Monday, May 2, 2011
Poets and the necessity of Heroes?
According to Kierkegaard, heroes and poets are dependent on each other and necessarily need each other. However, if the passing of history is merely through poets, what is the necessity of heroes? Let us say Achilles never existed and Homer just made him up. The story of Achilles survives and he is a hero in that story, so the concept of the hero exists, yet the hero himself never did. (Not exactly parallel, but the concept of a unicorn exists without the actual unicorns existing. We do not believe unicorns are real. However, what if there was a Homer who wrote about them, would we now consider them extinct akin to dinosaurs?) The value of the story and the history itself is not affected by existence, or lack thereof, of the heroes, merely the poets.
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I think that what Kierkegaaaard was getting at is that the poets MAKE the heroes real by telling their stories. The heroes are real insofar as they exist in the collective consciousness of our history, and the way the enter into that consciousness is through the poets. Similarly, the poets need heroes to write about, or their stories will be empty.
ReplyDeleteIn addition to what Oscar has mentioned, I think the reality of the heroes is essential because were they *all* mere fantasy then they'd represent an unrealistic target for humans to aim for.
ReplyDeletePart of the hero/poet dynamic is that the hero engages in activities beyond the capability of the poet; they represent ideals to strive for. But the possibility of achieving those activities or heroic deeds is only actionable if they have some basis in reality (or we believe them to have some basis in reality).
The poets regale us with the tales of the hero not only to inform but to inspire.
My best answer to this-
ReplyDeleteThe fact that the story itself may be fictional doesn't mean you cannot draw a lesson from it and look upon it as an ideal to model yourself after. The hero may not be real and may be invented by the poet but there certainly are heroes out there; the author isn't making that up. The moral still may be imparted through a fictional means and the audience can still cheer for the hero.
There is no Mr. Holland and he had no opus. Richard Dreyfuss plays him in a movie; we all know that. And yet, Mr. Holland is a hero and I can imagine someone being inspired by the film, perhaps even into becoming a music teacher themselves. After all, there are good music teachers in the world, not just in a movie about Mr. Holland.
I'll grant that it does not matter much whether the story or the hero is real, especially in terms of its significance. I guess the problem I mostly see is the mutual dependence that is seemingly described between the poet and the hero. If the hero does not exist, poet can just make him up as well as his acts, while a hero really does need a poet to write about him. It kind of makes the hero less important in my view.
ReplyDeleteWell, there are many things that cannot be entirely made up. They can be exaggerated, sure, but the human mind is not imaginative enough to make it up out of whole cloth. To use another example, if there were no such things as ships, you probably couldn't make up a ship or a brave shipman. However, there were and are brave sailors in the world. So it wasn't that big of a stretch when Patrick O'Brien made up Jack Aubrey.
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ReplyDeleteBack to the idea that we cannot entirely make things up, I tend to disagree. Look to Jules Vern who thought of the subway and the submarines before they were invented.
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