Literary Time

Literary Time

By Thomas Richards

Literature is canonical only if some of the literary canon is present within it.

     This can happen in many ways. A great work is an event within literature, and it is registered as such. This registration usually takes place within the new work, which makes a place for itself within literature by a marshaling of the forces from the literary past (however configured) that matter to it. Each new canonical work reinflects the canon that led up to it. The references can be made in many ways, through allusion, etymology, copying, rewriting, structural similarity, naming, and many other means besides. What is uncontested is that a new great work will always refer, somehow, to old great works. This is as old as the Iliad taking the grid of its stories from Gilgamesh, as modern as Joyce retelling the Odyssey and Jean Rhys adding her coda, Wide Sargasso Sea, to Jane Eyre, or as contemporary as Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe inserting the affair of two gay men within the medieval Book of Margery Kempe. By using a proven literary frame as a plot, a writer makes it possible to open up a work to more than historical time and mere chronology. This use opens them up to literary time.

     Literary time is not time in any conventional sense of the word, but time as it exists in the literary canon. T. S. Eliot describes it as “a feeling that the whole of literature from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country’s a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.” As a novelist, E. M. Forster imagines the same simultaneous order, with“all novelists writing their novels at once, no matter what ages and races them come from,” working “together in a circular room.” The literary canon exists in time—but only in the sense of a latency. The canon’s circular room is potentially there to any writer who enters it, from any direction. This latency is more or less immune to the winds of historical time; even Camus speaks of “la paix parfaite des livres.” If all the classics departments in the United States were suddenly to be abolished for political reasons, as some have proposed, it would not affect the latency of the classical canon in the least. The classical canon would still be there in that essentially latent state that is the condition of the canonical. In this way, literary latency is our greatest protection against the forces of censorship. Only a few copies of a text need survive to make the latency manifest. Fifty or so Illiads and three Odysseys over three thousand years were enough. Most literary writers are concerned, not with university of access, but with the particulars of textual survival. Again, this is often very slender. Our two greatest writers of the 19th century are Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson. Melville saw only around 3,000 copes of Moby-Dick sold in his lifetime, and Dickinson, only a few of her poems printed. Most really great works are never lost. Speaking of the loss of “the 150-odd writers of [ancient Greek] tragedy whose names are known,” the great classicist M.I. Finley observes that “there is reason to believe that the process of selection through the ages was not a bad one.” Keats’ epitaph makes much the same point when it says, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” It only seems evanescent. “Writ” is a pun on Holy Writ. It of course does not matter if his particular name was writ in water. We do not know who wrote Holy Writ in most cases. The names can always be cast on the water. It is the texts that survive, and they often survive in the fairly nebulous state I am calling latent form.

     The paradox here is that the more of what is written is placed within literature, the freer writers are to make it their own. Literature has too many moving parts to have to invent them all anew each and every time. Working within literature gives a writer the deep freedom of form. Working conservatively within literature can in this way produce very radical results—in the sense of giving the new work a deep rootedness in the old, which lends, in the right hands, unexpected boldness to the new. Try taking all the referents out of The Waste Land. It becomes flat and insipid. Without the Troubadours the wonderful early work of Pound would barely exist. And Ulysses without Homer would be an odd collection of short stories with no inner interconnectedness. The examples go on and on. Tennyson’s In Memoriam is a great poem; his “Ulysses” is a canonical one. The Turn of the Screw is uncannily good because of all the ghost stories that lead up to it and make it function the way it does. Wuthering Heights is instinct with Milton, Byron, and Hogg. There are a lot of great writers whose work will not become canonical because their work is not literary in the specifically canonical sense I mean above. Any literary work that does not engage the canon is ephemeral. There can be great, even magnificent ephemera. Many great novels fall into this category. Gone with the Wind may be a superb story, but it’s really a movie told in prose (the movie does it ample justice), whereas Absalom, Absalom has within it the beating heart of the American Civil War, not in spite of the range of its reference, but because of it. The Civil War may well ultimately need the structuring agency of latent form to deal with its full extremities of emotion and violence. As Coleridge says, the creative imagination shows itself most intensely in “the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities” and especially in combining “a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order.”

     This is true even when the latent form is veiled, as it often is in modern poetry.  As an example, here is my poem, “Rest Stop.” I actually wrote it just before writing a much longer narrative poem, called Antigone at Antietam, as an experiment of sorts, an experiment in literary time:

Rest Stop

     The first thing to notice about the poem is that it is written in tetrameter. In tetrameter, there are four iambs in each line, making for a total of eight beats. This meter is used in English, mostly in Scottish and English traditional ballads, so it is a very marked, if quiet choice. The meter is further apposite because it is at once both balladic and epic. The ballad form was used during the Civil War, and the epic is just the form the story needs, so it is a good thing both can be present together in literary time. Indeed it is possible to read “Rest Stop” and not notice that it is written in a very old meter. Ezra Pound describes the shorter epic lines as being “readable” in English, which rarely uses lines as long as those found in Homer. Looking at various translations of Homer published over the centuries, Pound finds he prefers the late-medieval ones, which have “an authenticity of conversation as would be demanded by an intelligent audience not yet laminated with aesthetics,” along with “the repetitions of the chanson de geste.”

     Reading about this meter made me want to use it in a poem. I reduced the short epic line Pound talks about even further, from ten to eight beats per line, to suit the laconic rhythms of American speech ( J. V. Cunningham rightly remarks how frequently Americans speak in iambic tetrameters, often in complete grammatical units.) Pound was right to say that its reduction in length gives it a lightness of motion that mitigates against the usual heaviness of the long epic line when it is translated into English. And right away I found that using it in a poem made me, willy-nilly, use it the way it was meant to be used in the traditional ballads, but with a lovely tilt toward the Chanson de Roland and the 1545 L’Iliade of Hugues Salel. An traditional meter is inescapably traditional. Write in it, and the tradition will emerge, whether the writer or reader knows it or not (you can easily set up your own experiment by trying to write a villanelle). Form governs meaning in poetry, though the line-by-line government is often more flexible than one might think. Flexible is the one word I would not hesitate to apply to the best modernist poetry. The past is inescapably present in its deep and persistent forms, but often in very unexpected ways. As W. H. Auden observes: “Originality means… the capacity to find in any other work of any date of any date or locality clues for the treatment of one’s own subject matter.”

     The poem opens in an unepic vein. A rest stop off the highway. But even here, there are soundings. The daughter is complaining (the Iliad starts with two complaining heroes). They are at Assembly Point One (epics commonly begin with the assembly of armies). And a sense that the actual place of the epic has been lost—was it near here?—a big maybe, like the location of the actual Troy. “Captions” evokes the problem of the formulaic. The containment of the flushing water, drawing out the Bull Run river, evokes Hephaestus’s containment of the river attacking Achilles in book 22 of the Iliad. These details are there, but once again, they are not meant to be noticed. A lot of detail in poetry is quietly there in that state of latency I have already talked about. It’s there primarily to be unconsciously registered, though later, it’s possible to tease out the system of reference, as I have done. By no means did I put all this in there consciously. As I hope will become clear, the meter did it.

     The epic form, then, is inescapably present in the meter of the poem. Yet the poem actually contrives to escape from it, a line at a time. This is fully on view in the third stanza. The stanza begins in a fully epic vein, with the marshaling of the armies for war. “The armies coming at night, on roads/”. Yet a third eyelid blinks in this one small line. This is the only line in at the poem that has nine beats. The epic form is present, but something about it is not being religiously observed. Usually epics begin with an almost reverent observance of epic meter. This one doesn’t.

     The next lines are epic too, but in gradually lessening degree. They move from the mythologically menacing full moon, to steel, which never appears in epic (it’s always bronze or iron), to the daguerreotype, which is starkly hieratic in its contrasts of black and white, but still a modern technology.  Then we come to: “but see.”

     And now the close observation, which marks this as a modern take on the epic, begins. The one simile in the poem “like corn more nib than husk” is a truncated epic simile, which is often drawn from agriculture. Corn is a grain, of course, but a distinctly American one, and one that rarely appears in traditional epics. The details about the uniforms build on each other. The more realistic the details, the more the meter strains to contain them (the simile is part of this) in this old form, until, by the end of the stanza, the meter breaks apart. The last line has only three beats. It is in modern free verse. The strain of the real has broken apart the mythic quality of the epic line. The final line reaches the extremity of the real—the lines in italics are a quotation from an actual letter written by a Union soldier in 1861. The soldier is going to war, but his experience is completely quotidian. He is not an epic warrior but an untrained amateur soldier heading into battle for the first time.

     The last stanza returns the poem fully to the real. But only seemingly. That reality has been reconfigured by the emergence of epic in the minutiae of real experience. The ranger tips her hat at the narrator. The sense is that though the epic moment may have receded, it still exists in that state of latency which is the operative state of canonical literature. The poem ends, but the traditional ballad meter, derived as it is in this case from 12th- and 16th-century epic meters, is still fully intact, reestablished after the few lines at the end of the 3rd stanza, and observed rigorously to the end. The epic is there in the ordinary—even when it seems not to be. At the farthest, most realistic, reach of epic meter, there is the father with his tired wife and restless daughter. At the nearer reach is the full apparatus of epic itself, the great marshaling of the armies that begins the third stanza. The modernity of the poem consists in its gradual modulation away from the epic back toward the real. The canonical quality consists of the epic embedded in the real, and the real in the epic. The poem ends with the reader uncertain as to what the ranger knows about this. Is she a kind of Muse, far-seeing, who knows that ordinary tourists coming to the Manassas battlefield may well experience an epic recrudescence of the Civil War? Or is she just tired at the end of a long day at the gate?

     We will never know. But in “Rest Stop,” the form of the epic persists, even if unseen or unrecognized. Even “rest stop” can sound almost like a poetic command governing meter: Rest/stop. But only almost. Nothing is as it seems in this poem. The real is the epic and the epic is the real, and both, as literary, are simultaneously and inextricably present, latently, in the form of the poem.

*

“Rest Stop” really was an experiment. I wrote the poem to test my sense of literary time. I thought if I wrote in a certain form, a certain content would emerge. Not magically or ineffably, of course, but because I set myself to a course of reading to get to know the epic in its medieval incarnations prior to writing it. I could have tried to break away from it completely. I did a little by making the opening so quotidian, and by shortening the length of the line. But as I wrote, I felt the palpable pressure of the epic form emerging from within the meter I was writing in. That is, I wrote with a memory of how the meter has been used in the past, and from that memory emerged a number of conditions of possibility. It’s worth emphasizing these were only—conditions. I could have rejected my own memory of the specific capabilities of this form of verse. Writing, I still had choices to make, but the range of those choices was vastly extended by the history of the form, even as I modified the form. I also found that, try as I might to make everything fairly modern, the past underwent a recrudescence in my hands. I use this word because it connotes an partly undesirable condition—in that there is a sense here that I cannot escape the past. I am writing the poem because I am carrying it within me as meter birthing form. This is what my friend W. Jackson Bate called it “the burden of the past on the English poet.” It felt heavy. When I tried to get away from it I couldn’t. Something embedded in the meter kept pulling me away from that car in the parking lot and into the past. As my late friend knew well, “burden” is also an old word for “refrain.”

     The past of the American Civil War, of course, had no received form for epic expression. With her unerring instinct, Emily Dickinson uses tetrameter in almost all of her poems, though few touch on the Civil War directly. This is where there is real refreshment in the canonical. Lance Morrow has said that the American Civl War was all of Homer and Shakespeare packed into four years. That is, the history has a dramatic and mythical quality. However, a writer has never come along to do it full justice, though a few texts have come glancingly close (The Red Badge of Courage, but only in its treatment of battle, gleaned from Stendahl’s The Charterhouse of Parma; Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, as a nightmare); Dickinson’s “After great pain,” written in the fall of 1862,  just after Antietam. Only epic or poetic drama are likely to be epic or dramatic enough, but these genres do not suit modern sensibilities. It’s also true that it may be too soon. Homer wrote at least 400 years after the Trojan War. Shakespeare sets almost everything in a fairly remote past, or at least a putative or displaced past. The forms we favor now are inimical to this treatment of the past. Henry James feels that “the reachable past” of the novel is only about forty or fifty years—the length, roughly, of living memory.  Beyond that, we enter the artificial world of the historical novel. Only the epic has a mythical enough inflections to do justice to the Homeric and Shakespearean qualities of the Civil War. Our vast realistic reconstructions of the Civil War, from historical novels to movies to physical reenactments in situ, only serve to parcellize the Civil War into modern, realistic perspectives that fall far short of what ought to be written about the Civil War. The mythic qualities of the war can and will only appear when writers are able to translate the events into mythic literary form. Undoubtedly this will entail considerable distortion. If you wince at this, remember it is because you are too much of this one moment in time. I do think it likely that several hundred years may have to pass before the Civil War recedes into a mythical-enough past that it can be treated in the Homeric or Shakespearean manner that it deserves.

     Mythical enough. This was precisely my problem as I wrote “Rest Stop.” I live in a modern, realistic world. So does the father who has the vision. His little vision is fragmentary, which makes sense because we are so far from the epic form that any recovery of it is likely to be fragmentary at first. But “Rest Stop” show that the vision is still possible. The epic survives as a latent form among the texts and conventions of the canonical. It just needs someone who can see and feel it as a latent form.

     To return now to my sense of latency in literature. A great writer is a specialist in latent form. Shakespeare could tease a latent form out of almost any random story he came across; he found Aeschylus and Sophocles in Macbeth. Dante and Milton were able to pull the epic form out of the great miscellany of the Bible. Melville used the Bible and Shakespeare to create Ahab. More recently, the form of The Waste Land is the very form of canonical latency itself; it reads like a fractured encyclopedia of latent forms. The Cantos of Pound function in much the same way. This makes sense: the job of the great writer is to bring back the canon in a new way. Irreferential literature will never be canonical. Great works have to fit with what is already there. The unexpectedness of the fit is what make them great. Who would have thought the Leopold Bloom could be Ulysses? Or to take a much smaller example, who would have thought that a tired father pulling his family into a rest stop in Manassas, Virginia, would rewitness the epic marshaling of the great armies of the civil war (they were, in fact, marshaled fully for the first time there at Manassas, like at Aulis in the Iliad; thus the apposite choice of setting; Gettysburg would clearly not have been a good fit here). It’s not likely my little poem will not make the cut for the canon. But at least it has about it the precondition of the canonical. Many other works do, too, even though, in most cases, they will not make it there either. Glück’s Margery Kempe meets those preconditions, but I can’t tell if it will last or not. The decision of a new publisher to pick up the book, publishing it for a second time, is perhaps a sign that it might.

     Latency is life of a sort, a solution in suspension pending a precipitate, but it is also a very real suspension. Almost nothing being written now, and very little that is valued now, will be read in the future. This is the condition of literature, and in our time it has been almost universally rejected by teachers and critics. I can well imagine what they might say to me; their arguments are only too familiar. What they cannot understand is that the literary canon cannot be changed or extended except by purely literary means. The present has almost no existence in literary time. Wait a hundred years, the canon is always telling us—as if we could. No one has ever existed who will have that kind of patience, or that kind of time.

*

The exact status of the canon—where it exists, and how—has long been a matter for debate. Most answers are epistemological and temporal. The canon is known and constructed  by writers, readers, critics, institutions. The actual status of the canon is ontological and atemporal. That is, it inhabits a state of being which various writers perceive at various times as canonical within their texts. “Canon formation” is a contradiction in terms because it presumes an agency outside literature. Canons are not formed by anything other that the independent interrelationship of the texts themselves in a text. This is where the latency lies. The interrelationship of these texts— as felt within the mind of the writer, writing— is what constitutes the canon. Each writer may configure the canon a little differently, but there are enough regularities, and enough overlap, to make a reasonable Venn diagram out of it. The only thing that is genuinely outside the canon is a non-overlapping state. Popular writers with no range of textual reference will never enter it. Even densely literary writers may or may not, or they may be in for a while, then out for a while. But this literary intertextuality is the very precondition of the canonical, a necessary but certainly not a sufficient condition.

     In this way, the canon survives like a virus from generation to generation. The comparison is apposite because a virus needs a host. Just as viruses have no independent existence outside the host, the canon cannot exist for long without being hosted in a literary work. There it is revived, felt as an animate form of being that informs the texts at its most fundamental stratum. Reading Dante or Joyce or Shakespeare, we feel a continuous but temporary sense of lineage. Homer, our great point of origin, is nothing if not pure rearranged lineage, as Millman Perry has shown so brilliantly (Homer was just about the best arranger who ever lived). Nothing in the Iliad or Odyssey is not canonical. The canon only exists as a revived thing within the literary work. Any attempt to make it something other than this is truly evanescent, if not a little ridiculous.

     To return to my poem: its essential underlying function is to assemble its own canon. Here it is Homer, army assembly scenes in other epics, medieval Troiads in French tetrameter and pentameter, and some modern poems about the recovery of the past, such as Philip Larkin’s “Church Going.” The canon is temporary to the poem, but if it is successfully temporary, it becomes available as a potential canon-combination to any acutely literary reader. The particular combination is reanimated in each instance of reading. It can pass unnoticed, of course, and often does. But properly speaking, it becomes canonical only when recognized as such by a reader. Different texts help readers along to this in different ways. The Waste Land has footnotes. War and Peace has Clausewitz-like excursions into the politics of war. Joyce has pages of out-and-out eschatology in A Portrait. You don’t have to be a highly-trained reader to figure this out. You just need to be paying attention to the text itself, and not to whatever the voices of a particular moment in time are telling you to see in it.

     For most readers, the greatest danger is that the combined strength of the voices of the present will drown out the quietly intertextual voices of the past. This makes sense. Present voices are alive and loud, while the voices of any given text exist in the barely-audible state of latency that is the canonical. They are the voices of the dead, after all.

     To sum it up: a canon is a temporary textual assemblage of a literary lineage as projected by a single text. A multiplicity of overlapping projections, offering what seem to be complementary assemblages, can of course give the feeling of considerable solidity, a stable list of sorts. But when the projections cease to overlap, as they often do over time, each text is left with its own available intertextual resources. They may or may not be revived as such, but often they slip into the state of latency that I have defined as the basic condition of the canonical. Potentially canonical writing reinflects the canon by making its latent forms manifest. Great works of literature are little potential canons, and it is worth remembering that this potential, as nebulous as it seems, is more than enough to insure their survival.

     It is a strangely satisfying process, because it puts literature in charge of itself. This is as it should be. Time is always on the side of literary time. The gatekeepers may still be at their gates, but it does not matter to great works whether those gates are open or closed, and never will.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Jan-Mar 2024