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Sins of Omission in “On the Waterfront” (1954) (Part 1) May 06, 2024

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Terry Malloy and his fellow longshoremen on the New York docks are witnesses to union corruption under labor boss Johnny Friendly, but won’t testify against him because of his violent intimidation tactics, which ensure that union members remain “D and D”—that is, deaf and dumb—to any illegal activity. When Terry’s collaboration with Friendly results in the death of his friend Joey Doyle, and when Terry subsequently falls in love with Joey’s sister, Edie, he’s forced to reckon with this D and D policy, as well as his own passivity, guilt, and naivete. Wes & Erin discuss Elia Kazan’s 1954 film On the Waterfront, which might be said to dramatize the so-called “sin of omission” while asserting that its opposite, truth-telling, can be a radical and perhaps even a strangely physical form of heroism. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Terry Malloy and his fellow longshoremen on the New York docks are witnesses to union corruption under labor boss Johnny Friendly, but won't testify against him because of his violent intimidation tactics which ensure that union members remain D and D, that is deaf and dumb to any illegal activity. When Terry's collaboration with Friendly results in the death of his friend Joey Doyle, and when Terry subsequently falls in love with Joey's sister Edie, he's forced to reckon with this D and D policy as well as his own passivity, guilt and naivete. Today we're discussing Elia Kazan's 1954 film on the Waterfront, which might be said to dramatize the so called sin of omission while asserting that its opposite, truth telling, can be a radical and perhaps even a strangely physical form of heroism. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. 1:26 Wes: Okay, so Erin, it's been a long time since I've seen this movie and the only scene that really stuck with me is that famous scene in the cab with Terry and his brother Charlie and Brando doing that amazing performance, which I'll read in a moment where he says he could have been somebody and calls himself a bum. So that's something. When I was looking at some of the background for this, I was interested in seeing how many actors praised Brando for that performance. It is a great performance, but I didn't really think that much about it when I was watching the film because I was watching for other things. Scorsese said, everything that we know about the power of great screen acting relates back to him. When you watch his work in on the Waterfront, you're watching the purest poetry imaginable in dynamic motion. Kazan himself said, if there's a better performance by a man in the history of film in America, I don't know what it is. Al Pacino says he couldn't move. He was so touched by the performance. And then Anthony Hopkins said, when you Brando in the famous cab scene and on the Waterfront, it's still breathtaking. So I think that's one reason why the cab scene is so memorable. There's a real pathos to the scene. And then Brando pulls it off very well for the second act. It's the climactic scene which leads us into everything that follows in the third act. So I thought we'd start out by talking about the scene a little bit. And I was going to ask the question of, well, what makes him a bum? And why is he using that word in particular? And it comes up in the movie several times. So he says, do you want to read this and do. And do your Brando imitation? 3:02 Erin: Yeah. My famous. 3:03 Wes: Pretty certain you have a Brando impression that you do in private that you're unwilling to do in public because you're so good at so many other impressions. 3:13 Erin: Thank you. 3:13 Wes: Yeah, I think you've done Katharine Hepburn on the show. But that's. 3:17 Erin: That's as far as I'll go. I'll go as far as from New Haven to Hartford, but no further. 3:22 Wes: All right, well, so I'll read it, and then I'm going to be doing the Brando voice in my head, but I can't do it. So in the cab scene. So Charlie has said, you could have been another Billy Conn as a boxer. And he blames it on the manager. He blames the loss of the fight on the manager, when really it was. The fight was rigged by Johnny Friendly. And Charlie played a part in that. So Terry says, you was my brother, Charlie. You should have looked out for me a little bit. You should have taken care of me a little so I wouldn't have to take dives for short end money. So that was Terry speaking, and Charlie says, I had some bets down for you. You saw some money, Terry, you don't understand. I could have had class. I could have been a contender. I could have been somebody. Could have been somebody instead of a bum, which is what I am. Let's face it. It was you, Charlie. So it's interesting, he talks about wanting to have been taken care of because that is thematically part of the movie and it involves taking care of the pigeons. But we'll get. We'll get to that. But I wanted to start with this concept of being a bum. 4:22 Erin: Yeah. At the end of the film, not the very end when Terry goes down to the docks. But prior to that, when he testifies and he comes back and talks to Edie, he says, they always said I was a bum. Well, I ain't a bum, Edie. So something about him being restored to non bumness occurs over the course of his decision to testify for this waterfront crime commission. But I was thinking about that, too. I was thinking a lot about Terry's passivity and how speech is something that restores this active quality to him. Maybe the film locates the origin of his becoming a bum with the moment that he throws the fight, which, of course, happens prior to the timeline of this film. But we learn later on that however many months or years earlier, he had deliberately thrown a fight and thereby lost out on having a great career as a prize fighter. And so the first time we see Brando, when he's coming up from that shack on the edge of the docks having had a meeting with Johnny Friendly and his men, I noticed that Brando is always sticking his right arm in his jacket. To me, it looked like he was sort of holstering it. You know, he was pulling his punches, maybe. So something about being a bum has to do with the fact that he's no longer active. He's given something away. He's not performed to the best of his ability when he could. He's deliberately pulled punches, held back. And something then about speech and about his testimony restores that activity to him and makes him no longer a bum. It cures this passivity and this inaction. And I was really interested in that transformation and whether or not speech is enough to affect it. Which is maybe a slightly different question than this idea of being a bum, but I think it's related. 6:08 Wes: Yeah. So whether or not speech is enough, as in needing violence, needing to beat up Friendly. 6:14 Erin: No, but that's where one's mind automatically goes, right? Because what would be better than speech? You know, I'm not saying that there's necessarily an answer to this, but, you know, it's silly because I think I want something that isn't speech, that's somehow more than speech, but isn't violence, you know, and maybe that middle ground doesn't. But I think there's something about Terry being a prize fighter. And this whole final scene when he's beaten up by Johnny Friendly's men, where it's located in the film, it's a form of penance for the action that he's already taken. So it's not quite part of that action. It's the fallout of it. And he's outnumbered by so many men that he can't fight back. And so he just takes this beating. But that, too, strikes me as being really passive. Like, he actually tries to physically defend himself and to fight back, but ultimately that's fruitless. And so. So all of that to say, I don't know what the solution would be. That would involve not violence, but more than speech. I keep reaching for something more than 7:15 Wes: that, but I think walking up to the warehouse workplace, it is interesting because we see him testify, and one wonders at that point in the film, is that the climactic moment? Is that the defeat of the antagonist? And it turns out, no. And then you see him get into the fight with Friendly, and you wonder whether he's going to kill Johnny Friendly or he's going to get killed. I mean, I honestly forgot. I didn't know if there was a tragic ending to this. 7:42 Erin: Right. 7:42 Wes: And then the really, you know, the genuinely climactic moment, of course, is not the violence, but walking into the warehouse, ultimately stumbling because he's been beaten up so badly, but also getting everyone to follow him and wresting control, essentially wresting control away from Johnny Friendly, away from on behalf of the people, on behalf of the little man, the common man. And that wresting away of control is not something that is accomplished through violence or even that can be accomplished through violence. It's more about changing people's mindsets in such a way, because they. They outnumber the mobsters, obviously, but changing people's mindsets in a way where they can cooperatively stand together, which is, of course, what a union ultimately represents and what makes the infiltration and corruption of that such a terrible thing. But to restore that cooperative spirit, that unity between people, is the only way to go. And that seems to be the middle ground that you're talking about between violent action and mere speech, which, of course, is what we get when he testifies. 8:45 Erin: So you're. You're convinced by that ending. It's satisfying to you? I mean, I. Don't get me wrong, I think that when he walks in, it's tremendously moving, but it's also, you know, the film ends very quickly, and it comes with that conclusion is sort of the knowledge that he's now beaten the entire corrupt system and everything is going to be restored. And so I know that some people have thought that's maybe a little bit easy. I mean, I like the reading that you're giving of it, that it's beyond speech and the restoration of this unity. And obviously inherent in the cab scene as well, and throughout the whole film is this idea of what a union is, what a family is, what relationships are, what we owe to each other. And so restoring that is. Seems to me to be really crucial. At the same time, it's given such a kind of, like, Hollywood ending. It strains believability for me just a tad. Yeah. 9:32 Wes: Yeah, I get that. I think thematically it works, and I think it's emotionally impactful. I am someone who's bothered by plot holes a lot. It wasn't enough of one to bother me for me in this case, but I get what you're saying. So I think with the concept of being a bum, you were talking about passivity and him pulling punches, and I think that's great. In a sense, everyone who's being exploited by the mobsters is a bum in that sense. Right. And I think there's a lot in here about exploitation and the concept of exploitation and corruption. And it had me thinking about the meaning of those things and why people would engage in it. Right. So there's. Obviously, there's financial motives for mobsters, but there's also. It's actually a lot of work to be a mobster, it turns out. It's not just strong arming people and killing people and engaging in the risk of being killed. But, you know, there's an accountant, and they're essentially running a business, so why not just run a legitimate business? And it, you know, towards the end of the movie, Johnny Friendly says, we're going legit for now because I'm under scrutiny. And undoubtedly they could look good legit, and they'd probably be a profitable enterprise if they went legit. So the question for me was, why do people engage in this behavior anyway? And there's. There's lots of answers to this. Some of it is about freedom, being outside of the system. There's status and power that come with it. There's community, a kind of, you know, second family of sorts. But I think this need to exploit and turn people into bums is a very strong motive. So when you first see Johnny Friendly, for instance, I think he's watching a boxing match. He's ignoring his men who are trying to get him to pay attention to business stuff, which is really apt because I think we can wonder in retrospect whether that was just another rigged match, which means that he's not watching it for the suspense of the match. And he doesn't take that sort of inherent risk, right, of rooting for someone and not knowing whether they're going to win and then enduring the disappointment if they lose. It's all just rigged. But he's getting a kind of enjoyment out of that. And the enjoyment, in a way, is I think of this as rigging the scene. It's like he's outside of this scene, outside of this environment, looking into it in a way, like an audience member except he's in control of it. And in particular, anything internal to the scene, which is people's own work and their own good faith efforts, become false. Right. He can turn them into something false. So Terry becomes a bum by being controlled in that way. He allows his whole future to be compromised. He is prevented from doing his own real work in a way. He's prevented from doing something earnest and from participating in a kind of meritocracy, which I think is part of what the mobsters are transcending. So in other words, I think there's this need to spoil, not just to control it for financial gain, but there's a joy in exploiting it. And, well, not just exploiting it, but corrupting it and spoiling it. Spoiling is the word that I'm looking for, almost as if it's envied. So. And they need to do the same thing with the dock workers. They need to take what might be honest labor if it could afford the men who do it a decent living and if they had some sense of dignity. But it turns them into bums. Right? It turns them into. Like, they're like beggars. They have to stand on the docks and if they're lucky, they get some. Some work. 13:08 Erin: Hmm. I think in that moment when he's watching the boxing match, he turns it off out of frustration and he says something like, ain't nobody tough anymore. Which is really interesting with. 13:16 Wes: Okay, so I'm. I'm wrong about that then. 13:19 Erin: No, I think. I think I love this. This reading that you're giving to that scene. I think it's so apt and it reminds me actually, you know, if he did control it and he's still frustrated with the outcome, that's kind of even more fascinating. But it's reminiscent to me of the moment when the heavies are standing outside the bar right at the beginning when they throw Joey Doyle off the roof. And these heavies remark to themselves out loud, you know, somebody fell off the roof. So this is really interesting tension set up right away between, you know, the action that happens that we see as the viewers, that we know that they know exactly what's happened because they might as well have been, you know, they're interc…

Full show notes at the publisher

Consciousness Bemoaned in “Aubade” by Philip Larkin (Part 2) Apr 29, 2024

Show notes

In the medieval tradition of courtly love, the aubade inverts the serenade. Where one heralds an evening arrival, the other laments a morning departure. In John Dunne’s famous poetic contribution to the genre, he chastises the sun for waking and so separating lovers, but consoles us with the notion that the power of the sun is ultimately subordinate to the imperatives of love. More bleak, Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” seems to abandon this indictment on behalf of love for one on behalf of self-love, perhaps even on behalf of life itself. Morning awakens us to both workaday drudgery and an awareness of our own mortality. As a consequence, life is harder to live by the light of day, the consolations of philosophy and religion notwithstanding, and vitality is confined to the sorts of evening revelry that make waking all the harder. Wes & Erin discuss whether life (and love) can be reconciled with human self-consciousness and all that it entails. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Okay, welcome to Subtext. This is part two of our discussion of Philip Larkin's poem Aubade. We got half a half a line into the second stanza, so we'll pick it up from there. The mind blanks at the glare created by our speed as we go through this poem. Okay, so we were just about to get to the lines. Oh, actually, in fact, I never read this second stanza Aloud. So perhaps I should. 1:01 Wes: Yeah. So why don't you read the stanza and then we. 1:03 Erin: Okay, here we go. The mind blanks at the glare not in remorse, the good not done, the love not given. Time torn off unused, nor wretchedly because an only life can take so long to climb clear of its wrong beginnings and may never but at the total emptiness forever, the sure extinction that we travel to and shall be lost in always. Not to be here, not to be anywhere, and soon. Nothing more terrible, nothing more true. 1:35 Wes: Okay, so as usual, I've been operating under a misconception because of my misinterpretation of. I had been thinking about death in life as wasted time and inhibited love. But he's denying that here. He's saying the mind blanks at the glare. Not because we are remorseful about unused time and love not given or because. And this is a great. This is a really great idea. Only life. And only life can take so long to climb clear of its wrong beginnings. The idea that we've been screwed up by our childhoods. Right. And a significant portion of our life involves trying to climb clear of. Of that so that we can really achieve what we want to achieve. So there's this kind of remedial aspect to some aspects of how we spend our time. And we only have one life to do it. So the question is, can we do all the remedial stuff and then get into AP calculus once we're done with that? But he's saying it's not that either. It's not that we have so much to overcome in our limited time, but just this idea that our extinction is. Sure. And I guess one might think that that deprives anything that we might do. No matter how productive we are, no matter how much love there is in our life, it perhaps makes it all meaningless, that we can't. None of that can be meaningful, if. Sure, extinction is what lies at the end of it. 3:12 Erin: You know, I think your reading is correct, though, because, I mean, I think it is on a certain level. First of all, the best phrase in the whole poem is time torn off, unused. And, you know, and we do get. You know, we do. We do spend some lines here really preoccupied with what he says. He's not preoccupied by. So, you know, again, I think he's. Through negation. He's. He's able to sort of occupy two states of mind at the same time. 3:42 Wes: Yeah. 3:42 Erin: But I do think, you know, I'm really interested in this idea of remorse as actually maybe a fantasy about more life. You Know, this is the idea that maybe somewhere, some other time, under some other circumstances, you could have had another life. Or it's kind of dreaming of a parallel life in which the correct choices were made, the achievements, you know, were many. I don't know. You know, in which everything went well. Right. And so this. This idea of. I think what he's thinking of as, like, deathbed remorse is actually a further stay against this idea of extinction, because it's actually a fantasy about another thread, a continued life, or just a different one, but still something that's more life. Right. And what he's talking about is shutting all that down because those kind of open up little wormholes of hope and possibility. The thing that's really the scary part is the extinction. And I'm not sure that I agree. I mean, not that it's my place to agree or disagree with the poem, but I think remorse can be a much scarier thing than the eternal dirt nap. I don't know. 5:01 Wes: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, yes, there are nights when I wake up in existential dread. Oh, my God, I'm going to die. 5:10 Erin: Yeah. 5:11 Wes: And I. Unless one has some religious consolation for that, that can be quite piercing, but it's pretty rare. I actually used to do that as a kid, believe it or not. 5:24 Erin: That explains a lot. Yeah. 5:27 Wes: Like, oh, my God, I'm gonna die. But I think, yeah, most of us are concerned about what we can fit into life. This is one life to live, and how do we make it the best life that we can live, and how do we get as much love and work accomplishment and then good, which, of course, is the word that I ignore. Right. There's a triad here. Good love and time unused, which, you know, thinking of not just work, but anything we might do. So, of course, I ignored the good part. Right. The good not done. All the nice things we might have done for people or the. Or how we might have perfected ourselves ethically or improved ourselves ethically and been better people and proved, you know, maybe done something for justice in the world and things like that. So that's the part I ignored. But, yeah, so there's. There's a trio of these things. And I think, yeah, most of us think in those terms about when we're fearful about time passing, we're fearful about not being able to do enough of those things. 6:38 Erin: Did I ever tell you my. My panic attack in the Coolidge Corner theater story? 6:45 Wes: No. 6:47 Erin: So I think I've only had, like, one really extremely vivid reckoning with my own death. I mean, I think you know, obviously I have garden variety thoughts of death all the time, but I was in the Coolidge Corner Theater. I was watching The Old Man & the Gun, the Robert Redford film that came out maybe, oh, I don't know, five, five years ago now. Five, six years ago. 7:10 Wes: I haven't heard of it. 7:13 Erin: It's. I don't remember if it was good or not, because I. For whatever reason, I went to go, you know, this is Coolidge Corner Theater. Was like, you know, kitty Corner to my apartment. So sometimes I would just like, at the last minute just go in and see a movie by myself. And anyway, I was sitting in the theater. Redford came on the screen. I was shocked at how old he was. And suddenly I had a really. A really vivid experience of the fact that, like, I was actually going to physically die someday. And because Redford looked so old. So I guess if Redford's gonna die, I am, too. I don't know. And anyway, it was so upsetting and so vivid that I started, I guess, having a panic attack. Like, I couldn't breathe. And I actually had to leave the theater to calm down. And anyway, sorry, that's just a ridiculous. I just love telling that story. 8:14 Wes: I don't have to have a movie ticket to have that experience. I just have to look in the mirror. 8:21 Erin: No, but it's a Redford. 8:22 Wes: Who is that person? 8:24 Erin: I know there's something. 8:25 Wes: Well, that's what I used to look. 8:27 Erin: Exactly. 8:30 Wes: I was a model. Yeah. No, that's really interesting because it captures all of this at a visceral level. It's not just about. So what is it? Yeah, what is it about someone looking really old and Robert Redford in particular, that would cause a panic attack? What aspect of your mortality is that plugging into another world? Is it about the eternal dirt nap or is it about time torn off, unused, or which. 9:02 Erin: I think more the former, but also the idea that there is an initiation into death. I think there was also something kind of religious, too, in the fear that, oh, he has aged. We are all going to undergo aging. The manner of our death might be excruciatingly painful and drawn out. If things don't go so well for us, you know, we're not all guaranteed to die in our sleep. And then I'm going to have to give an account of what I've done. Like, I think it's all kind of in a ball for me. You know, it's all. It's all entwined together. And part of that could be my sense of faith. Which is also, like, I think, a really profound fear that he's not giving any attention to in this poem, which is like, what if. You know, what if you die? And then after you die, there's someone who has on divine videotape every single bad decision you've ever made in your entire life and then plays it back to you, and you have to give an account for that. You know, you have to pay for it. 10:12 Wes: I'd rather do the eternal. 10:14 Erin: Exactly. Right. Like, you know, it's like, oh, yeah, religion is just a way to make you feel better about yourself. Really. That's not my. Not my experience. 10:23 Wes: I would not want to relive all my bad decisions. 10:26 Erin: Yeah. So I think, you know, I think that was a big part of it for me, and I think it was. Yeah. I think it was induced by this idea that even Redford is getting old and is going to die. And so that means. That means it's going to definitely happen to mere mortals like me. And. I don't know. 10:44 Wes: I mean, anyone could have not gotten old. It would have been him, right? 10:48 Erin: Or Paul Newman. But Paul Newman's already dead, so unless he's just, you know, been assumed into heaven. 10:55 Wes: Is Paul Newman dead? 10:56 Erin: Oh, yeah. He's been dead for a while. 10:58 Wes: I had no idea. 10:58 Erin: Yeah, I thought, Joanne Woodward's still alive, but you surprised? 11:03 Wes: Oh, I was thinking Natalie Wood. I thought you were messing with me. Okay. 11:06 Erin: No, no, no, no, no, no. Joanne Woodward, his wife. 11:09 Wes: But Paul Newman, he was. Isn't he the one who put his head, face in the bowl of cold water to prevent aging? Or is that Robert Redford? 11:17 Erin: I don't know. I've never heard that. But I don't think Paul Newman would do ice dives. What? Really? 11:22 Wes: You don't think so? Okay, he's too manly for that. 11:25 Erin: No, he was so. He was so ambivalent about his own looks, and they caused him so many problems that you. I think it would have been. If I had to venture a guess, I would assume it would have been a relief for him to age a little bit, though. I don't know. With men, sometimes they look even better when they age. It's a whole thing. Anyway, the point being, I think that these thoughts that he's talking about of this kind of, you know, I'll call it like the deathbed remorse thoughts, I think that can't help but be tied to or come with, you know, in the caboose of. Or in the trunk of the car of extinction. Because it's about. What is this Extinction about it's the lack of continuation in one's life that means one wants one's life to continue. There's inherent remorse in the idea of extinction for what is lost. I think it's about more than just this idea that the screen goes blank and that's it, you know? 12:23 Wes: Yeah. I mean, we develop all these abilities, for instance, we learn all these things. This is always what struck me as this is the meaning aspect of it. Right. So there's the dirt nap aspect, but then there's the way in which everything that we might think is meaningful in some sense could be deprived of meaning by the fact that it's all going to be terminated. What's the point of becoming good at something if all of that work is for naught in some larger sense, because it can't be carried forward indefinitely. 12:54 Erin: Right, right. But isn't that also what gives. You know, we also wouldn't, say, develop any skills if we lived forever, you know what I mean? Like, there would be no. I don't know, there would be no point to becoming good at anything if any kind of excellence wasn't needed to give meaning to our lives, sustain our lives for the brief time that we're here. We could always just say, oh, we'll do it later. There's no urgency, there's no pressure to become great. I mean, I think like, death maybe takes away the. The meaning of becoming good at something, but it also lends the meaning for. At least for certain things. I mean, maybe not for like, you know, learning to play the piano, but certainly for making the most of one's time in certain crucial other ways. I mean, I think that includes playing the piano. But, you know, for argument's sake. 13:44 Wes: Yeah, that's a good point. I was thinking. And you know, if just thinking strictly in terms of accomplishment, people can be driven by prestige or they can be just driven by love of the work itself. But to the extent that we're driven by prestige, yet that's something that's time pressured. Perhaps it is the case that if we had an infinite amount of time to do any of those things, then it would become meaningless. And after all, the person who's a great novelist inside of 80 years, if I have an infinity to tell myself that I might be able to do that one day. Yeah, no, I think so. That's a good point. Before we move to the next stanza, just like this, these last two lines, not to be here, not to be anywhere and soon nothing more terrible, nothing more true. Makes me think there should be a Dr. Seuss version of this with drawings and just for kids. 14:46 Erin: Oh, the places you won't go when you're dead. 14:50 Wes: That's great. Everybody dies. 14:56 Erin: I really want you to become used 14:58 Wes: to the idea early. 14:59 Erin: Yeah. I really want you to write a series of children's books on the theme of mortality. 15:04 Wes: Actually, that is actually not a bad idea. 15:07 Erin: That would be horrid. Have you ever read. I had some of these books. Maybe. Maybe it was Hilaire Belloc wrote a couple of children's books on this theme or. I also loved the Edward Gorey, the kids dying in gruesome ways according to the Alphabet. You know, like A is for Arthur who was struck down by an axe or whatever, you know, and it shows, like all these kids being brutally murdered or dying in heinous ways. Anyway, I loved that when I was a kid. Kids are sickos. 15:37 Wes: All right, you want to read the next one? 15:40 Erin: This is a special way of being afraid. No trick dispels religion. Used to try that. Vast moth eaten musical brocade created to pretend we never die. And specious stuff that says no rational being can fear a thing. It will not feel, not seeing that this is what we fear. No sight, no sound, no touch or taste or smell. Nothing to think with, nothing to lo…

Full show notes at the publisher

Consciousness Bemoaned in “Aubade” by Philip Larkin (Part 1) Apr 22, 2024

Show notes

In the medieval tradition of courtly love, the aubade inverts the serenade. Where one heralds an evening arrival, the other laments a morning departure. In John Dunne’s famous poetic contribution to the genre, he chastises the sun for waking and so separating lovers, but consoles us with the notion that the power of the sun is ultimately subordinate to the imperatives of love. More bleak, Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” seems to abandon this indictment on behalf of love for one on behalf of self-love, perhaps even on behalf of life itself. Morning awakens us to both workaday drudgery and an awareness of our own mortality. As a consequence, life is harder to live by the light of day, the consolations of philosophy and religion notwithstanding, and vitality is confined to the sorts of evening revelry that make waking all the harder. Wes & Erin discuss whether life (and love) can be reconciled with human self-consciousness and all that it entails. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:20 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: In the medieval tradition of courtly love, the Aubade inverts the serenade where one heralds an evening arrival, the other laments a morning departure. In John Donne's famous poetic contribution to the genre, he chastises the sun for waking and so separating lovers, but consoles us with the notion that the power of the sun is ultimately subordinate to the imperatives of love. More bleak, Philip Larkin's poem Aubade seems to abandon this indictment on behalf of love for one, on behalf of self love, perhaps even on behalf of life itself. Morning awakens us both to workaday drudgery and an awareness of our own mortality as a consequence. Life is harder to live in the light of day, the consolations of philosophy and religion notwithstanding, and vitality is confined to the sorts of evening revelry that make waking all the harder. Today we discuss whether life and love can be reconciled with human self consciousness and all that it entails. This is Wes Alwan and this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to subtext. Okay, so today we are discussing Philip Larkin's Aubade. I looked up the pronunciation. I don't think I said that. I don't think I pronounced it correctly when we announced it on the last episode. I think I might have thought it was obeyed. Anyway, it's Aubade. 2:03 Erin: That is how it's spelled. 2:04 Wes: Yeah, it is French. Technically. I've had some French and should know better. But anyway, so it's interesting because this is a form of poem that is meant to be a kind of love song between lovers separating at dawn. And I think it has its origins in troubadours. Provencal, right? Courtly love. John Donne, who we've done before on this podcast, has a famous example called the Sun Rising, which maybe we could point to some of the elements of that by way of comparison. This poem is an interesting twist on the aubade because it in the typical. So I guess we should say, what does a typical aubade do? Lovers have spent the night together, they're parting in the morning. And the aubade addresses what specifically about the parting? I guess it could be any aspect of it. 3:05 Erin: Well, it's regretful and it's a love poem. There's regret about leaving the lover. So I think it has a couple of mixed emotions, typically. 3:15 Wes: And in the John Donne's poem, there's an element of defiance which is pretty typical of him. So the poem starts with busy old fool, unruly sun, why dost thou thus? It's not the first inanimate object that he's insulted as if it were a person. And then the way it ends is with she's all states and all princes I, nothing else is. Thou, sun, art half as happy as we, and that the world's contracted thus. Thine age asks ease. And since thy duties be to warm the world that's done in warming us, shine here to us. And thou art everywhere. This bed thy center is these walls, thy sphere. So the world, in a sense, revolves around the lovers and the sun, which is the thing, right, that's interfering with the couple and is the cause of them having to part, is defeated in a sense. So I guess it doesn't have to all be regret. It can be some element of defiance there, or turning it around on the villain. In this case, the sun who's causing the parting. 4:24 Erin: The parting is put off for now. They never quite part. I don't know if this is like full aubade, because eventually he invites the sun in, in a sense, but they still haven't gotten out of bed. The sun rising part, too. The Sunne rising up after bed. 4:42 Wes: The Sunne rising. Yeah. It is spelled S U N N 4:46 Erin: E. I know, it's. Yeah. 4:51 Wes: All right. So do you know of any other famous examples? 4:55 Erin: This is the one I always think of. 4:57 Wes: Yeah, I think of that. And I think of this Larkin poem, which is interesting in that it seems not to have anything to do with lovers parting at dawn. Why is this an aubade? And what is he doing here? 5:08 Erin: Yeah, I was thinking a little bit about this. Like, the dawn kind of breaks during the poem. The anticipation of the dawn occurs in line three, but it hasn't actually happened yet. So it's sort of pre dawn. The trope seems to be inverted where he's. 5:27 Wes: So he's mentioning work. So the reason the villain is the sun, or it's having to go to work, or it's whatever it is that there's a kind of coupling that happens at night in the sense it's not just sex, but it's the sleeping next to each other the whole night. And I guess. Right. That's really. If you had to count up the hours that a couple spends with each Other, the majority of it would be while they're sleeping, because otherwise they're out doing. Other people have to go to work. And so work. The poem starts with the concept of work. So it's apt. It's not completely irrelevant to the aubade. And that's the subject, but it doesn't explicitly mention the idea that work is interfering with love. 6:15 Erin: Yeah, well, I mean, I think work here will come to have a couple different valences. I mean, I'm thinking about the fact that the lover that he's with, if you will, in this poem is death, or thoughts of death, or the reality that's really always there. Right. And then when dawn comes, the curtains are drawn on those thoughts of death as his actual literal curtains open up and let in the light and obscure the reality of death that haunts him. So in that sense, the lover is death, as I said, but also the poem itself. And this idea of maybe where art fits into work or where the very action of writing this poem fits into the schema that Larkin is introducing here is itself maybe sort of performing an aubade quality, like the very meditation in poetic form is perhaps something like the preoccupation with the lover that is actually keeping the thoughts of death at bay, or at least sort of containing them, which is a bit twisted around. Maybe that doesn't quite work. But I was just thinking a lot about, if not the form of the poem, then the sort of action of writing the poem in the face of what the content of the poem is telling us to do, and whether or not the poem therefore performs a kind of lover function or this idea of, like, whether he's spending the night with the poem or writing the poem rather than with a lover. I know it took him. I think it took him several years to write this poem, but I think that because it seems to unfold in real time or it dramatizes a particular set of moments, I wonder if the poem, therefore, is sort of taking the place of the lover. 8:00 Wes: Yeah, that's a very good point. The poem is taking the place of a lover, or are you suggesting it's to an unnamed, unmentioned lover? When you said the lover, certainly the former lover is. Death is important, but go ahead. Sorry. 8:18 Erin: Yeah, yeah. So definitely, I think this is Larkin at his most alone. So definitely the poem in the place of a lover in the role of a lover. The idea that he's wiling away his hours writing this poem rather than sleeping with someone. 8:38 Wes: Okay, right. Right. That's another good thing to keep in mind. So we can think of death as the lover. We can think of the poem itself because it's what he's spent his time doing overnight. Is that the idea? All right, so we have two candidates. It occurs to me that originally, the aubade is a song sung by a departing lover to a woman who's sleeping. So it doesn't have to be about that circumstance. It could be anything. I mean, I think it's meant to be evocative of dawn in some way, but I don't know enough about these actual songs of the Middle Ages. There's. Apparently, there's a book by. And I got this off of Wikipedia, but by Gale Sigal called Erotic Dawn Songs of the Middle Ages, voicing the lyric lady. 9:28 Erin: Oh, yeah, I have it. It's right on my shelf. 9:31 Wes: There's enough of these to have a whole book about that. So I don't. You know, it'd be interesting to know what the content of these songs is and how it varies and the extent to which they're on the nose or they might make creative departures in the way that Larkin does. But, yeah, so I like this idea of. So I think we talked about death as the lover or the poem itself as the lover. And then it's possible the poem is. Maybe this won't make sense once we get into the analysis, but it's possible that this would be something that he's writing to a human lover. Okay, should we start going stanza by stanza? 10:12 Erin: Sure, yeah. Do you want me to read one stanza at a time or. 10:15 Wes: Yeah, let's do that, I think. 10:17 Erin: Okay. So here's the first stanza. I work all day and get half drunk at night Waking at four to soundless dark I stare. In time the curtain edges will grow light Till then I see what's really always there Unresting death A whole day nearer now making all thought impossible but how and where and when I shall myself die Arid interrogation. Yet the dread of dying and being dead flashes afresh to hold and horrify. 10:50 Wes: Really interesting irony here in the sense that light is going to be evocative of death. You might think that going to sleep in the dark and the dark itself would be the thing that is, strictly speaking, evocative of dying and death. But here it's actually the light coming in around the curtain edges and the transition from night into morning that is evocative of death. 11:19 Erin: Yeah, I think that transition idea is a really interesting one because it's the thing he's anticipating. So right now he's in the dark room occupied with these thoughts of death, the light coming in, or, you know, he's anticipating that the light is going to come in and obscure this vision that he has. So there's something about him being in this dark room with the curtains over it that he's sort of entombed right now. And then the light is going to come in, open up the tomb and distract him from the thoughts of death. But I was thinking a lot about that sort of, you know, that transitional idea that you're getting at, where. So there's something, you know, a bit reversed about this because we begin with him in the room. You know, it seems like his sort of normal state, his regular operating system is, you know, lying and thinking about death. And the intrusion of the day is this sort of false thing, the. That comes in and obscures those thoughts for a while. But, you know, he implies that these are always kind of lingering at the edges of his field of vision, even when he's not in bed, mulling this stuff over. So I was thinking a lot about the idea of the day as the distraction from this sort of regular operating system, of the speaker, of thinking about death all the time and how that's kind of. Maybe it flips our usual expectations. And also thinking about this idea of him being dead or in a kind of faux death, lying in this bed, in this dark room and then rising up into a kind of life during the day. It seems also to flip the expectation that death is something that waits for us at the end. It's like a state that he's always in that he's just taking a break from temporarily. 13:05 Wes: I think that's a good point. It's the. So the sense in which day is evocative of death is just the sense in which it is a timekeeper. Here's another repetition. Here's another day. And I am one day closer to death. And death is inevitable. So this transition period, if it were all day or all night, if all of our existence were confined, if there weren't the cyclical event to remind us and to parse out time in this way, then obviously we would still have clocks and watches. But the timekeeping is kind of embedded in nature. Whereas the sun rising, one might think it would be a source of optimism and hope. And look, here's a whole new day ahead of me. One can always look at it as just another tick of the clock and look at it as an indication that one's future is contracting, not expanding, that time is running out. 14:09 Erin: Yeah, this first line, I'm really Intrigued by. Because it sort of starts with this idea of being anesthetized. That the workaday world is exhausting enough or onerous enough that the speaker needs to get half drunk in order to sort of deal with the stress of the day. So he's in this state at the beginning of the poem. Because, as often happens when you drink too much, you wake up in the middle of the night. So these thoughts are intruding after. 14:41 Wes: Really. I've never experienced. 14:42 Erin: Right after a day of actually taking the waking world, if you will, quite seriously and actually needing to induce a kind of, you know, anesthetized, deadened state in order to deal with the oppression of reality. So that, as a kind of setup, is just a really interesting idea to me because it seems to fly in the face of what he'll later say he's afraid of, which is this idea of being anesthetized and never waking up. Which is something a bit different from taking the edge off of your day. But I still think that there's this, you know, courting, if you will. He seems to fall pretty definitively on the side of believing that waking life is kind of a lie and that it's all a farce and a charade and we're all going to die. But I think in terms of the way that he lives his life, the little glimpse that we get into how his days normally go in this first line, there's something a bit more complex, I think, happening there. 15:44 Wes: Yeah, we're going to learn that part of the problem is that time is being wasted. And that's one of the ways in which death is invading life. Life is not being fully lived. There's a lot of similarities, I think, to. Well, conceptually at least, to the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock being anesthetized and the idea of time being wasted and passivity, which is an interesting way to think of work. But I wanted to say this first line is great. Right. It's the kind of line where. Okay, yeah. I'm almost guarantee to read the rest of the poem. And that's not just because it has the word drunk in it. 16:29 Erin: I just love those drinking poems. 16:32 Wes: I love the symmetry of the first eight syllables. So you have. It's. Before we get to syllable…

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Identity and Infamy in “Citizen Kane” (1941) (Part 2) Jan 15, 2024

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Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane.” Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, HelloFresh. Go to HelloFresh.com/subtextfree and use code subtextfree for free breakfast for life. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Wes: Okay. Welcome to part two of our discussion of Citizen Kane. We had just gotten done talking about the complicated way that Kane comes across, especially in that scene where Gettys is threatening him. And Gettys doesn't come across entirely as simply a villain. In contrast to Kane, Kane is just as much as a villain in that scene. And something you said, Erin, I thought was very interesting, which is that he never does anything good. And I'm trying to think if he ever does anything good. And it, you know, on first blush, that seems right to me. And it would be interesting to think of what if the film had him do something that was unequivocally good. That's kind of save the cat moment in the film where the protagonist is made likable to the audience, whatever his trajectory is going to be. It might make the tragic downfall. It might give it more emotional heft. I don't know. In that first Scene where we first see him as an adult in the newsroom. Young Orson Welles. There's at least a hint of that. There's a kind of idealism there, it seems it makes you think that maybe you're gonna see him actually do good things with his newspaper. Maybe he is gonna expose someone's corruption. And the one. The person whose corruption he does expose, Gettys. That again, that is made more complicated by the fact that he wants to defeat Gettys politically and is using his own newspaper in a corrupt way to support his own campaign. 1:53 Erin: Thinking through this, I can think of one instance in which he does something we might call good. And I'm thinking that this might actually turn out to be a lot more significant, maybe symbolically, than I had considered before. And that's when he's distracting Susan when she has her toothache. 2:12 Wes: Right. 2:12 Erin: I love that scene. I mean, I think it's a really sweet scene. I also think that maybe in the previous episode, I said that Emily comes across as being sympathetic in the confrontation scene. I'm actually not sure why I said that. I don't 100% think that's true because I don't think that Emily is a very sympathetic character overall. And I think it's ironic that, you know, Hearst's biggest issue that he took with the film, it seems, which is very gallant of him, is the fact that he felt it maligned. Marion Davies, who. Susan is sort of. Susan is like the funhouse mirror version of Marion Davies. And actually, I think that Susan is an extremely sympathetic character. Okay? She's shrill, she's too loud of a voice. And maybe she's a little bit idiotic at times, but. But I really like her. I mean, of anybody in the movie, I think I have the most emotional connection to her, perhaps. I mean, I'm in love with Orson Welles, but that's beside the point. Anyway, so she's extremely childlike, right? And in this scene where she has a toothache, which is really funny. I love that first scene where she starts laughing at him on the street. When she first sees him, we see that she has no idea who he is. So she has this inherent innocence. She's not out to get some rich guy or anything like that. Not at all. And in order to distract her, he puts on a little bit of a show. And it allows time, I suppose, for the medicine to kick in or for the toothache to totally subside. It's unclear. And she forgets all about it and is cured. And there's a metaphor there to the movies perhaps. Right. Especially in the middle of 1941 or 1940 really, when the film was made, hadn't gotten into the war yet and were still in the throes of the Depression. And movies were obviously this great escapist entertainment. And maybe the suggestion is that Cain's papers are also a kind of escapist entertainment, that they're giving people something to distract themselves from their toothaches or something. I don't know. But I do think it's significant that if we can argue, and maybe there are other instances I'm not thinking of, you can tell me. But if we do argue that this is kind of the one good thing that Kane does or the one time that he really shows a sort of selflessness or a desire to authentically please someone else versus sort of throwing gifts at them or doing all these other self aggrandizing things that he does throughout the film, like making her into an opera star, which we could talk about is really self interested on his part. Right. If this is the one moment in which he loses that self interest and is just focused on making someone else happy, how significant then that this is his downfall? Right. That because of this affair, this is the self sabotage that's going to ruin everything for him. 5:02 Wes: Yeah. And it's interesting because when he meets her, he says, I was on my way to the western Manhattan warehouses in search of my youth. Do you remember that? Did you mention that? And then I've forgotten that you mentioned that. 5:18 Erin: I talked about it a little bit in terms of. In the previous episode. I think this is where Mary's stuff is held that he keeps on. That he hangs onto. So this is presumably how he still has the sled. 5:29 Wes: Yeah, yeah. So it suggests that he's on his way to find his sled. Is that what's going on? 5:37 Erin: I think just look through the old garbage heap from Colorado. His mother's dead at this point. Right. Or maybe she just died and he's gonna go on a. Oh, he even says it. He's gonna take a sentimental journey. Right? 5:50 Wes: Yeah. Yep. So you were asking about the. Or you were. You were suggesting that he does something good here by help. By distracting her from her toothache. What does he do? He moves his ears. He does the shadow puppets. 6:04 Erin: Yeah, of course, you know, she doesn't. Yeah, I was just going to say of course. It's also an instance in which he gets to show off and be the center of attention, but he doesn't have to exert himself in these ways. Right, right. 6:18 Wes: She doesn't know who he is, which is crucial. At a certain point he'll say, I run a couple of newspapers. Which is a line that gets repeated. In fact, near the. I think it's near the end when he's. Well, he uses it to threaten people at various points. So he says it to Susan, oh, 6:40 Erin: I've found the mention of the mother, she hadn't just died. He says that she died a long time ago and her things were put in storage out west. And yeah, so just want to make that correction. 6:51 Wes: Okay. So yeah, so the other, this whole idea of newspapers comes up again in the end where her music teacher is worried that he's going to be a laughingstock if Susie is allowed to sing in public. And that's where Kane again says, I basically, okay, I own the newspapers. Her reputation is gonna. I'm the guardian of her reputation. So there's that echo from this first meeting with Susie where he mentions running a couple of newspapers as if it's in a kind of modest or self deprecating way. She doesn't know who he is and he's not explicitly saying, hey, I'm famous. 7:38 Erin: Right. 7:39 Wes: But yeah, I think you're right. There's something about that, there's something sweet about that scene. I also found some. A little bit, I don't know, creepy, not sinister is the wrong word. A little bit creepy. When he's watching her sing for him. Definitely something a bit obsessive and controlling. And you can see that his relationship to the world has become more one of possession already at this point. 8:08 Erin: Yeah. I mean so significantly they meet in the street because she's laughing at him because he's just gotten, he's gotten mud splattered all over him by passing carriage and she says she invites him up to her apartment to get the mud off him. Right. So. So there's the suggestion here that she's going to be redemptive for him. And of course there's also, right like the, the funny sort of reverse meaning in terms of the fact that this is going to begin their affair. This is a situation in which there's the opportunity for his opponents to sling mud at him because he has this secret. Right. So she's both going to kind of clean him up and dirty him at the same time. And the redemption I think is. Yeah, it's short lived in terms of his political career, as I've already said. Like, you know, we have this moment where he does some sweet things for her but ultimately this is going to be the ruin of his Public life. We also have him being kind of sweet and receptive to this, to her as a person, and then insisting that she sing for him, which might be something sweet, but then we know that based on. Even as you're suggesting, and I agree in the way that he's relating to her in this scene when she's singing, that this is going to become a problem, that there's something sinister here about this relationship to her singing. Especially because I was almost wondering as I was watching this if Orson Welles is signaling during their conversation about her singing career that he's not quite listening to her or he's not listening to this one particular part of her story, which is that she's not that interested in being a singer, but her mother wants her to be. And you know how mothers are. And to that he says, yes, his eyes glaze over. We assume that he's thinking about his own mother. But there's also, I think, a point at which she repeats this sentiment and talks about her mother wanting her to be an opera singer. And at some point, I get the impression that he's not really paying attention. So what's curious about this singing thing is that she does make it clear that this is her mother's aspiration for her. But then he actually fills the role of the mother by continuing her singing career and by kind of forcing her into those. So he takes on this, like, oddly maternal role, which is weird. Obviously, it's connected to his own mother. That connection is, as I said, explicitly made in the dialogue. And then the really mysterious part of this, though, the piece of this that I don't quite understand is, like, why singing. Why does he take this on? You understand later that it's a point of honor for him, that he's not gonna be made a laughingstock and he's going to, you know, prop her up and insist on this career because she's been made fun of and she's an extension of him or she's an object that he own. But singing, thinking through this a little bit, it's the manipulation of the voice. Maybe he wants to be the puppet master. Right. I'm on the edge of something here, but you take over. 11:10 Wes: I haven't thought about why singing in particular. You have me thinking about the way in which he's invested in trying to make Susie a successful opera singer. And part of that is getting her lessons and seeing if she can improve. And I. To my amateur ear, they don't make her obviously, horrible, right? 11:30 Erin: No, not at all, maybe. 11:31 Wes: Right. But she just doesn't have the innate talent to really rise to the level that he wants her to rise to. And it turns out in the end, she doesn't even want to do that. She tells him she never really wanted to be a hugely successful singer. For some reason, she tells him that from the beginning. Yeah, that's right. And so for some reason, he needs to repair her and make her into something. And I assume that's part of why he's making this transition from his first wife to his second. I mean, obviously there's the famous montage scene where we see his first wife, Emily, complaining about the amount of time he's spending with the newspaper. So it's a very ordinary and typical sort of conflict that ultimately leads him to divorce. But you can also, you know, meeting Susie is the inciting incident for the breakup. And I think part of his fascination with her is her. She has a lower status than his wife, and he can give her any status that she's going to have by using newspapers to manipulate her reputation and forcing her on the world and trying to create a different reality by having all of his papers give her good reviews except for the one review by his friend, which we'll talk about in a minute, or the one review that he actually finishes and publishes, that Jed starts and Kane finishes. So his conception of being one of the people with Citizen, or being a champion of the people, or loving other people, doing good for other people, it involves, again, the use of manipulation. It involves this idea that he can manipulate other people's perception of reality in order to paint something in a good or bad light in order to manipulate reputation. So instead of just being interested in Susie as she is and loving her and all the rest, he has to embark on this project of using his power to make her into something which is not what she wants. And I don't even think he's particularly invested in what it is that he's trying to make her into. I just think he's invested in the process of using the power that he has with newspapers to. To turn her into something that is his own product. 14:08 Erin: Yeah. What you say about her voice, I mean, I think her voice is sweet and obviously he likes it. And in a healthy relationship, which this is already not starting out as a healthy relationship. Right. But if it were and he liked it, it could be part of his private enjoyment in a good way. Not in this way that we're pointing to, is embedded within this very first scene in which he's staring at her kind of. I mean, how would we describe that kind of covetously or I think. I think creepy is a good word for it. Right. But if he weren't staring at her in this way and if they didn't have such a destructive relationship and he liked her voice, which he's entitled to like, and I do think that she has a. She has a sweet voice, then this could be part of their shared enjoyment. Their. Yeah, they're. Again, a kind of private enjoyment in the home where she could sing for him and he would like that, and it could be something positive in the relationship. But a voice for opera, a voice of that size is a relatively rare thing. You either have it or you don't. You can. If you have it, you can improve it. You can train it, you can learn to control it. But you can't take a small voice or a thin voice and make it big and full. And so he's fundamentally asking her to contort herself into something that she's not. And I think maybe it relates to this idea of this private versus public divide. Right. If she was just singing for him in private, I don't mean like behind a closed door, but, you know, like entertaining friends, something like that, not having to be a public figure, a public opera singer, then that would be one thing. The operatic voice, the largeness, the pure size of that instrument. It, you know, it's something that is designed to fill a theater without amplification. It's a big voice. It's something public. And so I think that his desire to turn her to that indi…

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Identity and Infamy in “Citizen Kane” (1941) (Part 1) Jan 08, 2024

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It’s a film bursting with objects—the treasure troves of Xanadu, a snowglobe, jigsaw puzzles, a winner’s cup, the famous sled. Even the conceptual elements of the film’s plot are expressed tangibly. Kane’s mind-boggling wealth isn’t an abstraction, but a list of concrete holdings—gold mines, oil wells, real estate. And the news Kane controls and manipulates, when yoked to another noun, is something one can hold in one’s hands: a newspaper. Kane, too, is described as the incarnation of several abstractions. As his obituary tells us, he himself was “news,” as well as the embodiment of whole years in a swath straddling the 19th and 20th centuries. One might call him the American idea personified. But what these terms really mean and how they’re made manifest in Kane is hard to pin down. At times, he seems to be no more than a vast, empty planet around which objects swirl. What’s at his core, then? What did his life mean? One reporter searching for the secret of Kane bets that just one fact—the identity of “Rosebud”—would explain his whole life. Another suggests that it’s in the sum total of his possessions. Yet another thinks, curiously, that even Kane’s actions won’t tell us who he really was. So what, then, determines his or any identity? What’s the measure of a person? The objects they possess? The abstract ideals they claim to stand for? Their actions? Or something still deeper? Wes & Erin discuss possibly the greatest film ever made: from 1941, Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Erin: It's a film bursting with objects. The treasure troves of Xanadu, a snow globe, jigsaw puzzles, a winner's cup, the famous sled. Even the conceptual elements of the film's plot are expressed tangibly. Kane's mind boggling wealth isn't an abstraction, but a list of concrete holdings, gold mines, oil wells, real estate and the news Kane controls and manipulates, when yoked to another noun, is something one can hold in one's a newspaper. Kane, too is described as the incarnation of several abstractions. As his obituary tells us, he himself was news, as well as the embodiment of whole years in a swath straddling the 19th and 20th centuries. One might call him the American idea personified. But what these terms really mean and how they're made manifest in Kane is hard to pin down. At times, he seems to be no more than a vast empty planet around which objects swirl. What's at his core then? What did his life mean? One reporter searching for the secret of Kane, bets that just one fact, the identity of Rosebud, would explain his whole life. Another suggests that it's in the sum total of his possessions. And yet another thinks, curiously, that even Kane's actions won't tell us who he really was. So what then determines his or any identity? What's the measure of a person? The objects they possess? The abstract ideals they claim to stand for their actions? Or something still deeper? Today we're discussing possibly the greatest film ever made from 1941. Orson Welles, citizen Kane. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. 1:47 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan. 1:49 Erin: And you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, I'm curious. If you had to name one object that is most important in your life or that somehow represents you, what would it be? No pressure. Just one thing and you can't. No redos. 2:08 Wes: Does it have to be from childhood? 2:10 Erin: No. 2:12 Wes: Probably my iPhone. 2:15 Erin: No. I knew you were going to say that. 2:17 Wes: Everyone isn't. That everyone's. 2:19 Erin: That's your rosebud. 2:21 Wes: But at this point, they start out in early childhood with it. Do TikTok. 2:27 Erin: It is a rectangle. 2:28 Wes: We used this company all our life. Now. Yeah. Right. We can't. It's not big enough to ride down 2:34 Erin: a snow hill, but maybe one day. 2:38 Wes: But let me think of a. Let me think of a more. Something with more sentimental value. The first thing that comes to mind that I have from childhood. Let's do that. Is a teddy bear that I got from my mom when I Was five years old. And I still remember her giving it to me on my birthday. And I named it Charlie Honey Bear. I still have it. It's one of the few things I have because when we came over from Ireland when I was nine, it's a long story, but we lost all our possessions that we had in Ireland, and the only things that I had on my person did I end up keeping. So all my everything from childhood was gone except for good old Charlie Honey Bear. Well, fun fact, the back of his head is burnt because I dropped him in the fireplace at some point. He still has this soot stained back of his head, but he's still running strong. They used to make him really durable back in the day. How about you? 3:41 Erin: Oh, I don't have an answer for this. I'm putting you on the spot. 3:44 Wes: Screw you. 3:47 Erin: I'd really have to think about it, 3:48 Wes: but I regret telling that story. 3:50 Erin: I know I trapped you. I trapped you. No, but I was thinking about whether or not that's. I was thinking about this idea of a totem object and whether or not people have these things if they can name off the top of their heads, you know, you're part of my social experiment. If they can name off the top of their head something that they would save in a fire, obviously, you know, Charlie Honey Bear narrowly escaped. But fun fact, Charlie Honey Bear is Susan's nickname for Kane. But anyway, yeah, I mean, I was reading a little bit about what Welles thought about the word rosebud, that maybe even Kane didn't know or remember what that meant, that it was just a kind of an unconscious word that was floating around in his mind unconsciously from childhood, that maybe he wouldn't even have been able to say that it was written on the sled. And so whether or not that word as divorced from the object even means something even less tangible or less, I don't know, somehow explainable than the sled itself. That memory is such an unpredictable, unstable kind of thing, and our relationship to our own childhoods can become so romanticized, estranged, somehow we take sometimes, as memory often works, we take memories, memorable events from things that are utterly inconsequential, and somehow those become the things that we remember best from certain periods of our lives. Anyway, all of that to say that I was just thinking about the significance of Rosebud and whether this rang psychologically true on a contemporary level. I mean, it must, it's very significant. People seem to agree this is a pretty good movie. 5:43 Wes: So which, whether, which part rings psychological? 5:47 Erin: The idea of Rosebud of a singular object, of a life reduced to. Yeah. Or something that one carries with you, even if it's just a word that you don't even know the significance of. 5:59 Wes: Yeah. Well, it's interesting. When you started to ask that question and you said the word object, I started to worry that you were going to ask me which of his antiquities I was most impressed by. And I thought, oh, am I supposed to know what some of those are? Because I don't know any of them. You know, one of the things I had reflected on is that that sled ends up in the big, huge room before it's burned. It's in there with all his possessions, including all those statues and other antiquities. And I. By the way, it's a scene that reminds me of the end of the Raiders of the Lost Ark. And the Ark kind of is kind of a sled too. Right. Or it looks like one, maybe. Could be. It could be repurposed as a sled. It. What the final scene suggests to me is that what replaces the sled in his adult life are all these statues and other antiquities, these possessions, which, you know, whereas the sled is something that can be used for play and childhood fun. And like I said, you can take it down a snow hill. There's a certain element of vitality and freedom associated with it. The antiquities are more about. You get the impression he's trying to aggrandize himself both by having those possessions, but also by identifying with whatever is the subject of a monument. I don't know if that answers your question. Your question was about. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. 7:42 Erin: Whether this was psychologically accurate to the way that we relate to objects. I mean, I think that the final scene, they're taking inventory and they have two categories for the stuff that's in that room. Junk and art. Right. And the $2 stove, part of the estate of Mary Kane Charles, mother from Colorado, that's in there, too. Right. And so he seems to have amassed, and we're told earlier in the film, I think, right. That he has a big warehouse in western Manhattan where he stored everything from his mother's estate and from this house in Colorado. Right. So the fact that all of these things are in the same kind of junk pile together or maybe in the same warehouse, or in this instance, in the final scene in the atrium altogether, implies the people going through an inventorying are trying to figure out what to throw away and what to save. What's junk and what's art. But of course, like any mother saddled with a macaroni necklace that their child has made for them, knows sometimes the junk is a lot more valuable or of much more psychological importance than some expensive vase or something like that. Right? 8:54 Wes: Yeah. So the question is whether it's psychologically realistic. So you don't. Do you have anything from childhood that 9:02 Erin: I have Lots of things. I mean, too many things. I think that's. Maybe that's the question that I have, is the fact that one can reduce everything to the sled. I have probably if I sat down and thought about it and made a list, I could think of 25 things that each represent some area of my life that are still kicking around somewhere. At my grandmother's house, at my parents house, in my apartment, in somebody's basement, you know, things that I've held onto. And so maybe it's the singularity of the sled or the fact that one could be reduced to a single object. Like, I think I'm interested in the fact that Kane can't be pinned down. It seems like Kane is almost like a vacuum in the middle of the film. Of course, the point is that the sled doesn't explain everything, right? But the interest in the fact that this guy who is sort of everything and nothing and who is vast and simple at the same time, who has conflicting motivations and seemingly like a very complex personality, that he can be a explained and not explained in a single object, I think is. I mean, maybe that just increases his complexity or something, that he has all these objects and really just one is the thing that has haunted him or something. It's these sort of opposed binaries united across all vectors of his personality, so that he would be a collector of everything in the world on the one hand, and then just wanting, not wanting, but being explained by one object on the other hand. 10:39 Wes: It's associated early on with his loss of his parents and his capture by Thatcher. Is that the name of the person who runs the trust? Thatcher? So I think it must have even more significance than many an object, childhood object, would have for us. He attacks Thatcher with it. Thatcher tries to give him a new one. And that forms the basis of a transition from childhood to adulthood. We jump over a whole bunch of years by kind of sledding over it, I guess. And the first act is really about that conflict with Thatcher. So I think this led. It is about, as someone says later on, at the nearly very end of the film, it is about something he's lost, but it's also about what he becomes. Because his desire to become a tabloid newspaper operator who can make or ruin people's reputations in the name of representing the people. That is obviously framed as part and parcel of his defiance against Thatcher. I want to become everything you hate, he says near the end of the first act, and even to the point where he's willing to publish articles that are not beneficial to companies in which he has lots of shares of stock. So I think the sled is also a representation of, or it's representative of defiance. And somehow that defiance went awry and turned in on itself. It didn't have the forward momentum that it was supposed to have. It went off track. So that whereas he starts out wanting to be a man of the people and to fight for justice, the whole act of being involved in this use of information to create whatever reality he wants to create for his own purposes, that becomes something. It becomes about his own reputation. 12:54 Erin: Yeah, I'm thinking about that replacement sled and what that's maybe representative of. Right. Because we have the early sled is rosebud, obviously, which is suggestive of nature and innocence and femininity with his mother, his relationship with his mother. And then we have this replacement sled that Thatcher hands him, which has crusader on it. It's the name of it. 13:20 Wes: Oh, really? Okay. 13:22 Erin: Yeah. Interesting. And, of course, this is something tough and, you know, representative maybe of. We think of a crusader, I think of armor, something protective that's donned against the world, against attack. But there's also something romantic about being a crusader, being a knight in shining armor, a protector, or someone who goes out on a kind of a mission, obviously. And so I'm interested in the fact that this crusader sled is Thatcher, hands it to him in the same way that Thatcher kind of hands him the money, so to speak, that makes Kane able to be the defender of the people that he seems to wish to become. And that itself is a kind of crusading effort to. So obviously the two sleds represent one Kane in childhood, the other Kane in adulthood. But I suppose I'm interested in the fact that Thatcher supplies this sled to him. It's symbolic to me in that Thatcher, of course, has, like, affected his maturation by coming into his life and being his trustee and changing everything. But also this idea of crusading, which seems to run against, as you're pointing out, seems to run against Thatcher's personality, or, you know, it's a way of Kane trying to defy Thatcher by being the defender of the people or whatever, is also lent to him. It's like an idea that's been lent to him by Thatcher as well. Perhaps just in negative. Right. In defiance of what Thatcher represents, but also literally in terms of this sled. Yeah, yeah. 15:03 Wes: The money both gives him a target of his crusade and his discontent and something to fight against and then it gives him the means for conducting the fight. So it creates a kind of contradiction or paradox for him from the beginning. And it's an odd situation for him to be in where he's not rebelling against his own father and there's this suggestion by the mother that she's sending him to be brought up where the father can't get him. So there's the suggestion that the father has abused him, but instead of going through that kind of rebellion against his own parents, he's doing it against a surrogate who is. What, he's not a foster parent? Exactly. Although I suppose he must have played the role of a parent up to a certain point.…

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Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” (Part 6) Dec 25, 2023

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Part 6 of Wes & Erin’s discussion of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.” Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, St. John’s College. Learn more about undergraduate–and graduate–Great Books programs at St. John’s in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Annapolis, Maryland at sjc.edu/subtext. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:13 Wes: Okay, welcome to part six of our discussion of The Winter's Tale. We are just going to finish up Act 4 and then get into Act 5. We just discussed the giving of the flowers and the meaning of all that stuff and grafting on and weeds and all the rest of it. So I think we're ready to move on to the point where Autolycus comes in and is selling the ballads. What do we want to say about that? 0:44 Erin: Just before we do, if you don't mind, for one second, I just want to point out, you know, we were talking in the previous episode about these complications of this flower imagery, how it doesn't quite line up with the whole this element of disguise, this God and goddess metaphor, that it all gets a little bit messy. But one thing I noticed that follows that and precedes this Autolycus stuff we're gonna get into is a complication of this idea of blushing and pallor, which I hadn't noticed before that the queen 1:16 Wes: of curds and cream. 1:18 Erin: Exactly, exactly. Well, and Florizel has been praising Perdita by saying one of the loveliest speeches, I think, in the whole play. What you do still betters what is done. When you speak sweet, I'd have you do it ever. You know, everything she does is better than the thing before it. And he ends that speech by saying, each your doing, so singular in each particular crowns what you are doing in the present deeds, that all your acts are queens, so even everything she does is royal. And she responds to this by saying, oh, doricles, which. This is his false identity, you know, he's dressed down as a shepherd. O Doricles, your praises are too large, but that your youth and the true blood, which peeps fairly through it to plainly give you out an unstained shepherd with wisdom I might fear, my Doricles, you wooed me the false way. So this is really interesting because she says, you know, I could see that you're true and that you are unstained, that you are not trying to get in my pants by saying all this sweet stuff to me. You know, I could see you're innocent, and I could see that by your true blood. This kind of flips, this idea of the virginal pallor image that previously we'd been talking about, or this idea of blood as, you know, the blush entering in as being the sort of rite of spring, as being the, you know, synonymous with, like, obviously imagery of, you know, the sexual act or of becoming blushing, because you're being seen by someone and have a burgeoning romance with them, and therefore, you know, you start to become stained with sexual desire, if you will, in your. The blushing of your cheek. So here it's like, what makes him a true noble intent and sort of like a true virgin, if you will, is the blood is the blush. This is an inversion. And then later, as you point out, Camillo looks at Perdita and says he tells her something that makes her blood look out. Good sooth, she is the queen of curds and cream. So then Florizel is whispering something in Perdita's ear that makes her blush. And then he remarks that she has this peaches and cream complexion to her. So I don't know what to say about that, except just to point it out that the true blood, of course, what she might be noticing is also maybe an inside joke between the two of them about his royal blood, so she could see that he's going to not woo her the false way, precisely because he's a prince. And this also gets into what we were talking about previously, about Perdita's goodness as being inherent to her genetic makeup because she's a princess rather than just a shepherdess. And maybe in this moment, Perdita is attributing Florizel's moral upstandingness with the fact that he's a prince. Those two things are kind of collapsed on each other. Right. 4:08 Wes: She's saying, if I didn't know better, I'd think you were trying to get in my pants because of these. With these extravagant praises. Right. This is flattery. And the way. How does she know better? She know because he's blushing, which can be taken as a sign of desire, but it can also be taken as a sign of conscience, shame or embarrassment or something like that. So there are certain emotions that are grafted together and can't be disentangled. It is desire. And yeah, his. There is a deceptiveness to the praises in some sense, but the desire is also entangled with. With. So it's lust on the one hand, but it's also respect and love on the other. And the two things are tangled up. And the two things are both revealed in the blushing, in the redness. So I think that's a great point, which is that, yeah, this is another. The many ways in which this redness can have these two different meanings that are connected to each other. So I think that love is complex in this sense, and it combines honesty and deception and combines ulterior, your physical, lustful motives with true respect for a person. That's what comes across here to me. 5:20 Erin: Yeah. You're also making me think of maybe if Leontes saw this, he would say, is blushing nothing? Because it's something that is, as you're suggesting. It can mean all of these things together or at once, and it could mean innocence or it could mean guilt. Right. But it's complicated and it's something that. The way you present could be deceptive. It could have many different potential meanings or all the meanings together. And this opacity, even of something as sort of self revealing as blushing to me, indicates the complexity of human nature and human desire, which is one that Leontes wants to flatten into one single read. Right. He would read guilt into a blush rather than being shy, as you're suggesting, or actually being innocent. Right. And that. That flattening is what makes Leontes so dangerous. Whereas I think that what you're suggesting is that the multiplicity of possible interpretations is actually much more accurate and much more fruitful. And, you know, both on a linguistic level, as we see in the complexity of these speeches, but also in terms of just understanding people having many different sides to them. 6:30 Wes: You know, and I think we'll get some of the same complexity with Autolycus's songs. I love the way he's introduced by the servant. He sings several tunes, faster than you'll tell money. He utters them as he had eaten ballads. So he's memorized a lot of songs. Is that a reference to memorization or is it just a reference to how well he performs them? Because obviously they're written down, but in any case, he shall come in. I love it. This is the clown. I love a ballad even too well, if it be doleful. Doleful matter merrily set down are a very pleasant thing indeed in sung lamentation. So seems like a bit of a reference to this admixture of comedy and tragedy that we have here in the Winter's Tale. And then the servant says he has the prettiest love songs for maids. So without bawdry, which is strange, that he makes the maid to answer, whoop, do me no harm, good men. I'm not actually quite sure what's being said here, except that it seems like they're so free of. Of bawdiness that they frame the intentions of the man as being pure, as being good. You know, again, we get this connection to what we've just been talking about, but you can correct me if I'm wrong on that interpretation. And we do, you know, Perdita, just a little ahead of that, will say, forewarn him that he used no scurrilous words in his tunes. I love that. So, again, you know, that's what's deception, what's manipulation? What's an expression of pure, pure good intentions. Autolycus the deceiver seems to be providing the implements of deception that will lead to love. But maybe this, again, an invisible hand argument where the ornamental deceptive serves the higher, a higher purpose of the down to earth. So maybe this is kind of a counter thesis that I talked, again about the mind not being able to pay off reality in several different ways. Maybe the suggestion is, is that, yes, it can, because the world would not reproduce if it weren't for these elements, these things that happen in the domain of the mental, the symbolic, the possibly deceptive or possibly inadequate to reality. In other words, we need to misapprehend the world to some extent in order to bring it into being and in order ultimately to. To connect to it. Maybe that's the counter thesis here. 8:55 Erin: That's a great point tied up with that, I think. Is this what you've pointed out about him having eaten ballads and Whether that means he's a good memorizer or a good performer. It puts me in mind of someone who has to be a good actor, right? If he's, you know, a good repertory actor will have to have eaten many parts, right? He'll have to have many parts memorized and at the ready to be able to perform them. And also, of course, he has to be a good actor in actually performing them convincingly. And you have me thinking about the implications of what it means to be a good actor. And a good actor that is like, you know, not a bad actor, not someone who performs bad actions, but someone who performs good actions and the ways in which Autolycus is, as a pickpocket is a bad actor. But in the end, you know, his pickpocketiness is put to good ends. He becomes a good actor almost in the spite of himself. Right. And that. This, I think, is the nature of what you're suggesting about courtship, that deception or being a bad actor can be put to these more positive ends, that this is the way the world goes round. This is how people are born. 9:57 Wes: But it's interesting. It sounds like the tales are non. The ballads tell tales that are winter's tales. They're non romantic, they're non sexual, and somehow that serves the purpose of wooing a woman. So Mopsa says, pray now, buy some. She's talking to the clown. I love a ballad in print of life, for when we are sure they are true, for then we are sure they are true. So this idea of printing, it occurs, this metaphor of printing occurs a few times in the play, mainly with respect to children looking like their parents. So that we know, right? So that Leontes knows that Mamillius is his, because he looks a lot like him. Or Perdita will look a lot like her mother. But in this case, right, it's an absurd thing to say, because if you look at what Autolycus is selling, here's another ballad of fish that appeared upon the coast On Wednesday, the four score of April, 40,000 fathom above water, and sung this ballad against the hard hearts of maids. All this very specific. It sounds like data, right? But it's all bullshit. It. It was thought she was a woman and was turned into a cold fish, for she would not exchange flesh with one that loved her. The ballad is very pitiful and as true. Is it true too, you think you five justices hands at it and witnesses more than my pack will hold. So again, these are old wives tales, or winter's tales, obviously false, but being Represented as true. And that's the way they differ from being just a mere fairy tale, tale or piece of fiction. People want to believe that they're true, and in believing that they're true, be romanced, be wooed to love with non body, like tabloid content. In a way, it's like handing someone the National Enquirer and saying, here you go, love. This is my gift to you. Have I won you over? Really fascinating idea. I. I think we would normally expect these ballads to be romantic, and that would be their function. So we have a rather odd thing going on here, and it's clearly supposed to serve a thematic purpose. And again, I think it speaks to the necessity of some sort of untruthfulness in leading us back to truth and back to love. 12:23 Erin: Yeah. The thing this is putting me in mind of is my favorite song from. From any Shakespeare play, which is the Sigh no More Ladies song from Much Ado, which maybe it has a similar function in that it's kind of doing the opposite of what you would expect it to do. Right. It's a love song, or it's a song in a romantic comedy which is advocating against love. I think it goes, sigh no more, lady Sigh no more Men were deceivers ever or men were constant never One foot in sea and one on shore to one thing constant never. That's right. Then sigh not so, but let them go and be you Blithe and Bonnie Converting all your sounds of woe into hey nonny nonny. So it's like, forget about men. They're awful, they're deceptive. Just give up love. Right. And this is within a play which is advocating for love and for marriage, and also in which the women are being accused of deception. You know, hero is being accused of deception, not her boyfriend. Right. But here that's kind of flipped on its head in this, where instead of saying, get married, it's saying, don't get married. Instead of following the theme of the play in which a woman's constancy is called into question, the song is saying that men are the inconstant ones. So I wonder about these songs as counterpoints. 13:36 Wes: I think, yeah, this Autolycus is the suitable provider of counterpoints here. And I think we should skip to the end of the act where he gives his final speech. What happens with. With Polixenes and Florizel. I think it's a bit of plot development. And so he's gonna get very angry and forbid them from being together and makes lots of threats. And the interesting thing is we Get a little bit of a repetition between Florizel and Polixenes of the dynamic between Leontes and Camillo earlier on in the play. And we get a bit of Polixenes being a madman like Leontes was, but now with respect to the Youngins. And then Camillo, you know, we get another reiteration. Camillo saves the day with a nice little plot, sends them to Sicilia and ultimately get them costumed for that. And then we have Autolycus enters and gives us a little capstone or what's the word to the act? Cherry on top. I don't know. 14:36 Erin: Yeah, like putting a button on it. Mm. 14:38 Wes: Yeah. So I think the one thing I wanted to draw attention to was this idea that, you know, he says, what a fool Honesty is. And that's right after. Where does he say that? 14:51 Erin: Line 594. Gosh, this is a long scene. 14:56 Wes: So, you know, Camillo has just helped them plan to do something deceptive, but again, it's a deception that serves a higher cause. And Autolycus, ha ha. What a fool Honesty is. And trust his sworn brother, a very simple gentleman, but he's celebrating his thievery and his ability to. To sell all these knickknacks and ballads as if he's manipulated or deceived people into doing that. You know, my clown, who wants but something to be a reasonable man, grew so in love with the wench's songs that he would not stir his pettitoes till he had both tune and words. 15:32 Erin: Pettitoes. It says here, toes, usually of a pig. So it's like his little piggies, his little toes. Sorry. 15:38 Wes: So cute. So, you know, and then towards the end, we get. I see that thi…

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Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” (Part 5) Dec 18, 2023

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Part 5 of Wes & Erin’s discussion of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.” Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, St. John’s College. Learn more about undergraduate–and graduate–Great Books programs at St. John’s in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Annapolis, Maryland at sjc.edu/subtext. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:13 Wes: Welcome to part five of our discussion of the Winter's Tale. And parts five and six. We will be discussing acts four and five. So we just got done discussing act three and some of the action. We, with Hermione and Paulina, noted that they use language in a different and more persuasive way and talked a little bit about the concept of evidence and the oracle and all that stuff. And now we are going to get a very different scene, I guess, at the end. We already moved to the desert. The end of Act 3, we moved to the desert of Bohemia. But now we're going to fast forward 16 years and Shakespeare will directly apologize to us for that. For just taking a big shortcut there and having. Well, I guess his shortcut is, the way he handles this is to have the personification of time come out and tell us that he's going to be sliding over 16 years. Time begs forgiveness and essentially says, but think about it. I'm so powerful, I can overthrow law and, and custom. You know, laws change, customs change over time. Time is powerful enough. In other words, I'm going to apologize for this trick of fast forwarding, but as the personification of time, I can do that. It's a very funny way of excusing himself by personifying time. 1:44 Erin: If only Shakespeare were a screenwriter, he could just say, here is a title card that says 16 years later. Something like that. Instead, he has to do this whole song and dance. 1:54 Wes: I guess he could have had someone come out with a card. Is there a way to do this without that? How would you clue the audience in? It would probably emerge from context. That's true, but the groundlings might not like that. They might start throwing things. Is there anything else of significance to get from the section on Time? 2:15 Erin: Well, you know, we get a little pre figurement of, you know, as we have all along, of some of the, what do we want to call it, horticultural imagery that's gonna come up throughout Act 4. So time says, I turn my glass and give my scene. Such growing as you had slept between. This image of things growing, of profundity, of profusion, I think is gonna be important in this pastoral act. And then in line 24 time says to speak of Perdita now grown in grace, equal with one. This idea of grace and growing, coming together. Presumably she's growing more and more like her mother, Hermione, because Hermione is the image of the figure of grace in the. I almost said in the film, figure of grace in the play. So, yeah, I think hints of this are shooting up here. They're sprouting. And it'll come to full flower maybe later in Act 4, Scene 4, I think is why. 3:11 Wes: Right, right, right. 3:13 Erin: But one of the things that I think I've come to understand about Act 4 and it's kind of unnecessary length. I don't know if this is too early to give a bird's eye view of the entire act. It's just that the length is doing some work here to help us shift tonally. It's providing some insulation, if you will, from the tragedies that have just occurred. Because people have just died in, you know, grievous ways. And now we have to forget our troubles and get happy. So something about the length, I think, is helpful. And even this speech by time, maybe it's oddity and maybe the fact that it isn't just a title card is helping that prolongment as we shift into something different here. 3:53 Wes: Yeah. Is this his long. I mean, it's not his longest. Hamlet is his longest. This strikes me as a very long play. But I didn't really check that to 4:00 Erin: see it is one of the longest. One of the longer. I don't think it's. 4:04 Wes: Okay. I'm looking now, I'm looking at the stats, and it seems like there's a lot of other much longer plays. So why does it feel so long? It's kind of in the middle, so. No way. 4:14 Erin: Really? I thought it would be in the top, say, quarter of, I guess. 4:18 Wes: No, I guess you're right. It is in the top quarter. But Hamlet's longest, Richard iii. Coriolanus. Coriolanus, Cymbeline, Othello, King Lear, Henry V, Troilus and Cressida. Henry iv. So I just read all of them. Yeah, the two Henry IVs are longer. So act four is very long. So I don't know. Yeah, I didn't analyze this specifically, but I. You know, I suppose it feels longer because in a way, it is two plays divided by 16 years. And we transition to a much different place as well in Act 4, you know, we saw a little bit of Bohemia in Act 3, but that was the desert. And now, apparently Bohemia includes a little bit of English countryside as well, because that's the way it actually feels. And it's important, right, that we are making this transition to something pastoral, something rustic. It's important that Perdita now be a shepherd's daughter and that she will be the mistress of the sheep shearing. It's a context of renewal and animal husbandry. Is that. I don't know why. That's just something. Let's leave that part out. Yeah. It's the context of renewal and rebirth and the birds and the bees, so to speak. And we're going to try and figure out in these last two parts of our discussion, how that recompenses everything that's gone before and what the deeper connection is between Leontes's jealousy and difficulty with the concept of gratitude and, you know, problems not just with Hermione, but his own child and his relationship with Polixenes. And finally, if I, you know, if my thesis has any weight, this whole concept of the relationship between mind and world. I think we want to try to figure out how all of this rustic context and these young, how that kind of renewal will pay all of that off. 6:27 Erin: You're reminding me that. That, you know, the transition actually comes a little bit sooner. Or maybe we just glossed over this at the end of the last episode. It's difficult to say now, but Act 3, Scene 3, is really, I think, the transition, it's one between. The hinge point is the famous exit pursued by a bear. Did we talk about that? Yeah, we did talk about that. Okay. And then the transition into prose, which is as obvious a shift of tone as anything, perhaps, but you're putting me in mind of the Shepherd In Act 3, Scene 3, around line 107108, the shepherd referring to what the clown has just reported to have seen. His son, the clown has reported to have seen, which was not only Antigonus being eaten, but then everyone in the ship becoming flap dragoned by the sea. A word that I'm not gonna put into every single poem I write, not really. But anyway, the description of what's happened to both to Antigonus and his apparent dismemberment by this bear, and of the ship getting flap dragoned about, of course, has become funny already. Like, this is already kind of a joke. So anyway, the clown reports this back to the shepherd, and the shepherd says, heavy matters, heavy matters. But look thee here, boy. Now bless thy. Thou metst with things dying, I with things newborn. Heavy matters, heavy matters. Is almost kind of funny in itself. Reminds me of. Is it 80s slang to say like, oh, that's heavy, man. It's real heavy. It must be, right? Because we were talking about. Oh, I think back to the future Doc makes a comment about whether or not things have more mass or weight in the future because Marty keeps saying, that's heavy, man. And so anyway, the transition here in the Shepherd's Speech is signaled for us before time even enters with thou met' st with things dying. I with things newborn. And I'm wondering if this is a little bit of a. You know, it's literally a turn signal within the text to say that was tragedy. Right. Tragedy is meeting with things dying. Comedy is something about being reborn. Something about. Well, I said reborn, which is an interesting mistake, but newborn may be reborn too. Something about birth seems inherent to comedy. Maybe. What is that? The birth of laughter? Something about maybe surprise being inherent to comedy. I'm not sure. I haven't thought that through. 8:56 Wes: You know, the comedies generally get the young lovers together in general. Usually people are hooked up by the end of a comedy. So comedy, strictly speaking, is just. Just means a happy ending. And typically an ending that unites spouses or lovers. Right. In tragedy, everyone dies. In comedy, everyone pairs up. And sex and death essentially provides the engine for birth. Yeah, exactly. So the engine of renewal. And why do we. Yeah, I think it's a good question. Why is that in particular associated with hijinks and laughter and funniness? Why is it the romantic comedy typically, and not the romantic drama? I guess if there's drama, people are not getting along, essentially. But in any case, yeah, I think that's a really good point. We get the turn signal, as you put it in the text, that we're gonna go to what is newborn and reborn. This scene reminded me of. Of the Tempest in that Miranda witnesses a shipwreck which turns out to be the cargo of that shipwreck includes her future husband, includes her father's enemies, but also her future husband. And when she sees it, she feels this tremendous empathy and talks about how much it hurt her to. I forget the exact words, but to see this happening to these people, in this case, the clown, the son kind of sees it as a joke, or it's played not for empathy and not for sympathy, but for. For laughs. And it's interesting in that it kind of inverts that scene in the Tempest. Perdita, of course, is just a baby at these. This point, and she can't. And she's. You know, the shipwreck is of the. Has something to do with the Past, not with the future. Right. The shipwreck kind of in for Miranda is a forward looking event and her father has essentially brought these people or had a role in bringing these people to the island. In this case, it's a way of casting off the past. It seems like kind of a harsh fate for Antigonus, but symbolically it seems important that the past be shipwrecked, so to speak, or gotten rid of. 11:19 Erin: Is Miranda, remind me, is she watching it happen like we're watching her her watch this shipwreck happen, or does she report it? 11:26 Wes: She's reporting it to Prospero, if I remember correctly. 11:32 Erin: Okay, so similar situation here where we don't see the clown see it, but he comes back and reports it almost immediately thereafter. That kind of ruins my little thesis, but I think it still holds true. I'm thinking about, is it Mark Twain who said that comedy equals tragedy plus time? I'm wondering if I could tie that together. 11:52 Wes: Or is it Alan Alda? 11:55 Erin: Yeah. 11:57 Wes: Hal Holbrook, I don't know. Is that Mark Twain? 12:00 Erin: I think it might be. 12:01 Wes: Okay. 12:02 Erin: But yeah. What Woody Allen movie was that in the Alan Alda was that Crimes and Misdemeanors? 12:08 Wes: Yeah. 12:09 Erin: Yeah. I was just wondering if there was a difference maybe in tone between the Miranda and the clown scenes because Miranda was seeing live, as it were, and the clown is reporting it. But that doesn't hold up. But I do think it's interesting that so much in the second half of the play is reported to us after the fact. Even the reconciliation that'll come in Act 5, spoiler alert. That is reported to us. 12:34 Wes: Shakespeare's much criticized for that. 12:36 Erin: Though I can't quite make a distinction between Miranda and the clown here in terms of how they report the show Shipwreck on a literal level. I mean, we have time. Time as a body or a person, a body of people or a person coming in and putting just some distance between. And this is maybe what I'm trying to suggest about the length of Act 4. The fact that it seems so incredibly long and this insulation that we need from the tragedy, we literally just need a little bit of time in order to think that what the something tragic can actually turn into something funny. 13:11 Wes: I think we do need a sense of the passing of time. Insulation, I think, is a good is a good word. It's not enough just to cut to some scene with a shepherdess or whatever, and we quickly infer that it's Perdita we need. Time's appearance itself is comic and Shakespeare is giving A, you know, he's poking fun at himself to some extent. So he takes us out of the play a bit and then puts us. Lands us nice and soft back down in it with a different attitude. And as you point out, he's already done that with the pursued by bear bit and making fun of a scene at the end which might otherwise have been construed as tragic. It's pretty clever to make a comedy out of a tragic scene and then make that the seed of this rebirth. 14:02 Erin: I mean, I guess Antigonus death is funny. And we get this gruesome description from the clown, that the bear tore out his shoulder bone while Antigonus was still crying to him. Why is that funny? Or that the bear half dined on the gentleman? He's at it now. So he's still, as we speak, consuming Antigonus, who hopefully by this point is dead. But, you know, why is that funny? I'm thinking about, I don't know, something like, I'm a great fan of Buster 14:29 Wes: Keaton or Chaplin, you know, often the slapstick of dismemberment. 14:35 Erin: Yes, yes. But also the fact that so often their films are about men that are down and out. Lots of Buster Keaton shorts begin with him losing his job and being out on the street, and then a series of misfortunes happen to him. And for some reason they're funny because there's a slapstick element to it. But if we were to take that same premise and say, you know, an Italian neorealist film like Bicycle Thieves, you know, everything goes wrong and that's a tragedy. He loses whatever. These films all follow this trope, but Right. Of like one terrible thing after another happening to some poor schmuck, you know, and why is it funny in a Keaton film? And it's tragic and sad and heartrending in something like Bicycle Thieves, you know, there's a very fine line and some of it is just Keaton's movements, like the way his body moves and. Yeah, the little slapstick kind of jokes that punctuate everything. So is that what this comes down to? That Shakespeare, this great writer of wonderful lines and everything, all he has to do is kind of turn Antigonus into a slapstick buffoon. And that's what makes the difference. 15:44 Wes: I think the slapstick is part of it. And also we are taken out of the play a bit because it's a bit abrupt and farcical. And in fact, this is one of the things it'll is described later on in the play as something like an old Tale or. Right, an old wives tale or a Winter's Tale. This is one of the things that draws our attention to the fact that we ought not to take all of this too seriously. We've been drawn into the tragic frame. We've really been drawn into a kind of psychologically realistic narrative up to this point. And now we're being hit on the head and told that a…

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Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” (Part 4) Dec 11, 2023

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Part 4 of Wes & Erin’s discussion of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.” Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, HelloFresh. Go to HelloFresh.com/subtextfree and use code subtextfree for free breakfast for life. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:17 Erin: patreon.com/subtextpodcast you're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. 0:33 Wes: Okay. Welcome to part four of our discussion of The Winter's Tale. We just got done discussing act one. Now we're ready to rocket through act two. 0:45 Erin: We'll see. 0:45 Wes: Although I think the beginning of act two is going to be. It's going to be a lot and then it really picks up. But yeah, so this. Now we get to the point which we've discussed. I think we've already discussed it a bit, which is the interaction between Mamillius and his mother and the ladies, who I take to be, in part, at least, his. His nannies suggestive, bit sexually suggestive. And then we get the part about the. His mom asking for the tale and him saying, a sad tale's best for winter. There's a number of references internal to the play, to this concept of a. A winter's tale or an old wives tale. One of them comes up when some, I think some gentlemen say later on that the recovery of Perdita will sound implausible. It's like an old wives tale. The bear, the fact that Antigonus is killed by a bear makes it sound like an old wives tale. The fact that Hermione is still living makes it sound like an old wives tale. And then Autolycus, we'll talk about a tale of a Puritan and his honest wife. And that's in the context of him defending the honesty of his ballads after Mopsa asks for a ballad that is the print of life. So they're looking for honesty in these tales. But in any case, this, I think, is this first internal reference to the idea of a winter's tale. And of course, Shakespeare is doing all of this intentionally. It has to be a reflection on the status of the thing that he's writing and not unlike what's going on in the Tempest as well. But the other. I think we've talked a bit about how this is a trigger for Leontes. And I think part of it is the fact that it's whispered. And the reason why Mamillius is going to whisper this to his mom, he says, I'll tell it softly so yon crickets won't hear something like that. That right, yon crickets shall not hear it. And I think by crickets he's referring to the ladies. He's just had this interesting, you know, we'd want with you if you'd have us experience with ladies. And now he's going to. It's almost like he's trying to create jealousy. Okay, well, now I'm going to give something to you, Mom. And the ladies are not allowed to hear it, even though they've just been flirting with me. And so here we have a child who's trying to induce jealousy. And then we have an adult, Leontes, who is. Obviously, he's already been set off. He's already in a state of jealousy, but it's hard not to believe that this feeds it. 3:32 Erin: Yeah, and it's an interesting. This moment is an interesting flip of the imbalance that we've been speaking about previously, where we have Hermione among a bunch of men. Right here we have Mamillius, the sole boy, among a bunch of women. And this feels to me like a very. The beginning of the scene is a very female space. It's a. It's what I would call in a grad class is like female coded space. Mamillius is commenting on their makeup. And also there's a lot of. 4:07 Wes: You learned it of women's faces. 4:09 Erin: Yeah, that's right, that's right. And there's a lot of discussion of the moon. Of course, he talks about the half moon made with a pen of the eyebrow. And then later a lady will say of Hermione, the queen, your mother rounds a pace which is also reminiscent to me of like a moon. She's, you know, she's. She's waxing, so. 4:31 Wes: And they're teasing him that he's not going to be the apple of her eye anymore when she has a baby. 4:35 Erin: And we know this, this baby too is. I have a lot of theories about this. I think this is related, very closely related to the spider, which will come later. But I. I think it's obvious to me, or maybe I'm just imagining this, like Leontes. It seems obvious to me that everyone knows this is going to be a girl. Like there's a kind of competition, male, female competition, inherent to this discussion with Mamillius. Maybe I'm making that up, but I do think that the spider, which comes in just a second later, practically maybe bears this out, that Perdita is the spider. I don't know. 5:18 Wes: Interesting. Before we get to the spider, just maybe as we keep going, we can think on why is a sad tale best for winter. What does Mamillius mean by that? I don't have much to say about that right now, but it could be something to keep in mind. And then I think it might be worth relating that later on, Perdita is actually, when she's handing out flowers to people at the sheep shearing. She will. To Polixenes and Camillo, she will give these winter, winter flowers anyway, flowers that are appropriate to old age. And she will lament the fact that she doesn't have any springtime flowers for if that's right, for Florizel and for others who then. And for all the young people, people, she doesn't have flowers suitable to them. So winter, in other words, is also a stand in for age, which is not surprising. Winter's tale, old wives tale. It's something having to do with what older people tell younger people. We've associated it with superstition. Maybe also we can associate it with the deceptions that older people engage in, especially with regard to sex, Right. Oh, a stork brought the baby. That's why your mother is rounding. Not that those two can be reconciled, but. So childhood theories of. Distorted theories of sexuality that are in some ways encouraged by adults. I just want to emphasize the fact that, yeah, this idea of a winner's tale has something to do with what it is parents are communicating to children. The representatives of old age are bequeathing to the younger generation. Plastics. Right. I'm thinking of the Graduate now. Again, someone pulling this idea in person and talking about plastics. But in any case, and also keep in mind, the way the second half of the play is going to recompense the first, the way the more comic part is going to be recompense, the springtime, let's say, is going to be recompensed to the. The wintry, tragic first part of the play. Older people have to move aside, right, to allow the younger generation to do their thing and to allow the seasonal cycle to complete itself. And the question is, are they doing that in the way in what it is they're communicating, not just in old wives tales, but in culture in general, in what they are bequeathing to the younger generation. Are they facilitating that transition or are they not? And both Winter's Tale and the Tempest seem to be about facilitation of that transition. In Prospero's case, he has to let go, right, and give Miranda away, even unto his son of his enemy. And we get some of that in this as well. So just thoughts as we go forward. I don't know if you wanted to add anything to that. 8:18 Erin: No, I like that a lot. I hadn't thought about Winter as 8:23 Wes: an 8:23 Erin: older person, in which case, I think for me a sad Winter's tale would be one of regret. And that maybe is it becomes a winter's tale by the end of Act 3 or at some point in Act 3, thinking about Leontes as being middle aged, as we've already discussed, and maybe in the previous episode, we talked about the moment that Leontes kind of animates that clock, that he gets it to speed up. So maybe in some way that's representative of speeding toward that kind of regret or mourning that we're talking about, where this is becoming the winter's tale. Maybe it was a fall tale. You know, presumably in terms of the seasons of life, Leontes and Hermione maybe are middle aged or approaching middle ages. By the end of Act 3, he will have sped everybody up to this tale of regret and mourning, like an old tale, a winter's tale which then, as you say, I think becomes a tale of recompense and spring and renewal in the final two acts. 9:25 Wes: Yeah, properly speaking, it should be an act of mourning. We got at this in the Tempest. And the aesthetic in general, arguably must include not just the manic moment, not just the denial moment, not just the putting of things into sprites and goblins or distortion, the harsh realities of the world through one signifier or another. But one has to let go of the manic moment, the moment of grandioseness or even revenge, which is what Prospero would like to do in essentially telling the story of his enemies landing on his island and wanting to control and destroy them. Instead, he sublimates that into something aesthetic. And there's a morning in that. Right. There's a letting go. And the larger letting go is the ceding one's own interests and ambitions to those of the younger generation. So properly told, The Winter's Tale should be about that. Improperly told, it can become something darker, like revenge, or in Leontes' case, jealousy. His jealousy may involve not wanting to let go of something as his wife has her second child, or as his good friend leaves or. I haven't thought that through. We're getting a little bit. We're getting hints of the way the second part can link up with the first and involve some kind of recompense. But unfortunately, we are still stuck with crazy Leontes at this phase. It's actually quite fortunate. Don't get me wrong. This is the best part of all this, and it's why we're spending so long on it. And this spider steeped speech is just amazing. 11:01 Erin: So, yeah, speaking of grandiosity, I just. I have to start using this line all the time. How blessed am I in my true opinion? I love it. That's the way that the spiders. 11:13 Wes: How accursed in being so blessed. 11:16 Erin: Okay, there's the flip side. But yeah, it's hard. It's hard to be as blessed as he is with omnipotence and omniscience. 11:26 Wes: But do you want to read this, the relevant poem? 11:29 Erin: Yeah. So he goes on to say, there may be in the cup a spider steeped, and one may drink, depart and yet partake no venom, for his knowledge is not infected. But if one present the abhorred ingredient to his eye, make known how he hath drunk. He cracks his gorge his sides with violent hefts. I have drunk and seen the spider. Oh, I love it. 11:51 Wes: I have drunk and seen the spider. That's all awesome. So what is he saying here? This again gets at the strange nature of jealousy, which is that. Or betrayal, which is that if you don't know someone has been unfaithful to you, then there's a sense in which you're not harmed by it because no distress is caused to you. Right. Harm may be impending. It may be that there's betrayal if you knew about it. It's a clue to what might happen in the future when the more overt actions that could actually harm you, not just because your feelings are hurt, but in any case, for this to fully have an impact, for the Hermione's unfaithfulness fully to have an impact, he can't. It can't just be that it's happened. He has to actually know about it. So you, you not only drink from the poisoned cup, you know what, you have just drunk and then you come down with all the symptoms. But of course, the symptoms in his case are just crazy jealousy. That's the thing he doesn't seem to understand. It's not that there's a spider in his cup at all. There's no spider in his cup. But he thinks there is. It's the problem. And the symptom is jealousy. The symptom is not he's taking the. His pain to involve an actual betrayal when the pain is caused by suspicion. 13:20 Erin: And I love the supremacy of thought here because thinking through this literally, and maybe this is too obvious to even say, right, but what he's describing is two situations, one of which someone drinks a drink, they don't know a poisonous spider is in it. So they're okay. Well, of course it's unprovable. And if they did later die, let's say they did drink a poisonous spider. Didn't know a poisonous spider was in there. Then of course, later, if they died, it would be attributed to some other cause because no one would know that they drank the spider. If. If you drank something, Wes, like if I gave you something and then I said, by the way, I put a poisonous spider in your drink, even if I didn't, you would then probably get sick, Right, because you would be. You would be upset or disgusted or something like that. And maybe you would gag or something if not. 14:09 Wes: Or induced by suggestion. 14:11 Erin: Yeah, exactly. So there's. There's the very suggestion of. Yeah, whether I put it in your drink or not. The suggestion is what produces the visual evidence which Leontes is reading as proof. So he's sort of reverse engineering this idea. But what's most interesting to me is, and I think I talked about this in one of the first two episodes is this X ray vision idea that happens on 45 where he says, I have drunk and seen the spider. So like so many of the. Of the turns of phrase he uses, it's in reverse order. I have drunk and seen the spider. That can't be possible. If you. He drinks it, then he sees the spider. The spider's inside of him by that point, so he's never seen it. He's just had to have been told or presented the ingredient to his eye. But then again, that's another example of some of an impossibility. You can't drink the spider and then have someone present the spider to you to prove that it was in your cup the whole time. Something's broken there, right? 15:19 Wes: Yeah. No, I think it's a good point. Unless the spider has marinated in the drink and poisoned it and then it's left at the bottom once you've drunk. I don't know. 15:29 Erin: Could be. I don't know how. 15:30 Wes: That's my way to. That's just me trying to save the appearances. 15:33 Erin: But no, I think it's important. I think this X ray thing is important because it's totally insane pain. It's also, to me reminiscent of. It's a body inside of a body. It's a pregnancy. This is. This links up to my idea that the spider is Perdita. You know, the baby itself is like proof of. Of infidelity. You know, dance. Dancing around in there, inside your stomach. Right. In the adaptation that I looked at, Hermione is frequently feeling her stomach and getting. While other people are talking, miming, having other people, like the ladies come up and feel her stomach. And it's obviously suggested the baby's kicking. 16:16 Wes: Which one is it? 16:17 Erin: The one with Antony Sher. I Can't remember his name now. 16:21 Wes: Yeah. And it's set in the 19th century. 19th century, yeah. I didn't watch it, but I know I saw a preview of it, so I immediately brought that one to mind. Yeah. So she's touching her belly a lot. 16:35 Erin: Yeah, she's touching her belly and other people are coming up to touch it. And the suggesti…

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Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” (Part 3) Dec 04, 2023

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Part 3 of Wes & Erin’s discussion of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.” Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, St. John’s College. Learn more about undergraduate–and graduate–Great Books programs at St. John’s in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Annapolis, Maryland at sjc.edu/subtext. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:16 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast you're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. 0:34 Wes: We are continuing our discussion of Shakespeare's the Winter's Tale. This is part three of a multi part series on the Winter's Tale. I think we may have said in our, in the last part that we were probably going to go for four parts. I think this is going to be a six part series now because we only got through act, not all of act one. We got through part of act one in the first two parts. In part three, we are going to launch ourselves at the beginning of Act 2. 1:07 Erin: I'm predicting this is going to take roughly 16 years. So by the time Perdita is ready to marry, we will be done. 1:15 Wes: That's right. We should call on time to intervene here and just fast forward us. But yeah, so we're not going line by line, but we're, we're taking it easy. So to Speak. And I don't know if we mentioned last time that we are. We're going to be releasing weekly now. So we're doing twice as much recording, maybe a little bit more. And then we are not putting. Instead of doing Postscript, we are doing it, what's essentially a part two. And most of those will not behind. Be behind the paywall. So that's the new approach that we're taking. I don't think. Did we mention that in our last. 1:53 Erin: I don't think so. 1:54 Wes: Okay, so we left off at the point where Leontes had been very mean to Hermione and had to say the least, and had her carted off to jail. 2:09 Erin: Oh, that's where we left off. 2:10 Wes: Okay, I'm looking at act one, scene two. And we were just about to get into his conversation with Camillo. He had just finished his rant about it's a bawdy planet and there's no barricado for belly. People are getting cuckolded, Men are getting cuckolded left and right. And then that part of the scene ends with, I'm like you. Mamillius says, I am like you. They say, leontes, why, that's some comfort. So at least you're my child. So then we get Camillo, and we wanted to get into the scene a bit, in part for the. There's the famous speech about the spider and the level of paranoia. We get some real insight into that in this scene because Camillo is a wise advisor and is going to try to put the brakes on this, but to no avail. So he starts out by noting the interaction between Polixenes and Hermione and asks Camillo why it is that Polixenes stayed. And Camillo says, at the queen's. At the good queen's entreaty. And Leontes replies that the queens, be it good quote, unquote, shall be pertinent. But so it is. It is not. Was this taken by any understanding pate but thine. For thy conceit is soaking. I'm just. This isn't a major point that I'm getting at here. I just. I love this line. For thy conceit is soaking. And I had to think about what it. It meant. His imagination is absorbent, and he is likely to notice things that others are not likely to notice. So Leontes is curious. Leontes has noticed this. It's the basis for his jealousy. Camillo, at least has noticed the fact that the queen. That Polixenes stayed on the queen's entreaty. And Leontes is what he's asking here is as if other people have looked at it with the same level of suspicion. And in a way, he's making the assumption that Camilo's absorbent imagination has drawn the same conclusion that Leontes has about her infidelity, which of course he hasn't. So I guess this is important in the sense that there's a big confusion in Leontes about what constitutes evidence, what constitutes insight. He's going to tell us over and over again that it's enough for him to feel suspicion. And because of the fact that he has these very heightened senses and is very aware of the world, that's enough evidence for him. It's more trustworthy than what his advisors are going to say, for instance. And in any case. So I thought that was a. You know, I just thought that was a great way of putting. 4:54 Erin: Is great. Thy conceit is soaking. Is really wonderful turn of phrase. And then there's a discussion between Leontes and Camillo shortly thereafter about what constitutes negligence. And there's this idea in Camillo's speech about being willfully negligent, which I think is really interesting. So what Leontes sees as. What he sees as heightened understanding on Camillo's part would suggest that Camillo needs to come to the same conclusion that Leontes has, that Camillo needs to look at the evidence and see what Leontes sees in it. And the fact that he doesn't means that he's been negligent, which supposes that a sort of heightened, insane way of. Of interpreting factual information. Right. Is. Is. Is normal. And that to not see this kind of pattern that Leontes sees is negligent. The. In other words, that Camillo somehow isn't trying hard enough, right. To come to the imaginary conclusion that Leontes comes to. But since we spoke in the previous episodes about how suggestive the language is between Polixenes and Hermione, I do wonder if there's a certain amount of negligence on Camillo's part. I don't know if I've come out the other side now, and I agree with Leontes that they're acting very suspicious, as we've already hinted at before. So what constitutes negligence to a. 6:28 Wes: That was the original ending of the play, by the way. Leontes and Hermione are in bed together, reading, and she says, you know what, honey? You were actually right all along. It's okay, Hermione, I forgive you. And then roll credits. Sorry, sorry to interrupt. 6:47 Erin: No, no, yeah. It just things. Like, to put this another way, Right. We have to, in order to not go insane the way Leontes has, we have to admit a certain amount of negligence all the time. Right. In order to tamp down the things that we could be noticing, if we noticed everything around us, we would go insane. So where is the line between fact finding, or I should say clue gathering and willful negligence? And I think this is what the discussion between Leontes and Camillo is getting at. Around line 242. And then in Camilo's response, around 250. 7:27 Wes: Yeah. So right after telling Camillo that he has such a great. That he's so perceptive, he finds out that Camillo doesn't share his paranoia and then starts attacking immediately. And he does something which he will do in other places in the play with people who are trying to make him be more reasonable, which is, you guys are just so naive. You don't know how the world works. Again, it's always an appeal to the bawdy planet framework. You don't know how deceptive people are and licentious and all of that stuff. So we have been deceived in thy integrity, deceived in that which seems so. So he's, you know, now Camillo has deceived him into thinking that he was a wise counselor. And then in the next fool thou seest a game played home, the rich stake drawn and takest it all for jest. So in other words, Camillo noticed that she got him to stay. She got that Hermione got Polixenes to stay, but he's not willing to draw the right conclusions from that. He just takes it as nothing, just takes it as a jest or takes it for what it is at surface level. But Leontes sees underneath the surface. I think the thing in the first two parts of our discussion that I emphasized was the way in which this play is an ethical and epistemological reflection on the world that involves. It's a reflection on the inadequacy of the mental world and the social world to the physical world. So this question of how do you recompense hospitality? Well, you can only say thanks, and that's not anything, that's nothing. And then in this case it's about. The epistemological problem is about the role of suspicion in drawing these conclusions. But not just suspicion, but theoretical frameworks in general. So sometimes I think there's a critique of empiricism here, because Leontes will say, I don't need your advice. And again, we'll not just say this to Camillo, but to other advisors. Later. I don't need trials. I'm not even going to trust the oracle. I'm not going to trust any secondhand sources. This is like what the conspiracy theorist does. I can trust my own firsthand experience. That's what's trustworthy. I'm a radical empiricist. Except that experience is that word can include an equivocation. Is it actual empirical experience? Is it the actual observations? Or is it your own mental state or your own, the theory that you're applying to the data and that where that theory may be nothing more than suspicion, or it may be some cynical outlook, it may be the bawdy planet theory that you apply to some innocent interaction between your friend and your wife, and then the data gets interpreted into something sinister. So, again, I think we are dealing with the relationship between mind and world and the inadequacy of one to the other. In the first case, it had something to do with thankfulness, and in this case it has to do with what's going on with his jealousy. 10:50 Erin: I love that. And I'm wondering if I could wrap this around into something else that you're making me think of or if these things tie together, because I'm thinking about this idea of one's firsthand experience being paramount and wondering if that means that automatically that's going to increase the opacity of everyone else around you. 11:10 Wes: Right? 11:10 Erin: That if you only trust your own firsthand experience, you can't take anything anybody else says on faith, and it denies their own interiority, or that interiority could be useful to you in some way, could add to your own experience. Is that. 11:25 Wes: Yeah, correct. First of all, that's great. I love the way you put that. The making others opaque. 11:32 Erin: Well, and then every time you say bawdy planet, of course, I know you're saying B A W, D Y, but I hear body, B, O, D, Y. And of course, a planet is also a planetary body. And I'm thinking about the animalistic metaphors that occur throughout the first two acts, maybe longer, but I'm just thinking about those two right now. The repeated reference of Hermione to a horse or to a cow, and this is also carried out in the male equivalents of these things as well. But this reduction to the animalistic, which Then at line 276 in this conversation between Camillo and Leontes turns into something that's almost like a. Oh, what's the word? An effigy. She becomes a hobby horse, right? Which is supposed to be. It's glossed in my notes as a slut a woman who could be ridden by anybody. Right. So. So we have this sort of reduction to animals and then further reduced to just a pure hollow body. It's just a representation of something else, even a representation of an animal, not even of a woman. Shortly thereafter, we have. He calls her. Let's see, she says rank is any flax wench that puts to before her troth plight. That too is very suggestive to me, obviously. 12:50 Wes: Sorry, what line is that? 12:52 Erin: This is the following line 277. So the. This means a woman. A flax wench is a woman who works with flax to make cheap cloth. But also the phrase has contained it within the idea that the woman is made of flax. Right. She's a flax woman. 13:08 Wes: And these puts to before her troth plight has sex before marriage. Is that what that is? 13:13 Erin: Yes, yes. And so these two reductions to something which is something which is totally hollow. Right. Has no interiority that. In other words, that Hermione is not a real person, she's an animal. Or even an effigy of an animal or an effigy of a woman. Of course, this will be really interestingly turned inside out when she becomes a statue that then actually becomes a real live woman. But I'm wondering if this is a further illustration of the kind of mind that you're speaking of, which would reduce everyone to a kind of flatness or a kind of hollowness. 13:55 Wes: Yeah, I think that's great. 13:56 Erin: Also, I'm thinking too about just because empiricism made me think of this, I'm thinking also about what I believe would be a contemporary understanding of animals as right as machines. Wasn't that the theory for a long time that animals were just extremely sophisticated? 14:12 Wes: Well, that was machines on a certain level. Descartes theory this would have been. And I don't. This predates Descartes. I don't know how much it was in the air, but there's a lot in here that makes me think of Descartes, by the way, and I put that in my notes. And of course it predates that, but it wouldn't be surprising if that's already part of the culture to some extent. There's a lot in Shakespeare that's suggestive of skeptical strains in the history of ideas, which is not surprising because the Renaissance and the texts that they've discovered that are leading to this sort of perspective, I mean, I think that started in the 1400s, the rediscovery of Lucretius de rerum Natura and Epicureanism and Atomism and all the things that we take for granted in the modern world. The way of looking at things scientifically, that's been around for quite a while and of course, obviously is a big part of what makes Shakespeare the introduction of the skeptical and the scientific frame of mind and the anti superstitious frame of mind. Does that make sense? 15:23 Erin: Yes, definitely. 15:25 Wes: But you were thinking about in particular of animals. Descartes famously saying that animals are machines. And maybe that idea is at work here. Here. 15:34 Erin: Yeah, yeah, I think so. But maybe just for the sake of accuracy, I'll, I'll back off that a little bit and just say that, that I just think there's a curious, coming full circle here where Leontes is trying to see into people imagining their supposedly secret thoughts. But ultimately what that does, ironically, is reduce them to bodies or people who are just ruled by their appetites and increases the sense of the. The actual impenetrability of another human being. 16:04 Wes: Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah. I think that when you talk about the opacity of others, again, I think about this in relation to conspiracy theory, and I know I've talked about this before, but the conspiracy theorist in a way is not unscientific, but ultra scientific. They are too focused on the concept of firsthand experience. So people 9, 11 truthers want to pretend that they can do experiments that show that the towers couldn't have fallen based on X, Y or Z. In other words, they don't trust the experts, which in some cases is not surprising. But more importantly, they don't trust their ability to rely on other human beings as a source of knowledge or as one of the foundations for their knowledge, which we all have to do that. And it's not because we're naive. It's not because we don't know that people can be deceptive, as someone like Leontes th…

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Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” (Part 2) Nov 27, 2023

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Part 2 of Wes & Erin’s discussion of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.” Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, St. John’s College. Learn more about undergraduate–and graduate–Great Books programs at St. John’s in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Annapolis, Maryland at sjc.edu/subtext. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:12 Wes: Okay. Welcome to part. Part two of our discussion of the Winter's Tale. We had just been talking about the way that Hermione persuades Polixenes to stay and the, as I count them, four different sections to that argument ending with this concept of imprisonment. I think, Erin, you were about to move on to the next phase where we get some pretty serious flirtation between Hermione and Polixenes. Obviously, Leontes has been activated by several different things that have already gone on. And he's even. He's drawn apart before that whole Verily section to observe them unobserved. And then now he's going to look on as Hermione gets very flirty. Go ahead. 1:06 Erin: Yeah. She wants to know what he was like. When he was little. And interestingly, he's been there for nine months. 1:12 Wes: But he's a bad boy. 1:15 Erin: That's right. And he reveals their backstory after being. I don't know what they were talking about for the first nine months, but now he has something new to tell her. He says, we were two lads. He's speaking of his childhood friendship with Leontes. When they were BFFs, they were two lads that thought there was no more behind but such a day tomorrow as today and to be boy eternal. So this is a very strange way of putting this, right? First of all, there's this. The boy eternal. There's this Peter Pan quality to this, right? They wanted to be. They wanted to stay young forever. But two lads that thought there was no more behind but such a day tomorrow as today. So behind here, meaning after, there was nothing after today but a tomorrow. That's just like today. So this idea of the stillness of time, I think is really interesting in this word behind, because besides the fact that it's a funny word for other reasons, but the fact that behind means both before and after. 2:21 Wes: Yeah, it sounds like. No, it sounds like what he's saying is they thought they would live forever. So she brings the conversation back to their youth and says, was not my lord the verier wag o' th' two? And my Lord probably refers to Leontes, right? But I think it's at least syntactic. Or semantically, it could just as well refer to the person she's talking to, since he's also Lord. I don't know. But in any case, she sets up this idea. Who's. Who's the. Who's the more bad? You're both bad, but who's more bad? And Polixenes, I think, is trying to. I don't know, he's trying to be a little bit evasive. We're twin lambs, all right? So it's not one of us. We're lambs. We're innocent and we're twinned. One of us wasn't worse than the other. And we. What we changed was innocence for innocence. And they hadn't dreamed of ill doing and all that stuff. But they. He's already alluded to this idea that they might be eternally youthful. And then there's the idea that they're twinned innocent. Except he alludes to the idea that they didn't stay innocent because he says, and our weak spirits never been higher, reared with stronger blood, we should have answered heaven boldly, not guilty. The imposition cleared hereditary ours. So he's saying we could have gone on being innocent forever if we hadn't been reared with stronger blood. And then she says, by this we gather you've tripped since. So she's pushing the conversation once again into the idea that they've tripped up, that they've been sinful, that they've been bad boys. She's pushing them. She's pushing Polixenes for some sort of confession to their youthful sexual indiscretions. That's what all of this is about. And each time he tries to evade that, she puts that back on track. 4:24 Erin: Yeah, there's this. There are so many strange things happening here. I mean, to say that they were not even guilty of original sin is really fascinating. So. So there's a transposition of. In the sort of pre sexual existence that the two of them had in which they were twin lambs. So they were. They were one and the same. They were the same thing. So this is the pre. Pre branching. Right. They were. And they were bleating at each other. B, L, E A T bleating like ba at each other. So they were sort of pre. Language as well. They had no original sin, so they were pre. Pre lapsarian as well. Which they then. Sorry. So then Polixenes locates the moment of the fall or the trip, partly because of Hermione's suggestion, with the idea of a woman rather than he's transposing Eve for the apple is essentially what he's doing. 5:23 Wes: Interesting. 5:23 Erin: Right, Because Adam and Eve live together as a couple, pre original sin, in a sinless state. The apple was the introduction of sin, not anything that he did with Eve. It's not as though in a Judeo Christian society, people believe that like, just to be with a woman is inherently sinful or something like that. Right, but there's a. But there's a transposition happening in which the object, the apple, is replaced by Eve herself. Eve's person. Just the very existence of women is somehow a sinful quantity with which these boys must reckon. Right, so. So then we have. By this, we gather you have tripped since. So since then you've tripped, you've sinned since. But of course, as you've suggested, right. To trip, to fall, the fall of man is associated with like your foot slipped, which is, you know, it's a euphemism for having an affair. So that was the introduction of sin with woman. Well, so he then says, oh, my most sacred lady, temptations have since then been born to us. Which is an interesting turn of phrase for in those unfledged days was my wife a girl? Your precious self had then not crossed the eyes of my young playfellow. So temptation is created, oddly enough, with the introduction of their wives into their lives. Yeah, right. When his wife was a girl, this is the only mention I think we get of Polixenes wife. She's a wife first, then a girl in that ordering. And then all she had to do was cross their eyes. There's something strange about that. Eyes crossing and crossing across one's path. Right. Or sort of commingled there. All they had to do was walk in front of them and then something is broken. 7:10 Wes: Yeah, I like that. So he. When he talks about the not guilty hereditary ours, he's saying that that would have been the case if we hadn't been raised with stronger blood, which I don't know exactly what being reared with stronger blood means. I mean, if he's talking about nature or nurture there, right. If we hadn't been such lusty young men or if it was just a matter of how they were raised. But he's suggesting, yes, like she. She gathers that they have tripped since he's alluding to not being innocent anymore. And I think she's already taking that to be a reference to sexual activity by young men. And she's pushing for confessions about, did you. Who did you date before you got married? Who did my man date before he got married? 8:01 Erin: What's your body count? 8:02 Wes: That's. 8:03 Erin: They say now. 8:03 Wes: Yeah, what's your body count? And. And then he says something, which I think he's trying to evade that by saying, well, yes, I think he's trying to suggest that they've only been involved in sexual sins with the wives. Although she makes a remark about that the offenses we have made you do will answer if you first sinned with us, and that with us you did continue fault and that you slipped not with any. But with us. He's trying to skip over any previous relationships and say, okay, we've sinned with you because you're our wives. Right. And she says, okay, well, that's fine as long as you didn't sleep with anyone before us. And what's also interesting is that it's a foursome at this point in the way they're speaking. There's already this kind of swingers element to. Is it infidelity outside of the foursome or outside of the twosome? 9:08 Erin: Right, right. Yeah. I'm wondering if we can tie this. What's strange is that they're talking about something which is not a Sin as a sin. Right. Obviously, if you have sex with your wife, it's not sinful in the traditional sense of that term or in any other sense. But it seems like this suggestion is maybe that the first time they sinned in this imaginary scenario which Hermione is trying to get him to sort of cop to. So the first sin here might have been an out of wedlock tryst perhaps, but it has not been. But even that has not been separated from like, whatever sex that they've had once they had actually gotten married. It's as if every. It's as if every sexual experience one can have, even with one's own wife, is somehow an infidelity or. Or a. It's a. It's all fornication. So. So the swingers idea that you're talking about I think is really interesting because if it's all fornication, it might as well be with anyone, right? It might as well be with somebody else's wife. If all sex is sinful, there is no fidelity. And so the other interesting element that's added to this little chunk of speech that Hermione has here is she first says the word grace. She says Grace to boot is glossed in my text as heaven help me. But this is the first time that she's said this word, which she'll subsequently say many other times, which is this idea of, as we've talked about in previous episodes of Right. Unmerited favor that one gets from God. In a way, the opposite of sin. Not literally, but it runs at cross purposes to sin. And so she's introducing this idea of grace at the same time that any kind of human sexual activity is being painted with the broad brush of sin. And I don't know what to make of that. I haven't really thought about it, but I just think it's an interesting moment at which this grace idea is injected into the conversation. 11:08 Wes: Yeah, yep, it's sin. Lest you. Lest you say your queen and I are devils, they're the temptresses. But, yeah, I think that's very interesting. At the very least. I haven't thought about the grace part of this, but at the very least, it's really interesting that she is pushing Polixenes for this sexual gossip, essentially. And meanwhile Leontes is spying on them and this is the nail in the coffin that's catastrophic. He. It's right at this point that he comes up on them and enters the conversation again and says, is he won yet? And she says, yeah. And he has that little aside and I love all the asides in this, by the way, and in the BBC production that I recommended from 1981, I think it's all done so well. So he has this little aside where he says, at my request, he would not. These sides are really interesting in this because a lot of Leonte's insanity, his insane musings happen through those little asides. But yeah, so there it seems like, I think if you were reading this quickly and you might. Or seeing it performed, you might say, huh, this is an awfully abrupt transition. He's upset that Hermione could convince Polixenes now, and this is what's going to set him off, that he couldn't get Polixenes to stay, but Hermione did. But if you look back at all of this has been set up in various ways that not only psychologically account for the jealousy, but very tightly integrated into everything that's going on thematically. 12:55 Erin: Yeah, we have this idea. Is he won yet winning in terms of winning over a lover. Right. Or winning someone to you in terms of being in a relationship or even for marriage or something like that. So, yeah, that phrasing already suggests that. 13:12 Wes: Well, it's even extended. So it's even extended because it. He, Leontes will say, you never spoke to a better purpose. And she'll say, never. And he'll go, oh, yeah, do duh, never but once when you said yes to my proposal. So he creates this direct parallel between his proposal to marry to Hermione to marry him and her persuasion of Polixenes to stay. 13:46 Erin: That's right. And in his description of the efforts that he made to win Hermione over. It's pretty. It's not a happy memory, this winning her over, that he waited three crabbed months which had soured themselves to death. Ere I could make thee open thy white hand. This is not the eternal summer of the twin lambs. This is a time of bitterness that he waited for Hermione to accept him. He was not happy in the process of winning her over. So there's already this almost nastiness, not explicitly so, but I think within Leontes own heart. We can see a kind of nastiness towards Hermione in this characterization. 14:29 Wes: Well, it's interesting because it suggests she teases him an awful lot, including that previous tease where she says, not that I don't love you, if you want to go spend time with your buddies or your buddy here for an extra month, that doesn't mean I don't want you around. But in this case to my eye, she's playfully teasing him, which. Well, so anyway, in any case, let me make the larger point. Regardless of what's going on here, there's some teasing in this that suggests that they have a relationship, which allows for that. And it's even the case. We should point out that Polixenes has been there for nine months and it doesn't seem like Leontes has gotten jealous yet. Things are a little off in the beginning, but we see everything build up within the context of the play. So whatever has gone on Leontes, it's the leave taking that's really important to stimulating Leonte's suspicions. It's this concept of gratitude that is pivotal. It hadn't happened before the leave taking, and now it is. And of course, the fact that they're reaching the nine month mark, they're nearing the nine month mark on the pregnancy and that's. It's been nine months of visit and various other things are important as well. But, yeah, at this point, I think he's primed. He's primed for what comes next. Too hot. Too hot to mingle. Friendship. Far as mingling bloods, which is really fascinating because it sounds like he's talking about. Is he talking about his friendship with Polixenes or is he talking about her friendship with him? Or both? 16:24 Erin: This is the question, who is he jealous of here? 16:28 Wes: Exactly. 16:28 Erin: Right, Yeah. 16:30 Wes: I mean, yeah, no, I think you're exactly right. Who is he jealous of? I think in the end it's probably both, but we have to. I don't think we can avoid a conclusion that a big part of it is he's upset that this, his twinned lamb, this person with whom he has a very strong relationship that's described as love, has said no to him, but said yes to his wife. And I'm sure reams of literature have been written on the homoerotic aspect of this, but which plays a greater role here, his love of Hermione or his love of Polixenes? I don't think we c…

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