Father

Today is my Father's birthday, and at dinner he told us that he has come to a really profound piece of wisdom. Here is what he says:

"Man Long my son, sons are the be all and end all of existence. Without sons, life is meaningless. When you get a wife, your primary concern is getting sons and protecting the family bloodline. In the future, when you are in your middle age, you may come to a crisis, in which your wife is not capable of having sons. If that is ever going to happen to you, at the moment of crisis, you are going to talk to your wife, and tell her that your very existence depends on her getting a son. At this point she may get all sentimental and tries to evoke your memory and your love to save your marriage. But you will come to me, and I will tell you that you should get rid of her. You will then get a divorce with your wife and get another one in order to get your sons. You will then realize that you have made the right decision."

That's wisdom? Then what is insanity?

The Ultimate Bad Poem

Everyone has ideas of what a good poem is. Anyone has any idea how to write a bad poem? I have sort of thought about that, and produced one, which is to be included in my revised Chelsiad:

Oh Leo! Come and kiss my hungry lips
And put your hands around my longing hips.
Oh Leo! How I long to feel your grips,
Your lovely hand my heart from my breast rips.
In your presence the stars do fancy flips,
The virgin moon behind the black clouds slips.
The rising sun, climbing up the hill, trips
As I dream of you in my movie clips.

To rhyme with lips eight times, and put all the cliche images together, that must be a pretty bad poem...

A Critique of Aristotle's Poetics: Part II

Now I would like to talk about Aristotle's idea of hamartia. Aristotles writes: "[The tragic hero] is one who neither is superior [to us] in virtue and justice, nor undergoes a change to misfortune because of vice and wickedness, but because of some [hamartia], and who is one of those people with great reputation and good fortune..." Aristotle is intelligently vague here with regards to the nature of hamartia. Hamartia, modernly translated as "error", has no specific moral meaning. Philoctetes' error of entering unknowningly the gods' santuary is equally an error as Macbeth's decision of murdering King Duncan. It is because of this error that the character's fortune changes.

There is, of course, some valuable insights in Aristotle's theory of hamartia. It recognizes human imperfection, as any human being can consciously or unconsciously fall into error. It recognizes the nature of the human condition, which constitutes that of suffering because of human being's own imperfection. Also, in many tragedies, characters do make grave mistakes that they regret, but very often these mistakes cannot be reversed.

But because of this theory of the tragic hamartia, literary critics were set off in search for an error in every single tragedy and evaluate the tragedy in accordance with the profoundity of the error. Hence we get the phenemenon of thumbs up for Oedipus Rex and thumbs down for Women of Trachis: Oedipus' error is subtle, and it comes back with its greatest impact, while Deianira's error (of giving the poisoned cloak to Heracles) is so simple that people are incline to see Deianira only as a stupid character.

If tragedy is ultimately about the human condition, and is about how it affects us emotionally, then something is very wrong when a theory of tragedy cannot account for a play, like Women of Trachis, that is full of suffering and is emotionally extremely powerful. It is not a great wonder that this should happen with Aristotle's theory because the idea of hamartia is not even close to be complete in explaining the human condition in dramatic terms. If all of life is a stage, then the human condition is far more than just one serious mistake. Within the span of a tragic life on stage, there are many factors that contribute to the committing of that error. The tragic dimension of the human condition is also more than realizing the error, but also picking up on the responsibility of that error, which, though a mistake, is nonetheless an act of free will. The error is just one aspect of the tragic. In fact, it is not even a necessary aspect of tragedy of one wishes to define "tragedy" in a more general way, as I have defined before: through the unfolding of drama the protagonist comes to recognize his/her own helplessness and imperfection as a human being. An error is just one means in which the goal of "tragic vision" or recognition is achieved; two other means (but not exhaustive) include hubris and psychomachia, which Aristotle does not talk about in the Poetics.

For the longest time, translators have translated hamartia as "flaw". Hence we get this really weird notion of the "tragic flaw". This notion especially had haunted scholars for centuries. Like the idea of the tragic error, scholars had been desperately trying to locate one specific flaw that the tragic hero possesses, leading to his downfall. This idea, it seems to me, is absolutely absurd. In a real life, why would one single flaw bring down a person? Human beings are so full of flaws that flaws almost always conspire together to bring them down. So what makes us think that in tragedies the human condition is such that only one flaw (e.g. Macbeth's ambition) bring down the hero? Take the case of Macbeth as an example: why would ambition be the flaw? what about indecisiveness? what about weakness of will? what about superstitution? what about no flaw at all? To pinpoint down a single flaw will never be a complete reading. It would be a flawed reading of the text.

As I think about the Poetics more, I am really skeptical as to just how good a literary critic Aristotle was back in his days: his theory, while they can account for the basic theatricality of the dramas of his time, in many cases fails to account the human (for a lack of a better term) aspect of drama. The works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides (all available to him) are so rich in its tragic vision, yet Aristotle for some reason can only really do a good reading to a handful of the tragedies. What is baffling is that so many scholars accepted Aristotle's theory so unconditionally, that they look for the various flaws of the tragedies rather than the flaws of the theory.

A Critique of Aristotle's Poetics: Part I

Aristotle's major contribution to literature is his Poetics. It is the first piece of systematic literary theoretical analysis, and it remained tyrannically as the source of structural literary analysis. His definition of "tragedy" is in particular thought provoking. I would like to take this opportunity to seriously think about Aristotle's definition by first giving it a brief summary, then offering my critique.

In the Poetics, Aristotle defines "tragedy" as "a representation of a serious, complete action which has magnitude, in embellished speech, with each of its elements [used] separately in the [various] parts [of hte play]; [represented] by people acting and not by narrations; accomplishing by means of pity and terror the catharsis of such emotions." There are several points that deserves careful examination:
1. "magnitude": what does that mean? Is tragedy then only applicable to "great individuals"? Or must it be an action with larger-than-life outcome?
2. "embellished speech": this obviously mean poetry in its technical sense. But why is it necessary to have embellished speech? Is it just because of the magnitude of the drama? Or is there something more to that?
3. "catharsis": why must emotions be purged by tragedy? Is it not true that more often times emotions stay with us after we watch a play? When a stream of blood flows out of Agamemnon's house in The Oresteia, is our fear purged? Or does it haunt us in our own memory everytime we revisit that scene again?

Aristotle goes on to list the elements of tragedy, and there are six of them, in order of importance: plot, character, diction, reasoning, spectacle and song. Then he spends a good deal of time talking about the importance of plot, and parts of plot that make the best tragedies. These are reversal, recognition and suffering.
1. "reversal": this seem to refers specifically to the reversal of fortune in a character, usually but not always from good to bad. One thing we might want to think about is why should reversal be included in a tragedy? What if our tragic hero is a villian? What if there is no reversal of fate? Would it make a tragedy such as Agamemnon (taken out of the trilogy, which, for Greek tragedy, is more or less legitimate) less powerful?
2. "recognition": Aristotle is intelligently vague with this term. Is this suppose to mean a recognition of the tragic hero's previous error, or of the tragic hero's helplessness as a human being? The two cases are completely different: one is an epistemological recognition, and the other is a moral one. By citing Oedipus Rex, it seems that Aristotle means the former. But the problem with that is the former is not emotionally powerful unless the latter is also realized. In fact, the essence of "recognition" seems to be only the latter. The tragic error needs to be recognized within the scope of human morality: Oedipus' mistake does not mean anything if it has nothing to do with the gods' prophecy.
3. "suffering": this might be the only part of Aristotle's theory of tragedy that actually works. Human suffering, specifically, is what makes up the human condition. As Philoctetes shows us, human existence requires suffering, and it is not avoidable. If tragedy is designed to illuminate to the audience its condition, then suffering is a necessary component of the drama. In fact, a tragedy without suffering makes no sense; even Vladimir and Estragon, while waiting for Godot, suffer, and this is a play in which there is no action. The characters simply exist, and by virtue of their existence, they suffer.

First Presentation with Condomania

Today I skipped my Milton class and went to Hamber Secondary to do my first ever condomania presentation! I got to the school an hour early (the bus timing was very bad, obviously), and stood by a tree, partly to hide from the rain, partly to go over my lines. Mia, my veteran co-facilitator, arrived quite late, and I was very scared for a moment, because I did not want to present in front of an all boy audience in my very first presentation.

The time came. The boys arranged themselves into a circle, and I asked Mia to give me two parts: the introduction, and one of the Q&A activities. I was actually quite calm in my introduction. I made sure I spoke everything I need to say, and then I handed over to Mia. Admittedly, I feel my own face growing red; I think I was very nervous. But as the day went on, things were fine and I was very comfortable in my discussions. The boys were not rude; they were rather quiet and very unwilling to say "penis". My several joke attempts seem to work, although Mia's jokes are way better:
-My joke: we have mostly negative reasons for why we have sex because we are brought up in a world in which we are told only what NOT to do. For example, in a game of hockey, we are told that we should not punch other people's faces. We are never told what we are actually allowed to do. So if one day someone decides to put a puck inside his mouth and run into the goal, we would have to make a new rule in saying, "no one is allowed to put the puck inside his mouth and 'score' a goal that way". That rule, again, is defined by what we are not allow to do.
Mia's joke: let's say we have a bucket of blood, semen, vaginal fluids and breastmilk, and I have a huge cut and blood is everywhere. If I'm just standing here, and the bucket is over there, am I going to get infected by STIs?
Anyway, Mia gradually took over the workshop, and I jumped in here and there. But overall I was happy with my first workshop. Mia gave me some really good words of encouragement, so thumbs up for her. And I think getting this one out of the way means I can be more confident next time.

The boys liked us, so that's also a fantastic thing.

(PS: I told Claire today that I am doing a condomania - sex ed. - workshop and she cracked up. Yesterday I told Regina and Ainge, and both of them cracked up. WHY? Don't I look like a youth sex educator??? Must I stick to my books? You know, Shakespeare is very dirty too. And I can write dirty in heroic couplets as well:

O Why does every time the Redcrosse knight
Draws his huge sword to fight for Una's plight?
Why do the Baron's scissors seem to cut
A lock of hair that's near the lady's butt? (Dialogue Between Ego and Id, 23-26; see April's entry)

Sophocles' Philoctetes

The idea of "tragedy" has been my primary academic theme for this term. On the past Thursday I gave my seminar presentation on Oscar Wilde's Salome and Richard Strauss' Salome and how both works are tragic, in the definition given in my previous entry. I was quite happy that my definition works even for such a bizarre work as Wilde's drama. Its success gave me confidence to apply it to Julius Caesar and Milton's Samson Agonistes.

But just last night I read Sophocles' late tragedy Philoctetes, and a good deal of my definition now needs reconsideration. While my general definition more or less stands, the three tragic situations all fail to account for the tragic beauty of Sophocles' work.

Philoctetes, for those of you who do not know Greek mythology, was the bearer of arms (bow) for Heracles. He joined the Troy expedition with Agamemnon and his crew, and was abandoned by the crew in Lemnos when he accidentally disturbed a special santuary of the gods and was bitten by a poisonous snake. He was abandoned because his wound reeked and his screams were unhumanly loud and annoying. He was left all alone for nine years until after the death of Achilles and Ajax, when Helenus (son of Priam) prophecized that the Grecian crew needs Philoctetes and his bow to achieve victory. Sophocles' story begins with Neoptolemus (the son of Achilles) and Odysseus coming back to Lemnos. Odysseus plans to take Philoctetes by craft. He convinces Neoptolemus to help him. Neoptolemus, whom Philoctetes never saw before, approaches the crippled hero. They have an extensive conversation, through which Neoptolemus wins Philoctetes' trust. The crisis of the drama comes when Odysseus shows up and tells Neoptolemus to give him the bow (which Neoptolemus holds in his hands). After an internal struggle, Neoptolemus, assuming his nature again, gives the bow back to Philoctetes and asks him sincerely if he will come to Troy. Philoctetes, while thanking the son of Achilles, bitterly declines the offer. At the end of the play, Heracles appears in human form and finally convinces Philoctetes that he is destined to be in Troy and win all his honours there.

What's interesting about Sophocles' play is that the tragic moment occurs before the beginning of the play. The moment in which Philoctetes was abandoned by his crew is the time when he realizes his own imperfection and helplessness (against the gods, especially, whom he only accidentally offended) as a human being. Throughout the course of the play, Philoctetes gradually reveals his immense suffering during his nine years of solitude. His bitterness is a very powerful manifestation of the pains he suffered. It is certainly an emotionally extremely powerful drama. But if we want to analyse it, we find that many theories of tragedy break down.

My theory of the tragic situation breaks down: Philoctetes' accident is not an error - it is not even an action; unlike Oedipus, who actually undeliberately acts and kills his father, Philoctetes just walks into the santuary (Greek santuaries actually have no indicative boundaries at all). Philoctetes might as well stand still and mistakenly breath in air that is especially reserved for the gods. Philoctetes is not hubristic, nor is he torned by any psychomachic struggles. Aristotles' theory falls apart with this play: if the protagonist is Philoctetes, then there is no reversal, no recognition, and many too much suffering. Wikipedia's theory also fails: Philoctetes ends happily. Philoctetes is better off at the end of the play. The fact that the tragic moment occurs before the beginning of the play is Sophocle's stroke of absolute brilliance; it is also that which makes the play so problematic to analyse.

One thing is certain though: Sophocles most definitely is saying something fundamental about the human condition. The fact that both divinities and human beings hurt and abandoned him for nine years suggests some kind of irrationality of this universe. The drama is set up such that the cunning Odysseus is played by the same actor as Heracles, the god who restores Philoctetes. Being compelled by both the human and the divine force to return to Troy, Sophocles, through the story of Philoctetes, seems to suggest that the condition of human existence is suffering. Suffering is something we cannot escape; at the same time it is only through suffering that the joys of human existence come to mean anything. This is why Philoctetes is such a powerful play.

(Who are we kidding? Which of Sophocles' surviving play is not powerful?)