“African,” as opposed to the balance of the “Attic” style. In his Institutio Oratoria (XII.79), Quintilian had already emphasized that the best style must display “magna, non nimia, sublimia non abrupta, fortia non temeraria, severa non tristia, gravia non tarda, laeta non luxuriosa, iucunda non dissoluta, grandia non tumida” (grandeur, not excess, sublimity not harshness, strength not rashness, severity not grimness, gravity not dullness, joy not abandon, pleasantness not decadence, greatness not pomposity).
Not just Roman orators but also ancient Christian rhetoric denounced the kakozelon, or damaging affectation, of the Asianic style. For an example of how profoundly scandalized the fathers of the church were when faced with examples of this “mala affectatio,” see the invective by Saint Jerome (in Adversus Iovinianum, I): “Such is the barbarism displayed by these writers, and so confused does their discourse become thanks to these stylistic vices, that we have reached the point where we do not understand who is talking and what is being discussed. Everything (in these works) is expanded only to then burst like a weak serpent which splits in two as it tries to contort itself…. Everything is caught up in such inextricable verbal knots that one could quote Plautus here: ‘Here nobody except the Sibyl could understand anything.’ What are these verbal monstrosities?”
This broadside sounds like the spiteful description a traditionalist might make about a page from The Book of Kells or Finnegans Wake. But in the meantime something was to change: those qualities that, according to classical tradition, had been classified as vices would become virtues in the poetics of Hisperic writers. A page of Hisperic writing no longer obeyed the laws of traditional syntax and rhetoric, the models of rhythm and meter were overthrown in order to produce expressions that had a baroque flavor. Sequences of alliteration that the classical world would have considered cacophonous began to produce a new music, and Aldhelm of Malmesbury (Epistula ad Eahfridum, PL, 89, 91) had fun composing sentences where each word began with the same letter: “Primitus pantorum procerum praetorumque pió potissimum paternoque praesertim privilegio pane-gyricum poemataque passim prosatori sub polo promulgantes….”
The Hisperic style’s lexis became enriched with incredible hybrid words, borrowing Hebrew and Hellenistic terms, and the text was studded with cryptograms and enigmas that defied any attempt at translation. If the ideal of classical aesthetics was clarity, the Hisperic ideal would be obscurity. If classical aesthetics exalted proportion, Hisperic aesthetics would prefer complexity, the abundance of epithets and paraphrases, the gigantic, the monstrous, the unrestrained, the immeasurable, the prodigious. The very search for nonstandard etymologies would lead to the breaking down of the word into atomic elements, which would then acquire enigmatic meanings.
The Hisperic aesthetic would epitomize the style of Europe in those dark ages when the old continent was undergoing demographic decline and the destruction of the most important cities, roads, and Roman aqueducts. In a territory covered in forests not only monks but also poets and miniaturists would look out on the world as a dark, menacing wood, teeming with monsters and crisscrossed with labyrinthine paths. In these difficult and chaotic centuries, Ireland would bring Latin culture back to the continent. But those Irish monks who wrote down and preserved for us that small amount of the classical tradition they had managed to salvage would take the initiative in the world of language and visual imagination, groping for the right path in the dense forest, like Saint Brendan’s comrades, who sailed the seas with him, encountering monsters and lost islands, meeting a giant fish on which they disembarked when they mistook it for an island, an island inhabited by white birds (the souls who fell with Lucifer), miraculous fountains, Paradise trees, a crystal column in the middle of the sea, and Judas on a rock, beaten and tormented by the incessant pounding of the waves.
Between the seventh and ninth centuries, it was perhaps on Irish soil (but certainly in the British Isles) that there appeared that Liber Monstrorum de Diversis Generibus,* which seems to describe many of the images that we find in The Book of Kells. The author admits in the opening pages that although many authoritative books had already recounted similar lies, he would never have thought of presenting them again if “the impetuous wind of your requests had not unexpectedly arrived to throw me—a terrified sailor—headlong into a sea of monsters. […] And without doubt it is impossible to count the number of kinds of monstrous marine animals which with enormous bodies the size of high mountains whip up the most gigantic waves and shift huge expanses of water with their torsos, almost seeming to uproot the water from the depths only to then heave themselves toward the quiet estuaries of rivers: and as they swim along, they raise spume and spray with a thunderous noise. In huge ranks, that monstrous, enormous army crosses the swollen plains of blue water, and sweeps the air with lashes of the whitest spray, white as marble. And then churning up the waters with a tremendous backwash, waters already in a ferment because of the huge mass of their bodies, they head for land, offering to those standing on the shore watching them not so much a spectacle as a scene of horror.”
However fearful the author may have been about telling lies, he cannot resist the colossal beauty of this fascinating falsehood because it allows him to weave a tale as infinite and varied as a labyrinth. He tells his story with the same pleasure as the Vita S. Columbani describes the sea around the island of Hibernia, or as in the Hisperica Famina (a work with which the author of the Liber Monstrorum must have had a certain familiarity), where adjectives like “astriferus” or “glaucicomus” are used to describe the breakers (and Hisperic aesthetics would privilege neologisms such as “pectoreus,” “placoreus,” “sonoreus,” “alboreus,” “propriferus,” “flammiger,” and “gaudifluus”).
These are the same lexical inventions praised by Virgil the Grammarian in his Epitomae and Epistulae* Many scholars now maintain that this mad grammarian from Bigorre, near Toulouse, was in fact an Irishman, and everything—from his Latin style to his vision of the world—would seem to confirm this. This Virgil lived in the seventh century and therefore, presumably, one hundred years before the production of The Book of Kells. He would cite passages from Cicero and Virgil (the famous one) that these authors could never have written, but then we discover, or presume, that he belonged to a circle of rhetoricians, each of whom had taken the name of a classical author. Perhaps, as has been surmised, he wrote to mock other orators. Influenced by Celtic, Visigoth, Irish, and Hebrew culture, he described a linguistic universe that seems to spring from the imagination of a modern surrealist poet.
He maintains that there exist twelve varieties of Latin and that in each of them the word for
“fire” can be different: “ignis,” “quoquihabin,” “ardon,” “calax,” “spiridon,” “rusin,” “fragon,”
“fumaton,” “ustrax,” “vitius,” “siluleus,” “aenon” (Epitomae, IV. 10). A battle is called “praelium” because it takes place at sea (“praelum”), because its importance brings about the supremacy (“praelatum”) of the marvelous (Epitomae, IV. 10). Geometry is an art that explains all the experiments with herbs and plants, and that is why doctors are called geometers (Epitomae, IV. 11). The rhetorician Aemilius made this elegant proclamation: “SSSSSSSSSSS. PP.
NNNNNNNN. GGGG.R.MM.TTT.D. CC. AAAAAAA. IIIIWWWW. O. AE. EEEEEEE.” This is supposed to mean
“the wise man sucks the blood of wisdom and must be rightly called leech of the veins” (Epitomae, X.1). Galbungus and Terrentius clashed in a debate that lasted fourteen days and fourteen nights, discussing the vocative of “ego,” and the matter was of supreme vastness because it was a question of determining how one should address oneself with emphasis: “Oh, I, have I acted correctly?” (O egone, recte feci?). This and much more is told us by Virgil, making us think of the young Joyce wondering whether baptism with mineral water was valid.
Each one of the texts I have mentioned could be used to describe a page of The Book of Kells or, for that matter, a page of Finnegans Wake, because in each of these texts language does what the images do in The Book of Kells. Using words to describe The Book of Kells is tantamount to reinventing a page of Hisperic literature. The Book of Kells is a flowery network of intertwined and stylized animal forms, of tiny monkeylike figures amid a labyrinth of foliage covering page after page, as if it were always repeating the same visual motifs in a tapestry where—in reality—each line, each corymb, represents a different invention.
It has a complexity of spiral forms that wander deliberately unaware of any rule of disciplined symmetry, a symphony of delicate colors from pink to orangey yellow, from lemon yellow to purplish red. We see quadrupeds, birds, greyhounds playing with a swan’s beak, unimaginable humanoid figures twisted around like an athlete on horseback who contorts himself with his head between his knees until he forms an initial letter, figures as malleable and flexible as rubber bands inserted amid a tangle of interlacing lines, pushing their heads through abstract decorations, coiling around initial letters and insinuating themselves between the lines. As we look, the page never sits still, but seems to create its own life: there are no reference points, everything is mixed up with everything else. The Book
