Greg Dening - In this marvelous study of the actual mutiny on the Bounty, Greg Dening examines both history and its representation in film, literature, and popular culture

Greg Dening, Mr Bligh's Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theater on H. M. Armed Vessel Bounty. Cambridge University Press, 1992.

"Captain Bligh" is a cliche of our times for the extravagant and violent misuse of power. In fact, William Bligh was one of the least physically violent disciplinarians in the British navy. That paradox inspires the author to ask why, then, did Bligh have a mutiny? Its answer is to display the theatricality of naval institutions and the mythologizing power of history. Mr Bligh's Bad Language is an anthropological and historical study of the mutiny on the Bounty, and its role in society and culture. Throughout the book, Greg Dening draws on a wide range of intellectual influences, ending with the cinematic versions of the mutiny in the twentieth century.

In this marvelous study of the actual mutiny on the Bounty, Greg Dening examines both history and its representation in film, literature, and popular culture. One of the more famous stories of the high seas, the subject of numerous films and many books, the mutiny has left a significant mark.        Dening chooses to view (and represent) the whole episode as theatre. The book is presented (in its framework, if not actual form) as a play. There are three acts to it, complete with prologue, two entr'actes and an epilogue. Each act is introduced, and then offers two scenes -- a Narrative one, describing the actual events, and a Reflection on those events.        Combining the study of history with more modern theories of literature, theatre, and popular culture Dening is able to give a comprehensive account and explanation of why the events on the Bounty became what they did. One argument made in the book is that the notorious Captain Bligh was, in fact, not the sadistic, mean man he is made out to be, and that his failure lies elsewhere. Dening convincingly presents the events as theatre, and he basically argues that Bligh's failure was in not knowing how to play his role.        Dening follows the transformation of the Bounty story from history to popular legend to the subject of books and films. He even finds a wealth of material in the repeated filming of the story, each version of which he discusses.        The book is filled with fascinating detail. The mutiny story is well-told, and Dening's broad interpretation around it is superb. A fascinating, marvelous read, we recommend this book highly. - The Complete Review

Social theorists have tried many definitions of human nature: human beings are the animals that
    make tools, that laugh, that play. I have another: Human-beings are history-makers. We eternally
    make our present by looking backwards. We present ourselves by expressing a significant past.
    To know us in our history is to know who we are. -Greg Dening (Performances)
At 4:30 A.M. on April 28, 1789 a series of events began which has ever since held a grip on Western imagination.  Fletcher Christian lead a mutiny against Captain William Bligh aboard HMS Bounty.  The aftermath of this rebellion included: Bligh's remarkable 4,000 mile journey with 18 loyal crewmen in an open launch; the sinking of HMS Pandora, which had been sent out to arrest the mutineers, with a loss of 34 men, including 4 of the Bounty crew; and the establishment of a weird sort of tropical commune on Pitcairn's Island by Christian and eight other men along with the Tahitian women (and a few friends and progeny) who may or may not have been the precipitating cause of the whole fiasco.  Eventually Bligh would return to sea, three of the mutineers would be returned to England and hanged and all but one of the men on Pitcairn's Island would be murdered or die of disease. Now there's obviously enough material there to justify the boatload of Bounty books, plays and movies that have poured forth in a steady stream over the past two centuries, but what Professor Dening has uniquely done is to consider the uses to which the story has been put over those years.  He makes the convincing argument that Captain Bligh, contrary to popular imagery, was not particularly abusive of his men.  Indeed, the title of the book is reflective of Dening's position that Bligh was mostly despised for the harsh language he used in upbraiding men, not for any physical measures nor for the quality of his command in general.  Having made his case, Dening moves on to a consideration of why our historical understanding of Bligh requires that he be seen as an ogre.  If the "reality" is that he was a fairly mild captain for his time, why do we, looking backward, see him as the very embodiment of tyrannical authority?   Why are Christian and his cohorts seen as heroes, virtual freedom fighters? The book is wide ranging, learned, entertaining and thought provoking, but its best feature is the balance that Dening strikes between the effort to present the story of the Bounty as ethnographic history ("an attempt to represent the past  as it was actually experienced") and the realization that:     a historical fact is not what happened but that small part of what has happened that has been used
    by historians to talk about,  History is not the past: it is a consciousness of the past used for present
    purposes. Everyone who has ever been subjected to a history course in the modern university is familiar with the obsession with primary sources, the Left dictatorship which controls academia insists that the "truth" is to be found in the pamphlets and diaries and letters of the unimportant and the obscure, rather than in the texts and speeches of the great who shaped our understanding of events.  Dening, on the other hand, understands that there is a fundamental dichotomy between the way participants experienced historical events and their importance to the society as a whole.  In a very real sense, it is simply not important whether Christ was the son of God, whether England ruled the colonies harshly, whether Southerners fought for slavery, whether FDR ended the Depression, whether Nixon subverted the Constitution and Clinton merely lied about sex--what matters is that this is how we perceive these events.  In Denings' felicitous phrase: Illusions make things true; truth does not dispel illusion. - www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/383/Mr.%20Bligh's%20.htm

Greg Dening, Performances, University Of Chicago Press, 1996.


With elegance and candor, Greg Dening offers a panoramic collection of rich and densely textured essays that demonstrate how we can only understand our present through our consciousness of the past and how in thinking about the past we mirror the time and place of our own living.

For Dening, history saturates every moment of our cultural and personal existence. Yet he is keenly aware that the actual past remains fundamentally irreplicable. All histories are culturally crafted artifacts, commensurate with folk tales, stage plays, or films. Whether derived from logbooks and letters, or displayed on music hall stages and Hollywood back lots, history is in essence our making sense of what has and continues to happen, creating for us a sense of our cultural and individual selves.
Through juxtapositions of actual events and creative reenactments of them—such as the mutiny on the Bounty in 1787 and the various Hollywood films that depict that event—Dening calls attention to the provocative moment of theatricality in history making where histories, cultures, and selves converge. Moving adeptly across varied terrains, from the frontiers of North America to the islands of the South Pacific, Dening marshals a striking array of diverse, often recalcitrant, sources to examine the tangled histories of cross-cultural clash and engagement. Refusing to portray conquest, colonization, and hegemony simply as abstract processes, Dening, in his own culturally reflexive performance, painstakingly evokes the flesh and form of past actors, both celebrated and unsung, whose foregone lives have become our history.


Greg Dening offers a variety of readings of history in this collection of essays. In an engaging style and using fascinating examples, Dening shows how varied views of events ("history") can be, and how pervasive such history is in our culture -- as something that is constantly used and referred to in fashioning the present and how we see it. History, Dening claims, can be seen as theatre, and the events that shape much of it (particularly those when cultures first meet) can be seen as performances. The interpretations of these performances by the audience often go disastrously wrong. As Dening shows, it can be a useful way of reexamining events, and understanding them better.
       Much of this is familiar from one of Dening's previous books, the brilliant Mr. Bligh's Bad Language (see our review). The Pacific, an area of interest for the Australian historian and anthropologist Dening, offers a number of other examples (though the mutiny on the Bounty is also revisited), and Dening also brings in examples from farther afield. They are interesting stories, well told, and Dening makes a convincing case for his "poetic for histories".
       Among the subjects of the essays are: Cook's encounters in the Pacific, the Battle of Valparaiso (off Chile in 1814), the various films about the mutiny on the Bounty (familiar material from Mr. Bligh's Bad Language), the "Songlines" Bruce Chatwin wrote about, and Anzac Day.
       The only real disappointment is that the essays are relatively brief, and that Dening's treatment remains somewhat cursory. Spoiled by the riches of Mr. Bligh's Bad Language the reader wants equally rich detail here. Nevertheless, it is a fascinating collection and it is certainly recommended. - The Complete Review

Challenges to Perform: History, Passion and the Imagination by Greg Dening