Assessment time

We had a take-home exercise to complete by tomorrow to round off this semester's unit on Literature and Cinema.  The questions were released on Friday.  I didn't particularly like any of them but I chose the following (Question 4, on irony).

“Irony was a fundamental feature of ancient tragedy and the view of life it inspired, yet it may be argued that some modern literary or cinematic genres – such as the mystery or the thriller – are similarly motivated by an ironic sense.”  Discuss in terms of one cinematic and one literary text.

Oedipus the King - Sun.Ergos Company, Alberta

I chose Oedipus the King and Brazil.  I finished the essay this afternoon around five o'clock.  It came in at 1,640 odd words, less than 10% over the limit so I shouldn't be marked down for that.  I think it's a decent essay.  Here's how it ends.

Gilliam’s ending to Brazil may be read as an ironic commentary on, or rejection of, the didactic certainties of Aristotelian tragedy in general and Oedipus the King in particular.  When Sam’s escape fantasy is revealed as such, Helpmann remarks “He’s got away from us Jack” to which the torturer replies “I’m afraid you’re right ... He’s gone.”  In that moment, Sam, the hero of the melodrama that is Brazil, attains the psychological oblivion, release or escape denied to the tragic hero Oedipus.




In his valedictory address to the Chorus blind Oedipus asserts that:

… had I known a way to choke the springs
Of hearing, I had never shrunk to make
A dungeon of this miserable frame,
Cut off from sight and hearing; for 'tis bliss
to bide in regions sorrow cannot reach.

Brazil - Sam Lowry escapes

Sam Lowry’s escape into the imagined paradise of his personal Brazil reaches that blissful region free from sorrow Oedipus craves.  Both texts depend on irony to lead the audience to their different conclusions.  The tragedy by Sophocles offers catharsis and the possibility of moral improvement or learning.  Gilliam resists didactic certainties and by means of ironic questioning of the ways in which genres raise expectations he de-stabilises generic conventions to reach an ambiguous, unsettling conclusion that invites us to re-read and re-appraise both the text and ourselves.

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This is how A Penance ends

Funeral of Hercules: Hans Sebald Beham, 1546

       And yet, be sure of this: though I am nothing,
and cannot move a step, yet I will punish
her who has done this deed. Let her but come:
she will discover and proclaim that I
in death, as in my life, destroyed the wicked.

Sophocles, Trachiniae

There are seven basic plots

This is where it starts (maybe): a story that might become a book called A Penance (or something drawn from that idea)

But before Amphitryon reached Thebes, Zeus came by night and prolonging the one night threefold he assumed the likeness of Amphitryon and beddedwith Alcmena¹ and related what had happened concerning the Teleboans. But when Amphitryon arrived and saw that he was not welcomed by his wife, he inquired the cause; and when she told him that he had come the night before and slept with her, he learned from Tiresias how Zeus had enjoyed her. And Alcmena bore two sons, to wit, Hercules, whom she had by Zeus and who was the elder by one night, and Iphicles, whom she had by Amphitryon. When the child was eight months old, Hera desired the destruction of the babe and sent two huge serpents to the bed. Alcmena called Amphitryon to her help, but Hercules arose and killed the serpents by strangling them with both his hands.² However, Pherecydes says that it was Amphitryon who put the serpents in the bed, because he would know which of the two children was his, and that when Iphicles fled, and Hercules stood his ground, he knew that Iphicles was begotten of his body.

Appollodorus: Book  2, Chapter 4, Section 8
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2,000 words ... at last!

Spike finished her essay on memory and technology today ... at looooooooooooooong last (and just a teensy-weensy bit late).  But it's done and it's a more than decent job.

We've talked about its content quite a bit as Spike read articles, chapters in books and pages on the web.  I reacted instinctively against assertions that new technologies are degrading our human capacity for personal and collective memory.  I thought "bullshit" and "Luddites".  It's always wearing to read cultural Cassandras bemoaning some new fangled thing and the loss of some idealised (never extant) golden age.  I accept that change can be unsettling but just because  technology advances that doesn't necessarily mean we're going to Hell in a handcart (as some guy called Huyssen seemed to suggest).  Get with it man.  We're human.  We forget.  it's part of the condition (a position I was glad to see endorsed by some uber-smart American cultural theorist by the name of Wendy Chun).  God, think how ghastly the alternative could be: to never forget; to remember everything?  No thanks.

Huyssen's wailing conservatism made me think of Derrida For Beginners an excellent introductory text from the late 1980 by the Pluto Press.  It re-told in the inimitable graphic novel style of that series Plato's record of Socrates' discourse on the new technology of writing.  We were going to Hell in a handcart way back then as well.  (It took a user of writing to pass on the mad-Greek's nonsense but I'm sure Socrates and Huyssen would have us skip lightly over that little irony).  I mentioned this to Spike.  I think it helped.

Here he is then, in a translation from The Phaedrus.  A brave, brilliant man it seems.  One who was prepared to die on a point of principle.  But clearly, on some questions, daft as a brush.  Socrates:

At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. 
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First essay finished ...

This essay will show that it is essential to The Aeneid, an epic poem extolling piety and duty, that Dido’s love is fired by how a dutiful man behaves (rather than tells his story) so that the destructive consequences of demonstrably gendered disregard of duty, and female defiance of male authority, lead inexorably to the collapse of self, State and the operation of law, order and good government.

1200 words.  It's a start.

Aeneas and the Harpies

Book III of the Aeneid.  I have an essay to write about Dido's love for Aeneas.  This evening, however, we've not yet reached the end of our hero's long re-telling of his misadventures after Troy fell.  (Although it's a long re-telling it's nothing like as long as the tall tales told about Odysseus, which are - from time to time - ponderous.)  When we reached Strophades and the Trojans set about the "sleek lusty herds of cattle grazing the plains, / flocks of goats unguarded, cropping grassland" I was on the side of the Harpies to be honest.

It may be that there are "no monsters on earth more cruel, / no scourge more savage" than Celaeno and her sisters.  But Aeneas must have known to whom those cows and goats belonged when he started hunting them down.  Sometimes, one despairs of these epic heroes.  As Homer (Simpson) might say: Harpies?  Doh!

Aeneas and his companions fighting the Harpies.  Francois Perrier (1646-47)

Stand By Me

Taking a break from The Aeneid, we watched Stand By Me (which Spike had not seen before).  I had forgotten about 'barfaramma'.  Locked into some Classic texts (as I currently am) I watched the movie and couldn't help thinking of The Odyssey Book XI and The Aenid Book VI: Odysseus, Aeneas and Chris Campbell visiting the dead.  It may not be entirely correct to say that there are no new stories to tell but it's certainly easier to identify variations on well-worn themes.
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The Odyssey

I finished The Odyssey today (E V Rieu's prose version).  First thoughts?

For an ancient text it has a complex structure.  There's certainly a beginning, middle and end but not necessarily in that order, which puts the claims of postmodernists somewhat to shame.  There is a movie-like structure - open in Olympus - cut to Ithica to follow Telemachus for 4 books - cut to Calypso's island and follow Odysseus as he leaves, battles Poseidon then strikes land to meet Naussica - long flashback as he tells the tale of his troubled return from Troy and the loss of all his men - then follow his meandering return to Ithica where he loiters in disguise, testing everyone, before the gothic horror of the slaughter of the suitors and the happy ever after with Penelope and Laertes.

That and Odysseus is definitely not a modern hero.  He's not all that likeable really (Telemachus may be the only decent principal character in the whole tale).  Odysseus is devious, cunning, vain, egotistical, arrogant, quite often staggering obtuse, verbose, irritating and a bully who behaves very badly at times (but only if you assess him through modern eyes).  The way he sets up the slaughter of the Suitors then executes his plan is murderous rather than heroic ... in modern terms.  But he's not a modern hero and his story is not a modern story. It's not even a story about the relationships between human actors (mostly showing interest in the affairs of men).  It's a classical Greek morality tale about what constitutes the proper and improper relationship between men and the immortal gods.  So the slaughter in the banquet hall is righteous vengence and divine retribution for the folly and immorality of the Suitors and the twelve unfaithful maid-servants.  There were quite a few times while I was reading of Odysseus' exploits that I had to step back to remind myself he is heroic in an entirely different way to the cotemporary world's heroic ideal or archetype.  But even now, having finished the text and sitting here writing this I still react against his decision to string the great bow then shoot an arrow through the neck of a man lifting a two-handled goblet of wine to his lips in a room whose doors have been secretly locked by the bloke with the big bow and arrow.

I read the verse version next month. Maybe the poetic structure will create the distance I need between me and my 21st Century tendency to judge in humanist terms.
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The Book Of The Dead

Like the breath of an ancient story whispered
down through the ages of men who wonder
at the mystery of a life lived unfulfilled,
the sound of your heart beating in its chamber
reminds us of the half-clasped hope, held
once with certainty but now less surely so;
loosened by too many doubts and questions
left unanswered by misadventure's twists
and turns taken on this rumbustious journey
we never sought to set out on, though it persists
as we did once, despite the odds, against all
logic, common sense and evidence before us.
But we can do no more or less because we are
still frail and foolish men called ever from afar.
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It's all the fault of women, apparently

I read Book Three of The Iliad this evening: Paris, Menelaus and Helen. The text lead me to some pages in Wiki concerning the judgement of Paris. I vaguely recalled the phrase but not the story behind it. Reading the summary in Wiki, I had an 'aha' moment ... so that's what led to the Trojan War. It wasn't simply (or at all) that Helen was fickle, favouring Paris on her wedding night to Menelaus. Helen, I now understand - although maybe I knew this but had forgotten - Helen was the bribe offered by Aphrodite to Paris given the task (by Zeus) of choosing "the fairest" at a feast on Mount Olympus. The prize to be awarded by Paris was the golden apple - aka the apple of discord - thrown into the mix by Eris, the goddess of Discord, who had not been invited to the banquet by Zeus. So it's all the fault of women, except if Zeus had been more attentive to the needs of everyone none of the mess would have happened at all.
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Agamemnon's dream

Book Two of The Iliad today. The latter half, known as the catalogue of ships, is (to say the least) challenging. Basically it's a long list of ancient Greeks' names and just as long a list of ancient Greek places - principalities, kingdoms and cities - most of which are difficult to pronounce and some impossible. And there are the Trojan leaders and places too. I guess the listings meant more to Greeks around 400 BC when the oral tradition, the need to recite great works in public was at its height. Still, I ploughed through it. One must.

The opening sequence was enjoyable: capricious Gods, evil Dream whispering in the ear of a vainglorious Agamemnon, the rush for the boats home as he tests his men and the efforts of Odysseus to rally the troops. They do feel real, those Kings and Generals of Greece. Agamemnon, proud but brave, a nincompoop at times; Nestor the toady, arse-licker; sulking Achilles, loyal Odysseus. As for the gods? One of the most appealing aspects of these epic tales is that the gods are such capricious, scheming, untrustworthy and devious actors in their own rights; a warring family who fight the petty battles of Mount Olympus often like bored, impetuous, spoiled children. You would think that Agamemnon might have known better than to trust the words of Dream. He'll learn (too late).
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The Quarrel by the Ships

Sitting at home, bathed in the warm sun of a Spring Saturday, I was gripped by another of my periodic moments of self-doubt about writing. You know the sort of self-destructive, poisonous thought ... I'll never amount to anything, never produce anything worthwhile, never be published, etc, etc. All of that's probably true but none of it manages to kill the desire.

Ditch the ego, just write ... said Halimah (years ago). I try but every now and then again I wonder, write what? How?

So, I spent a while today wandering the Internet looking for something, not sure what; a spark of genius, inspiration maybe or an easy answer (of which there are none). I did, however, come across this piece of useful advice (from Stephen King). "If you want to be a writer you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot." It's hard to resist the obvious.

It seems like a good idea, therefore, to go back to the beginning (so to speak). That explains the hour or so, probably more, reading aloud book one of The Iliad in a translation by Ian Johnston

Good old Homer, then: my saviour. Maybe. Maybe not. At least I'm writing something, even if it's no more than this blog entry about how I'll never amount to anything as a writer.
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Ovid

The Creation of the World

Of bodies chang'd to various forms, I sing:
Ye Gods, from whom these miracles did spring,
Inspire my numbers with coelestial heat;
'Till I my long laborious work compleat:
And add perpetual tenour to my rhimes,
Deduc'd from Nature's birth, to Caesar's times.
Before the seas, and this terrestrial ball,
And Heav'n's high canopy, that covers all,
One was the face of Nature; if a face:
Rather a rude and indigested mass:
A lifeless lump, unfashion'd, and unfram'd,
Of jarring seeds; and justly Chaos nam'd.
No sun was lighted up, the world to view;
No moon did yet her blunted horns renew:
Nor yet was Earth suspended in the sky,
Nor pois'd, did on her own foundations lye:
Nor seas about the shores their arms had thrown;
But earth, and air, and water, were in one.
Thus air was void of light, and earth unstable,
And water's dark abyss unnavigable.
No certain form on any was imprest;
All were confus'd, and each disturb'd the rest.
For hot and cold were in one body fixt;
And soft with hard, and light with heavy mixt.


The beginning of Book 1 from the version translated by Sir Samuel Garth, John Dryden, et al
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