Peter Singer’s Popular Ethics

Nick Harris, 9/16/24

Peter Singer’s Ethics in the Real World (Updated edition Princeton 2023) presents a popularist view of serious matters of ethics. According to Singer, the idea that moral judgments carry objective truth became unpopular in philosophical inquiry in the 1930s (8). From this position, Singer starts with this thesis of “logical positivism,” a discipline that arose to declare that the truth of moral judgments is something no one can prove in a logical manner. By starting with logical positivism, Singer can move forward to tackle personal views of ethics as valid sentiments and view how we can ward off illogical as well as nonsensical ethical relativism.

In the world of logical positivism, moral judgments are nothing more than personal attitudes defined by faith or emotions. We can set up faith and emotions as two separate lines of inquiry. The faith argument comes from religion and the individuals therein who view humanity as existing under the laws of God (or without the laws of God) as long as the viewpoint coincides with the faith. Others, and the ones that Singer tries to explain, see moral judgments as expressions of personal attitude. This view plays out in two ways:  either a moral judgment explains the avoidance of agony, or a moral judgment reflects a personal desire. In the former morality, evil is defined as the willful subjugation of physical pain upon another individual. In the latter morality, good results from whatever the individual desires.

The trouble with this two-fold system is that neither view truly considers the good that an individual should try to do to others, if at all. Singer addresses the avoidance of agony, either giving it or receiving it, through the work of Derek Parfit (Reasons and Persons, 2017, as applied in Singer, “Introduction,” xi). Singer’s view of Parfit is that “to live ethically, all one needs to do is obey the generally accepted rules that begin with ‘You must not” (xi). Perhaps Singer’s Australian background puts him in the position of sparking the individual’s sense of accomplishment. His position connects the individual intrinsically to an aesthetic experience, a fulfillment of desire caused simply by putting oneself in a natural environment (what I think of as an Australian norm) and observing what happiness and awe can come of it (373).

Singer’s theses of good and evil touch in most every instance with aesthetic theory, hence why I am interested in it as applicable to literature and postmodernist inquiry. But Singer’s aesthetics is not a lofty pursuit. He grounds ethics and aesthetics in real-world experiences such as the consciousness of animals, the nature of human life and death, and the nature of political rights of the individual to vote, participate in activism, or even simply be a citizen of a political unity. The value judgments of art versus human health bring with them the very headaches in which Singer loves to indulge (the question of monetary donations for instance as explored on p. 201-202).

Perhaps these practical questions interfere with aesthetic readings such as the Hardy novel Jude the Obscure to which I consistently refer in these essays. But I argue that keeping the practical question of Singer in mind creates new vistas while immersing oneself in the tragedy of a man of nature condemned to forever seek out the wonders of the industrial age and the resultant life of the mind therein. Jude goes further and further away from his agricultural beginnings as he seeks the supposed comfort of a life of philosophical inquiry, only then to be confronted with the realities of a hard life of the search for sexual fulfillment coupled with gender inequality and the class system inequality that destroys him. All his lives—mental, physical, sexual, emotional—share an impact that makes Jude question the very inevitability of suffering. The artwork imparts this aesthetic to the reader through the formal and emotional quality of the literature. Singer’s popular ethics reminds us of this hard, naturalistic ethic present in the artistry of Hardy. The art intertwines itself with the reality, inescapable.

 Abjection and Jude

Nick Harris

25 July 2024

Abjection and Jude

Kristeva's theory of abjection outlined in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980), examines the human psychological reaction to what is considered impure, disgusting, or taboo. Of special interest in this examination is the role of the 'other' in societal constructs. She asks when “the other” exhibits traits which repulse the individual, traits that make “The other” horrific.

            Kristeva’s concern with application to literature becomes prominent from the beginning of her forming the theory of abjection. Most of Powers of Horror is an application of this idea of abjection to the literary works of Celine. This off-the-wall abstraction of connecting two ideas in a somewhat stream-of-consciousness fashion reflects what L. Kleinman calls Kristeva’s want to “swim through life”:

Kristeva describes herself…as “swimming through life,” that is, not having a plan or direction. This way both of living and of being an intellectual well describes the trajectory of  her life and thought. Par. 7

The literary application of abjection is justified in Kristeva’s defense of her position of swimming without direction. Abjection, dealing with the concept of horror, can be especially instructive in application to gothic literature. But other literatures (such as the novels of Celine which Kristeva approaches) benefit from the abjection lens also. Finding traits in “the other” that make an individual disgusted speaks to how that individual is expressing value judgments, for disgust is a value judgment. Abjection can help define an individual’s concept of bad versus good and, by extension, evil versus honorable.

            My application of Kristeva’s abjection allies it with Nussbaum’s ethics of literature. Thus, when I approach the literature of Thomas Hardy, whether the gothic short story “The Withered Arm” or amore traditional naturalistic novel such as Jude the Obscure, I do so from the point of view of how the characters are influenced by what they think of as disgusting, Jude’s opinion of his wife’s leaving him, for instance. This abjection influences that character’s sense of right and wrong, allowing him to eventually go into a relationship with a woman who is not his wife, who is indeed married to another man whom she has left due to his abuse of her, the suffragette (and Jude’s cousin) Sue Bridehead.

            The second major division of Hardy’s novel concerns the development of this relationship and its consequences to Jude’s goals. When he married, Jude had given up his goals of intellectual freedom, symbolized by the possibility of studying philosophy at the university in Christchruch, Finding himself set free of that marriage, at least in terms of his having to tend to it if not the legal marriage itself, he can pursue the goals once again. But his abjection to the notion of marriage creates the situation where he now finds himself having to support Sue, thus giving up his intellectual goals once again. Jude’s decisions based on an abjection caused by circumstances not of his doing (the leaving of the wife) lead him into a fated situation that will not let him succeed.

            This situation is only the beginning of Jude’s tragedies. But as the beginning, brought on by an ethical abjection, the reasoning to cling to Sue, despite society’s disapproval of married individuals living with each other outside of the legal marriage, is the bedrock of Jude’s tragedies. He is searching for an ethical thing to do that affords him the acquiring of his goals, which includes a life with Sue. He cannot, however, find anything but heartache on his path. He becomes disgusted at his own life, an abjection that overwhelms him.

_______

Kleinerman, L. (2022). Julia Kristeva: Perspectives on Her Life and Work. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 70(4), 763-774.  https://doi.org/10.1177/00030651221119062

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, 1982.

 

 Nick Harris

Blog June 21, 2024

The Turn to Ethics and Affect

            The critical reader observes how in my previous post “Immediacy Put into Practice” on Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, or at least one chapter of it, can easily be compared to close reading of text and how such close reading reflects the text as a whole. Such parsing, if we can call the process by that name, is common in poetry reading, but in larger prosaic works proves problematic simply because of how to choose which portion of the text the critic will examine. Usually, an early chapter will set a tone that the rest of the book will follow, but not necessarily. Followers of the history of Postmodernism may immediately go to the idea of “deconstruction,” Jacques Derrida’s examination of extreme close reading as a determinant of the ideas behind the text. Though influential at the time of the decade of the 1980s, deconstruction has reached a certain limit due to the nature of such close reading’s questionable end results as relative to the theme of the work. Deconstruction reaches into topics beyond literary theory such as fine arts and hard science, and in these areas, the relevancy of close reading can often come out as comical. One can write about “The Tao of Physics” for decades and still have the splitting of the atom into quarks to deal with on a practical level, or at least the search for the reality behind such quantum physics, a reality that threatens to destroy the planet at any given moment (see the example of Christopher Norris, 1998).. So, the critic today wants to turn to other historical progressions from Barthes and Sontag’s pop culture immediacy in order to ascertain their relevance beyond the close reading of literary texts. One such development also occurred in the decade of he 1980s and from a questionable progression of ideas, those of ethics and literature.

            According to Wayne C. Booth’s The Company We Keep, the search for ethics in literature before the 1980’s had the name “the affective fallacy” and was generally discredited in the literary theory community (p.4). Since the 1990’s a “turn” has occurred which takes the basic ideas of ethics and literature out of “fallacy” mode, making not only a “turn to ethics” possible, but also, eventually, a turn to the psychological goodness of “affect” in literature as a means towards individual happiness and therefore an added relevance to the entire reading process.

But Booth points out the questionable origins of this turn to ethics as a means toward manipulation of educational texts. Booth writes:

                        The concern for an ethical criticism of texts arose in the 1980s

in part due to several objections to the readings of American texts from

the nineteenth century which used words and phrases of a racial pejorative

character. Chief among these is the use of Huckleberry Finn by Samuel

Clemens, which had been a popular text for collegiate use for over a

century.

Such concerns led to other ethical boundaries which various organizations claimed needed to be kept in check, often resulting in what amounted to book banning in schools by both conservative forces and progressive forces wishing to change societal attitudes toward the disenfranchised. Booth’s conclusion: “Anyone who attempts to invite ethical criticism back into the front parlor, to join more fashionable, less threatening varieties, must know from the beginning that no simple, definitive conclusions lie ahead” (pp 4-5). No simple conclusions are a truth that has haunted readers before these concerns and afterwards.

            Critics had to take a look at the issue from the perspective of classical philosophy to step the literary criticism toward a more positive direction. The work of philosophers such as Marth C. Nussbaum and Rochard Rorty has advanced the concern of ethics and literature into a more positive realm. We base this positivity mostly on Aristotlean concerns for how art has an effect upon the individual. Selections from Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions from 2001 show this turn to the formation of individual morality as an important aspect of critical reading. From the “Introduction,” Nussbaum writes, “Instead of viewing morality as a system of principles to be grasped by a detached intellect, and emotions as motivations that either support or subvert our choice to act according to principle, we will have to consider emotions as part and parcel of the system of ethical reasoning” (1). Nussbaum’s insistence on compassion as an element of reading brings the critic closer to embracing the idea of “affect” – an embracement which before this turn to ethics had been derided, possibly because of a Platonian, logical viewpoint that critics had held in perpetuity.

            About this progression of ideas from the counterculture insistence on immediacy, critics can now see beyond the further limitations of deconstruction as we delve into the ethereality of an Aristotlean doctrine of “Ethos.” Other critics can hold with deconstruction. Still others keep the modernist insistence on structuralism alive, and, indeed, the equation  of structure with deconstruction is easily observed even if the words might be antonymic in nature. But in terms of the spirit of the counterculture, that the critic, the reader, needs to have a freedom to develop ideas as they are presented on a moment-to-moment basis, we can now turn to ethics and affect in our search for how to show the continued relevancy of reading in an increasingly dehumanized world.

 

References

Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep. University of California Press,1988.

Norris, Christopher. "On the Limits of "Undecidability": Quantum Physics, Deconstruction, and Anti-realism." The Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 11 no. 2, 1998, p. 407-432. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/yale.1998.a36808.

Nussbaum, Martha C. “Introduction.” in Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 1-14.

 

The quantum image is a copyright-free reproduction from Istock Getty Images.

 

 

 

              

 

 Nick Harris

Blog June 14, 2024

Immediacy Put into Practice

            Chapter Seven of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure makes a good case study for implementing immediacy as a technique for better understanding of the text, or, as Roland Barthes would claim it, the pleasure of the text. This early episode deals with Jude’s courtship of the country girl Arabella whom he will marry in the following chapter, but for now, is the object of his immediate fascination. He refuses to call their interactions a courtship, indicating that he has no designs in mind other than the sensation of the moment; nothing is leading to anything else, but everything is simply and suddenly present. This sense of immediate satisfaction interrupts his long-range dreams as he struggles to keep subdued his ambitions for studying at Christminster in favor of enjoying each moment he spends with Arabella.

            If we take a structuralist approach, we can interpret the chapter as a grand arch leading from Jude’s decision to approach Arabella after her flirting in the previous chapter to the high point of the kiss at the top of the hill. This kiss, actually the second kiss, realizes the apex of the desires that Jude has been wrestling with, and the top of the hill is an appropriate setting for such an apex. Occurring in paragraph 45 of 76 in the chapter, the definitive kiss defines the top of an arch at the point between halfway and three-quarters of the curve. Certainly, the text shows attention to the accumulative effects of Jude’s desire as it approaches that kiss and the denouement and conclusion that come in quick succession afterward.

            But the theme of this chapter concerns turning away from grand designs. Jude has a lifelong intention of studying at the college in Christminster, a desire that he confirms in his study of Greek. Indeed, the moments of this study are his most longed-for times: “During the whole bygone week he had been resolving to set this afternoon apart for a special purpose,—the re-reading of his Greek Testament…. He had anticipated much pleasure in this afternoon’s reading, under the quiet roof of his great-aunt’s house as formerly, where he now slept only two nights a week” (VII. pars. 2-3). Yet, in the sentence immediately after the last one, Jude shows us that his intentions have had a great interruption: “But a new thing, a great hitch, had happened yesterday in the gliding and noiseless current of his life, and he felt as a snake must feel who has sloughed off its winter skin, and cannot understand the brightness and sensitiveness of its new one” (par. 3). Jude wrestles with his desires for the next paragraphs until the promise of immediate release confirms his decision in paragraph 8: “As he walked he looked at his watch. He could be back in two hours, easily, and a good long time would still remain to him for reading after tea.” He is walking to Arabella, and though he structures his intentions, that two-hour format falls apart in the immediacy of each moment he spends with her leading up to the kiss on the hilltop.

            The story plays out the imagery of Jude’s recognition of the interruption to his life that Arabella has caused through a nature-oriented description. I shall repeat it:  “…he felt as a snake must feel who has sloughed off its winter skin and cannot understand the brightness and sensitiveness of its new one” (par. 3). Jude uses an image of natural beauty here, significant to his unescapable regard for the natural countryside environment in which he has lived his life. Yet, because the image is that of a snake, it also carries with it a sense of danger. Jude’s desires are new and “bright,” but make him akin to the snake as it slithers through the progressions of its natural existence.

            As Jude approaches Arabella’s house, the natural imagery takes over with a similar mix of austere beauty and interruptive disgust: “Here at the base of the chalk formation he neared the brook that oozed from it, and followed the stream till he reached her dwelling. A smell of piggeries came from the back, and the grunting of the originators of that smell” (par. 9). Not only is his desire for escape from the drudgeries of country life symbolized in his dream of philosophical study at Christminster, but Jude insists of the paradox of clinging on to beatific rural images, even if they are replete with sensory irritations such as the smell of a piglot.

            As readers, we experience the sensations along with Jude. The sudden decision to go search for the origin of the smoke disrupts the intended timeline, but neither Jude nor his readers care much for the disruption as we are caught up in the moment. The accumulation of these moments makes the inevitability of Jude’s quick marriage to Arabella, the abandonment of his long-held plans, more acceptable.

And yet, like the snake, the inevitable events carry with them a sense of foreboding. As the reader reads the book, she/he can look back on the celebration of these events in their immediate jouissance as an ironic foreshadowing of Jude’s abandonment of his goals in the face of a series of determined events. In the following chapter of the book, Jude marries Arabella, and she decides to flee the marriage in an escape to Australia. In subsequent chapters, he meets up with his cousin, Sue Bridehead, who also has escaped a troubled marriage that legally has not ended. Together, they embark on a series of life adventures even though they are still married to others. This dichotomy of intentions, immediate decisions, and the irony of fate blocking their path to happiness informs the remainder of the novel.

Yet we remember the “brightness and sensitivity” with which Jude first shed his old skin, a skin that had worn itself out with a long-held intention of escape into the world of ideas. If we read Chapter Seven not as a structured golden arch, but as a series of impactful events and images, then we hold on to the sense of the new skin of our immediate existence. We better understand the paradox of immersion in the natural world, symbolized by the attraction to Arabella, while at the same time having an underlying intention of progression into a world away from Arabella’s, an intention we wrestle with giving up, even though we cannot do so completely.

__________

The Barthes reference in the first sentence is to Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. by Richard Howard, New York: Hill & Wang, 1980. [original Le Plaisir du Texte, 1973).

Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure references come from the Project Gutenberg publication, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/153/pg153-images.html#chap07 Release date: August 1, 1994 [eBook #153] Most recently updated: August 28, 2022Credits: John Hamm. Revised by Joseph E. Loewenstein, M.D. [original 1895]

 

 

Ethics and Literature: The Road from Semiotics to the “Turn”

 

A contemporary reader finds problems in determining a timeline between semiotics as practiced by Roland Barthes and previously investigated in my blogs and the burgeoning ethics and literature debate, the so-called “Turn to Ethics.” The reader can make no easy connection, so one may wonder why any critic would search for such an evolution. But in my recent blogs attempting explanations of Barthes’ “Mythologies,” I have laid the groundwork for creating such a connection. The early semiotics of Barthes and his American champion Susan Sontag hold a colonel of what Jean-Francios Lyotard would in 1979 term “Postmodernism,” the abandonment of large philosophical schools for smaller, more detailed, and immediate concerns. The development of an ethics and literature connection must, by definition, explore individual moments within narratives in order to determine what ethical centers connect aesthetic concerns, especially literary ones, to definitions of good and bad.

            One chief proponent of this turn to ethical considerations is the critic Wayne C. Booth. As explained in Stiles and Harris, 2009, Booth’s theories point out that the reader of a narrative will link the text to causes and impacts concerning the individual’s need to  “desire and fear, love and hate, emulate and spurn while reading on how those patterns then shape our character” (318). Booth’s initial explanation of the turn to ethics comes from his 1961 The Rhetoric of Fiction, a work heralded by Stiles and Harris as “a masterpiece” (312). But the specific ideas quoted above are heralded in what is perhaps Booth’s most influential study of ethics and literature, The Company We Keep from 1988. In this work Booth explores not only the relationship between reader and author, but between reader and implied author of the narrative. Whether that narrator is dependable or not, they become a sort of friend, a company which the reader keeps. In keeping company with the implied author, the reader must make personal decisions about the validity and the quality of goodness that the author is attempting to relate.

Booth is developing a standing tradition of American philosophy wherein aspects of religion and philosophy, ethical aspects especially, have a direct connection to literature and aesthetics. He relates his ideas to American pragmatic philosophy, especially the aesthetics of Santayana. Booth reaffirms the basic ideas of Santayana: “The relationships between literature, art, religion, and philosophy are prominent themes throughout Santayana’s writings” (Saatkamp and Coleman, Part 2). We can laud Booth for keeping these American pragmatic philosophy connections alive in the criticism of literature.

We can further respect Booth for keeping the ethics and literature connection viable during the 1980s, an age which portrays the concept of ethical literature taken to disreputable lengths through the practice of banning books. According to Booth’s The Company We Keep, organizations concerned with keeping a particular type of conservative Christian morality alive in American education carried the idea of ethical literature into the practice of taking objectionable books away from the eyes of young students (Introduction). This type of enforced morality might have been where the concept of ethics and literature ended if not for the concerns of literary critics such as Booth. Booth kept alive the search for connections between philosophy and the purpose of literature. He thus helps to answer the question of why literature has a purpose--or at least a purpose beyond simplistic entertainment through narratives. Though such entertainment can have merits in the philosophical search for happiness and the use of artistry to achieve it, we must continue the further investigation of ethics as a core value of literature and a purpose for its study.

By looking at Booth’s investigation of the core values of literature and ethics in the 1980s, we find a link between the pop-art concerns of the 1960s which would turn the reader away from modernist concepts of literary greatness to a more inclusive concept of the value of art, a concept that includes popular values. The instigation of symbols of popular culture as veritable in the world of aesthetics keeps alive the investigation of ethics and art, including literature, in the face of dogmatic censorship. The works of Booth reinforce when this connection.

The point here is that a link exists between the concerns of pop culture counter-culturalists of the 1960s and the consideration of ethics and literature that arose in the 1990s. We can find Booth lacking in some fundamental definitions of concepts such as the difference between his implied author and the concept of the unreliable narrator. He never clarifies. But studying Booth helps the contemporary critic see how the connections exist between the various eras of counterculture, the 1960s and the 1990s, even though those are decades when the counter-culture wanes.

The good news is that coming out of the other side of the 1980s is the work of philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum who shares Booth’s proclaimed Aristotlean values and applies them to the study of literature, and pragmatists such as Richard Rorty, further showing us how we validate the study of literature as a conduit of ethics and humanity. Thus, I find the popular semiotics of Barthes as a vital precursor of the contemporary world of literature and ethics. Not only is semiotics a precursor, but it is a philosophy we can incorporate into present-day criticism alongside the study of ethics and literature.

 

_______

 

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. University of Chicago Press, 1961.

-----. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1988.

Lyotard, Jean-François. "Defining the Postmodern." ICA Documents4: Postmodernism. London: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1986. 6-8.

Saatkamp, Herman and Martin Coleman, "George Santayana", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2023/entries/santayana/

Stiles, Stefanie, and Randy Harris. “Keeping Curious Company:  Wayne C. Booth’s Friendship Model of Criticism and the Work of Hunter S. Thompson.” College English, Vol. 72, No. 4 (Mar. 2009), pp. 313-337. http://www/jstor.org/stable/25472331    

 

                                                                                    Nick Harris, April 26, 2024

                                                         “Operation Margarine”

Barthes’ mythologies are images of popular culture as emblematic of underlying cultural ideas. I have already looked at two of these “mythologies,” “The World of Wrestling” and “Romans in Film.” In another such short essay, “Operation Margarine,” Barthes likens the formation of societal constructs such as the military and the church to pop culture ideas of plasticity as shown by common household items such as margarine. “Astra” was the name of a popular brand of margarine in Barthes’ France that he uses in his commentary on society. Barthes’ short piece on margarine is further evidence of his preoccupation with gleaning symbols of social meaning, especially that of plasticity, from everyday items. Barthes termed these societal symbols “Mythologies.” Written for popular magazines, these short pieces appear in his 1957 collection appropriately entitled Mythologies . In many “Mythologies,” theatricality comes through as the predominant means of symbology. “The World of Wrestling” shows the live immediacy of theater in the pro-wrestling ring and “Romans in Film” shows the plasticity of the presentation of actors in films. But here, in “Astra,” the symbol is the plasticity of the item, the fact that margarine is a fake, a substitute for the real thing -- butter.

The imagery is significant for understanding the way we use signs and symbols today. These signs and symbols are reflective of the particular brand of postmodernism created by early postmodernists such as Barthes. In the modernism that preceded Barthes, the concerns of modern philosophy attempt to establish a proper canon of artistry. This canon lauds works it determines as artistic based on a largely structural approach. The modernist artist, the “great” artist, achieves her/his greatness through a strategic used of predisposed forms. The postmodernist, however, wants to incorporate the ideas of the common everyday culture into the philosophy of art and life. Thus Barthes, and his American champions such as Susan Sontag, abandon the restrictions of form and use the familiar literary device of the symbol. Something stands for something else. But Barthes and Sontag push the idea of symbol and signifier into a new light wherein the familiar image becomes a signifier of deeper cultural values. These are the “Mythologies.” Barthes creates this is the type of signification in “Operation Margarine” wherein the plasticity of margarine reflects the plasticity of religion and politics in contemporary society. Margarine helps us to understand Sontag’s battle cry: “The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have” (99). Until we consumers know that we have accepted something as a substantive substitute, we cannot fully shake off the cloud of knowledge which our current sense of Order gives to us and our capacity for immediate reaction lessens.

The basic conceit of margarine as a symbol concerns its substitution for something else, the real thing that is butter. By plasticizing butter, margarine is not quite the same thing as butter. But Barthes emphasizes that margarine is not necessarily bad. As a symbol, it still has merits, not as flavorful as the merits of butter, but nonetheless having a decent taste. Though at first decried as something horrific (“…margarine? Unthinkable!”), the consumer becomes aware of the value of the product: “…margarine is a delicious food, tasty, digestible, economical, useful in all circumstances. The moral at the end is well known: ‘Here you are, rid of a prejudice which cost you dearly!” (Mythologies, 42).

The symbol of societal attitude toward margarine becomes an insight into societal attitudes toward an ever-increasing critical view of politics and religion. The increasing awareness of the unthinkable things about politicians and religious figures that define our use of these societal constructs in the contemporary world becomes less odious with the salve of that which alleviates our prejudice against something at one time we may have thought unethical. “A little ‘confessed’ evil saves one from acknowledging a lot of hidden evil.” Furthermore, “What does it matter, after all, if Order is a little brutal or a little blind, when it allows us to live cheaply?” (Mythologies, 42). The margarine of the small confessions, the little brutalities, keeps the consumers satisfied, even though this margarine is not the real thing.

 

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Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. (1957) translated by Annette Lavers, New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.

Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation,” The Susan Sontag Reader. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1982. 95-104.

                                                                                                                        Nick Harris, April 19, 2024

 

                                    "The Romans in Film" according to Roland Barthes

Barthes defines the 1953 film Julius Ceasar as a primitive use of two signs to tell the audience what spectacle they are watching. The two signs are the Roman short-locked haircut and the sweat on the Roman faces. These two symbols tell the viewer everything they need to know about “Roman-ness” in the grand spectacle of a Hollywood version of Shakespeare. In the online world, we can look up pictures of John Gielgud as Cassius, the Devil on Brutus’ shoulder, to see what Barthes is talking about. The locks of the haircut fall short on the forehead, and the skin shines with what I suppose is sweat, at least Barthes interprets the glossiness in that way.

Barthes conclusion in his short examination of “The Romans in Film” is quite negative. “For although it is a good thing if a spectacle is created to make the world more explicit, it is both reprehensible and deceitful to confuse the sign with what is signified” (28).  This quote has two parts. Examining the first, we take in his presumption that “a spectacle is created to make the world more explicit.” From reading Barthes’ “The World of Wrestling,” the genesis piece of his Mythologies, we understand that the immediacy of spectacle is wondrous, a call back to the drama of ancient Greece, where symbol and signified have a pure relationship brought on by, among other things, the insistence of the masque telling us exactly what we need to have as our interpretation of the immediacy of the event.

The second part of Barthes’ sentence, however, tells us that the two symbols of the 1953 Julius Caesar  fall short of the wanted wonderment. The symbols fall so short as to be “reprehensible” and “deceitful.” Putting the coiffure on the actors gives them an instant representation that is untrue. The spectacle of Rome and the spectacle of Shakespeare is not in the haircut. The spectacle is in the action and the words. Likewise, the angst and emotion lies not in a plasticized sweat. Let Shakespeare’s words hit us with their punch and vigor. Let the actors show us what villains and heroes they are, complicated through their hesitance to do what they think good, or, in Antony’s case, to revolt against the terrorists in the way he knows he must.

And yet, the film gives us hairdos and reflections of soundstage lights on the faces of the actors. And we, the viewers, are supposed to swoon with the “fact” that the film shows us its spectacle. The signs have become what is the wanted intent, and that magnificent drama and emotion on its step-by-step basis that comprises the Shakespeare and his interpretation by the actors falls to second place. Film, if it chooses to, can create this imbalance. The balance is in the struggle within the characters as Antony approaches his victory. The wrestling of Brutus with Antony, both internal and external, is the balanced spectacle here, not their make-up.

Brutus as Antony approaches. Stock image from Alamy.

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Barthes, Roland. “The Romans in  Films.” Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers.  NY: Hill     and Wang, 1972, pp. 26-28.