Poisoned Cornucopia

← 20 | 21 → Andrew Taylor
Edith Cowan University, Perth

“If Music Be the Food of Love, Play on”: The Ambivalences and Necessity of Excess

Duke Orsino’s opening words in Shakespeare’s Twelfth-Night serve as my introduction to this discussion of Excess. As one would expect with Shakespeare, the dense language is shot through with multiple meanings, ambiguities and ironies. Music is a food – specifically the food that nourishes love – but too much of it produces the opposite of nourishment. Music is nourishment, but taken to excess it leads, not to a kind of amorous obesity, but to death. The appetite will “sicken, and so die.”

The whole play, Twelfth Night, is structured around ambiguities and ambivalences. What is most relevant here, however, is the role played by Excess. Excess turns a positive into a negative, a food that nourishes into a poison that kills. This is not so much a poisoned cornucopia, to refer to the title of this conference, as a cornucopia that transforms itself, by means of Excess, into a poison.

This characterization of excess as deadly is somewhat extreme, though not totally untruthful. The most obvious example would be the physical obesity that is afflicting the developed world today. According to recent OECD figures, obesity is estimated to be responsible for one percent to three percent of total health expenditure in most countries, while in the United States it accounts for between five percent and ten percent (OECD Obesity Update 2012). And in Australia, as just one example, it is now the major cause of premature death, having overtaken smoking to gain this dubious honour (Corderoy 2010).

So Excess can indeed by deadly. Where once people starved, or struggled to fill their stomachs and those of their children, in affluent countries people are eating themselves to death at an ever-increasing rate. A further and outstanding ← 21 | 22 → example of obesity will be discussed later in this paper, but first one must look at other forms of deadly Excess.

Alcohol is an obvious example. It is difficult to find concise, meaningful statistics related to the harm alcohol causes because excessive alcohol consumption can affect health in a variety of ways. One of the most obvious is the way alcohol contributes to traffic accidents, as well as accidents with machinery in the workplace or in the home. The fatalities and injuries that result from this are a major drain on nations’ health budgets. Then there is the physiological damage excessive alcohol consumption causes to the body. The list of the kinds of death it might be responsible for makes frightening reading. On the other hand, there is some evidence that people who drink moderate amounts of alcohol live longer than teetotalers.

In my own country, Australia, there is another frightening consequence of excessive alcohol consumption: domestic violence. This is particularly the case in remote Aboriginal communities (community is indeed an ironic name for these places.) Child abuse is rife, violence is common and violence against women occurs in epidemic proportions, babies are born affected by FAS (fetal alcohol syndrome) leading to permanent mental impairment and heart damage. All this generates further hopelessness and social disfunction for the future. Of course, alcohol abuse and social disfunction occur in the non-Aboriginal population also, but not to the same extent.

Other, maybe less startling, instances of Excess, will be discussed soon. But before that, one must mention briefly perhaps the most insidious and, until recently, the most frightening form of Excess – cancer. Cancer, as we all know, occurs when an organ’s cells multiply and fail to die. In many instances cancer cells migrate and develop further cancers in other parts of the body from where they originated – they metastasize. Cancer is the most personal, most intimate, form of Excess: more and more of our own cells, multiplying more and more, until excessive life becomes its opposite – death. Surfeiting sickens, and thus causes death. Until several decades ago cancer was spoken of in hushed tones – it was seen, understandingly enough, as a death sentence. But the slogan prominently displayed in an Australian oncology ward some years back proclaimed: Cancer is a word, not a sentence. Modern medicine recognizes that there are many cancers, an excess of varieties of cancer, just as cancer is an excessive proliferation of cells. But many of them now respond to treatment and a growing number are curable, while newly developed gene techniques are helping target a specific person’s cancer with greater precision than was once dreamed of. For those who are interested, one can wholeheartedly recommend a recent book, The Emperor of All Maladies, by Siddhartha Mukherjee (2010).

← 22 | 23 → It is time now to turn briefly at other forms or modes of Excess – not medical this time, but social. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s brief article, “The London Riots – On Consumerism coming Home to Roost” (Baumann 2011) – is a well known diagnosis of what Bauman sees as the core and essential flaw in modern society – its division between the “haves” and the “have nots”. (This phrasing goes back to Ernest Hemingway’s 1937 novel, To Have and Have not, which dealt with an American forced by poverty into smuggling between the USA and Cuba.) The haves suffer from a kind of bulimia of possessions: “we dispose of one object of consumption in order to replace it with a “new and improved’ one which serves us as the prime measure of our social standing and the score in the life-success competition” (Baumann 2011). Buying a new car every two or three years would be a case in point. The have nots, by contrast, are the poor and deprived, barred from entering that temple of consumerism, the shopping mall. According to Bauman, so totally is a consumerist mentality engrained in our modern conscience that for those excluded from indulging in it “non-shopping is the jarring and festering stigma of a life un-fulfilled – and of [its] own nonentity and good-for-nothingness.”

Bauman’s article is a polemical piece and perhaps deliberately overstates the situation. There are many sources of satisfaction in life other than consumerism: a long loving relationship between people, children and family, a satisfying job (not necessarily well paid, perhaps not even paid at all but volunteer work done in retirement), involvement in the natural world, sport and, significantly, the arts. Yet Bauman is undoubtedly right in the broad picture: we live in a society where excessive consumption is the norm, and an inability to participate in it breeds envy and a desire to hit back. Hence the London riots that prompted his article.

How did we get this way? Bauman argues that in the second half of the twentieth century we changed from being a society of producers to a society of consumers. But there have always been conspicuous consumers: just look at the grand palaces and residences of Europe – just think of Versailles – or the Forbidden City in Beijing, or the Villa Adriana near Rome. What has happened is that the growing affluence of Western society and its developing middle class from the Enlightenment onwards has meant that excessive consumption has passed from the hands of the privileged few into the hands of the many. An extreme consumerist aristocracy has been supplanted by a consumerist middle class society.

It undoubtedly remains true that, as George Orwell wrote, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” (90). One thinks of Gordon Gekko, the main character in the 1980 movie Wall Street, (and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, 2010) and the famous line attributed to him, “Greed is ← 23 | 24 → Good.” Actually that is not exactly what he said in the movie: what he said was considerable worse: “Greed, for want of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies […] and greed, mark my words, will […] save […] that […] malfunctioning corporation called the United States.”

Well, the world and its financial systems saw what Bernie Madoff and Lehmann Brothers and similar heroes of financial greed and Excess did for the world economy in 2008. There seems little need to say any more on that topic.

Instead, a quick look at a newer and wildly proliferating area of Excess – information. The Information Age has its earliest beginnings in the development and subsequent growth of newspapers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though the first true newspaper is generally considered to be the Relation aller Fuernemmen und gedenkwuerdigen Historien which appeared in Strasburg from 1605 on. (The first English language newspaper was The London Gazette, which first began regular publication in 1666.) Before newspapers the regular dissemination of news and information was virtually impossible in a growing society. But what is commonly referred to today as the Information Age is generally seen as having started with the widespread use of computers from the 1970s onward. Even those who grew up well before then, now find it hard to imagine the world as it was before the Internet. The amount of important information – financial, scholarly, news and current affairs, science, etc. – available instantly on the Internet is almost incalculable. In addition, there are movies, music, and all kinds of social media – not to mention pornography. If there is information you want, you can get it. The Internet, for example, is the biggest cookbook the world has ever seen, and it is getting bigger by the minute.

Is anything wrong with this? Certainly this access to information on an unprecedented scale opens up intellectual and imaginative horizons in a totally new and exciting way. But one needs to make the crucial distinction between information and knowledge. Plato made this distinction in his dialogue, Phaedrus, more than two thousand years ago. To slightly modernize Plato’s terms, information is what is written down – in his day that was on manuscripts, where it might languish and even perish. In contrast, true knowledge is inscribed “in the soul of the learner” (98). Just how much of the information available today on the Internet – today’s equivalent of Plato’s books - would pass that test? Would the two hundred and fifty million images posted on Facebook every day? Would the ceaseless torrent of trivia on Facebook and Twitter qualify?

What might appear a positive side of this modern development is the way social media can evade censorship in oppressive regimes. It has been credited with having the capacity to mobilise protests and even uprisings during the ← 24 | 25 → Arab Spring, particularly in Tunisia and Egypt. On the other hand the threat it presents to traditional news sources means that everyone can be a journalist, and the traditional gate-keeping role of responsible news sources is bypassed. With such excessive quantities of information indiscriminately available, how can one distinguish what is accurate from what is rumour or plain false?

All this brings us to the question of what is Excess, and what is not.

Folk wisdom is studded with exhortations to moderation, e.g. the English proverbs “Too many cooks spoil the broth” or “A little goes a long way.” Wine labels carry the advice to “Enjoy in moderation.” In Australia there is a delicious substance called Vegemite - which only Australians find edible. It is a kind of disgusting looking thick brown paste, which you smear thinly on hot toast to make the most delicious breakfast imaginable. Its motto is, or was, “Too much spoils the flavour.” This might give us some guide as to what Excess is.

Duke Orsino asked for an Excess of music so that his appetite, his love, might be poisoned by it. Excess, I would argue, comes into being at that point where something harmless or even beneficial reaches and exceeds that crucial point, when it results in harm. When the drug that cures becomes a poison that kills. If it causes no harm, it is not Excess. Rain, for example, is essential for life and prosperity. When the Nile flooded ancient Egypt, bringing water and fresh alluvial soil, it sustained Egyptian civilization for more than three thousand years. Floods in the Philippines or India or Australia, on the other hand, are another matter. When rain causes floods and destruction, as it so often has, then it is Excess.

There is nothing particularly original about this definition of Excess, unless perhaps it is the emphasis on harm, on destructiveness, as its defining quality. Excess is what it is, not because it exceeds social norms or expectations, not because it offends our sense of proportion or good taste or balance, not because it offends or confronts accepted ethical standards, not because it rejects or refutes widely accepted religious or political beliefs. All of these actions can indeed be healthy, promoting imaginative, social and political growth, as they have in the past. Excess comes into being only when these actions, whatever they are, become harmful and ultimately destructive.

But perhaps there was one – and perhaps only one – instance of Excess that was wholly positive, wholly creative, and which has made us what we are today. And which, in an almost excessive way, we perpetuate, which we replicate, today, hundreds of thousands of years after it first occurred. Once it entered into the life of our hominid ancestors, Homo Erectus perhaps, it became transformed and, in turn, transformed him and her into Homo Sapiens – into what we are today. What I am referring to is, simply, play.

← 25 | 26 → In what follows I want to acknowledge my debt to a recent study by the very eminent sociologist Robert N. Bellah called Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, published in 2011. Bellah, in turn, in his discussion of play, freely acknowledges his debt to Gordon M. Burghardt’s 2005 study, Genesis of Animal Play, and Johan Huizinga’s famous 1938 study, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Elements in Culture.

As Burghardt makes very clear, humans are not the only creatures that play – at least in their infancy. Friedrich Schiller, in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man, writes rather anthropomorphically that “when the lion is not gnawed by hunger, and no beast is challenging him to battle, his idle energy creates for itself an object; he fills the echoing desert with his high-spirited roaring, and his exuberant power enjoys itself in purposeless display” (133-4). In his discussion of Plato’s Parable of the Cave, Bellar writes that for Plato “the freedom of play was linked to another realm where necessity does not reign” (585). Play, in other words, whether animal or human, can be defined as intrinsically motivated activity serving – at least initially – no other end than itself.

To understand Bellah’s core argument we must think ourselves back, and back […] and back […] to when our forebears were not really human as we understand it today. Approaching human shape, they were hunter-gathers of the most rudimentary kind, not much different from the apes that were their evolutionary ancestors. Their days were spent in hunting whatever animals they could kill – fish, birds, impala, rats, even insects – and scavenging whatever cereal, fruit, vegetables or other plant life they could find. Any spare time was devoted to defending their territory from competitors or walking to new sources of food, or engaging in sex so that the family group could perpetuate itself. Then something happened. At some time food became more plentiful, perhaps through some form of rudimentary agriculture, or through migration into more bountiful areas. And, most significantly, their children were being born, as they are today, unable to fend for themselves. Months, even years, had to be spent ensuring enough of them survived to maintain the group’s population. Most young mothers today may not agree here, but compared with what had been the situation before, something like leisure emerged. And with it, play.

Most psychologists and sociologists today, and the general public also, think of play as a preparation for more adult roles. Children grapple and wrestle with each other in order to prepare themselves for their future role as warriors, for example. And there is no doubt much truth in this. Kittens and puppies wrestling and biting give some substance to this notion of play as a preparation for adult activity. But when looking at our earliest hominid ancestors, Bellah rejects this teleology, this argument that our earliest ancestor children played in order ← 26 | 27 →to learn how to become like their fathers and mothers. Their play was, quite simply, something in excess of what their marginal existence required; it served no survival purpose. From the point of view of their hard pressed parents, play was a waste of time, simply what children do and that they will grow out of. It took place in that space opened up by the fact that these children were born too immature to care for themselves, or to contribute to the wellbeing of the family group (until they grew older, that is). As such, play was therefore the first, originary, instance of Excess in our human ancestry.

Play of this kind is still with us, even among adults. But it is precisely what we have since done with it, and which other animals have not, that makes us distinctly human. Since those early times, between three and four hundred thousand years ago, play has evolved, just as we have, into something beyond its origins. Play has proliferated into a diversity of activities that we see essential to our life, both as individuals and as a society. It is hard for us to think back to that earliest moment, when play served no useful purpose, when it was an Excess of what is needed to keep us and the family group alive. Cormac McCarthy’s recent apocalyptic novel The Road (2006) and Peter Brook’s stunning production of Colin Higgins’, Dennis Cannon’s and Colin Turnbull’s play The Ik (1984, 1985) portray a contemporary society reduced to such extremes. In these circumstances, play disappears. It is abraded by the harshness of the need simply to survive, though in McCarthy’s novel love survives, at least until the next turn of the road.

Now why should a novel and a film serve as examples of such extreme circumstances? Bellah’s argument is that Play, this very first instance of Excess, essentially gives rise to the life of the mind that we know today. From that first emergence of Excess has grown so much of what today defines our life. The first to emerge was dance, and song, which then became a way of bodily enacting ritual, which then have evolved, many centuries later into narrative, myth, religion, philosophy and every manifestation of the arts.

By way of approaching a conclusion, it is time now to turn to literature, because I think that the preceding argument might shed some light on one of the most puzzling aspects of literature – why we admire and even identify with characters who in our personal life we would find utterly repulsive.

The Ancient Greeks had a word to describe people who were excessive: hubristic. They suffered from hubris, excessive ambition, and generally rivalled the Gods – to their detriment. In Greek tragedy we identify with the hubristic hero while conscious that we are backing the wrong horse – his inevitable fall from greatness is the essence of Greek tragedy. Something happened to this genre when, more than two thousand years later, it emerged in Europe. The English dramatist Christopher Marlowe’s two-part play Tamburlaine the Great (1587 or ← 27 | 28 → 1588), exults what became known as “the over-reacher.” Throughout the play we cheer Tamburlaine on, from success to success, from atrocity to atrocity, until he meets his inevitable end. He is a monster, his pride and his cruelty are appalling, he is a war criminal, but he is a monster of Excess, and we admire him.

Shakespeare’s Falstaff is a more famous example. He is undoubtedly the most loved of Shakespeare’s characters. Verdi wrote an opera about him. We identify with him: “Banish plump Jack and you banish the world” he declares in Part 1 of Henry IV (ii, iv). Somehow he is our world. Yet were we to have to deal with him today he would be grotesque. Considering what he does, we would probably call the police. The young and suddenly very cold new Henry V, once his close companion in devilry, banishes this lord of misrule. But why do we feel this to be harsh? Falstaff is described as a “tun of guts” and only his age and his excessive belly get in his way of having sex. He is very clever and a great speaker, and these advocate for him. But like Tamburlaine, we admire him for the sheer guts with which he is himself. While Henry V becomes the successful political figure, Falstaff reminds us of our bodily entity. Falstaff is Excess personified, but we can share in his inner life, his ambitions and his disappointments.

This capacity to empathise with, even be enraptured by, figures that in real life we would find repulsive or grotesque, remains one of the puzzling effects of art. Theoreticians and neuroscientists have put forward their various explanations. Two Australian novels provide further and contrasting examples. Randolph Stow’s Tourmaline (1963) centres on a charismatic figure who is rescued from the desert in Western Australia and who mesmerizes a whole struggling remote town that had once been a gold mining centre but is now moribund. He proclaims that he will find water (with resonances of “the water of life,” spiritual salvation) but is an utter failure. We, the readers, along with the novel’s narrator, know he is an imposter and will never do what all the townspeople hope and believe he will. Yet we sympathise, even rally behind, this monstrous parody of something like a modern Christ figure, even though we know that he knows that he is a fraud. Why?

Peter Carey’s novel, Oscar and Lucinda (1988), made into a movie directed by Gillian Armstrong in 1997 and starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett, is another example. It is a complex novel and one does not need to go into the plot details here. The two protagonists are not monsters, but they are monumentally unrealistic, even hubristic. In the last part of the book they try to ferry a church made of glass up a river to a country town. The symbolism is extreme: a church would indicate some aspiration that transcends the merely material. Glass indicates clarity, purity, but also extreme fragility. As one expects, the venture is disastrous, the church overturns and is smashed. But what a madly ← 28 | 29 → quixotic, excessive and utterly unexpected thing to try to do! Oscar and Lucinda are heroes, not totally unlike their ancient Greek precursors, as they tackle the impossible, even though they are not tragic. They are not quite comic either, but somewhere in between, like Falstaff. We admire them in the excessiveness of their unrealistic and unattainable ambition. Why?

And Kurtz? “Mr Kurtz, he dead”, we are told in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (150), one of the greatest novels in the English language and possibly one of the greatest written by a Polish novelist. Of course: Excess kills, its poisonous nature is what distinguishes it from mere abundance. This is graphically illustrated in the 1979 movie directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now, based on Conrad’s novel but set in Vietnam and Cambodia, where we see skulls displayed on stakes as we approach “Kurtz’s” house. In Conrad’s novel, the story is told by a widely experienced but rather ordinary seaman called Marlow (like the dramatist, though spelled a little differently) as his audience sits on the deck of a boat in the Thames, waiting for the tide to change, so that it can leave port. But when we – and Marlow – finally find Kurtz deep in the Belgium Congo, it is Kurtz who captures our minds.