On Literary Criticism and Self-Inflicted Questions

“Three Ways of Going Wrong: Kipling, Conrad, Coetzee” by Douglass Kerr comes to some interesting conclusions and constructs connections which I would not have noticed had they not been pointed out to me. The connection between Kurtz and the Magistrate, for example, would have gone completely unnoticed were I not to have read this article. Also, his discussion of the outlaw and the lawman was particularly interesting.

However, I was less intrigued by the article than by the questions that suddenly and inexplicably jumped into my mind while reading the criticism. For some reason, I began musing upon the ideas of how the empire -- and indeed civilization and society itself -- is portrayed within the two novels: “Heart of Darkness” and “Waiting for the Barbarians.” In what ways is the empire viewed in each of the novels? (Well, one’s a novella.) It seems to me that in “Heart of Darkness” society and civilization are viewed as being beneficial to Europeans. For when Kurtz wanders too far from the empire’s tight grip, he looses himself in the savagery and darkness that surrounds him. His escape from society leads to his downfall. However, in “Waiting for the Barbarians,” Coetzee remarks upon the corrupting and poisoning influences of empirical life. The empire is seen as something evil, something unfeeling, something ignorant of the peaceful lives the barbarians lead outside the grasp of “civilization.” In fact, in Coetzee’s work, are not the citizens of the empire more barbaric than those who live far from their walls and regulations? For two literary works that are so similar in subject matter, it came as quite a surprise to think upon how the two differ.

And now I begin to wonder: “Why?” How can two books with similar themes, characters, and commentary have conflicting ideas on the benefits of empire? I have yet to come up with a satisfactory answer.

Overall, though, I thought the criticism was well worth reading. (This, despite the fact that I am now agonizing over my own questions.)

I hope you have a lovely winter break.

On Style and First Impressions

Reading J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians is quite the different experience from reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The fact that the novel is written in the present voice is very interesting. The reader witnesses the action as it happens -- quite unlike the memories being retold in Heart of Darkness. As discussed in class, this prevents most foreshadowing and gives the reader an eerie uncertainty of what might happen later on in the novel.

Waiting for the Barbarians reads very quickly. Most of the sentences are short and to the point -- which is a far cry from the lengthy, flowery sentences of Conrad’s, who seems to delight in listing adjective after adjective.

This is, indeed, another detail which differentiates the two works of literature: Coetzee’s lack of long descriptive passages. Sure, there are small portions of description, however, the action is always moving forward. Each sentence and phrase seems to hold something of significance to either setting, character, plot, or theme. These full sentences make it extremely unbeneficial to become distracted while reading the novel, or to merely skim over lines. Missing a sentence could cause the reader to miss crucial bits of information and leave him or her lost within the plot. (Wait…. What just happened? When did he leave the granary? And where did those people come from?)

The text is also broken up frequently into portions of a few pages by pairs of asterisks, which allow the reader frequent breaks and gives the illusion of an even faster progression through the novel.

Overall, though, I seem to be enjoying Waiting for the Barbarians quite a bit. I am very much a fan of the asterisk breaks as mentioned in the previous paragraph. (I was never one for long chapters. They make my progress seem much slower.) I look forward to the completion of the text and its discussion in class. (319)

Happy Thanksgiving (Break)!

On "To Boldly Go" and Heart of Darkness

Notes on Linda J. Dryden's "To Boldly Go": Heart of Darkness and Popular Culture

-Heart of Darkness is a novella that has not yet been "closed" because the story is still relevant in the 21st Century.

-The story continues to be re birthed over and over again through parodies and references in popular culture.

-There is "a broader interdependence between popular culture and some of our most valued literary products."

-Without Heart of Darkness, either Apocalypse Now would never have been made, or it would have been a completely different film. Less powerful. Less enduring.

-Did Conrad's work continue to be popular because of its lasting literary merit? Or was it Coppola's Apocalypse Now that renewed interest in the novella?

-"In a sense, a kind of two-way process is enacted here whereby literature is influencing the more populist media of the cinema, which itself is reflecting that literature back at an audience who subsequently find a new relevance in a 'old masterpiece' "

-"High" culture, as it is called, seems to be seeping into popular culture which blurs the dividing line between the two.

-Star Trek uses the same themes and plot points that Heart of Darkness uses. Africans are replaced with alien species, however, both raise the same questions regarding race relations and colonialism.

-Popular culture cannot exist without "high" culture to draw upon.

-"The point is that without the elite products of our culture, such as literature, popular culture itself would be impoverished, lacking in cultural reference points on which to base its narratives."

-Heart of Darkness is apparently "one of the most frequently quoted texts within popular culture and media."

"It has become part of our cultural heritage."

On Closure and Stability

While the last section of The Sound and the Fury does not close the novel definitely -- many ends are left open and possibility for the future still remains -- one aspect of the section does help give the novel a base and some form of closure. This device is, of course, the use of a third-person narrative. By leaving behind the stream-of-consciousness method used in the first three sections, William Faulkner creates a foundation which offers the reader a small portion of -- if one can say this in regard to the Compson family. -- stability. Abandoning the chaos and disorder of the minds of the Compson men, the reader is finally able to see the Compson family in a third-person panorama. By disengaging the reader with the characters, Faulkner allows the reader to look back over the novel as a whole and put together -- within his/her own mind -- the entire tragedy of the Compson family. The reader sees each event in chronological order, piecing together the story bit by bit and finally is able to see the entire arch of the novel. In this way, the last sections offers closure -- closure that the novel would indeed lack were the story to end with yet more twisted memories. (212)

On Quentin and His Symbols

The Language of Chaos: Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury
May Cameron Brown
American Literature, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Jan., 1980), pp. 544-553
Published by: Duke University Press

“No battle is ever won. …They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.” (93) This quote from Quentin’s father epitomizes the nihilistic view that becomes the death of Quentin, a view that is found within various symbols throughout his section.

Throughout the article, May Cameron Brown explores, step by step, the recurring themes of the last day of Quentin Compson’s life and in what way they lead to the young man’s suicide. Of the symbols she discusses, the three that stood out where time, shadow, and twilight.

“For Quentin, time is painful and destructive. He lives in the past, which he attempts to reconstruct by imaginatively damning himself and Caddy to the purifying flames of hell. …Because time is his enemy, responsible for his loss of Caddy and hence for his suffering, he seeks to destroy it by breaking his grandfather‘s watch and then to escape it by avoiding all instruments which record time. The more desperate he is in his efforts to avoid time, the more conscious of it he becomes.” (Brown 545-546) For Quentin, time is a trap. No matter how hard he tries, Quentin is powerless both to stop time and to move it backwards. He is as a stone within a stream, the world -- time itself -- surrounds him, flowing past him, regardless of his desires or wants.

Throughout Quentin’s section, another predominate symbol is that of the shadow. In a way, the shadow is connected to time, for it is a simple way for the reader to know what time of day it is. However, the shadow also symbolizes Quentin and his disassociation from the rest of the world. The boy feels he is a shade of a person and, either resulting from this feeling or because of it, feels he is unable to effect the corporeal world. Brown points out, “It is Quentin’s partial awareness of the emptiness of words and values which creates his despair and isolates him in a world of shadows.” (Brown 550)

Finally, because of Quentin’s deep connection with shadows, his most sacred moment is, fittingly enough, that time of shadows, twilight. We all know twilight to be important since it was Faulkner’s first title for the novel. Even Quentin is aware of this affinity he has to the time after sunset. “On a conscious level Quentin associates twilight with a peaceful state, with the anticipated suicide when time will cease to torture him. …[Twilight] is for him both a quality of light and a quality of mind.” (Brown 551) In fact, the whole of Quentin’s section takes place during his last day alive, the twilight of his life.

May Cameron Brown explains some interesting symbols that are present throughout the second part of Faulkner’s novel which not only include time, shadow, and twilight, but also mirrors, doors, sisters, and water. By looking beyond the obvious, Brown discovers a deeper meaning than could ever be stumbled upon during a first reading and, in turn, creates a more fulfilling portion of The Sound and the Fury.
553 Words

On Repression and Psychosis

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a disturbing look into the mind of a woman who has been pushed past her emotional cliff-face into the turbulent seas of insanity. This woman, who is obviously not her in right mind to begin with, is forced into a small room where she is not permitted to do anything even remotely active. All she can do to occupy her time is lie there and let her imagination run wild.

This freedom of her mind is what conjures up the woman behind the wallpaper. This feral woman who claws at her surroundings is trapped, unable to free herself, and becomes even more bestial by the moment. The woman behind the wallpaper is obviously a physical representation of the real wife’s subconscious. Not able to express herself through what many would call normal means, forcing herself to put on this docile, domestic mask in front of her husband, friends, and company, living day after day, week after week, staying subservient to her husband who does not allow her even to express herself or show any part of her personality but for her meek-tempered, apologetic, docile housemaid side, forces her to bottle her emotions and psychosis deep within her, where it builds and builds until it is unable to contain itself and erupts from her subconscious, projecting itself onto the walls in a physical manifestation of her inner turmoil in an act which finally frees her from the constraints imposed upon her by outside forces and allows her inner personality to reign free.

What the wife sees behind the wallpaper is actually herself. This is confirmed at the end with the transformation of the wife into the woman. Despite the placid outward appearance, an inner war is waging within the wife. It was only a matter of time before that inner turmoil was able to burst free from the mild-mannered wife’s outer façade.

The story is also a commentary on the social position of women at the time. The wife is forced into trying to change herself for her husband and to meet the expectations society has of her. She is not expected to express herself. She is not expected to think for herself. She is not even expected to act for herself. The wife is pressed into this mold the society of the time expects all women to fit within and in order to do this, she must subdue her true self. She is slowly drowning, losing herself to the demands of her patriarchal society. As Sylvia Plath described, the wife is a woman “in the bell jar, [whose life is as] blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”

The yellow wallpaper of the dilapidated room symbolizes the binding confines of society from which the crazed woman -- the wife’s tormented subconscious -- tries desperately to escape. This ugly, peeling, wallpaper is society’s hidden, unattractive side which forces the wife to conform.

At the conclusion of the story, the subconscious of the wife has finally burst forth, transformed by the repression into a twisted, vicious, shade of a person. The story is a lesson regarding the stifling of one’s true self and the consequences of such an action. Because, really, who wants to turn into the lady behind the wallpaper? (551)

On the Husband and The S.A.R

The characters that Raymond Carver creates in his short story “Cathedral,” simply put, are more than they appear. At first glance, the husband of the story seems like a shallow, simple character. A character one might find more at home as a secondary character in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, perhaps, or in any novel written by Stephenie Meyer. However, when read more closely, the depth of the character of the husband begins to show through.

We get the initial and most revealing view of the husband--a character who we never learn the actual name of--through the narration of the story, as it is told in the first person through his eyes. The reader learns about the character merely through the ways he describes things. We listen to his tone, his inflections, his somewhat bitter and sarcastic comments. (And yes, I say “listen” despite the fact that the reader never literally hears a sound but for the turning of the pages.) The husband’s thoughts are short and clear. Never flowery. Always efficient. At first read, throughout most of the novel, the husband seems aloof, slightly bitter, quiet, and almost apathetic. He is reluctant to let the blind man, Robert, sleep at his house. He has a drinking problem. He smokes cannabis. He isn’t religious. He leads what some may call an uneventful, slightly depressing life. He simply lives from day to day, forcing himself through the routine of everyday life. To those who don’t take the time to read into the character, it must seem like he doesn’t care about anything at all.

This idea of the husband not caring, however, is a false one. In fact, the character who seems so rough and apathetic on the outside shows the reader his thoughtful half throughout the course of his narration. The first one and a half pages are dedicated not to himself, or the setting, or the theme, but instead to telling the reader all about his wife. The fact that he’s bitter about “the man who’d first enjoyed [his wife’s] favors,” (4) is a sign of how much he actually cares about her. How much the wife actually cares for her husband, however, is a different essay. Despite what her actual feelings are for the man who married her, the husband cares for her more than he ever lets on in the story. He tries to be hospitable to the man his wife is obviously more interested in than her own husband and later even tries to protect her modesty in front of him. These are not the actions of a man apathetic to his wife.

The husband is also a character who can easily put himself in another person’s situation. (The exception to this power is, of course, the fact that he cannot put himself in the mind of a blind man. At first, anyway.) When he hears the story of Robert’s wife, Beulah, his heart actually goes out to the woman. He feels for the “pitiful life this woman must have led.” (15) He even is shocked and saddened over the thought of “a woman who could never see herself as she was seen in the eyes of her loved one.” That’s a powerful, emotional thought no two-dimensional character could ever conceive.

Strangely enough, the character of the husband reminds me of another complex character found in a famous novel of one of Raymond Carver’s main influences. That character: Jake Barnes. That author: none other than the influential Ernest Hemingway. Both characters seem apathetic and both are almost completely disillusioned with the world around them. Both are fans of alcohol. And both have much more complex emotions than they actually let on. Not to get on too much of a tangent, but Jake Barnes, like the husband, sets up this exterior shield which hides his true self from others around him. The two characters both have an amazing amount of love (Yes, you heard correctly, Ernest Hemingway wrote about love!) within them that they are either afraid or unwilling to show. Anyway, while not important to the character development in the short story, I merely wanted to point out that were these two characters ever to meet, they would have “such a damned good time together.”

We never learn the name of the narrator, this husband who has a much deeper side than he lets on, but we learn so much more about this character’s character that one hardly cares! His name seems almost trivial in the grand scheme of things. And what’s amazing is that we learn all about this character merely through his narration of one simple evening spent with his wife and her blind friend. And think about it. If the husband did not have this hidden, softer side, he would never go through the powerful transformation that he does at the end of the story. Where would the be story be then?(819)

Why is the husband so reluctant to express this softer side to those around him?

Why *don’t* we learn the wife and the husband’s names?

Why *do* we learn Robert and Beulah’s names?

What’s the deal with the whole dinner scene?

What happened at the end of the story? How? Why?

On Baba O'Riley and Teenage Wasteland

I merely thought I'd post this video for those who would like to listen to the song referred to in the short story. The song is called Baba O'Riley (not Teenage Wasteland as many assume) and was written by Pete Townshend of the Who.

Enjoy!

(Also, if you wait until the end of the video, you can watch a few Who music videos as well!)

On Miss Emily and J.K. Rowling

Miss Emily in William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily is a woman with a problem. And no, I am not speaking of her problem with necrophilia. (Though, that is related to her larger problem.) Miss Emily is a character who simply cannot let go. She cannot bear to see the people she loves leave her and that is what compels this lovely, Southern woman to act in ways one would not think possible.

Grief, and the feelings of loneliness that accompany them, are experienced by all people. The way others choose to deal with these feelings, however, vary from person to person. Miss Emily has difficultly moving past the first step of grief: Denial. When she experiences the death of her father, Miss Emily refuses to even acknowledge his death for three days! This denial is even brought to the extreme when she kills Homer rather than lose him, and even refuses to let go of the dead body, preferring instead to lie with the corpse night after night than admit to herself that he, and her father for that matter, is dead.

This fear and hatred of death is nothing special and haunts most cultures around the world. Miss Emily’s unwillingness to admit that those she loved have left her reminds me of “The Tale of the Three Brothers” mentioned in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. This story is about three brothers who, after cheating Death out of their lives, are each granted a wish. The eldest brother asks for a wand more powerful than any in existence. By this reasoning, he considers himself more powerful than Death. His wish is granted and he receives the wand, but shortly enough, after bragging to all around him of the wand’s power, the eldest brother is killed and his wand stolen. Thus, Death claims the first brother. The middle brother, whose love had perished, asks for a stone that can return those who have died to the living world. With it, he calls back his love from Death. However, this woman is not the one who left him. She is a soul trapped in the mortal world and curses her fate. The middle brother is thus driven to suicide by watching the woman he once loved suffer. Thus, Death claims the second brother. However, the youngest brother asks for an invisibility cloak. He then hides from Death for the rest of his long life, fathering a son, and in turn passing the cloak to the boy when he is finally ready to walk with Death as his equal.

Miss Emily is most similar to the middle brother. Both of the two refuse to let the ones they love pass “through the veil.” However, the obsession they have is unhealthy as it prevents them from moving on with their lives. Both unable to even pass the first stage of grief cripples the two to a point of stasis. The two are both very relatable though, despite the fact that one is a borderline necrophiliac, as who would not wish a dead loved one to return?

Death haunts us all. We know of no way to escape it or reverse it. This is what makes it imperative to find ways to deal with it. Society usually frowns upon necrophilia, so it’s best to find a more suitable way to deal with your insecurity about lost.

Simply put: If you can’t deal with loss, I suggest you seek professional help rather than kill your lover and sleep with his dead body. Just a thought. (593)

On Summer Reading and Sylvia Plath

To begin with, the required list of books read over the summer:

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (of course)
Old School, Tobias Wolff
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling
Breaking Dawn, Stephenie Meyer (Yes, I read it. Yes, it was terrible.)
Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
Dracula, Bram Stoker (And to all those Twilight/Stephenie Meyer fans out there: You want a *good* piece of vampire fiction?! Read Bram Stoker. That, or Anne Rice. At least their novels don't read like poor fanfiction.)

(Looking over this list, it seems only Old School, Pride and Prejudice, and Breaking Dawn were books that I had read for the first time this summer.)

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“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”

The first sentence of Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar brilliantly sets the tone of the stark, real, horribly believable journey of one woman into the depths of madness and back to the shores of sanity. Esther Greenwood, the lady whom the novel revolves around, is a young woman who travels to New York over the summer for a internship with a prominent magazine. Esther is a character who watches the world; she does not participate in it. Her eye is detached from the chaos that envelops her as she observes from afar. In her own words: “I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”

Esther then travels back to her home in Massachusetts where she struggles to decide what to do with the rest of her life and slowly begins to drown in depression. She is subjected to a traumatic experience involving an improperly executed electroshock treatment and later ends up crawling into the cellar where she swallows a severe overdose of sleeping pills in an attempt to kill herself.

After being sent to a new mental hospital, Esther begins a slow, life-changing recovery. Scattered throughout these events in her life are others: a rejection for a writing course taught by a distinguished author, more electroshock treatments, the suicide of a friend, a handful of love affairs with a variety of gentlemen, and the loss of her virginity. The novel ends as Miss Greenwood is led before a group of doctors who will decide if she is well enough to leave the hospital. The reader never learns what becomes of this interview, for the novel ends with the sentence, “The eyes and faces all turned themselves toward me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room.”

Esther Greenwood is a woman who knows exactly what she wants in life. Everything. But she can't decide on any choice before her and as she turns from "one mutually exclusive thing" to "another," she watches opportunity slip from her hands.

Esther is a character distinguished from her friends. She feels neither the buzz nor the excitement of New York City her friends do. Her world is silent. Her world is one within her own mind. And as she feels this sense of isolation, this pressing feeling of separation traps her. Like a bell jar. And suffocates her.

Sylvia Plath’s writing is brutal and honest, her descriptions, stark and real. No detail is spared in her dark, gritty world. Esther’s descent into madness is reasonable. The transition is slow and while she becomes increasingly insane, the reader sees each step in her life as rational and even “sane.”

The novel is gripping, chilling. One that you will question and ponder long after finished. (623 words)

The following is a selection of quotes from the novel. They are not included in the word count.

“The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”

"I had removed my patent leather shoes after a while, for they foundered badly in the sand. It pleased me to think they would be perched there on the silver log, pointing out to sea, like a sort of soul-compass, after I was dead."

"How did I know that someday - at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere - the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?"