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Georges Bizet wrote of Carmen, “I have written a work that is all clarity and vivacity, full of colour and melody. It will be entertaining. Come along – I think you are going to like it.” The Met’s 2014 Carmen is a welcome return for Richard Eyre’s wonderful 2010 production. It was brooding and atmospheric and claustrophobic and doom-laden and I did quite like it. Though I think, re-watching the 2010 version (Met Opera on Demand makes this far too easy), that I prefer the earlier version, as it has more vivacity and less unrelieved gloom (though even the 2014 version perks up for the irrepressible and almost Gilbert-and-Sullivan-esque comic quintet in act two). There are three main musical themes in the prologue to Carmen. First is the infectiously joyful “March of the Toreadors”, repeated once in act four, then there’s what may be the best-known song in all opera, the “Toreador Song”, repeated once in act two (yes, that one, to the tune of “Toreador, don’t spit on the floor”), and finally there’s the ominous “Fate Theme”, which recurs six times in the next four acts. Legend (a.k.a. “The Victrola Book of the Opera”) has it that this last is a transcript of the only piece of Heavenly music that Satan remembered after being cast out of Heaven, though absent a definitive explanation of how Bizet came by this strange intelligence, I’m not sure that legend gets away with it. But by sheer weight of numbers, doom-laden-ness is bound to be play an important role. People who protest that this isn’t what they would mean by “vivacity” or “entertaining” could recall that the Icelanders who got that far west called the frozen place they got to “Greenland” to make it sound more attractive to the people back home: Bizet may be being disingenous. Except that the first two themes of the prologue really are foot-stampingly cheerful. There’s a balance here, and it feels like the 2014 version, while brilliant and provoking and I’m very glad I saw it, is a useful example of what happens when you push down too far on one side. (Which is not to say that the sets and the costumes and the music and the dancing were not wonderful, because they absolutely were.) Aleksandrs Antonenko’s Don José (2014) reminded me of Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy: there’s a facial similarity, but also, from the moment Carmen appears, Antonenko is transfixed by her, staring at her from the other side of the stage. At the same point in the 2010 version, Roberto Alagna’s Don José has his back to her, cheerfully rolling a cigarette, unconcerned. Yes, when she starts singing at him directly he turns to her for a moment, and then he just smiles and turns away again. And yes, he’s reeled in shortly after that, but it wasn’t doomed from the very first moment. The original text (in a bit left out in both cases) has Don José excuse himself to Zuniga just before the cigarette girls appear, saying he needs to make a chain for his firing-pin, and he is still doing that when Carmen comes up to him: she has to ask him what he’s doing to get his attention. And then she throws the flower. And then he has three lines for the impression that has just been made, the first of which is dismissive. I’d really like to see that version some day, though it might be less palatable that a star tenor is ignoring the action for one of the most famous scenes of the opera. (Having said that, the Met Player also has a version from 1997 with Waltraud Meier and Plácido Domingo, which comes much closer, with Domingo ignoring Carmen through much of the song, sitting with his back to her working on the priming-pin, and it works really really well.) [And to digress into Doctor Who for a moment, in square brackets for those who would rather not, one of the reasons I want that missing scene-ette is for the utter “Dark Water” (8.11) parallel:
One could argue that Carmen has nothing to do with Doctor Who, but given that in the very first appearance of Clara in “Asylum of the Daleks” (7.1), the music that she is playing is from this scene of this opera, the converse is clearly not true.] So. Doomed from the very first moment? Certainly one way of playing it. Not for nothing does Hugh Macdonald say “French opera never produced another femme as fatale as Carmen”. And it is a fitting touch that Carmen and José’s only moments of happiness, between running away to be free in the mountains with the smugglers at the end of act two and being on the outs together in the mountains at the beginning of act three, are portrayed not by the singers themselves but by two ballet dancers over the beautiful music of the entr’acte. And their motions and the music are much more free in these moments than the dancers dancing much more constrictedly over the “Fate Theme” in the prologue, or that the female dancer wears black for the “Fate Theme” and white for the freer and lovelier entr’acte. (That costume change, and whether it represents an actual change in Carmen’s being or just in José’s perception of her, is worth a thesis on its own.) And yes, the children’s chorus at the changing of the guard in act one and the crowd waiting for the march of the toreadors in act four remind us that not everyone is unhappy or doomed. But it feels as though the two leads are too single-mindedly gloomy. It also feels odd that when they’ve been single-mindedly doom-eager all the way through, and Carmen reads her and José’s deaths in the cards over and over in act three, Carmen can effortlessly leave and be a completely different person in act four. Yes, this is prepared for by
But… Ah. You wonder what Don José’s paired replying song would have been towards the end of act three, when he has instead the single line “prends garde à toi, Carmen”, reprising the warning refrain of Carmen’s famous love (?) song from act one. It is almost as though in this version it isn’t Carmen that trapped José (though aside from the Mr Darcy stare in act one, that is what seemed to happen), but José that somehow trapped Carmen. Which would explain Escamillo’s polite but failing attempts to reason with José in act three (also cut here is the first half of the knife fight where Escamillo is much better than José but only defending himself, and when José complains that he isn’t trying, Escamillo agrees that he isn’t, explaining that it’s his job to kill bulls, not people, and he really doesn’t want to kill him), and Carmen’s attempt to escape and create a new life in act four, at the end of which, unfortunately for all concerned, José catches up with her. So. Brilliantly performed? Yes. Psychologically astute? Yes. Deeply troubling? Yes. “Entertaining”? … Well, definitely the first three! |
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Even more spoilers, obviously. I wanted to like this as much as “Dark Water”. And I did really like it: the character beats with the Doctor and Missy, Clara and Danny, and the witty banter with U.N.I.T., were exceptional. Kate Lethbridge-Stewart: Now that I have your attention, [gestures the Doctor forward] welcome to the only planet in the universe where we get to say this: he’s on the payroll. I could watch it over and over for moments like that. But a second viewing reminded me that for me Moffat episodes fall into two groups. Some absolutely work on first viewing and continue to absolutely work going forward (“The Pandorica Opens” / “The Big Bang”, "The Day of the Doctor”, “Dark Water”), and some absolutely work on first viewing and continue to work on subsequent viewings provided you can let things go (“The Angels Take Manhattan”, “Death in Heaven”). And yes, this is Doctor Who, with a 2,000-year-old alien and a magic box that travels in time and space, and once you’ve swallowed that, complaining about madly bogus science or unexplored consequences for bystanders may be missing the headline. But at the end of “Death in Heaven”, a few weeks after all the cemeteries in the world started disgorging their dead as converted Cybermen, people are walking across a square, unconcerned. Nobody is freaking out. It is as if it never happened, or as if it only “really” happened with relation to four people in one cemetery. It comes unstuck, like the Weeping Angel of Liberty stomping through the streets of the City that Never Sleeps, and nobody else looks up and stops it in its tracks? No, because the only important people in that story are the Doctor and River, Amy and Rory. Accept that and you’ll be fine. Same here. The mad notion that a drop of Cyber-pollen making contact with a dead person will build a fully converted Cyberman, somehow also spontaneously generating out of nothing powered armour, energy weapons, electronics, power supplies, and, oh yes, a jet pack? It’s just there so that Missy can offer the Doctor an army and say “I need my friend back.” The character beat trumps everything else. (There’s a Paul Cornell Doctor Who story, “Goth Opera”, with almost the same MacGuffin: an airborne virus converts all in its path into vampires. But vampires have never pretended to be scientific. With Cybermen, there’s at least a presumption that they might be, and your willing suspension of disbelief may vary when they aren’t.) That said, let’s get back to the good stuff. Doctor: Hush! I’m trying to count! Moffat said in August that he had no intention of bringing the Master back (of course, Rule One is Moffat Lies), explaining that the arch-villain coming back over and over again with a cunning plan, and never once remembering all the previous times the hero foiled the cunning plan, was stale. So what we get instead is the explanation that fans (and Moffat counts) have built around the fact that the Master keeps trying regardless, even though he cannot possibly imagine he will succeed, and that he has always had some regard for the Doctor, going back to their first onscreen meeting in 1971: Doctor [Jon Pertwee]: You’ve come here to kill me, of course? Suppose the arch-villain isn’t really trying to take over the world with overcomplicated plots that (s)he must know are doomed to fail? Suppose (s)he just on some level wants to reconnect with an old friend? Suppose the hero on some level understands this? Suppose the hero’s friend sees the problem with the hero’s sympathy that the hero doesn’t? And that’s what Moffat gives us. All of it. Doctor: I had a friend once. We ran together when I was little. And I thought we were the same. When we grew up we weren’t. And now, she’s trying to tear the world apart and I can’t run fast enough to hold it together. Doctor: Why are you doing this?? Clara: Old friend, is she? If you’ve ever let this creature live, everything that happened today is on you. All of it. On you. And you’re not gonna let her live again. And of course the Doctor has let the Master live, and it is on him. All of it. And the whole story of those forty-four years is laid bare by Moffat in a few simple sentences. Including Clara’s unexpected role as the Doctor’s teacher: Doctor: I used to have a teacher exactly like you. (And it’s a wide-open question whether the Doctor meant a Time Lord from the Academy or Barbara Wright.) And it’s frighteningly brilliant. So maybe this is, for me, a third category of Moffat episode: there are clear holes, but the brilliance of the thing that Moffat cared about delivering and delivered in spades is so great that I almost don’t care. There’s much more: these aren’t even the best lines of the episode. There’s more to say about Danny, and yes, the wonderful cameo from “the Brigadier”. (“Of course. The Earth’s darkest hour, and mine. Where else would you be. ... Thank you.”) But this feels like the thing that I struggled with the most. |
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Yes, there are spoilers. Lots of them. I have no idea how someone new to the program would react to this one, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Nods to everything from the Second Doctor stories Tomb of the Cybermen and The Invasion (which apparently gets an even more tangible link next week, when Kate Lethbridge-Stewart throws the head of one of the Invasion-era Cybermen at the feet of the new ones), to the setup of a standard Third Doctor vs the Master allied with alien invaders of Earth story, to the Cloister Bell as the first TARDIS key hits the lava (first heard in the Fourth Doctor’s Logopolis), to the introduction of Kamelion in the Fifth Doctor’s King’s Demons (though that involved an android briefly impersonating the Master, and not the other way around), to the young Chang who was suborned by the Master in the Eighth Doctor’s TV movie (“Doctor Chang!”), possibly to The Eleventh Hour (Missy walking through the 3W hologram as the Doctor walked through the Atraxi one), to Day of the Doctor (The Doctor: “You’re very… uh… realistic.” Clara: “Tongues?” The Doctor: “Shut up.” / Eleven: “venom sacs in the tongue?” Ten: “yeah, I’m getting the point, thank you.”), and to Time of the Doctor with Clara’s disagreement with something in another universe about what the important question is, not to mention multiple callbacks to episodes from this season. Then there are musical motifs: the Doctor saying “I feel like I’m missing… something… obvious”, cue ominous music, but not just any ominous music, that’s the Cyberman theme from series two. And a cheeky nod to Capaldi’s best-known previous role as the very sweary Malcolm Tucker (Doctor Chang, examining the psychic paper: “Why is there all this swearing?” / The Doctor, taking it back: “Oh. I’ve got a lot of… internalized anger.”) And, with a female Master onscreen, a future female Doctor becomes canonical (the possibility was already allowed for by a line in the Neil Gaiman story from series six), answering a question which has been in the air ever since Tom Baker was asked thirty-five years ago if he thought his successor could be a woman, to which he mischievously replied “Oh, what a good idea!” Back to Dark Water. First off, it’s a Moffat two-parter, so it is very unlikely that it will stay in the Third Doctor and UNIT vs Master allied with aliens invading the earth, cue likely falling-out between aliens and Mistress and possible alliance between Mistress and Doctor to contain the threat. (Hmm. Aside from UNIT, how very End of Time.) As Amy said towards the beginning of The Big Bang, which turned the already-complicated Pandorica Opens on its head, it will probably get more complicated than that. No idea how, but looking forward to finding out. One more prediction: in the last moments of this episode, Danny sees the reflection of the civilian boy he killed as he is considering deleting his humanity (and, unknown to him, being re-downloaded into a Cyberman). Given his strong sense of responsibility for the children in In the Forest of the Night, I expect this will cause him to decide not to delete his humanity, but to work with the boy, to find out where they really are and what they can do about it. Though if Danny’s dead body already has a Cyberman exoskeleton around it, and besides which is dead, and the Doctor has stated that they can’t use the TARDIS to fix that (and yes, I know, the Doctor lies, but…), I’m not sure what can be done. Though there’s also the question of what happens to Orson Pink in that case. The episode itself? Felt really really good. No, there’s no scientific reason why Cybermen would still need organic components (the skeletons) or downloaded organic minds (with icky emotions removed), but they’re here as pure horror, not hard science fiction. Or we’re back to the idea that they aren’t and don’t see themselves as robots, but as upgrades of living things. And apparently on a voluntary basis this time. “We are the Cybermen and we are here to help”?? Although the way Danny is emotionally sucker-punched by being exposed to the parts of his life most likely to cause him to willingly agree to delete his emotions suggests either that the not-emotionless Missy or Seb gave them some pointers on how to improve their “voluntary” success rate, or they’ve been running A/B tests for so long on how to get the most voluntary conversions (since they really believe it’s for the good of the recipients) that they’ve come up with a strategy so effective that it looks like emotional insight. Clara’s post-its as she prepared to answer Danny’s question from last week and tell him the truth, and then started with the most important thing, which was nothing to do with the adventures? And then killing Danny in the cold open? And Clara’s response? “It wasn’t terrible: it was boring. … He was alive, and then he was dead, and it was nothing.” / “I don’t deserve anything. Nobody deserves… anything.” [“Od’s bodykins, man, much better: use every man / after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?” – Hamlet II.ii] “But I am owed… better.” Still bitterness from Kill the Moon in that last phrase? Entirely possibly. And then the seven keys to doomsday (sorry, to the TARDIS, though the number of keys is probably a reference to Seven Keys to Doomsday, a Doctor Who stage play in 1974, re-released as a Big Finish audio in 2008), one of them hidden in Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife (which could be subtitled the story of the Doctor and River Song), and then the volcano scene which acknowledges that sometimes time can be rewritten and sometimes it can’t, and it takes a Time Head to tell which is which, and even if it can it takes precision and great care. And the whole scene calling back to Journey Blue in Into the Dalek trying to threaten the Doctor at gunpoint to taking her back to her ship, and him outfacing her until she says please. Or the Deep Breath interrogation scene with its discussion of options and fallbacks. “Paradox loop”, as the Doctor desperately tries to get Clara to understand, knowing that River would understand instinctively, and perhaps forgetting that in The Wedding of River Song River did know but since it was someone she loved dying she decided she didn’t give a damn about the rules either. And then “Do as you’re told”, and we’re back to the fraught conversation near the end of Listen, except this time it ends differently. And then she throws the last key and… “I’m sorry, but I’d do it again.”… The acting from both Coleman and Capaldi in this scene is superb. (And never mind that the Doctor can open the TARDIS by snapping his fingers, and for that matter so can Clara. That’s not the emotional point of this scene.) And it just keeps going. “I love him.” “Yeah, you’re quite the mess of chemicals, aren’t you.” Capaldi’s slight frown after Coleman says “Absolutely fair enough”, before explaining what he actually meant, leading up to the transcendently wonderful “Do you think I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference?” And then the Doctor’s wholly alien response to Clara’s entirely human reaction? I mean, yes, probably also true that “We’ve got work to do” is a reference to the Seventh Doctor story Survival, but that scarcely seems to matter. These may be my favourite scenes from the whole fifty-one-year history. And then we’re back to Danny in the Nethersphere, and Chris Addison being delightfully camp as the Nethersphere administrator Seb. “There are some forms to fill in. It might help you relax. Well, it won’t, but we do need them filled in.” And Twelve continues his strange mix of not understanding humans at all, and suddenly seeming to understand them better than they do themselves, berating Clara for her appearance and attitude until she bursts out “Are you forgetting why we’re here?” and he retorts “We’re here to get your boyfriend back from the dead. So buck up, and give me some attitude.” And then Michelle Gomez as Missy turns up, and that’s a totally brilliant scene too. “My heart is maintained by the Doctor”, indeed. “You can probably take your hand down now, Doctor.” And then we get the Doctor being as protective as a can-opener [Gaudy Night]: “Are you okay?” (Clara holds out her hand) “No.” (The Doctor takes her hand) “Good. There would be something very wrong if you were.” (And the skulls turn their heads to watch them as they go, recalling the crypt in The Wedding of River Song, but working so well it doesn’t really matter.) And then Danny gets the call from someone on the other side called Clara Oswald. (And at the same time Doctor Chang says “I promise you, this is not the con,” which leads to the question what would he admit was the con, which we’ll presumably get to next episode.) In Time of the Doctor, all of Gallifrey was behind the crack in the skin of the universe, and was asking the question “Doctor Who?”, a question which only the Doctor knew the answer to, and so if he gave that answer, they would know it was safe for them to come back. Near the end of that episode, Clara spoke through the crack and told them they were asking the wrong question, that his name was the Doctor, and that if they loved him, and they should, they would help him. Back to Dark Water, Clara is talking with Danny, and after the Doctor primes her again to be skeptical, wants him to answer questions that only Danny would know the answer to, so she can come and get him. He, since he knows that he’s dead and she isn’t and shouldn’t be, refuses to give her the answer she is asking for, saying only that he loves her. Which is so sublimely in character for Danny (and such a callback to the sequence in Time of the Doctor and to two earlier conversations this episode) that though Clara appears not to realize it at first and breaks off the call, the penny may have dropped as she backed her chair away, and certainly will sometime before the end of next episode. But Clara is distracted by the revealed Cyberman of Dr Skarosa, and let’s pause there a moment, because Missy making her pet scientist stooge take a name clearly based on the Dalek homeworld of Skaro feels like such an obvious clue to the Doctor (if he were paying attention) that it reawakens the long fan-held suspicion that all of the Master’s plans are so ridiculously flawed that they have to be more about attracting the Doctor’s attention than actually taking over the world. Which makes sense of Missy’s delivery of the “my boyfriend… because he loves me so” lines from Deep Breath, which seemed a bit off if it were something she actually believed, but if it’s something that she has wished so long were true but knows on some level is not, her delivery is brilliant and makes perfect sense. Then we’re back outside to the reveal of who Missy actually is (the looks on both of their faces worth pages of dialogue) and the Cybermen walking down the steps of St Paul’s, and through the eye of one of the Cybermen (top-notch direction from Rachel Talalay throughout, and also a likely shout-out to The Time of Angels and the eyes being not the windows of the soul but the doors) we’re back to the Nethersphere and Danny hesitating over the delete button and turning the reflection of the iPad to reveal that the boy he shot is standing behind him, and the boy starts to speak… cue closing credits. Damn near perfect. There’s three words for it. |
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First, when they make the “Strax Was Right!” T-shirts, I want one. Second, on the madly bogus science, take a deep breath and remember that this is Doctor Who, where a box can vanish from one physical location and reappear in another, laws of conservation of mass be damned. I was in high school when Full Circle came out, and when Tom Baker said “definitely morphologically similar karyotypes”, I nearly switched my grade 13 credits to include biology because I had no idea what it meant but it sounded cool. And yes, Capaldi did mispronounce “prokaryotic” as “prokoryatic”. (See “The reason I’m writin’ / Is how to say chitin” for handwaving about a similar gaffe from Pertwee.) But so what? The moon wouldn’t actually gain 1.3 billion tonnes in mass as it got ready to hatch, causing the higher tides and natural disasters? Check. Apparently, in real science, it would lose 15% or so of its mass before hatching. Of course, this implies a warm and well-ventilated incubator, not a near-vacuum. And it would further imply that Doctor Who is trying to be science-fact, and not using science-fiction trappings to provide verisimilitude to a fairy tale. On which grounds, I’m not going to say anything more about the madly implausible single-celled organisms that end up looking like (and spinning webs like) spiders. They aren’t the point. Clara asks the world what they think should be done and then ignores what they say? Not bothered by that either. (Part of that may be pesky facts eclipsing the fairy tale: given all the natural disasters, who is to say how many people actually saw Clara’s broadcast, or changed their lights for that reason? The lights turning off in visible-from-the-moon blocks are more likely to be power companies turning off, or losing to natural disasters, whole sections of the grid at once.) But even if we allow the fairy tale that Clara asked and the result from the bits of the world that she could see was what those people thought, it doesn’t absolve her from making the best decision she knows how to in that moment. She is perfectly able to make a different decision, so long as she can live with the results. It feels like a rebuttal to the unanimous referendums of The Beast Below – and who else wonders if the “unique” Moonite isn’t also the last of the Star Whales? (And don’t get me started on the “science” of that episode.) One thing that did bother me was the Doctor leaving the three humans to make up their own minds. The Doctor feeling that the decision was too important for humankind not to make without his interference, totally fine. But on the Day of the Doctor, another day where the whole path of a civilization was decided, Clara didn’t leave the three Doctors alone because the decision was one that Gallifreyans had to make without interference. Clara inadvertently changed the future of everything just be reminding the Doctor to be himself... “Then what do I do?” / “What you’ve always done. Be a Doctor.” It seems a big thing for the Doctor to forget. It seems the sort of thing he ought to have remembered before making the quip about it being time to take the stabilizers off Clara’s bike. Lundvik’s “What a prat” was well earned. Another thing that bothered me was Clara’s later outburst at the Doctor. Of course there should have been an outburst, between the fear that she might have gotten it wrong and the anger that the Doctor left her to make the decision on her own. But “Don’t you dare lump me in with the rest of the little humans that you think are so tiny and silly and predictable” doesn’t feel like it belongs in the same universe as “Blimey, that’s amazing. Do you know in nine hundred years of time and space I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t important before.” The same universe as Waters of Mars Ten, who (infamously) did divide people into important people and little people, maybe. But as Eleven he grew out of that. For the “officer” shot from The Caretaker to have been so effective he must as Twelve have moved some way back. The nine hundred years on Trenzalore from Time of the Doctor, culminating in the regeneration? But he stayed because he cared about those people, not because he thought they were tiny and silly. And when Lundvik asks “Who put you in charge?” in Kill the Moon, he doesn’t tell her precisely why he should be in charge, as he does (as Ten) when Rickston asks the same question in Voyage of the Damned, he just says “Okay, you say ‘run’ then!” It makes total sense that Clara should have an outburst and take the Doctor to task for leaving when she wanted his help, or at the very least his support. But this particular outburst doesn’t make sense to me. Waiting with interest to see how  elisi shows that it all makes sense after all. |
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It was brilliant. Just go see it already. More coherent notes might possibly follow, but that's the gist. |
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And on trying to follow a link from poisoninjest to hernewshoes , I discovered the_red_shoes's post with Ben Jonson's translation of that verse by Petronius, which I had only seen before in Helen Waddell's translation:Foeda est in coitu et brevis voluptas et taedet Veneris statim peractae. non ergo ut pecudes libidinosae caeci protinus irruamus illuc (nam languescit amor peritque flamma); sed sic sic sine fine feriati et tecum iaceamus osculantes. hic nullus labor est ruborque nullus: hoc iuvit, iuvat et diu iuvabit; hoc non deficit incipitque semper. -- attr. Petronius Arbiter Doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short; And done, we straight repent us of the sport: Let us not rush blindly on unto it, Like lustful beasts, that only know to do it: For lust will languish, and that heat decay, But thus, thus, keeping endless Holy-day, Let us together closely lie, and kiss, There is no labour, nor no shame in this; This hath pleased, doth please and long will please; never Can this decay, but is beginning ever. -- Ben Jonson Delight of lust is gross and brief And weariness treads on desire. Not beasts are we, to rush on it, Love sickens there, and dies the fire. But in eternal holiday, Thus, thus, lie still and kiss the hours away. No weariness is here, no shamefastness, Here is, was, shall be, all delightsomeness. And here no end shall be, But a beginning everlastingly. -- Helen Waddell No clever turn for the sestet: I just wanted to see the three of them together. This may be why I tend to stay off LJ for long periods of time: it's too easy to get lost in all the interesting stuff in here.
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I was crediting poisoninjest for her mood icons when I came upon her post discussing with some heat that a month ago Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance sent forth a petition doubting that Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare. And I must admit that in this case, when I violently agreed with the arguments being made, and shared the dismay at some of the statements from the other side, it seemed perfectly reasonable for her to say (against the disbelief that one person could have written 37 plays, where nobody contests that Vega wrote some 1500 to 2500) "Lope de Fucking Vega, bitches". So I guess I'm inconsistent. Oh well. But vastly entertained.
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From Gaudy Night, chapter one, Phœbe and Harriet: "...He's writing a paper that contradicts all of Lambard's conclusions, and I'm helping by toning down his adjectives and putting in deprecatory footnotes. I mean. Lambard may be a perverse old idiot, but it's more dignified not to say so in so many words. A bland and deadly courtesy is more devastating, don't you think?" I'm reading Douglas Hofstadter's Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language and having trouble getting into it, which puzzles me because both the subject matter and the conceit (88 translations of a French poem from 1537, wound round with Hofstadterian essays, and yes, the echo of iumonna gold galdre bewunden was deliberate) sound absolutely my kind of thing. Still trying to understand that, though the book has already paid for itself by prompting me to get hold of Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, which is quite probably the best book I've read this year. But Hofstadter is currently lambasting an article by John Searle, and yes, it looks like Searle's article is intellectually dishonest, but the hyperbolic invective creeping into Hofstadter's tone is off-putting. You can hear the tone of incredulous disbelief in his words, and it distracts -- and suddenly I understand that quip in Gaudy Night about a bland and deadly courtesy being more devastating. Hofstadter isn't weakening the truth of his argument, but he is weakening the impact of his argument by descending into the lists and taking a swing. He may have felt goaded into it, but it's a danger. Like some parts of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion: I may agree absolutely with the point that he's making, but his tone makes me feel awkwardly that there must have been a way of expressing it which wouldn't alienate part of the audience.
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So I was wearing my old college scarf yesterday, not for any snobbish reasons but because it's the warmest scarf I have and it has been cold. And someone came up to me and asked "Is that a Darwin scarf?" First time anything like that has happened in Toronto. And I admitted it wasn't, with that slight apology that Trinity people sometimes feel we owe for our extreme insularity, and it had been so long (my grade 12 Latin teacher gave me the scarf when he heard I was going up to Cambridge, and that was 18 years ago) that for a few moments I didn't even remember whether we had a Darwin College. But of course we did; and it was in the gardens there that I did Theseus from Midsummer Night's Dream at the end of my first undergraduate year -- they had said they wanted a dead-serious Theseus, who might sound as though he was reading the FT while doing the "More strange than true" speech, and I thought "Sure, I can do that". And where the fireworks from a neighbouring May Ball seriously disrupted our stroll and dialogue in IV.i and then completely failed to come in on cue when I wanted them for the throwaway line "Go, bid the huntsmen wake them with their horns". You know, for all the complaining I may do from time to time, it has been an interesting old life, and no mistake. And, because after that I was curious to see what a Darwin scarf looked like, here's the list. |
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Or, why am I still reading this awful book? Well, it's an interesting idea, that there weren't actually widescale Anglo-Saxon invasions, that it was mostly acculturation. And one I would once have been professionally very interested in. And the idea may be valid even if his expression of it is off. But I wish I could find a better and more scholarly expression of it, because when he comes out with something like "Being human, we like to personify such things, so we conjure up Arthur on one side and the likes of Alfred, Hengist and Horsa on the other." my blood pressure does something unfortunate. And maybe he only means only that there were characters like Alfred on the Saxon side, and isn't borrowing Alfred from his place in real history (king of the West Saxons from 871-99, and of the "Anglo-Saxons" from perhaps 886, and incidentally the English defender of Britain against the invading Vikings) and thrusting him back into a different and mythical conflict four centuries earlier on the opposite side, but it leaves me greatly vexed. And rather unwilling to take his word for anything else, which would be unfortunate if there are bits of the book that are scholarly and accurate. I was re-reading Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing the other day, and Henry has the wonderful speech when he's comparing real writing with a cricket bat, which -- even if it may look like a club -- is actually several pieces of wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that it's sprung, like a dance floor. Real writing is like that. Then you can hit a ball with barely any effort and it will go sailing out of the grounds. If you had used a club instead, the ball would only have travelled a few feet and you'd end up dropping the club and jumping around with your hands in your armpits. This book is a club in its recording of facts, even if its prose style is rather good. ("Consult any list of Roman emperors and it makes the English medieval monarchy, even during the Wars of the Roses, look remarkably stable." It's a very good line. It may even be true, but there's no way I'm prepared to take his word for it at this point: he has completely blotted his copybook.) (Okay, it's not as bad as the book I read years ago in which Merlin arranged for Beowulf to be killed by a flamethrower. But that was at least supposed to be fiction.) ETA: So if this man, writing in 2004, shows up how easy it is to disprove Myres again, given that Myres was already quite discredited when I went up to Cambridge in 1989, I shall graduate from being vexed to being filled with rage. I am absolutely prepared to believe the basic case -- that archaeological evidence doesn't support the idea of largescale Anglo-Saxon invasions -- but this particular exposition of it is doing its cause more harm than good. Open question (mainly directed as sollersuk): is there a more scholarly exposition of this theory published somewhere else? |
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worried about time passing
entertained
curious