When novelists become Cubists": the prose ideograms of Guy Davenport Critical Essay

Andre Furlani

Guy Davenport's narratives are hybrids of ction, documentary, poem, and illustration, A disciple of Ezra Pound, he adapts to the short story the ideogrammatic method of The Cantos, where a grammar of images, emblems, and symbols replaces that of logical sequence. This grammar allows for the grafting of particulars into a congeries of implied relation without subordination. In contrast to postmodernists, Davenport does not omit causal connection and linear narrative continuity for the sake of an aleatory play of signication but in order to intimate by combinational logic kinships and correspondences among eras, ideas and forces. His collages (he calls them "assemblages of fact and necessary ction") are arbitrary without being gratuitous, play proceeding in them under the auspices of emancipatory containment. These features of Davenport's experimentation are revealed in three exemplary texts. Although rich meditations on squandered or misdirected cultural possibility, each is encomiastic and prospective r ather than elegiac and nostalgic. Davenport summons and rechannels dormant energies released by his archival subjects--the Vorticist art of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, the discovery of the Aurignacian cave paintings at Lascaux, and the utopian project of Charles Fourier. Assemblage For Guy Davenport "every force evolves a form." It is typical of him, who makes this epigram the title both of an essay and of a book, to nd a contemporary avant-garde formula not in, say, Shklovsky, Marinetti, or Rimbaud but in the founder of the Shakers, Mother Ann Lee. He scarcely trusts an idea that is not on closer inspection an old one. For Davenport it is always later the same day. He shares with the modernists a disposition towards syncretic structures. A Lascaux aurochs and a Picasso bull share their pigment; a Pre-Socratic fragment and a Wittgenstein Zettel share their ink."A work of art," Davenport claims in the forward to Every Force Evolves a Form, "is a

form that articulates forces, making them intelligible" (xi). Seeking out forms that might faithfully correspond to the range of forces inhering in his literary subjects, he follows his modernist precursors in assuming that a new subject entails the renegotiation of formal convention. As a consequence, his is one of the most eclectic and innovative bodies of ction in contemporary American literature. Indeed, he has renegotiated the conventions distinguishing prose from verse. During a period when the rst person present retrospective narrative has nearly monopolized American short ction, he has almost entirely eschewed the subgenre, except to adapt it. (Thus the youths who narrate "The River" and "O Gadjo Niglo" omit all punctuation except the period and the question mark.) He prefers to draw on much more heterogeneous stylistic instigations, such as surrealism, hexameter mime, formalism, dramatic monologue, classical e clogue, collage, Roman cento, Japanese renka, postcard, imaginary dialogue, Hellenistic philosophical sketch, and journal. In Davenport, collage structures predominate. Encouraged by William Carlos Williams's maverick deance of the proprieties separating verse from prose, he has treated the story in a kindred way. In narratives inspired as much by modernist painting and poetry as by ction, he juxtaposes a variety of discontinuous and discrete writings and images. Laurence Zachar argues that Davenport's writing is situated "aux frontieres intergeneriques" where manifold modes are brought into concord: "L'etonnant chez Davenport est la facon don't ce materiau qui parait l'incarnation meme du chaos--hermetique, enigmatique, obscur, avec son tropplein de references--se revele en fait etre construit, ordonne, structure. Plus l'on s'y plonge, et plus l'on distingue de cohesion dans le texte" 'What astonishes in Davenport is the way in which material that seems the very incarnation of chaos--hermetic, enigmatic, obscure, with its proliferation of allusions--in fact reveals itself to be constructed, organized, structured. The more on e immerses oneself in them the more one discerns the texts' cohesion, (62). Davenport also works along the intergeneric border between text and graphic, for he illustrates many of his texts. (1) "The prime use of words is for imagery: my writing is drawing," he states in an interview (Hoeppfner 123). Visual imagery is not subordinated to writing in Davenport, who draws on the assemblage practice of superimposing image and writing. "I trust the image; my business is to get it onto the page," he writes in the essay "Ernst Machs Max Ernst." "A page, which I think of as a picture, is essentially a texture of images. [...]The text of a story is therefore a continuous graph, kin to the imagist poem, to a collage (Ernst, Willi Baumeister, El Lissitzky), a page of

Pound, a Brakhage lm" (Geography 374-75). At the University of Kentucky (where he taught for most of his academic career), Davenport once offered a course with the Olsonian title "The Poem as a Field of Force." The force remains for him immanent in matter rather than transcendent in spirit. Particularity rather than abstraction discovers the orders of the real. The materiality of the work of art and its constructed nature are consequently emphasized by his use of an ideogrammatic method that allows for the grafting of particulars into a congeries of implied relations without subordination. For him writing can enter into an isomorphic relationship with nature and a cosmos which is itself conceived of as a harmonization of independent forces. With a nod to lm-maker Stan Brakhage, Davenport calls his compositional principle "architectonic form." (2) In the essay "Narrative Tone and Form," he identies in twentieth century literature "a movement from assuming the world to be transparent, and available to lucid thoughts and language, to assuming (having to assume, the artists involved would say) that the world is opaque" (Geography 311). Architectonic form derives from modernist experiments in disrupted perspective (as, for example, in collage and vorticism). "The architectonics of a narrative," Davenport says, "are emphasized and given a role to play in dramatic effect when novelists become Cubists; that is, when they see the possibilities of making a hieroglyph, a coherent symbol, an ideogram of the total work. A symbol comes into being when an artist sees that it is the only way to get all the meaning in. Genius always proceeds by faith" (312). The unparaphrasable architectonic text "differs from other narrative in that the meaning shapes into a web, or globe, rather than along a line" (318). The essence of such art "is that it conceals what it most wishes to show; rst, because it charges word, image and sense to the fullest, fusing matter and manner; secondly, to allow meaning to be searched out" (57-58). In architectonic form, meaning may be generated more in the interstices between images, citation, and passages of dialogue than in the content of these elements. "It is the conjunction, not the elements, that creates a new light," Davenport says in an essay on poet Ronald Johnson (194). This is the Poundian aesthetic Charles Olson attempted to translate into practical pedagogical terms as rector of Black Mountain College, a school organized, as Olson explained in a 1952 letter, on the "principle that the real existence of knowledge lies between things & is not conned to labeled areas" (quoted in Duberman 341).

A species of Pythagorean materialism underlies such procedures. For Davenport, projective verse "insisted that the world is interesting enough in itself to be reected in a poem without rhetorical cosmetics, an arbitrary tune for melodramatic coloring, or stage directions from the literary kit and caboodle" (Geography l92). (3) For Davenport, "the writer assembles, nds, shapes. There is nothing to be gained by displacing the authentic" (383). In an essay he calls his "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier" an assemblage (380), and in an interview extends the term to describe his ction in general. As a professor, he explains, "the mind gets in the habit of nding cross-references among subjects. This is the best way in the world to make my assemblages, as I call them. I don't think I've ever written a story. If Henry James wrote stories, if Dostoevski wrote stories, I don't write stories" (Alpert 3).

About assemblage, Peter Quartermain notes that "its raw materials are often associationally powerful, almost always ready made, and identiable (nails, dolls' eyes, photographs, dried owers, old wood). That is to say, they retain much of their previous history (their contextual residue); it is also to say, in the words of one critic, that (compared to collage) 'its ultimate congurations are so often less predetermined.' The interpolation of non-art material, indeed the exclusive use of such material, provides what art historians have come to call a 'frame,' by means of which no attempt is made to represent anything, but the actuality of 'the world' is permitted to erupt within the environment of the work, and the boundaries between objects, categories, and activities dissolve" (180-81). (4) Though Davenport's conservative impulse dictates a stricter selection of materials and a more overt sense of order than do the assemblages of such artists as Robert Rauschenberg, the visual arts analogy still holds. Q uartermain identies Davenport's innovative use of assemblage as his most important "contribution to the art of ction" (181). Marjorie Perloff makes a yet larger claim. In The Dance of the Intellect, she identies "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier" along with such later Beckett prose texts as Ill Seen, Ill Said as portentous instances of "free prose," in which converge attributes of free verse and associative prose: the rhythm of recurrence predominates, the principle unit is the short phrase, and the syntax is prone to inversion and ellipsis. She stresses the foregrounded patterns of sound in Davenport's text, the often primitive syntax, the repetitive vocabulary,

and the suspension of causal chains. Davenport's curious conjunction of time frames, narrative and lyric forms, and verse and prose elements (not to speak of the sixteen remarkable illustrationsdrawings, photographs, pictograms, etchings--that in Davenport's words "turn the text into a graph ['to write' and 'to draw' being the same Greek verb]") creates a hybrid mode for which we not yet have a generally accepted name. Pieces, texts, lyrics of ction, associative monologues, collage, bricolage, assemblage, free prose--perhaps the name is less important than the recognition that we are living in a world of new literary organisms. (151) (5) To illustrate features of assemblage in Davenport's work, I will focus below on three characteristic texts and their subjects: "The Bowmen of Shu," "Robot," and "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier." Illustrated with pen and ink "quotations," these assemblages are rich meditations on squandered cultural possibility. They are, however, encomiastic and prospective rather than elegiac and nostalgic. While mourning forfeited legacies, Davenport seeks in all three texts to recover and adapt dormant energies released by the texts' subjects. They are celebrations of possibility, explicitly in their subject matter, implicitly in their structure. "The Bowmen of Shu" Davenport appropriately employs the principles of the Poundian ideogram in an assemblage whose subject was one of Pound's most gifted proteges, the artist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. "The Bowmen of Shu" is a Poundian medley of syncretic image rhymes, accretions of isolate elements within an integral eld. Divided into discontinuous titled paragraphs as well as into pen and ink "quotations," (6) it resembles his earlier story "Tatlin!" Though the French expatriate never received the ofcial patronage that his contemporary Constructivist briey enjoyed, Gaudier-Brzeska became like Tatlin an exemplary modernist casualty of the age's destructive politics. Along with his acquaintance T.E. Hulme (the subject of Davenport's story "Lo Splendore della Luce a Bologna"), Gaudier died on the Western Front. In "The Pound Vortex," Davenport contends that World War I blighted "a renaissance as brilliant as any in history" (Geography 166). Virginia Woolf dated the twentieth century from a day in 1909; Davenport ends it in 1915 , the year of Gaudier-Brzeska's death: "it is now clear that he died with the century. What we call the twentieth century ended in 1915."

"The Bowmen of Shu," rst published in 1983 in Blast 3 (a compendium in honour of Wyndham Lewis), (7) borrows its subject from one of the most notable contributors to Lewis's avant-garde journal and its logic from a letter Gaudier-Brzeska sent to Dorothy Shakespear's s mother from the front two months before his death; Pound quotes the letter in Davenport's primary source, the memoir Gaudier-Brzeska: "E[zra ...]has sent me the Chinese poems. I like them very much. I keep the book in my pocket, indeed I use them to put courage in my fellows. I speak now of the 'Bowmen' and the 'North Gate' which are so appropriate to our case" (68). Cathay, Pound's versions of classical Chinese verse transliterated from Ernest Fenollosa's Japanese translations, belongs to what in an essay Davenport calls the modernist "renaissance of the archaic" (Geography 20). Davenport's story shares with its modernist precursors a sensitivity to historical recurrence. Its opening segues without transitions between a December 1914 letter t o John Cournos from the front, omniscient descriptions of the trenches at Neuilly St. Vaast, and passages from Pound's version of Rihaku's "The Bowmen of Shu." Gaudier himself made the parallel: "like the chinese bowmen in Ezra's poem we had rathereat fern shoots than go back now" (Apples 3; Twelve l40). (8) Accentuating this sense of atemporality is the non-linear progression of the story. Though it begins and ends by recording dates (of the letter to Cournos, of Gaudier's death), its titled paragraphs are organized solely by thematic juxtaposition and complementarity. Some are documentary, as in quotations from Rodin's notebooks, Blast, Cathay, or the letter of condolence from the captain of Gaudier's infantry company. Others are recreations of the Kensington milieu, descriptions of the artist's Polish lover, summaries of Vorticist doctrine, glimpses of Rimbaud dying and of Brancusi embarking for Paris, and of Gaudier as a child and in his London atelier. The story's ligature is the trenches, where Gaudier spent his last six months and from where he wrote letters and a report for Blast. The stress thus falls as much on the monstrous cataclysm to which Gaudier-Brzeska eagerly contributed his chauvinism as on the aesthetic movement to which he contributed his genius. Davenport places Vorticism in the context of barbaric historical vortices. Gaudier-Brzeska recovers and harnesses the primitive, which the story celebrates, but yet more primitive forces are at work in modern Europe, and it is our own loss as much as the artist's that he chooses to align himself with

both. The artist who revives monumental stone sculpture by reduction in masses and planes ("I shall derive my emotions solely from the arrangement of surfaces," he wrote for Blast from the trenches [Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska 28]) is now swept into the atavism of trench warfare. As an artist, Gaudier-Brzeska exalted instinct over reason--hence his preference for Minoan over classical Greek sculpture. "The modern sculptor is a man who works with instinct as his inspiring force," Gaudier-Brzeska wrote in The Egoist a year before his death. "His work is emotional. [. . .] What he feels he does so intensely and his work is nothing more nor less that the abstraction of this intense feeling." Such sculpture, he concluded, "is continuing the tradition of the barbaric peoples of the earth (for whom we have sympathy and admiration)" (qtd. in Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska 37). For his part, Davenport likewise reduces the narrative of Gaudier-Brzeska to the verbal equivalents of masses and planes. The ellipses exalt instinct, for the connections between parts are made as much by intuition as by reason. In the essay "The Symbol of the Archaic," Davenport commemorates modernist primitivism: "the impulse to recover beginnings and primal energies grew out of a feeling that man in his alienation was drifting tragically away from what he had rst made as poetry and design and as an understanding of the world" (Geography 28). Gaudier embodies a modernism that interprets contemporary life by means of the archaic inheritence. In 'The Bowmen of Shu," Davenport deplores the irony that so vital and regenerative an impulse could be diverted into the apocalyptic asco of trench combat. Under the rubric LA ROSALIE, a single-sentence paragraph quotes (slightly altered) a letter sent to Pound within days of Gaudier-Brzeska's death: "The bayonet, so called because we draw it red from the round guts of pig-eyed Germans" (8; 145). In his Blast report from the French front, Gaudier-Brzeska declared, "I HAVE BEEN FIGHTING FOR TWO MONTHS and I can now gauge the intensity of life" (Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska 64), a remark for which Davenport reserves a separate (uncapitalized) paragraph (9; 145). Gaudier's article, however, goes on with martial fervor worthy of Marinetti: "THIS WAR IS A GREAT REMEDY [. . .] IT TAKES WAY FROM THE MASSES NUMBERS UPON NUMBERS OF UNIMPORTANT UNITS" (Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska 27). The penultimate paragraph of 'The Bowmen of Shu" quotes the Blast memorial to Gaudier-Brzeska, "Mort pour la patrie," but omits its celebration of his military feats and adds the mensural eloquence of "4 Octobre 1891-5 Juin 1915" (20; 158). "It is part of the war waste," Pound lamented in his memoir, as he did later in "Mauberley" (17).

What Davenport salvages from such a futile loss is the grandeur of GaudierBrzeska's accomplishment, which Davenport's numerous visual quotations celebrate, and the value of his instigation, to which the story turns for inspiration. Like much of Davenport's ction, the story is as thematically cohesive as it is narratively disjunctive. It descends through strata of parallel lives: Gaudier is a Rimbaud moderne, a medieval cathedral mason, a 4th century B.C. Chinese warrior, a Dordogne cave painter. The enemy arrows of Bunno become the German artillery, the Chinese frontier of Rihaku the Western front, the Knossos labyrinth a German "Irrgarten lit with pale batterypowered lights" (7; 143). Gaudier-Brzeska's studio is described as "his Font de Gaume," the site of Magdalenian cave paintings in the Val Dordogne (18; 156). The aim less to depict a stationary subject than its energy, (9) the afnity with primitive artists, the archaic themes and treatment--all invite Davenport's comparison of Gaudier to another mercurial young French genius attracted to warfare. Seizing on a coincidence, the sculptor's birth in the year of Rimbaud's death, to project the artists' consonance, Davenport describes Gaudier's birth in a paragraph directly preceding one concerned with the poet's death. (10) Davenport eloquently reinforces that proximity in the story's two closing paragraphs. In the rst, he cites Gaudier-Brzeska's epitaph, the second his fellowship with Rimbaud in posterity:

The Red Stone Dancer Nos fesses ne sont pas les leurs. II faut etre absolument moderne. 'Our buttocks aren't theirs. It is necessary to be absolutely modern.' (20; 158) In a small hatch work pen and ink in Apples and Pears and in a full page enlargement in Twelve Stories, Davenport "quotes" Gaudier-Brzeska's varnished sandstone sculpture Red Stone Dancer, a kinetic image of a squat dancer's energy. Here, Davenport expresses the appreciation of masses in relation, and the dening of these masses in planes, that, as Pound makes clear, the artist characterized as sculptural ability (see Gaudier-Brzeska 20. Indeed, Davenport's story quotes these aphorisms from Blast). By locating instigations in the distant past, Gaudier-Brzeska became, as Rimbaud urged in Une Saison en enfer, "absolument moderne" 'absolutely modern' (152). Davenport's story both honors this legacy and involves itself,

formally and stylistically as well as thematically, in its perpetuation. Although in The Dance of the Intellect, Marjorie Perloff draws attention to the ideogrammatic design of Pound's memoir (see her ch. 2), it is left to Davenport to achieve in his work a genuinely ideogrammatic hybrid of ction, documentary, poem, and illustration. In his texts, Davenport makes of literary genres simply conventions to be renegotiated, invitations to rethink ction as a genre. "Robot" In "The Bowmen of Shu," Davenport adapts the techniques of assemblage to biographical ction. In the 0. Henry Prize-story "Robot," he adapts them to historical narrative. (11) Based on the 1940 discovery of the paleolithic cave paintings at Lascaux, it is a boys' adventure yarn about buried treasure, a guided tour of the Magdalenian caves, an illustrated lecture on the sources of modernism, an idyll, and a meditation on aggression. A group of Montignac youths lose their mascot dog down a hole while hunting rabbits in the Dordogne countryside. Attempting to retrieve the dog, named Robot, the youths discover the largest and most richly painted of all prehistorical caves. With his one good eye, the paleolithic authority Abbe Breuil soon attests to the murals' authenticity. He discusses at length the provenance and the import of the paintings with the boys before swearing them to secrecy, as does a Resistance member later when a scheme is hatched to conceal arms in the cave. "The Bowmen of Shu," like Davenport's later meditation on Thoreau, "The Concord Sonata," challenges the distinction between story, essay, and biography. But more so than either of these texts, "Robot" effaces the perceived border between fact and ction. Here, as in "Herakleitos," "Juno of the Veii," and "August Blue," Davenport works from archival yet remote and obscure material. "The subjects I chose for the stories in Tatlin! are all in the position of being, as fact, almost not there. "Davenport notes in "Ernst Machs Max Ernst" (Geography 376). Of the discovery of Lascaux, he says, "no accounts agree. Indeed, "Robot" retains an atmosphere of romance calculated to undermine the illusion of documentary fact created by the historical images and documentation. This interplay between fact and ction extends to one between image and text. Davenport's versions of Aurignacian horses, aurochs, and reindeer, interpolated throughout the story, are not reproductions but mediations made strange by recontextualizatio n. Like the verbal evocations of the Lascaux murals, wartime France, Dordogne geography, and adolescent male bonds, the drawings are faithful both to the limited available evidence

and to the material of Davenport's chosen media. The pen and ink drawings are breathtakingly accurate yet are intended not for a faux-Lascaux simulacrum but for the unavoidable and suggestive distances of the at, monochrome printed page. Davenport nds impetus for the fusion of image and word in the Lascaux caves themselves, for the Aurignacian glyphs are primitive to the very distinction. He calls the artefacts ideograms, and in such instances as the hunter mural transposes both verbal and pictorial evocations of the same image. On the page following Davenport's drawing of the painting, Breuil describes its bird-headed ithyphallic stick man beside a javelin and a gored bison whose "spilling entrails are an ideogram of the vagina. The bison is life under the guise of death" (97; 102). He conjectures that "in the painter's vocabulary of symbols to die by the spear and to receive the male are cognate female verbs. The hieroglyphs of these cave painters for wound and vulva are probably the same." In "Robot," Davenport presents the analogy in the primitive art between sacricial violence and renewal as a tragic precedent reiterated in contemporary history. Guernica was bombed by some of the same Henkel III B bimotors that now, three years later, y over the Dordogne. At the 1937 Paris World's Fair, Picasso exhibited his massive memorial to the victims, its iconography indebted to the cave paintings at Altamira located near Guernica. In "Robot," Breuil recalls the artist's visit to the site: "The bison at Altamira were to him tres moderne. I have always thought of him as a Cro-Magnon painter out of time.[...] And when Picasso painted his great symbolic picture of the bombing of Guernica, he made one of the bulls of Altamira dominate the design.[...] The painting I see is as old as Lascaux" (99-100; 104-05). (12)

While the antifascist engagement of the story's Catalan expatriate Ramon aligns him with his artistic compatriot, he is the unavoidably sinister agent of military reprisal, intimidating the youths with threats and unlike them using his masculinity belligerently. "This is a matter of cojones," not of art, he says of the arms stockpile: "Foutre les tableaux!" (93-94; 98-99). A story that begins with a band of affable teens maintaining a merry vigil over a prehistoric gallery ends with Resistance members depositing a consignment of arms in a chthonic arsenal. The former are protecting invaluable paintings, the latter invaluable freedoms, but where art is not honored liberty may not be respected. The stick-like bird-headed hunter is a "minor animal" among the meticulously realized animals of Lascaux, and for him death and regeneration are, as Breuil

proposes, "cognate" terms: "The hunter with arms outstretched before the wounded bison is embracing the idea of death, which to him is the continuity of life" (97; 10 2). The carbines, grenades, ares and .45s stored by the Resistance in the Shaft of the Hunter are cognate with the stick-man's javelin, and cognate too is the reliance of men in both epochs on violence to safeguard life. Davenport concludes "Robot" with the pairing of syncretic images of violence. Here, he employ an alternative imagery, that of discrete isometric paragraphs forming a kind of prose couplet. The rst paragraph describes the stealthy stockpiling of Resistance arms, the second a cave explored years before by Breuil on the Swiss Drachenberg where Neanderthal hunters had placed cave bear skulls.

The rst boxes of ammunition were placed in the Shaft of The Hunter and the Bison late in October, when the moon was dark. Long cases of carbines packed in grease, grenades, ares, .45s rose in neat stacks to the black shins of the prancing horses. At the Drachenberg the bears' skulls sat on their ledges hooded in dust older than Ur or Dilmun. Their muzzles all pointed to the rising sun, which fell upon them dimly in the depth of their cave in the cliff, lighting all but the sockets of their eyes. (103; 108-09) The image of the horse is a melancholy inversion of the story's opening, a drawing of a Lascaux horse and a description of it "prancing as if to a fanfare by Charpentier" (71). Though the Neanderthal was capable not only of these crude ursine totems but of the deft Somaliland drawings Breuil has also examined, it is the menacing skulls that are left to gaze eyeless out of the story's conclusion. The description of the Resistance arsenal is embedded between contrary depictions of early man: the brute idolaters of the cave bear and the Somaliland painters of domesticated oxen. The story does not attempt to reconcile these conicting yet equipoised images of the Neanderthal, nor to reconcile either of them to the Lascaux arsenal. Their taut balance is Davenport's visual and literary image of human care and creativity bound inextricably to a capacity for self-slaughter.

"Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier"

In "Robot," Davenport uses collage devices while adhering to linear historical narrative; in "The Bowmen of Shu," he creates a new kind of discontinuous biography out of formalist montage. In "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier," he even more radically adapts ideogrammatic method by assembling it from a variety of elements according to what Charles Olson calls "composition by eld" (16). Davenport's text makes a renewed contribution to the renaissance of the archaic, for the West African Dogon, considered among the most primitive of surviving Stone Age peoples, are its central subject. Davenport has the Dogon cosmogony dictate the text's form, juxtaposing it with descriptions of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Paris, the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, Fourier's utopian New Harmony, da Vinci's bicycle, pollinating bees, Beckett in conversation, and the like. Interpolating collaged images throughout, he lays out all these elements in asyndetic relation as in a Pound Canto, "ply over ply," as Pound says (Canto s 15). "For Pound," writes Laszlo Gen in his study of ideogrammatic form, "the setting side by side, without copulas, of verbal pictures will perforce establish relationships between the units juxtaposed. Such juxtapositions he called images. The image is the basic form of ideogrammic composition; it is not simply a visual impression but a union of particulars transposed onto the conceptual plane" (xii). In the essay "Olson," Davenport defends Olson's use of this method: "The seeming inarticulateness of Olson's 'The Kingshers' is not a failure to communicate," he says, "but a declining to articulate images and events which can be left in free collision" (Geography 99). Unlike Olson, however, Davenport is careful to establish an overtly overarching order that will imply not merely the coherence of the text but the isomorphic nature of the cosmos itself. Thus, in revising the text for publication in Da Vinci's Bicycle, (13) Davenport imposed on all but three of its discrete paragraphs the same isomorphic pa ttern concluding "Robot." Bach of its four-line paragraphs is in addition contained, with only two exceptions, in nine numbered paragraph sections. Davenport imposes this arbitrary and severe order on the text with the same deftness and pliancy as Marianne Moore brings to her syllabic verse or John Berryman to the six-line triple stanzas of the Dream Songs. Supercially a congeries of heterogeneous paragraphs and images arbitrarily ordered, the text is in fact meticulously structured to correspond to the intricate concords of Dogon cosmogony. Its rectangular paragraph blocks, lending a

grid-like appearance to the text, coincides with the grid on which the Dogon map out the cosmos. The Dogon universe contains, but is in no way tyrannized by, aleatory forces. Indeed, the random and anarchic are indispensable to the larger benign order. Davenport praises this tension in the story "Fifty-Seven Views of Fujiyama": "Dissonance chiming with order, strict physical law in its dance with hazard" (Apples 31; Twelve 174). Within random contingency, the Dogon detect an elaborate system of correspondences, indices for larger and redemptive forces. Such attention to immanent pattern and symbol is reproduced in Davenport's text. Dogon facility for reading into phenomena multiple levels of harmonious sense inspires the reticulation of Davenport's text. "I may be a Dogon," Daven port told Erik Reece. "They can represent anything four ways--from total abstraction to realistic portrayal" (Reece 46). Pattern is not often a property of surfaces. "Nature loves to hide," Heraclitus declared in a thus-rendered passage of Davenport's translation of the complete fragments (Herakleitos 14; Seven Greeks 159). (14) The Dogon are exemplary searchers who nd what nature hides, and the theme of "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier," worked out through the spiral interweavings of independent elements, is the genius of foraging. Davenport explains in "Ernst Machs Max Ernst" that the text "isolates this theme of foraging and proceeds like an Ernst collage to involve seven themes, or involucra, which when opened disclose the theme of foraging in several senses" (Geography 379-80). He praises "this Dogon sense that man is a forager trying to nd God's complete plan of the universe" (379). As the French anthropologist Marcel Griaule forages among the Dogon to learn the particulars of primitive cosmogony, the Dogon themselves forage in nature for divine traces. (15) In this they follow and honor their impish god of contingency Ogo, described as a kind of Dogon Hermes, native American Raven, or Voodoo loa. Ogo disrupts the demiurge Amma's oppressive scheme of creation. Amma is compelled to patch up the world as best he can after his mischief (Ogo concocts a host of vexatious insects and inedible fruits), but the world is now immitigably inuenced by Ogo's "sign," the acacia that, like him, Davenport writes, "is incompletely made. Like him it searches for its twin. It searches in sunlight the completion of its being. It must search forever, never nding, like Ogo" (Da Vinci's 96).

Out of this radiates the story's reiterations of inquisitive and gamey

intelligence: Gertrude Stein seeking the new in her car in Paris; Wilbur Wright maneuvering his Flyer into gure eights; da Vinci sketching a bicycle four centuries before its invention; the early photographer Henri Lartigue hunting for images to try to freeze time; the Dogon shepherds journeying to the mystic caves; the philosopher Fourier striving to base a utopia on the integration rather than repression or deection of human passions. Davenport himself searches out Fourier's Montmartre grave site and shares a drink with Samuel Beckett to learn more about Joyce, a blind metaphysician of the Heraclitean logos linked in the story to the Dogon priest Ogotemmeli. who explains the cosmos to Griaule. Like Ogo, all these "must search forever" for the disclosure of an immanent order. For Heraclitus the logos, for Christians the word made esh, for the biochemist DNA, for the Dogon bummo: "It is written in every crabgrass seed, it is written in the okra, in the spider's eye, in the stars" (85). The text celebrates those who "searched out the harmonies, the afnities, the kinship of the orders of nature" (68). (16) In the essay "Finding," Davenport describes the Sunday afternoons of youth spent combing the upper Savannah valley for Indian arrowheads with his "foraging family" (Geography 361). In Davenport, such a custom inculcated the peculiar virtue of disinterested curiosity, for arrowheads were sought without larger aims. "I learned from a whole childhood of looking in elds how the purpose of things ought perhaps to remain invisible, no more than half-known. People who know exactly what they are doing seem to me to miss the vital part of any doing" (366). In Davenport's ction diverse elements are arranged both for the sake of their place in the Heraclitean concord and for their own sake. While "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier" proves to be an involved network of corresponding elements, the text throughout retains some of the enigmatic happenstance of those Savannah valley pastures. Although Lance Olsen suggests that the story "is a translation of the childhood need to forage into the adult world" (155), for Davenpo rt such a primary drive is more crucial to maturation and adulthood. But Olsen rightly notes that the author is the story's master forager, assembling from his often incongruous nds a textual eld in which the reader "nds himself metamorphosed into a detective attempting to solve a mystery through the logical assembling and interpretation of palpable evidence" (155). In his study of The Cantos, Davenport denes the Poundian ideogram as "a grammar of images, emblems, and symbols, rather than a grammar of logical sequence.[...] An idea unies, dominates, and controls the particulars that make

the ideogram" (Cities 28, 30). He insists on the intelligibility of this method: "The components of an ideogram cohere as particles in a magnetic eld, independent of each other but not of the pattern in which they gure. The ellipse, which we feel to be the absence of predication, is the invisible line of attraction between particle and particle" (74). Pound's imprint on "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier" is obvious, (17) as is the "triple piled" method of William Carlos Williams's Paterson, (18) yet T.S. Eliot's experiments in ideogrammatic method are equally germane to Davenport, who shares with the poet an avant-garde aesthetic and a conservative temperament. Davenport's text reverberates with echoes of Four Quartets. (19) Both focus but do not depend on a specic place (for Elio t, Ferrar's rebuilt church at Little Gidding and the London of the Blitz; for Davenport, Fourier's grave and a village in subSaharan Africa); both juxtapose distant ages without transitions; they adapt inherited structures (the terze rima inections of Eliot's re watch, Davenport's use of Dogon cosmological structure); they cite a range of sources (sometimes the same one, e.g., Heraclitus and Mallarme's "Au Tombeau d'Edgar Poe"); and both of these rigorously impersonal texts include an intensely personal pilgrimage to a grave site (Ferrar's and Fourier's). (20) Both writers endeavor to integrate the particulars into the general without violence to particularity. And both wish to imply complementarity among seemingly isolated elements. But though both authors place themselves within the eld of composition, Davenport is more careful not to dominate it intellectually or morally; rather, he inscribes his unavoidable subjectivity within the larger forces invoked by the text.

Eliot told the Paris Review's Donald Hall, "That's one way in which my mind does seem to have worked throughout the years poetically-doing things separately and then seeing the possibility of fusing them together, altering them, and making a kind of whole of them" (qtd. in Gardner 14). In a 1976 interview with Barry Alpert, Davenport described how his stories emerge from the independent jottings of his notebook: "My writing unit is such that I start literally with scraps of paper and pages from notebooks. Every sentence is written by itself; there are very few consecutive sentences in my work.[...] Single sentences, which are revised eight or nine times. And I nd a place for them, so that the actual writing of any of the stories of Tatlin! was a matter of turning back and forth in a notebook and nding what I wanted" (5).

Davenport thus echoes Eliot in a method of composition predicated ultimately on a Coleridgean faith in the conversion of series into wholes. (21) The difference between them is, of course, the transcendental locus of unity in Eliot. Order for Davenport remains immanent in nature, without the kind of metaphysical guarantees implied by Eliot's sacramental language. Davenport's assemblage is carefully arranged to insinuate possibilities of patterned energy rather than to proclaim its source and nature. The ability to fashion a Coleridgean "whole" is the mastery celebrated in "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier," but the story is not itself the crystallization of this trait. It is, rather, Fourier who is presented as an exemplary instance of such a capacity. Davenport describes Fourier's deteriorated gravesite and imagines the body's decomposition ("the uid tongue is now trash" [Da Vinci's 681) to underscore the neglect of the philosopher's ideas. (22) Though Fourier's ideas are as eclipsed as his plot is derelict, Davenport, who has called him "the greatest mind of the 19th century" (Alpert 6), proceeds to insist on Fourier's centrality: All of nature is series and pivot, like Pythagoras' numbers, like the transmutations of light. Give me a sparrow, he said, a leaf, a sh, a wasp, an ox, and I will show you the harmony of its place in its chord, the phrase, the movement, the concerto, the all. (Da Vinci's 71) Fourier shares with Linnaeus, Swedenborg, and the Transcendentalists the condence that the diversity of living forms can be arranged according to an idealist morphology, what Goethe termed the open secret of empirically veriable Urphanomene, archetypes that reveal nature's core principles. For Davenport, this was primitive intuition before it became Enlightenment science, hence the predominance in "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier" of Dogon metaphysics, manifest in the content of Ogotemmeli's utterances and immanent in the text's form. "There are two hundred and sixty-six things out of which Amma made the world," Ogotemmeli tells Griaule (Da Vinci's 81), each dividing schematically into geometrically strict divisions mapped out on a 266-cell grid. The seemingly arbitrary accumulation of the text's grid-like paragraphs, all but two of which are isomorphic, fullls Dogon computations: 255 paragraphs plus eleven full-page visual collages. There are 266 "things" out of which Davenport made the text. Thus an appearance of whimsical imposition of meaningless pattern proves on inspection to be dictated by the core content of the text. Like the syllabic statuary of Marianne Moore's idiosyncratic yet strictly structured stanzas,

Davenport's strictly patterned prose stanzas are arbitrary but far from gratuitous. (He employs this structure in several later texts, including "On Some Lines of Virgil," "Fifty-Seven Views of Fujiyama," the second part of "Apples and Pears.") As in Moore, the formal order both testies to condence in larger harmonies and constitutes a reaction as stern as T.S. Eliot's to proclamations of anarchic aesthetic liberty. (23) In an interview Davenport objects to the use of the word "constraints" to describe this style: "Constraints is not exactly the word. A style has its rules. I have used isometric paragraphs as a formal device exactly like the paragraph itself. Prose narrative has units (the chapter, areas of dialogue). Architecture may be behind much of this-'stanza' means 'room.' Each of my texts has its own architecture, as it has its own narrative rhythm. By 'constraint' you mean rules, order, Formal devices" (Hoepffner 122). As originally published in The Georgia Review, "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier" was divided into 33 sections of varying length, its paragraphs indented and also of varying length. For publication in Da Vinci's Bicycle, Davenport completely revised the text, regularizing the length of all but two sections. In this revised, typescript all but one of the paragraphs are shaped into precise rectangles (disarrayed by the shift to print yet still apparent, since all paragraphs remain four lines long). While the sections no longer separate independent material, disparate matter may converge in the same paragraph: You must understand, Beckett said, that Joyce came to see that the fall of a leaf is as grievous as the fall of man. lam blind, Ogotemmeli said, opening a blue paper of tobacco with his delicately long wrinkled ngers, his head aloof and listening. (98) As in the contents of a Joseph Cornell box or a collage canvas, the conjunction here of paragraphs neatly separated in the Georgia Review version of the text yields fortuitous parallels. The blind, long-ngered smoker Joyce (illustrated by Davenport from a Gisele Freund photo [78]) is, like Fourier, da Vinci, and Stein earlier in the text, placed in structural proximity to imply afnity to the Dogon metaphysician. Peter Quartermain notes a link to the techniques of Cubism: "It is a visual attening of surface, and it renders that surface opaque, and thus the writing draws attention to itself as writing, as medium, in a manner directly analogous to that of Cubism" (179-80). Davenport jettisons causal connection and narrative continuity not in favor of an aleatory play of signication, but in order to intimate by combinational logic kinships and

correspondences among eras, ideas, and forces. The concluding ve paragraphs of "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier" are a quotation from Gertrude Stein's description in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas of the victory procession up the Champs Elysees. Stein and Toklas "were admirably placed and saw perfectly" (106). The concluding, irregular paragraph reads: "The French carry their ags best of all, Pershing and his ofcer carrying the ag behind him were perhaps the most perfectly spaced." Stein savors not only objects but intervals and lines in this fourth procession through "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier." Davenport witnesses the contrastingly modest Giscard-D'Estaing inaugural on the same avenue: "There was no La Marseillaise, no parade. Hatless he strode along alone" (71). On the eve of visiting Fourier's grave, Davenport is struck by another contrast, that of an imaginary procession of New Harmony citizens in Fourier's utopia. This one occupies 22 paragraphs ("There are twenty-two families of things," Ogotemmeli explains [83]) along the same rout e as the military parade and the D'Estaing inaugural, but this is a brigade without national or political afliations, one in which even the Police of the Gardens and Corporals of Fine Tone march unarmed. The children ride totemic animals (such as the nowextinct quagga) and play trumpet fanfares:

They are masters of horns and owers, of printing and dancing, of the cello and cartography, of crystals and snakes, of polyhedral tensegrities and cetacean speech, of history and embroidery. They are companions palatine of the Great Bear of the Dnieper. (72) Stein witnesses, by contrast, a rigid martial procession that, in Davenport's text, fails to stay in sync. Whereas the Fourier procession embodies a Pythagorean faith in measure, the text's ending is not "perfectly spaced": the concluding section contains not nine but only two paragraphs, and the nal paragraph is not isometric. The story thus embodies the characteristic tension in Davenport's ction between a Rilkean yearning for fostering containment and a fear of bridling, sterile regimentation. While its isomorphic nine-paragraph units ally "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier" with the Dogon demiurge Amma, its composite structure allies it with Ogo (the two deities functioning rather like the Urizen and Los of Blake's cosmology). The tension is inherent in Fourier's utopian program. A radically antirepressive individualist polity is founded on a subtly

coercive system of hierarchies, a paradoxical "calculus" of the passions as elaborate as the dietary regimen of Leviticus or the labor regimen of a Victorian textile mill. "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier" structurally emulates Fourier's taxonomical rigor, but sets these against the spontaneous and the accidental, those forces Fourier appreciated and Ogotemmeli classied under the dominion of the puckish god Ogo: "For it is Ogo's gift that he built accident into the world's structure" ( 97). Ogo disrupts the painstaking symmetries of Davenport's text by botching the last section and nal paragraph. Every force evolves a form in Davenport, furnishing the organizing principle of his diverse ction and validating his novel stylistic choices. Yet force is an impersonal, awesome and terrible property, one to be venerated and appeased rather than loved. Ogo expresses a principle of play that operates as a voluntary, limited, and contingent expression of force. In Davenport's work, play is the genial human embodiment of aloof inhuman force. For him, play is force under the auspices of emancipatory utopian containment (idealized in the Dogon and in Fourier's social vision). In contrast to the linear, continuous, and temporal conventions of traditional ction, Davenport models his texts on the multi-dimensioned, discontinuous and spatial principles of the playing eld. His texts may be overtly structured, labyrinthine "involucra," but they are none the less impish concoctions, ones not only organized to assimilate accident and inspiration but also distinguished by every kind of verbal extravagance and teasing high jinks. They are the domain of Ogo no less than Amma. Notes For valued assistance in the preparation of this essay I am gratefully indebted to Brian Jones. (1.) Davenport is an illustrator of books (such as Hugh Kenner's The Stoic Comedians and The Counterfeiters) and journals (such as The Kenyon Review, Parnassus, and Paideuma). His art is the subject of Erik Anderson Reece's monograph, A Balance of Quinces, which reveals the inseparable relationship between Davenport's literary and pictorial work.

(2.) Brakhage has written admiringly of Davenport. In "Ice is for Coffee and

for Wine" he speaks of the joy to have "at last met such a man as Pound describes Remy de Goncourt to have been...i.e. one whose intelligence was a way of feeling" (7). (3.) In the essay "Olson," Davenport shows how this technique succeeds in "The Kingshers" (Geography 80-99). (4.) Quartermain quotes from Seitz, The Art of Assemblage 25. (5.) Perloff quotes from Davenport's "Ernst Machs Max Ernst" (Geography 380), which she goes on to argue marks a similar challenge to generic convention by being "a lyrical collage essay" (152). (6.) See, for instance, the preface to his book-length poem Flowers and Leaves: "The decorations for this volume are all quotations" (4). (7.) Pp. 77-95. As well, Davenport published it as a limited edition (New York: The Grenfell Press, 1984) before including it in Apples and Pears 1-20 and also in Twelve Stories 139-58. (8.) I cite the appearance of "The Bowmen of Shu" both in Davenport's Apples and Pears (1984) and in Twelve Stories (1997). (9.) Of The Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound, Pound tells us that Gaudier-Brzeska told his model, "it... will... not... look... like you. It will be the expression of certain emotions which I get from your character" (Gaudier-Brzeska 50). In Davenport's story, the artist tells Pound, "It will not look like you, you know. It will look like your energy" (16; 156). In Apples and Pears, Davenport places his drawing of the sculpture at p. 9, in Twelve Stories at 147, where it is blown up into a full page image.

(10.) The version of "The Bowmen of Shu" reprinted in Twelve Stories omits the stylized version of Gaudier-Brzeska's sketched prole of Pound that separates the two paragraphs in Apples and Pears. (11.) "Robot" was rst published in Hudson Review 25.3 (Autumn 1972): 413-46. It was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories of 1973 & The Yearbook of the American Short Story, Martha Foley, ed. (Boston: Houghton, Mifin), 1973: 67-98, and in Prize Stories 1974: The O. Henry Awards,

William Abrahams, ed. (New York: Doubleday), 1974: 186-214. In my citations, I identify rst its appearance in Tatlin!, second in Twelve Stories. (12.) In the essay "Guernica," Davenport links Picasso's painting to Palaeolithic art: "The deepest allusion may be to the painted cave at Altamira (at Santander, a few miles from Guernica), and to other prehistoric caves with their bulls and horses. We know that Picasso visited Altamira while Henri Breuil was copying its images in the early years of the century. (Lascaux was not discovered until 1940, so that the dying horses cannot be an allusion to the disembowelled bison there, transxed by a spear, though the accuracy of Picasso's evocation of Magdalenian cave art is inescapable.)" (Hunter Gracchus 183). (13.) Au Tombeau de Charles Tomeau" rst appeared in The Georgia Review 29.4 (Winter 1975): 801-41. (14.) Davenport also makes the maxim the title and subject of a 1968 ink and gouache painting: Nature Loves to Hide is reproduced in Erik Anderson Reece's monograph A Balance of Quinces, as is Davenport's acrylic painting Herakleitos and Knaps (see 126 and 84). The philosopher is also the subject of Davenport's story "Herakleitos" (see Taitlin! 1-51 and Twelve Stories 1-53). (22.) In the uncollected 1985 poem "37, Avenue Samson, Cimitiere Montmartre," Davenport describes Fourier's grave: Nigh mad Nijinski's wanton bones, Slant among these cornered stones, In dust of roses, buttons, cloth, Promised kingdom of rust and moth, Circle and parabola stand, Ellipse and hyperbola and, Splendid within that tetragraph, The old accountant's epitaph, Who spat on silver to inspire The keepers of the sacred fire: Eyes in their loving generate Character, attraction, fate. Wayfarer, you have come upon Charles Fourier, the merchant's son, Who is asleep, asleep. Deny If you dare that the good can die. (23.) Moore is the subject of the celebratory essay "Marianne

Moore" (Geography 114-22), the poem "At Marathon," and is as well the inspiration, with Louis Agassiz, of the poem that follows "At Marathon" in Thasos and Ohio, "The Medusa" (25-27). Works Cited Alpert, Barry. "Interview with Guy Davenport." Vort 9 3.3 (1976): 3-18. Blast 3. Ed. Seamus Cooney; co-ed. Bradford Morrow, Bernard Lafourcade, and Hugh Kenner. Santa Barbara, CA.: Black Sparrow P, 1984. Brakhage, Stan. "Ice is for Coffee and for Wine." Margins 30 (Aug.-Sept. 1974): 6-7. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Vol. 2. Ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. Princeton, NJ: Bollingen, 1983. _____. Collected Letters. Vol. 4. Ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. Oxford: Clarendon P. 1959. Davenport, Guy. Apples and Pears. San Francisco: North Point P, 1984. _____. Cities on Hills: A Study of Ezra Pound's A Draft of XXX Cantos. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1983. _____. Da Vinci's Bicycle. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979. _____. Every Force Evolves a Form. San Francisco: North Point P, 1987. _____. Flowers and Leaves. Flint, MI: Bamberger Books, 1991. _____. The Geography of the Imagination. San Francisco: North Point P, 1981. Rpt. New York: Pantheon, 1992. _____. Herakleitos and Diogenes. San Francisco: Grey Fox P, 1979. _____. The Hunter Gracchus. Washington: Counterpoint, 1996. _____. Seven Greeks. New York: New Directions, 1995. _____. Tatlin! New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974. Rpt. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. _____. Thasos and Ohio. San Francisco: North Point P, 1986.

_____. Twelve Stories. Washington: Counterpoint, 1997. Duberman, Martin. Black Mountain. New York: Dutton, 1972. Eliot, T.S. Four Quartets. London: Faber, 1959. Gardner, Helen. The Composition of Four Quartets. London: Faber, 1978. Gen, Laszlo. Ideogram: History of a Poetic Method. Austin: U of Texas P, 1982. Haepffner, Bernard. "Pleasant Hill: An Interview with Guy Davenport." Conjunctions 24 (1995): 118-24. Olsen, Lance. "A Guydebook to the Last Modernist: Davenport on Davenport and Da Vinci's Bicycle." The Journal of Narrative Technique 16.1 (Winter 1986): 148-61. Olson, Charles. Selected Writings of Charles Olson. Ed. Robert Creeley. New York: New Directions, 1966. Perloff, Marjorie. The Dance of the intellect. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985. Pound, Ezra. The Cantos. New York: New Directions, 1995. _____. Gaudier-Brzeska. New York: New Directions, 1974. Quartermain, Peter. Disjunctive Poetics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. Reece, Erik Anderson. A Balance of Quinces: The Paintings and Drawings of Guy Davenport. New York: New Directions, 1996. Rimbaud, Arthur. Poesies, Une Saison en enfer, Illuminations. Ed. Louis Forestier. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1984. Seitz, William C. The Art of Assemblage. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961. Williams, William Carlos. Paterson. New York: New Directions, 1992. Williamson, Alan. "A Lateborn Modernist." Shenandoah 26.4 (Summer 1975): 87-90. Zachar, Laurence. "Guy Davenport: Une Mosaique du genres." Recherches

Anglaises et Nord-Americaines 21 (1994): 51-63. Andre Furlani (furlani@alcor.concordia.ca) is assistant professor in the department of English at Concordia University, Montreal. His recent publications include articles on Elizabeth Bishop's prose in Critique, Herman Melville's Platonism in Studies in Short Fiction, and postmodern historiographical drama in Canadian Literature. Forthcoming are chapters in books on the literary treatment of childhood sexuality (University of Minnesota Press) and on the American poet Ronald Johnson (University of Maine Press). He is completing a study of Guy Davenport.