Our Name is Subtext, Podcast of Podcasts. Hear our “Ozymandias” Discussion, Ye Listeners, and Despair!

The land is not just ancient but “antique,” and while many of its artifacts end up as the possessions of distant museums, they may yet be capable of overpowering their audiences. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is traditionally taken as an exploration of hubris, and of the obliviating effect of time on power and its pretensions. But the poem also speaks to the power of art to preserve, and how this is accomplished by a hermeneutic collaboration between artist, audience, and subject matter. If there is something alive in the passions reproduced within an artist’s inanimate medium, then our creative powers may ultimately not belong to us.  Thanks to our sponsor BetterHelp. Get 10 percent off online therapy at betterhelp.com/subtext Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode. Transcript 0:12 Wes: The land is not just ancient, but antique, and while many of its artifacts end up as the possessions of distant museums, they may yet be capable of overpowering their audiences. Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ozymandias is traditionally taken as an exploration of hubris and of the obliviating effect of time on power and its pretensions. But the poem also speaks to the power of art to preserve and how this is accomplished by a hermeneutic collaboration between artist, audience and subject matter. If there is something alive in the passions reproduced within an artist's inanimate medium, then our creative powers may ultimately not belong to us. This is Wes Alwan. 0:56 Erin: And this is Erin O'Luanaigh. 0:57 Wes: And you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, I think this is a really appropriate poem to do after Alien, because I probably have a much looser association here. The poem is actually quoted in Covenant. I found out when looking at trivia. 1:16 Erin: Oh, wow. 1:17 Wes: I thought, oh, there's a segue for us from Alien to Ozymandias. 1:21 Erin: Well, isn't this also inscribed at the foot of the space jockey or. That's a joke. I know that it's not 1:31 Wes: the gears. We're processing that because obviously it's impossible for that to be. 1:37 Erin: You know, those aliens are like really big Shelley fans. 1:41 Wes: Yeah, that's Ridley Scott trying to be the king of kings there with that massive space jockey. 1:49 Erin: That's a good Cecil B. DeMille plug right there. Yeah, yeah. Another TV show or film or whatever that references. This is Breaking Bad, right? Because when I talk about it with my students, they're like, oh, this is the Breaking Bad poem, which is awesome. That thrills me that they both have seen Breaking Bad and have familiarity with this poem because of Breaking Bad. But I feel like this gets referenced all the time. I don't know. Are there other places where it appears besides Alien? Breaking Bad. 2:18 Wes: I don't know. But this idea will be part of our conversation today to the extent to which the poem itself is a monument and self referential. Right. In its aspiration to become a monument. The parallel between the artist and Ramses II, AKA Ozymandias. Much cooler name. 2:34 Erin: Totally. 2:34 Wes: I'm sure it's appeared in many places and I'm sure it's the most well known of Shelley's poems or the most read. Right. There's Prometheus Unbound. 2:45 Erin: I had the misfortune of reading that entire thing. Yeah. 2:48 Wes: You know, I tried to look at read some other Shelley poems As preparation for this. I can't say he's a poet that generally grabs me and he's a very. What's the word for it? Excited. Yeah, that's excited guy. This poem, it seems to kind of depart from his usual style in a 3:10 Erin: way which I love. Shelley is, full disclosure, he's by far my least favorite of the six major English Romantic poets. Ode to the West Wind was frequently parodied in my house growing up. I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. We'd say that whenever we like. Something bad happened that was very minor. Oh, no, we ran out of coffee. 3:31 Wes: Yeah, dinner's late. Again. 3:33 Erin: I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. Yeah, so. So he was always like the object of our scorn, my mom and I. She also hated Shelley. 3:43 Wes: So, I mean, he did have a very tragic life, but it was kind of self imposed. 3:48 Erin: Yeah, yeah. Not quite up to the Keats standard of tragedy. 3:53 Wes: Right. He tried pretty hard to. 3:56 Erin: Yeah, yeah, exactly. 3:57 Wes: Beginning with being very publicly an atheist in school and publishing a tract and sending it to all the professors and bishops, pissing everyone off and. And ending with falling out of a boat. Sorry. 4:12 Erin: Yeah. When I was at Oxford. It's funny because there's a whole monument to him at Oxford now, which is hilarious considering what happened to him there. They've reclaimed him, I guess. Yeah. But this, you know, this is a wonderful poem. Should we just get started and just read it and then talk about it or should we say anything more? It's an occasional poem, in a way. 4:32 Wes: Should we say a little bit more about the background? 4:35 Erin: Sure. 4:36 Wes: So the. The poem began as a competition and between him and his friend Horace Smith. Right. They tasked themselves with writing a sonnet on the same topic. And I think it was inspired by a visit to the British Museum. Right. And the sculpture is, you know, fragment of a statue of Ramses II, that had been taken out of Egypt. And at this. At this time, there are lots of antiquities, Right. Flowing out of Egypt because of Napoleon's invasion, basically, and plundering of all those ruins and artifacts. So there was quite a bit of Egyptian stuff arriving at the museum. And I think the statue at the museum was a impetus for this. 5:16 Erin: And then they found that Diodorus little fragment, the Roman historian. 5:20 Wes: Right. 5:21 Erin: So Diodorus described this inscription on a statue which read, king of Kings, Ozymandias am I. If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him outdo me in my work. Which is like pretty awesome inscription. So I think that directly inspired Both sonnets that came out of this, one of which has a much more involved title than Shelley's Ozymandias. The title is hilarious of the other one. I don't know if we should say it now or talk about it later. Okay, so the title of Smith's poem is, On a stupendous leg of granite discovered standing by itself in the deserts of Egypt, with the inscription inserted below. 5:58 Wes: Wow. 5:58 Erin: I gotta say that even I know that's a bad title. 6:01 Wes: Well, he wins the competition for title length. 6:04 Erin: Yeah, there you go. That's what it's all about. 6:07 Wes: Big, big title. So. Yeah, so I think Ozymandias is the Greek name for Ramses ii. So the poets connected the statue and the account from Diodorus and then went from there. The competition was on, but it's not really much of competition in the end. Maybe we'll get a chance to look at Smith's poem a little bit, but sure. Yeah. It's just not even close. Shall we read the poem and then you can read it, and then we can talk a little bit about the structure and rhyme scheme and then move on to our analysis. Okay, go for it. 6:38 Erin: Okay. I met a traveler from an antique land who said, two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. Near them on the sand half sunk a shattered visage lies, Whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command tell that its sculptor well those passions read which yet survive, Stamped on these lifeless things the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear. My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Nothing beside remains Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away. 7:22 Wes: Very nice. So the structure of this, am I right to say it combines two types of sonnet, the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean? 7:30 Erin: Oh, yeah, I guess. Yeah, I guess it does. 7:32 Wes: So the rhyme scheme is more Shakespearean. Right. But it's divided into a octave and a sestet. It's a, B, A, B, A, C, D, C, E, D, E, F, E, F. So it's a weird little variation, you know, it's a regular. I guess it still qualifies as a sonnet. 7:54 Erin: Oh, there are much, much crazier sonnets than this. 7:58 Wes: I figured. 7:59 Erin: Yeah. So the thing that strikes me first, always when I read it, and it always surprises me, is that almost the entire poem is a quote, which is bizarre. So there's this bizarre distancing effect that Shelley's using where the I that begins the poem just completely drops away. And the entire thing is this quote of this traveler. So it's sort of doubly refracted for a poem that begins with the I. It's extremely impersonal. And it's this traveler's account of the sculpture coming upon it in the sand. And then there's also the quote within the quote of the traveler reciting the inscription. It's very strange. 8:39 Wes: It creates this sense of mediation on the one hand, so you get a kind of further insulation between the audience and the poet here by interposing someone else. And then there's always the question of the reliability if you interpose a Persona, narrator. But the question of the reliability of the narrator always arises. And that's kind of apt in this case because we're going to also take this as a commentary on art and the artist and the status of representation, which we'll get to. And we can think of the travel in various ways. So we're thinking here about source material and reliability. And I think people were. It was kind of controversial whether. Right. Diodorus himself could be relied on, whether this account was actually accurate or his accounts were actually accurate. So who's the traveler? Right. Is it Diodorus? Are we meeting him metaphorically. There are also a lot of people writing travelogues at the time. You know, just as all the antiquities were coming back, people were visiting and writing about Egypt. And so there's the question of the reliability of those accounts. We could think of the narrator as someone in the past meeting Diodorus, or we could think of Diodorus in a way as a time traveler, which is apt in the sense that these monuments themselves sort of become time travelers that speak to us through time. So there's a lot of ambiguities just in this use of a traveler here. And we'll see that's repeated throughout the poem. A lot of interesting pregnant ambiguities. So that work very well in the poem. The word antique. Well, yeah, I think, is a great word. 10:15 Erin: Right, right. 10:16 Wes: Not ancient. 10:17 Erin: Yeah. So I just wanted to dive right in and call our attention. I mean, that's the word that grabs your eye in the first line. An antique land. Like you say, it's a place where a lot of antiquities are coming out of. But there's also this idea that the land itself is antiqued or. I don't know, what do we want to say about that? 10:35 Wes: The things that come out of. Out of Egypt are antiquities and maybe even think the Sorts of things that will end up in antique stores and end up in people's living rooms of tourists, ultimately, if not museums. So it recasts the land as something that is for the conqueror, for the exploiter. In this case, Napoleon. Right. And Britain. So we're immediately confronted with an irony which is that Ramses' monument is supposed to, in a way, make him the big guy. He's sort of to help him trans. Temporarily subject others. Right. It's not good enough that he's king of kings. He's got to do that across time by way of his monuments. In this case we get a reversal, right? The monuments simply become something to be enjoyed in a museum, something to be plundered and so on. So that's just the things you can do with one word, right? 11:35 Erin: Yeah, I love that as a whole civilization or country as now being a place of plunder, which is allowed because of the fact that its glory days are past. Right. So those empires currently at the height of their powers can come in and make of this antique land, you know, what they want. But obviously contained within the poem, I think, as you're suggesting, is this idea that those civilizations currently at the height of their powers will also then become antique lands that the dominant force can come in and take their knickknacks from. 12:08 Wes: Naturally, we can ask the same question of the work of art. Does the work of art subject the audience in a way, as I think Ramses imagines his monuments subjecting future peoples? Or does the audience subject the work of art? Right. Curate it, take it, put it in a museum, make the artist their servant, you work for me, that sort of thing. And then just to say once again that we are, I think the mediation of the traveler raises the question of accuracy, which is that old Platonic accusation, art is a lie, artists are making things up. Or even representation per se keeps us at a distance from reality. It's not something to be valued or favored. And it can even have a bad influence on us. It can be a way of sort of virally spreading poor character. That's Plato's accusation. Aristotle responds with the concept of catharsis, a different concept of identification that might not be so corrupting to us. So I think we can, you know, we can introduce all those. Those ideas here that I think do pay off later. 13:18 Erin: Sure. Well, I think that gets us to the two vast and trunkless legs of stone, Right. Because right away we have this heroic scale of the body. Something that's literally blown out of proportion, or it's in proportion but it's way blown up. 13:33 Wes: Yeah, yeah, very good. 13:35 Erin: So I think it's supposed to be reminiscent maybe of the Colossus of Rhodes. Keeping that in mind. 13:41 Wes: Yeah, yeah, I think that's very good. Because this word. We're going to be confronted later on in the poem with two ideas that are opposed to each other. One is this idea that the statue mocks, and the other is that it, well, reads. That it reads something. Well, it's an accurate representation. On the other hand, it mocks, which. There's a double entendre there. You know, mock is simply an imitate, simply as engage in representation of mimesis. But on the other hand, might mean make fun of. And in this case, possibly by caricaturing, possibly by distorting. So that the grandiosity of Ramses, as you're pointing out here, can be related to a kind of lack of accuracy or misrepresentation or even caricature and mockery. So inadvertent self caricature, simply by virtue of his arrogance and his aspirations. 14:43 Erin: Right. And he's been cut off. We have these great pairings of descriptors, I think, that happen throughout the poem. So we have famously, the last two pairs, the lone and level and the boundless and bare. But here we have vast and trunkless. And as you suggest, like the hand that mocked, the heart that fed. So we have these pairings of things which I think are kind of opposed to each other. So the idea that the legs can be vast is sort of ironically cut off at the knees or a little higher up, that it's also trunkless. So it's a kind of absurdity. An absurdity. Absurdity which is obviously highlighted in the title of the Horace Smith poem, that if you're just going to focus on these two legs, it kind of becomes unintentionally hilarious that here that it's extremely profound. 15:31 Wes: So this is something that I didn't actually pick up on this. This contrast you're highlighting between the vastness of the legs and their trunklessness, which we could see that as the grandiosity itself producing a kind of fragility or weakness, right. With the legs representing those. The aspiration to dominate or to walk over or to bestride the narrow world. But it's that size, right, which makes the monument ultimately so vulnerable to time and to the elements. If someone were injured, for instance, right. They lost their legs in an accident, we wouldn't look at the legs and say, oh, those legs are trunkless. 16:12 Erin: Right. 16:13 Wes: Look at the trunk and say, oh, that trunk is legless. So it's an interesting visual inversion of injury, I think. 16:22 Erin: So the legs, presumably, they carry your body around. They carry your. Your message, your. Your goods, your attempts to conquer. And the word trunkless is always so strange because whenever I. I would show this to my students, they would at first think that whatever was being described was an elephant. They're not used to the idea of a trunk as a torso, but it called my attention to the fact that a trunk is. Is also what you might carry stuff around in. Right. Like you're a trunk, like a traveling trunk, where you might take, if you're Shelley, to go spend some time in Egypt or Greece or wherever you might go, if you're Shelley. So there's an idea of storage and carrying across one's message, which is inherent in a conquering country. Right. So that I think, is. Is great in this word trunkless, even if it does make us think of dumbo. 17:17 Wes: I have one more association, which is probably loose and unfounded, but the word bootless in a Shakespearean Sonnet, Sonnet 29, that's great. It's the kind of thing that can unconsciously influence a poet in an unconscious way. If you're writing a sonnet and you've read lots of sonnets here, it's trunkless instead of bootless, with the boots intact, so to speak. 17:39 Erin: Mm. That's nice. Yeah. So near these. These legs of stone, we have this shattered visage half sunk in the sand. And from what we can tell of these descriptors, it's just the lower half of the face. 17:52 Wes: Right. 17:53 Erin: I'm thinking of that famous fragment in sort of like a black granite, of just the lower lips of a monumental sculpture. Do you know what I'm talking about? I always think of that little. That. Not little, but that large lip fragment. 18:07 Wes: The Egyptian Sphinx. 18:09 Erin: No, not the Sphinx. Sphinx. We have the full head. So what I'm thinking of is actually in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it's a fragment of a queen's face in yellow Jasper. 18:19 Wes: Yeah. So it's the lower half of her face. 18:22 Erin: Yeah. Because I think that's really all we get. I mean, that's what I imagine. Do you see a whole face, but just with a crack in it? 18:29 Wes: Yeah. That's very interesting. Yeah, that's the way I see it. And now I'm seeing half sunk, a shattered visage lies. So now I'm wondering if only half the head is above the sand or if the. 18:44 Erin: I guess it could be, like, upside down in the sand. So we're only getting. Because we get these three incredible descriptors, all of which are in reference to the mouth. 18:54 Wes: Yeah. It could be half buried and upside down and shattered to boot. 18:58 Erin: That's very interesting, but I like to think of it as. Yeah, just the bottom half of the face and the chin somewhat sunk in the sand. That's my mental image. 19:08 Wes: I have trouble seeing a sneer with just the bottom of the face. But, yeah, I get that that's a more dramatic reading, in a way. 19:16 Erin: Well, that's what I. Whenever I do. And actually, in looking up this poem online, I saw a bunch of really silly illustrations of what this is. And it shows a full head sunk in the sand next to two legs. But whenever I would kind of draw it out for students, I would just show, like, the bottom half of a face and then two legs. 19:34 Wes: Interesting. Yeah. Okay. So I'm looking at some of the. And I have seen these pictures before which have probably influenced my. The way I've imagined poem. 19:42 Erin: You know, the sort of illustrations of the poem. 19:44 Wes: Yeah, illustrations of the poem. Yes. I've. I've seen many. 19:47 Erin: I like this idea that all we get is the mouth. I mean, I think that there's a delicious irony to that. You know, we get the legs that can't go anywhere and that aren't carrying anything. They aren't carrying a load. And we get the mouth that speaks to us through the inscription. But that is disembodied. 20:03 Wes: He can sneer and he can say something very arrogant, let's say. But he can't see. 20:10 Erin: Right. He can't see the irony. His own words are creating, perhaps. Or smell the irony. 20:16 Wes: Right, right. Seeing or smelling. 20:18 Erin: Yeah, yeah. So we have the following descriptors for this visage. So half sunk. And then we have. Whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command. So I have that as three descriptions of the same thing. Frown, wrinkled lip, sneer of cold command. Which then makes me wonder, like, why give three. If you have a whole face, why give three descriptors for the lips? I mean, it could be just a preoccupation with the lips, certainly. But I just. I find all these three things so interesting because it seems to grow. It's frowning, it has a wrinkled lip, and then it becomes sneering. It seems slightly different, maybe with each, but it kind of shows this multiplicity of possible angles on distaste that seem to be represented here. Slightly, you know, shades slightly different from each other. 21:11 Wes: Yeah. I mean, being sneering and let's say, being caught up in Will to Power. If we're Plato, we think that, well, that's a version of unhappiness and hence the frown. But the person in that moment, of course, cold command, just. Just is what is happiness to them. So a sneer, in a way, if it's also a frown, betrays itself. And it's telling that we, you know, if you're right, and we only see half the face, or at very. At the very least, we're focused on half the face, that's very telling, that that's all that's required to give us that emotion. It's incomplete, it's not whole, and maybe even there's something deformed about it. And in a way, it's also more suitable to the medium than other emotions. Right. This is something in cold stone, something frozen, something rigid. And, you know, in any statue, we're kind of. We. We catch ourselves and we characterize it, personifying it. Right. To say that the statue is frowning. Right. Is in a way, an inaccuracy. The statue can't frown. The frowning is represented in the statue. The same thing with Stand in the Desert, by the way. Stand is polyvalent. Standing is something a human does. You could say a statue is standing in the sense that it represents human standing, but you could also say a statue stands in the sense that it's just a standing structure. 22:31 Erin: And this is arguably not a standing structure. 22:33 Wes: Right? 22:33 Erin: Yeah. 22:34 Wes: So the question of accuracy that shows up at the beginning of the poem when you interpolate a traveler, and then ultimately there's a lot of interpolations. There's us, the audience in our interpretation. There's the poet, there's the text, there's the traveler, there's the sculptor, there's Ramses' own self representations and so on. Right. We get the whole. The endless sort of number of displacements. The way that shows up in a work of art is just the sense in which the representation is not the real thing. And we wonder whether to be bothered by that. So beyond the technicalities, was it Diodorus? Is that a real historical account? Beyond those sorts of technicalities, there's always the question of whether art can represent the truth, if so, and maybe it is, you know, as Keats thought, beauty is truth, so that we can circumvent all questions of factual accuracy, as we saw with the urn. But in part, that's the question that's raised here and kind of gets us to the next line where he, you know, he attributes a kind of accuracy to the sculptor. 23:45 Erin: Am I right. To think that the traveler who's describing this is sort of vacillating between two interpretations. It's like he's saying it's a frown and then he's looking closer. Well, what is it? Well, it's just a wrinkled lip. But then from that again he gets a different interpretation, which is a sneer of cold command. So he's first reading it as a frown and he's sort of looking closely at the lips and seeing that they're wrinkled and then sort of deciding that it's less a frown and more a sneer. 24:10 Wes: Yeah, that's interesting. That's a possibility which didn't occur to me because I read the Traveler in a way as very matter of fact, in a sense, until we get to the sort of arresting turn in the poem, Nothing beside remains. 24:23 Erin: Well, the Traveler, I think, is doing a lot of interpretive work here that sort of half sunk in the poem, if you will. Like a lot of it is subterranean, you know. And so he goes on to say, you know, that this, this frown, this sneer, show that its sculptor accurately portrayed the subject. Right. But of course, he has no way of knowing if this is an accurate portrayal. So that also is a value judgment. So I think that the Traveler is doing a lot of op ed interpretation of this. 24:53 Wes: Yeah, that's very good. Yeah, I actually. I actually did have that in my notes. That is the first point where we come to question, I think the traveler as sort of just a matter of fact teller of a tale because. Yes. Tell that its sculptor well, those passions read. How could the traveler possibly know? Right. 25:10 Erin: And I love that tone. It's a very flat tone. You know, it's an even tone with which he's presenting this. So it is presented as a historical account. But as we know with. I mean, I think this is true for Herodotus, Thucydides. Right. They weren't present for pretty much anything that they were describing. 25:26 Wes: Right. 25:26 Erin: They were. They were just getting secondhand accounts. But speaking in an authoritative way about those secondhand accounts. Yeah. So we have this blank sort of AP description of facts without pausing to realize, oh, he's actually, he's doing a lot of interpretive work here. 25:42 Wes: Yeah. 25:43 Erin: So he's saying that this, this frown or sneer, we can argue, as we've already said, if those two things are distinct from each other, that this expression on them in the mouth tell that its sculptor. Well, those passions read which yet survive stamped on these lifeless things. So the sculptor read the passions of his subject accurately and transmuted them into his portrayal. So passions, I think, is the word that stops me here. It seems to, in a way, be sort of the opposite of this cold command, which is dispassionate. And obviously, if we think of, like, passion as being a kind of love or obsession, it's also negated by the idea of the frown or even a sneer. 26:31 Wes: Yeah. Well, I wanted to say one more thing about accuracy, which is that the question of whether the sculptor can, well, read these passions, on the one hand, it seems impossible for the traveler to know whether this can be a good reading of the actual visage. Right. What was sort of the actual kind of expression that Ramses had or would have, maybe habitually, on his face? But unless we think that there's another concept of reading, let's say, or interpretation at work, which is just to say that the artist really knows how to represent arrogance, or whatever you want to call it, accurately. So the artist becomes a good representer of the passions, regardless of who Ramses II really was. Or even that. Just that it's done beautifully. So that's the third question. So there's the factual accuracy, there's trueness to a general character type, and then there's just the idea of doing something very skillfully and beautifully. And two and three naturally are connected. 27:37 Erin: I like that third idea, that if you just portray something with beauty, that that creates its own accuracy. I like that a lot. 27:45 Wes: Yeah. It's untruth. Yeah. So in this case, the passions. I think part of what's interesting here is, you know, as you pointed out, the conflict between this word passion and what's come before. Does cold command really count as passion? I'm calling it arrogance and will to power, but maybe we can think of some other words. But are those sorts of things passions, they seem, in a way, dead. Right. They seem more. The stone seems actually very appropriate for them. Or maybe the passions are. They're sort of buried in some sense. But the other thing is, while those passions red, there's really no antecedent to that directly. There's what's on the face, a face that's shattered. We're even meant to infer the antecedent here. 28:30 Erin: And, of course, that doubling of passions and coldness is contained within that following line. Right. They yet survive, but they're lifeless. So there's that same dichotomy in the following lines. So. And they're stamped on these lifeless things. So there's a kind of a critique of the artist's ability in that I think that he's, you know, oftentimes in statues of any great figure, there's usually some sort of identifying characteristic that is their signature, their trademark. Akhenaten obviously had a, you know, a different artistic whole movement behind him, but he's always portrayed as being that. He has that kind of rounded belly. You know, he could always tell Akhenaten by his little potbelly. And there are lots of other sort of characteristics. So there's almost this idea of that if you want to portray Marcus Aurelius or Ramses II or whoever, that you might stamp him with the recognizable characteristics of his, you know, what he's most known for. I don't know if that is maybe involved here. I mean, I think it's part of it. But this idea that we have this stamp of a characteristic on what, what is the stamp here and what is the lifeless? So it seems like the passions are stamped on. So the passions are alive, but the lifeless things are what the pieces of stone. It's very strange when you tear it apart, it starts to crumble, so to speak. So let me pause here for a moment to talk about the sponsor of today's episode, Better Help. That's H E L P. As someone who has found therapy to be really useful at different points in my life, I believe strongly that it can be an essential tool for growth and self reflection. 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Again, that's betterhelph e l-p.com subtext and now back to the show. 31:11 Wes: Yeah, so this is kind of built into mimesis. It's a problem inherent in representation and mimesis, which is that the medium of representation is naturally lifeless in a sense. It's naturally cut off in some way from the real thing. And even when we talk about our passions, right? So if we have a conversation and I say, I was scared yesterday or I was angry yesterday, that's not the same thing as re experiencing it. I might have some of that experience again in the telling of it. But even to use words, even to use concepts, even to represent, is to take me away from the reality of the actual experience. Except that in the case of a work of art, I can be induced to some extent. Now, I don't know if I can be induced with the feeling of arrogance by looking at a sculpture like this, right? I can't become the sneering cold commander necessarily. Maybe I do a little bit through identification, but there is some ability here to sort of virally infect me with the passion in question, which is really important because that is the thing that actually survives with art. The sculpture could even disappear entirely, but it could create a kind of culture, right? The cultural effect of these monuments, even if a particular monument doesn't survive, could be something felt, right? The culture of Egypt is part of our present, and its passions are to some extent our passions. Maybe that's just because we're human. But also maybe there's something distinctively Egyptian, right? Left over in them. It's almost like DNA or a virus in the way that this is the thing that survives from generation to generation, or the memetic character of culture. Even if particular works of art don't survive, it's something at the level of passion that gets propagated. 33:08 Erin: And yet there's something highly manufactured about that word stamped at the same time, like an assembly line. This has the character of Egypt on it, TM with a circle around it. 33:18 Wes: I think this is important, and this is what you were getting at before. I mean, I think this gets us to the relationship between red and mock, which is to say that if we're making something true to life in the sense that we are trying to accurately represent not the person, but a particular frame of mind, a particular passion or maybe arrogance, then the tendency is towards caricature, right? The tendency is towards exaggeration because we have to produce an effect in the audience and we have to make it recognizable. And in reality, people are very complicated, and it's tough to communicate that complexity. So that's the sense in which trueness requires mockery in a way. And that's one. Or that's one take on mockery in this. It's dangerous. And I Think authors worry about this. And I think even in our last recording on Bartleby, the concept of characterlessness is in part a reflection on this problem, a reflection on the extent to which the creation of character is fraught with conflict and inaccuracy. Or on a personal level, in something like Prufrock. Right. Are we pigeonholing someone? Are we leaving them wriggling on a pin? This reminds me of my experience as a reporter, an animal healthcare reporter, strangely enough, in which I wrote this glowing profile of someone, this police officer who started the first animal cruelty department within a police force. And she was very unhappy with my glowing portrait because I told a story, I created a narrative. And I wasn't trying to be overly dramatic. I was trying to highlight, I thought, what were some really true, interestingly dramatic facts in the story, like the fact that she grew up next to an animal hoarder who she later had to arrest. And she saw those things as caricatures and as misrepresentations of the subtleties, what was going on. And I realized she was right. So that just in the process of trying to tell a coherent story, I was engaged in misrepresentation. So once again, we confront the question of whether aesthetic representation or even storytelling, even if it's reporting is naturally misleading and misleading in its attempt to either be beautiful or in its attempt to. Even in its attempt to be true in some sense. Right. If it's going to be. If we're attempting to be true to character or to passion by making it something that can have a suitable effect on the audience. 35:59 Erin: Well, yeah. In its attempt to get itself read. Yeah, right. What reader would go to a newspaper and just want to hear the driest possible recounting of exactly just the facts? Yeah, yeah, right. I guess it calls all of news reporting into question because all of news reporting is an attempt to, you know, narrativize and storytell, expounding upon actual fact. But it also is a medium that's reliant upon an audience, just like the arts are reliant upon an audience. And if it's not compelling, then who's going to want to ingest it? 36:32 Wes: Yeah. And compelling is a good word and hints at how deep this problem gets, because we do tend to conflate aesthetics and truth, even truth and metaphor. Right. So in Much Ado About Nothing, we talked about the extent to which metaphor could be used as an element in reasoning to make an accusation seem true. You know, they're so stained with blood that they could make the entire sea red or Something like that. And the use of metaphor and wit. Right. So a battle of wits involves the use of metaphors in a way that are convicting of the other person in the sense of, you know, convicting them of being an oaf or stupid or silly, partly because they lose the battle of wits at that moment, but also just because the representation is so clever that it makes it seem like it must be true. So one might argue, as Nietzsche did, that all language, in a way, is metaphor. So we are confronted with that Platonic problem of the inherent inaccuracy in representation, but we gravitate towards these. So, for instance, to something like metaphor as a kind of truth teller or as an indicator of truth, for better or for worse. So it may be actually that there are ways in which it actually is a good indicator of a certain kind of truth. 37:47 Erin: I was just writing about this for my theory of poetry class, and my professor was talking about how metaphor, you tell the truth up to a certain point. It's like trying to get to a place where you have to. You can only drive so far, and then you have to get out and walk on foot to the rest of the way to your destination. That metaphor is doing that walking. But that there's also the false kind of metaphor, she said, in which you drive up and then in the last couple seconds, you switch to walking and make it look like you walked the whole way. Sort of performative element of metaphor, which is sort of emptier wit, in a way, you're putting me in mind of that. 38:24 Wes: There's always the problem of how far you can extend the metaphor. How long does the analogy hold? Or between what elements of the vehicle and the. What's the other one? 38:34 Erin: Tenor. 38:35 Wes: Yeah. How many isomorphisms are there between the two structures? I mean, you see this all the time in political reasoning on Twitter, where people create a metaphor or an analogy between two things, and so they know one commonality, and then they infer that some other commonality must hold when it obviously doesn't. 38:57 Erin: Right. 38:58 Wes: Just bad reasoning. 38:59 Erin: I did a whole segment with my students once on Twitter and logical fallacies, and they realized that every single tweet they had ever read was a logical fallacy. 39:08 Wes: Right. But it's emotionally very, very satisfying. 39:12 Erin: Right. 39:13 Wes: So passions well read or something Mocked. The other thing I think about the stamped on these lifeless things is this a funerary monument. 39:22 Erin: You know, that's interesting. I would take this to be a statue erected to someone at the height of his powers. Right. 39:28 Wes: I think you're right. I Think I think of that because, you know, of Egypt's sort of obsession with what are basically grand tombs and, you know, including the pyramids. Right. Essentially huge tombs and massive funerary monuments and the sense in which. Even though in this case it's not specifically that. The sort of irony of trying to become immortal through something dead or even become immortal through one's tombstone, essentially. 39:56 Erin: Right. 39:56 Wes: Which you could read any sculpture, a monument as being that. 39:59 Erin: Well, and I think the ways in which Egyptians took that literally by being buried with objects that were meant to sustain them in the afterlife, too, is. I mean, it takes. It takes on a kind of a deadly seriousness when you're. 40:13 Wes: Another misuse of metaphor. 40:14 Erin: Yeah, right. Right. Yeah. A literalizing element. We've already glanced at it, but it takes us to the most, I think, by far the most difficult line of the poem. And a line that I still struggle to understand grammatically to what it refers to. The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. So do you take that to be the hand of the sculptor? The hand of the statue of Ozymandias? Of both? Who's them? What heart is feeding whom? It's very confusing, I think. 40:45 Wes: Yeah. I have to admit it took me a while to figure out this line, and one of the readings that you've mentioned just didn't even occur to me. So the way I ended up taking this is that it's the hand of the sculptor who. Who mocks the passions, where mock, again, is ambiguous between just represents those passions on the face and perhaps exaggerates or caricatures them. Or beyond that, just the very circumstantially mocks them by representing arrogance in a medium that is inevitably going to fracture and decay and be subject to the ravages of time. And then the heart that fed, I take to be Ramses' heart feeding those passions. 41:28 Erin: Hmm. Okay. 41:29 Wes: What's your other? 41:30 Erin: Well, I would say that that's not the most intuitive first reading. Am I wrong in saying that, or was that your first reading? Because I would say that is my 41:38 Wes: first reading, but it took me a while to figure out what them refers to, what the object of fed is, which is to say them. What's your other take? 41:47 Erin: Well, I'd say that the most intuitive to me, and I could be totally wrong, is this idea of mocking, connecting back to the of cold command so that he, the sculptor, is portraying Ramses or Ozymandias mocking hand, which maybe doesn't survive, but is interpreted through the portal of the mouth in the same way that the traveler is attributing all of these emotions to just one mouth, again, in my interpretation. And that he's also. That he has a heart that is somehow also feeding his subjects at the same time that he's mocking them. Subjects, meaning. Now, we get into this interesting idea of the subjects of a king and then the subject of one's artwork. And I think that when I teach this poem, my students most often think that the hand that mocked them in the heart that fed. That's describing Ozymandias, describing the statue, or describing real life. Ozymandias and his characteristics, which the sculptor is looking at in trying to sculpt his subject. And that's all kind of going into it. But then, of course, the second read is. No, wait, grammatically, this lines up with the sculptor, not the subject of the sculpture. 42:59 Wes: Yeah. 43:00 Erin: But it could potentially go both ways. Or not. The grammar of this is so tricky. 43:06 Wes: Yeah. 43:07 Erin: It could also be that Ozymandias is mocking the sculptor, too. The sculptor's attempts. 43:11 Wes: Yes, yes. I mean, I think these are all readings which she can get mileage out of that work. The sculptor. Well, those passions read which yet survive. So the passions survive, stamped on these lifeless things. What do they survive? Survive actually is transitive in my reading. Survive as an object. They survive the hand, the passions survive, the hand that mocked them on my reading. That's one of the interesting ironies of the poem, which is that on one level, it seems to have a very simple moral about hubris and arrogance and how power is ephemeral. On the other hand, it's the passions that themselves seem to survive. And I talked about that in terms of cultural influence and in terms of the influence of the work of art on the emotions of the audience, something that can affect their character, something that can lead to. To dispose them, to behave in certain ways. You know, if it's artistic influence, it could lead in the viewer of the sculpture to replicate a style, replicate something within that. But in general. Right. It's just the way cultural influence works. It becomes part of our character. It makes us do things. So there's a real hegemony represented here. Right. In Ramses, which is a cultural hegemony, a cultural influence. And that's what is immortal in works of art as well. We can create a parallel between the artist's grandiosity and that of Ramses and say here that neither of them really survive. And even the survival, again, of the object itself is not what's at issue. It's the survival of not to Be too nerdy about it, but it's information that survives. It's something out there, in a way, in the ether, where I'm including information in information, something encoded that can infect and spread. It's like a virus. And that includes passions. It includes any sort of response we might have to a work of art or any artifact, anything cultural, anything. Any representation. But anyway, going back to the grammar. Yeah, that's what I see. I see survive as transitive and the passion surviving, the hand that mocks them and the heart that feeds them. It sets up a kind of competition between artist and subject, which I think you kind of hinted at. Who is it that is made immortal? Artist or the subject matter or something else or something beyond that. The cultural entity, the passion? 45:43 Erin: Well, yeah. And you're making me think, therefore, of. I mean, what is the most sort of the most straightforward part of the poem, which is that we actually get the subject's words, we get the thought bubble, the speech bubble, within the statue itself, inscribed on the pedestal. Which is an interesting idea that the. What I think you're suggesting, which is that the inscription can provide sort of one reading, but that the way that he's portrayed can be betrayed by the artist. So we get the subject of this sculpture. In other words, Ozymandias wants to have his portrait in stone. Right. And he wants to have this inscription very explicitly describing his. The message that he wishes to get across. And yet that same message, through the work of the sculptor, can be betrayed. So there can be a clash, in other words, between the inscription and the actual depiction of the subject matter. 46:41 Wes: Yeah, yeah. 46:42 Erin: So the, you know, after the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed, which is a very difficult line, we get a very straightforward message, the message that Ozymandias wishes us to take away from confrontation. Yeah. And then, of course, the ways in which that message has already been betrayed by the sculptor and then ultimately by what happens to the sculpture itself. So Shelley writes, and on the pedestal, these words appear. My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair. Okay. So we have the pedestal, which must be underneath these trunkless legs, and Ozymandias announces himself, gives his name, calls himself King of Kings. Which is, of course, in a different culture, that would have a very different meaning. Right. A very grandiose meaning here is imposed upon it because we know it's associated with Christ to be the King of Kings. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair. So it seems as though it's an invitation for Those who think they're great, like maybe Napoleon coming to take his treasures from Egypt to say, okay, you think you're great, but look at everything that I've done and despair of your paltry efforts. And among his works, presumably, is this statue, which does still remain. Let's give him some credit here. 48:04 Wes: Right. 48:04 Erin: That was it. Right. 48:07 Wes: And we got the most important thing, the sneer. You know, if it is just the sneer that remains, it's, you know, it's like Cheshire Cat. Right, Right. Give us the essence of it all. And hasn't he succeeded then? 48:18 Erin: Well, totally. And I. I mean, I would argue that the. The fact that these items do remain is kind of an argument against what a lot of people take to be the whole message of the poem. 48:27 Wes: Yeah. 48:28 Erin: It does survive. Survival is the word of the day here. 48:32 Wes: Yeah. And the poem itself becomes its own sort of monument, you know, propagate the survival. And art somehow does that. And then the question is, what survives? And I've been arguing that passion, or some kind of correlate of that is really, really the kind of viral or the bit of DNA that really does survive whatever happens to any particular media. Yeah. The poem is a reflection on whether art can make anything immortal, even if not a person, even if not an artist, even if not a particular thing that's represented. Something. I love the line, look on my work. See? Mighty and despair, which. That's got to be a grandiose moment that every artist has experienced. Right. It's an agonistic endeavor. It's a competitive endeavor. You're engaged in a dialogue with previous artists and attempt to take up their influence, which could be a kind of subjection. Right. If you're not careful and you become entirely derivative, then you don't transcend it. But also can be an important influence that can lead to a kind of artistic freedom, which I think is part of the goal. Right. Real creativity, some real kind of freedom that can't be unmoored from the past and from tradition, but in some sense must transcendence. I think it's an emotion that's appealing to artists, but it has to be gotten over in some way. The sort of. The grandiose. Look how powerful I am. That narcissistic moment, that's what's fragile, and that's what could lead to something that truly is ephemeral in every sense, which doesn't have any cultural staying power. 50:13 Erin: What's so delicious about this, too, is that the very origin of this poem is an artistic competition. 50:19 Wes: Right, Exactly. 50:20 Erin: So he's rubbing poor Horace's nose in it. 50:24 Wes: Yep, yep. 50:25 Erin: Horace. Destined not to be famous with a name like that. If he had changed it to Ozymandias, then maybe. 50:30 Wes: Is the artist trying to be a dictator to subject the audience, or do they have to do something else? They have to move out of that moment. 50:39 Erin: I think you're also making me think of the fact that so often with this ancient statuary, we don't get the name of the. Of the sculptor ever. You know, we have no idea who the sculptor is. We know, of course, who the rulers are that they depict. And obviously here we get a direct inscription, but we get this nameless influence at the same time of the sculptor handed down someone whose name we don't know, but who has stamped his creations with his own artistic gifts. The anonymity of it is interesting to me. 51:15 Wes: Yeah. If it's a contest between the sculptor and Ozymandias, neither actually win. It's passions that win. So the hand that mocks doesn't survive. The heart that inspired them doesn't survive. A third thing is the only survivor in this battle. And the same thing for Smith and for Shelley. In a way, the artist is a medium. Right. And they're inspired. And the better an artist is, and the more they're operating at their optimum, the less credit they ought to get. Right. Because it's just the gods moving through them. 51:47 Erin: Sure. 51:48 Wes: So the better you are, the less credit you get as an artist. 51:52 Erin: Right. The more that mediating factor disappears. Yeah, yeah. So then we get the final three lines. Nothing beside remains round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare. The lone and level sands stretch far away. So there's nothing around this statue. And I love colossal wreck. I love the idea that this is. The statue is a vessel again, carrying its message, even though it's trunkless. Right. The idea that it's like a shipwreck in the middle of the sea of the desert. 52:23 Wes: Yeah. Is it the desert that has caused an empire to disappear, or is it the artistic monument that creates the desert in some sense, because it's so powerful, because it's like a nuclear blast and everything around it is sort of obliterated in a way, if it's truly great. I know that's a stretch, but that's the sort of thing I think about at the very end is if you reverse the causality and you make this fractured visage, this sort of nuclear bomb that has gone off and produce the post apocalyptic wasteland around it. 52:58 Erin: I like that. Yeah. I Mean the desert is still in the process of digesting the statue. Right. The statue is half sunk. But I like that alternate reading. Obliteration capability in art has interesting complications too. 53:15 Wes: And then if it's a wreck, if it's remnants of a vessel or a ship, it's not something that is fully sunk. Right. So in some sense it can still navigate this sandy, desolate world or even this, you know, this nothingness. Nothing beside remains. Ramses is trying to call our attention to all the great works that he has done. Right. So which really are other people's works? They're the works of slaves or the works of the sculptor. And they are meant to be intimidating. They're meant to induce despair, despite the fact that they are where they do survive. They're just the sorts of things that are going to be exploited and subjected and put into museums and enjoyed. So subjected to whatever extent the audience subjects something, a work of art, that they enjoy all that stuff. But if we are the competitive artist, it's enough that one beautiful thing survive to leave us in a state of desolation. I don't know where I'm going with that, but the other thing I wanted to mention was your focus on this word wreck. It makes me wonder to the extent to which you can see any work of art as a wreck in the sense of an abandoned ship. Because I'm thinking in terms of this DNA or RNA analogy. I think of the capsid to a virus. It's sort of in this kind of protein shell and it's not activated except when it gets into a body and it can sort of hijack the living processes of a body and make the cell produce that DNA to exert its influence and naturally in the same way. Right. The aesthetic object is not activated except in relation to the audience, except in relation to acts of interpretation. So it's kind of freeze dried until then. And you have to add interpretative water to it. Yeah, yeah. And then it comes alive. So it lives in, it can be alive in us. But by itself it's always this wreck that navigates, so to speak, in the sense it doesn't, doesn't really move, doesn't do anything in that kind of sandy realm of nothingness. And the artist has to confront the blank page, the realm of nothingness, in order to put something there. It's a courageous act, it's an anxiety producing act. And then the audience has to be able to retrieve it from nothingness. 55:48 Erin: So you're suggesting that pre and post traveler, this is just the tree falling in the woods and not making a sound because the person needs to hear the sound. In other words, the sound phenomenon is something that only the listener can partake of. So the traveler is sort of activating it, but then otherwise, if he hadn't come across it, it would still just be a wreck. 56:13 Wes: And the power ultimately belongs to the audience. 56:17 Erin: Right. You're also making me think that there's something wrecked, as I think we've already been talking about. In any attempt at representation, there's always going to be something fragmented about any representation because it's not the genuine article, you know, it's not the real guy. So there's always, I think, something missing there. And here that fragmenting of representation is literalized and the missing parts of the body are made literal in the fact that only the bottom half or the full shattered face and these two legs are what remain. 56:47 Wes: Yeah. 56:48 Erin: So we'll continue our conversation about this in the postscript. And I'm also going to read Horace Smith's effort at producing an Ozymandias poem, which is kind of hilarious at times. I don't know. Yeah, we'll see. 57:00 Wes: We might just make a quick reference to Plath's the Colossus, right? 57:05 Erin: Yeah, yeah, that'd be great. 57:06 Wes: Okay. All right. 57:07 Erin: Thank you, thank you. 57:18 Wes: [email protected] subtext Also, this, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com AirwaveMedia.com.