all that is old is new again: on Guy Davenport's The symbol of the archaic

 

One of the great essays in my life is Guy Davenport’s The Symbol of the Archaic, which appeared in the Georgia Review in 1974. I’m not sure when I read it – perhaps back in my high school days.

Essays are not given enough credit. We think of them as lesser creatures, where the great beasts are poems and novels. Myself, I grant the utility of these categories without taking them too seriously. Although The Symbol of the Archaic is not one of Pound’s Cantos, it definitely takes from the Cantos the traveling technique, that of a movie camera thrust among personal and cultural bric-a-brac, whose speed – the movie camera’s – is adjusted to a personal sensibility recognizing in the very instant of demonstration the connections that may or may not be in operation in some real history, some real slice of multitudinous life. And isn’t this what we all dream of?

The content of Davenport’s essay, a theme to which he returns again and again, is the overlap of the modern (which encompasses a certain 18^th century and goes right up to the non-sequitorial magisterial which came out of Olson’s typewriter at the end of his life) and the archaic, that which is lost in deep time. The inscrutable rubbish and signs left by paleolithic hominids.

This is how Davenport begins:

 

The ox rib and its inscrutable scribble helps Davenport move on to the whole ephemeral nature of civilization (and, indeed, the ephemeral nature of its discontents), and the way the poets have taken it up, and the impossible nostalgia for what was lost. Davenport was, politically, a standard American liberal, but culturally, he was a conservative of the Hugh Kenner variety.  Thus, the wrecks of what was lost imply the wreckers, and we among them. It is a strain of political impossibilism hymned by John Ruskin in the great proto-Canto, Fors Clavigera, and it leads to a certain melancholy which is ultimately foreign to the American writer, who are the spawn of discovery – that adventurer’s justification, eventually, for every bushwacking and seizure.

Modernism, when Davenport wrote this essay, was still exciting. For me, an awkward sixteen year old in Clarkston, Georgia, modernism looked like a way out of suburban flatheadedness. I little knew that it had given up the ghost to – whatever eclectic thing we have had since. I am rather happy that, at the moment in all the arts, there is a return to modernism – from the margins, from the black dada of Adam Pendleton.

I think Davenport captures something that was silently programmatic in modernism, which was its invention of the pre-historic, the archaic:

“If we say, as we can, that the archaic is one of the great inventions of the twentieth century, we mean that as the first European renaissance  looked back to Hellenistic Rome for a range of models and symbols, the twentieth century has looked back to a deeper past in which it has imagined it sees the very beginnings of tion. The Laocoon was Michaelangelo's touchstone; the red-stone kourus from Sounion was Picasso’s.”

Here – as I was dreaming up this little essayistic ditty – I want to jump to a little remarked, but remarkable, piece of reportage by the Communist Egon Erwin Kisch that is included in his Gesammelte Werke 5: Das Kriminalkabinett von Lyon (The criminological cabinet of curiosities in Lyon). Which contains, surprisingly enough, a superposition of the archaic (stones with markings, rather like those of the ox-bone) and the most modern (fingerprints). And which I think is just a beautiful essay. Yesterday I put up an image from that piece. It shows a burglar with a jimmy in one hand and a revolver in the other. The burglar, through some complicated heist slapstick, fell into a pile of sand, leaving this impression, which was latter captured by pouring plaster of paris in the indentation in the sand, which was later used in the court case against the burglar.

But I think I’ll do  this later.