A Parable

The first item up for auction was a vase. The artist didn’t pay much attention to it. It was a nice piece, a colored glass art vase, but the artist had barely enough money to feed himself, and he had plenty of more important things to buy than objects d’art. He was also distracted by his own paintings, which were hung on a screen on stage left, lot number 7. He hoped that they would sell—he needed the money—but something about one of them was disturbing him.

The auctioneer cried sold and the word reverberated in the ensuing silence, as he scribbled down the buyer’s number in a little book on the podium. The next item up for bids, he said, was lot number 4.

The artist got up from his seat in the back row and approached the stage, where he could get a better view of the painting. A wake of discontentment trailed behind him: he was blocking the view. He tried to get off to one side, but there he couldn’t see the painting.

The auctioneer asked if the man in the front would please sit down. But the artist didn’t listen. He was staring at the painting, a simple still-life. Something was wrong with it, he wasn’t sure what.

The guard, a tall man in a severe black suit, lightly grabbed the artist’s hand and led him to the door. The guard let him go once they had reached the lobby, and walked back into the auditorium where the auction was being held.

The artist, defeated, left the building. People passed him by as he stood on the sidewalk, trying to decide what to do. He was worried that, since he had been ejected from the auction, he wouldn’t get paid for the sale. Then, as his thoughts returned to the present, he realized what he could do. He rushed back into the auction house, where the guard halted him.

The artist begged the guard, telling him who he was, and showing him identification. The auctioneer, who noticed the commotion at the door, told the guard to let him back in, since he did have a lot up for auction. The artist thanked him and said that he wanted to withdraw one of the pieces from the lot, because he had to change it. The auctioneer told him that the lot was up for bidding already, and that several bids had been made. He said that it was too late.

A man in the front row had the winning bid. The artist walked up to him and asked kindly if, after the auction ended, he could be allowed to finish the painting before the bidder took it. The bidder agreed.

But someone else was bidding on the painting, too. The other bidder did not agree to the artist’s request. He said that he liked the painting as it was, and that he could not permit the artist to destroy it.

The artist implored the bidder: he could not, he said, let that painting go out into the world, beyond his control, displaying his error forever, conveying something he did not want to convey. But the bidder did not listen.

The auctioneer restarted the bidding. The auction went back and forth between the two for a few minutes, as the artist sat in the front with the first bidder, urging him on. He bid eagerly at first, but then he grew more reluctant, and the artist had plea him to continue against the other bidder. Finally, the second bidder, tired of the bidding war and with no shortage of money, doubled the bid. The first bidder apologized to the artist and said that he could not match it. The artist exasperatedly raised his paddle. The auctioneer stopped in his tracks, not sure if the bid was sincere. He told the artist that he was not allowed to bid on his own items, and declared the second bidder the winner.

The artist said goodbye to the first bidder and walked to the back where the second bidder was sitting. The bidder, seeing the artist approaching, said that he was sorry, but he was transfixed by the painting, and he would not allow it to be changed. For a small peace offering, he said that he would buy the artist a new canvas and paint, so that the artist could make a new version of the painting that he was satisfied with. But the artist told him that he could not paint again what he had already painted.

~therighthandofnixon

Taste (1)

To extend what I was talking about last time a bit–

Alright, so we admit a plurality of tastes. We admit that our own preferences are not objective truth. But that doesn’t mean we have to stop making judgments about things. We admit that our opinions are subjective, but we don’t have to stop caring about them. If someone becomes so disengaged from their own taste that that have not stake in it at all, then they have, in a sense, ceased to live. Objectivity about life can be taken too far – you have to value your own perspective over that of others to some degree, even it it means not being objective. There are some senses in which one cannot reason logically about culture without ceasing to participate in it. The Bergson that I’ve been reading has not really converted me, but there’s something in his argument that (and I am simplifying things) time can only truly be understood through the intuition: that intellectualizing it, as we do when we try to measure it, causes it to lose something essential, since time is essentially subjective. Certainly this notion anticipated the Uncertainty Principle. Could it apply to our experience of culture as well?

~therighthandofnixon

Who Oppressing Whom?

Mike B.’s post yesterday on clapclap.org addresses some problems in leftist cultural critique that have bothered me as well: there is something disturbingly parternalistic and condescending in claiming that a certain group of people is under the influence of false consciousness, and such claims are often made with little understanding of the selected group’s actual motivations. There is certainly a well-documented tendency for some practitioners of critical theory to slide towards elitism – witness Adorno in the 1960s, with his insistence that jazz fans are somehow being lulled into acceptance of what he saw as inferior music – and while not all go that way, the tendency for critics to assume that no one could rationally like the things that they do not themselves like – in this case, it was Celine Dion – persists, and, as Carl Wilson came to realize in his investigation of Dion, it is fatal. I agree with the main drift of Mike B.’s post and I have nothing to add to it except to point the way to Isaiah Berlin’s attack on paternalistic notions of liberty, but there is a minor point of his that I would like to expand upon:

Their arguments [those of speakers at the EMP Pop Conference] ran more along Carl’s lines, that a strip mall eradicates the culture of a community. Moreover, there was a creepy strain of intentionality going on there, that zoning boards let strip malls in precisely so that they could accrue the benefits of destroying a community’s culture.

There certainly is a lot of cooperation between between the corporate and government worlds, but the assumption in a lot of leftist thought is that they all form one unit whose interests are exactly those of the status quo, so that whenever there is some aspect of culture that is perceived to have a negative effect on individual or community freedom, it is assumed to be imposed willfully by this oppressive body – it’s Pynchon’s Them, basically, which, as I’ve mentioned before, is a level of paranoia that we’re not meant to aspire to. It seems like Foucault’s claim that not all power is exerted by any particular party has given way to a semi-mystical idea of a generalized opponent that gets the blame every time something happens that might restrict people’s freedom. Max Horkheimer may have made a breakthrough when he declared that the critic of culture must acknowledge the fact that he or she is also steeped in it, but I think it’s time we take this a little further: whatever persons are pulling the strings of culture, if anyone is, live within that culture just the same as the rest of us, and might be pulling each others’ strings as well. There are no puppeteers behind the curtains, and no one is following a script.

~therighthandofnixon

American Blog Post

From Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One:

“Dennis sat in one of the arm-chairs, put his feet on the trolley and settled himself to read. Life in the Air force had converted him from an amateur to a mere addict. There were certain trite passages of poetry which from a diverse multitude of associations never failed to yield the sensations he craved; he never experimented; these were the branded drug, the sure specific, big magic. He opened the anthology as a woman opens her familiar pack of cigarettes.

“Outside the windows the cars swept past continuously, out of town, into town, lights ablaze, radios at full throttle.

“‘I wither slowly in thine arms,‘ he read. ‘Here at the quiet limit of the world,” and repeated to himself: ‘Here at the quiet limit of the world. Here at the quiet limit of the world” . . . as a monk will repeat a single pregnant text, over and over again in prayer.”

I posted earlier about evocative phrases that seem to be evocative only, in some way, through cheap trickery, and here they are is again. Dennis Barlow is not only a poetry addict, but a well-known hack poet, and like nearly every character in a Waugh novel, is entirely superficial and devoid of any genuine concern for the world. Whether we’re only meant to be laughing at Dennis for his superficial use of the poem (Tennyson’s “Tithonus”), or whether Waugh is making fun of Tennyson as well (which seems likely), this sort of relationship between reader and phrase is familiar. All Dennis is after, here, is the physiological effect that the particular phrase “at the quiet limit of the world” has on him. There is certainly something wrong with his superficial style of reading and failure to move beyond the old and familiar, and that is the main point of this scene, but it also brings up an issue about poetry in general that I can’t resolve. I can’t come up with a qualitative difference between a good poetic phrase, which still has a primary purpose of creating sensations, and a “branded drug” that may turn off the discerning reader, but that is nevertheless effective. What makes one way of evoking a sensation seem ‘cheap’ while another does not?

One major difference, I suppose, is originality, which bears on the reader as well as on the poet. Outside of poetry, one example of the “branded drug” I’ve found is the use of of the word ‘American’ to give a sense of import to a title. Thus, American Pastoral, American Psycho, American Gods, American Splendor, American Graffiti, American Beauty, American Beauty, American Gangster, American Gangster, American Water. The word, used in this context, seems to have turned, over the years, into an empty commonplace used to signify that This Is Big And Important. (American Pie doesn’t count because it is nearly impossible to make food sound serious.) The reason it might seem empty now, as it seems for me, is simply that it’s been done so many times before – setting the doubts that that casts on the creator aside, that gives it the sense of being prepackaged, particularly since it is used in the title, where it can easily resemble a brand.

But it’s not just originality or novelty, and it’s not just the fact that flashy phrases can distract from bad writing, dull ideas, aesthetic blunders, and so on. Some phrases just seem easier than they ought to be, and we, too clever to be so readily manipulated, push them away. I think there is more to our preference for poetry that avoids taking shortcuts on the way to our seratonin glands than simple admiration for the amount of effort put in by the poet. But where exactly is the corny different from what we perceive as genuinely powerful?

~therighthandofnixon

Dance: thoughts on form and presentation

In recent adventures of an artistic type I have seen many different forms of choreography in the various senior dance shows/ visiting dance shows that I have attended. In the past I have not been one to make many comments or observations on dance, it was an art I didn’t understand that well or appreciated very much. But that’s all changing now perhaps because I am looking at dance through a more artistic lens now (or perhaps because I know a choreographer who is changing my world.) But either way I am seeing it with new ideas in mind.

This brings me to the topic of this rather short post. Dance is a beautiful art form and when done right it has the potential to involve its environment. That ability is not unique to dance but I fear has been underutilized by it. Recently I attended a dance show where there was no set place for the audience and thus no set vantage point from which to watch the show. We sort of had to maneuver our way throughout the house and see what we could. I will talk further about this particular production when I get some visual aids from its choreographer but for now let it stand that this got me thinking about the use of space in dance.

Space plays an important role. That may be obvious to everyone reading this but yet it is not taken as serious as this statement suggests. The choreographer of this particular show utilized all the space, entrance space, audience space, performance space, exit space, and even the bathroom space. It brought up that all too popular question of where the show ended and the audience began. After all some of the dancers needed the participation of the audience to perform.

This example with its full contact between addresser and addressee makes the question easy to understand. But the aspect of space and expand that notion to sound as well stays true for staged dance. The design of the stag , the use of the stage, the non use of the stage, the off stage space, the audience space, it all plays into the production. Today’s art is in a sense frameless.

Sound may seem even easier to understand, with it being the driving force behind many of the dance forms. But also the lack of sound, or the audience participation in the creation of sound. These play roles as well. Voice over work, dancer speech and silent dance are powerful tools a dance can employ that at times create an extremely uncomfortable feeling for the audience. That feeling though negatively described with the word “uncomfortable” is one of the true feelings of art.

We’ve posted earlier about the weakness of easy art and I think that same theory applies here. Art that offends us or just makes us uncomfortable is by that definition not easy and therefore more engaging. We are forced to come to terms with that which influences us.

That’s enough for now but there will be much more.

Huysmans

Used Saves

In university bookstores run by Follett, used books get slapped with stickers that look like this:

This has to be a masterpiece of advertising copy. Sure, the typography is not great, but there’s something in the text – beyond the obvious use of ‘your’ to imply familiarity and the probably unintentional Jesus reference – that has a distinct effect, at least on me. The difficulty I’ve had trying to characterize this effect is what convinces me that whoever made this thing was really on to something. Something about the way ‘used’ is separated from the noun it modifies, and the sentence fragment ‘textbooks from your bookstore’ – not one textbook, not any specific collection of textbooks, just textbooks in general – brings on a storm of associations ranging from a bounty of wholesome oats to the inscrutable expression on the face of Ostade’s Fishmonger. Perhaps PR people have commandeered Agatha Christie’s secret to popularity [cached], and found themselves a phrase that, through some accident of neurology, causes a release of serotonin regardless of context. I don’t know, but there is something about this sentence-and-a-half.

Used saves. Textbooks from your bookstore.
                                                Shantih     shantih     shantih

~therighthandofnixon

The Post Post Post Post Post Structural/Colonial/Constructionist Post Post Pre Post Manifesto Post Art Post Avant Garde Post Man-Post_Festival

Art is arbitrary!

@ six this was decided by a context of messages.

The Mona Lisa is not always art!

There is a plane that is connected to another planeà These two planes cannot be separated from each other.

On one side lies the content that makes up the objects of art. On the other side lie the concepts that make ups what can be art. When in history these two sides have matched upà art was born.

The object did not exist before the concept, or the concept before the object!

No definition of art, that is no connection between an object and a concept is more artistic than another.

But ART as in the art of capital letters MUST challenge and if it doesn’t, if it sits idly by and lets you absorb it for the price of nothingà it is not artà no matter the form.

Does this make sense to you? No? then spelled out it is

(Spelled out) A painting by nature a painting is not by nature art!

Deconstruct this Saussure, Post C

-Huysmans

Henry Green

I recently read Living (1929) by the fairly obscure author Henry Green. Green fits into a general current in British fiction at the time of upper-class authors attempting to approach working-class life on its own level (or going slumming, if we’re being less charitable). Green took this project more literally than authors like George Orwell who attempted something similar – Green, a member of the aristocracy, actually went to work in his father’s factory out of what he later described as class guilt – and he took an idiosyncratic approach to prose that’s apparent from the beginning. On the second page:

“‘Tis ‘im, who was works manager, and Mr Dupret’s son were going about this factory. They went through engineer’s shop. Sparrows flew by belts that ran from lathes on floor up to shafting above by skylights. The men had thrown crumbs for them on floor.”

The most easily pinned-down of this style’s many peculiarities is the use of articles. The narrator usually omits ‘the’ and ‘a,’ but uses ‘this’ and ‘that’ as determiners a lot more often than they would typically be used. (There can be something disturbing about unusual uses of ‘this’ and ‘that,’ a lot more disturbing than you would think syntax could be.) The Wikipedia article claims, without a citation, that this styles is meant to mimic Arabic. Certainly, at times the narrator’s voice sounds like it’s not entirely fluent in English, but there’s more to it than that. Again and again the narrator conspicuously does things that omniscient narrators do not do, like make comments that do not seem to attach to any character and seemingly lose track of the story. It resembles more than anything else an oral storyteller who is ad-libbing from memory. The narrator is incompetent. It is certainly not an imitation of the voices of the blue-collar characters, who speak in a colorful but competent English, but it seems to be a mockery of someone, though it’s not clear whom.

The reason Green chose to use an unusual style is that he felt the need to distance himself from his subjects, to avoid coming off as condescending. I don’t think that it’s meant as a mockery of the less-educated, but there certainly is something off-putting about it. If it really is an imitation of an Arabic speaker’s English, then I could call it insulting or at least fetishistic, but I can’t come up with any particular reason to think that. There’s no reference to Arabic in the novel that I recall. The style was probably just an arbitrary choice, but I can’t help but wonder why he did it how he did.

~therighthandofnixon

on the art and narrative design of theme parks

Something that has come up in recent discussions is the artistic qualities of theme parks. This may sound more general than I actually mean it to. For we can probably all agree on the artistic merit of the architectural and visual elements of ride construction and theme park design. What I am more interested in for this post and future ones on this specific subject is the narrative presented by the ride separately and the park collectively.

It is possible that a theme park may be the best Aristotelian imitatio. But to achieve this best something has to change in the way this narrative is told; it can no longer be stagnant. For this narrative to achieve the level of imitation I am only beginning to conceive, a theme park would have to recognize to different levels of narrative development that would both have to evolve over time as well as connect the collaboration of the guests with the vision of the authors. So what are we really talking about here? A narrative woven into the development of each ride as each ride changes over time. So the guest that comes back later will see more of the story, nothing will conclude.

This is possibly an extreme that we neither have the technology nor the desire to create today but the fundamental idea already exists and was pioneered by Walt himself. I truly believe there is a narrative behind these rides that should be looked at and analyized from a critical view. Even more I want to see it looked at comparatively; how do the narratives combine to create the narrative of the park as a whole?

As a quick aside: I do not mean to discuss the story of the park as in which rides were developed when and what news happened where. Rather what I am discussing is the fictional narrative presented by the theme of the park and the story of the rides.

This is only the beginning of what I envision to be a large critical experiment.

-Huysmans

The Politics of Elissa

The evolution of a story can be explained through the context in which it is retold. The context is one of six components identified by Roman Jakobson that make up a message. In the development of the story of Elissa, the founding queen of Carthage, all six components have changed. The Aeneid by Virgil informs its audience that Rome was destined for greatness by the king of the gods, Jupiter. To demonstrate just how heroic and noble the hero Aeneas is, Virgil presents his conquests of foreign lands and hearts before founding the future empire of Rome. Virgil’s timing in producing this epic was not inconsequential but rather was instigated by the recent transition of Rome from a republic to an empire. The Aeneid captured the spirit of the new Rome and represents a national founding epic connecting the Empire to the heroes of Troy, the founding of Carthage, and of course the desires of Jupiter. At a much later time and across the Mediterranean, Fawzi Mellah reconstructed the same founding of Carthage story as seen in the Aeneid but without Aeneas. For Mellah the story represented the need for a national heritage of the newly independent country of Tunisia. Between Mellah and Virgil, Chaucer used the same story to identify the attributes of a good woman while Dante reminded his readers that Carthage’s founding queen still lays beneath the earth for her love of the hero of Rome. Yet earlier than any of these examples of Elissa’s story came the original Greek version, remembered now only through other references. This version exemplified the early concepts of “otherness” in order to help define the culture of Greece. From a version of orientalism to a Roman version of imperialism and concluding as an example of postcolonial nationalism, the story of Elissa has changed as much as the political message it carries.

            The original references to Elissa come from a Greek source from the third century B.C.E. Mary Louise Lord identifies the Greek historian, Timaeus of Tauromenium, as being the oldest account of Elissa (Lord 30).[1] Timaeus’ account describes Elissa as the sister of Pygmalion, the king of Tyre. Timaeus also outlines many of the key elements important to Mellah’s version. Timaeus’ Elissa founds Carthage, leaves after her husband is killed by her brother, is proposed to by the king of the Libyans and commits suicide to remain faithful to her dead husband (Lord 33). Lord suggests that Greek writers preserved Timaeus’ story of Elissa because it was an example of a woman using deceit to save her country. One reference to the story comes from a Greek tractate entitled “Women Intelligent and Brave in Warfare” (Lord 33). Lord continues by identifying several other references to the story Elissa all in Latin and many by early Christian thinkers. In each example presented by Lord Elissa’s story is described without reference to Aeneas, save the Aeneid by Virgil. What is emphasized instead is her ability to outwit Pygmalion, negotiate land grants from Libya, and her unyielding devotion to her dead husband (Lord 34). Elissa becomes a noble example for the developing Christian community as a chaste woman who successfully salvaged her culture and founded Carthage. The Latin versions of Elissa, in terms of Jakobson’s diagram, have a different code and context from the original Greek version along with a different addresser and addressee but the contact and message have stayed relatively the same.

            The context for which this message is being sent shifts from an audience interested in “Women Intelligent and Brave in Warfare” to one liking her to an “Example of Chastity.” For a Greek audience governed by the pursuit of knowledge and the reality of warring states such a figure was inspirational and encouraging. But for an audience struggling to establish its religious culture in a Roman dominated world, Elissa was an icon of their noble message, chastity. In both cases the character of Elissa, a Phoenician, is being used as an example of how to better themselves, Greeks or Christians. Edward Said relates the concept of Orientalism to this very idea. Said suggests that the perceived study of Orientalism, the study of the east, is in reality a study of the west. Though at the time Timaeus was writing down the story of Elissa, Carthage was to the west of Greece, the concept of Orientalism remains relevant. Carthage was not part of Greece and was later destroyed by Rome in the Punic Wars, thus for both Timaeus and the later Greek writers, Carthage represented a foreign land. In describing the modern version of Orientalism, Said suggests that “Orientalism responded more to the culture that produced it than to its putative object, which was also produced by the West” (Orientalism 33). If we take Greece and the later Christian writers to be the West in this situation, we can identify the Carthage of both Timaeus’s and the Christian writers’ version as a fictional creation of those authors. Elissa’s Carthage is not representative of the real Carthage. In both cases the goal was to make a value judgment on the actions of Elissa and to liken those actions to the ideal of the author’s culture. This similarity resulted in the message staying relatively the same with the emphasis shifting based on the context. In the Aeneid, however, the message is altered to allow for a sense of nationalism to be added to the message.

            Virgil’s Aeneid uses the original Elissa story by Timaeus to place Aeneas above Elissa. He achieves this by altering the story to connect Elissa’s founding of Carthage with Aeneas’ voyage from Troy to Italy. On the way from Troy Aeneas is forced to make port in Carthage due to actions taken by gods not happy with his future success. This alteration to the story assists the presentation of Aeneas as a noble, conquering hero. Virgil has set Aeneas up as the hero of defeated Troy who will carry the torch of the Trojans to Italy and found Rome which will than become the Empire envisioned by Jupiter. The story begins with Aeneas’ arrival in Carthage and the hospitality he is welcomed with by the founding queen, Dido (Elissa).[2] Aeneas is grateful for the hospitality and stays in Carthage until Jupiter sends for his return to the sea, in order to continue the voyage to Italy. During his stay in Carthage, Elissa, stricken by Cupid’s arrow, falls madly in love with Aeneas and seeks his hand in marriage to unite the Trojan exiles with the new Carthaginians. The wedding scene as described by Virgil is somewhat confusing and concludes with conflicting beliefs as to what transpired. Aeneas does not believe he has consented to marriage while Dido does. This discrepancy makes it all the more easier for Aeneas to leave when the time comes. Furthermore when he does finally leave it is because he has been called upon to do so by the gods. Thus “Father Aeneas” neither leaves Elissa by his own free will nor breaks any marital vow in leaving. These small details to the story allow Aeneas to be free of any responsibility for his actions and the consequences they entail. Dido’s role in the Aeneid ends with her death at the end of book four. Instead of dying to perserve her devotion to her dead husband, she commits suicide in the Aeneid because she cannot have Aeneas for a husband. Virgil described her death as “not merited or fated, / but miserable and before her time / spurred by sudden frenzy” (Virgil 102). What Virgil is describing is that she took her own life for no good reason, thus ending before her time and through an action that is irrational. By placing Dido as acting irrationally, Virgil further separates her from the “Pious Aeneas.”

In regards to Jakobson’s diagram we find that with the Aeneid has changed the message as well as the context and code in which this story is being transmitted from addresser to addressee. The code shift is from Greek to Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. The context changes from being a story about a foreign culture to that of a story using a conquered culture to pay homage to the dominating culture. The Aeneid can be described as work of nationalism before the time of nationalism. By connecting the Roman Empire with a divine past, it establishes the credibility of the new empire. Furthermore it achieves this nationalism through Rome’s imperialistic past as the conquered of Carthage. This part of the Aeneid does not describe the history of the nation per se but rather describes how the founders of Rome conquered the hearts of a foreign nation they later physically defeated. Virgil is creating what in hindsight Stephen Greenblatt identified as the “reaffirmation of a shared and stable culture that is, as Mr. Will puts it, “the nation’s social cement” (Greenblatt 290). Greenblatt is describing the canon that George F. Will, a columnist, sees as being attacked by professors of literature. For Virgil and the Roman Empire this “social cement” must include their power over the Carthaginian state. Bringing in the context of which the Aeneid was written illuminates the reasons for the alterations made to the Greek story by Virgil. As the story travels through time more alterations will be made as the context for communicating the story changes.

Dante Alighieri cites the story of Dido very briefly in Inferno, the first book of the Divine Comedy. Dido is seen in hell and has been destined to spend eternity there for her betrayal to her dead husband, Sychaeus.[3] But more specifically Dante identifies her reason for being there with her love driven suicide (Dante 43). By making this comparison, Dante is validating the story of Dido as told by Virgil. Though Dante’s reference to the story is not a representation of the story itself but its similarities with Virgil’s version of the story can be explained through Jakobson’s diagram. Virgil and Dante share the same contact (text), code (Latin), and message (Dido’s death for love of Aeneas). The context can be seen as different based on the historical moment at which each version was written but the audience is of the same nationality (Roman/Italian) thus lending itself to continuing the imperialistic message created in the Aeneid.

Writing a few years later and in another part of Europe, Geoffrey Chaucer describes the story of Dido as an example of good woman in The Legend of Good Women. Chaucer’s Dido dies pregnant and betrayed by Aeneas. Chaucer describes Aeneas as lying traitor who betrays his marriage vows to her and sneaks away in order to marry again in Italy (Chaucer 643). The Aeneas presented here is not the “Pious Aeneas” Virgil created but rather is a traitorous Aeneas who has betrayed this good woman, Dido. Every subtle detail Virgil added to heighten the innocence and piety of Aeneas has been removed by Chaucer in favoring Dido as the victim of a deceitful opportunist. Looking at Jakobson’s diagram these differences can be attributed to the differences in the message characteristics. Again the message is relatively the same; Aeneas arrives at Carthage on his way to found Rome, he spends time there, Aeneas and Dido have the marriage seen together, Aeneas must leave and Dido kills herself for her love of him. What changes is how these events are interpreted; Aeneas’ departure is viewed negatively, Chaucer confirms the wedding did happen, and Dido dies with a child. The interpretation is indicative of the difference in addressee and context for these two writers. While Dante is building off of the founding epic for his nationality, Chaucer is using a foreign epic to help create his national identity.

During Chaucer’s time England was still in the process of forming a national heritage, using works such as Chaucer’s to help define what is to be expected of English women. Therefore for Chaucer there was no desire to stay true to the Aeneid as the Aeneid did not represent his cultural heritage. Along with reinterpreting the character of Dido, Chaucer also translated the story from Latin into Middle English, thus altering the code as well. The act of translating the Latin epic into an English example work is reflective of a trend in translation identified by Susan Bassnett. In looking at the development of the Czech literary tradition, Bassnett cites Josef Jungmann’s idea of translation as “a significant part of the development of the new Czech literature,” Jungmann goes on to argue that “the point of origin of a text was less important than what happened to that text in the process of translation” (Bassnett 14).  If we apply this idea to Chaucer’s work we see that Dido is becoming an example of a good woman for English standards as her story becomes English, through being read in English. Therefore the act of translation aids the developing English literary tradition in forming its “social cement.”

Fawzi Mellah’s version applies Bassnett’s idea on translation with Said’s theory of imperialism leading to nationalism. In defending his own work, Said describes how the imperialistic influence of the European colonial powers gave birth to the nationalistic ideas that lead to colonial revolutions across the globe. Said eloquently demonstrates that “Today a fantastic emphasis is placed upon a politics of national identity, and to a very great degree, this emphasis is the result of the imperial experience” (Politics of Knowledge 196). Mellah’s version of Elissa’s story, that is a version based largely on the original version rather than Virgil’s version, represents this national identity. Mellah introduces his text with a short description of its voyage through translation. According to Mellah the text as he has it originally appeared on stelae[4] in Punic characters and was later translated into Arabic by his grandfather. Mellah himself took over the labor and completed translating all of the stelae into French. He discovered that they made up a letter from Elissa to her brother, Pygmalion, who killed her husband and took over Tyre from her. In describing the task of translating the letter, Mellah admits that he “altered things to such an extent that I can no longer claim in all honesty that this letter is Elissa’s; it is also somewhat mine” (Mellah 4).  Mellah is very clever here in how he is presenting the work. He has suggested that a discovery from antiquity was modernized into Arabic (the dominant language of Tunisia) and was then later translated into French (the former colonial power of that region) by himself (a Tunisian). This translational voyage complete with the numerous historical inaccuracy best describes the translational trend described by Bassnett. Tunisia as a post-colonial nation is searching for its own unique national heritage and has found it by reclaiming one taken from it a long time ago by the Romans. It is just as Bassnett describes, “emergent nations had to establish a tradition and a canon” (Bassnett 14). The last part of Mellah’s admission is the conclusion of the translational voyage; Mellah has made it his own. And since Mellah is Tunisian and writing as a Tunisian he has made the story Tunisian, thus returning it to its home.

The fundamental story contains all the elements of the original Greek version as presented by Timaeus, but is greatly expanded in detailing Elissa’s journey from leaving Tyre and founding Qart Hadasht.[5] Much of this expanded quest establishes Elissa as the first individual in history to consider the ambiguity behind language, the power of music on a civilization, and the pros and cons of polygamy versus polyandry. Through the letter she writes, the reader is introduced to an Elissa that is a strong and wise leader who has put the future of her people far above her own happiness. She demonstrates her cunning in planning the future of her people while also presenting her incredible accuracy in predicting the future of her people and her own story.

Another remarkable claim made by Mellah is that this version of the story originates from the story itself; it is the first version to be presented from Elissa herself rather than about Elissa. Again this returns to the idea of nation building after colonialism. In studying the influence of the industrialization of print, Nelly Furman suggests that “Print culture molded individuals into a collectivity with people they actually did not know but with whom they were sharing information at a distance” (Furman 68). This concept behind the influence of print can be applied to the potential influence of Mellah’s work. He has constructed a shared identity for Tunisia, one that individuals of different backgrounds can agree upon.

Looking at Mellah’s work in terms of Jakobson’s diagram we find that the message, though expanded, contains the same fundamental actions while the code, context, and addressee are greatly changed. The context for Mellah is the establishment of a national epic. This context is similar to what Virgil set out to do but instead of it using a foreign nation to establish the national heritage, Mellah is writing about his own nation. A second difference in regards to the context is that this version is also responding to imperialism from the point of view of the colony rather than that of the colonizing nation. These differences in context explain the difference in story arch between the two national epics. Virgil starts and ends his story around the actions of Aeneas while Mellah focuses on the actions of Elissa, starting his version with her departure from Tyre. The code is also drastically different. Virgil’s code was Latin and the original story was presented in Greek, here we are given it in French but told it was first in Punic characters and then Arabic. Arabic’s place as being mythically the code reflects its connections with the native lands rather than the European empires. Lastly the addressees in Mellah’s version are Tunisians. This addressee is the first addressee in the history of this story’s development to be connected to the character herself. In the Greek, Latin, and Middle English versions the addressees were all European and thus regarded the story of Carthage as being a story of an “other” land. But with Mellah’s addressees the story is of their “own” land. This fact gives greater significance to the nation building potential of Mellah’s epic.

Beginning with a Greek writer describing a foreign land to highlight intelligence and war, Elissah was created in order to fulfill the needs of other cultures seeking to define themselves against Carthage. This tendency has been greatly explored by Said in his work with Orientalism from which Said was able to conclude that the Orient of was “an integral part of European material civilization and culture” (Orientalism 20). This Orientalism was adapted to affirm the imperialistic conquests of the Roman Empire through Virgil’s use of Dido as a resting point for the hero of Rome, Aeneas.Virgil took just the essence of the original message in order to fulfill the needs of a drastically different context. He was engaged in a large scale nation building exercise and utilized the defeat of a foreign power to highlight the superiority of the new empire. From Virgil’s work came the reference in Dante’s Inferno to reaffirm Carthage’s place in hell for their weakness and defeat against the might Rome. Chaucer on the other hand interpreted the story differently to help define his own culture while hinting at the weaknesses of a rival culture, Italy. Chaucer highlights the noble attributes of Rome’s enemy while emphasizing the sinister attributes of Rome’s hero. The journey of the story ends with Mellah’s version which brings Elissa back to Tunis and connects the story to an Arabic past. Each of these authors have taken the same story and have used relatively the same actions to achieve drastically different ends. Said has looked at how literature and politics connect and has concluded that “works of literature are not merely texts. They are in fact differently constituted and have different values, they aim to be different things, exist in different genres, and so on” (Knowledge 202). The text is more than just the text and therefore a text when placed in different context and different codes achieves drastically different ends. Ultimately Said concludes that “it is probably correct to say that it does not finally matter who wrote what, but rather how a work is written and how it is read” (Knowledge 202). Today we can read Mallah’s Elissa as an example of a mythical epic being returned to its home to become a modern national epic. The story has traveled the path of orientalism, imperialism, and nationalism as much as the cultures that used it have.

-Huysmans

Works Cited:

Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum.

Bassnett, Susan. Comparative Literature: a Critical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Legend of Good Women. 1380.

Furman, Nelly. French Studies: Back to the Future. 1998.

Greenblatt, Stephen. “The Politics of Culture.” Falling Into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford Books, 1994. 288-290.

Jakobson, Roman. “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics.” Style in Language. Ed. Thomas A. Sebeok. Cambridge: MIT P, 1960.

Lord, Mary Louise. “Dido as an Example of Chastity: the Influence of Example Literature.” Harvard Library Bulletin 17 (1969): 30-35.

Mellah, Fawzi. Elissa. Ed. Howard Curtis. London: Quartet Books, 1990.

Said, Edward. “Orientalism.” Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: a Reader. Ed. Padmini Mongia. 1996. 20-36.

Said, Edward W. “The Politics of Knowledge.” Falling Into Theory. Ed. David Richter. 1994. 193-203.

Virgil. The Aeneid. Ed. Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Bantam Dell, 2004.

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[1] Timaeus (c. 356-260 B.C.E) wrote in Greek and gave Elissa the name Theiosso which according to Lord is a form of Elissa (Lord 33).

[2] Dido is the name given to Elissa by Virgil. Timaeus explains that Dido was given to her by the Libyans due to her long wandering. Lord, however, concludes that Dido has no etymological association with wandering.

[3] Sychaeus is the Latin name given to her husband by Virgil. Her husband goes unnamed in the original Greek reference and shows up as Acherbas in some of the alter Christian references, also written in Latin (Lord 34).

[4] A stelae is a Greek word used to describe a stone or slab of wood designed for funerary or commemorative purposes and is almost always inscribed with text and sometimes images.

[5] Qart Hadasht is introduced by Mellah and literally means New City in Arabic. The linguistic relationship between this word and Carthage is not hard to imagine and it is very possible that Mellah is creating this new word to further connect the story of Elissa with Tunisia through the use of Arabic.