Charm in Literature from Classical to Modernism

Charmed Life

Richard Beckman

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030253455
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Charm in Literature from Classical to Modernism: Charmed Life discusses charm as both an emotional and aesthetic phenomenon. Beginning with the first appearance of literary charm in the Sirens episode of the Odyssey, Richard Beckman traces charm throughout canonical literature, examining the metamorphoses of charm through the millennia. The book examines the works of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Proust, Joyce, Mann, and others, considering the multiplicity of ways charm is defined, depicted, and utilized by authors. Positioning these poems, dramas, and novels as case studies, Beckman reveals the mercurial yet enduring connotations of charm.

© The Author(s) 2019

R. BeckmanCharm in Literature from Classical to Modernismhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25345-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Preface

Richard Beckman¹  

(1)

Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

 

 

Richard Beckman

Abstract

This study discusses the word and the concept of charm in canonical literature and in everyday use. The meaning of charm metamorphoses with each appearance over millennia, its sense, pejorative or favorable, deployed to suggest a quality either delightful or entrapping. Its significance in classics old and recent is remarked on classics from Homer to Joyce. It is a vital word in literature and journalism, with its sense and its standing mercurial. Charm is paradoxical: the breaking of its spell can be amusing, as here or as in Voltaire’s Candide, or moving, as in the dissolution of Kate Croy and Merton Densher’s love for each other in The Wings of the Dove or both comical and melancholy as in Marcel’s doomed fascination with Albertine in Proust.

Keyword

The concept of charm

End Abstract

Charm can be as simple as a gracious social manner, as natural as the pleasure in noticing beauty in a person, in a facial expression, in art. But is charm itself an art? Can it be learned, can charm be faked? If it seems rehearsed and put on for effect, or is in some way manipulative, its want of depth will be discerned. It can be attempted but will it be charming? Possibly, it can work for a while, but fakery will out. At its best it is spontaneous. A woman in Yeats’s Adam’s Curse laments that “we must labor to be beautiful.” That is the case for poetry as well, but after the labor, the beauty must seem natural and the line of poetry must seem a moment’s thought. Yet we cannot say that we must labor to be charming. “Labored charm” does not make sense. If tried, it would fail. The following actually happened: a new member in a university department of philosophy was so charming that the other members of the department were impressed, pleased, and took delight in his company. This lasted three months. Then one colleague after another realized that this charmer had no depth or integrity. The charm evaporated. They could not stand him. Something similar occurs in the world of art. This too did happen: a 100 year old counterfeit of a sixteenth century masterwork had been accepted, purchased, exhibited. Then a curator noticed that the painting betrayed traces of the art of the later period that the counterfeit came from. The counterfeiter could not escape the styles of his own time, was unaware that he was working with its conventions. Its admirers gave up on it. Faking will out. Beauty sometimes seems spontaneous, charm always. With most graphic art and sublime music, it is their beauty that moves us and to achieve that may have taken labor and many revisions. Its charm may have come from a last minute paint stroke—seen in many Rembrandts. Mozart often seems improvisational and sometimes actually was. He would write down at home the music he had improvised in a drawing room.

Charm the word is always negative in Shakespeare . Characters such as Rosalind , Cleopatra , and Falstaff charm us, but they are not described as charming (while Odette in Proust is so described, although she is not). Of course, Shakespeare understood charm, but he did not use the word in our sense. The charm in Macbeth’s “charmed life” is ambiguous, an ambiguity on which the plot of the drama hinges: Macbeth does not fancy that he is charming, only that his life is charmed. His hubris allows him to think that he is protected by the weird sisters’ promise, a charm like an alchemist’s charm, but better; it is the illusion that the witches have thrown over him that is the charm, an equivocation that destroys him. The charm that he relies on will turn out to be his illusion of invulnerability. Today psychology would classify this illusion as a symptom of clinical narcissism . We all remember the evil queen’s “mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all.” Queen, fake; Snow White, natural.

Charm charms us and for millennia has charmed writers and bards. A brilliant woman can charm the birds out of a tree. The chapters here take up the ever-changing sense of charm in literature, beginning with Homer and, in this study, concluding with Thomas Mann. In the works examined here, the theme of charm is central, not incidental. It is sometimes that which the lonely heart longs for, as in Proust . At other times, it is deplorable, the very quality to be avoided (as in Gaskell ). And sometimes it is an eerie mix of both, as in Mann .

© The Author(s) 2019

R. BeckmanCharm in Literature from Classical to Modernismhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25345-5_2

Begin Abstract

2. The Sirens in Homer

Richard Beckman¹

(1)

Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Richard Beckman

Abstract

This study of charm begins with the Sirens that tempt Odysseus with their irresistible singing. Homer’s Greek did not include “charm,” yet that word appears in most English renderings of their bewitching song: we encounter “clear voiced song,” “honeysweet sound,” “voice of the wondrous Sirens,” and “haunting song.” In Pope’s version of 1726, the Sirens are “sweet charmers,” and in his translation, the word charm in one sense or another occurs 56 times. Homer’s Sirens are the archetype of Marlene Dietrich’s Lola Lola and of all enchanting women whose song or looks lures men to their ruin. In Genesis, Eve too is a charmer. Like Homer’s Sirens, she coaxes him, and promising desirable knowledge, and, because of her persuasions, the human race is cursed with mortality.

Keyword

Homer’s Sirens as archetypes of charm

End Abstract

First among charmers are Homer’s Sirens , and the word “charm ,” used variously, occurs in most English renderings of their bewitching song. “Charm” (deriving from Latin) was not in Homer’s Greek, but in literal translations the sense of charm is rendered “clear voiced song” (Loeb Classical Library version, book 12, line 44) and it is translated variously as “honeysweet sound,” “voice of the wondrous Sirens ,” and “haunting song.” In Chapman’s Homer of 1616, the word charming does appear, but still seems to mean spellbinding; the word occurs with a difference in Pope’s version of the Odyssey in 1726. He calls the Sirens “sweet charmers,” and in his translation, the word charm in one sense or another occurs 56 times; in his Iliad of 1720, he employs it 68 times. The Iliad charming? It has been quipped that Pope’s Iliad takes place in an eighteenth-century drawing room. Yet his depiction of charm in the pointedly mock epic The Rape of the Lock was perfect. In a sober translation of 1900, Samuel Butler makes charm part of the song the Sirens sing (Fig. 2.1):

Fig. 2.1

John William Waterhouse (Ulysses and the Sirens 1891. Oil on canvas. 100.6 × 202.0 cm. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Purchased, 1891 (p.396.3-1))

‘Come here,’ they sang, ‘renowned Ulysses, honour to the Achaean name, and listen to our two voices. No one ever sailed past us without staying to hear the enchanting sweetness of our song—and he who listens will go on his way not only charmed, but wiser.

Homer’s Sirens are the archetypes underlying Marlene Dietrich’s Lola Lola and of all enchanting women (or, at least, female presences) whose song lures men to their ruin. In Genesis, Eve too is a charmer. Like the Sirens , she coaxes and promises desirable knowledge, and, because of her persuasions, the human race is cursed with mortality. Unlike the Sirens , Eve more or less means well. What her appearance was Genesis does not say, just that, like Adam, she was naked and unashamed. Milton assumes that she was “with perfect beauty adorned,” and in art, Eve is always lovely, and, with a kind of guilty innocence, physically seductive as in Breughel and Cranach . One iconographic tangent of the Sirens and Eve is depicted in the Garden of Eden scene in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry of 1410. The Limbourg brothers show the tempter as a creature in the tree of knowledge handing Eve two of the forbidden fruits. The creature is a serpent below the waist and a Siren above. So is Raphael’s wise serpent in a ceiling fresco in the Vatican, and in Bronzino’s Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time .

On the other hand, the earliest illustrators of the Sirens show them as anything but beautiful (Homer presents them as incorporeal voices). Chapman introduced erotic overtones, writing that the Sirens “gave accent in the sweetest strain / That ever open’d an enamour’d vein.” In rendering their song, he has them claim that they had left men “ravished.” (Robert Fagles’s version of 1996 has “So they sent their ravishing voices out across the air.”) Closer to Homer in time, a fifth century BC vase shows a Siren as a bird, something like a barnyard hen, with a smallish and less than pretty woman’s head.

The notion that they are irresistibly beautiful, nevertheless, is strong, and only one translator, Robert Fitzgerald , ventured, to translate Seirênês as “harpies”—plausibly, since the harpies too were bird-women. At the other extreme, Victorian and Edwardian paintings depict Sirens possessing a centerfold sexiness: Armitage , 1888; Waterhouse , 1891; Draper , 1909. Homer, unlike Victorian artists who make them numerous, specifies that there are two, just enough for a song to be sung in harmony (“Sweet coupled airs we sing”). Since song resists graphic representation, painters have had to show their bodies, not their voices, as charming, violating Harrison’s pious observation that Homer had the Sirens address themselves to the spirit: “It is strange and beautiful that Homer should make the Sirens appeal to the spirit, not to the flesh.” (Jane Ellen Harrison in Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. Section 197, Cambridge University Press, 1908.)

Debussy could represent the song of the Sirens in his Nocturnes, but limits them (six or so) to sweet recurrent chanting. Nor could an ancient bard have sung it or even tried since the word Sirens , plural ( Odyssey , XII.39), refers to their sound in the singular (“Whoever… hears the Sirens’ voice). One voice singing harmony would not be possible. In any case, the sweet singing, the really charming element, could not be represented directly, only alluded to as it is in “Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast” (Congreve , The Mourning Bride, 1697). Many readers of the Odyssey forget that the words Odysseus heard are actually supplied in the text (lines 184–192).

Even the learned Sir Thomas Browne erred when wrote in 1658 that “What song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture” ( Hydriotaphia , chapter V). But the words are there in Book XII of the Odyssey.

The Sirens of the Odyssey appear in three passages. In the first, Odysseus recounts to Alcinous, king of the Phaeacians, how when Circe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Preface
• 2. The Sirens in Homer
• 3. Charm in Chaucer
• 4. Spenser Versus Charm
• 5. Shakespeare and Charm
• 6. Milton and Dryden
• 7. Pope
• 8. Charm Transfigured
• 9. Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron
• 10. Gaskell, Thackeray, and Joyce
• 11. Acerbic Charm; Ludic Charm
• 12. Proust
• 13. Charm and Cleverness in Joyce
• 14. Mann’s Felix Krull
• Back Matter