First let me say I must admit gratitude that our re-entrance into our blog discussion after our panel presentations is based on a novel. Nothing quite as wonderful as a plot to keep the mind engaged. …And, just a thought… with that in mind, how might we argue the importance of text and context when addressing song?
…But before I digress too much from my principal questions:
Before the beginning of the eclogues, in chapter nineteen, we are presented with Dametas’ awkward little song of self-celebration after Dorus’ slays the bear. In this song he gives thanks to Pan, somewhat mirroring the invocation of both Dorus’ Muse and Thyrsis’ “my god Pan” in their singing match. How does Dametas’ song (the first we see in Arcadia) set us up for the (potentially arguably) more dignified eclogues? The eclogues begin with Dorus and Thyrsis’ competition to prove their verbal virtuosity; however, this skill is to be proven by their ability to create in their audience the stirrings of compassion—he who expresses the depth and praise of his love with the greatest skill by eliciting the greater sympathy will prove the winner. How might this speak to song, as we have studied it, and how might the invocations play into this? Certainly, compassion may be played upon by presenting the necessity of man’s call on a higher power. How and to what extent is this power (in this case deity) an “other” or outside of the imagination of man, which is so greatly prized in a defense of poetry or song? How and to what extent might Thyrsis’ “balance[ing] the highest point of man’s wit with the efficacy of nature” (Sidney’s Defense of Poesy) in his verses complicate this?
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Evelyn, I think I want to respond to the first question you asked about the importance of text and context when addressing song, mostly because as I read the songs in this piece, I tended to read them in terms of Boulton's discussion of narrative and lyric as "two distinct and often opposed literary types" happening in a particular textual moment. Perhaps it is wrong to admit this, but in all honesty, when I read narratives that have song breaks, I tend to skip over the songs (shame, shame). In the past I've been suspicious that the author was just trying to prove his virtuosity as a writer by inserting a song in a narrative. Judging from my copy of Sydney's Arcadia, it seems that I'm not the only one who has tended to view such moments as secondary or complementary to the main text. The eclogues in my version are stuck in the appendix, removed from the main context. Is this the case in everyone else's versions?
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting though that some songs do appear in the main text. In particular, Zelmane's song reveals her to Musidorus. I read this particular moment in the text as an example of Boulton's discussion of lyric's emotive function when it is used to reveal a character's thoughts and feelings. No doubt there are more readings of this moment, but I found it interesting that this shift, from narrative to lyric, coincided with Musidorus's recognition that his friend's identity had shifted yet again, from Daiphantus to Pyrocles to Zelmane. It almost serves to jar the reader, to highlight a particular moment as important. More important in terms of Boulton's argument, this particular moment seems to highlight the relationship between narrative and lyric, Pyrocles and Zelmane. Maybe I'm completely out there with this reading, but for me, this particular moment was one that worked in terms of the song's placement within the narrative text.
Also, maybe I am asking this because I watched Rocky Horror Picture Show this weekend, but I wonder about the relationship between lyric and narrative and song and film. Are works like Sydney's the predecessors to modern musicals? Are there traces of future Broadway productions in texts like Arcadia?
The lyrical sparring between Thyrsis and Dorus that begins the first eclogues is, I think, interestingly reminiscent of both modern pop music and classical rhetoric. We’ve talked plenty in class about the concept of performer ethos in a somewhat Aristotelian sense, and here we see performers enacting their rhetoric in a setting very similar to that of classical civil discourse. Of course, the matter here is not, should such-and-such law be repealed? or, should so-and-so have to eat hemlock and die? but rather (as Evelyn said above), who can best express the pathos of love? Still, while emphasis has surely been shifted from logos toward pathos, the same principles of showmanship and eloquence apply. That’s ethos.
ReplyDeleteAs for the parallels to modern (and I mean that loosely – last 100 years, let’s say) pop, mawkish zingers like “I have no shows of wealth: my wealth is you” (Dorus, 187 in the Penguin edition) seem analogous to “I don’t care too much for money. Money can’t buy me love.” Pop stars, Beatles to Backstreet Boys, have long ridden “heartthrob” ethoi, which require them to sing seductively to the impersonal “you” of the opposite sex. That seems more or less what Thyrsis and Dorus are after, and theirs is analogous the rhetorical plane of pop music: he who can elicit the strongest pathos rises up the pecking order. I’m reminded of The Beatles’ “You’re Going to Lose That Girl,” a song which could be taken as a “bring it on” to others in the ‘60s pop scene.
The eclogues in mine are interspersed throughout the text (at least I think they are, they’re at the end of each section), but that is interesting that the publisher of your text thought they were better suited separated. Of the lyric insertions, Boulton states that the “device introduces an element of disruption into the narrative work.” (Course pack 181) The question here is probably whether the eclogue adds to or helps carry along the narrative, or is merely an ornamental feature that interrupts. While I assume that the editors felt the narrative was better left uninterrupted, it’s interesting that they decided to change Sidney’s narrative structure.
ReplyDeleteThese songs seemed to be different than the few that were interspersed with the text. The eclogue songs were much longer and contained a much more textual adornment. The imbedded songs were relatively brief and didn’t drastically interrupt the narrative. The separation is a bit like the recitative compared to aria in opera. The recitative moves along the plot, but doesn’t have the most amazing song functions in the world. The imbedded text helps to move along the plot, but doesn’t go crazy with the flourishing. The aria is meant to show off the voice, so it doesn’t focus on the words to drive along plot, but rather the song elements. The eclogues show off the skill of the ‘composers’ more than drive the plot.
First, my eclogues are not separated in the edition I have, but are within, or I guess, following each chapter.
ReplyDeleteIn reading Sidney's Arcadia I tended to focus on Jakobson's terminology referenced in Boulton's essay as lyrics in texts as either having "communicative" or "poetic" function. Beginning even with Zelmane's song,(which was the first use of song in the chapter, yes?) and as Mandy has already mentioned) the lyrics function with the voice of a character singing out to an audience in order to communicate, (usually as an emotive function) (20). (It is not usually part of the plot but more Zelmane, although not intending a literal audience, is singing to her beloved and is lamenting (sorry if my last paper is leaking in a bit here) her loss. I am still considering why the lyrics are included primarily near the end of the chapter and why this choice? It might be the most important or the most playful of the scenes, needing a kind of campy performance to play up the irony of two main characters dressed in drag. But I can't help but wonder (I also lose a bit of interest when there are songs within a text) how this alters the audience? This must be a part in the book where the author wants the audience/reader to engage, to listen to what is being sung as much as the narrative that was spoken by multiple characters before this. I still cannot decide if the author wants the reader to sing along as much as see the characters ability to play along with the performance of Dorus and Zelmane. So, here's my main issue: If the reader was previously engaged with the narrative and meeting of new characters who back track and tell the visiting or newly introduced character (usually Palladius, but not always) what all the drama is about (ex. scene with Helen of Corinth telling Palladius why she is crying) then how do the songs contribute to the narrator(s) ethos? I think the reader is pulled in by the story itself and for sake of two men dressed in drag, needs the song as performance (as I have already stated) but there must be something more to it.
I was tempted to say the singing competition between Dorus and Zelmane is a plot transition, as Boulton mentions songs are sometimes used for, but that might not hold up considering there are already more than a few plot shifts within the text (I'm glad they included a character summary after the introduction) before the Book One.
If I was forced to pick a function that seems to best suit the function of the song within the text, besides that it's communicative, is what Boulton dedicates his third chapter to: "using insertions to enhance the liveliness of the descriptions of celebrations and its development by his imitators." If Zelmane is truly is performing as woman, what better time and place to sing as a woman and express her ethos through this celebration of self?
In responding to the idea of texts/contexts, I am drawn foremost to the second eclogues and this sort of ludic casting of "the skirmish betwixt Reason and Passion."
ReplyDeleteTo me, this is a discourse that travels better than most. Casting this encounter in terms of the history of teaching composition (and arguably, the accompanying teaching of rhetoric), I first see some embodiment here of the cycles within the field that have been reduced to the terms "process" and "product," but for sake of this comparison could be more fruitfully be thought of as objectivist and subjectivist rhetoric (which has then taken on different guises [with modifications] as the tension of Romantic and Classical thought, the Elbow/Bartholomae debate, etc).
This song also seems to attempt a defusing of the Plato bomb--the argument in the Republic Book X of the dangers of the "honeyed muse" of poetry, the enemy of rationality. From what I have read on that issue, I take the side claiming that Plato was not arguing against poetry writ large, but a certain type of doubly imitative poetry or a poet who would mimic the "base" (whatever that might be). This song is stressing an interestingly dialogic interplay between the two faculties, in a nod almost to Walker's interpretation of the interplay andcommon lineage between rhetoric/poetic, something that, post-enlightenment, we have always wanted to tease apart and sequester.
I agree with Mandy that there seems to be a foreshadowing/parallel between embedded song in narrative and present-day musicals. Sung dialogue in musicals has always seemed a bit wonky to me-- and I've never quite understood its purpose (esp. in any fight scene.) Boulton suggests that (at least in medieval lyric poetry) music "had a great role in its affective impact" (7). Maybe... but why?
ReplyDeleteBoulton admits that, "...there is no inherent bond between the melody and particular words," so why bother singing them in the first place? The songs must be, by Boulton's definition, anyway, "communicative," as they are attributed to specific characters, but their communicative work happens during an almost intermission time in the text. This question has been raised and discussed, but I'm still confused-- are the eclogues "supposed" to be embedded in the books? Or are they intended to be set off at the end of each? Perhaps their work is akin to the work of the chorus's songs between scenes in Greek drama.
I do think it's interesting that the songs in the eclogues take shape largely as competitions (whether more formal or just flaunting wit/ verbal prowess), whether between Dorus and Thrysis, Dicus and Dorus, or shepherds posing as Reason and Passion (definitely my favorite exchange.)
The back-and-forth does, as Jonny points out, does exhibit the skill of the "composers" but perhaps also sets up a framework for the latter songs? After getting in a few jabs, Reason offers, "We are too strong; but Reason seeks not blood," and Passion answers (later): "What shall we win by taking Reason's yoke?" They end by embracing; I wonder if song enables dramatic work to be accomplished because of its own self-awareness of its artifice (Boulton calls a version of this the "metadialogue")?
Evelyn—I’m thinking about your question about Demetas’s song (the first—chapter three) in how it prepares us for the rest of the songs. The thought didn’t occur to me as I read, it didn’t stick in my head like the songs-in-drag-that came later, but I’m glad you asked this question because it gave me a reason to re-look at that song and try to make better sense of it.
ReplyDeleteThe song is about Demeta’s pretty daughter, Mopsa, though I’m not sure if it’s Demeta’s but one of Mopsa’s suitors (“A pleasant fellow of my acquaintance set her praises in verse,” Kalandar recounts, p 77 in my version). Its purpose is to commit the beautiful woman’s shape to memory by comparing her traits to those of certain gods. The speaker needs a Muse in order to remember the way she looks-- “The Gods must help, and precious things must serve to shew her shape.” The song ends with the risqué allusion: “As for her parts unknown, which hidden sure are best:/ Happy be they which well-believe, and never seek the rest,” which changes the song to be a rhetorical device to say: ‘step off, she’s mine.’
In looking at it as a set-up, I’m not positive exactly how it works, though maybe there’s something in the fact that the singer says that his Muse escaped, and the next line comes from his own idea, which then lays out the rest of the song. It’s like he says: “I need the Muses’ help… Hey, I have an idea!” I’m not sure if we’re supposed to believe that we’re watching the Muse in action, or if we’re supposed to believe that he didn’t need the Muses after all.
We certainly know, from the songs later on and from the narrative sections, the people certainly depend on these Muses. In the same chapter, a little earlier, Kalander says that the Muses have chosen Arcadia as “their chief repairing place” (75 in my version) which I thought, though I may have misread, was his way of justifying why the shepherds were such good songsters. If so, the songs seem to have a restorative purpose—they are the means by which things get set right. And you know my thoughts went straight to Woody Guthrie, who said “A song is what’s wrong with the world and how to fix it.”
Another possibility for how the song might set up other songs is the mere fact that it’s about devotion to this woman, and that the woman is being protected, which might actually allude to Basilius’s daughters. And we know from later on that Basilius surrounds himself with shepherds and that their eclogues somehow symbolize ‘devotion’ fused with ‘recreation’ (83 in the next chapter, right after the letter). In this way, I’m thinking the songs, especially in the eclogues, are significantly supposed to serve as entertainment or recreation, but also somehow recharges the story (I like the way the word ‘recreation’ breaks down to ‘re-creation’). In that case, Boulton’s idea that songs interrupt narrative, when Sidney might be hoping that they pour more life into it. I suppose every author that chose to put a song into narrative probably thought this way, but it seems like Sidney is drawing more attention to that idea, maybe exploring it?
I'm interested in Boulton's application of Bakhtin's "dialogic" to lyric insertions. As Boulton describes, this term allows us to view lyric insertions not merely as related to the central narrative through juxtaposition but more so through conversation. This combination of styles and genres and forms, I think, allows the novel interspersed with song to acknowledge multiple realities or multiple aspects of a reality, as can be seen in Sidney's work (world invoked by narrative vs. idyllic work of the lyric) - and furthermore, these realities are in conversation with one another, are constantly informing and re-forming one another. In keeping with Bakhtin, the various forms included in Sidney's Arcadia also allow additional conversations to take place. For example, the formal conversations that occur over time, between works/authors, are also present in Sidney's Arcadia. In this way, I think Arcadia can be read as a conversation on (democratic?) governance - content-wise and formally.
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