This week's been fun. Every now and again, I have a couple weeks of awful, disturbing dreams. Looks like those just started up again. On the bright side, less sleep means I'm reading, crocheting and gaming more. Finally got my priest to 70, finished a scarf, started re-playing FFII for the amazing dialogue (every inconvenience is greeted with the same "NOOOOOOO!") and the fabulously plausible plotlines (every secret door is triggered by a gramophone playing the same sequence of songs)...I'm quite productive at the moment. We'll see how that stands in a couple of days.
On the book front, just finished The Penelopiad, by Margaret Atwood (who else, really?) and...I'm not at all sure. It's the story of what happened while Odysseus was off fighting the Trojan War and wandering around aimlessly after, but told by Penelope and a chorus of the maids who Odysseus killed at the end of The Odyssey. On the one hand, it's a man-bashing rant. On the other hand, Odysseus had it coming, and few of the men in The Odyssey are good guys by modern terms. The unsubtle gender commentary is disturbing, but I can't really criticize it. There are very few men (that Penelope interacted with, at least) who were stellar examples of a husband, partner, or father. Telemachus arguably got a bit of a bad rap, since all he did was disobey his mom multiple times, but the rest of the lot? Pretty fair. (Well, except Menelaus. Can't help but like him. He fought for ten years for his unfaithful wife, and then took her back? He's either very dumb or exceptionally loyal.)
It can get a little repetitive, though. The format is one of the better parts, since it alternates between Penelope's narrative and the maids' opinions. The maids alternate styles of narration, ranging from Greek chorus-style dramatic narratives to vaudeville ballads. Some work better than others, and they're beating the same horse to death (we got killed unfairly, Odysseus is awful, we had no rights), but it's an interesting way to break up Penelope's story. I'd give it a 7/10 in general, but a 9/10 for those with an interest in classics. It's a different perspective on an old story, and it brings up some interesting questions on how much slack people should cut historical characters.
Odysseus isn't the best example, but when is it okay to denounce a character from a different time period/culture? Think of someone more clear-cut, like Genji. He rapes multiple women, causes his stepdaughter to commit suicide due to his sexual misconduct, does little to raise his sons properly (even Prof. Wilson couldn't defend him on that count), abandons his wife until just before her death (which he, arguably, helped cause) and commits a whole slew of actions that modern people in America frown on.
However, he was perfectly within bounds based on the rules and norms of Heian Japanese culture. Is it okay to just let it slide, then? Murasaki wrote during a different era, with a different culture and different expectations. As a woman writer, she designed Genji as the perfect man, both as a public and private figure. Even though he's awful by American standards, he was the perfect son, husband, and prince by Heian standards.
Okay; Genji was almost a millennium ago. What about more modern characters? When is it okay to look at a supposedly heroic character and say, "Alright, I understand where you're coming from, but you're horrible"? It's harder, to a degree, with modern characters; antiheroes and fatally flawed characters are in, so you're not supposed to like them.
Clearly, there's no line in the sand for cultural relativism. However, with that said, why didn't we deal with this in any of our English classes in college? "Topic: 12 Steps to Admitting You Loathe the Classic Hero and Subsequently Defending Yourself Against Rabid Fans." Might have been useful. At the very least, it would have been a great excuse to make WGSX majors cry tears of pure rage. And that's always worth something.
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4 comments:
A German mythology expert once calculated that although the Odyssey takes place over a period of around ten years, Odysseus himself is only ever traveling for one year, which is impressive, considering the fact that he sails to Hades and back. He does spend the last seven years trapped on a goddess's island, waiting for his divine patrons to finally get around to springing him.
Is he a philanderer? Yep. (There's no way around his spending a year with Circe. Everything else can sort of be justified, but not that year with Circe.) Does he have an excuse for being so late? Don't wrathful gods count for anything? I mean, Posedion rules the seas and Ithaca is kind of impossible to reach by land...
In response to your later question, I'd say that you should always to take context into consideration. You can criticize the context afterwards – what kind of a twisted society produces that sort of monster? – but you've got to take it into account.
It's with modern novels, where the context is modern, that we can unleash our hatred. Because there are definitely modern novels where the hero (who isn't an anti-hero) irritates me to the point of me hating him. (Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein, for example.)
Though now that I think about it... Chrétien de Troyes' Cliges has a sequence where a knight and his lady are acting just like teenage kids. ("I can't ask her out, she'd shoot me down!" and "I can't tell him I love him – what if he hates me?") That would imply that people haven't changed all that much since then, even if the context is very different. Hmmm... Tricky.
Ooo.
Must've missed out on Charlebois's blood-in-a-shark-tank method of teaching "The Wife of Bath's Tale." This included asking the class whether she was a proto-feminist, using the means at her disposal to get what she wanted out of life, or whether the hubby with the Big Book of Evil Women was right and she was a pretty naughty lady.
Frustration all around.
It seems like context is very, very important to understanding. But that's highly influenced by the religious studies side of my brain in which scripture needs necessarily to be fluid and dynamic at the same time that it's way outdated. Understanding the context from which the text emerged helps to dismiss passages problematic to modern sensibilities. Which is kind of cheating, even if it makes things easier. With literature though, you're not bound to take the text as a model for anything except artistic or perhaps political creation.
Reprehensible characters can ruin a book if everything else doesn't balance it out. Holden Caulfield sucks, and I don't feel that Catcher in the Rye sufficiently made up for his sucking. A matter of tastes. I also thought Briony sucked. But Attonement was sufficiently well crafted to use her suckitude to be a brilliant (if frustrating) novel.
But that's obviously for more modern, western works. I don't know that you can do more than appreciate the difference between standards with older or foreign ones.
-Jess
Oh dear God I wrote a dissertation.
Sorry.
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