Rhythm: Form and Dispossession

By Vincent Barletta

More than the persistent beat of a song or the structural frame of poetry, rhythm is a deeply imbedded force that drives our world and is also a central component of the condition of human existence. It’s the pulse of the body, a power that orders matter, a strange and natural force that flows through us. Virginia Woolf describes it as a “wave in the mind” that carries us, something we can no more escape than we could stop our hearts from beating.

Vincent Barletta explores rhythm through three historical moments, each addressing it as a phenomenon that transcends poetry, aesthetics, and even temporality. He reveals rhythm to be a power that holds us in place, dispossesses us, and shapes the foundations of our world. In these moments, Barletta encounters rhythm as a primordial and physical binding force that establishes order and form in the ancient world, as the anatomy of lived experience in early modern Europe, and as a subject of aesthetic and ethical questioning in the twentieth century.

A wide-ranging book covering a period spanning two millennia and texts from over ten languages, Rhythm will expand the conversation around this complex and powerful phenomenon.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Mar 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9780226685908

Book preview

Rhythm

Rhythm

Form and Dispossession

VINCENT BARLETTA

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2020 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-68573-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-68587-8 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-68590-8 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226685908.001.0001

The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Stanford University toward the publication of this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Barletta, Vincent, author.

Title: Rhythm : form and dispossession / Vincent Barletta.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019024364 | ISBN 9780226685731 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226685878 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226685908 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Rhythm. | Rhythm in literature.

Classification: LCC BH301.R5 B37 2020 | DDC 111/.85—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024364

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Carolina

Contents

Preface

1   Rivers Stopped or Flowing Backward

2   Harmony, Number, and Others

3   Twentieth-Century Measures

Conclusions

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Subject Index

Index Verborum

Preface

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

«HENRI LEFEBVRE (2013), 21»

Signification is thus conceived on the basis of the-one-for-the-other proper to sensibility, and not on the basis of a system of terms which are simultaneous in a language for the speaker, and which simultaneity is in fact only the situation of the speaker.

«EMMANUEL LEVINAS (1978b), 77»

In a 1926 letter to Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf writes, Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. [ . . . ] Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it (1980a, 247). Here Woolf is speaking quite specifically of the practice of prose composition, but her wave in the mind metaphor is nonetheless suggestive beyond this restrictive domain. This is, in effect, Woolf’s definition of rhythm: a preverbal interaction between the self and the external world that results in some form of internal displacement. That is, we see or otherwise sense something, and before we can describe the thing or our perception of it, or even form words, we are moved. In her 1905 essay Street Music, Woolf goes a bit further:

The beat of rhythm in the mind is akin to the beat of the pulse in the body; and thus though many are deaf to tune hardly anyone is so coarsely organized as not to hear the rhythm of his own heart in words and music and movement. It is because it is thus inborn in us that we can never silence music, any more than we can stop our heart from beating; and it is for this reason too that music is so universal and has the strange and illimitable power of a natural force. (1905, 147)

Writing here two decades before her letter to Sackville-West, Woolf presents rhythm as both universal and as a natural force linked to the body and with seemingly unlimited power. Emma Sutton (2010) has pointed out Woolf’s debt to Stéphane Mallarmé for this understanding of rhythm, and while the influence seems undeniable, it is worth questioning whether it manages to explain as much as one would like. There is, for example, the complexity of the idea that music is inborn in us. This conceit speaks, after all, to much more than the relatively banal repetition across time of one’s heartbeat; it is about time, to be sure, but also about resonance, vitality, and the body’s broad entrainment through percussion, a flex-and-rest duality that gives life and thus precedes cognition or even experience. It is, in the most complete sense, a matter of form.

Writing just four years after Woolf’s letter to Sackville-West, the Portuguese modernist poet Fernando Pessoa would speak of rhythm as a movimento íntimo da alma (intimate movement of the soul; 1986, 49), an image that likewise speaks to the physical alteration of what we consider, even if just out of habit, to be our most interior self. It is true that Pessoa, throughout his extensive corpus of published and unpublished work, most commonly equates rhythm with poetic meter. He tends to find it stifling and artificial, and he often mocks it openly. Here, however, he is concerned with something much less mechanical or even experiential. As with Woolf, Pessoa points to an elementary formation, in the strictest sense, of the body and the self. It is part of a nonlinear movement (through time and space) that is primary for Pessoa, even constitutive, but it is always there; and poetry at its best can connect us to it, or, at its worst, push us into a narrow tunnel of artificiality, the hickory-dickory-dock of fixed poetic meters. In this latter scenario, time in all its phenomenological complexity—as movement, as embodied reverberation, as horizon—is compressed into linear time, a soulless reduction.

If rhythm is for Woolf and Pessoa a kind of form-giving, internalized displacement, or some primary interruption of our habitual economy (a resetting or recalibration of our most basic footing), this seems to push far beyond more common matters of poetic meter and prosody. Referring to related but not identical concerns, Henri Meschonnic has gone so far as to argue that la métrique est la théorie du rythme des imbéciles (metrics is the rhythm theory of imbeciles; 1982, 143). But then these self-consciously modern ideas on rhythm do not come from nowhere; in fact, they connect to much older, even ancient theorizations of rhythm that similarly have little to do with regularity, repetition, or even (in the strictest sense) time. Beyond this, they also anticipate powerful theories of rhythm linked to aesthetics, ontology, and ethics that find expression and development only after the Second World War.

Pessoa and Woolf have come to occupy a pivotal place in the history of ideas, and despite their more obvious differences (most notably the matter of gender, their publication record, and the almost total absence of eros in Pessoa’s life and writings), there are important similarities between them. In the first place, both lived and worked during the same tumultuous period of European history—three years Pessoa’s senior, Woolf would survive her Portuguese counterpart by only five years. Both experimented extensively with neopaganism and formed part of groups central to the modernist project in England and Portugal respectively.¹ In fact, both have come practically to be synonymous with modernism itself in their respective countries. Over their careers, both would have a complex (to be kind) relationship with fame and their audience, and both would die far too young. They intersect, too, on the matter of rhythm; however, Pessoa tends to retreat from any explicit theoretical exposition, while Woolf shows herself to be particularly persistent and incisive. In a later letter to the composer Ethel Smyth, she says: All writing is nothing but putting words on the backs of rhythm. If they fall off the rhythm one’s done (1980b, 303). For readers of jazz history, this comment will likely conjure up John Coltrane’s oft-cited statement on falling off the back of rhythm while playing with Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot Café in the 1950s: I was playing a solo [ . . . ], and I lost my place. It was like falling down an elevator shaft (Hentoff 1995, 73). The sensation of falling, expressed by both Woolf and Coltrane, is a key insight for any adequately nuanced theory of rhythm, as Sutton has indicated with respect to Woolf:

Her image characterizes rhythm as animated, purposeful and autonomous; it predates and determines the choice of words put on it, just as, in the letter to Vita, rhythm makes words to fit it. Rhythm is primary whilst words are secondary—fragile and unstable, prone to fall[ing] off. Rhythm, implicitly, has a generative and epistemological force; as Woolf reiterates elsewhere, meaning is not constructed only by words. In these accounts, rhythm precedes the act of writing, though whether it is perceived to exist externally or internally, in the writer’s creative mind or body, varies in Woolf’s accounts. The implied allusion to horses, like that to waves break[ing] and tumbl[ing], does associate rhythm with the natural world (albeit a partially domesticated version of nature), but this is not to say that Woolf’s image necessarily suggests a single cosmic rhythm or, indeed, natural rhythms determined by the gender, race or sexuality of the writer. (2010, 177)

Whether off a horse (or camel or elephant, one imagines) or down an elevator shaft, the sensation appears to be the same: rhythm is primary, even formative, and we are either bound to it or we are sent spinning off and downward. To extend Pessoa’s image of interiority, one imagines here the soul losing the intimacy of its movements and whirling ever outward until there is no interiority at all. But then this prompts the question: if we are bound to rhythm in some way, what is the nature of this bond? Are we ever without it? What happens to us, beyond metaphoric approximation, when we fall? Where do we fall? More to the point, do we ever land?

In the present book, I address these and related questions through an examination of three key moments in the long and varied history of rhythm as an object of critical inquiry. Before saying more on these moments (spread out across a long stretch of time, though much less physical distance), it bears mentioning from the outset that they are by no means all there are. It would be foolish, after all, to undertake (alone) anything like a global history of rhythm, and it would be even more risible to limit that history to three moments in (mostly European) history. In fact, my goal is much more modest. By focusing on three discrete historical moments and a more or less fixed corpus of texts, I hope only to provoke a deeper, more elemental conversation on rhythm—one that moves beyond metrical and even temporal restraints. Put another way, I have no real intention for the present volume to be anything like the last word on the subject of rhythm; rather, it is an attempt to take up once again an ancient conversation, to extend a hand (as Paul Celan might put it) and hope for other hands to meet it.

The first moment upon which I focus is a foundational one. It is in ancient Greece, after all, that written theories of what we now understand as rhythm (ruthmós) first emerge. My main interest here lies with pre-Socratic dramatic, philosophical, and poetic works, because it is during this period and in these texts that one finds the earliest formulation of ruthmós, the idea at the center of the present book. Especially important, though by no means exclusively so, are the atomist theories of Democritus and Leucippus, the lyric poetry of Archilochus, and the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. In these texts, ruthmós consistently points to bondage, order, dispossession, and especially form. It is, in a very direct way, a morphological, spatial, and even ethical concept rather than a strictly temporal one, and this becomes clearer when we consider later Platonic and Aristotelian accounts of rhythm, such as Aristoxenus’s fragments on Greek musical rhythm. It is no stretch to suggest that, before the fourth century BCE, rhythm is a robust theory of things themselves, a physics that manages to elude mere mechanics. Of course, this would change after Plato, and much of the present book is devoted to working back from Plato’s articulation of rhythm and what has almost organically followed from it. For the purposes of this preface, one might summarize this evolution of thought in the following way: through Plato, Greek notions of rhythm would find more mathematically precise articulation as expressions of time and movement; however, they would also, in the process, lose a great deal of their philosophical depth. That is, while Greek, Latin, and Arabic music and poetry developed highly sophisticated and precise taxonomies of rhythm, none of these linked the movement of bodies in time to anything beyond corresponding ideas of aísthêsis (feeling) or, more ambitiously, numerical (celestial) harmony. Rhythm here is both temporal and experiential, even conventionally musical, rather than formative, intimate, and precognitive.

It is undeniable that Platonic theories of rhythm significantly altered ideas of ruthmós that had come before the fourth century BCE. By the time of Aristotle and his students (not to mention his later Arabic translators and commentators), ruthmós was in fact inseparable from temporality, repetition, performance, poetry, and music. Its temporal character became nothing short of axiomatic (Wolf 1955). The newly conceived rhythmic systems themselves naturally differ according to region, language, and culture (the Greek pous, for example, taking a back seat to bayt in Arabic poetry and music); however, the underlying sense of rhythm as a temporal phenomenon, linked or not to the movement of dancers’ bodies, would remain constant. This does not mean, of course, that earlier ideas of rhythm went away entirely; however, it seems undeniable that they remained mostly latent—stowaways on ships driven by number—until well into the fifteenth century.

The second moment I consider is the sixteenth century, when new theories (and ideologies) of rhythm, harmony, number, and vernacular poetry firmly take root in Europe. It is also during this period that Iberian poets, such as Garcilaso de la Vega (1501?–1536) and Luís Vaz de Camões (1524?–1580), begin to hold these poetic theories up to the lived experience of global empire in a systematic way, and so I have chosen to turn my focus there.² Here, it should be made clear, there is no overt or systematic countertheory to received and somewhat (by then) conventional accounts of rhythm as temporal measure. That is, poets in the sixteenth century, whether from the Iberian Peninsula or elsewhere, do not tend to present explicit theories of what they consider rhythm to be in any but the most conventional sense. The term rhythm, in fact, scarcely appears in poetic work from this period. One brief exception to this rule is a work by the Castilian playwright Lope Félix de Vega y Carpio (1562–1635), who speaks of rhythm in his 1598 play, El vaso de elección San Pablo (The Chosen Instrument, Saint Paul). In the third act, a fictional Seneca speaks of the bad poetry that has begun to fill Rome:

Siempre fue / soberano y excelente / en los griegos y latinos / el arte de la poesía, / mas no admite medianía / en sus intentos divinos; / que como puede pasar / sin ella y sin la pintura, / al mundo ha de ser tan pura, / que exceder y aventajar / pueda al humano deseo, / que la humilde o la mediana / su sacro ritmo profana, / y desto mejor Orfeo / y Apolo, sus inventores, / podrán mostrar la experiencia, / cuya divina excelencia / cuentan tan varios autores. / Pero ya ha llegado a Roma / tiempo que, con seso vano, / contra Virgilio y Lucano / cualquiera la pluma toma. (act 3, lines 512–33)

The art of poetry was always sovereign and excellent among the Greeks and Latins, but it never admits any mediocrity in its divine intent; since this can occur without poetry (or painting), the latter must be to the world so pure that it exceeds and surpasses human desire, as the humble or mediocre work will profane its holy rhythm. Orpheus and Apollo, its inventors, can better demonstrate this, as their divine excellence is described by many authors. But a time has now come to Rome that with vain intellect anyone can take up their pen against Virgil and Lucan.³

The idea in Lope of mediocre poetry somehow profaning the holy or sacred rhythm of poetry itself (the best representatives of which would be Orpheus and Apollo) likely rests squarely on notions of meter and prosody, although one suspects that matters of theme likewise have something to do with what he considers excellent or even divine poetry to be. It would at least make sense that the divine or pure poetry he treasures finds its (Stoic) way past human desire through both prosody and theme. There is a wondrous complexity to this late sixteenth-century account of rhythm from the perspective of vernacular poetics (i.e., rhythm as a stand-in for poetry itself); however, one must also bear in mind that what is most at stake here is a temporal, even numerical account of rhythm itself. My strong suspicion, in fact, is that the sacro ritmo (holy rhythm) to which Lope refers is directly linked to musica universalis, the mathematical and temporal harmony of the celestial spheres.

Lope’s explicit account of rhythm in El vaso de elección San Pablo is rare among early modern poets. Beyond this, however, his framing of rhythm is by and large in keeping with ideas inherited from Latin grammarians and other writers from late antiquity. Rhythm here (as I will explore in chapter 2 of this book) is intricately connected to harmony and even newly minted appreciations of vernacular rhyme.

What of other poetry? Are there theorizations of rhythm that are less explicit or operate at other, more pragmatic levels of reference? I argue that poets during the early modern period persistently—even obsessively—point to other possibilities for rhythm related to form, space, and ontology. There is, of course, a humanistic return to classical thought during this period, but I argue that this is ultimately less decisive than the possibilities opened up by the turn to vernacular poetry and (in the Iberian Peninsula) the far-reaching and contradictory effects of empire. In chapter 2 I spend a fair amount of time laying out the rhythmic implications of European vernacular poetry, but I ultimately turn to the matter of how poets (such as Camões) used both epic and lyric to unpack the existential problems (some expressed through and as time) that imperial expansion represented, even for its nominal victors. It is, perhaps, a case of poets doing the sort of work on rhythm that philosophers and grammarians could not or would not do. It is also, by necessity, incomplete and fragmented insofar as it persistently points to feelings and forces it cannot name. Despite such limitations, the theories of rhythm encoded in this poetry remain powerful and of great import, given that they deploy sensibilities and conceits that threaten to undo the very logic of the verbal utterance and, with it, empire. To make use of an aqueous conceit that resonates with the early modern Portuguese imaginary, it is poetry that functions much like a rip current, carrying the swimmer under and out to sea even as surface waves move in regular intervals toward the shore.

In the final chapter I move to the twentieth century to consider the self-conscious questioning of rhythm that took shape in African, Anglo-American, and European thought. Important for this discussion are John Dewey’s early account ([1934] 2005) of rhythm and aesthetic experience, Émile Benveniste’s philological analysis of ruthmós from 1951, Emmanuel Levinas’s phenomenology of rhythm, aesthetics, and ethics from roughly the same period to the early 1970s, and Léopold Sédar Senghor’s examination of rhythm in the context of West African thought and the négritude movement. Beyond these openly theoretical texts, I consider selected primary works of twentieth-century literature. Of particular interest are Chinua Achebe’s thoughts on African myth, his own Igbo-language poetry, the work of his childhood friend Christopher Okigbo (who died at the start of the Biafran War in Nigeria), and the poetry of the twentieth-century Mozambican poets Noémia de Sousa and José Craveirinha. Moving into more contemporary work, while perhaps also coming full circle, I conclude the chapter with a discussion of rhythm and classical Greek poetry in Alice Oswald’s Memorial (2011).

Throughout this book I argue that a common thread runs through these three historical moments, a thread characterized by an approach to rhythm that transcends poetry, aesthetics, and even temporality. Each example, in its own way, addresses rhythm as a powerful force that holds us in place and shapes the foundations upon which we and our world ultimately rest. Rhythm speaks, one might say, (to) the very conditions of our being in the world.

Other Than Time

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

For a recent exposition of such temporal ideas of rhythm, and their application to broader ways of understanding the world, it is useful to turn to a recent work, Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015). At the start of her chapter on rhythm, Levine offers a general definition:

Rhythms, if we define the term broadly, are pervasive. From shift work and travel timetables to religious rituals and the release of each summer’s blockbuster movies, repetitive temporal patterns impose constraints across social life. Often these forms are routinized—the predictable rhythms of everyday life, such as clocking in to work or the release of children from school. Sometimes these temporal markers repeat at long intervals: the harvest, the reunion, the centenary celebration. Typically many are overlaid, as a particular person might struggle to balance work and school schedules, remembering when to pay the electric bill, see a probation officer, take communion, and swallow a pill, pausing at regular intervals to accommodate the need