Macbeth's Twist on Nihilism

When rereading Macbeth recently, the first thing that jumped out at me was Macbeth’s imp of the perverse (previous post). The second was Macbeth’s nihilism, which appears early in the play and increases as his doom draws near. Yet the nihilism in Macbeth is no mere dismal pronouncement of life’s meaninglessness.

Surely this celebrated soliloquy is one of the finest nihilistic statements in all of literature:

     Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

     Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
     To the last syllable of recorded time,
     And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
     The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.
     Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
     That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
     And then is heard no more. It is a tale
     Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
     Signifying nothing.

From the Orson Welles film adaptation:

 

By this point, Macbeth’s life has completely fallen apart. Having attained the throne through murder, he finds himself a despised tyrant holed up in his castle and going mad. His wife and co-conspirator, Lady Macbeth, has committed suicide and he fears his own end draws near. He has played his part, and poorly, and now the curtain falls and he asks, as we all must, “What was the point?”

But here comes the twist. No sooner has Macbeth finished speaking than he learns an army approaches. His clock is up, but instead of further bewailing the dumb machinery of fate, he rouses himself to meet this final challenge on the battlefield:

     I gin to be aweary of the sun,

     And wish the estate o’ the world were now undone.
     Ring the alarum bell! Blow wind! Come, wrack!
     At least we’ll die with harness on our back.

Macbeth’s response to the meaninglessness of the universe is to create meaning through action. This is the kind of nihilism I like, positive nihilism, nihilism which says, along with Nietzsche, “Okay fine, so the universe itself doesn’t hold meaning, then I’ll give it meaning!” This is the heroic tenor par excellence, and indeed these four lines from Macbeth ring like passages from Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses”:

     Death closes all: but something ere the end,

     Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
     Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

And this:

     Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

     We are not now that strength which in old days
     Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
     One equal temper of heroic hearts,
     Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
     To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Macbeth and Ulysses, murderer and hero, may not be that dissimilar. In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom quotes Nietzsche from Daybreak. In characteristic fashion, the philosopher denies the conventional moralistic reading of Macbeth in favor of something bolder and more life-affirming:

He who is really possessed by raging ambition beholds this its image with joy, and if the hero perishes by his passion this precisely is the sharpest spice in the hot draught of this joy. . . . How royally, and not at all like a rogue, does [Shakespeare’s] ambitious man pursue his course from the moment of his great crime!

This is a tempting interpretation of Macbeth, but let’s face it, it has problems. Macbeth’s pursuit of his course is very much like a rogue’s. He murders his guest and king while he sleeps. Then he hires common cutthroats to kill his dearest friend and friend’s son. I’m judging by conventional standards of morality, but if Macbeth’s behavior isn’t roguish, I don’t know what is. Although Macbeth does begin to stir earlier, it is only after all is lost that he exhibits anything I would say resembles Ulysses’ valiance.

Or rather, exhibits it again. Several lines in Macbeth make it clear that Macbeth was once a good man, a loyal servant to his king, and one hell of a fighter. According to Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare, the historical Macbeth, who lived from 1040 to 1057, was also a better man than we see throughout most of the play. According to custom in nascent Scotland, there were legitimate reasons for rebelling against one’s king. Macbeth may have felt Duncan was too soft for protecting the land against invasion. Or Lady Macbeth may have had a blood feud with him. In Asimov’s words:

If Macbeth, encouraged by his wife, aspired to the throne, he did so in the approved Scottish fashion of the time. He raised an army and rebelled.

But this is the genius of Shakespeare. Many of Shakespeare’s works can be read numerous ways, the thrust changing with each director, actor and viewer. Henry V has been played as pro-war and anti-war. Coriolanus is either one of Shakespeare’s best or worst. The introduction to my copy of Julius Caesar says that Shakespeare did not try to settle the debate about whether Caesar was a hero or a tyrant and his assassins heroes or villains. Shakespeare raises questions but only toys with answers.

And so it goes with Macbeth. Does the Scottish king’s nihilism reject or affirm life? I’ve provided some thoughts on the matter, but the only way you can answer that question is by engaging with the text yourself.

 

 

Other posts on Shakespeare:

The Imp of Macbeth's Perverse

Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream (and Baltar in Battlestar Galactica)

Who Would Win a Fight Between Hamlet and Coriolanus?

 

 

The Imp of Macbeth's Perverse

 Whenever I approach a text, I’m less interested in what critics tell me I should get out of it than I am in what simply fascinates me about it. This is the authentic experience of a work of art, a meeting of two spirits, one within the reader and the other within the text. One such point of fascination for me when rereading Macbeth recently was the main character’s imp of the perverse.

The imp of the perverse is an expression that comes from Edgar Allan Poe’s story of that name. The story is narrated by a man in prison who murdered someone and then could not subdue an irresistible urge to confess it. He did these things precisely because he knew he should not. Furthermore, he insists that everyone has these urges:  

With certain minds, under certain conditions, it becomes absolutely irresistible. I am not more certain that I breathe, than that the assurance of the wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us, and alone impels us to its prosecution.

Macbeth and Lady Macbeth demonstrate exactly this weakness. They cannot stop themselves from their crimes, and afterward cannot refrain from divulging them. In Lady Macbeth’s case, her weakness comes from a mental breakdown, whereas Macbeth himself, despite hallucinations and wild raving, maintains a slight grip on sanity. Nonetheless, he just . . . can’t seem . . . to stop himself. And the result is a lot of trouble. Having gained the throne of Scotland through murder, he can’t enjoy it, for his secret is out and he worries it will lead to his doom:

     We have scorched the snake, not killed it.
     She'll close and be herself, whilst our poor malice
     Remains in danger of her former tooth. 

On the surface, we may view the witches’ magic as driving Macbeth’s fate, but they are also representative of a force within Macbeth himself: his imp of the perverse. For this reason, I always feel sorry for Macbeth. He can’t hold back from his evil deeds and suffers as a result. Are we not all like this? Do not our personal failings frequently steer us into trouble? Even worse, we can tell ourselves, “You do not want to do that,” all the while knowing we will do exactly that. It’s as if there is a little demon inside driving our actions.

In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom raises Nietzsche and Freud as subsequent thinkers who also believed that “we are lived, thought, and willed by forces not ourselves,” and certainly thinkers have long seen this externality to our very selves as the essence of being human. I think of the transcendental philosophers of the Enlightenment, as well as Heidegger and his concept of Dasein. Human beings are distinguished by their ability to step back from and look at themselves, and even to step back and look at themselves looking at themselves. In that light, the imp of the perverse is merely a term for a mischievous aspect of our innermost nature that acts independently of our conscious control.  

Shakespeare is full of protagonists with this problem. Like Macbeth, Hamlet sees a ghost that may be of his own imagination, and his fitful response lays waste around him, eventually leading to his own death. Romeo and Juliet’s drives are obviously hormonal and lead to self-immolation. Coriolanus is an interesting twist on the theme, for he willingly follows his nature to his doom. In fact, he insists on it, and this very stubbornness is part of his imp.

There are many reasons to read Shakespeare, but his insight into human nature is the most compelling. He wasn’t the first to present audiences with the dual nature of their species (surely examples can be found stretching back to antiquity), but he was able to do it in a way that has mesmerized audiences for centuries and will continue for centuries more. If you haven’t already seen the latest screen version of Macbeth, I recommend you watch it. And when you do, keep your eyes open for the character unlisted in either the dramatis personae or the credits:

The imp of Macbeth’s perverse.

 

 

Other posts on Shakespeare:

Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream (and Baltar in Battlestar Galactica)
Who Would Win a Fight Between Hamlet and Coriolanus?

The Ancients' Guide to Love and Sex in the 21st Century

 

"Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come"

--Shakespeare, Sonnet CXVI

Plato’s Symposium opens with some Athenian luminaries attending a banquet at the tragic poet Agathon’s place. The gathering begins with everyone agreeing not to drink and ends in drunken revelry. In between, the attendees deliver speeches in praise of love, the finest of them by none other than Socrates himself. I don’t intend to offer my own encomium to love here, but I do have some thoughts on the speeches in the dialogue.

A krater depicting a symposium. I took this photo a few years ago at an exhibit of ancient Mediterranean pottery at San Francisco Airport. From my notes: Symposia were male drinking parties. Wives were excluded, but hetairai (courtesans) were welcome. Music, dancing, games and "erotic activity" were also part of symposia.

PHAEDRUS

What I find most interesting about Phaedrus’ speech is his use of the word lover. Today when we use the word lover, we usually think of one of two in a mutual romantic relationship. A close look at Phaedrus’ speech, however, shows a subtle difference. He uses the word lover to mean one who is in love with another, with reciprocity common but unnecessary. When he makes an example of Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad, he admits Achilles’ love for Patroclus, but also makes a distinction between lover and beloved:

Very different was the reward of the true love of Achilles towards his lover Patroclus—his lover and not his love (the notion that Patroclus was the beloved one is a foolish error into which Aeschylus has fallen, for Achilles was surely the fairer of the two.

Perhaps I like this distinction on a rational level because it suggests one of the key points in the dialogue, that love is by the inferior for the superior. I decided to reread the Symposium because of references to it in Saul Bellow’s novel Ravelstein. In the novel, the narrator and titular character love each other as friends, but the narrator goes to great lengths to show that Ravelstein is the superior of the two, and thus the narrator’s devotion.

Or perhaps Phaedrus’ use of lover simply appeals to me because it allows for praise of unrequited lovers, who seek to be more virtuous and thereby win their beloved’s approval. The plight of one who moons over someone one-sidedly--a situation to which I’m no stranger--seems less unseemly when granted classical gravitas.

PAUSANIAS

Pausanias makes a distinction between high and low love:

Evil is the vulgar lover who loves the body rather than the soul, inasmuch as he is not even stable, because he loves a thing which is in itself unstable, and therefore when the bloom of youth which he was desiring is over, he takes wing and flies away, in spite of all his words and promises; whereas the love of the noble disposition is life-long, for it becomes one with the everlasting.

Judging by the jests they trade, Agathon and company have no small amount of appreciation for comely youths, so they would likely understand our modern obsession with sex, but Pausanias makes the commonplace assertion that when truly in love, you find something more in your partner. In wedding speeches and Facebook posts, husbands and wives are always talking about how “kind, caring and sweet” their partners are. This is something like that, but given how much time the great philosophers of ancient Greece spent pondering the “noble disposition,” I think Pausanias has in mind something higher than mere niceness.

But that’s for Socrates to elucidate. First, the playwright Aristophanes--of Lysistrata and Chiraq fame--makes a speech, but only after having overcome a bout of the “hiccough.”

ARISTOPHANES

Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein makes much of the sex myth in Aristophanes’ speech. The idea is that far in humanity’s past, man and woman were one being, but together they were so strong that Zeus found it necessary to weaken them by separating them. Severed from one another and finding themselves incomplete, men and women each yearned desperately for completion. Taking pity on them, Zeus provided a way for them to rejoin through love and sex. However, this was not limited to opposite-sex couples:

…or if man came to man they might be satisfied, and rest, and go their ways to the business of life: so ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man.

Certainly there is poetry in this, and I used to view the search for love in this way. A good mate fills a hole inside, completes you, shines light in your darkness. Nowadays, however, I’m more inclined to see the search for “the one” in Lacanian terms. Everyone has a hole inside that is part of their psyche and can never be filled. Two people just means two holes. Thus, Lacan says that sex--seen as the ultimate fulfillment of two individuals each in the other--is impossible (previous post).

But Aristophanes’ myth, usually deployed for its picture of two individuals coming together in perfect harmony, could also be seen as explaining the very separation described by Lacan. And even Lacan didn’t mean to say that all hope was lost. While ultimate satisfaction isn’t possible, we can’t help but search for it, and the search has its own rewards.

SOCRATES

When it’s his turn, Socrates says that love is always of the beautiful, which is the good, and one who gains the good gains happiness. Since the good for Plato is the Form by which all other forms are known, love is nothing less than a vehicle to a higher state of being:

And the true order . . . is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is. This . . . is that life above all others which man should live, in the contemplation of beauty absolute.

By now we are talking about love of abstracts, of truth. Socrates typifies this latter type of love more than any other figure in the ancient world, while the love he shares with statesman and general Alcibiades--a love characterized by mutual respect and chaste nights cuddling under a blanket--represents a higher type of love between two individuals.

Does anyone experience the higher forms of love anymore? Chaste romantic relationships do exist--just ask Colin Farrell about Elizabeth Taylor--and if all my time on Twitter has taught me anything, it is that the world is full of people passionate about ideas, art and knowledge. But whatever form love takes, Socrates would tell us to do it as best we can so it makes us better people.

Socrates Seeking Alcibiades in the House of Aspasia, Jean-Léon Gérôme.

 

Previous posts mentioning Plato:

Have a Holly Jolly (and Consumerist yet Discerning) Christmas

The Philosophy of Zombie Strippers

 

A Brief Line of Inquiry: The Sixties

When Jefferson Airplane appeared on American Bandstand in 1967, Dick Clark’s questions addressed the Sixties counterculture’s challenge to social norms. The band’s answers are brief but interesting, and one in particular got me to thinking: How should we judge the Sixties?

 

I especially like this part:

Dick Clark: Older people worry, they see the way you’re dressed, they hear your music, they don’t understand. Do parents have anything to worry about?

Paul Kantner: I think so. Their children are doing things that they didn’t do, and they don’t understand it.

Kantner’s answer evokes a vision of Sixties rebellion, a vision that runs deeper than slogans like “love and peace,” a vision that marks an event (previous post), a vision that destroys an old order so it can open new possibilities, an emancipatory vision. You know that society that we’re always talking about, the one at the heart of the culture wars, the one where everyone is free to explore their potential, broaden their minds and project themselves freely regardless of race, creed, gender, sexual orientation and so forth? Well, that’s what they had in mind.

When I was growing up, the Sixties were a big topic and the attitude was generally positive. The Baby Boomers had come to run the show and were looking back at their youth. Enough time had passed to make the media interested in a retrospective. Golden oldies radio stations abounded and parents lectured their children about how superior the music had been back in the day. Pundits embraced the hippies’ vision as sincere if nothing else, discussed Camelot in tones by turns reverential and scandalized, and debated and redebated the Vietnam War. Everyone knew the Sixties weren’t all good, but let it be known those years had some substance.

However, the Sixties had already proven a bit of a disappointment. As a kid, nothing could bore me more than The Big Chill or Thirtysomething, and to this day I’ve never watched much of either, but my impression was always of Boomers gaining weight, getting divorced, and finding themselves lost after the promise of the Sixties had vanished. One year, they were poking daisies in the barrels of rifles held by National Guardsmen, smoking weed and making free love. A blink of an eye later and they were crunching numbers in cubicles, failing to lose weight, and fighting with exes over the kids.

Jefferson Airplane provides a good example. When Kantner and some other members of the group went on to form Jefferson Starship, a legal squabble over the name ensued. That's hardly the Woodstock spirit. And in her autobiography Somebody to Love?, Grace Slick herself describes her participation in Starship (yet a third band) as selling out. And as much as I love Starship, its music is all Mannequin while Jefferson Airplane’s lyrics sound more like a rant from the firebrand Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (previous post):

     We are forces of chaos and anarchy

     Everything they say we are we are

     And we are very proud of ourselves

     Up against the wall

     Up against the wall motherfucker

     Tear down the walls

          --“We Can Be Together,” Jefferson Airplane.

A 1970 performance:

 

Critics say the Sixties counterculture warriors were supposed to “tear down the walls,” but instead they caved on their ideals and became yet another generation of stiffs, the generation that created a good number of the messes facing the world today and continues to stand in the way of fixing them.

Allan Bloom offered scathing criticism in his book The Closing of the American Mind (1987). According to him, student protesters in the Sixties were a bunch of improperly educated, uncultured rowdies trying to disguise skipping school and taunting their elders as fighting for justice. When universities began caving to their demands, it was like adults ceding authority to children.

Much about Bloom’s criticism is ludicrous--like his running comparison of student protesters with Nazis--but is there not a hint of juvenile attitude in Jefferson Airplane’s interview with Dick Clark? The band members exchange glances and snicker like kids allowed to hang out with the adults, or like high schoolers smug over a prank in class. This suggests that the vision out of San Francisco may have been little more than hijinks. In retrospect, might we not see in this an indication of the movement’s quick demise?

So how should we judge the Sixties?

The answer is obvious: We need not judge any decade as wholly good or bad. The times deserve a full exploration in their complexity. This inquiry is one I will continue, but at the moment I feel that while the aspirations of the Sixties were a dream that has ended, that dream has not been forgotten and thus still holds potential. Perhaps, looking back to the Sixties for inspiration, we can still do what our forbearers didn’t, and in so doing take the world, if not to utopia, then at least a step closer.

 

A Few Quick Words on David Bowie’s Blackstar

Note: I wrote this post earlier today on the spur of the moment. When I came back to post it tonight, I read the news that David Bowie had just passed away due to cancer. Now I wish I had said something more significant, but I’m posting this in its original form anyway. The world has just lost another of its great voices, and this loss hits hard.
 
David Bowie’s first studio album appeared in 1967 and 49 years later we have his twenty-fifth. Fans and critics are hailing Blackstar as some of his finest work, and this not quite three years after The Next Day won similar acclaim. As an on-and-off-and-on-again Bowie fan since his Tin Machine days, I was quick to download Blackstar.

Yes, I had good taste even in 1989 when Tin Machine’s first album came out, just not good enough taste to know who David Bowie was apart from Tin Machine. I didn’t really get into David Bowie until I ran across the three-disc version of Bowie at the Beeb, which includes a number of BBC Radio sessions from 1968 to 1972, plus a concert from 2000. The earlier recordings capture Bowie as an affable and earnest young man with one leg in Dylanesque folk music. This Bowie was more approachable for me than his later more wacked-out material, but it got me headed in that direction.

The rest of Bowie’s career would see the rise of Ziggy Stardust and any number of personas and musical styles that I’ll probably never be able to fully explore. The changes can be frustrating since one album is often completely different from the next, making it difficult for listeners to find their footing, and leaving new listeners without a clear place to start. For those with patience and intrepidity, however, there is always something incredible to discover. Some of my favorite Bowie, for example, is on the 2002 release Heathen:

 

And now there’s Blackstar. I’m still getting to know it, but here’s an early impression. It’s dark and digital, raw and electronic, jazzy and rocking, strange and melodic, and filthy and funny, with many songs weaving among these characteristics with a fluidity that is sometimes missing from the more experimental Bowie. Much of “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” for example, is a blend of slewing saxophone and guitar solos with a smooth drum beat as Bowie repeats the words of the song’s title, drawing them out mournfully. It’s an unusual noodle of a song, but the results are eminently listenable.

The first single is a good summary of Blackstar’s mood, but perhaps a little on the album's darker side:

 

I suppose that video could be off-putting for some, but I’d encourage anyone to begin their own exploration of Bowie’s music, if they haven't already. Start with Bowie at the Beeb, or The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, or Blackstar, but give it a shot and find the Bowie style that strikes a chord with you. It can be powerful stuff.

Oh, the Blog Posts I'll Never Write! Part 2

Back in August of last year, I tried to initiate a slowdown of my blog, but it didn’t go so well, so I’m trying again. I need to make time and mental space for other things, including other writing, so The Gleaming Sword must retreat into a corner. However, once an idea grabs ahold, I can’t move on until I get it out, so this is another attempt to spit out some quick summaries of ideas I've been kicking around.


In Defense of the Star Wars Prequels

J.J. Abrams has given the people what they wanted. Star Wars: The Force Awakens has been a success among critics and fans, and as a lifelong fan myself, I too found it immensely satisfying. However, it also reminded me of what I loved about the prequels.

Many said Episodes I through III just didn’t feel like the first movies. With its goofy aliens, slapstick humor, and even scatological humor, The Phantom Menace was childish. Attack of the Clones subjected us to a dorky adolescent romance that actually included frolicking in a field. Then Revenge of the Sith was daaark. However, I always saw this as part of George Lucas’s genius. He was clearly more interested in grooming a younger generation that would carry the franchise through the coming decades than he was in pleasing the original trilogy’s older fans, and it worked.

The subsequent changes in tone match Anakin as a maturing character on his way through all the usual life changes, plus some truly awful ones as he becomes a Sith Lord. Meanwhile, Lucas’s new audience was also growing up, perhaps not as quickly, but quickly enough for many to identify with the changing themes of the series. This is a metalevel to the films that fascinates me.

I also liked the epic nature of the prequels, which many considered too complicated. Whereas Episodes IV through VI focused on the adventures of a ragtag band of rebels, the prequels paint on a broader canvas that includes political intrigue and massive military campaigns actuating change on a galaxy-historical scale. Throw in the usual mythological themes, only amped up, and the prequels take the radio-serial style of the original movies and enlarge it to the scale of a Wagnerian cycle.

 

The Force Awakens, on the other hand, comes off very much like a film of its time. It’s a very good one, but there must be other viewers out there who feel something is missing, namely George Lucas’s vision and style.

 

On Feminisms

In Modernism and Nihilism, Shane Weller argues that instead of one single philosophy of nihilism, there are many, sometimes conflicting, nihilisms plural. While reading the shojo manga Revolutionary Girl Utena the other day, it occurred to me that we would benefit from viewing feminism the same way.

In one spectacular sequence in the manga, Utena is playing basketball against the boys and beating them as a series of captions states her philosophy:

“I want to be a prince. A prince is much better than a princess, who needs protection.”

Accordingly, Utena dresses like a boy, uses a masculine first person pronoun for herself, and is confident and physically fit. Later, when she joins an order whose members follow a mysterious code from beyond, she rescues a peer from an abusive relationship and assumes a strong position within the group. When she was a child, a typical handsome “prince” saved her, but at least as of Volume 1, there are suggestions that she herself is, in some magical way, her own hero. The male characters’ only chance of holding their own against her lies in treating her as an equal.

 

This is one style of feminism with roots that go back much further than the Nineties, when Utena was published. It is the feminism of Princess Leia in A New Hope (1976), who talks back to Sith Lords, greets her rescuer with sarcasm, and snatches a blaster from a space pirate so she can shoot her way to freedom. It’s the feminism of Greta Garbo in Queen Christina (1933), determined to walk and talk like a man but accept no man as master (previous post). Both Utena and Queen Christina further their gender-bending with an affection for women that hints at the romantic and sexual.

This style of feminism reminds me of statements by Camille Paglia in Vamps & Tramps. Paglia writes that what she and other feminists in the Sixties wanted was to do what men were doing, so they went out and did it, accepting the risks and responsibility. Paglia has nothing but scorn for feminism that turns victimhood into an occupation. Reading Utena, I couldn’t help but see how different Utena’s pursuit of “strength” and “nobility” is from hyperfeminism online’s whining and bullying.

General education teaches us about the suffragists of the late 19th and early 20th-Centuries and the Sexual Revolution of the Sixties and Seventies. Many remember how feminists in the Eighties were often portrayed as bra-burning, butch, man-hating radicals. I remember reading around the turn of the millennium how feminism had softened to embrace women who wanted to be powerful but also feminine. Now, Third Wave feminism is inescapable and anyone active online is bound to have run across terms like third world feminism and first world feminism.

Thus, feminisms plural isn’t a hard idea to grasp, but learning to be mindful of it and speak accordingly is harder. Yet I’m convinced that more of us doing so would help the current debate about feminism be more productive. I’m always saddened by the discourse of people who appear to feel feminism is one thing to be championed or rejected whole. We might find ourselves agreeing more if we were specific about exactly which of the many feminisms we are praising or condemning.

 

Hermann Hesse’s Demian and Jungian Psychoanalysis

The first time I read Hermann Hesse’s novel Demian, I didn’t know who Carl Jung was. When I dug out an old paperback recently and reread it, I realized it’s informed by more than a little psychoanalysis, and the mystical tone suggests Jung over other theorists.

 

Demian tells of Emil Sinclair’s process of developing his true self, a process Jung calls individuation. An interesting cast of characters aids this process, from his childhood enemy Franz Kromer, to his spiritual teacher Pistorius, his close friend Max Demian, and Demian’s mother Eva. Some or all of these represent psychoanalytic concepts. Is Demian Emil’s Shadow? Is Eva his anima? Are they all psychopomps?

But all I have are intimations of hypotheses that need to be tested by rereading Demian and brushing up on my Jung, and I don’t have the time. Oh, I could Google what I want to know, but this is a train of thought I would prefer to flesh out for myself. Like my planned series of posts on Joseph Conrad, maybe I will someday.

I can tell already that these summaries aren’t going to satisfy me, but 2016 calls for a break with old lines of thought so I can pursue new ones.

 

 

Adventures of a Cultural Omnivore: 2015

Each December, I try to put up a post on the best media I encountered throughout the year. This year, my omnivorous appetite for culture concentrated on music more than anything, but I did all right in other categories as well.

 

Books

I didn’t neglect fantasy (George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire) or science fiction (Warhammer 40K), but as usual, the classics made the biggest impression. Joseph Conrad’s portrayal of the British Empire in Heart of Darkness connected in my mind with W.E.B. Du Bois’s comments on colonialism and racism in “The Souls of White Folk,” and I almost got around to a whole series of posts on it (previous post). Honorable mentions would include Franz Kafka’s The Trial, for its absurdist take on the workings of bureaucracy, and Hemingway’s Men Without Women. Every time I read Hemingway, I wonder why, if he had such an impact on English style, more authors don’t write like he did.

 

Comics

I would recommend He-Man and the Masters of the Universe from DC Comics to anyone who enjoys fantasy, and I would highly recommend Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham’s run on Miracleman from the Nineties, now being brought to digital format by Marvel. However, nothing could top Ms. Marvel this year.

Kamala Khan is a Pakistani-American high school girl and a Muslim. After a weird gas gives her the ability to stretch her body, she starts fighting Jersey City’s bad guys and, completely without permission, adopts the name Ms. Marvel, which once belonged to her idol Carol Danvers, currently known as Captain Marvel. For her costume, she redesigns a burkini.

 

 

Kamala gained a lot of press as DC’s first Muslim character with her own title, and her cultural and ethnic background is important, but she’s also just a high school girl running the teenage gauntlet and trying to figure out who she wants to be--and it isn’t anybody but herself. She doesn’t have her parents’ roots in Pakistani culture, she isn’t as religious as her brother, and she isn’t like the other kids at her typical American school either. She has squabbles with peers and falls in and out of love and is painfully self-conscious and unsure of herself.

Literature is full of cookie-cutter caricatures along those lines, but writer G. Willow Wilson brings Kamala to life in ways that resonate across cultural and generational divides, and Adrian Alphona’s art is unique, effective, and frequently hilarious. Together, the two serve up everything from typical superhero exploits to tear-jerking drama--and at least one moment among the most powerful I’ve ever read.

Early in Volume 1, Kamala’s powers are fluctuating wildly and she suddenly finds she has transformed to look exactly like her hero Captain Marvel, a classic buxom blond beauty whom Kamala sees as perfect. But a mere 23 pages into the series, I had already come to understand and care about Kamala so strongly that I only wanted her to be who she is--a short, sometimes clumsy brown-skinned girl with unruly black hair. That’s part of her beauty, and watching her turn white felt wrong, wrong, wrong.

 

 

I was so impressed by Kamala Khan, and have been so unimpressed with most of the 2016 presidential candidates, that I even whipped up a couple memes featuring her. Nothing mind-blowing, but feel free to share:

 

I love it when she embiggens her fists:

 

Movies

Early in the year, I continued a stretch of films from director Jean-Luc Godard. Then after my son started leaving the house each day for kindergarten, I was actually able to hit the movie theater every now and then! Spectre and Star Wars: The Force Awakens were both excellent, but it was Mad Max: Fury Road that inspired me most. The result was a series of blog posts examining the movie from the perspectives of feminism, Christian myth, and Marxism:

     Mad Max Feminista

     Jennifer Blood Feminista
     Mad Max: Of Hawks and Doves
     Mad Max: Out of Eden
     Mad Marx: Frederick Road

 

Television

I also found the time--I have no idea how--to watch more TV this year. Penny Dreadful and Outlander were entertaining, while Supergirl was just the fluff I was looking for. The show has problems, but Melissa Benoist isn’t one of them. She’s fairly wonderful, and watching her deal with her life as Kara Danvers is one of the highlights of the series. Meanwhile, Game of Thrones continues to engross and Syfy appears to have a quality space opera in The Expanse. However, Mad Men really was the best show on television, and the question needs to be asked: Has there ever been a better show on television?

 

Video Games

The only video game I played this year, aside from a little Relic Run (Tomb Raider) on my iPhone, was Silent Hill: Downpour. I felt like it was a return to form for home console games in the series, after Homecoming was so bad GameStop salespersons encouraged me not to buy it. I should have listened. Downpour doesn’t try to break or even bend the template for Silent Hill, it just tries to get it right and succeeds.

 

Music

This year, I learned that scores of bands I’ve never heard of are pumping out some incredible metal: Barren Earth, Khemmis, My Dying Bride, Tribulation, Krisiun, Avatarium, Sylosis, Sulphur Aeon. However, the bands that really struck a chord with me this year lay in a completely different direction. One was Siouxsie and the Banshees. I can’t believe I didn’t discover them earlier. They belong in the company of alternative music greats like U2, R.E.M. and The Cure, and you may put “Night Shift” on my list of coolest songs ever:

 

Then one morning I put on some Jefferson Airplane and Grace Slick’s voice in “Somebody to Love” electrified me. Of course I’d heard the song countless times, but this time I really heard it. Now Jefferson Airplane is an obsession. I’m still just wading in, but the water promises to get deep as I explore more of their music and the movement out of San Francisco that they were a part of:

 

And there you have my favorites from 2015. Let me know yours. This cultural omnivore is always looking for something else to eat.

 

Related posts:

Twilight of the Cultural Omnivores
Best in Comics 2014
Best in Music 2014
Best of Books 2014
Best in Movies, Video Games, Comics 2013
Best in Music 2013
Best in Books 2013