THINGS

Fall 2001
Volume 28, Number 1

By most accounts, the form of the earliest secular poetry in English--the riddle--descends from the genre of the aenigma, first composed by English scholars (in Latin) in the seventh century.1 Because the Latin clerical tradition of riddling was far less robust and inventive than its Anglo-Saxon descendant, however, this literary-historical account may be less significant for a genealogy of lyric than the cultural disposition of the riddle poem. Archaeological evidence reveals that the earliest poetry in English displays an affinity for objects whose rarity and eccentricity were signaled by a peculiar verbal identity. Indeed, it may be possible to claim that lyric poetry first emerged in English as the enigmatic voice of certain highly wrought objects.

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In the humanities, the material substance of ordinary things is judged to be either an intuitive certainty or an arcane possession of physics. Matter is no longer viewed as a problem relevant to humanistic criticism. These assumptions, which extend to the ostensibly critical study of material culture, are among the long-term effects of literature's (and philosophy's) withdrawal from serious debate over the nature of material substance. Science has long been regarded as the sole arbiter in the determination of matter. The result is that the authority and explanatory power of literary or cultural theory in relation to material culture is limited by its dependence on science not only to furnish a plausible account of material substance, but to determine, in a fundamental sense, what sets material things apart from ideas or events.

See Also Mary Poovey: The Model System of Contemporary Literary Criticism (Spring 2001) Lesley Stern: Conversions (A Story Blown Hither and Thither) (Spring 1999) Wu Hung: The Painted Screen (Autumn 1996)

In this essay, I am concerned essentially with what lyric poetry may be able to tell us about the material substance of things, and if what matters about the world in a poem holds any particular significance for the history of philosophical materialism. Science continues to be puzzled by distinctions between ponderable and imponderable bodies or, more precisely, by the coexistence of these properties in a single entity. What do the intuitive properties of an object (what we can perceive of it) have in common with the invisible foundation of material substance? Following the development of modern physics, this question has become more acute because certain kinds of subatomic events do not appear to observe the laws of intuitive bodies--the very bodies that are ostensibly founded on these inscrutable events. Hence, real bodies appear to be composed of unreal substance. And the substance of things--the insensible foundation of material bodies--possesses intuitive reality solely in the form of images and tropes. Substance, in this sense, is the solution to the conundrum posed by things that speak in riddles: the verbal identity of these objects, which is the source of their obscurity, corresponds to the role of analogy in the determination of material substance. More precisely, when an object speaks in riddles, it reveals its true "substance." That is to say, the innate obscurity of matter in the history of physics, like the inscrutability of things in lyric poetry, betrays the inescapable role of language in depicting the nonempirical qualities--the invisible aspect--of material phenomena. The production of verbal or lyric substance in poetry therefore corresponds to an essential aspect of the way science understands the nature of the material world.

1. W. P. Ker comments on Anglo-Saxon literature's affinity for the riddle: "Poetical riddles were produced in England more largely than anywhere else in the Dark Ages, both in Latin and the native tongue.... The difference is that the old English poetical fashions are much more favourable to this kind of treatment than anything in Latin. It is the proper business, one might say, of the old English poetry to call things out of their right names" (W. P. Ker, The Dark Ages [London, 1904], p.Ê92; hereafter abbreviated D). Northrop Frye makes a bolder claim, identifying the riddle as the primordial form of one of the two basic modes of lyric poetry, which are melos and--the mode proper to the riddle--opsis; see Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J., 1971), p. 280. On the riddle as one of the essential roots of lyric poetry, see Andrew Walsh, Roots of Lyric: Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics (Princeton, N.J., 1978), ch. 2.

Daniel Tiffany is the author of Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound (1995) and Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (2000). A poet and translator, he is coeditor of a new book series on auditory culture and teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.