csuf e222-r american lit since 1865 fall 06

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2006-12-08T11:39:00.000-08:00

Welcome to E222-R, American Literature from 1865 to the Present
Fall 2006 at California State University, Fullerton

This blog will offer posts on all of the authors on our syllabus. I will post two kinds of notes: general and page-by-page. Both kinds are optional reading, but I encourage you to read the entries as your time permits. While they are not exactly the same as what I may choose to say during class sessions (i.e. these are not usually exact copies of my lecture notes), they should prove helpful in your engagement with the authors and in arriving at paper topics and studying for the exam. Unless otherwise noted, the edition used for our selections is Baym, Nina et al. (eds.) The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vols. C, D, E. 6th ed. New York: Norton, 2002. ISBN 0393977943.

A dedicated menu at my wiki site contains the necessary information for students enrolled in this course; when the semester has ended, this blog will remain online, and a copy of the syllabus will remain in the Archive menu.

Week 16, Ginsberg, Snyder, and Plath

2006-12-07T18:04:00.000-08:00

Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Sylvia Plath. Ginsberg’s Howl and Selections (2863-77). Snyder’s Selections (2956-67). Plath’s Selections (2967-79).

General Notes on Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (2863-73).

Four major influences on Ginsberg are William Blake, Jack Kerouac, Walt Whitman, and Zen Buddhism. William Blake’s influence is apparent in the sometimes hallucinogenic, visionary status of Howl, and Jack Kerouac’s shows in Ginsberg’s persistent tying together of his personal experience and his poetry. Kerouac’s idea was that you were supposed to live what you wrote about, not just write about what you thought other people ought to do. Insistence on authenticity isn’t really a new idea, of course—you can find it in many worthwhile authors (Orwell living amongst the lower classes whose plight he wanted to describe, Hemingway’s European and African travels, etc.). Still, the “make it real” ethos is especially intense in the beatnik authors. It amounts to a partial, but not necessarily total, rejection of the past (texts, culture, politics, etc.) in favor of the lived present.

Ginsberg’s concern for the present time leads us to our third influence, Whitman. The comedian Steve Allen used to put on a television show called Meeting of Minds in which important people (as portrayed by actors) of different eras would come together and share their ideas. I imagine Whitman meeting T. S. Eliot, author of “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and practically screaming at Eliot, “don’t fit your ‘individual talent’ into the tradition of dead white Euro-poets! Go out and observe everything, hear everything, experience everything, for yourself. Embrace disparate experiences, scenes, and people.” Stylistically, Whitman’s impact upon Ginsberg is obvious in that both express themselves in free verse. Ginsberg likes what he calls “long clanky statements” that permit “not the way you would say it, a thought, but the way you would think it . . . . [W]e think rapidly in visual images as well as words, and if each successive thought were transcribed in its confusion . . . you get a slightly different prosody than if you were talking slowly.” Still, I wouldn’t overstate Whitman’s influence on Ginsberg. While the former usually refrains from passing judgment on what he encounters, Ginsberg, who like Whitman sometimes fuses the personal with the collective and the political, adopts a more defiant stance. Ginsberg often seems to be conveying a nearly raw transcription of an outraged, defiant mind in action. We are treated to a mix of words, images, and feelings, tumbling along at a rapid pace. Of course, like the romantics and like the modernist practitioners of “stream of consciousness” writing, Ginsberg is capable of eloquence and perfect coherence when he chooses to exhibit them. No doubt he did some editing and polishing of his poems—but that wasn’t really the essential thing about him as a poet.

With regard to the influence of Zen Buddhism, rejecting western ratiocination leads Ginsberg to an interest in the immediacy of insight offered by the Buddhist masters. The point is rather like Wordsworth’s in his “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”—namely, while the scientist seeks truth only in some remote future and must tear things apart so he can understand how they work, the poet sings a song for everyone. That “song” unites us, putting us in direct contact with our deepest and most common passions: love, wonder, etc. Buddhism of whatever sort stresses the power of “letting truth happen”; it emphasizes the epiphanic “unconfusion” that comes when you are able to let go of powerful illusions about yourself and your society. The western pursuit of knowledge is usually described in terms of intellectual difficulty, or mental hard labor. (John Donne’s description in “Satire 3” of how to gain theological understanding might well be generalized to cover the sciences: “On a huge hill, / Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will / Reach her, about must and about must go, /And what the hill’s suddenness resists, win so.”) But the Buddhist notion favors intuitive immediacy. To be sure, it takes self-discipline to make “letting truth happen” possible, but still the emphasis is on intuition, not the relentless exercise of reason and analysis. “Sunflower Sutra” is one example of a Buddhism-inspired poem in Ginsberg’s collection.

The Beatniks, Society and Politics in the American 1950’s: The 1950’s beatniks are the precursors of the 1960’s hippie movement. The difference is that while the former could only convey their message as outcasts—voices in the urban wilderness—hippies like Abby Hoffman and Timothy Leary (an Ivy-League scientist) tended to be insiders with a broad base of support amongst youth and the more disaffected in the adult population. We have the Vietnam War to thank for the hippie movement; although many people (President Nixon’s so-called “Silent Majority”) seem to have remained loyal to the voices of authority, millions didn’t. “Question authority” is a 1960’s phrase that does honor to the beatniks, our version of romantic revolutionists who place the greatest value on questioning, experimenting, and setting off on new paths to insight. The beatniks are a sympathetic group because they rebelled against semi-secular Puritanism. During the quietly oppressive “I like Ike” years, when Mutual Assured Destruction was supposed to keep us safe, Duck and Cover was Plan B in case M.A.D. didn’t ward off catastrophe, and absolutely everybody (if you followed the official culture) was lily white, straight, married, had a nice suburban house with a well-maintained lawn, two-and-half beaming children, and a dog named Skipper. Thanks to the wonders of mature industrial capitalism and America’s newfound power on the world stage after WWII, the standard of living was rising rapidly, and it’s fair to admit that millions of people lived some version of the American Dream. Those who didn’t were—well, one just didn’t talk about those people (who were bound to be considered losers, perverts, or second-class citizens). David Halberstam is one of the best historians to read on the 1950’s (see his book entitled The 1950’s). He captures the period’s mixture of giddy, innocent optimism and paralyzing dread that drove people en masse to accept the official line on domestic policy and foreign affairs.

An admittedly hasty historical generalization might give us a direct way of connecting to the chilly, uncertain and anxious (even if outwardly confident) era in which Allen Ginsberg wrote Howl. Many citizens in post-9/11 America have surely felt something like the dread experienced by Americans who lived through the Cold War, even though, of course, the threat we face isn’t quite on the order of the “absolute annihilation” that might have happened back in the 1950s and 60s. While many people have observed with concern the civic implications of the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretapping, “extreme rendition,” secret prison camps, the recent virtual suspension of habeas corpus ad subjiciendum appeals, and other such legislation and practices on the part of our government, a large number of Americans seem to accept without much difficulty the notion that such departures from accepted official behavior are “necessary to stop the terrorists.” When people are afraid, they tend to let the authorities do whatever said authorities claim is requisite: in a word, they conform. Well, those who spoke out against the government and American society in general during the 1950’s must have felt a chill at least as deep as dissenters do today: those who didn’t like the status quo in politics, social affairs, sexuality, or anything else sounded bizarre, or even crazy, to the majority around them. The Committee on Un-American Activities dates from the passage of the McCarran Act or Internal Security Act of 1950 (which President Truman vetoed, only to see the Congress override his denunciation of a bill he considered as dangerous as the Federalists’ Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 during the administration of John Adams). Under Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, this Committee undertook to question anybody—but most prominently left-leaning Hollywood celebrities—who might be guilty of an “un-American” thought. As a teacher, I’ve long felt that although I’m entitled to my own views, I ought to avoid political grandstanding and arm-twisting. But for the most part, poets operate under no such constraints – Ginsberg and his fellow beatniks will tell you exactly what they think about anything and everything. I suppose that’s one of the most attractive things about them—in an age when art has obviously become sanitized and commodified, they retain a certain “you-be-damnedness.” This quality certainly shows in Howl.

Page-by-Page Notes on Part 1 of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (2863-73).

2865-70. The poem begins with “I saw.” Ginsberg follows this eyewitness claim with 11-12 pages of relative clauses. The idea is, “don’t argue with me—I saw all of this, in one way or another.” Some of the visions are almost certainly literal since Ginsberg would have been familiar with the beat and homosexual underground. Some of it is hallucinogenic reverie, but of course for Ginsberg the two registers of experience are not necessarily separate. What the speaker sees is all of the things that good 1950s “I like Ike” types do not, and his catalog of what he saw and what others have done amounts to a litany rejecting official power and personal restraint. The ordinary citizens do not perceive the highs or the lows embraced in Part 1. To some extent, the beat generation writers are fighting against middle-class mediocrity and conformism in the same way that romantic poets and modernists fought against utilitarian ideology and so forth.

Ginsburg’s style and subjectivity-model are Whitmanesque—open to the world and to its disparate experiences and people. But there is a difference because Ginsberg’s aim is not necessarily to affirm what he has seen and heard. Ginsburg is a much darker poet; he is exuberant to the same degree as Whitman, but the exuberance is closer to that of William Blake than it is to the celebratory viewpoint of Whitman. With Ginsberg, we sometimes get a catalog of rejection of everything that smacks of power and restraint: he has something of the Hebrew Scripture prophet about him: “woe unto you, O Jerusalem,” etc. The Whitman-indebted theme of frank sexuality appears early and remains throughout. Like drugs, sex is a purgatorial path towards transcendence. In Ginsberg, though, there’s a sex-radical edginess, as if the kind of outrageous and sometimes public sex he describes is meant to undermine the aggressively “phallocentric” quality of a militaristic American political and social system.

Throughout this section, the speaker shows what happens when hipster sensibility meets Wall Street, Main Street, Madison Ave. and what even President Eisenhower would later call “the military-industrial complex” (that is, the incestuous relationship between major arms manufacturers and the Armed Forces, to which, of course, we might as well add certain civilian government officials who make decisions about funding and who, when they leave government, often end up serving as lobbyists and industry employees or officers. Fashion, journalism, the economic system, the armed forces, all go together to make up one vast Moloch-system. If we want to use Marx-style terminology, base and superstructure are intimately related: material reality is closely allied with the order of representation to serve the interests of power and wealth. Mid-century people live in a world where “Absolute Reality” is best figured as a fleet of “drunken taxicabs” (2868 bottom)—conveyances more likely to run you down than to take you where you want to go. The behavior of the hipsters might be understood as a counter-strategy, an insistence upon unrepression and excess, to combat the even more insane “irrational exuberance” (Allan Greenspan’s phrase) of capitalist economics and its military and political props. Philosophers at least as far back as Adam Smith and Hegel, not to mention Marx, of course, have explained very cogently that a market system is based upon our propensity to purchase and consume to excess: what the system sells is only partly physical products; even more important is the selling and diversification of desire for those products and the pleasure they promise us. Only a subsistence or barter economy, after all, is based mainly on need; a sophisticated, robust market economy is based on desire, on what we want:: does anyone really need 200 shades of lip gloss, $200 jogging shoes, jeans that cost more because they have prefab holes in them, fancy overpowered cars with designer trim, and so forth?

As we move towards the end of the first section, Ginsberg makes several references to death and rebirth. He even depicts the hipsters as Christ figures, if we take into account his quotation “eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani,” which means, “Lord, Lord, why have you forsaken me?” That is what the Gospel writer Matthew describes Jesus as saying in his final moments on the cross. The ending of Part 1 is difficult—the heart of life’s poem has, Aztec-fashion, been butchered from the hipsters’ bodies, but still it’s “good to eat a thousand years.” These hipsters are said to have re-arisen, so it seems that their hearts are offered as a living sacrifice.

Page-by-Page Notes on Part 2 of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (2863-73).

The second part begins with a question with prophetic overtones. It reminds me of the way William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot pose similarly prophetic questions in “The Second Coming” and The Waste Land, respectively. The answer to the riddle is “Moloch,” so here is some information on that god. Molech, whose name probably derived from Melech “king” and Bosheth, “shame”, was one of the deities worshipped by the idolatrous Israelites. He was referred to as “the abomination of the children of Ammon” (1 Kings 11:7) and the primary means of worshipping him appears to be child sacrifice or “to pass through the fire.” Solomon was said to have built a temple to him. www.deliriumsrealm.com/delirium/mythology/moloch.asp. In Paradise Lost (1.391-405), Milton describes Moloch as follows:

First, Moloch, horrid King, besmeared with blood
Of human sacrifice, and parents’ tears;
Though, for the noise of drums and timbrels loud,
Their children’s cries unheard that passed through fire
To his grim idol. Him the Ammonite
Worshiped in Rabba and her watery plain,
In Argob and in Basan, to the stream
Of utmost Arnon. Nor content with such
Audacious neighbourhood, the wisest heart
Of Solomon he led by fraud to build
His temple right against the temple of God
On that opprobrious hill, and made his grove
The pleasant valley of Hinnom, Tophet thence
And black Gehenna called, the type of Hell.

And again, according to the Dictionnaire Infernal—Collin de Plancy (1863) (paraphrased), “Moloch was the god of the Ammonites, portrayed as a bronze statue with a calf’s head adorned with a royal crown and seated on a throne. His arms were extended to receive the child victims sacrificed to him. Milton wrote that Moloch was a frightening and terrible demon covered with mothers’ tears and children’s blood. Rabbis claim that in the famous statue of Moloch, there were seven kinds of cabinets. The first was for flour, the second for turtle doves, the third for an ewe, the fourth for a ram, the fifth for a calf, the sixth for a beef, and the seventh for a child. It is because of this, Moloch is associated with Mithras and his seven mysterious gates with seven chambers. When a child was sacrificed to Moloch, a fire was lit inside the statue. The priests would then beat loudly on drums & other objects so that the cries would not be heard.

But in Ginsberg’s lexicon, Moloch stands for the mind itself. This kind of definition reminds us of William Blake’s line in “London,” “the mind-forged manacles I hear....” We build up a certain comfortable (or even uncomfortable) view of the world and become trapped by that view. But the reference is capable of several interpretations—for example, the rituals of Moloch involve fire, and fire is obviously a means of purification. Immersion in experience, though painful, is necessary if you want to attain insight or transcendence. Section 3v ends with the hipsters going down to the river, and to me it’s hard to tell if their arriving at it is liberating and somehow “baptismal,” or if their continual sacrifice is all a waste, a chaotic series of sufferings and visions swallowed up by the vast system Moloch. But I don’t think it really is a waste: at least the hipsters have defied the idol Moloch, have decidedly cast off the mind-forged manacles or ideological stays of the Political/Military/Industrial/Social system that is America in 1955.

Page-by-Page Notes on Part 3 of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (2863-73).

Ginsberg met Carl Solomon while visiting his own mother in a mental hospital, and they subsequently became companions. This part is about the projected return of Carl Solomon from madness, I think, and his return as Ginsberg’s companion. I’ve read that it was in fact Ginsberg’s feelings about Solomon’s bout of insanity that inspired or drove Ginsberg to write Howl, and to an extent, I suppose, it makes sense to read the poem as a preparatory ritual for reconciliation with the recovered Solomon. The last line is an echo of Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” in which, of course, Whitman, treating the slain President Lincoln as an American symbol whose sacrifice capped off the Civil War and made national redemption possible, traces his long journey home from Washington, D.C. to his final resting place in Springfield, Illinois. At the same time, the poem treats this larger-than-life figure with great tenderness, even intimacy, dwelling on the need to find an appropriate way to speak about Lincoln now that he’s gone., how to reconcile the country to the loss and, in a sense, to the man himself. Similarly, Ginsberg’s relationship with Solomon is both deeply personal and, at the same time, something relevant to the wider American social and political scene, where there is much need for sanity, healing, and reconciliation. Notice also the several references to apocalyptic war.: Ginsberg’s defiant and apocalyptic imagery is at least partly drawn from the era’s aggressively “nuclear” militarism: the threat of the mushroom cloud and utter extinction is everywhere and is felt by nearly everyone on the planet, including many who lived in the majority of countries that didn’t even have “the Bomb.” In this section we find references to the grand struggle between socialism and capitalism, with Ginsberg taking the socialist side—that is a particularly dangerous thing to do in the McCarthyist 1950’s.

General Note on Allen Ginsberg’s “Footnote” to Howl (Not in The Norton Anthology of American Literature; it’s in the City Lights edition).

In this section, Ginsberg echoes Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In that work, Blake performs what we might call a proto-deconstruction on the binary opposition heaven/hell. His point is that the two states are not to be understood in isolation—rejectionism or exclusionism isn’t enough, any more than you can return to a state of innocence from a state of experience. Blake insists on not privileging one voice or one state of mind over another because that is the primal error—it generates false abstractions and sets up false oppositions between one person and another and even within the same person’s psyche. The directness of Ginsberg’s borrowing from Blake’s style and manner of thinking suggests that Ginsberg, too, wants to emphasize that the way to redemption, to a legitimate sense of the divine, is through material experience, not denial of it. Neither Blake nor Ginsberg is one to avoid direct confrontation with individuals, systems, and ideas when he finds it necessary. In Blake and Ginsberg’s redemptive terms, “Everything that lives is holy.” Ultimately, we might argue that in its defiant insistence on reestablishing authentic connections between people and in its desire that wrongs be righted, Ginsberg’s Howl is more “comic” than a product of sorrowful “tragic vision, “ in which suffering is accepted and must be borne perpetually with no real expectation of justice or even full intelligibility about our place in the world or our relationship to the divine..

“A Supermarket in California” (2872-73). I think the poet is wondering what sort of comparison to make between his America and Whitman’s America. But also he could be asking, “what is the point of defining America?” I draw this possibility from the line “what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?” At the beginning of the poem, Ginsberg has gone shopping for images. The supermarket is of course one of those 1950s phenomena—convenient and yet impersonal, anonymous. Whitman’s ghostly, quizzical presence injects a note of personality and perversity into this sterile urban environment. He is also perhaps Ginsberg’s Virgil, the poet who has preceded him in exploration and death.

“Sunflower Sutra” (2873-74).  The term “sutra” refers to the sermons of Buddha or the bodhisattvas (near-Buddhas).  In this poem Ginsburg meditates on the relationship between body and soul.  His point is that the two are not really separate.  Rather, as he says in Buddhist fashion, we have “accomplishment-bodies” while here on earth.  We are constantly in transition from one stage to the next.  Jack Kerouac starts off the meditation by telling Ginsberg to concentrate on a dusty old sunflower in a San Francisco rail yard.  As the poem progresses, Ginsberg (I’ll just go ahead and call him that) explains that this bedraggled sunflower is like the human soul.  With concentration, the poet becomes “unconfused” about his own human potential, and, in a grand gesture, he takes up the dead material sunflower and wields it as a scepter, like a king.  The poem is obviously inspired by William Blake’s poignant “Ah! Sunflower,” one of his Songs of Experience, which runs as follows:

Ah! sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun,
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller’s journey is done;

Where the youth pined away with desire,
And the pale virgin shrouded in snow,
Arise from their graves and aspire;
Where my sunflower wishes to go.

Page-by-Page Notes on Sylvia Plath’s Selections (2967-79).

“Morning Song” (2968-69). Sylvia Plath had two children, and this poem is about one of them just after the child’s birth. Usually, we sentimentalize the relationship between a newborn baby and its mother, but Plath does not do that, insisting “I’m no more your mother/than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow/effacement at the wind’s hand.” The infant (Frieda since she was born in 1960; Nicholas wasn’t born until 1962) is at least as much a new voice as a new body, and that voice takes its place among the elements.

“Lady Lazarus” (2969-71). Plath made three suicide attempts, the last of which was successful. Her tone is understandably very bitter, and the speaker apparently feels as if people take a lurid interest in someone who has survived a suicide attempt. And of course anyone who survives such an attempt feels first and foremost like a failure. Another insight might be that any attempt at suicide that goes beyond a half-hearted gesture is successful because it amounts to a rejection of life. I believe that’s why Plath says she has already died at least once, which I gather from her line, “I do it [dying] exceptionally well.” There is much self-deprecation in this poem—the speaker must feel as if she has been putting on a show for others, as if having “returned from the dead” raises expectations of insights on the order of Dante and transforms her emaciated, battered body into something like a saintly relic (during the Middle Ages, people used to pay good money for bones and other items alleged to belong to the saints, bits of the True Cross, and so forth). Much of her poetry contains references to the Jews who died in the Nazi Holocaust—she often compares herself to them, though she isn’t Jewish. The second half of the poem is gruesome in that way since she seems to be comparing her own body to a melted down filling, like the ones Nazis collected from the camps where they gassed and then cremated their victims. God and Lucifer amount to the same malign power, both of them Nazi-like brutes, who are to be counter-threatened, not bargained with: “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.” There’s a sense here that Plath’s speaker attributes much of her anger and her troubles to relations with men.

“Ariel” (2971-72). Plath had a horse named Ariel, and the word in Hebrew means “lion of God.” So she is riding her horse into “the cauldron of morning,” the sun, back to the beginning of things and as if canceling out her accumulated experiences (the “solar journey” motif is evident in this poem, but the speaker isn’t “riding westward” like John Donne’s in his poem “Good Friday, 1613”). The rider-poet and the fiercely energetic horse have become one. Much of the poem gives the sense that the speaker is determinedly and with abandon casting off everything closest to her – “the Child’s cry / Melts into the wall” is one line that might be read in this light. She also describes herself as “The dew that flies / Suicidal.”

“Daddy” (2973-74). It’s clear enough that Plath was ambivalent about the power of the men in her life; it’s a bitter thing to “Nazify” your own father, and at the heart of the poem is the line “Every woman adores a fascist.” Plath’s father was a college professor and bee-keeper named Otto who died of an embolism after surgery for complications due to diabetes. He seems to have had gangrene. Mainly I think Sylvia is trying to deal with this loss—probably what she’s expressing, even though it sounds like hatred or a sense of being abused, is guilt and confusion over an irretrievable loss. Since Otto died when Sylvia was eight, one of the poem’s statements in particular is very dark: “I was ten when they buried you.” In other words, we are to imagine the dead father rotting above ground, unable to get himself buried. This dead father continues to tyrannize her imagination, haunt her like a vampire. It doesn’t help that subsequent relationships with men bear the mark of this struggle with the absent father who inhibits and forbids. So insistent is this haunting that the father comes to stand in for death itself, if I understand the poem right – isn’t that what the “black telephone” reference is about? As if she could speak to the dead man through it, connect with death itself? When the speaker says, “I’m through,” I interpret her words as a defiant insistence that she is through being obsessed with her loss, through with constant transaction or dwelling with death. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that Plath was able to finish with these things and live out her life, which accounts for her status as something like a latter-day romantic, a tormented poet who died before her time.

“Words” (2975). This is a personal poem, I think, that is also about the connection between words, the world around us, and our experience of inwardness. The speaker says that her words strike natural things like an axe, and the echoes of the strike gallop off like horses, while the “sap” from the stricken tree “wells like tears” with sap that, like any stirred or troubled waters, seeks to re-establish its calm reflective surface. The reference to tears makes a connection between the speaker’s emotions and the natural world her words penetrate or strike, as if there’s an affinity between them. (Compare such affinities to Ovid or Dante’s way of humanizing nature and vice versa.) The rock turns out to be like a “white skull,” as if the events described, or the processes described, are occurring in the speaker’s head. In the end, the speaker re-encounters her words “on the road,” and now they have become “dry and riderless,” no longer driven, that is, by what generated them: the thoughts and desires of the one who uttered them. It is the “fixed stars” that rule the speaker’s life, not the words that have come back to greet her from the past (figured spatially as a road). Perhaps this is one way of saying, as Auden does in “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Or even more broadly, our words don’t allow us to shape, predict, or control the larger patterns that emerge from our lives. In the end they are hollowed-out abstractions, going everywhere and nowhere; they, too, are beyond our control.

“Blackberrying” (2975-76). I need to think about this fine nature poem when I have more time, but it seems to me that usually such poems about seasonal harvesting, mowing, and so forth (Marvell, Keats, many others) are either pensive or bustling. This one is more of a sober, somewhat lonely observation about the landscape and the viewpoints or lookouts it offers. I think one of her children may be with her, to judge from the “milk bottle” reference. But I ‘m not sure about that.

“Purdah” (2976-77). The first part of the poem portrays the female speaker in her hard materiality, something to be reflected in the mirrors wielded by the husband, “Lord of Mirrors.” By implication, this wife is only allowed to see herself through the husband’s authorized version of her. But it turns out that she isn’t all surface, all exteriority: at the end she speaks of unloosing “The lioness, / The shriek in the bath, / The cloak of holes.” There is something more than a placid face “behind the veil.”

“The Applicant” (2978). This poem is a dark-comic examination of marriage as an insecure man’s “last resort.” The potential wife is many helpful, protective things – a willing “hand,” a protective “suit,” filler for an empty head, a “poultice” (something absorbent to treat pain and wounds, something with which to remove stains), and “image” for a man’s eye. The ceremonial language of marriage, “will you marry,” comes in for mockery more than once, and the line referencing what to do with the wife’s tears over her husband’s death, “We make new stock from the salt,” points to a grim psychic economy for the marriage bond. Nothing’s wasted, it seems, and even the sorrow will be put to use by the unnamed “we,” the system, the institution.

“Child” (2979). This poem may be addressed to Plath’s second child Nicholas, born in 1962. His eye is clear as yet, but the speaker laments that its objects may contaminate it all too soon: the mother’s misery, the drabness of the apartment, with its “Ceiling without a star.” The theme of motherhood is a disturbing one here: it’s partly an institution into which Plath and her speaker can’t fit themselves and don’t seem to find fulfillment. We have seen this issue before, in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand.

General Comments on Unassigned Sylvia Plath Poems (Not in our Anthology).

“Tulips.” Theodore Roethke was a big influence on Sylvia Plath, something you can tell by paying attention to the odd way she treats natural imagery. Ted Hughes says this poem is a description of her appendicitis operation. Plath had also miscarried shortly before that event. She seems to be thinking about death, and the presence of the tulips unsettles her—they are red, and swallow up the room, starving her of oxygen. By implication, there is some ambivalence towards her husband and children, who also unsettle and starve her.

“Elm.” This is a variation on the ancient trope of the tree on a hill being shaken by a storm. But here the elm tree, personified and speaking, mirrors back to the speaker her own darkness and confused agony. I think this is one of the poems Plath wrote after Ted Hughes left her. // We could read this poem as a companion to the Colossus. Her father Otto, a professor of German and entomology who died when she was very young, is treated with much ambivalence and even hostility here. I don’t think the target is so much her father—after all, he died so early in Sylvia’s life—but rather the patriarchal power he represents.

“Black Rook in Rainy Weather.” This poem shows the speaker communing with nature in her odd way—we might contrast that way with the nature poetry of pockets Hopkins, who sees all around him things honoring God by being themselves, and everywhere patterns of order. Plath says she would like occasional “backtalk” from the heavens—I particularly like the sixth and seventh stanzas, the ones in which the black crow orders its feathers and grants “A brief respite from fear / Of total neutrality.”

“The Colossus.” The speaker represents herself as working on an ancient statue, one of the seven wonders of the world—the Colossus of Rhodes. It seems he is broken in pieces thanks to some terrible event, and she cannot put them together again. I believe Sylvia Plath follows in the tradition of Virginia Woolf as an intellectual. She is surrounded by a mostly male literary tradition, and must make the best she can of her situation. The Oresteia, to which Plath refers, opens with the transgression of Clytemnestra, who is subsequently punished for the murder of Agamemnon by her son Orestes. The speaker carries on in workmanlike fashion, but says the work makes her none the wiser. Perhaps, as has been suggested, she is figuring herself as a priestess tending to a dying God or to her male Muse.

Page-by-Page Notes on Gary Snyder’s Selections (2956-67).

Snyder foregoes the “connective tissue” that makes ordinary, non-poetical speech and writing intelligible, giving us instead enigmatic snippets of thought and imagery. That’s a challenge to our insistence on narrative fluidity and to our strong bias in favor of discursive hashings-out of problems and ideas. We think a linear stream of language can handle anything, but we are probably way off in that regard. Snyder gives us stubborn “blocks” of text instead, and these call up stubborn blocks of images—he seems to be trying to capture something about the process whereby we perceive, think, and feel.

“Milton by Firelight” (2957-58). Well, as A. E. Housman’s speaker says in “Terence, This is Stupid Stuff,” “Malt does more than Milton can, / To justify the ways of God to man.” Here in Snyder’s poem, the point is that nature will outlast human myths and propensity to turn everything in an otherworldly direction and describe life as a stark morality play. Ordinary experience, too, has a poetry and a rhythm of its own, as we can see from the descriptions of nature and human routine.

“Riprap” (2958-59). This poem might bear comparison with William Carlos Williams’ “A Sort of a Song,” in which the speaker describes metaphor as a saxifrage plant splitting rocks, reconciling humanity to inanimate stones. Here in Snyder’s poem, the speaker’s words are figured as cobbling for the mind in its attempt to scale the difficult slopes of thought. They give us a sense of solidity and direction, just as the emergent “riprap” patterns of things in the material realm, if I understand the middle lines. But the end of the poem is challenging: “all change, in thoughts, / As well as things.” What do these two lines imply?

“August on Sourdough, A Visit from Dick Brewer” (2959). What matters is apparently not what the two men said but rather the situation in its entirety, including the natural events surrounding them and the purpose that brought Brewer out West, which may have been partly to talk with the poet.

“Beneath My Hand and Eye the Distant Hills. Your Body” (2959-60). Seems like this is a Whitman-style poem. The speaker describes his exploration of the lover’s body, eroticizing its shapes and contours in language that evokes exploration of a natural landscape.

“The Blue Sky” (2960-65). This poem is difficult not only in its syntax, formatting, and non-narratival way of proceeding, but also in its eclecticism. But it makes sense as a poem rooted in Buddhist notions about purity, healing, and awakening to spiritual truth. The movement in this poem seems to be from the earth to the sky throughout: we draw our materials for physical and spiritual healing from the earth, as the shamans and medicine-men do: roots, herbs, and so forth. We also derive psychoactive substances from the same general sources: peyote, for instance, is used by the American Indians. It seems to have something like an LSD effect, engendering strange visions. Perhaps this visionary experience amounts to a way of healing or remedying our earth-boundedness, our limitations as physical beings. As always, I find William Blake valuable in talking about visionary writing of any kind: he says in one of his poems that we must look “through the eye and not with it.” The eyes are physical instruments in the ordinary sense, but they are at the same time “spiritual instruments” that construe material things spiritually without denying their material existence. That capacity is what Blake emphasizes, not the mechanistic qualities of the human eye. Snyder’s poem in its entirety makes a similar point about interpreting nature, if we reflect on the title in conjunction with the poem as it plays out: the blue sky is something we can see all around us, but at the same time, it is a symbol of transcendence and purity. As your notes point out, blue is color Buddhism employs to figure the absolute. Well, the poem stresses two things: the necessity and art of healing in a material world full of suffering and sorrow, and the necessity of representing an absolute realm beyond that world and all its strife. As for the several forays into Indo-European and other etymology, they amount to a search for another realm of purity, another primal source of humanity: to honor language this way is to honor ourselves because, as one modern philosopher has written, language is “the dwelling-place of Being.” It isn’t just an instrument we use (like a hammer or a saw)—in modern times, language is often thought of as the symbolic order into which we are born and which constitutes us as what we are. So a return to etymologies, to the roots of words, doesn’t necessarily imply a naïve concern for some alleged connection between words and things in the world; rather, it may involve a return to our own source in words, to the source of our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. The words Snyder treats this way have to do with what we have symbolically made of the sky and with our concern for healing.

“Straight Creek—Great Burn” (2965-66). What I like about this poem is the way it combines fanciful, mythic ways of interpreting nature with very fine observation of natural processes and things, which observation reveals something of the landscape’s history, too. The poem flows, yet it flows somewhat slowly so that we have to take notice of each image or thought as it’s presented to us. The poem ends with the settling down of birds, so its energy or impetus comes from nature and cedes to nature in the end.

“Ripples on the Surface” (2966-67). Here the interest lies in how the poet brings out nature’s patterns, how its infinitely many shapes may be “variations of a theme.” This is something I find worthwhile because I like nature photography: the best photographers have an eye for just that sort of patterning; they don’t just take pictures of “pretty landscapes.” The last seven lines are enigmatic, in that they place a “little house” in the context of the wilderness. What does the line “Both together, one big empty house” imply about the presence of a little house in a natural scene? Does anything human automatically transform and humanize nature, as it does in Wallace Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar”?

Week 15, Tennessee Williams

2006-11-30T18:03:00.000-08:00

Please check back in future. I did not get around to posting material on this author during the semester, but will post an entry when I have time to transcribe and edit my notes.

Week 13, Hughes and Steinbeck

2006-11-16T18:03:00.000-08:00

Langston Hughes and John Steinbeck. Hughes’ selections (1891-1901). Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1901-13).

Page-by-Page Notes on Langston Hughes’ Selections (1891-1901).

1892-94. “The Negro speaks of Rivers.” Rivers are the source of life and vitality. Africa is represented as the cradle of civilization. Perhaps the river also gives us a different way to reckon time. It creates its own temporality. In this poem, the river is also associated with purity, hope, and endurance—in short, with the deeper currents of humanity that prove irresistible in the long run.

1893. “Mother to Son.” The homely metaphor that the mother uses is appropriate to the way she has lived her life. The advice she gives is that determination and endurance are the keys to success.

1893-94. “Weary Blues.” I don’t know much about the blues, but this kind of music seems like sorrow sounding out itself. The song does not amount to whining; it is a call to be strong. The blues song puts the piano player to sleep but continues to echo in his mind. The music even replaces the moon and the stars.

1894. “I, Too.” To sing is to be. Art is a key part of self-definition. The speaker reckons “many years” as “tomorrow,” and knows how to laugh at oppression.

1895-97. “Mulatto.” This poem adopts a mocking tone, and it concludes by confronting white people with a boy of mixed race. The mixing of races was a fact of life in the South, but knowledge of it was generally repressed because acknowledging it would tear down white racial purity doctrine. The poem associates black people with the night, joy, and sensuality—things that white people can give in to and then reject scornfully.

1896. “For a Dark Girl.” This poem appropriates the minstrel genre, and replaces it with something more realistic. I am reminded of Billie Holiday’s doleful song, “Strange Fruit.” See also “Silhouette” on page 1899.

1896. “Vagabonds.” This poem resembles William Blake’s Songs of Innocence in its simplicity. The idea is that even adults must be able to recognize bitter truth without being crushed by it.

“Refugee.” As Du Bois and others have pointed out, once the original struggle for freedom had succeeded, further struggle was necessary. Self-definition and autonomy only come with difficult experience. Martin Luther King Jr. will later refer to the Declaration of Independence as a “blank check.” Just as in the poem “Democracy” (1900-01), the sentiment is not cynicism. Instead, freedom is represented as a deep, perpetual desire, not as an abstraction. A modern theorist has described history as “the pain of our ancestors.” That definition makes sense especially when we are reading African-American literature.

1897-98. “Madam and Her Madam.” The speaker rejects southern gentility bluntly because she sees it as false consciousness. It is vicious to be polite to people whom you are in fact treating like trash.

1899. “Visitors to the Black Belt.” Again, the issue of self-definition is vital. White America continually defines black people in demeaning ways, even when it glamorizes Harlem, jazz, and so forth.

1900. “Commercial Theater.” In this poem, the speaker laments that his favorite art forms, though deeply American, are treated as if they are foreign and exotic. Jazz becomes swing, played by Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, and other white musicians. Many African-Americans saw this borrowing as cultural expropriation. Black people have long been an integral part of American history, but Hughes points out that they often see themselves plundered as a rich vein for exotic representations. So they were still being treated as foreigners even in the Twentieth Century.

1900-01. This poem looks forward to Martin Luther King’s civil opposition to the argument that black people must not “force the issue” of equal rights. The truth is that all genuine progress is untimely because there will always be people unwilling to grant such progress—it goes against their perceived interests. Langston Hughes, like King, understands that history is made by human action, by confrontational people who draw prejudice and injustice into the light of day and make it contemplates itself. Waiting accomplishes nothing. In this poem, Hughes describes freedom as “a strong seed” (something natural) but also as something that needs human nourishing.

Page-by-Page Notes on John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1901-13).

1902-03. In these selections, we get mostly the narrator’s perspective, but he describes what happened to families like the Joads while they made their way west. Such midwesterners were trying to live a poor-folks variation of the Jeffersonian “gentleman farmer” ideal. They may not have had fine manners or the erudition of a Jefferson, but they maintained an organic, almost mystical relationship with the soil. However, agriculture had been undergoing mechanization from the 1890s onwards, and by 1910, large tractors were widely used on big plots of land. The 1920s began to experience excessive agricultural production, so much so that by 1934 FDR succeeded in passing the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which paid farmers not to overproduce and further destabilize the market for their crops. The 1930s were simply terrible—drought combined with the effects of over-farming to create the Dust Bowl, as large portions of the Midwest came to be called. (These general points can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl.) That condition is what drove Okies like the Joad family out west, especially to California. But this great migration westward differed from predecessor migrations in that it was the result of desperation, not a sense of boundless opportunity. Steinbeck captures the eerie desolation left behind when he describes civilized homes returning to wilderness. On 1903, he writes, “The wild cats crept in from the fields at night, but they did not mew at the doorstep anymore. They moved like shadows of a cloud across the moon, into the rooms to hunt the mice.” Steinbeck’s realism allows him to capture the unfolding human drama of the Dust Bowl exodus with great accuracy. However, the objective reality he registers calls for taking up an attitude, not for false neutrality. It cries out for strong judgment against oppressors, for cynicism about the self-serving mythologies of the marketplace (which many stubborn supporters of President Herbert Hoover continued to maintain), and denunciation of class snobbishness and essentialism. But it also called for compassion for those who were simply confused rather than malicious. There is appropriate lyricism in the midst of Steinbeck’s realistic writing—this tone works especially well when he is trying to capture the persistence of hope even when it would seem that all objective justification for hope has disappeared. It is easy to see the simultaneous despair and determination in the faces of poor people captured on film during the 1930s—the Library of Congress website at http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/trm016.html. I suppose that combination of despair and determination is what Steinback wants us to appreciate.

1905. The tire-dealer is a small-time opportunist preying upon desperate people. The same goes for the maker of the handbill promising Okies jobs out west. The point of such handbills is to create a pool of surplus labor, thereby driving the price of labor down. The kind of resentment generated by such swindles was widespread. There was a great deal of anger against the capitalist order and its ideology, even though America has never really turned to radical forms of government such as socialism. A good book to read on the subject of America’s leftist and progressive tradition is Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

1906-13. Route 66, which was built in 1926-27, ran through the heartland all the way to Southern California nearly to the ocean around Santa Monica (see the Wikipedia article on Route 66 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_66.) Chapter 15 describes the life that passes through and congregates in areas connected with that once vital highway, which was decommissioned in the mid-1980s but still exists in parts as a scenic route. Rich people, truck drivers making a stable living, and employees at the many diners dotting the road, are all described. Steinbeck uses an impersonal narrative style to categorize the waitresses, cooks, and other characters, and he captures the emptiness they must feel. We can sense this in the mechanical way the waitress must say again and again “What will you have today?” Insecurity besets even the wealthy men and women who breeze along at 65 mph and stop for coffee and pie. Everyone is isolated, and nobody can fully understand the plight of the poor. But as the bread-and-candy scene from 1910-13 shows, Steinbeck apparently believes people from all classes retain some common humanity, some empathy, even though they feel compelled to disguise it fiercely. Insecurity and fear make the diner employee Mae mask her generosity, her desire to protect the dignity of downtrodden people. Al the cook disguises his own decency with cuss words, but it comes through all the same, and the truck drivers leave a tip that more than makes up for the generosity Mae has shown. This desire seems to be the light of hope in Steinbeck’s otherwise very bleak novel.

Week 12, Fitzgerald and Hemingway

2006-11-09T18:02:00.000-08:00

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams” and “Babylon Revisited” (1641-72). Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1846-64).

General Notes on Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams” (1641-58).

Dexter Green is middle class in genteel Dillard, and his wise, practical way with money makes him very rich while he’s still in his twenties. He holds to the Protestant Work Ethic and isn’t a speculator in stocks like many of his Ivy League classmates. Still, he is a hopeless speculator in romance, having become hooked on Judy Jones when he was fourteen and she was eleven. She embodies Dexter’s “winter dream,” and seems to speak to what is most dynamic and vital in him. But as it turns out, the Siren has nothing to say. Judy is described as pure body and “direct personality,” more or less the promise of limitless beauty and sexuality. She is premature in her perfection, and burns out young, becoming hollow and domesticated. So Dexter’s dream is shattered, and his worldly success brings him only disillusionment. He returns to his home town, but the American Dream he has achieved rings hollow. Fitzgerald deals with both class and romance, but the two don’t go together easily. He’s interested in fundamental conflicts in the American character, if one may use such terms: a main conflict here is between the material, practical side of Americans and the spiritual, romantic side. It seems the Dexter projects romantic qualities onto Judy that she really doesn’t have. Judy is attractive because of her air of pure promise, her beautiful exterior that turns out to be hollow inside. Dexter is able to infuse this hollow or empty center with whatever content he likes.

Dexter associates with what we might call “the leisure class” of Lake Erminie. Thorstein Veblen’s classic sociology work The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) deals with this group and traces its history to modern times. Dexter sees himself as the “rough stuff” of the leisure class; he’s not really part of it, but can imagine that his children might fit easily enough and move with the leisured people in their casual, understated way. Why? Because they will not have had to earn their money the way Dexter did. People sometimes accuse Fitzgerald of really believing that the rich are fundamentally different from other people, but his stories don’t play that way. Wealth buys a person some distance from the crowd and freedom from immediate want, but of course this distance and freedom usually creates problems of its own—ennui, a sense that life is meaningless, etc. These problems aren’t the exclusive province of the “beautiful people”; it’s just that they have more time to dwell upon them.

General Notes on Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited” (1658-72).

Babylon was an opulent ancient city of the neo-Babylonian Empire that flourished in the 600’s BCE. It’s also the place where the Israelites were held captive when the Babylonians captured Jerusalem in 586 BCE. So the spiritual ideal is there, but is held captive to the material realm. In Fitzgerald’s short story, Babylon is Paris, France in its pre- and post-Crash-of-1929 incarnations. For Charlie Wales, a once-wealthy businessman, Paris represents a time of drunken excess and irresponsibility. Later, Paris becomes the place where he must reckon the damages he has wrought upon himself and others. Charlie has reformed and, though haunted by guilt, seeks to rebuild a home with his sister and his daughter Honoria. But the lesson the Depression was that chickens really do come home to roost. I think Alan Greenspan would have to call the Roaring Twenties a time of “irrational exuberance” leading to financial meltdown. The global economy of the time was built on endless speculation, with little or no security net to protect the system from misuse or, as some would say, from its own flaws. Expectations of prosperity must be made real by tangible performance, or the bottom quickly drops out of the financial markets—something most of us are familiar with thanks to the 1987 Stock Market plunge and then the Dot.Com Boom/Bust cycle of the 1990’s, when many people invested in internet startup companies that themselves seemed to have no idea how they were ever going to turn a profit. On the personal level, Charlie has recovered from his troubles with the bottle, but the consequences of his past “irrational exuberance” remain to be dealt with in the present. There just aren’t any clean breaks from the past or any bright new beginnings, as is proven when Charlie’s old comrades-in-cups Lorraine and Duncan prove.

On the whole, the story casts materialism as a species of forgetfulness or oblivion-seeking, so Charlie’s actions during the Roaring Twenties were like a drug he was taking to forget his problems with his wife. Well, the new reality for him is a downer, just as it is for American and indeed for Western Europe. The wildness and conspicuous consumption of the Twenties, with its eternal sense of the present, has given way to an emergent and somber Protestant Work Ethic. (If, that is—as at least Charlie can—one can find any work that needs doing and brings pay.) Lincoln and Marion Peters represent that work ethic—they never whooped it up like so many during the period of easy living. Marion, especially, resents Charlie’s behavior; she sees that he ruined other people’s lives, went into a sanatorium, and then started over again, landing on his feet while so many others had no such luck. He’s making reasonable money again. I suppose that while Fitzgerald isn’t exactly a fictionalist who deals with the down-and-out class—the kind who find out the hard way that, as the song says, “you don’t get no bread with one meatball”—they’re in the background. Guys like Charlie get a second act, a second chance to make good, but millions of truly poor people whose only flaw was not being well connected didn’t have that kind of luck. John Steinbeck will, of course, give us a sense of the wretchedness and poverty that marked the 1930’s.

Page-by-Page Notes on Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1846-64).

1848-49. The story’s simple motif is that of “a person’s life reviewed at the point of death.” But this motif is complicated by the statement that talking is just something one does to pass the time and that the speaker really doesn’t much care about anything by now. His days as a writer are done, so he will not be able to pass along any of his insights about living or dying.

1850-51. One likes to think of snow as symbolizing purity, but here the references indicate something more like deception, or even cruelty and oblivion.

1852-54. The argument between Harry and his wife arises because he seems determined to wound her, to “leave nothing behind.” It’s better, he thinks, to reduce their relationship to sex, money, comfort, and reputation. Even privately, he casts himself as a hollow liar selling “vitality”—the vitality that should have gone into his writing. No doubt this was a serious consideration for Hemingway, too—he went in for politics and journalism, and adopted the George Orwell ethos that one should go to the front, to the slums, and so forth, to make authentic contact with one’s subject matter. But now Harry is a “kept man,” and he lacks the will to do better than, say, F. Scott Fitzgerald in writing about the upper crust, which is his current milieu.

1854-56. Circumstances really get the better of the characters in this story: Helen’s search for meaning in life was badly impacted by the death of her child in a plane crash. Then Harry’s random (?) failure to treat his wound properly—is it just chance that makes him behave so self-destructively? Or is it a will to annihilation? Well, in spite of his machismo, he will be taken down by some invisible germs. And on 1855, the Hyena symbolizes death as something stealthy and opportunistic—not at all like the famous Grim Reaper of medieval iconography.

1857-64. Harry’s mortal illness is especially galling to him because he has long felt it a duty to write about his experiences. Having rendered that experience inauthentic and fallen in love with lies as the grease of social interaction and romance, he has nothing about which to write, and now he’s too tired and sick to grapple with a final description of the ultimate experience, death. Becoming alienated and hollowed out, we might say, gives one a certain perspective on feelings, events, and relationships, but perhaps it is also fatal to a writer in that it strips him of the desire to write anything at all. In the end, Harry dreams of escaping to the white summit of Kilimanjaro. Harry’s failure, of course, allows Hemingway the scripter to offer us some of his finest insights and most lyrical (if stark as always) writing. So perhaps through Harry, Hemingway has at least for a time confronted his own anxieties as a writer and dealt with them.

Edition: Baym, Nina et al. (eds.) The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vols. C, D, E. 6th ed. New York: Norton, 2002. ISBN 0393977943.

Week 11, Larsen

2006-11-02T18:02:00.000-08:00

Nella Larsen. Quicksand (1527-1609).

Page-by-Page Notes on Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1527-1609).

1527. Intro. Du Bois had said that the Twentieth Century would be about “the problem of the color-line.” Race would be the defining issue. Du Bois’ “talented tenth” concept might be the spiritual progenitor of the Harlem Renaissance, which Langston Hughes later called “a state of mind.” This was especially true of the Roaring 20’s. The Harlem Renaissance includes authors such as James Weldon Johnson, Claude Mackay, Alain Locke, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Nella Larson, among others. The idea for Du Bois was that people of African descent should cultivate their own space, their own identity—not an identity based on white people and their expectations. Well, Nella Larsen is part of the Harlem Renaissance, but she seems to have interpreted both the “primitivist” or essentialist emphasis and the Du Boisian “New Negro” emphasis as traps, at least if one espoused them too rigidly.

Larsen’s protagonist in Quicksand, who is of mixed race, burns with anger at both white people and black people. She neither accepts being defined by whites nor falls comfortably into line with any definition of herself. This isn’t to say that she can get away from others’ definitions—her experience in the novel is largely structured by them. That fact is what makes this excellent book so depressing—on the one hand, Larsen has created a strong protagonist who strives for happiness and self-perfection, and who rightly rejects the notion that she ought to be defined or limited in her actions by race. But on the other hand, almost everything that happens to her amounts to that kind of obstacle. Her search for fulfillment bears some resemblance to that of Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening—both try to achieve some measure of independence, and both want to be accepted for who they are, but others find it impossible to make such “concessions.”

What underlies Helga Crane’s unhappiness and discontent? Well, I’d say it’s the basic predicament so well described by John Stuart Mill in his Autobiography: the desire for freedom, for fulfillment and success, for “things,” for happiness as something more than just a fleeting moment. The trouble is, of course, that all of these basic desires are not only difficult to attain, but in Helga’s case they are inflected by America’s problems with race relations (as well as by certain limitations placed on her by others because of her gender). The German philosopher Georg Hegel made a key modern point about identity when he suggested that it was formed by dynamic relationships with others. His claim that freedom could only be fully realized in a community was influential, too. It’s obvious in view of this matrix how difficult Helga’s search for freedom and self-development will be: she really isn’t accepted even by those white people who care about her in America, and she chafes at the kind of black community she encounters at the Naxos school where she teaches for a time. Helga feels the kind of “twoness” that Du Bois attributes to black people in the United States during his time, and in fact even going to a Scandinavian country doesn’t take away this strong sense of double identity. The only solution to Helga’s quest—marrying a black minister and moving to the South—hardly turns out to be authentic or satisfying.

1538-41. Helga feels the need to belong somewhere, but the uplift community’s tool is to suppress so-called race tendencies. Dr. Anderson nearly “uplifts” Helga right back into the uplift project she is determined to reject, but when he reveals the basis for his pitch—his assumption that Helga is “a person from a good family,” she feels more than ever driven to define herself against such snobbishness. Even so, her defiance masks deep inner conflict about her sense of identity and belonging.

1550. Rejected by Uncle Peter on 1544-45, and subsequently by prospective employers for being overqualified, Helga finds that fate takes the shape of Jeanette Hayes-Rore. This wealthy ideologue leads her to New York City’s Harlem and to Anna (who becomes her landlord and friend) and away from Chicago (where she was born) as well as from the South.

1577. What one wants is often impossible to define; still, one is compelled to define it anyway, to supply some content. That content must come from somewhere—the trouble is that a person really can’t control “where” it comes from, at least not entirely.

1578ff (Chs. 13-15). In Copenhagen, Helga is not considered inferior, but she’s viewed as exotic, almost freakish. Others make decisions for her, and we find her slipping into her old pattern of anger and discontent. The Vaudeville act she witnesses infuriates her—she has internalized this “silly half-savage” notion of black people, so seeing it on the state unsettles her. Moreover, the Danes betray a kind of wide-eyed racial bias that is no less wounding even if it lacks the historical saturation and malevolence of American racism. Underlying the Danes’ laughter at the Vaudeville act may well be the same pseudo-scientific race notions from which the white South developed its justification of their “peculiar institution” of race-based slavery.

Edition: Baym, Nina et al. (eds.) The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vols. C, D, E. 6th ed. New York: Norton, 2002. ISBN 0393977943.

Week 10, Eliot

2006-10-26T18:01:00.000-07:00

T. S. Eliot. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1420-22), “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1425-28), The Waste Land (1430-43).

General Notes on Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1420-22).

What’s the question to be addressed? Well, don’t ask. It may be Hamlet’s question—“to be, or not to be” since J. Alfred is like that character in (at least as some have interpreted him) in his indecisiveness and his feeling that “the time is out of joint.” But the only kinds of questions J. Alfred proposes directly are, “do I dare?” “How should I presume?” “How should I begin?” etc. In the plot sense, of course, the question concerns whether and how Prufrock may contact a woman he desires. He wants to declare his love, at least in the interrogative mode. But the main problem is that he is unable to pose this meaningful, portentous question, whatever we claim it is.

Prufrock’s references to nature are oddly anesthetic, which seems appropriate given his state of mind and his need for concealment. The cityscape in this poem is depressing.

There is always time, says J. Alfred, for “visions and revisions” (33). Time is a burden, and J. Alfred finds that he is unable to follow the aesthetes’ prescription to do nothing in the most elegant, artful ways, thereby redeeming superfluousness as a counter-ideal to western utilitarianism and the Protestant Work Ethic. Prufrock can’t let go of the feeling that he ought to act in the world, that he ought to ask big questions and mean something. But he’s too regimented by the quotidian—those “coffee spoons” by which he measures his existence; he’s too timid, too formulated by the gaze of other people, to give an account of himself (60). Human self-awareness is founded upon and always invaded by others—the poem reinforces the basic Hegelian idea that the self is social, a matter of social situatedness and expectations. And here, the “others” who permeate Prufrock’s consciousness seem to be sedately merciless.

Prufrock refers to the “eternal Footman” (85), a reminder that, as Denis Diderot’s Jacques says, “no man is a hero to his valet. We should be in control of life, but life just snickers at us. Perhaps Prufrock would like to play John the Baptist and tell us that he is waiting for the one who will bring completion to us all, but here the issue is, as he says, “no great matter” (83). After line 87, the issue becomes whether it is worth it for this “dead” man to play Lazarus and reawaken with a declaration of live. But why bother in such a dead world? And what if Prufrock’s meaning doesn’t correspond with what the woman “meant” (96-98)? At 111ff, the speaker points out that he’s no Hamlet—the time may be out of joint, but he’s not the one to “set it right”; he’s more like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern than Hamlet. At the poem’s end, Prufrock confesses that he doesn’t believe the mermaids will sing for him. Perhaps their magical chant is for themselves, or for others, but not for him. In the next-to-last stanza they seem to lead to another realm, a transformation or passage over the waters to new life. But Prufrock will stay where he is, will stay underwater and finally drown in his isolation. Alongside whom—who is the “we” he includes?

From Ritual to Romance, by Jesse Weston.

Eliot’s debt to the book From Ritual to Romance (1920) is significant, so here are some notes on that book: author Jesse Weston quotes Sir Francis Bacon: the soul should expand to meet the fullness of a mystery; mystery should not constrict itself to the limits of the soul. And that will be the point when T.S. Eliot uses myth—to go beyond the bounds of the individual ego and force the modern reader to confront his inability to appreciate the ancient myths by which people once lived meaningful lives.

Weston wants to go beyond and before the grail legend as we now have it—she is interested in finding out what lies behind the explicitly Christian and Romance or Arthurian versions of the grail quest. Throughout her book, she finds that ancient fertility myths are the source of the modern grail legend. She wants to trace the evolution of religious consciousness or at least to find out what lies at its base. She insists against Ridgeway that religion has always been more than simply ancestor-worship; it has always been connected with something beyond the individual self and immediate family relations. It has been about the relationship between the human and the divine.

So that is one interest Eliot might take in Jesse Weston—the way in which genuine religious consciousness connects us to some realm beyond ourselves.

Moreover, Weston says that the ancient myths are life-myths—they are about the cycle of death and rebirth, and of course they are connected with seasonal change. Eliot wants to tap into this kind of imagery and significance in his poem.

Jesse Weston mentions several versions of the grail legend, and in some of them the sick or dead Fisher King is responsible for the desolation of the land, while in others the questor himself fails to answer the question properly and becomes responsible for the desolation of the land. Weston finds that the first version is the more genuine and ancient, but I am not certain that Eliot cares which came first—it would make sense for him to pose responsibility or agency as a legitimate question in his poem. For us, this means we must ask about the extent to which the poem itself is complicit in the condition it describes and in this way responsible for its perpetuation. What then would the punishment be? Would it have something to do with incoherence?

Weston describes the grail legend as follows: the main object is the restoration to health and vigor of a King suffering from infirmity caused by wounds, sickness, or old age. Further, it seems that the King’s illness has caused war or blight. The hero must “restore the waters to their channel,” and make the land fertile again. So the hero must restore the land to its previous condition, and most importantly make the King healthy again. Castration is sometimes the wound alluded to—loss of generative power.

That author also says that the Aryans believed in sympathetic magic. They believed in prayer and supplication, but also believed they could stimulate divine activity. According to Sir J. G. Fraser in The Golden Bough, these ancients believed that the animal and vegetable world were bound together and that the same principle of life and fertility was at work in them both. Anthropomorphizing nature is one way of showing this. According to Weston, life cults evolved beyond a belief in the vivifying power of water to recognition of “a common principle underlying all manifestations of life.”

Weston comes around to saying that the wasteland is central to an understanding of the entire myth cycle. The grail is not a horn of plenty—it does not seem to be the case that we actually feed from the grail cup. Rather, it is a kind of magic artifact. The four symbols are cup, lance, sword, and dish. They correspond to the pack of cards as hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs. The tarot pack seems to have been introduced to Europe from the East. The fish as a symbol predates Christianity. It has to do with the origin and preservation of life since it is commonly believed that all life comes from water.

General Notes on Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1425-28).

Eliot clearly rejects romantic self-expression as a justification for poetry. Instead, the poet “expresses” the Mind of Europe, the western literary and philosophical/religious canon. This western tradition is an ideal order of texts, a place we can visit to reconnect with whatever may still speak to us from the past. How does the poet do that? It is not simple—conforming to tradition takes hard work, it seems. The poet must cultivate what on 1425-26 Eliot calls “the historical sense”: Homer, Virgil, Dante, and others are still with us, if we approach them rightly. Appreciating the past in relation to the present gives us the only real chance we have of understanding the present. Individual poets are most liberated, most original, in sacrificing their eccentric egos to the “Dead Poets,” becoming thereby a medium for the kinds of feelings and subjects already explored and fixed in textual form by the predecessor poets. If modern poets return to their ancestors in the spirit of self-sacrifice, their minds may then serve as a catalyst and actually change how we read past authors. In that way, the present, as Eliot points out, alters the past. Reading The Waste Land (which Eliot wrote after his “Tradition” essay) may get us to re-examine any number of authors—Shakespeare, Ovid, Augustine, and so forth.

The past is altered by the present. We might consider this simply good neoclassicism—the past is a stable entity, yet it is not unattainable for us. It seems to me that for Eliot, European literature is one large lyric poem, unified like the poetry that Cleanth Brooks and other New Critics consider autonomous. Eliot means by historical sense something very different from historicism. It isn’t so much that ideas become obsolete, but rather that conditions render us unable to act or appreciate the relationship between past and present. It seems to be a perceptual problem brought on or intensified by material developments.

In fact, says Eliot, only the present can render the past intelligible. So how is this idea different from the romantic pursuit of ever-greater self-consciousness? The infinite march of reflective understanding, or the infinite regression of acts of self-consciousness—only not at the individual level.

Where does the individual poet get the ability to tap into this tradition? Well, see Matthew Arnold, who says that the man and the moment are necessary to genuine creation. Arnold says that we need a current of true and fresh ideas. Eliot seems to think that there is not such a current in his own day, so the poet becomes rather a bookish creature. The poet, that is, must be difficult in this modern age.

Eliot uses the term depersonalization. We might look at this demand of his from a few different perspectives. Northrop Frye, for example, writes in his book T. S. Eliot that Eliot is interested in eastern mysticism and religion. In such religious contexts, one achieves a sense described by the phrase “thou art that.” The terms karma and atman come to mind—karma is due to selfishness or desire, and atman is a kind of identification with the world without completely losing one’s individuality—it is a “total self.” And of course, this is what romanticism is always trying to accomplish—recovering a loss unity between mind and nature, between an individual and all others. Well, we might also bring up Matthew Arnold, who writes about the need for disinterestedness, the ability to remain aloof from the goings-on of the world in all its self-interested frenzy. Arnold’s term refers to criticism, of course, not so much to poetry, but the point is that one needs to get outside one’s ordinary skin and achieve a certain degree of objectivity about the object of one’s attentions. Like Matthew Arnold, Eliot offers a formulation that betrays a certain pathos, a personal need to escape from personality. Notice that Eliot uses terms such as self-surrender. Perhaps his scientific metaphor of platinum covers up this romantic pathos. Indeed, we might compare his metaphor to romantic inspiration theory. The mind of the poet serves as a catalyst for language drawn from tradition and culture; tradition itself speaks through the poet. In a sense, then, this is an expressive theory—but what is expressed is not the poet’s personality but rather something much larger than himself. The poetic process is rather like the achievement in Hindu religion of “atman.” It is fair to remind ourselves that romantic theorists do not necessarily advocate simple theories of self-expression—they capture the complexities of language as a medium for spirit, and it makes sense to describe romanticism as an encounter between language and the poet, not simply as self-expression. In any case, the reward for readers is a truly new, authentic experience with art.

The poet has an experience with language and tradition, and is not simply expressing desires that flow from autonomous consciousness. Language and tradition use the poet; they express themselves through poetry. Again, it is worthwhile not separating Eliot entirely from romantic theory. Do good poets ever simply express their feelings? Oscar Wilde points out that “all bad poetry originates in sincere emotion.” When Eliot uses the term “fusion,” there is something in that term of the romantic symbol. The metaphor is scientific, but it carries theological overtones. The romantic symbol fuses things that were disparate, overcomes the gap between subject and object.

See the nightingale reference—this is a concrete image that serves as a focal point for disparate feelings. A complex, traditional literary image of this sort has the power to unify and embody otherwise disjointed feelings. So the poet is a medium who wields such images, he is not a personality that needs to express itself. His primary task is to combine images and words drawn from the literary tradition.

The New critics claim that poetic context warps ordinary or denotative meanings to suit the context of the poem. On this page, Eliot refers to emotion in this way. He rejects Wordsworth’s theory that emotion is recollected in tranquility, favoring instead a different kind of concentration. He seems to like the older or combinatorial terms of faculty psychology—for an author like Sir Philip Sidney, remember, originality was not the point of writing poetry.

We should mention imitative theory—the poet does not imitate but rather serves as a catalyst for the past, for tradition. Repetition is not the goal, but rather a scientific version of poetic creation comes to the forefront. It is as if Eliot is trying to achieve a balance between neoclassical respect for culture and modern faith in “making it New,” with a trace of romantic creative pathos thrown in for good measure. Eliot does not assume that tradition is simply stable, so pure imitative theory would not make sense for him. I don’t think he would agree that we can simply point to touchstones, as Matthew Arnold would call them.

Eliot calls emotion impersonal, and he means that emotion is embodied in the poem and sustained by its contexts. Up to now, we have listened to Eliot offer advice to the poet, as many poet-critics have done. But let’s ask at this point where the reader fits into Eliot’s scheme. The implication of what I just said about emotion getting embodied in an image or in the poem is that the reader, like the poet, must go out of himself and be willing to engage in a certain kind of transaction with language. So reading a modernist poem like The Waste Land turns out to be a very difficult endeavor.

General Notes on T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

Section I. The Burial of the Dead.

Major themes: Frustrated hope for regeneration; frustrated desire experienced as confusion; “undeadness.” London is an unreal city, a place that represents the death of human purpose and meaning. There is an obvious reference to the seasonal cycles of nature, which here seem to be disjointed. (April should not be the cruelest month, but it is.) Another theme is the possibility that an authoritative voice might emerge either to help us get out of our predicament, or at least to explain clearly what it is.

What Eliot introduces us to in this first section is a Dante-world in which individuals are profoundly alienated from themselves and from one another and from any system of meaning that would make sense of their lives. In order to be reborn, a person first must die a genuine death, but that kind of death seems to be denied the characters whose voices we hear in the wasteland. Northrop Frye points out that in The Wasteland, the characters do not seem to know their situation; they are uncomprehending, neither living nor dead. They cannot even die—a problem we encounter in the first part of the poem generally.

I would like to introduce the problem of narrative unity. How are we to construe the speaker of this poem? Is there one? Would it make sense for there to be only one speaker in the context of T. S. Eliot’s poetics? He firmly rejects what he considers romantic egocentrism—the poetry of pure self-expression—but he also rejects Matthew Arnold’s version of disinterested objectivity, as well as the Victorian Sage writers and their strategies for garnering authority. I don’t think we are going to get a final version of the truth from any single narrative voice, even though Eliot says that Tiresias’ vision is the poem’s central one. Several voices emerge in this first section.

Marie. The first voice is that of “Marie,” an alienated aristocrat. She speaks of fragmentary childhood experiences that she cannot put together or properly interpret. The cosmopolitan figure Marie represents the kind of decadence that led to the First World War—she is among the living dead. She hides in her books and fragmentary childhood memories, her sense of racial pride. There is no genuine sense of place, origin, or tradition for her. Apparently, this character is modeled after Marie Larisch, the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Bavaria Ludwig Wilhelm and the actress Henriette Mendel. She was a confidante of the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, and acted as go-between for Crown Prince Rudolf and Baroness Mary Vetsera. Eliot actually met Marie.

The imagery associated with Marie as well as the comments she makes bespeak frustrated desire, desire frustrated by the world in which she lives. The setting of the poem seems to be post WWI Europe, most particularly London, but the reminiscences of Marie refer to a time before that. She introduces unwittingly the theme of descent into an underworld, which for her seems to involve frustrated sexual desire—a world in alliance with what Eliot might call death’s dream kingdom, a division that stops short of full spiritual enlightenment. She or her interlocutor—it is difficult to see which—claims to be neither living nor dead, and looks into the heart of light uncomprehendingly. She is the “hyacinth girl,” and this may be a reference to the fertility myths that Eliot got from Jesse Weston—the cult of Adonis employed the hyacinth flower to mimic the blood of the dying God. But the hyacinth girl does not seem to understand her relation to this mythology. Moreover, I’m reminded by the criticism I’ve read that this imagery appears in other Eliot poems—a male figure meets a young girl who is holding flowers. Perhaps Dante provides a clue to the meaning of this symbolism: in purgatory, Dante has a vision of a young woman named Matilda, who is in Eden. This vision of Matilda eventually gives way to the higher vision of Beatrice, so Matilda is a lower-level figure for Dante. She gives him a lecture on the properties of seeds—in Eden, things grow with unbelievable ease; there is no question of sterility or painful birth into the light of day. In Purgatorio Canto 28, Dante exhibits some resentment of what he has seen. Now, generation is no easy matter. The references to Tristan reinforce the theme of frustrated desire.

The Prophet. Between these passages where Marie and a lover speak, we are treated to the language of biblical prophecy reminiscent of Ezekiel. This voice promises to show us “fear in a handful of dust” (30). What is the function of this kind of language? Dryness, drought, predominate in this passage—there is no hiding from the sterility of the desert, and it is possible that the references to “something different” refer to Christ. Or perhaps they simply refer to death, which Marie and her lover cannot comprehend because they are neither living nor dead. The kind of desire they exhibit is bound to fail them in age, for it leads nowhere beyond the boundaries of the self. They are self-isolated characters. Prophecy of radical change is no shelter or comfort for them.

Immediately following this voice, or interrupting it, rather, we find a reference to Ezekiel. Perhaps these references are meant to remind us of the deeper significance missed by people like Marie, but as a student of Victorian literature, I would add that biblical prophecy is one of the more common strategies employed by the Victorian sage-writers. So I am not certain that I trust this style, which Eliot as a modern author is almost bound to reject as a marker for deeper significance in the poem. In any event, the prophetic voice challenges us with the fact that we know nothing but broken images and that drought is the prevailing condition of life. It is clear that what “the freeing of the waters” cannot yet occur.

Madame Sosostris. This character is a fake prophetic voice, and she is not even certain that she can transmit the insight into the future she believes she has to offer—”one must be so careful these days.” The tarot pack she wields seems to be somehow related to the fertility cults or life myths, at least indirectly. She refers to a drowned sailor, telling her interlocutors that this is their card. So the theme here is drowning, immersion, transformation. Is the Hanged Man the Fisher King? In any case, I don’t think we will get the answers from her, though her reference to the need to fear death by water is interesting because this sort of death may amount to a genuine “sea-change,” genuine death and transformation.

Citizen or Dantean Pilgrim in the Unreal City. This voice gives us a vision of a dying civilization. As Dr. Johnson would say, if you’re tired of London, you’re tired of life. Everybody in the Citizen’s London seems to be tired of life. This part of the poem associates London with Dante’s Inferno. What we have seen so far is characters who are among the living dead, so the entire first section is a descent into the underworld. At the end of Section 1, the theme of death and regeneration surfaces. What would it mean if the corpse were to sprout? The dead here seem resentful, sterile, and seek no regeneration—it would only disturb them if a corpse were to reawaken.

Charles Baudelaire is mentioned here, too, in the last line of the first section. This poet concerns himself with a teeming city of anonymous souls wrapped up in themselves and not connected with the bustling life around them. Yet, Baudelaire sees that it’s necessary not to deny the present state of affairs. He is someone who could immerse his language and himself in a bustling urban environment and not get lost. That’s what connects him to the prophetic authors and the Hindu holy texts in Eliot—all are able to immerse themselves in a hostile environment and return alive to bring us insight. We might use that standard to judge the voice that speaks at the poem’s end, incidentally—he asks in borrowing a thought from the Bible, “shall I at least set my lands in order?”

II. A Game of Chess.

Themes: The consequences of the frustration and confusion we saw in Section I.

It seems that two main voices are heard in this part—an upper-class voice and a lower-class voice. Sterility is common to them both. The first is shot through with ornate poetic references, one to Cleopatra and her splendor, another to Dido of Carthage, another to Ophelia, and yet another to Philomela, who was violated by the barbarous King Tereus and turned into a nightingale. This is a legend about swallowing one’s own increase, as the King was made to do when he was served his own son, Itys. But here, there is no mention of a tapestry telling the whole story. Ovid had managed to find beauty in Philomela’s sad tale, but here the nightingale sings to uncomprehending “dirty ears,” and no vital connection between mythic narrative and nature emerges.

“A closed car at four” (136) is an important line because even if rain came, the speaker would not allow it to penetrate. There is a total absence of any inspiration or genuine life in this section—the wind stirs, but to no real effect. And the culture of the past, most particularly Shakespeare, is turned into a silly ragtime hit. Fire is mentioned, but it is not the kind that purifies leading up to the releasing of the waters. The lower-class woman of this section bears children and has abortions, and both acts seem to mean about the same to her. From such an attitude will come no regeneration at either the individual or societal level. The reference to Ophelia at the end of this section underscores the craziness of the sexuality to which the poem alludes.

As Northrop Frye says, the title of the second part may well refer to Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. There, of course, the issue is whether Ferdinand and Miranda will marry and help regenerate the social order. Certainly, the women in this second part have little in common with Miranda. But the stakes are high, even if they don’t know it.

III. The Fire Sermon.

Themes: The vision of Tiresias; a call to purification.

We arrive at the autumn, the nadir, of the poem, a point at which physical and spiritual regeneration have been denied. Of course, this part hardly sounds like a sermon, but it teaches us by the light of a mythic synthesis—Tiresias, Buddha, Augustine. So what is the point? Something seems to be happening because at 173, we hear that “the river’s tent is broken.” The River Thames is flowing to the ocean, carrying no more filth with it. But the entire section seems to be about seductions, and the poet works in previous references to Philomel as well as Sweeney, commonly glossed as the low and sensual man. The prophet Tiresias has been both a woman and a man, so he can judge the scene he describes. In his note, Eliot claims that Tiresias is central to the poem, but that needs explaining. I’ve heard it said that the poem’s references to sexual sterility are to be replaced by poetic engendering or reproduction—the capacity of poetic language to reshape the cultural heritage just at the point when all seems lost and irretrievably alien, fragmented. But that notion sounds a bit too optimistic for this poem, doesn’t it? It sounds like a concerted effort to make the poem offer a standard modernist thesis about poetic language. I don’t think Eliot is necessarily offering us one big claim about art’s regenerative power.

Tiresias is, of course, prominent and wise—he sees the typist’s loveless act and the comprehends the soulless lust of the “young man carbuncular.” The typist allows herself to be used like a public urinal. Obviously, this kind of sexuality is sterile. The same goes for the scene that evokes the alleged furtive union between Queen Elizabeth and Leicester. Perhaps the point is that these lurid images and references must be worked through for purification to occur. Note the reference to St. Augustine at 307-10 (“To Carthage then I came,” etc.). Augustine dwells upon how we are at first trapped in our senses and prone to obsession, and how God needs to move us beyond them. His particular spiritual stumbling block, as he explains in The Confessions, was lust.

Edmund Spenser also makes what a cameo appearance in this section—there is a reference to his “Prothalamion,” or song in preparation for the marriage of the Earl of Worcester. The poet asks the Thames to run softly until he finishes his poetic task. Spenser wrote of the Earl’s marriage in an elegant, innocent-seeming way, which lends irony to his line, “Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song” (176). But there may be more to the story than this—it’s something to look into.

IV. Death by Water.

Themes: the meaning of death and its connection to rebirth.

Frye says that this part refers to physical death, just as burial means physical life but spiritual deadness. But in any case, the Phoenician here seems genuinely to die, forgetting everything. And perhaps forgetting is in itself a kind of purification, given where the scene occurs in the poem. Perhaps the passage indicates a drowning to ordinary life—the life of commerce, awaiting spiritual sea-change. And Carthage was a Phoenician colony, a place Aeneas needed to leave in order to found a new order in Western history. John Carlos Rowe said in a lecture at which I was present that this section may refer to a baptismal immersion in culture and history, a purgation of the ego that makes way for a more genuine self rooted in interconnection with other members of a community. Perhaps, but that seems to me a theoretical imposition on the poem’s immediate matter. Earlier, we saw the phrase “the burial of the dead” used ironically: the Anglican service renders death official, and offers hope to the living. Death is usually an institutional matter. Here, Phlebas the Phoenician gives his body to the sea, forgetting profit and loss, and entering the whirlpool. Then we are warned not to die the way Phlebas did. This raises the question, “where, if anywhere, does death lead?”

V. What the Thunder Said.

Themes: Who can make the waste land fertile and whole again? How can we escape from the prison-house of the self and merge with the divine?

Frye refers to the voice that emerges in the final few paragraphs as “fallen Adam,” who does not have the power to regenerate what he has destroyed. But Rowe says that the voice emerging is the poet himself, as both madman and Fisher King. (One of the voices is that of Hieronymo from Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, a character who uses his madness as a tool to get revenge on a world that has betrayed him.)

We hear of a walk through the desert and barren cities to the Arthurian place of testing, the Chapel Perilous. What is to be confronted there? Well, at last the torrent of rain at least promises to come from the sacred Indian River—“Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves / Waited for rain…” (396-97). The Thunder speaks, and tells us that we must practice self-control, give alms, and show compassion. The line “thinking of the key, each confirms a prison” (415) brings to the fore the problem against which that advice contends: egocentrism, the isolation of the individual from communal purpose.

But I’m not certain that this poem achieves any solution—it is easy to read it in light of the Eliot’s conversion to Anglicanism in 1927, but that would be anachronistic. We have gone through the Chapel Perilous, and there’s some sense towards the poem’s end that “the waters will be freed,” some hint of progress towards spiritual regeneration and the reclaiming of the land as fertile. It may be that the attempt to put together Eliot’s poetic fragments is in itself a kind of answer or salvational quest. But the poem ends with an untranslatable Hindi quotation, really a magic incantation—“Shantih.” I see no final resolution to the predicament that has been described. Perhaps all that can be offered is some indication of how to proceed, how to undertake the necessary journey. Or we might even want to compare the overall effect with Yeats’ “Second Coming,” where the old cycle is ending and the new one is coming, but we aren’t quite sure what the new cycle is going to be. I know from my reading in the Hindu holy texts that they embrace destruction as inseparable from creation. The ancient texts treat death, ruin, and the passage of epochs as necessary, even as they offer consolation and calm. There’s something almost magical in these texts about the recounting of loss and destruction, as if the story of loss is itself the stuff of a new mythology and a new quest. The Waste Land and its strong poetic voices may well take much the same view.

Edition: Baym, Nina et al. (eds.) The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vols. C, D, E. 6th ed. New York: Norton, 2002. ISBN 0393977943.

Week 09, O'Neill

2006-10-19T18:01:00.000-07:00

Eugene O’Neill. Long Day’s Journey into Night (1340-1417).

General Notes on Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (1340-1417).

It’s worth considering O’Neill’s drama in light of Aristotelian dramatic theory. In The Poetics, Aristotle describes tragedy as follows: plot (the arrangement of incidents) is the soul of tragedy; so important is it that the revelation of character is secondary. The plot must be arranged logically and each event should be connected to what follows; everything in a good tragedy should seem both probable and necessary—the best plays contain no improbable nonsense to offend our sensibilities or insult our intelligence. What have come to be called the “unities of time and place” are also quite helpful, in Aristotle’s view, although he’s not nearly as rigid about them as his neoclassical followers: the dramatist should make the events cover a believably short period of time (perhaps one day), and the location should be believably compact, too. A well-constructed plot that more or less adheres to the unities will generate the right emotions in the audience—pity and fear, and the rousing of these emotions, says Aristotle, will lead the audience to an emotional resolution or catharsis. In the best plays, such as Oedipus Rex, the moment the protagonist recognizes his error combines with the play’s “reversal”—the beginning of the hero’s downfall. The spectators see what happens and empathize, realizing that they, too, might do the same thing in the same circumstances. The spectators’ pity and dread upon beholding the play’s dénouement (its resolution or, literally “untying of the knot”) leads to a cathartic reaction. This term had a medical connotation—it meant something like “trepanning” or slicing a vein to purify the blood of harmful elements. So we might interpret catharsis as “purgation or purification.” A common addition to the medical sense these days is that catharsis consists in the attainment of intellectual clarification—as the tragedy unfolds, the spectators learn something about themselves, the necessity of suffering, and their place in the cosmos.

To what extent does O’Neill follow Aristotle? Well, we might say that O’Neill adheres strictly enough to the unities of time and place to satisfy even an eighteenth-century neoclassicist: Long Day’s Journey into Night takes up only one day, and is mostly located in the Tyrone’s home. We begin to see major differences when we consider plot unity. It’s easy to grasp that O’Neill’s plot, while logical enough, is far more sprawling than anything we would expect in a classical drama. Greek plays generally weren’t over-filled with action-hero incidents, either—in a Greek play, one or two “big things” happen, and for the most part the play consists in the characters taking up attitudes towards what has happened. (Dialogue—the confrontation of attitudes and ideas—is a key part of the “action” for the Greeks.) The drawn-out quality of O’Neill’s play betrays a significant departure from ancient theory: like many other moderns, O’Neill is mostly concerned with character—for him, plot is for the sake of character, and not the other way around. So the temporal and spatial tightness of the play, as we might term it, is for the sake of tracing and revealing the emotional histories of the play’s main people: Jamie, Edmund, Mary, and father James Tyrone. In this sense and as we might expect, O’Neill is closer to Freud than to older theories about the nature and purpose of drama—as the plot unfolds, whatever is closest to the main characters (their fundamental drives, anxieties, and desires) will come out, just as surely as “murder will out” in Hamlet. The emphasis is on the doleful economy of the psyche—on, as Edgar Poe might say, “the mournful and never-ending remembrance” to which the characters are chained by personality and circumstance, in spite of their many attempts to forget the past. Each family member is placed in confrontation with the others, and that is how they and we arrive at the most worthwhile insights about their history and current predicament. Edmund confronts Jamie, father James Tyrone confronts Edmund, and so forth. What, then, do they or we learn? If there is “recognition,” what is it?

Well, it’s probably true, as Tolstoy says at the beginning of Anna Karenina, that “every happy family is the same; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But there’s something typical about the Tyrones as an unhappy family unit—their problems are their own, we might say, but at a deeper level, they’re our problems, too. I mean that these four characters are chained together as a family unit in spite of their efforts to break away. Moreover, they’re all actors donning masks and playing a part. They have obviously poured enormous psychic energy into this “family production,” but their creation has brought them no genuine happiness. Wilde said in speaking of Greek tragedy that if you give someone a mask, you’ll get the truth—i.e. that a mask provides cover and facilitates the revelation of character. I suppose we do learn the truth about the four main characters in O’Neill’s play, but learning the truth, unmasking the illusions, doesn’t bring happiness or lend the play a happy ending. Generating and maintaining the illusions by which we live may be necessary—a point we can find in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and Freud, among others—but it doesn’t bring us comfort. Neither does stripping away those illusions to confront the bare truth. Either way, it seems, we lose. I think that is what O’Neill’s play dramatizes for us; it’s what we “recognize” about the characters and ourselves. Amongst the characters in the play, I suppose it’s Edmund who arrives at much the same recognition. But I don’t see that it is “cathartic” in any Aristotelian way. The family’s competing, incompatible illusions, desires, and cross-purposes have generated a huge trap for them, and they can’t get out of the trap that is constituted by the unhealthy domestic scene they inhabit. The play ends in alienation and isolation (as student Jacob Plsek pointed out in class). As Freud explains, in the psychic economy nothing is wasted; past traumas don’t just evaporate. Rather, what has been repressed, screened, masked, distorted and so forth, returns. By what were the main characters’ lives structured? James Tyrone, a flawed product of his impoverished past, sought security and a chance to cheat fate; Jamie and Edmund rebelled against the father and sought not security but the insight (or oblivion) to be had from the pursuit of decadent aestheticist extremes; Mary sought purity in the home and independence for herself. Nobody gets any of these things in a satisfying way. In the end, Mary becomes entirely detached, and the three men confront one another about what has happened to her and their own complicity in the return of her mental instability. They remain stuck in the family predicament, and seem doomed to keep repeating it until death parts them. This family is riven by irresolvable conflicts, and there may be no way out.

Page-by-Page Notes on Act 4 of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (1340-1417).

1394-96. Mary’s poison is morphine, James’ is whiskey and “morbid” literature and gloomy philosophy. The literary works he reads lend perspective—Dowson and Baudelaire in particular provide an aesthetic symbolist pose on which Jamie and Edmund have patterned their lives. Shakespeare the bourgeois gentleman was good enough for their father, “the old bog-trotter,” but not for them.

1397. We keep getting sordid revisions of the past—Mary’s illusions about her father in this case, and her dream of being a nun or a concert pianist.

1398-1401. Edmund and Tyrone could use a session with Dr. Phil, it seems. Well, no permanent reconciliations for them are in the works. Here the focus is on the injustice James’ miserly behavior has done Mary and is doing Edmund. The latter has tried to double back and relive his father’s life, the better to understand him. But in O’Neill, apparently, repetition always involves difference. Similar events or actions produce different results. In addition, one can’t really live somebody else’s life. The experiences don’t form Edmund as they did James.

1404-05. Just after the father cites Cassius about the “fault” being “not in our stars . . . but in ourselves,” we see that Edmund rejects such heroism and rejects his father’s need for security. Edmund rejects his father’s brand of heroism and clawing one’s way to success; he seeks self-annihilation, wants to become a sea gull or merge with the landscape. But that’s perhaps already a desire scripted by his father, and it isn’t an aspiration a person could really live. Edmund takes as his goal in life the attainment of brief epiphanies surrounded by darkness, gloom, and irony.

1407. What had impressed Edmund about his father’s revelation, Jamie has heard before and finds contemptible, a “sob story” recited over and over again by a ham actor. So much for any ideas we might have had about Aristotelian recognition scenes—Jamie undermines his father’s epiphany.

1408-10. Jamie sympathizes with unambiguous losers like Fat Violet. His star is hitched to his mother since her cure would be his, too. But this affinity creates a trap because failure feeds more failure. He becomes cruel and hateful—he quotes Wilde’s line from “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” “Each man kills the thing he loves,” and interprets this to mean that those who are dead inside must make everything else equal to their own spiritual deadness. So he will do his best to drag his brother and indeed the whole family down with him.

Edition: Baym, Nina et al. (eds.) The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vols. C, D, E. 6th ed. New York: Norton, 2002. ISBN 0393977943.

Week 08, Sandburg and Stevens

2006-10-12T17:59:00.000-07:00

Carl Sandburg and Wallace Stevens. Sandburg’s selections (1229-33). Stevens’ selections (1234-51).

Page-by-Page Notes on Carl Sandburg’s Selections (1229-33).

“Chicago” (1231). This poem starts tersely with a summary of how the city is useful to the rest of the country. Then it becomes Whitman-like free verse, capturing the poet’s thoughts, which are neither utopian nor naïve—there’s a note of working-class defiance running through the poem. We are confronted with one story—what people say about Chicago—and with an counter-story: what Chicago says about itself. Is there brutality and hunger in Chicago? Sure. But the speaker proudly enlists commercial jingles to proclaim the virtues of the Windy City: it is “handler to the nation,” etc. Labor is central to America, and Chicago is a supplier of means for others. What does it produce? Its own sense of strength and independence. Other thoughts . . . Modernism is mostly cityscape art when it is representational—an art that tries to embrace the new conditions in which it must go forwards. That’s quite a challenge to accept since modernity (and particularly industrialism) has its own “rage for order.” It is always remaking everything (as Marx writes in The Communist Manifesto, under the bourgeoisie “all that is solid melts into air,” and so forth), even though artists don’t want us to be trapped in the processes of technology and citification, of “modernity.” Adopting modernity in formal and experimental terms is both a risk and an opportunity. In any event, by the poem’s conclusion the “used people” have come alive and are proud of their useful activity. Sandburg sometimes writes a poetry of labor, of flexing muscle. The influence of Whitman is clear, but of course in Sandburg we have the Modernist setting to deal with as well. Questions: In what sense is this poem’s treatment of Chicago similar to Whitman’s treatment of his subjects, if you have read some work by that poet? How does the speaker reply to those who don’t think much of Chicago— what defense does the big city offer?

“Halsted Street Car” (1231). This poem conveys pure emptiness and alienation in faces made blank by hard work. Sandburg suggests to cartoonists (often preoccupied with politicians and fashionable people) that there is plenty of work to be found trying to capture the insults to humanity that daily life visits on city-dwellers. Charles Dickens, that great describer of mid-Victorian Britain, was, after all, a literary caricaturist who conveyed more of “reality” than many more sober novelists and newspaper writers.

“Child of the Romans” (1232). The shovelman works to make it possible for others to enjoy (if not necessarily notice) the finer things in life, the beautiful things.

“Cool Tombs” (1233). Usually, Sandburg writes about bustling scenes. This poem is about a reflection on his usual subject. Silence is the great leveler—a theme as old as Pindar’s Odes. What links the people mentioned in this poem? Probably the theme of sacrifice—Lincoln, Grant, Pocahontas.

“Grass” (1234). The battle names mentioned in this poem memorialize the mass suffering of soldiers during the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War, and WWI, preserving a sense of human purpose. But we forget the real events soon enough, and the bones and flesh of the soldiers turns to fertilizer. The fine words and monuments dedicated to the soldiers are little more than pious abstractions that tend towards right-thinking forgetfulness. But of course one could say that the grass heals us, too. Forgetting may be the way civilization moves forward, even the way it survives. Nietzsche says many times in his works that forgetting is necessary for life, and some of the WWI poets (Sassoon and Owen particularly) make much the same point, with much irony. Questions: What is the “work” of the grass at the battle sites the speaker mentions (Austerlitz, Waterloo, Gettysburg, Ypres, and Verdun)? Why is the work-process referenced in this poem necessary?

Page-by-Page Notes on Wallace Stevens’ Selections (1234-51).

“The Snow Man” (1238-39). Poets usually write about spring, summer, and fall, not about winter. Well, Stevens and Frost like winter, as does Coleridge. Here is a kind of reverse-romanticism: to write about winter, you have to become “every dead thing” (Donne), not glad and cheerful. You must know how to behold “nothing.” Is there a language appropriate to that, one that wouldn’t animate what is dead but would respect its deadness, and not, thereby, strip it of its meditative value? Does the poem convey this kind of beholding? Seeing something and writing about something aren’t the same thing. Question: How does this poem counter the “romantic” way of relating to and representing nature as an expressive vehicle? What must happen, according to the speaker, for someone to write about winter accurately?

“Anecdote of the Jar” (1241). The simple jar, a trivial if useful human product, swallows up the landscape and dominates it, un-wilds it. “Dominion” is a term from Genesis, King James translation—we were given dominion over the earth and its creatures, and our perceptions and perspectives have a similarly dominant effect. So again we find the nature/humanity theme. But another possibility is that Stevens enjoys investigating how we focus on things, on the way perception begins with one narrow thing and then one percept or one thought, to borrow a phrase from William Blake, “fills immensity.” This way of focusing seems to be a human imperative, and Stevens isn’t always certain about its results. He’s interested in a basic philosophical question: what can we know, and how can we know it? Questions: Why does the simple jar that the speaker has placed on a hill dominate everything around it? How do you interpret the thought that the jar does not “give of bird or bush”?

“Peter Quince” (1242-43). In what sense is the beauty “in the flesh” immortal, and not the abstract or Kantian kind of beauty as form? Susannah’s beautiful body escaped the elders, and still reminds us of its purity.

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (1243-45). Blackbirds are everywhere, between everything and everything else, active and yet watching and waiting. It is necessary that they should be there, but we pay them no mind. Stevens may be asking with this poem what gets bracketed out when we think, when we write, or when we perceive in our everyday fashion. The blackbird isn’t exactly romantic “transcendence,” but it’s outside the field of ordinary human perceptions and affairs. It is everywhere and nowhere. Another way to interpret the poem is to suggest that the speaker wants to know how everything—bird, beholder, landscape—hangs together, how it all makes sense. But the poem offers no final answer. Questions: The blackbird is hardly a creature we associate with romantic transcendence of the ordinary—so what is special about the blackbirds in this poem? With what does the speaker intimately connect them, and why? Why are there thirteen ways (and counting, we may suppose) of looking at a blackbird?

“The Idea of Order at Key West” (1245-47). Fishing boat lights order the seascape. We judge and set our boundaries with reference to human artifacts. Would nature swallow us up otherwise? Or would there be no meaning? But the voice sings or makes a world, creates it—a world quite aside from nature. This voice creates a linguistic universe. Is the order of language commensurate with the material order (or with thought)? The sea-song isn’t what the speaker and Ramon Fernandez hear, it seems. Rather, I would say that the poem privileges the human maker, the Joycean female “artificer.” But does that world get passed along to the audience? Or are the speaker and Ramon even an audience for her? The phrase “rage for order”—is meaning proper to one person, something more or less private? Or is it beyond that scope, a phenomenon that begins with one person and the becomes its own world? (Really what I should do is compare this approach to the one that would say language is an order that is from the outset beyond the individual.) Questions: The speaker says that he and his companion “Ramon Fernandez” hear the poem’s “she” and “not the sea” (14). What relation, if any, does the speaker posit between the female singer and the ocean scene around her? Who is the “maker” referenced in line 53, and what is the “rage for order” that the speaker says governs that maker?

We might use this poem as a hedge against both the claims of neoclassicism and romanticism: Stevens tries to describe the order of the sea, but doesn’t claim that there is a “correspondent breeze” or any understandable connection, emotional or otherwise, between him and the sea. He is not privileged to convey the sea’s “order” to us or even to himself. Neither is he able to understand how the sea works in rational terms.

Stanzas 1-2. The lady’s voice and the sea don’t seem to be commensurate; her song didn’t come from the sea, and the sea’s cry doesn’t pattern her thoughts or words.

Stanza 3. We confront the question of spirit: does the lady’s song come from her spirit?

Stanza 4. This stanza tells us that the song is more than just the singer’s voice and the seascape together; her voice gives a different order to the sea. Does that mean the poem addresses the way we search for hints of something transcendental, something beyond the material (here, the sea), beyond even the human voice? Does some spiritual order embrace the lady, the sea, and speaker? If so, is that order something we can grasp as intelligible? The singer’s song may reveal a process that is the source of the “blessed rage for order” to which the speaker attests—we were told in the second stanza that (as the case must be) the song was “uttered word by word.” That is perhaps how the order takes shape –one word at a time, language creates its own order that orders everything around it.

Stanza 5. The singer’s voice (we don’t know the words she sings) draws the sea’s self into her own—she has something like the creative power of a goddess. Yet what is created is only “for her.” Her only world appears to be the one she sings by the margin of the sea. Doesn’t that imply that her beholders/hearers really can’t enter the world she creates?

Stanza 6. Why does a new order, a new symmetry, emerge with the cessation of the singing and the daylight? Fishing lights, put where they are by humans, “fix” the sea and the night, remaking them as objects of perception. Critics have long puzzled over the stanza’s mention of Ramon Fernandez, and one interpretation I’ve read is that Fernandez, a leftist who had veered to that position from the opposite perspective, was always nothing if not certain about his views. In the poem’s perspective, that kind of certainty seems out of place.

Stanza 7. The poem that has spent its time apparently praising “creative song” now suggests, perhaps, that “the words she sang” are “of our origins.” Has the lady uttered nothing less than herself, word by word? Still, for all our power to order things, do we know what “ghostlier demarcations” make us?

“Study of Two Pears” (1248). This poem offers an ethics of seeing. Color, texture, and so forth, are of course subjective experiences. But this rootedness in subjectivity doesn’t respond to our will. The speaker doesn’t will to see the pears a certain way. Instead, it is as if he must see them in a certain way, as if they command his attention. Seeing has its rigors, makes its demands on us; objects of perception will assert their sway.

Edition: Baym, Nina et al. (eds.) The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vols. C, D, E. 6th ed. New York: Norton, 2002. ISBN 0393977943.

Week 07, Lowell and Frost

2006-10-05T17:58:00.000-07:00

Amy Lowell. Selections (1143-51).

Notes on Amy Lowell (1143-51).

On Imagism:

“In a Station of the Metro”

The apparition of these faces in a crowd

Petals on a wet, black bough.

In this poem of two lines, two clear images capture two observations and one feeling. The “petal” image is quite sharp—it brings to mind the original. Contrast this approach with the insistence of Johnson’s Imlac in Rasselas that “we do not paint the streaks of the tulip.” Pound wants to call to mind a particular group of petals on a black bough, and capture all the soft texture, too. He’s not trying to embody an abstract archetype or concept.

Imagism (HD, Lowell, Pound, Hulme)

1) common but exact words.

2) free verse forms for new ideas.

3) free choice of subjects.

4) poetry follows painting—it renders the particulars and eschews grand narratives

5) hardness, clarity, not blurring or indefinition

6) concentrate, concentrate, concentrate as the Zen Masters say. Haiku.

The idea is to link one sharp image with one sharp impression, one thought one feeling. It is rightly said that imagism follows symbolism, but I think the difference shows in the “sculpture over music” choice of the imagists. Symbolists see poetic words as an order of their own -- a human product that slips beyond us to become its own realm, even a transcendent realm that we must approach on its own terms. There is much value in that view! Christian and romantic hopes for spiritual and imaginative transcendence are now transferred to and invested in language itself. In the “Metro” poem, Pound just wants to capture a simple observation with a clear and distinct image. (The poem’s feeling is complex, by no means sentimental.) The emphasis on brevity suggests a rejection of eloquence, a C18 distrust of language as getting in the way of things. But the success of this little poem is impressive: the words seem to correspond exactly to the observation or the impressions, and the feeling. (On impressionism—see Wilde on the suggestiveness of nature—is that something imagism rejects?)

The Poet’s Trade by Amy Lowell

No one expects a man to make a chair without first learning how, but there is a popular impression that the poet is born, not made, and that his verses burst from his overflowing heart of themselves. As a matter of fact, the poet must learn his trade in the same manner, and with the same painstaking care, as the cabinet-maker. His heart may overflow with high thoughts and sparkling fancies, but if he cannot convey them to his reader by means of written word he has no claim to be considered a poet. A workman may be pardoned, therefore, for spending a few moments to explain and describe the technique of his trade. A work of beauty which cannot stand an intimate examination is a poor and jerry-built thing.

In the first place, I wish to state my firm belief that poetry should not try to teach, that it should exist simply because it is a created beauty, even if sometimes the beauty of a gothic grotesque. We do not ask the trees to teach us moral lessons, and only the Salvation Army feels it necessary to pin texts upon them. We know that these texts are ridiculous, but many of us do not yet see that to write an obvious moral all over a work of art, picture, statue, or poem, is not only ridiculous, but timid and vulgar. We distrust a beauty we only half understand, and rush in with our impertinent suggestions. How far are we from “admitting the Universe”! The Universe, which flings down its continents and seas, and leaves them without comment. Art is as much a function of the Universe as an Equinoctial gale, or the Law of Gravitation; and we insist upon considering it merely a little scroll-work, or no great importance unless it be studded with nails from which pretty and uplifting sentiments may be hung!

Page-by-Page Notes on Amy Lowell’s Selections (1143-50).

1144. “The Captured Goddess.” We feel more than see the goddess; we catch an effect of her. She transforms everything to pure color and light, but she falls prey to the men of the marketplace, the man at the marketplace. They install her there as a statuette to be exchanged for other common objects. She is more valued as a mere thing than as the spiritual creature she really is.

1146. “Madonna of the Evening Flowers.” This poem tells a story, but its specific effect is that of objectifying the lover (Ada Russell, most likely). Lowell does this kind of thing without turning people into objects. The sacred references and the allusions to paintings help her achieve this effect. (Madonnas, Botticelli’s “Venus,” and the “Canterbury bells” fit into these categories.)

1147. “September, 1918.” As always, war reorganizes people’s perceptions and commands their energies. Here, the speaker tells us that she has no time for poetic reflections, or even, for that matter, for anything more than “the endeavour to balance myself / Upon a broken world” (17-18).

1147-48. “Meeting-House Hill.” Subjective perception here transforms the landscape and blot out the speaker’s sense of time’s passage. Associational connections abound in this poem.

1148. “Summer Night Piece.” This poem is a good example of imagism, with its memorable description of a garden in moonlight.

1149-50. “New Heavens for Old.” The speaker is concerned to let us into a state of mind that contrasts with the Whitman-like physical descriptions. Her state of mind seems similar to the speaker’s in John Donne’s poem, “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day”:

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring:
For I am every dead thing,
In whom love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
He ruined me, and I am re-begot

Page-by-Page Notes on Robert Frost (1174-1201).

“The Pasture” and “Mowing” (1175-76). Both poems are about the attitudes a person may adopt towards country work; the first seems full of joy, while the second conveys a sense of the intentness and intensity of labor—there’s no sound but the scythe chopping the grass. The scythe “whispers” something, but doesn’t speak. This kind of human activity generates consequences for other creatures, but we don’t really notice—witness the scared green snake. Sometimes farm life makes a person treat nature in a very use-oriented way—Frost would have understood why that’s necessary, but of course he’s also one of the keenest observers of the natural world, so he senses the conflicting attitudes the same person may adopt, depending on the season and the exigency of the moment (harvest time, for example).

“The Tuft of Flowers” (1176-77). This is another poem about labor, but with a different emphasis—I suppose it’s an unusually “matter-of-fact,” American-style romantic poem. The absent worker’s decision to leave a little tuft of blossoms alone provides food for the butterfly, which in turn leads the speaker to an appreciation of his fellow laborer. The rhymed couplets keep the thought attractively simple, increasing the emphasis for the speaker’s realization at the end: “men work together,” rather than in isolation as at first he had thought. A feeling of human interconnection and connection with nature trumps that initial feeling of isolation.

“Mending Wall” (1177-78). A wall is something material that enforces immaterial notions—private property, rules and conventions, privacy. It even implies a certain view of human nature perhaps. The traditional saying “good fences make good neighbors” means we are fallen—”lead us not into temptation.” Frost begins the poem with a counter-folk observation. He says that nature (something) doesn’t care much about arbitrary human divisions. We have to keep mending and reconceiving them. But that labor isn’t without its value and dignity—the mischief of spring suggests a radical idea: why walls? The old-fashioned neighbor won’t go for it—his folk wisdom takes on the dignity of nature. You live by such ideas; questioning them, as the speaker does, would be impertinent. It’s the kind of thing a city slicker would do. The folk saying itself is a “wall,” and the neighbor would like to keep it intact.

1. What—aside from the obvious—is a “wall” in this poem’s context? How might this poem be explored as a philosophical musing upon the origin and nature of the divides we set between nature and ourselves, between one person and another?

2. What seems to be the speaker’s attitude towards his neighbor—we know they disagree about whether or not their two properties really need a dividing wall, but how does the speaker respond to his neighbor’s insistence on upholding tradition and property rights?

“The Death of the Hired Man” (1178-82). This poem’s form is one at which Frost excels—it’s conversational, a very down-to-earth discussion between two people, in this case Mary and Warren, who employ the occasional laborer Silas. When Silas returns for the last time, what comes out is that while Mary seems to be more sympathetic to Silas’ plight, both husband and wife apparently feel more or less the same way. Both are concerned to protect the sick man’s dignity, and he slips away quietly. So often rural life is idealized, but Frost is generally very blunt about the difficulties it involves—life for a man like Silas is bound to be full of hazards and uncertainties, and it seems he can’t even rely on the kind of family connections that might help a person better circumstanced than he.

“Home Burial” (1183-85). Again, this is one of Frost’s many conversational poems—a very dark one because the exploration is the attitudes people strike up in the presence of death. The husband stands accused of gruffness and insensitivity. He admits his faults, I think, but at the same time he seems to be trying to understand what upsets his wife so much. There’s a quiet accusation in his remarks to her about the loss of her first-born child—one not unlike what King Claudius says to Hamlet when the latter mourns his father’s death so long: “why stands it so particular with thee?” Well, this is a good poem to explore what Frost might tell us about the value of such personal discussions—to what extent does what a person says about life’s most troubling aspects seem to match (or just cover up) genuine feelings and ideas?

“After Apple-Picking” (1185-86). This is a harvest poem with a twist—what comes to mind is a comparison with Keats’ “To Autumn,” which praises the feeling of temporary rest, of stasis barely keeping away those “gathering swallows” that portend the change to winter. Here in Frost’s poem, the speaker seems satiated with harvest-gathering, and he desires nothing more than to sleep. But what kind of sleep will it be? Well, as so often in Frost, what seems like a simple “nature-thought” is probably a thought about the whole course of the speaker’s life. Intense activity in the presence of nature leads to an intensely meditative moment, which leads to a question about the larger pattern and meaning of a person’s life. But what I like about this poem is the way it leaves open the ultimate value of asking ultimate questions about “the meaning of life.” We tend to ask them in such circumstances that the answers we arrive at may be muddied or tainted. Well, I suppose the woodchuck knows….

“The Wood-Pile” (1186). There’s an interesting analysis of this poem at http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/woodpile.htm, the Modern American Poetry site. Anyhow, the central object of meditation, the thing that leads to a Wordsworth-like “surmise,” is the wood-pile. This wood-pile is the product of another person’s focused labor—something made with much activity, much energy, and then left out there in the woods to “warm the frozen swamp” in its own good time. And make no mistake—nature’s time is not our time. I think Frost is right to question our way of “making things mean something, occupying our time,” and so forth. What matters more—the labor that fills our lives, that largely gives us our sense of purpose and significance, or these quiet communions with objects like that wood-pile? Which is more true—the purposeful labor, or the profound reflection?

“The Road Not Taken” (1187). Choices always entail consequences; everything you do comes with an opportunity cost. There doesn’t seem to be much difference between the two roads—both of them are inviting, relatively fresh and worn at the same time. Still, it matters because it is the speaker’s choice. Others have already taken these roads—but his choice is no less original and personal. When you see a fork in the road, take it, as Yogi Berra would say. The speaker takes the trouble to explain that neither road is really “better” than the other—from a vantage point in the future, we will come to think of the choices we have made as somehow fated or inevitable, fraught with meaning. But that is an ex post facto construction. The speaker’s original choice embraced randomness—he took a long look down one road, found it very fine, and then went right ahead and took the other. And he muses that as he speaks of this event in the past tense now, so in future he will still be mulling over the choice he made.

3. How different are the two roads (or life-paths, metaphorically)? Why does it matter which road the speaker says he’s chosen?

“An Old Man’s Winter Night” (1188). An old man goes down to the cellar and forgets why. But it’s more than a senior moment—Frost evokes well the sense of emptiness, of shrinking back into the confines of a decaying body and into the past, that comes with age. The poem’s passage of the moon and its effect on icicles reminds me of Coleridge’s conversation poem “Frost at Midnight.” In that poem, the “secret ministry of frost” may refer to the mystical properties of nature, but also to the imagination and to the mind’s communion with itself. I don’t know—the old man’s sleep seems to be dreamless. He is exhausted, and wants nothing more, it seems, than quiescence.

“The Oven Bird” (1188). This poem treats mid-summer as a time between two “fallings” or falls. Mid-summer is an almost silent time, a liminal season. Things are happening in summertime, of course, and artists often treat it as a joyous time (Vivaldi in his composition on the Four Seasons, for example). But Frost’s poem emphasizes the appeal of spring and fall.

“Birches” (1189-90). Birch trees apparently bend during a storm, and sometimes don’t snap back to their former position. They don’t do that, however, when children use them to balance while playing in solitude. The speaker prefers to imagine the trees as having been bent by such children, not by the storms that seem actually to have bent them. Then the climbing and descending action he has described come to serve as a figure for the way things stand between human beings and earth. We must project an “elsewhere” and strive towards it. But the speaker would like to reach for his ideal like the children who climb the beech trees and then are let down gently back to the earth they love. He doesn’t want to abandon the material world for an icy abstraction.

“Out, Out—” (1190). The boy’s accident seems not quite real, and yet all too real and final. He has his moment of recognition, even though it’s only about losing his hand and becoming a semi-invalid. But soon something much more final happens when he slips into shock and dies. The last two lines say everything with respect to those still living—the boy now offers them nothing “to build on,” so they must turn to the future.

“Fire and Ice” and “Nothing Gold can Stay” (1191). As for the second poem, it reminds me that Frost is finely attuned to nature’s little changes—it’s vital to good nature poetry to capture a sense of permanence in the midst of what is perhaps best characterized as a Heraclitean flux.

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (1191). In this poem, the woods are both social in that they are owned by someone and primeval, in that they call us out of our everyday selves, even out of our comfortable notion that everything must be or can be humanized. The poem does not amount to a statement about sublimity because sublimity makes us withdraw inwards to overcome our anxiety over being crushed by nature, and it allows us to assert our power over nature. Here, the speaker rejects the call of the woods, perhaps the call of death, the unconscious desire simply to stop living. He withdraws into a consciousness determined by promises—human obligations and ties. But that is not the same thing as exalting humanity over nature. The assertion this poem makes is dark and depressing, as if promises don’t matter, but we must keep them. It would be worth mentioning also that the quatrain form of the poem and its rhyme scheme reinforce the hypnotic quality Frost wants to achieve.

4. If this poem is in part a “call of the woods,” how would you give voice to it—what do the woods “say” to the speaker? But at the same time, why isn’t it quite right to leave the matter at this primeval level—how are the woods part of the human world as well?

5. What are “promises” in the context of this poem? Why must they be kept? How does the speaker seem to regard these obligations?

“A Boundless Moment” (1192). The speaker’s brief ecstasy brings him a hint of May in March. But as usual in Frost, nature keeps its own time. Our aspirations and projections remain our own—imping one’s wing on the passage and promise of the seasons is an old poetical game, one not to be despised, but also not to be done without awareness that it is a game.

“Spring Pools” (1192). Nature is cast here as impatient, as always becoming something different. The speaker wants more time to admire and contemplate it, as the pool metaphor indicates.

“Once by the Pacific” (1192-93). The separation of the waters from the waters, etc. —as in Genesis. That’s what made the world a livable, comfortable place. Here we get a taste of the apocalyptic strain, the sublime, which temporarily interrupts the genial correspondence between human beings and nature.

“Two Tramps in Mud Time” (1193-94). Two mindsets lean against each other: need/utility, and the pleasure-principle or do-it-yourself autonomy. The woodsmen “you have always with you,” to borrow a line from the Gospels. The speaker’s relation to the wood-chopping is sacramental, extravagant, exuberant. The last stanza implies that we must combine love and need, avocation and vocation, work and play, into one vision.

“Departmental” (1195). Ants are fun to watch, but so many of the things they do resemble the customs and activities of humans. Here they show a decent, if unsentimental, respect for a fellow worker-ant. Probably a lot of our own formal behavior is like that, too.

“Acquainted with the Night” (Not in our anthology, not assigned). Here distance gives perspective, but does not satisfy. The speaker moves beyond the ordinary bounds of the city and of meaning. There is meaning beyond everyday purpose and the bustle of life—but what kind of meaning? The wanderer takes on the cast of a philosopher, asking “why?” when others don’t. In the beyond region where he goes, time is “neither wrong nor right.” But all of his observations still relate to the realm of humanity—the poem does not offer an escape.

6. What kind of meaning lies beyond the everyday purpose and bustle of life referenced in this poem? What does it mean to say that the clock “proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right”? Does this poem offer an escape from the city, withhold an escape, or does it suggest something else? Explain.

“West-Running Brook” (Not in our anthology, not assigned). This is philosophy in simple words, coaxed out of him by her—the couple in the poem. The metaphor that compares life to a stream of water is ancient; Heraclitus used it. This is a dialogical poem that asserts that life consists in a flowing “west” and a simultaneous desire to seek our origins. See also Matthew Arnold’s poem “The Buried Life.” The form captures a meaning as it has been worked out between two people, and memorialized with the title phrase.

7. This poem asks, in dialogic form, one of philosophy’s great questions—what is our source? What perspectives on that question do the poem’s man and woman offer—how much do they hold in common?

“Design” (1196). This poem concentrates on so-called unattractive creatures. The question the speaker poses could be related to William Blake’s question, “did he who made the lamb make thee?” Why is it important to ask about small things as the speaker does?

8. The speaker asks a question after William Blake’s heart—as when he asks of the Tyger, “what immortal hand or eye / dare frame thy fearful symmetry?” What explanation, if any, does the speaker arrive at for the existence of “dimpled spiders” and other such creatures, found so unattractive by so many people?

“Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same” (Not in our anthology, not assigned). Self-consciousness is a track added to the birds’ song. Is Eve’s “overtone” good or bad?

9. Here Frost may refer to an issue that interest the romantic poets—the extent to which human beings, when they relate themselves to nature, imitate it, and so forth, act well or ill. What does the speaker in this poem suggest, and from what specific language in the poem do you draw your explanation?

“The Gift Outright” (1198). The idea here is that America was and is all potential. Of course, running against this is a modern conception of American history that tries to include what was formerly banished from consideration by the “Manifest Destiny” doctrine.

“Directive” (1198-99). The poem recasts the grail quest and the legend of the Fisher King. But it seems to connect to Keats’ “Grecian Urn” ode as well, in which the speaker contemplates the urn’s painted “cold pastoral.” In Frost’s poem, the object of contemplation is a real “ghost-town”—a ghost-town in which you can lose yourself seeking, and then find yourself again, re-imagining in this deserted scene all the old human activities that make life worthwhile and meaningful. The aesthetic moment—the part corresponding with Keats’ meditation on life in connection with an art object, is the introduction of the Arthurian goblet.

“The Figure a Poem Makes” (1200-01). Frost’s main claim here is that poetry’s value is realized only in the actual experience of writing it and reading it—it isn’t like science or academic study, which yields knowledge as “results.” There’s a sense in this essay that the poetic process itself—not the artist—is in charge, at least at the deepest level. Frost’s description of poetry is not entirely unlike that of Wordsworth, who describes it as a species of meditation. But Frost emphasizes not so much an unbreakable organic connection between the poet and nature (though nature surely is important to him, too) as a sense of near-constant surprise: “The artist must value himself as he snatches a thing from some previous order in time and space into a new order with not so much as a ligature clinging to it of the old place where it was organic” (1201). To me, that sounds more like literary modernism than romantic organicism. I suppose Frost would agree somewhat with Archibald Macleish that “A poem should not mean but be.” This is basic formalist doctrine of the sort you can find in, say, Cleanth Brooks: poetic language establishes its own connotations and contexts; it is not primarily referential if by that we mean it points insistently to the world beyond the poem. But then, I don’t know—Frost probably wouldn’t want to be classified as a straightforward formalist, either. When I read his poems, I feel that they are not trying to isolate themselves from the life around them and become a world unto themselves. Instead, they seem to open out onto all sorts of life-experience, literary and otherwise. Then, too, Frost emphasizes the power of the human voice in his poetry. And above all, Frost just doesn’t bill himself as a theorist, and doesn’t come across that way in his interviews, like the fine one he did for The Paris Review in 1960. (http://www.theparisreview.org/media/4678_FROST.pdf) He writes in the present piece that poetry makes a “figure”: “It begins in delight and ends in wisdom” (1200). I like that quotation; to me, it aligns Frost generally with a long tradition of wisdom writing from the Bible onwards. His variation on the theme is to suggest that one of the things we learn from writing or reading a poem is that language has a power to lead us on of its own accord—we listen to what we have “said” and are impelled to respond, and so forth. Language has many tricks and deep wells of resource; it is not a blunt instrument for the delivery of edifying content. Any good poet ought to know that, of course. In that way, I suppose a person can play the formalist and demand close attention to words, but also insist that “poetic language” isn’t something we must keep hermetically sealed off from every other kind of language, or from the flow of life. Auden says in his poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” that “poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its making . . . .” True enough, but another true saying (this time that of critic Kenneth Burke) is that “literature is equipment for living.” That is, it teaches us a certain way of thinking, of coping with things, etc.

Frost makes a few political remarks in this brief essay as well: “I have given up my democratic prejudices and now willingly set the lower classes free to be completely taken care of by the upper classes. Political freedom is nothing to me” (1201). Taken as high-serious commentary, that wouldn’t sound very attractive—especially in 1939, the year in which Hitler started WWII—but I don’t believe Frost is operating in “high-serious” mode here. Most likely he’s just eschewing abstract political rhetoric. After all, he later interceded with the State Department to help spring Ezra Pound from incarceration not because the two poets shared some common commitment to right-wing lunacy or to an “aesthetic ideology” that might accord with such craziness, but simply because he used to know Pound and felt that the man had suffered enough for his pro-Mussolini rants during WWII. Frost’s comments elsewhere on FDR’s New Deal are measured, not condemnatory, and he was apparently a democrat by party affiliation.

Edition: Baym, Nina et al. (eds.) The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vols. C, D, E. 6th ed. New York: Norton, 2002. ISBN 0393977943.

Week 06, London

2006-09-28T17:57:00.000-07:00

Notes on Jack London’s Tales of the Pacific: “The House of Mapuhi” (31-53); “Mauki (64-79); “The Sheriff of Kona” (121-34); “Koolau the Leper” (135-50); “The Bones of Kehekili” (151-73).

“The House of Mapuhi” (31-53)

Human desire outlasts or rides out nature’s spectacular fits. So which desires are most worthy of survival? Whose wishes does the story validate? The tale only seems to pit primitive beliefs and desires against more civilized ones. But things aren’t so clearcut as that by the end, when Mapuhi is left alone with his family speculating about their prospects for getting their house built, and dealing with the white people’s economy. The elements expose us all to luck and randomness, but there’s more than that to Mapuhi’s survival, it seems; his material fantasy of a home sustains him, and it is also what sustains Nauri when she makes her way back home. Mapuhi has a will to live and some firm plans that don’t reduce to mere greed. He wants to make his ideal real. London’s socialist viewpoint makes him well attuned to the way in which invisible forces control our behavior in the “civilized” world – after all, it was Marx who described the power of the commodity as a form of fetishism.

Well, the story mocks human pretensions to strength and permanence. Toriki and Levi, for example, are taken away by the storm; Captain Lynch and the Mormons die, too. Raoul survives, and there’s something admirable about his matter-of-fact utterance, “So this is a hurricane” even at the worst point of his sufferings. Mapuhi survives, and so does Nauri even though she is an old woman. In London, there’s often a Darwinian cast since “the survival of the fittest” seems to appeal to him. But physical strength doesn’t necessarily equate with being fittest to survive. Persistence persists, we might say.

Towards the end of the story, after the brief but violent hurricane works its destructive magic, the perspective has shifted decisively from Raoul to Mapuhi and family. This isn’t a return to primitivism. That huge pearl works as a talismanic object to help Nauri make her way home—it stands not so much for greed as for hope. In the end, the natives are left huddling over the value of the white men’s hard cash, so they really can’t escape from the “civilized” economy and all the risks connected with it.

“Mauki (64-79)

Mauki is a “special” breed of primitive, a strong individual. The story pits two kinds of savagery, we might say: Mauki’s (as explained on page 65) versus the “degenerate brutality” of the white man Bunster, which is of course backed up by the larger-scale violence of those man-of-war ships off the coast. Mauki escapes countless times only to be recaptured. Being sent to serve Bunster on Lord Howe Island, however, turns out to be his salvation—an outcome half-predicted by the white men who sent Mauki to him (71). Bunster’s severed head becomes a powerful fetish-object, and is made to serve Mauki’s ends once he returns to Malaita on the Solomons, making himself ruler of his old homeland. It seems that both sides are resourceful in their own ways, but Mauki wins this particular context between European colonizers and natives. In the end, the joke is on the white men and their ridiculous legal contracts—we recall that Mauki’s many escapes had bound him ever more closely to his indentured status, but when he gains enough information about his European oppressors, he is able to turn that information to account, taking a sadistic and oddly appropriate revenge upon Bunster, whose head becomes the most powerful “devil-devil” on Malaita.

“The Sheriff of Kona” (121-34)

Again, it’s a contest between natives and whites, with the latter defining themselves as the healthy ones and the former being defined as subject to the dread disease leprosy. The narrative really rubs things in with regard to the Europeans’ notions about their immunity to leprosy: Lyte Gregory is said to have been in perfect health, and it’s said as well that he really loved Kona and thought of it as his native land. But then he becomes a leper, and such pariahs cannot be suffered to remain in the island paradise of Kona. Leprosy has its own time-frame—an incubation period of seven years makes for lots of uncertainty, waiting for the dreadful transformation of self into despised other. A person may have cancer or some other disease, but a person afflicted with leprosy is a leper. Since biblical times, the disease has usually been treated more as a moral condition, a state of soul, than as a mere skin disorder. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond points out that disease is every bit as much a weapon for colonial invaders as the guns and swords they carry with them. The Conquistadores, for example, followed that paradigm whether wittingly or otherwise—they brought their pathogens with them and wiped out large portions of the native population. Smallpox and other diseases made the work of conquest much easier. In the case of Hawaii, leprosy seems to have been imported along with the Chinese laborers brought in to work the cane fields planted by the European colonizers in the 1830’s. Once established among the native population, the disease became a powerful way to regiment them and sap their strength in more ways than one. So the Sheriff of Kona can hardly be expected to accept the fact that he himself has fallen prey to leprosy—the disease has asserted its power over at least one “inevitable white man,” a man who has apparently sent many a native Hawaian to the leper colonies. As usual in London, nature is always ready to assert its imperatives and must not be despised.

“Koolau the Leper” (135-50)

London’s interest in Darwinism and socialism are both in evidence here. Koolau pits his fierce will to remain free against the foreigners who would send him to Molokai’s leper colony along with his band of outcasts. On 135-37, he sets forth the social and political case against the colonialists: the Europeans brought in Chinese laborers to work in the cane fields around the 1830’s, and with them came leprosy. The whites persist and dominate the native Hawaians, with leprosy become yet another means of subjugating them. Koolau is a political rebel as well as a leper, and his victory is that he dies a free, if miserable, man, clutching his rifle and keeping his own terms. Of course, nature still takes even this brave fighter down—as so often in London’s fiction, the narrative resists the urge to soften the edges of nature. Even in the midst of paradise, nature can reduce us to rotten flesh over an agonizingly long period of time. Many of London’s “paradises” are real enough and beautiful beyond belief (I certainly found Hawaii breathtaking when I visited a few of the islands some years ago), but they’re not really for us. We suppose that because we divide up and define the land, we can then make claims upon nature and insist that it serve us.

“The Bones of Kehekili” (151-73)

Very often London seems most interested in pitting human beings against nature, or emphasizing the necessary closeness between them, but here he explores the power of human culture. Kumuhana the commoner, in the course of reluctantly spilling the secret of Chief Kehekili’s bones, reveals just how powerful the institution of rank has been in structuring the course of his life. This human institution seems every bit as powerful as the terrible forces of nature—hurricanes, earthquakes, and so forth. London is at least as much a psychologist as he is a nature-writer.

Edition: London, Jack. Tales of the Pacific. New York: Penguin, 1989. ISBN 0140183582.

Week 05, Washington and DuBois

2006-09-21T17:57:00.000-07:00

Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery Ch. XIV (760-68) and W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk (876-901).

General Notes on Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, Chapter 14, “Atlanta Exposition Speech” (760-68). (Speech given in 1895; book published in 1901.)

Even though black/white relations by no means constitute the whole of American racial history, it has long been acknowledged that African Americans’ struggle for freedom and equality has played a vital role in American history since its Puritan beginnings. The Civil War of 1861-1865 was a defining moment in our history, and by 1863 when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, that war revolved around the issue of slavery. Before 1863, the war was fought mainly between white people over the preservation of the Union. Still, the political struggle between North and South had always involved strongly held convictions about slavery—whether it ought to be restricted, abolished, or extended into new territories in an expanding country. Lincoln said in the 1850’s that “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” and his statement neatly summed up the nation’s dilemma over slaveholding. To understand American history, one must understand something of African American history. Of course, the term “history” doesn’t even begin to address the great contribution to American culture made over several centuries by writers, artists, and musicians of African descent. Here are some general things to consider when reading African American literature:

1. How do various writers and activists define “action” in both an individual and a collective sense? Upon what philosophical and experiential bases do they offer such definitions? In relation to the collective sense, what program for advancement does the writer set forth?

2. To what extent do they view resistance (of whatever kind specified) on the part of individuals and groups as likely to succeed? What role do violence and fear play in black/white relations during the period concerned?

Booker Washington speaks almost twenty years after the end of Reconstruction in 1876 with the disputed election of Republican Rutherford Hayes, who had to allow southerners their “states’ rights” in order to avoid Democrat Samuel Tilden’s challenge to his election. The 1890’s were times of robber-baron capitalism and colonial expansionism. Northern merchants and manufacturers who had complained about the South’s “unfair” use of unpaid labor before the Civil War aimed to benefit from that same labor pool after Reconstruction. The North cared little for the plight of black southerners left to the mercies of their former masters. The era was caught up in accumulating wealth and preaching the gospel of self-help. Washington was very much a product of the age—he, too, preached the gospel of self-help. To be fair to him, however, we should recognize that his cooperative attitude is a response to dire threats against black people. White southerners clearly felt threatened by the possibility of black equality set forth by radical Republicans during Reconstruction. Historians estimate that over 100,000 people—mostly black—were murdered by white supremacists from Reconstruction to Booker Washington’s time. (D. W. Griffith’s 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation chronicles, in romanticized form, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War.) So Washington offers a compromise—if white people will stop killing black people, the latter will keep to themselves rather than assert their full equality and will concentrate on bettering their condition in a “non-threatening,” apolitical way. They will work with white people like a closed fist of unity in economic matters, but the races will be separate as the fingers in all things social and political. That’s what Du Bois later calls disdainfully “the Atlanta Compromise.”

Page-by-Page Notes on Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, Chapter 14, “Atlanta Exposition Speech” (760-68).

762. This page lays bare the conflict in the Address: the loyalty Washington invokes resembles the “loyalty” that whites expected an enslaved people to show for those who had enslaved them. Moreover, Washington says that the “purely social” can be kept separated from economics. The paragraph beginning “There is no defence” makes an attractive suggestion: “casting down your bucker where you are” might turn out to mean “let’s start out on the sure path towards full development of the nation’s resources and of black people’s potential as full citizens.” But that is not how the racist element among southern whites would react to such a statement. To them, the “highest intelligence” of black people would certainly not imply anything like eventual equality of opportunity. So even if Booker’s deal pays 1000% interest, it’s fair to ask who will receive nearly all of the profit. Economic cooperation doesn’t necessarily lead to social equality. And does black “self-help” doctrine amount to absolution for the white people who had done such enormous injustice?

763. But to be fair to Washington, we should also say that part of his pitch is an appeal to respect universal justice and to acknowledge a Law beyond the one promoted by racist local sheriffs, or even, for that matter, by entire states similarly biased against black people. In some southern towns, a black person could scarcely go to the law for redress of grievances since “the law” was indistinguishable from the KKK. D. W. Griffith’s 1915 silent masterpiece, The Birth of a Nation, gives a good sense of how powerful was the white paranoia/supremacy complex that blacks confronted. Since Washington is working against lynch law and mob rule, we might credit him with making a pretty decent playing hand out of almost nothing. Up until the time he wrote Up from Slavery, the only attitude towards African American labor in the South seems to have been resentment, and any demands for greater liberty and equality were generally met with contempt or worse.

Questions on Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, Chapter 14, “Atlanta Exposition Speech” (760-68).

1. Washington’s advice to fellow African Americans is, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” How does he illustrate that statement, and what does the illustration reveal about the primary means Washington believes will lead to progress? In what way is his praise of the Atlanta Exposition linked to this belief?

2. After the Civil War, the federal government attempted to transform the South by pursuing a policy of “Reconstruction.” By 1877, however, many African Americans found themselves in the grip of resentful white southerners. In what way is Washington’s 1895 advice a response to that situation? What “compromise” does he offer to whites?

3. Why might Washington’s advice to African Americans generate in that group a great deal of bitterness against him and his program of action? What alternate course or courses of action would oppose his program? At what points in his speech, if any, does Washington anticipate the bitterness of black opponents or the possible misconstruction of his argument by white listeners?

General Notes on W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, Chapter 3, “Of Booker T. Washington and Others” (876-901).

Style reveals attitude, and it’s easy to see that Du Bois’ lyrical and by turns elegiac, mystical, and sharp-tongued style cuts against Washington’s pure optimism. While Washington embraces the forward-looking expansionism of 1890’s America, Du Bois takes a sidelong glance at it and doesn’t place much stock in Washingtonesque “cooperation” between white and black people. In terms of substance, Du Bois disputes his rival’s increasingly acknowledged position as a “black leader” (a concept that modern race-discourse seems to find outmoded since nobody is widely acknowledged today as a “black leader” in the style of, say, Washington or, later, MLK and Malcolm X. As Henry Louis Gates writes, black Americans now find it possible to have an “unmediated relationship to power” rather than one mediated by some major figure.) By whom exactly, Du Bois wants to know, was Washington “chosen” to speak for African Americans if not by white people whose interests were thereby served? Du Bois finds that Washington’s compromise strategy is bound to bear bitter fruit and compromise black integrity.

Du Bois wants to fight white power in the courts and in the classroom, especially in the college classroom. Legal equality and higher education of all sorts are cornerstones of his approach and that of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded by Du Bois and others in 1909), which organization he served for a time before resigning over philosophical disagreements. Du Bois explains Washington’s program in historical and political terms not too different from the ones I mentioned in my entry on Washington: after 1876, black self-assertion was dealt a blow with the end of Reconstruction. So Washington comes along with his “submissive” commercialist compromise, which pleases Northern capitalists who are investing in the South and Southerners who will not grant black citizens anything like equality. In effect, as Du Bois describes it, Washington’s attitude in “The Atlanta Expo Address” is, “we know our place.”

In our selection, Du Bois casts himself as a model intellectual—a skillful writer capable of both pointed criticism and soulful lyricism, a man who believes that striving is the central fact of human life. Washington may reduce the ideal for black people to expression and material prosperity through physical labor, but Du Bois will not follow this path to financial security. It is only the Age’s crass ideal, not something that a people really ought to strive for as the purpose of life. That higher ideal, in Du Bois’ view, is essential the romantic, Hegelian one of self-transcendence. So the “twoness” he announces on 877, difficult though it may be to bear, causes the sort of dissatisfaction that should spur African Americans towards self-transcendence—the problem of “twoness” will be deeply involved in black people’s attempts to arrive at adequate self-expression as individuals and as a race, to arrive at genuine cultural autonomy and political equality. Du Bois writes as a sociologist and historian, and he finds it necessary to describe black history in America in these terms, not just to submerge it hastily into “the American Dream” or conjoin it with the era’s commercialist imperatives. Du Bois makes demands upon white people—he is not interested in letting them off scot-free for the oppression wrought in previous centuries or the present one. Much of the chapter we are examining insists that one can only negotiate well from a position of strength on all levels—intellectual, spiritual, and material. No level of striving should be sacrificed to the others. Black people have already contributed much to “America,” he points out—so why should they supinely agree to start over again at the bottom of the ladder?

On 879, Du Bois’ emphasis on striving shows. History proceeds not through accommodation and compromise, he insists, but rather though individual and collective struggle. The “veil” metaphor—“the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.” Hegel’s “Master/Slave Dialectic” from The Phenomenology of Mind would be an appropriate frame of reference here. In the unsatisfactory relationship Hegel describes, the slave or bondsman, compelled as he is to labor for the master’s benefit, comes to know more about himself and the master than the master knows about either. Vital to self-knowledge is mutual recognition by both parties, both of whom must be capable of granting such recognition without coercion. But that capacity is what’s missing from the master/slave (or former slave) relationship as Hegel describes it. A slave or social inferior cannot grant free recognition, and most white people saw no need to acknowledge the value of black labor, or intellect, or culture. Nonetheless, the bondsman or (here) ex-bondsman achieves through labor and suffering a kind of self-understanding, however dissatisfying and limited. I believe Du Bois is suggesting that African Americans have a special understanding of what “America” means, and that they should by no means be willing to compromise, Washington-style, on the value of their contributions to American culture, prosperity, and history. At the same time, Du Bois calls for black people to assert and achieve a strong measure of autonomy as a people—advocacy of full legal and civic equality does not reduce to a paean to the “melting pot.” The kind of limited self-knowledge attained through suffering and bondsmanship demands a movement towards self-transcendence, it demands dissatisfaction and a willingness to confront and overcome injustice. All in all, Du Bois’ historicization of programs for black advancement (i.e. his tracing out in the selected chapter of various strategies over the centuries) tells him that Washington, in embracing his age’s rampant commercialism and will-to-material-progress, has failed to achieve a sense of the alternatives available to him and to the black people he means to lead forward. And based on the history he describes, Du Bois emphasizes the value of being constructively at odds with one’s era, at odds with its values and practices. On this point, see page 888 bottom especially.

Questions on W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Chapter 3, “Of Booker T. Washington and Others” (876-901).

1. Du Bois’ chapter consists partly in a history of African American strategies in dealing first with slavery and then with the state-supported racism that took hold after the Civil War’s end. What strategies does Du Bois say have been available, and under what circumstances have they been employed?

2. What specific things does Du Bois praise Booker T. Washington for doing? How much credit does he give his rival?

3. What reasons does Du Bois offer for thinking that Washington is pursuing the wrong strategy for black advancement? What harmful effects will Washington’s “compromise” have?

4. Although much of this chapter offers a critique of Washington, Du Bois nonetheless promotes a strategy for black advancement in the face of white hostility and oppression. What, then, does Du Bois believe should be done?

Edition: Baym, Nina et al. (eds.) The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vols. C, D, E. 6th ed. New York: Norton, 2002. ISBN 0393977943.

Week 04, Chopin

2006-09-14T17:56:00.000-07:00

Kate Chopin. The Awakening (633-723).

Page-by-Page Notes on Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (633-723).

Sections 1-4 (633-40)

633-35. We open with a parrot—a natural thing that mimics human speech. The scene consists of a married woman, a laid-back, shallow husband, and an unattached young man—it seems obvious enough where the plot must tend. It’s “only natural.” Even so, awakening to desire (to what is “natural”) turns out to be the hardest thing of all. Was there ever a state of nature in which pure impulse and free eroticism went without restraint? After all, even animals have social structures that demand otherwise.

Well, the story is about Edna’s realization that desire has the power to transform perception and behavior. That’s probably why the story must unfold rather slowly. Edna’s “awakening” to herself happens through stages that require time, reflection, and interpretation on her part. Neither Robert nor Edna is particularly self-aware at the outset.

636-40. Edna’s Protestant upbringing makes her an outsider in Catholic Creole society, with its easygoing aristocratic morals. As yet, she has only a vague sense that something is wrong—see 637 2/3 way down. Mr. Léonce Pontellier is a gentle tyrant. He has a genteel object-relation to his wife. She is a pretty possession. He’s not a bad man; he is instead a typical, shallow, club-going man.

Sections 5-6 (640-43).

641-42. Edna is drawn to the easy-mannered Madame Ratignolle, whom Robert adores at the moment. She wants to paint the Madame’s portrait, to capture her spirit on the canvas, so to speak. This desire to represent Madame Ratignolle introduces Edna to us as an artist, as someone driven to see things clearly and to express them. But artistic media or materials are opaque and tend to resist those who try to shape them. See 642, Section 6, where Edna is said to seek clarity; she shows a need to realize, situate, and “think” herself. As things shape up, Edna will confront what Freud calls “the task of civilization”—a task that draws upon the libidinal or erotic energy of individuals like Edna for the purpose of larger, communal needs. Freud’s 1939 Civilization and Its Discontents emphasizes the tension between a given society and the individuals who must do its bidding—communal harmony and purposiveness seem to be at odds with the happiness of the individual and the erotic couple. Young men like Robert can at least project themselves into the world and seek self-verification in that way, but Edna faces much more difficulty in attempting to do the same thing. It’s worth considering the motif of music in this novel as well. Why does it occur so often?

Sections 17-18 (671-76).

672-76. Edna skips her reception day, rejecting domesticity very pointedly. At 673 bottom, she begins to find herself, but we are told that the “voices were not soothing.” On 674 top, she stomps on her wedding ring, but is unable to destroy it. On 675-76, the Ratignolles’ perfect union doesn’t impress her at all.

Sections 19-21 (677-83).

677-82. Madame Reisz and the Atelier. On 677, Léonce becomes angry, and Edna decides to go upstairs to her loft or atelier to paint. On 678, painting again reveals a need to attain clarity and to express one’s inner self. This kind of expression brings Edna happiness. But shadowing her escape into art is a void, a dark vision of devouring worms. On 682, Frederic Chopin’s crisp music gives way to Richard Wagner’s “Liebestod”: death-in-passion.

Sections 22-24 (683-90).

684. The issue here is “how to handle Edna.” Dr. Mandelet’s C19 view emerges: woman is a “delicate organism.” The New Woman is all aflutter with strange notions, and so forth. All the same, the good doctor suspects that Edna is having an affair.

687-88. Mandelet notices Edna’s animal vitality, partly due to the passion she shares with her Colonel father for horse-racing, a sport involving chance and free-spiritedness. Mandelet tells and old tale about straying and returning, while Edna invents a less trite story. The doctor sees her “inner life” awakening. Is it due to Alcée? The Colonel, meanwhile, advises Monsieur Pontellier to be stern with his wife.

689-90. Edna, now alone, enjoys the objects in her once-bustling domestic space in a new way. This moment prefigures her attainment of what Virginia Woolf will later call “a room of one’s own.” Then Edna reads Emerson, the philosopher-poet who wrote “whimsy” above his study door and who always preached about self-improvement and self-reliance.

Sections 25-28 (690-98).

690-91. Edna meets Alcée the handsome young man of fashion, who is conventional and not much of an independent thinker. They head for the horse races, where the horses “intoxicate” Edna. What matters about horse-racing isn’t analysis—it is consequentiality, chance, the chase.

693-94. Robert has now replaced Léonce in Edna’s affections. Alcée is only her narcotic, an upper of sorts. Alcée is frank and appeals to her animalism, as on 694 middle.

694-96. While Edna speaks of her caprice in taking a small house, Mademoiselle Ratignolle wants to know the reason for this decision. At 695 bottom, Edna becomes clearer on the point, and makes a central statement: she is determined “never again to belong to another than herself.” So it is not just that she loves Robert. On 696 bottom, Madame Reisz understands that matters are not so simple; she asks Edna pointedly is she in fact loves Robert.

697-98. The intellectual and emotional elements of awakening come together here. Reisz’s metaphor of a fledgling bird shows her “feminist” grasp of Edna’s situation—the older woman is said to be “wonderfully sane,” whatever Alcée thinks. Edna feels no shame or remorse; rather, she feels regret. She regrets that the “accelerant” of her awakening has been pure eroticism, not love. Romantic or forever-style love is turning out to be too binding. Only frank sexuality liberates a person, it seems—but this freedom isn’t that kind that brings comfort or security. In Section 28, Edna’s realization seems very clear. She needs an other, an object, but knows she hasn’t found an adequate one.

Sections 37-39 (718-23).

718-19. Madame Ratignolle’s labor is witnessed by Edna with agony—she interprets it as the ancient curse of womankind. Edna falls to indifference for now, and offers a confused explanation to the sympathetic Mandelet. Soon will come her final awakening.

720. The passage on the necessity of illusion seems almost Nietzschean, and looks forwards to Freud on the problem of adequate relations between individual and society. Edna insists on waking up and on not being duped. Even so, she remains romantically entangled, as if spiritual striving can never get free of the need for embodiment, for relations with other material beings. She places her hopes in Robert, putting aside the tug she feels at the thought of her children. But Robert has abandoned her with a trite sentiment. Edna lies awake and does her thinking, which thinking may “script” her fatal action later.

722-23. Edna makes her way mechanically to the seductive, sensuous ocean, and is naked before the sun and waves. All the objects of her desire she now knows to have been transient. It appears that an undelimited awakening is deadly. The inadequate objects propelling her forwards have been necessary, but Edna doesn’t want to return to her attachment with them. This fact certainly doesn’t amount to a condemnation of her—Edna is bold enough to exhaust her powers on “the ancient problem of desire” as something we can never really satisfy, at least not permanently.

Edition: Baym, Nina et al. (eds.) The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vols. C, D, E. 6th ed. New York: Norton, 2002. ISBN 0393977943.

Week 03, James

2006-09-07T17:56:00.000-07:00

Henry James’ “The Beast in the Jungle” (524-53) and “The Art of Fiction” (553-67).

Page-by-Page Notes on Henry James’ “The Beast in the Jungle” (524-53).

James gives us an early example of modernist writing – complexity and obliqueness are his hallmarks, though these terms need not imply that his writing lacks precision. He seems to be pursuing a kind of psychological realism, which combines with his narrators’ analytical precision and refusal to accept explanations or appearances at their initial value. We should add to these comments on style the modernist understanding that much “communication” isn’t strictly verbal – thus the attention to the little things people do (gestures, glances, etc.), and sometimes to what isn’t said.

In James’ story here, we’re given a sense of fact at the outset that rapidly falls apart – John Marcher’s recollection of his meeting with May Bartram is by no means accurate, even though this meeting turns out to have great signficance. I recall Nietzsche’s comment, “facts are precisely what there aren’t – there are only interpretations.” Or Michel de Montaigne’s remark in the Essais (to paraphrase), “It is not things we need to examine; it is interpretations of things.” Memory turns out not to be reliable in the story at hand – it is important, but not a solution or an answer to Marcher’s problems, it seems – if anything, I’d say Marcher traps himself by reconstructing a highly overwrought sense of his own past.

Section 1. On 528-30, the narrator details Marcher’s current understanding of the longtime vague presentiment that shapes his entire life. What is this presentiment or intimation? Marcher waits and watches for the event (natural-seeming to him, but strange to others) that is to happen to him, he awaits his “fate.” I think James is as always an historian of consciousness in his treatment of Marcher’s obsession. That is, the mid-Victorian culture critic and poet Matthew Arnold had referred to modernity as a confusing time in which “everything is to be suffered or endured, nothing to be done” (paraphrase from the Preface to Arnold’s 1853 Poems). The modern human being, in other words, seems unable to act decisively in the world – too much going on, too much information floating around, which results in a feeling of paralysis. (Some internet-based British company markets a Jane Austen action figure – maybe they should offer a Matthew Arnold action figure, too. But what would he be doing? Quoting bleak poetry about inner confusion and loss of the will to act?) Well, then, Marcher is a typically modern man; he spins a a pathos-filled yarn about an event that is to happen to him, something that will be imposed upon him from without but which is nonetheless intimately related to his life’s course, his deepest personal identity. This event will lend purpose to his past and present, and cap off his life at the end with unique meaning. Meantime, it’s all waiting, speculation, exclusion of anything and anyone that doesn’t fit into his personal myth. We notice that Marcher turns May Bartram into a spectator of his life as well as an intimate confidante; she is attracted into his ego-orbit like a satellite circling a planet. Or at least that’s the way he seems to understand the relationship. Modernist authors are, of course, very much interested in “the power of myth” – an author such as T. S. Eliot, for instance, insists on collecting together the fragments of past myths and trying to make them serviceable in the present day. But Marcher’s myth is profoundly personal and even solipsistic – it doesn’t lead to an authentic sense of purpose or meaning, even if he’s quite certain that it does. We, as James’ collective readership, can’t buy into Marcher’s myth, even if we may not be as perceptive about our own personal myths as we are about that of a fictional character.

Section 2. On 532-33, Marcher implies that things between him and May are getting along, but really the story as a whole shares with Seinfeld the quality of “being about nothing.” Marcher’s genteel, Victorian-style regard for May’s feelings gives way on 532 to the naming of the Beast. The spring or leap of the beast organizes Marcher’s sense of the present and his expectations for the future; it is his personal version of the truth. James is as always concerned with the subjective side of life, with the nature of personal experience. But this emphasis doesn’t equate to the claim that getting in touch with subjectivity provides answers for all of life’s problems, either with regard to the individual or an entire society.

Section 4. For me, 540-44 have a “comi-tragic” quality. Marcher is mystified by May’s revelation to him – he has always played the Victorian gentleman with her, keeping her at arm’s distance since, after all, one doesn’t invite a lady on a tiger hunt. The only thing missing from May’s performance in the present section is the stock phrase “kiss me, you fool!” I suppose that for John Marcher, a genuine narcissist, “love” isn’t an event at all. This section makes me suspect that the narrator (and by implication Henry James) isn’t particularly interested in Marcher or his story. Instead, what we are getting is a psychological study of sorts, an analysis of how “life’s meaning” is spun. James was probably acquainted with John Stuart Mill’s account of his breakdown as a young man, and his consequent understanding that “meaning” or “happiness” is precisely what you don’t get when you seek it directly and organize your whole life around that search. “Ask yourself if you are happy,” wrote Mill, “and you cease to be so” (Autobiography).

Moreover, in the third and fourth sections, we see that May Bartram is defined as a Sphinx, that mysterious woman with all the answers. It seems to me that this definition of May as Sphinx (and Sibyl) is just a variation on the old “woman as the inessential other” sham. Marcher may not exactly be a ball of activity. In fact, he’s profoundly passive, waiting for that special something or that special nothing to happen to him. But May functions as the woman who supposedly lives to fulfill Marcher’s destiny. It’s possible that May speaks in riddles to draw us into Marcher’s mystification. By means of his opaque style, James keeps the kernel of a simple story hidden from us.

Section 6. Marcher undertakes a clichéd, empty trip to exotic Asia, and this trip is followed by what seems to be a final recognition on his part that he has thrown away his life in following the trail of his self-made delusional myth. Even so, he dies in the act of refusing enlightenment; he’s just trying to avoid the final spring of the Beast. Marcher has lived “the ancient problem of meaning,” and lived it badly – not heroically, as May claims at one point. I don’t suppose James is naïve enough to think we can dispose of myth-making altogether. So is James, by means of his narrator, offering us any moral here? Is the point of the story something like “all you need is love” or “action is the cure for all spiritual ailments”? I doubt it because James isn’t much of a sentimentalist, and we have heard these old saw about action before. It seems to me that the obliqueness and complexity of James’ style wards off sentimental readings of “The Beast in the Jungle” even as it may make us complicit in Marcher’s confusion and self-mystification. I find it hard to believe there are any easy solutions or answers to the question of meaning that has long driven people half-mad or paralyzed them. There’s a connection, a shock of recognition, for us as readers, I think – “yes, that might be me.” But I don’t feel a great deal of sympathy for Marcher at the point of his demise. I am instead left with a sense that the narrative treats the problem of meaning or purpose in a bemused, disinterested (i.e. neutral), almost jaded way, as if in self-contempt for even bringing up the whole affair yet again, for the umpteenth time in literary history. The ancient Greeks coul embrace the paradoxical notion that “fate” is imposed on us by external forces but also that we are nonetheless somehow still accountable for how we stand up to what happens to us. Marcher lives this ancient problem, and lives it rather badly. I treat Henry James as an historian of consciousness and western culture, not as an author bent upon offering us solutions to ancient (and modern) problems.

General Notes on Henry James’ “The Art of Fiction” (553-67).

James defends realism from the strict moralists who say that art can’t be realistic, that it’s always an attempt to deceive readers into taking fiction for fact. This misunderstanding stems from a failure to understand that there is something fundamentally fictive even about our perceptions of “reality.” Of course the moralists also find the writer’s freethinking and experimental way of dealing with community standards offensive.

James, as an early Modernist, finds the pre-Kantian and Puritanical basis of such arguments vulgar and narrow-minded. I think this goes towards the romanticism the editors find in his theory of fiction—the mind is creative, so it’s acceptable to make fictions. Put in modernist terms, this becomes a demand for formal innovation—the emphasis is on “making it new.” Fiction offers us a way to compare one set of stories with another—the one we call reality. We must maintain some dividing line between them, but not a concrete barrier.

What’s the difference between realism and poetry? It would be worthwhile to mention Oscar Wilde and the symbolists who condemn realism as a failed technique because, they say, it only panders to middle-class vanity and insipid expectations. James doesn’t see realism that way. He might say that prose fiction packs much the same innovational punch as poetry, without the grandiose and apocalyptic claims that have since the days of Wordsworth and Shelley characterized that genre.

On James’ relationship to his public—well, his novels are pretty intricate; he doesn’t exactly write for the masses even though he seems to have been popular. People still joke that James’ subtlety makes it hard to determine when some characters enter or exit his narratives. His style is chiseled, precise, lapidary in its polish and attention to detail. His appreciation for realism and good prose is a way of carrying forwards the tradition that good literary art commands attention, uplifting and improving those who come into contact with it. It is also an art that lends itself to discerning criticism. Mention Shaftesbury in this regard since he sticks up for the much-berated critic against wild poets who rail at them.

James writes about the public—what kind of publics does he favor and disfavor? It’s clear that the novel, being the bourgeois art form, developed alongside advancing literacy and leisure time for ordinary people. This means that it must be defended from some of the very people who favor it most because they would strip it of its ability to offer perspective on life, critical distance and critical immersion. They would trivialize it by treating it in vulgar utilitarian fashion—the aim of reading a novel might be just to get to the happy ending, etc. That turns a novel into an entirely exhaustible commodity rather than one with a kick, that keeps something in reserve as potential to change people, expand their horizons, etc. He opposes the reductiveness of the statement “get real,” the charge that fiction is trivial because it isn’t strictly real life. That implies a misunderstanding of reality, of life itself. The vulgar literalist, as aesthetes had already pointed out, are the most deluded and unrealistic souls of all—they’re farther from the mark than Don Quixote could ever be.

Page-by-Page Notes on Henry James’ “The Art of Fiction” (Different Edition; Norton Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1st. edition).

858. James says that form is artistry, and he defends fiction from the casual consumer. He praises the novelists who maintain their distance from the public aside from the general imperative that a novel must be interesting. There are many ways of being interesting. This is modernist formalism and autonomy in the language of individualism and impressionism. Here James goes further than just say, in audience-oriented or pragmatic fashion, that a book is more than an exhaustible commodity. He seems ill at ease with such pragmatic arguments, and goes beyond them to upholds the principle of formal freedom. Even if we leave aside the book’s effect on the public, I think, James as a modernist would still insist that the artist be true to his mission, true to his own impression of the world and to the autonomy and integrity of art. So we should be careful to keep his view distinct from the older argument that art must make itself useful or be dismissed. Modernism rejects this claim, often rather confrontationally.

859. Painting and the literary word: language is even freer from materiality than is painting, which admits of a more determined “grammar.” But this freedom isn’t free from human concerns. James finds maximum space for personal impression-registering and execution, for feeling. Modernists like Yeats sometimes describe their striving in art as an attempt to get beyond the mire of human veins and transmute troubling passions into pure and eternal form, as in “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Byzantium.” I know James thinks in terms of working with form, but I don’t find him downplaying the role of impression and expression, feeling, either. He isn’t saying art is an escape from the human and the fleeting. Art can’t become purely object, purely objective. Why doesn’t he compare literature to music (as Pater would have) even as he compares it to painting? Well, I suppose that music, as pure form, might be somewhat too free from the humanity that goes into its creation. Words may leave more room for expression and creativity, openness to interpretation since a word is by no means as crisp a unit as a musical note. You don’t need an heroic failure like the OED to deal with the “connotativeness” of notes. James isn’t trying to escape criticism or interpretation into a realm of pure and transcendent form. To say that about the novel in particular would be to divorce it from its roots as a popular art form that makes an impact on ordinary people. His theorizing about form and freedom is, therefore, partly a defense against the public and partly a defense of the public’s interest in the novel as a serious art form.

860. James wants to rescue the sense of flexibility for the novel from Besant’s well-intentioned but false preciseness and his broad-minded but still moralistic bent. Reality is plastic and open-ended, so the novelist’s creation-process and formal products can claim the same quality. In what sense does a good novelist honor and even, perhaps, “imitate” nature? By being true to its openness and plasticity. This is at the heart of Baconian empiricism: Bacon says that those who think they’ve already understood nature as a set of fixed principles or processes have done it a great injury. The novelist shouldn’t try to offer instant fruit, but should instead pursue “experiments of light.” Might compare and contrast this idea of openness to experience with Nietzsche’s insistence on how the fixer-uppers reduce and falsify nature, which he takes to be unstable and dynamic at base. I believe James is closer to the British empirical tradition because he doesn’t show much interest in chaos for chaos’ sake, or for shock value in unsettling everyone’s belief in eternal verities. What he says is not that artists are wild-eyed dynamos or lawless intuitionists in touch with the primal rawness of things (if that’s even what N says), but rather that there is a legitimate correspondence between the open way the mind perceives and creates and the way “reality” proceeds. James emphasizes this in a gesture that is both romantic-subjectivist (emphasis on the mind’s creativity) and open to the external world, which he grants some objective status. This is one way to capture the complexity of modernism—yes, it represents a subjectivist, inward turn, but at the same time not all authors preach the doctrine of Paterian isolation from contact with others or the world. James isn’t out to destabilize and then remake our vision of the real from the ground up. Supplement the idea that modernity consists in being “intimately alone together” with this Jamesian sense of possibility, plasticity. That’s his brand of optimism. Looking around one turns out to be looking forward.

861. Here the phrasing sounds Paterian—“let nothing be lost upon you,” etc. Openness to experience—broadly defined as infinite in variety—as opposed to fixity and system and moralism. James doesn’t go for the idea that there is any one way of gathering or processing experience. Anybody worth the title of writer experiences the world in a deeply individual way, and must be true to his or her impression of things.

Edition: Baym, Nina et al. (eds.) The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vols. C, D, E. 6th ed. New York: Norton, 2002. ISBN 0393977943.

Week 02, Whitman

2006-08-31T17:55:00.000-07:00

Walt Whitman’s Preface and text of Leaves of Grass (17-79); “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (116-22).

General Notes on Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, “When Lilacs…” (17-79, 116-22).

Transcendentalism: Emerson and Thoreau in particular, along with Whitman later on, have always reminded me of Thomas Carlyle’s doctrine of “natural supernaturalism,” with its emphasis on the need to reinterpret the ordinary as miraculous, the “natural fact” as the sign of “spiritual fact.” American Transcendentalism is a belated version of romanticism, self-consciously constructed as such, but it wouldn’t be fair to say it’s less worthwhile on that account. Just and the British had to confront their own long history and literary tradition, so do the Americans have to confront the British and find a way to strike out on new paths. The transcendentalist authors disperse into various subregions of interest: myth, classics, nature, American history from Puritan times onwards, and so forth.

“Preface” to Leaves of Grass. Whitman’s description of the European literary tradition as a “corpse” is respectful enough, yet it also involves a “will to forget” the past, to clear away old customs and traditions. Whitman, like his America, is forward-looking and intent upon life in the present. What characterizes Americans, according to Whitman? See page 21, paragraph 2: they are democratic-spirited, egalitarian, and can hardly comprehend the concept that ordinary people should defer to a class of “betters.” Americans, implies Whitman in language similar to that used by Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America, have a certain healthy ignorance of the old ways and forms. What can a poet do, then? A poet can capture some of this egalitarian spirit, generosity, and healthy individualism from the people, and can reenforce a sense of that spirit by suggesting its correspondence with the American environment’s vastness and generosity. Whitman doesn’t judge people or try to rank the facts of internal or external experience. There’s little sense of hierarchy in his poetry, almost no sense that rigid analytic methods are being applied to whatever the poet mentions. Instead, we get celebratory catalogs – long lists of things, places, people, animals, feelings, situations, occupations, and so forth. We even find these catalogs in the Preface, as on page 22.

What constitutes Whitman’s distinctness as an American author? One thing is how he relates to and represents the natural world. It’s easy to find in his poetry a characteristically romantic celebration of nature – nature frees us up for intuition, expression, connection-making, and the experience of love as the wellspring of life. But in Whitman, such benefits don’t seem to come at the expense of society. He welcomes industry, construction, science, etc. as coequal and equally generous processes, as companions alongside natural process. As an example, see page 52 of Leaves of Grass.

One other point of distinction is Whitman’s definition of the poet’s relationship with his or her audience – the British romantics tended to characterize themselves as isolated prophets who had been forced into a corner by an uncaring citizenry deaf to the “language of the heart” and intent only on making progress, accumulating material wealth, and so forth. The British poet-nightingales also make much of bearing the burden of linguistic expression – their poetry often foregrounds the question of “commensurateness” between words and inner life (feelings, spiritual truth, intuition). Do our words assist us in making inner life communicable, or do they instead betray us far more than they help, and lead us to indulge in comforting illusions about ourselves and the world in which we live? In a sense, the romantics are haunted by medieval Christian theologians’ concerns about the problem of signification in its relation to spirit. Whitman, however, is almost entirely upbeat about expressive language’s benefits: on page 27, he says that we go to poets on equal terms; his bard is “commensurate” with the common people, and need not be considered remote, exalted, or incomprehensible. While Whitman pays his respects to the Brits’ elegiac treatment of nature and to their concerns about the limitations of language, the only difficulty he seems to discover is how to convey enough of America’s hugeness and diversity. His optimism doesn’t seem to be a rhetorical symptom of near-desperation. It isn’t forced but instead seems genuine – some would even say naïve – as if the poet were a second Adam.

Leaves of Grass, 1855. The poem is certainly expressive and romanticist, but the “self” expressed is also romantic in the best sense: it is transpersonal. See page 40: the speaker’s first answer to the child’s question is that grass is an emblem of his own personal optimism. But look how he expands and broadens this definition. The second definition is that the grass is the “handkerchief” of God. It’s one of those Emersonian “natural facts” that is in turn the sign of a “spiritual fact.” The third meaning is that the grass is earth’s offspring – an example of organic process. Fourth, the grass is a “uniform hieroglyphic” that treats all people the same. And fifth, it is “grave-hair” – the power of hope overcoming despair in the face of death. Whitman will return to this sense at page 79, middle. So all of these meanings of grass encompass the identity of the speaker. Whitman doesn’t really exalt himself in a narrow way. Instead, he emphasizes common feelings, natural functions like sexual expression, work, activity, and in general the life process.

While Whitman is not the sort of poet who enjoys antagonizing opponents, he still sets himself agains a steadily advancing bourgeois or middle-class conception of the individual as a pleasure-seeking atom bouncing around in isolation from others, accumulating possessions, gratifying itself, and embracing false notions about security – all while promoting the most puritanical moral strictures on other people’s conduct. This notion of the selfish indivual is Whitman’s target just as it was the target of his romantic predecessors in Great Britain.

Whitman’s “Song” is filled with religious references – he sometimes appears to invite comparisons between his speaker and Jesis, the sufferer for the sins of others, redeemer of lost causes. On page 69, Whitman’s speaker calls religion a timebound myth – something useful in its time, but now in need of a makeover. Still, see page 52 bottom, and page 53 lines 520 and following, page 67 line 955, and pages 70 and 73. These passages seem designed to invoke a harsher and more challenging side of Christ – the admonisher of Pharisees and other “easy readers” seeking only reaffirmation and comfort. Given all the Christian allusions, it is perhaps too facile to reduce Whitman’s attitude in Leaves to nationalistic jingoism, individual selfishness, and cheerleading for capitalist accumulation. Whitman seems to be “pro-everything,” but he also shows a strong awareness that an emergent market society like America can appropriate and neutralize nearly any statement short of absolute devastation. There’s something of the “free radical” in Whitman in that he doesn’t welcome cheap appropriation of his message – that’s a quality subsequent poets will recognize right on down to Ginsberg in Howl. It’s also fair to point out that because America hasn’t always lived up to its high ideals and promise, many subsequent authors (literary and otherwise) have found it necessary to confront the darker side of our history – not everything can be subsumed under the Whitmanesque category of “vista.” In any case, on page 55, Whitman’s speaker seems to have it in for critics and chatterers – see lines 579-85. The speaker asks that his poems be taken as words that open out onto the world of experience – as he says on page 75, you’re the only one who can travel your road. Nobody else – including uninhibited, free-verse-slinging poets – can travel it for you.

Whitman makes similar claims to the ones made by the English romantics: he emphasizes nature’s value, the power of the individual, and the need for imaginative sympathy. But he writes a distinctly American poetry. There is no sense of isolation, no sense that the poet is haunted by the inability of his language to bear the burden of spirit and imagination. Whitman writes as if America is a new Paradise. We don’t see angst, but rather exuberance. Thoreau is similarly bold in his forms and themes.

Whitman celebrates common things—the body, grass, and so forth. An important function of poetry for him is to declare things outright without worrying about consequences or rigid logic. He tries to convey a sense of “nature without check with original energy.” He writes as if his wanderings as a naturalist and journalist justify this stance—it isn’t a matter of arriving at a perspective through Carlyle’s agonizing spiritual struggle, as in Sartor Resartus.

Each line of poetry is a blade of grass. We should mention Blake’s way of dealing with childhood—Whitman is a very different kind of prophet. Both authors are exuberant, but Whitman simply says, “I don’t know anything more than a child.” Guesses are fine with him. But he comes round to a striking statement about how lucky it is to die. One must compare this with, say, Shelley’s angst about the destructive and creative power of nature—Shelley is an apocalyptic poet; there is as much darkness in him as light. Not so with Whitman—he seems able to celebrate even the darkness without wishing it away.

When it comes to writing about sexuality, this American Victorian obviously has no shame. In this poem, the woman’s gaze caresses the men. Notice the sexual overtones of the poem’s conclusion—”spray” would be considered outrageous for the times.

Whitman’s boldness and catalog style show here—notice the phrase “Cosmos of Manhattan.” Whitman cares nothing about privacy; he is not a poet very much concerned with the romantic burden of moving from inwardness to outward expression. Perhaps he does write self-expressive poetry, but the real project is not so much to make external what is inside of him but rather the project is to get everything down on paper in the limited amount of space in a particular poem. His poetry is celebratory somewhat like a rushed dispatch from the front, written by a journalist. Whitman’s poetry merges with the project, with the vastness, of America itself.

Sometimes, Whitman is almost messianic. At lines 503- 504, he nearly equates himself to Christ, in suggesting, as Christ does, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me” (Matthew 25)

What exactly is the speaker? He is autochthonous, which means he seems to grow from the ground. Whitman is capable of being nationalistic as well as an internationalist. For him, poetry is another declaration of independence, but it is also written without rancor. His tones are often biblical, and go from high to low and back again.

“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

This poem tells a story about the effect of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral procession on the poet and the nation. The poem shows itself being constructed, tells us how it was written—that is in part its subject: how does speech issue from anguished silence, hope from despair?

The task of the poet at first is to figure out how he will prepare himself, how he will perfume the grave and so forth. Yet, it all sounds like the preparation for a wedding, as if Whitman does not separate such institutional moments. The poem includes references to ancient mourning rituals and creates a sense of the mourner as lover, not unlike the erotic sensibility of the biblical “Song of Solomon.”

Lincoln’s coffin presides over the remaining task of unifying the country—notice the changes in perspective. The setting brings the poet together with a national panorama of people mourning and celebrating Lincoln. The poem itself becomes an offering to death, and towards the end, the three main symbols – heaven (star), earth-flower (lilac), and bird (thrush)—come together. The bird is the mediator between heaven and earth by means of its song, which song becomes a central statement in the poem around line 135 and following (page 120).

The last stanza of Section 15 (page 121ff) may be a reminder of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, in which the President speaks about the need to take care of widows and orphans, thereby helping to “bind up the nation’s wounds,” healing insofar as possible the torn bodies and spirits left behind by the Civil War of 1861-65. The entire stanza broadens to a panoramic vision of the Civl War dead, so Lincoln’s own death becomes a symbolic and sacrificial lesson for the country.

Finally the poet, by the way he describes his hopes in the presence of spring, takes away some of the shock and sting of Lincoln’s death. Look at the time frame—in the beginning of the poem, it seems fair to suggest the speaker has been before where he now stands. He has felt similar grief here. And the bird, a thrush, must in any event sing. This event—Lincoln’s death—that has dumbfounded the nation, is not singular; it can be accepted and life will go on. The power of ritual is that it can enfold and render intelligible even terrible events.

Edition: Baym, Nina et al. (eds.) The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vols. C, D, E. 6th ed. New York: Norton, 2002. ISBN 0393977943.

Week 01, Introduction

2006-08-24T17:52:00.000-07:00

Welcome to E222-R, American Literature from 1865 to the Present
Fall 2006 at California State University, Fullerton