Reading · Teaching · Writing

On Creativity–Saturation or Serendipity

Alison BakerLeave a comment

During the last week of a long spring semester my students started talking about whether or not we’d run out of ideas. Like, as a species. We were reading the last essay in Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millenium, “Multiplicity,” which is the one where he talks about encyclopedic novels. Calvino argues that in order for literature to stay relevant in the 21st century and beyond, it has to keep attempting new, ambitious things. He talks about books that try to ‘contain multitudes’—books that are like people: constellations of lots of knowledge and experience and other books.

It’s an idea worth exploring because it posits where we get ideas from to be creative. When authors push boundaries, what are they pushing on? When we try to come up with something new, what does that mean? In a world where Game of Thrones is derived from Lord of the Rings is derived from Norse myth, is anything original?

Of course.

Yes, on the one hand, Disney is remaking their animated classics in live action versions, and every book about magic seems to nod to Harry Potter, and memes are funny because they’re repetitive. On the other hand, that is the whole history of creativity in a nutshell. Nothing comes from nothing. The whole history of creativity and innovation comes is a process not of creating from nothing, but of making stuff out of other stuff. In the most literal sense, paintings are made out of paint and canvas: materials become something new.

But ideas work that way too.

Calvino calls this process “combinatorial play” in his 1967 essay “Cybernetics and Ghosts.” He talks about it both  in the context of the first storytellers, kind of rubbing a few words together until something sparked with meaning, and then also of computer software, that can be used to compose text. We’re always and ever manipulating ideas and words and plots that we already know.

For the Google generations, this means we need to do more filling of our own heads with material we can manipulate if we want to be creative. If we offload everything, there’s nothing for our subconscious to play with. I talk about this in a few blogs on memory.

For the bigger picture, though, Anthony Brandt and David Eagleman’s recent book The Runaway Species makes the best sense of it for my money. All creative activity involves working with something to create something new. Again, nothing comes from nothing. Brandt and Eagleman capture the processes in the delightfully alliterative trio of “bending, breaking, and blending,” but they corroborate the product in-product out model.

In bending, they argue an artist takes a material and just reshapes it. This is the modeling clay method, but the world is your oyster, not just the Play-Doh bucket. Take what already exists, and smush it until it looks different. Caricatures. Variations on a theme (in music, but also visual arts, like Monet’s series of haystack paintings or Hokusai’s wood blocks of Mt Fuji. In literary terms, think of Sherlock Holmes—variations on a theme.

Breaking involves actual rupture of a thing—Picasso’s people, buildings or bodies or books deconstructed and reassembled. Calvino’s hypernovel, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler breaks the narrative in to a dozen pieces, split up by other stories. The tower of the art gallery is split and separated in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum.

Blending heads back to Calvino’s combinatorial idea. If we put two things together, we get something new. Yellow and blue make green, yes, but also King Arthur legends and comedy sketch shows make Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

All of this is to say that my students don’t need to worry that there won’t be new ideas and new art. If we have a flood of texts and images now, it’s just that much more raw material for the artists and inventors of the next generation—them. And I can’t wait to see what they come up with.

Reading · Teaching · Uncategorized

The Daily Reading Quiz: A low-tech love story

Alison Baker2 Comments

In the year of remote learning at the beginning of the pandemic, I had to put my reading quizzes online, and the easiest way to do that was in multiple choice quizzes delivered by our campus Learning Management System.

It was awful.

I kept them light and always included a silly, obviously joking answer to make people laugh, because my secret ingredient is always laughter.

But when we went back to campus, students wanted to keep the quizzes, and I acquiesced for that first, weird, hybrid term. Now we’re back to in-person classes and hand-written quizzes, and you can have them when you pry them from my cold, retired hands.

Here are the reasons I will keep them as long as I can:

This week’s reading quiz material.
  1. These short, objective quizzes over their reading assignments help me learn students’ names faster in the first weeks, when I have to hand them back every day.
  2. They show me what students remember about the text they read—sometimes they don’t remember exactly what I’m asking for, but if they remember the scene and give me some relevant details, I can give them half credit, and I learn what passages were tricky to understand. With a bubble quiz, you either click the right bubble or you don’t.
  3. They are hand-written. That means I get to know their handwriting, which is sometimes useful. I also learn whether they are they type of person to use a new, pristine sheet of paper each time, whether they use grid paper or sketchbook paper or write with glitter gel pens, whether they tear off the “schniblins” from the edge of their spiral bound paper, whether they will try to fit the whole semester’s quizzes on to one half sheet of notebook paper.
  4. They give me the chance to say “hello” to students who don’t say much, as I pass out the previous day’s quizzes, and to comment on a cool travel mug or a haircut. They also provide space for messages—to thank me for the occasional free quiz, to ask if they’re feeling better after missing a class due to illness, to comment on how well they’re doing or suggest they consider a minor in English. Discussions go further faster the better we know each other.
  5. Sometimes people answer quiz questions with an illustration. Once they do, and I color what they drew, they know (and tell others) that I will color whatever they draw. It’s true. If you draw a smiley because you can’t remember how to spell something, or if you doodle a border as you’re waiting for the quiz to start, I’ll color it in. I’ll start with the color I’m grading with, but pretty much everywhere I grade, I have access to several colors. So I color. I once had a student who spent the minutes before class illustrating a scene or two from the text across the bottom of his quiz. Every day. I asked him for some at the end of the term, and he gave me the whole stack he had tucked in the back of his binder. I still have them.
  6. And then I also use these quizzes as a springboard for the day’s discussion. If students want to haggle over a question they deem tricky or if they genuinely didn’t understand some of what they read, that’s where we start. Because their reading of these texts is what we’re all here for. I’ve read them.

So in the post-pandemic days, some students are trying to get away with no paper: no books, no notebook paper. They’re reading online, taking notes electronically, and they don’t see any reason to carry paper and pencil. (These are still in the minority, but they’re loud. 😊) To those students I explain that paper and pen are required materials for my class, just as a lab coat and goggles are for a chemistry lab.

These quizzes are a multi-function assessment tool, and for me, nothing we developed during our online learning crush comes close to delivering all these benefits. And when the cloud crashes and everyone’s Canvas shell disappears, I’ll still have my little stack of index cards with quiz questions. Right next to my butter churn.

Living · Reading · Uncategorized

Apologia: In Defense of Trans Becoming

Alison Baker4 Comments

(First, if you don’t recognize the literary genre of the apology, no worries. It’s old and underused. Just know it’s a genre; I’m not sorry for anything.)

I find myself baffled by all the anti-trans legislation in various stages around the country. I understand that differences intimidate people, but I stand firm in the conviction that we should embrace and nurture our individual differences, rather than drive wedges between groups of people. Years of studying mythology, literature, and history have taught me that humanity works best when we work together (Dante says it is in our unity that we can aspire to divinity), so I question all that would divide us. And Ovid’s Metamorphoses is literally a whole work organized around the principle of change–not incidentally, then, there are characters like Iphis and Caenis who change gender.

Today I want to talk about individuals.

We all become who we are by pruning away bits we don’t want and adding new ones. We may stop smoking or quit a job or a habit that makes us unhappy. We may move and learn how to navigate a new environment, letting our perspective broaden with new experiences. We grow by learning, leaving behind older versions of ourselves.

Our bodies change too, becoming stronger and more coordinated when we’re young, and then less so again as we age (she says with her reading glasses perched on her head and a pulled muscle from going up stairs). Every time we lose weight on purpose or gain weight for muscle and strength, we change our bodies for what we hope will be a better self. Every time we practice a new skill, study a new subject, or read a new book, we realize a little more mental potential. And every time we adopt self-care habits or practice spirituality, we tend to and develop our souls.

With all these glorious changes going on every day in every person, why in the name of humanity would we draw a line where some of these changes happen to be related to gender? Right now, everyone you know is changing: kids are becoming adults; novices are becoming experts; monolinguals are becoming polyglots; couch potatoes are becoming athletes; people are becoming parents and grandparents and cousins; dabblers are becoming artists, and yes, some people are becoming women or men or discovering they’re non-binary.

Change is inevitable. Some of it happens without conscious effort, and we still praise it, as when children hit milestone birthdays or “graduate” from kindergarten. How much more do we celebrate protracted, conscientious efforts to become better versions of ourselves, as when we learn a trade, finish a rehab program, gain a certification or a degree, train for a marathon, or commit to a calling? We should show the same support for and celebrate those who are stepping into their true gender. It’s just another way to unfurl the butterfly’s wings.

And if that doesn’t work, we can always just focus on our own growth and let others get on with theirs.

Living · Reading · Teaching

Creating ourselves: Creation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Alison Baker2 Comments
Maybe not what Ovid intended, but this gift
from a wonderful friend reminds me that even
rough-hewn folks know how to be tender.

The first book of the Metamorphoses involves the change from chaos to order and compiles multiple creations of the cosmos and of humanity. This tracks for me; lots of traditions have similar creation stories, and without ironclad faith one seems as reasonable as the next. The fact that they overlap at all, in fact, is comforting to some degree and hints at a unified human experience.

So when he starts by describing chaos, “an undigested mass/ of crude, confused, and scumbled elements” (3), I’m ready for him to establish some order, but he’s not very accommodating. His first mysterious creator is “a god—and nature, now become benign” (3). This god, whom he later calls the Architect of All (5), sorts the mismatched elements, and he shapes—in ways reminiscent for me of the Old English depiction of the Christian God as Shaper/Fashioner—the earth and heavens. It’s an image of god-as-sculptor, and in Ovid’s work this god first fashions mortals as well. God is an artist and humanity is glitter—an accessory to make the earth shine.

Or else Prometheus molds humans out of clay (6).

Or else they’re formed of giants’ blood by Gaia after the gigantomachy—the war between Gaia’s giant children and the Olympians (9).

Or else they’re grown from the rocks that Pyrrha and Deucalion drop behind them as they walk away from Themis’s temple after the Flood (18).

All of these stories exist alongside each other in Book 1 of the Metamorphoses. Ovid is certainly collecting and organizing source material, but he does not overtly privilege one version over the other. If anything, he orders them too. He starts with a god creating almost ex nihilo, then from mud or earth, then blood, so the material is moving up the Great Chain of Being as we go. Then the last one is back to stone, but they need no god—mortals create the next race of humans on their own, trusting to the earth to soften and shape the stones they drop/plant into people.

There are at least two ways to read that last account: either Pyrrha and Deucalion drop stones back in to Gaia—the womb of the world, who does the rough hewing—or they are responsible themselves for choosing the stones, placing them correctly, and letting them grow on their own. If you take the second reading, Ovid might be describing an evolution of creation.

And it’s this last story that compels me now, still in this weird limbo of a global pandemic, when we’re emerging but also hesitant and making conscious (often draining) decisions about how we re-enter the world. The stones that Pyrrha and Deucalion drop behind them “began to lose their hardness;/ they softened slowly, and in softening,/ changed form.” Their nature grew “more tender” (18).

Ovid reminds us to note our stony ancestry, our toughness and tenacity, but just now I’m more interested in that tenderness; for me, that way lies hope. That we can be tough but develop softness, tenderness, and compassion is very heartening right now, as we absorb the lessens taught by this trying time.

So that’s what I have for you tonight—a wish that you recall your strength but indulge your tenderness, and extend that mercy to someone else who could use it. Put some purposeful gentleness in to this next age of humanity we are shaping together. Thanks in advance. 😊

All quotes taken from The Metamorphoses of Ovid: A new verse translation. Trans: Allen Mandelbaum. Harcourt Brace 1993.

Teaching · Uncategorized

Back to School: Fall 2021

Alison Baker1 Comment

What. A. Year.

And by “year” I mean 17 months that feel like five years. And by “what” I mean quelle castastrophe, che bello, que año de cambios.

How are you? Are you still there? What is left and lost and undone and reshaped of you? I am tired. But just now, quiet and still and hopeful.

I’m teaching on campus again–just one class–so far, just one hour. And one of my husband’s classes was moved online after one day, so I’m very clear how precarious everything is, but one hour is more than I got all last year, and it was glorious—masks and anxiety and all.

It’s Myth as Literature again. And myth reminds me to think broadly, and we start with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which reminds me to notice how beautiful humanity is and how ubiquitous change is, and I can feel some of my mushy insides congealing into a new butterfly.

So here is a teeny blog for re-emerging, as the academic year begins:

I hope you are finding parts of yourself you didn’t know were there and that you put them to use.

I hope if you’ve been working, you’re staying safe; if you’re rejoining the in-person workforce, I hope you’ve been safe and you begin to feel more confident every day.

I hope where you’ve lost has been healing, and that those holes give you some new perspectives to help you move forward.

I hope you read some things that distract you and challenge you that aren’t news items. And I hope you have the means and space and energy to pursue something new during this transition.

I hope you have let yourself grieve and continue to. And I hope even more that you let yourself rejoice.

And I hope when we get this pandemic under control and start thinking about how we want to live this next phase of our lives, we can agree that a butterfly would be beautiful, but a phoenix would be even better.

Living · Reading · Teaching

Summer Reading During a Pandemic

Alison BakerLeave a comment

So this has been a weird summer. And spring. You know; you’ve lived it too.

My campus went online after March 13, so we have been teaching, advising, and meeting from home for months. I have some thoughts. I have had some thoughts before now, but honestly I’ve had more feelings than thoughts. I couldn’t bring myself to write this summer, so I feel like I’ve got some catching up to do, but in keeping with what I’ve been telling my family, my students, my friends, and my colleagues, I’m going to be gentle with myself and just pick up the keyboard and start, not fret about what I didn’t do this summer.

I often post a blog or two about my summer reading, in part because it’s such a big deal for someone who teaches literature to be able to read something not for class, and in part because many of you wonderful folks who read this little blog are also big readers. This summer was something else. Here’s what went down:

  1. Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son. I took a seminar on Dickens in grad school, and this was my favorite. I haven’t, however, revisited it in the twenty years since then. It’s still lovely, but I have to tell you, I started in March, and I’m not through it yet. I’ve been reading it in little bites—a chapter or three here and there, then nothing for two weeks. Somehow I haven’t been able to sustain the attention Dickens requires. From time to time I had twinges of guilt or shame at being less capable of reading a big novel, but this is just not the summer for (multiple) big novels. Whatever. Someday this fall Florence will get her happy ending, and that’s just fine.
  2. James Nestor’s Breath, a new non-fiction book about how we breathe and how we should breathe for better physical and mental health. I have gotten one massage  in the last six months, and when I did, my massage therapist recommended it. And now I recommend it. It’s readable, practical, and I found myself reading passages out loud to unsuspecting family members about how to calm anxiety and get better sleep. Timely, no?
  3. A Book that Takes its Time by Irene Smit and Astrid von der Hulst. This is basically a compilation of articles suitable for publication in the magazine FLOW, and I enjoyed all the pieces and their piecemeal nature. It’s easier to read two pages of something delightful than, for instance, 900 pages of Dickens.
  4. Michael Watkins’s The First 90 Days. I recently started in a new leadership position with a wildly different job description, so I was looking for resources. Tragically, my first 90 days were all online, during summer, far away from the fine folks I’ll be attempting to lead, so all this one gave me was a vague sense that I was missing opportunities.
  5. Patricia McKissick’s The Dark-Thirty: Southern Tales of the Supernatural. This is a lovely collection of African American fiction for kids, and it was one of the several ways I started thinking about race and history and doing better personally and nationally. I also bought Alice Walker’s Hard Times Require Furious Dancing and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. Walker is miraculous, but I haven’t read any Whitehead. I’m optimistic.
  6. Small Teaching: Online by Flower Darby and James Lang. Darby is adapting Lang’s Small Teaching, and I am frantically searching for ways to help my students stay connected to each other and the texts I teach. This has some good stuff, so I hope I finish it and put it to use in time. Cross your fingers for me; the countdown’s on.
  7. The first two novels in the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. These were the first choices of a friend who did what it takes to guarantee that I read a book—she bought me a copy and started a book club. We had good talks on Zoom about whether the murderbot is male or female and all the other things one talks about when one reads science fiction.
  8. Joyful by Ingrid Fetell Lee, which I found via her TED Talk, and which gave me lots of little, happy boosts from reading it and consciously looking for sources of joy. For an incontrovertible happy-ass like myself (who’s been struggling of late), I now feel super-charged in the “Notice Cool Stuff and Enjoy It” category.
  9. Lisa Schneidau’s Botanical Folktales of Britain and Ireland. If you know me, this has my name written all over it. I’m reading one a night, and they’re perfect.
  10. Allan and Jessica Ahlberg’s The Goldilocks Variations. It’s a picture book. That one I finished.  But it’s also outstanding in every way, and I highly recommend it.

So what have we learned? I’m scattered, or eclectic, looking for comfort and inspiration, sometimes finding them, sometimes not finishing what I start or even starting at all. It’s been a wild summer, hasn’t it? What I’ve learned above all is to be gentle—with myself, with others, with the world. That’s all that’s working for me consistently.

I hope wherever you are, you’ve found some comfort, some solace, some insight and inspiration this summer, and if you’d like to talk about books—books I read, or you read, or books half-finished or waiting patiently on the end table, filled with potential, let me know.

Reading · Teaching

Reading Dante in Isolation

Alison Baker1 Comment

I recently moved my teaching online, along with the rest of the world. I was in the middle of Dante’s Inferno.

The course on Epics (this term) wound its way from Greek and Roman treatments of the Trojan War to Dante’s critique of some of those tropes and characters, and we were just about to talk about how low in Hell Ulysses gets placed when we disbanded. We left some things hanging as we moved in to a new, foreign medium.

But the conversation continued. We were fortunate to have built a good base; we were about halfway through our semester, so comfortable with each other and our content. And the content is all connected.

The last day we met in person, we talked about Dante’s treatment of thieves. As we considered why thieves get transformed in to snakes in hell, we teased out all the imagery and traced through-lines. For about four cantos, Dante winds the image of a coiling snake through theft and fraud and lying to achieve personal ends: thieves and liars, snakes and friars. In a  beautiful confluence of word and image, all of Dante’s snake imagery fits those who steal, like the serpent who stole Paradise from Adam and Eve, with his forked, venomous tongue, through Ulysses, who counseled fraud and convinced his men to seek that which was beyond their reach (the mountain of Purgatory). Because we had a firm grasp of the snaky thieves, our first discussion online went almost as smoothly as it would have face to face.

Gustave Dore’s illustration of a thief transforming to a snake

After that, though, two things happened. First we went deeper, and trying to envision the fractious Sowers of Discord and the ultimate traitors in the 9th circle were harder to get our heads around. That Dante places those who create division among humanity—divisions in religious sects, in families, and between people and their lords reminded us of our distance from one another during our quarantine.

We are stronger together in so many ways, but one of them is in education. Dante argues this negatively in Inferno, when he shows how destructive division is to humanity, and he argues it in Paradiso, where he shows that the unity of humanity is godlike. We are most like god when we gather together and support each other as one. That’s why the Sowers of Discord are in deep Hell. That’s why even the introverts are feeling the sting of a quarantine. That’s why we learn better in a classroom than on the internet.  

Lucie reads the Inferno. Her Italian is impeccable.

But sometimes we have to be apart. So I am grateful for all the ways we have found to create community virtually. The next big event was that the midterm took place as scheduled–a dramatic reading of seven cantos of the Inferno. People read from their own homes, some with sound effects (because they’re way cooler than I am), and on their phones or their laptops or with whatever means they had. And we heard Ugolino confess his cannibalism and Nimrod shout his babble and Satan mumble with his mouth full. And we shared in the horror of those scenes and the power of performance to unify actors and audience.

Finally, we discovered my cat and Dante share a birthday, so they decided my cat was Dante reincarnated. Therefore, despite what feels like the theft of our face to face community, I’m confident in our ability to come together in other ways, building unity and shared knowledge, and optimistic about the rest of the term.

Living

The Quarantine/Mom Blog

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The Quarantine/Mom Blog

I have not blogged for a while. It’s the biggest lapse since I started blogging, actually. Things have been… you know how things have been. I’ve been torn between trying to stay positive and feeling anxious and being grateful that my parents don’t have to deal with a quarantine.

Which leads me to the mom blog.

Mom was a little girl in World War II. She had very few memories, really. Dad was older; he was old enough to remember, but not old enough to understand. He had stories about collecting fighter plane cards and feeling lucky that Grandpa scored a giant barrel of eggs preserved in water glass. His memories felt sheltered to me—innocent.

Mom, who didn’t remember the war, but remembered growing up poor after it, was undeniably shaped by it. She was frugal—clipped her coupons, made her own clothes, and crocheted toys for us. She lived as if she didn’t have much, even when she was comfortably middle class. Some of that rubbed off on me.

But along with being cautious with her funds, she also appreciated what she did have, perhaps because she remembered very clearly not having much at all. No store-bought toys. One chicken for nine people. The stories she told involved people, not things.

So when I think of her living through a quarantine in a pandemic, and I try to imagine what she would have done, I don’t have to look too far. As I walk the dogs around our neighborhood and chat with neighbors, I am following my genetic directive. When I text and zoom and email friends to stay in touch, I’m reminded of how Dad set up a special chair for her to talk on the phone. I send out greeting cards to friends in far-flung places, and I remember the drawer she had full of cards for all occasions and the long list of holiday card recipients.

And I think despite having more in common with my dad, mom left her mark on me in many ways. She would have hunkered down during a quarantine and done whatever it took to keep her family safe. She would have kept people distracted with stories and games. She would have been delighted but flummoxed by video chat. And there’s no way in hell she’d have run out of toilet paper.

Stay safe out there, my friends.

Living

Wending, Winding, Wandering

Alison BakerLeave a comment

I have rediscovered how delightful it is to go for a walk.

I turn on my Runkeeper app and head out, clocking my time, my distance, and my pace, and nodding sheepishly if I’m near another person when my phone squawks out my progress report.

We take for granted the things we do with little effort, but I’ve been reading Shane O’Mara’s new book, In Praise of Walking, and he points out how much neurological and physiological energy go in to walking, and that and my six-year old sense of wonder have me heading out a couple times a week on treks with no destination other than the distance covered before I get back.

O’Mara’s book is wonderful, and I recommend it. He’s a neuroscientist, so he talks about the systems involved in walking—our muscles and skeletal system are working, of course, but so are our senses and our vestibular system (responsible for balance). This book is about more than neuroscience, though. It’s an apology for walking as of benefit to our bodies, our minds, and even our social lives. It argues that walking is not only fundamental for humans, evolutionarily speaking; it is unique. That got my attention.

So I’ve started walking with purpose again. I live in a hilly suburb with lots of trees, and I work on a university campus that used to be an Arabian horse ranch. Both offer lovely walking. I just have to get up and do it.

Some people grab their dogs and go for a brisk walk. We, however, have a Basset Hound. There is nothing brisk about his cadence except in the distance between the couch and the refrigerator. But he needs to be walked. I just don’t count the saunter as proper exercise. For a real walk, the heart-pumping, sensory experience O’Mara recommends, one must not be walking a Basset.

Twice a week, then, I’ve started going for a solo walk, to rediscover my brisk pace and reap some of these walking benefits. It’s great. It’s really great. Although when I walk alone, I’ve discovered I free my inner six-year old. If it’s not the Basset slowing me down, it’s the Beauty.

The world is so beautiful. When I’m walking and not trying to drag a dog or keep up a conversation, I’m noticing every bird song, every elegant line in a building, every flower and tree blooming and growing and dying, and it’s all lovely. I’ve seen plenty of trees; these are not novel things. But when your only purpose is to go and be going, you have license to notice everything and give it all your attention. And when you do that, or at least when I do, you become captivated by color and sound—by the world—in a more dynamic, invigorating way than when you just see it presented on television or through a window.

Audrey Hepburn’s Sabrina learned to be “in the world and of the world,” and that is how I feel on a walk. Shane O’Mara says “You’re not built from the soles of your feet up—it’s more like your head is a ‘castle in the air’, with scaffolding reaching down to the ground” (64). All of that scaffolding is trundling up hills and through intersections and feeling the contours and textures of the world, while I take in the light reflecting off surfaces and the rustle of spring flowers in the wind.

There’s a long history of people praising walking as a balm for the body and mind. Charles Dickens walked the street of London in the evenings, listening to people and gathering story material. Friedrich Nietzsche sorted all his many thoughts on long walks. Recently there has been fresh attention to the mental boost a walk can give, either for clarity or creativity. They all seem right to me as I tool around, trying to break my last record without breaking my neck gawking at the architecture.

Reading · Teaching

Primary and Secondary Epics, or Why Virgil is Harder than Homer

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Primary vs. Secondary Epics, or why students have more trouble with the Aeneid than the Odyssey

My students finished the Odyssey last week. I think it went well. We had good talks about all the things—from the mythic underpinnings to the historical details to the glory of oral formulae and the imagistic delights of the epic simile. (They found the animal similes charming—Odysseus as lion, as octopus… I still prefer Odysseus imaged as a sausage rolling in a pan, close to bursting.) We even discussed translation issues, and the fact that class issues are not obscured in Emily Wilson’s new translation—slave status was clearer than ever.

And we wrapped up, thinking this old tale is still beautiful, provocative, useful, and relevant. Mission accomplished.

Then we started Virgil’s Aeneid. And many of them balked.

It’s harder to read. They feel like they’re missing something. It’s so dense. And they’re absolutely right.

The Odyssey is a primary epic. Even though we pin our hopes on someone named Homer, it doesn’t feel authored. It feels straightforward, accumulative, formulaic, inevitable. It feels like it has been composed orally, around hundreds of hearths. It reads quickly, and it’s full of action. Everyone felt able to comment because it invites everyone inside. It builds its lessons by comparing examples of how to treat guests, for instance.  

The Aeneid, in contrast, is VERY authored. Commissioned by Augustus Caesar to give weight to the destiny of Rome, this story follows the Trojan survivor, Aeneas, on a comparable path through the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas, but continues on to the west coast of Italy, where he will found the city of Rome. The content is comparable, but everything else is different.

First, Virgil has a commission. He’s writing for the emperor—the most glorious audience, about the origins of Rome—the most glorious of subjects. So he’d better make it sound glorious. He does. But what makes a poem glorious can also make it difficult. He uses elevated language; he relies on his audience for allusions he makes to other texts and myths; he weaves in subtext about the possible collateral damage on the way to Rome. Especially for the protagonist, Aeneas, the founding of Rome must take precedence over anything he might want for his personal life—a happy second marriage in Carthage, for instance.

So we have a lot to unpack that we didn’t when reading The Odyssey. The poem begins, for instance, with Juno raging about Aeneas’s relative success. It summarizes neatly three main reasons Juno despises Aeneas. (Trojans have spurned her beauty and taken her daughter’s job, not to mention the fact that Trojan-founded Rome is destined to overthrow her cherished Carthage in the Punic Wars.) Virgil expects that his audience is familiar all these intertexts, and that they know the history of Troy and its many founders, and all the variant names of Roman gods. Spoiler alert: we don’t.

This means the first day of the Aeneid discussion was more literary and history lecture than most. It was more damage control and me assuring them that it was a really good story, worth the time to sink in to. Fortunately, there’s plenty to appeal. All I have to do (with any text, really) is show them where to look.

What you gain with an author over a folk composition is detail. Virgil details scenes and the emotions they evoke with painstaking, breathtaking precision. When the old Trojan king, Priam, dies at the hands of Achilles’s son, all the pathos of the young, disrespectful thug desecrating the sacred altar of the Trojan gods bring one to tears:

                “…he dragged him to the very altar stone,
                with Priam shuddering and slipping in
                the blood that streamed from his own son. And Pyrrhus
                with his left hand clutched tight the hair of Priam;
                his right hand drew his glistening blade, and then
                he buried it hilt-high in the king’s side.
                This was the end of Priam’s destinies.” (Aeneid II. 738-43)

And when Dido falls in love with Aeneas, tempting him to linger in Carthage, his divine mandate to leave and get back to his destiny makes Dido desperate, and she lashes out at him:

“Deceiver, did you even hope to hide
so harsh a crime, to leave this land of mine
without a word? Can nothing hold you back–
neither your love, the hand you pledged, nor even
the cruel death that lies in wait for Dido?” (IV. 410-14)

She vacillates between outrage and despair, and she sounds at once timeless and current–psychologically real. That’s what an author adds that oral formulae don’t achieve. These characters pulse and bleed. We feel we know them. The emotions  they feel are real and immediate; we feel with them.

So it may take a little longer to get in to, but when we do, all will be well. Authored texts offer different experiences, and they’re usually the kind that English majors respond well to—ones where we can talk about how knowledge of the culture and the author add to our understanding. Folk texts are not less cool, with their archetypes and patterns and regional “flavors.” But they are different. It depends on whether you’re in the mood to read about “Jack” or Jay Gatsby. You get to choose.

Except when it’s assigned for a class. Then you read what is assigned. Yes, there will be a quiz.