Stab & Blab
Into the “research topics that I’ll never get around to” stack goes: trace the development of the literary convention of the post-mortal strike monologue. The old stab & blab, “Ai! I’ve just been horribly shot/stabbed/crushed/impaled but instead of going into shock I will now deliver a speech.”
Secret research assistant posits that this might have worked its way into literature from stage drama, pointing to Dido’s death in Aeneid as an early example.
Posted at 11:49 am
April 29th, 2006 at 1:36 pm
How else to capture the moment? It goes by so quickly, but it’s so interesting. I’m enamored the scene where Actéon, in Charpentier’s version of his demise, says in the most courtly French that his speech has become a confused bleat. Using those elegant words, even in describing their impossibility, is a way of enunciating something that can’t be grasped through its simple representation, that’s to say, a grown haute-contre bleating on stage. I appreciate the librettist’s subtlety, here, though my writing teachers were all obsessed with “show, don’t tell”. Telling has its own magic.
The stage, you say? Aren’t there death speeches in Herodotus? I can’t remember. I can’t remember anything these days.
May 1st, 2006 at 8:07 am
I reserve the right to pout over my dire lack of research assistants, secret or otherwise.
As for things to do when you’re dead, I like the detective story tradition of the Elaborate Post-mortem Clue. Somehow the mortally wounded person manages to grip something, or scrawl something in their own blood, or disarray their surroundings in a way cryptic enough to leave numerous red-herring explanations for the unwitting, but coherent enough to clear the way to a solution for the wise detective.
May 1st, 2006 at 7:48 pm
I’m not a very good research assistant, especially because Steven informed me that he doesn’t think anyone died on-stage in Greek drama (though neither of us would know about the Roman part) and he said it in an awfully authoritative manner that makes me inclined to agree.
BUT (and you knew there’d be one!) your more learned respondent might be onto something about this Herodotus stuff. It made me think of the not-death of Croesus which I had to check was in 1.86 & .87 since I surely don’t remember that, but while being burned alive on a pyre he has time to say plenty of things, including a plea to Apollo that brings the rain. Ah, Sardis and its sieges!! That’s the only bell it rang for me, but my Herodotus is well beyond rusty.
As for good old Dido, as I think I’ve told you already but will now tell all posterity, I think when her limbs loosen at the moment of (if I remember correctly, which I may well not, post-soliloquy) death that’s a shout-out to good old Eros and the epithet he always brings with him in the Greek lyric poetry. At the least, it’s literalizing the died-of-a-broken-heart bit and even beyond I think it’s doing an orgasm=death thing, although I suspect that if I read more dirty Archilochus poems I’d find that that’s a much earlier equation. Probably this is something that every classicist already knows, but the good thing about not being a classicist is that I can say stupid things and be a bit proud about it. I got to cluck at a footnote in Herodotus already tonight, though, so I don’t want to push it. Blah blah blah.
May 1st, 2006 at 8:40 pm
Oh!! Varia, there’s a death secret in Herodotus, too! When Cambyses dies he warns his cohort to be sure that rule remains in Persian hands, but they scorn him because he was dumb enough to get cursed and stabbed and offed. It’s only later when they realize they’ve been ruled by a Magian False Smerdis pretending to be the (Persian) real Smerdis that suddenly this Persian identity concept becomes meaningful to them and they overthrow the imposter. It’s not a very good death secret, but I wrote my little semester paper about it and was rather proud of myself and figured I might as well tie it in. This is hardly as much fun as scrawling something in blood (although I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some of that in Herodotus, maybe along with the necrophilia) but I thought it was an interesting related concept.
May 2nd, 2006 at 8:08 am
It IS interesting! If only they’d had a Great Detective on hand to sort things out. And false identities and pretend heirs! I think it’d make a ripping yarn.
May 2nd, 2006 at 9:02 am
Well, and the imposter was discovered because he had no ears (or presumably only partial ears, but it’s not clear from the text) and the Persian conspirators eventually got one of his wives to feel up the side of his head and confirm this. This story is one of my favorites in there, but I think you’re right that Hercule Poirot would have just herded everyone into the throne room and found some way to show the ear-stubs and then also lectured the Persians for being too self-absorbed and money-grubbing to figure things out sooner.
May 2nd, 2006 at 9:52 am
One would have thought they’d have noticed that earlier.
May 2nd, 2006 at 9:58 am
Obviously he used a cunning disguise. He wasn’t a villainous impostor for nothing!
May 2nd, 2006 at 10:00 am
Hats cover a multitude of sins.