Jonas' Reading Dante

Even as we are engaged in a slow reading* of parts of the Purgatorio in preparation for tackling the Paradiso, we can rest assured that what it means to read will forever be an open question.

For several years, the American artist Joan Jonas, whose work is part of the U.S. exhibit at this year's Biennale in Venice, has been working on a series of performative pieces entitled Reading Dante.

In an interview with Art Forum, she drew a parallel between Dante and Aby Warburg:

In my mind, Dante connects to Aby Warburg, who was central to my last large-scale work of this kind, The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things. Both had an overarching worldview. Dante thought epically during a moment—the medieval era—when people were very isolated, and Warburg attempted to synthesize widely disparate cultures through the lens of art history. For me, they both represent characters that are on a journey through life that involves thinking about the world as a whole, not just what’s immediately around them.

Jonas, Reading Dante

According to a gallery where the work was performed, Jonas is continually revising:

Reading Dante IV draws inspiration from Dante's fourteenth-century Divine Comedy, a reoccurring topos of Jonas's work since 2007. Each performance and installation becomes increasingly layered as the work transforms and develops.

Reading Dante becomes an act of translation:

Jonas translates the medieval allegory, borrowing small fragments of the text and greatly reinterpreting the story through performance, sound, drawings, video and installation. The artist dynamically visualizes the journey of the characters, merging their experience with her own through footage of travels and performance. Galleria Raffaella Cortese.

In another interview (in frieze), Jonas says:

Dante separated heaven, purgatory and hell but I don’t believe in such a separation. One aspect, though, that interested me is the fact that Dante was the first writer to write using vernacular Italian so I want to record lots of different people reading Dante.

With a work so rich as Dante's, the acts of translation are unending, as are the many varieties and forms its reading can assume.

Jonas, Reading Dante

video clip

Diverse images, Jonas Galleria Raffaella Cortese

*slow reading

"To read well, that is to say, to read slowly . . ."

Laudator Emporis Acti has two delightful posts on slow reading. One involves the famous classics scholar Eduard Fraenkel:

He lectured effectively on Catullus, Virgil, and Horace; but he exerted special influence through his famous seminars on Aeschylus's Agamemnon, in which he went through the play in almost as much time as it took Agamemnon to capture Troy.

The other cites E. A. Poe, and this from Nietzsche:

It is not for nothing that I have been a philologist, perhaps I am a philologist still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading....For philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow—it is a goldsmith's art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. But for precisely this reason it is more necessary than ever today, by precisely this means does it entice and enchant us the most, in the midst of an age of 'work', that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to 'get everything done' at once, including every old or new book:—this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers.

We are not alone! 

The reader

From the beginning of the Antigone, Creon is fearful of a return of violence which turns into heightened suspicion of deviations from absolute adherence to his authority. His first address is orchestrated: He singles out a group of loyal followers because he suspects that some in the city are not in sympathy with his reign, or with his edict that the enemy dead, including Polyneices, lie unburied.

First he accuses the guards of collusion, then he suspects a secret cabal has bribed them. He must let go of those fantasies when he learns it was a young girl, acting alone, who disobeyed his order. When Haemon reminds him that other voices in the city did not harmonize with his, Creon is quick to find motivation for his son's error. Since even he can't credibly think Haemon has been bribed, his fertile imagination fabricates other reasons: Cherchez la femme, etc.:

Do not, my son, banish your good sense
through pleasure in a woman, since you know
that the embrace grows cold                                        {650}
when an evil woman shares your bed and home.
What greater wound can there be than a false friend? (philos kakos)
No. Spit on her, throw her out like an enemy,
this girl, to marry someone in Death's house.
I caught her openly in disobedience
alone out of all this city and I shall not make
myself a liar in the city's sight. No, I will kill her.

When Haemon spits (πτύσας), it won't be at Antigone.

the boy glared at him with savage eyes, spat in his face . . . {1231-32} 

τὸν δ᾽ ἀγρίοις ὄσσοισι παπτήνας ὁ παῖς, πτύσας προσώπῳ 

The last speaker to address Creon's judgment is Teiresias. If Antigone had a simple emotional conviction that it was wrong to leave her brother unburied, and Haemon could offer rational political and social reasons that any ruler would be wise to listen to, Teiresias doesn't begin with feeling or reason. He starts with signs (σημεῖα):

Τειρεσίας

γνώσει, τέχνης σημεῖα τῆς ἐμῆς κλύων. 
εἰς γὰρ παλαιὸν θᾶκον ὀρνιθοσκόπον 
1000ἵζων, ἵν᾽ ἦν μοι παντὸς οἰωνοῦ λιμήν, 
ἀγνῶτ᾽ ἀκούω φθόγγον ὀρνίθων, κακῷ 
κλάζοντας οἴστρῳ καὶ βεβαρβαρωμένῳ. 
καὶ σπῶντας ἐν χηλαῖσιν ἀλλήλους φοναῖς 
ἔγνων: πτερῶν γὰρ ῥοῖβδος οὐκ ἄσημος ἦν. 

Teiresias
You will understand, when you hear the signs (σημεῖα) revealed by my art. As I took my place on my old seat of augury where all birds regularly gather for me, I heard an unintelligible voice among them: they were screaming in dire frenzy that made their language foreign to me. I realized that they were ripping each other with their talons, murderously—the rush of their wings did not lack meaning (οὐκ ἄσημος). [1005]

From long experience, the prophet knows what these birds ought to sound like. But instead of what he expects, he hears an "unintelligible voice" (ἀγνῶτ᾽ ἀκούω φθόγγον). He is brought to interpret this voice because it is, at first cry, unintelligible. The sting (οἴστρῳ) of their screams (κλάζοντας) turned them into barbarous babble: βεβαρβαρωμένῳ. The onomatopoeia carries both the "babble" and the sense that the birds have begun speaking in an incomprehensible, or foreign, tongue. The tearing of talons, the strange speech, and the whir of wings (the rush of their wings did not lack meaning (ἄσημος)) all become signs that the prophet begins to read:

He interprets, or translates these foreign signs. They are foreign by virtue of being other than clear, beautiful signs. They are shrill:

nor does any bird sound out clear signs (εὐσήμους) in its shrill cries, for they have tasted the fatness (λίπος) of a slain man's blood.

οὐδ᾽ ὄρνις εὐσήμους ἀπορροιβδεῖ βοάς ἀνδροφθόρου βεβρῶτες αἵματος λίπος. 

Reading begins with the unintelligible, the screech one would rather not have to listen to. Efforts to read closely at times fail to follow Tiresias's method. How often do we "read" by attending to what makes sense, and mute, or ignore, the parts of a text that don't immediately conform, or "fit"?

Teiresias' speech is his treatise on reading. He reinforces the point that he is blind, that he is led by a child who helps him "see" the signs before he can interpret them. The treachery of sight lies in how often it is misled by appearances, where truth, often, is not found:

And it is your heart that is the source of the sickness now afflicting the city

καὶ ταῦτα τῆς σῆς ἐκ φρενὸς νοσεῖ πόλις. 

It might be worthwhile at this point to briefly ponder Teiresias's lesson as we look at the relation of dialogue to ode in the play. One way to read Antigone is to remain within the logic of the dialogues, to consider the themes of justice and power solely as they are elucidated by the speeches and stichomythia. But then, the poetry of the odes gets relegated to a kind of filler, or window dressing, between the dialogues. 

Each of the odes is packed with images that relate to the themes, yet not always in some clearly logical, or intelligible way. (The hideous blindings of the last, very dark ode, for example -- if they don't fit a certain view we have of the play's overall theme, what are they there for? Merely a few unintelligible yawps?)

Let's consider the speech of Teiresias in relation to two moments where we've encountered birds before. In the first ode (the parodos), which evoked the fear and pathos of a city threatened on all sides by murderous generals, the chorus sings of an eagle: 

He set out against our land because of the strife-filled claims of Polyneices, and like a screaming eagle he flew over into our land, covered by his snow-white wing, with a mass of weapons and crested helmets. (110-116)

ὃς ἐφ᾽ ἡμετέρᾳ γᾷ Πολυνείκους 
ἀρθεὶς νεικέων ἐξ ἀμφιλόγων 
ὀξέα κλάζων 
ἀετὸς εἰς γᾶν ὣς ὑπερέπτα, 
λευκῆς χιόνος πτέρυγι στεγανός, 
115πολλῶν μεθ᾽ ὅπλων 
ξύν θ᾽ ἱπποκόμοις κορύθεσσιν.

The "he" here is, in fact, not any particular person, but the entire army personified as a "man." The man came against Thebes because of the strife (νεικέων)-filled claims of Polyneices (the name means "much strife"), and abruptly we hear the piercing cries (ὀξέα κλάζων) of a shrieking eagle poised to swoop down and devour the city.

The piercing (ὀξὺν) shriek of a bird is also heard when the guards discover Antigone by the body of Polyneices:

she wailed aloud with the sharp cry of a grieving bird, as when inside her empty [425] nest she sees the bed stripped of its nestlings

ἡ παῖς ὁρᾶται, κἀνακωκύει πικρᾶς ὄρνιθος ὀξὺν φθόγγον

In the logic of Creon's world, the tears of a sister weeping for her brother could never possess the power, the terminal violence, of Polyneices' white eagle. It would make no sense for the light dust spread by a girl to cause greater ruin than the united wrath of the Seven. Or for her grief to pull apart a dynasty. Yet it does. Creon's heart (φρενὸς) is sick. That which we do not readily understand could be a sign whose very absence of sense deserves a look. An enigma. It was a woman with eagle's wings and the power of a lion that brought Oedipus to himself.

What appears to say nothing, to be utterly "Greek to us," might in truth speak volumes about nothing but ourselves.

Kermode and Suspended Endings

Among the many notices of Frank Kermode's passing, this from AKMA along with this in the Telegraph and this in Slate are memorable. AKMA also put some words of Kermode here - it's a reflection on a time when he gathered an amazing assortment of British readers to spend some time working on the torrent of Continental literary, critical, psychanalytic and philosophical work coming from mainly from France in the 1970s.

What comes through in the last  is Kermode's sense of an ending, a divergence of ways, in 1974. It comes as he evokes a time in which he had everything to do with the realization, for at least a brief moment, of a tolerance to take in, to examine, works written in languages other than English by authors whose thought rested on vastly different theoretical and technical underpinnings from those familiar, safe and sane to the Anglo-American critical community.

If anyone ever was the embodiment of the patient labor of reading, contemplative work with sufficient integrity to not need to enter into academic infighting, buzzword fusillades, or damnation through faint feints of praise, it was Kermode. That he was able to engage a certain insularity of English approaches with the full force of his considerable intelligence -- and to come away enriched by the experience -- is a tribute to his critical scope. I'm reading a couple of his collections these days, and will probably have more to say about him.

Some of the books he'll be remembered for are:

Two about reading from NPR

Classic Lit No Longer Makes The Grade Among Leaders

NPR notes that world leaders no longer seem to immerse themselves in the classics - unlike Yeats,* Alexander the Great, who slept with the Iliad under his pillow, or John Adams, who read Thucydides in Greek. Click for more.

*Thanks to an alert friend for calling attention to my  having heard "Great" as "Yeats."

...and...

Why Johnny Can't 'Deep Read'

In the audio of this NPR story about "deep reading," Google Chairman Eric Schmidt laments the loss of this faculty. More here.

Language as human nature

Languages, of course, are human creations, tools we invent and hone to suit our needs. Simply showing that speakers of different languages think differently doesn't tell us whether it's language that shapes thought or the other way around. To demonstrate the causal role of language, what's needed are studies that directly manipulate language and look for effects in cognition.  Lera Boroditsky in WSJ

This story in the Wall Street Journal was the most tweeted story of the past weekend. Nothing surprising there, the relationship of language to thought, lexis to logos, has long been investigated and reflected upon and is probably fundamental to our experience of the world. The discipline of philology seems relevant here, and reading seems highly relevant to philology. That is to say, when we read (especially if, along with Nietzsche, we read slowly), we make the effort to apprehend the sense of words, the play of figures, the relations of characters, the structure of the narrative, the allusions and debts owed to previous texts, i.e., tradition. We call upon our knowledge of grammar as well as of rhetoric, logic, history and culture. In Horace's "Epistle to the Pisos," the line between a strictly textual property, such as meter, and an extra-textual realm, such as the growing power and complexity of the Roman state, is not merely thin, but becomes a membrane in which the music of the Carmen and the manners of society are interrelated parts of some larger whole.

All of which is just to say we happily tweet about our metaphors, our languages, and our world, but to get beyond received ideas about such subjects takes some care, some reading, and some time. When Prof. Boroditsky writes:

Language is a uniquely human gift. When we study language, we are uncovering in part what makes us human, getting a peek at the very nature of human nature.

we nod in assent, but we also should continue to ask: if language is part of what makes us human, what is the proper way for we humans to "study language"? We can remark on different patterns, and linguistic structures found in diverse tongues, and make inferences about how different native speakers experience the world differently. That begs the question of translation, the carrying over of meaning from one tongue to another, which begs in turn the more basic question of meaning, its provenance, nature, action, and relation to what is real. One thing's clear: there's far more to language, and to human nature, than time sequencing and the direction one writes in. For some far-reaching aspects of language we literally may have no words.

Is the Classics Group about to be claimed for the avant-garde?

According to the Guardian, the new thing is slow reading:

a literary revolution is at hand. First we had slow food, then slow travel. Now, those campaigns are joined by a slow-reading movement – a disparate bunch of academics and intellectuals who want us to take our time while reading, and re-reading. They ask us to switch off our computers every so often and rediscover both the joy of personal engagement with physical texts, and the ability to process them fully.

A few associated links:

Lance Fletcher, founder of The Academy of Slow Reading, points us to Nietzsche.

And here's a blog apparently devoted to slow reading.

Here's Fletcher on the process:

The intention of the teaching of slow reading (which, as I said, is what I understand philosophy to be) is to subvert the customary mode of reading. Its intention is to afford students (i.e. those who make us the gift of their listening) some critical access to their own interpretive activity.

Newsweek was not slow in picking it up, and found a professor who says:

"schools should encourage old-fashioned exercises such as reading aloud."

What a concept!

[The Classics Group has been meeting in Sarasota for some ten years, reading aloud complete works from the ancients - Homer, Virgil, Plutarch, Horace, Genesis, Samuel I and II - along with works of Dante, Shakespeare, Milton and others. With no tutors or presenters, we read and enjoy, attending to texts, pausing to observe, comment, question, or simply take them in with relish and, occasionally, vinegar.]