Seguiremos defendiendo a España y a los españoles, aunque nos sigamos quedando solos, porque estar solos sin el apoyo de otros partidos políticos no nos importa, porque sabemos que estamos acompañados de millones de españoles. #EspañaSiempre #ApoyoLaMoción pic.twitter.com/IldMb2uBbb
— Javier Ortega Smith (@Ortega_Smith) September 30, 2020
miércoles, 30 de septiembre de 2020
#ApoyoLaMoción
El PSOE, mamporrero de la Antiespaña
Seguimos denunciando el blanqueamiento a Bildu pic.twitter.com/r9I3PJmGX1
— Carlos García Adanero (@GarciaAdanero) September 29, 2020
Nueva piel de Blogia
Mi viejo blog de Blogia, que aún anda por ahí, ha cambiado de repente de piel, sin que yo intervenga. Cualquier día se evaporará Blogia súbitamente (o Blogger, for that matter) pero de momento lo que ha hecho ha sido mudar o mutar de piel:
Sánchez, con los golpistas del PSOE
Sánchez lamenta la retirada del nombre de Largo Caballero y dice que los madrileños no olvidarán su lucha por la libertad https://t.co/R1zUA7jpWI pic.twitter.com/Mw50TXDELQ
— Europa Press (@europapress) September 29, 2020
Sin complejos y sinvergüenza:
En la sesión de control Sánchez recomienda al PP que no defienda al Rey porque por defender la unidad de España estamos “como estamos” en Cataluña. “Tenga cuidado”, le dice...No tiene vergüenza.
— Rosa Díez (@rosadiezglez) September 30, 2020
—oOo—
Bibliografía sobre Vico
Me citan en esta bibliografía sobre Vico:
Peone, Dustin. "Works on Giambattista Vico in English from 2009 to 2018." Institute for Vico Studies, Emory U. Online at Academia.*
https://www.academia.edu/37129523/
2020
—oOo—
martes, 29 de septiembre de 2020
lunes, 28 de septiembre de 2020
René Girard sur Antigone
René Girard. (...) La lecture non sacrificielle que je propose ne cherche nullement à effacer des Évangiles les passages qui nous présentent la mort du Christ comme dévouement absolu aux disciples et à l'humanité entière: "Il n'est pas de plus grande preuve d'amour que de mourir pour ses amis" (Jn 15, 13). Remarquons une fois de plus que jamais dans les Évangiles cette preuve n'est définie comme sacrifice. Chez Paul, ce sont des expressions comme "œuvre d'amour" ou "œuvre de grâce" qui lui peuvent être considérés comme métaphoriques en raison de l'absence de toute théorie proprement sacrificielle, analogue à celle de l'Épître aux Hébreux ou à toutes les théories subséquentes.
Le recours au jugement de Salomon permet de traiter comme elle mérite de l'être l'objection dérisoire de masochisme machinalement opposée par les courtiers en démystification à la notion chrétienne du dévouement jusqu'à la mort.
Guy Lefort: Dans la littérature tragique, il existe un texte, je pense, qu'on peut rapprocher du jugement de Salomon et un personnage qu'on peut comparer à la "bonne prostituée"; c'est Antigone.
René Girard: Notons d'abord qu'au début d'Antigone, on se trouve "comme d'habitude" chez les tragiques et les prophètes, au paroxysme de la violence réciproque. C'est cela, il me semble, que symbolise, ou désymbolise, la mort simultanée d'Etéocle et de Polynice, l'impossibilité de différencier jusque dans la mort. On ne peut jamais dire ou nier quoi que ce soit d'un des deux frères sans qu'il ne faille aussitôt le dire ou le nier de l'autre. Tout le problème de la violence est là. C'est bien pourquoi Créon entend différencier les frères ennemis; mais il est frappant de constater qu'au ébut de son premier discours dans Antigone, il donne une formule analogue à celles qu'on trouve aussi chez Eschyle et chez Euripide et qui dit, justement, l'impossibilité de toute différence:
Dans leur double destin, les deux frères ont péri en un seul jour, donnant et recevant les coups de leurs bras iniques.
Euripide, lui, termine ainsi dans les Phéniciennes la description du combat:
... la poussière aux dents, et chacun meurtrier de l'autre, ils gisent côte à côte, et le pouvoir entre eux n'est pas déapartagé.
En bon chef d'État, comme l'Ulysse de l'Odysée et le Caïphe de l'Évangile, Créon voudrait bien mettre fin à la peste des doubles et il sait qu'il ne peut y parvenir qu'en maudissant un des deux frères et en bénissant l'autre, exactement comme le vieil Isaac dans l'histoire tout à fait parallèle de la bénediction de Jacob.
Si Créon exige que les Thébains soient unanimes, dans leur exécration de Polynice, c'est parce qu'il reconnaît que seule l'unanimité peut conférer à la victime émissaire le pouvoir de restructurer la communauté.
C'est pourquoi Créon ne peut pas tolérer le comportement d'Antigone. Antigone s'oppose au mensonge mythologique; elle dit que les doubles sont identiques et qu'il faut les traiter l'un et l'autre de la même façon. Elle dit la même chose, en somme, que le Christ et c'est comme lui qu'elle doit mourir, expulsée elle aussi par la communauté.
Simone Weil, avec son intuition admirable, a reconnu dans Antigone la figura Christi la plus parfaite de tout le monde antique. Elle a mis l'accent sur le vers prodigieux que Sophocle met dans la bouche de son héroïne et qui énonce la vérité de la cité des hommes. Ce vers qu'on traduit généralement par: "Je ne suis pas née pour partager la haine mais l'amour" signifie littéralement: "Non pour haïr ensemble mais pour aimer ensemble, je suis née." La cité des hommes n'est un aimer ensemble que parce qu'elle est aussi un haïr ensemble et c'est ce fondement de haine qu'Antigone, comme le Christ, amène au jour pour le répudier.
A Créon qui ne peut que lui répéter la vieille scie de toutes les cultures humaines: "On ne peut quand même pas traiter les amis comme les ennemis" (lui qui avouait un peu plus tôt la non-différence des deux frères). Antigone répond: "Qui sait si les dieux, en dessous de nous [en dessus de nous?] veulent vraiment cela? (cette différence que tu réclames entre les bons et les méchants)."
Ce vers suggère ce que les Évangiles rendent complèttemnt explicite: si la divinité existe, elle ne peut pas s'intéresser aux querelles des doubles.
Si grand que soit le texte de Sophocle, on ne peut pourtant pas, selon moi, la mettre sur le même plan que le texte du jugement de Salomon. C'est dans le contexte des rites funéraires refusés par Créon à Polynice qu'Antigone élève sa protestation. Ce n'est pas pour un enfant vivant, comme la prostituée du livre des Rois, qu'elle accepte de mourir, c'est pour un être déjà mort; et à cause de cela, le texte d'Antigone échappe plus difficilement que celui des Rois à une définition sacrificielle. Il n'a pas la même puissance de révélation. La différence entre le texte tragique et le texte biblique, c'est au texte évangelique, bien entendu, qu'il faut demander de la ddéfinir. Seul le texte tragique est passible d'une observation qui revèle ici son sens: Il faut laisser les morts enterrer les morts (Mt 8, 22).
Il est regrettable, assurément, que la puissance d'attention de Simone Weil ne se soit jamais orientée vers les grands textes de l'Ancien Testament. Elle en était empêchée par sa fidélité aux pires aberrations du milieu intellectuel dont elle faisait partie. Tous ses maîtres, comme le philosophe Alain, étaient des humanistes hellénisants qui lui ont inculqué à l'égard du texte biblique l'espèce d'horreur sacrée qui caractérise la pensée moderne dans son ensemble, à quelques exceptions près, genéralement discréditées et privées de toute influence.
(René Girard et al., Des Choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (Le Livre de Poche), 348-51).
René Girard, La Violence au cœur des sociétés
—oOo—
Expediente Royuela: Novedades Sobre el Mayor Escándalo Político y Social de la Historia de España
Hay una cosa tan escandalosa como el escándalo en sí... o quizá más: el hecho de que no sea escándalo
—para la prensa y los políticos, que guardan escrupuloso silencio al respecto. Y para el rebaño, claro.
Ese escándalo, el escándalo de lo que es la opinión pública en España, y su manipulación, se hace mayor con cada día que pasa.
Rosillo, Pedro. "Expediente
Royuela: Novedades sobre el mayor escándalo político y social de la historia de
España." Video. YouTube (El Arconte)
27 Sept. 2020.*
2020
Se trata aquí sobre trapos sucios de:
Pablo Iglesias; PSOE; Masonería; Corrupción en el Tribunal Supremo y Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Cataluña; Judicatura española y magistrados corruptos; Juicios amañados y compra de sentencias; Crimen organizado; Mafia; Corrupción policial y de forenses; Sentencias prevaricadoras, Chantaje; Fiscales criminales, Evasión de impuestos, Abortos; Asesinatos, Mafia, Denuncias falsas que prosperan y denuncias verdaderas que se ignoran, Fiscales y Jueces criminales; Periciales caligráficas; tráfico de drogas; Amaño de evidencia y denuncias falsas; Sicarios; Espionaje.... y Corrupción a gran escala en la justicia española.
Y los principales implicados (criminales o víctimas) mencionados en el vídeo son:
José Mª Mena, Carlos Jiménez Villarejo; Luis Esquirós; Javier Royuela Samit; Jorge Xurigué Blanch; María Mena Maiqués, Carlos Jiménez Villarejo; Carlos Jiménez Jorquera; José Antonio Cano Vidal; Jorge González San Martín; Jorge Juan Pérez Sanjurjo; Rafael García Ruiz; Francisco Garrido Villardel; Juan Manuel García Peña; Juan Manuel Borego Sanz; Pedro Sánchez Sánchez, Carlos Morín Gamarra; Carlos Sánchez Villaverde; Rafael Picaso Marco; Jorge Irigaray García de la Serrana; María Eugenia Alegret Burgués; María Teresa Compte Massachs; Montserrat Tura Camafreitas; Ignacio Sánchez García-Porrero; José Carretero Domenech; Carlos Alberto Bolaña Rabade; Emilio Bazzacco; José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero; Cándido Conde-Pumpido; José Antonio Martín Pallín; Elisabeth Castelló Fontova; Javier Arzúa Arrugaeta; Pedro Martín García; María José Magaldi Paternostro; José Luis Valverde Villarreal; Josep Arimany i Manso; Ernest Maragall; José Antonio Cano Vidal a.k.a. "Martín Gordillo"; Jorge González San Martín; Guillem Vidal Andreu; Gerard Thomas Andreu; Enrique Sarasola Marulanda; Mariano Fernández Bermejo; Santiago Vidal Marsal; Arbitrium abogados; Gian Luigi Gigli; Ginemedex; Victoria Virtudes, Clínicas Dator; Nuria Pola; Nestor Quartino; Miguel Mas Salvado; Felipe González; Enrique Granados Gancedo; Tribunal Supremo; Juan Fernando López Aguilar; Javier de la Rosa; "Operación Chumi', murder of confidents; Marc Junyent Craf; Mercedes de Pablo Vinaixa; Antonio Guerra González; CONCAPA - José Albiol Verdecho e hija; Cesáreo Rodríguez Aguilera; Guillermo Castelló Guilabert; Mariano Barbero Santos; clan Calabrese; Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado; Alfonso de Borbón Medina; Antonio Herrero Lima; Alfredo Pérez Vega; Joaquín Viola Tarragona; Jorge de Caralt Garriga y Pablo de Caralt Vicente-Arche; Carlos Ferrer Salat; Alberto Pindado González; Alejandro de Mora y Aragón; José Mª Bofill de Quadras; Juan Guerra; Manuel Segura Viudas; Ricardo Arriaga Suñé; Jesús Gil; Salvador Viada; Sergio Rodríguez Leal; Casa Real (Felipe VI); José Luis Gimeno Roses; Pablo José Otero Negreira; Miguel Pietro Cuervo —y otros. Margarita Robles; Martín Rodríguez Sol; Amigo Palau; Grande Marlaska, Carod-Rovira; Herri Batasuna.
Y el amaño del atentado del 11-M.
Una cosa que no denuncia ni Vox
—oOo—
The Restoration (Barnard)
Ch. 7 from A Short History of English Literature, by Robert Barnard (2nd ed.):
The Restoration
In the popular English imagination, the Restoration of 1660 is one of those watersheds of history, a period when the whole atmosphere changed from that of a gloomy prayer-meeting to one of licence, ribaldry and unashamed pleasure. No doubt the popular view is nonsense as far as the vast majority of the inhabitantes of the British Isles were concerned: the average villager (and Britain was still very much a rural civilization) would doubtless have registered that church services had regained a little of their old ceremony, that country pastimes such as maypole-dancing were no longer to be regarded as works of the devil, but there would have been no great change otherwise in their lives. It needed more than a new regime in Whitehall to change the patterns of existence in Little Totham by the Wold.
But in so far as the king set the tone for metropolitan life and the life of the gentry in general there is a grain of truth in the popular myth. The new ruling class—many of whom, like the King, had spent formative years in exile on the Continent—looked to France for their culture and their manners; the dominant tone of the Court and of upper-class London life in general was gay, cynical and permissive. The King himself—in every way the opposite of his virtuous, domestic and unwise father—used all his considerable political skills to avoid 'going on his travels again'; he was gregarious, democratic in his habits, unashamedly promiscuous. Londond gossip fell delightedly on the doings of his mistresses, from the flagrant Duchess of Castlemaine, busty, greedy and vicious, to the charming and earthy Nell Gwynne. It was all very different from Oliver Cromwell's time.
One inevitable consequence of Charles II's jubilant and acclaimed return was the reopening of the theatres: the thirst for drama was such that he had hardly set foot on English soil before troupes of actors were being formed and the old plays dusted down. Nevertheless, when things settled down, the new theatres were physically and spiritually very different from the old. For a start, the theatre confirmed the trend of the pre-Commonwealth stage: it moved entirely indoors. It was roofed in, lit by artificial lighting, with scenery, and the stage area divided off from the audience by the proscenium arch (though in early years there was an 'apron' out into the audience, one tiny relic of Elizabethan customs). In addition, the female roles were now played by women, as on the Continent—an innovation which was made, according to Charles, 'in the interests of morality,' though the reverse might have been a more honest justification. All these changes marked great gains for the theatre as a place of illusion, though many of them involved a loss of that speed, vigour and free play of the imagination which had characterised Elizabethan theatre at its best.
Charles was no more anxious than the city worthies of Elizabethan times that the theatre (though it provided him, in one way or another, with his main forms of entertainment) should blossom in an unrestricted manner. Performances in London were licensed, and restricted to two companies. Perhaps the most significant fact about Restoration drama is this: until the end of the century two theatre, and often only one, supplied the needs of play-going London; yet even so, plays were seldom performed more than five or six times, the performances frequently being little better than shambles. Nothing could more vividly illustrate the contraction of the audience for drama than this. The theatre may have attracted a fair cross-section of the nation, but it was a very tiny segment, and in the middle and lower reaches the theatre-goers were only typical of the more 'liberated' members (the diarist Samuel Pepys is a good example). The theatre was no longer the mirror of the nation, but was dominated by a small, like-minded clique, who looked to the theatre to confirm its prejudicesm cynicisms and aristocratic illusions.
One sees this very clearly in the comedies of the time: the principal characters are generally drawn from the charmed circle of aristocratic life in the metropolis, and anyone outside that circle is a booby, a villain or a butt. The city businessman or the rural squire is equally to be ridiculed and deceived. There are, to be sure, fools within the charmed cirlce: elegance overdone becomes foppery, and is mocked; amorousness in women is admirable until the lady becomes middle-aged, then it is depicted as a ravening fever close to nymphomania. But as a whole the characters display the qualities that were admired: balance, judgment and cool, cynical sense. The dramatists, in other words, turned a blind eye to the uglier sides of aristocratic life under Charles—to the violence, the disease, the exhaustion of excess. The court wanted to see themselves as an exquisitely refined elite, as the witty custodians of civilized values. And that, for the most part, was how they were shown.
One of the few playwrights who was a partial exception to this was William Wycherley (?1640-1716). He was himself a fringe member of the Court circle (he was one of the many lovers of the Duchess of Castlemaine, which argued a strong constitution rather than a delicate stomach), yet he seems to have been as much repelled as attracted by it. There is no doubt he perceived the heartlessness and hypocrisy behind the elegance and charm. He seems to have been a tormented, uncomfortable, bitter man, a moralist and a libertine, a strange mixture of old values and new. The contradictions find expression in his plays. The Country Wife, the most famous of them, was for two centuries unperformed in its original version, thought in our own more lax time it is perhaps the most frequently revived Restoration comedy. It has two concurrent, intersecting plots. In one Horner, a London gallant, has the rumoiur spread through town that—as a result of an unsuccessful operation for the pox—he is now impotent. The result is that whereas once he was the terror of all husbands, they now rush to offer their wives to him, seeing him as a harmless companion for them while they, the husbands, go about their own business. The wives, once the secret has been revealed to them, enthusiastically play along, for they are voracious harpies to a woman. The second plot concerns Pinchwife, an elderly roué, who has married a 'country wife' much younger than himself. Much of the action concerns his attemps, inevitably vain, to keep her faithful to him, and culminates with Horner's both cucolding Pinchwife yet managing to keep his secret safe.
Wycherley's satiric flail cuts to left and right: sex-crazed wives, negligent husbands, reformed rakes and foolish men of fashion fall beneath its blade. Words change meaning in the mouths of these fashionable hypocrites: 'honour'—as in the phrase 'man' or 'woman of honour'—becomes synonymous with dishonour, unchastity, limitless sexual appetite, similarly with 'reputation,' which means nothing but a false front. In the famous 'China' scene, a masterpiece of elegant obscenity, Lady Fidget, who has been copulating with Horner in the next room, emerges holding a piece of his china collection, and in the ensuing dialogue 'china' gains a monstrous patina of sexual significances:
LADY FIDGET: I have been toiling and moiling for the prettiest piece of china, my dear.
HORNER: Nay, she has been too hard for me, do what I could.
MRS SQUEAMISH: Oh Lord, I'll have some china too. Good Mr Horner, don't think to give other people china and me none; come in with me too.
HORNER: Upon my honour, I have none left now.
MRS SQUEAMISH: Nay, nay, I have known you deny your china before now, but you shan't put me off so. Come.
HORNER: This lady had the last there.
LADY FIDGET: Yes, indeed, madam, to my certain knowledge he has no more left.
MRS SQUEAMISH: O, but it may be he may have some you coulde not find.
LADY FIDGET: What, d'ye think if he had had any left, I would not have had it too? for we women of quality never think we have china enough...
The elegant indiscretion of this is not altogether typical of Wycherley. More often his wit has a whiplash quality: the innate honesty of Wycherley's mind cuts through pretence, it shouts 'Look how things really are':
HORNER: But prithee, was not the way you were in better? Is not keeping [a mistress] better than marriage?
PINCHWIFE: A pox on't! the jades would jilt me. I could never keep a whore to myself.
HORNER: So, then you only married to keep a whore to yourself.
What modern critics find puzzling, even disturbing about Wycherley is what were his positives: they find it inconceivable that Horner the libertine should be able to waltz through the play, bedding women right, left and centre, yet should find himself at the end unexposed, quite prepared to continue with his rake's progress. Why, the man even seems to be happy! In bewilderment, critics have called him a 'horned beast', a shell of a man unable to find real emotional fulfilment; one critic has even called the joyous seduction of the delightful Margery Pinchwife 'moving drama, the result of a realistic imagination as powerful, almost, as Ibsen's.' That is not hjow it seems in performance. On stage the play becomes a delighted celebration of Horner's enterprise, initiative and cunning. And I have little doubt that that was what Wycherley intended.
Most Restoration dramatists made more effort than Wycherley to cover a brutal sexual code under a cloak of elegance and wit. The typical Restoration comedy plot concerns the efforts of a gentleman of fashion to disencumber himself of stale amorous entanglements, and win the hand of the heroine, who is, typically virtuous (for double standards prevail for almost all the dramatists except Wycherley), witty, and 'a good match' from the financial point of view. Dorimant, in Etherege's Man of Mode, is the archetypal Restoration hero: his attitude to women has been described by John Wain the novelist as a sort of 'fighter-pilot's mentality: he wants to get them before they get him.' After several acts in which we have seen his ruthless, contemptuous, purely accumulative attitude to women, it is not easy to get any warm, pleasurable feeling when finally he wins the charming Harriet. But perhaps, we are not meant to; perhaps hoping for such a feeling is a modern sentimentalism. To most Restoration writers marriage seems to be less of a matter of love than of dynastic necessity: one married to perpetuate one's line, and the honeymoon is no more than an interlude between pursuing beddable women and pursuing more beddable women. It is hard to take. At least Wycherley did not commit the hypocrisy of granting Horner a happy marriage at the end of The Country Wife.
The most elegant of all the Restoration writers was Congreve (1670-1729) and it is in his work that the uglinesses of the age were transmuted into something infinitely witty, imaginative and delicate. Even his butts—the country boobies, the ageing but amorous women of fashion—express their oddities with such verbal distinction that the edge is taken of the brutality. In his masterpiece The Way of the World the elderly Lady Wishfort (i.e. wish-for-it, and the reader should be able to guess what she wished for) is a case in point. An absurd, posturing, amorously optimistic creature, her language removes her into a realm of artificiality and fantasy, so that she becomes almost a person of distinction. She is not a butt, more an oddly misshapen pottery firm. Her misuse of the English language is more subtle and imaginative than Sheridan's Mrs. Malaprop in the next century, and less likely to bore on repetition: 'You must not attribute my yielding to any sinister appetite, or indigestion of widowood, nor impute my complacency to any lethargy of continence. I hope you do not think me prone to any iteration of nuptials.' It is mostly when she is emotionally disturbed by a member of the opposite sex who might (with luck) have designs on her that her language becomes deranged. At other times it has a directness that is still imaginative yet precise: 'I look like an old peeled wall.'
With Congreve, in fact, we move away from comedy as social comment and towards comedy as fantasy. When Millamant, the heroine, comments that when she does her hair she always uses poetry for curl-papers, because it never will sit pleasantly with prose, we are very close indeed to the world of Oscar Wilde. This makes it difficult to see the progress of Millamant and her admirer Mirabel towards a modus vivendi that will enable them to endure married life as anything as serious as a 'rationalization of sex', as some critics have called it. It is true that the high-point of the play is the scene in which both of them state their terms for matrimony, the necessary conditions which will render marriage tolerable enough for Mirabel to give up his life of promiscuous pleasure and for Millamant to (as she puts it) 'dwindle into a wife.' But since the conditions put forward by both of them all concern the conduct and rights of the wife, its nby no means easy to see the scene as a serious or impartial investigation of the state of marriage. In fact, if we bring any sort of moral code to bear on the play at all, Mirabel's actions throughout are nothing short of loathsome. It is Congreve's achievement that he persuades us to leave such codes along with our hats and coats in the cloackroom, and enter a world of high, fantastic comedy, purged of the grossness of earlier Restoration plays.
There was good reason why the blatant crudities of Wycherley and Etherege had been refined out of Congreve's style. In the closing years of the century there had been published Jeremy Collier's Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, in which Congreve had been singled out for attack, though for the wrong reasons. Collier, like the Elizabethan puritans before him, saw the theatre as a sink of iniquity, a place where vice was recommended and virtue ridiculed. His ire was in no way diminished by the existence of a more elevated sort of play in the Restoration theatre: the heroic tragedy. These plays, classical in conception, French in inspiration, were often full of splended rhetorical poetry (Dryden's All for Love is the best known example but Otway's Venice Preserved is perhaps more theatrically viable), yet their expressions of invincible heroism and undying loves are ultimately unconvincing, and sit uneasily in the English dramatic tradition. Collier's attack was most opportunely timed: in 1698 the hectic, permissive world of the Restoration was gone; since the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which chased out the Catholic James II, a Dutchman had occupied the throne, worthily and unspectacularly; the revels were over, responsibility and dullness reigned.
Restoration comedy never really recovered from the attempt to clean it up. Perhaps it was unscrubbable. In the early years of the eighteenth century there werer several lively, eminently stageworthy plays: Farquhar's The Beaux' Stratagem and The Recruiting Officer are works of no great distinction, but they can still charm audiences in performance. But when the middle-classes started tricling back to the theatres and demanding a more sentimental, more overtly moral typ of comedy, the stage was set for a long period of decline in the British theatre.
If we look in vain to most Restoration dramas for firm principles, for consistent moral and social attitudes, these qualities were to be foun in abundance in the greatest poet of the age. John Dryden (1631-1700). This may seem odd at first sight: Dryden began his poetic career with Heroic stanzas to the Glorious Memory of Cromwell yet spent most of his life as a defender of the restored Stuart sovereings; he wrote one long poem in defence of the Protestant religion as enshrined in the Church of England, and another, after his conversion, in parise of Catholicism. Nevertheless, the old gibes that Dryden was a truncoat and a time-server could not be further from the truth. Like many who grow up in times of social upheaval (his adolescence covered the period of the Civil war, his young manhood the dictatorship of Cromwell), his first commitment was to public order, to a strong, accepted central authority. Radical or revolutionary movements seemed to him at best to bring dubious benefits, at the cost of certain misery. Authoritarian rule which sprang from and respected the ancient traditions of the country seemed infinitely better than (what he saw as) a democracy supported by a rabble and led by power-crazed egotists. It was inevitable that Dryden should support the country's legitimate monarchs, inevitable that his religious quest should lead him finally to the Catholic Church.
It is Dryden's political ideas, and his political gut-reactions too, that give such strength and urgency to his greatest satire, Absalom and Achitophel. It was written to order, about a particular situation at a particular time, the 'Catholic plot' crisis of 1679-1681, and it was intended to influence the situation. In the late 1670s the joy that had greeted Charles II's Restroation had given way to scepticism and disillusion: restorations always bring disappointment, for they are expected to restore times which are gone forever. A new opposition party began grouping, consisting of members of the gentry who felt they had failed to get their just rights, puritans who had opposed the Restoration throughout, traditional Parliamentarians, and Protestants with a genuine and deep-rooted fear of the Catholic Church. The catalysts of the crisis was an exceedintly unsavoury character called Titus Oates, a man with a Catholic past, a dubious theological degree (like Dr Ian Paisley in our own day, and the comparison need not end there) and a new-found but loud devotion to the Protestant religion. It was Oates's 'revelation' of a series of Catholic plots centred on Charles's brother and heir, James, Duke of York, and involving Charles's Catholic queen, that brought this heterogeneous opposition together. Soon anti-Catholic hysteria gripped the nation in much the same way that anti-witchcraft hysteria was to grip American Salem not long afterwards. The opposition began to demand the exclusion from the succesion of the Catholic Duke of York, and the adoption of Charles's illegitimate son the Duke of Monmouth (the white Protestant hope) as heir to the throne.
It was into this situation that Dryden weighed with his scoriating satire Absalom and Achitophel. His choice of a biblical parallel to the present situation was a stroke of genius. Charles II becomes King David from the Old Testament, and at once his profligacy takes on a new, attractive, even a spiritual look:
In pious times, e'er priestcraft did begin,
Before polygamy was made a sin;
When man on many multiplied his kind,
E'er one to one was cursedly confined,
When nature prompted, and no law denied
Promiscuous use of concubine and bride;
Then Israel's monarch, after Heaven's own heart,
His vigorious warmth did, variously, impart
To wives and slaves: and, wide as his command,
Scattered his Maker's image through the land.
Thus the loose moraled Charles is transformed into David, father of his people, living in the days before monogamy was ordained, and before priests of varying religions began causing trouble and restricting natural pleasures (Dryden was no friend to priests of any religion: it is worth looking closely at the first line, with its suggestion that priests diminish rather than increase piety, and its wicked pun on the word 'craft'). Sexual licence becomes 'vigorous warmth'—something good and (literally and metaphorically) life-giving. Charles's habit of scattering bastards in his wake is transformed into something like largesse—a shower of gold descending on his subjects: 'scattered his maker's image through the land.'
After a no-holds-barred description of the English (called here, of course, the Jews) as 'a headstrong, moody, murmuring race,' and one that had veered from religion to religion over the last century of so ('Gods they had tried of every shape and size / That God-smiths could produce, or priests devise'), Dryden comes to the heart of his poems and his pupose. This is a series of satirical portraits of the main conspirators against Charles II. Dryden is one of the great artists of the satirical portrait, the thumbnail sketch of a man that utterly demolishes his reputation and credibility, and at the same time both establishes him as an eternal type and suggests general reflections on human nature. For example, the Earl of Shaftesbury ('Achitophel'—one of the main conspirators, and evil genius to the young Duke of Monmouth) is depicted as fiery, turbulent, cunning, the incurable and perennial conspirator, and a man 'for close designs and crooked counsels fit.' Then Dryden broadens out the picture to establish him as a type: he makes him into a crazed, over-venturesome sailor, good in high seas, but bored in calm waters:
Pleased with the danger, when the waves went high,
He sought the storms; but, for a calm unfit,
Would steer too nigh the sands to boast his wit.
And then he immediately comes in with a trenchant couplet of generalized reflection that has become the classic quote to describe not only the brilliant political adventurer, but all erratic men of genius—a quote that is as relevant in our own days as in his:
Great wits are sure to madness near allied
And thin partitions do their bounds divide . . .
The portraits in this rogues' gallery range from the crude, comptentuous daub to the most subtle pieces of ironic brushwork. Exuberant mud-slinging is good enough for the mean, slippery Sheriff of London, who 'Did wisely from expensive sins refrain, / And never broke the Sabbath but for gain.' More subtle arts of destruction were called for by the various, talented, changeable Duke of Buckingham ('Zimri'), who, according to Dryden, changed sides as he would his coat, dabbled in everything and excelled in nothing:
Stiff in opinion, always in the wrong,
Was everything by stats, and nothing long:
But in the course of one revolving moon
Was chemist, fiddler, statesman and buffoon.
The placing of those last four nouns is in itself a lesson in the techniques of satire.
If these portraits are the central achievement of the poem, Dryden shows almost equal mastery in the action of the poem, which is mainly a dialogue between Achitophel and Absalom (the Duke of Monmouth) in which, amid echoes of Paradise Lost, Achitophel takes on Satanic dimensions as the tempter, and Absalom becomes the weak, narcisssistic pawn in a political game he barely understands (for Charles loved Monmouth, as David did Absalom, and any more culpable involvement could not be suggested). The poem is by turns subtle, vigorous, dangeerous and uproarious — atriumph of suggestion, tact and sheer impish cleverness. It has claims to be the greatest satire in our language.
Dryden's other great satire is MacFlecknoe, in which a rival poet, Thomas Shadwell, author of some bad poetry and some lively and very dirty plays, is crowned King of Dullness by his predecessor Flecknoe (another dreadful poet):
Shadwell alone my perfect image bears,
Mature in dullness from his tender years;
Shadwell alone of all my sons is he
Who stands confirmed in full stupidity.
The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense.
But we should not forget that Dryden is not just a satirist. In fact, he can claim to be among the most various poets in our language. He was a master of the Ode, with two outstandingly brilliant Odes to St Cecilia (patron saint of music), of which the second, Alexander's Feast shows him still at the height of his technical powers, and still experimenting, in the last years of his life. His tributes to friends and kinsmen (for example To the Memofy of Mr Oldham) are as positive and sober as his satire is destructive and hilarious. His occasional poems (such as that celebrating the return of Charles II from exile, or Annus Mirabilis, in which he depicts the year of the Great Fire of London and the Plague) are much above the average for such productions, and no doubt gained him the Poet Laureateship (he was one of the few to hold this office while still wriring good poetry). His poems on serious and religious matters are restrained but often moving statements, and his translations are frequently brilliant — he made Chaucer available again after generations of neglect due to the transformations of the language since his time. We know virtually nothing of Dryden the man. If we judge him from his poetry he was versatile, trenchant, contemplative, witty, and supremely sane.
Dryden stood alone among Restoration poets; there were others with talent, notably the Earl of Rochester, whose life of daring and varied debauchery, ending in that ultimate debauch a death-bed repentance, intefered with his poetry too greatly for him ever to do justice to his talent. But there is something in the literary history of the Restoration period which is of reater significance for the future than any bouquet of minor poets: this is a vigorous crop of prose writers, forging a prose idiom to march the already established dramatic and poetic idioms. Aubrey's Brief Lives of his contemporaries are quirky and delightful contributions to the as yet new art of biography, and we get an even more vivid picture of notable personalities from the best diaries of the period, notably Evelyn's and Pepys's.
But of all the writers in thie new and rather difficult medium of prose the one whose influence was greatest was John Bunyan (1628-1688), for his Pilgrim's Progress was staple reading for generations, the sort of book that is read first in childhood (as George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver reads it) and constantly returned to for delight and spiritual refreshment thereafter. Modelling his prose on the Bible (the influence of the 1611 Authorized Version of the Bible on English prose cannot be exaggerated), he describes the pilgrimage that to him life was in the from of an allegory. Christian, the principal pilgrim, travels with other like-minded people of varying degrees of determination and genuine piety through a series of perils — natural, human and supernatural — to his destined heaven. Bunyan's experience as a preacher (in and out of jail) is obvious, but so is his natural talent as a story-teller, and his feeling for language that is at once simple, fortright, homely, yet vivid.
A very different sort of narrative was that provided by Aphra Behn (1640-1689), the first woman writer to be mentioned in this survey (and, alas, it will be a century before another gains a place). Mrs Behn wrote a series of plays, notably comedies that went a good deal further in bawdy than even most male writers of the time. But what she is remembered for today is some prose narratives which are clearly stepping-stones from the Elizabethan short tale to the novel as we know it today. The best remembered of these is Oroonoko, the tale of a noble savage sold into slavery in Surinam. The impeccable nad high-toned moral sentiments of this noeble creature are not likely to appeal to the modern reader, but the believable setting and inter-racial relationships are the result of Aphra Behn's own stay in the colony. Aphra Behn created a narrative that seemes to people at the time to be not really fiction, but a documentary account of events and people that actually took place. Defoe in the next century created several such works, and they lead us directly to the novel proper.
By the Sword Divided - Restoration
—oOo—
Cien Mil Lecturas
Cien mil lecturas lleva (nada más en ResearchGate) mi capítulo sobre la Poética de Aristóteles. Muchas más todavía si sumamos las de otros repositorios donde está. No deja de sorprenderme mi éxito (sin cobrar) en ResearchGate. Semana tras semana recibo comunicados de que soy el más leído en mi universidad y en los principales campos temáticos en los que he trabajado, no sólo crítica y lingüística sino también Literatura, Filosofía, Análisis del Discurso a veces... El más leído del mundo, hay que suponer. Cosa que, como digo, si bien es halagadora, no deja de extrañarme. En el caso de este artículo la cosa es un poco más comprensible puesto que el que tiene arrastre realmente en este asunto no soy yo sino más bien Aristóteles.
—oOo—
domingo, 27 de septiembre de 2020
L'Idole Atomique
Un passage mémorable de René Girard sur la spécificité du moment historique de la mondialisation et la technologie après la 2ème Guerre Mondiale—sur la Bombe de l'Apocalypse, la violence sacrée, et l'ordre présent de la communauté mondiale.
René Girard (et al.), Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (Le Livre de Poche, p. 364-):
Ce que la violence apocalyptique doit d'abour révéler et la seule chose qu'elle puisse révéler directement, c'est la nature purement humaine et la fonction à la fois destructrice et culturelle de la violence.
Pour comprendre que nous vivons déjà cette révélation, il suffit de réfléchir au rapport que nous entretenons tous, en tant que membres de la communauté humaine mondiale à l'armement formidable que s'est donné l'humanité depuis la fin de la seconde guerre mondiale.
Quand les hommes parlent des moyens nouveaux de destruction, ils disent "la bombe" comme s'il n'y en avait qu'une et qu'elle appartenait à tout le monde et à personne, ou plutôt comme si le monde entier lui appartenait. Et elle apparaît en effet comme la Reine de ce monde. Elle trône au-dessus d'une foule immense de prêtres et de fidèles qui n'existent, semble-t-il, que pour la servir. Les uns enfouissent dans la terre les œufs empoisonnés de l'idole, les autres les déposent au fond des mers, d'autres encore en parsèment les cieux, faisant circuler sans fin les étoiles de la mort au-dessus de l'inlassable fourmilière. Il n'est pas la moindre parcelle d'une nature nettoyée par la science de toutes les antiques projections surnaturelles qui ne soit réinvestie par la vérité de la violence. De cette puissance de destruction, on ne peut pas ignorer, cette fois, qu'elle est purement humaine, mais, sous certains rapports, elle fonctionne de façon analogue au sacré.
Les hommes ont toujours trouvé la paix à l'ombre de leurs idoles, c'est-à-dire de leur propre violence sacralisée, et c'est à l'abri de la violence la plus extrême, aujourd'hui encore, qu'ils cherchent cette paix. Dans un monde toujours plus désacralis´, seule la menace permanente d'une destruction totale et immédiate empêche les hommes de s'entre détruire. C'est toujours la violence, en somme, qui empêche la violence de se déchaîner.
Jamais la violence n'a exercé plus insolemment son double rôle de "poison" et de "remède". Ce ne sonta pas les antiques bourreaux du pharmakos qui le disent, ce ne sont pas des cannibales emplumés, ce son nos spécialistes de la science politique. Seule, à les en croire, et nous pouvons les croire, l'arme nucléaire maintient de nos jours la paix du monde. Les spécialistes nous disent sans ciller que cette violence protège. Ils ont parfaitement raison, mais ils ne se rendent pas compte du son étrange que rendent de pareils propos au milieu d'un discours qui, pour tout le reste, continue à fonctionner comme si les humanismes qui l'inspirent, que ce soit celui de Marx, de Montesquieu, ou d'autres encore, étaient aussi valables que par le passé. Ils démontent les ressorts de la situation avec une maestria si tranquille et si terre à terre, sans jamais cesser de croire à la "bonté naturelle" de l'homme, qu'on se demande si, dans la vision de tous ces experts, c'est le ynisme qui l'emporte ou au contraire l'inconscience et la naiveté.
Quel que soit l'aspect sous lequel on l'envisage, la menace actuelle ressemble aux terreurs sacrées et réclame le même type de précautions. C'est toujours à des formes de "pollution" et de "contamination" qu'on a affaire, scientifiquement repérables et mesurables, mais qui n'en rappellent pas moins leurs contreparties religieuses. Et pour repousser le mal, il n'y a jamais d'autre moyen que le mal lui-même. Tout renoncement pur et simple à la technologies paraît impossible; la machine est si bien agencée qu'il serait plus dangereux de s'arrêter que de continuer à avancer. C'est au cœur même de la terreur qu'il faut chercher les moyens de se rassurer.
L'infrastructure cachée de toutes les religions et de toutes les cultures est en train de se révéler. C'est le vrai dieu de l'humanité que nous fabriquons de nos propres mains pour bien le contempler, celui qu'aucune religion désormais ne réussira plus à maquiller. Nous ne l'avons pas entendu arriver parce qu'il ne voyage plus sur les ailes palmées des anges des ténèbres, parce qu'il apparaît toujours désormais là où personne ne l'attend, dans les statistiques alignées par les savants, dans les domaines les plus désacralisés.
C'est un sens merveilleuxde l'à-propos qui suggère à leurs inventeurs, pour les armes les plus terribles, les noms qui évoquent le mieux la violence extrême, les divinités les plus atroces de la mythologie grecque: Titan, Poséidon, Saturne, le dieu qui dévore ses propres enfants. Nous qui sacrifions des ressources fabuleuses à engraisser la plus inhumaines des violences, pour qu'elle continue à nous protéger, et qui passons notre temps à transmettre à des planètes déjà mortes les messages dérisoires de la planète qui risque de mourir, par quelle hypocrisie extraordinaire prétendons-nous encore ne pas comprendre tous ces hommes qui, avant nous, faisaient déjà la même chose, ceux qui jetaient par exemple dans la fournaise d'un quelconque Moloch un seul de leurs enfants, deux tout au plus, afin de sauver les autres?
Le rapprochement s'impose, on le voit, entre la paix étrange que nous vivons et celle que faisaient jadis reigner, dans la plupart des sociétés, les religions proprement rituelles. Il faut se garder, pourtant, d'assimiler purement et simplement les deux groupes de pénomènes. Les différences, ici, importent plus encore que les ressemblances.
Si nous disons que les hommes "adorent" leur propre puissance destructive, c'est de façon métaphorique que nous parlons. La métaphore a une valeur révélatrice qui n'a rien d'illusoire. Dire que l'analogie est simplement rhétorique, ou qu'il s'agit, comme on dit aujourd'hui, d'un "effet de vérité", serait ridicule. De cette analogie, il y a une leçon à tirer, et nous ne pourrions pas la tirer si nous cédions au vertige du nihilisme cognitif qui triomphe partout à l'heure actuelle. Et pour cause!
Mais cette leçon n'est pas simple. Ce qui rende nos conduites actuelles analogues aux conduites religieuses, ce n'est pas une terreur vraiment sacrée, c'est une crainte parfaitement lucide des périls qu'un duel nucléaire ferait courir à l'humanité. La paix actuelle repose sur une appréciation froidement scientifique des conséquences uniformément désastreuses, peut-être même fatales, qu'aurait pour tous les adversaires l'utilistation massive des armes accumulées.
Les conséquences pratiques de cet état de choses sont déjà visibles dans les faits. Les préposés à l'utilisation des armes monstrueuses se gardent soigneusement de recourir à elles. Pour la première fois dans l'histoire des "grandes puissances", on voit des adversaires potentiels sincèrement désireux d'éviter toute action, toute situation susceptible d'entraîner un conflit majeur.
—oOo—
Tertulia de Federico: El asalto del Gobierno a la Justicia
______
Año y pico después:
Vega, Isabel. "La Fiscalía exonera a Don Juan Carlos." ABC 2 March 2022.*
https://www.abc.es/espana/abci-fiscalia-exonera-juan-carlos-202203021716_noticia.html
2022
Los muertos del Covid
Estos sí se acuerdan de nuestros muertos. Hoy. Un parque de Madrid. La Asociación Nacional de Víctimas y Afectados por Covid. pic.twitter.com/fwUEorwY8R
— Fernando Lázaro (@lazaroelmundo) September 27, 2020
Absolución del autor
Me citan en este artículo narratológico brasileño sobre la absolución del autor (casi digo amnistía o indulto):
Trentin Oliveira, Raquel. (U Federal de Santa Maria, raqtrentin@yahoo.com.br). "A absolvição do autor nos estudos narrativos contemporâneos." Gragoatá 25, n. Comemorativo (July 2020): 415-29
https://doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.v25iEsp.34213
Online at ResearchGate.*
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343382608
2020
Revista ésta publicada por el Instituto de Letras de la Universidad Federal Fluminense.
El río al que se refiere lo de "Fluminense" me imagino que es Rio de Janeiro, aunque la universidad está en Niterói:
—oOo—
sábado, 26 de septiembre de 2020
viernes, 25 de septiembre de 2020
Que Viva el Rey
Eso. Que cobre un poco de vida. Que parece su retrato.
— JoséAngelGarcíaLanda (@JoseAngelGLanda) September 25, 2020
No se puede ser neutral entre la ley y la traición—al menos no es ése el papel del Rey. Si su neutralidad le parece a Carmen Calvo exquisita, es que es perniciosa.
Actuación irresponsable del Rey
—oOo—
Telling Times
Me citan en History and Theory, en este artículo de Jonathan Carter sobre historiografía (David Carr) en teoría, y en la práctica sobre Batman y la compra de terrenos de aborígenes australianos en el siglo XIX.
(Carr, David. Time, Narrative, and History. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986):
Carter, Jonathan. "Telling Times: History, Emplotment, and Truth." History and Theory 42 (Feb. 2003): 1-27. Online at Academia.* (David Carr; John Batman; Aboriginals).
https://www.academia.edu/4435880/T
2020
—oOo—
Series Turcas
Me citan en este artículo turco sobre series de TV turcas, y la narrativización de la historia en ellas:
Erol Isik, Nuran. "Evaluating Narrativization Practices in Turkish TV Serials as a Venue of Popular Historiography." Türkiye İletişim Araştırmaları Dergisi 34 (2019): 183-95. (Resurrection, You Are My Homeland, Yunus Emre).
DOI 10.17829/turcom.518871
Online at Academia.*
https://www.academia.edu/42688954/
2020
Se llevan últimamente, las series turcas. Pero yo aún no he visto ninguna; de momento estamos con Ozark. Donde hay a todo tirar cabezas de turco.
Y recupero hoy otro artículo más sobre turcos y cabezas de turco, éste sobre Otelo:
_____. "Otelo siempre en Alepo (& A Malignant and a Turband Turke)." Net Sight de José Angel García Landa 21 Feb. 2016.*
https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/OteloAlepo.html
2020
—oOo—
Repitiendo el error del indulto a los golpistas
Lo del indulto a los golpistas ya sabemos cómo acaba: lecciones del 34 https://t.co/Umi4Mg5384
— Dolça Catalunya (@DolcaCatalunya) September 25, 2020
jueves, 24 de septiembre de 2020
A jamais, Juliette
Adiós a mi cantante favorita. Se quedan con nosotros sus canciones...
Muere Juliette Gréco, el último icono de la canción francesa https://t.co/fVvtpRdfy4 pic.twitter.com/bMUGPiImLo
— Lo De Cultura (@LoDeCultura) September 24, 2020
Sword of a Woman
Artículo sobre las diferencias sexuales en el cotilleo.
— Pablo Malo (@pitiklinov) September 24, 2020
“La lengua es la espada de una mujer, y nunca deja que se oxide".
-proverbio chino https://t.co/UkhcrimsEf
El Informe Royuela y la justicia
El informe Royuela y la justicia https://t.co/QHtZUrNDeN a través de @ElDiestro_
— JoséAngelGarcíaLanda (@JoseAngelGLanda) September 24, 2020
miércoles, 23 de septiembre de 2020
Bibliografía de Filología Hispánica
De años anteriores a 2013. Citan un artículo mío:
Quirós García, Mariano, and Rosabel SanSegundo Cachero. (Instituto de Lengua, Lingüística y Antropología, CCHS-CSIC). "Bibliografía." Revista de Filología Hispánica 93.2 (July-Dec. 2013): 361-467.*
Doi: 10.3989/rfe.2013.13
https://www.academia.edu/37521050/
2020
—oOo—
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