The History Man

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42 JOURNAL OF THE HELLENIC DIASPORA enced (in terms of an open future—Phernazes does not know what is going to happen). The present of the poem (Cavafy's) includes the awareness of Phernazes' present as fixed in a pattern which could only be perceived long after the event. This dual perception of a historical moment is poignantly reinforced by the nature of the dilemma facing Phernazes in Cavafy's poem. He, Phernazes, faces the same problem that Cavafy, in bringing Phernazes' consciousness to us, simultaneously surmounts: how to bridge the gulf between the historical and the experienced past, how to depict the "emotions" (the nature of the experience) of a historical character at a historic moment. It is perhaps for this reason that Cavafy's poem bears a title apparently more appropriate to Phernazes' work-in-progress than to his own completed poem. The poetic function fulfilled or attempted by Cavafy and his creation, Phernazes, seems then to be to recuperate historical time as experienced time, and bring it within the ambit of personal memory and the individual imagination with which the poet assimilates and refurbishes his own experience. History interrupts the poet's act of creativity, but that act was itself partly dedicated to the recuperation of the historical past, and is in turn recuperated for us as a part of history. Even the eruption of history in the form of real and decisive events is not unambiguously treated. D.N. Maronitis, in a perceptive essay on this poem (1970), goes beyond what is explicitly stated in the text and interprets Phemazes' dilemma as, in part, a pragmatic one: will the attribution of "intoxicated pride" to his illustrious ancestor be flattering to the king who is Phernazes' patron? (According to this reading, "philosophy" in the seventh line also means, ironically, something like "circumspection.") Maronitis further believes that the last four lines of the poem are causally connected to what has gone before: because of what has happened, Phernazes makes up his mind to write, after all, that it was "intoxicated pride" that Dareios experienced. According to this reading, the historical tide that in the poem begins to sweep away Phernazes and "Greek poems" together with the kingdom of Pontos, in fact liberates the poet. It inspires him with the correct and satisfying solution to his artistic dilemma, but it simultaneously removes altogether the pragmatic dilemma that had faced him. If Mithridates is never going to read the poem and reward the poet, if, most probably, the poem is never even going to be finished, then what need is there to flatter anybody? What need, either, to worry about dumbfounding his critics? Whether Maronitis's additional subtlety is accepted or not, what is ultimately validated in this poem seems to be the "poetic idea" of the third from last line. This is what matters: the act of creativity, whether the writing of verses, the making of wine bowls, or the fashioning of statues. The creative act is more important than the artifact in which it results: the insistence of the poetic idea that haunts Phernazes is more important than the poem he would in other circumstances have completed, and which would most probably have suffered, in due course, the fate of
The History Man 43 the fragmentary inscription of "In the Month of Athyr." Poems and artifacts are not proof against time, as that poem movingly demonstrated. But the capacity to create anew, with its fickle relation to the contingent external forces that comprise historical fact, is ever-present, and in fact is no less necessary for the production of the historical record than for that of poems and fiction. Phernazes' poem, presumed unfinished, stands beside the palaeolithic cave paintings inscribed in inaccessible niches as a monument to a human impulse and power, whose value resides less in the created thing than in its creation, which is perhaps the greatest human defense against time and oblivion. I have tried to show that Cavafy's historical poems are neither the mere dabblings of the antiquarian nor necessarily the "alibis" for private obsessions. Neither do they seek to be read as allegory, whether moral or political, nor as myth-making. They are rather the testimony to a rational confrontation between the creative imagination, whose sphere is the present moment, and the consciousness of the past as always beyond the reach of that moment. Cavafy's "sense of time" is more complex than either Seferis or Malanos acknowledged: it includes the awareness of two quite different perceptions of time, the historical and that of experience or memory. And his historical and erotic poems together dramatize the interplay between these two perceptions of time, and between either or both of them and the present moment of creativity. Cavafy's poetry as a whole can be seen as the attempt of a modern poet in the European tradition to transcend the idea of time without recourse to myth. History and memory occupy the space in Cavafy's work that in other contemporary writings is taken up by myth. If the result is an uncanny likeness between Cavafy's Alexandria and Joyce's Dublin, a "myth in progress," it has been achieved in Cavafy's case by a method which is the opposite of that employed by his Irish and Anglo-American contemporaries. Cavafy's method is not to seek to override or to "redeem" time by appeal to the timeless order of myth. But then he did not seek, as Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, and Pound all did, to discover or establish order in the present. The present in a poem by Cavafy has no meaning outside of the creative act. At the heart of his poetry lies the attempt of the experiencing and imaginative consciousness, present in the act of creativity, to comprehend and relate to all that is not present. Poetry provides the medium in which the present tense can be perpetuated as the act of writing, and in poetry the present tense can refer to nothing but the time of writing. In consequence, all personal experience and all of recorded history are banished from the creative present, but are at the same time inseparable from it because the past is intelligible only as the sum of an infinity of such momentary presents. Cavafy's poetic method is to subvert history from within. Often echoing the voice of the historian and with copious and respectful references to the historical record, Cavafy breaks up the conceptual continuum of recorded history into its constituent moments of individual experience. And the constituent moments of history are frequently chosen and drama-
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 and 12: The History Man 33 When I had succe
Page 13 and 14: The History Man 35 could have done
Page 15 and 16: The History Man 37 inscription beli
Page 17 and 18: The History Man 39 who, in defeat,
Page 19: The History Man 41 to make an impac

The History Man

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