On Apr 24, 2005, at 2:07 AM, HANNIBAL HAMLIN wrote:
>
> I didn't mean to sound generally skeptical about numerology -- I'm
> alarmed at generating a response from Anne that's even a little
> defensive!  Her readings of Fletcher are splendid, and convincing, and
> I also take David Wilson-Okamura's point about the numbers mentality
> (counting, counting) likely to have been induced by an education in
> quantitative metrics.  All this makes perfect sense.  And I find the
> studies by Hieatt, Fowler, Rostvig and others illuminating (indeed I
> dip into numbers briefly myself in my work on Psalms).  My concern is
> mainly with the kind of probability tests that Anne uses -- i.e., we
> do need to use them.

<snip>

> Patterns involving calendrical numbers (hours, days, weeks, years,
> etc.) seem especially reasonable to me, especially when, as in Anne's
> example, they can be connected to the sense of the poem.  When we move
> into more arcane numbers, I begin to be more skeptical.  The same
> tests apply, of course, and if the numerological patterns are
> consistent, demonstrable, and enhance the meaning of the poem, they
> seem valuable.  But the more abstract the calculations become, and the
> more they depend on various mystical understandings of numbers (and if
> one yokes together all the ancient number systems, there are a LOT of
> numbers that are significant -- almost any number can be made
> significant somehow), the more rigorously I think we ought to apply
> our tests.

Well, I mean to be broadly skeptical about numerology, which has been a
crackpot science for several millennia in both the ancient Classical
world and the Near East.  There may be some historical utility in
analyzing a literary text that contains numerical patterns that the
author intentionally wove into the poetic pattern, but I doubt there is
any 'value' to the exercise for aesthetic analysis and evaluation.
Having read most of the studies listed above and many more--there's a
handy bibliography of numerology at Bar Ilan University listed
below--and having had some aspects of it forced down my graduate school
throat, I have never found a single case where it enhanced my immediate
or long-term enjoyment of a work.  That judgment, I must add, also
applies mutatis mutandis to Dante.

Let us say that Prof. Hamlin's very sensible tests for an
empirically-verifiable numerical construct in some literary work have
been met.  We can admire the author's cleverness in concealing, or at
least coyly enticing the reader to find, numerological relationships.
    But how does the mere presence of, say, an arithmetic ratio in a
poem provide any more value to our response than the type font or the
paper watermark?  Kazantzakis intentionally cast his "Odusseia" in 33,
333 lines.  They may have had some mystical significance for him, but
they have none that I can see for any serious reader.  Hunting for such
relationships seems about the same as hunting for four-leaf clovers in
a pasture.  For those who maintain that verifiable numerological
constructs have a value, I'd like to see an argument that clarifies
just what that literary value may be.  Number symbolism of the kind
practiced by the Pythagoreans, Plato, Hrosvita of Gandersheim, Nicolas
of Cusa, Spinoza in his ethics more geometrico, Novalis, Kepler and
many another depends on the belief that mathematical laws and the
mathematically-analyzable harmony of nature are both aspects of the
divine mind.  Well, if modern literary numerologists would like to
ground the ultimate value of their practice on the divine mind, I have
nothing to object.  But think of the pedagogical consequences: claiming
a special literary merit for this kind of number symbolism requires the
introduction of a religious belief system into criticism.  Strip away
the mysticism and you strip away the value, if not the existence, of
numerological relationships.  Those who ground number symbolism on the
divine mind should, I suppose, recite to their students and colleagues
the old expression that the mathematical Pythagoreans kept repeating:

arithmwi de te pant' epeoiken ("all things are like number").

Sextus Empiricus subjected mathematical Pythagoreanism to a withering
critique in his "Pros arithmhtikous" (the fourth book of "Pros
mathhmatikous") that still seems to me quite effective.  The
Pythagoreans attributed a special significance to the number ten, which
they called the 'tetraktys' because the first four numbers add up to
ten.  They called it, quoting Sextus, "Phghn t' aenaou phusews
rizdwmat' ekhousan" ( "the fount containing the roots of everlasting
nature").  Sextus proceeds to show the problems inherent in claiming
that the universe and the individual soul are both governed by numbers.
  I am not, let me hasten to add, advocating a radical skepticism
against number mysticism, only trying to draw out what seem to me the
unexamined consequences for aesthetic criticism.

I am also dubious about Prof. Wilson-Okamura's remark that a numbers
mentality would have been induced by quantitative metrics.  Classical
poets learned meters as whole structures and did not have to count,
which would have made no sense anyway with the triadic structures of
Pindar, Aeolic meters and stanza forms, dactylo-epitrite meters or
virtually any other metrical unit.  I suspect he had the dactylic
hexameter in mind, where one could I suppose count off a sequence of
six dactyls and spondees.  But the Greek dactylic hexameter was not a
linear sequence of feet (much as that may be taught in school).  The
verse really consists of two cola divided by a medial caesura: the
colon - u u - u u - (occurring independently as the hemiepes, usually
symbolized by D in Greek metrics) is the structural unit.  As M. L.
West points out in _Greek Metre_, the hexameter is essentially D u | u
D - ||, where the two short syllables on either side of the caesura
could be replaced by one long syllable.  The Latin hexameter was
probably learned and conceived in the same way, since its practitioners
all knew Greek.  Greek and Roman poets thought and felt rhythm in terms
of cola, not in terms of feet.  Counting played no role in composition,
though it may in the much narrower accentual-syllabic meters of
English.  Much as I love English, it suffers from a poverty of metrical
as opposed to free verse resources.

Here is the short bibliography of numerology I mentioned above:

(http://faculty.biu.ac.il/~barilm/bibnumer.htm)