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Beauty is truth (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fpb contra elskuligr)
In the late eighteenth century, the European powers, having long been involved in Indian politics, suddenly found themselves, as a result of the collapse of the Mughal Empire and of the technological superiority of Western arms, in possession of large tracts of Indian land. England, as everyone knows, was particularly successful in this, and eventually marginalized her French, Dutch and Portuguese rivals. The peace of 1763 left her with the enormous mouthful of Bengal; and the restless and violent politics of post-Mughal India soon insured that further conquests would follow.
England was perhaps the least prepared of all major European powers for such an imperial burden, but to all of Europe, India was for all practical purposes a closed book. Nobody had any idea of the country's traditional religion or culture, except for a few Jesuit missionaries who had published their findings in Rome - and just about then, the "enlightened" politicians of Europe were persecuting the Jesuits almost into oblivion. Apart from them, a few travellers and merchants had visited Indian courts from time to time - where they had found Muslims, a culture known and fairly well understood to Europeans. Other than that, next to nothing was known. Paradoxically, more was known about the closed empire of China, where Europeans were rarely allowed to enter, than about the largely wide-open subcontinent.
Now, there are responsibilities that no ruler of any country, whatever their status, can dodge, and one of them is to be responsible for justice and internal peace. So the British, themselves at the time possessed of one of the most backward and ill-managed justice systems in Europe, started sending judges and other administrators to Bengal. One of these was Sir William Jones, a sound and conscientious man who set himself out conscientiously to learn and understand the Indian legal system. To his immense surprise, he discovered that the country's learned language was remarkably similar to Latin; and to his even greater surprise, that that language embodied not only a complex legal system, but a huge literary tradition, which he set out to make known to Europe.
His first translation was of a play by Kalidasa, called "Sakuntala Recognized". It went through Europe like a storm. In spite of the wars then tearing the continent, all the savants from Russia to France joined in a chorus of enthusiasm; the greatest living poet, Goethe, not only wrote two famous couplets of praise to this completely unexpected masterpiece, but paid it the homage of imitation, placing episodies derivated from its opening at the start of his own Faust.
Now if we takeelskuligr's attitude to art, this can only be seen as fallacious. Europe at the time knew nothing - I cannot repeat it enough - of the very peculiar culture of India, nothing of casre or pantheism, nothing of the Indian idea of powerful ascetics with the power of magicians. These are things that underlie the narrative of Sakuntala as they do those of every other work of literature or art to come out of India, from the beginnings to the present day. If the understanding of literature and art depends on the understanding of local cultural conditions, how could Europeans of the Napoleonic age, perhaps less open to alien influences than any other, be so struck by the product of an alien culture? Surely this must be a case of a random piece of work finding an unexpected resonance away from its proper home, based on misunderstanding.
Except that this is nonsense. Long before the arrival of the British, Kalidasa was recognized as the greatest poet in the Sanskrit language, and Sakuntala Recognized as the greatest drama in Indian literary history. That is why Sir William translated it in the first place. It had been endlessly copied out, commented on, imitated, followed from. And that was no coincidence: the qualities that Goethe and his contemporaries had recognized, even in a translation of a translation (I do not think that Goethe could read Sir William's English version, let alone his transcription of the Sanskrit original), were really there. Subsequently, the Europeans gorged themselves on Indian literature, always, for some reason, fastening on the best - the Ramayana - the Vedic hymns - the greater Upanishads - the BhagavadGita; all work that had the highest prestige among Indians, religious prestige in fact, and that was immediately and punctually recognized as immensely important by European savants. Goethe was far from the last to be influenced by Indian lierature; one just has to think of the acknowledged importance of the Upanishads for Schopenhauer.
The fact is that the culture-specific theory of the arts is, except as a minor correction on possible provincial excesses, plainly wrong. If it were, we would have to forget our canon of great works every hundred years or so; for there is nothing more obscure, more alien, and more thoroughly and continuously misunderstood, than the way our great-dgrandparents spoke, thought, and dreamed.
Take another theatrical work, Shakespeare's Othello. To anyone who knew even a little sixteenth-century history, there could be nothing more ridiculous than the notion, widespread among producers and actors, that this play has something to do with colonialism. Not only is it the case that Othello and the Venetian army were in Cyprus to protect the islanders from a far worse enemy; not only did Shakespeare visibly idolize Italy and Italian city-states such as Venice and Florence (the motherland of Michael Cassio); not only is there no evidence that he even understood that the Cypriots were not themselves Venetian (in the same way that he seems to have thought that Vienna was an Italian city). The point is that the very notion of colonialism completely reverses the experience of the world of any late-sixteenth-century Christian European. Of course, we remember this age for the immense conquering adventures of Spaniards in Mexico and Peru and Portuguese in the Indian Ocean; but to the contemporary average European these were faint and distant matters, echoes from far and little-known lands, as compared with the colossal fact of the rise of the Turkish Empire. In front of this giant despotism whose mailed glove had gripped the throats of three continents, Europeans felt both helpless and ashamed. Helpless, because nobody was apparently able to check the onward push of the Turkish hordes, who had in a few decades subdued all the Near East down to Yemen and the borders of Ethiopia, west as far as ALgiers, and north all the way to the Ukraine and the gates of Vienna; ashamed, because in spite of this colossal and clearly perceived threat, no European power had managed to come together in the alliance that the times so clearly required.
The notion of colonialism, then, implies Europe in a position of permanently superior military and economic power, Europe expanding, confident, conquering: which was the exact opposite of how Europe felt in Shakespeare's time. That Europe was a collection of squabbling, collapsing statelets, torn apart by war as much within as without, more concerned with stabbing each other in the back than with dealing with the common enemy - a mass of trembling, quarrelling dwarves in the shadow of a murderous giant. To even talk of colonialism in the context of Othello is to absolutely reverse the whole cultural and political environment of the age.
I will go further. Politically, Othello is impossible to understand except in the context of the recent and hideous Turkish conquest of Cyprus. Venice had been the only power apparently able to resist the Turks, holding a handful of islands in the Eastern Mediterranean in spite of anything that the enemy could do to dislodge them. But in 1570 that dream was rudely broken, when the last Venetian fortress in Cyprus, after a heroic ten-year struggle, fell to the Turks. All of Europe was shocked by the report that the Turks, who made war in a way that the most depraved European would not conceive, had had the unhappy Venetian general, Marcantonio Bragadin, skinned alive, and then had taken his flayed skin, stuffed with hay, on a hideous parody of a victory ride through the island, tied to a donkey.
The fall of Cyprus was the high point of the Turkish terror. If Cyprus had fallen, Venice could no longer be trusted to hold the sea alone; if Venice failed, it was hard to imagine what other power could hold the horror back. The tragedy of Cyprus briefly focussed minds, and three traditional enemies - Spain, Venice and the Pope - pooled their navies to inflict on the Turks the overwhelming naval defeat of Lepanto (1574). However, that alliance soon fell apart; its great commander, Don Juan of Austria, died mysteriously - poison was suspected - and Spain soon resumed a policy hostile to both Venice and Shakespeare's England. (Even at Lepanto itself, the Genoese admiral Andrea Doria, ally of the Spanish and enemy of the Venetians, had behaved with such uncharacteristic hesitation and cowardice as to rouse the suspicion that he might have been preparing to go over to the Turks.) And still Turkey loomed like an unextinguished forest fire, all across the south and east of Europe.
The relevance of this to the play is clear. Shakespeare has done what men in times of terror and confusion tend to do: he has dreamed of a Leader. This alien soldier of mysteriously royal birth (as he claims himself) and unblemished Christian faith is the one person who can hold the Turks back: "another of his fathom they have none", says Iago even as he prepares to destroy him. Iago, willing and eager to pursue his hatred of the Moor even though he knows he is irreplaceable. To a man writing in the 1590s, the very mention of Cyprus, let alone staging most of the play there, could not but point to the tragedy of the island's fall; nothing could be clearer to the spectators than that, if Othello dies, Cyprus is doomed and Venice under threat. And just to make the picture complete, his false ally Iago has a typically Spanish name and is cast as a typical Spanish intriguer.
There is more to say, but I think the point is sufficiently made: Now that you know all that, is your enjoyment of Othello increased one bit? I doubt it. At best, you may have had some misunderstandings removed; but our enjoyment of the play does not depend on having any idea of contemporary events. It has to do with universal human experiences. And if we speak of Anglo-Saxon poetry, do you imagine for a minute that the authors or the listeners of the greatest piece of Anglo-Saxon poetry did not feel their selves to vibrate under its impact as we do?
"Mind must be harder, Heart must be keener,
Bravery be greater, As our strength lessens.
Here our lord Lies cut to pieces,
A good man brought down; If one so much
As thinks to leave this field, Let him howl for ever!"
England was perhaps the least prepared of all major European powers for such an imperial burden, but to all of Europe, India was for all practical purposes a closed book. Nobody had any idea of the country's traditional religion or culture, except for a few Jesuit missionaries who had published their findings in Rome - and just about then, the "enlightened" politicians of Europe were persecuting the Jesuits almost into oblivion. Apart from them, a few travellers and merchants had visited Indian courts from time to time - where they had found Muslims, a culture known and fairly well understood to Europeans. Other than that, next to nothing was known. Paradoxically, more was known about the closed empire of China, where Europeans were rarely allowed to enter, than about the largely wide-open subcontinent.
Now, there are responsibilities that no ruler of any country, whatever their status, can dodge, and one of them is to be responsible for justice and internal peace. So the British, themselves at the time possessed of one of the most backward and ill-managed justice systems in Europe, started sending judges and other administrators to Bengal. One of these was Sir William Jones, a sound and conscientious man who set himself out conscientiously to learn and understand the Indian legal system. To his immense surprise, he discovered that the country's learned language was remarkably similar to Latin; and to his even greater surprise, that that language embodied not only a complex legal system, but a huge literary tradition, which he set out to make known to Europe.
His first translation was of a play by Kalidasa, called "Sakuntala Recognized". It went through Europe like a storm. In spite of the wars then tearing the continent, all the savants from Russia to France joined in a chorus of enthusiasm; the greatest living poet, Goethe, not only wrote two famous couplets of praise to this completely unexpected masterpiece, but paid it the homage of imitation, placing episodies derivated from its opening at the start of his own Faust.
Now if we take
elskuligr's attitude to art, this can only be seen as fallacious. Europe at the time knew nothing - I cannot repeat it enough - of the very peculiar culture of India, nothing of casre or pantheism, nothing of the Indian idea of powerful ascetics with the power of magicians. These are things that underlie the narrative of Sakuntala as they do those of every other work of literature or art to come out of India, from the beginnings to the present day. If the understanding of literature and art depends on the understanding of local cultural conditions, how could Europeans of the Napoleonic age, perhaps less open to alien influences than any other, be so struck by the product of an alien culture? Surely this must be a case of a random piece of work finding an unexpected resonance away from its proper home, based on misunderstanding.Except that this is nonsense. Long before the arrival of the British, Kalidasa was recognized as the greatest poet in the Sanskrit language, and Sakuntala Recognized as the greatest drama in Indian literary history. That is why Sir William translated it in the first place. It had been endlessly copied out, commented on, imitated, followed from. And that was no coincidence: the qualities that Goethe and his contemporaries had recognized, even in a translation of a translation (I do not think that Goethe could read Sir William's English version, let alone his transcription of the Sanskrit original), were really there. Subsequently, the Europeans gorged themselves on Indian literature, always, for some reason, fastening on the best - the Ramayana - the Vedic hymns - the greater Upanishads - the BhagavadGita; all work that had the highest prestige among Indians, religious prestige in fact, and that was immediately and punctually recognized as immensely important by European savants. Goethe was far from the last to be influenced by Indian lierature; one just has to think of the acknowledged importance of the Upanishads for Schopenhauer.
The fact is that the culture-specific theory of the arts is, except as a minor correction on possible provincial excesses, plainly wrong. If it were, we would have to forget our canon of great works every hundred years or so; for there is nothing more obscure, more alien, and more thoroughly and continuously misunderstood, than the way our great-dgrandparents spoke, thought, and dreamed.
Take another theatrical work, Shakespeare's Othello. To anyone who knew even a little sixteenth-century history, there could be nothing more ridiculous than the notion, widespread among producers and actors, that this play has something to do with colonialism. Not only is it the case that Othello and the Venetian army were in Cyprus to protect the islanders from a far worse enemy; not only did Shakespeare visibly idolize Italy and Italian city-states such as Venice and Florence (the motherland of Michael Cassio); not only is there no evidence that he even understood that the Cypriots were not themselves Venetian (in the same way that he seems to have thought that Vienna was an Italian city). The point is that the very notion of colonialism completely reverses the experience of the world of any late-sixteenth-century Christian European. Of course, we remember this age for the immense conquering adventures of Spaniards in Mexico and Peru and Portuguese in the Indian Ocean; but to the contemporary average European these were faint and distant matters, echoes from far and little-known lands, as compared with the colossal fact of the rise of the Turkish Empire. In front of this giant despotism whose mailed glove had gripped the throats of three continents, Europeans felt both helpless and ashamed. Helpless, because nobody was apparently able to check the onward push of the Turkish hordes, who had in a few decades subdued all the Near East down to Yemen and the borders of Ethiopia, west as far as ALgiers, and north all the way to the Ukraine and the gates of Vienna; ashamed, because in spite of this colossal and clearly perceived threat, no European power had managed to come together in the alliance that the times so clearly required.
The notion of colonialism, then, implies Europe in a position of permanently superior military and economic power, Europe expanding, confident, conquering: which was the exact opposite of how Europe felt in Shakespeare's time. That Europe was a collection of squabbling, collapsing statelets, torn apart by war as much within as without, more concerned with stabbing each other in the back than with dealing with the common enemy - a mass of trembling, quarrelling dwarves in the shadow of a murderous giant. To even talk of colonialism in the context of Othello is to absolutely reverse the whole cultural and political environment of the age.
I will go further. Politically, Othello is impossible to understand except in the context of the recent and hideous Turkish conquest of Cyprus. Venice had been the only power apparently able to resist the Turks, holding a handful of islands in the Eastern Mediterranean in spite of anything that the enemy could do to dislodge them. But in 1570 that dream was rudely broken, when the last Venetian fortress in Cyprus, after a heroic ten-year struggle, fell to the Turks. All of Europe was shocked by the report that the Turks, who made war in a way that the most depraved European would not conceive, had had the unhappy Venetian general, Marcantonio Bragadin, skinned alive, and then had taken his flayed skin, stuffed with hay, on a hideous parody of a victory ride through the island, tied to a donkey.
The fall of Cyprus was the high point of the Turkish terror. If Cyprus had fallen, Venice could no longer be trusted to hold the sea alone; if Venice failed, it was hard to imagine what other power could hold the horror back. The tragedy of Cyprus briefly focussed minds, and three traditional enemies - Spain, Venice and the Pope - pooled their navies to inflict on the Turks the overwhelming naval defeat of Lepanto (1574). However, that alliance soon fell apart; its great commander, Don Juan of Austria, died mysteriously - poison was suspected - and Spain soon resumed a policy hostile to both Venice and Shakespeare's England. (Even at Lepanto itself, the Genoese admiral Andrea Doria, ally of the Spanish and enemy of the Venetians, had behaved with such uncharacteristic hesitation and cowardice as to rouse the suspicion that he might have been preparing to go over to the Turks.) And still Turkey loomed like an unextinguished forest fire, all across the south and east of Europe.
The relevance of this to the play is clear. Shakespeare has done what men in times of terror and confusion tend to do: he has dreamed of a Leader. This alien soldier of mysteriously royal birth (as he claims himself) and unblemished Christian faith is the one person who can hold the Turks back: "another of his fathom they have none", says Iago even as he prepares to destroy him. Iago, willing and eager to pursue his hatred of the Moor even though he knows he is irreplaceable. To a man writing in the 1590s, the very mention of Cyprus, let alone staging most of the play there, could not but point to the tragedy of the island's fall; nothing could be clearer to the spectators than that, if Othello dies, Cyprus is doomed and Venice under threat. And just to make the picture complete, his false ally Iago has a typically Spanish name and is cast as a typical Spanish intriguer.
There is more to say, but I think the point is sufficiently made: Now that you know all that, is your enjoyment of Othello increased one bit? I doubt it. At best, you may have had some misunderstandings removed; but our enjoyment of the play does not depend on having any idea of contemporary events. It has to do with universal human experiences. And if we speak of Anglo-Saxon poetry, do you imagine for a minute that the authors or the listeners of the greatest piece of Anglo-Saxon poetry did not feel their selves to vibrate under its impact as we do?
"Mind must be harder, Heart must be keener,
Bravery be greater, As our strength lessens.
Here our lord Lies cut to pieces,
A good man brought down; If one so much
As thinks to leave this field, Let him howl for ever!"