Richard Beck
by Richard Beck
Homer’s Iliad, like the Bible, establishes time, and therefore history, as essential to the western tradition. The Old Testament chronicles the history of Israel; Homer’s first epic condenses the Fall of Troy into a matter of weeks. Hesiod sets his Theogony in Heaven, his Works and Days on Earth, the one universal, the other particular. In his second epic, the Odyssey, Homer expands the narrow space and time of Israel and Troy to include all the known world. Thereby is epic geographically and temporally expanded. No longer merely a microcosm of a single culture, it bodies forth instead the Cosmos, a feature adumbrated in the Iliad’s Shield of Achilles. Only in metaphor does Homer include the work-a-day world of his contemporary Hesiod. Like the Bible, which includes God and his divine son, they both include all their gods. Cosmology is a theme in Homer, Hesiod, Vergil and Ovid, as it is in the biblical Genesis, where the first seven days are recorded. Modern tradition names them Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Sentence of the Gods recovers their earlier names, Roman, Greek and Middle Eastern, and denominates them SOL and LUNA, ARES, HERMES, HERA and APHRODITE, plus EL. These divine figures comprise the epic’s major sequences (see its emblem, whose letters are the first in the titles of its 26 books). The Sentence, then, is organized into three Solar books, four Lunar, four Martial, six Mercurial, four governed by Hera, nine by Venus and two by the ancient god El, the fateful Sumerian, Babylonian, Hebraic and Phoenician divinity renamed by the Greeks “Kronos” and again by the Romans “Saturn.” (See Frank W. Stevenson’s opening paragraph to Chapter 6, “El,” in Chaos and Cosmos in Morrison’s Sentence of the Gods (Bangalore: St. Joseph’s Press, 2005).
In my Introduction to MM: The Sentence Commuted (Norman, OK: Sentence of the Gods Press, 2005), I had acknowledged my need for “informants” to summarize work by Chinese and Japanese contributors. I might have made more explicit my uncertainties with regard to other Asian traditions, first among them, the Indian. One of course cannot allow one’s lack of Sanskrit and Pali, of Chinese and Japanese (or of the multitude of Southeast Asian languages) to inhibit one’s curiosity or to exclude one from matters that are accessible, albeit imperfectly, through translation. In fact MM himself, who has studied eight languages, has for the most part relied upon translation, especially in the case of Asia, to provide him with access to Vyasa and Valmiki, authors of Mahabharata and Ramayana, India’s greatest epics; to the philosophical texts of the Upanishads and the Dhammapada; to those of Confucius and Lao-zi (which he is capable of reading in Chinese); to such a Japanese classic as Lady Murasaki’s diary. He himself has admitted that he reads no Burmese, Thai or Cambodian, no Malay, Indonesian or Pilipino. In this regard I follow him. We live in a world, however, where it ill behooves us to justify our ignorance of Islam, of Africa, of other cultures on the grounds that we have no primary linguistic knowledge of them. With Realization, the twelfth volume in Sentence of the Gods, East meets West, a theme of much that follows in this ingeniously organized, universal epic. I ask the reader’s indulgence for my shortcomings as an introducer.
The fundamental battle of epic is not between Greeks and Trojans, who in Homer speak the same language and are indistinguishable, but between representation and allegory (see MM’s “Allegory and the Western Epic,” in Particular and Universal). Troy comes to be not so much a place as a topos. As Vergil in a sense had located Carthage in Troy, so Morrison locates Troy in Istanbul. With Eden it is our original “family scene.” “The Blinding of Homer” delves deeper into the dramatic underpinnings of epic in myth, and ascends to the Attic drama that arises out of Homer. MM’s Sleep is Hypnos but also Thanatos. Both are states rather than places. Accordingly the poems of Sleep must be read allegorically. This first book of Sentence of the Gods prefigures many of the epic’s notable elements: travel, actual and imagined; the contemporary and the antique; the secular and the sacred. Following graduation from Harvard, on his trip from Cambridge to Norman, MM’s juvenilia were stolen along with a VW bus parked on a street in New York City. Starting afresh, he blended the Modernism and Surrealism that he taught for 20 years in Oklahoma into a graceful amalgam that suggests a surrealization of Wallace Stevens (whom he had written his dissertation about), an amalgam of New York and Paris, dreamlike but thoughtful. With “I Was Thinking” he both concludes and begins.
“After I’d finished Sleep,” MM tells us (see Manjushree S. Kumar’s interview in MM: The Sentence Commuted ), “I cast about for an entirely different way of writing.” Whereas the first book collected independent poems, the second designed a deliberate sequence. “I began to imitate the photograph,” he adds. From the nighttime places of Sleep MM moves to the gemlike daytime scenes of O, from a book of 52 pages (cp. the number of weeks in a year), one which contain seventeen poems, to a work of 60 poems in 60 pages (cp. our duodecimal 60 minutes to the hour). Composition will be continuous in Light, as in most later work. The characteristic form, then, of a Morrisonian book begins to emerge. As the Sentence progresses its logic becomes more apparent. The “O” of SOL, says MM, is the Helios within Apollo, or the sun itself. For me O represents an “opening out” to the real world. Whereas Sleep had situated us in relation to various traditions, O chooses among them to build a more explicit relation to time and place: Chicago, Boston and New York seen as photographic moments or poetic postcards. O’s fragments coalesce into a narrative. We note the brevity of its lines, reminiscent in their prosody of William Carlos Williams, the playfulness of its language, but also MM’s “poise” here (as James Merrill remarked). Time has become implicit in the Sentence.
As Stevenson brilliantly explicates three sequences in Sleep (see his Chapter 1), so Ron Phelps gives us a brilliant theory of Light (see MM:SC), whose narrative thread, composed of many stories, unifies its discourse. Light’s shadowy characters and ambiguous plots represent the conscious staging of a year’s worth of dreams. The poet had wondered, he tells me, what kinds of daytime “reality” would find their way into this “sublunary” world? Like U and Need, Light is an episodic narrative. As the culmination of SOL it reflects both the illumination and the obscurity of the moon. Its original title, “Light at the End of the Darkened Room,” was shortened, first to “The End of the Darkened Room,” then to “Light,” as SOLUNA’s six alchemical titles came into focus: Sleep, O, Light, U, Need, A . . . A what? At this point MM did not yet know. For me Light is an awakening. As the initiation into LUNA it presages the wakeful dreams of U and Need. The sequence expresses the four phases of the moon: full (Light), crescent (U), waning (Need), dark (A). The classical epic speeds up narrative or slows it down; the time in which MM’s episodes occur never seems to be manipulated, though here the author measures out the reader’s temporal experience in proportion to an actual year. Thus in the first of three consecutive epyllia Time, we might say, has been miniaturized.
U, the first of two paired poems, bristles with the bright ironic gloss of pop art as it describes the cultural emptiness and social awkwardness of a town that resembles the Norman, Oklahoma in which Morrison composed it. From the dream world of Light we move to a world of conflicted imagination, befitting the inner, negative “UN” of LUNA. Like The Faerie Queene, which MM studied at Yale, introduced in China and will use as a hypertext for Renewed, U and Need are works of fantasy. (See too the influence of Spenser’s six/seven part romance, Books I-VI plus The Mutabilitie Cantos, on Morrison’s six/seven-stage epic: six if we count SOLUNA as a single stage). U and Need were composed a line a day over six years, a steadying procedure that twice reduced 1000 days to 1000 lines, again miniaturizing real time. SOLUNA’s 365 manuscript pages symbolized for MM the magnus annum. Light, U and Need offer epitomes of this larger alchemical phase of the Sentence. What space, we might ask, does U represent? A space that could be real but one that is too satirical to be convincing. What space does Need represent? The imagined space of dream allegory, as in Chaucer’s Hous of Fame. What space does SOLUNA represent? It varies, for a marked feature of MM’s work is variety. “In SOL and LUNA I decided to write,” he tells me, “six books in six different styles.”
When Morrison told Merrill that Milton was his model for Need, the later JM retorted, “The poem reminds me of Hoffmann.” If U bears a textual similarity to A, in its blatant incorporation of literal reality, in the realism with which domesticity is depicted, then Need projects us into a purely fanciful realm, where human relations are defined by archetypes rather than society. Its oneiric mood returns us to the surrealism of Sleep, its nighttime ambiance to Light. Its archaic language and mythic sense, however, set it apart from MM’s other books. Gio Ferri has economically suggested various parallels, which I had summarized in the Introduction to MM:SC. The poem’s composition line by line, preceded each previous evening by the reading of a single page of the 1000-page Norton Anthology of English Poetry, must represent one of the strangest and most obsessive methods of poetic composition. Yet the resulting narrative is also strangely compelling, perhaps in part due to its strict iambic pentameter. Whereas the world of U is one that could be imagined to exist, the world of Need could only have been imagined. Insofar as Milton’s unhappy first marriage may be reflected in the strife between Adam and Eve, perhaps the source of Need’s macabre dramaturgy lies in biographical facts. We await a biographer who might cast light on the personal element in these curious poems.
A is the culmination of both LUNA and SOLUNA. Sleep is a “preparatory” book, in the sense that Cicero prepares for his memory exercises, then executes them. In his first book MM’s poems seem executed almost according to plan. One situates oneself to begin. In A one resituates oneself and turns to the rest of ARES. Unlike Sleep and A, the middle books of SOLUNA exist in a constructed space through which the author guides an “unprepared” reader. With A we pause before arriving at Revolution and thereby completing the first “sentence” within the Sentence. A relates to the books that precede it by emptying out their content. Whereas SOLUNA represents a giant version of Sleep, adumbrating the larger work’s content (as do the opening sections of Vergil, Dante, Spenser and Milton), A is important to the rest of the Sentence in quite a different way. These Dada-like poems make one feel that no “work” has been done (though careful inspection, or comparison with sources, proves otherwise). As a meditation on the particular they remind us of MM’s Particular and Universal. For despite their actual dates, places and people, the poems of A are also mysteriously universal. Aristotle’s exclusion of actuality as a subject for poetry is here answered by Morrison’s deliberate inclusion. In this important book the document becomes a poem, the poem a document.
Revolution, a collaborative novel that combines America Today, Ancient China, Revolutionary France and France Today, is revolutionary in a number of senses: it encompasses political revolution; it goes round and round from topic to topic; it connects things that cannot in fact be connected, perhaps as a way of reflecting on the process of transmigration (its Chinese translators have so rendered its title: Lun Hui). Like This, which juxtaposes medieval Japan and ancient Rome, Revolution plays different cultural fields off against one another, a common procedure in the Sentence. To Dan Boord, a student, were portioned out the topics of America Today and Revolutionary France, as MM took up Ancient China and France Today. By turns Morrison wrote his chapters in Paris, while Boord wrote his in Norman. The original result is the Sentence’s first work in prose, though in a highly charged medium, so little like the novel that a five-chapter Chinese-English redaction has been subtitled “A Menippean Satire.” Revolution re-imagines prose fiction as a form of poetry, as an avant-garde enactment. Like A it is a factualization of literary process, a literalization of autobiography, inscribed not in memory but in the moment, as so many of Morrison’s subsequent books will be. It represents the beginning of a process whereby MM works through the tradition of prose (history, fiction, modern epic), as he had earlier revised the tradition of verse.
Nouvelles impressions d’Afrique is the antecedent (the “pretext,” in Morrison’s terminology) that deepened his reflection on imagined time and space. Raymond Roussel, creator of the most severe avant-garde method of composition, deconstructer of fiction in his Iliadic Locus Solus and Odyssean Impressions of Africa, went on to create an extreme poem, Further Impressions of Africa, in whose first line a parenthesis opens only to close along with half a dozen others in the poem’s final line. In Each all is parenthetical. The prose work is based not on Roussel’s poem but rather on the illustrations that the wealthy Frenchman commissioned to fill out a text for the printer. What is Each? An imagined travelogue; a piece of wit, filled like the Frenchman’s work with extreme paronomasia; the ramblings of an unreliable narrator, who answers Roussel’s extremity by extending the extremity of Revolution’s content. Relevant again is Cicero’s imagination of a space in which the orator moves from place to place, from object to object, where the subjects of his oration have been laid out in advance, thereby strengthening his memory and personalizing his discourse. Though the “pretext” for Each may lie in a cutting edge text by Roussel, the “subtext” of the book (another of MM’s terms) is Homer himself, who envisions his own Odyssey by mentally traveling through a familiar space.
From a surrealized Homeric imitation MM turns to imitate Homer’s experience. (At the end of ARES we also engage HERMES, the last letter of the messenger’s name overlapping the last of the war god’s.) The first half of “S” is MM’s Iliad, the second half, his Odyssey, along with the final episode in Vergil's life. We note the enormous difference in tone between Each and Second, as the latter book dispenses with a fictionalized first person (Alexis Lichine) to adopt an authorial third person. (See here MM’s “Preface to Every Second,” “On the Question of the Personal” and “A Note on Genre,” in MM:SC.) In the emblem the letters of HERMES have been reversed, so that the creator of the alphabet may link up with ARES and HERA. Likewise the order in which these books were composed is not straightforward. Realization was first, Magic, second, Engendering, third, Every, fourth, Second, fifth and Her, sixth. In the prescribed order, however, we are meant to feel a jolt as we move from Each to Second. A singular voice is replaced by a multitude of voices, many textual, some biographical, all interwoven with MM’s sober narrative. This multivocal interinvolvement of text and comment is itself a commentary on Homer (like the figures of Attic drama at the end of Part 1 or the Dantesque death of Vergil at the end of Part 3). Second argues again that “everything is in Homer.”
What is the relation between Homer and the Bible? None, we are tempted to say. Or at least there was none historically. As with Every and Second, bound together in the Working Week Press edition, the relationship is a back formation. A long and rich tradition, of course, beginning with Milton, relates the Bible to Homer; and perhaps this is what MM is up to: a re-imaging and personalizing of the two classics. He traveled first to Israel, then to Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, where he dramatically situates the Trojan War as on a stage. Next he reenacts Odysseus’ (or it is Homer’s?) experience. In so doing, he creates a space and timeliness into which alternative voices may enter: Vergil’s, Dante’s and others’. To limit ourselves to the biblical imitatio: we note that the voices of Moses and David are joined by the likes of a more contemporary King, Elvis Presley (whose museum is the principal attraction on the bus tour route that MM took from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem). Rather than recapitulate The New Testament, with its various locations, Morrison gets on a plane and recapitulates instead the diaspora of Christianity within the region, to Amman, to Beirut. This too he re-imagines in terms of a single scenario viewed from a Beirut hotel window. Any modern who reads Homer without knowing the Bible, or the Bible without Homer, is missing something. HERMES’ double movement is under way.
Into the first ten books of the Sentence the personal has entered though a variety of strategies and indirections. With Magic the personal comes to the fore, as literal autobiography, at least when MM, and not Orisis, is the subject of the narrative. In all the books of HERMES the reflective reader wonders, which is the foreground and which the background, which the primary text and which the “intertext”? Do real, mundane events illustrate the thought of the classic, or does the classic comment on those mundane events? And how, for that matter, can an ancient text comment on the present? Hermes is the god of texuality, not only the inventor of writing but also the original hermeneutical reader. In another sense he is the author of the Sentence. Like Hermes MM is highly educated, widely traveled and eloquent. As Magic details his movements we learn that he has advanced from Birmingham, Alabama, to Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago and New York, taking out time at Yale and Harvard to hone his hermeneutical skills before arriving at a scene of challenged textuality. Unlike Second and Every, Magic is rooted in a pre-classical (Egyptian) and a postclassical (Neoplatonic) text, the Corpus Hermeticum. The god of universal travel conspires to record MM’s ascents, descents and tergiversations, glossing his mundane life and the higher cultural traditions that have influenced him.
Realization, like Magic and Engendering, are typical of HERMES since their intertexts are classics, here Upanishads, Dhammapada and Bhagavad Gita, the first philosophical, the second moral, the third poetic. Such variety matches another variety, monistic Indic optimism finding its counterpart in emergent Texas; Buddhist moralism, in Massachusetts; bhakti, in California. Realization, a fundamental Hindu concept, is transmogrified to manifest itself as a Whitmanesque fecundity under control, a fervent yet disciplined self-fulfillment. MM surveys America, its highways, byways, towns and cities, its mores and manners, its heroic brio so broadly and breathtakingly that one reader has renamed the larger enterprise Sentence of the Grass. Instead I am reminded of Democracy in America, a precedent for Whitman that is still prescient. Like Toqueville, Morrison exercises a double point of view, redoubled by his own French “education.” In classical terms his Quixotic triple itinerary, with its Odyssean outward voyages and returns, reminds me more of Herodotus than of Homer, for here it is the author himself who is constantly in motion, his technique that of the “motion picture.” The variety of race, culture and scenery suggests the Hiranyagarbha, or golden cornucopia of Hindu myth. Like WW, MM conned well the Indian masters before his day of setting out.
More ironic and self-contained but equally original, Engendering is a companion piece to the book that precedes it. More difficult of accomplishment than Realization (considering its narrower scope), linguistically bolder (Chinese syntax is introduced as purely American idiom), MM’s study of Norman, Oklahoma is sympathetic to this resident of the university town, whose “gown” dominates its day-time yang-like realm (where a Confucian intertext instructs us), and whose “town” dominates the night-time yin-like realm (where a more laid back Taoism prevails). Though Ezra Pound is a distant model, Morrison has surpassed the pioneer in his assimilation of Chinese thought to the requirements of a western audience. My own reading, informed, as I say, by no direct knowledge of the Chinese originals, views with modesty the book’s more competent reception at the hands of the Chinese themselves (who have reissued and introduced it) and the even more trenchant Sinology of Stevenson, an American scholar familiar with the original traditions (see below). The singularity of Engendering, which applies Realization’s in situ method to a single locale, seems consistent with the more monolithic, cohesive and continuous (but withal narrower) Chinese tradition, one that suffers in contemporary comparison with the greater ethnic, social and cultural variety of India.
Not only did Robin Schultz, a Norman small press publisher, issue the first editions of Realization and Engendering, he chauffeured MM about as he was collecting material for half of the next book in the sequence, sonnets about Oklahoma City (my birthplace, to which Robin and I often return). Her’s second half is set on the other side of the world, where its sonnets in prose describe Angkor Wat. Designed as an epitome of the Sentence, this half Hesiodic book glances backwards to the Homeric Second, forwards to Life, which also summarizes the epic. By turning SEMREH into HERMES Her initiates a more localized version of the larger retrograde reading of the Sentence. Though the great Cambodian temple reposes majestically, Morrison, following the scholar Eleanor Mannikka, has written about it by moving through its resplendent, sacred spaces, which for the Khmers had epitomized a ritual world not altogether unlike Sentence of the Gods. MM’s full, complicated and vivid book contains many original elements, from the alternation of verse and prose commentary to other innovations in sonnetry. The opening sequence, which embodies a “crown” of sonnets, initiates a narrative in parody of the Theogony. Homeric in their comic treatment of the gods, these poems nonetheless derive even more of their spirit and detail from Hesiod’s perennially popular account of divine origins.
Next, in the retrograde reading of the Sentence, comes the trilogy All Regarding Exists, which combines three landscapes (Arizona’s, New Mexico’s and Oklahoma’s) with three Chinese types from the body of dynastic literati painting (All with the Ming, Regarding with the Sung, Exists with the Yuan). Underlying these books, along with Her, the first in the HERA sequence, are four Hindu gods: Shakti, the archetypal woman, plus the three gods of the trimurthi, Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma. Shiva, who underlies Exists, is often described as the destroyer of the universe; Vishnu, who underlies Regarding, as the maintainer of the cosmic order; Brahma, who underlies All, as its creator. These Indic gods form the deepest substratum; their Greek counterparts, Hera and her three brothers, Hades, Poseidon and Zeus, the next, higher level, on which Hera represents the Earth; Hades, the Underworld; Poseidon, the Oceans; and Zeus, the Heavens. One level above, Yuan painting is a model for Oklahoma; Sung, for New Mexico; and Ming, for Arizona landscapes. Exists interweaves in situ descriptions of the Oklahoma landscape with seven portraits of Oklahomans: Susan Smith, a petroleum geologist; John Kane, a cattle rancher; Yvonne Kauger, a state supreme court justice; David Savage a “land man” (and his wife); Summer, a stripper; Robin Schultz, a poet; and Richard Beck, a philosopher.
All, Regarding and Exists also comprise the first of three trilogies in the Sentence, the second reading Her Engendering Realization, the third, Magic Every Second. The first is respectively paradisal, purgatorial and infernal, the second, infernal, purgatorial and paradisal, the third again paradisal, purgatorial and infernal. To take the last first, Second,1, the Iliadic section, represents the inferno of war; Second,2 the Odyssean quest for self-knowledge, intensified and completed in Second,3, the section based upon Vergil. The middle trilogy, the second half of SEMREH, reading progressively, begins with the infernal Her and continues with the purgatorial Engendering, educational in its themes and intertexts, and concludes with the paradisal Realization, its third section interweaving the Bhagavad Gita. Moreover, these nine books also form a trilogy of trilogies, infernal (Second Every Magic), purgatorial (Realization Engendering Her) and paradisal (Exists Regarding All). A desideratum of MM criticism would be to begin with Divine, which more literally models itself on La Divina Commedia and imitates not only Dante but his followers Tasso and Ariosto, and to continue with his trilogy of trilogies. Regarding is notable for its purgatorial siccity. It balances the natural grandeur of America’s most spectacular landscapes with the exiguous life of small town and rural New Mexico.
In the progressive reading Exists, Regarding and All represent a Dantesque sequence (see my comments on Exists for other allegorical dimensions). We note that as a “corner” book All partakes of two divinities, Hera and Aphrodite. Not surprisingly the conjunction of mother and lover risks discomfort. This, at least, was my initial response to its detailed landscapes, which provoked in me an overwhelming sense of the visual relieved only by MM’s record of the wild animals and moments of thought that occurred during his experience of Eastern Arizona’s imposing natural phenomena. (I am not a nature person.) Perhaps my view of the mode is egregious. Others, such as Wordsworth and Graves, have defended landscape poetry, even as a vehicle for complex human cerebration (“Any thought, no matter how complex,” says the latter, “may be expressed in terms of landscape”). Not that cerebration is MM’s purpose here. Like the monumental Chinese landscape painter, he seems instead bent upon escaping all merely human complexity in favor of a salubrious account of the American Southwest, one of the world’s most extraordinary regions. His descriptions, which extend the in situ method to a text without an intertext, achieves a purity of effect, through what Phelps has characterized as “exquisitely detailed scientific nature writing at the level of Thoreau.”
Possibly is the first of four books in APHRODITE that employ “hypertexts,” the other three the evenly numbered Renewed (4), Divine (6) and This (8). Unlike Renewed, whose hypertext, Spenser and his Faerie Queene, is scarcely audible, Cervantes, the hypertextual figure of imitation here, constantly hovers above the in situ description of South America and Iberia, partly because Don Quijote, his comic masterpiece, bleeds into the narrative as intertext as well. (Such is also the case with Dante’s Commedia in the first part of Divine, all three of whose parts imitate the template of Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso.) MM tropes the double consciousness of the Don and Sancho and the capaciousness of their creator in describing his own journey through the Luso-Hispanic worlds of Miami (USA); Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile and Peru; Spain and Portugal. Despite its geographical and cultural retrospection from the New World to the Old, Possibly is about the future, about the world of possiblity (MM at one point quotes from a textbook on the theory of probability). Miami represents the Future, we might say, South America, the Present, Iberia, the Past. Thus, like Vergil’s larger epic, MM’s epyllion embraces past, present and future. Contradicting stereotypes, Spain, however, turns out to be more colorful than Brazil and more lively than Maimi.
Among the five non-hypertextual books in APHRODITE are three (aside from the initial All and the terminal Excelling) set in places especially appropriate to the goddess: India (Happening), Thailand (Or) and Italy (Divine). Though latterly self-subdued by imitation of the British colonialist’s Victorian prudery, India’s remains an essentially erotic culture, as its living tradition of dance and drama (transformed into modern videos and romantic movies), its ancient sculpture and its general warmth manifest. India is a large country with high mountains, deserts, great rivers and a lengthy coastline. It is marked by differences in temperature, diet and religious practice, to say nothing of language and politics. Unlike many former colonies it is on amiable terms with its former colonizers, who contributed to its present status as a unified nation by establishing institutions of learning and administration, networks of transportation and communication. The variety of MM’s Happening reflects the richness of ancient, medieval, colonial and post-colonial India. Its voicing is notably less schematic than that of earlier intertextual books and therefore more egalitarian, as suits a democracy. Its secondary voices more closely resemble the narrator’s. Morrison has undoubtedly been influenced by India’s contributions to the West, in comparative philology, philosophy and religion.
Renewed is the second of four books in APHRODITE that employ “hypertexts.” Here the objects of imitation are Apollonius’ Argonautica, Vergil’s Eclogues and the 1001 Nights, superimposed upon the underlying design of Spenser’s three-part Faerie Queene (Books I-II, III-IV and V-VI). MM will use these texts in relation to his treatment of Alexandria, the Nile and Cairo, which he visited, along with South America, Iberia, the Middle East, Greece and Italy, during his 1999-2000 trip around the world. “A Note on Genre” (see MM:SC) identifies the book’s theme as “a renouvellement de l’esprit.”
As the text of the Sentence interweaves cultures with one another, so MM in his ubiquitous travels moves from country to country, lecturing to one group of people about another group of people with respect to their morality, esthetics and politics. Thammasat University, where he served as Visiting Professor of Western Literature, asked that he lecture on Shakespeare and Henry James; National Singapore University, on the whole of Chinese culture; the University of Rome, on Whitman; Beijing University, on Southeast Asia and Western Europe. To date Morrison has given 170 lectures in eighteen countries, simultaneously diffusing information and absorbing it. In Or, his brief study of Thailand, the voicing is simpler than in most of his other books. Except for seven in situ descriptions of Bangkok he turns to memory as the method for recording his impressions. (One notes the double-endedness of the Sentence in this regard.) Thailand, which I have not yet had the pleasure of visiting, strikes me in many ways as a country like France. Culturally diverse, it engages regional loyalties. As one is said to hail from Auvergne, not France, so, I am told, one is said to hail from the Isaan rather than Thailand. Krung Thep, the City of Angels, and Paris, the City of Light, are sophisticated centers of multiethnic, multicultural societies. In this they resemble ancient Alexandria, which figures textually in Second and geographically in Renewed. One notes these parallels approvingly.
The five books of APHRODITE that describe places (Arizona, India, Thailand, Scandinavia and China) in greatest detail extend MM’s epic geographically. The four intercalated books governed by hypertexts, that is, by hovering objects of imitation (Cervantes, Spenser, Dante, Ovid and their masterworks) extend it historically. We had seen how Homer figures variously in Each, Second and Every. Divine imitates not only the person of Dante (as Possibly, the person of Cervantes), it also imitates his Divina Commedia in its tripartite infernal, purgatorial and paradisal structure, whose last two cantiche invoke as well the examples of the greatest Italian poet’s two principal continuators, Ariosto and Tasso (their historical order reversed, so that Tasso may stand for the purgatorial and Ariosto for the paradisal). The first half of the book is set in Rome, the third quarter, in Siena, Bologna and Ferrara, the fourth, in Venice, Verona and Florence, before MM returns to the capital for conversation with three students on the topic of Rome’s future. Like that of Dante, his method in Divine is allegorical. Before leaving for Italy he had schematized the seven famous northern cities (along with Rome, first and last) as Luxuria, Austeritas, Sapientia, Juventa, Voluptas, Imperium, Clementia and Aeternitas. Like the seven gods who preside over the Sentence, these eight allegorical figures rule Divine.
The four books from Revolution to Every are set outside the USA; the subsequent seven, from Magic to All (with the exception of half the sonnets of Her, set in Cambodia), are set within the USA. With Possibly, the second book of APHRODITE, we leave the USA not to return, till we reach the final book of the Sentence. The sequence’s second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth books are set, respectively, in South America and Iberia, India, Egypt, Thailand, Italy and Scandinavia. In tours Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark, four of the five Scandinavian “swans.” (Only Possibly, with its eight countries, has a greater geographical range.) One subspecies of epic is the geographical. After Homer’s Odyssey, the Alexandrian epic becomes even more wide-ranging, till in the age of discovery Camoens describes a trip around the world undertaken by Vasco da Gama. Sentence of the Gods, however, is the first epic in which the poet himself describes in situ the world at large. Much is omitted: the Polar Regions, subequatorial Africa, Polynesia. In at least gazes down from high above on continental Asia, as MM flies from Hong Kong to Copenhagen. Absent Iceland, In’s summertime Scandinavia constitutes a pastoral, but unlike those of Theocritus, Vergil, Sanazzaro, Marot and Spenser, this one is real rather than imagined. In is one of the most charming books of the Sentence.
This represents a development from the found materials that MM had quoted and shaped in A and the quotations that he has deployed throughout the HERMES and intermittently throughout the APHRODITE sequences. The book has two subjects: medieval Japan and ancient Rome. In advance Morrison determined that instead of revisiting Rome and Japan he would compose the book out of quotations from other books. These he has artfully selected, revised and regularized, so that each quotation is the same length. There can be no question of plagiarism, for no commercial benefit is sought by using other writers’ words, all which may, if required, be located in the “Books Quoted” of the final page. (Only had Andy Warhol marketed his own soup in Campbell Soup cans would there have been an issue of copyright.) MM’s work belongs instead to the traditions of exact imitation, East and West, in this epic context, of Girolamo Vida, who “overwrote” Vergil’s Aeneid by using his very words to another effect. Context is everything. What do Lady Murasaki’s Japan and Cleopatra’s Rome have in common? More than one might have supposed, but in Morrison’s method we learn by contextualization rather than by comparing texts, even though MM had originally planned a book based upon Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Lady Murasaki’s Diary, both of which he still quotes, in translation.
China appears twice in Sleep (see 10 FINGERS and “I Was Thinking,” where the phrase “Chinese lamps and Indian fans” may acknowledge that MM had already sought illumination and relief from the two greatest Asian traditions). As I noted in my Introduction to MM:SC, however, Sentence of the Gods also includes six books that embody Chinese culture more profoundly. Engendering (in the Northeast Asian tradition of embedding Confucian texts for memorization) incorporates two central, classical texts, one the Analects; Revolution makes use of all three major Chinese traditions. MM studied in Chinese with a Chinese painter, has lectured on, and has made use of, three dynastic types as “subtexts” for books in HERA. In Excelling he recorded, in situ, his 1992 trip with a Chinese friend to Hong Kong and thence by boat, train and plane to Shanghai, Chongqing, Chengdu, Kunming and Guangzhou. Life will contain yet more Chinese material. Why the title Excelling? Because, though we have life, we nonetheless wish to go beyond it. (See China’s continual capacity for reinventing itself.) Perhaps Aphrodite makes such “excelling” possible. In this final “corner book” Morrison himself seems to ask, “Is contemporary China dominated by Aphrodite or by El, by love, that is, or by fate?” Only time will tell. By Excelling Life have we arrived at death? Read on.
The Indian, Thai, Japanese and Chinese are not the only Asian cultures that MM describes. In Northeast Asia he also writes about Korea; in Southeast Asia, about Myanmar, Cambodia and Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. To pieces about Southeast Asia and Western Europe Life adds descriptions of Africa, Central Europe, China and the USA, all regions that Morrison has recently visited and written about. These pieces will appear in a collection that serves as the final book of the Sentence but also its first (in the retrograde reading). Just as Sleep evolves into the Sentence, so the Sentence devolves into Life. Given its position some may regard the epic’s last book as the end, but by turning the epic around, MM implies, death can be averted, as the starting point of the oeuvre is reconceived. Now we may move through the Sentence backwards and forwards, endlessly. Among other possible ways of reading it are: (a) forwards from Sleep to Engendering and backwards from Life to Her; (b) forwards and backwards simultaneously, by pairs of books; (c) backwards and/or forwards from any given point; and (d) along vertical lines such as SOL to R to H (giving us the Solar sequence Sleep, O, Light, Realization, Happening). Hence a freedom of movement is bestowed on the reader and with it the opportunity to explore the full variety in Sentence of the Gods.
Richard Beck