So, last night I went to the opera with my one white friend who studies India, to see "Pagliacci", which is about a troupe of clowns where the main dude's wife cheats on him just like the clown she plays in the act does to the clown he plays in the act, and it call comes out on stage.
Afterwards, she was saying that in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana there's this same sort of 'collapsing of frames', where the author who's authoring the epic inserts himself into it in knowing ways, and that got us to talking about examples from Western, non-Indian cultures (e.g. Don Quixote, etc.), and we realized that there seemed to be no good, famous examples of the phenomenon from Christian culture -- the closest we could think of was that Gregory of Nyssa's "Life of Macrina" is a text modelling a holy person who should be imitated, and in the text it has her reading the lives of other holy people to model herself after!
"Man, what a shitty thing for a religious tradition not to have," I was like, especially one that's so proud of its texts."
"I know," she was like, and shook her head.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment