Discussion: Damasio and Scarry

DESCARTES' ERROR
We had a good discussion tonight about this text.  I think most people enjoyed it and found it contained much to think about.  The discussion ranged over many different - but interconnected - topics. We spent alot of time discussing the concept of free will and trying to define free will vs personal responsibility, how does upbringing, brain damage, substance or other abuse etc affect this.  We had a good discussion on the value judgments made about brain issues vs other issues.  If you have cancer or diabetes or a broken leg there is usually no blame to the person, no negative judgments of their character, no blame whereas with many mental illnesses, we are uncomfortable with this, we may blame them for their illness, for their lack of "willpower".  A few people in the class deal with people with mental illnesses through their work, two through social services and one through the prison system and it was good to hear their perspective on these issues.

We also discussed sick cultures and what Damasio might have been referring to in the 1990s when it spoke about sick sectors of American culture.  One aspect might have been violence, video games, issues with sexuality etc.  Damasio didn't really elaborate on what he had in mind when he included the comment in his book.

We spoke a little about the effects of civilization on humankind and whether we are progressing (continuing to evolve) or whether we are just cycling through variations in human nature.

I didn't take alot of notes as I was guiding the discussion but I thought there was so much scope in this book, especially coming as it does after we've worked our way through the centuries of thinkers who have been wondering about the various roles of passion and reason, our place in the world.



ON BEAUTY AND BEING JUST - by Elaine Scarry
Roberta was scheduled to lead the discussion and had sent out a detailed list of questions she wanted us to consider and how she wanted us to consider them.  Unfortunately she didn't make it to the class and so Stephen led the discussion on the areas of the book he wanted to explore.  This is the 1st year that the book has been included in the GLS curriculum and everyone found it challenging.  It's a deceptively thin book, looks very pretty with its smooth cover, thick coloured end papers and textured paper.  I think that most people, especially after having read the very scientific Descartes' Error, were looking forward to a book discussing beauty and its role in human existence.  This book didn't really do this adequately for most of us.  It was interesting but since none of us have a background in aesthetics or have done any reading in it (except maybe Stephen?) we had trouble with the conceptual level Scarry was writing from.

PART II
Scarry says Beauty was banished from academic world for 2 decades.  Political critique was based on:

1. distracts us from important stuff like suffering, "wrong social arrangements"
2. when we make beauty an object of sustained regard, our act is destructive to the object

It's not that beauty wasn't appreciated but rather that it wasn't considered a good enough reason by itself to value something academically.  The class didn't agree with a) Scarry's statement or b) that her reasons for this valid.  The 3 in the class who had just finished an undergraduate degree did say that they found that universities or faculties tended to become very entrenched on a specific way to do things and all the other ways are denigrated each time a new "fad" comes along - which is not to say that new fads are adopted frequently or easily but rather that academic thinking tends to be quite prescriptive and proscriptive in how their field of study should be studied, discussed and written about.

Our view of beauty may be changing based on changes in the world such as ability to reproduce much beauty much more easily.  When you can find images of great works of art on the Internet or buy a decent quality reproduction of art you've seen in any museum shop, it's not as rare as it used to be.

Steve brought up the Pidgin Restaurant in Vancouver's Eastside and the protests against it, protesting against gentrification.  He said this fits in with what Scarry said: that the wealthy diners will be gazing out at the suffering poor and this could be harmful to them (destructive); and the beauty of the restaurant and the food may distract society from the 'wrong social arrangements'.  The whole argument seems a stretch to me but again, I probably have to think about it a bit more.

"No detailed argument or description is ever brought forward to justify this generalization, yet the generalization has worked to silence conversations about beauty.  If this critique or the other critiques against beauty were crisply formulated as edicts or treatises with sustained arguments and examples, the incoherence would be more starkly visible and the influence correspondingly diminished.  They exist instead as semi-articulate but deeply held convictions that - like snow in a winter sky that keeps materializing in the air yet never falls or accumulates on the ground - make their daily way into otherwise essays, articles, exams, conversations.  Suddenly out of the blue, someone begins to speak about the way a poet is reifying the hillside or painting or flower she seems to be so carefully regarding.

Stephen said that the Heisenberg principle, interpreted to mean that the gaze of a viewer affects the observed object, was adopted by the humanities to say that people's gazes whether this is the male gaze harming a female or whatever, have an effect on what they are observing and that this effect likely is not benign or is actually harmful - at the very least there is an effect.

Elaine Scarry would have spent much time in university environments that constrained value judgments of what is beautiful by wanting to apply notions of patriarchy, prejudice etc

We then moved on to discussions of 'lateral disregard' and how Scarry proposed that when we put our notice to something beautiful, we bring less attention to other related objects.  This can lead to problems with over-specialization or fixations about things we admire, find beautiful.  This concept carried more weight that some of Scarry's other arguments or propositions.

It was interesting to consider Scarry's references to Simone Weil who was "always deeply somatic: what happens, happens to our body." pg 111 Damasio would, I think, agree with this.

The essentialist who believes beauty remains constant over the centuries and the historicist or social constructionist who believes that even the deepest structures of the soul are susceptible to cultural shaping have no need, when confronting the present puzzle, to quarrel with one another.  For either our responses to beauty endure unaltered over centuries, or our responses to beauty are alterable, culturally shaped.  And if they are subject to our willful alteration, then we are at liberty to make of beauty what we wish.  pg 74

Kant is an essentialist and Hume is a historicist, Hume felt that rights and wrongs change over time, according to conditions, externals.  I don't think there is an intrinsic beauty or rather, I think that beauty is very much affected by the viewer (their background, culture, experience, education, mood etc).  I think there are some qualities that humans tend to find beautiful such as symmetry etc but the range of things we find beautiful is so wide and varied and the effect beautiful things have on us is also so varied that I can't conceive of beauty being constant.

The discussion made me consider about beauty from the perspective of non-humans.  It seems a very human concept and while animals can be interested in many things in all my observations of them I can't think of any time I've thought they noticed or had a any notion of beauty.  This thought seems to lead me straight to next week's text which is "The Animal that Therefore I am" which I'm looking forward to reading.

Discussion: Frankenstein

We began this discussion by, as usual, speaking a little bit about the background of the person as well as what was going on in the world (usually Europe) at the time. In this case, Mary Shelley's backstory was as interesting or even more so than the text we are reading of hers. There were several significant people in her life, most notably her father William Godwin and her lover (later husband) Percy Bysshe Shelley. As well, in the background, there is her deceased mother, early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, whose writings Mary Godwin Shelley would have read.


Mary Godwin would also have been exposed to many many intellectuals during her childhood: writers, philosophers, scientists, politicians etc. Percy Shelley was a fan of Mary Wollstonecraft and of William Godwin and falls in love with Mary Godwin when she is about 17. They elope (illegally as PB Shelley is still married to Harriet Westbrook) to the continent, accompanied by Mary's half-sister Claire Clairmont (who later becomes Lord Byron's lover). After a couple of years of moving around on the Continent and in Britain, the Shelleys head back to Europe, again accompanied by Claire. Byron has been ejected from England due to accusations of incest among other things and the Shelleys find themselves his neighbours in Switzerland. Claire becomes pregnant with Byron's child - her daughter Allegra was born in 1817. Prior to the summer of 1816 when she began Frankenstein, Mary Shelley bears two children, a daughter who dies a few days after birth and later a son, William. That Fall (1816), both Harriet and Mary's older half-sister, Fanny, commit suicide. Mary completes Frankenstein the following spring, 1817.

Frankenstein was conceived during a summer spent in Switzerland with PB Shelley, Claire Clairmont and Byron. The Shelleys had had to travel through France in 1814, just after Waterloo which had devastated France. Mary would have had a close connection to France given her mother's interest and presence in Paris during the French Revolution. There had been a volcanic eruption and the weather that summer was very bad and they had to amuse themselves indoors, reading gothic novels and German ghost stories and eventually challenging each other to write their own ghost story. Mary struggled to find a worthy idea and an image comes to her in a nightmare one night. Shelley continued to work on Frankenstein upon their return to England in the Fall, with PBS' encouragement and support. It is published in January 1818.


We discussed several of the noted themes in this novel: alienation, intellectual hubris and good science/knowledge vs bad science/knowledge. One area of discussion was about the difference between 'being' and 'appearing', a Rousseauian concept and which we see in the alienation and rejection of the creature based solely on his appearance.


Stephen also mentioned the recurrence of the word 'sympathy', here meaning a sympathy of minds. Captain Walton is looking for this and feels he had found it in Victor Frankenstein; the creature is desperate for this and never finds this, and this drives his actions his entire life.


Stephen's notes for this discussion include some "plots to follow": Walton’s Journey to find the “power that attracts the needle” – Walton is the one who “learns”, who has a chance to reform himself; those seeking glory via the pursuit of knowledge “secret of life”, becoming isolated from society; the Creature’s transition from benevolent “child of nature” to violent predator due to alienation and injustice.


There were also various themes: Nature vs Nurture – The Individual and Society; Dangerous Knowledge (including the failure of science to take responsibility for its creations which in the 20th century became a metaphor for issues around nuclear power); Parenting (and the issue of men trying to take over women's role as the carrier and nurturer of the child - women were particularly weak in this novel which is interesting considering the author is a woman) and the novel was also affected by the proximity of the French Revolution (power of reason, the innate human capacity for reason and benevolence and justice).


BYRON gave us some background on the Prometheus myth, important since Shelley's novel has the subtitle "The Modern Prometheus". Her husband, PB Shelley also considered himself a Prometheus. Prometheus was originally a trilogy (Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound and just the title of the 3rd, lost, play, Prometheus the Fire-Bringer). He was a titan and his name is thought to mean foresight (though one theory translates it as thief of fire). Prometheus helped Zeus but later interfered in Zeus' plans. He is seen as a trickster figure. In Hesiod's Theogeny, the use of fire was already known to humans but Zeus takes it away as punishment for a trick. Prometheus smuggles fire back to the humans in a giant fennel stalk. In Aeschylus' play, in addition to giving mankind fire, Prometheus is also thought to have taught them several arts of civilization such as science, medicine, agriculture as well as mathematics and writing He helped Zeus but then he intervened in Zeus' creation of man by giving humans fire. He became a figure who represented rebellion but who also represented human striving, especially after scientific knowledge. I don't know whether prior to Frankenstein Prometheus symbolized the risk of overreaching, hubris and unintended consequences.


Byron asked about Alienation: "the monster is victim to extreme alienation. Do we relate to this today? Some types of alienation include alienation from his creator, alienation form friends, alienation from himself. But, is the monster actually alienated from himself? Or are we today more separated from ourselves than the monster was? (On 131 the monster asks himself questions most people wouldn’t dare. He tries to understand himself.) Oddly, regarding alienation, we can perhaps see the monster and Frankenstein as aspects of one being separated from itself...could this be an outcome of what happens when we 'knowers' don't really know ourselves? Is this our warning?" Stephen noted that Frankenstein and his creature are never seen together and asked whether this could position them as 2 facets of a human being. Similarly, Frankenstein's friend Henry Clerval could be seen as an amalgam of various missing aspects of Frankenstein's being: lightness, gaiety, creativity, passion and compassion, conscience etc.

Byron had a lot to say about what Frankenstein tells about Beauty. "Our society is filthy. Our understanding of beauty is delusional and off target. We have people injecting botulin into their faces. We have people cutting the fat out of their bodies without making any more significant life changes. We have lineups at the makeup store where people pay plenty of money to paint over their skin. We have people putting silicone into their chests to look bustier. We have people eating liquid diets. People starving themselves to look thinner. People spending hours a day at the gym. And to what end? Is this end beauty? It is more likely that the hideous monster is a better example of what beauty ought to be? Most of us can’t accept ourselves in our own skins, so who are we to judge beauty? Are our imperfections what make us ‘ugly’? Or is it more likely our imperfections are what make us beautiful and we cannot see this?"


"Arguably, the monster’s biggest problem is that he is too human. In fact, he is more human and humane than people not created by Frankenstein. What does this say about our fellow creatures and the level of humanity with which we treat each other? How good have we gotten at being terrible human beings since the time this book was written? Would a present-day retelling look much different? Or is this really just a warning of our ambitions as human beings striving to be what we think better human beings would be? Victor says it himself: "seek happiness in tranquility, and avoid ambition" (220)."


Abilio also presented some aspects of the novel. He spoke about the danger not just of science but of knowledge, citing Facebook and do we want one site where everyone, from childhood friends to employers to people you met travelling etc, can find out masses of information about you. It made me think about data mining and the gigabytes of information companies and governments are collecting about us, to the point that analysis of our emails, Facebook posts, spending habits etc can tell a stranger what our age and gender is, religion, sexual orientation, whether a woman is pregnant and when she is due (being done currently by Walmart to allow for targeted marketing of customers so they can send them ads for baby stuff).


I'm still amazed at how relevant many of these texts are. We often read them thinking that we have to remember the context in which they were written or make allowances for customs and norms of the time yet so often the insights, the conflicts, the questions they are grappling with are ones we still are grappling with today. Wondering about the danger of knowledge takes us right back to where we started in September with Genesis and Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge. And here we are with Mary Shelley in 1817 worried about the dangers of untempered intellectual curiosity and here we are today still unable to come to any consensus as we play around with DNA, with weapons of mass destruction and with super computers and the Higgs Boson.

Shelley: Frankenstein

Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus; Penguin Classics, London, 2003

Mary Shelley grew up in a household composed of her father, noted rationalist philosopher and writer William Godwin, her step-sister Fanny (who was the 1st daughter of Mary's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft and her American lover, financier Gilbert Imlay) as well as Godwin's 2nd wife and her children.  Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had died 10 days after Mary's birth, due to complications from the birth.  According to Maurice Hindle's introduction, Mary grew up with a father who espoused the view that a "new system, based on 'universal benevolence', could create a just and virtuous society," maintaining that this virtue "would naturally emerge from the exercise of reason and free will, as developed in an 'enlightened' society."  Hindle quotes Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and writes "knowledge, and the enlargement  of intellect, are poor, when unmixed with sentiments of benevolence and sympathy...and science and abstraction will soon become cold, unless they derive new attractions from ideas of society."

Hindle mentions the Gothic imagery popular at the time Shelley wrote Frankenstein, and the use of monster imagery to demonize anything challenging the status quo.  Hindle notes that this style even permeated the writing of conservative political philosophers such as Edmund Burke, and in his introduction he includes a passage from Burke commenting on the French Revolution where he wrote that "vice assumes a new body. The spirit transmigrates; and, far from losing its principle of life by the change in its appearance, it is renovated in its new organs with the fresh vigour of a juvenile activity.  It walks abroad; it continues its ravages..."  Godwin himself was commonly described as a monster.  Walpole described him as 'one of the greatest monsters exhibited by history' and Burke called Godwin's opinions "pure defecated atheism...the brood of that putrid carcase the French Revolution."

Hindle ends his introduction by quoting physicist Brian Easlea in Fathering the Unthinkable who raises the issue of "Mary Shelley's indictment of masculine ambition" and her exposure of "the compulsive character of masculine science."  Hindle tells us that in her last novel, Shelley ends by having the hero say "This...is Power! Not to be strong of limb, hard of heart, ferocious and daring; but to be kind, compassionate and soft." In Frankenstein, Shelley certainly seems to want to highlight the hubris and the danger of the purely intellectual approach to science, something that still resonates today when the newspapers are full of reports of people trying to manipulate DNA to create new, "better" beings, implanting uteruii into women so that they can bear children, manipulating our environment on a scale that is truly earth-shattering and then proposing to mine the solar system for our short term benefit...  The awareness that today these reckless experiments in the name of 'science' are being driven by greed rather than by the intellectual thrill of discovery, or by a thirst for power via domination over nature, just makes mankind's hubris that much more unbearable.

The original frontispiece for Frankenstein, contains a quote from Milton's Paradise Lost.  This poem has been referenced in so many texts we've read the last couple of months that I am going to have to finally read it.  Echoes of this poem come up again and again in this text.

pg 96 "Alas...when falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness?"

Shelley writes alot about nature.  "When happy, inanimate nature had the power of bestowing on me the most delightful sensations.  A serene sky and verdant fields filled me with ecstasy." [pg 71].  The nature in Switzerland, where she and P.B. Shelley were living when she conceived of and wrote Frankenstein, contributes an enormous amount to the Gothic - as well as the elemental - feel of the book.  I couldn't help but compare her descriptions of the area around Geneva with her mother's descriptions of Denmark, Norway and Sweden when she travelled through those countries in the 1790s.  I find her writing particularly her choices of adjectives (imperial, vast, glorious, immutable and especially the overused adjective 'sublime') overwrought but I did appreciate the scenery she evokes, and the sense of place.

The abrupt sides of vast mountains were before me; a few shattered pines were scattered around; and the solemn silence of this glorious presence-chamber of imperial Nature was broken only by the brawling waves or the fall of some vast fragment, the thunder sound of the avalanche or the cracking, reverberated along the mountains, of the accumulated ice, which, through the silent working of immutable laws, was ever and anon rent and torn, as if it had been but a plaything in their hands.  These sublime and magnificent scenes afforded me the greatest consolation ...  [pg 99]

...Mont Blanc, the supreme and magnificent Mont Blanc, raised itself from the surrounding aiguilles, and it's tremendous dome overlooked the valley. [...] The very winds whispered in soothing accents, and maternal nature bade me weep no more.  [pg 98] 

Shelley was particularly affected by her hikes around the Mer de Glace near Chamonix.

The sea, or rather the vast river of ice, wound among its dependent mountains, whose aerial summits hung over its recesses.  Their icy and glittering peaks shone in the sunlight over the clouds.  My heart, which was before sorrowful, now swelled with something like joy; I exclaimed - 'Wandering spirits, if indeed ye wander, and do not rest in your narrow beds, allow me this faint happiness, or take me, as your companion, away from the joys of life.'

I can't help but contrast this paean to the joys of life with the perspective Shelley offered some 25 pages earlier.   Frankenstein's youngest brother William is murdered by Frankenstein's nameless monstrous creation. Frankenstein's friend Henry, in an excess of exclamation points and overblown sentiment, tries to console him:

Dear lovely child, he now sleeps with his angel mother! Who that had seen him bright and joyous in his young beauty, but must weep over his untimely loss! To die so miserably; the feel the murderer's grasp!  How much more a murderer, that could destroy such radiant innocence!  Poor little fellow! one only consolation have we; his friends mourn and weep but he is at rest.  The pang is over, his sufferings are at an end forever.  A sod covers his gentle form, and he knows no pain.  He can no longer be a subject for pity; we must reserve that for his miserable survivors.

Truly a bleak outlook on life.  I'm not sure that I would have found Henry's words comforting in the face of the loss of a child.  This is always something I have never understood about many religions: the Christian religions which preach about living your life in such a way that you may ascend to heaven but regardless you will have to spend time in purgatory (and as Dante showed us in his Inferno, there was no section except the outermost part of the circles of Hell where you would want to spend even one second); the Vedic texts and Buddhist philosophy which counsel people to aim for the almost unattainable Nirvana; the Greeks describing an unattainable perfection of forms; to the Islamic texts with their promises of the companionship of pure ones in paradise.  Why should there be any sorrow or resistance to death if what comes later is what you are supposed to be aiming for, if life is just something to be endured and suffered through.  I can understand that, if day-to-day life is hard, people would dream of something better after they die but in that case, why fear it or grieve its coming?

Frankenstein is a Gothic story.  Shelley describes the scientist's dark arts; and the original concept for the story came to her in a dream when she saw the image of the pale creator bent over his awful creation.  She describes his research:

Darkness had no effect upon my fancy; and a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm... I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain. [pg 52-53]

Even the 'monster' says that "Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it." [pg 102] - though he had far more reason than Frankenstein himself to find life unbearable.  "So much does suffering blunt even the coarsest sensations of men." [pg 168]

Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded.  I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.  Make me happy [he says to Frankenstein] and I shall again be virtuous. [pg 103]

The monster pleads a good case for the torment of his misery and, aside from his quickness to wreak revenge, he seemed to have the possibility of goodness as well as baseness within him - just as mankind does.  Yet Frankenstein, despite his initial agreement to create a companion for the monster, deems him "a fiend whose unparalleled barbarity had desolated [Frankenstein's] heart." [pg 170] I don't find the monster, other than his physical abilities, to be any more malignant, evil, depraved, barbarous etc than mankind.  The media and history books are full of people far more evil, depraved and ill-intentioned than Frankenstein's monster.  To this day.  So far civilization does not seem to have extracted or cured any of these tendencies from human nature.

At the end of the story the monster laments:

Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, and of enjoyment.  Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding.  pg 223

Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all human kind has sinned against me?  pg 224 

Society still judges people by appearance, forgiving the beautiful and engaging and condemning the ugly, the odd, the different.

Frankenstein is a good example of reason gone bad.  His scientific curiosity and his hubris took him into dangerous territory and like the scientists today who push the envelope either to see if they can or because of greed, he didn't engage his intellect to consider what the results of his actions might be, nor his humanity to care about the consequences.  Shelley seemed to want to offer a warning about the dangers of actions untempered by humanity or by those human feelings which we tend to think are desirable (compassion, fellow feeling, mercy, unselfishness, affection etc).  She has Frankenstein say:

A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind, and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility.  I do not think that the  pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule.  If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. pg 56

He goes on to say that had this rule been observed Greece would not have been enslaved and the Americas would have been discovered more gradually and the existing empires (Mexico and Peru are the examples given) not destroyed.  In Frankenstein's case he allowed his reason to be a slave to his passion (which Hume has said is how it always has to be).  The consequences of reason being the slave of dark passions (greed, jealousy, hate, envy) often seem to be the most terrible.  The narrator [pg 29] notes that Frankenstein "appeared to despise himself for being the slave of passion"but here he is just speaking about allowing his equanimity to be affected by despair or grief.  In the rest of the book however, Frankenstein reminds me of Werther in his self-absorption and lamentations about how his feelings are affecting him.  Page after page about his anguish, shame, guilt, despair, wretchedness, suffering, melancholy etc etc etc. Ah poor me!!

After moping around for years, worrying and depressing everyone around him, Frankenstein has the gall to say to Elizabeth, his patiently-waiting childhood companion, on their long-delayed wedding day:

You are sorrowful, my love. Ah! if you knew what I have suffered, and what I may yet endure you would endeavour to let me taste the quiet and freedom from despair that this one day at least permits me to enjoy. [pg 197]

The self-absorbed, whiny, arrogant man! His sufferings?!?  He caused the death of his youngest brother and allowed the execution of an innocent young family servant unjustly blamed for the murder.  He's kept his family and especially Elizabeth waiting and in the dark about how he is doing - and WHAT he is doing - for almost his entire adult life.  He has unleashed a monster and treated it in such a way that its only aim is to wreak revenge on Frankenstein by taking away anyone he loves (as Frankenstein has prevented the monster from having any loving companion in his life) - and he doesn't warn any of his 'loved' ones of the danger they are in because he is too afraid to own to the enormity and the consequences of his actions.  And he then has the audacity to chastise Elizabeth for being melancholy on their wedding day.

Towards the end, Frankenstein speaks to Captain Walton about reason and passion.  He asks him to "undertake [Frankenstein's] unfinished work; and I renew this request now, when I am only induced by reason and virtue. [...] I dare not ask you to do what I think right, for I may still be misled by passion.

Shelley also has the monster suffer the effects of passion:

I knew that I was preparing myself for a deadly torture; but I was the slave, not the master, of an impulse, which I detested, yet could not disobey.  pg 222

Both Frankenstein and his monster allowed their passions to take over their lives and this weakness consumed their lives and laid waste to the lives of everyone around them.

At the end, Shelley imbues the monster with all the mixtures of qualities we find in mankind.

My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy; and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change, without torture such as you cannot even imagine.  [pg 222]

Shelley wrote these words in 1816 yet today we are still trying to figure it all out.  There was an article in the newspaper today reporting the results of some experiments into humans behaving in mean or bullying ways. Situations were set up with research subjects where they were told or induced to ostracize or gang up on or to make things difficult for a few other participants.  When they assessed the feelings of the people who had been bullied and compared it to the people who had done the bullying behaviours, they found that it was psychologically more traumatic for the person acting badly or meanly than for the victimized or oppressed person.

I didn't like Shelley's overwrought writing style but the situation she imagined and the themes she wove into her work still hold resonance today - and her imagery has endured and kept a firm place in people's imaginations and in our roster of bogeymen.

Discussion: DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover

This text is being read in the section called Politics & The Body, along with The Communist Manifesto, Freud, Thoreau and Frankenstein.  Professor Thomas Grieve led the class this time, a specialist in literature from the modern period (1910-1930)

Grieve listed some of the themes in the book:

• Loss of pastoral world
• Class system
• War

He quoted from Wordsworth

"THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US; LATE AND SOON"

          The world is too much with us; late and soon,

          Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

          Little we see in Nature that is ours;

          We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

          The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

          The winds that will be howling at all hours,

          And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

          For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

          It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be

          A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

          So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

          Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

          Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

          Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Mellors represented the world that is being lost.  He is scornful of upper classes so he retreats to dialect, Lady Chatterly has to meet Mellors on his terms, in his world: in the woods (nature), having him speak in dialect to her though he can speak the same "King's English" that she speaks.  His virility is linked to nature and in many ways he is portrayed as the "Noble Savage".

We discussed why Connie chose or connected with Mellors.  It began with compassion, when Mellors saw her as vulnerable and as compassionate.  They each saw each other as distinct human beings - he saw the "woman" in her, not just the person.

Lady Chatterly's Lover is emphatically a post WWI war novel.  They had just experienced a horrendous war; one which made civilization realize that it had not advanced as far as they had been thinking.  This aspect of a damaged generation comes up several times.  At Mellors and Connie's 1st sex encounter, she is crying with all the anguish of her generation's forlornness pg 125
Going back to the 1st lines of the book, Lawrence begins with the "tragic age"

Ours is essentially a tragic age..We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

We discussed how Mellors is an early "angry young man", a manifestation we are not one with yet, though the youth are getting angrier and the abilities to demonstrate or act on their anger are much more global.  The situation in many European countries such as Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain, with 60-70% unemployment for men in their 20s, as well as the lack of possibilities for many immigrants in countries such as France, are leading to a build up of rage and despair.

Grieve provided us with some background to the writing of the novel.  How does this match DHL's life? He came from lower classes in mining town; ran off with married woman, an aristocrat; at the time he was writing LCL he was impotent because of his TB, his wife Frieda was sexually voracious and taking lovers, and making sure he knew it.  For Lawrence, depressed because of the state of the world, tender-hearted fucking is what will save us.  His hero, Mellors holds the power.  Lawrence has been accused of being misogynistic and we found this hard to assess just from one novel.  He writes ostensibly from a woman's point of view yet his writing is very much a man's perspective with its emphasis on the phallus.  It's the man who liberates the woman.  He educates her, guides her, he is the teacher, the wise experienced one, who frees and awakens her sexually.  For me it was quite paternalistic.  I don't know if I would call Lawrence misogynistic or whether he is just, unavoidably, male in outlook and focus.

Lawrence sees sex as a preventative or as protection against the decay of the world: against mechanization, industrialization, the weakening of men.  Some of his concerns are right on the money: the blight of industrialization, the lure and destruction of both Mammon and the bitch-goddess (much as I don't buy into the female characterization of this) of Success.

Discussion: Thoreau and Freud

Our Thoreau discussion was led by Kirsten.  I read this short essay and while I felt agreement with some of what Thoreau had to say, about standing up for what you believe in, about not supporting entities (even if this means your government) that are carrying out actions you believe are wrong but I was left floundering somewhat by Thoreau's omission of any attempt to define conscience, to describe how this would work in reality.  I realize he was living in a very different time, less than a century after the American states, including Massachussetts, had been involved in a revolution to force independence from Britain.  Revolt against your government in this context would likely have been seen in a more acceptable and necessary light.  But Thoreau was a smart and thoughtful man and I would have thought he would have contemplated more stable situations and what future roles of democracy, conscience and individual rights and responsibilities might entail.  Kristen was helpful in giving us some background about Thoreau including his adherence to transcendentalism with its belief in the innate goodness of the human being.  I'm not sure that I'm as sanguine as Thoreau was.  I believe that there is innate goodness in human beings but I also believe (as did Freud) that there is innate aggressiveness and my worry in allowing individuals complete freedom is that those who contain more aggressiveness, allowed to run riot, can very easily and quickly with - mankind's technological and strategic abilities - come to dominate the more innately 'good' humans and certainly to oppress the weaker members of any community.

Kristen sent out a good set of questions but we only had a chance to discuss the 1st one - and even then it was a topic that we could have discussed for an entire day:

1. How do we determine what is right?  What are the rights of the individual vs the rights of society?

We live in a society which currently does not nurture a conscience in its citizens, instead it encourages obedience.  People may take actions based, they claim, on their conscience but at what point does their right to obey their conscience end?  My mind immediately went to the Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr quote that "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins."  But a determination of 'harm to others' is not always as clearcut as in Wendell Holmes' quote.  We had a brief discussion about how to define conscience.  Examples brought up were conscientious objectors to the Vietnam war draft - where conscience was defined on the basis of adherence to religious tenets or teachings.  Society seemed willing to concede the overriding dictates of conscience if it was backed up by the practice of an accepted religion but in the absence of a religious foundation for conscience or in a current western world where religion holds less sway on society, where is conscience defined?  We discussed certain actions that may be sanctioned or even prescribed by religion and/or cultural norms: honour killings, genital mutilation, Christians objecting to abortion clinics (with varying levels of force reaching all the way up to sniper killings of doctors).  Thoreau doesn't explicitly state this but he was focused on the rights and obligations of the individual and for Thoreau, as for Wendell Holmes, the right of an individual to follow his conscience ends where harm to another might begin.

Thoreau was a fan of less government.  How do we make government more responsive to the needs to the people it governs?  Decentralization of government is one way of having a more flexible government with potentially less oppression of individuals (or potentially oppression of fewer individuals).  Switzerland would be one example of a country with a more decentralized government, with its various cantons.

It was an interesting discussion but we ran out of time to really dissect into what is conscience and how do we determine what someone's conscience is?  It was time to move onto Civilization and its Discontents, as postulated by Freud.

Dr. Jerry Zaslove led the discussion on Freud's text Civilization and its Discontents.  Dr. Zaslove has been studying Freud and the field of psychoanalysis for decades.  He spoke a bit about Vienna, the birthplace of psychoanalysis, where Freud lived for most of his life.  He had sent us a few texts including one containing Freud's views on capital punishment, and provided a handout on Ritual Psycho-Analytic Studies by Theodor Reik.  Zaslove made the point that the word civilization in the context of this book is probably not the best word.  Culture would have been more apt.  Freud (and Thoreau) are trying to understand the institutions that mankind had developed and how they have come to create such problems for individuals.

Freud is a modern step along a long pathway we've been following from the time of Copernicus through the the Enlightenment (Rousseau, Darwin, Nietszche, Kant, Thoreau etc) to a more modern era, one in which we may not need a state but we do require  a Social Contract.  Freud's method involved psychoanalysis, and the cornerstone of psychoanalysis is repression and the unconscious.  Freud saw psychoanalysis as a dynamic way of assessing the human mind rather than a static set of descriptors of symptoms.  Yet language is the main tool of psychoanalysis.  For someone new to the field, the jargon is a big barrier - not only to understanding but also because many of the words are sound cliched.  Interestingly, Professor Zaslove has been working on an analysis of psychoanalysis and aesthetics: aesthetics as a way to alleviate the suffering that civilization or culture causes to individuals.  Chapter II offers ways of coping with the unhappiness of life.  3 ways.  Deflection, intoxication or .....
Freud was influenced by Darwin and the concept of development and some of Freud's totemic concepts.

Dr. Zaslove briefly defined some of the language associated with psychoanalysis:

• Neuroses - where the ego is divided against itself
• Psyche - from the german means soul or spirit - the inner location of the body
• repression - in the german means repulsion, pushing away
• sexual - phases of the development of the human animal i.e.: adolescence, having a love object, Eros
• cathexis - one part of the mind is occupied by another part of the mind - almost militarily
• civilization - group or mass psychology - the energy of a group
• Id - place of non-conscious drives
• Ego - the self or "i"
• Super-ego - the over 'I' or meta-'I' - stands above the "I"; free association
• transference 
• obsession or compulsion - qualities of the human psyche

Zaslove described some of the influences at the time:

A time of revolutions and counter-revolutions
Archaeological investigation into ancient civilizations
Class system, industrialization - Freud was pessimistic whether these would change - persisent ruling class
City states such as Vienna are undergoing changes and stresses
Growing middle-classes - increased neuroses

One technique used in psychoanalysis is to try and understand emotions through memory and Zaslove briefly mentioned Mimesis in people.  Neurosis is a key issue in individuals as well as in society.  To Freud neurosis is not an illness, it's a consequence in the development of the mental life as a child, where it finds itself divided against itself.  The child has all these undifferentiated drives.  Each child will attach itself to an object (mother, father, grandparent or other caregiver).  The neurosis is the coming into existence of consciousness.  The human animal doesn't do this automatically, it does it via love and touch and by creating a picture .  The healthy self, in an effort to keep itself together, creates an imago, of that which has been lost or that which can be attained in the future.  The resistance or conflict arises when the child realizes that it won't achieve this image.

Civilization and Its Discontents is an anti-platonic book.  It's a book about where we are now (100 years ago) - about modernity.  It's a developmental psychology, it assumes the individual is capable of development.

Freud: Civilization and its Discontents

Freud, Sigmund: Civilization and its Discontents, Tr. David McLintock; Penguin Modern Classics, St. Ives 2002.

These week we are reading a work of Freud's and an essay of Thoreau's.  Knowing only the most minimal and banal information about each of these (Freud as psychoanalyst with a fixation on the Oedipus complex and blaming the mother for any difficulties in an individual's life; and Thoreau as a simple-living backwoods philosopher who wrote Walden) I didn't immediately see a connection between the 2.

The book of Freud's we are reading is about Civilization, something I have never spent much time thinking about but, if pressed, would probably have said is a good thing.  I had a hard time with the introduction as it plunged me immediately into the deep end of psychoanalytical jargon and concepts, territory unknown to me.  I immediately found myself floundering in the murky depths of concepts about the anal eroticism of young human beings, primitive sniffing men on all fours and the repression of olfactory stimulation when mankind evolved from all fours to standing erect, discussions of the id, ego and super-ego, Eros, the totemic phase, and oceanic feelings.  I was having a hard time relating this to civilization but once I got into Freud's text itself, I found much there to make me think and reflect.

Freud's discussion was a bit challenging for someone lacking any previous knowledge of his earlier works (this text being written in 1929 and Freud lived from 1856 to 1939).  What was interesting to me is what I've been exposed to, via books and media culture (TV, movies etc), during my lifetime of western society's reaction to Freud's findings during the remainder of the 20th century (and now into the 21st century).  I found his discussions (about the exigencies of civilization, the role of religion, the conflict between the individual and society) were really thought-provoking and made me want to read more in this area - though what I really wanted to read, being lazy, was a text from some learned person assessing mankind and society in the 21st century in a manner similar to Freud's processes in the late 19th and early 20th century.  I was very curious, as I read about sexual repression, the constraints civilization imposes on an individual's appetites or drives, the importance of various innate human drives, about what this now looks like for someone growing up in the 21st century.

Freud writes quite a bit about why mankind may have developed and submitted to civilization.  In return for increased security (controlling nature, decreasing risk of physical harm including starvation, exposure to the elements, mitigating against intra-species aggression etc), mankind had to give up or constrain basic human pleasure-seeking drives, most notably for Freud (and according to him, man - though it is not always clear to me when Freud means "Mankind" and when he means "man") the drive for sexual gratification.  

[...] Civilization designates the sum totals of those achievements and institutions that distinguish our life from that of our animal ancestors and serve the dual purpose of protecting human beings against nature and regulating their mutual relations. [pg 27]

Communal life becomes possible only when a majority comes together that is stronger than any individual...The replacement of the individual by that of the community is the decisive step towards civilization."  "Its essence lies in the fact that the members of the community restrict themselves in their scope for satisfaction [...] The next requirement of civilization is justice. [pg 32]

Much of mankind's struggle is taken up with the task of finding a suitable...accommodation between the claims of the individual and the mass claims of civilization. [pg 33]

What has occurred since Freud wrote this text, is a large body of research on animals, animal behaviour, animal societies, interactions, learning etc - and I'm fascinated by what we have learned about mankind vs the animal kingdoms in the last 100 years.

Freud goes on to discuss civilization and writes on pg 39 how, though women "1st laid the foundations of civilization with the claims of their love," men are set the difficult task of maintaining it and forced to "sublimate their drives," given that women have "little aptitude" for this and indeed soon resent men's distraction from their "duties as a husband and father."

Again, in the year 2013, almost 1/2 century since the early days of 'women's lib', I would really like to read a modern take on this from someone who has studied Freud and his field over the past few decades.  One jarring note, from a perspective 100 years later than when Freud was writing, lay in a footnote to Section IV where he notes:

... erotic relations are so often associated with a degree of direct aggression, quite apart from the sadistic component that quite properly belongs to them.  Faced with such complications, the love-object will not always be as understanding and tolerant as the farmer's wife who complained that her husband no longer loved her because he had not beaten her for a week.

Freud looks at several tactics mankind has experimented with to try and cope with the realities of civilization.  I found it interesting to read his opinion of communism, given that we read The Communist Manifesto just last week.  Freud writes about communism and the contention that mankind's "nature has been corrupted by the institution of private property." [pg 49]  He contrasts this with Christianity's grandiose and, Freud maintains, impossible commandment to 'Love thy neighbour as thy neighbour loves thee.'  Freud states that communism's attempt to redress inequality by abolishing private property rights and rights of inheritance don't take into account the 'natural' inequalities that will always occur due to varying genetic physical attributes and innate and unequal mental abilities.  Freud writes that:

Aggression was not created by property; it prevailed with almost no restriction in primitive times, when property was very scanty. [pg 50]

Freud considers aggression "an indestructible feature of human nature."

It was also interesting, on pg 50, to read Freud's comments about one outlet for mankind's natural aggression which is found within small tight cultural units, where aggression is directed outwards to outsiders.  Freud calls this the 'narcissism of small differences.' pg 51

As a scientist I enjoyed Freud's simple description of the goal of science.

...What we strive for in scientific work - a simple answer that neither neglects nor does violence to the facts.

In Part VII Freud speaks about internal controls that civilization instills to curb mankind's innate aggression, such as guilt and the need for punishment.  I'm sure I could pick up almost any book from the pantheon of literature and find this as one of the themes in the book.

Professor Zaslove sent along various extracts to consider as we read Freud this week.  One of these contained some responses Freud had communicated to Theodor Reik in 1926, when asked by Judge Emil Desenheimer of a Germanic Supreme Provincial Court for his views on capital punishment.  Freud raised the issue of 'talion' as an early legal principle, a term I'd never heard of.


According to Britannica Online Encyclopaedia: Talion:  A talion is a legal principle originating back in Babylonian times and in Palestine, based on the "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" concept.  The law makers in those times, and extending through the early Roman times and occasionally resurfacing in the middle ages, felt that the punishment should more literally match the crime.  Eventually the injured party could also choose to be compensated financially instead.  The Latin term was lex talionis.

Reading about it in Britanica Online, it made me think of my recent trip a couple of weeks ago to Todos Santos Cuchumatan, in northwestern Guatemala.  I've been there yearly since 2009, working on a canine population and rabies control project for Veterinarians Without Borders Canada.  It's a Mayan community which has been able to maintain a strong sense of identity and culture and resist the pace of change experienced elsewhere in the last century.  Though I'm seeing changes even in just 4 years, due to the availability of cellphones and the internet, it is still quite traditional.  This year we had one team member interviewing some of the people in the community.  One interesting thing to come out was a different concept of justice.  I knew that the municipal leaders spend much of their time mediating property disputes and other areas of conflict but one woman's story really brought it home to me.  Most of the dogs in Todos Santos, owned or otherwise, run loose in the community.  One woman told us that her dog, while running loose, had got into her neighbour's house and had eaten some of the neighbour's food.  The neighbour complained to the municipality and asked to be compensated for her loss.  The decision, and this was not deemed unusual by the community, was that the dog-owning woman had to either poison her dog or else pay a significant amount to the neighbour to make up for the lost food.  Being poor, the woman had to poison her own dog, something she is still heart-broken over months later.  This to me is an odd way of dispensing justice but it seems to fit with the ancient concept of 'talion'.

Freud seems to have a pessimistic tone in his book.  Having recently experienced WWI in the decade prior to this book being published, Freud must have been disillusioned about the earlier bright promise of civilization and the industrial revolution.  The aggression, territorialism, brutality and carnage that occurred during the war would have seemed an enormous fall from the civilized heights promised by the advances of the 19th century.  In this book Freud proposes that mankind may 

gradually carry out such modifications in our civilization as will better satisfy our ... demand for a form of life that will make us happy with[out] allowing so much suffering, which could probably be avoided. [pg 52]

In the year 2013, I'm finding it hard to judge whether civilization/culture or society have advanced in a desirable way from where we were at the beginning of the 20th century or whether we have lost our way.  This is probably a significant factor in my decision to embark upon this Master's program and explore the works of bright people over the preceding centuries and up until today.  I'll see if I'm able to come to any decisive conclusion 4 years hence.

Discussion: Marx and Brecht

Our session this evening considered Marx's famous work The Communist Manifesto  along with a play by Bertold Brecht, situated during WWII but based on the ancient Greek play Antigone.  

We began with Marx.  Chris led the discussion with contributions from Stephen.  One aspect that was mentioned was that Marx based his analysis of the dialectical issue of human history on Hegel's work (which we haven't read); and that communism and a revolution by the proletariat will eliminate this constant conflict between something and its antithesis because the proletariat includes everyone and will not have an antithetical entity.  Marx would go on to define a dialectic that was different from Hegel's, Marx even referred to his dialectic as the opposite of Hegel's.  This dialectic became defined as 'dialectical materialism' or the primacy of the material way of life over all forms of social consciousness.

Marx felt that all inequality was due to property ownership, which was also the control of the means of production.  At the time that he was envisioning a workers' revolution, his worker's paradise, Marx did not contemplate power issues occurring in a communist system, issues such as we have seen in countries such as China and Russia and to some lesser degree Cuba, in the century following the publication of the Manifesto.

Marx and Engels went back to try and look into the origins of class structure and see whether in other societies such as aboriginal societies, tribal societies etc they functioned differently from 'civilized' societies.  They concluded that the problems stemmed from ownership of property (which became ownership of the means of production especially during the industrial revolution).

Chris showed us a brief video of an early Soviet 'cartoon' which would have been shown in various villages after the revolution, to try and convince the peasants of the value of collectivization.  In jerky animation it showed the evils of capitalism and the benefits of working together for the good of all.  It reminded me of the old posters we would still see which had been popular in the 1920s - 1940s.

These posters would show strong austere workers working hard or with fists upraised in support of the revolution.  

I remember seeing idealistic students, decorating their university dorm rooms with these old posters from Russia.

I don't remember seeing many from China but they have the same flavour:

Even western posters had the same look at the time. 

When I see images from North Korea today I see the exact same style and imagery: urban scenes in the background (man's achievements) and in the foreground men and women lined up at attention in 'heroic' poses.

ANTIGONE

Bertold Brecht 10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956

Brecht wrote this play just after the end of the second World War, in 1947/1948.  Brecht had spent the war outside of Germany, moving around the Scandinavian countries and then to the USA until he was blacklisted and called to appear before the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee).  He then returned to Europe, to Switzerland where he lived until moving to East Germany after the war.

The discussion of Brecht's play Antigone was interesting.  Jonas led the discussion which I always find interesting since when he is not leading the discussion he tends to be very quiet in class.  He had sent us out a list of questions, I've attached a few of them and our discussion here:

1. Who is the real hero of the play, Kreon or Antigone?
Kreon was a dynamic character, & Antigone was more static. Antigone is more heroic here. I felt Kreon was more static in this version than in Sophocles whereas Antigone seemed more heroic here compared to Sophocles' version where she just seems to have a martyr-complex and to value her dead, flawed brother above her live, vulnerable sister. Creon in the Sophocles version was more appealing to me - when he was at his most rigid I could still understand why he was the way he was.

2. Given that the play opens in post-war Germany, are we to view Kreon as Hitler? Was Argos the Soviet Union that bounced back from a Nazi invasion to utterly shatter Germany?
We didn't discuss this much but I saw a lot of WWII symbolism in the play.

3. After reading the Communist Manifesto, do you see Kreon as a Bourgeois imperialist and autocrat? Do you see Antigone and Hamon as rebellious Proletarians?
There is a hint of this when Kreon refers to Hamon as being Antigone's "comrade" (p 43). Hamon retorts, "Not only hers, but of all that's just, wherever I see it." It was very interesting to read this at the same time as Marx. There is so much from the manifesto that even if not directly referenced, obviously influenced the thinking of the following century.

4. Brecht changes the Ode from Love to a Bacchanalian orgy. As Antigone was preparing for her death, the city was literally in the throes of a drunken hedonistic orgy. Why did Brecht do this?
We discussed how this is likely to show that people continue on with their lives despite horrors. We have an enormous capacity to "move on" from things, to tolerate, adjust, forget, forgive.

Again, we could have taken up the entire time available just to discuss any one of these.  The influence of Marx and the rejection of prussianism and naziism were very apparent in this play, though unlike Anouillh, Brecht did not spend the war in either Germany or an occupied country.  I find it somehow reassuring that artists return to old stories to try and say something about the world they live in.  I don't know why this seems different than the endless plundering of previous movies that Hollywood does - maybe because when Hollywood remakes a movie they don't seem to bring anything new to the works, nor to have anything much to say.

  

Anouilh: ANTIGONE

Anouilh, Jean: Antigone; tr. Barbara Bray, Methuen, London,  1987

Jean Anouilh 1910-1987
Born in Bordeaux. His father was a tailor and his mother a violinist (at a nearby resort). The family moves to Paris when he is 8. Begins Law at the Sorbonne but quits to become a dramatist. He was quite influenced by the work of Pirandello, which surfaced in Paris in the 1920s.  Marries the actress Monelle Valentin when he is 22. Prisoner of war (briefly) in 1940. Antigone begins her 1st run (500 performances) in 1944, with Monelle Valentin in the lead role.  Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh perform in  Antigone at the London Old Vic in 1949. Lives near Lausanne for the last 30 years of his life. Anouilh increasingly disillusioned by French society, and has a particular antipathy to De Gaulle but also the far left militants.

Anouilh describes to Paul Vandromme what the theatre meant to him "Thanks to those spring evenings [at the theatre] in 1928 I was able to escape a little from the long night of my existence."

The Methuen edition describes some differences between Anouilh's Antigone and Sophocles'. Anouilh omits Tiresias, the blind seer.  In Anouilh's version, Creon (Antigone's uncle and now King of Thebes due to the deaths of both her brothers, Oedipus' sons) does not experience the growth and change we saw in Sophocles' version.  In the original, Creon has a conversation with both Tiresias and with his own son Haemon and both these men urge him not to carry out the death penalty Antigone received when she disobeyed Creon's edict and buried her brother Polyneices.  Creon spurns their advice initially, determined to be a strong impartial ruler but he eventually repents and realizes that by holding to his decision, he is dishonouring the gods.  In Anouilh's version, Creon is a more sympathetic man who has given up the life he enjoyed in order to become King of Thebes when both of Oedipus' sons kill each other.  His growth seems to have taken place prior to the events of the play.  Anouilh also omits much of the power and reason of Haemon's speeches.

It's interesting reading this Antigone after having read Elizabeth Smart's "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept." (I've been reading a bit out of sync over the break). Both are young passionate women who are very judgmental and intolerant (as is Werther) of age and its apparent compromises. All three are very idealistic and uncompromising.

It's not an original observation that passion and youth go together but the 3 books I've just read in the last week have really pummelled me with this dogmatic pairing.  All 3 texts, 2 fictional, one poetically autobiographical, have main characters that are young, subsumed by passion and intolerant of age, reason, compromise, survival.  All 3 see age or even maturity as, literally, a fate worth than death.  I'm still coming to grips with this uncompromising view of passion and with the prospect that passion, real passion, is - possibly, likely, sadly - only attainable in the young.  I'm not quite ready to give up on the possibility of passion but I also don't see life in such uncompromising, black and white, all-or-nothing, terms.

Laura was speaking the other day about having watched Baz Luhrman's "Romeo & Juliet" in another class.  She'd 1st seen the film as a teen or young adult and had found it very moving and enthralling, very powerful.  She said watching it in class made her realize the generational difference between herself and some younger classmates - who found the film dated and laughable.  I saw the film as an adult, probably in my 30s and I wasn't emotionally affected by it but thought it was a worthy update of the famous play.  It's interesting how age so affects perception.  I'm finding that about books I'm re-reading that I read as a teen or young adult.  I may get more context, more perspective, more substance out of them now but I don't know if they will affect me emotionally or chromatically the same way certain books did when I was young.

I enjoyed reading a different version of Antigone - for the same reason I enjoy (usually) seeing repeated versions of various of Shakespeare's plays - you get something different out each time.  I did very firmly have in my head, the whole time I was reading it, the fact that it was written in Paris during the 2nd world war.  Images from Casablanca and other WWII films and books would flit around in my head as I read through the play.