
Thursday, April 28, 2016
Reality
Edgar Degas, the artist, always spoke out against artists painting outdoors in the landscape, "en plein air," as they used to say. He insisted that the artist's vision was compromised by the in your face sensation produced by the so called "real thing" right there. In the studio before the easel the artist was free "to see" what in fact was the vision of his psyche, the true reality of the artist. I have a friend who is a gifted artist, but I think limited by wanting to paint the reality she sees before her rather than in her heart and soul. I remember once looking at a sketch she had made of a little boy standing on what seemed to be a dinner plate, and saying: "Why don't you add a dead bird lying there on the plate?" She was not scandalized by my suggestion, bizarre as it was, respond simply: "But there was no dead bird." I have always treasured Degas' advice because I think it frees a critic in other areas as well. In the study of antiquity the evidence available is scanty, and unevenly distributed. Only a very few plays, for instance, of the oeuvre of Aeschylus and Sophocles survive, and when you add in the larger number of extant Euripidean pieces you still have statistically a miniscule sample of the output of the Athenian fifth and fourth centuries. This means that to speak of Aeschylus' or Sophocles' style and dramatic tendency is nonsense, and further still to speak of Greek tragedy in general is ridiculous. So much of my studies were devoted to fending off the seductions of those who would insist on the historical truth, the realities of the ancient world, when what we have is surmise filtered through a variety of intelligences devoted to a variety of different things. I remember when I wrote about Thucydides in my ancient Greek literature book I was most of all impressed by how his account of the rise of Athenian imperialism and the war with Sparta was shaped, or so it seemed to me, by the commonplace sense of development in tragic drama, and I was happy to see this opinion voiced by Francis Cornford in his wonderful Thucydides Mythistoricus devoted to the idea that Thucydides did not simply lay out "the facts," but made a narrative obedient to the tragic development from pride to ignorance to error to awareness to fall. Ancient historians consider Herodotos to be the myth maker, the man who was more interested in a good story than historical fact. But perhaps it was just that he knew what was available, and how fact and theory were available in story, and Thucydides was doing the same, but talking in a more "scientific" way. I loved this chapter in my book, and remember showing it to a distinguished scholar of ancient Greek history, a close friend and someone with whom I had gone to graduate school years before. I couldn't wait til he laid the book down after reading the chapter. "Pure bullshit," was what he said
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