Chichele Essay 2013 Loss Benjamin van Leeuwen When King Lear finally slumps in death, the corpse of his faithful daughter Cordelia in his arms, in the nihilistic atmosphere of arguably Shakespeare s greatest tragedy, he has lost everything. In contrast to Gloucester s more positive passing offstage in the more dignified Greek tradition, smilingly, and reunited with Edgar Lear has been broken as a man to such an extent that death is not only inevitable, but also a welcome respite. The very loss of his kingdom, authority, loyal daughter, and even his mind have reduced his constituent parts in much the same way the body politic of his realm has increasingly disintegrated throughout. However, loss is too often viewed disparagingly due to its omnipresent role in the genre of Tragedy under Aristotle s principles in his Poetics, the very protagonist he specifies in all tragic writings has already lost something before the tale unfolds, and it is the absence of that trait or virtue that makes the title character flawed. However, the nature of losing something can often lead to gains, despite initial counterintuitiveness. For the protagonist of John Fowles The Magus, to lose the perceivably narrow preconceptions of his Oxford English Literative education through the help of the afore-mentioned Magus, he is opened up literally (!) to new worlds. From a more artistic perspective, the occurrence of losing someone or something often leads to fantastic pieces of work being created due to the enhanced emotions brought about, such as Josef Suk s emotionally charged Asrael Symphony in a morose C minor after his wife s passing, or more recently James MacMillan s The Confessions of Isabel Gowdie; a predominantly modal work influenced equally by European avant-garde, Stravinsky s ability 1
with rhythm, Pärt and Glass work with minimalist string pieces, and traditional Scottish melodies, written for a suspected 16 th century witch burnt at the stake as the mass she never had. Even to look at ourselves, we are observing a centuries-old benefit of loss; that is, the product of Darwin s concept of evolution. Therefore, as I finish this introductory paragraph, I thank my ancestors for allowing me to write these words by not losing in the evolutionary survival for superiority. From loss comes benefit in the long term, regardless of the short term pain or sacrifice. As P. Clodius Paetus Thrasea so logically put to the senate in section 20 of Tacitus s Book XV from his Annals, from human transgression comes the ability to make new laws. However for these to be created and further society, fault must first be committed in this case, the arrogance of Claudius Timarchus claim that he could choose whether or not to give the official thanks of Crete to the Roman representative of the Senate. Loss is a crucial aspect of law in many aspects besides this theoretical Roman logic, not least in making the guilty party in a lawsuit pay for the opposition s legal fees an incentive which motivates trials, and the last defence or offence that can possibly be made. This in part explains our sympathy for Vittoria Corombona in Webster s The White Devil as she protests Monticelso has raped justice while being led off to the house for penitent whores; she has lost her case due to the inherent misogyny of a Renaissance Italian Court, and thus has only lost due to moral and sexual unfairness. In looking rather dualistically at the negatives and positives of loss, one cannot help but think of the practice of gambling, in which one person s misfortune is precisely and consequentially mirrored by another person s success. By placing a bet on anything as simple as the flip of a coin to the complexities of the river card in a game of Texas hold-em poker you are essentially saying that you are right, and are actively hoping for another man to fail so that you may 2
profit from his misfortune. While on a localised level it is easy to condemn such a system if one is too susceptible to the unfortunate plight of the loser, this principle also upholds the principle of capitalism, and the fundaments of Western economic thought; a system arguably proved to be the most successful in making the most people happy, despite being inherently founded on willing the particular company you have predicted to fail to financially collapse. While communism theoretically appears to seem more morally defensible in deeming all humans equal, it is the unfortunate (but inevitable) opinions of those in charge that the citizens they command are more equal. This acknowledgement of the fact that not all humans are equal and that some will inevitably lose out that was the vision of Darwin in explaining the evolution of all species. By losing the parrots with the regular beaks who could not open nuts for example, the species was able to evolve and populate the Galapagos Islands. Loss is equally important in order for the development of society to Niccolo Machiavelli, who actively encouraged peoples ruled by ineffective rulers to revolt. While of course this was written in Italy, contextually influenced by the often corrupt working of the many city states such as Florence, Venice and Rome and the Papacy as so vividly portrayed in Piero s The Family, the relevance of overthrowing a leader for the good of society was not lost on Cromwell either, though this time in 17 th Century Britain. With the loss of Charles I s head came the (albeit brief) more democratic period of the Cromwellian Protectorate despite Royalist insurgency throughout; a short respite from monarchical absolution ended in 1660 with the return from France of Charles II. Milton s heavily influenced work Paradise Lost is arguably made all the more compelling by these contrasted events, especially with regard to the character portrayal of the Devil and his Cromwellian trait of offering an alternative to God s absolutist rule. Though Eve s decision is responsible for much of the subsequent misogyny in many cultures that our society has only begun to address 3
relatively recently in the scale of time, Philip Pullman has praised both their efforts in obtaining Free Will, and called the loss of Edenic bliss.. a small price to pay. However not all connected events to Paradise Lost are positive, especially Henry s plans to translate it into Latin in Donna Tartt s novel The Secret History. Many things are often lost in translation in this case converting Milton s skilful iambic pentameter would have been particularly messy had Henry not committed suicide since there is much truth in the assertions of several German Romantic linguistic philosophers like Hegel and Schlegel that the cultural identity of a nation or race is tied to its own language. When Thomas Mann s protagonist in the short story Gladius Dei asks the shopkeeper to remove a sexually provocative picture of the Madonna from the window, it was because the artist had taken her very principle of purity from her, theologically thus ruing the possibility of the immaculate conception, and thus having created a work that was to him artistically imperfect. Continuing to combine these two ideals of religious and artistic purity, although now in the Muslim tradition, it is interesting to note that Muslim rug makers deliberately make at least one mistake in their work as a contingency, because to attempt artistic perfection would be sacrilegious. Thus for both the Muslim artisan, and the lecherous window shoppers of Berlin (interesting circumstantial linguistic point of interest to window shop in French is faire du lêche-vitrine ), objective imperfection is nevertheless their sense of perfection. This subject/object distinction is crucial when considering varying opinions on the concept of whether something really is a loss or a gain to an artistic work, thus once again proving that there truly never can be a definitive set of ideals for aesthetic perfection (despite Tolstoy s ruminations in What is Art? and Basil Hallward s best work in Wilde s Dorian Gray), and ultimately one must eventually cop-out and fall back on Keats reliable words that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. 4
In conclusion, loss is not just the negative institution that Greek drama has already given us a preconception of, but similarly it is too predictable and obviously dualist to conclude that loss has its benefits too. What is consistently factual is that loss will inevitably result in a winner and a loser, even though their respective identities may be argued over by others in their subjective viewpoints. Just as the fact that we have lost the meaning of the Voynich manuscript makes it all the more intriguing, the fact that we now know that the Mayans were wrong in predicting that we all would have lost our lives by now rather diminishes their scientific credibility. However, we should never lose faith in our achievements, nor name our daughter Cordelia just in case another branch of the British monarchy is discovered. 5