Sept. 27. Stockman and Socrates and the consequences of saying what you believe

In my class on Classical Political Thought, we are currently reading about and discussing the life of Socrates; a man who would stand in the public market, barefoot and impoverished, and try to teach the world about the degradation of Athenian society. The most recent document we are discussing is the Appology where Socrates stands in front of the Athenian court and is tried, convicted and sentenced to death. His situation was very similar to that of Stockman's. Here are two men who simply wish to point out the vileness of society and to make people think about how their actions are affecting others and in the end their teachings are considered unwelcome and they end up being ostracized and thrown bodily out of society.
Both men could be considered guilty of the sin of pride. Socrates, after the court convicts him, tells the court that his just punishment should be to receive free food from the hall of heros and a living expense from the people. He mocks the jury and the narrow margin that convicted him turns into a vast majority who seek his death. Even in the end he continues by claiming that in the end the court will be the ones punished rather than himself. And, judged from a rational point of view and considering Socrates' arguments and teachings, his last words are not all that radical, but when you've just angered a room full of self important men, you are not likely to receive amnesty.
Stockman too argues his point to the last, over the shouts of hatred and demands for silence. Rather than letting go of his pride and working with the council to find a solution to the problem that wouldn't bankrupt the town, he continues on in an ineffective effort to fight his entire town.
Yet, Ibsen, like whatever fate determined the life of Socrates, made a sort of no win situation for Stockman. If the bath's weren't cleaned up and the technologies weren't put in place, a great many innocent travelers would become seriously ill. Especially since, as Morgan says in her blog, the bacterial infection was caused by Cholera. If Socrates truly believes that the sophists are ruining his nation, how can he stand by and let it crumble to dust, as the young are taught the art of lying rather than how to judge the world morally and virtuously.
So what are they to do? How do they recreate a sense of moral order within the community? Is martyrdom the only solution? In a real-world situation where a community is not a closed system as Ibsen describes, how could this situation be handled better so that both sides get what they want, a moral community and a way to survive in an economic slum?
Do we not have to face this question today?

Sept. 22. An enemy of the People

If Ibsen viewed his characters as bacteria, he certainly had some interesting comments to make on small town society and the role of development and science.
It is difficult to imagine that Ibsen remained completely objective in his study of human interaction as he wrote his plays. First, there is never a dull moment in the progression of events; never a lull that would reveal the everyday activities of the family. Real life is rarely as exciting as Ibsen portrays it, even in the midst of a scandal such as occured when the doctor tried to publish his discovery of the contamination of the local baths. He also does not show all the activities that occur in the house, as an anthropologist or social scientist would in order to give a full account of the progression of events that led to the town's reaction. We do not see the rocks being thrown into the window on the night that the town rejects the doctor's publication, nor the dismissal of Petra and her reaction as well as that of the woman who dismissed her. There are large pieces missing in this examination of the interaction between the citizens of the town.
Second, Ibsen's characters seem exaggerated to make them fit the situation or stereotypical. The doctor, Thomas Stockman is pompous and arrogant to the point of near insanity. For a man who has only recently been able to return to his home and just now has a stable income, it seems unlikely that a normal man would give up the comforts of a hot meal and a home in order to pursue a stubborn plan that could have been more easily handled if he had discussed his findings with the council first to try and find a reasonable and cost effective way to sole the contamination issue without creating a mass panic. He even is amazed at his current wealth, showing off the new comforts in his living room and the large amounts of good food on the table. It seems that a man who had known exile and harsher times would, at least at the end when he is faced with the loss of his position and later with the loss of an income from his father-in-law, would back off in order to provide for his family. Katherine Stockman, too seems to bee the stereotypical housewife of the time period, she goes along with her husband and while the men of the town portray her as the voice of reason, she still bends quite easily when her husband's honor is attacked rather than try to defend the future of her three children. Petra is the loving, doting daughter who follows in her father's footsteps and teaches radical ideas that he approves of throughout the town. The journalists seem to be trying to look out for the interest of informing the community, but they like the politicians look only at the monetary costs of the project and ignore the health hazards. The mayor of the town is portrayed as the stereotypical gentleman who must bow to the will of the people, even in the face of causing sickness and harm to others. He must, after all take care of the tax payers first.
Ibsen seems to have a clear agenda. If he views the world as bacteria to be studied and analyzed, he analyses with a deep-set hatred for these bacteria. He is not the objective scientist who studies his subjects for the purpose of discovering their nature and seeing how they react to one another and in certain situations. He seems to have had the objective in mind before he set out. He does not show the good in men, which most theorists agree exists on the individual level, he only shows those situations where man acts in a despicable manner in a bad situation. The play is simply a demonstration of Ibsen's views on humanity rather than a study of the real thing. This subjectivity, would lose him all credibility in the scientific community, therefore I find it hard to view him as a scientist such as Linneaus or Galton.

Sept. 20. Ibsen and Nansen

An examination of the life of Henrik Ibsen, by wikipedia, reveal a somewhat bitter childhood and an adulthood mixed with failure, exile and eventual success. Ibsen's once wealthy father became an alcoholic after he lost his company and fortune and was forced to declare bankruptcy. As an adult, Ibsen failed to enter into a university since he could not pass the entrance exams. He worked for a great deal of time at a Norwegian production company where he helped to write, direct and produce plays but he did not write any original pieces. His abandoned his marriage, enacted in 1858, six years later for a self imposed exile of nearly 30 years in Italy. His original plays were not successful until 1865 when his play Brand received critical acclaim.

The scene in the Biographer's Tale, where the son greets his father asking for help and the father refuses, seems to reflect this turbulent and dark history. The father seems to see in his son all the characteristics he loathes in himself, the alcoholism and the lack of pride and diligence. Each of Ibsen's contributions to the work reveal a critique of the morals and accepted 'myths' or ideas used to explain a cultural belief. In the case of Henrik's confrontation between father and son, according to one myth, is the father not supposed to support his son and try to help him out in this time of crisis, and according to a different myth, the father should refuse the son's request, otherwise how will the son learn to become independent? Yet if the scene is examined with the knowledge of Ibsen's childhood, it would seem that the roles of father and son have been reversed. Ibsen would be the father character while Ibsen's father would be the son. Ibsen critiques his father's alcoholism and inability to support his family while Ibsen's father asks for aid. In this case what are the 'myths' that society would use to judge the situation? A son should always support a father, no? So, in his own mind, Ibsen is going against the grain of society, essentially breaking the moral code.

In Nansen's experience such a strange role reversal occurs when he discovers that the biographer he has been studying, and who is known to write acclaimed biographies known for their truth and lack of bias, has been writing fictional tales about his three subjects, Ibsen, Galton and Linnaeus. In essence Nansen's hero/idol, Destry-Scholes has just committed what would seem to be a crime against the rules of biographers, just as Ibsen has committed a crime against his father when he refuses to support him in his time of crisis. But as Nansen discovers along his journey, the truth is very flexible and in the game of biographers it can easily be broken.

Ibsen's acclaim comes from his criticism of social morals, myths and codes. How does one know what is right and wrong and who should decide that? Why should the relationship between father and son be dictated by outside forces in society? Why should a biographer write only the facts when often even those facts are subject to interpretation? Why can a biographer not write his own view of what happened in the subjects life? As Nansen discovers, he is the writer of his own life and only he can determine the rules he should live by.

Sept. 13 Death and the Photograph

“Roland Barthes was right, in his book on photography, to say that photographs are essentially involved in death. This creature was living and will be dead, a photograph says, according to Barthes... All writing about photographs, including this writing I am at present engaged in, has something decayed (decadent) and disgusting about it. People have not understood (except Barthes to a certain extent) the horror of these snatched imprints of light and shadow on jelly (Hiroshima gave us a way, a clichéd way quickly, of seeing what it was to leave your shadow etched by brilliance when you were evaporated)... It is partly, too, as primitive peoples believe, that the identity is chipped or sucked away by the black hole in the shutter... I hate photographs (p. 164). 

To a reasonable, rational human being this argument and discussion seems irrational when considering Phineas work. After all, Phineas is studying dead men, their lives and existences. Is a biography, a collection of the actions of a man once living, not also like a photograph, in that it says “This creature was living and will be dead”? You cannot write about someone until the moments that you are writing about have passed and many biographies are written posthumously. So, why then is Phineas, who is endeavoring to write about a dead man who wrote about dead men so abhorrent of photographs?

Also, Vera, Phineas’ love interest, has a collection of x-rays that she has arranged and colored displayed as works of art in her room. Phineas found her art lovely and both agreed that the images are not displaying death but life. How is an x-ray different from a photograph? Both use a rather similar method to develop and if considered, one might say that an x-ray is more related to death than a photograph, since, more often than not, x-rays are taken at moments when someone has been injured while photographs are normally taken as someone experiences a moment in life. If looked at this way, an x-ray would be a reminder of the fragility of the human existence.

Yet perhaps Phineas’ perspective can be understood if one thinks about how people look at photographs as compared to biographies and x-rays. When a person loses a loved one, a photograph, which is a personal item that links the viewer with the deceased, can be studied and agonized over. That photograph can be a constant reminder of what you have lost. In my experience, family members will cut out a copy of a persons’ obituary, which can by said to be a miniature biography, and keep it in a book of some sort. But when they turn for a reminder of their lost loved one, they do not turn to the obituary, but to their collection of photographs. The photos act as a link between the current time and memory. An obituary reminds the person of the facts and things of the deceased person’s life, but the photo reminds them of the emotional bond. It is this bond that links photos to death. One takes a picture so that one can look at that picture and remember what was going on at the time. A biography allows the writer to pull back from the emotional side of the equation and look at the facts and things of the person’s life.

Phineas can write biographies and save himself from the horror associated with photographs by ignoring the more human aspects of his subjects life and focusing on the facts and things. As a biographer you cannot know how the person felt and guessing would probably have the unintended consequence of altering the facts and things and tainting them with your guesses.

Sept. 8. Vera, Fulla and Phineas

I wonder at the stark contrast between Phineas' two lovers Vera and Fulla and the reason for the detail that Byatt uses to describe their relationship and the nature of that relationship with Phineas.
Vera, a pale, thin young woman who works as a radiologist, lives in a dark and ordered space and who's passion is the artistic renderings of x-rays. Fulla is bright, voluptuous and fierce and passionate about insects and improving the condition of the planet through a holistic process that would incorporate the roles played by the insect population.
Vera seems to act as the voice of reason, intellect and investigation. Her passions in life, the x-rays, a relative of photographs, which Phineas discovers to be linked rather closely with death, and her investigation into the life of her dead uncle Scholes Destry-Scholes, seem to be the embodiment of Phineas' search for facts and things. Her fragility and her emotional break down after viewing the x-ray of a dying man, could possibly symbolize the frailty of an existence devoted entirely to a life of study of others.
Fulla on the other hand, is the emotional figure, full of life and vibrancy who knows who she is, what she wants and where to go to get it. She is also tied to the planet and has all the characteristics of an earthy creature. Her passion, insects and the identification of their roles in nature, and her physical appearance, a bright cap of bushy hair that seems to defy all constraints, suggest that she symbolizes man's connection to nature. Nature that is always linked to emotion, but solid and unyielding. She ties reason and intellect to nature through application of her studies on insects. 
As Phineas develops his relationship with each he begins to take in the traits of both, or rather to discover those traits within himself. He becomes fuller, and even his complexion and disposition improve. He learns to be invested both with facts and things, but also with their application in the real world. He is no longer concerned with the dead, his biographical subject and all of his biographical subjects have long since passed, but with how to improve the lives of the living, through his work with Fulla and to a certain extent, his work at Puck's Girdle where he helps people find a way to travel on strange paths.
Yet why is it necessary for Phineas to have a physical relationship with these two women at the same time? Socially such things are usually not acceptable and Phineas himself seems slightly embarrassed with the situation. In older texts, such a relationship would develop as a  friendship would result in the same intermingling of perspectives. Why can Phineas not have an intellectual relationship with the women? Is it the time period the book was written in? Such a situation is much more socially acceptable now than it would have been even fifty years ago. Did the author add the relationship in order to attract a larger audience? The subject matter is rather dry after all, perhaps she thought that such a situation would draw in more readers. Also one could argue that Phineas is using the two women in a rather horrible way and the women lose their value as intellectual beings in the process. Personally I find that it detracts from the overall story (Alfred Hitchcock's hidden violence, that your own imagination fills in, is much more frightening than the blood baths that most horror films include).
Perhaps there is a reason for Byatt's decision and I'm just not seeing it.  

Sept. 6: Lumps in Foucault, Pale Fire and the Biographer's Tale

When I was little my father once told me there were only two kinds of people in the world: Lumpers and Splitters. Lumpers, in order to make sense of their cosmos, have to take all the small details and lump them together into ideas that are easier to understand or that fit into a grander picture. Splitters take all of their daily thoughts, words and actions and split them up into more manageable forms which they constantly scrutinize so that they can further split them into smaller pieces. For the most part I'm still a little hazy on the distinction between the two but it makes perfect sense to my father.
The young biographer in the Biographer's Tale begins his story by collecting all the smallest pieces of evidence about his biographer and lumping them into categories that he can further lump together so that he can make sense of what is going on in the biographer's analysis of his subject's lives. The marbles and note cards, which he continuously examines and rearranges, represent the little details of the biographer's life which the young man is trying to lump together to make into a complete human being. The final product would have been completely different if the young biographer had taken these small pieces and analyzed and further divided them with all of the numerous literary, behavioral and psychological theories he constantly tries to avoid. The young biographer's methods of analysis and his interpretation of the biographer's notes and symbols determine the entire evolution of the young biographer's life. These strange little ways of organizing life, Foucault's very specific list of slimy, unwholesome creatures he would not eat and the gibberish of the young child in Pale Fire, are a manifestation of the character and personality of the mind's behind such random organizations. These organizational methods have do not have the same meaning from one person to the next. The biographer's marbles, for example, represent an entirely different set of thought for the young biographer than the deceased man he's studying. For the young man the marbles played a key role in his development as he found out who he was and what kind of work he wanted to do with his life. For the old biographer, the marbles represented places, times, people and all other sorts of things he encountered while studying those about whom he was going to write his interpretations of their lives. In the end the young biographer puts them in a bowl on display whereas the old man had them hidden away in a shoe box in his niece's attic. The objects are important for both characters but the details of their importance are different for each man and help to distinguish what sorts of lives they live or lived.
The lumpers and splitters theory still boggles my mind, but it explains how some people organize their lives and how they make sense of the events that unfold on a daily basis. Random lists of disgusting animals that one would not want to eat may be an important indication that Foucault did not think like the average man and helps to explain how he could ask such previously un-thought-of or at least un-voiced questions about the nature of society. Rather than looking at the world from what most people would consider a forward facing perspective, listing all the foods he would like to eat, Foucault starts from the opposite end and lists those that would probably turn most stomachs.