30 Jan

“Life is a Dream” by Calderón de la Barca

Posted by argumentativeoldgit in Drama, literature, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , .

The Golden Age of Spanish Drama is something I’ve only heard about rather than known about, and so, to remedy that, it seemed reasonable to start at the very top, as it were – with what is possibly the most famous play of that era, Life is a Dream (La vida es sueño), written in the mid-1630s by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. And reading it (in a translation into English blank verse by poet Roy Campbell), I could not help wondering to what extent I needed to be acquainted with the theatrical traditions of an era in order to appreciate its drama. I am not at all acquainted with this era, but I would guess, from reading this play, that theatre-goers of mid-17th century Spain went to the theatre with expectations considerably different than those of modern audiences.

One could, of course, forget about theatrical traditions, and read it as a closet play, but I am not sure that works either. Take for instance, a passage such as this (one of many I could easily have chosen):

        Those snowflaking haloes,
Those canopies of crystal spread on high,
Lit by the sun, cut by the circling moon,
Those diamond orbs, those globes of radiant crystal
Which the bright stars adorn, on which the signs
Parade in blazing excellence, have been
My chiefest study all through my long years.

Passages such as this belong to a dramatic tradition in which discursive, rhetorical flourishes are relished for their own sake, and take precedence over such matters as dramatic pace or momentum. This passage is part of an extremely long expository speech, the essence of which could easily have been communicated in a half dozen lines or so, but, quite clearly, the mere expository facts are of lesser concern here than relishing words for their own sake. One gets a few such passages in the earlier plays of Shakespeare also, but, very noticeably, Shakespeare soon learnt to tailor his speeches to serve his dramatic ends; but here, in what I think I am right in saying is among Calderón de la Barca’s most mature and considered works, dramatic ends are almost invariably secondary to a delight purely in language.

That is not intended as a criticism. Placing delight in language ahead of dramatic purpose is no doubt alien to our modern tastes – which may well deem passages such as the one quoted above as bombastic and otiose – but there is no reason why e should judge works from the seventeenth century by our modern criteria. But the problem comes when one is not entirely sure what the criteria actually are whereby a work such as this should be judged. To determine that, one needs ideally to immerse oneself in the literature of that period, and to read both primary and secondary texts: otherwise, one is, as I was, at a distinct disadvantage.

I took for granted that Calderon knew what he was doing, and that these long speeches, rather like the arias of a Handel opera, far from being errors of judgement, are intended primarily to be admired for their own sake, and only secondarily to advance the drama. I do not know whether or not I was right in thinking this, but there was no other way I could make sense of the work. I remembered Ana’s husband in La Regenta, reciting the great speeches from Spanish drama, and rolling his tongue round their magnificent sounds and sonorities – enjoying them, indeed, for their sounds, their imagery, their poetic resonance, rather than for what they communicate: for he felt nothing of their passion.

But while these many speeches retard any sense of forward movement, it could be argued, I suppose, that forward movement is not even something Calderón was aiming at here in the first place. This play, as the title suggests, presents life as essentially a dream, an illusion, and forward movement is as irrelevant in this play as it is in a dream. The entire action of the play seems to be taking place not so much in the real world, but in some strange hinterland of the mind – not of a mind that is awake, but of a mind asleep and dreaming. There is about this play a sense of the phantasmal, of the incorporeal, at times appearing even to foreshadow the dream plays of Strindberg. This did surprise me: I had always associated the idea of life as something essentially unreal to be a feature of Hindu philosophy, which describes the physical world as maya – illusion; but Life is a Dream was written long before awareness of Hindu philosophy had entered the western world. It is true, I suppose, that Plato had famously described the physical world as shadows cast on the walls of a cave by a greater reality of which we are but vaguely aware; St Paul, too, had spoken of those things we perceive in our lives as seen “through a glass darkly”; but both had indicated that there does exist a greater reality beyond our perception, and that what we perceive is but a shadowy, distorted glimpse of that greater reality. But, in Calderón’s play, there’s no such indication: our perceptions here are not even a glimpse of any greater reality; indeed, there isn’t even any indication that a greater reality may exist. What we see on stage is the only reality there is, and this reality is, possibly, utterly insubstantial.

The dramatic situation is as unreal as a dream.  A royal prince has spent all his life imprisoned, because his father, the king, had foreseen that this prince, should he succeed to the throne, will cause havoc. But now that this prince has grown into adulthood, the king his father, considering the possibility that his prognostication may have been wrong, has his son drugged into a sleep, and brought from the isolation of his prison-house into the royal palace. There, when the prince awakes, he runs wild – not surprisingly, perhaps, given how isolated from reality he has been for his entire life. His father’s prophecy had proved a self-fulfilling prophecy: as in Sophocles’ play, the very steps taken to avoid a prophecy ensure that the prophecy comes true. So the prince is drugged again and taken back into his prison; and when he awakes there, he is told that all he had experienced was but a dream. But then, the borders between dream and reality become further blurred: the prince is now freed by his father’s soldiers, and is declared king; and he takes this, too, as illusory, since, after all, all of life, everything, is a dream. And if a dream is all it is, one might as well live life as such. For what else is there?

Into all this is woven various subplots concerning family honour, long lost children and siblings, and the like – all that paraphernalia that modern audiences may well find a trifle dull. But we see all this, as it were, through a gauze: all this, too, we sense, is unreal. Nothing is real. All that seems real, all that seems to us tangible, is but the product of some sleeping mind, which may or may not be our own. And that calls into question even our own identity. If I exist only because I think, then the thought precedes the existence; and if that is so, how can I claim that thought to be my own? In short, how can “I think” precede “I exist”?

No doubt those well versed in ontology will point out where I have gone wrong here – for I am sure that an ignoramus such as myself is bound to go wrong when speaking of such matters. But in any case, what we are discussing here is not a philosophical treatise, but a play. And it is a play in which the very certainties of our own existence are questioned – not from the perspective of philosophy, but of the imagination. Shakespeare had questioned it too: the events in the enchanted Athenian wood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream may be seen, as the title suggests, as a sort of communal dream; The Tempest, too, may be seen as the dreamlike unweaving of reality in some mysterious region of the mind. But before the lovers and the rude mechanicals enter the wood, the world they inhabit is a real one; and the world they return to afterwards is similarly real, albeit transformed by their dream. And similarly, once all is resolved in The Tempest, they sail away from the dreamlike island back into reality. But here, in Calderón’s play, there is no reality to go back to, just as there is no reality from which they had emerged: here, all is unreal.

I do not know whether my reading of this play is a valid reading: I will need to acquire a better knowledge and understanding of this literature before I could make any pronouncement on this matter with any confidence. But I am glad I encountered it; and, while I may draw certain parallels with Shakespeare, or even with Strindberg, this really is quite unlike anything else I think I have encountered. I only draw these parallels because, when one comes across something so entirely new, it is natural to try to relate it to things one does know, if only to get one’s bearings. And I am glad that I encountered these works in Roy Campbell’s translation, as his blank verse really is quite splendid. (I had a look as well at the translation by Edward Fitzgerald – he of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam fame – but, at first glance at any rate, it seemed to me like second rate Victorian verse. That may be unfair: I’ll look into it again.)

How a play such as this may be performed on a modern stage, I have no idea: I don’t even know whether it can hold a modern audience with modern expectations, but, no doubt, an imaginative director may find interesting ways of staging it. But the work itself, despite depicting the world and our lives within it as essentially insubstantial, has sufficient substance to merit not merely revisiting, but further study of the literary and theatrical cultures that produced it.

16 Jan

Turgenev’s shorter fiction

Posted by argumentativeoldgit in books, literature, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , , , .

I’m never quite sure what the difference is between the short story and the novel – whether the difference is merely a question of length, or whether there is something else involved. For if it is merely a question of word-count, the borderline isn’t clearly defined: where exactly is the demarcation line between the two? And if there is no clear demarcation line, how do we classify those works that seem too long for short story, and yet not long enough for a novel?

To resolve this issue, a third category was introduced – the novella. But this doesn’t really improve matters, as where, previously, there had been one undefined demarcation line, now there are two. And even if we know roughly – since all questions of taxonomy in these matters are inevitably imprecise – where these demarcation lines lie, we may question why they lie where they do, and not elsewhere. For instance, we can all agree that Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer”, say, is a short story, Heart of Darkness a novella, and Nostromo a novel. Yet, although we take the trouble to separate out these works, we lump  together Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and Tolstoy’s War and Peace in the same category, even though the latter is some seven times as long as the former. It all seems so arbitrary that I can’t help wondering whether these classifications purely in terms of length serve any purpose at all.

So maybe it isn’t merely a question merely of length, but of scope. But if we follow this line of thought, we run into even greater problems:  length is, at least, quantifiable; heaven only knows what we mean by “scope”. And yet, it does seem reasonable to assert that War and Peace has a broader scope than Fathers and Sons: the former addresses a great many themes, and the latter only one. (Or, at best, only a few.) Tolstoy’s novel has a great many narrative strands and focal points of interest; Turgenev’s doesn’t. This is not to say that Turgenev’s novel is, for this reason a lesser work of art: a songwriter is not attempting to compose a symphony, and it would be foolish to judge a song and a symphony by the same criteria. But a distinction along these lines may, perhaps, give us an insight into why we feel it natural to distinguish between the short story (or the novella) on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the novel. The former contracts, focusing our attention on a single issue, or on a small handful of issues: the latter expands to take in more.

Such a definition does not, I fear, stand up too well to close scrutiny. Many of Chekhov’s stories, for instance, imply so much more than is directly stated, that they seem to have the scope of novels. On the other hand, a novel such as The Golden Bowl by Henry James spends its immense length focusing on the interactions of just four characters – although such is the significance that James finds in the course of his painstaking dissections, that the few focal points upon which he closes seem to imply an entire universe. In short, differentiating the short story and the novel in terms of scope is fraught with all sorts of difficulties and inconsistencies. But in discussing the short fiction of Turgenev, it is, I think, useful. For Turgenev’s literary imagination was such that it eschewed vast canvases, with its intersecting strands and multiple themes: he preferred limiting his focal points, concentrating on fewer things, and achieving, in the process, a unity and a perfection of form that is usually denied those writers whose scope is broader. Turgenev is, in short, a songwriter rather than a symphonist.

This is apparent even in his full-length novels. If many of Chekhov’s short stories seem like novels in miniature, Turgenev’s novels often give the appearance of long short stories. Indeed, I am not entirely sure why Rudin is counted as a novel, and The Torrents of Spring a novella: although I haven’t counted the words, they seem to be of similar length, and in neither is the scope particularly broad. In both, Turgenev deals with the theme of the sadness of life – of our inability, due either to fate or to the weaknesses in our characters, to seize happiness when we can, so all we are left with in the end is a regret for what might have been. This, indeed, seems to be a running theme in virtually all of Turgenev’s work, and it usually presents itself in the form of a sad love story. For Turgenev delighted in writing love stories: he had a natural gift for lyricism; he could write prose as exquisite as any nocturne by Chopin (and this lyricism survives even in translation); and he could describe with a disarming openness and poignancy the most tender and intimate of thoughts, feelings, sensations. The battlefield of Borodino may well have been beyond his range, but there aren’t many who could depict so perfectly the gentle, nocturnal musings of a pained and stricken heart.

If all this makes Turgenev sound a bit twee, perhaps, a bit precious, then yes, our modern sensibilities, hardened as they are by the abrasive and the garish, may well perceive his writings as such. But I can’t help thinking that that is our loss, and that we should, at least for a while, put the neon lights out of our minds so as better to perceive the softness of a moonlit night.

In the course of pursuing his theme of the sadness of unfulfilled lives, he strikes upon another theme that is often regarded as archetypally Turgenevian – that of the “superfluous man”, the man who, despite being intelligent and even gifted, is, nonetheless, for reasons not easy to articulate, curiously ineffective. Indeed, one of his novellas is actually titled The Diary of a Superfluous Man, and, once again, it takes the form of a love story – in this case, a rejected love. Both the title and the form recall Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman”, but the content could hardly be different. Gogol’s story is phamtasmagoric, garishly coloured, and nightmarish: Turgenev prefers pastel shades, gently probing into the seemingly unanswerable question of why a human, not noticeably deficient in any obvious way, should nonetheless be “superfluous”.

The theme of the “superfluous man” has political and social implications as well of course, but, while Turgenev explored these implications in some of his novels, I distinctly get the impression that he was drawn into political themes simply because, as an intelligent man living in those times, he could not very well avoid them; but that he was happier focusing on the personal, the intimate. In Asya, we see the narrator too indecisive to respond adequately to a love that is offered him: the narrator is ostensibly at the centre of the story, but, very subtly, it is the title character, Asya, whom we see purely through the narrator’s eyes, who is really at its centre: the focal point is not the narrator’s “superfluity”, as such, but the pain of rejection experienced by Asya.

First Love too is about unrequited love – in this case, of a teenage lad, unused to and puzzled by the sudden stirrings of the heart. It is often regarded, with good reason, as a perfect example of Turgenev’s art: the narrative line is clear, uncluttered, and elegant; the psychological depictions are acute; and, in terms of form, it is about as close to perfection as is possible. But perhaps the best of all – at least, the one that affected me most – is the late novella Torrents of Spring. This was one of Turgenev’s last works, and the narrator, like the author, is a man in his late middle age, and lonely. He tell of his youth, when he might have found the happiness that he now lacks, but which, through the weakness of his own character, he threw away even as it was within his grasp. The story itself is deeply poignant, and the storytelling is absolute perfection: the uncluttered elegance of the narrative line, and its sense of artless ease, could only have been achieved by the most refined and sophisticated artistry; and its evocation of sadness, regret, and of loneliness, continues to haunt the mind long after one has finished reading. Fathers and Sons is often held to be Turgenev’s masterpiece, partly, I suspect, because of its political and social implications, but I am not sure that his masterpiece isn’t The Torrents of Spring: here, Turgenev isn’t concerned either with politics or with society: he focuses instead on what, I think, interests him most – the vagaries of the human heart.

There are two novellas that aren’t love stories – Mumu, a heart-rending story of a mute serf (i.e. slave) forced by his unfeeling and uncaring mistress to kill his own dog, because its barking disturbs her. (By “mistress”, I don’t mean, of course, a woman with whom he is having an affair, but, rather, the woman who owns him, body and soul.) And there is King Lear of the Steppes, a late masterpiece, which tells a story the narrator had witnessed when still a young lad, and not mature enough to understand the significance of what he sees. It is a tale of a peasant family, told with Turgenev’s characteristically direct and uncluttered style. However, it lacks his usual lyricism: we have here, instead, a story of immense power. It is also bleak and pessimistic: the “Lear” of this tale, an aged peasant, does not even have the consolation of a Cordelia. Turgenev was not always the soppy romantic he is sometimes made out to be.

***

Turgenev is often ranked with his great contemporaries Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, but this comparison does him no favours. For trying to compare Turgenev’s fiction with that of the other two is, essentially, comparing songs with symphonies: inevitably, the song is drowned out. But Turgenev’s voice, though quieter and less powerful, and, perhaps, more difficult to appreciate in our more abrasive times, remains potent. Certainly, few writers have conveyed with such artistry and refinement the sheer sadness of our unfulfilled human lives.

***

The translations I read:

“First Love and Other Stories” translated by Richard Freeborn, Oxford World Classics (contains The Diary of a Superfluous Man, Mumu, Asya, First Love, King Lear of the Steppes, The Song of Triumphant  Love)

“The Torrents of Spring” translated by David Magarshack, published by Folio Society (originally published by Hamish Hamilton)

1 Jan

A sentimental post to start the year

Posted by argumentativeoldgit in literature, Music, Poetry, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , .

That there hath pass’d away a glory from the earth.

There comes a time in middle age when the Ghosts of one’s Christmases Past begin to outnumber even the most optimistic of estimates of the Ghosts of Christmases Yet to Come. Since I have long passed that tipping point, and the weight of Christmases Past lies so heavily in the balance, I trust I may be excused for focusing on the former rather than on the latter. And as I do so, it is hard not to feel, as Wordsworth did, that there has indeed passed away a glory from the world. Now, before I am accused of sentimentality – as is usually the case when I try to speak of such matters – let me expand a little.

Something has changed – something is very different now from what it had been in our childhood years, and the difference, as any smug commentator will tell you, is in what has changed in ourselves rather than in the outside world. Wordsworth – never the sentimentalist despite ignorant claims to the contrary – recognized this. The innocent brightness of a new-born day, he knew, is lovely yet. There’s no point asking where is fled that visionary gleam: it’s still there – we just can’t perceive it any more, and that’s all. It’s the way things are: no point lamenting the inevitable. But Wordsworth himself, though determined to find strength in what remains, could not help lamenting. We cannot, after all, stop feeling things merely because “there’s no point to it”.

One of the most touching of these laments is the poem “The Oxen” by Thomas Hardy, written in the darkest days of 1915, when he was an old man of seventy-five years, and when Europe, as if justifying the prophetic pessimism he had expressed in his novels years earlier, was in the process of tearing itself apart. In this wonderfully touching poem, Hardy looks back on childhood innocence and naivety; but the poem is not really about either: it is about one’s longing for a time when such innocence and naivety had been possible. There may not be any point to such longing, but we feel a great many things that have no point to them. That such longing is futile does not make it ridiculous, but, rather, imbues it with a profound sadness.

I find a similar lament in a piece that is often regarded merely as candy-coated decorative fluff – in the score of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. It is, of course, a perennial Christmas favourite, to be wheeled out every year along with the crackers, the Christmas tree, the mince pies, and the Dickens; and few, I think, will deny its charm. But what frequently is denied is its profundity. Tchaikovsky himself, we are told, considered the subject matter to be too light, and although, being a consummate professional, he gave it his finest craftsmanship, what he withheld was his artistry. It is merely decorative, merely a bit of fluff.

I have never been able to reconcile myself to this view, as I find the music genuinely and very deeply moving. I can’t deny that it is full of music that is decorative; neither can I deny that its subject – a Christmas Party, a child’s subsequent entry into a world of fairy tales, and her journey to the Kingdom of Sweets – is very slight, even, perhaps, trivial. But I was very interested to read recently this excellent piece by music critic Gavin Plumley, in which he argues that The Nutcracker is a piece that deserves to be taken seriously. Whatever Tchaikovsky’s initial feelings about the nature of his commission, he argues, the composition of the piece was taken very seriously indeed, and not merely in terms of craftsmanship.

Although it’s always dangerous relating a work of art to the artist’s biography, it was good to have confirmation of what seems to me obvious from the music – that, far from being decorative fluff, it is a serious and deeply felt work, and a response to an emotionally shattering event (the death of Tchaikovsky’s sister). As Plumley puts it, “The Nutcracker undoubtedly poses much larger questions than is often suggested”. But what exactly those “larger questions” are is not obvious, and different listeners will have different views on this.

To me, these larger questions are not about mortality: Tchaikovsky kept that for his 6th symphony, a work that, for me, in many ways complements The Nutcracker. Neither is The Nutcracker, as is often suggested, about Clara’s progress from childhood to womanhood: true, the nutcracker become a handsome prince, but I can detect no eroticism in the music, nor any indication of Clara’s sexual awakening. Indeed, she and the Nutcracker Prince go to the Kingdom of Sweets, which hardly suggests leaving childhood behind. These are not what I see in this piece, although what I do see seems difficult to articulate.

One thing that never ceases to strike me about the score (the full score, that is, and not the series of bleeding chunks that form the suite) is a sense of tenderness, a sense of yearning, and a profound melancholy that seems quite at odds with its alleged light-hearted fluffiness. Is there anything in all music that is more tender or yearning than that beautiful passage at the start of the forest scene towards the end of Act One? Or what about the passionate longing in the Act Two pas de deux? (“How is it possible to make so much just out of a simple descending scale?” Britten had wondered.) The underlying seriousness of passages such as this bleeds, as it were, into the rest of the score, infusing even the most joyous of numbers, the most seemingly uncomplicated of childlike dances, with a sense of something more deeply felt – something more deeply interfused, as Wordsworth might have said.

The Nutcracker depicts childhood innocence and naivety, but, as with Hardy’s poem, these are not, for me at least, its central themes: at the centre of this piece there is, I think, our adult longing for childhood innocence and naivety. And this longing, Tchaikovsky knew as well as did Wordsworth or Hardy, is futile: no matter how fervently we may long, we can never return to our childhood state. Indeed, this state of blissful innocence may never really have existed in the first place. But that does not prevent us from longing for it. It is this sense of futility of such longing that infuses this otherwise joyous music with so profound an underlying sense of sadness: I find it almost heartbreaking in its poignancy. Longing for something that can never be attained is a familiar Romantic trope: in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, for instance, this longing was for erotic fulfilment; here, it is for a childhood that is for ever gone.

That, at least, is how it seems to me. Underlying the joyous festivities of The Nutcracker (for it is indeed joyous), I seem to hear a lament similar to what I find in so much of Wordworth’s poetry, or in Hardy’s “The Oxen”.

Tchaikovsky’s next great masterpiece, his last, was his 6th symphony – an unblinking stare into the face of death itself, and among the most shattering of any works of art, in any medium. If The Nutcracker is Tchaikovsky’s Song of Innocence (albeit innocence seen from the perspective of experience), his 6th symphony is his Song of Experience. They are two very different works of, for me, comparable artistic stature. While one looks back at the Christmases Past, evoking its joys but imbuing these same joys with the profound sadness for that which is lost, the other looks heroically and unflinchingly at what is Yet to Come. As another poet put it, we look before and after, and pine for what is not.

Happy New Year, everyone!

10 Dec

Greetings from my sickbed

Posted by argumentativeoldgit in Uncategorized.

It’s taking longer than I’d expected. After my recent operation, I thought I’d be more or less back to normal within a few weeks. Well, without going into tedious details, I am more or less back to normal – up to a point; but not up to the point where I can focus on serious reading, or engage my mind sufficiently to write blog posts. Random babblings such as this post I can just about manage, but anything more ambitious is currently beyond me.

But that itch for writing posts persists, despite my inability to put together anything too coherent. There is so much I’d like to read, and write about. Before my recent illness, I was reading the Penguin Classics version of the Mahabharata, which I was expecting to finish around this time: that’s currently on hold. Before that, I read a number of novellas by Turgenev, and was planning to write something on them here. Shortly after my operation, on the recommendation of Amateur Reader, I got myself Roy Campbell’s translations of four plays from the Spanish Golden Age: I thought I could focus on those during my recuperation, but that turned out to be over-optimistic. I guess they must all wait till later – after Christmas, perhaps.

I was also planning a post comparing the performances of King Lear by Michael Pennington, Anthony Sher, and Glenda Jackson. The first two I had seen earlier this year, and had tickets for the third. However, that Glenda Jackson performance for which I had tickets was just a few days after my triple bypass operation, and, though they were hot tickets that could easily have exchanged hands at far more than the price I had paid for them, this was hardly the foremost thing in our minds at the time, and I am afraid those tickets went to waste. Where the greater malady is fixed, the lesser is scarcely felt.

We did, however, get to see Don Giovanni about two weeks ago.  We had tickets for the Glyndebourne Touring Opera production, which was playing in nearby Woking. My fear was that I might fall asleep during the performance, but not only did I manage to stay awake, I loved every minute of it. (Although I do wish they performed the usual text that conflates the version originally performed in Prague, and the later version, with changes, that was performed subsequently in Vienna: here, they chose to perform the Vienna version, with the consequence that some of the most wonderful music – notably the gorgeous tenor aria Il mio tesoro – was missing.) It made me wonder again just what it is about this opera that makes it so great. Of course, the quality of the music is beyond compare, but this is not merely a great work of music, it is, self-evidently, a great opera – i.e. a great musical drama – and to this day, after some forty or so years of close acquaintance with it, I am not sure why. The last time I wrote about this work, I opined that the character of Don Giovanni is a complete blank: beyond a desire for constant sexual gratification, there is absolutely nothing to the character at all, and that any moral or philosophical depth that people see in him is but the projections of their own preoccupations on to what is essentially a blank screen. I hold by that still. But it leaves open the question of how it can be possible for a drama so dominated by so shallow a personage to achieve such profundity. I really do not know. That it is profound is beyond question,  but while I think I can explain, at least up to a point (since works of such stature can never be exhausted), what Le Nozze di Figaro and Cosi Fan Tutte are about, I find myself at a loss in trying to account for the greatness of Don Giovanni. It is little wonder that so many people across so many ages have projected on to the figure of Don Giovanni their own preoccupations: the idea that what exists at the centre of this immense work is but a vast vacuum is very difficult to take in.

Now, if I had been more my usual self, I could have made a decent post out of all that. But this will have to do for now I am afraid.

Whether my recent experience will change my blogging style I do not know. Maybe there will emerge from my chastening brush with mortality a less abrasive blogger, gentler and kinder, in keeping with the gentler and kinder politics we have recently been promised.  But then again, maybe not. We’ll have to wait and see. For the moment, I am trying my best to keep my blood pressure under control, and that means keeping away from political developments – both domestically and internationally; and keeping away also from blog posts and opinion pieces that I know will light my admittedly short fuse.

In the meantime, I would like to thank all of you who have sent me good wishes either in the comments section of this blog, or by e-mail. I know I have not responded to them individually, but they really are much appreciated. Sending good wishes may not seem like much, but it is: that there are people – many whom I have not even met – who are thinking about me when I’m going through a bad time really does count for a lot, and is very comforting. It is something I will remember, and hold dear. My sincere thanks to you all.

And have a very happy Christmas, and New Year. May you all enjoy to seasonal excess the food and drink that I, following medical advice, cannot!

Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_-_The_Census_at_Bethlehem_-_WGA03379

“The Census at Bethlehem” by Peter Bruegel the Elder, courtesy of Musée des Beaux Arts, Brussels

1 Nov

The Argumentative Old Git is unwell

Posted by argumentativeoldgit in Uncategorized.

I know I sometimes have fairly long periods of inactivity on this blog, but none has been longer, I think, than the hiatus between my last post and this. Fact is, as the title of this post indicates, I have not been well. Well, it’s no secret, so I might as well spit it out … Two weeks ago I had a heart attack, and have since undergone open-heart surgery. I am now back home recuperating, but, as yet, am in no state, mentally or physically, to write new posts.

This is not the end of the blog. I am told I am recovering well, and that my current state of physical exhaustion and of mental torpor should not last too long. As and when I become better, I shall of course return to blogging. Till then, there’ll be no new posts, no responses to comments, nor replies to individual e-mails (of which I know there are some residing in my inbox).

My time will be spent in napping, in taking brief walks round the house, and in silent gratitude to those whose skill and care have saved my life.

Speak to you all later.

12 Oct

Jane Austen and pornography

Posted by argumentativeoldgit in Culture, rant. Tagged: , , , , .

Now that I have captured your attention with the title, let me get a few boring bits out of the way before getting on to the meatier part of the story. (Is “meatier” really the word I want to use here? Never mind – let it stay.)

I’m afraid that the Times is behind a paywall, so this link possibly won’t be of much use to most readers. But in case you are a subscriber of the Times, do please have a look at this. For the rest, I’ll summarise as best I can.

Jenni Murray, presenter of the BBC Radio 4 programme Woman’s Hour, and author of the recently published book A History of Britain in 21 Women, speaking at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, has advocated teaching children about pornography. She notes, quite rightly, that pornography is now all-pervasive in our society, and that we cannot get rid of it. Under the circumstances, she argues, it is better that children were to be educated on the matter, “so that at least those girls know and all those boys know that not all women are shaved, that not all women make that bloody noise”, and so on. In other words, to teach the children that what they see in pornographic films is but a fantasy.

This seems well-intentioned enough. Except that I don’t know that I would fancy being the teacher in one of these “analysis” classes.

For one thing, it is difficult to know how one can “analyse” pornography without being morally judgemental. Kant, I gather, had told us that each human being is an end in herself, or himself. I am no philosopher, but this does seem to me a splendid base on which to build our morality. Put simply, human beings are subjects, not objects, and are hence entitled to respect. In pornography, however, each human being is an object, and nothing more. Thus pornography is built upon a base that is inherently demeaning, and is, by definition, immoral. I am not sure how much more there can be to “analyse”.

Of course, it could be that Jenni Murray was quoted out of context, so I do not want to say much more here on this particular matter. But I do want to comment on her reference to Jane Austen, as that brings us close, I think, to one of the recurrent themes of this blog. Ms Murray is quoted as saying:

We give our kids Jane Austen to read and we say “OK, let’s analyse it, what is it saying and what does it mean?”

Why not put boys and girls together in a class, you show them a pornographic film and you analyse it in exactly the same way as you teach them to read the other cultures that are around.

Quite apart from the desirability or the morality of showing pornography to children, what strikes me here is the absurd notion that literary culture (of which Jane Austen is treated as a representative) and pornographic culture are merely two of many “cultures that are around”, and that, by implication, both are equally worthy of being taught, and that both can be analysed “in exactly the same way”.

But the works of Jane Austen should be taught not because they are representative of one of the many “cultures that are around”: they should be taught because they are amongst the finest products of our civilisation. That’s it. No other reason. If we do not believe that certain works of literature have inherent value that elevates them above certain other works of literature; and that the finest examples of literary culture civilise us and humanise us in a way that, say, the culture of pornography cannot; then there’s no point studying literature at all. We might as well just “study” pornography. In “exactly the same way”.

I’m afraid this is the kind of insulting nonsense one gets to when one embraces cultural relativism. What a wonderful future we envisage for our children! We cannot even communicate to them the peaks of our human civilisations, because we have stopped believing in such things ourselves.

12 Oct

The Duchess of Malfi violated

Posted by argumentativeoldgit in Uncategorized.

I generally try to ensure this blog is suitable for family reading, and, to that end, I try to avoid anything that may, in the words of Mr Podsnap, bring a blush to the cheek of a young person. However, WordPress provides me with the various items people have searched on to arrive at this blog, and it appears that someone recently found this blog by searching on the words “analization of Duchess of Malfi”.

I like to think this person had meant “analysis”. At least, I hope they did.

7 Oct

“La Regenta” by Leopoldo Alas

Posted by argumentativeoldgit in books, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , .

Late to the party, as ever. La Regenta by Leopoldo Alas, a massive novel written in the 1880s (i.e. slap bang in the middle of what is possibly my favourite era for literature – at least as far as novels are concerned), translated from the Spanish by John Rutherford (whose wonderful translation of Don Quixote I recently commented on), was nominated as a “group read” amongst various book bloggers. Now I know why I am so reluctant to take part in these group-reads: I am invariably way behind everyone else. However, undaunted by the 700 and more pages of sight-destroying print, I did dive in, and I am glad I did so. It proved an exhausting read, but sometimes, exhaustion can be a price worth paying.

Before I go on to put together my personal impressions – for that’s all these blog posts of mine are – I should direct the reader’s attention to some other very perceptive posts on this novel in other blogs. In no particular order:

A Commonplace Reader

Serallion

Wuthering Expectations

Six Words for a Hat

Tredynas Days

(Please do let me know of any others I have inadvertently omitted, and I shall add them.)

I have gained much understanding from these blogs, and, in what follows, will be plagiarising without acknowledgement many of these bloggers’ ideas and insights.

Now that these preliminaries are over, let me dive in again – this time, to try to make some sense, hopefully, of this massive work. And I suppose I should add here what is known as a “spoiler alert”:

*** SPOILER ALERT: The following inevitably reveals some aspects of the plot of La Regenta ***

***

I once formulated a theory that characters in Russian novels have souls, but characters in French novels don’t. It seemed quite neat to me at the time, even with the modification I had almost immediately to make, to the effect that when Russian novelists do create characters without souls, they are shocked by their soullessness – in Gogol’s case, sufficiently so to draw attention to the fact in the title.

But a little more thought convinced me that I had best shelve my theory – at least, before someone brought up Andre Gide’s La Porte Étroite, or François Mauriac’s Thérèse. The problem is, I think, that I tend see Flaubert as an exemplar when it comes to French novelists, and easily forget that not all French novelists were so uncompromisingly cynical. But, for better or worse, when I think of the French novel, it’s Flaubert who comes first to mind. And although La Regenta is a Spanish rather than a French novel, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary seems to me to be stamped all over it.

This is not a very original observation. Indeed, it often seems that Alas had deliberately set out to invite comparisons with Madame Bovary. Once again, we have the central character, a woman, married to a ninny and suffocating in a provincial town; we have the townspeople – empty, vapid, pompous, shallow, trivial, self-regarding, venal, tedious, dull, corrupt – all depicted with great cynicism, and, frequently, a quite savage irony; and once again, we have a central plot involving adultery – adultery as a much sought-for release from all the frustrations of daily tedium, but which, inevitably, ends badly. The presence of Madame Bovary in the background can hardly be ignored, and Alas must, indeed, have been aware of it.

But of course, this is no mere re-run of Madame Bovary: that would have been pointless. For all the apparent similarities, there are significant differences – in the narrative technique, in the characters’ psychologies, and also, I think, thematically.

For one thing, this is a much longer novel: it is more than 700 pages in John Rutherford’s translation, and, if the print had been of a somewhat more reasonable size, I suspect it would have been nearer a thousand. This is the sort of length one would expect of epic novels – Les Misérables, say, or War and Peace; that so many pages are taken to narrate what is, in essence, a provincial and domestic story, the outline of which may easily be summarised in a few sentences, imparts to the reader – to this reader, at least – a sense almost of suffocation. We too seem, like Ana, the regenta (judge’s wife) of the novel’s title, to be inhabiting this endlessly tedious, soulless waste.

But one person, at least, does have a soul, and that is Ana. She is the only character in the entire novel whose soul is specifically referred to. In this, the novel is very different from Madame Bovary: there, Emma was as empty and as vapid as all the others, and the terrible irony was that her rebellion was every bit as shallow and stupid as that she was rebelling against. Here, in contrast, Ana really does have a soul, albeit a soul that is parched and empty; and she is in search of something – she barely knows what – that would provide her soul with sustenance.

But there seems to me to be an uncertainty here – an uncertainty that Alas carefully leaves unresolved. What really is the nature of Ana’s religious yearnings? Is it a mystical longing, or mere hysterical religiosity? Is it a search for spiritual grace? Or could it be that it is but a sublimated form merely of sexual desire? Could the cynicism of the narrator (whose voice may or may not be the voice of Alas himself – we can never be quite sure) extend so far as to see Ana’s spiritual yearning, and, by implication, all spiritual yearning, as no more than a craving for sex – an essentially animal craving that we dress up in fancy clothes to convince ourselves of our essential seriousness?

This was not, I think, among Flaubert’s concerns in Madame Bovary, but it seems to me here a major theme. This entire novel is drenched with a sense of often quite raw sensuality, which is all the more potent for being repressed: a glimpse of an ankle, the outline of a female form apparent behind a dress – the slightest thing, indeed – is enough to set off the good people of Vetusta into the most febrile imaginings, the most prurient fantasies. Don Alvaro Mesia, the local Don Juan, is celebrated and looked up to for his many conquests. In one particularly distasteful scene, Don Alvaro tells admiring members of the town’s gentlemen’s club of one of his many “seductions” – in reality, nothing short of rape. And how the assembled gentlemen of the club all lap it up! Physical sex, sensuality, is the focal point of all their aspirations, all their yearnings.

Amidst all this prurience, all this salaciousness, Ana’s spiritual yearnings and passions – generally regarded as a bit unseemly, as “overdoing it”, and, despite the example of St Teresa, as something not really appropriate for a lady, and a judge’s wife at that – may well be a yearning for something more beautiful, more uplifting. But the nagging suspicion persists that, at bottom, it may be nothing more than the same desire for physical sex that everyone else in the town seems to feel. Married to a man much older than himself, who does not sleep with her, and who treats her as a daughter rather than as a wife, Ana is, sexually, deeply frustrated; and, during that brief period when her sexual desires are satisfied, her spiritual yearnings seem altogether to disappear. But Alas – or his narrator, should the two be different – refuses to commit himself on this point. Perhaps because there can be no definite answer to this: the wellsprings of human motivation are, after all, obscure.

If it is at least possible that Ana mistakes her physical desires for spiritual yearnings, there is no doubt that Don Fermin, the canon theologian, makes the same mistake. He is introduced as proud and ambitious, strong, powerful, and virile. But he takes his calling seriously enough not to break his chastity. (At least, not with Ana: women from the lower orders- maidservants and the like – are fair game.) When he becomes Ana’s confessor, he falls head over heels in love with her: indeed, he becomes quite besotted. But he convinces himself, and convinces Ana, that theirs is a “spiritual” union. He is grossly mistaken. When Ana betrays him to form a less-than-spiritual union with Don Alvaro, the canon theologian’s reaction, too,is less than spiritual: it is, indeed, quite volcanic. Here, again, Alas’ fictional world diverges from Flaubert’s: the eruptive force of Don Fermin’s fierce passions has no place in the world of Madame Bovary.

The third member of the triangle here is, of course, the lover, in this case, the experienced “seducer” – and, indeed, rapist, as rape counted as “seduction” in this proper and moral society – Don Alvaro. He is a “man of the world”, as they say; Ana, on the other hand, has led a very sheltered life, both before and after her marriage. Once Don Alvaro gets the opportunity, he knows precisely what to do to get her into bed, to convince her that in him she would find the true object of her aspirations, her desires. She is putty in his hands. It is an expert seduction, to be sure, and how ironic it is that so high-minded a lady as Ana, so demure, so far above the salacious gossipmongering and sexual flaunting of the other ladies, should fall for someone such as Don Alvaro. But fall she does, and to Don Fermin, the sense of betrayal is earth-shattering: his entire being, which he had invested in Ana, collapses; his belief that he had with her a “spiritual union”, disintegrates. He could not have reacted more violently had he been her husband.

It is unusual to have a love triangle from which the husband is excluded, but the husband here, an elderly retired judge, seems almost completely sexless. Even when presented with evidence of his wife’s infidelity, he seems almost incapable of summoning up the passion that he knows he should, under the circumstances, feel. His interests lie elsewhere – in hunting, and in classical drama, from which he would delightedly recite the most passionate of lines, without being able to feel any of that passion himself in his real life. It would have been easy to have turned him into a mere comic figure, but, despite the unremitting cynicism of the narrative, he emerges – to me, at least – as curiously sympathetic: he is a man so immersed in his own little world, and so unthinkingly happy in it, and so utterly blind to anything outside it, that when that outside world intrudes into his own, he is lost. A nincompoop he may be, but this judge, so helpless because he is so incapable of judgement, does, I think, arouse more pity than disdain.

So this, then, is the story, and a fairly simple story it is too. And yet, it is of epic length. Indeed, I can think of many a novel whose content may be described as “epic” that are, nonetheless, much shorter than this.

The length is accounted for, I think, by the meticulousness of Alas’ approach. Not for him to give a rough impression of the town Vetusta (a fictionalised Orvieto), or to drop suggestions into the reader’s mind and leave it there: he has, meticulously, to bring the entire town to life, detailing its streets, its social institutions, its citizens, and give them all weight and solidity. And he delves into his characters’ minds – what they think, what they feel, how they view themselves and each other. Even minor characters do not escape his detailed scrutiny.

Of course, he knew that he was risking writing a very boring novel: it cannot be an easy thing, after all, to depict tedium without being tedious oneself. And in his constant use of irony – it is impossible to ignore the influence of Flaubert here – he further risks alienating the reader from the characters: irony, after all, invariably distances. But, although the novel is (or, at least, seemed to me) frequently suffocating, it is never dull. The sense of suffocation is, I think, deliberate: it is not enough to be told of the sense of suffocation felt by Ana – we have to experience it also. But tedium is kept at bay by the sheer polish of the writing, and by the vitality he manages to inject into even the most insignificant of the characters. Flaubert managed to make his readers interested in even someone such as Félicité (“Un Coeur Simple”), a character whom, in real life, we’d probably find too dull to want to spend much time with; Alas has the same ability to arouse interest in characters who, in real life, are likely to arouse in us little but a sense of tedium. And, to be entirely honest, I’m not quite sure how either Flaubert or Alas pulls this off. But it is fascinating to see them do it.

The first of the two halves into which the novel is split is virtually all expository. The exposition is what we need to know for the story to make sense, and most writers try to get it out of the way as soon as possible, but not Alas: for him, the exposition is not merely there to make the story intelligible – it is for him as integral and as important a part of the novel as is the central drama. For his interest here is not merely in the principal figures of the drama, but also in the environment they live in, and in others who share that environment. These three hundred and fifty pages of the first part take us through only three days, but Alas has no interest here in giving an impression of time moving forward: what momentum there is comes from a sense of mass rather than of velocity. What matters here is not a sense of the story moving forward, but of the realisation of an entire town, of an entire body of people inhabiting that town. Even at the end of that first half, at a point where a great many novels would already have run their course and ended, we are given a detailed flashback telling us of Don Firmin’s mother, his birth, and his childhood: we are still, in other words, in the exposition.

As I finished the first part, I couldn’t help wondering how the novel would progress in the second. Tchaikovsky once said of Brahms’ violin concerto that Brahms had built a good, solid plinth, but, instead of placing a sculpture on it, he had merely gone on to create yet another plinth. Although I have the temerity to disagree with Tchaikovsky on this point, that does seem to me as striking image. In the first part of the novel, Alas has, indeed, created an immensely strong expository plinth; but what was he going to put on top of it? Would his focus still be on mass rather than on velocity?

The focus does indeed alter in the second part, but Alas was too fine a writer to change gears too suddenly. But slowly, almost imperceptibly, the central characters and their drama become increasingly prominent, increasingly take centre stage. We find, to start with, that each new chapter, though beginning with some other set of characters, inevitably gravitates by the end towards Don Firmin, Don Alvaro, or to Ana. After a while, chapters begin with these figures, and they begin to stand out more strongly in relief from the others. The pace gathers slowly, but the cumulative effect, though still carrying more mass than speed, is tremendous. And the climactic section, prepared for so meticulously and over so long a span, does not disappoint: all the passions that had been simmering so long under the surface seem suddenly to explode. The effect is tremendous.

***

La Regenta would not have been possible, I think, had Madame Bovary not been written, but, despite the many parallels, Alas’ concerns are different from Flaubert’s. Where Flaubert shook his head sadly at the sheer futility of all human activities, and at the humanity’s desire to transcend the limits imposed by human stupidity, but its inability, because of that very stupidity, to do so, Alas was more concerned with spiritual aspirations in a doggedly unspiritual world, and with sexual desires in a society that, though fascinated by sex, represses these desires, so that eroticism degrades into mere prurience. And he wonders to what extent the two are indeed one and the same thing – to what extent our spiritual yearnings are but sublimated forms of our animal appetites. He is interested also in human passions that, however we try to hide them under civic structures and civilised customs, refuse to remain hidden. The result is a novel that is not, perhaps, the easiest to read, but is worthy to take its place amongst the finest products of a most illustrious literary era.

[8th October,2016: edit made to correct a misleading passage regarding the plot.]

26 Sep

Tony Harrison’s “Oresteia”

Posted by argumentativeoldgit in Drama, literature, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , .

Some verse dramas hold the stage in translation, but others don’t, and I am not entirely sure why that should be. Ibsen’s Brand and Peer Gynt, though both written to be read rather than performed, hold the stage magnificently in any number of translations; Shakespeare’s plays, too, even when separated from Shakespeare’s English, are successfully performed around the world in just about every language there is. And yet, despite many years of theatre-going, I have yet to see a performance in English of plays by Racine or Corneille, by Goethe or Schiller, or by Pushkin, that I would describe as dramatically compelling. It’s tempting to say that the fault lies with the translations, but I don’t think that’s the case: John Cairncross’ translations of Racine, for example, are, I think, magnificent; but while they compel the reader’s attention in the study, they seem to me less effective when it comes to compelling the audience’s attention in the theatre. These plays, in English translation, are often wonderful dramatic poems, but I remain unconvinced about their qualities as poetic dramas, and would hazard the guess that Racine and Corneille, Goethe and Schiller, Pushkin, etc., whose works are among the undisputed peaks of the western canon, were, unlike Shakespeare or Ibsen, greater poets, perhaps, than they were dramatists. But this is just a guess: unable as I am to read any of these writers in the original, I can’t, and don’t, insist upon it.

When it comes to ancient Greek drama, we have a further complication: not only do we have to negotiate translation into another language, we have to deal with dramatic conventions that are very alien to modern conceptions of drama. Once again, these works are compelling when I read them in the study, but less so when I see them in the theatre. In all these years, I have seen only one production of a Greek play that worked in performance – a thrilling production of Sophocles’ Electra, featuring Fiona Shaw in the title role, and directed by Deborah Warner: I saw this some quarter of a century ago now, and I still remember coming out of the theatre at the end, genuinely shaken by what I had experienced: it had the same sort of effect on me as I get from seeing a good production of King Lear. But as for all the other productions I have seen of Greek drama, they have generally fallen pretty flat. Maybe I have just been unlucky: maybe there have been many other productions as powerful as that production I’d seen of Electra, and I just happened to miss out on them; but, having been disappointed by so many productions over so many years, I can’t help feeling that these Greek tragedies, without dispute among the greatest of literary masterpieces, are best treated as closet dramas, to be read, much as we’d read, say, Milton’s Samson Agonistes.

Friends of mine who know Greek tell me that no translation comes close to matching the originals, but then again, they would say that, wouldn’t they? When one puts in effort into something, one wants to have something to show for it; and who, having put so much effort into learning Greek to the level where they can read Aeschylus or Euripides, would care to concede that plebs like me, who haven’t put in that effort, could appreciate these writers to the same level? I don’t dispute them, of course: I have no doubt they are right. However, I will insist that these works, even in translation, are profound experiences. I have, over the years, not only amassed but have even read a wide range of translations, explaining to guests who scan my bookshelves and wonder why I have a dozen or so translations of Sophocles that a man must have a hobby. And, since each translation is necessarily an interpretation, I find it fascinating comparing them, and trying to piece together from the different perspectives of the various translators something of what the original vision may have been like.

My most recent reading of Greek tragedies was The Oresteia of Aeschylus, in the translation by the poet Tony Harrison. Perhaps “translation” is not the right word for it: I argued in a recent post that the successful translator of poetry cannot afford to be too literal, since the literal meaning is but one of many things – and not necessarily the most important thing – that a translator needs to convey. And it can be argued that, beyond a point, so far is the translated version from the original in terms of literal accuracy, that it can no longer be regarded as a translation as such. Whether Tony Harrison’s version is too far from the original to be still considered a “translation”, I do not know: comparing with the other translations I have, he obviously takes far more liberties with the literal meaning. But it may be that he is closer to Aeschylus than the more literalist translators in some other aspects – the sound, say, or the nature of the impact made on the reader or the hearer. I cannot tell. What I can tell, though, is that his is by far the most striking version of these three plays that I have encountered. I do not mean that as a criticism of the others, but where the others are eloquent, polished, fluent, Harrison is rugged, abrasive, uncompromising, often relying on sound to convey the sense.

This may be demonstrated by a few examples. Take, for instance, the repeated refrain in the first great chorus. Michael Ewans (Everyman) renders it:

Cry sorrow, sorrow – yet may good prevail!

Robert Fagles (Penguin Classics) translates this as:

Cry, cry for death, but good win out in glory in the end.

Hugh Lloyd-Jones (university of California Press) has:

Sing sorrow, sorrow, but may the good prevail.

While Frederic Raphael and Kenneth McLeish (Methuen) go for:

Sing songs of sorrow, but let the good prevail.

Richmond Lattimore (University of Chicago Press), meanwhile, has:

Sing sorrow, sorrow: but good win out in the end.

Ted Hughes (Faber & Faber), like Harrison, himself a poet, does away with the repeated refrain altogether, rephrasing the essence of it in different ways each time it appears. And I think, comparing the different versions, we can see the essence: the line is in two halves – the first an expression of lament, the second of hope. But all too often in the translations, the expression of sorrow appears more potent than the expression of hope, leaving us with a slight sense of anti-climax. Presumably this is why Fagles has expanded the latter half of that line – to give it a greater weight. Harrison’s version, however, is very different from any of the above:

Batter, batter the doom-drum, but believe there’ll be better!

The differences are striking. Clearly, Harrison’s is not a literal reading, but what we get is by far the most forceful. “Batter[ing] the doom-drum” sounds far more active and energetic than merely crying or singing of sorrow, while “believe there’ll be better” strikes a note of defiance that I cannot find in any of the other translations. The preponderance of the hard “b” and “d” sounds gives the line a greater muscularity, and the near-rhyme of “batter/better” – the two words that that open and end the line – knits the two halves together. Whether all this brings the line closer – at least in spirit – to the original, I do not know, but it is certainly more striking than any of the others.

Throughout Harrison’s version, he uses alliterative clusters, compound words (as in German), words forced together almost with a violence, with the impact of the sounds and rhythms compensating for the lack of a clear syntax. For instance:

Calchas the clanseer saw into the storm-cause –
Artemis she-god goaded to godgrudge

The clans and the clanchiefs clamour for sea-calm
The god-sop that gets it makes their guts sicken

The cure for the stormblast makes strong men craven

Or:

A surge of choler and grudge sweeps over my spirit,
spitted on pain like a stabwound or spearthrust.
Drops like the spindrift spat off a seaswell
break from my eyes like the sight of this curl.

Or:

so men get gulled get hauled into evil
recklessness starts it then there’s no stopping

so a Father can take his own she-child take her
and kill her his she-child his own flesh and blood

The war-effort wants it the war-effort gets it
the war for one woman the whore-war the whore-war

a virgin’s blood launches the ships off to Troy

It is tempting to fill this post with further examples, but let us not try the reader’s patience more than is absolutely necessary. Suffice to say that all other translations I have read seem, in comparison, too refined, too polite.

In his illuminating introduction, Tony Harrison describes his attempt to find a poetic style and diction that could form an equivalent in English to Aeschylus’ verse, that would achieve, as he puts it, “both the weight and the momentum”, and mentions, significantly, Gerard Manley Hopkins, “a Professor of Greek, who achieves both the sweep and the grandeur I have always found in Aeschylus”. And he quotes two lines by Hopkins:

Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivelled snow
Spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deep

The critic D. S. Carne-Ross had asked “Does this not read like an inspired translation of some unknown fragment by Aeschylus?” To which Harrison replies:

Indeed it does, like an inspired Victorian translation, and I have always felt that Hopkins, with his clotted but never clogged or cumbersome line, and his thorough knowledge of Greek, had everything necessary to render a great translation of Aeschylus, except, perhaps … a feeling for the theatre …

Harrison himself was clearly aiming himself for the “clotted but never clogged or cumbersome line”, and I think he succeeded magnificently. As for how this will work in the theatre, I really do not know. This translation was commissioned by the National Theatre, and was performed there, under the direction of Peter Hall, in the early 1980s. I would have loved to have seen it, but I was back then a student in the north of England, and certainly didn’t have the finances in those days to come down to London. But something such as this demands to be read as well: without getting into that debate yet again on whether or not a play is better seen or read, experiencing it on the printed page was spellbinding. As with Christopher Logue’ magnificent version of The Iliad, this is great poetry in its own right.

With this translation, the work itself seemed, as it were, renewed: it was like seeing something familiar from a completely new perspective. (Which, after all, is the whole point of reading different translations.) I must admit, though, that I still find the first play of the trilogy, Agamemnon, the most compelling. Perhaps it’s the old story of Hell being more interesting than Heaven: the whole trilogy represents a journey from darkness to light, from Hell to Heaven (at least, a Heaven of sorts), and, as with Dante, it is Hell that makes the greater impact. (Milton, too, struggled to make God as interesting as Satan.) And the Hell that is presented in Agamemnon, once etched on the mind, is hard to erase. That long narration by the chorus of the sacrifice of Iphigenia; Agamemnon’s homecoming – where he is persuaded to trample the blood-red tapestries into his palace; Cassandra’s prophetic terror before the doors of the Argos, before she walks in to meet her death; Clytemnestra’s narration of how she killed her husband and his slave, and her imagining the dead spirit of Iphigenia in the underworld, greeting with a kiss her father who had killed her … these have long haunted my imagination, and will continue to do so.

In comparison, I find little in the subsequent plays that affects me anywhere near so powerfully. This is not a criticism of the work: it is, rather, a reflection of my own sensibilities, and expectations. In the second part, Aeschylus narrates how Orestes returns, and, with the help of his sister Electra, kills his mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover Aegisthus. This same story is told both by Sophocles and by Euripides in their plays, both titled Electra, but where the younger dramatists were more interested in the psychologies of the participants of the drama, Aeschylus seems to draw back from the individual characters, and focus on the larger moral pattern. And similarly in the last part, The Eumenides: the focus is not so much on the individual characters, but on the broader question of how we humans, blinded though we are with rage and maddened with blood, can emerge from darkness into light. This is clearly what Aeschylus intended, and this is, indeed, what lies at the heart of the trilogy as a whole, and it is but a reflection of my own personal preference that the psychological approach of Sophocles and of Euripides attracts me more.

But the larger moral pattern that emerges is, nonetheless, fascinating. Aeschylus dramatises the emergence of light in the darkness: from a Hell in which our passions and our instincts reign supreme, and lawless revenge but feeds upon itself, so that each act of vengeance is but a new crime that also cries out for blood, we are presented, by the goddess Athena, with a new way of ordering our lives – a new way rooted in civil discourse, legal institutions, consensus and compromise. In short, civilisation. But, however desirable that civilisation is, however preferable to the horrors of our instinctive bloodlust, it is simply not, for me at any rate, as dramatically interesting.

However, there is of course more, far more, than my crude summary above suggests. The emergence of civic institutions from the darkness of lawless primal urges should not, I think, be seen as something happening in time – i.e. it is not the case that one replaces the other over time: rather, the two co-exist, and will go on co-existing within our divided minds. The final acquittal of Orestes, and the subsequent torchlit procession of triumph, do not cancel out the slaughter of the helpless Iphigenia, or the elemental terror of Cassandra: such terror cannot be cancelled out, or banished, for they live with us still. And neither can the Furies be banished: Athena herself, at the end, incorporates them into the newly-formed legal system: no matter how civilised we may be, no matter how many curbs and restraints we may put upon our primal urges for the sake of being able to live together with what harmony we can muster, at the bottom of it all lies a terror than cannot be wished away – not even by a goddess.

But a step has been taken, an important step: the gods, who used to order mortals to commit acts of revenge – which themselves are crimes calling out for further revenge – have now delegated their powers and responsibilities to humans: it is now up to us to shape our morality, to determine for ourselves, through discourse and consensus, guilt and innocence, and treat both accordingly. But at the bottom of it all lies terror. We cannot do without terror. Even through the triumphant songs at the end, there sound the screams of Cassandra as she walks into the palace of Argos to meet her doom.

 

 

 

14 Sep

Lionel Shriver on identity

Posted by argumentativeoldgit in rant. Tagged: , .

Membership of a larger group is not an identity.

“Not identity politics again!” I hear you all moan.

Sadly, yes. But I won’t rant on about it this time. I merely wish to point any reader who may be interested in these matters towards certain things that have been said and written recently.

The quote above is from a talk given recently by American novelist Lionel Shriver at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival. It’s not that identity does not matter, but, rather, it is not something that is conferred on one merely by membership of a larger group. The implications of this seem to me important: one’s identity describes who one is as an individual; it is something that one forges for oneself. It is not mere membership of a tribe.

The whole speech was intelligent and eloquent, and, I think, well worth reading. However, not everyone thought so. Yassmin Abdel-Magied is amongst those who took offence. She makes the devastating observation that “Shriver’s real targets were cultural appropriation, identity politics and political correctness”, and explains here why she therefore felt compelled to heroically walk out:

As my heels thudded against the grey plastic of the flooring, harmonising with the beat of the adrenaline pumping through my veins…

Frankly, I am not so convinced that walking out is always seen as a political statement. If I am at a lecture and see someone walking out, I usually assume they’re going for a pee. But now that I know this was indeed a heroic political gesture, I suppose I should take it a bit more seriously.

For Abdel-Magied was by no means the only one who took exception to Lionel Shriver’s speech. From the opening line of this article, it seems there were others who also heroically walked out. So serious was the fall-out, indeed, that, “as a result of the backlash, Brisbane Writers Festival organised a ‘right of reply’ event”. Which is fair enough. People must always have the right to reply. Especially if they feel, as Abdel-Magied does, that

The kind of disrespect for others infused in Lionel Shriver’s keynote [speech] is … the kind of attitude that lays the foundation for prejudice, for hate, for genocide.

Blimey!

Then, yesterday, an article by Nasrine Malik appeared on this matter in The Guardian. The headline (not written by Nasrine Malik) tells us that “identity politics doesn’t deserve Lionel Shriver’s contempt”. The article itself, however, is somewhat more nuanced than the headline would suggest, although Malik is quite vehement in distancing herself from Shriver, and insists, as Abdel-Magied had done, that “cultural appropriation” is very much “a thing”:

It is very much a thing. It is, in fact, one of the most frustrating and complicated things to explain and justify to those who have the luxury … of living a life that no one, in the present or historically, has plundered.

I’ll leave the reader to determine what Malik means by having one’s life “plundered”, either “in the present or historically”. I can’t really make much sense of it myself.

Having distanced herself from Shriver, Malik goes on to make many of the points that Shriver herself had made. Her only point of contention with Shriver, as far as I can see, is that Shriver is not very “respectful”. The question of why culture – one’s own, or others’ – should automatically be entitled to respect is one Malik does not address. I’m afraid repeated insistence on “respect” reminds me of nothing so much as The Godfather films.

So there it is. I won’t repeat my own thoughts on the matter: I have previously banged on at length about literature and identity politics, and about the concept of cultural appropriation; and, since I am not a paid columnist, there seems little point in recycling old material when I have no new thoughts to add. I have also, fairly recently, commented on this crazy idea that literature is about “telling one’s story”, or of “giving voice to one’s experience”, or that the story one tells, the experience one “gives one’s voice to”, is necessarily representative of one’s group. In any case, if Lionel Shriver’s eloquence doesn’t convince people, I doubt mine will.

But does any of this actually matter? Could not all this merely be a storm in a teacup? May one not, in these matters, take the imperious view of Edmund Burke?

Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they are many in number, or that, after all, they are other than the little, shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour.

Sadly, no, I don’t think so. Thoughts that are prevalent make an impact on the real world. If we believe that we are defined primarily or even solely by our race, our religion, our gender, our sexuality, and all those other things that seem so essential to proponents of  identity politics; if we believe that we cannot grow and develop, and move away, should we so want, from the various features allegedly pre-determined for us by the circumstances of our birth; if we feel it wrong to absorb other cultures, or for people from other cultures to absorb ours; then the walls we build around ourselves are more than merely walls of the mind.

Last year, I was troubled when a diversity officer (sic) at a students’ union in Britain organized an event which white people were told not to attend. Now, I read that California State University in Los Angeles is offering racially segregated accommodation to its students.

Racial segregation. In the name of liberalism.

I fear we ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

 

 

POSTSCRIPT (added 14th September, 2016, 17:15 BST)

I just read a post on this matter on Kenan Malik’s blog Pandemonium. Amongst other things, he says:

The Festival organisers removed from their website links to Shriver’s talk, while also organising a ‘right to reply ‘session with, among others Abdel-Magied and the Korean-American author Suki Kim.  Lionel Shriver was not at this session because it was deliberately organised at the same time as Shriver was speaking, promoting her new novel The Mandibles. There is something more than a little ironic for a festival of writers to remove from their website the keynote speech at the festival because some objected to it, and to organise a ‘right to reply’ while both ensuring that the speaker being replied to cannot attend and removing the speech which is being replied to. The Festival seemed less concerned with opening up debate than with assuaging hurt feelings.

I had not known these details when I wrote my post above, and decided to add this postscript, as I felt these details are of interest. I’d like to add also that the whole of Mr Malik’s post is well worth reading.

POST-POSTSCRIPT (added 16th September, 2016, 15:35 BST)

The links to Lionel Shriver’s speech have now been restored, and the Festival Organisers blamed their temporary unavailability on a technical glitch. The New York Times have corrected their article to reflect this, so it is only right that I do the same.

 

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