(no subject)

[malsperanza]

OK, time to try this gizmo.

All this talk lately about the Body and its transformations. First, last week, the whole business about romantic transvestism & its connection to the Tortured Hero: Hero torture and hero feminization seem to be linked somehow--but no one wants to say how, or why it works so well. I keep asking and getting evasive answers. We like it when the hero is tied to a post or manacled in the galleys and whipped bloody (e.g., Errol Flynn in Captain Blood, Alan Ladd in pretty much every movie he made, but especially Two Years Before the Mast; and all the bodice ripper novels; but also perfectly respectable literature, like Wuthering H and The Unbearable L of Being--well, more or less).

We like it even more if he is wearing ruffles at the time. If there is a literal, implied, or metaphorical rape as well, so much the better. This is feminizing the masculine with a vengeance. So, is my friend X. transforming himself in order to be more mysterious & exotic to the ladies, or more familiar? And to himself?

Then somehow this discussion began to merge with the discussion over in DT realm about polyjuice transformations and their relationship to sex. Because a polyjuice transformation of the kind that DV imagines is no more than the logical extreme of transvestism: put on the clothes, put on the mask, play dress-up in the flesh of the Other. It's inherently sexually transgressive. I loved it when that conversation fell into a scholastic debate on the cellular or genetic or subatomic transformations brought about by polyjuice, because it is so close to the stuff Augustine goes on about, when he's worrying about the resurrection of the body: What is the perfect age of the body at the time of resurrection? (Answer: 30, which he, reassuringly, considers the bloom of youth.) Will aborted fetuses be resurrected? (And if so, will they too be 30 years old?) Will Siamese twins be two people or one? Will all our hair and nail clippings be attached back to us, not to mention beards? If I eat a piece of someone, when I am resurrected, will I get to keep the flesh that his body part was transformed into, or will it go back to its original owner? In other words: what are the material limits of the individual body, and how much of identity is lodged in the body?

Went rummaging in Carolyn Walker Bynum for this: "Augustine was not completely consistent about whether martyrs rise with scars indicating their tortures, but in ... City of God ... he equated such scars with personal experience or history and thereby suggested that body is in some way a necessary conveyor of personhood or self." And a little earlier: "When Augustine looks at change, he sees decay, so much so that he sometimes equates resurrection with escape from process ... after death, which is only a moment in the putrefaction that continues between birth and judgment, we can rise to incorruption. Once risen, we will truly escape change. ... salvation as the crystalline hardness of stasis." Cheerful guy, Augustine.

But at any rate, it's one possible reason for the hero torture and the scars: the scars mark the body of the hero as having a history; the signs of his heroic work are written on his body. (Yeah, that again.) They are proof of his identity. Can't have a hero without a heroic body; can't have a heroic body without marking it; can't mark it without hurting it. And yet, despite its scars, the hero's body remains exquisitely beautiful and perfectly ambisexual.

The carnivalesque urge to dress in another guise--other clothes, other flesh, the other sex--is directly opposed to this goal of achieving a perfect, unchanging paradise. Carnival is all about change, constant transformation, endless layers of masks. It is what life is before we achieve perfection. And for the hero it is what life is before he achieves his quest--which is (always) to discover himself. So the hero who is empty of identity, and is all things to all people, the pure perfect object of desire (poor sod), can transform himself into everything--masculine man, feminine woman, masculine woman, feminine man, etc.--and keeps on doing so, over and over, until he finds himself at the end of his quest, and locates his identity in his own body. Until then, he is in a constant state of polyjuice intoxication.

I keep coming back to Dionysus (the androgynous, cross-dressing, mask-wearing, theater-loving, dangerous, beautiful Oriental god) and Pentheus, the king who dresses as a bacchante to spy on the women, and ends up spilling his own sacrificial seed and blood in consequence. Talk about hero torture. I still can't tell if my friend X is a hero or not. Probably not a successful one, and (so far) singularly free of suffering or scars.

Come to think of it, Achilles dresses as a woman: early in his career, when he is hiding from his heroic destiny, & IIRC gets one of Lycomedes' daughters pregnant. Turns out (surprise surprise) that the 17th c loved this scene. How absolutely perfect.

http://www.calliope.free-online.co.uk/achilles/pic35.htm
http://www.abcgallery.com/P/poussin/poussin83.html
http://www.abcgallery.com/P/poussin/poussin97.html (a real hoot)
http://www.kfki.hu/~arthp/html/q/quellin/erasmus/achilles.html
http://www.getty.edu/art/collections/objects/o791.html
http://www.bestpriceart.com/painting/?image=batoni1.jpg&tc=cgfa
http://towerwebproductions.com/mythology/art/achilles_vanlint.htm
http://www.calliope.free-online.co.uk/achilles/pic27.htm
http://www.calliope.free-online.co.uk/achilles/pic33.htm (OK Primaticcio's too early, but still)

and this one from the 18th c., too good to overlook:

http://www.calliope.free-online.co.uk/achilles/pic26.htm

And a mighty pretty girl he is, too.

Comments

[chresimos.livejournal.com]

I am impressed by your collection of Achillesindrag art. Vile union, what begat the loathsome Pyrrhus, whose alternate name I kept reading as 'Neopolitan' and thinking of ice-cream. *sigh*