As I continued to think about our difficulties in framing the past (as covered by the last post), I was
reminded of David Trinidad's poem "Ancient History" (from his very cool book, Plasticville.)
Ezra Pound famously said that "an epic is a poem containing history." Trinidad's piece may be too short to be considered an epic, but it certainly is a "tale of the tribe." Or rather, it reveals how our contemporary tribe tells its tales to itself.
The poem offers a very strange, yet entirely familiar sort of history, going from the years 1949 through 1966 (and skipping years throughout). Here are the first two stanzas:
1949 Hedy Lamarr snips Victor Mature's hair while he sleeps,
but he regains his strength in time to heave the pillars
apart. George Sanders, an urbane leader of Philistines,
raises his glass with rueful approval as the temple col-
lapses about him.
1955 Condemned to wander the Mediterranean after the fall of
Troy, Kirk Douglas is bewitched by Silvana Mangano,
while his crew are transformed into swine.
The dates the poem refers to are the years in which the movies it describes appeared. Most are not "historical dramas" per se, but films of mythic worlds out of the Bible or the Odyssey. But historical epics are included too:
1960 Kirk Douglas excels in gladiatorial school, falls in love
with Jean Simmons, and rebels after a private games
staged for Roman general Laurence Olivier. Olivier
makes a casual (but unmissable) come-on to slave-boy
Tony Curtis.
As you progress through this poem, you become amazed at how many types of history Trinidad splices together. Not only is myth mixed with actual history, but the whole poem is framed with an awareness of Hollywood's past. In each stanza, instead of the names of historical or mythic figures, you get the actual actors.
And, along with the cinematic past, bits of social history break through. As can be seen in the passage above, the film Spartacus marked a moment in cultural as well as filmic history: it was one of the early examples of homoerotic desire getting somewhat direct representation in a big-budget, mainstream flick.
To top it all off, the poem ends by including even prehistory. The last two lines (under the stanza dated "1966") read:
Raquel Welch, clad in a bikini of wild-beast skins, is
carried off by a squawking pterodactyl.
The End of History...or a New Kind of History?
By deriving the chronology of his poem from film, rather than literal history, Trinidad offers a kind of explicit proof of a point touched upon in the last post: the past and its traditions ain't what they used to be.
Not only is history now made of commercialized media products rather than years, but it's more difficult to think of it as linear. That older notion, the poem hints, might itself be nothing but "ancient history" by now.
However, for me, the poem is nevertheless deeply historical. For it documents a key aspect of our zeitgeist. The fact that, awash in media products -- many of which offer profoundly contradictory messages -- one can't help but become aware of the artificiality that inhabits even the most "serious" presentations.
Which is to say that, though constructed of film images, this is actually a pretty realistic poem -- because it's so accurate in portraying an unavoidable quality in the way we now look at our times, present and past But its realism is arrived at in a new way. I'm reminded here of something Fredric Jameson wrote:
"If there is any realism left ... it is a 'realism' that is meant to derive from ... becoming aware of a new and original historical situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach." (p. 25)
Unlike Jameson, though, I don't find this situation necessarily depressing. Perhaps the awareness of artifice that media culture has forced upon us has simply helped us discover something that was true all along: what we think of as "history" has always been nothing more than a collection of texts -- whether made of images, manuscripts or oral accounts.
Or nothing less: the impetus behind the distinguished work known as New Historicism starts precisely from the understanding that all history is mediated through images, words, propaganda and the spectacles (pun intended) they fashion. The way all these tell their tales is seen, in fact, as the not-so-royal road to grasping at least the ideology (if not truth) of an era.
And the wit and humor Trinidad's poem offers in the handling of such materials is a necessary reminder of something else: when you're constantly bombarded with messages, the most skillful response is often to stay light on your feet.
Ezra Pound famously said that "an epic is a poem containing history." Trinidad's piece may be too short to be considered an epic, but it certainly is a "tale of the tribe." Or rather, it reveals how our contemporary tribe tells its tales to itself.
The poem offers a very strange, yet entirely familiar sort of history, going from the years 1949 through 1966 (and skipping years throughout). Here are the first two stanzas:
1949 Hedy Lamarr snips Victor Mature's hair while he sleeps,
but he regains his strength in time to heave the pillars
apart. George Sanders, an urbane leader of Philistines,
raises his glass with rueful approval as the temple col-
lapses about him.
1955 Condemned to wander the Mediterranean after the fall of
Troy, Kirk Douglas is bewitched by Silvana Mangano,
while his crew are transformed into swine.
The dates the poem refers to are the years in which the movies it describes appeared. Most are not "historical dramas" per se, but films of mythic worlds out of the Bible or the Odyssey. But historical epics are included too:
1960 Kirk Douglas excels in gladiatorial school, falls in love
with Jean Simmons, and rebels after a private games
staged for Roman general Laurence Olivier. Olivier
makes a casual (but unmissable) come-on to slave-boy
Tony Curtis.
As you progress through this poem, you become amazed at how many types of history Trinidad splices together. Not only is myth mixed with actual history, but the whole poem is framed with an awareness of Hollywood's past. In each stanza, instead of the names of historical or mythic figures, you get the actual actors.
And, along with the cinematic past, bits of social history break through. As can be seen in the passage above, the film Spartacus marked a moment in cultural as well as filmic history: it was one of the early examples of homoerotic desire getting somewhat direct representation in a big-budget, mainstream flick.
To top it all off, the poem ends by including even prehistory. The last two lines (under the stanza dated "1966") read:
Raquel Welch, clad in a bikini of wild-beast skins, is
carried off by a squawking pterodactyl.
The End of History...or a New Kind of History?
By deriving the chronology of his poem from film, rather than literal history, Trinidad offers a kind of explicit proof of a point touched upon in the last post: the past and its traditions ain't what they used to be.
Not only is history now made of commercialized media products rather than years, but it's more difficult to think of it as linear. That older notion, the poem hints, might itself be nothing but "ancient history" by now.
However, for me, the poem is nevertheless deeply historical. For it documents a key aspect of our zeitgeist. The fact that, awash in media products -- many of which offer profoundly contradictory messages -- one can't help but become aware of the artificiality that inhabits even the most "serious" presentations.
Which is to say that, though constructed of film images, this is actually a pretty realistic poem -- because it's so accurate in portraying an unavoidable quality in the way we now look at our times, present and past But its realism is arrived at in a new way. I'm reminded here of something Fredric Jameson wrote:
"If there is any realism left ... it is a 'realism' that is meant to derive from ... becoming aware of a new and original historical situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach." (p. 25)
Unlike Jameson, though, I don't find this situation necessarily depressing. Perhaps the awareness of artifice that media culture has forced upon us has simply helped us discover something that was true all along: what we think of as "history" has always been nothing more than a collection of texts -- whether made of images, manuscripts or oral accounts.
Or nothing less: the impetus behind the distinguished work known as New Historicism starts precisely from the understanding that all history is mediated through images, words, propaganda and the spectacles (pun intended) they fashion. The way all these tell their tales is seen, in fact, as the not-so-royal road to grasping at least the ideology (if not truth) of an era.
And the wit and humor Trinidad's poem offers in the handling of such materials is a necessary reminder of something else: when you're constantly bombarded with messages, the most skillful response is often to stay light on your feet.
