A
Short History of the Complaint.
The Complaint. On
Attainment Forgone and Inconstancy: the Most Constant Refrain in Literary
History, Highest Attainment in the World of Poetry, in the Realm of the Global
Lyric (and in Music).
Single voice (whence the
cause for complaint) – against the world or because abandoned by it… virtue
unrewarded, passed over or ignored. Most commonly a putting into words (through
the images these express) of an inconsolable sense of loss…
A keening which informs us
of its cause; a moan configured as a message.
As
persistent in history, in the history of writing, most cogently in the history
of the lyric, of song, moreover in popular song, as in our wounded psyche - or
maybe more so… as life must, in spite of everything, go on… or, conversely,
because a lyric poem may survive a person’s life (Shakespeare’s boast in the
sonnet, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’).
Structurally, isomorphic
with the exposition of the problem in the problem/solution analysis of form
(the clash of the ‘problem’ phase is a kind of complaint).
In
history (the history we have received, the stories we have been told, which
inform us of the way in which we tell our story):
Egyptian
writing, perhaps, provides some of the earliest examples (3rd
millennium BC). The complaint can be found in the tales of ‘Sinhue’ and the
‘Eloquent Peasant’, ‘The Dialogue of a Man and his Soul’, the laments of ‘The
Dialogue of Ipuur and the Lord of All’, and even a complaint from beyond the
grave, ’The Teaching of Lord Amenemhat’: in these tales and teachings we find
the complaint as foiled desire, sexual disappointment and as a complaint to the
ruler for a perceived lack of recompense or reward for loyal service… the first
recorded instance of the economic complaint?
In
Chinese literary history, the complaint as a genre occupies a prominent place;
from the Ur text of Chinese culture, the
Book of Songs (the popular lyric section) to the Elegies of the State of Chu (where the complaint appears as the
dominant thematic form) as well as in the ‘Lament…’ by the same author, to the
glories of Tang dynasty poetry (especially that of the late Tang) … And on, a
canon as genre established…
Ancient
Tropological aside. The tropes that follow lend themselves
to the genre of, or may signal the presence of, the Complaint : Anthypophora
(rogatio) to pose and answer ones own question; Ecphonesis (exclamatio) the
expression of extreme emotion; Metalepsis, present effect, distant (temporal)
cause (as blame); and Apostrophe or Prosopopoiea, featuring the appeal to,
naming, or evocation of a Name, in this case the appeal to the named one for
help, or to denounce unfairness, sub-lunary or celestial, or to denounce their
unfairness… the unfairness of the one so named (or in the Elegy, the unfairness
of the loss of the named one).
Roman
writing evinces a range of relations to the ‘lover’, ranging from idealised
aristocratic women (only these may have had the freedom to live this way) such
as Catullus’, Lesbia/Clodia (or their use as inspiration for a largely
imaginary addressee), to the realities of the cultured prostitute… The
Complaint surfaces most obviously in the poetry of blocked or denied desire as
a literary convention (along with the aristocratic Lady or the cultured
prostitute), the obstacle (again class or social status as obstacle, wither high
or low, or just literary convention) – and not a little grossness. See Catullus
(poems 11 and 58). The subjective, lyric turn of the nepteroi was particularly suited to the (lover’s) complaint. See
also Tibullus and his ‘Delia’ and ‘Nemesis’ and Sextus Propertius’ trials with
his ‘Cynthia’ and then there is the Ovid of the Erotic Poems (the ‘Amores’,
‘Cures for Love’ and ‘Art of Love’, including also the ‘Letters…’ ). Even
Horace, too, may be found to moan just a little in his Satires (I, i); a sermon
as much as a satire; a complaint as much as a compendium of folly.
The
Historical Complaint: histories structured as narratives of ‘the Fall’, just
like Gibbons, Rise and Fall of the Roman
Empire, may be complaints against the causes of that fall; in Gibbon’s
case; the history of Christianity. History read as tragedy, like the genre of
tragedy itself, is a form of compliant of the vagaries (or machinations) of
Heaven, or Fate.
The
Religious Complaint. The ‘Lamentation’ as a religious genre. Jewish and Christian:
as found in the Bible, where the
stories of Jeremiah, Moses and Isaac, and of course Job, who losses everything,
exemplify a test of faith. Can one complain of Fate: in Greek tragedy does the
victim complain… : yet it is the basic innocence of Oedipus, for example, which
makes the sense of tragedy all the greater. This sense carries an implicit
complaint as to the ways of the gods. Yet a Muslim or even Buddhist ‘complaint’
at first thought appear unthinkable; would this not be a form of sacrilege - evincing
insufficient ‘submission’ or ‘detachment’? Yet as we shall see we have the
elements of complaint (sexual, existential and historical) in the Arab and
Persian lyric. Which together with the additional influence of the pan-European
(early) medieval Saint’s Life, featuring the dance of saint (usually male, a
spiritual ’Lover’) and convert (female, the Lady as chaste) often contrasted to
the heathen desires of a third party, of a given ruler, king or consul, as
another potential antecedent or ingredient of ‘courtly love poetry’. Itself
including (at its inception) as well as itself becoming antecedent for the
sexual complaint (effectively constituting a parallel sonnet tradition and
featuring in the poetry of the Metaphysicals, ‘To his coy mistress…’).
The
Religious Complaint (continued). The Indian tradition offers another version of
the complaint as a cause for (introduction to) instruction. A form popular with
religious reform movements, as for example in the Shiva poems of the 10th
c Hindu reform movement, a complaint regarding wealth, privilege, caste and
gender roles - often posed as rhetorical questions.
The
Religious Complaint (as Genealogy or Isomorphology). The Persian tradition……
exemplified by the Gazel, and the poets Hafiz and Rumi. Where the predominance
of the spiritual content does not exclude the complaint due to material life
and love. Including the
exploitation of the ambiguity of earthly and spiritual desire, where the
relation to the Ideal or Beloved, which may be the relation to ones own soul or
to God, is explored. This tradition and its many variations itself then feeding
back into the Arab or Islamic tradition and so to Mozarabic Spain, where its
massive popularity guaranteed an influence on local bilingual poetry (Arabic,
Occitan dialect) that transmitted the tradition first to the Troubadours, in
Occitan/Provencal and Old French and then to Old German, the Minnesingers and
the Meistersingers. Similarly in Sicily, where Arab traditions predominated in
the Norman courts, permeating into Italian culture (an influence denied by
Petrarch, as in Spain, where to this day these connections – or, maybe now,
their degree of importance - are still denied…). A marriage of traditions,
Muslim and Christian, on the ground of the Beloved and ‘her’ Lover’s complaint.
So informing and influencing the European ‘courtly love’ tradition and its
influence up to our own day; including the evolution of the popular folk song
and its heirs in the popular lyric of mass culture (adding to the perennial
popularity of the Beatles: ‘The day breaks, your mind aches…’, ‘Norwegian
Wood’, etc, etc).
Complaint
types in general in Arab poetry: pre-Islamic poetry offers Shanfara’s Ode,
‘Lamiyyatu’l’Arab’, where the complaint is of the harsh desert life – so
offering an (first?) instance of the geographical complaint. Whilst in the
dirge it is the loss of a (male) relative or husband as hero that is lamented,
written by (and narrated as from a) female voice; largely also the case for the
elegy, ‘dritha’ or ‘marthiya’, the most famous practitioner of which was the
poetess Khansa. In ‘The Poor Man’s Daughter’ the lot of the daughter after the
expected death of the impecunious father is bewailed. Poetry after the arrival
of Islam continues the tradition of the lament : in Muti’s ‘The Yeoman’s
Daughter’ the poet laments the loss of an admirer; Abu l’Ala writes critiques of the epoch and its
superstitions ; and Mu’tamid reveals a defeated ruler of Spain, imprisoned in
Africa, lamenting his fallen state and that of his family. And not forgetting
Madjnoun Layla, the ‘Tristan of the Orient’, whose Beloved may well be read as
having exceeded any available reality.
Arab
poetry also includes an ambiguity regarding the relation of the religious and
the secular. The Beloved as soul or person; desire as sacred or profane. And
who at times can tell them apart? The Beloved may therefore feature in the
Complaint as existential or sexual.
Then there is Ferdowsi’s
(11th century) epic verse complaint, ‘Shahnameh’, bemoaning the time
of the Muslim conquest of
And is the Koran itself the
bearer of human complaint? In the very first chapter, ‘The Cow’, we hear the voice
of complaint, with the invocation to ‘remember’; however the complaint is not
metaphysical, not levelled at the heavens, but admonitory, the voice of the
intermediary baring the complaint of the heavens to those who have forgotten…
this voice then returns at various times again to complain of lapses and to
remind…
The Consolation of
Philosophy
(as with much religion, which the ‘Consolation…’ in fact is) as the apposite
response to a complaint (existential)!
Which is not quite the same
as ‘being philosophical’ about it…
Celtic
literature: more obviously in the Laments, where the meditation on ruins
manifests epochal complaint, and the plight of the character/narrator (and
‘implied’ author, at the very least) as expressing ground for existential complaint.
Elegy (when not a form of praise song) may also be a euphemism for Complaint…
History
again (courtly traditions): In most court or ‘courtly love’ poetry, Classical,
feudal-aristocratic, Christian and Arabic, pre-Islamic Europe and post, the turning
of an obstacle into a virtue, a complaint into praise, to elevate the Beloved
into ‘the Lady’, to civilise the Lover into ‘the Lord’, augmenting the manners
of the court, of displaying their ideal form; the discourse, in subjunctive
voice, of courtly behaviour. An exchange relation where the (literary)
foregoing of pleasure results in an identity gain (a gain in civilisation; the
attainment of a civilised identity). But still evincing no lack of complaint
regarding the lack of ‘reward’ for faithfully rendered service…
The
early sonnet, Petrarch through Wyatt, Daniel and Surrey, features much in
plaintive voice; causes for complain are not lacking: the pains of the Lover;
the ground for the movement to (literary) renunciation and ‘service’; as well as
complaint of the dangers of court life; who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ –
‘actually-existing’ courtliness, we might say. An ‘exchange’ being thus made
(with virtue, a positive identity, as reward) there is no longer cause for
complaint. So following the ‘courtly love tradition’ in poetry, in the Lyric:
in the Romance, adultery, not renunciation, reigned supreme, although usually
ending in tragedy, and so a return to order… So raising the question of the
Romance as sharing the accolade as the tragedy (the bearer of tragic content)
of the literature of the Middle Ages, medieval or feudal period, with the
Saint’s Life, most especially the latter’s popular guise with the gesta as passione, the tales of the martyrs – where the tragedy is not a
fall but an elevation.
The
vehicle for much courtliness, the Sonnet, is, in its darker, we might say, more
realistic or pragmatic aspects, a form which adopts the complaint as its
content of expression. The Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s late sonnets is indeed
cause for complaint.
Done
complaining? Donne, in his Holy Sonnets, discourses on the difficulties of
faith and loss – with a passing debt to the biblical Lamentations. Existential
then; over and above the sexual complaint (‘can’t get no… satisfaction’) of the
other ‘Metaphysicals’. Yet Donne too, with Shakespeare, complains of love’s
‘fever’. Showing that even with faith we have not yet done complaining…
With death the (heretical)
complaint to the deity; dirge, wake… ritual of passing in (or over) the dead,
of moving on the dead, moving on our memories. The complaint due to (and due
from) those left behind…
‘Death’ and Emily
Dickinson. Along with the speculation on desire in the poetry of Emily
Dickinson, there is the speculation on death; so constituting a double complaint.
The resulting personification of Death often leads to a conflation of both
themes. In Sylvia Plath poetry is also as viewed from the ‘woman’s room’ (if
with somewhat more experience) and offers the complaint due to husband, fate,
and madness…
The ‘confessional’ suicide
poem or radical play or even suicide as complaint; from the legendary poet Qu
Yuan (the inspiration behind Duanwu, or the Dragon Boat festival in China) to
Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell, to Megan Terry, Marsha Norman Adrienne Kennedy
and Ntozake Shange, modern American poets and playwrights.
The complaint against
death: the complaint against time (Nietzsche); against entropy. The past can
not be undone: and then all passes…Such things must be put up with (‘being
philosophical’) – or transformed into poetry.
Or into music… (how many
transitions into the minor, down a fourth or unresolved dissonances are
musico-affective equivalents of the complaint?)
One
key ingredient of the Complaint, indeed its cause, the obstacle to the
(implied) poet’s desire, often takes the form of the key agon (contradiction or conflict of loyalty or identity) of a given
society. Expressed through desire, or its frustration, due to the social
divisions (such as class barriers) or conflict of loyalties (Family v State) of
a society, so constituting this division as obstacle, as cause for complaint.
Just like the tragedy (a genre constituted from social agon and its resolution in death) where the obstacles result not in
sadness but the annihilation of the key players. Do the frustrations that cause
the complaint transcend the social form and its limitations that propel tragedy
to its bloody and sobering end? Tragedy takes the cause for complaint to its
extreme end (as contained, incited by a particular agon as apposite for a given social form). By contrast we have
adultery, miscegenation, and Greco-Roman ‘New Comedy’ as the positive
resolution of such (often through the rectification of a mistaken identity).
The Lyric Complaint’s
relation to Tragedy is as the individual, more personalised, perhaps more
democratic, form of suffering, as compared to the collective witness of a
socially significant crisis in human affairs. In the tragedy we witness -with
the chorus or other characters- the end of those -socially significant
individuals- who Fate or whose desire, has caused them to transgress – so
before the return to order, tragedy. In the Lyric we endure.
In
European culture an important part of the lyric tradition, especially that
christened (sic) the ‘courtly love tradition’, consists of the Complaint (from
lack of reciprocity, lack of reward
for services rendered, to the loss of a lover, as due to military affairs, the
crusades, the mal mariee genre, etc).
Followed by its transfiguration as ‘service’ in the cause of the unattainable,
or hard-hearted, Lady (although a pragmatic or ’realistic’, indeed ironic or
down-right parodic strand, has always existed side by side, to ‘debunk’ the
idealisations of the courtly form, so again complaining of the realities of
human desire). The evolution of the complaint in all its double-edged awareness
continues in Italian 19th century poetry in Leopardi (the ‘Canti’)
following the complaint due to unrewarded service with the ironies of expecting
nothing more… In
For which humanity quickly
finds its natural and habitual therapy, an instinct for ‘the talking cure’, a
putting into words (transformed into poetry).
Or into music…
The
lone voice of complaint; the lyric voice: the collective voce of complaint; the
chorus: verse and chorus as backbone of our song traditions… The lone voice of the
suffering individual and his or her re-appropriation (comforting) by society…
The voice of inner expression (its codes and genres in a given culture) and the
voice, or echo, of ritual in art (never far away). Melody and harmony; the
voice and its place with others. (Leaving the genre of dance, of bodily
movement and that which incites it, to fill in the remaining musical element of
rhythm).
(‘I can’t get no…’)
The
Blues: the Complaint as musical genre. Slow blues shares this with the
classical adagio; mourning as unresolved loss as complaint - although slow
movements, Baroque, classical and romantic do, of course, resolve, in key and
in cadence onto a tonic triad, the blues, famously, does not… retaining its
flattened seventh. Music as wordless (but not silent) complaint. The
accompaniment to the Complaint takes on a life and history of its own… (Blues,
Jazz, atonality and beyond…). Complaint (a ‘true’ complaint) as
‘problem-solution’ form without the solution, without resolution (whence the
cause for complaint…).
Why
this predominance of the Complaint in the Lyric - in lyrical mode? Collective
complaint certainly is possible, and - some might say, casting an un-jaundiced
eye over history - as much called for. Yet, we feel it as an individual matter,
(almost) inexpressible (like pain, whose substitutes are the cry and the
complaint). The cry is inarticulate, so passing most obviously into music: the
Complaint however, is articulate; by definition words can be found, words that
suggest images, words that do communicate, by convention to be sure, the inner,
so invisible anguish of the lyric first person voice. Inner sensations,
personal feeling, are traditionally handed down to poetry as best expressed in
the Lyric as the best vehicle or carrier of this nexus of private (as opposed
to public) emotions (the appropriation is felt to be individual and private
even as it is publicly performed and heard). Therefore the ubiquity and success
of the Complaint, as expressing the inner frustration, of loss, of failure, of
betrayal, of personal inadequacy (occasionally bordering on self-abjection –
also found in religious variants… as in existential and emotional prostration
before the sublime lover…). All these are vocalised (given rhythm and metre,
sound and song) and so always given images… (memorable and expressive of
otherwise inexpressible feelings… or perhaps more precisely, unattainable ends
as source for our world of representations, the consolations of literature and
the solace of song). So telling our story – but (radically) in the singular.
Or perhaps now we might
say…iStory. Needless to say the lowercase ‘i’ is hardly a claim to modesty or
unassuming selflessness (in an increasingly competitive society such could only
be a form of rhetoric – much like the denial of self found in religious
practice; designed to found a new self, rather than preside over its
disappearance).
Lone voice of the lyric
verse, at times joined (so no longer alone) consoled or witnessed (so no longer
alone) by the chorus. (The constitution of popular song).
Universal
genre. Where there is desire (or servitude), there also will be the complaint;
the handmaiden of art as at once a confession, a consolation, and a commentary
on our innermost lives.
*
So
offering a new mood to the study of languages and their expressive force, a
genre in cultural expression as well as in literature and the lyric; the plaintive mood (what happens when the
indicative is to be negated but the impossibility of the subjunctive mood is
realised).
Copyright Peter Nesteruk, 2013