The Consolations of Writing: Literary Strategies of Resistance from Boethius to Primo Levi - Rilegato

Zim, Rivkah

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0691161801 ISBN 13: 9780691161808

Casa editrice: Princeton Univ Pr, 2014

Riassunto

Why writing in captivity is a vitally important form of literary resistance

Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy as a prisoner condemned to death for treason, circumstances that are reflected in the themes and concerns of its evocative poetry and dialogue between the prisoner and his mentor, Lady Philosophy. This classic philosophical statement of late antiquity has had an enduring influence on Western thought. It is also the earliest example of what Rivkah Zim identifies as a distinctive and vitally important medium of literary resistance: writing in captivity by prisoners of conscience and persecuted minorities.

The Consolations of Writing reveals why the great contributors to this tradition of prison writing are among the most crucial figures in Western literature. Zim pairs writers from different periods and cultural settings, carefully examining the rhetorical strategies they used in captivity, often under the threat of death. She looks at Boethius and Dietrich Bonhoeffer as philosophers and theologians writing in defense of their ideas, and Thomas More and Antonio Gramsci as politicians in dialogue with established concepts of church and state. Different ideas of grace and disgrace occupied John Bunyan and Oscar Wilde in prison; Madame Roland and Anne Frank wrote themselves into history in various forms of memoir; and Jean Cassou and Irina Ratushinskaya voiced their resistance to totalitarianism through lyric poetry that saved their lives and inspired others. Finally, Primo Levi's writing after his release from Auschwitz recalls and decodes the obscenity of systematic genocide and its aftermath.

A moving and powerful testament, The Consolations of Writing speaks to some of the most profound questions about life, enriching our understanding of what it is to be human.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Rivkah Zim teaches early modern English and comparative literature at King's College London. She is the author of English Metrical Psalms: Poetry as Praise and Prayer, 1535–1601.

Dalla quarta di copertina

"Zim has done nothing less than reveal how prison writing, far from being a marginal genre, is a locus for the expression of some of the most profound thinking that humankind has managed to achieve. Here the human condition is laid bare, in all its agony and ecstasy. The originality and ambition of her work are truly remarkable."--Alastair Minnis, Yale University

"Prison narratives reflect a multifaceted response to the combined issues of failure, defeat, disgrace, and, often enough, imminent death. To think about them from a literary perspective, one has to untangle the rhetorical strategies used to write them.The Consolations of Writing does this very successfully by looking at the selected narratives alongside each other and in the historical contexts in which they were constructed."--Michael Questier, Queen Mary University of London

Dal risvolto di copertina interno

"Zim has done nothing less than reveal how prison writing, far from being a marginal genre, is a locus for the expression of some of the most profound thinking that humankind has managed to achieve. Here the human condition is laid bare, in all its agony and ecstasy. The originality and ambition of her work are truly remarkable."--Alastair Minnis, Yale University

"Prison narratives reflect a multifaceted response to the combined issues of failure, defeat, disgrace, and, often enough, imminent death. To think about them from a literary perspective, one has to untangle the rhetorical strategies used to write them.The Consolations of Writing does this very successfully by looking at the selected narratives alongside each other and in the historical contexts in which they were constructed."--Michael Questier, Queen Mary University of London

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The Consolations of Writing

Literary Strategies of Resistance from Boethius to Primo Levi

By Rivkah Zim

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2014 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-16180-8

Contents

Acknowledgments, ix, 
Introduction, 1, 
Part I. In Defense of Civilization, 19, 
1. The Disciplines of Reason and Lyric Poetry, 21, 
2. Creative Dialogues with Textual Partners, Past and Present, 79, 
Part II. Preservation of Self, 119, 
3. Memory and Self-Justification: Images of Grace and Disgrace Abounding, 121, 
4. Memorial Narratives as Salvation for the Feminine Self, 166, 
5. The Consolations of Imagination and Lyric Poetry, 213, 
Part III. Testimony for Mankind, 265, 
6. With Hindsight and Beyond Resistance, 267, 
Conclusion: Beyond Testimony, 302, 
Select Bibliography, 311, 
Index, 319, 

CHAPTER 1

The Disciplines f Reason and Lyric Poetry

Anicius Boethius, Of the Consolation of Philosophy (ca. 524–25): The Foundations of Resistance in Dialogue and Lyric

Power politics, court intrigue, forged letters, and no opportunity to mount a defense against lying informers led Boethius, by his own account, to a death sentence in a "lonely place of banishment." He complained that he had inspired hatred for "freely follow[ing] his conscience" to "resist evil" and "defend justice." The condemned man's suffering is always an intrinsic part of the message of The Consolation of Philosophy, which offers readers a defense of Boethius's ideas of Roman culture and civilization: self-sufficiency, religious devotion, book learning, imitation of ancient Greek ideals, and a strong tradition of public service. Boethius echoed and transmitted classical traditions and cultural premises that were to become the dominant intellectual heritage of Western Europe in the centuries after his death. The Consolation represents the values and forms in which that heritage was transmitted. But the authority of experience that readers throughout the Middle Ages perceived in his final work rests on the author's fictional representation, in affective lyric verses and in dramatic prose dialogue, of his feelings, ideas, and existential problems as a prisoner condemned to death by a corrupt political regime. In this case the particular is paradigmatic: it relates to his situation and establishes a typical pattern and model for others. Boethius's politics, philosophy, and influence on medieval literary culture are well documented. The Consolation was read by grammar school pupils and in some universities; it also circulated among lay readers at courts in various parts of Europe. It mediated complex ideas through affective imagery and the dialogue form that mirrored a process of education enacted within the text; it engaged its readers' interests and sympathies while stimulating their imaginations and intellectual curiosity. It was also adapted and imitated by some of the greatest vernacular poets of the Middle Ages, including Jean de Meun, Dante, and Chaucer.

This chapter seeks to demonstrate how Boethius's text established many of the themes and forms that spoke to and for later writers in prison. These include: consolation from the expressive power of ordered lyric meters set against the disorder of injustice and suffering in the real world; the importance of a well-stocked mind and imagination in maintaining resistance to oppression (memories of literature, learning, and life sustain the prisoner; images of nature mirror the order of creation and bring the beauty of the external, visible world into the confines of the prison); the expressive potential of paradox in reconciling apparent contraries and celebrating the creativity that may arise under situations of adversity (a process of gain by loss). The text also promoted the subtle simplicity of dialectic and patterns of opposing binaries used to resolve impossible tensions in apparently progressive forms of logical argument and related forms of dialogic exchange between different points of view represented in argument, correspondence, and intertextual allusiveness. Finally, it demonstrated the urgent need often experienced in the condemned cell to set the record straight (to name names) or to construct a memorial image of the authorial self (however defined) and, more objectively, to testify for humankind by offering insights derived from the prisoner's experience. The value of reason and intellectual argument as a bulwark against chaos or tyranny, which Boethius substantiated in this work, became a recurrent theme that mitigated the experience of many later prison writers. This was largely owing to the aesthetic and intellectual coherence of his text, its explicit but subtle associations with his own situation, and his enduring reputation as a persecuted writer and scholar.

THE PRISONER

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (ca. 480–ca. 525) was an intellectual allied by birth, upbringing, and marriage with the last patrician families of ancient Rome. This background set him apart from many contemporaries among the ruling class, most of whom had come to power with the Ostrogoths—a barbarian nation—during Boethius's lifetime. His learning and scholarship were rooted in veneration for a golden age long past. He claimed it was his ambition to revive contemporary Latin learning, and his models were ancient Greek commentaries on the works of Plato and Aristotle. Philosophy was the queen of sciences, and Boethius's persona in the Consolation also addresses her as the mistress (O magistra) of all virtues. His own surviving scholarly works include translations and commentaries on Aristotle's works, and treatises on arithmetic, music, and Christian theology. His other intellectual masters were Seneca, Cicero, and St. Augustine. However this idealization of Greek culture and ancient Roman institutions came to carry political implications that eventually cost him his life. By 522 he was Master of the Offices—a position comparable to head of the civil service –and the most powerful Roman in Theodoric's administration of the western Roman Empire. But such good fortune was short-lived. Since Theodoric ruled Italy under the nominal, but increasingly tenuous, control of Constantinople, loyalty to the old Roman imperial culture (by this time vested in the Greek-speaking eastern empire), might be construed as political disloyalty to the new order. Boethius claimed that his unspecified actions in defense of the Senate—a bastion of patrician Roman interests—at a time of crisis in relations between the eastern and western parts of the empire, had laid him open to a charge of treason (ca. 523–24). This charge led to his disgrace, exile, and execution at Pavia. Details of the conspiracy charges and, similarly, of the actual conditions under which he was held in Pavia are uncertain. Yet he appears to have had opportunities to write one last work, The Consolation of Philosophy, in which he drew on earlier cultural memories, personal experience, and scholarship.

The authorial persona constructed within the Consolation—a poet and former student of philosophy—is a condemned prisoner whose experience and family background overlap with that of Boethius, the historic individual known from other sources. In the earliest manuscript of the text, his words are indicated by the letter B in the margin. This Prisoner's situation reflects the unjust persecution of a righteous individual who says he went into politics because he thought that he could make a difference in public life by applying philosophical principles. He had tried to benefit others but found himself "inevitably opposing the plans of selfish and unprincipled men." The Consolation begins with a poem—a lyric complaint by the Prisoner who is emotionally overwhelmed by the crisis of his fall from office. The Prisoner goes on to lament that "in the effort to keep [his] conscience clear and do what was lawful and right, [he] offended a lot of people who were more powerful than [he was]." It is a familiar story with perennial resonance in politics. He insisted that he had taken his stand on the principles of Socrates in proclaiming that it is wrong "to assent to a lie or to obscure the truth." The Prisoner further indicated that he had made a written record of his side of the case adduced against him, "even though it was extremely distasteful to have to discuss these absurd forgeries" in which he had been accused of trying "to protect Roman liberties" (p. 14). He also complained that he had not been able to examine the prosecution's case and had been condemned to death, and all his property confiscated, without the right to speak in his own defense: "Whatever I may have done, I did not deserve to be treated in this way for a charge such as this. My accusers know that this is all nonsense, and they dress up their accusations with the further slander that I committed some kind of sacrilege in campaigning for high office" (p. 16). The Prisoner's energetic self-defense becomes a rant and after a few more pages in this vein it may well seem to a neutral reader that his indignation undermines his reputation as a philosopher. His complaints imply his need to redirect his mind and mental energies in order to benefit from any philosophical consolation. In the early chapters this miserable and over-agitated prisoner is a sympathetic figure, but his self-pity makes him seem unreliable.

The narrative setting for the entire work—as frequently illustrated—is the Prisoner's bedside in his cell. However, the main impact of the opening sections arises from Boethius's creation of his second persona—a surreal, feminine personification of his life's vocation, the love of wisdom: Philosophia. As a heavenly figure she seems a manifestation of the divine intervention required to restore the Prisoner to his senses, but she is not a goddess. She has piercing eyes and varies from human size to a height that enables her (symbolically) to penetrate the heavens. She appears to be of great age and her dress is tattered and dusty, though of a finely woven, imperishable fabric that she had made herself with "meticulous workmanship" (bk. 1, pr. 1, p. 3). The sign of theta, embroidered on the top hem, signifies contemplative philosophy, including theology and metaphysics. (As Henry Chadwick points out, theta also denoted a condemned prisoner.) On the lower hem of her dress, the sign of pi signifies practical philosophy, including ethics. Philosophia suddenly appears by the bedside of the distraught Prisoner from nowhere (while he is venting his woes) to diagnose his mental confusion (the dis-ease evident in the opening lyric complaint), as indicative of his urgent need for the moral medication of consolatio: "It is time for healing, not lamenting." He is lost, she decides, because he has forgotten who he is. Yet the Prisoner soon recognizes this stern but kindly authority figure as his former nurse. She sits on his bed, wipes the tears from his eyes, and identifies him as the man "brought up on the milk of my learning": a philosopher. The Prisoner is struck dumb with amazement, and we, as readers, are also intrigued and enchanted as she attempts to clear the "blinding cloud of worldly concern" from his eyes. She is a commanding yet compassionate presence, and the initial impact she has on the Prisoner (and Boethius's readers) retains its force throughout the work. She towers over him (as his intellectual superior), and after a while he recognizes the lady Philosophy, his first and last teacher.

"My poor boy (alumne)," she replied, "why should I desert you now? Should I not help you with that burden you bear in no small measure because of my teachings and the hatred of my name? Do you suppose I would be frightened by unmerited accusations? Will Philosophy abandon an innocent man and not be a companion to him on his journey? Should I be distressed by false accusations? I am horrified at such a thought! I am accustomed to being attacked and was a veteran of such battles even before the time of my servant Plato. In Plato's own time was I not with his teacher, Socrates, who was put to death unjustly—a death that turned out in the end to be a ... triumph (victoriam mortis)?" (bk. 1, pr. 3, Slavitt, pp. 7–8)

Dealing with persecution is part of the philosopher's job description. Her role is to instruct as well as comfort the Prisoner, who thereby rediscovers the philosophical basis of his life's work, and his composure. During the course of their dialogue, as the substance of the text unfolds over five acts or books, Philosophia brings the Prisoner back to himself literally and figuratively. She promises to give his "mind wings on which to lift itself," and she fulfills her promise (bk. 4, pr. 1, Watts, p. 117). Her teaching is restorative and therapeutic; its literary process enacts its function which may be repeated at every reading by any reader who engages with the text's different levels of operation and appeal.

Many early exchanges between them are so lively it must have been easy for naive readers to forget that both personae are fictions created by the actual prison writer, Boethius. Philosophia as logician tempers her reliance on dialectic to her pupil and patient's capacity to understand. He learns fast, regaining his composure and intellectual grasp, as her arguments develop. By the end of the Consolation of Philosophy—the reenactment of Philosophia's therapy—he catches up with her command of metaphysics, and the distinction between the two voices diminishes. Subdivisions of the text into prose dialogue for argument and thirty-nine poems interspersed regularly in different meters, for (as stated) lyric distraction, imaginative refreshment, and reinforcement of the argument, enable the Prisoner to transcend the material reality of his imprisonment. The text ends in a universal ethical and moral imperative, voiced by Philosophia addressing the Prisoner (and all Boethius's readers).

Avoid vice ... and cultivate virtue; lift up your mind to the right kind of hope, and put forth humble prayers on high. A great necessity is laid upon you (vobis), if you will be honest with yourself, a great necessity to be good, since you live in the sight of a judge who sees all things. (bk. 5, pr. 6, Watts p. 169; Loeb, p. 434)

While the text opens with detailed reference to the life of the Prisoner in a prefatory frame of personal memoir, which is important in engaging the interest of Boethius's reader, this framework of personal narrative, running through books 1 and 2, is not closed off. The text's open ending broadens its message to include anyone who empathizes with the Prisoner. Yet it is important to register that the representation of the Prisoner's attitude always arises from a retrospective view of an uncompleted narrative action. After the first lyric complaint by the Prisoner, this retrospective implies that his struggle to compose himself philosophically, within the action of the text, was resolved before he first picked up his pen. Even though it was produced in adversity, the Consolation is a polished literary work that meshes closely with Boethius's earlier writing; it is not a prisoner's diary. (This is an important distinction in all prison writing.)

While Boethius's story gives the Prisoner a personal history, it also places the authorial persona in a recognizable cultural context, which I shall argue is part of his wider political purpose in the Consolation: to define and defend his values through the intellectual and artistic coherence of the work. The autobiographical passages also fill out the portrait of the Prisoner, making him more credible and thus able to address and represent others in different kinds of adversity. Boethius's choice of literary forms and use of two voices aids these purposes. Yet it is also clear from the earliest copies of the text that readers of the Consolation have always associated the author with the Prisoner. At the end of book 3 Philosophia explains that on the authority of Plato "we must use language akin to the subject matter of our discourse" (bk. 3, pr. 12, Watts, p. 113). The Socratic method used literary forms of dialogue and dialectic as performative representations of teleological argument. (These arguments proceed in a series of binary oppositions to conclusions preordained by their premises.) This dramatic present-tense form enabled a teacher to demonstrate a process of argument progressively, stopping to clarify queries as necessary, and creating opportunities for attractive examples along the way. Boethius's dialectic and dialogue are modeled on Greek philosophical teaching texts; this method was heuristic, conventional, and also in accordance with his life's work and known intellectual loyalties.

(Continues...)

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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Princeton Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2014
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0691161801
• ISBN 13: 9780691161808
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 323
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile