Theodora Elucubrare

I'm currently reading selections from the de Goncourt journals, which are, well, often casually misogynistic, but also a fascinating look into the literary world of 1850s Paris. The de Goncourt brothers are fairly clearly mediocre talents who hang out with better writers, like Flaubert, and the journals are full of clear attempts to be aphoristic, which often miss the mark. But then sometimes they come out with something like this:


all of which is very true and very depressing. It's a chestnut that it's easier to critique than to praise, but one that's always held very true for me. It's very easy to be dismissive of things that you don't like, and wonder how anyone could ever like them. Personally, I love tearing things down, especially when they're hilariously bad (see also: my post on the guy who was really into the Real Historical Merlin and really this whole tag) but I do try to stay with things that are objectively bad. And yes, I do believe in the concept of "objectively bad." The Merlin book, for example, has shoddy research and is clearly written from a parti pris.

"Objectively bad" is harder in fiction, obviously, and the distinction needs to be made between "I don't like it, but it's good," "I don't like it because it's bad," "I like it but it is bad (guilty pleasures)" and "I like it because it is good." The first category is the hardest to fit things into, I think, because it's easier to find faults in a work than in yourself. I think for me at least Kazantzakis' The Odyssey: a Modern Sequel falls into this category. It's beautifully written, or at least translated, and it's a pretty good imitation of Homer, but I couldn't finish it because I detested his characterization of Odysseus. I also have trouble with "I like it but it is bad" - I suppose Sword of Attila works, but I am willing to lower my standards for things that aren't supposed to be Great Works of Fiction. The prose is readable, the characters are decent (no heroes you want to shake out of frustration, no cardboard cutout villains), so I don't think you can legitimately call it "bad," just "not literature" - but it had no pretensions to being literature, so you can't fault it for that.

In fact, I think most of my guilty pleasures are just things that are low culture and not trying to be high: operetta, trashy fantasy novels, trashy historical fiction. Of course, it's possible to be bad even admitting lower standards: The Blending series, despite some gorgeous cover art is truly awful. The first sentence is "Lorand stood in the farmyard just at dawn, watching the sun rise like the great ball of Fire magic it was," and it just gets worse from there. The characters are awful, the world makes no sense, and the prose is terrible. It also shades into "so awful I like it," but that's another story.

On another note, it really makes me wonder when people praise the worldbuilding in "Europe with fantasy names!" books. Not when it's like, Generic Medieval Setting, which is annoying but can be tweaked to make it interesting (and to be quite honest, I don't really mind medieval fantasy, as long as you make an effort), but when it's actually, literally Europe but with different names. Like the Kushiel series, or Guy Gavriel Kay's Sailing to Sarantium. I liked Sailing to Sarantium, I really did (although not enough to read the second one, but that's partly because I was broke), but you can only really praise the worldbuilding if you don't know the first thing about Byzantine history. Like, the fact that there was a Byzantium. And I know people are, you know, less into Byzantine history than me, and don't know about the who Amalsuntha thing, but really, Kay takes most of his plot points whole from history. I'm not saying I hate the idea, although it does make me wonder why you can't just write a historical novel with magic, but it's not good worldbuilding.

So to be completely elitist, because I believe that is the whole point of this post, I do have more taste than you. Or well, not "you" you, but the general person.

Oh, look! It's my favorite things in one place: Phèdre and theory of translation!
( so of course I did a long analysis of it. )

We're putting on Hippolytus in Greek, as I may have mentioned once, and I just bought a copy of Racine's Phèdre, because I love it to bits and realized that I don't own it. So of course I'm thinking about both of them a lot. It's really a shame that the Racine is based on Hippolytus; it would be much fairer to it if I could read it alone and not as an adaptation of the Euripides. It's not that I like it less, only that I keep comparing it, and weighing the interpretation of the characters.

And it's sort of on this basis that I've decided Phèdre's weaker. The addition of Aricie isn't just "lame" because she has no character at all (which she doesn't); it would weaken the play even if she were the most dynamic character imaginable. It changes a conflict of ideologies, of Hippolytus' inflexibility against Aphrodite's power, represented by Phaedra, to a choice between two women.

That is to say, there is no possibility that Hippolytus will agree to the nurse's request that he take Phaedra as a lover. He hates women and loves his chastity. By creating a Hippolyte who loves a woman, Racine makes the opposition not between two life-paths, but the more normal, and thus if not less interesting, less extreme, choice between one woman and another. There are, of course, moral differences between choosing Aricie and Phèdre - Phèdre is still Hippolyte's step-mother and the wife of his father - but it's not the choice between absolute purity and sexual activity that Hippolytus is forced to make.

Both plays, of course, are products of their time. Hippolytus, like much of Greek drama and epic, warns against the dangers of inflexibility and stubbornness. (Of course, because if Euripides wasn't an atheist, he certainly didn't like the gods, Hippolytus is also about the impossibility of pleasing a goddess who would destroy a man simply for not choosing to follow her path. Even then, Hippolytus' crime isn't only not engaging in sexual activity, it's really the long speech about the evils of women. Without that attitude, he would be acceptable; but in that speech he shows that he doesn't just choose to abstain from Aphrodite's realm, he scorns it and hates it, which is always a bad move.)

In any case, products of their time. Euripides treats subjects that Greeks were accustomed to see in the theater; Racine writes the story that a 17th century French audience wants to see - a love story, couched in the specific and formulaic language of the French Classical theater. Racine could not have written a play with no love story; it was, like someone saying "hélas" at least three times, a requirement of the form.

For me the conflict between who Hippolytus is - a man who chose chastity and Artemis - and who Aphrodite, goddess of all that he hates, wants him to be is much more interesting than a love triangle. But they're not really comparable and perhaps shouldn't be; and yet I can't help it.

Paul Veyne's "Did the Greeks believe in their Myths" is one of the better books I've read lately,¹ although it didn't quite speak to what I wanted to know. Unfortunately, I think what I want to know is unknowable: that is, if you went up to the average 5th century Athenian and asked him "do you believe in Zeus? and if so, is the Zeus you believe in the same one who seduced Leda and Semele?" would he say yes.²

Since that's pretty much impossible to figure out, Veyne writes about the attitude of historians to myth - for example, Herodotus' essentially uncritical acceptance of the historicity of the Trojan War or Heracles. On the way, he hits some points that were really more interesting than his main idea (which was, I think, that the Greek or Roman historians could believe and not believe in the myths). For example, he notes that we as modern readers tend to think of the Athenians as a monolithic "cultured populace," which, if you think about it for more than a second, can't have been entirely the case.

I think we're using different definitions of "believe;" he speaks of "believing in" Madame Bovary³; I wouldn't use believe about a work that was created to be a fiction. I might believe that such characters might exist, but I hardly believe that Madame Bovary herself once existed in whatever miserable provincial town that novel's set in. For me, one believes in a god or a cause (but of course, "believe in" and "believe" are different). That is to say, I believe that the earth is round; I don't believe in God or studying for tests.

There is one point I disagree with him on, and it's not really central to his argument - that the Greek myths have no chronology. His analogy is "asking whether Zeus seduced Danaë before he ravished Leda is like asking whether Tom Thumb's adventures took place before or after Cinderella's wedding." That's hardly accurate: fairytales take place in what may in fact be the same world - surely its stock characters are the same - but they have no interconnectivity.

Homer, most likely drawing upon tradition, has Odysseus meet heroes in the underworld and Nestor speak of his time fighting alongside the great heroes of yesterday; thus, Oedipus and Theseus must have had their existence before the Trojan War. As he mentions often, the Greeks made little distinction between history and myth (and if verifiable history was missing, a myth would do nicely); therefore, myth is a history, and as such has its own (mostly) internally consistent timeline.

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¹OK, it didn't have much competition; Nagy may be an expert in the field, but Pindar's Homer is bloated and uninteresting.
²He would probably say "what? and can I have five drachma?"
³He is also amazingly and adorably French the whole way through. He also talks about the "voluntary blindness of husbands and parents."*
*Speaking of "adorable," he quotes his child as saying "Papa, so all the houses aren't already built?"

Anthropology is hard.

Anyway, there's always a question, to me, of how conscious the average person is of the "deep inner meaning" of rites - and if they're not conscious of it, is it really there? For the most part, the anthropologist is a foreigner, and even when he's not, they're better educated than the people he's studying. And so, he's not a part of the community, and looks at things they do every day from an analytical point of view.

I'm sure we do things - being afraid (but, and this is another problem, it's often less "afraid" than "aware of the fact that it is a noteworthy event") of black cats, perhaps - that a foreign anthropologist might think were terrible meaningful and important, but I would say, Oh, I just do it because I always have.

That doesn't necessarily make the custom invalid (although that is a very infelicitous phrase), but I don't think that one should base the idea of the current society on the rites practiced.

(This made even less sense than I usually do, because I have no idea what I'm talking about!)

So, I had my first experience of La forza del destino last night.
( Why two work and one doesn't )
In sum, oh, Francesco, you used to be the one who didn't write terrible libretti! How could you do this to me?

Because it's summer and I have nothing better to do, I've been fixing some of the gaping hole in my knowledge of history. Admittedly, the way I'm going about it involves reading the first book at the library with an interesting title, but it's better than nothing.
( Historical Thoughts )