Poetry and Mischief

By Eli Siegel

(1949)

THIS TALK IS on a pretty hidden phase of the activity of human beings. There is something in nearly all people making them, when they see something too smooth, want to muss it up. There is a desire to throw snowballs at silk hats, set firecrackers at sewing circles, give the Bronx cheer in a pompous meeting, and say, “The hell you did! Says who?”

This tendency can be called a desire to disturb order too sure of itself. It can have a good form and it can have a bad form. There is a desire to disturb what is good, orderly; there is a desire to take something that looks sure of itself and muss it up. It has a very deep source, because it can be said that the world is mischievous. I remember years ago I was in a park and there was all grass and one very impudent dandelion. I said, How did it come, in all of infinity, that this dandelion should be interfering with all this grass, and have this touch of yellow in this otherwise uninterrupted green?

Mischief, in a deep sense, has been put in the last lines of a famous poem by Shelley, “The Cloud.” The cloud is decidedly mischievous. It won’t let anything alone, and it does like to pull down tablecloths and mess up good arrangements. We have in these lines the spirit of universal mischief. The cloud is talking:

I implied last week in my talk on Poetry and Time that time as to eternity is like mischief as to order. The earth can be seen as a mischievous happening in an otherwise monotonous universe. Anything that seems to interfere with space, nothingness, time, in the largest sense of the words, is an interruption which is something lively and also mischievous. That phase of the world which is against order and repetition and routine, sometimes for a good reason and sometimes for a bad reason, can be called the spirit of mischief. Mischief can be described as against an end seen as an end. That has to do somewhat with the origin of the word: chief means the head or the end.

The Trouble

Mischief is in everyone. If we don’t know how to manage it, there will be trouble. We do look for trouble. The idea of happiness, even, being orderly, we don’t like. We would rather have some disturbance. The tendency to make fun of things is something which can cheapen us. It is present in many people in a cheap form. There are some people who, as soon as they respect something, have to change it into something that they don’t respect. This has made for a great deal of agony. It is one of contempt’s boring darlings. It is had. There is a mischief which is boring.

The kind of mischief which can’t stand anything being good or worthy of respect has afflicted about every person who was ever born, in one fashion or another. In some persons it is very virulent. It can stop them from being happy and can give them, I may say, abstract boils. There is mischief, though, which is good. And this began very early.

The thing in Greece which made the Greeks expel Aristides because he was too just—”I don’t want that man: he is too just!”—is present throughout Greek literature. In Aristotle’s Poetics there is a comic thing mentioned: Margites, about a person who never did anything right. There is also extant (Margites is not extant) a parody of Homer’s Iliad. Some people have felt that it was written by Homer himself, since, it was thought, he was displeased because the Iliad didn’t get all the attention it should—apparently it did later. But Homer was disgruntled because the readers of then didn’t like the Iliad as much as they should. Most people now think that the parody of it, The Battle of the Frogs and Mice, was written by someone else in an attempt to make all those gods and heroes, who are in the Iliad, look not so good. What are all these gods talking so big for? All these heroes, Achilles, Hector, Ulysses, Ajax, Menelaus, Helen herself—who cares? We’ll change them into frogs and mice! The poem is good.

Harold N. Fowler, in his quite good History of Ancient Greek Literature, describes the tendency to aesthetic mischief and also ethical mischief, of Greece in perhaps the fifth century BC: there were “sportive poems, or mock-heroic epics.” He deals with the Batrachomyomachia, The Battle of the Frogs and Mice:

It is a parody of the Homeric epic….A mouse, Psicharpax (Crumb-stealer), escapes from a cat and goes to a pond to drink. There the king of the frogs, Physignathus (Puff-cheek), son of Peleus (the Muddy), asks him to come and visit his palace, and undertakes to carry him thither on his back. When they are in the midst of the water, the sudden appearance of a watersnake so frightens the frog that he dives and leaves the mouse to drown. This is seen from the bank by the mouse Leichopinax (Plate-licker), who tells the tale to the tribe, and forthwith the mice declare war.

Somehow the gods get worried about this. Fowler includes a passage in a prose translation:

But Zeus called the gods to the starry heaven, showed them the greatness of the war, and the mighty warriors, many and great, and bearing their long spears; and sweetly smiling, asked who of the gods would aid the frogs and who the mice in their distress; and to Athena he spoke: “My daughter, wilt thou go to the mice to aid? for in thy temple they aye skip about, rejoicing in the fat and food from sacrifices.” So spoke the son of Cronus; and Athena answered him: “O father, never would I go as helper to the mice in their distress, since many evils they have done to me….They gnawed my robe, which I did toil to weave of delicate woof, spinning a delicate thread, and holes they made therein; but the mender follows me and duns me for interest; on this account I am wroth….Yet not even so do I wish to aid the frogs. For they too are lacking in firmness of spirit.”

So this is a way of doing mischief. Here it takes an aesthetic form, because it takes something pompous and great and mighty and makes it look unimportant.

This has been done again and again. We have it even in slang. When, for instance, a person who helps a show is called an “angel,” indirectly we are making fun of the idea of God helping us. It is done in ever so many ways. Sometimes we don’t know that we are doing it. The tendency to take that which is orderly and mighty and make it look not so orderly and mighty is a tendency to mischief. And it is as big a thing in the history of thought as it is in the history of poetry. It has gone on for many years in many forms.

There Is Rabelais

Sometimes a person mischievously attacks a notion. Sometimes a whole period is attacked. Rabelais, when he is greatest, is mischievously valuable. Toward the end of the first part of his great work, Gargantua and Pantagruel, he has a poem that is an introduction to “The Abbey of Thélème”; it was published around 1533. This Abbey is mischief itself, a place where you can do anything you want. And in the introductory poem, Rabelais says there are certain people he doesn’t want there: persons too interested in making money. Then he has a presentation of a very wonderful time with ladies. This is from the Urquhart and Motteux translation:

This is a mischievous attack on the ideas of the Middle Ages: that God is somebody to get later, that God doesn’t believe in a good time, that God wants you to do all the things you don’t want to do. —This is a description of the Abbey. It is in prose, but it is in the poetic field:

All their life was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of their beds when they thought good: they did eat, drink, labour, sleep, when they had a mind to it, and were disposed for it….In all their rule, and strictest tie of their order, there was but this one clause to be observed,

DO WHAT THOU WILT.

So mischief can take the form of saying: Look how bad things are; I can mischievously show you that they can be much better, and I’ll present you such a picture that you will be ashamed of yourself! Mischief, in other words, can fight for a possible virtue and be against a present disorder and sadness and untruth.

Famous Mischief

Mischief can be shown in the universe: we can say that man causes mischief, and we can also say that the universe causes mischief. Shakespeare presents, very quickly, an idea of malign mischief in the witches in Macbeth. These witches are as famous as any in the mischief line. They just know how. They can confuse anybody, and they do confuse Macbeth. Witches would be people who were very crafty, with a bad purpose—unless they were very unusual witches. This is from act 1, scene 3:

She is really quite awful, because all that has happened is that a sailor’s wife had some chestnuts and munched them; the witch said, Give me some, and the sailor’s wife didn’t like that and said, Get out of here: “‘Aroint thee, witch!’ the rump-fed ronyon cries.” “Ronyon” is a term of insult. So the witch is going to go after the woman’s husband, who is a commander of a ship. She is going to bother him so much that he won’t be able to sleep. And he is going to grow thin, and have storms. It happens she would also like to have him drown, though she can’t do that. But she is going to bother him like anything just because his wife didn’t give her any chestnuts. Now, that’s mischief. But the rhythm is ominous.

Later, in act 4, scene 1, we have the three witches functioning in a different fashion. They are just heaping up a cauldron of trouble. Here we have the rhythm of mischief:

This represents trouble-making, and the confusing of people, and the making them think they can do things. These witches sure changed Macbeth. They turned him from a rather nice person into a homicide. So they are decidedly troublesome.

The desire to alter things, to make fun of things, went on. It goes on all the time, because there are two things we like: we like a clock to remain on a mantelpiece; we also like it to fall off. Both of these things are in us. We like to see a thing all good, and we like to see it torn. We like hair that is very smooth, and we like hair that is rumpled. Both of these things satisfy something in us, and in a deep field we can get into much trouble.

Some 18th-Century Mischief

There was an interesting bit of warfare in the 18th century.

In 1770 Oliver Goldsmith gave a beautiful description of a deserted village. He was very sad about it and musical, and one of the characters he described was the very nice clergyman. This clergyman was lovely:

This, in a way, had a touch of iconoclasm, because most poems didn’t deal with plain people, people who made only forty pounds a year. But it is very sweet, because this clergyman is such a lover of God and his fellow man. Goldsmith goes on:

So this clergyman helps the sick poor man, shows him how to get to heaven, and cheers his last moments.

Then, about ten years later, George Crabbe, the first mighty realist in English poetry, describes a village. He is going to show a clergyman—and it is in the same meter Goldsmith used, the heroic couplet. In his poem The Village, Crabbe is saying, in answer to Goldsmith: That is a village of England, huh?—I’ll show you what a village really is like!

Crabbe has been describing someone who is dying in the poorhouse, and he deals with the clergyman. What this clergyman is interested in is riding on his horse and hunting. And Crabbe quotes a phrase of Goldsmith. Now Crabbe, I am sure, respected Goldsmith as a writer, but he does say: Goldsmith, what are you doing?—Is that the village of England?! The kind of village Crabbe sees is pretty terrible. He says about the dying man:

This is a showing up. You can be mischievous in showing that people have made things gloomy, and you can be mischievous in showing that people have made things too nice.

Byron Made Useful Fun

Perhaps the greatest man of mischief in modern times is George Gordon, Lord Byron. He was worried about himself, and while worried about himself, made useful fun of nearly everything in the world at the time. And he was quite effective. I read for the moment a passage from his Vision of Judgment, which was a parody of a kind of Southey’s poem praising George III after he died in 1820.

The poem of Byron was published in 1821 in the Liberal, a magazine which was quite to the left, and the publication of the poem got the printer into trouble. I read an early stanza of it, because it shows Byron taking his ease with the Lord in heaven and making fun of the angels. That had been done before, but not with this passion. This is mischief, because it takes all the propriety of heaven and shakes it up. The first two lines are: “Saint Peter sat by the celestial gate; / His keys were rusty, and the lock was dull.” Here is the second stanza; this is heaven:

Anything that takes what seems to be well-managed and shakes it up is in the line of mischief.

Hugo’s Profound Mischief

Victor Hugo is one of the mighty changers of the world. He is one of the great writers of the world; and in his twenties he issued quite a few manifestos, statements about art and poetry. They are very important still, and I think we are going to get back to them. One of the most important is the Preface to Cromwell, a play which isn’t thought much of, though the Preface is. He was 25 at the time, and he felt that the world itself had been dealt with in too orderly a way.

Byron did a lot of shaking up. In the field of literary technique he wasn’t so mischievous—he followed forms that had been used before. But everything—the way people saw each other, what they felt was true, what was sincerity and wasn’t—he certainly went about changing and making fun of.

Hugo in his prose is more philosophic. He sees that the world is funny and serious. He sees that man is funny and serious. Strangely enough, he says that Christianity made man aware of that. I’ll read some passages from this important Preface. You will see the relation of them to mischief and to Aesthetic Realism. This was in 1827:

On the day when Christianity said to man: “Thou art twofold, thou art made up of two beings, one perishable, the other immortal, one carnal, the other ethereal, one enslaved by appetites, cravings, passions, the other borne aloft on the wings of enthusiasm and reverie…”—on that day the drama was created. Is it, in truth, anything other than that contrast of every day, that struggle of every moment, between two opposing principles which are ever face to face in life…?

The sublime and the grotesque…meet in the drama, as they meet in life….Hence, it is time to say aloud…that everything that exists in nature exists in art.*

In the novel Hugo wrote shortly after this, Notre Dame de Paris, the chief character, Quasimodo, is like a gargoyle. He has been called a gargoyle; and the desire for mischief in the Middle Ages is shown in those gargoyles, those queer figures, just as it can be seen in African sculpture. Hugo was very much aware of it. He says the grotesque has to be welcomed; you have to put together the symmetrical and the disorderly! Here are some more passages:

The modern muse will…realize that…the ugly exists beside the beautiful, the unshapely beside the graceful, the grotesque on the reverse of the sublime, evil with good, darkness with light….Poetry will take a great step, a decisive step, a step which, like the upheaval of an earthquake, will change the whole face of the intellectual world. It will set about doing as nature does, mingling in its creations—but without confounding them—darkness and light, the grotesque and the sublime….

Thus, then, we see a principle unknown to the ancients, a new type, introduced in poetry….This type is the grotesque….We have now indicated the significant feature, the fundamental difference which, in our opinion, separates modern from ancient art,…romantic literature from classical literature.

It is very strange to see Hugo saying that the romantic is an inclusion of the ugly. But in a way it is true. And the romantic is the inclusion of mischief.

Out of statements like this came the desire for distortion; the desire to make strange things out of people; impressionism, and even later, cubism; surrealism, wherever it is authentic; the thing that made Modigliani draw very thin ladies, and made Lachaise make very fat ladies. People do all kinds of things to people. Sometimes it is in a fake fashion; sometimes in a true fashion.

What the Grotesque Has Done

On the one hand [the grotesque] creates the abnormal and the horrible, on the other, the comic and the burlesque….It is the grotesque,…which now casts into the Christian hell the frightful faces which the severe genius of Dante and Milton will evoke, and again peoples it with those laughter-moving figures amid which Callot, the burlesque Michelangelo, will disport himself[,]…exhibits Sganarelle capering about Don Juan and Mephistopheles crawling about Faust.

This is a great time. This is the beginning of art as we have it now. And when a surrealist talks about romanticism in a superficial fashion, he ought to be shut up, because the whole business began about this time consciously. Of course there were things done in the Middle Ages, but one of the important affirmations of the liberty to play any trick you want with nature, as long as you respect it, is given here by Hugo. Hugo goes on:

The universal beauty which the ancients solemnly laid upon everything, is not without monotony.

This began things. It made later for the praise of the Devil by Baudelaire. It gave a chance for Rimbaud to go wilder than most people had gone. As I shall show, it had something to do with symbolism. It had something to do with Dadaism and beauty gone wild—all the bells ringing and nothing else heard.

Hugo saw that what is real is a wonderful mingling of two things which seem so very different. This Preface is important, not so much because it praises the ugly, but because it says that for a person to be honoring of the beauty, the ugly also has to be taken seriously and deserves to be loved—just as Aesthetic Realism says that if you want to know what pleasure is, you should take a course, not so much in the experience of pain, but at least the knowing of what it is.

Progress and Mischief

Mischief continued during the 19th century. In his “Song of the Exposition,” Walt Whitman says: Down with the goddesses! Down with Rome! Down with Athens! We don’t want them—bring on Columbia (that is, America)! In a way, it was very necessary to say. So here is a passage where Whitman says, We don’t want your old subjects—no more Greece and Rome!:

We see that the making fun of Homer, of the Iliad, which was in The Battle of the Frogs and Mice, is carried on in another fashion by Whitman. Of course, the danger is that when something is shown to be lacking, the good thing about it is forgot. That is a danger very often succumbed to. So I can see this passage as quite funny and still like Homer.

The desire to say Down with everything! took form in many manifestos of the 19th century. There were changes; there were persons who wanted to see everything exactly. Zola was mischievous, and he said: Why don’t you describe an epileptic? Why don’t you describe spittle coming out of a sick man’s mouth? Why don’t you describe the smells in the rooms of the poor? Why don’t you describe what it really is to be drunk—not just somebody drunk and singing—somebody really drunk, sodden drunk, and lying on the street with foam coming out of his mouth, perhaps urinating? That is what he wanted.

All these things were attempts to shake up, to say: Look here, this silk hat needs a little thing thrown at it; in fact, a big thing. It is done in all kinds of ways, because the history of progress can be called the history of good mischief.

Mischief Goes On

Toward the end of the 19th century, with Mallarmé, and Verlaine to a degree, and Rimbaud, we have symbolism. The problem of symbolism is the problem of something and nothing, and it has to do with time too. I cannot talk on symbolism at length now because this is a talk generally on mischief. But I read a few quotations. I have translated them. One is from Mallarmé, from his “Inquiry on Literary Evolution,” of 1891:

To name an object is to do away with three-quarters of the enjoyment of a poem, which is to get its secret bit by bit. The suggestion is dream. It is the true use of that mystery which is symbol: it is to evoke little by little an object in order to show a state of mind; or, to the contrary, to choose an object and to bring out from it a state of mind by a series of readings.

This may be hard to follow. But there was a desire to see the object, as in impressionism, as having a haze about it; as we see in the music of Debussy, a sort of mystery, a prolonged quality, not something that could be described as a warehouse. There was, with symbolism, the feeling that everything, if it could be understood, could be seen as a correspondence: that if you say anything too directly you take away from its meaning—just as, if you held a beautiful thing with too heavy a grip, you would hurt it.

This is a big matter. And the meaning of it is still going on, because there is a desire simultaneously to make fun of the weight of things and also of the lightness of things. We shall see that the greatest mischief-makers after the First World War, and the most thorough, couldn’t have done their job without the kind of statements that Mallarmé makes.

Now, these movements, though they are looked on as literary happenings, have to do with the fate of people. There has not been a literary problem at any time which doesn’t concern everybody in America. That is something which I have not given complete evidence for, but it is so. The passages I’m reading have got to do with the fate of people.

Manifestos and Mischief

In France in particular there were movements. There were movements in painting. There was cubism after impressionism, and there was surrealism, and vorticism, and other things. People were angry with everything. They wanted to change everything, and Down with the academicians! and so on. It seemed that the whole world should be changed. This seemed even clearer with the First World War than later, because more people were being killed more noticeably and for a longer time in the First World War than in the Second. The killing was miserable in both instances, but somehow the First World War seemed to be even battier, because it was felt that fighting fascism had some sense.

In 1916 in Zurich there was the greatest mischief-maker with manifestos of modern times. He makes the surrealists look dull, although he really grew into surrealism. His name was Tristan Tzara. He was a Rumanian Jew, born in 1896, and what he said in 1916 in Zurich was something! Conscientious objectors were there, and refugees, and they discussed art. This was in the midst of the war.

It is thought that Tzara looked into a dictionary for a word, and came across the word dada, which in French means hobby-horse, and is also an infantine word meaning nothing at all. After a while Tzara issued manifestos, many manifestos. I read a few sentences from two. This one has the title “Dada Doesn’t Mean Anything”:

So DADA was born, through a need of independence, of distrust for the community. Those who belong to us keep their liberty. We do not recognize any theory.

…Everything one looks at is false….

We have shaken up the weepy tendency in us….We need works which are strong and forever not understood….

There is a great, destructive, negative work to do. To sweep out, to clean.

Another is called “Dadaist Disgust”:

Unrestrained protest by one’s whole being, with destructive action is dada…; abolition of creation, dada…; abolition of memory, dada; abolition of archeology, dada abolition of prophets, dada; abolition of the future, dada; liberty, dada, dada, dada.

Then, Tzara has this very charming bit, called “To Write a Dadaist Poem”:

Now, this was wild. And the important thing to see is that it is the culmination of mischief. It is the saying that nothing matters: that if you say anything or don’t say it, it is dada, and that the only matter of importance is nothingness. Later we had surrealism, trying to make the machine alive, and the unconscious. But the purity in its manifestos is the charming thing about dada. Dada and cubism are related. But in dadaism we do see nihilism, anarchism, the utmost in the making of things as if they weren’t. There was a time when they said, Dada is dead—they had gone the limit.

The Unconscious Is Mischievous

This represents a part of the unconscious, because the unconscious is mischievous: would like to say that things are, but can also say they aren’t. And this has to do with art. We can say that a thing isn’t when it is, or we can say that a thing is when it isn’t. Art has done both; done it subtly, sometimes fetchingly, sometimes brutally. It is important.

In order to understand what poetry can do and what a self can do, we have to understand the possibilities of mischief. And mischief still goes on.