Literature and the Gods by Roberto Calasso

Author:Roberto Calasso [Calasso, Roberto]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 978-0-307-53773-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-06-15T16:00:00+00:00

For example, an open window at night, the two shutters secured; a room with no one in it, despite the stable atmosphere produced by the secured shutters, and in a night made of absence and questioning, no furniture, except perhaps some plausible hint of vague consoles, a frame, combative, with death throes, around a mirror hung in the background, with its reflection, starry and incomprehensible, of the Ursa Major, the Great Bear, that connects this abandoned lodging of the world to the sky alone.

This paraphrase, itself an enchanted shred of prose, refers to the one lyric of which Mallarmé declared that he didn’t even know if it made sense or not, and that even if it didn’t the author nevertheless “would take comfort from it … thanks to the amount of poetry that it contains.” All of which will serve as the definitive demonstration that the only acceptable paraphrase is not the one that results from the improvident determination to translate a poem into some supposed meaning, but on the contrary a literary genre in its own right. And one that in this case is especially precious to us, because it states the implicit subject of the poem: the “room with no one in it.” It has been observed that from the upheaval of 1866 on, Mallarmé’s poetry abandons the outside world and shuts itself away in a room. But what is this room that coincides with the very space of the poem? Could it be that room “with no one in it,” inhabited only by a mirror? And who was it who just left that room, a few seconds, or millennia, ago?

There is a very strong and very ancient emotion that is rarely mentioned or recognized: it is the anguish we feel for the absence of idols. If the eye has no image on which to rest, if there is nothing to mediate between the mental phantasm and that which simply is, then a subtle despondency creeps in. This is the atmosphere that reigns in the first dream of which we have a record, a dream told by a woman, Addudûri, overseer of the palace of Mari in Mesopotamia, in a letter etched on clay tablets more than three thousand years ago. “In my dream I had gone into the temple of the goddess Bêllit-ekallim; but the statue of Bêllitekallim wasn’t there! Nor were the statues of the other divinities that normally stand beside Her. Faced with this sight I wept and wept.” The first of all dreams speaks of an empty temple, like Mallarmé’s empty room. The statues have been carried off, deported perhaps, along with the people who worshiped them. That kind of thing happened then. Loss precedes presence: every image must abide by this rule. And this helps us understand why literature, guardian of every space haunted by phantoms, has so adroitly searched out those fugitive idols and restored them to their pedestals.

And the mirror? Mightn’t that too be inhabited? Let’s take a look. Along the frame we see the perennial pursuit, tussle, and flight of gods, Nymphs, and fabled beasts.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.