Thanks for your thoughts about the humour and horror stuff. First off, you ask if I actually like and watch horror much. I think part of my growing fascination with horror is that it's something I never really indulged in much, but not because I didn't have a taste for it, but rather because I didn't have the stomach for it. As a kid and teenager I knew I couldn't handle spicy food, and it was only in my mid-twenties that I slowly discovered that I could now handle spicy food and really enjoy it. Similarly, what little horror I saw as a kid deeply traumatized me and gave me nightmares, and even now I get really spooked by effective horror (my girlfriend takes much amusement at my getting the willies). But, like with spicy food, my palate's gotten duller, so I can handle the stuff without too much trauma, so I've started to explore more. And part of what fascinates me about this question is precisely the fact that I seem to be so deeply affected by horror. What is it about this stuff that troubles me so much?
I think another thing that fascinates me about the topic is simply that I'm fascinated by and enjoy humour and also find it dangerously precarious. It's a very thin line between humour and creepy. It's one of the things I admire about black humour as well as authors as diverse as Chekhov and Roald Dahl: they leave you unsure whether you ought to laugh, and that in itself is quite effective.
I actually do remember that scene you mention from Mulholland Drive and remember finding it tremendously effective. I think part of what makes it work is that the guy himself is so bizarre (such a Lynch character) and yet he's clearly very nervous and the way he tells the story builds up incredible tension. And this being a Lynch film, you haven't the least idea what's going to happen when we look around the corner. But what we see is just a tacky-looking beast and that instantly deflates the tension. A friend of mine who's a real horror connoisseur told me about a complaint that Stephen King had about the difficulty of building suspense in horror: the suspense is easy, but actually showing the monster is almost inevitably a let-down. You show the audience a thirty-foot tall man-eating slug and the audience says, "oh, I was kind of expecting a three-hundred-foot tall man-eating slug." The scene in Mulholland Drive seems deliberately to play on this, to say, "okay, whatever you were expecting back there, it's better than what I could show you, so let's just play up the humour instead."
It also raises a further question: Lynch films aren't generally classified as "horror," but I'd say there's certainly an element of horror in them, or at least the uncanny, which is to horror what suspense is to mysteries.
I think you're right that most horror almost inevitably teeters on the edge of humour. Both deal with the grotesque, and especially for an audience that knows it's dealing with fiction, and a postmodern audience most especially, it's hard to do the grotesque without devolving into giggles. But it is possible. And usually humour and horror are easy to distinguish, especially when it's not in fiction but in real life.
Anyway, a few thoughts about comedy and tragedy in the Symposium. I wonder if I can tie this back into some of the stuff I said about Eric Havelock. The theatre was traditionally one of the main repositories of Greek wisdom: both Plato and Aristotle quote the tragic poets almost as much as they quote Aristotle when they want to illustrate a point. In that sense, Platonic philosophy is in competition with theatre as much as it is with the rhetoric of the sophists for the claim to being the dominant mode of thought and discourse in Ancient Greece. And just as a dialogue like the Phaedrus tries to demonstrate philosophy's superiority over rhetoric by showing how Socrates is a better rhetoritician than the sophists, the Symposium seems to want to demonstrate that philosophy offers better drama than the dramatists. Fitting, then, that Alcibiades should enter at the end and declare Socrates to be the champion. And at a party celebrating Agathon, too--cheeky!
As for why the dialogue is predominantly comic rather than tragic, I wonder if that's because Platonic philosophy is itself more comic than tragic, or at least it's rational and optimistic where tragedy emphasizes irrationality and pessimism. With the blessings of philosophy, nothing that befell the House of Atreus should have happened. Nor Oedipus, nor Medea, etc. Nietzsche's main complaint about Socrates in The Birth of Tragedy is that he brings a sunny rationality onto the Greek stage, thereby killing the--for Nietzsche--much more profound tragic yet cheerful spirit of pre-Socratic Greece.
I worry all these thoughts are already obvious to you. Though I suppose there are worse things to do than state the obvious. Like state the misleading or patently false.
Monday, March 22, 2010
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Short
I feel like I should have read your last post slowly and carefully, but in case I don't manage to do that any time soon, I'll just jot down the first couple of things that came to mind while reading it. First a question - do you actually like horror? do you ever watch the films or read the books? One of the wonderful horror/ humor moments that comes to mind when thinking of the connection between the two (and I think horror movies that aren't on some level supposed to be comedies are rather an exception - Brain dead, dead snow, evil dead, Sean of the dead - they're all comedies), but the first creepy comic thing that comes to mind that works incredibly well is the scene from Mulholland Drive in which some guy comes into a fast food restaurant with a silly name - binkie's or something, and asks to see the manager... he wants to look out back because he saw something horrible in a dream, some sort of man/ creature that he would never want to see again. It's haunting him and he wants to reassure himself it isn't there. The manager is okay with this, and opens up the back and brings him out - it's broad day light in a safe suburban setting. The creature is there and appears to devour the guy. Both the comedy and the horror (which are largely dependent on timing and decor and probably don't come through in my description) are largely dependent on the absolute normality of the setting. The people, the surroundings, the outfits, everything is familiar and ought to instill confidence and a sense of security. The world is governed by laws which work off a basic exchange - a certain amount of security for a certain amount of freedom. When those laws are violated, the comic can result from the new found freedom, while horror results from the loss of security. Clearly this doesn't work for all humor... at least not the freedom idea, I don't think. But it is one interesting link. Funny the role murder plays in both... lack of restraint, exaggeration. Think of the scene at the end of Kill Bill part one when for what seems like forever the main character hacks through dozens of people with blood spattering in all directions - I laughed uncontrollably the first time I saw it. The violence was cartoonish because it was without consequence, because the people dying were not real people whose irrevocable loss I was aware of. A person not initially realizing they've lost a limb, or holding on to their own severed hand, once again potentially comic or horrifying, according to whether there are consequences, according to whether loss is internalized and permanent.
I don't think I've added much to what you said - it's an interesting topic. There's the connection between shrieks of laughter and screams of horror - waiting expectantly for something horrible or something comic to happen - audience members bracing themselves and making themselves consequently more susceptible to the desired effects (expecting something unexpected), though that's touching on cheap comedy and bad horror - I've never been much for the giddy variety of either.
In real life, genuinely horrible situations, humor often becomes a necessary defense... in my case at least, when I laugh at something upsetting, it is usually linked precisely to the liberation I mentioned before, a shift of perspective and a denial of importance or consequence to things that before something bad happened I might have seen as serious or even momentous. I have had moments where I suddenly had a profound sense that nothing could happen that was worse than death, and death, which is inevitable, isn't really that horrible... at moments like that, there is only freedom and real insecurity is impossible - the comic dominates absolutely.
I don't think I've added much to what you said - it's an interesting topic. There's the connection between shrieks of laughter and screams of horror - waiting expectantly for something horrible or something comic to happen - audience members bracing themselves and making themselves consequently more susceptible to the desired effects (expecting something unexpected), though that's touching on cheap comedy and bad horror - I've never been much for the giddy variety of either.
In real life, genuinely horrible situations, humor often becomes a necessary defense... in my case at least, when I laugh at something upsetting, it is usually linked precisely to the liberation I mentioned before, a shift of perspective and a denial of importance or consequence to things that before something bad happened I might have seen as serious or even momentous. I have had moments where I suddenly had a profound sense that nothing could happen that was worse than death, and death, which is inevitable, isn't really that horrible... at moments like that, there is only freedom and real insecurity is impossible - the comic dominates absolutely.
humour and horror
Well, I've recently handed in a draft of a chapter on Wittgenstein and Heidegger that's been keeping me from focusing on much else besides for the past few weeks. I don't particularly feel like writing about it at the moment, but I'll need to revise it in the next month or so, so you may not end up being completely deprived of that pleasure. I'm also not going to comment on your last (now long ago) post because you sent me the paper it turned into, and I hope I'll find a chance to read it in the next couple of weeks.
Instead I'm going to talk a bit about humour and horror, which is the topic of a paper I'm working at revising right now. I was hoping I could make some changes and then send it off for publication, but as I find almost always happens when I'm revising something--either in academia or creative writing--I tend to just stare blankly for days, grow to hate myself, and then make a few minor fixes and tell myself that I'll make some real improvements on the next sweep through. I'm right at the beginning of that painful process right now, and I thought it might do myself a double favour to type some of the thoughts up here. First, it might help me organise my own thinking on the topic, and second, it might provoke a response in you that helps my own thinking. No pressure, though. I've hardly been doing that kind of service for you.
Anyway, here's the plot, in rough outline. There are various philosophical questions that come up with regard to humour, foremost being the question of what humour is. A search for a satisfactory theory of humour should presumably do two things for us: give us necessary and sufficient conditions that fix what sorts of things are humorous, and also give some sort of explanation of why these things are humorous, tell us what it is about them that provokes this particular response in us.
One of the more promising lines of attack on this front are so-called "incongruity theories" of humour, which define humour as connected in some way to the perception of incongruity. This claim needs refinement in a number of ways: obviously not everything that's incongruous is humorous, and not all humorous things seem to be necessarily incongruous (laughing at someone behaving in a way that's ridiculously typical of them finds humour not in the incongruity of the behaviour but precisely in how closely it fits that person's typical patterns of behaviour). The counter-example that motivates my paper is horror, which also seems to rely on perceptions of incongruity. But I don't want to take this discovery as evidence of just how ludicrously off-the-mark incongruity theories are, but rather take it as evidence of just how close humour and horror are.
Another point that humour and horror have in common is that they can be regarded in many ways as aesthetic phenomena, and be subjected to aesthetic judgment, but unlike most aesthetic phenomena, their success depends on immediate response. I can mull over a painting and declare on reflection that I think it has a marvellously subtle beauty to it, but if I mull over a joke and on reflection declare that it's funny, that's tantamount to saying the joke's failed. Same with horror: if it fails to scare us, it hasn't done its job.
That said, I think horror isn't really about fear anyway (the only other paper I've found on the comparison between humour and horror argues that horror is incongruity plus fear and that humour is incongruity minus the fear). Horror comes from a deeper sense of something being amiss in the universe, or more precisely, something being amiss in our normally stable sense of self. What's scary about zombies chasing us isn't simply the fear that we're going to die, but the fact that the dead have come to life and that people we knew are no longer people and are trying to kill us. The incongruity that's central to horror is an incongruity in our conception of the human: our sanity depends on there being a sharp line between the human and the inhuman, and horror blurs that line.
Another point worth remarking on with both humour and horror is that the incongruities they rely on require a certain aptness. Not just any incongruity is funny because some incongruities are simply weird. If I see three bananas lying on the sidewalk, that's neither humorous nor horrific, but it is incongruous. Humour relies on incongruous twists that strike us as slyly appropriate: jokes about lascivious priests work because, on one hand, priests are supposed to be celibate--hence the incongruity--but on the other hand, we recognise that, in fact, priests are often nothing of the sort. The incongruities in horror tend to rely on a deeply rooted sense of cosmic justice. The Birds, for instance, starts out with the two protagonists flirting in a dangerously cavalier way, with a love bird at the centre of their flirtation. Soon enough, they learn that birds aren't something to be trifled with, the implication being that neither is love. With both humour and horror, the aptness and the incongruity seem to derive from the discovery or recognition that the world is bound to upset our best-laid plans, that our rationality is limited, that we are finite beings. This characterisation might seem a bit grandiose for describing casual jokes and cheap horror flicks, but I think I can answer that by simply saying that they're superficial instances of deep phenomena.
One line of attempting to define humour would be to say that there's some characteristic of humour itself--to say that humour is an entity out there in the world--by which we can identify it and distinguish it from everything else. My counter-example to show that this can't work is black humour, because black humour--it seems to me--can be either humorous or horrific depending on how we look at it. You could say it's a humorous way of reflecting on horror, but there are also circumstances where the humour simply won't be taken up, and what one person might see as grimly comic another might see as simply horrific. (There's a nice story of Kafka reading the first chapter of The Trial to Max Brod, but being unable to finish because he was laughing so hard.)
More broadly speaking, it seems we can find pretty much anything humorous and pretty much anything horrific in the right frames of mind. (This is one sense in which humour and horror seem as much emotional phenomena as aesthetic phenomena). The point is, first of all, that pretty much anything can strike us as incongruous given the right frame of mind--language itself contains the incongruity of random marks corresponding to meanings--so whatever humour and horror are, they aren't things "out there" to be detected independent of our responses to them.
In prying them apart, I want to say it has something to do with the nature of play. Humour is a species of play, whereas horror isn't, or at least isn't straightforwardly so. What play is and how it works is tremendously complicated and intriguing and I don't have enough to say about it right now. But for the moment, take these as characteristics of play: (1) it involves a kind of distancing, or "as if" behaviour, where we don't take what we're playing at as fully seriously; (2) it's bounded in space and time: there's a kind of "play-ground" in which play is acceptable, but there are subtle rules or principles that govern how and where we can play; (3) play involves creatively developing on a theme, whether it's passing a ball toward scoring a goal or building on jokes. I'm sure I could think of other important characteristics. But the important thing for the moment is that humour involves the distancing aspect of play, which horror lacks. Under the aspect of humour, everything seems remote, and as a result, we feel safe. When the world is laughable, we can't be hurt, because under the aspect of play, important things can't be hurt. In the world of cartoons, Coyote can blow himself up as much as he likes but he won't actually be harmed.
In horror, by contrast, I'd suggest that the notion of precariousness of human identity that I wrote about earlier comes from the fact that nothing feels safe anymore. It's not just that there's a monster that's going to get us, but that the universe is fundamentally out of joint. Horror gives us a world in which play isn't possible.
Both of these responses are important, I claim, and both are related to the fact that the actual occupies a vanishingly small space within the realm of the possible. We tend to think of the way things are as fixed and necessary, but what both humour and horror reveal is that things could be radically otherwise. Depending on how we encounter this discovery, we can either have a sense of distance on the actual that makes it seem laughably trivial, or we can respond with a horrific sense of agoraphobia, realising that how things are is by no means safely established.
Shit, I really have to run, so I'm not going to be able to check over this or say anything about the Symposium--not sure I have much of any interest to say anyway--and also I haven't had a chance to think through the fact that some things are clearly funny that aren't horrific. Horror can sometimes be amusing, but aside from the case of black humour, humour is rarely horrific. I'm not quite sure why. Maybe it's because horror only plays on the precariousness of human identity, so there are vast swathes of humour that aren't susceptible to being viewed as horror.
Sorry this was so hasty and such a mess. Not promising for the paper I want to write.
Instead I'm going to talk a bit about humour and horror, which is the topic of a paper I'm working at revising right now. I was hoping I could make some changes and then send it off for publication, but as I find almost always happens when I'm revising something--either in academia or creative writing--I tend to just stare blankly for days, grow to hate myself, and then make a few minor fixes and tell myself that I'll make some real improvements on the next sweep through. I'm right at the beginning of that painful process right now, and I thought it might do myself a double favour to type some of the thoughts up here. First, it might help me organise my own thinking on the topic, and second, it might provoke a response in you that helps my own thinking. No pressure, though. I've hardly been doing that kind of service for you.
Anyway, here's the plot, in rough outline. There are various philosophical questions that come up with regard to humour, foremost being the question of what humour is. A search for a satisfactory theory of humour should presumably do two things for us: give us necessary and sufficient conditions that fix what sorts of things are humorous, and also give some sort of explanation of why these things are humorous, tell us what it is about them that provokes this particular response in us.
One of the more promising lines of attack on this front are so-called "incongruity theories" of humour, which define humour as connected in some way to the perception of incongruity. This claim needs refinement in a number of ways: obviously not everything that's incongruous is humorous, and not all humorous things seem to be necessarily incongruous (laughing at someone behaving in a way that's ridiculously typical of them finds humour not in the incongruity of the behaviour but precisely in how closely it fits that person's typical patterns of behaviour). The counter-example that motivates my paper is horror, which also seems to rely on perceptions of incongruity. But I don't want to take this discovery as evidence of just how ludicrously off-the-mark incongruity theories are, but rather take it as evidence of just how close humour and horror are.
Another point that humour and horror have in common is that they can be regarded in many ways as aesthetic phenomena, and be subjected to aesthetic judgment, but unlike most aesthetic phenomena, their success depends on immediate response. I can mull over a painting and declare on reflection that I think it has a marvellously subtle beauty to it, but if I mull over a joke and on reflection declare that it's funny, that's tantamount to saying the joke's failed. Same with horror: if it fails to scare us, it hasn't done its job.
That said, I think horror isn't really about fear anyway (the only other paper I've found on the comparison between humour and horror argues that horror is incongruity plus fear and that humour is incongruity minus the fear). Horror comes from a deeper sense of something being amiss in the universe, or more precisely, something being amiss in our normally stable sense of self. What's scary about zombies chasing us isn't simply the fear that we're going to die, but the fact that the dead have come to life and that people we knew are no longer people and are trying to kill us. The incongruity that's central to horror is an incongruity in our conception of the human: our sanity depends on there being a sharp line between the human and the inhuman, and horror blurs that line.
Another point worth remarking on with both humour and horror is that the incongruities they rely on require a certain aptness. Not just any incongruity is funny because some incongruities are simply weird. If I see three bananas lying on the sidewalk, that's neither humorous nor horrific, but it is incongruous. Humour relies on incongruous twists that strike us as slyly appropriate: jokes about lascivious priests work because, on one hand, priests are supposed to be celibate--hence the incongruity--but on the other hand, we recognise that, in fact, priests are often nothing of the sort. The incongruities in horror tend to rely on a deeply rooted sense of cosmic justice. The Birds, for instance, starts out with the two protagonists flirting in a dangerously cavalier way, with a love bird at the centre of their flirtation. Soon enough, they learn that birds aren't something to be trifled with, the implication being that neither is love. With both humour and horror, the aptness and the incongruity seem to derive from the discovery or recognition that the world is bound to upset our best-laid plans, that our rationality is limited, that we are finite beings. This characterisation might seem a bit grandiose for describing casual jokes and cheap horror flicks, but I think I can answer that by simply saying that they're superficial instances of deep phenomena.
One line of attempting to define humour would be to say that there's some characteristic of humour itself--to say that humour is an entity out there in the world--by which we can identify it and distinguish it from everything else. My counter-example to show that this can't work is black humour, because black humour--it seems to me--can be either humorous or horrific depending on how we look at it. You could say it's a humorous way of reflecting on horror, but there are also circumstances where the humour simply won't be taken up, and what one person might see as grimly comic another might see as simply horrific. (There's a nice story of Kafka reading the first chapter of The Trial to Max Brod, but being unable to finish because he was laughing so hard.)
More broadly speaking, it seems we can find pretty much anything humorous and pretty much anything horrific in the right frames of mind. (This is one sense in which humour and horror seem as much emotional phenomena as aesthetic phenomena). The point is, first of all, that pretty much anything can strike us as incongruous given the right frame of mind--language itself contains the incongruity of random marks corresponding to meanings--so whatever humour and horror are, they aren't things "out there" to be detected independent of our responses to them.
In prying them apart, I want to say it has something to do with the nature of play. Humour is a species of play, whereas horror isn't, or at least isn't straightforwardly so. What play is and how it works is tremendously complicated and intriguing and I don't have enough to say about it right now. But for the moment, take these as characteristics of play: (1) it involves a kind of distancing, or "as if" behaviour, where we don't take what we're playing at as fully seriously; (2) it's bounded in space and time: there's a kind of "play-ground" in which play is acceptable, but there are subtle rules or principles that govern how and where we can play; (3) play involves creatively developing on a theme, whether it's passing a ball toward scoring a goal or building on jokes. I'm sure I could think of other important characteristics. But the important thing for the moment is that humour involves the distancing aspect of play, which horror lacks. Under the aspect of humour, everything seems remote, and as a result, we feel safe. When the world is laughable, we can't be hurt, because under the aspect of play, important things can't be hurt. In the world of cartoons, Coyote can blow himself up as much as he likes but he won't actually be harmed.
In horror, by contrast, I'd suggest that the notion of precariousness of human identity that I wrote about earlier comes from the fact that nothing feels safe anymore. It's not just that there's a monster that's going to get us, but that the universe is fundamentally out of joint. Horror gives us a world in which play isn't possible.
Both of these responses are important, I claim, and both are related to the fact that the actual occupies a vanishingly small space within the realm of the possible. We tend to think of the way things are as fixed and necessary, but what both humour and horror reveal is that things could be radically otherwise. Depending on how we encounter this discovery, we can either have a sense of distance on the actual that makes it seem laughably trivial, or we can respond with a horrific sense of agoraphobia, realising that how things are is by no means safely established.
Shit, I really have to run, so I'm not going to be able to check over this or say anything about the Symposium--not sure I have much of any interest to say anyway--and also I haven't had a chance to think through the fact that some things are clearly funny that aren't horrific. Horror can sometimes be amusing, but aside from the case of black humour, humour is rarely horrific. I'm not quite sure why. Maybe it's because horror only plays on the precariousness of human identity, so there are vast swathes of humour that aren't susceptible to being viewed as horror.
Sorry this was so hasty and such a mess. Not promising for the paper I want to write.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Convalescent
Well, I'm writing under the, possibly very false, assumption that writing something is better than writing nothing. I had expected to have a free week with no classes, not very much that I had to rush to do, when I could spend days at a time reading whatever I chose... then I got hit with the worst illness I've had in years, and for days I was incapable of doing anything at all. As I started to recover I could watch movies on my computer - sometimes mostly listening to them with my eyes closed. I lost five days completely. Nw that the break is almost over, when I pick up a book I've been meaning to get around to, I read ten pages or so knowing that I can't really get into it, that there isn't time to read the whole thing or even half, and I don't concentrate all that well. I have a big presentation to prepare for next Thursday (on the Symposium), a pile of tests and papers to correct, and articles I'm supposed to be looking over.
The articles are translations into English for a Dictionary of philosophical untranslatable terms originally published in French. Some entries are words, word pairs or word groups that really only exist in one language, such as the difference between Vorhanden and Zuhanden, which is clearly mostly a Heidegger article, or Sein/ Sosein/ Aussersein, which is largely focused aroung Meinong. Some, like the entry on 'Object' are talking more about a term's absence in a ancient Greek and the way it is read back into classical texts, sometimes slightly distorting them. Some, like 'translation', are largely the history of a concept - once again, in ancient Greek there was a word 'to Hellenize' or 'to make Greek', but no word acknowledging two-way translation... various words are used in Latin for adopting Greek texts, and the various words that are used for translation as well as the use of the word 'translatio' are all bound up with various ideas of transmission, fidelity, betrayal, etc., and the whole fifty page article is actually pretty interesting. I have a badly-paid, occasionally unpaid side gig reading through translations and checking them against the original. It's mostly interesting, but it has been a massive time and energy drain this semester.
When I was reading through another article on the Phaedrus, I thought to look up a myth mentioned at the beginning of the dialogue in Robert Graves' 'Greek Myths'. At the end of the little entry on Boreas, Graves has a note which begins "Socrates, who had no understanding of myths, misses the point of Oreithyia's rape". I laughed when I read that - especially thinking back on Derrida's constant praise of Plato's myth-making in the same dialogue.
I'll be largely wrapped up in Plato for at least another week, despite my desire to start reading more modern stuff again as well. Not only that, but a large part of my Plato reading is going to have to continue centering around 'the Symposium'. One of the articles I read today was one I was kind of looking forward to reading because of its topic, though I was disappointed by how it was treated. The subject was the theatricality of the dialogue... what I was specifically looking for was an explanation of the fact that at the very end of the dialogue Socrates is talking to Agathon the tragedian and Aristophanes the comedian about the idea that the same person who can write a good tragedy should be able to write a good comedy. The whole symposium is in honor of Agathon's triumph as a playwright, and a crown is going to be awarded to the best encomium by Dionysus himself, and of course Alcibiades comes in at the end drunk as the living embodiment of Dionysus, wearing a crown of ivy and violet, and he gives the crown to Socrates (sort of), What is the importance of all the theatrical references? How should they reflect on everything else in the dialogue? What's with the whole comedy/ tragedy thing? It's often said that the comic elements in the symposium are evident (Aristodemus' awkward arrival without Socrates, Aristophanes' hiccups, etc.), and questioned whether there is a tragic element, and if so, what? This article was suggesting that the date of the events in the dialogue was the surest clue - 416, just a year before peace would once again be broken Alcibiades and Phaedrus would be accused of defacing Herms, Athens would lose a major battle and things would go to hell. Within a couple years of the Symposium, only Aristophanes and Socrates would still be left in the city. This particular article suggested that the very beginning of the dialogue would have taken place in 399, and this part sort of does interest me. No evidence is given here for the specific dating at 399, but it is supposed that the reason fact gathering is going on at the beginning about events belonging to the distant past is that Socrates has already been accused though not yet tried, and in this period before Socrates' death an attempt is being made to assemble Socratic Logoi as accurately as possible for posterity, particularly while facts can still be verified by Socrates himself. This would help to explain why Apolodorus is in such a foul mood at the beginning, and it also helps to explain why everything is at such a remove... it's always said that Socrates' couldn't decently repeat the praise that Alcibiades made of him, but this doesn't explain the stress on temporal distance, the fact checking and the fact that it isn't even a second-hand account.
Anyway, I realize that this is pedantry and not the voicing of ideas for us to discuss... which is also too bad, because I know I had ideas to discuss recently. Oh well. I hope things are well in England and you've been keeping yourself pleasantly occupied. Tell me if you have any ideas about the discussion of comedy and tragedy at the end of the Symposium and how it might fit into the dialogue as a whole. I would really like to have a convincing sense of why it needs to be there.
The articles are translations into English for a Dictionary of philosophical untranslatable terms originally published in French. Some entries are words, word pairs or word groups that really only exist in one language, such as the difference between Vorhanden and Zuhanden, which is clearly mostly a Heidegger article, or Sein/ Sosein/ Aussersein, which is largely focused aroung Meinong. Some, like the entry on 'Object' are talking more about a term's absence in a ancient Greek and the way it is read back into classical texts, sometimes slightly distorting them. Some, like 'translation', are largely the history of a concept - once again, in ancient Greek there was a word 'to Hellenize' or 'to make Greek', but no word acknowledging two-way translation... various words are used in Latin for adopting Greek texts, and the various words that are used for translation as well as the use of the word 'translatio' are all bound up with various ideas of transmission, fidelity, betrayal, etc., and the whole fifty page article is actually pretty interesting. I have a badly-paid, occasionally unpaid side gig reading through translations and checking them against the original. It's mostly interesting, but it has been a massive time and energy drain this semester.
When I was reading through another article on the Phaedrus, I thought to look up a myth mentioned at the beginning of the dialogue in Robert Graves' 'Greek Myths'. At the end of the little entry on Boreas, Graves has a note which begins "Socrates, who had no understanding of myths, misses the point of Oreithyia's rape". I laughed when I read that - especially thinking back on Derrida's constant praise of Plato's myth-making in the same dialogue.
I'll be largely wrapped up in Plato for at least another week, despite my desire to start reading more modern stuff again as well. Not only that, but a large part of my Plato reading is going to have to continue centering around 'the Symposium'. One of the articles I read today was one I was kind of looking forward to reading because of its topic, though I was disappointed by how it was treated. The subject was the theatricality of the dialogue... what I was specifically looking for was an explanation of the fact that at the very end of the dialogue Socrates is talking to Agathon the tragedian and Aristophanes the comedian about the idea that the same person who can write a good tragedy should be able to write a good comedy. The whole symposium is in honor of Agathon's triumph as a playwright, and a crown is going to be awarded to the best encomium by Dionysus himself, and of course Alcibiades comes in at the end drunk as the living embodiment of Dionysus, wearing a crown of ivy and violet, and he gives the crown to Socrates (sort of), What is the importance of all the theatrical references? How should they reflect on everything else in the dialogue? What's with the whole comedy/ tragedy thing? It's often said that the comic elements in the symposium are evident (Aristodemus' awkward arrival without Socrates, Aristophanes' hiccups, etc.), and questioned whether there is a tragic element, and if so, what? This article was suggesting that the date of the events in the dialogue was the surest clue - 416, just a year before peace would once again be broken Alcibiades and Phaedrus would be accused of defacing Herms, Athens would lose a major battle and things would go to hell. Within a couple years of the Symposium, only Aristophanes and Socrates would still be left in the city. This particular article suggested that the very beginning of the dialogue would have taken place in 399, and this part sort of does interest me. No evidence is given here for the specific dating at 399, but it is supposed that the reason fact gathering is going on at the beginning about events belonging to the distant past is that Socrates has already been accused though not yet tried, and in this period before Socrates' death an attempt is being made to assemble Socratic Logoi as accurately as possible for posterity, particularly while facts can still be verified by Socrates himself. This would help to explain why Apolodorus is in such a foul mood at the beginning, and it also helps to explain why everything is at such a remove... it's always said that Socrates' couldn't decently repeat the praise that Alcibiades made of him, but this doesn't explain the stress on temporal distance, the fact checking and the fact that it isn't even a second-hand account.
Anyway, I realize that this is pedantry and not the voicing of ideas for us to discuss... which is also too bad, because I know I had ideas to discuss recently. Oh well. I hope things are well in England and you've been keeping yourself pleasantly occupied. Tell me if you have any ideas about the discussion of comedy and tragedy at the end of the Symposium and how it might fit into the dialogue as a whole. I would really like to have a convincing sense of why it needs to be there.
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