In George Eliot’s Romola, we see events from the perspective of four major characters (one at a time): Tito Melema, Baldassarre Calvo, Tessa, and Romola herself. Four people can have up to 3! = 6 bilateral relationships. In Romola, each of these six potential connections is filled out with several independent interactions.
Just for example, Tito encounters Nessa on his first day in Florence and then on several important occasions, Baldassare takes shelter in the farm where Tessa lives, Tessa’s toddler runs into the street and into Romola’s arms, and Tito washes ashore at Baldassare’s very location on the shore of the Arno. In that last case, the older man has no reason to expect his enemy to appear, but when this happens, he understandably feels that “something was being brought to him” for a reason–as a “fortunate chance for him” (italics in the original).
These distinct connections arise over a short period in quite a large community. (The population of Renaissance Florence was on the order of 100,000, but that understates the improbability, since Baldassare has been enslaved in the Middle East and encounters Tito almost as soon as he finds himself in Florence. The odds of that encounter must be one in a million.)
I think we generally assume that we pass through life with one thing just happening after another–sometimes as a result of our decisions, but often by sheer contingency. Occasional coincidences should be expected as a matter of probability, but they do not mean anything. Every one out of a million events will be a one-in-a-million event.
These assumptions make Romola look contrived and perhaps didactic, evidently the work of an artist who has deliberately connected four characters in the maximum number of ways to explore symmetries and contrasts. The text seems unlike life.
As Caroline Levine (yes, my sister) shows, Romola learns as the story unfolds. She figures out that life is not foreordained and prophesies are unreliable–sometimes true, but only by chance. (Prophesies are important in this political novel, since the main political actor, Savonarola, gains his influence through prophesy.) Romola concludes that human beings make free moral choices that alone determine what happens. Her conclusion seems inconsistent with the density of coincidences in the plot, which should instead suggest (as the addled Baldassare concludes) that everything has been set up for a reason.
Caroline notes that plotted narratives typically have a strange feature. The author knows what will happen and selects the events to narrate with that outcome in mind. It’s a flaw in a plotted narrative if we’re told things that don’t matter later.
Imagine two events that occur in a sequence, A and B. In a novel, A should have an affect on B, yet B is the cause of A in the sense that it explains why A is narrated.
This means that Romola may (or may not) be correct about how life works, but she is wrong about her own story as it is told in the eponymous novel. Her story is determined by an omniscient creator and organized to reach coherent conclusions.
For me, the density of coincidences is a bit alienating: it’s like seeing the puppeteer’s hands. As the coincidences mount, I think: this is just too improbable. I prefer Middlemarch, which also has coincidences, but at a much lower rate. Still, perhaps the best conclusion is that any narrated story is a contrivance. In this case, it’s contrived to teach us that only our choices matter, and that is a bit of a paradox.
Supposedly, many American men think more than once a day about the Roman empire. This seems implausible, but I must admit that Rome often comes to my mind. For instance, I recently read Zenobia; Shooting Star of Palmyra by Nathanael Andrade (Oxford University Press, 2018).
A powerful female monarch from Syria, Zenobia has been a figure of fascination for 18 centuries. She’s been a symbol for misogynists and feminists, for European imperialists, Arab nationalists, and cosmopolitan modernists. She appears in Christian histories, the Talmud, early Islamic sources, and bel canto operas.
Andrade selects and sorts the ancient written sources (all of which are biased in various ways) and relevant inscriptions, coins, and statuary. He is especially helpful at explaining the context of Palmyra, a thriving merchant city with a distinctive hybrid culture. The protagonist of his book was Septimia Zenobia (a Hellenistic monarch), Iulia Aurelia (a Roman woman of the senatorial class), and Bathzabbai (a Palmyrene clan leader), and she probably inhabited all three roles fully.
We know almost nothing about her inner life, but her story is dramatic. The 240s and 250s saw the Roman empire often at war with the nascent power of Sassanian Persia to its east. In 260, the Romans suffered a catastrophe when their emperor, Valerian, was defeated on the battlefield and taken prisoner. At the same time, the empire was beset by Germanic invasions and a rebellion in Gaul. The whole eastern Mediterranean was at risk, but it was saved by a Palmyrene leader named Odeanthus (a.k.a. Odainat), who bore Roman titles, including commander, governor, and consul. With the Empire in disarray, Odeanthus essentially ruled an important region from his capital in Palmyra, calling himself King of Kings, albeit without openly challenging Roman sovereignty.
After four years of rule, Odeanthus was murdered by assailants who remain unknown to this day. The initial propaganda from Rome implied that Odeanthus was killed because he’d become treasonous. It’s likely that a pro-Roman faction in Palmyra expected to replace him. Instead, his widow, Zenobia, quickly gained political control and reigned as a regent in the name of her minor son Wahballath, a.k.a. Septimius Vaballathus, a.k.a. Athenodorus. Now some of the Roman propaganda suggested that an evil and unnatural woman had killed her husband to gain his throne.
Zenobia seems to have led a tolerant and culturally vibrant polity that may have seen itself as Palmyrene and/or Syrian, although she presented herself and her son as Roman officials and claimed to be related to the Greek-speaking Egyptian queen Cleopatra. She ruled various kinds of pagans, Christians (both orthodox and gnostic), early rabbinic Jews, Manichaeans, Zoroastrians, and others. The Greek philosopher Longinus was a courtier and reputedly Zenobia’s personal mentor, although he was not actually the author of On the Sublime, which was attributed to him in later centuries.
Zenobia’s territory dramatically expanded when her forces captured Egypt, the breadbasket of the Roman empire and the terminus of sea routes in Asia. It’s not clear why she launched this invasion, but it could have been on behalf of Palmyrene merchants who competed with Egyptians. Zenobia was now calling herself Augusta (a title for an empress) and using the title Augustus for Wahballath. She was empress of the richest third of the Roman imperium. One can imagine a stable new entity forming in the Levant. However, In 272, the Emperor Aurelian invaded and defeated the Palymrenes, taking mother and son to Rome as prisoners. The unified Roman empire still had another century and a half to go.
Andrade deals sensitively with the horrifying events at the site of ancient Palmyra in 2015-2016. The site had been controlled by European imperialists and then by Syrian secular nationalists, each of whom had exploited Zenobia’ memory for their own purposes. ISIS destroyed the ruins and their living guardians as an attack on both Assad and the West.
Out of the countless depictions of Zenobia since her time, I’ll mention a set of paintings by Giambattista Tiepolo. These works hang in different museums and had miscellaneous titles. In 1974, Fern Rusk Shapley first noted that they all depict scenes from the life of the Queen of Palmyra. Shapley conjectured that the Zenobios, a noble Venetian family who were unrelated to Zenobia but who happened to share her name, commissioned them for one room in their palazzo. Knox (1979) accepts that they are all by Tiepolo but thinks that the artist painted them over several decades for the Zenobios.
Of course, these paintings are not realistic or consistent with modern scholarship–or even very serious–but I appreciate that Tiepolo could imagine Zenobia as a heroic soldier and as a stoic victim. The National Gallery’s Queen Zenobia Addressing Her Soldiers (1725/1730) shows her in a martial pose–see above–while the Prado’s Queen Zenobia before the Emperor Aurelian (1717) depicts her as gracious in defeat. Both look like scenes from an opera.
References: Shapley, “Tiepolo’s Zenobia Cycle,” in Robert Enggass, Hortus imaginum: essays in Western art (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1974): George Knox, “Giambattista Tiepolo: Queen Zenobia and Ca’Zenobio: ‘una delle prime sue fatture’,” The Burlington Magazine 121.916 (1979): 409-418. See also: Velazquez, The Spinners; Goya’s Familia del infante Don Luis; and three great paintings in dialogue
Perhaps each species has a different “umwelt,” a unique enveloping environment that is experienced and influenced by the organism’s sensory organs and nervous system. In that case, reality is not one connected thing, but rather everything that you can I could possibly experience and describe, plus the many other universes that are “enacted” (Varela, Thompson & Rosch 1991) by other species–those known and unknown to us, existent and yet to be.
Reflecting on such radical unknowability may have spiritual implications, which have been explored in different ways by Dogen (1200-1253 CE), Ludwig Wittgenstein, and others. (See “thinking both sides of the limits of human cognition.”)
William Blake presents a relevant discussion in his Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793). Oothoon–a female figure, described as “the soft soul of America”–invokes the radical diversity of animal experiences, “as different as their forms and as their joys.” She implies that the consciousness of the chicken, pigeon and bee are fundamentally different. She uses such examples to pose a question about our own consciousness:
Ask the blind worm the secrets of the grave, and why her spires
Love to curl round the bones of death; and ask the rav’nous snake
Where she gets poison; and the wing’d eagle why he loves the sun
And then tell me the thoughts of man, that have been hid of old.
Blake, Selected Poems, Penguin Classics (p. 63).
I am not sure whether she is inviting us to imagine the experience of eagles and worms, or whether she assumes this would be impossible. Later, she exclaims, “How can one joy absorb another? are not different joys / Holy, eternal, infinite! and each joy is a Love” (p. 65).
This is a plea for appreciating fundamental diversity. She uses it to ask the person she loves, Theotormon, to accept her for who she is.
Blake had been exploring arguments for empathy. In his poem The French Revolution (1791), the pro-republican Duke of Orleans says to his reactionary peers:
But go, merciless man! enter into the infinite labyrinth of another's brain
Ere thou measure the circle that he shall run. Go, thou cold recluse, into the fires
Of another's high flaming rich bosom, and return unconsum'd, and write laws.
If thou canst not do this, doubt thy theories, learn to consider all men as thy equals,
Thy brethren, and not as thy foot or thy hand, unless thou first fearest to hurt them.
Blake may not endorse Orleans’ belief that one can actually enter others’ brains. I am not sure whether he thinks such radical empathy is virtuous or impossible. Either premise could be the basis for appreciating everyone’s uniqueness.
Bromion is a (very bad) male character in the Daughters of Albion. He replies to Oothoon by acknowledging that there are many
... trees[,] beasts and birds unknown:
Unknown, not unpercievd, spread in the infinite microscope,
In places yet unvisited by the voyager and in worlds
Over another kind of seas, and in atmospheres unknown (p. 64).
Bromion then poses a series of questions about whether there are different wars, sorrows, and joys for these creatures. I think his answer is No:
And is there not one law for both the lion and the ox?
And is there not eternal fire, and eternal chains?
To bind the phantoms of existence from eternal life? (p. 65)
Here Bromion explicitly contradicts an aphorism from Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” (1790)– “One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression” (p. 58)–which makes me suspect that Blake is against Bromion’s view.
The third speaker in The Daughters of Albion is Theotormon. He asks Oothoon to share what she knows of the world, “so that [he] might traverse times & spaces far remote.” But he is not sure what this will do for him:
Where goest thou O thought! to what remote land is thy flight?
If thou returnest to the present moment of affliction
Wilt thou bring comforts on thy wings, and dews and honey and balm;
Or poison From the desart wilds, from the eyes of the envier?’ (p. 64).
Theotormon is worried that empathy might cause envy or other harms. But Oothoon is sure that any experience of a consciousness other than one’s own is beneficial. She concludes the poem: “Arise and drink your bliss, for every thing that lives is holy!’ (p. 68). Theotormon sits silently while the other daughters of Albion “echo back her sighs.”
(Translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, from Najwan Darwish, Exhausted on the Cross, NYRB Books 2021.)
I don’t know the Arabic word that is the title of this poem. The English word can mean a logical fallacy–changing the meaning of a term between one part of an argument and another–or a deliberate trick. Macbeth calls a promise “that lies like truth” “th’Equiuocation of the Fiend.”
Deceit is a fault, but equivocation can also imply an inability to decide, or even a choice to remain undecided, like Keats’ “capab[ility] of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts. …” One can equivocate because several options seem attractive, or because all seem terrible.
I read Darwish as self-critical. He is confessing his equivocation, his failure (sometimes) to take a stand, much as, in “In Shatila,” he asks himself how he could have turned smilingly away from an old refugee:
How could you smile, indifferent
to the brackish water of the sea
while barbed wire wrapped around your heart?
How could you,
you son of a bitch?
But what should be expected of him? At a time when everyone is supposed to take one side, to state one truth–when we are all our own communications departments, and silence is called complicity–I resonate with the poet’s equivocation. His uncertainty becomes a doubt about who he is, and that doubt becomes the country he dwells in, wherever he goes. It’s the only country he has.
(By the way, I have no idea whether Darwish feels equivocal today, and I don’t mean to attribute any stance to him in this moment. The poem is several years old. It does speak to me today.)
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC displays The Feast of the Gods by Giovanni Bellini with additions by Titian (1514/1529), The Old Musician by Edouard Manet (1862), and The Family of Saltimbanques by Pablo Picasso (1905). These major works talk to each other.* We might say that the Bellini is a work of art, the Manet is a work about art, and the Picasso is about the artist.
Bellini’s painting illustrates a story from Ovid (Fasti I:415ff.). Mario Equicola, a courtier in service to the Duke of Ferrara, had given Bellini detailed and learned instructions about how to represent the original passage (Colantuono 1991). Equicola argued that poetry was the greater art; painting was merely derivative. Some contemporaries disagreed with this assessment, but all expected art to represent classic texts: usually Scripture, but in this case a pagan myth.
Bellini creates a kind of set for the gods, a flat area with a backdrop (which is now mostly Titian’s work). The characters are shown frozen in the midst of action.
Giovanni Bellini and Titian, The Feast of the Gods, 1514/1529, oil on canvas, Widener Collection, 1942.9.1
The artist counts on certain expectations that make the image easily legible. As usual in Renaissance art, light comes from a sun behind the viewer’s left shoulder. Space is reserved between the major objects and the edges of the canvas, so that the scene is “framed” both aesthetically and literally. Objects that are further away are not only smaller but blurrier and lit differently from those at center-stage (sfumato). Although the characters are Greco-Roman gods, they wear costumes and hold props from Bellini’s own time. Their bodies and other objects are represented with glowing detail; for example, the ceramics represent the earliest depictions of Chinese porcelain in European art.
If this is what we expect from art, then it is hard to see how anyone could surpass Bellini. He knows all the tools and techniques. He can represent round objects and faces rotated on all axes; light reflecting on metal, glass, porcelain, and liquid; water flowing through space; shadows and highlights; and naked and clothed bodies with discernible weight. But once this kind of painting has been produced at a high level for several centuries, the whole approach could become tired–especially once artists become enthusiastic about radically different styles from other cultures and times.
Detail, showing water flowing into a glass vessel
Manet’s The Old Musician bears some similarities to Bellini’s work. Again, several characters are presented on a flat stage with a tree and the sky behind them and light coming from the upper-left. However, the edges of this image cut right through one human figure and the tree, reminding us that we are looking at a painted canvas. Especially in the foreground and around the boy’s silhouette, the paint strokes are easily legible (another reminder that this is a painting). A horizon is visible, but the background is ambiguous. Flat ground behind the boy seems to morph into a low wall behind the young man. The sun casts shadows to the right of the violinist but to the left of the man in the tall hat. Perhaps the setting is the outskirts of Paris or another great city, but the location is obscure.
And there is no story. Maybe the people will move later on, but they are not evidently in the midst of doing anything now. The musician has stopped playing his violin, which might have animated them before. No character looks at any other, except that the musician stares at us.
You need a guide, such as Charles Fried (Fried 1969) or David Luban (Luban 1994) to tell you that the figures here are quoted from previous works of art, including an ancient statue of the philosopher Chrysippus, Watteau’s Pierrot (1718-19), and Manet’s own Absinthe Drinker (1858-9). The subject of this painting is not any story but art itself. The tradition within which Bellini painted has come to an end, like a tune previously played by a musician who is now “old.”
The figures in Manet’s painting are timeless and may combine costumes from diverse periods, but it’s safe to say that they are socially marginal. The young girl is barefoot and responsible for a baby. This is not a conventional family or a respectable organization but perhaps a band of homeless people. One of them, the violinist, is clearly a kind of artist, and the painting implies that artists in general are outsiders. In contrast, Bellini had painted his work for the private study of Duke Alfonso d’Este. From Bellini to Manet, successful artists have evolved from well-placed courtiers to bohemians.
Picasso was a spiritual heir to Manet. A young migrant from Spain, living in bohemian Paris among poets and artists, he embraced a marginal and critical role. He and such friends as the poet Guillaume Apollinaire regularly visited the circus, where they felt (or at least claimed) an affinity with the performers. In The Family of Saltimbanques, Picasso depicts a group of acrobats from the lowest tier of that profession. The landscape is even emptier than in the Manet.
By Pablo Picasso – Digital reproduction or scan of original painting: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27675009
The harlequin figure may be a self-portrait, the large jester is probably Apollinaire, the woman may be Picasso’s lover and model Fernande Olivier, and the girl may represent an orphan whom Olivier and Picasso had recently adopted, only to return her–rejected–to an orphanage. This image, then, is self-referential and confessional, in contrast to the outward stance of both Bellini and Manet. It exemplifies Picasso’s Rose Period, which had recently succeeded his Blue Period, and it can be understood as an objective correlative of the painter’s evolving mood.
These three paintings share several motifs. For instance, the feet. The Naiads in the Bellini are barefoot, per Ovid:
Naides effusis aliae sine pectinis usu, 405
pars aderant positis arte manuque comis;
illa super suras tunicam collecta ministrat,
altera dissuto pectus aperta sinu;
exserit haec umerum, vestes trahit illa per herbas,
impediunt teneros vincula nulla pedes.
There were Naiads, some whose hair flowed down without a comb,
others having arranged it by hand with skill.
This one serves with her tunic gathered above her calf,
another opens the robe to reveal her breast:
This one uncovers a shoulder, another drags her hem in the grass
No tender foot is shackled with a shoe.
These naked feet are meant to be mildly erotic. Not so with Manet, whose shoeless young girl is poor and encumbered with an infant. With her dirty feet, she may refer to Caravaggio’s Madonna of Loreto (1604-6). And Picasso’s saltimbanques wear slippers for acrobatics.
All three paintings relate in important ways to poems. I’ve mentioned that Bellini’s work illustrates a passage from Ovid’s Fasti. This is a somewhat distasteful story. Priapus (whom Bellini shows erect under his tunic) is about to rape a Naiad named Lotis while she sleeps, but a donkey brays, awakening the whole company and subjecting Priapus to ridicule. He then kills the donkey with his scythe. (In Bellini’s version, it looks as if Mercury was already watching before the donkey brayed.)
Manet’s friend Baudelaire encouraged him to paint modern society. These lines of Baudelaire’s can be compared with The Old Musician:
À une Mendiante rousse
Blanche fille aux cheveux roux,
Dont la robe par ses trous
Laisse voir la pauvreté
Et la beauté ...,
To a Redhead Beggar Girl
Pale girl with auburn hair
Whose clothes though their holes
Let your poverty show
And beauty ...
Most of all, the fifth of Rilke’s great Duino Elegies is entirely about Picasso’s Family of Saltimbanques, with which he lived (in the Munich home of Hertha Koenig) for several months in 1915, after having seen the same painting in Paris. The poem addresses each character in turn.
Rilke begins:
Wer aber sind sie, sag mir, die Fahrenden, diese ein wenig
Flüchtigern noch als wir selbst, die dringend von früh an
wringt ein wem, wem zu Liebe
niemals zufriedener Wille? Sondern er wringt sie,
biegt sie, schlingt sie und schwingt sie,
wirft sie und fängt sie zurück; wie aus geölter,
glatterer Luft kommen sie nieder
auf dem verzehrten, von ihrem ewigen
Aufsprung dünneren Teppich, diesem verlorenen
Teppich im Weltall.
[...]
But who are they, tell me, these drifters, just a bit
More fleeting than ourselves, wrung out from early on--
by whom, for whose desire, by what insatiable will? Instead, it wrestles them,
bends them, loops them and swings them,
throws them and catches them again; as if through oiled,
slippery air, they come down
on the worn-out mat, worn ever thinner by their constant
leaping, this carpet that is spent in space.
[...]
Rilke takes Picasso’s static image and gives it a story, a before-and-after, much as Bellini had turned Ovid’s narrative into a snapshot. Not only does Rilke imagine that the acrobats were jumping before the calm moment captured in paint, but he discusses how they gradually learned to leap.
He begins a later stanza:
Ach und um diese
Mitte, die Rose des Zuschauns:
blüht und entblättert.
Oh and about this
center, the rose of onlooking:
it blooms and sheds its leaves.
Most translations (collected by Martin Travers) presume that the acrobats form the rose. That is probably correct. However, I suspect that Picasso is also the “rose of onlooking.” During his Rose Period, his pink-ish mood suffuses his work. The painting is a kind of self-portrait as well as an answer to Manet and the tradition of narrative art that preceded them both.
*Picasso definitely knew The Old Musician. Manet may not have known The Feast of the Gods, which was in England in his day. He’s responding to the overall tradition of European painting. References: Anthony Colantuono (1991) “Dies Alcyoniae: The Invention of Bellini’s Feast of the Gods,” The Art Bulletin, 73:2, 237-256; Michael Fried (1969), “Manet’s Sources: Aspects of His Art, 1859-1865,” ArtForum, vol. 7 no. 7; David Luban (1994) Legal Modernism, University of Michigan Press. See also: Velazquez, The Spinners; an accelerating cascade of pearls (on Galileo and Tintoretto); Manet’s “Old Musician” (from 2004).
