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David Auerbach on literature, tech, film, etc.

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Lucan’s Civil War: Fortune, Fate, and Caesar

Tezcatlipoca, "Enemy of Both Sides"

Down to the real business of the poem. Nicole made a great post about fate and fortune, and Lucan misses no opportunity to tell us how Fortune is the supreme god at work here, having completely supplanted the less fickle Greek and Roman gods of old. Though plenty fickle themselves, they could be addressed. They could be appeased. They had reasonably clear motivations. Fortune is opaque, implacable, and plausibly malevolent. Lucan invokes Fortune constantly as the ultimate force behind everything.

Though Lucan does not personify Fortune in any meaningful way, the closest analogue I know for Fortune would be Tezcatlipoca (“Smoking Mirror”), the supreme god of the Aztecs (Mexica), also known by the epithets “Enemy of Both Sides” and “He Whose Slaves We Are.”

Inga Clendinnen memorably describes Tezcatlipoca in her interpretation:

Tezcatlipoca, unlike other Mesoamerican deities, did not represent a particular complex of natural forces. Nor did he provide an emblem of tribal identity. He was the deity associated with the vagaries of this world, of ‘the Here and Now’, as ubiquitous and ungraspable as the Night Wind: fickleness personified.

‘He only mocketh. Of no-one can he be a friend, to no-one true.’

Tezcatlipoca in the Mexica imagining of him was the epitome of the great lorrd: superb; indifferent to homage, with its implication of legitimate dependence; all bounty in his hand; and altogether too often not in the giving vein.

Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs: An Interpretation

So it is with Fortune.

At the start of the poem, Caesar is Fortune’s favored child, and he knows it. He has the upper hand against the aging general Pompey (aka Magnus), who is formidable but unfavored. Anyone reading the poem will know that Caesar will win the war but soon be assassinated, Fortune having abandoned him, so it is temporary. Yet even Caesar seems to realize this, and plunges headlong as long as Fortune is at his back. With Fortune on his side, Caesar is portrayed as possessing strength and will beyond that of the old gods.

A striking scene appears in Book I, when Caesar is about to cross the Rubicon and meets a tearful apparition of Rome:

Now the cold Alps were past on Caesar’s course,
and in his mind the great revolts and coming war
had been conceived. At the waters of narrow Rubicon
the leader saw the mighty image of his fatherland
full of sorrow, trembling clearly in night’s darkness,
white hair disheveled on her head crowned with towers,
locks shorn and arms laid bare she stood before them;
choked by sobs she spoke: “How far will you go?
Where do you bear my standards, men? If you come
as lawful citizens, you must stop here.” Cold dread
seized their leader’s limbs. His hair stood high on end,
and faintness checked his footsteps at the river’s edge.

Soon he spoke: “You who overlook the city’s walls
from Tarpeia’s rock, Thunderer, you Phrygian housegods
of Iulus’ clan, and secrets of Quirinus who disappeared,
and residing on high Alba, Jupiter of Latium,
and Vestal fires and you, O godly apparition,
Rome—favor my endeavors. No furious arms
attack you. See me, victor on land and sea,
Caesar, always and even now your soldier.
He will be guilty who made me your enemy.”

Civil War I.200-220

Caesar hesitates briefly on seeing the ghost. He is not inhuman. But he responds with a skillfully rhetorical argument. (Rhetoric is very important at every level of Civil War.) He tells her that she should favor him, and that he is on her side. And he is on Rome’s side because Fortune is on his side. He will win, and so therefore he will be the protector of Rome. And thus he is already the protector of Rome; it’s just that a lot of people, including Pompey, don’t yet understand that.

This is hardly a valid argument, but the apparition does not have a chance to respond. The argument is enough to convince Caesar, and so he marches onward toward Rome. A running motif will be the power of speech to compel people to do almost anything, including die. Having crossed the Rubicon river, Caesar declaims to no one in particular how Fortune has put him above the law and above the gods:

 “Here, right here, I shed peace and our defiled laws.
Fortune, I follow you. Faith can go to the winds—
I’ve put my trust in the Fates. Let war decide!”

Civil War I.244-7

Caesar is conscious of his role as an agent of Fortune. He is certainly a power-hungry monster, but he also recognizes that he is rolling with the flow of fate, almost possessed by it. His men grumble and don’t particularly want to fight, but they don’t dare voice their fears, and when the venal Curio eggs Caesar on, it’s as though he were stoking a white hot furnace:

So [Curio] spoke, and though hell-bent on war already,
the speech adds rage and ignites the leader, as much
as clamor aids the Olympic stallion—though pent in
behind starting bars, he’s straining over the gates
and now leans hard to burst free from the bolts.

Civil War I.317-21

Again, the language is that of surrendering to instinct and fate. By Book III, Caesar is openly proclaiming himself the chosen one to his troops:

 These Greeks trust in vain the haste of my course!
For though we are in a hurry to get out west,
there’s time to destroy Massilia. Be glad, my cohorts!
Fate offers us spoils of wars along the way.
As a wind loses power—unless it runs up against
strong dense forests, it dissipates into empty space—
and as a great fire dies down when nothing obstructs it,
so not having enemies harms me. I think it a waste
of armed force if those I can conquer don’t fight back.

Civil War III.373-382

I think this is more than mere simile. The Greek and Roman gods were notable in displacing gods of nature; relative to most cultures’ mythologies, there are far fewer nature gods, and by the time of the Iliad they have receded into the background, a point Moses Finley makes in his wonderful The World of Odysseus. Finley points out that sun god Helios is portrayed as mostly impotent and harvest/fertility goddess Demeter is just plain ignored. He attributes this to the Greek warrior culture enabling the elevation of the aristocratic Olympian gods.

But in Lucan, those gods are absent, and when invoked are useless. Mars is mentioned, but more as a metaphor rather than as any actual deity. The superhuman forces at work are natural, not supernatural. Wind, fire, and all the other elements of the celestial clock trump any action. And those elements are all components of Fortune and Fate. Wind and fire obey the laws of physics and nature; so Caesar obeys his laws of nature, which drive him to endless violence. In the case of Massilia, the village declares itself neutral and though Caesar could simply go on, he takes the time to destroy them. Because it’s his nature.

In such a world, knowledge is at best useless, and at worst a curse. Omens and forecasts only make you more aware of what you can’t control:

Why,
Ruler of Olympus, did you add these cares
to anxious mortals, to know future disasters
through dire omens? Either the creator of things,
when first flame abated and he obtained the reign
over rude and formless matter, fixed the causes
eternally—by which he holds all in order,
obeying the law himself—then partitioned
the world into ages, set limits for the fates;
or nothing is settled and fortune wanders uncertain,
twisting and turning events, and chance rules mortals.
May it be sudden, whatever you devise. Let
the minds of men be blind to future fate.
Leave them free to hope within their fears.

Civil War II.4-17

Whether the world is order or chaos, we have no control over it. (I’m not sure why Lucan chooses to ask the Ruler of Olympus, however.)

Lucan’s Civil War: About That Dedication to Nero

Nero: Still more handsome than Galba

Nicole talked about the opening of Civil War and the peculiar dedication to Nero.

Lucan apparently wrote the first three books of his epic before he fell out of favor with Nero, and so there’s been a lot of dispute over whether the praise of Nero at the beginning of the poem is sincere.

Even as the poem bemoans the awfulness of the Roman Civil War, Lucan says that still, the reward of Nero made all that horror worthwhile.

This is certainly bombastic praise, and conceivably sincere, but what about the next passage?

When your watch is through
and you seek the stars at last, your chosen court
of heaven will welcome you, delighting the pole.
You could hold the scepter, or you may like to mount
Phoebus’ flame-bearing chariot, range the earth—
unfazed by the change of sun—with roving fire;
whatever you please: each god will cede to you,
and nature will relinquish her right to you
to be what god you will, install your world throne.
But do not choose your seat in Arctic regions,
nor in warm skies inclined to adverse south winds:
from these your gaze on Rome would be aslant.
If you weigh on any one part of boundless space
the axle will feel the load. Keep your weight
to the middle: balance heaven.

Civil War I.48-62 (tr. Matthew Fox)

Let’s look at Susanna Braund’s translation of the bolded lines:

If you press on either side of the boundless ether,
the sky will feel the weight.

[Aetheris inmensi partem si presseris unam,
Sentiet axis onus.]

Even allowing for cultural differences, this line seems awfully suspicious. Lucan says that Nero is so heavy that he must be careful not to sit too far to one side in heaven or else he’ll crush the sky. Of all the possible metaphors Lucan could have used, this one seems rather inopportune. He had not fallen from favor with Nero yet, but wouldn’t it have been exactly these sorts of antics that alienated Nero in the first place?

In his essay “Is the Eulogy of Nero Ironic?” Pierre Grimal disagrees and insists this is sincere praise. He makes a weak case: he simply ignores the boldface lines above, and he quotes Tacitus as saying that Nero was young and handsome. Unfortunately, Tacitus doesn’t say this; he only says that Nero was younger and less ugly than the bald, arthritic 72 year old emperor Galba. That’s a low bar.

If Grimal has to reach that much for evidence, I distrust his thesis, and so I will stick to believing that Lucan was mocking Nero from the start. The sinister ambiguity of the final lines of the eulogy certainly leave room for interpretation:

But you’re a god to me now: and if as seer
my heart is seized by you, I’d have no need
to rouse the god who stirs up Delphi’s secrets
or to bother Bacchus to abandon Nysa—
you are enough to empower Roman poems.

Civil War I.68-72 (tr. Matthew Fox)

And what a poem Nero empowers. On to more weighty (ho ho) matters next!

David Quint on Structuralism and New Historicism and Theory in General

David Quint, in his estimable book Epic and Empire, argues against the totalizing tendency of much literary theory and criticism of the 20th century. He speaks of poststructuralism and New Historicism but the general argument could apply to any number of other theories as well. (This is, essentially, what I criticized Derrida for doing in his attack on Husserl.)

I register here my methodological distance from, while acknowledging my indebtedness to, a poststructuralist critical practice that, in turning literary studies back toward history, has incorporated the models of structuralist anthropology. In this line of work, which is sometimes broadly called New Historicism, the literary text is one of an array of cultural products that share a single deep structure or mentality.

My reservations about this practice are partly conditioned by the more local explanations I have arrived at concerning epic and its relationship to the political order. In the widely conceived web of intertextual relationships that constitute the structuralist-historicist slice of history—in which all components of the culture are presupposed to develop at more or less the same rate at any historical moment—the literary text seems capable of being linked with almost any other text of the culture, and there appears to be no control to determine the juxtaposition. The text’s own explicit allusive network becomes only one element of this intertextuality, and certainly not a privileged one. Politics, too, the social disposition of coercive power, becomes one more product of this patterned mentality or “poetics.” That is, politics is necessarily aestheticized by the interpreter. It is one thing to acknowledge that power to some degree depends on the manipulation of semiotic and symbolic order—I do, in fact, argue this—but quite another to conflate the two.

Furthermore, attention to synchronous historical relationships can cause the text’s participation in a diachronic literary history to be overlooked.

David Quint, Epic and Empire (14)

Similar points have been made by many critics of such overarching theories, but this is the most compact statement of the critique that I’ve seen, so I thought it deserved quoting. The underlying irony Quint seems to emphasize is that the conflation of power and semiotics is, in fact, a semiotic power grab.

Euripides’ Bacchae: Two Boys at Play

The Bacchae has a reputation as Euripides’ greatest play. It’s hard for me to say. Even for a wildly eccentric and subversive playwright like Euripides, it is very odd. It was one of his very last plays, written quite late in life (in his 70s possibly), but even the contemporaneous Iphegenia at Aulis is nothing like it. It is concertedly archaic and much more soaked in myth and paganism than most of his other, more “human” dramas like Medea and The Trojan Women, which give voice to tremendous amounts of pain and suffering on behalf of life’s losers and victims.

The Bacchae lacks a certain type of immanent universality, though it has plenty of blunt impact. It is still overwhelming and shocking, and ends with one hell of a memorable image: King Pentheus’ severed head impaled on a very phallic thyrsus held by his mother, who has disemboweled him in the midst of Bacchic ecstasy. (The thyrsus is a fennel staff with a pine cone or bunch of leaves on top, a Dionysian symbol.)

Agave (center) and part of her son Pentheus (left), from Brad Mays' production

Thematically, however, it deals in more abstract universalities. Since abstract universalities are more prone to change over the millennia than concrete notions of pain and death, it is more difficult to grasp just exactly what is going on with the Dionysian cults and rituals that occur, even if you’re familiar with how they operated. Add to that Euripides’ inevitable perversions of received values and ideas, and the drama is baffling.

It is quite unusual (even unique?) in surviving Greek drama in making a god not only a spectator and an agent of the action, but the actual protagonist. (Other tragedies with Dionysus as protagonist have been lost.) He is Dionysus returns to Thebes with a group of maenad followers, having returned from the east where he had been establishing his mysteries and rites. His Theban mother Semele was killed by his father Zeus on account of Hera’s jealousy (long story), but the rest of her family has been slandering her by saying she lied about Zeus being her lover, and that that is why Zeus killed her. Dionysius’ cousin Pentheus, son of Semele’s slandering sister Agave, is now king of Thebes and has banned worship of Dionysus.

Dionysus is extremely angry about all of this and eagerly tells the audience, in proto-Richard III style, that he is going to take serious revenge. We follow him as he brings most of Thebes under his spell, Pied Piper-like, causes a major earthquake, and then disguises himself as a human and torments Pentheus at length. Eventually he tempts Pentheus with talk of the maenads’ orgies and has Pentheus cross-dress as a maenad so that he can spy on them. (Here Dionysus certainly anticipates Shakespeare’s similarly twisted Duke in Measure for Measure, as well as that other puppet-master Prospero.)

As expected, the maenads rip Pentheus to shreds, thinking he’s a wild animal—animal dismemberment was part of Bacchic rituals. Agave proudly brings back Pentheus’ head, thinking that she’s slaughtered a lion for a feast. Dionysus removes the spell from Agave so she can see what he has done to her own son, and Dionysus exiles the remainder of the family. Dionysus prophecies that Semele and Agave’s parents, Cadmus and Harmonia, will be turned into serpents.

These grim antics are accompanied by joyless songs from the chorus of maenads, but much of the play is just Dionysus (disguised) and Pentheus onstage in dialogue, occasionally with a visiting messenger, until Dionysus sees Pentheus off to his doom and returns only in the guise of a god in the denouement to pronounce doom. The chorus, as well as some of the other characters, incessantly remind the audience that one does not anger a god and get away with it, ever.

Yet Dionysus’ behavior is perplexing. He hardly seems like the good-times god of wine, and certainly not the buffoon of other myths. His Hermes-esque (Hermetic?) trickery and plotting seem calculated and malevolent. In a bit of mythological overlap, Cadmus and Harmonia’s transformation into serpents echoes the two serpents of Hermes’ symbol, the caduceus. To push that point a little further, Dionysus prophecies their fate simultaneously, emphasizing the pairing, whereas in the traditional account, Harmonia wishes herself to be transformed only after Cadmus transforms (by his own wish).

[The confusion of the diabolical caduceus and the healing staff of Asclepius persists, and Thomas M. Disch had some fun with the confusion in his apocalyptic novel The M.D.]

Even more strangely, Dionysus lets himself be humiliated by Pentheus, who temporarily imprisons him and cuts off his hairlocks. (Dionysus will later cause Pentheus to grow girlish hair.) Yes, it’s a setup, but why? Dionysus is already hellbent on revenge and manipulating events, Pentheus has already refused to allow worship, and Pentheus has no need to indict himself further.

None of this is enough to make you ultimately sympathize with Dionysus, who gets very nasty indeed. The sheer vigor of his revenge rhetoric as the play goes on is enough to make him unpalatable, like someone crushing ants for not staying out of his way. But in the facts, he is a victim, not of Pentheus but of other gods, particularly his wicked stepmother Hera. His obsession with revenge is not so different from that of Medea and Hecuba and Electra, Euripides’ vengeful women, but they were all more sympathetic than Dionysus. They weren’t gods.

Pentheus, for his part, is impetuous, arrogant, and unyielding, but unlike Creon in Antigone, he’s just a kid: he’s described as beardless and Agave reports she has killed “a lion’s cub,” not a full-grown lion. He argues with Dionysus and readies for war against the maenads, but is abruptly distracted by the promise of seeing the secret Dionysian rites. (Has he even been with a woman?)

PENTHEUS: Bring my armor, someone! And you stop talking.

(Pentheus strides toward the left, but when he is almost offstage, Dionysus calls imperiously to him.)

DIONYSUS: Wait! Would you like to see their revels on the mountain?

PENTHEUS: I would pay a great sum to see that sight.

E. R. Dodds describes the moment in a Freudian fashion:

What happens is rather the beginning of a psychic invasion, the entry of the god into his victim, who was also in the old belief his vehicle. In the maddening of Pentheus, as in the maddening of Heracles, the poet shows us the supernatural attacking the victim’s personality at its weakest point—working upon and through nature, not against it. The god wins because he has an ally in the enemy’s camp: the persecutor is betrayed by what he would persecute—the Dionysiac longing in himself.

These Dionysian rites then destroy Pentheus. He has inherited the sins of his ancestors without even the capacity to understand them clearly. Just before sending him off to his doom, Dionysus tells him he will return cradled in his mother’s arms, a happy regression to infancy.

Dionysus (left) and Pentheus

The result is a peculiar portrayal of a god very unlike the irritable but invulnerable deities for whom nothing is of lasting consequence. It feels closer to the Old Testament God, with his mysterious contradictions, hurt feelings, and inconsistencies. As Dionysus sets up Pentheus repeatedly, I think of God hardening the Pharaoh’s heart against Moses. Greek gods usually aren’t so roundabout, not even Hermes. (“My ridiculously circuitous plan is one-quarter complete!“)

Aristophanes portrayed Dionysus as an idiotic buffoon in the comedy The Frogs, and he normally stands apart from the other major gods in lacking jealousy and gravitas. Euripides evens the balance in The Bacchae, but the standard account still persists as well. Dionysus is a child with a dead mother, a wicked stepmother, and a disputed and absent father. The Greek gods are irrational and jealous, but they are not children. (Even Hermes is older than Dionysus.)

Here, though, Dionysus is an illegitimate child, even by the standards of Greek gods. Dionysius himself not accepted, not legitimate in Olympus, not even properly born to his mother before she died but incubated in Zeus’s thigh. He cannot take out his mourning and rage on other gods, but he can on the humans who ridicule his mother. In the myth, Hera motivates Semele’s sisters to slander Semele, but here they do it out of pure pettiness and spite, further stressing the emphasis on the human plane of events. Greek gods normally lash out at humans who are favored by other gods, but Dionysus is the only god in play here. And since the sin against him is that of questioning his very legitimacy, birth, and godhood, that he is defending himself against such accusations puts his status in doubt.

And so Dionysus is a neglected and resentful child, less legitimate than the other gods (much in the way that Dionysiac cults were viewed suspiciously and as illegitimate), punishing his action figures because he has power over them. The story is two boys having tantrums, one of whom happens to be a god.

The nature of Pentheus’ final sin is that of a man (or boy) thinking he is punishing another human, not a god. At that single point, Dionysus is humanly sympathetic, before the power shifts. I think that the need for Dionysus’ humiliation comes from theme and structure. Dionysus and Pentheus must be put on an equal level for a time, so that Dionysus is not only disguised as a human but is acting as one as well. (This also seems unprecedented in Greek literature, to the best of my knowledge.) That is to say, Dionysus can capture the audience’s sympathy only until he exerts his powers–his ability for revenge–at which point he is monstrous. He becomes a god, can only be recognized as a god, by becoming a monster.

What it all means I doubt anyone can say. That we are all children? That we have sympathy not for victims, but for the powerless? That our expressions of sympathy are as irrational and unjust as our expressions of revenge? Because I’ve tried to speak about the less culturally-bound aspects of the play, I’ve barely touched the difficulties and confusions around the Bacchic cults and rituals themselves. It is the most complicatedly ambiguous drama I can think of until Shakespeare came on the scene.*

_____

*As with Hamlet, we also lack crucial context as to predecessor plays around the Dionysus myth and exactly which parts of the myth Euripides altered, and consequently don’t know precisely what audiences of the time would have been surprised at.

New Articles on Computers and Culture

n+1 has posted roughly the first third of my article The Stupidity of Computers online. It talks about what computers can do easily, and what is near-impossible for them.

 

The Stupidity of Computers

 

Computers are near-omnipotent cauldrons of processing power, but they’re also stupid. They are the undisputed chess champions of the world, but they can’t understand a simple English conversation. IBM’s Watson supercomputer defeated two top Jeopardy! players last year, but for the clue “What grasshoppers eat,” Watson answered: “Kosher.” For all the data he could access within a fraction of a second—one of the greatest corpuses ever assembled—Watson looked awfully dumb….

Some of the towering achievements in computer science have been in the creation of brilliantly clever, efficient, and useful algorithms such as Quicksort, Huffman Compression, the Fast Fourier Transform, and the Monte Carlo method, all reasonably simple (but not obvious) methods of accomplishing precisely specified tasks on potentially huge amounts of precisely specified data. Alongside such computational challenges there has been the dream of artificial intelligence: to get computers to think….

 

It has a bit of the history of artificial intelligence, which one rather famous AI researcher has called “a history of failure,” including SHRDLU, ELIZA, and MGonz. (For more details, see Mark Humphrys’ paper “How My Program Passed the Turing Test.”)

I also have a long feature on “A-culture” (anonymous internet culture: 4chan, Anonymous, etc.) now up at the online magazine Triple Canopy. It is in two parts, beginning with an essay:

 

Anonymity as Culture: Treatise

Alienation, irony, autonomy, discourse. On 4chan and Internet masquerade.

4chan

It gets worse.

Today, the most ubiquitous online communities are social networks where our identities are mostly known and mostly persistent. Each tweet, each status update, is branded with a persistent name or affiliation.

Yet for people who do not want to be known, do not want to be corralled into demographic groups, and do not want the hierarchy of prestige, other spaces persist. These are the sort of spaces that were the progenitors of social networks: newsgroups, chatrooms, online forums, and Internet Relay Chat channels. They offer a lack of accountability for what one says, a way to hide unappealing facts about oneself, and an instant escape hatch if things get unpleasant. They offer anonymity.

The growth of these anonymous spaces marks the first wide-scale collective gathering of those who are alienated, disaffected, voiceless, and just plain unsocialized….

 

Delve then, if you dare, into the glossary and case studies:

 

Anonymity as Culture: Case Studies

Homosexuality, suicide, hate, porn. Four episodes and a glossary.

trap

A trap can never be obvious, or else it isn’t a trap.

Transgenderism is one of the recurrent obsessions of A-culture—specifically the idea of the trap, i.e., a male who presents himself as a woman and would be taken for a woman except for his genitals. The phrase—taken from Admiral Ackbar’s exclamation on being ambushed in Return of the Jedi: “It’s a trap!”—is a pejorative indicating that straight men have been tricked into being aroused by one of their own gender. However, it’s not unusual for posters to identify themselves as traps, or for posters to declare an interest in traps and even express confusion over their attraction to them. The trap embodies two conflicting impulses of A-culture: the love of deviancy and surprise, and the pervasiveness of suspicion, deception, and ridicule. This paradox is best exemplified by the posting of the technically self-contradictory statement “I’m a trap.”

I wrote this article in the spirit of Erving Goffman.

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