By Jonny Thakkar

It is by now well known that Bob Dylan fills his recent songs with lines taken from elsewhere. Just as ‘Love and Theft’ - whose very title is an ostentatious quotation, from the title of Eric Lott’s book about white singers coopting black culture - contains phrases from Virgil, Fitzgerald and Junichi Saga, as well as the usual panoply of blues artists, so the source of many Modern Times lyrics has been found to lie in Ovid and Henry Timrod. As Robert Polito points out, it may well turn out that every bit of speech on the album can be traced to some other work (1).

In composing an article on ‘Workingman’s Blues #2’ - the best song on Modern Times - I was forced to address this feature of Dylan’s latest album. Several explanations have been ventured, and I hope to add another shortly. Until then, I want first to suggest a way in which the problem has recently become deeper. We learn from Tell Tale Signs that the early version of ‘Ain’t Talkin’’ contains no Ovid references. Given that it ends up with nine, this is surprising. Are the references integral to the song, or mere adornments? How much interpretative pressure can we reasonably put on a song thrown together in the studio?

But my main purpose here is simply to add to the findings of Scott Warmuth, Cliff Fell and Richard Thomas (2) by suggesting further connections to both Ovid and Timrod in Modern Times and other works of that period. It is worth admitting at the outset that many of these are mere echoes, and therefore become plausible only in the context of the nineteen Ovid and sixteen Timrod references already found by others.

Ovid

Workingman’s Blues #2

1. Poems demand for the writer leisure and solitude: I’m tossed by sea and wind, savaged by winter. - Tristia, 1.1.42

Now, I’m sailin’ on back, ready for the long haul / Tossed by the winds and the seas

2. My tears flow uninterrupted except when I pass out, when a sleep like death stuns my senses. - Black Sea Letters 1.2.28-29

Sleep is like a temporary death

3. There’s no one alive today whom my words have wounded. - Black Sea Letters 4.14.44-5

You’ve wounded me with your words

Ain’t Talkin’

4. Of this I’ve no doubt - but the very dread of misfortune often drives me to nurse superfluous fears. - Black Sea Letters 2.7.5-6

I’m not nursing any superfluous fears

Someday Baby

5. He was making for his homeland, a cheerful victor: I was driven from mine - fugitive, exile, victim. - Tristia, 1.5.66

Now I’m going to drive you from your home, just like I was driven from mine

6. Though I often yearn to write about something else, I find myself slipping back into the same old rut. - Black Sea Letters, 4.15.33-4

I keep recycling the same old thoughts

The Levee’s Gonna Break

7. Look at me - I’ve lost my home, the two of you, my country, they’ve stripped me of all they could take - Tristia 3.7.46

Some of these people gonna strip you of all you can take

8. For the good I hoped from you, my friends, forgive me. I’ll not repeat that mistake. - Black Sea Letters, 3.7.10

I tried to get you to love me, but I won’t repeat that mistake

Beyond The Horizon

9. All this I’d sooner credit than think that you, my dearest comrade, have changed, have set aside your love for me. - Tristia 4.7.20

I still can’t believe that you’ve set aside your love for me

10. Provided always you make your repentance plain - Tristia, 4.9.4

My repentance is plain

11. ‘Yet it’s better (I think) that my friend’s zeal should have faded than that they should have pled for me in vain.’ - Black Sea Letters, 3.7.35-36

I’ve been pleading in vain (3)

Huck’s Tune

12. ‘Enough that I should live amid ice and Scythian arrows (if such a version of death can be called ‘life’.) - Black Sea Letters, 1.7.10

In this version of death called life

Masked & Anonymous

13. ‘Rather stretch out your arm for the weary swimmer to grasp at, don’t balk at holding up his chin!’ - Black Sea Letters 2.6.13-14

Would you reach out your hand to save a drowning man if you thought he might pull you in?

Timrod

Workingman’s Blues

1. And, if it may be, save / These sacred fields of peace / From stain of patriot or of hostile blood - The Cotton Boll

All across the peaceful sacred fields / They will lay you low

Spirit On The Water

2. ‘Burn your way to the heart!’ - Praeceptor Amat

You burned your way into my heart

3. ‘How then, O weary one! explain / The sources of that hidden pain?’ - Two Portraits

Can’t explain / The sources of this hidden pain

When The Deal Goes Down

4. ‘A simple, but still a most magical strain, / Its dim monotones have bewildered my brain - Vox Et Praeterea Nihil

My bewildered brain toils in vain (4)

5. ‘In my dreams, / I see it beaten by the midnight rain, / Or chilled beneath the moon.’ - A Mother’s Wail

The midnight rain follows the train

Huck’s Tune

6. ‘“Perhaps,” he said, “this lady and her elves / Will one day come, and take me to themselves.”’ - A Vision of Poesy

All the merry little elves can go hang themselves! (5)

Notes

(1) http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/feature.html?id=178703

(2) http://dylanchords.info/45_modern/timrod.html and journal.oraltradition.org/files/articles/22i/Thomas.pdf . One of Thomas’ examples appears to be erroneously cited: “there’s barely enough skin to cover my bones” is at Tristia 4.6.42, not 4.7.51.

(3) Oddly enough, bobdylan.com replaces this lyric evidently present on the album with ‘I ponder in vain’.

(4) Again, bobdylan.com has this inaccurately, as ‘bewildering brain’.

(5) This link is not clear at all, but nonetheless worth including for two reasons. First, it is a puzzling line which does not fit well with the rest of ‘Huck’s Tune’, and is therefore in need of explanation. Second, there are at least five references to elves in Timrod’s collected poems, making them one of the notable features of his work.

by Hamid Khanbhai

Only months before Rubber Soul, their first strong album, The Beatles released Help and that lyrical nadir, Another Girl. The song appears to be void of psychological and narrative interest. We are introduced to a nameless, amorphous and uncharacterised trio, the components of a scarcely delineated love triangle. The singer has found ‘another girl’ who is ‘new’, ‘sweeter [than quite a few]’, and while he ‘[doesn’t] want to say’ the current situation has made him unhappy, he has been persuaded to jump ship by the potential longevity of the alternative - ‘who will love me till the end/through thick and thin/she will always be my friend’. At the risk of over-reading, one could detect a faux-naivety in the chasteness pretended for the new relationship, or even a callous insouciance in the lazy sketchiness of the whole speech-excuse which is, after all, directed at the girl he is about to dump. In addition, there is an insistence in the song’s ratiocinatio that fails to convince, but does he believe he can get away with it? Has he that much of a hold on the girl that she will obediently let go? ‘I ain’t no fool’ he proclaims twice; quite truthfully, the zealous listener might reckon, when educing the genuine, licentious motivations in ‘Nobody in all the world can do what she can do’, with all its laid-back implications of supinely superior. Under, on top, every which way. But in continuation it becomes unclear who is under whose thumb. The singer almost pleads, ‘so I’m telling you, “this time you’d better stop” / For I have got another girl. Another girl’. This punter has a history of trying to push off, but for a pole always stuck in the mud. Who is he kidding anyway and what is stimulating this outburst: is the one whom we mistook for the hapless, (frigid?) girl actually the master of ceremonies, the real paramour who maintains silent control and wears the trousers when it boils down to break-up sex? Is Another Girl being sung to a coital rhythm where, naturally, the intonation and breathing of normal speech are impossible? If this were a tenable reading then the verse would structurally be better placed at the end. But it’s not.

Later in 1965 The Beatles tried their hand at writing some respectable lyrics¹. Norwegian Wood tells of yet another triste tryst. It was, however, such a departure from the saccharine chimes of previous albums and enough of an anomaly even on Rubber Soul to provoke speculation about whether Lennon and McCartney had fallen under the spell of someone like Bob Dylan. Blonde on Blonde, released the very next year during Dylan’s prolific early electric period, would have critics rewriting the score: who was influencing whom? Fourth Time Around was too evocative of Norwegian Wood for it to be a coincidence. Then again, it was seamlessly integrated into an album that was, in terms of the orchestration and the use of language, unmistakably Bob. Did Dylan play his song for the band when they met in 1964 at the Delmonico Hotel in New York? Were contemporaries right to read into the last lines a note of censure about borrowing compositional styles - “I never asked for your crutch; now don’t ask for mine”? Who really cares? This question of influence imposes too unidirectional a schema on the fertile ferment of the mid-sixties and is not important. Had Christopher Ricks paid any attention to the songs in his self-pleasuring, self-parody of a book, Dylan’s Visions of Sin, I’m sure he would have claimed that what does matter is that they are patently analogues².

Norwegian Wood

I once had a girl //3
or should I say //2
she once had me… //2
She showed me her room //3
isn’t it good //2
Norwegian wood? //2

She asked me to stay and she told me to sit anywhere, //5
so I looked around and I noticed there wasn’t a chair. //5

I sat on a rug
biding my time
drinking her wine.
We talked until two
and then she said
“It’s time for bed”

(instrumental verse)

She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh.
I told her I didn’t and crawled off to sleep in the bath.

And when I awoke
I was alone
this bird had flown.
So I lit a fire
isn’t it good
Norwegian wood.

Fourth Time Around

When she said,”Don’t waste //3
Your words, they’re just lies,” //2
I cried she was deaf. //2
And she worked on my face //3
Until breaking my eyes, //2
Then said, “What else you got left?” //2
It was then that I got up to leave but she said, “Don’t forget, //5
Everybody must give something back for something they get.” //5

I stood there and hummed,
I tapped on her drum and asked her how come.
And she buttoned her boot,
And straightened her suit,
Then she said, “Don’t get cute.”
So I forced my hands in my pockets and felt with my thumbs,
And gallantly handed her my very last piece of gum.

She threw me outside,
I stood in the dirt where everyone walked.
And after finding I’d
Forgotten my shirt,
I went back and knocked.
I waited in the hallway, she went to get it, and I tried to make sense
Out of that picture of you in your wheelchair that leaned up against…

Her Jamaican rum
And when she did come
I asked her for some.
She said, “No, dear.”
I said, “Your words aren’t clear,
You’d better spit out your gum.”
She screamed till her face got so red then she fell on the floor,
And I covered her up and then thought I’d go look through her drawer.

And, when I was through
I filled up my shoe
And brought it to you.
And you, you took me in,
You loved me then
You didn’t waste time.
And I, I never took much,
I never asked for your crutch.
Now don’t ask for mine.

The musical structures are almost identical. Both use quick three time in E Major. The principal motif in each case spirals down an octave from the tonic and is supported by a simple chord structure moving from tonic to subdominant and back again. Neither song has a refrain and every verse comprises two instances of the spiralling melody, each lasting seven bars or three lines of 3, 2 and 2 bars as printed above³. This is followed by a rhyming couplet spread over ten bars that in Fourth Time Around completes the verse, whereas in Norwegian Wood it has the feel of an intercalated or secondary verse structure. Dylan’s final verse replaces the ten-bar couplet with a third repetition of the main melodic phrase.

Both songs make use of a highly allusive idiom; they are replete with the are-we-aren’t-we anxiety of bedroom cut and thrust. ‘I once had a girl / or should I say / she once had me’. ‘To have’ is to hold but also to hoax. To fool around with. Every syntactic proposition could be (mis-)interpreted as a sexual proposition. Being asked to sit in a room without chairs might be an invitation to lie on the bed. However, the future arsonist is at pains to convince us that he has not dipped into the Ars Amatoria, and plumps for ‘a’ rug instead. The indefinite article draws attention to itself - which or whose? But let’s not get carried away, since he is ‘biding his time’, expectantly and preparatorily lapping up her wine. Then “it’s time for bed” and she, not he, is the early riser, prompting us - primed for erotic connotations - to revise our parsing of the line with a new understanding of non-consummation. There is, however, an instrumental verse suggestively inserted in between. Perhaps time enough for a quickie or two before dropping off in the bath.

Dylan’s hero would have us believe from the start that this is his fourth time tonight. There is just as much sass in both these protagonists as there is in the cackling cock-tease of Norwegian Wood, but the man makes no bones about being firmly in control. He does not get punished for passivity. If anything, he is guilty of saying too much, making suspicious any amorous reassurances that precede the start of the narrative. The language of love continues to be allusive - tapping on drums, peeking through drawers - but it is also elusive, evasive: ‘“your words aren’t clear”’, or should I say, ‘“your words they’re just lies”’. Her frustration is caused by the belief that love should be an analogue of equitable commerce - language and goods in transparent flux. Analogy, ana- (according to) logos (ratio; word), implies not only keeping things in proportion but also meaning what one says. However, he doesn’t believe in tit for tat, whether pledging fidelity or, possibly, funds. The proffered gum is interpreted unequivocally as an insult: your breath smells.

And yet, why are we hearing these songs in the first place? And why are we hearing them as songs? Epic makes readily explicit the motivation and means for song, which seems an unnatural communicative device in our modern times: opera’s relative unpopularity is not simply due to the whiff of elitism but, in no small part, to its alleged lack of realism. Milton’s motivation is no less than to rewrite the scriptures in order ‘to justifie the wayes of God to men’. A muse is usually incited as influence or literal inspiration, breathing in the words: ‘Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story’ opens Fitzgerald’s translation of The Odyssey. Lyric poetry, on the other hand, more often than not dispenses with these formulaic justifications of the chosen medium. People can write poems simply to write poems. Nor does the subject of the poem have to account for the form by some forced tip of the hat to mimesis. So too with songs, themselves Lyrics. What influences the singer of Norwegian Wood to pick up his guitar and clear his throat? Perhaps music sublimates his emotions enough to allow him to communicate them that way. But why would we care any way; is the implication that the audience has asked him to recount his bedroom trauma?

Fourth Time Around has more complex mimetic foundations. The protagonist is a musician of sorts who hums and drums, which together with plenty of evident chutzpah support the choice of balladry as his preferred mode of expression. It becomes apparent only gradually that the intended audience is not external to the fictional world of song and singer, but ‘you’ - another character, Another Girl. And yet, unlike in the two Beatles’ songs, there can be no doubt as to the power relationship in play. The story of the termination of a prior romance is being related as an analogy to the present situation and it serves as a circumlocutory means to the same end - the dissolution of the current coupling. Both break-ups are temporally coextensive: as the narration of the former separation unfolds, so too the process of effecting the current one, a fact only realised by the audience (us and her) when the last three lines have been voiced. Here, finally, we understand the original impetus, the motivation for the song. Its raison d’être is therefore internal, part of the fictional fabric but also part of the source of its dramatic power. The act of breaking up is completed in the act of singing the ending. Then there is only silence: both narratives are over with no come-back, no possible retort.

It has been an unabashedly one-sided affair.

[1] This is not to say that they had not previously composed some cracking tunes.

[2] Thus abstracting songs and literature from History, Ricks indulges an unbridled impulse for intertextuality, drawing Donne, Marvell, Swift and Hardy into a discussion of Lay Lady Lay, for example.

[3] I have altered the format of both from that of their respective publications, which makes for a clearer comparison and better reflects the sung phrasing. The form of a song has already been denatured when the lyrics are freed from the stave and given the aspect of poetry on the page.

By Jonny Thakkar

It was hard to know what Hillary Clinton was up to. “Shame on you, Barack Obama,” she jabbed. “Enough with the speeches and the big rallies and then using tactics right out of Karl Rove’s playbook. This is wrong, and every Democrat should be outraged.”

Obama’s crime had been to send out flyers criticizing Clinton’s health care plan. The claim was that since the plan would achieve universal health care only by imposing fines on those who did not buy insurance, this might end up harming the extremely poor. This is an intricate policy debate, and there are arguments on both sides.

During a televised debate a few days later, Clinton argued that her plan was a good thing - not that Obama had distorted it. So why the earlier outburst? Was it just desperation or stress? Only days later, after the Ohio primary, did her plan become clear.

A great way to disarm an objection is to make it yourself. That way you get to control the situation, take credit for your honesty, and deny your opponent the satisfaction of a palpable hit.

Even better is to accuse the other of whatever fault you expect them to accuse you of. That way if they strike back it will seem defensive. Six of one and half a dozen of the other, people will think.

By accusing Obama of dirty tricks, Clinton opened up the space for her own. Her campaign circulated a photo of Obama in Somali dress. Next she released a commercial implying that American children would be more likely to die if he was president. And finally she conceded that he is not a Muslim “…as far as I know”.

The tactic worked. Obama was in a headlock. If he responded in kind it would be the pot calling the kettle black. If he didn’t respond he wasn’t a fighter. And if he didn’t fight for himself, how would he fight for the workers of Ohio?

Buried in the self-interest behind this tactic is an interesting intuition about how we can influence one another that in turn implies a theory of how we understand the world.

The world is complex. To understand it, we need to simplify things. We need a framework, hooks that we can peg things to. These hooks embody a pre-understanding of whatever is to be interpreted. This can be dangerous. Sometimes we end up hearing what we expect to hear, rather than what was actually said. Reality pulls us up short eventually, of course. But not before a brief period of disconnect.

We can influence one another by manipulating this framework. You offer someone square pegs for round holes, and they’ll try them out for a good while. That is why spin-doctors release details of a politician’s speech before it’s been given. A speech can be interpreted in many ways. If you’re told beforehand what the salient points will be, you’ll listen out for them. There need be nothing sinister in this - it’s why we use introductions and conclusions.

The Clinton headlock is a particularly complicated framing strategy. The aim is first to get people to pre-understand the field of play as nasty and unfair; then to hit below the belt; and finally to have this understood as self-defence. It takes political genius - of a certain kind.

Some relevant links:

(1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qmet77JCniU&feature=related
(2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lc5xWfEijKA
(3) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgSj5Wt1Ap4
(4) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHFREDHB-nQ

By Jonny Thakkar

Every time we think about something explicitly we do so against a background of implicit presuppositions. As finite beings we have no option but to take things for granted. Not everything can be up for grabs at once; in any consideration we need to hold some things constant.

Assumption and presumption are two ways of taking something for granted. Both simplify. Assuming supply and demand are equal allows us to consider the relation of profits to productivity. Presuming the universe does not deceive us by randomly changing its ways allows us to consider the laws of nature. The difference is that assumptions are still in question, whereas presumptions are obvious.

Our activities are shaped by what we take for granted. That is why scientists try to state their assumptions as fully and clearly as possible. If we take something for granted that we ought not to, everything else becomes suspect.

It is impossible to state the obvious. No one claims to know the obvious; it just is obvious. It is precisely what is not in question, what is not a thesis at all, what seems necessary. This raises a problem. What if we’re on the wrong track? How can we assess our presuppositions?

The first step is to discover them. This can be done only partially. You can only know the obvious when it is no longer obvious, when it has already become contingent. You realize that you had taken something as obvious.

No one enters a cocktail party resolving to keep a certain distance from others and to expect the same from them. But if someone tried to converse with you by talking directly into your ear instead of to your face, they’d be breaking an implicit rule. It would be funny, because it’s just so obvious that you don’t do that. Yet just by doing it they would make you wonder why it’s so obvious.

Creative people are more able to see the obvious as contingent. Only when we hear of a creative solution to a problem do we find that what was holding us back was our presupposition that it would be solved in a certain way. Until we see the solution we don’t even realize that we had the presupposition.

What is obvious varies across cultures. What it is obvious varies across cultures. Take a magical formula. Which part of a magician’s body houses his magical formulae? For Trobriand Islanders, the answer is obvious: the belly. As a result, a magician is forbidden to eat certain foods before, during and after a performance (1). Such a conception wouldn’t so much as occur to us.

Until we encounter people with other presuppositions, we do not realize our own. This is one of the benefits of travel. It is a familiar observation that there are two sorts of travel. Whereas mere travel satisfies your curiosity, good travel leads you to know yourself better.

But any given culture differs from past cultures as well as contemporary ones. Hence ‘travelling’ to past cultures also puts the obvious in question. To come to know past cultures is to come to know your own.

The aim isn’t to feel humble vis-a-vis past cultures. There is reason to believe that our presuppositions will be better on the whole than those that preceded them. Some things get discovered; others get disproven.

A proposition often begins as a foreground hypothesis before sinking into the background as a presumption. Something stops being a hypothesis once it is no longer in doubt. It is obvious to us that magical formulae would be stored in the brain because we know that is where memory functions are located.

One reason to study the great philosophers is to find out where our presuppositions came from. From this angle, the most important thinkers are those who created the obvious. They shaped our world.

This throws up a paradox. When we read an author whose ideas have become obvious, their most important insights fade into the background; what strikes us is their mistakes. Hence influential thinkers - Marx, Freud, Mill - can fall into disrepute. What we want from them we have and what we don’t have we don’t want.

But influence is not enough to make a thinker great. History sometimes makes mistakes. It is very far from being one long debate in which the strongest argument wins out. Our ideas are shaped by what we do, by the world we encounter in our practices; but the world can alter for many reasons - climate, disease, technology, power struggles, etc.. Many people are not ruled by reason; if it is pointed out to them that they cannot account for their views, or that their beliefs are incompatible, they sometimes shrug their shoulders and go on. Even the most abstract ideas are often accepted because they provide an attractive way of seeing things; and things can appeal to us for a variety of psychological reasons.

Because history might have taken a wrong turn, we need to justify our presuppositions as much as we can. This is why we travel back in time. We want to find out what our presuppositions are, where they come from and whether they are justified. In principle these are three separate tasks; in practice, they are best done together, by studying the great philosophers of the past.

If we only wanted to discover the nature and origin of our presuppositions, no priority would be given to the greats. A law might reveal what a culture took as obvious more than a work of philosophy; and a second-rate pamphlet might have been more influential than a detailed demonstration. And if we only wanted to assess our presuppositions, no attention would be paid to the greats in their pastness. We might want to steal a few ideas from them, but no more than that.

Given that we want to do all three, studying one of the greats is ideal. To be a great philosopher is to be historical, influential and rigorous. To study one we have to think alongside them. We have to take their problems as our own and undergo their thought processes. This imposes three requirements on us.

We need to exercise our imagination. The difficulty of imagining ourselves in the thinker’s position reveals just how alien their presuppositions are; this in turn reveals how alien ours would be to them, and hence what ours actually are. We must become familiar with the tradition. It helps to be aware that one thinker may share the presuppositions or presume the conclusions of another; we should read them in terms of their influence and influences. And we have to make their thought processes as justifiable as possible. To do this just is to assess their justification.

To study a great philosopher is therefore to consider what our presuppositions are, where they came from and whether they are justified.

But that’s not all. There is a happy side effect to all this. Imitating an expert helps us learn any activity. To think alongside a great thinker is to imitate them. So to study the philosophers is to learn to think for ourselves. And that can be useful. (2)

(1) Gunter Senft, ‘Body and Mind in the Trobriand Islands’, Ethos 1998, pp.88-89

(2) The ideas in this article were mostly taken from the history of philosophy.

By Jonny Lowndes 

The 20th Century often expressed itself as footnotes to Edgar Allan Poe. Any literature that concerned itself with the new urban sublime was ripping off his story, The Man of the Crowd; any that tried to ‘explain the ways of the dead god to man’ - that tried to mate Milton and Nietzsche - used Poe’s inscrutable streets, decaying manses (for example the House of Usher) and shelterless interiors (the noisy boudoir of A Tell-Tale Heart) as a crucible; any that hailed science (The Gold Bug) or crime (the Dupin stories) as subjects fit for literature did so from behind Poe’s wizened aegis. 

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By Ollie Thomas

‘Flowing into’ or ‘flowing onto’? The former, in the earliest Latin uses – as rivers flow into the sea, blood into the heart, or words into our ears. But metaphorical ‘influence’ was figured long before then, by Muse inspiring poet, or god inspiring prophet. Such inspiration – making breath flow into – came from above, even if you were a Delphic priestess reaching your trance by sitting over a fuming crevice.

Influence is, from this beginning, a power-relationship, and the influenced, being less powerful, are like wrestlers pinned down and no longer in a position to exercise their volition ‘freely’. So we are ‘under’ the influence of alcohol even as it circulates within us. Most of us are first initiated into familial power-relations, and perhaps it is unsurprising that literary influences have often been figured as old men (of course, the authors were mostly men): the sort who ruled households in Proto-Indo-European society, and served as councils of elders in many of its daughter-societies; the sort who were constantly mentioned as exempla in Roman discourse, and whose wax busts were kept in noble houses and paraded at funerals (if wax can be moulded to be like them, so can we…). Although the past is ‘behind’ us in the normal English metaphor, and below us archaeologically, genealogically these old men are still figured as above us, though physically they are not on an Olympus.

One story, then, is that literary influence, flowing down a ‘genealogy’ of authors, threatens to flood us. The ‘anxiety of influence’, aside from a fear of drowning, could be the fear that we won’t live up to our fathers, and/or as Harold Bloom did one can give it a Freudian spin – the latent desire to get rid of them. But if we actually believe in the Freudian dimension of this, what ‘mother’ do our influences threaten to keep us from? Perhaps the Muse of originality. Already in the 5th century BC, Choerilus of Samos complained ‘O happy the servant of the Muses who was skilled in song in those days, when their meadow was still uncut: now it has all been made into allotments and genres have reached their boundaries, so that we are left last in the race without anywhere to take our newly-yoked wagon, however hard we look around.’ No doubt some authors are anxious about, say, treading in Shakespeare’s footsteps, as Brahms was initially nervous about taking on the Beethovenian symphony. Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid quotes from the original as its motto: ‘he follows his father, though his strides are not so great’ – the original refers to Ascanius running alongside Aeneas as they leave Troy.

Perhaps, however, Dryden’s reverence stems from the inherently epigonal nature of a translation. A useful comparison is Statius in the century after Vergil. He already ended his epic about Thebes with a similar allusion to the same scene as Dryden: ‘My Thebaid… live on, I pray, but do not assail the divine Aeneid – rather follow at a distance and constantly adore its footsteps’. This time, Statius sets his book up as Creusa, the wife of Aeneas who follows loyally behind him and Ascanius, but does (as Statius fears) go missing. This reverence is evidently playful posturing rather than genuine expression of anxiety; similarly, Choerilus followed his complaints with an epic poem about historical Greek relations with Persia – profoundly innovative content for the genre.

After all, to return to the Freudian aspect, most of us grow up to love our fathers. To turn the ‘anxiety of influence’ model on its head, some poets were eager to trace themselves back to figures of authority. A guild of singers from ancient Chios had the name ‘Homeridae’ (originally, probably ‘guild of the public gathering’, after their performance-context). To publicise their most impressive songs, they reinterpreted their name as ‘sons of Homer’ and by the late 6th century BC had invented a biography for the legendary maestro (e.g. his blindness, which makes him a prophet-like figure of mystique). Though these Homeridae, then, were closely aware of the power of an authorial name, they effaced their own names in favour of Homer’s. Of course, this required some very specific circumstances – the guild setup, and low circulation of books so that there was no standard edition and no interest in copyright. However, it still seems closer than anxiety as a description of the relationships of, say, Roman poets to their predecessors. When these authors mention their poetic forebears, they are more life-givers with whom we can play than stern fathers whom we must live up to or overcome; playing is, after all, at the root of poetic ‘al-lus-ion’.

We shouldn’t liberally assign neuroses to authors who figure an artistic influence as a father-figure. In any case, the concept of father, whether or not Freud was right, is too historically-determined to make any such assignment straightforward. But it may be worth asking whether this image of influence has itself had a beneficial influence on the history of art. Most obviously, has it made the canon patriarchal? A second point: in a recent interview on BBC Radio 3, the pianist Stephen Hough generated some surprise for listing several of his contemporaries as major influences on his playing, and I think it is true that current conceptions of influence place too much weight on a generation-gap. Influences are limited to one direction in time, of course: ‘Eliot influenced Shakespeare’ only works as a shorthand for the truism that ‘living in a world which has read Eliot makes a difference to how one interprets Shakespeare’. I was delighted to find the alternative image of a {cheeky younger brother}/{older brother} relationship in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes (5th century BC): as the poem presents Hermes as a cheeky younger brother who steals things from Apollo, it cheekily borrows and overturns features of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, such as the question of which god was first to patronise lyre-playing. Fraternality is also the message of Pope in appendix 7 to the Dunciad: he assembles a mass of basically parallel abuse levelled by critics at him and at Dryden. So too Eliot in The Waste Land, a tissue of fragmented allusions, quotes Baudelaire’s ‘hypocrite lecteur – mon semblable, mon frère’, and thus shows himself to be a reader of Baudelaire’s, and thus his like and his brother.

By De Froment, who intends to rewrite this soon, but sweetly met his deadline.

“Let’s go out on Friday and get shitfaced”. “It was a great night, we got absolutely battered”. “Chris is hilarious - he was ratted that night”. There’s a lot of talk of drinking, of how much people have drunk, and of how much they’re going to drink. It’s a part of our culture. The lads get pissed. The girls get pissed too. It’s a badge of honour for some, and a pleasing topic for some holier-than-thou it-wasn’t-like-this-in-my day hand wringing for others. The plague of binge drinking. The youth spilling out of pubs and hitting each other in the face. For fun. ‘Cause they’re rat-arsed. The language of drunkenness is rich, and talk of how much everyone’s drinking is around us all the time, from our nearest and dearest, and from the great and good. We’re bathed in it, pickled in it.

    
All this talk may only be making things worse. There’s an interesting phenomenon known in psychological circles as pluralistic ignorance, and it looks like this. A survey was done of some undergraduates (why undergraduates? Because they lurk within arm’s reach of psychology departments, and they can be bribed for their answers with points towards their course grade). “On a scale of one to ten, how comfortable are you with the level of drinking on campus?” “How comfortable do you think the average undergraduate is with the level of drinking on campus?” Take the average of the answers to question one, and you know how relaxed the average undergraduate says they are with the level of drinking. Then we want to know how this compares with the answers to question two. It turns out undergrads consistently think their average peer is more comfortable with the amount everyone’s drinking than they really are. For some reason they get an inaccurate picture of the norm.

Getting a norm wrong on its own is hardly going to make the room spin. However it doesn’t end there. If you come back to these people three months later, or to the men, at least, they’re happier with the level of drinking than they were to begin with. They’ve internalized the norm that they picked up on several months earlier. The trouble with this is that it wasn’t the norm at all. They’ve conformed to a norm that doesn’t even exist. On top of this, it looks like their boozing may go up with their comfort levels too. Interestingly none of this seems to affect the women. They get the norm wrong, but that’s where it ends.

Pluralistic ignorance about drinking norms writ large might explain why people are drinking more and more, and sounding more and more blaze about it. On the other hand mistaken exaggeration of the norm might explain why so many irritating rent-a-gobs think the country’s morals are going down the drain, when they’re not. That’s an empirical question, really.

By Philip Wood

The social sciences have long been familiar with the idea that social phenomena have ‘functions’, i.e. that phenomena exist because they play a role in ensuring the survival of an entire ‘social organism’. I would like to return to some of the problems of Darwinian models within the social sciences at a later date, but, for the time being, I will attempt to apply this functionalist model within the conjoined histories of religion and social commentary.

Functionalism has an implicitly historical framework. If a given institution or movement exists in one time period then its function should be retained in a future time period, even if within a different guise. There are some obvious problems with this idea as a universal tool of analysis: it assumes the comparability of the same societies in different periods and the similarity of its behaviour and ‘goals’. But neither can it be universally rejected- there are clearly societies where new institutions have evolved to fill the gap left by the demise of older ones. In the sociology of religion a prime example might be the encouragement of material investment amongst religions of the middle classes, the Weberian observation of the connection between Protestantism and capitalism that has also been observed for Judaism and forms of Buddhism and Islam.

I would like to suggest a similar continuity between the functions provided by eschatological and millennial forms of Christianity in early modern Britain and its successors in the Victorian period and twenty-first century environmentalism. These continuities were not those of the histories that these communities and interests groups wrote for themselves: they did not generate their own internal solidarity by looking back to other groups as antecedents. Instead the continuity is suggested from observing the role filled by all these groups as vehicles for apocalyptic sentiment. Read more »

By Ollie Thomas

 

In Sophocles’ play, Antigone refuses to let her brother Polynices, who has died attacking his own state and whose corpse has been exposed in punishment, lie unburied. Creon therefore labels her a traitor, and demands that she be buried alive by being walled up in a small hill-cave. Tiresias then warns (too late) that the gods are angry at him for having ‘cast underground one of those above… and kept here one of those from underground’ – he has impiously misaligned the categories ‘above/below’ with ‘dead/living’.

 

Tiresias presents ‘above’ and ‘below’ as immutable categories which can ground divine laws, but Antigone’s case shows rather that topographical concepts are conventional and change from society to society. To me, it is only natural to call caves ‘underground’ if they have long and/or descending entrance-passages – other caves are problem-cases which are not clearly above or below. For the Greeks, however, caves are underground. But they did not simply apply the criterion ‘Is there earth above you?’. The Athenians sometimes threw traitors’ bodies into a large uncovered pit, which they evidently deemed underground enough for the corpse not to pollute the surrounding community as Polynices’ does.

 

This difference between ancient Greece and Britain in the concept ‘below ground’ may be relevant for understanding Greek disposal of traitors, but is trivial against the variety of spatial terms in the world’s languages – which interestingly do not at all reflect a single set of evolved concepts. More surprising, for example, is the existence of ‘-vara’ to denote ‘through a tube’ in Karuk (a Californian language), or of distinct single prepositions for ‘in a tube’ and ‘in a cup’ in Tzeltal (a Mexican language), or of languages which use spatial relators measured against the Earth (e.g. compass-terms) instead of ones measured against other movable objects (e.g. left / right / behind). Despite this variety, there is little evidence that different cultures think about space differently – for example, people whose language distinguishes between ‘on’ (touching) and ‘above’ (not touching) are no better at recalling a series of pictures where that difference is important. Read more »

By Jonny Thakkar

A seaplane, a speedboat and a helicopter – all white – set against golden beaches and the cyan sea. Bond alights and stands for a moment, summer suit and shades, sizing up the surroundings and waiting for them to return the favour. The peacock has landed. This is 007 for the GQ era.

A car engine sounds just outside the frame and is held there teasingly. This is the first time Bond has driven in Casino Royale – what’s his choice of wheels this time?

It’s a Ford. A Ford. And the fact is flaunted. The camera is deliberately kept at badge-height for four of the next nine shots. The exposition is so long-winded it draws attention to itself. The car comes round a corner twenty metres ahead of us, and we pan right to follow it trundling on past. Bond gets out and ties his shoelaces right in front of the badge as the porter drives off. When we’re not looking at the front badge we’re looking at the back one. When we’re not looking at the outside we’re looking at the inside. Meanwhile, trumpets sound. It’s a strange combination of the car worship common to all Bond films and primitive advertising techniques. Product placement raised to a level of intensity made utterly bathetic by its object – the Mondeo. Read more »