dissonance
Aug. 26th, 2003 05:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyMirrorthaw and I have just agreed it's too hot to cook. Vile weather.
Let us all sing the praises of air-conditioned libraries, where today I read one really smart article on Equus, one cheerfully loony article on Equus (from Names: The Journal of the American Name Society, so I knew what I was getting into), and three variously stupid articles on Equus. It pains me how many ways there are of misreading a play.
Let us all sing the praises of air-conditioned libraries, where today I read one really smart article on Equus, one cheerfully loony article on Equus (from Names: The Journal of the American Name Society, so I knew what I was getting into), and three variously stupid articles on Equus. It pains me how many ways there are of misreading a play.
no subject
Date: 2003-08-26 05:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-08-26 06:17 pm (UTC)Is this like the "The Fall of the Roman Empire was caused by lead pipes" theory?
The smart article, to give credit where it is due, is by Una Chaudhuri.
Most of the Equus stupidity revolves around misreading Dysart. So that Doyle W. Walls, for instance, argues that "The spectator of Equus must accept the paradox that a repulsive, horrific crime committed against innocent horses ignites a positive, poetic, spiritual fire within the deadened, timid soul of Dysart" (Walls 317-18). When Dysart is not timid, and frankly I don't think I do have to accept a paradox that only Mr. Walls sees in the play. I don't think Alan Strang ignites anything in Dysart and I certainly don't think, if he does, that it's anything suitable to the adjective "positive."
Then there's Thomas Akstens and his simple-minded application of Victor Turner, which somehow bases its argument on the straw-man that there was ever any doubt in the world that Dysart would treatAlan. He thinks that the audience is alienated from Dysart by his dream of blood-sacrifice and ends with a rousing defense of nothing: "We know that Dysart is a complex and problematical character, but this may only serve to add further weight to the satisfaction we feel, as an audience, when what we sense is inevitable is brought to pass by Dysart himself, in defiance of his own ambivalence and despair" (Akstens 97).
And then there's the bad-crack-Nietzsche school. (Apparently, Nietzsche is all the rage in Equus criticism. Go figure.) This was the most infuriating of the bunch, because--aside from its major point being an argument from absence--it commits one of the worst critical sins of all time, that of arguing as if the play says what you want it to say, rather than reading what it actually says:
If you actually read the play, it's entirely clear that horses represent the opposite of Frank's atheism, and I am not convinced in the slightest by the claim that Alan seeks through his religion to reunite his parents. Alan is trying to get AWAY from his parents (and indeed, who can blame him?). It's always a bad sign when a critic seems to have ta'en a scunner to a particular character; Mustazza's axe is swinging for Dysart's head, which throws his interpretation of the play radically out of balance. Bad critical technique.
But my favorite, actually, is the inspired lunacy of the onomatology guy, who thinks that Alan Strang's name is an allusion to Jesse James (or James Jesse) Strang, a Mormon who claimed leadership of the Mormon Church after Joseph Smith's murder, got booted, founded his own sect, and was murdered himself in 1856. Simpson's got this tremendous riff on "desert saints" (Dysart/desert, and Dysart's first name, Martin, is of course a reference to St. Martin), which is apparently the title of a couple of books about J. J. Strang (Simpson 186). And then he crowns this inspired Cloudcuckooland theorizing by, in order to shoehorn his theory into a space too small for it, loftily ignoring the fact that when the Young Horseman mocks Frank by identifying himself as "Jesse James," that the guy probably both the Y. H. and Shaffer himself had in mind was, gosh, none other than Jesse James.
But the pure undiluted nutballism of that theory gives it its own special charm.
no subject
Date: 2003-08-26 07:18 pm (UTC)by the WATER?
Is this like the "The Fall of the Roman Empire was caused by lead pipes" theory?
----
Disturbingly similar, I suspect.
I read this paper; I swear it exists. Somebody actually asserted that Latin initial F- dropped in Castile because the geology of the area is such that the water is low in natural fluoride. Folks lost their front teeth early, you see, and couldn't pronounce [f] properly.
The paper provided no evidence for the assertion about the geology, nor did it attempt to explain why a few cases of medial -f- strengthened instead of dropping.
no subject
Date: 2003-08-26 07:35 pm (UTC)Works Cited
Date: 2003-08-26 06:19 pm (UTC)Akstens, Thomas. "Redression as a Structural Imperative in Shaffer's Equus." Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 6:2 (1992): 89-98.
Chaudhuri, Una. "The Spectator in Drama/Drama in the Spectator." Modern Drama 27:3 (September 1984): 281-98.
Mustazza, Leonard. "A Jealous God: Ritual and Judgment in Shaffer's Equus." Papers on Language and Literature 28:2 (Spring 1992): 174-84.
Simpson, Hassell. "A Pair of Desert Saints: Name Symbolism in Peter Shaffer's Equus." Names: Journal of the American Names Society 41:3 (September 1993): 183-93.
Walls, Doyle W. "Equus: Shaffer, Nietzsche and the Neuroses of Health." Modern Drama 27:3 (September 1984): 314-23.
Re: Works Cited
Date: 2003-08-27 04:21 am (UTC)Re: Works Cited
Date: 2003-08-27 04:41 am (UTC)Re: Works Cited
Date: 2003-08-27 05:26 am (UTC)Back to off-topic topic. I like the images on that quiz. I don't upload pictures, so I'm afraid I often take quizs primarily for the pictures. :-)