A rather confused article on the othering of violence; it's adapted from an upcoming book and I don't think that it really works in this condensed form. However, I'm looking forward to the book when it comes out: Bloodlust: On the Roots of Violence From Cain and Abel to the Present. I'm interested to see how he'll relate othering to the duel - assuming that the duel is covered, of course.
I have a review-in-process which should be up tomorrow evening, so stay tuned!
Showing posts with label theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theory. Show all posts
Sunday, 3 April 2011
Wednesday, 30 March 2011
Locke / The origins of duelling
My last entry had a very cross tone to it, which can attributed in equal parts to stress and Dryden himself. I wasn't making very good progress with anything he had written so I switched to reading John Locke. I am reading his Essay concerning Human Understanding and it is still challenging yet more enjoyable than Dryden. It's only partly a thesis-related text: it isn't directly related to my subject but his discussion of personal identity may yield some material that can be of use. At the very least, it will provide some perspective on the sort of things that people in the late seventeenth century were thinking about. I haven't read very far into the Essay yet; the abridged version is over four hundred pages long and I started right from the beginning by reading the OWC introduction by Pauline Phemister. I shall report anything of relevance to my research when I come to it.
I'm currently writing about the origins of duelling. Many critics seem to take it for granted that the duel was a direct descendant of the medieval joust, the idea being that young men of the late sixteenth century longed for the days of romance and chivalry, and that they incorporated the fashionable new rapier into semi-ludic displays of battles. I'm not so sure. It would be very odd indeed if a nostalgia for the joust persisted into the seventeenth century, simply because almost nothing else from the middle ages was remembered fondly during this period. It was only later, during the late eighteenth century, that we begin to see a renewed interest in medieval culture and romance - and, significantly, it is during this period that we can observe a decline in the popularity of the duel. While Tennyson was writing his Idylls of the King, while Macready was reviving King Lear, while the Camden and Early English Texts societies were being founded, duelling had fallen entirely out of fashion. One would think that if duelling were the relic, or at least a direct relative, of the middle ages, the Victorians would have embraced it and it would have a strong presence in the later nineteenth century. Instead, they turned to attempts at historical reenactment.
If anything, many seventeenth-century cultural fashions were deliberate steps away from the middle ages, back to the classical world. The heroes of plays and poems were classical, or came from the Old Testament; little is written of King Arthur or the Virgin Mary, both major characters in medieval writing.
We might also add that the joust was a formal, mercenary event, held in public and considered entirely acceptable during its time. It has more in common with the Roman gladiatorial combat, or even the modern football match. Duelling, however, was controversial from the outset. It was illegal, which meant that it had to be held in secret, and it was fought to settle a question of honour. If you found yourself being challenged to duel, it would mean that you had grievously offended someone (perhaps by calling them a liar or seducing their sister) and the only way to settle things was with a duel. There was also an extralegal element to duelling that is entirely absent in jousting; one fought a duel to provide retribution for a personal injury that the official law would not pursue.
My concern which follows this is why this method of settling things became so popular. To be continued!
I'm currently writing about the origins of duelling. Many critics seem to take it for granted that the duel was a direct descendant of the medieval joust, the idea being that young men of the late sixteenth century longed for the days of romance and chivalry, and that they incorporated the fashionable new rapier into semi-ludic displays of battles. I'm not so sure. It would be very odd indeed if a nostalgia for the joust persisted into the seventeenth century, simply because almost nothing else from the middle ages was remembered fondly during this period. It was only later, during the late eighteenth century, that we begin to see a renewed interest in medieval culture and romance - and, significantly, it is during this period that we can observe a decline in the popularity of the duel. While Tennyson was writing his Idylls of the King, while Macready was reviving King Lear, while the Camden and Early English Texts societies were being founded, duelling had fallen entirely out of fashion. One would think that if duelling were the relic, or at least a direct relative, of the middle ages, the Victorians would have embraced it and it would have a strong presence in the later nineteenth century. Instead, they turned to attempts at historical reenactment.
If anything, many seventeenth-century cultural fashions were deliberate steps away from the middle ages, back to the classical world. The heroes of plays and poems were classical, or came from the Old Testament; little is written of King Arthur or the Virgin Mary, both major characters in medieval writing.
We might also add that the joust was a formal, mercenary event, held in public and considered entirely acceptable during its time. It has more in common with the Roman gladiatorial combat, or even the modern football match. Duelling, however, was controversial from the outset. It was illegal, which meant that it had to be held in secret, and it was fought to settle a question of honour. If you found yourself being challenged to duel, it would mean that you had grievously offended someone (perhaps by calling them a liar or seducing their sister) and the only way to settle things was with a duel. There was also an extralegal element to duelling that is entirely absent in jousting; one fought a duel to provide retribution for a personal injury that the official law would not pursue.
My concern which follows this is why this method of settling things became so popular. To be continued!
Thursday, 24 March 2011
Dryden
Allied with Milton eventually but am now hopelessly struggling with Dryden. His Conquest of Granada is impossible, but again, I should read it as it was one of the crucial heroic plays that were so frequently parodied later on. It has a vaguely Achilles-like main character and starred Nell Gwyn and I hate it; that is about all I have to say about it. However, Dryden also provides an introduction on the subject of heroic plays which I've tried to read. He writes of the classical authors:
Is he agreeing with Aristotle, that heroes should be flawed but still inherently right? I think he is, although perhaps not as emphatically. Lord, he's exasperating.
They made their heroes men of honour; but so, as not to divest them quite of human passions and frailties: they content themselves to shew you, what men of great spirits would certainly do when they were provoked, not what they were obliged to do by the strict rules of moral virtue.
Saturday, 19 March 2011
Poetics
I took Aristotle's Poetics to work today, another relic from my time as an undergraduate that I didn't recall very well, and I ended up hitting upon several interesting passages. Poetics is of course a deconstruction of epic and tragedy in classical literature and has exerted a powerful influence over western dramatic criticism that cannot be overstated; I could hardly not read it.
What I found most interesting is Aristotle's assertion that tragedy reflects the lives of people better than those around us. To simplify his argument, the tragic model depends on disaster befalling good people. He goes on to write:
It occurred to me that this description of the ideal tragedy was in fact what irked critics of both epic and tragedy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Aristotle's proposal that the tragic subject should be innately better than real people in spite of any flaws they possess cannot be reconciled with the principals of Commonwealth and post-Restoration societies, which were partly acting in response to Christian idealism. For many critics, Milton and Dryden among them, a perfect (or even superior) hero could not be synonymous with a flawed hero; the flaws provided an insurmountable obstacle to achieving perfection or superiority. Why should an irascible, lazy character be superior to those surrounding him?
I think to most modern readers this sounds a reasonable complaint so perhaps it is surprising how relatively recently it arose. This objection had seen some light in earlier centuries - Odysseus appears in Dante's purgatory undergoing punishment for crimes of fraudulence during the Trojan war - but it was during the seventeenth century that it first appeared with frequency. Reaction then was variously Miltonian, as I began to discuss in my previous entry, or comic (Behn, Dryden, and later Fielding). Note also that it was here that the lines between epic and tragic began to blur.
I couldn't comment conclusively on how the dilemma was resolved in nineteenth-century literature but it seems to me that the later twentieth century saw a revival of the classical model of the hero who is flawed yet still superior to his fellow men. For example, the action-men heroes of the late 1970s through to the early 1990s (Rocky Balboa, Max Rockatansky, John McClane, Costner's Robin Hood, Martin Riggs) are don't respect authority, are anti-intellectual, lack conventional manners, and perhaps use a native slyness to win the day; nevertheless they are invariably innately better than the characters who surround them and it is they that the audience cheers for. There are of course variants (Indiana Jones is an obvious example of the intellectual action hero) but the formula is generally the same. Like Aristotle's description of the tragic subject, these epic heroes are painted as they are, as everymen, but made better-looking - given, in short, a kind of intrinsic nobility that real everymen don't possess.
But I'm getting side-tracked. I don't believe that Aristotle addresses the conflict between superior and flawed heroes later on in his Poetics - I'd be very surprised if he does, in fact - but I'm interested to see what else he has to say. So far it has been an enlightening read.
What I found most interesting is Aristotle's assertion that tragedy reflects the lives of people better than those around us. To simplify his argument, the tragic model depends on disaster befalling good people. He goes on to write:
Since tragedy is an imitation of people better than we are, one should imitate good portrait-painters. In rendering the individual form, they paint people as they are, but make them better-looking. In the same way the poet who is imitating people who are irascible or lazy or who have other traits of character of that sort should portray them as having these characteristics, but also as decent people. (Poetics, 8.1, trans. Malcolm Heath, Penguin 1996, p.25)
It occurred to me that this description of the ideal tragedy was in fact what irked critics of both epic and tragedy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Aristotle's proposal that the tragic subject should be innately better than real people in spite of any flaws they possess cannot be reconciled with the principals of Commonwealth and post-Restoration societies, which were partly acting in response to Christian idealism. For many critics, Milton and Dryden among them, a perfect (or even superior) hero could not be synonymous with a flawed hero; the flaws provided an insurmountable obstacle to achieving perfection or superiority. Why should an irascible, lazy character be superior to those surrounding him?
I think to most modern readers this sounds a reasonable complaint so perhaps it is surprising how relatively recently it arose. This objection had seen some light in earlier centuries - Odysseus appears in Dante's purgatory undergoing punishment for crimes of fraudulence during the Trojan war - but it was during the seventeenth century that it first appeared with frequency. Reaction then was variously Miltonian, as I began to discuss in my previous entry, or comic (Behn, Dryden, and later Fielding). Note also that it was here that the lines between epic and tragic began to blur.
I couldn't comment conclusively on how the dilemma was resolved in nineteenth-century literature but it seems to me that the later twentieth century saw a revival of the classical model of the hero who is flawed yet still superior to his fellow men. For example, the action-men heroes of the late 1970s through to the early 1990s (Rocky Balboa, Max Rockatansky, John McClane, Costner's Robin Hood, Martin Riggs) are don't respect authority, are anti-intellectual, lack conventional manners, and perhaps use a native slyness to win the day; nevertheless they are invariably innately better than the characters who surround them and it is they that the audience cheers for. There are of course variants (Indiana Jones is an obvious example of the intellectual action hero) but the formula is generally the same. Like Aristotle's description of the tragic subject, these epic heroes are painted as they are, as everymen, but made better-looking - given, in short, a kind of intrinsic nobility that real everymen don't possess.
But I'm getting side-tracked. I don't believe that Aristotle addresses the conflict between superior and flawed heroes later on in his Poetics - I'd be very surprised if he does, in fact - but I'm interested to see what else he has to say. So far it has been an enlightening read.
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