Two poems by Christopher Norris

Christopher Norris is the single most authoritative voice on literarytheory in the Anglophone world. His prodigious output over fourdecades has covered developments in French philosophy fromDerrida to Badiou, while always retaining a deep engagement withcontemporary analytic philosophy. However, little in his manypublished works would have prepared one for the astonishing twopoems which Critical Quarterly is delighted to publish on the followingpages.

Formally, they are a genuine tour de force. Terza rima is the rhymescheme chosen by Dante for his Divine Comedy . Each stanza of threelines provides, in the end word of its second line, the rhyme for the firstand third lines of the following stanza. Suggestions as to why Dantechose this form have ranged from the theological, an imitation of theTrinity, to severely practical, a device to ensure against error by futurecopyists. Terza rima is notoriously difficult for an English poet becauseof the fact that Italian’s simpler linguistic history has produced a greatdeal more rhyme words than English. Indeed, when in the air-raidsequence of ‘Little Gidding’ T. S. Eliot attempted the form, heabandoned rhyme altogether.

The poems, however, are not simply formal displays of virtuosity, butreflect on central problems of interpretation, focused very precisely onthe attempt to understand two lives – the English poet Philip Larkin andthe German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Both start with problemsof interpretation, in Larkin a mis-remembered line, with Nietzsche,Derrida’s famous interrogation of the marginal jotting ‘I have forgottenmy umbrella’. In both cases these problems lead into reflections that areboth theoretical and biographical.

The union of the theoretical and the biographical reminds us thatNorris’s first book was on William Empson and that Empson was theEnglish poet who most successfully employed terza rima in thetwentieth century. In our ends are our beginnings.

COLIN MACCABE

Ecce Homo (Nietzsche in Turin)‘I have forgotten my umbrella.’

– Friedrich Nietzsche, marginal jotting from the Nachlass

‘. . . the hypothesis that the totality of Nietzsche’s text, in some monstrous way, might wellbe of the type “I have forgotten my umbrella” cannot be denied.’

– Jacques Derrida, Spurs, trans. Barbara Harlow

‘Can an ass be tragic? To perish under a burden one can neither bear nor throw off? Thecase of the philosopher.’

– Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Walter Kaufmann

On a cold winter day in Turin, not long before being confined to the mental institutionswhere he would spend the rest of his life, Friedrich Nietzsche witnessed a man beatinghis donkey. An ass, a beast of burden, the lowest of the low. A master punishing a pieceof property, a thing that happened to be alive and capable of feeling pain – a scene thathas been played out a million times in the history of the world. Nietzsche’s responsewas immediate and dramatic: he rushed forward and embraced the ass, shielding it fromits master’s blows, weeping and sobbing uncontrollably in a paroxysm of spiritualagony.

– http://consciouschoice.com/issue

Only a few years previously they had gone following in Nietzsche’s footsteps in Silsand had tracked down a Herr Zuan, who confessed to having belonged to a gangof children who had regularly tormented the philosopher as he wandered aroundthe village in the rain with a red umbrella: ‘They amused themselves smugglingstones into the closed umbrella, so that they all fell onto his head when he openedit up. He would then chase after them, waving the umbrella and uttering threats, but henever caught them. What a terrible situation for the suffering man, we thought,vainly pursuing his tormentors and perhaps even thinking that they were in the rightafter all, because they represented life as opposed to mind, unless the experienceof a genuine lack of pity caused him to doubt the truth of some of his philosophicalclaims.’

– Adorno, ‘Aus Sils Maria’ (1966), cited in Detlev Claussen, Theodor Adorno:One Last Genius, trans. Rodney Livingstone

Whether it rained or not we cannot say.No witnesses saw fit to make a note,

And nothing in the text points either way,

Except of course the passage where he wrote‘Ich habe meinen Regenschirm vergessen’,

Which all the sapient sutlers like to quote

Because it offers such a handy lessonIn how it is up to us, who read him now,

To figure out just what to put the stress on.

So maybe it is a simple case of howHe set off for the Bibliothek one day,

With memories of all that cold and snow,

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And someone said: the Sun is here to stay,So leave the Regenschirm behind, and take

Some extra books, or sandwiches. For say

It rains, what then? Mere Regen cannot makeThe Übermensch do more than mend his pace

And wish that it rain harder, for the sake

Of putting human weakness in its placeAnd drowning all those untermenschlich cries

Of mere ressentiment that could not face,

Like him, that sudden darkening of the skies.Or maybe (others say) he wrote and signed

That sentence, not just to memorialise

The fact of having left the thing behind,But more to cock a snook at all those folk,

The Schleiermachers and their earnest kind,

For whom each word the author wrote or spokeNeeded unveiling. After all, the name

‘Schleiermacher’ means ‘veil-maker’, so the joke

Is on anyone who tries to do the sameAnd strip away the layers of veiled intent

That yield the hermeneut his game and fame.

Yet maybe none of these was what he meant.Perhaps it was a memory-jogging note,

Though self-addressed (but then they’re often sent

To jog the sender: ‘Wear your winter coat’,‘Make sure you put the cat out’, ‘Don’t forget

To take your brolly next time’). So the quote

Means one thing for the hermeneutic setOf veil-removers, but another quite

For those who like to see the first lot fret

When nothing comes of all that eruditeAnd super-subtle scanning of the text,

Except to show the scanners how they might

Keep second-guessing this way and the nextAnd still have got no closer to the gist

Of what he jotted down that day, and vexed

The commentators, who suspect they’ve missedSome meaning more profound than any gloss

They’ve yet come up with. For indeed the list

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Is endless even if you skip the drossAnd draw a line at some of what his French

Lecteurs have lately seized their chance to toss

Into the Nietzschean pot. The ÜbermenschMay then be represented, as by Jacques

Derrida, scribbling the note on some park bench

Or maybe after lunch, when he got backTo work and thought he’d add an extra bit

Of text to what the experts now, for lack

Of any thought on his part to submitA working plan or title, simply call

The Nachlass. Then the theory goes that it,

The brolly-note (remember?), sanctions allAnd any meanings that the hermeneut

May find, tease out, or otherwise just haul

Up from some private repertoire, then rootRound in the archives till he hits upon

That jotting as the perfect thing to suit

His sanction-busting purpose. So he’s wonHands down whichever way the game might go,

Whether as just a piece of solemn fun

Devised to tempt the earnest to a showOf seeking after non-existent truth,

Or as a sop to Freudians in the know

(Umbrella – what a gift! – the psycho-sleuthCould hardly miss it). Or the message may

Be simply, boringly, that all those sooth-

Saying weather-forecasters had gone astrayAnd he believed them, paused an Augenblick,

Then left the thing at home that rainy day.

The main point is, you never have to pickOne reading only from the going range,

Or do your best to make that reading stick

Against the ravages of time and change,Or (less dramatically) semantic drift

And everything that makes our meaning strange

Even to ourselves across the slightest shiftOf mood or scene.

But later came the boys,A gang of them, who watched Herr Nietzsche lift

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His Regenschirm and laughed to hear the noiseOf pebbles, maybe stones, we hope not rocks,

Cascading from its folds. Suppose he toys

A moment with the thought that what so mocksHis foresight is a momentary blitz

Of hail or sleet, then something falls and knocks

His brief-case from his hand. Think too, since it’sA pleasing thought, that when he rushed outside

And clasped that donkey by the neck, this fits

With what he might have learned that day of prideBrought low, or how the Untermenschen feel

When values get transvalued. So he tried,

Tried one last time, to stop the hurt and healWhatever wounds his words had sometime dealt

In ways unknown to him, and might yet deal

Beyond his furthest reckoning. Thus he felt,Quite simply, ‘This must not go on’, and ran

To save poor Dobbin from the driver’s belt.

Well, maybe: so we’d wish the tale to scan,‘Poetic justice’ and all that, yet still

We know this sits awry with Superman,

Who would not let such waverings of the WillTo Power extend beyond the puny sphere

Of what concerned the healthy and the ill

In human, all-too-human terms. So mereDonkey-directed goodness of the kind

Heart-warmingly evoked would seem a mere

Irrelevance to Nietzsche’s sterner mind,Whose habitation was some place beyond

Those promptings of a spirit so confined

To donkey-human nature. It’s a fondAnd wishful reading – then we might decide –

That there grew up between them such a bond

As somehow might transvalue every triedAnd tested axiom of Nietzschean thought.

At any rate it is hard to set aside

An ending of the hard-nosed cynic sortThat has him merely going off his head,

Or driven mad by everything he’d taught

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Of how to overcome the mighty deadBy acts of will that ruined all their good

And brought it out iniquitous instead.

So there’s the choice as he presents it: shouldPoor Dobbin’s case prevail, along with that

Quite natural (all-too-natural) brotherhood

Of man and man, or man and beast, or whatThe moralists, whom he so tongue-lashed, took

As gospel truth? Or should we take him at

His own more forceful estimate, and lookRather to all those übermenschlich bits,

The gospel passages in Nietzsche’s book,

Which find no room for Dobbin-love since it’sOne further menschlich, all-zu-menschlich sign

Of just how well that donkey-label fits

The humanists, well-meaners, all those finePurveyors of a splendid moral code

That, if you followed it right down the line

Of slavish rectitude, would point the goadThat Jesus used to spur his donkey on,

And ride in triumph down the victim’s road.

Still we may think, or wish, or hope he’d wonThrough to a sense of things more kind and kin

To us and all the donkey-types, or gone

Back to the Bibliothek and settled inSome window seat where sunlight filtered through

Despite the rain, and where he might begin,

Once more, his patient labours to undoThat whole inverted value-code that he’d

Long laboured patiently to make anew

But now saw only as the brutish creedThat made the donkey-Führer raise his whip.

So might the story go if simple need

Of fellow-feeling be allowed to tipThe balance contrary to all we know

Of man and work. True, humble scholarship

Or getting-right was not his thing, althoughThe Basel-prof young Nietzsche tried his hand

In that line as apprentice-work, and so

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Went on to demolition-work as planned,Leaving us free (the ‘us’ he singled out

As readers fit though few) to understand

Not what he took himself to be about,But how we take him now, with half an eye

To present needs, and half to what the rout

Of all those Zeitgemässig values byAn unknown Zukunft might yet bring to light.

This much at least is certain: when we try

To cogitate such things as best we mightWith him as tricksy guide, it’s not so much

The donkey we remember, or the sight

At which he turned slave-moralist, or suchThrice-welcome signs of what we fondly feel

Must show him to have had ‘the human touch’.

Rather, it’s all the passages of realEcht-Nietzschean stuff where Übermensch holds sway

And values get transvalued, not to heal

A donkey’s wounds, but more to hear it bray,And revel in the sound as once he had

(Though now resolved to put the thought away)

In what the music told of Siegfried’s madDevotion, or Brunnhilde’s fiery end,

Or everything he came to deem a bad

Since all-zu-deutsch refusal to extendMere menschlich sympathy to those who fell

Beneath the bar of outright foe or friend.

Still it is the case that most of us do well,‘Us’ Nietzsche-hooked yet kindly types, to choose

This as the story we prefer to tell,

One where the cost’s worth bearing if we loseThe gist of what his Dionysus taught,

The wisdom of Silenus, to refuse

All pleasure at the fact that we’ve been broughtInto the world, but rather curse the hour

That saw our birth. And then – his harshest thought

Even for those with Zarathustrian powerOf Selbstvernichtung – we must think it good

That each last pain and punishment of our

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Whipped-donkey lives not happen once, but shouldEternally recur and every time

Count highest of all blessings that we could

Will for ourselves. And so the only crime,Ressentiment, the sin against his own

Unholy ghost, was what we deem sublime,

Us mere ressentimentalists, when shownIn acts of donkey-kindness.

This at leastWe may affirm as something to be known

Despite all that: that when he hugged the beastIn wordless ecstasy of Mensch und Tier,

An act proscribed by his ascetic priest

As strictly as by Übermensch, then we’reIn it with Dobbin as the blows rain down

And Dobbin’s saviour when a passing tear

Of all-too-human weakness makes him frownAt what he’d missed, and then at last consign

(Perhaps – here wishful thinking tends to drown

Our sceptical defences) every lineOf what he’d said in übermenschlich mode

To some past life of which he can divine

Naught save the spite that drove him on to loadEver more weight on lumbering Dobbin’s spine,

Until that passing hubbub in the road.

Then the long silent reverie that showedMadness, oblivion, or one last mute sign:

This thing of suffering I acknowledge mine.

CHRISTOPHER NORRIS

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Larkin After Freud (After Larkin)

The odd thing is, they make sense either way.Take out the negative or leave it in,

There’s still some sense (some truth) in what they say.

That line of Larkin has the double spin,The one that goes (I think) ‘Beneath it all

Fear of oblivion runs’. And yet its twin

Version’s what some crossed wire has me recallAt least as often as the Larkin line,

Or else I can’t decide, so opt to stall

Mid-air between them. Second version, mine:‘Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs’.

Both true, I think; though sometimes I incline

One way, sometimes the other, still the one’sThe kind of truth that strikes you dumb with fears

When, Larkin-like, you wake before the sun’s

Half-up, while the other strikes you (though the beer’sA help with this) as honester by far

Than all that tragic posturing. But here’s

What’s really odd: although the two things are(You might think) just flat contrary, they seem

More like two planets of a single star

Or minor variants on a common theme.Maybe some thought like that’s what came to Freud

And gave him his idea that when we dream,

Or joke, or else let slip some half-enjoyed,Half-censored verbal cock-up, then the gist

Of what we’ve said strikes sense and logic void

Because the unconscious just compiles a listOf pretty much whatever comes to mind,

And then makes room for everything it missed

The first time round. So meanings get assigned,Whether by high-paid shrink or high-powered scan

Of Freudian-Lacanian textual kind,

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Ad libitum if contradictions canBe taken on board without the slightest strain

Simply by lifting Aristotle’s ban

On conjuncts p and not-p, or again,Simply (like Freud) by sheer decree that laws

Such as excluded middle not obtain

Once consciousness stops clutching at the strawsHeld out by ego and first takes a leap

Into id’s darkling precincts. Yet this clause,

Though plausible enough while we’re asleep,Or drunk, or drugged, or babbling to the shrink

In hope of getting poems on the cheap

By free-association, doesn’t linkTo anything that’s worth a second look

When you wake up in Larkin-land and think,

Like him, that straightforward logic’s all it tookTo figure this one out: ‘all men must die,

And since the author-name on this my book

Of poems picks me out uniquely, I,A man (at least as common usage goes),

Just have to get the message and apply

Strict bivalence’. For there’s no help from thoseCrass derelictions of the poet’s art

That find in Freud their pretext to suppose

Mere piled-up contradictions are a partOf what it takes to make a poem good,

As well as get you over a bad start

To one more average day. And if you shouldMaintain that poetry’s the very place,

If anywhere, that contradictions could

Stand unresolved and give the mind its spaceFor some Whitmanian revelation, then

Just think again. Better like Larkin face

The heebie-jeebies, panic feelings whenYou stagger out of bed at dead of night,

Thoughts of the toad work squatting on your pen,

Since that’s your life, or since the stuff you writeIs what defines you. Thoughts like these, and worse –

Fears of what tenured barrel-scrapers might

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Come up with once they’ve published all your verse,Bottom-drawer stuff included, then looked round

For something to redeem them from the curse

(Remember Jake Balokovsky?) of being boundTo give old farts like you the final say

On what gets into print of what they’ve found

When rummaging through the Nachlass. Anyway,Talking of bottom-drawer, this stuff has drawers

In plenty, along with bottoms on display

In schoolgirl dorms. Which should at least give pause,Even in our post-Nabokovian times,

To wonder if the poet Larkin’s cause

Was much advanced by having petty crimesAgainst the rules of communal good taste

Allowed to dull the music of his rhymes,

Or let such hard-won mastery go to wasteBecause some posturing hack of a reviewer

Said ‘now this moral issue must be faced’

And faced it with one eye toward the sewerOf tabloid sensibility, and one

Toward the few and (thank god) daily fewer

Purveyors of that high Leavisian toneThat counted Sterne a ‘nasty trifler’, or

Advised young Auden that technique alone

Could not make up for deficits of moreImportant things like ‘felt experience’, ‘tact’

‘A sense of reverent openness before

Life’, and (no doubt what Larkin also lackedHad Dr Leavis diagnosed his case),

‘Moral maturity’. Still there’s the fact

That’s led me on this periphrastic chaseThrough the Collected Poems; namely, how

That line of Larkin manages to face

Both ways, for me at least, between what nowSeems just plain true and has the line run ‘fear

Of oblivion’ (in which case the words allow

No space for some alternative ideaMore comforting or not so prone to take

The edge off everything most near and dear),

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And now what gives me wriggle-room to make‘Desire of oblivion’ slot so aptly in,

Not for the sound alone, nor for the sake

Of giving it some vaguely Buddhist spin,Which he’d have ridiculed, but, more than that,

For how it picks up signals from its twin

Planet way out beyond the fenland-flatAnd featureless terrain of Larkin-earth.

For that’s (forgive the kid-talk) where it’s at,

Where Hull’s a very heaven, where there’s no dearthOf bosomy English roses, where the year

That sex began was Larkin’s year of birth,

Where there’s a luxury pad for Mr. Bleaney,Where cycle-clips are in, and where the prize

For ‘relevance’ isn’t tagged for Seamus Heaney.

Then there’s the twin-earth Freud who’s far too wiseTo let the primary process have its way

With sense and logic, so lets them revise

What it throws up, and not be kept at bayBy any special licence that extends

From Freshman-Freud to kinky games we play

(He played them too, but strictly with close friendsLike Kingsley), or from sheer psychotic rage

To all those Larkin-hated fads and trends,

Surrealism’s offshoots, that assuageThe old desire that consciousness lie low,

But only by regressing to a stage

Of infantile disorder. So there’s noQuestion which way the signifier slid,

On Larkin’s view of it, when Freud said: ‘Wo

Es war, da soll Ich werden’, ‘Where the IdOnce was, there shall the Ego come to be’,

And then – in case that bit of jargon hid

The crucial point – suggested that we seeThis process metaphorically by way

Of what the Dutch contrived (all that debris

Shored up against their ruin) to waylayThe encroaching tides that else would soon undo

And mock their draining of the Zuider Zee.

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But then you have the tribe of Lacan whoReject this whole idea of Freud’s intent

As a mere sop to that perfidious crew

Of US ego-reinforcers bentNot just on getting people to accept

Their share of ‘everyday average discontent’,

But also on contriving that they’re keptIn ignorance of that which, squarely faced,

Might leave them ill-adapted or inept

At all those tasks, no matter how debased,That set the standard for a life well spent,

At least as reckoned by the types best placed

To set it since the fact of their assentIs what defines the standard. So this comes

With all the force that social powers invent

To keep some people happy in the slumsOf fake desire, and others just as glad

To halt slum-clearance, or screw up the sums

That might convince the first lot they’ve been hadBy this entente between the threat-turned-lure

Of capitalist dream-investment and that bad

Revision of the Freudian talking cureThat fixed its sights no higher than to keep

People at work (the main thing), or ensure

That nothing should disturb the restful sleepOf those whose egos need the gentle stroke

Supplied by countless plumbers of the deep

With snorkels trimmed to order. So the folkWho look that way for comfort, or to get

Some notion of what’s clamouring to poke

Up from the turbid depths, may cease to fretAnd thus hold out much better through the grind

Of work-routine than those with compass set

By analysts of a more Lacanian kind,Or maybe poets of Larkinian bent,

Whose sense of what Freud really had in mind

With that land-drainage metaphor, or meantBy ‘Where id was, shall ego be’, was not

At all what helped the ego to augment

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Its dykes against the tide, but rather whatLeapt off the page to an attentive eye

Or sharp-eared follower of the Freudian plot.

Such was its sense if read aright: that ‘I,This plaything of the errant signifier,

Mere ego-figment, structures all awry,

Caught up in the dumb vectors of desire,Shall never pitch my mansion where the id

Holds sway, yet ever hopelessly aspire

To do so, then discover that my bidFor selfhood ends with ego landed square

In id’s domain, or buffeted amid

The iceberg shoals of the unconscious, whereThe waterline, as all good Freudians know,

Is what decrees our consciousness can share

Merely some glimpse of what goes on below,And then no further down than lets it stay

Safely in sight of all the surface show,

With snorkels still an option. Should it strayYet deeper, then it has to face the test

Of finding all the props knocked clean away,

As if the poet finally confessedThat Bleaney’s room was his room, and the toad

Work hunkered squat on poems like the rest

Of his and other lives. So what bestowedSome momentary grace on all those gay

And gaudy wedding-parties when they rode,

Like him, that clattering carriage all the wayFrom Lincolnshire to London, could not yield

More than a mindflash memory of the day

When alternating views of town and field,Glimpsed sidelong from his window of the train,

Merged with the ribald din that half-appealed

And half-appalled. How else should we explainWhy now at last, although so long concealed

By his refusal of the vatic strain,

His use of the prosaic as a shieldAgainst romantic uplift, or his plain

Preference for metonymies that sealed

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All fake transcendence off, the rule’s repealedAnd metaphor emerges once again

With power to send its arrows far afield,

Even if nowhere quite becoming rain.

CHRISTOPHER NORRIS

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