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,”.

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

Comparison between the movie Apocalypse Now (old version) and the novel Heart of Darkness - psychological analysis of the protagonists

Heart of Darkness written by Joseph Conrad and "Apocalypse Now" a movie directed by Francis Coppola are two works that parallel one another but at the same time reflect their own era in time and their creator's own personal feelings and prejudices. "Apocalypse Now" was released in 1979 after two years in the making, as Coppola's modern interpretation to Joseph Conrad's novel, Heart of Darkness . Conrad's book is an excellent example of the advances writers and philosophers made in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This advance deals with civilized humanity's ability to be prepared for and know the unknown. Comparatively, Copolla's movie does the same in the late 1970's. "Apocalypse Now" dares to breach the edges of soldier sanity in a stressful and protested Vietnam War.

One of the many similarities between Heart of Darkness and "Apocalypse Now" is race. Joseph Conrad and Francis Coppola both use white men as the characters that have dominance (Bradley). The white men not only dominate their respective crews, but also the peoples native to the country the white men are visiting. The character Conrad uses, Marlow, and Coppola uses his character, Willard, both look at the natives as though white men are the civilized culture and the native people are the savage culture (Franklin). Both works also reflect the theory that "civilized" white men that go into an uncivilized land become savage and do not return to white civilization. An example of this that is in the book is Marlow’s appointment with the doctor. The doctor measures Marlow's skull to compare its size at the present time to the size of his skull upon his return from the Congo. The thought is that a civilized man’s skull is a different size than a savage's skull. When Marlow asks the doctor how what the results of this test have been in the past, the doctor comments that there are none because no civilized person has ever returned from the Congo. An example of this in the movie is when Willard faces his own personality of whether or not to complete his soldierly mission of killing Kurtz or to abort it. If he completes the mission he is still civil, if he does not, the Vietnam jungle has conquered him. The first soldier that is sent to kill Kurtz did not kill Kurtz, but in fact became one of his followers. The jungle overcame the first soldier. Marlow is portrayed as a wanderer of the sea. The narrator described him to somewhat of a hero. Their mission is to find Kurtz and take him down at all costs. In both stories Kurtz is a psychotic rebel, worshipped as a god, who threatens the stability of his original unit, but in one it is an ivory trading company and in the other it is the US Army. Kurtz, who had begun his assignment a man of great idealism and the highest morals, had become strangely savage. Tribes of natives worship the man who lives in a hut surrounded by fence posts topped with recently acquired human skulls. Kurtz has undergone a total breakdown of the physical, psychological, and spiritual. Along the trip into the wilderness, Willard and Marlow discover their true selves through contact with savage natives. As Marlow ventures further up the Congo, he feels like he is traveling back through time. He sees the unsettled wilderness and can feel the darkness of its solitude. An important similarity of the main characters in each work is that each character has a sympathy for Kurtz and when Kurtz dies, Marlow and Willard see a little of themselves in this degenerated savage white man (Harris). Perhaps the similarity of the book and movie is that we, the reader and viewer are intended to discover the darkness in our own hearts.

Both stories are about a man’s journey into his self, and the discoveries to be made there. They are also about Man confronting his fears of failure, insanity, death, and cultural contamination. In Heart of Darkness there is an outside narrator telling the story that he heard Marlow tell. Conrad uses Marlow’s imagery and objective observation to establish a criticism of “civilized” society. The very opening paragraphs create a dark image of London, the center of civilization during Conrad’s time. The comparison between the pilgrims and the cannibals on Marlow’s ship yields another example of the savagery of civilization. Marlow also exhibits a resolution of frankness and truth. Throughout the novel he emphasizes his contempt for shallow, materialistic men, and his value on honesty. This brings up a theme of hypocrisy or insincerity in the story. Another theme is hegemony. Whenever fundamentally different cultures meet, there is often a fear of contamination and loss of self that leads us to discover more about our true selves, often causing perceived madness by those who have yet to discover.

Evil often breaks out during times of isolation from our culture, and whenever one culture confronts another. The use of a political, military, or economic domination of one country over another, ivory trading, is imperialism. This is another theme of the story. The title of the novel, “Heart of Darkness”, has several meanings. Perhaps it means how we refer to the Middle Ages, when science and knowledge was suppressed as the “Dark Ages”. According to Christianity, in the beginning of time all was dark and God created light. This can have two meanings: Kurtz is worshiped as if he is a god. Perhaps he created light for his tribe. Or according to “Heart of Darkness” before the Romans came, England was dark. In the same way, Africa was considered to be in the ‘dark stages’. Yet, when it is looked into deeper, the usual pattern is reverse and “darkness means truth, whiteness means falsehood”. This reversal tells a political truth about races in the Congo, a psychological truth about Marlow and any number of moral truths such as the use of ivory trading which is dark and dirty. It also can represent the “heart of Africa”.

Although there was much similarity between the two works, there are many discrepancies that make Heart of Darkness and "Apocalypse Now" dissimilar. The settings of the stories were different and written in different time periods. Heart of Darkness, written in the late nineteenth century, was set in a wild African jungle frontier. "Apocalypse Now", released in 1979, was set in a war torn and hostile Vietnam. This could have been Coppola's opinion of a wrong political action and the brutality and senselessness of war (Harris). Conrad used ivory traders as his characters and the ivory trade in Coppola used of soldiers and the Vietnam War. Another difference in the two is that the ivory traders were in the Congo of their own free will and greed. The soldiers were not there of their own free will, many were drafted into Vietnam. Character differences in the two works reflect that Willard, Coppola's adapted character of Conrad's Marlow is really nothing like him. Marlow was eager to meet Kurtz and perhaps learn secrets of the ivory trade in Zaire. Willard on the other hand seemed to have a death wish. Throughout the entire movie, Willard is a depressed human. He has a soldier's killer instinct; this is something Coppola added to his character.

The ties between Joseph Conrad’s book, Heart of Darkness and Francis Coppola’s movie, Apocalypse Now are unmistakable. Apocalypse Now’s accuracy in following the story line of the Heart of Darkness is amazing even though the settings of each story are from completely different time periods. From the Congo in Africa to the Nung River in Vietnam, Joseph Conrad’s ideals are not lost. In both the book and the movie, the ideas of good and evil, whiteness and darkness, and racism are apparent. Both examine the good and evil in humans. In my opinion, the compared themes in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now is that they are both on a quest for Kurtz, which turns into an obsession or fascination of him. I also see them as a journey between the polar opposites of a western, civilized, army command center, and the jungle of Kurtz’s camp. I found the novel to be boring and slow paced, while the movie was action packed and seemed to be a great success. Apocalypse Now is similar to Heart of Darkness in the ground-laying outline but mainly differs in many aspects. Both have excellent insight into the madness of men, the insanity of the situations, and the emotional changes imminent as a result of a traumatic journey. Although the two stories are similar in several aspects, their contrasting approaches achieved two different meanings and conclusions. Both successfully portray the inherent darkness evident in men’s souls that Conrad strove to reveal.

It is difficult to Heart of Darkness without the mention of "Apocalypse Now". Parallels in the movie and novel tie them together as a modern version or revision of an older masterpiece. A comparison of this is Shakespeare's play version of Romeo and Juliet written in 1595 and Baz Luhrmann's 1996 film version of the same work. It is perplexing that the story is lifted from the pages of a book and placed in a completely different context, is written and engineered in a way that retains some of the ideas and themes that Conrad addressed in his book.