tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26314702573604542372024-03-07T23:32:14.653-08:00Comparative Literature 325, World Literature after 1650CPLT 325, World Literature after 1650. Spring 2012 at California State U, Fullerton.Alfred J. Drakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16752305052112968118noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2631470257360454237.post-90039445799302558022012-05-12T20:30:00.005-07:002012-05-12T20:30:34.450-07:00Week 16, Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman<b>Notes on Wole Soyinka’s <i>Death and the King’s Horseman</i></b><i><br /></i>This play deals in part with the inability or refusal of one culture to understand another that it has subordinated, but more importantly it deals with the reflection of a culture on its own traditions and values at a moment of crisis.<br /><br /><b>SCENE ONE</b><br />Briefly, we should note the joyous quality of this scene, the celebratory and processional quality of it. This is what Eleshin has lived for: this day. He and others around him know the significance of the day, and rejoice in the experience and understanding of it. It’s reaffirmative of life and their entire culture, reaffirmative of the continuity between the living and the dead, and it will keep the world centered. <br /><br /><b>SCENE TWO</b><br />3036-43. Sgt. Amusa is horrified when he sees Pilkings wearing a Yoruba mask. Amusa is supposed to have converted to Islam, but he is still astonished to see Pilkings disrespecting the culture from which he comes. It's obvious that the mask retains its power for him: "Sir, it is a matter of death. How can man talk against death to person in uniform of death? Is like talking against government to person in uniform of police." Much of this scene consists of Pilkings showing just how uncomprehending and insensitive he is regarding his colonial subjects. Amusa has collaborated in the repression of his people by helping to stamp out their customs, and Pilkings insults the man nonetheless. He also insults Joseph the servant, who is a Christian, on 3038. And on 3039, it seems that Joseph is the one who makes it clear precisely what may be going on in the Yoruba town: "You mean the chief who is going to kill himself?" This is news to Jane and Simon Pilkings. On 3041, Pilkings reveal something I find interesting about his attitude, and strangely, it turns out later that it would probably have been better for him to follow his own instincts rather than try to stop what's going on. He says, "I don't have to stop anything. If they want to throw themselves off the top of a cliff or poison themselves with the sake of some barbaric custom what is that to me? If it were ritual murder or something like that I'd be duty bound to do something." He sees the King and is Chieftain-servant as nuisances and doesn't really care what happens to them. All the while, the Brits are preparing for the evening's entertainment – a ceremonial ball in honor of his Royal Highness, who is visiting the colony.<br /><br /><b>SCENE THREE</b><br /><br />3043-47. The first half of the scene is devoted to something like a ritual humiliation of Amusa, who is clearly doing the bidding of his Imperial superiors. It is he who has tipped off the Europeans about what is happening here in the market. The women make potent jokes about his manhood or lack thereof, and it stings him to the quick. We notice that under stress, his speech alters markedly from the limited but standard British that he must speak around his employers to the mixed dialect of his own people. The little girls in particular are fun to listen to while they parody the British manner of talking and acting. That is on 3045-46. The older women rejoice in this little performance, seeing in it a great deal of strength and intelligence.<br /><br />3047-51. This half of the scene, by contrast to what has gone before, is a celebration of Eleshin's masculinity as he prepares for his end. He performs the act of generation with his bride, and then begins to dance and go into a trance with the assistance of the Praise-Singer. There is a question and answer session between those two as the women dance around them. This session seems to be meant to explain the true nature of what is happening and about to happen, and it attests to the readiness of Eleshin to carry out his final action. It is not difficult to catch the sense of connection between the members of this world and the next: the Praise-Singer's words about those who inhabit the other realm do not simply exalt them, but instead an implicit demand is made that they should treat Eleshin with honor.<br /><br /><b>SCENE FOUR</b><br /><br />3051-53. This scene opens with some British ceremony to contrast with the ritual preparation we have encountered in the first three scenes. The Resident shows himself to be a man of very little comprehension regarding Yoruba culture, even as an air of emergency is struck up at the very outset of the scene. All he can do is prattle on about how the natives like bright colors and hats. <br /><br />3054-55. More interesting is the conversation between Jane Pilkings and Olunde, which is both painful and illuminating: Jane thinks that going to Oxbridge must by now have dashed out all of the ancient culture in this young Nigerian man, but it quickly becomes clear that she is mistaken. Olunde asks, "And that is the good cause for which you desecrate an ancestral mask?" And he goes on to say "I discovered that you have no respect for what you do not understand." This is on page 3054. This mask is itself an emblem for the power of the ancestors and the importance of a meaningful death in this culture. It is a culture in which the dead are not finally dead and their spirits may even be alive in the bodies of their descendents. The death mask is not a trivial cover for pleasantries but rather a conduit that links the living to the dead. Furthermore, when Jane tells him about the British man who blew himself up going down with the ship in the harbor, the anecdote only serves to show how differently the two cultures regard death. Olunde thinks the British Capt.'s actions were justified, but Jane is horrified by them. Much of this Jane seems to regard as arrogance, which is a typical charge leveled by colonial masters against their subjects.<br /><br />3056-57. Olunde tries to explain what he has learned in Great Britain and from his own reflections as he matures. He tries to explain that his father Eleshin is "protected" by his own traditions and by what has already passed in the mind's eye. Apparently this is an important concept in Yoruba culture: Eleshin has already seen himself going through the ritual action he must perform; in his own eyes and in the eyes of others, he is already a dead man or rather he has passed on to another realm. He does not need protection from European authorities. Olunde's next point on 3056 is that what the white races are good at is survival, pure and simple. In other words, they can talk all they want about commerce, Christianity and civilization as did Dr. Livingston, but they are simply using others to survive. And a lot of their energy, he goes on to explain, is thrown into covering up this fundamental truth. White culture is a culture that thrives upon lying to itself about what it is up to. Olunde has learned the truth about European war from those who suffered through it in his studies as a medical student. We see that Olunde does not accept Europe's right to define his people in comparison to what the West offers as its own story.<br /><br />3058-59. Olunde reveals that he himself thinks as his father does. He says to Jane, "and anyway, my father has been dead in my mind for nearly a month. Ever since I learnt of the King's death. I've lived with my bereavement so long now that I cannot think of him alive. On that journey on the boat, I kept my mind on my duties as the one who must perform the rites over his body. I went through it all again and again in my mind as he himself had taught me." What the both of them need to do goes beyond individual human will or weakness or grief – it is, as he says, an action to be taken for the welfare of his people.<br /><br />3060-61. The confrontation between Olunde and his disgraced father is wrenching to contemplate. Olunde says only, "I have no father, eater of left-overs." The man he sees before him does not match the man he has come to contemplate and accept in his mind's eye. Neither does Eleshin think any better of himself. He has failed in what he has spent his entire life preparing to do, and that's all that matters to him now. Jane is at least sympathetic, though I don't think she really understands what's going on. This scene, which began with British pomp and pleasantry, now shows no trace of ceremony at all – just the stark confrontation between father and son.<br /><br /><b>SCENE FIVE</b><br /><br />3061-65. Eleshin tries to explain to Pilkings exactly what he has done by preventing the ritual sacrifice. It is not merely a personal tragedy, but the world is no longer able to sleep, it is not at peace. Eleshin says that there was a particular moment related to the location of the moon that was to be his sign to move on to the next realm. The spirits had given him notice to prepare and be on his way. Yoruba religion is not particularly hierarchical, with a transcendent God or set of gods, but instead relations between this world and the other are transactional and constant. In other words, the two realms communicate. I think that's the case with a lot of cultures – it certainly would be a good description of the way the Greeks regarded the realm of Hades, this world, and Mount Olympus above. Each realm has its own prerogatives but is in communication with the others. There is no more center or security now: Eleshin says, "The world is set adrift and its inhabitants are lost. Around them, there is nothing but emptiness." He sees Olunde as his avenger – the young man has learned the white man's ways, and will find some means to make things, if not right, then at least not so unbearable. On 3063, Pilkings attempts to wield Yoruba sayings against Eleshin, but fails.<br /><br />3164-65. Even so, as Eleshin explains to his own bride, there is a sting in what Pilkings had said. He tells his bride, "You were the final gift of the living to their emissary to the land of the ancestors, and perhaps your warmth and youth brought new insights of this world to me and turned my feet leaden on this side of the abyss. For I confess to you, daughter, my weakness came not merely from the abomination of the white man who came violently into my fading presence, there was also a weight of longing on my earth-held limbs. This is something like a Garden of Gethsemane moment, wherein Jesus was tempted to let the cup pass, tempted to avoid the sacrifice he knew in his heart must be made. Except that Jesus passed that test – his humanity did not keep him from accepting the heroic burden. Eleshin is very hard on himself; he feels that he has utterly failed in his duty towards his people and his king. He does not use the white man Pilkings as a means of escaping this disgrace. On 3065, Iyaloja is allowed into Eleshin's presence, and humiliates him but at the same time explains accurately the consequences of his failure.<br /><br />3066-67. Iyaloja insists that Eleshin has revoked his own heroic status, and become a coward and slave to the European colonists. His life had been spent preparing for this moment of following the King as his loyal horseman, and because that was so he was treated royally, eating the best food, dressing in great style, and garnering tremendous respect from everyone around him. His whole life was a celebration in preparation for ceremonial death. He has now rendered his life meaningless. At the bottom of 3066, Eleshin again explains what he thinks is the source of the weakness that struck him down: "It is when the alien hand pollutes the source of will, when a stranger's force of violence shatters the mind's calm resolution, this is when a man is made to commit the awful treachery of relief, commit in his thought the unspeakable blasphemy of seeing the hand of the gods in this alien rupture of his world." He almost saw the intrusion of Pilkings as divine intervention. The question that Iyaloja asks Eleshin is filled with terrible import to him: "Whose trunk withers to give sap to the other? The parent shoot or the younger?" Iyaloja knows that Olunde will sacrifice himself because Eleshin has failed to do his duty. The younger man must lose his vigor and even his life to make up for what the father has done.<br /><br />3068-71. The only thing left is for the death of Olunde to be attested. His body is the burden of which Iyaloja had spoken rather cryptically moments before. Eleshin must impart a secret message to the body of his son. There is no comfort for Eleshin in any of this, I suppose, for Iyaloja says to him, "The son has proved the father Eleshin, and there is nothing left in your mouth to gnash but infant gums." As Iyaloja explains directly after Eleshin strangles himself before anyone can stop him, even in the other realm, he will be treated as a lesser man than his son. There is no final redemption, no real relief at the point of death for this unhappy man. He has become the emblem of a disrespected culture. In the end, I believe Wole Soyinka is not writing only to protest imperial domination of his homeland, though that would by no means be an illegitimate thing to do. The tragedy that Eleshin suffers is indeed related to that domination, but it is not simply caused by it. His suffering and disgrace also have to do with Yoruba culture itself, for it is first and foremost within that culture that he has failed. And the weakness he describes is, I think it's fair to say, universal in its nature. It is the stuff that led Nikos Kazantzakis to write The Last Temptation of Christ. And what is that last temptation? Simply the desire to live one's life, not to be a hero, to give in to the attractions of this world. This is a harsh burden that many cultures, perhaps all of them, would impose upon the distinguished.<br />Alfred J. Drakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16752305052112968118noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2631470257360454237.post-44747218599855464662012-05-12T20:28:00.003-07:002012-05-12T20:28:45.364-07:00Week 15, Dadaists, Kafka, Borowski<b>Dadaism Notes</b><br /><b>Tristan Tzara</b><br />Perhaps I should not reduce what Tzara says to something that makes sense too easily, but here goes anyway: abolition of everything that has gone before, including logic, reason, order. It isn’t difficult to see how this movement can be distinguished from modernism –when the author calls for the “abolition of the prophets,” he is suggesting that spontaneity is far more important than knowing the future. The point is that a prophetic speaker speaks from profound understanding of the past and is making a prediction about the future; this kind of speaker would have a firm grip on reality, one that reaffirms reality. That is not what our author here is advocating. There is also something of an attack upon meaning itself; perhaps we can generalize the author’s phrase “lively satisfaction of knowing that it doesn’t matter” to cover just about everything he says. We might at first suppose that writing a manifesto of this sort and rejecting the past strips the present of any chance to become authentic, grounded on something stable, but that seems to be precisely the point. Dadaism talks a lot about spontaneity, and in a sense it is an attack upon the very concept of “meaning.” it is not trying to establish a new set of permanent conventions, a new and stable order of representation. Refer to Tristan Tzara’s “Proclamation Without Pretension”: he uses the word “BEAUTIFUL” to signify such a stable order. It also seems that he keeps multiplying his definitions of Dadaism – that makes sense because simple new definitions must not emerge.<br /><br />On the eve of the Second World War, Walter Benjamin wrote something in “The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction” that may be appropriate here: Benjamin was interested in the potential of modern technology to liberate art and its audiences from the shackles of the past. Benjamin saw the problem with conventional museum art being that it tended to support the values of the period in which it was produced. Conventional art is inherently conservative. It ratifies the reality of which it speaks or that it presents visually.<br /><br />When Dadaists conjure reality, they tend to use shocking images and dream sequences –there is a pronounced Freudian tendency in Tristan Tzara’s work and in Dadaism generally. Liberation is to be achieved from anything that ties us to the given order of things and to the given ways of doing things. Including art itself, which takes as its goal permanent defamiliarization. In that sense, Dadaism is revolutionary: consider Leon Trotsky’s notion of permanent revolution rather than a one-time event.<br /><br /><b>Kurt Schwitters</b><br />In “Anna Blume,” the author plays with pronouns in an unconventional way to suggest something like union with the beloved, but the effect is whimsical rather than solemn as in more conventional poetry. He makes an intimate association between the lady’s name and her qualities. This poem is on the one hand sensuous and sensual and yet it refuses easy definition, makes it impossible to get an ordinary realistic sense of what the lady looks like: how else are we to understand a line such as “Blue is the color of your yellow hair”? The poet does not want to capture his love object conceptually so that she is reduced to something ordinary and predictable, just another traditional, conventional Petrarchan lady. This woman’s very name “drips like softest tallow,” which suggests on the poet’s part a desire to refuse even the conventional signification implied by a name.<br /><b> </b><br />
<b>Paul Élouard</b><br />I like “The Mirror Of A Moment” because it suggests something like what I was saying when addressing Tristan Tzara’s manifesto: I mean that it emphasizes the present but not in a way that allows it to become solid. What do mirrors do? Mirrors present or represent reality to us without alteration, seemingly fixing it in stone. The point is to experience the present but not to solidify it and make it available for the future in some stale manner. All descriptions, all definitions, in the Dadaist context –pardon the phrase –must be self-confounding.<br /><br /><b>André Breton</b><br />“Free Union.” This is a descriptive and erotic poem that illustrates very well what I was just saying about Tzara’s manifesto and the brief poem by Élouard –we get a series of very descriptive and overlapping images, but those images do not add up to a coherent picture of the beloved. They are not supposed to. The body of the lover is generative rather than reducible to a solid set of qualities or shapes.<br /><br />“Vigilance.” This poem has something like a narrative. It suggests that the poet is on a quest of some sort involving reduction by fire, or purification, and then entering a ship of infinite possibilities. Humanity is torn, unwoven, and everything is reduced to “a shell of lace in the perfect shape of a breast.”<br /><br /><b>Aimé Césaire</b><br />I gather from his selections a sense of the effect of wild nature on language and logic – it’s very much like automatic writing, as the Norton editors suggested.<br /><br /><b>Joyce Mansour</b><br />Counter-reduction might be the goal here – is often said that man objectify women, reduce them to what they want them to be. Mansour does something like that to her imagined male object as well.<br />
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<b>Notes on Franz Kafka</b><br />
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<i><b>Metamorphosis</b></i>There is no shortage in literary history of strange transformations. There is The Metamorphosis by Roman poet Ovid, and there is The Golden Ass by another Roman poet, Apuleius. But in those texts, the strange transformations didn’t happen without a reason that the poet cared to explain –magic was involved, or the transformed person had been trying to escape from someone pursuing him or her, or was being punished for something done. That is not the case with Kafka. His protagonist has nothing but a disorderly dream as warning for his transformation. The story, as the Norton editors point out, is not allegorical – it is not a tale in which we are to translate the concrete, material image of a creature into some abstract quality, as when we say a lion stands for courage, and so forth. It is tempting to turn the entire story into an allegory that way, into a story that involves the coming-to-consciousness of the protagonist to his previous situation. But the problem with doing that is that Kafka focuses so intently upon the present situation. We are less concerned about the old person than we are about the current insect. I am not even sure that this “insect” is allowed to reflect a great deal on the changes that come over the members of his family as they gradually reject him. He does have powers of reflection, but obviously this is not a narrative from which he is going to emerge alive and a wiser man, or even a wiser insect. The transformation creates an impossible situation which turns fatal, as we might have expected.<br />
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<b>Tadeusz Borowski<br /><br />“Ladies and Gentlemen, to the Gas”</b><br />The worst thing about what the author describes is that it all points towards an “order of things,” not simple chaos or wild accident. People do terrible things, crimes of passion and greed are committed, and so forth, but here in the Nazi death camps we have a well-machined, competently staffed system for dehumanizing people and destroying them in the most efficient manner. And while the narrator mentions “pity” as a reason for trying to deceive the victims into thinking that they’re only going to be entering a new life instead of being marched to their deaths, I think that motive applies only to the prisoner-guards, not to the Nazis themselves: their inhumanity shows that their immediate motive for deception would have been crowd control. They wanted doomed people to do as they were told, so they needed to convince those people that things were somehow on the path to normalcy. Otherwise, chaos and unruly violence could have broken out. But it gets worse – there are unmistakable signs of a diabolical “theater of cruelty” in the behavior and language of the Nazi Offiziere and Soldaten: they take sadistic delight in using the language and gestures of civility and then lashing out with barbarous vigor at their victims. Why did they do that? Well, at one level it may have been a desperate, successful attempt on their part to maintain distance from what they were doing: turn it into a highly efficient, often repeated bit of theater, and you’re just playing a role again and again, a role that doesn’t touch you. Partly such theater seems intended to justify what’s being done, as when the Nazis invoked medical and legal language and procedure to condemn people and perform outrageous experiments on them – a show trial or a doctor’s stamp of approval allowed them to do anything they wanted. Or maybe it’s still worse in the current case, in the camps and on the loading platforms – making “theater” of the whole affair might be said to deepen or heighten its reality: the stage has that effect, you know. Children play-act to prolong the satisfaction of the game, and adults sometimes do the same. Borowski describes well how the guards banter pleasantly with one another even as they prepare to brutalize the poor souls who roll in with each train – you’d think they were on a picnic, the way they carry on amongst their peers. Try watching The Wannsee Conference, a film that chronicles the matter-of-fact way in which key Nazi officials decided on the nuts and bolts details of the Endlösung der Judenfrage (“Final Solution of the Jewish Question”) we know as the Shoah or Holocaust.<br /><br />It isn’t hard to see the relevance of Kafka’s body of work here: we have an unapproachable order like the ones in his novels – an irrational and yet very efficiently managed bureaucracy against which a lone individual (or even a large group of individuals) is entirely powerless. We also confront the issue of guilt, of complicity in one’s own oppression and the oppression of others: everything comes to resemble a human food chain, with each person doing what is necessary to survive. What the Nazis announced in bold black and red was the death of the human spirit itself, or at least the death of all parts of it except what allows for the most sadistic and depraved acts imaginable. <br /><br />A number of representative acts are crammed into Borowski’s brief account about being a prisoner tasked with unloading and processing the human “cargo” that came rolling in on the railroad tracks regularly to be exploited and destroyed immediately or after an agonizing stint as industrial or agricultural slaves. Guards tossing live disabled children onto a heap of corpses for immediate burning; mothers driven to abandon their children and then reproached for their “unnaturalness” in wanting to survive; crowds confined in cattle cars, gasping for air and crying for water. It’s a hellish vision created entirely by Germans who have stomped the humanity out of themselves with their own jackboots, and forcibly perpetuated in the actions of some of their prisoners, who do what they must to survive.<br /><br /><br /><br />Alfred J. Drakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16752305052112968118noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2631470257360454237.post-70718753124139658612012-05-12T20:24:00.003-07:002012-05-12T20:24:43.752-07:00Week 14, Garcia Lorca, Borges, Neruda<b>Notes on Federio Garcia Lorca</b><br />Lorca was a tragic figure – a Spanish Andalusian poet who was executed by General Francisco Franco's fascist squads at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 (when Lorca was 38 years old), a war that Hitler used as a trial run for further violence, a training ground for his own army. Franco put down the leftists in Spain and continued until the early 1970s as Spain's dictatorial ruler. Truth and art are often casualties of war, and Garcia Lorca's bitter end proves it.<br /><br />Still, he left behind a lot of writing, and what's included in our anthology is the "Lament for ISM." Mejias was not only a bullfighter but a Renaissance man, learned and cultured. That's the capacity in which FGL knew and mourned him. A traditional elegy laments and memorializes a beloved person – consider Milton's "Lycidas" for his Cambridge University friend Edward King, or Tennyson's In Memoriam AHH for Arthur Henry Hallam, or Shelley's "Adonais," an elegy for John Keats.<br /><br />Structurally, the poem is interesting, with its deep-song refrain of "at five o'clock in the afternoon." That time is the point at which ISM's whole life comes together and ends. He was gored by a bull and it took a while for him to die. Gangrene was involved. The first section concerns the events leading up to "five" when ISM passes away from his wounds.<br /><br />In translation as in the original, there's a mixed quality to the poem. The images are both starkly material and beautiful – the processes that lead to death aren't pretty, and FGL confronts that fact. To get any lasting value from his friend's death, and properly pay his respects, he must regard death as a brute fact and acknowledging the dissolution of the body is part of that. Near the poem's beginning, FGL covers the things one does in Spanish culture when a person is about to die. A lot of what's recounted in this vein is not aesthetically pleasing, of course: death lays eggs in the wound, gangrene sets in, and so forth. There is an element of realism here not entirely unlike Flaubert's description of Emma Bovary's death by arsenic poisoning.<br /><br />In the second section, which begins with the speaker's perspective – "I will not see it" – we come to an attitude of defiant refusal, or denial. He hasn't yet accepted the fact that ISM is dead; he must accept this w/o flowery rhetoric eventually. At line 78, we get a sense of the perspective of ISM himself; that perspective is confusing, rendered in alienation: "he sought for his beautiful body and encountered his open wound." He looks for what he was, but he has already been transfigured. The body and its processes begin to open out into death itself, blood spurting on the ground and everywhere. <br /><br />Blood is mentioned often, and it spills out into the natural environs. Natural dissolution has begun and must take its course. See line 124: "Now he sleeps without end …. now his blood comes out singing …." The second section ends with such references, and still the speaker says, "I will not see it." Blood is life's source, but here exsanguination connects the human body with the natural environment. Perhaps the need here is to face up to the stark reality, the eternity, of death itself. Blood may connect us, but to say that isn't to say that the conscious self or ego survives the dissolution of the body. Consciousness seems here to be extinguished utterly: ISM "sleeps without end" (). Admitting this will be the precondition for paying a worthy tribute to the bullfighter. <br /><br />So if consciousness doesn't last, what does? Sections 3 and 4 seem like they're going to continue the theme of dissolution: "We are here …" and "All is finished," etc. But they are moving us forward along with the poet. One of the striking things about confronting the body of a beloved person is that the body becomes stone-like in its coldness, a dead person becomes like stone. ISM lies upon the stone as if he becomes one with it – the opposite of a soft, living body. But the stone won't dissolve anytime soon, while the body will quickly perish and decay. <br /><br />In the last few sections, it's revealed that much of what we try to do by way of memorializing the dead winds up instead paying tribute to the obliteration of the beloved. An old gravestone becomes a marker of forgetting rather than remembrance. In ancient cemeteries, they used to dig up the bodies buried long before to make way for the newly dead. Hamlet is a fine example of that: the sexton is digging up an already-occupied space (Yorick, among others) to make way for the body of Ophelia. <br /><br />In the last part of the poem, we are told that "the bull does not know you …" and that ISM has "died forever," which becomes the refrain. But FGL sings of him and his great qualities, among them the willingness to confront the prospect of death. "No te conosce nadie, pero yo te canto." What is known, then, what is being sung? Not you but about you. FGL apparently agrees with the traditional claim that poetry can do something stone can't. See Shakespeare's Sonnet 55 to the fair young man, which begins<br /><br />Not marble, nor the gilded monuments<br />Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;<br />But you shall shine more bright in these contents<br />Than unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time.<br /><br />It isn't Mejias the bullfighter but an archetype of excellence that will be sung and that will survive. But the poet only gets to that point by admitting that the living, breathing person is in fact gone. Once that's achieved, he comes round to the task of properly memorializing him as an archetype of grace, excellence and courage. Death is the absolute limit that must be confronted, which on the poet's part entails a rejection of sentimentality or flowery rhyme.<br />
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<b>Notes on Jorge Luis Borges </b><br />Borges was Argentinian born, and spent much time in Europe. He fared badly during the regime of Juan Peron since Borges was more closely allied with the Left than the Peronistas were willing to tolerate. See page 2412: "In 1946 the Peron regime removed him from the librarian's post" and moved him over to the job of "chicken inspector." Buck buck buck!! But later on he fared much better. In each life some chickens will cluck. His amanuensis in later years, by the way, was Alberto Manguel, who wrote an interesting book called A History of Reading. <br /><br />Borges is the antithesis of a realist, though the present story reads clearly enough, and is rather like detective fiction: here's the official account, and here's the truth about how the info was obtained to bomb this little town. He rejects the idea that art must copy life, must tie itself to a realistic representation of life in all its banality and ideological pushiness. He's more of a philosophical artist, a postmodernist of sorts. A realistic author like Jane Austen or Gustave Flaubert, after all, writes in the basic belief that life is intelligible and unified and that one can, therefore, represent it coherently and accurately, more or less in linear fashion, well-sketched and consistent characters, etc. But maybe that's too tidy and excludes everything that doesn't add to the unity-and-coherence effect. One ideological reason for this is that such an author may not really want things to change, though that's not entirely fair since you could say that first you have to recognize how things are in the first place. Still, it's at least arguable that the realistic agenda ties one to or makes one complicit in the perpetuation of what is represented. Borges as a man of the Left is interested in social and political change. <br /><br />Borges isn't describing a reality but many, but inventing new worlds upon worlds, promoting the free play of imagination. That is a Surrealist thing to advocate in the name of change, and of course we often say that Borges inspired a great deal of Latin America's magical realism, itself a species of literary surrealism relying on the juxtaposition of alternate realities. History, myth, any source of insight will be placed on the same level – a fact I believe the Norton editors refer to. The productions of imagination are granted their own reality, probably because doing that encourages a brand of literature less tied to the way things supposedly "just are" and more allied with possibilities.<br /><br />The story itself begins by referring to actual textbook history: "You will read that an attack … had to be postponed …" But let Borges' narrator tell us what really happened. This something that really happened sounds like it's scripted by the Freudian Unheimlich, the shock of recognition of something mysterious. His own past is what causes this shock -- his grandfather was writing a book about the constitution of time and eventuality. He becomes a character in that book, at least by projection, as if the present had already been predicted. Yu Tsun had no idea that he was going to find out about this secret of his ancestral past, but he finds out all the same. He was in Staffordshire with Rudeberg and they are caught, pursued by the Irishman Madden, a detective who has been seeking them out. Why has he done what he's done, acting as a spy? "I wanted to prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies" (2415). He possesses the name of the town that the Germans must bomb because it has an artillery park is Albert. The only way to convey it is to kill a man named Stephen Albert since his last name matches. Madden is looking for him, and Tsun knows he'll eventually be caught. Can he get to Stephen Albert first? That's the thing. But Albert happens to be a sinologist. Tsun can only get to the house by means of a maze, which is uncanny because that's what his grandfather's book was about. Uncanny, and it all keeps coming back to the protagonists personally and to their own history, these great events of history. See 2416 bottom.<br /><br />What will we learn? Well, we will learn why Tsun's grandfather wrote the book, why he made such a project of time. The story's burden is to explain the alternate conception of reality and time that Tsun's grandfather had come up with. It's Stephen Albert who enlightens Tsun about his own past. I suppose the both of them are living out one version of reality. The grandfather had, after all, been killed by the hand of another, just as Stephen Albert will be. As it turns out, the book and the labyrinth are the same thing, and Albert has figured it out: an entirely different way of dealing with temporality, with narrative. The garden was the "chaotic novel" (2419). Well, as Yogi Berra says, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." In Borges-world, you can hardly do otherwise! Or how about, "That place isn't popular anymore – everybody goes there"? Many futures, infinite possibilities, and they all happen. It's almost as if what the old man Pen' was on to was something like today's "string theory," which tries to bring together quantum mechanics and general relativity.<br /><br /><b>Notes on Pablo Neruda</b><br />As for politics, well, Neruda’s a Chilean. As I’ve probably mentioned, America has a long and troubled history in central and south American politics. We have generally supported the business and military interests that suit us, not necessarily the ones that would improve life for people in Chile, or Peru, or Costa Rica, or wherever in Latin America. United Fruit was huge in central America, and in Chile, for instance, you had to reckon with Anaconda and its mining interests. Such multinationals aren’t interested in nation-states except as a hindrance to the flow of capital where they – the companies – want it to go, a hindrance to how they want to deal with labor arrangements and standards, and so forth. When Chile got its independence from Spain in the 1820’s, things may have looked promising, but then the Brits stepped in and got control of many of Chile’s resources, and of course the USA had interests of its own, so we tried to foil the Brits. Anyway, it gets ugly and complicated, and the worst of it is probably our campaign to discredit Salvador Allende, Chile’s socialist but legitimately elected president, in 1973. After that, Augusto Pinochet established a military dictatorship. I don’t know that the CIA planned the coup itself, but it’s obvious that the US benefited from the change and that the militarists were encouraged by the money and effort we put into destabilizing Allende’s presidency.<br /><br />Neruda became very much a “poet of the people.” But that title seems to come in the course of his political development towards leftism. He starts off as a love & nature poet, moves on to the impure/pure poetry debate, with the “impurists” being something like advocates for surrealist description of objects, not “ego-centered.” That’s not the same thing as realism, of course: the point is rather, I think, to embrace the fully human and reject the too-well-arranged and centered self of the bourgeois ideologue, and to embrace heterogeneity of the object world. See “Walking Around” for this influence (2443-44). In André Breton’s 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, dreams and free imagination take precedence over waking, orderly reality and its prim associations between one thing and another. In the visual arts, think Salvador Dalí. Openness to contradiction is vital. Neruda writes, <br /><br />"Let that be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand's obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law or beyond it.<br /><br />A poetry impure as the clothing we wear, or our bodies, soup-stained, soiled with our shameful behavior, our wrinkles and vigils and dreams, observations and prophesies, declarations of loathing and love, idylls and beasts, the shocks of encounter, political loyalties, denials and doubts, affirmations and taxes.<br /><br />The holy canons of madrigal, the mandates of touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing, the passion for justice, sexual desire, the sea sounding, willfully rejecting and accepting nothing: the deep penetration of things in the transports of love, a consummate poetry soiled by the pigeon's claw, ice-marked and tooth-marked, bitten delicately with our sweatdrops and usage, perhaps. Till the instrument so restlessly played yields us the comfort of its surfaces, and the woods show the knottiest suavities shaped by the pride of the tool. Blossom and water and wheat kernel share one precious consistency: the sumptuous appeal of the tactile.<br /><br />Source: "Toward an Impure Poetry," [date 1935] in Pablo Neruda, Five Decades: A Selection ( Poems: 1925-1970), translated by Ben Belitt (New York, Grove Press, 1974), pp. xxi-xxii.<br /><br />But as he develops, Neruda’s belief in the material-reality-rendering possibilities of language really comes into full play: see “I’m explaining a few things” (2445-46). Why is he rejecting flowery erotic or pastoral poesy? Well, “Come and see the blood in the streets” of Spain during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. That’s the imperative – to bring together the ordinary people against a fascist such as General Franco, whose rule, unfortunately, outlasted his allies Hitler and Mussolini right on through the early 1970s.<br /><br />In the portion of Canto General that we have, the great Andes mountain, Macchu Picchu, at once seems to swallow up humanity and to become the symbol of its permanence, the permanence of Peruvian and indeed Latin American culture, in spite of what the Spaniards did to the Incas, Maya, Aztecs and other early civilizations. “The Heights” and its imagery, as the editors point out, works against pure linearity as a principle of understanding history; the technique is instead to amalgamate or fuse many memories, many images, many periods into something like a unified vision founded on hope for the future. This is a mainstay of Latin American literature, with its emphasis on what’s often called “magical realism.” The past is never entirely lost; it haunts the present but also affords vision and opportunity to those who are willing to confront and embrace it rather than deny it. All you need do is read Marquez’s Cento Años de Soledad to realize that.<br />Alfred J. Drakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16752305052112968118noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2631470257360454237.post-54702330741559722672012-05-12T20:22:00.001-07:002012-05-12T20:22:26.077-07:00Week 13, Kawabata YasunariI haven't found the time to type up my notes for a blog entry on this author. I may do so in future.Alfred J. Drakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16752305052112968118noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2631470257360454237.post-85896304162357748152012-04-15T18:33:00.001-07:002012-04-15T18:33:24.441-07:00Week 12, Thomas Mann's Death in Venice<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">NOTES ON <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">DEATH IN VENICE</i></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">Chapter<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>1 (1840-43)</span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">Von Aschenbach is taking a
walk through Munich when we first meet him, and ends up reading the headstones
in stonemasons' shops.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His work, which
is that of a writer, demands "particular discretion, caution, penetration,
and precision of will" 1841).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is
a meticulous craftsman.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The sight of a
foreign traveler, even if the man is hostile, provokes von Aschenbach into a
state of imagination and wanderlust.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He
envisions tropical landscapes, primitive wildernesses and so forth (1841).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is left when this vision fades
successfully attempting to rationalize his need to travel somewhere beyond the
mountain "rustic country house" (1842) that has been his only retreat
over the years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is aware of a
"growing lassitude, about which no one could be allowed to know"
(1842) and which must not be allowed to impact or diminish the value of his
meticulous work as a writer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is a
perfectionist, and for this quality, we are told, "he had curbed and
cooled his emotions, because he knew that emotion inclines one to satisfaction
with a comfortable approximation, a half of perfection" (1842
bottom).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He has attained mastery as a
writer, but even he feels that his work lacks "those earmarks of a fiery,
playful fancy" (1843) that his audience might appreciate even more than
perfection.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So von Aschenbach decides to
do some safe traveling for a month or so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The stranger who prompted this decision is by now nowhere to be found.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Chapter 2 (1843, 48)</span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">The picture that emerges of
von Aschenbach is that of a bourgeois intellectual whose art has grown
dignified and respectable with age, to the point where they're including him
now in the German educational system's equivalent of standard textbooks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is the son of a civil servant and his
mother was a Bohemian music director's daughter (1843 bottom-44 top).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The author describes von Aschenbach's
literary ascendancy in ideal terms, so that he seems like the very pattern of
success as a career or professional author.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He aims to please the general public as well as a younger and more
challenging audience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Again and again,
the author sets forth the strong work ethic of this writer: "he was not so
much born for constant exertion as he was called to it (1844 middle).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He plans to live a long life so that his
writing me deal with all the phases of a long life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What he possesses is not so much what we
might call romantic genius as a Protestant work ethic imported into the realm
of artistic creation (1845 top).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His own
watchword, we are told, is that "nearly everything achieving greatness did
so under the banner of 'Despite' – despite grief and suffering…" (1845
middle).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is a kind of passiveness
to his whole ethos, for which the author St. Sebastian the martyr.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To me, the most significant passage in this
chapter is the following: "von Aschenbach was the poet of all those who
work on the edge of exhaustion, of the overburdened, worn down moralists of
achievement who nonetheless still stand tall, those who, stunted in growth and
short of means, use ecstatic feats of will and clever management to extract
from themselves at least for a period of time the effects of greatness"
(1846 top).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It seems to me that this
sort of description damns von Aschenbach with faint praise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His sort of greatness so-called is the only
sort recognized by the mass of people he aims to please.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is the only sort recognized by his age,
apparently.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That does not necessarily
make it a genuine greatness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is
extremely clear towards the end of the first paragraph on 1846.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What is one to say about an author whose
career can be summed up as a "defiant rise to dignity, beyond any twinge
of doubt and of irony that might have stood in his way" (1846 middle)?</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Around the time we learn that
he is appearing in anthologies, we learn that he married only to have his wife
die young.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He also has a daughter (18 47
3/4).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the end of the chapter, the
author explains the difference between art and other kinds of experience:
"Art offers a deeper happiness, but it consumes one more quickly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It engraves upon the faces of its servants
the traces of imaginary, mental adventures and… Engenders in them a nervous
sensitivity, and over-refinement, a weariness and an inquisitiveness such as are
scarcely ever produced by a life full of extravagant passions and
pleasures" (1848 top).</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">Chapter 3 (1848-66)</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">Von Aschenbach decides upon a
visit to Venice after he becomes disappointed with the Adriatic island he had
originally fixed on (1848).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Venice is an
exotic and ancient place, and easy enough to get to for any European.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An eminently logical decision on the part of
the good professor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But we are soon made
aware that this trip is not going to be a three-week tour, to borrow a line
from Gilligan's Island.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The eerie
appearance of an old merrymaker unsettles von Aschenbach: "scarcely had
Aschenbach gotten a closer look at him when he realized with something like
horror that this youth was not genuine" (1849).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The merrymaker is an elderly man dressed up
with the trappings of youth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is inappropriate,
untimely.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wouldn't everyone around him
notice?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Asks von Aschenbach to himself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"It seemed to him that things were
starting to take a turn away from the ordinary, as if a dreamy estrangement, a
bizarre distortion of the world were setting in…" (1850 top).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Approaching Venice from the sea is a
remarkable sight, finds von Aschenbach, but with regard to that elderly
merrymaker, things only get more unsettling: the old fellow has had too much to
drink and can't hold his liquor, so he makes a perfect fool of himself with
obscene gestures and inappropriate gregariousness (1851 middle), which
culminates in some babbling about beloveds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The affinity between this old reveler and von Aschenbach will, of
course, become ruefully apparent as the novella develops.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Von Aschenbach wants to go to
the steamer landing, but his squirrely gondolier is determined to take him to
the Lido because the steamer will not accept luggage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A contest of wills follows (1853-54).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As soon as von Aschenbach lands and the
gondolier takes off without collecting his fee, we find out that he did not
have a license.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nothing is as it should
be; everything is "odd" (1855 top).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The narrator makes an interesting remark about the difference between
introspective people and ordinary people: "A lonely, quiet person has
observations and experiences that are at once both more indistinct and more
penetrating than those of one more gregarious; his thoughts are weightier,
stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Images and perceptions that others might shrug off with a glance, a
laugh, or a brief conversation occupy him unduly, become profound in his
silence, become significant, become experience, adventure, emotion" (1854
bottom-55 top).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This kind of distinction
should clue us in to the way Thomas Mann is going to treat conceptual
oppositions, neither simply approving nor condemning them.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Von Aschenbach soon takes his
fateful first glance at the young Polish boy with whom he will soon become
obsessed: "Aschenbach noted with astonishment that the boy was perfectly
beautiful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His face, pale and gracefully
reserved, was framed by honey-colored curls.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He had a straight nose and a lovely mouth and wore an expression of
exquisite, divine solemnity" (1855).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Already von Aschenbach is comparing him to Greek statues.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is not entirely certain whether this boy
is in poor health or simply pampered, but von Aschenbach, we are told, believes
the second hypothesis: "There is inborn in every artistic disposition an
indulgent and treacherous tendency to accept injustice when it produces beauty
and to respond with complicity and even admiration when the aristocrats of this
world get preferential treatment" (1856).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The immediate effect of this vision upon him is something like
intellectual stimulation, and von Aschenbach initially dismisses the whole
affair: he "ultimately concluded that his thoughts and discoveries
resembled those inspirations that come in dreams: they seem wonderful at the
time, but in the sober light of day they show up as utterly shallow and
useless" (1857 middle).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Nonetheless, his dreams seem disturbed after this initial meeting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is at this point that we hear about the
stultifying, sultry and stagnant atmosphere in Venice, a phenomenon with which
von Aschenbach is familiar since he has been to Venice before and left the
place on account of the unhealthy weather.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Soon, von Aschenbach is
remarking upon "the truly godlike beauty possessed by this mortal
child" (1858 middle), and deciding that he will stay longer in spite of
the weather.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The narrator lets us in on
the fact that von Aschenbach has always felt a love of the sea, thanks to its
indistinct and vague qualities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"It
was a forbidden affinity, directly contrary to his calling, and seductive
precisely for that reason" (1859).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That is, his cultivation of meticulous stylistic perfection as a writer
contrasts with his love of the immeasurable void.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, no sooner are we let in on this
insight than the void is traversed by none other than Tadzio: "the
horizontal line of the sea's edge was crossed by a human figure" (1859
middle).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is evident that the boy
can't stand the sight of a Russian family, which only adds to his attractiveness
to von Aschenbach.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of the child's
playmates kisses him, which leads von Aschenbach to quote from Xenophon (1860
bottom).</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">This way of interpreting the
boy's every move and appearance becomes more intense soon enough: "The
sight of this lively adolescent figure, seductive and chaste, lovely as a
tender young god, emerging from the depths of the sky and the sea with dripping
locks and escaping the clutches of the elements – it all gave rise to mythic
images" (1861 top).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At this point,
what are we to make of language such as, "A paternal kindness, an
emotional attachment filled and moved his heart, the attachment that someone
who produces beauty at the cost of intellectual self-sacrifice feels toward
someone who naturally possesses beauty" (1861 middle)?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is still the language of Platonism, and
has about it the air of a rationalization of erotic interest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As the weather worsens, von Aschenbach
decides that the sickness attending upon the weather is too great to bear (1862
middle).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He really must leave this
place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Von Aschenbach consumes his final
meal at the hotel, and just as he finishes, Tadzio walks by, prompting the
scholar to bless the boy under his breath (1863 bottom).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And he thinks that's the end of it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it really isn't since he finds
unacceptable that he has now twice been forced by his body's limitations to
abandon this place that seems so conducive to the formulation and flourishing
of ideals and spirit (1864 middle).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But
a problem with his luggage solves the greater problem with his anguish over
having to leave Venice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Back to the
hotel he goes (1865 top).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Von Aschenbach
is not entirely unaware that his difficulty in leaving had most of all to do
with the young boy he has taken such an interest in: "He felt the
excitement in his blood, the joy and pain in his soul, and recognized that it
was because of Tadzio that his departure had been so difficult" (1866
top).</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">Chapter 4 (1866-74)</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">The narrator's language
becomes more and more imbued with mythic quality to characterize the state of
von Aschenbach's mind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>See the very
beginning of the chapter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tadzio is now
the almost constant object of his attentions (1867 middle).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most of page 1868 is taken up with a detailed
description of the child's appearance as if he were a Greek statue.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And then follows this effusion: "Image
and mirror!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His eyes embraced the noble
figure there on the edge of the blue, and in a transport of delight he thought
his gaze was grasping beauty itself, the pure form of divine thought, the
universal and pure perfection that lives in the spirit and which here, graceful
and lovely, presented itself for worship in the form of a human likeness and
exemplar" (1868 bottom).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>See also
what is said about the way the sun "turns our attention from intellectual
to sensuous matters" (1868 bottom).</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">Will add notes on Chapter 5 if time permits.... </span></div>Alfred J. Drakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16752305052112968118noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2631470257360454237.post-38270833159746475962012-04-15T18:31:00.001-07:002012-04-15T18:31:09.730-07:00Week 11, Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author<b>Notes on Luigi Pirandello’s <i>Six Characters in Search of an Author</i></b><i><br /></i>Traditionally, theater has been theorized as providing distance from “real life” so as to afford us perspective and intelligibility. Paradoxically, it achieves this distance by means of emotional intensity – dramatic illusion is actually part of the mechanics, I suppose, necessary to the moral and didactic aims of theater. Aristotle (384-22 BCE) says that of the six elements of a play (plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, and song), by far the most important is plot, or mythos. That’s because the plot arranges the incidents of the drama to provide us with the pattern of a single coherent action that rivets our attention, eliciting pity (éleos) and fear or terror (phóbos); the process as a whole leads to catharsis (cleansing, purification, etc.) and, at least in the usual interpretation, teaches us something about ourselves and our relationship to other human beings and to the divine realms.<br /><br />What Pirandello explores in the present play is not so much the erasure of the usual distinction between art and the rest of life, but rather an experimental alteration in the logic of dramatic illusion. It has become characteristic of post-modern drama to break this illusion or do other strange things with it, but in Pirandello’s day that was still a novelty (even though you can find it at work in Shakespeare). We are in fact watching quite a spectacle and we know that that’s what it is, of course – it’s pretty hard to get around Dr. Johnson’s C18 pronouncement, “The truth is, that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players” and that “If there be any fallacy, it is not that we fancy the players, but that we fancy ourselves unhappy for a moment.” Still, it seems possible at times to draw in the audience until they feel as if they are something more like participants in a “happening” (to borrow a sixties word) than mere spectators of a dry proceeding on a stage. Pirandello’s way of doing this is by way of a species of mise en abîme, wherein we behold the preparations for a real play (that Pirandello himself wrote) interrupted and taken over by the realer-than-life imaginative projections of characters from an unfinished novel – these characters astonish and captivate the actors onstage, convince il produttore (who initially sees himself as pretty much what a producer is – not a creative agent like the regista or director but rather as a sort of glorified handyman seeing that everything comes off smoothly) to let things tumble on as they subsequently do: the characters generate chaos on the stage when they insist that their passionate melodrama must be acted out and expressed just as they know it has to go. It’s their sole purpose in their fictive life, after all – they’re not just actors who have memorized lines that they then have to work up the feeling to speak. It seems this author had failed them, had failed to round off the necessary actions and give the characters the relief of finality. <br /><br />In a sense this is absurdist realism: it’s a trick of art to impose order and significance and comforting truisms on the events and emotions that make up life. One of the most powerful views of art is that it’s a species of illusion or deception that lends clarity to other areas of life, opens up a space for reflection on them. That view places art on the side of civilization and order, uses art as an instrument for the sake of these things. The illusion created is usually smooth, even seamless. But the modern sense of reality is permeated by complexity, incompatibilities of all kinds, and a strong dose of incoherence: in plain English, it’s messy, not an unbroken, polished surface. In so far as there’s dramatic illusion in this Pirandello play, I suppose, it’s one that tugs us into this messy modern reality: what’s taking place on the stage is supposed to capture our attention and seem real to us or at least as compelling as if it were real, at least at times. Isn’t that what Coleridge meant by “a willing suspension of disbelief”? So the question may not have so much to do with illusion but rather with the nature of the reality that we are being led to experience and contemplate. If the world beyond the play’s confines isn’t one in which people’s passions and actions are easily manageable and ordered to lead to a predictable outcome or a firm set of rules by which to live, perhaps art need not imply such a smooth and satisfying reality. Modernity tends to construe grand concepts like “civilization” itself a species of pleasant illusion or even delusion. <br /><br />Not that the play is particularly bleak in what it implies about “real life.” The Father character insists that what he and the others want to put on is more real than real life or an ordinary play. His point seems to be that in everyday life, we can squirrel out of being pinned to who we are and in fact we can change somewhat, so our notions about eternal verities always turn out to be premature. By contrast, the situation he’s in is inescapable and eternal, almost a version of damnation: he must keep reliving his reality, while ours turns out to have been an illusion tomorrow. At least we can move on. And this eternal recurrence, to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche, isn’t one he or any of them can easily or finally embrace. I’d say the relationship the play posits between life and art is uneasy, but not necessarily that its vision of life is hopeless. The possibility of change cuts both ways: we may end up “the puppets of ourselves,” trapping ourselves into various harmful and inauthentic roles, but maybe it doesn’t have to be that way. <br /><br />Why do they need an author? Well, they say they must be allowed to “write” their own actions and passions, but without an author (a figure for God?) there’s no finality, nothing beyond the framework of their “scenes” to give them their ultimate significance, put a cap on everything. Indeed, asking the producer to become the writer might even be taken as a wish for the death or devaluation of the author, an act of resentment against the original author who abandoned them.<br /><br />But if one comes to think of civilization itself as a species of illusion or lie, this view of art may be challenged. Might it not be best to force your audience to participate in a confusing real-time “reality” that doesn’t so easily assert an orderly and coherent world beyond the play’s confines, one in which passions and actions are manageable and predictable?<br /><br />Artists rearrange events and alter characters or “outline” them to bring out patterns of meaning for themselves and us, the audience. So at one level, we’re being reminded that art really doesn’t “imitate” life, but only gives us a distanced version of it. And all the stage references and critical commentary remind us of the fact that we are watching a play <br /><br />At another level, though, what happens with these struggling “characters” is in fact acted on the stage for us, as a traditional play would do. At that level, it becomes clear that raw, traumatic events can be conveyed with considerable effect. After all, the whole thing’s a play put on for us, the audience. It’s still dramatic illusionism, only with an extra bubble surrounding it.<br />Alfred J. Drakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16752305052112968118noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2631470257360454237.post-60435048463403724042012-04-15T18:28:00.005-07:002012-04-15T18:28:46.960-07:00Week 09, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="mw-headline"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; font-variant: small-caps; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi;">Part 1: "Underground"</span></span><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; font-variant: small-caps; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi;"></span></h3>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="mw-headline"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi;">Part 1, Chapter 1</span></span></h3>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="mw-headline"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi;">The first thing
we find out about the narrator is that he is spiteful and physically ill.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Moreover, he is very self-conscious, very
aware of this spitefulness that belongs to him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He explains that he was a rather badly behaved civil servant who took
pleasure in causing distress to others who needed his help.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But he can't even really enter into his own
spitefulness since as he tells us, it was all sort of an act: "not only
was I not a spiteful man, I was not even an embittered one… (1307).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This narrator, it quickly becomes apparent,
likes to make bold assertions and then take them back or at least modify them –
he is obviously unreliable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He speaks of
"contradictory elements" (1308) in his nature, and these elements
torment him.</span></span></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> The inability to act is the next thing the narrator
explains following upon his stated realization that he can't either embrace
spitefulness or become good – he is always uncomfortably somewhere in between
the hero and the rascal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And here we are
introduced to the notion that intelligence is more a curse than a blessing – a
smart man can't do anything or become anything, while fools skate through life
always certain of themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To be
intelligent is to have no character and therefore strangely unlimited and
undelimited, while the man of action is limited.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He used to be a collegiate assessor, but a
relative left him 6000 rubles, so he retired last year, and now lives in expensive
St. Petersburg.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first chapter ends
with a tricky rejection of the discourse of "a decent man" – the
decent man takes pleasure in talking about himself, and our narrator says,
"I too will talk about myself" (1308).</span></div>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="mw-headline"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi;">Part 1, Chapter 2</span></span></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">To be overly conscious is a disease (1309 top).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The more conscious the narrator became about
the beautiful and the sublime, about the good, the less able he was to act, and
thus he became bitter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But finally,
after much struggle, this bitterness becomes sweetness and finally pleasure
(1310 top).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is it the same for
others?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He wants to know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As for the pleasure he is talking about, we
are told that it came from "the overly acute consciousness of one's own
humiliation…" (1310).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You can't
change, and you can't do anything, so why not be a scoundrel?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He declares his aim to be explaining the kind
of pleasure he is talking about, the perverse pleasure in one's own humiliation
and incapacity to do anything about it.</span></div>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="mw-headline"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi;">Part 1, Chapter 3</span></span></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">What do normal people do when they run into natural
limits, into a brick wall imposed upon them by nature itself?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Well, normal, probably stupid people,
according to our narrator, simply give up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He calls these people "spontaneous" (1311), and says that the
wall, for them, is definitive and meaningful, even "mystical" (1311).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is not so for a mouse like our narrator –
for that is what he calls himself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
mouse has what the narrator calls "overly acute consciousness"
(1311), meaning that he is highly self-conscious, self-aware.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This mouse cannot even work up and execute a
plan for revenge the way the so-called "man of nature and truth" can;
that is because the mouse knows that revenge is wrong, or at least that it
makes no sense to call it justice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So he
cannot act, and seethes with resentment (1311).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This is the origin of spitefulness and resentment, an important quality
to our narrator, even though as his reasoning progresses, he demonstrates a
conviction that spitefulness, like other supposed reasons, is ultimately hollow
because it requires an agent that the spiteful but intelligent man simply does
not believe in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">But here things become even more complicated because
our mouse starts to take a certain pleasure in his own predicament, his own
feeling of being done an injustice and yet not having the ability to do
anything about it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>See page 1312 on
this, and 1313 for the narrator's explanation: he doesn't care about the laws
of nature or that 2+2 make 4; the thing is, he dislikes such laws and that is
what matters most.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is better, he
thinks, to refuse reconciliation with the laws of nature, mathematics, natural
science, and so forth, better to oppose them all so long as you can maintain a
certain independence of thought and will.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Simply not to be an absolute dupe seems to be his goal, and to achieve
it he sets himself against the cosmos and other men.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is bitter pleasure in this.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The narrator is not asserting that he is in
possession of any grand systematic truth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Far from it.</span></div>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="mw-headline"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi;">Part 1, Chapter 4</span></span></h3>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="mw-headline"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi;">The narrator
insists further that even consciousness of pain can lead to a kind of
voluptuous pleasure – it is precisely the fact that you know there's no one to
blame for your toothache that you betray by moaning about it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nature can inflict all sorts of injuries and
humiliations upon you and your body, even if you despise nature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There's nothing you can do about it, and
perhaps that is what eventually leads to this strange pleasurable sensation or
enjoyment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>See page 1314 in particular:
the enjoyment becomes downright voluptuous, says the narrator, when, say, the
19<sup>th</sup>-century man moaning about his toothache becomes fully aware
that the moaning accomplishes nothing but to annoy everyone around him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He knows he's just acting spitefully and
maliciously, and that is what he takes such great pleasure in: it is a kind of
knowledge, admirable or otherwise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
narrator really drills home the point when he asks at the very end of the
fourth chapter, "Can a man possessing consciousness ever really respect
himself?"<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To be self-conscious
makes it impossible to have self-respect.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Apparently, only healthy, normal idiots respect themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So why be normal?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To be normal is to live comfortably within
one's petty performances, one's illusions, always to be surrounded by the paper
bag of unalterable reality.</span></span></h3>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="mw-headline"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi;">Part 1, Chapter 5</span></span></h3>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="mw-headline"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi;">The narrator
describes boredom as central to his consciousness – he has always found himself
stirring up trouble, getting emotionally involved in things he doesn't really
care about, and so forth, simply to escape this boredom for a moment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The excess of consciousness that structures
his being leads, as he says, to "inertia" (1315).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The normal, stupid person has little trouble
finding a foundation or a secure basis for action in the world, but clever
individuals understand that there is probably no such foundation, that there
are most likely only "immediate and secondary causes" (1315), at
least as far as we can know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Justice
would be a primary cause, but that is exactly the sort of thing our mouse can
never find fully justified, cannot discover – there is only an infinite
succession backwards of secondary causes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>You might think spite could stand in for a primary cause, but the
problem is that it disintegrates pretty quickly, and you are left with nothing
but contempt for yourself for having believed it could serve as a foundation
for action.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Strong negative emotions, in
other words, soon burn themselves out, and you can't really maintain them as
the basis for sustained action.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So we
are back to inertia again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is
hardly surprising: the narrator </span></span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">can't set forth any of his claims in terms of the primary causality that
makes it possible for "normal people" to act.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The underground man can never act, speak or
write in perfect faith in the justice of his beliefs or words.</span><span class="mw-headline"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi;"></span></span></h3>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="mw-headline"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi;">Part 1, Chapter 6</span></span></h3>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="mw-headline"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi;">If only, says
the narrator, he could pinpoint the reason for his inactivity as laziness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But he cannot even do that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A person can make a fine career out of
laziness, and be well respected for it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>You could for example be a connoisseur or art critic who simply affirms
what everybody else thinks constitutes "the beautiful and sublime"
(1316).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That way, you become part of a
social system revolving around groupthink, aesthetical or otherwise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you don't mind going along, it's very easy
to get along and prosper.</span></span></h3>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="mw-headline"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi;">Part 1, Chapter 7</span></span></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Plato's notion that enlightenment is the key to the
good society because people always act in their own self-interest seems
ridiculous to our narrator, who insists that history proves quite
otherwise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What's the value in
constructing utopias, in that case?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No
value.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The greatest advantage of all,
the one beyond any "rational, advantageous desire," is "<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">independent</i> desire" (1320).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To follow your own will, even if it takes you
off the edge of a cliff – that, I think our narrator is saying, is the key to
human existence and it annihilates all utopias from the time of Plato onwards.</span></div>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="mw-headline"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi;">Part 1, Chapter 8</span></span></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">But what if even free will, which are narrator has
been so energetically promoting, turns out to be an illusion?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What if science destroys any possible belief
in it?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What if desire itself is nothing
but the slave of necessity?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Desire is
irrational, and that is its chief virtue – the narrator says that reason is
only one dimension of life and that desire is much more pervasive; it is
"a manifestation of all life" (1321).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Another key statement: humanity is defined as "a creature that walks
on two legs and is ungrateful" – but more particularly, perpetually badly
behaved (1322).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We really do not act in
our own best interests, either collectively or as individuals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The key to this chapter appears towards its
conclusion: even if we could predict and tabulate all the motions of human
desire, even if we turned out to be piano keys played upon by the alleged laws
of nature, we would go so far as to abandon sanity itself to escape
determination and predictability.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Threatened
with being the slave of necessity, or 2+2, so to speak, man will curse, cause
disturbances, stir up trouble, defy and make those things the meaning of his
existence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What would be the point of
desire if it were not unpredictable, if it were reducible to an algorithm of
the laws of nature?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>2+2 always make 4,
even if your will has nothing to do with it, so why align yourself with the
laws of mathematics and nature? </span></div>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="mw-headline"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi;">Part 1, Chapter 9</span></span></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The narrator contrasts us with ants making their
anthills.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The difference is that they
keep doing the same thing and their purpose is completely utilitarian.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They're going to make good use of the
anthills that they build and will keep doing so until there are no more
ants.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But for us, achieving the goal of
our constructions is the beginning of death, just as 2+2 make 4 is "the
beginning of death" (1324).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Consciousness is a curse, but at the same time, we would not give it up,
and it is "higher than two times two" (1325).</span></div>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="mw-headline"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi;">Part 1, Chapter 10</span></span></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Crystal Palace is really not as useful as a
chicken coop, says the narrator, and at least the chicken coop isn't terrifying
in its implications for free will and desire.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It is impossible to stick out one's tongue at such a palace (1325).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And in the end, this palace really is a
chicken coop because it shelters us from the truth that we are nothing more
than dupes, is just an illusion that we cherish, an illusion of purpose and
perpetual progress.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The narrator
concludes this chapter by recognizing just how dangerous his own brand of thinking
is to everyone who is not like him (1326).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></span></div>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="mw-headline"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi;">Part 1, Chapter 11</span></span></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In this final chapter of the first part, the
narrator explains what to some degree he has meant all along by "the
underground": he apparently means by this phrase in part thinking itself,
but we should add that this thinking is dialogical, meaning that he imagines an
audience in response to it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To this
audience he declares that "it's better to do nothing!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Conscious inertia is better!"<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(1326) There is something of the back and
forth of conversation going on in this so-called underground.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The underground is everything that healthy,
normal people repress as they go about their waking lives and business – they
have no need of such philosophizing and agonizing over things like purpose and
free will.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It's what mustn't be uttered,
perhaps even what shouldn't be thought, lest one suffer the psychological
consequences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The narrator insists that
he will never print his words and share them with the public, which privacy-device
creates a sense of intimacy as we read – it is as if we are not the reading
public but rather individuals who have somehow come by this unpublished
manuscript, which itself seems to be the effusion of a man who has been
underground for his entire life.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Why not just recall it in his head, if he doesn't
mean to publish?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The narrator doesn't give
a solid answer to this question, but tells us that perhaps recalling old
memories will provide some relief and allow him to get rid of those memories
once and for all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is an ancient
concept of writing, in which the act of writing cuts off a stream of thought
from consciousness, alienating it forever from its producer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is more or less what Plato makes
Socrates say in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Phaedrus</i> about the
invention and act of writing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And of
course the narrator is simply bored, so setting down his tale will give him
something to do: maybe in that sense it is an act of mischief, just as he said
earlier about how we deal with boredom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Does the tale that follows reinforce the philosophy that he has set down
with such deliberate lack of systematic rigor?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That remains to be seen, but in general, it seems to back up the first
part of the text.</span></div>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="mw-headline"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi;"></span><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi; text-transform: uppercase;">Part 2: "Apropos of the Wet
Snow"</span></span></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Part 2,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Chapter 1</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">At the age of 24, the narrator was outwardly
conventional; the unsettling thing that comes out here is how much of the
"underground" was already within him, though it may have structured
his life at that point more or less in the form of social awkwardness, the
inability to meet the gaze of other people, etc.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even the normal activities in which the young
narrator engaged were already manifestations of his resentment and defiance of
all things conventional.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 12.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The section in which the
officer picks him up like a puffball and moves him aside is hilarious.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The big fellow is like a force of nature: there's
no point in resisting him because he's a healthy, normal blockhead who probably
wouldn't accepting a challenge from a resentful man-mouse like our narrator.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn't even seem to notice the actual bump
that the narrator finally manages to give him after two years or so, in an
attempt to turn the affair into something suitably romantic, suitably honorable
and literary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In other words, he's
trying to transform his sordid, petty reality into something heroic, to creat a
situation in which he would be the equal of the blockhead officer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Along the way, there's the delicious, bitter
pleasure of his own self-conscious state of humiliation: all those abortive
attempts before the final impetuous one (1336).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>If we can say there's a pattern of behavior in this second part, it's
something like the following: self-reflection, resentment, boredom with it all,
an attempt to get outside one's head, an action at last taken, followed by consequent
withdrawal and return to inertia or some other escapist state of mind.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Part 2,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Chapter 2</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The narrator withdraws into a fantasy world of
romantic reveries about heroism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He goes
to see Setochkin and, more importantly for the rest of the narrative, visits Simonov,
his old friend from school days.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Part 2,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Chapter 3</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">We learn quite a bit about the narrator's early
years: he was sent to school by distant relatives, and felt abandoned.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Much of his present character stems from
those school years – his contempt for his fellow students and yet his desire to
be recognized by them, even to conquer them after a fashion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He becomes studious because they aren't.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even as he plans to attend the dinner for the
shallow, handsome officer Zverkov, he senses the hollowness of the whole
enterprise; that is, putting one over on his old "frenemies" by
insisting on attending a dinner to which he hasn't been invited.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I love the fact that the friends already at
Simonov's for the initial meeting, Ferfichkin and Trudolyubov, scarcely
acknowledge his presence even though he hasn't seen them for years ().<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All of these so-called friends, of course,
and especially the as-yet absent Zverkov, represent stupid acceptance of
reality and the limitedness of all that is healthy and normal.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Part 2,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Chapter 4</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The narrator shows up early to dinner since he has
not been told about the one-hour time change (1345).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The better part of the chapter centers on the
humiliation of this and indeed of the whole evening.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Zverkov's infinitely stupid condescension
figures heavily (1346), and so does the bickering of his other friends along
with his own attempt to insult Zverkov, which is initially (1349) and then
subsequently rebuffed (1351).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the
end, the narrator is ignored.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although
he wrangles six rubles to follow his frenemies to the brothel they have gone to,
his request for reconciliation is refused by Zverkov (1351 top).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Part 2,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Chapter 5</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The narrator keeps patterning his plans after great
Russian literary works such as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Masquerade</i>
by Lermontov (1353).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Life imitates art,
or at least it would if the narrator had any courage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His confrontation with so-called reality
(1351) nets him not the opportunity to slap Zverkov but rather a chance meeting
with Liza, a humble prostitute.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He will
take out his anger and resentment on her since Zverkov is unavailable.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Part 2,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Chapter 6</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The narrator's conversation with Liza begins here,
with an inward realization of just how stupid his own debauchery is (1355
middle).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The conversation continues and
the narrator's goal is to save Liza after the manner of a Russian hero (1357).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It seems that he has sexual relations with
her in the course of this meeting (1358).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He sets before her the image of a happy family life, and paints for her
the horrid prospect of continuing on in this lifestyle (1360-61).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At first he fails to understand that Liza's
sarcasm is only a cover for genuine feeling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He knows that his own rhetoric is what she says: something straight out
of a book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It's cheap talk, and hardly
sincere.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Part 2,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Chapter 7</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Liza continues to be subjected to the narrator's
harangue, and the pitch reaches its sentimental crescendo (1364 top).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The narrator even finds that he responds to
his own emotional words.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This rhetoric
is effective with Liza since it seems to be what she needed to hear in her
real-life context.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is irony in the
sense the narrator has so often tried to pattern his life, unsuccessfully
enough, after literary texts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Liza
touchingly shows the narrator the letter she received from a gentleman caller
who knows nothing of her sordid present (1365).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>While leaving, the narrator realizes "the truth" about this
whole encounter – as he will say in the next chapter, it has all been nothing
but sentimentality, fundamentally insincere.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span lang="FR" style="font-size: 10pt;">Part 2,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Chapter 8</span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">The narrator writes to S and pays his debt with borrowed money.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But he is still tormented by thoughts about
Liza, about her pathetic match-light smile, and obsesses over being found out
in his cheap apartment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He continues to
spend absurd, romantic stories about himself (1368).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But as it turns out, the narrator can't even
be in charge as a master, as we can see from his interactions with Apollon, his
condescending and infuriating servant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Liza enters just at the point where the narrator is arguing with Apollon
over unpaid wages.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is a humiliating
moment for the narrator.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Part 2,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Chapter 9</span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Infuriated with Liza, the narrator mocks her in recalling their
previous encounter, informing her that it was all just an act.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why is he so angry at this unoffending young
woman?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Probably because she has
confronted him with the gap between his self-image and his actual
identity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Hegelian Master/Servant
dialectic may be a good thing to discuss here since </span><span style="font-size: 9.5pt; letter-spacing: -.5pt;">for the German Idealist
philosopher Georg Hegel, the self is founded upon confrontational moments—risk,
contradiction, dread. The self is established by struggle for recognition and
certainty, which entails withholding recognition from others, and Hegel's
famous representation of the founding of self-consciousness involves a primal
struggle to the death between two individuals, with the outcome being the
lordship of one and the enslavement or subjugation of the other, and a
consequent need for mediating their now-indirect relations through a
relationship to and with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">objects.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i>But the Master/Servant dialectic </span><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">can also be read, as
Alexandre Kojève and others have done, as a continuing struggle that happens
internally, inside the head of each individual rather than a physical struggle
between two individuals: a battle for self-recognition, authenticity, personal
autonomy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I suggest that success in this
endeavor would perhaps be constituted by an adequate fit between who one really
is and who one thinks one is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If that's
the right way to put it, it's clear that the narrator is not succeeding.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Liza is not a blockheaded master-consciousness,
and in fact the narrator says that the relative position between himself and
this young woman had been reversed: just as she was in the subject-position at
the brothel, the weeping nervous wreck of a narrator is now in precisely that
position relative to her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He takes her
solicitude for pity, and that is unbearable to him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is a sensitive servant-consciousness who
seems to be offering him the very recognition he craves but cannot abide.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The situation is intolerable.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Part 2,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Chapter 10</span></b><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt;">The narrator says that for him, love has always
been a matter of dominating others, and it is the product of struggle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But then, his hatred of real-life makes it
impossible to deal with the "subjugated object" (1377). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Liza takes her leave, having rejected the
crumpled five ruble note the narrator tried to give her as a token of his own
spite, a symbol of his wish to see her as nothing more than a prostitute in
spite of her genuine affection for him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In the end, writing this entire story down seems to have been punishment
rather than relief.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The narrator has
throughout cast himself as the anti-hero, the man alienated from so-called real
life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The underground seems to be the
place where an unquenchable desire to engage with real life battles an equally
strong desire to escape from it and forget it altogether, to disappear into
heroic fictions spun by others or by oneself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></span>Alfred J. Drakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16752305052112968118noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2631470257360454237.post-60056415609524119292012-04-15T18:25:00.002-07:002012-04-15T18:26:02.319-07:00Week 08, Baudelaire and Mallarme<br />
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">NOTES ON CHARLES BAUDELAIRE </span></b></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Charles
Baudelaire. From <i>Flowers of Evil</i> (Vol. E, 1380-98). </span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif"; font-size: 10pt;">Introductory:
General Notes on Baudelaire’s </span></b><i><b><span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif"; font-size: 10pt;">The
Painter of Modern Life</span></b></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">We can use impressionism to draw out Baudelaire.
It’s only the roughness of the eye that makes two things look identical. It’s
getting harder to perceive anything in a fresh, accurate way. The artist must
defend that capacity without rejecting modernity. To lose this ability is to
lose your soul — Baudelaire borrows from Christianity (original sin, fallenness
of perception, etc.) Seeing is itself a moral act. He’s one of the forebears of
aestheticism. <i>Aisthanomai </i>means
“I perceive for myself” (not as others try to make me perceive or understand).
Expressive poetics aside, this is what the romantics argued when they said it
was vital to strip away the “film of familiarity” and see things anew.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">But Baudelaire doesn’t tell us to desert the urban
site of spiritual corruption. Rather, we
begin by seeing our cityscapes clearly. Artists should wrest from Parisian
boulevards with their businesslike evanescence something of permanent value,
something that will make us see rightly rather than accept stale, conventional
perceptions. <i>Denaturalization</i>: art denaturalizes us to our surroundings,
makes us see them like intelligent children with expressive capacity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Baudelaire offers a few different categories for the
artist and perceiver: the dandy, a haughty aristocratic pose (Brummel) that
remains aloof. And there’s the flâneur, who is a figure for the poet-observer;
the aim is to obtain clarity for an instant and to make art register that
clarity in a crisp thought or image. Photography would be a good contemporary
model: not romanticism—not individuals with their own “passions and volitions”
coloring the world with subjectivity or rejecting it stormily. Rather, it is
closer to the model of a roving, voracious photographer—the camera as “eye,”
taking in everything as it is, this instant. To photograph is not simply to
copy. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">So Baudelaire captures the way modern art is of two
minds about its relationship to the era. On the one hand, there’s immersion
with a little still in reserve; on the other, there’s aloofness or <i>ekstasis</i>.
In neither case is there simple realism. Even the flâneur as artist treats life
as raw material. It is a point of honor to create or capture beauty in the
evanescent cityscape. It seems that Baudelaire’s “doubleness” would be a good
way to describe modern art, its two tendencies: and literary modernism involves
both of them. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 126.6pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Notes on the
Poems</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">"To the
Reader"</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">I find Lowell's translation very broad, preserving
the rhyme scheme at the expense of precision of meaning. But we should look at the translation before
us. There's much in this proem of the
luxury of self-reproach, homage to the search for novelty, anything, anything
at all, to break out of the unbearable stupidity of everyday life and
conventional morality. But the worst
"sin" of all, it would appear, is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">boredom,
</i>which in French is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ennui </i>(from
Old French <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">enuier,</i> modern French <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ennuyer,</i> to annoy)<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, </i>which involves both boredom and depression, apathy,
listlessness. It's similar to the
spiritual sin of acedia (akedía, Greek, spiritual sloth). So what does this <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ennui </i>make possible? I think
it's vital to recognize that the state of soul or mind here is as much an
opportunity as a curse, at least for Baudelaire and the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">décadents </i>who followed him.
There's a constant movement towards the voluptuous and the sensuous in
Baudelaire, but also a reflux of disgust upon giving in to such states or
objects. I don't think a philosophy like
Baudelaire's, which is more or less the basis of the Decadent Movement, can be
adopted straight-up, I mean without some irony and a sense of humor: it's
morbid, obsessed with the seamy side of things and with strange novelties. Well, the author's theoretical writings
openly reject merely natural things and effects as too limited, too base: as he
writes in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Painter of Modern Life, </i>"nature
counsels nothing but crime." The
glib way of putting this is of course Oscar Wilde's wonderful judgment on
natural sunsets: all we get from mother nature, said Oscar, is second-rate
copies of Turner's magnificent painted sunsets.
Nature has no imagination, it seems.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">"Correspondances"</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">But on nature, "wait, there's more!" Specifically, there's symbolism. The poem "Correspondances" gives us
a more respectful view of nature's value to us: "nature is a temple"
and we wander in its symbolic power and evocations. It's as if our gaze is met by nature's
towards us. The editors mention
Baudelaire's interest in synesthesia, or the blending of the senses as though
they all harmonize, all come together to give us a unified experience of some
"mystic unity" (the Norton editors mention this aptly on 1383). This is an odd relationship with nature,
isn't it? It's hardly the one you'd get
from, say, Wordsworth, where the natural world is said to be the source of our
moral being, of healthy and universal sensations that connect each person to
all others, at least potentially. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">One could say that to call nature a temple is to
transform nature into something that signifies in the human realm; but then,
the obverse is also true: it's to suggest that the human realm of language and
symbol and image corresponds to nature.
This is how Baudelaire offers a sense of idealism, of the possibility of
transcendence, if we want to call it that.
This poem is vital to the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">symbolistes
</i>in that language itself takes center stage along with the mind's power: the
point here isn't to imitate an objective, unchanging external reality, it's to
assert a mystical correspondence between spiritual or mental states and the
realm of external nature. There's a
tendency in modern times to replace any notion of objective reality with an
emphasis on the power of language as a realm in its own right, one that shapes
and perhaps even constitutes our sense of reality, and later symbolist poets
such as Mallarmé will take this idea very far indeed.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">"Her
Hair"</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">For me, the key to this poem is its sensual
intensity, which is almost like that of John Donne, he of the "she is all
states, all princes I" rhetoric that we can find in "The Sunne
Rising" and other poems. But aside
from the gesture towards annihilating time and space, what about the speaker's
wish to know "a measure / Of fertile idleness and fragrant
leisure"? As so often, Baudelaire
explores the strange delights of indolence, of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ennui.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">"A
Carcass"</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">This poem follows the ideational structure of a
Shakespearean sonnet: "If this be error and upon me proved, / I never
writ, nor no man ever loved." That
is, the poem's conclusion reasserts the same ideal that the rest of it tore
down, with all those images of decay and references to the ugliness and stench
of death: putrefaction, morbidity, horror.
Consider, too, Hamlet's mocking muse while beholding the skull of Yorick
in 5.1: <a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2631470257360454237" name="190">"</a></span>Now get you
to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let / <a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2631470257360454237" name="191">her paint an inch
thick, to this favour she must</a> /<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2631470257360454237" name="192"> come; make her laugh at that.</a>" This is the embrace of opposites that the
Norton editors mention in connection with Baudelaire's poetics: life and death,
beauty and decay, the material and the ideal.
His poetry has something of William Blake's intensity in this regard.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">"Invitation
to the Voyage" (51<sup>st</sup> poem of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">les Fleurs du Mal</i>)</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Is the speaker in fact offering us an idealistic,
otherworldly vision? Maybe, maybe not –
the poem revels in eroticism, which isn't the same thing as emphasizing or
gesturing towards some grand abstract ideal realm. Will the lover accept the invitation? That's not so certain: the poet says her eyes
(windows to the soul) are treacherous, not to be trusted, though by no means to
be left behind or rejected and despised.
And of course consider the poem "Voyage," where the passage
seems to be anything but towards an otherworldly ideal.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">NOTES ON STEPHANE MALLARME</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Intro: Notes on Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Crisis
of Poetry” </span></b><span style="font-size: 10pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Mallarmé is anti-utilitarian and
anti-instrumentalist: poetry is an encounter with language <i>as language.</i> We might, of course, ask whether or not this
Mallarméan scheme takes anti-instrumentalism and impersonalism too far. It
amounts to a complete divorce between ordinary language and poetic language,
and perhaps therefore repeats on the level of pure language the isolation of
the romantic poets from their society. At least, that’s one way of looking at
the matter.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Music, for Mallarmé, is orderly and yet liberatory.
We align ourselves as listeners with its successive notes, with its unfolding,
and we should experience music as pure play. We should not reaffirm our
personal or “tribal” power over nature, but instead connect by means of music
and poetry with something beyond ourselves. Mallarmé refers to this realm as
“impersonal,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is devoid of passion. Poetry
is a <i>supplement—</i>it supplies a lack in the ordinary.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">The “French Revolution II” is the movement from the
Alexandrine verse of Racine and Corneille to free verse, <i>vers libre.</i>
This change is no doubt allied with a shift in social and political
arrangements from monarchical, semi-feudal to modern, parliamentary,
commercialist nineteenth-century society.
Mallarmé isn’t in favor of middle-class vulgarity and self-satisfaction,
but the breakup of the Alexandrine is an opportunity not to be missed. It’s an
opportunity for poetry to become what it ought to be—both sensuous and ideal,
an order that liberates all who come to it. It ought to be personal and yet
lead us beyond personality.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">The Alexandrine imposed a false decorum and order
upon language, taming and imprisoning it. Language was therefore used to ratify
conservative French values. Mallarmé’s poetics are anti-instrumentalist, just
as he is anti-Cartesian more generally—against the preeminence of mind as
opposed to matter, reason as opposed to passion. As for ordinary language, we
“use” it to express our feelings and ideas (romanticism) and to refer to things
in the external world (realism, everyday living). Both uses are instrumental,
and they falsify experience and even the meaning of being human. Language
thereby becomes a mere tool shed full of implements, not the House of
Being. The point seems to be to get back
to a moment before our senses and capacities were so ruthlessly sundered by
social imperatives and philosophical constructs, back to a more genuine kind of
experience.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">But Mallarmé considers language more worthwhile than
the fake “autonomous individual” who uses it to shore up a narrow sense of self
and world, more worthwhile than the everyday business that can be transacted
with it or within its sphere. This anti-middle-class sentiment makes language
the new principle of aristocracy, the ennobling force, the power that lets us
keep contact with mystery, with “play” (<i>jouissance,</i> as in Barthes and
Derrida) and with the holy (Heidegger). Yet, the realm of Language isn’t an
empty externality, a metaphysical far-away place we can command. The goal isn’t
facilely to get there from here since that would be to commit the same error as
instrumentalists commit.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">As the Beckett character says, “what matter who is
speaking?” Ordinary speech disappoints us because it doesn’t correspond to
real-world qualities when we expect it to. We aren’t gods and cannot achieve a
one-to-one correspondence between words and things. (Perhaps this is what Paul
de Man refers to when he says that even Mallarmé leaves the supremacy of nature
untouched.) But poetry liberates us from such selfish demands for pedestrian
intelligibility; it’s an impersonal language where the Ideal is at play. It creates
an order that we can enter, a sort of mystical realm. There is no need, as far
as Mallarmé is concerned, to turn to the “author-function” (as Foucault calls
it) as a principle of interpretive stability.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Evocation and suggestion are better than fact. In
somewhat plain terms, we might say that they lead us to a better realm than the
everyday one we usually inhabit. Mallarmé might be described as a Platonist,
but again that would be rather misleading. He isn’t really pushing a movement
from a deluded “here” to a metaphysical “there.” In his view, it seems,
language itself is the realm of purity; language is a here-realm of pure play,
not a beyond of the sort that philosophical realists posit. Even so, it seems that Mallarmé invests a
great deal in this order of language.
The Symbolists generally treat language as having magical incantatory
power, and (following Schopenhauer), as a refuge from human will and
strife. Yeats describes the city of
Byzantium in this manner; the holy city disdains “All that man is, / All mere
complexities, / The fury and the mire of human veins.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Mallarmé suggests in his prose an interest in
turning what Nietzsche calls the abstraction-making power of language (its
tendency to lie about the referential world), to account as music, as
suggestibility that creates its own order. Mallarmé is not out to shore up the
triumphant individual <i>ego,</i> the narrow shopkeeper-self in us all.
Instead, he wants to see the triumph of language with a capital “L,” language
as its own order, one that liberates us into what Heidegger will later call
“the light of Being.” Language isn’t a tool shed; it is the dwelling-place of
genuine humanity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Faune:</span></b><span style="font-size: 10pt;"> Two levels or registers are
often being pursued, as in the Faun poem – as the editors say, it’s an erotic
poem rather like a classical idyll, and at the same time it makes sense to read
it almost in the manner that one reads STC’s “Kubla Khan” -- as a poem about
the creation and reality-status of poetic language itself. Did the Faun actually possess the nymphs? Even he isn’t certain either way, and one
wonders how much it really matters, if language and imagination are realms all
their own, with equal status. Or you can
go all absolutist on us and ask, might this poem be about the pursuit of an
absolute ideal (Venus?) that remains always out of reach? But again, how much, if at all, does it
matter if we can’t get there from here, can’t attain the pure ideal? Don’t we need it anyway?</span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Poe’s Tomb: </span></b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">I suspect that what they like
comes from Poe’s prose – his command over human emotions, his ability to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">summon up a mood</i> and then construct a
poem like “The Raven” to make it happen in his readers. The order of language and its effects takes
precedence over the people who come to the poetry. Works like magic. At his best, Poe writes stories and a few
poems that have a hypnotic effect on us.
You go Poe! </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>Alfred J. Drakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16752305052112968118noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2631470257360454237.post-34440189982368976002012-04-15T18:22:00.002-07:002012-04-15T18:25:52.652-07:00Week 06, Flaubert's Madame Bovary<br />
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Part
1, Chapter 1 (1088-94)</span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Charles
Bovary is a bumpkin at school, but diligent.
Father once an army surgeon; married for money. They live on a farm. Mother embittered. Upbringing – father a Rousseauist, mother
fawns. Charles passes <i>officier de
santé</i> exams on second try. Uni life
agrees with him. Mother finds him a good
practice in Tostes, and a rich wife, Heloise, who bosses him like mother.</span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><u><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Questions/comments</span></u></b><b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">:</span></b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;"> why start with Charles?
Well, I suppose we need to know what's <i>in </i>him. What will Emma have to work with? Not a helluva lot, it seems – the parents are
a work of art, with dad a second-rate retailer of Revolutionary primitivist
ideals. Charles doesn't measure up even
to <i>that </i>nonsense.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Part
1, Chapter 2 (1094-99)</span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Charles
sets farmer Rouault's leg. Meets R's daughter Emma, and comes back often. Charles' jealous wife searches Emma's past –
convent, uppity. Charles finds out that
Heloise's fortune is bogus after lawyer bilks her. She promptly dies of a stroke.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><u><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Questions/comments</span></u></b><b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">:</span></b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;"> Circumstance, opportunity is almost fiendish in its appeal to
the pedestrian instincts of such characters as Charles – they're passive, just
take what comes their way.</span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Part
1, Chapter 3 (1099-1102)</span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Rouault
visits Charles to pay his fee and condole.
Charles visits Rouault, falls in love with Emma. Dad is pleased – she's grown too good for her
surroundings. Emma wants a romantic
torchlight wedding, but they get a traditional one with a party.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><u><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Questions/comments</span></u></b><b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">:</span></b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;"> Same comment as for Ch. 2 – opportunity accepted. Emma, we see, is budding romantic – this
wedding establishes the pattern; she ends up accepting the commonly done thing,
the cultural script, custom and tradition.</span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Part
1, Chapters 4-5 (1103-08)</span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Wedding
fun; Charles ecstatic, Emma happy. They
return to Tostes; new home described minutely.
Heloise's old wedding bouquet induces brooding, but it passes. Charles contentedly excited, doting; Emma
disappointed in fairy-tale "passion."</span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><u><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Questions/comments</span></u></b><b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">:</span></b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;"> GF determined to describe everything in minute detail. Why?
It's more than authorial pride, I think – he sees realism as a
duty. To understand Emma's reality, I
suppose, is to know her plight. In this
sense, the descriptions of homes and locales, etc. is loaded towards sympathy
with her.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Part
1, Chapter 6 (1108-11)</span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Emma
recalls convent -- aesthete, loved religion of sorrow, mystery. Old maid's ballads and romance novels,
Scott. Mother died, Emma rebelled
against convent rules. Home again, she
grew tired of routine; Charles didn't compare to romance books.</span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><u><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Questions/comments</span></u></b><b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">:</span></b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;"> Emma's memories, a precocious aesthete, or rather a sensualist,
sentimentalist! Emma loves the
mystery-suggestive surface of things. I
can't really blame her for this – it's just who she is. Mention the Augustinian context: signs
leading us onwards to spiritual understanding.
But of course it doesn't work that way here – the written influences,
etc., just lead to rebellion, dissatisfaction with dull, insightless authority.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Part
1, Chapter 7 (1111-15)</span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">After
honeymoon? Emma grows detached from
contented, worshipful Charles, wishes she had inspiring man to introduce her to
<i>variety, passion. </i>Resents
Charles' jealous mother. Why did she
marry? Invitation to ball at Marquis d'Andervilliers!</span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><u><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Questions/comments</span></u></b><b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">:</span></b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;"> The first of several instances in a pattern of hopes raised and
dashed that wears her down eventually.
Emma's detached and resentful stance against poor Charles, who has no
interiority and can't recognize anyone else's, gives way to hope in the form of
an invitation beyond her station: "betters."</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"></span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Part
1, Chapter 8 (1115-21)</span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Emma
delighted with chateau, aristos. Charles
a klutz, but the experience rivals her romance books. Ignored, but "Vicomte" dances with
her. Going home, Emma is disillusioned
by contrast. Fires maid, snipes at
Charles, as memories of ball fade.</span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><u><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Questions/comments</span></u></b><b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">:</span></b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;"> Emma's ecstasy gives way to stark disillusionment, a rage that
causes her to mistreat others.</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"></span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Part
1, Chapter 9 (1121-28)</span></b></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Emma
dreams of Paris via capital maps, reads.
Winter unbearable; gives up music, etc.
Moody extremes, isolation > illness.
At Rouen, Charles' prof suggests scene-change. To Yonville.
Emma burns Heloise's bouquet; is pregnant when they move.</span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><u><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Questions/comments</span></u></b><b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">:</span></b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;"> Neither Charles nor his professor can conceive of a woman
having an inner life in anything other than purely "medical" terms:
basically, this is like the American Mitchell's "rest cure" about
which Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote so well.
Pregnancy is brought in in that stark way it often is: a sudden question
mark, a game-changer. How will this
inflect Emma's emotional path?</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"></span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Part
2, Chapters 1-2 (1128-38)</span></b></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Yonville
market town near Rouen. Innkeeper Lefrançois, tax man Binet, apothecary
Homais. At Lion d'Or, Homais' boarder
Léon (lawyer's clerk) bonds with Emma over sentimental novels, platitudes. At home, Emma ruminates, but has hope.</span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><u><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Questions/comments</span></u></b><b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">: </span></b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Okay, hope-inducer #2: Léon the Naïve. Consider closely exactly what draws Emma and
this young man together: what is the ground of their affinity? I'd say they've found in those sentimental
books and ideas an objective correlative for their own perfectly unoriginal
longings for something better.</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"></span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Part
2, Chapter 3 (1139-45)</span></b></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Léon
surprised at his performance with Emma.
Homais helps Charles get set up; money worries. Emma hopes for male child – freer! Berthe.
Bovary's parents visit. Léon goes
with Emma to nurse's home; stroll along river afterwards; rumors.</span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><u><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Questions/comments</span></u></b><b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">: </span></b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">This chapter renders Emma's thoughts about gender – her
desire for a male child makes sense. She
and Léon cause some rumors to float about – typical small town, everybody knows
everybody and people will be talking.
Partly that's moralism, partly it's that they have nothing better to do. Flaubert does a good job of delivering to us,
especially, just how <i>oppressive </i>life could be in a little town.</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"></span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Part
2, Chapters 4-5 (1145-53)</span></b></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">In
winter, sight of Léon through window stirs Emma. At Homais' place, Emma bonds with Léon over
books, fashion while Charles dozes. Léon
lacks courage, but Emma's discontent grows.
She laments her "fate," guesses Léon's feelings. Trying to compensate by being ideal wife, she
rages inwardly, weeps, etc. Then,
draper-moneylender Lheureux shows up!</span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><u><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Questions/comments</span></u></b><b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">: </span></b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">More bonding with Léon over that sentimental and
idealistic stuff – have a look at some of it.
This is a good chapter to examine the psychological process of <i>compensation</i>
as denial that GF so often attributes to Emma.
Emma is like an actress playing a role, but inwardly she is going crazy
with frustration and desire. Monsieur
Lheureux's timing is, of course, perfect, almost diabolical – he represents the
vapidity of materialist culture at its worst: an endless succession of <i>things
</i>to which we can attach our desires.
But these things don't lead up and out; they just lead in a circle
chaining us to our pettiest, objectified desires.</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"></span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Part
2, Chapter 6 (1153-61)</span></b></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Church
bells -- Emma recalls convent, heads for church. Abbé Bournisien scolds catechism class. Emma asks for spiritual aid, but he doesn't
understand, advises tea. Emma shoves
Berthe, causing her to fall. Timid Léon
decides on Paris law study.</span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><u><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Questions/comments</span></u></b><b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">: </span></b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Church bells – as George Herbert says, "something
understood"? No, not in this novel
– Emma's old aestheticism comes to a false rescue. The Abbé is a one-dimensional man, has
absolutely <i>nothing </i>to offer Emma except some dietary advice. Stomachs, not souls, are his concern. This is an almost Voltairean portrait of the
Catholic Church at the local level coming from GF.</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"></span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Part
2, Chapter 7 (1161-66)</span></b></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Emma
mourns Léon, reproaches herself. Illness
as at Tostes. Rodolphe Boulanger brings
servant to see Charles. He is drawn to
Emma. How to seduce her? A worldly fellow, he plans.</span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><u><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Questions/comments</span></u></b><b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">: </span></b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Emma relapses into illness, and now we're introduced to a
new sort of consciousness: the wily cad Rodolphe. He's a sexual predator, and nothing more,
whatever his capacity to cover nature with artifice. A perfect embodiment of the sharklike
environment GF is describing: assume others are wicked or shallow, and treat
them accordingly. The objectification
Rodolphe practices almost makes us appreciate plodding, kind Charles. Almost.</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"></span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Part
2, Chapter 8 (1166-80)</span></b></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Agricultural
Show for Prefecture of Seine-Inférieure at Yonville! Medals, exhibits, food, speeches extolling
Louis Philippe's post-Bourbon July Monarchy (1830-48; abdicated, fol. by Louis
Nap. III's 2<sup>nd</sup> Rep/Empire to 1870)!
Rodolphe pursues Emma here; his pseudo-revolutionary, libertine hints
alternating with patriotic-economic talk of Prefect's rep. Wet fireworks don't dampen Emma's interest,
Homais writes fine account of the day.</span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><u><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Questions/comments</span></u></b><b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">: </span></b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Well, it doesn't get any better than this – a show! But the boring speeches are masterfully
interwoven with Rodolphe's sleazy, slick courting of Emma. Worth looking at for GF's skill with dialogue
at cross-purposes. While the pol pitches
vapid patriotism, R serves up an enticingly spiced bowl of nothing to Emma.</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"></span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Part
2, Chapters 9-10 (1181-92)</span></b></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Six
weeks pass, as Rodolphe planned: he's exploiting her frailties, situation. He suggests riding; Charles agrees. Emma easily seduced, goes home joyful like a romantic heroine:
"J'ai un amant!" Covert
letters, trips to R's farmhouse, then Charles' garden for prudence's sake. R's cynicism tempered by Emma's beauty; she
is <i>not </i>cynical but loves him.
Guilt eventually drives Emma to play the self-sacrificing model wife and
mother again.</span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><u><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Questions/comments</span></u></b><b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">: </span></b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Focus on the mild resistance and easy seduction scene
here. Yet Emma is transcendent, one with
her romance heroines after this banal experience. Rodolphe's thoughts are rather interesting,
too – the difference between how he processes her appeal, and she his. But Emma's guilt soon reasserts itself –
she'll never cut the mustard with Nietzsche!</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"></span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Part
2, Chapter 11 (1192-1200)</span></b></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Emma
and Homais spur Charles to advance career by operating on servant Hippolyte's
clubfoot. Gangrene sets in. A better doctor amputates. Homais distances himself; Emma is disgusted
with despondent Charles, forgives herself for adultery.</span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><u><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Questions/comments</span></u></b><b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">: </span></b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Nothing like a botched surgery to liven things up. "Losing!" GF's medical descriptions are
impressive. Charles is an <i>idiot, </i>so
Emma excuses all her bad behavior – not one of her finer moments in the
novel. Nice portrait of a more
respectable country doctor – see his matter-of-fact amputation job.</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"></span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Part
2, Chapters 12-13 (1200-15)</span></b></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Affair
renews intensely. Emma's self-pity makes
her easy prey for Lheureux. Rodolphe tires
of her. Bovary's mother visits; Emma
begs R to take her away. And
Berthe? Emma's exotic hopes surge. R delays; they plan to meet in Rouen; thence
to Paris and Genoa. But R cynically
calculates it's too much trouble; musing about past loves, he writes to Emma
that he prefers to save her rep. Sight
of R's departing carriage causes her to fall seriously ill for 43 days. By October, Emma improves.</span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><u><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Questions/comments</span></u></b><b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">: </span></b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Emma's self-pity is nauseating here, and Lheureux's
timing is again impeccable. Focus on how
predictably the whole elopement plan falls apart, with Rodolphe's letter-box
musings leading him back to the stony narcissism that defines him. Emma suffers her third bout of illness – this
time it's quite serious.</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"></span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Part
2, Chapters 14-15 (1215-27)</span></b></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Charles
worries about Emma, money. Lheureux presents bill; Charles borrows at 6%. Emma recovers, becomes devout. To Rouen theater for variety: she's annoyed
with Charles' oafishness, but loves Donizetti's Scott-based <i>Lucia di
Lammermoor. </i>Léon's there! Charles must go home, but insists that Emma
go to the opera again with newly sophisticated Léon.</span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><u><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Questions/comments</span></u></b><b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">: </span></b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Money asserts itself – again, Lheureux's baneful
influence. Charles is ensnared,
too. Emma's turn to religion is again in
vain. And the theater episode simply defies belief – Charles can't figure out
why he shouldn't leave a young man alone with his flighty, susceptible
wife. The man belongs in a Chaucerian
farce, except that he's so nice!</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"></span></div>
<br />
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Part
3, Chapter 1</span></b>
<br />
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Léon’s
experience in Paris has made him somewhat worldly, sophisticated here in
Rouen. He stops by to see Emma at her
hotel. They talk for quite a while, Léon
kisses her, and they agree to meet in private at the Cathedral tomorrow. Emma shows up late, the two end up on a tour
of the church, and finally spend private time together in a carriage. Emma misses her Hirondelle back to Yonville,
but gets a hack to catch up with it.</span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Part
3, Chapters 2-4</span></b></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Bovary's
father has died. Emma goes through the
motions, which satisfies grieving Charles, whose mother comes to visit. Lheureux presents Emma with unpaid bills and
sells her more expensive goods, convincing her to get power of attorney from
Charles. She goes to Rouen to have Léon
draw up the papers, and they spend much time together there; the affair grows
more serious. Emma is more and more
ensnared by Lheureux, takes piano lessons in Rouen – a ruse to visit Léon, of
course.</span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Part
3, Chapters 5-6</span></b></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Emma
and Léon idealize, sentimentalize each other. Emma disappears into fantasy, no
patience with Charles. Piano teacher doesn’t recall Emma’s name; Lheureux spots
her, gains leverage. Emma continues to spend and borrow from Lhereux in a cycle
of desperation. She becomes frustrated
with Léon, who doesn’t understand her extravagant demands on his affections. Things worsen at home, and Charles sets out
after her when she forgets to let him know she’s going to Rouen. Homais visits Rouen, Emma angry with Léon for
spending time with him; back in Yonville, she fumes, then stops idealizing
him. Things turn mostly physical; Emma
tries to control Léon even more. Sheriff
serves notice about debt; more borrowing from Lhereux, hopeless attempts at
economy. Charles worries about Emma’s
domestic failures. Léon tires of her
extravagance; she becomes decadent, corrupt.
Court order to pay 8,000 francs.
Lhereux refuses to help this time.</span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><u><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Questions/comments</span></u></b><b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">: </span></b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Oh what a tangled web we weave,
when first we practice to deceive! The
two lovers are deceiving themselves, sentimentalizing what they’re up to and
who they are; the materialization of Emma’s airy fantasies is commodities –
fine stuff brought to you directly from the U of SCP, Yonville. Lheureux has a field day now that he suspects
her adulterousness. </span><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Emma's turn to religion is again in
vain, and her tastes run to the corrupt and decadent; even Léon is tired of
her. What makes her common is that her
efforts tend to go in the most predictable destinations.</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"></span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Part
3, Chapter 7</span></b></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Sheriff's
officers inventory household; Emma resents Charles’ very innocence. Rouen’s bankers won’t help, nor will
Léon. Public auction notice; lawyer
Guillaumin wants sexual favors to help; she refuses. What about Rodolphe? She plans unreflectively to prostitute
herself with him.</span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><u><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Questions/comments</span></u></b><b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">: </span></b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">The law closes in on Emma (and Charles), and there’s no
help anywhere. Illusions are just about
entirely stripped away at this point, with Emma more or less resorting to an
attempt at prostitution.</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"></span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Part
3, Chapter 8</span></b></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Rodolphe
won’t lend. No further options, so Emma
makes Justin let her into Homais’ store.
She swallows arsenic, goes home contented. Charles finally learns about confiscation,
and finds Emma in bed; she gives him a letter to read tomorrow. Nausea sets in, and Charles reads the letter
early. Doctors and priests can’t help;
she dies painfully in a few hours.</span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Questions/comments:</span></b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;"> Consider how accurate the poisoning
effects are; Flaubert evidently knew a lot about the subject, did his
homework. Emma dies hard, since a heavy
dose of arsenic isn’t an easy way to go.
Arsenic is a heavy metal like lead and mercury, and the symptoms are
horrifying to behold. “Acute exposures
generally manifest with the cholera-like gastrointestinal symptoms of vomiting
(often times bloody) and severe diarrhea (which may be rice-watery in character
and often bloody); these patients will experience acute distress, dehydration
(often), and hypovolemic shock.”</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"> </span><a href="http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/812953-overview"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Emedicine</span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt;">. </span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"></span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Part
3, Chapter 9-11</span></b></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Charles
slowly recovers from Emma's death. His mother assists. Emma's father too distraught to offer
comfort. Priest and Homais keep vigil.
Charles wants Emma buried in her wedding dress and quarrels with his mother
about funeral expenses. Sexton
Lestiboudois convinced grieving Justin has been stealing his potatoes. Creditors besiege Charles. Léon gets engaged, Charles writes that Emma
would be pleased – he still doesn’t have a clue, even when he stumbles on an
old letter from Rodolphe. Mother and
servant leave, and Charles secludes himself.
Homais shuns him as a social inferior.
Finally, Charles finds letters from R and L and figures out what Emma
was up to – he’s a broken man. He
forgives guilty Rodolphe in Rouen, blaming “destiny.” Next day he dies in his garden. Property sold for creditors, Berthe sent to
her grandmother, then to stay with a poor aunt.
Berthe winds up working in a cotton mill. As for Homais, “il vient de recevoir la croix
d’honneur.”</span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Questions/comments:</span></b><span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;"> The ending seems almost sneering in its
matter-of-fact handling of the Bovary family’s devolution, downward
mobility. It’s hard to forgive Charles
for forgiving Rodolphe, and the economic sins and omissions of the parents are
visited on Berthe. These final chapters
take on the caste almost of an anti-bourgeois Grimm’s fairy tale, as commercial
and social reality close in on the Bovarys and finally crush them like ants
under someone’s boot. The amoral Homais
is the only winner in this situation – he’s too shallow even to have a conscience,
and he prospers. He’s a creature of his
environment. After Emma’s gruesome
death, old patterns reassert themselves for most of Yonville; only Charles
seems transformed – I like him the better for it, but of course the change
proves to be the death of him. It seems
like a bit of a Romantic flourish on Flaubert’s part, but you could also say
Charles is merely imitative in his love and admiration for Emma, so much so
that he even copies her tastes. Emma’s
rejection of the oppressive environment, we might say, makes her, too, a
creature of it, but not an adaptable one – her attempts to break out of the
mundane world surrounding her, to realize her true individuality or
authenticity, come to nothing and she takes her husband and child down with
her. In the end, it doesn’t matter. So that’s the upshot of Flaubert’s realist
method: to render a banal, materialistic provincial society in exquisite
detail, heaping contempt on its values and suggesting that there’s really no
way out once you’re born into such a society.
</span></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="litnotetext" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #339966; font-size: 10pt;">Which brings us to the value of realism – its primary virtue is
honesty in representation, an unsparing commitment to craft and to truth in
analyzing and describing characters and their environments. Often there’s a political and critical edge
to such work – consider George Orwell’s realistic accounts of the Spanish Civil
War, or the element of realism in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">1984, </i>with
its gritty portrayal of a fictional authoritarian regime not unlike the Soviet
Union or perhaps Nazi Germany. But as
for the mid-C19 realism represented by Flaubert, it has its defenders and
detractors. Henry James, writing towards
the end of the nineteenth century, insisted that people shouldn’t make too many
demands on novelistic form or content because it’s the high privilege of
novelistic fiction to capture and render life as it is, to embrace the world as
best we can determine what it is, how it works.
At the other end of the spectrum would be critics such as Oscar Wilde,
always the lover of symbolism, comedy of manners, and in general any kind of
art not tied to the doctrine that art consists in an “imitation of life.” Wilde can come across as sort of glib about
such matters, but his dislike for most realism is insightful: he thought art
and literature should help us realize our own imaginings, that it should enrich
and ennoble life, give us visions of something and somewhere and someone <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">better – </i>not just show us “the way
things are.” What <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ought </i>they be like? That’s
not just smugness or aristocratic posing on his part, or on the symbolists’,
either – it’s a view going all the way back to Plato’s distrust of poets as
“liars” who just follow their own inspiration or desires rather than rendering
for us a vision of beautiful order by which to live. Of course, Plato thought this so-called world
of appearances was itself already a pack of lies – even if you copied things as
they seem to be, you’d still be lying, as far as he is concerned. But the C19 realist felt committed to
describing things as they are, here at the material and social level. They did not idealize or prettify what they
saw. </span></div>Alfred J. Drakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16752305052112968118noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2631470257360454237.post-86138599362597538022012-02-22T07:35:00.000-08:002012-02-22T07:35:13.673-08:00Week 05, Goethe's Faust<b>European Romanticism of Herder, Rousseau, Goethe, etc.</b><br />Neoclassical and Enlightenment thinkers tended to emphasize the orderly collective, the reason-based and structured community, with perhaps "the passions" yoked as instruments in the service of reason. (See Plato's Phaedrus for its depiction of the fiery steeds of good and bad passion, both of which need to be controlled by Reason, which alone guides us towards the Good and the True.)<br /><br />Romantics emphasize the potential of the individual – some of their favorite notions are imagination, genius, particularity, passion – that is, the individual in all his or her eccentricity and emotional intensity, in fact, is often set forth as the universal. William Blake is the strongest advocate for that kind of striving towards the universal not as a neoclassical abstraction but instead as something inextricable from that which embodies it. "One thought fills immensity," he says, and how about his opening to "Auguries of Innocence"? <br /><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
To see a world in a grain of sand,<br />And a heaven in a wild flower,<br />Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,<br />And eternity in an hour.</blockquote>
<br />Walt Whitman sings a "Song of Myself" that turns out to be a song about everybody else at the same time, no? But all this is common to Romantic thought, in one way or another. It is intuition, emotion, imagination, and in some versions (Wordsworth and Rousseau, for example) love of natural beauty and process, that grounds our hopes for progress, for transformation, and a more beneficial and free social order.<br /><br />Neoclassical and Enlightened art sometimes amounts to a Horatian uplift or affirmation campaign based on "imitation" (mimesis), with the aim being to give you what you have already been led to think, only in a more elegant, memorable form: "whatever is, is right," as Alex Pope says. The artist chooses to represent and ornament a good, rational order as the ideal, and make us fall in love with it. (This need not involve lying about the way things really are at present.)<br /><br />Romantic art can be isolated, brooding and withdrawn (examples would be Byron's Manfred, or Shelley's poet-nightingale singing to soothe itself), but often it is confrontational, expressive, ambitious. Both expressive theory and mimetic theory tend to advocate an ethics and an agenda, but the ethics and agenda are very different. Romantic art wants to change you, shake you up; Romantic lyric and music want to turn your head, refocus your attention, start the social and perceptual revolution with you – yes, you! Neoclassical satire, by contrast, may be wonderfully confrontational, but in a piece like Candide, Voltaire wants to tear down your delusions and propose rational, particular "fixes" or offer limited, sage advice; that is because Enlightened thinkers deal with society and man as a kind of machine or edifice, while the Romantics conceptualize society as a living, changing organism, one moving pretty quickly towards liberation and self-expression. Who knows where the changing will take us, or even whether it will end?<br /><br />In an even broader context beyond art, this organic/emotional versus mechanical/rational contrast profoundly affects European politics from the C18 onward. The American Founders, men of the Enlightenment, drew up contracts of sorts, documents enumerating grievances and setting forth rational, discrete "fixes" and constraints. That's where we get the salutary notion (poorly defended today by so-called conservatives) that there ought to be strong limits on what government can do to us or make us do to others. The French Revolution might have begun that way, but it turned into something much more organic, expressive, dynamic, violent, and transformational. France was never the same after the Revolution of 1789: it led to a near-total alteration of society and politics. I think our Romantic moment or baptism of fire came with the Civil War – Lincoln's Gettysburg Address reads like it was written by an expressive poet; he speaks of the birth and death of nations, and of souls struggling to break free. But it's fair to say that America didn't come into its own until the First World War, when our power became manifest as we helped to settle a great European struggle. Of course, the rest of the C20 pretty much belonged to us, and with the possible exception of the Roman Empire, the world has never seen the like of us for sheer importance and power.<br /><br />I should add the following: Romantic art is not only ambitious, it is at the same time intensively self-reflective, self-questioning and philosophical – it turns on its own central concepts and submits them to the fires of introspection and critique. It's true that the Enlightenment fostered the spirit of critique, most notably in the formulation of Kant's injunction sapere aude. But Romanticism does this with unparalleled feeling and intensity. So ideas such as intuition, imagination, revolution, social and poetic/linguistic organicism, etc. – are by no means left unquestioned. Emotion or passion is construed as the ground of human universality, yet who has more closely looked into the risks of such deep passion, the possibility that it may take a tailspin towards mere fantasy, irrationalism, self-delusion, and despair? Who has noticed and reflected more darkly on the potential that imagination has not only to renew the world but also to trap us with its own productions and isolate us from humane engagement with things and people as they are? Who has more strongly emphasized that glorifying "the individual" at the expense of the community might well lead nowhere but to narcissism, solipsism, and incomprehensibility? Or that it might in fact worsen the primal eldest curse, alienation, which, after all, Romantic poets and other artists tend to take as the absolute precondition of authentic humanity? Count Manfred on the Alps is grand, but not a happy man. Besides, the Romantics themselves weren't generally so superior and removed: Lord Byron died of a fever in 1824 helping the Greeks organize the fight for their independence from the Ottoman Empire (1821-30). Not exactly an alienated recluse, was Byron – he was more like a rock star with a scandalous personal life and a principled politics.<br /><br />With this mention of "passionate self-critique," we should move to Goethe, who was both an early proponent of emotionalist art or "Sturm [stormy passion] und Drang [impulse or stress]" (Werther) and a critic of that impulse when, along with Friedrich von Schiller and others, he moved towards what came to be known as "Weimar Classicism" (Weimarer Klassik) from the 1770's through the first decades of the C19. To be sought were balance and perspective in and through art and artistic education. The aim was to promote human integrity, wholeness, clarity well-roundedness – to synthesize the best of the Romantic and the Enlightened outlooks. Read Schiller's brilliant Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man -- I can't recommend this book highly enough as a meditation on the difficult but ultimately promising relationship between aesthetics, society and political change. Anyhow, in Goethe we see not only the propensity for self-criticism but also a particularly strong dose of wit and humor in doing so – he's quite the intellectual's poet. In truth, his own erudition probably rivaled that of Doctor Faust, since there's just about no branch of learning in which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe didn't dabble in a long life that stretched from 1749-1832. He was a true polymath – artist, scientist, philosopher, you name it.<br /><br /><b>The Protagonist, Heinrich Faust:</b><br />Marlowe's Faustus was nobler in that he at first made his pact with the devil's helper because of his desire for forbidden but genuine knowledge: ultimate understanding of the universe and its secrets. True, he also wanted to experience the sensual side of life to the fullest.<br /><br />Goethe's Faust makes his bargain when he has already rejected the quest for such ultimate knowledge. Now what he wants is more human extremes, a total openness to experience of any kind, be it pleasure or pain. In sum, he aligns himself with his own romantic or "Sturm und Drang" definition of human nature as restless, perpetually unsatisfied and striving. The way up is through humanity itself, the inner space of human nature, so to speak.<br /><br /><b>Margarete, or Gretchen:</b><br />She is somewhat more complex than what we might expect: she isn't as pure as Faust insists she must be: she is easily seduced with gifts and kind words, and puts up no real resistance to Faust's advances. She isn't bad – just ordinary. After all, Mephistopheles had said the witch's potion would make Faust think every woman Helen of Troy.<br /><br /><b>Mephistopheles:</b><br />Goethe has updated him and given him a wry sense of humor – a new tradition that lasts to this day. Gretchen sees him in his lineaments nonetheless: repulsive, unsympathetic, antipathetic to love's attractive power.<br /><br />What is Goethe apparently trying to accomplish with this respinning of the old story in which a learned doctor is condemned for seeking forbidden knowledge at the expense of his humanity?<br /><br />He turns the usual moral fable neatly on its head: our incompleteness is our greatness; that's the new Romantic paradigm. But the lesson and path are more complicated than that. Goethe is mature enough to act as historian and philosopher to the movement with which he is associated, European Romanticism. Faust's pursuit of extreme experience is by no means purely admirable: in fact, it begins with a species of utter boredom and a self-pitying kind of irony: "Was it for this empty, high knowledge that I've spent so much of my life?" In the end, Faust isn't condemned in Part 2 as we expected he would be. His movement away from narcissism and towards compassionate intersubjectivity is enough to earn God's favor. But the narcissism is there, and it's acknowledged rather than papered over.<br />Alfred J. Drakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16752305052112968118noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2631470257360454237.post-31217877292062877812012-02-13T19:06:00.001-08:002012-02-13T19:06:35.412-08:00Week 04, Voltaire's Candide<b>NOTES ON VOLTAIRE'S <i>CANDIDE</i> </b><br />
<br />
What are the basic premises of the European Enlightenment and of philosophes such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, d'Alembert, Diderot, and Montesquieu?<br /><br />1. Universe is intelligible and orderly, governed by natural forces we can comprehend by the use of reason and applied science. Deism is a religious corollary, and so is an insistence on observing tolerance and following moral standards that we have drawn mainly from within ourselves.<br /><br />2. Individuals and indeed human history can be understood on rational terms. Knowledge implies responsibility for exercising control over ourselves individually and our affairs collectively.<br /><br />3. Humanity is improvable, perfectible. Locke's tabula rasa notion of childhood stresses education since environment is critical. We can make progress in science, government, and society.<br /><br />4. Notions of perfectibility, knowability, and control lead to a democratic impulse in Enlightenment thought, even if many intellectuals favored "enlightened autocrats" like Frederick the Great. If we made our own institutions over time, we can change them when they no longer suit us.<br /><br />The Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) sums up the European Enlightenment well. Kant said that the essence of the Enlightenment could be captured in the phrase sapere aude, “Dare to Know.” Humans possess the power of reason, and they are responsible for knowing the sources, operational principles, and limits of that power. That is what the three famous Critiques are for: Critique of Pure Reason (how we can perceive and know); Critique of Practical Reason (Ethics); Critique of Judgment (Aesthetics). We are free rational and moral agents living in a world that we ourselves largely render intelligible by means of our powerful mental faculties. We are not determined by nature or bound to naturaal necessity; we give laws to Nature, and our standards derive not from an external source (God) but rather from our own capacity to act morally.<br /><br />Voltaire and the French philosophes were publicizers, popularizers, and practical reformers, not ivory-tower thinkers.<br /><br />Voltaire was exiled for a while to England for insulting a French nobleman, the Chevalier de Rohan. He favored a dash of English government and British empiricism – healthy alternatives for French Cartesian rationalists and political absolutists. He opposed Europe's addiction to war, issuing the remarkable comment, "murder is strictly punished unless you do it in great numbers and to the sound of trumpets." He also favored civil liberty and opposed the Catholic Church in his famous cry, "écrasez l'infâme," by which he meant superstition and bigotry, in particular the Catholic Church with its long history of persecution against free-thinkers and intellectuals. This sentiment is optimistic because it assumes that removing obstacles systematicaly will open the way to improvement of the human condition.<br /><br />In Candide Voltaire is considering the problems of personal autonomy, determinism, and the possibility of social and political justice. It's all well and good to cook up theories and "oughts," but how have people always treated one another? There's plenty of evidence for a strong search into that question, so let's have a look. Well, let's have an an outrageously satirical, over-the-top look, anyway. Yet, how far beyond realism are the events of Candide? Is human history devoid of brutal sadism and torture, mass rape, horrible pestilence, total war, and so forth? No! It's an awful thought, but what you get in Candide – silly stuff about El Dorado and all the ridiculous recognition scenes aside – is concentrated realism. A modern equivalent might be something like Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, though that film is considerably more pessimistic in its outcome than Voltaire's text.<br /><br />In a sense, Candide is atypical of Voltaire as a philosophe thinker, or at least it isn't to be taken on its own, in isolation from his larger body of work. Rather we should probably read it as an antidote to the mistaken assumption that Voltaire might run to extremes in his bold advocacy of humanity's prospects in the face of a long, ridiculously hideous history constituting evidence to the contrary. Candide deflates the scientific pretentions, the cocksure absurdity of the -ism associated with the late C17 rationalist philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in particular: optimism. Voltaire doesn't reject optimism in a general, non-philosophical sense. Rather he tries to prevent it from rigidifying into a system of the sort that Dr. Pangloss advocates. Whenever that happens to a philosophy, it loses much of its insight and value. He's a philosophe, not a dogmatist. To be hopeful and positive-spirited is not to be an oblivious fool. Vigilance is the watchword, and the upshot of Candide, the moral lesson, is simply we must cultivate our own gardens. In other words, keep it real and do something tangible that benefits you and those around you. Do not fail to see what's really going on, and don't build intellectual and desire-based sand castles in the air. But don't give up, either -- that just runs against human nature and it makes life impossible, stagnant, intolerable.<br /><br />
<b>Main Points about Candide: </b>The text confronts you with raw experience, shocking stuff. This representation dumps a vat of acid on C18 optimist and rationalist pretentions, corroding the frameworks commonly used to control and understand people and things. The point is to reveal the underlying reality of events and circumstances. Voltaire is, therefore, a good Baconian empiricist and an honest historian, and optimistic views don't correspond to real life. We might be able to see that if we just stopped blurting out formulae and precepts and instead opened our eyes. As they say, "denial isn't just a river in Egypt," and a huge amount of human energy seems to go towards the denial of everything from our own mortality to the atrocities we are capable of committing. And truth, as Nietzsche will later inform us to our discomfiture, very often looks suspiciously like a species of error that makes us feel good about ourselves. In the best sense, this philosophe Voltaire is anti-systemic in his insistence on vigilance, his opposition to religious and philosophical dogma. For the rest, we will run through the text's highlights.<br />Alfred J. Drakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16752305052112968118noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2631470257360454237.post-12981735572760176752012-02-13T19:00:00.001-08:002012-02-13T19:02:21.735-08:00Week 03, Racine's Phaedra<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">NOTES ON JEAN RACINE'S <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">PHAEDRA</i></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Racine
stages a central theme in ancient Greek tragedy: knowing things doesn't afford one
control over them. That is the
disturbing insight to reckon with in the current play. As always, cosmic irony is at work: the
cosmos are indeed orderly, but not in a way that brings comfort to humans who
thrive on predictability and nourish dreams of their own dignity.</span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">With
regard to Theseus, his savvy as a womanizer and martial adventurer hardly
translates into insight into his domestic affairs. Racine's Theseus isn't the one in
Shakespeare's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Midsummer Night's Dream, </i>the
hero who manages to get on fine with his earlier wife, Hippolyta, Queen of the
Amazons.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Phaedra's
ancestry matters – she is the daughter of Minos of Crete (son of Zeus by
Europa) and Pasiphae (daughter of the sun) who fell in love with a bull:
Pasiphae's destructive, unnatural passion seems to afflict her daughter, too. Phaedra is fully aware of the quandary she is
in, but can do nothing positive to escape from it: her gambit to drive away
Hippolytus fails miserably.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">In
Euripides' version, Hippolytus is devoted to Artemis rather than Aphrodite, who
is therefore angry with him. Aphrodite represents
passion denied in this case, the consequences of which are disastrous. As in Euripides' <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bacchantes, </i>those who deny the erotic force in life are almost
bound to meet with a bad end: in that play, Theban king Pentheus is torn to
shreds by his mother Agave and the Bacchantes whom he scorns.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Racine's
style is the epitome of early neoclassical excellence: as the Norton editors
say, his ability manifests itself in a fine combination of genuine passion and
stately form; the latter, rather like the masks that the ancients wore during a
tragedy the better to bring out the character, helps intensify the passion.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Alexandrines
– how they work, 12 syllables (13 if last one is unstressed), pause after the
sixth (caesura), and four accent-points, major ones on the sixth and twelfth
syllables.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">A
needless alexandrine ends the song<br />
that like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along. </span><span lang="FR" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">(Pope's "Essay on Criticism")</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span lang="FR" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Hippolyte (opening of
first act)</span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="FR" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Le dessein en est pris: je pars, cher Théramène,<br />
Et quitte le séjour de l'aimable Trézène.<br />
Dans le doute mortel dont je suis agité,<br />
Je commence à rougir de mon oisiveté.<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
</span></div>Alfred J. Drakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16752305052112968118noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2631470257360454237.post-38251669844865137382012-02-12T19:04:00.000-08:002012-02-22T07:37:11.872-08:00Week 02, Matsuo Basho<b>Notes on Matsuo Basho. <i>The Narrow Road of the Interior.</i></b><br />
This work has a bit of Henry David Thoreau about it, though obviously it doesn't have the American Transcendentalist or late-romantic emphasis on individualism and self-expression. What it has in common is that it's sort of a literary pilgrimage, not just an unadorned trek through nature. Thoreau's Walden wasn't only about nature, and neither was A Week on the Condord and Merrimac just a simple nature jaunt with no ulterior motive.<br />
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Concentrate on the near-constant minging of natural description/interpretation and Basho's interactions with worthy people he meets along the way, monuments, and so forth. Consider why this is especially appropriate in an island country such as Japan, one with a lot of people in a fairly small amount of space. Comment on Basho's haiku origins and how they fit into his travel narrative as focal points or summings-up and memorializings of his experiences.<br />
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2288. How does Shonagon conceptualize nature, how does she relate to it and describe it? I think she describes nature as if it were a work of art; we only have selections, but I find that she concentrates mostly on still-life tableaux, and not so much on natural process or activity, though of course that is always implied in any sensitive description of nature. Nature is presented to her as a series of distinct but related objects, aesthetic objects. She seldom speaks harshly about nature, but instead finds something good to say about most natural objects. She is not always so generous about human beings within the court system or outside of it. But that doesn’t bother me—people can take care of themselves; we should be indulgent with nature. Shonagon is very conscious of nature’s presence in literary tradition, both Japanese and Chinese, and she mixes in this awareness with her naturalistic descriptions. In the example of the pear blossom, it is Chinese literature that leads her to make a close examination of the blossom itself. She does not hesitate, either, to mingle observation of nature with comments about human affairs like coming home from a festival. She is not, in other words, a purist who must block out all things human to talk about nature—that is probably more a product of modern necessity. In Japan , as I’ve read, people once lived very close to nature, and then when the island became crowded, they had to work hard to recreate a sense of the natural, by means of artifice. Zen gardens epitomize this kind of artifice—they are at once natural and artificial, we might say.<br />
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Buddhism's key concepts and how this early romance novel, while also containing elements of Daoism and Confucianism, fits within the Buddhist framework in spite of its whimsicality. Just about everything that happens reinforces Buddhist notions about how desire and misprision bind people to the world, keep them from doing what they need to do, etc.<br />
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<b>The Four Noble Truths and Three Laws</b><br />
1. life is suffering<br />
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2. suffering is a product of attachment or desire<br />
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3. it’s possible to let go of attachments<br />
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4. there’s a true path towards liberation -- meditation, self-annihilation, detached action; see the Eightfold Path from Buddha's first sermon "setting the wheel of truth in motion": right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration.<br />
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<b>Three Laws: </b>Anicca (impermanence); Dukkha (suffering, all phenomena unsatisfactory)' Anatta (non-self, no ego); the five precepts basically have to do with clean, peaceful living so that you don't get attached to the body and its desires or to material objects.<br />
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So the straightforward message is that misdirected desire makes us unhappy, but right conduct and attitude can bring us peace. On the whole, Buddha counsels reorientation of one’s sensibilities and attentions away from the self and towards the community.<br />
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<br />Alfred J. Drakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16752305052112968118noreply@blogger.com0