Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra: Primitive Song

I had such high hopes for this book. I casually researched Bowra on teh internets [sic], and found him to be quite a wit--the Oscar Wilde of anthropology. "Buggers can't be choosers", he once quipped, and "I expect to pass through this world but once and therefore if there is anybody I want to kick in the crotch I had better kick them in the crotch now, for I do not expect to pass this way again." Surely such a wit would bring a fresh and axiomatic flair to his seemingly dry thesis: that the very earliest, paleolithic forms of human song could be extrapolated from those of certain primitive peoples. The age of a society, he rightly posits, has nothing to do with its similarity to paleolithic society, and modern Selk'nam and Yamana tribes likely bear a closer resemblance to our primitive forbears than ancient Greece or Rome.

I regretfully report that Bowra does not live up to my expectations, however, and I consider this the first time that Philip Ward's recommendation has led me wrong. Even such tedious texts as Tacitus' or Saint Teresa's at least had some literary value, and inspired some worthwhile thought. Not only is Primitive Song empty of Bowra's celebrated wit, it is without scholarly merit, and even approaches certain analytical fallacies for which scholars are infamous.

Borges famously satirized the propensity of scholars to project onto a text and overattribute to it in his short story "Pierre Menard: Author of Don Quixote". There Borges describes a modern writer who reproduces Don Quixote word for word, and picks his text apart. Menard does not translate Cervantes' work; he writes it anew without ever having read it--a Borgesian situation to be sure. In the fashion of a smirking academic, Borges proceeds to show how the two identical texts are completely different, hilariously overreading between the lines and close reading the work to death.

I don't necessarily find anything wrong with this sort of textual scrutiny; scholars do it all the time. We isolate a single anapest in Shakespeare and write at length on how brilliantly the choice of scansion illustrates the overrarching themes of the oeuvre. I remember being guilty of it myself in an essay about Dickinson's poem "Much Madness is Divinest Sense". "By capitalizing the word 'Eye', Dickinson invokes the word 'I'." I wrote. "Suddenly, the 'discerning Eye' does not belong to some unidentified person, but to the author herself, and even to the reader." Barf.

But even this is not as nauseating as the conclusions drawn by Bowra from the most primitive of texts. Here is just one example: from the single-line poem "The Old One--to me--weather from the West", he
extrapolates

"It is a bald statement of fact, but it is nonetheless infused with emotion, with anxiety and implied complaint. Each word does its utmost by hinting beyond what it actually says, and nothing could be more compressed. But it is certainly a work of art, an exhibition of words set to action through passion by restraint. It catches what matters most in the blah blah blah etc."

Double barf. I am a big fan of close reading, but this goes too far, and throughout the entire book. Not only are such conclusions meaningless, they are disreputable. Bowra goes so far that his authority is undermined and the reader discounts the entire book. The only thing that makes reading it less than a complete waste of time is that I invariably find more to write about texts that I don't like than those I do. Et voila!