Re: [Marxism] Why Does Fahrenheit 9/11 Pursue Conspiracy Theory?

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect wrote:
>
>
> Bring it after me.
> I will not be afraid of death and bane,
> Till Birnam forest come to Dunsinane.
>
> Marxism, by contrast, could never inspire literature or films such as
> these. Why not is an interesting question.

Part at  least of the answer.

Classic tragedy (whether ancient Athens or 17th c. England) _as a genre_
(pretty much regardless of the writer's intentions) presupposes an
unchanging order which is violated and then reasserts itself violently.
"Ripeness is all" as a character says in _Lear_. And this is brought out
powerfully in Ezra Pound's translation of the _Women of Trachis_.
Herakles is dying in torment from the poisoned shirt which is wife
(unintentionally) gave him. He says to his son that his father (Zeus)
had promised him that he should find rest after this last labor which he
has just completed, and he had thought that meant a peaceful life at
home. But he had been wrong: it meant death, for there are no labors
among the dead, and then (in Pound's translation, all caps Pound's):

        Time lives, and its going on now.
        I am released from trouble.
        I thought it meant life in comfort.
        It doesn't. I means that I die.
        For amid the dead there is no work in service.
        Come at it that way, my boy, what

        SPLENDOUR,
                   IT ALL COHERES.

It has been said of the Greeks generally that they did not expect the
world to be pleasant, but they did demand that it make sense, be
intelligible, fit together: COHERE, even if the coherence is at the
price of human misery. Such misery was justified by the splendor of it
all coheres. One can see that operating in Macbeth and the lines Lou
quotes, for Birnam forest did indeed come to Dunsinane -- thus
guaranteeing that James VI of Scotland (in legend the descendant of
Banquo) would come to the throne as James I of England, thereby averting
the chaos that the death of Queen Elizabeth without issue threatened.
(The Civil War of the 1640s had long been feared in the late 16th
century, and _Macbeth_ probably echoed those fears for its original
audience.)

But Marxism can generate its own great literature -- great even in the
thinness of translation:

Germany, Pale Mother
        by Bertolt Brecht

'Let others speak of her shame
I speak of my own.'

O Germany, pale mother!
How soiled you are
As you sit among the peoples.
You flaunt yourself
Among the besmirched.

The poorest of your sons
Lies struck down.
When his hunger was great.
Your other sons
Raised their hands against him.
This is notorious.

With their hands thus raised,
Raised against their brother,
They march insolently around you
And laugh in your face.
This is well known.

In your house
Lies are roared aloud.
But the truth
Must be silent.
Is it so?

Why do the oppressors praise you everywhere,
The oppressed accuse you?
The plundered
Point to you with their fingers, but
The plunderer praises the system
That was invented in your house!

Whereupon everyone sees you
Hiding the hem of your mantle which is bloody
With the blood
Of your best sons.

Hearing the harangues which echo from your house,
   men laugh.
But whoever sees you reaches for a knife
As at the approach of a robber.

O Germany, pale mother!
How have your sons arrayed you
That you sit among the peoples
A thing of scorn and fear!
-----

Carrol


_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism