But then again, this week I went to Handel's Apollo e Dafne in the Neo-Palladian palace, Castletown House. Beautiful music in a beautiful room in a beautiful house.
Still, beautiful rooms in beautiful houses are exceptions that prove the rule that I mentioned in the first paragraph. Ireland does not have a well developed culture of the appreciation of visual arts and architecture because art is costly. The evidence for this in Castletown was obvious. During the interval I looked out the sash windows of the The Long Gallery, over the broad meadows and saw in the distance Conolly's Folly - built in the 1740s to give work to the local poor who'd been devastated by famine in 1740 - 41.
The walls of the corridors were covered by portraits of the aristocrats who'd lived in the house over the centuries but the images that stood out for me were photographs of the labourers whose work created and sustained the wealth and position of their supposed betters. Castletown house is a beautiful place but at what cost?
Handel's cantata, as well as the myth of Apollo and Daphne as it is told in Ovid's Metamorphoses is a reminder of the same point - beauty is costly.
The story of Apollo and Daphne is a refusal, followed by a change, followed by another refusal. Each part proves this point.
First, Daphne refuses Apollo's sexual advances. For Daphne, bearing Apollo's beautiful child would be too costly.
The myth begins with Apollo's return from battling the Python. Walking through the woods he has just one thing on his mind and the sight of the beautiful Daphne is the very thing he needs.
Thanks to Cupid, however, Apollo is the last thing Daphne needs. While Apollo has been pierced by Cupid's love inducing arrow, Daphne has been pierced by one that makes her feel only contempt for Apollo. Naturally, she scorns and rejects him. From Handel's libretto:
"Sempre t'adorero....Sempre t'aborriro!" (I will always love you...I will always hate you!)
Why does Daphne refuse him? Well, there would be very little for her in a coupling with Apollo.
In Ovid's version of the story Daphne's refusal of childbearing and rearing is an absolute one: When her father, Peneus, tells her “You owe me a son, my daughter....Now when, my child will you give me grandson?”she replies: “Darling father, I want to remain a virgin forever. Please let me, Diana's father allowed her that”.
Daphne has everything to lose. Sure, Apollo is a god but why should she have anything to do with this guy? For all his fine talk about love and the like when you strip it down he's basically a soldier coming back from the war looking to get laid.
She'd probably end up looking after the child of their union while Apollo would surely go off on his merry way.
In Handel's version, Dafne's refusal to enter into this reproductive contract with Apollo is a commonsense one: “Il ragion frena t'amor” (Reason arrests love) “Piu tosto morire che perder l'onor” (It's better to die than to lose one's honour). Why should I submit to this 'love' – it's neither reasonable nor honourable.
So while Apollo sings from the outset that “La terra e liberta” (the land is free) what he has to offer Daphne is not freedom. She already has freedom. She knows its importance. She too sings about it at the start: “Felicissima quest'alma Ch'ama sol la liberta/Non v'è pace, non v'è calma Per chi sciolto il cor non ha” (Most blest is this soul, that loves only freedom. There is not peace, there is no calm if the heart is not unfettered)
Second, Daphne changes into a laurel tree, arresting forever Apollo's pursuit and her flight.
"Tu non mi fuggirai!...Si, che ti fuggiro!" (You can't get away from me, yes I will get away from you!)
In this way they create a union that outlasts any possible physical union they might have had. In other words, they re-create themselves as timeless symbols of art.
What happens is a kind of sublation of the proposed relationship (sex and reproduction) into another kind of relationship (the production of art). Daphne refuses Apollo's invitation to join together and produce a child. And yet, her transformation is actually a kind of acceptance that they will always be together in that moment of suspended pursuit.
"It is you who will always be twined in my hair, on my tuneful lyre...with your glory and praise everlasting"
In Ovid's version of the myth Apollo had claimed from the beginning that he was the god of art: “I am the lord of the lyre and song”. But it is only when Daphne is changed into a laurel tree that this is proven. He is only the lord of lyre and song because Daphne's transformation changes him just as much as it changes her.
Before this episode, Apollo had been arrogant and rapacious; arguing with Cupid and lusting after Daphne's beauty. It is only after the chastening experience of his failure in love that he can truly claim to be the lord of the lyre and song.
Together, Apollo and Daphne create a beautiful representation. The cost for Apollo is that he must forgo his previous incarnation as a vain, lustful, arrogant god.
What about the cost for Daphne? Well, ending up as a tree is hardly the kind of outcome that most people look forward to. In fact, Daphne's transformation is actually a better outcome for her. I will explain this in a moment.
But what does it mean to say that Apollo and Daphne end up as art? How does the metamorphosis resulting in a stasis of never - ending, never - fulfilled pursuit and flight add up to art?
I am about as far away from an expert on what defines art as you are likely to meet, so I don't mind - since it's unavoidable - being wrong. A definition that I like is that outlined by Kant in his Critique of Judgement.
For Kant, art is “a kind of representation that is purposive in itself and, though without an end, nevertheless promotes the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable communication”
Well, Apollo and Daphne's arrested embrace is 'purposive in itself' - in that its energies are forever in motion and yet are not directed beyond itself. It is immanent. Unlike a 'real' embrace which can have extrinsic purposes; pleasure, reproduction, this embrace has no other purpose than to remain forever unfulfilled.
Similarly, their embrace is timeless - "without an end" in Kant's formulation - and so contrasts once again with the real life moment of which it is ostensibly a representation. In time, all things pass away, in time, lovers consummate their love, in time, lovers grow tired of love. In art, there is no consummation, no weariness, no death, embraces go on forever.
In this way, the metamorphosis of Apollo and Daphne into this frozen moment always reminds me of Keats' representation of a similar moment in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal – yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Because Apollo's and Daphne's coupling becomes an eternal reminder of the transitory nature of love and desire it satisfies the third criterion in Kant's formulation in that it "promotes the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable communication".
In other words, the sublation of human desire into the production of a symbol reflects back into the the imperfect, inescapable human world.
What "mental powers" can be "cultivated for the purposes of sociable communication" by thinking about Apollo and Daphne are anyone's guess.
For me, Daphne has rejected sexual union with Apollo because the costs are too high. What woman in her right mind would get mixed up a promiscuous thug like Apollo?
On a more serious note, Daphne's ambition was greater than to be Apollo's plaything and to suffer the trauma of bearing his child. As I said before, the production of that kind of beauty was too costly.
It seems to me that Daphne's ambition was greater than this.
Third, Daphne's second refusal is a refusal to be an object in art. She refuses the default position of women in art. As John Berger wrote in Ways of Seeing "A woman in the culture of privileged Europeans is first and foremost a sight to be looked at".
Daphne refuses to be looked at.
Unlike her heroine, Diana, who when she was looked at by Acteon, had the voyeur transformed into a stag and devoured by his own dogs, Daphne's gift is actually art. In becoming a tree - in reproducing herself in this form she is visible in what she creates; not in what she is.
And what she has made of herself, what she has produced is, according to Ovid's telling of the tale, a beautiful object:
"The feet that had run so nimbly were sunk into sluggish roots; her head was confined in a treetop, all that remained was her beauty"
So, was this metamorphosis too great a cost for Daphne? Remember how important freedom was to her. It depends on whether the transformation was her decision: She has escaped from the suffering of bearing and rearing Apollo's child. She has not been trapped and exhibited as an object. Maybe her metamorphosis was a decision to choose a life devoted to art similar to that celebrated in Yeats' poem Sailing to Byzantium.
And yet I can't help but think of the arms and legs that had 'run so nimbly' and worked so hard over the centuries to produce and maintain the conditions that made beautiful things like Castletown House, Handel's Apollo e Dafne or Bernini's sculpture of Apollo and Daphne possible. On a literal reading Daphne ends up dead at the end of this story, despite the fact that at the end of Ovid's account she seems to be pleased enough:
"With a wave of her new formed branches the laurel agreed [with Apollo's praise of her] and seemed to be nodding her head in the treetop"
At the end of Handel's cantata, Dafne has even less to say. Alongside her muteness is the fact that she has sacrificed her life, for who can live as a tree? It's possible to interpret her sacrifice as a change for the better - and that is exactly what I have done!
However, no reading of her metamorphosis as a change for the better can erase the fact that she has lost a great deal too. This is to say nothing more than what Kant sees as definitive of art in general that it "promotes the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable communication". Art is not art if it does not in some way make you think and feel differently about the world that it comes from and the world that you live in.
Castletown House, as a condition of being a beautiful Palladian mansion has to bear the marks of the countless, anonymous lives of labourers, peasants and servants that were given to produce and maintain its beauty. The story of Apollo and Daphne has to bear the marks of the silencing and sacrificing of women that have always been a condition for the production of beautiful things - paintings, sculpture, literature and, maybe most of all, children.
The production of beautiful things is costly.
No comments:
Post a Comment