Category — Literature & Poetry

Will linked us to this piece by James Bowman earlier.  Bowman writes:

I mention this difference between the fantastical as it existed in olden times and today, which some may think a trivial one, because we are or ought to be coming to realize that acknowledged fantasy, of the kind the movies have inherited from science fiction, is a different kind of thing from fantasy that doesn’t know it is fantasy…. But if there is no longer any attempt at imitation of reality but only the aptly-described “magic” of the movies making new realities, then there is no longer any such thing as art as it has been understood for the last three thousand or so years in the West.

Then again, when someone writes of myths they believe in this is usually not considered fantasy is it? Such writing would surely be considered religious texts. Bowman misses a much larger and more important aspect of fantasy which is that it is – at its best – an elaborate allegory. Tolkien’s Middle Earth was not something he believed in, per se, but it was most certainly a vehicle through which he could explore his beliefs. The myths he borrowed from may have been more Pagan than Christian, but the themes Tolkien was exploring were certainly in the Christian tradition. As Michael Weingard notes in his excellent essay on the dearth of Jewish fantasy:

Christianity has a much more vivid memory and even appreciation of the pagan worlds which preceded it than does Judaism. Neither Canaanite nor Egyptian civilizations exercise much fascination for the Jewish imagination, and certainly not as a place of enchantment or escape. In contrast, the Christian imagination found in Lewis and Tolkien often moves, like Beowulf or Sir Gawain, through an older pagan world in which spirits of place and mythical beings are still potent. Nor is this limited to fauns and elves. This anterior world can be dark and frighteningly alien, as Tolkien has Gandalf indicate in The Two Towers. “Far, far below the deepest delvings of the Dwarves,” the wizard says, “the world is gnawed by nameless things. Even Sauron knows them not.” Lewis sounds the same note in Perelandra when, far below the surface of the planet Venus, his protagonist catches an unsettling glimpse of alien creatures, and wonders if there might be “some way to renew the old Pagan practice of propitiating the local gods of unknown places in such fashion that it was no offence to God Himself but only a prudent and courteous apology for trespass.”

Fantasy is, after all, an exploration of our history and of – to put it somewhat crudely – what it means to be human. The fantastical often serves as contrast to our own humanity. The ‘other’ serves as a sort of mirror. Tolkien’s elves are a glimpse at a sort of perfection we humans cannot attain – at least here on Earth (or Middle Earth). The humans in Narnia have a very special role in the determination of events there. Magic is a window (indeed, a house full of windows) into all the ways we could be, or wish to be, but are not and never will be. In a sense, fantasy takes new worlds and false histories and creates little laboratories of experience. It is more inward looking than science fiction, which is by its nature a forward looking genre. It requires that we see beyond the fantastic to get to the deeper meanings.

What it does not require, in any sense, is a belief in the fantastical worlds it creates, either on the part of the writer or the reader. Bowman misunderstands the very nature of fantasy. Tolkien’s exploration of power and loss (of the war-torn, fast-changing world he existed in, the death of the agrarian society and the rise of the machine) could have as easily played out in a non-fantastical piece (though perhaps it would not have been quite so memorable). He did not need to believe in his creation to believe in the meaning behind it, any more than he would need to believe in any other fiction he created – on our own world or in some other.

Bowman writes elsewhere:

What I objected to in our contemporary fantasists — the question of their predecessors was too complicated for me to go into in such a short article — was that they deliberately and as a precondition of their art cut me off from any possibility of belief in the worlds they represent to me because they do not believe in them themselves. And if they don’t believe in them, why should I? And if I can’t believe in them, why should I care about them?

To draw a comparison between the fantasy of our modern world and the fantasy of some ‘olden-days’ is to miss the point of fantasy in the first place. Homer did not write fantasy novels, but the works of Homer, like the folklore and myth of so many cultures, provides the inspiration for much of what fantasists do today. If we believe in our own myths, after all, then they are not really fantasy.

Why should we care about these stories if we cannot be bothered to believe in them? I would say, quite simply, because the truth of a story is not always found merely in its narrative. If Bowman cannot see past the fantastical – something that even Homer surely wanted his readers to do – to see the humanity beneath it, then he is not reading either myth or fantasy in the way it was meant to be read. Nor Homer, for that matter.

Furthermore, we should read because we enjoy a good story. If we cannot enjoy a good story because the author who wrote it did not ‘believe’ it, then we should stop reading fiction altogether. Like perfection, a critic can easily become the enemy of the good.

Fantasy will never be like the ‘olden days’ and nor should it.  At least not in this world.

Thinking of the Kuhn discussion, I’d like to look at how a mythical culture understands an innovation of techné/craft; here treated as both a divinely revealed gift and the ground of human tragedy.

We start with the Titan Prometheus. In the Theogony, Hesiod depicts Prometheus as a sly trickster who angered Zeus by giving him the bones of an ox wrapped in glistening fat to eat. For unclear reasons, Zeus responded by vowing to keep the secret of fire from mankind, but Prometheus secreted away a ray of fire for man in a fennel stalk, a story that could reflect earlier man’s experience with fire sparked by lightning and carried by similar means. When he found out, Zeus punished Prometheus by having him bound to a pillar, where his liver was munched on by an eagle each day and regenerated each night, until he was finally freed by Heracles. Man, meanwhile, was punished with the creation of woman, according to the misogynist Hesiod, the source of all his troubles. Ever the Zeus propagandist, Hesiod uses the Prometheus story to show, “It is impossible to hoodwink Zeus, or to surpass him”. But, of course, Prometheus did hoodwink Zeus.

Living in a time of Athenian optimism (mid-400s BCE), Aeschylus, instead, depicts Zeus as a tyrant, recently enthroned by coup, paranoid about losing power, and planning to exterminate man. Some readers doubt the generally pious Aeschylus could have created this Zeus, but he isn’t much different from the bullying character elsewhere in mythology. Also, Aeschylus doesn’t really describe Prometheus’s gifts as pure windfalls. For example, his first gift, the ability to imagine a happy future, hides from men their wretched actuality. The other gifts: medicine, astrology, writing, metallurgy, and fire are also mixed blessings. Man’s imaginative creations somehow alienate him from his own condition, allowing him to deceive himself as to his mortal physical state. Prometheus is still a trickster. This is pilfered divine knowledge, hidden from men because, with it, they would be as gods, but not gods. The human condition is tragic precisely because we can imagine a future brighter than we are allowed by nature. [Read more →]

Tyler Cowen and Peter Suderman have both compiled (non-definitive) lists of books which have influenced them the most over the years.  I have thought about this some, and come to the decision that the books I read as a child were by far the most influential – far more influential than anything I read later as a college student or the ones I read nowadays.  So here’s a list, from memory, of the most influential books I read as a child.

The Lord of the Rings – This one is the obvious choice for a fantasy reader, I suppose.  I read it in fourth grade for the first time and loved it, and have read it several times since. It is still the definitive work of epic fantasy, I believe.  The only downside is that so many people attempted to imitate Tolkien when they should have been writing their own ideas.

The Prydain Chronicles – Lloyd Alexander was never as well known as Tolkien, but his Prydian books were wonderful young adult fantasy novels steeped in Welsh myth.  So while some of the characters mirrored those in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the stories themselves were unique and interesting and lively.  I read these ones countless times.

The Dark is Rising Sequence – This series taps into the old Welsh and British mythology fairly heavily, mixing the modern world and Merlin and time travel together in an epic clash between good and evil.  One of many books I read and loved that transports us from the mundane world into one much darker and more fierce.

A Wrinkle in Time – This was one of those books that really stopped me in my tracks. Free will, conformity, and the seduction of evil are all present here.

The Giver – Another glimpse into totalitarianism and conformity and the dangers of ‘sameness’ and ignorance of history.  Less fantastical than my typical childhood read, but sort of shocking also.

The Bridge to Terabithia – They made a movie about this book recently.  Please don’t watch it.  Sometimes movies can enrich the book experience, but not when they are mangled by over-Disneyfication. Terabithia helped me understand tragedy and loss better.

The Castle in the Attic – To be honest, I can barely remember this book, but like Narnia it helped transport me into another world – something I did a lot of as a kid.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court – This was a good, funny, cynical take on the King Arther stories.  Very helpful to round out all that heroism and chivalry with some good, honest, witty realism.

Narnia – Like the Lord of the Rings, these books are simply staples of young adult fantasy.

King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table – I have read so many King Arthur books at this point I can barely keep track of them.  This was one of the first.

I Am the Cheese – This was far more dystopian a tale than I typically read as a child, and still sort of haunting whenever I think about it.

Some honorable mentions:

Watership Down, Lord of the Flies, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh, The Wind in the Willows, The Last Unicorn, the Redwall books, the books of Roald Dahl and many others…

I should probably put child’s things away at this point and read more serious works of fiction and non-fiction – more philosophy, theology, et alia.  And yet … perhaps it is having children of my own now, or perhaps it is simply that I read to escape, but when it comes down to choosing I still find myself with some fantasy novel in hand, or some work of science fiction or mystery.  Yes – I do dip into non-fiction at times.  The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is certainly one of the most influential histories of my adult life. A Short History of Nearly Everything has been one of my favorite non-fiction reads in the past few years.  Crime and Punishment is hardly fantasy, and has been one of my favorite works of fiction that I’ve read since high school.  I blazed through a great deal of literature both contemporary and classic during college.  Some of it was quite good.

But the books that I’ve really loved have been Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell; the George R. R. Martin books; even the Harry Potter books.  True – much of the fantasy genre is fairly awful. Perhaps that’s why I’m so glad whenever I do find something good – even older children’s fantasy that I missed somehow as a child, like the work of Diana Wynne Jones.

What I’d like to read soon are the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks. And Jane Jacobs. And Diane Ravitch’s latest. And Joe Abercrombie (who, like Banks, is mysteriously missing from the local library…) And some Chesterton.

I’m currently reading  the sprawling Malazan books of Steven Erikson (now on House of Chains); and After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre – though I do not spend enough time reading (and I have a suspicion that this will remain the case until my children are older.) I’ve also got Mieville’s The City and the City lined up, though I admit to being a little stuck in Erikson’s series, making it hard for me to move on to other things.

So much to read, so little time.

Update: I’ve been asked to link to some translations. Here is the Perseus Project Symposium English translation which includes the Greek linked at the right. There is also the Internet Classics Archive Benjamin Jowett translation. Angie Hobbs did a great podcast on erotic love in the Symposium. Here is the Gutenberg Project’s Jowett translation. Google Books also has a translation.

As planned, today (technically, tomorrow) I’d like to get a conversation going about Plato’s Symposium. What I’ve done is to write down some questions while reading the text. They certainly aren’t exhaustive or expert, but I think they’re a start. Also, I would definitely not take them as a questionnaire. Instead of trying to answer all of them, please feel free to post comments about whatever questions strike your interest, or pose questions of your own.

The theme of the Symposium is éros, which can be defined as desire or longing, often of a passionate nature. Socrates, of course, has a very different definition. Any students of classical Greek are hereby invited to offer additional definitions.

As the framing story sets the stage, we hear about Aristodemus, a student who is in love with Socrates. A lot of students fall in love with Socrates. A repeating theme here and in other dialogues is the (homo) erotic aspect of the search for truth. Should we understand philosophical education as, in some sense, basically erotic?

The conversation turns to a recent symposium. The symposium was a sort of ritualized drinking party. Often conversation at a symposium would focus on a chosen topic. Here, the question is how best to celebrate the god of love. [Read more →]

The conservative-attack-on-Ayn-Rand essay isn’t anything new, and I don’t know if anyone will ever top Whittaker Chambers’s classic review of Atlas Shrugged, but The New Criterion’s Anthony Daniels has made another entry in the genre. [Read more →]

An old joke holds that historians are gossips with footnotes. This often seems true of Herodotus, the “father of history”. Curious about everything anyone tells him, at times, he can be a bit credulous and some of the stories he relates are what we would call tall tales. Nevertheless, his methodology- taking various accounts of past events and making decisions about which are the most plausible and what resulted from those events- is indeed historiography. Besides, it’s pretty hard not to enjoy the sort of historian who can write a sentence like, “There is a place in Arabia… where I went to try to get information about the flying snakes.” [Read more →]

In keeping with Mr. Kain’s suggestion for more interaction at this party (less sitting in the corner of the room, glumly sipping a whiskey sour) and pivoting off of Mr. Schaengold’s great post about eros and tragedy, I’d like to suggest that we meet up here next Wednesday to discuss Plato’s Symposium.

Several people have suggested the book club idea and my feeling is that it would be best done in tandem with what I’m already doing. I don’t feel comfortable asking everyone to have read all of Thucydides by next week! But I do think that there are plenty of books that would be great fun to read together. So, I’d like to start alternating between texts where I’ll  “go it alone”, so to speak, and book discussions. With any luck, publishers will start putting stickers on the books we discuss, like they do for Oprah!

Okay, so the Symposium is a text dealing with love and eros. Plato has two other dialogues on the erotic: Lysis and Phaedrus, which are good too. (I had planned to do all of the Platonic dialogues together, but I think the book club idea is probably better.) An interesting source on courtesans and boy favorites is Athenaeus.

As for translations, I like the Loeb Classical Library edition. As usual, I’d recommend the Penguin Classics edition, mainly for the introductory essay. And Leo Strauss did an interesting study of the Symposium. Online, I’d recommend the Internet Classics Archive “Symposium”. There is also the Project Gutenberg translation. I’d be amazed if there isn’t a version accessible by Google Books.

My plan, to the extent that I have one, is to post discussion questions on Wednesday in lieu of a long post about my own thoughts, and then we could discuss the text together. Ritual wine drinking is optional.

The Oresteia is a monument to the advent of law and order over primitive cycles of vengeance. The three-play cycle (the only complete Greek trilogy we have) was first performed at the Dionysia festival in Athens in 458 BCE and won first prize. It was understandably a crowd pleaser, as it celebrates the recently established democratic institutions of Athens and the development of civilized order out of ferocious chthonic nature, represented here as the younger generation killing the older, but also as the formation of a patriarchal society and the divine sanctioning of an act of matricide. It remains a work of uncanny power and terrifying intensity.

Agamemnon

After the Trojan War, the victorious king Agamemnon returns home to Argos. He and his men have been through hell, but among the victory celebrations he is apprehensive about giving in to the thrill of victory, fearing hubris, that paramount Greek flaw. Aeschylus reminds us repeatedly that this war turned the world upside down and destroyed many lives simply to reclaim unfaithful Helen; there would be something inappropriate about crowing over an abattoir. In contrast to the Iliad, where Agamemnon’s pissing contest with Achilles nearly destroys the Greek army, here he is subdued and even timid, reluctant to enter his own palace with his loving wife Clytemnestra.

His humility is, no doubt, caused in part by the public knowledge that Agamemnon took the life of his own daughter Iphigenia. Caught in a storm that threatened to wreck the fleet, he took the advice of religious prophets and sacrificed his daughter to appease the gods. Facing an impossible choice, he picked poorly and now bears the guilt; Voltaire, memorably, saw Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia as a model example of the damage caused by religious superstition. [Read more →]

Judging by the freshmen at my university (hereafter “Mall U”), I’d guess that high schools now assign the Odyssey more often than the Iliad. I suppose the Odyssey is more a yarn, with daring do, exotic locations, high adventure and true love. It’s more accessible and the Iliad is, by contrast, intense, violent, and a bit dismal. Personally, however, I prefer the Iliad and find the Odyssey a bit too much like a boy’s adventure tale.

The tale begins ten years after the Trojan War. Achilles is dead, Menelaus and Helen have reconciled, and most of the warriors have returned home. All but one ill-fated ship. In Ithaca, Odysseus’s wife Penelope and her son Telemachus are awaiting his return. He’s been gone for nearly two decades and the natives are getting restless. The local swells are hanging around the royal house, drinking and trying to get in Penelope’s tunic. She is undecided: desperately awaiting his return, while letting the suitors hang about offering her gifts. She has promised to marry someone after weaving a burial shawl, and each night she unweaves it, perhaps the most creative example of cock-teasing in world literature! [Read more →]

Now we come to Theogony, Hesiod’s account of the old gods and the coming of the Olympians. It’s rougher going than Works and Days. Some sections feature interminable lists as hard to keep straight as the Biblical begetting, while others draw out episodes with varying degrees of intrinsic interest. All the same, the Theogony is a good introductory overview of the Greek Old Gods, and there’s a primitive brutality to the stories that makes them compelling reading.

In the beginning, there was Chaos. The Babylonian Enûma Eliš embodies chaos in the goddess Tiamat, a badass beast who must be destroyed before civilization can commence; she is also winter, but what great poetic insight it is that chaos is winter! The Babylonians and Egyptians describe an amorphous fluidity. The Scriptures describe the chaos as formlessness and darkness, an abyss with God bringing light; the void is quickly glossed over. In most of the polytheistic mythologies, however, Chaos had time to dance drunk in the void, screw in the darkness, and spawn all sorts of wild monsters. This seems to me the more accurate account, told here in about 725 BCE.

[Read more →]

The Mesopotamians lived in a world that, at first glance, reminds one of the Ancient Greeks. There is the same interaction with a plethora of gods who guide men, but often remain indifferent to them. There is the same acceptance of hierarchy, kingship, and the priestly class as the natural social order and analogues to the Divine order. There is the same surprising acceptance of combat and violence, and a taste for heroics. And there is the same world order that seems both naively straightforward and surprisingly cruel.

Such is the case with The Epic of Gilgamesh, a story that was first recorded in Sumerian before 2,000 BC and in the most familiar Akkadian version about 1,000 years later, and which records the story of a quite likely real King from around 2600 BCE. And what a King! King Gilgamesh of Uruk was a huge and beautiful warrior who led the construction of the city walls; no small feat in Ancient Mesopotamia. We can assume this meant the use of conscripted labor from the community and he soon earned a reputation for tyranny among his people. In desperation, they appealed to the gods to get him off their back. This, then, is an ancient story about good government, as well as a lesson for humanity on how to live in the world. It suggests that the key to being both a good king and a good man is to have a sense of limits. [Read more →]

Continuing in the theme of the soldier’s dilemma, we have the Bhagavad-Gita, an excerpt from the Indian epic poem the Mahabharata. It is often read alone however; partly because the Mahabharata is so long (about one hundred thousand verses, or thirty times the length of Paradise Lost by one count), and partly because the Bhagavad-Gita is such a concise introduction to some of the key ideas of Hinduism. Like the Iliad, it centers on an epic war that could be based in historical fact.

Actually, the main story is a quite reminiscent of the Iliad; it’s also the tale of a great warrior who balks at fighting in an epic battle. The story begins with the warrior Arjuna, son of Pandu, on the night before a battle between his army, the Pandavas, and their cousins, the Kauravas, sons of Dhritarashtra. The kingdom has been divided following the retirement and death of Pandu and the Kauravas won a 13 year guardianship of the Pandavas’ half in a gambling match. Time’s up and they won’t return the territory to their cousins. The Pandavas hope to win back their kingdom and their honor. Arjuna has come to survey the battlefield with his charioteer Krishna. He is not sure he wants to join the battle.

It strikes me that the reservations Achilles has about fighting are primarily self-centered, while those of Arjuna are actually pretty reasonable. He objects that the war will require him to kill fathers, teachers, grandfathers, brothers; not to mention killing his own kin and former instructors: he sees no glory in this. Moreover, war shatters social stability. Arjuna: “When unrighteous disorder prevails, the women sin and are impure; and when women are not pure, Krishna, there is disorder of castes, social confusion.” Certainly, he’s not the first soldier to worry about adultery at home! His larger point is that war does not forge a new order, but represents the collapse of all order. Unleashing war can do more harm than can be undone; Arjuna wants to know how we can tell that the alternative wouldn’t have been better. Of course, we want to win; how to be sure that things would actually be better under our rule, and enough so to justify rupturing the social order? In true neoconservative style, Krishna doesn’t really address these concerns at first, instead implying that Arjuna is a coward! [Read more →]