"The Geography of the Imagination," Essays by Guy Davenport

 

Dr. Guy Davenport studied at Duke and Oxford, and received his PhD at Harvard in 1961, with a dissertation on Ezra Pound’s poetry. The Geography of the Imagination compiles 40 erudite, closely reasoned essays, and I will readily confess that I have not read all of them. Each piece is filled with such vast background and erudition that, even for a culture vulture like me, it became overwhelming — too much to review. But there is a lot I can tell you:

Grant Wood’s well known and much-parodied painting American Gothic is over-rich with graphic references, according to the professor, from Scots-Presbyterian geometric fabric patterns, to the seven trees being a reference to those of King Solomon’s porch; the style of the house in the background gives the piece its title, American Gothic, as it is a classic of the American Gothic Revival style; a bamboo sunscreen on the porch has been purchased from China via Sears Roebuck; it rolls up, and suggests nautical technology applied to the prairie. Davenport takes some length to extol the eyeglasses, invented in the Thirteenth Century, the same era that the buttonholes came into use in the configuration seen in the painting. The farmer’s modest wife secures her Reformation collar with a cameo brooch which recalls a style from the Sixth Century BCE; she is the product of the ages: she has the hair-do of a Medieval Madonna, and besides the collar and cameo, wears a Nineteenth-Century pinafore. The stock market crash of 1929 has put that look in her eye.

In a piece called “The Symbol of the Archaic,” Davenport points out that in the Western historic scheme“archaic” for more than a millennium meant ancient Greece and Rome. It wasn’t until the 20th Century that science helped the humanities dispel this myopia, and establish the true archaic in cave paintings from 40,000 years ago. He cites Pablo Picasso as one of the principal beneficiaries of this discovery: the artist apparently copied the lines sketched long ago on a wall in a cave in Spain in some of his most famous human figures. From this runway he soars into a discussion of Pablo Neruda and the historian William H. Prescott, who, he says, were “appalled by the brutality with which the indigenous cultures of the Americas were murdered.”         References to Melville and the poet Charles Olson on the “ruins of the Second World War,” who in turn was one of the most insightful readers of Melville, whose “Clarel was one of the great (and greatly neglected) meditations on ruins (of Christianity as well as of cultures which he greatly expected he might have found more congenial than his own, if mankind had allowed them to survive)…”

Each essay that I read had these paths and tracings to cultural guides — readers and cognoscenti who understood the great artists — their great observations on culture, morals, antiquity, literature, society, and art, and fed these appreciative insights to those of us (like Professor Davenport), who thirsted for them, and who could explicate and appreciate them and do their bit for the rest of us in their turn.

A side note I have to add: in the piece “The Symbol of the Archaic,” Davenport includes a coinage by Ezra Pound: pejorocracy, ruling by the worst of men. These rulers are put in place because of rampant and willful stupidity, “as it [modernity] has no critical rules for analyzing reality such as the ancient cultures kept bright and sharp.”

Some of my few readers will appreciate literary essays; I eat them up for sustenance. They reach me in ways no other written thing can. I’ve just gleaned a little idea of the topography of the tip of the iceberg here; this review is simple reporting, moreso than my other reviews. Thanks for your support.