What are those things in the centre of their mouths, that ringed silence, that crushed clock, screams of dead and flying things: as if all of their verbs, those private plazas, had coagulated, into nouns, and the nouns themselves something subterranean, blind and telescopic, crooked and evil, the paths of the law
This text arose from reading Rebecca Comay’s beautiful essay ‘Adorno’s Siren Song’, which focuses on the figure of honey in the Odyssey, and from Hannah Proctor’s recent essay ‘Death and the Maiden.’ I have failed to make substantive commentary here on either. They, instead, have left some traces.
The anatomy of Proverbs
The fractured text of the Book of Proverbs contrasts with the extended poetry of the other books of Solomon. It is composed according not to the formal demands of poetic material but according to an attempt to transmit wisdom. What is this transmission like? How does wisdom differ from its transmission, and how do the two interact? What is brought to expression?
The book’s nine opening chapters address the transmission of wisdom as the father’s moral teaching of a son. But it is not the son who is to be morally educated, not him as a person. Instead, these chapters proceed by dissection; wisdom is not of the individual but of the organ: the heart; the eyes; the feet that tread the path of life; and the mouth (see 4:23-27). Morality must be taught to each; the moral son is broken apart.
If each organ might stand metonymically for the moral subject, then the mouth in this regard poses a problem. The heart, which connects the ego to his soul, is hidden. The eyes are open to sensation and revelation; the feet may choose a path straight or crooked. Each of these organs plays a simple function: the heart and the feet are untroubled by pleasure. The mouth not so. And it is the mouth on which Proverbs dwells – the title already discloses the orality of this book. The mouth, lips and tongue are mentioned over a hundred times in the book’s 31 chapters. Perhaps Proverbs must be read backwards, not as teaching on how to use one’s mouth to act wisely, but as a critical analysis of the difficulty of the mouth itself. Wisdom becomes a heuristic for this task. The transmission of wisdom occasions the expression of the mouth’s difficulty.
Centrally, in these opening chapters, the father counsels conjugal fidelity. His counsel gives expression to a problem of orality.
My child, be attentive to my wisdom; incline your ear to my understanding, so that you may hold on to prudence, and your lips may guard knowledge. For the lips of a strange woman drip honey, and her speech is smoother than oil; but in the end she is bitter as wormwood, sharper than a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps follow the path to Sheol. She does not keep straight to the path of life; her ways wander, and she does not know it. And now, my child, listen to me, and do not depart from the words of my mouth…” (5:1-7)[1]
Around a description of an archetypal femme fatale three mouths coalesce. The mouth of the father, the son, and the forbidden woman. The proverb strains between the spoken word; the wisdom of the silent, he who guards it with closed lips; the sexually alluring honeyed lips of a strange woman from which emanate unctuous words.[2] Wisdom is to be transferred between these mouths. Its instability – the possibility of folly, is the expression of the difficulty of the human mouth. The transmission of wisdom in proverbs is caught in the complexity of mouths, of tongues and lips and tastes. For proverbs are not the law, the father not the Lord.
What is this wisdom that finds itself in the mouth of the father and not of the Lord? Wisdom enters the text in Chapter 8, through a poem in which it is personified as a woman. “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago.” she says. “Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water, before the mountains had been shaped, I was brought forth – when he had not yet made earth and field, or the world’s first bit of soil.” (8:22-26). She closes her poem, “When he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters ought not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.” The valences of wisdom both make and defy history: timelessly she works through creation, but she delights before the human race. In wisdom the knowledge of humans is related to the divine, for “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.” Yet wisdom is independent of the Lord, made in his first act, externalised by him. As a worker by his side she requires human transmission – instruction from one generation to the next. She requires the human mouth.
In human poetry this personification of wisdom, this timeless woman, is granted her own mouth: “Hear, for I will speak noble things, and from my lips will come what is right: for my mouth will utter truth; wickedness is an abomination to my lips. All the words of my mouth are righteous; there is nothing twisted or crooked in them.” (8:6-8) Personified wisdom is also embodied wisdom; embodied wisdom is too dissected. As transmission breaks into poetry, as it reflects upon its own object, it exposes its own problematic condition and proposes a new obscure relation: “Do not forsake her, and she will keep you; love her, an she will guard you.” (4:6) Wisdom as woman is to be loved, exalted, for her lips that sense abomination. But the love of wisdom as woman offers no communion, but only the guarding and security of the ego from death. She is to be loved but not as a person: her lips are not to be loved as an entrance into her, but only as a place of declamation. Her human mouth is merely poetry.
The mouth in the Book of Proverbs contrasts with the heart. Sealed within the person as the mediator of life and soul, the heart is a figure of profound disconnection, the link between life and soul unmediated by an opening on to the world; the heart is without sense. And alongside the heart and the mouth in this text is the path of the feet. Proverbs speaks of the path of life which is not crooked. And in the section describing the son’s temptation by the strange woman, describes her path as a “path to Sheol” as her feet go down to death. Her path does not keep straight; her path is dark, unknowable. But even these paths in the world, Manichean figures of the traversal of reality, lead back to the mouth. For “from the fruit of the mouth one’s stomach is satisfied; the yield of lips brings satisfaction. Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruits.” (18:20-21) If the heart is shrouded from the world by the body and the paths of life and death mark the fundamental bifurcation of reality illuminated by wisdom, then the mouth which opens on to the world, which can love and taste, speak, eat, and close itself off from the world may govern both. The souls of the good might be damaged not by the badness of the heart but by oral folly. The paths, dark and light, are in the power of the tongue.
The dialectic of the proverb is this: wisdom in the mouths of humans is granted oral expression, but its truth is to try to renounce its orality. The orality of the proverb tends to the closure of mouths, towards the end of orality, of the blocking of paths so that they may be illuminated, of the purity of the heart untroubled by temptation: “When words are many, transgression is not lacking, but the prudent are restrained in speech” (10:19); “Those who guard their mouths preserve their lives; those who open wide their lips come to ruin.” (13:3) For the human mouth utters not only spoken truth but deals in giving and taking pleasure, in the violence of law and the joy of folly, in the drinking of wine and gnashing of teeth. The human mouth might be governed by each. Wisdom ancient is weak between lips and teeth and tongue.
This dialectic is not merely a matter of difficulty, of the complexity of the mouth, its rivenness with hunger, sex and law, but also a question of authority, and the unity of the mouth as a figure of sovereignty. How does the learned mouth of the father compare to the honeyed mouth of this strange woman? How do the closing lips of the wise compare with the lips of personified and embodied wisdom to which wickedness is an abomination? Proverbs consistently presents the authority of the father as moral. “Listen, children to a father’s instruction, and be attentive, that you may gain insight; for I give you good precepts: do not forsake my teaching. When I was a son with my father, tender, and my mother’s favourite, he taught me, and said to me, ‘let your heart hold fast my words; keep my commandments and live. Get wisdom; get insight: do not forget, nor turn away from the words of my mouth.’” (4:1-5) His lips, following his own father’s, have already forsworn sex and hunger for speaking of proverbs. He who guards his mouth appears as the desexualised shadow of personified wisdom. Since his mouth has already renounced pleasure, since it speaks a tasteless archaic wisdom without sense, is the father not a tragic figure – a figure of sublime emasculation and anaesthesia? In the proverb does he not renounce his sensuous sovereignty and announce his weakness? Is the pronouncement of the proverb not the expression of the ambivalence of his own position?
And what of our two women? And why might not, for the misogynist Solomon, real women’s mouths speak wisdom? Why must women appear as these two archetypes: one forever dark and fallen, treading her dark, deathly path; the other a mere figuration of an idea who cannot be loved for her figure? The one with her slippery mellifluous words, the other whose lips feel abomination but who speaks without passion? These were always the female archetypes portrayed by the father who claims to teach the son about the world but betrays instead his own interest.
A note on Freud
One of the changes in Freud’s thought between his Three essays on Sexuality and his 1914 essay ‘On Narcissism’ is that in his early thought ‘erotogenic zones’ are limited to the mouth, the anus and the genitals; while by the time of his revision of metapsychology in the mid-1910s, he will claim that, “we can decide to regard erotogenicity as a general characteristic of all organs.” The energetics of psychic mechanism is in this thought libidinalised; organic life itself eroticised. If life in general was eroticised, this would not straightforwardly lead to a lessening of Freud’s interest in the oral, anal, and genital, but it would transform their role in psychic life. No longer were they centres or ‘sources’ of erotic energy and excitement, but became instead centres of psychic organisation in the sense of governance. Demeaned in this transformation is the privilege of the mouth, anus, and genitals as sites of intercourse – not only sexual intercourse, but intercourse with the world. They are openings of the soma on to what is beyond the limits of the organism (although not necessarily what might be intojected or cathected, as though an organ of the ego, organised by the psyche.) In this movement of Freuds thought, these zones become transformed into references to moments in ontogenetic development, standing for moments of governance in the maturing psyche.
When Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle returned to the question of the limit of the organism, the edge or frontier of the soma on to the world, he was less concerned with the somatic opening on to the world than how the organism might come to close itself off from the world, and how it might make its skin inorganic as a defensive measure. This interest in a deathly exterior rests on Freud’s earlier move in which it is not merely the case that “internal organs” can be erotogenic zones, but that there is a generalised internalisation of erotogeny that in itself becomes the seal of the organic qua life.
[1] All biblical quotations from NRSV.
[2] I am interested too in how close this figure is to writing of revelation, in the shifting of an oral mode to an optical one. In the apocalypse many of these figures and archetypes reoccur in distorted form in a different type of writing. Is the mouth of this strange woman not akin to the book given by the Angel to John in Rev. 10? “So I went to the angel and told him to give me the little scroll; and he said to me ‘Take it, and eat; it will be bitter in your stomach, but sweet as honey in your mouth.’ So I took the little scroll and ate it; it was sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach was made bitter. Then they said to me, ‘You musy prophesy again about many peoples and nations and languages and kings.’” (10:9-11) Meanwhile, famously in revelation the strange woman reappears as the Whore of Babylon becoming a cosmic force, or in a most extreme expression she is “the great city that rules over the kings of earth.” (17:18). I was reminded of this relation by a reference to Rev. 10:10 in the Adorno – Mann correspondence, of this book or scroll that tastes like honey. There is a wonderful woodcut by Dürer of this scene, and it was close to their minds as Adrian Leverkühn, the protagonist of Mann’s Doktor Faustus writes an oratorio based on Dürer’s series of woodcuts of the apocalypse of John.