Features
January 2002
a blurred vision: Gottfried Benn's prose Dylan in Elysium the mantra of the cliché - Northrop Frye's "Anatomy" Mommsen on Euripides a museum-piece at best - "Njal's Saga" pretentious - Polkinghorne's "Belief in God in an Age of Science" September 11. 2001 the latest outbreak of tolkienitis
Does anybody remember the Senate's first session after the atrocities? The chaplain had chosen for his opening prayer a string of rousing sound-bites from the prophets of the Old Testament. (I shall never forget his triumphant look after he had finished his delivery.) Subsequent speakers used a notably different tone, but without stretching it, for a moment I imagined the terrorists speaking a very similar prayer before their murderous assault. Does nobody pay attention?
The Bible reports how Hebrews had invaded Canaan. Cities of the native population, daring to resist their summons, saw their males put to the sword without distinction. Neither repentance nor conversion would shield the rest from the inevitable holocaust. Not a single creature was to be left alive. And should a gallant and aristocratic spirit, like King Saul, attempt to break this cycle of violence, there would be a "man of god" to make his life miserable. Subsequently Judaism spawned Christianity and Islam. Both faiths adopted the concept of "Holy war." Jesus and Mohammed took turns to pronounce their intentions:
"I am come to send fire on the earth, suppose ye that I am come to give peace? I tell you, Nay" (Lk. 12:49, 51)! "The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and expel from his kingdom all which do iniquity, and cast them into a furnace of fire" (Mt. 13:41). "For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and a man's foes shall be of his own household. He that loveth father or mother and son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. (Mt. 10:35-37) "From henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three. (Lk. 12:51-52) Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came to send a sword (Mt. 10:33-37)." "But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father" (Mt. 10:33-37).
"Surely Allah will gather in hell the hypocrites and infidels" (Koran 4:140). "Those who disbelieve, We shall make them enter fire" (Koran 4:56); "like dregs of oil; it shall boil in (their) bellies" (Koran 44:43-58). "Fight, till strife be at an end, and the religion be all of Allah's" (Koran, 8:38). "Do not take your fathers and your brothers for guardians if they love unbelief more than belief; if your fathers your sons and brethren, your mates and your kinsfolk are dearer to you than Allah and His Apostle, then wait till Allah brings about His command: and Allah does not guide the transgressing people (Koran 9:23-24). "Therefore seize and kill them wherever you find them" (Koran 4:89). "Those who reject Our communications are the companions of the flame" (Koran 5:86).
It is all there. "The terrorists' directive,
... to kill Christians and Jews, to kill all Americans, ... including women and children,"
is far from being:
"a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam, ... that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics." (President Bush in his Congressional address).
Mohammed says:
"The sword is the key to heaven and hell. A drop of blood shed in the cause of God, is of more avail than two months of fasting and prayer. Whosoever falls in battle, his sins are forgiven."
It could be much worse, if fewer people would observe moderation in their faiths, but this moderation is not received from scripture. In Sunday school and Mosque, the faiths continue pumping their intellectual sewage into the minds of the uninformed and immature. When Lk. 19:27 says:
"Those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me,"
then the right reverend Matthew Henry explains it to mean that those who not submit to Christ's yoke, shall be dealt with as his enemies and
"inevitably be ruined by the wrath of Christ." *)
For obvious, but not necessary good reasons, political cant and the media remain coy before the fact. In the name of tolerance and a fragile status quo with forces of darkness in our own backyard, we refrain to make the right use of the first amendment. We rather not know the history of two millennia of deliberate and relentless assaults on culture and human lives by the two faiths. Religious upbringing and the preposterous pretense to absolute and exclusive truth have kept civilization under siege for millennia.
Personally I never ascribed to the sentimental tenet of cultural equality. It was not such a bad thing to see the British empire impose an universal standard of legal accountability. Gandhi operated the way he did, because as barrister at His Majesty's bar he knew his options; the response of the colonial government was predictable. It is called rule of law. But imagine the same Gandhi facing a different system, say under Stalin, or a clash of cultures with his own Islamic fellow-citizens. No, don't imagine! Reality is already a step ahead: 4,000,000 refugees crossing the border between Pakistan and India, trains filled with uncounted dead, and the Mahatma killed by an assassin.
In the ongoing war against drugs, "God-intoxication" is the most dangerous drug of all and still freely available over the counter. The towers of the WTC fell victim to the religious concept of a god-given right to obliterate any dissenter. Every progress in public health, education, the sciences, had been accomplished in the teeth of organized hostility from various religious camps. The losses to learning, literature and art had been horrendous.
"War," says Clausewitz, "is politics by different means." We have the war; we know the Jihad's political agenda. Western values and democracy are totally rejected, because it is felt to undermine Islamic culture. What are our objectives? Do we know where we are going? If not, the land of the free will soon be short of tall buildings. And every fallen tower will mark the grave of another liberty. The lights are dimming. The future on this planet is either secular, or our species has no future at all!
[All quotes are abbreviated.]
* It has repeatedly been brought to my attention that the sentence in Luke is drawn from a parable and therefore has to be seen in its "merely metaphorical" context. But this doesn't change anything at all, on the contrary: as a little story with a moral it has been put in a concrete circumstantial setting: the situation when Herod the Great's rule had passed on to his sons. I fail to see how this possibly could blunt the edgy statement? It is a reference to the common expectation of the imminent end of times, it attacks the credentials of Herod's successors as insufficient and it is a veiled hint at Jesus' own aspirations.
© - 1/12/2002 - by Michael Sympson - all rights reserved
the latest outbreak of tolkienitis Tolkien "Lord of the Rings," and "The Fellowship of the Ring."
As we left the cinema I apologized to my company that I had taken her through the ordeal of LotR. I found it a chore to sit out the film ("thin on story," said my sweetheart) I found it even more of a chore to read the book. But telling so to a tolkienist can provoke a surprisingly emotional outcry. Suddenly some perfectly nice people pronounce from the top of their lungs: "A book that changed my life!" "The best film of all times!" Excuuuse me! "Cinema Paradiso," "The Life of Brian," "Fellini's Satyricon," "Blade Runner," "Schindler's List," hey "Lawrence of Arabia" for crying out loud, "Patton," "12 angry Men," "The seven Samurai," "Doctor Strangelove," "Lady Killers," "Apocalypse Now," "Amadeus," Peckinpaw's "Billy the Kid," "Once upon a Time in the West," "Berry Lyndon," "Catch 22," Pasolini's "Decamerone," "Titus," and scores of films which I remember though I would have to dig for the title (the salespeople flick with Al Pacino and Jack Lemon and a half dozen other top billing actors in the cast) - have they suddenly vanished from memory? Been obliterated? Never existed? It can be a spooky experience to come home and the key doesn't fit the lock while nobody around seems to have noticed anything unusual.
Tolkien's own claims were modest enough. He denied any "allegorical significance or contemporary political reference" and as for "the inner meaning or 'message,' it has in the intention of the author none." LotR was composed "at intervals during the years 1936 to 1949" and published in 1954. Tolkien was a noted scholar on medieval literature and especially fond of the "Kalevala." He made no secret of it. At times the tone mimics the voice of a storyteller from the nursery: evil words not to be spoken but in a whisper, ancient languages not to be divulged to the profane ear, quick glances from beneath bushy eyebrows. The narrative ploy of withheld information, or the right word passed on at the wrong time or to the wrong person comes a bit too often. Tolkien certainly had more fun in drawing up his maps and inventing all those languages for his trolls and elves, then it was for me to slog through. If you postulate too many propositions up front, things become circular, and you pull out in the end only what already had been stipulated. Frodo went on a mission - so what? It went to nowhere, I didn't already know.
Tolkien had the advantage of a cushy academic position to bring bread to the table. So after dinner Tolkien could withdraw to his toy trains where he constructed, as tolkienists insist, an entire alternative world. And certainly, this is what good authors are doing! Whether they write "Anna Karenina," or "Madame Bovary," or "Swan's Way," it is all a mock-up to flesh out a fairy tale, no matter how closely it may resemble our familiar every day. The stuff of good imaginative writing is made neither from great ideas nor moral and political convictions. It is in the detail, and when it all comes together, the narrative begins to sing and the harmonies up high resound to the novel's intricate calculus of destiny. Endowing a hobbit with one or two endearing characteristics and sending the creature on a wild goose chase after a foregone conclusion (in terms of story and plot) is not quite the same as creating an ambiguous human being to the point that the protagonist appears to be shouldering the story all by himself and carries it boldly where no author has gone before.
Northrop Frye has pointed out that imaginative literature, not unlike math, is based on stipulated propositions. Hamlet is not about ghosts, but the ghost a stipulated prop to propel the story. Shakespeare was a wise man, he left it by one ghost and did not distract us from the story with an addition of sorcery. A "Midsummer Night's Dream" is a bit different, but, characteristically, a comedy. A real good fairy tale doesn't lose sight of the difference between the miraculous and the plausible. The angels in the bible still need wings or at least a ladder (Gen. 28:12). In Lucius Apuleius' ancient novel from 170 AD, which has lent its name to this webpage, the protagonist finds himself magically transformed into an animal and witches besmear their skin with potions, grow feathers and fly through the open window. But magic and witchcraft always come as the extraordinary event, the thing that is not supposed to happen. This is an old narrative convention and it is there for a good reason.
In his days E.T.A. Hoffmann (1775-1822) was more influential than Keats, Goethe, and Byron together. Hoffmann's thing was the intrusion of the magic world through the seams of the every day. It is not always clear how this is accomplished. Sometimes a carnival princess turns out to be a real princess - but where? In the dreams of an impresario for the comedia del arte? Or is she a refuge, living incognito in a small town in Tuscany, and surviving as a seamstress? Did Anselmus see his new employer stretch coat tails and fly across the river? Could it be Loewenhog is actually a silver thistle in search for his lost lover? Can a device from the king of the fleas really make you look into the mind behind your adversary's eyes? Who can tell? The man to whom this happens, is a bachelor in his thirties and buys every year a boy's world of toys as a Christmas present to himself. That superman has a second identity as a bungling news reporter is a ploy originally invented by Hoffmann.
E.T.A. Hoffmann was a child of the 18th century, he admired Lawrence Sterne. He also was a romantic. His stories and novels are a prank on the cold rationalism of the older generation. A teapot can pull a nasty face; a doorknob suddenly raise a snake's golden head and hiss at you. Magic happens, but unannounced and not as a matter of course. What may scare the wits out of the protagonist, barely rattles anybody else, who merely admires the craftsmanship of the door handle's polished brass. Magic occurs only to the simple heart of the bungling fool (an old cliche) who in the end will be rewarded for his meek existence with the robe and scepter of a prince of fantasy. Every writer of the period learned a trick or two from Hoffmann. E.A.Poe, Gogol, Victor Hugo, Balzac. The great Pushkin's "Queen of Spades" is a close adaptation of Hoffmann's original story, transposed from first person narrative to the third person.
Obviously all this has little to do with Tolkien's world, where magic is taken in stride, like in the nursery stories. "Fantasy" without the sustained ambiguity between the miraculous and the plausible is just fast food for the hasty reader. The stupid old fetish doesn't bite when you spit at it in the museum, but here it is supposed to save the world from - well from what? To me, the Manichean chess game between black and white magic, has always been particularly tedious. What evil? What good? The two sides are at each other's throat basically for rewards and lifestyles, sometimes even for the same reward and lifestyle. What's the difference? If I had to live in Middle Earth and could choose, I would emigrate. It is easy to be anti-civilization when Tylenol and central heating keep you comfortable. And isn't it strange how few people, even in good fiction, actually suffer from the flu? Sword wounds yes, but a simple cough? Or a toothache?
I mean, who in his right mind, will get himself in harm's way of a sword, even in the old days? These are cop-outs for the writer who lacks imagination and can't find an angle on pneumonia and consumption. Not that I doubt that unicorns exist! Five glasses of Jonny Walker Black Label work wonders, and I can clearly see the creature from my window. Incidentally, Lucius Apuleius and E.T.A. Hoffmann had been great humorists. So is Douglas Adams. By contrast, "SF" and "Fantasy" are serious business. The lack of humor can reach biblical proportions. To be a good writer should mean to write well, regardless of genre and subject matter. Kafka, Borges, Douglas Adams, even Mervyn Peake's "Gormenghast" trilogy is proof that neither "Fantasy" nor "SF" should be a license for bad writing. Tolkien's kind of "Fantasy" is a nostalgic take on barefooted yeomen, and the haunts of black magic. The book is anti-technology with magic doing the plumbing (I needed that last Xmas, my toilet was flooding), anti-economy, which is easy when gnomes and dwarfs work the mines for you (even a hobbit needs pots and pans), and anti-politics. Cute! Next!
© - 1/12/2002 - by Michael Sympson - all rights reserved
a blurred vision: Gottfried Benn's prose
Translating imaginative literature is not like translating for the United Nations. There are two major barriers: an unfamiliar language and unfamiliar conventions of style. The problem is to translate faithfully without producing something too outlandish to be acceptable for the English or American reader. Gottfried Benn's prose is sometimes hard to categorize - what the author calls a "story" or even a "novel," are extended monologues which easily flow over into his marginally more explanatory essays. At best we should think of it as a verbal collage, a prose poem in Rimbaud's vein, by one of the great linguistic geniuses in his own language. But under the glittering surface there runs a subterranean line of thought - or rather an obsession, one of Benn's pet-hates. It gives a powerful expression to the author's disgust with the empirical realism of modern science (written by an extremely well trained scientist) and also for a sentiment of disappointment with rationalism and neo-Kantian idealism. (Plenty of "-isms," sorry for that!)
During the 1920s Benn had a small but devoted following in France. He was credited to be one of the four major poets of his time in the whole of Europe. In his own country he was less appreciated, but still acknowledged as one of the leading intellectuals before 1933. Then came Hitler and Benn fell into the snare of his own irrationalism. Personally he found the vulgarity of the Nazis despicable, and he certainly was no anti-Semite, but he agreed on a particularly nasty point, little debated, if at all, that made him a Nazi-sympathizer even after 1945: Benn was a physician by profession, he had a profound understanding of genetics and at least since 1930 his work is laced with approving remarks on eugenic policies; policies which in the hands of the Nazis meant "mercy killings" of the mentally impaired and mandatory castration of carriers with hereditary diseases. Benn himself had a sister suffering from hereditary glaucoma and he was convinced that even his own family had to be cut off from the gene pool.
The result was Benn's very public commitment to the Nazis after 1933. It immediately ruined his international reputation and alienated him from most of his friends, of which many had been forced to flee into exile. However the new masters smelled a rat. Benn was too intellectual, too sharp, too "cynical" for their taste; his publications before 1933 contained passages which could be interpreted as "liberal" (read his essay on abortion) and lax on morals. Benn's unflinching view on the facts of biological life earned him the denigration of a "pervert and sodomite." As a doctor he was stricken from the list of general practitioners, who are entitled to write subscriptions under the national health insurance act - which was tantamount to a professional death sentence. As an author he was still able to publish until 1938; then official censorship put an end to his literary career as well. In 1935 Benn retreated into the army's medical corps, and survived the war as a colonel.
Except for the last year of the war he had always been appointed to the staff of the German High Command. In this function he produced a study on the causes of suicide. Had this study sent the wrong message, widows of war veterans could have lost their pensions, because their husbands had taken their own life. Benn knew this, and he argued therefore, that suicide is a completely spontaneous act, born out of a moment's despair. The widows continued to receive their pensions. After the war Benn regained part of his literary reputation, but he never recanted the views that made him commit his political boo-boo in the first place - a fact conveniently glossed over by his admirers. His early work betrays all the seeds and intellectual props which led to Benn's downfall, but Benn's dazzling rhetorics make it pass unnoticed under a veneer of an elitist art-philosophy. He often referred to Friedrich Nietzsche as his most important influence.
© - 1/12/2002 - by Michael Sympson - all rights reserved
a museum-piece at best "Njals Saga"
Narrative style, especially with a lesser talent, often is not more than a conveyor - only in essays and poems style is allowed to take the lead. In Icelandic Sagas, style is a bare bone conveyor, a burp between two draughts from the mead-horn. This might not always be the author's fault. There is an intimate relationship between style and technology. In the beginning people scratched on potsherds. The shards were small and the expression was terse. Later people began to impress little wedges on palm-sized clay cakes. The expression was still terse. Egypt introduced papyrus, reed-pen, ink, and inkwell (even the alphabet, before the public scrbes' professional snobbery turned to hieroglyphics) so one could expect to find the written expression to loosen up a bit.
Well, not exactly! In illiterate societies the redundancy of oral formulas had always been a means to assist the memory, but papyrus scrolls too could be a pain. An author would be very reluctant to go through the trouble of repeated unscrolling of sometimes 90 ft. of cumbersome papyrus, if he could help it. So for cross-references he would rather trust his memory and his style would amplify in some formulaic fashion and work with clauses that encapsulate summaries of his references. Then codices made it possible to turn pages marked in an index. The writing became terse again. Papyrus is brittle material, not very suited for quires. So forty sheep were needed to provide the parchment for just one handwritten copy of Sturljuson's collection of Icelandic Sagas. An expensive affair.
But this suited the tacit biker types from the polar circle just fine. They could anyway barely put two words together without getting into a brawl. And when they actually got into the spirit of it, it sounded like a laconic litany, full of slayings, of weddings, and accounting sheets on blood money. Oh, and genealogies; to break the monotony. Tons of it! So a saga's diction is terse and comes in simple sentences, either because it was in the nature of those biker types, or because it was expensive to write it down - in which case the 13th century editor deserves the credit. A typical saga doesn't waste time with descriptions and the characterizations are limited to curt quips.
It took another half millennium before it dawned on Gutenberg to bring together all the good stuff - alphabet, letters cast in metal, paper, and the staple of Mediterranean husbandry, the oil-press. In terms of style a new medium opened up to new forms of expression. In the process authors have become self-conscious and express themselves no longer in strings of redundant sub-clauses. Now it is more of an analytic tit for tat. Authors in France, during the age of Louis XV, used to draft their prose in verse - to weed out "poetic" redundancy and clear the phrasing. For the second time after Antiquity, prose had a chance to be an art-form ... it still could be, if our electronic age doesn't flush it down the telly-tubes.
Njals' Saga is undoubtedly a stepping stone on the way in the development of modern literature. But it is all about slayings and blood money and weddings and blood money and slayings and slayings and blood money and Hallgerd and slayings and blood money - oh, and genealogies! Tons of it! Heraclit got it right: war is the father of all innovation and we never step into the same river twice. But the Saga's violence is getting us nowhere and the never ending cycle of murder and retribution is of the same monotony at the end as it was at the beginning. The saga's lack of humor is of almost biblical proportions, except for the unintended kind. Embroiled in hacking and stabbing at his fourteen attackers and short of breath, Gunnar has nothing better to do than improvise a brand-new single for medieval Iceland's top ten.
I don't know about you people: I am writing on a computer and I believe in progress. Njals' Saga, like all the rest from old Norse, is overrated, a museum piece at best.
© - 1/12/2002 - by Michael Sympson - all rights reserved
the mantra of the cliché "Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays" by Northrop Frye
What ever your college teacher has told you, imaginative literature is not about ideas and opinions. What we look for instead is sensitivity, sensual quality, lucidity of image and thought, fantasy, and diction. It is a mode of perception and representation, the interface between the world and the author's temperament. In the beginning was the word, style and composition are of the essence and grand ideas are merely functional props to propel a story or the poetry. Great books need no external referent, they are alternative worlds in their own right. It is the critic's task to unlock these worlds and outfit the reader with the right gear for his own journey of discovery. It is not the critic's task to be the surrogate reader who substitutes his own generalizations for all the so lovingly crafted details a good writer has put into his work.
The Nobel-laureate Joseph Brodsky maintained that language and literature are more ancient and inevitable than any form of social organization. This might be. But there is such a thing as development and evolution, even in the arts. To define literature basically as a myth-building activity is a tat one-sided. In fact it was never really true: Homer dealt with the facts and fantasies of an already bygone era in the fashion of his own period. And when Aristotle in his poetics mentions the word 'myth,' he simply means 'story.' But a story is only the vehicle. The specific detail, the significant trifle, a disdain for generalities, attention to subtleties, curiosity for what lays beyond the mythological paradigm these are the hallmarks of genuine art and determine the quality.
From 1984 to 1992 I had been living in China, almost completely isolated from the Western world. When I came home I realized that I had some catching up to do. For instance the bookshops reserved separate shelf-space for "Gay & Lesbian," "Women's Fiction," and even something labeled as "New Age" a spooky term which seemed to have cropped up straight from Huxley's 'Brave New World.' I soon learned that it meant something very different and I realized that the late Northrop Frye, would have fitted in splendidly in this new age of bogus spirituality, bogus science, and bogus academia. In fact his disciples already have made it all the way to Hollywood. Today every film-script submitted is gauged by its compliance with the mythological structure that underpins the 'Wizard of Oz.' ... Wow!
Mr. Frye attempted to provide a sort of Cabala for the critical profession. He declared to ascribe to the laudable premise that the principles of criticism must arise from an empirical study of the texts themselves. Consequently Frye was never really interested in the author's voice as such. In fact he thought it ok to ignore authors altogether: never mind how carefully Proust has crafted his subtle structure of counter points and hidden references, never mind how original a multi-layered temperament may reflect on its perception this is just "lifeless text," we got to stuff the pastry, give me "proto-generic forms," give me "archetypes!" Let us bring it down to our own level of clichéd thinking and readily available formula. Shakespeare didn't mean to say that? In fact he wouldn't even have a clue what we are talking about? Who cares?! This is an exercise for our academic society of mutual masturbation. Not for people interested in Kafka.
So in Frye's scheme of things, Montaigne, or Marcel Proust, by default, wither on the fringes. So do Flaubert, Dos Passos, (is he actually mentioned at all?) Auden, T.S. Eliot, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov - "What's the use?" you ask, when you wrestle with deadlines and the daily task of 3000 printable words. Frye utterly lacks application. Armed with nothing but his typology you will never be able to recognize a talent when you see it. But of course if all you aspire is a parasitic career in academia on the bones of already dead poets - Mr. Frye is the man. Consequently, Frye summarily dismisses as insufficient and individualistic any honest effort to explore the specifics of a text. In his view, a long tradition of critical appreciation, which had begun with Longinus and found in Nabokov its most vociferous advocate, has barely a right to exist.
Frye was a pigeonholer. He wanted to classify and label. For him the world of literature since Aristotle hadn't moved an inch. When Frye divided his essay in four sections on 'historical,' 'ethical,' 'archetypical,' and 'rhetorical' criticism, or modes, symbols, myths, and genres, he made it look as if he deals with matters of great complexity, but it always comes down to the most general, i.e. emptiest, denominator. Of course Mr. Frye was neither stupid nor did he lack a certain turn of phrase. But a man of genius is able to frame this whole book in one aphorism. In "Kafka and his Precursors" Jorge Luis Borges first gave the example and then made the point that all this classifying is a product of hindsight. Suppose Kafka had died in his cradle, then nobody would ever see what Kierkegaard, Browning and Melville have in common. Good writing begins where the clichés end. Mr. Frye's book is a glorified 'Anatomy' of literary clichés. People seem still to build academic careers on this crap, and college teachers continue to regurgitate these "illuminations" to their students. It boggles your mind.
© - 1/12/2002 - by Michael Sympson - all rights reserved
Mommsen on Euripides from "Roman History" by Theodor Mommsen
"... at the same time like the Greek comedy, so did the Greek tragedy make its arrival in Rome. It was a more valuable and in a certain sense easier acquisition than the comedy. The foundation for a Greek tragedy - the Homeric epics - was not entirely alien to a Roman and indeed connected with his own etiological legends. Generally a responsive native could make himself much easier at home in an idealized world of heroic myths, than on the fish market of Athens. However, the tragedy as well, only not so blunt and without the vulgarities, advanced the anti-national and hellenizing trends, and it is of great importance, that the Greek stage of the era had been mostly dominated by Euripides (c.484-406 BC) This is not the place to discuss in great detail this remarkable man and his rather curious effect on contemporaries and on posterity, but the spirit of the later Greek and of the Roman-Greek period was influenced by him to such extent, that it makes it necessary to sketch out at least some of his basic characteristics.
Euripides belongs to the class of poets, who bring poetry to a higher level, yet their progress reveals far more instinct for what ought to be achieved, than actual powers of poetic execution. The profound expression, which ethically as well as poetically sums up a tragedy - meaning, that decisive action is identical with suffering - has of course been accomplished in the Greek tragedy as well; it shows the heroic stature of humanity, but its actual characterization is foreign to it. The unsurpassed grandeur, in which the conflict between men and destiny are carried out in Aeschylus's dramas, depends mainly on the fact that the struggling powers are conceived as forces of nature; the human element in "Prometheus" and "Agamemnon" is only lightly touched by a poetic presentation of the individual. Sophocles shows understanding for the condition of human nature - as king, as an elderly, as a sister - but the human microcosm in its universality he fails to show in even a single person.
A great aim had been accomplished, but not the ultimate: if compared with Shakespeare, it makes Aeschylus and Sophocles merely the imperfect stepping stones in a development, which presents the human condition in its totality, and weaves together each of the rounded characters into a greater poetic picture. Just how Euripides manages to show humanity as it is, represents more a logical and in some sense historical achievement, than progress in poetry. He brought the antique tragedy to an end, but did not create the modern play. Everywhere he came halfway to a halt. The masks - which translate the expressions of the inner life from the specific into the general - are as necessary for the typical tragedy in Antiquity, as they are incompatible with a modern character play; yet Euripides kept them in use. With a marvelously discerning instinct, because it never managed to give the dramatic element free reign or to present it in its purity, the older tragedy had the sense to bind itself to the vehicle of epic stories from the superhuman world of gods and heroes and to the lyrical chorus.
One feels that Euripides jerked his chains: in his stories at least, he went as far down as to half historical times, and his choral lyrics receded into the background; so much so, that in later performances they often had been left out altogether and hardly to the plays's detriment - yet he never brought his characters entirely down to earth nor did away with the chorus altogether. In every way and everywhere he is the comprehensive expression of an era, which on one hand, accomplished the greatest motions in history and philosophy and on the other hand clouded the purity and simplicity of national poetry. If the reverent piety of the older tragic playwrights, whose plays seemed to shine with an overflow from heaven itself and the enclosure of the older Greek's narrow horizon is still holding its satisfyingly powerful sway over the audience, then Euripides' world appears in the treacherous twilight of speculation, as far removed from divinity as it is a matter of intellect, and murky passions flash like thunderbolts from a grey cloud cover.
The old, deep felt faith in destiny has vanished. Now fate is ruling in all its appearances as a despotic power, and gnashing their teeth, its slaves shake the chains. The kind of scepticism which is the disguise of faith in despair, has found in this poet a voice of demonic power. By necessity, the poet never achieves a creative conception that would transcend his own capacities and he never develops a truly poetic effect from the composition as a whole. That is why in a manner of speaking, he appeared to be indifferent to the composition of his tragedies, even downright blundering, as he fails to center his plays around a plot or character. The slipshod way of introducing the plot in a prologue and resolve it by divine fiat or by similar crude means, had been Euripides' very own innovation. All his effects flow from the detail, and with great skill indeed, he has mustered every means to cover up the irreplaceable want of poetic totality. Euripides is the past master in the kind of effects which as a rule originate from the sensual and sentimental and often titillate the sensitivity with a peculiar perfume, for instance, of love stories combined with murder or incest.
In their own way, the presentation of Polyxena's dying on her free will, or of Phaedra who is secretly consumed by her pains of love, or especially of the mystically enchanted "Bacchants," is of great beauty, but it is neither morally nor artistically pure, and Aristophanes' observation that this poet would never be able to present us with a Penelope, is perfectly justified. Of a similar kind, in Euripides' tragedies, is the appeal to conventional compassion. His underdeveloped heroes appear to be disgusting or ludicrous, or both, like Menelaos in "Helena," Andromache and Electra as poor dairymaids, or the sick and ruined merchant Telephos. So plays which live more in a down to earth atmosphere make perhaps the most delightful impression of his many works and turn tragedy into a moving family saga and almost into a sentimental comedy, such as "Iphigenia in Aulis," "Ion," "Alcestis." Almost as often, but with lesser luck, the poet tries to bring intellectual interests into play.
That is what causes the complications in his plots, calculated not, as in the older tragedy, to move the mind, but instead to flex our curiosity. It gives reason for the pointed controversy of the dialogues, which is almost unbearably for the rest of us, who are not born in Athens. It explains the sententious sound-bites, which litter Euripides' plays like flowers in a display. And it especially opens the road for Euripides' psychology which is not at all based on immediate empathy, but a product of reason and rationalizing. His "Medea" is indeed cut out from real life, in as much as she had been sufficiently supplied with funds before her travel: of a conflict between motherly love and jealousy, the unsuspecting reader won't find a whole lot in Euripides. Most of all, the poetic effect in a tragedy of Euripides has been replaced by the tendentious and ideological.
Without actually commenting on immediate concerns of the day and quite resolutely focussing more on social than political matters, Euripides inner disposition in the end holds common ground with the political and philosophical radicalism of the period and makes him the first and foremost apostle of a new cosmopolitan humanitarianism, which resolves the old Athenian national values. For this reason, the irreligious and un-Athenian poet ran into the opposition of his peers, while the younger generation and foreign countries surrendered with a moving enthusiasm to the poet of sentimentality and love, of the smart sound-bite and tendency, of philosophy and humanity. With Euripides, the Greek tragedy overstepped its boundaries and finally collapsed: but the cosmopolitan poet's success profited from this even more, since simultaneously the nation too overstepped its boundaries and finally collapsed.
The criticism of Aristophanes might have been correct all the way, ethically as well as poetically; but in history the impact of poetry is rarely linked to its absolute quality, but rather to the extent it manages to anticipate the zeitgeist; and under this aspect, Euripides is without peer. So it eventually happened, that Alexander [the Great] did read him studiously, that Aristotle formed his definition of the tragic effect with Euripides in view, that in Athens the latest generation of poets and artists somehow referred to him as their model, that Athens' "New Comedy" is nothing but a transformation of Euripides into the comic genre, and that the latest decorations on Athenian ceramics no longer drew their ideas from Homer's epics but from Euripides' plays, and finally, when old Greek gave way to the new Hellenism, that the poet's fame and influence was more and more on the ascend and the Greek enclaves in foreign countries, in Egypt as well as Rome, found their new identity mainly under Euripides' influence. ... ."
by Theodor Mommsen, 1868 - © - 1/12/2002 - translated by Michael Sympson - all rights reserved
Dylan in Elysium "Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas 1934-1952" by Dylan Thomas (1914-1952)
According to Dylan Thomas' fans - I know a few - Shakespeare had slapped Dryden on his back with joy, when he saw Dylan entering Elysium. Elysium is a rather curious place, where mankind's geniuses must wait their time. Only after the last trace of his books here on Earth had been destroyed, a genius is permitted to enter the ivory portal to the bliss of oblivion. On my last visit Elysium looked like a cute medieval town, without electricity and plumbing, timber frames under steep shingle roofs and a restaurant with a view. Tourists would love to shoot pictures in the market place at the canopied well and the memorial plaque. It reads: " In honour of Caliph Omar, who ordered the books of Alexandria's great library to be burned in the public baths." There are other plaques and narrow but picturesque lanes hide colorful names like "Attila's Gym," or "Torquemada's Rotisserie," under ivy and clustering roses.
Unfortunately idle visitors are permitted only on rare occasions; their visas expire after 24 hours, and you better be dead before you apply. For dead poets, afterlife can be a long stretch. Many take on a job - Shakespeare owns the town's pharmacy and oversees the mint, Dante runs a poultry farm, and Dryden is the mayor's secretary. The mayor himself is a bald headed figure with a sweet expression under sunken eyes and has an unpronounceable name. Before the flood he had composed a cuneiform poem on clay tablets which by now should have safely crumbled to compost and dust. He had already handed over the town's keys to his successor and was on his way to the portal where his friends had prepared a farewell party. But Charles Dickens - the town-crier - caught up and informed the poor soul that some blithering archaeological busybody just had unearthed and restored the clay-fragments and even prepared to publish a translation. The man broke out in tears.
Very soon newcomers discover, that there is a sexlife after death, but once you screwed out your brains, what else is there left to do? The forests surrounding the town, are dense and infinitely wide. However the food is good. Marcel Proust is handing out leaflets: He and Oscar Wilde are joined proprietors of the only Restaurant in town. There is also a jail. It is filled only with publishers under the supervision of warden Thomas Jefferson, who, I am told, has completely reformed his opinions. If a genius feels like it, he can ask Mr. Jefferson for the key, and to his heart's delight beat up one of the prisoners. There are days when geniuses queue up in line and nobody yet has ever missed his turn. So doubtlessly Dylan Thomas is there too, I wonder whom he is beating up right now, but I am not so sure about the slap on Dryden's back.
© - 1/12/2002 - by Michael Sympson - all rights reserved
pretentious and verbose "Belief in God in an Age of Science" by John C. Polkinghorne
I have a simple question: can anybody show me a single scientific discovery that had been based on the hypothesis that there is a God? Just one? I am not talking about a scientist's individual belief - which can be anything, even to have a look into "the mind of God" (Hawking). No, I am talking about the procedure of going from a hypothesis to a mathematical model and then to the experiments which check on the predictions of the model and establish the facts that result from such trials. So, was there ever a hypothesis that included "God" in the master-equation and actually yielded science? Well? I am listening ... thought so. There is obviously a difference between actually doing science and the appropriation of science for screwed up metaphors, in order to rationalize the irrational urge to believe.
Recently I heard a "reborn" ex-scientist referring to the 2nd law of thermodynamics to "explain" her newfound faith in "creation." The law states, that in a closed system the amount of entropy increases to a point where all energy comes to rest in an equilibrium. So hot gas molecules in a closed chamber initially clump together and drift in clouds before they evenly distribute and cool down. From a state of lower entropy we progress towards maximum entropy. The 2nd law's application is universal and goes from steam engines to the entire Universe, it is the reason why time is running on a one way road. But everyday parlance, in a completely arbitrary fashion, likes to term the two states as "ordered" and "chaotic," meaning that over time there is a gradual increase of disorder.
Strange what the urge to believe can do to your faculties of reasoning. The reborn believer claimed compatibility of the 2nd law with the Bible account of "creation." I was puzzled. The 2nd verse of Genesis says: "the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep ... ," or as the Hebraic bible says, "everything was a tohubohu," a great chaos. Not a single notion of a state of order in the beginning. It seems, man just can't bear the thought to be a mere sideshow. In our egotism we require a God who is exclusively concerned with us; we would rather accept hell than our own insignificance. In Sir Winston Churchill's words: "... if there is no God and we are snuffed out like candles, then there is no point to anything. Therefore I believe ... ." Of course, an infidel's urge to disbelieve, could be just as irrational.
However, whenever in rare moments of intellectual honesty we squarely face the world, then all we can see is a cultivated patch of knowledge surrounded by ignorance, which, as it so happens, is the favorite playground for religious fantasies. I am not saying that science is the only path to intellectual and spiritual integrity. Marc Aurel's "Meditations" are a great testimony to intellectual honesty and humility in a pre-scientific age. My point is: we don't do science to find comfort, and who can claim to find comfort in the "truth" is a rare bird indeed. No true scientist and no true philosopher ever claims to possess a know-it-all panacea.
But religious doctrine does. That is its comfort and its lure; it unashamedly exploits the human weakness. Babies cry and thunder teaches praying, because as a species we either lack what it takes to cope with the facts of life on their own terms, or the modicum of intellect which grandmother Evolution has bestowed upon us, came for a price - the price of boredom. Bored minds try anything to fend off the bottomless void. Even an illusion, even religion! But science is science; if properly conducted, it does not depend on views and philosophies. Mr. Polkinghorne speaks for his own limitations not for an expansion into the realm of truth.
Dogma always knows where it is going, but religious doctrine still has to show that it would be willing to undergo an equally rigorous test of verification and falsification as the hard sciences and surrender the keys if it fails to pass. Till then I find little more than a haze of grand words, and little sense. In the end it all comes down to an old observation of mine: that even very good scientists usually make lousy philosophers. The question how the Universe came about is not really a scientific question, and skills are skills - although "how to treat spouse and kids, how to cope with pain and failure" are not, as a reviewer at Amazon seems to think, purely "matters outside of science."
And even if it were true, and if indeed "for literally everybody, skills of that kind are more important than scientific knowledge," it is not a substitute for "truth." Knowledge about the physical world is far from being at the most basic level - it can only be acquired after an ethical commitment to intellectual integrity, a very developed system of education, hard work, and exposure to a rigorous regimen of trials and checks. Truth doesn't come in candy wrappers and it is a sad fact that literally billions of the human race pass their lives without ever facing a basic truth on their own. Books like Mr. Polkinghorne's are poor and presumptuous substitutes.
© - 1/12/2002 - by Michael Sympson - all rights reserved