Un-Fading the Hero
Reconfiguring Ancient and Premodern Heroic Templates in Modern and Contemporary culture
The Permanence of the Heroic
Are we living in a post-heroic age? Along with the dead of God, man, the author and the novel – to mention only the most renowned phenomena to have been solemnly pronounced dead since the beginning of the former century (and even earlier) – the hero (m/f) is one of those spectral notions that have outlived again and again their alleged demise and even seem to flourish the more they get deconstructed, rejected or negated. The hero may die and he even must die in many cases to acquire his heroic status and re-appear, pop up again and again in other forms and discourses, forever involved in a quasi-Ovidian process of metamorphosis. Not only the transformations of the ancient, medieval and pre- modern heroic narratives – from Oedipus over Perceval to Faust, not to forget biblical heroes (including the resurrected Christ himself) – can be followed into the heart of contemporary cultural and artistic discourses; contemporary heroes of film and television have turned reincarnation and ‘return from the dead’ into a necessary constitutive formal aspect of their insisting presence – or at least the insistence of their persona (e.g. James Bond, Dr. Who, Spooks) – in serial narratives. In short:
the hero is ‘alive and kicking’ in so far as he/she is un-dead, a spooky figure that turns up whenever he is declared dead and supposed to be forgotten.
The contributions to this special issue all deal with the question of such ambivalent reshaping and reconfiguring – the often ‘uncanny’ living on – of ancient and premodern heroic templates, concepts, tropes, figures or narratives in modern and contemporary cultural productions and practices. How are the ancient or pre- modern epic and mythic self-fulfilling prophecies and allegories transformed in modern and contemporary narratives with their often ‘democratic’ contexts and situational logic, in which notions like coincidence (or contingency), momentum and (mediatized) charisma have replaced the logic of destiny, predestination, necessity and authority based on supernatural election or mythical legitimization?
Can processes of deheroization and (re)heroization always be neatly disentangled?
And what about the moral dignity that is often attributed to heroes: isn’t that a profoundly modern gesture, or at least: a radical departure from as well as a re- writing of ancient concepts of the hero through the lens of Christian martyrdom?
These and other crucial questions are triggered and partly dealt with by Oliver Kohns’ introductory essay on “Die Demokratisierung des Helden in der Moderne” (“On the democratization of the Hero in Modernity”). Referring to the
seminal work of a.o. Harry Siedentop, Kohns points out that the ancient concept of Heroism had nothing to do with moral virtue. The hero was a hero because of a violent death that turned him into a spirit of the Dead, representing the “mystical ground of authority” (de Montaigne) and the fictional foundation of law and order in the polis. That heroes might as well be criminals and enemies of the state was as evident as their necessarily aristocratic status. In modernity, actually starting with Christianity, only the aesthetic attractiveness of the ancient hero as a form is retained and filled with modern categories and values like individuality, autonomy, conscience, personal virtue and moral greatness. Kohns retraces the genealogy of this modern ‘Heroism’ that has become a (democratic) opportunity for everyone in the long 19th century (Hegel, Carlyle) until the presumably ‘heroic’ death of the soldiers in the trenches of the first World War. That their intrinsic moral quality is again of no relevance and that their sacrificial death for the fatherland was imagined as a necessary moment in a regenerative and salvational process to preserve the
“higher life” of nation and state designates a further shift in the re-interpretation of ancient heroism; but from a certain perspective, this view seems to come closer again to the original violent death that was considered to be the foundational moment for the polis than the 19th-century attempts to turn political and historical actors into ‘great Men’, heroes of (their) time, decision-makers and guides in times of crisis and upheaval.
As Kohns point out, Carlyle presents his concept of the heroic as a historical variable. However, it is no coincidence that the main frames of reference in Carlyle’s lectures on “Hero-worship” are both the mythical dawn of modern politics during the French Revolution as well as religion, when he appropriates religious figures such as the prophet Mohammed and Martin Luther or even the Puritan Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon Bonaparte as main examples of his theory of the hero.
Even though the French Revolution radically jettisoned aristocratic notions of the hero in the name of republican equality and democracy, Carlyle maintained the need of other authoritative heroes as a basis for political stability and order: more specifically, modern politics needs righteous heroes, who selflessly defend their beliefs in spite of fierce opposition. In Carlyle’s view, heroes should be sincere defenders of an inner moral truth. Sincerity and rightfulness are not just something heroes can lay claim upon: these properties are the result of attribution by the people that is intuitively looking out for heroic figures in whom they can recognize themselves and their own inner beliefs. The hero is to some extent a representative figure or a pars pro toto of the entire people. Carlyle holds his “representational”
form of heroism for the foundation of socio-political order. These mechanisms of accreditation are, according to Carlyle’s frame of reference, the reason why heroic statuses can always be revoked. Heroes are forever bound by their dependence on their followers.
The allegedly “incorruptible” Maximilien Robespierre is perhaps one of the most iconic French revolutionaries to illustrate the problematic nature and fragility of representational claims: as a highly contested figure, some communist propagandists saw in him the messianic embodiment of revolutionary justice and democracy, while conservatives and liberals despised him for the terrorist excesses they hold him responsible for. Michiel Rys reconstructs the Robespierre reception in two historical dramas written by Otto Franz Gensichen in the context of the
German unification in 1871. Rys reveals how Gensichen rewrites historiographical, political and literary pretexts in order to deny the label of heroic martyr that especially some socialist historiographers sometimes ascribed to Robespierre. Gensichen not only discredits Robespierre’s public persona as righteous defender of the people’s wellbeing, but also refutes his political ideas, i.e. his ‘inner truth’. In his revolution plays, Gensichen attempts to vanquish the revolutionary spectre of Robespierre that just wouldn’t fade away and was in the course of the 19th century haunting liberal and bourgeois society in the guise of subversive socialist and communist ideology. Rys’ contribution shows how configurations of de- and re-heroization can be instrumentalized for ideological purposes.
In Bart Philipsen’s comparative analysis of three contemporary post-dramatic theatre productions staging Friedrich Hölderlin’s unfinished political drama “The Death of Empedocles”, the aporia’s and inadequacy of the heroic paradigm for political agency in the context of 18th and 19th century revolutionary and post- revolutionary Europe are laid bare. If such historical heroes appear as ghosts, they do so because the heroic persona they have claimed for themselves or that has been imposed upon them has become utterly obsolete. From Klaus Michael Grüber’s staging in 1975 (“Empedocles. Reading Hölderlin”) to recent theatre performances by Romeo Castellucci and Theater Zuidpool Empedocles – the hero ‘that wants to disappear’ – is re-interpreted as a critical figure whose undecidedness between lingering and leaving finally prefigures a posthumanist perspective; he becomes the hero that is not intimidated by Foucault’s prediction that ‘Man will be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’.
It may already have become clear that the very broad scope of these research questions about heroism was narrowed down by the choice of a special focus on the (inter)mediality of appearing and disappearing, fading in and fading out (both literally and in a metaphoric sense) of the heroic in different discourses and artistic forms. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that all the contributions following the introductory essay of Kohns zoom in on cases that are taken from performative art (especially theatre but also music) as well as visual arts, from the spectacular theatre shows of the 17th century to modern media, film and television. The other essays are thematically clustered. The first group of texts are connected because of their special attention for the performative dimension inherent to the heroic: figures can enact themselves as heroes or stars, but this means that they need the acclamation or approval of their respective audiences. The second cluster expands the scope of this theme further and tackles the issues of genre and intertextuality more explicitly as a specific means to write and rewrite heroic concepts.
Performativity and Impact
The uncanny dimension of the hero (or the heroic) as a fading figure between life and death casts an interesting (though ambivalent) light on the assumption that heroes are supposed to be recognizable figures of identification and imitation, that they stand for something in a clear manner and represent something valuable, something one would like to attain oneself. However, not few attractive heroes distinguish themselves less through a solid identity or firm, let alone virtuous behaviour, then through their often outspoken ambiguous and unpredictable, if not incomprehensible behaviour as well as through their ubiquity and liminality. One
of the most obvious examples may be the popularity of pirates in different cultural discourses, including literature and art, from the early 18th century till the Pirates of the Caribbean series. The fascination for these outlaws and their ‘performative’
counter-order, so meticulously reconstructed and analysed in Ulrike Zimmermann’s contribution, is certainly rooted in the anti-authoritarian, law-defying habitus of the pirates. Whereas the unpredictable or altogether transgressive behaviour of pirates may well lie at the basis of their imaginative potential and the public’s everlasting fascination, there have been many attempts to pin this elusive figure down by using him as a “surface onto which a variety of socio-cultural agendas can be projected”.
Especially since the 19th century pirates were more and more perceived through the lens of melodrama and adventure fiction. Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera The Pirates of Penzance (1879), which is still performed today, and the tremendously popular adventure novel by Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883) have shaped the perception of audiences until today. Fiction and spectacle construct pirates as transgressive, not in the least by re-appropriating their own sense of performativity, as illustrated in the specific choreography of their appearance and disappearance. Indeed, the element of against-all-odds unlikeliness and law-defying unpredictability could become the basis of the representation of pirates. As the character, (dis)appearances and adventures of Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean demonstrate all too well, a great deal of the fascination lies in his non-identity and unpredictability, he is a
‘queer’ figure, “somewhere between hero, anti-hero, comical and campy figure”
(Heike Steinhoff, Queer Buccaneers), but he is also – like many other pirates – a figure on the threshold of life and death, transgressing it and returning as a ghost into the world of the living.
A longe durée diachronic perspective allows to retrace the shifts and transformations, continuities as well as blatant discontinuities in the performative and receptive mechanisms behind the ‘making’ or ‘entrance’ as well as the ‘exit’
of heroic agency. How bold it may seem at first to compare let’s say 17th century spectacular theatre to the present day digital film industry. Yet, Christiane Hansen’s essay “(Un)Fading the Hero in Pre- and Postmodern Cultures of Visual Artifice”
convincingly examines the structural analogies between 17th century ‘baroque’
technological modernization in theatre and 20th/21st century ‘neo-baroque’ 3D innovations in spectacular visual aesthetics. Both historically determined forms of visual regimes have radically reshuffled the position and role of the spectators in such a way that they could experience the scenic space as an illusionary totality.
Heightened immersion maximized the audience’s affective responses, such as admiration and fascination. Both 17th and 21st century regimes of spectacular visual effects also “are conceived to influence the processes between hero(in)es and their audiences”. Hansen shows how questions on the medialization of the heroic has in both epochs provided a means to fade or deconstruct and un-fade or reassess conventional notions of the heroic itself. As Hansen argues, spectacular visual arrangements “questions the heroic within structures of (im)materiality and its perceptual and affective effects on the audience, thereby positing it between the political appropriation of the admirable and the market rationale of cinematic sensationalism”. Whereas in the 17th century, the heroic play urged audiences to admire heroic virtue, the sensation-driven horror play reconfigures this aesthetic strategy and “capitalises on spectacular violence and the fascinating impact of the
protagonist”. Contemporary reactions to the latest developments in 3D film in fact seem to reframe these same arguments in terms of concerns about the potential impact of illusion and evidentiality. On top of that, Hansen’s reflections on recent film making provides further context for Zimmermann’s reading of Pirates of the Caribbean as a film series that stresses the performative and unpredictable aspects inherent to piracy in order to produce surprise effects meant to leave audiences baffled.
The next contributions in this volume to explore the dynamics between heroic figures and their audiences. Heroism is in most of the case studies exposed as the result of complex performative acts and processes of ascription, especially when the medium itself is reflected upon, or as Hansen puts it: “On a meta-reflective level, this focus can be used to re-assess the visual, performative and narrative channelling of heroisation as a cultural practice.” The ascription of heroism as well as its devaluation or demise through media strategies, either premodern or contemporary, refer to a necessary and constitutive entanglement of production and reception, the ‘making-of ’ the heroic is as much the result of a whole production apparatus as it is the outcome of public reception. Hardly any of the heroes or the heroic situations that are discussed in the following essays do not deal at the same time with the role of the ‘audience’, be it the real public that is dedicated to e.g. its television heroes and build fan communities with a strong inclination towards re- enactments (e.g. the Trekkies) or the audiences within the plays or fictions. Heroes become heroes or lose their heroism before audiences, they enter and leave virtual as well as real stages of perception, they fade in and out in the eyes and ears of a public. The vicious circle of stardom and fandom is reflected upon in divergent essays, that, on an abstract level, prove this fundamental aspect of heroism to be a phenomenon of longue durée.
In her contribution “Die Diva wird tragische Heldin”, Hanna Klessinger reconstructs an interesting shift in the history of German theatre around 1900.
In “Schauspielerinnenstücke” by Arthur Schnitzler (Das Märchen, 1893), Hermann Bahr (Der Star, 1898/99) and Heinrich Mann (Schauspielerin, 1911) she discovers a critical reflection on a problematic trend in the late 19th century theatre culture that made the dramatic heroine disappear behind the glamourous star actress. Actresses publicly staged themselves in a “Gesamtinszenierung” that encompassed not only their outward appearance and beauty, but also made their private life public, and eventually even denied the mere possibility that a star had a life of her own.
This also involved the development of the expectation of a public longing to see actresses playing the “role of their life”. Eventually, the boundaries between fact and fiction could not be clearly discerned any longer. The glamorous aura of the star completely superseded the tragic roles she played. But do stars always have to satisfy their fan’s needs? Bahr, Schnitzler and Mann critique and counter this trend in their plays by showing different stages of an emancipatory escape, i.e. radical
“fading out” of the modern actress out of the suffocating star cult.
Relating the metaphor of fading in / fading out with the performativity of stardom, Benjamin Van Tourhout’s essay – a testimonial document of a playwright that, as a kind of intermezzo, neatly fits within the scope of this volume and its more theoretically inspired contributions – describes and reflects upon the creative process that lead to his play Je suis une étoile (2004) about the French fin-de-siècle
Parisian painter Maria Bashkirtseff (1860-1884) who tried to compensate her lack of success as a painter by creating and publishing an extensive series of diaries in which she wrote down a heroic fiction of herself as a tragically struggling artist.
Van Tourhout sees her work as a prefiguration of contemporary self-fictions in social media. She creates herself the virtual eye of the beholder that seems to reflect but actually produces in a performative way the heroic fading of a ‘star’ that had never really shined. Van Tourhout’s first play self-consciously uses Bashkirsteff ’s fading as a strategy to fade its author himself into the Flemish theatre landscape.
Genre and Intertextuality
Klessinger’s and Van Tourhout’s essay make one point very clear: the role of the readers and viewers in the process of (de)heroization cannot be underestimated, as they actively participate in the construction, maintenance and reshuffling of heroisms. Stars need fans: the diva’s aura necessarily depends on accreditation of their audience. Jochen Antoni argues that the genre of animated television shows in general and the popular series Futurama (1999-2013) in particular have a specific ability to show deconstructed and disappearing heroes. In line with our postmodern awareness of the textuality in cultural practices, animated television shows like Futurama negotiate models of heroism intertextually in fandom language, i.e.
the discourse of the viewers themselves. This technique of intertextual reference mirrors the audience’s admiration for heroes and its involvement in (de)heroisation processes on a self-reflexive meta-level. Futurama self-consciously displays and subverts the functioning of narrative conventions and heroic concepts: “Futurama’s highlighting of genre conventions as narrative conventions always also reveals this aspect of heroisation while indirectly pointing the audience to their own role within the process of making a hero.” In Futurama, it is the anti-hero, or rather ‘meta-hero’
Fry who, having been frozen until the year 3000, comments his new environment with the language and habits which the target audience, typically familiar with the genre characteristics of such science fiction story lines, knows all too well: the hero behaves as a fan and constantly refers to fandom practices, so as to eventually deconstruct and subvert them. Indeed, Futurama reveals that heroism is an artificial construct, i.e. the result of the audience’s own ascription; the audience is forced to reposition themselves and to question conventional cultural assumptions and mechanisms.
Antoni’s essay resonates with Zimmerman’s and Hansen’s and shows that genre characteristics too can provide a means to negotiate and question essentialist concepts of the heroic. At least as transgressive or ghostly as the pirates described by Zimmermann are the modern popular ‘heroes’ that espionage and intelligence service fiction has produced at least since the Cold War. In her essay “The Fading of the Hero in the 21st Century Espionage Fiction. Character turns in the Television Series Spooks” Barbara Korte show how the divergent spy models of John Le Carré and Ian Fleming – the former underscoring the ambiguities and uncertainties of the spy’s presumably heroic role, the latter the more affirmative outspoken spectacular action heroism – seem to merge into the popular spy fiction series Spooks. This series makes full use of the genre features of spy fiction in order to negotiate the (morally ambivalent) character’s heroic contours. A trademark of Spooks is the unexpected
and disturbing replacement, the emergence and fading out of its alleged heroes;
the concomitant turns of plot and character expose the ambiguity of the so-called heroism of the spy, the defender of homeland security who nevertheless has a license to kill and whose behaviour very often comes close to that of the villains he has to eliminate. The moral twilight in which he moves corresponds to his liminal position “in the cold” (as in Le Carré’s The Spy who came in from the Cold) or the outside of the political community that he has to protect by violating the norms and values of that same community. Indeed, exactly because the spy balances on thin ethical borders between heroic, courageous selflessness and a rogue, shady existence, the genre of spy fiction itself can be seen as a privileged medium for a critical enquiry or even deconstruction of the heroic, i.e. the normative and evaluative frames that constitute heroic identities.
The intertextuality and re-writing of more or less conventional heroic schemes and the participative role of the audience in the (critical) reassessment of heroisms are not only crucial in literary and visual modes of representation, but can – mutatis mutandis – be transposed to auditive genres too. Pieter Bergé’s contribution “Heroic and Anti-Heroic Traces in Dmitry Shostakovich’ Fifteenth Symphony” investigates musical segments that at least since the première of Beethoven’s Sinfonia Eroica in 1803 typically refer to the heroic, among which the funeral march has become the most topical. Martial segments could be reconfigured in new compositions, thus creating a complex network of references and (new) meanings, that encompass negotiations of the heroic as well. Indeed, Shostakovich’s combination of the march topos with other musical quotations renegotiates former concepts of the heroic and anti-heroic. This musical technique of intertextual rewriting problematizes straight-forward interpretation of the heroic’s musical rendition, as Bergé shows with respect to the reception history of Shostakovich’s play.
Either in the form of musical motifs, or in narrative (visual and literary) modes of representation, concepts of the heroic are constantly written, overwritten and rewritten: such intertextuality can be explicitly reflected and commented upon, not in the least in postmodern theatre productions that are highly conscious of their own textuality. Geert Kestens’ contribution examines Paul Pourveur’s postmodern play Congo, that uses Belgian colonial history as a pretext to explore the possibility of human agency and heroism as a function of an underlying and highly male- gendered desire to reach a goal. Pourveur’s Congo maximally exploits postmodern alienation strategies in order to show that the heroic has vanished. Techniques like metafictionality, intertextuality and mythologization are deliberate instruments to actively engage the audience in the critique and reflection on the conditions and possibilities of heroism in postmodern, Western societies. Indeed, as the explicit performativity of theatrical language is laid bare, conventional features of narrative and heroic frameworks are cancelled out. The play even suggests that the conditions for heroes and martyrs have faded away in the era of late capitalism that these heroisms a commodity of the entertainment industry. Kestens’ reading shows how Pourveur made heroisms fade out until the point of total dissolution.
Diametrically opposed to the apparent “death of the hero” in Pouvreur’s Congo, a contemporary incarnation of the heroic like the eponymous hero of one of the longest-running programs on British television, Dr. Who, may endlessly regenerate and reincarnate, acquiring a new body and personality while maintaining
archive, a catalogue or a manual of narrative plots, motifs and themes that have structured heroic narratives and incarnations throughout the centuries.
The contribution of Maria-Xenia Hardt in this volume describes processes of appearance and disappearance in Dr. Who as they fundamentally interact with existing patterns and heroisms of highbrow and popular culture. The series fades the Doctor’s character into different genres and overwrites it with diverse concepts of the heroic, in order to “playfully” challenge their underlying conventions, such as the faith we have in stereotypical heroic figures. Dr. Who, through appearance, disappearance and reappearance, manages to articulate and shift between different types of heroic agency, that often lean on the processes of performativity, recognizability and public impact the previous essays have unravelled. Hardt shows how the ‘fading out’ and ‘fading in’ of the Doctor’s character during his perennial regeneration process and epic journey are crucial for the reshuffling of heroic concepts. Nevertheless, the endless cycle of appearance, disappearance and re-appearance of heroisms in a slightly altered way eventually creates the illusion of a reassuring familiarity and authenticity, while at the same time satisfying the public’s longing for excitement.
The Doctor’s regeneration process symbolizes the key insight that combines the essays in this volume: that although we are supposedly living in post-heroic times, the hero fades out and fades in, albeit in novel forms, genres and modes of production and/or reception. This volume shows that conceptualizations of the hero(ine) and their modes of fading in and fading out change as they pass through different media, genres, contexts and modes of reception. Fading and unfading again and again, the heroic, embodied by all sorts of hero(in)es, is alive and kicking.
Bart Philipsen & Michiel Rys KU Leuven
