Roberto Calasso - Literature and the Gods

The question is an urgent one and demands a response, if only because such responses as it gets can prevent or precipitate one of the many massacres someone is forever on the brink of perpetrating. Each one of these disasters comes fitted out, like some grotesque puppet, in peculiarly local dress and regional arguments; but once the many vernaculars have been translated into the lingua franca, the question is always the same, so much so that it has now invaded a vast area of our field of vision. It’s an ancient question, whose beginnings, as Italo Calvino once slyly remarked, swing back and forth, according to one’s point of view, “between the end of the Paleolithic and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.” And it’s a question that has to do with the whole. Clumsy as it may be, the word “globalization” at least has the merit, constructed as it is around the word “globe,” the largest conceivable whole, of being symptomatic. Now, communities conceived as a whole — or “holistic societies,” as Louis Dumont referred to them — have been the norm in the history of humanity, in all its phases and all its many forms, while the society based on technology stands out as an extraordinary novelty. Here all kinds of equivocations raise their heads: on the one hand, it would be absurd to blame community, as such, for the terrible crimes that plagued the last century; on the other hand, one cannot help wondering whether the traditional criticisms leveled at the technological society — that it fragments and atomizes, leaving people rootless and alienated — are not in fact aimed at a false target, or at least at something that is no more than a façade. Meanwhile behind that façade another powerful holistic machine is at work, a machine as big now as the planet itself and intent on weaving together a community, exclusive of all others, yet capable of accommodating all those others within itself like so many Indian reservations, some of them seething with natives and vast as subcontinents. It will be obvious that in some respects this new entity is radically different from those that came before it. Here for the first time the natural world is no longer that which surrounds and encloses a community, but that which is itself enclosed. As in China the park of the Son of Heaven is home to examples of every kind of living creature, but only as samples and emblems, so the Earth is now no longer the place “on which the altar is circumscribed,” but has itself become that circumscribed place whence the materials for our experiments can be collected. No one knows now how to invoke it so that “dressed in Agni [Fire] the black-kneed Earth” might make us “resplendent, keen.” And no one could now claim to recognize in its fragrance the same scent “that at the marriage of Sury? Daughter of the Sun, impregnated the immortals on the edge of the times.” It was then that “as a horse frees itself from dust, the Earth shook off the peoples who had dwelt on her since her birth.” Those motes of scattered dust now have the earth in their grip, yet have almost forgotten how to caress the body of the “golden breasted” woman to whom they long clung as parasites. This new and boundless community is governed by rules based on phantoms and procedures — rules no less binding than those of ancient communities. Before such an all-embracing power could establish itself, a coup d’état had to take place, a long and extremely slow coup d’état by which the brain’s analogical pole was gradually supplanted by the digital pole, the pole of substitution, of exchange, of convention, on which are based both language itself and the vast network of procedures in which we now live. This phenomenon, at once psychic, economic, social, and logical, is the consequence of a revolution that has been going on for thousands of years, and is still going on: the one truly permanent revolution we know of. Its Zeus is the algorithm. From this revolution all else follows. Yet it is a process still largely unrecognized, and perhaps we cannot even hope to recognize it in its entirety, since we are still immersed in it — submersed, even. In which case the questions we should be asking lie elsewhere: Is the technological community compatible with itself? Or will it be overwhelmed by the very process that brought it into being?

Certainly whoever it was who wrote the short text that usually goes by the name The First Systematic Program of German Idealism could hardly have been thinking of all this. Was it Schelling? Or Hegel? People still argue the point. The manuscript has been dated at around 1797 and was found among Hegel’s papers and in his handwriting. In any event, whether Schelling or Hegel, the author was struck by an idea that he not unreasonably declared to be new: “I shall speak of an idea that so far as I know of has never occurred to anyone before: we must have a new mythology.” Now then, this idea belongs to the vast web of implication that spreads out from the word “community”—a fact that did not escape the unknown author, who continued thus: “So long as we are unable to make our ideas aesthetic, which is to say mythological, they can be of no interest to the people.” There it is, the fatal word “people,” a word that is no more than a stronger formulation of the more subdued “community.” The assumption looks forward to the premise Nietzsche would one day announce in characteristically peremptory tones: “Without myth every civilization loses its healthy and creative natural force: only a horizon drawn by myths can hold together a process of civilization in a single unit.”

Like a whisper, or a light-footed messenger, the idea of the “new mythology” would set out from this obscure manuscript buried in Hegel’s papers to visit other minds. Friedrich Schlegel’s, for example. A few months later, on the pages of the Athenaeum , he would be writing: “We don’t have a mythology. But I am telling you: we are about to have one, or rather, for a long time now we have been working hard to produce one.” As so often, Friedrich Schlegel is displaying a remarkable effrontery here: true, the essential question is briefly illuminated, but immediately the mind is obliged to go a step further and ask: can one really “work hard to produce” a mythology, in the way one might produce a literary review? There is something strident in the words, but Schlegel doesn’t want to dwell on that. Nobly ebullient as his concepts become increasingly vague, he goes on: “The new mythology must be elaborated from the most profound depths of the spirit; it must be the most artistic of all works of art, since it will have to embrace all others, be a new riverbed and recipient for the ancient eternal and original spring of poetry, and be itself the infinite poem that contains hidden within it the germ of all other poems.” The final thrust runs as follows: “You may smile, perhaps, at this mystic poetry and the disorder that such a throng and profusion of poetry would produce. But the supreme beauty, nay, the supreme order, is still and only the beauty of chaos, and to be precise of a chaos waiting only for the contact of love to open out into a world of harmony, like the world of ancient mythology and ancient poetry. For mythology and poetry are one and the same, indivisible.” More than a critic, Friedrich Schlegel was a formidable literary strategist. He had a talent for the impetuous and ambiguous — the which he deployed so as to illuminate one way forward while obscuring a great many others. One day it would be plain that that way was in fact the chosen path toward a literature Schlegel himself was born not to practice but to prophesy — something that I shall be calling absolute literature.

There was no solid theory to what Schlegel was suggesting. His comments more closely resemble a lightning military strike than a piece of reasoning. People must be made to accept an act of appropriation. The whole of mythology was brusquely annexed to poetry. Henceforth the gods would no longer be mere inert material dragged out of rhetoric’s warehouse to decorate the friezes and pediments of neoclassicism, but the very stuff and spring of literature itself. And, like a gambler who keeps on raising the stakes, Schlegel adds: there is no question of speaking of just the one mythology, for “insofar as they are profound, beautiful, and wise, the other mythologies must also be reawakened to hasten the formation of the new mythology.” This is the decisive move: to rend the heavens to the East and let a swarm of unknown divinities settle on the European scene with the same rights as the Olympians: “Oh, that the treasures of the Orient were as accessible to us as those of classical Greece! What new springs of poetry might flow to us from India if only some German artists with the universality, the depth of comprehension, the genius of translation that is naturally theirs, could take advantage of the opportunity that this ever more brutal and obtuse nation little knows how to seize. It is in the East that we must look for the Romantic supreme.” This sentence was indeed the reckless supreme of the Romantic endeavor. But the Romantics would never get to the Orient. Rather, they were themselves the Orient of Europe, an Orient whose music rang out on piano keys. The Orient in the literal sense remained far away and was allowed to filter through only with prudence. But this should hardly surprise us: it is still far away today and continues to provoke an unspoken fear whenever its texts and images are approached. Not that Schlegel didn’t make an honest attempt: a few years after the piece in Athenaeum and having taught himself some Sanskrit, he was to publish a book called On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians . And yet we find too little in those pages to justify such an ambitious title, and only as a nostalgic farewell does Schlegel allow himself, in passing, as it were, the fine definition of mythology as “the densest weave of the human spirit.” This sudden paralysis of an otherwise febrile mind can be attributed to a hidden motive that we haven’t as yet touched on: there is a perennial duplicity in the early Romantics whenever they talk of the gods, the myths and mythology. At first the subject had been presented in purely literary terms: the gods and the mythological fabric around them (only the ancient gods? only the Greek? or the modern as well? and the Oriental too?) offered the possibility for a grandiose reshuffling of the literary pack. It was as if forms left barren by the Enlightenment were longing to take in these divine guests, not just as ornamental walk-ons now, but in all the fullness of their powers. At the same time it was clear to everybody that evoking the gods meant evoking the communities that had celebrated their cults. So the Romantics looked around outside their small kingdoms, countries thrown into turmoil by the Napoleonic whirlwind, and couldn’t find anything that would serve their purpose. Neither the society that was falling apart nor the one that seemed ready to form had anything to do with those antique communities that had experienced the adventures of the gods in the Mysteries, or, at the end, in that ceremony that was Greek tragedy. At which point Romantic eloquence ran dry. They drew back as if afraid of being surprised by the police, and chose to let a convenient curtain come down upon the scene. Speculations about the “new mythology” soon petered out.