Customer Reviews

The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays (Nonpareil Book, 78)

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Whether it's criticism, social commentary or his amazing historical fiction, Davenport has that knack for plunging an arm into the stream of time and pulling up luminous pebbles, then arranging them brilliantly.

This is mostly a collection of writings about writers, but don't let that deter you. When Davenport writes about writers, the result has the quality of a madman's mosaic, a Watts tower of literary observation.

"The Geography of the Imagination," which lends its title to this collection, relates the Dogon trickster legends of West Africa to Brer Rabbit, to an essay on furniture by Poe, to Oswald Spengler's "Decline of the West" (seen in terms of World War I and the first three stories in Joyce's "The Dubliners"), to the Persephone myth (and its realization in a bit of O. Henry sentiment). It ends with a close analysis of classical imagery in Grant Wood's painting, "American Gothic." Along the way, Davenport introduces, in cameo appearances, John Philip Sousa, Heraclitus, Amerigo Vespucci, the sack of Eleusis by the Visigoths, the idea of Germany, Thomas Jefferson's dinners, the discovery of binary stars, and the industrial revolution. The essay itself is not quite 12 pages long.

While discussing Stanley Burnshaw's 'The Seamless Web', Guy Davenport summed up exactly how I felt after reading 'The Geography of the Imagination'. "It is like being in the room with a charmingly intelligent man who has found a big subject in several hundred books. He attacks the subject this way, that way, pointing out this astuteness and that perception, all the while taking down book after book and reading the relevant passage. Having heard him to the end, you are still a bit puzzled as to how you might condense it all for its coherence and thrust, but you are aware that it is an important discussion you've heard."

The 'coherence and thrust' is quite plain - the problem is that 'The Geography of the Imagination' begins just shy of where my education ends, and then shoots upward, stratospherically, from there. Whereas I thought I knew something about the humanities and their historical perspective, I was astonished at how limited my fractional knowledge really was, and how ably Mr. Davenport exposed my boundaries by linking modern, often unappreciated, masterworks to the classical past in ways I would never have seen unassisted.

That's the thrust - modern literature and poetry and art and even music and architecture peeled back layer by layer to uncover their links to antiquity - and how those allusions to the past skip over the present's community conscious like a flat rock across a shallow creek. I may see something in these works that resonates, but I don't know why, or else only dimly recognize the references. Guy Davenport, on the other hand, zips back and forth between the ages, then laterally across genres and mediums, teasing out parallels and themes between such strange bedfellows as, for example, Poe, Grant Wood, and the myth of Persephone, sure-handedly leading the reader through a byzantine maze of arcana and out into fuller perspectives.

At times I wonder if Mr. Davenport hasn't read too much into his subjects - could these artists and writers have purposely added *all* that he sees in their work? It doesn't matter, because there are plenty of other connections that ring true, and the point isn't so much whether the artists were aware of it as that, with the trained eye (or guided, as I was by the author), it's possible to recognize and appreciate the subtleties permeating their art. However, Mr. Davenport also makes it clear that the people he writes about absolutely intended for most of these allusions to be there. For instance, when he delves into poetry, I was simply astounded at the precise and compact ordering of words and myth and oblique references by the masters. It's like a coded text, an intuited lingua franca for people who meet at the non-Euclidean borders of dreams and the subconscious.

While Mr. Davenport makes a strong case for the poets he believes in, poetry, for me, is only a slight interest, and I think it's important to note that the book's first half is almost exclusively about poets and their work. These are poets (Pound, Zukofsky, Marianne Moore, Charles Olson, Jonathan Williams and Ronald Johnson, among others) and their poems that the author expects us to be quite familiar with already, and honestly, many of these sections were over my head. Still, I value quite highly the introduction to the concepts behind this type of poetry, and to the other subjects also, as an extension to an incomplete education.

Other highlights are sections on Eudora Welty, James Joyce, Osip Mandelstam (who was previously unknown to me), and anecdotal essays concerning Joyce Kilmer, Wittgenstein, Charles Ives, and Shelley's Ozymandias. Except describing any particular essay of Mr. Davenport's as limited to one person misses the point entirely. In the imagination's geography, every country shares a border and a history, and, as the author demonstrates, it is impossible to write about one without examining the others. And even if much of the territory is terra incognito for me, his demanding and un-condescending essays are perfect launching pads for further explorations.

Guy Davenport once commented humorously that he had eleven readers. He was certainly a genius and definitely unconventional. While he loved literature, evidently food meant nothing to him --- he would often dine on fried Oscar Mayer bologna and Campbell's soup.

The aspect which I find most puzzling is clearly on view in "Geography" -- his strong taste for incomprehensible writers, or at least "extremely unconventional writers." Olson?? Pound's Cantos? and he moves without hesitation to a philosopher widely viewed as extremely eccentric and hard to understand: Wittgenstein. To put it in another way, if YOU can't make head or tail of someone, you're likely to find that someone on Davenport's list of favorites.

But when he flies closer to earth ("closer to the understanding of mere mortals") he has some of his best moments, in my opinion. His chapter on Whitman is really excellent, although you may find his insistence that the internal combustion engine has made life dull a bit of a stretcher. His essay on "Hobbitry" is excellent, and he even manages to say something interesting about Joyce Kilmer's "Trees!"

If you have an interest in 20th-century literature, you should take a look at this book. You will almost definitely learn from it, even at moments when you are shaking your head in disagreement. Not to be overlooked, Guy Davenport was a true American original.