How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken
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Authors: Daniel Mendelsohn
Essays
for
Bob Silvers
Chip McGrath
and for
Bob Gottlieb
Â
T
he words
critic
and
critical
, which tend to leave a slightly sour taste in the mouth of contemporary American culture (“Don't be so critical!”; “Everyone's a critic!”), are derived, indirectly, from the Classical Greek word
krinô
, “to judge.” The noun that comes from that verb,
kritês
, simply denotes a person who makes judgmentsâthis being another word that provokes a certain anxiety today. (“Who am I to judge?”; “Don't be so
judgmental
!”) For the Greeks, a
kritês
could be any number of things: an arbitrator in a dispute; a historian (who, according to one Greek author writing in the second century
A.D
., must approach his raw data in the manner of an interrogating judge in a legal proceeding); an interpreter of dreams; or one of the aesthetic referees who judged the fiercely competitive theatrical competitions held each spring in Athens. The playwright Aristophanes liked to interrupt the action of his comedies in order to make flattering appeals to this or that
kritês
watching the show. Not infrequently, he won.
Critic
, then, is a word with a rich and suggestive pedigree. As, indeed, are other words derived from
krinô
, words like
criterion
(a
means for judg
ing or trying
, a
standard
) andâa word that you might not have suspected is even remotely related to “critic”â
crisis
, which in Greek means a
separating
, a power of
distinguishing
; a
judgment
, a
means of judging
; a
trial
. For what is a crisis, if not an event that forces us to distinguish between the crucial and the trivial, forces us to reveal our priorities, to apply the most rigorous criteria and
judge
things?
This book is a collection of judgments: which is to say, a collection of essays by a critic. As might be guessed from the foregoing excursion into etymologies, the critic in question has a background in Classics. In the late 1980s and early 1990s I did my graduate work in Greek and Latin, with an eye to a career in academia; instead I became a journalist. This fact will help to explain two important features of this collection.
The first, and less important, is its content. The subjects of many of the pieces collected here, which span a number of genresâbooks, theater, films, and translationsâand represent most of the fifteen years I've been writing as a professional critic, have some connection with Greek or Roman culture. There are essays about a movie version of the Trojan War and a steroidal biopic about Alexander the Great; about an updated feminist spin on Euripides'
Medea
and a romanticized drama about the Classics scholar and poet A. E. Housman; about a contemporary verse adaptation, by Sylvia Plath's widower, of a Greek tragedy about a man who treats his wife badly, and a tendentious popular account of the Peloponnesian War. As this list suggests, I've generally been less interested in writing about classical texts or culture per se than in taking a look at the ways in which popular culture interprets and adapts the Classicsânot least because of what those interpretations and adaptations tell us about the present, about us. (The Athenians may well have thought that
Medea
was about language and politics; we think it's about desperate housewives.) Only one of the essays here, in fact, is about a book that is scholarly in nature, and that book caught my interest precisely because it attempted to use the Classics as a weapon in a contemporary political battle. Such attempts to use, and abuse, the classical heritage in order to influence mainstream political and cultural discussions, from
the conduct of the war in Iraq to the legal status of gay marriage, are the object of more than one judgment in these pages.
A background in the Classics accounts for another, more important and I hope more consistent feature of this collection (which, after all, consists mostly of pieces that have no connection at all to the classical world). When you are exposed for a long time to the astringent beauties of the classical languagesâthe hard and unyielding grammars, the uncompromising demands of syntax and exigencies of meter, none of which admit of either shoddiness or approximationâyou can develop a taste for a certain kind of rigor; you may begin to seek it elsewhere. To my mind, that rigor serves as a kind of template not only for the method that the critic necessarily applies to his subject (art, theater, film, dance, literature, whatever) but also for the qualities to be sought in the works themselves. Those qualities are: a meaningful coherence of form and content; the subtle but precise deployment of detail in the service of that meaning; vigor and clarity of expression; and seriousness of purpose. Since I see no reason why those standards shouldn't be imposed on (and those qualities sought in) the products of mainstream cultureâat least those with aspirations to seriousnessâas much as on those of high culture, I've attempted to seek, and to impose, accordingly in my own critical writing.
Those conjugations, declensions, and meters can take you away from texts altogether; can give you a taste for what you might call the infinite interpretability of thingsânot of this or that book or play (with their hidden coherences, turns of phrase, and elegances of poetic diction, which, armed with your paradigms and dictionaries, you eventually learn to decipher) but of whole cultures. These, too, can in their way be reduced to their essential componentsâto their grammars and vocabularies, so to speak. Civilizations, too, can be “read.” (And judged.) It says something significant, for instance, about the Greek conception of the mind and its activities that hidden in the very old verb
oida
, “to know,” is a fragment of an even more ancient word,
id-
, “to see.” (It's the
vid-
in
video
.) And it might well say something meaningful about the
Greeks and their understanding of the complicated and perhaps inevitably tragic relationship between art, which gives meaning to life, and death (which gives meaning to life in a different way) that the name of that shining god of Art, Apollo, is so closely linked to the verb
apollumi
, “to destroy.”
Â
This brings me to my titleâwhich, as it happens, has nothing whatsoever to do with the ancient world, although the words in question belong to a writer whom you could certainly characterize as the twentieth century's answer to Euripides: a modern playwright who, like his ancient antecedent, had a particular genius for creating memorable heroines as mouthpieces for universal human emotions.
“How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken” is a quote from the stage directions to a play by Tennessee Willliams, a great American drama about the victimization of a fragile girl who is tragically in love with beautiful, breakable things: the famous glass menagerie that gives the play its title, and which of course provides a richly useful symbol for the themes of delicacy and brittleness, of the lovely illusions that can give purpose to our lives and the hard necessities that can shatter them. Interestingly, Williams's phrase occurs in a stage direction not about the play's set design but about a certain musical leitmotif he has in mind, one that (he writes, in his typically meticulous directions)
expresses the surface vivacity of life with the underlying strain of immutable and inexpressible sorrowâ¦. When you look at a piece of delicately spun glass you think of two things: how beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken. Both of those ideas should be woven into the recurring tune.
I suppose that one reason that this haunting line struck me with such force when I first came across it is that it acknowledges, with perfect simplicity, the inevitable entwining of beauty and tragedy that is
the hallmark of the Greek theater, and is a consistent element in the works that have always moved me the most, from the plays of Euripides to the
History
of Thucydides, from the light comedies of Noël Coward to the films of Pedro Almodóvar. As the Greeks knew well, it's the potential for being brokenâwhich boils down to the knowledge that we all must dieâthat gives resonance and meaning to the small part of the universe that is our life. The necessity, in the end, of yielding to hard and inexplicable realities that are beyond our control is a
tragic
truth; without that, all you've got is mushâmelodrama, and Hallmark sentimentality. That so much of contemporary culture is characterized by this kind of sentimentality, by a seeming preference for false “closures” over a strong and meaningful confrontation with real and inalterable pain, is a cultural
crisis
. That crisis is another theme that runs through many of the essays here.
But to my mind Williams's haunting phrase illuminates not only the nature of certain works that have preoccupied me, but also something about the nature of the critics who judge those works. For (strange as it may sound to many people, who tend to think of critics as being motivated by the lower emotions: envy, disdain, contempt even) critics are, above all, people who are in love with beautiful things, and who worry that those things will get broken. What motivates so many of us to write in the first place is, to begin with, a great passion for a subject (Tennessee Williams, Balanchine, jazz, the twentieth-century novel, whatever) that we find beautiful; and, then, a kind of corresponding anxiety about the fragility of that beauty.
Many of the reviews here are, in fact, judgments about the success of contemporary attempts to interpret, or adapt, or reexamine subjects about which I have deep feelings: the grand and glittering Homeric epics and Virginia Woolf's gossamer
Mrs. Dalloway
; the comedies of Mel Brooks or the tragedies of Euripides; the Classics as a symbol, now being used and abused by this or that faction (the gays, the neocons) to score points in the Culture Wars. And those pieces that are about new work for which there is no original still seek to make use of stan
dards, of criteria, that like so much of contemporary culture are, in fact, rooted in certain ancient traditions which are themselves beautifulâand fragile. If I mention Aristotle's or Horace's theories of poetry in my review of
Troy
, it's not out of some kind of loyalty to my subjectâproduct placement for the Classicsâbut because no one has ever stated as crisply and usefully just what it is that epic is supposed to do for its audience.
Respect for the integrity of the original stems, indeed, not from some blind curatorial reflex (hence my conclusion, in one of these pieces, that Aeschylean tragedy is better served by productions that put, say, a bathtub and some circular saw blades onstage than by “authentic” stagings complete with ancient-looking muslin cloaks and sandals), but instead precisely from a sense that the classics of any genre are classic in the first place precisely because they have always been, and will always be, deeply relevant to, and incomparably illuminating of, human experience. That relevance, that ability to enlighten, are themselves rather beautiful; they're the ultimate standards,
kriteria
, by which any work is judged.
Â
Rather than organizing the pieces collected here chronologically or by genre, I've grouped them according to some broad categories. When you first start writing as a freelancer, you're happy to take whatever work you can get; over time, though, it becomes clear both to your editors and to yourself that there are certain subjects you're attracted to, certain motifs you keep finding no matter what you're writing about. Another way of saying this is that however random the assignments you accept, you always end up writing your own intellectual autobiography. As I read over the past fifteen years' worth of my articles and reviews, I was struck by the way in which, however diverse the subjects under reviewâ
The Lovely Bones
and
Brokeback Mountain
, Henry James and
United 93
âI've kept returning to certain general themes. These themes, perhaps not surprisingly, are the same ones that interested me
when I was a graduate student in Classics working on a dissertation about heroines in Greek tragedy and the heroes they often compete with, and sometimes displace, in times of civic crisis or war: the representation of women and men, of femininity and masculinity, in popular culture; gender and sexualityâparticularly, since I'm gay, homosexuality; the techniques of tragedy and comedy; the translation and adaptation of classics for general audiences; and the often fraught intersection of literature and war. So I've organized my essays accordingly here, although they can of course be read in any order at all.
âNew York City, October 2007