Simon Jarvis

Quality and the non-identical in

J.H.Prynne’s ‘Aristeas, in seven
years’
This piece is 7,200 words or about sixteen printed pages long.

... from Parataxis magazine, Cambridge

Back to Parataxis contents list

J.H.Prynne’s poetry has been comparatively little written about, and it seems likely
that many readers first come across his work through Donald Davie’s Thomas
Hardy and British Poetry (1973), in which Prynne makes a brief appearance as a
Hardyesque poet of modest political hopes whose principal concern is to rebuke
those who aspire more immoderately than himself.(1) The approach of Peter
Ackroyd, though it contrasts sharply with Davie’s, appears equally tangential: in
his Notes for a New Culture (1976), Ackroyd presents a proto-Derridean Prynne
whose poems have a ‘completely written surface’ and eschew ‘extrinsic reference’
entirely.(2) Although there have since been other and more attentive critical
accounts than these, a note to the collected edition of Prynne’s work which
appeared in 1982 still felt it necessary to attempt to deflect the course which
interpretation of it had previously taken: ‘Much early critical response to
J.H.Prynne’s work mistakenly took its cue from the first line in this book: ‘The
whole thing it is, the difficult’, failing to establish that difficulty as being the
ardent ‘matter’ and the accompanying breadth of imaginative and political
reference.’ Whilst this note has sometimes been read as a parodic one (as for
instance by Dennis Keene writing in PN Review in 1982) (3) there are advantages
in taking it seriously.
The difficulty is claimed not to be a manner of presentation supposedly
separable from subject matter, but to be inherent in the matter addressed itself.
Moreover, the insistence upon ‘imaginative and political reference’ gives notice
that this inherent difficulty is not to be taken as an epistemological one: Prynne’s
poetics is not amongst those which believe themselves to be criticising the
referential shortcomings of an hypostatized ‘language’ simply by exemplifying
them. The work draws on a lexicon which does not restrict itself before an
imaginary ‘general reader’ of average competence; instead the breadth of
vocabulary draws attention to, and asks readers to resist, the division of intellectual
labour by which powerful practices of knowledge are made to serve sectional
interests. The matter is difficult, that is, because although the matter which is to be
engaged with is conceived of as a ‘whole thing’, the languages and knowledges
which are at our disposal are cognitively and politically partial. Or rather, they are
not at all at ‘our’ disposal in the covertly inclusive sense that such a pronominal
adjective would claim for itself: as ‘Die a Millionaire’ notes, ‘we are the social
strand/ which is already past the twist-point &/ into the furnace.’(4) That pronoun
appeals as if to a community of speakers and writers, which is as yet no
community but a series of markets and hierarchies, of a language, which is no
common tongue.
In such circumstances the notion of linguistic competence resembles that of
political competence or citizenship in that by it a formal or juridical equality
conceals substantive inequity, which can then be discounted as contingent or
accidental. Calls for all writing to be accessible to all competent readers given a
modicum of effort have as their corollary a double exclusion: of thought and
reference which does not fall within the terrain of such average competence; and
of the incompetent reader, apparently self-disqualified before writing judged
accessible by appeal to a consensual notion of competence. These considerations
do not mean that Prynne’s work is cavalier about the question of accessibility. But
the routes of access that are offered to these poems are not falsely immediate ones:
rather, they discover (as the poem ‘One Way at Any Time’ schematically
demonstrates) that linguistic understanding is necessarily socially mediated.(5) In
consequence, working with the poems will not be only a question of reading them
off against a competence which has been accumulated in advance; readers are
asked to become researchers, to take purchase on the whole body of the language
and the history and polity sedimented within it, rather than acquiescing in their
dispossession in the name of the figment of a common readership.
Yet it is not generally the intention of this work to assemble a surrogate public
language and life from fragments of sectional knowledge, as if the privatised
segments of knowing practice could be taped together to constitute or reconstitute
such a public culture. Commenting on volumes IV, V and VI of Charles Olson’s
Maximus Poems in 1973, Prynne wrote that ‘this poem, which might in some ways
seem close to that panic-stricken encyclopedic impulse, as in Cassiodorus, which
merely confronts the decline & splitting of awareness, is in fact something else;
i.e. not secondary assemblage but primary writing;’.(6) The claim of divided
intellectual labour, that it does or will eventually add up to complete coverage of
what is thereby made into the material to be known, is resisted; enquiry which has
restricted its thought at the point where thought threatens to cross the boundaries
between faculties is not limited only in the extent of its coverage but damaged
within itself. But since what Prynne refers to as ‘the decline and splittings of
awareness’ are not only to be thought of as a series of bad intellectual habits which
can be shifted by exhortations to a more holistic methodology, but as a stubborn
and powerful social process, what kind of ‘primary writing’ can there be which
does not simply mask these divisions, by offering epistemologically to transcend
them, or by painting the consolatory picture of a unified culture which once was,
or could in future, be ‘ours’?
One answer might be suggested by the exhortation of ‘The Numbers’, the first
poem in the book:

Signs or array,
we should take this, we should
really do so. There is no other
beginning on power.
Such is to elect terms,
to be the ground for names.
We should come to the other thing, the in-
fluence of terminal systems, from there. [...]
Here is the elect, the
folds of our intimate surface. (7)

The parataxis leaves unclear whether the demonstrative ‘this’ which ‘we should
take’ is to be identified with ‘Signs or array’ or not, but this failure to specify is
just Prynne’s point here: what the demonstrative pronoun refers to remains
unspecified since the ‘intimate surface’ faced by each reader is various and to be
taken up by readers rather than prescribed by the poet. But what the passage does
clearly insist upon is that ‘the in-/ fluence of terminal systems’ is not to be
approached externally, so as to provide a causal narrative in which the supposedly
prior determinations of such systems upon each particular are set out, but
immanently, through the particularity of linguistic, conceptual, and bodily
experience. Any other procedure amounts to a defeatism of reason which, on the
one hand, surrenders in advance the critical purchase of the subject to determining
powers which are always conceived of as being elsewhere, and yet, on the other,
implicitly claims for itself a standpoint outside such systems from which they can
be disinterestedly described. Such is the point of Prynne’s secularization of both
the political and religious senses of the notion of ‘election’. After a political
election the voice of each voter in the polity is transferred to a representative, who
will speak for each voter. The salvation of an elected soul is decided upon by an
external deity. In each case, election acts as a deferral of the subject’s agency to
some end elsewhere. For Prynne, to regard as the ‘elect’ ‘the folds of our intimate
surface’ is literally to choose to start with the particulars at hand rather than to start
by disempowering or disqualifying such particulars as mere contingency, accident,
or appearance, whose significance is to be redeemed elsewhere. In such
circumstances ‘we’ might become a real collective rather than its representative
image.
This is not a choice to seal off some realm of this-ness which could be seen as
impervious to external determination: the passage quoted does still insist on
arriving at an account of ‘the in-/ fluence of terminal systems’, and the range of
political and economic reference made by subsequent pieces in Kitchen Poems and
in the later collections bears this insistence out. Attempts (such as that of Michael
Grant in the Dictionary of Literary Biography) to assimilate Prynne’s wish to start
from individual experiences to Husserlian phenomenology write off his
acknowledgement that to understand individual experience is also to go beyond it.
(8) Prynne invokes demonstrative immediacy not phenomenologically, as a
category, but dialectically, as a moment: once examined, apparent immediacy
necessarily reveals its own mediatedness. To do justice to what lies at hand would
eventually be to understand how it does lie enmeshed in ‘terminal systems’.
A later and more extended statement of Prynneian poetics than the review of
Olson, is the ‘Letter to Andrew Duncan’ printed in the Grosseteste Review for
1984. In the course of the ‘Letter’ Prynne considers the consequences of such
thoughts for the practice of writing:

... in many different contexts I observe habits of language formation which are not
only grammatically retarded; they exploit the potential for thought and feeling to
which they refer by milking it of potency and in the same sweep drastically
abridging its connection with the physical substrate. ‘Steel is the pacer of the will’
(p116); ‘Love is the glove of anxiety’ (p54); ‘The act lives under the lintel of
time’; in each of these cases the force of the idea grabs strongly the means for its
apodictic assertion. The verb is an imperious recruitment and material is
suppressed in the very act of claims for its release. (9)

In the phrases of Duncan’s quoted here, the words referring to what Prynne
characterizes as ‘physical substrate’ or ‘material’ — ‘the pacer’, ‘the glove’, ‘the
lintel’ — are appropriated in a merely illustrative way. They offer to make more
satisfyingly concrete or imaginable the supposedly abstract concepts to which they
attach: ‘love’, ‘the will’, ‘the act’. But, as Prynne indicates, they in fact have a
different effect. On the one hand, it is implied that ‘love’, ‘the will’, and ‘the act’
are too general or abstracted to make effective reference of any kind, since they
require the help of the ‘glove’, ‘the pacer’ and the ‘lintel’ to supplement and
illustrate them. On the other hand, it is implied that the ‘physical substrate’ or
‘material’ has more than accidental significance only in so far as it can be
appropriated to illustrate a concept. Prynne’s criticisms take the appropriations
made by the writing’s rhetorical practice as an epitome of (both analogous to and
exemplifying) a political appropriation, in this case the appropriation
recommended by Duncan’s instrumentalist politics: ‘The verb is an imperious
recruitment and the material is suppressed in the very act of claims for its release.’
The point of such criticisms is not to recommend a ‘materialist’ poetics
supposedly granting direct access to a realm of concretion undisturbed by
concepts. As an earlier passage in the ‘Letter’ remarks, ‘That which is prior to the
plasticity of thought and its expression of course provides the physical modes for a
method of thought itself, without which the imagist merely counts bricks.’ Rather,
it is to remind us that metaphorical or comparative identification may enrich or
empower writing at the expense of that to which writing hopes to do justice; so
that the habitual laudatory adjectives for admired poetry — that it is ‘rich’ or
‘powerful’ — may in themselves bestow no more automatic praise than they
would when applied to a person. At a time when, as David Trotter has pointed out
in his book The Making of the Reader (1984), the ability to come up with striking
metaphor and simile is widely taken as a sufficient test of poetic merit, Prynne’s
literalist poetic clearly places him at some distance from poetic institutions
employing such criteria.(10)
But Prynne’s criticism here is not only a criticism of one rhetorical figure. In
two of the three instances cited by Prynne, the verb of ‘imperious recruitment’ is
the apparently innocuous copula ‘is’. What it might mean to think of the verb ‘is’
as being capable of an ‘imperious recruitment’ can perhaps be better understood in
the light of the critique of the predicative judgment given in Hegel’s Encyclopedia
of the Philosophical Sciences:

... the untruth of the immediate judgement lies in the incongruity between its form
and content. To say ‘this rose is red’ involves (in virtue of the copula ‘is’) the
coincidence of subject and predicate. The rose however is a concrete thing, and so
is not red only: it has also an odour, and a specific form, and many other features
not implied in the predicate red. The predicate on its part is an abstract universal,
and does not apply to the rose alone. There are other flowers and other objects
which are red too. The subject and predicate in the immediate judgement touch, as
it were, only in a single point, but do not cover each other. (11)

The point of Hegel’s critique is that there is more to the word ‘is’ than predication:
the copula contains the implication that it identifies subject and predicate, rather
than merely asserting that the predicate belongs to the subject. The predicative
judgement, therefore, may be ‘correct’ as Hegel concedes: but its ‘untruth’ lies in
its one-sided abstraction of the meaning of ‘is’, which performs a similar
abstraction upon the qualities of subject and predicate. T.W.Adorno’s Negative
Dialectics pursues this thought and considers it not merely as a logical but also as
a social problem. Adorno argues that the belief that true thinking may simply be
equated with correct predicative thinking both reflects and enables the imperative
to a universal exchangeability of objects within organised economic life:

The exchange principle, the reduction of human labour to the abstract universal
concept of average working hours, is fundamentally akin to the principle of
identification. Exchange is the social model of the principle of identification, and
without the principle there would be no exchange; it is through exchange that non-
identical individuals and performances become commensurable and identical. The
spread of the principle imposes on the whole world an obligation to become
identical, to become total. But if we denied the greater glory of the irreducibly
qualitative, that parity should no longer be the ideal rule — we would be creating
excuses for recidivism into ancient injustice. The exchange of equivalents has long
since consisted in just this, that unequal things would be exchanged in its name,
that the surplus value of labour would be appropriated. If comparability as a
category of measure were simply annulled, the rationality which is inherent in the
exchange principle — as rationality, of course, but also as promise — would give
way to direct appropriation, to force, and nowadays to the naked privilege of
monopolies and cliques. (12)

The way in the which the qualities of concept and object are suppressed in a
predicative proposition reflects and assists the way in which the different qualities
of commodities (including commodified human labour) are regarded as irrelevant
to their expression as exchange-value. The limitations of the predicative
judgement, that is, are not merely contingent limitations of this particular mode of
expression, but are representative of the limitation upon thought as such within a
society in which all qualitative difference is increasingly required to become
commmensurable and exchangeable. The consequence is that thought experiences
the difficulty of doing justice to its objects within the structure of its own most
elementary identifications; but also that there is no transparent conceptual medium,
set apart from identificatory thinking, which would give direct access to qualitative
difference. Rather, Adorno would argue, overcoming the contradictions of
identificatory thought is not the work of thought alone: critical thinking seeks to
bring concealed contradictions to light, but not to pretend that their resolution is a
purely cognitive problem.
It is not clear that Prynne would wish to endorse all the terms of this argument,
but they do nevertheless indicate the nature of the difficulties facing any writer
who wishes to do justice to the non-identical or qualitatively different. Such an
aspiration, as the frequent recurrence of the word ‘quality’ both in the title and in
the texts of Prynne’s poems themselves suggets, is important to Prynne’s poetic
undertaking. Adorno’s argument suggests, as does Prynne’s own ‘A Letter to
Andrew Duncan’, that any writer wishing to do justice to the non-identical will
experience these difficulties not merely as an abstractable thematic content but
also within the form or style of the writing itself.
If these arguments themselves seem excessively cognitive ones with which to
address the work of a poet, their relevance is nevertheless confirmed not only by
the terms of Prynne’s ‘A Letter to Andrew Duncan’ but also by the refusal of his
work either to surrender as non-poetic the aspiration to do justice to minute
particulars or to take up the sheltered but displaced ground of a relative aesthetic
autonomy whence whatever is written need not be taken literally. This distrust of
the offered partial haven of relative autonomy indicates why it is that dialectical
logic, rather than dialectical aesthetics, most usefully addresses Prynne’s work.
The most extended effort at taking up with the question of qualitative difference or
non-identity amongst Prynne’s earlier work is the poem ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’
which first appeared in the volume Aristeas in 1968 and was then reprinted in The
White Stones in 1969. The poem is amongst the most rebarbative for any who
would regard the minute particulars of political, historical and philological enquiry
as embarrassingly and unpoetically specific: its closing list of references to
academic books and articles produces further embarrassment by suggesting that
reading should not be contemplatively confined to the text itself, but prepared to
enquire beyond it. It should be said that it cannot be the hope of this short
discussion to exhaust all the arguments and informations which might animate this
poem: but since the point is not to give a brochure of all possible arguments but to
argue those which are most important this should not give too much
disappointment. Moreover, although the list of references asks for further reading
to be done, such reading by no means provides a key with the aid of which the
poems might simply be decoded. The poem might be thought of as writing rather
than assemblage in the sense that it takes up with and recasts its sources rather than
simply taking them over, so that attention to its lexicon and syntax is attention to
the matter at hand rather than to decoration.
The figure named in the poem’s title is the seventh-century B.C. Greek poet
Aristeas of Proconessus, an island in the sea of Marmora between the Black Sea
and the Mediterranean. Of Aristeas’ lost poem, the Arimaspea, only a handful of
lines of variable authenticity are extant.(13) Herodotus, however, gives in his
Histories a substantial report of the poem’s contents, which purport to be an
account of Aristeas’ seven years’ journey north with the assistance of Apollo from
the fuller’s shop [*] in Proconessus, his native island, where he was thought to
have fallen down dead, to the nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples of the Russian
steppes, and of the reports given to him by those peoples of the inhabitants further
north: of the allegedly one-eyed Arimaspians and their antagonists, a race of
griffins guarding large reserves of gold; and further still, of the Hyperborean
paradise beyond the north wind.(14) Prynne’s poem is concerned as much with the
nomadic peoples reported by Aristeas as with Aristeas himself: and while the same
passage from Herodotus is one of the primary historical sources for research into
these peoples, a variety of ethnographic and philological sources are also referred
to both in the poem and in the list of references given at its close.

[ * ] Full: 1. to cleanse and thicken (cloth) by special processes

in manufacture. 2. (of cloth) to become compacted or felted.
[Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary]

It becomes clear on a first reading that the poem’s structure is not a

straightforwardly narrative one, for several reasons. In the first place the elements
of a simple past-tense narrative concerning Aristeas do not, even fragmentarily,
run sequentially from the beginning to the end of the poem. Instead, the pattern of
their narration is a recursive one, in which events mentioned earlier in the poem
may be reverted to and amplified. Thus it is not until towards the end of the
poem’s third section that the simplest narrative information in the poem, ‘Aristeas
removed himself for seven years/ into the steppes ...’ is given.(15) Secondly, and
more importantly, many passages of the poem are in the present tense. This
combination of tenses is not the result of a wilful attempt to question the viability
of a temporal framework for narrative as such, at a purely epistemological level,
but reflects the necessarily fractured method of any investigation of the nature of
prehistoric societies: historical accounts, by definition, give a severely limited
report of prehistory, and ethnographic or anthropological evidence drawn from
groups still existing separately or only recently assimilated into more extended
polities is essential to any conjectural reconstruction of pre-historic social
organisations. So that the present-tense geographical peripheries of the centralised
polities from which the pre-historian writes coincide cognitively with the past-
tense periphery of pre-history.
But several passages of the poem indicate that the poet wishes to surrender the
central vantage-point granted by the extended and settled polity from which
nomadic cultures come to seem peripheral. Such a vantage-point is explicitly
questioned: the description of the Cimmerian invasion of the settled territories of
Asia Minor as ‘ruinous’ is placed between quotation marks and then glossed: ‘as
any settled and complaisant fixture/ on the shoreline would regard the movement
of pressure/ irreducible by trade or bribery.’(16) So that Aristeas, the researcher-
poet who is both the poet’s topic and his model, is taken as proceeding quite
otherwise than as a chronicler of the displaced from the established place of civic
settlement. The poem’s opening lines give a compressed and multiply layered
account of the surrender of any settled perspective:

Gathering the heat to himself, in one thermic

hazard, he took himself out: to catch up with
the tree, the river, the forms of alien vantage (17)

Initially, the ‘he’ referred to in these lines is liable to be identified simply with
Aristeas: Aristeas gathered heat to himself for his journey into the north and ‘took
himself out’ of the settled civilisation of Proconessus both in the literal sense of
removing himself from that city and in the metaphorical sense of staging his own
death, as to take a village out in modern warfare is to destroy it. He catches up
with ‘the tree, the river’ in his journey north in the literal sense that trees and rivers
have already, long before humans, occupied the northward terrain left by the
retreating glaciers; the rivers and trees are forms of specifically ‘alien vantage’
upon the land in the sense that they are other than human. But ‘the forms of alien
vantage’ are also, for Aristeas, the purchase of alien groups of humans, of non-
settled and non-Greek communities, upon the earth. Aristeas seeks to catch up
with, to understand, the relation to a place and its qualities that is not determined
with reference to a fixed city.
But another reading of these lines would notice that although there is a strong
presumption that the ‘he’ referred to is Aristeas himself, this cannot be taken for
granted. The two articles by A.F.Anisimov on Evenk shamanism in Siberia given
in the list of references to the poem suggest that ‘the tree, the river’ are also to be
intepreted as the concepts of ‘clan-tree’ and ‘clan-river’ around which Evenk
shamanism revolves.(18) Both clan-tree, represented by a larch-tree used as the
central pole of the shaman’s tent, and clan-river, thought of as flowing through the
tent, are devices by which the shaman claims the ability to move between the
upper world of immortal spirits, the middle world which the clan itself inhabits,
and the lower world of the clan’s dead ancestors. The Evenk word khamat-mi, ‘to
catch up with’, is also used as a technical term within Evenk culture for the
shaman’s dance performed with the hope of attracting animals and securing
success in the hunt. As Anisimov explains, whoever would become an Evenk
shaman by any other means than ancestry must ‘take themselves out’ by departing
from the clan for a period of trial in the forest; at the same time shamanistic
activity as such involves taking one’s self out and temporarily inhabiting spirit-
forms of the lower and upper worlds. So that the first three lines may be read as
referring not only to Aristeas, but also to a shaman-figure of this kind. The point of
the way in which these first three lines allow a double thread of reference to be
pursued through them is not necessarily to endorse the view that Aristeas was a
shaman, but to suggest at the poem’s outset a structural analogy between the risks
taken by Aristeas in abandoning his settled community and his settled personality
and those taken by the shamans in the religion of those with whom Aristeas wishes
to catch up. The researcher-poet must attempt to give up a fixed vantage over what
is to be sung or written about. Such analogy persists throughout the poem, but
never becomes simply identification:

Aristeas took up it
seems with the
singular as the larch
tree, the
Greek sufficient
for that. (19)

Aristeas’ ‘Greek sufficient’ (where ‘sufficient’ is to be understood as a substantive

rather than as an adjective) for the shaman’s larch-tree, the world- or clan-tree by
which the shaman can move amongst the upper, middle, and lower worlds is
named as ‘the singular’. Such a formulation appears opaque at first, but it becomes
clearer as the poem proceeds. There ‘the singular’ carries, firstly, the sense of ‘not
plural’: Aristeas takes himself out of his collective and of his collectively defined
settled identity into a definition of self simply by his lone trajectory, in which, as
the poem later remarks, ‘who he was took the/ collection of seven / years to thin
out...’ Aristeas’ nomadic self is not, unlike the civic self, defined by a series of
returns to the same place: as we’re told later, he is ‘no longer settled / but settled
now into length; he wore that/ as risk.’ (21) This leads us to a further sense of ‘the
singular’ as ‘that which occurs only once’: Aristeas’ departure from Marmora
having apparently fallen down dead is an extraordinary or miraculous event, a
‘singular’ occurrence.
An amplification of Aristeas’ ‘singularity’ is to be found later in the poem:

... it was
himself as the singular that he knew and
could outlast in the long walk by the
underground sea. Where he was as
the singular
location so completely portable
that with the merest black
wings he could survey the
stones and rills in their
complete mountain courses, [...]
With his staff, the larch-pole, that again the
singular and one axis of the errant world. (22)

The staff of Apollo, who is not only the god of poetry but also the pastoral deity of
flocks and herds, is here linked to the larch-pole which holds up the shaman’s tent
and represents the central axis of the clan-world. The world in such a construction
of place is taken as itself ‘errant’, as wandering past the nomads, rather than vice
versa, since wherever the larch-pole of the shaman’s tent is placed is the clan’s
portable and temporary location. This singularity is not reserved to the heroic class
of poets and shamans: singularity, as Prynne conceives of it, is not the mastery of
self-sufficient subjectivity. Rather, that the clan’s collective gatherings take place
around such a temporary and portable focus allows a constellated movement in
which individuality is neither subordinated to the collective nor imagining itself as
independent of, as master of, the collective:

The
spread is more, the
vantage is singular
as the clan is without centre.
Each where as
the extent of day deter-
mines, where the
sky holds (23)

The clan is without centre but it is still a clan: as a flock or herd of birds or animals
has no centre but is still a flock. Whereas the established city-centre measures all
places with reference to itself, so that many of the earth’s qualities becomes
accidental to it, the clan measures itself with reference to places and qualities of
the earth, where light falls on its surface. Anisimov notes that amongst the series
of meanings for the Evenk words buga-bua-ba are both ‘place of birth’ and also
‘weather’: in such a semantic series transient qualities of the world would appear
not to have been distinguished from supposedly permanent ones.(24) Such is the
point of Prynne’s insistence upon Apollo as not only the poetic but also the
pastoral deity: the shaping imagination of the shaman or poet is not a ‘frenzy/ of
spirit’, but is akin to and partially enables the constellated individuality within
collectivity of the clan, and Apollo’s divinity is earlier referred to as ‘fixed in the
movement of flock’.(25) This relationship between the clan’s pattern of movement
and poetic or shamanistic imagination is more directly referred to later in the
poem:

Prior to the pattern of settlement then, which

is the passing flocks fixed into wherever
they happened to stop,
the spirit demanded the orphic metaphor (26)

The ‘orphic metaphor’ refers to Orpheus’ supposed ability to charm animals, trees
and rocks by his song: as the Evenk shaman is supposed to populate the entire
clan-world with auxiliary bird-, fish- and animal- spirits which protect the clan
from whatever lies outside it. Such a notion of course risks presenting us with the
all too familiar figure of the poet-king, able to shackle up all accidents to the
poetical polity which he makes, a figure of whom poets have been understandably
fond. But the poem immediately and pointedly cuts back upon any attempt to
regard the poet or shaman as effectually the maker of the polity or clan:
that they did migrate and the spirit excursion
was no more than the need and will of the
flesh. The term, as has been pointed out,
is bone, the
flesh burned or rotted off but the
branch clacined like what
it was: like that: as itself
the skeleton of the possible
in a heap and covered with
stones or a barrow. (27)

So that whereas the ‘need and will of the flesh’ as an economic demand leads spirit
to the ‘orphic metaphor’ which will organise the clan-world in whatever location it
occupies, the term (or, glossing this word etymologically from Greek terma, the
‘limit’) to such metaphorical construction of a clan-world is physical death, whose
remnants of bone remain irreducibly literal: ‘calcined like what/ it was: like that:
as itself’. The bones of the dead represent the limit to the clan-world both in the
general sense that they represent a limit to its metaphorical construction as made
by the shaman and in the straightforward sense that the bones buried as the
nomadic clan moves on leave a map of the clan’s literal itinerary, its limits. The
excursion of spirit and the need and will of the flesh don’t get placed in a causal or
historical order of priority: neither is the unquestionable base, nor is either merely
superstructural. But such reminders of the material moment in the clan’s existence,
critically, prevent its constellated organisation from being taken as a mere way of
thinking which could be uncomplicatedly transplanted, like a set of attitudes, to
settled industrial and agricultural society.
Thus a recursive pattern is set up whereby the poem extends trust to apparently
fictional and archaic religious motifs, but always counts the cost of such trust by
recounting the material needs and desires which such motifs both support and
depend on. This applies equally to Aristeas himself: although his departure into the
northern steppes is credited as a spontaneous self-exile at the poem’s opening, the
poem later speculates on the material circumstances of his departure: Aristeas’
region, Asia Minor, is ‘ruined’ by an invasion of Cimmerians, themselves
displaced from the steppes by the Scythians, and Aristeas himself is touched by
this danger, so that his departure to the steppes is not simply a spontaneously
heroic expedition but has its own material motives. These motives are expanded
upon later when the Cimmerian invasion has once more been mentioned: ‘Hence/
the need to catch up, as a response to cheap money.’(28) Once more, what appears
at the poem’s opening as a spontaneous leap has its financial logic: any invading
clan treating gold as ornament or use-value rather than as generalised money-
commodity would from the point of view of a monetary economy merely devalue
the coinage. So that Aristeas’ apparently exceptional flight represents a financial
crisis experienced by his city as a whole: he sets off to discover where such cheap
money comes from: bluntly, to find gold. But the extent of this trip adds up to
more than its immediate occasion: more questions are asked than answered in this
search for gold:

From here comes

the north wind, the
remote animal
gold how did
he, do we, know
or trust, this? (29)

The ‘this’, the knowledge or trust of which is in question, has multiple referents.
On the one hand, this story: how did Aristeas know or trust this, the story that gold
was to be found in the extreme north? How do we know or trust this, the story of
Aristeas’ journey, with its fabulous elements ‘beyond belief’? On the other hand,
this gold: how, in what way, did he or do we know or trust the qualities of gold, as
ornament or value? Both Aristeas’ expedition, and the poet’s attempt to imagine it,
are efforts at knowing or trusting what is remote which lead to a questioning of
what appeared most familiar: the apparently ‘solid’ value of gold.
What then, are the perspectives afforded to Aristeas by his surrender of settled
vantage and adoption of ‘the singular/ location’? The answer is a complex one:

And looking down, then, it is no outlay

to be seen in
the forests, or
scattered rising
of ground. No
cheap cigarettes nothing
with the god in this
climate is free of duty ... (30)

Aristeas can see ‘no outlay’: which might here have either the sense of ‘layout’, or
that of ‘expenditure, investment’. The first of these senses is readily grasped: no
political map of the land as colonised, as laid out, is presented, since the nomadic
clan does not organise land as territory in this way. In the second sense of ‘outlay’,
the clan’s geographical drift is not an economic expansionism which ‘invests’ a
financial outlay in (that is, buys up) the land it occupies. This contrast between the
clan’s movement and the expansion of a fixed power dominating an expanding
economic territory is further pursued in the closing three lines of the passage: the
place where duty-free goods like cheap cigarettes can be bought is a contrived gap
between polities whose tax regulations are there suspended, a ‘free’ trade area
where there is no duty paid to the state. The passage recalles Prynne’s contrast
between Asiatic and Greek economic organisation in the prose piece ‘A Note on
Metal’ (first published in the same pamplet as ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’) :

On the great alluvial plains of Asia the condition was one of power rather than
value; that is, substance, and not (in the first instance) transfer as exchange. Flocks
and herds can be stolen, bartered, given in gift or tribute, so that wealth for the
most part is the power of a technique to hold all that, again the politics of limit.
Whereas the Greek traders were already middlemen with no political standing,
Sardis no city but a commercial centre working on the trick of abstract distance
between real supply and real demand. Lydia, as Childe again said, was ‘a frontier
kingdom owing its prosperity to transit trade.’ (31)

Whereas amongst the nomadic or semi-nomadic societies of Asia wealth appears

directly for the power that it is, in Greek economic organisation relations between
people begin to appear as a relation between things, so that the Greek commerical
centres allow for the partial appearance of a formal juridical equality concealing
substantive inequity. There is ‘nothing’ ‘free of duty’ in the steppes because no
sphere of trade notionally and misleadingly separated from that of political power
has been established. The contrast between Greek economic life and that of the
steppes is amplified in the penultimate section of ‘Aristeas, in seven years’’

‘7 is gold, in this northern clime

which the Greeks so held to themselves and
which in the steppe was no more
than the royal figment.
This movement was of
course cruel beyond belief, as this
was the risk Aristeas took
with him. The conquests were for the motive of
sway, involving massive slaughter as the
obverse politics of claim. That is, slaves and
animals, life and not value: ‘the western Sar-
matian tribes lived side by side not in a loose
tribal configuration, but had been welded
together into an organised imperium
under the leadership of one
royal tribe.’ Royalty
as plural. Hence the calendar as taking of
life, which left gold as the side-issue, pure
figure.’ (32)

Whereas in the steppe those who inhabit it hold the use-values to themselves, as ‘A
Note on Metal’ argues, with the Greeks it is gold that they ‘so held to themselves’,
as the means and measure of their standing. So that gold in the steppe is not the
currency of value but the ornament of power: as the gold taken from Scythian
burial chambers is generally worked into figures rather than coins or ingots.
This passage of the poem leaves its contrasting polities and economies
awkwardly at odds. Do not the italicizations, ‘life and not value’, ‘Royalty as
plural ‘, seem to urge us towards the recidivism into the direct exercise of power
which Adorno warns is the price of a glorification of the irreducibly qualitative?
Any reader following the antithesis developed between Greek trading and Asian
nomadic cultures up to this point could be forgiven for seeing its outcome as a
simple recommendation of the latter: the description of the Cimmerian invasion of
Asian Minor as ‘ruinous’ is sceptically placed within quotation marks and taken as
the partial response that any such settled fixture would make. But here the
movement of peoples across the steppes is frankly admitted to have been ‘cruel
beyond belief’ and to have involved ‘massive slaughter’. So that the italicized
words do not urge approval of the life of the steppe but recognition of its
qualitative difference in all its aspects from that of the trade economy. At the same
time the poem’s use of both past and present tenses reminds us that this qualitative
difference is not to be consigned to the ‘archaic’ or ‘primitive’ stage of a unilinear
narrative of history: such a narrative would already have settled into the vantage
which Aristeas, and the poet, have attempted to surrender. Prynne takes up with
the irreducible difference of nomadic cultures not nostalgically or recuperatively
but dialectically: these cultures do not provide a plan or model for social justice
but their difference does limit and measure the claims of a system of universal
exchangeability to provide the self-evident structure of equity.
It may now be possible to address the aporetic and puzzling coda to the seven
sections of ‘Aristeas, in seven years’:

Guarded by the griffins, which lived close to the

mines, the gold reposed as the divine brilliance,
petrology of the sea air, so far from the shore.
The beasts dug the metal out with
their eagle beaks, rending in the
cruel frost of that earth, and
yet they were the guardians, the figure of flight
and heat and the northern twist of the axis.
His name Aristeas, absent for
these seven years: we should
pay them or steal, it is no
more than the question they ask. (33)

Griffins appear not only in the report of the contents of Aristeas’ lost poem given
by Herodotus, but also as visual representations in the ornamental figures (often
themselves made of gold) found both in the Scythian burial chambers of the South
Russian steppe, and in Siberian burial chambers. E.D.Phillips, in an article cited by
Prynne, compares the Scythian griffin to the heavenly gold-guarding dragon of
Turkish, Mongol and Tibetan mythology and suggests that ‘gold found anywhere
may have been regarded by the Scythians, as by other Asiatic nomads, as a
heavenly and so a sacred metal’.(34) The poem draws attention here to what might
appear as a contradiction in the ancient accounts of the griffins: the metal is dug
out of the ground, but to no end other than to be guarded from those who would
expropriate it. It is sacred and ornamental use-value, not the money-commodity as
exchange-value. The last point of the ‘northern twist of the axis’ of which the
griffins are said to be the ‘figure’ is the Hyperborean paradise: but the griffins are
the utopian figure, not of a life without labour, but of a labour which would not be
for sale. What restitution could there be for the golden figures removed from
Scythian and Siberian burial chambers and melted down to make coinage or
collected in state museums? None, of course: to pay or steal would be equally
absurd when not only the griffins but any who believe in them are no longer to be
located. It is not an answer that these figures or these seven years of Aristeas’
journey will provide, but a question: by which the incommensurably qualitative
comes to measure what it has been measured and sold by.

Notes

1. Donald Davie, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (London, 1973), pp.113–129

2. Peter Ackroyd, Notes for a New Culture (London, 1976), p.130

3. Dennis Keene, ‘In Extenso’, PN Review 9: 34 (1982), pp.64–5

4. J.H.Prynne, Poems (Edinburgh & London, 1982), p.16

5. ibid., p.109

6. J.H.Prynne, ‘Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems: IV,V,VI’, Io 16 (1972–73),

p.91.

7. Prynne, Poems, pp. 11–12

8. Michael Grant, ‘J.H.Prynne’, in Dictionary of Literary Biography 40 (2),

pp.448–453

9. J.H.Prynne, ‘A Letter to Andrew Duncan’, Grosseteste Review 15 (1984), p.104

10. David Trotter, The Making of the Reader (London, 1984), p.

11. William Wallace, N. Hegel’s Logic (Oxford, 1975), p.237

12. T.W.Adorno Negative Dialectics trans. E.B.Ashton (London, 1973), pp.146–7

(Revised with reference to Adorno Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main, 1975),
pp. 149–50)

13. See, in addition to the references given by Prynne, J.D.P.Bolton, Aristeas of

Proconnesus (Oxford, 1962)

14. A.D.Godley, ed. and trans. Herodotus (London, 1963), pp.212–235

15. Prynne, Poems, p.91

16. ibid., p.92

17. ibid., p89

18. A.F. Anisimov, ‘The Shaman’s Tent of the Evenks and the origin of the
shamanistic rite’ and ‘Cosmological concepts of the peoples of the north’ in
H.N.Michael, ed. Studies in Siberian Shamanism (Toronto, 1963)

19. Prynne, Poems, p.89

20. ibid., p.91

21. ibid.

22. ibid., pp.90–1

23. ibid., p.92

24. Anisimov, ‘Cosmological Concepts’, p.175

25. Prynne, Poems, p.89

26. ibid., p.91

27. ibid.

28. ibid., p.82

29. ibid., pp.89–90

30. ibid., p.90

31. ibid., p.128

32. ibid., p.94

33. ibid.

34. E.D.Phillips, ‘The Legend of Aristeas: Fact and Fancy in early Greek notions
of East Russia, Siberia and Inner Asia’, Artibus Asiae 18 (1955), p.174