Carlyle thought we need heroes.
Borges had a problem or two finding one!
He lived in the age of the anti-hero -- even though he never saw a film by
Woody Allen!
In a message dated 11/26/2015 1:07:02 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes: "In Borges' third lecture (from his 1967-68
Charles Eliot Norton Lectures) ["The Telling of the Tale"] "[p]oetry [...] has
fallen asunder; or rather on the one hand we have the lyrical poem and the
elegy, and on the other we have the telling of a tale – we have the novel."
This reminds me of this essay, "The teller and the tale". The essay -- not
by Borges! -- considers how the teller (e.g. Homer?) forms part of what he
is telling (Achilles' wrath) -- or not.
Helm goes on to quote from Borges:
"One is almost tempted too think of the novel as a degeneration of the
epic, in spite of such writers as Joseph Conrad or Herman Melville."
The implicature seems to be that Conrad and Melville cannot 'degenerate'
from anything since they are perfect.
This is so obvious that Grice would call it an 'entailment'!
Borges goes on:
"[I]f we think of the novel and the epic, we are tempted to fall into
thinking that the chief difference lies in the difference between verse and
prose, in the difference between singing something and stating something."
Or dancing something. Oddly, the etymology of 'ballad' is from an Italian
verb, 'to dance'.
Borges:
"But I think there is a greater difference. The difference lies in the
fact that the important thing about the epic is a hero – a man who is a pattern
for all men."
Well, that applies more properly, according to Aristotle (in his "Poetics")
that Borges dismisses, to the 'tragedy'. There's no tragedy without a
tragic hero. Achilles's wrath is the origin of Achilles's tragedy, and
Donizetti indeed turned the tragedy into a melodramma in his very earliest
melodramma.
Borges goes on:
"[W]hile, as Mencken pointed out, the essence of most novels lies in the
breaking down of a man, in the degeneration of character."
-- or woman. Borges once translated trans-gender novel "Orlando" by Woolf
(Virginia, not Leonard) and had the translation signed by his mother! (Some
think the translator was his mother!).
Borges:
"[N]owadays if an adventure is attempted, we know that it will end in
failure."
Or not end at all! Vide, "The endless novel".
Borges:
"[W]hen we read Franz Kafka’s The Castle, we know that the man will never
get inside the castle. That is to say, we cannot really believe in
happiness and in success. And this may be one of the poverties of our time. I
suppose Kafka felt much the same when he wanted his books to be destroyed: he
really wanted to write a happy and victorious book, and he felt that he
could not do it."
Does 'happy' apply to a book or to the reading of a book, or to the ending
of a book: e.g. "The Wizard of Oz" has a happy ending (of sorts) -- if
you're not the Wicked Witch of the West.
Borges goes on to refer to Kafka:
"He might have written it, of course, but people would have felt that he
was not telling the truth. Not the truth of facts but the truth of his
dreams. [...]"
Kafka's "Process" has a moral, to boot: a critique of bureaucracy, or as
the Hungarians call it, 'the red tape'.
Borges goes on:
"I]n a way, people are hungering and thirsting for epic. I feel that epic
is one of the things that men need. Of all places (and this may come as a
kind of anticlimax, but the fact is there), it has been Hollywood that has
furnished epic to the world."
With Brad Pitt as Achilles!
But for tragedy one goes to Cinecittà, and Pasolini. His "Medea" with Maria
Callas, for example!
Borges (before going blind, obviously) loved the cinema, but disliked
dubbing. He once saw "La signora delle camelie" with Greta Garbo dubbed to
Mexican.
Borges wrote in a woman's journal of the day: "I wish they had put Maria
Ramos on the silver screen, to match Maria Ramos's voice. But to see Greta
Garbo speaking Maria Ramos's Mexican dialect is a bit beyond the suspension
of disbelief that my father taught me about!"
Borges goes on:
"All over the globe, when people see a Western"
and Witters loved them, Norman Malcom (who taught with Grice at Cornell)
tells us,
"– beholding the mythology of a rider, and the desert, and justice, and the
sheriff, and the shooting, and so on - I think they get the epic feeling
from it, whether they know it or not. After all, knowing the thing is not
important."
I see westerns as historical! Puccini saw them as "melodrammi". His first
title for "La fanciulla del West" was "La fanciulla d'Occidente". Based on
Belasco! What a melodramma! The good thing is that Puccini uses authentic
Western toones, like "Camptown Races" and a few waltzes that you'd hear in
"them Western bordellos"!
Helm comments:
"I had to reread these passages. At first I thought Borges was saying all
novels describe a degeneration of character. I thought of Hardy’s Jude
the Obscure and Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Not all novels are like that.
Who would read them if they were, and as to Kafka, I read his (unfinished)
novels years ago and resolved never to read them again; although my resolve
weakened and I attempted to reread The Castle but didn’t get very far."
And as I was saying, while The Castle is surreal, "The Process" is a
realistic critique of 'the red tape'; so some novels have a 'message'! and
they
are just the medium!
Helm goes on:
"But Westerns as he says do, many of them, have the epic feel. I recall
in Boot Camp in 1952, after qualifying at the shooting range at Camp
Matthews, we got to sit outside on the grass of a sloping knoll and watch High
Noon. Surely that movie has Borges' “epic feeling.” Susan loved Westerns,
especially those written by Louis L’Amour. She also loved Mysteries, but
only those in the “cozy” category. I preferred more action oriented
mysteries."
Then there's the historical side to the western (Jamaicans cannot have a
western, for example) and the melodrammatic side to it, that Belasco and
Puccini exploited.
And then as McEvoy would say, there's the Wittgensteinian side of what a
western shows but does not tell -- for, why would Witters like westerns? One
would rather have him liking "The merry widow" since he was from Vienna!
Helm:
"But I had to admit that while I don’t recall a degeneration of character
in mystery or detective novels, they do, many of them, tend to be dark.
One of the most popular series is Michael Connelly’s “Bosch” series. Bosch
is a superb and relentless detective, but he won’t comply with bureaucratic
politics and his bosses and coworkers don’t like him. He doesn’t care.
He is driven to solve the case “for the victim” and won’t be deterred no
matter what the threat. None of Connelly’s novels have happy endings."
This reminds me that in melodramma, at a time, 'lieto' was a requisite of
the 'fine': the ending had to be happy. This was for some librettists quite
a challenge when they had to adapt "Medea" after she had killed her two
children!
An unhappy ending was NOT accepted in the aristocratic opera boxes of
Europe!
Helm:
"Borges said no one believed in happy endings: “Nowadays when people talk
of a happy ending, they think of it as a mere pandering to the public, or
they think it is a commercial device; they think of it as artificial. Yet
for centuries men could very sincerely believe in happiness and in victory,
though they felt the essential dignity of defeat."
Well, Metastasio is the librettist of the 'fine lieto'. But this was an
Italian degeneration of the Roman practice of tragedies that WERE tragedies --
such as Seneca. (My favourite tragedian, since he cared to translate the
best from the Greek, including Fedra and Medea, my favourite tragic heroines
-- later played on the stage by Sarah Bernhardt in those decadent
adaptations by D'Annunzio.
Helm goes on:
"One of the very popular story lines in TV detective series is for the
main character to be accused of a murder. It doesn’t matter if up until this
episode he has been the epitome of virtue, the evidence (because he is
being framed) points to him as the guilty party; so the character is hounded by
bureaucratic officials (often he has to become an outlaw to clear himself)
and threatened by criminals before he manages to clear his name. But I’ve
noticed that there is no summing up at the end of these episodes. It is
enough for the writers that the “hero” is cleared. They don’t make the
bureaucrats appear and tell him that they are sorry for doubting him and so
there is the “feeling” that he, like Kafka’s Joseph K retains the guilt in
the minds of the bureaucrats and others. The hero escapes punishment, but
through some trick perhaps. They continue to believe him guilty."
And the keyword for a Greek would be 'hubris', not really 'guilt'. Because
the hero is not really responsible for what happens to him, in the legal
'use' of 'guilty' as analysed by H. L. A. Hart!
Helm:
"Westerns, at least the older westerns weren’t that bad. The hero defeats
the bad guys, gets the girl, and often the ranch that comes with her. He
also gets the respect of the town people. Perhaps by then he doesn’t
respect them, but they don’t continue to persecute him. If they are
respectable
they are ashamed.
I just yesterday ran across this review:
http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/novelreadings/spenser-and-susan-and-not-minding/
It is about Robert B.
Parker’s “Spenser” series. I had never read any of the novels but decided
to try one. I downloaded the first in the series, The Godwulf Manuscript,
written in 1977. I looked up Parker before I started it. He acquired a
PhD and did his thesis in hard-boiled detective fiction."
Borges loved detective stories, and indeed his "Garden of Forking Paths"
was by mistake published in a detective journal! He was in love with
Chesterton's meta-theory of the detective fiction: for example, that NO MAGIC
is
allowed (Borges' collected non-fiction is available in an accessible Penguin
volume).
Helm goes on:
"He taught only a few years and then wrote novels full time. I am 73%
(according to Kindle) through The Godwulf Manuscript and was reminded a bit of
Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. The authors are academics
and write about what they know. Albee’s characters remain in academia and
Connelly’s remain in his doctoral thesis. “Why were you fired”
Lieutenant Quirk asks Spenser at one point. “Insubordination. I specialize
in it.”
[or words to that effect].
Good implicatures!
Especially because one cannot specialise in SUBORDINATION (Grice coined
'unpublication' because he found that there was no word to that negative
effect!).
Helm:
"At this point in the novel, no one likes Spenser except for a few sexy
women. The men want to beat him up or kill him. Why doesn’t Connelly have
Spenser try at least a little bit to get along with people? Perhaps because
he wanted to stay in the “hard boiled” genre. Spenser I suppose becomes
a hero, and according to the above review acquires a coterie of people who
will help him during emergencies, but he remains, if I understand him “
outside.” He will never satisfy Borges’ requirements for the epic hero."
And then there's the tragic hero. I don't think an epic needs a 'hero'.
One can think of the source for Verdi's "The Lombards at the First Crusade"
as a kind of collective epic -- the Italians dying of thirst in Jerusalem
under the horrid ultratropical sun --.
Wagner's operas, on the other hand, do require a hero, his "Heldentenor",
where "Helden", I found, is nothing but 'heroic'. The fact that the hero
for Wagner has to be male says something about him!
Helm concludes:
"I wondered about Thomas Carlyle. I read his Heroes and Hero Worship
twice, but so long ago that I can’t relate it to Borge’s thesis about the epic
hero."
And then there's the tragic hero, and Wagner's heldentenor, which the
Italians translate as 'tenore eroico': Ippolito (in the tragedy with his
stepmother, Fedra), or Enea, in Berlioz's "The Troyans", and so on.
Helm notes:
"Borges has made some disparaging comments about Carlyle so perhaps there
is little commonality of thought here. Borges elsewhere seems to like
Ulysses as a hero,"
But is he one? I would NOT place Monteverdi, "Il ritorno d'Ulisse in
patria" as featuring a hero, tragic or not. Telemaco was possibly a hero,
though.
I hope Borges is not referring to JOYCE's "Ulysses" (He LOVED Joyce, just
because nobody understood him in Buenos Aires!)
Helm notes:
"[B]ut Carlyle like Cromwell and Napoleon, “heroes” that few would admire
today. Can Ulysses be admired? Dante after all put him in that Eighth
level of Hell for his deeds as a trickster."
No, I don't think Ulisse counts as a hero. He was too smart for that!
Aiace, the one who committed suicide because he lost Achille's arms in the
dispute with Ulisse does! (And my favourite statue of all time is the Belvedere
torso which has now been identified not as an ERCOLE but as the very AIACE
"contemplating suicide", where 'contemplating', as when Borges was 'looking
at the books on his shelves' is metaphorical.
Cheers,
Speranza
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