mrsronweasley (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mrsronweasley) wrote2003-10-24 02:34 pm
mrsronweasley) wrote2003-10-24 02:34 pm
"The Charioteer" and related ramblings.
...Let us say, then, that the soul resembles the joined powers of a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. Now the horses and drivers of the gods are of equal power and breed, but with men it is otherwise...
Plato, "Phaedrus"
I'm (re)reading Mary Renault's "The Charioteer", and I have realized something. One of the things that fascinates me about about the history and the very being of homosexuality, as well as its place in the world, the in- and out-side of it, is ambiguity. Hinst of homosexuality lurk in culture (popular and otherwise) everywhere. And they have done for centuries. The gentlemen's clubs of London that united men outside the company of their wives in a proper society circle that I am almost certain hid more than it revealed, though I, of course, don't know for sure. There have been ambiguous laws and straight-forward laws. There is the celluloid closet of Hollywood; cartoons that disguise hints of homosexuality behind colorful characters. Greek "friendships". Achilles and Patroklos.
In "The Charioteer", M.R. dances an incredible waltz around these ideas. There are hints of sado-masochism that are so subtle, you have to strain your eyes to see, and you'll only get it on the third try, and then there are outright admissions of "queerness" and talk of Tchaikovsky being gay. You have to know subtlety very well to understand the entire novel, and I'm not sure I still do, fully. But it hides and reveals so much. There is a scene that basically parallels Adam and Eve being stricken from paradise, using two young men as the first natural couple. You also have to know what happens before they're "stricken" in order to get the entire important of it, I think. There is also a conversation that, on the surface, discusses the dangers of soldiers being "seduced" by concientious objectors, and the double-meaning in just tickles me.
Mary Renault, of course, is a Master of subtlety and writing between the lines. She writes so beautifully. There is that wonderful scene in "Fire From Heaven" where Alexander and Hephaestion actually have sex, but nowhere does it outright say it. It makes allusions to mating foxes and those foxes keeping their secret, and then Hephaestion raises his head, and Alexander's eyes are closed...it's just beautiful. Really beautiful.
In "The Charioteer", there is only one sentence, I think, that suggests that the man character has just had sex with somebody and then a much longer reflection on the consequences. It's so ambiguous and interesting. This novel is like all of queer history rolled into one piece of amazing writing. It's subtle, sneaky, mysterious, sad, reckless, open and beautiful. And, oh so very ambiguous. The fact that it's set in WWII England, in a war hospital, is also not lost on me. She's astounding.
And this really brings "OotP" home. JKR has once said, I believe, that there is not a single topic that she can think of that cannot be put into children's books. Well, there you have it. With all the little hints of R/S that even non-shippers admit to seeing, it's no wonder so many of us believe in it. It's there, if you're willing to look for it.
Sorry about the ramblings. But I also wanted to include a scene from "The Charioteer". It's not really a spoiler... The main character, Laurie Odell, meets another rather important character, Andrew. Laurie is 23 here, and Andrew is... 19? 18? I'm not sure. Anyway, I wanted to include it because it's so beautiful.
Here, Laurie is in the hospital - he was wounded, almost lost his leg, so now he's recuperating. A group of C.O.s was just brought in to take place of the maids that have left and quite a few soldiers are upset about it.
******
The cement floor outside was wet; a voice said quickly, "Look out for the bucket."
Before he had seen around the door, some instantaneous reflex caused Laurie to say "Oh, thanks very much" in a conversational, instead of an automatic way.
He came out. In the open doorway of the lavatory, the boy who had been scrubbing the floor sat back on his heels and smiled.
Laurie stopped in his tracks, balanced himself between the crutch and the pathroom doorpost, and smiled back. Well, he thought after a moment, one can't just stand around grinning like a fool. "Hello. What was that bit of Mozart you were whistling just now?"
The boy put down the floorcloth, wiped his hands on the seat of his trousers, and with the back of it pushed the hair away from his eyes. It was fairish, the color of old gilt. He had a fair skin which was smoothly tanned, so that his gray eyes showed up very bright and clear. He was working in old corduroy trousers and a gray flannel shirt with rolled sleeves.
"I'm not sure," he said. "I was thinking about something else." Fearing perhaps that to have sounded unsocial, he smiled again.
Laurie had become touched with a feeling of panic, like someone confronted with a locked door and a strange bunch of keys, none of which may fit. He said with a jerk, "I thought it might be the Oboe Quartet in F Major." This simply happened to be one of the few he could identify by name. The boy said in a willing way, "It might have been; it's one I'm very fond of" and stirred the cloth in the bucket, sending up a clean bleak small of carbolic.
"Was it this bit?" Laurie said. He tried to hum a few bars of the first movement. The boy sat with a listening expression; at the end he said with serious courtesy, "Yes, it probably was that bit," and then, as there began to be a pause, "Have you ever heard Goossens play it?"
"No. Only on a record. Have you?"
"Only the record."
There was another pause. The boy started to work again, though not in a dismissing way, and moved the bucket into the lavatory doorway. "This is a bit of a dreary job for you," Laurie said.
"Here. Move that mucking bucket, you lazy ----, d'you think we've got all day?" Laurie hadn't heard Willis coming behind them.
The boy had started a little, but repressed it quickly; he moved the bucket, civilly but without apology. Willis stepped forward to pass it. There was a kind of forced clumsiness in his gait, a crude preparation for knocking the bucket over. Laurie swung out on his crutch and, silently, caught Willis's eye. It was a look he had not tried on anyone since his last year at school, but apparently it still worked. Willis's face slumped soggily, seeming to mirror a defeated ancestry as long as Banquo's line of kings. He went inside and slammed the door. It was over in seconds.
The boy stood up. Laurie could see that he was shyly, but doggedly, working up to something. "That was very kind of you. But it will have to come out sometime, if that's how he feels. We have to cope with all that ourselves, I mean. It's the least we can do, after all, isn't it?"
The brush with Willis had fortified Laurie's self-confidence. "Well, to you it probably seems to be your business; but to me it seems to be mine. I have to live here."
"Have you been here long?"
"Oh, I more or less crept out of the woodwork, I---"
The face of the bearded man came in the door. He looked at them with a kindly detached interest and said briskly, "When you've finished in there, Andrew, will you take the swill bucket down to the main kitchen? They'll show you there what to do with it." The boy looked up, smiled with a casual but affectionate ease, said, "All right, Dave," and bent to his scrubbing again.
Andrew, thought Laurie; the name slipped into place like a clear color-note in the foreground of a picture.
**********
I'll end it here, because it's waaay too long to type out. But I just love this scene. It's so beautiful. It's not the best scene, of course, and there are many beautiful scenes in this book, but it's just so defining.
Plato, "Phaedrus"
I'm (re)reading Mary Renault's "The Charioteer", and I have realized something. One of the things that fascinates me about about the history and the very being of homosexuality, as well as its place in the world, the in- and out-side of it, is ambiguity. Hinst of homosexuality lurk in culture (popular and otherwise) everywhere. And they have done for centuries. The gentlemen's clubs of London that united men outside the company of their wives in a proper society circle that I am almost certain hid more than it revealed, though I, of course, don't know for sure. There have been ambiguous laws and straight-forward laws. There is the celluloid closet of Hollywood; cartoons that disguise hints of homosexuality behind colorful characters. Greek "friendships". Achilles and Patroklos.
In "The Charioteer", M.R. dances an incredible waltz around these ideas. There are hints of sado-masochism that are so subtle, you have to strain your eyes to see, and you'll only get it on the third try, and then there are outright admissions of "queerness" and talk of Tchaikovsky being gay. You have to know subtlety very well to understand the entire novel, and I'm not sure I still do, fully. But it hides and reveals so much. There is a scene that basically parallels Adam and Eve being stricken from paradise, using two young men as the first natural couple. You also have to know what happens before they're "stricken" in order to get the entire important of it, I think. There is also a conversation that, on the surface, discusses the dangers of soldiers being "seduced" by concientious objectors, and the double-meaning in just tickles me.
Mary Renault, of course, is a Master of subtlety and writing between the lines. She writes so beautifully. There is that wonderful scene in "Fire From Heaven" where Alexander and Hephaestion actually have sex, but nowhere does it outright say it. It makes allusions to mating foxes and those foxes keeping their secret, and then Hephaestion raises his head, and Alexander's eyes are closed...it's just beautiful. Really beautiful.
In "The Charioteer", there is only one sentence, I think, that suggests that the man character has just had sex with somebody and then a much longer reflection on the consequences. It's so ambiguous and interesting. This novel is like all of queer history rolled into one piece of amazing writing. It's subtle, sneaky, mysterious, sad, reckless, open and beautiful. And, oh so very ambiguous. The fact that it's set in WWII England, in a war hospital, is also not lost on me. She's astounding.
And this really brings "OotP" home. JKR has once said, I believe, that there is not a single topic that she can think of that cannot be put into children's books. Well, there you have it. With all the little hints of R/S that even non-shippers admit to seeing, it's no wonder so many of us believe in it. It's there, if you're willing to look for it.
Sorry about the ramblings. But I also wanted to include a scene from "The Charioteer". It's not really a spoiler... The main character, Laurie Odell, meets another rather important character, Andrew. Laurie is 23 here, and Andrew is... 19? 18? I'm not sure. Anyway, I wanted to include it because it's so beautiful.
Here, Laurie is in the hospital - he was wounded, almost lost his leg, so now he's recuperating. A group of C.O.s was just brought in to take place of the maids that have left and quite a few soldiers are upset about it.
******
The cement floor outside was wet; a voice said quickly, "Look out for the bucket."
Before he had seen around the door, some instantaneous reflex caused Laurie to say "Oh, thanks very much" in a conversational, instead of an automatic way.
He came out. In the open doorway of the lavatory, the boy who had been scrubbing the floor sat back on his heels and smiled.
Laurie stopped in his tracks, balanced himself between the crutch and the pathroom doorpost, and smiled back. Well, he thought after a moment, one can't just stand around grinning like a fool. "Hello. What was that bit of Mozart you were whistling just now?"
The boy put down the floorcloth, wiped his hands on the seat of his trousers, and with the back of it pushed the hair away from his eyes. It was fairish, the color of old gilt. He had a fair skin which was smoothly tanned, so that his gray eyes showed up very bright and clear. He was working in old corduroy trousers and a gray flannel shirt with rolled sleeves.
"I'm not sure," he said. "I was thinking about something else." Fearing perhaps that to have sounded unsocial, he smiled again.
Laurie had become touched with a feeling of panic, like someone confronted with a locked door and a strange bunch of keys, none of which may fit. He said with a jerk, "I thought it might be the Oboe Quartet in F Major." This simply happened to be one of the few he could identify by name. The boy said in a willing way, "It might have been; it's one I'm very fond of" and stirred the cloth in the bucket, sending up a clean bleak small of carbolic.
"Was it this bit?" Laurie said. He tried to hum a few bars of the first movement. The boy sat with a listening expression; at the end he said with serious courtesy, "Yes, it probably was that bit," and then, as there began to be a pause, "Have you ever heard Goossens play it?"
"No. Only on a record. Have you?"
"Only the record."
There was another pause. The boy started to work again, though not in a dismissing way, and moved the bucket into the lavatory doorway. "This is a bit of a dreary job for you," Laurie said.
"Here. Move that mucking bucket, you lazy ----, d'you think we've got all day?" Laurie hadn't heard Willis coming behind them.
The boy had started a little, but repressed it quickly; he moved the bucket, civilly but without apology. Willis stepped forward to pass it. There was a kind of forced clumsiness in his gait, a crude preparation for knocking the bucket over. Laurie swung out on his crutch and, silently, caught Willis's eye. It was a look he had not tried on anyone since his last year at school, but apparently it still worked. Willis's face slumped soggily, seeming to mirror a defeated ancestry as long as Banquo's line of kings. He went inside and slammed the door. It was over in seconds.
The boy stood up. Laurie could see that he was shyly, but doggedly, working up to something. "That was very kind of you. But it will have to come out sometime, if that's how he feels. We have to cope with all that ourselves, I mean. It's the least we can do, after all, isn't it?"
The brush with Willis had fortified Laurie's self-confidence. "Well, to you it probably seems to be your business; but to me it seems to be mine. I have to live here."
"Have you been here long?"
"Oh, I more or less crept out of the woodwork, I---"
The face of the bearded man came in the door. He looked at them with a kindly detached interest and said briskly, "When you've finished in there, Andrew, will you take the swill bucket down to the main kitchen? They'll show you there what to do with it." The boy looked up, smiled with a casual but affectionate ease, said, "All right, Dave," and bent to his scrubbing again.
Andrew, thought Laurie; the name slipped into place like a clear color-note in the foreground of a picture.
**********
I'll end it here, because it's waaay too long to type out. But I just love this scene. It's so beautiful. It's not the best scene, of course, and there are many beautiful scenes in this book, but it's just so defining.
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