[lit-ideas] Re: "Why the Bad Must Always Attack the Good"
- From: Michael Chase <goya@xxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 10:46:56 -0700
Le 26 juin 05, à 15:44, Eric Yost a écrit :
[snip]
I used Salieri loosely, not in the sense of asserting the truth of the
poisoning controversy or Salieri's alleged confession of poisoning and
his later alleged suicide. (Pushkin apparently bought into the
poisoning theory and wrote the first play about it.) As metaphor, I
mentioned Salieri as an example of Cain and Abel, for Salieri was
certainly an extremely ambitious person in the realm of Italian opera
and did try to thwart Mozart (for whom most forms came easily) on
occasion.
MC: Might good and bad be - to *some* extent at any rate - a matter of
perspective?
Eric: Sure. Maybe there's nothing more to it than saying "excellence
creates envy," but I didn't want to dwell on the issue of what
constitutes good versus what constitutes bad--because in the initial
spark of this thread we are given Cain and Abel, who by definition
represent the "good" sacrifice to the Lord versus the "less than good
but adequate" sacrifice to the Lord.
M.C. Perhaps there's room for debate even here. In his great early
novel La Modification, Michel Butor identified more with Cain, as the
eternal outsider and exile. Irenaeus speaks of a Gnostic sect called
the Cainites : their holy writ was the Gospel of Judas.
Mike, you undoubtedly know the Philo allegory better than I do. If we
put the question of what constitutes good and bad in brackets, would
you concede that there is a tendency for the mediocre to attack the
better than mediocre, at least more than vice versa?
M.C. Fascinating question, not least because it changes things a great
deal. When one speaks of evil vs. good, the temptation is to
hypostatize these entities, to the point where a whole lot of people,
including more than one American head of state, actually believe that
there are Things out there named Good and Evil respectively : the
former is occasionally identified with the USA, the latter with Bin
Laden.
Yet how things change when we shift from Good vs. Evil to mediocre vs.
Better : no one, I take it, would attempt to hypostatize this latter
pair of contraries : perhaps we realize, as innate Aristotelians, that
mediocre and better, as mere relatives, have no independent existence,
whereas Good and Evil look an awful lot like substances (cf. the
Manichaeans)?
Anyhow, is it true that the mediocre attacks the better? Only in a
metaphorical sense, since only entities can attack one another, and
these two are at best pseudo-entities. Mediocrity tends to prevail at
any given time, since, almost by definition, it corresponds to the
taste of the majority (have you watched TV or been to a Hollywood movie
lately?). The "better" is often declared to be so in retrospect : there
is nothing more clichéd than the genius artist (= better), ignored by
his contemporaries and considered subordinate to artists we *now*
consider mediocre, who several generations later is declared to surpass
them to the extent that all memory of the poor schmucks is obliterated.
Metaphorically, then, we could say that the mediocre and the better are
in constant conflict : the mediocre tends to win battles (= temporary
celebrity), the better tends to win the war (= perennial glory).
But is that really any different than to say that tastes change? (this
is not a rhetorical question : I really am not sure of the answer).
Best, Mike.
Michael Chase
(goya@xxxxxxxxxxx)
CNRS UPR 76
7, rue Guy Moquet
Villejuif 94801
France
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