I thought I'd be writing today about how going to see the New York City Ballet in a mostly Balanchine program deepened my experience of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, which I'm reading for next week's religious ethics class. The famous "leap of faith" is, after all, not a leap over Lessing's ditch, but a ballet dancer's seemingly physically impossible and effortless rise. The ballet was indeed splendid. But instead I was caught short by Fear and Trembling's epigraph, which seems to me to point to the origins of a phrase I thought I understood - I learned it in Australia, where I heard it often.
The phrase in question is "tall poppy syndrome," the tendency (now apparently moderated) to punish and persecute those who stand out, as one might chop the heads off poppies which grow taller than others. At the time I understood it as analogous to the Japanese idiom, 出る杭が打たれる, deru kui ga utareru: the stake which sticks out gets pounded in. Both described a conformist society suspicious of those who stand out, even (or especially) if they excelled in some way. Tall poppy syndrome was the reason, I was told, why Australians of talent never stayed in Oz but left for London, America, anywhere.
But now, from that famous Danish decryer of conformity, I learn that the poppies refer back farther, and more profoundly. More precisely, Kierkegaard quotes J. G. Hamann:
This is the kind of deliberately obscure and hermetic emblem Hamann (about whom I taught a whole graduate seminar a few years ago) specialized in, and Hamann-like also in suggesting on the very first page of a book that the reader will almost certainly miss its point - though Kierkegaard adds the twist that his pseudonymous author Johannes de silentio probably doesn't know what he's conveying either. An editor's note explains what's going on, or at least what's being alluded to:
While engaged in war with Gabii, Tarquinius Superbus (an early king of Rome) had his son flee to Gabii under the pretence that he had been mistreated by his father. The inhabitants made him their military leader, and by striking off the heads of the tallest poppies in his garden before the eyes of his son's messenger, Tarquinius managed to convey to the son that he should put to death or banish the leading men of Gabii. This done, Gabii quickly surrendered to Tarquinius.
So tall poppy syndrome is also a way of defeating an enemy: makes sense, then, as a term used by alienated Australian cultural exiles who felt unappreciated at home and yet never quite accepted in the colonial metropole. And how sweet to use a phrase which the hoi poloi (like me!) will think is a humble farm expression but really refers to classical antiquity!
Of course, in Hamann and in Kierkegaard other things are at work, notably a Christian theological point about a father, and a son whom we may be tempted to think the father has treated badly: Abraham and Isaac anyone, or - and - The Father and The Son? For Kierkegaard, savage critic of "Christendom," most of Christian tradition must be the messenger, who doesn't even know what he's reporting. And who are the leading men of Gabii who must be put to death? The superficial preachers, the philosophers, or at least our inner superficial preachers and philosophers. But in Kierkegaard, as in Hamann, it's never as simple as this, there are layers and levels, inversions and allusions... What fun! Pirouettes as well as leaps!
The phrase in question is "tall poppy syndrome," the tendency (now apparently moderated) to punish and persecute those who stand out, as one might chop the heads off poppies which grow taller than others. At the time I understood it as analogous to the Japanese idiom, 出る杭が打たれる, deru kui ga utareru: the stake which sticks out gets pounded in. Both described a conformist society suspicious of those who stand out, even (or especially) if they excelled in some way. Tall poppy syndrome was the reason, I was told, why Australians of talent never stayed in Oz but left for London, America, anywhere.
But now, from that famous Danish decryer of conformity, I learn that the poppies refer back farther, and more profoundly. More precisely, Kierkegaard quotes J. G. Hamann:
Was Tarquinius Superbus in seinem Garten
mit den Mohnkopfen sprach, verstand der Sohn,
aber nicht der Bote.
(What Tarquin the Proud said in his garden with the poppy
blooms was understood by the son but not by the messenger.)
mit den Mohnkopfen sprach, verstand der Sohn,
aber nicht der Bote.
(What Tarquin the Proud said in his garden with the poppy
blooms was understood by the son but not by the messenger.)
This is the kind of deliberately obscure and hermetic emblem Hamann (about whom I taught a whole graduate seminar a few years ago) specialized in, and Hamann-like also in suggesting on the very first page of a book that the reader will almost certainly miss its point - though Kierkegaard adds the twist that his pseudonymous author Johannes de silentio probably doesn't know what he's conveying either. An editor's note explains what's going on, or at least what's being alluded to:
While engaged in war with Gabii, Tarquinius Superbus (an early king of Rome) had his son flee to Gabii under the pretence that he had been mistreated by his father. The inhabitants made him their military leader, and by striking off the heads of the tallest poppies in his garden before the eyes of his son's messenger, Tarquinius managed to convey to the son that he should put to death or banish the leading men of Gabii. This done, Gabii quickly surrendered to Tarquinius.
So tall poppy syndrome is also a way of defeating an enemy: makes sense, then, as a term used by alienated Australian cultural exiles who felt unappreciated at home and yet never quite accepted in the colonial metropole. And how sweet to use a phrase which the hoi poloi (like me!) will think is a humble farm expression but really refers to classical antiquity!
Of course, in Hamann and in Kierkegaard other things are at work, notably a Christian theological point about a father, and a son whom we may be tempted to think the father has treated badly: Abraham and Isaac anyone, or - and - The Father and The Son? For Kierkegaard, savage critic of "Christendom," most of Christian tradition must be the messenger, who doesn't even know what he's reporting. And who are the leading men of Gabii who must be put to death? The superficial preachers, the philosophers, or at least our inner superficial preachers and philosophers. But in Kierkegaard, as in Hamann, it's never as simple as this, there are layers and levels, inversions and allusions... What fun! Pirouettes as well as leaps!
