The History Man

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34 JOURNAL OF THE HELLENIC DIASPORA usage, the words mean literally to experience one's life as a temporal series. Time in the second line is an open series, the succession of one moment by another that puts all experience beyond our grasp as soon as it is registered as experience, and it ends only with the death of the experiencing "I" (one is reminded here of the early poem "Candles"). Two kinds of time have been established: recorded time, which is perceived as a dosed series; and experienced time, which remains an open series. If the first two lines establish, respectively, historical time and timeas-experienced, the two lines which follow repeat the parallel, but in reverse order. The third line refers to experienced time, the fourth to historical. The third line establishes the poet's experience as having happened "last night"; that is, it is perceived only in relation to the unspecified present which produced the text. (To have given a date for his personal experience, as Cavafy does in many of his erotic poems, would have been to reach out from time as experienced to time as recorded, that is, to a wider system of historical interrelations independent of the experiencing "I." On the other hand, the life and early death of Caesarion cannot be detached from the epoch of the Ptolemies. Caesarion exists in the present only through the historical record. His unfortunate role in history, which sealed his fate, is all, ironically, that survives of the living youth. The achievement of the rest of the poem is to engineer a convergence between the two sorts of time which had first been set up as parallel. Among the historical epigraphs, the mention of Caesarion stands out, paradoxically, for the king's historical insignificance. Because he was only a victim and not a maker of history, he is denied the platitudinous epithets that deprive the other Ptolemies of any possibility of human individuality. This silence on the part of the historical record provokes the leap whereby the poet experiences the imaginative re-creation of a historical personage, as if from something out of his own lived past. The convergence of the two kinds of time in the poem is achieved in the second section with its juxtaposition of a "mention" in a historical text and the unexpected adverb "suddenly," located in the immediate past. The poem imaginatively reconstructs two pasts—the poet's own ("last night"), and the historical past of Caesarion, which, "last night," the poet had imaginatively reconstructed as if it had belonged to remembered experience. The poem proposes an analogy between the perception and re-creation of personal memory (located in the recent past, "last night") and the perception and reconstruction of a past foreclosed as part of history and remote beyond the range of personal memory. It is not that history becomes present: Cavafy's imagination re-creates Caesarion in the poet's own room and time, but it does not in the process detach the king from the remote historical context in which he lived and died. "And so fully did I imagine you" (experienced time) is completed not by "you stood before me," but by the lines following "as you would have been." The imaginative achievement consists not in conjuring up a beautiful youth from the recesses of history (a poet who was "a poet only"
The History Man 35 could have done that), but in juxtaposing experienced and historical time in such a way that each comes to be seen in terms more usually appropriate to the other. In the last nine lines, it is the poet's experience of only "late last night" that is depicted with the finality of the past tense appropriate to the closed series of distant historical events; while the verbs relating to Caesarion "in conquered Alexandria" are deprived of timereference in usages more appropriate to the experienced present, looking uncertainly into a future that has not yet been foreclosed: "you would have been," "hoping still," "they might . . .," "who were whispering." Experienced time becomes historically fixed, remote and determined, while historical time is experienced, not directly in the present of writing (as happens, arguably, with Eliot or Seferis), but in the immediate past in which ordinary, personal experiences are also perceived. Time, which is perceived in irreconcilable ways in the words "to verify a date" and "to pass the time," is finally seen as indivisible: history is experience and experience is history. What this means for the "historical poet" is that his exploration into the workings of time, although confined to the past, is not limited to the operation and span of personal memory, but may range freely through the millennia of recorded history. It may be argued that the achievement of the historical poems proper (of which "Caesarion" is not one) is to scrutinize the historical record through the perspective of time-as-experienced, and, in so doing, to raise searching and perhaps unanswerable questions about the nature of the historical process. 3. Cavafy's historical poems range across a well-defined space, both geographically and in historical time. Geographically, this space is bounded by Rome in the west and by the limits of Hellenistic penetration in the east,6 but its capital city is Cavafy's own city of Alexandria. In time, once the poems dealing with myth and those treating history in terms of moral allegory are set aside, it becomes evident that none of the historical poems proper deals with a period earlier than the conquests of Alexander the Great and the consequent expansion of Hellenism, while an appropriate terminus in the other direction is set by two poems relating to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 that brought the Byzantine Empire to an end.' The historical record for this long period (the "dedine and fall" of classical Hellenism?) exists in two forms: in surviving inscriptions and papyri, and in the synthetic work of historians from Arrian to Sphrantzes, whose writings have been copied and preserved through the centuries. In 6See "Epitaph" (1893: Anekdota, 57), "Philhellene" (1906/1912: A37, tr. 31), and "Coins" (1920: Anekdota, 181). 7"Theophilos Palaiologos" (?/1914: Anekdota, 131, tr. 147) and "Earthen" (1921: Anekdota, 183). Interestingly, neither was published by Cavafy.
Page 1 and 2: The History Man 1. by RODERICK BEAT
Page 3 and 4: The History Man 25 Two poems which
Page 5 and 6: The History Man 27 like an unbroken
Page 7 and 8: The History Man 29 first draft, now
Page 9 and 10: The History Man 31 history?" Applie
Page 11: The History Man 33 When I had succe
Page 15 and 16: The History Man 37 inscription beli
Page 17 and 18: The History Man 39 who, in defeat,
Page 19 and 20: The History Man 41 to make an impac
Page 21 and 22: The History Man 43 the fragmentary

The History Man

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