Rhythm: Form and Dispossession 9780226685908

Citation preview

Rhythm

Rhythm Form and Dispossession

v i n c e n t b a r l e t ta

The University of Chicago Press  ó Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2020 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2020 Printed in the United States of America 29  28  27  26  25  24  23  22  21  20  1  2  3  4  5 isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­68573-­1 (cloth) isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­68587-­8 (paper) isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­68590-­8 (e-­book) doi: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago /9780226685908.001.0001 The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Stanford University toward the publication of this book. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Barletta, Vincent, author. Title: Rhythm : form and dispossession / Vincent Barletta. Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2019024364 | isbn 9780226685731 (cloth) | isbn 9780226685878 (paperback) | isbn 9780226685908 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Rhythm. | Rhythm in literature. Classification: lcc bh301.r5 b37 2020 | ddc 111/.85—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024364 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Carolina

Contents Preface  ix



1

Rivers Stopped or Flowing Backward  1

2

Harmony, Number, and Others  42

3

Twentieth-­Century Measures  91 Conclusions  161 Acknowledgments  167 Notes  173 Bibliography  191 Subject Index  209 Index Verborum  219

Preface Thus the sensible, the scandal of post-­Platonic philosophy, reclaims its dignity in thought, as in practice and common sense. It never disappeared, but has hardly suffered from this transformation that accords it the place of honor in thought and recovers its meaning and richness. «henri lefebvre (2013), 21»

Signification is thus conceived on the basis of the-­one-­for-­the-­other proper to sen­sibility, and not on the basis of a system of terms which are simultaneous in a language for the speaker, and which simultaneity is in fact only the situation of the speaker. «emmanuel levinas (1978b), 77»

In a 1926 letter to Vita Sackville-­West, Virginia Woolf writes, “Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. [ . . . ] Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it” (1980a, 247). Here Woolf is speaking quite specifically of the practice of prose composition, but her “wave in the mind” metaphor is nonetheless suggestive beyond this restrictive domain. This is, in effect, Woolf ’s definition of rhythm: a preverbal interaction between the self and the external world that results in some form of internal displacement. That is, we see or

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otherwise sense something, and before we can describe the thing or our perception of it, or even form words, we are moved. In her 1905 essay “Street Music,” Woolf goes a bit further: The beat of rhythm in the mind is akin to the beat of the pulse in the body; and thus though many are deaf to tune hardly anyone is so coarsely organized as not to hear the rhythm of his own heart in words and music and movement. It is because it is thus inborn in us that we can never silence music, any more than we can stop our heart from beating; and it is for this reason too that music is so universal and has the strange and illimitable power of a natural force. (1905, 147)

Writing here two decades before her letter to Sackville-­West, Woolf presents rhythm as both universal and as a “natural force” linked to the body and with seemingly unlimited power. Emma Sutton (2010) has pointed out Woolf ’s debt to Stéphane Mallarmé for this understanding of rhythm, and while the influence seems undeniable, it is worth questioning whether it manages to explain as much as one would like. There is, for example, the complexity of the idea that music is “inborn in us.” This conceit speaks, after all, to much more than the relatively banal repetition across time of one’s heartbeat; it is about time, to be sure, but also about resonance, vitality, and the body’s broad entrainment through percussion, a flex-­and-­rest duality that gives life and thus precedes cognition or even experience. It is, in the most complete sense, a matter of form. Writing just four years after Woolf ’s letter to Sackville-­West, the Portuguese modernist poet Fernando Pessoa would speak of rhythm as a “movimento íntimo da alma” (intimate movement of the soul; 1986, 49), an image that likewise speaks to the phys­ ical alteration of what we consider, even if just out of habit, to be our most interior self. It is true that Pessoa, throughout his extensive corpus of published and unpublished work, most commonly equates rhythm with poetic meter. He tends to find it stifling and artificial, and he often mocks it openly. Here, however, he is concerned with something much less mechanical or

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even experiential. As with Woolf, Pessoa points to an elementary formation, in the strictest sense, of the body and the self. It is part of a nonlinear movement (through time and space) that is primary for Pessoa, even constitutive, but it is always there; and poetry at its best can connect us to it, or, at its worst, push us into a narrow tunnel of artificiality, the hickory-­dickory-­dock of fixed poetic meters. In this latter scenario, time in all its phenomenological complexity—­as movement, as embodied reverberation, as horizon—­is compressed into linear time, a soulless reduction. If rhythm is for Woolf and Pessoa a kind of form-­giving, internalized displacement, or some primary interruption of our habitual economy (a resetting or recalibration of our most basic footing), this seems to push far beyond more common matters of poetic meter and prosody. Referring to related but not identical concerns, Henri Meschonnic has gone so far as to argue that “la métrique est la théorie du rythme des imbéciles” (metrics is the rhythm theory of imbeciles; 1982, 143). But then these self-­consciously modern ideas on rhythm do not come from nowhere; in fact, they connect to much older, even ancient theorizations of rhythm that similarly have little to do with regularity, repetition, or even (in the strictest sense) time. Beyond this, they also anticipate powerful theories of rhythm linked to aesthetics, ontology, and ethics that find expression and development only after the Second World War. Pessoa and Woolf have come to occupy a pivotal place in the history of ideas, and despite their more obvious differences (most notably the matter of gender, their publication record, and the almost total absence of eros in Pessoa’s life and writings), there are important similarities between them. In the first place, both lived and worked during the same tumultuous period of European history—­three years Pessoa’s senior, Woolf would survive her Portuguese counterpart by only five years. Both experimented extensively with neopaganism and formed part of groups central to the modernist project in England and Portugal respectively.1 In fact, both have come practically to be synonymous with modernism itself in their respective countries. Over their

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careers, both would have a complex (to be kind) relationship with fame and their audience, and both would die far too young. They intersect, too, on the matter of rhythm; however, Pessoa tends to retreat from any explicit theoretical exposition, while Woolf shows herself to be particularly persistent and incisive. In a later letter to the composer Ethel Smyth, she says: “All writing is nothing but putting words on the backs of rhythm. If they fall off the rhythm one’s done” (1980b, 303). For readers of jazz history, this comment will likely conjure up John Coltrane’s oft-­ cited statement on “falling off the back of rhythm” while playing with Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot Café in the 1950s: “I was playing a solo [ . . . ], and I lost my place. It was like falling down an elevator shaft” (Hentoff 1995, 73). The sensation of falling, expressed by both Woolf and Coltrane, is a key insight for any adequately nuanced theory of rhythm, as Sutton has indicated with respect to Woolf: Her image characterizes rhythm as animated, purposeful and autonomous; it predates and determines the choice of words “put” on it, just as, in the letter to Vita, rhythm “makes words to fit it.” Rhythm is primary whilst words are secondary—­fragile and unstable, prone to “fall[ing] off.” Rhythm, implicitly, has a generative and epistemological force; as Woolf reiterates elsewhere, “meaning” is not constructed only by “words.” In these accounts, rhythm precedes the act of “writing,” though whether it is perceived to exist externally or internally, in the writer’s creative mind or body, varies in Woolf ’s accounts. The implied allusion to horses, like that to waves “break[ing]” and “tumbl[ing],” does associate rhythm with the natural world (albeit a partially domesticated version of nature), but this is not to say that Woolf ’s image necessarily suggests a single cosmic rhythm or, indeed, “natural” rhythms determined by the gender, race or sexuality of the writer. (2010, 177)

Whether off a horse (or camel or elephant, one imagines) or down an elevator shaft, the sensation appears to be the same: rhythm is primary, even formative, and we are either bound to it or we are sent spinning off and downward. To extend Pessoa’s image of interiority, one imagines here the soul losing the inti-

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macy of its movements and whirling ever outward until there is no interiority at all. But then this prompts the question: if we are bound to rhythm in some way, what is the nature of this bond? Are we ever without it? What happens to us, beyond metaphoric approximation, when we fall? Where do we fall? More to the point, do we ever land? In the present book, I address these and related questions through an examination of three key moments in the long and varied history of rhythm as an object of critical inquiry. Before saying more on these moments (spread out across a long stretch of time, though much less physical distance), it bears mentioning from the outset that they are by no means all there are. It would be foolish, after all, to undertake (alone) anything like a “global history of rhythm,” and it would be even more risible to limit that history to three moments in (mostly European) history. In fact, my goal is much more modest. By focusing on three discrete historical moments and a more or less fixed corpus of texts, I hope only to provoke a deeper, more elemental conversation on rhythm—­one that moves beyond metrical and even temporal restraints. Put another way, I have no real intention for the present volume to be anything like “the last word” on the subject of rhythm; rather, it is an attempt to take up once again an ancient conversation, to extend a hand (as Paul Celan might put it) and hope for other hands to meet it. The first moment upon which I focus is a foundational one. It is in ancient Greece, after all, that written theories of what we now understand as rhythm (ruthmós) first emerge. My main interest here lies with pre-­Socratic dramatic, philosophical, and poetic works, because it is during this period and in these texts that one finds the earliest formulation of ruthmós, the idea at the center of the present book. Especially important, though by no means exclusively so, are the atomist theories of Democritus and Leucippus, the lyric poetry of Archilochus, and the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. In these texts, ruthmós consistently points to bondage, order, dispossession, and especially form. It is, in a very direct way, a morphological, spatial, and even ethical

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concept rather than a strictly temporal one, and this becomes clearer when we consider later Platonic and Aristotelian accounts of rhythm, such as Aristoxenus’s fragments on Greek musical rhythm. It is no stretch to suggest that, before the fourth century BCE, rhythm is a robust theory of things themselves, a physics that manages to elude mere mechanics. Of course, this would change after Plato, and much of the present book is devoted to working back from Plato’s articulation of rhythm and what has almost organically followed from it. For the purposes of this preface, one might summarize this evolution of thought in the following way: through Plato, Greek notions of rhythm would find more mathematically precise articulation as expressions of time and movement; however, they would also, in the process, lose a great deal of their philosophical depth. That is, while Greek, Latin, and Arabic music and poetry developed highly sophisticated and precise taxonomies of rhythm, none of these linked the movement of bodies in time to anything beyond corresponding ideas of aísthêsis (feeling) or, more ambitiously, numerical (celestial) harmony. Rhythm here is both temporal and experiential, even conventionally “musical,” rather than formative, intimate, and precognitive. It is undeniable that Platonic theories of rhythm significantly altered ideas of ruthmós that had come before the fourth century BCE. By the time of Aristotle and his students (not to mention his later Arabic translators and commentators), ruthmós was in fact inseparable from temporality, repetition, performance, poetry, and music. Its temporal character became nothing short of axiomatic (Wolf 1955). The newly conceived rhythmic systems themselves naturally differ according to region, language, and culture (the Greek pous, for example, taking a back seat to bayt in Arabic poetry and music); however, the underlying sense of rhythm as a temporal phenomenon, linked or not to the movement of dancers’ bodies, would remain constant. This does not mean, of course, that earlier ideas of rhythm went away entirely; however, it seems undeniable that they remained mostly latent—­ stowaways on ships driven by number—­until well into the fifteenth century.

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The second moment I consider is the sixteenth century, when new theories (and ideologies) of rhythm, harmony, number, and vernacular poetry firmly take root in Europe. It is also during this period that Iberian poets, such as Garcilaso de la Vega (1501?–­1536) and Luís Vaz de Camões (1524?–­1580), begin to hold these poetic theories up to the lived experience of global empire in a systematic way, and so I have chosen to turn my focus there.2 Here, it should be made clear, there is no overt or systematic countertheory to received and somewhat (by then) conventional accounts of rhythm as temporal measure. That is, poets in the sixteenth century, whether from the Iberian Peninsula or elsewhere, do not tend to present explicit theories of what they consider rhythm to be in any but the most conventional sense. The term rhythm, in fact, scarcely appears in poetic work from this period. One brief exception to this rule is a work by the Castilian playwright Lope Félix de Vega y Carpio (1562–­1635), who speaks of rhythm in his 1598 play, El vaso de elección San Pablo (The Chosen Instrument, Saint Paul ). In the third act, a fictional Seneca speaks of the bad poetry that has begun to fill Rome: Siempre fue / soberano y excelente / en los griegos y latinos / el arte de la poesía, / mas no admite medianía / en sus intentos divinos; / que como puede pasar / sin ella y sin la pintura, / al mundo ha de ser tan pura, / que exceder y aventajar / pueda al humano deseo, / que la humilde o la mediana / su sacro ritmo profana, / y desto mejor Orfeo / y Apolo, sus inventores, / podrán mostrar la experiencia, / cuya divina excelencia / cuentan tan varios autores. / Pero ya ha llegado a Roma / tiempo que, con seso vano, / contra Virgilio y Lucano / cualquiera la pluma toma. (act 3, lines 512–­33) The art of poetry was always sovereign and excellent among the Greeks and Latins, but it never admits any mediocrity in its divine intent; since this can occur without poetry (or painting), the latter must be to the world so pure that it exceeds and surpasses human desire, as the humble or mediocre work will profane its holy rhythm. Orpheus and Apollo, its inventors, can better demonstrate this, as their divine excellence is described by many authors. But a time has now come to Rome that with vain intellect anyone can take up their pen against Virgil and Lucan.3

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The idea in Lope of mediocre poetry somehow profaning the holy or sacred “rhythm” of poetry itself (the best representatives of which would be Orpheus and Apollo) likely rests squarely on notions of meter and prosody, although one suspects that matters of theme likewise have something to do with what he considers “excellent” or even “divine” poetry to be. It would at least make sense that the divine or pure poetry he treasures finds its (Stoic) way past human desire through both prosody and theme. There is a wondrous complexity to this late sixteenth-­century account of rhythm from the perspective of vernacular poetics (i.e., rhythm as a stand-­in for poetry itself ); however, one must also bear in mind that what is most at stake here is a temporal, even numerical account of rhythm itself. My strong suspicion, in fact, is that the “sacro ritmo” (holy rhythm) to which Lope refers is directly linked to musica universalis, the mathematical and temporal harmony of the celestial spheres. Lope’s explicit account of rhythm in El vaso de elección San Pablo is rare among early modern poets. Beyond this, however, his framing of rhythm is by and large in keeping with ideas inherited from Latin grammarians and other writers from late antiquity. Rhythm here (as I will explore in chapter 2 of this book) is intricately connected to harmony and even newly minted appreciations of vernacular rhyme. What of other poetry? Are there theorizations of rhythm that are less explicit or operate at other, more pragmatic levels of reference? I argue that poets during the early modern period persistently—­even obsessively—­point to other possibilities for rhythm related to form, space, and ontology. There is, of course, a humanistic “return” to classical thought during this period, but I argue that this is ultimately less decisive than the possibilities opened up by the turn to vernacular poetry and (in the Iberian Peninsula) the far-­reaching and contradictory effects of empire. In chapter 2 I spend a fair amount of time laying out the rhythmic implications of European vernacular poetry, but I ultimately turn to the matter of how poets (such as Camões) used both epic and lyric to unpack the existential problems (some expressed

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through and as time) that imperial expansion represented, even for its nominal victors. It is, perhaps, a case of poets doing the sort of work on rhythm that philosophers and grammarians could not or would not do. It is also, by necessity, incomplete and fragmented insofar as it persistently points to feelings and forces it cannot name. Despite such limitations, the theories of rhythm encoded in this poetry remain powerful and of great import, given that they deploy sensibilities and conceits that threaten to undo the very logic of the verbal utterance and, with it, empire. To make use of an aqueous conceit that resonates with the early modern Portuguese imaginary, it is poetry that functions much like a rip current, carrying the swimmer under and out to sea even as surface waves move in regular intervals toward the shore. In the final chapter I move to the twentieth century to consider the self-­conscious questioning of rhythm that took shape in African, Anglo-­American, and European thought. Important for this discussion are John Dewey’s early account ([1934] 2005) of rhythm and aesthetic experience, Émile Benveniste’s philological analysis of ruthmós from 1951, Emmanuel Levinas’s phenomenology of rhythm, aesthetics, and ethics from roughly the same period to the early 1970s, and Léopold Sédar Senghor’s ex­ amination of rhythm in the context of West African thought and the négritude movement. Beyond these openly theoretical texts, I consider selected primary works of twentieth-­century literature. Of particular interest are Chinua Achebe’s thoughts on African myth, his own Igbo-­language poetry, the work of his childhood friend Christopher Okigbo (who died at the start of the Biafran War in Nigeria), and the poetry of the twentieth-­century Mozambican poets Noémia de Sousa and José Craveirinha. Moving into more contemporary work, while perhaps also coming full circle, I conclude the chapter with a discussion of rhythm and classical Greek poetry in Alice Oswald’s Memorial (2011). Throughout this book I argue that a common thread runs through these three historical moments, a thread characterized by an approach to rhythm that transcends poetry, aesthetics, and even temporality. Each example, in its own way, addresses rhythm

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as a powerful force that holds us in place and shapes the foundations upon which we and our world ultimately rest. Rhythm speaks, one might say, (to) the very conditions of our being in the world.

Other Than Time Perhaps the most basic assumption about rhythm is that it is an inherently temporal phenomenon. We speak of rhythm as patterned repetition over time, as periodicity, as the alternation between, for example, a strong this and then a weaker that (as in TICK [silence] tock, or the reassuring trochees of a beating heart) within an unchanging forward flow of time. There are, of course, diverse kinds of rhythm: the iambs, trochees, spondees, and dactyls of poetry, the circadian rhythms by which biologists measure daily sleep cycles, or the three-­four meter of a waltz. We may even speak in a wholly unmarked way of the rhythm or tempo of a game, the Vatican-­approved rhythm method of contraception, or “finding our rhythm” in domains as varied as family life, business, and sports. Philosophers such as Lúcio Pinheiro dos Santos (1889–­1950), Gaston Bachelard (1884–­1962), and Henri Lefebvre (1901–­1991) have attempted, in related ways, to turn the analysis of these domains into a science. Nature also seems to have a rhythm, expressed through the movement between day and night, as well as—­at least in areas at some distance from the equator—­the circular march from spring to summer and then on to autumn and winter. What do these ideas of rhythm have in common? First and foremost, there is the axiomatic and mostly implicit (even “natural”) belief that rhythm is linked to time. In circadian rhythms, for example, the twenty-­four-­hour day moves forward as a kind of implacable flow, a steady forward stream of time. Within this flow, we say, there are up times and down times, an alternation of energy that bears an analogous resemblance to the arsis and thesis of dance and of counterpoint, or the stress-­ and-­rest variability of song. In this and other cases, rhythm as repetition across linear time is taken for granted and employed as a principle for understanding different facets of being.

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For a recent exposition of such temporal ideas of rhythm, and their application to broader ways of understanding the world, it is useful to turn to a recent work, Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015). At the start of her chapter on rhythm, Levine offers a general definition: Rhythms, if we define the term broadly, are pervasive. From shift work and travel timetables to religious rituals and the release of each summer’s blockbuster movies, repetitive temporal patterns impose constraints across social life. Often these forms are routinized—­the predictable rhythms of everyday life, such as clocking in to work or the release of children from school. Sometimes these temporal markers repeat at long intervals: the harvest, the reunion, the centenary celebration. Typically many are overlaid, as a particular person might struggle to balance work and school schedules, remembering when to pay the electric bill, see a probation officer, take communion, and swallow a pill, pausing at regular intervals to accommodate the need for food and sleep and to celebrate significant events on individual, family, national, and religious calendars. (2015, 49)

One notices from the outset that Levine’s definition of rhythm is unabashedly, even exclusively temporal. Rhythm diverges little from the standard dictionary definition of the term, which has been, since Plato but especially since the Latin grammars of the fourth century CE, linked to ordered, arithmetical repetitions over time. She speaks of intervals, pauses, and repetitions with the conceptual confidence of a musicologist. We might agree that, from the outset, Levine seems already to know what rhythm is, and her analysis consists of unpacking the inner workings of that definition within different cultural domains. To ask the seemingly naive question “But what is called rhythm?” is to place an entire section of Levine’s magisterial book into doubt. In a similar vein Amittai F. Aviram, in Telling Rhythm: Body and Meaning in Poetry (1994), speaks at great length about poetry and meaning in relation to rhythm and postmodernity. Early in his book he defines rhythm explicitly: Rhythm is the more or less regular repetition through time of a sensory experience, especially auditory or tactile. As such, the experience

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of rhythm involves both cognitive apprehension—­the recognition, expectation, and completion of patterns—­and physical involvement or participation. [ . . . ] Rhythm is a source of pleasure, and, upon reflection, it inspires a sublime wonder. Rhythm exerts a force of catchiness that engages the listener’s desire to participate, a kind of drive toward rhythm. It is in this sense that I refer to rhythm as having a sublime power. The present theory of poetry is based upon this sense of rhythm. (1994, 43)

Aviram leans toward a more embodied and perhaps not so wholly temporal account of rhythm, but he inevitably pulls back from it throughout his analysis. He speaks of “catchiness,” “engagement,” and “participation,” but these concepts find only limited exploration insofar as Aviram’s study relies upon a definition of rhythm limited to the “regular repetition through time of a sensory experience.” Further on in his introduction, he speaks of rhythm as lying outside of language and connected to unconscious drives of pleasure and power: Throughout this discussion, by design I have referred to rhythm as a kind of nonsense, aware of the deprecatory feel of this term. From the point of view of normal, rational language—­that is, language as a system of signs used to mean things other than themselves, rhythm is nonsensical, it has no meaning at all. Rhythm from this point of view is empty. But from another, hypothetical point of view outside of language, rhythm would seem very full—­not of meaning, but of pleasure and power. (1994, 55)

These drives are tied to the body for Aviram (he cites Sigmund Freud directly), but they are also inherently temporal. To illustrate his ideas regarding pleasure, rhythm, and extra-­linguistic nonsense, for example, Aviram turns to the example of a woman he saw at a laundromat, dancing in time to the beat of a washing machine (1994, 55). As with Levine, there is much to admire in Aviram’s text; however, as I argue throughout this book, there is good reason to question, or at least bracket off as contingent, the relation of both time and experience to rhythm. From a more philosophical perspective, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has argued for an appreciation of rhythm in language

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that moves beyond hermeneutics and meaning to take into fuller account the “physical reality” of language. In a focused exposition of such “presence,” he adopts an understanding of rhythm that is, as I show in chapter 1, quite close to that developed by Martin Heidegger in his lectures on Heraclitus. As Gumbrecht has it: “As soon as the physical reality of language has a form, a form that needs to be achieved because of its status of being a time object (‘ein Zeitobjekt im eigentlichen Sinn,’ according to Husserl’s terminology), we say that it has a ‘rhythm’—­a rhythm that we can feel and identify independently of the meaning that language ‘carries’ ” (2006, 320). For Gumbrecht, rhythm implies form and physicality—­presence—­but as a Husserlian “time object in the proper sense,” it is still defined first and foremost by its temporal character.4 In his account of the materiality of language, Gumbrecht likewise approximates Levinas’s own argument about language (especially poetic language) and what precedes meaning and even consciousness: Le mot n’est pas séparable du sens. Mais il y a d’abord la matérialité du son qu’il remplit et qui permet de le ramener à la sensation et à la musicalité telle que nous venons de la définir: il est susceptible de rythme, de rimes, de mètres, d’allitérations, etc. Mais le mot se détache de son sens objectif et retourne à l’élément du sensible encore d’une autre manière: en tant qu’il s’attache à une multiplicité de sens, en tant qu’ambiguïté qu’il peut tenir de son voisinage avec d’autres mots. Il fonctionne alors comme le fait même de signifier. Derrière la signification du poème que la pensée pénètre, à la fois elle se perd dans sa musicalité, qui n’a plus rien à faire avec l’objet, qui varie peut-­être uniquement en fonction de ce qu’elle écarte, de ce dont elle se libère. La poésie moderne, en rompant avec la prosodie classique, n’a donc nullement renoncé à la musicalité du vers, mais l’a cherchée plus profondément. (Levinas 1947, 86–­87) A word cannot be separated from meaning. But there is first the materiality of the sound that fills it, by which it can reduced to sensa­ tion and musicality such as we have defined it is capable of having rhythm, rhyme, meter, alliteration, etc. And a word detaches itself from its objective meaning and reverts to the element of the sensible in still another way inasmuch as it is attached to a multiplicity of

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meaning through the ambiguity that may affect it due to its proximity with other words. It then functions as the very movement of signifying. Behind the signification of a poem which thought penetrates, thought also loses itself in the musicality of a poem which has nothing to do with objects and perhaps varies solely in function of what thought sets aside, what it liberates itself from. Modern poetry, in breaking with classical prosody, has nowise given up the musicality of verse, but has sought it at a greater depth. (Levinas 1978a, 47–­48)

The idea that “thought also loses itself in the musicality of a poem” is in many ways similar to Gumbrecht’s “presence,” and it likewise foreshadows Levinas’s own argument, published just a year later, that music, poetry, and art take hold of the body prior to meaning, pulling it into rhythm. Older, better-­known approaches to rhythm, such as Bachelard’s and Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis (both with a significant debt to Pinheiro dos Santos), likewise revolve primarily around time, even as they seek to link it to space, sensation, and energy. In the chapter of The Dialectic of Duration in which Bachelard offers a synopsis of Pinheiro dos Santos’s account of rhythm and psychology, for example, he speaks of vibration and pain: If physical pain is sufficiently slight, it too comes within the competence of rhythmanalysis. With a little practice, we can for example make [a] toothache vibrate. All we need do is calmly and attentively put it into its proper perspective and avoid the general annoyance and agitation that would fill up the intervals of the particular pain. The throbbing of this local pain then acquires its regular rhythm. Once this regularity has been accepted, it comes as a relief. Pain is truly restored to its local aspect because its correct temporal aspect has been fully determined. ([1950] 2016, 135)

Bachelard’s approach to rhythm helps him to counter Henri Bergson’s focus on continuity, bringing together under the rubric of science both the physics of vibration and the process of dialectic. It is at once a philosophy and a (scientific) method of attunement; whether it can attenuate the agony of a toothache, of course, is yet to be determined. Writing earlier in The Dialectic of

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Duration, Bachelard addresses Bergson directly: “We wish therefore to develop a discontinuous Bergsonism, showing the need to arithmetize Bergsonian duration so as to give it more fluidity, more numbers, and also more accuracy in the correspondence the phenomena of thought exhibit between themselves and the quantum characteristics of reality” ([1950] 2016, 20). To “arithmetize” duration, to assign it number and disclose the process by which it is achieved, is central to the Bachelardian project; importantly, it is also tied to a broader account of physics, a science of all matter and energy: Matter exists in and only in a time that vibrates, and it is because it rests on this time that it has energy even in repose. We would therefore be forgetting a fundamental characteristic if we were to take time to be a principle of uniformity. We must ascribe fundamental duality to time since the duality inherent in vibration is its operative attribute. We now know why [Lúcio Alberto] Pinheiro dos Santos has no hesitation in writing that “matter and radiation exist only in and through rhythm.” This is not, as is so often the case, a declaration inspired by a mystique of rhythm; it really is a new intuition, firmly based on the principles of modern wave physics. ([1950] 2016, 125)

There is an apparent connection here with pre-­Socratic atomist theory; however, insofar as the very concept of rhythm for Bachelard (following Pinheiro dos Santos) is numerical and temporal rather than formal, his conception of rhythm remains resolutely—­ even axiomatically—­Platonic. More recently Lefebvre has called for “a new field of knowledge: the analysis of rhythms; with practical consequences” (2013, 13). Lefebvre’s book—­equal parts invitation and provocation—­ has had significant influence in the social sciences, especially in fields open to in situ observation, such as geography, urban studies, sociology, and anthropology. Time-­lapse video recordings have proven especially useful as they help to reveal repetition, stress, change, and energy across larger swathes of both space and time. An excellent example of this work is a recent talk given by Dawn Lyon (2014), a sociology professor from the University of

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Kent, in which she presents to her audience a six-­minute time­lapse video of one day of business at London’s Billingsgate fish market. Fixing her camera to a spot several feet above the market, she photographs the space once every ten seconds over a span of eleven hours (1 a.m. to 12 p.m.). She also records corresponding bits of sound once every hour as she walks around the market. The result is in many ways beautiful—­a digital presentation of human activity within a defined space that resembles music visualization in many ways, though with greater variation and informational richness. Beyond the beauty of this quotidian ballet (the mopping and spraying at the end of the day are particularly compelling), Lyon uses her video to call attention to the Lefebvrian idea that time and space are not given to us a priori but are rather achievements, the result of activity. Here we find common ground with sociological subfields, such as conversation analysis and ethnomethodology to be sure, but there is also meaningful spillover into fields that attend much more explicitly to history and cultural context, such as the ethnography of communication. Adopting rhythm as a unit of analysis, the argument goes, compels us to see whatever we refer to as “the social”—­and even space and temporality themselves—­as an emergent phenomenon, something we achieve through practice, interaction, repetition, and change. What is the specific idea of rhythm that underlies Lefebvre’s call for rhythmanalysis? It is self-­consciously both temporal and spatial, as is the case with Bachelard; it also similarly pushes against the Bergsonian notion of duration, focusing much more on the relation (as in a numerical ratio) between instants. Lefeb­ vre, to be fair, does not reduce these relations to mere linear equations (with time and space as the respective x and y axes of a Cartesian grid); however, he remains openly committed to the mathematical precision that he believes this “new” mode of philosophical analysis will bring. Lefebvre’s approach to rhythm is likewise inseparable from his broader commitment to Marxist theory, which leads him to privilege human agency, labor (broadly defined), and the social

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processes by which space and time emerge through the everyday actions of human agents. He makes this evident in one of the opening passages of his book: Is there a general concept of rhythm? Answers: yes, and everyone possesses it; but nearly all those who use this word believe themselves to master and possess its content, its meaning. Yet the meanings of the term remain obscure. We easily confuse rhythm with movement [mouvement], speed, a sequence of movements [ gestes] or objects (machines, for example). Following this we tend to attribute to rhythms a mechanical overtone, brushing aside the organic aspect of rhythmed movements. Musicians who deal directly with rhythms, because they produce them, often reduce them to the counting of beats [des mesures]: “One-­two-­three-­one-­two-­three.” Historians and economists speak of rhythms: of the rapidity or slowness of periods, of eras, of cycles; they tend only to see the effects of impersonal laws, without coherent relations with actors, ideas, realities. (2013, 15–­16)

Much of the promise of Lefebvre’s version of rhythmanaly­ sis is his decisive move from duration to instants (and their relation) and from “impersonal laws” to actors. Within this scenario, the space-­time of the Billingsgate fish market (or any other example) emerges not through the natural flow of time or through impersonal movement, but rather by means of the leaps, steps, lunges, and moves made by actors who achieve the fish market through this activity. Time speeds and slows, spaces close or open up, all of these changes emerging from human interaction. And rhythm, the meaning of which remains obscure, is nonetheless for Lefebvre the best tool to examine, measure, and appreciate this fact. The passage from Rhythmanalysis that I have just cited also discloses the idea of rhythm that informs Lefebvrian rhythm­ analysis: it is, as with Bachelard, fundamentally Platonic. It measures the movement of bodies across both time and space, generating a kind of chronotopic calculus that shifts, opens, closes, and regenerates through human labor. Lefebvre’s idea of rhythm is not reducible to time; in fact, his stress on space would be an innovation not only for rhythm theory, but also for Marxist

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thought. Nonetheless, there remains a fundamentally arithmetical character to Lefebvre’s approach to rhythm, a not-­so-­distant cousin of the late-­antique idea of numerus. My point in presenting these examples, some recent and others more established, is not to diminish their importance or to criticize them unfairly for what they do not address. I mention them, rather, to illustrate a common and limiting trend in nearly all critical or philosophical treatments of rhythm. Put simply, we customarily take as axiomatic a narrow and ultimately undertheorized idea of what rhythm might be. We do not, in other words, tend to ask “What is rhythm?” without having an a priori sense of what the answer to this question might be: a particular “moving ratio” (to borrow a phrase from Paul Rabinow) of time, space, number, and the senses. In a surprisingly large amount of critical work, in fact, rhythm seems to require no definition whatsoever; it is something that passes as self-­evident, at least in terms of its generic features. In more specific terms, we tend to speak at length of different kinds or types of rhythm, and of all the rhythms (in plural) that surround us and shape our experience. Like Meno, who presents to Socrates a laundry list of virtues rather than a definition of what virtue itself might be, we expand our own list of rhythms (e.g., seasonal, musical, circadian, poetic, conversational, etc.) while remaining distant from all but an ultimately reductive understanding of what rhythm is and what it does to us. As even Lefebvre admits, the meaning of rhythm remains “obscure” (2013, 15). To return to our original examples, when Woolf and Coltrane speak of rhythm and the sensation of falling, are they speaking primarily of a temporal experience, one ordered into beginning, middle, and end? Can we speak of an experience at all, or does rhythm engage us (to paraphrase Aviram) at a point anterior to this? Related to this, not incidentally, is Levinas’s account, in Autrement qu’être ou au-­delà de l’essence (Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, 1974), of the preontological dispossession effected by sensibility: “Le sensible—­maternité, vulnérabilité, ap­ préhension—­noue le nœud de l’incarnation dans une intrigue plus

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large que l’aperception de soi; intrigue où je suis noué aux autres avant d’être noué à mon corps” (The sensible—­maternity, vulnerability, apprehension—­binds the knot of incarnation to an intrigue larger than the apperception of self; an intrigue according to which I am bound to others before being bound to my body; 1974, 96). It is worth mentioning, in a more poetic vein, that Woolf likewise speaks of sensibility and specifically rhythm as something pre-­experiential, the condition for writing itself. We can only address these questions in the most provisional way, insofar as definitions of rhythm cannot avoid a certain circularity, a production of the very thing one wishes to define, or, at worst, a reduction of the sensible to apophansis; however, it is through a focused account of rhythm that we can begin to point to what lies before (and perhaps beyond) experience, judgment, and even temporality. Rhythm, to paraphrase Levinas once again, involves a being-­taken-­hold-­of—­he speaks in Autrement qu’être, his last book-­length statement on the matter, of “arracher le pain à sa bouche” (pulling the bread from one’s mouth; 1974, 94)—­that has always already occurred. If we tend to speak of it in terms of what we perceive, as patterns of repetition over time, this is merely the exposed summit of an enormous undersea mountain.

1 Rivers Stopped or Flowing Backward During the first half of the seventh century BCE, the Greek mercenary and poet Archilochus (ca. 712–­648 BCE) composed the earliest known account of rhythm. It appears in a poetic fragment in which the poet, self-­fashioned as a soldier, exhorts his spirit (thumós) to take account of the force that rhythm exerts over him: θυμέ, θύμ᾽ ἀμηχάνοισι κήδεσιν κυκώμενε, ἀνάδυ, δυσμενῶν δ᾽ ἀλέξευ προσβαλὼν ἐναντίον στέρνον ἐνδόκοισιν, ἐχθρῶν πλησίον κατασταθεὶς ἀσφαλέως: καὶ μήτε νικῶν ἀμφάδην ἀγάλλεο μήτε νικηθεὶς ἐν οἴκῳ καταπεσὼν ὀδύρεο: ἀλλὰ χαρτοῖσίν τε χαῖρε καὶ κακαῖσιν ἀσχάλα μὴ λίην: γίγνωσκε δ᾽ οἷος ῥυσμὸς ἀνθρώπους ἔχει. (Edmonds 1931, 2:130) Spirit, spirit—­unsettled and helpless in your sufferings, your enemies come at you; and yet face them and ward them off; fortify your breast, meet them in close and remain steadfast; and should you prevail, don’t celebrate openly, or if defeated, don’t collapse in your house to wail and lament; rather, rejoice for what is good and grieve for what is not, but not too much: come to recognize the rhythm that holds us all.

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Chapter One

Encoded within these seven verses is an immediately apparent concern with praxis and moderation—­what one should do, what one should not do, and how one is to react to victories and defeats. Beyond this general preoccupation with ethics, however, the fragment likewise contains a direct call to decisive action, a command to “come to recognize or discern” that is also, some­ what paradoxically, an appeal to accept dispossession and the lim­ its of human power. The fragment begins with an apostrophic summoning of the poet’s soul: “Spirit, spirit” (θυμέ, θύμ᾽). There is an intensely performative, almost incantatory aspect to this opening, a trochaic invocation directly followed by a statement on the condition of the poet’s spirit that is at once phatic (from the perspective of the imagined conversation between the poet and his spirit) and descriptive (from the perspective of the audience/reader): “unsettled and helpless in your sufferings” (ἀμηχάνοισι κήδεσιν κυκώμενε). Considered as a whole, the verse first invokes the poet’s spirit before moving on to offer it empathy and provide a window into its difficult situation: at the end of its powers, troubled by a host of sorrows and (at the start of the second line) beset by enemies. What occupies the majority of the second verse, all of the third, and the first part of the fourth is a call for the spirit to stand up to its enemies, to “meet them in close” and fight to the best of its abilities: “δυσμενῶν δ᾽ ἀλέξευ προσβαλὼν ἐναντίον / στέρνον ἐνδόκοισιν, ἐχθρῶν πλησίον κατασταθεὶς / ἀσφαλέως.” (and yet face them and ward them off; / fortify your breast, meet them in close and / remain steadfast). The rest of the fragment, up to the final phrase, deals explicitly with how one is to respond to victory or defeat. In an elegantly phrased line, Archilochus calls on his spirit to deal with good and bad in a measured way and to avoid extremes: “ἀλλὰ χαρτοῖσίν τε χαῖρε καὶ κακαῖσιν ἀσχάλα / μὴ λίην” (rather, rejoice for what is good and grieve for what is not, / but not too much). It is at the very end of the fragment that Archilochus mentions rhythm (ruthmós, or, in the Ionian dialect in which he writes, rusmós). Urging his spirit to “γίγνωσκε δ᾽ οἷος ῥυσμὸς

Rivers Stopped or Flowing Backward 3

ἀνθρώπους ἔχει” (come to recognize the rhythm that holds us all), Archilochus presents rhythm as a force that not only limits or constrains all humans (this generality expressed through the accusative plural of ánthrôpos) but one that also gives us form and meaning, pushing us always toward a mean between two forces. What this call in the final phrase also achieves is the central paradox of the poetic fragment itself; namely, that the transitive act of coming to recognize rhythm with which Archilochus begins finds itself immediately checked and directed back upon the speaker and his audience. We are called on to know, but what it is that we are to know is precisely the limits of our own powers with respect to and because of rhythm: it holds us and keeps us in check (an idea expressed through the verb éxô). As in the first verse, Archilochus places his spirit at the end of its powers (amêxanos), although now not because of the threat of external enemies but rather because of rhythm’s a priori hold upon it. Focusing on the relation between these two lines, one encounters a kind of circularity to the fragment: it is, sensu stricto, a call to act; however, the action for which it calls ends with the recognition of the absolute limits of human action, of rhythm’s inescapable, centripetal power. In speaking of rhythm as he does, Archilochus is not urging his spirit (and, by extension, his audience) simply to come to a realization of the external accidents and phenomena that create the horizon of one’s conscious possibilities or experience; that is, the fragment is not primarily concerned with ethics in a normative or conventional sense. At a much more immediate, even preconscious level, Archilochus is speaking of a universal force that he believes somehow always already holds us and even bends us in specific ways. Rhythm for Archilochus is thus not fortune, nor is it impacted by fortune (understood broadly). It serves, rather, as a force that grasps us and gives us form even be­­ fore experience; or to put it in more direct terms, it is form, both constituting us and holding us in check. The idea of rhythm as form seems to have little to do with a time-­based conception of rhythm. There is no body in movement

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Chapter One

or a drumbeat here; rather, it seems to speak to a condition of being, a gravitational force that holds us all suspended. Is this what Archilochus means? To begin to answer this question, it is useful to turn to the clearest articulation of this notion of rhythm, which would emerge in the fifth century BCE through pre-­Socratic atomist philosophy. For atomists such as Democritus, who largely incorporated the thought of Leucippus into his own philosophical system (a system to which modern readers have access in large measure through extensive citation by Aristotle), all matter is composed of eternal and uncaused atoms (the adjective átomos means “uncut” or “indivisible” in classical Greek) that swerve around one another within infinite, empty space owing to their differing sizes and weights. Moving as they do, some atoms inevitably crash into one another, while others fit together temporarily as larger assemblages. These assemblages, achieved through perpetual movement (or “flow”) and the commensurability of their consti­t­ uent atoms, make up for Democritus not only all the matter of our physical world, but also our bodies, our souls, and our very thoughts. Charles Joseph Singer briefly explains the implications of this line of atomist thinking: The qualities that we distinguish in things are produced by movement or rearrangement of [ . . . ] atoms. As everything is made up of these unchangeable and eternal atoms, it follows that coming into being and passing away are but a seeming, an appearance produced by the rearrangement of the atoms. The beings that you and I think we are, are but temporary aggregations of atoms that will soon separate to enter into the substance of other beings. And yet, in ages of time, perhaps, we shall be re-­formed, when it may so fall out that our atoms come together again. Thus history may repeat herself end­ lessly. (1941, 15)

Singer speaks of  “coming into being” and “passing away” as forms of “seeming” according to atomist thought, although one should not read this as something akin to the later baroque concern with essence and appearances or even to Plato’s allegory of the cave

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(Republic 514a–­20a; Plato 1982c), according to which there exists some fundamental reality (e.g., the Kingdom of God or Plato’s nonspatial and atemporal realm of Forms) beyond the material world and human perception. For the atomists, there is in fact no ultimate reality beyond that of uncreated atoms and the space of non-­being through which they move; the entire universe is for them thus shaped by the fundamental contingency that characterizes the assemblage of atoms that make up matter (always only temporarily), from the largest planet to the smallest, most insignificant thing. In this, the emphasis is placed squarely on space rather than time. How did the atomists speak of atomic assemblages? More to the point, what is the term that they consistently employ to describe the form that matter takes within this contingent and fluid framework of coming together and pulling apart? The answer, as Émile Benveniste points out, is rhythm (ruthmós): Et c’est bien au sens de “forme” que Démocrite se sert toujours de ruthmós. Il avait écrit un traité Περὶ τῶν διαφερόντων ῥυσμῶν, ce qui signifie “sur la variété de forme (des atomes).” Sa doctrine enseignait que l’eau et l’air ῥυθμῷ διαφέρειν, sont différents par la forme que prennent leurs atomes constitutifs. Une autre citation de Démocrite montre que’il appliquait aussi ruthmós à la “forme” des institutions: οὐδεμία μηχανὴ τῷ νῦν καθεστῶτι ῥυθμῷ μὴ οὐκ ἀδικεῖν τοὺς ἄρχοντας, “il n’y a pas moyen d’empêcher que, dans la forme (de constitution) actuelle, les gouvernants ne commettent d’injustice.” C’est du même sens que procèdent les verbes ῥυσμῶ, μεταρρυσμῶ, μεταρρυθμίζῶ, “former” ou “transformer,” au physique ou au moral: άνοήμονες ῥυσμοῦνται τοῖς τῆς τύχης κέρδεσιν, οἱ δὲ τῶν τοιῶνδε δαήμονες τοῖς τῆς σοφίης, “les sots se forment par les gains du hasard, mais ceux qui savent (ce que valent) ces gains, par ceux de la sagesse”; ὴ διδαχὴ μεταρυσμοῖ τὸν ἄνθρωπον, “l’enseignement transforme l’homme”; ἀνάγκη [ . . . ] τὰ σχήματα μεταρρυθμίζεσθαι, “il faut bien que les skhêmata changent de forme (pour passer de l’anguleux au rond).” Démocrite emploie aussi l’adjectif ἐπιρρύσμιος; dont le sens peut maintenant être rectifié; ni “courant, qui se répand” (Bailly) ni “adventitious” (Liddell-­Scott), mais “doté d’une forme”; ἐτεῆ οὐδὲν ἴσμεν περὶ οὐδενος, ἀλλ’

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ἐπιρρυσμίη ἑκάστοισιν ἡ δόξις, “nous ne savons rien authentiquement sur rien, mais chacun donne une forme à sa croyance” (= à défaut de science sur rien, chacun se fabrique une opinion sur tout). (1966b, 329–­30) And it is indeed in the sense of  “form” that Democritus always presents ῥυθμός. He wrote a treatise Περὶ τῶν διαφερόντων ῥυσμῶν, which means “on the variety of form (of atoms).” His doctrine taught that water and air ῥυθμῷ διαφέρειν, that is, they differ from one other due to the form that their constituent atoms take. Another citation from Democritus shows that he also used ῥυθμός to describe the “form” of institutions: οὐδεμία μηχανὴ τῷ νῦν καθεστῶτι ῥυθμῷ μὴ οὐκ ἀδικεῖν τοὺς ἄρχοντας, “there is no way, given the form of the present constitution, to prevent rulers from committing injustices.” The verbs ῥυσμῶ, μεταρρυσμῶ, μεταρρυθμίζῶ, “to form” or “to transform” in the physical or moral sense, work in the same way: άνοήμονες ῥυσμοῦνται τοῖς τῆς τύχης κέρδεσιν, οἱ δὲ τῶν τοιῶνδε δαήμονες τοῖς τῆς σοφίης, “fools are formed by the gains of chance, while those who know (and value) these gains [are formed] by wisdom”; ὴ διδαχὴ μεταρυσμοῖ τὸν ἄνθρωπον, “teaching transforms a person”; ἀνάγκη [ . . . ] τὰ σχήματα μεταρρυθμίζεσθαι, “it is indeed necessary for the shapes to change form (in order to go from angular to round).” Democritus also uses the adjective ἐπιρρύσμιος, whose meaning can now be corrected; it is not “courant, qui se répand” (Bailly) or “adventitious” (Liddell-­Scott), but “having a form”: ἐτεῆ οὐδὲν ἴσμεν περὶ οὐδενος, ἀλλ’ ἐπιρρυσμίη ἑκάστοισιν ἡ δόξις, “we have no genuine knowledge of anything, but everyone gives a form to his or her belief ” (= lacking knowledge of anything, everyone none­ theless forms an opinion on everything). (1971, 282–­83)

According to Democritus, ruthmós can refer both to the contingent form of matter in a universe of eternal and uncaused flow as well to the generic principle of form taken by phenomena in the social world—­institutions, organizations, and even human attitudes and comportment. For the atomists, as Pierre Sauvanet argues, ruthmós is thus nothing short of “the instantaneous schema of the world’s underlying structure, achieved through the incessant combination of material atoms” (1999, 44).1 As such, ruthmós constitutes for them a theorization of form as an always

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provisional achievement within a world characterized by constant movement and interaction (even at the atomic level) rather than as the instantiation of an a priori, essential design. Put another way, we might say that for Democritus, ruthmós signifies form (as in sxêma) within a universe where all compound things are inherently emergent and transitory—­a temporary stoppage in “flow.” In section 985b of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, one finds a straightforward account of this line of thought: Leucippus and his associate Democritus say that the full and the empty are the elements, calling the one being and the other non-­ being—­the full and solid being, the empty non-­being (whence they say being no more is than non-­being, because the solid no more is than the empty); and they make these the material causes of things. And as those who make the underlying substance one generate all other things by its modifications, supposing the rare and the dense to be the sources of the modifications, in the same way these philosophers say the differences in the elements are the causes of all other qualities. These differences, they say, are three—­shape and order and position. For they say the real is differentiated only by “rhythm” and “inter-­contact” and “turning”; and of these, rhythm is shape, inter-­contact is order, and turning is position [ . . . ]. (1941, 697)

Aristotle’s final line from the passage above equates ruthmós with sxêma (τούτων δὲ ὁ μὲν ῥυσμὸς σχῆμά ἐστιν ἡ δὲ διαθιγὴ τάξις ἡ δὲ τροπὴ θέσις), which reduces the subtle distinction that the atomists held between the two terms but faithfully links the concept of rhythm to form and space rather than to some sort of temporal patterning. It is necessary only to understand that the sort of form to which we refer when we speak of ruthmós in this way is fluid and inextricably linked to kinêsis rather than fixed and expressible as stasis. For Archilochus, it is within a frame of constant movement or flow—­at once ontological and ethical—­that we engage our enemies, experience victories and defeats, and come (or fail) to recognize the formative power that rhythm exerts upon us. Sauvanet, who is admittedly focused on more explicitly philosophical

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accounts of rhythm developed by figures such as Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle, succinctly characterizes Archilochus’s ethico-­ poetic notion of rhythm as a force that “seems effectively to order the life of human beings [and] is seen by Archilochus to be at work in all circumstances: everything occurs as if there existed some sort of natural ‘law of the mean’ for humankind and for every individual” (1999, 13). Archilochus’s fragment addressing his spirit constitutes a poetic call to recognize that our powers—­our very lives—­are held in check and given form by the force of rhythm. But what exactly is this rhythm for Archilochus? There is without question a significant amount of what resembles atomist thought at work here; however, to present the fragment on rhythm as an early articulation of such ideas, an atomist philosophy avant la lettre, seems wholly inadequate, if only because such a move diminishes the poem’s significant, even overarching commitment to lyric address and performativity. Beyond this, too, the fragment makes explicit reference to a force that has already taken hold of humans, as if it preceded experience, being, and temporality itself. What, we may ask, is the link that Archilochus forms and exploits between ethics, ontology, and lyric address? It is one thing, after all, to speak of rhythm’s power over humans—­its effects—­and quite another to say what it is, to attempt to define it in some comprehensive way. We know very little about Archilochus’s life and only slightly more about his work, so it is difficult to develop a full sense of his thoughts on most matters. It is known that he was born on the island of Paros (part of the Cyclades island group in the central Aegean Sea) and worked primarily as a mercenary soldier throughout his life. He was also highly esteemed as a lyric poet, and by the fifth century BCE he was considered by many to be the equal of Homer himself. His poetry, elegies composed in epic hexameters and less formal (and metrically more varied) iambs, survives today only in fragments, and he offers little beyond the poetic fragment cited above to help us understand what precisely it is that he means by ruthmós.

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Despite the fragmentary condition of Archilochus’s extant works, there is nonetheless a strong sense that ruthmós operates for him (and his listening public) as something other than the experience of suffering or punishment; in fact, as I have just suggested, it seems to be of a wholly different order than experience altogether. That is, if it holds and restrains us, it does so not as something we encounter consciously or in time, but rather as something (even if paradoxically) anterior to this. We see this, for example, upon comparing the fragment above with the following three verses by Archilochus cited by Stobaeus in his fifth-­ century CE compilation of Greek poetry: δύστηνος ἔγκειμαι πόθῳ ἄψυχος, χαλεπῇσι θεῶν ὀδύνῃσιν ἕκητι πεπαρμένος δι᾽ ὀστέων. Wretched I lie, wrapped in longing and lifeless, crushed by a god-­given pain, pierced through my bones. (Edmonds 1931, 2:84)

The theme here is explicitly erotic, and Archilochus develops it by means of a suite of images linked to bondage and restraint. The lover is “wretched” (dústênos) and crushed to the point of lifelessness by the pain of desire, pierced through his bones by a chronic ache visited upon him by Venus. There is, as in the fragment on rhythm, a pointed expression of the limits of human agency: desire puts an end to the subject’s ability to act (even to live), and yet even this desire has its roots outside the subject, as something forced upon him by divine will. Put another way, even the lover’s desire is not of his doing or within his control; the process is characterized by passivity and a state of no longer being able. Archilochus frames this sort of suffering quite differently from rhythm, however, in that the latter for him has taken hold of us (anthrôpous éxei) as part of the stoppage of flow by which we emerge as conscious, experiencing subjects somehow, only afterward, vulnerable to the whims of the gods and fortune. It is before the fact—­a condition, as John Dewey would later frame

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Chapter One

it, rather than an example or result of experience. The pain of desire, on the other hand, takes hold of us as an accident of our being-­in-­the-­world rather than a characteristic of such being. Put another way, love suffering is for Archilochus but a particularly dramatic example of the sorts of setbacks and enemies, divine or earthly, that one’s soul may encounter in the world. This is of a very different order from rhythm, which seems for Archilochus to do its work beyond, or, perhaps more accurately, before such experiences: it is always already there, constraining and bending us in particular ways. In a Kantian (and thus admittedly anachronistic) sense, we might even justifiably wonder whether for Archilochus rhythm operates as something like the very condition of possibility for experience. Archilochus’s statement on rhythm is undoubtedly suggestive; however, it is also somewhat vague, or at the very least imprecise. And it is quite possible, of course, that this is exactly the point. As Sauvanet has argued at some length, ruthmós consistently carried a fundamental and robust polysemy in ancient Greece (1999, 13). What follows from this, Sauvanet argues, is that if we wish to develop anything resembling an adequately contextualized understanding of rhythm before Plato, we must find a way to assemble and “hold together the different meanings” that constitute the term’s inherent “semantic richness and complexity” (ibid.). And so for Archilochus, we are left with the pieces of the puzzle that his poetic fragment provides: rhythm—­a force akin to form—­always already holds us all, and we would do well to come to recognize (and accept, one imagines) its binding effect.

Heraclitus’s Daemons Heraclitus, writing roughly a century and a half after Archilochus, would offer a similarly poetic and fragmentary account of rhythm. As with Archilochus, little is known of the life of Heraclitus, although it is generally accepted that he was an autodidact from Ephesus (Greek Asia Minor) who authored one book, which is preserved today only in numerous fragments and citations. His most extensive early biographical treatment comes

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in Diogenes Laertius’s third-­century CE Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (Βίοι καὶ γνῶμαι τῶν ἐν φιλοσοφίᾳ εὐδοκιμησάντων), although it seems likely that Diogenes Laertius himself drew from several anecdotal and indirect sources. He sums up Heraclitus’s thought in the following way: “All things are composed of fire, and into fire they are again resolved; further, all things come about by destiny, and existent things are brought into harmony by the clash of opposing currents; again, all things are filled with souls and divinities [daimónôn]” (Laertius 1925, 415).2 The divinities or daímônes to which Diogenes Laertius refers constitute a central aspect of Heraclitus’s thought on ethics, as evidenced by his fragment 119: “A man’s disposition (êthos) is his destiny (daímôn)” (Heraclitus 1991, 68). Given its importance, it is worth considering the extent to which Heraclitus links daímôn, as an individual and internal divine power that controls one’s destiny (as opposed to the more general archaic concept of moĩra as a somewhat arbitrary—­even absurdist—­ outward principle of fate), to the concept of rhythm as Archilochus had developed the idea. Constantine J. Vamvacas explains Heraclitus’s understanding of daímôn, and its link to freedom, fate, and order (lógos), in the following way: The archaic Greek myth viewed man’s life as arbitrarily determined by Moira, the goddess of destiny—­an external demonic power. Heraclitus locates the daemon (spiritual, guardian powers) within man: “A man’s character is his daemon.” Inescapable destiny continues to exist for Heraclitus. “Without question there always are destined events,” he declares. However—­and here lies the fundamental difference from the mythic tradition—­this does not mean that man is not free. Personal freedom and inescapable fate are not incompatible but complementary: man is free and responsible to choose between self-­entrapment within his illusory “private thinking” and bestial life, on the one hand, and on the other, self-­opening up toward the “common and divine Logos.” The latter choice leads to homo-­logia (to the agreement and oneness with Logos), conscious consent and submission of one’s individual being to the common and divine, cos­ mic Logos, which comprises the due measure and supreme law—­natu­ ral and ethical—­of all beings. (2009, 120)

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What emerges from this is the idea that Heraclitus understood human freedom to revolve around the conscious choice facing us all either to operate in line with the “supreme law”—­the cosmic lógos—­or to continue to fool ourselves that this law is not ultimately binding. It is in this sense, as the freedom to believe in and act according to supreme law or not, that Heraclitus viewed human freedom and destiny to be complementary rather than op­­ posed principles. How does the concept of rhythm fit into Heraclitus’s thought on freedom and responsibility? In the first place, he appears never to have made use of the term ruthmós in his writing. That said, he repeatedly employs the verb réô, from which ruthmós is derived, to develop his “flux doctrine.” According to this, the universe and everything in it exists in a constant state of becoming and flux conditioned, as Diogenes Laertius points out, by the unifying logic (lógos) or measure (métron) of opposites in a relation of balanced exchange that always inevitably “returns us to the status quo ante” (Kahn 1981, 144).3 Charles H. Kahn imagines this structure as a “measured pendulum swing” over the progression of time, according to which nothing is “taken without repayment” (ibid.). This framework suggests that the principle of rhythm as constraint or a “holding in check” is indeed present in Heraclitus; if it is articulated, once again, through the verb éxô in Archilochus, it is developed in Heraclitus’s writing, albeit in a fragmentary way, through his elaboration of lógos and métron.4 Taking Archilochus’s poetic theorization of ruthmós into account, in fact, we might go one step further. It is worth considering, after all, that both Heraclitus’s universal framework of fluidity and contingency and his equally broad principle of measure are in fact already encoded within his conception of réô as the verbal form of ruthmós. Looked at in this way, we might revise our understanding of pánta reĩ (everything flows) to account for the inherent polysemy of réô as a term that for Heraclitus points to much more than what the English verb to flow can possibly convey. “Everything flows,” we might say, but with the caveat that by flow we mean something much more complex and even potentially contradictory than the

Rivers Stopped or Flowing Backward 13

translation alone might suggest—­perhaps something akin to the “vortex in the flow, or the reversible in the irreversible,” as Michel Serres has put it (2000, 154). For a philosopher such as Heraclitus, predisposed to see human freedom and fate as complementary rather than opposing forces, it seems logical to consider that the concept of “flow” would also imply its supposed opposite (i.e., the stoppage of flow). Heidegger has suggested as much (or perhaps more) in his comments on Thrasybulos Georgiades’s work on rhythm and language: “Georgiades points out that humans do not make rhythm; rather, for the Greeks, the ῥυθμός [measure] is the substrate of language, namely the language that approaches us. Georgiades understands the archaic language in this way. We must also have the old language of the fifth century in view in order to approximate understanding of Heraclitus” (Heidegger and Fink 1979, 55). As W. Julian Korab-­Karpowicz has pointed out, Heidegger’s interest in Heraclitus was much more than superficial (2017, 109). Lexi Eikelboom adds even further context: At first blush, [ . . . ] Heidegger’s rhythm appears to be a hybrid between the Benvenistian nature of rhythm as form, on the one hand, and the more traditional, Apollonian form-­against-­chaos or Deleuzian repetition of actualities, on the other. Rhythm is not under the control of humans but is something more primordial that they encounter in language, yet this primordiality is not chaos but the process of binding, of struggle. Therefore, the relationship between rhythm and physis is not as opposed as at first appears to be the case. A restraint of physis can never be absolute. The rhythmic form is only ever momentary and conflicted. It is not rigid and immovable but emerges in and of the flux of physis, suggesting that it is more like Benveniste’s definition—­a momentary, changeable form—­than might first appear to be the case. (2018, 78)

Heidegger is here reading Georgiades (and Heraclitus) according to his own thinking about language and ontology; however, his call always to be mindful of the complex language ideologies and forms of verbal praxis in play within archaic Greece and how our own conceptions not just of rhythm but of language itself

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can skew and limit our understanding of Heraclitus and his use of réô certainly ring true. As I have already mentioned, Sauvanet argues convincingly that ruthmós possessed a relatively wide semantic range within classical Greece from at least the time of Archilochus. In this, Sauvanet seems to agree with Heidegger and Georgiades, while departing strategically from Benveniste’s more focused philological approach. The question, which must remain open, is whether for Heraclitus the verb réô was likewise characterized by the robust polysemy that Sauvanet attributes to its nominal form.

Aeschylus and the Spectacle of Enrhythment If Archilochus’s theory of rhythm resides at the intersection of poetry and ethics, the concept would find perhaps its most iconic expression within a moment of inhuman torture. The scene is mercifully a fictional one, occurring early on in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound.5 In terms of the question of rhythm, the scene revolves around the Titan Prometheus’s short but evocative description of his unjust punishment at the hands of the newly crowned Zeus. As many of us were taught in high school (our debt to Edith Hamilton enduring and unpayable), Prometheus’s story more or less begins with his giving tacit support to the Olympian gods in their parricidal war against the Titans.6 After winning the violent conflict, Zeus claims the throne that had once been held by his father, Cronus, and the Olympian gods begin to take charge of things: the beautiful Aphrodite, born of seafoam and Uranus’s severed genitals (Cronus’s ascent to the divine throne had been no less vicious than that of Zeus), begins her reign over love, beauty, and pleasure; her husband, Hephaestus, takes control of the forge and fire; Ares becomes the god of war; Poseidon takes over from Oceanus as the ruler of the seas; and so on. Through a clever trick at Zeus’s expense, Prometheus shows his loyalty to mortal men, whom he himself, according to some versions of the myth, had created out of clay (the first mortal woman, Pandora, would emerge later from a different batch of earth molded

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by Hephaestus). Zeus retaliates by depriving men of the gift of fire, and Prometheus then counters by stealing it back for them. As the conflict escalates, Zeus orders Hephaestus to bind Prometheus in chains to a massive rock where a giant eagle will tear away at his ever-­regenerating liver. Prometheus is eventually freed from his bondage by his own gift of prophecy, with a strong assist from a centaur’s act of self-­sacrifice and Heracles’s brawny heroism, but the story most of us read, and the story in Aes­ chylus’s play, nonetheless ends with Prometheus still suffering through his unjust bondage and contesting it loudly to anyone who will listen: “ὦ μητρὸς ἐμῆς σέβας, ὦ πάντων / αἰθὴρ κοινὸν φάος εἱλίσσων, / ἐσορᾷς μ᾽ ὡς ἔκδικα πάσχω” (O my revered mother, o heaven turning the light common to all, you surely see how unjustly I am treated; Aeschylus 2008b, 314–­15). The play’s unresolved ending aside, the scene that most interests me occurs relatively early, near line 240; in it, a chained Prometheus recounts to the assembled chorus the events that led to his imprisonment, ending with a short but dense description of his current state: ἀλγεινὰ μέν μοι καὶ λέγειν ἐστὶν τάδε, ἄλγος δὲ σιγᾶν, πανταχῇ δὲ δύσποτμα. [ . . . ] ὅπως τάχιστα τὸν πατρῷον ἐς θρόνον καθέζετ᾽, εὐθὺς δαίμοσιν νέμει γέρα ἄλλοισιν ἄλλα καὶ διεστοιχίζετο ἀρχήν: βροτῶν δὲ τῶν ταλαιπώρων λόγον οὐκ ἔσχεν οὐδέν᾽, ἀλλ᾽ ἀιστώσας γένος τὸ πᾶν ἔχρῃζεν ἄλλο φιτῦσαι νέον. καὶ τοῖσιν οὐδεὶς ἀντέβαινε πλὴν ἐμοῦ. ἐγὼ δ᾽ ἐτόλμησ᾽: ἐξελυσάμην βροτοὺς τὸ μὴ διαρραισθέντας εἰς Ἅιδου μολεῖν. τῷ τοι τοιαῖσδε πημοναῖσι κάμπτομαι, πάσχειν μὲν ἀλγειναῖσιν, οἰκτραῖσιν δ᾽ ἰδεῖν: θνητοὺς δ᾽ ἐν οἴκτῳ προθέμενος, τούτου τυχεῖν οὐκ ἠξιώθην αὐτός, ἀλλὰ νηλεῶς ὧδ᾽ ἐρρύθμισμαι, Ζηνὶ δυσκλεὴς θέα. (Aeschylus 1922, 1:468–­70)

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It is painful for me even to speak of these things, but it is also painful to keep silent: it is wretched either way. [ . . . ] As soon as [Zeus] took his seat on his father’s throne, he immediately assigned to the various gods their various privileges, and organized his government; but of those wretched creatures, mortals, he took no account at all—­on the contrary, he wanted to obliterate the race altogether and create another new one. And no one resisted that plan except me. I had the courage to do it, and rescued mortals from being shattered and going to Hades. And that, you see, is why I am being racked by these torments, agonizing to suffer and piteous to see. I took special pity on mortals, but was not held to merit it myself; instead I have been disciplined in this merciless way, a sight to bring disgrace on Zeus. (Aeschylus 1922, 1:469–71)

This is a dense and moving passage, and particularly poignant are Prometheus’s first two verses, a metadiscursive statement focused on the telling (or not) of his story itself: “It is painful for me even to speak of these things, but it is also painful to keep silent: it is wretched either way” (ἀλγεινὰ μέν μοι καὶ λέγειν ἐστὶν τάδε, / ἄλγος δὲ σιγᾶν, πανταχῇ δὲ δύσποτμα). Here Prometheus points to a precise moment of paralysis; that is, he speaks about speech and not-­speech as antinomies that paradoxically have the same dolorous, even “wretched” effect. As occurs through much of the play, the subject (i.e., Prometheus) is rendered helpless, an object, a thing even, that serves primarily as nourishment for a large carnivorous bird and as a spectacle of Zeus’s newly minted power. At a more pragmatic, even poetic level, however, Aeschylus has Prometheus end the first two verses with a noticeable pause generated by a change of line coupled with the definitive close of a syntactic unit. There is a taking of breath, a noticeable, even unavoidable silent beat. What does this silence mean, charged as it is by the statement of incapacity and suffering that precedes it? In a more general sense, what do such silences say? Turning to the Swiss sound artist Salomé Voegelin, we might begin to haz­­ ard a theory: Silence is a mirror that shows this formless subject to himself: echoing back from the shiny surface of ice and snow he hears himself as listener in his surroundings. All sounds I hear include my own

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and I am always at the center of all the sounds heard. Silence is the place of the “I” in the listened-­to world. However, this is not a confident, territorial “I” but an “I” in doubt about his position, forever awkward about being in the middle of the “picture.” This middle is stretched out all over my perception, centripetally into me and centrifugally from me, transparently covering the perceived with its shiny materiality to reveal it and reflect myself within its quietness. This transparent cloak that bares what it covers is silence as the call to listen to the world and to myself, as things in the world. (2010, 93)

Does Prometheus’s silence, however brief, form such an interruption, a pause that cloaks and uncovers the self as a source of listening? It is precisely here, one might argue, that the “thingness” of Prometheus—­and perhaps of the chorus and the audience as well—­most clearly emerges. Following Serres, this phrase is at its root a linguistically focused expression of ruthmós, of a stoppage of verbal (and rational) flow, of the momentary reversal of the irreversible, of a form of fundamental constraint or interruption that renders the speaker patient in the linguistic sense, hemmed in and silenced (temporarily) by what Archilochus had described as “the rhythm that holds us all.” In general, Alan H. Sommerstein’s English prose translation of the original Greek manages to get across to his reader the striking piteousness of Prometheus’s situation and the bitterness of his accusations against Zeus. However, it likewise conceals, as translations from Greek invariably do, much of the conceptual and discursive complexity embedded within the original passage. The phrase that merits our attention is quite short and occurs at the very end of the section cited above. Sommerstein translates it into English as “instead I have been disciplined in this merciless way,” which, as the diagram below shows, is a reasonably direct translation of the Greek phrase ἀλλὰ νηλεῶς / ὧδ᾽ ἐρρύθμισμαι: ἀλλὰ allà but

νηλεῶς nêleôs mercilessly

ὧδ᾽ hôde thus

ἐρρύθμισμαι errúthmismai [I have been] disciplined

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The final word of the phrase, errúthmismai, is a middle voice form of the verb ruthmizô, and as Benveniste has pointed out, the idea of ruthmós is firmly embedded within it. Benveniste himself translates this phrase as “a pitiless fate has made my  form (= condition)” (1966b, 331), which admittedly takes some liberties with the Greek syntax, even if it makes a serious effort to give a fuller sense of ruthmizô as the action of “giving form.” Heidegger, in his seminar on Heraclitus, refers to this passage, giving a more literal rendering of ruthmizô, or at least approving of the way in which Georgiades renders it: [Georgiades] cites a passage from Aeschylus’s Prometheus, to which [Werner] Jaeger likewise has referred and in which the ῥυσμός or ῥυθμίζω [ . . . ] has the same meaning as in the Archilochus fragment: ὧδ᾽ ἐρρύθμισμαι [ . . . ]. Here Prometheus says of himself, “[ . . . ] in this rhythm I am bound.” He, who is held immobile in the iron chains of his confinement, is “rhythmed,” that is, joined. (Heidegger and Fink 1979, 55)

Heidegger opts to “let rhythm be” in his treatment of the line from Prometheus, insofar as he underscores the status of ruthmizô as the transitive verbal form of ruthmós: “to (en)rhythm” or “to be (en)rhythmed” (rhythmisiert) in its middle form (Heidegger and Fink [1970] 1996, 94). This said, Heidegger’s linking of ruthmizô to being “joined” ( gefügt) also reflects his own somewhat idiosyncratic approach to rhythm, based directly on Aristotle’s invented term arrúthmistos (lacking rhythm/form) (ibid.). I will have more to say regarding Heidegger’s use of Aristotle’s statement on rhythm; for the moment it is enough simply to allow his translation of errúthmismai (“in diesem Rhythmus bin ich festgebannt” [in this rhythm I am bound fast], or simply, “[bin ich] rhythmisiert” [I am enrhythmed]) to stand (ibid.). In conventional terms, of course, the verb ruthmizô is potentially rendered in English as “to bring into measure or proportion: generally, to order, to educate, train” (Liddell and Scott 1983, 720). Given the relatively broad semantic range of ruthmizô in English, Sommerstein’s translation of the verb as “to discipline”

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is perfectly justifiable, especially within the immediate context of Prometheus’s utterance. There is, however, a troubling lack of precision underlying this and nearly any conventional English translation of ruthmizô, insofar as these translations consistently fail to consider the underlying sense of ruthmós—­as it was conceived during the fifth century BCE—­that is encoded within the verb and serves as its semantic root. Bracketing off for the moment Sommerstein’s rendering of ruthmizô as “to discipline,” it seems worth taking seriously Heidegger’s suggestion that we approach it as “to (en)rhythm,” understood as a particular kind of  “giving form” and “holding”—­or even “building”—­in both the physical and ethical spheres.7 There is great promise to such an approach, and the first step in exploring its possibilities is merely that we recalibrate what it is that we mean by “rhythm” when we speak of ancient Greek texts (or even later works not necessarily written in Greek). Returning to Archilochus, we see what this more contextualized approach might yield a more fine-­grained and productive treatment of ῥυσμὸς ἀνθρώπους ἔχει that views this phrase as an early theorization of “enrhythment”—­a sort of at once metaphysical, discursive, and ethical bondage that interrupts and holds us at the most basic level and gives us form. As for Prometheus, in being chained to the rock and tortured (in theory for eternity, and thus in some sense outside of time), we might say that he has been painfully reduced or bound to Zeus’s new Olympian order, “enrhythmed” by the new machinery of Olympus: an archaic Charlie Chaplin caught in the gears of change. Also important is the fact that Prometheus has been made to serve as a perverse and naked spectacle (théa) of that order—­a spectacle, not coincidentally, also visible to the play’s audience. The idea of Prometheus’s enrhythment as a form of spectacle—­as something to be pointed to and beheld rather than explained and referred to—­suggests with even greater force that ruthmós somehow lies at the very boundaries of language itself, as a momentary stoppage or reversal of referential “flow” if not an interruption of lógos in the broadest sense. How does this

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manifest itself in Prometheus Bound ? In the line that I have analyzed above, for example, Prometheus employs the demonstrative adverb hôde (thus, or in this way) to index his punishment: “ὧδ᾽ ἐρρύθμισμαι” (thus am I disciplined/enrhythmed). This deictic construction further underscores the important performative and pragmatic features of enrhythment for Aeschylus, both as a dramatist and as a poet: its power and its effects upon us are not to be described or represented but rather to be pointed to and witnessed as a “spectacle” that refers indexically (that is, in a relation of contiguity with the spatio-­physical surround, in a sense, entailing context itself ) to the order for which it exerts its force.8 In this sense, Prometheus’s enrhythment stands at the very end of our world (embodied, on one level, by the peripheral Caucasus, which is the setting for Aeschylus’s play) and at the boundaries of what language can say; along with Prometheus, we move to a place (or, more accurately, a stance) of dispossession—­a letting-­go of reason and power—­where it is both painful to speak and painful to remain silent. That is, insofar as enrhythment reveals itself, it is as a “stoppage of flow” within which one can say only “look,” “thus,” or “here I am.” As Voegelin might pre­ sent it, it is a place of listening.

Persians and Ritual Helplessness Moving beyond Prometheus Bound, we see that Aeschylus in fact doubles down on his extrasemiosic conception of rhythm as form in Persians. A veteran of the Battle of Marathon, Aeschylus was directly affected by the Greco-­Persian Wars, and his dramatic account of what follows the defeat of Xerxes I at the Straits of Sálamis is a foundational, world-­building work in just about every sense. As Benveniste points out in his survey of tragic Greek accounts of ruthmós, the ghost of Darius the Great reports at one point early in the play that Xerxes had ordered his men to whip the Hellespont with chains to calm its waves and so facilitate its crossing:

Rivers Stopped or Flowing Backward 21

παῖς δ᾽ ἐμὸς τάδ᾽ οὐ κατειδὼς ἤνυσεν νέῳ θράσει: ὅστις Ἑλλήσποντον ἱρὸν δοῦλον ὣς δεσμώμασιν ἤλπισε σχήσειν ῥέοντα, Βόσπορον ῥόον θεοῦ, καὶ πόρον μετερρύθμιζε, καὶ πέδαις σφυρηλάτοις περιβαλὼν πολλὴν κέλευθον ἤνυσεν πολλῷ στρατῷ; θνητὸς ὢν θεῶν τε πάντων ᾤετ᾽, οὐκ εὐβουλίᾳ, καὶ Ποσειδῶνος κρατήσειν. πῶς τάδ᾽ οὐ νόσος φρενῶν εἶχε παῖδ᾽ ἐμόν; δέδοικα μὴ πολὺς πλούτου πόνος οὑμὸς ἀντραπεὶς γένηται τοῦ φθάσαντος ἁρπαγή. (Aeschylus 1922, 1:96–­98) And it is my son, by his youthful rashness, who has achieved this without knowing what he was doing. He thought he could stop the flow of the Hellespont, the divine stream of the Bosporus, by putting chains on it, as if it were a slave; he altered the nature of its passage, put hammered fetters on it, and created a great pathway for a great army. He thought, ill-­counselled as he was, that he, a mortal, could lord it over all the gods and over Poseidon. Surely this was a mental disease that had my son in its grip! I am afraid that the great wealth I gained by my labors may be overturned and become the booty of the first comer. (Aeschylus 1922, 1:97–­99)

Darius the Great characterizes Xerxes’s actions as a mad attempt to restrain, transform, or “enrhythm” the sea as if it were his slave or servant (doũlos). The verb that Aeschylus uses to get across this sense of transformation is meterrúthmize (the third-­person singular, active, indicative, and imperfective form of ruthmízô with the prefix meta-­added to it), which Sommerstein translates as “altered the nature of.” Aaron Poochigian, for his part, somewhat creatively translates the phrase póron meterrúthmize into English as “[he] contrived a new bridge” (Aeschylus 2011, 28). Poochigian’s translation follows Smyth’s rendering of the phrase as “[he] set himself to fashion a roadway of a new order” (Aeschylus 1922, 173). Benveniste offers a translation of póron meterrúthmize that is relatively close to that of Sommerstein: “(Xerxes, in his madness,) intended to transform a strait” (1966b, 331). Looking at the phrase in light of a broader discussion of ruthmós, we might likewise render it simply as:

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πόρον póron strait (acc. sing.)

μετερρύθμιζε meterrúthmize he transformed (imp.)

That is, “he [i.e., Xerxes] transformed the strait” in the imperfective aspect, implying that the action was ultimately not realized, which Benveniste reproduces well through his rendering of the line: “[Xerxes] intended to transform a strait.” The main difference between Benveniste’s/Sommerstein’s and Poochigian’s translations of this phrase rests largely on the sense that each has of metarruthmízô; however, it also hinges on how they choose to render póros, which generally signifies a “place to cross a river or body of water” and can thus mean both “strait” and “bridge” (Liddell and Scott 1983, 662). Given that Aeschylus presents it in the accusative singular (póron) and links it, as a direct object, to metarruthmízô (which can really only mean “to trans-­form” in the sense that Benveniste explains it), it seems most likely that what is being transformed here—­or at least that which Xerxes has hubristically sought to transform—­is the strait itself. Beyond Aeschylus’s reference to the intended transformation of the Hellespont through a transitive verbal form of ruthmós, he also speaks of its restraint in a similar way and in the process offers a striking theorization of rhythm. In line 746, just before his use of metarruthmízô, Aeschylus speaks of Xerxes’s intention to “restrain the flow” of the Hellespont. The phrase in question is ἤλπισε σχήσειν ῥέοντα, which quite literally means, “he intended to restrain the flow.” Significantly, both sxêsein and réonta come from terms linked to the analysis of ruthmós. The first of these, sxêsein, is the future infinitive of éxô (to hold, or to hold in check) and the second, réonta, is the present accusative participle of réô (to flow). That is, while Archilochus speaks of humans being held in check by rhythm (ῥυσμὸς ἀνθρώπους ἔχει), Aeschylus speaks here of an individual human (foolishly) attempting to hold a flowing strait in check (ἤλπισε σχήσειν ῥέοντα). And both poets, it is worth pointing out, use the same verbs—­éxô and réô—­to express these ideas, a fact that further joins the concept

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of ruthmós to flow and restraint while strongly suggesting that these two ideas were hardly antinomies in classical Greek, at least insofar as they relate to the idea of ruthmós. Moving on from lines 740–­52 of Persians, one is also struck by the way in which the text persistently confronts its audience with the spectacle of enrhythment and the limits of semantico-­ referential signification. The play is filled, for example, with cries and howls of different sorts, such as what Poochigian translates as the “cursing and accursed shout” (kakophátis boê) with which the chorus greets Xerxes upon his return (v. 936; Aeschylus 2011, 34). Maurice Blanchot, it is worth pointing out, depends upon both Archilochus and Aeschylus to present rhythm as a disastrous power that fundamentally interrupts the subject and pushes him or her to the edge of an abyss at which he or she is reduced to the status of an object among other objects: “‘Know what rhythm holds men.’ (Archilochus.) Rhythm or language. Prometheus: ‘In this rhythm, I am caught.’ Changing configuration. What is rhythm? The danger of rhythm’s enigma” (1995, 5). This statement, which owes as much to Emmanuel Levinas as (if not more than) to Archilochus and Aeschylus, will be the focus of a subsequent chapter, and I mention it here only to demonstrate the link between the “cursing and accursed shout”—­a shout that carries with it the noisy, inhuman character of an animal cry (boê also being an adjective that means “of an ox”)—­and the metaphysical and ethical work conjured up by pre-­Socratic accounts of rhythm. If one accepts that Aeschylus constructs a kind of bridge between lamentation and interruption (of both personhood and poetry), then something very profound is at work in Persians when, for example, the first words uttered by Xerxes upon his return are: “ὅδ᾽ ἐγώ, οἰοῖ, αἰακτὸς” (Here I am, oioi, wretched; v. 931). As with Prometheus’s statement to the chorus regarding his enrhythment (hôd’ errúthmismai), Aeschylus begins here with a demonstrative pronoun (hôde) that once again places the utterance following it on strongly deictic footing.9 And what follows directly afterward is yet another deictic pronoun, this time

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the first-­person singular subject pronoun egô; and then, directly after this, an indeclinable cry of woe (oioĩ)—­a cry that signifies only as a conventional index (within classical Greek theater) of catastrophic suffering. One might be tempted to discard this cry owing to its conventionality; however, we must resist the temptation to do so. In fact, it is this outburst’s very conventionality that makes it significant as a culturally structured index of unspeakable sorrow, as an intelligible theory of language at the very boundaries of language, of enrhythment. Throughout Xerxes’s first spoken line in Persians, there is only one word with semantico-­referential content: aiaktòs (lamentable). The others—­“thus,” “I,” “oioĩ ”—­all work deictically to join the utterance to an emergent and provisional context of utterance, to a speaking body, to a given performance. In this way, they function as all deictic forms of language necessarily do, namely as verbal discourse that “stands for its object neither by resemblance to it, nor by sheer convention, but by contiguity with it” (Hanks 1999, 119). As indexical signs, they also serve, according to William Hanks’s account, “as the point-­from-­which, or semiotic origin of, a presuppositional/entailing projection of whatever is to be understood as context” (ibid.). It follows from this that if statements such as ὅδ᾽ ἐγώ, οἰοῖ, and αἰακτὸς are contiguous with the world within the play and with that of its performance, they are also powerful tools for bringing that world into being, even if they declare (in terms of a pointing-­out as well as in the more enrhythmed sense of what one does before customs officials when crossing an international border) nothing more than the naked presence of what was previously latent.10 “Look, I am here, and I bring the abyss with me,” Xerxes seems to say; “listen to it and become listening itself.” As Blanchot and Levinas would later claim, it is precisely this idea that would come to form the very basis of modern conceptions of art and poetry. There are many other forms of wailing and lamentation in Persians. Looking solely at some of the earlier verses, we find: “αἰαῖ, διαίνεσθε, Πέρσαι, τόδ᾽ ἄχος κλύοντες” (Ay, ay! Weep, Persians, hearing this painful news; vv. 258–­59); “ὀτοτοτοῖ, μάταν τὰ

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πολλὰ βέλεα παμμιγῆ γᾶς ἀπ᾽ Ἀσίδος ἦλθε δᾴαν ἐφ᾽ Ἑλλάδα χώραν” (Otototoi! What folly the various missiles we launched from Asia and the battle in Greece; vv. 268–­70); “ὀτοτοτοῖ, φίλων ἁλίδονα μέλεα πολυβαφῆ κατθανόντα λέγεις φέρεσθαι πλάγκτ᾽ ἐν διπλάκεσσιν” (Otototoi! You say that our loved ones are now sea-­tossed, helpless, drowned, dying. They are pressed to the waves by their garments; vv. 274–­75); “ἴυζ᾽ ἄποτμον Πέρσαις δυσαιανῆ βοὰν δᾴοις, ὡς πάντα παγκάκως ἔφθισαν: αἰαῖ στρατοῦ φθαρέντος” (Raise an unhappy, comfortless wail for the Persians; thus are they wholly undone. Ay, ay! Our army is destroyed; vv. 280–­84); and “ὦ πλεῖστον ἔχθος ὄνομα Σαλαμῖνος κλύειν. φεῦ, τῶν Ἀθηνῶν ὡς στένω μεμνημένος” (O greatest hatred, to hear the name Salamis. Pheu! I choke when reminded of Athens; vv. 284–­85). Later in the play, once Xerxes appears, the intensity of these cries only heightens: “οἰοιοῖ βόα καὶ πάντ᾽ ἐκπεύθου” (Oioioi! Cry out and seek an answer!; v. 955); “αἰαῖ αἰαῖ, δύα δύα” (Ay, ay! Misery, misery!; v. 1039); “ὀτοτοτοτοῖ. βαρεῖά γ᾽ ἅδε συμφορά” (Ototototoi! This all weighs heavy; v. 1045). The final line of the play, a response by the chorus to Xerxes’s laments, is also nothing if not an invitation to more wailing: “πέμψω τοί σε δυσθρόοις γόοις” (We will accompany you with our ill-­sounding wail; v. 1076). Much of Persians consists, one might say, of language at its very limits and meaning inseparable from presence (and suffering). What is this presence? In Persians, at least, it is likely best described not as being (in the Heideggerian sense) but as dispossession, a passivity and distress that precede all and have no end: a primordial enrhythment; a “listening,” in Voegelin’s sense of the term. Xerxes’s homecoming is, in this sense, no homecoming at all (nóstos), just as his outward journey was in no sense a quest or search for knowledge (ekpunthánomai). And the Persians drowned and washing up on Kunósura, never to be buried, are not in any proper sense dead at all within the logic of the play but dying, endlessly dying.11 How to theorize this, this horrific spectacle of enrhythment, this fundamental reversal of flow? Perhaps the closest Aeschylus comes to doing so is in lines 985–­86, when

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the chorus cries to Xerxes for all the unburied Persian souls he left behind in Greece: “ὢ δαΐων. Πέρσαις ἀγαυοῖς κακὰ πρόκακα λέγεις” (Oh, wretched ones. To noble Persians, you speak misery beyond misery). This attempt to “speak misery beyond misery,” or, even more literally, to speak the “evil that precedes evil” (in a more direct rendering of kakà prókaka)—­in other words (to borrow once again from Blanchot), to write the disaster, and not as a mimetic exercise but as an entailing one—­is, I would argue, at the very heart of Aeschylus’s Persians.

Pindar, Xenophon, and Aesthetic Form Writing at roughly the same time as Aeschylus, the lyric poet Pindar (517–­438 BCE) similarly equates ruthmós with form (Smyth, 1900, 74). Speaking in his Paean B2 of the mythological third temple of Apollo at Delphi, supposedly made of bronze and designed by Hephaestus and Athena, Pindar writes: “ὦ Μοῖσαι, τοῦ δὲ παντέχνοις / Ἁφαίστου παλάμαις καὶ Ἀθάνας / τίς ὁ ῥυθμὸς ἐφαίνετο?” (Oh, Muses, what was the form brought to light by the all-­skillful / hands of Hephaestus and Athena?; Power 2011, 68). Here Pindar uses ruthmós to refer to the shape or form of the mythological temple. Beyond this, he speaks of this form’s coming-­to-­be by means of the verb phaínô, a strategy that makes the building’s design a kind of disclosure, a literal “bringing into the light” of a specific ruthmós. Here the reader and, more to the point, the listening public are faced with revelation rather than creation, insofar as the gods bring the temple’s form/ruthmós “to light” or instantiate it, making it available as an object of perception and experience. Put another way, Pindar suggests that a given ruthmós—­a form, pattern, or structure of contingent interrelation—­existed prior to the building of the temple and that the gods brought it to light and made it an object of perception and experience through the construction of the temple. In this way, the potential becomes the actual and the “there is” becomes the “there it is.”

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If Pindar’s fragment on Apollo’s temple at Delphi suggests revelation, Xenophon (c. 430–­354 BCE) would turn in his Memorabilia 3.10.10 to a more openly aesthetic and perhaps less performative account of rhythm. Xenophon narrates a scene in which Socrates visits Pistias, a skilled armorer. Admiring Pistias’s work, Socrates asks why it is that it costs more than that of others, although it is no stronger nor more expensive to make. Pistias’s response is that his is superior in design, which leads to a short dialogue between the two on form and fit. Pistias’s response to Socrates regarding the cost of his armor is worth examining, even if briefly. He says: “ὅτι, ἔφη, ὦ Σώκρατες, εὐρυθμοτέρους ποιῶ” (Because the proportions of mine are better, Socrates; Xenophon 2013, 250–­51). The word here that corresponds to “fit better” in Xenophon’s text is euruthmotéros, a comparative adjective derived from ruthmós and giving the literal sense that Pistias’s armor is “better rhythmed” or “better formed” in a specific way. In this case, it is a matter of fit; the armor conforms better to the body of its owner and so warrants a higher price. This is not, to be sure, a philosophical account of ruthmós; however, if Xenophon’s understanding of ruthmós lacks the philosophical depth of Aeschylus or the performative dynamism of Pindar, it nonetheless makes use of a very similar sense of ruthmós linked to form, movement, and contingency.

Creon’s Pain One of the more difficult passages of Sophocles’s Antigone likewise revolves around the pre-­Socratic idea of rhythm and enrhythment. Readers may remember that the conflict at the heart of the play stems from Theban king Creon’s decision not to bury Polyneices, Antigone’s brother, and to punish with death anyone who attempts to do so. Antigone, invoking divine authority and natural order, disobeys the king and inters her brother. Creon imprisons her, and the rest of the play—­along with the multiple deaths that come at its climax—­deals with Creon’s stubborn

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resolution to carry out the sentence and Antigone’s unflagging commitment to her principles. Early in the play (vv. 254–­376), shortly before Antigone is arrested, a sentry comes to Creon to reveal to him that someone, in violation of the royal decree, has removed Polyneices’s body. This exchange is a contentious one, and the sentry finds himself forced to defend his own innocence in the matter. He finally takes his leave, thanking the gods for having spared his life and vowing never to return to court (although he does in fact return shortly afterward with Antigone in tow). Near the end of the scene the sentry asks for permission to plead his own innocence, but Creon is unwilling to listen. Reginald Gibbons and Charles Segal render the scene as follows in their English translation: sentry: Will you allow me to say a word, or should I turn and go? creon: Do you still not know how much your words annoy me? sentry: Would it be your ears or your spirit that they sting? creon: Why are you trying to diagnose where I feel pain? sentry: He who did it hurts your mind; I hurt your ears. creon: Ugh! It’s plain that you were born to talk and talk! sentry: That may be so. But I never did this thing. creon: Yes, you did! What’s more, you sold your spirit for some silver. sentry: Ah! It’s terrible for him who believes to believe what’s false. (Sophocles 2003, 90)

The Gibbons and Segal translation is useful in many respects; however, in the fourth line, Creon’s complaint about the sentry’s desire to “diagnose” him masks important aspects of the Greek original. The sentry first asks Creon if he is distressed by the sound of the former’s voice, as he claims, or by the impact his words have on the king’s conscience. The original Greek reads: “ἐν τοῖσιν ὠσὶν ἢ ‘πὶ τῇ ψυχῇ δάκνει” (v. 362). A more literal translation of this question might be: “In your ears or upon your spirit [psuxê] does it bite?” Creon’s response, rendered by Gibbons and Segal somewhat anachronistically as, “Why are you trying to diagnose where I feel pain?” reads somewhat differ-

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ently in Greek: “τί δὲ ῥυθμίζεις τὴν ἐμὴν λύπην ὅπου.” The verb ruthmizô (in the second-­person singular, active voice, indicative) is central here, for Creon is asking quite literally: “But why do you ruthmizô my bodily pain?” From Creon’s perspective, this question has to do with the sentry’s attempt to situate, order, or give form to the distress, pain, and/or grief (lúpê) that his voice causes Creon. There is the idea of enrhythment here, and no less so than in Prometheus Bound. In Aeschylus’s tragedy, Prometheus speaks explicitly of his bondage as enrhythment (a “bringing to order”), while here Creon asks the sentry why the latter would situate, classify, or delimit (ruthmizô) his bodily pain in such a way. Whether he is truly confused or merely being obtuse, here Creon is answering the sentry’s question with another question, one that places in doubt the very premise of the sentry’s (admittedly very pointed) query. In terms of ruthmós, what is at stake in the exchange between the sentry and Creon is the precise form of the latter’s pain. More to the point, the sentry seeks to specify the spatial locus—­ and thus the class or order—­of the “biting” about which the king has just complained. Is Creon truly distressed by the sound of the sentry’s voice, or is he most pained by its biting or pricking of his (guilty) conscience? Sophocles’s audience would know the implied answer to this rhetorical question, and there would thus be a fair amount of irony associated with Creon’s challenge to the sentry’s attempt to order or give form to his distress. Is the king troubled by sound or by what he is made to feel? Rather than answer this question, or even address its moral implications, Creon challenges the very foundation upon which it rests. “Why would you enrhythm my pain in this way? Why give it form as either the heard sort or the kind that stems from a guilty soul?” Whatever one is to feel about Creon’s question, predicated as it is upon his less-­than-­credible incredulity, it remains clear that the idea of rhythm encoded in the sentry’s question remains distant from any notion of repetition across linear time, or even time itself. More important, it would seem, is the issue of (bodily) space.

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Plato’s Moves A century or so after Sophocles, Plato would pick up the rich and paradoxical Greek conception of ruthmós and give it numerical specificity, linking it to conceptions of embodied movement, meter, harmony, and ethics. Benveniste describes this process: Platon emploie encore ruthmós au sens de “forme distinctive, disposition, proportion.” Il innove en l’appliquant à la forme du mouvement que le corps humain accomplit dans la danse, et à la disposition des figures en lesquelles ce mouvement se résout. La circonstance décisive est là, dans la notion d’un ruthmós corporel associé au métron et soumis à la loi des nombres: cette “forme” est désormais déterminée par une “mesure” et assujettie à un ordre. Voilà le sens nouveau de ruthmós: la “disposition” (sens propre du mot) est chez Platon constituée par une séquence ordonnée de mouvements lents et rapides, de même que l’ “harmonie” résulte de l’alternance de l’aigu et du grave. Et c’est l’ordre dans le mouvement, le procès entier de l’arrangement harmonieux des attitudes corporelles combiné avec un mètre qui s’appelle désormais ruthmós. On pourra alors parler du “rythme” d’une danse, d’une démarche, d’un chant, d’une diction, d’un travail, de tout ce qui suppose une activité continue décomposée par le mètre en temps alternés. (1966b, 334–­35) Plato still uses ῥυθμός in the sense of  “distinctive form, disposition, proportion.” His innovation was in applying it to the form of movement which the human body makes in dancing, and the arrangement of figures into which this movement is resolved. The decisive circumstance is there, in the notion of a corporal ῥυθμός associated with μέτρον and bound by the law of numbers: that “form” is from then on determined by a “measure” and numerically regulated. Here is the new sense of ῥυθμός: in Plato, “arrangement” (the original sense of the word) is constituted by an ordered sequence of slow and rapid movements, just as “harmony” results from the alternation of high and low. And it is the order in movement, the entire process of the harmonious arrangement of bodily attitudes combined with meter, which has since been called ῥυθμός. We may then speak of the “rhythm” of a dance, of a step, of a song, of a speech, of work, of everything which presupposes a continuous activity broken by

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meter into alternating intervals. The notion of rhythm is established. Starting from ῥυθμός, a spatial configuration defined by the distinctive arrangement and proportion of the elements, we arrive at “rhythm,” a configuration of movements organized in time. (1971, 287)

What Benveniste attempts to describe here is the transition from ruthmós to our modern conception of rhythm, although as he admits, Latin conceptions of numerus (number, rhythm) are also important to consider as an intermediary step. As the Latin term numerus suggests, atomist Greek theories of flow and material assemblage, of what Serres describes as the “reversible in the irreversible” (2000, 86), would see themselves subsumed within arithmetic and brought within the sphere of numerical proportion. This proportion is, for both Plato and Aristotle, extendable to the ethical sphere; it can be understood to function as a kind of disciplining or reining in (for example, through paideia) of flow: the wild youth that Plato describes in Laws thus find proper measure in their movements and comportment through ruthmós. In his account of the process by which ruthmós came to take on the modern sense of rhythm, Benveniste is content to point to a decisive turn with the philosophical writing of Plato in the fourth century BCE: Le sens modern de “rythme,” qui existe bien en grec même, y résulte a priori d’une spécialisation secondaire, celui de “forme” étant seul attesté jusqu’au milieu du Ve siècle. Ce développement est en réalité une création, à laquelle nous pouvons assigner sinon une date, du moins une circonstance. C’est Platon qui a précisé la notion de “rythme,” en délimitant dans une acception nouvelle la valeur traditionnelle de ruthmós. (1966b, 333–­34) The modern sense of “rhythm,” which indeed exists in Greek itself, results a priori from a secondary specialization, that of “form” being the only one attested until the middle of the fifth century [BCE]. This development is in reality a creation to which we can assign, if not a date, at least a circumstance. It is Plato who specified the

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notion of  “rhythm,” by delimiting the traditional meaning of ῥυθμός within a new acceptation. (1971, 286)

That is, Plato employs ruthmós in much the same way as philosophers such as Democritus and Leucippus before him (i.e., as form), but he also works to transform it, to give it a kind arithmetical precision and ethical reach while extending it to the sphere of dance and bodily movement. Most important, and beyond situating ruthmós squarely within the body and its movements, Plato also places rhythm on decisively arithmetical footing. In doing so, he connects it to temporality and brings it into close family resemblance with métron. Plato’s move toward an arithmetical conception of ruthmós is significant in itself, and it was influential for centuries afterward insofar as it came to intersect with broader conceptions of harmony associated, in the first instance, with Pythagoras. Daniel Heller-­Roazen has recently made this point quite explicitly: “The medieval authors went far in such numeric representations of time. In addition to measuring the duration of the melodies in homogenous, divisible elements, they also developed the art of altering sequences of time through forms of augmentation and diminution defined in the classical art of arithmetic” (2011, 48). Drina Hočevar, focusing on questions of “movement and poetic rhythm,” has described these theories otherwise: Platonic dualist ontology inspired by Pythagorism [ . . . ] understood human life in a dualistic way, where two different and opposing elements (body and soul) were together against their will, so to say. To use a play on words, body (soma) is understood as the sepulcher (sema) of the soul. In relation to rhythm the combination of two opposed elements could result in their higher harmonic unity. Thus, rhythm understood as the combination of two opposed movements, fast and slow, could result in consonance or harmony. But rhythm was also understood as “order in the corporeal movements (as in dance) combined with measure,” while order in sounds, and consonance of opposed sounds (high and low) is defined as harmony. (2003, 87)12

As is perhaps apparent from Hočevar’s explanation, there is an inherently mathematical foundation supporting what she sees as

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the Pythagorean/Platonic conception of rhythm and harmony. Evanghélos Moutsopoulos likewise underscores the importance of Plato’s newly mathematical conception of rhythm for his philosophy in general: “Rhythm is, for Plato, the sole element of music that possesses a primordial value, since it brings itself into effect through its purely mathematical structure, which links ha­­­ rmony and dance, movements of the voice and the body with move­ ments of the soul” (1989, 78 n. 4). Despite the linkage between Platonic and Pythagorean conceptions of harmony and rhythm, it is important to keep in mind that for Plato rhythm remains a resolutely sublunar and ethical phenomenon that is not organically connected to the movement or harmony of the planetary spheres and the cosmos. It is, rather, resolutely embodied. Sauvanet goes to great pains to make this clear, pointing out that for Plato the relation between rhythm and the cosmos is merely one of analogy: In all senses of the term, rhythm is first of all sensible: it excites the senses, it is anchored in sensation. In speaking philosophically about rhythm and eurhythmics in the Greek sense, we must first of all turn to the texts, in which ruthmos is never used to refer to the cosmos, but always in relation to anthropos. This is not a case of mere sophistry: what we can affirm is that there is a profound analogy between ruthmos and cosmos in Plato, between the two levels of order, the human and the cosmic. Under the rubric of order, ruthmos and cosmos are analogs of one another: rhythm is to bodily taxis what cosmos is to the universal taxis (insofar as order itself is always a cosmic order). But let us understand well: the relation between ruthmos and cosmos is one of analogy, not of equality, nor is it a simple likeness. For Plato, ruthmos is human and cosmos is cosmic—­what remains is the analogy itself, like a relation of relations. (1999, 70–­71)

This analogical relation of ruthmós to the Pythagorean notion of kósmos (itself an explicit ordering of the heavens) in Plato is highly suggestive, but it can also lead to misunderstanding regarding not only the relation between bodily “order in movement” (κινήσεως τάξει) and celestial order but also the relation between rhythm and harmony—­terms that would become essentially synonymous during late antiquity and remain so well into the seventeenth century.

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Plato’s newly arithmetical conception of rhythm and harmony would find its most iconic expression in Laws 664e–­65a. Laws is the last of Plato’s written works, composed not long before his death, and it is notable for the absence of Socrates. A dialogue between three participants (an Athenian, a Spartan, and a Cretan), it focuses much less than the Republic on ideal systems and forms while paying greater attention to practical matters of just government. In the second book, Plato’s Athenian, speaking on the proposed arrangement of the three choirs to be established in a just society, proposes: Εἴπομεν, εἰ μεμνήμεθα, κατ᾽ ἀρχὰς τῶν λόγων, ὡς ἡ φύσις ἁπάντων τῶν νέων διάπυρος οὖσα ἡσυχίαν οὐχ οἵα τε ἄγειν οὔτε κατὰ τὸ σῶμα οὔτε κατὰ τὴν φωνὴν εἴη, φθέγγοιτο δ᾽ ἀεὶ ἀτάκτως καὶ πηδῷ, τάξεως δ᾽ αἴσθησιν τούτων ἀμφοτέρων, τῶν ἄλλων μὲν ζῴων οὐδὲν ἐφάπτοιτο, ἡ δὲ ἀνθρώπου φύσις ἔχοι μόνη τοῦτο: τῇ δὴ τῆς κινήσεως τάξει ῥυθμὸς ὄνομα εἴη, τῇ δὲ αὖ τῆς φωνῆς, τοῦ τε ὀξέος ἅμα καὶ βαρέος συγκεραννυμένων, ἁρμονία ὄνομα προσαγορεύοιτο, χορεία δὲ τὸ συναμφότερον κληθείη. (2013, 1:76). You may recollect that we said, at the opening of our discussion, that all young creatures are naturally full of fire, and can keep neither their limbs nor their voices quiet. They are perpetually breaking into disorderly cries and jumps, but whereas no other animal develops a sense of order of either kind, mankind forms a solitary exception. Order in movement is called rhythm, order in articulation—­the blending of acute with grave—­pitch [ἁρμονία], and the name for the combination of the two is choric art. (1982a, 1261)

The idea of rhythm as order in movement, that is, the ordered movement of dancers’ bodies in choric art (and, as we will see, rhythm as harmony for later authors such as Plotinus), is of course tied, in poetry at least, to Greek conventions of quantitative meter. This is so largely owing to Plato’s very conception of movement and sense. Turning back to Sauvanet, one notes that he reads Laws 664e–­65a as a point of origin, quite literally the “birthplace,” of modern notions of rhythm as an ordering of experience and movement: “We have in this passage the

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very birthplace of rhythm—­and of its origins, according to the Greek text—­as a figure of order. Let us read the text closely: kinêsis comes to be ‘ordered’ (taxée) by a taxis; simple movement, whether graceful or not, becomes rhythm through the imposition of an order: rhythm is the human body’s syntax” (1999, 74). The temporality at work here, as Sauvanet reads Plato, is that first there is the general principle of movement and then ruthmós is applied to it, to order it and make it (metaphorically) grammatical. Plato also develops the idea of rhythm as syntax in his Sym­ posium. In sections 187b–­ c Eryximachus speaks explicitly of rhythm and duality, arguing: διαφερόμενον δὲ αὖ καὶ μὴ ὁμολογοῦν ἀδύνατον ἁρμόσαι—­ὥσπερ γε καὶ ὁ ῥυθμὸς ἐκ τοῦ ταχέος καὶ βραδέος, ἐκ διενηνεγμένων πρότερον, ὕστερον δὲ ὁμολογησάντων γέγονε. τὴν δὲ ὁμολογίαν πᾶσι τούτοις, ὥσπερ ἐκεῖ ἡ ἰατρική, ἐνταῦθα ἡ μουσικὴ ἐντίθησιν, ἔρωτα καὶ ὁμόνοιαν ἀλλήλων ἐμποιήσασα: καὶ ἔστιν αὖ μουσικὴ περὶ ἁρμονίαν καὶ ῥυθμὸν ἐρωτικῶν ἐπιστήμη. (1925, 126) There is [ . . . ] a kind of discord which is not impossible to resolve, and here we effect a harmony—­as, for instance, we produce rhythm by resolving the difference between fast and slow. And just as we saw that the concord of the body was brought about by the art of medicine, so the other harmony is due to the art of music, as the creator of mutual love and sympathy. And so we may describe music, too, as a science of love, or of desire—­in this case in relation to harmony and rhythm. (1982d, 540)

The idea of rhythm that Eryximachus develops here, as Hočevar points out, is akin to a musical, mathematical harmony achieved through a relation between fast and slow. As an inherently ethical concept, rhythm is that which links music to the soul, or, more correctly, links the virtuous soul and its words to music. Rhythm without words (i.e., sense) is, quite literally for Plato, nonsense, and thus highly undesirable (keep in mind that rhythm is inextricable from ethics and the perfection of the soul). As Sauvanet explains, “Instrumental music is for Plato

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a heresy” (1999, 67), and rhythm links the (expressive, logical) movements of the soul to the movements of the body in dance. For Plato, rhythm places sense in sensation. It is the order of the body in movement—­and not just any movement, but rather that which intersects with the soul and its lógos. Rhythm is, for Plato, thoroughly normative. Plato’s approach to ruthmós involves, as Benveniste points out, a shift from general notions of shape to a mathematical account of form linked to métron and thus to time. In Philebus17d, for example, Plato speaks of the “features of the performer’s bodily movements, features that must, so we are told, be numerically determined (ἀριθμῶν μετρηθέντα) and be called ‘figures’ and ‘measures’ (ῥυθμοὺς καὶ μέτρα)” (1982b, 1093). Writing later in Laws 665a, he defines ruthmós as “order in movement” (kinêseôs táxei), speaking in particular of dancers’ bodies: “Order in movement is called rhythm, order in articulation—­the blending of acute with grave—­pitch (harmonía), and the name for the combination of the two is choric art” (1982a, 1261). The link that Plato forges between ruthmós and arithmós would become all but unbreakable, as evidenced in Aristotle’s Poetics 1448b, 20–­22: “Imitation, then, being natural to us—­as also the sense of harmony and rhythm, the meters being obviously species of rhythms (τὰ γὰρ μέτρα ὅτι μόρια τῶν ῥυθμῶν ἐστί, φανερόν)—­it was through their original aptitude, and by a series of improvements for the most part gradual on their first efforts, that they created poetry (poíêsis) out of their improvisations” (1941, 755–­56). The idea here that meters are essentially (“obviously,” as Aristotle puts it) fixed pieces (mória) of rhythm is a direct result of Plato’s quantification of ruthmós and would find extensive expression in late antiquity and beyond.

Aristoxenus and Divisible Time Likely the most influential Greek theorization of rhythm after Aristotle is that of his student, Aristoxenus of Tarentum (fl. 335 BCE). A highly skilled musician, Aristoxenus wrote several treatises on music and harmonics, most of which survive

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only as fragments. His treatise on harmonics is his best-­known work, and it remains central to modern theories of Greek music (Borthwick 1991). The treatise on rhythm has had less of an impact, in part because it is extant only in three manuscript fragments copied out centuries after Aristoxenus’s death. Two of these fragments are held by the Vatican Library (Vaticanus gr. 191 and Vaticanus Urbinas gr. 77), and the third is held by the Marcianus Library in Venice (gr. app. cl. VI/3). Of these, the Venetian manuscript is the earliest extant copy of Aristoxenus’s treatise on rhythm, and it was redacted no earlier than the twelfth century (Marchetti 2009, 27). Classical scholars have worked for over two centuries to develop an adequately philological understanding of Aristoxenus’s treatise on rhythm, an effort that has focused at once on determining the reliability of its manuscript witnesses and on whether Aristoxenus’s account of rhythm amounts to a fundamental questioning of commonly held ideas regarding the links between quantitative verse and choral performance (Barker 1978). A recent argument in favor of this latter point can be found in the 1990 edition of the Elementa rhythmica (as Aristoxenus’s treatise has come to be called) produced by Lionel Pearson. In his review of Pearson’s edition Andrew Barker summarizes the issue: It cannot be doubted that rhythm [ . . . ] was crucial to Greek musical performance, especially in the case of choral lyric, which was intimately linked with dance. The fact that stress patterns did not directly inhere in lines of verse, considered just as word sequences, has disguised their importance from scholars whose tendency is to treat poetry exclusively within the modern category of “literature.” (1991, 72)

The problem for philologists, of course, has been that their principal evidence for the possible linkages between quantitative meter and rhythm (in the Platonic sense of “ordered movement”) is written poetry. How to read rhythm from “lines of verse” in which “stress patterns [do] not directly inhere”? This is where theorizations of musical rhythm such as Aristoxenus’s Elementa

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rhythmica can fill in many gaps; however, there is the equally pressing question of how influential or even accurate Aristoxenus may have been with respect to musical rhythms. How much of his taxonomy of rhythm is simply wishful thinking? Whatever the importance of Aristoxenus for classical Greek theories of musical rhythm, it seems clear that his understanding of rhythm has little to do with pre-­Socratic considerations of form, ethics, and space. Aristoxenus’s conception of rhythm is based squarely on both time and number, as is evident from the very beginning of his text: “Ὅτι μὲν τοῦ ῥυθμοῦ πλείους εἰσὶ φύσεις καὶ ποία τις αὐτῶν ἑκάστη καὶ διὰ τίνας αἰτίας τῆς αὐτῆς ἔτυχον προσηγορίας καὶ τί αὐτῶν ἐκάστῃ ὑπόκειται, ἐν τοῖς ἔμπροσθεν εἰρημένον. νῦν δὲ ἡμῖν περὶ αὐτοῦ λεκτέον τοῦ ἐν μουσικῇ ταττομένου ῥυθμοῦ” (That rhythm has many natures, of what sort each of these is, for what reasons they have received this same name, and what underlies each of them, has been discussed above. Now we must speak of rhythm as assigned to music; Marchetti 2009, 34, 64). The Greek participle tattoménos at the very end of the passage (ταττομένου ῥυθμοῦ) is a variation of the form tassoménos and stems from the verb tassô. The meaning, as Christopher C. Marchetti correctly suggests in his English translation of the Elementa rhythmica, has to do with “appointment,” “arrangement,” or “assignment.” As a past participle, tattoménos (in the genitive singular) serves to create a passive-­voice construction, which implies a common or even commonsense conception of musical rhythm. Here Aristoxenus is speaking of rhythm as it is (habitually) “assigned to music,” though precisely by whom he does not say. Further on, Aristoxenus defines more directly what he means by “musical rhythm”: “Ἀκόλουθον δέ ἐστι τοῖς εἰρημένοις καὶ αὐτῷ τῷ φαινομένῳ τὸ λέγειν, τὸν ῥυθμὸν γίνεσθαι, ὅταν ἡ τῶν χρόνων διαίρεσις τάξιν τινὰ λάβῃ ἀφωρισμένην, οὐ γὰρ πᾶσα χρόνων τάξις ἐν ῥυθμοῖς” (this formulation follows upon what has been said and the phenomenon itself: rhythm arises whenever the distribution of time intervals takes on some definite arrangement, for not every arrangement of time intervals is in-

Rivers Stopped or Flowing Backward 39

cluded among rhythms; Marchetti 2009, 35 and 65). As in the prior passage, the term that Aristoxenus employs for “arrangement” is táxis, which connects his understanding of rhythm more or less seamlessly to Plato’s arguments about the “order” (táxis) of dancer’s bodies across linear time. The element of time likewise finds explicit expression in Aristoxenus, in that he defines rhythm as a “definite arrangement” (táxin aphôrisménên) in the “distribution of time intervals” (τῶν χρόνων διαίρεσις), or, perhaps more literally, in the “divisibility of time.” It follows from this that both the temporal nature of (musical) rhythm and the divisibility of time are for Aristoxenus axiomatic.

Aristotle’s Point To conclude this chapter, it is worth bringing up an Aristo­ telian argument regarding poetry that partially intersects with twentieth-­century accounts of rhythm. It is a relatively fine point but a significant one. Aristotle argues that the process by which an early attunement to nature (e.g., the waves and eddies in rivers) morphed into a mathematical measurement of time and repetition was anything but a “natural” process: as he sees it, early improvisations, combined with a “natural” aptitude for the sensing of nature’s patterns and a good deal of experimentation, led to poetry and poetic meters. Benveniste would agree with this much, although he would also argue strenuously that the historical trajectory of this phenomenon and the trajectory of its theorization as ruthmós are not the same. The latter, in fact, is the result of a good deal of reasoning as well as a philosophical desire to bring focus and (mathematical) rigor to a concept that had previously seemed somewhat amorphous and broad. Benveniste drives this point home at the end of his study on rhythm, returning to the first principles he mentions at the beginning of the essay: Il a fallu une longue réflexion sur la structure des choses, puis une théorie de la mesure appliquée aux figures de la danse et aux inflexions du chant pour reconnaître et dénommer le principe de mouvement

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cadencé. Rien n’a été moins “naturel” que cette élaboration lente, par l’effort des penseurs, d’une notion qui nous semble si nécessairement inhérente aux formes articulées du mouvement que nous avons peine à croire qu’on n’en ait pas pris conscience dès l’origine. (1966b, 335) It required a long consideration of the structure of things, then a theory of measure applied to the figures of dance and to the modulations of song, in order for the principle of cadenced movement to be recognized and given a name. Nothing is less “natural” than this slow working out, by the efforts of philosophers, of a notion which seems to us so necessarily inherent in the articulated forms of movement that we have difficulty in believing that people were not aware of it from the very beginning. (1971, 287)

Here Benveniste argues most directly against mimetic or “naturalist” accounts of rhythm such as those offered by Dewey and Josiah Royce earlier in the century. In speaking of the “structure of things,” Benveniste is referring quite specifically to atomist thought and the idea of ruthmós as form or shape. That this early approach would then find its way—­through deliberate philosophical moves—­to a description of patterned bodily movement is for Benveniste a much more complex and historically accurate account of how we have come to speak of rhythm as we do. Serres quibbles with Benveniste’s understanding of riverine currents and so opens the possibility that early conceptions of ruthmós may very well have emerged from the empirical observation (or Abgelauschen, if we choose to take Georg Curtius [1879] at his word) of natural phenomena such as flowing rivers and their eddies. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari similarly disagree with Benveniste on this score: Recent studies on rhythm, on the origin of that notion, do not seem entirely convincing. For we are told that rhythm has nothing to do with the movement of waves but rather that it designates form in general, and more specifically the form of a measured, cadenced movement. However, rhythm is never the same as measure. And though the atomist Democritus is one of the authors who speak of rhythm in the sense of form, it should be borne in mind that he does

Rivers Stopped or Flowing Backward 41

so under very precise conditions of fluctuation and that the forms made by atoms are primarily large, nonmetric aggregates, smooth spaces such as the air, the sea, or even the earth (magnae res). There is indeed such a thing as measured, cadenced rhythm, relating to the coursing of a river between its banks or to the form of a striated space; but there is also a rhythm without measure, which relates to the upswell of a flow, in other words, to the manner in which a fluid occupies a smooth space. (2002, 363–­64)

Deleuze and Guattari effectively conflate Benveniste’s account of rhythm as form with Platonic ideas of ordered movement, and this seems largely to be the source of their skepticism. The “upswell of a flow” that they describe—­a vortex—­actually seems quite close to what Benveniste sees in his pre-­Socratic sources. Serres develops this idea (even as he moves the locus of rhythm from the sea to the river), arguing that rivers certainly flow (over space and time), but they also contain within them eddies and larger vortices that interrupt or even temporarily reverse that flow. For Serres, the notion of ruthmós as something akin to (but not the same as) sxêma could very well have come from the contemplation of such features in nature and from it the later, Deweyan view of rhythm as “irregular regularities.” As important as Serres’s observation may be, however, it does not necessarily undo Benveniste’s historical argument regarding Plato and the evolution of the term ruthmós. In a sense, both Benveniste and Serres are correct, and both would likely agree (along with Sauvanet and, from a different perspective, Deleuze and Guattari) that while our modern understanding of rhythm certainly has its origins in Greece, it is most directly linked to the later thought of Plato and not to the earlier work of philosophers such as Heraclitus, Leucippus, and Democritus, or poets such as Archilochus and Aeschylus. But then it is also not the case that the earlier conception of ruthmós as a fundamental tension between temporal, ethical, and spatial orders disappeared altogether. Like the river Helicon after Orpheus’s murder, it can be understood to have merely moved underground—­altered its flow—­while continuing to find expression in the work of later philosophers and poets.

2 Harmony, Number, and Others In 1595 the first edition of the collected lyric poetry of the Portuguese poet Luís Vaz de Camões appeared in Lisbon. A posthumous collection (Camões had died in 1580, after battling a short illness), the anthology came a full twenty-­three years after the publication of Camões’s epic masterpiece, Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads, 1572). Published by Manuel de Lira and financed by a local bookseller, Estêvão Lopes, the anthology offered an expansive collection of previously unpublished and largely unknown com­ positions, several apocryphal, bearing the title Rhythmas.1 What is the significance of the title? On one level at least, the answer stems from the significant semantic overlap in Renaissance Europe between the words rhythm and rhyme in discussions of vernacular poetry. As Neil Rhodes has it, the two words were “synonymous” in sixteenth-­century England and were even “pronounced in the same way” (2009, 39). In line with this, Rhodes argues, rhyme would commonly be used to refer generically to both “accentual-­stress meters as well as to homophonic line endings, since the one was thought to imply the other” (ibid.). One finds evidence of this phenomenon in Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie (1595), where Sidney speaks of “rime or measured verse” (1923, 27) in one early passage but then goes on to discuss “the verie Rime it selfe” (1923, 44) in another section, highlighting,

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for example, masculine and feminine end rhymes in English, French, and Italian. The latter example appears in a section of the Defence devoted to the question of classical and vernacular meters, and in it Sidney offers an even fuller account of rhythm and rhyme, presenting both as intertwined concepts: Now of versefying, there are two sorts, the one auncient, the other moderne. The auncient marked the quantitie of each sillable, and ac­cording to that, framed his verse: The moderne, obseruing onely number, with some regard of the accent; the chiefe life of it, standeth in that like sounding of the words, which we call Rime. Whether of those be the more excellent, wold bear many speeches, the ancient no doubt more fit for Musick, both words and time obseruing quantitie, and more fit, liuely to expresse diuers passions by the low or loftie sound of the well-­wayed sillable. The latter likewise with his rime striketh a certaine Musicke to the eare: and in fine, since it dooth delight, though by another way, it obtaineth the same purpose, there being in either sweetnesse, and wanting in neither maiestie. (1923, 44)

For Sidney, the quantitative meters of classical poetry, which “marked the quantitie of each sillable,” give way to modern vernacular meters, which observe “onely number, with some regard of the accent; the chiefe life of it, standeth in that like sounding of the words, which we call Rime.” The learned poetic evolution in England from quantitative meters built around combinations of short and long syllables in Latin to accentual meters in English with homophonic line endings (according to Sidney, the “chiefe life” and most musical component of accentual verse) is thus for Sidney a historical process best understood not necessarily as a decline or falling-­off from earlier models but rather as the gradual development of a viable alternative to classical forms. For him, the two systems essentially represent different ways of arriving at the same effect: both possess “sweetnesse,” and neither lacks “maiestie.”2 A fundamental aspect of this argument revolves around the idea that classical notions of rhythm find new expression in late sixteenth-­century conceptions of rhyme—­that

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is, that the latter is a salient, even central aspect of the former in English vernacular poetry. There would be a movement against rhythm/rhyme in favor of quantitative English verse at the beginning of the seventeenth century, championed perhaps most famously by Thomas Campion (1567–­1620) in his Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602). This movement would be short-­lived, however, for even Campion’s proposed system admitted the importance of stress (Attridge 1974, 228). Samuel Daniel’s response to Campion, contained in his A Defence of Ryme (1603), in fact presents both stress-­based meter and rhyme as “natural” to English verbal practice: Every language hath her proper number or measure fitted to use and delight, which, Custome intertaining by the allowance of the Eare, doth indenize, and make naturall. All verse is but a frame of wordes confinde within certaine measure; differing from the ordinarie speach, and introduced, the better to expresse mens conceipts, both for delight and memorie. Which frame of wordes consisting of Rithmus or Metrum, Number or Measure, are disposed into divers fashions, according to the humour of the Composer and the set of the time; and these Rhythmi as Aristotle saith are familiar amongst all Nations, and è naturali & sponte fusa compositione: And they fall as naturally already in our language as ever Art can make them; being such as the Eare of it selfe doth marshall in their proper roomes, and they of themselves will not willingly be put out of their ranke; and that in such a verse as best comports with the Nature of our lan­ guage. (Tayler 1967, 50)

For Daniel, rhythm (“number”) and meter (“measure”) are both numerical frames for utterances meant to delight and serve memory. Using Aristotle as a reference, he claims that these frames are particular to each “nation,” and their familiarity leads to a sense of naturalness (to the ear) and even intransigence: “They of themselves will not willingly be put out of their ranke.” In other words, the quantitative Latin verses that worked fine in Rome cannot really work in England, where different “frames” or rhythmi have long been in use and have come to be “natural”

Harmony, Number, and Others 45

to the language—­or, more important, to the ears of those who speak it. In sixteenth-­century France, the situation with respect to rhythm and rhyme was in many ways similar to what one finds in England, and it is because of this that Michel de Montaigne could discuss the rythme of a hypothetical poem in his essay on the education of children (“Je ne suis pas de ceux qui pensent la bonne rythme faire le bon poëme” (I am not among those who think that good rythme makes a good poem; 2003, 191), and Joachim Du Bellay could complain of the “étroite prison de rime” (narrow prison of rime; 1549, 35) in which French poetry was then compelled to operate; and both would be understood to be speaking about roughly the same thing.3 In Italy, Francesco Petrarca’s fourteenth-­century Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Fragments of Common Things), more commonly known as the Canzoniere (Songbook) or Rime sparse (Scattered Rhymes), had by the sixteenth century already become perhaps the most celebrated lyric collection in Europe and had done much to influence poetic composition—­as well as conceptions of rhythm and rhyme. In this broader European context, in fact, one might justifiably read the Portuguese Rhythmas as a slightly bookish synonym for Rimas, which is the very title given to Pedro Craesbeeck’s second edition of Camões’s collected lyric, published in 1598. Along with the extensive (though not complete) semantic overlap that existed between rhythm and rhyme in sixteenth-­ century Europe, both terms could also serve as metonyms for poetry or verse itself. Petrarca’s Rime sparse provide once again a clear and paradigm-­shaping example of this phenomenon. A French case worth noting is Pernette du Guillet’s posthumous collection of lyric compositions, which bears the title Rymes de gentille et vertueuse dame, Pernette du Guillet (Rhymes of the Refined and Virtuous Lady, Pernette du Guillet, 1545), and there are important Portuguese examples of such usage as well. A year before the publication of Camões’s Rhythmas, for example, Simão Lopes would publish a collection of religious poetry composed by Diogo Bernardes (ca. 1530–­ca. 1605) under the title Varias rimas ao

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Bom Jesus, e à Virgem gloriosa sua mãe e a santos particulares (Assorted Verses to Good Jesus and to the Glorious Virgin, His mother, and to Specific Saints, 1594). In 1596 Lopes would publish another, much more famous secular anthology by Bernardes titled O Lyma (The Lima [River]) that would be republished in 1597 by Manuel de Lira as Rimas varias, flores do Lima (Assorted verses, Flowers of the Lima [River]).4 Neither of these anthologies using the term rimas in the title contains a prologue or any other explanation of the term’s use, which suggests that its meaning—­as a synonym for poetry or verses—­was assumed to be unambiguous to the broader reading public. Beyond the examples of Bernardes’s poetry, along with the two editions of Camões’s lyric verse already mentioned, it is admittedly difficult to find print editions of poetry in sixteenth-­ century Portugal that make use of rimas or rhythmas in the title; however, it should be noted that this fact is strongly conditioned by the general paucity of print editions of Portuguese poetry during that period. Inquisitional censorship in sixteenth-­century Portugal (aided to an extent by a complex royal bureaucracy with its own censors) was strikingly efficient, and works of poetry deal­ing with secular love came under particular scrutiny.5 In his appendix to the 1581 index of books banned in Portugal, Bartolomeu Ferreira, the Inquisitional deputy charged with overseeing book publication in Lisbon during that period, would go so far as to exhort the Portuguese to abstain from reading any books containing “desonestidades ou amores profanos” (immodest discourse or examples of profane love; Sá 1983, 637).6 Despite Inquisitional limitations, poetic anthologies in languages other than Portuguese (especially Italian) and manuscript copies of poets’ work did nonetheless make their way into the libraries of Portuguese readers, and one can certainly find textual examples in early modern Portugal of the use of rhythm and rhyme as stand-­ins for poetry. Looking just to printed works, one finds two sonnets in António Ferreira’s Poemas lusitanos (Lusitanian poems, 1598) that make use of rima in precisely this way: “Ah, porque não posso eu em prosa, ou rima” (Ah, because I cannot in prose or

Harmony, Number, and Others 47

verse; 2000, 61) and “Limiano, tu ao som do claro Lima” (Limiano, you to the sound of the clear Lima), which ends its first quatrain with “Amor, fazes soar na doce rima” (Love, you make resound in sweet verse; ibid., 91). João de Lucena’s brief description of literature and Portuguese evangelization in sixteenth-­ century Hormuz, published in 1600, also speaks of prosa and rima as different forms of discourse: “Aprenderam com extraordinária curiosidade as orações e declaração dos mistérios e mandamentos de nossa santa lei os meninos, os escravos, o povo todo; trocaram-­ se-­lhe as cantigas lascivas e menos cristãs em prosas e rimas pias e devotas” (The children, slaves, and everyone else learned their prayers, the sacraments, and the commandments of our holy law with extraordinary curiosity; immoral and less Christian songs were exchanged for pious and devout prose and verse; 1600, 767). Aside from Lucena’s perhaps overly sanguine view of Christian life in Portuguese-­controlled Hormuz, control that would disappear entirely only two decades later, what emerges from these ex­ amples is a clear sense of rima as a ready-­to-­hand synonym for verse or poetry (and as something readily distinguishable from prose) in late sixteenth-­century Portugal. A century later, in his Vocabulário portuguez e latino (Portuguese and Latin vocabulary), the Anglo-­French cleric Rafael Bluteau (1638–­1734) would define rima both as consonantal correspondence (rhyme) and as composition, which he claimed was extendable beyond discourse to the arrangement or form of objects, such as wood or dead bodies, in a pile: Rima: Deriva-­se do Grego Ritmos, que quer dizer Numero, ou de Rima, que no Grego val o mesmo que Vocabulo ou Dicçaõ, & chamamos Rimas as dicções ou palavras que respondem a outras em consoantes & porque o dispor consoantes em Rima se chama compor, chamamos Rima a compostura de algüas cousas sobre outras, como Rima de madeyra, Rima de corpos mortos, etc. (1720, 337) Rima: Derived from the Greek ritmos, which means numero, or from rima, which in Greek means the same as vocabulo or dictio; and we call rimas those words that correspond to others in terms of their

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consonants; and because the practice of producing consonantal cor­ respondence in rima is known as composing, we call rima the composition [or formation] of certain things on top of others, such as a rima of wood, rima of dead bodies, etc.

Bluteau here posits a direct link between the Greek term ruthmós and the concept of rhyme (joined through the Latin construction numerus), and he also makes mention of the broader concept of rima as composed verse. Beyond this, he also references what he considers to be the metaphoric extension of the notion of rima to other arranged objects, such as pieces of wood or dead bodies. Bluteau is of course right that one can speak of a rima de madeira (i.e., a stack of wood) in Portuguese; however, in this case the source is not ruthmós or even the vernacular notion of rima, but rather the Arabic noun rizma (‫) رزمة‬, which simply means “bundle,” “bale,” or “pack” (Wehr 1994, 390). This is an etymological error, of course; however, it is worth noting that the morphological conceptualization of rhythm that underlies it, of rhythm as the formal arrangement of matter (compostura de algüas cousas sobre outras) rather than of time, intersects in provocative ways with early Greek theories. This question of incidental intersection aside, Bluteau’s dictionary entry for rima provides a valuable account of the term’s use both as a synonym for rhythm and as a metonymic stand-­in for poetic verse itself well into the seventeenth century. In Spain, the publication of Lope de Vega’s Rimas humanas y divinas del licenciado Tomé de Burguillos (Human and Divine Rhymes by the Licenciate Tomé de Burguillos) in 1634 likewise presents concrete evidence of such use. Returning to the anthologies of Camões’s lyric poetry published in the 1590s, one might justifiably conclude that the use of both Rhythmas and Rimas as the title for subsequent anthologies might signify, at least in the most quotidian sense, his poetry or verses. Nearly three hundred years later Richard Burton would render Rhythmas/Rimas as Lyricks in his 1884 English translation of Camões’s lyric poetry, and in this we can confidently make the claim that

Harmony, Number, and Others 49

he is following usage common both to sixteenth-­century Por­ tugal and nineteenth-­century England.

Some Exceptions While rhythm and rhyme tended to be interchangeable concepts and/or stand-­ins for poetic verse itself within treatments of vernacular poetry during the Renaissance, it is worth mentioning that there were also important, if isolated, efforts in the sixteenth century to deal with them in a more nuanced way.  The earliest of these is Du Bellay’s account of rhyme and meter in the Défense et illustration de la langue française (Defense and Illustration of the French Language, 1549), as Henri Meschonnic has pointed out (1982, 148).7 Du Bellay first describes the dire situation of French verse in dramatic terms of Promethean bondage: Et bien que n’ayons cet usage de pieds comme [les Grecs et Latins], si est-­ce que nous avons un certain nombre de syllabes en chacun genre de poème, par lesquelles, comme par chaînons, le vers français lié et enchaîné est contraint de se rendre en cette étroite prison de rime, sous la garde, le plus souvent, d’une coupe féminine, fâcheux et rude geôlier et inconnu des autres vulgaires. (1549, 149) And even though we do not make use of quantitative metrical feet as the Greeks and Latins do, we do expect a certain number of syllables in each type of poem, by which, as if by shackles, the French verse line, fettered and chained, is forced to surrender itself within a narrow prison of rime, most frequently under the guard of a feminine caesura, an annoying and rude jailer, unknown to other vernaculars.

Seeking to rescue French verse from the rhythmic “prison” within which it had formed during the medieval period, Du Bellay then moves beyond verse to discuss rhythm in language more generally: Tout ce qui tombe sous quelque mesure et jugement de l’oreille, dit Cicéron, en latin s’appelle numerus, en grec ῥυθμός, non point seulement au vers, mais à l’oraison. Par quoi improprement nos

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anciens ont astreint le nom du genre sous l’espèce, appelant rime cette consonance de syllabes à la fin des vers, qui se devrait plutôt nommer hómoiotéleuton, c’est-­à-­dire finissant même, l’une des espèces du rythme. Ainsi les vers, encore qu’ils ne finissent point en un même son, généralement se peuvent appeler rythme d’autant que la signification de ce mot ruthmos est fort ample et emporte beaucoup d’autres termes, comme ϰανὼν, μέτρον μέλος ἕυφωνον, ἀϰολουθία, τάξις, σύνϰρισις, règle, mesure, mélodieuse consonance de voix, con­ sécution, ordre et comparaison. (1549, 36) All that falls under some measure and judgment of the ear, says Cic­ ero, is called numerus in Latin and ῥυθμός in Greek; and this is so not only in verse, but also in prose. Given this, our predecessors erred by placing the name of the genus under that of the species, referring to the agreement of syllables at the end of verses as rime, when they should call it hómoiotéleuton, that is, “having the same ending,” which is but one of the species of rhythm. Therefore, even verses that do not end with the same sound can generally be called rhythm, especially since the meaning of the term ruthmos is exceedingly ample and comprehends many other terms, such as ϰανὼν, μέτρον μέλος ἕυφωνον, ἀϰολουθία, τάξις, σύνϰρισις, rule, measure, melodious agreement of voice, sequence, order, and comparative juxtaposition.

The main point that Du Bellay makes here has two parts: in the first place, he points out that the French term rime is derived from the Greek ruthmós and linked to the Latin numerus; from there, he makes the claim that ruthmós, numerus, and rime are all generic terms applicable to many forms of harmonious discourse and not merely to the much narrower phenomenon of rhyme or hómoiotéleuton. Once again, Du Bellay’s larger goal here is to release French vernacular verse from strict conventions of meter and rhyme inherited from the medieval period (a goal shared by other figures of La Pléiade such as Pierre Ronsard and Jean-­Antoine de Baïf ), and his clarification regarding rhythm as a principle of harmonious discourse that transcends both is for him an integral part of this project. Of course, what underlies Du Bellay’s argument is the Renaissance understanding of rhythm and vernacular

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poetry, which linked both inextricably to principles of harmony and euphony more generally. Published near the end of the sixteenth century, The Arte of English Poesie (1589), commonly attributed to the English critic George Puttenham, approaches rhythm and rhyme in vernacular English poetry in a way similar to that adopted by Du Bellay. In the book’s early section on proportion, for example, one finds the following comparison of quantitative poetic meters in classical antiquity and the accentual meters of English: This [system of classical meters] was a pretie phantasticall observation of [the Greeks and Romans], and yet brought their meetres to have a marvelous good grace, which was in Greeke called ῥυθμός; whence we have derived this word ryme, but improperly and not wel because we have no such feete or times or stirres in our meeters, by whose simpathie, or pleasant conveniencie with th’eare, we could take any delight; this rithmus of theirs, is not therefore our rime, but a certaine musicall numerositie in utterance. (Puttenham 1869, 83)

For Puttenham, the Greek notion of ruthmós is synonymous with a “certaine musicall numerositie in utterance” that has little to do with the harmonious “congruitie in sounds pleasing the eare” that characterizes vernacular poetry (ibid., 79). The question of musical numerosity is key to Puttenham’s conception of classical forms of poetic rhythm (as in Sidney, Campion, and Daniel), as is his interest in pleasing aural congruity with respect to poetry in English; this is so in large measure because he very explicitly understands poetry to be a “kinde of Musicall utterance” (ibid.). Puttenham develops this idea with much greater precision in a subsequent chapter on “proportion in Concord, called Symphonie or rime” that is worth reproducing in full: Because we use the word rime (though by maner of abusion) yet to helpe that fault againe we apply it in our vulgar Poesie another way very commendably and curiously. For wanting the currantnesse of the Greeke and Latine feete, in stead thereof we make in th’ ends

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of our verses a certaine tunable sound: which anon after with another verse reasonably distant we accord together in the last fall or cadence: the eare taking pleasure to heare the like tune reported, and to feele his returne. And for this purpose serve the monosillables of our English Saxons excellently well, because they do naturally and indifferently receive any accent, and in them if they finish the verse, resteth the shrill accent of necessitie, and so doth it not in the last of every bisillable, nor of every polisillable word: but to the purpose, ryme is a borrowed word from the Greeks by the Latines and French, from them by us Saxon angles, and by abusion as hath bene sayd, and therefore it shall not do amisse to tell what this rithmos was with the Greekes, for what is it with us hath bene already sayd. There is an accomptable number which we call arithmeticall (arithmos) as one, two, three. There is also a musicall or audible number, fashioned by stirring of tunes and their sundry times in the utterance of our wordes, as when the voice goeth high or low, or sharpe or flat, or swift or slow: and this is called rithmos or numerositie, that is to say, a certain flowing utterance by slipper words and sillables, such as the toung easily utters, and the eare with pleasure receiveth, and which flowing of wordes with much volubilitie smoothly proceeding from the mouth is in some sort harmonicall and breedeth to th’ eare a great compassion. This point grew by the smooth and delicate running of their feete, which we have not in our vulgare, though we use as much as may be the most flowing words and slippery sil­ lables, that we can picke out: yet do not we call that by the name of ryme, as the Greekes did: but do give the name of ryme onely to our concordes, or tunable consentes in the latter end of our verses, and which concordes the Greekes nor Latines neuer used in their Poesie till by the barbarous souldiers out of the campe, it was brought into the Court and thence to the schoole, as hath bene before remembred: and yet the Greekes and Latines both used a maner of speach, by clauses of like termination, which they called ὁμοιοτέλευτον, and was the nearest that they approched to our ryme: but is not our right concord: so as we in abusing this terme (ryme) be neverthelesse excusable applying it to another point in Poesie no lesse curious then their rithme or numerositie which in deede passed the whole verse throughout, whereas our concordes keepe but the latter end of every verse, or perchaunce the middle and the end in meetres that be long. (1869, 90–­91)

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Puttenham first distinguishes between “countable number” (arithmós) and “musical number” (ruthmós) and attributes the latter to classical poetry, which is characterized, according to him, by “flowing utterances” made up of words and syllables arranged in such a way that they pour easily from the tongue and are easily received by the ear. Such a numerical principle is, strictly speaking, lacking in the accentual verse of vernacular English poetry, and so it is only by “abusion,” as Puttenham argues, that the English speak of ryme in the context of their vernacular poetry. According to Puttenham, it is misleading to use the term ryme to speak of vernacular English poetry. Like Du Bellay, Puttenham makes it clear that neither the Greek term ruthmós nor the Latin numerus corresponds in any general way to vernacular poetics, owing in large measure to the significant differences that exist between classical quantitative meters and the accentual-­ stress meters of vernacular poetry. That said, there is for Puttenham a species of ruthmós/numerus that, while almost wholly absent from classical poetry, finds ample expression in vernacular poetry, namely homophonic line endings or what we conventionally describe in modern English as rhyme (homoiotéleuton). Beyond his description of the differences between classical and vernacular English poetry, Puttenham also offers a significant value judgment. As he puts it, the widespread implementation of homoiotéleuton in English poetry—­by no means a salient characteristic of classical verse—­constitutes a valuable innovation with respect to the classical concept of “musical number” and so can be described as a form of ryme: “So as we in abusing this terme (ryme) be neverthelesse excusable applying it to another point in Poesie no lesse curious then their rithme or numerositie.” The statement that line-­final homophony is in some sense “no lesse curious” (i.e., “ingenious”) as a poetic device than classical forms of quantitative meter (ruthmós/numerus) is a dramatic one; however, as we will see, it is of a piece with other sixteenth-­century defenses of vernacular poetry written in other parts of Europe beyond England and France. In general, Puttenham, like Du Bellay, attempts to bring a certain amount of

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precision to sixteenth-­century theories of rhythm and rhyme, which are for him still nonetheless inextricably linked to classical notions of harmony and (musical) number.

Soropita’s Vernacular Theory of Rhythm Putting aside questions of common usage and general theories of poetic rhythm in the Renaissance, it is worth considering the explicit theorization of rhythm found in the reader’s prologue to the 1595 edition of Camões’s lyric poetry. This brief text is generally attributed to the volume’s editor, Fernão Rodrigues Lobo Soropita. Probably born in Lisbon in the 1560s, Fernão Rodrigues Lobo seems to have received the nickname “Soropita” (according to Maria Luísa Linhares de Deus, a reference to his unattractive physical appearance and bohemian character) during his time as a law student at the University of Coimbra (2007). Soropita graduated from Coimbra in 1583, after which he worked primarily as an attorney in Lisbon until his death sometime after 1616.8 Apart from his work as a lawyer at court, Soropita was also a devoted poet and humanist, although very little of his creative work was published during his lifetime. According to Sheila Moura Hue, he published only one poem before his death, a sonnet written in Castilian, “Este cestillo de olorosas flores” (This little basket of fragrant flowers), that forms part of a 1588 anthology meant to commemorate the arrival of holy relics at the Jesuit church of São Roque in Lisbon (2011a, 908).9 Beyond this single poem, there is of course his 1595 edition of Camões’s Rhythmas, and then in 1597 Manuel de Lira would print what seems to be Soropita’s last published work, a legal manual bearing the title Informação de direito (Instruction on the Law), of which there is no known extant copy (Hue 2011a, 909). Despite the paucity of his published works, Soropita seems to have enjoyed a solid reputation as a man of letters in early modern Portugal. In his 1685 edition of Camões’s lyric poetry, Manuel de Faria e Sousa describes Soropita both as Camões’s first editor and as a writer of excellent and sophisticated poetry:

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El primero que en Portugal le escrivió Elogio [a Camões] haziendo juizio de sus obras, y singularmente destas, fue Fernando Rodríguez Lobo Soropita, hombre famoso en la jurisprudencia; insigne Abogado en Lisboa, no de los que solo manejan lo severo de las leyes, ï lo forense de la Abogacia; mas de aquellos que con luzido ingenio saben salir de essa casi mecanica a los cultos jardines, y regaladas fuentes del Parnaso, con él apazible caudal de las buenas letras, como lo supo este Varon, no menos docto en ellas, y en la urbanidad, y en la política, y en la Poetica. El escrivió excelentes versos, ï otras cosas de entretenimiento para entendidos, no para ociosos, con gran felicidad. (1685, “Juizio destas rimas,” para. 5) The first person in Portugal to praise [Camões] and present a focused, monographic appreciation of his works was Fernão Rodrigues Lobo Soropita, a man famous in the field of jurisprudence. A respected attorney in Lisbon, he was not one of those who deals only with the rigid aspects of the law and the forensic practice of lawyering; rather, he was one of those who with lucid genius can leave that quasi-­mechanism for the cultured gardens and delightful fountains of Parnassus, and with it the pleasant bounty of good literature, as Soropita knew well, since he was equally learned in letters, urbanity, politics, and poetics. He happily wrote excellent poetry and other things meant to entertain the learned rather than the indolent.

Faria e Sousa’s positive account of Soropita’s literary skill and acumen would find further expression in Francisco Manuel de Melo (1608–­1666), who would speak of Soropita in almost hyperbolic terms in his Hospital das letras (Hospital of Literature, 1721): “Posso afirmar que se padece duma paixão extrínseca, bem pode ser; mas que no espírito poetico que o informou, está são de todo os quatro costados. Foi poeta mestre, e quando não escrevera mais que os seus desvarios, bem se vê que quem desvariando acertava por aquelle modo, quanto acertaria atinado!” (I can affirm that it’s certainly possible that he suffered from some external perturbation; but as for the poetic spirit that informed him, this was present in him through and through. He was a master poet, and although he never wrote more than rants, it’s easy to see that one who hits his target so well while raving would do

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so even more effectively exercising prudence and restraint; 1900, 65). Diogo Barbosa Machado (1682–­1772) would be similarly liberal in his praise for Soropita, lifting whole sentences from Faria e Sousa in the second volume of his Bibliotheca lusitana (Lusitanian Library) and adding that Soropita “compoz além de muitos versos de differente metro, em que fez patente a elegante afluencia da sua musa” (composed many verses in different meters, in which he made evident the elegant affluence of his muse; 1747, 53). Soropita received considerable praise from seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century writers; however, the first edition of his unpublished work would not appear until 1868. Edited by no less a figure than Camilo Castelo Branco (1825–­1890), it contains twenty-­one examples of Soropita’s poetry and prose taken from a single manuscript found in the Benedictine monastery of São Martinho de Tibães, near Braga (Soropita 1868). The edition con­ tains the following texts: 1. “Regimento escolastico para os estudantes, que se achou no ventre de uma toninha” (Curriculum for students, which was found in the belly of a porpoise) 2. “Carta de um negro a uma dama com um soneto” (Letter from a black man to a lady with a sonnet)10 3. “Carta do auctor a um amigo, em que lhe dá conta do que passou quando se sahiu de Lisboa pela vinda dos inglezes no anno de 1589” (Letter from the author to a friend, in which he relates what happened when he left Lisbon due to the arrival of the English in the year 1589) 4. “Carta do mesmo” (Letter of the same sort) 5. A poem titled, “À morte de um contentamento” (To the death of a contentment)11 6. “Commentarios saragoçanos sobre os desposorios da saudade com o descontentamento, que se acharam no cartorio de Mulatá Arrais” (Zaragozan commentaries on the marriage of longing with discontent, which were found in the registry of Mulatá Arrais) 7. A sonnet titled, “A umas lágrimas de uma despedida” (To some tears from a farewell)12

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8. A sonnet titled, “A uns olhos” (To some eyes)13 9. A poetic satire in Portuguese that begins with a line in Castilian: “Afuera, afuera pensamientos míos!” (Out, out my thoughts!) 10. “Pàrrafo notável sobre as barbas deste mundo, agora novamente agorentado por Bernabé de Soria, alcaide mór de Fonte Rabia e Feitor da caza de Bruxellas” (Notable passage on the beards of this world, now newly updated by Bernabé de Soria, governor of Fonte Rabia and chief commissioner of Brussels) 11. A sonnet that begins, “Doces cuidados meus que já algum dia” (My sweet cares that someday soon) 12. A sonnet that begins, “Do grande mar do meu tormento antigo” (Of the great sea of my old torment) 13. “Prognostico do anno de 1595, o qual se achou no bucho de um elefante na Ribeira de Coruche” (Forecast for the year 1595, which was found in the belly of an elephant on the riverbank in Coruche) 14. A sonnet in Castilian that begins, “Ya de esperar estoi desesper­ ado” (I am already in despair from waiting) 15. “Carta para certa senhora de Lisboa, feita por um seu affeiçoado, na banda d’além, em resposta de outra sua” (A letter for a certain lady from Lisbon, written by her friend on the other side of the Tagus, in response to a letter from her) 16. “Satyra, na data de uma cadeira a um fulano de Figueiredo que era torto de um olho; e um fulano Correia, judeu” (A satire, on the occasion of a chair in law being offered to a nobody from Figueiredo with a lazy eye; and another given to a nobody named Correia, a Jew)14 17. “Descobrimento das ilhas da poesia, novamente composto por Cid Ruy Dias, condestable de Benavente, Imperador de Cacilhas, capitão-­mor da poesia em garganta” (Discovery of the islands of poetry, newly composed by the Cid Ruy Díaz, constable of Benavente, emperor of Cacilhas, captain-­major of poetry left in the throat) 18. “Segunda parte do descobrimento da poesia, composta por Ruperto de Alançon, rendeiro do Reguengo de Catalunha, e prioste da ordem de Calatrava em Porto de Moz” (Second part of the discovery of poetry, composed by Ruperto de Alançon, tenant of Reguengo de Catalunha, and treasurer of the order of Calatrava in Porto de Mós)

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19. A satire that begins, “Arre! Arre! para traz” (Whoa! Whoa! Back up)15 20. A satire that begins, “Tacanhos, vis, apoucados” (Tightwads, miscreants, feckless) 21. “Elegia da minha penitencia” (An elegy on my penance)16

As evidenced by the list of titles, there is a great deal of humor and mordant, even cruel satire in the texts collected in the Tibães anthology. In 1922 Carolina Michaëlis would produce a study of a seventeenth-­century songbook manuscript owned by Aníbal Fernandes Tomás that contains several dozen works by Soropita. The manuscript, which bears the title Flores várias de diversos autores luzitanos (Various Flowers of Different Portuguese Authors) but would come to be known as the Cancioneiro Fernandes Tomás after the publication of Michaëlis’s study, contains texts by Soropita not found in the Tibães manuscripts as well as variants of works published in the 1868 edition, some of which are very serious poetic compositions that had previously been attributed (many by Soropita himself ) to Camões (Michaëlis de Vasconcellos 1922). In 1971 the Museu Nacional de Arqueologia e Etnologia in Lisbon would publish a facsimile edition of the Cancioneiro Fernandes Tomás (Tomás 1971) and more recently Linhares de Deus has published an edition of Soropita’s complete works, through which we are able to gain a more global sense of Soropita’s prose and poetic work (Soropita 2007).17 As Hue argues, the “satirical and burlesque tone” of Soropita’s prose and poetic writing is its dominant characteristic; however, his deeply pious (and deadly serious) “Elegia da minha penitencia” is the composition that modern readers know best (2011a, 910). Written in 1599 during one of the many outbreaks of the plague that afflicted Lisbon throughout the sixteenth century, this poem mirrors many of the mannerist themes of Camões’s own lyric works, especially the latter’s two well-­known compositions comparing Zion to Babylon (“Sôbolos rios que vão” [On the rivers that flow] and “Cá nesta Babilónia donde mana” [Here in this Babylon from which flows]).18 Most significant is the opening conceit,

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which situates the poem-­as-­utterance in a sterile and punishing present: “Aqui neste deserto secco e pobre” (Here in this dry and barren desert). The echo with Camões’s “Here in this Babylon from which flows” is especially striking, even if both compositions draw their ultimate inspiration from the Book of Psalms. Breaking from Camões’s sonnet, Soropita opts to begin his poem with the two-­syllable aqui rather than the monosyllabic cá, which on one level reflects a practical concern for meter (i.e., the ten-­syllable verse). On another level, however, the use of aqui [a-­ki] links the opening line sonorously to the e (“and”) at the start of many of the poem’s following lines. Pronounced [i] (as in the English “bee”), this Portuguese conjunction not only creates a referential chain that links whole phrases together throughout the poem; it also creates a prosodic and aural link between the here of the poem’s opening and the long line of argumentation that makes up the poem’s semantico-­referential content. This is not mimesis in any strict sense but rather a deictic, listened-­to connection between a locus of poetic utterance and the thoughts contained in that utterance: here there are things to consider, and those things are inherently, sonorously linked to the here where the poetic subject lays them out. What are these things? They are more openly spiritual than what one finds in Camões (even near the end of the latter’s life), but they are also inseparable from a place that is nothing if not an interruption of flow, a place where one is no longer a subject in any full sense. In the end, this entire poem is a mute utterance, a crying out that is never in any real sense articulated, as if the lyric subject had simply, much like Prometheus long before him, spread out his chained arms to say, “Here I am,” or “Thus.” The difference with Soropita is that there is no Zeus to blame for his enrhythment ; it is merely part of his condition as a child of Adam. In this way, blame shifts to a cry for mercy, and the responsibility for suffering is transferred from a jealous and petty god to the sinner himself. What do I mean when I claim that Soropita’s lyric utterance is no utterance at all? He makes this point in every stanza: he has lost his sight, his voice, and himself. How then, can he

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speak? How can the lyric subject articulate anything absent her or his subjectivity, the conditions for the possibility of speech? It is strictly impossible, and yet the subject can listen—­an object among objects, a hollow instrument of reverberation, a momentary containment of flow. Desire and sin have left Soropita’s lyric self sick and blind (in the here of the poem), but not deaf; and he listens most intently for the salvation that only God can bring him. The rest is silence, an attunement to the mercy that God may show him, and always in this place here.

Soropita on Rhythm Soropita’s prologue to the 1595 edition of Camões’s lyric poetry possesses little of the conceptual and discursive depth that one finds in his penitential elegy. He does speak explicitly of rhythm; however, he does so according to precedents established by Latin grammarians and argues that the merits of the anthology derive, at least in part, from principles of harmony inherited from classical antiquity. In the process, he makes explicit mention of the Greek term ruthmós, linking it to the Latin grammatical con­ cepts of numerus and harmonia (with, it bears mentioning, Ital­ ianate notions of rima and especially Petrarch’s Rime sparse lurking not so far in the background). Near the very beginning of the prologue, Soropita writes: E começando pelo título, esta palavra rhythmas [ . . . ] descende de ruthmos, vocablo grego, que quer dizer número ou harmonia, como declara Diomedes gramático e Nicolão Perotto. [ . . . ] E em ambas as significações convêm propriamente ao verso de medida italiana, porque não somente consiste em certo número de sílabas, mas também na harmonia causada dos acentos e consoantes como prova Benedetto Varchi no dialogo Herculano, na pergunta 9. Nem isto recebe duvida por que geralmẽte o corpo de toda a sorte de poëma se forma de numero, & armonia, donde nasceo chamarlhe Possidonio Stoico, dicção numerosa, que consta de medida certa, como refere Laertio na vida de Zenão. Em tanto que sendo Socrates avisado por hum oraculo, se queria alcançar a bemaventurança applicasse o

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animo à musica, entende o que satisfazia ao intento daquelle aviso em se empregar todo em fazer versos por ser a armonia & numeros delles parte da mesma musica, como cõta Caelio Calcagnino na oração que fez em louvor das artes. (Camões 1595, 6v) And beginning with the title, this word rhythmas [ . . . ] comes from ruthmos, a Greek term that means numerus or harmonia, as Diomedes Grammaticus and Niccolò Perotti both declare. [ . . . ] And both meanings correspond well to Italianate verses, not only because they consist of a fixed number of syllables, but also due to the harmony caused by their accents and consonants, as Benedetto Varchi proves in the ninth question of his L’Ercolano. Nor is this in doubt, given that generally the body of any sort of poem is formed by number and harmony, which is why Posidonius the Stoic calls poetry dictio numerosa, which consists of a regular meter, which Laertius speaks of in his life of Zenon. When Socrates is advised by an oracle that to achieve happiness he should apply his energy to music, he understands that to follow this advice he devote himself completely to the composition of verses, given that the harmony and numerus of these comes from music itself, as Celio Calcagnini relates in his oration in praise of the arts.

What Soropita offers in this paragraph is a peculiarly humanistic explanation for the somewhat puzzling title he has given to his edition of Camões’s lyric poetry. Reading it, one might conclude that even as Rhythmas refers to Camões’s poetry in the most banal sense, it also speaks, at a somewhat deeper level, to rhetorical conceptions of elocutio and harmony as framed by humanists in Portugal and beyond. Soropita first justifies his claims regarding rhythm, numerus, and harmony through an explicit reference to the late-­antique grammarian Diomedes Grammaticus (fl. late fourth century CE) as well as the Italian humanist Niccolò Perotti (1429–­1480 CE). The text by Diomedes that lies at the center of Soropita’s citation is the Ars grammatica (Art of grammar), a popular compendium of fourth-­century Latin grammars by figures such as Charisius, Cominianus, Donatus, and Victorinus written for Greek elites under Roman rule (Schenkeveld 2004, 118). Beyond the general

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popularity of the Ars grammatica throughout the medieval period and into the Renaissance (a popularity eclipsed perhaps only by Donatus’s Latin grammar), it is the third and final book of Diomedes’s grammar, which is focused on questions of prosody, that is of interest to Soropita. On the question of rhythm, Diomedes offers a brief definition: “Rythmus est pedum temporumque iunctura cum levitate sine modo. Alii sic, rythmus est versus imago modulata servans numerum syllabarum positionem saepe sublationemque contemnens” (Rhythm is the light and unbounded combination of syllables and metrical feet. According to others, rhythm is the harmonious image of a [classical] verse that preserves the verse’s syllable count but frequently disregards its patterns of stress; Keil 1857, 1: 473). This is a strikingly narrow conception of rhythm, and it does much to reveal the strong preference that Diomedes (and, one imagines, his Latinized Greek readers) had for quantitative verse. As Diomedes puts it, rhythmic verse is simply that which manages to achieve a certain measure of harmony—­ although it is either not limited to a fixed number of feet and syllables, or it is but fails to follow prescribed systems of stress. In this sense, rhythm for Diomedes refers to lesser, nonquantitative verses that nonetheless produce a kind of harmonic effect. The significance of this definition of rhythm emerges when we take into consideration the definition of meter that Diomedes offers directly afterward: Metrum est pedum iunctura numero modoque finita; vel sic, metrum est conpositio pedum ordine statuto decurrens, modum positionis sublationisque conservans. [ . . . ] Clarius sic, metrum est quod certis pedum quantitatibus qualitatibusque rhythmo discriminatur; distat enim metrum a rhythmo, quod metrum certa qualitate ac numero syllabarum temporumque finitur certisque pedibus constat ac clauditur, rhythmus autem temporum ac syllabarum pedumque congruentia infinitum multiplicatur ac profluit. (Fitzhugh 1909, 44) Meter is a combination of feet that is finite in number. That is, meter is the combination of feet arranged in a bounded set that pre­

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serves the syllable count. To be clear, meter differs from rhythm both quantitatively and qualitatively because of its fixed feet. Meter is thus unlike rhythm in that meter is determined by the fixed quality and number of syllables and time, and it consists of and is closed off by clear and unequivocal feet. Rhythm, however, is the congruence of time, syllables, and feet that multiply and flow to infinity.

Thomas Fitzhugh, in his 1912 analysis of Indo-­European rhythm, offers a concise explanation of Diomedes’s account of rhythm and meter, focusing specifically on what for Fitzhugh is an unfortunate Hellenocentric marginalization of popular Latin rhythms inherited from early Indo-­European patterns of arsis and thesis: “The only aspect of tripudic [i.e., traditional dance] rhythm which orthodox grammar will discuss is that which has been modulated to reproduce the time-­beat or ictus of quantitative verse, and which therefore is true to the number of syllables in the verse, but often utterly regardless of the quantity of thesis and arsis” (1912, 98).19 Fitzhugh’s impassioned arguments regarding the tripudium aside, he is certainly correct to point out that Diomedes’s definition of metrum, namely “a combination of feet that is finite in number,” places it in opposition to rhythmus, which is, according to Diomedes, theoretically boundless. For a better understanding of this conception of rhythm and meter, it is worth turning to one of the direct sources for Diomedes’s definition of rhythm, Gaius Marius Victorinus’s fourth-­century Ars grammatica. Interestingly, Victorinus not only speaks of rhythm as boundless, but he also situates it, following Plato, in the “modulation and movement of the body,” as in dance: Rhythmus est pedum temporumque iunctura velox divisa in arsin et thesin vel tempus quo syllabas metimur. Latine numerus dicitur, ut Virgilius: “numeros memini si verba tenerem.” Differt autem rhythmus a metro, quod metrum in verbis, rhythmus in modulatione ac motu corporis sit; et quod metrum pedum sit quaedum compositio, rhythmus autem temporum inter se ordo quidam; et quod metrum certo numero syllabarum vel pedum finitum sit, rhythmus autem numquam numero circumscribatur. Nam ut volet, protrahit

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tempora, ita ut breve tempus plerumque longum efficiat, longum contrahat. Unde et rhythmus, id est a rhysi et fluore quodam, nuncupatur. (Keil 1857, 6:41–­42).20 Rhythm is the quick combination of feet and time divided into arsis and thesis, or the time by which we measure syllables. In Latin it is called numerus, as in Virgil: “the rhythm [numerus] I remember, if only I still knew the words.” Rhythm differs from meter in that meter resides in words and rhythm in the modulation and movement of the body; and while meter consists of a certain finite number of metrical feet or syllables, rhythm is never circumscribed by number [numero]. It manipulates time as it pleases, making short syllables long and long syllables short. For this reason, we use the term rhythm, which comes from [the Greek] rhys, which means “to flow.”

Here Victorinus fudges the Greek verb réô (or its more common present active infinitive form, reĩn), but what matters for our discussion is the fact that the double meaning of numerus is evident in his text as well as in Soropita’s prologue; it too appears to have been central to Latin grammatical conceptions of rhythm (as opposed to meter) from at least the fourth century CE onward. Augustine of Hippo (354–­430 CE), for example, would articulate much the same idea in his highly influential De musica when he famously (and economically) writes: “Omne metrum rhythmus, non omnis rhythmus etiam metrum est” (All meter is rhythm, but not all rhythm is meter; 1873, 140).21 For Augustine as for Victorinus and Diomedes, it is thus primarily the unboundedness and embodied, somehow harmonious feel of rhythm that characterizes it and differentiates it from meter. And it is, more than anything else, the semantic pliability of numerus, with its link to arithmetic proportion and harmony (but not necessarily finitude), that for Latin grammarians and rhetors of the late antique period connects it to the Greek notion of ruthmós. The text by Niccolò Perotti to which Soropita makes reference is the former’s Cornucopiae (1489), a thousand-­page humanistic commentary on Martial’s Epigrams originally published in Venice (there would be many subsequent editions) and used extensively during the sixteenth century as a Latin lexicon.22 A stu­

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dent of  Vittorino da Feltre and Guarino Guarini in Verona before studying with Lorenzo Valla in Rome, Perotti was an active and accomplished humanist whose work on Latin grammar earned positive reviews from no less a figure than Erasmus of Rotterdam; and while his Rudimenta grammaticae (Rudiments of Grammar, 1473) was by far his most popular work, his Cornucopiae was nonetheless influential even in middlebrow intellectual circles, as evidenced by Soropita’s use of it. In the Cornucopiae Perotti defines numerus as follows: “Et quoniam omnis concentus, et omnis harmonia numeris constat, frequenter etiam pro ratione harmonica ponitur, quam Graeco vocablo rhythmos appellamus” (Since every example of concord and harmony corresponds in number, numerus is also frequently used to mean “harmonic ratio,” which we also refer to with the Greek term rhythmos; [1536] 1994, 63). In what amounts to a kind of dictionary definition of rhythm from late fifteenth-­century Italy, Perotti matter-­of-­factly links the Latin term numerus to both rhythm and harmony while also reinforcing the arithmetical platform upon which Soropita seeks to build a conceptual link between hendecasyllabic Italian verses and larger principles of harmony. Soropita goes on to link Neo-­Latin conceptions of rhythm to Italianate vernacular poetry, arguing that the qualities of both numerus and harmonia are found in hendecasyllabic verses, “not only because they consist of a fixed number of syllables, but also due to the harmony caused by their accents and consonants.” Soropita leans on Benedetto Varchi (1502?–­1565) to support this argument, citing the latter’s dialogic treatise on the Florentine dialect, L’Ercolano (Hercolano, 1570 [but written in 1560]).23 On the matter of rhythm, Varchi argues that the Tuscan vernacular (la lingua Volgare as well as la lingua fiorentina) is more beautiful than Greek and Latin owing to its inversion of the classical relation between numerus and harmonia: “Che ella sia più bella, io lo provo, perché la Greca, e la Latina si servono principalmente del numero, e dell’armonia in conseguenza, dove la Volgare all’opposto si serve principalmente dell’armonia, e in conseguenza del numero” (I feel that it is more beautiful, because Greek and Latin depend mostly

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principally on numerus and on harmony only as a consequence of this; Florentine, however, depends principally on harmony, and on numerus only as a consequence; 1858, 164). What does Varchi mean here? Earlier in the same section he articulates what he feels is the difference between numerus and harmony, opting for a relatively narrow definition of the former linked to quantitative metrics: E dico che la bellezza della lingua così Greca, come Latina, consiste primieramente nel numero, e secondariamente nell’ armonia; perchè tanto i Latini, quanto i Greci nel comporre i loro versi e le loro prose avevano risguardo primieramente alla brevità, e alla lunghezza delle sillabe, onde nasce il numero; e poi secondariamente, e quasi per accidente, all’ acutezza, gravezza degli accenti, onde nasce l’armonia; perciocché, pure che il verso avesse i debiti piedi, e i piedi le debite sillabe, e le sillabe la debita misura, non badavano agli accenti, se non se in conseguenza; dove la bellezza della lingua Volgare consiste primieramente nell’ armonia e secondariamente nel numero, perchè i Volgari nel comporre i loro versi e le loro prose hanno risguardo primieramente all’ acutezza, e alla gravezza degli accenti, onde nasce l’armonia, e poi secondariamente e quasi per accidente, alla brevità e lunghezza delle sillabe, onde nasce il numero; perciocché, pure che il verso abbia le dovute sillabe, e gli accenti sieno posti ne’ luoghi loro, non badano nè alla brevità, nè alla lunghezza delle sillabe, se non se in conseguenza. (1858, 152) And I say that the beauty of Greek and Latin resides first in number and secondarily in harmony. This is so because when the Latins and Greeks composed their verse and prose, they focused first on the brevity and length of the syllables, from which emerges number. They concerned themselves only secondarily, almost by accident, with the pattern of acute and grave accents, from which emerges harmony. For this reason, if a verse had the required feet, and the feet the required syllables, and the syllables the required measure, then there was little concern for accents, except as a secondary effect. On the other hand, the beauty of the Florentine vernacular resides first in harmony and secondarily in number, because when vernacular writers compose in verse and prose, they pay attention primarily to the pattern of acute and grave accents, from which emerges harmony.

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Only secondarily, and almost by accident, do they pay any attention to the brevity and length of syllables, from which stems number. For this reason, if a Florentine verse has the required syllables, and the accents are in their place, there is little concern for the brevity or length of the syllables, except as a secondary effect.

For Varchi, the beauty of the Tuscan vernacular (and he could cer­ tainly say much the same of any of the Romance vernaculars or English) resides in its commitment to harmony, defined as the interplay between ictic and nonictic syllables.24 After foregrounding harmony to distinguish the Tuscan vernacular from Latin, Varchi goes on to describe the great flexibi­l­ ity of the vernacular with respect to the placement of stress: I Latini ponevano l’accento [ . . . ] o in su l’ultima sillaba, o in sulla penultima, o in su l’antepenultima, e non mai altrove; dove i Toscani, il che è cosa più naturale, lo pongono e in sulla quarta, e in sulla quinta, e in sulla sesta sillaba, come l’essempio del Boccaccio allegato dal Bembo, portàndosenela il lupo, e talvolta in sulla settima, e ancora in sull’ottava, per l’esempio addotto da Messer Claudio, il quale io per me non comprendo, né ’l so direttamente profferire, fàvolanosicenegliene, nel quale, se si conta quella sillaba, a cui egli è sopra, come s’è fatto infin qui, sarebbe l’accento in sulla nona. (1858, 165) The Latins situated the accent [ . . . ] either on the final syllable, on the penultimate syllable, or on the antepenult, and never anywhere else. The Tuscans, more closely following nature, place it on the fourth, the fifth, and the sixth syllable from the end, such as Boccaccio’s example taken from Bembo: portàndosenela il lupo. Here the stress falls on the seventh syllable from the end, although it can also fall on the eighth syllable from the end, as in the following example from Messer Claudio Tolomei. I do not understand its meaning myself, nor do I know how to pronounce it: fàvolanosicenegliene. Placing the stress on the first syllable, as I have done here, the accent would fall on the ninth syllable from the end.

It is in this flexibility, which implies a departure from artificial, numerical rules in favor of more “natural” and harmonic ones (the

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implication being, more broadly, a kind of syntony with celestial harmony, seen as at once arithmetical and felt), that Varchi situates the prestige and beauty of the vernacular. Soropita, for his part, takes up Varchi’s argument to justify the publication of Camões’s lyric work and link it to more historic ideas regarding rhythm and poetic verse. After Varchi, Soropita cites the Greek polymath Posidonius of Rhodes (ca. 135–­ca. 51 BCE), who argues in his treatise on dic­ tion that poetry is speech adorned by meter and rhythm, and that a poem is poetry that likewise represents or imitates matters pro­per to the gods and humans: Ποίημα δέ ἐστιν, ὡς ὁ Ποσειδώνιός φησιν ἐν τῇ Περὶ λέξεως εἰσαγωγῇ, λέξις ἔμμετρος ἢ ἔνρυθμος μετὰ σκευῆς τὸ λογοειδὲς ἐκβεβηκυῖα: τὸ ἔνρυθμον δ᾽ εἶναι τό: “γαῖα μεγίστη καὶ Διὸς αἰθήρ.” ποίησις δέ ἐστι σημαντικὸν ποίημα, μίμησιν περιέχον θείων καὶ ἀνθρωπείων. (Laertius 1925, 168) In his treatise on style, Posidonius states that poiêma is an utterance that is metrical or rhythmic, elaborated so as to go beyond prosaic language. We see this in the following example [from Euripides]: “Oh great Earth, and Zeus’s heaven!” Such an utterance becomes poetry when it incorporates an imitation of things divine and human.

The idea of a “metrical or rhythmic utterance” (λέξις ἔμμετρος ἢ ἔνρυθμος) is significant here, in part because of the somewhat vague distinction it makes between ruthmós and métron. They are simultaneously lumped together as if synonymous and distinguished as if separate things, separated by a disjunctive conjunction (ή). This suggests that for Posidonius (at least in Diogenes Laertius’s synopsis of Posidonius’s thought) rhythm and meter share a kind of family resemblance while signifying identifiably—­ even if marginally so—­different things. In a 1692 Latin-­Greek parallel edition of Diogenes Laertius, translated from the Greek in the early sixteenth century by the Florentine theologian Ambrosius Catharinus (né Lancelotto Politi, 1483–­1553), the distinction between rhythm and meter is similarly fuzzy even if not

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abandoned altogether: “Poëma item est dictio certa mensura constans; aut, numerosa cum elaboratione, prosae orationis speciem excedens; ut, maxima tellus et, Jovis aether. Poesis autem significativum est poema, divinarum humanarumque rerum imitationem complectens” (A poem is an utterance that corresponds to a fixed measure; rhythmic through elaboration, it exceeds prose oration, [as in]: “The great earth and the heavens of Jove.” This poiêsis becomes poema when it engages in the imitation of divine and human things; Laertius 1692, 401). For Ambrosius, working only a half century prior to Soropita, a poetic utterance is, according to Posidonius, an utterance that corresponds to a fixed meter and is elaborated in such a way as to be rhythmic (numerosus). When one adds the imitation of divine and human matters (here the reference is to mimêsis in the Aristotelian sense) to such an utterance, the result is a poem. What Soropita does with this idea, of course, is to focus tightly on the question of number not as a synonym for rhythm (as opposed to meter) but rather in direct reference to the sort of syllabic computation common to Romance vernacular poetry. This is, strictly speaking, a misreading, albeit a strategic one, given Soropita’s desire to argue for the value of eleven-­syllable Italianate verses. Soropita concludes his introduction on rhythm by citing Celio Calcagnini’s Oratio sive encomion artium liberalium (Discourse or Encomium on the Liberal Arts, 1544). Calcagnini (1479–­1541) was an important humanist in early sixteenth-­century Ferrara, and his collected works, published posthumously in Basel in 1544, enjoyed a wide readership throughout Europe for several decades. In the Oratio Calcagnini cites an episode from the life of Socrates to determine whether to include poetry in his study as a discrete category: “Diu vero mecum dubitavi, quo in censu disciplinarum poeticen collocarem. Nam Socrates eam visus in parte musice constituere, quom admonitus oraculo, ut ad musicen animum applicaret, si vellet ad felicitatem pervenire, nihil prius sibi faciundum putavit quam scribendis carminibus vacare” (I was truly uncertain about including poetics in my list of the disciplines. For Socrates places it under music: when prompted

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by the oracle to devote himself to music if he wished to attain happiness, his understanding was that he should spend his time writing poetry; 1544, 545–­55). Here Calcagnini wonders whether poetry is in fact best classified as a species of music, and he uses a Socratic example to justify and contextualize his doubt. For Soropita, however, poetry is without question a form of music because it contains the same form of “armonia & numeros” (harmony and number/rhythm). This argument of course had its roots in the widespread and varied tradition of performative song forms in the Iberian Peninsula, as well as throughout the Mediterranean, many of which blended music and poetry. Sacred and courtly music, to which Soropita was also no stranger, like­ wise made ample use of music and verse—­by the sixteenth cen­ tury, within complex polyphonic arrangements that relied on a steady rhythmic pulse (tactus) to maintain order. It is worth underscoring the perhaps unsurprising fact that music treatises from the second half of the sixteenth century tend to speak of numerus with much greater specificity than Soropita does. For example, the focus in Rome and especially in Ferrara on polyphonic harmony and new chromatic experiments led to treatises such as Vicente Lusitano’s Introduttione facilissima, et novissima, di canto fermo, figurato, contraponto semplice, et in concerto (Easy and New Introduction to Cantus Firmus, Cantus Figuratus, Simple Counterpoint, and Concerted Counterpoint, 1553) and Gioseffo Zarlino’s highly influential Le istituzioni harmoniche (The Harmonic Institutions, 1562). Lusitano, a Portuguese singer and composer who made his way to the papal choir under the patronage of Dom João III’s ambassador to Rome, Afonso de Lencastre (1505?–­1572), focuses almost exclusively on the arithmetical bases for different forms of polyphony and enharmonics.25 Zarlino goes even further, defining music as a science concerned with “sonorous number,” a blend between time and sound: Come l’arithmetico considera principalmente il numero, cosi il numero è il soggetto della sua scienza. Et perche i musici, nel voler ritrovar le ragioni d’ogni musicale intervallo, si serveno de i corpi

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sonori, et del numero relato, per conoscere le distanze, che si trovano tra suono et suono, et tra voce et voce; et per sapere quanto l’una dall’altra sia differente per il grave et per l’acuto, mettendo insieme queste due parti, cioè il numero, et il suono; et facendo un composto dicono, che il soggetto della musica è il numero sonoro. Et benche Avicenna dica, che’l suo soggetto siano li tuoni et li tempi; nondimeno considerata la cosa in se, ritrovaremo tutto esser uno; cioè rifferirsi li tempi al numero, et li tuoni al suono. (1562, 29) As the mathematician is principally concerned with number, so it is that number is the subject of his science. And musicians, in wishing to discover the logic behind each musical interval, make use of sonorous bodies and of relative number to determine the distance between sounds and between voicings, as well as the difference between one voicing and another in terms of grave and acute. They in fact bring these two parts—­number and sound—­together to form a compound, such that the subject of music is sonorous number. And while Avicenna states that his subjects are tones and times, it is more correct to say that both of these are one; that is, Avicenna’s times mean number, and his tones mean sound.

Zarlino’s reworking of Avicenna’s categories was likely not controversial for musical theorists in the late sixteenth century; how­ ever, it does suggest interesting pathways for research in early modern poetics. What might it mean, for example, to approach poetry not principally as concepts or words but as a complex interweaving of number, sound, and verbal utterance? In light of Zarlino’s argument regarding the science of music, this idea probably helps to explain Soropita’s decision to give the title Rythmas to his anthology of Camões’s lyric. Beyond the importance of the contents of Soropita’s anthology for early modern European lyric, it bears mentioning that his account of rhythm—­number, but indivisible from other less abstract phenomena—­is a relatively common one for the period. In its very conventionality, however, it helps modern readers to contextualize a bit the humanistic theories of rhythm that inform the first edition of Camões’s lyric, published as it was during a decade that saw a flurry of editorial activity with respect to Portuguese

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lyric.26 Beyond this, Soropita’s short account provides a concrete example of just how vexed Renaissance notions of rhythm could be, even when the author’s explicit goal is to present a clear and convincing definition. In the domain of poetics, we are left with an unresolved tension in mainstream sixteenth-­century thought between number, rhythm, meter, and harmony. The four terms are arguably different; however, their intersections are such that no theorist ever managed to distinguish them consistently and develop from them a coherent theory of how they might relate to one another. Musical theorists had better luck working through number and sound; however, the precision they bring to musical analysis and theory remains a distant horizon for scholars concerned with poetics. In the end, explicit theorizations of poetic rhythm during the sixteenth century lead to more confusion; the idea of rhythm proves amorphous enough to serve the rhetorical needs of a wide range of authors and projects. The question that now emerges is whether ideas on rhythm such as those advanced by Soropita correspond in any meaningful way to what one finds in poetry from the period. In the concrete case of Camonian lyric, the quick answer is yes and no. On one hand, Camões was aware of the same rhetorical principles that Soropita mentions. He was a self-­conscious and experienced practitioner of both traditional Iberian and newer Italianate verse forms, and questions of harmony and musicality (numerus) were undoubtedly at the very center of both his written work and his thinking. That said, there is also something far more troubling in Camões’s poetry, both epic and lyric, that works against all the easy talk of harmony, number, and order and points to a sense of rhythm that is much more akin to the formative interruptions and reversals one finds in classical Greek literature.

Strange, Not Barbarous Despite the extensive and explicit discussion of rhythm that appears in Soropita’s prologue to the 1595 edition of Camões’s lyric poetry, it is worth noting that the poet himself never articulates

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a theory of rhythm or defines it in any explicit way. And yet, a focused reading of Camões’s poetry reveals that he consistently pushes hard against the ideas articulated by Soropita in that prologue, developing as he does an almost uncanny poetics of disharmony and inversion. The emergence of this poetics has much to do with the broader aesthetic and philosophical goals of mannerism, which began to make an impact on Portuguese poetry and thought by the middle of the sixteenth century; however, it is also linked to Camões’s extensive knowledge of classical learning and (no less important) to his seventeen years of overseas ser­ vice to Portugal’s Indian Ocean empire. We might begin by focusing on one of his best-­known compositions, an endecha (a traditional Iberian song form associated with the planto or lament) commonly referred to as “Aquela cativa” (That captive) or, alternatively, “Bárbora escrava” (Barbarous/Barbara [the] slave). This poem speaks of the unshakable, erotic love that the poetic subject has for an enslaved woman whose dark beauty, he claims, surpasses that of any white European woman. Soropita includes the poem in the fifth part of his anthology, devoted to redondilhas, motes, esparsas, and grosas, all of which are traditional song forms. In Portuguese poetics, redondilhas are compositions of varying length that consist of verses of either five (redondilha menor) or seven syllables (redon­dilha maior). Camões’s “Aquela cativa” is made up of verses of five syllables, and this is likely why Soropita includes it with the redondilhas.27 Beyond its formal classification, Soropita also provides a rubric: “Endechas, a hũa catiua com quẽ andaua d’amores na Índia, chamada Barbora” (Endechas to a slave, named Barbara, with whom he had an affair in India; 1595, fol. 159r–­v). A good deal of scholarship has attempted to draw out the historical details of Camões’s possible relationship in Goa with a black slave named Barbara, but with little success.28 And given that much larger ques­ tions regarding Camões’s life remain enshrouded in mystery, the fact that a microdetail such as this remains uncertain comes as little surprise. It is plausible that Camões had some interaction with such a woman during his time in Goa, as there were numerous

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enslaved Africans present in Portuguese India throughout the sixteenth century (commonly referred to in the historical record as cafres). However, the state of unshakable penury in which Camões lived, from his departure for Asia to his untimely death, makes it highly unlikely that that he owned any slaves himself. Beyond the question of Camões’s biography, there is an even larger mimetic question that is worth addressing, albeit briefly. Perhaps the most popular reading of “Aquela cativa” leaves open the question of Camões’s biography, seeing the poem instead as a dense representation of the Portuguese empire’s racialized economy of sex. This economy, referred to as Lusotropicalism by the early twentieth-­century Brazilian social scientist Gilberto Freyre, posits (inter alia) that the Portuguese, thanks to their high degree of social malleability, were more inclined to racial mixing than other European imperial powers: “Mas independente da falta ou escassez de mulher branca o português sempre pendeu par ao contato voluptuoso com mulher exótica. Para o cruzamento e miscigenação. Tendência que parece resultar de plasticidade social, maior no português que em qualquer outro colonizador europeu” (Independent of the absence or scarcity of white women, the Portuguese always tended toward sexual contact with exotic women. For breeding and miscegenation. A tendency that seems to result from greater social plasticity in the Portuguese than in any other European colonizer; 2002, 213). The discourse of Lusotropicalism reached its apex in Portugal during the later stages of António Salazar’s fascist dictatorship, and poems such as Camões’s “Aquela cativa” were commonly trotted out as confirmation of Portugal’s enduring and quite literal love for its African colonial subjects. While the discourse of Lusotropicalism has largely disappeared from serious scholarly work, it remains surprisingly resilient in the popular (and political) imaginary in both Portugal and Brazil. One might say that many readers in these countries (and throughout the Portuguese diaspora) tend still to understand Camões’s poem as a probable bio­ graphical fiction that nonetheless reveals a more general (and, not coincidentally, flattering) truth.

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A reading of “Aquela cativa” that focuses explicitly on rhythm will necessarily be less concerned with questions of mimesis (biographical or otherwise) and more focused on issues of metapoetics. This is so, to begin with, because one rarely gets the sense while reading Camões, whether his epic or lyric poetry, that he is primarily concerned with representing a world. Even in Os Lusíadas, which is ostensibly an epic retelling of Vasco da Gama’s first voyage to India, the events of the journey are frequently subordinated to lyric episodes, such as the encounter with Adamastor (canto 5) and the detour to the Island of Love (canto 9), that pause temporal movement and narration in favor of lyric performance and prophecy (Gil 2009b). The entire ninth canto of Os Lusíadas, one might justifiably argue, is itself outside of the world and, toward its end, even time. This is not to say that things do not happen within the canto, of course. The story is, in fact, quite straightforward. On their way back to Portugal from India, Gama and his men arrive at an island conjured up out of nothing by Venus. Once ashore, they engage in an explicitly allegorical sexual escapade with a group of compliant nymphs (made so by Cupid’s arrows). Afterward, the nymph Tethys takes Gama to see the future by means of a wondrous “world machine.” Despite this narrative skeleton, it is difficult to see the crew’s animalistic orgy on Venus’s island as in any sense mimetic, because Camões himself frames it as an aside or pause in the action. Even when this fantasy subsides, Camões moves quite literally outside of time and world into the realm of prophecy. It is of course true that the events Tethys foretells have already occurred for Camões’s readers; however, what most matters here is the poetic and generic reframing of history (i.e., representation) as prophecy (i.e., performance). Beyond the fine-­grained complexities of referentiality in Os Lusíadas, it is also true that Camões’s poetry as a whole maintains a practically obsessive concern with poetry itself, as well as the act of composing it. Part of this poetic project is the development of an implicit, even latent theorization of rhythm that cannot be tied to a particular text or tradition. There is, of course, Camões’s undeniable commitment to classical literature and thought. It is true

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that he was never officially a student at the University of Coim­ bra; however, he did receive there a highly sophisticated understanding of the Greco-­Roman foundations of  Renaissance thought and expression: Homer, Virgil, Horace, Propertius, and Ovid, as well as Cicero, Plato, Aristotle, Quintus Curcius, and Quintilian, to name but a few sources. There is also Camões’s seventeen years of service to the Portuguese empire in Asia, an experience that influenced his art in different ways and at levels that have yet to be fully considered. What theories and practices of rhythm did Camões encounter in Goa and Macau? And what of his two-­year layover in Mozambique as he made his way back to Portugal? It seems implausible that the rich philosophical, poetic, and musical traditions of these regions would not have given at least partial shape to Camões’s understanding of rhythm in meaningful ways.29 They would have intensified and complicated, at the very least, his concern for alterity, temporality, and bondage (his own and that of others), a concern that could not but place in doubt Renaissance ideas of harmony and numerus. “Aquela cativa” offers a relatively clear view of this tension in Camões’s poetics, even as he makes use of a traditional Iberian song form to do so. The poem begins with its primary conceit: “Aquela cativa / que me tem cativo, / porque nela vivo / já não quer que viva” (That captive / who holds me captive, / because I live in her / no longer wants me alive). This is a Petrarchan idea, and the notions of amorous bondage as well as the beloved’s power over life and death are common enough throughout the sixteenth century in Iberia. What Camões does to this conceit, however, matters a great deal. As Rita Marnoto has argued, Camões is working here in an explicitly mannerist vein to push Petrarchan notions of both white feminine beauty and harmony off their foundation just a bit (2002, 2005, 2007). He is also taking a traditional Iberian song form and pushing it into new conceptual and contextual territory. But there is, of course, much more to the poem than even this. In the fourth stanza (out of a total of five), Camões begins to develop a discussion of “blackness” and bondage that is at once

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rooted in experience, poetic tradition, and more troubling ontological concerns: “Pretidão de Amor, / tão doce a figura, / que a neve lhe jura / que trocara a cor. / Leda mansidão / que o siso acompanha: / bem parece estranha, / mas bárbara não” (Blackness of love, / so sweet the figure, / that the snow swears to it / that it would trade color. / Happy docility / accompanied by wisdom: / it does seem strange, / but not barbarous). What to make of the construction “pretidão de Amor”? What is this blackness of love that Camões links to the body ( figura) of his beloved? It’s a disturbing construction, really, in that it both underscores and openly eroticizes the beloved’s embodied blackness, even as it frames this blackness as an abstract essence rather than an adjectival accident. That the word pretidão likewise sounded strange to the ears of Camões’s audience is evidenced by the fact that one finds only two other examples of the word in sixteenth-­century Portuguese texts: the first in João de Barros’s description of the skin color of the Akan king Kwamin Ansah, and the second in Jerónimo Cardoso’s 1569 Latin-­ Portuguese dictionary, as the translation for pullīgo (dark color). I am aware of no instances of it prior to the sixteenth century, nor have I found it in any seventeenth-­or eighteenth-­century Portuguese texts. My search has almost certainly not examined every possibility; however, it nonetheless remains fairly clear that while preto (black) was a common adjective used to describe people’s skin, pretidão  —­as an abstract noun—­ was still a learned neologism in sixteenth-­ century Portugal. To speak of  “blackness” as an essence rather than a condition—­ especially in relation to the color of a person’s skin—­in early mod­ ern Portuguese is extremely rare and strange, even though the adjectives preto and negro are certainly common during the same period. And it is not that contact with sub-­Saharan Africans was necessarily uncommon in Portugal’s colonies or even in Portugal itself: it is estimated that by 1550 the African population of Lisbon, a result, most directly, of the large-­scale enslavement and sale of people from western Africa, was roughly ten thousand (or 10 percent of the city’s population) (Couto 2003). Despite

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this contact, and an almost universal recognition of African Oth­ erness in early modern Portugal (and the overseas empire), the question of “blackness” (or “whiteness,” for that matter) as an essence is not yet part of the conceptual landscape. What does Camões mean when he speaks of blackness? More precisely, what does he do through its use? In speaking of the “blackness of Love,” ostensibly as a trope for the beloved herself, he grammatically converts a simple adjectival form (preto) into an abstract nominal one through the addition of a suffix (pretidão). This move from black to blackness, one might argue, represents an early and somewhat tentative move in the development of modern Western notions of race: it speaks of blackness as ousía, an innate form of being. On another, more poetic level, however, Camões dramatically expands and recontextualizes a common Petrarchan conceit that would find ample development during the early modern period. Petrarch does in fact speak of il nero and il bianco in the Canzoniere, but when these are not merely figurative references to Laura’s eyes, they speak to moods or forms of suffering: a figurative darkness or lightness that intersects with modern notions, such as the “dark night of the soul” or a “black prison of suffering.” In this Petrarchan vein, Camões’s “pretidão de Amor” points most directly and conventionally to the figurative darkness of amorous bondage. For Camões, both domains are in play. He is sincerely concerned, as sixteenth-­century Iberian lyric poets tended to be, with reworking Petrarch in ways that speak to new realities and anxieties, amorous and otherwise. Beyond this, he quite consciously links this explicitly poetic project to the (newly) essentialized and inescapable blackness (as an innate form of Otherness) of his lyric beloved’s skin and hair. In the end, what is formed is a kind of monstrous conceit (Camões refers to it as estranha [strange]) that brings harmony and excess into an unresolved tension. The enslaved black woman has enslaved the (white) poet, both bringing an end to his customary jouissance and giving him form, expressed as life. How do we understand this tension? As I have just hinted, it is most

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clearly seen as a spiritual, poetic, and physical bondage that gives form to and orders the poetic subject even as it threatens to end his life. He is, in a very strict and philosophical sense, her captive. And it is Camões’s linking of poesis and bondage that helps to uncover a bit the subterranean theories of rhythm at work in his lyric poetry as a whole—­theories that go well beyond the grammatical, prosodic, or rhetorical concerns of Soropita and his Latin sources and move into territory previously, though by no means comprehensively explored by pre-­Socratic Greek poets and philosophers. Like Prometheus, Camões asks his reader to regard the naked spectacle of his own enrhythment. His reference to the “blackness of Love,” for example, speaks of enrhythment at many levels: there is amorous bondage; there are the perverse power asymmetries of colonial rule that paradoxically bind colonizers along with the colonized and bind masters along with their slaves; there is the unresolved disharmony of sublime blackness as an abstract essence; there is also the impossibility of poetry, encoded in the “blackness” of love but also in the third and fourth lines of the final stanza: “nela, enfim, descansa / toda a minha pena” (in her, finally, rests / all of my suffering [and pen]). Here Camões exploits the double meaning of pena, as he does in many other poems, to speak of a respite from suffering and the end of poetry itself. And ultimately, poetry (and language more generally) was the most oppressive and cruel form of enrhythment that he faced. In this sense, Camões’s poetics is an antipoetics—­a vortex in the flow of harmonic expression that begins with Horace, passes through Petrarch, Pierre de Ronsard, and Garcilaso de la Vega, and ends, somewhere between Goa and Macau, with him. There is, in the end, no resolution to Camões’s “Aquela cativa”; it remains strangely discordant, a song that speaks in general terms of the sort of form-­giving “interruption of flow” mentioned by Serres (2000) and more specifically of how love, sex, empire, and human bondage condition it. This is not the felicitous miscegenation of Freyre’s Lusotropicalism; rather it is a relation that results in dispossession, the colonizing subject turned to ash, to

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paraphrase Castilian poet Garcilaso de la Vega (1501?–­1536). In this sense, Camões’s endecha speaks to the warped realities of Portuguese empire and specifically the Estado da Índia while also offering a metapoetic theorization of rhythm as that which transcends numerical order and harmony.30 It is a force that holds us captive (as Greek thinkers before Plato had argued), gives us form, and ultimately lies beyond definition and representation—­a kind of abyssal blackness. This is, in a very concentrated form, Camões’s poetics, developed throughout his lyric and epic poetry and intertwined here with colonial economies of desire that run both parallel to and up against theories of poetic expression at the end of the sixteenth century. Turning back to Os Lusíadas, one sees how this reckoning with enrhythment also shapes Camões’s strange (but not barbarous) performance of Portuguese history and imperial expansion.

South African Virgil Midway through canto 5 of Os Lusíadas, Camões recounts the historic first passage of  Vasco da Gama and his small fleet around the Cape of Good Hope. There the members of the expedition encounter the monster Adamastor (stanzas 37–­60), a giant trans­ formed into melancholic earth who angrily foretells the sig­nif­ icant losses that the Portuguese will suffer on their future jour­ neys around the cape before recounting the pitiable details of his imprisonment. A scene that occurs, not incidentally, at the exact midpoint of Camões’s epic, Gama’s poetic encounter with Adamastor has been the subject of focused and continuous crit­ ical attention since at least the seventeenth century.31 Also in place since that time is a strong critical consensus regarding the episode’s importance for Camões’s poem as well as for any adequately contextualized understanding of the complex ideologies of empire and exploration that so extensively shaped late sixteenth-­century Portugal. Over the past century or so, much of the criticism devoted to Adamastor has focused on explaining how the episode in which

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he appears fits into the structure and logic of Camões’s ten-­canto epic. As part of this trend, there has also been a focused effort on the part of many critics to tease out the potential (especially classical) sources for Camões’s monstrous invention: a Greek titan so disproportionately enamored of the sea nymph Thetis that he is transformed into the naked, vengeful semipersonification of  Table Mountain itself.32 Most commonly linked to the classical figure of Polyphemus, the one-­eyed, man-­eating giant who very nearly consumes Odysseus and his men in Homer’s epic, Adamastor has over the past few decades emerged as something of a dark and maledictive signpost for the newly globalized world in which the Portuguese had, by Camões’s time, come to take center stage.33 Helena Langrouva has articulated this point eloquently, speaking in dense, nearly poetic terms of Adamastor as a sign of Gama’s fear of the monstrous Other, of the largely unknown world—­in which land and people merge into something like an ominous natural force—­that lay before him as he rounded the cape. He is also for Langrouva an invitation to “reflect on the notion of limit ” itself as well as on the mortal and immediate dangers of excess (2006, 39). One might see the Adamastor episode as a kind of phylogenetic rite of passage, or, perhaps more accurately, a simulated interpellation or reckoning for the Portuguese, an Other that calls them “into rhythm” (in the sense in which Archilochus and Aeschylus employ the term) and brings into question the entire imperial enterprise even as it reinforces its classical philosophical foundations. As Langrouva puts it, Adamastor himself emerges from the episode as a “warning sign of that Other, of the fear of the monstrous, a sign that points to an anti-­world and to the unknown that can destroy and subvert everything” (2006, 35). Langrouva is of course not thinking here of pre-­Socratic Greek notions of ruthmós, of Serres’s “vortex in the flow” (2000, 154), and yet the connection between her description of Adamastor and these ideas of rhythm could hardly be clearer. Perhaps, one might even speculate, it is to Prometheus that Adamastor owes his most meaningful intertextual debt; they are both, after all, ardent and rebellious titans endowed with the gift of prophecy, and they both find themselves

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reduced in the end to ireful and pathetic tableaux vivants capable in their suffering only of shaming emerging world orders. For all the overarching significance and hermeneutic potential of the Adamastor episode, it is nonetheless what takes place directly after it that offers the most direct theorization of rhythm in canto 5 and perhaps in Os Lusíadas as a whole. As Camões narrates it, Gama and his companions take leave of Adamastor, seeing with the rising sun the full earthen form of the giant: “Já Flégon e Pyrois vinham tirando / cos outros dous, o carro radiante, / quando a terra alta se nos foi mostrando / em que foi convertido o grão Gigante” (Now Phlegon and Pyrois came pulling, / with the other two [horses], the radiant chariot [of the sun], / and Table Mountain came into view, showing us / into what the giant had been transformed; [1572] 2006, 208). They then sail eastward “um pouco” (a bit) before arriving again at land, where they encounter a small community of Khoekhoe pastoralists native to the region, who greet them with music, singing, and dance.34 According to the anonymous ship’s log attributed to Álvaro Velho (fl. ca. 1500), a member of Gama’s crew on the first voyage to India, Gama’s fleet arrived at the Cape of Good Hope on 18 November 1497—­almost exactly ten years after Bartolomeu Dias’s historic voyage to Kwaaihoek, at the eastern edge of the cape. Two weeks later, while sailing along the coast of Mossel Bay, Gama decided to drop anchor to engage in trade with the people he saw there. The exchange went well, and by 2 December a crowd of roughly two hundred people had gathered to interact with the newcomers. As Velho tells it: Ao sábado [2 Dezembro] vieram obra de 200 negros, entre grandes e pequenos, e traziam obra de doze reses, entre bois e vacas, e quatro ou cinco carneiros; e nós como os vimos, fomos logo em terra, E eles começaram logo de tanger qua­tro ou cinco flautas, e uns tangiam alto e outros baixo, em maneira que concertavam muito bem para negros de que se não espera música; e bailavam como negros. E o capitão-­ mor mandou tanger as trombetas e nós, em os batéis, bailávamos e o capitão-­mor de volta connosco. E, depois de acabada a festa, nós fomos em terra onde [tínhamos ido] da outra vez, e ali resgatámos

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um boi negro por três manilhas, o qual jantámos ao domingo; e era muito gordo, e a carne dele era saborosa como a de Portugal. Ao domingo [3 Dezembro] vieram outros tantos, e traziam as mulheres consigo e moços pequenos; e as mulheres estavam em cima de um alto, perto do mar, e traziam muitos bois e vacas. E puseram­se em dois lugares, ao longo do mar, e tangiam e bailavam como ao sábado. (1960, 11)35 On Saturday [2 December] there gathered a group of some 200 blacks, both adults and children, and they brought with them some twelve oxen and cows, and four or five rams; and we, as they had seen us, began to come ashore to meet them. They then began to play four or five flutes, some playing up high and others down low, in such a way that they harmonized [concertavam] very well for blacks from whom one doesn’t expect to hear music; and they danced as blacks do. Our captain-­major ordered the trumpets played and we began to dance in our boats along with the captain-­major. Once these festivities had concluded, we purchased a black ox from them for three ivory bracelets, and we ate it the following day; it was very fat, and its meat was as tasty as ox meat is in Portugal. On Sunday [3 December], many others came, and they brought women and small children with them. The women remained up on a piece of high ground near the sea, and they brought many oxen and cows. They all situated themselves in two places along the beach and played and danced as they had done the day before.

It is perhaps understandable that Velho, who had by this time been at sea for nearly five months, seems to be as interested in plump cattle as in the people who raise them; and yet, his record of the encounter with the Khoekhoen is remarkable in terms of the detail that he provides regarding the performative aspects of the meeting and the questions that these raise. Did the Portuguese trumpets harmonize with the African flutes? Did the former drown out the latter? Did the music blend at all? Are we to assume that the Khoekhoen heard the Portuguese trumpets? Was each group watching the other as it engaged in its own dancing? They certainly seem to have been aware of one another, so how exactly did their co-­presence shape each individual

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performance? Velho doesn’t address these questions, but he does make it clear that on both days the music and dancing served as a prelude to trade: on the first the Portuguese bartered for an ox directly after the festivities; and on the second, we are likely to infer that only the Khoekhoen performed, and the subsequent jewelry-­for-­oxen transaction was derailed when a dispute broke out over access to fresh water. The conflict quickly escalates, and Gama finally orders two cannon shots fired into the forest as a show of force.36 This results in the Khoekhoen retreating to higher ground and taking their livestock with them. After a digression on South African oxen and nguni cattle, Velho recounts how his shipmates killed a large number of sea lions and African penguins before installing a stone monument (padrão) and a tall cross on the shoreline (both of which were quickly taken down by the Khoekhoen) and sailing onward (1960, 12–­13).37 A more popular account of the Portuguese encounter with the Khoekhoen, based in large measure on Velho’s text, is found in the História do descobrimento e conquista da Índia pelos portugueses (History of the Discovery and Conquest of India by the Portuguese, 1552–­61), written by Fernão Lopes de Castanheda (ca. 1500–­1559). On the weekend that Gama and his crew spend in Mossel Bay, Castanheda writes: E logo ao sábado vieram obra de duzentos negros entre homens e moços que trouxeram doze bois e quatro carneiros. E como os nossos foram a terra começaram eles de tanger quatro flautas acordadas a quatro vozes da música, que para negros concertavam bem. O que ouvindo, o capitão-­mor mandou tanger as trombetas e bailava com os nossos. E nesta festa e no resgate dos bois e carneiros se gastou aquele dia e o mesmo fizeram ao domingo em que veio muito mais gente que dantes, assim homens como mulheres, e trouxeram muito gado vacum. (1552, 8) On Saturday, they saw a group of approximately 200 blacks, men and young boys, who had brought twelve oxen and four rams. And as the Portuguese were heading to shore, four natives began to play their flutes in four-­part harmony; and for blacks they harmonized well. Hearing this, the captain-­major ordered his own trumpets to

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play and he danced with his crew. They spent the day in this merriment and in the purchase of the oxen and rams. They did the same thing on Sunday, and many more people came than before, women as well as men, and they brought many cattle with them.

Castanheda spends much less time than Velho lingering over the Portuguese encounter with the Khoekhoen, but he does see fit to include the performative elements of the meeting, even adding a bit of musical specificity to Velho’s account. In lieu of “four or five flutes, some playing up high and others down low,” Castanheda specifies that there were four flute players, and that they achieved four-­part harmony: “quatro flautas acordadas a quatro vozes da música.” Along with Velho, Castanheda underscores the harmonic character of the music through his use of the verb concertar ; and he also, like Velho, qualifies the harmonious quality of the music, embedding it within Eurocentric economies of race and power associated with the then burgeoning empire: as he puts it, following Velho’s lead, the musicians harmonized well “para negros” (for blacks). Unlike Velho, Castanheda makes no mention of the Khoekhoen dancing, but he states explicitly that the Portuguese played their trumpets and danced, and that Gama danced along with them. Working independently of Castanheda, the noted Portuguese humanist João de Barros (1496–­1570) also deals with the episode between Gama’s crew and the Khoekhoen in the first volume of his Décadas da Ásia (Decades of Asia, 1552). Although not as immediately popular among sixteenth-­century Portuguese readers as Castanheda’s more economical account of Portugal’s expansion into Asia, Barros’s text does serve as the principal historical source for Camões’s epic and continues to be an important source for historians of early modern Africa and Asia (Barletta 2010, 117–­58). With respect to the encounter between Gama and the Khoekhoen, Barros adds some key details to Velho’s narrative and alters others: E posto que ali acharam negros de cabelo revolto, como os passados, estes sem receio chegaram aos bateis a receber qualquer coisa que lhe lançavam na praia, e por acenos começaram logo de se entender

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com os nossos; de maneira que houve entre eles comutação de darem carneiros a troco de coisas que lhe os nossos davam. Porém, de quanto gado vacum traziam, nunca puderam haver deles uma só cabeça; parece que os estimavam, porque alguns bois mochos que os nossos viram andavam gordos e limpos, e vinham as mulheres sobre eles com umas albardas da tábua. E em três dias que Vasco da Gama se deteve aqui, tiveram os nossos muito prazer com eles, por ser gente prazenteira dada a tanger e bailar, entre os quais havia alguns que tangiam com uma maneira de flautas pastoris, que em seu modo pareciam bem. Do qual lugar Vasco da Gama se mudou para outro porto perto daquele, porque entre os negros e os nossos começou haver alguma porfia sobre resgate de gado. (1778, 286–­87) There they found curly-­haired blacks as in the past; these readily approached the boats to receive anything that was thrown to them on the beach, and by signs they soon began to understand the Portuguese. Soon they and the Portuguese reached an agreement to trade some rams for things that the latter offered them. In spite of all the cattle that they brought with them, however, it was not possible to obtain even one of them; it seems that they valued them highly, be­ cause some hornless oxen that the Portuguese saw were fat and clean, and women rode upon them with wooden saddles. In the three days that Vasco da Gama stayed there, the Portuguese enjoyed themselves very much with the natives, who are happy people given to play mu­ sic and dance. Among them were some who played a kind of pasto­ ral flute, which sounded good in its own way. Vasco da Gama finally left this place and moved to a nearby port, because a disagreement had broken out between the blacks and the Portuguese having to do with the sale of livestock.

Barros presents details here that do not appear in Velho or Castanheda. He speaks of an unwillingness on the part of the Khoekhoen to let go of any of their oxen, although Velho’s diary and Castanheda’s history both make it clear that Gama and his crew were able to purchase at least one of these. Why, according to Barros, do the Khoekhoen refuse to sell oxen to the Portuguese? The explicit reason he gives is the high esteem that they seemed to have for these animals, evidenced by the fact that the Portuguese saw a group of Khoekhoe women seated on clean, fat,

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hornless oxen outfitted with wooden saddles. While it remains unclear what Barros’s source for this detail might be, its purpose appears to be to underscore the pastoral character of Khoekhoe society on the eastern coast of the Cape of Good Hope, in contrast with the beach-­ranging Khoekhoen encountered by Gama and his crew on the western coast of the Cape (an encounter that Camões would use to provide comic relief in Os Lusíadas, canto 5, stanzas 26–­36). Barros further highlights the pastoral character of Khoekhoen society near Mossel Bay through a more detailed account of the performative aspects of their culture: “[É] gente prazenteira dada a tanger e bailar, entre os quais havia alguns que tangiam com uma maneira de flautas pastoris, que em seu modo pareciam bem” ([They] are happy people given to play music and dance. Among them were some who played a kind of pastoral flute, which sounded good in its own way; 1778, 287). The “pastoral flute” that Barros describes here is significant, and when combined with his depiction of the Khoekhoen’s attachment to their cattle, it suggests a pastoral scene.38 Barros’s pastoral suggestions find significant development in Camões. In canto 5 of Os Lusíadas, the latter describes the Khoekhoen encountered by Gama in Mussel Bay as Virgilian shepherds playing rustic flutes and singing: “Cantigas pastoris, ou prosa ou rima, / Na sua língua cantam, concertadas / Co doce som das rústicas avenas / Imitando de Títiro as Camenas” (They sing pastoral songs, in prose or verse, in their language, with the sweet sound of oaten flutes, imitating the muses of Tityrus; canto 5, stanza 63, lines 5–­8).39 It is important here to note that singing is something that Camões adds to his account of the meeting between Gama and the Khoekhoen; Barros, Castanheda, and Velho mention only flute music and dance. The reference to the “muses of Tityrus” (de Títiro as Camenas) links the passage and the Khoekhoen of the eastern cape to Virgil’s Eclogues, in which the fictional shepherd Tityrus figures prominently. What is one to make of the idea that the Khoekhoen are in some way imitating classical Muses? It is one thing, after all, to find similarities between Khoekhoen song and the Eclogues

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and quite another to see the former as an imitation of the latter. On one level, it has to do with Camões’s European frame of reference, according to which a pastoral scene accompanied by music and song cannot but have roots in a classical source. It also has the effect, for European readers, of elevating the art and culture of the Khoekhoen while (in a more openly colonial vein) embedding them within the same language game of imitatio in which the Portuguese likewise found themselves. According to this reading, the song of the Khoekhoen is not in any meaningful sense “Other,” but rather an African variant of a European mode of cultural practice that was then read (once again, in Europe) as universal. It is an openly colonial move, to be sure, but it is also one that presents the opening of the Indian Ocean not as a journey into the unknown so much as a passage—­after the encounter with the dangerous Khoekhoen hunter-­gatherers on the western cape and of course Adamastor—­into the (amenable and colonizable) same. The sameness of the Khoekhoen, and even the colonizing pastoral framework within which Camões places them, has its limits. And these limits, as Camões expresses them, have everything to do with rhythm. Put directly, even as Khoekhoen song appears to have its origins in Virgil, or at least in the same form of divine (daemonic) inspiration that shaped Virgil’s eclogues, there is a part of it that remains inscrutable. Camões claims that Gama and his crew could not tell if the Khoekhoen were singing in prose or in poetry: “Cantigas pastoris, ou prosa ou rima” (Pastoral songs, in prose or verse). It bears mentioning here that the indecipherable character of the Khoi language is historically one of the fundamental aspects of European encounters with the Khoekhoen. Seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century Europeans would refer to them as “Hottentots,” in imitation of the unique sound of their verbal practice, either in conversation (Maingard 1935) or in song ( Jeffreys 1947), which is characterized by a complex system of clicks. The question then emerges: how can the Khoekhoen be imitating the pastoral Muses of Virgil in any meaningful way if one cannot even tell whether their singing is in verse or prose?

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In speaking of Khoekhoe song as simultaneously Virgilian and rhythmically impenetrable, Camões, as in much of Os Lusíadas, essentially gives with one hand while taking away with the other: the Khoekhoen are recognizable as shepherds whose music and song fit neatly into the generic framework formed (for Camões) by Virgil’s eclogues; however, their singing remains so inscrutable that one cannot tell if it is poetic or not. This is a sizable gap, and one that has little to do with hermeneutics. Ca­ mões is not puzzled about the content or theme of Khoekhoe song, after all; what troubles him—­presenting yet another “end to his pen”—­is the very rhythmic status of their singing. Here there is recognizable flow (generic, discursive, musical) as well as the stoppage or reversal of that flow. We see Virgil on the horizon (behind and before us), but we are also denied the very conditions for the possibility of Virgilian pastoral song: verse lyrics sung in such a way that one senses what Varchi terms harmony. Can there be harmony when it is not clear even whether a song is sung in prose or verse? There can be musical harmony, and there can also be rhythmic numerosity (to paraphrase Puttenham); but can there be harmony in a broader, performative sense? The question of harmony is perhaps impossible to answer; however, the operation of rhythm (ruthmós) seems impossible to miss, and it points (happily for the modern scholar) to a founda­ tional encounter of form-­giving interruption and dispossession. One is pulled in by music and song to a relation of what Emmanuel Levinas would refer to as “participation,” a kind of magic spell that quite literally holds us in place. It is a moment of intense lingering for Camões, as well as for his historical sources, in that it pulls him in only to hold him in place, as if at a cliff ’s edge. This is likewise a key feature of Camões’s poetics, and it is not incidentally an integral aspect of the early modern European colonization of Africa, the Americas, and Asia: an enrhythment out of which would emerge modernity and a new world order. By way of conclusion, it is useful to return to the very beginning of Camões’s Os Lusíadas, to his description of the very point

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of origin of the Portuguese empire. Where do the Portuguese come from? From where do they sail? As he puts it, in the second verse of the very first stanza, the Portuguese empire begins at the “ocidental praia Lusitana” (western Lusitanian beach; canto 1, stanza 1, line 2). What is meant here by “beach”? On one hand, it is the point of departure for the ships—­where land meets the water (in this case, the Tagus estuary, a brackish mix of sea and river). Looked at more poetically, however, it is also a point of swirling, unstable, and not necessarily fertile footing. If the Portuguese “come from” a western beach in Camões’s epic, then it is necessary to see them as at once marginal (i.e., from neither land nor sea, but where the two meet) and wholly subject to the forces of rhythm. There is the flow of the Tagus River, which leads inexorably to the sea, the ocean, and to India; and there is also the stoppage or reversal of that flow at the beach—­a place not unlike Prometheus’s rock, where enrhythment makes of us a spectacle to shame the gods. And what do the Portuguese find after departing from such a spot? For Camões, and in response to the more mechanical, hopeful, and openly mathematical theories of his contemporaries, it is nothing if not more of the same. Self and Other. Flow and the reversal or interruption of that flow.

3 Twentieth-­Century Measures The turn of the twentieth century brought with it a renewed in­ terest in rhythm as a subject of focused philosophical and poetic inquiry. Theories of rhythm from the European Renaissance, rooted as they were in authoritative accounts of mathematical proportion across linear time (numerus), had ultimately left little conceptual room for later authors to explore ideas of form, bind­ ing, and interruption that early Greek thought had once so indis­ solubly linked to ruthmós. If Galileo Galilei argued in the early seventeenth century that mathematics is the language of the uni­ verse (1623, 25), then rhythm, with its newly reinforced link to Pythagorean notions of celestial numerus, inevitably folded itself neatly into this thinking as a mathematical expression of time. As one might imagine, this did not completely prevent poets and thinkers from the seventeenth century onward from grappling with rhythm in different ways. As I show in the previous chap­ ter, the Portuguese poet Camões provides a vivid example of how writers from the late sixteenth century gestured toward earlier notions of ruthmós as they reckoned with the powerful effects of empire and a growing uncertainty regarding language. Given rhythm’s by-­then-­conventional link to number and (by exten­ sion) meter, however, such work was relatively uncommon and understandably difficult to carry out. That is, while Camões’s

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work is unquestionably moving and conceptually rich, it re­ mains largely imprecise and even conflicted in many respects, as if pointing to something it cannot name and lamenting the seeming impossibility of its full expression. The reason for this is relatively straightforward: to a large degree, any understand­ ing of the prerational, formative, and binding aspects of ruthmós, such as that elaborated by Archilochus and Aeschylus centuries before, had become by then a latent presence. Later exceptions to this rule of latency, or at least near-­ exceptions, do exist. One important if somewhat tentative ap­ proach to rhythm in the eighteenth century is that of Denis Diderot (1713–­1784). Writing in his Salon de 1767 (Salon of 1767), Diderot speaks directly to the question: Qu’est-­ce donc que le rythme me demandez-­vous? C’est un choix particulier d’expressions; c’est une certaine distribution des syllabes longues ou brèves; dures ou douces, sourdes et aiguës, légères ou pesantes, lentes ou rapides, plaintives ou gaies, ou un enchaînement de petites onomatopées analogues aux idées qu’on a, et dont on est fortement occupé; aux sensations qu’on ressent et qu’on veut ex­ citer; aux phénomènes dont on cherche à rendre les accidents; aux passions qu’on éprouve, et au cri animal qu’elles arracheraient, à la nature, au caractère, au mouvement des actions qu’on se propose de rendre. (1821, 434) What then is rhythm, you ask me? It is a particular choice of words, a certain distribution of syllables that are long or short, hard or soft, bland or pointed, light or heavy, slow or fast, plaintive or gay, a se­ quence of little onomatopoeias analogous to the ideas by which one is preoccupied, to the sensations one experiences and wants to ex­ cite, to the phenomena whose contingencies one wants to depict, to the passions one feels, and to the animal cry they provoke, to the nature, character, and movement of the actions one sets out to render. (1995, 2:231)

Diderot defines rhythm as a “sequence of little onomatopoeias,” grounding his definition in an unabashedly metrical conception according to which prosody or rhythm serves as a simultaneous

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index of the signified, the referent, and various forms of affect. Like onomatopoeia, rhythm—­for Diderot a metered “choice of words” instantiated through utterance—­is co-­present with the world to which it refers and thus also helps (temporally) to entail and systematize that world. The relation here between utterance and the context of utterance is one of contiguity and mutual de­ pendence, a fact that moves rhythm closer to its extrasemiosic roots, even if tentatively. Diderot goes further with his idea of rhythm as index in the same essay, arguing that rhythm is “l’image même de l’âme ren­ due par les inflexions de la voix, les nuances successives, les pas­ sages, les tons d’un discours accéléré, ralenti, éclatant, étouffé, tempéré en cent manières diverses. Écoutez ce malade qui traîne ses accents douloureux et longs. Ils ont rencontré l’un et l’autre le vrai rythme, sans y penser” (the very image of the soul rendered by the voice’s inflections, successive nuances, transitions, the tones of discourse accelerated, slowed down, flashing brilliantly, effacing itself, and tempered in a hundred different ways. Listen to the sick person dragging out those painful and long stresses. They’ve both encountered true rhythm without thinking of it; 1821, 435). Here rhythm, still defined as a temporally sequential string of “little onomatopoeias,” quite literally points to what lies beyond (and before) linguistic signification, even as it retains its fundamental link to time, number, and poetics. For Diderot, rhythm is unquestionably still number, but it is also, which is no less important, an “image” of the speaker’s soul—­most precisely, an index of some real inner state. Moving to the early nineteenth century, one finds another ex­­ plicitly philosophical consideration of rhythm in book 3 of Ar­ thur Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation, 1818–­19). In a discussion on the aes­ thetics of poetry, Schopenhauer argues: Das Metrum, oder Zeitmaaß, hat, als bloßer Rhythmus, sein Wesen allein in der Zeit, welche eine reine Anschauung a priori ist, gehört also, mit Kant zu reden, bloß der reinen Sinnlichkeit an; hingegen

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ist der Reim Sache der Empfindung im Gehörorgan, also der em­ pirischen Sinnlichkeit. Daher ist der Rhythmus ein viel edleres und würdigeres Hülfsmittel, als der Reim, den die Alten demnach ver­ schmähten, und der in den unvollkommenen, durch Korruption der früheren und in barbarischen Zeiten entstandenen Sprachen seinen Ursprung fand. (1844, 427) Meter is the measure of time; and as rhythm, it has its being only in time, which is a pure a priori intuition. To use Kant’s language, it is pure sensuality. Rhyme, on the other hand, is a matter of sensa­ tion in the organ of hearing and is thus empirical sensuality. There­ fore, rhythm is a much nobler and worthier instrument than rhyme, which the ancients accordingly disdained. It had its origin in the imperfect languages that emerged from the corruption of earlier languages and came into being in barbarous times.

For Schopenhauer (perhaps following Augustine), meter is a subset of rhythm, and both exist only in time (“in der Zeit”). Time, as he puts it, is an intuition that serves as a condition of experi­ ence, whereas rhythm is that which one experiences in time. It is mostly because of this Kantian construction that Schopenhauer considers rhythm to be a “nobler” poetic instrument than rhyme. There is also an ideological bent to Schopenhauer’s argument, however: he speaks openly of rhythm’s origin in “uncorrupted” languages, namely Latin and Greek. Whether or not we agree with Schopenhauer’s Kantian frame and/or his unabashedly pur­ ist characterization of classical (European) languages, what re­ mains is the fact that he does not question the temporal nature of rhythm itself. In fact, Schopenhauer’s argument rests squarely on an axiomatic view of rhythm’s temporal essence; it is for him a seemingly universal philosophical given that requires no fur­ ther elaboration or proof. Looking back and, as we shall soon see, forward to explorations of ruthmós’s philosophical and po­ etic possibilities, one finds promise in Schopenhauer’s account of the body and sensibility. Nonetheless, his uncritical insistence on the temporal (even metrical) nature of rhythm and his views on language ultimately reduce his account to a kind of modernizing

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stereotype, one that is subject to just the sort of ambivalence—­ that which goes without saying yet must nonetheless be repeated endlessly—­that Homi Bhabha unpacks in settings of colonial rule (1994, 95). Perhaps the most widely known and influential nineteenth-­ century account of rhythm is that of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietz­­ sche’s various discussions of classical music, meter, and rhythm are based on his considerable knowledge of Greek philology; how­ ever, he too falls back into an almost wholly numerical concep­ tion of rhythm. In his Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, 1872), Nietz­ sche famously speaks of the Dionysian and Apollonian impulses of Greek tragedy, and he chooses to place rhythm squarely on the Apollonian side.1 Describing the eruption of Dionysian music in Greek culture, Nietzsche first describes the ordered and conven­ tionally rhythmic nature of Apollonian music before speaking of the force that the Dionysian would exert upon it: Wenn die Musik scheinbar bereits als eine apollinische Kunst be­ kannt war, so war sie dies doch nur, genau genommen, als Wellen­ schlag des Rhythmus, dessen bildnerische Kraft zur Darstellung apollinischer Zustände entwickelt wurde. Die Musik des Apollo war dorische Architektonik in Tönen, aber in nur angedeuteten Tönen, wie sie der Kithara zu eigen sind. Behutsam ist gerade das Element, als unapollinisch, ferngehalten, das den Charakter der dionysischen Musik und damit der Musik überhaupt ausmacht, die erschütternde Gewalt des Tones, der einheitliche Strom des Melos und die durchaus unvergleichliche Welt der Harmonie. (1920, 30) If music was apparently already known as an Apollonian art, this mu­ sic, to be precise, was but a wave-­beat of rhythm, the artistic power of which had developed to represent Apollonian states of mind. The music of Apollo was Doric architecture in sound, but only in hinted­at tones, like those of the cithara. The un-­Apollonian character of Dionysian music distances itself from this element of caution, and so it turns music in general to the shattering power of sound, the uni­ fied current of melody, and the incomparable world of harmony.

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Here Nietzsche makes explicit mention of the movement of waves (Wellenschlag), and there can be little doubt that he does so with an awareness of the link that nineteenth-­century philologists then hypothesized regarding the “flow” of sea waves and the early Greek origins of the term ruthmós. For Nietzsche, however, the matter of rhythm as an “interruption of flow” reads merely as an orderly and rational parsing of time and experience: a wave hits the shore, there is (let us say) a two-­beat rest, another wave hits, and so on. It is a decidedly Platonic view of rhythm, in line with the “ordered movement” of dancers and the numerical propor­ tion of the universe. For Nietzsche, rhythm in classical Greece is but an ordered and numerically proportional alternation between long and short. It is measured, even cautious. As he sees it, when this “Doric” order collides with the Dionysian, a more holistic and powerful form of Greek music and culture emerges. To Nietzsche’s way of thinking, it is in fact this very blending of ruthmós/arithmós with (Dionysian) melos that generates Greek music and, beyond this, the particular modus vivendi of the Greeks themselves. This view of ancient music, as many critics have brought up, is closely linked to Nietzsche’s stance toward the music of Richard Wagner; however, it also depends on a flattening out of the deeper, non­ numerical links that ruthmós possessed for early Greek thinkers—­ links of which Nietzsche was fully aware. To be fair, The Birth of  Tragedy would not be Nietzsche’s last word on the matter of rhythm. As Elaine P. Miller has pointed out, he would have more to say throughout his career; never­ theless, these thoughts would ultimately repeat Nietzsche’s tem­ poral understanding of the concept and find expression within his overarching concern with “contrasting the rhythm of ancient Greek thought with that of his own time” (1999, 5–­6). Here Nietz­ sche historicizes and situates rhythm (i.e., ancient Greece as compared to nineteenth-­century Germany), but he stops short of exploring in any substantive way his understanding of what it might in fact be. In Die fröliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science), for example, Nietzsche lays out a complex vision of rhythm as a kind

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of magnetic force or lasso that, as we will see, would become cen­ tral to Emmanuel Levinas’s account of rhythm as participation: Der Rhythmus ist ein Zwang; er erzeugt eine unüberwindliche Lust, nachzugeben, mit einzustimmen; nicht nur der Schritt der Füsse, auch die Seele selber geht dem Tacte nach,—­wahrscheinlich, so schloss man, auch die Seele der Götter! Man versuchte sie also durch den Rhythmus zu zwingen und eine Gewalt über sie auszuüben: man warf ihnen die Poesie wie eine magische Schlinge um. Es gab noch eine wunderlichere Vorstellung: und diese gerade hat vielleicht am mächtigsten zur Entstehung der Poesie gewirkt. Bei den Phythago­ reern erscheint sie als philosophische Lehre und als Kunstgriff der Erziehung: aber längst bevor es Philosophen gab, gestand man der Musik die Kraft zu, die Affecte zu entladen, die Seele zu reinigen, die ferocia animi zu mildern—­und zwar gerade durch das Rhyth­ mische in der Musik. (1887, 105) Rhythm is a compulsion; it engenders an unconquerable desire to yield, to join in; not only the stride of the feet but also the soul itself gives in to the beat—­probably also, one inferred, the soul of the gods! By means of rhythm one thus tried to compel them and to exercise a power over them: one cast poetry around them like a magical snare. There was another, stranger notion, and it may be precisely what contributed most powerfully to the origin of poetry. Among the Pythagoreans it appears as a philosophical doctrine and as an edu­ cational contrivance; but even long before there were philosopher­s, one acknowledged music to have the power to discharge the emo­ tions, to cleanse the soul, to soothe the ferocia animi—­and indeed precisely through its rhythmic quality. ([1887] 2001, 84)

Here rhythm is quite literally compulsion, a force that brings both human and gods to heel. An “allure impersonelle” (imper­ sonal gait; Levinas 1951, 98) that locks body and soul into step, an entrainment that moves beyond ethics and into metaphysics. This is a potentially powerful idea, and it more than anything else demonstrates Nietzsche’s awareness of the well-­established philosophical—­ and prephilosophical—­ roots of the concept. In spite of the potential encoded within this conceit, however,

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Nietzsche ultimately follows convention by linking rhythm to “culture” in the modern (though pre-­Boasian) sense and limit­ ing it to the powerful and temporally sequential forms of mu­ sical performance that the Greeks had developed even before Pythagoras. In an August 1888 letter to musicologist Carl Fuchs, Nietz­ sche speaks again of rhythm as restraint and compulsion: “Rhythmus im antiken Verstande ist, moralisch und ästhetisch, der Zügel, der der Leidenschaft angelegt wird. In summa: unsre Art Rhythmik gehört in die Pathologie, die antike zum ‘Ethos’ ” (Rhythm in the ancient sense is, morally and aesthetically, the halter that is placed on passion. In sum, our modern sense of rhythm belongs to pathology while the ancient sense belongs to ethics; 1888, 1097). There is a direct engagement with pre-­ Socratic philosophy in Nietzsche’s letter to Fuchs, as well as a nod to the ideas he develops on rhythm in The Gay Science; however, Nietzsche backs away from any account of rhythm that might distance it from his (and Fuchs’s) larger interest in music. That is, if rhythm served as a “halter” or bridle for the passions in an­ cient Greek culture, it did not exercise its power in any precon­ scious, formative way, but rather as a simultaneously pragmatic and ethical principle hardwired into classical music and dance. Put another way, it is a question of cultural practice rather than ontology. This view of rhythm—­tied up with stable, Doric con­ ceptions of patterned movement in time—­is directly linked to Plato’s notion of “ordered movement” along with more overtly musicological ideas regarding the repetition of patterns of long and short tones/syllables across time. In short, rhythm is still unquestionably “in der Zeit.” Within the 1888 Fuchs letter, Nietzsche’s broader goal is admit­ tedly to tease out an ecstatic, barbaric, and eternal notion of rhythm linked to the Dionysian and hold it up to the more ordered and ordering Apollonian model. As Miller puts it, Nietzsche wishes first to distinguish between “a rhythm that is completely subjected to time, or a time-­rhythmic, and a barbaric rhythm that gives itself over to affect, an affect-­rhythmic” (1999, 2). Having done this, Nietz­

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sche effectively holds these two rhythmics up to each another to form a more holistic account of  Western music more generally. Rhythm, in other words, is about temporal restraint in the Apol­ lonian sense (the Doric alternation of arsis and thesis or, alterna­ tively, of long and short), and it is about temporal upspringing in the Dionysian sense. In either case, as well as in the result of their collision, rhythm for Nietzsche remains on unwaveringly tempo­ ral ground.

Century of the Turn Even in light of influential theorizations of rhythm during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is safe to say that the ques­ tion of rhythm as something other than strict temporality took on new importance at the start of the twentieth century. In Europe, this stemmed in part from a desire among poets and other artists to sever “any Romantic links between verse form and the cosmos” and do away with the residual nineteenth-­century belief in a di­ rect mimetic relation between the “harmonious” natural world and poetic rhythm (Evans 2010, 162). Also important were advances in classical and Indo-­European philology along with a new aware­ ness of non-­Western, especially African, music and thought.2 Writing in his notebooks in 1915, Paul Valéry offers one of the earliest takes of rhythm in the new century. “This word rhythm,” he writes, “is not clear to me. I never use it” (Ce mot rythme ne m’est pas clair. Je ne l’emploie jamais; 1973, 1281). This su­ premely economical statement, penned in the four-­year period during which Valéry was laboring over the composition of his first major poetic work, La jeune parque (The Young Fate), is both a false confession and a philosophical provocation. The falsity of Valéry’s statement resides in the simple fact that he had al­ ready spoken a great deal about rhythm and would continue to do so over the course of his life, filling up several pages of his voluminous notebooks with ideas and reflections on the topic. Focusing primarily on poetics, David Evans has neatly summed up Valéry’s treatment of rhythm over time:

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The eighteen-­year old Valéry writes to Charles Boès in 1889, “I believe in the all-­powerfulness of rhythm” [ . . . ] and line five of “Orphée” (1891 version) reads: “Le dieu chante, et selon le rythme tout-­puissant” (the god sings, and by the all-­powerful rhythm); and while this youthful enthusiasm for rhythm never abates, the relation­ ship between rhythm, poetry, and verse is never taken for granted. (2010, 159)

To be clear, the god who sings in Valéry’s sonnet is Orpheus him­ self, and his song derives its strength from rhythm, an undefined force that is somehow “all-­powerful.” One may rightly point out that Valéry would remove any explicit mention of rhythm from the final edition of “Orphée.” This later revision would seem at one level to suggest that, contra Evans, Valéry may have wished to steer attention away from rhythm in his later work. In the 1891 version, the sonnet’s fifth and sixth verses read: “Le dieu chante, et selon le rythme tout-­ puissant / s’élèvent au soleil les fabuleuses pierres” (The god sings, and by the all-­powerful rhythm / the fabled stones rise to the sun; Evans 2010, 159). In the 1920 edition of Album des vers anciens (Al­ bum of ancient verses), the lines read: “Si le dieu chante, il rompt le site tout-­puissant; / le soleil voit l’horreur du mouvement des pierres” (If the god sings, he smashes the all-­powerful site; / the sun witnesses the horror of the stones’ movement; ibid.). In the 1891 version, it is “all-­powerful” rhythm that moves the stones; however, in the later version, it is the “all-­powerful” mountains themselves that meet the superior force of Orpheus’s song and crumble. Has rhythm disappeared from the sonnet? It certainly has in any explicit sense; however, one can also infer from the later version that the unmatchable force within Orpheus’s song, capable of toppling “all-­powerful” mountains and causing stones to rise to heaven to form the “high, golden, and harmonious walls of a sanctuary” (les hauts murs d’or harmonieux d’un sanctuaire), is nothing but the rhythm of which Valéry speaks in the poem’s earlier version. According to this reading, rhythm comes to oc­ cupy an even more heightened role in the later version of “Or­ phée.” It is no longer merely “all-­powerful” (as paradoxical as this

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may seem) as in the 1891 text; rather, Valéry now sees it as some­ thing that stands beyond the very measure of power, a terrible force that somehow exceeds those considered all-­encompassing. Seen in this way, rhythm is the object not of excision (or even diminution) in the 1920 edition of “Orphée,” but of apotheosis. It is that than which there is no greater, a force beyond omnipo­ tence itself. What is provocative about Valéry’s brief statement on rhythm from 1915, as well as his treatment of it in “Orphée,” is that while it places into question what it is that we commonly mean by the term, it neither offers nor assumes an alternative definition. And this is precisely the point for Valéry: that rhythm, while a supremely powerful (potentially infinite) force worthy of serious study and contemplation, cannot ultimately be clarified through definition. It is, to Valéry’s mind, inherently unintelligible: “Le rythme est la propriété imitable d’une suite. Je dis imitable et non: intelligible” (Rhythm is the imitable property of a sequence. I say imitable and not: intelligible; 1957, 1:1282). Seen in this way, any definition of rhythm one might offer would either be a fal­ sifying reduction (of which there have been many) or a move into the sphere of embodied performance. It is a sort of alternate logos for Valéry, one that somehow embeds the infinite within language as one might stuff the sun into a pillowcase. Turning once again to Evans, one finds Valéry approaching rhythm as though he were staring into some sort of dark abyss. In response to a passage in “La création artistique” (Artistic cre­ ation) in which Valéry discusses the process by which a rhythmic pattern took hold of him and eventually developed into an utter­ ance, Evans argues: Rhythm here appears as pure, pre-­linguistic, unsayable (indicible); it requires formulating in words, in order to exist, in order for us to apprehend it, and yet that expression in words also veils it suffi­ ciently to protect its absolute quality. The nature of poetic rhythm, therefore, lies in a kind of oscillation between an undefinable pre-­ textual absolute and textual forms which point to its existence be­ yond them; and since none of those textual forms can ever be an

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exact representation of the absolute literary rhythm, genuine poetic rhythm, in opposition to the mechanical, metrical and predictable, must be complex, shifting, elusive. (2010, 169)

This is, to be sure, a largely temporal account of rhythm; nonethe­ less, it points beyond time to what lies before and beyond it: an absolute paradox of what cannot ultimately be said in poetry but which cannot exist elsewise, much as the vortex depends on the river’s unidirectional flow. Turning back to Valéry’s claim that to define rhythm “would be to produce it,” one sees the early seeds of this mature thought in the more dramatic 1915 statement of nonuse. In 1935 Valéry would say more on rhythm, making explicit reference to the link then taken as fact between rhythm and the movement of waves. He writes, “Il est impossible à mon avis de réduire le rythme à l’observation objective. C’est pourquoi je blâme les termes rythme des vagues qui éliminent la sensibilité” (It is impossible, in my opinion, to reduce rhythm to objective observa­ tion. This is why I dislike the term “rhythm of the waves,” which eliminates the senses; 1957, 1:1351). Here Valéry has not forgotten that vision is itself a sense; rather, he is underscoring the acutely felt condition of rhythm, its force upon the body. For Valéry, we do not observe the “rhythm of the waves” from dry land so much as we are ourselves submerged within them, tossed around and gasping for air. The question that emerges from this is: how we are to examine and measure something that is all around us and within us, conditioning our very being? To define rhythm, in this sense, would be akin to defining that which serves as the very condition of our experience. This is clearly so when it comes to poetry (Valéry’s principal concern), but it also has consequences beyond this domain. In the end, rhythm is for Valéry an unmis­ takably poetic phenomenon that exceeds and precedes language, because it is in encoded within its use. It is not observed but felt—­much as Diderot links it to the world-­forming (and reveal­ ing) force of deixis and as the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, to whom I now turn, presents it as a condition for aesthetic experience.

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Form and Experience In the winter and spring of 1931, Dewey inaugurated the William James lectures at Harvard University with a series of talks on philosophy and art. In one of these lectures, titled “The Natural History of Form,” Dewey spoke at length of the conditions that underlie the generation of artistic form, which were for him in­ evitably rooted in the world and in our repeated interaction with it as, in his words, the “environment” of our experience. Devel­ oping his idea of artistic form and experience, Dewey under­ scores the fundamental importance of rhythm for both. In doing so, he also articulates a theory of rhythm’s prehistoric origins and subsequent evolution, a process rooted in long-­term, repeated human interaction with nature and the eventual expansion of such interaction to new domains of cultural practice (Dewey [1934] 2005, 153). I begin here by examining Dewey’s suggestive account of rhythm, repetition, and aesthetic experience. Dewey begins his lecture on artistic form with a discussion of experience and environment that seeks to strengthen his more general philosophical claim that works of art are not stand-­alone “objects” so much as mediating means for and the consumma­ tion of activities fully situated within the experiential world.3 As part of this, he speaks directly of form as an outcome of the in­ teraction between self and the environment: “Interaction of en­ vironment with organism is the source, direct or indirect, of all experience and from the environment come those checks, re­ sistances, furtherances, equilibria, which, when they meet with the energies of the organism in appropriate ways, constitute form” ([1934] 2005, 153). There are two striking elements to this preliminary conception of form. In the first place, it underscores the idea that experience, aesthetic or otherwise, is tied to and dependent upon objects in the world and is thus inextricably linked to what lies beyond the self. For Dewey, such objectivism is not necessarily explicative of the entirety of form or experi­ ence; however, it is nonetheless essential to their existence. As he puts it, moving on to focus explicitly on aesthetic matters:

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“The general conditions of aesthetic form [ . . . ] are objective in the sense of belonging to the world of physical materials and energies: while the latter do not suffice for an aesthetic experi­ ence, they are a sine qua non for its existence” (ibid.). What fol­ lows from this idea, of course, is an objectification not only of the spatio-­physical world but also of text, language, and other symbolic aesthetic phenomena. We might say that for Dewey it is only to the extent that written texts, utterances, and ideas exist as objects in the world that the subject (Dewey’s generic human “organism”) may interact with them and so achieve form; and as Dewey takes great pains to make clear, while the “thingness” of written texts, utterances, and ideas is by no means enough in it­ self to render form, aesthetic form and experience are nonethe­ less impossible without it. Put another way, it is the very facticity of objects and energies that allows the human subject (however defined) to engage in the sorts of interactions that produce form. The second striking aspect of Dewey’s preliminary framing of form is that it builds upon an axiomatic belief in the quasi-­ agentive, constraining powers of the ever-­shifting world that constitutes environment. To paraphrase Dewey once again, when the energy of the environment, which operates principally as an active, constraining force, meets the energy of the (presum­ ably human) organism in certain “appropriate” ways, the result is a proportional tension that yields form. As is perhaps already apparent, this conception relies on a singularly dynamic view of environment as a kind of co-­constructor of form, or at least as much more than a barrier or merely limiting context to be mas­ tered and overcome for form to be achieved. Dewey’s argument is that form is properly seen as a productive tension sustained by two sources of energy—­one emanating from the organism (however defined) and the other from an environment (which Dewey goes to great pains to define) that is somehow external to that organism. One may infer from this that form for Dewey, whether artistic or not, does not inhere within a given object, nor does it exist solely in the mind of the individual; rather, it is fundamentally interactional, emerging through the repeated

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give-­and-­take that goes on between the self and its immediate environment, an environment that includes the objects, instru­ ments, ideas, and symbolic tools that mediate interaction and serve as much more than the static “context” or “conditions” of experience. This focus on the immediate environment of experi­ ence and the mediating means that shape “transactions” between the individual and that environment—­with context framed as a kind of result or achievement rather than simply the condition of such interaction—­points to a highly dynamic and emergent conception of both knowledge and form. Dewey’s approach situ­ ates form not as an a priori or static feature of objects but rather as a collaborative accomplishment between objects (as features of environment) and the self. Form, put another way, does not reside in the object, nor is it the result of an agentive and socially embedded organism perceiving a static and inert object; rather, it is the result of a microlevel interaction that occurs between the self and the object, a co-­construction in the most literal sense. What of aesthetic form? What makes it identifiably different from other kinds of form? This, for Dewey, is largely a matter of stance. To illustrate his approach, Dewey freely adapts Max Eastman’s example from The Enjoyment of Poetry of an imagined ferry ride into New York City and the attitudes of the different passengers (Eastman 1913). There are the impatient traveler anx­ iously marking the ferry’s progress and the idle passenger turning her gaze to this building and then another in no particular order. There is the tourist bewildered by the expanse of it all; and then there is the artist, who sees the “colored and lighted volumes in relation to one another, to the sky and to the river” (Dewey [1934] 2005, 141). While Eastman seeks to divide the world into more or less static “practical” and “poetic” camps, the point here for Dewey is not so much to develop a taxonomy of the viewing and/or listening subject as to understand the complex back-­and-­ forth—­the resistances and affordances—­between that subject and the world outside. In the first place, Dewey stresses that the difference between aesthetic experience and that of the impa­ tient, the idle, or the touristic ferry passenger is not a question of

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whether the skyscraper, the ferry, the dock, or the city street is or is not an adequate subject of artistic activity and contemplation. For Dewey, the facticity and beauty of the world—­synecdochally represented here by New York City—­and our continuous inter­ action with it as the environment of our experience remains con­ stant and wholly adequate for aesthetic experience. In the second place, Dewey argues that what marks an aes­ thetic stance is that one sees (or hears, one can extrapolate) a scene as a “related part of a perceptually organized whole” ([1934] 2005, 141). What this means for Dewey it that the scene’s “val­ ues, its qualities as seen [or heard], are modified by the other parts of the whole scene, and in turn these modify the value, as perceived, of every other part of the whole” (ibid.). To see the Empire State Building aesthetically, in other words, is to see it as part of a larger composition, one comprising other buildings, the sky, the streets, and the water now framed as colors, light, and volume: “its values, its qualities as seen, are modified by the other parts of the whole scene, and in turn these modify the value, as perceived, of every other part of the whole” (ibid.). For Dewey, this relationship between the part and the whole, according to which each addition of color or sound diminishes or at least af­ fects some other existing color or sound, is fundamental for any adequately nuanced account of artistic form. To use another of Dewey’s examples, when a painter such as Henri Matisse adds yellow, red, and green to a white canvas, there must be a balance between them so that one color does not diminish or wholly sub­ due the others. In Matisse’s words, “The relationships between tones must be instituted in such a way that they are built up in­ stead of being knocked down” (ibid.). Importantly, this notion of aesthetic form finds expression whether one is painting La joie de vivre, designing a building, or furnishing a room, insofar as, in the latter case, “the householder sees to it that tables, chairs, rugs, lamps, color of walls, and spacing of the pictures on them are so selected and arranged that they do not clash but form an ensemble” (ibid.). In the end, aesthetic form is tied to objects in the world—­in that it is inseparable from their affordances and

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resistances—­and revolves around the extent to which we (as art­ ists, as humans) carry them to full consummation or the fulfill­ ment of their, and our, possibilities. After his improvisations on Eastman and Matisse, Dewey of­ fers an explicit definition of aesthetic form, describing it as “the operation of forces that carry the experience of an event, object, scene, and situation to its own integral fulfillment” ([1934] 2005, 141). What does Dewey mean by “integral fulfillment,” exactly? In “The Challenge of Philosophy,” he seeks to define it: “Tan­ gled scenes of life are made more intelligible in aesthetic experi­ ence: not, however, as reflection and science render things more intelligible by reduction to conceptual form, but by presenting their meanings as the matter of a clarified, coherent, and inten­ sified or ‘impassioned’ experience” ([1934] 2005, 290). The idea is somewhat vague beyond the fact that it seems to be tied to unity and harmonious composition, and that it is achieved only by means of the working-­through of resistance and tension with something outside the self via technique and the intellect, with­ out which art (as an activity) would involve only a “fluid rush to a straightaway mark” with “no possibility of development and fulfillment” (Dewey [1934] 2005, 141). From this it follows that the “connection of form with substance is thus inherent, not im­ posed from without” and that it “marks the matter of an experi­ ence that is carried to consummation” (ibid.). Artistic form is all around us, according to Dewey; we merely need to give in to the very human—­even inevitable—­tendency to “arrange events and objects with reference to the demands of complete and unified perception” (ibid.). Form here is thus also an activity, a working upon and within the world, the flow of an experience toward its “own integral fulfillment.” What remains constant is the notion of interaction, of a productive tension—­the outcome of which is never certain—­out of which both experience and form emerge. Having discussed experience and aesthetic form, Dewey goes on to examine the conditions and the characteristics of the “en­ vironing world” that make such form possible. The first of these characteristics, he argues, is rhythm. For Dewey, rhythm is at its

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root a natural and temporal phenomenon, an “ordered variation of changes” ([1934] 2005, 141). From the perspective of modern philosophy and poetics, there is, of course, nothing particularly controversial about this definition; Western notions of rhythm since Plato have largely taken as axiomatic the temporal char­ acter of rhythm, and repetition has been a central aspect of this understanding. As Dewey sees it, rhythm has over several millennia come to shape our experience of and interaction with nature and one another. He presents it as an elemental force, a kind of natural state of nature that conditions the most basic aspects of human existence and activity: The larger rhythms of nature are so bound up with the conditions of even elementary human subsistence, that they cannot have escaped the notice of man as soon as he became conscious of his occupations and the conditions that rendered them effective. Dawn and sunset, day and night, rain and sunshine, are in their alternation factors that directly concern human beings. ([1934] 2005, 141)

At the heart of this argument on rhythm is the human rec­ ognition, theorization, and representation of the environment of experience. Also central here is an a priori understanding of rhythm as a temporal, repetitive phenomenon. The question, of course, is whether this is in fact what rhythm is, and what might be gained by holding Dewey’s account of form and interaction up to ideas of rhythm with roots in a philosophical tradition that precedes and runs parallel to that which springs from Plato. To begin with, Dewey’s presentation of rhythm is of a piece with his earlier contention that “there is rhythm in nature before poetry, painting, architecture and music exist” ([1934] 2005, 141). It finds even more deliberate expression in his historical account of the development of art and artistic rhythm out of human in­ teraction with the various tools, forces, and materials of the sur­ rounding environment: Sooner or later, the participation of man in nature’s rhythms, a part­ nership much more intimate than is any observation of them for

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purposes of knowledge, induced him to impose rhythm on changes where they did not appear. The apportioned reed, the stretched string and taut skin rendered the measures of action conscious through song and dance. Experiences of war, of hunt, of sowing and reaping, of the death and resurrection of vegetation, of stars circling over watchful shepherds, of constant return of the inconstant moon, were undergone to be reproduced in pantomime and generated the sense of life as drama. The mysterious movements of serpent, elk, boar, fell into rhythms that brought the very essence of the lives of these animals to realization as they were enacted in dance, chiseled in stone, wrought in silver, or limned on the walls of caves. The for­ mative arts that shaped things of use were wedded to the rhythms of voice and the self-­contained movements of the body, and out of the union technical arts gained the quality of fine art. Then the ap­ prehended rhythms of nature were employed to introduce evident order into some phase of the confused observations and images of mankind. Man no longer conformed his activities of necessity to the rhythmic changes of nature’s cycles, but used those which necessity forced upon him to celebrate his relations to nature as if she had conferred upon him the freedom of her realm. ([1934] 2005, 154)

This dense passage plots out the history of rhythm as a concept from its earliest prehistoric beginnings. It is an idea born out of a kind of originating dance with nature, the intimate participa­ tion of humans with nature’s inherent movement. Importantly, these rhythms (and the ensuing relation) were for Dewey some­ how always already there for our ancestors; and, as he argues, it is precisely the decisive moment when these ancestors unmoored themselves just a bit from nature’s “universal” rhythms and began to apply the logic of these to new domains—­music, dance, the hunt, war—­that we might begin to speak of artistic rhythm and aesthetics. This is the origin story (contra Valéry) that he offers. Dewey argues that rhythm has its roots in nature and in hu­ man intimacy with cyclical and measured changes in the natu­ ral environment. From this primordial relation, there was—­as he has it—­a gradual expansion and subsequent application of the principle of a natural “ordered variation of changes” to non­ natural domains and activities. To put this idea in something like

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Aristotelian terms, Dewey’s argument is that our ancestors did not imitate nature so much as recontextualize their interactional relation to it within new cultural (e.g., artistic) domains. Dewey goes on: The circular course of the seasons affects almost every human in­ terest. When man became agricultural [roughly ten thousand years ago], the rhythmic march of the seasons was of necessity identified with the destiny of the community. The cycle of irregular regularities in the shape and behavior of the moon seemed fraught with mysteri­ ous import for the welfare of man, beast, and crops, and inextricably bound up with the mystery of generation. ([1934] 2005, 153)

This notion of “irregular regularities” is its own elegant definition of rhythm after Plato, and it of course also fits well with Dewey’s broader argument. That Benveniste would blow up the philologi­ cal foundation for such naturalist theories in 1951 is another mat­ ter (Benveniste 1966b); in 1931 such ideas were still current, and Dewey puts them to robust use in service to his naturalist con­ ception of both rhythm and form. As he tells the story, rhythm emerges out of an intimate engagement with nature—­interaction with environment, which is for Dewey the foundation of experi­ ence itself. From this, rhythm as a full-­fledged aesthetic concept comes to be through the repeated observation of its function and effects, and its subsequent application to new, socially embedded (and not necessarily “natural”) domains. The stress that Dewey places on praxis and interaction situates rhythm within the quotidian lifeways of our early ancestors and presents it as a fundamental feature of the conditions that make experience possible. As part of the natural landscape, rhythm for Dewey is always already there to condition our being and serve as the ground for what we see, feel, and do, and in this there seems to be potential agreement with much older, even pre-­Socratic accounts of rhythm. As part of what Dewey would later refer to as “situation,” rhythm exists “prior to, neutral to, and inclusive of, any distinction and relation that can be legitimately instituted between subject and object” ([1943] 2008, 70). It comes onto the

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scene, in this sense, prior to judgment or even cognition; it is, for Dewey, an integral part of the kinetic and indivisible relation between organism and environment that serves as the ground for experience. As potentially compelling as Dewey’s account of rhythm may be, his reliance on a wholly temporal definition of rhythm serves to limit its scope. That is, Dewey pulls rhythm into his complex account of (human) experience, but he does not place into ques­ tion what it is he or anyone else might mean by the term. As he presents it, rhythm is a string of “irregular regularities” stretched out over and in time with only a secondary connection to form. There is also a question regarding what it is that Dewey means by “organism” and what its relation to other organisms might be. For example, is this individual organism meaningfully divisible from other organisms (human and otherwise) even if it is not separable from environment? Are other organisms simply part of this environment? To answer this question requires an account of Dewey’s philosophy that goes far beyond the present chapter; however, one might nevertheless question the extent to which it rests on post-­Enlightenment ideas of individuality and the self that have shaped Euro-­American philosophy and thus distance it from the more expansive understanding of rhythm laid out by philosophers working before Plato and/or outside of Greece.

Rhythm and  Négritude Even in postcolonial settings still extensively shaped by European thought, there is a sense that other options are possible, and that these have important and potentially productive implications for the analysis of rhythm. One may take, for example, Léopold Sédar Senghor’s early twentieth-­century account of African epistemol­ ogy: “ ‘Je pense donc je suis,’ écrivait Descartes. La remarque en a déjà été faite, on pense toujours quelque chose. Le Négro-­africain pourrait dire: ‘Je sens l’Autre, je danse l’Autre, donc je suis.’ Or danser, c’est créer, surtout lorsque la danse est danse d’amour. C’est en tout cas, le meilleur mode de la connaissance” (“I think

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therefore I am,” wrote Descartes. On this, the point has already been made: we always think something. The Black African might say: “I sense the Other, I dance the Other, therefore I am.” And to dance is to create, above all when the dance is one of love. This is, in any case, the best form of  knowing; Senghor 1964, 259). Here Senghor defines knowledge, and the knowing self, as irresolvable dialectics between the “organism” and what lies beyond it in a way that suggests at least partial agreement with Dewey. Where he differs is in his account of rhythm and the connection that it has to knowledge and being: “La vérité poétique s’identifie, ici, à la vérité scientifique, pour qui l’être de l’être est énergie, c’est-­à-­dire rythme. Comme je le disais, le rythme, ‘c’est l’architecture de l’être, the dynamisme interne qui lui donne forme, le système d’ondes qu’il émet à l’adresse des autres, l’expression pure de la force qui, à travers les sens, vous saisit à la racine de l’être’ ” (Poetic truth is identified here with scientific truth, for which the being of being is energy, that is, rhythm. As I have said, rhythm “is the architec­ ture of being, the internal dynamism that gives being form, the system of waves that it emits to others, the pure expression of the force that, through the senses, seizes us by the roots of being”; 1964, 281).4 If rhythm truly is the “architecture of being” as Senghor sug­ gests, then it follows that the organism cannot in any real sense be in its absence. That is, rhythm is not only a sine qua non for experience, as Dewey suggests; it is also a condition for being. It is, in fact, the very being of being for Senghor. What this means, ultimately, is that rhythm—­as the architecture of being, its foun­ dational principle—­has ontological priority not only to human experience but also to the being of  human organisms. This is quite similar to the idea of rhythm as form, and it takes Dewey’s idea even further, presenting the human (however defined) subject as a person—­though not necessarily an individual—­who exists only through enrhythment. On the implications of the traditional Af­ rican notion of personhood, Senghor writes: Les Négro-­Africains, s’ils ne mirent jamais l’accent sur l’individu, ne négligèrent pas, pour autant, la personne, comme on le dit trop

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volontiers. La réalisation de la personne est moins dans la recherche de la singularité que dans l’approfondissement et l’intensification de la vie spirituelle. [ . . . ] En Afrique Noire, l’homme est lié à l’objet de propriété, comme nous l’avons déjà vu, par le lien juridique de la coutume, encore et surtout, par un lien mystique. L’homme se sent une personne—­clanique, je le reconnais—­devant l’objet de propriété, qui est, à son tour, senti comme personne. Ainsi la pro­ priété des moyens de production n’est plus quelque chose d’abstrait, d’illusoire. Le travailleur sent qu’il n’est pas un simple composant de sa terre ou de son outil. Il sent, il sait que son intelligence et ses bras œuvrent librement sur quelque chose de vivant et de bien à lui. (1959, 269–­70) One must point out that Black Africans, if they never stress the individual, do not similarly neglect the person. The person emerges less in the search for singularity than in the deepening and intensi­ fication of spiritual life. [ . . . ] In Black Africa, one is linked to the object of property, as I have already stated, through the legal bond of custom, as well as—­and above all—­by a mystical bond. One feels oneself to be a person—­part of a clan, I admit—­when faced with the object of property, which is, in turn, felt as a person. In this way, ownership of the means of production is no longer abstract or illu­ sory. The worker feels that they are not a simple component of their land or work. They feel, they know that their intelligence and their arms work freely on something alive and of some good to them.

Here personhood distances itself from individuality and instead embraces a primary relationality that includes a world of others, all considered likewise to be persons. What is the structuring prin­ ciple of these relations? What is the ontological glue that binds a woman to her tools and to her neighbor? For Senghor, the answer is rhythm. Even when he moves on to a discussion of African art and a presumably temporal account of rhythm as “régularité dans l’irrégularité, l’unité dans le diversité” (regularity in irregularity, unity in diversity; Senghor 1959, 275), there is an awareness of the deeper connections that link rhythm to being. To be a person, as Senghor has it in his account of traditional African philosophy, is to be enrhythmed and rhythmic through and through.

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What is it that the African notion of rhythm offers? What are its connections to early Greek thought? Senghor touches on this explicitly in an earlier essay on the potential contributions of African thought: C’est par ce mythe grec [d’Antée] que je veux finir. Elle n’est pas étrange, cette rencontre du Nègre et du Grec. Je crains que beau­ coup, qui se réclament, aujourd’hui, des Grecs, ne trahissent la Grèce. Trahison du monde moderne, qui a mutilé l’homme en le fai­ sant “animal raisonnable,” plutôt en le sacrant “Dieu de raison.” Le service nègre aura été de contribuer, avec d’autres peuples, à refaire l’unité de l’Homme et du Monde: à lier la chair à l’esprit, l’homme à son semblable, le caillou à Dieu. En d’autres termes, le réel au surréel—­par l’Homme non pas centre, mais charnière, mais nombril du Monde. (Senghor 1964, 38) It is with the Greek myth [of Antaeus] that I wish to conclude. It is not so strange, this encounter between Black and Greek. I fear that often those who invoke the Greeks today only betray Greece. A be­ trayal by the modern world, which has mutilated humans by mak­ ing us “rational animals,” or rather by crowning man the “God of reason.” The service that Blacks will render, along with other peo­ ples, is to restore the unity of Humans and the World: to link the body to the spirit, the person to other persons, the stone to God. In other words, the real to the surreal—­with humans not as the center­ piece, but working as a hinge, as the world’s navel.

The restoration to which Senghor refers relates directly to his statements on rhythm. If modernity has indeed “betrayed Greece,” then one would have to list the far-­reaching revision of ruthmós after Plato—­a process by which it was rendered arith­ metical, rational, and somehow decoupled from the body—­as a significant piece. If rhythm is indeed the “being of being,” then what Senghor promises is a wholesale revision of Western phi­ losophy, even beyond the revolution promised (but never deliv­ ered) by Lúcio Alberto Pinheiro dos Santos and Gaston Bach­ elard. Dewey does not go this far, in part because the “rational animal” at the center of his philosophy does not permit it (even

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if he comes tantalizingly close), and in part because his under­ standing of rhythm, an understanding that he never calls into question, from within or beyond the classical Greek tradition, is a modern and mostly conventional one. Senghor’s take on rhythm and Western thought points to something foundational and potentially disconcerting: we are not in control, at least not as much as we would like to believe, of the process by which we live and repeatedly give meaning to our experience. While Dewey seeks to heal the philosophical rift forged between the human “organism” and the environing world, his invocation of rhythm—­still wholly the product of an analo­ gous philosophical rift between form, ethics, and temporality—­ does little to help. As early Greek thinkers such as Democritus and Aeschylus made clear, rhythm is form itself. In this, Senghor is right to point to a “betrayal” of Greek thought and likewise right to point to the possibility of rhythm, from an African point of view, as the “architecture” of being, as the very structure or form of being in the world. As such, rhythm serves as a radical limit on human agency; it is, in essence, a primordial disposses­ sion. That is, environment is not only something with which we inevitably interact; it also something much more powerful and even entraining—­a force that brings us into form. This is what Dewey perhaps points to but cannot say.

African Poetry Senghor makes a broad claim for his account of rhythm as on­ tological architecture, speaking of a generalized “African” point of view on the matter: “Je sens l’Autre, je danse l’Autre, donc je suis” (I sense the Other, I dance the Other, therefore I am). The question then is raised whether this idea finds expression in the work of other poets from the continent and the extent to which regional, national, and linguistic differences alter it in any significant way. Turning to the Nigerian poet and novelist Chinua Achebe (1930–­2013), one finds little in the way of an explicit theory of

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rhythm; however, scholars such as B. Eugene McCarthy have considered how the rhythms (i.e., repetition, prosody, and syn­ tax) of Igbo oral narrative shape his writing. In his analysis of Things Fall Apart, McCarthy suggests that “rhythm, as Achebe seems well aware, [ . . . ] can range from a stress within a phrase or sentence, to the structuring principle of a paragraph, to the form of an entire work” (1985, 256). McCarthy’s definition of rhythm here is decidedly conventional, although his analysis is unquestionably compelling and thorough. In “Language and the Destiny of Man,” Achebe underscores the role of rhythm in his comments on the creation myth of the Fulani people of Mali. As the traditional story goes, there was at the beginning a drop of milk. From this, Doondari, the creator, creates the five elements of stone, iron, fire, water, and air. Problems begin to arise shortly after the creation of humans: But man was proud. Then Doondari created blindness and blindness defeated man. But when blindness became too proud, Doondari created sleep, and sleep defeated blindness; But when sleep became too proud, Doondari created worry, and worry defeated sleep; But when worry became too proud, Doondari created death, and death defeated worry; But when death became too proud, Doondari descended for the third time, And he came as Gueno, the eternal one And Gueno defeated death. (1990, 135)

To end the cycle of pride, creation gives way to salvation and Gueno, the all-­powerful god of which Doondari is but an aspect, has the final word. Directly after reproducing this creation story, Achebe draws his reader to its repetitive, rhythm aspects: “You notice, don’t you, how in the second section of that poem, after the creation of man, we have that phrase ‘became too proud’ com­ ing back again and again like the recurrence of a dominant beat in rhythmic music? Clearly the makers of that myth intended us

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not to miss it” (1990, 135). What is significant here is not neces­ sarily the connection that Achebe makes between poetry and music; this is, in the end, of a secondary order. For Achebe, all that repetition, the rhythm of the utterance, ultimately serves to ensure that the message finds its desired end. Much can happen between the sender and the recipient, and so the dangers of pride are “shouted like a message across vast distances until the man at the other end of the savannah has definitely got it, despite the noise of rushing winds” (ibid.). Here rhythm—­as repetition but also as Promethean bondage—­drives home the story’s message, pulling listeners in and binding them to an order built up out of the error of excessive, persistent pride. In “Uno-­Onwu Okigbo” (A wake for Christopher Okigbo), Achebe develops an account of rhythm as architecture through the adaptation of a traditional Igbo dirge. Christopher Okigbo (1932–­1967), a childhood friend of Achebe’s, was himself one of West Africa’s most gifted young poets, and his death (along with the destruction of much of his written work) was a profound and tragic loss for Achebe and many others.5 His death was sudden but not wholly unexpected: with the outbreak of the Biafran War, Okigbo joined the newly formed Biafran military as an officer; he was killed in action only months later. Near the end of “Uno-­Onwu Okigbo” (which literally means “Okigbo’s Death House”), Achebe speaks of the coming dance: “Ngwa, nee egwu k’onabia!” (Quickness, see the dance that is coming!; 2002, 147). A line later, he speaks also of the coming war: “Ifugo na agha awa?” (Have you seen the war raging?; 2002, 147). In both cases the poem presents the ideas of “coming” and “raging” in the progressive aspect as ongoing actions. This is achieved through the use of the na particle, which can be used in different Igbo dialects to express both progressive and future action (Oha 2006). Here we see the untrammeled flow of action and time, a movement toward the speaker and his audience that appears uninterrupted and inevitable. All one can do, it seems, is be a witness to a dance that is already in the process of coming (na-­abia) and a war that is already raging (na-­awa).

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Achebe builds his poem, however, on the bones of a traditional Igbo funeral song. There is tradition and resolute “pastness” in the poem, and his adaptation of it—­the war and Okigbo’s death—­ are at every step conditioned by this. Okigbo himself articulated the effect that this engagement with tradition can have in his 1962 poem, “Lament of the Silent Sisters.”6 In the third section, Okigbo writes: Each of us an urn of native Earth, a double handful newly gathered. We carry in our worlds that flourish Our worlds that have failed. . . . (2008, 41)

That “newly gathered” double handful of native earth each of us holds—­an “us” that refers specifically to a Nigerian audience in the context of the political turmoil in western Nigeria—­speaks at once to tradition, to the recognition of that tradition, and to Nigerian independence, then in its infancy and under threat. It also pushes against more established accounts of Okigbo’s poet­ ics, which have tended to marginalize Okigbo’s work (in En­ glish, at least) at this stage in his career as “Euromodernist” and thus not sufficiently “African” in focus (Suhr-­Sytsma 2012). This living, continuous past, remobilized and adapted to the present but also threatened by the very conditions of the present, is at the very center of Okigbo’s “Silent Sisters” and of Achebe’s tribute to Okigbo after the latter’s death. Here the present interrupts and gives form to tradition, molding it and containing it within the “urn” that is once spatial and ontological. As the “native earth” fills us (inevitably, fully), we also give form to it. For Achebe, this new order or form for that earth is most dramatically—­and lamentably, even tragically—­achieved through the violence of the civil war and the death of Okigbo. For Achebe, the one who can call the dance is suddenly gone, and the performance comes to an abrupt halt: “Egwu ebee na mbelede!” (The dance ends in suddenness!; 2002, 147). This line expresses an interruption of the poetic-­musical flow, but it also points, at the level of the hu­

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man existent (to borrow a term from Levinas), of a more imme­ diate and worrisome shattering of the “urn” that we are or have been until now. In Okigbo’s “death house,” there is performance and the sudden stoppage of that performance, the shattering of the pot that for Okigbo held the very earth of being. Moving outside of  Nigeria but staying with the matter of per­ formativity and song, one finds a similarly powerful account of rhythm in Mozambican poetry from roughly the same period. Of particular interest is the work of  Mozambique’s two most im­ portant early poets, José Craveirinha (1922–­2003) and Noémia de Sousa (1926–­2002). Mozambique was a Portuguese colony from roughly 1500 to 1975; however, this does not mean that the Portuguese had extensive control over the region during this time. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, in fact, their hold was spotty and mostly limited to coastal cities such as Lourenço Marques (now Maputo, Mozambique’s capital) in the south and Sofala and Beira in the north, next to the Pungwe River (near the Zambezi delta). One exception to this coastal rule is the north­ ern inland city of  Tete, the largest city on the Zambezi River and an established Swahili trading center even before the Portuguese took control of it around 1530. One particularly dramatic example of the tenuous and uneven control that the Portuguese held over Mozambique has direct importance for the poetry of Craveirinha. In the early nineteenth century, after a defeat at the hands of the army of King Shaka Zulu, the Nguni general Soshangane moved his army north into Mozambique and Zimbabwe, where he quickly formed a regio­ nal empire named for his grandfather, Gaza. It was through this Nguni migration that the Zulu war dance known as xigubo was introduced into Mozambique, and it is to this dance that Craveir­ inha refers in the first published collection of his poetry (Chigubo, 1964). The Gaza empire reached its highest point of power in the middle of the nineteenth century, and their influence was such that Portuguese landowners along the Zambezi River were compelled to abandon their estates; colonial cities such as Tete, Sena, and Sofala survived only by paying significant tribute to Soshangane.

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The last Gazan emperor, Ngungunhane (ca. 1850–­1906) came into direct conflict with the Portuguese during the last decade of the nineteenth century, and during this period Lourenço Marques itself was threatened by a Ronga insurrection and a mobilization of  Ngungunhane’s army. The colonial war against Ngungunhane lasted for nearly all of 1895, ending only when the Portuguese, led by Joaquim Mouzinho de Albuquerque, managed to buy off regional chiefs once loyal to the Gazan emperor and then attack his capital, Chaimite (near the Limpopo River). The Portuguese took Ngungunhane prisoner and sent him to the Azorean island of  Terceira, where he died in 1906. By the middle of the twentieth century Portuguese control over Mozambique was more or less secure, although the cul­ tural and linguistic diversity of the country made it difficult for colonial authorities to consolidate their power. Even today only about 50 percent of the country speaks Portuguese (mostly as a second language). There are forty-­three different Bantu lan­ guages spoken in the country, with Xironga—­the language that Cra­­veirinha and Sousa use in their poetry—­accounting for roughly 750,000 speakers in Maputo and to the south.7 Also a challenge for the Portuguese was a growing awareness among the colonized of the inherent injustice of European control and a sense of com­­ mon cause with activists and thinkers in Francophone and Anglo­ phone Africa as well as with African Americans and Latin Amer­­ icans and Brazilians of African descent. This awareness would crystalize into a full-­fledged independence movement (the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique, or FRELIMO), which was formed in Tanzania in 1962 and which launched its first armed offensive against the Portuguese in 1964. Mozambique would gain its inde­ pendence in 1975, only to sink into a brutal fifteen-­year civil war between FRELIMO (now openly Marxist) and RENAMO (Re­ sistência Nacional Moçambicana), an anti-­Marxist organization originally funded by Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa. The war resulted in millions of dead, maimed, and displaced as well as a military stalemate. After a negotiated peace in 1992 FRELIMO,

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now quite happy with capitalism, consolidated its political power in the country. Craveirinha and Sousa were journalists as well as poets, and both were deeply involved from the start in the Mozambican in­ dependence movement, although from different vantage points. Both were consciously inspired by the global négritude move­ ment, with a direct debt to Senghor. Both were from Maputo. Both were of mixed Portuguese and Ronga descent, and the ques­ tion of racial mixing or mestiçagem would see ample development in their poetry, perhaps most notably in Craveirinha’s “Ao meu belo pai ex-­emigrante” (To my handsome ex-­immigrant father). And finally, both poets wrote principally in Portuguese, although they also made generous use of Xironga vocabulary. As for the matter of rhythm in Craveirinha and Sousa’s po­ etry, it is worth pointing out that questions of form and dispos­ session (given the centrality of mestiçagem, this is in line both with Achebe’s approach to tradition and with Greek [i.e., West­ ern] philosophical concerns) are paramount in Lusophone Af­ rican cultures, even if its articulation is difficult to unpack. The Angolan writer Manuel Rui, speaking in São Paulo in 1985, goes so far as to theorize rhythm in an explicit way, linking it to a subtle program of postcolonial identity formation—­a program somewhat paradoxically possessing greater liberational potential for the Portuguese than for Angolans: Quando chegaste mais velhos contavam estórias. Tudo estava no seu lugar. A água. O som. A luz. Na nossa harmonia. O texto oral. E só era texto não apenas pela fala mas porque havia árvores, parre­ las sobre o crepitar de braços da floresta. E era texto porque havia gesto. Texto porque havia dança. Texto porque havia ritual. Texto falado ouvido visto. É certo que podias ter pedido para ouvir e ver as estórias que os mais velhos contavam quando chegaste! Mas não! Preferiste disparar os canhões. A partir daí comecei a pensar que tu não eras tu, mas outro, por me parecer difícil aceitar que da tua iden­ tidade fazia parte esse projeto de chegar e bombardear o meu texto. Mais tarde viria a constatar que detinhas mais outra arma poderosa

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além do canhão: a escrita. E que também sistematicamente no texto que fazias escrito inventavas destruir o meu texto ouvido e visto. Eu sou eu e a minha identidade nunca a havia pensado integrando a destruição do que não me pertence. Agora sinto vontade de me apoderar do teu canhão, desmontá-­lo peça a peça, refazê-­lo e dis­ parar não contra o teu texto não na intenção de o liquidar mas para exterminar dele a parte que me agride. Afinal assim identificando­me sempre eu, até posso ajudar-­te à busca de uma identidade em que sejas tu quando eu te olho, em vez de seres o outro. (1985) When you [i.e., the Portuguese] arrived older people told stories. Everything was in its place. The water. The sound. The light. In our harmony. The oral text. And it was text not only through speech but because there were trees, nets above the cracking of the forest’s arms. And it was text because there was gesture. Text because there was dance. Text because there was ritual. Spoken, heard, and seen text. It’s true that when you arrived you could have asked to hear and see the stories that the older people told! But no! You preferred to fire your artillery. At that point, I began to think that you were not you, but another, as it was difficult for me to accept that it was part of your identity to arrive here and immediately blast away at my text. Later I came to realize that you possessed another weapon more powerful than your guns: writing. And that in the written text that you con­ structed, you systematically labored to destroy my text, which is lis­ tened to and seen. I am myself, and I’ve never thought of my identity in terms of the destruction of what is not mine. But now I wish to take control of your guns, dismantle them piece by piece, reconstruct them and fire against your text not with the intention of annihilating it completely but only with the goal of eradicating the part of it that assaults me. In the end, identifying myself always as myself, I may even be able to help you to find an identity for yourself in which you are you when I see you, instead of always being the Other.

Orality, nature, and embodied performance are central to Rui’s essay. Also central is his surgical attack on the lingering remains of imperial logic and force. The imagery is undoubtedly of armed resistance, but it is not violent so much as it is charitable: Rui’s goal is to end the colonial assault (even a decade after Angola’s independence), but he also seems committed to redeeming the

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European Other so that the latter might once again make up a self  (an urn full of native earth, perhaps) rather than a gun-­toting and malarial literatus lost in the tropics. There is of course a strong debt to Brazilian modernism in Rui’s statement, and it would be difficult to overstate the enor­ mous impact that Brazilian letters have had on Lusophone Af­ rican writers since the middle of the last century.8 But there are key differences as well. For example, the model that Rui presents is not cannibalistic, nor does it suggest something as anodyne as hybridity. More radically, it involves a (nondiasporic) postco­ lonial human subject already possessing a strong sense of iden­ tity—­an identity predicated upon enrhythment—­who is willing both to resist the harmful effects of European colonization and to restore once again the human face of the colonizer. This in­ volves the use of literature and poetry to resist, to be sure, but it also involves an effort to rebuild, to restore, and to reinhabit an electric space of human being—­a space in which trees and story­ telling events come together to entail a world and give form to human subjects within it. How do Craveirinha and Sousa fit into Rui’s framework? To answer this, I will look first at “Chigubo,” the title poem from Craveirinha’s earliest poetic anthology. As I have pointed out, chigubo (or xigubo) is a Xitsonga word that refers to a war dance; the dance consists of rapid and dramatic synchronized move­ ments by men lined up in rows and accompanied by drums and at times a choral refrain.9 In his poem Craveirinha transforms the dance into both verbal practice and a dense theorization of rhythm similar to what one sees in Rui two decades later. Craveirinha begins “Chigubo” with a dedication to Claude Co­ uffon, a noted French Hispanist and an important theorist of the négritude movement of the period. After the dedication, he begins with: “Minha mãe África / meu irmão Zambeze / Culucumba! Culucumba!” (My mother Africa / my brother Zambezi / Culu­ cumba! Culucumba!; 1964, 22). This introductory stanza signifies on many levels. In the first place, it serves as a kind of religious in­ vocation informed by the négritude movement: Mother Africa (the

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land), Brother Zambezi (the river), and Culucumba, the Ronga Great Spirit. Here we find an explicit tension between earth and sky, which is not represented so much as entailed through the per­ formative invocation and the powerful indexical charge that it car­ ries. In a sense, the lines literally make present what they name. On another level, Craveirinha links this invocation rhythmically (in a more conventional sense) to the xigubo war dance insofar as it fol­ lows the patterns of stress and release that correspond to the begin­ ning of that dance. Like Rui (although much more economically), Craveirinha presents everything “in its place,” and like Achebe, he is consciously building the new struggle upon the wreckage of past struggles (an image also expertly developed by Mia Couto in his 1992 novel Terra sonâmbula [Sleepwalking Land]). From the start, we might say that Craveirinha takes control of colonial guns (e.g., poetry, the Portuguese language, mimesis), and dismantles them piece by piece, reconstructing them and firing against European no­ tions of text and logic through specifically Ronga theories of poetry, performance, being-­in-­the-­world, and rhythm. It is a performative entailment of a new order, built upon the dark soil of the past. Two stanzas after the introductory invocation, Craveirinha picks up the intensity through a poetic instantiation of the per­ formance itself: Dum-­dum! Tantã! E negro Maiela músculos tensos na azagaia rubra salta o fogo da fogueira amarela e dança as danças do tempo da guerra das velhas tribos da margem do rio. (1964, 22–­23) Dum-­dum! Tan-­tan! And black Maiela, muscles tense on the blood-­red spear, leaps the flames of the yellow bonfire and dances the wartime dances of the old tribes by the riverside.

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Here Craveirinha uses onomatopoeic language to entail the sound of drums (marvelously rendered through Portuguese nasal vowels—­a technique that Craveirinha would use in many other poems) before narrating the dance: Maiela—­a kind of Bantu everyman—­leaps over the bonfire to perform the xigubo in prep­ aration for war.10 A leap of defiance as well as a leap through time, Maiela’s action places him in conscious conflict with his Portu­ guese colonizers; however, it also places him in direct, abiding con­­ nection with the “velhas tribos da margem do rio” (old tribes by the riverside)—­his ancestors—­and the river basin itself, through a process of enrhythment that is at once a conjuring up of the past and a new/old mode of being in the water, the sound, the light, the trees, and the dance: an enrhythment explicitly (and deicti­ cally) presented as such. In another poem from Chigubo, “Sangue da minha mãe” (Blood of My Mother), Craveirinha similarly invokes performativity. He begins: Xipalapala está chamar oh, sangue de minha mãe chigubo vai começar chigubo vai rebentar oh, xipalapala está chamar sangue de minha mãe! (1964, 30) Xipalapala is calling oh, blood of my mother xigubo is going to begin xigubo is going to burst out oh, xipalapala is calling the blood of my mother!

Here Craveirinha’s mestiço status comes to the forefront, as it is precisely his mother’s African blood that is called to presence by the impala horn (xipalapala). The horn signals the beginning of the xigubo dance, but it also serves to take hold of the lyric subject’s maternal blood, to pull him into the performance even before it has begun, to enrhythm him. As in Achebe’s poem for Okigbo, there is a sense of progressive action, something that is already happening, an uninterrupted flowing already in motion.

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For Craveirinha, however, what is already occurring is the sound of the xipalapala, which calls those who can hear it to the xigubo, which has not begun yet. In this sense, Craveirinha situates his poem—­as much an adaptation of tradition as Achebe’s poem, in spite of the hard-­to-­miss linguistic dominance of Portuguese over Ronga—­in the moments before the dance, in the call to dance that takes hold of his mother’s blood. It is a call to discourse, a saying whose said is the dance itself, a waking-­up to a new/old order: “o mato dos xipenhe vai finalmente acordar / e gritar no ronga da grande fogueira / gritar sangue de minha mãe!” (the for­­ est of the steenboks will finally awake / and shout in the Ronga of the great bonfire / shout the blood of my mother!; 1964, 31). Here the Ronga language is linked both to the dance and to the blood of his mother, an indissoluble link to the earth and the for­ est as well as to new possibilities and new forms. These, in any case, were Craveirinha’s hopes during the ramping up of the Mo­­ zambican war for independence. Sousa, who was close to Craveirinha, would develop similar ideas on rhythm as architecture, although she would express them differently and at a slightly earlier time in Mozambique’s history.11 Her poem to Billie Holiday, “A Billie Holiday, cantora” (To Billie Holiday, Singer), composed in 1949, springs immediately to mind. The poem begins with the poetic subject alone in darkness; then, in the second stanza of this poem, Sousa writes: E então, tua voz, minha irmã americana, veio do ar, do nada, nascida da propria escuridão . . . Estranha, profunda, quente, vazada em solidão. (2001, 134) And then, your voice, my American sister, came from the air, from nothing, born from the darkness itself . . . Strange, deep, hot, Emptied out in solitude.

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Sousa begins in the anonymous night of solitude, of nothing at all, and then (então) this is broken or reversed by the voice of another caught in much the same darkness but somehow gener­ ating heat and resonance: “my American sister.” In the third stanza, there is some apparent confusion. Sousa writes: “E começava assim a canção / ‘Into each heart some rain must fall . . .’ ” (And the song began like this / “Into each heart some rain must fall . . .”; 2001, 134). The problem here is that Bil­ lie Holiday never recorded this song. Written by Allan Roberts and Doris Fisher, “Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall” (not “heart,” as Sousa has it) was first recorded in 1944 by the Ink Spots and featured a duet between Bill Kenny and Ella Fitzger­ ald. There was no other version of the song recorded until the 1950s, and so one must conclude that Sousa either confused Fitzgerald with Holiday (though the two women had extremely different voices) or she heard Holiday sing a different song. An­ other possibility, of course, is that Sousa is here employing po­ etic license to imagine Holiday singing a song that she never recorded. Whatever the case, Sousa’s error places the poem on interesting poetic footing, insofar as it breaks with, whether ex­ plicitly or not, any representation of actual experience; that is, the poem itself reveals the impossibility of what it purportedly represents as true. In the fifth stanza, Sousa moves back to the question of Hol­ iday’s voice and its ability to carry with it a long and painful history: Com a tua voz, irmã americana, veio todo o meu povo escravizado sem dó por esse mundo fora, vivendo no medo, no receio de tudo e de todos . . . (2001, 134) With your voice, my American sister, came my entire people, mercilessly enslaved throughout the world, living in fear, in doubt of everything and everyone . . .

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Here Sousa forges a connection to the rolling pain and laughter of Holiday’s voice, a voice that binds her—­even if for a brief moment—­and cuts through her solitude. That the scene is a fic­ tional one does not undermine its force; rather, it pushes the poem out just beyond the sphere of experience and mimesis, into a deeper theorization of poetry, music, voice, and participation. Can a voice, even an imagined one, cut through darkness and solitude, carrying a long history with it to fill the self with earth, to “build” it anew?12 This is likely the heart of Senghor’s idea, and it is also what one finds in Okigbo, Achebe, and Craveirinha. The question of voice comes up again in a poem that Sousa first published in 1953, in Meridiano, the bulletin of the Casa dos Estudantes do Império. The poem is “Nossa voz,” and it begins: Nossa voz ergueu-­se consciente e bárbara sobre o branco egoísmo dos homens sobre a indiferença assassina de todos. Nossa voz molhada das cacimbadas do sertão. (1953) Our voice raised itself, conscious and barbarous above the white selfishness of men above the murderous indifference of all. Our voice, wet with backlands dew.

The dew-­wet, conscious, and barbarous voice of the “we” in this poem, set off from the explicitly racialized (white) Otherness of the “not we,” possesses a definite power—­like that of  Billie Hol­ iday—­to entail a new world, to bind people, place, and time to­ gether. There is likely no conscious connection here between the “barbarous voice” to which Sousa refers and Luís de Camões’s much earlier “escrava bárbora” (barbarous slave), but the poem does read nonetheless as a kind of inversion or even anthro­ pophagic reworking of Camões’s colonial conceit. She continues: Nossa voz gritando sem cessar, nossa voz apontando caminhos, nossa voz xipalapala nossa voz atabaque chamando nossa voz, irmão!

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nossa voz milhões de vozes chamando, clamando, clamando. (1953) Our voice ceaselessly shouting, our voice pointing out paths, our voice xipalapala our voice atabaque calling our voice, brother! our voice millions of voices calling, crying out, crying out.

The use of anaphora (nossa voz) and the references to the im­ pala horn (xipalapala) and conga drum (atabaque) foreground the question of rhythm in this poem; however, Sousa’s use of the term atabaque instead of xitende—­the latter a much more com­ mon name for this drum in southern Mozambique—­also explic­ itly links this voice (and the notion of enrhythment that accom­ panies it) to Brazil, to the ancient Arab slave trade, and to the broader African diaspora. As in Craveirinha’s “Chigubo,” Sousa is here fastening together a world through voice, a world that passes through both space and time through verbal performance, a world that is in some real sense “ours” through both semantico-­ referential modes of signification (atabaque) and rhythm con­ sciously framed as an interruption of these (nossa voz atabaque chamando).

Benveniste: Philology as Psychology Turning back to Europe, but still at the midpoint of the twenti­ eth century, the pre-­Socratic notion of rhythm would undergo a powerful and significant reformulation. There are many reasons for this, among which one might single out modernism’s explicit focus on form, the serious questions regarding human agency (and culpability) that followed World War II, and a broader philo­­ sophical interest in physics after the splitting of the atom. These changes were all acutely felt in the academic fields of linguistics, philology, and philosophy; however, the most direct source of renewed interest in early Greek theories of ruthmós within the

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humanities was undoubtedly Émile Benveniste’s “La notion de ‘rythme’ dans son expression linguistique” (The notion of “rhythm” in its linguistic expression, 1951). A short, dense essay, “La notion de ‘rythme’ ” expresses Benveniste’s desire to connect ruthmós, and thus rhythm, to specific currents of thought before Plato and expand this link to more general forms of cultural practice in archaic Greece. To support his more theoretical conclusions, Benveniste also presents dozens of contextualized instances of ruthmós (as well as other derivations of the verb reô) from Greek texts representing several genres. It is, oddly enough, through this strictly philological work—­rather than his more theoretical arguments—­that Benveniste would most strongly in­fluence sub­ sequent accounts of rhythm. Born in Aleppo in 1902 to Sephardic Jewish parents, Émile Benveniste was originally encouraged by his father to pursue a life of religious scholarship; however, he chose to adopt a more secular course and eventually made his way to Paris and the Sorbonne. While in Paris the young Benveniste became a student of Antoine Meillet (1866–­1936), who was then serving as professor of com­ parative philology and general linguistics at the Collège de France (a position that Benveniste would inherit upon Meillet’s death). Meillet, himself once a student of Michel Bréal (1832–­1915) and Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–­1913), was perhaps the leading com­ parative Indo-­Europeanist in France at the turn of the twentieth century, and his publications (over twenty books and nearly five hundred articles) on comparative linguistics, Indo-­Iranian, Arme­ nian, and even Greek and Latin were widely known. Benveniste’s relationship with Meillet would prove fundamental to the former’s thought, and even as late as 1968 Benveniste would acknowledge his debt to Meillet, referring to him somewhat reverently as “mon maître” (my teacher; Benveniste and Daix 1968, 10). Perhaps the most important aspect of Meillet’s approach to language and culture for Benveniste was Meillet’s concern with cultural history and the links between social and linguistic change. Rüdiger Schmitt describes Meillet’s comparative method in the following way:

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His approach to language history was quite novel in that he took into account together historical grammar proper, the entire philo­ logical evidence, and the facts of cultural history such as language contacts and sociolinguistic influences. For Meillet took sociolin­ guistic aspects much more into account than most scholars do even today; in his opinion language development was first and foremost the result of social changes and diversifications (migrations, changes in the population or in political, economic, religious and other con­ ditions). (2002)

Meillet himself, writing in the introduction to his landmark La méthode comparative en linguistique historique (The Comparative Method in Historical Linguistics, 1925), presents this idea even more directly: “Une langue ne se comprend pas si l’on n’a pas une idée des conditions où vit la population que l’emploie; et l’on ne peut davantage comprendre vraiment une religion ou des usages sociaux sans connaitre la langue des hommes qui pratiquent ces usages” (A language cannot be understood if we have no idea of the conditions or lived experience of the population that employs it; and we further cannot truly understand a religion or its social uses without coming to know the language of the people who practiced these uses; 1984, vi). It is precisely this understanding of language and culture as interwoven phenomena (or, perhaps more accurately, practices), combined with more overtly (post) structuralist conceptions of linguistic reference (Thomas 2006), that would shape Benveniste’s later account of Greek theories of rhythm and his ideas about the evolution of the term ruthmós. Benveniste first published his examination of ruthmós in 1951 within the Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique ( Journal of Normal and Pathological Psychology), then under the direction of France’s leading historical psychologist, Ignace Meyerson.13 The publication of the rhythm study in this journal, a fact some­ what obscured by its 1966 republication in Problèmes de linguistique générale (Problems in General Linguistics), a much more widely read two-­volume anthology of Benveniste’s published work in general linguistics from 1939 to 1964, helps to explain the openly psychological stance that he adopts from the beginning:

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“Ce pourrait être la tâche d’une psychologie des mouvements et des gestes d’étudier parallèlement les termes qui les dénotent et les psychismes qu’ils commandent, le sens inhérent aux termes et les représentations souvent très différentes qu’ils éveillent” (Benveniste 1966b, 327) (It might be the task of a psychology of movements and gestures to study also the terms that denote them and the psychological phenomena that they control, the meaning inherent in the terms, and the often very different representations that they awaken; Benveniste 1971, 281). For Benveniste, one is to infer, rhythm is just such a term, insofar as it has come to de­ note a wide range of “movements and gestures” within the specific (if broad) cultural tradition of Western thought. Benveniste here forges a dynamic connection between mental processes, embodied movement, and the linguistic terms—­such as ruthmós—­that ex­ press them. Arguing here as elsewhere against universalist theories of consciousness, according to which language and thought exist independently (with the latter enjoying ontological priority over the former), Benveniste frames his account of rhythm as a kind of case study for an as-­yet unformed field of inquiry at the intersec­ tion of linguistics and historical psychology: Peut-­être même servirait-­elle à caractériser distinctivement les com­ portements humains, individuels et collectifs, dans la mesure où nous prenons conscience des durées et des successions qui les règlent, et aussi quand, par-­delà l’ordre humain, nous projetons un rythme dans les choses et dans les événements. Cette vaste unification de l’homme et de la nature sous une considération “temps,” d’intervalles et de retours pareils, a eu pour condition l’emploi du mot même, la gé­ néralisation, dans le vocabulaire de la pensée occidentale moderne, du terme rythme qui, à travers le latin nous vient du grec. (1966b, 327) Perhaps [rhythm] even serves to differentiate forms of human com­ portment, individual and collective, insofar as we are conscious of durations and the sequences that regulate them, and also when, be­ yond the human sphere, we project a rhythm onto things and events. This vast unification of humankind and nature under a consider­ ation of “time,” with its intervals and repetitions, has had as a condi­

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tion the use of the word itself, the generalization, in the vocabulary of modern Western thought, of the term rhythm, which, by way of Latin, comes to us from Greek. (1971, 281)

For Benveniste, it is a historical fact that in modern Western thought the notion of rhythm has come to signify and differ­ entiate different sorts of temporal phenomena both within the human sphere and beyond. It is also a historical fact, he argues, that the use of the term rhythm has been a condition of this pro­ cess and that this term has its origins in the intertwined roots of Greek language and thought. This is slightly different from Dewey’s more axiomatic account of rhythm, and what follows from this explicitly philological framing of the question is the need to understand not only the historical processes by which Greek conceptions of rhythm have come to be generalized within modern Western thought, but also the no-­less-­historical processes by which the Greek notion of rhythm—­conditioned as much by the repeated use of the term ruthmós as by interaction with envi­­ ronment—­came to be in the first place. Throughout “La notion de ‘rythme’ dans son expression lin­ guistique,” Benveniste focuses his attention on the analysis of tex­ tual examples from fifth-­century BCE Greece and before. In all cases, his analyses serve to support his critical scrutiny of the philological foundations upon which the naturalist understanding of rhythm’s origins, according to which the concept of ruthmós emerged out of the ancient observation of the “flowing” (reĩn) of sea waves, was based. As part of this inquiry, Benveniste also ar­ gues that before the fourth century BCE, the Greek term ruthmós in fact had very little to do with the musical and prosodic concerns to which we tend to refer when we speak of rhythm today. He begins his study by rearticulating the then-­widely held naturalist theory regarding rhythm’s origins: En grec même, où ruthmós désigne en effet le rythme, d’où dérive la notion et que signifie-­t-­elle proprement? La réponse est donnée identiquement par tous les dictionnaires: ruthmós est l’abstrait de

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reĩn (couler), le sens du mot, dit Boisacq, ayant été emprunté aux mouvements réguliers des flots. C’est là ce qu’on enseignait voici plus d’un siècle, aux débuts de la grammaire comparée, et c’est ce qu’on répète encore. Et quoi, en effet, de plus simple et de plus sat­ isfaisant? L’homme a appris de la nature les principes des choses, le mouvement des flots a fait naître dans son esprit l’idée de rythme, et cette découverte primordiale est inscrite dans le terme même. (1966b, 327) In Greek itself, where ruthmós does in fact mean “rhythm,” where does the notion come from, and what does it properly mean? All dictionar­ ies give the identical response: ruthmós is taken from reĩn, “to flow,” the sense of the word, argues [Émile] Boisacq, having been taken from the regular movement of sea waves. This is what was taught more than a century ago, when comparative grammar emerged as a discipline, and it is repeated still. And what, really, could be simpler and more satisfying? Humans have learned the principles of things from nature, the movement of waves planted in our mind the idea of rhythm, and this primordial discovery is inscribed in the term itself. (1971, 281)

Having presented both this etymology and the theory that seeks to explain it, Benveniste then moves on to support the former while seeking to debunk the latter. In this, he seeks to refute the sense of rhythm, presented by Émile Boisacq in his Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque (Etymological Dictionary of the Greek Language; 1907, 845), as somehow the result of a more or less “natural” observation of nature: Il n’y a pas de difficulté morphologique à rattacher ruthmós, par une dérivation dont nous aurons à considérer le détail. Mais la liaison sé­ mantique qu’on établit entre “rythme” et “couler” par l’intermédiaire du “mouvement régulier des flots” se révèle comme impossible au premier examen. Il suffit d’observer que réô et tous ses dérivés nomi­ naux [ . . . ] indiquent exclusivement la notion de “couler,” mais que la mer ne “coule” pas. Jamais reîn ne se dit de la mer, et d’ailleurs jamais ruthmós n’est employé pour le mouvement des flots. Ce sont des termes tout autres qui dépeignent ce mouvement: ámpôtis, raxía,

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plêmurís, saleúein. Inversement, ce qui coule (reî), c’est le fleuve, la rivière; or, un courant d’eau n’a pas de “rythme.” Si ruthmós signifie “flux, écoulement,” on ne voit pas comment il aurait pris la valeur propre au mot “rythme.” Il y a contradiction entre le sens de reîn et celui de ruthmós, et l’on ne se tire pas de difficulté en imaginant—­ce qui est pure invention—­que ruthmós a pu décrire le mouvement des flots. Bien mieux: ruthmós, dans ses plus anciens emplois, ne se dit pas de l’eau qui coule, et il ne signifie même pas “rythme.” Toute cette interprétation repose sur des données inexactes. (1966b, 328) There is no morphological difficulty in linking ruthmós to réô, through a derivation that we will consider in detail. However, the semantic link that has been established between “rhythm” and “to flow” through the mediating notion of the “regular movement of sea waves” reveals itself to be impossible upon first examination. It suffices to observe that réô and all its nominal derivatives [ . . . ] ex­ clusively indicate the notion of “to flow,” but the sea does not flow. Never is reĩn used to describe the sea, and apart from this, ruthmós is never used to describe the movement of sea waves. The terms that depict such movement are completely different [ . . . ]. Inversely, that which flows (reĩ ) are rivers and streams; that is, a current of water has no “rhythm.” If ruthmós indeed signifies “flux, flowing,” it is difficult to see how it could have come to have the meaning of the term “rhythm.” There is a contradiction between the sense of reĩn and that of ruthmós, and we don’t eliminate the difficulty simply by imagining—­a pure invention, in any case—­that ruthmós was ever used to describe the movement of sea waves. More to the point: ruthmós, in its most ancient usage, never refers to flowing water, nor does it signify rhythm. This entire interpretation rests on inaccurate data. (Benveniste 1971, 327)14

The problem here for Benveniste, as Serres has pointed out, is how to account for the semantic leap that seems to have occurred from reĩn (the present infinitive of réô) to ruthmós. How, he asks, did the Greeks move from a verbal expression of “flux” or “flow­ ing” (reĩn) to a noun that serves as the origin of our modern concept of rhythm? What, in other words, did ruthmós mean for Greek writers before Plato, and what is its semantic relation to

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the verb réô? And how did it come to mean “rhythm”? To begin to answer this question, Benveniste looks first to atomist phi­ losophers before turning to poetry. In the end, Benveniste draws three succinct conclusions from his survey of Greek examples of ruthmós. The first of these is that “ruthmós ne signifie jamais ‘rythme’ depuis l’origine jusqu’à la période attique” (ruthmós never signifies “rhythm,” from its ori­ gins to the Attic period; Benveniste 1966b, 332). In other words, although the modern word rhythm undoubtedly has ruthmós as its ultimate source, the two words mean something quite differ­ ent. Benveniste’s second conclusion, stated also near the begin­ ning of his essay, is that the term ruthmós was “jamais appliqué au mouvement régulier des flots” (never applied to the regular movement of sea waves; ibid.). In this way Benveniste seeks to refute the naturalist theory of rhythm’s origins that continued to be influential into the middle of the twentieth century, as evidenced by Dewey’s account of its origins. His third and fi­ nal point is that ruthmós consistently meant “ ‘forme distinctive’; ‘figure proportionnée’; ‘disposition,’ dans les conditions d’emploi d’ailleurs les plus variées” (“distinctive form”; “proportioned fig­ ure”; “disposition,” in conditions of use that are otherwise quite varied; ibid.). “De même” Benveniste goes on, “les dérivés ou les composés, nominaux ou verbaux, de ruthmós ne se réfèrent jamais qu’à la notion de ‘forme’ ” (In a similar way, the deriva­ tives or compounds, nominal or verbal, of ruthmós never refer to anything but the notion of “form”; ibid.). One question that emerges from Benveniste’s study is how ruthmós relates to other Greek terms, such as sxêma, that like­ wise mean “form.” How does it differ from these, if at all? With respect to schêma, Benveniste distinguishes its use from that of ruthmós: Entre sxêma et ruthmós il y a une différence: sxêma par rapport à éxô, “je (me) tiens” (cf. pour la relation lat. habitus: habeō) se définit comme une “forme” fixe, réalisée, posée en quelque sorte comme un objet. Au contraire ruthmós d’après les contextes où il est donné, dé­ signe la forme dans l’instant qu’elle est assumée par ce qui est mou­

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vant, mobile, fluide, la forme de ce qui n’a pas consistance organique: il convient au pattern d’un élément fluide, à une lettre arbitraire­ ment modelée, à un péplos qu’on arrange à son gré, à la disposition particulière du caractère ou de l’humeur. C’est la forme improvisée, momentanée, modifiable. Or, reîn est le prédicat essentiel de la na­ ture et des choses dans la philosophie ionienne depuis Héraclite, et Démocrite pensait que, tout étant produit par les atomes, seul leur arrangement différent produit la différence des formes et des objets. On peut alors comprendre que ruthmós signifiant littérale­ ment “manière particulière de fluer,” ait été le terme le plus propre à décrire des “dispositions” ou des “configurations” sans fixité ni néces­ sité naturelle et résultant d’un arrangement toujours sujet à changer. (1966b, 333) There is a difference between sxêma and ruthmós; sxêma, in relation to éxô, “to hold” (cf. the relation of Lat. habitus to habeō), is defined as a fixed “form” realized and presented in some way as an object. On the contrary, ruthmós, according to the contexts in which it is given, designates form in the instant that it is assumed by what is mov­ ing, mobile, and fluid, the form of that which does not have organic consistency: it corresponds to the pattern of a fluid element, of an arbitrarily shaped letter, of a robe that one arranges at one’s will, of one’s particular disposition with respect to character or mood. It is improvised form, momentary and alterable. Now, reĩn is the essential predication of nature and things in Ionian philosophy from Hera­ clitus; and Democritus thought that, everything being produced by atoms, only the differing arrangement of these atoms could produce the difference of forms and objects. We can now see that ruthmós, meaning literally “a particular manner of flowing,” was the most proper term to describe “dispositions” or “configurations” without fixity or natural necessity and arising from an arrangement always subject to change.

The distinction that Benveniste makes between sxêma and ruthmós relies on the subtle semantic differentiation between form conceived of as static and objective (sxêma) and form as the pro­ visional disposition or arrangement of phenomena normally in flux (ruthmós). In this, Benveniste departs somewhat from Wer­ ner Jaeger’s earlier framing of ruthmós, which goes much further

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in separating the term from the notion of “flow” (1986, 1:126).15 Benveniste’s argument, more focused in any case on philological rather than properly historical or philosophical concerns, is that both sxêma and ruthmós existed as two ways of expressing “form” in Greek until well into the fourth century BCE, when the latter began to take on the primarily musical and prosodic meaning that it has today. It is worth mentioning that Benveniste’s account of rhythm in ancient Greece has not gone uncontested. Most notable among those qualifying or contesting Benveniste is Serres, who argues against the former’s claim that “a current of water has no ‘rhythm’ ” as well as his larger argument against the naturalist theory of rhythm’s origins. Serres points out, within a more general argu­ ment regarding flux and the “birth of physics,” that the eddies and whirlpools that form in rivers are in fact clear examples of “rhythm” in flowing water. Serres agrees with Benveniste that it is right to link ruthmós to form and to credit the atomists with the first theorization of the concept; however, Serres goes against Benveniste when he argues (1) that there is a fundamental con­ ceptual link between reĩn and ruthmós in the work of the atomists and (2) that this link emerged through empirical observation, through a philosophical seeing-­things-­as-­they-­are on the part of Leucippus and Democritus: Émile Benveniste questions the etymology of the word “rhythm.” He remarks, in the purest tradition of Heraclitus, Montaigne and so on, that a flow of water cannot form a rhythm. It is monodromic and unicursal, universal. Does not turn back on itself. But rhythm comes back here. It is contradictory. How is it that the words ruthmós and reĩn have always been placed together? It is impossible. Rhythm appears for the first time among the atomists, Leucippus and Democritus, as one of the key words of their philosophy. It signifies a form. To understand this fluid form, Benveniste proposes the word “fluence,” while the history of science provides “fluxion” and “fluctuation.” The linguist, like Heraclitus, Montaigne, and the rest, never sailed in fresh water. Nothing flows as they thought. Direct physical experience, simple practice, reveal the rhuthmos in the rhein,

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or the vortex in the flow, or the reversible in the irreversible. Rhythm is a form, yes, it is the form adopted by atoms in conjunction in the first dinos [vortex]. In the beginning is the cataract, the waterfall: here is the rhein, the rhesis. The dinos which appears then brings a momentary reversibility to this irreversibility: thus rhuthmos. No, it was not Plato who first made possible and imagined rhythm, it was the atomists. Linguistics meekly [sans contradiction] follows usual practice, the nature of things and abstract theory. Democritus saw the rhythm where it is, Benveniste didn’t see it. Heraclitean irrevers­ ibility is rhythm, here, there, in Democritus and all the atomists. (2000, 153–­54)

The momentary reversibility of irreversibility, the “vortex in the flow,” is for Serres at the very center of atomist accounts of rhythm as well as early Greek conceptions of music and poetry (understood together as musikê). For him, the seemingly irre­ versible flow (reĩn) of water carries within it a series of momen­ tary stoppages or reversals of flow, as evidenced by the eddies and whirlpools that form in rivers and streams. There is thus, as Serres has it, a very natural reversibility hardwired into the irreversible; and this reversibility—­from which emerges the con­ cept of rhythm as both natural and aesthetic form—­reveals itself (pace Benveniste) through empirical observation. It is for this reason that Serres argues against Benveniste’s theory that it was Plato who first spoke of rhythm as we tend to understand it. For Serres, it was the atomists (though not, oddly enough, Archilo­ chus or Heraclitus) who first conceived of rhythm in both the archaic and the modern sense—­as a generic “reversal of flow,” a momentary vortex in the broader reĩn of the universe.16 And, he argues, the atomists did so through the observation of the physical world—­of eddies in rivers and streams, the momentary reversal of what is nonetheless inarguably irreversible. Benveniste may well be mistaken regarding the navigational realities brought up by Serres, and it is also conceivable that his structuralist skepticism regarding the naturalist theory of ruthmós’s origins is likewise misplaced. However, if one’s principal concern is the twentieth-­century reappraisal of rhythm’s Greek

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origins, it is worth bracketing off these issues and focusing on the fact that both Benveniste and Serres agree on the centrality of the pre-­Socratic conception of ruthmós as “form” and the integral role that fifth-­century BCE atomists played with regard to its systematic theorization. And then, at a more directly philological level, it is difficult to overstate the importance of the astonishing number of textual examples that Benveniste provides in his study, many of which had not been previously known or considered. As the story of  Western philosophy goes, Plato picked up the rich albeit paradoxical Greek conception of ruthmós and gave it numerical specificity, linking it to conceptions of embodied move­ ment, meter, and harmony. Benveniste describes this process, recounting the transition from ruthmós to our modern concep­ tion of rhythm—­although, he admits, Latin conceptions of numerus are also important to consider as an intermediary step. As the Latin term numerus suggests, atomist Greek theories of flow and material assemblage, of what Serres describes as the “revers­ ible in the irreversible,” would see themselves arithmetized and brought within the sphere of numerical proportion. Benveniste argues quite forcefully that this was by no means a “natural” pro­ cess but rather the result of a good deal of reasoning as well as a philosophical desire to bring focus and rigor to a concept that had previously seemed somewhat amorphous and broad. He ends his study on rhythm with a return to the first principles he mentions at the beginning of the study: On est bien loin des représentations simplistes qu’une étymologie superficielle suggérait, et ce n’est pas en contemplant le jeu des vagues sur le rivage que l’Hellène primitif a découvert le “rythme”; c’est nous au contraire qui métaphorisons aujourd’hui quand nous parlons du rythme des flots. Il a fallu une longue réflexion sur la structure des choses, puis une théorie de la mesure appliquée aux figures de la danse et aux inflexions du chant pour reconnaître et dénommer le principe du mouvement cadencé. Rien n’a été moins “naturel” que cette élaboration lente, par l’effort des penseurs, d’une notion qui nous semble si nécessairement inhérente aux formes articulées du

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mouvement que nous avons peine à croire qu’on n’en ait pas pris conscience dès l’origine. (1966b, 335) We are far indeed from the simplistic picture that a superficial ety­ mology used to suggest, and it was not in contemplating the play of waves on the shore that the primitive Hellene discovered “rhythm”; it is, on the contrary, we who are making metaphors today when we speak of the rhythm of the waves. It required a long consideration of the structure of things, then a theory of measure applied to the figures of dance and to the modulations of song, in order for the principle of cadenced movement to be recognized and given a name. Nothing is less “natural” than this slow working out, by the efforts of philosophers, of a notion which seems to us so necessarily inher­ ent in the articulated forms of movement that we have difficulty in believing that people were not aware of it from the very beginning. (1971, 287)

In a sense, both Benveniste and Serres are correct, and both would likely agree (along with Sauvanet) that while our modern understanding of rhythm certainly has its origins in Greece, these origins are situated within the later thought of Plato and not with the earlier work of philosophers such as Heraclitus, Leucip­ pus, and Democritus, or poets such as Archilochus and Aeschy­ lus. But then it is also not the case that the earlier conception of ruthmós as a fundamental tension between temporal, ethical, and morphological orders disappeared altogether. Like the river Heli­ con after Orpheus’s murder, it can be understood to have merely moved underground—­altered its flow—­while continuing to find expression in the work of later philosophers and poets. Returning to Dewey’s account of rhythm in “The Natural History of Form,” one notices (thanks in large measure to Ben­ veniste) the many potential intersections with earlier Greek ac­ counts of rhythm. There is, for example, the multifaceted ques­ tion of repetition, interaction, and nature, articulated perhaps best by Dewey in a brief phrase: “the terms ‘natural law’ and ‘nat­ ural rhythm’ are synonymous” ([1934] 2005, 155). Perhaps Dewey was onto more than he knew. That is, if he speaks of “natural

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rhythm” as a synonym for “natural law,” an idea that seems to be in dialogue with pre-­Socratic atomists if not with Archilochus, he also does not move beyond a temporal account of rhythm. For Dewey, rhythm is ordered repetition that yields form but is not synonymous with it: “As far as nature is to us more than a flux [reĩn?] lacking order in its mutable changes, as far as it is more than a whirlpool of confusions, it is marked by rhythms” ibid.). Implicit here is an axiomatic understanding on Dewey’s part of what rhythm in fact might be. What might his ideas on art, in­ teraction, and aesthetics have yielded had he pushed into deeper philological waters? What might Dewey have said about form had he come to understand it in terms of the early Greek no­ tion of ruthmós, instantiated time and again as the very whirlpool that halts and even temporarily reverses the flow of the physical world and our experience of, within, and/or by means of it? In the end, the many births of rhythm, as Dewey might frame it (his thoughts primarily on our hunter-­gatherer ancestors), dem­ onstrate not only the centrality of environment to all experience (aesthetic and otherwise) but also the very limits it imposes upon human agency, or our ability “to be able” as Emmanuel Levinas has put it (1987b, 74).

Otherwise on Rue Michel-­Ange Whatever the merits of  Benveniste’s midcentury study of ruthmós, there can be no question regarding the impact that it has had. For a quick example of its influence on continental philosophy, one might turn to an early passage in Maurice Blanchot’s L’écriture du désastre (The writing of the disaster, 1980), in which he di­ rectly cites pre-­Socratic sources: “ ‘Connais quel rythme tient les hommes.’ (Archiloque.) Rythme ou langage. Prométhée: ‘Dans ce rythme, je suis pris.’ Configuration changeante. Qu’en est-­il du rythme? Le danger de l’énigme du rythme” (“Know what rhythm holds men.” (Archilochus.) Rhythm or language. Prometheus: “In this rhythm, I am caught.” Changing configuration. What is

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rhythm? The danger of rhythm’s enigma; 1980, 14).17 As Leslie Hill points out, Blanchot’s direct source for these citations of Ar­ chilochus and Aeschylus, as well as the idea that rhythm (or ruthmós) is best defined as a “changing configuration,” is Clémence Ramnoux’s Vocabulaire et structures de pensée archaïque chez Héraclite (Vocabulary and Structures of Archaic Thought in Heraclitus, 1959), itself an edition of her doctoral thesis, defended that same year in Paris (Hill 2005, 163). This would appear to point away from Benveniste, except for the fact that “La notion de ‘rythme’ ” is in fact Ramnoux’s direct source for her citations of Archilochus and Aeschylus (ibid.). The result is a chain of transmission run­ ning straight from Benveniste through Ramnoux to Blanchot. I will return to Blanchot’s reading of Ramnoux later in this chap­ ter, but it bears mentioning here that there are many other such chains with Benveniste as their point of origin, and still others—­ Henri Meschonnic being perhaps the most celebrated case—­for whom the debt is both direct and sizable (Bedetti 1992). At roughly the same time that Benveniste was writing “La no­ tion de ‘rythme,’ ” the Lithuanian-­born French philosopher Em­ manuel Levinas (1906–­1995) was also, albeit in a different section of Paris and with different goals in mind, reimagining the concept of rhythm. In a 1951 essay on ontology titled “L’ontologie est-­elle fondamentale?” (Is ontology fundamental?) and published in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale (Review of Metaphysics and Morality), Levinas speaks only briefly of rhythm, but in doing so he opens a pressing question regarding the possible intersection of aesthetics and ethics. More specifically, Levinas questions whether rhythm can serve as a potential substitute in art for the relation of sociality or face, the central concept in his philosophical system.18 This of course begs the question: what exactly does this question mean, and why is it significant for an account of rhythm linked to pre-­Socratic ideas of ruthmós? At first blush Levinas’s understand­ ing of rhythm seems to have more in common with Plato’s ac­ count of ruthmós in Laws 665a than anything written prior to the fourth century BCE. Near the end of his essay, he asks:

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Les choses peuvent-­elles prendre un visage? L’art n’est-­il pas une activité qui prête des visages aux choses? La façade d’une maison, n’est-­ce pas une maison qui nous regarde? L’analyse jusqu’ici menée ne suffit pas à la réponse. Nous nous demandons toutefois si l’allure impersonnelle du rythme ne se substitue pas dans l’art, fascinante et magique, à la socialité, au visage, à la parole. (1951, 97–­98) Can things take on a face? Isn’t art an activity that lends faces to things? Isn’t the façade of a house a house that looks at us? The anal­ ysis up to this point does not give us an answer. We ask ourselves, however, if the impersonal movement of rhythm does not substitute in art, fascinating and magical, for sociality, face, and speech?

In speaking of the “impersonal movement” of rhythm, Levinas surely understands rhythm to be a temporal phenomenon. Where else would this movement occur but in time? At this level, one may justifiably conclude, rhythm seems to move as do the waves of the sea, the current of a river, or the bodies of dancers. Levinas was undoubtedly aware of Plato and his account of rhythm as the order of movement in time; however, he was even more directly influenced by Nietzsche, whose ideas on rhythm likewise run through his written work. Following Nietzsche, Levinas likewise understands rhythm to be a compulsion, and in this sense, his use of allure intersects with the Old French (and modern English) sense of “attraction” as much as it signifies (in modern French) “movement,” “appearance,” or one’s “gait.” It is also connected, as Matthew Sharpe has pointed out, to Lucien Lévy-­Bruhl’s anthropological account of participation in non­ monotheistic societies (2005, 40), which presupposes a refusal of logic and allows for an interminable metaphysical doubling—­ described by S. A. Mousalimas as “multinumeration, consub­ stantiality, and multilocation” (1990, 39). So then, if rhythm is ordered movement and a swirling, participatory force or com­ pulsion, the question then becomes how—­or, perhaps more ac­ curately, when—­it links to experience. It is in relation to the sphere of experience that Levinas’s seemingly temporal account of rhythm moves into different ter­

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rain, and it is here too that he breaks with Plato. Strictly speak­ ing, the workings of rhythm, insofar as they have any philoso­ phical significance for Levinas, operate outside of, or, perhaps more accurately, before experience and thus, in a strict (if seem­ ingly paradoxical) sense, also before temporality. Like Archilochus be­fore him, Levinas sees the compulsive, impersonal force of rhythm—­an interruption that may or may not bring with it so­ ciality and responsibility—­as always already having taken place. That is, even at the very moment at which I begin to experience a song, poem, or sculpture, I have always already been enrhythmed by it. It lassos me, taking hold of me half a step before I arrive. Like Prometheus, I can only point to its effect (its hold on me) after the fact and say “thus” or “here I am.” In a broader sense, Levinas’s questioning of rhythm reflects his simultaneous debt to Plato, Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger as well as his decisive break with these predecessors. Jill Stauffer offers a concise account of this difference: The ethical response described by Levinas occurs in diachrony, a non-­ space outside of time. The third [person] and politics and people’s identities enter “later” in synchrony (and that “later” is in quotation marks because these temporalities are not in linear progression—­ though it is also true that “later” is never figured as “sooner” because of the priority of ethics). When did I become responsible? Always already. When will I have discharged this responsibility? Always not yet. Responsibility does not, strictly speaking, exist. It is not coter­ minous with the present. But it also is. And that is the difficulty. (Stauffer and Bergo 2009, 42–­43)

It is within this dispossessive “always already/not yet” that rhythm for Levinas takes hold of us, interrupting our spontaneity and pulling us to it. We stand before Las meninas or a Japanese garden and we experience it, we theorize it, we judge it. These actions, however, are on a wholly different plane from the workings of rhythm, which for Levinas has always already placed a weight on our back that we cannot hope to shrug off. Once again, before we have experienced a work of art in any conscious way, it has already

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enrhythmed us, taking hold of our bodies and locking us into a relation with it. The key question for Levinas is whether rhythm here pulls us to the edge of an abyss of sleepless existence where subjectivity is not even possible, where we are but objects among other objects. One might imagine, as Voegelin does (2010), what occurs when we enter a room filled with extremely loud, puls­ ing music: there is a measure of pain, to be sure, but there is also the undeniable fact that our bodies have already begun to move as if strong hands were pressing and pulling at us, as if we were being carried along by a current or spun around in a whirlpool. Our bodies, that is, are taken in this way even before we become conscious of it, before we can give consent. It is here, in this tem­ poral gap between sense and sensibility, that we are enrhythmed and our subjectivity vacated. We are transformed into one more assemblage of particles carried along on a river of sound even before we are aware that this has occurred or even that we are we. This is, not incidentally, the “danger of rhythm’s enigma,” as Blanchot sees it: rhythm strips us of our subjectivity (a very lit­ eral disaster), but there is no reason to believe that it replaces the subject with any ethical relation of “face,” such as occurs when one encounters another human—­we are quite simply undone and dispersed before we are conscious of the experience. We become objects ourselves, alongside an endless flow of other objects in a state of anonymous existence. Such questions are at the very heart of Levinas’s brief treatment of rhythm in the 1952 essay on ontology, although he does not develop them any further in that context. Levinas would of course say more about rhythm; how­ ever, the matter of whether rhythm serves as a substitute for the relation of face in art, is perhaps his most sanguine articulation of its possibilities. Four years prior to the publication of “L’ontologie est-­elle fondamentale?” Levinas offered perhaps his most focused ac­ count of rhythm and art in an article titled “La réalité et son ombre” (Reality and Its Shadow). Here he links both to a kind of daemonic magic or hypnosis that serves as little more than an evasion of ethics and sociality:

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L’idée de rythme, que la critique d’art invoque si fréquemment, tout en la laissant à l’état de vague notion suggestive et passe-­partout, indique la façon dont l’ordre poétique nous affecte plutôt qu’une loi interne de cet ordre. De la réalité se dégagent des ensembles fer­ més dont les éléments s’appellent mutuellement comme les syllabes d’un vers, mais qui ne s’appellent qu’en s’imposant à nous. Mais ils s’imposent à nous sans que nous les assumions. Ou plutôt, notre consentement à eux s’invertit en participation. Ils entrent en nous ou nous entrons en eux, peu importe. Le rythme représente la situa­ tion unique où l’on ne puisse parler de consentement, d’assomption, d’initiative, de liberté parce que le sujet en est saisi et emporté. Pas même malgré lui, car dans le rythme il n’y a plus de soi, mais comme un passage de soi à l’anonymat. (1948, 775) The idea of rhythm, which art criticism so frequently invokes but leaves in the state of a vague suggestive notion and catch-­all, des­ ignates not so much an inner law of the poetic order as the way the poetic order affects us, closed wholes whose elements call for one an­ other like the syllables of a verse, but do so only insofar as they im­ pose themselves on us, disengaging themselves from reality. But they impose themselves on us without our assuming them. Or rather, our consenting to them is inverted into a participation. Their entry into us is one with our entry into them. Rhythm represents a unique situation where we cannot speak of consent, assumption, initiative or freedom, because the subject is caught up and carried away by it. The subject is part of its own representation. It is so not even despite itself, for in rhythm there is no longer a oneself, but rather a sort of passage from oneself to anonymity. (1987a, 3–­4)

Here Levinas describes in the most direct terms how rhythm pulls us into a participatory relation that vacates subjectivity be­ fore it can even emerge. It is, quite literally, a disaster. In terms of the Jewish philosophy with which Levinas was certainly familiar, rhythm’s effect turns the world (“reality,” as Levinas terms it) into a graven image where all is but shadow and loss. This is in fact the most likely reading of the “substitution” that Levinas de­ scribes in “L’ontologie est-­elle fondamentale?” In other words, it is not a substitution that stands in for the relation of face in order to produce a similar result; rather, it is a counterfeit. As Philippe

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Crignon explains it, Levinas “only conceives of artistic activity as a plastic immobilization, a molding of what, by essence, could not and should not be fixed. The carnal that escapes toward an absolute future, in the obscurity and mystery that the caress of the lover touches without ever grasping, is absorbed here in a simple thing, that is, in a simple form. The skin that troubles is inverted into a surface” (2004, 112). With art, the argument goes, we are not met from above by a human Other who commands responsibility, a meeting that serves as the condition for the pos­ sibility for ethics; rather, we are pulled down into a deep pool of objects in movement, of anonymous flow: On trouve un apaisement lorsque, par delà les invitations à compren­ dre et à agir, on se jette dans le rythme d’une réalité qui ne sollicite que son admission. Le monde à achever est remplacé par l’achèvement essential de son ombre. Ce n’est pas le désintéressement de la contem­ plation, mais de l’irresponsabilité. Le poète s’exile lui-­même de la cité. A ce point de vue la valeur du beau est relative. Il y a quelque chose de méchant et d’égoïste et de lâche dans la jouissance artistique. Il y a des époques où l’on peut en avoir honte, comme de festoyer en pleine peste. (Levinas 1948a, 787) We find an appeasement when, beyond the invitations to compre­ hend and act, we throw ourselves into the rhythm of a reality which solicits only its admission into a book or a painting. Myth takes the place of mystery. The world to be built is replaced by the es­ sential completion of its shadow. This is not the disinterestedness of contemplation but of irresponsibility. The poet exiles himself from the city. From this point of view, the value of the beautiful is rela­ tive. There is something wicked and egoist and cowardly in artistic enjoyment. There are times when one can be ashamed of it, as of feasting during a plague. (Levinas 1987a, 12)

This appeasement is an evasion for Levinas, a dodging of one’s own existence, characterized now not by heroic (masculine) authenticity but by an irreducible responsibility to the human Other before us. As Richard A. Cohen succinctly presents it: “The subject of ethical relations [ . . . ] does not constitute mean­ ing, but is subjected to an overwhelming obligation with the

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Other imposes” (1981, 196). In this sense, rhythm in art presents not only the draw of irresponsibility and childish enjoyment but also the threat of self-­annihilation. Insofar as rhythm pulls us into participation, we run the risk of losing all. Like the Per­ sian dead in Aeschylus, we are made to float on the sea without burial, without identity, without any finality at all. We become “of the sea” as the sea likewise enters us, bit by bit, until there is nothing left to be called human at all. Published in Les temps modernes (Modern Times), a journal then under the direction of Jean-­Paul Sartre and explicitly com­ mitted to littérature engagée, it is worth noting that “La réalité et son ombre” was something of an editorial anomaly, a sentiment clearly expressed by Maurice Merleau-­Ponty in his preface to the essay: L’étude qu’on va lire donne une description frappante du milieu préhumain, en deçà du temps et de la vie, qui est celui de l’art et de la littérature. Si l’auteur les délie du souci d’exprimer l’expérience humaine, c’est que l’art, selon lui, se place avant le monde vrai, et que l’artiste comme artiste n’est pas encore un homme. S’il respecte l’indifférence de la conscience artiste, il ne consent pas à l’appeler générosité, et il y a du mépris dans ce respect. C’est à la philosophie et à l’action qu’il réserve la vérité. Il faut avouer qu’il y a là pour tout le monde un problème. Même si l’on réintègre la littérature à l’activité signifiante de l’homme, même si on la prend tout entière comme parole et question de l’auteur à son public, il y a en fait une solitude de l’écrivain, il y a, dans l’expression littéraire et artistique, une mise en question de soi-­même une humeur rêveuse qui font de l’écrivain un mauvais partisan, et souvent aussi, comme on dit, un homme sans caractère. [ . . . ] Simplement, quelles que soient les difficultés de l’expression lit­ téraire, elles n’autorisent jamais l’écrivain à maquiller l’échec en vic­ toire, à se réfugier, comme disait M. Blanchot, dans le “petit enfer de l’éternité littéraire,” à se détourner d’une expérience qui est son contact avec le monde, le thème avoué ou secret de tout ce qu’il dit. Emmanuel Lévinas remet à une critique philosophique le soin de récupérer l’art pour la vérité, de renouer des liens entre la pensée “dégagée” et l’autre, entre le jeu de l’art et le sérieux de la vie. Plus

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optimiste, Sartre pense que l’art et la littérature peuvent se sauver eux-­mêmes s’ils se retrouvent comme parole ou signification vi­ vantes, et que la liberté de l’art a des complices en tout homme. Ou, si l’on veut, plus pessimiste, il ne pense pas que les difficultés de l’action ou de l’expression philosophique soient moindres que celles de la littérature et de l’art, ni d’un autre ordre. Pour l’un comme pour l’autre, la conscience artiste doit être sauvée d’elle-­même, et nous souhaitons qu’E. Lévinas contribue ici même à la réveiller re­ spectueusement. (Merleau-­Ponty 1948, 770–­7 1) The following study offers a striking description of the pre-­human state, before time and lived experience, which is that of art and lit­ erature. If the author unbinds these from any concern for expressing human experience, it is because art, according to him, is situated before the real world and that the artist qua artist is no longer a person. If he respects the detachment of the artistic conscience, he does not consent to call this generosity, and there is a hint of disdain in this respect. It is for philosophy and action that he reserves truth. One must admit that this poses a universal problem. Even if we manage to reintegrate literature within the sphere of meaningful human activity, even if we take it as gospel and as a matter between authors and their readers, there is in fact the solitude of the writer; there is, in literary and artistic expression, a questioning of oneself, a dreamlike mood that makes the writer a bad advocate, and fre­ quently enough, as we say, a person without character. [ . . . ] Simply put, whatever the difficulties of  literary expression might be, they never authorize writers to disguise defeat as victory, to take refuge, as Maurice Blanchot has said, within the “little Hell of liter­ ary eternity,” to turn away from an experience that is their contact with the world, the expressed or secret theme of all that they say. Emmanuel Levinas subjects to a philosophical critique the concern for recuperating art for truth, for renewing the links between “disen­ gaged” thought and the other, between the play of art and the serious matters of life. More of an optimist, Sartre believes that art and lit­ erature can be salvaged if they rediscover themselves as speech or liv­ ing signification, and that the freedom of art has accomplices in all of us. Or if one prefers a more pessimistic view, he does not consider the difficulties of action or of philosophical expression to be fewer than those of literature and art; nor are they of a different order. In both

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cases, the artistic conscience must be saved from itself, and we wel­ come Emmanuel Levinas to contribute here to wake it respectfully.

Here Merleau-­Ponty, whose sudden death in 1961 was to pre­ vent him from fulfilling his commitment to serve on Levinas’s thesis defense committee (for which Levinas submitted his first major monograph, Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité [Totality and Infinity: Essay on Exteriority]), clearly spells out the main com­ ponents of Levinas’s aesthetics as articulated in “La réalité et son ombre.”19 In the first place, enrhythment occurs before experience for Levinas—­it is an embodied effect that takes hold before one is conscious of it. In a sense, we begin to sway to a work of art before we can be aware that this happening; rhythm has already taken hold of us. In the second place (and this matters most to Levinas), this aesthetic enrhythment can never lead to ethics in the way that an encounter with another human being (Autrui) can, and the art­ ist is thus limited to the role of fingidor (feigner), to paraphrase Fernando Pessoa. Literature, one might say, is “magical,” but in a way that takes us farther from the truth and into a dreamlike state of evasion. It pulls at our bodies and holds us in place, giving us a form (ruthmós) that asks nothing of us and cuts off the possibility of sociality and thus ethics. Levinas’s point, as Merleau-­Ponty makes clear, is that the artistic consciousness is essentially disengaged, and that this is not necessarily a problem of theme: all literature and art is essentially rhythmic, magical, and disengaged. Given the striking length of Levinas’s life and career, it is perhaps not surprising that his views on something as quintes­ sentially human as art and poetry would shift over time. Not that he would ever embrace aesthetics in some systematic way; rather, he seems to have been at least partially open to redefin­ ing what art—­especially poetry—­could be. One sees perhaps the most dramatic possibilities in Levinas’s reaction to the poetry of Paul Celan (1920–­1970). Celan would serve as a kind of provoca­ tion for Levinas, who developed throughout his long career a unquestionably conflicted view of poetry. Notes Levinas, writing after Celan’s tragic death in 1970:

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Je ne vois pas de différence, écrit Paul Celan à Hans Bender, entre une poignée de main et un poème. Voilà le poème, langage achevé, ramené au niveau d’une interjection, d’une expression aussi peu ar­ ticulée qu’un clin d’œil, qu’un signe donné au prochain! Signe de quoi? De vie? De bienveillance? De complicité? Ou signe de rien, ou de complicité pour rien: dire sans dit. Ou signe qui est son propre signifié: le sujet donne signe de cette donation de signe au point de se faire tout entier signe. Communication élémentaire et sans révé­ lation, balbutiante enfance du discours, bien maladroite insertion dans la fameuse langue qui parle, dans le fameux die Sprache spricht, entrée de mendiant dans la demeure de l’être. [ . . . ] Il se trouve donc pour Celan que le poème se situe précisément à ce niveau pré-­syntaxique et pré-­logique (comme cela est, certes, de rigueur aujourd’hui 1), mais aussi pré-­dévoilant: au moment du pur toucher, du pur contact, du saisissement, du serrement, qui est, peut-­être, une façon de donner jusqu’à la main qui donne. Langage de la proximité pour la proximité, plus ancien que celui de la vérité de l’être—­que probablement il porte et supporte—­, le premier des langages, réponse précédant la question, responsabilité pour le pro­ chain, rendant possible, par son pour l’autre toute la merveille du donner. (1976, 48–­49) I don’t see the difference, wrote Paul Celan, to Hans Bender, be­ tween a handshake and a poem. In this way, the poem, the height of language, is reduced to the status of an interjection, of a form of expression as inarticulate as a wink, as a sign to one’s neighbor! A sign of what? Of life? Of kindness? Or complicity? Or a sign of nothing, or of complicity for nothing: saying without a said. Or a sign that is its own signified: the subject gives a sign of this giving of a sign to the point they become entirely a sign. Elementary com­ munication without revelation, stammering infancy of discourse, a maladroit insertion into the famous “language that speaks,” the fa­ mous “die Sprache spricht,” a beggar’s entrance into “the house of being.” [ . . . ] One finds that for Celan the poem is situated precisely at this pre-­syntactic and pre-­logical level (as is of course de rigeur these days!), but also at a level of predisclosure: at the moment of pure touching, pure contact, grasping, squeezing, which is, perhaps, a way of giving even the hand that gives. Language of proximity for

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proximity, older than that of “the truth of being”—­which probably it carries along and sustains—­the first of all languages, the response preceding the question, responsibility for the neighbor, making pos­ sible, by its for-­the-­Other, the entire marvel of giving.

Here one senses a very different idea of substitution, one that approximates or even engenders the relation of face and social­ ity. Poetic language here operates in the vocative case, as Levi­ nas would elsewhere describes it. Celan himself would speak of poetry as a “handshake,” a gesture that speaks simultaneously of generosity and responsibility. Philippe Lacoue-­Labarthe de­ scribes Celan’s approach as an explicit and intentional interrup­ tion: “Poetry as Celan understands it is thus in this sense the in­ terruption of the ‘poetic.’ At least, it is defined as a battle against idolatry. All ‘real’ poems, all that are effectively poems, seem to aim at nothing other than being the place where the ‘poetic’ col­ lapses and becomes abysmal” (1999, 86). How does rhythm fit into Levinas’s account of the “pure touching, pure contact, grasp­ ing, squeezing” that he finds in Celan’s poetry? In large measure, it is the very materiality of rhythm, as form and interruption capable of signifying outside of hermeneutics, that Levinas sees as its utmost possibility. That is, insofar as po­ etry can intervene in the world through its very (material) status as the trace of a vocative “saying” rather than a totalizing “said” (a distinction that Levinas would explore in great depth in Autrement qu’être ou au-­delà de l’essence [Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence], his last book-­length attempt to move beyond Hei­ degger and articulate his own alternative), it can substitute for face in something other than an evasive and incantatory way.20 In his account of Levinas and aesthetics, Henry McDonald ex­ plains this further: Levinas is careful to distinguish [ . . . ] between “the singing and the song”—­between the act of telling and what is told—­which is a ver­ sion of his more basic distinction between the Said and the Say­ ing, le dit et le dire. The Said includes the totality of language in all its referential and thematic functions. The Saying, on the other

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hand, is a condition of possibility of the Said and can be signified only through language, not in it. In attempting to convey the Say­ ing within the Said, language inevitably, necessarily, betrays itself (which doesn’t mean the betrayal shouldn’t be committed), for the Saying leaves in the Said only what Levinas calls the trace of itself, a trace that does not, however, compromise the exteriority of the Saying to the Said. (2008, 32)

Poetry, taken from its hermeneutic heights into the muddy depths of sound, of hands making and reaching out for other hands (to paraphrase Celan’s famous 1961 letter to Hans Bender), appears here to offer other alternatives. One imagines that the “language of proximity for proximity” is, if nothing else, a modern adaptation of form, a gloss on ruthmós—­as the physical trace of a reaching-­ out with hands, of a poetic “dwelling for the other”—­that remains hopeful in spite of all.

Oswald’s Lyric Iliad It is perhaps fitting to end this chapter on modern and contempo­ rary poetry with a turn back to ancient Greece. In the prologue to her recent “excavation” of the Iliad, Alice Oswald describes Homer’s epic as a “vocative” poem (2011, ix). It is, as she understands it, a performative (and harmonious) collision between “high epic and choral lyric poetry,” a fact that transforms the Iliad, when stripped of its overarching linear narrative, into “a kind of oral cemetery—­in the aftermath of the Trojan War, an attempt to remember people’s names and lives without the use of writing” (ibid., ix–­x). Oswald’s stated goal is to recapture some of the enargeia encoded within the Iliad, as one might “lift the roof off a church” to look inside and recall “what one is worshipping” (ibid., ix). The result, as she claims, is “a bipolar poem made of similes and short biographies of soldiers, both of which derive [ . . . ] from distinct poetic sources: the similes from pastoral lyric (you can tell this because their meter is some­ times compressed as if it originally formed part of a lyric poem); the biographies from the Greek tradition of lament poetry” (ibid.).

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Oswald’s project is at once poetic and philological (she herself trained as a classicist), and reading it, one is struck by the im­ plicit theory of rhythm that emerges from it. In her afterword to Memorial, Eavan Boland speaks of the effect of the book’s format: “Each [name] comes with a nanosecond’s visibility, a camera flash of passionate lyric. For a brief moment—­too soon to know them, but long enough to mourn them—­we see these young men leaping, screaming, running forward into dust and confusion” (2011, 83). One gets a concrete sense of the effect cre­ ated by Oswald’s approach through her description of the epic’s very first death, that of Protesilaus (2:698–­710), the first Greek to land ashore in Troy: He died in mid-­air jumping to be first ashore There was his house half-­built His wife rushed out clawing her face Podarcus his altogether less impressive brother Took over command but that was long ago He’s been in the black earth now for thousands of years. (2011, 9)

This is a relatively close rewording of Homer’s own account of Protesilaus’s final moments and their aftermath, which likewise highlights the sudden, homicidal interruption of his leap from the ship to shore, from peace to war: “τὸν δ᾽ ἔκτανε Δάρδανος ἀνὴρ / νηὸς ἀποθρῴσκοντα πολὺ πρώτιστον Ἀχαιῶν” (But a Dardanian man / killed him leaping from his ship, the very first of the Achaeans). Here Homer (and Oswald after him) presents to the listener/reader a violent stoppage of flow—­through space and ontological status. The Trojan’s spear halts the forward prog­ ress of Protesilaus’s body while also tearing him from the world. This, I would argue, is as close to ruthmós (seen as enrhythment) as one gets in Homer: an opening death that closes the world, pushing everything—­Protesilaus, the Trojan, the ship, the sea, the spear, the sand—­down into the ash-­colored wet sand. The Trojan faces Protesilaus, impales him, ends him, and plunges ev­ erything around him into the sleepless night of war and lament.

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The war, the world, is over before it has begun, before we know it has happened. Also telling in Oswald’s anthology are the deaths of Imbrios (13:168–­82) and Amphimachos (13:185–­87) and the simile that fol­ lows them: Honorable Imbrios left his house in Pedaios And took lodgings in a drafty street in Troy He could have been a rich man He married Priam’s daughter Medesicaste But his marriage was a death warrant How can you kiss a rolling head Even Amphimachos died and he was a rarity A green-­eyed changeable man from Elis He was related to Poseidon You would think the sea could do something But it just lifted and flattened lifted and flattened Like a stone Stands by a grave and says nothing Like a stone Stands by a grave and says nothing (2011, 43)

Oswald removes much of the narrative context here (e.g., Im­ brios slain by Teucer, Amphimachos by Hektor), and the simile that she offers is not found in either episode of the Iliad. The focus rests on those left to mourn the deceased: first there is Me­ desicaste made a widow, and then there is a collective “you” left to question why Poseidon did nothing to save his own grandson. These are mourner’s questions, an attempt to reckon—­after the fact—­with what has been cut or interrupted. Given the verses by Archilochus with which I opened chap­ ter 1, it is anything but coincidental that Oswald (by means of Homer) underscores in these stanzas the formative, even defini­ tive, limits of human agency. She presents her reader with surprise over Poseidon’s inaction (“Even Amphimachos died”) and then bends this sensation into a silent abiding that borders on helpless­

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ness. As in Archilochus’s fragment on ruthmós, everything here revolves around what one is left to face, an event that cannot be altered, remedied, or even adequately comprehended. How does a bride kiss a rolling head? Why did the sea do nothing to save Amphimachos? There is no answer to these questions (beyond Poseidon’s own helplessness, available only to readers with knowl­ edge of Homer’s epic) and no real logic behind their occurrence. As Boland suggests, we cannot know these men; there is time (and power) only to mourn them. And so we grieve, and in the process, we come to recognize that it is precisely this suffering—­at once active and passive, or at least always already delimited—­that gives form to our lives. As in Archilochus’s fragment or all those mo­ ments of lamentation in Aeschylus’s Persians, we are able to do little but temper our response to experience and come to recognize the ruthmós that holds us all, even before this experience occurs. After narrating the deaths of Imbrios and Amphimachos, Oswald offers her reader a simile of silent abiding, one through which the living find themselves transformed into speechless, uncomprehending witnesses to violent death. They are like the stones that stand beside a grave and say (and do) nothing. This perhaps logically leads to the question of whether poetic mourn­ ing is an act of saying in any significant sense or not. Are we silent, after all, when we weep over the deaths of these young men? Do we not utter things? Do we not wail? Are we truly akin to silent stones when we mourn our dead? Is there no logic or definitive action in this? Here too, Oswald effectively channels ancient Greek notions of speech and logos. To get a better sense of what this means, it is worth turning from Oswald’s link to Archilochus to the connections between her account of rhythm and speech and that found in Aeschylus’s Persians. As I argued in chapter 1, much of Persians consists of per­ formed suffering on the part of the Persian characters, who are left to mourn both their dead and their new vulnerability to Athens. In Memorial Oswald does not reproduce or invoke the cacophonic howls of mourners at the end of their rope, but she does point to the same sort of primordial enrhythment. As in

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Persians, Oswald’s graveside stones are powerless to act, except insofar as they listen. This “listening” (and here I am referring once again to Voegelin’s idea) is at once a doing and a suffering, a move downward into a space in which the subject becomes—­ like a stone—­one more thing in the world. In these Homeric episodes and their linking simile, Oswald does not give the bes­ tial howl of loss one finds in Persians; however, she does situate this loss beyond the sphere of logos, as a befuddled questioning, a silent abiding, a rhythmic (in the conventional, Platonic sense) repetition. What is the effect of these three features? What is their internal logic? In some ways, we are like the “fish in the wind” offered up by Oswald in one of her many aquatic similes: it “jumps right out of its knowledge / and lands on the sand” (2011, 39). The difficulty one faces in trying to get to the bottom of these questions likely has little to do with Oswald’s conscious goals as a poet and more to do with what occurs when one en­ gages the Iliad (or any early Greek poetic work) in the commit­ ted way in which she does.21 In another episode that Oswald adapts from Homer’s poem, one finds Achilles killing Lykaon and then battling the River Sca­ mander. In the Iliad, the scene reads: Achilles drew his keen blade and struck [Lyacaon] by the collar-­ bone on his neck; he plunged his two-­edged sword into him to the very hilt, whereon he lay at full length on the ground, with the dark blood welling from him till the earth was soaked. Then Achilles caught him by the foot and flung him into the river to go down stream, vaunting over him the while, and saying, “Lie there among the fishes, who will lick the blood from your wound and gloat over it; your mother shall not lay you on any bier to mourn you, but the eddies of Skamandros shall bear you into the broad bosom of the sea. There shall the fishes feed on the fat of Lykaon as they dart under the dark ripple of the waters—­so perish all of you till we reach the citadel of strong Ilion—­you in flight, and I following af­ ter to destroy you. The river with its broad silver stream shall serve you in no stead, for all the bulls you offered him and all the horses that you flung living into his waters. None the less miserably shall

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you perish till there is not a man of you but has paid in full for the death of  Patroklos and the havoc you wrought among the Achaeans whom you have slain while I held aloof from battle.” (Homer 1898, book 21, vv. 114–­35)

In response to Achilles’s actions and promise of further blood­ shed curse, the river asks him to stop: “My fair waters are now filled with corpses, nor can I find any channel by which I may pour myself into the sea for I am choked with dead, and yet you go on mercilessly slaying. I am in despair, therefore, O leader of your host, trouble me no further” (Homer, 1898, book 21, vv. 220–­21). Achilles denies this request, and the river responds by attacking him directly, threatening to bury him under its crest­ ing waters. In the end, Hera calls in Hephaestus to beat the river back with fire and spare Achilles. As it begins to boil, Scamander acquiesces and promises never again to intervene in the war be­ tween the Greeks and Trojans. What does Oswald do with the episode from the Iliad ? True to her broader goal, she turns it into a scene of mourning, first establishing the context: “But Achilles killed so many men / Standing downstream with his rude sword / Hacking off heads until the water / Burst out in anger lifting up a ridge of waves / That now this whole river is a grave” (Oswald 2011, 67). She then moves on to describe the aftermath of all the death shov­ eled into the river: “Women at the washing pools / When they hear the river running / Crying like a human through its cham­ bers / They remember Thersilochus lying / In a quick-­moving never-­ending darkness / Between steep steps of echoing rocks” (ibid.). The relation between running water, and particularly the sound of running water, and the still pools where women bathe is significant. Here is flow and the stoppage of flow, and that point of stoppage or interruption is precisely the place of re­ membrance and mourning. Thersilochus no longer lies “between the rocks,” but the performative site of washing and mourning recreates him in that place, an eddy that reverses—­momentarily and ephemerally—­the human flow of the river. Death is not

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that stoppage, but in the hands of Oswald, Homer’s epic-­lyrical mourning of the dead is. Here, once again, is an early articula­ tion of rhythm that find its own remembrance (one that is no less performative and sensational) in Oswald’s poem. In this way, modern conceptions run back through Greek ones—­a conversa­ tion across time on rhythm—­performative, lyric, tragic.

Conclusions Ending with a focus on, or perhaps more accurately a pointing toward, the physical materiality of sound takes us once again back to the pre-­Socratics. One might rightly see this entire book as a preliminary and necessarily idiosyncratic account of the intersection of sound—­defined broadly as vibration, as embodied reverberations that not only arrive at the ear but also penetrate the body, even as they move out from the body, like sight, toward an object—­and poetics: a kind of auditory regime experienced and reproduced at the deepest human level, not as an external force, but as a reverberation between the world and us that constrains and gives form. In this sense, the present book links the modern to the premodern, showing the extent to which the ancient, the medieval, and, a fortiori, the early modern permeate our sense of the contemporary, as well as the future. If rhythm is a foundational and fundamental conceit of modernity, these theories of rhythm and auditory experience are also shaped by culture and a half-­buried genealogy that remains, as a kind of latent presence, within all of our conceptions of rhythm and our world. Following Christopher Okigbo once more, rhythm is both the urn and the native earth with which we fill it. The present volume is most explicitly about rhythm and (pre)modernity, and it takes rhythm (like sound itself ) as both a human universal and

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as a cultural construct, an achievement, a genre of experience and patience. A regime. And speaking in terms of regime leads perhaps inevitably to the intersection of the poetic and the sacred, the latter not necessarily conceived as metaphor. In the second chapter of the Book of Jonah, the eponymous prophet finds himself swallowed up by a large fish. Once inside, Jonah somehow overcomes his mortal fear long enough to offer up a song to God. Toward the end of it, he sings: “The waters compassed me about, even to the soul; the deep was round about me; the weeds were wrapped about my head. I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars closed upon me forever; yet hast Thou brought up my life from the pit, Oh Lord, my God” ( Jon. 2:6–­7). Setting aside the religious weight of Jonah’s song, it is worth examining these verses in light of their significance for a history of rhythm. Of particular interest is the deceptively straightforward phrase near the end of the passage cited above: “I went down to the bottoms of the mountains” (l-­kitsvi harim yaradti; Mamre 2016). The verse in Hebrew begins with a prepositional phrase (l-­kitsvi) that revolves around a plural form of the Hebrew noun ketsev. What does ketsev mean? In modern Hebrew it most commonly signifies “rhythm,” “rate,” or “tempo”; however, its meaning in biblical Hebrew would seem to suggest something quite different. Derived from the verbal root k-­ts-­v (to cut, chop, or shear), the noun ketsev originally meant “cut” (e.g., a cut of meat), “shape,” or “limit.”1 In 1 Kings 6:24–­25, for example, one finds a description of the two cherub statues located in the sanctuary of Solomon’s Temple: “And five cubits was the one wing of the cherub, and five cubits the other wing of the cherub; from the uttermost part of the one wing unto the uttermost part of the other were ten cubits. And the other cherub was ten cubits; both the cherubim were of one measure and one form.” In Hebrew, the phrase translated into English as “one measure and one form” is middah achat v’ketsev echad (Mamre 2016). In a literal sense, then, both statues were of the same size and shape, and it is the noun ketsev that is used to

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express “shape” or “form.” Again, in 1 Kings 7:37, we find a description of the bases for the ten metal lavers located in Solomon’s palace: “After this manner he made the ten bases; all of them had one casting, one measure, and one form” (kazot asah et eser ha-­mkonot; mutsak echad, middah achat, ketsev echad l-­kullahnah; Mamre 2016). In this passage, we once again find ketsev signifying the physical form, shape, or limits of an object. In these passages, the nominal form of k-­ts-­v suggests the result of an act of cutting or the place at which a particular cut is made. In the case of Jonah’s mountains, he is describing, one might say, his fall to the very lowest point on earth, to that bottommost edge at which high mountains have their dark, aqueous beginning. This is also, of course, a geological trope for Jonah’s own ignominious descent and subsequent rise to see once again the holy temple of God; however, what matters most for a discussion of rhythm is the broader sense that one might excavate from the noun ketsev. Turning back to the use of ketsev in relation to the cherubim of the Temple, we find a subtle, metaphoric shift from the quotidian notion of ketsev as “limit” or “cut” to its application within the aesthetic sphere. In this sense, ketsev could signify in biblical Hebrew both the bounded limits of matter and the shape or form of an object, such as a work of art. In the Talmud, ketsev likewise consistently signifies “shape,” “form,” or “extremity”; however, it also takes on the further metaphorical meaning of “law” or “decision,” giving the sense of a “question” or “matter” that has been decided or “given shape” ( Jastrow 1926, 1404). In the Jerusalem Talmud, for example, we find the phrase halachot ktsuvot, signifying “decided questions of law.” The shift here, at least within the domain of late-­antique Jewish scholarship, seems to have been from using ketsev to describe material objects (things that can be cut or delimited) to having it refer to immaterial matters (decisions, questions, and ideas). What remains constant in this shift, however, is that ketsev continues to refer to the form of something, whether a stone sculpture, food, or a question of law.

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During the modern period there occurred a more dramatic shift in the semantic range of ketsev. Put briefly, in using ketsev to signify “rhythm” or “pace,” the idea of form shifts from a concern with matter (and its limits) to an ordering of time (and temporality). In other words, whereas ketsev had previously referred to the form of objects in the world, it has since come to refer primarily to the form or “cut” of time. Sliced into units, time itself thus be­ comes a kind of halachah ktsuvah, a “settled [i.e., measured] matter” rather than an opening; and looked at diachronically, this metaphoric extension of material form or shape has apparently squeezed out the very aspect of materiality that had been at the center of the original term. Or, we might ask, has the older connection to materiality and form endured? Put another way, is there a meaningfully material, even morphological aspect to our understanding of rhythm in Hebrew? Does some piece of  Jonah’s mountains—­their undersea limits—­rest within our modern talk of time, pace, and rate? While the historical trajectory of ketsev is a complex one (it seems only to have come to signify rhythm in the nineteenth century, and largely through a conscious engagement by poets writing in Hebrew with Western literature), its early use corresponds in significant ways to that of ruthmós, the ancient Greek noun from which is derived the English term “rhythm” (as well as the modern Hebrew ritmus, an alternative to ketsev). This is not necessarily a matter of common sources or some form of cultural influence, though of course one cannot rule out such pos­­ sibilities. What is perhaps most striking here is the idea of ketsev as a form or cut—­something akin to the Spanish talla—­extended poetically in the Book of  Jonah to the very depths of a spiritual and geographic abyss. Here ketsev signifies a boundary or limit, beyond which one cannot even imagine. Is this a space or a time? Is it before or after? Nearer to us than experience or beyond it? We return once again to the fragment by Archilochus that kicks off the first chapter of this book. He calls on his spirit to know, knowing full well—­as Paul Celan did, according to an older, perhaps less dogmatic Emmanuel Levinas—­that such knowledge is

Conclusions 165

only an act of giving (though not giving up). Rhythm is a grasping of hands, to be sure, but it is by no means egalitarian. It strips us of power and jouissance, bringing us into order. And to fight it is as illogical as Jonah’s fighting the sea, for it has always already occurred and has always already formed us.

Acknowledgments This book has benefited from the help and support of a great number of people. I was initially moved to write a book on rhythm, or at least to begin developing a more concrete sense of the term’s potential meanings, through conversations with my colleague and friend Marília Librandi. Her sophisticated approach to literature and commitment to following philosophical questions wherever they may lead continue to be a source of inspiration. Also important at the early stages of the project were conversations with some of my colleagues at Stanford University: Dominic Brookshaw, Amir Eshel, Monika Greenleaf, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, and Joan Ramon Resina. They supported my (then largely amorphous) research project, tolerated my naive questions, and encouraged me to keep digging. It is impossible to overestimate the importance of such early enthusiasm and understanding, especially from one’s campus colleagues; without it, I likely would have written no more than a few scattered notes before moving on to something less difficult. Just as this project was beginning to take shape, I was fortunate enough to be awarded a yearlong fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center. The daily conversations at the center, the time to focus on my work, and the chance to present my ideas as they developed made this one of the best and most productive

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Acknowledgments

years of my professional career. I’m especially grateful to Caroline Winterer, the center’s director in 2013–­14, and all the fellows who so generously shared their ideas and opinions during that decisive and truly enjoyable year. As the different chapters of this book were inching toward completion, I was able to present them in several different settings. For their kind invitations to present my work-­in-­progress, I’m grateful to Mia Mochizuki at New York University Abu Dhabi; Michael Wyatt and the entire staff at Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti in Florence; João Figueiredo and Miguel Tamen at the Programa em Teoria da Literatura da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa; the organizers of the 2014 Kaleidoscope Conference at the University of  Wisconsin–­Madison; Catarina Fouto at King’s College London; Zoltán Biedermann at Uni­ versity College London; the organizers of the 2015 Discourses of Belonging in Hispanic and Lusophone Literatures conference at the University of  Minnesota Twin Cities; Josiah Blackmore at Harvard University; the organizers of the Poetics Reading Group at Stanford University; Duarte Pinheiro and the Program in Portuguese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley; the organizers of the 2016 Crossing the Line conference at the University of California, Davis; Enrique García Santo-­Tomás and Cristina Moreiras at the University of Michigan–­Ann Arbor; Frederick de Armas, Robert L. Kendrick, and Justin Steinberg at the University of Chicago; and Simon Park and Phillip Rothwell at the University of Oxford. For allowing me to present here work published in earlier form, I wish to thank Rowman & Littlefield Publishers for portions of chapter 3, which appeared as “The Births of Rhythm: John Dewey and Aesthetic Form,” in Repetition, Recurrence, Returns: How Cultural Renewal Works, edited by Joan Ramon Resina (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019). A section of this book’s conclusion was also taken from an article of mine published in a special issue of the journal Dibur devoted to form as “Rhythm as Form,” Dibur 2 (2016), edited by Vered Karti Shemtov and Anat Weisman (arcade.stanford.edu/dibur/rhythm-­form-­0).

Acknowledgments

I have also benefited (once again) from the tremendous efforts and interest shown to this book by Randolph Petilos and the staff of the University of Chicago Press. Their hard work, along with the careful, generous reading given to the manuscript by two outside readers, has helped to make this book a much more readable, coherent piece of scholarship. I am also grateful to Barbara Norton and Marta Steele, whose careful copy editing and thoughtful corrections saved me much embarrassment. I have made every effort to incorporate their many suggestions and insights into the final version. Any errors that may remain are, of course, completely my own. I need to thank all of the friends and family who helped me in different ways. Jesús Rodríguez-­Velasco has consistently pushed me to be better since our first meeting over a decade ago, and I truly miss the wide-­ranging conversations we had while he was here on the West Coast. Also greatly missed is Dominic Brookshaw, who taught me more about Persian literature and poetry in general in his short time at Stanford than I could have managed on my own in two lifetimes. My collaboration with Marília Librandi during her time at Stanford altered my career in innumerable ways, and I look forward to further such work even though we no longer have offices in the same building. I am also grateful to Enrique García Santo-­Tomás, who trusted me to translate his excellent book on early modern optics and who has since become a close friend. Professional friendships with Stanford colleagues Thoraya Boumehdi, Robert Harrison, Marie Huber, Alexander Key, Joshua Landy, Lea Pao, Richard Roberts, Vered Shemtov, and Marie-­Pierre Ulloa have also proven invaluable. Thanks also to Laura Hubbard and everyone at the Stanford Center for African Studies for their support and continued collaboration. To my friends and accomplices at the American Portuguese Studies Association, I can only express my gratitude and humility for letting me have a say in things. Fernando Arenas, Sophia Beal, Ana Paula Ferreira, Anna Klobucka, Jeremy Lehnen, Leila Lehnen, Pedro Meira Monteiro, Victor Mendes, Robert Newcomb, Rex Nielson, Ricardo Vasconcelos, and Estela Vieira have been wonderful

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Acknowledgments

friends and inspiring colleagues. In Brazil, I’m grateful for the continued friendship of Sérgio Bairón, Fernando Céspedes, João Adolfo Hansen, Marcelo Jasmin, Alcir Pécora, Jamille Pinheiro, and Marcelo Rangel. I also wish to give special thanks to my Italo-­Brazilian partner in crime, Luca Bacchini; I couldn’t find a better collaborator for all our shared interests that cut across Italy, Portugal, and the Atlantic. In Portugal, it’s as much a matter of family as it is work. Abel Barros Baptista, Michael Baum, Humberto Brito, João Figueiredo, Ana Maria Martinho, Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, Clara Rowland, Miguel Tamen, and Richard Zenith have all contributed enormously to my thinking in this book, as well as to my sense of belonging in the world. To my wife, Laura, I can only begin to express my thanks for her patience, love, and support over the past two decades. She’s made enormous sacrifices for this book, and I’ll spend the next several years (Deus volens) trying to make it up to her. Nothing in life has enrhythmed me as she has, and I thank heaven for the form she has given me. I also owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to our daughters, Mónica and Carolina, who spent so much time over the past five years watching their dad sit more or less silently in front of a laptop. I do most of my writing at home, and this is because I need them close in order to have any thoughts at all. They are the world we made, now making us in turn. This book is dedicated to Carolina, who is sick of always having to defer to her big sister in things that matter. But yes, I love them both equally (infinitely), and everything I write, no matter how thin or academically dry it may be, is my gift to them. Someday, I’m well aware, such gifts are all they’ll have left of their father. It’s necessary also to thank all my colleagues in the Departments of  Iberian and Latin American Cultures and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. I couldn’t ask for better teammates, and it has been both a pleasure and an honor to write this book while working with them. Much of what is contained here has come directly from discussions with students, and I wish to thank them all for sharing their ideas with me and for listening to me on occasion. I’m especially indebted to Boris Shoshi-

Acknowledgments

taishvili, who read an early draft of chapter 1, and to Lorenzo Bartolucci, Leonardo Grão Velloso, Daniel Hernández, Thomas McDonald, George Rosa-­Acosta, Juan Esteban Plaza Parrochia, Ami Schiess, Nelson Schumacher Endebo, Romina Wainberg, and Callie Ward for their keen interest and thoughtful suggestions. Aí tem e estou tod[o] a chorar.

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Notes preface

1. On the historical differences between English and Portuguese mod­ ernism in light of the latter’s semi-­peripherality, see Santos (2002). 2. For an account of the connections between empire and Portu­ guese literature, see Catz (1992), Figueiredo (2003), and Gil (2009a). 3. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 4. These ideas find preliminary expression in Gumbrecht (1994). chapter one

1. Geoffrey S. Kirk and John E. Raven summarize these ideas as fol­ lows: “Leucippus and his associate Democritus hold that the elements are the full and the void; they call them being and not-­being respec­ tively. Being is full and solid, not-­being is void and rare. Since the void exists no less than body, it follows that not-­being exists no less than being. The two together are the material causes of existing things. And just as those who make the underlying substance one generate other things by its mod­ifications, and postulate rarefaction and condensation as the or­ igin of such modifications, in the same way these men too say that the differences in atoms are the causes of other things. They hold that these differences are three—­shape, arrangement, and position; being, they say, differs only in ‘rhythm, touching and turning,’ of  which ‘rhythm’ is shape [form], ‘touching’ is arrangement, and ‘turning’ is position” (1957, 406–­7).

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Notes to Pages 11–19

2. Diogenes Laertius also has much to say about Heraclitus’s strange death. Suffering from some form of edema, Heraclitus first consulted with doctors before administering an ill-­advised and disastrous course of treatment: “Hermippus says that his question to the doctors was if anyone can reduce the entrails and draw off the moisture; when they said ‘no’ he placed himself in the sun and told the children to cake him with manure; thus being stretched out he died on the second day and was buried in the market-­place. Neanthes of Cyzicus says that being unable to break off the manure he remained, and not being recognized because of the change he was devoured by dogs” (Laertius 1925, 411–­13). 3. For more on Heraclitus’s philosophy and its impact on later Greek thought, see Popper (2013, 10–­16) and Sauvanet (1999, 22–­38). 4. For more on the notion of measure in Heraclitus, see Geldard (2000, 70–­71), Kahn (1981), and Spariosu (1991, 63–­67). 5. It is worth mentioning here the theory, advanced by Herington (1970), Griffith (2007), and West (1979), among others, that Aeschylus was not the author of Prometheus Bound. This idea, far from conclusive, is based on stylistic analysis and the belief that Aeschylus was too con­ sistently reverent in his treatment of Zeus to have written anything that so openly presented him as cruel and unjust. Whether Aeschylus wrote Prometheus Bound or not is of little consequence to the present book, given that all scholars agree that the play is a work written during the fifth century BCE. For more on this, see Irby-­Massie (2008). 6. Over seventy years since the first publication of Hamilton’s text (as a high school student in the early 1980s, I was given the 1981 Penguin edition, and I still have vivid memories of reading this handy pocket edition during school assemblies and day trips to the beach), one still marvels at the clarity with which she writes of myths that seem to be tangled and intractable almost by design. Only brief theoretical depar­ tures such as the following serve to date the text and give contemporary readers pause: “Of course the Greeks too had their roots in the primeval slime. Of course they too once lived a savage life, ugly and brutal. But what the myths show is how high they had risen above the ancient filth and fierceness by the time we have any knowledge of them. Only a few traces of that time are to be found in the stories” (1942, 4–­7). 7. In “Poetically Man Dwells. . . .” Heidegger addresses “building” directly: “Poetry is what really lets us dwell. But through what do we at­ tain to a dwelling place? Through building. Poetic creation, which lets

Notes to Pages 20–46 175

us dwell, is a kind of  building” (1971, 213). The link between Hölderlin’s “dwelling” and Heidegger’s understanding of “building” depends di­ rectly upon questions of form in the pre-­Socratic sense. See also Nowell­Smith (2012). 8. For more on context and the entailing effects of deictic reference, see Hanks (1992 and 1999). 9. On “footing,” see Goffman (1981, 124–­59). 10. Avery has likewise pointed out that Xerxes’s speech in the play moves from “utter despair” to “communal sorrow” (1964, 182). For more on the idea of presence and the limits of meaning, see Gumbrecht (2003). 11. For more on the dead in Persians, see Ebbott (2000). 12. I wish to thank my colleague Monika Greenleaf for bringing Hočevar’s book to my attention. chapter two

1. For a detailed account of this edition, see Hue (2011b). 2. In line with this ambivalence, it is worth noting that Sidney himself composed a small number of quantitative verses in English, though these were in essence experiments that received little uptake (Weiner 1986, 213). 3. Such usage was in keeping with standard understandings of the term in France from at least the fourteenth century (Willett 2004). Ni­ cole Oresme (1320?–­1382), for example, speaks directly to understand­ ings of rhythm and rhyme in medieval France within a short com­ mentary on his translation of Aristotle’s Ethics: “[Aristote] ne prent pas rimes, ainsi comme l’en use communément en françois de ce mot; il entent par rime toute mesure convenable de sillebes ou de sons” ([Ar­ istotle] doesn’t take rimes to mean what this word commonly means in French; he understands by rime all suitable measure of syllables and sounds; Meunier 1857, 198–­99). In this passage, Oresme has translated the Latin rhythmus as rime, essentially converting rime and rythme into doublets in Middle French, whether this was, in etymological terms, truly the case or not. For more on the question of rhythme and rime as doublets in Middle French, see Menut (1922). 4. “Lima” here refers to the river that flows through northern Por­ tugal and Galicia. 5. Even Camões’s epic, Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads, 1572), found itself under intense Inquisitional scrutiny: if the first edition was published

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Notes to Pages 46–58

with only written warnings from Bartolomeu Ferreira that its readers not confuse matters of pagan mythology with Christian theology, the 1584 edition found itself greatly altered and even abridged (“mutilated” is the word that Portuguese scholars tend to employ) before Ferreira permitted its publication. In such a context, it is perhaps not surprising that the first print editions of poetry by major Portuguese lyric poets such as Francisco de Sá de Miranda and António Ferreira were likewise published as late as 1595 and 1598 respectively, although both had by then been dead for several decades. This of course did not stop the ac­ tive circulation of manuscript copies and even clandestine publications in Lisbon and elsewhere. For more on this, see Rodrigues (1980). 6. For more on the culture of censorship in Portugal during the early modern period, see Saraiva (1962, 158–­68) and Rodrigues (1980, 11–­40). 7. See also Dessons and Meschonnic (2008, 11–­12). 8. As Hue reports, “He was still alive in 1616, as the bookseller Do­ mingos Fernandes refers to him [then] in a prologue as an attorney active in the court” (2011, 909). 9. The title of the anthology is Relaçam do solemne recebimento que se fez em Lisboa às santas relíquias que se levaram à Igreja de S. Roque da Companhia de Jesus aos 25 de janeiro 1588 (Relation of the Solemn Reception That Was Carried Out in Lisbon for the Relics That Were Brought to the Church of São Roque of the Company of Jesus on 25 January 1588). 10. The sonnet begins: “Amor por vossa amor me açouta e pinga” (Love, for your love, whips and tortures me). 11. The poem begins: “Despojos tristes de um contentamento” (Sad victims of a contentment). 12. The sonnet begins: “Quando de ambos os céos cahindo estava” (When I was falling from both heavens). 13. The sonnet begins: “Formosos olhos, onde o amor descança” (Beautiful eyes, where love rests). 14. The poem begins: “Ah, que del-­rei, que morreu / o Nosso Pero dos Reis” (Ah, what of the king, for our Pedro dos Reis has died). 15. This text is also listed as number 18 in Castelo Branco’s 1868 edition. 16. This elegy begins, “Aqui neste deserto secco e pobre” (Here, in this dry and barren desert). 17. For more on this, see Hue (2011, 909). 18. The entire poem reads as follows:

Notes to Page 58 177

Aqui, neste deserto secco e pobre, só de medonhos monstros habitado, que a morte triste em sua sombra cobre, Nesta imagem de bruto transformado, Por mão da consciencia vingadora Sou, todos os momentos, castigado. E, se levanto as azas, alguma hora, ao céo, que nunca cessa de chamar-­me, por ver se minha sorte se melhora, Ainda bem não tento levantar-­me, quando outra vez me abaixa o grave pezo de que eu tão sem razão quiz carregar-­me. E, se quero fugir, logo, em despreso da minha mal perdida liberdade, pelos cabellos fico outra vez preso. Lembra-­me a minha prodigalidade com que debaratei tanta riqueza nos jardins encantados da vaidade! E, quando agora a força da pobreza entre brutos me offrece mantimento, sei que metto em affronta a natureza. Lembra-­me aquelle ousado pensamento que, como Joroboão, se alevantou contra o throno real do intendimento; E tanto que por rei se corou, como idolos em alto levantados, os seus proprios conceitos adorou. Lembra-­me aquelles barbaros cuidados que com profanos fogos abrasaram os edificios para o céo lavrados. E, depois que ao sanctuario a luz tiraram, como Naburzadão com sua gente os propósitos santos profanaram.

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Lembra-­me o juizo vão que ousadamente os segredos do céo saber queria também como Saul desobediente. Até que, em tantos dias, veio um dia, que lhe poz a cabeça pendurada onde sua soberba merecia. Lembra-­me a feição mal empregada que entre apetites máos ficou por terra qual outra Jesabel despedaçada. Mas é tal o veneno que se encerra nestes pedaços que ficaram d’ella, que assim despedaçada me faz guerra. Lembra-­me sobre tudo a nobre estrella que co’ divino lume resplandece nesta alma que algum tempo foi tão bella. E, se por mercê sua o céo quizesse que este lume, de lá favorecido, n’outro lume de amor se convertesse, quão prestes fôra n’elle consummido este profano altar, onde amor cego com tantos sacrificios foi servido! E, postos meus desejos em socêgo, o rebelde estandarte recolhêra, que eu tantas vezes contra o céo desprego! Bem sei que, ao contrario, mereceram minhas desordens que com tal soltura no caminho da morte se perderam; mas vós, Senhor do céo, que a formusura do vosso rico amor communicastes tão largamente a toda a creatura, obrai agora em mim o que obrastes quando, entre gente tão desconhecida, tantos raios d’amor manifestastes.

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Que eu sou aquelle Lasaro sem vida, que a graça, que por graça esta alma tinha, com tanto damno meu tenho perdida. E, posto que faltei quando convinha, vossa misericordia é tão immensa que não póde encurtal-­a a falta minha. Sou aquelle leproso, onde a detença de tantas culpas tão contagiosas só, como exemplo seu, faz tanta offensa; culpas de cada vez mais perigosas; pois o mesmo uso máo, que m’as sustenta só, pelas não deixar, m’as faz formosas. Sou o mudo, o cego . . . O céo se representa rico de preço para libertar-­me deste cruel senhor que me atormenta. Mas o ‘spirito, que houvera de ajudar-­me, de sorte neste carcere immudece que não sabe pedir-­lh’o, e resgatar-­me. Sou aquelle doente, que perece, paralitico, já desconfiado, de quem o mundo seu também se esquece. E, se por vós não fôr remediado, esta fé, que assim sêcca está, comigo irá também por preza do peccado. Sou o cego que, apoz o mal que sigo, os mal guiados passos tão mal rejo que de um perigo vou n’outro perigo; E por-­me tantas nevoas o desejo na luz, com que a alma innobrecestes, que a mim mesmo me busco e não me vejo. Vós que os remedios todos nos posestes nesta cruz onde a gloria se conquista, dar-­me della podeis, como já destes,

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vida, limpeza, falla, força e vista! (Soropita 1868, 147–­54) [Here, in this dry and barren desert, inhabited only by fearsome monsters, and covered by the shadow of sorrowful death, into this image of unreason transformed through the hand of vengeful conscience, I am at every moment punished. And, if at times I raise my wings to heaven, which never ceases to call me, to see if my situation has improved, as soon as I try to raise myself up I’m pushed down by the heavy weight that I foolishly chose to carry. If I try to escape, I’m held by the hair in disdain for my poorly lost freedom, and I am once again a prisoner. I’m reminded of the prodigality with which I wasted so much wealth in the enchanted gardens of vanity! And now, when the force of poverty offers me sustenance among beasts, I know that I am offending nature. I’m reminded of that proud thought that, like Jeroboam, rose up against the royal throne of understanding; and as it was crowned a king, like idols raised up high it came to adore its own conceits. I’m reminded of those barbarous desires that with profane fires scorched the buildings built up toward heaven.

Notes to Page 58 181

And after they took the light from the sanctuary, like Nebuchadnezzar and his men they profaned its holy purposes. I’m reminded of the vain idea that proudly sought the secrets of heaven just as disobedient Saul had once done. Until, after some time, there came a day when his head was made to hang down where his swollen pride merited. I’m reminded of my misused mien, which fell down among wicked appetites, like another Jezebel torn to shreds. But such is the venom enclosed in those pieces that remained of it, that even in shreds it tortures me still. I’m reminded, above all, of the noble star that with divine fire radiates in this soul that was once so beautiful. And if through mercy heaven should wish that this flame, so favored by it, be converted into a flame of love, how quickly would this profane altar, where blind love with so many sacrifices was served, be consumed in it! And with my desires so quieted, I’d roll up the rebel standard, which I frequently unfurl against heaven! I know well that, on the contrary, my faults deserve only to be lost without further thought on the path of death; but may You, Lord of heaven, the beauty of whose rich love you expressed far and wide to every living creature,

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work now in me that which you did when, among unknown peoples, You manifested so many rays of love. For I am that lifeless Lazarus, deprived of the grace my soul once had, after having done so much self-­harm. And though I failed when it suited me, Your mercy is so immense that my shortcomings cannot diminish it. I’m that leper, in whom the lingering of so many contagious faults alone, as an example, so offends; faults each time more dangerous; since they are sustained in repetition and so have become to me more beautiful. I’m the mute, the blind man . . . Heaven appears with all the wealth to free me from this cruel master who torments me. But my spirit, which should help me, only falls mute in this prison and doesn’t ask for help or rescue. I’m that sick man who dies, paralyzed, hopeless, a person forgotten also by his world. And if this is not resolved by You, my faith, which is also withered, will go with me held captive by sin. I’m the blind man who follows evil and lets his poorly guided and errant steps go from one danger to another. And desire places so many clouds before the light by which you ennobled my soul, that I search for myself but do not find me.

Notes to Pages 63–67 183

You who put all of our remedies on this cross of ultimate glory, can give to me, as You once did, life, purity, speech, force, and sight!] 19. In English, the passage from Diomedes that Fitzhugh cites reads: “Meter is a combination of feet that is finite in number. That is, meter is the combination of feet arranged in a bounded set that pre­ serves the syllable count.” 20. The quote from Virgil, “Numeros memini si verba tenerem,” comes from his ninth eclogue. 21. For more on Augustine’s De musica, see Brennan (1988), Bower (2008), Crossley (1951), Knight (1949), Marzi (1969), and Perl and Kriegsman (1955). 22. For more on the context of Perotti’s project, see Grafton (1983, 1–­17). 23. On Varchi’s decision to refer specifically to the dialect of Flor­ ence (rather than Tuscany), it is useful to consider the following passage from L’Ercolano: cesare: Dunque dicono il vero coloro che affermano, la lingua Fio­ren­

tina essere e Toscana, e Italiana. varchi: Il vero. cesare: Perché dunque volete voi che ella si chiami Fiorentina? varchi: Perché ella è; e l’inganno sta che le cose si debbono chiamare

principalmente dagl’individui, e essi le chiamano dalle spezie, e da’ generi, come chi chiamasse voi o uomo, o animale, e non Conte Cesare, come propriamente doverebbe. (1846, 171) [cesare: Then those who affirm that the Florentine, Tuscan, and Italian languages are one and the same thing are correct. varchi: That’s true. cesare: So why do you wish it to be called Florentine? varchi: Because that’s what it is. The error resides in the fact that things should be called by their specific names, and not according to their species or genus; it is as if someone called you man or animal, rather than Count Cesare, as they should.] 24. It is worth noting Varchi’s previous (incomplete) texts on the Tuscan dialect: Alfabeto bastante a sprimere tutti gli elementi e suoni della

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Notes to Pages 70–81

lingua toscana, o vero fiorentina (Alphabet Sufficient to Express All the Ele­ ments and Sounds of the Tuscan or Florentine Language) and Gramatica toscana (Tuscan Grammar). For more on these, see Sorella (1995, 63). 25. For more on Lusitano’s career and importance as a musical in­ novator during the late Renaissance, see Stevenson (1962). 26. Marnoto writes: “Em 1594, sao impressas as Várias rimas ao Bom Jesus de Diogo Bemardes. No ano seguinte, a primeira edição das Rhythmas de Camões e as Obras de Sá de Miranda. Em 1596, O Lima e, em 1597, as Rimas várias. Flores do Lima de Diogo Bernardes. Em 1598, a segunda edição das Rimas de Camões e os Poemas lusitanos” (2007, 31). 27. As for the rest, esparsas are normally melancholic single-­stanza poems, adapted from troubadour lyric, of anywhere from eight to six­ teen verses; motes are motifs or refrains that can serve as the basis for longer compositions; and grosas or glosas are songs in which each stanza ends with one of the verses of a given mote. 28. Worth noting is Xavier da Cunha’s book-­length study of Camões’s poem (1893), in which he argues strenuously that the poet had an af­ fair with a Goan woman. His reasoning is explicitly racist: “ ‘Pretos os cabelos’!—­note-­se bem. Nunca ninguem tal disse da immaranhada car­ apinha de uma africana! E seria então lícito admittir que um adorador do loiro, como Camões se prezava de confessar-­se a cada passo, viesse pôr em relevo, ante o ‘aureo crino’ do seu constante amor, o horroroso topete de uma horrorosissima ethiope?” (“Her hair is black”!—­take note of this. Never did anyone say such a thing about the tangled, kinky hair of an African woman! And would it make sense to suggest that a lover of blondes, as Camões repeatedly professed himself to be, should highlight, before the “golden tresses” of his constant love, the horrific tuft of a hid­ eous black woman?; 1893, 152). 29. For music in the Portuguese empire, see Coelho (2005). 30. For a contextualized sense of these (politico-­theological) perver­ sions and paradoxes, see Marcocci (2014). 31. Serious critical accounts of the Adamastor episode begin (and in some ways still end) with Manuel de Faria e Sousa’s 1639 edition of Os Lusíadas, which includes extensive commentary. 32. Key works include Bernardes (1988), Blackmore (2009), Castro (2008), Ramalho (1975), Saraiva (1991), and Vieira (1987). 33. David Quint has offered perhaps the best-­known articulation of this reading: “Following a typical Renaissance literary practice of imi­ tative contaminatio, Camões has combined all the classical representa­

Notes to Pages 82–84 185

tions of Polyphemus into his mythical figure. In doing so he has also managed to capture something of Dido’s spurned love and irrationality in Adamastor, for Virgil’s queen is depicted as a kind of Cyclops in love. Ovid, in fact, remembering how the frenzied Dido became an­ other Polyphemus, makes his enamored Polyphemus, as he turns upon Galatea’s lover Acis (13.865–­66), echo Dido’s vindictive speech (4.600–­ 601) seven lines before it turns into her great curse. Thus Dido and Polyphemus had achieved a kind of reciprocity—­between monstrous passion and passionate monster—­in the classical literary tradition that informs Camões’s fiction. Dido’s presence can also be felt in the fu­ ture orientation and historical concreteness of Adamastor’s prophecy. Polyphemus cursed Odysseus alone, but, like Dido, Adamastor directs his words not so much against the epic hero as against his imperialist successors” (1993, 115). Quint goes on to read the Adamastor episode as an attempt on Camões’s part to “submerge” both the voice of native Africans and the classical topos of the “epic curse,” reducing these to a string of diffuse atmospheric disturbances: “We have seen that the curse typically lends the epic loser something of an autonomous voice and identity. But here it issues from a giant cloud rather than a human agent. Its characteristic prophecy of a future history of resistance that may unsettle the political dominance and closed histories of the victors turns into a weather forecast” (ibid., 124). And insofar as Adamastor becomes little more than a monstrous and brumal image of the Por­ tuguese themselves, Quint argues, the former’s curse on Gama and his successors paradoxically finds itself appropriated by the ideologies of the Portuguese and put to work within the perverse logic of their em­ pire (ibid.). 34. For more on the history of the Khoekhoen, see Boonzaier, Mal­ herbe, Berens, and Smith (1996), Raven-­Hart (1967), and Sadr (2008). 35. Velho’s Roteiro existed in manuscript form until 1838, when Di­ ogo Köpke and António da Costa Paiva edited a print edition pub­ lished in Porto. 36. According to Dellinger (2008), each of Gama’s ships, the São Ga­ briel and the São Rafael, was outfitted with ten pieces of artillery. On the construction of these ships, Ames writes: “The two ships [ . . . ] were sturdier, heavier vessels called naus. They had three masts; the fore and main rigged with square sails, and mizzen or rear rigged with a triangular or lateen sail to facilitate maneuverability.  These ships were perhaps 100–­120 fifteenth-­century tons, and seventy-­five to eighty-­five

186

Notes to Pages 84–118

feet long, they had a flat bottom with a high square stern and bow, which could be used as a fourth mast rigged with a square spritsail. The bowsprits carried a carved wooden figurehead of the ship’s patron, and their sails the Red Cross of the Order of Christ. The hold was divided into three compartments: the rear for powder, shot, firearms and other weapons, the middle for water casks, extra cable and riggings, and the forward for food and other spare equipment. The ships had two decks, with the lower one, like the hold, divided into three compartments for more provisions, trading goods and gifts for the peoples they encoun­ tered. Boards were also attached near the waterline to reduce rolling and pitching in heavy seas. These naus had a larger draft and were slower than caravels but da Gama and his crews would gain in available space, comfort and overall seaworthiness on the voyage which awaited them” (2009, 11). 37. Immediately after constructing both the cross and the padrão, the members of Gama’s fleet saw a small group of Khoekhoe tear them both down: “E à quinta-­feira seguinte [Dezembro 7], estando nós para partir dita angra, vimos obra de 10 ou 12 negros, os quais, antes que nós dali partíssemos, derrubaram assim a cruz como o padrão.” 38. For more on the intersection of language/literature and empire in Barros, see Barletta (2013). 39. On “oaten flutes” and the pastoral, see Poggioli (1975) and Welch (1911, 279–­81). chapter three

1. For a detailed account of Nietzsche’s understanding of classical meter, see Halporn (1967). 2. For a musicological account of the historical development of  “Af­ rican rhythm,” see Agawu (1995). 3. For an interesting take on “mediating means,” see Wertsch (1998). On Dewey’s notion of art as experiential process, see Kruse (2007). 4. The quote is from Senghor (1956, 60). 5. For more on Okigbo, his life, and his poetry, see Nwoga (1984), Esonwanne (2000), Nwakanma (2010), Okafor (1998), and Anozie (1972). 6. For an account of Okigbo’s composition of  “Lament of the Silent Sisters” and his attempts to publish the long poem, see Echeruo (2004). For more on Okigbo’s marginalization within African letters, see Chin­ weizu and Madubuike (1980).

Notes to Pages 120–135 187

7. The most widely spoken indigenous language in Mozambique is Makhuwa, with over three million speakers in the north. The country has about 2.5 million native speakers of Portuguese, mostly in urban centers such as Maputo (pop. 1.2 million). 8. See, for example, Oyebade (2007). 9. For more on the xigubo and its connections to Ronga culture, see Junod (1897, 53–­66). 10. For more on Craveirinha’s poetry and its links to African music and dance, see Firmino (1995). 11. The first published anthology of Sousa’s poetry did not appear until 2001 (Sangue negro), and her work has not been the object of much systematic analysis. Selected poems have appeared in anthologies of African and Luso-­African poetry, and her importance for the develop­ ment of Mozambican literature during the period just before indepen­ dence is incontestable; however, her work has attracted relatively scant critical attention. In her 2005 monograph on poetry in Angola and Mozambique, for example, Rita Chaves only mentions Sousa twice in passing, while devoting much of her book to Craveirinha. For a notable exception, see Owen (2007). 12. Not incidentally, Holiday would express something analogous in her own autobiography, speaking of performance and the racism she encountered when she toured with Artie Shaw in the late 1930s: “When I was with Artie Shaw, I went to a place where we were sup­ posed to play a dance and they wouldn’t even let me in the place. [ . . . ] When I finally did get in, I played that first set, trying to keep from cry­ ing. Man, when you’re on stage, you’re great, but as soon as you come off, you’re nothing” ( Jones 1997, 95). 13. The Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique served in France as an important forum, even in its precipitous postwar decline, for broadly humanistic and interdisciplinary inquiries into human mental processes, and under Meyerson’s direction it also served as a preemi­ nent venue for research focused on historical psychology, a field tightly associated with Meyerson himself. For more on Meyerson, the Jour­ nal de psychologie normale et pathologique, and the place of both within French psychology during the first half of the twentieth century, see Parot (2000). 14. For a subtle reworking of Benveniste’s etymology, see also Serres (1977, 190) and Sauvanet (1999, 18).

188

Notes to Pages 138–143

15. Jaeger argues: “We must not be misled by his words into thinking that Archilochus’ rhythm is a flux—­although the modern idea of rhythm is something which flows, and some derive the word itself from ῥέω ‘to flow.’ The history of the word warns us against that interpretation. Its application to the movement of music and the dance (from which we derive our word) was secondary, and somewhat concealed the primary meaning. We must first inquire what the Greeks took to be the essence of dancing and music; and that is clearly shown by the primary mean­ ing, which appears in Archilochus’ lines. If rhythm ‘holds’ mankind—­I translated it ‘holds in bonds’—­it cannot be a flux. We must rather think of Prometheus in Aeschylus’ tragedy, who is chained immovably in iron fetters; he says, ‘I am bound here in this “rhythm” ’; and of Xerxes, of whom Aeschylus says that he chained the current of the Hellespont, and ‘changed to another form (“rhythm”)’ the watery way across it: that is, he transformed the waterway into a bridge, and bound the current in strong bonds.” Rhythm then is that which imposes bonds on movement and confines the flux of things: just as it is in Archilochus. Democritus too speaks in the true old sense of the rhythm of atoms, by which he means not their movement but their pattern—­or as Aristotle perfectly translates it, their schema. That is the interpretation which the ancient commentators correctly give for Aeschylus’ words. Obviously when the Greeks speak of the rhythm of a building or a statue, it is not a metaphor transferred from musical language; and the original conception which lies beneath the Greek discovery of rhythm in music and dancing is not flow but pause, the steady limitation of movement” (1986, 1:126). 16. Fernando Pessoa would also allude to this notion in his “Essay on Heraclitus,” in which he speaks very directly about the “reversible in the irreversible”: “A vida é a morte. A vida do todo depende da morte de mil células” (Life is death. The life of the whole depends on the death of a thousand cells; Pessoa 2012, 120). 17. For an account of the immediate impact of Blanchot’s “fragmen­ tary” book, see Morot-­Sir (1981). 18. To explore the question of rhythm in Levinas’s philosophy, it is useful to sketch out a general sense of his intellectual trajectory. Born in Kaunas, Lithuania, to a middle-­class Jewish family, Levinas first at­ tended a secular Russian-­language school before enrolling in a Jewish gymnasium. Upon graduating, Levinas moved to Strasbourg in 1923 to undertake university study in philosophy, and it was here that he began his lifelong friendship with his fellow student Maurice Blanchot. Upon

Notes to Page 143 189

graduation, he began a long-­term course of study on Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations, 1900), a move that brought him to Freiburg in 1928 to take seminars with Husserl himself. It is here that he also attended lectures by the young Martin Heidegger, whose “genius” Levinas proclaimed as early as 1932 in his short essay “Martin Heidegger et l’ontologie” (Martin Heidegger and Ontology). Levinas earned his Ph.D. from Strasbourg in 1929, with a thesis on intuition in Husserl’s Logical Investigations. He would take French citi­ zenship the following year and marry Raisa Levi, whom he had met in Kaunas. Having never studied Greek, he was unable to obtain the agré­ gation in philosophy and so was unable to obtain a teaching position at a French university or lycée (Critchley 2002, xvii). He finally took a job at the private Alliance Israélite Universelle in Paris and settled into his administrative and teaching duties. During this time, he also wrote a string of philosophical essays and regularly attended meetings at the home of Gabriel Marcel (1889–­1973) as well as lectures on Hegelian philosophy given by Alexander Kojève (1902–­68) at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Critchley 2002, xviii). Levinas joined the French officer corps in 1939 as an interpreter of Russian and German. The Nazis captured him in June 1940; however, he was protected from summary execution or transfer to a concentration camp by the Geneva Convention. He spent the remainder of the war in Stalag XI-­B, a prisoner-­of-­war camp in Fallingbostel, Lower Saxony. Like other Jewish officers in the camp, Levinas was made to wear a spe­ cial marking on his uniform, and he was precluded from any religious observance. Meanwhile, his wife and young daughter, Simone, spent the war in hiding, thanks in large measure to the help of Blanchot and the Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul. They reunited with Levi­ nas after the war, but his Lithuanian family was not as fortunate. The Germans took Kaunas from the Soviets in June 1941 and quickly allied themselves with Lithuanian nationalists under the command of Algir­ das Klimaitis (1910–­88). A pogrom quickly ensued, and the Lithuanians and Germans collectively killed thousands of  Jews in Kaunas by the end of the month (Lescourret 2006, 126). The SS isolated the survivors—­ numbering perhaps thirty thousand—­in a ghetto and continued to murder civilians while sending others to concentration camps. Levinas would learn after the war that members of the SS under the command of Franz Walter Stahlecker (1900–­1942) had shot his mother, father, and two younger brothers, as well as his extended family, not long after the

190

Notes to Pages 151–162

Kaunas pogroms (Lescourret 2006, 126). These wartime events would mark Levinas’s thought in many ways, and it was during his imprison­ ment that he would sketch out the early framework for this, in texts such as De l’existence à l’existent (From Existence to the Existent, 1947) and Le temps et l’autre (Time and the Other, 1948). 19. For more on the intersections between Levinas’s and Merleau-­ Ponty’s thought, see Busch (1992). 20. A broader exploration of this point can be found in Kearney (2002), Riera (2004), Robbins (1991), and Sparrow (2013). Sparrow some­ what provocatively compares Levinas’s account of rhythm in “Reality and Its Shadow” to Deleuze’s analysis of rhythm and sensation in the art of Francis Bacon (Deleuze 2005). 21. For an excellent alternative example of such Homeric engage­ ment, see Haroldo de Campos’s translation of Homer’s poem (2002–­4). conclusions

1. In Galilean Aramaic ktsv also meant “to cut,” while in Arabic the same meaning was associated with the verb qadhaba (Brown, Driver, and Briggs 1906, 891).

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Subject Index Achebe, Chinua: on consequences of creation of humans, 116–­17 Adamastor, in Camões’s Os Lusía­ das: classical echoes of, 184–­85n33; as monstrous Other of new worlds and fear, 80–­81; as Polyphemus, 81 Aeschylus: Persians, 20–­26; Pro­ metheus Bound, 14–­20, 174n5 analogy: of cosmos and ruthmós (Plato), 33 anaphora: in Sousa, “Nossa voz,” 128–­29 anonymity: rhythm as passage into (Levinas), 147 Archilochus: and “enrhythment” as bondage, 19; earliest known account of rhythm by, 1–­4; influence on posterity, 7–­10 Aristotle: as basis of Daniel’s poetics, 44–­45; on form and ruthmós, 7; on poetry, links to modern concept of rhythm, 39–­41; on ruthmós and arithmos (Poetics), 36. See also rhythm (ruthmós)

Aristoxenus of   Tarentum: treatise on rhythm (Elementa rhythmica), 37–­39 arithmetic: in atomist theories, 31 (see also numerus); concept of within ruthmós (Plato), 32 art: and anonymity (Levinas), 147–­48; enjoyment of, shameful (Levinas), 148; rhythm in, threatens self-­ annihilation (Levinas), 148–­49 atomism, 4–­8 Augustine of Hippo: on rhythm vs. meter (in De musica), 64 Avicenna: Zarlino refers to on music, 71 Aviram, Amittai F.: defines rhythm, xix–­xx Bachelard, Gaston: as Platonic, xxiii; on vibration and pain, xxii Barker, Andrew: on rhythm vs. stress patterns in music, 37 Barros, João de: principal historical source for Camões, 85–­87 Bellay, Joachim du: on rhyme as a prison, 45, 49; on rhyme as species

210

Subject Index Bellay, Joachim du (cont.) of rhythm, 49–­50; on rime, ruth­ mós, and numerus, 49–­51. See also rhyme; rhythm (ruthmós) Benveniste, Émile: on rhythm, 5–­6, 18, 30–­32, 131–­41; on rhythm not rooted in nature, 39–­40, 136, 138–­ 39; Serres refutes, 138–­39. See also rhythm (ruthmós) Bergson, Henri: Bachelard on continuity of, xxii–­xxiii Bernardes, Diogo: two volumes by refer to poetry as rimas, 45–­46 blackness ( pretidão): in Camôes, 77–­78. See also Camões, Luís Vaz de Blanchot, Maurice: on rhythm as disastrous power, 23, 142–­43, 146 Bluteau, Rafael: defines rima as “rhyme” and “composition,” 47–­48; links ruthmós with rhyme, 48. See also rhyme; rhythm (ruthmós) Boisac, Émile: Benveniste refutes, 134–­35 Branco, Camilo Castelo: edits collection of Soropita’s unpublished work, 56–­58. See also Soropita Burton, Richard: translates Camões’s poetry into English, 48–­49 Calcagnini, Celio: cites Socrates on poetry and music, 69–­70 Camões, Luís Vaz de: “Aquela cativa” (endecha), 74–­75, 76–­80; classics background reflected in opus, 75–­76, 81, 87–­88, 184–­85n33 (see also Adamastor); echoes of in Soropita’s work, 58–­59 (see also Soropita); Os Lusíadas, 75–­80; poetics of, 72–­80; Rhythmas, 42, 45, 48, 54 Campion, Thomas: champions return to quantitative verse, 44

Castanheda, Fernão Lopes de: on Portuguese encounter with Kho­ ekhoen, 84–­85 chigubo (war dance), 117; Craveirinha refers to, 119; subject of Craveirinha anthology of poetry, 123–­26 choric art: defined in terms of rhythm (Plato, Laws), 36 classical cultures/languages, 131–­41; Camões’s background in, 75–­76, 81, 87–­88, 184–­85n33; Nietzsche’s grounding in, 95–­99; Schopenhauer’s view of rhythm rooted in, 94. See also Virgil, Eclogues colonialism, Portuguese, 119–­23; Cra­ veirinha dismantles poetry of via Ronga, 124; decried by Sousa, 128–­29 Coltrane, John, xii cosmos (kósmos): analogy with ruth­ mós (Plato), 33 (see also rhythm [ruthmós]) Craveirinha, José, 119–­21, 123–­26 creation: Fulani myth of, 116–­17 Crignon, Philippe: on Levinas on artistic activity, 147–­48 daimôn: Heraclitus on, 11–­12 dance: Craveirinha transforms, 123 Daniel, Samuel: on stress-­based meter and rhyme as “natural” to English (A Defence of Ryme), 44–­45 definition: as listing, xxvi; of rhythm, 8 deictic expressions, 20, 23–­24 Deleuze, Gilles: on rhythm rooted in nature, 39–­40 Democritus, 138, 139; on rhythm as form, 40–­41 (see also form); similarities with Plato on ruthmós, 32 (see also rhythm [ruthmós]); source of theory of atomism, 4–­7

Subject Index 211 Descartes, René: Sédar derives African epistemology from, 111–­12 Dewey,  John: critiqued, 111; on rhythm in history and nature, 108–­11, 141–­42 Diderot, Denis: definition of rhythm, 92–­93. See also rhythm (ruthmós) Diogenes Laertius: on Heraclitus, 10–­11 Diomedes Grammaticus, Ars grammat­ ica: definition of rhythm, 62 (see also rhythm [ruthmós]); Gaius Marius Victorinus as source of, 63–­64 Doondari (Fulani god/creator), 116 drums: in Craveirinha’s “Chigubo,” 123, 125; in Sousa’s “Nossa voz,” 128–­29. See also music; rhythm duality: in Platonic ontology, 32; and rhythm (Plato, Symposium), 35; in time and vibration (Bachelard), xxiii duration (Bergson): need to arithmetize (Bachelard), xxii–­xxiii Eastman, Max: opposes human reactions to ferry ride, 105–­6 Eikelboom, Lexi: on Heidegger’s concept of rhythm, 13 English: vernacular, in poetry, 51–­53 enrhythment: by art (Levinas), 145–­ 46; Camões’s, 79; in Craveirinha’s poetry, 125; early theorization of (in Archilochus), 19; Levinas on, 151; primordial, as presence, 25; Prometheus’s, 19–­20, 29, 90; in Sophocles’s Antigone, 27–­29 eros: and music, 35; rhythm prior to suffering of (and all “enemies”), 9–­10 Evans, David: on Valéry on rhythm, 99–­100, 101–­2 experience: rhythm’s link to (Levinas), 145

Faria e Sousa, Manuel de: lauda­ tory description of Soropita by, 54–­55 Ferreira, António: opposes prosa to rima, 46–­47 Ferreira, Bartolomeu, 46 fire: Prometheus’s gift to mortals, 14–­15 Fitzhugh, Thomas: on Diomedes’s account of rhythm, 63 form: aesthetic view of (Dewey), 105–­7; environment brings us into (Senghor), 115; as interaction of self with environment (Dewey), 103–­5; rhythm akin to, 10; rhythm and, 107–­11, 136, 138; rhythm as, 3–­7, 18, 20, 26, 27, 29, 31, 39–­40, 136–­37, 173n1. See also rhythm [ruthmós]; rhythmanalysis) freedom, human: Heraclitus on, 11–­12 (see also Heraclitus) Freyre, Gilberto, 74 Fuchs, Carl: Nietzsche’s letter to about rhythm, 98 Gaius Marius Victorinus: one source for Diomedes Grammaticus, 63–­64 Gama, Vasco da: in Camões’s Os Lu­ síadas, 80, 81–­87. See also Camões, Luís Vaz de Georgiades, Thrasybulos: Heidegger on, 13 gods, Olympian: Prometheus as “en­ rhythmed” by, 19; rhythm reaches out to, 97; win war with Titans, 14 Greek, ancient: Benveniste’s theories on ruthmós grounded in, 131–­41. See also classical cultures/languages; rhythm (ruthmós) Guattari, Félix: on rhythm rooted in nature, 39–­40

212

Subject Index Guillet, Pernette du, 45 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich: on rhythm, xx–­xxi Hamilton, Edith: memories about, 174n6 harmony: and beauty of  Tuscan/ Romance vernacular(s), 66–­67; and meter, 64 (see also meter); in music played by Khoekhoen, 85, 89; and rhythm, 32–­33, 65, 66–­ 67 (see also rhythm [ruthmós]) Heidegger, Martin: on Heraclitus, 13–­ 14; on translation of ruthmizô, 19 Heller-­Roazen, Daniel: on ruthmós and harmony, 32 Heraclitus, 138, 139; death of (Dio­g­ enes Laertius on), 174n2; Heidegger on, 13–­14; links daimôn to rhythm (in Archilochus’s sense), 11 Hill, Leslie: on rhythm as “changing configuration,” 143 Hočevar, Drina: on movement and poetic rhythm, 32–­33 Holiday, Billie: Sousa (fictional) poem to, 126–­28 homoioteleuton. See rhyme Husserl, Edmund, xxi imperfect (tense): depicts action unrealized (Benveniste), 21–­22 Inquisition, in Portugal: poetry bypassed, 46–­47 Jaeger, Werner: on rhythm, 137–­38, 188n15 Khoekhoen, Portuguese encounter with: in Camões, Os Lusíadas, 82–­84; in Castanheda’s História, 84–­85; in João de Barros, Décadas da Ásia, 85–­87

lamentation: forms of, 24–­25 Langrouva, Helena: on the Other, 81 language(s): enrhythment at bound­ aries of, 20, 24; at its limits (in Persians), 25; and linguistics, Meillet on, 130–­31; poetic schemes vary among (Daniel), 44; and rhythm, xxi, 13 (see also rhythm [ruthmós]), Latin: compared to Tuscan vernacular (Varchi), 67 Lefebvre, Henri: on analysis of rhythms as new discipline, xxiii–­xxiv Leucippus, 4, 7 Levinas, Emmanuel: on (poetic) language, xxi–­xxii; notion of  “participation,” 89, 97, 144 (see also Camões, Luís Vaz de); on rhythm, 143–­54 Levine, Caroline: general definition of rhythm, xix Lévy-­Bruhl, Lucien: influence on Levinas’s thinking, 144 linguistics, historical: Meillet on, 130–­31. See also language(s) Lobo, Fernão Rodrigues. See Soropita Lopes, Simão, 45–­46 Lucena, João de: opposes prosa to rima, 47 Lusitano, Vicente, 70 Lusotropicalism: Gilberto Freyre on, 74 Lyon, Dawn: on time and space (video), xxiii–­xxiv Machado, Diogo Barbosa: praises Soropita’s work, 56 Mallarmé, Stéphane, x mannerism, 73, 76 Marxist theory: and rhythmanalysis, xxiv–­xxvi

Subject Index 213 Matisse, Henri: and aesthetic form, 106–­7 McCarthy, B. Eugene: on Achebe on rhythm, 115–­16 Meillet, Antoine: pioneer in sociolinguistics, 130–­31 Melo, Francisco Manuel de: praises Soropita, 55–­56 Merleau-­Ponty, Maurice: on Levinas’s aesthetics, 151 Meschonnic, Henri, 49, 143; on metrics, xi mestiçagem (racial mixing), 121, 125 metaphor: of music as magnetic force or lasso (Nietzsche), 96–­97 (see also music); slavery as (Camões), 78–­79; “wave in the mind” (Woolf ), ix–­x meter: compared to rhythm, 64, 68–­ 69; defined by Diomedes Gram­ maticus, 62–­63; quantita­tive vs. modern (“Rime”) (Sidney), 43–­44. See also poetry; rhythm (ruthmós) metrics: as study of imbeciles (Meschonnic), xi Michaëlis, Carolina: produced songbook containing works by Soropita, 58. See also Soropita Miller, Elaine P.: on Nietzsche on rhythm, 96, 98 modernism: Woolf and Pessoa synonymous with, xi–­xii Montaigne, Michel de: on rhyme in poetry, 45. See also poetry; rhyme; rhythm (ruthmós) Moutsopoulos, Evanghélos: on Plato on mathematics in rhythm, 33 movement: ruthmós linked to, 7–­8, 30 (see also rhythm [ruthmós]) Mozambique: gains independence from Portuguese in 1975, 120–­21

music: Apollonian vs. Dionysian aspects of (Nietzsche), 95–­99; as “inborn in us” (Woolf ), x; as number and sound (Zarlino), 71; poetry as form of, 51, 69–­70, 139; reciprocatively played by Portuguese and Khoekhoen, 84–­85; and rhythm, xiv, 35, 38–­39; treatises on (late sixteenth century), 70–­7 1. See also poetry; rhythm (ruthmós) musica universalis: “sacro ritmo” linked to, xvi myth: Fulani, of creation, 116–­17; of Orpheus, 99–­101; of Prometheus, 14–­15; of titans, 81–­82. See also Prometheus nature: rhythm and, xviii, 39, 40–­41, 99–­101, 108–­10, 133–­35, 138–­42 négritude: and rhythm, 111–­29 Ngungunhane: Portuguese defeat and take as prisoner, 119–­20 Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Birth of Tragedy, 95–­96; The Gay Science, 96–­98; influence on Levinas’s concept of rhythm, 144; on rhythm, 95–­99 numerus: as intermediary between ruthmós and rhythm, 31; Renaissance musical treatises on, 70–­7 1. See also music; rhythm (ruthmós) Okigbo, Christopher: as caller of the dance when alive, 118–­19 onomatopoeia: in Craveirinha’s po­ etry, 124–­25; rhythm as series of (Diderot), 92–­93 Orpheus: Valéry’s sonnet on, 99–­101 Otherness: African, 77–­7 8; European, 121–­23, 128–­29; monstrous, of unknown world, 81; and Self, in Camões, 90

214

Subject Index performance: and rhythm, xiv Perotti, Niccolò, Cornucopiae: defines numerus, 65 Pessoa, Fernando: compared to Woolf, xi–­xiii; on rhythm as movement of soul, x Petrarca, Francesco: huge influence of Canzoniere (Rime sparse) in Europe, 45; influence on Ca­ mões, 78 philology: psychology as (Benve­ niste), 129–­42 philosophy, 97, 98. See also individual names physics: and duration (Bachelard), xxiii Pindar: on Apollo’s temple at Del­ phi, 26 Pinheiro dos Santos, Lúcio Alberto: Bachelard on, xxiii; on rhythm and psychology, xxii Plato: on definition via listing (Meno), xxvi; integrates traditional and new in ruthmós, 30–­32; recreates rhythm as more mathematical, xiv, 31–­33; on rhythm as syntax (Symposium), 35; on ruthmós, 30–­36, 139, 140. See also rhythm (ruthmós) poetics: Camões’s, as antipoetics, 79. See also Camões, Luís Vaz de; poetry poetry: Aristotle’s and modern con­ cepts of rhythm, 39–­41; censored by Inquisition in Portugal, six­ teenth century, 46; creation of, as “building,” 174–­75n7; defined, 68–­69; end of (Camões), 79; mediocre profanes sacred “rhythm” of, xvi; modern, musicality of (Levinas), xxii; as music, 139;

Puttenham on theory/classical background of, 51–­54; and rhythm, xiv; rhythm/rhyme overlap in Renaissance, 42–­54; as rima, first opposed to prose, 46–­47; vernacular English (Puttenham on), 51–­52; vernacular Italianate, 65–­67. See also poetics; rhyme; rhythm (ruthmós) Portuguese people: Camões on origins of (Os Lusíadas), 89–­90 Posidonius of Rhodes: defines poetry, 68–­69. See also poetry Prometheus: Adamastor as, 81–­82; in Aeschylus, 15–­20; in myth, 14–­15; as “spectacle” “enrhythmed” by Olympians, 19 proportion: numerical/ethical, 31; as “Symphonie or rime,” 51–­52. See also rhythm (ruthmós) prose: poetry (rima) first opposed to, 46–­47 psychology: philology as (Benve­ niste), 129–­42 Puttenham, George: on quantitative vs. accentual meters (ruthmós vs. ryme), 51 Pythagoras/Pythagoreans: and concept of harmony, 32, 33; on rhythm (Nietzsche), 97 Ramnoux, Clémence: on rhythm as “changing configuration,” 143 repetition: in Fulani myth of creation of humans (Achebe), 116–­17; and rhythm, xiv, 116–­17, 142. See also rhyme; rhythm (ruthmós) Rhodes, Neil: on rhythm and rhyme as synonymous, 42 rhyme: as metonym for poetry/verse, 45, 46–­49; overlap with rhythm

Subject Index 215 beginning in Renaissance, 42–­54; rhythm superior to (Schopenhauer), 93–­94. See also poetry rhythm (ruthmós), 81–­82; akin to form (Archilochus), 9–­10; analogy with cosmos (Plato), 33; and arithmos (Aristotle), 36; as atomic assemblages, 5–­7; as beat of pulse, x; and being (Senghor), 111–­13; Benveniste on, 129–­42; catchiness of, xx, 97; centripetal power of (Archilochus), 3; compared to meter (Diomedes, Victorinus, Augustine), 62–­63, 64, 68–­69; compared to sea/water waves, 96, 102, 133, 138–­39, 140–­41, 144; connected to flow and restraint, 21–­23; defined by Diderot, 92–­93, 102; defined by Diomedes Grammaticus, 62; defined by Perotti, 65; defined by Puttenham, 51; defined by Soropita, 60–­72; defining, xviii–­xxvii, 8, 30–­31; earliest known account of, 1–­4; as ethical (Plato, Symposium), 35; etymology of (Benveniste), 134–­36; and form, 136, 138 (see also form); Indo-­European, 63; as instants with human actors (Lefebvre), xxv; in Khoekhoe music, 89; lacking words as undesirable (Plato), 35–­36; and mathematics, 91; meaning of, “obscure” (Lefebvre), xxvi; as metonym for poetry/ verse, 45, 46–­49; modern meaning of, 31–­32; modernization process from ruthmós, 30–­32; of nature (Dewey), 108–­10 (see also nature); and négritude, 111–­29; Nietzsche on, 95–­99; not connected to nature, 39–­40; as order in movement

(Plato, Laws), 34; overlap with rime beginning in Renaissance, 42–­54; and philosophy, 97, 98; Platonic theories of, xiv, xxv–­xxvi; as poetic meter (Pessoa), x; power of (Valéry on), 100–­101; precedes temporality (Levinas), 144–­45; as repetition/Promethean bondage (Achebe), 116–­17; silence as (Prometheus Bound ), 16–­18; and “the social,” xxiv; sublime power of (Aviram), xx; theorized (by Rui), 121–­23; as theory of “things,” xiv; undefinable (Valéry), 101; Vega y Carpio on, xvi; as “wave in the mind” (Woolf ), ix. See also enrhythment; form; Plato; poetry; rhythmanalysis rhythmanalysis, xxii; notion of rhythm underlying, xxiv–­xxv; as Platonic, xxv–­xxvi. See also rhythm (ruthmós) rima. See poetry Ronga (language), 126 Rui, Manuel: on orality vs. writ­ ten text, 121–­22; on rhythm and postcolonial identity for­ mation, 121–­23. See also rhythm (ruthmós) ruthmós. See enrhythment; form; Plato; rhythm (ruthmós) Sackville-­West, Vita: letter from Virginia Woolf, ix–­x Sauvanet, Pierre: on polysemy of rhythm, 10, 14; on rhythm and cosmos as analogical, 33; on rhythm and cosmos as normative, 35–­36; on ruthmós making movement grammatical, 35 Schmitt, Rüdiger: on Meillet, 130–­31

216

Subject Index Schopenhauer, Arthur: defines meter as subset of rhythm, 94–­95 Senghor, Léopold Sédar: on African epistemology, 111–­12; influenced Craveirinha and Sousa, 121; on new rhythm principle as betraying Greek thought, 115 Serres, Michael: responses to Benveniste’s ideas, 138–­40; on ruthmós as sxêma, 41 Sidney, Sir Philip: on rhythm and rhyme (Defence of Poesie), 42–­44 silence: in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, 16–­17 Singer, Charles Joseph: on atomism, 4–­5 slavery: metaphorical (Camões), 78–­79. See also Camões, Luís Vaz de Smyth, Ethel: Woolf ’s letter to, xii Socrates: on poetry and music, 69–­70; quoted by Xenophon, 27; on rhythm in Plato’s Meno, xxvi; Soropita on, 61 Sophocles: Antigone, 27–­29 Soropita (Fernão Rodrigues Lobo): first edition of unpublished work of (Tibães anthology), 56–­58; influenced by Zarlino, 71; other collections of works by, 58; prologue to Camões’s Rhythmas, 60–­70 (see also Camões, Luís Vaz de, Rhythmas); similarities with Camões’s lyric works, 58–­59; vernacular theory of rhythm of, 60–­72. See also rhythm (ruthmós) Sousa, Noémia de, 119, 121, 126–­29; evokes Camões’s “barbarous voice,” 128 space(s): open/close within rhythm, xxv (see also rhythm [ruthmós]) speech: and nonspeech (in Pro­ metheus Bound ), 16

Stobaeus, 9 Sutton, Emma: on “falling” sensation (Woolf ), xii temporality: and rhythm, 99, 108–­11, 144, 145. See also rhythm (ruthmós) Tibães anthology, 56–­58 time, x, xi, xiv, xix-­xxi; compressed by artificiality (Pessoa), xi; represented numerically by medievals, 32; rhythm linked to, xviii, xxv, 39, 93–­94, 98–­99; and space, as achievements (Lefebvre), xxiv; unifies humans and nature (Benveniste), 132–­33; vibration of (Bachelard), xxiii Valéry, Paul: evolving views on rhythm, 99–­102. See also rhythm (ruthmós) Vamvacas, Constantine J.: on Heraclitus’s view of daimôn, 11–­12 Varchi, Benedetto, L’Ercolano: on beauty of  Tuscan vernacular, 65–­68; on numerus vs. harmony, 66–­67 Vega, Lope de: on Seneca on bad poetry, xv–­xvi; uses rimas for “poetry,” 48 verses, hendecasyllabic: Soropita on, 65. See also meter; poetry; rhythm (ruthmós); Soropita Virgil, Eclogues: influence of on Camões’s Khoekhoen, 87–­89 virtue: Meno on (Plato’s Meno), xxvi Voegelin, Salomé, 16–­17 war dance (chigubo): subject of Craveirinha anthology, 123–­26 Woolf, Virginia: compared to Pes­ soa, xi–­xiii; defines rhythm, ix–­x

Subject Index 217 words: rhythm lacking as undesirable (Plato), 35–­36. See also language writing: rhythm primary to words in (Woolf ), xii

Xerxes: lamentations of, 24–­25; tries to rein in Hellespont (Persians), 21–­23 xigubo. See chigubo

Xenophon: on costly armor as eu­ ruthmóteros, 27

Zarlino, Gioseffo: on music as a science, 70–­71

Index Verborum Greek aiaktos, 24 aisthêsis, xiv akolouthia, 50 amêxanos, 3 anthrôpos, 3, 33 arithmos, 36, 52, 53 arruthmistos, 18 arsis, xviii, 63, 64, 99 atomos, 4 boê, 23 daimôn, 11 dinos, 139 doũlos, 21 dustênos, 9 egô, 23–­24 ekpunthanô, 25 êthos, 11 exô, 12, 22, 136–­37 euruthmoteros, 27

harmonia, 36, 60, 61 hôde, 23 homoioteleuton, 50, 52, 53 kanôn, 50 kinêsis, 35 kosmos, 33 logos, 11, 12, 19, 36, 101 lupê, 29 melos, 96 metaruthmizô, 21, 22 metron, 12, 32, 36, 68 mimêsis, 69, 124 moĩra, 11 moria, 36 musikê, 139 nostos, 25 oioĩ, 24 ousia, 78

220

Index Verborum paideia, 31 phainô, 26 physis, 13 poiêma, 69 poiêsis, 36, 69, 79 poros, 22 psuxê, 28

tassô, 38 tassomenos, 38 tattomenos, 38 taxis, 33, 35, 39, 50 thea, 19 thesis, xviii, 63, 64, 99 thumos, 1

reĩn [sic], 137, 138 reô (reĩn), 11, 12, 14, 22, 64, 130, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 139, 142, 188n15 rhuthmos [sic], 138, 139 ruthmizô, 18, 19, 29 ruthmós, xiii, xiv, xvii, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 36, 40, 41, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 61, 64, 65, 68, 91, 92, 94, 96, 114, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 140, 142, 143, 151 ruthmós/arithmos, 96

Latin

sunkrisis, 50 sxêma, 7, 41, 136, 137, 138

tactus, 70 tripudium, 63

ictus, 63 imitatio, 88 metrum, 63 numerosus, 69 numerus, 31, 48, 49, 50, 53, 60, 61, 64, 65, 66, 70, 72, 91, 140 rhythmus, 63