France: The Gods Will Have Blood

France, Anatole: The Gods Will Have Blood, Frederick Davies; Penguin Classics, London, 1979

I enjoyed this book - though the subject matter was grim.  It was strange to think of Mary Wollstonecraft being in Paris at the same time as the events depicted in this novel.  I thought the characters were interesting and the events in the novel were quite incredible even though they must bear a very close resemblance to what actually occurred and to many of the people involved.

Gamelin was a frightening character because he seemed quiet and sane yet was capable of so much evil action.  I thought that St. John Rivers in Jane Eyre (which is our next book) was similar in that he had a cold character and a somewhat self-righteousness nature.  I think as a missionary he would have been an intolerant man who would have exacted severe punishments on his "flock" 'for their own good'.
As with most readers, I really liked Maurice Brotteaux des Ilettes, the atheist epicurean.  He says

Ignorance is the necessary condition of human happiness...We are almost entirely ignorant of ourselves; absolutely of others.  In ignorance we find our bliss; in illusions, our happiness.

Barthes would have agreed with him about our ignorance of others.

Brotteaux also speaks on the value of human life, saying that he doesn't feel it has much value.

Nature...has certainly never given me evidence to believe that a man's life has any value; indeed on the contrary, she shows in many ways that it has none.  The sole destiny of all living beings seems only to become fodder of all other living beings fated also to the same end.

Like a good epicurean, atoms to atoms.

Gamelin asks Broatteaux whether he believes in Reason.

I hope at least, Citizen Brotteaux, that when the Republic establishes the worship of Reason, you will not withhold your acceptance of so wise a religion?

I love reason, but my love does not make me a fanatic, Brotteaux answered. 'Reason is our guide, a light to show us our way; but if you make a divinity of it, it will blind you and lead you into crime.'

This book very graphically and effectively describes what can happen when people become fanatical about change or about a cause.  I remember a movie I saw in the 90s about China and it showed the same situation where a major societal change has taken place and people are paranoid, fanatical and severe.  It was called The Blue Kite by Tian Zhuangzhuang.  You would see people turning neighbours in before they could turn you in.  I especially remember one scene where one of the main characters is at a meeting where they are dealing with a major problem and he leaves to go to the bathroom - when he comes back everyone turns silently to look at him and he immediately realizes that they have decided to make him the scapegoat and he is sent to a work camp.  I also remember a scene, I think from the same movie, where the officials have banned dogs (probably because of rabies concerns) and they are killing any dogs they see but they are also inspecting everyone's homes for dogs.  A family hides their little dog in a bench when the inspectors come and everything seems ok and then the dog whines and the inspectors stop as they are leaving and then follow the noise and find and seize the dog.  I can't remember whether they shoot it or just take it away but I can't imagine what the people would have felt like during those times.

The Gods Will have Blood reminded me of that atmosphere.  Movies I have seen about the Spanish Civil war and the revolution in Russia often dealt with those themes as well.
France writes:

The Convention intended to have one remedy for everything: Terror.  Blood would have blood.

France describes the magistrates, untrained men given the power of life and death.  Towards the end of the Terror, the prisons were so full of the accused that the magistrates were instructed not to even hear witnesses or defences, not to try and ascertain facts but just to use their consciences, their intuition to decide whether an accused was guilty or innocent.  France describes the trials of several

obstinate, empty-headed soldiers with the brains of sparrows in the skulls of oxen [...] What did it matter whether this soldier was innocent or guilty! [...] It was imperative to teach these generals of the Republic to conquer or to die.

Gamelin had a passion for the Republic but no love of humanity. He declaims:

I am a magistrate. I am responsible only to my conscience...Judgment is mine, not yours. I know neither friends nor enemies.

Brotteaux speaks to Gamelin about the regime and suggests a more Machiavellian process would have been more successful.

It seems to me they would have done better to have killed off quickly and secretly the more irreconcilable of their enemies and won over the others by gifts and promises.  A Tribunal such as yours kills off people too slowly and inspires too little fear to achieve any good. [...] The harm it does is to unite all in whom it inspires fear, and makes out of a diverse crowd of contradictory interests and passions, a powerful party capable of effective, united action.

Despite this somewhat ironical suggestion, Brotteaux seems to have a tolerance and acceptance or human foibles.  He mentions a curé he once knew and says:

We should adopt his principles and govern men as they are and not as we'd like them to be.

Gamelin has been swayed by the absolutism of the Revolution.  He describes hearing Robespierre speak and says:

Through the voice of this wise man, he was discovering lighter and purer truths; he was comprehending a philosophy, a metaphysic, of revolution which raised his thoughts far above gross material happenings into a world of absolute certainties safe from all the subjective errors of the senses. [...] Robespierre simplified everything for him, revealing the  good and the evil to him in simple, clear terms [...] Gamelin tasted the mystical joy of a believer who has come to know the word that saves and the word that destroys.

It's a frightening picture and France structured his tale very cleverly and marched me through to an ending where all the people who were in positions of power and adoration have now been brought low and sent to the guillotine but not before killing many of their former compatriots and friends.  A new order is being established and the novel ends with two of the survivors, Elodie and Desmahis joining together and moving on.

It was an unsettling novel and it made me want to go back and read A Tale of Two Cities.

Discussion: Barthes & Smart

Yesterday we discussed two very different books about love.  One was the Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart's prose-poetry book, By Grand Central Station I sat down and Wept.  The second was French intellectual Roland Barthes' treatise on love, A Lover's Discourse.

For Smart's book, the discussion ranged through many areas:

• Is your reading or enjoyment of a text affected by the character/morals of the author ?  Some people felt that Smart's affair with a married man did tarnish the brightness of her prose.  Stephen proposed that Smart wanted to be a poet and realized that to write stirring poetry she needed life experiences much removed from her conventional upbringing and remote location in pre-War Ottawa.  He felt this could have been an impetus for her actions in bringing George Barker to North America and in carrying on the affair.

• Someone asked whether we would think differently had Elizabeth Smart been a man.  Laura mentioned than she read this book right after reading Werther and initially thought that the author WAS a man until quite far along in the book, when Smart returns to Ottawa.

There were so many unknown quantities in this book - from Smart's deliberate style which is not based on a chronology of facts to the 1st person style which tells us nothing about George Barker nor about his wife.  We see it all from Smart's perspective.  We had much the same situation in Werther where everyone was seen through his lens.

Most of the class liked Smart's poetic style.

We discussed the fact that, though Smart's book took place during WWII, she barely mentions the war and is only concerned with her love affair.  Apparently she was criticized for this when the book came out.  I didn't agree with this criticism.  I thought she referred to the war in a way that showed she had strong feelings about the reality and the horrors of war.  Much of the book takes place in North America and especially in California.  I would imagine at the time (early 40s) that the war did not resonate to the same degree as it would have in Great Britain or Europe.  I would guess from her comments that Smart was anti-war and as such, could not be expected to be all rah-rah-rah about it.  She was also young and in love.

Stephen mentioned some elements I hadn't picked up on: her use of water or fluid imagery.  Her references to nature and her social commentary were some of my favourite parts.  Her comments on youth and aging were also very pithy - though being middle-aged, somewhat hard to receive.

The 2nd book was Barthes' discourse on love.  Most of the class enjoyed the book.  Joni put together a couple of pages of quotations from the text and posed some questions arising from these, which we discussed.  The majority of the class enjoyed the structure.

We spoke about whether Barthes or Smart were gendered.  I felt that both novels were somewhat gendered - Smart's possibly less than Barthes to me.  I did find Barthes very gendered.  Some of his observations were applicable to both make and female but several of them were from a perspective I could not relate to.

It has been a good experience to read Werther, Smart and Barthes within 1-2 weeks of each other.  Now on to the terror of the French Revolution and Anatole France.

Barthes: A Lover's Discourse

Barthes, Roland: A Lover's Discourse - Fragments, tr. Richard Howard; Hill and Wang, New York, 2010

A telling instance of the narrowness of a North American science-based education is that I'd never heard of Roland Barthes before receiving the reading list for LS801, the 2013 edition.  I found this a challenging book to get through.  It took me quite a few chapters to get into the format, the structure of the book.  Though Barthes is dissecting love into its various manifestations, I still found that I wanted to argue against many of his declarations and conclusions - or at least ask for more exposition.  I really wanted to be sitting around a long dinner table, discussing his ideas and hearing him expound on his views.  I needed more, to really understand what he was trying to say.  I also didn't really feel that I had a good sense of Barthes as a man, what he would have been like in conversation with friends.

I've never had to look up so many words/jargon as while reading this book.  Barthes is writing his discourse from a lengthy background of study, discussion and theorizing.  I found the book was too referential for someone who has not been a student of philosophy.  I very much liked the structure of the book because I am a person who likes collecting bits and pieces and later trying to make a whole of them.  It's probably best a book to be dipped into in small doses with much time to ponder in between, not read straight through like a narrative.  I felt I needed to read Barthes' source material (of which I have really only read Werther, and Plato's Symposium & Phaedrus so far) - and then go back and reread Barthes' discourse again.

Sentences such as the following gave me much grief in trying to understand what Barthes was trying to say:
On pg 103 THE GHOST SHIP,

"errantry does not align - it produces iridescence: what results is the nuance. Thus I move on, to the end of the tapestry, from one nuance to the next (the nuance is the last state of a colour which can be named; the nuance is the Intractable)."

or when speaking about amorous exuberance, on pg 86 about EXUBERANCE which

"can be interlaced with melancholy, with depressions and suicidal impulses, for the lover's discourse is not an average of states; but such a disequilibrium belongs to that black economy which marks me with its aberration and, so to speak, with its intolerable luxury."

Barthes provides several introductory pages about how the book is structured.  Regarding the meaning of the "Lover's Discourse" on pg 94 NOVEL/DRAMA, Barthes writes:

"Enamoration is a drama, if we restore to this word the archaic meaning Nietzsche gives it: 'Ancient drama envisioned great declamatory scenes, which excluded action [...] 'Amorous seduction (a pure hypnotic moment) takes place before discourse and behind the proscenium of consciousness: the amorous "event" is of a hieratic order: it is my own local legend, my little sacred history that I declaim to myself, and this declamation of a fait accompli (frozen, embalmed, removed from any praxis) is the lover's discourse." 

Barthes goes to numerous sources, from the written realm but also from conversations with friends and acquaintances - and his marginalia is interesting.

Some random bits that I enjoyed or puzzled over:
Under JEALOUSY pg 145 he quotes Djeddi in La poesie amoureuse des Arabes Joseph yielded 'to the extent of a mosquito's wing.'  He writes that his references are "not authoritative but amical".
After Baudelaire and Ruysbroek "the gentleness of the abyss"
He writes that a sigh is "an expression of the emotion of absence."



In WHAT IS TO BE DONE, pg 62, Barthes speaks of

"Ethics, the unpersuadable science of behaviour."

And on pg 71 THE OTHER'S BODY

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tips of my words.  My language trembles with desire.

On pg 129  in IDENTIFICATIONS:

Identification [with other lost lovers] is not a psychological process; it is a pure structural operation: I am the one who has the same place I have.

In the section ATOPOS pg 34, defined as "unclassifiable, of a ceaselessly unforeseen originality,"
Barthes describes the beloved in one of the most succinct and beautiful ways I have ever come across:

"the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the specialty of my desire."  

 He goes on to say that:

"The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others).

This agrees with my perception that there is not "One" person, there are many possible people that may be potential lovers but it all depends on timing, circumstance, the many external as well as internal factors.
A potential lover's desirability is also affected by mass culture.  In SHOW ME WHOM TO DESIRE
on pg 136, Barthes describes love as an "affective contagion,"

this induction, proceeds from others, from the language, from books, from friends: no love is original.  (Mass culture is a machine for showing desire: here is what must interest you, it says, as if it guessed that men are incapable of finding what to desire by themselves.

If this was true in the 70s, I can only begin to imagine how much more this applies to the 21st century.

This is unlike the Ancient Greeks' conception of love, the androgyne.  Barthes refers several times to the idea of the androgyne as propounded by Plato/Socrates and Aristophanes.  This is an image and a concept that has stuck with me ever since we read The Symposium.  It's appealing to think that there is another out there who fills the missing bits in oneself - there's a inevitability and durability to that concept that can be reassuring when in the torment of the love gone wrong or faded away.  In I WANT TO UNDERSTAND pg 60, he reprises Zeus' command to Apollo to 

"turn the faces of the divided Androgynes...toward the place where they had been cut apart...'so that the sight of their division might render them less insolent'."

 - like Adam & Eve and the citizens with the Tower of Babel in Genesis, we mortals sometimes presume.

In UNION pg 226

"En sa moytie, ma moytie je recolle - to her half, I rejoin my own half...desire is to lack what one has - and to give what one does not have: a matter of supplements, not complements."

Barthe spends an afternoon trying to draw Aristophanes' conception of the original hermaphrodites (androgyne figure) and concludes it is a "farce figure" and "out of the mad couple is born the obscenity of the household (one cooks, for life, for the other)."

He was very perceptive in describing all the odd little facets of love relationships.  On pg 92  THE WORLD THUNDERSTRUCK he is speaking of writing about one's own love (in journals, correspondence etc) and notes

"the events of an amorous life are so trivial that they gain access to writing only by an immense effort: one grows discouraged writing what, by being written, exposes its own platitude.

He was also effective describing love relationship other than the romantic or sexual ones.  In NO ANSWER pg 167 

"The perfect [...] friend, is he not the one who constructs around you the greatest possible resonance? Cannot friendship be defined as a space with total sonority?"

I had a hard time with much of Barthes mention of his mother and mothers and sons.  He portrays his mother is such a 2-dimensional, childish way.  She is discussed only in relation to her effect on her child, not as a person, a lover in her own right.  I'm not sure if this is a mother-son thing or a gender thing (Barthes is less interested in women as individuals, especially insofar as love is concerned).  In discussing Werther, Barthes refers to the famous blue coat which he was wearing when he met Lotte.  On pg 128  in BLUE COAT AND YELLOW VEST, Barthes writes:

"This blue garment imprisons him so effectively that the world around him vanishes: nothing but the two of us: by this garment Werther forms for himself a child's body in which phallus and mother are united, with nothing left over.  This perverse outfit was worn across Europe by the novel's enthusiasts, and it was known as a "costume a la Werther."

This isn't an analysis that resonates with me.  Nor can I identify or agree with his statement on pg 133 in IMAGES

"I project myself there [into a romantic painting of a cold scene] as a tiny figure, seated on a block of ice, abandoned forever.  "I'm cold." the lover says, "let's go back"; but there is no road, no way, the boat is wrecked.  There is a coldness particular to the lover, the chilliness of the child (or of any young animal) that needs maternal warmth.

To me, a woman, Barthes seems to be condescending when he mentions women.  He doesn't mention women often but when he does, it often has a negative cast.  In DOMNEI pg 82

"I shall exasperate myself with the chatter of women in the drugstore who are delaying my return to the instrument to which I am subjugated"and in THE DEDICATION pg 76

"I have this fear: that the given object may not function properly because of some insidious defect...for example, the latch [of a box] doesn't work (the shop being run by society women)"

In GRADIVA pg 126

"I want to possess fiercely, but I also know how to give actively.  Then who can manage this dialectic successfully? Who, if not the woman, the one who does not make for any object but only for . . . giving? So if a lover manages to 'love', it is precisely insofar as he feminizes himself, joins the class of Grandes Amoureuses, of Woman Who Love Enough to Be Kind."

The section which really resonated with me was THE UNKNOWABLE, on pg 134:

"I can't get to know you" means "I shall never know what you really think of me." I cannot decipher you because I do not know how you decipher me.

"To expend oneself, to bestir oneself for an impenetrable object is pure religion."
"To make the other into an insoluble riddle on which my life depends is to consecrate the other as a god."

This made me think of Elizabeth Smart who seems to have consecrated her life to orbiting around Barker.  Someone in our discussion noted that one of her sons said that all her life she regarded George Barker as a Jesus-figure.

Barthes goes on to write, in this section, that

"all the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other is not to be known." "I am then seized with that exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone who will remain so forever: a mystic impulse: I know what I do not know."

In THIS CAN'T GO ON, pg 141, Barthes describes suffering in love as pleasurable.
"Ever the 'artist', I make form itself into content" (echoes of McLuhan's 'the medium is the message').  It's not about what is causing the suffering, it's about the suffering itself.
Once the exaltation of suffering has dissipated, Barthes says he is "reduced to the simplest philosophy: that of endurance."  He quotes a folk poem that accompanies Japanese Daruma dolls:

Such is life Falling over seven times And getting up eight.

In JEALOUSY, pg 144

"As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common."

Barthes includes the etymology of the word jaloux which interestingly is borrowed from the troubadours.

He very accurately describes many of the progressions and devastating aspects of love, the events that wear away at the foundations.  In NO ANSWER pg 167 he writes:

"When you were talking to him, discussing any subject at all, X frequently seemed to be looking away, listening to something else: you broke off, discouraged; after a long silence, X would say: 'Go on, I'm listening to you'; then you resumed as best you could the thread of a story in which you no longer believed."

Also in GRADIVA, pg 125 he describes much of the game-playing which drives me crazy within a relationship and which is supremely irritating to have to observe in other people's relationships.  If only we could keep the resolve and clear-sightedness we can have when outside of our relationships, for when we are in the throes of relationships' dark sides.

I found less agreement with his statement in THE HEART pg 53, that "only the lover and the child have a heavy heart" but as with many of the areas where I initially found I disagreed with Barthes or even felt really irritated by something he wrote, when I thought about it more and tried to dissect or even refute it, eventually I could distill my ideas and examples down into his truth.  The examples I could think of of non-love related angst and pain often could be reduced to a sense of isolation, of aloneness, of abandonment.  Perhaps this is where he gets his repeated return to comparisons with mother-son bonds.

In one section, GOSSIP, he unexpectedly (for me) compares passion and reason, and writes on pg 184,

the gossip is light, cold, it thereby assumes the status of a kind of objectivity; its voice...seems to double the voice of knowledge (scientia)...When knowledge, when science speaks, I sometimes come to the point of hearing its discourse as the sound of a gossip which describes and disparages lightly, coldly, and objectively what I love: which speaks of what I love according to the truth.

In an echo of Neil Young "It's better to burn out than to fade away"in THE INTRACTABLE on pg 23 Barthes affirms love as a value regardless of how it all works out in the end; that he can be happy and wretched at the same time.  When told "this kind of love is not viable" he asks: 

"Why is the viable a "Good Thing?  Why is it better to last than to burn?"and states that he has "withdrawn from all finality."

SOBRIA EBRIETAS

Barthes ends his discourse with this section and defines this as abandoning the "will-to-possess".  He quotes a zen saying:

"As I sit calmly, without doing anything, spring comes and the grass grows of its own accord."

On pg 8 in HOW THIS BOOK IS CONSTRUCTED Barthes specifies that he is not trying to set down a philosophy of love but merely to affirm it.  Such a philosophy would be a perversion of its elements, a monster, and he quotes from a mathematician that "we must not underestimate the power of chance to engender monsters," warning the reader not to draw conclusions from the order of the various sections.  It's not a book to be read as a narrative and it's a book I will come back to, to read a section here and there and think about it, then come back to it again after I've done further reading and studying.  I'll put it on the bookshelf near my bed with some of the other bits I want to re-read.

Smart: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

Smart, Elizabeth: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept; Flamingo/HarperCollins, Hammersmith, 1992

I read this book as a rite of passage in my teens - a Canadian rite of passage.  I'd forgotten what Smart's prose was like.  Some time in the last 5 years I read Rosemary Sullivan's biography of Elizabeth Smart which I found fascinating: partly because of the details of her life in the earlier part of the last century but also because she has a nature so dissimilar to mine.  Her decisions, her actions and the way she lived her life were so different from my life and my choices that it seems far more than 1/2 a century and several wars distant from my lifetime.

I just finished Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and it is interesting to compare the 2 books: Goethe from the male perspective in 18th century Germany and Smart's from the female perspective in North America.  One somewhat fictional (though Goethe incorporated events from his own life as well as an acquaintance who committed suicide because of unrequited passion) and the other poetically autobiographical.  Both writers passionate and literary people.

I enjoyed Smart's writing and imagery though my ever-rational side kept parsing the sentences for truth to anchor the poetry in fact and chronology.  Of course she reminds me of Sylvia Plath, similar time period and both women in love with philandering poets and tolerating their comings and goings, waiting and suffering for their lover to return to spend some time with them.  I also can't help thinking about Pat Lowther.

Like poetry, Smart's prose captures moments and vignettes with brief bursts of strong imagery.  In one of my favourite sentences she captures whole [passionless] lifetimes in one sentence.  

When I hurry down the street it is not any game I hold in my mind and play with the passers by, but the shyness which keeps seamstresses nervously peering out of their badly-lit rooms, half hidden behind the drab lace, preferring to dream over their gas-jets and mild tea than submit to the rude investigations of the world.

This is every Anita Brookner novel, distilled down to one sentence.  Smart then goes on to write:

There are such, you know, and they treat their possessions gently, as if they were children or animals. But don't think they are overlooked. Thousands of angels yearn over them, are even now embroidering them skirts, and getting ready to teach them the rhumba.   [Part 6]

Where Brookner seems to have some fellow feeling for her gentle, quiet, oh-so-correct women, Smart sees their lives with a twist of humour but humour arising from the contempt of the young and passionate for the aged and resigned.  Later in Part 8 she is more explicit about her contempt for the degenerations of passionless old age, saying of the old:

Or does nature walk beside them, holding their flabby forearms and whispering medicinal lies? For memory deserts them and their eyes get dimmer as the past achieves perspective. 

Who can say there is anything won at such a price?

[..] But her eyes were like medieval wild men in her head, clutching at her diminishing days that brought them no rest. [Part 6]

Smart, like Goethe/Werther, also has a strong relationship with nature.  She writes "But what can the wood sorrel and the mourning dove, who deal only in eternals, know of the thorny sociabilities of human living?"

On passion/love:

The stream of our kiss put a waterway around the world, where love like a refugee sailed in the last ship.  My hair made a shroud, and kept the coyotes at bay while we wrote our cyphers with anatomy.

[..] I am possessed by love and have no options.

[Part 10]  He kisses the circles on top of the water beneath which I lie drowned.  Soft as a fish, the kiss glides down to me, it swims through me, trailing its bubbles of love.

Smart writes about "the hatred of the mediocre for all miracles."

[...] Not one of all those martyrs nailed to every tree in the western hemisphere will find favour in the editor's measuring eye.  On the amusement page, to fill up space, one inch and a half, perhaps, of those who were forced to die.

Butter is up 10 cents.  The human being is down.

When she and Barker are arrested at the California/Arizona state border, and charged with intending to cross state lines for the purposes of sexual communion, Smart writes at the end of their 2-day interrogation, 

Who is for us if these are so fiercely against?  All our wishes were private, we desired no more scope than ourselves. Could we corrupt the young by gazing into each other's eyes? Would they leave their offices?  Would big business suffer?

Though the majority of the book takes place in America with references to England, I enjoyed the odd Canadian reference

But faint as hope, and definite as death, my possible phoenix of love is as bright as a totem-pole, in the morning, on the sky, breathing like a workman setting out on a job.

Asking no one's forgiveness for sins I refuse to recognize, why do I cry then to be returning homeward through a land I love like a lover?

[...] how sympathetic the frozen Chaudiere Falls seem under the December sky, compared with these inflexible faces.

The passion burning through Smart's book, though it only covered a short period during her early 20s, is incandescent.  And the fact that she spent her life in England raising 4 children she had with Barker, though they never married and he only visited intermittently, suggests the centrality of passion in her life persisted.

Discussion: Werther and Antigone

We had our 1st discussion since we broke at the end of the Fall term.  It was great to see everyone again and plunge back in to our progression through the philosophy and literature of the last 4000 years.  Stephen reviewed the texts we'll be covering this term.  They are grouped into themes, and not arranged as chronologically as LS800.  The 1st set deal with overwhelming passion: The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Jean Anouilh's version of Antigone, written in Paris during WWII.  Next week Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept and A Lover's Discourse by Roland Barthes. Then Anatole France's The Gods Will Have Blood (about fanaticism during the French Revolution) and after that Jane Eyre (reason making an appearance).  We then move into the next series, mainly concerned with reason/unreason: Doestoevesky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Kierkegaard; then 3 big texts: Darwin's Origin of the Species, Marx's Communist Manifesto and Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents as well as our 3rd version of Antigone, also written during WWII but by Bertold Brecht.  We end the Politics and the Body series with Lady Chatterly's Lover and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
The final series are 5 more modern texts that examine much of what we have been reading and discuss where that leaves us: Adam Phillips 'Darwin's Worms', Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own', Antonio Damasio's 'Descartes Error' and Elaine Scarry's 'On Beauty'; finishing April 13 with Jacques Derrida's 'The Animal that Therefore I Am'.

We started with Goethe's Werther, which he wrote as a young man after suffering through unrequited love.  He used the writing of Werther as catharsis for his feelings.  It is considered one of the 1st novels of the Romantic period, where the focus moved to the individual, with the appearance of modern self-consciousness and sensibility (the importance of personal feelings).  Werther was an alienated artist and didn't really have a firm place in any of the worlds he entered: too wealthy and intellectual for the rural Waldheim but too low-born for the aristocracy and court life (though had he been happy to be a clerk toiling away in the background, he would have been fine at court).

Stephen sent out some material about Werther which included a quote by Goethe about Werther.  I always wondered about one term he uses, "true penetration of mind," which I have read in various 19th century books.
“I portray a young person who, endowed with profound, pure feeling and true penetration of mind, loses himself in rhapsodic dreams, undermines himself by speculation until he finally, ravaged by the additional effect of unhappy passions and in particular by an infinite love, shoots himself in the head.”
What does the speaker mean when they use this phrase?  Is it sympathy of mind with the speaker or something more objective?

Lorraine led the discussion.  She brought 2 quotes, applicable to passion, from a book she was reading over the break called Adult Literacy.

[Fear] has no logic.  It destroys confidence and common sense: my actions and my works were sometimes inappropriate to the situation at hand. (Helfield, 1997)  Lorraine proposed that this sentence would apply equally to passion.

Our humanity is most evident in our feelings, yet it is this affective aspect of our nature that is so often ignored. (Goleman, 1995)

Lorraine notes Goethe/Werther's use of "I", very brave to use 1st person.  She felt Werther was arrogant.  He was certainly self-absorbed and I think he was condescending in some regards (to some of the people he met: the rural people, the aristocrats at court and the ambassador he worked for).  He was probably arrogant about his own abilities but what mainly came through for me was his absorption in his own feelings.  For me he would have been a tiresome penpal.

Lorraine mentioned a similar book about unrequited love: Yentl by Isaac Bashevis Singer

The epistolatory style used in Werther was very popular for awhile in the 18th and 19th centuries but is not used as much any more.  I have a fondness for it -  that feeling that you are peeking into someone else's life as it unfolds.  I still remember reading and rereading "Daddy-Long-Legs".  I'm not sure it would count as great literature but I did enjoy it when I was young. The limitation of a book advanced only via letters (usually just one person's letters as is the case in Werther) is you only see things from the letter writer's viewpoint.  We don't know much of Lotte or Albert, or even Wilhelm's viewpoint.

Werther is not only about love and passion and pain but also commentary about the society of the time that locked people into very limited roles and options.  Lotte had no choice but to marry the man her parents had betrothed her to, Albert was busy working his way up the minor functionary pathway.  Werther himself was not part of the labouring classes nor completely accepted by the aristocracy but his options to move in and out of these strata was curtailed.  The farmhand was in love with his mistress, who needed labourers to manage the farm she was left yet they were not allowed to have a legitimate relationship though this would likely have been an ideal outcome for both of them.

The novel is set at a time when we are seeing the beginning of the change towards valuing the individual and also the inroads against the predominance and unassailability of the aristocracy.  Europe's resistance to this change is what soon will result in the French Revolution.

ANTIGONE
Does the metatheatre aspect, with the Prologue/Chorus announcing right from the beginning what was going to happen in the play, add or take away from the impact or enjoyment of the play.  Most people felt that it helped, made them concentrate more on the characters and what they said rather than wondering what was going to happen.  It also put entire audience on the same footing knowing what was going to happen.
Lauren mentioned that a friend of hers had just come back from London and saw quite a few plays and in every single one actors would come out for 30-60 minutes before the play started and put on their makeup on the stage, chatting with the audience.  The new trend it seems.

How did the anachronistic elements work?   For most people it either supported the play or at least didn't detract from it.  The stylistic choice to start with breaking the 4th wall already tears us away from the Greek version of the play and from our expectations.  Having 20th century garb, motor vehicles and manners of speaking was not jarring (to read - I'm not sure how it would be seeing the play itself).  I do remember really disliking and being bothered by reading the "hillbilly accents" given to the Spartans in the version of Lysistrata I read.

In Sophocles' version of Antigone, Creon experiences enormous personal growth (through tragedy) during the play. Does Anouilh's Creon experience any growth or change?  I didn't think he did.  In Anouilh's version, Creon was an urbane city dweller when he was suddenly faced with having to give up his desired life and assume the duties of King of Thebes.  In the play he notes that he did this out of a strong sense of duty.  This Creon is much more nuanced and kinder than Sophocles ruler but he experienced his growth before the start of the play.  He does suffer change (the death of son and wife an his role in Antigone's death) but we don't know how this may have altered him.

In Sophocles' Antigone, her reasons for defying Creon and burying her brother would have been supported by the audience as she was obeying the death rituals required of family in order to honour them and to honour the gods.  In Anouilh's version, Antigone just seems to be stubbornly set on dying because she can't face the inevitable compromises of maturity and age.  She is certainly a figure that is true to her feelings, her passions but her passions are passions for her feelings not passions for anyone else so she is a very self-absorbed character and not as sympathetic because of this.

Lauren asked whether Anouilh was misogynistic in his treatment of his female characters?  None if the 4 female characters were particularly well-rounded or compelling.  Some liked Ismene (Abilio preferred Sophocles' Ismene), some felt the nurse provided a warm glimpse into what the 2 girls childhoods and homelifes would have been.  I'm not sure I would have called him misogynistic.  Creon was the most interesting character but aside from him and the young idealistic passionate Antigone, all the other characters, male or female, were quite superficially sketched.

I found both these books interesting.  Both from the perspective of temperament and of age, I can't identify with either Werther or Antigone but I do feel that being able to respond with emotion, being able and willing to react emotionally to the world around you, are what add the joy to life.  I just can't give myself up to this and ignore all other considerations.  Neither Werther nor Antigone would have approved of me.

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.

Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther; Tr. Michael Hulse; Penguin Classic; London, 1989

This is one of Goethe's earliest works.  He wrote it after a period of time when he fell in love with a woman engaged to another man he was friendly with; and also after he learned of the suicide of a young man over a failed love.  It's written in the form of letters to an old friend but it seems quite dated. Having a man write another male friend bemoaning and sighing over his forbidden love seems very unlikely in this time.

His passion does ring true though Goethe didn't bring Lotte to life for me - she seems colourless and not very present.

Werther has a discussion with Albert (Lotte's fiancé) about love and passion.
[...] a man wholly under the influence of his passions has lost his ability to think rationally, and is regarded as intoxicated or insane.

Werther replies: Ah you sensible people! [...] Passions! Intoxication! Insanity! You are so calm and collected, so indifferent, you respectable people, tut-tutting about drunkenness and holding unreasonable behaviour in contempt, passing by like the priest and thanking God like the Pharisee that you are not as other men.  I have been intoxicated more than once, my passions have never been far off insanity, and I have no regrets [...]

As Werther becomes more depressed about the futility of his love for Lotte (the lack of any future togetherness) he speaks about the transitory nature of much love and the relative unimportance of individuals. [26 October]

Your friends value you! You often make them happy, and your heart in turn feels it could not do without them; and yet - if you were to go, if you were to depart from this intimate circle, would they feel the void, how long would they feel the void that your loss tore open in their fate? - how long? - Oh Man is so transient a being that even where his existence is most secure, even where his presence makes its sole true impression felt, he must fade and disappear from the memories and souls of his loved ones, soon, oh so soon!

[27 October]
I could often tear my heart open and beat my poor head on seeing how little people can mean to each other.  if I do not offer love and joy, happiness and warmth, ah! the other will not bring them to me either; nor will my heart, overflowing with rapture, move him at all if he is cold and listless.

Werther continues to love and pine after Lotte but after she marries Albert, he finds that he can't bear the idea, can't keep himself away from her and so he borrows Albert's pistols (such a passive-aggressive move though maybe it wasn't at that time) and shoots himself.  Like the real model (Jerusalem), Werther doesn't die right away but lingers for a day or so before dying.

Goethe has some lovely descriptive phrases about the countryside where Werther spent most of his time, in the mountains.  He speaks about sitting many hours at a table outside an inn, under the linden-trees.

The language is very over-wrought: beset hearts, floods of tears, tear my heart asunder, awesome majesty, torment, ardent pleasures, anguished spirit etc.  High Romance.

It seems very different from the man who wrote Faust.  Werther is very intolerant about reason, maturity and age.  In Faust, the older Goethe is more sympathetic to aging, writing: "Old age doesn't make us childish, as they say, It finds the true surviving child in us."  Though I didn't end up feeling connected to any of the characters or their problems, Werther's passion did seem strong and all-consuming and I felt this was a good introduction to an early Romantic novel.  Exposing my lingering prejudices, I would probably have found Werther's emoting more bearable if he were a female - but then again, maybe not...he did go on and on.