The Best That Has Been Said and Thought in the World...
A man of wealth and taste, Rufus F., writes:
Allow Me to Introduce Myself...: [W]hen you face a classroom of young people, newly paroled from the American high school system, and now stepping out of the blizzard of pop cultural nothingness, and start talking about “the canon” with them, it’s a bit like watching two alien life-forms encountering each other for the first time. There’s a total disconnect between their culture and their cultural patrimony. High culture--those elevating works of art and literature that have survived the test of time--are disdained as pretentious and elitist; and in turn seem to have been taken hostage by academics! And yet, while I am of the generation that remains steeped in pop culture, it’s hard not to feel increasingly that, in the words of David Cronenberg, “it just doesn’t feed me”.
How did enjoyment of and engagement with the canon become so specialized, narrow, professionalized, and soulless? Here the culture wars have obscured more than they’ve illuminated. Dating the “crisis of the humanities”: namely, academia’s divorce from the larger culture, only back to “postmodernism” or “the 60s campus protests” suggests that the humanities were in far better shape before that time. But reading the memoirs of people who went through the educational system in the 1800s, one hears the same complaints.... The political debates about the canon overlook the fact that back to the Renaissance roots, the humanities have gone through alternating periods of deadening specialization and thrilling revitalization; we’re just overdue for the second....
I propose to “blog the canon”; from Homer to Hitchcock, Wittgenstein to Warhol, and Plato to Passolini. I want to do is write in a lively, irreverent, and passionate way about “the best that has been said and thought in the world”, and how these works affect me, a relative pisher in many of these areas. I am no expert. (With any luck, I’ll win one of Andrew Sullivan’s “poseur alerts”!) But I do want to write about the Aeneid the way we bloggers write about Avatar--as a living part of our culture...
Unfortunately, he begins with Aeschylus's The Suppliants, which is not a terribly good play. Indeed, it is barely a play at all. It is much more a set of hymns and dances strung along a narrative arc: Danaos and his daughters arrive at Argos pursued by their Egyptian cousins, the King of Argos has to decide whether to recommend that the Assembly grant them asylum--thus risking bloody war--or turn them back--thus breaking their duty to and risking the anger of Zeus Xenios, protector of strangers and refugees. The King of Argos and Danaos go off to the Assembly. The daughters worry. The King of Argos and Danaos return with good news. The Egyptians arrive and are sent off.
The part of it that is a play--the decision on the part of the King of Argos to try to offer aid--is made very quickly:
Aeschylus, Suppliant Women (ed. Herbert Weir Smyth, Ph. D.): King of Argos: And on many sides there are difficulties hard to wrestle with; for, like a flood, a multitude of ills bursts on me. It is a sea of ruin, fathomless and impassable, which I am launched upon, and nowhere is there a haven from distress. For should I not pay the debt due to you, the pollution you name is beyond all range of speech; yet if I take my stand before the walls and try the issue of battle with the sons of Aegyptus, your kinsmen, how will the cost not mount to a cruel price--men's blood to stain the ground for women's sake?
And yet the wrath of Zeus who guards the suppliant compels my reverence; for supreme among mortals is the fear of him. Aged father of these maidens, take these boughs straightway in your arms and place them upon other altars of the country's gods, that all the natives may see the sign that you have come in suppliance. And let no random word fall against me; for the people could complain against authority. It may well be that some, stirred to compassion at the sight, will hate the wantonness of the troop of males, and that the people will be more friendly towards you; for all men are well disposed to the weaker cause....
And its ratification by the Assembly takes place offstage, and its favorable outcome telegraphed--there isn't a lot of dramatic tension here:
Your father will not leave you here alone for long. I am going now to call together the people of the land, that I may make the masses friendly; and I will instruct your father in what things he should say. Now stay here and beseech the gods of the land with prayers to grant what you desire, while I go to advance your cause. May persuasion and efficacious fortune attend me!...
So, since we are bound to read it as a play--rather than as a succession of religious or quasi-religious hymns strung onto a narrative arc--we are bound to say "huh?!" when Rufus F. says that this is part of “the best that has been said and thought in the world.” It ain't.
It would have been much better to start with Antigone. Now there is a play! Hell, start with Jean Anouilh's version--or, indeed, with the best of all Antigone's, Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona's The Island...