Cesare Borgia (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
maleborgia) wrote2012-02-22 12:22 pm
maleborgia) wrote2012-02-22 12:22 pm
Entry tags:
Biography and Heroes
The problem I have with biography is the temptation of it all. If done right, in the way that I think most people would consider “right”, it offers a compelling case-study of a character and validates the individual as a pressing moment in history. It is addicting because it allows us to read history onto ourselves in a more immediate way and because it allows for easier relation to past eras. There is an ease to it, a very human-presence, that is not so tangible in broader scopes. We relate to the world on a human scale and we like it when the world can be funneled to relate to us on this same level. It is tempting to read history through other human perspectives and, after all, that is what all writing is, regardless of whether or not it is obviously whittled into a relatable shape. My complaint is that history then becomes a series of stepping stones, from great man to great man, from the heroes to the villains of our cultural memory, and while individuals are certainly worthwhile, we are clipping our own wings if we refrain from studying anything else. We are upholding the privileged story if we rely on individuals to moralize and lecture if for no other reason than that it is impossible to see who is really slipping between the cracks until we look at the larger picture. I collect biographies, I have shelves of them, I leapt on the chance to buy one in Spanish. I read fictional accounts, histories that blend more into fantasy, stories that are so poorly written they are laughable; I look at representations in television, movies, video games. I understand how compelling biography can be. If you are reading this, you know very well that I live in a glass house.
The other thing that bothers me about biography, although not on as personal a level, is how often they are disconnected from reality. They name places (Rome, Florence, Naples), dates (1475, 1492, 1503), players (Caterina Sforza, Leonardo da Vinci, Cardinal della Rovere), but generally ignore larger issues at hand because on an immediate level most of us are more concerned with these details of our lives than with the larger forces at play. I was able to get away with the incredibly masturbatory act of writing about the Borgias for graduation because their biographies did not connect them to some of the more general patterns and problems I was interested in, leaving that space open for me to explore. They had been turned into heroes, villains, antiheroes in something like that order, because as Randolph Starn points out, individuals can and have been reappropriated for political and cultural purposes: “heroes are not born, but made—or, rather, re-made”.
This is not a new development. Starn was talking about the tendency of people in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to do the same. One obvious example is that of Julius Caesar, who was not only remembered but idolized as the man who had at one point bound together what had disintegrated into warlords and city-states. He was not simply born a hero but became one through the story told about his actions, and then was re-made as a hero when that story became increasingly compelling in the peninsula once again. For an American-centric example, Abraham Lincoln was not a hero from birth but stepped into the role or had it read onto him, in the context of political leader or defender of the union or, in the story that was part of the cultural experience I grew up with, liberator of the enslaved. His actual role in history does not always match up to the ideal that he is made into--heroes are not born.
And, similarly, villains are not born. People can do amazingly cruel things just as they can fight against them. But villains become villains for the cultural reading of these acts, not for the acts themselves. Heroes and villains are human constructs and subject to human fallacy regardless of any moral relativity. Not that, of course, it is not easier to read someone who does commit atrocities into the role of villain, but that oftentimes things are hardly so black and white and even the person's acts themselves are influenced by the broader surroundings. This does not always excuse them, but it does complicate the situation and offers another strike against this genre of biography, or at least against the reading of them on their own.
I will cut to the chase. Cesare Borgia is neither hero nor villain, although he lived in a time that, it has been asserted, practiced the creation of both with greater frequency. To call him either is to privilege him above others who for whatever reason remain mere humans. Although I enjoy stories about him, especially where he is cast in the most recent reading of antihero (the little ironies of his death especially set him up well for a reading of tragic hero), I have to keep the voice in the back of my head that reminds me of the problems of getting too invested. I keep a quote on my desktop by Hayden White that talks about the creation of heroes and the reading of mood onto history. It explains that "how a given historical situation is to be configured depends on the historian's subtlety in matching up a specific plot structure with the set of historical events that he wishes to endow with a meaning of a particular kind. This is essentially a literary, that is to say fiction-making, operation"--the same events can be understood in different ways. I have seen the exact same sequence of events in Cesare's life taken as evidence of his psychopathy or genius, political aptitude or paranoia, devotion or intimidation. One historian will assert that his father was the real power as proven by how Cesare's sweep through Italy ended after his death, while another insists that Cesare strong-armed his father, fundamentally concerned with enjoying his time in the Vatican, into paying out for his plans. Obviously they both cannot be true, or at least not both the same kind of truth.
As White goes on to say, however, to acknowledge these narratives as fiction-making "in no way detracts from the status of historical narratives as providing a kind of knowledge [... and] such plot structures [are] one of the ways that a culture has of making sense of both personal and public pasts". I cannot remember if I ever did write about Cesare's ideas about the public and private but the fact that I am compelled to do so at all demonstrates that I am guilty of this fiction-making as well, and for the very reasons pointed to here. It is a way for me to work through an understanding of the more general literature I was reading--it provides a human perspective for me to read history through. It is a biography, although one that I am obviously aware is false. It is taking a person I am used to seeing lifted up above mere humans and exploring what that means and why that happens, and the farther we get from the source material the more interesting and multi-varied the answers seem to be. The initial hero-villain flip is easy enough to understand, as it matches up neatly and unsurprisingly with the rise and fall of families and the change of power in the peninsula. (With a closer look it is more complicated, as the two readings overlap but still have much to do with politics and state-building.) The slow crawl away from villain is more interesting, especially when complicated with the change of culture over both time and physical space.
It is more obvious than ever that heroes are not born but made and can be re-made. In Maoist China, Joan of Arc was occasionally used as a heroine of the revolution. Were Mao's goals remotely relevant to Joan's? You would be hard pressed to successfully argue that she would have spearheaded his revolution, or even really found a place in it, making her a good example of a hero that was made and re-made again, in new and unusual ways. Cesare, too, has been made and re-made as his family name has taken on new meaning over the years. A quick GIS brings me a conservative seven different makings of him on the first page alone (one of them Souryo Fuyumi's). The name, then, is beyond the individual man because it is impossible to come to him without first stripping away all the layers that culture--not just Italian or European or Western culture--has built on top of him, and being inevitably influenced by them. What are you supposed to do with someone who has been filtered through so many different lenses? It's a privileged question, since so few people are remembered in such a fashion at all, and everyone has some lens on their story, even if they write their own history themselves.
Regardless, I enjoy his biographies, if only because as they tell the same story in different ways they occasionally shine more light on the authors than on the historical figure as they make them in their own images out of the clay of documents and older analysis. I was very aware of and rather embarrassed of my my own bias both towards the man and the circumstances as I was writing for class in part because after seeing the same template filled in so many different ways I knew the variety of things it could inadvertently expose. It is a guilty pleasure, though, like I said, and what I like best is the repetition of the story. There are retellings that I prefer to others, just like some storytellers are more adept at drawing in their audience than others. I enjoy the process of making and unmaking and making again and I am continually tempted to try my own hand at it, if only on this little corner of the Internet. He is neither fundamentally a hero nor a villain, after all, but a slate for us to project upon, not blank but with a leading line: "There once was a man who did many things and maybe he is in need of redemption or maybe he is in need of condemnation; craft him into whatsoever you desire, because he is dead and cannot well argue back".
And if he cannot argue then the problem is not that this crafting is not historical, because there is always at least some seed of history in all of the stories that spring up around and on top of him as even the most adamantly fact-driven would call it, but that they conflate his history with our own. We are unable to write pure history, because writing by nature necessitates framing and any frame we choose to engage with prioritizes one view over another. Furthermore, the further we slide from the turn of the fifteenth century, the easier it is to put our words into his mouth, or into the mouths of his detractors if we choose to label him more villain than hero. We are more removed from their reality and able to speak more freely--we are not automatically familiar with the surrounding circumstances and so it is easier to take things out of context and bend them to our present needs. This bending serves a purpose as well, if a moralizing one, and that is where lines begin to get crossed. As White points out, "all the historian needs to do to transform a tragic into a comic situation is to shift his point of view or change the scope of his perceptions". From a literary (or fiction-making) perspective, this is simple enough, and in some sense we are unable to write or conceive of anything but fiction regardless.
To write history, then, is to write fiction--or maybe to write fiction within a given set of guidelines or cliches--, but on the sliding scale between truth and falsehood we prioritize those histories that seem to err closer to what strikes us more soundly as truth. Those that sell themselves as fantasy or historical-fiction outright have their own set of criteria and may be more blatantly a stepping stone of a great man since great men are the ones with stories that have been emplotted as such. Biographies, then, are difficult to swallow because they are part of this dialogue of stepping stones while simultaneously claiming to be more factual than more sweeping works. Which is more true on a personal level, after all, what a generalized study about poverty and unemployment in America says, or what your own personal experiences are? There is a disconnect between the way we often look at the two and a similar thing happens in this genre. Nearly any interpretation or claim can be levied because what is true for the majority is not true for everyone and who are we to deny another person's individual experience? I can argue that it is highly unlikely for a father to be bullied by his son or for a brother to lust after his sister, but I cannot deny that there are exceptions to the rule. Even looking at what is probable given our understanding of the various social and cultural (etc) forces at play is problematic either because we are too close to see the patterns or because we are too far to look at them without struggling not to read our own changed circumstances back onto them. There are problems with history as there are with any other way of looking at and trying to understand the world and I am playing fast and loose with it both in general and in this particular wall of text.
So my point, then, maybe, is to apologize. I feel like I need to be forgiven for bowing to this desire to play God and for toying with ideas that I do not--and never will--properly understand. As far as sins of history go, however, this one is relatively minor, and my apology is slightly tongue in cheek. Worse things have been done with whatever real individual once lived under the weights we have piled upon him and I am certain that worse things will still be done. I am just playing pretend in a corner, but it is not altogether different from what has been done for centuries with the same characters and plot. It is deliciously rewarding to bring what we call history but may as well be called life into a form we can relate to and understand and look at and say to it "you were born in September of 1475, you lived and you fucked and you died an inglorious and ironic death in Vianna at the age of 32, largely broke and abandoned in this world, a metaphor for our own lust for temporal power, and if you stand just so and raise your chin to the light I will chisel you a pedestal and title you 'Hero'".
The other thing that bothers me about biography, although not on as personal a level, is how often they are disconnected from reality. They name places (Rome, Florence, Naples), dates (1475, 1492, 1503), players (Caterina Sforza, Leonardo da Vinci, Cardinal della Rovere), but generally ignore larger issues at hand because on an immediate level most of us are more concerned with these details of our lives than with the larger forces at play. I was able to get away with the incredibly masturbatory act of writing about the Borgias for graduation because their biographies did not connect them to some of the more general patterns and problems I was interested in, leaving that space open for me to explore. They had been turned into heroes, villains, antiheroes in something like that order, because as Randolph Starn points out, individuals can and have been reappropriated for political and cultural purposes: “heroes are not born, but made—or, rather, re-made”.
This is not a new development. Starn was talking about the tendency of people in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to do the same. One obvious example is that of Julius Caesar, who was not only remembered but idolized as the man who had at one point bound together what had disintegrated into warlords and city-states. He was not simply born a hero but became one through the story told about his actions, and then was re-made as a hero when that story became increasingly compelling in the peninsula once again. For an American-centric example, Abraham Lincoln was not a hero from birth but stepped into the role or had it read onto him, in the context of political leader or defender of the union or, in the story that was part of the cultural experience I grew up with, liberator of the enslaved. His actual role in history does not always match up to the ideal that he is made into--heroes are not born.
And, similarly, villains are not born. People can do amazingly cruel things just as they can fight against them. But villains become villains for the cultural reading of these acts, not for the acts themselves. Heroes and villains are human constructs and subject to human fallacy regardless of any moral relativity. Not that, of course, it is not easier to read someone who does commit atrocities into the role of villain, but that oftentimes things are hardly so black and white and even the person's acts themselves are influenced by the broader surroundings. This does not always excuse them, but it does complicate the situation and offers another strike against this genre of biography, or at least against the reading of them on their own.
I will cut to the chase. Cesare Borgia is neither hero nor villain, although he lived in a time that, it has been asserted, practiced the creation of both with greater frequency. To call him either is to privilege him above others who for whatever reason remain mere humans. Although I enjoy stories about him, especially where he is cast in the most recent reading of antihero (the little ironies of his death especially set him up well for a reading of tragic hero), I have to keep the voice in the back of my head that reminds me of the problems of getting too invested. I keep a quote on my desktop by Hayden White that talks about the creation of heroes and the reading of mood onto history. It explains that "how a given historical situation is to be configured depends on the historian's subtlety in matching up a specific plot structure with the set of historical events that he wishes to endow with a meaning of a particular kind. This is essentially a literary, that is to say fiction-making, operation"--the same events can be understood in different ways. I have seen the exact same sequence of events in Cesare's life taken as evidence of his psychopathy or genius, political aptitude or paranoia, devotion or intimidation. One historian will assert that his father was the real power as proven by how Cesare's sweep through Italy ended after his death, while another insists that Cesare strong-armed his father, fundamentally concerned with enjoying his time in the Vatican, into paying out for his plans. Obviously they both cannot be true, or at least not both the same kind of truth.
As White goes on to say, however, to acknowledge these narratives as fiction-making "in no way detracts from the status of historical narratives as providing a kind of knowledge [... and] such plot structures [are] one of the ways that a culture has of making sense of both personal and public pasts". I cannot remember if I ever did write about Cesare's ideas about the public and private but the fact that I am compelled to do so at all demonstrates that I am guilty of this fiction-making as well, and for the very reasons pointed to here. It is a way for me to work through an understanding of the more general literature I was reading--it provides a human perspective for me to read history through. It is a biography, although one that I am obviously aware is false. It is taking a person I am used to seeing lifted up above mere humans and exploring what that means and why that happens, and the farther we get from the source material the more interesting and multi-varied the answers seem to be. The initial hero-villain flip is easy enough to understand, as it matches up neatly and unsurprisingly with the rise and fall of families and the change of power in the peninsula. (With a closer look it is more complicated, as the two readings overlap but still have much to do with politics and state-building.) The slow crawl away from villain is more interesting, especially when complicated with the change of culture over both time and physical space.
It is more obvious than ever that heroes are not born but made and can be re-made. In Maoist China, Joan of Arc was occasionally used as a heroine of the revolution. Were Mao's goals remotely relevant to Joan's? You would be hard pressed to successfully argue that she would have spearheaded his revolution, or even really found a place in it, making her a good example of a hero that was made and re-made again, in new and unusual ways. Cesare, too, has been made and re-made as his family name has taken on new meaning over the years. A quick GIS brings me a conservative seven different makings of him on the first page alone (one of them Souryo Fuyumi's). The name, then, is beyond the individual man because it is impossible to come to him without first stripping away all the layers that culture--not just Italian or European or Western culture--has built on top of him, and being inevitably influenced by them. What are you supposed to do with someone who has been filtered through so many different lenses? It's a privileged question, since so few people are remembered in such a fashion at all, and everyone has some lens on their story, even if they write their own history themselves.
Regardless, I enjoy his biographies, if only because as they tell the same story in different ways they occasionally shine more light on the authors than on the historical figure as they make them in their own images out of the clay of documents and older analysis. I was very aware of and rather embarrassed of my my own bias both towards the man and the circumstances as I was writing for class in part because after seeing the same template filled in so many different ways I knew the variety of things it could inadvertently expose. It is a guilty pleasure, though, like I said, and what I like best is the repetition of the story. There are retellings that I prefer to others, just like some storytellers are more adept at drawing in their audience than others. I enjoy the process of making and unmaking and making again and I am continually tempted to try my own hand at it, if only on this little corner of the Internet. He is neither fundamentally a hero nor a villain, after all, but a slate for us to project upon, not blank but with a leading line: "There once was a man who did many things and maybe he is in need of redemption or maybe he is in need of condemnation; craft him into whatsoever you desire, because he is dead and cannot well argue back".
And if he cannot argue then the problem is not that this crafting is not historical, because there is always at least some seed of history in all of the stories that spring up around and on top of him as even the most adamantly fact-driven would call it, but that they conflate his history with our own. We are unable to write pure history, because writing by nature necessitates framing and any frame we choose to engage with prioritizes one view over another. Furthermore, the further we slide from the turn of the fifteenth century, the easier it is to put our words into his mouth, or into the mouths of his detractors if we choose to label him more villain than hero. We are more removed from their reality and able to speak more freely--we are not automatically familiar with the surrounding circumstances and so it is easier to take things out of context and bend them to our present needs. This bending serves a purpose as well, if a moralizing one, and that is where lines begin to get crossed. As White points out, "all the historian needs to do to transform a tragic into a comic situation is to shift his point of view or change the scope of his perceptions". From a literary (or fiction-making) perspective, this is simple enough, and in some sense we are unable to write or conceive of anything but fiction regardless.
To write history, then, is to write fiction--or maybe to write fiction within a given set of guidelines or cliches--, but on the sliding scale between truth and falsehood we prioritize those histories that seem to err closer to what strikes us more soundly as truth. Those that sell themselves as fantasy or historical-fiction outright have their own set of criteria and may be more blatantly a stepping stone of a great man since great men are the ones with stories that have been emplotted as such. Biographies, then, are difficult to swallow because they are part of this dialogue of stepping stones while simultaneously claiming to be more factual than more sweeping works. Which is more true on a personal level, after all, what a generalized study about poverty and unemployment in America says, or what your own personal experiences are? There is a disconnect between the way we often look at the two and a similar thing happens in this genre. Nearly any interpretation or claim can be levied because what is true for the majority is not true for everyone and who are we to deny another person's individual experience? I can argue that it is highly unlikely for a father to be bullied by his son or for a brother to lust after his sister, but I cannot deny that there are exceptions to the rule. Even looking at what is probable given our understanding of the various social and cultural (etc) forces at play is problematic either because we are too close to see the patterns or because we are too far to look at them without struggling not to read our own changed circumstances back onto them. There are problems with history as there are with any other way of looking at and trying to understand the world and I am playing fast and loose with it both in general and in this particular wall of text.
So my point, then, maybe, is to apologize. I feel like I need to be forgiven for bowing to this desire to play God and for toying with ideas that I do not--and never will--properly understand. As far as sins of history go, however, this one is relatively minor, and my apology is slightly tongue in cheek. Worse things have been done with whatever real individual once lived under the weights we have piled upon him and I am certain that worse things will still be done. I am just playing pretend in a corner, but it is not altogether different from what has been done for centuries with the same characters and plot. It is deliciously rewarding to bring what we call history but may as well be called life into a form we can relate to and understand and look at and say to it "you were born in September of 1475, you lived and you fucked and you died an inglorious and ironic death in Vianna at the age of 32, largely broke and abandoned in this world, a metaphor for our own lust for temporal power, and if you stand just so and raise your chin to the light I will chisel you a pedestal and title you 'Hero'".