Error-fest 2006!!

Another post on error! For the full error experience, start reading a couple of posts ago.

What function does error serve in narrative?

For Aristotle the recognition (anagnorisis) of error (hamartia) is one of the essential parts of the tragic plot:

Sleeping with your mother is bad.
Knowing that you're sleeping with your mother is tragic.

Often, though, error narratives are really correction narratives.

Error allows us to reimagine the order of things, to return to order on more voluntary or on transcendent terms. The Iliad is a story of error: Agamemnon's error in taking Achilles' girlfriend (he later blames this error on Ate, a personification of madness). More importantly, it is the story of Achilles' error in refusing to fight. This error leads, however indirectly, to the death of his friend, Patroclus. Achilles' refusal was error, but it was a necessary error: it allowed him to return to battle with god-made armor, a heart full of revengeful battlelust, and a sharper sense of purpose than Homer Simpson at a beer garden.

In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas discussed the importance of error for the historical narrative of messianic redemption: O felix culpa quae talem et tantum meruit habere redemptorem: "O happy sin that earned such a great and good redeemer."

The "fortunate fall" of Adam and Eve paves the way for a messiah who will redeem mankind. It also allows for a return to paradise that is made transcendent. The first paradise was what it was. You know, nice and everything, but there wasn't anything to compare it to. The paradise of a redeemed mankind would be made even paradisier by having been expelled from the first one.

This model of error and renewal recurs throughout literary history.

There is a wonderful scene in Villette, in which the plain and retiring Lucy Snow is coerced into wearing a pink dress to a concert. She prepares uneasily, eyeing her companion's brown dress: "How I envied her those folds of grave, dark majesty!"

Lucy is intensely conscious of her dress and worried that she will be an object of ridicule in this "bright tint." She and her party walk into the concert hall, and she recounts their progress to their seats:

We moved on—I was not at all conscious whither—but at some turn we suddenly encountered another party approaching from the opposite direction. I just now see that group, as it flashed—upon me for one moment. A handsome middle-aged lady in dark velvet; a gentleman who might be her son—the best face, the finest figure, I thought, I had ever seen; a third person in a pink dress and black lace mantle.

I noted them all—the third person as well as the other two—and for the fraction of a moment believed them all strangers, thus receiving an impartial impression of their appearance. But the impression was hardly felt and not fixed, before the consciousness that I faced a great mirror, filling a compartment between two pillars, dispelled it: the party was our own party. Thus for the first, and perhaps only time in my life, I enjoyed the “giftie” of seeing myself as others see me. No need to dwell on the result. It brought a jar of discord, a pang of regret; it was not flattering, yet, after all, I ought to be thankful; it might have been worse.

It's a tiny moment of misreading and correction in a novel filled with misreading. Bronte's narrative solicits misreadings from her readers and Lucy is continually misreading her situations. This moment of recognition is not on the Aristotelean model, but rather marks the beginning of observation and recognition that reshapes the course of the novel.

We should all have such "gifties" - complete with discord and pangs of regret. It could, after all, be worse.

O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us.
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion:
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us,
An' ev'n devotion!

- Robert Burns, "To a Louse"