Considering the nineteenth century parenting techniques used in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the story focuses on the creator’s poor "parenting" of his “child” leading him to an unjust life. The fatherhood in the novel is dually examined through Victor’s father Alphonse and through Victor himself. In both cases the reader becomes a witness of the failure of the paternal function. Regarding the motherhood, the loss of the mother in the beginning of the novel leads to consequences that will destroy later the whole family. All these unfortunate events voice the idea of the importance of these two significant factors, whose absence in different aspects creates a world full of sorrow and redemption.
The motif of motherhood has a very important role in the rising of the children and unites the dwellers of the house. The mother’s death shakes the foundations of the family and put in Victor’s mind the idea of creating artificial life. This explains the sorrow of the son about the death of his mother for which he blames his father. He has the desire to become better than his father because of who he led a life that was burdened with high expectations that he set for him. The failure of the father Victor and the failure of the father Alphonse are different in the novel. But their incapability of satisfying the expectations of being fathers leads to their punishment.
There is a reference in the story of Shelley’s mother, who has died due to complications from her birth. She first hands the experience of the loss of the parent, because she was raised without her mother. So the female, and especially, the mother, is seen as the wellspring of compassion even today not only in the 19th century. The role of the father is not as important as the role of the mother. She is the one who raises the child and teaches them the morality and goodness. This is expressed vividly in the screenplay of Kenneth Branagh’s film when the father brings the orphan Elizabeth in their home: “MOTHER: You must think of her as your own sister. You must look after her. And be kind to her.” (Lady S. & Hart V. J.) She teaches Victor to be compassioned and polite, thus putting the foundations of his moral behavior. The colors before her death in the film are bright, there is much more lights and everybody is happy. In the night of her death the atmosphere changes rapidly with the bad weather. There is a storm which somehow predicts for something bad to happen. The destroying of the tree by the lightning is very symbolical: “VICTOR: As a boy, I stood at this window and watched God destroy our tree.” (Lady S. & Hart V. J.) In this scene the tree of the family is annihilated and probably the mother dies at the same time. It is a very strong moment in the film. After the mother’s death Victor builds a monument for her, in honor of her. The future absence of the mother is a strife that Victor experiences in his development.
The failure in the “fatherhood” of Victor is his creation and his refusal to take responsibility for the life he has created. Like Prometheus he rebels against the laws of nature and as a result is punished by his creation. They both are punished for their actions, when Victor, in a way, steals the secret of creation from God and the Titan steals fire from heaven to give to the man. The fire is equivalent to the Revolution and the French Revolution – the great utopian promises of the 18th century, but nobody including Victor didn’t think of the consequences. In both cases the creation rebels against the creator. Shelley expresses the view that the creator is at fault, not the creation .That is how the book can be seen as a criticism not only of scientists who are unconcerned by the potential consequences of their work, but also of fathers who don’t take responsibility for their children. Victor rejects the creation when it seeks him out and he abandons it, which directly leads to his personal downfall. The absence of parenting and guidance until Frankenstein encountered society which add that moral failings that are also due to the lack of a parent's love. Victor fears the creature’s desire to destroy him by killing everyone most dear to him, which is a part of his punishment. There is an irony in the name of Victor, his name suggests victory, but his creation of new life brings only defeat and death. The failure of the father of Victor is his incapability to save his wife, even though he is the best recognized doctor and respected by all who knew him for his integrity. His punishment is the murder of his little son, killed by Frankenstein, for which Alphonse dies from grief. He is not directly punished by his son, but it is a result of Victor’s deeds.
The role of the mother and the father as creators and teachers is very important to Shelley's creature. The failing of Victor to parent his “son” creates a "monster” that later revenges for his abandonment, and his punishment is not only for his creator but also for his whole family. And the reason for all this comes from the death of the mother, whose absence provokes some actions of his son that for good or bad destroy are being punished by God and destroy the whole family. Here Shelley gives utterance to the importance and the role of the motherhood and the fatherhood. The story implies an idea that Margaret Mead states very well, but namely that "Motherhood is a biological fact, while fatherhood is a social invention."
WORK CITED
Type of Entry:
Film Screenplay. Two authors.
In-Text Citation Form:
(Lady S. & Hart V. J.)
Works Cited Form:
Frankenstein (1994) by Steph Lady & James V. Hart.
Revised draft by Frank Darabont.
From the novel by Mary W. Shelley.
2nd revised draft, February 8, 1993 http://sfy.ru/?script=frankenstein_1994
четвъртък, 30 януари 2014 г.
USA and Great Britain Literature Reading Notes
KURT VONNEGUT
Slaughterhouse Five
Comments on Chapter Two
Kurt Vonnegut is one of the 20th century's great American pacifists. His work Slaughterhouse Five is the semi-autobiographical account of the fire bombing of Dresden, Germany by the British and American air forces in the February of 1945. It is the story of Billy Pilgrim, who has become "unstuck in time". His life is given to the reader out of order as he travels back and forth in time. He can see his birth and death and he can jump from one moment to another with no pattern to predict what will come next. The novel is an earnest anti-war novel. It isabout the war experiences of the main hero who are actually of the author itself, who appears in Chapter One and Chapter Ten, putting the frame of the novel. He himself has experienced these horrible events and exposes his trauma from the War through the life of Billy Pilgrim. The novel is known for its dark humor and use of science fiction which are typical for the other Vonnegut’s works. Slaughterhouse Five is highly moral story that derives from the effects of Dresden’s events that has marked Vonnegut’s life. It’s a novel about overwhelming this trauma from the war events, a novel about death and time.”So it goes.”
The section of the novel that I am going to comment on is Chapter Two and more precisely some passages from this section of the novel. After the appearance of Vonnegut in Chapter One, aiming to announce that he controls the hero of the story Chapter Two begins with the appearance of Billy and the well known sentence “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time”. Here the reader is introduced to the main character, Billy Pilgrim.We become witnesses to the first time when Billy gets unstuck in time. He wanders from moment to moment in his life, experiencing chronologically disparate events right after one another. There is plenty of analepses and prolepses that have a dramatic function in the story. Billy travels in time and some kind of complexity appears and confuses the reader.. The introduction “Listen” leads in the fiction within the fiction, which makes the work metafiction or so-called mise en abyme (a french literary term used to name metafiction). Billy is a chronotope, because of his symbolic journey to Tralfamadore.
There are many figures of speech in Chapter Two, like symbols and metaphors. Let’s take Billy's hometown Ilium, which is another name for the city of Troy, which is the doomed city under siege in the Iliad of Homer. Billy’s hometown is named after a city that was destroyed by war, a city that has lost the battle. Here we can see the contrast between the non-heroic Billy and a glorious war hero. His appearance on the battlefield is like a chaplain’s assistant. He is not ready for this war. He is weak and pathetic boy in the middle of the battleground. Even his name is a symbol of innocence. He is called “Billy” rather than “William” because he is more like a naïve traveler than a warrior. His last name of Pilgrim also has symbolic significance. Billy is on a journey to different periods of his own life. Vonnegut gives the reader exactly a non-heroic Billy because he doesn’t want to glorify the war. The moment with the pool in his childhood kept my attention. It is very symbolic flashback. It can be found reference to the War in the essence of this situation.
“It was like an execution. Billy was numb as his father carried him from the shower room to the pool. His eyes were closed. When he opened his eyes, he was on the bottom of the pool, and there was beautiful music everywhere. He lost consciousness, but the music went on. He dimly sensed that somebody was rescuing him. “
First the reader can reveal the symbolic use of the water. Water is often used in literature as origin of life. It is a symbol of the beginning, of birth. The reader can see the hidden parallel situation behind this one with the pool. Being thrown in the pool is equal to being thrown on the battlefield of the War. He had no choice to choose if he wants or not. The situation in the pool is compared to “an execution”. Here this could be considered as a hint for the reader to refer this happening to the War. Billy is a little boy who cannot swim it is the same when he is sent to take part in the War. He is unskilled and he is not able to discharge his duties as a soldier. On his first appearing on the battleground of the War he feels as numb as when his father throws him in the pool. We can also understand by his eyes which were closed that he was scared. The bottom of the pool refers to the battlefield-the worst place where anybody could be. His father tries to teach him how to swim by the sink-or-swim method. If he does not swim-he sinks, he will die. He has no choice. It is the same with the War. He cannot give up and if he dares to do –he will be killed, he will die. You have to fight for dear life. The “free will” does not exist.
Death is mentioned many times in Chapter Two. The narrator announces the death of Billy’s father two times. Another meet with the death is the mentioned dead of Billy’s wife and the dead body of the famous runner in the nursing home. Each of these deaths is mentioned without much tact. There is never any emotional response elaborated, though the people around him grieve. After each death he says the phrase “So it goes.” This is the Tralfamadorian response to death. Billy exposes their perception for death in his second letter.
'The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.'
Here is an explanation of the conception of death and time in which believe the Tralfamadorians and Billy. According to them all time happens simultaneously, so a man who dies is actually still alive, since all moments exist at all times. People only appear to die. But he is alive in the past. All moments of past present and future are always alive. So Billy doesn’t take death for a big deal. It is something normal and at that moment the person is only in a “bad shape”. On the background of all the crucial events connected with the War this conception for the death is quite positive. And if the reader really understands what is this idea for the unavoidable end of every human being it could influence his/her life very positively. At least this could make the reader think about dead not so dramatically and to expect it like a physical stage of the body separated from the soul. But actually Vonnegut’s conception and attitude toward death is very personal as he himself would attempt suicide by pills and alcohol after the death of his mother who committed suicide. The zoo on Tralfamadore where are held Billy and the famous actress Montana Wildhack can be read as a symbol of the worldview that helps Billy to assimilate his experience into his post-war life and his meets with death. This assimilation can be considered as an assimilation of the author himself caring the burden of the war trauma.
Even though Vonnegut put in the novel science fiction it reminds me a lot of the book of Ian McEwan, Atonement. Like in Slaughterhouse Five there is no chronology of the events. There are a lot of analepses and prolepses in the book, shifting back and forth so the reader cannot understand which of these moments are current. And just like Vonnegut who moves and controls his protagonist, at the end of the book appear the one who has controlled all the time the protagonists of the story. The movie Slaughterhouse Five begins in the same way like Atonement –with the typing of the type-writer. It put the fictional element within the novel which is fiction as a whole and predicts its power which will influence the heroes and the reader. There is War issue in Atonement too. And its moments in the novel are as powerfully and crucially described as in Slaughterhouse Five. In both novels the goal of this fictionally invented world, where everybody is happy is to deal with the trauma from the war, even though the past cannot be touched and changed. Concerning the skipping from one moment to another and the traveling in the future the novel and the movie Slaughterhouse Five is similar to Donnie Darko Book of Richard Kelly. The Donnie Darko like Billy is moving back and forth in his life. He knows the time of his death and what will happen to him. The protagonist Donnie Darko dies in his room hit by an engine of a crashed falling plane and he knows this before it happens. This strongly remind me of the scene with the plane in Slaughterhouse Five, when Billy says that they are going to die.
Published at the height of the Vietnam War in 1969, Slaughterhouse Five is considered by many critics to be Vonnegut’s greatest work. He combines science fiction, autobiography, historical fiction, and modern satire in the depiction of the life of his hero Billy Pilgrim, which are typical characteristics for postmodern literature. According to me the autobiographical participation makes the novel great and unique anti-war work, because Vonnegut exhibits his own life experience from the firebombing in “the land of Oz”. The novel is classic in any time, but its publication during the ongoing Vietnam War made it extremely successful.
Nancy Willard
Comments on “How to Stuff a Pepper”
And on “Questions My Son Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Him”
From her poetry collection “Carpenter of the Sun”
Nancy Willard is an American poet and short story writer. Nancy Willard was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She was educated at the University of Michigan and Stanford University. Willard is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Water Walker, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has also written two novels, and four books of stories and essays. In 1982, she received the Newbery Medal for A Visit to William Blake's Inn. Nancy Willard has an unerring ear for authentic speech, a sensitive, almost delicate feeling for tender childhood relationships, and real skill in shaping and bringing off a story. Her poems point to genuine talent. Her works are filled with wit, charm, elegance, and magic. Nancy Willard's best poems—and her best are as good as they come—illuminate local, humble subjects: flowers, moss, children, the patterns of domestic life. Nancy Willard is a teacher, a storyteller whose “ broken speech of wizards” appear as real magic in the recent trends in American Poetry.
One of the poems I choose to comment on is How to Stuff a Pepper. It is from her poetry collection Carpenter of the Sun, which includes some of her best poems from Masks for a Naked Poet. The collection is about flowers, vegetables, animals and her son. There are also some darker things, but there are not many of them. Her poems do not put the reader on a test, which is not wrong because for the reader it is her duty to suffer more so that she might entertain the reader with her sorrows.
Take your pepper green, and gently,
for peppers are shy. No matter which side
you approach, it's always the backside
In contrast to Adrienne Rich’s ideology, Nancy Willard reveals no overtly feminist positions in this poem. She speculates on the shyness of her green peeper. This part of the poem is filled with shy wonderment, with a tenderness toward Creation that is rare in contemporary poetry.
and enter a moon, spilled like a melon,
a fever of pearls,
a conversation of glaciers.
It is a temple built to the worship
of morning light
She represents the things of nature as marvelous and more marvelous are the things of man. She spiritualize the glaciers with their “conversation”. She uses similies comparing the moon to a melon. She sets down things in a proper order. The poem has diction of cookbook and at the same time of fairytale. Willard uses language of fancy and of directions.
You say I have not yet taught you
to stuff a pepper?
Cooking takes time.
Nancy Willard tells us not to be so hard on ourselves. Even thought the poem sounds poised and calm it is active and its stillness of rapt gets the attention of the reader. It is like an exquisite miniature, filled with luminosity. Her domestic is not merely cozy, and she's not merely domestic.
The other poem I choose from this compilation is Questions My Son Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Him. It is about her son and the difficulty of being poet and a mother at the same time.
2) Do butterflies make noise?
The wire in the butterfly’s tongue hums gold.
Some men hear butterflies even in winter.
The animals and the kids are typical for her poems. The artist is enthralled and trapped by superstitious and various magic like birthdays of gorillas, hearing of the butterflies in the winter, earlobes pierced by a tooth of steel. The kid is attracted to magic, the reader also becomes attracted to this magic of the creative artist.
God made the thread: O man, live forever!
The poem evokes the pathos in life. The child plays and amuses us while the truth of life comes from the adult people. This is ultimately incomprehensible world. There is no fatigue over the weirdness of absurdity of life. The poem is closer to blessing and benediction. The author speaks to the child in us, the student, the wonderer.
I find opposition to this poem in the work of my favorite poet Charles Bukowski “My Old Man”. In contrast to Willard’s poem which conveys affection between a parent and a child the poem of Bukowski conveys the damaged relation of a father and a son. Questions My Son Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Him exposes involvement and acceptance between a parent and a child, while the father in My Old Man does not accept his son. Willard’s poem expresses a deeper meaning of time through life.
Nancy Willard displays a lovely wit in her poems which is rare among poets these days. Through her magical poems she speaks to the child in us. She is also a convincing teacher and we wait impatiently for new lessons. There is abundance of good humor in her stories and there is no self-pity in them. In her poems life is sad, wonderful and magical. She produces sad songs in difference to the Spirit of the Age.
Henry James
Daisy Miller
Chapter Four
(comments on Daisy Miller’s ostracism)
Daisy Miller, is one of Henry James's most popular works. It first appeared in England in Cornhill Magazine in 1878. In it James presents an early version of his "international theme" by juxtaposing the manners and culture of American tourists in Europe with those of Americans who have lived abroad for a long time. It represents the behavior, customs and values typical of a particular social class in a given time and place. The novella contrasts the rigid social laws of Europe and the independent, unconventional spirit of this young American woman, Daisy Miller. Daisy Miller is is an examination of late nineteenth-century morality and manners.
The story begins with the meet of the young American expatriate Winterbourne and the attractive and naive American Daisy Miller in In Vevey, Switzerland. Winterbourne escorts her to the Castle of Chillon. Daisy appears dangerous to the established social code there. She runs her reputation by associating with the handsome Italian Giovanelli. After a harsh exchange of words with Winterbourne, Daisy pays a rash evening visit to the Colosseum. As a result, she falls ill with fever and dies a week later. After her death Winterbourne realizes his love for the dead American girl, his premature judgment of her, and his own blindness in the face of European convention.
After this Daisy was never at home, and Winterbourne ceased to meet her at the houses of their common acquaintances, because, as he perceived, these shrewd people had quite made up their minds that she was going too far. They ceased to invite her; and they intimated that they desired to express to observant Europeans the great truth that, though Miss Daisy Miller was a young American lady, her behavior was not representative--was regarded by her compatriots as abnormal. Winterbourne wondered how she felt about all the cold shoulders that were turned toward her, and sometimes it annoyed him to suspect that she did not feel at all. He said to himself that she was too light and childish, too uncultivated and unreasoning, too provincial, to have reflected upon her ostracism, or even to have perceived it. Then at other moments he believed that she carried about in her elegant and irresponsible little organism a defiant, passionate, perfectly observant consciousness of the impression she produced. He asked himself whether Daisy's defiance came from the consciousness of innocence, or from her being, essentially, a young person of the reckless class.
Daisy is the prototype of "the American girl" of the post Civil War period. She is oblivious to the social codes of the Old World. Daisy is direct, independent and somewhat presumptuous. For the “shrewd people” she was going too far. This shrewd people are the society that reject her and like this society Winterbourne harshly judges Daisy's alleged social transgressions.The unknown narrator only has access to the main character Winterbourne’s thoughts. The passage is framed around Daisy Miller and her “abnormal behavior” as a subject of Winterbourne’s study. Because of her “not representative” behavior many saw her as a shocking example of the type of American that was infiltrating upper-class society, both in the New World and the Old. Winterbourne’s wonder about how she feels show that he is concerned about her. In the passage there is a well made description of Daisy Miller but from Winterbourne perception. The phrase “he asked himself” means that he is doubting about what Daisy really is. But he is blinded by the society. So he cannot understand that she is only flirting and he offends her. Winterbourne is the pivotal character of the story. According to these critics, by presenting Winterbourne's disapproval of Daisy's essentially innocent activities, James subtly admonished the narrow attitudes adopted by many Americans abroad. So the impression appears to be very powerful argument for the attitude of the society.
I'm a fearful, frightful flirt! Did you ever hear of a nice girl that was not?
Firstly the attention of the reader is caught by the first sentence. There is an alliteration created by the words fearful, frightful and flirt. Daisy, in her way, is explaining to Winterbourne that her intentions are completely innocent and that she is living by the morals of American youth that is something normal for her. She is quite aware of what she is doing. She has the free will and she wanted to live now, for the moment.
Winterbourne realizes that Giovanelli and Daisy are in love and he expands and distorts their relation.
mentally that little American flirts were the queerest creatures in the world
By saying this he employs types. This saying categorizes Daisy again. The conflict expresses the understanding of the tension between old and new, conventionality and individuality, Europe and America, and appearance and reality in the novella. Henry James depict the generic “American girl” but there are evidences to think that Winterbourne is the pivotal character. By presenting Winterbourne's disapproval of Daisy's essentially innocent activities, James subtly admonishes the narrow attitudes adopted by many Americans abroad. There are debates about Daisy’s death if Daisy deserves her fate or Winterbourne causes her downfall.
Henry James uses the “American girl” in many of his works. Her extended depiction James refined in Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) . The work reminds me a lot of the conflict in Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin. In this work we examine the prevailing modes of conduct peculiar to a specific time and place that control the characters’ perceptions and behavior. The relationships between the two protagonists are almost the same. The man hides his affection with the girl and he considers her for a simple girl from the lower classes. The appropriate norms of the society and the prejudices are the obstacles in their path. Henry James admires Jane Austin. She is best represented in America by Edith Wharton in The Age of Innocence (1920).
Henry James is regarded as a subtle craftsman who skillfully reflected the late nineteenth-century concern with morality and social behavior. Daisy Miller's originality, stylistic distinction, and psychologically complex characters have proved his professionalism. His work is an evidence of his embarrassment over the lack of manners of many of his countrymen who toured Europe. James let Daisy dies rather than making her a heroine. This is an ambiguous ending which is James’ intent for writing the novella. Instead of being an illustration of the moral code of the middle and upper classes, Daisy Miller was meant to be a warning to American travelers of the period. . To this day the story continues to be widely anthologized and discussed for its complex and interesting characters and its examination of late nineteenth-century morality and manners.
Gretel Ehrlich
The Solace of Open Spaces
About Men
Gretel Ehrlich is a writer of essays, short stories and poems which are included in many anthologies including Best Essays of the Century, Best American Essays, Best Spiritual Writing, Best Travel Writing, and The Nature Reader. She is the author of The Solace of Open Spaces, Yellowstone, Drinking Dry Clouds, To Touch the Body and many others. The themes of her writings are United States or Americans, Gender roles, Nature, Women, Rodeos, Animals or Frontier or pioneer life. In The Solace of Open Spaces she challenges serious myths concerning gender and its relationship to the American West. The book consists of twelve essays which represent the West not as usually as a man’s world, but as a world of capable women who work along with the men. This is a book of essays which introduces her life experience and a sort of lessons to what it is like living in Wyoming. But most of all Gretel Ehrlich represents in this essay collection the healing power of nature on a place where you can “lose yourselves”.
I decided to comment on one of the twelve essays of The Solace of Open Spaces, called About Men which originally appeared in Time magazine. Ehrlich’s aim in the essay is to reconsider the basic stereotype about western man and “cowboys”. She tries to reveal their complex nature by giving examples, descriptions and details of their life. Along with the debunking of cowboys’ stereotype she impresses also the natural world that affects them.
The only place in the city where can be seen cowboys is on the Marlboro advertisements in the subway. Gretel Ehrlich introduces the hidden features of the character of the western man. For most of the people, especially in the big cities, there is a fixed stereotype about the cowboys. They are seen as “strong and silent”, but nobody can see that their silence is evoked by their loneliness, because there is no one to talk to in the wilderness. Everybody knows this romantic picture of a cowboy who “rides away into the sunset”, but nobody knows that he is riding the horse since early morning, working all day long and now sixteen hours later he is coming back home. Ehrlich debunks the stereotype of the “macho” giving several characteristics of the cowboy. She says that he is “convivial, quirky and softhearted”, which is deeply admired by her but nobody can see this. The cowboy is compared with “a pile of rocks”, possessing an instinct for survival. All this iconic myth about the cowboys is built on the American notion of heroism. But the heroism is not important here, it is all about “acting spontaneously” in the face of the danger. On this wild place there is no need to demonstrate any heroism. The westerner’s courage is “selfless” and it is a form of confession. They take care about their animals and it is not about being macho, but human, because the world they live in is dangerous and they need to be survivors and they never make a complaint. Debunking the stereotypes about the cowboys, Ehrlich encourages readers to consider how manliness is a quality which, for cowboys, also requires a balancing of more conventionally typical feminine qualities, such as caring and compassion. The cowboys, as Ehrlich writes, are "androgynous at the core."
The cowboy seems cold, but his emotion is hidden behind his rough behavior. Gretel Ehrlich proves this with a sentence of a westerner, talking about a little lamb- "Ain't this little rat good-lookin'?" He is using “rat” instead of “lamb”, because lamb is diminutive and for him it is probably unusual to say this word with his harsh speech. Inside the cowboys are tender, but they just cannot express themselves because of lack of vocabulary. Their behavior is the same with the women. They are evasive with them. They don’t know how to behave with them and how to express their tenderness. When they meet a woman they tip their hats and say “Howdy ma’am?” instead of shaking their hands.
The cause for the emotional devolution of the westerners is probably their social isolation and the geographical vastness. But there is a certain contradiction and if we have to escape from the logical thinking we can find an opposite statement. The cowboys are vulnerable and fragile. They live outside in landscapes within the beauty of nature, taking care about animals and calves die in their arms. This is enough to make somebody vulnerable and emotionally unprotected. The power of nature turns their trip to the mountain into a holy pilgrimage. So the wild nature that affects on them causes their emotional evolution, not devolution. Their social isolation is not a relevant reason to think that the western men are not fragile and it appears that their strength is also softness and their toughness is a “rare delicacy”.
About Men is an essay that leads the reader to the inner emotional world of the men from the West. It can be compared with Annie Proulx’s short story Brokeback Mountain which is adapted for the film of the same name with the help of the screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. The story is about two young cowboys who meet in Wyoming in 1963 and who forge a sudden emotional and sexual attachment. The similarity between the essay and this short story is the depiction of the inner world of the cowboys, which is different from the iconic myth of their stereotype. The young westerners in Brokeback Mountain are silent and cold-looking boys who meet in the Brokeback Mountain for a common work. Being alone in the nature they show their strong emotions and tenderness and fall in love with each other. In this story the author like Gretel Ehrlich shows how a cowboy can be softhearted and vulnerable, but only in the presence of nature. The mountain gives freedom to their emotions. The open spaces make the men forget the prejudices and throw away the mask which hides his passion and emotion. The anti-type of The Solace of Open Spaces is Pete Fromm’s Indian Creek Chronicles
The solitude of natural environments enables people to discover and explore their social and personal identities. In the dozen essays that constitute The Solace of Open Spaces, Ehrlich reflects on the toughness it takes to live in the harsh solitude. She finds the balance between the comfort and the emptiness of the open spaces. She debunks the stereotype about the westerners, showing their hidden, tender nature. Yet as the title of her book indicates, she found “solace” in the wind-swept landscape where Ehrlich balances her attention between this landscape and the people she meets in Wyoming.
McCullers, Carson
The Ballad of the Sad Café
Carson McCullers (full name Lula Carson Smith McCullers) is an American novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, and poet. McCullers published only eight books for her short life. Her best known novels are The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which she wrote at the age of twenty-two, and Reflections in a Golden Eye, set in a military base. Although McCullers's oeuvre is often described as "Southern Gothic," she produced her famous works after leaving the South. In her works she examines the psychology of lonely, isolated people. Her eccentric characters suffer from loneliness that is interpreted with deep empathy.
The Ballad of the Sad Café is one of McCullers's best works of fiction and her most successful exploration of her signature themes: loneliness and the effects of unrequited love. Briefly, the story of the novella tells of a strong woman, Miss Amelia Evans, who falls in love with a hunchback, Cousin Lymon. At the end he destroys Miss Amelia's cafe with his lover who is her former husband. According to McCullers, the basic condition of human existence is the loneliness and the isolation, which are very well embodied in the characters of her novella. Other themes of her work are the failure of communication, the gender roles, which are very important for the relations between the characters, the love and the marriage and the theme about the outcast. The Ballad of the Sad Café reflects McCullers's interest in freaks, social misfits, and grotesques and mainly the paradox of shared isolation.
Love can be considered to be the central theme of the novella as The Ballad of the Sad Café is an enigmatic story of love and loss. Regarding this theme I was impressed by the author’s definition of love. It strikes me because it sounds so simple but at the same time it depicts the complex nature of love. It is the only clear definition of love as in the novella it is hard for the reader to understand what kind of love is this of the characters and what are their feelings that lead them to such circumstances.
First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons -- but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries.
This is an excerpt from the author’s definition of love. The conception of these lines is based on the “circle” or the triangle of love in the novella. All of the characters have got the experience of being the lover and the beloved, but there is an impossibility of reciprocal love. The love of every character is frustrated and confused and this frustration gives them the knowledge that the isolation is a basic existence of the human. The tragedy of the story comes just from this fact that after all no one actually succeeds at loving or being loved in return. McCullers is trying to explain that the differences in feeling and thinking of everybody are the main obstacles for a reciprocal love. These two “different countries” may be also referred to the gender role in the novella, which stands in the way of their mutual affection. The gender roles of Amelia and Cousin Lymon are reversed as Amelia has more masculine traits and Cousin is more feminine. By means of this change of roles McCullers questions the masculinity and femininity that helps the reader to understand the theme of love whose deadly triangle is destined for doom.
The love of Amelia to Cousin Lymon is called “phenomenon”. What is a phenomenon? The definition of this word is a circumstance or fact that is perceptible by the senses, a significant occurrence and a marvel. The love is a circumstance for Amelia. It is something that does not happen every day. Here comes the theme of loneliness and isolation. Miss Amelia is a classic outcast and she is on the other site of society, so her meet with the love is rather unusual for her. The arrival of Cousin Lymon opens her heart, it is like a miracle for her, the “phenomenon” of her life. Breaking her heart and trashing her café with her ex-husband he pulls down her life. He also destroys her sociability whose symbol is the café, which is already trashed by him. From now on Amelia loses forever her connection with the people. The only positive thing in the story is the open ending which makes the reader think what happens.
A similar theme about strong women and isolation can be found in the works of Gretel Ehrlich. The depiction of masculinity traits in women is a common method of writing for both authors. They are writing about capable women who are working outside the home. Most women, including Ehrlich herself, work along with the men and pull their own weight, even in the midst of personal tragedy, by adopting typically masculine qualities. The place where they live plays a crucial role in human’s life setting the mood of the scenes. But the reader can also find a difference in presenting the loneliness and the isolation. McCullers presents the place of living negatively as a cause for human misfortune and loneliness. While about Gretel Ehrlich the emptiness of the place may be also comfort for the human spirit, which means that she is thinking more positively about the isolation of the man, finding peace in the loneliness. But as McCullers says they are from two “different countries”.
In The Ballad of the Sad Café Lula Carson Smith McCullers gives the reader a story of misfits doomed to loneliness caused by a failure of communication and unrequited love. The themes about the loneliness and the misfortune of love, embodied in the story are repercussion of McCullers own life. There are contradictions among the critics about the originality of her works, but for sure the “Ballad” is considered to be her most remarkable work.
SOURCES
Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse Five- book source (Chapter Two) (p.20,13) http://literature2.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/slaughterhouse-five.pdf
Kurt Vonnegut’s biography:
http://www.gradesaver.com/author/kurt-vonnegut/
Postmodern literature:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern_literature
Information about the book: teacher’s guide http://www.randomhouse.com/acmart/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385333849&view=printtg
Nancy Willard
“How to Stuff a Pepper” – poem
http://www.blogster.com/anacoana/how-to-stuff-a-pepper-by-nancy-willard
“Questions My Son Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Him”
From the Passages for Discussion and Textual Analysis
Nancy Willard’s biography
http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/nancy_willard/biography.
Henry James
Book source-Daisy Miller, Chapter 4
http://www2.newpaltz.edu/~hathawar/daisy2b.html
Information about the book
http://www.enotes.com/daisy-miller/social-concerns-themes
Gretel Ehrlich
Information about the author: http://www.enotes.com/solace-open-spaces-salem/solace-open-spaces
Quotations from the essay:
http://howlandpowpak.neomin.org/powpak/data/thomas.williams/articles/document_ar27.PDF
Carson McCullers
Quotations from the book: http://www.4shared.com/office/1GhEgfdi/carson-mccullers-the-ballad-of.html
Information about the author: http://kirjasto.sci.fi/carsonmc.htm
Slaughterhouse Five
Comments on Chapter Two
Kurt Vonnegut is one of the 20th century's great American pacifists. His work Slaughterhouse Five is the semi-autobiographical account of the fire bombing of Dresden, Germany by the British and American air forces in the February of 1945. It is the story of Billy Pilgrim, who has become "unstuck in time". His life is given to the reader out of order as he travels back and forth in time. He can see his birth and death and he can jump from one moment to another with no pattern to predict what will come next. The novel is an earnest anti-war novel. It isabout the war experiences of the main hero who are actually of the author itself, who appears in Chapter One and Chapter Ten, putting the frame of the novel. He himself has experienced these horrible events and exposes his trauma from the War through the life of Billy Pilgrim. The novel is known for its dark humor and use of science fiction which are typical for the other Vonnegut’s works. Slaughterhouse Five is highly moral story that derives from the effects of Dresden’s events that has marked Vonnegut’s life. It’s a novel about overwhelming this trauma from the war events, a novel about death and time.”So it goes.”
The section of the novel that I am going to comment on is Chapter Two and more precisely some passages from this section of the novel. After the appearance of Vonnegut in Chapter One, aiming to announce that he controls the hero of the story Chapter Two begins with the appearance of Billy and the well known sentence “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time”. Here the reader is introduced to the main character, Billy Pilgrim.We become witnesses to the first time when Billy gets unstuck in time. He wanders from moment to moment in his life, experiencing chronologically disparate events right after one another. There is plenty of analepses and prolepses that have a dramatic function in the story. Billy travels in time and some kind of complexity appears and confuses the reader.. The introduction “Listen” leads in the fiction within the fiction, which makes the work metafiction or so-called mise en abyme (a french literary term used to name metafiction). Billy is a chronotope, because of his symbolic journey to Tralfamadore.
There are many figures of speech in Chapter Two, like symbols and metaphors. Let’s take Billy's hometown Ilium, which is another name for the city of Troy, which is the doomed city under siege in the Iliad of Homer. Billy’s hometown is named after a city that was destroyed by war, a city that has lost the battle. Here we can see the contrast between the non-heroic Billy and a glorious war hero. His appearance on the battlefield is like a chaplain’s assistant. He is not ready for this war. He is weak and pathetic boy in the middle of the battleground. Even his name is a symbol of innocence. He is called “Billy” rather than “William” because he is more like a naïve traveler than a warrior. His last name of Pilgrim also has symbolic significance. Billy is on a journey to different periods of his own life. Vonnegut gives the reader exactly a non-heroic Billy because he doesn’t want to glorify the war. The moment with the pool in his childhood kept my attention. It is very symbolic flashback. It can be found reference to the War in the essence of this situation.
“It was like an execution. Billy was numb as his father carried him from the shower room to the pool. His eyes were closed. When he opened his eyes, he was on the bottom of the pool, and there was beautiful music everywhere. He lost consciousness, but the music went on. He dimly sensed that somebody was rescuing him. “
First the reader can reveal the symbolic use of the water. Water is often used in literature as origin of life. It is a symbol of the beginning, of birth. The reader can see the hidden parallel situation behind this one with the pool. Being thrown in the pool is equal to being thrown on the battlefield of the War. He had no choice to choose if he wants or not. The situation in the pool is compared to “an execution”. Here this could be considered as a hint for the reader to refer this happening to the War. Billy is a little boy who cannot swim it is the same when he is sent to take part in the War. He is unskilled and he is not able to discharge his duties as a soldier. On his first appearing on the battleground of the War he feels as numb as when his father throws him in the pool. We can also understand by his eyes which were closed that he was scared. The bottom of the pool refers to the battlefield-the worst place where anybody could be. His father tries to teach him how to swim by the sink-or-swim method. If he does not swim-he sinks, he will die. He has no choice. It is the same with the War. He cannot give up and if he dares to do –he will be killed, he will die. You have to fight for dear life. The “free will” does not exist.
Death is mentioned many times in Chapter Two. The narrator announces the death of Billy’s father two times. Another meet with the death is the mentioned dead of Billy’s wife and the dead body of the famous runner in the nursing home. Each of these deaths is mentioned without much tact. There is never any emotional response elaborated, though the people around him grieve. After each death he says the phrase “So it goes.” This is the Tralfamadorian response to death. Billy exposes their perception for death in his second letter.
'The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.'
Here is an explanation of the conception of death and time in which believe the Tralfamadorians and Billy. According to them all time happens simultaneously, so a man who dies is actually still alive, since all moments exist at all times. People only appear to die. But he is alive in the past. All moments of past present and future are always alive. So Billy doesn’t take death for a big deal. It is something normal and at that moment the person is only in a “bad shape”. On the background of all the crucial events connected with the War this conception for the death is quite positive. And if the reader really understands what is this idea for the unavoidable end of every human being it could influence his/her life very positively. At least this could make the reader think about dead not so dramatically and to expect it like a physical stage of the body separated from the soul. But actually Vonnegut’s conception and attitude toward death is very personal as he himself would attempt suicide by pills and alcohol after the death of his mother who committed suicide. The zoo on Tralfamadore where are held Billy and the famous actress Montana Wildhack can be read as a symbol of the worldview that helps Billy to assimilate his experience into his post-war life and his meets with death. This assimilation can be considered as an assimilation of the author himself caring the burden of the war trauma.
Even though Vonnegut put in the novel science fiction it reminds me a lot of the book of Ian McEwan, Atonement. Like in Slaughterhouse Five there is no chronology of the events. There are a lot of analepses and prolepses in the book, shifting back and forth so the reader cannot understand which of these moments are current. And just like Vonnegut who moves and controls his protagonist, at the end of the book appear the one who has controlled all the time the protagonists of the story. The movie Slaughterhouse Five begins in the same way like Atonement –with the typing of the type-writer. It put the fictional element within the novel which is fiction as a whole and predicts its power which will influence the heroes and the reader. There is War issue in Atonement too. And its moments in the novel are as powerfully and crucially described as in Slaughterhouse Five. In both novels the goal of this fictionally invented world, where everybody is happy is to deal with the trauma from the war, even though the past cannot be touched and changed. Concerning the skipping from one moment to another and the traveling in the future the novel and the movie Slaughterhouse Five is similar to Donnie Darko Book of Richard Kelly. The Donnie Darko like Billy is moving back and forth in his life. He knows the time of his death and what will happen to him. The protagonist Donnie Darko dies in his room hit by an engine of a crashed falling plane and he knows this before it happens. This strongly remind me of the scene with the plane in Slaughterhouse Five, when Billy says that they are going to die.
Published at the height of the Vietnam War in 1969, Slaughterhouse Five is considered by many critics to be Vonnegut’s greatest work. He combines science fiction, autobiography, historical fiction, and modern satire in the depiction of the life of his hero Billy Pilgrim, which are typical characteristics for postmodern literature. According to me the autobiographical participation makes the novel great and unique anti-war work, because Vonnegut exhibits his own life experience from the firebombing in “the land of Oz”. The novel is classic in any time, but its publication during the ongoing Vietnam War made it extremely successful.
Nancy Willard
Comments on “How to Stuff a Pepper”
And on “Questions My Son Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Him”
From her poetry collection “Carpenter of the Sun”
Nancy Willard is an American poet and short story writer. Nancy Willard was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She was educated at the University of Michigan and Stanford University. Willard is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Water Walker, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has also written two novels, and four books of stories and essays. In 1982, she received the Newbery Medal for A Visit to William Blake's Inn. Nancy Willard has an unerring ear for authentic speech, a sensitive, almost delicate feeling for tender childhood relationships, and real skill in shaping and bringing off a story. Her poems point to genuine talent. Her works are filled with wit, charm, elegance, and magic. Nancy Willard's best poems—and her best are as good as they come—illuminate local, humble subjects: flowers, moss, children, the patterns of domestic life. Nancy Willard is a teacher, a storyteller whose “ broken speech of wizards” appear as real magic in the recent trends in American Poetry.
One of the poems I choose to comment on is How to Stuff a Pepper. It is from her poetry collection Carpenter of the Sun, which includes some of her best poems from Masks for a Naked Poet. The collection is about flowers, vegetables, animals and her son. There are also some darker things, but there are not many of them. Her poems do not put the reader on a test, which is not wrong because for the reader it is her duty to suffer more so that she might entertain the reader with her sorrows.
Take your pepper green, and gently,
for peppers are shy. No matter which side
you approach, it's always the backside
In contrast to Adrienne Rich’s ideology, Nancy Willard reveals no overtly feminist positions in this poem. She speculates on the shyness of her green peeper. This part of the poem is filled with shy wonderment, with a tenderness toward Creation that is rare in contemporary poetry.
and enter a moon, spilled like a melon,
a fever of pearls,
a conversation of glaciers.
It is a temple built to the worship
of morning light
She represents the things of nature as marvelous and more marvelous are the things of man. She spiritualize the glaciers with their “conversation”. She uses similies comparing the moon to a melon. She sets down things in a proper order. The poem has diction of cookbook and at the same time of fairytale. Willard uses language of fancy and of directions.
You say I have not yet taught you
to stuff a pepper?
Cooking takes time.
Nancy Willard tells us not to be so hard on ourselves. Even thought the poem sounds poised and calm it is active and its stillness of rapt gets the attention of the reader. It is like an exquisite miniature, filled with luminosity. Her domestic is not merely cozy, and she's not merely domestic.
The other poem I choose from this compilation is Questions My Son Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Him. It is about her son and the difficulty of being poet and a mother at the same time.
2) Do butterflies make noise?
The wire in the butterfly’s tongue hums gold.
Some men hear butterflies even in winter.
The animals and the kids are typical for her poems. The artist is enthralled and trapped by superstitious and various magic like birthdays of gorillas, hearing of the butterflies in the winter, earlobes pierced by a tooth of steel. The kid is attracted to magic, the reader also becomes attracted to this magic of the creative artist.
God made the thread: O man, live forever!
The poem evokes the pathos in life. The child plays and amuses us while the truth of life comes from the adult people. This is ultimately incomprehensible world. There is no fatigue over the weirdness of absurdity of life. The poem is closer to blessing and benediction. The author speaks to the child in us, the student, the wonderer.
I find opposition to this poem in the work of my favorite poet Charles Bukowski “My Old Man”. In contrast to Willard’s poem which conveys affection between a parent and a child the poem of Bukowski conveys the damaged relation of a father and a son. Questions My Son Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Him exposes involvement and acceptance between a parent and a child, while the father in My Old Man does not accept his son. Willard’s poem expresses a deeper meaning of time through life.
Nancy Willard displays a lovely wit in her poems which is rare among poets these days. Through her magical poems she speaks to the child in us. She is also a convincing teacher and we wait impatiently for new lessons. There is abundance of good humor in her stories and there is no self-pity in them. In her poems life is sad, wonderful and magical. She produces sad songs in difference to the Spirit of the Age.
Henry James
Daisy Miller
Chapter Four
(comments on Daisy Miller’s ostracism)
Daisy Miller, is one of Henry James's most popular works. It first appeared in England in Cornhill Magazine in 1878. In it James presents an early version of his "international theme" by juxtaposing the manners and culture of American tourists in Europe with those of Americans who have lived abroad for a long time. It represents the behavior, customs and values typical of a particular social class in a given time and place. The novella contrasts the rigid social laws of Europe and the independent, unconventional spirit of this young American woman, Daisy Miller. Daisy Miller is is an examination of late nineteenth-century morality and manners.
The story begins with the meet of the young American expatriate Winterbourne and the attractive and naive American Daisy Miller in In Vevey, Switzerland. Winterbourne escorts her to the Castle of Chillon. Daisy appears dangerous to the established social code there. She runs her reputation by associating with the handsome Italian Giovanelli. After a harsh exchange of words with Winterbourne, Daisy pays a rash evening visit to the Colosseum. As a result, she falls ill with fever and dies a week later. After her death Winterbourne realizes his love for the dead American girl, his premature judgment of her, and his own blindness in the face of European convention.
After this Daisy was never at home, and Winterbourne ceased to meet her at the houses of their common acquaintances, because, as he perceived, these shrewd people had quite made up their minds that she was going too far. They ceased to invite her; and they intimated that they desired to express to observant Europeans the great truth that, though Miss Daisy Miller was a young American lady, her behavior was not representative--was regarded by her compatriots as abnormal. Winterbourne wondered how she felt about all the cold shoulders that were turned toward her, and sometimes it annoyed him to suspect that she did not feel at all. He said to himself that she was too light and childish, too uncultivated and unreasoning, too provincial, to have reflected upon her ostracism, or even to have perceived it. Then at other moments he believed that she carried about in her elegant and irresponsible little organism a defiant, passionate, perfectly observant consciousness of the impression she produced. He asked himself whether Daisy's defiance came from the consciousness of innocence, or from her being, essentially, a young person of the reckless class.
Daisy is the prototype of "the American girl" of the post Civil War period. She is oblivious to the social codes of the Old World. Daisy is direct, independent and somewhat presumptuous. For the “shrewd people” she was going too far. This shrewd people are the society that reject her and like this society Winterbourne harshly judges Daisy's alleged social transgressions.The unknown narrator only has access to the main character Winterbourne’s thoughts. The passage is framed around Daisy Miller and her “abnormal behavior” as a subject of Winterbourne’s study. Because of her “not representative” behavior many saw her as a shocking example of the type of American that was infiltrating upper-class society, both in the New World and the Old. Winterbourne’s wonder about how she feels show that he is concerned about her. In the passage there is a well made description of Daisy Miller but from Winterbourne perception. The phrase “he asked himself” means that he is doubting about what Daisy really is. But he is blinded by the society. So he cannot understand that she is only flirting and he offends her. Winterbourne is the pivotal character of the story. According to these critics, by presenting Winterbourne's disapproval of Daisy's essentially innocent activities, James subtly admonished the narrow attitudes adopted by many Americans abroad. So the impression appears to be very powerful argument for the attitude of the society.
I'm a fearful, frightful flirt! Did you ever hear of a nice girl that was not?
Firstly the attention of the reader is caught by the first sentence. There is an alliteration created by the words fearful, frightful and flirt. Daisy, in her way, is explaining to Winterbourne that her intentions are completely innocent and that she is living by the morals of American youth that is something normal for her. She is quite aware of what she is doing. She has the free will and she wanted to live now, for the moment.
Winterbourne realizes that Giovanelli and Daisy are in love and he expands and distorts their relation.
mentally that little American flirts were the queerest creatures in the world
By saying this he employs types. This saying categorizes Daisy again. The conflict expresses the understanding of the tension between old and new, conventionality and individuality, Europe and America, and appearance and reality in the novella. Henry James depict the generic “American girl” but there are evidences to think that Winterbourne is the pivotal character. By presenting Winterbourne's disapproval of Daisy's essentially innocent activities, James subtly admonishes the narrow attitudes adopted by many Americans abroad. There are debates about Daisy’s death if Daisy deserves her fate or Winterbourne causes her downfall.
Henry James uses the “American girl” in many of his works. Her extended depiction James refined in Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) . The work reminds me a lot of the conflict in Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin. In this work we examine the prevailing modes of conduct peculiar to a specific time and place that control the characters’ perceptions and behavior. The relationships between the two protagonists are almost the same. The man hides his affection with the girl and he considers her for a simple girl from the lower classes. The appropriate norms of the society and the prejudices are the obstacles in their path. Henry James admires Jane Austin. She is best represented in America by Edith Wharton in The Age of Innocence (1920).
Henry James is regarded as a subtle craftsman who skillfully reflected the late nineteenth-century concern with morality and social behavior. Daisy Miller's originality, stylistic distinction, and psychologically complex characters have proved his professionalism. His work is an evidence of his embarrassment over the lack of manners of many of his countrymen who toured Europe. James let Daisy dies rather than making her a heroine. This is an ambiguous ending which is James’ intent for writing the novella. Instead of being an illustration of the moral code of the middle and upper classes, Daisy Miller was meant to be a warning to American travelers of the period. . To this day the story continues to be widely anthologized and discussed for its complex and interesting characters and its examination of late nineteenth-century morality and manners.
Gretel Ehrlich
The Solace of Open Spaces
About Men
Gretel Ehrlich is a writer of essays, short stories and poems which are included in many anthologies including Best Essays of the Century, Best American Essays, Best Spiritual Writing, Best Travel Writing, and The Nature Reader. She is the author of The Solace of Open Spaces, Yellowstone, Drinking Dry Clouds, To Touch the Body and many others. The themes of her writings are United States or Americans, Gender roles, Nature, Women, Rodeos, Animals or Frontier or pioneer life. In The Solace of Open Spaces she challenges serious myths concerning gender and its relationship to the American West. The book consists of twelve essays which represent the West not as usually as a man’s world, but as a world of capable women who work along with the men. This is a book of essays which introduces her life experience and a sort of lessons to what it is like living in Wyoming. But most of all Gretel Ehrlich represents in this essay collection the healing power of nature on a place where you can “lose yourselves”.
I decided to comment on one of the twelve essays of The Solace of Open Spaces, called About Men which originally appeared in Time magazine. Ehrlich’s aim in the essay is to reconsider the basic stereotype about western man and “cowboys”. She tries to reveal their complex nature by giving examples, descriptions and details of their life. Along with the debunking of cowboys’ stereotype she impresses also the natural world that affects them.
The only place in the city where can be seen cowboys is on the Marlboro advertisements in the subway. Gretel Ehrlich introduces the hidden features of the character of the western man. For most of the people, especially in the big cities, there is a fixed stereotype about the cowboys. They are seen as “strong and silent”, but nobody can see that their silence is evoked by their loneliness, because there is no one to talk to in the wilderness. Everybody knows this romantic picture of a cowboy who “rides away into the sunset”, but nobody knows that he is riding the horse since early morning, working all day long and now sixteen hours later he is coming back home. Ehrlich debunks the stereotype of the “macho” giving several characteristics of the cowboy. She says that he is “convivial, quirky and softhearted”, which is deeply admired by her but nobody can see this. The cowboy is compared with “a pile of rocks”, possessing an instinct for survival. All this iconic myth about the cowboys is built on the American notion of heroism. But the heroism is not important here, it is all about “acting spontaneously” in the face of the danger. On this wild place there is no need to demonstrate any heroism. The westerner’s courage is “selfless” and it is a form of confession. They take care about their animals and it is not about being macho, but human, because the world they live in is dangerous and they need to be survivors and they never make a complaint. Debunking the stereotypes about the cowboys, Ehrlich encourages readers to consider how manliness is a quality which, for cowboys, also requires a balancing of more conventionally typical feminine qualities, such as caring and compassion. The cowboys, as Ehrlich writes, are "androgynous at the core."
The cowboy seems cold, but his emotion is hidden behind his rough behavior. Gretel Ehrlich proves this with a sentence of a westerner, talking about a little lamb- "Ain't this little rat good-lookin'?" He is using “rat” instead of “lamb”, because lamb is diminutive and for him it is probably unusual to say this word with his harsh speech. Inside the cowboys are tender, but they just cannot express themselves because of lack of vocabulary. Their behavior is the same with the women. They are evasive with them. They don’t know how to behave with them and how to express their tenderness. When they meet a woman they tip their hats and say “Howdy ma’am?” instead of shaking their hands.
The cause for the emotional devolution of the westerners is probably their social isolation and the geographical vastness. But there is a certain contradiction and if we have to escape from the logical thinking we can find an opposite statement. The cowboys are vulnerable and fragile. They live outside in landscapes within the beauty of nature, taking care about animals and calves die in their arms. This is enough to make somebody vulnerable and emotionally unprotected. The power of nature turns their trip to the mountain into a holy pilgrimage. So the wild nature that affects on them causes their emotional evolution, not devolution. Their social isolation is not a relevant reason to think that the western men are not fragile and it appears that their strength is also softness and their toughness is a “rare delicacy”.
About Men is an essay that leads the reader to the inner emotional world of the men from the West. It can be compared with Annie Proulx’s short story Brokeback Mountain which is adapted for the film of the same name with the help of the screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. The story is about two young cowboys who meet in Wyoming in 1963 and who forge a sudden emotional and sexual attachment. The similarity between the essay and this short story is the depiction of the inner world of the cowboys, which is different from the iconic myth of their stereotype. The young westerners in Brokeback Mountain are silent and cold-looking boys who meet in the Brokeback Mountain for a common work. Being alone in the nature they show their strong emotions and tenderness and fall in love with each other. In this story the author like Gretel Ehrlich shows how a cowboy can be softhearted and vulnerable, but only in the presence of nature. The mountain gives freedom to their emotions. The open spaces make the men forget the prejudices and throw away the mask which hides his passion and emotion. The anti-type of The Solace of Open Spaces is Pete Fromm’s Indian Creek Chronicles
The solitude of natural environments enables people to discover and explore their social and personal identities. In the dozen essays that constitute The Solace of Open Spaces, Ehrlich reflects on the toughness it takes to live in the harsh solitude. She finds the balance between the comfort and the emptiness of the open spaces. She debunks the stereotype about the westerners, showing their hidden, tender nature. Yet as the title of her book indicates, she found “solace” in the wind-swept landscape where Ehrlich balances her attention between this landscape and the people she meets in Wyoming.
McCullers, Carson
The Ballad of the Sad Café
Carson McCullers (full name Lula Carson Smith McCullers) is an American novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, and poet. McCullers published only eight books for her short life. Her best known novels are The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which she wrote at the age of twenty-two, and Reflections in a Golden Eye, set in a military base. Although McCullers's oeuvre is often described as "Southern Gothic," she produced her famous works after leaving the South. In her works she examines the psychology of lonely, isolated people. Her eccentric characters suffer from loneliness that is interpreted with deep empathy.
The Ballad of the Sad Café is one of McCullers's best works of fiction and her most successful exploration of her signature themes: loneliness and the effects of unrequited love. Briefly, the story of the novella tells of a strong woman, Miss Amelia Evans, who falls in love with a hunchback, Cousin Lymon. At the end he destroys Miss Amelia's cafe with his lover who is her former husband. According to McCullers, the basic condition of human existence is the loneliness and the isolation, which are very well embodied in the characters of her novella. Other themes of her work are the failure of communication, the gender roles, which are very important for the relations between the characters, the love and the marriage and the theme about the outcast. The Ballad of the Sad Café reflects McCullers's interest in freaks, social misfits, and grotesques and mainly the paradox of shared isolation.
Love can be considered to be the central theme of the novella as The Ballad of the Sad Café is an enigmatic story of love and loss. Regarding this theme I was impressed by the author’s definition of love. It strikes me because it sounds so simple but at the same time it depicts the complex nature of love. It is the only clear definition of love as in the novella it is hard for the reader to understand what kind of love is this of the characters and what are their feelings that lead them to such circumstances.
First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons -- but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries.
This is an excerpt from the author’s definition of love. The conception of these lines is based on the “circle” or the triangle of love in the novella. All of the characters have got the experience of being the lover and the beloved, but there is an impossibility of reciprocal love. The love of every character is frustrated and confused and this frustration gives them the knowledge that the isolation is a basic existence of the human. The tragedy of the story comes just from this fact that after all no one actually succeeds at loving or being loved in return. McCullers is trying to explain that the differences in feeling and thinking of everybody are the main obstacles for a reciprocal love. These two “different countries” may be also referred to the gender role in the novella, which stands in the way of their mutual affection. The gender roles of Amelia and Cousin Lymon are reversed as Amelia has more masculine traits and Cousin is more feminine. By means of this change of roles McCullers questions the masculinity and femininity that helps the reader to understand the theme of love whose deadly triangle is destined for doom.
The love of Amelia to Cousin Lymon is called “phenomenon”. What is a phenomenon? The definition of this word is a circumstance or fact that is perceptible by the senses, a significant occurrence and a marvel. The love is a circumstance for Amelia. It is something that does not happen every day. Here comes the theme of loneliness and isolation. Miss Amelia is a classic outcast and she is on the other site of society, so her meet with the love is rather unusual for her. The arrival of Cousin Lymon opens her heart, it is like a miracle for her, the “phenomenon” of her life. Breaking her heart and trashing her café with her ex-husband he pulls down her life. He also destroys her sociability whose symbol is the café, which is already trashed by him. From now on Amelia loses forever her connection with the people. The only positive thing in the story is the open ending which makes the reader think what happens.
A similar theme about strong women and isolation can be found in the works of Gretel Ehrlich. The depiction of masculinity traits in women is a common method of writing for both authors. They are writing about capable women who are working outside the home. Most women, including Ehrlich herself, work along with the men and pull their own weight, even in the midst of personal tragedy, by adopting typically masculine qualities. The place where they live plays a crucial role in human’s life setting the mood of the scenes. But the reader can also find a difference in presenting the loneliness and the isolation. McCullers presents the place of living negatively as a cause for human misfortune and loneliness. While about Gretel Ehrlich the emptiness of the place may be also comfort for the human spirit, which means that she is thinking more positively about the isolation of the man, finding peace in the loneliness. But as McCullers says they are from two “different countries”.
In The Ballad of the Sad Café Lula Carson Smith McCullers gives the reader a story of misfits doomed to loneliness caused by a failure of communication and unrequited love. The themes about the loneliness and the misfortune of love, embodied in the story are repercussion of McCullers own life. There are contradictions among the critics about the originality of her works, but for sure the “Ballad” is considered to be her most remarkable work.
SOURCES
Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse Five- book source (Chapter Two) (p.20,13) http://literature2.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/slaughterhouse-five.pdf
Kurt Vonnegut’s biography:
http://www.gradesaver.com/author/kurt-vonnegut/
Postmodern literature:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern_literature
Information about the book: teacher’s guide http://www.randomhouse.com/acmart/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385333849&view=printtg
Nancy Willard
“How to Stuff a Pepper” – poem
http://www.blogster.com/anacoana/how-to-stuff-a-pepper-by-nancy-willard
“Questions My Son Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Him”
From the Passages for Discussion and Textual Analysis
Nancy Willard’s biography
http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/nancy_willard/biography.
Henry James
Book source-Daisy Miller, Chapter 4
http://www2.newpaltz.edu/~hathawar/daisy2b.html
Information about the book
http://www.enotes.com/daisy-miller/social-concerns-themes
Gretel Ehrlich
Information about the author: http://www.enotes.com/solace-open-spaces-salem/solace-open-spaces
Quotations from the essay:
http://howlandpowpak.neomin.org/powpak/data/thomas.williams/articles/document_ar27.PDF
Carson McCullers
Quotations from the book: http://www.4shared.com/office/1GhEgfdi/carson-mccullers-the-ballad-of.html
Information about the author: http://kirjasto.sci.fi/carsonmc.htm
The function of intertextuality in D.M Thomas' novel The White Hotel
D. M. Thomas’s novel The White Hotel is one of the most controversial intellectual projects of the post- WWII period. It contains the distinctive traits of a postmodern work. The White Hotel is remarkable for its blend of history, fantasy, poetry, clairvoyancy and psychoanalysis. But what makes the text unique, is the multiple intertextuality. D. M. Thomas uses other authors’ works in his novel which can be considered as plagiarism but this fact manages to hide the border between history and fiction and portrays the violence of this era.
The text offers the reader borrowings from the libretto of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, Pushkin’s poem Eugene Onegin, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard, Anatoli Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar and D. M. Thomas’s poems, and excerpts from Freudian letters and books.” This “sharing” illustrates the intertextual condition of all literary texts and, indeed, of the entire cultural domain. “ ( Kostova, L. ) . The role of the letters is very important because they introduce the constant merging of historical and fictional text. D. M. Thomas includes in his work a letter of Ferenczi in the prologue because he is convinces that he ought to commence the way back first of all and not with Freud or even with Jung, but with Ferenczi on the journey of the analysts to America. Regarding Babi Yar, D. M. Thomas bought Kuznetsov’s historical-documentary novel only because it was a fat book and he was going on a journey but later he finds a metaphorical connection between Babi Yar and the poem that opens The White Hotel. In the novel can be also found intertextuality with Dora’s case, through which Freud imposes his general theories on individual subjects regardless of their particular histories and symptoms. Using the Freudian texts D. M. Thomas acquires a Freudian style of writing. It can be observed even in the way that he brings in cultural allusions, quotations from poetry, which is very Freudian and which according to D. M. Thomas is a sign of humanism of this analyst, which is admired deeply by D. M. Thomas.
The aim of the letter of Ferenczi in the prologue is to reveal the relationship between Freud and Jung. Ferenczi writes to Gisela that “there has been a little tension between Jung and Freud....” (Freud and “The white Hotel”, 1959) This discloses the contradictions between the two psychoanalysts. The talking of Jung about the "peat bog corpses" that have been found in northern Germany can be considered as extraordinary coincidence when one thought of the other kind of peat bog corpses which later in the century the Germans were desperately trying to dig up to try and cover their traces of Babi Yar.
The other letters in the epistolary prologue discuss a specific case and its patient’s writings which describe actual historical characters and circumstances. This intertextuality set the stage not only for the central role of psychoanalysis and its emphasis of eros and thanatos, but it also introduce the constant line between historical and fictional text. There are themes that come out later in The White Hotel from D. M. Thomas’s poem Viennia, Ziirich, Constance. One of the themes is this of the paranormal knife blade snapping or the knife which snaps in Emma Jung's kitchen drawer. “In Emma's kitchen-drawer a knife blade quietly snapped.” ( Freud and “The white Hotel”, 1957). This is not directly inserted in The White Hotel but it is implied in the section where Freud and Jung are arguing for the paranormal and the telepathy and they hear this bang in the cabinet. This scene is another proof of their contradictory relations because Freud claims that there will be another bang, they hear the bang again and the reader is told that Freud did not quite trust Jung after that.
Concerning the intertextuality with Dora’s case, Freud’s diagnosis and the corrective footnotes suggest that Lisa’s case must be read as a commentary on Dora’s case. Dora was never permitted to speak, but D. M. Thomas allows Lisa to speak on her own behalf. This intertextuality and the approach of the author question Freud’s abilities and become a symbol of psychoanalysis’ limitation. This freedom of Lisa to speak undermines psychoanalysis’ authority, supported by the quote of Heraclid that the soul of man is a far country, which cannot be approached or explored.With the repetition of the quote D. M. Thomas emphasize on the connection with the massacre at Babi Yar.
The texts that D. M. Thomas introduces in The White Hotel are intermixed with his own discourse, so he should not be considered to be a plagiarist. The texts taken from the Freudian letters and books aim to make the reader acquainted with the subject of the psychoanalysis. On the other hand the fictional extension of this subject aims to challenge the psychoanalysts and to display the limitation of their abilities. The strong influence of The White Hotel upon the novel of John Kerr A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein cannot be missed. The book obtains most of its themes from D. M. Thomas’s novel and its poems. This is another proof that The White Hotel is one of the most remarkable novels of the British literature and an inspiration for contemporary directors and writers.
Work Cited:
Type of Entry In-Text Citation Form Works Cited Form
Electronic source:
Article form a Journal (Freud and “The
white Hotel”, 1959)
(Freud and “The
white Hotel”, 1957) BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL VOLUME 287 24-31 DECEMBER 1983
Medicine and Books
Freud and the "White Hotel"
D M THOMAS
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
pmc/articles/PMC1550192/
pdf/bmjcred00586-0057.pdf
Article (Kostova, L.) SOME THOUGHTS ON THE WHITE HOTEL
Ludmilla Kostova,
University of Veliko
Turnovo,Bulgaria
The text offers the reader borrowings from the libretto of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, Pushkin’s poem Eugene Onegin, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard, Anatoli Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar and D. M. Thomas’s poems, and excerpts from Freudian letters and books.” This “sharing” illustrates the intertextual condition of all literary texts and, indeed, of the entire cultural domain. “ ( Kostova, L. ) . The role of the letters is very important because they introduce the constant merging of historical and fictional text. D. M. Thomas includes in his work a letter of Ferenczi in the prologue because he is convinces that he ought to commence the way back first of all and not with Freud or even with Jung, but with Ferenczi on the journey of the analysts to America. Regarding Babi Yar, D. M. Thomas bought Kuznetsov’s historical-documentary novel only because it was a fat book and he was going on a journey but later he finds a metaphorical connection between Babi Yar and the poem that opens The White Hotel. In the novel can be also found intertextuality with Dora’s case, through which Freud imposes his general theories on individual subjects regardless of their particular histories and symptoms. Using the Freudian texts D. M. Thomas acquires a Freudian style of writing. It can be observed even in the way that he brings in cultural allusions, quotations from poetry, which is very Freudian and which according to D. M. Thomas is a sign of humanism of this analyst, which is admired deeply by D. M. Thomas.
The aim of the letter of Ferenczi in the prologue is to reveal the relationship between Freud and Jung. Ferenczi writes to Gisela that “there has been a little tension between Jung and Freud....” (Freud and “The white Hotel”, 1959) This discloses the contradictions between the two psychoanalysts. The talking of Jung about the "peat bog corpses" that have been found in northern Germany can be considered as extraordinary coincidence when one thought of the other kind of peat bog corpses which later in the century the Germans were desperately trying to dig up to try and cover their traces of Babi Yar.
The other letters in the epistolary prologue discuss a specific case and its patient’s writings which describe actual historical characters and circumstances. This intertextuality set the stage not only for the central role of psychoanalysis and its emphasis of eros and thanatos, but it also introduce the constant line between historical and fictional text. There are themes that come out later in The White Hotel from D. M. Thomas’s poem Viennia, Ziirich, Constance. One of the themes is this of the paranormal knife blade snapping or the knife which snaps in Emma Jung's kitchen drawer. “In Emma's kitchen-drawer a knife blade quietly snapped.” ( Freud and “The white Hotel”, 1957). This is not directly inserted in The White Hotel but it is implied in the section where Freud and Jung are arguing for the paranormal and the telepathy and they hear this bang in the cabinet. This scene is another proof of their contradictory relations because Freud claims that there will be another bang, they hear the bang again and the reader is told that Freud did not quite trust Jung after that.
Concerning the intertextuality with Dora’s case, Freud’s diagnosis and the corrective footnotes suggest that Lisa’s case must be read as a commentary on Dora’s case. Dora was never permitted to speak, but D. M. Thomas allows Lisa to speak on her own behalf. This intertextuality and the approach of the author question Freud’s abilities and become a symbol of psychoanalysis’ limitation. This freedom of Lisa to speak undermines psychoanalysis’ authority, supported by the quote of Heraclid that the soul of man is a far country, which cannot be approached or explored.With the repetition of the quote D. M. Thomas emphasize on the connection with the massacre at Babi Yar.
The texts that D. M. Thomas introduces in The White Hotel are intermixed with his own discourse, so he should not be considered to be a plagiarist. The texts taken from the Freudian letters and books aim to make the reader acquainted with the subject of the psychoanalysis. On the other hand the fictional extension of this subject aims to challenge the psychoanalysts and to display the limitation of their abilities. The strong influence of The White Hotel upon the novel of John Kerr A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein cannot be missed. The book obtains most of its themes from D. M. Thomas’s novel and its poems. This is another proof that The White Hotel is one of the most remarkable novels of the British literature and an inspiration for contemporary directors and writers.
Work Cited:
Type of Entry In-Text Citation Form Works Cited Form
Electronic source:
Article form a Journal (Freud and “The
white Hotel”, 1959)
(Freud and “The
white Hotel”, 1957) BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL VOLUME 287 24-31 DECEMBER 1983
Medicine and Books
Freud and the "White Hotel"
D M THOMAS
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
pmc/articles/PMC1550192/
pdf/bmjcred00586-0057.pdf
Article (Kostova, L.) SOME THOUGHTS ON THE WHITE HOTEL
Ludmilla Kostova,
University of Veliko
Turnovo,Bulgaria
Comment on the character of Sarah Woodruff in The French Lieutenant’s Woman.To what extent is she a victim of circumstances?
The nineteenth century John Fowles’ romantic novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman successfully reproduces the typical Victorian woman and society, skillfully illustrated in situations and dialogues. The novel is stereotyped in Victorian fashion - romance, misunderstanding, intrigue forbidden love, betrayal, carnal desire and a classic "triangle" between two women attracted to the same man. It is touched with typical twentieth-century irony. The characters in the story can be seen as typical Victorians in their attitudes and behaviour, but not the main protagonist Sarah Woodruff. She is known by her un Victorian directness and ability to see through people. And these are some of the differences that turn her into a victim of the prejudices of the Victorian society.
Sarah Woodruff is the protagonist of the novel, called "the French Lieutenant's Woman" or "Tragedy" or the "French lieutenant's whore" because it is believed that she had an affair with a shipwrecked French sailor. She is a figure of intrigue due to rumors that circulate around her. Sarah is portrayed as a mysterious and ambiguous character throughout the novel. Her affair with this French sailor changes her into an outcast dismissed by the society. She is the tragedy and the trouble in the novel. Her strong sexuality turns her into a rival among the women. She falls a pray to to the notions of gender in upper middle-class Victorian society. But her mysterious personality gives rise to a lot of questions like: Is she a sly, manipulative character, is she a product of the French Lieutenant's lust or is she really a victim and if yes, to what extent?
The mysterious or evil woman character of Sarah often and commonly found in a Victorian novel, makes the reader suspect that some assumptions about Sarah’s nature and motives might be false, like the story about the French Lieutenant which turns out to be a lie, passively perpetuated by Sarah. There is always a sense that she is not saying everything and that she might be deceiving the reader about her true nature,which makes her an unreliable narrator. The reader learns of her history and character only through what she says with a face she lets the world see, but later we find that much of what people believe about her is untrue. Only Charles’ understanding and misunderstanding of Sarah forms the readers’ perceptions of her. She is also independent and is willing to lie to preserve her position. So it is difficult for the reader to create her entire image, because it can be seen only through the subjective perspective of the other characters and mainly of this of Charles.The protagonist of a story is the main character who traditionally undergoes some sort of change. Often the one who dares to change the principles and the habits of a society is being dismissed by this society. Here in the novel, the outcast is Sarah, who is rejected by Victorian society. This is the thing from which Charles is attracted the most. And this attraction for Sarah stems mainly from the aura of strangeness that the local rumors have built around her, and this stands as a symbol of the forbidden through which she presents a picture of dark intrigue and mystery. Sarah’s “strangeness” makes her different from her Victorian counterparts in dress, behavior and attitude.
Sarah is established from the beginning as the “poor Tragedy”. She is a certainty of the innocence of her identity of her being unfairly outcast. Tragedy has been linked to the novel as a literary genre being used to train moral nature by sympathy with noble characters. According to Zuzana Vránová in her essay :“this arousal of sympathy does not limit itself to influencing the readers only, but functions within the story as well – Sarah is seen as a person to pity and help.” (Vránová Z.) The appearance of Sarah is provided with a well modeled face, dark eyes that “could not conceal an intelligence, an independence of spirit”, strong eyebrows and a wide mouth, indicating “suppressed sensuality”, tanned complexion and hair with red tints. These tints add Sarah a sort of divine, saint odor, because n medieval paintings, hair of Virgin Mary and the robes of Angels were depicted red. Concerning her sexuality it is the biggest weapon given to her which she does not only use in an unconscious way. That’s why she is considered exceptional in the opposite direction as in the Victorian period the situation was quite different. The Lieutenant’s Woman is described as a definitive study of the sexual repression of the Victorian age. The characters react as they do largely because of the sexual mores of the time through which the reader can see the embodied sexual and sensual elements in the story.
The ambiguity of Sarah’s character is well portrayed throughout the story, but he reader can assume that she is merely a victim to the notions of gender in upper middle-class Victorian society. The different perceptions through which her character is seen question the reader if he/she should pity her or despise her and is she a victim as the others are victims. Fowles quotes in the beginning of Chapter 2 E. Royston Pike Pike’s “Human Documents of the Victorian Golden Age” which comments on the population of women being higher than that of men. The idea that is implied in these statistics is that the role of Victorian women is that of a wife and mother, but not all women can fulfill their role as wives and mothers, because there are more women than men. So the quote becomes ironic in the context of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Sarah is free of the conventional role society attempts to impose on her and because of this last reputation she is in disgrace with the Victorian-era town.
The thematic of The French Lieutenant’s Woman concerns range from the relationship between life and art and the artist and his creation to the isolation that results from an individual struggling for selfhood. The novel contains 20th century sensibilities and perspectives, despite it is firmly set in the mid-Victorian period, when the poor, innocent and harshly treated woman Sarah Woodruff is spurned by those who are better off socially, if not morally. The novel examines the link between the Victorian society and an outcast, a victim of the epoch, because of its difference. In the process of this examination John Fowles reveal the romantic part of being an exile.
Sarah Woodruff is the protagonist of the novel, called "the French Lieutenant's Woman" or "Tragedy" or the "French lieutenant's whore" because it is believed that she had an affair with a shipwrecked French sailor. She is a figure of intrigue due to rumors that circulate around her. Sarah is portrayed as a mysterious and ambiguous character throughout the novel. Her affair with this French sailor changes her into an outcast dismissed by the society. She is the tragedy and the trouble in the novel. Her strong sexuality turns her into a rival among the women. She falls a pray to to the notions of gender in upper middle-class Victorian society. But her mysterious personality gives rise to a lot of questions like: Is she a sly, manipulative character, is she a product of the French Lieutenant's lust or is she really a victim and if yes, to what extent?
The mysterious or evil woman character of Sarah often and commonly found in a Victorian novel, makes the reader suspect that some assumptions about Sarah’s nature and motives might be false, like the story about the French Lieutenant which turns out to be a lie, passively perpetuated by Sarah. There is always a sense that she is not saying everything and that she might be deceiving the reader about her true nature,which makes her an unreliable narrator. The reader learns of her history and character only through what she says with a face she lets the world see, but later we find that much of what people believe about her is untrue. Only Charles’ understanding and misunderstanding of Sarah forms the readers’ perceptions of her. She is also independent and is willing to lie to preserve her position. So it is difficult for the reader to create her entire image, because it can be seen only through the subjective perspective of the other characters and mainly of this of Charles.The protagonist of a story is the main character who traditionally undergoes some sort of change. Often the one who dares to change the principles and the habits of a society is being dismissed by this society. Here in the novel, the outcast is Sarah, who is rejected by Victorian society. This is the thing from which Charles is attracted the most. And this attraction for Sarah stems mainly from the aura of strangeness that the local rumors have built around her, and this stands as a symbol of the forbidden through which she presents a picture of dark intrigue and mystery. Sarah’s “strangeness” makes her different from her Victorian counterparts in dress, behavior and attitude.
Sarah is established from the beginning as the “poor Tragedy”. She is a certainty of the innocence of her identity of her being unfairly outcast. Tragedy has been linked to the novel as a literary genre being used to train moral nature by sympathy with noble characters. According to Zuzana Vránová in her essay :“this arousal of sympathy does not limit itself to influencing the readers only, but functions within the story as well – Sarah is seen as a person to pity and help.” (Vránová Z.) The appearance of Sarah is provided with a well modeled face, dark eyes that “could not conceal an intelligence, an independence of spirit”, strong eyebrows and a wide mouth, indicating “suppressed sensuality”, tanned complexion and hair with red tints. These tints add Sarah a sort of divine, saint odor, because n medieval paintings, hair of Virgin Mary and the robes of Angels were depicted red. Concerning her sexuality it is the biggest weapon given to her which she does not only use in an unconscious way. That’s why she is considered exceptional in the opposite direction as in the Victorian period the situation was quite different. The Lieutenant’s Woman is described as a definitive study of the sexual repression of the Victorian age. The characters react as they do largely because of the sexual mores of the time through which the reader can see the embodied sexual and sensual elements in the story.
The ambiguity of Sarah’s character is well portrayed throughout the story, but he reader can assume that she is merely a victim to the notions of gender in upper middle-class Victorian society. The different perceptions through which her character is seen question the reader if he/she should pity her or despise her and is she a victim as the others are victims. Fowles quotes in the beginning of Chapter 2 E. Royston Pike Pike’s “Human Documents of the Victorian Golden Age” which comments on the population of women being higher than that of men. The idea that is implied in these statistics is that the role of Victorian women is that of a wife and mother, but not all women can fulfill their role as wives and mothers, because there are more women than men. So the quote becomes ironic in the context of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Sarah is free of the conventional role society attempts to impose on her and because of this last reputation she is in disgrace with the Victorian-era town.
The thematic of The French Lieutenant’s Woman concerns range from the relationship between life and art and the artist and his creation to the isolation that results from an individual struggling for selfhood. The novel contains 20th century sensibilities and perspectives, despite it is firmly set in the mid-Victorian period, when the poor, innocent and harshly treated woman Sarah Woodruff is spurned by those who are better off socially, if not morally. The novel examines the link between the Victorian society and an outcast, a victim of the epoch, because of its difference. In the process of this examination John Fowles reveal the romantic part of being an exile.
Critical analysis of Henry Fielding’s novel Joseph Andrews. Fielding’s Preface to the book. How does he define his own text in it? What is the main target of his social criticism?
Henry Fielding is one of the fathers of the modernist movement. His novel Joseph Andrews embodies in realistic prose a panoramic survey of the contemporary society. It owes much of its humour, digression and lower-class characters to the genre of writing known as picaresque. His famous work advocates an easygoing Protestantism in which charitable works are the signs of goodness and sociability, where providence is the reliable guardian of the virtuous. Joseph Andrews is an astounding representation of the 18th century English social life and manners which gives utterance to Fielding's comic moral vision throughout this period. It is rich in philosophical digressions, classical erudition and social purpose. The social life portrayed by Fielding is scrutinized in every facets of this society in which the writer studies different characters which enables him to explore all the unpleasant aspects of life of his time. These characters are depicted in the novel as human beings camouflaged in various shades of vanity, hypocrisy and narcissism, which are some of the main targets of Fielding’s social criticism.
Despite Fielding’s undoubtedly comic outlook, his comic writing in the Preface has a serious point. The target of his criticism expressed by irony is not the classical principle itself but the modern works that fail to live up to that principle. Fielding rejects burlesque and caricature, inspiring laughter with humor used as a vehicle of moral commentary. He confines himself strictly to Nature. He is performing a corrective function for the moral of the age, exposing the true Ridiculous that takes part in everyday life. In his work he criticizes the amoral side of this period. According to Tanvir Shameem, “Fielding’s exploration begins with his survey on the nature and temperament of women of his time.” In his essay “Joseph Andrews as a Social Satire” (Shameem,T.) he considers that “women of all classes were snobbish and amorous to some extent.”; Shameem suggests that “the sensuality of women is reflected at its best through the representatives like Lady Booby, Mrs. Slipslop and Betty. Lady Booby feels greatly attracted by Joseph’s manliness and personality and seeks in vain to evoke his sexual response to gratify her sensual appetite. Mrs. Slipslop also follows her mistress’ path and tries to win Joseph as a lover. Even Betty, the sympathetic maid also falls in love with Joseph and seeks in vain to have sexual gratification from him. All these amorous intentions show a fair picture of the amoral side of the 18th century society.”
The promise of happy outcome, the careful definition of terms and most of all the existence of the Preface indicate the extent to which Fielding is in control of his novel. The reader becomes a witness of characters who have a life of their own, but it is the essence of humanity, distilled through Fielding’s own vision. It is presented to us through the lines: “I describe not men, but manners, not an individual, but species” (Book III, Chapter1). This is one of the ways he defines his own text. There are vices for which he apologizes in the Preface, but they are more than balanced by the character of Adams and by the fact that they are “accidental consequences of some human frailty or foible.” Apart from the central moral preoccupations that can be argued, there is a good deal of incidental social satire throughout the novel. One of the targets of his satire is the ridiculous, but in particular Fielding offers a number of ironic insights into two worlds that he knew well: the law courts and the playhouses. These criticized worlds strike in some parts of the novel modern readers as a grotesque piece of satiric exaggeration, accurately indicate the savagery of English law, regarding the theft or damage of property, in the period. David Nokes writes in his “Joseph Andrews Critical Studies Notes” (Nokes,D.) that “in the novel Fielding has great fun ridiculing legalistic jargon and casuistry but often the pattern of argument and debate suggests the adversarial structure of legal proceedings.” Nokes considers that “in all these ways the atmosphere of the law court permeates the book, and enforces a permanent sense of judgement and arbitrament.” According to him “usually the terms of that judgement are concerned with the balance, or conflict, between social and moral values, as the reader is required to contrast the standards of the world with the ideals of Christianity. But if the reader is the jury in this court, Fielding’s irony insures that he is well vetted, and retains full control of both the evidence and the sentence. However, if Fielding’s novel is partly a court of justice, it is also in part a theatre. Theatrical similes abound. In order to impress upon the reader the sudden pallor in Lady Booby’s face at Joseph’s mention of his virtue, Fielding offers this analogy:
You have seen the faces, in the eighteen-penny gallery, when the trap-door, to soft or no music, Mr. Bridgewater, Mr. William Mills, or some other of ghostly appearance, hath ascended with a face all pale with powder, and a shirt all bloody with ribbons.“ (Book I, Chapter8)
Fielding’s definition of good nature is exhibited by some of his characters, like Parson Adams. He preaches against the vanity and pretension of his own age. The distinguished Teaching Professor of English, at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Homer Goldberg writes in one of his essays that “Fielding goes on to characterize his society as:
a vast masquerade, where the greatest part appear
disguised under false visions and habits; a very few
only showing their own faces, who become, by so doing
the astonishment and ridicule of all the rest”
("On the..." 322).
According to Stephen Conway in his essay “Narrative and Narrator: An analysis of Joseph Andrews” (Conway, S.) “with good nature comes a responsibility to humankind.” He considers that “with this in mind Fielding believed there was hope that the ills of society, including the hypocrisy, the affectation, the corruption and the vanity of his own age, could be overcome and perhaps his writing was his contribution to this ongoing struggle.”
Many critics recently explored Fielding's complex value system, like Martin Price who suggests that Fielding's low characters contribute to his definition of virtue. Another critic Martin Battestin makes a study of the character of Sophia Western, using her as an example of Fielding's nuanced moral code. In brief, Fielding’s satire in Joseph Andrews refers to not only particular individuals but also to an entire 18the century English community. The novel is infused with compassion, comedy, and a heightened sense of realism, which together turn into a vivid manifestation of the cankers of the society.
Despite Fielding’s undoubtedly comic outlook, his comic writing in the Preface has a serious point. The target of his criticism expressed by irony is not the classical principle itself but the modern works that fail to live up to that principle. Fielding rejects burlesque and caricature, inspiring laughter with humor used as a vehicle of moral commentary. He confines himself strictly to Nature. He is performing a corrective function for the moral of the age, exposing the true Ridiculous that takes part in everyday life. In his work he criticizes the amoral side of this period. According to Tanvir Shameem, “Fielding’s exploration begins with his survey on the nature and temperament of women of his time.” In his essay “Joseph Andrews as a Social Satire” (Shameem,T.) he considers that “women of all classes were snobbish and amorous to some extent.”; Shameem suggests that “the sensuality of women is reflected at its best through the representatives like Lady Booby, Mrs. Slipslop and Betty. Lady Booby feels greatly attracted by Joseph’s manliness and personality and seeks in vain to evoke his sexual response to gratify her sensual appetite. Mrs. Slipslop also follows her mistress’ path and tries to win Joseph as a lover. Even Betty, the sympathetic maid also falls in love with Joseph and seeks in vain to have sexual gratification from him. All these amorous intentions show a fair picture of the amoral side of the 18th century society.”
The promise of happy outcome, the careful definition of terms and most of all the existence of the Preface indicate the extent to which Fielding is in control of his novel. The reader becomes a witness of characters who have a life of their own, but it is the essence of humanity, distilled through Fielding’s own vision. It is presented to us through the lines: “I describe not men, but manners, not an individual, but species” (Book III, Chapter1). This is one of the ways he defines his own text. There are vices for which he apologizes in the Preface, but they are more than balanced by the character of Adams and by the fact that they are “accidental consequences of some human frailty or foible.” Apart from the central moral preoccupations that can be argued, there is a good deal of incidental social satire throughout the novel. One of the targets of his satire is the ridiculous, but in particular Fielding offers a number of ironic insights into two worlds that he knew well: the law courts and the playhouses. These criticized worlds strike in some parts of the novel modern readers as a grotesque piece of satiric exaggeration, accurately indicate the savagery of English law, regarding the theft or damage of property, in the period. David Nokes writes in his “Joseph Andrews Critical Studies Notes” (Nokes,D.) that “in the novel Fielding has great fun ridiculing legalistic jargon and casuistry but often the pattern of argument and debate suggests the adversarial structure of legal proceedings.” Nokes considers that “in all these ways the atmosphere of the law court permeates the book, and enforces a permanent sense of judgement and arbitrament.” According to him “usually the terms of that judgement are concerned with the balance, or conflict, between social and moral values, as the reader is required to contrast the standards of the world with the ideals of Christianity. But if the reader is the jury in this court, Fielding’s irony insures that he is well vetted, and retains full control of both the evidence and the sentence. However, if Fielding’s novel is partly a court of justice, it is also in part a theatre. Theatrical similes abound. In order to impress upon the reader the sudden pallor in Lady Booby’s face at Joseph’s mention of his virtue, Fielding offers this analogy:
You have seen the faces, in the eighteen-penny gallery, when the trap-door, to soft or no music, Mr. Bridgewater, Mr. William Mills, or some other of ghostly appearance, hath ascended with a face all pale with powder, and a shirt all bloody with ribbons.“ (Book I, Chapter8)
Fielding’s definition of good nature is exhibited by some of his characters, like Parson Adams. He preaches against the vanity and pretension of his own age. The distinguished Teaching Professor of English, at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Homer Goldberg writes in one of his essays that “Fielding goes on to characterize his society as:
a vast masquerade, where the greatest part appear
disguised under false visions and habits; a very few
only showing their own faces, who become, by so doing
the astonishment and ridicule of all the rest”
("On the..." 322).
According to Stephen Conway in his essay “Narrative and Narrator: An analysis of Joseph Andrews” (Conway, S.) “with good nature comes a responsibility to humankind.” He considers that “with this in mind Fielding believed there was hope that the ills of society, including the hypocrisy, the affectation, the corruption and the vanity of his own age, could be overcome and perhaps his writing was his contribution to this ongoing struggle.”
Many critics recently explored Fielding's complex value system, like Martin Price who suggests that Fielding's low characters contribute to his definition of virtue. Another critic Martin Battestin makes a study of the character of Sophia Western, using her as an example of Fielding's nuanced moral code. In brief, Fielding’s satire in Joseph Andrews refers to not only particular individuals but also to an entire 18the century English community. The novel is infused with compassion, comedy, and a heightened sense of realism, which together turn into a vivid manifestation of the cankers of the society.
вторник, 25 юни 2013 г.
Poetry of Denise Levertov and Fiction and Theory of William Gass (Postmodernism)
Denise Levertov's poetry explores several dimensions of the human experience,which are nature, love and motherhood, war and the nuclear arms race, poetry, the role of the poet and mysticism. She has been outspoken on women's rights, peace and justice issues, race, and human rights in general.She was an activist and feminist, which she expressed through her poetry. During the course of a prolific career, Denise Levertov created a highly regarded body of poetry that reflects her beliefs as an artist and a humanist. Her work embraces a wide variety of genres and themes, including nature lyrics, love poems, protest poetry, and poetry inspired by her faith in God. Levertov's American poetic voice is, in one sense, indebted to the simple, concrete language and imagery.
Levertov’s statements about the free verse, the organic poetry and its varieties are rather abstract. Following William Carlos Williams she rejects the iambic pentameter line for a more “organic” form. For her the back of the idea of organic form is the concept that there is a form in all things and in our experience which the poet can discover and reveal. A poet is therefore “brought to speech” by perceptions of sufficient interest. According to her the ultimate goal is the splendor of authentic, the creation of which involves the writer in a process rewarding in itself.
Mysticism has a long tradition in Levertov’s family. Her metaphysics, which emphasize beauty and wholeness, set her apart from the post-existentialist poetics of the language poets. For her it is faithful attention to the experience from the first moment of crystallization that allows the forerunning words to rise to the surface. With that same fidelity of attention the poet, must follow through, letting the experience lead him through the world of the poem, its unique inscape revealing itself as he goes. Her statement about the process of writing of a poem is that various elements of the poet’s being are in communion with each other, and heightened. Ear and eye, intellect and passion, interrelate more subtly than at other times and the checking for accuracy, for precision of language, that must take place throughout the writing is not a matter of one element supervising the others but of intuitive interaction between all the elements involved. In the same way, content and form are in a state of dynamic interaction. The understanding of whether an experience is a linear sequence or a constellation raying out from and into a central focus or axis, for instance, is discoverable only in the work, not before it.
About the rhyme, the chime, the echo and the reiteration she thinks that they not only serve to knit the elements of an experience but often are the very means, the sole means, by which the density of texture and the returning or circling of perception can be transmuted into language, apperceived. Corresponding images are a kind of nonaural rhyme.
According to her it usually happens that within the whole, that is between the point of crystallization that marks the beginning or onset of a poem and the point at which the intensity of contemplation has ceased, there are distinct units of awareness and for her anyway it is these that indicate the duration of stanzas. Sometimes these units are of such equal duration that one gets a whole poem of, three-line stanzas, a regularity of pattern that looks, but is not, predetermined. She explains the design in the form of the poem by telling a story with her son, who was at the age of nine. He had been making a crayon drawing of a tournament, he had not been interested in the forms as such but had the need to speak in graphic terms, to say, “And a great crowd of people were watching the jousting knights.” There had been a need to show the tiers of seats, all those people sitting in them. And out of the need had arisen a formal design that was beautiful-composed of the rows of shoulders and heads. It is in very much the same way that there can arise, out of fidelity to instress, a design that is the form of the poem-both its total form, its length and place and tone, and the form of its parts.
Denise Levertov’s point of view about the organic poetry is that the metric movement and the measure in it is the direct expression of the movement of perception. And the sounds, acting together with the measure, are kind of extended onomatopoeia –i.e., they imitate not the sounds of an experience, but the feeling of an experience, its emotional tone, its texture. The varying speed and gait of different strands of perception within an experience result in counterpointed measures. Thinking about how organic poetry differs from free verse, she writes that most free verse is failed organic poetry, that is, organic poetry from which the attention of the writer had been switched off too soon, before the intrinsic form of the experience had been revealed. But Robert Duncan point out to her that there is a free verse if which this is not true, because it is written not with any desire to seek a form, indeed perhaps with the longing to avoid form and to express inchoate emotion as purely as possible. There is a contradiction here, however, because if, as she suppose, there is an inscape of emotion, of feeling, it is impossible to avoid presenting something of it if the rhythm or tone of the feeling is given voice in the poem. But perhaps the difference is this that free verse isolates the “rightness” of each line or cadence if it seems expressive, never mind the relation of it to the next, while in organic poetry the peculiar rhythms of the parts are in some degree modified, if necessary, in order to discover the rhythm of the whole.
Does the character of the whole depend on, arise out of, the character of the parts? For Levertov it does, but it is like painting from nature, supposing an absolute imitation, on the palette, the separate colors of the various objects which are going to be painted. Yet when they are closely juxtaposed in the actual painting, they may have to be lightened, darkened, clouded or sharpened each color in order to produce an effect equivalent to what we see in nature. Air light, dust, shadow, and distance have to be taken into account. Or in organic poetry the form sense or “traffic sense,” as Stefan Wolpe speaks of it, is ever present along with fidelity to the revelation of meditation. The form sense is a sort of Stanislavsky of the imagination: putting a chair two feet downstage there, thickening a knot of bystanders upstage left, getting this actor to raise his voice a little and that actress to enter more slowly; all in the interest of a total form he intuits. Or it is a sort of helicopter scout flying over the field of the poem, taking aerial photos and reporting on the state of the forest and its creatures- or over the sea to watch for the schools of herring and direct the fishing fleet toward them. She represent the manifestation of form sense like the sense the poet’s ear has of some rhythmic norm peculiar to a particular poem, from which the individual lines depart and to which they return. She talks about a quotation from Emerson: “The health of the eye demands a horizon.” This sense of the beat or pulse underlying the whole she thinks of as the horizon note of the poem. It interacts with the nuances or forces of feeling which determine emphasis on one word or another, and decides to a great extent what belongs to a given line. It relates the needs of that feeling-force which dominates the cadence to the needs of the surrounding parts and so to the whole. Robert Duncan also points to what is perhaps a variety of organic poetry: the poetry of linguistic impulse. This seems so her that the absorption in language itself, the awareness of the world of multiple meaning revealed in sound, word, syntax, and the entering into this world in the poem, is as much an experience or constellation of perceptions as the instress of nonverbal sensuous and psychic events. What might make poet of linguistic impetus appear to be on another tack entirely is that demands of his realization may seem in opposition to truth as we think of it. That is ,in terms of sensual logic. But the apparent distortion of experience in such a poem for the sake of verbal effects is actually a precise adherence to truth, since the experience itself was a verbal one.
For Denise Levertov form is never more than a revelation of content. She has always taken this to mean that the law- one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception, no loading of the rifts with ore, because there are to be no rifts. Great gaps between perception and perception which must be leapt across if they are to be crossed at all. The X- factor, the magic, is when we come to those rifts and make those leaps. For her a religious devotion to the truth, to the splendor of the authentic, involves the writer in a process rewarding in itself. But when that devotion brings us undreamed abysses and we find ourselves sailing slowly over them and landing on the other side- that is ecstasy. The poem is with two, three, four and five-stanzas.
In one of her poems “The Ache of Marriage” we can hear sounds that imitate not the sounds of an experience, but the feeling of an experience, its emotional tone, its texture. Denise Levertov attempts to explain the pain this marriage experience. It is a pain that affects both emotional and physical states of being. Levertov describes the pain as if someone were reading her thoughts. Through Levertov's use of non-conventional form, the theme of the pain of marriage and overcoming that pain jumps from the page.She divides the poem into two parts. On one hand, Levertov shows the difficulty in making a marriage last. She depicts how a marriage can ache and hurt. On the other hand, Levertov says that a blissful marriage as the ultimate goal. All the trial and tribulations a marriage endures prove to be worth it the sacrifices. Through her words, the dichotomy of marriage is personified as an actual human entity. It is a being, which aches in the "thigh and tongue" . Levertov's clever use of the literary technique of personification shows how marriage is hard but it can be a beautiful institution if sufficient time and energy are spent to correct what has been destroyed. “Illustrious Ancestors” rings like a bell for the immigrants. "Solid as a bench" is such a visceral image to anyone who has worked with wood. Levertov is so direct in this poem, none of the vaguely mysterious symbolism that enchants us. Nevertheless, the pull of family history makes this piece enchanting in its own right. The mystery of those whom we can never know and yet carry in us is powerful, and Levertov succeeds mightily in expressing that power.In “Overland to the Islands” we can see a sense of the beat or pulse underlying the whole as the horizon note of the poem. It interacts with the nuances or forces of feeling which determine emphasis on one word or another, and decides to a great extent what belongs to a given line. It relates the needs of that feeling-force which dominates the cadence to the needs of the surrounding parts and so to the whole.
Most of Levertov’s poetry, in fact, revolves around questions thresholds, borders, transpositions between different states of being. There is clearly an autobiographical aspect to this theme in terms of her own displacement to the United States after the Second World War, and in her poem “Stepping Westward” she plays intertextually with Wordsworth’s title by imitating his metaphors of transformation and renewal:
What is green in me
darkens, muscadine…
I fall
in season and now
is a time of ripening.
Her personal exile becomes symptomatic of larger conceptual dislocations, particularly the movement between religious belief and agnosticism that becomes more prevalent in her later poetry. In “William: An Essay” we can see the metaphysics, which emphasize beauty and wholeness. The crystallization allows the forerunning words to rise to the surface. She is painting from nature, supposing an absolute imitation, on the palette, the separate colors of the various objects which are going to be painted. There she mentions the river, the wind, the water, the mud, the roots.
Levertov’s poetry is more than the fulfillment of her deeply felt task. It is also the artistic re-creation of all of her experience: of her joy of being alive, of her love of nature, of people she has known and loved and lost, of writing poetry of her fears and doubts and “wavering”, of her private quest of her God. Here again we can see a vivid picture of the nature and intuitive interaction between all the elements. In “The Wings” we can also see her inspiration by her faith in God. The wings, probably of an angel put the poem in divine dimensions and a mystical world. These wings embody the freedom performed in two parts-black and white. Through the colors she paints the initial feelings creating magical utterance. In “Where Is the Angel?” we observe the same tendency. In it she is in a moment of spiritual despair, lack of freedom, talking about her soundless speech, looking for her angel. In the context of Levertov's religious pilgrimage, these are breakthrough poems, filled with hard-earned spiritual insights.
William Gass is very intuitive in writing fiction. He finds the happening and the manner of its organization like a process of discovery, not a process of using some doctrine with which the writer can fit everything into. He treats the development of fiction as a search for form. One way of treating the history of any art is to see it as engaged in such a search. For then he is examining its growth from the inside, as the activity turns upon itself to discover its true interior, its essence, its aim.
He accepts the statements of Cervantes and Rabelais that the origins of the novel in the 18th century show it to be an art in search of a soul, a nature, in short, a form. He talks about the book The Rise of the Novel where Ian Watt suggests that the novel’s early formlessness was the price it paid for its realism, and it is dangerous for the novel to be an imitation of another kind of literary work, one presumably, like a poem or play, blessed with rigor, enjoying more constraints, exhibiting more art. Gass displays the fact that the early novel borrowed its forms, and borrowed its realism as well, by copying already existing prose works. Early novels are literally made-up copies of the format of non-fictional works, and ape their use of language. He divides this activity of “making-up” into two kinds: printed and oral. Under the heading of the printed he puts diaries and journals, travel books, history and other biography, collections of letters, and so on. All of these types had structures designed to
reveal the necessities of history, the demands of geography, the nature of human psychology, and the rigors of reasoning. They were linear in conception, casual or rational in the connection of their parts, and dedicated, they always said, to the truth. The oral tradition for him had two branches. The formal oral presentation was sermons, lectures, debates, ceremonial orations, and so on. The informal sorts were gossips, anecdotes, conversations, slanging matches, and so forth. The early novel was a fictional copy of a factual form. For William Gass the realism of the novel is initially derivative. It gains its realism by copying some other form whose realistic purposes were frequently alleged and widely accepted. The thing that most interests him is why make up a reality which is already being adequately represented. There were histories and biographies aplenty, philosophies weighed the bookstore shelves, travels amazed and amused. The question is why fake it? The answer probably is because there was a new audience, and this audience was not interested in what the writers used to call important affairs, but in their affairs. Especially in affairs of the heart. They wanted to know the trivial items of everyday life, the excitement of scandal, the easy sentimentalities of courtship and romance, data which would validate their own existence simply by being mentioned in a book. The readers of these new things called novels were endlessly nosy, with a voracious appetite for small things they could swallow. The novel became progressively an instrument of voyeurism. These novels had a positive effect on the understanding of this society by stressing individuals and concrete conditions, those simple people who were usually left out of regular histories. The style of such works was moral and nice, but not intrusive. The rise of the novel is roughly contemporary or simultaneous, with the decline of prose, especially in English. The triumph of print also meant that literature could safely abandon the formulas of poetry, the oral tradition. Then the text was the permanent record, and had become memory itself. Print was enormously linear. The eye could flee across the page within the mind right behind it, faster and faster. The text moved in the way the speaker’s voice moved. With the victory of print, something very important happened. The motion of the text passed to the reader. And the idea was to read rapidly. Then because the reader didn’t have to remember anything, the novel began, perversely, to demand complete attention and total recall.
Philosophy’s role in all of this can be found in the so-called education novel”- those of Goethe, Rousseau, Richardson- but especially in the writings of the Marquis de Sade, whose work, Philosophy in the Boudoir gives new twist to the seduction theme. If the reader moves the text, the text must entice the reader to read on. If that reading eye wavers, the text dies. Richardson is the champion among prick teasers. Seduction and its cost - that is his subject. According to Gass education is seduction. It was so with Socrates, and it is so with the Marquis de Sade, whose writings provide us with a revolutionary method. De Sade has an ill-formed and badly borrowed theory of human nature which he describes and defends at length in his books. He then puts in some sexually stimulating passages, and the reader’s arousal proves his philosophical points. Q.E.D where Q stands for quim, E for erection, and D for damp. Eventually serious novelists began to form their worlds, not as they thought their readers might like them, but as they felt the world really was. It began to be understood that the linear structure of the traditional novel had philosophical and political significance. The novelist began to look instead at the other arts, envying them their ownership of their modes, because the copied orders implicit in the historical tomes or geographical adventures had not been created to satisfy esthetic aims, but for far more practical purposes. Great novelists had been overcoming the recalcitrance of these factual genres. William Gass thinks what the novelist better know is the nature and the life of language. That she composes sentences, where the secret lay, in the basic unit of prose, the sentence itself. For him the novelists knew how important to the novel the structure of their sentences was. Once the novelist’s search for an indigenous form began, every possible field of activity was plundered: stealing, borrowing, mimicking, they seemed to be curse. Great works were again created against the grain. “Impressionism” describes certain literary techniques and their effects.
The discovery of the stream of consciousness seemed to provide a breakthrough, giving the novelist, her own subject. Narrative had become a stream, the referential world a waking dream. However, the stream of consciousness was badly polluted, not the pure place to paddle in as first thought. The stream of consciousness was in fact a sewer full of borrowed forms. The same consciousness might be at one moment imitating a porno tale, in another a courtroom drama, in still another ballfield with the bases loaded, while at another time, its own funeral oration. Consciousness had no form of its own, not even banks to its so-called stream. Gass says that novelists have always imitated others, stolen modes and manners. He thinks that the subject of fiction will become the art of fiction itself, and the search for form the novel’s search. Eventually novelists and critics began to wonder what form was all about anyway, what kind of thing did it manage to be? Form has always been feared and the content has always been admired. But this merely means that there have always been as few good readers and critics as writers, and as little love for literature as for anything demanding a cultivated discernment, discovered in reading and realized in writing. In any field of form you must call upon a space where forms can be purely presented, for the form of a thing, as Wittgenstein pointed out, it cannot be spoken about, it can only be shown, and these spaces are where the novelist show theme- the forms which hold thought and the world together as though they were their bones. In his first lecture, William Gass tries to describe some of these spaces, some which were thought to be important as they appear both in the realm of ordinary life, and also in fiction and in philosophy. He tries to demonstrate how our cultural space is made of signs, and suggest the importance of its syntax. He talks about narration, and its devices, and of inscriptional space as well, and touches upon grammatical, syntactical, and logical spaces, including some of their differences. He explains how the novelists begin in the composition of any fiction, at the level of mythos, or story. This level lies outside language. The second level is that of the narration. There the novelist decides how the story shall be told, the order of the events, in what voice or person they shall be presented, and choose the fundamental module of the action. After this comes the level of inscription, the actual writing, and therefore the management of the spaces, which Gass mentions. Subsequent levels are concerned with the way in which a text is experienced. In the text time is represented as passing. And, of course, reading takes its own time too. Relating this is another authorial task. Nevertheless, the novelist sometimes matches the passage of time in the reader’s life with the one the reader is reading about in his book. The other thing in which Gass is interested and about which he is talks is the way of existence of the text and the way of its experience.
Clearly text exists all at once, every word is simultaneous with every other, although texts must be experienced a bit at a time. The novelist is making a structure out of words, and it is in every way a spatial entity, dependent, as all meaning is, on a series of relations which can only be apprehended in a textual space. A word is a mark, an imagined thing or quality or moment, and a meaning. Meaning has no material existence, it is the thought of a thing. And if the “container” of meaning is Mind, and Matter the world of the thing, then the mark, the token, the sign, is like Descartes’ pineal gland, mediating between these two quiet different realities Mind Mark Matter- this is the structure of the stuff the novelist work with when they write.
Finally there is the sixth stage. Here the text, conceived as having, in all its parts, simultaneous existence, is metaphorically connected to another kind of space, through what Gass has called the “trope of the text”. That is, how does the text think of itself, how does it imagine it exists, does it imagine itself as a history? Ultimately the novelist must take charge of every level, order each, and then harmonize the stages with respect to one another. But before any forming can take placed, a further transformation must occur- an ontological one. The novel in particular, is dragged down by its endless attention to trivial detail, by its illusory love of ordinary life. Language has to be transformed before it can be formed. The first stage in this transformation is the replacement of “life” with language. Through feeling may be fleeting, its description need not be; through acts and their consequences fade like ripples on a pool, their rendering remains; though people may lead trivial, vulgar, mean-spirited lives, their written history can be significant, beautiful, and in the ignoble nobly put. Gass conclude his lecture is Stuttgart with a few words about form itself. The earliest and perhaps most primitive sense of form- and therefore, from the emotional point of view, very likely the most powerful is the conception of it as the felt boundary of any inhabited area, an area created by life and its actions. Simple realism understands form as the relatively stable containing contour of an object, particularly as it is visually perceived. Form is relational, and what counts is not the shape of an object or its measurements but the relations that object enters essentially into. In complex rationalism, form is discovered to be a function of content, and content the function of form. Form becomes the content of the work of art.
In “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” Gass not only makes short lists of names and objects, but he also creates the very structure of the tale from his ingrained habit of list-making. The story, in brief, becomes a list of lists. There is no regular story line or even normal paragraphing but rather a series of journal-like entries, each one with its appropriate subtitle such as “People,” “Weather,” or “Place.” There is only one voice, that of the unidentified poet-narrator, who is living in the dismally boring town of B, Indiana, which is identified in the preface to the whole volume, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, as Brookston, Indiana. It is a collection of painfully beautiful and innovative short stories by a conspicuously talented writer. Gass may be responsible for coining the term “metafiction,” but these pieces demonstrate few of the reflexive excesses of his contemporaries like John Barth or Robert Coover. Having indulged in wild, often nonsensical, and quasi-pornographical textual play in Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, and saving his philosophically-informed comments on literature for his essays, found in Fiction and the Figures of Life, Gass in this collection instead undermines traditional literary realism by emphasizing the sensuous qualities of the words he uses. By offering his readers an intense aesthetic experience of language itself, Gass makes his readers comprehend, as he writes in his essay “The Medium of Fiction”: “that fiction should be made of words, and merely words, is shocking, really.” Words, as the “flesh” of his “concepts,” are the only physical traits available to his readers, so Gass exploits every opportunity to direct attention to the arbitrary qualities and independent being of those words, but without ever totally severing them from their function and meaning in the story. For Gass, narrative doesn’t occur at the level of plot but at the level of words, “the coming on and passing off of words,” so that a microdrama occurs as each word gives way to the next,Gass speaks of “the exasperatingly slow search among the words I had already written for the words which were to come.”. The novella “The Pedersen Kid” is the most conventional piece here, but it bears obvious traces of an aesthetic overhaul. Gass admits in his preface that he undermined a thrilling tale involving murder in the isolated countryside by “covering the moral layer with a frost of epistemological doubt” and “erasing the plot to make a fiction of it.” The final product whites out its origins in genre fiction by obsessively repeating the word “snow,” creating a cold, barren, and ambiguous atmosphere in which murder appears liberatory for the young son of an alcoholic and abusive father. “Order of Insects” discretely functions as an allegory of the uncanny power of literature.
In the story, a suburban housewife, despite being constrained by her gender role and domestic duties, develops an obsession with the bodies of the black bugs that she discovers every morning on her downstairs carpet. The insects, which are never seen alive, only lying on their backs dead with their legs up in the air, offer the woman a mystical vision of order that seems incompatible with her mundane existence. She reflects on the insects’ bodies: “The dark plates glisten. They are wonderfully shaped; even the buttons of the compound eyes show a geometrical precision which prevents my earlier horror. It isn’t possible to feel disgust toward such a order.” After the insects have taken over her imagination, the woman adds, “When I examine my collection now it isn’t any longer roaches I observe but gracious order, wholeness, and divinity.” At a couple points in the story, Gass underscores how the shriveled corpses of the insects resemble the apparently lifeless words printed in black on the page. He writes, “if the drapes were pulled, ,the insects appeared, so like ink stains or deep burns they terrified me,” and later on, “Corruption, in these bugs, is splendid. I’ve a collection now I keep in typewriter ribbon tins, and though, in time, their bodies dry and the interior flesh decays, their features hold.” The order of insects at such moments dissolves into the order of Gass’s words, and the reader converges with the woman, confronted by material traces on the page that always exceed any demands for meaning. The collection’s titular piece, “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” abandons any interest in plot; Gass divides his imaginary construction of a Midwest town into sections with quasi-objective labels such as “PLACE,” “WEATHER,” “PEOPLE,” “BUSINESS,” and “VITAL DATA.” The narrator, perhaps recoiling from a failed love affair “For I am now in B, Indiana: out of job and out of patience, out of love and time and money, out of bread and out of body.”, presents some fundamentally ambivalent, but gorgeously written, reflections on the town. At times, he exhibits a nostalgic and idealistic fondness for the setting: “The shade is ample, the grass is good, the sky a glorious fall violet; the apple trees are heavy and red, the roads are calm and empty; corn has sifted from the chains of tractored wagons to speckle the streets with gold and with the russet fragments of the cob, and a man would be a fool who wanted, blessed with this, to live anywhere else in the world.” But such statements are usually quickly contradicted bymore critical comments “It’s a lie of old poetry. The modern husbandman uses chemical from cylinders and sacks, spike-ball-and-claw machines, metal sheds, and cost accounting. Nature in the old sense does not matter. It does not exist.” or by troubling details, such as the fact that most of the town’s industry has been lost to bigger cities or to the monopolies of corporations “Everywhere . . . the past speaks, and it mostly speaks of failure. The empty stores, the old signs and dusty fixtures, the debris in alleys, the flaking paint and rusty gutters, the heavy locks and sagging boards: they say the same disagreeable things.”. Discussing the difficulties of defining the Midwest, Gass writes, “This Midwest. A dissonance of parts and people, we are a consonance of Towns. Like a man grown fat in everything but heart, we overlabor; outlook never really urban, never rural either, we enlarge and linger at the same time.” The Midwest - a non-place, a nondescript setting - is a fitting subject or even a character for Gass’s particularly writing project. In his preface, Gass discusses his own undistinguished Midwest origins, which left him no recourse but to use language to construct an identity from nothing but potential noise: “I was forced to form myself from sounds and syllables.” Returning to the geographically and culturally empty terrain of the Midwest, which offers little for simple representation, he has to construct an order through language, producing himself at the same time as he produces his subject: “I was born in a place as empty of distinction as my writing desk. When I wrote most of these stories, it was a dining table, featureless as Fargo.” But in the story itself, the success of this project is ultimately far more ambiguous, the constructed order more tenuous: “I must pull myself together, get a grip, just as they say, but I feel spilled, bewildered, quite mislaid. I did not restore my house to its youth, but to its age.”
As in Omensetter's Luck, the texture of the world is composed of words and, particularly, of words turned into poem-like lists. There is again the preoccupation with names, including Mr. Tick, the narrator's cat, and such hilarious names as “Gladiolus, Callow Bladder, Prince and Princess Oleo, Hieronymous, Cardinal Mummum, Mr. Fitchew, Spot.” The narrator also lists all the possessions of an old man in Brookston, a kind of pack rat who has saved everything, even the steering tiller from the first, old-fashioned car he owned.The narrator is a saver of things, too, a poet without a lover or a job who painfully plods through each day, examining the minutest details of his environment -clouds, trees, buildings- until they become a kind of poetry. This process of saving things through documentation is especially evident in the entries marked “Data,” which culminate with a magnificent list of all the social clubs and civic organizations in Brookston, from the Modern Homemakers to the Merry-go-round Club. One theme that emerges clearly in this story is the idea that something can be so boring that it actually becomes interesting—if one has the artist's eye and the ability to have “intercourse by eye.” Another theme is the loneliness and isolation, often self-imposed of the American artist. In the preface, Gass observes, “The contemporary American writer is in no way a part of the social and political scene.”
Thus this famous story, for all of its well-articulated pain and loneliness, is ultimately a celebration of the power of art to elevate and transform even the plainest elements of a little Midwestern hamlet. “In the spring the lawns are green, the forsythia is singing, and even the railroad that guts the town has straight bright rails which hum when the train is coming,”.
Levertov’s statements about the free verse, the organic poetry and its varieties are rather abstract. Following William Carlos Williams she rejects the iambic pentameter line for a more “organic” form. For her the back of the idea of organic form is the concept that there is a form in all things and in our experience which the poet can discover and reveal. A poet is therefore “brought to speech” by perceptions of sufficient interest. According to her the ultimate goal is the splendor of authentic, the creation of which involves the writer in a process rewarding in itself.
Mysticism has a long tradition in Levertov’s family. Her metaphysics, which emphasize beauty and wholeness, set her apart from the post-existentialist poetics of the language poets. For her it is faithful attention to the experience from the first moment of crystallization that allows the forerunning words to rise to the surface. With that same fidelity of attention the poet, must follow through, letting the experience lead him through the world of the poem, its unique inscape revealing itself as he goes. Her statement about the process of writing of a poem is that various elements of the poet’s being are in communion with each other, and heightened. Ear and eye, intellect and passion, interrelate more subtly than at other times and the checking for accuracy, for precision of language, that must take place throughout the writing is not a matter of one element supervising the others but of intuitive interaction between all the elements involved. In the same way, content and form are in a state of dynamic interaction. The understanding of whether an experience is a linear sequence or a constellation raying out from and into a central focus or axis, for instance, is discoverable only in the work, not before it.
About the rhyme, the chime, the echo and the reiteration she thinks that they not only serve to knit the elements of an experience but often are the very means, the sole means, by which the density of texture and the returning or circling of perception can be transmuted into language, apperceived. Corresponding images are a kind of nonaural rhyme.
According to her it usually happens that within the whole, that is between the point of crystallization that marks the beginning or onset of a poem and the point at which the intensity of contemplation has ceased, there are distinct units of awareness and for her anyway it is these that indicate the duration of stanzas. Sometimes these units are of such equal duration that one gets a whole poem of, three-line stanzas, a regularity of pattern that looks, but is not, predetermined. She explains the design in the form of the poem by telling a story with her son, who was at the age of nine. He had been making a crayon drawing of a tournament, he had not been interested in the forms as such but had the need to speak in graphic terms, to say, “And a great crowd of people were watching the jousting knights.” There had been a need to show the tiers of seats, all those people sitting in them. And out of the need had arisen a formal design that was beautiful-composed of the rows of shoulders and heads. It is in very much the same way that there can arise, out of fidelity to instress, a design that is the form of the poem-both its total form, its length and place and tone, and the form of its parts.
Denise Levertov’s point of view about the organic poetry is that the metric movement and the measure in it is the direct expression of the movement of perception. And the sounds, acting together with the measure, are kind of extended onomatopoeia –i.e., they imitate not the sounds of an experience, but the feeling of an experience, its emotional tone, its texture. The varying speed and gait of different strands of perception within an experience result in counterpointed measures. Thinking about how organic poetry differs from free verse, she writes that most free verse is failed organic poetry, that is, organic poetry from which the attention of the writer had been switched off too soon, before the intrinsic form of the experience had been revealed. But Robert Duncan point out to her that there is a free verse if which this is not true, because it is written not with any desire to seek a form, indeed perhaps with the longing to avoid form and to express inchoate emotion as purely as possible. There is a contradiction here, however, because if, as she suppose, there is an inscape of emotion, of feeling, it is impossible to avoid presenting something of it if the rhythm or tone of the feeling is given voice in the poem. But perhaps the difference is this that free verse isolates the “rightness” of each line or cadence if it seems expressive, never mind the relation of it to the next, while in organic poetry the peculiar rhythms of the parts are in some degree modified, if necessary, in order to discover the rhythm of the whole.
Does the character of the whole depend on, arise out of, the character of the parts? For Levertov it does, but it is like painting from nature, supposing an absolute imitation, on the palette, the separate colors of the various objects which are going to be painted. Yet when they are closely juxtaposed in the actual painting, they may have to be lightened, darkened, clouded or sharpened each color in order to produce an effect equivalent to what we see in nature. Air light, dust, shadow, and distance have to be taken into account. Or in organic poetry the form sense or “traffic sense,” as Stefan Wolpe speaks of it, is ever present along with fidelity to the revelation of meditation. The form sense is a sort of Stanislavsky of the imagination: putting a chair two feet downstage there, thickening a knot of bystanders upstage left, getting this actor to raise his voice a little and that actress to enter more slowly; all in the interest of a total form he intuits. Or it is a sort of helicopter scout flying over the field of the poem, taking aerial photos and reporting on the state of the forest and its creatures- or over the sea to watch for the schools of herring and direct the fishing fleet toward them. She represent the manifestation of form sense like the sense the poet’s ear has of some rhythmic norm peculiar to a particular poem, from which the individual lines depart and to which they return. She talks about a quotation from Emerson: “The health of the eye demands a horizon.” This sense of the beat or pulse underlying the whole she thinks of as the horizon note of the poem. It interacts with the nuances or forces of feeling which determine emphasis on one word or another, and decides to a great extent what belongs to a given line. It relates the needs of that feeling-force which dominates the cadence to the needs of the surrounding parts and so to the whole. Robert Duncan also points to what is perhaps a variety of organic poetry: the poetry of linguistic impulse. This seems so her that the absorption in language itself, the awareness of the world of multiple meaning revealed in sound, word, syntax, and the entering into this world in the poem, is as much an experience or constellation of perceptions as the instress of nonverbal sensuous and psychic events. What might make poet of linguistic impetus appear to be on another tack entirely is that demands of his realization may seem in opposition to truth as we think of it. That is ,in terms of sensual logic. But the apparent distortion of experience in such a poem for the sake of verbal effects is actually a precise adherence to truth, since the experience itself was a verbal one.
For Denise Levertov form is never more than a revelation of content. She has always taken this to mean that the law- one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception, no loading of the rifts with ore, because there are to be no rifts. Great gaps between perception and perception which must be leapt across if they are to be crossed at all. The X- factor, the magic, is when we come to those rifts and make those leaps. For her a religious devotion to the truth, to the splendor of the authentic, involves the writer in a process rewarding in itself. But when that devotion brings us undreamed abysses and we find ourselves sailing slowly over them and landing on the other side- that is ecstasy. The poem is with two, three, four and five-stanzas.
In one of her poems “The Ache of Marriage” we can hear sounds that imitate not the sounds of an experience, but the feeling of an experience, its emotional tone, its texture. Denise Levertov attempts to explain the pain this marriage experience. It is a pain that affects both emotional and physical states of being. Levertov describes the pain as if someone were reading her thoughts. Through Levertov's use of non-conventional form, the theme of the pain of marriage and overcoming that pain jumps from the page.She divides the poem into two parts. On one hand, Levertov shows the difficulty in making a marriage last. She depicts how a marriage can ache and hurt. On the other hand, Levertov says that a blissful marriage as the ultimate goal. All the trial and tribulations a marriage endures prove to be worth it the sacrifices. Through her words, the dichotomy of marriage is personified as an actual human entity. It is a being, which aches in the "thigh and tongue" . Levertov's clever use of the literary technique of personification shows how marriage is hard but it can be a beautiful institution if sufficient time and energy are spent to correct what has been destroyed. “Illustrious Ancestors” rings like a bell for the immigrants. "Solid as a bench" is such a visceral image to anyone who has worked with wood. Levertov is so direct in this poem, none of the vaguely mysterious symbolism that enchants us. Nevertheless, the pull of family history makes this piece enchanting in its own right. The mystery of those whom we can never know and yet carry in us is powerful, and Levertov succeeds mightily in expressing that power.In “Overland to the Islands” we can see a sense of the beat or pulse underlying the whole as the horizon note of the poem. It interacts with the nuances or forces of feeling which determine emphasis on one word or another, and decides to a great extent what belongs to a given line. It relates the needs of that feeling-force which dominates the cadence to the needs of the surrounding parts and so to the whole.
Most of Levertov’s poetry, in fact, revolves around questions thresholds, borders, transpositions between different states of being. There is clearly an autobiographical aspect to this theme in terms of her own displacement to the United States after the Second World War, and in her poem “Stepping Westward” she plays intertextually with Wordsworth’s title by imitating his metaphors of transformation and renewal:
What is green in me
darkens, muscadine…
I fall
in season and now
is a time of ripening.
Her personal exile becomes symptomatic of larger conceptual dislocations, particularly the movement between religious belief and agnosticism that becomes more prevalent in her later poetry. In “William: An Essay” we can see the metaphysics, which emphasize beauty and wholeness. The crystallization allows the forerunning words to rise to the surface. She is painting from nature, supposing an absolute imitation, on the palette, the separate colors of the various objects which are going to be painted. There she mentions the river, the wind, the water, the mud, the roots.
Levertov’s poetry is more than the fulfillment of her deeply felt task. It is also the artistic re-creation of all of her experience: of her joy of being alive, of her love of nature, of people she has known and loved and lost, of writing poetry of her fears and doubts and “wavering”, of her private quest of her God. Here again we can see a vivid picture of the nature and intuitive interaction between all the elements. In “The Wings” we can also see her inspiration by her faith in God. The wings, probably of an angel put the poem in divine dimensions and a mystical world. These wings embody the freedom performed in two parts-black and white. Through the colors she paints the initial feelings creating magical utterance. In “Where Is the Angel?” we observe the same tendency. In it she is in a moment of spiritual despair, lack of freedom, talking about her soundless speech, looking for her angel. In the context of Levertov's religious pilgrimage, these are breakthrough poems, filled with hard-earned spiritual insights.
William Gass is very intuitive in writing fiction. He finds the happening and the manner of its organization like a process of discovery, not a process of using some doctrine with which the writer can fit everything into. He treats the development of fiction as a search for form. One way of treating the history of any art is to see it as engaged in such a search. For then he is examining its growth from the inside, as the activity turns upon itself to discover its true interior, its essence, its aim.
He accepts the statements of Cervantes and Rabelais that the origins of the novel in the 18th century show it to be an art in search of a soul, a nature, in short, a form. He talks about the book The Rise of the Novel where Ian Watt suggests that the novel’s early formlessness was the price it paid for its realism, and it is dangerous for the novel to be an imitation of another kind of literary work, one presumably, like a poem or play, blessed with rigor, enjoying more constraints, exhibiting more art. Gass displays the fact that the early novel borrowed its forms, and borrowed its realism as well, by copying already existing prose works. Early novels are literally made-up copies of the format of non-fictional works, and ape their use of language. He divides this activity of “making-up” into two kinds: printed and oral. Under the heading of the printed he puts diaries and journals, travel books, history and other biography, collections of letters, and so on. All of these types had structures designed to
reveal the necessities of history, the demands of geography, the nature of human psychology, and the rigors of reasoning. They were linear in conception, casual or rational in the connection of their parts, and dedicated, they always said, to the truth. The oral tradition for him had two branches. The formal oral presentation was sermons, lectures, debates, ceremonial orations, and so on. The informal sorts were gossips, anecdotes, conversations, slanging matches, and so forth. The early novel was a fictional copy of a factual form. For William Gass the realism of the novel is initially derivative. It gains its realism by copying some other form whose realistic purposes were frequently alleged and widely accepted. The thing that most interests him is why make up a reality which is already being adequately represented. There were histories and biographies aplenty, philosophies weighed the bookstore shelves, travels amazed and amused. The question is why fake it? The answer probably is because there was a new audience, and this audience was not interested in what the writers used to call important affairs, but in their affairs. Especially in affairs of the heart. They wanted to know the trivial items of everyday life, the excitement of scandal, the easy sentimentalities of courtship and romance, data which would validate their own existence simply by being mentioned in a book. The readers of these new things called novels were endlessly nosy, with a voracious appetite for small things they could swallow. The novel became progressively an instrument of voyeurism. These novels had a positive effect on the understanding of this society by stressing individuals and concrete conditions, those simple people who were usually left out of regular histories. The style of such works was moral and nice, but not intrusive. The rise of the novel is roughly contemporary or simultaneous, with the decline of prose, especially in English. The triumph of print also meant that literature could safely abandon the formulas of poetry, the oral tradition. Then the text was the permanent record, and had become memory itself. Print was enormously linear. The eye could flee across the page within the mind right behind it, faster and faster. The text moved in the way the speaker’s voice moved. With the victory of print, something very important happened. The motion of the text passed to the reader. And the idea was to read rapidly. Then because the reader didn’t have to remember anything, the novel began, perversely, to demand complete attention and total recall.
Philosophy’s role in all of this can be found in the so-called education novel”- those of Goethe, Rousseau, Richardson- but especially in the writings of the Marquis de Sade, whose work, Philosophy in the Boudoir gives new twist to the seduction theme. If the reader moves the text, the text must entice the reader to read on. If that reading eye wavers, the text dies. Richardson is the champion among prick teasers. Seduction and its cost - that is his subject. According to Gass education is seduction. It was so with Socrates, and it is so with the Marquis de Sade, whose writings provide us with a revolutionary method. De Sade has an ill-formed and badly borrowed theory of human nature which he describes and defends at length in his books. He then puts in some sexually stimulating passages, and the reader’s arousal proves his philosophical points. Q.E.D where Q stands for quim, E for erection, and D for damp. Eventually serious novelists began to form their worlds, not as they thought their readers might like them, but as they felt the world really was. It began to be understood that the linear structure of the traditional novel had philosophical and political significance. The novelist began to look instead at the other arts, envying them their ownership of their modes, because the copied orders implicit in the historical tomes or geographical adventures had not been created to satisfy esthetic aims, but for far more practical purposes. Great novelists had been overcoming the recalcitrance of these factual genres. William Gass thinks what the novelist better know is the nature and the life of language. That she composes sentences, where the secret lay, in the basic unit of prose, the sentence itself. For him the novelists knew how important to the novel the structure of their sentences was. Once the novelist’s search for an indigenous form began, every possible field of activity was plundered: stealing, borrowing, mimicking, they seemed to be curse. Great works were again created against the grain. “Impressionism” describes certain literary techniques and their effects.
The discovery of the stream of consciousness seemed to provide a breakthrough, giving the novelist, her own subject. Narrative had become a stream, the referential world a waking dream. However, the stream of consciousness was badly polluted, not the pure place to paddle in as first thought. The stream of consciousness was in fact a sewer full of borrowed forms. The same consciousness might be at one moment imitating a porno tale, in another a courtroom drama, in still another ballfield with the bases loaded, while at another time, its own funeral oration. Consciousness had no form of its own, not even banks to its so-called stream. Gass says that novelists have always imitated others, stolen modes and manners. He thinks that the subject of fiction will become the art of fiction itself, and the search for form the novel’s search. Eventually novelists and critics began to wonder what form was all about anyway, what kind of thing did it manage to be? Form has always been feared and the content has always been admired. But this merely means that there have always been as few good readers and critics as writers, and as little love for literature as for anything demanding a cultivated discernment, discovered in reading and realized in writing. In any field of form you must call upon a space where forms can be purely presented, for the form of a thing, as Wittgenstein pointed out, it cannot be spoken about, it can only be shown, and these spaces are where the novelist show theme- the forms which hold thought and the world together as though they were their bones. In his first lecture, William Gass tries to describe some of these spaces, some which were thought to be important as they appear both in the realm of ordinary life, and also in fiction and in philosophy. He tries to demonstrate how our cultural space is made of signs, and suggest the importance of its syntax. He talks about narration, and its devices, and of inscriptional space as well, and touches upon grammatical, syntactical, and logical spaces, including some of their differences. He explains how the novelists begin in the composition of any fiction, at the level of mythos, or story. This level lies outside language. The second level is that of the narration. There the novelist decides how the story shall be told, the order of the events, in what voice or person they shall be presented, and choose the fundamental module of the action. After this comes the level of inscription, the actual writing, and therefore the management of the spaces, which Gass mentions. Subsequent levels are concerned with the way in which a text is experienced. In the text time is represented as passing. And, of course, reading takes its own time too. Relating this is another authorial task. Nevertheless, the novelist sometimes matches the passage of time in the reader’s life with the one the reader is reading about in his book. The other thing in which Gass is interested and about which he is talks is the way of existence of the text and the way of its experience.
Clearly text exists all at once, every word is simultaneous with every other, although texts must be experienced a bit at a time. The novelist is making a structure out of words, and it is in every way a spatial entity, dependent, as all meaning is, on a series of relations which can only be apprehended in a textual space. A word is a mark, an imagined thing or quality or moment, and a meaning. Meaning has no material existence, it is the thought of a thing. And if the “container” of meaning is Mind, and Matter the world of the thing, then the mark, the token, the sign, is like Descartes’ pineal gland, mediating between these two quiet different realities Mind Mark Matter- this is the structure of the stuff the novelist work with when they write.
Finally there is the sixth stage. Here the text, conceived as having, in all its parts, simultaneous existence, is metaphorically connected to another kind of space, through what Gass has called the “trope of the text”. That is, how does the text think of itself, how does it imagine it exists, does it imagine itself as a history? Ultimately the novelist must take charge of every level, order each, and then harmonize the stages with respect to one another. But before any forming can take placed, a further transformation must occur- an ontological one. The novel in particular, is dragged down by its endless attention to trivial detail, by its illusory love of ordinary life. Language has to be transformed before it can be formed. The first stage in this transformation is the replacement of “life” with language. Through feeling may be fleeting, its description need not be; through acts and their consequences fade like ripples on a pool, their rendering remains; though people may lead trivial, vulgar, mean-spirited lives, their written history can be significant, beautiful, and in the ignoble nobly put. Gass conclude his lecture is Stuttgart with a few words about form itself. The earliest and perhaps most primitive sense of form- and therefore, from the emotional point of view, very likely the most powerful is the conception of it as the felt boundary of any inhabited area, an area created by life and its actions. Simple realism understands form as the relatively stable containing contour of an object, particularly as it is visually perceived. Form is relational, and what counts is not the shape of an object or its measurements but the relations that object enters essentially into. In complex rationalism, form is discovered to be a function of content, and content the function of form. Form becomes the content of the work of art.
In “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” Gass not only makes short lists of names and objects, but he also creates the very structure of the tale from his ingrained habit of list-making. The story, in brief, becomes a list of lists. There is no regular story line or even normal paragraphing but rather a series of journal-like entries, each one with its appropriate subtitle such as “People,” “Weather,” or “Place.” There is only one voice, that of the unidentified poet-narrator, who is living in the dismally boring town of B, Indiana, which is identified in the preface to the whole volume, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, as Brookston, Indiana. It is a collection of painfully beautiful and innovative short stories by a conspicuously talented writer. Gass may be responsible for coining the term “metafiction,” but these pieces demonstrate few of the reflexive excesses of his contemporaries like John Barth or Robert Coover. Having indulged in wild, often nonsensical, and quasi-pornographical textual play in Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, and saving his philosophically-informed comments on literature for his essays, found in Fiction and the Figures of Life, Gass in this collection instead undermines traditional literary realism by emphasizing the sensuous qualities of the words he uses. By offering his readers an intense aesthetic experience of language itself, Gass makes his readers comprehend, as he writes in his essay “The Medium of Fiction”: “that fiction should be made of words, and merely words, is shocking, really.” Words, as the “flesh” of his “concepts,” are the only physical traits available to his readers, so Gass exploits every opportunity to direct attention to the arbitrary qualities and independent being of those words, but without ever totally severing them from their function and meaning in the story. For Gass, narrative doesn’t occur at the level of plot but at the level of words, “the coming on and passing off of words,” so that a microdrama occurs as each word gives way to the next,Gass speaks of “the exasperatingly slow search among the words I had already written for the words which were to come.”. The novella “The Pedersen Kid” is the most conventional piece here, but it bears obvious traces of an aesthetic overhaul. Gass admits in his preface that he undermined a thrilling tale involving murder in the isolated countryside by “covering the moral layer with a frost of epistemological doubt” and “erasing the plot to make a fiction of it.” The final product whites out its origins in genre fiction by obsessively repeating the word “snow,” creating a cold, barren, and ambiguous atmosphere in which murder appears liberatory for the young son of an alcoholic and abusive father. “Order of Insects” discretely functions as an allegory of the uncanny power of literature.
In the story, a suburban housewife, despite being constrained by her gender role and domestic duties, develops an obsession with the bodies of the black bugs that she discovers every morning on her downstairs carpet. The insects, which are never seen alive, only lying on their backs dead with their legs up in the air, offer the woman a mystical vision of order that seems incompatible with her mundane existence. She reflects on the insects’ bodies: “The dark plates glisten. They are wonderfully shaped; even the buttons of the compound eyes show a geometrical precision which prevents my earlier horror. It isn’t possible to feel disgust toward such a order.” After the insects have taken over her imagination, the woman adds, “When I examine my collection now it isn’t any longer roaches I observe but gracious order, wholeness, and divinity.” At a couple points in the story, Gass underscores how the shriveled corpses of the insects resemble the apparently lifeless words printed in black on the page. He writes, “if the drapes were pulled, ,the insects appeared, so like ink stains or deep burns they terrified me,” and later on, “Corruption, in these bugs, is splendid. I’ve a collection now I keep in typewriter ribbon tins, and though, in time, their bodies dry and the interior flesh decays, their features hold.” The order of insects at such moments dissolves into the order of Gass’s words, and the reader converges with the woman, confronted by material traces on the page that always exceed any demands for meaning. The collection’s titular piece, “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” abandons any interest in plot; Gass divides his imaginary construction of a Midwest town into sections with quasi-objective labels such as “PLACE,” “WEATHER,” “PEOPLE,” “BUSINESS,” and “VITAL DATA.” The narrator, perhaps recoiling from a failed love affair “For I am now in B, Indiana: out of job and out of patience, out of love and time and money, out of bread and out of body.”, presents some fundamentally ambivalent, but gorgeously written, reflections on the town. At times, he exhibits a nostalgic and idealistic fondness for the setting: “The shade is ample, the grass is good, the sky a glorious fall violet; the apple trees are heavy and red, the roads are calm and empty; corn has sifted from the chains of tractored wagons to speckle the streets with gold and with the russet fragments of the cob, and a man would be a fool who wanted, blessed with this, to live anywhere else in the world.” But such statements are usually quickly contradicted bymore critical comments “It’s a lie of old poetry. The modern husbandman uses chemical from cylinders and sacks, spike-ball-and-claw machines, metal sheds, and cost accounting. Nature in the old sense does not matter. It does not exist.” or by troubling details, such as the fact that most of the town’s industry has been lost to bigger cities or to the monopolies of corporations “Everywhere . . . the past speaks, and it mostly speaks of failure. The empty stores, the old signs and dusty fixtures, the debris in alleys, the flaking paint and rusty gutters, the heavy locks and sagging boards: they say the same disagreeable things.”. Discussing the difficulties of defining the Midwest, Gass writes, “This Midwest. A dissonance of parts and people, we are a consonance of Towns. Like a man grown fat in everything but heart, we overlabor; outlook never really urban, never rural either, we enlarge and linger at the same time.” The Midwest - a non-place, a nondescript setting - is a fitting subject or even a character for Gass’s particularly writing project. In his preface, Gass discusses his own undistinguished Midwest origins, which left him no recourse but to use language to construct an identity from nothing but potential noise: “I was forced to form myself from sounds and syllables.” Returning to the geographically and culturally empty terrain of the Midwest, which offers little for simple representation, he has to construct an order through language, producing himself at the same time as he produces his subject: “I was born in a place as empty of distinction as my writing desk. When I wrote most of these stories, it was a dining table, featureless as Fargo.” But in the story itself, the success of this project is ultimately far more ambiguous, the constructed order more tenuous: “I must pull myself together, get a grip, just as they say, but I feel spilled, bewildered, quite mislaid. I did not restore my house to its youth, but to its age.”
As in Omensetter's Luck, the texture of the world is composed of words and, particularly, of words turned into poem-like lists. There is again the preoccupation with names, including Mr. Tick, the narrator's cat, and such hilarious names as “Gladiolus, Callow Bladder, Prince and Princess Oleo, Hieronymous, Cardinal Mummum, Mr. Fitchew, Spot.” The narrator also lists all the possessions of an old man in Brookston, a kind of pack rat who has saved everything, even the steering tiller from the first, old-fashioned car he owned.The narrator is a saver of things, too, a poet without a lover or a job who painfully plods through each day, examining the minutest details of his environment -clouds, trees, buildings- until they become a kind of poetry. This process of saving things through documentation is especially evident in the entries marked “Data,” which culminate with a magnificent list of all the social clubs and civic organizations in Brookston, from the Modern Homemakers to the Merry-go-round Club. One theme that emerges clearly in this story is the idea that something can be so boring that it actually becomes interesting—if one has the artist's eye and the ability to have “intercourse by eye.” Another theme is the loneliness and isolation, often self-imposed of the American artist. In the preface, Gass observes, “The contemporary American writer is in no way a part of the social and political scene.”
Thus this famous story, for all of its well-articulated pain and loneliness, is ultimately a celebration of the power of art to elevate and transform even the plainest elements of a little Midwestern hamlet. “In the spring the lawns are green, the forsythia is singing, and even the railroad that guts the town has straight bright rails which hum when the train is coming,”.
Homosexuality in jokes (Theories of Humor)
Questioning problems with homosexuality and discussing them has been a taboo for centuries. Many texts dealing with such matter have been banned. But nowadays censorship over homosexual topics is being lifted, leaving people free to discuss, and create jokes about it. The following paper deals with homosexual jokes about lesbians and gay men. Some of the jokes may be considered as extremely vulgar but it depends on the reader’s intention and most of the jokes are ribald because of the sexual matter. About the explanation of “what is funny” in the jokes the Tripartite Classification of Victor Raskin (1985) will be used (Incongruity, Hostility and Release) as well as Alleen Nilsen’s Features of Humor (1999: 202-203) – exaggeration, irony, underestimation, ambiguity, etc. The paper is going to introduce a number of jokes, taking into consideration the function of their structure and distinguishing it from the everyday talk.
Five websites were used when assembling the corpus of jokes that are going to be discussed. They all contain jokes on homosexual matter in English. While for some a number of them might sound abusive and untrue, their purpose is not to offend, but to entertain while exaggerating rumors and speculations.
The incongruities in jokes are explained nowadays by The General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) (Attardo and Raskin 1991) which is based on an earlier work partially dealing with the matter – the Semantic-script Theory of Humor (SSTH) (Raskin 1985). In accordance with these theories jokes consist mainly of two overlapping scripts which are in opposition – bona-fide (literal script) and non-bona-fide (figurative script). The punch line in a joke usually introduces this type of change. It is considered necessary in order for a joke to be funny (Raskin 1985). The joke in (1) is an example of the binary opposition expected vs. non-expected
(1) In a small cathedral a janitor was cleaning the pews between services when he was approached by the minister. The minister asked the janitor, "Could you go into the confessional and listen to confessions for me? I really have to go to the bathroom and the Widow McGee is coming. She tends to go on but never really does anything worthy of serious repentance, so when she's done just give her 10 Hail Mary's and I'll be right back."
Being the helpful sort, the janitor agreed. Just as expected the Widow McGee came into the booth and started her confession. "Oh Father, I fear I have done the unforgivable. I have given into carnal thoughts and have had oral sex."
Stunned, the janitor had no idea how to handle this situation. Surely 10 Hail Mary's would not do. So, in a moment of desperation the janitor peered his head out of the confessional and asked an altar boy, "Son, what does the minister give for oral sex?"
In reply the altar boy said, "Two Snickers bars and a Coke."
The funniness resides in both the unexpected answer as well as in an apparent misunderstanding. Whether the text is to be considered a joke depend on the reader/listener’s “global intention towards the text” (Genova 2002). The overlapping script in the punch line completely changes the meaning of the question in the set-up part – from "Son, what does the minister give for oral sex?" the question unintentionally, perhaps, becomes “How much do you pay for a blowjob?” . The funniness of the joke is reached exactly by the ambiguity in the set-up part question.
One more example can be given about the “unexpectedness” of a punch line.
(2) A faggot hadn't had any sex for quite some time. One night,
he happened to run into a wino just outside of a gay bar. He said to
him, "Look, I do not know you, and you don't know me, but if I can
have sex with you, I'll give you fifty bucks!" The wino considered
this proposition and said, "well---okay. But you ought to be
forewarned that I have crabs." "That's all right," said the faggot...
"I love seafood."
Although the joke is quite explicit, the humorous effect is not lost. The speaker relies on the ambiguous meaning of the phrase “crabs” , while the first person talks about crabs in meaning of lice, the other person takes his words literally, leaving the assumption that the ‘crabs’ are crawfishes in the sea. The GTVH gives an explanation on how this switch makes people laugh - “The punchline triggers the switch from the one script to the other by making the hearer backtrack and realize that a different interpretation [of the joke] was possible from the very beginning.” (Attardo and Raskin 1991: 308)
The punchline is a very critical aspect of the joke. It contains the funniness and is what initially makes people laugh. There are specific proven ways to get to the punchline. The one is to put the punch-word as far to the back of your joke as possible without adding more words. We can see one of these specific ways in the following example
(3) A man dies and goes to Hell. The devil greets him and says, "You may choose which room you wish to enter. Whichever you choose, the person in that room will switch with you. They'll go to Heaven and you'll take over until somebody switches with you. So go on, pick a room."
The devil leads him to the first room where someone is tied to a wall and is being whipped. The second room has someone being burned by a torch. The third has a man getting blown by a naked woman.
"I choose this room!" the man says.
"Very well," the devil says. He walks up to the woman and taps her on the shoulder.
"You can go now. I've found your replacement."
The punchline in the joke is the last word. Every other word in the joke is a setup for a surprise at the end. We can notice how after the punchline, there are no words. The reason for this is that if you have the audience laughing and you begin to talk again, they’ll stop laughing in order to hear what you have to say. It’s called stepping on your laughs. It is like a rule in telling jokes and something that you should never do because it will condition the audience not to laugh. The surprise is left to the very end of the joke so that you have the attention of the audience which waits for this end of the joke with great tension. This is something that is definitely useful to know if considering stand-up comedy.
Some features of humor like irony, superiority, ambiguity, hostility, understatement, wordplay, etc are listed by Alleen Nilsen in “Living Language” (1999: 202-203). The following several examples in the paper show these features. One of the ways to achieve the wordplay in the joke which triggers the homor is by polisemy. Polysemes are words or phrases which have multiple meanings. Polysemy appears when a preexisting word (or phrase) is applied to a new situation, thus gaining a new meaning. Sometimes even etymology – the study of the history of the words – finds it difficult to establish a connection between different meanings (mostly because it has been lost during the centuries). Polysemy can be employed in humor in order to create yet another kind of wordplay and in this way – a funny situation. We can find a polyseme in the following joke
(4) What did the gay man say in the Chinese restaurant?
"May I please have the cream of sum yung gai?"
The humorous effect in this joke is achieved by the background. In this case the gay man is in a Chinese restaurant and he orders “the cream of sum yung gai”. The literal meaning of the phrase is a traditional Chinese cream, but in this situation the gay uses the phrase figuratively which changes the meaning of the phrase. Although the gay is in a Chinese restaurant he uses the phrase to say that he wants the semen of a young Chinese man. The polysemic character of the phrase is what makes the joke funny –the phrase is used figuratively rather than literally. We can see another example of a misinterpretation of a word in (5)
(5) What's the worst thing a straight guy can say in a gay bar?
Can you push my stool in please?!
The joke is quite explicit, the funniness comes from the unexpectedness of the answer in the punch line and again from the background. The words of the straight guy in a normal bar sound normally and in this case “stool” means a chair. The change of the meaning of the word ‘stool’ is what causes the opposition of the two scripts. However in a gay bar the word “stool” takes a different meaning - this of faeces. Thus the words of the straight man turn into a request for homosexual sex act between men.
Another way of achieving a wordplay which triggers humor is by homonymy. Homonyms are words that share the same spelling and pronunciation but have different meanings. Based on incongruity, the jokes which employ homonymy present situations in which misunderstanding leads to funny situations.
(6) Did you hear about the two queers who had an argument in a gay bar?
They went outside and exchanged blows!
The funniness in the joke come from the misinterpreting the meaning of the word “blow”. It is considered to be a reference to hit in a fight, instead it denotes an act of French love between two gay men. We laugh at the way of thinking of two gay men in a situation of struggle between them who are shared stereotypes. Stereotypes play an important role in humor. They are beliefs about certain social groups or groups of individuals based only on assumptions. Like prejudices, stereotypes are mostly subjective and untrue, relying on false premises. We may observe different examples of stereotypes in homosexuality – these of sentimental gay men, of horny gay men always taking certain situation sexually (see (6)), of masculine lesbians (the so-called butches), etc.
It is known that the gay men and the lesbians are engaged in a peculiar ‘homosexual war. There has always been tension between these groups of homosexual people. It's not uncommon for gay men to make jokes about their female counterparts or the opposite. There are different arguments about this but their rivalry has given birth to jokes such as this one
(7) There were two gay men and two lesbians moving from California to New York. Which ones got there first?
A: The lesbians, they got there lickity split, while the gay guys were still packin' their shit!'
The teller of the joke is probably a lesbian, because the joke is focused on the fact that the gay men are slower than the lesbians. In this situation the lesbians reach first California and start making love while the gay men are “still packin’their shit”. The word “shit” may refer to baggage as well as to faeces which makes this word in the joke a homonymy. The ridiculousness of the situation is a result of the intolerance between the gays and the lesbians.
Last, I would like to discuss a few question-answer jokes on homosexual matter. The structure of a question-answer joke is quite simple – it consists of two parts which, as the name suggests, ask a question and receive an answer. Unlike everyday talk, when we use questions in order to receive the information we require, this type of jokes relies on wit and the unexpectedness of the answer. They are usually quite implicit and brief. Let’s have a look at such jokes
(8) Q: What do you call a homosexual dentist?
A: Tooth fairy
(9) Q: What does a homo say to another gay going on vacation?
A: Can I help you pack your shit?
(10) Q: What do you call a ship full of fags?
A: The navy!
(11) Q: How do you get a nun pregnant?
A: Dress her up as an alter boy.
(12) Q. Did you hear about the two homosexual judges?
A. They tried each other.
When telling such a joke, the one who does the telling usually waits for a negative answer to the question and then gives his or her clever interpretation. If you can take your set-up and whittle it down by three words and still get the same or better response, you should do it. Sure, it means the joke will take up less time, but it will also allow for a quicker route to the punchline, which will set up a quicker response. The question-answer jokes rely on different strategies for achieving funniness, such as blending, polysemy, homonymy, homophony, etc.
(13) What do you call a homo Jew?
A Heblew
The explanation of this joke is quite simple; we have handy used word play. “Heblew” is a word made up of two combined words - a blend of words; (blending in linguistics) and the effect is stunning. The two words that are mixed into “Heblew” are “blew” (referring to the verb blow (in sexual aspect)) and “Hebrew” (referring to Jew). Imagine what Hebrew would be a lesbian, it sounds absurd, but this makes the joke funny. Due to the nature of the wordplay, the joke in (13) may produce greater impact if told verbally, rather than if simply read. In joke (14) we can see another example of blending in question-answer jokes
(14) Q: What do you call a lesbian eskimo?
A: A klondyke.
In this joke the blending word is “klondyke” which is a combination of dyke (a lesbian) and klondyker (East European factory ship,often used for fishing). The blending again sounds absurd, but the reader/listener should find the funniness between the two words and how they are combined. Joke (15) is an example of question-answer joke in which we can see a polysemy.
(15) Did you hear about the two queers who were in a telephone box?
They were trying to ring each other!
The funniness in the joke above is achieved by the polysemy “ring”. The wordplay is in the different usage of the word “ring”, which is due to the background and the situation. The literal meaning of the word is to call somebody, as we can consider because of the mentioned telephone box. However, the meaning of the word changes and it becomes figurative. This figurative meaning of the word “ring” makes it to be considered in a sexual aspect.
The strategy used in question-answer jokes is very simple. The teller of the joke has to try to tell the joke in a way so that the listener won’t be able to predict the final result. The punch line is the key for the funniness of the joke because this is the part where the fun is hidden. While in the first part, the set up, there we have the basal information, the part that makes us anxious to look forward to the very funny end. As they say in literature, the dénouement is in the punch line.
Baring the previous aspects and examples in mind, when it comes to explaining humor and naming the techniques used, we fully comprehend the complexity of the matter. Humor is part of our daily life. We tell jokes to our friends, and our friends tell us jokes, we read them in newspapers in books, we watch comedians on TV. Briefly we are surrounded by jokes. The telling of joke seems to be easy, but actually it is very difficult. There are people who are born with talent for doing this and the telling of jokes is not for everybody. Exploring the cultural and social factors and shared stereotypes regarding homosexual people makes us understand homosexuality in jokes better. But it also helps us to find the real purpose of those jokes, which is to entertain and heal social differences.
Work cited
Attardo, Salvatore, and Victor Raskin (1991) Script Theory Revis(it)ed: Joke Similarity and Joke Representation Model. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 4.3-4: 293-347
Genova, Dafina. (2002). “American and Bulgarian Political Humor: Similarities or Differences”. In: America across Cultures: Europe and beyond. International Conference, Veliko Turnovo University, April 7-9, 2002 (in press).
Nilsen, Alleen Pace (1999) Living Language. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon
Raskin, Victor (1985) Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel
Five websites were used when assembling the corpus of jokes that are going to be discussed. They all contain jokes on homosexual matter in English. While for some a number of them might sound abusive and untrue, their purpose is not to offend, but to entertain while exaggerating rumors and speculations.
The incongruities in jokes are explained nowadays by The General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) (Attardo and Raskin 1991) which is based on an earlier work partially dealing with the matter – the Semantic-script Theory of Humor (SSTH) (Raskin 1985). In accordance with these theories jokes consist mainly of two overlapping scripts which are in opposition – bona-fide (literal script) and non-bona-fide (figurative script). The punch line in a joke usually introduces this type of change. It is considered necessary in order for a joke to be funny (Raskin 1985). The joke in (1) is an example of the binary opposition expected vs. non-expected
(1) In a small cathedral a janitor was cleaning the pews between services when he was approached by the minister. The minister asked the janitor, "Could you go into the confessional and listen to confessions for me? I really have to go to the bathroom and the Widow McGee is coming. She tends to go on but never really does anything worthy of serious repentance, so when she's done just give her 10 Hail Mary's and I'll be right back."
Being the helpful sort, the janitor agreed. Just as expected the Widow McGee came into the booth and started her confession. "Oh Father, I fear I have done the unforgivable. I have given into carnal thoughts and have had oral sex."
Stunned, the janitor had no idea how to handle this situation. Surely 10 Hail Mary's would not do. So, in a moment of desperation the janitor peered his head out of the confessional and asked an altar boy, "Son, what does the minister give for oral sex?"
In reply the altar boy said, "Two Snickers bars and a Coke."
The funniness resides in both the unexpected answer as well as in an apparent misunderstanding. Whether the text is to be considered a joke depend on the reader/listener’s “global intention towards the text” (Genova 2002). The overlapping script in the punch line completely changes the meaning of the question in the set-up part – from "Son, what does the minister give for oral sex?" the question unintentionally, perhaps, becomes “How much do you pay for a blowjob?” . The funniness of the joke is reached exactly by the ambiguity in the set-up part question.
One more example can be given about the “unexpectedness” of a punch line.
(2) A faggot hadn't had any sex for quite some time. One night,
he happened to run into a wino just outside of a gay bar. He said to
him, "Look, I do not know you, and you don't know me, but if I can
have sex with you, I'll give you fifty bucks!" The wino considered
this proposition and said, "well---okay. But you ought to be
forewarned that I have crabs." "That's all right," said the faggot...
"I love seafood."
Although the joke is quite explicit, the humorous effect is not lost. The speaker relies on the ambiguous meaning of the phrase “crabs” , while the first person talks about crabs in meaning of lice, the other person takes his words literally, leaving the assumption that the ‘crabs’ are crawfishes in the sea. The GTVH gives an explanation on how this switch makes people laugh - “The punchline triggers the switch from the one script to the other by making the hearer backtrack and realize that a different interpretation [of the joke] was possible from the very beginning.” (Attardo and Raskin 1991: 308)
The punchline is a very critical aspect of the joke. It contains the funniness and is what initially makes people laugh. There are specific proven ways to get to the punchline. The one is to put the punch-word as far to the back of your joke as possible without adding more words. We can see one of these specific ways in the following example
(3) A man dies and goes to Hell. The devil greets him and says, "You may choose which room you wish to enter. Whichever you choose, the person in that room will switch with you. They'll go to Heaven and you'll take over until somebody switches with you. So go on, pick a room."
The devil leads him to the first room where someone is tied to a wall and is being whipped. The second room has someone being burned by a torch. The third has a man getting blown by a naked woman.
"I choose this room!" the man says.
"Very well," the devil says. He walks up to the woman and taps her on the shoulder.
"You can go now. I've found your replacement."
The punchline in the joke is the last word. Every other word in the joke is a setup for a surprise at the end. We can notice how after the punchline, there are no words. The reason for this is that if you have the audience laughing and you begin to talk again, they’ll stop laughing in order to hear what you have to say. It’s called stepping on your laughs. It is like a rule in telling jokes and something that you should never do because it will condition the audience not to laugh. The surprise is left to the very end of the joke so that you have the attention of the audience which waits for this end of the joke with great tension. This is something that is definitely useful to know if considering stand-up comedy.
Some features of humor like irony, superiority, ambiguity, hostility, understatement, wordplay, etc are listed by Alleen Nilsen in “Living Language” (1999: 202-203). The following several examples in the paper show these features. One of the ways to achieve the wordplay in the joke which triggers the homor is by polisemy. Polysemes are words or phrases which have multiple meanings. Polysemy appears when a preexisting word (or phrase) is applied to a new situation, thus gaining a new meaning. Sometimes even etymology – the study of the history of the words – finds it difficult to establish a connection between different meanings (mostly because it has been lost during the centuries). Polysemy can be employed in humor in order to create yet another kind of wordplay and in this way – a funny situation. We can find a polyseme in the following joke
(4) What did the gay man say in the Chinese restaurant?
"May I please have the cream of sum yung gai?"
The humorous effect in this joke is achieved by the background. In this case the gay man is in a Chinese restaurant and he orders “the cream of sum yung gai”. The literal meaning of the phrase is a traditional Chinese cream, but in this situation the gay uses the phrase figuratively which changes the meaning of the phrase. Although the gay is in a Chinese restaurant he uses the phrase to say that he wants the semen of a young Chinese man. The polysemic character of the phrase is what makes the joke funny –the phrase is used figuratively rather than literally. We can see another example of a misinterpretation of a word in (5)
(5) What's the worst thing a straight guy can say in a gay bar?
Can you push my stool in please?!
The joke is quite explicit, the funniness comes from the unexpectedness of the answer in the punch line and again from the background. The words of the straight guy in a normal bar sound normally and in this case “stool” means a chair. The change of the meaning of the word ‘stool’ is what causes the opposition of the two scripts. However in a gay bar the word “stool” takes a different meaning - this of faeces. Thus the words of the straight man turn into a request for homosexual sex act between men.
Another way of achieving a wordplay which triggers humor is by homonymy. Homonyms are words that share the same spelling and pronunciation but have different meanings. Based on incongruity, the jokes which employ homonymy present situations in which misunderstanding leads to funny situations.
(6) Did you hear about the two queers who had an argument in a gay bar?
They went outside and exchanged blows!
The funniness in the joke come from the misinterpreting the meaning of the word “blow”. It is considered to be a reference to hit in a fight, instead it denotes an act of French love between two gay men. We laugh at the way of thinking of two gay men in a situation of struggle between them who are shared stereotypes. Stereotypes play an important role in humor. They are beliefs about certain social groups or groups of individuals based only on assumptions. Like prejudices, stereotypes are mostly subjective and untrue, relying on false premises. We may observe different examples of stereotypes in homosexuality – these of sentimental gay men, of horny gay men always taking certain situation sexually (see (6)), of masculine lesbians (the so-called butches), etc.
It is known that the gay men and the lesbians are engaged in a peculiar ‘homosexual war. There has always been tension between these groups of homosexual people. It's not uncommon for gay men to make jokes about their female counterparts or the opposite. There are different arguments about this but their rivalry has given birth to jokes such as this one
(7) There were two gay men and two lesbians moving from California to New York. Which ones got there first?
A: The lesbians, they got there lickity split, while the gay guys were still packin' their shit!'
The teller of the joke is probably a lesbian, because the joke is focused on the fact that the gay men are slower than the lesbians. In this situation the lesbians reach first California and start making love while the gay men are “still packin’their shit”. The word “shit” may refer to baggage as well as to faeces which makes this word in the joke a homonymy. The ridiculousness of the situation is a result of the intolerance between the gays and the lesbians.
Last, I would like to discuss a few question-answer jokes on homosexual matter. The structure of a question-answer joke is quite simple – it consists of two parts which, as the name suggests, ask a question and receive an answer. Unlike everyday talk, when we use questions in order to receive the information we require, this type of jokes relies on wit and the unexpectedness of the answer. They are usually quite implicit and brief. Let’s have a look at such jokes
(8) Q: What do you call a homosexual dentist?
A: Tooth fairy
(9) Q: What does a homo say to another gay going on vacation?
A: Can I help you pack your shit?
(10) Q: What do you call a ship full of fags?
A: The navy!
(11) Q: How do you get a nun pregnant?
A: Dress her up as an alter boy.
(12) Q. Did you hear about the two homosexual judges?
A. They tried each other.
When telling such a joke, the one who does the telling usually waits for a negative answer to the question and then gives his or her clever interpretation. If you can take your set-up and whittle it down by three words and still get the same or better response, you should do it. Sure, it means the joke will take up less time, but it will also allow for a quicker route to the punchline, which will set up a quicker response. The question-answer jokes rely on different strategies for achieving funniness, such as blending, polysemy, homonymy, homophony, etc.
(13) What do you call a homo Jew?
A Heblew
The explanation of this joke is quite simple; we have handy used word play. “Heblew” is a word made up of two combined words - a blend of words; (blending in linguistics) and the effect is stunning. The two words that are mixed into “Heblew” are “blew” (referring to the verb blow (in sexual aspect)) and “Hebrew” (referring to Jew). Imagine what Hebrew would be a lesbian, it sounds absurd, but this makes the joke funny. Due to the nature of the wordplay, the joke in (13) may produce greater impact if told verbally, rather than if simply read. In joke (14) we can see another example of blending in question-answer jokes
(14) Q: What do you call a lesbian eskimo?
A: A klondyke.
In this joke the blending word is “klondyke” which is a combination of dyke (a lesbian) and klondyker (East European factory ship,often used for fishing). The blending again sounds absurd, but the reader/listener should find the funniness between the two words and how they are combined. Joke (15) is an example of question-answer joke in which we can see a polysemy.
(15) Did you hear about the two queers who were in a telephone box?
They were trying to ring each other!
The funniness in the joke above is achieved by the polysemy “ring”. The wordplay is in the different usage of the word “ring”, which is due to the background and the situation. The literal meaning of the word is to call somebody, as we can consider because of the mentioned telephone box. However, the meaning of the word changes and it becomes figurative. This figurative meaning of the word “ring” makes it to be considered in a sexual aspect.
The strategy used in question-answer jokes is very simple. The teller of the joke has to try to tell the joke in a way so that the listener won’t be able to predict the final result. The punch line is the key for the funniness of the joke because this is the part where the fun is hidden. While in the first part, the set up, there we have the basal information, the part that makes us anxious to look forward to the very funny end. As they say in literature, the dénouement is in the punch line.
Baring the previous aspects and examples in mind, when it comes to explaining humor and naming the techniques used, we fully comprehend the complexity of the matter. Humor is part of our daily life. We tell jokes to our friends, and our friends tell us jokes, we read them in newspapers in books, we watch comedians on TV. Briefly we are surrounded by jokes. The telling of joke seems to be easy, but actually it is very difficult. There are people who are born with talent for doing this and the telling of jokes is not for everybody. Exploring the cultural and social factors and shared stereotypes regarding homosexual people makes us understand homosexuality in jokes better. But it also helps us to find the real purpose of those jokes, which is to entertain and heal social differences.
Work cited
Attardo, Salvatore, and Victor Raskin (1991) Script Theory Revis(it)ed: Joke Similarity and Joke Representation Model. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 4.3-4: 293-347
Genova, Dafina. (2002). “American and Bulgarian Political Humor: Similarities or Differences”. In: America across Cultures: Europe and beyond. International Conference, Veliko Turnovo University, April 7-9, 2002 (in press).
Nilsen, Alleen Pace (1999) Living Language. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon
Raskin, Victor (1985) Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel
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