(Drawing by Eunostos, December 2010.)
This is one of cream pies culture geek said. If you pronounce the sentence "I am your father", the caller, if he knows a little bit Star Wars , Immediately think replica "cult" of Darth Vader to Luke Skywalker which is one of the great dramatic moments The Empire Strikes Back cons (if you're looking "I am your father" on Wikipedia , it is actually the replica that you speak the article).
But a little common sense will soon suspect that this "I am your father", delivered in 1981 AD by the Gregorian calendar, is perhaps not the first replica of the kind in fiction, especially if the investigation is expanded to other media as cinema. Let's see ... What was there in the same kind with the ancients?
The Return of Ulysses
If you were a (e) small (e) Greek (that) born (e), say the fifth century BC, your culture would merit poets and particularly the largest of them: Homer (it matters little here that he really existed, the people of the time were convinced that, in this case is the same). In the event that you have the chance to be educated a little push, which was obviously not the case for everyone, you would have learned by reading your letters the two epics of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey . You'd probably also learned passages by heart (yes). And, throughout your life, you will come across references to Homer in a variety of contexts and in all sorts of people and writers, both poets, philosophers, orators, politicians, etc.. Nothing equivalent to the phenomenon geek there, of course: Homer was part of the cultural mainstream, paramount in the construction of collective identity of the ancient Greeks.
However, there is a "I am your father" in Homer: specifically in the Odyssey , singing XVI, v. 188. So probably the Odyssey a Greek of the classical period would think immediately on hearing the sentence.
Let me remind you just what it is about. If the Iliad told a few days of the Trojan War (the wrath of Achilles after a dispute with Agamemnon, king of Mycenae), the Odyssey , meanwhile, takes place after the end of war, and tells the long and perilous journey of Odysseus' return to the small island, Ithaca, he is the sovereign. In fact, for more than half of the epic, we follow several parallel plots. One, recounted in the first four songs, tells the journey of Odysseus' son, Telemachus, who travels to Greece seeking information on the fate of his father disappeared, nobody can say if it is still living and has a chance of finally returning after twenty years. The other plot, the best known is the journey of Odysseus himself, told a fairly complex, because the story begins in medias res , when Odysseus has wandered for several years and is prisoner of the nymph Calypso, and then we learn through flashbacks several (in literary analysis, it is called analepses), how he got there.
In XIII singing, Odysseus finally gives up on the shore of Ithaca, but his patron goddess, Athena, warned that other dangers lurking on again: his palace was invaded by a crowd of princes and nobles of Ithaca and elsewhere, the pretenders, so named because they are trying to force the wife of Ulysses, Queen Penelope, to remarry one of them, under the convenient excuse that Ulysses has disappeared and is probably dead, the whole course in order to seize the throne of Ithaca. Odysseus himself, returns sole survivor of its fleet after its sinking, it has no weapons or troops, and if he arrives at the palace in his true identity, he risks being murdered by the contenders, very superior numbers. Ulysses must disguise himself as a beggar and investigate to find allies in Ithaca and palate. Her first ally is of course his son, Telemachus. The song
XVI, Ulysses, with the help of Athena, momentarily gets rid of rags which he clothed himself and shows his son in his true shape. Athena gives him even a boost: it not only took away his disguise Shabby, but it makes it more beautiful than usual, so it looks like a god descended to earth. Telemachus, seeing him so changed, got scared, thinking he really dealing with a god, but Odysseus reassures him:
George Lucas (and Joseph Campbell)-cons attack
fans of George Lucas might be tempted to marvel again at the perfection of the master's work: "He had read Homer, and he refers to it in a roundabout way!" Not wanting to disappoint them, it seems very unlikely for two reasons. The first is the radical difference in the context of revelation: in the Odyssey , the revelation of the identity of Odysseus to Telemachus is a moment of great happiness, and is also a hub of plot, since the father and son together will be able to confront and chase contenders who covet power. In The Empire Strikes Back cons, it's a horrible revelation, made after a fierce battle, and that puts Luke in a situation of moral dilemma difficult to sustain.
Despite this, we could still believe, with a lot of goodwill, Lucas knowingly prepares a vision of the father-son relationship completely opposite to the one described Odyssey (the father becomes, not a model and an ally but an enemy and therefore a figure of foil).
Hence the second reason, biographical one: it is far from certain that Lucas had read Homer when he developed the plot of his first trilogy of films. Not at this level of detail, in any case, since it was not Hellenistic and has not really made classical studies (equivalent of our curriculum Classics).
However, Lucas has taken a course in sociology of myths in the 1960s (at least in the thick file that ends the first volume of the Omnibus edition of Star Wars novels ), so he probably had knowledge of the history of the Odyssey , probably not through an approach to literary studies , but through an anthropological or psychological, which focuses on "myths" understood as stories reduced to storylines, therefore considered outside the specific contexts of their literary or artistic evocations. Lucas claimed in particular the influence that had on him the work of mythologist Joseph Campbell ( including his book The Hero With A Thousand Faces , published in 1949 and translated into French under title The Hero with a Thousand Faces ), works that take a psychoanalytic approach, among others, in line with Jung. George Lucas is part of the many artists who, since the creation of mythological studies in the second half of the nineteenth century, were influenced in their work not only by works of artists from earlier eras, but also ( perhaps especially) by the currents of thought Humanities their time.
Parenthesis: the approach adopted by myths Campbell is far from unanimous among scientists, especially as regards his theory of "monomyth" (which tries to find the same narrative pattern and a common symbolic language in myths of the world). But that did not stop said monomyth become the darling of Hollywood directors, who used it as a working basis for achieving specific scenarios to gather a wide audience.
(Photo: George Lucas in 2009, then Joseph Campbell about 1984. Source: Wikimedia Commons .)
short, do not think it is easy to establish a direct relationship between the Odyssey and cons The Empire Strikes Back under the pretext that a father did recognize his son in these two stories: not only is it unlikely that the second does so voluntarily referred to the first, but this kind of scene recognition is a classical string (if not a cliché) tales of adventure. Above all me, since my 2010, which, being both player and spectator Homer The Empire Strikes Back cons, uses the latter as a prism through which to look at the ancient epic, so fun as anachronistic.
From greek paterfamilias the Sith Lord Black: What are dads now?
In this perspective joyful mix of ages, which is especially fun is to see how, here as often, the ancient epic has something fresh from his distant successors. Frankly, if I were to choose a father-son pair, between Odysseus and Telemachus or Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, I would opt for the former without hesitation. A former Jedi who transferred to the dark side, the servant of a tyrant and inclined to the galactic arbitrary executions, tell me about a paternal model! What the hell he could have happened between the two so that the unhappy father spends long-awaited hero status to that of a mortal enemy?
In good scientific rigor, is the kind of question that would require laying a thesis (at least) to get a satisfactory answer. As we are simply a blog, and I've been very talkative, I blithely summarizes some twenty-eight centuries that separate Homer to George Lucas and I tell you, probably Freud. This time, moreover, is someone whom Lucas can only have heard about on the benches of the university, and is a researcher whose work has long influenced the study of mythology. In the Freudian perspective, especially when used in a somewhat casual, no matter the ages, geographical and cultural contexts, it is always the same drama that is replayed in the human psyche, that ( to stick to the best known) of the Oedipus complex, in which, as you know, the child is attracted by his mother and hates his father.
(Photo: Sigmund Freud, Max Halberstadt in 1922. Source: Wikimedia Commons .)
"Exactly, Oedipus, is much older than Freud," you say. "We are in ancient Greece, Oedipus and unlike Telemachus disagreement especially well with his father!" Certainly, and we could find many other examples of mythological characters caught in this kind of confrontation family (remember, without looking very far: Zeus, for example). Yes, but ... Freud made a very specific use of the Oedipus story, which he also uses one of the many evocations: Oedipus King, the famous tragedy of Sophocles. In the treaty The interpretation of dreams s he published in 1900, Freud employs the tragedy as an example to illustrate his theory on the psychological development of children. Example in which he says certainly find a confirmation of the generality of his theory.
Since Freud, the complex of Oedipus passed into everyday language, so that one refers to it as a kind of evidence. Except that Freud did, during the following decades, the subject of many questioned, which strongly nuanced (or more) his theories. But to stay on topic, have to say on the Hellenists of the Freudian myth of Oedipus and his dad? I pass the floor to Jean-Pierre Vernant:
assert anything about the psychology of human beings in general (hence the scale of the species in the world and throughout history) therefore requires multiple methodological precautions that Freud is not, partly because at his time anthropology was not yet as developed as it is today. Needless to say, in such a context, the "monomyth" to Campbell, who uses the same type of general statements (the existence of a symbolic language that can be found in the myths of all cultures) may have the greatest difficulty in proving its veracity.
But no matter: the artist is free to take over these interpretations, as those of Freud in 1900 than in 1949 Campbell, to make its honey in the world of fiction. Hence Darth Vader.
Should we complain? Should he miss the good old days of Ulysses dad? Not necessarily. For if one could show without too much difficulty as the Odyssey has helped build the ideal representation of the nuclear family as it was still over there is little in the Western world, and as it still appears in many public dramas (father, mother and child against the rest of the world), do not fool ourselves: the world of Ulysses was radically different from ours. And it would not really give us any lessons, for example, women's place in society (even if Penelope, overall, has not fared so poorly).
Ultimately, the only major final conclusion one can draw from this comparison is much smaller, and this is excellent site TV Tropes with his pragmatic way of any fictional theorizing processes, we can provide: "I am your father" is what is called a process Older Than THEY think, older than you thought.
This is one of cream pies culture geek said. If you pronounce the sentence "I am your father", the caller, if he knows a little bit Star Wars , Immediately think replica "cult" of Darth Vader to Luke Skywalker which is one of the great dramatic moments The Empire Strikes Back cons (if you're looking "I am your father" on Wikipedia , it is actually the replica that you speak the article).
But a little common sense will soon suspect that this "I am your father", delivered in 1981 AD by the Gregorian calendar, is perhaps not the first replica of the kind in fiction, especially if the investigation is expanded to other media as cinema. Let's see ... What was there in the same kind with the ancients?
The Return of Ulysses
If you were a (e) small (e) Greek (that) born (e), say the fifth century BC, your culture would merit poets and particularly the largest of them: Homer (it matters little here that he really existed, the people of the time were convinced that, in this case is the same). In the event that you have the chance to be educated a little push, which was obviously not the case for everyone, you would have learned by reading your letters the two epics of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey . You'd probably also learned passages by heart (yes). And, throughout your life, you will come across references to Homer in a variety of contexts and in all sorts of people and writers, both poets, philosophers, orators, politicians, etc.. Nothing equivalent to the phenomenon geek there, of course: Homer was part of the cultural mainstream, paramount in the construction of collective identity of the ancient Greeks.
However, there is a "I am your father" in Homer: specifically in the Odyssey , singing XVI, v. 188. So probably the Odyssey a Greek of the classical period would think immediately on hearing the sentence.
Let me remind you just what it is about. If the Iliad told a few days of the Trojan War (the wrath of Achilles after a dispute with Agamemnon, king of Mycenae), the Odyssey , meanwhile, takes place after the end of war, and tells the long and perilous journey of Odysseus' return to the small island, Ithaca, he is the sovereign. In fact, for more than half of the epic, we follow several parallel plots. One, recounted in the first four songs, tells the journey of Odysseus' son, Telemachus, who travels to Greece seeking information on the fate of his father disappeared, nobody can say if it is still living and has a chance of finally returning after twenty years. The other plot, the best known is the journey of Odysseus himself, told a fairly complex, because the story begins in medias res , when Odysseus has wandered for several years and is prisoner of the nymph Calypso, and then we learn through flashbacks several (in literary analysis, it is called analepses), how he got there.
In XIII singing, Odysseus finally gives up on the shore of Ithaca, but his patron goddess, Athena, warned that other dangers lurking on again: his palace was invaded by a crowd of princes and nobles of Ithaca and elsewhere, the pretenders, so named because they are trying to force the wife of Ulysses, Queen Penelope, to remarry one of them, under the convenient excuse that Ulysses has disappeared and is probably dead, the whole course in order to seize the throne of Ithaca. Odysseus himself, returns sole survivor of its fleet after its sinking, it has no weapons or troops, and if he arrives at the palace in his true identity, he risks being murdered by the contenders, very superior numbers. Ulysses must disguise himself as a beggar and investigate to find allies in Ithaca and palate. Her first ally is of course his son, Telemachus. The song
XVI, Ulysses, with the help of Athena, momentarily gets rid of rags which he clothed himself and shows his son in his true shape. Athena gives him even a boost: it not only took away his disguise Shabby, but it makes it more beautiful than usual, so it looks like a god descended to earth. Telemachus, seeing him so changed, got scared, thinking he really dealing with a god, but Odysseus reassures him:
"I am not a god, why compare me to one of the immortals? I am your father , the one who has cost so many tears and anguish and for which you suffered the onslaught of these people! " (Meaning: the pretenders, who constantly seek to exclude Telemachus power, which would be the rightful heir. The translation is by Victor Berard.)And here is our "I am your father" (e No Homeric Greek, it gives ἀλλὰ πατὴρ τεός εἰμί: "No, I am your father").
George Lucas (and Joseph Campbell)-cons attack
fans of George Lucas might be tempted to marvel again at the perfection of the master's work: "He had read Homer, and he refers to it in a roundabout way!" Not wanting to disappoint them, it seems very unlikely for two reasons. The first is the radical difference in the context of revelation: in the Odyssey , the revelation of the identity of Odysseus to Telemachus is a moment of great happiness, and is also a hub of plot, since the father and son together will be able to confront and chase contenders who covet power. In The Empire Strikes Back cons, it's a horrible revelation, made after a fierce battle, and that puts Luke in a situation of moral dilemma difficult to sustain. Despite this, we could still believe, with a lot of goodwill, Lucas knowingly prepares a vision of the father-son relationship completely opposite to the one described Odyssey (the father becomes, not a model and an ally but an enemy and therefore a figure of foil).
Hence the second reason, biographical one: it is far from certain that Lucas had read Homer when he developed the plot of his first trilogy of films. Not at this level of detail, in any case, since it was not Hellenistic and has not really made classical studies (equivalent of our curriculum Classics).
However, Lucas has taken a course in sociology of myths in the 1960s (at least in the thick file that ends the first volume of the Omnibus edition of Star Wars novels ), so he probably had knowledge of the history of the Odyssey , probably not through an approach to literary studies , but through an anthropological or psychological, which focuses on "myths" understood as stories reduced to storylines, therefore considered outside the specific contexts of their literary or artistic evocations. Lucas claimed in particular the influence that had on him the work of mythologist Joseph Campbell ( including his book The Hero With A Thousand Faces , published in 1949 and translated into French under title The Hero with a Thousand Faces ), works that take a psychoanalytic approach, among others, in line with Jung. George Lucas is part of the many artists who, since the creation of mythological studies in the second half of the nineteenth century, were influenced in their work not only by works of artists from earlier eras, but also ( perhaps especially) by the currents of thought Humanities their time. Parenthesis: the approach adopted by myths Campbell is far from unanimous among scientists, especially as regards his theory of "monomyth" (which tries to find the same narrative pattern and a common symbolic language in myths of the world). But that did not stop said monomyth become the darling of Hollywood directors, who used it as a working basis for achieving specific scenarios to gather a wide audience.
(Photo: George Lucas in 2009, then Joseph Campbell about 1984. Source: Wikimedia Commons .)
short, do not think it is easy to establish a direct relationship between the Odyssey and cons The Empire Strikes Back under the pretext that a father did recognize his son in these two stories: not only is it unlikely that the second does so voluntarily referred to the first, but this kind of scene recognition is a classical string (if not a cliché) tales of adventure. Above all me, since my 2010, which, being both player and spectator Homer The Empire Strikes Back cons, uses the latter as a prism through which to look at the ancient epic, so fun as anachronistic.
From greek paterfamilias the Sith Lord Black: What are dads now?
In this perspective joyful mix of ages, which is especially fun is to see how, here as often, the ancient epic has something fresh from his distant successors. Frankly, if I were to choose a father-son pair, between Odysseus and Telemachus or Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, I would opt for the former without hesitation. A former Jedi who transferred to the dark side, the servant of a tyrant and inclined to the galactic arbitrary executions, tell me about a paternal model! What the hell he could have happened between the two so that the unhappy father spends long-awaited hero status to that of a mortal enemy?
In good scientific rigor, is the kind of question that would require laying a thesis (at least) to get a satisfactory answer. As we are simply a blog, and I've been very talkative, I blithely summarizes some twenty-eight centuries that separate Homer to George Lucas and I tell you, probably Freud. This time, moreover, is someone whom Lucas can only have heard about on the benches of the university, and is a researcher whose work has long influenced the study of mythology. In the Freudian perspective, especially when used in a somewhat casual, no matter the ages, geographical and cultural contexts, it is always the same drama that is replayed in the human psyche, that ( to stick to the best known) of the Oedipus complex, in which, as you know, the child is attracted by his mother and hates his father. (Photo: Sigmund Freud, Max Halberstadt in 1922. Source: Wikimedia Commons .)
"Exactly, Oedipus, is much older than Freud," you say. "We are in ancient Greece, Oedipus and unlike Telemachus disagreement especially well with his father!" Certainly, and we could find many other examples of mythological characters caught in this kind of confrontation family (remember, without looking very far: Zeus, for example). Yes, but ... Freud made a very specific use of the Oedipus story, which he also uses one of the many evocations: Oedipus King, the famous tragedy of Sophocles. In the treaty The interpretation of dreams s he published in 1900, Freud employs the tragedy as an example to illustrate his theory on the psychological development of children. Example in which he says certainly find a confirmation of the generality of his theory.
Since Freud, the complex of Oedipus passed into everyday language, so that one refers to it as a kind of evidence. Except that Freud did, during the following decades, the subject of many questioned, which strongly nuanced (or more) his theories. But to stay on topic, have to say on the Hellenists of the Freudian myth of Oedipus and his dad? I pass the floor to Jean-Pierre Vernant:
But what a belonging to the literary culture of the Athens of the fifth century BC and transposes itself to a very free Theban legend much earlier, prior to the plan of the city, can it confirm the observations of a physician of the early twentieth century to customers of patients who haunt his office?This question was taken from the beginning the article "Oedipus unashamedly" together in the first volume of Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (a classic Greek Studies, which also includes articles by Pierre Vidal-Naquet). In this article, as its title implies wait, Vernant strongly criticizes the Freudian interpretation of Oedipus Rex , because it is not so easy to establish the constancy of psychic mechanisms in cultured human and at times radically different. That is certainly the kind of hasty conclusions that can not afford the method adopted by Vernant and colleagues, that of anthropology historical fact that lends a lot of attention to the specific context of each culture in a place and at any given time, and showed the importance of cultural context in the psychological construction of the individual.
assert anything about the psychology of human beings in general (hence the scale of the species in the world and throughout history) therefore requires multiple methodological precautions that Freud is not, partly because at his time anthropology was not yet as developed as it is today. Needless to say, in such a context, the "monomyth" to Campbell, who uses the same type of general statements (the existence of a symbolic language that can be found in the myths of all cultures) may have the greatest difficulty in proving its veracity.
But no matter: the artist is free to take over these interpretations, as those of Freud in 1900 than in 1949 Campbell, to make its honey in the world of fiction. Hence Darth Vader.
Should we complain? Should he miss the good old days of Ulysses dad? Not necessarily. For if one could show without too much difficulty as the Odyssey has helped build the ideal representation of the nuclear family as it was still over there is little in the Western world, and as it still appears in many public dramas (father, mother and child against the rest of the world), do not fool ourselves: the world of Ulysses was radically different from ours. And it would not really give us any lessons, for example, women's place in society (even if Penelope, overall, has not fared so poorly).
Ultimately, the only major final conclusion one can draw from this comparison is much smaller, and this is excellent site TV Tropes with his pragmatic way of any fictional theorizing processes, we can provide: "I am your father" is what is called a process Older Than THEY think, older than you thought.
0 comments:
Post a Comment