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Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Alms For Oblivion
A month ago, in comments to his own counter-anthology post, Matt Greenfield proposed Dryden's preface to Troilus and Cressida as a fine thing - which was a coincidence, since I was just then contemplating a post about how people have never known quite what to make of that play, usually settling for making a different one, one way or another. Dryden: "I undertook to remove that heap of rubbish under which many excellent thoughts lay wholly buried." The one time I saw it performed, Hector was played by what appeared to be a 12 year old girl, possibly on the theory that Shakespeare was trying to write Spy Kids and slipped.
I got thinking about the play last month because I was rereading Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind (for an APSA panel on conservatism I just participated in with Henry Farrell, Russell Arben Fox, Scott McLemee and - glad to meet him - former First Things editor Damon Linker.) The Kirk preface quotes a 1953 review by one L.P. Curtis:
This eloquent and confident book should hearten present conservatives and open the eyes of many of them to the splendor of their moral heritage. It should give pause to those scientistic planners and sentimentalists who dismiss the forebodings of Shakespeare's Ulysses as old hat ... in spite of shortcomings Kirk fulfills one of the higher aims of the historian: he teaches us a way of life, and one, moreover, that is tried in experience and sprung from our condition. (p. ix)
The complex irony here is thick. If you don't know the play, let me give you a grand tour through Ulysses' two great speeches, skipping the love plot and most of the Trojan stuff but still including liberal (ahem) swathes of dramatic context. I'll make some points about political theory, some points about this wonderful play. (Pardon the long quotes, but this is some of my very favorite stuff. And I have these pet theories, you see.)
[The MIT online edition is very readable, but note: unless you click the entire play on one page link you miss the prologue, which you shouldn't.]
Ulysses' speech in Act I.iii is the one Curtis has in mind. Let me work up.
In this scene, the Greeks are in council of war; their policy debate has a highly contemporary feel. The Greek forces, once so "fresh and unbruised," are bogged down; dissension in the ranks; concerns that the original, official casus belli looks slight, in hindsight. ["Menelaus' queen/With wanton Paris sleeps; and that's the quarrel."]
'Stay the course' needs a morale booster-shot in the arm. Agamemnon takes a game whack at 'up, up and play the game':
AGAMEMNON:
Princes,
What grief hath set the jaundice on your cheeks?
The ample proposition that hope makes
In all designs begun on earth below
Fails in the promised largeness: cheques and disasters
Grow in the veins of actions highest rear'd,
As knots, by the conflux of meeting sap,
Infect the sound pine and divert his grain
Tortive and errant from his course of growth.
Nor, princes, is it matter new to us
That we come short of our suppose so far
That after seven years' siege yet Troy walls stand;
Sith every action that hath gone before,
Whereof we have record, trial did draw
Bias and thwart, not answering the aim,
And that unbodied figure of the thought
That gave't surmised shape. Why then, you princes,
Do you with cheeks abash'd behold our works,
And call them shames? which are indeed nought else
But the protractive trials of great Jove
To find persistive constancy in men:
The fineness of which metal is not found
In fortune's love; for then the bold and coward,
The wise and fool, the artist and unread,
The hard and soft seem all affined and kin:
But, in the wind and tempest of her frown,
Distinction, with a broad and powerful fan,
Puffing at all, winnows the light away;
And what hath mass or matter, by itself
Lies rich in virtue and unmingled.
War separates the men from the boys. It reveals what everything is really worth. Ergo, war is good. Agamemnon hereby invites a characteristic equivocation, as do 'national greatness' proponents today. On the one hand, a shared enthusiasm for the greatness of the venture is proposed as a prerequisite for the venture's success. So enthusiasm for greatness is good. But 'greatness as means to the end' tips over, confusedly, into 'greatness is the end'.
See Yglesias' post discussing Lawrence Kaplan's TNR cover article. Kaplan: "Alas, Bush still acts as though national life can somehow be compartmentalized, with a nation of couch potatoes footing the bill for ambitious foreign and military policies." The men-from-the-boys separation problem the Greeks grapple with is Achilles, the tent potato, lolling with Patroclus, refusing to fight. Yglesias quotes an anonymous letter-writer (kind enough to cite my good old David Frum "Dead Right" posts): "I think we need a quick way of referring to the idea that there's something better about having a lot of problems and overcoming them through stoicism, grit, and resourcefulness than not having such problems in the first place." Since I fear the repercussions of letting this writer's suggestion - 'Holbo's fallacy' - roll around the world, I prefer to call those who lobby on behalf of this fallacy 'the protractive trial lawyers association'. (Those who oppose this conflux of saps errant are in favor of 'tortive reform'. Clear?)
Getting back to Troilus and Cressida, Nestor next gives a speech about the value of risk as an end in itself - the undesirability, in itself, of security: "In the reproof of chance/Lies the true proof of men: the sea being smooth/ How many shallow bauble boats dare sail/Upon her patient breast, making their way/With those of nobler bulk!" (Cf. David Frum [per my old posts again] on why unfettered laissez faire is not merely consistent with stable conservative traditionalism but a precondition for its realization: "The great, overwhelming fact of a capitalist economy is risk. Everyone is at constant risk of the loss of his job, or of the destruction of his business by a competitor, or of the crash of his investment portfolio. Risk makes people circumspect. It disciplines them and teaches them self-control." Frum advocates capitalism not as an engine for the generation of economic value but as an engine of its destruction, generating moral value. Attempts to smooth the seas with safety nets are opposed not because they will fail but because they might succeed. An odd view, yes.)
Finally Ulysses steps up and delivers his tremendous stemwinder (inevitably quoted in every scholarly discussion of the Great Chain of Being - Lovejoy; "The Elizabethan World-Picture"; that stuff).
ULYSSES
Troy, yet upon his basis, had been down,
And the great Hector's sword had lack'd a master,
But for these instances.
The specialty of rule hath been neglected:
And, look, how many Grecian tents do stand
Hollow upon this plain, so many hollow factions.
When that the general is not like the hive
To whom the foragers shall all repair,
What honey is expected? Degree being vizarded,
The unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask.
The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre
Observe degree, priority and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office and custom, in all line of order;
And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
In noble eminence enthroned and sphered
Amidst the other; whose medicinable eye
Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil,
And posts, like the commandment of a king,
Sans cheque to good and bad: but when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents! what mutiny!
What raging of the sea! shaking of earth!
Commotion in the winds! frights, changes, horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixure! O, when degree is shaked,
Which is the ladder to all high designs,
Then enterprise is sick! How could communities,
Degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenitive and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
But by degree, stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores
And make a sop of all this solid globe:
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead:
Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resides,
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself. Great Agamemnon,
This chaos, when degree is suffocate,
Follows the choking.
And this neglection of degree it is
That by a pace goes backward, with a purpose
It hath to climb. The general's disdain'd
By him one step below, he by the next,
That next by him beneath; so every step,
Exampled by the first pace that is sick
Of his superior, grows to an envious fever
Of pale and bloodless emulation:
And 'tis this fever that keeps Troy on foot,
Not her own sinews. To end a tale of length,
Troy in our weakness stands, not in her strength.
Getting back to Curtis on Kirk - this is Kirk all over. Kirk quotes John Adams (who he identifies as the true model for American conservatism). Adams:
Nature, which has established in the universe a chain of Being and universal order, descending from archangels to microscopic animalcules, has ordained that no two objects shall be perfectly alike, and no two creatures perfectly equal. Although, among men, all are subject by nature to equal laws of morality, and in society have a right to equal laws for their government, yet no two men are perfectly equal in person, property, understanding, activity and virtue, or even can be made so by any power less than that which created them; and whenever it becomes disputable between two individuals or families, which is the superior, a fermentation commences, which disturbs the order of all things until it is settled, and each knows his place in the opinion of the public. (quoted, p. 98)
Kirk explains that Adams thinks the point of government is to minimize ferment. At this point - per Frum - a bold fusionist gesture elbows into view. Free markets mean constant ferment. If conservatism means ferment’s minimization, it seems the two conflict. But economic ideals of efficiency can be portrayed as similar to conservative ideals of stability, however little practical economic life resembles either. Think of the Great Chain of Being as a cosmic Nash Equilibrium, with personal virtue cast in the role of game strategy. Virtuous harmony is achieved in the body politic when no agent can rise above its proper station, because every other agent adopts a virtuous posture such that the would-be social climber can only go down.
Sticking with foreign policy, "Troy in our weakness stands" is classic 'stab-in-the-back'. The reason the Greeks aren't winning ... is that Achilles and Patroclus are making fun of them in a tent.
ULYSSES
The great Achilles, whom opinion crowns
The sinew and the forehand of our host,
Having his ear full of his airy fame,
Grows dainty of his worth, and in his tent
Lies mocking our designs: with him Patroclus
Upon a lazy bed the livelong day
Breaks scurril jests;
And with ridiculous and awkward action,
Which, slanderer, he imitation calls,
He pageants us. Sometime, great Agamemnon,
Thy topless deputation he puts on,
And, like a strutting player, whose conceit
Lies in his hamstring, and doth think it rich
To hear the wooden dialogue and sound
'Twixt his stretch'd footing and the scaffoldage,--
Such to-be-pitied and o'er-wrested seeming
He acts thy greatness in: and when he speaks,
'Tis like a chime a-mending; with terms unsquared,
Which, from the tongue of roaring Typhon dropp'd
Would seem hyperboles. At this fusty stuff
The large Achilles, on his press'd bed lolling,
From his deep chest laughs out a loud applause;
Cries 'Excellent! 'tis Agamemnon just.
Now play me Nestor; hem, and stroke thy beard,
As he being drest to some oration.'
That's done, as near as the extremest ends
Of parallels, as like as Vulcan and his wife:
Yet god Achilles still cries 'Excellent!
'Tis Nestor right. Now play him me, Patroclus,
Arming to answer in a night alarm.'
And then, forsooth, the faint defects of age
Must be the scene of mirth; to cough and spit,
And, with a palsy-fumbling on his gorget,
Shake in and out the rivet: and at this sport
Sir Valour dies; cries 'O, enough, Patroclus;
Or give me ribs of steel! I shall split all
In pleasure of my spleen.' And in this fashion,
All our abilities, gifts, natures, shapes,
Severals and generals of grace exact,
Achievements, plots, orders, preventions,
Excitements to the field, or speech for truce,
Success or loss, what is or is not, serves
As stuff for these two to make paradoxes.
Speaking of paradoxes, the trouble isn't that Achilles and Patroclus are a two-man anti-war tent show . (Thersites is the real Ted Rall in the Greek camp.) Rather, the trouble is that Achilles actually takes the 'greatness' to heart. He is put off by the fact that, several years on, the war seems to lack the specifically heroic aspect Agamemnon and Ulysses advertise as precisely the point of it all. Ulysses obviously didn't get to the top by rolling the dice and hoping for the best. You don't just toss valuable war material to the wind to test whether it's going to get blown away. Only a brainless idiot would praise embracing avoidable risk as an end in itself (and I'm sure David Frum would agree.)
They tax our policy, and call it cowardice,
Count wisdom as no member of the war,
Forestall prescience, and esteem no act
But that of hand: the still and mental parts,
That do contrive how many hands shall strike,
When fitness calls them on, and know by measure
Of their observant toil the enemies' weight,-
Why, this hath not a finger's dignity:
They call this bed-work, mappery, closet-war;
So that the ram that batters down the wall,
For the great swing and rudeness of his poise,
They place before his hand that made the engine,
Or those that with the fineness of their souls
By reason guide his execution.
Let me tell you a bit about Henry Farrell's paper for our panel, "Conservative Debates Over the Iraq War". He writes about the ongoing policy debates between the 'realist' wing and the 'neocons'. Classically, realists cast international relations as an arena of incessant conflict - from diplomatic jostling up to war and down again, ever ebbing and flowing. This arena is populated by amoral, self-interested agents, and wisdom dictates behaving accordingly. By contrast, the neocons are idealists about upholding moral values. Yet, writes Henry [I'm quoting a draft with permission]: "the argument between realists and neo-conservatives isn’t really an argument in the sense that we usually understand it. The real disagreements are usually left unstated or semistated, because they are less about the substance of politics than the style ... On the one hand, conservative realists acknowledge the moral ambiguity of international politics - but in so doing advocate a kind of conservatism that is ethically empty, a pursuit of self-interest dressed up under the pretty name of prudence. On the other, neo-conservatives claim to adhere to values, and to provide a moral basis for foreign policy - but (even if one takes their arguments at face value) only do so by ignoring the international system as it actually exists. The international system - a realm of politics which has at best a minimal ethical content - is a hostile realm for the conservative approach to human behaviour." So there is an uncomfortable hopping from the frying pan of intolerable cynicism into the fire of unsustainable idealism, and back again. The debate has trouble rising about this painfully reactive oscillation.
The 'style' point is rather crucial. Henry cites a Cory Robin Boston Review piece, "Endgame" on William F. Buckley and Irving Kristol on conservative malaise, pre-9/11:
For Buckley and Kristol, [the free market] was too bloodless a notion upon which to found a national order, much less a global empire. It did not provide the gravitas and élan that the exercise of American power required at home and abroad. It promoted self-interest over the national interest, not the most promising base from which to launch an empire. What's more, the right-wingers in charge of the Republican Party didn't seem to realize this.
"The trouble with the emphasis in conservatism on the market," Buckley told me, "is that it becomes rather boring. You hear it once, you master the idea. The notion of devoting your life to it is horrifying if only because it's so repetitious. It's like sex."
And Kristol:
—"there's the Republican Party tying itself into knots. Over what? Prescriptions for elderly people? Who gives a damn? I think it's disgusting that ... presidential politics of the most important country in the world should revolve around prescriptions for elderly people. Future historians will find this very hard to believe. It's not Athens. It's not Rome. It's not anything." Kristol thought it unlikely that the United States would take its rightful place as the successor to empires past.
So Henry writes:
This emphasis on conservatism as a movement which must have a sense of the heroic lest it dwindle into mere selfishness, has the paradoxical effect of emptying out the core of conservatism. Kristol and Kagan suggest that what matters is a sense of “national greatness” rather than a specific set of virtues, or goals, or policies. Rather than being a defence of a particular set of transcendent values, conservatism becomes a kind of perpetual crusade, a continued attempt to create a sense of national greatness and of heroic endeavour. The content of politics - the particular tasks that the heroes must carry out, and the dragons that they must slay becomes secondary to the heroic form. Here, conservatism is reduced to nothing more than a more-or-less aesthetic disposition towards politics, a kind of "proto-cognitive itch" [Henry's quoting my 'dead right stuff' again - thank you, thank you]. Not so much a commitment to a set of transcendent values, or even a pragmatic Burkean attachment to tradition, as a desire that politics provide a sense of the heroic.
In sum, the move to combat moral nihilism through the positive cultivation of solid, enduring martial values ["Hollow upon this plain, so many hollow factions"] breeds a specific style of perpetual treadmilling over the abyss of nihilism: form masks a hollow core; or, what may be worse, a core run to rot. Thersites puts it thusly:
THERSITES
Agamemnon, how if he had boils? full, all over,
generally? ...And those boils did run? say so: did not the
general run then? were not that a botchy core?...Then would come some matter from him; I see none now.
But Shakespeare does an even better job of capturing the schizophrenia when Ulysses second great speech rolls around (when he switches keys from neocon to realist, that is.)
Returning to Curtis' review claim that Kirk's Ulyssean 'Great Chain of Being' conservative idealism "should give pause to those scientistic planners" who dismiss him: the irony - we've seen it already - is that Ulysses IS a scientistic planner. One of his best bits - which I would love to hear delivered with a suitably dead-eyed, understated chill - is a speech explaining to the accidental anti-warrior Achilles that the Greek intelligence service has him under such tight, panoptical surveillance that they have made the secrets of his love life into 'affairs of state', even to the point of knowing his thoughts before he does. (Achilles has a Trojan girlfriend - Hector's sister - and Ulysses has been intercepting the mails, apparently.)
The providence that's in a watchful state
Knows almost every grain of Plutus' gold,
Finds bottom in the uncomprehensive deeps,
Keeps place with thought and almost, like the gods,
Does thoughts unveil in their dumb cradles.
There is a mystery - with whom relation
Durst never meddle - in the soul of state;
Which hath an operation more divine
Than breath or pen can give expressure to:
All the commerce that you have had with Troy
As perfectly is ours as yours, my lord.
This can easily be read as a 'you're mine' threat. (Don't get the CIA mad at you.) But Ulysses actually lets it drop discretely in the context of an ostensibly friendly interaction. Which isn't really so friendly.
What happens is this: in order to get Achilles to fight, the Greek commanders go through a ridiculous song and dance of praising Ajax - not the brightest torch in the festival procession, but built like slab - as the man to defeat Hector. Having seen this lot conspicuously ignore him, chasing after Ajax, Achilles wonders what has happened to his fame. And Ulysses happens to walk by his tent, reading a book:
ACHILLES
What are you reading?ULYSSES
A strange fellow here
Writes me: 'That man, how dearly ever parted,
How much in having, or without or in,
Cannot make boast to have that which he hath,
Nor feels not what he owes, but by reflection;
As when his virtues shining upon others
Heat them and they retort that heat again
To the first giver.'ACHILLES
This is not strange, Ulysses.
The beauty that is borne here in the face
The bearer knows not, but commends itself
To others' eyes; nor doth the eye itself,
That most pure spirit of sense, behold itself,
Not going from itself; but eye to eye opposed
Salutes each other with each other's form;
For speculation turns not to itself,
Till it hath travell'd and is mirror'd there
Where it may see itself. This is not strange at all.ULYSSES
I do not strain at the position,-
It is familiar,- but at the author's drift;
Who, in his circumstance, expressly proves
That no man is the lord of any thing,
Though in and of him there be much consisting,
Till he communicate his parts to others:
Nor doth he of himself know them for aught
Till he behold them form'd in the applause
Where they're extended; who, like an arch,
reverberates
The voice again, or, like a gate of steel
Fronting the sun, receives and renders back
His figure and his heat. I was much wrapt in this;
And apprehended here immediately
The unknown Ajax.
Heavens, what a man is there! a very horse,
That has he knows not what. Nature, what things there are
Most abject in regard and dear in use!
What things again most dear in the esteem
And poor in worth! Now shall we see to-morrow--
An act that very chance doth throw upon him--
Ajax renown'd. O heavens, what some men do,
While some men leave to do!
How some men creep in skittish fortune's hall,
Whiles others play the idiots in her eyes!
How one man eats into another's pride,
While pride is fasting in his wantonness!
To see these Grecian lords!--why, even already
They clap the lubber Ajax on the shoulder,
As if his foot were on brave Hector's breast
And great Troy shrieking.ACHILLES
I do believe it; for they pass'd by me
As misers do by beggars, neither gave to me
Good word nor look: what, are my deeds forgot?
And now, having warmed up with this theme of relativism, Ulysses second great speech - his great, panegyric embrace of nihilism:
ULYSSES
Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
A great-sized monster of ingratitudes:
Those scraps are good deeds past; which are devour'd
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
As done: perseverance, dear my lord,
Keeps honour bright: to have done is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail
In monumental mockery. Take the instant way;
For honour travels in a strait so narrow,
Where one but goes abreast: keep then the path;
For emulation hath a thousand sons
That one by one pursue: if you give way,
Or hedge aside from the direct forthright,
Like to an enter'd tide, they all rush by
And leave you hindmost;
Or like a gallant horse fall'n in first rank,
Lie there for pavement to the abject rear,
O'er-run and trampled on: then what they do in present,
Though less than yours in past, must o'ertop yours;
For time is like a fashionable host
That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand,
And with his arms outstretch'd, as he would fly,
Grasps in the comer: welcome ever smiles,
And farewell goes out sighing. O, let not
virtue seek
Remuneration for the thing it was;
For beauty, wit,
High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,
Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all
To envious and calumniating time.
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,
That all with one consent praise new-born gawds,
Though they are made and moulded of things past,
And give to dust that is a little gilt
More laud than gilt o'er-dusted.
The present eye praises the present object.
Then marvel not, thou great and complete man,
That all the Greeks begin to worship Ajax;
Since things in motion sooner catch the eye
Than what not stirs.
I trust it is clear how this makes a mockery of the first speech's theme of a stable Great Chain of Being, with everything valued for what it is, and in its proper place. To the contrary, the universe is an ascending anthill of creatures crawling over each other, rising and falling, in ceaseless antagonism - a realm in which the virtues are trumped by dust. To put it more strongly: Ulysses is clearly going out of his way to cause the very problem he warns against. "Power into will, will into appetite/And appetite, an universal wolf." It works. Achilles gets back in harness to run until he drops, as suits Ulysses strategic convenience; the complex irony being that, if ever there were an argument for staying in your tent and just having a good time as long as you can - Ulysses just gave it. He even signs off with what should be yet another argument against what he is arguing:
And all the Greekish girls shall tripping sing,
'Great Hector's sister did Achilles win,
But our great Ajax bravely beat down him.'
Farewell, my lord: I as your lover speak;
The fool slides o'er the ice that you should break.
This is a precise inversion of Nestor's earlier 'bauble boats' vs. 'nobler bulk' figure. In war, the heavy armor takes the punishment. And why exactly would you want to break the ice the fool slides over? Because you want to drown in an oblivion of cold, black water, while some idiot prances around above you?
(Extra bonus irony: at some point someone took 'one touch of nature makes the whole world kin' out of context, and it's wandered ever since, doing part-time environmental lobbying as a paean to the pacifying effects of pastoral settings.)
In the event, the one who gets swallowed by darkness isn't Ulysses but Hector. (Act V contains the memorable line: "One bear will not bite another, and wherefore should one bastard?") All Ulysses' brilliantly laid war plans come apart and it's just all careening off all in the fog of war. Hector and Achilles do meet and fight but Achilles - the tent potato - is too out of shape and starts wheezing. Hector manfully lets him live to fight again, maybe after he's been to the gym for a couple weeks. But Ulysses takes advantage of this respite to take a page out of Ulysses' playbook. He decides to use his brain for a change:
ACHILLES
Come here about me, you my Myrmidons;
Mark what I say. Attend me where I wheel:
Strike not a stroke, but keep yourselves in breath:
And when I have the bloody Hector found,
Empale him with your weapons round about;
In fellest manner execute your aims.
Follow me, sirs, and my proceedings eye:
It is decreed Hector the great must die.
They come upon Achilles after he has put off his helmet and shield at the end of the day's fighting.
ACHILLES
Look, Hector, how the sun begins to set;
How ugly night comes breathing at his heels:
Even with the vail and darking of the sun,
To close the day up, Hector's life is done.HECTOR
I am unarm'd; forego this vantage, Greek.ACHILLES
Strike, fellows, strike; this is the man I seek.
Hector doesn't get any famous last words. And his killers get no lines whatsoever.
I have a notion that this play is (as many directors have decided) unstageable for a variety of reasons - a few of which I will get to in just a moment. But the text still craves visual accompaniment. I think someone should get it illustrated, graphic novel-style, with a very eclectic selection of artistic styles. The mood shifts so jarringly and wildly - it's funny and gross and serious and action-packed and contemplative and mournful and moving and romantic and satiric, without ever stabilizing. This ought to be visually cued in a more hyperbolically cartoonish manner than human actors could. I think Hector's death would be a fine occasion for some Frank Miller-ish myrmidons to rise up and fall like a black tide over a Ravishing Ronald-looking Hector in his underpants, with paunchy Achilles roaring them on.
What makes the play hard to stage? Answering one part of this question will get us back to where we started.
When I first read the play in college - in a class where we read 17 plays in 10 weeks - I was immediately smitten by its glorious cynicism, which appealed to my innocent sophomoric sensibilities. (One touch of nature.) Given no background on this text - not told how to take it; just set to read it - I instantly clutched to my breast the fact that Ulysses was a cynical bastard to give that first speech, then the second. I imposed a frame familiar from Hollywood (where else?) To pick just one familiar example (I can't remember what comparisons I forged at the time): Ulysses is like Capt. Dudley Smith in LA Confidential, an avuncular but hard and crafty leader who turns out to be much worse than you thought. That is, the second speech is the one that's really true. Ulysses is a nihilist in idealist's clothing. When it came time to write my term paper, I conducted my first ever scholarly literature search and discovered to my amazement that the Great Chain of Being speech was generally regarded as expressing - straight - an admirable moral view. Ulysses is, therefore, a sympathetic figure. This was like finding out that everyone was reading The Wit and Wisdom of Senator Palpatine. Or, if that's too strong: Tony Soprano on Family - Lead From The Heart (Don't Bleed From the Heart). No, you simply can't take it straight.
Was I the only one who had actually read all the way to Act III, I wondered? I crept up through the 50's and 60's (no one seemed to see what I saw) and found more recent critics who indeed saw Ulysses more or less as I did, who went so far as to see Thersites as the voice of conscience in the play. (I think, starting in the late 70's, the adjective 'Nixonian' crept into some discussions. The pall of the Vietnam War hung over all, I believe.)
So I never fail to find it paradoxical when someone cites the 'Degree priority and place' stuff straight - as Curtis did in his 1953 Kirk review. It was quite standard, but all very bizarro, reception-wise. No doubt the stuff that appealed to me was precisely the 'rubbish' Dryden wanted to clear away. All this nasty war stuff.
And now it's been more than 10 years since I read any scholarship on Troilus and Cressida. I'm pretty hazy about all that stuff now, if anyone cares to correct me about the record, regarding how views of Ulysses' character have shifted and been updated. (Maybe I should delve back in.) As I have become old and wise I realize that the 'Ulysses as nihilist' view doesn't work any better than the 'Ulysses as idealist' view. He is neither a realist about IR, nor a neocon, you might say. He's both and neither, since the combination (as Henry Farrell says) just ... doesn't ... make ... sense.
I've come to think that's more or less the point.
Would you like to hear my theory? OK, briefly. (This post isn't getting any shorter, I realize.)
I suspect Troilus and Cressida was substantially inspired by a number of themes, passages, linguistic bits and piece of Montaigne that Shakespeare would have imbibed through John "Holofernes" Florio's 1603 translation of the Essais. They knew each other through their mutual patron, the third Earl of Southhampton. [What do you think? Hot or not? PDF] I have this file full of notes containing what I take to be tell-tale internal linguistic evidence, since the Florio - like Shakespeare - is so heavily neologistic. But I'm not trained in the actual honest-to-gosh textual analysis methods I would need, so I probably shouldn't do crackpot amateur theory-spinning in public. I haven't even checked in 15 years to see if someone has written, or preemptively debunked, my Montaigne-Troilus and Cressida influence thesis.
Still, I am willing to inch out on a limb and opine that a lot of the really serious dramatic difficulties of the play stem from the stubborn unsuitability of certain characterically Montaignean elements for effective drama. Wonderful in an essay, just confusing on the stage. Three general points (I've got lots).
First, there is a highly distinctive philosophical joke about the Great Chain of Being that Montaigne unwinds like yarn in "Apology For Raymond Sebond". The pattern repeats very strikingly in Troilus and Cressida. But I won't try to explain that. In general, the play is incredibly speechified. There are all these long, fantastic philosophical monologues and debates. I love them. They are among my favorite bits of Shakespeare. But dramatically this is a very serious problem. People are just standing around droning on and on, and the little skeptical reversals and ironies and joys of the argument are simply too slight to be picked up by the audience as they fly past. It's like watching invisible people do judo.
As in Montaigne, the style is not to cue or telegraph to the audience where the epistemological flip is made. So you just realize at some point that now you are heading in the opposite direction and feel lost. On the page this is delightful because you can retrace. On the stage, not so easy. To put it another way, the play is like a vast canvas, whose beauty is dappled with tiny, watch-maker precise details; and then you ask everyone to appreciate the canvas from 30 feet. (But it makes the play a great read. And it would be a great graphic novel. The speeches could each be given some appropriately cartoony image to go with.)
Second, per above, I think the characters are intentionally inconsistently drawn. (See Florio's translation, "Of the Inconstancie of Our Actions".)
I have often thought that even good Authors doe ill and take a wrong course, wilfully to opinionate themselves about framing a constant and solide contexture of us. They chuse an universal ayre, and following that image, range and interpret all a mans actions; which if they cannot wrest sufficiently, they remit them unto dissimulation.
Ulysses is not aware of how he is reversing himself, in trying to trick Ulysses into fighting. He is simply divided against himself. The parts are not reconciled, and Ulysses does not seem aware of the conflict. Giving a fine speech, then tricking Ulysses, makes sense to him on the practical level, however deeply odd and hypocritical the conjunction makes him look. He has a job to do and these are just two parts of the job. He is moved by incidental features of his environment, who and what he is managing at the moment, to shift one way or the other.
Which brings me to ...
Three, the characters are all moved by incredibly slight, incredibly petty reasons. The war itself is a macrocosmic illustration: Helen sleeps with Paris. "And that's the quarrel." As Montaigne writes:
The soules of Emperours and Coblers are all cast in one same mould. Considering the importance of Princes actions, and their weight, wee perswade ourselves they are brought forth by some weighty and important causes; wee are deceived: They are moved, stirred and removed in their motions by the same springs and wards that we are in ours. The same reason that makes us chide and braule and fall out with any of our neighbours, causeth a warre to follow betweene Princes; the same reason that makes us whip or beat a lackey maketh a Prince (if hee apprehend it) to spoyle and waste a whole Province. They have as easie a will as we, but they can doe much more. Alike desires perturbe both a skinne-worme and an Elephant.
In I.i we hear that "Hector, whose patience Is, as a virtue, fix'd, to-day was moved: He chid Andromache and struck his armourer." Why? Yesterday Ajax hit him on the head and his pride is stung. Then, in council in II.ii, Hector very soberly lectures hot-head Troilus about why they should give Helen back. "Brother, she is not worth what she doth cost/The holding." It is wrong to keep her, their honor does not properly depend on it, etc. etc. He even quotes Aristotle, in a burst of anachronism.
That more or less shuts up Paris and Troilus. And so on, until after hundreds of lines of sobriety from Hector about why they should give Helen back: "I propend to you/In resolution to keep Helen still/For 'tis a cause that hath no mean dependance/Upon our joint and several dignities." Presumably Hector, having not quite vented his frustration at being hit on the head by browbeating his brothers, is still itching to hit Ajax on the head, which he won't be able to do if they give Helen back.Paris and Troilus, you have both said well,
And on the cause and question now in hand
Have glozed, but superficially: not much
Unlike young men, whom Aristotle thought
Unfit to hear moral philosophy:
The reasons you allege do more conduce
To the hot passion of distemper'd blood
Than to make up a free determination
'Twixt right and wrong, for pleasure and revenge
Have ears more deaf than adders to the voice
Of any true decision.
The point being: the council scene, which seems so important - Aristotle and everything - is actually irrelevant to what is really happening. Namely, one man hit a man on the head, who now wants to hit him back. On stage, this irony of vain human nature won't be clear because there is nothing to cue it. So the council scene just feels confusing. How was this decision reached? What were all those speeches about?
Hector ends up dead not just because he has disarmed, per above, but more specifically after chasing down a Greek in golden armor, only to find the man inside is diseased and hideous. He lectures the poor dead fellow on his unwisdom in making himself such a glamorous target: "Most putrefied core, so fair without/Thy goodly armour thus hath cost thy life." And then the same thing happens to Hector himself.
Truely, when I consider man all naked ... and view his defects, his naturall subjection, and manifold imperfections, I finde we have had much more reason to hide and cover our nakednesse than any creature else.
So, to conclude, I don't think that scurrilous, sore-covered Thersites is supposed to have the wisdom, even though he sees all. For what is the use of seeing all if you still end up 'lost in the labyrinth of your fury'. (See Montaigne, "Of Cato the Younger", for example.)
Well, that's enough for tonight. I'm rereading Montaigne right now because I'm working on the subject of his influence on Nietzsche for my Nietzsche class. Perhaps I'll try to write up my crackpot theory about Montaigne and Troilus and Cressida, for your amusement. Good night.
Comments
You know, maybe I’ll go ahead and write an old fashioned review of the collection I found that Jew of Malta essay in, $137.20 or not. One of the best pieces is an infectiously enthusiastic survey of John Florio’s career; one of the weaker pieces (although still readable) weakly argues that Iago’s speeches are “influenced” by Montaigne. (Actually, she doesn’t bother to offer much argument, and admits that she might as well picked William Cornwallis’s English essays except then she would’ve had a harder time getting an essay about Iago into a collection about translators and international travelers. But I can’t be too mad, since I’d never heard of William Cornwallis before. Check this quote out:
“It is a pretty soft thing this same Love, an excellent company keeper, full of gentlenesse and affabilitie; makes men fine and to go cleanly; teacheth them qualities, handsome protestations; and if the ground be not too barren, it bringeth forth Rimes, and Songs full of passion, enough to procure crossed armes and the Hat pulled down. Yea, it is a very fine thing, the badge of eighteene and upward, not to be disallowed. Better spend thy time so then at Dice.”
)
I’m fond of T&C too—beats the rotten oozing core out of A&C if you ask me—but, and I know this is getting monotonous, but, oh man, that Marston guy is so cool!
I think many of the characters in Troilus and Cressida say things that sound plausible if not actually wise, but none of them retains moral authority for more than a moment. The play keeps undercutting our perceptions, forcing us to reinvest our sympathies in new places.
Part of the fun of the play, as I argued in an article once, is that the characters keep mutating. They have multiple personalities. For example, there are several versions of Hector: the rational, philosophical advocate of peace; the impetuous, chivalric advocate of war who loves to fight but spares his fallen foes; and the ruthless, acquisitive, rather mercantile figure who sees a weak warrior in nice golden armor, hunts him down, and kills him. And Hector abruptly and with no reason switches from Hector1 to Hector2 in the middle of the council speech discussed by John above. It is tempting to reach for a psychological explanation that unifies all of these disparate actions, but the play insistently foregrounds this continual splitting of multiple personalities. The play thus denies audiences one of the fundamental satisfactions of literature: we do not accumulate and deepen our knowledge of the play’s characters, but rather keep discarding it and starting over.
Dryden was deeply disturbed by this fragmentation of character, and he saw it as a sign of incompetence. In the preface to his version of Shakespeare’s play, Dryden says things like,
The last property of manners is, that they be constant, and equal, that is, maintain’d the same through the whole design: thus when Virgil had once given the name of Pious to Aeneas, he was bound to show him such, in all his words and actions through the whole Poem.
. . . unless he [a poet] help himself by an acquir’d knowledge of the Passions, what they are in their own nature, and by what springs they are to be mov’d, he will be subject either to raise them where they ought not to be rais’d, or not to raise them by the just degrees of Nature, or to amplify them beyond the natural bounds, or not to observe the crisis and the turns of them, in their cooling and decay: all which Errors proceed from want of Judgment in the Poet, and from being unskill’d in the Principles of Moral Philosophy.
Dryden altered the council scene to fit this theory of character: in his version, Hector starts the scene as a cool rationalist and only decides to send a challenge to the Greeks after his little son Astyanax offers to send his own challenge (2.1.).