Pater Familias » Literature

ADAPTING GATSBY.

Philip — Wed, 16 May 2012 00:21:10 +0000

ADAPTING GATSBY. I posted here about Gatz, an adaptation of THE GREAT GATSBY in which one of the characters reads aloud all of THE GREAT GATSBY. It’s a wonderful experience, and it is now having a second run at the Public Theater. Barbara Chai interviewed John Collins, the director of Gatz, in the Wall Street Journal (May 8),and asked him about Baz Luhrmann’s coming adaptation of the book. Collins is curious about it, after having spent so much time with Fitzgerald’s words. He volunteered that the risk in adapting the book is in adding material rather than leaving things out (of course, Gatz leaves nothing out). He says: “That’s some of what Fizgerald does best in this book—the way he writes around certain important events and details.”

THE LACK OF PRIMOGENITURE AND THE FALL OF ROME.

Philip — Tue, 15 May 2012 00:59:41 +0000

THE LACK OF PRIMOGENITURE AND THE FALL OF ROME. In Mary Beard’s review in the London Review of Books (April 26) of CALIGULA: A BIOGRAPHY by Aloys Winterling, she says that Augustus failed to create a reliable system of monarchical succession, in part because Rome did not have a system of inheritance such as primogeniture. I posted here about Adrian Goldsworthy’s theory that Rome fell because emperors were preoccupied with attempts on their lives; Goldsworthy says that starting from 180 A.D. every adult emperor faced at least one attempt to depose him. Mary Beard says that there are claims that every member of the first dynasty of Roman emperors was murdered. I can explain the quiet period in the middle as being primarily the period when each emperor adopted as a son his chosen successor. When Marcus Aurelius, the last of the Five Good Emperors, died in 180 A.D. he returned to the hereditary principle of naming his genetic son as his successor, and the bloody battles for succession began again.

Mary Beard also ventures an explanation for why the Roman historians portray emperors as monsters. If an emperor has been killed in a coup, men who were courtiers in the old regime may curry favor with the successor by speaking ill of the previous emperor. And those contemporary histories are the basis for modern histories.

DID SHAKESPEARE KNOW THE WRITINGS OF HEGEL, MARX, NIETZSCHE, FREUD, WITTGENSTEIN AND DERRIDA?

Philip — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 01:14:23 +0000

DID SHAKESPEARE KNOW THE WRITINGS OF HEGEL, MARX, NIETZSCHE, FREUD, WITTGENSTEIN AND DERRIDA? Graham Holderness has a review in the Times Literary Supplement (April 20) of SHAKESPEARE AND LITERARY THEORY by Jonathan Gil Harris. The book has chapters for the major developments in literary theory in the last 20 years (“formalism, structuralism and deconstruction;…Marxism, …and postcolonial theory”). Holderness and Harris highlight the role of Shakespeare as inspiring the literary theory. Rather than theory interpreting Shakespeare’s plays, Shakespeare gives rise to modern theory. Holderness quotes Harris: “Literary theory is less an external set of ideas imposed on Shakespeare’s texts than a mode… of critical reflection inspired by, and emerging from, his writing.” Holderness and Harris both quote Terry Eagleton: “it is difficult to read Shakespeare without feeling that he was almost certainly familiar with the writings of Hegel, Marx, Nietszche, Freud, Wittgenstein and Derrida.”

JESUIT EDUCATIONS.

Philip — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 16:51:13 +0000

JESUIT EDUCATIONS. When I quoted Virginia Woolf that: ULYSSES was “the book of a self-taught working man….”, I did not point out that Joyce in fact had an excellent Jesuit education. This wikipedia article traces his education—reflected in PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST—at Clongowes Woods College, a Jesuit boarding school; at Belvedere College, the Jesuits’ Dublin school; and at University College, the Catholic university in Dublin. Virginia Woolf was dismissing Joyce’s Jesuit education as as worthless.

Kids, it works both ways. Mary Jane’s sister Carol objected to her marrying me because I did not have a Jesuit education.

JOYCE AND VIRGINIA WOOLF (COMMENT).

Philip — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:11:29 +0000

JOYCE AND VIRGINIA WOOLF (COMMENT). When I posted on Virginia Woolf’s view of Joyce, I had been struck by the vehemence of her feelings about the lower classes. Nick and Rebekah posted differing comments about how Virginia Woolf felt about the Irish. Spurred by the comments about Woolf and the Irish, I went to Google and found that her feelings about ULYSSES were much more complex than I had realized. This post on the Blogging Woolf website sketches some of them. I had quoted from Woolf’s Diary: “I finished ULYSSES….Genius it has, I think.” I had not realized that the full sentence was much more negative: “I finished Ulysses, & think it a misfire. Genius it has I think; but of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense.” I also had not realized the extent to which Virginia Woolf felt a sense of competition with the another literary genius of the same age. Some quotes from the Diary on the blog post illustrate this. She acknowledged that she had her “back up on purpose” against ULYSSES and at another time wrote in a letter that: “what she was attempting was probably being better done by mr joyce.”

ULYSSES—VIRGINIA WOOLF LIKED THE BOOK, DESPISED THE AUTHOR.

Philip — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 18:57:32 +0000

ULYSSES—VIRGINIA WOOLF LIKED THE BOOK, DESPISED THE AUTHOR. In the Times Literary Supplement (March 23), J.C has some quotations from Virginia Woolf’s A WRITER’S DIARY which show a startling snobbery in the literary world of 100 years ago. Woolf read ULYSSES on August 16, 1922, shortly after it was published. Her first reaction was that it was:”…an illiterate, underbred book”. Three weeks later she wrote : “I finished ULYSSES….Genius it has, I think.” Her negative first reaction on August 22, 1916 may have been influenced by what she thought of Joyce in her diary entry for the date: ULYSSES was “the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking and ultimately nauseating.”

“IN THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND….”

Philip — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 22:06:42 +0000

“IN THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND….” When I was young, I read a story (probably abridged) by H.G. Wells in the Reader’s Digest entitled “The Country of the Blind” (this wikipedia article has a summary of it). In the story a mountaineer falls into a valley in which all the villagers are blind. When he realizes this, he repeats to himself the proverb “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king” and expects to rule the villagers. Instead the villagers, who function successfully in their environment, continue to govern themselves, and show concern for this man who seems to them obsessed with an imaginary power. Wikipedia says: “The village doctor suggests that [the mountaineer’s} eyes be removed, claiming that they are diseased and are affecting his brain.” Each version of the story ends with the mountaineer weeking to escape the valley where he was never king.

Imagine a world in which there are 88 autistic persons for each nonautistic person—reversing the recent estimates cited by Jonathan Lehrer. Perhaps the autistic majority would impatient with the slow procession of information by the nonautistic.

ANOTHER VOTE ON UMBRIDGE.

Philip — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 22:54:25 +0000

ANOTHER VOTE ON UMBRIDGE. A few days ago, I showed Annalisa my draft post about my visceral fear of Umbridge. She sent me this link to an image on Pinterest which shows that I am not the only one who … Continue reading →

THE SCARIEST VILLAIN IN HARRY POTTER?

Philip — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 21:53:57 +0000

THE SCARIEST VILLAIN IN HARRY POTTER? I looked in on Mary Jane while she was watching THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX again, and it occurred to me that of all the villains in the Harry Potter books, I find Dolores Umbridge to be the scariest. I think that I am not alone and that she is one reason why THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX seems to be the least popular of the books. She creates fear because most of us have encountered ruthless bureaucrats or people who enjoy abusing their authority. Torture and abuse for petty legalistic pretexts are more convincing than metaphysical evil. We don’t encounter people who look like Voldemort or the other villains. Umbridge is familiar because she is dowdy, and ordinary, even with her pink outfits. This website has pictures of her. It also has a biography of her that I found astonishingly thorough.

OLIVIER’S INSIGHT ON IAGO’S MOTIVATION.

Philip — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 01:32:15 +0000

OLIVIER’S INSIGHT ON IAGO’S MOTIVATION. I can’t find it using Google, but long ago I read an interview with Olivier about Iago’s motivation. Olivier said that when he was young, he had trouble playing Iago because he could not understand Iago’s motivation. Then he had an insight during his service in World War II. Another man got an assignment that Olivier had coveted, and Olivier found himself consumed by rage against the person who had beaten him out. He then realized that the primary motive that Shakespeare ascribes to Iago was plausible, and said that he never had a problem with understanding Iago thereafter.

IAGO AS A SEDUCER.

Philip — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 02:31:45 +0000

IAGO AS A SEDUCER. The digital view of Othello also raises the possibility that Iago can be played as literally an attempted seducer with a homosexual attachment to Othello. The wikipedia article on Iago says that some critics thought that Kenneth Branagh played Iago as homosexual. Branagh’s response was that: “I had no consciousness of doing that at all, but I did play as though he loved Othello. But I don’t mean in a sexual sense.” And this review by Christopher Bray of terry Coleman’s biography OLIVIER retells a theater story: “Researching the part of Iago, Olivier had a chat with Freud’s biographer, Dr Ernest Jones, who told him he was playing a homosexual. At the next rehearsal, Olivier surprised Ralph Richardson’s Othello by kissing him on the lips.”

IAGO AS A COURTIER.

Philip — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 01:30:51 +0000

IAGO AS A COURTIER. The digital analysis of Othello that sees Iago’s dealings with Othello as “like the language of courtship but it’s really a perverse seduction of Othello by his lieutenant” has two aspects. That Iago is Othello’s lieutenant recalls plays where a subordinate manipulates and comments on his master. Courtiers deploy the skills of a courtier—flattery and gossip, and theater often mocks them or their masters. This wikipedia article on Iago says that the role is thought to have been created by Robert Armin who specialized in playing intelligent clowns and created the roles of Touchstone, Feste, and the Fool in Lear.