Do you ever have a day when you really love what you do for a living?

Today one of my Intro to Drama students gave me a YA novel called Another Faust, which she had inscribed with the following note: "To A, whose course made me want to be an English major (so I could learn more words like 'defenestrate'!)".




Grin.




Hey, not one but TWO Spanish Golden Age plays we read this semester featured defenestrations. (Apparently Madrid, like Scotland and Prague, is a place where you don't want to stand near a window in times of civil unrest.) I told them I didn't get to use the word very often, so I was going to make up for it by using it dozens of times in those classes. And I was as good as my word.

I also appreciated it when the last student out of the exam turned to me and said "I hope Duke sees the results of their hubris next year." 

Double points for Duke-bashing and use of "hubris" (a term ID from the exam).  He had obviously learned the lesson of a whole semester listening to me whine about college basketball and the plight of my beloved Tar Heels.

Bacchic revels and Autographing Jesuses

I have been absent for a while, I know.  In the time since I have last been with you, I have been to California to give a paper at a conference, graded up a storm in preparation for the end of the semester on Tuesday (with miles to go before I sleep), taught endlessly, sat in a state of exquisite tension watching my Tar Heels' progress through the NIT tournament, and tried to ignore the odious Blue Devils' (our archnemeses) progress through (sigh) the NCAA tournament.  It has been quite the psychodrama.

Oh, and I have fallen back into infatuation with Dancing with the Stars (which I continue to dream will one day feature a Tar Heel basketball "Star"), watched the ingeniously low-key and oddly Darwinian Fantastic Mister Fox, failed to hate New Moon on the scale that I was sure I would (is it possible that it is the rare film that is actually at its best on a tiny airplane screen? It gave all the teen melodrama the perfect minute frame.), and thoroughly loved one of the rare Judith Ivory novels I hadn't yet read (Bliss).

~     ~     ~

But back to the conference, which, as it turns out, was fascinating.  Quite the trigger of new ideas.

I saw a paper given by a fight director/historian of stage combat about the Rumble in West Side Story, whose forms he traced back to a variety of Spanish switch-blade fighting called navaja that is (as it turns out) very closely related to flamenco.

The day before, I attended a presentation on a small town in Brazil (Nova Jerusalém) that stages a mammoth quasi-medieval processional drama every year.  It began on quite a humble scale. Eventually, its founders created a "stage" around which the audience could process, with the actor-Christ, through the stations of the cross.  This stage is a third of the size of the original walled city of Old Jerusalem.  Nowadays thousands attend each performance (which has a cast of hundreds), and the starring roles are played by telenovela actors, prompting the New York Times to ask: "Should Jesus sign autographs?".

~     ~     ~

The keynote was a very interesting talk on metatheatre (theatre about theatre), which is my field, so I was filled with delight.  We got into a rollicking debate about the nature of metatheatre in Euripides' The Bacchae, which is often cited as the non-comic origin of metatheatre as a genre (theatrical self-consciousness suffusing every part of the play) rather than a device used every now and then.  Old Comedies, you see, had been flinging their theatricality at their audiences like the embittered stand-up comics they were for years before The Bacchae.

In this, Euripides' last play, the king of Thebes, Pentheus, is disturbed to find that a new religious cult from the East has come to his city and possessed its citizens.  The women of the town, in particular, have been moved to abandon their homes and take to the forest, where they spend their days in a state of ecstatic glee, frolicking amidst the flowers, striking rocks to make streams of wine spring forth from them, and ripping animals into pieces with their bare hands.

Pentheus is particularly annoyed to find that this is the cult of Dionysus, a cousin of his.  Dionysus' mother, Semele, miraculously conceived before she was married.  She claimed that she had lain with Zeus, the king of the gods, in disguise.  The women around her, including her sisters and a woman who is actually Zeus' wife in disguise (those gods like nothing better than a good game of dress-up), mocked her for the feebleness of this lie - clearly she had slept with a mortal man and was attempting to hide it in the most sacrilegious possible way. Or perhaps her lover is only pretending to be a god, and she is just the most gullible woman ever to walk the earth.

Semele begins to feel a bit doubtful.  So she begs her lover to reveal himself in his true form. Reluctantly, he gives in, and when she gazes on him in all his divine glory, she is struck by a lightning bolt and consumed by flame.  Zeus snatches the fetal Dionysus from her burning body.

See?, her sisters (including Pentheus' mother) say, the god struck her down because of the infamy of her claims to divine impregnation.  And that is when the newly-divine god of wine and theatre decides to come to town and teach his female relatives a vengeful lesson about doubting divinity.  He drives them wild with Bacchic ecstasy, taking over their senses almost against their will.  When Pentheus tries to drive the cult out, he lures him back in by saying this: Aren't you at all curious about what the revels of the Bacchae look like?  After all, who knows what those ecstatic women are up to, partying alone up on that mountain?  Don't you just want to take a look?  Well, then, you had better dress up as one of them, so as to avoid attracting attention.

And the next thing Pentheus knows, he is dressed in the slightly feminine robes of Dionysus.  He is an exact double of the god. When he goes up to spy on the Bacchae, his own mother leads the women in ripping him limb from limb.  Metatheatre is a perilous thing.

Much is often made of the idea that acting is represented here as a sacrificial act: the root of the word "tragedy" is a Greek word meaning "goat-song," which seems to speak to the ritual qualities of the Festival of Dionysus where the plays were performed.  Chant a choric ode, sacrifice a goat, perform a tragedy: they are all gifts to the gods.  But the tragedy in particular asks the tragic hero, and the actor who plays him (less often her), to sacrifice himself for the community.  They suffer (and, as characters, often die) as the scapegoat for our common guilt.  So Pentheus becomes the first human actor, the first person to dress up and take the place of the god in the sacrifice, and tragic metatheatre is born.

But equally interesting to me (as I said in the conference discussion) is the way that this is a metatheatre of spectatorship; an exploration of the perils of watching, and a warning to the audience of what they are getting themselves into.  Spectatorship is a kind of gateway drug: "Don't you want to see...", Dionysus says to Pentheus.  And he does, he really really does.  When we hear about something alien or unthinkable or extreme, we can't help but want to see it - why else are we watching The Bacchae?  But look what happens to Pentheus next: he is drawn into the spectacle, not as separate as he would like to think a spectator should be, and the next thing he knows he is a Bacchante, he is Dionysus, he is an actor, he is the sacrifice itself.  Never forget that Dionysus was born out of an act of forbidden spectatorship: please, god, show me your true face, so that I can be sure.

There are consequences to looking on the divinity, and on truth.  Acting is the gods' way of protecting us from the pure extremity of the real, the truth.  Revelation is a variety of punishment.

~     ~     ~

Anyhoo.  A bit bleak, that.

Adaptation was really the topic of the day. During a panel on film and theatre (one of my favorite subjects), we got to talking about the nature of adapting material between the two forms.  Is responsible, thoughtful adaptation (I found myself asking the panel) always a meta-act, because it has to justify the creation of a new artistic artifact in a different genre or form?  Does it always have to say "Here is what film, or the graphic novel, or live performance brings to The Producers / Hamlet / Buffy that the original couldn't offer in its form"?

~     ~     ~

During a talk on reinterpreting Shakespeare, I began to contemplate a new course structure.  Normally I try to cram as much material into the semester as I think my students can handle.  I am a syllabus glutton.  But suddenly I began to consider the opposite strategy - a course in which we covered a single canonical play in extreme, microscopic depth.  It would be called something like "Dissecting and Adapting the Canon."

In the first half of the term, we would work our way through the text (something like Measure for Measure or Oedipus) scene by scene, doing close readings and reading secondary sources on historical questions, different theoretical approaches to the text, etc.  At midterm, instead of an exam, we would have a semi-staged reading of the text with "explanatory notes" on various issues of interest interjected by the students.  It would be open to the university community as a whole, with the intention of making this a regular feature of the department's yearly schedule - something friends could attend, teachers could assign as extra credit, etc.  Performance-as-research. 

The second half of the term would be an extended adaptation project.  We would read theories of adaptation, read and view works influenced by our key text, and, finally, theorize and compose a new work of art that rewrites our original text, but lends it a new form based on the concerns of our particular culture moment.  Not a modernization, but a complete rethinking of the text.  What elements in it speak to us most urgently now, and why?  In place of a final exam, students would hold another staged reading, this time of their own creation.

We will see what happens to this idea after a few years of percolation.

Dark Angel and Lord Carew's Bride

Oh, there are so many unreviewed books building up in drifts in my library, my office, my bedside table.  I worry that if I don't review them in the first flush of having read them, I won't remember anything of wit or importance I have ever had to say about them.  But when I finish a novel (and particularly the rollicking plot- and character-oriented novels I have mostly been reading this year) I feel a profound, addictive need to get deep into another as quickly as possible.  Hence the drifts of books forming sedentary layers of forgottenness about my house - the deeper they are in the pile, the less I can recall about them.  That's nobody's model of responsible readerly behavior.  It is beginning to resemble the bibliophile's equivalent of an opium den around here.

So let's see whether I can't toss off a few reviews every now and then, shall we?

To start with: the two novels I just finished.  Some of Mary Balogh's early (mid-90s) Regency novels are being re-released* by Dell in two-in-one volumes.  The first is this pairing of Dark Angel and Lord Carew's Bride.  I acquired it on the strength of the reputation of the latter, which I had often heard cited as one of Balogh's strongest.  From the other novels of hers I had read, I found her work to be entertaining and consistently strong, without being extraordinary in any way that would urge me to keep it on my shelves.

In Dark Angel, however, she builds up a cast of characters that might be compelling (or at the very least comfortable) enough to draw on my lasting affection.  Jennifer Winwood and her cousin Samantha are coming to town for their first Season, although Jennifer is already all but engaged to the angelically beautiful Lord Lionel Kersey.  I can't help but feel that when a man is praised for his "angelic" beauty in a romance, that is a clear sign that he has a rotting inner life to rival Dorian Gray's.  Certainly if we are told at the beginning of a romance that the heroine is already in love, you can bet her beloved is a rotter. (Exceptions will be made - I say magnanimously - for childhood loves, which are the basis for many of my favorite plots.)  After all, what will the arc of the plot be if the love is a fait accompli, no longer available to be fallen into?

And sure enough, Lionel Kersey is a toad of a human being.  Samantha (the more beautiful and also the more level-headed of the girls) sees through him from the beginning: he is too cold,** she tells her lovestruck cousin.  And Jennifer, enamored though she is, can't seem to get her fiancé (they make the match rather quickly, to the delight of both families - another sign that all is not well with the romance, familial approval) to express any sort of private affection for her.  Is it too bloody much to ask to be kissed by one's betrothed at the age of twenty?, she wonders daily, in somewhat tamer terms.

But meanwhile she is drawn in by the "dark angel" of the title - Gabriel, the Earl of Thornhill, darkly handsome and obviously quite taken with her.  Stay away from him, warns the angry Lord Kersey, he has a reputation that will ruin you.  When she asks what exactly Thornhill has done, Kersey sneers at the ill-breeding that would produce this kind of curiosity.   (Ultimately she does find out: he is accused of impregnating his own step-mother, and then stealing away with her to the continent while his father dies of a broken heart.  Then he, so the story goes, abandons his step-mother and sibling-child to return to England.) We begin to think that Samantha might have been right about the priggish Kersey.

But even as we think this, Lionel Kersey reacts to the increasing closeness of his bride and Thornhill with a maneuver that can only be described as "lashing out romantically" - he maneuvers Samantha into the garden, makes a play for her sympathy, and then kisses her - ignoring the initial violence of her reaction.  The damage is done: at eighteen, and in receipt of her first kiss, she finds herself madly in love with a man she can barely respect.  How could he betray her cousin like this?  Kersey says that the choice of bride was his father's; his own choice (he looks at her meaningfully) would have been very different.  She, to her very great credit, is thrown into a deep ethical swivet by this revelation.  All the more so when he asks her if there isn't anything she could do to help end his engagement.  It wouldn't be honorable for him to do it, you see....

The next novel (Lord Carew's Bride) takes Samantha's story as its subject: after facing heartbreak with Kersey, she remains steadfastly unattached for the next six years, despite the court of devoted male followers who dog her every move.  She feels distinctly solitary, although she would hesitate to call herself "lonely."  One day, while wandering in the countryside on the borders of a friend's estate, she encounters the disabled Hartley Wade, who introduces himself as a landscape gardener.  He is (prepare for a fairly tortured plot device here) reluctant to reveal his true identity as Lord Carew, the owner of the land she is standing on, for fear that she will feel embarrassed by the trespass.  But he is also drawn in by her easy enjoyment of his company - could he have finally found a woman who will love him for himself, rather than for his title?  There is only one way to find out - extended subterfuge!

But when he finally wins her, can he really trust her?  Is she just fleeing the painful love that has scarred her for the last six years?

I will start with two shocking revelations:

First, I know Lionel Kersey is a villain beloved by many, but for me he was the weak point of these books.  He needed to be more ambiguously evil to be truly effective.  We are sure for the whole of both books that he is a turd of a human being, but the heroines are continually lulled into questioning whether he has turned over a new leaf.  Because we are more sure of his villainy than they are, the unevenness of our knowledge causes us to despise them and their naiveté a little bit.   But in fact theirs is the more narratively fascinating belief: being in doubt about the truth of his feelings and intentions would and should have produced an infinitely more complex story than simply fearing what havoc he would wreak next out of pure and motiveless evil.

I am borrowing freely from Coleridge in that last phrase, of course.  The great Romantic poet, in talking about Iago, speaks of the "motive-hunting of motiveless malignity."  It isn't so much that Iago lacks reasons for his villainous actions: you can find them in abundance throughout Othello.  But they all seem either insufficient or excessive to account for his behavior: an over-determination of his disgruntlement (over-determination, in this case, being Academickese for a stance that multiple, perhaps even too many, causes) or a response that could only be classified as over-reaction.  He is motive-hunting: assigning causes to an evil that exceeds and precedes logic.

And this is what the plotting that surrounds Lionel Kersey feels like, albeit with a character whose motiveless evil is distinctly less grand and complex than Iago's.  The reasons for his actions are always muddy, even if you can ultimately tease them into some sort of sense. For instance: if he wanted to break off the engagement by hook (encouraging Samantha to speak to her cousin about their love) or by crook (throwing Jennifer together with Thornhill until her reputation is in tatters), then why does he warn his fiancé to stay away from his scandalous nemesis at the beginning?  Why exactly is he so eager to get rid of her, anyway?  God knows he had no intention of letting his social life be hampered by marriage - everything would have continued (with his at-least-two mistresses, briefly mentioned) much as before.  What is his goal in the game that he and Thornhill (and later, he and Carew) are engaged in?  What is at stake for him?

Admission number two: I liked Dark Angel better than Lord Carew's Bride.  The writing seemed more complex, and the situation slightly more compelling.  And this despite the fact that Dark Angel's premise is infinitely more conventional than LCB's: we are talking the common garden satanic-rake-who-isn't-as-dishonorable-as-everyone-believes vs. the rather unusual unhandsome-recluse-with-serious-physical-disabilities-who-wins-the-heart-of-the-most-beautiful-woman-in-London (why? because they both love sitting in gardens in silence.  How could that have failed to be brilliant and revolutionary?? Seriously!).  Perhaps DA manages to be more compelling because the resolution of the conflict in LCB is fairly swift: one moment there is no trust, and the next there is.  All they really needed, it turned out, was a relaxing hand massage.  Hmm.

But there were also some lovely moments in Dark Angel.   If you live in fear of spoilers, it might be best to stop here because this comes from fairly late in the novel.   The one that struck me most strongly was from the crucial Regency scene - the wedding night.  It is always intriguing to see how authors will communicate this experience which is somehow the essence of alienation from one's own body.  It is complicated for Jennifer by the fact that she is, in fact, forced into marriage with the hero, while still feeling herself to be in love with the villain:

Oh, the reality of it had hit her at that moment.  She was naked on the bed, spread wide, and her body was being used by someone who was not herself.  It belonged to him, to be used for the rest of their lives whenever and however he chose to use it.  She was no longer in possession of her own body or of her own person.  She had felt in that moment all the total and permanent loss of privacy.  Even the inside of her body - there - no longer belonged to her.

In both novels, Balogh repeatedly comes back to the uncomfortable idea that marriage is a matter of bodily ownership - like slavery.  But that is not even the most interesting aspect of this passage for me: I am struck in particular by the idea that the loss of privacy is total and it is permanent - it cannot go by half-measures and it cannot be recovered.  The cynicism and the violation of this scene - which she also enjoyed - is complex and realistic and wrenching.  Both hero and heroine end up crying on their wedding night. And for a romance to grapple with that successfully is quite a feat.

Dark Angel / Lord Carew's Bride
Mary Balogh (Canada, 1994)
*** and **1/2



(Janine of Dear Author has an interesting review up of Dark Angel - she calls Balogh's writing "like my first taste of sushi [...] something unusual, intense, and raw, to which my palate was unaccustomed.")




*There is something shudder-inducingly awful about the double-"re" structure of this verb, and its re-redundancy.
 ** See here the entire cinematic history of painfully beautiful blond men who are cast as villains.  Poor blonds. So misunderstood.