I’m having huge ethical problems with alchemy. Alchemy as I understand it is the attempt to bring a material object to its telos or final physical form (aka gold usually) by spiritual processes or whatnot – basically that alchemy requires the purity of soul of the alchemist in order to bring about the purest form of the object. Yes? But fundamentally this seems to be attempting to mess with God’s creation by changing something that God has created and giving it a new or better form, almost as if trying to ‘fix’ what God didn’t make perfect in trying to make it perfect. But being not God, should humans ever have attempted that, and in the very attempt isn’t that somehow latently say that one was assuming that God had made a mistake? Or even further, wouldn’t it be the height of hubris to assume that one could be a successful alchemist, or that successful alchemy could be done by anyone other than Jesus, since humans are all sinful and thus lacking in the perfection required to bring objects to their telos? I know that they conceived of the world in distinct levels or hierarchies of creation from something like a stone all the way up the sphere of the angels, but where do we get off thinking we can actually move something up the spheres? Isn’t even the really legitimate, non-fetishizing attempt to perform alchemy in a sense idolatrous? Would it perhaps work better to look at all the different forms of metal that one finds on the earth and assume that they are all there in varying states of perfection as a sort of reminder that all souls exist in varying states of perfection?
Alchemy was being held up as a sort of recourse against the monetary/financial view of gold, viewing the financialization of gold as being fetishistic, whereas for alchemists gold is merely the outward material sign of a more spiritual form of perfection.
Donne – Songs and Sonnets/Holy Sonnets/Satire 3:
Donne is particularly concerned with love between souls rather than between bodies (sex) in his poetry. For him, love is expressed as a meeting of souls – this particular conceit finds itself in ‘the Good Morrow’ or ‘Air and Angels’ where Donne goes to extremes (especially in the latter) to make sure that the love he expresses is not physical, or at the very least doesn’t have its origins in physicality. Sex then seems (however rarely it really happens explicitly) to be merely an extension of this contact between souls. ‘The Flea’ is a great poem, as the poet exclaims how wonderful it is that both of their blood is now contained within this one insect, and that it has accomplished without consequence what for them may very well result in pregnancy. The genius of this poem is that his mistress then heartlessly crushes this creature he’s imbued with such significance. This he manages to turn into an excuse to have sex – if she hasn’t damaged them physically by killing something that has their blood and power in it, then surely she shouldn’t worry so much about her reputation being ruined by having sex with him. Love for Donne is largely an ecstatic force – something that brings him outside of his body, and his lover outside of his/hers (having flipped through the Enigmatic Narrator), and he seems to draw pictures of the lovers quite often, encased in each other’s arms or staring off into space and enjoying being together, rather than focusing on actions or words. Love is thus the communion of souls, rather than the joining of bodies (although that may happen as well), and is interesting in comparison to Rochester, who looks entirely to the physical and experiential aspects of relationships, but seems entirely unable to love, or at least to consummate a sexual relationship with one he has fallen in love with. For Donne, sex and love seem to go together naturally and much more comfortably. Donne also doesn’t seem to have hated his life as much as did Rochester… Donne also runs into problems when dealing with the increase or decrease of love. This seems to point to some sort of valuation of love that in a world of Platonic love he is uncomfortable with, though it reminds me quite a bit of one of the first dictums in the Art of Courtly Love which quite clearly states that love is always increasing or decreasing – love is always valued in a sense, and that value is subject to constant change based on the actions and emotions of the lovers – Capellanus then continues by explaining the various emotional games of jealousy, etc., that one can play in order to help increase the other’s love. Capellanus was, however, not even remotely interested in Platonic love, focusing much more strongly on erotic love between adulterous couples.
The other major strain in Donne’s poetry is religious. He experiences a crisis of faith (and/or not a crisis per se, but a problem with religion in politics). The Holy Sonnets are largely a response to his position of faith, as it Satire no. 3, which is an attempt to persuade people to decide upon matters of faith in rational ways, as opposed to just basing their faith on the faith of their fathers. Donne at times doesn’t seem entirely comfortable with his jump to Anglicanism – there is speculation that he converted due to political pressures - as a Catholic, he would be unable to advance in politics or in the court scene, and he seems to desire very much to be active in the court scene (one reason I saw for this is that this desire to be a part of the court comes from the major success and influence at the time of Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier which was very much in vogue at the time). One major worry seems to be (especially in Sonnet 5) whether or not it is too late to ask forgiveness for his rather flirtatious past. He also seems often to picture God as the Old Testament God – he mentions floods and plagues and the like, and it may be because of that picture that he worries so much about the possibility of salvation. He occasionally pictures his relationship with God as that of lovers – nicely medieval of him – and at times demands that God court him/that he court God or that God come and force him away, imprison him, or enthrall him as the only possible means by which he might be saved. Borrowing from Hawkes, for Donne, alchemy is something for God to practice on human souls, as their time on earth is time for God to help bring those souls to their perfection – presumably this would happen through the grace that Donne seems perpetually unsure of.
Herrick – ‘A Farewell To Sack’ is probably my favorite poem of the bunch. He turns the sherry he’s talking about into something approximating a combination of God and the Muses, which has power to make him creative and to complete him – it is his ‘soul to body’ ‘man to woman’ etc. – this all seems rankly idolatrous and really entertaining. The farewell itself is interesting in that it seems to understand all the flaws in his conception of the sherry, and is thus bidding it goodbye because he knows himself unable to deal with it in a moderate, natural fashion. The “Welcome to Sack” figures sack as a lover he’s dismissed in order to make the love between them grow (another trope used, however far removed, in the Art of Courtly Love). The idolatry of the former poem is renewed here, and celebrated as illustrious, and the union of himself and his beloved sack is treated in rather the same way the combining of blood is treated in Donne’s ‘the Flea’ – very much as a combination of the souls and blood of lovers.
Then we have the ‘carpe diem’ poems, which either point to a brief and fleeting moment of youth and beauty, or in the case of “Corinna’s Gone a-Maying” seem to have much more to do with enjoying a fun time in the brief moment that leisure time is found – there is also a sensuousness to his description of nature that further implies the seduction that seems to be at the heart of every good ‘carpe diem’ poem. ‘The Bad Season’ on the other hand points to the time after the heyday of fun, the misery that accompanies it. He doesn’t even really look back on the memories with enjoyment, but posits instead what he would do were the opportunity available to him to enjoy his life, and otherwise sits in moroseness. One would hope he enjoyed his time as much as he sent out to in the carpe poems… the general sense of sadness and repose in seclusion seems to be the hallmark of post-Charles-execution poems of cavalier tradition during the interregnum.
Lovelace – ‘the Grasshopper’ Combines a bit of the ‘carpe diem’ spirit of enjoyment the grasshopper has in summer with its ability to make happy all things around it and the idea that people should enjoy life when the opportunity presents itself like the grasshopper does, with the idea that happy moments and days don’t last – as in, grasshoppers die in winter – so when winter happens one should lay one’s store in with one’s friend – the poem at this point turns to a celebration of Platonic friendship, figured as the way in which people in adverse times can survive them. Through the bonds of such friendship, the participants need nothing outside of it, and thus can surmount everything – he counts this friendship as more important than the reality of the events outside the home and hearth, and that happiness comes from the feelings the friends can create in and with each other, rather than from the external world.
Denham – ‘Cooper’s Hill’ Denham seems to believe in divine right of rule, and thus imbues kingship with unalienable right to power by the one God has chosen (sloppy way to write that). He uses words to create new meanings, so that something like Cooper’s Hill can be a floating signifier that he can pin down with whatever meaning he wants – if successful, the Hill can be transformed into Parnassus, a transfiguration that would imply the poet’s almost god-like power over signification. WWMT? (what would Milton think?) He does a nice reading of St. Paul’s (recently restored) v. Chertsey Abbey (decaying due to Henry VIII) , which he would have say that Charles is a religious stronghold, rather than the hypocrite that Henry turned out to be shortly after being awarded the ‘defender of the faith’ title. That St. Paul’s is associated with Anglicanism is also helpful in that it shows the king to be a Reformer rather than a relapsing Catholic. Windsor is also mentioned, as is the court at York, both of which correlate to the idea that it is the king (or the presence of the king) which creates a court and gives it meaning. Charles is described as the height of perfection in a king in uniting both military might and piety, which works back into the idea of Charles as king as divinely ordained, militarily great (he is figured as Mars) and pious (through the Order of the Garter), the oppositions which create a strong and ideal king. The end of the poem is a dire warning against the populace and Charles going for opposite extremes – in the violence he creates he seems to envision the whole of the horrors of the Civil War before they happen.
Rochester - Ad lib as necessary. Talk about the poem 'Signoir Dildo'...
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Summer!!!! will come eventually
Prompted by an email from Mom, I got to thinking about this summer - something I haven't really been doing because everything after May 4th pretty much doesn't have meaning to me yet. So here's plans so far:
- May 9th-13th: Kalamazoo, MI - Intl Medieval Congress - roadtrip!
- Some point after that late May - Alan coming to visit
- June 7-10th - Tony's cousin Christian's wedding (to a Melissa, comically enough)(and free!!) - roadtrip to Bangor, Maine
- June 24-July1 - Visiting Jackie and Jay - Florida!! We were going to roadtrip with Tony's Mom and Aunt Carol, but evidently tickets are only about $167 from ABE into JAX, and it's a two hour drive to Tallahassee from there, so we're evidently maybe going to fly. (either way, just found out that's also paid for!!)
- July 17th - Harry Potter movie #5 (I should double check date)
- July 21st - Harry Potter 7 comes out (Alternate YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY and BOOOOOO sad -it's the last one)
- July 23rd-mid August - Going home!! - Once we get Potter finished, we're hauling ass to KS via I-70 - part of my insane self thinks that Tony and I should just try and do it all in one day. As according to mapquest, if we go the most direct route, it's *only* 18 hours or so and we wouldn't have to deal with Chicago traffic, which is what made last year's trip so heinously long... and we'll be playing fun with wedding planning!!
- July 25-29 (to be confirmed, but almost definite) Tony's parents are coming out to KS and want to check out rehearsal dinner places. Tony's Mom really wants to hit Lydia's.
- August 27th - hell (school) starts again
The rest of the summer will be devoted to sleeping off exam stress, dancing, wogging, grilling, working on a publication or two, and spending enough time with the kitties to apologize for all the time we'll be leaving them. The most ridiculous thing is that even with all this traveling, most of the expensive stuff is being taken care of for us, so it's going to be a cheap summer for Tony and I - when we're actually in Bethlehem, we're not planning on doing too much other than hanging out mostly at home. So I think we'll be okay with finances and everything else, and everything should be good. Though I'm still going to see if I can get some online tutoring or something, because I feel like I should do SOMETHING decent and we'll be gone so much I couldn't do weekly appointments.
But at least with a summer like this, the stress of this awful semester should melt away.
T-minus 32 days, 12 hours, and 36 minutes until exams. Off to read more Chaucer.
- May 9th-13th: Kalamazoo, MI - Intl Medieval Congress - roadtrip!
- Some point after that late May - Alan coming to visit
- June 7-10th - Tony's cousin Christian's wedding (to a Melissa, comically enough)(and free!!) - roadtrip to Bangor, Maine
- June 24-July1 - Visiting Jackie and Jay - Florida!! We were going to roadtrip with Tony's Mom and Aunt Carol, but evidently tickets are only about $167 from ABE into JAX, and it's a two hour drive to Tallahassee from there, so we're evidently maybe going to fly. (either way, just found out that's also paid for!!)
- July 17th - Harry Potter movie #5 (I should double check date)
- July 21st - Harry Potter 7 comes out (Alternate YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY and BOOOOOO sad -it's the last one)
- July 23rd-mid August - Going home!! - Once we get Potter finished, we're hauling ass to KS via I-70 - part of my insane self thinks that Tony and I should just try and do it all in one day. As according to mapquest, if we go the most direct route, it's *only* 18 hours or so and we wouldn't have to deal with Chicago traffic, which is what made last year's trip so heinously long... and we'll be playing fun with wedding planning!!
- July 25-29 (to be confirmed, but almost definite) Tony's parents are coming out to KS and want to check out rehearsal dinner places. Tony's Mom really wants to hit Lydia's.
- August 27th - hell (school) starts again
The rest of the summer will be devoted to sleeping off exam stress, dancing, wogging, grilling, working on a publication or two, and spending enough time with the kitties to apologize for all the time we'll be leaving them. The most ridiculous thing is that even with all this traveling, most of the expensive stuff is being taken care of for us, so it's going to be a cheap summer for Tony and I - when we're actually in Bethlehem, we're not planning on doing too much other than hanging out mostly at home. So I think we'll be okay with finances and everything else, and everything should be good. Though I'm still going to see if I can get some online tutoring or something, because I feel like I should do SOMETHING decent and we'll be gone so much I couldn't do weekly appointments.
But at least with a summer like this, the stress of this awful semester should melt away.
T-minus 32 days, 12 hours, and 36 minutes until exams. Off to read more Chaucer.
Wogging
Tony and his Dad both RUN. His Dad ran the NY Marathon back in November, and both of them did an Olympic length triathlon last summer. So Tony's Mom and I started joking over dinner one night that since neither one of us can run, we should start 'wogging' - walking/jogging. So finally, five months later, I went out this early afternoon and 'wogged' in order to try to blow some of the nervous tension out of my system. I went for 27 minutes - run 1.5-2 minutes, walk 2.5 minutes, and got not very far. I'm guessing about a mile and a half, though I may take the car out later and figure it out. I'm also hoping that if I can build up a bit of endurance, I won't be dying by the end of ballet.
I missed some ballet classes in the last term, so I made them up in the jazz class right before my ballet class and got completely hooked - so I signed up when the new session started this week for a jazz/ballet double header. It's awesome and I know it's good for me because I can feel my muscles getting better and I can eat ice cream again without feeling guilty *YAY!!!!!!!!!!* but I'm so exhausted by the end of ballet that I can barely keep the jumping going - partially because my muscles are tired but mostly because I can barely breathe and the breaks between my group and the other groups that go are not enough for me to catch my breath. So hopefully wogging will help the endurance factor.
So we'll see how this goes.
Exam update: constantly reading Chaucer. Have a meeting with David on April 10th and would like to have one with Kate soon. I need to email her. I got official exam dates - May 1st is the 5 hour major field written, May 2nd is the 2 hour minor field written, May 3rd (the day all bad things happen in Chaucer) is dead day, and May 4th is the 2 hour oral exam/answer defense. I'll be done at 11:00 on May 4th and know presumably within 15 minutes whether or not I've passed.
So that means I only have 1 month and two days before this all starts. ACKS!!!!!!!!!!!!
I missed some ballet classes in the last term, so I made them up in the jazz class right before my ballet class and got completely hooked - so I signed up when the new session started this week for a jazz/ballet double header. It's awesome and I know it's good for me because I can feel my muscles getting better and I can eat ice cream again without feeling guilty *YAY!!!!!!!!!!* but I'm so exhausted by the end of ballet that I can barely keep the jumping going - partially because my muscles are tired but mostly because I can barely breathe and the breaks between my group and the other groups that go are not enough for me to catch my breath. So hopefully wogging will help the endurance factor.
So we'll see how this goes.
Exam update: constantly reading Chaucer. Have a meeting with David on April 10th and would like to have one with Kate soon. I need to email her. I got official exam dates - May 1st is the 5 hour major field written, May 2nd is the 2 hour minor field written, May 3rd (the day all bad things happen in Chaucer) is dead day, and May 4th is the 2 hour oral exam/answer defense. I'll be done at 11:00 on May 4th and know presumably within 15 minutes whether or not I've passed.
So that means I only have 1 month and two days before this all starts. ACKS!!!!!!!!!!!!
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Ask not for whom the bell tolls...
Ugh, &etc.
So it's officially Spring in just about slightly under two-ish hours or so. That means that the season of exams is really about to hit, and I'm hoping that with it the motivation I've lacked since my meeting with Kate last Wednesday and David last Thursday re-asserts itself in a rather permanent fashion.
I've finally had my first 'exam nightmare' where I was stuck in a room with the other five people suffering through this hell in a month and a half, couldn't think of anything very well to answer questions with because I hadn't gotten enough reading done and was pulling on every scrap of every memory I had to get through the tests (something I used to be really good at in high school and college multiple choice exams, when I think about it - I shouldn't get the grades I get sometimes because I just get lucky, or get whatever the underlying concept is and then apply until it stops working). Needless to say, it wasn't a fun dream, although the person in the room who broke down crying and threw a monitor thankfully wasn't me. So maybe subconsciously I don't think I'm too far behind.
Kate told me in my last meeting that I'm doing well but should probably head off into church-land, which I meant to do a while ago. So I'm eventually going off to the mental landscapes of the Church as it existed in its fracturing 14th century form - meaning really that my next few weeks when not reading stuff for David are going to be consumed with reading Piers Plowman, The Showings of Julian of Norwich, and The Book of Margery Kempe. Joy of joys. I remember really loving the part of Julian I've gotten through - her take on spirituality is unlike anything I've ever seen and of all the things I've ever read (Bible included), I hope she's right. I'll post on her at some point. Her writing is amazing. She tends to refer to herself only as "this creature" as though constantly reminding herself of her status as a created being, and has visions where she is assured of God's intent to save humanity, God's love for humanity, etc. She fiercely resists gendering God, or rather genders God in every way possible, so that at one point Jesus is represented in an extended metaphor of motherhood. She has the visions when she's thirty or so, and spends literally the rest of her life (a good couple of decades) just meditating on what she's seen. I'll post more when it's fresher in my mind.
Other than that, David wants to have another meeting this Thursday, so I've plowed my way through Donne and the Cavalier poetry tradition, and am currently trying to slog through the rest of the White Devil. Everyone seems to love this play. I think I prefer the Duchess of Malfi, though we'll have to see once I've finished this. I haven't gotten to the really macabre part yet - the two illicit lovers have so far only managed to kill off their respective spouses. I haven't gotten to all the fun vengeancy stuff yet. Gotta love revenge tragedies...
I get papers tomorrow and need to start grading those as well. And KU plays Thursday night - YAY!!! for finally making it into the Sweet Sixteen again. Pitt plays immediately after, so Tony and I will have a long night at the pub. At least it's not supposed to snow again anytime soon, so we won't get iced into the apartment the way we were Friday night.
In other news, Tony took the Myers-Briggs test and came out an ENFJ. I took it again for shits and giggles and came out for the 50,999th time as an INFP with a vengeance. I think I've finally figured out that the reason this surprises people sometimes is that I tend to keep most of the emotion fairly internal, and people usually see outbursts where I appear relatively T-like when someone has violated something I find important (like plagiarizing on a paper - I think I get a sick pleasure out of frying people that do that because I can't stand the thought of something a)thinking they could get away with that and more importantly b) not caring enough about thinking or learning that they feel as though cheating is a better option because it frees up time for partying).
I have Nunk on my lap right now, purring.
I've been really introspective lately, more than usual, which I think accounts for my lack of blogging. I suppose that in some sense that doesn't make sense - when feeling introspective I usually feel the need for some sort of outlet for it - but lately the introspection has taken the form of wanting to be alone somehow, like running off to the local Starbucks (because such is sadly what's available right now) to read by myself and feel nicely alone in the crowd. I think I've been trying to figure out how my brain works for the billionth time, and I keep waiting for something in the literature to catch me or make me make sense to myself. Maybe I'm too ingrained in consumerism and twenty-first century culture to find myself in literature written by people who lived before capitalism took over... or maybe I should just get out of theory for a while. Ugh.
Back to reading or to getting sidetracked by television or trying to figure out what all I need to do to my 'immortality' paper of last semester to make it publishable quality for a journal doing an issue on eschatology.
Life.
So it's officially Spring in just about slightly under two-ish hours or so. That means that the season of exams is really about to hit, and I'm hoping that with it the motivation I've lacked since my meeting with Kate last Wednesday and David last Thursday re-asserts itself in a rather permanent fashion.
I've finally had my first 'exam nightmare' where I was stuck in a room with the other five people suffering through this hell in a month and a half, couldn't think of anything very well to answer questions with because I hadn't gotten enough reading done and was pulling on every scrap of every memory I had to get through the tests (something I used to be really good at in high school and college multiple choice exams, when I think about it - I shouldn't get the grades I get sometimes because I just get lucky, or get whatever the underlying concept is and then apply until it stops working). Needless to say, it wasn't a fun dream, although the person in the room who broke down crying and threw a monitor thankfully wasn't me. So maybe subconsciously I don't think I'm too far behind.
Kate told me in my last meeting that I'm doing well but should probably head off into church-land, which I meant to do a while ago. So I'm eventually going off to the mental landscapes of the Church as it existed in its fracturing 14th century form - meaning really that my next few weeks when not reading stuff for David are going to be consumed with reading Piers Plowman, The Showings of Julian of Norwich, and The Book of Margery Kempe. Joy of joys. I remember really loving the part of Julian I've gotten through - her take on spirituality is unlike anything I've ever seen and of all the things I've ever read (Bible included), I hope she's right. I'll post on her at some point. Her writing is amazing. She tends to refer to herself only as "this creature" as though constantly reminding herself of her status as a created being, and has visions where she is assured of God's intent to save humanity, God's love for humanity, etc. She fiercely resists gendering God, or rather genders God in every way possible, so that at one point Jesus is represented in an extended metaphor of motherhood. She has the visions when she's thirty or so, and spends literally the rest of her life (a good couple of decades) just meditating on what she's seen. I'll post more when it's fresher in my mind.
Other than that, David wants to have another meeting this Thursday, so I've plowed my way through Donne and the Cavalier poetry tradition, and am currently trying to slog through the rest of the White Devil. Everyone seems to love this play. I think I prefer the Duchess of Malfi, though we'll have to see once I've finished this. I haven't gotten to the really macabre part yet - the two illicit lovers have so far only managed to kill off their respective spouses. I haven't gotten to all the fun vengeancy stuff yet. Gotta love revenge tragedies...
I get papers tomorrow and need to start grading those as well. And KU plays Thursday night - YAY!!! for finally making it into the Sweet Sixteen again. Pitt plays immediately after, so Tony and I will have a long night at the pub. At least it's not supposed to snow again anytime soon, so we won't get iced into the apartment the way we were Friday night.
In other news, Tony took the Myers-Briggs test and came out an ENFJ. I took it again for shits and giggles and came out for the 50,999th time as an INFP with a vengeance. I think I've finally figured out that the reason this surprises people sometimes is that I tend to keep most of the emotion fairly internal, and people usually see outbursts where I appear relatively T-like when someone has violated something I find important (like plagiarizing on a paper - I think I get a sick pleasure out of frying people that do that because I can't stand the thought of something a)thinking they could get away with that and more importantly b) not caring enough about thinking or learning that they feel as though cheating is a better option because it frees up time for partying).
I have Nunk on my lap right now, purring.
I've been really introspective lately, more than usual, which I think accounts for my lack of blogging. I suppose that in some sense that doesn't make sense - when feeling introspective I usually feel the need for some sort of outlet for it - but lately the introspection has taken the form of wanting to be alone somehow, like running off to the local Starbucks (because such is sadly what's available right now) to read by myself and feel nicely alone in the crowd. I think I've been trying to figure out how my brain works for the billionth time, and I keep waiting for something in the literature to catch me or make me make sense to myself. Maybe I'm too ingrained in consumerism and twenty-first century culture to find myself in literature written by people who lived before capitalism took over... or maybe I should just get out of theory for a while. Ugh.
Back to reading or to getting sidetracked by television or trying to figure out what all I need to do to my 'immortality' paper of last semester to make it publishable quality for a journal doing an issue on eschatology.
Life.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
And an editorial comment...
... I don't know if it's that I've had class with the man nearly every semester for the past almost four years, or if it's just that his theory makes sense of a lot of things that bother me on a regular basis, but I think Hawkes is dead on with everything he says, and everything he says is exactly why I won't go into advertising despite the fact that the number one thing my Ph.D. makes me do is read floating signifiers with the accuracy and depth of (insert insane sports metaphor here that I would make if I knew more about sports). Realizing that there's actually a way to look at capitalism as Satanic, and that looking at capitalism in that way answers the majority of the minor ethical issues I had with Louis Vuitton purses makes the world make a lot more sense than it did.
YAY for David!
And let's all hope that he doesn't decide to haul off to another school before I finish my Ph.D....
YAY for David!
And let's all hope that he doesn't decide to haul off to another school before I finish my Ph.D....
I've been busy
So I had a meeting with Kate today, wherein I basically spewed every thought I've had pertaining to medieval literature over the past two months to her. Upshot - I need to figure out why Malory was being pissy at the Scots, or rather what was going on in Anglo-Scot relations when Malory was writing, and I also need to stop busying myself with the lit I'm really in love with and start reading some churchy stuff. So prepare yourselves, my beloved if almost nonexistant audience, for an onslaught of everything you could ever hope (or not) to read/know about the ways and means of the Medieval Catholic Church (and its dissidents)...
My newfound need to memorize Piers Plowman aside, the meeting went pretty well. And the meeting I had with David on Monday?
It was postponed until today.
Make that tomorrow at 5.
Hopefully it'll get done then, because I have basketball to watch, dammit, and my birdies play Friday night at 6. It would take a hurricane to keep me away from the bar then. Tornadoes wouldn't really phase me, and I can deal with snow...
Other than that, life continues. I feel horribly cut off from my friends and like I'm scrambling to figure out if anyone here still really is friends with me (I know that I still have friends here and such, but after the blow out with one particular person I think I'm being a bit more paranoid than normal), and I miss my KS friends because half of them don't live there anymore and I spent so much time over break sick that I never even made it to Lawrence. And I MUST be sick not to get to Lawrence, because I have too many happy memories there and miss Jen a ton... I did finally get over my Spring Break cold though, as evidenced by the near-psychotic level of writing I managed today (see my other four posts for the day...) - I love when the ADD hyper-focus kicks in.
At this point, I'm tired, I've had two beers, three shots of espresso, half a piece of coffee cake and three potato skins. I should probably eat something with substance (or at least vegetables), and come up with a way to help soothe my muscles from the late night jazz/ballet punishment they underwent last night.
And finally, I adore Philip Glass. We were dancing to some of his work last night in jazz, and it was totally awesome and wonderful.
My newfound need to memorize Piers Plowman aside, the meeting went pretty well. And the meeting I had with David on Monday?
It was postponed until today.
Make that tomorrow at 5.
Hopefully it'll get done then, because I have basketball to watch, dammit, and my birdies play Friday night at 6. It would take a hurricane to keep me away from the bar then. Tornadoes wouldn't really phase me, and I can deal with snow...
Other than that, life continues. I feel horribly cut off from my friends and like I'm scrambling to figure out if anyone here still really is friends with me (I know that I still have friends here and such, but after the blow out with one particular person I think I'm being a bit more paranoid than normal), and I miss my KS friends because half of them don't live there anymore and I spent so much time over break sick that I never even made it to Lawrence. And I MUST be sick not to get to Lawrence, because I have too many happy memories there and miss Jen a ton... I did finally get over my Spring Break cold though, as evidenced by the near-psychotic level of writing I managed today (see my other four posts for the day...) - I love when the ADD hyper-focus kicks in.
At this point, I'm tired, I've had two beers, three shots of espresso, half a piece of coffee cake and three potato skins. I should probably eat something with substance (or at least vegetables), and come up with a way to help soothe my muscles from the late night jazz/ballet punishment they underwent last night.
And finally, I adore Philip Glass. We were dancing to some of his work last night in jazz, and it was totally awesome and wonderful.
David Hawkes - Idols of the Marketplace
Autonomy of representation!!!! Signs are granted power over what they used to merely represent, and image and presentation are more important than content itself. In the late sixteen to late seventeenth centuries, autonomy of representation was strongly linked to idolatry, and idolatry was seen in nearly every aspect of life. Idolatry, roughly put, is the adoration of the products of men’s hands, rather than the work of God. Idolatry is thus an ‘unhealthy materialism’ which leads to compulsive addictions and sensuality. Today we have succumbed to this tendency so thoroughly as to have it be invisible to our eyes, which is why an examination of seventeenth century literature can be so instructive.
The correlating idea to the rise of idolatry is the simultaneous rise of the market economy and of capitalism (the making of money with money). This rise of capitalism subverts teleology (i.e., the end of money is not to make more money), and confuses the natural progression of means and ends – money is a means to an end, rather than an end in and of itself.
So: objectification is idolatry, and objectification is linked up to the market economy. This makes sense because the market economy leads us to desire commodities, which are idols in that they are works of men’s hands rather than a reflection of God, or telos, so that capitalism leads us away from God and toward the idolatrous desire for commodities, or money (by which means we can then purchase commodities). Commodities seem to be defined as things that people can buy and feel as though they need that aren’t needs or that seem to have no essential use value. They are in this sense fetishized. Double check this with Hawkes.
The way this book departs from typical Marxist thought is that the rise of Capitalism is not seen as part of an overriding progression – rather than being a telos or a path to that end, it is seen as the seventeenth century viewed it – a “unmitigated disaster.” The seventeenth century viewed life in totality, rather than dividing it up into spheres of economy, religion, philosophy, etc. Dropping the typical Marxist move of privileging the concept of the class struggle allows one to open up the inquiry and view capitalism as other than teleological in its bent.
Exchange value == human labor รจ exchange value is abstracted human life. Exchange value allows unequally-valued items to be exchanged. Societies have long struggled to deal with this- usually happens through religion – this book looks in part at the effect of what we would call religion on what we would call economics.
The discovery of the new world and the massive influx of gold and commodities that came from that led to a market economy rather than an exchange economy based on use value. It is this rise of the commodity economy that was given an ethical critique in the seventeenth century.
Idolatry and commodity fetishism are homologous. Economics can now be thought of in terms of semiotics, the relation and system of signs that it is. Shell argues that history can be viewed as a progression of increasing independence of signs from the things they ostensibly represent. Both Shell and Goux see this increasing independence in both economics and language, where a sort of perverted telos seems to be the eventual autonomy of signs. One way to trace this is in the view of money, which went from being Gold itself to being represented BY Gold to being eventually totally off the Gold Standard, which means that money itself really is an autonomous sign with no basis in any sort of material reality. What this basically means is that there is no longer really any such thing as money, and yet money still has near-supreme power over life now as we live it.
The rise in the autonomy of signification is usually regarded now as being ethically neutral, if not downright liberating in that it frees people from the teleological modes of thought that have often been experienced as oppressive. However, in the seventeenth century it was not regarded as such – during the time when the people of England were forced to understand the rise of autonomous signification in their daily lives, they experienced this and thought of it as the rise of idolatry. Money is often thought of as a “carnal invention” that “distorts the divinely ordained natural order” – money becomes the subject of human adoration, rather than God. (as an aside, one could read pretty much all of Jonson’s plays, as well as Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, in exactly this vein).
Idolatry is the reduction of spirit to matter, objectification.
The correlating idea to the rise of idolatry is the simultaneous rise of the market economy and of capitalism (the making of money with money). This rise of capitalism subverts teleology (i.e., the end of money is not to make more money), and confuses the natural progression of means and ends – money is a means to an end, rather than an end in and of itself.
So: objectification is idolatry, and objectification is linked up to the market economy. This makes sense because the market economy leads us to desire commodities, which are idols in that they are works of men’s hands rather than a reflection of God, or telos, so that capitalism leads us away from God and toward the idolatrous desire for commodities, or money (by which means we can then purchase commodities). Commodities seem to be defined as things that people can buy and feel as though they need that aren’t needs or that seem to have no essential use value. They are in this sense fetishized. Double check this with Hawkes.
The way this book departs from typical Marxist thought is that the rise of Capitalism is not seen as part of an overriding progression – rather than being a telos or a path to that end, it is seen as the seventeenth century viewed it – a “unmitigated disaster.” The seventeenth century viewed life in totality, rather than dividing it up into spheres of economy, religion, philosophy, etc. Dropping the typical Marxist move of privileging the concept of the class struggle allows one to open up the inquiry and view capitalism as other than teleological in its bent.
Exchange value == human labor รจ exchange value is abstracted human life. Exchange value allows unequally-valued items to be exchanged. Societies have long struggled to deal with this- usually happens through religion – this book looks in part at the effect of what we would call religion on what we would call economics.
The discovery of the new world and the massive influx of gold and commodities that came from that led to a market economy rather than an exchange economy based on use value. It is this rise of the commodity economy that was given an ethical critique in the seventeenth century.
Idolatry and commodity fetishism are homologous. Economics can now be thought of in terms of semiotics, the relation and system of signs that it is. Shell argues that history can be viewed as a progression of increasing independence of signs from the things they ostensibly represent. Both Shell and Goux see this increasing independence in both economics and language, where a sort of perverted telos seems to be the eventual autonomy of signs. One way to trace this is in the view of money, which went from being Gold itself to being represented BY Gold to being eventually totally off the Gold Standard, which means that money itself really is an autonomous sign with no basis in any sort of material reality. What this basically means is that there is no longer really any such thing as money, and yet money still has near-supreme power over life now as we live it.
The rise in the autonomy of signification is usually regarded now as being ethically neutral, if not downright liberating in that it frees people from the teleological modes of thought that have often been experienced as oppressive. However, in the seventeenth century it was not regarded as such – during the time when the people of England were forced to understand the rise of autonomous signification in their daily lives, they experienced this and thought of it as the rise of idolatry. Money is often thought of as a “carnal invention” that “distorts the divinely ordained natural order” – money becomes the subject of human adoration, rather than God. (as an aside, one could read pretty much all of Jonson’s plays, as well as Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, in exactly this vein).
Idolatry is the reduction of spirit to matter, objectification.
Geoffrey of Monmouth - Historia Regem Britanniae
Arthur is given the Malory-style birth of the trick of Merlin allowing Uther into bed with Ygerne while her husband dies in battle with Uther’s soldiers. Merlin then disappears. He isn’t raised outside of the court, seems to have known his father, and basically isn’t mentioned after his birth until Uther dies. He then becomes king without the major struggles and insurrections Malory’s Arthur deals with. Instead, Arthur of his own will decides to go off and fight the Saxons, and is remarkably successful in this. This is what Malory seems to replace with the fights against the Northern Scottish kings in the early parts of Arthur’s reign. Arthur is thus fully represented as King of the British, fighting against the Saxons and the Angles.
The fight with Lucius is unprovoked, but welcomed as it allows the knights who have spent five years wasting their talents fighting against each other in tournaments to actually go into real battle. The point of this is that Arthur frees the Britons from their Roman bondage and from the tribute they had been required to send to the Romans – Arthur thus makes Britain into a fully free country, rather than one that has been in some sense bonded to the Romans either through occupation or through custom. There are also elements of Romance in this section – Arthur defeats a giant, people kill 3000 men each in battle, etc. This particular section, and the section before it during the peace time, seems to be the section most appealing to the French Romance writers, who use the scene set up at Caerleon for their Arthurian court.
- The French writers don’t bother with any of the fights against the Saxon, preferring (as do Welsh romances) to have Arthur be already all-powerful – they don’t seem to worry about how Arthur actually rose to power, and let Arthur rum amuck in England and Wales and Cornwall without bothering to distinguish between them. The only real territorial boundaries seem to be a question of whether a particular episode is taking place in a French territory or a territory someplace in the British Isles. This seems to help erase the role of the British/Welsh in the tales, so that by the time Malory is writing, Arthur can be basically British or English or whatever, as the two terms seem to mean essentially the same thing.
Notice that by the end of the Arthurian episode, the various different knights have all set up cities and kingdoms in France, which works to create a British/French cultural and imperial alliance that can prove useful to the Anglo-Norman audience for whom Geoffrey writes. Many of Arthur’s knights are buried in towns or cities that they’ve either created or that are the capitals of their respective kingdoms. This lays the groundwork for a Celtic-French overlap, so that one could read the eventual takeover of the Normans as being a return of the British to power in their home country, over and above the marauding Saxons.
The Arthur/Mordred episode is the start of a series of civil wars wherein British rulers, all deriving lineage from Arthur’s cousin Constantine, formerly Duke of Cornwall, either give in to pointless power lust by conquering all the islands of the North Sea (everything from Iceland to Norway and Denmark, which seem to be considered islands by virtue of their association with Vikings). The reigning Britons eventually draw God’s wrath for being prone to homosexuality and paganism. Interestingly, it is the latter two that Gildas complains most about in his history, where he announces that the British deserve their fate at the hands of the Saxons for being so sinful. The Saxons ally themselves with Gormund, king of Africa, break their oath of fealty to the British, and take advantage of the near-constant British civil wars fomented by their leader, Keredic, to wrest power once and for all from the British.
Cadwallader, the last king of the British, is eventually forced to flee Britain due to the plague – he goes to King Alan in Brittany for a while, and when he resolves to go back and re-take Britain from the Saxons, who at this point have completely overrun the whole island, he is given a vision from God and told not to return to Britain until the time appointed in the prophecies when Arthur shall rise again to take back Britain for the British and restore its true name. The loss of Britain is thus seen as a punishment for offences against God. These offences all seem to be in the immediately-post-Arthur phase, starting with Arthur’s own nephew Mordred. When Cadwallader is barred from re-entering his homeland, the British also lose their name and thus in a sense their history – in losing the name “British,” they lose their link to Brutus and to the glorious history they had once had, and are instead condemned to be “Welsh,” which Geoffrey links either to a ruler or to their habitual barbaric tendencies – the latter makes most sense as Welsh derives from ‘waelisc’ in Saxon, meaning barbaric foreigner.
The fight with Lucius is unprovoked, but welcomed as it allows the knights who have spent five years wasting their talents fighting against each other in tournaments to actually go into real battle. The point of this is that Arthur frees the Britons from their Roman bondage and from the tribute they had been required to send to the Romans – Arthur thus makes Britain into a fully free country, rather than one that has been in some sense bonded to the Romans either through occupation or through custom. There are also elements of Romance in this section – Arthur defeats a giant, people kill 3000 men each in battle, etc. This particular section, and the section before it during the peace time, seems to be the section most appealing to the French Romance writers, who use the scene set up at Caerleon for their Arthurian court.
- The French writers don’t bother with any of the fights against the Saxon, preferring (as do Welsh romances) to have Arthur be already all-powerful – they don’t seem to worry about how Arthur actually rose to power, and let Arthur rum amuck in England and Wales and Cornwall without bothering to distinguish between them. The only real territorial boundaries seem to be a question of whether a particular episode is taking place in a French territory or a territory someplace in the British Isles. This seems to help erase the role of the British/Welsh in the tales, so that by the time Malory is writing, Arthur can be basically British or English or whatever, as the two terms seem to mean essentially the same thing.
Notice that by the end of the Arthurian episode, the various different knights have all set up cities and kingdoms in France, which works to create a British/French cultural and imperial alliance that can prove useful to the Anglo-Norman audience for whom Geoffrey writes. Many of Arthur’s knights are buried in towns or cities that they’ve either created or that are the capitals of their respective kingdoms. This lays the groundwork for a Celtic-French overlap, so that one could read the eventual takeover of the Normans as being a return of the British to power in their home country, over and above the marauding Saxons.
The Arthur/Mordred episode is the start of a series of civil wars wherein British rulers, all deriving lineage from Arthur’s cousin Constantine, formerly Duke of Cornwall, either give in to pointless power lust by conquering all the islands of the North Sea (everything from Iceland to Norway and Denmark, which seem to be considered islands by virtue of their association with Vikings). The reigning Britons eventually draw God’s wrath for being prone to homosexuality and paganism. Interestingly, it is the latter two that Gildas complains most about in his history, where he announces that the British deserve their fate at the hands of the Saxons for being so sinful. The Saxons ally themselves with Gormund, king of Africa, break their oath of fealty to the British, and take advantage of the near-constant British civil wars fomented by their leader, Keredic, to wrest power once and for all from the British.
Cadwallader, the last king of the British, is eventually forced to flee Britain due to the plague – he goes to King Alan in Brittany for a while, and when he resolves to go back and re-take Britain from the Saxons, who at this point have completely overrun the whole island, he is given a vision from God and told not to return to Britain until the time appointed in the prophecies when Arthur shall rise again to take back Britain for the British and restore its true name. The loss of Britain is thus seen as a punishment for offences against God. These offences all seem to be in the immediately-post-Arthur phase, starting with Arthur’s own nephew Mordred. When Cadwallader is barred from re-entering his homeland, the British also lose their name and thus in a sense their history – in losing the name “British,” they lose their link to Brutus and to the glorious history they had once had, and are instead condemned to be “Welsh,” which Geoffrey links either to a ruler or to their habitual barbaric tendencies – the latter makes most sense as Welsh derives from ‘waelisc’ in Saxon, meaning barbaric foreigner.
Ingham - Sovereign Fantasies
Imaginative writing can be used in a very real sense to create empires – especially when written from the conqueror’s perspective, when the writing can re-create the history to say what needs to be said to make the current dynasty seem inevitable, favored by history, etc. Ingham’s book looks at the ways in which imaginative writing worked to help create unity among the peoples in Britain, mostly so that she can explore the ways in which the imaginative writing is used by those people as a space where they can mourn the past, the way things might have been, the plight of the subaltern groups on the British Isles such as the Welsh, etc. The Romances are thus a way for the English to claim Welsh loyalties even as they can mourn the loss of the culture and the power.
Ingham is looking at conceptions of nationalism, especially in Medieval terms, as “nationhood” is usually a concept that isn’t thought to come into being until the Early Modern period and is often conceived in terms that are directly opposed to medieval modes of thought and organization. She looks at the concept of a nation as an “imagined community” where a sense of similarity and identity is created through, among other routes, literary imagination. The imaginative writings encode cultural losses as well as victories, and she argues that the losses encoded in the works are largely explored on a gendered basis. This allows for a community of men to for and work together as knights, thus forming a sort of imagined community, while the women in the Arthurian legends, always so potently drawn, are areas where desire, loss, and possibilities are inscribed. Women often come into the stories in ways that disrupt the male community, and thus explore and occasionally explode the fiction of the male community.
Geoffrey in particular is interesting in this way because his story of Arthur created a strong amount of discontent and uneasiness in other historians, especially William of Malmesbury, who described Geoffrey’s tale as an account of “false myths” and “Welsh ravings.” Ingham argues that the reason Geoffrey’s tale is considered so dangerous is because of the reaction it provoked in the Welsh – the figure of Arthur provided a rallying point for the disheartened Welsh, and various Welsh insurrections figured around leaders (like Owain Glyn Dwr) who would use the figure of the dragon (a symbol of Arthur) to raise their followers. Malmesbury’s discomfort with Geoffrey’s tale, as well as the risings that so often used Arthur as a rallying point, work to show the intense cultural power that mythology can have.
The myth of Arthur created by Geoffrey also proved to have cultural power in that several AngloNorman kings felt the need to commission genealogies somehow “proving” their family link to Arthur, as though being related in some way to Arthur provides a sort of stamp of legitimacy on kings. Geoffrey at several points in his book dedicates it to various leaders, which seems to point out the role that powerful political figures have in crafting history and its contents (and discontents) for people to read. Moreover, the way Geoffrey crafts the initial British colonization of Amorica reverses the eventual Norman colonization of England – the formulation can be used to imply that the Normans are descendents of the original Bretons who have come to reclaim the island.
Ingham makes an interesting note with regards to Geoffrey v. Bede: Geoffrey is castigated by other historians because the basis and assumptions he takes for his background of his history are fundamentally Welsh in origin, style, and pleasure. Bede, on the other hand, is regarded as being much more truthful (despite the fact that there are many things in Bede that would be considered bad history, irrational, or impossible) because the basis for Bede’s history is Christian, and thus more familiar and acceptable to the ruling class. Gildas is interesting in this vein as well, as he gives a tragic account of British history in terms of loss and divine wrath, seeing as he does that the British deserve their fate due to their unending civil wars in the post-Arthurian period.
Ingham is looking at conceptions of nationalism, especially in Medieval terms, as “nationhood” is usually a concept that isn’t thought to come into being until the Early Modern period and is often conceived in terms that are directly opposed to medieval modes of thought and organization. She looks at the concept of a nation as an “imagined community” where a sense of similarity and identity is created through, among other routes, literary imagination. The imaginative writings encode cultural losses as well as victories, and she argues that the losses encoded in the works are largely explored on a gendered basis. This allows for a community of men to for and work together as knights, thus forming a sort of imagined community, while the women in the Arthurian legends, always so potently drawn, are areas where desire, loss, and possibilities are inscribed. Women often come into the stories in ways that disrupt the male community, and thus explore and occasionally explode the fiction of the male community.
Geoffrey in particular is interesting in this way because his story of Arthur created a strong amount of discontent and uneasiness in other historians, especially William of Malmesbury, who described Geoffrey’s tale as an account of “false myths” and “Welsh ravings.” Ingham argues that the reason Geoffrey’s tale is considered so dangerous is because of the reaction it provoked in the Welsh – the figure of Arthur provided a rallying point for the disheartened Welsh, and various Welsh insurrections figured around leaders (like Owain Glyn Dwr) who would use the figure of the dragon (a symbol of Arthur) to raise their followers. Malmesbury’s discomfort with Geoffrey’s tale, as well as the risings that so often used Arthur as a rallying point, work to show the intense cultural power that mythology can have.
The myth of Arthur created by Geoffrey also proved to have cultural power in that several AngloNorman kings felt the need to commission genealogies somehow “proving” their family link to Arthur, as though being related in some way to Arthur provides a sort of stamp of legitimacy on kings. Geoffrey at several points in his book dedicates it to various leaders, which seems to point out the role that powerful political figures have in crafting history and its contents (and discontents) for people to read. Moreover, the way Geoffrey crafts the initial British colonization of Amorica reverses the eventual Norman colonization of England – the formulation can be used to imply that the Normans are descendents of the original Bretons who have come to reclaim the island.
Ingham makes an interesting note with regards to Geoffrey v. Bede: Geoffrey is castigated by other historians because the basis and assumptions he takes for his background of his history are fundamentally Welsh in origin, style, and pleasure. Bede, on the other hand, is regarded as being much more truthful (despite the fact that there are many things in Bede that would be considered bad history, irrational, or impossible) because the basis for Bede’s history is Christian, and thus more familiar and acceptable to the ruling class. Gildas is interesting in this vein as well, as he gives a tragic account of British history in terms of loss and divine wrath, seeing as he does that the British deserve their fate due to their unending civil wars in the post-Arthurian period.
parts of Stein's 'Reality Fiction'
Stein sees romance and historias as coming out of the same cultural needs and doing the same sorts of cultural work. They both work to create a mode of interpretation for a secular world, one that is concerned with secular as opposed to clerical power, and provides hermeneutical tools for people to interpret the new world order of the high medieval period. These new modes of writing are used primarily in Anglo-Norman and Capetian state-formation activities (Stein avoids using the term “nation” as he wishes to avoid the teleological connotations of that word). He agrees implicitly with Ingham that any and all activities of state formation are always an act of construction or a fictionalization of a community that isn’t necessarily there, but might be formed though the effective use of narrative rhetoric. This rhetoric can be used both in the creation of centers of power as well as in narratives of resistance – the point is to create a rallying point around which a movement can start or a group of people can cohere.
Stein sees many of these texts as operating on a fine line between history and hagiography: there seems always to be a major historical revelation about to come in the texts at hand, especially in the histories, but that revelation is always put off and never quite revealed – whatever revelation there might be is always somehow beyond the grasp of either the historian or the people for whom the historian is writing. This sort of writing gains its effectiveness through an audience assent to a belief in the mimetic truth of the story they’re being told, regardless of how improbable it may seem.
Stein sees in critiques of Geoffrey’s work as bad history the seeds of good fiction, and asserts that the fiction Geoffrey uses “returns to history the power to locate secular experience in the secular world and thus to make it knowable.” (107).
Stein points to the moment in Geoffrey when Arthur receives the letter from Emperor Lucius demanding tribute and accusing Arthur of having unfairly taken over Gaul as a rewriting of the triumph of the Arthurian story as seen from the position of those who aren’t the winners in history. This is a section where it allows the subaltern point of view of any historical story to be aired: viewed from one side as a heroic king, Arthur is now suddenly a tyrant unfairly controlling realms which rightfully belong to others. Eventually, the fight over Gaul becomes nothing but a contest of forces on either side, as every other normal mode of determining legitimate kingship is thrown out the window. Arthur’s side of the battle becomes a conglomeration of Anglo-Norman holdings in Geoffrey’s day, and Lucius becomes the ‘Other’ against which they must fight for their superiority. In a sense, then, because of the letter and the duality between Arthur and Lucius, the text undermines itself and power is revealed to be nothing beyond itself. Arthur’s eventual success in Gaul against Lucius is thus not a divinely-sanctioned victory, nor is it a victory which once and for all seals British greatness – it is merely an empty show of power, victorious in the secular sense but only because of secular means and power. It is what it is and nothing more.
In the Arthurian section of the Historia, romance makes a full showing only to be revealed as the processes of political performances of power. Arthur has his seat in Caerleon and gives his tournaments, doles out goods and celebrates his largess as a political tool, rather than as a demonstration of how a good and just king should rule – he does this because he can and because it demonstrates his power, nothing more.
My one disagreement with Stein is his claim that Geoffrey illustrates the loss of British sovereignty of Britain as being nothing other than what it is – he denies the role of the divine in the loss. I think that Geoffrey is pretty particular in linking British loss of Britain with fate and with God’s will – it states it clearly in the text, and this opens up the possibility of a British return as according to Merlin’s prophecies which in part is the political and imaginative power of the text, and why the text is so fascinating for the Welsh and so politically dangerous to people like Malmesbury and Newburgh.
Stein sees many of these texts as operating on a fine line between history and hagiography: there seems always to be a major historical revelation about to come in the texts at hand, especially in the histories, but that revelation is always put off and never quite revealed – whatever revelation there might be is always somehow beyond the grasp of either the historian or the people for whom the historian is writing. This sort of writing gains its effectiveness through an audience assent to a belief in the mimetic truth of the story they’re being told, regardless of how improbable it may seem.
Stein sees in critiques of Geoffrey’s work as bad history the seeds of good fiction, and asserts that the fiction Geoffrey uses “returns to history the power to locate secular experience in the secular world and thus to make it knowable.” (107).
Stein points to the moment in Geoffrey when Arthur receives the letter from Emperor Lucius demanding tribute and accusing Arthur of having unfairly taken over Gaul as a rewriting of the triumph of the Arthurian story as seen from the position of those who aren’t the winners in history. This is a section where it allows the subaltern point of view of any historical story to be aired: viewed from one side as a heroic king, Arthur is now suddenly a tyrant unfairly controlling realms which rightfully belong to others. Eventually, the fight over Gaul becomes nothing but a contest of forces on either side, as every other normal mode of determining legitimate kingship is thrown out the window. Arthur’s side of the battle becomes a conglomeration of Anglo-Norman holdings in Geoffrey’s day, and Lucius becomes the ‘Other’ against which they must fight for their superiority. In a sense, then, because of the letter and the duality between Arthur and Lucius, the text undermines itself and power is revealed to be nothing beyond itself. Arthur’s eventual success in Gaul against Lucius is thus not a divinely-sanctioned victory, nor is it a victory which once and for all seals British greatness – it is merely an empty show of power, victorious in the secular sense but only because of secular means and power. It is what it is and nothing more.
In the Arthurian section of the Historia, romance makes a full showing only to be revealed as the processes of political performances of power. Arthur has his seat in Caerleon and gives his tournaments, doles out goods and celebrates his largess as a political tool, rather than as a demonstration of how a good and just king should rule – he does this because he can and because it demonstrates his power, nothing more.
My one disagreement with Stein is his claim that Geoffrey illustrates the loss of British sovereignty of Britain as being nothing other than what it is – he denies the role of the divine in the loss. I think that Geoffrey is pretty particular in linking British loss of Britain with fate and with God’s will – it states it clearly in the text, and this opens up the possibility of a British return as according to Merlin’s prophecies which in part is the political and imaginative power of the text, and why the text is so fascinating for the Welsh and so politically dangerous to people like Malmesbury and Newburgh.
Monday, March 12, 2007
Marlowe - all of it
Ignoring Faust here as I've been over it roughly 12,000 times since I first read it. Things to keep in mind: Faust idolizes the contract he's signed, and places primacy of those words over the boundlessness of God's mercy - this is what constitutes his fall and his inability to rise again, not that the contract itself actually has efficacy. He gives it efficacy through his belief in it only. He also believes in the autonomous power of signs, aka magic, which constitutes both his initial downfall and why he gives the contract such power. This also seems to be why he believes in the sign of Helen and treats it like Helen herself rather than the devil everyone knows the vision of her to be. Etc.
Tamburlaine: This play is great because it chronicles the meteoric RISE of someone to power. This is self-fashioning if ever anyone could do it - he takes himself from Scythian shepherd to king. Everything he says about himself is a boast he eventually manages to accomplish, though the note that he makes that the future tense is the proper way to refer to him is equally true - until the very end of the play, all of his boasts remain future things, not things accomplished. People fall behind him and follow his lead because of the sheer force of his rhetoric, his speaking ability, etc. If no one's done it yet, this would be a phenomenal play to do set in Nazi Germany featuring Hitler as Tamburlaine. I'll have to flip through and find some postcolonial criticism on this play, since the setting, the Turkish kings he overthrows, and the general orientalizing tendency are screaming out for some good post-col theory... The other big thing to keep in mind with Tamburlaine is that he's a tyrant, rather than a good leader: like Faust (and Barnabas, for that matter), he is a powerful figure who gains followers by his brilliance and linguistic cunning and yet commands them based on his personal whims, rather than on what might actually be good for the country at large. Tamburlaine p. 101 is great for this - he describes being a king as being a crown, power over life and death, the ability to have whatever one might wish, to be always obeyed and to create love in all who see one. Not a good king and the type of guy that would send shivers down the spine of most later political thinkers. He seems to be particularly good for Marlowe and even more interesting to think about in light of several of the attacks on Charles I - it would be interesting to find out if the play was performed much then and to what sorts of reactions. Marlowe is great for power dynamics because he so constantly bucked the system himself...
The Jew of Malta - The entire play revolves so closely around Barnabas that it's almost pointless to talk about anyone else. Barnabas sees himself as somehow separate from the entirety of the social world around him, and seems to claim this position as one of power, only to have that illusion taken from him when the government takes his belongings. At first he is concerned about his daughter and his wealth, but losing his wealth, he seems to distance himself from his daughter too. She is sent into the convent to pretend to become a nun so that she can recover the wealth he'd hidden in his (former) house (now nunnery), but that seems to take her away from him in that she then becomes the unwilling and mostly unknowing pawn in his revenge attempts against the governor. When she finds out that she has been used to help egg on a mortal duel between the man she loves and his would-be rival for her, she re-enters the convent and becomes Christian. Barnabas then uses Ithamore, his newly purchased Turkish slave, to deliver poison to the nunnery under the auspices of charity, thus killing both Abigall and all the other nuns. As a reward for his villany, Barnabas promises to make Ithamore his heir, and does seem to, to the point where he falls for Ithamore's extortion attempts and eventually kills Ithamore, the whore he's fallen for, and her pimp. He then manages to turn traitor to the city and let the Turks invade (for which they make him governor), and then decides to turn on the Turks for shits and giggles and try and come up with a way to live in Malta unmolested (knowing rightfully that as long as he's governor and powerful for treachery, his life is at risk every time he's near any other person).
Barnabas defines himself by two things: his religion and his money. His money is definitely the trump card, and he has a lot of it - even after they've taken everything and he just gets the little bit of leftover money he'd hidden in his house before it was seized, he still has enough to buy a house the size of the governors and pay for a slave to boot. He considers that without his money, he has nothing and is nothing at all - his daughter has significantly less importance to him than does his wealth, and his wealth in a sense becomes his family - it is because of his gold that he's willing to commit the varying acts of vengence. He calls himself a Jew, but mostly just to distinguish himself from Christians, whom he hates as much as they hate him. What role his religion actually plays in his life really isn't talked about too much, other than when he makes up little customs to excuse his behavior - claiming to have to breathe away so that he doesn't breathe the air of a Christian man is one example. Anyway, the play is horribly anti-semitic, but most interesting in that Barnabas is never allowed inside the social circle regardless of whether the Turks or the Christians are in charge - even as governor he is betrayed, and finally killed at the hands of his adversaries. He glories in revenge for revenge's sake, even when there's no point to his vengence. He seems to become a self-characature.
Tamburlaine: This play is great because it chronicles the meteoric RISE of someone to power. This is self-fashioning if ever anyone could do it - he takes himself from Scythian shepherd to king. Everything he says about himself is a boast he eventually manages to accomplish, though the note that he makes that the future tense is the proper way to refer to him is equally true - until the very end of the play, all of his boasts remain future things, not things accomplished. People fall behind him and follow his lead because of the sheer force of his rhetoric, his speaking ability, etc. If no one's done it yet, this would be a phenomenal play to do set in Nazi Germany featuring Hitler as Tamburlaine. I'll have to flip through and find some postcolonial criticism on this play, since the setting, the Turkish kings he overthrows, and the general orientalizing tendency are screaming out for some good post-col theory... The other big thing to keep in mind with Tamburlaine is that he's a tyrant, rather than a good leader: like Faust (and Barnabas, for that matter), he is a powerful figure who gains followers by his brilliance and linguistic cunning and yet commands them based on his personal whims, rather than on what might actually be good for the country at large. Tamburlaine p. 101 is great for this - he describes being a king as being a crown, power over life and death, the ability to have whatever one might wish, to be always obeyed and to create love in all who see one. Not a good king and the type of guy that would send shivers down the spine of most later political thinkers. He seems to be particularly good for Marlowe and even more interesting to think about in light of several of the attacks on Charles I - it would be interesting to find out if the play was performed much then and to what sorts of reactions. Marlowe is great for power dynamics because he so constantly bucked the system himself...
The Jew of Malta - The entire play revolves so closely around Barnabas that it's almost pointless to talk about anyone else. Barnabas sees himself as somehow separate from the entirety of the social world around him, and seems to claim this position as one of power, only to have that illusion taken from him when the government takes his belongings. At first he is concerned about his daughter and his wealth, but losing his wealth, he seems to distance himself from his daughter too. She is sent into the convent to pretend to become a nun so that she can recover the wealth he'd hidden in his (former) house (now nunnery), but that seems to take her away from him in that she then becomes the unwilling and mostly unknowing pawn in his revenge attempts against the governor. When she finds out that she has been used to help egg on a mortal duel between the man she loves and his would-be rival for her, she re-enters the convent and becomes Christian. Barnabas then uses Ithamore, his newly purchased Turkish slave, to deliver poison to the nunnery under the auspices of charity, thus killing both Abigall and all the other nuns. As a reward for his villany, Barnabas promises to make Ithamore his heir, and does seem to, to the point where he falls for Ithamore's extortion attempts and eventually kills Ithamore, the whore he's fallen for, and her pimp. He then manages to turn traitor to the city and let the Turks invade (for which they make him governor), and then decides to turn on the Turks for shits and giggles and try and come up with a way to live in Malta unmolested (knowing rightfully that as long as he's governor and powerful for treachery, his life is at risk every time he's near any other person).
Barnabas defines himself by two things: his religion and his money. His money is definitely the trump card, and he has a lot of it - even after they've taken everything and he just gets the little bit of leftover money he'd hidden in his house before it was seized, he still has enough to buy a house the size of the governors and pay for a slave to boot. He considers that without his money, he has nothing and is nothing at all - his daughter has significantly less importance to him than does his wealth, and his wealth in a sense becomes his family - it is because of his gold that he's willing to commit the varying acts of vengence. He calls himself a Jew, but mostly just to distinguish himself from Christians, whom he hates as much as they hate him. What role his religion actually plays in his life really isn't talked about too much, other than when he makes up little customs to excuse his behavior - claiming to have to breathe away so that he doesn't breathe the air of a Christian man is one example. Anyway, the play is horribly anti-semitic, but most interesting in that Barnabas is never allowed inside the social circle regardless of whether the Turks or the Christians are in charge - even as governor he is betrayed, and finally killed at the hands of his adversaries. He glories in revenge for revenge's sake, even when there's no point to his vengence. He seems to become a self-characature.
Trying to catch up - Jonson plays
I've gotten into this bad habit of getting reading done and then doing no real notation on it for a while, despite having spent most of this semester watching Tony get tons of reading done, only to not bother notating right away and then realizing that when he goes back to it a week or two later he's completely forgotten everything.
Faced with a meeting with David in two hours and forty minutes, I'm realizing I don't remember Jonson all that well.
So let's see what we can do here:
Volpone - This play involves an unscrupulous fox-like character (in the cunning and self serving way), the eponymous hero of the play, and his servant/leech Mosca (aka, housefly) who conspire to get money from all of the equally unscrupulous and greedy, if less intelligent, hangers-on who hope that by kissing up to the fake-ill Volpone through an incessent string of gift giving to eventually be the inheritor of his estate when the fake-ill Volpone finally kicks it. Volpone has, by the beginning of the play, already made quite a bit of money and has a reputation for being quite rich. He lies in bed fake-languishing in various degrees of fake-illness while Mosca, through intense verbal wit and ingenuity, somehow convinces each and every one in turn that they need to give the ailing Volpone whatever it is they have with them, as this next gift will surely be what establishes their position as sole heir to the estate. Eventually Volpone oversteps his bounds, tries to rape one of his dupe's wifes, and fakes his own death, names Mosca as his heir, and watches in laughter as his would-be heirs fight and are disappointed over what his will entails. Mosca then starts trying to get more and more money out of Volpone in exchange for not revealing the prank they'd been playing on everyone, and Volpone, rather than give in to Mosca, reveals himself to the courtroom so that Mosca may also share in the downfall.
The interesting thing here is the money - Volpone has no legitimate heir by blood, so he is free to do with his money whatever he chooses - he uses the scheme of playing the greedy wealthy people off of each other in order to make his money grow or breed in a sense. This, of course, is patently unnatural, just as Volpone's prey are using him as a sort of depository where they hope to make their money breed at huge interest rates - as in by bringing a bunch of plates or whatnot, they hope to eventually retrieve all that they brought and much much more in the way of riches. They all seem to be defining themselves in a way by the money they have or the money they want, rather than defining themselves in any flat linguistic terms. The court at the end, contrary to this, attempts to restore social order through relying on people's birth, rather than their money, to determine the "just" resolution to the whole deal. This is shown to be a sham as well, based on their contradictory treatment of Mosca. Volpone is let off the hook because of high birth alone - Mosca is treated well for having so much money, until he is relieved (as it were) of the money, at which point he is treated like the parasite his name marks him out to be.
The Alchemist - This is extraoridinary self-fashioning in the character of Face, who is able to be any and all things to anyone he needs be. He is the only character in the play who gets no come-uppance. Doll and Subtle are forced to flee the premises when the landlord returns, though they aren't punished beyond that (they do lose all their ill-gotten gains, though), and the people who are duped by Subtle's pretensions toward being an Alchemist, or Doll's dress-up as a fairy queen, all lose substantial amounts of money and dignity. The worst off are the Puritans, who blow on and on about the will of God, but also admit to being part of a Dutch moneylaundering scheme - the attack on them is the worst. Face, on the other hand, deftly stage-manages everyone around him and yet is able to re-assume the role of Jeremy, the landlord's "faithful" housekeeper once the landlord (Lovewit) makes his appearance in Act 5. Not only that, but in his role as housekeeper is able to keep in the name of his master all of the ill-gotten gains received through the alchemy scheme. I'd love to read a good new-economic crit piece of this play. And I'm sure if I think more this play is probably reeking with idolatry.
Bartholomew Fair - This one seems to be put together almost entirely to make fun of Puritans and idiots. Most everyone is either less intelligent than they think themselves, or significantly less pleasant to be around. It doesn't really have a plot, per se - it seems to imitate life at a fair based on life being a bunch of random encounters that, when in a small town, are usually with people you know, though don't necessarily like. Ursula the brewster/barwench is superbly done and reminds me of Skelton's Elynour Rummyng.... There's a trio of Welsh/Scottish/Irish characters that are treated with various degrees of contempt by the other actors - the Irishman gets it worst, at least in terms of the way the dialect and dialogue is written. He sounds almost incomprehenisible. The Scotsman's accent isn't so bad, but it isn't quite straight English, either, and the Welshman's accent is pretty much identical with the English onstage, except for the occasional phrase and the fact that Wasp keeps yelling that he smells like leeks and rotting cheese. He ends up seeming quite a bit like Fluellen, and methinks that if no one's done an article comparing the two groups, I should write it at some point when I get some time. I tripped over a book at GEMCS where someone was discussing England and the British Isles during the Early Modern period, and talked about England and its relations with Scotland, Ireland and France. Wales literally never got mentioned, even in the index. I was shocked. Evidently someone somewhere sometime did such a good job of muting Wales and keeping it synonymous (though erased) with England that by the Early Modern period, it isn't worth mentioning that they used to be different, or that Wales is England's first real colony...
Faced with a meeting with David in two hours and forty minutes, I'm realizing I don't remember Jonson all that well.
So let's see what we can do here:
Volpone - This play involves an unscrupulous fox-like character (in the cunning and self serving way), the eponymous hero of the play, and his servant/leech Mosca (aka, housefly) who conspire to get money from all of the equally unscrupulous and greedy, if less intelligent, hangers-on who hope that by kissing up to the fake-ill Volpone through an incessent string of gift giving to eventually be the inheritor of his estate when the fake-ill Volpone finally kicks it. Volpone has, by the beginning of the play, already made quite a bit of money and has a reputation for being quite rich. He lies in bed fake-languishing in various degrees of fake-illness while Mosca, through intense verbal wit and ingenuity, somehow convinces each and every one in turn that they need to give the ailing Volpone whatever it is they have with them, as this next gift will surely be what establishes their position as sole heir to the estate. Eventually Volpone oversteps his bounds, tries to rape one of his dupe's wifes, and fakes his own death, names Mosca as his heir, and watches in laughter as his would-be heirs fight and are disappointed over what his will entails. Mosca then starts trying to get more and more money out of Volpone in exchange for not revealing the prank they'd been playing on everyone, and Volpone, rather than give in to Mosca, reveals himself to the courtroom so that Mosca may also share in the downfall.
The interesting thing here is the money - Volpone has no legitimate heir by blood, so he is free to do with his money whatever he chooses - he uses the scheme of playing the greedy wealthy people off of each other in order to make his money grow or breed in a sense. This, of course, is patently unnatural, just as Volpone's prey are using him as a sort of depository where they hope to make their money breed at huge interest rates - as in by bringing a bunch of plates or whatnot, they hope to eventually retrieve all that they brought and much much more in the way of riches. They all seem to be defining themselves in a way by the money they have or the money they want, rather than defining themselves in any flat linguistic terms. The court at the end, contrary to this, attempts to restore social order through relying on people's birth, rather than their money, to determine the "just" resolution to the whole deal. This is shown to be a sham as well, based on their contradictory treatment of Mosca. Volpone is let off the hook because of high birth alone - Mosca is treated well for having so much money, until he is relieved (as it were) of the money, at which point he is treated like the parasite his name marks him out to be.
The Alchemist - This is extraoridinary self-fashioning in the character of Face, who is able to be any and all things to anyone he needs be. He is the only character in the play who gets no come-uppance. Doll and Subtle are forced to flee the premises when the landlord returns, though they aren't punished beyond that (they do lose all their ill-gotten gains, though), and the people who are duped by Subtle's pretensions toward being an Alchemist, or Doll's dress-up as a fairy queen, all lose substantial amounts of money and dignity. The worst off are the Puritans, who blow on and on about the will of God, but also admit to being part of a Dutch moneylaundering scheme - the attack on them is the worst. Face, on the other hand, deftly stage-manages everyone around him and yet is able to re-assume the role of Jeremy, the landlord's "faithful" housekeeper once the landlord (Lovewit) makes his appearance in Act 5. Not only that, but in his role as housekeeper is able to keep in the name of his master all of the ill-gotten gains received through the alchemy scheme. I'd love to read a good new-economic crit piece of this play. And I'm sure if I think more this play is probably reeking with idolatry.
Bartholomew Fair - This one seems to be put together almost entirely to make fun of Puritans and idiots. Most everyone is either less intelligent than they think themselves, or significantly less pleasant to be around. It doesn't really have a plot, per se - it seems to imitate life at a fair based on life being a bunch of random encounters that, when in a small town, are usually with people you know, though don't necessarily like. Ursula the brewster/barwench is superbly done and reminds me of Skelton's Elynour Rummyng.... There's a trio of Welsh/Scottish/Irish characters that are treated with various degrees of contempt by the other actors - the Irishman gets it worst, at least in terms of the way the dialect and dialogue is written. He sounds almost incomprehenisible. The Scotsman's accent isn't so bad, but it isn't quite straight English, either, and the Welshman's accent is pretty much identical with the English onstage, except for the occasional phrase and the fact that Wasp keeps yelling that he smells like leeks and rotting cheese. He ends up seeming quite a bit like Fluellen, and methinks that if no one's done an article comparing the two groups, I should write it at some point when I get some time. I tripped over a book at GEMCS where someone was discussing England and the British Isles during the Early Modern period, and talked about England and its relations with Scotland, Ireland and France. Wales literally never got mentioned, even in the index. I was shocked. Evidently someone somewhere sometime did such a good job of muting Wales and keeping it synonymous (though erased) with England that by the Early Modern period, it isn't worth mentioning that they used to be different, or that Wales is England's first real colony...
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