Roberto Calasso - Literature and the Gods

But above all Nymphs. It was this band of female and immensely long-lived, though not immortal, creatures who were to be the most faithful when it came to assisting metamorphoses in style. Announced for the first time in fifteenth-century Florence by the breeze that ruffled their robes (and it was a “brise imaginaire,” as Warburg points out), they have never ceased to make eyes at us from fountains and fireplaces, ceilings, columns, balconies, decorative niches, and balustrades. And they weren’t just an excuse for eroticism, the pretext for having a breast or a naked belly grab a place in our field of vision, though they were sometimes that too. The Nymphs are heralds of a form of knowledge, perhaps the most ancient, certainly the most dangerous: possession. Apollo was the first to find this out when he beset and then chased away the Nymph Telphusa, solitary guardian of an “unblemished place” ( ), as the Homeric hymn puts it, in the vicinity of Delphi. He had come there looking for a place to found an oracle for those who lived in the Peloponnese, the islands, and “those who dwell in Europe”—and this is the first text to refer to Europe as a geographic entity, though here it still means only central and northern Greece. First Apollo encounters the Nymph Telphusa, then the female dragon Python. Both protected a “spring of sweet waters,” as the hymn says, using the same expression twice. And with both Nymph and dragon Apollo uses the same words when he announces his intentions. For both were manifestations of a power that had split itself in two, appearing now as an enchanting young girl, now as a huge coiled serpent. One day the two figures would be reunited in Melusina, but for the moment what linkend them was the thing they were protecting: water that issued from the ground — water at once wise and powerful. Before anything else, Apollo was the first invader and usurper of this knowledge that did not belong to him: a liquid, fluid knowledge on which the god would now impose his own meter. From that day on, one of the names he let his worshipers call him was Apollo Telphusios.

Nýmphē means both “girl ready for marriage” and “spring of water.” Each meaning protects and encloses the other. To approach a Nymph is to be seized, possessed by something, to immerse oneself in an element at once soft and unstable, that may be thrilling or may equally well prove fatal. In the Phaedrus , Socrates was proud to describe himself nymphóleptos , one “captured by the Nymphs.” But Hylas, Heracles’ lover, was swallowed up by a pool of water inhabited by the Nymphs and never reappeared. The Nymph, whose arm drew him towards her to kiss him, “thrust him down in the middle of the whirlpool.” Nothing is more terrible, nothing more precious than the knowledge that comes from the Nymphs. But what are these waters of theirs? Only in late pagan times do we get a clue, when, in his De antro nympharum , Porphyry cites a hymn to Apollo which speaks of the , the “mental waters” that the Nymphs brought gift to Apollo. Once conquered, the Nymphs offered themselves. The Nymph is the quivering, sparkling, vibrating, mental matter of which the simulacrum, the image, the eídōlon is made. It is the very stuff of literature. Every time the Nymph shows herself, this divine material that molds itself into epiphanies and enthrones itself in the mind, this power that precedes and upholds the word, begins once again to throb. The moment that power makes itself manifest, form will follow, adjusting and composing itself with the power’s flow.

The most recent, majestic, and dazzling celebration of the Nymph is to be found in Lolita , the story of a nymphóleptos , Professor Humbert Humbert, an “enchanted hunter” who enters the realm of the Nymphs in pursuit of a pair of white bobby socks and another pair of heart-shaped spectacles. Nabokov, a master when it came to filling his books with secrets so plainly visible and even obvious that nobody could see them, states his tormented hero’s motives in a splendid tribute to the Nymphs only ten pages into the novel when, with his lexicographer’s scrupulosity, he explains how “between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or thrice older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as ‘nymphets.’” Although the word “nymphet” was to enjoy an astonishing future, mainly in the ecumenical community of pornography, not many readers realized that in those few lines Nabokov was actually offering the key to the novel’s enigma. Lolita is a Nymph who wanders among the motels of the Midwest, an “immortal daemon disguised as a female child” in a world where the nymphóleptoi will, like Humbert Humbert, have to choose between being thought of as criminals or psychopaths. From the “mental waters” of the Nymphs to the gods themselves, the passage is an easy one. If only because, when the gods made their forays down to earth, it was more often than not the Nymphs rather than the humans who attracted them. The Nymph is the medium in which gods and adventurous men may meet. But how can one recognize the gods? On this point writers have always been blessedly bold. They have always acted as if alluding to an enlightened observation of Ezra Pound’s: “No apter metaphor having been found for certain emotional colours, I assert that the Gods exist.” The writer is one who sees those “emotional colours.”

As for the esoteric truth of Lolita , this Nabokov crammed into a tiny sentence buried like a splinter of diamond in the overall mass of the novel: “The science of nympholepsy is a precise science.” What he did not say is that it was this “precise science” that, even more than his beloved entomology, he had been practicing his life long: literature.

The Nymphs clear the way — but other divine figures may burst into literature. So it is that in rare moments of pure incandescence the gods themselves can still take on a presence that leaves us speechless, overwhelmed, as the encounter with an unknown traveler may overwhelm and bewilder. This is what happened to Hölderlin. Born in 1770, at the close of what was for the gods the most arid and impervious of ages, he seemed from earliest childhood to be waiting for the “mnemonic wave,” which eventually crashed onto him like a breaker on rocks. But one mustn’t imagine that Hölderlin was alone in possessing this sensibility, though the form of his hymns would indeed be unique. When Hölderlin was still a tutor in the house of Diotima — otherwise Susette Gontard, wife of a Frankfurt banker — and before he had been dazzled by Apollo, he would receive a visit, in October 1797, from the twenty-three-year-old Siegfried Schmid. For two hours they talked about poetry in the attic room where Hölderlin lived. Having returned to Basle, Schmid wrote the poet a letter still pulsing with arcane enthusiasm. And he added a few lines of verse, including this couplet:

Alies ist Leben, beseelt uns der Gott, unsichtbar, empfundnes.

Leise Berührungen sind’s; aber von heiliger Kraft.

All is life, if God animates us, invisible, felt. They are light touches, but of sacred power.

It is hard to imagine how the essential tone, not just of one person but of the whole poetic psyche of the moment, could have been better or more soberly described. And at once we have an example of that “clarity of representation” ( Klarheit der Darstellung ) that, as Hölderlin himself would put it, “is as native and natural to us as the fire in the sky was to the Greeks.” Before the names themselves appear, then, before Greece rises dizzyingly up with its divinities and their noisy retinue, we have these “light touches” which alert us to the presence of an unnamed god. This was the experience from which all the rest followed, and that each would then elaborate after his fashion. Two years before Schmid’s letter Herder had already been wondering whether that new creature everyone was talking about — the nation — didn’t need a mythology of its own, and he looked forward to a resurrection of the Eddic myths. Schiller replied that he preferred to think of “poetic genius” as expressed by the Greeks and their myths, and hence “related to a bygone age, exotic and ideal, since reality could only spoil it.” A few months later and Friedrich Schlegel would be asking himself whether it mightn’t be possible to think up “a new mythology”—a fatal idea this, which would do the rounds of Europe until it got as far as Leopardi in remote Recanati. Leopardi was certainly favorably inclined to the “antique fables”; they were the mysterious remnants of a world where reason hadn’t yet been able to unleash the full effects of its lethal power, a power that “renders all the objects to which it turns its attention small and vile and empty, destroys the great and the beautiful and even, as it were, existence itself, and thus is the true mother and cause of nothingness, so that the more it grows, the smaller things get.” But Leopardi was too clear-sighted, his ear too finely tuned, not to appreciate that the “antique mythology,” if dragged bodily into the modern world like so many plaster busts, “can no longer produce the effects it once had.” Indeed, “in applying anew the same or similar fictions, whether to ancient matters, or to modern subjects or meaner times, there is always something arid or false in them, because even when, from the point of view of beauty, imagination, marvel, etc., all is perfect, still the persuasion of the past is missing.” In short, we moderns lack conviction; we don’t experience an inextricable tangling of the “antique fables” with the gestures and beliefs shared by our community, “since though we have inherited their literature, we did not inherit Greek and Roman religion along with it.” Without this bedrock, it follows that “Italian or modern writers who use the antique fables in the manner of the ancients, go beyond a just imitation and exaggerate.” The result is an “affectation, a crude sham,” a clumsy posturing, “pretending to be ancient Italians and concealing as far as possible the fact that they are modern Italians.” This is Leopardi at his most unforgiving, passing what seems to be final sentence not only on all romantic appropriations of the “antique fables” but on the whole verbal armory of those future Parnassians and symbolists whose appeal to the gods was above all a shield against the vulgarity of the shopkeeper. Yet despite this biting dismissal of all would-be “new mythologies,” Leopardi was nevertheless to give us a sympathetic and farsighted justification for the use of the “antique fables.” They are useful — no, they are precious — when it comes to escaping the asphyxia of our own time, with respect to which the poet can only be a ceaseless saboteur, since “everything can be at home in this century but poetry.” And here one might say that Leopardi is setting up a generous plea that might be used in defense of Flaubert, to absolve him from the one sin he can be accused of: not, of course, the immorality of Madame Bovary , but the noble shipwreck that is Salammbô . By all means let us hear Leopardi’s peroration: