A War Story

Ladies and Gentlemen, another winner off the Common Reading Exam List.

I find that I’ve been going through cycles with these works.  Most of the time, my selection of what to read next is influenced by several random factors: which time period from the list do I feel most lacking in?  Which work and/or author piques my interest at any given moment?  Have any of these works been brought up recently in conversation/class/the media?  Which title intrigues me the most?

One is always bound to like certain literature over others.  We all have taste.  Certain things appeal to us, certain things do not.  My waves of “love it” “hate it” could be influenced by any (or none of) the above factors.  I like to think of it like karma; here, you read something awful, then have a few good books before jumping into the fray of something that will feel like self-flagellation for a thousand pages or more (Doris Lessing, I’m looking at you).

By far my weakest section of the exam list is the modern section.  Incidentally, this is also the section which has been bolstered the least by my classes.  It’s probably a statement on the classes I chose to take over anything else (at this juncture, I’ll be an Eighteenth Century gal before you blink an eye thanks to the ever-wonderful best professor in the world).  In any case, I picked up Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods for a few reasons: I had actually purchased it (so I felt that I had to read it), it was from the modern section of the list, and it was a whippy three-hundred page slip of a thing.

And oh man. 

The novel is a purposefully fragmented account of the disappearance of fictional politician John Wade and his wife, Kathy.  It is told in chapters alternating between hypotheses about how the disappearance may have occurred, bits of evidence from subsequent trials/investigations, narrated bits of the couple’s life in the past as well as their life in the book’s “now”.  It is also one of the most noteworthy literary attempts to deal with Vietnam.

O’Brien was a Vietnam vet and his book downright screams of themes also present in Slaughterhouse Five, another account of war, its dangers, and an author trying to cope with the inhumanity of it.  The two novels are scarily similar in many ways.  O’Brien was a Vietnam vet present at the massacre of My Lai.  His tour ended in 1970.  In the Lake of the Woods deals heavily with the My Lai Massacre and was published in 1994, twenty-four years after O’Brien’s tour ended.  Vonnegut was a World War II vet and witnessed the fire bombing of Dresden while a prisoner in the city.  He was repatriated in 1945 and did not publish Slaughterhouse Five (which, surprise surprise, deals heavily with the Fire Bombing of Dresden) until 1969 (twenty-four years after his tour ended). 

Beyond these cosmetic similarities, the two novels are structured in nearly identical fashions.  Both are purposefully disjointed accounts of events which may or may not have any sense to them.  Both claim, up front, that there is no sense to be made from the contents of their pages.  Both remain unresolved in the minds of readers as they similarly provide no resolution to us.  Both struggle with the meaning of life-within-war and the humanity (or lack thereof) innately involved in the waging of a war.  Both are obsessed with the concept of losing something essential to one’s humanity and the inability to retrieve it after the war.  Both feature empty shells of people trying their hardest to go on with their lives despite the fact that they simply cannot reconcile what it is that they are missing post-war. 

Both beg us to re-examine ourselves and declare what it is that we couldn’t live without.  To witness the horrors and atrocities that Billy Pilgrim and John Wade have witnessed and committed is to sacrifice something essential of ourselves.  What is that something?  Where, within our souls, are the parts that make us human?  What would we lose that could make food taste bland and love become an empty word?

And are we to pity or condemn these “heroes”?  To me, this is a major point of divergence between the two stories.  I have always sympathized with Billy Pilgrim, though I know others find him whiny and his apathy difficult to stand.  The more I learned about John Wade, the less I liked him.  Like other characters in the book, I constantly felt that he was trying to pull the wool over my eyes (despite a quasi-omniscient narrator).  I did not trust him.  The narrative seems to pit the reader against him, attempting to sway us to some nefarious conclusion about him (though it is difficult to determine what, precisely, that is).  Even armed with this knowledge, I still found myself not wanting to sympathize entirely with him.  Bottom line: he was creepy.

The similarities between these two novels document the important creative process which seems to accompany the artistic processing of any great calamity.  It makes me wonder if a study of literature wouldn’t prove fruitful to the treatment of PTSD patients.  Through literature, we are allowed an (albeit obstructed) point of view into an author’s mind.  That point of view, it seems, could prove invaluable to helping those going through a similar situation. 

Overall, this book kept me wanting to return to it, despite how disgusted or appalled I may have been with its subject matter.  I even pondered trading in my read-at-the-gym non-literary fantasy novel for it a few times… though concluded that while I could read on the stationary bike, I definitely could not take notes, and read, and cycle at the same time.  Maybe that’ll be a trick for next time.

Rating: A Real Page-Turner.

In Springtime (the only pretty ringtime)

 Yesterday was my first day of school for Spring 2011.  Once more into the breach.  The first week of class is a peculiar experience spiced with all manner of conflicting emotions which waft through it like the daintiest of storm clouds.

First and foremost: WHERE DID MY WINTER BREAK GO!?  It seemed like such a long time period when I was looking forward to it like the light at the end of the tunnel of books and papers.  I didn’t get a break at all!  What did I even do with myself?!  Oh…. Right… wrote that one errant paper, celebrated holidays with my family, put together publication and conference proposals (not as many as last year, but still), worked, took weekend trips, read as much as I was motivated to for the MRE, cooked, slept, karaoked my little heart out…. Damn.  I guess this isn’t some trick of the cosmos or a time vortex caused by errant Time Lords.

Sigh.

Then there’s the excitement.  A new semester is a fresh start in a lot of ways.  Even though I’ve had two out of three of my professors before, even though I am going to be continuing the same ideological work that I have already begun, there’s new books, new notebooks, new pens and pencils, new theory, new classes, and new authors to explore and analyze.  It’s like opening up the doors to a new playground; your playmates by and large remain the same, and the same type of equipment is available to you, but there’s a new set-up and some new toys to tinker with.  Have I mentioned the new books?  The beginning of a semester is the only time when I feel justified in spending several hundred dollars in one go on books.  And oh man… do I love books.

There is also this feeling of tension upon walking into a brand new class.  The classroom dynamic for any given course is entirely different depending on the professor, the students, their backgrounds, and their relative interests in the topic at hand.  Prepping for the first day of class is like arming to step onto a battlefield for the first time not even knowing if the fight will ever begin.  You must prepare for any given situation.  Like a boyscout.  Or a good hitch-hiker.  Know where you towel is, and don’t panic.  There’s also a certain degree of feeling one’s way through things, a tentativeness about what you should and should not say and what that will spur from other students in the class (or the professor).  What hot buttons should you press?  Which should you avoid?  What will set them into a downward spiral of ranting?  What will spur interesting conversation?  Any good tactician knows that there are things you should show up front and there are things you should keep to yourself.  Secret weapons.  What should be yours in this class?  Your area of expertise is almost always written on your sleeve, but that most recent paper you wrote may be a good option… or the influential bit of theory that you have been contesting in your mind for the past few weeks….  In any case, chose wisely.  The course of your entire semester may remain in the balance.

Then, of course, there is the mental checklist.  As you glance down the syllabus for the first time you can begin to see how your semester will play out.  Where will you be busy?  Where will you have time to relax for a bit?  What other events do you have planned surrounding the dates before you that should influence your decision in when you should give oral seminar presentations?  What do you need to accomplish this semester?  When you have read everything that is before you, what will you really take away from it?

This semester, for me, is a big deal.  It’s my last semester of my MA.  It’s the semester in which I have to take my Master’s Reading Exam (March 21 and 22… shudder).  It’s the semester in which I discover what the next year or two (or seven) of my life will hold.  It’s a semester in flux, with very specific dates and deadlines which must be met in order to proceed with whatever it is that I’m going to do with myself in the near future.  So many questions, not so many answers, and it’s only the second day of class.

One thing is for certain: they’ll be seeing a lot more of my face at the gym and the bar.  Because really, what can life bring this semester that a good workout, a beer, and writing an emo poem or two cure?

Puerto Rican Love

As the winter break winds draws to a close, I’m busy attacking the Common Reading Exam List with a vengeance.  Last week, I got through passages from the Bible, three Nathaniel Hawthorne short stories (“My Kinsman, Major Molineux”, “The Minister’s Black Veil”, “The Maypole of Merry Mount”), and Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”.  This week already, I veritably blew through Jesus Colon’s A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches.

This is miraculous in several respects: the first being that I had absolutely no inclination to read the book based solely upon the title.  Criticism founded in any singular nationality is not something that I do, it’s not something that I’m comfortable with, and overall it represents a plethora of literary fields that I just do not connect to in any way, shape or form.  The closest I’ve come to any nationalist reading has been Irish literature, and that’s only because of a summer spent living in Dublin and my deep-seated adoration of Wilde and Yeats.  The title of this piece put me off; I have found by and large that any book based in a precept of national identity is just something I simply cannot relate to.  As a result, I find such books drab, boring, and perhaps not pointless but certainly without a point that I care to read about.

This book was gifted to me for my birthday, so even more than the other items on my CRE list, I felt obligated to read it.

And I have to say, I’m so glad that I did.

Jesus Colon came to New York from Puerto Rico as a stowaway in 1918.  He weathered some difficult times as one might imagine, but for that (if his writing is any indication of his actual temperament) never lost the spark of intellect, humor, and national identity that this book is steeped with.  It is noteworthy in that it is the first book-length work on the subject of Puerto Ricans in America to appear in English.  The vast majority of the book was written during the 1950s and it wasn’t published until 1961.  It is written in a series of short sketches (ranging in length from one page to seven pages), some of which appeared in print in various periodicals which Colon wrote for but most of which were never seen in print until the book’s publication.

Noteworthy to me is the amount of wit and humor in what could easily turn into a sob fest (not without reason, mind you, I’m not trying to trivialize the plight of the immigrant worker).  Colon’s style is light and quick.  Like a fencer, he never beats a point over the head.  He will touch and go, leaving you understanding, but still thinking.  He is subtle while remaining explicit and that is another part of what I love so much about this book.  I don’t feel talked down to, I don’t feel preached at, rather I feel taught.  He is educational without being didactic and entertaining without being trivializing.

I also connect with Colon as a person.  Colon paints himself as an educated man caught in a world set to minimize him.  He lovingly embellishes details of himself as a reader/writer/man that any not-so-closeted literary geek will connect to.  Things like feeling not fully dressed without a book tucked under his arm, his love for reading in the bath (and his method of doing so), and being able to recite Don Quixote because of his nostalgic childhood connection with the text appeal to me as a book nerd.  Things like his sneaky usage of his wife’s decorative bathroom towels, his examination of the practice of singing in the shower, his propensity to spend his day off riding the bus lines to their very last stop then journeying back on another bus, and his hesitancy to liken a woman to “a goddess” because he has never seen one appeal to me as a human being. 

Perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of the novel, to me, is entrenched in an incident which occurs at the book’s very beginning.  In Puerto Rico, cigar-factory workers would hire a man to read to them as they rolled cigars.  This man, called the Reader, would often be more of a performer than a straight reciter.  He would act out important passages of the books, commit them to memory verbatim, and perform them for the workers throughout the day.  Colon admits that, despite the years which separate him from his childhood in Puerto Rico, he can still hear the voice of the Reader reciting key passages to him from famous works of literature.  These books, these recitations, seem keystones in Colon’s interest in literature.  They are his first exposure to books (at least as presented in A Puerto Rican…) and he admits, “I can still see that window and listen to that voice reading from the adventures of Don Quixote or the miseries and persecution suffered by Jean Valjean, books and characters that will be remembered many years after the latest ‘whodunit’ has been read and forgotten” (12).  The performance, suffused in Colon’s bones, stayed with him over any contemporary work he read for himself.  It made the literature longer-lasting to him and provided scaffolding for the rest of Colon’s literary career.

To me, this is utterly indicative of the power of literature in performance.  You can read a book, certainly, but how long will that book remain with you?  How long will that reading be called into your memory?  Unless you are among the lucky percentage of the population with photographic recollection, chances are it is not that first reading which will stick but rather subsequent readings and conversations that occur from it.  On the other hand, you can go see a play.  A performance.  Something that can (and will) never be repeated in exactly the same way again, and how long will that remain with you?  A truly memorable performance is easier to digest, more suffusing, and easier to remember than a truly memorable read.  Colon’s experience stands testament to this. 

Overall, if you are at all interested in old New York, equal rights, Puerto Ricans, the labor movement, writing, reading, or just good literature, you should really give this book a go.  It’s a two-hundred-page-slip-of-a-thing divided into perfectly digestible bite-size bits, so it’s an ideal commuting buddy, bed-side book, or on-the-go-waiting-for-random-things read. 

Rating: I will cheat on the bard.

Works Cited

Colon, Jesus.  A Puerto Rican in New York And Other Sketches.  New York: International Publishers (2002).  Print.

A Knight's Tale

Slowly but surely, like the brave little toaster that I am, I have been hacking away at that good old Master’s Reading Exam List.  Today’s conquest, a poem that despite even my own amazement I had never read before, is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

After Niapaul’s intolerable novel, I wanted something that I knew I would enjoy and preferably something that I could bang out quickly.  Gawain really fit the bill.  I enjoyed it far more than I thought I would and I have so much to say about it that I’m going to have trouble fitting my reading into a blog-length post, so please bear with me as I digest this. 

First of all, if you haven’t read it, you really should.  There is a version made available by the University of Michigan co-edited by Tolkien (which really made my inner geek squeal) but it is in Middle English which even I find hard to read.  A good modern-English edition is W.A. Neilson’s.  Don’t get me started on the differences between “Old” “Middle” and “Early Modern” English, break-down of the history of the English language on another day, I promise.

Most notable within the poem is a tension between Paganism and Christianity, as presented by the title tension between Sir Gawain (a Christian Knight) and the unnamed-until-the-end Green Knight.  The story is actually a Christmas story; the Green Knight appears in Arthur’s Court while the Court is celebrating Christmas and the challenge the Green Knight offers is a “Christmas game” (verse 13 line 282).  Christmas, the ultimate Christian appropriation of Pagan festivals, thus sets the stage for the poem’s primary contention. 

Green, a color long associated with hills, dales, grass, and in general “that nature stuff” seems a fitting color for the champion of Paganism.  Anyone with a shrewd eye and a background in fantasy literature will spot the Green Knight’s true identity within the poem’s first fit.  When he enters Arthur’s court, he “in height outstripped all earthly men” (verse 7 line 137) and seems to be “half a giant on earth” (verse 7 line 139).  He is clearly not a man of mundane or earthly origins, if he was the anonymous poet wouldn’t have taken such care to wrap his imagery in otherworldly qualities.  In addition, the bargain which the Green Knight offers is that whomever strikes him shall have “a year and a day’s reprieve” (verse 13 line 96-97) before being struck in return.  A year and a day is, traditionally, a fairy bargain.  As if there were any doubt of the Green Knight’s supernaturalness, the issue is clinched when, after Gawain chops his head off in one stroke, Mister Green calmly picks his head off the ground and addresses the court Headless Horseman style reminding Gawain of the bargain they have made before riding out gallantly, head tucked underneath his arm.  It is revealed at the end of the poem after Gawain receives his due punishment that the Green Knight is Bertilak of the High Dessert in service to Morgan Le Fay who lent him magic and sent him on his journey to Arthur’s court to test the Round Table (see verses 98-99).  The Green Knight is definitively a Knight of the Fairies. 

The Green Knight’s challenge comes in a suitably Christian/Pagan number: three.  For three days does Gawain stay at the Green Knight’s court.  Three times is Gawain seduced by the Green Knight’s Lady, and three times does Gawain turn down her advances.  Three times does the Green Knight go hunting and return with his kill.  And, in the end, it is three strikes of the Green Knight’s axe that are given to Gawain as reward/punishment for his deeds.  We all know that Christianity’s big triad is the Father, Son and Holy Ghost and most of us are also aware that this triad was stolen from the Pagan Maiden, Mother and Crone.  Three, then, seems to be a very reasonable number for The Green Knight.

What’s been kicking around in my head is how each day of the hunt relates to each day of Gawain’s seduction.  The first day, the Green Lady comes to Gawain and (like a good psycho stalker) sits on the edge of his bed while he sleeps.  When he wakes, realizing that some crazy chick is watching him, she blushingly yet bluntly spends her morning flirting with him and begging a kiss.  That day, the Green Knight brings home a pile of deer.  The hunting of the doe (or “hart”) is a frequently used image of courtly love.  The lady, wide-eyed and chaste, runs from her knight as he pursues her and eventually slays her with “the bolt of love” (read: slay – little death, orgasm; bolt of love – the knight’s “sword”, distinct phallic imagery).  Of course, Sir Gawain, being a just and true Christian Knight who doesn’t believe in things like sex before marriage or sex with his host’s wife, retrieves from the Lady nothing but a single kiss (which, notably, he then gives to the Green Knight in fulfilling their bargain… there is a whole queer studies reading of this poem that I’m not even going to tinker with).

On the second day, the Knight hunts a boar.  On this day, the Green Lady comes to Gawain and admonishes him for not remembering the lessons of courtesy she had taught him the day before.  She is forward and feisty, and this time gives Gawain two kisses.  The boar, a deadly animal, is also an image we find in medieval paintings and stories.  Medieval bestiaries reported that the boar had no fear of death since his skin was hoary and acted like armor.  He is also the personification of lust, likely because of the large tusks which he uses to gouge his victims (see again: “dart of love”… hey, they didn’t have porn in medieval times, they had to make do with dirty tapestries).  Notable also is the use of the boar in the Psalms of David (80:13) who trounced God’s vineyard and thus became the evil antichrist (for more on medieval boar imagery, see Werness 48-50).  I’m not certain that we could go so far as to say that the Green Lady is the antichrist, but we can call her a harbinger of lust and an aggressive pursuant of the hunt, unafraid of courtly “death”.

On the third day, the Knight hunts a fox.  This third day is Gawain’s “undoing”, as it is on this day that the Green Lady connives him into taking her garter which Gawain then refuses to share with the Green Knight, thus breaking his bargain.  The fox is a familiar metaphor for cunning and trickery, an animal that is known in folklore and popular mythology to connive its victims into its wills and whims.  Certainly this is the Lady’s task for the day.  It is her cunning which finally breaks down Gawain’s resolve, convincing him to accept a gift which he knows he should share but does not.  For this, he receives a single nick of the Green Knight’s axe, a testament to his sins which he returns to the Round Table with.  Despite great temptation, this is the only misdeed which Gawain commits during the poem.

One could argue that since the Green Knight and his Lady are fairy creatures, the Knight’s hunt is some sort of ritual energy transfer between the totem he kills and the Lady.  The Knight’s bargain with Gawain provides the energy for this transfer, a ritualistic link between the Knight himself on the field and Gawain in the castle.  The relationship between this triad (The Knight, The Lady, and Gawain) once again echoes the poem’s cardinal power number, perhaps also fueling the power exchange between the hunted animals and the hunted Gawain.

The end message seems to be that, despite any initial animosity between the Christian Knights and the Fairy Knights, their value system remains compatible.  Gawain’s good behavior is praised by both sides, and his error is scolded then put into perspective by both sides.  Both the Green Knight and the Round Table admit that, despite Gawain’s small indiscretion, in the end he passes the test.  The Round Table Knights have earned the Green Knight’s respect and the Green Knight, in turn, is honored by the Round Table in their vow to forever after wear green baldrics to represent Gawain’s trials and tribulations.  Can the Green Knight and the Knights of the Round Table live in mutual respect?  The anonymous author at least seems to think they can.  Then again, he may have been a Green Knight himself, hence his anonymity.   

Since I lack a snappy ending for this post, I will leave you with Mister Eddie Izzard and the Church of England.  Cheers! 

Works Cited

Anonymous.  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  Ed. Betty Radice.  Trans. Brian Stone.  New York: Penguin (1974).  Print.

Werness, Hope B.  The Continuum Encyclopedia of Animal Symbolism in Art.  New York: Continuum International (2006).  Print.

            

It is (it is) a glorious thing to be a Pirate King

I had a plethora of things to blog about this past week but none of them are going to make it into this post. Instead, I wish to issue an apology.

I apologize profusely to anyone who was on line behind me at the Dana Library Computer lab this morning. Moreover, I apologize to the poor computer technician who was stuck with a jammed printer not once but twice due to my stack of printing making the entire operation explode. To be fair, I have a feeling the technical malfunctions had more to do with the printer duplex being bad than my Jubilee-like Mutant powers.

Today, I took the dive and invested a great deal of time into creating something pivotal to my continual perseverance and eventual conquest over the Master’s Reading Exam List. Flash back to about a year ago when I first encountered the list. As my eyes scanned down the page I was struck by a sudden lightheadedness, a dizzy sensation compounded by the gravity of the situation at hand. “Good god,” I thought, “this is a lot of stuff to read.” After the brief I-wasn’t-an-English-major-in-undergrad heart attack passed, I realized something else. “Good god, this is a lot of stuff to buy.”

The rising cost of living has demanded many things from the poor graduate student. Amongst these things is a sad truth; we very rarely have money for spare books. I know that the books on the Master’s Reading Exam list aren’t exactly “spare books”, they are required reading for my degree.  For all intents and purposes, they qualify as course books. I need them. I can’t do without them. The fate of my diploma rests in their hands.

I know, I know, my mother said it too. “But Danielle, you could just go to the library and borrow these books for free!” Well, no not really. If I am going to retain any of the information in these books, if I am going to read them critically, if I am going to have anything to say about them when all has been said and done, I need to write all over them. Word to the wise English major: get over your phobia of marking up texts as soon as humanly possible. Glossing a text makes it yours and moreover allows you to process what you are reading as you are reading it. It gives you the ability to interact with the reading thus making the reading experience into a conversation rather than a one-way entertainment situation. So no, I can’t just borrow them from the library. I need my own copies.

Luckily, there is a fabulous resource for this sort of thing. A wonderful magical place where information is freely and plentifully available. A place where texts abound in all sorts of scholarly and non-scholarly forms. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the internet has revolutionized text acquisition.

After several hours of googling, copying, pasting, printing, causing printer jams and binding the resulting spoils into adorable binders organized by time period, I now own at least two thirds of the Master's Reading Exam list.

Part of me feels guilty. Like this stack of papers is ill-gotten goods. Piratical booty which required a parrot and an eye patch to acquire. I am not joking when I say that the resulting pile from my marathon printing session was at least a ream and a half worth of paper (printed double-sided by the way… oi vey…). Then I realized: this printing isn’t free, it’s part of my tuition. I paid for this in my semester bill. This isn’t piracy, this is smart business practices. I’m not stealing, I’m simply making the most of my hard-earned loan money.

So, I’m sorry lab guy. I’m sorry adorable undergrad who only wanted to print a draft of her summer research paper. I’m sorry whomever has to re-stock the paper (I cleaned out at least two drawers worth in two different R2D2-sized printers). But my wallet just couldn’t handle the MRE list without this.

Litany Against Fear

Last week, in a monumental coup against the Common Reading Exam List, I finished not one but two books.  You’ve already heard what I have to say about Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.  Book number two was the vastly different Mrs. Dalloway.

This may make me a horrible human being (and moreover a horrible woman literati), but I had never before read anything by Virginia Woolf.  In fact, the only reason I have a passing acquaintance with her is due to my close acquaintanceship with a Woolf scholar whom I met during my sojourn in Dublin.  She loved Virginia Woolf.  She ate Virginia Woolf for breakfast, lunch, comps and dinner.  I have always respected said friend, so I knew there must be something to dear Ginny… just not anything that I had ever chosen to delve for before.  It was a classic case of “Meh, I’ll read it later”.

When “later” finally caught up to me and I had finished succumbing to Woolf’s siren song, I must say I am left aswirl with half-formed notions which even now as I try to articulate them elude my grasp.  Nebulous thoughts and concepts, amorphous ideas, nothing concrete or solid.

I attribute this partially to the style of Woolf’s writing.  The best impression I have of Mrs. Dalloway’s writing can be summarized by the infamous first words of Finnegan’s Wake, “riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs”.  Woolf’s writing flows, perhaps not as freely as Joyce’s notoriously contemptuous bane of English majors everywhere, but still meandering itself down the progression of human thought.  Since the events of Mrs. Dalloway happen entirely inside the characters’ heads, one way or another, they are written to reflect this.  This freely flowing thoughtful writing, rather than capturing and holding my attention, encouraged it to wander as well.  There were several re-readings involved in the completion of this book.

I enjoyed it.  Immensely.  Let me start by saying that.  But that being said, I’m left with the age-old adage.  You know, the thing that academics are never supposed to say.  Those baneful words that expose one’s intellectual underbelly to the hungry dogs of snobbish competition and arrogance. 

I don’t get it.

No really, I don’t get it.  Why is this book a classic?  Why is it on my reading list?  What was I supposed to take from this book over anything else that Woolf wrote (or really anything else written in the history of literature)?  Like I have already said, it was a delightful little read, but if you asked me to write a paper on it I feel as though I have nothing new or interesting to add to the Burkean Parlor of intellectual thought surrounding this book.

So I did what any self-respecting scholar would do in my situation: I googled it.  I read the wikipedia article.  I even stooped so low as to peruse the cliff notes in hopes that a succinct summary of what I had read would help me to see some gem of scholarly thought that I had previously missed.

And I am just as stumped as I was twenty minutes ago.  I see the major themes; Woolf’s points about mental illness and its treatment, feminism and homosexuality; but I really (still) have nothing to say about them in relation to this book that wasn’t said in aforementioned wikipedia article.

So naturally what comes to my mind now is a question about scholarship in general.  I am certain that, at some point in their scholarly careers, everyone has felt this way about something.  But articulating that in any form is so strictly taboo that most intellects would rather pretend they have something to say than admit that they would much prefer to listen to other peoples’ incites.  My question is this: is there one work of literature, some book somewhere, a classic of the English language, that everyone feels this way about but is too embarrassed to admit?

Why do we do this to ourselves?  Why is the playground of intellectual thinking so riddled with bullies that any sign of weakness makes one ready to tear apart one’s fellows rather than help to mend their brokenness?  Are we all so afraid that our brains don’t measure up to whatever standard we have silently communally agreed upon that human weakness makes us dithering idiots rather than human?  Yes, our job as scholars is to challenge each other in pursuit of some greater understanding, but does that mean we have to step on heads to advance our own careers?

Forgive me for being pessimistic, and perhaps this is all a reaction to my own feelings as an outsider in any English department.  I’m an actor/scholar.  That’s who I am, that’s what I’m trained to do.  I feel lucky to be considered a peer here in my English program because frankly I don’t consider myself one.  My knowledge of classics, theory and literature in general pales in comparison to most of my fellows.  However, I do know several peripheral areas of the field very very well.  That knowledge has served me in more ways than I can tell, but most importantly has given me the ability to make my way through English literature classes as an outsider welcomed into the inner ring.  As I look around me, I see friends, I see intellectual equals, but I do not see peers.  Our fields, though similar, diverge at several important junctures.  This divergence allows me to walk with my classmates along their paths for a time, but will inevitably send us to opposite ends of a great body of intellectual knowledge.

So as an inside outsider, let me say this: the fear of being wrong in a Graduate classroom is so stifling that it cuts off conversation before anyone has a chance to speak.  This shared fear is thus the mind-killer and we would all do well to recite Frank Herbert’s infamous passage to ourselves a few times before class.  Maybe then we could dispense with the trappings and posing of intellect and get to what really matters.

The More you Know...

Today, friends, I take a much-needed break from rambling incessantly about teenaged vampires. This may be because my shame finally caught up with me, but I will choose instead to lend it to the fact that I have succeeded in diving back into the Common Reading Exam List.

This past weekend, I got through the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. I will admit first and foremost that I don’t have a great deal to say about this book. To me, it is a landmark piece about a time in history that is now not much more than painful memories and curling yellowed paper. Slavery was horrendous, of that there is no doubt. This book must have gone a long way towards proving that to individuals of the time and perhaps even individuals of a generation or two after the time. However, to me, modern liberal-minded girl that I am, it just is. I don’t feel more intellectually enlightened having read it (though I ate through it like it was a pound of chocolates… except without that bloated guilty feeling afterwards).

I suppose I should at least try to say something scholarly and insightful about it despite my current difficulty with thinking DEEP THOUGHTS. A few things did strike me. The first of which being that Douglass’ most salient simile for slavery was to piracy; the hard-won fruits of an honest man’s labor are then heartlessly and cruelly taken from him so that the thief may prosper. The pirate image stuck with me and has left me really pondering it. Doubtlessly, this simile is a romantic notion, but perhaps that judgment is simply my modern mind projecting anachronisms onto a dated piece. Still, I can’t help but imagine that Douglass was a man to whom pirates were all but myth. What I mean by this is that Douglass would never have met a pirate, even if they were perhaps more common in his world than in ours. To him, pirates (though very much real), were fictional characters and figures in stories told by his fellows rather than day-to-day realities.

Douglass was a highly trained caulker and worked on shipyards for many years, both before and after his emancipation. This nautical-centric life he led may also lend insight as to the curious choice in analogies. Perhaps putting things in terms of the sea came more naturally to him as this was how he lived his life. Perhaps the shipmen around him were so full of such analogies and stories as to pepper his speech and mind with images of the ocean. Perhaps this notion of the formation and source of Douglass’ choice in imagery is as romantic as the imagery itself.

A second thing which was prevalent to me throughout the narrative was the dichotomy between men and beasts. A “good slave” is essentially a man turned into a beast; a savage, someone whose sole focus is work, someone who has been stripped of any higher notion of hope for his life. Most importantly lacking from these beast-men is education. In a curious and fortuitous amalgamation of circumstances and ingenuity, Douglass was able to learn to read and write while still a slave. This knowledge, one comes to understand, is what drove him forward in his pursuit of freedom. With it, he could not ignore what was around him: that he was a man and thereby should be subject to the same freedoms as any other man. After all, he was capable of higher reasoning. Clearly there was no difference between him and the white street urchins so pivotal to his ersatz education. Despite this, Douglass himself admits several times that he wished he could return to ignorance. Once enlightened, there was no way for him to forget these lessons and thereby no way for him to be satisfied until he had attained absolute freedom.

“Knowledge is power”, certainly, and to me Douglass’ realization stands as a powerful statement about the importance of higher education. While something as simple as literacy could empower Douglass to understand his own innate worth as a human being, in modern times an individual must stretch further to find this empowerment. When my parents graduated from college, they could begin careers with merely undergraduate degrees. The fact that they chose not to speaks towards the values of my family, but that is besides the point. As the job market becomes increasingly competitive, education as a whole becomes devalued. In these times, it is well near impossible to get a high-paying career-type job without a Graduate Degree. Certain fields do bend and/or break this rule, and there will always be exceptions for extraordinary talent, but as a general rule getting one’s foot in the door increases with ease in direct proportion to the number of degrees one can list at the top of one’s resume.

While higher education is certainly vital for job-hunting, it is equally vital to the improvement of the human spirit. In school, we do not simply learn about books and formulas, we are also working towards the ultimate goal of expanding (and growing into) our potential as human beings. If literacy could unlock this for Douglass, think of the compounded factor of less fundamental knowledge on the human psyche. We learn about the world and we learn about ourselves. As the world devalues our education as it stands, we must counter with greater degrees of education to expand our worth and potential.

….as I read through this it sounds like a public service announcement. Coming from someone who does teach college and hopes to continue doing so in the future, it also sounds like a desperate plea to keep myself in a job. While I can’t deny the validity of either of these thoughts, I will also ask you to consider more deeply the value of your own education. What did college teach you? Okay, fine, what did it actually teach you? I can nearly guarantee that what you really learned had little to do with what the piece of paper on your wall tells you that you learned.

Practically Paradise

So I’m officially a week into the semester and I still haven’t re-cracked good William (Faulkner not Shakespeare). He sits on my desk and mocks me occasionally, but then I realized that I could just cover him up with a pile of other work. He’s been smothered in political pamphlets from the Revolutionary era ever since and occasionally I put my keys on top as a paperweight in case he gets any ideas about wriggling out from under. With the semester underway, reading Faulkner is the last thing on my list.

I did read Utopia this week (which is also on my list). Okay, I’ll admit it, it was for a class, but it still counts, right? Just because I’m reading of a syllabus doesn’t make it any less literary.

On dear Sir Thomas’ 1516 foray into a perfect society I have surprisingly little to say. The natural question that springs to mind whenever one picks up a work entitled “Paradise” (be it Dante or More) is how Utopian is Utopia? Naturally, I have little inclination to talk about this (though I’m certain we’ll be discussing it in class on Wednesday and I may or may not have an update after that as per how that discussion goes).

Oh, in case you were interested, Thomas More actually coined the word “Utopia” (OED). A small foray into our favorite encyclopedic volume of words tells us that in 1613 it came into wider use to mean “a place, state, or condition ideally perfect in respect of politics, laws, customs, and conditions”. It has been used steadily in that capacity ever since, but most people aren’t aware that they are referring to More’s pamphlet whenever they speak of ideality.

What I am intrigued by is the fact that More basically describes a communist state. Every place looks exactly the same, every person works the same amount of hours, every person receives what he requires. As More explains it, “…and seeing they be all thereof partners equally, therefore, can no man there be poor or needy” (148). I suppose what really struck me about this idea is how very ancient it is. Communist states were already being discussed as an ideal in 1516 England and have been pervasive throughout the minds of men since. I’m no historian, and certainly not a political historian, but this seems a very long time for such an idea to percolate. And nobody yet has gotten it right… the “communist” states of today are not More’s Utopia and never will be, when did the idea become sullied?

Now granted, More’s Utopia is not an enactable policy. Here is a country with wealth in store because they (as a society) hold no store in traditional signs of wealth. Here is a country whose foreign relations depend entirely upon the foreign countries thinking the Utopians curious and quaint. Here is a country where lawyers are banished (as deceivers, much like actors were in the days of yore). This is not reality, nor can it be. But I am dubious at best to say that there is nothing to be learned from Utopia.

Another thing Utopia does not account for is the nature of mankind. Utopia would like to believe the best of man, or at least that nurture will win over nature. I’m not entirely convinced that it will. However, given no evidence to back my claim, I wish to avoid delving further into the land of speculation. Suffice to say that I have a fairly pessimistic view of human nature, that way I can only be surprised not disappointed. For Utopia to hold, man as a society must behave as creatures of innate good.

But why bother discussing unattainable perfection at all? What is so fascinating about pretty things that we can’t have? I suppose the answer is that they are still pretty, whether real or not. Even if we can’t have it, we can still want it, and we can still wonder how to get it.

Works Cited

More, Thomas R. Utopia. Ralph Robynson Translation 1556. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999. Print.

"Utopia" The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 4 Apr. 2000 .

Communism is just a Red Herring....

Oh Ms. Lessing. Oh my good Ms. Lessing.

I may feel differently if I was more in touch with the generation of women whom your novel so (apparently) accurately describes. I may feel differently if I had any care for the importance of political movements throughout history. I may feel differently if this novel didn’t have me thinking so bloody much at moments in my life when I’d really rather not be thinking.

But as it is, I found The Golden Notebook to be torturous to read.

Perhaps this is part of the point. Certainly it details the downward spiral of Anna’s life as she struggles with her writer’s block as well as her relationships.

To me, the greatest question posed by the novel is about a woman’s life and its meaning. Can a woman be happy without a man? The answer, undoubtedly, is “no”. The men of Lessing’s Golden Notebook are perfunctory creatures who could never hope to fully satisfy any woman. It is no wonder Anna struggles so terribly to find true companionship.

The book seems to be written along strings upon strings of affairs, none meaning anything to the invested male party (though some do mean something to Anna). Anna’s life lacks guidance and definition without a man in it, she requires the presence of a man to give her meaning. Without him she becomes lonely, depressed, self-loathing, and entirely un-woman. The perfunctory relationships she does find cannot hope to give her the depth she requires, and she struggles throughout the novel to figure out why. This struggle, to me, is very deeply linked to sex. Anna certainly has a lot of sex, though she nearly never enjoys it. It is a function. A part of life. She craves it but when she receives it is unable to find pleasure or true fulfillment within it.

Certainly this is due to the superficial nature of the sex which Anna does have. She seems to be a magnet for gentlemen callers looking to get away from their wives, for men who are terrified of commitment, for blocked writers looking to find meaning in another blocked writer. In short, it is the entirely wrong people whom Anna attracts into her life.

The friendship between Anna and Molly is further exploration of this lack of male companionship. Both lacking a man, Molly and Anna begin the book in a deep relationship. Best friends. They even live together for a time. Can two women, lacking male partners, supply each other with ersatz companionship? Can a relationship between two women be as deep or as pervasive as that between a man and a woman? The book seems to imply no- this friendship between two single women cannot hope to replace what both women are missing out on without a man in their lives.

The entire story can be summed up, to me, in a passage from pg. 607, “Then I woke into a late afternoon, the room cold and dark. I am depressed; I was entirely the white female bosom shot full of cruel male arrows. I was aching with the need for Saul, and I wanted to abuse him and rail at him and call him names. Then of course he would say: Oh poor Anna, I’m sorry, then we would make love”.

In short, I really REALLY don’t understand why I spent the last few weeks reading this novel. Here’s hoping the next one is better.

Next up: Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner.

Work Cited

Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. Perennial Modern Classics. New York: Harper Perennial, 1999.

An Apology to Doris Lessing

Ms. Lessing,

I am so sorry that you are being put on the Margate Atwood list. I just had a crisis at work today… granted a crisis at my job involves spending hours in a private library pulling plays in hopes to find just a few more monologues for a class I’m TAing…. But a crisis nonetheless!

So I didn’t spend time with you today. I am sorry. Truly and deeply sorry.

And it’s not just because you’re book is so damned long and time is running out for my winter break.

….impressions so far are pretty mixed. I don’t think 150 pages is enough to really give an accurate assessment of this work of literature. I’m hoping that I have something to say before long though, otherwise I’ll just be scratching my head at the end of all of this wondering what the point is…. Again.

Most sincerely,

Danielle

The Stare-Down

Have you ever been secretly intimidated by a piece of literature?

And I don’t mean “secretly” as in being intimidated but not admitting it to your book club, I mean “secretly” as in being in denial about it. You keep meaning to read something, let’s say A Midsummer Night’s Dream. You know you should read Shakespeare because he is the father of modern theatre and the English language as we know it. You know you should read this particular play because it is a staple of theatre companies everywhere. It’s a comedy with lots of fun elements- no heavy-hearted Othello or Lear. Maybe you’ve heard of some of the characters before; Puck, the lovers Hermia, Helen, Demetrius or Lysander, Oberon, Titania. Or maybe you’re even a Greek history buff and want to read another take on the Theseus/Hypolyta story.

But for some reason, some reason unbeknownst to yourself, some ethereal reason that you can’t put your finger on, you just never read this particular work of literature. Even though you should. Even though culture tells you to. Even though your better sense tells you to. You may page through the book every time you pass it in the bookstore. You may even go so far as to purchase the volume. But, despite the piece beckoning you, you just don’t do it.

That’s been my relationship with The Handmaid’s Tale for the past week. I was supposed to be on a strict fifty-page-a-day regime over the winter break before the craziness of my jam-packed semester started. However, the holidays hit and I took some time off. Then it became “Oh, I’ll read it tomorrow”. And that’s gone on since I finished Heart of Darkness.

I don’t know what it is about this book. It’s a friendly book. Not too thick. If I put my mind to it, it’ll be finished in a matter of a few days. The subject matter doesn’t seem too terribly dry, the language isn’t dense or archaic, the story is renowned and well-written… there shouldn’t be anything stopping me from picking up this book and giving it the good ol’ Graduate School try. Somehow though, I’ve been finding ways to push dear Meg from my schedule day after day.

Well, I can no longer hide from her. I have a week before I begin my position TAing over winter break, and that means only seven days of unadulterated literature with nominal other demands upon my time.

There’s no more hiding, running or avoiding. There’s no more calling apologetically and promising to reschedule. There’s no more setting her up with a friend hoping that she likes him better than she likes me because I can’t stand to see the look on her face when I miss our appointed coffee meetings together. Tomorrow I have a date with Margaret Atwood.

A New Task...

My usual interests and extracurricular pursuits have officially been commandeered.

I have completed one semester as a Master’s student in English. This has brought with it a brave new world of work, pain, sleepless nights, new interests, new insights, tears, joy, you name it it’s been in there. I’m loving every minute of it.

It does, however, cut into my blogging time. Which is part of why I’ve decided to broaden the focus of my work here. One of my professors this semester made the observation that if she doesn’t write something about what she’s reading, it doesn’t stick. I tend to agree. The act of writing makes your mind process things differently. It makes your brain juices digest all those scrumptious words on the page. It makes you translate a mental experience to a different kind of mental experience and, ultimately, a physical experience.

To achieve my Master’s, I am required to pass an exam. The exam is on this booklist. As I wasn’t an English major in my undergrad, most of these books I’ve never heard of much less read. I’ve decided that as a companion to this reading list, as I slowly chew my way through it, I’m going to keep a record here of some thoughts about what I’m reading. At least then, when I go to study for la grande exam of doom I’ll have something to look back on. And maybe someone will enjoy my ramblings.

First up: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

First published in 1899 in Blackwood’s Magazine as a three-part series, the novella was then published as a complete work in 1902. Having spent time as a steamboat captain on the Congo, Conrad used his experiences in Africa as a basis for the book.

The story is told in a nested narrative as a sailor named Marlowe relates his experience in the ivory trade to other passengers of an unknown steamboat. This structure, reminiscent of that of Frankenstein or The Canterbury Tales, frees Conrad from having to take direct responsibility for any ideas stated by the text. Whether or not he meant to, Conrad liberated himself via the nested narrative, the mask of the inner character can be said to deflect any fault in the novella from Conrad himself.

The novella itself is short and dense. Packed with imagery and metaphor, at times it almost feels surreal to read. Because of this drifty dream-like quality to the narrative, I had to be particularly careful to not allow my mind to wander into my own dreamland. It wasn’t that I wasn’t enjoying the book (I actually did like it), it was that the boundary between this misty Congo river and my own hazy hallucinations was so thin that it was easy to forget. I had to re-read several passages due to having arrived at the end of the page and not being able to recollect what it was I had just read.

The major theme of the novella is supposedly the darkness of the dark continent (it is, after all, named for this), but other than throwing the word “dark” into a few passages I didn’t find this theme to be compelling or pervasive. Yes, the darkness of Africa is held against the light of civilization. Yes, civilization is supposed to bring light to dark places, etc. so on and so forth. I found a more pressing theme in the great silence of Africa. The jungle is constantly described as somewhere utterly quiet. Perhaps this is indicative of an ideal quality in its people; the people of Africa should remain as the country itself. Majestic, beautiful, and silent. They ought to have no voice, either in civilization or in their own home.

Funny enough the word “Africa” is never actually used in the book. Though this could be chalked up to the logic that no place names are used in the book, but I wonder what this says about sense of place in “the Dark Continent”. Does it not exist? Is one thing the same as another to the point that no word can describe place because place is interchangeable? Is Africa just too horrid to name?

I found myself reading in the school of Chinua Achebe (even before I realized there was a school of Chinua Achebe); this book does portray the African people in an utterly racist fashion. But can you blame it? I didn’t read Heart of Darkness thinking I would get a sermon on equality or some great enlightening “we are all equal” message. It was published in 1902 for chrissakes! This was a mere forty years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. Conrad by no means lived in a “racially enlightened society” and we cannot expect forward thinking. If we did, such thinking would no longer be extraordinary.

So I did find the portrayal of the African in this book to be as something other than human. They are animals, robbed of language, sense and even human form. At their best, they are part of the majestic otherworldly Africa scenery. At their worst, they are savage brutes. The cannibals that Marlowe’s steamboat crew hires are treated better than the run-of-the-mill African native in this novella, both in action and in description.

Pre-Achebe, the common reading of Africa in Heart of Darkness was of a place for insanity. It was what drove Kurtz mad. This is true, the man likely suffered from some jungle fever, illness of malnourishment, or parasite. Kurtz’s death is a fitting end for a man who fashioned himself into some sort of jungle God in order to pillage Africa herself. The Europeans rape Africa for her ivory, and Africa fights back. The Dark Continent reclaimed Kurtz and as the steamboat which bears him back to civilization leaves Africa, his health ebbs. Africa, then, is a cruel mistress. She will be revenged upon her tormentors, one way or another.

Achebe invokes a metaphore in his essay which I find particularly poignant; “Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray -- a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate. Consequently Africa is something to be avoided just as the picture has to be hidden away to safeguard the man's jeopardous integrity.” This also makes Africa the ultimate downfall of Europe. A single look into her dark, silent depths will kill the very image she was made to keep alive.

Perhaps the most pertinent to this blog, and of course the most interesting to me, are the brief glimpses and echoes of Shakespeare which I found within this book (oh shush, I find them all over). As Kurtz lays dying, Marlowe remarks, “His was in impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines” (86). I cannot help but hear echoes of Juliet’s “Me thinkes I see thee now, thou art so lowe, /As one dead in the bottome of a Tombe, /Either my eye-sight failes, or thou look'st pale.” The image of the far-away man, bellow the speaker, is pervasive in both these utterances.

A second parallel is found in Kurtz’s fiancé’s words upon hearing of his death. She laments, “I cannot believe that I shall never see him again, that nobody will see him again, never, never, never” (95). Read that and tell me you don’t see Lear over Cordelia’s body, “Why should a Dog, a Horse, a Rat haue life, /And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more, /Neuer, neuer, neuer, neuer, neuer.” I suppose it shouldn’t be all too surprising as Conrad originally learned English by perusing Shakespeare (betchya didn’t know that… betchya didn’t really care either… ah well it could be a conversation starter at your next cocktail party).

So to wrap things up for today; Africa: Big, Dark and Silent. Joseph Conrad: utter racist, but who could really blame him? Shakespeare: Still relevant.

Happy Holidays!

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'" Massachusetts Review. 18. 1977. Rpt. in Heart of Darkness, An Authoritative Text, background and Sources Criticism. 1961. 3rd ed. Ed. Robert Kimbrough, London: W. W Norton and Co., 1988, pp.251-261

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Modern Library Classics Paperback. New York: Random House, 1999.