E.L. Doctorow's recent essay on Faulkner's As I Lay Dying has set me to thinking about the two big American writers of the modern period: Faulkner and Hemingway. Doctorow begins his essay, which appeared in the New York Review of Books, with a brief and inconclusive comparison of the two rivals. Though Faulkner and Hemingway are opposites in so many ways, I've always seen them as going together: the two sides of the coin that, together, mark the currency of the American literary culture of the first half of the twentieth century.
Hemingway, of course, took the global view, his settings ranging from Michigan and Montana to Europe and Africa, but his characters almost inevitably assess the role that the American individual plays in these places. Faulkner, by contrast, famously and deliberately limited his range, with a few odd exceptions, to the borders of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, his own "native postage stamp of soil." Whereas Hemingway's protagonists, with the partial exception, perhaps, of the old man Santiago, seem like circumstantially distinct iterations of the same principle of identity (each an alternate version of Nick Adams, himself an alternate version of the writer himself), Faulkner's novels are so variously plotted that they often lack a single protagonist, and the characters are diverse and far-reaching, though most always Southerners: various Snopeses, Bundrens, Compsons, among many others, including both masculine and feminine, both black and white (and the potentially black and white Joe Christmas). That Faulkner dared to write seventy-some odd pages from the perspective of a mentally retarded narrator says much about the distinctive plurality of Faulkner's narrative vision.
Each writer was a great stylist, each a purveyor of his own particular and peculiar idiom, often imitated (and parodied) but never successfully copied. Both started from the same place: late 19th-/early 20th-century American realism: Mark Twain and Sherwood Anderson, among others, with their emphasis on regional life, on vernacular, on stories that seek to capture realities of the human experience. Hemingway would take this realist approach (more in the mode of Anderson than of Twain) through a brief tour of the Michigan peninsula before steaming off to Europe, to the wars that defined the time. Hemingway would make the terse prose of realism more terse, testing the boundaries of a certain kind of experimental minimalism, excluding everything that could be excluded to create a prose style that is eminently distinctive, that always keeps its reader thinking and guessing, looking over the text to find out who is speaking, to find out what has happened, to find out what it means. The result is that we pay attention to Hemingway's words. Joan Didion's 1998 essay in the New Yorker, marking (and, in Didion's own gradual and skillful way, condemning) the publication of the posthumous "Hemingway" novel True at First Light, will always seem to me the defining assessment of Hemingway's prose style, of his eminent skill as a crafstman (that is, to those who still believe there is something to be gained from literature, as an artist). Didion defines two kinds of writers, or perhaps two kinds of people: those who care about words and those who don't. She sets (again in a subtle and skillful way) Hemingway very significantly among those who do. That Hemingway's prose style seems to us less novel, less experimental, less adventurous to us than Faulkner's does is to some extent a sign of the tremendous influence Hemingway has had on the craft of prose writing -- both in fiction and in nonfiction. We are writing and reading everywhere, whether we like it or not, in the shadow of this giant. In the end, I assume that Hemingway's style required more labor than Faulkner's. The process of trimming, of scrutinizing each word and assessing its necessity, its relationaship to every other word in the text, must have been part of what drove the author literally to the point of ill mental health.
Faulkner took the realist approach (varying between the modes of Twain and Anderson, though it is Melville who rings in most clearly in Faulkner's prose stylings) in the opposite direction: he made it more real by making it more strange(1). Whereas Hemingway cut things, Faulkner added them. Faulkner magnified the focus on place till he had honed in with cartographical precision on one particular and discrete place, and then he examined every character, every situation, every detail, from every possible angle (and from a few impossible angles, as well) until the reader gains a kind of fly's eye perspective on things: several images coming together not in stereoscopic clarity but in juxtaposition to each other, in collage. This approach is most evident in The Sound and the Fury, with its four different narrators, and in As I Lay Dying, with so many narrators I had to take the book from the shelf and count them out before I'd venture to offer a number (which is fifteen, it turns out).
Hemingway looked for the one way to say something; Faulkner looked for the many ways to say something, but he typically chose the most complex and convoluted approach to saying it. That Faulkner used big multisyllabic words and a more Latinate diction, that he played so relentlessly with perspectives, does not necessarily make his work more difficult or more experimental(2). Try teaching The Sun Also Rises or "Hills Like White Elephants" to a group of high school students, and you'll know what I mean. Certain key elements in Hemingway do not emerge as self-evident. Not that Faulkner is by any means easier than his reputation purports him to be -- it's just that Hemingway is not as easy as his reputation purports him to be.
It is quite clear that Faulkner cared about words as well, but with a difference: Faulkner unmistakeably loved words, so much so that one suspects that in any particular work he would have used them all if he could have, some of them more than once. Thus Hemingway emerges from the journalistic tradition, which has for its foundation the strict necessity of words in the conveyance of information, while Faulkner emerges from the poetic tradition, which has for its foundation the aesthetic potential of words. This is not say that Hemingway could not be poetical or that (once you dig through the layers of narrative detail) Faulkner could not be a journalistic presenter of story, but this difference captures the essential trajectory of each writer. Faulkner's prose is magisterial but heavily freighted; Hemingway's, by contrast, is always in a low, even register, so light that it sometimes seems to blow away before you've fully felt it.
Finally, both men do, in a way, bring their individual concerns and preoccupations to bear in their work. Hemingway does so in a blunt and well-celebrated and equally well-derided way: most of his stories and novels are about parallel-universe iterations of the life he lived. All of Hemingway's personal neuroses are on display in rather blunt fashion in his work(3). Hemingway's obsession with the stereotypically masculine behavior of his times is probably what made him so popular in the man's world the living man inhabited, but which threatens to derail his legacy completely in our times, alienating a contemporary audience comprising individuals who have either moved past all that dated he-man stuff or have traded in the machismo of the author's time for a more contemporary brand of the same thing. Hemingway's sexism -- his shallow, innaccurate, incomplete, or just plain odd portrayal of women characters in his stories and novels -- has succeeded in alienating (Didion notwithstanding) a sizeable chunk of the human population. For his ideas, Hemingway might just not seem very relevant anymore. We don't see the giant anymore -- we can't; we only see his shadow. What we have to do with that shadow, though, is to extrapolate back to the giant himself, to see what he meant in his time and place.
What are Faulkner's neuroses? Perhaps they are more typical, less the result of ingrained psychological wounds than they are the result of the situations of the man's life: poor success in pursuing his romantic ambitions (followed up by a qualified success in the second act, when he eventually succeeded in his courtship of Estelle Oldham, the married woman he had pursued for over a decade), struggles with money, alcoholism(4). Faulkner also struggled to define his place in the world, wanting initially to live the kind of life Hemingway lived -- a life abroad -- instead of what he ultimately embraced: a kind of panoramic and self-aware provincialism. Faulkner relentlessly explores the issue of what the South means. His body of work might be seen even as a set of theories on the meaning of the American South.
All of this leaves us with the question of which writer is more relevant to the literary present, to the literary future. Again, we have two sides of one coin. You cannot understand the culture of American literary modernism without reading -- and reading deeply -- both authors. Hemingway may give us an outmoded way of seeing the world, but it was still a profoundly influential way of seeing the world. Thus Hemingway is no longer modern as we are modern --just as Shakespeare and Dickens are no longer modern. In the time, just over half a century, since his death, the world has inevitably changed. We see, on the surface, a Hemingway no longer relevant, but underneath a Hemingway who is no less fascinating, or perhaps more so because now we can see him for what he truly was, one who struggled with a sense of uncertainty, who felt always the need to prove himself, who embodied certain experiences of the era in which he lived. Maybe we don't merely see the shadow, after all. I think that we may, in fact, be able to understand Hemingway from a privileged perspective now, one that people in his own time could not. In Faulkner, we have a figure more in tune with the great overarching 20th century concerns of American society: race, class, and gender. We look through a window, a window of a singular gothic house rising out the swamp, and a scene bespeaking these concerns unfolds. Thus, again, we have the drama of the individual and the social drama. Both are part of the American psychology, and you can't understand one without the other.
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(1) Consider what music critic Greil Marcus had to say about traditional American folk music: that it was evidence of "the old, weird America." Along these lines, Hemingway might be said to explore the psychology of the individual -- an individual whose consciousness is inevitably modeled after his own -- whereas Faulkner plumbs the collective consciousness of American identity. What Faulkner finds is a truer, weirder America than any of us suspected was there.
(2) By calling both writers "experimental," I mean essentially that they were great stylists, great self-editors who considered the varying potentials of different vocabularies, different syntactical structures, different architectonics. To a lesser or greater extent, all writers do this, but rarely in so deliberately and self-consciously a way as Hemingway and Faulker did.
(3) Perhaps not all. As the man grew older, his work could not keep pace with the number and intensity of his problems.
(4) Faulkner certainly shared alcoholism in common with his literary nemesis, but with this crucial difference: Hemingway's work always revolves around the drinking habits of his characters, whereas Faulkner's does occasionally. I wonder, though, the extent to which alcohol truly contributed to Hemingway's troubled life story. Once you get past the prominent role the props of alcoholic behavior play in the fiction, other problems dominate the scene. Alcoholism may have been more a symptom of disease than the disease itself. By contrast, alcohol played a very direct role in Faulkner's demise: he is reported to have been plastered drunk during the riding incident that resulted in his death. In terms of money, Hemingway never seemed to be at much of a lack of it, and neither did most of his "code heroes." The typical Hemingway protagonist seems never to be worried about money: he can always get more from a grandfather somewhere who will send him sight drafts. Faulkner always seemed to be in need of money, by contrast, and many of his characters who have it know only how to lose it.
Sunday, May 6, 2012
Monday, March 26, 2012
'Tis Pity She's a Whore
Initially, the primary appeal (to its original 17th century audience as well as to our own) of John Ford's Tis Pity She's a Whore is the shock value of it. Once this appeal is satisfied, however, the play does still have more to offer.
At the start of the play, Giovanni, our protagonist, confesses his intense love for his own sister to the Friar, his tutor and mentor. What is striking about Giovanni's character at first is his sensitivity. We feel certain of the genuine nature of his feelings, the earnestness of his appeals to the Friar. Giovanni believes in the truth of his own arguments, which are based on a principle not unlike the primary one of the Metaphysical poets: the idea that earthly love is the closest we can come to knowing heavenly love, and therefore the closest we can come to knowing God. Giovanni is not a deliberate blasphemer. His love for his sister, so his argument goes, adds the familial love of brother and sister to the romantic love of intense passion, thus taking the degree of feeling to an unprecendented height. The Friar can only respond that incest is wrong because God abhors it and by saying that Giovanni will surely be damned for his sins. It's the equivalent of a parent telling a child because I said so as sole answer to the question why. Such reasoning often stops the child: an authority figure is an authority figure, after all, and the threat of punishment remains a powerful sway. Not for Giovanni, though, whose passion represents the kind of intense depth of feeling that Renaissance dramatists sought to instill in their characters.
At the same time that we develop a sympathy for Giovanni, we have to question the legitimacy of his enterprise, knowing as we do that ill fates are certain to befall both him and and his sister, whose feelings are equal to (or almost equal to?) Giovanni's own. By drawing us toward an incestuous pair of lovers, whose power to evoke sympathy is rivalled only by their power to evoke horror and disgust, Ford brilliantly leads us in to an examination of the incest taboo, one of the most universally shared taboos in all of human history (and in prehistory, no doubt). Without going into the discussion here, let us say that it is impossible to read (or, I imagine, to witness) this play without going over the arguments in your own head. What Ford gives us is the awful -- the truly grisly -- fate of his characters as admonition against breaking the taboo. This is what happens to you, he seems to be saying, if you engage in this sort of behavior. So the shock value of the play eventually gives way to a very conventional take on morality. That's certainly the only way to get it past the censors, but I also doubt that Ford ever had any intentions of truly questioning the universal moral sensitivities of civilized cultures. With Renaissance dramatists, I generally assume that their primary motivation in writing a particular play is to bring as many bodies into the theatre as they possibly can. They do that by offering lyrical insights into characters whose depths of feeling transcend everyday experience, transcend mere morality.
Though 'Tis Pity offers few speeches of great grace or depth, Giovanni does present to us a compelling and dynamic character. By the end of the play, we have born witness to a sense of moral ruination so complete that we can only agree with Brian Morris (editor of the New Mermaids edition of the text) that Giovanni has become a full-bore psychopath as a result of the alienation engendered by his actions. Passion gives way to insanity, and we lose our sympathy for Giovanni. Thus Giovanni comes closer, in the end, to Tamburlane or Macbeth than he does to Romeo. Perhaps this is the cost of his particular crime: for Annabella, the cost is her life, for Giovanni, his sanity and his moral bearing. 'Tis Pity does not attain the sophistication of Shakespearean language, but it does boast a complexity of character and theme. The action of the play is straightforward and brisk. It's hard to believe that Ford could get away with this sort of thing in the 17th century, so near to the inaugural of the Puritan interregnum, but maybe this play is exactly why the Puritans shut the theatres down. In any case, the moral message ends up being a pat one, after all. This is not the kind of behavior you should be engaging in if you want to lead a fruitful or a happy life.
At the start of the play, Giovanni, our protagonist, confesses his intense love for his own sister to the Friar, his tutor and mentor. What is striking about Giovanni's character at first is his sensitivity. We feel certain of the genuine nature of his feelings, the earnestness of his appeals to the Friar. Giovanni believes in the truth of his own arguments, which are based on a principle not unlike the primary one of the Metaphysical poets: the idea that earthly love is the closest we can come to knowing heavenly love, and therefore the closest we can come to knowing God. Giovanni is not a deliberate blasphemer. His love for his sister, so his argument goes, adds the familial love of brother and sister to the romantic love of intense passion, thus taking the degree of feeling to an unprecendented height. The Friar can only respond that incest is wrong because God abhors it and by saying that Giovanni will surely be damned for his sins. It's the equivalent of a parent telling a child because I said so as sole answer to the question why. Such reasoning often stops the child: an authority figure is an authority figure, after all, and the threat of punishment remains a powerful sway. Not for Giovanni, though, whose passion represents the kind of intense depth of feeling that Renaissance dramatists sought to instill in their characters.
At the same time that we develop a sympathy for Giovanni, we have to question the legitimacy of his enterprise, knowing as we do that ill fates are certain to befall both him and and his sister, whose feelings are equal to (or almost equal to?) Giovanni's own. By drawing us toward an incestuous pair of lovers, whose power to evoke sympathy is rivalled only by their power to evoke horror and disgust, Ford brilliantly leads us in to an examination of the incest taboo, one of the most universally shared taboos in all of human history (and in prehistory, no doubt). Without going into the discussion here, let us say that it is impossible to read (or, I imagine, to witness) this play without going over the arguments in your own head. What Ford gives us is the awful -- the truly grisly -- fate of his characters as admonition against breaking the taboo. This is what happens to you, he seems to be saying, if you engage in this sort of behavior. So the shock value of the play eventually gives way to a very conventional take on morality. That's certainly the only way to get it past the censors, but I also doubt that Ford ever had any intentions of truly questioning the universal moral sensitivities of civilized cultures. With Renaissance dramatists, I generally assume that their primary motivation in writing a particular play is to bring as many bodies into the theatre as they possibly can. They do that by offering lyrical insights into characters whose depths of feeling transcend everyday experience, transcend mere morality.
Though 'Tis Pity offers few speeches of great grace or depth, Giovanni does present to us a compelling and dynamic character. By the end of the play, we have born witness to a sense of moral ruination so complete that we can only agree with Brian Morris (editor of the New Mermaids edition of the text) that Giovanni has become a full-bore psychopath as a result of the alienation engendered by his actions. Passion gives way to insanity, and we lose our sympathy for Giovanni. Thus Giovanni comes closer, in the end, to Tamburlane or Macbeth than he does to Romeo. Perhaps this is the cost of his particular crime: for Annabella, the cost is her life, for Giovanni, his sanity and his moral bearing. 'Tis Pity does not attain the sophistication of Shakespearean language, but it does boast a complexity of character and theme. The action of the play is straightforward and brisk. It's hard to believe that Ford could get away with this sort of thing in the 17th century, so near to the inaugural of the Puritan interregnum, but maybe this play is exactly why the Puritans shut the theatres down. In any case, the moral message ends up being a pat one, after all. This is not the kind of behavior you should be engaging in if you want to lead a fruitful or a happy life.
Shakespeare's Coriolanus
In ways, Coriolanus is an underrated tragedy. It's easy to see, however, why it's not so famous as some of the others in the Shakespearean canon.
What Coriolanus lacks, as critics have noted, is the interiority of Shakespeare's most famous works. In the later years of his career, Shakespeare made at least a partial movement away from the innovations that he pioneered in his earlier plays, which culminated in the intense interiority of Hamlet. Late plays such as The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline shy away from a developed sense of interiority, but others such as The Tempest at least partly embrace it in a way more in keeping with the old (new) fashion. After reading Coriolanus, what really strikes me about Shakespeare is that he must have been interested in exploring different ways of revolutioning our understanding of depth of character; he offers us unprecedented insights into the internal lives of his characters not only through soliloquies and other revealing speech acts but through other experimental methods as well. He looked at character from every angle, and indeed some plays, including both Hamlet and Coriolanus, can almost seem like exercises in methods of character development. In Coriolanus, Shakespeare develops his hero's character by examination of act and externally-directed gesture. Coriolanus gives us another way of demonstrating character, the opposite of the method Hamlet uses. Coriolanus' character is developed precisely by his not speaking.
For this to work, Shakespeare has to make it clear that he is giving us another kind of character completely. The title character simply does not possess an internal life that is not represented clearly and accurately by his words and deeds. Coriolanus' most defining trait, outside of his absolute superiority as soldier and general, is his absolute forthrightness in word and attitude. He may be capable of irony -- particularly sarcasm, directed to the plebeians and their tribunes -- but he is incapable of dishonesty, of dissembling. What good would a soliloquy do for such a man? Nothing he could say in private to himself would tell us any more about him than what he says in public does. There's nothing he feels that he doesn't say before all. If Coriolanus were a novel, it would have to be in a very detached third person.
Coriolanus stands out among Shakespeare's Romans -- he's no Brutus, with his deep internal agonies, and not a Mark Antony, either, with his many brooding contradictions or slippery sense of character. It's not until the very end that Coriolanus ever feels a conflicted sense of duty. Before that, when exiled from Rome by the tribunes and their followers, he simply joins the side of Rome's enemies. It's less a matter of revenge and more a sensible career move: he's a soldier, and he needs to find work. Today, we think little of the ousted C.E.O. who moves on to head another company, or of the professional athlete who moves from one city's team to another's. Coriolanus doesn't agonize over the decision or the act. He just does what it is in his nature to do. If he can't fight for the Romans, he will simply have to fight for their enemies.
Coriolanus also stands out among Shakespeare's warriors -- he's no Macbeth or Othello, either, with their respective internal agonies. Unlike Macbeth, Coriolanus is incorruptible; his strict and militaristic sense of duty prevails without question. Unlike Othello, Coriolanus does not allow himself emotional luxuries like love. The one emotion he feels is anger, but even then his anger seems a very distant second to his stoical observeance of his sense of duty. When he does allow something else to enter in -- his feelings of pity for his mother, who to this point proves as warlike in her attitude as her son is in his deed -- it enters in swiftly, like a dagger. What affects Coriolanus is at least in part the fact that his mother bowing before him (instead of his bowing to her) violates his sense of order, his sense of right as it is supposed to be practiced. "The gods look down, at this unnatural scene / They laugh at." Before his mother kneels to Coriolanus, not even the thought of his wife and child's destruction can move him. To see his warlike mother cowed, however, unmans the warrior.
Coriolanus does possess a fascinating sense of character, one that we associate archetypally with the soldier. Coriolanus is the most ancient of Shakespeare's Romans, but his portrait also seems eerily like that of the soldier of today.
What Coriolanus lacks, as critics have noted, is the interiority of Shakespeare's most famous works. In the later years of his career, Shakespeare made at least a partial movement away from the innovations that he pioneered in his earlier plays, which culminated in the intense interiority of Hamlet. Late plays such as The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline shy away from a developed sense of interiority, but others such as The Tempest at least partly embrace it in a way more in keeping with the old (new) fashion. After reading Coriolanus, what really strikes me about Shakespeare is that he must have been interested in exploring different ways of revolutioning our understanding of depth of character; he offers us unprecedented insights into the internal lives of his characters not only through soliloquies and other revealing speech acts but through other experimental methods as well. He looked at character from every angle, and indeed some plays, including both Hamlet and Coriolanus, can almost seem like exercises in methods of character development. In Coriolanus, Shakespeare develops his hero's character by examination of act and externally-directed gesture. Coriolanus gives us another way of demonstrating character, the opposite of the method Hamlet uses. Coriolanus' character is developed precisely by his not speaking.
For this to work, Shakespeare has to make it clear that he is giving us another kind of character completely. The title character simply does not possess an internal life that is not represented clearly and accurately by his words and deeds. Coriolanus' most defining trait, outside of his absolute superiority as soldier and general, is his absolute forthrightness in word and attitude. He may be capable of irony -- particularly sarcasm, directed to the plebeians and their tribunes -- but he is incapable of dishonesty, of dissembling. What good would a soliloquy do for such a man? Nothing he could say in private to himself would tell us any more about him than what he says in public does. There's nothing he feels that he doesn't say before all. If Coriolanus were a novel, it would have to be in a very detached third person.
Coriolanus stands out among Shakespeare's Romans -- he's no Brutus, with his deep internal agonies, and not a Mark Antony, either, with his many brooding contradictions or slippery sense of character. It's not until the very end that Coriolanus ever feels a conflicted sense of duty. Before that, when exiled from Rome by the tribunes and their followers, he simply joins the side of Rome's enemies. It's less a matter of revenge and more a sensible career move: he's a soldier, and he needs to find work. Today, we think little of the ousted C.E.O. who moves on to head another company, or of the professional athlete who moves from one city's team to another's. Coriolanus doesn't agonize over the decision or the act. He just does what it is in his nature to do. If he can't fight for the Romans, he will simply have to fight for their enemies.
Coriolanus also stands out among Shakespeare's warriors -- he's no Macbeth or Othello, either, with their respective internal agonies. Unlike Macbeth, Coriolanus is incorruptible; his strict and militaristic sense of duty prevails without question. Unlike Othello, Coriolanus does not allow himself emotional luxuries like love. The one emotion he feels is anger, but even then his anger seems a very distant second to his stoical observeance of his sense of duty. When he does allow something else to enter in -- his feelings of pity for his mother, who to this point proves as warlike in her attitude as her son is in his deed -- it enters in swiftly, like a dagger. What affects Coriolanus is at least in part the fact that his mother bowing before him (instead of his bowing to her) violates his sense of order, his sense of right as it is supposed to be practiced. "The gods look down, at this unnatural scene / They laugh at." Before his mother kneels to Coriolanus, not even the thought of his wife and child's destruction can move him. To see his warlike mother cowed, however, unmans the warrior.
Coriolanus does possess a fascinating sense of character, one that we associate archetypally with the soldier. Coriolanus is the most ancient of Shakespeare's Romans, but his portrait also seems eerily like that of the soldier of today.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
The Odyssey Reconsidered
Questions abound regarding the authorship of this most famous of clasical texts. What strikes me most immediately, having just read The Odyssey for the first time in nearly twenty years, is the deliberate artfulness at work in the narrative framework of the story, which seems instinctively to me to be the handiwork of a single visionary poet. "Homer," I would guess, is not just a concept, but a real person who once lived and breathed as you and I do. Whether his name was really Homer and whether he was really blind -- those issues may be uncertain, but they are also more or less irrelevant. What we have here is a fine display of the poetic craft, and poetry is written by a poet.
My own relatively uneducated guess (I haven't read up on this topic) would be that Odysseus' recounting of his travels in Books 9 to 12 -- the most famous stuff, about the Cyclopes and the Sirens and dreadful Scylla and Charybdis -- is lifted pretty straight from the oral tradition. Much of the narrative is clipped and lacking in the rich descriptive detail that characterizes the rest of the poem. It's especially interesting to note that the episode with the Sirens is given a few brief and relatively straightforward stanzas. The destruction of three-fourths of Odysseus' men at the hands of the Laestrygonians occurs in the blink of a poetic eye.
Perhaps, then, the project that Homer engaged himself in was that of constructing an elaborate framework to embellish the meaning of the pre-existing text, which was perhaps an oral and never, to this point, a written text. Another possibility is that someone else added the material in books 9 to 12 after Homer had written the rest, with the goal of making sure that the popular elements of the story left out by the poet made their way into the text. We can never know, but it is certainly true that the style is flattened out greatly in this section of the poem, and there is little of the distinguishing genius of the rest of the story at work here, a lesser expenditure of poetic energy. What is present, however, is archetypal story material with a tremendously enduring appeal. Maybe the events recounted have enough to them to speak for themselves.
Other epics begin in medias res, but The Odyssey takes things a step beyond that by giving us the Telemachiad and then, after Odysseus' return, the lengthy matter of our hero reclaiming his wife and his home. The most powerful literary element of this epic, though, is the constant presence of Agamemnon -- in flashback, or as a ghost -- to remind us of what is at stake for Odysseus. Agamemnon is a richly developed foil for Odysseus, and among the highlights of The Odyssey are Odysseus' encounter with Agamemnon in Hades and the conversation between Agamemnon and the ghosts of the dead suitors in Hades. Agamemnon's tragedy highlights the poignancy of Odysseus' comedy and gives it a greater sense of dimension.
The soldier coming home, we are well aware now, faces challenges of all kinds in readjusting to life at home. Things have changed while the warrior was away. What is moving to me about the story of wily Odysseus is the nature of his quest. Other options -- including immortality -- present themselves to him, but all he wants is to return home, to his family, to his people -- to his birthright, his identity. There's a timeless appeal to this notion, which is at the heart of all adventures.
My own relatively uneducated guess (I haven't read up on this topic) would be that Odysseus' recounting of his travels in Books 9 to 12 -- the most famous stuff, about the Cyclopes and the Sirens and dreadful Scylla and Charybdis -- is lifted pretty straight from the oral tradition. Much of the narrative is clipped and lacking in the rich descriptive detail that characterizes the rest of the poem. It's especially interesting to note that the episode with the Sirens is given a few brief and relatively straightforward stanzas. The destruction of three-fourths of Odysseus' men at the hands of the Laestrygonians occurs in the blink of a poetic eye.
Perhaps, then, the project that Homer engaged himself in was that of constructing an elaborate framework to embellish the meaning of the pre-existing text, which was perhaps an oral and never, to this point, a written text. Another possibility is that someone else added the material in books 9 to 12 after Homer had written the rest, with the goal of making sure that the popular elements of the story left out by the poet made their way into the text. We can never know, but it is certainly true that the style is flattened out greatly in this section of the poem, and there is little of the distinguishing genius of the rest of the story at work here, a lesser expenditure of poetic energy. What is present, however, is archetypal story material with a tremendously enduring appeal. Maybe the events recounted have enough to them to speak for themselves.
Other epics begin in medias res, but The Odyssey takes things a step beyond that by giving us the Telemachiad and then, after Odysseus' return, the lengthy matter of our hero reclaiming his wife and his home. The most powerful literary element of this epic, though, is the constant presence of Agamemnon -- in flashback, or as a ghost -- to remind us of what is at stake for Odysseus. Agamemnon is a richly developed foil for Odysseus, and among the highlights of The Odyssey are Odysseus' encounter with Agamemnon in Hades and the conversation between Agamemnon and the ghosts of the dead suitors in Hades. Agamemnon's tragedy highlights the poignancy of Odysseus' comedy and gives it a greater sense of dimension.
The soldier coming home, we are well aware now, faces challenges of all kinds in readjusting to life at home. Things have changed while the warrior was away. What is moving to me about the story of wily Odysseus is the nature of his quest. Other options -- including immortality -- present themselves to him, but all he wants is to return home, to his family, to his people -- to his birthright, his identity. There's a timeless appeal to this notion, which is at the heart of all adventures.
Friday, January 13, 2012
Shakespeare and Kyd
It's inevitable that anyone who studies Hamlet will eventually encounter the scholarly discussion associating Shakespeare's play with that of one of his predecessors, Thomas Kyd, whose The Spanish Tragedy presents many themes that would work their way into Hamlet. Although I doubt that I am going to shine any new light on the points of comparison between the two plays here, I nonetheless wanted to put down in writing my observations after having read The Spanish Tragedy.
First of all, it's quite certain that Shakespeare would have been very familiar with The Spanish Tragedy. Written in the mid-1580s, the play was one of the most popular of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods. Though many of the thematic elements of the play were popular ones at the time, the precise combination of themes from The Spanish Tragedy that are repeated in Hamlet makes it highly unlikely that mere coincidence is at work here.
Beyond the fact that both plays are revenge tragedies that feature a ghost and a play-within-a-play, the most pronounced point of similarity between the two plays is the suicidal impulses experienced by the tragic avengers of both plays. These suicidal tendencies are the distillation of a deep-seated melancholy that springs from grief. This melancholy disposition represents a transformation of character both for Hieronimo in TST and for Hamlet. Each bore a different persona, a different personality before murder intruded on the father-son relationship. Does this thematic element -- the suicidal urge in response to profound grief -- have its origins somehow in Senecan tragedy? I am not familiar enough with Seneca to be able to say, but it would be worth an investigation. Regardless, both plays treat the suicidal impulse as a natural response to the death of one who is loved so dearly, and both plays present this kind of deep melancholy as an impediment to action -- ironically, an impediment to vengeance.
Hieronimo first presents his death wish in a speech immediately after his son's murder, in Act 2, Scene 5. After a dramatic expression of his desire to cease living, Hieronimo concludes his speech, which is in Latin, by saying:
Let me die with thee; thus would I go into the shadows. But nonetheless I will avoid yielding too quickly to death lest then no vengeance should follow thy death.
(Translation courtesy of the 1951 Croft Classics edition of the play.)
Hamlet inhabits a similar mental state, of course, when we first encounter him. (It's also worth noting the parallels here to Romeo and Juliet and to the Pyramus and Thisbe parody in A Midsummer Night's Dream.) Hamlet's first soliloquy -- "O that this too, too sullied flesh would melt" -- expresses his attitude, which might seem, to a modern audience, to display an unusual and extreme form of grief. Considered as a response to Kyd's play, however, Hamlet's suicidal despair makes more sense.
It is tempting, then, in terms of this theme, to see Hamlet as a case of the anxiety of influence, that influence being limited not to Kyd but perhaps to other revenge tragedies of the time, which employed similar plot points and character features. If we choose to see the play this way, we have to consider that as Shakespeare composed the play he consciously or subconsciously strived to one-up Kyd and other revenge tragedy writers at every step. Shakespeare knew, as he drafted this play, that the story would remind audiences of Hieronimo. Dazed by grief, beset by confusion regarding the nature of his son's murder, Hieronimo delays in his pursuit of revenge. Hamlet's delay, then, must be more pronounced in order to trump Hieronimo's. Hamlet's morbid nature, his suicidal disposition, his antic behavior, all must seem more intense than Hieronimo's for the play to work. Shakespeare could take it for granted that play-going audiences would be familiar with the generic conventions of revenge tragedy. The masterstroke of the revenge tragedy genre is the delay, the period of feigned madness that comes perilously close to the real thing -- and in Hamlet seems to become quite actually the real thing.
In TST, however, Kyd ultimately gives us the perfect avenger in Hieronimo. Hamlet, by contrast, is a reluctant avenger who, it seems, would rather return to his studies in Germany. Vengeance is Hieronimo's only motive, the only thing that holds him upright after his son's death, the only thing that animates his flesh. His delay is initially a practical matter -- he does not know who has killed his son. Next, he suspects but does not know for sure; he is worried he is being tricked. Hieronimo doubts the letter that Bel-Imperia sends to him -- written grotesquely with her own blood -- suspecting it may be entrapment. He seeks to verify the information contained in it just as Hamlet will seek to verify the Ghost's word as genuine. When Hieronimo finally knows with certainty, he has to face the task of seeking vengeance upon some very important members of the royal court, people above his station, just as Hamlet has to venge himself upon his King and uncle. Hieronimo devises his plan; then he follows it out to the very letter. To be sure, Hamlet, by contrast, stumbles somewhat into vengeance in his own Act 5. He is perhaps merely fulfilling the fate that is ordained to him, but there is no pronounced plan at work when Hamlet finally swashbuckles his way to Claudius' death -- and Hamlet's own. Does Hamlet know that the fate of the revenger also entails the avenger's own destruction? (He certainly seems to: "The readiness is all," he claims, and we suspect that he knows he is facing more than mere sport in what awaits.) If so, perhaps it is because he, too, an avid theatregoer, is aware of what happens to Hieronimo.
Hamlet's delay, in the context of Hieronimo's delay, and in the context of the ruination that is the result of Hieronimo's finally revenging the murder, is both more understandable and more curious. Hamlet has to delay because Hieronimo delays, and he has to delay more profoundly. But why else should Hamlet delay? Hamlet doubts the nature of the task, doubts himself, doubts the nature of all that he perceives, and, as I said, would rather resume his studies at the university, where he is learning to be a modern skeptic rather than the medieval prince who would be his father's son. A mere precautionary measure and a matter of mere strategy to Hieronimo become to Hamlet representations of the qualities of his character. He endlessly questions just about everything. Through Shakespeare's pen, this quality in Hamlet gives his character depth, and it generates a sense of ambiguity. It gives us time to see the reluctance in Hamlet's character. (Hamlet's eventual springing into action mode in Act 5, then, makes him, in a Kantian way, all the more the hero because he has, against his nature, summoned up the courage to act.) Hamlet presents to us a very different kind of avenger than the one we have with Hieronimo, whose delay occupies only about a third of TST, while Hamlet's occupies nearly the entirety of the play that bears his name. It may well be that Hamlet's delay is primarily plot-driven: Shakespeare needed a five-act play, and vengeance automatic is not going to supply acts two to four. But still, the result is the same: we are left to make sense of acts two through four. If Shakespeare's strategy here is merely to fill up the acts, he succeeds beyond the measure of his ambition, and the material he creates is so convincing and compelling that we have to treat it as though there were more to it. The relationship between structure and theme is so tight here that it may be impossible to separate the two.
Hieronimo does in fact possess a depth of character, as well, even if it is not so deeply pronounced as Hamlet's. Part of TST's emotional resonance comes from the fact that its hero cannot speak of what he believes to be true, especially not to Lorenzo, the chief villain of the play. Hieronimo says, "My grief no heart, my thoughts no tongue can tell" (Act 3, Scene 2). Hamlet says nearly the same: "But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue" (Act 1, Scene 2). The suffering that each hero bears, audible only to the audience, is a clear point of comparison between the two plays. Furthermore, both characters take on a madness that is partly feigned and partly real. Compare Hieronimo's clever disguise -- "my simplicity may make them think / That ignorantly I will let all slip" (Act 4, Scene 6) -- with Hamlet's -- "As I perchance hereafter shall think meet / To put an antic disposition on" (Act 1, Scene 5). Both heroes must not be themselves in order ultimately to be themselves.
Finally, in comparing these two, we have the fact that both protagonists are playwrights. Hieronimo is a playwright by circumstance. The plan to perform a drama is a mechanism by which he will exact vengeance on his son's killers. Hamlet, by contrast, is a playwright and dramaturge by nature. It just so happens that the play he directs presents the opportunity to catch his father's killer through the study of physiognomy.
In both plays, the suicidal impulse must also extend beyond the tragic heroes. In TST, it reaches Isabella, Hieronimo's wife, who succumbs to her suicidal yearnings late in the play but before revenge is acted out. In Hamlet, it destroys Ophelia, whose "self-slaughter," to borrow, out of context, a term from Hamlet, seems to be both an accident and an event with very clear antecedents. And of course, in both plays the body counts only mount from the points of these deaths onward.
Some further differences that must be noted include the inversion of father-son relationships (in terms of who is to be avenged and who is to seek the vengeance) and the frankly pagan attitude of the Kyd play, which boldly and unequivocally takes place in a universe in which the geography of classical mythology is valid, thus providing a pronounced contrast to the obsession with Christian religious themes that we see in Hamlet. Christian values are frequently cited as reasons for what not to do in Hamlet (reason not to commit suicide, reason not to kill a murderer who is, theoretically, praying, but, oddly enough, not reason to follow the Bible's advice ["Vengeance is mine ... saith the Lord"] and forebear seeking revenge), but we rarely see actions performed on the basis of the core Christian principals of faith, hope, and charity, or any other Christian value, for that matter. Still, the play inhabits a universe in which Christian beliefs provide context.
Would it be fair to say that if there were no Spanish Tragedy there would be no Hamlet? In such cases, it is always impossible to claim much of anything with certainty, but at the very least Hamlet would doubtless have been a very different thing if not for Kyd's play. The Spanish Tragedy does have a certain flair to it -- though melodramatic at times and a bit pedestrian in its language, it is a highly readable play, one that is almost flawlessly strucutred and designed, one that features well-drawn and compelling characters. Shakespeare's play, by contrast, is at times a glorious mess, which is no doubt partly due to the fact that the text was likely never prepared for publication by its author, but also perhaps due to something else at work in Shakespeare -- in all of his works, not just the one in question here. So many things are going at so many different levels. Shakespeare's language is dynamic and, when he wants it to be, sophisticated; with every word and phrase he grasps for something distinctive. But he also creates some scattershot imagery at times, as in the "To be or not to be" soliloquy with that business of "slings and arrows" and other military-style references mixing it up with a "sea of troubles." This kind of mixed metaphor is not an isolated incident in Shakespeare. Yet, all told, the speech is movingly profound, and the play digs more deeply into our consciousness -- and into that of the play's protagonist -- than The Spanish Tragedy ever does. I say this not to diminish the significance of Kyd's work, but to say that all the patter about Shakespeare over the centuries is a legitimately warranted phenomenon. It is hard to pin down exactly what it is about Shakespeare that makes him superior to a Kyd or a Marlowe, but superior he is. Perhaps it is exactly this quality -- that it is hard to get a handle on things in Shakespeare -- that makes him so great. We know that the words are powerful, but we have a hard time figuring out what exactly it is that they mean.
First of all, it's quite certain that Shakespeare would have been very familiar with The Spanish Tragedy. Written in the mid-1580s, the play was one of the most popular of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods. Though many of the thematic elements of the play were popular ones at the time, the precise combination of themes from The Spanish Tragedy that are repeated in Hamlet makes it highly unlikely that mere coincidence is at work here.
Beyond the fact that both plays are revenge tragedies that feature a ghost and a play-within-a-play, the most pronounced point of similarity between the two plays is the suicidal impulses experienced by the tragic avengers of both plays. These suicidal tendencies are the distillation of a deep-seated melancholy that springs from grief. This melancholy disposition represents a transformation of character both for Hieronimo in TST and for Hamlet. Each bore a different persona, a different personality before murder intruded on the father-son relationship. Does this thematic element -- the suicidal urge in response to profound grief -- have its origins somehow in Senecan tragedy? I am not familiar enough with Seneca to be able to say, but it would be worth an investigation. Regardless, both plays treat the suicidal impulse as a natural response to the death of one who is loved so dearly, and both plays present this kind of deep melancholy as an impediment to action -- ironically, an impediment to vengeance.
Hieronimo first presents his death wish in a speech immediately after his son's murder, in Act 2, Scene 5. After a dramatic expression of his desire to cease living, Hieronimo concludes his speech, which is in Latin, by saying:
Let me die with thee; thus would I go into the shadows. But nonetheless I will avoid yielding too quickly to death lest then no vengeance should follow thy death.
(Translation courtesy of the 1951 Croft Classics edition of the play.)
Hamlet inhabits a similar mental state, of course, when we first encounter him. (It's also worth noting the parallels here to Romeo and Juliet and to the Pyramus and Thisbe parody in A Midsummer Night's Dream.) Hamlet's first soliloquy -- "O that this too, too sullied flesh would melt" -- expresses his attitude, which might seem, to a modern audience, to display an unusual and extreme form of grief. Considered as a response to Kyd's play, however, Hamlet's suicidal despair makes more sense.
It is tempting, then, in terms of this theme, to see Hamlet as a case of the anxiety of influence, that influence being limited not to Kyd but perhaps to other revenge tragedies of the time, which employed similar plot points and character features. If we choose to see the play this way, we have to consider that as Shakespeare composed the play he consciously or subconsciously strived to one-up Kyd and other revenge tragedy writers at every step. Shakespeare knew, as he drafted this play, that the story would remind audiences of Hieronimo. Dazed by grief, beset by confusion regarding the nature of his son's murder, Hieronimo delays in his pursuit of revenge. Hamlet's delay, then, must be more pronounced in order to trump Hieronimo's. Hamlet's morbid nature, his suicidal disposition, his antic behavior, all must seem more intense than Hieronimo's for the play to work. Shakespeare could take it for granted that play-going audiences would be familiar with the generic conventions of revenge tragedy. The masterstroke of the revenge tragedy genre is the delay, the period of feigned madness that comes perilously close to the real thing -- and in Hamlet seems to become quite actually the real thing.
In TST, however, Kyd ultimately gives us the perfect avenger in Hieronimo. Hamlet, by contrast, is a reluctant avenger who, it seems, would rather return to his studies in Germany. Vengeance is Hieronimo's only motive, the only thing that holds him upright after his son's death, the only thing that animates his flesh. His delay is initially a practical matter -- he does not know who has killed his son. Next, he suspects but does not know for sure; he is worried he is being tricked. Hieronimo doubts the letter that Bel-Imperia sends to him -- written grotesquely with her own blood -- suspecting it may be entrapment. He seeks to verify the information contained in it just as Hamlet will seek to verify the Ghost's word as genuine. When Hieronimo finally knows with certainty, he has to face the task of seeking vengeance upon some very important members of the royal court, people above his station, just as Hamlet has to venge himself upon his King and uncle. Hieronimo devises his plan; then he follows it out to the very letter. To be sure, Hamlet, by contrast, stumbles somewhat into vengeance in his own Act 5. He is perhaps merely fulfilling the fate that is ordained to him, but there is no pronounced plan at work when Hamlet finally swashbuckles his way to Claudius' death -- and Hamlet's own. Does Hamlet know that the fate of the revenger also entails the avenger's own destruction? (He certainly seems to: "The readiness is all," he claims, and we suspect that he knows he is facing more than mere sport in what awaits.) If so, perhaps it is because he, too, an avid theatregoer, is aware of what happens to Hieronimo.
Hamlet's delay, in the context of Hieronimo's delay, and in the context of the ruination that is the result of Hieronimo's finally revenging the murder, is both more understandable and more curious. Hamlet has to delay because Hieronimo delays, and he has to delay more profoundly. But why else should Hamlet delay? Hamlet doubts the nature of the task, doubts himself, doubts the nature of all that he perceives, and, as I said, would rather resume his studies at the university, where he is learning to be a modern skeptic rather than the medieval prince who would be his father's son. A mere precautionary measure and a matter of mere strategy to Hieronimo become to Hamlet representations of the qualities of his character. He endlessly questions just about everything. Through Shakespeare's pen, this quality in Hamlet gives his character depth, and it generates a sense of ambiguity. It gives us time to see the reluctance in Hamlet's character. (Hamlet's eventual springing into action mode in Act 5, then, makes him, in a Kantian way, all the more the hero because he has, against his nature, summoned up the courage to act.) Hamlet presents to us a very different kind of avenger than the one we have with Hieronimo, whose delay occupies only about a third of TST, while Hamlet's occupies nearly the entirety of the play that bears his name. It may well be that Hamlet's delay is primarily plot-driven: Shakespeare needed a five-act play, and vengeance automatic is not going to supply acts two to four. But still, the result is the same: we are left to make sense of acts two through four. If Shakespeare's strategy here is merely to fill up the acts, he succeeds beyond the measure of his ambition, and the material he creates is so convincing and compelling that we have to treat it as though there were more to it. The relationship between structure and theme is so tight here that it may be impossible to separate the two.
Hieronimo does in fact possess a depth of character, as well, even if it is not so deeply pronounced as Hamlet's. Part of TST's emotional resonance comes from the fact that its hero cannot speak of what he believes to be true, especially not to Lorenzo, the chief villain of the play. Hieronimo says, "My grief no heart, my thoughts no tongue can tell" (Act 3, Scene 2). Hamlet says nearly the same: "But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue" (Act 1, Scene 2). The suffering that each hero bears, audible only to the audience, is a clear point of comparison between the two plays. Furthermore, both characters take on a madness that is partly feigned and partly real. Compare Hieronimo's clever disguise -- "my simplicity may make them think / That ignorantly I will let all slip" (Act 4, Scene 6) -- with Hamlet's -- "As I perchance hereafter shall think meet / To put an antic disposition on" (Act 1, Scene 5). Both heroes must not be themselves in order ultimately to be themselves.
Finally, in comparing these two, we have the fact that both protagonists are playwrights. Hieronimo is a playwright by circumstance. The plan to perform a drama is a mechanism by which he will exact vengeance on his son's killers. Hamlet, by contrast, is a playwright and dramaturge by nature. It just so happens that the play he directs presents the opportunity to catch his father's killer through the study of physiognomy.
In both plays, the suicidal impulse must also extend beyond the tragic heroes. In TST, it reaches Isabella, Hieronimo's wife, who succumbs to her suicidal yearnings late in the play but before revenge is acted out. In Hamlet, it destroys Ophelia, whose "self-slaughter," to borrow, out of context, a term from Hamlet, seems to be both an accident and an event with very clear antecedents. And of course, in both plays the body counts only mount from the points of these deaths onward.
Some further differences that must be noted include the inversion of father-son relationships (in terms of who is to be avenged and who is to seek the vengeance) and the frankly pagan attitude of the Kyd play, which boldly and unequivocally takes place in a universe in which the geography of classical mythology is valid, thus providing a pronounced contrast to the obsession with Christian religious themes that we see in Hamlet. Christian values are frequently cited as reasons for what not to do in Hamlet (reason not to commit suicide, reason not to kill a murderer who is, theoretically, praying, but, oddly enough, not reason to follow the Bible's advice ["Vengeance is mine ... saith the Lord"] and forebear seeking revenge), but we rarely see actions performed on the basis of the core Christian principals of faith, hope, and charity, or any other Christian value, for that matter. Still, the play inhabits a universe in which Christian beliefs provide context.
Would it be fair to say that if there were no Spanish Tragedy there would be no Hamlet? In such cases, it is always impossible to claim much of anything with certainty, but at the very least Hamlet would doubtless have been a very different thing if not for Kyd's play. The Spanish Tragedy does have a certain flair to it -- though melodramatic at times and a bit pedestrian in its language, it is a highly readable play, one that is almost flawlessly strucutred and designed, one that features well-drawn and compelling characters. Shakespeare's play, by contrast, is at times a glorious mess, which is no doubt partly due to the fact that the text was likely never prepared for publication by its author, but also perhaps due to something else at work in Shakespeare -- in all of his works, not just the one in question here. So many things are going at so many different levels. Shakespeare's language is dynamic and, when he wants it to be, sophisticated; with every word and phrase he grasps for something distinctive. But he also creates some scattershot imagery at times, as in the "To be or not to be" soliloquy with that business of "slings and arrows" and other military-style references mixing it up with a "sea of troubles." This kind of mixed metaphor is not an isolated incident in Shakespeare. Yet, all told, the speech is movingly profound, and the play digs more deeply into our consciousness -- and into that of the play's protagonist -- than The Spanish Tragedy ever does. I say this not to diminish the significance of Kyd's work, but to say that all the patter about Shakespeare over the centuries is a legitimately warranted phenomenon. It is hard to pin down exactly what it is about Shakespeare that makes him superior to a Kyd or a Marlowe, but superior he is. Perhaps it is exactly this quality -- that it is hard to get a handle on things in Shakespeare -- that makes him so great. We know that the words are powerful, but we have a hard time figuring out what exactly it is that they mean.
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Caravaggio's Judith
Judith is a beautiful but troubled young woman. She is engaged in something rather nasty, but God approves, more or less: the light says so.
The subject of this painting proves an excellent study for Caravaggio: the gory extremes suited his emergent mature style. Judith Beheading Holofernes is dated, according to my art book, at 1598, and the figures in the painting present in greater detail than those from some of Caravaggio's earlier works, the features more precisely rendered. The sensual boys of earlier paintings boasted little in the way of wrinkles, their frowns more pouty than anything else, their signature look one of indolence and the ennui that is born of it. Judith is lush, no doubt, and just as sensual, but what makes her alive--more so to me than the musicians of the earlier works--is the frown, the wrinkle of worry that troubles her brow, the upper lip slightly pulled back in distaste. These temporary blemishes in an otherwise blandly perfect face reveal a different kind of study: a figure engaged in process. Something is happening here.
The Sick Bacchus presents a touchstone for the study of Judith. The Sick Bacchus speaks of earthly discomfort, a clear sense of unease emanating from his expression, but he is posed, almost self-consciously so. Judith, by contrast, is in the midst of action. This Bacchus holds the bunch of grapes as though he does not know what to do with them, almost as though Caravaggio were trying to capture not Bacchus himself but rather the model posed as Bacchus--it's almost a meta-painting, from this perspective. What on earth do you expect me to do with these grapes? The question seems to weigh on the Bacchus model like an existential burden. The displeasure in the Bacchus model's expression seems as though it were a response to the situation he finds himself in: I'm sick of you, Caravaggio, and your relentless looking at me, and I just want you to leave me alone. The fact that some scholars believe the Sick Bacchus to be a self-portrait complicates but does not fully undermine this reading of the painting. Who can say that Caravaggio himself -- a licentious, easily provoked brawler with a sensitive heart, it would seem -- was not sick of himself?
Judith Beheading Holofernes takes the unease that defines the Sick Bacchus and adds further dimensions to it. If Sick Bacchus is autobiographical, Judith represents the exploration of the consciousness of the other. Judith, engaged in some dirty work, is in recoil, distancing herself from the action that her hands are accomplishing. In the midst of her righteous killing, the heroine grips her sword with a kind of awkwardness similar to that with which Bacchus holds his grapes. Judith holds the sword in her right hand, at the furthest remove from her body, as though she were merely in the act of dropping something repulsive and not as though she were in the midst of using this weapon to remove the head of a man who is still somehow (with half his head sawed off) fully alive, twisting his body around in the final moment before that vitality is extinguished. Judith is, despite the intensity of Holofernes' writhing, the clear subject of the painting: to her belongs the key action, the key movement. In the left hand, she holds the half-severed head at arm's length as well, though she does not seem nearly as uncomfortable with the head as she does with the sword.
Even at a glance, it is easy to see that the physics of motion do not seem to agree here; the details do not match up. We may never have witnessed a beheading ourselves, but we can extrapolate from our experiences of the physical world, and something does not seem right. It does not seem possible that the gentle sawing motion we seem to be seeing with the sword, like slicing into a roast chicken, could result in a beheading. Nor does the expression on Judith's face seem to possess the resolve, the fortitude, the emotional intensity required for her to commit such an act as the one she is presumably dedicating herself, body and soul, to committing. Perhaps Caravaggio--famous for pulling his models in off the streets, his Madonnas famously identified as real-life common prostitutes--took a kitchen girl for his model; it is as though he captured her in the act of pulling a drowned mouse from a pan of dirty dishwater. Imagine such a moment, and you have the look on Judith's face.
There are other things at work here--most noteably, most disconcertingly, and most bafflingly--the erotic undertone of the painting. Despite the look of distaste, of concern, on Judith's face, her nipples are unmistakeably erect beneath her thin, white blouse. Before you accuse me of perversion, take a look at the painting: even with a casual glance, the truth of what I say is clear as day. Even with a frown and her hair pulled back (she is in action mode, after all), Judith is not only a figure of beauty but also one with a clear sexual charge. Her beauty is not of the radiant, otherworldly kind, but of the here and now. Is Caravaggio trying to relay some kind of message about gender roles and sexuality? If so, that message is uncertain, and I don't think any other Caravaggios clarify the matter any. Maybe the idea is to establish a connection between violence and sex, two extremes of passionate action--but then again, the look on Judith's face is hardly one of passion. Rather, it is one of fulfilling a nasty obligation.
In case we doubt the kind of beauty Judith personifies, though, we have the old crone who stands beside her. Her ugliness is, beyond the effects of age, a true ugliness, born of the grotesque; it is just as physical, just as sensual (along the lines of evoking the sensory experience of the body) as Judith's beauty. The old woman stands rigid beside Judith, a bag in hand, ready to take the head of Holofernes before it drops. The contrast is not merely between youth and age, between the beautiful and the grotesque, but primarily between two opposing attitudes to what takes place in this scene: the old woman is eager, hard-eyed: that son-of-a-bitch has been a long time deserving his come-uppance. She is ready to take the head, although Judith is reluctant (but willing) to oblige in the preliminary beheading that is necessary for that to happen. Perhaps this is part of the definition of a hero, Caravaggio is saying: a hero (or heroine) engages in violence reluctantly, out of necessity, but a hero does what a hero has to do; the commoner searching roughly for justice just wants to take heads. Caravaggio himself, it seems, based on the police reports, tended toward the latter mode of behavior.
In short, there is much here that complicates Judith's act of heroism, such a mingling of various elements that they cannot be resolved. This painting is definitively imperfect, then, because of the awkwardness of these unresolved dimensions of meaning, but such imperfection seems to be precisely the point when it comes to Caravaggio, who painted human beings as he saw them, dirty fingernails and all. Somehow, though, despite the incongruity of Judith's expression and other near absurdities, this painting is as compelling as anything I have ever seen. Every time I open the art book, it is the scene that I end up resting on after flipping through many other pages, and it is the image to which I compare other works. To me, there is art before this painting, and there is art after this painting. I don't exactly know what the painter was up to, and I don't exactly want to know. There are, after all, some matters that even the light of truth leaves willfully obscure.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
On the Late Christopher Hitchens' Atheism
Over the years, I have read his articles with both admiration and outrage, usually depending on the subject, but I have to admit that the admiration won out in the end. Of all the defenders of recent political policies that I have vehemently disagreed with, he is perhaps the only one I respect.
I expected plenty of appreciations to appear upon Christopher Hitchens' death, but it is with some incredulousness that I read Ross Douthat's piece on Hitchens in today's New York Times. It's not the fact that Douthat wrote such an appreciation -- it was almost expected -- but rather the audacity and anti-Hitchensian quality of what he had to say, which appeared in the guise of a tribute.
Douthat is in many ways the anti-Hitchens. Hitchens' cynicism was hard purchased over the years. Douthat's cynicism seems to serve one purpose only, which is to further his conservative agenda. Hitchens was not afraid to break with the party line--he saw what he saw. Douthat always seems to see what he wants to see in a case. I have little respect for him as a writer or as a thinker.
Douthat's column on Hitchens explores the affinity that, according to Douthat, so many religious believers had for the devout atheist and self-declared Enemy of God. Without propounding any counter-theories of my own, I will say that it appears that Douthat is trying to claim Hitchens as one of his own, to make a holy pagan out of him, like Aquinas did with Aristotle -- a "Believer's Atheist," as the title of the column suggests.
Hitchens is reputed to be the kind of gregarious fellow who would sit down to a drink with his worst enemy, Mother Theresa, for instance. I don't know how he would feel at being labelled a "Believer's Atheist," but I suspect that the man who so adamantly and publicly refused requests from religious-minded individuals for a deathbed conversion during his long and public struggle with cancer might have taken issue with the epithet. What Douthat ends up claiming is a misreading of atheism -- Hitchensonian as well as the other varieties. Here's what he said at the end of his piece:
Atheist intellectuals of the Hitchens variety rarely talk about atheism as a font of despair. They are generally at peace with the world, with the universe, when they talk about their beliefs. The "wasting shadow" here is not Hitchens' or any other contemporary atheist intellectual's, for that matter -- it is Douthat's, because he is too limited in his worldview to appreciate the fact that people can lead fulfilling lives, even lives absent of despair and existential angst, without a belief in the afterlife. Thus, to say that Hitchens was not the kind of man to give in to despair is not to say that he was a man whose beliefs were all that similar to those of the believers. What we see here is Douthat's inflexible inability to inhabit the perspective of someone like Hitchens -- of someone with beliefs counter to his own.
Agnostics, also, such as this writer, can live content with mystery and uncertainty. I don't know what to expect after I die. I don't expect much, but I will be satisfied with whatever I get, and in the meantime I will focus on doing what little good I can in this world and trying the best I can to extract meaning from my experiences and from those of others. As for the "Marxist fairy tales" and "techno-utopian happy talk," I can only conjecture as to what Douthat might mean. I suspect he's just getting a stab at some enemies while he has the chance.
Douthat ends his column thusly, imediately following the previous quotation:
That "why" is why it's "completely wrong to give in to despair." Can there be no other reason besides God and the afterlife? Is a belief in humankind, the universe, and electro-magnetism not enough?
As we have seen before, when Hitchens first publicly announced that he had terminal cancer, we see here the believer's desperate hopes for the non-believer. It's a nice sentiment, I suppose, but it misses the mark because it refuses to demonstrate a decent respect for the non-believer's beliefs.
I expected plenty of appreciations to appear upon Christopher Hitchens' death, but it is with some incredulousness that I read Ross Douthat's piece on Hitchens in today's New York Times. It's not the fact that Douthat wrote such an appreciation -- it was almost expected -- but rather the audacity and anti-Hitchensian quality of what he had to say, which appeared in the guise of a tribute.
Douthat is in many ways the anti-Hitchens. Hitchens' cynicism was hard purchased over the years. Douthat's cynicism seems to serve one purpose only, which is to further his conservative agenda. Hitchens was not afraid to break with the party line--he saw what he saw. Douthat always seems to see what he wants to see in a case. I have little respect for him as a writer or as a thinker.
Douthat's column on Hitchens explores the affinity that, according to Douthat, so many religious believers had for the devout atheist and self-declared Enemy of God. Without propounding any counter-theories of my own, I will say that it appears that Douthat is trying to claim Hitchens as one of his own, to make a holy pagan out of him, like Aquinas did with Aristotle -- a "Believer's Atheist," as the title of the column suggests.
Hitchens is reputed to be the kind of gregarious fellow who would sit down to a drink with his worst enemy, Mother Theresa, for instance. I don't know how he would feel at being labelled a "Believer's Atheist," but I suspect that the man who so adamantly and publicly refused requests from religious-minded individuals for a deathbed conversion during his long and public struggle with cancer might have taken issue with the epithet. What Douthat ends up claiming is a misreading of atheism -- Hitchensonian as well as the other varieties. Here's what he said at the end of his piece:
When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor, and leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” — that “death is no different whined at than withstood.”
Officially, Hitchens’s creed was one with Larkin’s. But everything else about his life suggests that he intuited that his fellow Englishman was completely wrong to give in to despair.
Atheist intellectuals of the Hitchens variety rarely talk about atheism as a font of despair. They are generally at peace with the world, with the universe, when they talk about their beliefs. The "wasting shadow" here is not Hitchens' or any other contemporary atheist intellectual's, for that matter -- it is Douthat's, because he is too limited in his worldview to appreciate the fact that people can lead fulfilling lives, even lives absent of despair and existential angst, without a belief in the afterlife. Thus, to say that Hitchens was not the kind of man to give in to despair is not to say that he was a man whose beliefs were all that similar to those of the believers. What we see here is Douthat's inflexible inability to inhabit the perspective of someone like Hitchens -- of someone with beliefs counter to his own.
Agnostics, also, such as this writer, can live content with mystery and uncertainty. I don't know what to expect after I die. I don't expect much, but I will be satisfied with whatever I get, and in the meantime I will focus on doing what little good I can in this world and trying the best I can to extract meaning from my experiences and from those of others. As for the "Marxist fairy tales" and "techno-utopian happy talk," I can only conjecture as to what Douthat might mean. I suspect he's just getting a stab at some enemies while he has the chance.
Douthat ends his column thusly, imediately following the previous quotation:
My hope — for Hitchens, and for all of us, the living and the dead — is that now he finally knows why.
That "why" is why it's "completely wrong to give in to despair." Can there be no other reason besides God and the afterlife? Is a belief in humankind, the universe, and electro-magnetism not enough?
As we have seen before, when Hitchens first publicly announced that he had terminal cancer, we see here the believer's desperate hopes for the non-believer. It's a nice sentiment, I suppose, but it misses the mark because it refuses to demonstrate a decent respect for the non-believer's beliefs.
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