Otiose Interpositions

A very annoying poetic mannerism

A sentence from Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger (1903):

Und diese Beschäftigung bereitete ihm eine ganz ähnliche Genugtuung, wie wenn er mit seiner Geige (denn er spielte die Geige) in seinem Zimmer umherging und die Töne, so weich, wie er sie nur hervorzubringen vermochte, in das Plätschern des Springstrahles hinein erklingen ließ, der drunten im Garten unter den Zweigen des alten Walnußbaumes tänzelnd emporstieg…

And this activity gave him a satisfaction quite similar to when he paced around his room with his violin (for he played the violin) and the notes, as soft as he could bring them forth, mingled with the plashing of the fountain’s up-leaping jet in the garden below, under the branches of the old walnut tree…

This is elegant to a fault, and the fault is the little parenthesis: “for he played the violin”. We get an explanation of a statement that consists in a repetition of the same statement. You might as well say: “He looked around with his brown eyes (for he had brown eyes)” or “She came in from the rain (it was raining)”. To me this has the strange impression of being metrical filler: as if Thomas Mann, at a loss how to finish a line, came up with something inane but pretty so that he could move on to the next one.

So it’s no surprise that this kind of mannerism has its home in Latin poetry. Here are some examples:

1. Virgil Aeneid 6.405–7:

“Si te nulla movet tantae pietatis imago
at ramum hunc” (aperit ramum, qui veste latebat)
agnoscas.”

“If you are unmoved by the sight of such piety, at least this branch”—she drew out the branch hidden in her clothing—“you will recognize.”

2. Aeneid 12.206–7:

ut sceptrum hoc—dextra sceptrum nam forte gerebat—
numquam fronde levi fundet virgulta neque umbram…

“Just as this staff”—for he chanced to have a staff in his hand—“will never put forth foliage of delicate leaves or shade…”

3. Ovid Ars amatoria 2.131–2:

Ille levi virga (virgam nam forte tenebat)
Quod rogat, in spisso litore pingit opus.

[Odysseus] drew the scene desired by [Calypso] in the dense sand with a thin rod (for he chanced to be holding a rod).

4. Ovid Metamorphoses 6.358–9:

hi quoque vos moveant, qui nostro bracchia tendunt
parva sinu—et casu tendebant bracchia nati.

Be moved too by those who stretch forth their little hands in my lap (and by chance her children stretched forth their hands.)

5. Ovid Heroides 16, Paris to Helen 253–4:

dum stupeo visis—nam pocula forte tenebam—
tortilis a digitis excidit ansa meis.¹

While I gaped at the sight (for I chanced to be holding a cup)
The twisted handle slipped from my fingers.

In the Saturnalia of Macrobius, the grammarian Servius includes this literary device in his catalogue of techniques which were “either invented by [Virgil] himself, and not adopted from older writers.’ Of the examples 1 and 2 above, he says (6.6.13) Nec interpositiones eius otiosae sunt: ‘nor are his insertions pointless.’ But I have to object. It is not only pointless but perverse to write like lines like this! And worst of all: what Virgil seems to have done from necessity, Ovid seems to have done for pleasure, fully aware how annoying it was. There is no choice but to admire such masterful trolling. Seneca the Elder was right to say of him (Controversiae 2.12) that ‘this genius of a man did not lack the judgement to rein his poems in, but only the will.’²

1. I think something might be up here with the text. Why is pocula in the plural? Why is an explanation with “nam” given before any mention of a cup?

2. ‘Ex quo adparet summi ingenii viro non iudicium defuisse ad compescendam licentiam carminum suorum sed animum.’