0.1 Afterword  (Page 21/25)

who were your lovers? who were they who wrestled foryou in the dust?

which was the vessel of your lust? what leman hadyou, every day?

did giant lizards come and crouch before you on thereedy banks?

did gryphons with great metal flanks leap on you inyour trampled couch?

did monstrous hippopotami come sidling toward you inthe mist?

did gilt-scaled dragons writhe and twist withpassion as you passed them by ?

.... or did you love the god of flies who plagued thehebrew and was splashed

with wine unto the waist ? or pasht, who had greenberyls for her eyes?

or that young god, the tyrian, who was more amorousthan the dove

of ashtaroth? or did you love the god of theassyrian...

These questions are a virtual index of nineteenth- century Orientalist mythology. Yet here they only point up the " songless tongueless " condition of the sphinx and draw our attention to the massive ironythat, for all the breadth of the Orientalist pseudo-knowledge employed by the speaker, the sphinx finally remains as silent and unknown as at the beginning.The monologue’s speaker proceeds on the assumption that if he employs the right hermeneutic, the sphinx will finally yield its truth. Like the practical critiche is, he assumes that the sphinx contains its own meanings and can be glossed (both in the sense of having its truth revealed by way of attached commentary, and in the more medieval sense of glozed or "peered into"). But these assumptions only lead to his intellectual and psychological breakdown(" get hence, you loathsome mystery!.../ you make my creed a barren sham, you wake fouldreams of sensual life "); the excesses of Orientalist myth, projected onto thesphinx as " poisonous melodies, " are finally no match for the " steadfast gaze " and " sullen ways " of the object he faces. So the sphinx remains as much a" loathsome mystery " at the poem's end, at which point superstition has usurpedthe speaker’s will to knowledge, as it was at the beginning.

At this level, the poem can be read as about archaeological knowledge itself, at least as put to use within a late-VictorianOrientalist context. The sphinx then represents the absolute object faced by the archaeologist (the "relic"), ultimately indifferent to the scholar’s naiveattempts to appropriate it to a mythologically inflected historicism. The breakdown faced by the poem's speaker, according to this account, represents thecollapse faced by Orientalist knowledge itself, and it must have been one with which many nineteenth-century Egyptologists and Orientalists werefamiliar.

But as Henley’s review of the poem demonstrates, the processes of reading also frequently break down when readers of The Sphinx misconstrue the striking format of the 1894 book. And just as the speaker’s imagined resuscitation of the sphinxinvolves a willful blindness to its somnolence or “ statuesque ” objectivity, a certain deafness to its unyielding silence, so reading the poem involves acertain blindness to the material and visual “distractions” offered by the book’s illustrations, decorations, type-design and paper. For these featuresdeclare their parity or integrity with the poem itself, at every turn of the page, without ever threatening to overwhelm it. They embody what Jerome McGannwould call the poem’s “textual condition.” When we take these features into account, the book enacts an archaeological problematic very similar to the one played out at the poem’s semantic level. Just as the silent curio in the dimcorner of the speaker’s room points up all the more sharply the “excess” implicit in his mythic constructions of it, so the book’s decorations short-circuit the customary processes of reading, making self-conscious our desire to consume or to interpret the poem, as if the poem were somehow conscious of thehistorical problem posed by the event of its own reading. In this sense, The Sphinx constructs itself as a relic even as its archaeological “referent” recedes from view.