Journal articles on the topic 'The Devil to Pay in the Backlands'

“Yes, We Are Partners”: Correspondence of João Guimarães Rosa with his Translators In the article I present the correspondence of João Guimarães Rosa with his German, Spanish, Italian, French and American translators. The case of this most outstanding Brazilian novelist of the 20th century is special, because he was a polyglot and he actively participated in the process of translating his works. The main theme of the letters is the translation of his masterpiece, the writer’s only novel – Grande Sertão: veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands). This correspondence provides an insight into the poetics of the Brazilian writer and his theory of translation, shows specific relations connecting him with his translators, and also reveals various translation strategies used by Guimarães Rosa’s translators.

Resumo: Este artigo aborda a influência de Diadorim sobre Riobaldo em GrandeSertão: Veredas, pela perspectiva filosófica do sublime e da coragem (Schiller e outros), baseando-se em concepções de Walter Benjamin e dialogando com a crítica de Willi Bolle. O ensaio identifica, na obra-prima de Guimarães Rosa, uma relação importante entre o sublime, associado a Diadorim a partir de elementos levantados por Benjamin, como a figura guia, o amor provençal e o justo hermafrodita, e a coragem demonstrada por Riobaldo. Finalmente, contribui para a avaliação de Bolle quanto ao caráter dialético e verossímil do texto literário no que concerne à coragem desse personagem, em comparação com a representação do sertanejo em Os Sertões, de Euclides da Cunha.Palavras-chave: Diadorim, figura guia, sublime, coragem, Benjamin, Bolle.Abstract: This article approaches the influence of Diadorim upon Riobaldo in The devil to pay in the backlands through the philosofical perspective of sublime and courage (Schiller and others), based on Walter Benjamin’s conceptions and in dialogue with Willi Bolle’s critique. The essay identifies, in Guimarães Rosa’s masterpiece, an important relation between the sublime, associated with Diadorim per elements raised by Benjamin, as the guide figure, the corteous love, the hermaphrodite just, and the bravery showed by Riobaldo. Finally, contributes to Bolle’s evaluation of the dialectical and verisimilar character of the literary text concerning this character’s courage, in comparison with the countryside representation in The Backlands, by Euclides da Cunha.Keywords: Diadorim, guide figure, sublime, courage, Benjamin, Bolle.

Resumo: O objetivo do presente trabalho é refletir sobre a releitura dramática que a diretora Bia Lessa fez da obra Grande sertão: veredas, de João Guimarães Rosa. Com apoio de pressupostos teóricos de pensadores como Peter Brook, Bertold Brecht e Roland Barthes, a intenção é examinar a encenação do romance a partir do texto dramatúrgico (escrita cênica) construído pela própria diretora. Com vasta experiência em adaptações para o teatro de obras literárias canônicas (O homem sem qualidades, de Robert Musil; Os possessos, de Dostoievski; e muitas outras), Bia Lessa coloca em cena diferentes linguagens, tais como a expressão corporal trabalhada no limite e uma arquitetura cênica surpreendente. Assim, o sertão rosiano salta das páginas para o palco, eclodindo em pura teatralidade.Palavras-chave: Grande sertão: veredas, Bia Lessa, teatro, literatura, adaptação, encenação.Abstract: Our objective is to reflect on director Bia Lessa’s adaptation for the stage of Grande sertão: veredas novel. The main thinkers who will underpin this work are Peter Brook, Bertold Brecht and Roland Barthes. Our intention is to examine the dramatic text and the staging of the novel, both made by the director. With a vast experience in adapting canonic literary works (The man without qualities by Robert Musil; The possessed by Dostoievski, and many others), Bia Lessa takes books to theatre using different languages, such as body expression, explored to its limit and with an unusual set. Thus, Guimarães Rosa’s backlands is brought from pages to stage shining in pure theatricality.Keywords: The devil to pay in the backlands, Bia Lessa, theatre, literature, adaptation, staging.

Resumo: Este artigo tem por objetivo analisar as imagens do povo presentes na obra Grande sertão: veredas, de Guimarães Rosa. Para tanto, propõe-se fazer uma crítica das noções de comunidade e povo, configuradas pelo projeto de nação moderno da década de 1950. A crítica visa repensar o sentido totalizante dessas duas concepções. A leitura de Grande sertão: veredas pretende identificar na obra conceitos de povo e comunidade que escapam às reconfigurações modernas de nação. Nesse sentido, a partir das obras de Roberto Esposito, Didi-Huberman e Giorgio Agamben, analisa-se a população sertaneja não como uma união coesa, mas como uma multiplicidade de singularidades que habitam e convivem numa dimensão comunitária da vida. O domínio do comum é entendido como uma modalidade de ser-com, em que o convívio com o outro não é um reforço da identidade, mas sim uma expropriação de si, das fronteiras da subjetividade. Ao analisar os diversos povos do sertão, inclusive aqueles que foram mortos e cujos sofrimentos são testemunhados por Riobaldo, busca-se pensar num conceito de justiça relacionado com a memória que dá visibilidade a essas populações esquecidas do sertão.Palavras-chave: povo; comunidade; poder.Abstract: This article aims to analyze people images in Grande sertão: veredas (The devil to pay in the Backlands), by Guimarães Rosa. In order to do so, the notions of community and people, shaped by the project of modern nation construction in the 1950s, are criticized. The critique aims to reshape the totalizing sense of these two conceptions. The reading of Rosa’s novel intends to identify concepts of people and community that escape from the modern reconfigurations of nation. Therefore, in the light of Roberto Esposito’s, Didi-Huberman’s and Giorgio Agamben’s works, the backlands population is comprehended not as a cohesive union, but as a multiplicity of singularities that inhabits and coexists in a communitarian life dimension. The common domain is understood as a modality of being-with, in which the cohabitation with the other is not a reinforcement of identity, but an oneself expropriation and of the subjectivity borders. By analyzing the diverse hinterland peoples, including those who were killed and whose sufferings were witnessed by Riobaldo, a concept of justice related to the memory of the forgotten backlands populations is approached. Keywords: people; community; power.

O presente artigo tem por objetivo apresentar uma análise dos usos dos pronomes pessoais “nós” e “we” em um corpus paralelo ficcional, composto pelos textos Grande Sertão: Veredas, de Guimarães Rosa, e sua única tradução para o inglês, The devil to pay in the backlands, de James L. Taylor e Harriet de Onís. A investigação busca entender como os pronomes são usados quando os contextos nos quais eles estão colocados implicam a construção de situações de conflito armado. O artigo busca dialogar com pesquisas que investigam o uso dos pronomes pessoais como Barbara e Gouveia (2004) e Maia (1998), e também estabelecer diálogos com trabalhos que tratam da construção de identidades e de conflito como Leudar, Marsland e Nekvapil (2004) e Brewer (2011). Metodologicamente, foi utilizada a ferramenta software AntConc, com vistas a realizar trabalhos de levantamento e filtragem de dados para a pesquisa. Dentre os resultados, destacam-se a frequência de elisão do pronome “nós” em português (88,7% dos casos levantados a partir do corpus são de usos elípticos, contra 11,3% de usos explícitos); destaca-se também o uso explícito, e anteposto ao verbo, do pronome “we”, em língua inglesa (96% das linhas analisadas se encaixam nessa situação) – o que condiz com a estrutura esperada para a língua inglesa. No que diz respeito à construção de identidades coletivas, os dados contrariam as expectativas iniciais da pesquisa, não sendo unânimes os usos em referência aos grupos aliados, tampouco as associações esperadas de prosódias semânticas positivas construindo os grupos identificados como aliados.

Resumo: O ensaio pretende explanar sobre a travessia de Riobaldo em Grande sertão: veredas, como modelar do herói problemático na concepção proposta por Lukács, em A Teoria do Romance, através do estudo do episódio do (suposto) pacto demoníaco empreendido pelo protagonista da obra de Guimarães Rosa, nas Veredas-Mortas, feito que conduz a trajetória do herói por entre dúvidas e questionamentos, inerentes ao modelo lukacsiano. O estudo da obra rosiana será realizado por meio de análise comparativa com o pacto demoníaco realizado por Fausto, na obra homônima de Goethe, e de trechos de outras obras derivadas do tema do pacto demoníaco, como Dr. Fausto, de Thomas Mann e O mestre e Margarida, de Mikhail Bulgákov.Palavras-Chave: Grande sertão: veredas; Guimarães Rosa; Fausto; herói problemático; herói trágico; Lukács; pacto fáustico; pacto demoníaco.Abstract: The essay intends to explain the crossing of Riobaldo in Grande Sertão: Veredas as a model of the problematic hero in the conception proposed by Lukács in The Theory of the Novel, studying the episode of the (supposed) demonic pact undertaken by the protagonist of Guimarães Rosa’s novel, in “Veredas-Mortas”, moment that leads the trajectory of the hero through doubts and questions inherent to the Luckacsian model. The study over Rosa’s work will be carried out by comparative analysis with the demonic pact made by Faust, in the homonymous work of Goethe, and excerpts from other works derived from the theme of the demonic pact, such as Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita.Keywords: Grande Sertão: Veredas; The Devil To Pay In The Backlands; Guimarães Rosa; Faust; problematic hero; tragic hero; Lukács; faustian pact; demonic pact.

Resumo: O artigo se propõe a discutir a natureza erótica em Grande Sertão: Veredas estabelecendo como ponto de partida as noções de Eros apresentadas n’O banquete, de Platão. Sabendo-se que o discurso erótico no diálogo platônico é múltiplo, buscou-se neste estudo demonstrar que a natureza indômita de Eros agencia a narrativa de Rosa fundindo o plano da guerra exterior, as batalhas pelo poder no sertão, com o plano da guerra interior, o embate entre aquilo que a tradição expõe como interdito e o desejo que quer transgredir. Se Diadorim nutre o Eros que o impulsiona à guerra, Riobaldo é alimentado por um Eros que só pode consumar o desejado à luz da imaginação ou da pulsão de ver. O conceito freudiano de pulsão, ou impulso erótico, sustenta a tese de que a saga rosiana assume um caráter de prosa moderna justamente porque aciona categorias psicológicas no monólogo-diálogo de Riobaldo que permitem ao leitor confrontar o dentro e o fora, o eu e o outro, o narrado e o narrável. De natureza interdisciplinar, o estudo parte da filosofia de Platão e aproxima-se da psicanálise, com as categorias desenvolvidas por Freud (2010, 2013), tais como pulsão de vida e de morte e pulsão de olhar.Palavras-chave: Guimarães Rosa; erotismo; pulsão; desejo.Abstract: We propose a discussion about the erotic nature in Grande Sertão: Veredas (The Devil To Pay in the Backlands), establishing the Eros’ concept shown in Plato’s Συμπόσιον (Symposium) as the starting point. It is acknowledged that there’s a multiple erotic discourse in platonic dialogues, hence its study aims to show the Eros’ indomitable nature informs Rosa’s narrative. His narrative mixes the exterior war plan (the battles for power in northeast backlands) with the interior war plan (the clash between what the traditional society claim as a taboo and the desire to break free). If Diadorim nurtures the Eros connected to war impulses, Riobaldo is fed by an Eros that can only be consumed in the light of imagination or the drive to see. The Freudian concept of drive, or erotic impulse, sustains the thesis that Rosa’s journey emerges as a modern prose mostly because it fires psychological categories on Riobaldo’s monologue-dialogue, allowing the reader to confront the character’s inside out, the “me” and the “other,” the narrated and the tellable. This study develops its interdisciplinary nature as it starts from Plato’s philosophy and gets closer to psychoanalysis, with categories developed by Freud (2010, 2013), such as life drive versus death drive and sight drive.Keywords: Guimarães Rosa; erotism; drive; desire.

AbstractPentecostal drug rehabilitation centres in Guatemala City are informal responses to drug use, with these all-male institutions attempting to save drug users from what some Christians call ‘the devil’. Of ethnographic interest is that the mothers, sisters and wives not only pay for the capture and captivity of their loved ones but also volunteer their labour to support these centres. This article, in response, assesses not only the Christian impulse to domesticate sinners but also the extent to which a cult of domesticity organises Guatemala's war on drugs.

The topic of this paper is a Saami superstitious belief, namely the smørkatt "buttercat", which is without doubt a Nordic loan in Saami tradition. In olden days there were people who sold themselves or half of their souls to the devil for a considerable sum of money. They made a "butter cat" in order to get more milk. The "butter cat" looked like a ball of yarn. It stole cream and butter from the neighbour. The neighbour could not understand what had become of his butter. But he soon discovered that people who had only a few cows had a lot of butter. He chased after the "butter cat" and if he could capture it, the person who had sold his soul to the devil would die. This tradition existed among both the mountain Saamis and the Saamis who had settled down in the villages, but it was unknown among Norwegian people. The form and function of the "smørkatt" together with the way in which it could be disabled is in line with the Nordic tradition. This milk-stealing creature, which might be a hare or any other animal, is often a cat, particularly in northern Norway. It is a common Nordic tradition, too, that the animal is identical with its master, and because of that the master must die when the animal is killed. This link between the master and the animal is closer in northern Norway than anywhere else. Woman, animal and devil are linked to each other in the Nordic tradition, too, but the tradition that the master sells his soul to the devil is found only in Karasjok. It is clear, however, that people must pay for the devil's assistance. This theme is well-known in Europe in other connections.

‘Devil's gardens’ are nearly pure stands of the myrmecophyte, Duroia hirsuta , that occur in Amazonian rainforests. Devil's gardens are created by Myrmelachista schumanni ants, which nest in D. hirsuta trees and kill other plants using formic acid as an herbicide. Here, we show that this ant–plant mutualism has an associated cost; by making devil's gardens, M. schumanni increases herbivory on D. hirsuta. We measured standing leaf herbivory on D. hirsuta trees and found that they sustain higher herbivory inside than outside devil's gardens. We also measured the rate of herbivory on nursery-grown D. hirsuta saplings planted inside and outside devil's gardens in ant-exclusion and control treatments. We found that when we excluded ants, herbivory on D. hirsuta was higher inside than outside devil's gardens. These results suggest that devil's gardens are a concentrated resource for herbivores. Myrmelachista schumanni workers defend D. hirsuta against herbivores, but do not fully counterbalance the high herbivore pressure in devil's gardens. We suggest that high herbivory may limit the spread of devil's gardens, possibly explaining why devil's gardens do not overrun Amazonian rainforests.

The crucial twenty-third chapter of Melville's The Confidence-Man (1857) develops an arresting analogy between the linguistic wiles of the latest avatar of the Confidence-Man (or Devil) and the imagery of infectious atmosphere. The chapter opens with a flood of allusions to the notion of an insidious agent hidden in the air, carrying infection and threatening death: “At Cairo, the old established firm of Fever & Ague is still settling up its unfinished business; that Creole grave-digger, Yellow Jack—his hand at the mattock and spade has not lost its cunning; while Don Saturninus Typhus taking his constitutional with Death, Calvin Edson and three undertakers, in the morass, snuffs up the mephitic breeze with zest.” Eyeing from the boat rail the “swampy and squalid domain” that lies before Cairo, the Missourian, Pitch, peers through the “dubious medium” of a “dank twilight, fanned with mosquitoes, and sparkling with fire-flies” and revolves in his mind a foregoing conversation with the P.I.O. man, who, only moments before, had induced him to pay money for a promised boy servant. He begins to suspect he has been conned.

The crucial twenty-third chapter of Melville's The Confidence-Man (1857) develops an arresting analogy between the linguistic wiles of the latest avatar of the Confidence-Man (or Devil) and the imagery of infectious atmosphere. The chapter opens with a flood of allusions to the notion of an insidious agent hidden in the air, carrying infection and threatening death: “At Cairo, the old established firm of Fever & Ague is still settling up its unfinished business; that Creole grave-digger, Yellow Jack—his hand at the mattock and spade has not lost its cunning; while Don Saturninus Typhus taking his constitutional with Death, Calvin Edson and three undertakers, in the morass, snuffs up the mephitic breeze with zest.” Eyeing from the boat rail the “swampy and squalid domain” that lies before Cairo, the Missourian, Pitch, peers through the “dubious medium” of a “dank twilight, fanned with mosquitoes, and sparkling with fire-flies” and revolves in his mind a foregoing conversation with the P.I.O. man, who, only moments before, had induced him to pay money for a promised boy servant. He begins to suspect he has been conned.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore how consumers’ reactions lead to anti-consumption (AC) behavior and provide some important clues for the practitioners in the Turkish food industry. The reactions are based on consumer complaining behavior in the Turkish food industry.Design/methodology/approachIn total, 16 brands from the food industry with the highest complaint rates were selected as cases of the study. The consumer complaints from these brands were analyzed through a qualitative content analysis. In this analysis, four categories which are beverage group, food preparation group, junk food group, and delicatessen group were observed as the top complained sectors.FindingsThe authors made up five semantic categories and one emoticon category which are AC/boycott tendency discourse, bad hygiene, bad servicescape, deceptive advertisement and defective products based on consumer complaints and disappointed, astonished, devil, pouting, confounded, angel. The results imply that especially unfamiliar objects in food products, unconcerned customer services, deceptive campaigns and spoiled products make consumers exhibit AC behavior. In addition, consumers coded with emoticons as pouting, devil and disappointed are more inclined than others to stop purchasing, respectively.Research limitations/implicationsDue to the qualitative nature of the study, the authors do not make a generalization for the field. AC behavior, deceptive campaign, spoiled products, brand lose confidence and children sensitivity can be investigated with a quantitative study. And a new scale for this field can be developed. Through this scale development, researchers can reach new dimensions and expand the literature about the AC behaviors.Practical implicationsAn important implication which the authors got from the cases of the study is Hygiene. Although all cases have hygiene standards such as hazard analysis and critical control point, International Organization for Standardization (ISO 9001), etc., BH and spoiled products codes have high ranks among the cases. Due to this reason, companies should pay attention to their hygiene standards and increase the control period of the production process. Through the empowerment of the hygiene standards, they can fix their bad image on the customers and increase their dependability among the consumers.Social implicationsIn the context of this case study, customer service emerges as an important problem and concept. Insufficient customer service infrastructure should be developed and their institutionalization processes should be empowered by the firms. The authors believe that the deficiency of the institutionalization plays an important role on these problems. And the institutionalization level on the field among the cases of the firms particularly should be investigated by the researchers. Furthermore, companies can increase their complaint management efficiency by joining new complaint websites. Through this manner, they can learn how to deal with different problems and increase their problem-solving skills.Originality/valueThis study provides a comprehensive insight into consumers’ AC behavior. It reveals detailed drivers which may lead to AC behavior and contributes to the existing literature by determining the possible antecedents of AC behavior.

O artigo procura explicar como a formação dos senhorios coloniais motivou a elaboração da carta régia de 1753. A ideia central é analisar como a coroa tentou, na segunda metade do século XVIII, diminuir ou frear o poderio do que se denomina senhorio colonial, culminando na elaboração da carta régia de 20 de outubro de 1753, na qual sacramentava mais uma vez o cultivo. Ao longo da primeira metade do século XVIII, muitas foram as representações enviadas por diversos moradores, inclusive cá¢maras das vilas nos sertões, ao Conselho Ultramarino, solicitando auxá­lio ao rei no sentido de remediar a opressão que sofriam, ao serem obrigados a pagar rendas que consideravam indevidas. Ademais, por meio do argumento do justo tá­tulo reforçavam o cultivo enquanto a forma legá­tima de domá­nio sobre a posse, consequentemente sobre a propriedade. Palavras-chave: Direito Colonial. Justiça Colonial. Sesmarias.THE VAXATIONS AND OPPRESSIONS OF THE COLONIAL LORDS AND THE CONSTITUTION OF THE ROYAL CHARTER OF 1753 IN COLONIAL BRAZIL: The tradition of possession and the fair titleAbstract: This article intends to explain how the formation of the colonial landlords motivated the elaboration of the royal charter of 1753. The central idea is to analyze how the crown attempted, in the second half of the eighteenth century, to reduce or to curb the power of what is denominated colonial landlord, culminating in the creation of the royal charter of October 20, 1753, in which it again sacramented the cultivation. Throughout the first half of the eighteenth century, many petitions were sent by various residents, including municipal concils of the villages in the backlands, addressed to the Overseas Council, requesting aid to the king in order to remedy the oppression they had suffered, being forced to pay rents that they considered unduly. In addition, by means of the argument of the fair title they reinforced the cultivation as the legitimate form of dominion over the possession, consequently on the property. Keywords: Colonial Law. Colonial Justice. Sesmarias. LAS VEJACIONES Y OPRESIONES DE LOS SEá‘ORES COLONIALES Y LA CONSTITUCIÓN DE LA CARTA REAL DE 1753 EN BRASIL COLONIAL: la tradición de la posesión y el justo tá­tuloResumen: El artá­culo trata de explicar cómo la formación de los señorá­os coloniales llevó a la redacción de la Carta de 1753. La idea central es analizar cómo la corona intentó, en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII, disminuir o detener el poder de lo que se llama señorá­o colonial, culminando en la redacción de la carta de 20 de octubre, 1753, en la que sacramentaba una vez más el cultivo. A lo largo de la primera mitad del siglo XVIII, muchas fueron las representaciones presentadas por varios residentes, incluidas las cámaras de los pueblos en el interior del paá­s, al Consejo de ultramar, pidiendo ayuda al rey para remediar la opresión sufrida por la obligación de pagar los alquileres que se consideraban indebidos. Por otra parte, a través del argumento reforzaban del justo tá­tulo con base en el cultivo como forma legá­tima de dominación sobre la propiedad y, en consecuencia, en la propiedad.Palabras clave: Derecho Colonial. Justicia Colonial. Sesmará­as.

There is a disparity between expectations that the members of a community will work together for the common good — and the stark reality that human beings form into groups, or parties, to engage in conflict with each other. This is particularly the case in so-called popular governments that include some wider political involvement by the people. In ancient Greece stasis, or endemic conflict between the democratic and oligarchic elements of a city was very common. Likewise, the late Roman Republic maintained a division between the populares and the optimates. In both cases there was violence as both sides battled for dominance. For example, in late republican Rome street gangs formed that employed intimidation and violence for political ends.In seventeenth century England there was conflict between those who favoured royal authority and those who wished to see more power devolved to parliament, which led to Civil War in the 1640s. Yet the English ideal, as expressed by The Book of Common Prayer (1549; and other editions) was that the country be quietly governed. It seemed perverse that the members of the body politic should be in conflict with each other. By the late seventeenth century England was still riven by conflict between two groups which became designated as the Whigs and the Tories. The divisions were both political and religious. Most importantly, these divisions were expressed at the local level, in such things as the struggle for the control of local corporations. They were not just political but could also be personal and often turned nasty as families contended for local control. The mid seventeenth century had been a time of considerable violence and warfare, not only in Europe and England but across Eurasia, including the fall of the Ming dynasty in China (Parker). This violence occurred in the wake of a cooler climate change, bringing in its wake crop failure followed by scarcity, hunger, disease and vicious warfare. Millions of people died.Conditions improved in the second half of the seventeenth century and countries slowly found their way to a new relative stability. The Qing created a new imperial order in China. In France, Louis XIV survived the Fronde and his answer to the rage and divisions of that time was the imposition of an autocratic and despotic state that simply prohibited the existence of divisions. Censorship and the inquisition flourished in Catholic Europe ensuring that dissidence would not evolve into violence fuelled by rage. In 1685, Louis expelled large numbers of Protestants from France.Divisions did not disappear in England at the end of the Civil War and the Restoration of Charles II. Initially, it appears that Charles sought to go down the French route. There was a regulation of ideas as new laws meant that the state licensed all printed works. There was an attempt to impose a bureaucratic authoritarian state, culminating in the short reign of James II (Pincus, Ertman). But its major effect, since the heightened fear of James’ Catholicism in Protestant England, was to stoke the ‘rage of party’ between those who supported this hierarchical model of social order and those who wanted political power less concentrated (Knights Representation, Plumb).The issue was presumed to be settled in 1688 when James was chased from the throne, and replaced by the Dutchman William and his wife Mary. In the official language of the day, liberty had triumphed over despotism and the ‘ancient constitution’ of the English had been restored to guarantee that liberty.However, three major developments were going on in England by the late seventeenth century: The first is the creation of a more bureaucratic centralised state along the lines of the France of Louis XIV. This state apparatus was needed to collect the taxes required to finance and administer the English war machine (Pincus). The second is the creation of a genuinely popular form of government in the wake of the expulsion of James and his replacement by William of Orange (Ertman). This means regular parliaments that are elected every three years, and also a free press to scrutinise political activities. The third is the development of financial institutions to enable the war to be conducted against France, which only comes to an end in 1713 (Pincus). Here, England followed the example of the Netherlands. There is the establishment of the bank of England in 1694 and the creation of a national debt. This meant that those involved in finance could make big profits out of financing a war, so a new moneyed class developed. England's TransformationIn the 1690s as England is transformed politically, religiously and economically, this develops a new type of society that unifies strong government with new financial institutions and arrangements. In this new political configuration, the big winners are the new financial elites and the large (usually Whig) aristocratic landlords, who had the financial resources to benefit from it. The losers were the smaller landed gentry who were taxed to pay for the war. They increasingly support the Tories (Plumb) who opposed both the war and the new financial elites it helped to create; leading to the 1710 election that overwhelmingly elected a Tory government led by Harley and Bolingbroke. This government then negotiated the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, with the Whigs retaining a small minority.History indicates that the post-1688 developments do not so much quell the ‘rage of party’ as encourage it and fan the fires of conflict and discontent. Parliamentary elections were held every three years and could involve costly, and potentially financially ruinous, contests between families competing for parliamentary representation. As these elections involved open voting and attempts to buy votes through such means as wining and dining, they could be occasions for riotous behaviour. Regular electoral contests, held in an electorate that was much larger than it would be one hundred years later, greatly heightened the conflicts and kept the political temperature at a high.Fig. 1: "To Him Pudel, Bite Him Peper"Moreover, there was much to fuel this conflict and to ‘maintain the rage’: First, the remodelling of the English financial system combined with the high level of taxation imposed largely on the gentry fuelled a rage amongst this group. This new world of financial investments was not part of their world. They were extremely suspicious of wealth not derived from landed property and sought to limit the power of those who held such wealth. Secondly, the events of 1688 split the Anglican Church in two (Pincus). The opponents of the new finance regimes tended also to be traditional High Church Anglicans who feared the newer, more tolerant government policy towards religion. Finally, the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695 meant that the English state was no longer willing to control the flow of information to the public (Kemp). The end result was that England in the 1690s became something akin to a modern public culture in which there was a relatively free flow of political information, constant elections held with a limited, but often substantial franchise, that was operating out of a very new commercial and financial environment. These political divisions were now deeply entrenched and very real passion animated each side of the political divide (Knights Devil).Under these circumstances, it was not possible simply to stamp out ‘the rage’ by the government repressing the voices of dissent. The authoritarian model for creating public conformity was not an option. A mechanism for lowering the political and religious temperature needed to arise in this new society where power and knowledge were diffused rather than centrally concentrated. Also, the English were aided by the return to a more benign physical environment. In economic terms it led to what Fischer terms the equilibrium of the Enlightenment. The wars of Louis XIV were a hangover from the earlier more desperate age; they prolonged the crisis of that age. Nevertheless, the misery of the earlier seventeenth century had passed. The grim visions of Calvinism (and Jansenism) had lost their plausibility. So the excessive violence of the 1640s was replaced by a more tepid form of political resistance, developing into the first modern expression of populism. So, the English achieved what Plumb calls ‘political stability’ were complex (1976), but relied on two things. The first was limiting the opportunity for political activity and the second was labelling political passion as a form of irrational behaviour – as an unsatisfactory or improper way of conducting oneself in the world. Emotions became an indulgence of the ignorant, the superstitious and the fanatical. This new species of humanity was the gentleman, who behaved in a reasonable and measured way, would express a person commensurate with the Enlightenment.This view would find its classic expression over a century later in Macaulay’s History of England, where the pre-1688 English squires are now portrayed in all their semi-civilised glory, “his ignorance and uncouthness, his low tastes and gross phrases, would, in our time, be considered as indicating a nature and a breeding thoroughly plebeian” (Macaulay 244). While the Revolution of 1688 is usually portrayed as a triumph of liberty, as stated, recent scholarship (Pincus, Ertman) emphasises how the attempts by both Charles and James to build a more bureaucratic state were crucial to the development of eighteenth century England. England was not really a land of liberty that kept state growth in check, but the English state development took a different path to statehood from countries such as France, because it involved popular institutions and managed to eliminate many of the corrupt practices endemic to a patrimonial regime.The English were as interested in ‘good police’, meaning the regulation of moral behaviour, as any state on the European continent, but their method of achievement was different. In the place of bureaucratic regulation, the English followed another route, later be termed in the 1760s as ‘civilisation’ (Melleuish). So, the Whigs became the party of rationality and reasonableness, and the Whig regime was Low Church, which was latitudinarian and amenable to rationalist Christianity. Also, the addition of the virtue and value of politeness and gentlemanly behaviour became the antidote to the “rage of party’”(Knights Devil 163—4) . The Whigs were also the party of science and therefore, followed Lockean philosophy. They viewed themselves as ‘reasonable men’ in opposition to their more fanatically inclined opponents. It is noted that any oligarchy, can attempt to justify itself as an ‘aristocracy’, in the sense of representing the ‘morally’ best people. The Whig aristocracy was more cosmopolitan, because its aristocrats had often served the rulers of countries other than England. In fact, the values of the Whig elite were the first expression of the liberal cosmopolitan values which are now central to the ideology of contemporary elites. One dimension of the Whig/Tory split is that while the Whig aristocracy had a cosmopolitan outlook as more proto-globalist, the Tories remained proto-nationalists. The Whigs became simultaneously the party of liberty, Enlightenment, cosmopolitanism, commerce and civilised behaviour. This is why liberty, the desire for peace and ‘sweet commerce’ came to be identified together. The Tories, on the other hand, were the party of real property (that is to say land) so their national interest could easily be construed by their opponents as the party of obscurantism and rage. One major incident illustrates how this evolved.The Trial of the High Church Divine Henry Sacheverell In 1709, the High Church Divine Henry Sacheverell preached a fiery sermon attacking the Whig revolutionary principles of resistance, and advocated obedience and unlimited submission to authority. Afterwards, for his trouble he was impeached before the House of Lords by the Whigs for high crimes and misdemeanours (Tryal 1710). As Mark Knights (6) has put it, one of his major failings was his breaching of the “Whig culture of politeness and moderation”. The Whigs also disliked Sacheverell for his charismatic appeal to women (Nicholson). He was found guilty and his sermons ordered to be burned by the hangman. But Sacheverell became simultaneously a martyr and a political celebrity leading to a mass outpouring of printed material (Knights Devil 166—186). Riots broke out in London in the wake of the trial’s verdict. For the Whigs, this stood as proof of the ‘rage’ that lurked in the irrational world of Toryism. However, as Geoffrey Holmes has demonstrated, these riots were not aimless acts of mob violence but were directed towards specific targets, in particular the meeting houses of Dissenters. History reveals that the Sacheverell riots were the last major riots in England for almost seventy years until the Lord Gordon anti-Catholic riots of 1780. In the short term they led to an overwhelming Tory victory at the 1710 elections, but that victory was pyrrhic. With the death of Queen Anne, followed by the accession of the Hanoverians to the throne, the Whigs became the party of government. Some Tories, such as Bolingbroke, panicked, and fled to France and the Court of the Pretender. The other key factor was the Treaty of Utrecht, brokered on England’s behalf by the Tory government of Harley and Bolingbroke that brought the Civil war to an end in 1713. England now entered an era of peace; there remained no longer the need to raise funds to conduct a war. The war had forced the English state to both to consolidate and to innovate.This can be viewed as the victory of the party of ‘politeness and moderation’ and the Enlightenment and hence the effective end of the ‘rage of party’. Threats did remain by the Pretender’s (James III) attempt to retake the English throne, as happened in 1715 and 1745, when was backed by the barbaric Scots.The Whig ascendancy, the ascendancy of a minority, was to last for decades but remnants of the Tory Party remained, and England became a “one-and one-half” party regime (Ertman 222). Once in power, however, the Whigs utilised a number of mechanisms to ensure that the age of the ‘rage of party’ had come to an end and would be replaced by one of politeness and moderation. As Plumb states, they gained control of the “means of patronage” (Plumb 161—88), while maintaining the ongoing trend, from the 1680s of restricting those eligible to vote in local corporations, and the Whigs supported the “narrowing of the franchise” (Plumb 102—3). Finally, the Septennial Act of 1717 changed the time between elections from three years to seven years.This lowered the political temperature but it did not eliminate the Tories or complaints about the political, social and economic path that England had taken. Rage may have declined but there was still a lot of dissent in the newspapers, in particular in the late 1720s in the Craftsman paper controlled by Viscount Bolingbroke. The Craftsman denounced the corrupt practices of the government of Sir Robert Walpole, the ‘robinocracy’, and played to the prejudices of the landed gentry. Further, the Bolingbroke circle contained some major literary figures of the age; but not a group of violent revolutionaries (Kramnick). It was true populism, from ideals of the Enlightenment and a more benign environment.The new ideal of ‘politeness and moderation’ had conquered English political culture in an era of Whig dominance. This is exemplified in the philosophy of David Hume and his disparagement of enthusiasm and superstition, and the English elite were also not fond of emotional Methodists, and Charles Wesley’s father had been a Sacheverell supporter (Cowan 43). A moderate man is rational and measured; the hoi polloi is emotional, faintly disgusting, and prone to rage.In the End: A Reduction of Rage Nevertheless, one of the great achievements of this new ideal of civility was to tame the conflict between political parties by recognising political division as a natural part of the political process, one that did not involve ‘rage’. This was the great achievement of Edmund Burke who, arguing against Bolingbroke’s position that 1688 had restored a unified political order, and hence abolished political divisions, legitimated such party divisions as an element of a civilised political process involving gentlemen (Mansfield 3). The lower orders, lacking the capacity to live up to this ideal, were prone to accede to forces other than reason, and needed to be kept in their place. This was achieved through a draconian legal code that punished crimes against property very severely (Hoppit). If ‘progress’ as later described by Macaulay leads to a polite and cultivated elite who are capable of conquering their rage – so the lower orders need to be repressed because they are still essentially barbarians. This was echoed in Macaulay’s contemporary, John Stuart Mill (192) who promulgated Orientals similarly “lacked the virtues” of an educated Briton.In contrast, the French attempt to impose order and stability through an authoritarian state fared no better in the long run. After 1789 it was the ‘rage’ of the ‘mob’ that helped to bring down the French Monarchy. At least, that is how the new cadre of the ‘polite and moderate’ came to view things.ReferencesBolingbroke, Lord. Contributions to the Craftsman. Ed. Simon Varney. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982.Cowan, Brian. “The Spin Doctor: Sacheverell’s Trial Speech and Political Performance in the Divided Society.” Faction Displayed: Reconsidering the Impeachment of Dr Henry Sacheverell. Ed. Mark Knights. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 28-46.Ertman, Thomas. Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.Fischer, David Hackett. The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, New York: Oxford UP, 1996.Holmes, Geoffrey. “The Sacheverell Riots: The Crowd and the Church in Early Eighteenth-Century London.” Past and Present 72 (Aug. 1976): 55-85.Hume, David. “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm.” Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985. 73-9. Hoppit, Julian. A Land of Liberty? England 1689—1727, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.Kemp, Geoff. “The ‘End of Censorship’ and the Politics of Toleration, from Locke to Sacheverell.” Faction Displayed: Reconsidering the Impeachment of Dr Henry Sacheverell. Ed. Mark Knights. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 47-68.Knights, Mark. Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.———. The Devil in Disguise: Deception, Delusion, and Fanaticism in the Early English Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011.———. “Introduction: The View from 1710.” Faction Displayed: Reconsidering the Impeachment of Dr Henry Sacheverell. Ed. Mark Knights. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 1-15.Kramnick, Isaac. Bolingbroke & His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992.Macaulay, Thomas Babington. The History of England from the Accession of James II. London: Folio Society, 2009.Mansfield, Harvey. Statesmanship and Party Government: A Study of Burke and Bolingbroke. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1965.Melleuish, Greg. “Civilisation, Culture and Police.” Arts 20 (1998): 7-25.Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty, Representative Government, the Subjection of Women. London: Oxford UP, 1971.Nicholson, Eirwen. “Sacheverell’s Harlot’s: Non-Resistance on Paper and in Practice.” Faction Displayed: Reconsidering the Impeachment of Dr Henry Sacheverell. Ed. Mark Knights. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 69-79.Parker, Geoffrey. Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven: Yale UP, 2013.Pincus, Steve. 1688: The First Modern Revolution. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009.Plumb, John H. The Growth of Political Stability in England 1675–1725. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.The Tryal of Dr Henry Sacheverell before the House of Peers, 1st edition. London: Jacob Tonson, 1710.

There is an old Danish fable that says that the Devil was watching when God created the earth, and that, as the creation progressed, he became increasingly agitated over the wondrous achievements he was made to witness. At the end of it all, the Devil turned to God, and said, ‘Now, watch this.’ He created Iceland. It’s a vision of the country that resembles my own. I have always thought of Iceland as the island apart. The place that came last in the earth’s construction, whoever the engineer, and so remains forever distant. Perhaps that’s because, for me, Iceland is a home far from home. It is the country that I am from, and the place to which I am always tending—in my reading, my travels, and my thoughts. But since we left when I was ten, I am only ever in Iceland for mere glimpses of the Devil’s work, and always leave wanting more, some kind of deeper involvement. Perhaps all of his temptations are like that. Iceland’s is an inverted landscape, stuck like a plug on the roof of the Earth, revealing all the violence and destruction of the layers beneath. The island expands as the tectonic plates beneath it move. It grows by ten centimetres a year, but in two different directions—one towards the States, and the other towards Europe. I have noticed something similar happening to me. Each year, the fissure is a little wider. I come to be more like a visitor, and less like the one returning to his birthplace. I last visited in February just gone, to see whether Iceland was still drifting away from me and, indeed, from the rest of the world. I was doing research in Germany, and set aside an extra week for Reykjavík, to visit friends and family, and to see whether things were really as bad as they appeared to be from Brisbane, where I have lived for most of my life. I had read countless bleak reports of financial ruin and social unrest, and yet I couldn’t suppress the thought that Iceland was probably just being Iceland. The same country that had fought three wars over cod; that offered asylum to Bobby Fischer when no-one else would take him; and that allowed Yoko Ono to occupy a small island near Reykjavík with a peace sculpture made of light. Wasn’t it always the country stuck out on its own, with a people who claimed their independent spirit, and self-reliance, as their most-prized values? No doubt, things were bad. But did Iceland really mean to tie itself closer to Europe as a way out of the economic crisis? And what would this mean for its much-cherished sense of apartness? I spent a week of clear, cold days talking to those who made up my Iceland. They all told me what I most wanted to hear—that nothing much had changed since the financial collapse in 2008. Yes, the value of the currency had halved, and this made it harder to travel abroad. Yes, there was some unemployment now, whereas before there had been none. And, certainly, those who had over-extended on their mortgages were struggling to keep their homes. But wasn’t this the case everywhere? If it wasn’t for Icesave, they said, no-one would spare a thought for Iceland. They were referring to the disastrous internet bank, a wing of the National Bank of Iceland, which had captured and then lost billions in British and Dutch savings. The result was an earthquake in the nation’s financial sector, which in recent years had come to challenge fishing and hot springs as the nation’s chief source of wealth. In a couple of months in late 2008, this sector all but disappeared, or was nationalised as part of the Icelandic government’s scrambling efforts to salvage the economy. Meanwhile, the British and Dutch governments insisted on their citizens’ interests, and issued such a wealth of abuse towards Iceland that the country must have wondered whether it wasn’t still seen, in some quarters, as the Devil’s work. At one point, the National Bank—my bank in Iceland—was even listed by the British as a terrorist organization. I asked whether people were angry with the entrepreneurs who caused all this trouble, the bankers behind Icesave, and so on. The reply was that they were all still in London. ‘They wouldn’t dare show their faces in Reykjavík.’ Well, that was new, I thought. It sounded like a different kind of anger, much more bitter than the usual, fisherman’s jealous awareness of his neighbours’ harvests. Different, too, from the gossip, a national addiction which nevertheless always struck me as being rather homely and forgiving. In Iceland, just about everyone is related, and the thirty or so bankers who have caused the nation’s bankruptcy are well-known to all. But somehow they have gone too far, and their exile is suspended only by their appearances in the newspapers, the law courts, or on the satirical T-shirts sold in main street Laugavegur. There, too, you saw the other side of the currency collapse. The place was buzzing with tourists, unusual at this dark time of year. Iceland was half-price, they had been told, and it was true—anything made locally was affordable, for so long unthinkable in Iceland. This was a country that had always prided itself on being hopelessly expensive. So perhaps what was being lost in the local value of the economy would be recouped through the waves of extra tourists? Certainly, the sudden cheapness of Iceland had affected my decision to come, and to stay in a hotel downtown rather than with friends. On my last full day, a Saturday, I joined my namesake Kári for a drive into the country. For a while, our conversation was taken up with the crisis: the President, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, had recently declined to sign a bill that ensured that Iceland repaid its debts to the British and Dutch governments. His refusal meant a referendum on the bill in the coming March. No-one doubted that the nation would say no. The terms were unfair. And yet it was felt that Iceland’s entry into the EU, and its adoption of the Euro in place of the failed krónur, were conditional on its acceptance of the blame apportioned by international investors, and Britain in particular. Britain, one recalled, was the enemy in the Cod Wars, when Iceland had last entered the international press. Iceland had won that war. Why not this one, as well? That Iceland should suddenly need the forgiveness and assistance of its neighbours was no surprise to them. The Danes and others had long been warning Icelandic bankers that the finance sector was massively over-leveraged and bound for failure at the first sign of trouble in the international economy. I remember being in Iceland at the time of these warnings, in May 2007. It was Eurovision Song Contest month, and there was great local consternation at Iceland’s dismal showing that year. Amid the outpouring of Eurovision grief, and accusations against the rest of Europe that it was block-voting small countries like Iceland out of the contest, the dire economic warnings from the Danes seemed small news. ‘They just didn’t like the útrásarvíkingar,’ said Kári. That is, the Danes were simply upset that their former colonial children had produced offspring of their own who were capable of taking over shops, football clubs, and even banks in main streets of Copenhagen, Amsterdam and London. With interests as glamorous as West Ham United, Hamleys, and Karen Millen, it is not surprising that the útrásarvíkingar, or ‘Viking raiders’, were fast attaining the status of national heroes. Today, it’s a term of abuse rather than pride. The entrepreneurs are exiled in the countries they once sought to raid, and the modern Viking achievement, rather like the one a thousand years before, is a victim of negative press. All that raiding suddenly seems vain and greedy, and the ships that bore the raiders—private jets that for a while were a common sight over the skies of Reykjavík—have found new homes in foreign lands. The Danes were right about the Icelandic economy, just as they’d been right about the Devil’s landscaping efforts. But hundreds of years of colonial rule and only six decades of independence made it difficult for the Icelanders to listen. To curtail the flight of the new Vikings went against the Icelandic project, which from the very beginning was about independence. A thousand years before, in the 870s, Iceland had been a refuge. The medieval stories—known collectively as the sagas—tell us that the island was settled by Norwegian chieftains who were driven out of the fjordlands of their ancestors by the ruthless King Harald the Fair-Haired, who demanded total control of Norway. They refused to humble themselves before the king, and instead took the risk of a new life on a remote, inhospitable island. Icelandic independence, which was lost in the 1260s, was only regained in full in 1944, after Denmark had fallen under German occupation. Ten years later, with the war over and Iceland in the full stride of its independence, Denmark began returning the medieval Icelandic manuscripts that it had acquired during the colonial era. At that point, says the common wisdom, Icelanders forgave the Danes for centuries of poor governance. Although the strict commercial laws of the colonial period had made it all but impossible for Icelanders to rise out of economic hardship, the Danes had, at least, given the sagas back. National sovereignty was returned, and so too the literature that dated back to the time the country had last stood on its own. But, most powerfully, being Icelandic meant being independent of one’s immediate neighbours. Halldór Laxness, the nation’s Nobel Laureate, would satirize this national characteristic in his most enduring masterpiece, Sjálfstætt fólk, or Independent People. It is also what the dominant political party of the independence period, Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn, The Independence Party, has long treasured as a political ideal. To be Icelandic means being free of interference. And in a country of independent people, who would want to stop the bankers on their raids into Europe? Or, for that matter, who was now going to admit that it was time to join Europe instead of emphasizing one’s apartness from it? Kári and I turned off the south road out of Reykjavík and climbed into the heath. From here, the wounds of the country’s geological past still dominated the surface of the land. Little wonder that Jules Verne claimed that the journey to the centre of the world began on Snæfellsnes, a peninsula of volcanoes, lava, and ice caps on a long arm of land that extends desperately from the west of the island, as if forever in hope of reaching America, or at the very least Greenland. It was from Snæfellsnes that Eirík the Red began his Viking voyages westwards, and from where his famous son Leif would reach Vínland, the Land of Vines, most probably Newfoundland. Eight hundred years later, during the worst of the nation’s hardships—when the famines and natural disasters of the late eighteenth century reduced the nation almost to extinction—thousands of Icelanders followed in Leif’s footsteps, across the ‘whale road’, as the Vikings called it, to Canada, and mainly Winnipeg, where they recreated Iceland in an environment arguably even more hostile than the one they’d left. At least there weren’t any volcanoes in Winnipeg. In Iceland, you could never escape the feeling that the world was still evolving, and that the Devil’s work was ongoing. Even the national Assembly was established on one of the island’s most visible outward signs of the deep rift beneath—where a lake had cracked off the heath around it, which now surrounded it as a scar-scape of broken rocks and torn cliffs. The Almannagjá, or People’s Gorge, which is the most dramatic part of the rift, stands, or rather falls apart, as the ultimate symbol of Icelandic national unity. That is Iceland, an island on the edge of Europe, and forever on the edge of itself, too, a place where unity is defined by constant points of separation, not only in the landscape as it crunches itself apart and pushes through at the weak points, but also in a persistently small social world—the population is only 320,000—that is so closely related that it has had little choice but to emphasise the differences that do exist. After a slow drive through the low hills near Thingvellir, we reached the national park, and followed the dirt roads down to the lake. It’s an exclusive place for summerhouses, many of which now seem to stand as reminders of the excesses of the past ten years: the haphazardly-constructed huts that once made the summerhouse experience a bit of an adventure were replaced by two-storey buildings with satellite dishes, spa baths, and the ubiquitous black Range Rovers parked outside—the latter are now known as ‘Game Overs’. Like so much that has been sold off to pay the debts, the luxury houses seem ‘very 2007,’ the local term for anything unsustainable. But even the opulent summerhouses of the Viking raiders don’t diminish the landscape of Thingvellir, and a lake that was frozen from the shore to about fifty metres out. At the shoreline, lapping water had crystallized into blue, translucent ice-waves that formed in lines of dark and light water. Then we left the black beach for the site of the old Assembly. It was a place that had witnessed many encounters, not least the love matches that were formed when young Icelanders returned from their Viking raids and visits to the courts of Scandinavia, Scotland, Ireland, and England. On this particular day, though, the site was occupied by only five Dutchmen in bright, orange coats. They were throwing stones into Öxará, the river that runs off the heath into the Thingvellir lake, and looked up guiltily as we passed. I’m not sure what they felt bad about—throwing stones in the river was surely the most natural thing to do. On my last night, I barely slept. The Saturday night street noise was too much, and my thoughts were taken with the ever-apart Iceland, and with the anticipation of my returning to Brisbane the next day. Reykjavík the party town certainly hadn’t changed with the financial crisis, and nor had my mixed feelings about living so far away. The broken glass and obscenities of a night out didn’t ease until 5am, when it was time for me to board the Flybus to Keflavík Airport. I made my way through the screams and drunken stumblers, and into the quiet of the dark bus, where, in the back, I could just make out the five Dutchmen who, the day before, Kári and I had seen at Thingvellir, and who were now fast asleep and emitting a perfume of vodka and tobacco smoke that made it all the way to the front. It had all seemed too familiar not to be true—the relentless Icelandic optimism around its independence, the sense that it would always be an up-and-down sort of a place anyway, and the jagged volcanoes and lava fields that formed the distant shadows of the half-hour drive to the airport. The people, like the landscape, were fixed on separation, and I doubted that the difficulties with Europe would force them in any other direction. And I, too, was on my way back, as uncertain as ever about Iceland and my place in it. I returned to the clinging heat and my own separation from home, which, as before, I also recognized as my homecoming to Brisbane. Isn’t that in the nature of split affinities, to always be nearly there but never quite there? In the weeks since my return, the Icelanders have voted by referendum to reject the deal made for the repayment of the Icesave debts, and a fresh round of negotiations with the British and Dutch governments begins. For the time being, Iceland retains its right to independence, at least as expressed by the right to sidestep the consequences of its unhappy raids into Europe. Pinning down the Devil, it seems, is just as hard as ever.

Following the deep-seated analogy between biological and computer parasites, it is surely inconceivable that anyone would want to deliberately infect a computer. It’s a bad idea, right? Well, not necessarily. It seems that the University of Calgary (UoC) want to challenge the received wisdom of security experts—a judgment, which determines that there is no such thing as a good virus. The UoC wants to encourage their students to write and test malevolent viruses. Still following the biological analogy, Dr John Aycock, the academic who runs the program at UoC, likens the approach to ‘what medical researchers do to combat the latest biological viruses such as Sars’. He argues that ‘before you can develop a cure, you have to understand what the virus is and how it spreads and what motivates those who write malicious software’ (Fried). The reaction from security experts is not surprisingly one of dismay—for them, all viruses are bad. Nonetheless, it is Dr. Aycock’s provocation that may provide a much-needed alternative solution to one of the biggest problems facing the network society. As many affiliates of this composite society are increasingly discovering, the network is a present day communication paradox. It is a vast, fast, and efficient logic machine, but simultaneously it provides the perfect medium for viral contagion. Moreover, despite the efforts of a billion dollar anti-virus industry, current reactive solutions are clearly not working. A report in the UK (DTI) concludes that despite the considerable uptake of anti-virus software—93% of UK companies have anti-virus software—70% of all security breaches are from viral-like programs. (The DTI report claims that ‘two-thirds of organisations that had any security incident said that a virus infection was their worst one’. In comparison, a 1991 Gallup survey [in Louw and Duffy] showed that of 500 of the UK’s largest businesses 24% had experienced a viral attack.) Viruses, it seems, are progressively more capable of ‘bypassing traditional anti-virus software and targeting vulnerabilities’. However, Dr Aycock argues that academics should not bury their heads in the sand. They should openly recognise that ‘reacting to the virus is simply not working’ and instead support pro-active research into the creation of computer viruses. Within the bad idea itself there maybe a good solution. Naturally, the experts are outraged by what they perceive as an incursion beyond the ethical norms of the computer world. These recent events are part of an ongoing good virus/bad virus debate. Network controllers have long argued for the ethical containment of viral code. Unlocking the secrets of the virus writer is, according to the anti-virus community, a bad idea. In the early 1980s, when Fred Cohen began experimenting with self-replicating code as part of his PhD, he experienced the moral indignation of the computer community. Cohen’s viral research at the University of Southern California (USC) referenced von Neumann’s seminal work on cellular automata (1948) and the Darwinian computer games played out in the Bell Labs in the 1950s and 1960s (Dewdney). Cohen was working on a similar, but simplified, idea, a ‘program’ that could insert itself into other programs and assume control of them. In doing so, he quickly realised the potential problem of the computer virus. I’d been working on computer security for a long time – I knew how systems worked, and how different attacks worked… But it came over me. Anyone who writes one of these things would have something that could replicate everywhere (Spiller 172). After seeing the results of his experiments, network controllers at USC banned him from repeating any similar exercises. Moreover, after completing his thesis in 1985, he could not get it published in a journal until 1987 (Spiller 176; it was finally published in the journal Computers and Security), and suffered a ‘virtual lockout’ in the funding of further research. Cohen later refers to the ‘apparent fear reaction’ as a result of trying to solve technical problems with policy solutions. At the time, Cohen used the same biological analogy as Dr. Aycock to defend his research into computer viruses. The benefits of biological research on the quality of life is indisputable, and the benefits of computer virus research may some day pay off in the quality of our information systems, and by extension, our well being. (Cohen in Trends in Computer Virus Research) In the early 1990s, the network seemed to be a more open-minded society. Cohen was able to consider computer viruses in terms of the legitimacy of friendly contagion. The so-called benevolent virus appeared in his book A Short Course on Computer Viruses (Cohen 15). It was conceived of as a viral alternative to Turing logic. At the same time, physicist Mark Ludwig, driven by his desire to make technical information about computer viruses freely available, published the Black Book of Computer Viruses. Wired Magazine championed Ludwig’s ‘gruellingly meticulous analyses of viral performance and technique’ (Dibbell). In 1995, Tom Ray, a biologist turned computer programmer, created the viral-like Tierra program, an evolutionary race between digital hosts and parasites. Ray proposed that Tierra should exist in ‘a very large, complex and inter-connected region of cyberspace… inoculated with digital organisms, which will be allowed to evolve freely through natural selection’ (Ray)—ironically, something similar to what we are currently experiencing. In the early days, viral researchers were prompted to defend their work. In an interview in the virus webzine Alive in 1994, Cohen argued that a ‘symbol sequences without any known malicious side effects’ could not be considered as a bad idea. Ludwig contended that people were ‘brainwashed into believing that virus = bad…’ (Dibbell). However, more foreboding voices soon joined the debate. Spafford warned that while there is legitimate ‘scientific interest’ in viruses as a ‘means of modelling life’ and developing epidemiological defences, fellow researches should heed the dangers of further experimentation. True viruses are inherently unethical. For Spafford, the idea of a ‘good virus’ is an oxymoron. Following the exponential growth in malicious attacks in the mid-1990s, the idea of a good virus drifted considerably from the centre to the margins of the network society. In 1996, the IBM anti-virus researcher Sarah Gordon criticised Ludwig for elevating the status of the computer virus from the digital equivalent of a can of spray paint. With estimated costs to the worldwide Information Technolgy industry of $13 billion in 2001 (Pipkin 41) and the destructive force of a single worm costing tens of millions of dollars, not surprisingly the word ‘virus’ has developed a negative connotation. Even Cohen has realised that any acceptance of the benevolent virus would require considerable linguistic embellishment. Try ‘intelligent agents’, ‘artificial life’, ‘adaptive distributed networks’, and similar names and you will be far more successful. (Fed Cohen’s response to email questions posed by the author in June 2002) Within this heated climate, it was highly probable that Dr Aycock would stand accused of peddling a bad idea. Graham Cluley, a consultant for Sophos, rhetorically questions UoC’s ethics by asking, ‘should we teach kids how to break into cars if they’re interested in becoming a policeman one day?’ (Kelly). The anti-virus experts argue that by teaching how to ‘attack and destroy’ rather than ‘prevention, protection, and cure’, UoC will simply encourage the widespread contagion of the bad idea. However, UoC questions the naivety of this expert opinion. They argue that any ‘reasonably intelligent individual’ can access this information without attending university for four years. They claim it is ‘dangerous to think that virus writers can be stopped without a better understanding of how they operate.’ Maybe UoC are doing what academia does best. They are considering the virus in a new and unfamiliar light, clearing away ethical baggage, and crossing the moral boundaries of the network society. Deep-seated as it is, the analogy only goes so far. The network and the virus writer have developed their own biology, which is both technologically and culturally shaped. The search for a viral cure has to move away from the reactionary dissection of existing viral anatomies. Researchers need to look towards a pro-active engineering model that incorporates the complex human-computer assemblage. As one maverick expert suggests: Tomorrow’s experts need to learn to think beyond and develop better applications and operating systems that proactively block potential attack vectors rather than waiting to be attacked and then responding (a ‘security expert’ discussing the UoC programme in http://www.tla.ch/TLA/NEWS/2004sec/20040914Writting-Viruses.htm, 14 Sep. 2004) While many other types of furtive program, like ‘bots’, ‘crawlers’, and ‘spiders’ legitimately creep behind our screens, the virus is seen as a digital pariah. Whether or not the viral algorithm is benevolent or malevolent doesn’t seem to matter any more. The vast majority of the network society regards it as a bad idea. Nevertheless, Dr Aycock’s experiment with both the cultural and technological elements could produce a pro-active immunisation program. Whatever the conclusion, he should be applauded for attempting to carry out this experiment while beleaguered by so many experts who decide to judge innovation in terms of rigid moral outcomes. References Cohen, F. A Short Course on Computer Viruses. 2nd ed. John Wiley & Sons, 1994. Cohen, F. “Friendly Contagion: Harnessing the Subtle Power of Computer Viruses.” The Sciences Sept/Oct (1991): 22–8. Cohen, F. “The Legend: An Interview.” Alive 1.1 (April-July 1994). Dec. 2004 http://www.virusview.net/info/virus/j&a/alive11.html>. Cohen, F. Trends in Computer Virus Research. Pittsburgh: ASP Press, 1991. Dec. 2004 http://vx.netlux.org/lib/afc06.html>. Department of Trade and Industry. “Technical Report.” Information Security Breaches Survey (2004). PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Dec. 2004 http://www.security-survey.gov.uk>. Dewdney, AK. “Computer Recreations: In the Game Called Core War Hostile Programs Engage in a Battle of Bits.” Scientific American 250.5 (1984): 14-22. Dibbell, J. “Viruses Are Good for You: Spawn of the Devil, Computer Viruses May Help Us Realize the Full Potential of the Net.” Wired Magazine 3.02 (Feb 1995). Dec. 2004 http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.02/viruses.html> Fried, I. “Learn Virus Writing Skills in Canada”. ZDNet UK News 28 May 2003. Dec. 2004 http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/0,39020369,2135325,00.htm>. Gordon, S. The Generic Virus Writer II. IBM Research, 1996. Dec. 2004 http://www.research.ibm.com>. (Paper first presented at the 6th International Virus Bulletin Conference, Brighton, UK, September 1996.) Ludwig, M. The Little Black Book of Computer Viruses. American Eagle Publications, 1991. http://vx.netlux.org/lib/vml00.html>. Pipkin, D. Halting the Hacker: A Practical Guide to Computer Security. New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2003. Ray, T. A Proposal to Create Two Biodiversity Reserves: One Digital and One Organic: Technical Report. Tierra Homepage, 1995. Dec. 2004 http://www.his.atr.jp/~ray/tierra/>. Spafford, E. “Computer Viruses: A Form of Artificial Life?” Artificial Life II, Studies in the Sciences of Complexity. Ed. C. Langton. Addison-Wesley, 1991: vol. XII 727-47. Spiller, N., ed. Cyber_Reader: Critical Writings for the Digital Era. London: Phaidon, 2002. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Sampson, Tony. "Dr Aycock's Bad Idea: Is the Good Use of Computer Viruses Still a Bad Idea?." M/C Journal 8.1 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0502/02-sampson.php>. APA Style Sampson, T. (Feb. 2005) "Dr Aycock's Bad Idea: Is the Good Use of Computer Viruses Still a Bad Idea?," M/C Journal, 8(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0502/02-sampson.php>.

Cultural sociologists (Bourdieu; DiMaggio, “Cultural Capital”, “Classification”; Gans; Lamont & Foumier; Halle; Erickson) wrote about high culture and popular culture in an attempt to explain the growing social and economic inequalities, to find consensus on culture hierarchies, and to analyze cultural complexities. Halle states that this categorisation of culture into “high culture” and “popular culture” underlined most of the debate on culture in the last fifty years. Gans contends that both high culture and popular culture are stereotypes, public forms of culture or taste cultures, each sharing “common aesthetic values and standards of tastes” (8). However, this article is not concerned with these categorisations, or macro analysis. Rather, it is a reflection piece that inquires if opera, which is usually considered high culture, has become more equal to popular culture, and why some directors change the time and place of opera plots, whereas others will stay true to the original setting of the story. I do not consider these productions “adaptations,” but “post-modern morphologies,” and I will refer to this later in the paper. In other words, the paper is seeking to explain a social phenomenon and explore the underlying motives by quoting interviews with directors. The word ‘opera’ is defined in Elson’s Music Dictionary as: “a form of musical composition evolved shortly before 1600, by some enthusiastic Florentine amateurs who sought to bring back the Greek plays to the modern stage” (189). Hence, it was an experimentation to revive Greek music and drama believed to be the ideal way to express emotions (Grout 186). It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when stage directors started changing the time and place of the original settings of operas. The practice became more common after World War II, and Peter Brook’s Covent Garden productions of Boris Godunov (1948) and Salome (1949) are considered the prototypes of this practice (Sutcliffe 19-20). Richard Wagner’s grandsons, the brothers Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner are cited in the music literature as using technology and modern innovations in staging and design beginning in the early 1950s. Brief Background into the History of Opera Grout contends that opera began as an attempt to heighten the dramatic expression of language by intensifying the natural accents of speech through melody supported by simple harmony. In the late 1590s, the Italian composer Jacopo Peri wrote what is considered to be the first opera, but most of it has been lost. The first surviving complete opera is Euridice, a version of the Orpheus myth that Peri and Giulio Caccini jointly set to music in 1600. The first composer to understand the possibilities inherent in this new musical form was Claudio Monteverdi, who in 1607 wrote Orfeo. Although it was based on the same story as Euridice, it was expanded to a full five acts. Early opera was meant for small, private audiences, usually at court; hence it began as an elitist genre. After thirty years of being private, in 1637, opera went public with the opening of the first public opera house, Teatro di San Cassiano, in Venice, and the genre quickly became popular. Indeed, Monteverdi wrote his last two operas, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria and L’incoronazione di Poppea for the Venetian public, thereby leading the transition from the Italian courts to the ‘public’. Both operas are still performed today. Poppea was the first opera to be based on a historical rather than a mythological or allegorical subject. Sutcliffe argues that opera became popular because it was a new mixture of means: new words, new music, new methods of performance. He states, “operatic fashion through history may be a desire for novelty, new formulas displacing old” (65). By the end of the 17th century, Venice alone had ten opera houses that had produced more than 350 operas. Wealthy families purchased season boxes, but inexpensive tickets made the genre available to persons of lesser means. The genre spread quickly, and various styles of opera developed. In Naples, for example, music rather than the libretto dominated opera. The genre spread to Germany and France, each developing the genre to suit the demands of its audiences. For example, ballet became an essential component of French opera. Eventually, “opera became the profligate art as large casts and lavish settings made it the most expensive public entertainment. It was the only art that without embarrassment called itself ‘grand’” (Boorstin 467). Contemporary Opera Productions Opera continues to be popular. According to a 2002 report released by the National Endowment for the Arts, 6.6 million adults attended at least one live opera performance in 2002, and 37.6 million experienced opera on television, video, radio, audio recording or via the Internet. Some think that it is a dying art form, while others think to the contrary, that it is a living art form because of its complexity and “ability to probe deeper into the human experience than any other art form” (Berger 3). Some directors change the setting of operas with perhaps the most famous contemporary proponent of this approach being Peter Sellars, who made drastic changes to three of Mozart’s most famous operas. Le Nozze di Figaro, originally set in 18th-century Seville, was set by Sellars in a luxury apartment in the Trump Tower in New York City; Sellars set Don Giovanni in contemporary Spanish Harlem rather than 17th century Seville; and for Cosi Fan Tutte, Sellars chose a diner on Cape Cod rather than 18th century Naples. As one of the more than six million Americans who attend live opera each year, I have experienced several updated productions, which made me reflect on the convergence or cross-over between high culture and popular culture. In 2000, I attended a production of Don Giovanni at the Estates Theatre in Prague, the very theatre where Mozart conducted the world premiere in 1787. In this production, Don Giovanni was a fashion designer known as “Don G” and drove a BMW. During the 1999-2000 season, Los Angeles Opera engaged film director Bruce Beresford to direct Verdi’s Rigoletto. Beresford updated the original setting of 16th century Mantua to 20th century Hollywood. The lead tenor, rather than being the Duke of Mantua, was a Hollywood agent known as “Duke Mantua.” In the first act, just before Marullo announces to the Duke’s guests that the jester Rigoletto has taken a mistress, he gets the news via his cell phone. Director Ian Judge set the 2004 production of Le Nozze di Figaro in the 1950s. In one of the opening productions of the 2006-07 LA opera season, Vincent Patterson also chose the 1950s for Massenet’s Manon rather than France in the 1720s. This allowed the title character to appear in the fourth act dressed as Marilyn Monroe. Excerpts from the dress rehearsal can be seen on YouTube. Most recently, I attended a production of Ariane et Barbe-Bleu at the Paris Opera. The original setting of the Maeterlinck play is in Duke Bluebeard’s castle, but the time period is unclear. However, it is doubtful that the 1907 opera based on an 1899 play was meant to be set in what appeared to be a mental institution equipped with surveillance cameras whose screens were visible to the audience. The critical and audience consensus seemed to be that the opera was a musical success but a failure as a production. James Shore summed up the audience reaction: “the production team was vociferously booed and jeered by much of the house, and the enthusiastic applause that had greeted the singers and conductor, immediately went nearly silent when they came on stage”. It seems to me that a new class-related taste has emerged; the opera genre has shot out a subdivision which I shall call “post-modern morphologies,” that may appeal to a larger pool of people. Hence, class, age, gender, and race are becoming more important factors in conceptualising opera productions today than in the past. I do not consider these productions as new adaptations because the libretto and the music are originals. What changes is the fact that both text and sound are taken to a higher dimension by adding iconographic images that stimulate people’s brains. When asked in an interview why he often changes the setting of an opera, Ian Judge commented, “I try to find the best world for the story and characters to operate in, and I think you have to find a balance between the period the author set it in, the period he conceived it in and the nature of theatre and audiences at that time, and the world we live in.” Hence, the world today is complex, interconnected, borderless and timeless because of advanced technologies, and updated opera productions play with symbols that offer multiple meanings that reflect the world we live in. It may be that television and film have influenced opera production. Character tenor Graham Clark recently observed in an interview, “Now the situation has changed enormously. Television and film have made a lot of things totally accessible which they were not before and in an entirely different perception.” Director Ian Judge believes that television and film have affected audience expectations in opera. “I think audiences who are brought up on television, which is bad acting, and movies, which is not that good acting, perhaps require more of opera than stand and deliver, and I have never really been happy with someone who just stands and sings.” Sociologist Wendy Griswold states that culture reflects social reality and the meaning of a particular cultural object (such as opera), originates “in the social structures and social patterns it reflects” (22). Screens of various technologies are embedded in our lives and normalised as extensions of our bodies. In those opera productions in which directors change the time and place of opera plots, use technology, and are less concerned with what the composer or librettist intended (which we can only guess), the iconographic images create multi valances, textuality similar to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of multiplicity of voices. Hence, a plurality of meanings. Plàcido Domingo, the Eli and Edyth Broad General Director of Los Angeles Opera, seeks to take advantage of the company’s proximity to the film industry. This is evidenced by his having engaged Bruce Beresford to direct Rigoletto and William Friedkin to direct Ariadne auf Naxos, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and Gianni Schicchi. Perhaps the most daring example of Domingo’s approach was convincing Garry Marshall, creator of the television sitcom Happy Days and who directed the films Pretty Woman and The Princess Diaries, to direct Jacques Offenbach’s The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein to open the company’s 20th anniversary season. When asked how Domingo convinced him to direct an opera for the first time, Marshall responded, “he was insistent that one, people think that opera is pretty elitist, and he knew without insulting me that I was not one of the elitists; two, he said that you gotta make a funny opera; we need more comedy in the operetta and opera world.” Marshall rewrote most of the dialogue and performed it in English, but left the “songs” untouched and in the original French. He also developed numerous sight gags and added characters including a dog named Morrie and the composer Jacques Offenbach himself. Did it work? Christie Grimstad wrote, “if you want an evening filled with witty music, kaleidoscopic colors and hilariously good singing, seek out The Grand Duchess. You will not be disappointed.” The FanFaire Website commented on Domingo’s approach of using television and film directors to direct opera: You’ve got to hand it to Plàcido Domingo for having the vision to draw on Hollywood’s vast pool of directorial talent. Certainly something can be gained from the cross-fertilization that could ensue from this sort of interaction between opera and the movies, two forms of entertainment (elitist and perennially struggling for funds vs. popular and, it seems, eternally rich) that in Los Angeles have traditionally lived separate lives on opposite sides of the tracks. A wider audience, for example, never a problem for the movies, can only mean good news for the future of opera. So, did the Marshall Plan work? Purists of course will always want their operas and operettas ‘pure and unadulterated’. But with an audience that seemed to have as much fun as the stellar cast on stage, it sure did. Critic Alan Rich disagrees, calling Marshall “a representative from an alien industry taking on an artistic product, not to create something innovative and interesting, but merely to insult.” Nevertheless, the combination of Hollywood and opera seems to work. The Los Angeles Opera reported that the 2005-2006 season was its best ever: “ticket revenues from the season, which ended in June, exceeded projected figures by nearly US$900,000. Seasonal attendance at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion stood at more than 86% of the house’s capacity, the largest percentage in the opera’s history.” Domingo continues with the Hollywood connection in the upcoming 2008-2009 season. He has reengaged William Friedkin to direct two of Puccini’s three operas titled collectively as Il Trittico. Friedkin will direct the two tragedies, Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica. Although Friedkin has already directed a production of the third opera in Il Trittico for Los Angeles, the comedy Gianni Schicchi, Domingo convinced Woody Allen to make his operatic directorial debut with this work. This can be viewed as another example of the desire to make opera and popular culture more equal. However, some, like Alan Rich, may see this attempt as merely insulting rather than interesting and innovative. With a top ticket price in Los Angeles of US$238 per seat, opera seems to continue to be elitist. Berger (2005) concurs with this idea and gives his rationale for elitism: there are rich people who support and attend the opera; it is an imported art from Europe that causes some marginalisation; opera is not associated with something being ‘moral,’ a concept engrained in American culture; it is expensive to produce and usually funded by kings, corporations, rich people; and the opera singers are rare –usually one in a million who will have the vocal quality to sing opera arias. Furthermore, Nicholas Kenyon commented in the early 1990s: “there is suspicion that audiences are now paying more and more money for their seats to see more and more money spent on stage” (Kenyon 3). Still, Garry Marshall commented that the budget for The Grand Duchess was US$2 million, while his budget for Runaway Bride was US$72 million. Kenyon warns, “Such popularity for opera may be illusory. The enjoyment of one striking aria does not guarantee the survival of an art form long regarded as over-elitist, over-recondite, and over-priced” (Kenyon 3). A recent development is the Metropolitan Opera’s decision to simulcast live opera performances from the Met stage to various cinemas around the world. These HD transmissions began with the 2006-2007 season when six performances were broadcast. In the 2007-2008 season, the schedule has expanded to eight live Saturday matinee broadcasts plus eight recorded encores broadcast the following day. According to The Los Angeles Times, “the Met’s experiment of merging film with live performance has created a new art form” (Aslup). Whether or not this is a “new art form,” it certainly makes world-class live opera available to countless persons who cannot travel to New York and pay the price for tickets, when they are available. In the US alone, more than 350 cinemas screen these live HD broadcasts from the Met. Top ticket price for these performances at the Met is US$375, while the lowest price is US$27 for seats with only a partial view. Top price for the HD transmissions in participating cinemas is US$22. This experiment with live simulcasts makes opera more affordable and may increase its popularity; combined with updated stagings, opera can engage a much larger audience and hope for even a mass consumption. Is opera moving closer and closer to popular culture? There still seems to be an aura of elitism and snobbery about opera. However, Plàcido Domingo’s attempt to join opera with Hollywood is meant to break the barriers between high and popular culture. The practice of updating opera settings is not confined to Los Angeles. As mentioned earlier, the idea can be traced to post World War II England, and is quite common in Europe. Examples include Erich Wonder’s approach to Wagner’s Ring, making Valhalla, the mythological home of the gods and typically a mountaintop, into the spaceship Valhalla, as well as my own experience with Don Giovanni in Prague and Ariane et Barbe-Bleu in Paris. Indeed, Sutcliffe maintains, “Great classics in all branches of the arts are repeatedly being repackaged for a consumerist world that is increasingly and neurotically self-obsessed” (61). Although new operas are being written and performed, most contemporary performances are of operas by Verdi, Mozart, and Puccini (www.operabase.com). This means that audiences see the same works repeated many times, but in different interpretations. Perhaps this is why Sutcliffe contends, “since the 1970s it is the actual productions that have had the novelty value grabbed by the headlines. Singing no longer predominates” (Sutcliffe 57). If then, as Sutcliffe argues, “operatic fashion through history may be a desire for novelty, new formulas displacing old” (Sutcliffe 65), then the contemporary practice of changing the original settings is simply the latest “new formula” that is replacing the old ones. If there are no new words or new music, then what remains are new methods of performance, hence the practice of changing time and place. Opera is a complex art form that has evolved over the past 400 years and continues to evolve, but will it survive? The underlining motives for directors changing the time and place of opera performances are at least three: for aesthetic/artistic purposes, financial purposes, and to reach an audience from many cultures, who speak different languages, and who have varied tastes. These three reasons are interrelated. In 1996, Sutcliffe wrote that there has been one constant in all the arguments about opera productions during the preceding two decades: “the producer’s wish to relate the works being staged to contemporary circumstances and passions.” Although that sounds like a purely aesthetic reason, making opera relevant to new, multicultural audiences and thereby increasing the bottom line seems very much a part of that aesthetic. It is as true today as it was when Sutcliffe made the observation twelve years ago (60-61). My own speculation is that opera needs to attract various audiences, and it can only do so by appealing to popular culture and engaging new forms of media and technology. Erickson concludes that the number of upper status people who are exclusively faithful to fine arts is declining; high status people consume a variety of culture while the lower status people are limited to what they like. Research in North America, Europe, and Australia, states Erickson, attest to these trends. My answer to the question can stage directors make opera and popular culture “equal” is yes, and they can do it successfully. Perhaps Stanley Sharpless summed it up best: After his Eden triumph, When the Devil played his ace, He wondered what he could do next To irk the human race, So he invented Opera, With many a fiendish grin, To mystify the lowbrows, And take the highbrows in. References The Grand Duchess. 2005. 3 Feb. 2008 < http://www.ffaire.com/Duchess/index.htm >.Aslup, Glenn. “Puccini’s La Boheme: A Live HD Broadcast from the Met.” Central City Blog Opera 7 Apr. 2008. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.centralcityopera.org/blog/2008/04/07/puccini%E2%80%99s- la-boheme-a-live-hd-broadcast-from-the-met/ >.Berger, William. Puccini without Excuses. New York: Vintage, 2005.Boorstin, Daniel. The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination. New York: Random House, 1992.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.Clark, Graham. “Interview with Graham Clark.” The KCSN Opera House, 88.5 FM. 11 Aug. 2006.DiMaggio, Paul. “Cultural Capital and School Success.” American Sociological Review 47 (1982): 189-201.DiMaggio, Paul. “Classification in Art.”_ American Sociological Review_ 52 (1987): 440-55.Elson, C. Louis. “Opera.” Elson’s Music Dictionary. Boston: Oliver Ditson, 1905.Erickson, H. Bonnie. “The Crisis in Culture and Inequality.” In W. Ivey and S. J. Tepper, eds. Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America’s Cultural Life. New York: Routledge, 2007.Fanfaire.com. “At Its 20th Anniversary Celebration, the Los Angeles Opera Had a Ball with The Grand Duchess.” 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.fanfaire.com/Duchess/index.htm >.Gans, J. Herbert. Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste. New York: Basic Books, 1977.Grimstad, Christie. Concerto Net.com. 2005. 12 Jan. 2008 < http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=3091 >.Grisworld, Wendy. Cultures and Societies in a Changing World. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1994.Grout, D. Jay. A History of Western Music. Shorter ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1964.Halle, David. “High and Low Culture.” The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. London: Blackwell, 2006.Judge, Ian. “Interview with Ian Judge.” The KCSN Opera House, 88.5 FM. 22 Mar. 2006.Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary. 2001. 19 Nov. 2006 < http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=opera&searchmode=none >.Kenyon, Nicholas. “Introduction.” In A. Holden, N. Kenyon and S. Walsh, eds. The Viking Opera Guide. New York: Penguin, 1993.Lamont, Michele, and Marcel Fournier. Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.Lord, M.G. “Shlemiel! Shlemozzle! And Cue the Soprano.” The New York Times 4 Sep. 2005.Los Angeles Opera. “LA Opera General Director Placido Domingo Announces Results of Record-Breaking 20th Anniversary Season.” News release. 2006.Marshall, Garry. “Interview with Garry Marshall.” The KCSN Opera House, 88.5 FM. 31 Aug. 2005.National Endowment for the Arts. 2002 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. Research Division Report #45. 5 Feb. 2008 < http://www.nea.gov/pub/NEASurvey2004.pdf >.NCM Fanthom. “The Metropolitan Opera HD Live.” 2 Feb. 2008 < http://fathomevents.com/details.aspx?seriesid=622&gclid= CLa59NGuspECFQU6awodjiOafA >.Opera Today. James Sobre: Ariane et Barbe-Bleue and Capriccio in Paris – Name This Stage Piece If You Can. 5 Feb. 2008 < http://www.operatoday.com/content/2007/09/ariane_et_barbe_1.php >.Rich, Alan. “High Notes, and Low.” LA Weekly 15 Sep. 2005. 6 May 2008 < http://www.laweekly.com/stage/a-lot-of-night-music/high-notes-and-low/8160/ >.Sharpless, Stanley. “A Song against Opera.” In E. O. Parrott, ed. How to Be Tremendously Tuned in to Opera. New York: Penguin, 1990.Shore, James. Opera Today. 2007. 4 Feb. 2008 < http://www.operatoday.com/content/2007/09/ariane_et_barbe_1.php >.Sutcliffe, Tom. Believing in Opera. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1996.YouTube. “Manon Sex and the Opera.” 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiBQhr2Sy0k >.