper bounds; hold bac\ some of this reproof and be moderate!'' 121 am using the poems of Jamil and Abū Nuwās as examples of ghazal and \hamriya. The type of ghazal represented in the works o f ‘Umar ibn abī Rabi'a is very charming, despite its somewhat odd narcissism, but it is less important for the main line of the ghazal tradition than the ‘U dhrī type. 'Umar, although a city poet, seems in some ways more conservative than Jamil: he relies more on the ō//tf/-motif for a curtain raiser, and his gallantry has in it a lot of skirt-chasing in the Imra’alqays manner. Admittedly, the urban fea­ tures are very strong (compare the description of a letter in poem 32, in Der Diwan des 4Umar ibn abi Rebi'a, ed. P. Schwarz, 11/2 [Leipzig, 1909], 30, which would not be out of place in the Muwashshā), and the parodying of religious language foreshadows a develop­ ment that is still basically foreign to Jamil. (Cf. the startling use of a'ūdhu m inïÿ biki in poem 91; referred to by Schwarz, īv [Leipzig, 1909], 28.) Nallino is certainly right in seeing ‘Umar as a city poet and Jamil as non-urban, but he makes a less helpful distinction when he calls Jamil’s verse nasīb and ‘Umar’s ghazal (Littérature, 102). 13 Dīwan Jamīl, ed. Husayn Naşşār (2nd ed., Cairo, 1967), 59.

39

GENRES

and in Abu Nuwās: a-‘ādhilu mā ‘alā m ithlī sabllu wa-‘adhluka £ī 1-mudāmati yastatūlu14 Blatner, a person li\e me cannot be restrained. It is absurd of you to undertake reproving me about wine. In the qafida, the blamer had been a strawman of caution. His job was to try to prevent the protagonist from making the heroic gesture. Now poetry had lost heroic death as a topic, but the willingness to expose the self, to face danger and eventual destruction, retained its fascination and remained at the center by finding new forms. Paradise had spiritualized death and removed it from the arena of the heroic. The fixed idea took its place, which, whether in the form of obses­ sion with a woman or addiction to wine, in effect meant death to all things except the object of fixation. The lines by Jamīl are shot through with irony. The apos­ trophe to the blamers is in the old style. Unbridled speech is objectionable; the blamers should practice moderation, iqtişād. There are many parallels in pre-Islamic verse. But, in truth, the blamers must be accusing Jamīl of that very thing: lack of moderation. The middle way, qaşd, is the way of Islam: there is even a tradition that qaşdy together with delib­ erate and appropriate behavior (tu’ada and husn as-samt), makes up one twenty-fourth part of prophethood.15 Jamīl is 14Dīwan Abi Nuwās (Beirut, 1962), 495. Of the various uncritical editions that must be used until E. Wagner’s is completed, this one (Dār Şādir) is most convenient. Judging by Wagner’s literal transla­ tions from manuscripts, in his Abū Nuwās (Wiesbaden, 1965), the texts of most major poems seem reliable enough. 15 Cf. Ibn ad'Dayba£, Taysir cd-wusùl il a jà m ï al-uşūl (Cairo, 1934), iv, 266. 40

TH E POET AS R IT U A L CLOW N

a man who no longer feels a member of the community of men: wa-in qultu ruddī ba‘da ‘aqlī a'ish bihī ma‘a n-nāsi qālat dhāka minka ba‘Idulc If I say: “ Return some of my reason that l might live with it among human beings” she says: " The chance is remote The very opposite of qaşd. The same sense of being an out­ sider is found in Abū Nuwās: adhāqanī ş-şadda sū’u tadbīrī . . ,17 My improper conduct has acquainted me with the taste of the outcast’s life . . . Why should obsession be the mode in which walking the brink survives? As in the Greek romances, nasty turns in the lovers’ separate roads to Ever After sustain the reader’s inter­ est, and consummation forever stuck in potentia is the first theme of the ‘Udhrī ghazal. Such modfs have a way of invit­ ing obsession. But there is another reason. If the spiritual re­ fuses itself to poetry in an age that feels that human experi­ ence is tied together from above, then poetry, in its exclusion, must find human experience incoherent. W ithin that incoher­ ence, obsession supplies a point of orientation. The willingness to live ones obsession is at times obscured by the sense that fate has been at work. So for example in Jamil’s answer to a distributor of well-meaning advice: 10 Diwan Jamīl, 62.

17 Diwān A bn Nuwās, 259.

4r

GENRES

fa-qāla afiq hattā matā anta hā’imun bi-bathnata fīhā Iā tuīdu wa-lā tubdī £a-qultu lahū fīhā qadā 1-lāhu mā tarā ‘alayya wa-hal fīmā qadā 1-lāhu min raddi fa-in yaku rushdan hubbuhā aw ghawāyatan fa-qad j i ’tuhū mā kāna m iiinl ‘alā ‘amdi15 He said: "Sober up! How long w ill you be mad about Buthayna, without being able to do anything about her?” 1 1 said to him : " Concerning her, God passed upon me the sentence that you see. Can God's decree be controverted? / Whether to love her means to be guided aright or to stray, I stumbled upon this love without intent” A t times a desire is expressed to escape from it all: ‘adimtuka min hubbin a-mā minka rāhatun .. ,19 I wish I were rid of you, love. W ill you leave me no rest? To be sure, one would in no case speak of risking love as one might of risking death. But it would be a mistake to exag­ gerate the role of fate in the ‘Udhrī ghazal, and then set fate against the gamble and the voluntary risk in pre-Islamic po­ etry. The old poetry, too, entertained a concept of fate, and its image of the heroic was capable of emotionally accom­ modating the paradox of risking one’s fate.20 In Jamil’s 1&Dlwān Jamil\

73-74. 19 Dīwan Jamil, 104. 20 £Urw a ibn al-Ward puts into verse the notion of risking fate when he speaks o f gambling w ith the man aya, the demonic powers that snuff out one’s life when the tim e comes: ja-in fāza sahmun lilm anīyati lam ahun / jazū'an . . . , “ Should the gambling arrow of the m anīya w in, I w ill not lack equanimity . . .” (D îw àn, ed. ‘Abdalmu'Tn al-M allūhī [Damascus, ig 66], 68. Incip it: a q illt ‘alayya I4awma . . . fa-sharl). 42

T H E POET AS R ITU A L CLOW N

ghazals, the lover often complains about his destiny, but also embraces it, in an amor amoris: rafa‘tu ‘ani d-dunyā 1-munā ghayra wuddihā fa-mā as’alu d-dunyā wa-lā astazīduhā21 I have given up all desire involving this world except the love of her. Thus, Î make no requests of the world, nor do l feel that l must have an ampler portion. The following verse w ill help us unravel the contradictions here: wa-qultu lahā baynī wa-baynaki fa-'lamī mina 1-lāhi mīthāqun lanā wa-'uhūdu22 I said to her: “ You should realize that we have pacts between us, and a covenant of God No doubt, covenant (mīthāq) joins together a bundle of ideas, some fairly common in the ghazal, some proper to the language of the Koran. Compare the following by Jamīl: ta‘allaqa rūhī rūhahā qabla khalqinā . . .23 My soul became attached to hers before we were formed... The idea in this verse reflects the scene in sura 7 of the Koran, where God challenges the yet uncreated souls of men: a-lastu bi-rabbikum, “Am I not your Lord?”—and the souls acknowl­ edge God’s sovereignty over them. This primordial agree­ ment is immediately linked, in the same sura, to the covenant between God and the recipients of revelation. 21 D'iwan fam tl, 69. 23 Dītvan Jamīl, 77.

22 Dīwān Jamil, 63.

43

GENRES

It is in the nature of a covenant that it can be broken. Such is the case with the Koranic mithāq too. For Jamil, of course, there is no question of not keeping faith; nevertheless, his ob­ session is fate and covenant at the same time. The divine im­ position of it does not rule out a parallel role for the will. Jamil’s condition is not unique: it is a trick of obsession that the victim perceives w ill and compulsion as coexistent. It is in this light that Jamil’s indifference to right guidance (rushd) and error {ghawāya) must be understood. Compare the following quasi-proverbial pre-Islamic line, which is clearly echoed in Jamil’s verse quoted on p. 42, above: wa-hal ana illā min ghazlyata in ghawat ghawaytu wa-in tarshud ghazlyatu arshudi24 What am l but one of the Ghazlya? If they err, l err; if they follow right guidance, l do too. The poet, Durayd ibn as-Şimma, joins his tribe in a cata­ strophic military engagement after the tribe has rejected his arguments for restraint. k4What am I but one of the Ghazlya?” is an assent to a given situation. In the same way, Jamīl as­ sents to the given that is his obsession, the only affiliation he admits. Let us return to Jamil’s “I wish I were rid of you.” Obses­ sion in the ghazal functions as a replacement of the motif of death all the more easily as it constantly threatens to lead to death. There is no coyness or irony about the destructive power of love. When the lady’s relatives complain to Marwān ibn al-Hakam, the governor of Medina, and Marwan outlaws Jamīl,25 physical menace sharpens the sense of psychological 24 Th. Noldeke, Delectus Veterum Carminum Arabicorum (Wies­ baden, 1961 repr.), 32; Abū Tammām’s H aniāsa , 378. 25 Cf. Ibn Qutayba, Kitàb ash-shi'r wash-shu'ara’ (Beirut, 1964), 347: atāmya 'an Marwāna bil-ghaybi annahu-muqīdun damt, etc.

44

T H E POET AS R ITU A L CLOW N

ruin. It is no accident that the episode in which the govern­ ment withdraws its protection from the poet and allows him to become a prey to the first comer turns out to be a foikloric motif that is also found in the biographies of a number of other ghazal poets.20 Thus the cursing of Buthayna: ramā 1-lāhu fī ‘aynay buthaynata bil-qadhā wa-fī 1-ghurri min anyābihā bil-qawādihi27 May God cast motes into Buthayna!s eyes; may He blacken her brilliant teeth! and the complaint that love is a prison23 parallel the execra­ tions, in the old poetry, of Time, in which the speaker is caught as in a current that pulls steadily towards the falls.29 The seriousness of his sense of doom allows Jamil to annex the phraseology of religion with an urgency that is a far cry from ‘Umar ibn abī Rabī'a’s pleasantries in using Islamic expressions: y a q īilū n a jā h id yā ja m īlu b i-g h a z w a tin

wa-ayyu jihādin ghayrahunna uridu li-kulli hadīthin baynahunna bashāshatun wa-kullu qatllin baynahunna shahīdu30 2CMajnūn and Qays ibn Dharīh; see I. Kratchkovsky, ‘'Die Friihgcschichte der Erziililung von Macnūn und Lailā in der arabischen Literatur,” transi. H . Ritter, Oriens, virr (1955), 27 and 46. I see no reason, however, to consider such motifs the inventions of a later age, and alien to the Umayyad ghazal. The wholesale ascription of romantic ‘U dhrī motifs to tenth-century writers by Vadet, L ’esprit courtois cn Orient (Paris, 1968), 353-60, seems to me a case of excessive skepticism. 27 Dīwan Jam'll, 53. The interpretation by Ibn al-Anbārī, quoted by Naşşār, is too tortuous to be credible. 28 Uiwān Jamil, 99. 29 See Goldziher, Muhammedanische Studien, 1, 254.

80This

sequence of lines, found in several sources, is preferred by

45

GENRES

They say: “ Ta\e part in the Holy War (jihād), Jamīl, go on a raidl ” But what jihād do I want besides the one that has to do with women ? / Conversation in their company brings joy; but each man who dies in their midst is a martyr. Islam replaced the pagan’s heroic death with martyrdom; poetry, within the fragmented experience it chose for its own, equated martyrdom with the disastrous end of obsession. It is easy to see how such annexation of the language of Islam might imply an obsession so absolute as to leave no room for religion at all. That is the next step. Verses mis­ takenly attributed to writers of early ‘Udhrl ghazals reflect the conception that a later generation of readers held of the ghazal—readers of a period in which the poetry of obsession had taken on an antinomian cast. An example is the line in Qālfs Dictations: khalīlayya hal fī nazratin ba‘da tawbatin udāwī bihā qalbī ‘alayya fujūru51 My friends, is it a sin if, after having repented, l cast at her a glance to heal my heart? whose attribution to Jamīl Qālī rightly considers groundless. Another instance occurs in the Boo\ of Poetry and Poets, where Ibn Qutayba remarks that the following verse was er­ roneously thought to have been written by Majnūn Laylā: yā habbadhā ‘amalu sh-shaytāni min ‘amalin in kāna min ‘amali sh-shayçâni hubbīhā32 F. Gabrieli, “ Ġamīl al-'Udrī, studio critico e raccolra dei frammenti,” RSO, xvii (1937), 71. Naşşār separates the two verses. 81 Qālī, Kitāb al-amāTi (Cairo, 1965), 1, 183. 32 Ibn Qutayba, Shi‘r, 477. 46

T H E POET AS R ITU A L CLO W N

How excellent is the w or\ of Satan, if my love for her is of the w or\ of Satanl 3

The incompatibility of obsession and religion, which the ‘Udhrī ghazal usually keeps latent but occasionally lets peep out at us, becomes explicit in the wine songs (hjiamrīyāt) of Abū Nuwās.83 These poems present life as permanent Satur­ nalia in which addiction has supplanted devotion. A t the same time, the khamnya is very much concerned with certain religious concepts and associations, and, because of the inertia of literary forms, with heroic concepts as well. I w ill discuss reflections of the heroic experience, the antinomian turn of religious experience, and the assimilation of religious experience. A.

R

e f l e c t io n s

of th e

h e r o ic

e x p e r ie n c e

On getting drunk : fa-şurri‘a 1-qawmu wa-stadārat rahā 1-humayyā bihim fa-mālū34 88 Not that there is any lack of poems, attributed to authors of the Umayyad age, in which drinking and the sinfulness of drinking are flaunted. Cf. Abū Mihjan’s verse fa-ft shurbihà şirfan tatimmu l-mctāthimu, “ disobedience reaches its perfection in drinking it un­ mixed,” Abu Mihġati, Poetae Arabia Carmina, ed. L. Abel (Leiden, 1887), 15. Some of the extraordinary shockers attributed to the Umayyad Caliph al-Walïd ibn Yazīd are collected by Mas udi, cf. Les prairies d’or, ed. and transi. C. Barbier de Meynard and A. J.-B. Pavet de Courteille (Paris, 1861-1877), vi, 4-15. But al-Walīd’s collection contains many impious verses that later opponents of the Umayyad house may very well have composed for him. 84 D'iwān Abt Nuwās, 492.

47

GENRES

The people were thrown to the ground, after the millstone of drun\en giddiness had spun them around until they listed to one side. The root ş-r-‘ implies a violent movement. The turning m ill­ stone recalls the millstone o£ war, a cliché in pre-Islamic heroic verse. In conjunction with the phrase istadārat rahā . . . , the word qawm w ill be unmistakably associated with its original sense of “ fighting men of a tribe.” 35 Ibn Qutayba is not merely exercising the philologist’s fancy when he discovers in Imra’alqays the pre-Islamic source of the following verse by Abū Nuwās:36 fī majlisin dahika s-surūru bihl ‘an nājidhayhi wa-tiallali 1-khamru In a party where joy laughs wholeheartedly and where wine is permitted . . . Imra’alqays says this : hallat liya 1-khamru wa-kuntu mra’an ‘an shurbihā fl shughulin shāghili / am now permitted to d rin \ wine, after having been \ept from it by an all-absorbing occupation. The occupation was avenging his father’s murder; abstinence from wine (and from other amenities) was to last until blood had been shed for blood. Ibn Qutayba picks up the technical 35 For qawm, cf. for instance MufaddaTiyāt 20:17, with scholion. Abū Nuwās is expanding an old m otif here. Cf. M u f 120:39b ( ‘Alqam a): wal-qawmu taşra'uhum şahbctu \hurtumu> “ a wine made from the juice of untrodden white grapes was throwing the men on the ground.” 88 Shi'r, 703. Uiwan Abt Nuwās, 325. 48

TH E POET AS R IT U A L CLO W N

aspect of hallat iiya l-\hamru♦ It must be left undecided whether he is correct in reporting that Abū Nuwās too had a vow: to touch no drop of alcohol until he had secured a coveted rendezvous. He was no doubt justified in sensing a conscious echo—or parody—of the heroic in the \hamrīya. The commonplace metaphor virgin/old woman for old but fiery wine, as in the verse a-mā yasurruka anna 1-arda zahrā’u wal-khamru mumkinatun shamtā’u ‘adhra u37 Does it not cheer you that the earth is in bloom, while the wine is there jor the taking, old and virginal? seems to have started out as a description of war. Compare the verse by al-Kumayt: idhā badat ba da ka ibin ra’udin shamtā’a minhā J-lihā’u waş-şakhabu?* When, after having seemed a delicate young girl, war shows itself a graying old woman, quarrelsome and sh rill... Ironic punning makes use of echoes of the heroic in the following: da* ‘anka mā jaddū bihī wa-tabattali wa-idhā mararta bi-rab'i qaşfin fa-nzili lā tarkabanna mina dh-dhunūbi khaslsahā wa-‘mid idhā qāraftahā likinbali39 Duvan Ab't Nuwās, 14. 35 Die HāJim ijjāt des Kumait, cd. and transi. J. Horovitz (Leiden, 1904), 98 (of Arabic text) and 70 (of translation). 29 D'uvān A bi Nuwās, 499. 37

49

GENRES

Put away from you toil and serious efforts [or: the things that lead to high esteem among men], and give yourself up to frivolity. If you pass a boisterous party, stop right there. / Do not commit vulgar sins. If you are going to be a simier, then set your mind upon the noblest of sins. Tabattal is an ambiguous word. It may mean “ be frivolous” or else “ act the part of the hero.” “ Noblest,” in the second line, guarantees that this ambiguity w ill occur to the audience. It also happens that a whole series of words associated with war are usurped by Abū Nuwās’s preferred connotations. The flowers adorning a banquet w ill be our lances, the after­ dinner sweet and spicy delicacies our mangonel stones, and logically enough, becoming dead drunk our killings: fa-hādhī 1-harbu lā harbun tughimmu n-nāsa ‘udwānā bihā naqtuluhum thumma bihā nanshuru qatlānā40 This war is not the sort of war that grieves people by strife. / We k ill people by it, and by it we revive those we have killed. To sum up, in Abū Nuwās the borrowing of heroic lan­ guage is of the brandy-is-for-heroes kind, and the borrower gives the cold shoulder to such heroism as might be sought outside the wine garden and the upstairs room. B. T h e

a n t in o m ia n

tu rn

The wine song’s attitudes towards religion are something of a tangle. 40 Dīw'an Abi Nuwās, 613.

5°

TH E POET AS R IT U A L CLOW N

da‘i 1-basatīna min wardin wa-tuffāhi wa-‘dil hudīta ilā dhāti 1-ukayrāhi41 Leave the gardens of roses and apples; direct your steps —may you be guided aright—towards Dhāt al-U\ayrāh! No doubt, on hearing a line like this, the audience’s first reaction was astonishment. “Leave the gardens” misleads you: when taken by itself, it would better suit an ascetic poem. In the next half-line the optative turns the sentence into something of a sermon. Right guidance is a frequent no­ tion in the Koran and in pious exhortations, but the place where the spiritual pilgrim is advised to go happens to be a monastery of Christian monks who sell excellent wine. It is all a bit of a joke, and the invitation is not uncommonly out­ rageous: people often used to go on outings to such monas­ teries. The scandal is in the wording rather than in the con­ tents. To drink wine had been forbidden by Islam, but many people did drink. In this period the outlawing of alcohol re­ mained unenforced as often as not, and more than a few high officials of state opened a jar of wine now and then. This kind of thing went on much as in Christian Europe quite a lot of fornication must have taken place in spite of, or without ac­ companiment by, the roar of an already imagined hellfire. It is a fact, however, that addiction to wine was considered by the pious a great sin, kabīra, which would keep a man out of Paradise.42 The matter becomes more entangled when the speaker in the poem is conscious of breaking a prohibition of religious law and chooses to vaunt die transgression. Nothing could be more explicit than qum sayyidī nasi jabbāra s-samawati, 41 Dīwān A b ī Nuwās, 155. 42 Cf. Ibn ad-Dayba', Taystr, iv, 271.

51

GENRES

‘‘Come my lord, let us rebel against the Despot of Heaven,”43 or a creed such as this : anifat nafsiya l-‘azīzatu an taqna‘a illā bi-kulli shay’in harâmi mā ubālī matā yakūnu wa-qad qa<Jaytu minhu s-surūra ka’su himāmī44 My proud soul w ill be content with nothing but the forbidden. / 1 do not care when my cup of death w ill come; l have already had my fill of the joys of the [wine] cup. The Muslim writer who set about praising the joys of alcohol had a ready excuse: the Prophet himself declared that poets say one thing and do another.45 The widespread doc­ trine that poetry has nothing to do with reality was tailored for the irreverent. But within a poem poetry has its own real­ ity: once religion is brought in by the poet, it cannot be dis­ engaged from other matters in the work. The world created in the kjiamrtya is not something apart from religion, bi-mazil min ad-dīn.*6 Islam had perhaps little use for poetry; poetry had much use for Islam. Therefore, in “ let us rebel against the Despot of Heaven” the consciousness of rebellion really matters. W ith this consciousness, Abū Nuwās's wine songs pass beyond the jolly mimesis of dissipation. That there is a thrill to the forbidden was as much of a commonplace of psychology in the Middle Ages as it is now.47 But it is not so easy to say whether the emotion described here is a delicious 43 D'iwān A bī Nuwās, 117. 4i DJwān Ain Nuwās, 567. 45 Koran 26:226. 46 Cf. Abū l-Hasan al-Jurjānī, al-Wasāta bayna IMutanabbi w a \lm fūm ih (Şaydā, 1912), 58, in a passage concerning Abū Nuwās. 47 Cf. al-Jâhiz, Kitāb al-hayawān, ed. ‘Abdassalām Muh. Hārūn (Cairo, 1966), i, 167-68.

52

TH E POET AS R ITU A L CLOW N

shudder in Mr. McGregor’s garden, or something graver. “ I do not care when” is of course an intentional echo o£ the heroic devil-may-care,48 but it does not suffice to resolve the case. The invitation to rebel needs a closer look. There are many instances in the \hamnyat of a light­ hearted knocking at hell’s gate. In these passages, the poet appears a kind of ritual clown who brings a sense of release because behavior is permitted him that is not permitted others. Such is the case in most of the passages where Iblīs, the devil, is mentioned. He is at times called upon for a bit of help in a pleasantly wicked cause, because power over ob­ jects of sinful desire is the most practical among the devil’s prerogatives. But anecdotes involving such matters always have a comic peripety: the devil turns an ill-starred love af­ fair into success : fa-raddahu sh-shaykhu ‘an şu‘ūbatihl wa-şāra qawwādanā wa-lam yazali40 The Old Man turned him from being intractable, and became our guide, which he has been ever since. Iblīs is never a very sinister figure: he is an arch old fellow with whom it is entertaining, and not too dangerous, to do business. The beloved’s asperity is something of a mock catastrophe. The impious intent of the wine song lies in its response to the real catastrophe, the uncertainties of time: idhā kānat banātu 1-karmi shurbī wa-qiblatu wajhiya 1-husnu 1-jamīlu amintu bi-dhayni ‘āqibata 1-IayālI . . .co Cf. mā ubati, Mufaddaīiyat, 20:31. 49 Dtwān Abï Nuwās, 495. 50 Dtwān Abt Nuwās, 496.

48

53

GENRES

It is dawn; the muezzin’s call reminds the drinkers that time is passing. The drinker looks for salwa, distraction from an anxiety. Most elegantly, a single verse reveals the shudder at the party’s end, at the returning of time; the call of religion, which proclaims that with each night past time grows shorter and that man should look to what he ought most to be anxious about; and the perilous distraction chosen by the drinker: the unsafe safety of shutting his eyes upon time. Getting drunk was no allegorical business for Abū Nuwās. But when a poet consciously defines his stance as the opposite of the pious preacher’s, he just as consciously dares the public to listen to his work in full awareness of the waiz'% language. The word “ drunkenness" had allegorical overtones for anyone who ever listened to a sermon, or a religious soapboxoration. So had “ sleep,” “ stupor,” and the like—all stock-intrade in the \hamrīya. For example, in a letter that Hasan al-Başrī allegedly sent ‘Umar ibn ‘Abdal'aziz, passion for this world is said to blind a man to what he should be concerned with, so that when the hour strikes ishtaddat \urbatuhu ma a mā ‘ālaja min sakj'atihi, “his anguish is intense despite the ex­ tent to which he has managed to remedy his drunkenness,” because now ijtamdat 4alayhi sa\rat al-mawt, “ the throes of death are upon him.”67 Sa\rat al-mawt is the agony that de­ prives the sufferer of his powers of reason. The sakja (drunkenness) of passion for the world was then just such a suppression of reason, and a préfiguration of an unpropitious death. In the wine poem, sa\ra is a natural enough topic, but it is also a gesture: if it provides a kind of escape from time and fortune, that escape, for the Muslim, is as good as jump­ ing from the frying pan into the Fire. In discussing the invitation to rebel, we must keep in mind that there are verses in which Abū Nuwās speaks as a com­ plete unbeliever. Ibn Qutayba quotes one of these:58 07 Hilya, ii, 135.

58 Shi'r, 691. 56

TH E POET AS R ITU A L CLOW N

hayātun thumma mawtun thumma ba'thun hadīthu khurāfatin yā umma ‘amri Life followed by death followed by resurrection—all that, O Umm ‘Amr, is an old wives tale. It is very simple and straightforward, but it may be a literary pose. After all, Abū Nuwās also wrote ascetic poems and poems that implore divine forgiveness. We might assume that he found repentance in old age, after riotous decades throughout which he had held the very idea of another life in contempt, but there is good reason to think otherwise. We see from biographical details reported by a variety of au~ thorities that in Abū Nuwās extreme impiety, repentance, and recidivism could quickly follow one after the other. There is an enlightening anecdote.59 Abū Nuwās and some com­ panions are on a drinking excursion and are having a jolly time when a cloud of piety abruptly settles over some of the drinkers, who remind Abū Nuwās of the dreary prospect of divine punishment. If there is one thing Abū Nuwās cannot stand it is a spoil-sport, and he answers: mā şahha ‘indī min jamī‘i l-ladhl tadhkuru illā I-mawtu wal-qabru Of all you have been saying, I find only death and the grave indubitable, which, not surprisingly, horrifies his companions. To deny the resurrection is not at all of the same order of sinning as to wet one’s throat on a fine day.60 Reproved by his friends, Abū

,

69 al-Khatib al-Baghdadī Ta’r ī\h Baghdad (Beirut, 1966), v i i 4 4 1 ­ 4 2 ; Abu HifFān al-Mihzamī, A \hb ār Abi Nuwās, ed. ‘Abdassartār Ah. Farrāj (Cairo, 1953), 36-38. T d rik ji prints tadhktauhu in the verse below, which docs not suit the meter (sari'). 80 Cf. al-Adab aş-şaghīr, attributed to Ibn al-Muqaffa‘, in Rasa il al-

57

GENRES

Nuwās recants and apologizes. He holds no faith but Islam; however, rubbamā nazā bt l-mujūnu hattā atanāwala Vazaima wa-mā cīlama annī masūlun anhu wa-mu adhdhabun ‘alayh, “from time to time mujūn (libertinism, frivolity) overcomes me to such an extent that I commit mortal sins, oblivious of being answerable for it (mujūn) as well as of the punishment that it w ill bring upon me.” This is followed by an extempore poem—it turns out to be one of his most famous in the ascetic genre—and after that is over, all go back to do some more drinking. Abū Nuwās’s explanation is believable. Denial of resurrec­ tion is the logical extreme of the attitude that governs the wine song. The poetics of obsession or addiction in the place of supernatural coherence at last deny supernatural coher­ ence altogether. The position swings out this far: as far as it can go. Then it swings back to the utmost piety and the ascetic mode. What we see in Abū Nuwās is a w illful failure to heed call and warning; we cannot consider his \hamrlyāt products of a mind for which the call is fatuous and the men­ aces of the Koran a fiction.61 bulaghct, ed. Muh. Kurd ‘A ll (Cairo, 1946), 25: al-mu’minu b is hay1in mina l-ashyā’i wa-in kāna sihran \hayrun mimman la yu'm inu bishay’in wa-lā yarjū ma‘ādan, “ A man who believes in something, even if it is black magic, is better than a man who believes in nothing and expects no resurrection.” 61 Besides the pious zuhdiycit, there are also wine poems in Abū Nuwās’s dīwān that treat divine judgment as a reality. For example, Dlwān Abi Nuwās, 544: Ia-‘amrī la-in lam yaghfiri 1-lāhu dhanbahā fa-inna ‘adhābī fi 1-hisābi alīmu Upon my life, if God does not forgive sinning with it \w ine], my punishment, when the accounts are settled, w ill be a painful one. Admittedly, in this period many people put on an air of frivo lity in 58

TH E POET AS R IT U A L CLO W N

Rather, the deportment in these poems is what C. S. Lewis calied a truancy,62 but it is a truancy acted out with much seriousness, Some comparisons w ill help. “ My proud soul w ill be content with nothing but the forbidden” is not like the good-humored admissions of vice familiar from medieval Eu­ ropean literature. When the Archpoet writes implico me vitiis, immemor virtutis, / voluptatis avidus magis quam salutis,68 he reminds us of Abū Nuwās’s companions, every one of whom “puts worldly tilings well ahead of religion,” qad āthara d-dunyā ‘alā dīnihi,64 But the Latin poem is all fun : one sins because res est arduissima vincere naturam, because it is terribly hard to get the upper hand over nature, and not because one desires to rebel. And, to be sure, the Archpoet finishes with iam virtutes diligo, vitiis irascor, “ already now I prize virtue and frown upon vice.” We are not quite con­ vinced (he does not seem to want us quite convinced), but there it is. We also have Aucassin, who wants to go to hell with the fine knights who have perished at tourneys and with the fine, religious matters because such frivo lity was considered elegant; cf. Ah. Am īn, Duha l-lslām (Cairo, 1946), 1, 152-56, and G. Vajda, “ Les zindiqs en pays d’Islam au début de la période abbaside,” RSO, xvii (1937), 210, note 1. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate that the Nuwasian ^hamrīyas attitude towards religion is more profound and more complicated than mere elegance and w it would have it be. I must stress that I am concerned w ith the atdtudes ex­ plored in Abū Nuwās’s wine songs; whether the historical Abū Nuwās shuddered every time he thought of the Last Judgment, or, quite the opposite, entertained some form of M u rji’ite doctrine w ith particularly sanguine expectations of divine forgiveness, it is im ­ possible to say. . 62 C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (New York, 1958), 104. 63 “I get all tangled up in vice; I forget virtue; I crave pleasure more than salvation.” The Oxford Boo\ of Medieval Latin Verse, 264. 64 Dīwān Abi Nuwās, 600.

59

GENRES

courtly ladies who have two or three friends besides their husbands, but this is a raving answer to the reprimand that hell would be his lot if he became Nicolete’s lover.65 Troilus, too, is forgetful: A ll other dredes weren from him fledde, / Both of th’assege [ = siege) and his savacioun, 66 but once again, Abū Nuwās’s “ Come let us rebel” is a different matter. The invitation to rebel has melancholy for a backdrop. “ Do not stop to question desolate encampments that w ill yield no news of their vanished inhabitants,” we read again and again, “ better reach for the cup.” The inversion of the atlāl motif is a literary game, but it is also more than a game. The old bal­ ances are gone now: the theme of departure and of aban­ doned places, however ironically put, conjures up loss and futility, which leave a shadow, even after the poet has gone on to more exhilarating topics. As an example of such open­ ings, here is a verse in which the symmetry of consonants joins together grief and solace: lā tahzananna li-furqati 1-aqrāni wa-qri 1-fu’āda bi-mudhhibi 1-ahzāni67 Do not grieve over the dispersal of companions; entertain your heart with what causes sorrows to pass. A bit of gloom over the brevity of life and the toyings of for­ tune often is the mood of ergo bibamus poetry; the combina­ tion of rebellion with the movement from melancholy to utter absorption in pleasure sets the Nuwāsian hhamnya apart. It is a peculiar combination of the heart’s folly, the heart’s bold­ ness, and the heart’s ambivalent knowledge of itself as flesh. 05 Poètes et romanciers du Moyen Age, ed. A. Pauphilet (Paris, 1952), 457. Cf. the note, by Pauphilet, 011 the vocabulaire violem­ ment pittoresque de ce jeune fou. 66 Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, 1, 463-64. 07 Dlwān A bi Nuwâsy 611. 60

TH E POET AS R ITU A L CLOW N

There result from it a seriousness and an esthetic dignity that none of the components would attain by itself. C. T h e

a s s im il a t io n

of

r e l ig io u s

e x p e r ie n c e

The borrowing of terms and images associated with a spe­ cific mode of experience and their application to an utterly different mode may signal a variety of intents. When one mode is standard and the other something of a pariah, such borrowing may be a haif-willing acknowledgment by the out­ sider of the mafia in the dominant order’s phraseology. The complex political structures of New York street gangs used to be an example of this. Borrowing may be a cynical leveling of the values in the dominant order, aiming to set the domi­ nant against the outsider’s mode in an even match. In turn, as when the Beatrice of the Commedia is both the Beatrice of the Vita Nuova and the Sapientia of the Convivio,68 it may be an expression of the kind of synecdochic experience that follows upon perceiving that a mode may be inferior and yet reflect the lineaments of the superior: an experience of cor­ respondence that brings delight and a kind of hope. Borrow­ ing may remind us that a game is afoot, with rules that parody the rules of something serious. It can be gently or quite finger-waggingly ironic. It is with such a gently ironic hint that Chaucer quotes Dante, transferring to Cupid the homage originally offered the Virgin Mary ( Troiius a?id Criseyde, m, 1261-63) : Benigne Love, thou holy bond of thinges, Who-so wol grace, and list thee nought honouren, Lo, his desyr wol flee with-outen winges. Against the background of Paradiso, xxxm, 13-15: 68 Cf. C. S. Singleton, “Dante: W ithin Courtly Love and Beyond,” in The Meaning of Courtly hove, ed. F. X. Newman (Albany, N.Y., 1 968

), 4 3 '5 4 6l

GENRES

Donna, sei tanto grande e tanto vali che quai vuol grazia ed a te non ricorre sua disianza vuol volar senz’ ali. Lady, you are so great, and of such worth, that if anyone would have grace and does not ta\e recourse to you, his desire wishes to fly without wings. Such echoes can also be found in poetry with a carnevalesque cast: poetry in which the lowest farce prepares the highest solemnity. The Towneley Secunda Pastorum—surely a single author’s work—is a perfect example. Not only does the farce of the stolen sheep found in the crib parallel the subsequent visit of the shepherds to the infant Jesus.; the very words are repeated. Sheep and derlyng dere, fu ll of godhede are both addressed as lytylle day-starne (morning star).69 This is not mere play to a gallery of provincial snickerers. To give the devil his due is perhaps needed before the angelic can find room in the mind, certainly in a man who regards himself as a mixture of quite easily identifiable dross and a somewhat vaguer something else.70 Let us return to “Direct your steps—may you be guided aright—to Dhāt al-Ukayrāh” (p. 51) and take off from there again. The wine is bright enough to guide the traveler in the dark: 69 Secunda Pastorum, vss. 577 and 727: The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle, ed. A. C. Cawley (Manchester, 1958), 58 and 62. 70 Cf. the interesting observadon in E. C. Parsons and R. L. Beals, “ The Sacred Clowns of the Pueblo and Mayo-Yaqui Indians,” Amer­ ican Anthropologist, xxxvi (1934), 503, on ritual clowns who as a rule act contrary to the norm and are called Fariseos and the like, but during Lent serve as guardians of the image of Christ and as his special servitors. 62

T H E POET AS R IT U A L CLOW N

fa-htadā sārī z-zalami bihā ka-htidā’i s-safri bil-‘alami71 In the gloom, the voyager ta\es guidance from it, as travelers might be guided by a signpost. It did not take a fresh eye to see the shimmer of wine; al-A‘shā and al-Akhtal already compared wine to luminous objects of various sorts.72 But Abū Nuwās brought along some­ thing that struck people as new. Ibn Qutayba certainly thought so, and quoted several examples:73 £a-qultu lahū taraffaq bī fa-innī ra’aytu ş-şubha min khalali d-diyāri £a-kàna jawābahū an qāla şubhun wa-lā şubhun siwa çîaw’i l-‘uqāri wa-qāma ilā l-£uqāri fa-sadda fāha fa-āda Uaylu maşbūgha 1-izāri l said to him : “Do me a favor; I already see morning in the spaces between houses ” / He answered: “Morning? There is no morning except the light of the wine!' / He got up and stopped up the wine jug; night returned in its darl{-dyed cloa\ .

71DJwān Abi Nuwās, 537. 72 Their passages dealing with wine are collected in the back of I. Hāwī, Fann ash-shir al-\ham rī iva-tapawwuruhu 'inda l-arab (Beirut, 1970). See also I. Kratchkovsky, “ Der Wein in al-Ahtal’s Gedichten” Festschrift G. Jacob, ed. Th. Menzel (Leipzig, 1932), 146-64. 73 Shi'r, 692-93. Dtwan Abi N ttu’ās, 247 (w ith insignificant variants) and 146.

GENRES

hasbī wa-basbuka daw’uhā mişbāhan . . , Its light w ill do as a lamp for both of us

.

The self-sufficient source of light, to which men are guided, has Islamic overtones. Cf. Koran 24:35: al-lāhu nūru s-samawāti wal-arcli; mathalu nūrihi kamishkātin fīhā mişbāhun; al-mişbāhu fī zujājatin; azzujājatu ka-annahā kawkabun durrīyun yūqadu min shajaratin mubārakatin, zaytūnatin lā sharqīyatin wa-lā gharblyatin, yakādu. zaytuhā yudī’u wa-law lam tamsashu nārun; nūrun ‘alā nūrin; yahdī 1-lāhu Ii-nūrihi man yashā’u. God is the light of the heavens and of the earth. His light is like a niche that holds a lamp, the lamp being in a glass that seems a brilliant star. It is kindled from a blessed tree, an olive that is neither of the Hast nor of the West, whose oil almost radiates light even without a touch of fire. Light upon light, God leads to His light whom He will. The gloom through which the voyagers make their way to the bottle is, naturally enough, the other side of the light/dar\ opposition that occurs in the Koran time and time again.74 I suspect that it was the symbolic pull of the light-imagery in Abū Nuwās’s khamnyāt that made Ibn Qutayba feel that there was something new in these poems. He must also have noticed a revealing change in emphasis between the old and the new: al-A‘shā and al-Akhtal occasionally spoke of the lu­ minosity of wine, but they stressed its fragrance, while Abū Nuwās is far more interested in the play of light. 74 Many examples collected in Vajda, “ Les zindiqs,” 227, Notes 3 and 4. 64

TH E POET AS R IT U A L CLO W N

It is essential to note that Abū Nuwās’s \hamrīyāt also make use o£ imagery with religious associations whose sources must be sought outside of Islam. In some cases he is indebted to gnostic thought, the great well of cosmic images, which appears to run low with the passing of the formal Manichean religion, only to surge up again, inexhaustible, in the Ismā‘īlī and Illuminationist systems. In Abū Nuwās’s time, Manicheanism was persecuted; it was not yet ex­ tirpated. The majority of Muslims, presumably, had at best a garbled notion of Manichean doctrine, but it is inconceiva­ ble diat poets lacking in pious scruple would at this religious­ ly turbulent period remain unacquainted with some amount of gnostic imagery. Abū Nuwās himself reports that, in the prison where Manicheans were held and where he was taken by mischance, an acquaintance of his, Hammād ‘Ajrad, surprised him by being unmasked as a writer of Manichean hymns.75 An example of reflections of gnostic imagery is the following: isqinthā sulāfatan sabaqat khalqa ādamā fa-hya kānat wa-lam yakun mā khalā 1-arda was-samā ra’ati d-dahra nāshi’an wa-kabīran muharramā fa-hya rūtiun mukhallaşun faraqa 1-lahma wad-damā70 75 AT. al-aghānty 13:74. I stress that I am speaking of imagery, not of fam iliarity w ith doctrine. Cf. the doctrinal confusion in the satire in which Abū Nuwās accuses Abān al-Lāhiqī of being a Manichean, al-Jāhiz, Hayatuan, 448-50. Reference in Ch. Pellat, Le milieu Başricn et la formation de Gāhiz (Paris, 1953)» 220« 70 D'iwān Abi Nuwās, 541.

65

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Give me a fine wine to d rin \t of a vintage from before the creation of Adam, / a wine that existed when nothing was except heaven and earth, / that watched time grow up and grow old and decrepit / while it in turn became a liberated spirit that has parted from flesh and blood. The spirit freed of the body after eons of time, the beginning of this process before the creation of man—these are echoes of the gnostic drama. The words rūh and mu\halias together even strike one as technical terms. According to Shahrastānī, the Manicheans w ill have it that the world was created to compass “ the liberation of the various types of light from the various types of darkness,” li-tahjhalluşi ajnāsi n-nūri min ajnāsi z-zulma. As it turns out, rūh is the subtlest of the ajnās an-nūr.77 Christian ceremony is perhaps in back of another mis­ chievous passage: mā dhuqtuhā qattu aw unājī amāmahā 1-ka’sa bil-kalāmi7“ / have never tasted it without first whispering, in its presence, a quiet prayer over the cup. I do not mean to belabor the various religious echoes in the imagery of the wine song. There is no point in looking for 77 Shahrastānī, Kitāb al-m ilal wan-nihaly cd. W. Curcton (London, 1846), 191 and 189. I would like to note, in passing, that while proper Manicheans drank no wine, they were not averse to speaking of wine symbolically. The pitch-covered wine jar w ith fragrant wine inside is described in A Manichcan Psalm-Boo^, ed. and transi. C. R. C. Allberry (Stutt­ gart, 1938), 220. 78 Dlwān Abi Nuwās, 546. The m otif of prayer before wine occurs in al-A‘shā, where the person who guards the wine docs the praying. See Dlwān al-A'shā l-fab'tr, ed. M. M. Husayn (Cairo, 1950), 293. 66

TH E POET AS R ITU A L CLOW N

doctrine; what matters is the presence of such elements in the central myth (or mime) of the \hamrīya: the quest of a small company, in the obscurity of night, for the luminous, often also primordial, object towards which they are drawn.70 As I. Hāwl observes, the wine in these poems comes very close to the mystic wine of later Sufi poetry.80 Imagery with transcendental associations creates in the Xhamriya a sense of something like a rival religion. Such a de­ velopment is perhaps natural enough in a religious society, but it is ironic; for it is the end of the line for a genre that sprang from a poetic refusal to accommodate to the religious model of human experience. The wine song fosters its myth; it is never quite free of the shadow of Islam. As a result, Abū Nuwās’s f{hamrīyāt contain an unresolved contradiction that occasionally finds expression. The most ex­ plicit instance is the use of istighfār, the begging of God’s mercy, as a closing topos: fa-dhāka qabla nuzūli sh-shaybi ‘ādatunā Iākinnanā nartajī ghufrāna ghaffāri"1 Such is our habit until our hair turns gray, but we hope for the forgiveness of a forgiving one. A curious, elegiac contradiction occurs in poems that begin on a note of contempt for the traditional halt at a deserted 79 The night journey, by itself, m ight be a parody of a heroic motif. On the heroic night journey (idla j), sec M. Bravmann, “ The Return of the Hero; an Early Arab M otif,” Studia orientalia in honorcm C. Brockelmann (Halle, 1968), 21. The habit of inserting a circum­ stantial clause about the darkness or time of night (e.g., wal-laylti m u'tahjnin, D'iwan Abi Nuwās, 7) certainly derives from heroic poetry; cf. Mufaddaliyāt 1, 465 ( wal-laylu dāmisu) or Lāmīyat al-arab vs. 56 ( wal-laylu alyalu). 80 Fan» ash-shi‘r al-kjiam rī, 258. 81 Diwān Abi Nuwās, 261. 67

GENRES

encampment, but end by quoting a line o£ verse that presents the same encampment motif, or some related beduin-style form of nostalgia and remembrance. A striking example is a poem in which there are not one but two dragons biting their own tails: it begins with the trick of keeping away a queasy awakening by taking another drink da‘ li'bāklhā d-diyārā wa-nfi bil-khamri 1-khumārā Leave the desolate dwellings to the one who w ill cry over them, and stave off hangover by drinking more wine, and it ends with the verses rafa‘a ş-şawta bi-şawtin hāja lil-qalbi ddikārā şātii hal abşarta bil-khl tayni min asmā’a nārā82 He raised his voice in a tune that roused the heart to remembrance: / “ O my friend, did you see in al-Khītān a fire belonging to Asma ?” The poem has to end somehow. Wary of a nasty morning after, it sinks deeper into poetry: it admits through the stag­ ing that the play w ill not really do as a model for reality. A t times, the contradiction is worked into the vocabulary. This is the case in ‘afā l-muşallā, discussed in Chapter iv. An­ other example is the poem that, in verse two, describes the young men as andā'i ka’sin idhā mā l-laylu jannahumū sāqathumū nahwahā sawqan bi-iz‘āji 82 Dlwān A bī Nuwās, 245. 68

TH E POET AS R IT U A L CLO W N

Emaciated for love of the cup; whenever the night conceals them, they are anxiously drawn towards i t .. . and concludes with wad-dahru laysa bi-lāqin sha‘ba muntazimin illā ramāhu bi-tafrlqin wa-iz‘āji83 Time never finds people in any [group] that fits well together but that it afflicts them with séparation and anxiety. The repetition of izā j (to worry, make anxious), in a differ­ ent and more serious application, determines the direction of the poem.*4 Diwān A bī Nuwās, 136-37. The use of internal echoes of this kind, which is a favorite device of Abū Nuwās’s, w ill be further dis­ cussed in Chapter rv. 84 Both the technique and peripety of the poem have a most in­ teresting precursor in Mufaddaliyāt, 9, composed by Mutammim ibn Nuwayra. Mutammim’s section on wine ends w ith the line (vs. 30) 88

alhū bihā yawman wa-ulhī fityatan ‘an baththihim in ulbisū wa~taqanna‘ū I ta\e pleasure in it, and with the pleasure of it distract the young men from their sorrows, if they are clothed and veiled in sorrow. The metaphorical veiling (taqanna'ū) turns concrete and unavoidable in the last line (vs. 45): wa-la-ya’tiyanna ‘alayka yawmun marratan yubkā ‘alayka muqanna‘an la tasma‘u And once there w ill come upon you a day of weeping over you, when you w ill be shrouded and w ill not hear. 69

GENRES

In a poem that does sound as if it had been written in old age,80 the night journey to the wine seller’s house is described like this : fī faylaqin lid-dujā kal-yammi multatimin tāmin yahāru bihī min hawlihi n-nūtl Encompassed in gloom that was li\e a rough sea with clashing waves in which the mariner is stunned by terror. ,. In the next line, the drinkers stand in front of the wine seller herself: idhā bi-kāfiratin shamtaa, “ And suddenly there was a graying woman, an unbeliever. . . Sura 24 again comes to mind, this time verses 39-40, in which the works of the unbe­ liever are compared to just such a dark, tumultuous sea. Now the poem gets down to business: the wine radiates light; it showers sparks the way angels hurl stars at rebellious demons; the saki possesses all the charm of the angel Hārūt; in the pleasure garden the strings play their music and they are like a heavenly sphere turning round and round with the drinkers. A ll this was long ago. Youth is past, and so the poem ends this way : ad'ūka subhānaka 1-lāhumma fa-‘fu kamā ‘afawta yā dhā l-‘ulā ‘an şāhibi 1-hūti I call upon you, my God, glory be to you; forgive as you, most High, forgave the man of the Whale. Jonah takes us back to the first tempest at sea in the poem: the metaphor in line six, which gave the quest its weather. Through this short-circuit, the begging for mercy in the last 85 Dtwān A bī Nuwās, 111-13. 70

TH E POET AS R ITU A L CLO W N

line is pitched against the quest myth itself. The contradiction between role and reality is made explicit: the poet comes out o£ the Whale. 4

The heroic model bequeathed upon the \hamriya two char­ acteristics from which the libertine poet was never to escape: the emphasis on the tempting of personal catastrophe—which was now a catastrophe for all eternity—and the poetic stance of being an object of reproof among the reasonable. The bal­ ance, which in the old qaşīda these characteristics helped achieve, the wine song could not inherit. In pre-Islamic po­ etry, the heroic gesture was a peremptory social need and constructed a model for the entire community; the gesture in the \hamriya answered the subordinate need of institutional­ ized rebellion, the poet and his companions becoming a band of outsiders. The rebellion, which comes to transcend mere gouffre and takes the form of an inchoate rival religion, stands heir to the ritualistic qualities of the heroic qaşīda. The chief tableaux in Abū Nuwās—the night journey, the opening of the wine, etc.—retain various conventions of drinking scenes in the qaşīda. In some ways, however, the \hamrīya makes an odd inheri­ tor. The tavern scene is contrary to the archaic naslb in that the pre-Islamic poets used to recall a full past in a vague pres­ ent, while the /(hamrīya poet sees the party in the tavern as the very moment for which the wine has been stored since time immemorial: for him now is when the various predes­ tined parts of the experience find one another. The contrast lies, to some extent, in the nature of the subject matter, but it is characteristic of the thoroughly different results that, in qaşīda and ^hamrīya, similar poetic stances bring about. 71

GENRES

In the qaşīda, losses are voluntarily taken and danger is courted, and the result is a balance and an emotional security. In the \hamrīya, disaster is tempted through a w illful search for a false security from time, and the result is one half of a balance: the role of the ritual clown. The other half is the law-abiding Muslim. In the qaşīda, elegiac overtones were a breach in the model; in the \hamrīya they are bridges back to the extant model of coherence, to life in harmony with re­ ligious law. In sum, the qaşīda chooses to see time as the plane upon which plerosis and \enosis balance each other, but the \hamrlya—in its search for the wrong safety, in this truancy that is also a strange metamorphosis of the heroic gesture—pretends that time can be reduced to the precarious span in which obsession has its fling. Struggling not to notice the flow of time, the poetry takes on a character of constant, feverish agitation. It does so also because it must not look back and resign its role as a means of evasion; and it does so all the more easily because, as a poetry of obsession, it finds agitation its natural mode. Once again the obsessed man both wills and is trapped by his compulsion. That the libertine subdues time is spelled out in some of the poems. Here is the beginning of the piece that ends with the whale : wa-fityatin ka-maşābīhi d-dujā ghurarin shummi 1-unūfi mina ş-şīdi 1-maşālīti şālū ‘alā d-dahri bil-lahwi 1-ladhī waşalū fa-laysa habluhumū minhū bi-mabtūti86 Young men, brilliant as lamps in the dar\, all haughty, stiff-necked and \een, / who overpowered Time with the 80 In this context, as far as I can see, dahr and zaman are used in­ discriminately; cf. dāna z-zamanu laham, Dlwān, 7; dkallat lana riqhbu d-duhūri, Dlwān, 275. Note the assonance, supporting the lin k ­ age of meanings, between şālu and waşalū. 72

T H E POET AS R ITU A L CLOW N

pleasures they embraced, so th a t the ties between them and th e ir pleasures rem ained unsundered . . . B ut this comes fro m a poem in w hich rime passes and old age arrives: the triu m p h over tim e is p u t most explicitly where in the end it is acknowledged as a delusion. T h is need not sur­ prise us; we have seen that the \h a m n y a is a genre of contra­ dictions,57 In any case, the pre-Islamic d rinker starts out w ith ­ o u t w ild hopes about time, a contrast that a verse by a l-A ‘shā makes adequately clear: f ī fity a tin ka-suyūfi 1-hindi qad ‘alim ū an lavsayadfau ‘an d h i 1-hīlati I-hiyalu8S A m ong young men lik e In d ian blades, who had learned that the m an of cunning is not protected by his stratagems [th a t he too m ust d ie] . . ,

5 In the qaşīda, conventional description made palpable certain objects that embodied aspects of the heroic model. T o some extent, in the one h a lf of a model, w hich the \h a m r iy a is, the ritualistic function of description survives. The chief objects are w ine and boys: the great conventional catalogue is no longer common; b u t such objects are often

sketched in

phrases that are conventional enough to contain no info rm a ­ tio n at all. Such phrases act by their presence alone. In preIslam ic poetry the vocabulary is so m uch richer that it is the conventionality o f the denotations that strikes us, rather than 87 The same immediate contradiction of the trium ph over time occurs in Da‘ 'an\a law m ī . . . ighra'u ( Dtwan, 7-8), where wine goes round among young men to whom time is subservient, but in the next line the poet weeps because that wine is a tilin g of the past. Dtwan al-Ā'sha l-kubrr, 59.

83

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the exact phrasing, even though stock phrases do occur. In the kjiamriya, conventional description is very often reduced to basic building blocks: moon-faces, reed-waists, pearly teeth and ruby lips. Spenser too gives us ruby lips and pearly teeth, as does Ariosto, but their poetry, however decorative, is not nearly so weighed down by such descriptions as the Arabic lyric. In later Persian poetry, as Ritter has shown, the rubies and pearls become names for the objects they once de­ scribed, and it is the objects that interact.89 In Abū Nuwās this is not yet the case. “ His forehead is like the crescent moon’ is a predication in its own right—a simile rather than ossified metaphor—no matter how little real information we can distill from it. Undeniably, a great deal of Abbasid poetry must have been composed extempore, and we may be tempted to explain away the moon-faces as so much stuffing.90 The fact is, however, that such conventions crop up in poems that were obviously made with great care and attention to wording and structure. We must also not forget that whatever the way in which a convention gets into a line, once it is there it w ill have some sort of an effect on the mind of the audience, and the critic must attempt to pin down that effect. As a first step, we must distinguish between the type of formula described by Parry and Lord, and the type we are interested in. In Homer, or in the Serbo-Croatian epic, for­ mulas are operative. A formula like “ Yallah, he said, and got 89 H . Ritter, Ober die Bilderspracfie Nizamis (Berlin-Leipzig, 1927), 29. Cf. also Damaso Alonso, “ Poesi'a arabigoandaluza y poesi'a gongorina,” Al-Andalus, vin (1943), 138. 90 For extempore composition, cf. K. al-aghāni, nr, 129, where Abū l-‘Atāhiya declaims at the potter’s wheel while the young literati copy down his verses on potsherds. Also Aghānt, h i, 131, where Abū l-‘Atāhiya avers that he could speak in verse all day long if he so wished.

74

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on his horse*'J1 carries a narrative forward, and it tells us just enough of the action to suit that purpose. The same I think is true of the longer Homeric formulas. The Arabic formulas in question—“ Her teeth are like camomile flowers,” “ Her waist is like a reed”—do not carry anything forward. They are pure description for description’s sake. One might think of the permanent epithets in Homer, but those epithets are in real­ ity names or parts of names. A phrase x(y) where x is a per­ manent epithet w ill be part of some information with x(y) as the subject, object, or some such. In the Arabic, we have a statement y = z, where the entire predication is a cliché. In the Iliad it is extremely rare that a simile is repeated.92 A metaphor ends its life by becoming a name, but a new simile or metaphor gives the listener the shock of a re-order­ ing of experience. The listener suddenly becomes the nexus of the terms of comparison. In this way the simile can func­ tion as a kind of motor for the work Heidegger attributes to the language of poetry: Es ladt die Dinge ein, dass sie als Dinge die Menschen angehcn.93 But repetition works changes 91 A. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, i960), 46. 02 Cf. R. Lattimore in the introduction to his Iliad translation (Chicago, 1965), 43: “ as an essential characteristic of the formula is to repeat, an essential of simile is uniqueness.” This goes for epic poetry. As W. P. Ker said, Essays on Medieval Literature (London, 1905), 41, “ the conceits of the courtly poets are handed down like heirlooms from one generation to another.” Again, it is not the existence of conventional similes that is striking in Arabic poetry, but their quantity, and that they can be more or less arbitrarily inserted even in good poems. These similes are the arabesques of Goethe’s Xenie ( Geden\ausgabe der Wer\e, Briefe und Gesprache [Zurich, 1948-1954], u, 514), “ Alle die Andern, sie haben zu tragen, zu tun, zu bedeuten. / W ir, das glūckliche Volk, brauchen sonst nichts als zu sein.” 93 “ i t invites things to matter, as things, to man.” M. Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen, i960), 22.

75

GENRES

in the effect of a poetic description. Repetition of a word in a specific, restricted context can turn the word into a fetish— witness the vocabulary of literary erotica. Moreover, repeti­ tion may also reverse the direction of a simile’s or metaphor’s effect. The point may be reached where a phrase is associated with poetry as a mode of perception, and its efTect w ill be to transfer the object described into a poetic universe. The image goes from afferent to efferent, from bringing in to carry­ ing out. The word fetish does just this: it pretends to invite a reality to the mind, but in truth it carries the mind out into the shadowy world of its own fabrications. Repetition escapes this fate only in a poetry that is truly ritualistic, that, like the qaşīda, has a coherent and emo­ tionally valid model of reality to back it up. In the I^hamrīyāt, there are many ritualized actions—the night journey, the opening, mixing and pouring of the wine, etc.—but while these poems have an emotional validity as adjuncts to the model of life and death against which they rebel, in them­ selves they are a conscious truancy, and their ritualized ac­ tions a play. The result of this odd situation is that waists like reeds and faces like moons set off an oscillation—a teetering, one might say—between the body and the body’s shadow in the mind. In this manner, the conventional descriptions in Abū Nuwās remove us into a world that half knows itself to be poetic rather than realistic. The very permanence of images gives this world an air of paradise, a rêverie hors du monde, as Massignon said of gardens in Islamic countries.94 Our gar­ den is already decorated by some of the sapphires and emeralds, by some of the perfumes and other objects of non­ nature that run wild in the later poets, but its essential fur94 L. Massignon, “Les méthodes de réalisation artistique de l’islam,” Opera Minora (Beirut, 1963), ni, 16. 76

TH E POET AS R ITU A L CLOW N

nishing is the artificially used language of convention di­ vorced from the purpose of information. For the Chinese poet, procul negotiis means drinking his wine in the tranquil­ ity of the mountains. For the \hamrīya poet, turning from the world is turning instead to an ideal agitation of emotion in a world just artificial enough to preclude an intolerable run­ ning down of pitch. 6

In the ninth century, a variety of changes occurred in the course of Arabic poetry. Their effects were to be felt for a long time. An intellectual poetry of pointes, of concordia discors be­ came fashionable. Some of its aspects are discussed in the next chapter. At the other end of the scale, a generation or so after Abū Nuwās, poets appeared who, especially in panegyrics, re­ established the grand style. They made use of the conventions of the pre-Islamic qaşīda, and delighted in archaic vocabu­ lary as well as in a new rhetorical splendor. Their success forced ghazal and khamrīya into minor roles, although it must be conceded that the neo-classical style owed much of its vigor to an ability to assimilate touches that the other genres had developed. Chapter v includes a poem of al-Mutanabbl’s in which such assimilation is at work. Ghazal and bjiamrīya acquired symbolic contents and, once more, a profound cultural significance among the mystics: people in whose thinking God and obsession—Islam and po­ etry—were at peace.

77

fhvee Wasf: T w o Views of Tim e

O f

p o e tic

description {w a s f) independent o£ p lo t o r larger

fra m e w o rk Ib n a l-M u ‘tazz (d . 908) was the firs t m a jo r prac­ titio n e r. H is w o rk already contains the salient characteristics o f the genre. T h e ch ie f vehicle o f the w asf poem is the sim ile, less fre q u e n tly the m e taphor. T h e similes tend to lin k tw o p rim a facie unrelated sets o f objects, usually such th a t the ob­ jects w ith in each set stand in some fo rm o f coherence. T h e resu lt is a poetry o f w it, w ith emphasis on astou n d in g com ­ binations.

W asf poems are fre q u e n tly ve ry sh o rt: tw o o r

three lines m ay be the e xtent o f an e n tire piece. I f the qastda experienced tim e as a m e d iu m fo r various bal­ ances; i f in the h jia m n y a there was a struggle to h o ld on to the m o m e n t at any cost; the w asf poems I am about to discuss — and they are typ ica l— come after a fo r k in the ro a d : in one g ro u p the speaker e lim inates tim e altogether, and in the other he surrenders to tim e w ith his w h o le being.

1 T h is is w h a t Sanaw barî has to say about the narcissus: d u rru n tashaqqaqa ‘an y a w à q ïtin ‘alâ q u d u b i z -z u m u rru d i fa w q a b u sti s-sundusi1 1 Sanawbarî, D ïw ân, ed. Ihsân ‘Abbâs (Beirut, 1970), 180-81. Sanawbari died around the m iddle o f the tenth century, but his w o rk 78

TW O VIEW S OF T IM E

Pearls u n fo ld in g fro m y e llo w sapphires \w h ic h rest] on em erald stems over carpets o f fin e su n d u s -s il\. T h e verse refers a n a tu ra l object th a t m ay e lic it esthetic con­ te m p la tio n to an a rtific ia l c o n fig u ra tio n o f objects th a t are considered b e a u tifu l in themselves, and whose beauty there­ fore involves little or n o w ill to art. A d m itte d ly , the c o n fig u ra tio n o f these objects w h ic h are b e a u tifu l in

themselves is made o r im a g in e d by m a n . I t

is w ille d and i t is, o r m ig h t be, m ade fo r n o other purpose th a n to give us pleasure. T h e n a tu ra l object— the flo w e r— is h u m a n ize d w h en i t is lin k e d by the s im ile to such a c o n fig u ra ­ tio n . P u t m ore precisely : i t is enslaved to the esthetic interest. I t is a deceptive h u m a n iz a tio n , because the com parison be­ tw een petal and gem is paradoxical. A s the flo w e r is tu rn e d in to a set o f esthetic atoms, i t ceases to participate in the w o rld o f tim e and process, except by contrast. I t is n o w an alien. T o be sure, every m an-m ade esthetic object w ill be alien in a sense : i t w ill catch a m o m e n t o r a series o f m om ents and h o ld th em fast. B u t the c o m b in a tio n o f objects b e a u tifu l in themselves lacks th a t aura o f the creative act w h ic h retains objects o f a rt w ith in th e ir te m p o ra lity .2 Gems seem to radiate th e ir color fro m w ith in , in e xh au stib ly. W e act u pon th e m to some degree, cu t and com bine th e m as we please, b u t a d if­ ference rem ains between a p a in te r o r sculptor and a faceter o f precious stones. T h e one w o rk s p a in t o r stone in to m ean­ in g , the other m erely intensifies som ething th a t is already in the m ateria l. T h u s, the a rtific ia l flo w e r is n o t s ig n ific a n tly m ore th a n the sum o f its parts; the C oncert C ham pêtre is sig­ exemplifies what Ibn al-Mu‘tazz (d.

. . 908)

a d

already tends towards in

his wasf poems. 2 The w ord “ aura” is borrowed from W alter Benjamin; cf. Illu m in a ­ tions, ed. H . A rendt, transi. H . Zohn (N e w Y ork, 1969), 221.

79

GENRES

n ific a n tly m ore th a n the sum o f G io rg io n e ’s p igm ents. W it h the d im in u tio n in the esthetic role o f the creative act goes a loss o f te m p o ra lity ; th is loss the poets w h o em bedded gems and oth e r esthetic u ltim a te s in th e ir w o rk s considered a gain. W e can n o w correct o u r te rm in o lo g y . F o r a w o rk in g dis­ tin c tio n , le t us say th a t an object th a t is b e a u tifu l in and by its e lf (o r : an object th a t lies near the b e a u tifu l-in -its e lf end o f the scale) is “ decorative,” w h ile an “ esthetic” object is de­ te rm in e d by the aura o f a w ill to art. T h is d is tin c tio n gets rid o f the n o tio n th a t a decorative object m u s t decorate some­ th in g , and w ill p e rm it us to use “ decorative,” w ith o u t being derogatory, in speaking o f the b e a u tifu l-in -its e lf object th a t sparkles in the wasf-poem . T h e poets o f the M id d le Ages d id n o t in v e n t o u t o f th in a ir th e ch a n g in g o f n a tu ra l objects in to

decorative ultim ates.

T h e ir w o rld loved de co ra tio n : those w h o

could a ffo rd i t

m ig h t su rround themselves w ith trees encased in silver, fru its o f gold, and pools in w h ic h , instead o f w ater, q u ic k s ilv e r re­ flected the m oon.3 In the m edieval observer, gems and pre­ cious m etals le ft an im pression o f ad m ira b le a te m p o ra lity, i f fo r chem ical rather th a n esthetic reasons. I n a s tr ik in g pas­ sage o f the K itâ b a l-im tâ ‘ w a l-m u ’ânasa, A b u H a y y â n atT a w h ïd ï explains th a t w o m e n and c h ild re n m ay be th rille d by novelties, b u t tru e d ig n ity belongs to th in g s th a t are tim e ­ less, or, in the te m p o ra l realm , to th in g s th a t are m in im a lly subject to generation, such as gold, sapphires, etc.4 A n o th e r exam ple w il l carry us fu rth e r in o u r in q u iry : 3 See A. Mez, D ie Renaissance des Islam s (Heidelberg, 1922), 362-63. 4 A bü Hayyân at-Tawhïdî, K itâ b al-im ta! w al-m u’ânasa, ed. Ah. A m ïn and Ah. az-Zayn (Cairo, 1953), 1, 23-24. The idea is just about as old as anything in western literature. Compare the gold and silver dogs that guard Alcmous’ house (Odyssey vn, 91-94) and that were made by Hephaestus to be forever im m ortal and ageless, hous H . eteuxen . . . athanatous ontas \a i agërôs êmata panta. 80

TW O VIEW S OF T IM E

w a -ka’anna m u h m a rra sh-shaqïq i id h à tasawwaba a w tasa“ ad a 'iâ m u y â q ü tin n u sh irna ‘alâ rim â h in m in za barjad5 I t is as i f the re d anemones; as they sway u p a n d d o w n , / were banners o f re d sapphire upon chrysolite spears. T h e second lin e stiffens the m o ve m e n t described by the firs t. W e k n o w th a t chrysolite spears, w hatever th e ir effect in a museum , w ill n o t be m u ch good on the battlefield, and w e note w ith some p erplexity th a t sapphire banners w ill la ck the essential q u a lity o f fla p p in g in the w in d . T h e esthetic reduc­ tio n is tw o fo ld : the flo w e r is com pared to a fla g th a t is al­ ready reduced to its sapphire-and-chrysolite double. A l l o f w h ic h is ra th e r strange w hen w e consider th a t we are hear­ in g about anemones in m o tio n . E ven a m achine— and m edie­ va l people th o u g h t sleight-of-hand m achinery great fu n — could n o t copy the free va ria tio n s in the m ovem ent o f a w in d ­ b lo w n flo w e r or flag. I n the A ra b ia n N ig h ts , the depths th a t h ide gadgets o f supernatural po w er con ta in such tussauderies o f g o ld and precious stones. Objects w ith o u t te m p o ra lity , and A la d d in ’s tarnished o ld la m p — object fa lle n in to desuetude, fa lle n o u t o f tim e — together fu rn is h the m a g ic cellar. Indeed, there is a m agical aspect to the en tire operation we are w itnessing. T h e m ood o f \e n o sis th a t in various guises survived in g hazal and \h a m rly a is n o w gone. T h e self has retreated; the speaker w o u ld keep the poet’s give-and-take w ith the w o rld b u t w ith o u t h a z a rd in g an e m o tio n a l invest­ m e n t in the tem poral. I

w ill c la rify w h a t I m ean by th is give-and-take. T h e re is

a curious n o tio n , and one th a t has been passed d o w n in o u r 5 Sanawbarî, D ïw ân, 477.

81

GENRES

schools, one m ay assume, since tim e im m e m o ria l, th a t a sim ile serves to c la rify som ething and to render i t m ore v iv id by means o f a sort o f explanation. In n e a rly every case, th is no­ tio n is nonsense. T h a t i t is nonsense is h a rd ly a discovery. T h e Russian c ritic V . S hklovsky, fo r example, rem inds his readers o f G o g o l’s com parison o f the sky w ith the clothes o f G o d :6 an association w ith m ore p o w e r th a n an a lytic c la rity in it. A n d w e should n o t fo r a m o m e n t suppose th a t the s im ile th a t m ore or less obscures the sim ple object occurs o n ly in m o d e rn l it ­ erature. M . N u w a y h l has discussed an exam ple in

d e ta il:

A lq a m a ’s com parison o f a w in e -ju g w ith a gazelle standing o n a h illto p ( M u fa d d a lïy â t, 1 2 0 :4 4 )/ N o r does the vis u a lly precise sim ile necessarily y ie ld m ore e xp la na tio n th a n opac­ ity , an im pression o f th in g s u n p lu m b e d : corpses w ith skin sw ollen lik e the b a rk o f the tragacanth after ra in

(M u f.

53 7 ) ; fo liage w a v in g in the w in d lik e g irls p u llin g at one an­ o th e r’s h a ir ( M u f. 14:7), and so on. S hklovsky has argued th a t a rt means to snap us o u t o f o u r habits o f perception, to increase the d iffic u lty and le n g th o f perception, because the process o f perception is an esthetic end in itse lf.8 I t seems to m e th a t another step m u st s till be ta k e n : the jo b o f a sim ile, o f this autocratic setting up o f re la tio n s in the w o rld , is to tu r n the w o rld in to a code w ith an u n ce rta in m eaning. T h a t objects com bine in to chords makes the w o rld m ore p ro fo u n d , m ore m usical. B y m a k in g a sim ile, we produce a clue th a t in tu rn generates a p uzzle. W e have this satisfaction in exchange, th a t the term s o f com parison m eet in o u r m in d s to spark th e ir in trig u e and th e ir m ystery. A sim ile m u st be m ore than the sum o f its parts, because it is o n ly the entrance to the la b y rin th o f its im m a n e n t possibil6 See Russian F orm alist C riticism , ed. and transi. L. T . Lemon and M . J. Reis (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1965), 6. 7 ash-Shi'r a l-jà h ilï, 1, 107-20. 8 Russian F orm alist C riticism , 12. 82

TW O VIEW S OF T IM E

ities. S anaw barl’s flo w e r is one o f the rare instances where com parison really causes re d u c tio n rather th a n co m p le xity. T h e objects to w h ic h the flo w e r is com pared are decorative atom s: they define a single tra ck— the decorative— fo r the sim ile, and we w o u ld be lo o k in g in v a in fo r great skeins o f m e aning — unless we w ere lo o k in g at the m otives fo r the act o f re d u ctio n itself. T h e poet loses the m ystery o f the s im ile by u sin g objects th a t he has chosen fo r th e ir im m u n ity to tim e . O u t w ith the m ystery goes o u r experience o f h a v in g co n trib u te d to the w o rld

by co m b in in g its notes in to m u s ic : the decorative

atoms f it in to no chord, g a in n o th in g by the sim ile, and re­ m a in self-sufficient. By enslaving the w o rld to the decorative, we have lost c o m m u n io n w ith it. O f a ll these things,

the poem fro m w h ic h m y firs t quote

comes speaks m ost e lo q ue n tly :

1

a-ra’ayta ahsana m in ‘u y ü n i n -n a rjisi

2

d u rru n tashaqqaqa ‘an y a w â q ïtin ‘alâ

3

a jfâ n u k â fü r in k h a fa q n a bi-a‘y u n in

am m in ta lâ h u z ih in n a wasta 1-m ajlisi q u d u b i z -z u m u rru d i fa w q a b u sti s-sundusi m in z a 'fa râ n in n â 'im â ti 1-malmasi H a v e you seen a n y th in g p re ttie r than th e eyes o f jo n q u ils , o r the glances they cast a t one a n o th e r in the m id s t o f a p a rty ? / Pearls u n fo ld in g fro m y e llo w sapphires th a t rest on em erald stems over carpets o f fin e sunduss il\ . / E yelids o f ca m phor th a t flu tte r in saffron eyes, delicate to the touch.

In these firs t three lines, once again we have a tw o fo ld reduc­ tio n , b u t i t is som ewhat d iffe re n t fro m the previous one (see page 81). T h e eye-m etaphor on w h ic h the firs t lin e is b u ilt

83

GENRES

is im m e d ia te ly d ism a n tle d in the second, and the flo w e r as flo w e r is translated in to precious stones. I n the th ir d lin e the m etaphor is recovered, b u t n o w the eyes are n o lo n g er lin k e d to the flow er, b u t to c o lo rfu l herbs— another essential decora­ tiv e elem ent o£ the p e rio d .9 In other w ords, the m etaphor fr o m nature in lin e one has been broken in to tw o sets o f m eta­ phors, b o th a im in g at decorative u ltim a te s : gems and herbs. T h e n e xt lin e is another sideways step : 4

w a-ka ’annahâ a q m â ru la y lin ahdaqat bi-shum üsi d a jn in fa w q a g h u s n in amlasi I t is as i f n ig h t-tim e moons encircled suits in the d a r \ over sm ooth branches.

T h e eye is abandoned here, and the flo w e r is given a new p a rt-by-pa rt m etam orphosis. A fte r term s o f com parison th a t had d u ra tio n b u t no histo ry, we n o w get a co m b in a tio n th a t cannot possibly

exist outside

the poet’s fancy.

O bjective,

m easurable tim e is blocked in th is verse, w h ic h w o rk s n ig h t and day in to a single m o m e n t. I n the next line, 5

m u g h ra w riq â tu n f ï ta ra q ru q i ta llih â ta rn ü ru n ü w a n -n â z iri 1-m utafarrisi T h e y are d ro w n e d in tears, w ith the g litte r o f dew upon th e m ; they stare w ith a s c ru tin iz in g eye.

there is a re tu rn to the b e g inn in g , at least in the sense th a t once again we have b o th the eye and the flo w e r. T h e im age 9 Cf. Abu A l l 1-Muhassin at-Tanükhi, K itâ b ja m ï a t-ta w â ri\h ( almusammâ bi-nishw àr al-m uhâdara w a-akjibâr a l-m udh à\ara ), ed. D. S. M argoliouth (London, 1921), 144-45, an anecdote about the caliph ar-Râdi.

TW O VIEW S OF T IM E

is som ew hat peculiar : w e do n o t q u ite k n o w w h a t to m ake o f the co m b in a tio n o f te a rfu l eyes and sta rin g eyes. I t is at best less th a n em o tio n a lly straight, and perhaps i t is absurd to com m on sense. B ut, as i t happens, the “ sta rin g ” is p icke d up at the end o f the poem, and i t figures in the m a in line o f th o u g h t. Verse six brin g s one m ore re d u ctio n o f the k in d we have been discussing: 6

fa-id hâ taghashshathâ r-riy â h u tanaffasat ‘an m it'h li r ïh i 1-miski ayya ta n a fïu si A n d when the w in d s s trik e them , they exhale so m e th in g l i \ e the fragrance o f m u s \. W h a t a b reath!

B y now , the flo w e r has been tra n sm u te d in to a ll three o f the decorative elements that, o n the basis o f m edieval texts, we w o u ld expect to see: gems, a rom atic herbs, perfum es. N o t every re d u ctio n succeeds in ta k in g every com ponent o f the flo w e r in to account; indeed, the last one deals w ith a single n e w ly in tro d u ce d characteristic, b u t th is does n o t affect the bouquet o f the w hole. A fte r the last v a ria tio n , there is a sud­ den re tu rn to the h u m a n analogy proposed in the firs t line, and the description is allow ed an em o tio n a l overtone : 7

wa-hakâ tadànï ba'dihâ m in ba‘d ihâ ya w m a n ta d ln iy a m u ’n is in m in m u ’n isi T h e ir closeness to one an o th e r resembles the closeness, one day, o f frie n d to frie n d .

W e are re m in d e d o f talâhuz, “ casting glances at each o ther,” in the op e n in g verse. A s in lin e fo u r, the in itia l co n ju n c tio n between flo w e r and eye is revived. I t is in a d d itio n g ive n an

85

GENRES

em o tio n a l d ire c tio n ; one m ig h t say i t is saved fro m n e u tra lity . T h e m ood lasts th ro u g h the n e xt line, a ve ry bad one, w h ic h explains th a t people embrace at parties and flow ers in flo w e r­ beds. T h e n i t collapses :

9

w a -id hâ na‘asta m in a 1-m udâm i ra ’aytahâ ta rn ü ila y k a bi-a‘y u n in la m tan'asi A n d i f you g ro w d row sy w ith w in e yo u see them s ta rin g a t you w ith un d ro w sy eyes.

F o rm a lly

the co n ju n c tio n

is s till there. I n

contents i t

is

broken. I t is rem arkable h o w the opposition between the tw o h alf-lines is set o ff by the m e tric a l scheme. T h e m eter is \à m il, trim e te r acatalectic, in w h ic h the h a lf-lin e is constituted by three feet o f the fo rm — - - o r - - - - - - 9a is the fastest o f a ll the h alf-lines in the poem ( i t is the o n ly one in w h ic h a ll three feet begin w ith an anapest ra th e r than a sponde), b u t 9b puts o n the brakes, u sin g — - - tw ice and - - - - -

o n ly once.

“ Y o u see the m sta rin g ” takes us d ire c tly back to lin e fo u r, and n o w the p e c u lia rity o f the tear-drow ned b u t s c ru tin iz in g eyes becomes a little m o re understandable. I t is n o t at a ll re­ solved; rather, the co n tra d ic tio n th a t is o n ly sensed in lin e fo u r is n o w e x p lic itly revealed. A s tru c tu ra l see-sawing th a t goes on th ro u g h o u t the poem at last becomes p a rt o f the con­ tents. T h e re has been a v a c illa tio n between com parison w ith the fix e d or fantastic on the one hand, and w it h the n a tu ra l and m uta ble on the other. T o the latter, the m ore o r less u n ­ translatable yaw m an, “ one day,” in lin e seven— conventional m e tri causa p a d d in g th o u g h i t is— gives the re q u ire d fla vo r o f te m p o ra lity. B u t you cannot very w e ll have i t b o th ways. A s yo u r eyes begin to close, the flo w e r’s eye continues its scru tin y o f you. I t is n o t a frie n d after a ll: i t is n o t a yo u b u t 86

TW O VIEW S OF T IM E

an i t — S anaw barï’s poem puts in to w ords the esthetic im p li­ cations o f the genre to w h ic h i t belongs. T h e re are three m ore lines. I n these the m o tif o f the glance fin d s its r ig h tfu l o w n e r: the saki w h o holds the p oet’s life in his hands. T h e last line, aw qa'ta q a lb ï bayna la h z in m u tm i'in f ï 1-wuddi m in k a wa-bayna la fz in m u ’yisi J o in in g to glances th a t m ake me yearn fo r y o u r love w ords th a t b rin g despair, yo u have prostrated m y heart. beats a retreat to a fru stra te d desire th a t is less u n c o m fo rta ­ ble th a n e n d u rin g the gaze th a t the enchanted flo w e r fixes upo n the sorcerer.

2 I n the second g ro u p o f poems, tim e , fa r fro m being denied, haunts the very structure o f com position. a-mâ tara n-narjisa 1-mayyâsa yalhazunâ alhâza d h l fa ra h in b il-‘atbi m a s rü ri k a ’anna ahdàqahâ f ï h u sn i süratihâ m a d â h in u t- tib ri f ï a w râ q i k â fü ri k a ’anna ta lla n-nadâ fïh ï li-m u b s irih ï dam ‘u n tara q ra q a m in a jfâ n i m a h jü ri10 D o you n o t see the sw a g g erin g narcissus casting at us the glances o f a joyous person [i.e. a C ru e l B ea u ty] d e lig h te d by a lo ve r’s reproaches? / In the beauty o f th e ir fo rm , 10 Ibn al-M u‘tazz, D tw ân, ed. M uh yid dïn al-Khayyât (Damascus, 1951), 317. N o t included in the partial edition of his D ïw ân by B. Le w in (Istanbul, 1945-1950). 87

GENRES

the p u p ils o f th e ir eyes resemble golden u n g u e n t boxes a m id leaves o f cam phor. / T o the beholder, the dew upon the narcissus resembles tears th a t g litte r fro m the eyelids o f a forsaken lover. I n m a n y ways, this flo w e r is a great deal lik e S anaw bari’s. T h e purpose to w h ic h the conventional images are p u t is q u ite d iffe re n t. T h e firs t and th ir d verses go together; the m id d le verse seems extraneous to the lo g ica l progression o f the poem. I n lines one and three, we have on the le ft side (o f tra n s c rip tio n and translation, th a t is) tw o states o f one object (narcissus w ith o u t and w ith d e w ) and on the r ig h t one asym m etrical re­ la tio n w ith tw o con tra stin g fu n c tio n s (c ru e l beloved: happy — shunned love r: g lu m ). B u t the tr u th o f the m a tte r is th a t w e are show n n o t tw o successive states o f the flo w e r b u t sim ­ p ly tw o glimpses o f it, in such a w ay th a t the second tim e aro u n d we notice the dew drops we had missed at firs t. Espe­ cia lly because the segments on the rig h t-h a n d side are con­ trasted, a peculiar tim e -la g is fe lt. In S anaw barî’s lines about anemones (p. 81) the w in d b lo w n flow ers w ere reduced to im m o b ility and thus deprived o f perceptible tim e . In tu rn , the narcissus is observed piecemeal, in discrete segments o f tim e . W h a t we get fr o m the poet is n o t the u n fo ld in g o f possi­ ble analogies to one object, n o r a continuous sweep o f the eye, b u t a double-take. T h e in te rru p tio n by the second verse— assum ing th a t i t is in its correct place— emphasizes the dis­ creteness o f the tw o observations. T h e sense o f a double-take creates a certain im balance be­ tw een the tw o sides o f the comparisons in lines one and three. T h e fo llo w in g ch art represents this im balance, L and R stand­ in g

fo r

the

le ft

and

rig h t

tra n sla tio n : 88

sides

of

tra n s lite ra tio n

and

TW O VIEW S OF T IM E

L3

L s is placed behind L 1} b e ing a perception o f the same object. and R s are separate, a lth o u g h they m ay be bracketed as fu n ctio n s o f a single re la tio n . S u b lim in a lly d e sirin g to correct the im balance— a desire o f the m in d , w h ic h i t is perhaps the chief m e rit o f h istorica l lin g u is tics to have dem onstrated— the reader w ill do one o f tw o th in g s. H e m ay resolve th a t in real­ ity we are seeing tw o d iffe re n t flowers, and consequently p u ll o u t L s fro m behind L 1. O r else he m ay accede to the in s in u a ­ tio n o f a now -you-see-it-now -you-don’t character in the other side, the bracketed R 1 and R s. T h e firs t solution is ra th e r the less g rip p in g o f the tw o . I f the reader chooses to come to an e q u ilib riu m by a llo w in g R 3 to overlap R t , the poem w ill say th a t causing pain and s u ffe rin g p a in m ay a b ru p tly fo llo w each other in the same person; and then, i f L t and L s im p ly th a t perception is experienced in discrete segments o f tim e, R 1 and R :, im p ly th a t em otions too come in discrete segments: th a t successive em otions in the same person are n o t o n ly fu g i­ tive b u t also fragm e n ta ry, and— b e in g experienced as n o n ­ contiguous— unaccountable. A lth o u g h i t was possible to assign verse tw o a role w ith in the poem, there is no escaping the tr u th th a t i t p u lls the other w ay:

tow ards

d u ra tio n

w ith o u t

h isto ry.

By

contrast,

in

Sanawbarî a c e n trifu g a l p u ll came fro m the obvious tem po­ ra lity o f the w o rd yaw m an, “ one day.” A s in m a n y poems o f this period, a p e n d u lu m sw ings between tw o poles: experi­ encing tim e by m a k in g the sense o f its discreteness in to a p rin c ip le o f poetic structure, and re je ctin g the experience 89

GENRES

altogether. In

o u r last example, decorative re d u ctio n as a

m ode o f pure d u ra tio n appeared fo r a m o m e n t in lin e tw o as a te m p tin g lu x u ry , i f also as an e xplicatory contrast. I t is q u ite conceivable th a t this type o f w asf poem was led to its a ttitu d e tow ards tim e by a basic technique fo r setting up in trig u in g conceits. T h e tr ic k is to take tw o objects or q u alities A 1 and B 1 th a t h a rm o n io u sly coexist in a set Slt and th e n m etapho rically translate them in to objects or qualities A 2 and

th a t belong to a single set S2, b u t th a t are in some

sense contraries. C om pare the fo llo w in g verse: w a-suhaylun k a -w a jn a ti 1-hibbi f l 1-lawn i w a -q a lb i 1-m uhibbi f ï l-k h a fa q a n i11 W h ile Canopus resembles in color the c h e e \ o f the beloved, and in th ro b b in g the heart o f the lo ve r . . . C o lo r and th ro b b in g are sim p ly co n co m ita n t in St (th e sta r), w h ile the cheek o f the beloved and the he a rt o f the lover show tw o com plem entary modes o f excitem ent in S$. F o r an­ othe r example, here is a H e b re w couplet by M oshe Ib n E zra, in w h ic h the same tech n iq u e is used : v e-tappüah em et ël lô berà ’ô l ebad ‘ôneg l em e rïah v en 5shëq h ashabtïhü be-shür yâ rô q v e-àdôm q ebusïm bô p enëy hàshüq v e-hôshêq12 In tru th , G o d d id n o t create apples m erely as a delecta­ tio n fo r those w ho sm ell them o r leave in them the m a r \

111 have been unable to locate this verse in the works o f Abu 1-A lâ 1-Ma‘arri, to whom it is attributed by M . M . A bdalham ïd in his Shark maqàmàt B a d ï az-Zaman al-Ham adhàm , 419. 12 See H . Shirman (ed)., ha-Shira h a -ib rit bi-Sfarad u-bi-Provatis (Jerusalem and T el A viv, 1961), 1, 374. 90

TW O VIEW S OF T IM E

o f th e ir te e th l j A s 1 observe an apple in w h ich re d and green are join e d , I th in ly I see the faces o f lo ve r and beloved. T h e lover is sick w ith desire, the beloved blushes, and a very p re tty re la tio n obtains between S1 and S2. T h is is a fa vo rite com binato ry m ethod, and the ne xt poem, by Ib n a l-M u ‘tazz, demonstrates h o w easily the co n tra stin g term s o f one set can fo rm a tem poral sequence : k a m qad q ata 'tu ila y k a m in d a y m ü m a tin n u ta fu 1-m iyàhi bihâ sawâdu n -n â z iri f ï la y la tin fîh â s-samâ’u m u lim m a tu n sawdâ’u m u z lim a tu n ka -q a lb i 1-kâfiri w al-b a rq u y a k h tifu m in k h ilà li sahâbihà k h a tfa 1-fu’âdi li-m a w ‘id in m in z â ’i r i w a l-g h a yth u m u n h a llu n yasuhhu k a ’anna'hü dam ‘u 1-m uw addi‘i ith ra ilf in sà’i r i 13 H o w m any deserts have I crossed on m y w ay to y o u ! Deserts in w h ich a ll the drops o f w ater together were no bigger than the p u p il o f the eye!11 / D u r in g a n ig h t w hen clouds h u n g lo w in th e sky, and the sky was p itch b la c \ lik e an unbeliever s heart, J w h ile lig h tn in g w o u ld be fla sh in g fro m c h in \s in th e clouds as the h eart flashes a t the tim e appointed fo r a vis ito r, / a n d w h ile the ra in clouds poured d o w n to rre n ts lik e the tears o f one w ho 13 Ibn al-M u‘tazz, D ïw ân, 318. 14 Perhaps Ibn al-Mu‘tazz means “ the only drops o f water were [of] the pu pil o f the eye,” i.e., either the hum or of vision (cf., fo r example, The B o o \ o f the Ten Treatises on the Eye Ascribed to H u na in Ibn ls-haq, Arabic text ed. and transi. M . Meyerhof [Cairo, 1928], p. 73 o f the Arabic and p. 3 o f the English text) or the aqueous element in the eye, discussed by Aristotle, D e anim a, in / i , 425a, o f w hich the poet could have read the translation by Hunayn’s son, Ishaq.

91

GENRES

is saying goodbye as he fo llo w s a frie n d d e p a rtin g in the n ig h t. T h e re are three p rin c ip a l contrasts in the poem. F irs t, the second h a lf brings flashes o f lig h t and a d o w n p o u r to balance the darkness and the a rid landscape in the firs t. T h is contrast is p u t chiastically. Second, the comparisons go fr o m static to dra m atic. T h ir d , b u ilt in to the similes o f the second h a lf is the contrast the poem is re a lly a fte r: a rriv a l and departure. T h e other contrasts sim p ly orchestrate this last one. T h e technique I have described comes in to play in lines three and fo u r, w here various sim ultaneous events are related by circu m sta n tia l clauses, b u t w here s im u lta n e ity is dissected by the similes in to a te m p o ra l sequence: lig h tn in g goes w ith a rriv a l, ra in w ith the tears o f p a rtin g . A s in the previous examples, A ± and B , n o rm a lly coexist w h ile A 2 and B 2 m ake up an opposition, b u t n o w the opposition q u ite n a tu ra lly sug­ gests a passage o f tim e . T h e reader w ill note th a t the desert too has tw o states: the firs t and fo u rth lines cannot be de­ s crib in g sim ultaneous events. E v e ry th in g is open to sudden change,

to

tim e

in

w h ic h

one

discrete

segment fo llo w s

another. M y last e x h ib it comes fr o m H e b re w poetry, b u t i t is o b vi­ ously o f the genre we are discussing and rooted in the A ra b ic tra d itio n . T h e poem is by Samuel h a -N a g id :15 i asappe elêy shahaq v e-kokàbàv v e-abbït be-eres et r emâseyhâ 15

See ha-Shira h a -ib rit, i, 136. Shirman presents the text o f the

poem as it appears in Samuel ha-Nagid’s Ben Qohelet. This is the text I cite. The poet incorporated it in to a longer poem in another book of his, cf. D ivan Shem u’e l ha-N agid ( Ben T eh illim ), ed. D. Yarden (Jerusalem, 1966), 151-52. 92

TW O VIEW S OF T IM E

2 ve-âbïn be-lib b ï k ï y esïrâtâm ycsîrâ m eh u k kâ m â b e-m a‘ seyhâ 3 r e’ü et shem êy m â rô m k em ô qubbâ t efü r ïm b e-lü lâ ’ô t q erâseyhâ 4 v e-sahar v e-kokâbâv k em ô rô ‘à t eshallah be-tô k âhü k ebâseyhâ 5 k c- illü l ebânâ bëyn n esï ey ‘âb sefln â m eha lle ke t b e-nisseyhâ 6 v e-‘ânân k e-‘alm â al p 6nëy g in n â t eh a llë k v e-tashqe et hadasseyhâ 7 v e-‘âb ta l k em ô n a 'râ t ena‘ër m in se‘àrâh ‘alêy eres r esîseyhâ 8 ve-sh ô kn ïm k em ô hayyâ asher n à tetâ l e-lïn â v e-hasrôtâm abüsey'hâ 9 v e-k u llâ m yenüsün m ë-hatat m âvet k e-yônâ asher han-nës y enïsehâ io v e-sôfâm l c-h id d a m m ô t l e-sallahat asher shibb6rü k â tît harâseyhâ / I observe the s \y and its stars, and glance at the earth an d the th in g s th a t creep upon it. 2 I realize th a t th e ir creation was w isely carried out. 3 L o o \ at the heavens h ig h u p : they are lik e a dom ed tent, the loops alo ng the flaps be in g clasped together by hooks. 4 T h e m oon and the stars th a t go w ith i t are lik e a shepherdess w ho sends her lam bs to the w a te r m eadow . 5 A m o n g scudding clouds, the m oon seems a ship m o v in g u n d e r its banners. 6 T h e clo u d is l i \ e a y o u n g w om an w a lk in g in a garden, w a te rin g her m yrtles. y T h e cloudy haze o f dew is lik e a g ir l s h a kin g o u t upon the earth the drops o f w a te r fro m her h air. 8 A n d the in h a bita n ts are lik e a beast th a t lies d o w n to sleep; th e ir enclosed courts are the stables.

93

GENRES

9 A l l o f them flee fro m the te rro r o f death, as a dove th a t the hau>\ pursues. 10 A n d th e ir end is to be com pared w ith a plate th a t someone has smashed in to sherds. T h e poem n a tu ra lly fa lls in to three parts. T h e firs t tw o lines are p re fa to ry; the last tw o fo rm a conclusion. T h e longest sec­ tio n , lines 3-7, consists in a set o f comparisons, in each o f w h ic h te rm A is a celestial o r atm ospheric object, and te rm B a te rre stria l object o f some k in d . Series A is constructed in such a w ay as to give the im pression o f a connected sequence: sky— m oon haze o f

and stars— m o o n

dew. T h e re

am ong clouds— cloud— cloudy

is a clear d o w n w a rd

m o tio n

fro m

“ heavens up h ig h ” to “ haze o f dew .” T h e experience is o b vi­ ously spatial, b ro u g h t about by a broad d o w n w a rd sweep o f the eye, alth o u g h the lin e fo llo w e d is n o t absolutely c o n tin u ­ ous. A cascade effect is caused w hen com ponents o f series A appear in a certain verse and then reappear, in a d iffe re n t visua l syntagm , in

the n e x t: “ m oon am o n g stars” — “ m oon

am ong clouds,” etc. O n the plane o f vocabulary, a synonym ic va ria tio n ( sahar and l eb â n à fo r “ m o o n ,” 'â n â n and ‘âb fo r “ c lo u d ” ) parallels the sense o f seeing the same object in a new lig h t. A jerkiness results th a t recalls the view s o f the narcis­ sus o r the desert sto rm in Ib n a l-M u ‘tazz. Before I discuss its effect on the poem as a w hole, I m u s t tu r n to series B, the rig h t-h a n d side o f the comparisons. U n lik e its counterpart, series B consists o f term s th a t are n o t m o tiva te d by one another b u t o n ly by th e ir successive analogues on the le ft. T h e curious th in g about the term s o f series B is th e ir s im ila rity to one another. T h re e o f the five in v o lv e a w om an and w ater, and w a te r occurs in yet a fo u rth (verse 5 ). T h e s tru c tu ra l contrast between the tw o series re­ flects a fu n d a m e n ta l p rin c ip le o f language itself.

94

TW O VIEW S OF T IM E

T h e s im ila r images o f series B correspond to a su b stitu tio n set in the vocabulary, th a t is to say to a g ro u p o f sem andcally k in d re d w ords only one o f w h ic h w ill be picked by the speak­ er fo r a g iven slot in an utterance. T h is m a n n e r o f g ro u p in g w ords (e.g., “ fo rest/w o o d /co p se ” ) represents one axis o f the sem iological code; the other axis has to do w ith the w ay in w h ic h one elem ent m ay fo llo w another in an actual syntagm (e.g., “ m oth-eaten d ra g o n ” m a y occur, “ m oth-eat d ra g o n ” m ay n o t) . A s Saussure puts it, a s u b stitu tio n set exists in ab­ sentia (i.e., in the speaker’s m in d ) and is a v irtu a l m n e m o n ic series, w h ile a set o f w ords fo r m in g an actual syntagm exists in praesentia.16 N o w the objects th a t fo rm series A in o u r poem are in a re­ la tio n o f visual c o n tig u ity , and they clearly correspond in visual term s to a set o f elements arranged in praesentia. T h e objects o f series B s trike one as a su b stitu tio n set (a ll b u t one o f whose constituents o u g h t to be in absentia), b u t th a t has n o t undergone the selection process usual in speech. T h e con­ trast between the tw o sem iological axes b rin g s m e m o ry in to play— Saussure’s phrase is n o m etaphor. “ Shepherdess, g irl, yo u n g w o m a n ” — the series th a t should exist o n ly m n em on ica lly, in absentia— balances m oon, stars, and the rest, as th o u g h the depth o f rem em brance were being scoured to help the on lo oke r breathe u n der the vast spaces described in series A . H e seizes on m em ory, n o t so m u c h any specific content o f i t as the free m ovem ent th ro u g h tim e to w h ic h m e m o ry pretends— the echoes th ro u g h tim e in N e r16

F. de Saussure, Cours de lin g u istiq u e générale, ed. C. Bally and

A. Schehaye (Paris, 1962), 170-71. T o R. Jakobson belongs the m erit o f having first recognized how im portant a role Saussure’s distinc­ tion can play in stylistic analysis; cf. “ T w o Aspects o f Language and T w o Types o f Aphasie Disturbances,” in R. Jakobson and M. Halle, Fundam entals o f Language ( ’s-Gravenhage, 1956), 55-82.

95

GENRES

va l’s S ylvie, the taste o f the m adeleine. T h e specific im age ( “ w om an” +

“ w a te r” )

does, nonetheless, pro m o te the de­

sired effect: em otively, because its gentle figures o ffe r a con­ trast to the grander objects o f the n ig h t sky, and stru ctu ra lly, because “ w o m a n ” +

“ w a te r” is a lite ra ry archetype in the

N e a r East. T h e co m b in a tio n o f the w ords ta l and r esiseyhâ sends the audience d ire c tly back to Song o f Songs 5:2,17 b u t we m ay also th in k o f o u r firs t glim pses o f Rebecca, Gen. 24:11-15, and o f Rachel, G en. 29:8-io.18 T h a t the poet’s con­ tem poraries, reared on te xtu a l exegesis, w o u ld have in s tin c ­ tiv e ly analyzed the “ w o m a n ” +

“ w a te r” images in to th e ir

com ponents and then in to the u n d e rly in g archetype, I have no doubt. V e ry subtly, the audience has been m ade to sense th a t m e m o ry provides the m in d w ith an in n e r space and a free­ d o m fr o m the here-and-now, b u t in lin e e ig h t these notions are g iven a w rench, and in the fin a l couplet they are denied. I n lin e eight, the p a th fo llo w e d by series A comes d o w n to earth, and at once the su b stitu tio n set on the rig h t-h a n d side is b ro ke n o ff. “ T h e in h a b ita n ts ” are a class o f w h ic h the class “ sh ep herdess/girl/yo u n g w o m a n ” p ro p e rly fo rm s a part, so th a t we have a s h ift o f the class “ h u m a n beings” fro m one side o f the w o rd k^mô, “ lik e ,” to the other. T h is is a fo rm a l sw itch s ig n a lin g th a t we are m o v in g fro m class to class in a broader sense than had been apparent in the m id d le section o f the poem . M o re is being presented than a single set o f analogues to m eteorological m atters. W e are co n fro n te d w it h a set o f sets arranged in descending o rd e r: celestial objects and at­ m ospheric

phenom ena— h u m a n

beings— beasts and

b ird s—

17 Shirman, loc.cit. 18 Compare the meeting between Enkidu and the temple prostitute in Gilgam esh, tablet 1, col. 4. Also comparable is, I thin k, the meeting w ith

the Laestrygonian princess at the Artacian

105-08). 96

spring

(Od. x,

TW O VIEW S OF T IM E

clay. T h e descending lin e observed in the spatial arrange­ m e n t and in this classification is paralleled in the g ra m m a r o f the co n clu din g verses, w ith the verbs m o v in g away fro m the active

m ode.

In

the

m id d le

section,

the

hum an

beings

in series B are subjects w ith active-transitive verbs. I n lin e seven, the connection between subject and active verb is even p a n to m im e d

by paronom asia: n d r â / fn a ë r . I n

the sw itch-

lin e im m e d ia te ly fo llo w in g , the verb is n o longer transitive, and i t is no longer assigned to the h u m a n beings in the line, b u t to the next class d o w n : “ the in h a bita n ts [a re ] lik e a beast th a t lies d o w n to sleep.” ( I n H e b re w , the copula has a zero fo rm in the present tense.) In lin e nine, te rm B o f the com­ parison has no verb at a ll; instead, i t is the antecedent o f a relative clause o f w h ic h i t tu rn s o u t to be the object: “ as a dove th a t the h a w k pursues.” Once again, there is an asso­ nance lin k in g “ flee,” “ dove,” and “ pursue,” b u t n o w the action th a t is acoustically lin k e d to the object o f com parison is en­ dured rather th a n pe rfo rm e d by th a t object. In th is verse there is s till a nam ed outside agent— the h a w k . I n the con­ c lu d in g line, the last te rm B is th e object (v ia a re la tive clause aga in) o f a cru sh in g ly im personal ve rb : “ a plate th a t some­ one has smashed.” T h e m o od created by the spatial d o w n w a rd lin e — d o w n to the potsherds fa llin g to the g ro u n d — is n o t unaffected by the descending order o f categories fro m heaven to clay and by the sequence o f verb fo rm s. T o fo llo w i t th ro u g h is sentir l ’h o rrib le fardeau d u T em ps q u i brise vos épaules et vous penche vers la terre™ T h e jerkiness we noticed in the spatial sequence gains a m eaning w hen, in the last tw o verses, m e m ­ ory is checkmated. T h e single sweep o f the eye was analyzed in to

segments:

the

world-scape

th a t expands

over us in

a tra n q u il vastness could be grasped o n ly p a rt by p a rt; i t was 19

Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec and C. Pichois

(Paris, 1961), 286. (L e spleen de Paris, xxxm .)

97

GENRES

perceived by retakes. T h e cascade effect was n o t o n ly spatial b u t also te m p o ra l: the d iv is ib ility o f the sweeping glance is also witness to the a rb itra ry shears o f tim e . A t last the code invades the contents: sôfâm l e-h id d a m m ô t, “ th e ir end is to be com pared.” Perhaps th is im p in g e m e n t is m ore th a n a poetic m a n n e rism ; perhaps i t goes some o f the w ay to w a rd redeem ing the experience o f m em ory. T h e ir end is to be com pared; w e do the com p a rin g . W e are im p riso n e d in tim e , every b it as m u c h as the th in g s th a t s u rro u n d us; to compare, to sort o u t the relations about us, to actively experi­ ence o ur being in tim e is m a k in g the best o f it.

jr

98