Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic – Eagleton (Part 1 of 3)

2003 Blackwell Publishers, 328 pages

Back Blurb:

In this dazzling book, Terry Eagleton provides a comprehensive study of tragedy, all the way from Aeschylus to Edward Albee, dealing with both theory and practice, and moving between ideas of tragedy and analyses of particular works and authors. This amazing tour de force steps out beyond the stage to reflect not only on tragic art but also on real-life tragedy. It explores the idea of the tragic in the novel, examining such writers as Melville, Hawthorne, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Manzoni, Goethe and Mann, as well as English novelists.

With his characteristic brilliance and inventiveness of mind, Eagleton weaves together literature, philosophy, ethics, theology, and political theory. In so doing he makes a major political—philosophical statement drawn from a startling range of Western thought, in the writings of Plato, St Paul, St Augustine, Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Sartre and others.

This book takes serious issue with the idea of ‘the death of tragedy’, and gives a comprehensive survey of definitions of tragedy itself, arguing a radical and controversial case.

An ambitious all-encompassing political-philosophical approach. It covers under the umbrella of tragedy all the way from the dramatic form of tragedy, real life tragedy, tragedy in novels, and the philosophy of tragedy, otherwise called the tragic. First question: why doesn’t the back blurb say one or two words on Eagleton’s ‘radical and controversial case’? Will Sweet Violence be similar to Raymond Williams’ 1966 Modern Tragedy, which was also a rebuke of George Steiner’s 1961 title The Death of Tragedy?

My Reaction to the Back Blurb

My title, Risk Theatre: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected maintains a narrower scope: the art form of tragedy and the philosophy of tragedy. It leaves out real life tragedy (except for a brief discussion at the end) and tragic novels. It never occurred to me to include studies of real life tragedies such as AIDS, Chernobyl, the Challenger explosion, and others. If I had talked about the Challenger or the Fukushima tragedies, from my risk theatre model, I’d have to say that they could be similar to the art form of tragedy if they could be framed in such a way: the planner or engineer entrusted with the design and build of the space shuttle or nuclear power plant does his best to make it safe. He plans for the contingencies that he thinks will be likely to happen. He does his best to make it safe. He plans enough safeties so that the project can withstand a one in a hundred year event. He knows that, should a one in a thousand year event happen, lives will be endangered. He also knows if the project doesn’t go ahead bad things will happen. Maybe the Soviets will get ahead in the space race. Maybe people won’t have power. He weighs the opportunity costs of building the project, and decides to go ahead. After the project is built, a one in a thousand year event happens and all is ruined. So my idea of risk theatre could be extended to real life. But it’s hard. One of the things I talk about in my book is that tragedy is an ex-ante art: heroes base their decisions on forecasts. They don’t know what’s going to happen. In real life, you don’t know about the disaster until after it’s happened and you see the disaster from an ex-post, after the fact perspective. When that happens, people will usually form a committee to examine the accident and point fingers. That’s when tragedy gets ruined. I think that’s what Nietzsche was getting at when he said that Euripides and Socrates wrecked tragedy: their rationalist and enlightened interpretations of reality chase out that last little vestige of uncertainty in reality. To the rationalists, everything can be known in advance. And if it could have been foreseen, then it’s not tragedy, as it could have been avoided. The point of tragedy is that it couldn’t have been avoided. Each time Othello will strangle Desdemona. Each time Polyneices will be waiting for Eteocles at the seventh gate. Over and over.

Introduction

Summary of Eagleton’s arguments: tragedy’s too serious for postmodernists, too fatalistic for leftists, and too macho for feminists. Sweet Violence is not a historical study. Historicist and culturalist approaches to suffering place suffering in a historical or cultural setting. Historicist and culturalist approaches avoid tragedy because tragedy places suffering in a transhistorical context: remember historicism by definition states that social and cultural phenomena are determined by history. The ‘state of suffering’ that tragedy believes in, or seems to dramatize, is anathema to the historicist and culturalist purview. But this is wrong: ‘tragic art highlights what is perishable, contracted, fragile and slow-moving about us, as a rebuke to culturalist or historicist hubris’. The political left is silent about religion. Next thesis statement: ‘there are also theological ideas which can be politically illuminating, and this book is among other things and exploration of them’. Sweet Violence is Eagleton’s attempt to reconcile tragedy with the political left. It is a political study of tragedy.

My Reaction to the Introduction:

I buy his argument that tragedy is too full of fate and macho heroes for modern sensibilities. But aren’t some of our modern sensibilities shaped by the political left? I’m thinking of the Marxist playwright Arthur Miller. Or the anticapitalist Henrik Ibsen. So leftist critics don’t like tragedy but leftist dramatists do? And I would have thought tragedy would have been a happy hunting ground from feminists: from the beginning up to the present day, from Clytemnestra to Hedda Gabler, tragedy presents a veritable roll call of powerful female leads. In fact, I can only think of one tragedy that has no woman: and that would be Seneca’s over-the-top Thyestes. How does my title Risk Theatre fit in ? Well, the idea of heroes as high stakes gamblers gambling with values, beliefs, emotions should be politically agnostic. So risk theatre is not leftist, rightist, or feminist. You could say its postmodern in that it rejects modern theatre, e.g. epic theatre, metatheatre, theatre of the absurd, and the like. But risk theatre isn’t going back to Aristotle’s Poetics either. The argument that theatre dramatizes risk, the impact of the unexpected, and that heroes are high stakes gamblers isn’t going back to any specific theory. You could say it touches on Boethius’ conception of tragedy as involving fortune, but he didn’t include all the ludic aspects. Maybe risk theatre is a ludic theory of tragedy?—though ludic sounds too innocuous. I called risk theatre a neoclassical model in the book not because it was going back to classical models but because, from the beginning to the present day I find images of gambling in tragedy.

Chapter 1 A Theory in Ruins

Summary of Eagleton’s arguments: An overview of different definitions of tragedy from Aristotle to the present day. Why they are all wrong. The best ‘comprehensive’ definition of tragedy is ‘very sad’. But some sad events, such as Auschwitz, although it is ‘very sad’, is not understood to be tragedy. Plus, why are we enthralled by its sadness? Difference between term ‘tragic’ and similar, almost interchangeable terms such as ’misfortune’, ‘sad’, ‘shocking’. Formulaic rebuttals. Eagleton quotes the critic, and offers a riposte. For example: ‘As FL Lucas puts it: tragedy for the ancients means serious drama, for the middle ages a story with an unhappy ending, and for moderns a drama with an unhappy ending. It is hard to get more imprecise than that’. Or ‘Kenneth Burke’s definition of tragedy involves an essential moment of tragic recognition or anagnorisis, but while this may be true of Oedipus, it hold only doubtfully for Othello and hardly at all for Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman. In the case of Phaedra, no such recognition is needed. Tragic art for conservative theorists is a supremely affirmative affair. Conservative theorists such as Franco Moretti therefore deny the tragic exists in real life, saving themselves from wishing for a cataclysmic affair to happen in actual life to justify life. Eagleton provides the following example: ‘all-out nuclear warfare would not be tragic, but a certain way of representing it in art might well be. Behind this apparently lunatic notion, which only the remarkably well-educated could conceivably have hatched, lie [sic] a series of false assumptions: that real life is shapeless, and art alone is orderly; that only in art can the value released by destruction be revealed; that real-life suffering is passive, ugly and undignified, whereas affliction in art has a heroic splendour of resistance; that art has a gratifying inevitability lacking in life’. If tragedy matters to modernity, it is as much as a theodicy, a metaphysical humanism, a critique of Enlightenment. The left rejects tragedy and the right endorses it.

My Response to Chapter 1

How profitable is this division between left and right? Didn’t both the left (freedom fighters) and the right (Nazis guards) applaud Anouihl’s Antigone in 1944 occupied Paris? I like the idea of tragedy as an antidote for Enlightenment. Enlightenment philosophy taught us that we could know everything (e.g. Laplace’s demon who could work out the infinite past and future by studying the present and working causality forwards and backwards); tragedy teaches us that we know less that what we think. Some of Eagleton’s criticisms of other’s definitions don’t seem all that fair. For example, he calls out FL Lucas, but how far out is Lucas’ definition of tragedy from Henry Ansgar Kelly’s conclusions in Ideas and Forms of Tragedy whom Eagleton gives kudos to in his footnotes? As to Burke’s definition involving recognition, Eagleton cites Othello, Loman, and Phaedra as counterexamples. But doesn’t Othello have a recognition scene: he recognizes after he kills Desdemona that he’s been played by ‘honest’ Iago. Doesn’t Loman have a big recognition scene: the moment that he realizes that, because he has insurance, he’s worth more dead than alive? Doesn’t Phaedra have a recognition scene: the moment that she realizes the Nurse has let her down? As for Auschwitz, I don’t think someone could make a tragic play out of that (does anyone consider Hochhuth’s The Deputy to be a tragedy?). Auschwitz is a tragedy in the sense that it’s a horrible event, but it’d be hard to dramatize. Risk theatre understands that tragedy involves a wager that’s gone awry. And the hero has to put up at stake something that belongs to himself that he considers valuable. Maybe a play could be made about a hero who wagers life and livelihood in order to put a stop to Auschwitz? As for an all-out nuclear war: I guess risk theatre could make that into a play if the all-out war involved some kind of miscalculation in the game of brinkmanship between the generals that neither of them originally wanted. Eagleton puts me on hard ground by saying theories of tragedy have to be valid for what is tragic in life and what is tragic on the stage. To me, they’re different things, different perspectives. Sometimes they overlap, sometimes they don’t.

I would like to know how Eagleton knows that it is a false assumption that real life is shapeless and art alone is orderly. Lots of things in real life are shapeless: Brownian motion, the day to day movement of the stock market is a random walk (Fama won the 2013 Nobel for this discovery), Meursault’s life in Camus’ The Outsider. Risk theatre would find that ‘only in art can the value released by destruction be revealed’ because it is only when we see the hero’s reaction to loss that we can understand that the loss of what the hero staked is real. For example, I would argue that in his ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow’ soliloquy, Macbeth makes it absolutely clear the worth of what he has lost because of how much it hurts. You don’t know what you got till it’s gone, runs the old saw. And that saw applies to tragedy: heroes have to lose because you don’t know the value of what you have until it’s irrevocably wrenched away.

Chapter 2 The Value of Agony

Summary of Eagleton’s arguments: Hegel, Racine, Milton and others think tragic art is best thing since sliced bread. But their opinion is not shared by publishers and publicity agents. Public does not like tragic plays and novels where all hope is lost. Yeats and other writes, however, find that tragedy is more about ecstasy than agony. Tragedy, according to the artists (D. D. Raphael, Nietzsche, Eugene O’Neill, Richard Wagner), is just the thing that lifts one spirits after bankruptcy or bereavement. For Murray Gilbert, tragedy attests the triumph of the human soul over triumph and disaster. Eagleton agrees tragedy needs meaning and value if only to violate them. Franco Moretti quote: ‘It is as though it were argued that by strangling Desdemona, Othello paid tribute to her importance’. F. L. Lucas quote: ‘Tragedy portrays life so that its tears become a joy forever’. Eagleton says this is sadism. Kaufmann quote: “Kaufmann, rather extraordinarily, seems to think that there is solace in the thought that suffering is general, not just peculiar to oneself. It might be the thought os someone else being decapitated is usually comforting, but this is not much consolation when one is trying to come to terms with bereavement’. Disagrees with Steiner that tragedy is incompatible with Christian and Marxist worldviews. T. R. Henn quote with Eagleton’s reaction: “‘there is implicit, not only the possibility of redemption, but the spiritual assertion that man is splendid in his ashes, and can transcend his nature’. It is hard to see that the victims of Bosnia or Cambodia are particularly splendid in their ashes; and if Henn is reserving the triumph for art rather than life, then it is difficult to see its relevance to the latter.”

My Response to Chapter 2

Tragedy’s popularity among writers and its lack of popularity among the public reminds me of certain music bands who are more popular with other music bands than with the general public, bands like Velvet Underground, Rush (though Rush are pretty big), and Robert Johnson. Leonard Cohen probably falls into this category: for decades I had heard his covers (e.g. Everybody Knows covered by Concrete Blonde) thinking that they were original songs by the covering bands. Sometimes I would think, ‘Wow, all of a sudden their lyrics have become more profound!’ It wasn’t until hearing the song that concluded the movie Winterschlafer that I found out about Cohen. And then when I looked up with discography, I recognized about half the songs through covers! Obviously the bands had been listening to him more than the radio has been playing him. To me, tragedy is like the Velvets or Cohen, who sing about unhappy things. But wouldn’t you say their songs elevate the worth of life by portraying hurt?

Speaking of music, they did a recent study of what music people grew up listening to, and how successful they were later in life. And the winner?—heavy metal, believe it or not. And the loser, or least successful?—those who listened to pop music. The researchers came to the conclusion that heavy metal, by depicting the world as a hard, dog-eat-dog place, instilled the values of endurance and perseverance in young listeners. Conversely, pop music, by depicting an easy go lucky world, disillusioned listeners, who as they grew up and moved out into the real world, found that things aren’t that easy. There is a value to agony. And it is art’s job to inculcate its audiences with the right values. What are the right values? Well, that depends on what sort of world it is out there!

One thing my risk theatre model does is it asserts that there is solace in that suffering is general, and not specific. In ancient times, a commonplace of consolation was to say to the sufferer, ‘this is not to you alone, many others have suffered what you suffer’. This commonplace of consolation appears frequently in ancient tragedy, where it is voiced by the chorus. So when Theseus loses his wife in Hippolytus, the chorus, to assuage him, says ‘you are not the first to lose a wife, many others have as well’. It may sound grating on modern ears, but writers such as Cicero, Plutarch, and pseudo-Seneca have all written about the commonplace of consolation as being effective. Now, as to how victims of political injustice probably don’t take comfort in being splendid in their ashes, well it is true…in real life. Tragedy furnishes examples that can defend Henn’s position: consider Goethe’s Egmont. In that play, Freedom personified comes to visit Egmont, who is glumly awaiting execution. Learning that his death will kickstart the revolts that will eventually restore liberty to the Low Countries, he dies in an exalted state. Now it’s true that the victims of Bosnia and Cambodia are hardly splendid in their ashes, as Eagleton says. But what about those who died at Tianamen Square? Are they ‘splendid’ or ‘wasted’ ashes? On Eagleton’s comments that art transforming sorrow into joy, I recall Homer’s lines in the Iliad where Helen says to Priam that Zeus has given them sorrows so that their stories can be a story for the future singers to sing.

I take it that Eagleton wants to draw a sort of equal sign between actual tragedy and tragedy in drama. He wants them to be the same. Risk theatre differentiates itself from Eagleton’s views in that it posits that art and life are not the same. Risk theatre says that tragedy in drama is a high-stakes gambling act gone awry. Real life tragedies can be material for tragic drama only if they are presented as a gambling act gone awry.

Chapter 3 From Hegel to Beckett

Summary of Eagleton’s arguments: this chapter is on various tragic theories from Hegel to Beckett. For instance: ‘Far from being a catastrophe, tragic art for Hegel is supremely affirmative. It is the finest working model we have of how Spirit, once pitched into contention with itself, restores its own unity through negation … The world is rational, even if, curiously, it is through violent destruction that we come to appreciate the fact’. Eagleton comments on commentator’s favourite tragedies: ‘As far as Marlowe goes, it is true that Hegel has in mind ancient rather than modern tragedy. But even here his reflections are far too conditioned by Antigone, as Aristotle’s are by King Oedipus. It is remarkable how many general theories of tragedy have been spun out of a mere two or three texts. Eagleton on how for modern thinkers tragedy has become an ersatz religion. Nice purple passage from Jean-Francois Lyotard: ‘a narrow complicity is established between the sinner and the confessor, the witch and the exorcist, sex and sainthood’. Eagleton fills in Lyotard’s quote with Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, an atheist who writes articles on theology. Nice analysis of T. S. Eliot’s Family Reunion and Murder in the Cathedral: ‘What matters in Eliot is not action, and not even the consciousness of it, which is invariably false consciousness, but those meanings which act themselves out on a different stage altogether, that of the spirit or the unconscious’. Kierkegaard also covered, for whom ‘the tragic is the finite that comes into conflict with the infinite’. Nietzsche the counter-Enlightenment philosopher is contrasted with Hegel, the Enlightenment philosopher who tried to incorporate reason with tragedy. Some lines from Eagleton that have the klang of risk theatre: ‘Tragedy can be an index of the outrageous price we have sometimes to pay for truth and justice, not of their illusoriness … suffering is a measure of how catastrophic things are with us that change must be bought at so steep a cost’. Eagleton sees tragedy as revolution with Williams. ‘In ancient cults of sacrifice, value stemmed from the expiatory potential of death’. Nice Melville Moby Dick quote (which I recently read): even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them’. It goes well with the Lyotard quote, above.

My Response to Chapter 3

With the brilliant Melville and Lyotard quotes, I wonder if Eagleton is a closet gnostic?–you know, those who believe that God contain in himself both good and evil. Of course, from Eagleton’s comments on religion, I would have to guess that, if he is a closet gnostic, he would be a closet atheist-gnostic, if such a thing were possible. I think he uses the Lyotard quote is perfect since, for someone who spends so much time remonstrating Christianity, he is very well versed in its workings. The book has lots and lots of quotes, which Eagleton sometimes hides his true beliefs behind. His technique goes something like this: writers x, y, and z are wrong. But it’s hard to see what he himself actually believes. So far I gather that he likes Williams and doesn’t like Steiner and Krook. He grudgingly accepts Hegel and Nietzsche, or at least refrains from showering them with invective. He also enjoys Kaufmann, a writer I also enjoy. I presume in the later chapters his political theory of tragedy as a sweet, violent, and revolution inducing art will become clearer. Nice to see some lines that look at tragedy as an index of the cost of the price the hero pays. This jives well with risk theatre, my economic study of tragedy based on the principle of opportunity cost. There is a fundamental difference between our interpretations of cost, however. For Eagleton, what the hero sacrifices is lesser in value than what he hopes to gain (he uses the example of Abraham sacrificing Isaac). According to risk theatre, the value of what is staked is exactly equal to the value of what is at stake.

to be continued…

Until next time, I’m Edwin Wong and I’ve been doing Melpomene’s work by reading Eagleton’s Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic.

Reaching Out to Famous Writers – Taleb

Have you heard of Nassim Nicholas Taleb? He’s the author of Fooled By Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and the Markets, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, and Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Well, he’s a self-described renegade ‘philosopher of uncertainty’ who has set his sights on destroying the bell curve. It turns, out, that the familiar bell curve, which incidentally graced the ten Deutsche Marks bill along with a picture of its originator, Carl Friedrich Gauss, is a deceptive fraud. It focusses our attention on the normal distribution of events, whether the weather, earthquakes, or stock market prices. The ‘hump’ on the bell curve represents the normal distribution of events, the events that are likely. Well, Taleb argues that the unlikely events, represented by the ‘tails’ on the left and right side of the bell curve, is what actually shapes our lives. Who cares if there are no earthquakes for 50 years?–when the earthquake hits, it alters lives. Who cares if the stock market goes up for 10 years?–it’s when it collapses in the 11th year that wrecks folks’ retirement dreams. And so on.

It was in 2007 when I first ran into Taleb’s books. Fooled By Randomness and then The Black Swan. I was living in Providence, RI at the time, and they had a big Borders bookstore in Providence Place Mall (remember those days?). Fooled By Randomness was in the economics section, and, since I was looking for something to read that wasn’t related to my MA thesis, I picked it up. Well, it was a life changing book. After I read it, it occurred to me that you could devise a whole theory of tragedy (that was what I was trying to do) looking at tragedy as a sort of ‘risk theatre’ where the unexpected rules over heroes’ lives. The unexpected outcome, like Euripides likes to mention in the closing riposte of many of his plays, dominates our lives. The heroes make their plans looking at the hump on the bell curve. But they aren’t looking for the tail event to happen. They’re caught off guard and perish. Well, I spent the next ten years connecting this idea to the art form of tragedy. If it’s one lesson I learned, it is that, to come up with something worth pursuing, read outside of your chosen field. If you’re reading what everyone else is reading, you’ll likely start from the same standpoint and end up in the same place. But if you’re reading outside of your field, then, sometimes, you can find something different.

Well, now that the manuscript is completed (I was wondering for a long time whether it could be completed), it’s time to start reaching out to get some reactions. It turns out that Taleb now is quite famous, but not quite famous enough that it’s impossible to find his email address. He has a website, which, to my surprise, includes his email address. I thought, “Hey, maybe I’ll try reaching out to him.” You know, the interesting thing is he’s always talking about black swan events, but he’s never talked about the art form of tragedy, which I’m convinced now is a dramatization of black swan events. The black swan problem is a problem of induction. You can see a thousand white swans over the course of a thousand years and safely declare that there are no black swans. But inductive logic is very fragile. You just need to see one black swan (as they did in Australia), and all your thousands of years of thinking you’re right goes into the wastebasket. Another bird, the turkey also has a problem of induction: it thinks the farmer is a friend because every day the farmer brings food. But come Thanksgiving, things change, and it’s this change that has a big effect on the turkey’s life. So, back to the email: I decided I’ll write Taleb, thank him, and ask him what he thinks about my tragedy as ‘risk theatre’. Here’s what I wrote:

Hi Mr. Taleb,

I’ve been inspired by your books and wanted to share my story with you. It was in 2007 that I first came across The Black Swan in a Borders Bookstore in Providence, RI where I was finishing a MA at Brown University on ancient Greek tragedy. After reading it, I began to see the tragic theatre as a place which dramatized the impact of low-probability, high-consequence events. For example, in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane hill is a low-probability event. But when it happens, it has high-consequences. Or take Oedipus from Sophocles’ play. The chances that the oracle is right (he will marry his mother and kill his father) is a low-probability event: he has taken every safeguard to ensure it won’t happen. But when it does happen, it has high-consequences. Have you ever thought of tragic theatre as being a place where heroes take risks, and, as a result, are susceptible to ruin?

I did. I’ve spent the last ten years working on a new theory or tragedy called “risk theatre.” Like Aristotle’s Poetics or Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, risk theatre is a theory of tragedy. My theory posits that, in the tragic theatre, heroes are gamblers. They have skin in the game and leverage themselves 100:1, thereby exposing themselves to tail risk. So, although heroes are smarter, stronger, and devise the best-laid plans, the unexpected ruins them. I argue that the tragic theatre is a school for risk because it shows how, the more confident we are, the more we’re in danger. In today’s age where we are surrounded by GMOs, artificial intelligence, and mutual assured destruction ideologies, we can learn a thing or two about risk (mis-)management from ancient theatre.

I recently finished my book: Risk Theatre: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected and now I’m shopping for a publisher. I’m writing first of all, to thank you for your inspiring books, and second of all, to ask for your reaction on the idea of tragedy as a theatre of risk.

Sincerely,

Edwin Wong.

Well, Taleb’s website claims that his email backlog is sitting at 10 months. Stay tuned, assiduous readers, it’s just a blink of the eye away!

I’m Edwin Wong, and I’m doing Melpomene’s work.

The Communist Manifesto – Marx and Engels

Hands up, all of you who have talked about Marx, Engels, Marxism, and communism. And hands up, all of you who have read Marx and Engel’s works. Betcha lot of hands went up the first time around. Now, Marx’ masterpiece Capital, volumes 1-3 clocks in at 2500 or so pages of dense nineteenth century prose. No thanks. But then there is Marx and Engel’s The Communist Manifesto. There’s a nice little Penguin edition at the library with an introduction and notes by Gareth Stedman Jones. The Penguin edition reprints the Samuel Moore translation of 1888 (The Communist Manifesto was first published in 1848). Moore was a Manchester barrister and manufacturer. The translation plays fast and loose in some parts. But the Moore translation is seen as being canonical in some quarters, as Moore was Engel’s friend and Engels had approved the translation. If you strip away Jones’ 276 page introduction, Engel’s 7 prefaces, you are left with the final 53 page distillation known as The Communist Manifesto. 53 vs. 2500 pages. You know which one I’ll be reading.

And it’s a good thing it’s a short work. I’ve been borrowing books from the Greater Victoria Public Library for decades. I’ve borrowed literally thousands of books. All 21 day loan period. Except this book. It’s a 14 day loan period. If there’s such a high demand, why not get another copy?

Well, what did I learn?

Marx and Engels Anticipate the American Century

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development … Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacure no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle class,by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

There is a powerful dynamism in their writing. You can see why this communism thing caught on. Very charismatic

Marx and Engels Anticipate Free Trade

The bourgeoisie are on fire, nothing can stop them now that they have their ultimate weapon called Free Trade, which converts physician, lawyer, priest, poet, and scientist into wage-labourers:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom–Free Trade.

Today, we have NAFTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the EU and these larger and larger supranational trading blocks. The rise of free trade even calls into question the sovereign nation as the final arbiter, as by joining up with a free trade block, a sovereign nation in effect gives up some of its rights to levy taxes and raise tariffs. Funny thing, Marx and Engels foresaw the rise of free trade as well. Pretty prescient. Remember, they were writing The Communist Manifesto just before 1850, around the same time Melville was writing Moby-Dick and talking about the whaling trade.

Marx and Engels Anticipate the Increasing Division of Labour

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed–a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of production.

Sounds like they also anticipated the impact on the division of labour on entry-level or less skilled workers. Minimum wage is an ongoing debate. In the last provincial election, the NDP proposed raising minimum wage from $11.35 to $15 per hour. They eventually won the election after teaming up with the Green Party and scrapped the “living wage” platform. The proletariat class today, however, is smaller than what Marx and Engels envisioned. In the province of BC, Canada, under 5% of the workforce makes minimum wage. They don’t give exact numbers in The Communist Manifesto, but from the argument, it sounds like they were expecting most people to be in the proletariat, or the subsistence or minimum wage class, i.e. >50%, maybe closer to 80 or 90%.

Capitalism is a Snake that Eats Its Own Tail

Here’s the famous paragraph that closes the first section. In this passage, Marx and Engels describe how capitalism dooms itself:

The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage labour. Wage labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

The argument is that capitalism, because it needs labour, unites the previously desultory proletariat class. After uniting the proles, it squashes them so bad that the only way they can survive is by rising up and declaring private property void: without private property, the bourgeoisie have no reason to exist. So, the communist revolution is really a late stage of capitalism. Capitalism has to stick to its first principles to such a degree that it destroys the labour on which it depends for communism to become practical. Where are the trade unions? Where are the leaders of the proletariat. Why would the trade unions and the leaders of the proletariat allow things to reach such a stage–that part is not entirely clear to me.

Would Canada and the USA be Considered Capitalist Countries?

Or for that matter, have there been any capitalist countries, if we use Marx and Engels’ understanding of the condition of the proletariat versus the bourgeoisie?–

It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.

According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: that there can no loner be any wage labour when there is no longer any capital.

In this passage, they’re saying that in bourgeois society, it’s impossible for proles to save anything to claw their way up the food chain and those who have capital mooch off of the proles labour instead of putting in an honest day of work. Pretty black and white.

Final Thoughts

Marx and Engels write with conviction. That’s because they had skin in the game: they were more than armchair communists, they were out there blazing the campaign. For a small book written 170 years ago, it’s still very prescient today. One interesting stat: Marx and Engels writes that one in ten or 10% of the people hold private property. I take it that that means they own their own homes. According to the 2011 census, about 69% of Canadian households (9.2 of 13.3 million) owned their own dwelling. Times have changed. Perhaps for the better?

One last thing: for people who are so anti-capital, they sure spend a lot of time thinking about capital. There is a strange understanding between a hero and his nemesis.

Drama Versus Novel – Macbeth and Moby-Dick

Each art specializes in expressing a facet of nature. Rhythm, for example, belongs to the musical arts. The painted arts, of course, can convey rhythm as well. Looking at Géricault’s Epsom Races, one cannot but hear the familiar three beat signature of racing horses:

Géricault, Epsom Races (Course D’Epsom)

But motion is properly the property of music. Colour belongs to the painted arts. Of course music can also have “colour” or “scene:” for example, Liszt’s tone-poems has scene and Davis’ “King of Blue” has colour.

Now what about prophecy? I guess this isn’t really a facet of nature, but a facet of the supernatural. But which art owns the rights to prophecy? Well, let’s put it to the test! There’s two similar prophecies in Shakespeare’s play Macbeth and Melville’s novel Moby-Dick. Here we have drama and novel trying to do the same thing.

Contestant #1 Drama (Shakespeare’s Macbeth)

In this scene, the witches call up apparitions who prophecy to Macbeth:

SECOND APPARITION. Macbeth! Macbeth! Macbeth!

MACBETH. Had I three ears, I’d hear thee.

SECOND APPARITION. Be bloody, bold, and resolute; laugh to scorn

The power of man, for none of woman born

Shall harm Macbeth. [Descends]

MACBETH. Then live, Macduff: what need I fear of thee?

But yet I’ll make assurance double sure,

And take a bond of fate: thou shalt not live;

That I may tell pale-hearted fear it lies,

And sleep in spite of thunder.

[Thunder. THIRD APPARITION: a Child crown’d, with a tree in his hand.]

What is this,

That rises like the issue of a king,

And wears upon his baby-brow the round

And top of sovereignty?

ALL. Listen, but speak not to ‘t.

THIRD APPARITION. Be lion-mettled, proud; and take no care

Who chafes, who frets, or where conspirers are:

Macbeth shall never vanquish’d be, until

Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill

Shall come against him. [Descends]

MACBETH. That will never be:

Who can impress the forest; bid the tree

Unfix his earth-bound root? Sweet bodements! good!

Rebellion’s head, rise never, till the wood

Of Birnam rise, and our high-plac’d Macbeth

Shall live the lease of nature, pay his breath

To time and mortal custom.

Contestant #2 Novel (Melville’s Moby-Dick)

Ahab and all his boat’s crew seemed asleep but the Parsee; who crouching in the bow, sat watching the sharks, that spectrally played round the whale, and tapped the light cedar planks with their tails. A sound like the moaning in squadrons over Asphaltites of unforgiven ghosts of Gomorrah, ran shuddering through the air.

Started from his slumbers, Ahab, face to face, saw the Parsee; and hooped round by the gloom of the night they seemed the last men in a flooded world. “I have dreamed it again,” said he.

“Of the hearses? Have I not said, old man, that neither hearse nor coffin can be thine?”

“And who are hearsed that die on the sea?”

“But I said, old man, that ere thou couldst die on this voyage, two hearses must verily be seen by thee on the sea; the first not made by mortal hands; and the visible wood of the last one must be grown in America.”

“Aye, aye! a strange sight that, Parsee:–a hearse and its plumes floating over the ocean with the waves for the pall-bearers. Ha! Such a sight we shall not soon see.”

“Believe it or not, thou canst not die till it be seen, old man.”

“And what was that saying about thyself?”

“Though it come to the last, I shall still go before thee thy pilot.”

“And when thou art so gone before–if that ever befall-then ere I can follow, thou must still appear to me, to pilot me still?–Was it not so? Well, then, did I believe all ye say, oh my pilot! I have here two pledges that I shall yet slay Moby Dick and survive it.”

“Take another pledge, old man,” said the Parsee, as his eyes lighted up like fire-flies in the gloom–“Hemp only can kill thee.”

“The gallows, ye mean.–I am immortal then, on land and on sea,” cried Ahab, with a laugh of derision;–“Immortal on land and on sea!”

Both were silent again, as one man. The grey dawn came on, and the slumbering crew arose from the boat’s bottom, and ere noon the dead whale was brought to the ship.

Moby-Dick is narrative; Macbeth is dramatic. But which one does prophecy better? Both passages give me the chills because it’s quite obvious in both instances that the low-probability event that they laugh off is precisely what’s going to kill them.

Well, there’s more economy in drama. It takes Melville 362 words to convey what Shakespeare does in 201. Another dramatist might even have been able to do it in less. Shakespeare is known to be quite verbose (when you’re that good with words, why not?). Winner: dramatic art.

But, while drama is more frugal and to the point, there’s a third voice in the narrative version, the voice of the narrator. In Shakespeare, the witches and Macbeth converse: that’s it. In Melville, there is the main dialogue between Ahab and the Parsee, and the narrator adds the details of the shark’s tails and the description of the men’s silence after Fedallah prophecies. Of course, the director of the drama could invite the audience to see these supratextual details in the stage directions or the setting. Here I think that the writer is superior to the dramatist in that the writer has more control over the reader’s interpretation. The dramatist is at the mercy of the director. So, while it’s not the case that narrative art is richer, but it is the case that narrative art retains greater control of the artistic product. Winner: narrative art.

What about from the viewpoint of suspense? It’s patently obvious that Ahab is going to be seeing dual hearses that someone is going to bid the tree unfix his earthbound root. What both Shakespeare and Melville are doing is setting up their audience’s expectations by saying: “Stay tuned, just wait to see how I pull this off!” From the perspective of suspense, the narrative and dramatic arts come to a draw. But I’ll have to give this one to the dramatic arts because, Melville, to make the scene more “dramatic” borrows from drama: the exchange between Fedallah and Ahab is recited verbatim and could be part of a play.

Of course I say this because I’m Edwin Wong, and I’m doing Melpomene’s work and not the work of the Muse of narrative art.

Moby-Dick – Herman Melville

Ahab, the Monomaniac Captain of the Pequod

Everyone knows Ahab and the hunt for Moby Dick, the white whale. You know the one that begins with: “Call me Ishmael.” I had heard of Moby-Dick, but didn’t have any plans to read it. There’s a lot of good books out there and the opportunity cost of reading one book is the book that doesn’t get read. But, after watching the Star Trek movie First Contact, I knew I had to read it.

In First Contact, Captain Jean-Luc Picard (played by all-star Patrick Stewart) fights the Borg. The Borg are an enemy cyborg race that is perhaps most famous for their cubic spaceship (which is pure genius–why are spaceships aerodynamic when there’s no air in space?). Now Picard has a personal beef with the Borg, who had, in a prior encounter, kidnapped him, violated him by implanting cybernetic devices throughout his body, and destroyed his individuality. In his dreams he is still haunted by the voices of the Borg hive communicating. In this way, he’s like Captain Ahab, who lost his leg in an earlier encounter with the white whale and wants revenge at all costs. In this dramatic scene–one of my faves–Lily (played by Alfre Woodard) remonstrates Picard for his maniacal pursuit of the Borg. Here it is, or, better yet, watch it on YouTube:

LILY. It’s so simple. The Borg hurt you and now you’re going to hurt them back.

PICARD: In my century, we don’t succumb to revenge. We have a more evolved sensibility. [note time travel: Lily is from the 21st century and Picard is from the 24th century]

LILY: Bullshit. I saw the look on your face when you shot those Borg on the holodeck. You were almost enjoying it!

PICARD: How dare you!

LILY: Oh c’mon captain, you’re not the first man to get a thrill from murdering someone, I see it all the time.

PICARD: GET OUT!

LILY: Of what? You’ll kill me like you killed Ensign Lynch?

PICARD. There was no way to save him.

LILY. You didn’t even try! Where was your evolved sensibility then?!?

PICARD. I don’t have time for this.

LILY. Oh, hey, sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt your little quest! Captain Ahab has to go hunt his whale.

PICARD. What?

LILY. You have books in the twenty-fourth century?

PICARD. This is not about revenge.

LILY. Liar!

PICARD. This is about saving the future of humanity!

LILY. Jean-Luc, BLOW UP THE DAMN SHIP!

PICARD. NO! … NOOOOO! [smashes display case with his phaser rifle] I will not sacrifice the Enterprise. We made too many compromises already, too many retreats. The invade our space, and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds, and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn HERE. This far, NO further! And I will make them pay for what they’ve done.

LILY. [going over to display case] You broke your little ships. See you around, Ahab.

PICARD. [quoting Moby-Dick] …and he piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the rage and hate felt by his whole race. If his chest had been a cannon, he would have shot his heart upon it.

LILY. What?

PICARD. Moby Dick.

LILY. Actually, I never read it.

PICARD. [trace of a smile] Ahab spent years hunting the white whale that crippled him in the quest for vengeance. But in the end, it destroyed him and his ship.

LILY. I guess he didn’t know when to quit.

PICARD. [looks thoughtful, lays down phaser rifle and walks onto the bridge where all eyes await his command] Prepare to evacuate the Enterprise.

To me, the Melville quote doesn’t entirely work in a logical sense. Why would Ahab’s chest be a cannon? And if his chest is the cannon, why is the heart firing? Wouldn’t the chest be shooting itself? But in a greater sense, the line completely works. Like that song that sticks in your head, this line has haunted me for the last twenty years. It’s the sort of line I wish I could write, but never could. It was at that moment I thought: “I will read Moby Dick!”

Well flash forward twenty plus years. I recently finished Moby-Dick. But I never saw that quote. The closest line is: “He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.” They must have modernized the line a little bit, but at the sake of logic. The image of a chest as a mortar (an artillery piece with a large bore) and the heart as shell makes sense. But perhaps a lot of us have forgotten how these weapons work?–I had to look it up.

Tip for Readers Who Use Public Libraries

And by the way, a tip to assiduous readers who use the library. Often the library has a one measly copy of a classic title, such as Moby-Dick. The problem is, unless you can read at warp speed, you have to bring the book back before you’re done. Then you can’t get it back for months because other assiduous readers have also put holds on it. Well, often the library has two copies of a classic book: one regular edition and a second, large print edition. Everyone will put a hold on the regular edition, but hardly anyone ever puts a hold on the large print edition. And the large print edition is quite a bit friendlier on the eyes to boot!

Not All About Ahab

The book contains many wonderful “digressionary” chapters. There’s a chapter on the whaling industry. There’s a chapter on how passing ships hail one another. There’s multiple chapters on the whale’s anatomy. There’s a chapter on the whale’s diet. It’s amazing how important the whaling industry was in 1851 when Moby-Dick was published. From the spermaceti (the wax found in a whale’s head), they could manufacture candles, creams, and lamp oils. It also powered the Industrial Revolution by serving as a lubricant. In the 1800s, whaling was as important as the olive was to ancient Greek society (olives were also used for light/heat, consumption, and to make creams). The modern equivalent of the whaling industry today is the oil and gas industry. Maybe in a hundred years they will look back on the oil and gas industry like how we look back on the whaling industry? Who knows, it could happen in even less than a hundred years the way technology is advancing!

Because of all the digressionary chapters, I got a good history lesson in the whaling industry, whale anatomy, and also life in the 1800s. Did you know that the whaling ship was one place where race wasn’t an issue? Moby-Dick, remember, is set before the Civil War (1861-5). Everyone on the boat did their job and their value was in how well they did their job, not skin colour. I’m sure it’s out there, it would be interesting to read a book fact checking all of Melville’s theories on the whale’s anatomy, diet, how it swims, how old whales die, and so on.

I use to live in Providence, Rhode Island. From there it’s a 3-1/2 hour trip to Nantucket, the former whaling capital of the USA, and perhaps the world. Now Nantucket is a resort town. The permanent population of 10,000 is not all that different from what it was two hundred years ago. But mind you, it seems smaller because the population of the rest of the world has jumped from one billion in 1804 to about seven billion today. Living there, I got a sense that the communities there are a shadow of what they once were, though some of the more dilapidated parts have become inexpensive enough to spark reinvestment and renaissance.

Misquoting Moby Dick

Captain Picard isn’t the only one who misquotes Moby Dick. The Nobel Prize winning singer-songwriter Bob Dylan recently ran afoul of the quote police in, of all things, his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. What tipped off the quote police was the line: “Some men who receive injuries are led to God, others to bitterness.” It’s close to the actual lines in Moby Dick, but not quite close enough. It’s actually closer to the SparkNotes summary of the novel, you know that website that provides synopses to students writing last second essays!

But, if you have half an hour (I had one hour and watched it twice), watch Dylan’s Nobel acceptance speech on YouTube. He talks about how his songwriting is literature in the sense that three of his favourites–Moby-Dick, The Odyssey, and All Quiet on the Western Front–are literature. To him, literature is like a collage. It doesn’t have to “mean anything.” But, as life on the road has taught him, it has to be able to entertain.

The takeaway: maybe only critics need literature to “mean something.” Funny how people will interpret things when their job depends on it! You know, I’ve been thinking about the art form of tragedy for a long time, thinking about Aeschylus’ plays, O’Neill’s plays, and Shakespeare’s plays. Trying to make them mean something. I came up with this idea of tragedy as “risk theatre.” But, is there something monomaniacal, something Ahab-like in what theorists and writers do as they try to chase after their white whale?

Until next time, I’m Edwin Wong, and I will sail the seven seas to do Melpomene’s Work.

Low Probability High Consequence Events in Greek Tragedy: A Look at Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes

Going to Boston in January 2018

If at first you don’t succeed, try again! Though my proposal for the Shakespearean Theatre Conference was rejected, my proposal to speak at the annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies in Boston went through. Cool. I get to talk about my favourite tragedian, Aeschylus. And I also get to talk about my favourite tragedy, his play Seven Against Thebes. From what I remember, it’s a big conference. Hellenists and Latinists from all over the world converge on a hotel and fill it right up for the better part of a week. At any given time, there’s ten or twenty sessions going on, and they cover everything to do with the Greek and Roman world. There’s a ballroom filled with exhibitors: publishers with their books, travel agents (offering guided tours of Greece and Rome), and salespeople hawking software systems. Circus atmosphere. And lots of professors meeting up with their old buddies. And lots of boozing. One of my friends is a manager at Fairmont Hotels. The hotels circulate amongst themselves a report of how all these different organizations behave when they hold their conferences. The report on the Society for Classical Studies says that we’re a mild-mannered and generally well-behaved bunch that like the sauce. I can’t deny that, last time, to my amusement as I walked past the bar, this one old professor wearing a tweed suit happened to have one too many and fell off his barstool. His colleagues were picking him up, and trying not to laugh as they asked if he was okay. This is going to be fun! I’m looking forward to going.

Lionel Pearson Fellowship

The last time I was there, the Society for Classical Studies was still known by its original name which was the American Philological Association. Philology is the study of languages and their development. I guess because the term “philology” overlaps with “linguistics” they finally decided to change it. Or perhaps the acronym “APA” created confusion because the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association uses the same abbreviation?Anyway, in 2004, I was one of the four finalists for the Lionel Pearson Fellowship. The winner got to study for a year in England or Scotland. That year they annual meeting was in San Francisco and they flew all the finalists down for the interviews. There were four of us. They sat us down together in a room. There were three judges. And for what seemed like a long time, they would ask us questions about the Greek and Roman world. I thought I was prepared. But, as I listened to the other finalists, it dawned on me that there are some exceptionally bright and well spoken students out there! I remember wondering thinking how they could be so knowledgeable. It was an eye opening experience. After the interviews, they gave us maps and set the finalists through the city to to a team building treasure hunt. And that night we had dinner together with the judges. The winner that year was Lauren Schwartzman, and from her performance during the interview (which I witnessed firsthand), that’s who I would have put my money on! Funny thing, the next year when I started at Brown, one of my colleagues was Robin McGill, who had won the Pearson Fellowship the year before.

Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes

They were looking for a 650 word abstract and here’s my successful proposal:

The worst-case scenario in Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes happens if Eteocles and Polyneices confront one another at the seventh gate. Because of the multitude of permutations possible with seven attackers, seven defenders, and seven gates, the worst-case scenario is a low-probability event. The resulting miasma, however, makes it a high-consequence event. I argue that Seven Against Thebes provides an important lesson in risk management by bringing about, against all odds, the low-probability, high-consequence outcome. The lesson is that we are in the most danger when we are the most confident.

By repeated references to gambling, dice, and chance, Aeschylus encourages us to consider the likelihood of the worst-case scenario in terms of probability. Lottery images abound. First, the attackers draw lots to determine their stations (55-6, 375-6). Second, Eteocles invokes Hermes as the god of chance and lots when he comments on the matchup at the fourth gate: “Hermes has brought them together with good reason” (508). Commenting on another matchup, Eteocles says: “Ares will decide the outcome with dice” (414). Third, Eteocles alludes to an ominous throw in dice games (6+1) when he says that he will assign six defenders “with himself as seventh” (Roisman, 22n.15). Gambling references invite audiences to ask themselves what the odds of the worst-case scenario are.

What are the odds of the brothers meeting at the seventh gate? The odds are 1:49, or roughly two percent: the probability, therefore, is low. Although Aeschylus’ audience lacked modern probability theory and a way to compute the exact odds, Aristotle makes it clear that they could indeed differentiate between likely and unlikely outcomes (Cael. 292a29). Because of all the possible permutations with seven defenders, seven attackers, and seven gates, Aeschylus’ audience would recognize that, in a random setting (i.e. one where captains are posted to their gates by lot), the likelihood of the brothers meeting at the final gate is low.

Eteocles’ confidence is also bolstered, paradoxically, by another low-probability event. The matchups from gates one through six, being random, should favour neither brother. But what happens is that the matchups, when taken in aggregate, overwhelmingly favour Eteocles. The odds, for example, that an opposing captain at gate four bearing the device of Typhon on his shield will be matched up against a defender bearing the device of Zeus (who defeated Typhon) is 1:16. But even though this (and other) matchups are unlikely, they do take place. The fortuitous matchups bolster Eteocles’ confidence.

Eteocles interprets the fortuitous matchups as a sign that the gods are on his side because randomness in ancient Greece was anything but random: randomness was a manifestation of an underlying order in the cosmos. The lot, imbued with numinous significance, was expected to reveal the grand design. When the Achaeans, for example, were looking for a champion to duel Hector, they drew lots. Ajax’ lot, as though by design, “jumps out” of the helmet (Hom., Il. 7.181-3). So too the Olympians drew lots to see who would rule the sky, the seas, and underworld (Apollod., Bibl., 1.2.1). They decided by lot because fate or destiny revealed itself through randomness. Thus, when Eteocles sees the random matchups from gates one through six going his way, his confidence goes up.

Against all expectations, however, Aeschylus brings about the worst-case scenario: both brothers are called to the seventh gate. By bringing about the low-probability, high-consequence event against all odds, Aeschylus dramatizes risk: the most unlikely outcomes can have the most serious repercussions. As risk dramatized, Seven Against Thebes may be read as a lesson in risk management. Its lesson is that, like Eteocles, we are in the most danger when we feel the most confident. In today’s age where confidence in technology and progress may lead to the downplay of manufactured risks (whether environmental, nuclear, biological, or financial), ancient tragedy can still offer moderns an important lesson.

I must say it’s an art in itself writing these abstracts and proposals. I’m still learning. What I like about this proposal are the catch terms such as “low-probability, high-consequence” and “we are in the most danger when we are most confident.” Successful proposals are the ones in which the writer can get the reader to remember some catchy phrase (e.g. low-probability, high-consequence). Another technique would be to make a bold statement (e.g. we are in the most danger when we are most confident) that causes the reader to pause. Of course it helps if they pause and decide that they agree with your bold statement!

Until next time, I’m Edwin Wong and I’m doing Melpomene’s work by commenting on Aeschylus’ masterpiece, Seven Against Thebes.

Didn’t Go To Waterloo (2017 Shakespearean Theatre Conference)

My proposal “How Much Is the Milk of Human Kindness Worth?”to speak at the Second Shakespearean Theatre Conference at the University of Waterloo got shot down. Too bad, it’s sort of a neat conference that runs alongside the famous Stratford Festival. The reason for the rejection turns out to be the flood of submissions the organizers received: 50% more than in 2015 (it’s a biannual conference). It turns out that a quarter of the submissions were rejected. Doing a quick run on the numbers, there were 85 papers this year. That compares to 60 or so papers delivered at the 2015 conference. A Shakespeare resurgence is on our hands, all aboard!

One of the organizers offered some constructive feedback, which I’m thankful for:

keep trying. A lot of times it’s a hit and miss with how your title fits into the sessions.
sketch a critical context. In other words, tie in what you’ve done with what has been done.

I already have a date marked down in my calendar to submit another proposal at the end of 2018 for the 2019 Shakespearean conference. Time flies, that’s just a year and a couple of months away! The feedback on the critical context is especially helpful. I should read up on modern theories of drama and see how I can tie “risk theatre” with what other folks are doing. Research time! That is actually great, because I’ve been spending so much time going through Carla DeSantis’ (the editor) comments and rewriting sections of Tragedy Is Risk Theatre: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected that I haven’t had much of a chance to read as much as I’d like to. The rewrite is substantively complete now, so a chunk of time has freed up.

Onwards and upwards!

Until next time, I’m Edwin Wong, and, since I didn’t meet my Waterloo, I will continue to do Melpomene’s work.

World Order – Henry Kissinger

Kissinger World Order

Henry Kissinger, the legend! Secretary of State and National Security Advisor during perilous times. Went on the covert trip to China in the 1972. Playboy diplomat. Now (2017) 93 years old. He’s one person I had heard about, but did not know much about. His life has been so storied that it seemed decent to learn more about him. So when I heard about his latest book World Order (2014), I picked it up at the library. Thanks to Sally French and Josh Brown for an article mentioning this great book (and others–also reading Barking Up the Wrong Tree by Eric Barker, a book exposing commonplace fallacies on what it takes to be successful).

Kissinger – Author Blurb

Henry Kissinger served as National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and has advised many other American presidents on foreign policy. He received the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Medal of Liberty, among other awards. He is the author of numerous books on foreign policy and diplomacy and is currently the chairman of Kissinger Associates, Inc., an international consulting firm.

World Order – Back Blurb

Henry Kissinger offers in World Order a deep meditation on the roots of international harmony and global disorder. Drawing on his experience as one of the foremost statesmen of the modern era–advising presidents, traveling the world, observing and shaping the central foreign policy events of recent decades–Kissinger now reveals his analysis of the ultimate challenge for the twenty-first century: how to build a shared international order in a world of divergent historical perspectives, violent conflict, proliferating technology, and ideological extremism.

There has never been a true “world order,” Kissinger observes. For most of history, civilizations defined their own concepts of order. Each considered itself the center of the world and envisioned its distinct principles as universally relevant. China conceived of a global cultural hierarchy with the Emperor at its pinnacle. In Europe, Rome imagined itself surrounded by barbarians; when Rome fragmented, European peoples refined a concept of an equilibrium of sovereign states and sought to export it across the world. Islam, in its early centuries, considered itself the world’s sole legitimate political unit, destined to expand indefinitely until the world was brought into harmony by religious principles. The United States was born of a conviction about the universal applicability of democracy–a conviction that has guided its policies ever since.

Now international affairs take place on a global basis, and these historical concepts of world order are meeting. Every region participates in questions of high policy in every other, often instantaneously. Yet there is no consensus among the major actors about the rules and limits guiding this process, or its ultimate destination. The result is mounting tension.

Grounded in Kissinger’s deep study of history and his experience as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, World Order guides readers through crucial episodes in recent world history. Kissinger offers a unique glimpse into the inner deliberations of the Nixon administration’s negotiations with Hanoi over the end of the Vietnam War, as well as Ronald Reagan’s tense debates with Soviet Premier Gorbachev in Reykjavik. He offers compelling insights into the future of U.S.-China relations and the evolution of the European Union, and examines lessons of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Taking readers from his analysis of nuclear negotiations with Iran through the West’s response to the Arab Spring and tensions with Russia over Ukraine, World Order anchors Kissinger’s historical analysis in the decisive events of our time.

Provocative and articulate, blending historical insight with geopolitical prognostication, World Order is a unique work that could come only from a lifelong policymaker and diplomat.

What I Learned

I learned that the modern concept of world order originated from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. There, the European nations, decimated by the Thirty Years’ War and plague (decimated is too light a word, the toll of ‘total war’ was over a quarter of the population) came up with a framework for a modern world order. The sovereign state, respect for boundaries, respect for sovereign nations to make their own laws, and respect for sovereign states to their own religion were some of the tenets of the Treaty of Westphalia. The concept of ‘balance of power’ was also on the minds of the negotiators who divided Europe into a host of smaller states, none of which was large enough to conquer all the others.

From the Treaty of Westphalia, Kissinger looks at how Napoleon changed the game, and then goes beyond Europe, looking at conceptions of world order in Asia, the Middle East, and America. It turns out that this idea of democracy as the be all and end all is one of many approaches to world order.

Not only is Kissinger’s book a good history lesson, but it’s worth reading just for his little anecdotes which occur at the rate of one every forty pages or so. They’re like little ‘behind the scenes’ peeks at what goes on with our power brokers. Here’s a memorable one:

In 1981, during his last visit to Washington, President Sadat invited me to come to Egypt the following spring for the celebration when the Sinai Peninsula would be returned to Egypt by Israel. Then he paused for a moment and said, “Don’t come for the celebration–it would be too hurtful to Israel. Come six months later, and you and I will drive to the top of Mount Sinai together, where I plan to build a mosque, a church, and a synagogue, to symbolize the need for peace.

Until next time, I’m Edwin Wong and I’m Doing Melpomene’s Work.

Eagle Creek Surgical Centre (View Royal, BC)

It’s great to have been part of the construction team at Victoria’s newest medical facility, Eagle Creek Village Surgical Centre in View Royal. The facility is right next to Victoria General Hospital and is run by a Calgary company called Surgical Centres. Here’s their ‘About Us’ blurb from their website:

Our goal is to give you timely access to world-class surgeons who are using advanced technology. And as Canada’s largest and longest-serving broad-based private surgery company, we can do that. Since 1988, we’ve helped more than a quarter million people get access to the surgery and diagnostics they need; from spine surgery, orthopedic surgery, and endoscopy…to plastic surgery, corneal transplant, carpal tunnel surgery and more. Our staff and surgeons continually receive the highest ratings from our client surveys, something we pride ourselves on.

We work with organizations like the Workers’ Compensation Board, Regional Health Authorities, Department of National Defense and other third-party payers like your insurance company.

They’re going to start off by doing day procedures and endoscopies and then branch out to more complex procedures involving overnight stays (they have four overnight rooms). My friend DR who works at WCB and looks after injured workers is looking forward to reduced wait-times to treat folks who’ve been involved in workplace accidents.

Construction of the Surgical Centre

It was a challenging and rewarding project. Because it was such a fast paced project, a coworker, GM, from my days with Bayside Mechanical enlisted my help. GM now heads the Vancouver Island division of PML, Professional Mechanical and they had won the contract to install the mechanical scope of work, which includes plumbing, air conditioning, sheet metal, medical gas, fire protection sprinklers, insulation, and controls. Speaking of fast paced, did you know that they ripped open the roof in a functioning office building in the middle of winter to upgrade the structure so that it would support all the additional rooftop mechanical equipment? And for those of you in nicer climes, yes it snows and rains here.

I was holed up there in a construction shack from October to May. Actually, the office was rather nice. It had a waterview of the Gorge, for one. I didn’t know you could see the water from there. That will be nice for the doctors and patients. The views of the woods and farmland on the north side are also spectacular.

Lots of eye opening experiences. One of them was seeing the 275 ton mobile crane, (largest on the island) in action. This thing is a monster with a jib that goes up to heaven! Expensive too, all-in the rental was in excess of $2000/per working hour (that includes the 6 hours to assemble and disassemble). Though I’ve project managed care facilities before, this was my first experience with a full hospital. There’s sterilizers, washers, ultrasonic cavitators, macerators, RO water, filters: you name it! Thanks especially to GM, JB, MS, and KS for their help and tips. The Mechanical Contractor’s Association of BC had a writeup of the project in their Spring 2017 edition, thought I’d share this with all the assiduous readers out there. Until next time, I’m Edwin Wong and I’m doing Melpomene’s work in a roundabout way.

MCABC_Spring_2017_FINAL

Conference Proposal

Seven Against Thebes Conference Proposal

Here’s another conference proposal. It’s on Aeschylus little known play Seven Against Thebes. It’d be a good idea to keep a record of the proposals and organizers’ reactions to get an idea of their selection criteria. I’ve been trying to do a couple of things in these proposals. First: tailor the presentation to the theme of the conference. That means custom tailoring each proposal. Second: be realistic how much a 20 minute talk can cover. 20 minutes goes by like nothing. It’s good to narrow down the topic to a laser focus. Third: present the proposal in such a way that I’m offering the audience something useful. I have to make it so that it’s worth their time to come see the presentation.

A word to other conferencers out there: if you can’t expense travel to your university, consider applying for a credit card with travel perks. I applied for a TD Bank Aeroplan Visa Infinite card. By the time you read this, there may be other deals out there. The Aeroplan Visa Infinite came with a one year fee waiver and a free short haul flight in North America. Amenities include trip cancellation and medical insurance. Not a bad deal!

Here is the proposal for your review, assiduous readers:

To the Organizers of the 2017 xxx:

My name is Edwin Wong and I’d like to present about tragedy in an age of risk. I approach tragedy from a Classics background in ancient theatre (MA, Brown University). The idea of risk theatre is an exciting new conceptual framework of tragedy. Here is my proposal for your consideration.

Risk Theatre: Tragedy in Today’s Age of Risk

Like Metatheatre and Epic Theatre, Risk Theatre is a theory of drama. It is a new theory of tragedy for today’s age, an age filled with extraordinary and calculated risks, an age of Fukushima, bioengineering, and leveraged assets. It is an age of both super drugs and superbugs. Risk is ubiquitous and risk theatre presents theatregoers with a new critical tool.

Risk theatre posits that each dramatic act in tragedy is also a gambling act. In each tragedy, the protagonist makes a wager. In Seven against Thebes, Eteocles wagers that, by interpreting the scout’s report, he can save the city and avoid the worst case scenario: encountering his brother and shedding kindred blood. With seven besiegers, seven defenders, and seven gates, the odds are with him.

But Eteocles ends up, against all odds, confronting his brother. Seven, in this way, is a lesson in risk management. The play speaks out to the dangers of calculated risks and is a reminder to today’s masters of the universe who, in the name of progress, gamble with the fate of the world. Just as in theatre, in life more things can happen than what we expect will happen. By looking at tragedy as a gambling act, risk theatre offers a new theoretical framework to approach tragedy.

Thank you for considering my proposal. I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely yours,

Edwin Wong.

Until next time, I’m Edwin Wong and now I’m Doing Melpomene’s Work by going on the road.