A fascinating subject, the role of the individual personality, the individual self of the artist, in the history of literature!

In the following six talks devoted to this subject I do not intend to overwhelm you with details and exact information. I do not pretend to offer a fully researched study. Nor do I want to make a parade of learning.

Louis Dudek, 1989

Since we are talking about the ego, I have myself to clear first. I am very much aware of the fallacy and illusion involved in the common idea of scholarship. A moment’s thought should tell us how little the mind can retain, or recover in detail, of the thou­sands of books that any decent scholar is supposed to have read. The most simple computer will contain and deliver more exact knowledge than the most erudite head. Actually, the prepared lecture or scholarly paper is a pleasant piece of illusion designed to give the audience an impression that the mind of the speaker or writer is furnished with all kinds of elaborate information. In fact, this information has just been fed into the lecture or prepared paper at the cost of nerve‑racking re‑reading, rifling through reference books, and checking through histories. This is what I have done in preparing these talks.

I am not an expert, just a compiler. Much of what I am going to say goes far beyond the range of things I am supposed to know; it deals with psychology, anthropology, religion, history, metaphysics. In all these things I am an amateur. But we're all amateurs where it really matters. Mainly, I am interested in following through certain ideas. And in accord with these ideas, I shall be somewhat subjective and give you my private thoughts on a very fascinating subject. I hope you will be interested and carry these ideas further on your own. They have something to do with what actually happened in literature: I really want a balance between the subjective and the objective. But I haven't programmed myself to give anything like a complete answer to the questions I raise. I think the answer is somewhere along these lines; and at least some of the points I raise will be important in a final reckoning.

Well, to begin with, you’d think that the self of the artist, his unique identity, was the main fact in literature from the beginning. If art is self‑expression, even primitive artists must have expressed themselves and defined their own individuality.

Unfortunately, this is not so.

I don’t know how far back we should go. We could go as far back as tribal society, which shows us the individual absorbed in the collectivity of the tribe. The “I” does not speak in its own right, or have rights, or express a point of view. The totem defines who you are.

Or we could turn to the first written literatures. And there the first “I” that speaks is the voice of the god:

I can see right through to the limits of the darkness, I can behold everything right through to the Primeval Waters.

This is from ancient Egypt. In the Book of the Dead, about 2000 B.C., the god speaks:

I came into being of myself in the midst of the Primeval Waters in this my name of Khopri.

So, too, in our own Bible, in the first chapter of Genesis:

God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

So the First Person is God. The answer to Molly Bloom’s rhetorical question at the end of Ulysses: “Who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all?”

The Egyptians in their mythology had a visual organ, an Eye, moving about the universe: so that the Eye of God, however you spell it, comes before the “I” of man. In fact, it is some time before the individual poet and artist learns to say “I”.

The individual, even in much later societies, is still “the servant of so‑and‑so”, not yet an individual man. When a man said “I”, in the ancient inscriptions and texts, he spoke for his lord, for a god or for the king, not for himself. Only the god counted as a person; and after the god, the king, who was at first the embodi­ment of the god on earth. In Egypt, for example, the god Horus was the first king. Speaking of the Pharaoh as son of God, the Egyptologist R. T. Rundle Clark writes: “On the earthly plane he was the supreme man, heroic warrior and hunter, champion of right, uniquely vigorous and virtuous.” Greatness descends from gods to men; and the “I” of God is thus passed on to man—at first only to the great man, demigod or hero, who is king among men.

The kind of simple first person with which we are familiar—

            “For I have learned to look on nature . . .”

            “I took a day to search for God . . .”

            “Let us go then, you and I . . .”

comes very much later in literature. In fact, it is a modern idea. The "“I” is an idea; and doesn’t occur in literature until it is dis­covered as an idea. As Frederick Nietzsche, the super‑individu­alist, declares: “Creating ones were first of all peoples, and only in late times individuals: verily, the individual himself is still the latest creation.”

The birth of individualism is usually associated with the Renais­sance. It is from this period onward that the personal voice of the writer becomes more and more clearly defined in literature. But the growth of individualism, like the development of science, is a rediscovery and a leap forward of something that had had a full start in earlier, classical times. Some connection between science and individualism, in fact, might be suspected from the begin­ning, since science is clearly a revolt from God as conceived in the tradition. The key ideas of science had been sounded by the Greeks: for example, the theory of Pythagoras that number is the principle of all things; and the theory of atoms expounded by Epicurus and his disciple Lucretius, the enemy of religion. So, too, with the key ideas of literature. Several poets in the latter half of the first century B.C. created a personal kind of poetry which prefigures the later poetry of Europe. Among these, the chief was the lover‑poet Catullus, about 50 B.C. Before him there had been Lucilius, a rough writer of personal satire who had broken with old conventions; and among the contemporaries of Catullus there was Sextus Propertius, the Ezra Pound of that day, and the young man Tibullus, who died before his thirtieth year leaving a little book of sixteen poems.

These young poets, says Professor Clarence Mendell of Yale University, “shocked the world of letters by producing the first expression in Latin of intimate personal emotion.” The short poems of Catullus, especially, he tells us, “deal regularly with familiar personal incidents in realistic language and from a realistic point of view... A considerable group deals with Catullus' own love affairs, especially with the one which most influenced his life, his infatuation with the notorious Clodia or, as he calls her, Lesbia. Into these and a few others there enters a sincere passion that puts them in a class by themselves.”

                        Let us live, my Lesbia, let us love!

                        And weigh the muttering of crabbed old men

                        as dust, against this one reflection:

                        Suns can set, and they can return,

                        but we, once our short light is ended,

                        in long perpetual night must sleep.

                                    [“Vivamus mea Lesbia”, trans. L. D.]

To us, in these poems, whether we tackle them in the original—I use a crib myself—or in translation, the personal element is not as intimate as we’d like; but it is there. We are accustomed to Keats’ private griefs, André Gide’s confessions, William Carlos Williams’ “old ecstasies”—the extreme developments of personal expression in modern times—so that these classical poems may seem distant, formal, and still generalized to some extent. But all the elements of personal self‑indulgence are already there.

And there was probably more of the same kind of thing in ancient Greece, if the poems of Sappho could be retrieved. But we have only fragments, full of passion and fire, as in the following touchstone:

Ah, but he’s a lucky one, whoever he may be

      who sits by your side taking from your mouth

the honey‑tongued syllables, while he gives back

      love to your white ears,

and hears your love‑making laughter that so quick

     can fill my heart with wildness and excitement

that when I just look at you, all my words

     break up in my throat

and I'm just dumb before you, standing there,

    when suddenly a fire tears through my body

so that I cannot see a thing, and all my senses

    whirl in my ears,

then the sweat stands out on me, and a shaking

   takes hold of me, till I grow pale green

like grass, and like one dying I seem to

   fall to the ground.

[“Phainetai moi”, trans. L. D.]

Sappho lived about 600 B.C.; Catullus, 50 B.C. A great span of time. Sappho’s poetry would probably have survived if it had been less personal, in other words less disturbing to universal morality. Catullus died at the age of thirty, leaving his poems as a mere record of wayward youth. But clearly the origins of modern individualism already existed in early Greece and Rome. It is as if a great new evolution of history had started at various points, only to be interrupted by the centuries of barbarism and religion, as they have been called, to start all over again in the modern world.

The Greeks, on the whole, were universal in their art, not personal. Edith Hamilton writes:

‘To us a man's character is that which is peculiarly his own; it distinguishes each one from the rest. To the Greeks it was a man’s share in qualities all men partake of; it united each one to the rest. We are interested in people’s special  characteristics, the things in this or that person which are different from the general. The Greeks, on the contrary, thought what was important in a man  were precisely the qualities he shared with all mankind’.

And for us, it is in the Renaissance that the new period of individualism begins. The Middle Ages broke the development, one might say. They returned to a communal and universal conception of the truth. The Renaissance picked it up again and continued the personal, individual disruption of all catholic and universal truths.

This is a very big theory—but interesting. One might say that world literature moves from impersonal, universal conceptions of truth, from divine communications—as in the Book of Genesis and the Ten Commandments—to intimate, personal communication in everyday terms. Literature moves from impersonality to personality, from universality to the completely private experience. All the problems of modern literature turn on this split between the universal and the particular or private.

The Existentialist philosopher Merleau‑Ponty, whom I’ve been reading recently, has an essay on Montaigne in which he sees the sixteenth‑century essayist, with his garrulous and wandering personal explorations, as the first example of a writer whose consciousness of self is the key to the universe. Merleau‑Ponty quotes Montaigne: “If my soul could once find solid ground I would not need to make essays, I would come to a conclusion; but instead it is forever in a state of apprenticeship, making new trials.” And Merleau‑Ponty summarizes this condition as a search for reality through the self:

In this ambiguous self, open to all, which he could never cease exploring further, he found possibly the locus of all obscurities, the mystery of mysteries, and something like a final truth.

Consciousness of the self is his one fixed point, the measure for him of all other doctrines.

And yet this self, for Montaigne, is not a clear and defined entity. The search for the self, which is identified with the search for truth about the world, is the crux of the matter. “He does not know that point of rest,” says Merleau‑Ponty, “which will be the understanding in Cartesian terms. The world for him is not a system of objects of which he has the idea before him in advance, the self for him does not have the purity of intellectual understanding.” “For him,” he notes further, “as later for Pascal, we are involved in a world to which we do not hold the key, equally unable to remain within ourselves and within external things, expelled from them back into ourselves and from ourselves back to them.”

Merleau‑Ponty then describes the condition of the ego in such a world of doubt and indecision:

Before the world of objects and even of animals who repose in their own nature, consciousness is empty and avid: it is consciousness of all things because it is itself nothing, it gives itself to all things and holds on to no thing. Our clear ideas, involved despite everything in this flux they would prefer to ignore, risk becoming, instead of the truth of ourselves, mere masks under which we hide our real being. In Montaigne, the consciousness of the self is a question addressed to that opaque being that he is and from which he expects an answer—it is like an ‘essay’ or an ‘experience’ of himself.

It may be that this is reading too much Existentialism into old Montaigne; but there is something to it. Montaigne is nothing if not ingratiatingly personal: “I was born betwixt eleven and twelve o’clock in the forenoon the last day of February 1533 according to our computation, beginning the year the first of January, and it is now but just fifteen years since I was compleat nine and thirty years old; I make account to live as many more.” And he did live that long. As he goes on he drags into his book everything that comes into his head or into his personal experience: “There is no subject so frivolous, that does not merit a place in this rhapsody . . .”

Montaigne is all very well. He belongs to the High Renaissance, when the entire galaxy of western thought was shifted in such a way that the personality and voice of the individual eventually emerged into literature. He is not yet the central subject of his own book, though Merleau‑Ponty would have him that. He wanders throughout a wide range of human knowledge, on moral questions, on truth, vanity, and the passions, on war and government, on the law, on education, on religion (which he rather lacks), on books and the customs of society, on history, on ancient philosophy, always quoting to an extraordinary extent, as they did in the sixteenth century, from Greek and Latin poetry, and from the anecdotal history of the ancients. With every writer, no matter what his subject, we can always say that what interests us, ultimately, is the writer himself. And that is true for Montaigne. But Montaigne as a person is not yet the subject of his own study, nor is he the central subject of his book. Although a sceptic, he was seeking the truth; and it is still the elusive truth which is the subject of his book.

The writer who starts a new era in literature in this respect, who in fact provides the groundwork for all literature since the eighteenth century, is Jean‑Jacques Rousseau.

Rousseau is unique in that he turned his attention, and the attention of his readers, to his own personality, as no other writer had ever done before. He broke out with a new affliction, an almost pathological self‑consciousness, which he made the dramatic subject of his famous Confessions. Rousseau is the first writer in history for whom the facts of his own biography and the details of his personal feelings and experiences are important in the interpretation of his work. He put the first person at the centre of things.

There had been book confessions before; and there had been some biography. But both Rousseau’s Confessions and his conception of biography were radically new and different. St. Augustine’s Confessions, written in the fifth century, are really homilies on the good life, analogous to the Roman Catholic rite of confession and intended to serve as an example for moral improvement. Plutarch’s Lives of the Greeks and Romans, in the first century A.D., was also a work of edification: Plutarch's purpose was to use biography for moral and philosophical example. Rousseau was a great reader and admirer of Plutarch, but his revelation of himself as the subject of an introspective autobiography is carried out with an altogether different spirit and purpose.

“The real object of my Confessions,” he declared at the beginning of the Second Part, “is to contribute to an accurate knowledge of my inner being in all the different situations of my life.”

What an extraordinary objective! Of course there were other motives involved. But this one of self‑analysis, of self‑revelation with an absolute will to truth, carried out with the pure motive of self‑knowledge, was something new in history.

Other writers had looked at themselves, and at other people, to find objective truth, to discover the universal elements of human nature—as Shakespeare did. They were still concerned with the objective and universal truth in literature. Rousseau for the first time turned to the elements in his own nature, for no other purpose than to study the unique individual, himself. Like Gide, his later alter ego, he could cry out: “Je suis différent des autres!” And he does say almost identically this in the first sentences of the Confessions:

I am commencing an undertaking, hitherto without precedent, and which will never find an imitator . . .

(There, of course, he was mistaken!)

I desire to set before my fellows the likeness of a man in all the truth of nature, and that man myself.

Myself alone! I know the feelings of my heart, and I know men. I am not made like any of those I have seen; I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am no better, at least I am different . . .

Notice how disarming, honest, original and human, this great writer and thinker becomes in describing and analyzing himself. Completely the reverse of what we might imagine of a famous public figure, an outstanding philosopher:

Two things, almost incompatible, are united in me in a manner which I am unable to understand: a very ardent temperament, lively and tumultuous passions, and, at the same time, slowly developed and confused ideas, which never present themselves until it is too late… I feel everything and see nothing. I am carried away by my passions, but stupid; in order to think, I must be cool… My ideas arrange themselves in my head with almost incredible difficulty; they circulate in it with uncertain sound, and ferment till they excite and heat me, and make my heart beat fast; and, in the midst of this excitement, I see nothing clearly and am unable to write a single word—I am obliged to wait… I have never been able to produce anything, pen in hand, in front of my table and paper; it is during a walk, in the midst of rocks and forests, at night in my bed while lying awake, that I write in my brain; one may judge how slowly, especially in the case of a man utterly without verbal memory and who has never been able to learn six lines by heart in his life.

We wonder whether this is a genius or a neurotic nonentity! Such is the difference between the truth that you find in impersonal universal books—the kind of truth that men tried to discover before Rousseau, in Descartes, in Francis Bacon, or in Chaucer, and Dante, and Spenser—and the truth of subjectivity and personality.

For it isn’t just a new and interesting kind of book. It is a new perspective on life and reality, a new approach to the whole problem of experience and the nature and meaning of experience. Rousseau begins a shift in the frame of reference for literature, as radical as the Relativity Theory of Einstein is for physics. He begins the great avalanche of romantic literature, and he predicts the terrible scepticism and darkness of modern literature, though he himself is an optimist. And this great change in perspective turns on the idea of the self, the unique personality of the writer revealed in his late book, the Confessions.

So there is the one truth as the gods would have it, or as the high priests would declare it to be, for all time, universal, absolute, impersonal and divine; and there is “the world as I see it”. (The World as I See It, incidentally, is the title of a book of essays by Albert Einstein.) Subjectivity, personality, therefore challenge the universal truths of tradition and religion. Merleau-Ponty says of Montaigne: “he is on the opposite side from religion, if religion is an explanation and a key to the world.” And Rousseau is certainly a modern sceptic who seeks his own private religion in the total rejection of dogma, ritual, and the traditional tenets of faith. There is nothing more amusing than his description of his “conversion” to the Roman Catholic faith and his rational rejection of that religion. His “Confession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar” in Emile—a chapter describing his simplified natural religion—created one of the great intellectual storms of the eighteenth century. It was in fact Rousseau’s iconoclasm that pushed him into the solitary and painful condition where he had to take stock of himself and write the Confessions.

Subjectivity is opposed to universal truths. It stands opposed not only to traditional religion but ultimately to all objective claims to truth. It leaves man stranded and alone, a solitary individual, in a great sea of nothingness.

But the problem of subjectivity, as literature and faith are filtered through the personal ego of the writer, is not solved by siding with the modern subjective point of view, nor in rejecting that view (as T. S. Eliot did) for the sake of the traditional and universal. It is not solved by taking any one side. It is, however, a problem, a dialectic, a game of opposites. It passes through a multitude of variations before it reaches the present, not very happy time.