Abstract
The film Black Swan (2010) and its ancient counterpart, Horace Odes 2.20, are closely bound by their themes and imagery—the promise of artistic immortality, the search for perfection, grisly physical transformation, the artist’s swan song, death—yet they lack a history of direct influence. This chapter attempts to bridge that gap by arguing for classical reception as a branch of reception studies, and thus shifting the focus from author to audience. Reconceptualizing both works as objects of interpretation in the reader’s mind in turn dissolves hierarchical models of “original” source texts and epigones. Having done away with the “master text” and thus restored both texts to parity, the chapter concludes with a dialectical reading that has implications for our interpretation of both works alike.
The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven:
That image can bring wildness, bring a rage
To end all things, to end…
William Butler Yeats, Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen
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The same occurs when one attempts to question Black Swan’s antecedents, such as Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, Michael Powell’s or Hans Christian Andersen’s versions of The Red Shoes, or the folk tales on which they are allegedly based.
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Martindale (2007: 298) points out that, even recently, ‘many reception histories are highly positivistic in character (seeking to construct the-past-as-it-really-was-in-itself)’, giving the example of Mason’s reading of Martial through Ben Jonson, which casts itself ‘as a way, indeed the best way, of exploring the character of Martial’s meaning’ (1988: 300).
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Cf. Jauss (1982: 15), where he quotes Kosík (1967: 55) approvingly to the effect that ‘the life of the work results “not from its autonomous existence but rather from the reciprocal interaction of work and mankind”’, and the author is largely subsumed under considerations of production; later on even the work begins to blur into its reception: cf. (1982: 146), where awareness of the historical alterity of the text is ascribed to the ‘historicist-reconstructive reading’, rather than essentialized into the text—what makes the text ‘other’ in the reader’s experience, the product of ‘another’ place, time, and person, is itself a function of their reading practice insofar as it is not purely naïve. Thus, context and author are functions of interpretation, rather than objectively available givens.
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Not that it is inconsiderable; there is great value to the conservative idea that, in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s phrase, ‘se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi’.
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Baudrillard (1994: 6). Each of these phases ‘reflects a theology of truth and secrecy’, stemming ‘from the principle of equivalence of the sign and the real (even if this equivalence is utopian, it is a fundamental axiom)’.
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Baudrillard (1994: 6).
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Baudrillard (1994: 7).
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Baudrillard (1994: 9–10). It is worth noting the phrase ‘we have never believed in them’, significant for classics insofar as it implies, correctly in my view, that this condition of the third and fourth stages of the sign is not unique to the modern world; more likely, the first and second stages of the sign have more or less always been wishful retrojections, as in the myth of ages, Ciceronian reconstructions of the Republican past, the Second Sophistic’s lionization of classical Athens, and so on. The other noteworthy phrase is ‘an order that would have nothing to do with it’, that is, of something so alien that it must constitute a genuine encounter with the Real on an objective basis (if it were our subjective projection, the reasoning runs, it could not be so alien); this objectivity and Otherness can thus become the fixed point which supports an entire cultural system by standing behind it/underneath it as its ‘past’.
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But cf. Porter (2008: 469–70) for a different answer to the question of ‘why … the quiet advance of reception studies [has] become a boom’, though he acknowledges there that this boom occurs under the aegis of a resurgent positivistic historicism explicitly opposed to a ‘high theory’ that it reads as exhausted.
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Barthes (1977: 147).
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Martindale (2007: 302–3) puts it eloquently: ‘If the Aeneid has no single “originary” meaning, subsequent readings are equally subject to the slide in signification, in accordance inter alia with the particular needs and configurations of changing reading practices. To cope with this we might try to devise accounts that are not hierarchically arranged, but in which any text could speak to any other text on terms of equality… Rather than patronizing our predecessors, we might do better to put our minds into productive friction with other minds in our contemplation of past works. A reception history need not be part of a narrative of progress.’ Martindale there primarily refers to narratives of progress in the sense of improvement, but his statement applies equally well to narratives of progress in the simple sense of cause-and-effect concatenations: one can do reception studies through non-hierarchical juxtapositions, not simply by asking who read whom.
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Žižek (2006: ix).
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Ferris (2011: 28–35), Palumbo-Liu (2011) and Chow (2011: 17) write of ‘a process of subject de-formation’; Surin (2011) gives a useful and brief historical overview of the changing paradigm of Comparative Literature in the second half of the twentieth century, which does not mention crisis but instead ‘the supersession of the “old comp lit” which was “tottering towards the point of exhaustion and collapse”’ (66). Melas (2007: 1–43) also offers an excellent historical survey of Comparative Literature, its crisis, and its changing ‘Grounds for Comparison’ (the name of the chapter).
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Behdad and Thomas (2011b: 1).
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Surin (2011: 67).
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Hayot (2011: 89).
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See also Gikandi (2011: 256–59), primarily on the history of Eurocentrism in Comparative Literature, but also intriguingly on its synchronic essentialism: ‘where languages or cultures were, or appeared to be, diachronic, comparatists seemed lost and unsure about what to compare’ (258). This seems closely akin to the problem facing classical reception studies when they are deprived of a narrative that can unify, first, ancient literature as ‘Classical’, and then classical and modern literature as a ‘Western tradition’. For the term ‘synchronic essentialism’ see Said (1978: 240); the term is Talal Asad’s.
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Melas (1995: 276–77).
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In fact, practically the entire issue of World Literature Today in which Melas’s article appears is dedicated to exploring the notion of comparison; the rest deals with the aforementioned ‘crisis’ in contemporary Comparative Literature. Melas follows up on her musings in this short article with an excellent book, Melas (2007).
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What Melas posits as an alternative, I see as an epistemological necessity—after all, the practice that enforces comparisons between apples and apples is itself ultimately responsible for constituting its objects as apples and apples (like East and West; like ancient and modern). This renders its arguments circular and just as subjective as any other.
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Gourgouris (2011: 85).
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Gourgouris (2011: 84).
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Gourgouris (2011: 79).
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Gourgouris (2011: 85).
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Saussy (2011: 60).
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Saussy (2011: 62).
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Saussy (2011: 63).
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Cf. Nisbet and Hubbard (1978: 341) ad ‘obibo’: ‘Horace uses the language of real death to describe the deathlessness of his poems’.
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Fraenkel (1957: 301) calls it ‘repulsive or ridiculous, or both’; Page (1895: 295) thinks it careless; Erasmo (2006: 369–70) reviews these earlier commentators but aligns himself with Thévenaz (2002: 862 and n. 4), who gives a fulsome list of interpretive alternatives including parody, a baroque aesthetic, irony, and much more; Nisbet and Hubbard (1978: 334) try to have it both ways, by admitting that ‘the strangest part of the ode is Horace’s actual transformation into a swan’ (which they later refer to as ‘grotesque’, cf. ad ‘plumae’), but then heaping up enough historical parallels to/scholarly readings of scattered bits of the ode (or, more often, to Ovid, since he also describes metamorphoses) to show how ‘this is also made easier for him by the tradition’. This fails to convince.
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Erasmo (2006: 374) lays out various possibilities for biformis.
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Odes 3.30.6–7, non omnis moriar, multaque pars mei / vitabit Libitinam. Thévenaz (2002: 861, n. 2) remarks that analogies between 2.20 and 3.30 have often been noted by commentators, and gives a comprehensive list.
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Nisbet and Hubbard (1978: 337–38) associate the wing most directly with Horace’s poetic fame; yet they acknowledge in the introduction to the poem (336) that ultimately Horace is staking ‘a claim to immortality through his writings’.
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Nisbet and Hubbard (1978: 338) ad biformis: ‘Horace sees a piquant contrast between the ‘immortality’ of his poetry and his mundane corporeal existence’.
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West (1998: 145) notes that the comparison is especially risky in view of 2.20’s allusions to Pindar, the swan of Dirce, and Horace’s claims at Odes 4.2 that any who would rival Pindar would drown like Icarus.
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Cf. Nisbet and Hubbard (1978: 335–37) on poets’ epitaphs.
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Jacobson (1995).
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Thévenaz (2002: 871–75) discusses Horace and Plato at length. The Phaedo, of course, contains a reference to the swan’s dying song.
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Acknowledgments
There are a number of people whose help was instrumental in developing this chapter. Among these, I owe special thanks to my co-editor Anastasia Bakogianni for her diligent work and sage advice; to Cynthia Hornbeck, whose 2011 CAMWS paper (now a published article) led to conversations about Horace and art that inspired many of the ideas expressed above; and to Cliff Robinson and Carolyn Laferriere for taking the time to read and provide excellent feedback and suggestions on an early draft.
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Apostol, R. (2018). From Album Alitem to Black Swan: Horace and Aronofsky on Poetic Perfection and Death. In: Apostol, R., Bakogianni, A. (eds) Locating Classical Receptions on Screen. The New Antiquity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96457-7_6
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