No more pencils, no more books

I just had my last-ever class at Vassar. Still have to write two papers and a one-act play before I graduate, but other than that, I have learned everything that I will ever learn at college. Weird!

One thing I won't be sad to leave behind are some of the scholarly essays, especially the works of "literary theory," that I have had to read here. Granted, much of what I read increases my knowledge or even helps me see things afresh...but some essays are laden with jargon or digressions or pompousness, and I can do without them. My Shakespeare professor asked us which of our readings we liked the most and the least, and I gave my thumbs-down to an essay called "Out Damned Scot: Dislocating Macbeth in Transnational Film and Media Culture", by Courtney Lehmann. Ridiculously bad, it encapsulates everything that annoys me about certain trends in scholarship.

"Out Damned Scot" is full of pretentiousness, over-analysis, irrelevant leftist politics, and bizarre claims. It analyzes several recent film adaptations of Macbeth--we read it after watching Scotland, PA, a 2001 indie film that sets the Macbeth story at a 1970s fast-food restaurant. The essay's ostensible thesis deals with how these Macbeth adaptations respond to globalization, as well as how Macbeth, a "noir western," negotiates "desire and drive" to reinforce a corrupt capitalist system. (Or something.)

The essay begins with this confusing thesis, and a pretentious simile about how watching a DVD is like "the contested province of the thistle--a cross between a lone flower and a menacing mass of weeds" and thus like Scotland. Other pretensions include frequent use of the word jouissance, referring to our era as the fin de siècle, and citing Walter Benjamin, Homi Bhabha, Fredric Jameson, and Slavoj Zizek.

Much of Lehmann's essay ascribes absurd social significance to works of art (works of entertainment?) that probably can't bear such scrutiny--like In the Flesh, a porn adaptation of Macbeth. Lehmann writes, "The weird sisters proceed to get downright freaky among themselves [... culminating] in the head witch using a double-pronged dildo to pleasure the other two. In the broader context of the film, this image suggests the proverbial fork in the road." Um, perhaps not?

Then Lehmann discusses Star Wars: Macbeth, a short comedy film made by students at Glen Ridge High School in 1997 (you can watch it here; I haven't). Without any real evidence to go on, Lehmann decides it is a response to a traumatic event in Glen Ridge history: the 1989 rape of a retarded girl by high-school jocks. According to her, it shows the "revenge of the nerds," as well as an attempt to retreat to the golden days of the 1970s, before the rape occurred. When a nerdy Macduff kills an athletic-looking Macbeth and then "departs in a replica of the Millennium Falcon," "the implication is that [he] is headed 'back to the future' with a clean slate, having eliminated the evildoers who will give the school and surrounding community a bad name a decade later." Perhaps. But I'm more inclined to think that Star Wars Macbeth is just a youthful high-jink, the kind of skit that could be made by nerdy teens anywhere in America. Children have short memories and since the Glen Ridge trauma occurred when these kids were 10 or younger, I doubt many of them were thinking about it when they got to high school.

Lehmann also makes irrelevant jabs at the Bush Administration. In the porno Macbeth, when Banquo's ghost participates in an orgy while Macbeth sits and watches, Lehmann writes that this "[renders] the murder a failure and Macbeth an unlikely victim of John Ashcroft syndrome." Huh? A footnote explains that Ashcroft was defeated in a 2000 election by Mel Carnahan, who had died the previous month. (And Lehmann gets it wrong: the men were not competing for governor, but for the Senate.) I don't like Ashcroft either, but I know when he is relevant to a discussion versus when an author is trying to score points with leftist academics.

The analysis of In the Flesh concludes with the bizarre claim that masturbation reminds us of "self-detonating war instruments," and thus "the zero-sum game of suicidal terrorism," and "the spectacle of remote control warfare with smart bombs and unmanned planes, which remain the isolationist prerogative of those nations with the most pleasure and the least guilt." Gee, and I thought it was supposed to be fun...

Since Lehmann is discussing capitalism and globalization, it is relevant to point out how Scotland, PA amusingly plays with the similarity of "McBeth" and "McDonald's." But how does she possibly reach this conclusion: "The fetishized arches of the letter 'M' in this film ominously point to what comes after 'M'--'En'--as in noir and, of course, Enron." Maybe that's how her mind works--but do you immediately think of "Enron" when you see a big letter M?

So, good riddance to this kind of scholarly writing--so over-the-top, over-reaching and confused that I still can't explain Lehmann's thesis despite having read the essay three times. In fact, the more I read it, the more I decide it must be a parody of poorly written contemporary scholarship. But the sad part is, it's not.

The Man of Many Wiles

Vase painting depicting Odysseus killing the suitors. Photo from mlahanas.de

I wanted to take a real old-school liberal-artsy class before leaving Vassar, so I registered for English 320, "The Heroic Tradition." The professor calls us Mr. and Ms. (and this makes me sit up straighter, take more notice) and is fond of saying things like "Remember that scene in The Faerie Queene where..." or "Remember the wonderful first sonnet of Astrophel and Stella," ignoring the fact that none of us have read these works. Our reading this semester will remedy some of the gaps in our knowledge: it includes The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Paradise Lost, and other canonical texts.

We're halfway through The Aeneid right now--this is the first time I've read it, as opposed to The Odyssey, which I've read 2.5 times. I read the whole thing freshman year of high school, then the central books (5-12, Odysseus' journeys) freshman year of college for a class called "Wandering in Literature."

It feels good to do this, to revisit a fundamental text. It feels right. (Though I wonder why no one assigns The Iliad.) Each time I notice new and different elements--and isn't that how you distinguish great literature from the merely good? This semester, I was reading The Odyssey at the same time I had to read Mason Weems' The Life of Washington for my history class--this is the hagiography of George Washington that contains the original version of the cherry-tree story. I was very amused to discover that Weems steals elements of The Odyssey and uses them to underline Washington's heroism. He claims that Washington's father had a big gun that only he and his son could lift--obviously recalling Odysseus' bow that only he can string. There are even epic similes (the only time I have ever seen these in a prose narrative) comparing Washington to a lion, the same simile often used for Odysseus.

Of course, Weems' biography takes place in a clearly ordered moral universe where Washington is a great, pious, noble man who "could not tell a lie." Whereas the moral universe of The Odyssey is completely chaotic--it has very little internal logic, and I find that fascinating. The men who killed Agamemnon by ambushing him are denounced as cowards, but Odysseus ambushes and kills people at least twice: from the Trojan horse, and when he returns to Ithaka. Odysseus is a deceiver, boastful, always needing to assert his identity and get to his home. Due to his complexity, I find him much more interesting than I do Aeneas, at least so far.

I have also learned that there are myriad ways to study something like The Odyssey, even in the context of a class called "The Heroic Tradition." For instance, last year I took a class on fairy tales with a Jungian prof. Her version of a "Heroic Tradition" course would probably involve much work on archetypes and Joseph Campbell mythography. Campbell would surely have a lot to say about the section where Odysseus travels to Hades, as a reflection of "the hero's journey to the underworld and return with newfound knowledge." Conversely, my current prof said that the Hades scene is the one section of The Odyssey we are allowed to skip.

Instead, this year, we perform close readings that examine word choice (especially etymology), patterns of images, the characters' attitudes toward heroism and the author's attitude toward his characters, and any passages that seem especially thorny. Naturally, we focus a lot on the Homeric similes--I've done that before with Homer, but not to the extent of noticing how weird some of them are. There's a passage where Odysseus, weeping as he hears a bard recount the story of his victory over Troy, is compared to a defeated Trojan woman weeping over the death of her husband, presumably killed by Odysseus' band of Greeks... Just another example of that moral confusion that complicates The Odyssey.

Each of my 3 times reading The Odyssey, I have had to buy a new edition/translation. In high school we used Allen Mandelbaum's version. All I remember about this one was that Telemachus kept telling the suitors "Stop your brouhaha," which struck me a ludicrous word choice. Also it was a cheap mass-market paperback that was hard to hold. I did have to memorize the first 15 lines of this translation, which are full of interesting sonorities, alliterations, half-rhymes ("Muse, tell me of the man of many wiles / the man who wandered many paths of exile / after he sacked Troy's sacred citadel"). But I don't believe Mandelbaum is able to keep this up through all 24 books.

I got rid of the Mandelbaum version after getting Robert Fagles' translation three years ago. It is an attractive deckle-edged edition and Fagles is really trendy in academia--I read so many of his translations that year and thought they were all pretty good. This year, I read the Richmond Lattimore version (a nice trade paperback with good margins) and enjoyed it very much. Though the translation is from the '60s, it doesn't seem too dated or colloquial, and strikes me as being very faithful to the original Greek--for instance, using just as much repetition as Homer did, rather than trying to vary things for a modern reader. Twice over the course of two pages, Lattimore's version introduces Athene's speech with the lines: "Then in turn the gray-eyed goddess Athene answered him." Fagles tries to jazz this up by having the first instance read "And sparkling-eyed Athena drove the matter home," and the second, "Athena, her eyes flashing bright, exulted." Maybe this makes things more lively for a casual reader, but when you have to examine the text as closely as my prof demands--and, I would argue, The Odyssey gains so much by close examination--Lattimore's seems like the best choice.

Respecting the Classics?

I've been thinking about classic American drama lately: I'm writing a play set in 1934 and researching the theater of that time, plus Vassar is about to produce The Glass Menagerie, an atypical choice for our drama department. It's always struck me as a little odd how, in my time here, Vassar has produced just about every kind of play except for the American classics (which I'll define as dating from roughly 1920 to 1970). The only other one I recall is Joseph Heller's We Bombed in New Haven, which comes from the tail end of that era (1968--it's an anti-Vietnam play) and isn't exactly a masterpiece. Other than We Bombed... and Glass Menagerie, in my 4 years at Vassar, the drama department has produced/will produce:

• 2 Chekhov plays (Seagull and Uncle Vanya)
  
• 3 Shakespeare plays, plus another Elizabethan play called Gallathea
  
• 2 Sondheim musicals (Merrily We Roll Along and Into the Woods)
  
• 2 Greek tragedies (Oedipus at Colonus and Suppliant Women)
  
• Several post-1970 American and British plays (such as Quills by Doug Wright, Las Meninas by Lynn Nottage, OTMA by Kate Moira Ryan, Cloud 9 by Caryl Churchill, Not I by Beckett)
• Some "reworked classics" (Kushner's adaptation of The Illusion; a professor's adaptation of Pygmalion to modern NYC with an African-American Eliza; Suppliant Women and Not I were actually combined, so perhaps they fit here as well)
  
• Various kinds of original work: a two-act play by a senior playwriting major, a collaborative writing/acting/directing project by five seniors, a multimedia-theatre-dance piece about the government's treatment of Native Americans; and this coming spring, a New Plays workshop festival

Doesn't this list seem lacking in plays from between 1920 and 1970, especially American ones? Americans also get short shrift when it comes to 300-level Drama seminar classes: the subjects of these courses are always things like Shakespeare, Beckett, Artaud, Caryl Churchill, "Performativity of Female Authorship"... Granted, that last one covers some American women playwrights, but other than that, our country's theatrical heritage garners surprisingly little attention at Vassar.

The Drama Department's ignoring the classic midcentury American plays is especially strange because the acting style it teaches us (psychological realism, grounded in Stanislavski/"The Method") was invented to deal with just those sorts of plays. Instead, we have to learn one acting style in class, and a whole different style (for Shakespeare, Greek plays, etc.) at rehearsal!

I certainly don't believe that every "classic" play is as good as its reputation suggests (my Eugene O'Neill dissent, anyone?) but part of me also believes that an educational institution, like Vassar, is responsible for familiarizing its students with their cultural heritage, including the classic American playwrights. On the other hand, maybe the responsibility shouldn't be to uphold the "canon" of established playwrights, but to look beyond it instead. Or maybe, because many of us want to be theatre professionals when we leave Vassar, the school's responsibility should be to prepare us for the kind of theatre we will create post-college. And as authors like Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams get produced less frequently by the nation's theatre companies, it's less likely that Vassar graduates will get cast in their plays, and so it makes sense to pay them less attention during college. Perhaps Vassar really ought to focus on the kinds of plays that American theatres produce most regularly now. The Santaland Diaries and Tuesdays with Morrie, anybody?

In all seriousness, there's some great stuff on that list of the top 10 most-produced plays, and as for the stuff that's not so great... well, ultimately, I hope that the responsibility of an educational institution is to send its graduates out into the world armed and ready to make more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff. And that means familiarizing us with all different kinds of plays and acting styles, treating none of it too reverentially, allowing us to come to our own informed conclusions about what kind of theatre our society most needs. And sometimes, we need to be reminded where we came from; so in that sense, there will always be a place for the classics.