anthonyhowelljournal

I have always maintained that to view culture (art, literature, music etc)
chronologically – as if it were a narrative of effect followed by cause – is a rather daft
way of interpreting things: a perception engendered by the twentieth century –
hooked up to its belief in progress and modernity. My online project – Art and its
Dark Side – is a series of eight essays dealing with the ‘rivers of art’ – creative
concerns which have the abiding power to preoccupy artists and writers, and which
have always had currency in our cultural life. Two novels one thousand eight
hundred years apart constitute a testimony to this achronological view.

“Far we had not gone but we came to a river, the stream whereof seemed to run with
as rich wine as any is made in Chios, and of a great breadth, in some places able to
bear a ship, which made me to give the more credit to the inscription upon the pillar,
when I saw such apparent signs of Bacchus’s peregrination. We then resolved to
travel up the stream to find whence the river had his original, and when we were
come to the head, no spring at all appeared, but mighty great vine-trees of infinite
number, which from their roots distilled pure wine which made the river run so
abundantly: the stream was also well stored with fish, of which we took a few, in
taste and colour much resembling wine, but as many as ate of them fell drunk upon
it; for when they were opened and cut up, we found them to be full of lees:
afterwards we mixed some fresh water fish with them, which allayed the strong taste
of the wine. We then crossed the stream where we found it passable, and came
among a world of vines of incredible number, which towards the earth had firm
stocks and of a good growth; but the tops of them were women, from the hip
upwards, having all their proportion perfect and complete; as painters picture out
Daphne, who was turned into a tree when she was overtaken by Apollo; at their
fingers’ ends sprung out branches full of grapes, and the hair of their heads was
nothing else but winding wires and leaves, and clusters of grapes. When we were
come to them, they saluted us and joined hands with us, and spake unto us some in
the Lydian and some in the Indian language, but most of them in Greek: they also
kissed us with their mouths, but he that was so kissed fell drunk, and was not his
own man a good while after: they could not abide to have any fruit pulled from them,
but would roar and cry out pitifully if any man offered it. Some of them desired to
have carnal mixture with us, and two of our company were so bold as to entertain
their offer, and could never afterwards be loosed from them, but were knit fast
together at their nether parts, from whence they grew together and took root
together, and their fingers began to spring out with branches and crooked wires as if
they were ready to bring out fruit: whereupon we forsook them and fled to our ships,
and told the company at our coming what had betide unto us, how our fellows were
entangled, and of their copulation with the vines. Then we took certain of our vessels and filled them, some with water and some with wine out of the river, and lodged for
that night near the shore.”

Lucian’s True History – a novel by Lucian of Samosata – 2 nd century AD

“Where return? To the mines? Hebdomeros instinctively avoided these unhealthy
areas where fever reigned unchecked all the year round and innkeepers place
sulphate of quinine on the tables as elsewhere one places pepper and salt. Rather
the boredom of a life adjusted to the hands of a watch but essentially logical and not
lacking in poetry, full of unshed tears; the life on this road lined with houses from
each of which rose the lament of pianos bothered by adolescents practicing their
morning scales. All that would have been quite normal, after all, and Hebdomeros,
not to mention his friends and disciples, would hardly have been averse to taking a
few days’ rest in these monotonous, reposing surroundings, but something unusual
drew their attention and made them realize that things were not as normal as they
had at first thought. In front of each house was a small garden with cane benches
and chaises longues; in each garden an enormous old man, made entirely of stone,
was stretched out on one of the chaises longues; Hebdomeros was astonished that
the chairs were able to support such a weight, and said as much to his companions,
but when they drew nearer they saw that the armchairs which they had taken to be
made of cane were in fact all metal, and the interweaving of the steel threads,
painted a straw color, had been so well conceived that they could have withstood far
greater pressures. These old men were alive, yes, alive, but only just; there was a
very faint glow of life in their faces and the upper part of their bodies; at times their
eyes would move, but their heads remained motionless; it was as if they were
suffering from an eternal stiff neck and wished to avoid the slightest movement from
fear of reawakening the pain. Sometimes a light flush spread over their cheeks and
in the evening when the sun had disappeared behind the nearby wooded mountains
they talked from one garden to the next, telling stories of long ago. They spoke of the
days of hunts for roe deer and grouse in the forests that were damp and dark even at
noon; they recalled how many times they had rushed upon one another, holding their
rifles by the end of the barrel and brandishing them like clubs or grasping their
hunting knives in their fists. The eternal cause of these brawls was a dead animal
that two hunters at once claimed to have killed. But one evening the big stone men
no longer spoke; specialists who were hastily called to examine them found that the
tiny glimmer of life that had kept them alive until then had disappeared; even the top
of the cranium was cold and their eyes had closed; then it was decided to have them
taken away so that they shouldn’t uselessly encumber the little gardens of the villas;
a man who called himself a sculptor was summoned; it was a man with a disquieting
manner and a horrible squint; he mingled in his conversation stupid puns and coarse
jokes and his breath stank of brandy from yards away. He arrived with a case full of mallets of various sizes and set to work right away; one after the other the old stone
men were broken up and thrown into the valley, which soon began to look like a
battlefield after the battle. The tide rose up to these pitiful fragments; down there
behind the black cliffs whose silhouette looked like the figures of gothic apostles the
moon rose; a pale, northern moon; it was fleeing on the clouds across the sky;
Hebdomeros and his friends stood like shipwrecked men on a raft, looking toward
the south…“

Hebdomeros by Giorgio de Chirico, written in France in 1929

Lucian, a Greek-speaking author of Assyrian descent, wrote his “true history” as a
satire on far-fetched tales attributed to ancient sources. It includes travel to outer
space, interplanetary warfare, fusions of myths and rumours, and has been
described as “the first known text that could be described as Science Fiction.” The
writing swings easily from mythic scene to futuristic imagery in very much the way
that Hebdomeros – one of the few Surrealist novels – moves from one fantastic
scene to the next. John Ashbery has said of it:

“Surrealism has probably been the most powerful single influence on the twentieth-
century novel, yet it has produced few notable surrealist novels… The finest of them,
however, is probably Hebdomeros, written by Giorgio de Chirico. His language, like
his painting, is invisible: a transparent but dense medium containing objects that are
more real than reality.”

The same could be said of the True History. So surrealism was not invented in the
twentieth-century: that century merely gave it a name. It has manifested itself in
some form or other since Roman times, as has abstraction, which can be found in
several painters working in the Renaissance – an example being the work of
Giovanni Battista Bracelli – look at his Bizzarie di Varie Figure created in 1624), and
also Songues Drolatiques de Pantagruel – done in 1565- possibly by Francois
Desprez. These illustrations to Rabelais should remind us that Rabelais also may be
considered an author writing in the same fantastic vein.

Art and its Dark Side – https://anthonyhowelljournal.com/2013/07/06/art-and-its-dark-
side-introduction/

Bracelli’s Modern Art – https://anthonyhowelljournal.com/2019/10/26/bracellis-
modern-art-1624/

Lucian’s True History (illustrated) -ISBN 9798630380302 – no other information
available

Hebdomeros – Introduction by John Ashbery, Exact Change, 1992