'Misprisons': Inspired misreadings, creative mistakes

Not long ago, wandering around the vast Englishtown flea market, I effected a misprision. In the old days, before I got hip to modern critical theory, I would have said simply that I made a mistake, but I now see that misprisions are much to be preferred to vulgar mistakes. A misprision appears to be a particularly creative kind of mistake, not infrequently tenurable, an inspired "misreading" through which brilliant error redeems the inferior dullness of mere creative genius.

At the end of Herman Melville's White-Jacket there is a terrifying description, told in the first person, of a seaman's fall of a hundred feet from a yardarm into the night sea. As his body sinks deeper and deeper into the inky Deep he imagines that he must already be dead, until he is shocked into the realization that he is still alive by feeling his body brush up against some unidentifiable submarine object, "some fashionless form, some inert coiled fish of the sea."

You might think that that is pretty good writing, but it still leaves plenty of room for ameliorating blunder. A famous professor of American literature happened to pick up an edition of White-Jacket in which an inattentive compositor had set soiled instead of coiled — "some inert soiled fish of the sea" — allowing our English professor to write rapturously that hardly anyone but Melville could have created the shudder that results from calling this frightening vagueness some 'soiled fish of the sea.' The discordia concors, the unexpected linking of the medium of cleanliness with filth, could only have sprung from an imagination that had apprehended the terrors of the deep, of the immaterial deep as well as the physical.

That is a well-known bit of bibliographical trivia. What is less well known is that this whole textual can of worms, or in this case fish, grows out of a brilliantly mistaken reading of the famous suicide soliloquy by the world-weary hero in the first act of Hamlet: O that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd His canon 'gainst self-slaughter.

That's what is says in the folio; the reading of the second quarto, which you really ought to know, is "this too too sallied flesh" — i.e. salad (youthful, as in "salad days") flesh or possibly sullied or soiled (made unclean by the depraved self-abuse rampant among the youthful Danish aristocracy) flesh. But that is neither here nor there, neither fish nor foul papers. What is relevant is the fact that Melville, a notorious dyslexic, brilliantly misconstrued this passage when he wrote of his nearly drowned sailor. The parallels of situation between the agitated Yankee sailor and the depressed Scandinavian princeling (two youthful, accident-prone drifters contemplate annihilation in a liquid medium) are too obvious to ignore or to dismiss as mere coincidence. What poor Melville saw in his mind's eye as he read the page of Hamlet before him was of course not "solid flesh" but "soiled fish." Solid flesh is after all rather banal; soiled fish on the other hand is brilliantly imaginative. He tried to disguise the subconscious plagiarism by changing a single letter in the word "soiled" only to be unmasked a century later by the equally brilliant misprision of a professor of American literature.

My own misprision at Englishtown Market was much lower down the intellectual food chain. There I saw, and snapped up for a buck, a VHS video of what I thought was an English language version of a fairly recent Italian film I have never seen but have heard much praised, La vita e bella by Roberto Benigni. I thought this because it was in a do-it-yourself box marked "Beautiful Life." One buck! What a deal. This film had been described to me by someone whose judgment I trust as dealing in postmodern fashion with "the lighter side of the Holocaust," a critical description that intrigues but hardly beckons; and I had to work myself into the right frame of mind before I could put it into my machine.

It takes a certain mental preparation knowingly to watch a film about "the lighter side of the Holocaust." But I steeled myself with appropriate spiritual exercises, sat down, and began watching. What came up on the screen to jaunty music was the work of an Italian director all right, but his name was not Benigni, but Capra. Various time-warped Anglo-Saxon Americans were cavorting around a snowy New England village from a Norman Rockwell calendar. The chief cavorter was quite clearly a teen-aged Jimmy Stewart. We say that seeing is believing, but it actually works the other way around. That what most of us see in the world merely confirms what we already believe about it is daily demonstrated by the political views on this editorial page. It took a full half hour of this film before I would concede that it was actually set, as it pretended, in someplace called Bedford Falls and not in Buchenwald. Entirely without knowing it in a brilliant misprision I had bought a copy of not of Life Is Beautiful (1997) but of It's A Wonderful Life (1946), starring Saint James Stewart '32. By accident I had repaired a glaring lacuna in my collection of basic Princetoniana. It was Jimmy's own favorite movie. Also Frank Capra's, even though the actual if unacknowledged director was another famous Italian-American, Felix Culpa. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.