prev. atreia

crime and punishment heritage posts. to me.

that screenshot going around where that random person says james baldwin sounds like a pretentious blogger is driving me insane because like, imaging living in one of the most racist time periods in modern history, cultivating an eloquent and sophisticated manner of speech in part out of interest but also out of necessity to deflect racially motivated accusations of being uneducated (all while making irreplaceable contributions to literature and the humanities), only to still have deeply incurious white adults scoff at how seriously you seem to take yourself before defaulting to elevating (white) european literature like it's their factory setting decades later 🥴

Nietzsche | Dostoyevsky

lotr has me thinking about the wasted potential of orc deserters 🚬✌🏽😔

Do You See?

obsessed with this footnote in my copy of romeo and juliet

In the past I've shared other people's musings about the different interpretations of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Namely, why Orpheus looks back at Eurydice, even though he knows it means he'll lose her forever. So many people seem to think they've found the one true explanation of the myth. But to me, the beauty of myths is that they have many possible meanings.

So I thought I would share a list of every interpretation I know, from every serious adaptation of the story and every analysis I've ever heard or read, of why Orpheus looks back.

One interpretation – advocated by Monteverdi's opera, for example – is that the backward glance represents excessive passion and a fatal lack of self-control. Orpheus loves Eurydice to such excess that he tries to defy the laws of nature by bringing her back from the dead, yet that very same passion dooms his quest fo fail, because he can't resist the temptation to look back at her.

He can also be seen as succumbing to that classic "tragic flaw" of hubris, excessive pride. Because his music and his love conquer the Underworld, it might be that he makes the mistake of thinking he's entirely above divine law, and fatally allows himself to break the one rule that Hades and Persephone set for him.

Then there are the versions where his flaw is his lack of faith, because he looks back out of doubt that Eurydice is really there. I think there are three possible interpretations of this scenario, which can each work alone or else co-exist with each other. From what I've read about Hadestown, it sounds as if it combines all three.

In one interpretation, he doubts Hades and Persephone's promise. Will they really give Eurydice back to him, or is it all a cruel trick? In this case, the message seems to be a warning to trust in the gods; if you doubt their blessings, you might lose them.

Another perspective is that he doubts Eurydice. Does she love him enough to follow him? In this case, the warning is that romantic love can't survive unless the lovers trust each other. I'm thinking of Moulin Rouge!, which is ostensibly based on the Orpheus myth, and which uses Christian's jealousy as its equivalent of Orpheus's fatal doubt and explicitly states "Where there is no trust, there is no love."

The third variation is that he doubts himself. Could his music really have the power to sway the Underworld? The message in this version would be that self-doubt can sabotage all our best efforts.

But all of the above interpretations revolve around the concept that Orpheus looks back because of a tragic flaw, which wasn't necessarily the view of Virgil, the earliest known recorder of the myth. Virgil wrote that Orpheus's backward glance was "A pardonable offense, if the spirits knew how to pardon."

In some versions, when the upper world comes into Orpheus's view, he thinks his journey is over. In this moment, he's so ecstatic and so eager to finally see Eurydice that he unthinkingly turns around an instant too soon, either just before he reaches the threshold or when he's already crossed it but Eurydice is still a few steps behind him. In this scenario, it isn't a personal flaw that makes him look back, but just a moment of passion-fueled carelessness, and the fact that it costs him Eurydice shows the pitilessness of the Underworld.

In other versions, concern for Eurydice makes him look back. Sometimes he looks back because the upward path is steep and rocky, and Eurydice is still limping from her snakebite, so he knows she must be struggling, in some versions he even hears her stumble, and he finally can't resist turning around to help her. Or more cruelly, in other versions – for example, in Gluck's opera – Eurydice doesn't know that Orpheus is forbidden to look back at her, and Orpheus is also forbidden to tell her. So she's distraught that her husband seems to be coldly ignoring her and begs him to look at her until he can't bear her anguish anymore.

These versions highlight the harshness of the Underworld's law, and Orpheus's failure to comply with it seems natural and even inevitable. The message here seems to be that death is pitiless and irreversible: a demigod hero might come close to conquering it, but through little or no fault of his own, he's bound to fail in the end.

Another interpretation I've read is that Orpheus's backward glance represents the nature of grief. We can't help but look back on our memories of our dead loved ones, even though it means feeling the pain of loss all over again.

Then there's the interpretation that Orpheus chooses his memory of Eurydice, represented by the backward glance, rather than a future with a living Eurydice. "The poet's choice," as Portrait of a Lady on Fire puts it. In this reading, Orpheus looks back because he realizes he would rather preserve his memory of their youthful, blissful love, just as it was when she died, than face a future of growing older, the difficulties of married life, and the possibility that their love will fade. That's the slightly more sympathetic version. In the version that makes Orpheus more egotistical, he prefers the idealized memory to the real woman because the memory is entirely his possession, in a way that a living wife with her own will could never be, and will never distract him from his music, but can only inspire it.

Then there are the modern feminist interpretations, also alluded to in Portrait of a Lady on Fire but seen in several female-authored adaptations of the myth too, where Eurydice provokes Orpheus into looking back because she wants to stay in the Underworld. The viewpoint kinder to Orpheus is that Eurydice also wants to preserve their love just as it was, youthful, passionate, and blissful, rather than subject it to the ravages of time and the hardships of life. The variation less sympathetic to Orpheus is that Euyridice was at peace in death, in some versions she drank from the river Lethe and doesn't even remember Orpheus, his attempt to take her back is selfish, and she prefers to be her own free woman than be bound to him forever and literally only live for his sake.

With that interpretation in mind, I'm surprised I've never read yet another variation. I can imagine a version where, as Orpheus walks up the path toward the living world, he realizes he's being selfish: Eurydice was happy and at peace in the Elysian Fields, she doesn't even remember him because she drank from Lethe, and she's only following him now because Hades and Persephone have forced her to do so. So he finally looks back out of selfless love, to let her go. Maybe I should write this retelling myself.

Are any of these interpretations – or any others – the "true" or "definitive" reason why Orpheus looks back? I don't think so at all. The fact that they all exist and can all ring true says something valuable about the nature of mythology.

"I resisted its lessons. The student wizard Ged cracks open the surface of the night and releases a shadow version of himself into the world, a Jungian clot of personal darkness, that hunts him till he turns to face it and incorporates it back into himself where it belongs, by naming it with its true name: his own. I resolutely thought of the shadow as a bogey alien to Ged, and wondered why he wasn’t different at the end of the book when that dark thing was inside him. You cannot outrun yourself, the story said: a deeply unwelcome thought to me. I didn’t go to the worlds of story to be reminded that on a dark road your anger and your cruelty pace just behind you, daring you to turn your head, unless you let them travel safely within you."

- Francis Spufford on Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, in The Child That Books Built (2002), p. 84–85.

"The idea of reforming Omelas is a pleasant idea, to be sure, but it is one that Le Guin herself specifically tells us is not an option. No reform of Omelas is possible — at least, not without destroying Omelas itself:

'Those are the terms', indeed. Le Guin’s original story is careful to cast the underlying evil of Omelas as un-addressable — not, as some have suggested, to 'cheat' or create a false dilemma, but as an intentionally insurmountable challenge to the reader. The premise of Omelas feels unfair because it is meant to be unfair. Instead of racing to find a clever solution ('Free the child! Replace it with a robot! Have everyone suffer a little bit instead of one person all at once!'), the reader is forced to consider how they might cope with moral injustice that is so foundational to their very way of life that it cannot be undone. Confronted with the choice to give up your entire way of life or allow someone else to suffer, what do you do? Do you stay and enjoy the fruits of their pain? Or do you reject this devil’s compromise at your own expense, even knowing that it may not even help? And through implication, we are then forced to consider whether we are — at this very moment! — already in exactly this situation. At what cost does our happiness come? And, even more significantly, at whose expense? And what, in fact, can be done? Can anything?

This is the essential and agonizing question that Le Guin poses, and we avoid it at our peril. It’s easy, but thoroughly besides the point, to say — as the narrator of 'The Ones Who Don’t Walk Away' does — that you would simply keep the nice things about Omelas, and work to address the bad. You might as well say that you would solve the trolley problem by putting rockets on the trolley and having it jump over the people tied to the tracks. Le Guin’s challenge is one that can only be resolved by introspection, because the challenge is one levied against the discomforting awareness of our own complicity; to 'reject the premise' is to reject this (all too real) discomfort in favor of empty wish fulfillment. A happy fairytale about the nobility of our imagined efforts against a hypothetical evil profits no one but ourselves (and I would argue that in the long run it robs us as well).

But in addition to being morally evasive, treating Omelas as a puzzle to be solved (or as a piece of straightforward didactic moralism) also flattens the depth of the original story. We are not really meant to understand Le Guin’s 'walking away' as a literal abandonment of a problem, nor as a self-satisfied 'Sounds bad, but I’m outta here', the way Vivier’s response piece or others of its ilk do; rather, it is framed as a rejection of complacency. This is why those who leave are shown not as triumphant heroes, but as harried and desperate fools; hopeless, troubled souls setting forth on a journey that may well be doomed from the start — because isn’t that the fate of most people who set out to fight the injustices they see, and that they cannot help but see once they have been made aware of it? The story is a metaphor, not a math problem, and 'walking away' might just as easily encompass any form of sincere and fully committed struggle against injustice: a lonely, often thankless journey, yet one which is no less essential for its difficulty."

- Kurt Schiller, from "Omelas, Je T'aime." Blood Knife, 8 July 2022.

i love the original frankenstein novel a normal amount

How can you read "I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other" as a closeted teenager and not be changed on an atomic level because of it

afterall, feeling understood is the greatest form of love.

maybe i'm just a grumpy english major but i feel like a lot of the "lol people think shakespeare is pretentious but actually his plays are just dick jokes and swordfighting" posting can verge into "lol what if the curtains are just blue" territory. yes shakespeare plays are full of those things AND they are also profound and complex and thematically rich. people spend their careers analyzing them for a reason, actually. it's not just dick jokes all the way down. and sometimes people spend their careers analyzing the dick jokes. stop trying to pick one side of the dichotomy between high and low culture. it's both. it can be both.

Les Misérables, Volume I / Book V / Chapter III, trans. Hapgood

I see it a lot in my students that the ONLY mode they can engage with literature on is one in which they either say it's good because it's "relatable" or it's bad because they "can't relate to it" as well, and I feel like this is a symptom of the same problem. An unwillingness to engage with fiction outside of its ability to be a mirror to your specific worldview and set of morals. But art doesn't exist to give you moral purity badges--it's a mode of expression that produces conversations between artists and readers. And to engage in those converesations on an adult level you need to learn to process the discomfort of flawed human realities productively.

Things fall apart by chinua achebe is a perfect example of this. It's a book about a very very flawed man in early colonial Africa losing everything after being one of the most respected people in his tribe. And the whole time it's mildly uncomfortable and you're wondering why you're reading this story about such a terrible person. Then at the end he commits suicide and you're feeling just kind of neutral because this guy really sucked. But THEN the point of view switches to one of the white colonizers who recently came to his tribe. And this man contemplates that this event wouldn't fill a whole chapter of the book he's writing about his time in Africa, but just a paragraph, or perhaps a sentence.

And you're just absolutely eviscerated with the feeling of outrage. Because as terrible as he was, the main character was a PERSON. He was complex and so so flawed but he had a whole life that mattered. We had just read an entire multi chapter about his life. He was more than just a footnote in some asshat's autobiography.

Things fall apart was a book written by an African man as a criticism of the heart of darkness. It's a book about the humanity in the people you don't like or understand. And it breaks my heart thinking about all the people who read it and didn't understand because they refused to engage.

The entire time I was thinking "why am I reading about such a horrible person, why does this guy's story matter" and it's answered in the very last page. And people who refuse to engage with or analyze literature will never have that moment of understanding. His story mattered because he was a person. He wasn't evil, but he was selfish and cruel and had such a high opinion of himself. But he was a person. And he was worth more than a sentence.

This review really really puts into words my gripes with A Little Life and most of Yanagihara’s work

Someone today will read Shakespeare's hamlet and say omg he's just like me fr. Another person will read moby dick and proclaim Ishmael as an adhd king.

A person grieving for their recently deceased lover reads the iliad and they watch as Achilles rages and rages and god how righteous anger fueld by love is so devastating that it's ramifications still affect the world several thousand years later.

We might one day settle down and read the epic of gilgamesh and watch as a king has to accept the death of the person he loved the most. One of the very first stories ever written and it was about coping with death, and how to grieve.

We don't read classics because they're old, we read them because they remind us that we are never alone. That a character created over 500 years ago struggled with the exact same problems we all still have today. That even a king from centuries past had to deal with death just like me. That's what makes stories so powerful--they prove to us that we are never truly alone in what we are feeling.