Memory, Pleasure and Poetry: The Grammar of the Self in the Writing of Cavafy

Abstract

Memory, Pleasure and Poetry: The Grammar of the Self in the Writing of Cavafy* Alexander Nehamas A striking fact about Cavafy's "Walls" (1896/ZcW)1 is the extent to which this short, seemingly insignificant poem continues to fascinate, and to be discussed by, critics who judge it negatively: WALLS With no consideration, no pity, no shame, they've built walls around me, thick and high. And now I sit here feeling hopeless. I can't think of anything else: this fate gnaws my mind— because I had so much to do outside. When they were building the walls, how could I not have noticed! But I never heard a sound, a noise of builders. Imperceptibly they've closed me off from the outside world.2 * Edmund Keeley has kindly and generously discussed Cavafy's poetry with me over the years, and made perceptive comments on this essay: I owe him a deep debt of gratitude. His book, Cavafy's Alexandria: Study of a Myth in Progress (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), provides an unsurpassed overall picture of Cavafy's work, and what disagreements I register with it in what follows cannot obscure my heavy dependence on it. Another debt is owed and hereby acknowledged to Carolyn Anderson. Paul Bové and David Carrier discussed this paper with me and made me improve it in a number of ways. II give both the date of composition (when known) and the date of publication for each poem; if only a date of composition appears, the poem in question was not published by Cavafy. The definitive chronology of Cavafy's work appears in the tables provided by George Savidis in his edition, K. P. Kaváfi: Anékdota piimata, 1882-1923 (Athens, 1968). The information is summarized in the notes to C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, edited by George Savidis (Princeton, NJ. 1975). 2The Greek text follows George Savidis, K. P. Kaváfi: Piimata (Athens, 1963) and Anékdota Piimata. The translations are from Keeley and Sherrard, though I occasionally alter their version in the direction of greater literalness in order to make the grammatical points I need. Thus, in the seventh line of "Walls", I have avoided construing "builders" as the direct object of "heard" as Keeley and Sherrard do in translating Allá den ákusa poté króton ktistón i Ã-hon as "But I never heard the builders, not a sound". 295 296 Alexander Nehamas ΤΕΙΧΗ Χωϕίςπεϕίσκεψιν,χωϕίςλϕπην,χωϕίςαιδώ μεγάλακ'υψηλάτϕιγϕϕωμουÎ-κτισαντείχη. Καίκάθομαικαίαπελπίζομαιτώϕαεδώ. "Αλλο δεν σκÎ-πτομαι: τόν νουν μου τϕώγει αυτή ή τϕχη; διότιπϕάγματαπολλάÎ-ξωνάκάμωείχον. :ΑότανÎ-κτιζαντάτείχηπώςνάμήνπϕοσÎ-ξω. ΆλλαδενάκουσαποτÎ-κϕότονκτιστώνήήχον. 'Ανεπαισθήτωςμ'Î-κλεισανάπότόνκόσμονÎ-ξω. Though Xenopoulos and Michaletos as well as Papanoutsos have admired this poem,3 recent criticism has been considerably more hostile. Peter Bien, not without some justice, describes the walls as "vague and shopworn symbols."4 Edmund Keeley finds the analogy on which the poem depends to be "so uncomplicated and two dimensional that it provides little nourishment for the imagination. And the agents of (the) poet's predicament—an unspecified 'they' posing as builders— are so ill-defined that his complaint sounds rather paranoid."3 Yet the poem's attractiveness lingers on, and in trying to locate it within the text's thematic features, Keeley joins Malanos, Papanoutsos and Liddell6 in finding one "subtle effect": the growing sense that the walls are self-imposed, that the poet "himself has become the unspecified 'they' that oppress him, the mason of his own confinement."7 James Merrill, similarly ambivalent, writes that "They", other people, unnoticed by him, have immured the poet—so he says. Yet [the poem's homophonic rhymes], stifling, narcissistic, arro- 'Gregory Xenopoulos, "Enas piitÃ-s," Panathinea (30 November 1903), reprinted in Néa Estia (15 July 1933): 753-754; John Michaletos, I piisi tu Kaváfi (Athens, 1952), 42, 44; E. P. Papanoutsos, Potamos, Kaváfis, Sikelianós (Athens, 1955; third edition, 1966), pp. 151ff. More recently C. Capri-Karka has praised the poem, not very helpfully , on the ground that it expresses a "universal situation of isolation and oppression" in her Love and the Symbolic Journey in the Poetry of Cavafy, Eliot, and Seferis (New York, 1982), 30. 4Peter Bien, Constantine Cavafy (New York, 1964), 40. 5Keeley, Cavafy's Alexandria, 27-28. Timos Malanos, O Kaváfis (Athens, 1957), 69; Papanoutsos, 159; Robert Liddell, Cavafy: A Critical Biography (London...