A reader on reading - Alberto Manguel 2010
What song the sirens sang
Wordplay
“Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.
“No, I give up,” Alice replied. “What’s the answer?”
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 7
THE ODYSSEY IS A POEM OF false beginnings and false endings. In spite of the initial invocation to the Muse, in which the poet begs her to sing (in Robert Fagles’s translation) of “the man of twists and turns / driven time and again off course, once he had plundered / the hallowed heights of Troy,” the reader feels that these verses are not the start but the conclusion of the story, that the Muse has now ended her task and that everything has already been told.
The first book of the poem closes the seafaring narrative. It tells us that Odysseus left Troy a long time ago, that he suffered many misfortunes, and that neither his wife nor his son know his whereabouts. The last book opens the narrative to future undertakings, leaving the reader in suspense in the middle of a battle interrupted by Athena. But not only do the start and the conclusion of the poem explicitly assume the reader’s foreknowledge. Every one of Odysseus’s adventures carries the assumption of its own outcome and of the poem’s beginning and end. Every new episode assumes the entire Odyssey with a different and never-to-be-accomplished resolution: leading the life of a slave in the arms of the lovely Calypso, becoming guilty of infidelity with Princess Nausicaa, forgetting the world among the Lotus-Eaters, being ignominiously devoured by the cannibal Cyclops, falling victim to the wrath of King Aeolus’s winds, suffering a hideous fate between Scylla and Charybdis, dying under the swords of his wife’s suitors. Tempted by endless endings, Odysseus’s return is an eternal one.
One of these possible fates is prophesized to Odysseus by the ghost of the seer Tiresias in the Underworld: that after the story’s conclusion, once Odysseus has reached his Ithaca again, he will “go forth once more” and come upon “a race of people who know nothing of the sea” and here, among strangers, meet his true end. Dante, who had not read Homer, magically intuited the prophecy and made it come poetically true. In the circle of Hell where liars and cheats are punished, Ulysses (as Odysseus was renamed by the Romans) tells Dante that he did indeed undertake this further voyage, urging his aged companions to set sail once again. The famous passage was rendered by Tennyson in equally famous lines:
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Dante’s Ulysses sets off with his old crew, travels westward beyond the horizon, sees a mountain rise from the sea, rejoices but immediately despairs as a storm descends upon the ship and a whirlpool appears in its path and, “as Another willed,” it sinks into the unknown waters. Here ends Dante’s version of the Odyssey’s conclusion. Other than the implicit warning, that Ulysses’ account may not necessarily be the true one since he was condemned to Hell for deceiving, Dante tells us nothing about the old king’s intentions, about his will “to strive, to seek, to find”—what?
Homer, who offered Dante this coda to the story, also suggested (had Dante been able to read him) an answer to the question. The scene takes place in book 12 of the Odyssey, when Odysseus and his companions face the temptation of the Sirens. The enchantress Circe, after being ordered by the gods to release Odysseus from her charms, warns him of the dangers he will encounter as he sets forth (yet another retelling of the story). Among these dangers are the Sirens, capable of seducing mortals with their song. In Homer’s version they are only two, perched on a mountain of skeletons and putrid flesh that rises in the middle of a green meadow, waiting for passing ships. Whoever hears them sing, Circe tells Odysseus, will not return home again, will never be embraced by his wife or see his children’s smile, will be condemned to death and oblivion. To escape their wiles, Circe advises him to fill his men’s ears with wax and have himself tied to the mast. Then, though unable to approach them, Odysseus will nevertheless be able to hear the Sirens’ mysterious song. In Robert Fagles’s translation:
“Come closer, famous Odysseus—Achaea’s pride and glory— moor your ship on our coast so you can hear our song! Never has any sailor passed our shores in his black craft until he has heard the honeyed voices pouring from our lips, and once he hears to his heart’s content sails on, a wiser man. We know all the pains that the Achaeans and Trojans once endured on the spreading plain of Troy when the gods willed it so — all that comes to pass on the fertile earth, we know it all!”
Hearing them, Odysseus feels something within himself urging him to go towards them and gestures to his men to set him free, but they, obeying his first orders, tighten the rope that secures him to the mast. At last the ship sails past the danger and the Sirens vanish on the horizon. Odysseus and his companions have avoided yet another ending. Odysseus is now the only man on earth to have heard the Sirens’ song and survived.
Who are these Sirens? Homer does not tell us what they looked like. Ancient Greek decorations, not as old as the poem itself, show them as women with large wings or as birds with women’s faces. In the third century B.c., Apollonius of Rhodes, taking his inspiration from Homer, has his heroes, Jason and his crew, also meet the Sirens, and describes them as winged beings, half birds and half women, daughters of a river god and of one of the nine Muses. Apollonius says that the Sirens had served as Persephone’s handmaidens, entertaining her with their singing. A later legend adds that, after Persephone was kidnapped by the king of the Underworld, her mother, Demeter, punished them for not protecting her daughter, giving them wings and saying, “Now fly through the world and bring me back my child!” Another legend has it that it was Aphrodite who punished the Sirens for refusing to offer their maidenhead to either mortals or gods. Yet another tells that, in spite of having wings, the Sirens were unable to fly because the nine Muses (their mother and aunts), after defeating them in a singing contest, ripped off their feathers to make themselves garlands. Of the Sirens’ death there exist at least two versions. One says that they were killed by Hercules, whose sixth task was to eliminate the monstrous birds with beaks, wings, and claws of bronze who fed on human flesh in the Stymphalian swamps. The other, that after being snubbed by Odysseus, they plunged into the sea and drowned. It was perhaps this watery death that led in Latin tongues to the confusion between winged and fishlike creatures, calling both by the same name, unlike the distinction made in English between Sirens and mermaids, or in German between Sirene and Nixe.
Horrible as harpies or beautiful as nymphs, all Sirens are distinguished by their song. In the last book of Plato’s Republic, eight Sirens sing each a different note that together constitute the Pythagorean harmony of the celestial spheres, dear to ancient astronomers until the time of Galileo. For Plato, the Sirens’ song is less a deadly temptation than a necessary device for the correct working of the heavens. On the Sirens’ song depends the balance of the universe itself.
But can we know the nature of such a song? According to Suetonius, the emperor Tiberius, whenever he met professors of Greek literature, enjoyed asking them three impossible questions of which the third was: “What song did the Sirens sing?” Fifteen centuries later, Sir Thomas Browne observed that, though puzzling, the question was “not beyond all conjecture.” Indeed.
Several characteristics of the song are known to us. The first is its danger, since in its very attraction it makes us forget the world and our responsibilities in it. The second is its revelatory nature, since it tells of what has taken place and of what will take place in the future, of what we already know and of what we cannot discern. Finally, it is a song that can be understood by all, whatever their tongue or birthplace, since almost all men travel the sea and anyone might encounter the fearful Sirens.
These features lead on to further questions. First: where exactly lies the danger of their song? In the melody or in the words? That is to say, in the sound or in the meaning? Second: if their song reveals all, do the Sirens know their own tragic destiny or, like self-reflecting Cassandras, are they alone insensible to their own prophesizing music? And third: what is this language deemed to be universal?
If we suppose with Plato that their song is composed not of words but of musical notes, something in those sounds suffices to lend them sense. Something that the Sirens’ voices transmit (and that cannot be reduced to pure rhythm or intelligence) calls on those who hear them like a rutting animal, emitting a sound untranslatable except as an echo of itself. The Church of the Middle Ages saw in the Sirens an allegory of the temptations that beset the soul in search of God, and in their voices the beastly noises that lure us away from the divine. But it is perhaps for that same reason that the sense of the Sirens’ song, unlike the sense of God’s will, is “not beyond all conjecture.” The problem, I believe, touches upon certain aspects of the essential conundrum of language.
The tongues developed in the Homeric and pre-Homeric world, under the influence of migrations and conquests, for the purpose of both commercial and artistic communication, were “translated” tongues. That is to say, tongues that for reasons of war or trade served to establish connections between Greeks and “barbarians,” between those who called themselves civilized and the others, the speakers of babble. The passage of one vocabulary to another, the translation (in physical terms) of one perception of meaning to another perception of that same meaning is one of the essential mysteries of the intellectual act. Because if a semantic communication, oral or written, colloquial or literary depends on the words that make it up and on the syntax that rules it, what is preserved when we exchange them for other words and another syntax? What remains when we replace the sound, structure, cultural bias, linguistic conventions? What do we translate when we speak to one another from tongue to tongue? Neither the endemic sense nor the sound but something else that survives the transformation of both, whatever remains when all is stripped away. I don’t know if this essence can be defined but perhaps, as an analogy, we might understand it as the Sirens’ song.
Of all its characteristics, the most powerful one is its divinatory nature. All great literature (all literature we call great) survives, more or less painfully, through its reincarnations, its translations, its readings and rereadings, transmitting a sort of knowledge or revelation that in turn expands and illuminates new intuitions and experiences in many of its readers. This creative quality, like the shamanic reading of tortoiseshells or tealeaves, allows us to understand, through the reading of fiction or poetry, something of our own mysterious selves. This procedure entails not just the comprehension of a shared vocabulary but the discernment, in a literary construction, of a newly created meaning. In such cases, it is the reader (not the author) who recomposes and deciphers the text, standing as it were on both sides of the page at once.
In the same section of the Republic in which the Sirens appear, Plato imagines that when the great dead heroes of antiquity were told to choose their future reincarnations, the soul of Odysseus, remembering how ambition had made him suffer in his previous life, chose the life of an ordinary citizen, a fate the other souls had disdainfully discarded. In that instant, Odysseus rejects the glory of Troy, the fame of inventor and strategist, the knowledge of the sea, the dialogue with his cherished dead, the love of princesses and witches, the crown of slayer of monsters, the role of honorable avenger, the reputation of faithful husband: all in exchange for a quiet, anonymous life. We may ask if such wisdom, surprising in a man who felt that the adventurous life was his destiny, was not given to him in the moment when, tied to the mast, he heard the Sirens’ song.
Tiresias had told him that after the last, mysterious voyage his death would be peaceful, “a gentle, painless death … borne down with the years in ripe old age / with all your people there in blessed peace around you.” Dante was unable to grant it to him, and neither did the generations of poets who each in his own way translated the Sirens’ song. Almost all, from Homer to Joyce and Derek Walcott, demanded that Odysseus/Ulysses be an adventurer. Only a few, Plato among them, intuited that Odysseus alone could change his given destiny after discovering his true self in the song he is made to hear. In the fourth century A.D., the rhetorician Libanius, friend of Julian the Apostate, argued in his Apology of Socrates that Homer had written the Odyssey in praise of the man who, like Socrates, wished to know himself.
Dante too recognized the necessary ambiguity of the Sirens’ song, which allows each listener to hear a different version. In the nineteenth canto of Purgatorio, Dante dreams a dream. He sees (in W. S. Merwin’s translation),
a stammering
woman, cross-eyed, and her feet were crooked, her hands mangled, and her color faded.
Dante looks at her, and his gaze renders her beautiful. The woman begins to sing, and her song dazzles the poet.
“I am,” she sang, “I am the sweet siren
who lures sailors astray out on the sea
so full of pleasure they are when they hear me.
I turned Ulysses from his wandering course
with my singing, and he leaves me seldom
who is at home with me, so wholly do I satisfy him.”
Suddenly, “a watchful and holy lady” appears beside them and calls upon Virgil to tell Dante who this apparition really is. Virgil grabs the Siren, tears open her dress, and reveals a pestilential belly whose stench wakes Dante from his dream.
The Siren (as conceived by the poet) is the creation of Dante’s erotic desire, a desire that transforms the image he looks on, exaggerating its features until it acquires a haunting but false beauty. The Siren, as Virgil attempts to show his charge, is not a true amorous vision but a reflection of his own perverted longing. The Siren and her song are projections of that which Dante hides from himself, a shadow of his own dark side, unspeakable and hallucinatory, the secret text that Dante’s dream conjures up and that his consciousness attempts to decipher. This is a possible interpretation of Dante’s Siren. But perhaps more can be read in her changing apparition.
Centuries later, Kafka suggested that, faced with Odysseus’s expectations, the Sirens kept still, either because they wished to defeat him with their silence or because they were themselves seduced by the powerful gaze of the hero, and that the clever Ulysses only pretended to hear the magic song which they denied him. In this case, we might add, it was neither the sound nor the words that Ulysses perceived but a sort of blank page, the perfect poem, taught between writing and reading, on the point of being conceived.
Later still, Jorge Luis Borges, attempting to define his ars poetica, wrote,
They say that Ulysses, tired of astonishments
Wept for love at once again seeing his Ithaca
Humble and green. Art is like that Ithaca
Of green eternity, not of mere astonishments.
We too can imagine — why not?—that Ulysses, like Dante in Purgatory, was able to transform, through his amorous desire, the Sirens and their song. We can imagine him, “tired of astonishments,” reading the apparition, and its voice or its silence, as something uniquely personal. We can imagine him translating the Sirens’ universal language into a singular and intimate tongue in which he then composes an all-encompassing autobiography, past, present and future, a mirrored poem in which Ulysses recognizes, and also discovers, his true self.
Perhaps this is the way in which all literature works.