Category: Death Class Creative

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Piers Plowman (/A Brechtian Reinterpretation)

CategoryText
FormPoetry
GenreAllegory, Alliterative Verse, Dream Vision
AuthorWilliam Langland
TimeLate 14th Century
LanguageMiddle English
Featured InDeath, Mourning and Memory in Medieval Literature (YHU3345)

Piers Plowman is the highly acclaimed Middle English allegorical poem by William Langland, written after the Black Death. The alliterative poem is divided into multiple sections or visions (termed “passus”). The narrator encounters various allegorical characters ranging from “Reason”, “Fortune”, “Wrath”, to rather unapologetically named ones such as  “Do-Just-So-Or-Your-Dame-Will-Beat-You” and “Suffer-Your-Sovereigns-To-Have-Their-Will-Condemn-Them-Not-For-If-You-Do-You’ll-Pay-A-Dear-Price-Let-God-Have-His-Way-With-All-Things-For-So-His-Word-Teaches”, all in effort to learn and understand how to live life as a good Christian.

REFLECTIONS AND ENGAGEMENT

As a theological and social allegory, Piers Plowman pushes its literary form to the limit, with its endless search for authority and meaning in a post-plague era of death and social upheaval. During the medieval period, it was widely read and proved to be an influential text, even being used as inspiration during the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381. Given Piers Plowman’s social relevancy and popularity, my project hopes to re-imagine the text in a modern context while keeping its resonances as boundary-pushing social commentary. Moreover, just as Langland pushed against the didactic form of the allegory, my creative intervention attempts to move the theatrical form to the limits of realism, to comment on the crisis of society after a period of uncertainty, a reality we are still grappling with today.

CREATIVE PROJECT BY ASHLEY SIM SHUYI (’22)

Piers Plowman: A Brechtian Reinterpretation
Literary Art / Performing Art (Stage Play and Artistic Direction)
An Interpretation of Piers Plowman
Death, Mourning and Memory in Medieval Literature (YHU3345)
2021

Artist’s Remarks

My creative project will approach Piers Plowman from two directions – first as the writer of the Brechtian re-imagination of the text and secondly, as the artistic director commenting on the script with staging ideas. In this fictious production, I imagine that the play is put up by a very small team with aims to use art to generate some kind of social change, hence, the creative process between artistic collaborators is more transparent. As the writer, my re-interpretation of Piers Plowman focuses on picking out key moments in Passus V and VI and creating a montage-like sequence, one of the characteristics of Brechtian-inspired work. Moreover, as the script writer, I used the source text as the main inspiration, quoting the translation and the middle English to respect the socio-cultural world of the play, an important aspect of Brechtian work. Conversely, as the artistic director, I explain more fully what the staging could look like, while also removing more suspension of disbelief so the ‘audience’ (ie the reader of the script) can see behind the veil of the play’s staging, another Brechtian characteristic. This feature should also figure into the staging of the play as the set changes and costume changes happen in front of the audience. Overall, I want to construct a play, set during the time of Piers Plowman, that makes the audience confront the intellectual experiences of thinking about social issues rather than the feelings that heart-wrenching realism may invoke.

Compared to other medieval texts such as Dante’s Inferno or Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess, Langland does not invoke as many intertextual references to the literary canon, but rather, is interested in depicting social reality as a means to grapple with it. In a similar way, Brecht believed that “Art is not a mirror with which to reflect reality, but a hammer with which to shape it”1, with his work often being tied to specific social contexts. Thus, I see a striking similarity between Brechtian theatre and Langland’s poem as both attempt to use art and culture to reflect deeply on society in a way that requires several layers of interpretation and understanding. Piers Plowman is not obviously didactic; however, it forces the reader to confront absurd scenarios that astound and confuse, much like how Brechtian theatre is staged. In my re-imagination of Piers Plowman, I have utilized many Brechtian techniques to reflect my initial process of encountering Piers Plowman for the first time. Some key Brechtian theories I have chosen to employ include Verfremdung (V-effect), a devising process that aims to make the familiar strange as a means for the audience to reach a deeper level of understanding by being forced to resolve surface contradictions and Gestus, a type of physicality that hopes to represent a character rather than embody it. Just as Langland’s poems alienate the modern reader, I hope to do the same in my theatrical re-interpretation. In the process of reconstituting Lamgland’s poem into a play, I looked into medieval morality plays such as Everyman to understand how medieval theatre incorporated allegory. I noticed that the practice of stating the didactic purpose of the morality play at the beginning fits in nicely with Brecht’s V-effect as this sort of declarative statement in modern day would serve to alienate, allowing for an interesting cross-pollination of medieval and modern theatrical practice.

Additionally, in my theatrical re-interpretation, I wanted to highlight the feelings of anxiety after the plague, which had pushed the world to the brink of disaster. Seen through Piers Plowman and the narrative itself, the text constantly grasps for meaning as the characters clamour to find ‘Truth’, a religious symbol of redemption. Thus, Piers Plowman becomes a vehicle to embark on this spiritual quest as he becomes a pseudo-Christ-like figure, who in the process of leading them to salvation, re-affirms strict social hierarchies where “wives and widows [should] spin wool and flax” (Langland 6.13) and the knight should “uphold [his] obligation” to “take care” (Langland 6.33) of the people. However, this spiritual quest underpins larger societal issues as individuals such as the “pickpocket”, “ape-trainer” and “cake-seller” (Langland 5.630 – 634), believe that they have “no kin” with Truth, speaking to the larger issue that only communities of aristocrats believed that they have access to spiritual redemption. Compounded by the historical context of peasants being forced to work under the Ordinance of Labourers of 1349, I wanted to explore this social commentary through my use of placards which have often been used to comment on the unseen in Brechtian plays. Another way that Langland has created boundary-pushing social commentary is through his allegory of Hunger, which is also tied to the labour crisis. The violence with which Hunger is used to control the Waster is striking, as Hunger “gripped [the Waster] so that his eyes gushed water” (Langland 6.175). While exhibiting cruel violence, Hunger is simultaneously shown to restore social order. I wanted to figure this duality of Hunger into my montage sequence, choosing to construct Hunger as a modern-day rock star – a symbol of both vice and virtue. To do this, I conceived of unique staging elements such as costuming and lighting to create a jarring quality, alienating the audience.

To me, this project is a creative exercise in relating modern theatrical practice to Langland’s unique use of form. It is interesting to see many resonances with how literature and art tends to move after a catastrophic event such as the plague, or the pandemic, as there is clearly a pattern of art moving towards more absurd, post-modern directions. Other artistic movements such as Dadaism or the rise of Zoom theatre reflects this human desire to construct meaning in chaos by pushing the limits of the known. Piers Plowman represents this human impulse to explain the inexpressible, in a constant struggle to find meaning in a world surrounded by death, and it is my hope that my Brechtian reimagination of the text pay homage to its enduring relevance in the 21st century.

FOOTNOTES

1 The source of this quote has been disputed greatly so it is difficult to find where it was originally quoted from. However, this quote is one of the most commonly-attributed quote to Brecht. 

IMAGE CREDITS

[Featured Image] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piers_Plowman

CONTRIBUTED BY ASHLEY SIM SHUYI (’22)

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Hamlet in Bukit Brown: A Creative Exploration

CREATIVE PROJECT BY SIMONE TAM (’22)

Hamlet in Bukit Brown: A Creative Exploration
Performing Art (Proposed Directorial Vision)
An Interpretation of Hamlet
Death, Mourning and Memory in Medieval Literature (YHU3345)
2021

I. INTRODUCTION

The oft quoted “To be, or not to be – that is the question”1 in Shakespeare’s canonical text, Hamlet, is a solemn meditation on existence. It is a reflective grappling with states of life and death, a vacillation between doubt and certainty, and a question that is suspended within the intermedial throes of madness and sanity. Such a general utterance invites three potential interpretations on what “the question” in this context could be, moving from macro to micro spheres of agentic discourse: (a) whether life is worth living, (b) whether he should take his own life, and (c) whether he should act against the King.

These three possible interpretations suggest that while the play seems to centre around avenging his father’s death, Hamlet is essentially about identity and existence, as explored through the different proxies of politics, family, and romance/friendship – with the formation (and/or fragmentation) of the self taking on expressions of loyalty, duty, and love. This idea of identity and existence is not only embodied in the titular character, Hamlet, and in the relationships that he has, but also in the Ghost that appears and adds supernatural spice to what would be, otherwise, a plot without precedent.

In this way, Hamlet is a story that seems to be about a man’s search for “heimlich” (homecoming; belonging), wherein the themes of death, mourning, and memory are relevant to that struggle. The sense of “heimlich” is motivated by the presence of the Ghost, which is the interpretive crux to Hamlet’s character and the device that moves the plot of the play. The Ghost’s roaming and existence is also possibly a lack of eschatological “heimlich”, which surfaces an interesting cultural debate about the existence of Purgatory and theologically sanctioned practices of remembrance.

This creative exploration thus aims to reimagine how Hamlet participates in the debate about Purgatory and memorialising the dead through a proposed directorial vision of the play – an exploration of site-specific theatre, set in Bukit Brown Cemetery. This vision is inspired by itinerant cinema practices that have screened films in cemeteries for the dead (a cinema night for spirits), and commedia dell’arte as one of the first recognised theatre practices to perform in non-conventional production spaces.

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The Ripple Effects of Hamlet’s Murder

CREATIVE PROJECT BY SIDHARTH PRAVEEN (’21)

The Ripple Effects of Hamlet’s Murder
Animation
An Interpretation of Hamlet
Death, Mourning and Memory in Medieval Literature (YHU3345)
2021

Artist’s Remarks

Breakdown of Animation: Scene 1 of my animation begins with Yorick’s skull in frame. The skull then splits into several pieces which recombine to form a knife. Prince Hamlet’s hand then comes into frame as he grabs the knife and plunges it into Polonius’s heart in Scene 2. The heart starts bleeding in an explosive fashion as the camera pans upwards to show Polonius’s shellshocked face. The blood pouring out of the heart then fills up Ophelia’s gown in Scene 3. The camera zooms out and Ophelia’s face pops into the scene with her person being enclosed within Hamlet’s eyes. Hamlet cries in blood as his tears drown Ophelia. The wave of blood then transforms into Hamlet’s eyeballs as his mouth appears uttering the lines:

“Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander
returneth to dust, the dust is earth” (Shakespeare, 5.1.205-215)

The camera, then, pans downwards onto Scene 4 to reveal the cup of poison that kills Gertrude. A tree grows out from the cup and extends out of frame. The camera, for the last time, pans upwards to reveal Gertrude, Laertes, Claudius, and Hamlet all impaled by the tree.

The animation ends with the camera zooming in on Hamlet’s face as his own soliloquy about Alexander the Great’s remnants being part of the soil plays in the background.

Commentary: My visuals and the lines spoken in this animation contradict each other. While the soliloquys I have chosen as the audio suggest that Hamlet is a meditative spirit who understands how intangible, feeble, and pathetic human greed, emotions, and desires are, my visuals – that depict him committing murder and the ripple effects of his murder – suggest otherwise. They suggest that he is an impulsive creature who is so swayed by the happenings in his environment that he possesses no understanding of the ramifications his actions might have.

These soliloquys suggest that human might, wealth, greed, or, in the case of Yorick, even idiosyncratic traits that a person is remembered the most by, hold no weight over the all-levelling nature of death. Yet, Hamlet is constantly propelled by his emotions and swayed by his propensities. For example, upon seeing a player become so overwhelmed by emotion while acting The Aeneid out, Hamlet wonders why he was not as consumed by emotion when it came to enacting revenge on his uncle. (Shakespeare, 2.2.530-605) Similarly, he is once again spurred into a vengeful state when he hears about all the Poles and the Norwegians dying over plots of land. (Shakespeare, 4.4.60) But if he were to apply the essence of his soliloquys onto these thoughts, he would know that there are no emotions or goals worth pursuing when you think of them in a wider timeframe.

My Scene 1 punctures these soliloquys by having Yorick’s skull, a symbol of this meditative aspect of Hamlet, being torn apart and put back together as a knife – a tool that symbolises death. Hamlet’s act of murdering Polonius thinking it might be his uncle goes to show how propelled by tendencies he is. There was nothing calculative at all about his actions and therefore, just like Yorick’s skull, so do his ruminations on death break apart.

I begin to show the ripple effect of Hamlet’s murder by having the blood pouring out of Polonius’s heart drench Ophelia’s clothes in Scene 3. I also wanted to capture Gertrude’s expression about the river drenching Ophelia’s clothes and carrying her away. (Shakespeare, 4.7.181) This expression reduces Ophelia’s culpability in her own death: it was not just suicide but the river also played a role in killing her. Similarly, since Ophelia’s psyche shows a clear deterioration following Polonius’s death, (Shakespeare, 4.5.30) I wanted to put Hamlet partly at fault for her death. This is why I had her drown inside his eyes with her clothes drenched from Polonius’s blood: she is the first victim of Hamlet’s propensities. Ophelia’s site of death turns into Hamlet’s eyeballs and his talking mouth takes over the scene. I wanted to show Hamlet’s short-sightedness and ego through this scene. He does not think about Ophelia at all when he finds out that he had accidentally killed Polonius. His indifference is to be blamed when we are talking about Ophelia’s death.

Similarly, I animated a tree in Scene 4 because it was a good visual representation of the branching effect of Hamlet’s actions. Claudius and Laertes wishes to kill Hamlet because of his involvement in the deaths of Polonius and Ophelia. The glass of poison and the sword laced with the poison become all of their undoing as one thing leads to another and they all die by the end of the events of the play.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Audio Recording obtained from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ilZn_1MPrE&t=473s.

REFERENCES

William, Shakespeare. Hamlet. The Arden Shakespeare.

Boyle, Danny. Trainspotting. PolyGram Filmed Entertainment. 1996.

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Virgil and Dante Meeting Satan in the Ninth Circle

CREATIVE PROJECT BY OSHEA REDDY (’24)

Virgil and Dante Meeting Satan in the Ninth Circle
Visual Art (Painting)
An Interpretation of Inferno
Death, Mourning and Memory in Medieval Literature (YHU3345)
2021

Artist’s Remarks

My decision to paint Dante’s and Virgil’s encounter with Satan in Canto 34 after their long and arduous journey through hell is rooted in my fascination with Satan’s unusual presentation. In the popular culture of the 21st century, Satan is portrayed in a seemingly glorified light and regarded as the ‘king of hell’: someone devious, scheming, and to be greatly feared. However, in Inferno, Dante brings to life an almost pitiable version of Satan in his work’s anti-climactic ending. The devil is regarded as “the emperor of the dolorous kingdom” (34.28), the most damned and pathetic sinner to be sentenced to eternal punishment in hell. I drew inspiration from Gustave Doré, one of the most widely known and celebrated illustrators of Inferno for my painting. Doré’s depiction of Satan in this sphere of suffering encapsulates the image that came to my mind upon reading this canto: one of absolute isolation and sorrow.

Perhaps the most immediately striking aspect of my painting is my usage of a muted color scheme. Despite painting with acrylic paints (as opposed to Doré’s black and white rendition), I used at most four colors to paint the scene of desolation beholding the pilgrims as they meet Satan: black, white, brown, and dark blue. I took this decision in an attempt to emphasize the bleakness and misery characterizing this canto – Dante and Virgil are in the depths of hell, so far removed from humanity that to use any brighter colors would seem a gross misrepresentation of their location in Judecca. I contrast this muted scene with the figures of Dante and Virgil, who are overlooking Satan – Virgil’s cloak is a golden yellow, and Dante’s is red. The choice to depict them in brighter colors is indicative of their humanity and innate goodness. They are merely passers-by, meant to stand out against this scene in a visual juxtaposition of the life and hope they embody. I painted Virgil’s cloak in a shade of golden yellow as a mark of his being the guiding light and truth leading Dante through the depths of hell. His characterization as Dante’s “leader” (34.8) and source of comfort (“there was no other shelter” (34.9)) attests to the intimate relationship the two have struck, where Dante relies wholly on Virgil to guide him through hell. Interestingly, the two faces of Satan visible in my painting are also his red and yellow faces. This ironic parallel of colors reveals the duality in the scene – Dante and Virgil are on a journey that will ultimately lead them to God, whereas Satan will never again be able to see the face of God.

In terms of my painting style, I did my best to present another dichotomy – Satan is painted smoothly, with colors blended well, as opposed to the intentional crudeness with which I painted his surroundings. Particularly in the cliffs and the landing, I employed a palette knife and a technique using the back of a paintbrush to create texture in the clashing of the roughly blended colors. In this depiction, I hope to capture the moral degradation present in their location of Judecca. Being the home of the greatest sinners, where Dante and Virgil encounter “so much evil” (34.83) in the face of Satan, I took the opportunity to represent the undoing of humanity and the breakdown of moral goodness in the breakdown of color and technique in the scenic elements surrounding Satan. On the other hand, my efforts at painting Satan smoothly, with colors blended perfectly and without a blemish on his skin, is in acknowledgment of the fact that Satan had once been the most beautiful of angels – “the creature who had once been beautiful” (34.17).

Concerning the scene I have illustrated, I painted the river and the cliff tops with a purposeful quality of obscurity. While Dante depicts the river that Satan is trapped in as frozen over, reflecting the scene above it clearly “like straws in glass” (34.12), I chose to portray the river as murky and polluted. In this pollutedness, I hoped to dramatize the effect of Satan’s sins and the other sinners in hell by implying that they contaminated the water. This establishes the damning effect of the sins – by being able to visually grasp the effects of the sins clouding up the river, the graveness of their transgressions is emphasized. In my artistic rendition, Satan’s reflection is barely visible; however, I have included Dante and Virgil’s figures’ reflections. This is to demonstrate that, even in the obscurity of the river, it retains its ability to reflect even a fragment of moral goodness through its defilement, emphasizing that Satan is too far gone to be saved.

In choosing to omit the other sinners’ bodies depicted in Doré’s art, I focus the scene solely on Satan and the pilgrims. In knowing that Dante and Virgil are hurrying to leave – indeed, it takes only 68 lines for Virgil to declare that “[they] must depart” (34.68) – and in seeing only their two figures in relation to Satan, one is confronted with Satan’s absolute isolation. He is trapped in the frozen river, immobilized and alone. Satan desired to be as powerful as God; therefore, his contrapasso is his complete loss of bodily autonomy and a voice. The dehumanizing aspect of his poetic justice invokes a sense of pity in the onlooker as one regards the slobbering, weeping, and wordless demon. I included a plaque inscribed with “abandon every hope, you who enter” (3.9) in my painting to echo the sentiment that greeted Dante and Virgil upon their entrance to hell in Canto 3. I intended for this to evoke a second meaning to the inscriptions understood only upon meeting Satan in Canto 34: in this pathetic rendition of Satan, it is he who has to abandon all hopes of freedom and glory in his eternal banishment to the depths of hell.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

See Gustave Doré, “Satan” 34.34 here: http://www.worldofdante.org/gallery_dore.html.

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The Inferno Postcard

CREATIVE PROJECT BY YAP JIA YI (’21)

The Inferno Postcard
Visual Art
An Interpretation of Inferno
Death, Mourning and Memory in Medieval Literature (YHU3345)
2021

Artist’s Remarks

Drawing inspiration from Canto 34, this postcard evokes Dante’s completed imaginative vision of the afterlife. Viewing the postcard upright, we see Hell depicted on the left, beginning with the gateway to Hell. Instead of presenting each separate circle of sin, the choice to conflate distorted images of the Harpies, scabbing and suffering souls, the beheaded soul, and the reptile (serpent/snake) to make up Lucifer’s face expresses the accumulation of sin. Specific to Canto 34, the harshness of the black ink reflects Dante’s failure to illustrate the sight of Lucifer through speech. Flipping the postcard over, we see how the upside down and barely legible image of Satan represents the perverse nature of Satan’s three faces as a parody of God’s love, omnipotence, and omniscience. I chose to focus on the face that was positioned on the left to express the evil that continues to control the powerless Satan (34.44-5). For Dante, the source of evil that makes up Hell remains elusive, and Satan is but a figurehead who represents pure evil and who is not excluded from the poetic justice of the contrapasso. 

Dante’s side profile is intentionally drawn using a mix of grey ink and pencil to present a stark contrast against the mass of black ink and dark grey highlighter. Together with Dante’s right eye looking up towards Heaven (which is more in focus than his left eye that is veiled during his witnessing of punishment and sin), the contrast expresses the commediain two ways: one, the Inferno as a parody of the divine, and two, Dante’s escape from Hell unscathed. Dante states, “I did not die and I did not remain alive; think now for yourself, if you have wit at all, what I became, deprived of both” (34.25-7). This statement implies a shift “from the experience of sin to the recovery of original justice” (577). This shift is also expressed in the canto’s play on time, space and geography: 

On this side he fell down from Heaven; and the 
dry land, which previously extended over here, for 
fear of him took the sea as a veil,
and came to our hemisphere; and perhaps what 
does appear on this side left this empty space in
order to escape from him, and fled upward. (34.121-126) 

To achieve the same destabilizing effect on the viewers as did the canto’s manipulation of directionality (through phrases like “fell down,” “previously extended,” “fled upward” which require mental gymnastics on readers’ part), the intentional upright sketching makes illegible Lucifer’s face by focusing instead on Dante’s entry to Hell and his final escape, and one can only discern Lucifer’s haunting stare when flipping Dante’s portrait upside down. 

Finally, the postcard’s interpretative nature expresses the commedia in the Inferno as an immortalization the word of the divine (audaciously so through the words of Dante the poet) that is at once elusive in its reference to the source of evil and clear in the call for recognition and rejection of sin. The absurdity of the postcard compels its recipient to view the world through Dante’s critical humour, albeit in another time and space.

REFERENCES

Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno. Translated by Robert M. Durling. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. 

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Dante’s Satan – A Moving Image

CREATIVE PROJECT BY SIDHARTH PRAVEEN (’21)

Dante’s Satan – A Moving Image
Animation
An Interpretation of Inferno
Death, Mourning and Memory in Medieval Literature (YHU3345)
2021

Artist’s Remarks

This moving image depicts Dante’s Satan as he is described in Canto 34. The piece features Satan with three heads, a pair of wings and a beating heart. The head in the middle chews Judas, the one on the left, Brutus, and the one on the right, Cassius. 

On the three sinners: Brutus and Cassius’s sins mirror the bolgia of discord in how they betrayed Caesar, thereby causing political turmoil in Rome. Judas’ betrayal of Jesus can also warrant him a place in the third subcircle of the seventh circle reserved for those who were violent against God. As both Caesar and Jesus were foundational in shaping Italy’s culture and public consciousness, Dante ascribes an intense potency to the sins of those who betrayed them; thus they belong with Satan, the ultimate sinner who stood against God. To accentuate the nature of these sins even further, I borrowed the contrapasso elements from the ninth bolgia and the violence-against-God subcircle and weaved them into my animation. Cassius’s head is torn apart and put back together only to be torn apart again. This mirrors the punishment inflicted on Muhammed, Ali, and Bertrand de Born, who have their body parts torn and constantly separated from one another as punishment for sowing discord in the world. Brutus’s body is broken but is not being torn apart like Cassius’s because I wanted to represent the stoicism that he displays in Inferno — Virgil remarks that even though Brutus is writhing, he utters no words. (Inferno 34.66) The almost rigid nature of his body represents his choice to not show his pain. Dante perhaps respected Brutus enough to let his stoicism shine through even though he was being punished. There is smoke coming out of Satan’s mouth containing Judas. This is because Judas here is on fire. This reflects the nature of the punishment in the seventh subcircle, where flakes of fire fall on the spirits who were violent against God. Judas’s feet are sticking out because, as mentioned in Canto 34, his head is inside Satan’s mouth. (Inferno 34.63)

On Satan: I wanted to expound on the idea that we had discussed in class about Dante’s Satan as punishment but also the punished. I have captured the weeping and the “bloody slobber” from his mouth to portray him as someone as pitiable as the other three sinners. As for the background music, I reversed Sunn O)))’s song Báthory Erzsébet to get the unsettling, disturbing sounds that I added to my animation. I chose this track based on its review by someone I know: “What if Satan was in deep meditation? This is the noise that would emanate from His aura.” (Brahmecha, 2019) The track has a dark yet powerful energy and it seemed apt to me that in a space that punishes and disempowers Satan, the song’s reverse would play in the background.

REFERENCES

Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno. Translated by Robert M. Durling. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Brahmecha, Atharva. Thoughtssyncopated. 2019.

Sunn O))). Báthory Erzsébet. 2005. 

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No Path Marked

CREATIVE PROJECT BY ASHLEY SIM SHUYI (’22)

No Path Marked
Visual Art / Literary Art (Blackout Poetry)
An Interpretation of Inferno
Death, Mourning and Memory in Medieval Literature (YHU3345)
2021

Artist’s Remarks

In the process of researching and re-imagining this canto, I hoped to draw insight into how this Canto fit into the entire text, particularly with regards to immortalization and memory. This is one of the many instances where Dante tempts the sinner into sharing their story through the promise of glorious immortalization, where the sinner’s real ‘truth’ is revealed. With this in mind, I am interested in Dante’s text as a strategy of liberation – not only is the sinner liberated from being merely identified by his sin through Dante’s recording of his story, but his soul is also emancipated from its roots in the tree. On another level, Dante himself is liberated from the despair of hell by writing and recording this story. Due to these complex intersecting layers of memory, history and stories, I saw a need to combine multiple art and aesthetic forms for this creative re-interpretation.

In Inferno, Dante appears to be a master of re-constitution and intertextuality as he draws inspiration from a variety of sources from Greek and Roman classics to his contemporaries. Similarly, black out poetry is an aesthetic form that draws heavily on similar ideas of reconstitution. In particular, I was drawn to Austin Kleon’s work Newspaper Blackout, which used the newspaper as a source material to create new and interesting work. When creating the blackout poem, I focused on both words that illustrated the scene as well as its shape. For example, I transformed ‘not’ (line 1, 4 & 7) into 3 Nos which linguistically and spatially mirrors the lamentation of the sinners. Surrounding the 3 Nos, I also grouped words together which not only described the scene but also came together in a shape that signified chaos and confusion. 

Moreover, I was also intrigued by the medieval practice of creating palimpsests where one would recycle a piece of papyrus by washing off the original text. Inspired by this practice, I etched an illustration of the scene inspired by Gustave Dore’s illustration of Canto 13 over the blackout poem to create my own palimpsest. With Dore’s work as reference, I have used a similar composition of images, but I have changed the style of drawing, most significantly in my interpretation of the harpies and the shape of the trees. Compared to Dore’s illustration which is more realistic, I have decided to focus on shape and textures to create an atmosphere of chaos.

The title of my creative interpretation, no path marked, was largely inspired by the start of the poem “we entered a wood that no path marked. / Not green leaves, but dark in color, not smooth / branches, but knotted and twisted, no fruit was there, / but thorns with poison” (Dante 6.1 – 3). Even as Dante enters the forest where no discernible path forward is presented, the use of the negative “not” and the corruption of nature seen through the physical contortions of being “twisted” and the deathly “poisoned” nature of the branches underscores the unwelcoming, dangerous nature of the path ahead. I wanted to convey this sense of peril and precariousness through the misshapen lines and twisted shapes that the tree branches form surrounding the small figures of Dante and Virgil in the distance. A second central image in my drawing is the illustration of the harpies which are described as ugly creatures with human necks and faces intertwined with bird-like features. The Harpie at the bottom left of my drawing has the most distinct features, with a human face and textured wings, emphasizing the grotesque hybridity of the harpies watching over the sinners for eternity. 

In his final encounter with Dante, Piero, the sinner who Dante speaks to, asks Dante to “strengthen my memory, languishing still beneath the blow that envy dealt it” (Inferno 6.76), a final attempt to forge his story into collective memory and break free from the prison of anonymity. Just as Dante re-inscribes Piero’s story by retelling the reason for his sin in hopes of emancipating his soul which was originally “uprooted” by Piero himself and sent to “[fall] into the wood” (Inferno 6.99) for eternal damnation, I hope that my additional layer of re-interpretation and re-constitution is able to further liberate the souls that remain on the seventh circle of hell, both from the pages of the text and also from the suffering in the literary hell of Dante’s Inferno. 

REFERENCES

Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno. Translated by Robert M. Durling. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Austin Kleon’s blog can be found here: https://austinkleon.com/2014/04/29/a-brief-history-of-my-newspaper-blackout-poems/

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Love that Sends You To Hell

CREATIVE PROJECT BY VIVIEN SIM (’24)

Love that Sends You to Hell
Visual Art
An Interpretation of Inferno
Death, Mourning and Memory in Medieval Literature (YHU3345)
2021

Artist’s Remarks

The bedrock of my impression of this canto rested in one line that stood out to me. It is when Dante seems to grant to the reader as he writes that he “came into a place where all light is silent” (Alighieri, 5.28), which means that we have left the realm where expressions of human knowledge can be relied upon to convey what we see. As a result, I chose to steer my creative interpretation in the direction of expressionism. In expressionist fashion, I aimed to depict subjective emotions rather than objective reality, which was appropriate in the narrative of Canto 5 given that Dante himself acknowledges that the human understanding of reality seems to melt away. I chose to distort and exaggerate what this subjective experience might be through widely contrasting and vibrant colors to create a jarring effect. Ironically, as I went against the literal meaning of light being silent (5.28) by the sheer visual intensity of the different extreme shades of red, blue and yellow, I was also able to convey the frenetic and crazed nature of this circle of hell. We can no longer trust in human instinct to visualise hell as we like it because human reality dissociates. Our only mode of experiencing and perceiving is by emotion, expressive and wild. Thus, I hoped that my choice in depicting Canto 5 in an expressionist style would convey a hallucinatory lunacy that demands that we leave common sense behind as we approach Dante’s work.

Subsequently, I chose to depict Francesca de Rimini and Paolo Malatesta in the form of Edvard Munch’s The Scream(1893), arguably is one of the most iconic pieces from the expressionist art movement. His art aimed to convey a moment’s panic and the distortion of reality and perception of that one moment. In similar fashion, I hoped to convey this frozen vision of panic and anxiety on the faces of Francesca de Rimini and Paolo Malatesta to indicate how Dante might see them. In Canto 5, Dante seems to oscillate between condemning them as “damned […] carnal sinners” (5.37-8) and the more charitable “ill-born” souls (5.7). Immediately, we see Dante’s internal conflict between his duty to denounce their sin, and his poetic predisposition to pity these souls and even share in their humanity. At this moment, I was moved by a quote by Victor Hugo: “You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love, is to live by it.” The human tendency to romanticise love becomes wrong and turned upon its head in Canto 5 as we see souls that are punished forever because they followed “[love], which is swiftly kindled in the noble heart” (5.100). If Hugo asserts that we ought to stand by love, Dante interjects that there are consequences. We are then confronted with the bleak question of how we ought to negotiate our relationship with love. The horror reflected on the faces of Francesca de Rimini and Paolo Malatesta is in the viewer’s perception of disordered reality, which might mean that this existential threat belongs to the observer as opposed to the souls.

It is easy to distinguish between love and lust, then, and object that because of this difference, our perception of love might still save us from Dante’s hell because it is not sinful lust. However, I reject this objection by portraying the figures of Francesca de Rimini and Paolo Malatesta and the sinners in the whirlpool behind as discombobulated masses to form intersections between love and lust. I did this because Dante seems to conflate lust with a forceful compulsion that overrides all other instincts: “Love […] seized me for his beauty so strongly that, as / you see, it still does not abandon me.” (5.103-5) Dante simultaneously desexualises lust and blurs the boundary of this new definition with our own concept of love that is powerful enough to drive and motivate us. By portraying the figures of the souls as scarcely human, I aim to rob them of all aspects of physical desirability. What remains are pairs of souls locked in protective embraces where they bend to accommodate the shape of each other. This is what I hope to convey in Dante’s “sweet nest through the air” (5.83). Yet, the romanticism of this becomes lost as the souls’ see-through outlines render full visibility to the backdrop of the vivid hell horizon as a stark reminder that they are still punished for this warped desire. Even though Francesca de Rimini and Paolo Malatesta seem to be in tender embraces, they may be considered lucky to suffer together because behind in the “cruel air” (5.86), others are not as fortunate—some are in suspension just outside arms’ reach of each other.

What I hoped to achieve with my portrayal of Dante’s Canto 5 is a true, vivid and existential threat to our own vision of love, even if it is done in a highly distortive art style. The paradoxical element of damning souls in love to be together, even if it is hell, also lends insight into how there is a higher form of love still, something beyond human understanding. This might be indicative in Dante’s main motivations of the Inferno as he soldiers through hell to get to heaven, where God resides. In this project, I hoped to convey and reckon with Dante’s idea of what subtle distinctions there are to love: distinctions between what might damn one to hell and its purest form that might afford us closeness to God.

REFERENCES

Alighieri, Dante, Robert M. Durling, Ronald L. Martinez, and Robert Turner. Essay. In Inferno, 86–99. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Munch, Edvard. “The Scream,” 1893. National Gallery and Munch Museum. Oslo, Norway.

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The Earth and Its Dead (/Possibly on Earth)

CategoryText (Part of The Dominion of the Dead)
FormProse
GenreTheory
AuthorRobert Pogue Harrison
Time2003
LanguageEnglish
Featured In
Death, Mourning and Memory in Medieval Literature (YHU3345)

“The Earth and Its Dead” is the first chapter of Robert Pogue Harrison’s The Dominion of the Dead, a meditation on how ideas of death have shaped (and are still shaping) the interaction between the dead and the living world in Western civilisation.

REFLECTIONS

The thing that struck me the most within the chapter was Harrison’s descriptions of how differently we process death because signs of it are hidden from plain sight. For instance, Harrison writes that “Ruins in an advanced state of ruination represent, or better they literally embody, the dissolution of meaning into matter.”1 The quotation suggests that a person, when coming across a ruin, witnesses the decay of man-made meaning in the form of buildings into the seemingly neutral substance of dirt. An ancient building implies human intervention in the form of creation and art. Dirt and other natural elements such as plants do not do the same thing as easily. As such, a ruin represents the decay of human creation and by extension, human civilization itself. 

More terrifying than the earth, Harrison offers the even scarier option of the sea. He notes that “no doubt that is why the sea, in its hostility to architecturally or textually imprinted memory, often figures as the imaginary agent of ultimate obliteration.”2 When I read this, I got the image of a seaman faced with the vast expense of the sea. There is a distinct lack of landmarks within this image, which means that any instinctual navigational skills used on land are immediately rendered useless. As a result, the sea within this image seems timeless. There are no human marks of age in the same way that the earth preserves layers of buildings that one can peel back with some effort. One also cannot re-dig up evidence of the dead that were thrown in. This image of the sea is both terrifying and comforting to me, terrifying in that it feels disorienting because its nature rejects my understanding of it within the scope of the timeline of my life, and comforting in that within a post-industrial world that is changing at the speed of light, the apparent consistency of the sea appears to be a form of constant that one might rely on. 

APPROACH

As a result of these two images of the earth and the sea, I felt that I wanted to do a work that touches upon this image of death presented by this text, something that might present the same feelings of wonder I experienced when I read about how the earth and the sea hide the dead from us, and something that was disturbing and humorous at the same time.

Before this course, I had always rejected the reflection on death to cling on to the stagnant notion that it is something to be avoided. This opinion was convenient but also gave me a lot of fear due to an inability to reflect on the deaths surrounding me in my life. I took this course as an attempt to evoke some reflection and bring about some process of personal mourning. This text was a wonderful beginning for the course because it posed the notion of the perception of death being a product of environmental forces as much as them being a product of society in a way that I could still see around me. 

I took inspiration from a number of artworks that focus on the reexamination of rather severe situations through the bizarre. The first work I looked at was a short film called Possibly in Michigan3, Cecelia Condit’s 1983 short art musical that discusses the issue of sexual violence through the presentation of cannibalism. One of the things that stood out to me was its reversal of roles between the stalker and the victim. We expect, if anyone, for the man (stalker) to kill and eat the woman (presumed victim). Yet, the beauty ends up the beast as the woman and her friend kill and eat the man instead. The women’s thorough job at cleaning his bones and disposal and their discussion of their friend’s consumption of her own dog suggest a prevalence of women killing and eating creatures around them. I found this to be particularly relevant to the above presentation of death because I wanted to explore a situation where one might be able to regain some control over the loss of human creation through the decay of ruins.

The second work that I looked at was of a collage by Richard Hamilton titled Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? 

Fig 1. Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (Richard Hamilton, 1956)4

What I love about the collage is the unexpected nature of it. At first glance, it appears to be a hastily pulled-together image of a modern home with the latest appliances. One might go a step further and say that the couple and the appliances represent the ideal American home. Yet any observer who lingers for a second longer might notice how the figures appear to almost be caricatures of the highly sexualized tropes of masculinity and femininity, which seem to be at odds with the conservative nature of the traditional household. As a result, the contrast seems to be an alluring yet unsettling update to the notion of a household. I wanted to create a collage that presented this image of a traveler moving through ruins from the work but with elements that did not seem to match the tone of the original work. I sought to create a strong feeling of unsettlement and confusion that forces the viewer to slow down and perceive the artwork.

CREATIVE PROJECT BY WAN JIA LING (’23)

Possibly On Earth
Collage
An Interpretation of “The Earth and Its Dead”
Death, Mourning and Memory in Medieval Literature (YHU3345)
2021

Artist’s Remarks

For this collage, I wanted to make something that touches upon both the idea of death in the sea and on land. I decided to place the ruins of the buildings underwater to create the inversion of the notion that one cannot build anything within the sea. Within the last few years, it has become increasingly clear that humans are capable of locating some things within the ocean. I hope that the setting under the sea and delocalized buildings are disorienting to the viewer in a way not to suggest the destruction of a particular city, but to suggest that the destruction of places is universal. 

Within The Earth and its Dead, Harrison presents the image of a modern traveler coming across a ruin from a time before themselves. I loved this image of the disconnection between the cultural context that the traveler comes from and the guesswork involved in trying to incorporate this bit of human history into the traveler’s own cultural context. As a result, I tried to force the viewer to consider that through the usage of ruins of architecture from this century and the whimsical painting of a couple on a romantic boat trip from what appears to be the 1800s. The cheerful image of their trip stands in stark contrast to the ruins, but also inverts the timelines. This seems to present the travelers not as pilgrims, but as tourists to the location of destruction. Their ornate boat and clothing suggest a personal intent to have an enjoyable trip set in the context of past destruction. The grey and bland color palette of the ruins is a familiar image from movies of apocalypse, which gives the modern viewer a feeling of dread and grief as one can easily imagine the loss of lives. The cheerful couple seem almost sadistic in their ignorance of this destruction around them. This was done intentionally to encourage the viewer to consider how we view ruins of today. One tries to fit them into their own context or tries to be educated through the wide availability of sources today. Yet we cannot deny that we often visit sites of old ruins with an odd cheerful fascination, while a survivor from the time may only see the complete collapse of their meaning of civilization. 

The hand reaching in to pluck mushrooms was made with reference to the elements of absurdity in Possibly In Michigan. Harrison talks about the uncaring nature of the sea, which is not bound to human understanding of grief and loss. Amidst the terrible nature of the destruction and apparent casual cruelty of the couple, the giant hand and mushrooms suggest a world larger than this destruction. When we see the ruins, we see a loss of life as we know it. When the owner of the giant hand sees the ruins, they see a source of food. As a result, the viewer is forced to understand that the humans within this picture can hardly be considered the center of the picture. Other organisms continue with their lives against the backdrop of man’s attempts to grapple with and understand their own losses. 

Finally, I made a version that moves because I enjoyed how the elements flew into frame one by one. It gave this collage an additional layer of artificiality, which it should. I made an artificial portrayal of nature, designed to evoke emotions and present my take on Harrison’s writing. Harrison, too, has created a way of examining death that others attempt to peer into. I simply wanted to comment on the artificial nature of the eternal human struggle to understand the collective history of one’s people that made this course so enjoyable. 

FOOTNOTES

1 Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (University of Chicago Press, 2010).

2 Ibid.

3 The story centers around a young woman who meets her friend at the mall. They shop around and discuss their friend, who killed and ate her own poodle. They are stalked by a man who is disguised by a number of human and animal masks. He stalks the woman home and assaults her. Before he can kill her, he is killed by her friend with a gun. The two women cut him up and eat him. The film ends with the woman dumping a garbage bag with what one may presume to be the remains of his body onto her driveway for the trash-collector. 

4 “Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes so Different, so Appealing?,” Wikipedia (Wikimedia Foundation, May 13, 2021), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_what_is_it_that_makes_today%27s_homes_so_different,_so_appealing%3F.

REFERENCES

“The Dominion of the Dead.” University of Chicago Press, May 1, 2005. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo3617929.html. 

“Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes so Different, so Appealing?” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, May 13, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_what_is_it_that_makes_today%27s_homes_so_different,_so_appealing%3F. 

CONTRIBUTED BY WAN JIA LING (’23)