Sequels (was Re: Universitatlity)

Perhaps, Jim, your distinction between sequel and spin-off is worthwhile; I
suppose that I have thought of spin-offs as a sub-species of sequels, but
maybe this is not the most helpful way to think of it here.

However, if the Odyssey is a spin-off -- and NOT a sequel -- of the Iliad, I
would want that the Aeneid be called a different beast altogether. The
Odyssey gives the story of one character in the Iliad who was not the hero,
and the story told follows the Iliad chronologically. This will qualify it
as a spin-off, I suppose. The Aeneid, on the other hand -- which was
written many centuries later and in a different language -- does tell a
story that follows the Iliad chronologically, but it is not so clear that
our new hero is immediately pertinent to the old epic. Presumably Aeneus
was there, but he did not have the presence of Odysseus, and while in
Homer's epics it is clear that we are reading from the side of the Hellenes
(though not unsympathetically to the Trojans, perhaps), Virgil's puts us
firmly in Troy, and in an important way not even as Trojans but as the New
Trojans, as Romans.

It seems to me important that Virgil tells a founding story. Homer's heroes
might technically be our ancestors ("we" being Hellenes), but they might as
well be us. Virgil's heroes are importantly our grandfathers, not us ("we"
being Romans). Aeneus flees troy with his father on his back and pulling
his young son by the arm. It seems to me fundamental to the story that we,
as Romans, are sons of Aeneus, and the Trojans his father -- but that he,
Aeneus who connects them, is neither strictly us nor strictly them, the
unique middle-man.

Homer is certainly present in the Aeneid, but primarily, I think, as Virgil
nods to his master. The Aeneid turns the Homeric epics on their heads --
Homer beings with a war (in the Iliad) and ends with a journey (in the
Odyssey), while the Aeneid begins with a journey and ends with a war. This
sort of inversion persists throughout the book. What I think I'm trying to
get at is that the Aeneid's relationship to the Iliad, while important, is
fundamentally different from the Odyssey's. I'm not comfortable classifying
them both with the same title; if by some understanding of the terms the
Aeneid is a spin-off, I want the Odyssey to be a sequel, and if the Odyssey
is a spin-off I want the Aeneid to have some third designation.

But enough of that. However you classify these books, other clearer
examples remain. Oedipus at Colonus seems to me to be quite clearly a
sequel of Oedipus Tyrannus, unless one insists on some very particular and
unusual understanding of the word. Antigone seems very much to be another
sequel, though Oedipus is gone, since it continues something of the same
arc, with focus now on his children (and since it was probably written
first, you might call the other two prequels); though I suppose one might
object to this without Oedipus as the star. The Oresteia trilogy is another
good example where the continuity is exceptionally clear.

Of course it sounds terribly reductive to call Oedipus at Colonus "the
further adventures of Oedipus," and I'm inclined to say that in none of the
cases presented above are the second or third play or poem merely formulaic
re-castings of the first. Nevertheless, we do seem to have here plays and
poems that are inescapably sequels in some perfectly legitimate and even
ordinary understanding of the word. Each play certainly holds up as
excellent literature on its own, but you can read (or watch) Oedipus
Tyrannus, and then, later, see Oedipus at Colonus and learn whatever
happened to that poor Oedipus fellow. It seems quite like what has been
discussed here as a sequel to The Catcher in the Rye (though I, for one,
don't think Salinger is up to it like Sophocles was, nor that Holden has
enough substance to age like Oedipus did).

And certainly there are in the ancient literatures several examples of poems
and stories that compare a bit better with the "further adventures of. . ."
paradigm. Many groups of ancients were in the habit of picking a few
favorite semi- or pseudo-historical characters and telling one series of
adventures after another. Sometimes such series were artfully edited into
single, much longer works with common themes, as is apparently the case with
the standard Akkadian Gilgamesh epic (whose episodes are found, sometimes in
rather different forms, in much older Sumerian poems).

You mention in another post, Jim, that novels are a relatively new
innovation. I am not inclined to disagree, though of course this depends on
what we take "new" relative to, and of course neither is it clear what one
will include as a novel. Any estimation I care to make would include at
least Cervantes, and I wonder if we ought to include the tales of chivalry
that Cervantes tells us Don Quixote was reading. This puts us no later than
the 16th century (perhaps earlier?), and I wonder if those tales might have
fit the "further adventures of. . ." paradigm. I haven't read any of them,
and I'm not sure if any survive, but from the descriptions in Quixote I
expect that they do fit such a paradigm, and that somebody might have been
cranking out sequels. (And perhaps we should remember that the great Quixote
itself comes in two parts, the second of which might be called a sort of
sequel to the first.)

And Tim, I appreciate your last post. It is clarifying. I still wonder,
though, whether the cheap and formulaic installments that you meant to
suggest when you spoke earlier of sequels might not have been invented in
the '60s for the movies, but rather seem like it since they don't often
survive very well. We know rather reliably that Sophocles, for instance,
wrote somewhere in the region of 120 plays and only seven have survived
intact. They are very, very good. We have only two other surviving Greek
tragedians (Aeschylus and Euripides), whose plays survive in not entirely
dissimilar proportion, and a single surviving comedian (Aristophanes). Of
course we know that there were many more writers of tragedy and comedy
alike.

It seems reasonable enough to me that in another 2,500 years, supposing that
man sustains himself as successfully as in the last 2,500 (which might
require sustaining himself less "successfully" than in the last hundred and
fifty), a small handful of very excellent literary products, be they books
or movies, might survive, while the Rambo series is silenced by time. On
the other hand, perhaps we've preserved and duplicated all of our bullshit
so well that nothing short of annihilating the planet will do away with
Rambo. The principle remains, it seems to me.

(This, in fact, is one of the primary reasons why I find myself more and
more drawn to old and ancient books, and more and more reluctant to read
contemporary ones. Time acts as a great filter. There are so many great
books that I'll never have the time to read, I grow weary of wasting time
plodding through schlock. If I stick to books that many successive
generations have loved and maintained, the quality of my reading is much
easier to sustain. I suppose this might require some skepticism about
suggestions of appreciably shifting human natures or the inaccessibility of
books set in NYC in the first half of the 20th century, but my overwhelming
success with the tactic seems also to validate this skepticism.)

A subtler point might be very important, though: you suggested several times
that these trashy sequels are churned out by someone trying to cash-in on a
previous success. Perhaps these sequels are a recent invention after all,
or at least are suddenly much more common today, because this cashing-in
hasn't been such a distinct possibility for very long. Most of the oldest
authors of all are wholly or effectively anonymous, and none or
exceptionally few grew wealthy from their writing. Perhaps the struggle for
some sort of immortality through writing has been with us virtually since
the first words that were written, and the struggle for some sort of glory
through writing can be no newer than Ancient Greece and is probably much
older. The struggle for wealth through writing, however, is not among any
inheritance from antiquity.

-Robbie

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Received on Tue Dec 9 15:38:12 2003