Joseph S. Salemi

_________________

   FICTIVE MIMESIS, AND RARE TREASURES

   ___________________________________

When I was a child, my maternal grandfather told me that as a young man in Sicily (around 1900), he knew someone who had discovered a Roman coin while digging. The finder brought the coin to a numismatist, who told him (in full honesty), that it was an issue of a Roman emperor who had ruled for only eighteen days.

The numismatist said this to him: “This coin is unbelievably rare. If you try to sell it, many unscrupulous persons will offer you very large sums of money for it. Don’t accept their offers. Whatever large sum they propose to give you will not be a thousandth of the coin’s actual value.”

He then advised the finder (a young man in his twenties) to take it to a reputable museum, with himself along as a guide, and offer it for sale to the directors of the Roman Antiquities section. This is what they did, and the young man garnered a very substantial sum of money, with which he was able to marry and emigrate to the United States.

I often wondered about this strange and lucky find. Decades later I determined by research that the coin in question must have been from the reign of Marcus Aurelius Claudius Quintillus, who died in A.D. 270 after a reign of seventeen days. This was the closest number I could find to match my grandfather’s account, though some scholars argue that Quintillus may have been in power for a somewhat longer period of time. In any case, the guy wasn’t around for very long. There is a beautiful photo of a magnificent gold aureus with his striking profile at the Wikipedia entry for Quintillus.

I believe this story that my grandfather told me had a major effect on my habits of thought. The idea of finding something ancient and rare and precious, something hidden away for centuries, something that neither love nor money could ever replace or duplicate, took hold of me. That which was hard to obtain, and had the patina of time on it, became my Holy Grail.

I was literary by nature, so I became a collector of rare books and fine editions. I haunted antique and curio shops, flea markets, and little out-of-the-way places where specialty items could be bought. I hated gimcrack modern furniture, and only purchased heavy antiques. I gathered small objets d’art if they were old and beautiful and uncommon. When my Aunt Dorothy gave me Grandmother Salemi’s set of fine china from 1912, I nearly swooned in ecstasy.

This tendency had an effect on my taste in poetry, and also on my poetic style. I liked subjects that were obscure and recondite. I favored a consciously precise and almost hieratic choice of diction. I made sure that I used all the resources of the English language, including those that were complex, intricate, and even obsolescent. I wanted every poem that I signed to have the elegance and weight of hallmarked silver.

Later reading and study showed me that there were other approaches to poetry, and that poetry could be simpler, and more direct, and more emotionally plangent. I learned also that comedy, satire, lampoon, and polemical attack were equally possible for a good poet, and that poetry could be a very effective weapon. But I never doubted that whatever poem I wrote would always be a well-crafted fictive artifact, and never just a narrative exposition or an expression of belief and sentiment.

One of the most influential poems that I read as a child was “Spanish Waters” by John Masefield. It appeared in Children’s Digest, a small magazine for kids eight to twelve years of age. It’s a forty-line poem in AABB quatrains, written in trochaic octameter (yes!), with minor variations. The poem is a lush, exotic account of an old pirate’s memory of a huge cache of rare treasures buried on an island called “Los Muertos” (The Dead). The treasure is so rare and strange that my mother had to go to our huge Webster’s Dictionary to look up several words in the poem when I asked her to read it aloud to me, and explain what was being described.

I also developed a lasting fondness for Edgar Allan Poe—not just his poetry but also his many strange and unsettling short stories. Several were about murder and bizarre happenings, and the story “The Gold Bug” played right into my fascination with rare buried treasures. I also loved Poe’s use of carefully crafted English, and one of the first literary passages I ever memorized was the first sentence of “The Cask of Amontillado,” which I sometimes repeated over and over to myself, like a rosary prayer.

Let me say it again—I fully realize that there are other kinds of literary approaches. One’s poetry can focus on joy, on deep love, on religion, on hopes and dreams, on philosophical ideas, or anything else that fires the imagination and catalyzes a creative act. Mine is not the only way. But it is the one that I was born to follow, and that motivates me most urgently.

I frequently mention the phrase “fictive mimesis” in my critical commentary, and some readers seem to be confused by it. It’s actually quite simple: “mimesis” means imitation or copying, and “fictive” means made up or artificial. When poets practice fictive mimesis they imitate aspects of human life and behavior by making up scenarios or characters or events of their own construction, and then putting them into poetic form. It’s no different from what a playwright or novelist does when he creates a completely imagined drama with fictional characters. All the details are recognizably taken from life, but are put together in a unique way that has no relation at all to any actually lived incidents or real persons.

Here’s where the problem starts. Some people will jump up and say that many literary works are clearly autobiographical, or rooted in real events, or patterned after things that took place in someone’s life experiences. Sure, that’s true sometimes. But it is irrelevant and beside the point! Even if a writer is going to produce a text that is clearly connected with his experiences, he must revise, develop, embroider, and prune that material in ways that will make his finished product aesthetically pleasing and interesting. In other words, his work must not be mere reportage of what happened to him, but a fictional reworking of it that satisfies the aims of literary art. He must not “tell it like it is,” as the stupid mantra from the 1960s said. He must tell it like it never was, so as to make a dazzling spectacle of it in language and in imaginative reconstruction. That’s fictive mimesis. And it works best not when the writer is using his personal life as material, but when he completely forgets that and generates his material out of the play of imagination and remembrance, or from his reading and research. Browning’s dramatic monologues are a perfect example of this—he had no personal experience at all with the Renaissance figures whom he wrote about. All he knew concerning them came from books that he had read, and what he imagined was possible for them.

If a poet simply tells us about his personal life, or about some event that happened to him, or what he is actually feeling, or what he believes, that is not fictive mimesis. That is ordinary exposition, no different from giving a report, even if he puts it into rhyme and meter. Rather than mimesis (imitation), he is giving you exegesis (explanation) or perhaps diegesis (detailed narrative).

The problem with most beginning poets is that they do not understand this. They have been propagandized to believe that honesty and personal experience and confessional authenticity lie at the heart of the creative act. As a result, they never activate the mental switch that allows for the unusual, the rare, the unthought-of, the shocking, or the unexpected to go coursing through their brains. Instead, they’re simply telling you what happened to them, and what they’re feeling. They never get to first base in poetry!

But if you produce a totally fictive artifact by using fictive mimesis, you have made something just as rare and precious as that coin of the Emperor Quintillus. It is unique, it is purely a product of your own talent, and it will very likely be fascinating or appealing or shocking to an audience. Once when I taught a poetry class, I lost my temper at the narcissistic and sentimentalizing crap that my students were submitting and I shouted “Do you actually think anyone is interested in your damned personal feelings? Do you think anyone wants to read about what happened on your first date? Can’t you conjure up any subject or scenario more interesting than THAT?” In anger I then gave all of them the assignment to write a short poem that dealt with wine-making and drunkenness.

Recently I visited a small curio-and-junk shop in Brooklyn. It was packed with all sorts of stuff—some trivial and worthless, some battered, some just old. I love to walk around in such shops, and let fantasy, imagination, and memory swirl around in my brain as I examine the unexpected items one can find there. Suddenly I came to a locked glass cabinet, and nestled among the china and perfume vials and swizzle sticks I saw a woman’s compact from the early twentieth century. It was a small flat oval, with a Boucher-like female portrait behind glass on a black and green enameled lid.

The compact was heavy, but not of precious metal, and was decorated with small rhinestones and faux gold swags around the edges, in a Louis XV style. It was clearly something made for a middle-class clientele, and might have been sold for ten or fifteen dollars when it was new. But it had all the glory of Versailles in it. It was a magnificent fictive artifact! It struck me with its elegant perfection, its substantial weight, and the sheer aristocratic contempt that it seemed to express for the modern world. I bought it, not even questioning the inflated price that was being asked. All I knew was that it was “something rich and strange,” as Ariel said in The Tempest. And I thought that if I wanted an objective correlative for what I aimed at in my poems, this little compact would serve.

                         Return to Main Menu

Joseph S. Salemi has published poems, translations, and scholarly articles in over one hundred journals throughout the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. His four collections of poetry are Formal Complaints and Nonsense Couplets, issued by Somers Rocks Press, Masquerade from Pivot Press, and The Lilacs on Good Friday from The New Formalist Press. He has translated poems from a wide range of Greek and Roman authors, including Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Horace, Propertius, Ausonius, Theognis, and Philodemus. In addition, he has published extensive translations, with scholarly commentary and annotations, from Renaissance texts such as the Faunus poems of Pietro Bembo, The Facetiae of Poggio Bracciolini, and the Latin verse of Castiglione. He is a recipient of a Herbert Musurillo Scholarship, a Lane Cooper Fellowship, an N.E.H. Fellowship, and the 1993 Classical and Modern Literature Award. He is also a four-time finalist for the Howard Nemerov Prize.  His upcoming books, Gallery of Ethopaths, and a collection of critical essays, are forthcoming.

Home