On being a child of one's generation, redux.

I hate the way Sir Thomas Malory writes Gawain. I am used to Chretien de Troies's easy-going, charming Gawain -- "the Ladies' Knight" because he acquires a new lady-love in each story he appears in -- who occupies the position of Top Knight in King Arthur's court by virtue of being Arthur's sister's eldest son,* of being the best fighter out of the normal members of the court (as I recall, he is once knocked off his horse by Perceval in "Perceval, ou le Conte du Graal"; once battles Yvain to a weary sundown truce in "Yvain, ou le Chevalier au Lion"; and otherwise handily defeats all rivals), of being both brave and level-headed (brave enough to join Lancelot's quest to save the Queen in "Lancelot, ou le Chevalier de la Charrette" (sp?) without Lancelot's ulterior motive, level-headed enough not to charge the preoccupied Perceval but speak to him. In both these instances, Kay plays the rasher, more anti-social reflection of Gawain's good impulses, and is rewarded by being kidnapped himself in the first and having his arm broken in the second). He is the Compleat Knight, pious in measure and worldly without corruption, a fine fighter who fights without regret and so bold a lover, he is the only knight willing to woo a woman with dark hair (the marvelous Lunete, first adviser to Yvain's wife in "Yvain")! He is not always right -- his advice that Yvain leave his wife immediately after the wedding to go questing is obviously foolish, and nearly leads Yvain to lose her altogether -- and he is not always successful (each tale must have its own hero, and he is the hero of none). But he is clearly, and appropriately, Top Knight. And he is a terrible charmer to boot. Chretien wrote in the fourth quarter of the twelfth century. By the Prose Lancelot Gawain remains Top Knight at Arthur's court, but has been thoroughly displaced in the heart of the reader by Lancelot, who to this day is enshrined as Official Top Knight in popular culture. The triangle between Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere is central to many modern depictions (as to the third section of the Prose Lancelot, the section I read many years ago under the title The Death of King Arthur in Penguin, unless I'm totally mixed up), and "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" mentions the name "Gawain" only to offer him to one beast or another -- the ravenous rabbit, I believe. To Malory in 1475, Gawain has nothing of the Top Knight about him at all. He is viler than anything in Chretien's world, even the enemies. He is probably about the tenth-best fighter, but easily and plainly outclassed by Lancelot, Tristan, Lamorak (!! Perceval's older brother; in Chretien's tale, Perceval's elder brothers all died when he was a child and achieved no great fame), Palomides (Tristan's self-declared rival, the pagan knight who also loves Yseut la Blonde), and probably several others including his own younger brother Gareth, whom he doesn't fight directly, at least as far as I've gotten. (Somewhere not so very far into Book II.) He is called "the Ladies' Knight" not because all the ladies love him but because at nineteen he swears a special oath of protection to ladies after having accidentally chopped off a lady's head in a chapel instead of her lover's/. Chretien's Gawain is patient enough to suffer abuse at the hands of ladies who pronounce him a merchant wearing armor to avoid taxes because he does not fight in a tournament as a true knight would, and not fight at the tournament because it would be foolish to risk a wound when he is on a quest; Malory's Gawain is so angered by others' acknowledged superiority that his brother ends up killing their mother.** And on, and on. I have little patience with the elevation of Tristan (and less with the spelling "Tristram") to a high place at Arthur's court; I love Tristan and Yseut but they are a different story. I have other quarrels with Malory: even so strange a tongue he can render samey and sing-songy. But my real problem is how he treats Gawain. And this is where the title of this post comes in. Upon being struck by how difficult this actually made it for me to keep reading at a certain point, I thought: "So this is how it feels to have a headcanon." * Sister's son has long been recognized as a place of special honor in Arthurian legend: Tristan is also Mark's sister's son, and his maltreatment at Mark's hands is rendered especially bitter by the expectations his narratively special place has set. ** Lamorak's tourney victory enrages Gawain who believes Lamorak the killer of G's father Lot, so G persuades his brother Gaheris to follow Lamorak -- it turns out, to a tryst with their mother Morgause, where Lamorak denies having killed Lot. Gaheris announces that it would be unchivalrous to murder a naked knight and promptly kills his mother instead.

On an oddity of Georgian and Regency prose.

A grammatical oddity of Georgian and Regency English literary prose, that is. Namely: they do weird things with comparatives and superlatives.

Jane Austen is incredibly careful to put solecisms in the mouths of the John Thorpes and Lydia Bennets of the world and never into Catherine Morland's or Fitzwilliam Darcy's. Incredibly attentive to colloquialism, and scornful of those who depend on it overmuch -- think of Thorpe's "famous" this and that, of Maria Lucas and Lydia Bennet starting every other sentence with "La!," of Mrs. Elton's being always quite excessively shocked, and of the occasional "power of" xyz (where we would be more likely to say "heaps of"). Her narrators don't speak like that. Sometimes they speak strangely to us who would never use "eat" as a past participle ("when they had eat and were done..." and such), but perfectly grammatically for the time. Yet her fine speakers don't seem to distinguish comparatives and superlatives clearly as such. Oh, sure, comparatives are still used to compare -- you see "A is better than B" and not "A is best than B" -- it's not all the way to speaker incompetence. But over and over, "which [of two] was the handsomest," "whether A or B were tallest," when comparisons of two just can't take a superlative as we speak, not without a context strongly suggesting generalization they can't. You could say, "Which do you like best?" of two things without paying or drawing attention to their number, but "which of these two do you like" will always end in "better." Not so for Jane Austen. Very interesting!

And on the other hand the narrator of Pride & Prejudice definitely says "either of A, B, and C," when for us "either" can never branch into three, no matter the context. Very odd!

And for the Georgian:

"On the 16th day of June, 1703, a boy on the top-mast discovered land. On the 17th, we came in full view of a great island, or continent (for we knew not whether;) on the south side whereof was a small neck of land jutting out into the sea, and a creek too shallow to hold a ship of above one hundred tons."

That's from the Brobdingnagian section of Gulliver's Travels. So for Swift "whether" was the right way to say "which (of two)" in more cases than we would say it in. We'd say "do you know whether you are going or not?" or just "I don't know whether you are going?" And we'd say "do you know which of those you want?" or "which do you want?" or "I don't know which." But we would never say "I don't know whether." In Greek or Latin you can do that with the "whether"/"which (of two)" words, so perhaps that's the source of his comfort. But Gulliver's Travels is pretty far from fussily written. So maybe you could actually say that then! Wouldn't that be interesting?

On logos and magic in Plato's presentation of Socrates.

Plato's Socrates was not a normal human being. He went barefoot in winter and in battle. He stood motionless for hours, even a day, on end. He gave up his craft -- presumably stone-masonry, his father's craft -- to stand in the market-place or at the baths asking people questions about truth, beauty, goodness. Though hemlock is a miserable death and a long process of loss of functions, he died with dignity and quietness. He associated with strange people: Pythagoreans, priests with odd beliefs, boys, slaves, aspiring tyrants, future tyrants; yet somehow the dully respectable and practical Xenophon became a devoted follower (of the historical Socrates, not Plato's), too. Other pupils and friends of the historical Socrates included the hedonist Aristippus and the devoutly ascetic Antisthenes, and perhaps Aristophanes, whose brutal mockery in "The Clouds" Plato's Socrates claims in "Apology" set the stage for his later condemnation, yet who is given the most beautiful speech of the "Symposium." He moved in aristocratic circles -- Plato was descended from Solon and other legends of Athens, Alcibiades, Nicias, Laches, and later Xenophon were important generals, the famous sophists he conversed with and their wealthy hosts hardly made it a practice to invite members of the laboring classes to their speeches and soirées -- which does not sound so strange until we reflect and realize that we can't think of a single other classical Athenian who demonstrated even that degree of social mobility. Later came others like him -- court poets and philosophers, and a very few -- really I can only think of Cleanthes (the second head of the Stoic school, 4-3c BCE) at the moment -- who succeeded as figures of culture and learning without patronage or private wealth; and Cleanthes gardened for a living even when he was a prominent philosopher, and is condescended to for his manners and appearance and intelligence (!) in our ancient sources. (He was nicknamed "the Ox.") -- The Stoics and Epicureans actively embraced outsiders of various sorts, it is true. Epicurus's school received the only female pupils we know of in any school but the Academy, which supposedly took on two female pupils under Plato's rule (Axiothea and something with an "L") one of whom was reputed to dress in male garb while the other wore women's clothing. The Stoa was founded by a foreigner of dubious pedigree -- for, as Cicero points out repeatedly in his Tusculan Disputations (isn't it?), Zeno was from Cyprus, and therefore not necessarily of Greek descent -- and headed next by Cleanthes, though from Chrysippus to Marcus Aurelius most of its spokesmen are high-hats. The important late exception is Epictetus, who began his philosophical studies as a slave and later was freed, in middle age I think. But that was at Rome, and the Roman Empire offered dramatically better chances for social improvement than Athens ever had at its peak. There, the classes simply did not mingle. Yet Socrates did.

Certain words that characterize the oddness of Socrates recur throughout Plato: atopia, or being out of place, bizarre, absurd; eironia, "irony," which really meant "dissembling" (Socrates is rarely simply sarcastic), or preparing a face to meet the faces that you meet; epo[i]de -- incantation (lit. "sung over")-- and other words of magic spells and charms. Reversal too is a constant theme. In the "Apology," Socrates proposes as the alternative to the death penalty that he be given a state pension. In "Euthyphro," he stops a moment on the way to his trial for impiety to point out that well-regarded priests know less of piety than he. In "Protagoras" he engineers such thorough confusion that by the end he and Protagoras have switched their positions on all the issues they were considering. In "Gorgias" he acknowledges that by Athenian standards he is politically powerless and a poor speaker, then redefines politics and rhetoric so that he is the only person in Athens with any grasp of either. Further he cites the Pythagorean (and perhaps Heraclitean -- cf. "immortal mortals, mortal immortals") teaching that "who knows whether we the living are really dead, while the dead have life?" In "Phaedo" he asks his friends to offer a thanksgiving offering to Aesclepius the healer god after his death. And more, and more and more, climaxing, surely, in Alcibiades's drunken rant in "Symposium" about how ugly old Socrates refuses to play the part of lover but instead others woo him as if he were a beautiful young boy. His is the last speech. The dialogue ends with Socrates -- alone sober after the night's revelries -- trying to persuade the tragedian Agathon and the comic playwright Aristophanes that the true poet should be able to compose both tragedies and comedies, at dawn, while they struggle not to join the rest of the company in sleep. The echo of Socrates's night with Alcibiades, when too Socrates seemed simply not to see the physical temptations to which everyone else succumbed, and to which Alcibiades frantically endeavored to rouse him, is unmistakable. Alcibiades thinks that Socrates must have bewitched him to make him act the fool so, while remaining himself teasingly unaffected.

Charmides and Phaedrus (?) too accuse Socrates of witchcraft, and Meno compares his effect to the sting of a puffer-fish. Thrasymachus in "Republic" i and Callicles in "Gorgias" have nastier words for it: they feel not enthralled but bullied. In one important way Plato clearly sides with them against the charmed. For they recognize that Socrates has only his words for a net and a spell, and that he traps them and catches them with just words. They are not special, magical words unique to Socrates. On the contrary, he draws them out of every interlocutor, from famous sophists like Protagoras and Hippias to teenagers like Charmides and Theaetetus to Meno's innumerate slave. The words are theirs, not Socrates's. Famously he calls himself a midwife in "Theaetetus," because he can only help others nurture and deliver the babies conceived (if we accept "Symposium"'s account) in encounters with the Forms. "Symposium" suggests that we fall in love because we are already pregnant and wish "to give birth in beauty" -- that is, to express the goodness and truth and beauty we feel certain we have within us -- and for that we need others' help. Socrates helps through talking with us, through asking questions and worrying our replies until the weak spots show. His magic is speech and reasoned argument (both central meanings of the Greek "logos"), not a mumbled spell or sacrificed bird or buried curse-tablet. His wizardry and his bullying aggression are partial views of his midwifery.

Socrates was strange. He moved in social circles beyond his class, he sought out beautiful boys and then ignored their bodies, he humbled great speakers and arguers with simple questions, he sometimes felt no effects from cold and alcohol, he refused to take money for what he considered to be the most valuable service of all, his aid in the care of souls. Other contemporaries tried to explain him as magical. (The pseudo-Platonic "Theages" suggests the astonishing claims made for him when one of its characters claims to become wiser and better through mere physical proximity to Socrates.) Xenophon mostly ignores such claims, fearing perhaps that they come too close to the critiques that led to his trial and death. Plato, on the other hand, as is his wont, does something more ambitious and more audacious. He acknowledges the magic of Socrates, but offers a revisionist account on which it is nothing more than logos -- something we all have -- and on which any special talent or might of Socrates's lay in midwifery -- a profession of poor women (including Socrates's mother, he says in "Theaetetus") that no one powerful would dream of pursuing. It's true, Plato tells us, that Socrates is different, bizarre, dissembling, magical. In a culminating reversal, those very qualities only show the more clearly what is universally human in him.

On the disappointments of Mansfield Park.

I thought I was reading Persuasion and then it turned out I was reading Sense and Sensibility.