My friend Pat Conner
recently lent his copy of Nicolas Barker’s new book to me, knowing that I
have long been thinking about the topics of verse, and form, and writing, and
that my own thinking has tried to cover almost two of the five millennia that
Barker’s book attempts to survey. And while I think there is much to like about
this new book, I also have doubts about it, at almost every level. As I once
wrote about metrical study, it seems likely that experts should never take on
the work of reviewing each others’ books: we have too much at stake in our own
positions to be objective about the work of others. And yet, of course, a book
on such a specialized topic can only be reviewed effectively by someone with a
real depth of knowledge. It is a double bind from which there really is no
escape.
So let me begin this brief review by noting what I think
is especially strong about Barker’s book. First, it honestly tries to survey
five thousand years or so of recorded verse, and it does so with a wealth of
illustrative examples, many of which (though not all) are accompanied by clear
and legible photographic facsimiles, often in color. The sheer range of
examples is simply astonishing, and the numerous facsimiles offer opportunity
for readers to evaluate many of the claims and descriptive passages relating to
them. In this, the book takes seriously a position that is dear to my heart:
that the visible presentation of texts can be, and often is, meaningful in its
own right, above and beyond the linguistic content of the written characters.
That this is often true of verse in particular is, I think, one of the theses
of Barker’s book. If nothing else, the range of examples and facsimiles will
give readers interested in similar ideas a wealth of starting points for
considering how the visible component of texts might operate across a vast
range of Western scripts and languages. And in the interests of full
disclosure, I must admit that I have no real ability to comment on Barker’s
comments about Egyptian or Akkadian or even Greek verse, to take just three examples;
surely few authors or readers will attempt to span the range that this book
attempts, and I must marvel even at the attempt.
And yet.
I think this book fails to either have or express a
sufficiently clear understanding of exactly what verse is, as well as an
understanding of what writing itself is. Since the book attempts a survey of
the intersection of those two things across the full Western tradition of
writing, it seems important to me to be clear and precise about these two
important defining concepts. The remainder of my comments here will do what I
can to articulate both where and why Barker’s positions are insufficient, and
what might be done to address those insufficiencies.
1. The nature of verse. Barker’s position, I believe, is to claim that
poetry is language adorned with features intended to improve its memorability.
This book’s Preface, for example, begins with the claim “poetry is a memorial
device, its purpose to remind audience or reader” (ix). Again, at the beginning
of the first chapter, he writes “the verbal devices by which we recognize verse
were originally memorial in function,” though adding “they came to have their
own discipline” in time (3). Further, “verse had separated itself from all
forms of prose long before the first preserved records of either came into
existence” (3). But since the forms of prose Barker has been discussing were
those used by orators and preachers, organized by what Barker characterizes as
“mnemonic system[s] for recording words: rhetoric and theology” (3), he seems
to be suggesting that it is verse’s particular focus on the specific mnemonic
tools of alliteration, meter, and rhyme that define verse.
My anxiety about this definition or understanding of verse derives,
in part, from the way Barker’s book appears to work upon a definition of
writing as a technology designed also to supplement memory, a topic on which I
will have more to say below. But here, it is important to note that defining
the two phenomena this way aligns verse and writing as being analogous
phenomena. Such an alignment may well give a book a valuable coherence: if
writing’s purpose is the same as verse’s purpose, what could be more natural or
appropriate than to look at the history of written verse?
Unfortunately, I am convinced that the central claim that
the formal features of verse have a memorial function is simply untrue.
Ignoring, for the moment, the complications of writing, it think it is more
correct to understand the formal features of verse as artifice in language, the
very precondition for at least some sorts of art in language. In oral contexts,
verse is, specifically, an artificial subset of language more broadly. The
fact, which I think all must acknowledge, that prose too may be adorned with
rhythms, with alliteration, with rhyme, tells us that such artful adornment is
not the distinguishing feature between verse and prose. The central difference
lies, rather, in the structural (not memorial) form or function of such
adornment in verse. Verse has a meter, a measure, by which an entire passage of
verse (a poem, a section of a poem) has a defined structure. When what we once
took for the adornments of prose turn out to be structural, after all, we know
we have left the realm of prose behind. That those adornments (structural
meter, as well as its elements, which may include rhythm, alliteration, or
rhyme) may serve as aids to memory is a bonus, not a matter of definition.
I think we might actually go a step further. The
artificiality of verse is, in fact, not originally or essentially mnemonic, but
generative. This is certainly the case in oral-formulaic traditions (a topic
Barker barely even mentions), where verbatim memorization is not at issue. And
I suspect it is true in most other types of verse composition as well—except for
those varieties of written verse that rely upon visibility for their effects.
As always, discussions of this topic are made more
difficult by the common desire to also define or understand the difference
between verse and poetry. And Barker’s book certainly often appears to restrict
his range of interests to poets and poems in particular. I might be willing to
accede to a claim that all verse is poetry, because it is all artificial and
hence art-ful, but this additional level of definition is passed over entirely,
I think, in Barker’s book, in part because of the problematic claim that poetry
has a memorial function.
And, in the end, Barker’s book seems to operate on the
widespread belief that we all know verse when we encounter it. Though an early
passage of the book admits the
difficulty of sometimes recognizing whether or not a given passage is verse or
prose, nowhere does the book offer any actual guidelines for distinguishing the
genres, I think. And since the book is very good at saying (and providing
numerous examples of) verse written in long lines, not lineated according to
verse structure, the comparison to prose and a demonstration of how we can
identify verse in such cases would have been very welcome. But maybe that’s
just me.
2. The nature of writing. The very title of Barker’s book exemplifies an
understanding that what writing makes visible is language, since we know the
title does not refer to writing’s ability to preserve the unique auditory or
acoustic qualities of a well-known, well-loved individual’s voice. Certainly,
writing is not language, though it has often been held to represent language,
or to represent pieces of language. And yet even if we assent to the claim that
writing’s central purpose is to record language, to preserve it across time,
that claim does not entail that all other properties of writing are ignorable,
meaningless, or irrelevant. That is: even if the purpose we put writing to most
often is to record language, it does not follow that writing is (merely) a
record of language.
What other things writing is or might be are often hidden
from us, I think, by our very willingness to treat writing as recorded
language. And often enough, it is writers and poets themselves who have treated
writing in this reductive fashion, encouraging readers to do the same. But a
history of the intersection of writing and verse, I firmly believe, must attend
both to cases where the written text does and does not do more than represent a
passage of language.
This is a truth Barker knows well enough, and his book
essentially ends with a discussion of concrete poetry, in which the texts we see
cannot readily be spoken aloud. The implication, obviously, is that some poems
are more than pieces of language, and their texts are more than or different
from representations. Some poems are not about voices, or about reciting or reading out
loud. For Barker this appears to be understood as a development of the (late)
age of print, the end result of poets taking greater and greater control of the
appearance of their words on the page. As a result, Hrabanus Maurus’s
remarkable Carolingian multiple acrostics are mentioned only in the final
chapter, standing as a kind of precursor to the concrete poets, and acrostics
in general (though mentioned by Barker as being produced among both the Greeks
and Akkadians) are referred to only briefly and vaguely.
 |
| Adalstan Acrostic, from Oxford Bodleian Library C 697; 10th c. |
But
all along, writing has been more than a tool for representing language. The related
notion that writing is somehow related to memory goes back at least to Plato,
and perhaps a good deal further. Of course, one of the chief physical features
of writing is its durability across time, so very much in contrast to the
evanescence of spoken language. It is this durability, or endurance, that
generates the comparison to the mental function of memory, which is so
widespread in commentaries about writing as to need almost no justification.
And the origins of Western writing, at least, in record keeping seem to suggest
that the enduring record is what was valued in the earliest written texts. But the
part of writing that preserves or records something preserves language, and
definitely not memory, and this seems important to note and be clear about.
These critiques, about
Barker’s largely unstated definitions and understandings of verse and of
writing are not mere quibbles, I think: I think they reveal much about how this
book builds itself. It is an appealing notion to imagine that poetry or verse
is properly read or recited aloud, but it is, at best, a notion that applies to
only some poems, and perhaps not always the best ones. Even Shakespeare, I
think, writes some poems that cannot be read aloud, or that lose some of their
meanings when they are read aloud. To understand the nature of verse expression
we must always attend to whether a particular poem is a work of art in
language, or a work of art in writing, or even a work of art in manuscript or
in print. If we assume that “real” poetry is art-in-language, we must conclude
that acrostics, to take only a kind of example that Barker refers to on a
number of occasions, are mere writing games (Barker, writing of an Egyptian
poem with numbered stanzas in which the numbers are repeated homophonically
inside the first and last line of each stanza, suggests “These artifices,
however, even the play of words, are all more scribal than authorial” (12)
suggesting just what sorts of play an author or poet is allowed, in Barker’s view).
But surely we should judge an acrostic on its merits, rather than assume or
assert its use of a second dimension is merely a toy or a trick.
In the end, I am suggesting here that there is more than
one kind of poem. Some poems are works of art in language. Some are works of
art in writing. Some, I believe, are works of art in print, and some poems literally have two-dimensional or even three-dimensional spatial structures. A history of poetry, even a more limited survey of
how poetry has been recorded in writing, needs, I think, to have a clear and
effective understanding of what poetry is, what it consists of, and how these
different kinds of poems make their different kinds of meanings—because writing
is essential to some of these kinds of poems and irrelevant to one. Each time we read a poem, any poem from any period, it matters to the act of reading to know and understand which of these kinds of poem it truly is, in both the poem's essential nature, and in the instantiation of the poem we see before us.
And yet the
kinds of poems I’ve described in the paragraph above have become clear to me (to the
degree that they are clear) only after literal years of trying to understand
how poems I’ve read have been recorded and represented across time, and it has
been some of the hardest intellectual work I’ve ever engaged in. In some ways,
I can hardly critique Nicolas Barker for not seeing what it is I think I have
seen. And thus we return to the problem of an expert reviewing another expert’s
book.
In the end, I found much
to value in this book, and not only the profusion of facsimile images. Barker’s
range of reference remains impressively and usefully broad: there is much to
follow up here, in every chapter. It is a book that, in the best way, has much
to teach: especially if the reader is willing, as all critical readers should
be, to judge for herself which of its teachings to accept, and which to reject.
This review attempts to articulate what I’d try to do better, if I were trying
to write such a book: but I can only do so, of course, because the book exists
in the first place. I hope it is read widely by all those interested in the
materiality of text.
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