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Dated: Mar 4, 2011
This essay was written in the Spring 2011 semester as part of the Writing The Essay: The World Through Art course at New York University, which is now numbered ASPP-UT 2.
“We are going to try to perform for you today a curious and rather difficult experiment, “ says Leonard Bernstein in his 1954 Omnibus Lecture on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. “We are going to take the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and rewrite it.” It is, as Bernstein admits, an audacious endeavor, “but we will only use notes that Beethoven himself wrote.” For the next half-hour, Bernstein takes us through Beethoven’s discarded sketches for the first movement of the Fifth Symphony, explaining why each discarded sketch was ultimately inferior to the final version of the Fifth Symphony.
Beethoven was not known to be a prolific composer; he was known to be a prolific editor of his own work, sketching and writing and re-writing and re-writing his compositions until he was completely satisfied. Beethoven did not leave any clear indication of why he composed this way, but we can take a guess. In a letter to his friend and student Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven tells him to give his wife a surprise, remarking, “[b]etween ourselves the best thing of all is a combination of the surprising and the beautiful!” (Cooper 22).
That Beethoven wrote beautiful works is not in doubt. His works are melodically, harmonically and thematically consistent and have a strong sense of completeness and of wholeness. It is somewhat harder to pin down what made Beethoven surprising, and why being surprising should have been so important to him that he should have edited his own work so laboriously and extensively.
As early as 1783, when Beethoven was 13, he wrote, “My Muse in hours of sacred inspiration has often whispered to me: ‘Make the attempt, just put down on paper the harmonies of your soul!’… My Muse insisted – I obeyed and I composed” (Cooper 19). Beethoven’s compositional career and correspondence were marked by the overwhelming desire to create, and specifically to create great music; Cooper writes: “Music deserved such devotion in his view because it was a noble art – one that could ‘raise men to the level of gods’ and as it had such elevating powers it had to be treated with due respect in his compositions” (19).
Beethoven’s ambition to create great music was what “necessitated all the sketching and related labour” that Beethoven was known for among his contemporaries. Cooper argues that “a sense of struggle” permeates Beethoven’s sketches and many of his finished works – perhaps the struggle between the surprising and the beautiful can be considered the defining feature of Beethoven’s work (22).
In the prologue of Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr., Selby credits Beethoven as his “only ‘conscious’ influence… [Beethoven] knows, to perfection, how to hammer a phrase into your mind, repeating it over and over, yet always stopping at precisely the right time. And his work is beautifully inevitable, yet never predictable, no matter how many times you hear it.” Inevitability without predictability is a cardinal rule of any dramatic form, and one could perhaps say Beethoven was equal parts composer and dramatist.
In his book Story, Robert McKee writes that “story is born in… the difference between anticipation and result” (148-9). Each discrepancy in anticipation and result forms part of a progression, and “this pattern repeats on various levels to the end of the line, to a final action beyond which the audience cannot imagine another” (152). This, too, is a struggle; it is a struggle to reconcile the surprising with the beautiful, the unexpected with the inevitable.
Let us now take a look at how this struggle manifested itself in Beethoven’s music. In a 1973 lecture, Bernstein spoke of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 almost purely in musical terms: diatonic, chromaticism, circle of fifths. During a particularly unusual passage in the final movement, Bernstein is almost bursting with excitement: “Do you realize that that wild, atonal-sounding passage contains every one of the twelve chromatic tones except the tonic G? What an inspired idea!” (Bernstein 47) Inspired, certainly, but not a concept accessible to a musically-untrained listener. Of Bach, Bernstein speaks chiefly in melodic terms: melody, harmony, counterpoint. Bach’s contrapuntal work, he says, is “akin to a sublime crossword puzzle… where everything checks, and all the answers are right.” Fascinatingly, Bernstein explains Bach’s lack of popularity among modern audiences with, “Contrast makes drama… if you’re expecting any contrast, you’re not going to get it [from Bach].”
Bernstein’s approach to explaining Beethoven is completely different. He does not use the terminology of music. Not once does Bernstein discuss the harmony or counterpoint or cadences of the Fifth Symphony. Instead, he uses terms like static, stuck, mystery, build, flow, grounded, drive, climactic, dramatic, eruption, forward, abrupt, force. The words to explain the force of Beethoven’s music exist not in music, but in drama, in McKee’s “difference between anticipation and result”, in the tension between what is and what should be, that empty space that drives men to create. At one point in his lecture, Bernstein takes a sketch that Beethoven wrote for the Fifth Symphony, plays it, and tells us, “it would have fitted very neatly into [the] coda… harmonically, rhythmically, in every way except emotionally.” The sketch was logical, musical and beautiful, but it lacked the emotional force that would cause its listeners surprise. That alone disqualified it in Beethoven’s eyes.
Perhaps this is why Beethoven rewrote and rewrote his work. If the goal is musical intricacy, there is a point when the notes all add up, when the math works, a point at which the composer can stop and be satisfied that the music checks out. However, if the goal is dramatic tension and its corresponding release, there is no right answer, there is no one moment where everything checks. The composer is then working towards not musical, but emotional, dramatic perfection. And dramatic perfection does not depend on the ability to hear, to harmonize, although Beethoven certainly knew what his music would have sounded like. It depends on the ability to employ contrast to build tension to breaking point and towards an inexorable finish. Beethoven rewrote and rewrote his work because he was not looking for something that fit neatly; he was not filling out a crossword puzzle but telling a story, and the art of storytelling is in its curation, the removal of the things that do not push the drama to its climactic level and the refinement of things that do. How, then, does the composer know when the music is ready? He knows when he is emotionally satisfied with the music, not just when he has been intellectually satisfied by the filling of the crossword puzzle.
This predilection for the dramatic and the essential need for emotional expression often necessitated modifying the norms of musical form and performance, which Beethoven considered fundamental to the element of surprise that he sought to create. Cooper writes that “[Beethoven’s] desire to surprise his listeners also went hand in hand with his belief that his art should always be moving forward: ‘Art demands of us that we shall not stand still’… Progress implied experiment for him and surprise for his listeners… [b]ut originality was insufficient unless it was continually developing, and Beethoven on several occasions expressed concern for novelty in his music” (24).
Beethoven certainly was novel. His experiments with form had earned him criticism, especially in the early stages of his compositional career (Wallace 108). In typical Beethoven fashion, Beethoven answered his critics with the scherzo (literally, Italian for joke) of the Ninth Symphony: written in triple time, as is traditional for scherzos, in a standard ternary scherzo-trio-scherzo design, with the scherzo itself adhering to sonata form. Despite the strict form, the scherzo sounds beautifully loose and carefree, propelled forward by a rhythm so whimsical, so unlike triple time, that one almost hears Beethoven laughing ironically to his critics, “Look, triple time! Isn’t this what you asked for?” In doing so, Beethoven demonstrated that form must serve emotional expression, and emotional expression demands formal innovation.
Another example of Beethoven’s formal innovation can be found in his Piano Sonata No. 14 in C# minor, more commonly known as the “Moonlight Sonata,” is subtitled “Quasi una fantasia,” Italian meaning “almost a fantasy.” Those who know the work may find it an apt description, but the reality of the subtitle is more mundane: a sonata is typically a work in three movements, first a fast opening movement, then a slow second movement, and ending with one or two fast movements. Within each movement the music adheres to sonata form: introduction, exposition, development, recapitulation, coda. The famous first movement of the Moonlight Sonata, however, carries the direction “adagio sostenuto” – slow and sustained – and has no distinguishable sonata form. Not coincidentally, a “fantasy” is the musical term for a form without any clearly defined rules. András Schiff, in lectures delivered as part of a concert series, argues that the first movement is generally poorly interpreted and demonstrates an alternative which he believes to be closer to Beethoven’s intentions based on the performance directions, an interpretation in which “the harmonies swim together, like in a wash.” The pianoforte was a relatively young and still-developing instrument in Beethoven’s time, and different from the piano of today: it produced “a sharper attack, less development of the tone, and a much quicker decay” (Newman 47). It is much easier to understand and appreciate the full extent of Beethoven’s experimentation and novelty when taking these limitations into account; Schiff’s interpretation of the Moonlight Sonata is well-within the capabilities of the modern piano, but in Beethoven’s day this interpretation would have meant taking particular advantage of the specific qualities of the young pianoforte. No matter – Beethoven took this new instrument and the sonata to its known limit, and then broke that limit in a surprising and beautiful way – surprising in its visionary innovation, and beautiful in its unity of form and substance.
While the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata is the most well-known, my personal favorite is the third movement, which is the explosive culmination of the suppressed emotion in the two slow, calm movements that precede it; it is here that we find a classic example of the way Beethoven’s command of musical form gives his expression emotional force. In this virtuosic composition, Beethoven never lets us settle into the music: we are always moving, always being driven into the next note, always kept off-balance. The movement opens with a quiet measure beginning low on the piano, but moves swiftly through the notes of the C# minor chord into the higher notes, ending with two strongly accented sforzando (literally “compelling” or “straining”) C# minor chords at the end of the second measure. The C# minor chord is the tonic chord of this piece, and consists of a C#, an E, and a G#. The left hand plays two C#s, and the right hand plays four notes, the highest of which is a G#, which is the dominant note of C#. The dominant is a tremendously important note; it is what gives a musical key stability. The most important cadences in any key run through the dominant note. The strongest cadential ending there is in music, the perfect authentic cadence, consists of the dominant chord resolving to the tonic chord.
Let’s see what Beethoven does with those two sforzando chords as the piece progresses. He develops the opening theme over the next 12 measures, and then Beethoven repeats it - but this time, as we approach the two sforzando chords, Beethoven refuses to let us anticipate or pre-empt him. He uses a different form of the chord: he reaches higher than the G# that he used earlier, and hits the E above. To us, it comes as a surprise, and is cause for mild alarm: there’s something about this chord that sounds overstretched, that is reminiscent of someone straining for something just slightly beyond his reach. It is a heartbreaking chord. A look at the score reveals the genius of Beethoven: this chord is still a tonic, but this time it is played with two C#s on the left hand, and two Es on the right hand. The dominant G# is missing. No wonder it sounds so tragic - Beethoven deliberately destabilized the chord by removing its most important support. With this simple device, Beethoven at once expresses the heartache of one reaching for the heavens and grasping only air.
Another example of Beethoven’s ingenuity and musical innovation can be found in William E. Caplin’s essay, “Structural Expansion in Beethoven’s Symphonic Forms.” Using a theoretical approach to analyze Beethoven’s First, Third and Ninth Symphonies, Caplin demonstrates how Beethoven eschewed the obvious cadential progressions in favor of extending the open cadences for as long as possible until they could be resolved in a perfect authentic cadence. In plain language, this simply means that Beethoven avoided the obvious next note, building up musical tension until an opportunity to resolve all the open questions as strongly and as economically as possible presented itself. Caplin demonstrates that as Beethoven progressed as a composer, he became more adept at delaying the eventuality of the perfect authentic cadence, and that in the first movement of the Ninth Symphony, Beethoven evades the resolution of the cadence three times in the subordinate theme before finally resolving it at the end of the theme, going a full 70 measures without the perfect authentic cadence. When Beethoven finally does resolve the cadence, it represents an economy of form that had rarely been seen in classical music, a combination of a musical and dramatic resolution (53). This is exactly the story that Robert McKee spoke of, the “difference between anticipation and result” leading to a “final action beyond which the audience cannot imagine another” (148-52).
In his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde wrote: “From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type” (4). What Beethoven managed to do was combine the two: he took the musician’s form and applied to it the actor’s craft. What formerly required an understanding of musical form now had the ability to engage people in a form that could be felt, not just heard. Perhaps, also, that is why Beethoven has enjoyed such longevity in the repertoire, perhaps that is why it did not matter that Beethoven was deaf, for he wrote not music, but drama: we listen to Beethoven for the same reasons we watch plays and tell stories, because his music is a distillation of emotion; it strikes not only the ear, but also the heart.
Works Cited
- “Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.” Perf. Leonard Bernstein. Omnibus. CBS. 14 Nov 1954. Television.
- Bernstein, Leonard. The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. Print.
- Caplin, William E. “Structural Expansion in Beethoven’s Symphonic Forms.” Beethoven’s Compositional Process. ed. William Kinderman. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. Print.
- Cooper, Barry. Beethoven and the Creative Process. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.
- McKee, Robert. Story. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Print.
- Newman, William. Beethoven on Beethoven. New York: W.W. Norton, 1988. Print.
- Schiff, András, narr. “Part 4.3: Piano Sonata in C-sharp minor, opus 27 no. 2 (‘Moonlight’).” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media Limited. 23 Nov. 2006. Web. 2 Mar. 2011.
- Selby Jr., Hubert. Last Exit to Brooklyn. New York: Grove Press, 1964. Print.
- “The Music of J.S. Bach.” Perf. Leonard Bernstein. Omnibus. CBS. 31 Mar. 1957. Television.
- Wallace, Robin. Beethoven’s Critics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Print.
- Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. London: Penguin Classics, 2000. Print.
Dated: Dec 23, 2010
This essay was written in the Fall 2010 semester as part of the Writing The Essay: Art in the World course at New York University, which is now numbered EXPOS-UA 5.
As far as raw documentary material goes, it is hard not to feel that Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe hit paydirt with Lost in La Mancha. The film, documenting the “un-making” of Terry Gilliam’s failed epic The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, began life as a typical making-of documentary. Their role as documentarians was not to dig below the surface for factual or psychological truths not readily apparent, but simply to document, to get out of the way and let the material make its own case.
In such films, the filmmakers work with the understanding that the spectacle in front of the camera is more salient than anything the camera can create. This is true regardless of whether the documentary in question is a making-of or an unmaking-of documentary, because either way, an extraordinary drama will play itself out. As Philip French remarks in his review of Lost in La Mancha in the Guardian, “the business of making films is as interesting as the films themselves.” To mount a film production is an enormous undertaking involving not just huge sums of money over a long period of time, but also a considerable amount of faith.
In the case of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, the stakes were ratcheted much higher: the combination of a great director tackling great material so suited to him bred high expectations, attracting an investment of $32 million that would make it one of Europe’s biggest films, yet an investment that – as Gilliam himself says in Lost in La Mancha – was “way below what we would normally need to make a film like this.” As if that knowledge was not enough to deter him from such an undertaking, there was the specter of Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, a similarly adventurous production that stretched both its crew and its budget to extremes, then failed spectacularly at the box office for mysterious and mythical reasons.
Moreover, there was the small matter of the number of people who had attempted to adapt Don Quixote and failed. In The Impossible Musical, Dale Wasserman lists four major failed Quixote adaptations, including Orson Welles’ cursed production which he caustically describes as “an in-joke of sorts” in which “money ran out, actors died, and film had to be re-shot” (24). Philip French considers this one of the many advantages Fulton and Pepe had in the making of Lost in La Mancha, describing the history of cinema as “marked by the bleached bones of unmade or unfinished versions of Don Quixote,” conveniently setting the stage for Gilliam’s valiant attempt at defying historical precedent.
French also adds, “it’s as if some curse were transferred from its mad, idealistic hero to those attracted to bringing him to the screen.” What is especially curious about the spate of failures to adapt Don Quixote is that right at the end of the lengthy text, embedded in the narrative of Quixote itself, is the following warning:
For me alone was Don Quixote born, and I for him… let the weary and crumbling bones of Don Quixote rest in the grave… to mock the many [journeys] undertaken by so many knights errant, the two [journeys Don Quixote] made were enough. (Cervantes)
So, simply by taking on the challenge of adapting Don Quixote, Terry Gilliam was not just testing faith, he was tempting fate.
From the moment Gilliam began his project, it could only have been an epic success or an epic failure. When tempting the gods, there is no middle ground: either one tempts the gods and wins, from which we get the quintessential Greek comedic or epic form, or one tempts the gods and loses, from which we get the quintessential Greek tragic form.
Lost in La Mancha opens with goblin-like creatures dancing with fire torches laughing hysterically. The next thing we see is Terry Gilliam, rapt with childlike wonder, putting his little camcorder to his eye. The telephoto effect of Fulton and Pepe’s long lens gives us the impression of being close to and intimate with the action. We are close up on the devilish figures, then close on Gilliam, always enraptured by the dream being realized right before his eyes. Right from the beginning of the film, Fulton and Pepe present us with an image of a man enamored of the notion of staring gods in the face.
However, this does not explain why the film proves so effective. Even though the film obeys a traditional tragic form, this form only dictates an overarching structure – it tells us which elements constitute the story, but not how the story should be told. It does not explain why we are so engaged in the drama, so compelled to keep watching. Like an oft-heard, well-told joke, we want to hear the story even though we already know the ending, because there is joy in the telling, in the delivery of the joke itself. The tragic structure of Lost in La Mancha is not a sufficient explanation for the strength of the film: we also need to look at why the story works, why it can draw us in over and over again, why we can experience the tragedy of Gilliam’s failure afresh each time.
Ancient Greek dramatic practice provides a framework we could use as a starting point for exploration, but the specificities of the ancient Greek theater are very different from those of modern dramatic practice, and much of ancient Greek dramatic theory is no longer applicable in its original incarnation. What strikes the modern scholar or practitioner when studying Greek drama is the stringency of the form: the rhythm and cadence of the text, the role of the Chorus, the use of masks, and even the physical stage space itself are all highly stylized to fit to a rigid form.
Peter Hall, in his book Exposed By The Mask, argues that all drama requires a form that serves as a channel through which the artist can express emotion at an intensity beyond what is acceptable in daily life:
Any actor will tell you that if you wish to move an audience, you must not cry. Do not cry. If you cry, the audience will not. The actor must exercise restraint… a child who comes towards you trying not to cry (but who is filled with suppressed tears) is incredibly moving. (Hall 23)
Hall refers to such restraining, channeling forms as “masks,” invoking the masks used in ancient Greek theater. A mask is a containing, strict, almost unnatural form of expression that serves as a contract between an artist and his audience. Once the audience accepts the form, be it blank verse, sung dialogue or a physical mask, the audience also agrees to suspend their disbelief and to experience all the dramatic events presented to them as if they were real while in the full knowledge that they are not, in order to experience much more intense emotions than can be experienced in day-to-day life. The tension between the confining form of the mask and the vast extremes of emotion the mask hides creates a paradox that is infinitely engaging to experience. This is how, Hall argues, an audience can be made to live an event as horrific as Titus Andronicus cutting his hand off without having to believe that the actor has just severed his hand (27). Epic drama demands a mask. Without one, we cannot suspend our disbelief to experience drama on the epic scale. With one, we are liberated from the constraints of mundane reality.
So what is the mask of Lost in La Mancha? Why are we so engaged in the drama of Gilliam’s failed Quixote, when Lost in La Mancha does almost exactly what Hall advises against – presenting an extreme reality without a restraining form?
Everything that can go wrong goes wrong. I mean everything. Everything. Everything. Everything. I mean if you write a script and you think of the worst possible situation, you can’t make it up. – Nicola Pecorini, director of photography for The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, in Lost in La Mancha (2002)
On the second day of production, a storm approaches the shooting location. The sky has transformed from a pale blue into a sheet of billowing cloud, then abandons all pretense and turns aggressively dark. Yet principal photography continues, despite all better judgement. Jean Rochefort delivers his lines: “Yet according to the duty of my profession, I have no choice.” He follows this shortly after with, curiously enough: “Yield to heaven’s command!”
Thunder rumbles. Phil Patterson, the first assistant director, instructs the crew to secure all the equipment and to get under cover.
Terry Gilliam, in a moment of sardonic frustration, yells: “Yes! Whoa!” as the sky looms dark over the production and the lack of light casts a pall over the scene Fulton and Pepe present us. We are close up on Gilliam, but even the size of Gilliam in the frame cannot make us forget or ignore the enormity of the storm, or the futility of Gilliam’s madness against the force of nature’s madness.
As if to drive the point home, Terry Gilliam turns to Pecorini, his director of photography, and asks a dry, pointed, ironically self-aware question:
“Which is it, King Lear, or Wizard of Oz?”
A better script could not have been written.
Philip French of the Guardian describes a scene in which the film’s investors “get to see a frantic Gilliam direct Johnny Depp as he struggles with a fish beside a waterfall” as “scarcely believable in a fictional movie.” Indeed, in an article for Landmark Theatres, even Fulton and Pepe themselves wrote that if Lost in La Mancha had been fictional, no one would have believed it.
That is exactly it. A better script could not have been written, because it would not have been believed. A well-known director, making a high-stakes film destined to become a classic, has his equipment washed away by a freak storm the day after his audio recordings are ruined by the sound of NATO planes flying overhead and a week after his lead actor unilaterally delays his arrival on set due to back pain: that is exactly the kind of drama too indulgent to be taken seriously, without a restraining form to channel the sheer ridiculousness of the events towards a satisfying climax. If such a script were to be written, it would not be a drama or a tragedy as Lost in La Mancha is – it would be a comedy, akin to David Mamet’s State and Main or Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s Singin’ in the Rain. The comedic form is a contract in which the audience agrees to abide by unrealistic rules of engagement, to suspend their disbelief, in exchange for a big comedic payoff at the end. In a documentary there is no need for the audience to suspend their disbelief, because they are prepared to watch something as long as it is true.
If the contract of most drama requires a rigid and unnatural form, then the contract of the documentary requires veracity. The audience agrees to be engaged in the material on the condition that the events portrayed did happen, that everything that happens in front of the camera has some basis in reality – not simply an emotional or spiritual reality, but a factual reality that can be independently verified. That is a documentary’s mask, perhaps the most rigid and unbending mask of all – the material must be rooted not only in truth, but in fact.
Within the constraints of this form, any scenario is acceptable, however extreme or impossible it may seem. If the paradox of the theater and of fictional film is that audiences engage with the truth in the unbelievable, the paradox of the documentary form is that audiences engage with the unbelievable in the full knowledge that it is true. For this reason, documentary audiences feel violated when they discover they have been tricked into believing something that is not true, the same way audiences are repulsed by excessively theatrical drama. In both cases, the artist has broken the formal contract and reminded them that the story they are watching, that they are living, is untrue. This is why Pecorini says in Lost in La Mancha, “You can’t make it up.”
In the light of this understanding, one could perhaps argue that Fulton and Pepe would have been able to tell a fine story regardless of what actually happened with Gilliam’s production. Like a fully-wound wind-up toy, all the parameters for an extremely dramatic story had already been set and all that was left was to watch the drama unfold. It did not matter exactly how the drama of the production played out – it was always going to be epic, with or without their direct involvement. All they had to do was to get out of the way and let the material make its own case. Most importantly, it was always going to dare the viewer to disbelieve its account of an epic drama, and turn out to be unbelievably true.
Works Cited
- Cervantes, Miguel. Don Quixote. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005. Print.
- French, Philip. “Down the shoot.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media Limited. 4 Aug. 2002. Web. 30 Nov. 2010.
- Fulton, Keith and Louis Pepe. “A Curse of Mirrors.” Lost in La Mancha. Landmark Theatres. 2003. Web. 30 Nov 2010.
- Hall, Peter. Exposed By The Mask. New York: Oberon, 2000. Print.
- Lost in La Mancha. Dir. Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe. Perf. Terry Gilliam, Jeff Bridges and Tony Grisoni. Quixote Films, 2002. Film.
- Wasserman, Dale. The Impossible Musical. New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2003. Print.
Dated: Nov 30, 2010
This essay was written in the Fall 2010 semester as part of the Writing The Essay: Art in the World course at New York University, which is now numbered EXPOS-UA 5.
“The way in which [Columbus] wanted to know these things was not in the way of satisfying curiosity, or in the way of correcting an ignorance; he wanted to know them, to possess them… the person who really can name the thing gives it a life, a reality, that it did not have before.” (Kincaid 116) (emphasis mine)
In this passage from her essay “In History,” Jamaica Kincaid tells us that Columbus wanted to know not for the sake of knowing, but for the sake of owning; he understood that he who named something forever imposed his history on it for all who come after him and call it by his name. As a result, an object named after someone or spoken of in a specific context is given a history that is not inherent in its substance. A name is not merely a name, but an entire narrative.
The idea that “the person who can really name a thing gives it a life, a reality, that it did not have before” (116), the idea that we create reality as we experience it, as we name it, is particularly astonishing. That the context and the circumstances under which we encounter something should shape our understanding of its substance, its truth, to such an extent is on the one hand thrilling, and on the other terrifying. It gives the individual a power that is so easily wielded – speak and it is named – and produces effects of such massive consequence that they are almost imperceptible to us, since we have so little conception of what the substance of an object is without its name. Conversely, once we know the name of an object, we can begin to guess at the origin of the name and the journey that object has taken: we can begin to understand its history.
Through this window, Kincaid explores the relevance the name of something has to its substance, how we name differently because we see differently – and vice versa, as well as the importance of context in our experiences. She also implies that what is true for each of us is true only for each of us, that our personal histories shape our understanding of things, subtly putting the idea that there is any absolute, objective truth under the microscope. After all, if everything we know or thought we knew is not founded on the essence of things, but on our experience of them, how can anything we know be always true for anyone but ourselves?
Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay “History,” also argues that there is no objective history:
No anchor, no cable, no fences avail to keep a fact a fact. Babylon and Troy and Tyre and even early Rome are passing already into fiction. The Garden of Eden, the Sun standing still in Gibeon, is poetry thenceforward to all nations. Who cares what the fact was, when we have thus made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign? London and Paris and New York must go the same way. “What is History,” said Napoleon, “but a fable agreed upon?” (8)
Emerson makes a strong distinction between the facts and the perception of the facts, and argues that history is not objective the way facts are, but rather is subjective the way stories are. History is an experience that is relived by each person with each retelling, and for that reason the same history is not experienced by each person the same way each time. What was Babylon the fact yesterday is Babylon the myth today, because the strength of the story of Babylon has superseded the strength of the evidence of what Babylon was like.
Middle English did not distinguish between the words “history” and “story” – they both come from the same Greek root word historia (Partridge 289). Modern Spanish still uses the same word, historia, to mean both a narrative and the study of events that have occurred. If we were to be so bold, we could simply take the step of regarding history as story, and story as history.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, superficially, is about a man who reinvents himself to win the love of Daisy, the woman of his dreams – but if one chooses not to take it at face value, the novel becomes the story of America itself. One particular line from The Great Gatsby has always fascinated me: “His count of enchanted objects had been diminished by one” (Fitzgerald 93). Nick Carraway, the narrator, refers here to Gatsby’s green light. It is a green light, like any other green light. There is nothing special about a green light. Yet to those of us who have read the book who have any sympathy for Jay Gatsby, to say that the green light is just a green light is anathema. It is the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, the “orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us” (Fitzgerald 180). Just as Kincaid calls Antigua “green, green, green, and green again” (Kincaid 117) when regarded at a level removed from Columbus’s experience of it, Antigua was, to Columbus, not merely a thing but the capstone of an experience; it was the New World. It was reward, it was possibility, it was opportunity, it was uncharted territory. No wonder Columbus could not stop calling it marvelous. It was hope realized, distilled into dust and dirt and green.
It is of course not a coincidence that Gatsby’s light is green, just as Kincaid’s Antigua is green. The color green evokes images and sensations and hints at connections that other colors do not supply. The word “green” itself comes from Old English growan, to grow. Green is lush, green is fresh, green is youthful, and above all green is new. (It does not take much to see the jump from “green” to “marvelous” in Columbus’s eyes.) “Gatsby’s red light” would not only mean a completely different thing, but would give us a completely different story.
This prompts the question: what would Kincaid call Antigua if she had the privilege of naming it? “Green”? The reality is that every name carries its own story, meaning, and connotations. There is no name anyone could give Antigua that would be completely drained of meaning and significance, no name that would be objective. In another passage in her essay, Kincaid takes a more aggressive stance on the issue of names, making a distinction between names given by people with an investment in the object being named, and names given seemingly arbitrarily:
I was having an argument with myself over the names I should use when referring to the things that lay before me at my feet. These [plants]… had two names: they had a common name – that is, the name assigned to them by people for whom these plants have value – and then they have a proper name, or a Latin name… For a long time I resisted using the proper names of the things that lay before me. I believed that it was an affectation to say “eupatorium” when you could say “joe-pye weed.” I then would only say “joe-pye weed. (Kincaid 118)
“Joe-pye weed” – if she calls it by that name only to avoid calling it by the Latin name, surely she is imposing as much of an artificial name on the plant as the Latin system imposes. If one were feeling harsh, one could also argue that insisting on referring to the plants as “the things that lay before me at my feet,” for the sake of avoiding calling them either “eupatorium” or “joe-pye weed,” is just as much of an affectation as referring to plants by their concocted, assigned Latin names. To call the plants “the things that lay before me at my feet” does not simply mean exactly that – in this context, under these circumstances, this name also means neither joe-pye weed nor eupatorium. “The things that lay before me at my feet” – that name, too, has a story.
When the Malayan tiger, formerly classified along with Indochinese tigers as panthera tigris corbetti, was reclassified as a subspecies of the P. Tigris family in its own right, researchers named it panthera tigris jacksoni in honor of the tiger conservationist Peter Jackson. In Malaysia, where the Malayan tiger is regarded as a national icon, this news was not received without controversy: although it was considered great news that the Malayan tiger was receiving recognition, shouldn’t Malaysia itself have a say in what its national icon is called? The proposed compromise, curiously, was to “[give] two names to the Malayan tiger – one common name of the Malayan tiger and the other Latin name ‘panthera tigris jacksoni’” (New Straits Times 4 Nov 2004). In Malaysia, the Malayan tiger is also often referred to as panthera tigris malayensis.
My question is not whether the Malaysians should have the right to call their national icon anything they want – clearly, they do. My question is this: do the researchers, the “agreed-upon group of [zoologists],” not also have the right to honor their colleague? And beyond the abstract question of who has the right to name something, the facts remain thus: Peter Jackson is an important figure in tiger conservationism, and given that the Malayan tiger remains highly endangered, it is perhaps fair to ask if the Malayan tiger would still be extant, let alone recognized, if not for efforts inspired by Jackson. Even the Latin name, the name “arrived at by an objective standard,” is not as objective as Kincaid supposes; it carries its own story (121).
This is the dilemma that Kincaid faces, if not with the names of the things that lay at her feet, then with the name of Antigua. It goes without saying that the historical narrative of Antigua would be very different if not for Columbus; if Antigua had a different history, it would have had a different name. It is one thing to forget history; it is another thing to erase it.
“He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: ‘I never loved you.’ After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken.” (Fitzgerald 109)
The Great Gatsby is, at its core, a story about malleable histories. It is about the history that could be erased and rewritten, and about the history that could not be. Gatsby unilaterally altered his own history when he – as he – changed his name from James Gatz. What he could not erase and rewrite was the history of his relationships, because not one of us exists alone; we are all linked, each to many others, in a vast web of interconnectedness. We can choose to use names and remember histories that emphasize some relationships and de-emphasize others, but we cannot erase history.
If Antigua were to be renamed something else tomorrow, it would not be a clinical, objective, detached alternative of a name, but one that carries with it its own baggage and its own story, and one that would be inextricably tied to the decision to abandon “Antigua” as a name. The moment we name something, we impose a history on it, and to oppose a name on account of opposing the history it implies does not mean we can obliterate the memory of that history altogether.
“Oh, you want too much!” she cried to Gatsby. “I love you now – isn’t that enough? I can’t help what’s past.” She began to sob helplessly. “I did love him once – but I loved you too.”
… “You loved me too?” he repeated. (Fitzgerald 132)
Therein lies the rub. Certainly, as both Kincaid and Emerson suggest, there is not a single objective account of history, for we each experience history uniquely. However, all stories are built upon a semblance to reality, and none of us lives in a reality isolated from everyone else. Where different narratives of the same event overlap, history exists, a history that cannot be unilaterally altered by a single party.
Recall Emerson:
“What is History,” said Napoleon, “but a fable agreed upon?” (8)
Since the moment Columbus’s fleet sighted the Americas in 1492, the story of his discovery of the Americas has passed from news to recent history to distant history into fable, yet some elements remain consistent: the year 1492, the naming of places after things and places and ideas Columbus knew well, Columbus’s hopes for the New World, and above all, the significance of his arrival as the dividing line between two periods of the history of the Americas. We can argue over whether it is fair to mark the history of the Americas as beginning in 1492, or whether the name of Antigua represents an objective history of the place, or what history should mean to people who look like Jamaica Kincaid – but there is no doubt that where the stories of everyone who has a relationship with the Americas overlap, there the history, the fable, of Columbus in 1492 lies.
Works Cited
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “History.” Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson: first and second series complete in one volume. New York: A. L. Burt Company, 19xx ??. 3-32. Print.
- Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 1995. Print.
- Kincaid, Jamaica. “In History.” Writing The Essay: Art in the World, The World Through Art. ed. Darlene A. Forrest, Randy Martin, Pat C. Hoy II, and Benjamin W. Stewart. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010. 115-121. Print.
- “Malayan Tiger May Get New Name.” New Straits Times 4 Nov 2004. Print.
- Partridge, Eric. Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. New York: MacMillan, 1966. Print.