Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 20021

Day 1 January 7, 2002

1. Names. Introductions. Syllabus. This class as both a thematic course and a kind of "second time through" American lit, alongside Survey with some minor overlaps. Pass out handouts: Rowlandson, Filson, Franklin, for Wed., Jacobs and Douglas for Friday, then into Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick.

Some words on journals. For first one, send it to me at gundyj@bluffton.edu; use your preferred email account. I'll put all those addresses together and make a list; starting Friday, send your journal around to the whole list.

2. On Campbell's "monomyth": the kingdom is in danger, so a man goes on a journey, undergoes trials, struggles with the forces of evil, overcomes them, returns triumphantly with the gift that will save the community.

"Real world" questions/problems re Campbell:

How is the quest defined?

How is the hero chosen?

How does he/she relate to the community afterward? What if the hero is unsuited to boring middle-class life after the big adventure?

What about those "forces of evil"? What if they turn out to be human beings, not incarnations of the powers of darkness?

Whose experience does the Campbell version of the myth leave out or distort? Women, native Americans, blacks?

3. What other myths of heroes? Jesus? John Wayne? Rambo? Rocky? Luke Skywalker? Dennis Quaid in Independence Day? Shane? Frodo? Harry Potter? What qualities do they share? "Ordinary," yet special. Their secret nobility revealed after a period of obscurity and/or persecution. ("Maybe I'm a king!") The need for a quest, a journey, and to overcome evil by violence without becoming entirely subsumed in violence (putting on the Ring, going over to the Dark Side).

Questions/problems: hero's relation to society and to God/the gods: where does he fit? What are his qualities? Competence, skill in warfare, self-sacrifice?

Further question: heroes, of course, are supposed to triumph. But what when they don't? Tragic heroes in Shakespeare, in Greek drama, etc. What such in U.S.? Oedipus: Stafford writes "First he won so well he lost; then he lost so well he won."

Things going so badly wrong only the merest shreds can be salvaged?

How real are these myths? How do they relate to actual life?

What psychological needs do they serve?

How do the myths exist, persist or become transformed in American writing?

What do the particulars of American history and geography do to myths?

How do conscious literary artists remake or transform or parody them?

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 20022

Day 2 January 9, 2002

1. Names. 3 days for SL, durn it, but so it goes. Skim Custom House sketch, focus on stuff about Hawthorne, writing, find the letter, less on descriptions of people there.

Note that I'll put my notes, which many times include batches of stuff that I don't get said in class, on the class web site periodically, esp. so that you can consult them while working on exams. Note also plans to get Kari involved in this class, esp. in developing a web site with resources on authors and themes. If you come up with such, please let me know.

2. Thanks for journals, which were very interesting and a good start. I had 10 of 13 by 11:00. I'll compile a group list this afternoon or tomorrow morning, send everybody a message. Send me your address asap if you didn't get one done for today.

Three rather different versions of the American Hero for today. I want to think with you about their qualities as "heroes," maybe more deeply than most of the journals did.

Talk about captivity narrative, views of nature and the wilderness and the other, Promised Land vs. Howling Wilderness. The Errand into the Wilderness. A man went on a journey.

The captivity narrative. Slotkin: "A single individual, usually a woman, stands passively under the strokes of evil, awaiting rescue by the grace of God." (94) Note the mythic character of the narrative: ease/fall/testing/return. Note also that being forcibly carried into it was just about the only way for a woman to encounter the wilderness.

Slotkin says that bondage to the Indian is representative of the bondage of the spirit to the flesh and of the self-exile of the Pilgrims from England. The temptation to Indian marriage and "devilish" cannibal Eucharist had to be resisted; the ultimate return to community is akin to conversion. He also says the last passage about wishing for affliction shows fear of "the double-edged promise of the New World: the opulent rewards, which might make the spirit too secure and unready for the test, and the freedom from artificial restraints, which placed the whole weight of responsibility for the maintenance of virtue in thought and action on the lonely individual" (104).

Do you understand why this was popular? We love to hear about the sufferings of others, don't we, esp. women and children, esp. coupled with clear and not too threatening moral teachings? Cf. the spate of recent woman-as-victim TV movies?

She has an attractive style, I think, quite readable compared to many others of her time, a blend of vivid physical description and moral concern.

How does Rowlandson fit into Campbell's stages? She does go on an errand and return, though her heroism is mainly in surviving, not in taking some dramatic action as we typically expect from heroes. She's more Martyr than anything, hmm? Does she ever become "well adjusted" in the modern sense, in Pearson's sense? She doesn't even think of thinking in those categories.

3. What about Filson's version of Boon? The hunter, the pioneer, the breaker of the wilderness; not at ease within society, he must go out into the wild, learn from it, master it, and return. Note that the style here is almost entirely artificial in its smooth, bland, effete lyricism: Boon himself wrote things like "kilt a bar" on trees, mostly. And the motive is not disinterested--he wants to sell real estate in Kentucky, persuade people it's now safe to settle there.

Filson/Boon. His "errand into the wilderness" is less piously (personally) motivated than the Puritans'; consider the opening paragraph, which argues that whatever we do will further God's designs, regardless. It also assumes rather cavalierly that God is on his/our side, hmm? And on the side of cities and farms, vs. stinking wigwams and hunter/gatherers. Not much sense of Noble Savages there, hmm?

Boon seems partly interested in settlement, partly in just having a good old time with his buddies in the woods. The scene where suddenly the Indians break in upon them, they're abruptly captured: that primal American sense that we may at any moment be set upon by hostile strangers? That we must always be on our guard? (r)MDIT>>Deliverance(r)MDNM>>, the James Dickey novel, where the hero is an ordinary Joe who has to kill a murderous hillbilly with a bow and arrow to win his manhood.

Boon's stripped of all civilized trappings, including companions, except his gun, which is his main mode of relating to the wilderness, hmm? Another primary American scene, when he triumphs over the temptation to Puritan melancholy and self-doubt by killing the buck and feasting on it, looking out over the Ohio valley. The sense there of primal innocence and happiness and satisfaction, moment of romantic nature-worship: "It just doesn't get any better than this." In the beer commercials of course there are male companions, but often no women. (Unless the Swedish bikini team drops in.) But this moment is punctured, and Boon enters a round of battles, captures, escapes, trials, victories and losses in which that initial simplicity and calm become very quickly only a nostalgic dream. He does open the land, of course, he drives the Indians out, he wins; we're all living out the "happily ever after . . ."

What about the Indians in these stories? In Filson they're less purely brutes, after that opening invocation, than in Rowlandson; they are worthy opponents/captors/teachers, sometimes violent but not entirely inhuman, not merely demonic; still they are the enemy. Boon as "Instrument ordained to settle the wilderness": the sense of divine backing is crucial, of course, to American experience. Manifest destiny, God on our side, and all the rest. One major gap still remaining in this course is a first-person Indian voice from this time period; I regret that, but I haven't found one yet.

Note, too, that this hero is manufactured, made up, changed into a figure only vaguely resembling the real man--for commercial purposes. In his story hunting and fertility, violence and progress, are inseparably connected. The hunter must learn from the Indians, yet preserve some civilized essence of his own, mainly sentiment toward women and children. The struggle for space is underway, and violent repression of the Indians seems the only way to make the country safe for settlement, for women and children. "We continued our pursuit through five towns on the Miami Rivers . . . burnt them all to ashes, entirely destroyed their corn, and other fruits, and everywhere spread a scene of desolation in the country."

Slotkin: "An American hero is the lover of the spirit of the wilderness, and his acts of love and sacred affirmations are acts of violence against that spirit and her avatars." (22) Also Lawrence, of course.

4. Franklin: His lists and schedules and maxims. And, we should recall, his willingness to bend his own rules. The myth of the self-made man, who walks into Philadelphia with only a Dutch dollar and a copper penny, and through hard work and clean living emerges as a rich and powerful and virtuous man . . . There are only two stories, I heard once: "A man went on a journey . . ." and "A stranger came into town . . ." We've been talking about the first one, but this is the second: the hero who becomes one by conquering the city rather than the wilderness, whose triumph is in society rather than for it. The self-made man, the American Adam, all that stuff. The famous lists and charts. What do you make of all this? He strikes me as partly brilliant and partly frightening. He's a pragmatist, a planner, an operator, one of those guys who's always on the make. One of those guys who's great fun to be with if he decides that he likes you.

And Lawrence's view of Franklin: rather radically skeptical, overall. On the extirpation of the savages, on his dry set of virtues, on his parsimonious sense of the "soul." Lawrence's alternate list. http://xroads.virginia.edu/HYPER/LAWRENCE/dhlch02.htm. From that chapter:

"Which brings us right back to our question, what's wrong with Benjamin, that we can't stand him? Or else, what's wrong with us, that we kind fault with such a paragon?

Man is a moral animal. All right. I am a moral animal. And I'm going to remain such. I'm not going to be turned into a virtuous little automaton as Benjamin would have me. 'This is good, that is bad. Turn the little handle and let the good tap flow,' saith Benjamin, and all America with him. 'But first of all extirpate those savages who are always turning on the bad tap.'

I am a moral animal. But I am not a moral machine. I don't work with a little set of handles or levers. The Temperance- silence-order- resolution-frugality-industry-sincerity - justice- moderation-cleanliness-tranquillity-chastity-humility keyboard is not going to get me going. I'm really not just an automatic piano with a moral Benjamin getting tunes out of me.

Here's my creed, against Benjamin's. This is what I believe:

'That I am I.'

' That my soul is a dark forest.'

'That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.'

'Thatgods, strange gods, come f orth f rom the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.'

' That I must have the courage to let them come and go.'

' That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.'

There is my creed. He who runs may read. He who prefers to crawl, or to go by gasoline, can call it rot.

Then for a 'list'. It is rather fun to play at Benjamin.

1. TEMPERANCE

Eat and carouse with Bacchus, or munch dry bread with Jesus, but don't sit down without one of the gods.

2. SILENCE

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.

3. ORDER

Know that you are responsible to the gods inside you and to the men in whom the gods are manifest. Recognize your superiors and your inferiors, according to the gods. This is * the root of all order.

4. RESOLUTION

Resolve to abide by your own deepest promptings, and to sacrifice the smaller thing to the greater. Kill when you must, and be killed the same: the must coming from the gods inside you, or from the men in whom you recognize the Holy Ghost.

5. FRUGALITY

Demand nothing; accept what you see fit. Don't waste your pride or squander your emotion.

6. INDUSTRY

Lose no time with ideals; serve the Holy Ghost; never serve mankind.

7. SINCERITY

To be sincere is to remember that I am I, and that the other man is not me.

8. JUSTICE

The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgement is never just.

9. MODERATION

Beware of absolutes. There are many gods.

10. CLEANLINESS

Don't be too clean. It impoverishes the blood.

11. TRANQUILITY

The soul has many motions, many gods come and go. Try and find your deepest issue, in every confusion, and abide by that. Obey the man in whom you recognize the Holy Ghost; command when your honour comes to command.

12. CHASTITY

Never 'use' venery at all. Follow your passional impulse, if it be answered in the other being; but never have any motive in mind, neither offspring nor health nor even pleasure, nor even service. Only know that 'venery' is of the great gods. An offering-up of yourself to the very great gods, the dark ones, and nothing else.

13. HUMILITY

See all men and women according to the Holy Ghost that is within them. Never yield before the barren.

[ . . . . . . . . . . .]

" Benjamin, in his sagacity, knew that the breaking of the old world was a long process. In the depths of his own underconsciousness he hated England, he hated Europe, he hated * the whole corpus of the European being. He wanted to be American. But you can't change your nature and mode of consciousness like changing your shoes. It is a gradual shedding. Years must go by, and centuries must elapse before you have finished. Like a son escaping from the domination of his parents. The escape is not just one rupture. It is a long and half-secret process.

So with the American. He was a European when he first went over the Atlantic. He is in the main a recreant European still. From Benjamin Franklin to Woodrow Wilson may be a long stride, but it is a stride along the same road. There is no new road. The same old road, become dreary and futile. Theoretic and materialistic.

Why then did Benjamin set up this dummy of a perfect citizen as a pattern to America ? Of course, he did it in perfect good faith, as far as he knew. He thought it simply was the true ideal. But what we think we do is not very important. We never really know what we are doing. Either we are materialistic instruments, like Benjamin, or we move in the gesture of creation, from our deepest self, usually unconscious. We are only the actors, we are never wholly the authors of our own deeds or works. IT is the author, the unknown inside us or outside us. The best we can do is to try to hold ourselves in unison with the deeps which are inside us. And the worst we can do is to try to have things our own way, when we run counter to IT, and in the long run get our knuckles rapped for our presumption.

So Benjamin contriving money out of the Court of France. He was contriving the first steps of the overthrow of all Europe, France included. You can never have a new thing without breaking an old. Europe happens to be the old thing. America, unless the people in America assert themselves too much in opposition to the inner gods, should be the new thing. The new thing is the death of the old. But you can't cut the throat of an epoch. You've got to steal the life from it through several centuries.

And Benjamin worked for this both directly and indirectly. Directly, at the Court of France, making a small but very dangerous hole in the side of England, through which hole Europe has by now almost bled to death. And indirectly in Philadelphia, setting up this unlovely, snuff-coloured little ideal, or automaton, of a pattern American. The pattern American, this dry, moral, utilitarian little democrat, has done more to ruin the old Europe than any Russian nihilist. He has done it by slow attrition, like a son who has stayed at home and obeyed his parents, all the while silently hating their authority, and silently, in his soul, destroying not only their authority but their whole existence. For the American spiritually stayed at home in Europe. The spiritual home of America was, and still is, Europe. This is the galling bondage, in spite of several billions of heaped-up gold. Your heaps of gold are only so many muck-heaps, America, and will remain so till * you become a reality to yourselves."

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 20023

Day 3 January 11, 2002

1. Names. Scarlet Letter starting Monday--read at least through ch. 9, "The Leech." I forget which edition I ordered . . . but the chapters are short, and we shouldn't have much trouble with finding passages.

Everybody get the list of names?

About journals--my only suggestion would be that specifics are often useful to give weight and detail to your general statements. People are doing well at getting past "like" and "don't like" to real issues and substance, but that's an ongoing challenge.

2. Pick up with Lawrence's view of Franklin: rather radically skeptical, overall. On the extirpation of the savages, on his dry set of virtues, on his parsimonious sense of the "soul." On Franklin's God, a rather vague and Deist one. Lawrence's alternate list.

3. Interesting range of reactions in journals for today. Some found Jacobs less than convincing/sympathetic--want to talk about why?

Jacobs and Douglas: Self-definition and heroism depend a great deal on your subject position, your relation to the society in which you exist, hmm? Rowlandson lives beyond the edge for a little but returns to the middle, Franklin moves to the very top, Boon on the fringe, but Jacobs and Douglas must define themselves against the dominant society, they're under it, they mustdefy or resist it simply to survive as independent human beings.

Cf. Jacobs with Rowlandson? For the women, surviving captivity and preserving their virtue, or something like it, are the keys. For the men, it's measured violence, not going berserk, but not yielding either. Again, I don't make these observations because I think they reveal something essential about men and women, but because I think they suggest important cultural distinctions and values of their times. In Douglas the key scenes are the fight with Covey, in which he determines to resist, to refuse to serve, and the scene with the ships in the bay, which shows his psychological oppression but also his imaginative power to visualize and interpret the scene, to imagine freedom, and (in the context of the story) to pursue and achieve it. Cf. Jacobs in her attic hideaway, catching glimpses of her children through the little hole she's made, laying low until she can make a break.

Jacobs and the sentimental tradition: she appeals to the shock of attacks on her virtue, as Douglas also notes incidentally; Uncle Tom's Cabin, as influential as anything in crystallizing abolitionist feeling in the north, also dramatizes the ways slavery disrupted families and led to sexual abuses. What about the question of audience in these two? Does she appeal to a female reader, Douglas to a male one? Such questions are important re 19th-c. lit in America in general; Hawthorne and the "damned mob of scribbling women," Baym's essay on "Melodramas of Beset Manhood" about male authors canonized despite their lack of popularity, e.g. Hawthorne and Melville, largely because they appeal to white male literary critics. . . .

The intro to Jacobs introduces the issue of the "patriarchy," an important category for feminist thinking and criticism. What about the relation of Jacobs to Mrs. Flint? Mrs. Flint seems to fit the category of "oppressed oppressor," according to some analysis . . . is Covey in Douglas's narrative in a similar position? What sort of life does he have, really? It's reading against the grain to dwell on this too much, but Covey is himself "a poor man, a farm-renter," we're told, who is able to farm his land no doubt only because he gets cheap labor through his reputation as a slave-breaker. He's a person who does inexcusable things, and he has more ability to choose to change than the slaves do, obviously, but within the system he is acting more or less rationally--in his own self-interest, economically at least--if not ethically. Breeding the slave woman so she has twins is a rational act . . . we breed cattle, don't we?

In both of these, as in Rowlandson, note that their oppression is not total, their captivity is not absolute; they find allies, they manage to visit others who help them, they're connected to people slightly better off. There's Jacobs' grandmother, who protects her for years, and her children, who give her strength just by being present. What about Sandy Jenkins, who gives Douglas the root, for instance? I wouldn't read that supernaturally, but psychologically there's the suggestion that the root is an emblem of his right to resist, and of his membership in a community that recognizes that right. I suspect this means not that things weren't really so terrible, but rather that they were luckier than most, who without these minor but essential outside helpers were never able to escape, to learn to read and write, to tell their stories.

It occurs to me to suggest that both of these people, while they emphasize their individual struggles and triumphs of course, as we expect them to, also clearly indicate the importance of other people for them. Cf. Franklin's egocentrism, his concern for getting ahead, for appearing humble as a means of self-promotion, his belittling of the other printers in Philadelphia . . .

Jacobs: another one: woman, again, who triumphs through perseverance, hiding, cleverness, not through violence. Moral ambiguity and agonizing, being forced into moral compromises by lack of power.

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 20024

Day 4 January 14, 2002

1. Names. Keep reading for next time. I got most journals . . . Web site is starting to take shape. We'll have more time to work on Melville and MD. If you come across sites that seem helpful, let us know.

2. Starting in on Scarlet Letter Note the new movie version is perhaps admirable but doesn't much resemble what we're reading here. One of the "great books"; how many read it in high school? Also, it seems to me, a very strange book, essentially ambivalent, filled with inner tensions and contradictions. Hawthorne noted that reading it gave his wife a headache, 263-264 in Leverenz essay.

Almost the only "classic" American novel with romantic love at its center . . . in the 19th century, anyway. A peculiar fact in itself. Then there's the peculiar treatment of that love here: its consummation coming a year before the book begins, whatever courtship or wooing preceded that consummation left entirely to our imagination, and the novel itself being almost entirely concerned with the aftermath of what is, really, a failed romance. Hawthorne and Melville very close during its writing; both with sense of wickedness and transgression about what they were doing. And the treatment of female suffering.

The custom house sketch: look for 1) relation to past, to heritage; 20-22. Hawthorne's ancestors killed witches.; 2) relation of author to present society, people he works with there, 23, 25, 27-28 the patriarch, and food, 30-31 the old, dim warrior. 34 on Hawthorne and the others. Contrast of this life with his wild intellectual days, 35, Brook Farm and the transcendentalists and all that. 3) 37 ff. discovery of the story and effort to write it, what stands in way and what makes it possible. Moonlight and firelight, 44-45. Finally he's thrown out of office, and then he is able to write the story. What about him? Is he shy retiring guy, or active self-promoting bureaucrat? 42-44. Important to recognize that this is historical fiction, cast well before Hawthorne's own time.

In relation to heroism and humility: what do we have here? A book about a woman who submits to a community that judges her sinful. She wears the scarlet letter, it seems, almost willingly. She suffers, it seems, far more than she would need to, and persists in her role when it would be easy for her to escape it.

What kind of hero(ine) is she, then? Is her heroism in her humility? See ch. 13, which we'll talk about next time: "Another View of Hester."

What about the other characters, the pastor and sometime lover Dimmesdale, the wronged and vengeful husband Chillingworth, the beautiful but enigmatic love-child Pearl? And (the other major actor, who may pass unnoticed) the narrator, a pervasive and ambivalent presence, one whose sympathies seem to shift repeatedly . . .

Cf.David Leverenz, 264. "TSL's strange power . . . derives from its unresolved tensions. What starts as a feminist revolt against punitive patriarchal authority ends in a muddle of sympathetic pity for ambiguous victims. Throughout, a gentlemanly moralist frames the story so curiously as to ally his empathies with his inquisitions. . . . his characterizations of Hester and Chillingworth bring out Hawthorne's profoundly contradictory affinities with a rebellious, autonomous female psyche and an intrusive male accusor." Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter. Ed. Ross C. Martin. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 1991).

One question critics have turned over and over: who is the hero?

Look at the opening of the story proper: what happens there, for tone, symbolism, themes, setting, establishment of all those things? Civilization is the prison and the cemetery; it's ugly, repressive, joyless. But the wild rose-bush exists only with considerable difficulty.

-What about Hawthorne's Puritans? The Custom House sketch mentions his own ancestors who burned witches and such, as does the intro. Clearly H. is skeptical about their religious fervor and its effects on human beings. Even so . . . how do they come across? Dour, strict old men and humorless big women? Any hint of real religious feeling, of fruits of the spirit? Dimmesdale? Nina Baym says they're presented as merely "self-satisfied secular autocracy," into "authoritarian state with a Victorian moral outlook." Nina Baym, "Passion and Authority in The Scarlet Letter," NEQ 43 (1970) 209-230.

Baym says H. doesn't present Puritans' view of their purpose in New World, their covenant. The power structure is presented as outsider/unbeliever might perceive it. (214) It's authoritarian and conservative, assoc. with old men. D. fears being thrown out of company of patriarchs.

-What about the style? What is the voice of the narrator? How are events presented? Richard Chase: it's a series of tableaus, "all picture," a "possessive" imagination that refuses to relinquish the characters to our immediate possession. Lots of generalized, subjective, interpretive narration; he tells more than he shows.

-Who is the hero? What are heroic traits here? Whose side is Hawthorne on?

-Is this a woman's novel? How are woman's issues involved? Hester as Dark Lady, temptress, too beautiful and sensual to be trusted? Later in the critical survey the editor notes how hard the New Critics strained to make someone other than Hester the main character.

-Sketch each of the main characters. How do each of them change? What relationships develop between them?

3. Step by step:

ch 2: meeting the Puritans: what are they like? The big women, giants in the earth, cf. the pale thin maidens of the sort he married. Hester also as robust beauty, the Dark Lady . . . she won't be humiliated, she's heroic and almost transhuman.

ch. 3: We meet Chillingworth and Dimmesdale, D's entreaty.

ch. 4: the interview. Chillingworth accepts some of the blame; he's too old and too cold for her, she never loved him. But he insists he'll know the father. He forces her to keep his identity secret. End of chapter: he's compared to the Black Man, not for the last time.

ch. 5 Hester at Her Needle. Re-entry into the world, kind of day-to-day stress she must bear up under. Why does she stay? Her skill with needle earns her a place in this world. Question of what a woman can do, also not for the last time. 89 the letter starts to affect her, she imagines it allows her to see into the hearts of others, cf. Y.G.B. The chapter ends with letter, red-hot again, as imagined by "the vulgar." Typically Hawthorne to float these sorts of conjectures before us without committing himself to them . . .

Ch. 6 Pearl: "of great price," also of great cost, of course; what does Hester expect of her? Why dress her as she does? airy sprite, little elf, imp of evil . . . 98 she sees Dimmesdale's face in Pearl. 100 "I have no Heavenly Father." No earthly one either, evidently . . . Note the method of generalized narration with an occasional tableau inserted, brief conversations punctuating long explanations. Also the method of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a novelist not usually thought of in the same breath to my knowledge. . . . also cf. him for "magic realism," cf. Hawthorne's romances. Not exact, but some affinities.

Ch.7: Governor's Hall: 103 Pearl as another scarlet letter, similarly decorated. What sort of place is it? Wealthy, even opulent. They've been drinking. Distorted reflections, 106.

Ch. 8: will Pearl be taken away? 111 Pearl says she was plucked from the rosebush . . . a work of beauty out of nature, a work of art? She knows her catechism but won't say it. Vs. a work of God out of a strictly theological order. Cf. Hawthorne writing the book. . . Dimmesdale speaks up for her, persuasively. Chillingworth is preoccupied with figuring out the father. Mistress Hibbins the witch and the Black man return at the end. Many chapters end with somesort of equivocal supernaturalism, hmm?

Ch. 9: The Leech. Even then a dual meaning. 117 he's withdrawn his name "from the roll of mankind" for a new, dark purpose. His medicine: European elaboration, Indian simplicity; he's needed and valued. Dimmesdale is failing obscurely; Ch. is engaged to keep him going. Intimacy grows between them . . . D. is wide-ranging intellect as well as deeply conservative, 121-22. The town comes to think Ch. is Satan or his emissary, end of chapter again.

What else is to say? Questions to ask, maybe:

-What sorts of force are involved here? Religious, legal, moral, personal? There's no violence but it's certainly not a "peaceful" book either.

-What are the effects of the scarlet letter? How is it presented and discussed? What does it stand for, and what does it do? New England Primer,

-What other repeated themes/images are there? Water, signs, medicine, rosebush, light/dark, the Black Man, the scaffold.

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 20025

Day 5 January 16, 2002

1. Names. Finish book Friday, then into Moby-Dick. No class Monday for MLK Day. My text has 521 pages, 135 chapters; that suggests at least 100+ pages per class. It's best to read ahead; there will always be things you can return to in your journal, surely.

Note about "Some Views" added to web page. There's a link to that page on Jenzabar, by the way.

Speaking of journals, lots of interesting things in them this time. Maybe start with some of them, as we talk about this middle section of the book.

The pairings: Pearl and Hester, Chillingsworth and Dimmesdale. People mentioned these groupings; they seem resonant as well, hmm?

Baym: 217 "Pearl is Hester's sin and Chillingworth is Dimmesdale's." H. sees it as beautiful, wild, unmanageable, unpredictable child; D. as vengeful, embittered, offended husband. P. is H's id, Ch. is D.'s superego.

The middle scaffold scene. And then Hester, D. and Pearl in the forest. Tableux, static scenes with the characters placed very carefully, emblematically. Symbolic, or allegorical? They aren't reductive like Pilgrim's Progress, mere representations of vices and virtues.

The scene in the forest: description, 175. The Black Man, Mistress Hibbins. The encounter with the pastor: how does this go? He says she's happier than him because her scarlet letter is in the open. She tells him about Chillingworth. He blames her. What kind of guy is he, anyway? What do you suppose the one time, evidently, that they were together as lovers might have been like?

The central line, 186: "a consecration of its own." This is pretty much a central belief of our time, isn't it, that romantic love is as sacred as anything, that just about anything else can be sacrificed to a genuine passion?

She says let's leave: into the wilderness, or back to Europe. 188: Do anything, save to lie down and die! I'll go with you!

What about this? Today it doesn't strike us as esp. shocking, and even in Hawthorne's time it wasn't exactly unknown . . . it does come to poor Arthur as something of a shock, but he decides to go with her all the same. Hester tries to cast off the scarlet letter, and takes off her cap, and all her beauty pours back with the sun . . . but Pearl makes her put it back on, and as she does the sun fades again. Pearl refuses to make up to him.

Another point: from Baym: view of Puritans here is very much that of a skeptic, an unbeliever in the faith, whatever we think of how H. presents the community and Hester's relation to it. Says H. doesn't present Puritans' view of their purpose in New World, their covenant, makes them into merely "self-satisfied secular autocracy," into "authoritarian state with a Victorian moral outlook." The power structure is presented as outsider/unbeliever might perceive it. (214) It's authoritarian and conservative, assoc. with old men. D. fears being thrown out of company of patriarchs.

One stray thought from Gundy:

Is this also a massive subversion of "the patriarchy"? That Election Day scene, Dimmesdale marching with all the Great Fathers while the women and mere mortals look on . . . him preaching while Hester listens outside by the scaffold. Dimmesdale's "fall" is essentially his inability to give up his place among the great men. Hester's achievement is to persevere despite them, seeming to accept their categories but eventually subverting them.

D., despite his reputation as public servant/preacher, is ultimately only self-absorbed and fearful of damage to his reputation. His weakness is his refusal to do the right thing either for Hester or for himself. He makes only conventional admissions of guilt, which he knows are safe because the community will only read them as conventions.

He's a failed Christian because he never really repents, never accepts responsibiliity for his sin, except maybe in the final scene.

218 H. is torn between wish to feel that society has judged her rightly, and deeper conviction that what she has done is not sinful. Thus the amoral artistry of her decorating the letter, an assertion of her pride in what she's done and a masked defiance of the authorities.

221 Pearl functions to express all the "resentment, outraged pride, anger, and even blasphemy that H. feels" but cannot voice. Cf. the witches, who rebel but believe themselves evil, H. refuses to believe herself evil. ((NOTE: good. but what about Pearl's insistence that H. put the letter back on??))

Second scaffold scene, 144 ff. All the protagonists are there. How have they changed from the first one? Again, signs and wonders. A for Angel?

Compare "Purloined Letter" for triads and concealments: Hester/ Chillingworth/Dimmesdale, H/D/Pearl. 100. 146: Chillingworth as Lacanian analyst. Wouldn't this image of the analyst make him squirm, though?

162 Tongue of Flame and mountain-top--cf. the Catskill Eagle.

166 "To the untrue man, the whole universe is false." Cf. Ahab.

174 Dimmesdale "had expanded his egotism over the whole expanse of nature."

180 Hester's distance:"This might be pride, but was so like humility, that it produced all the softening influence of the latter quality on the public mind."

192 Chillingworth's transformation and fate, again cf. Ahab.

"Another View of Hester": how has she changed? How does she feel toward the community, even while submitting to its punishment? A complicated thing: she's submissive, but not really repentant, hmm? The romantic view that love should conquer all, vs. the view that a law is a law, a sin a sin? "The scarlet letter had not done its office." 184 on the Woman Question. Radical difficulties, just to begin to make change. Note also her radical division: between outward submission and inward rebellion.

Hester with Chillingworth: she begs him to ease up on Dimmesdale, for his own sake as well as Dimmesdale's. C. himself recognizes he's been made into a fiend by his lust for revenge, but puts it all down to "dark necessity" (167). Cf. Ahab on fate and so forth: men who refuse to change, out of what? Ego?

173 Hester lies to Pearl about the scarlet letter.

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 20026

Day 6 January 18, 2002

1. Names. Again, into MD next week. Read especially for characters, for shifts in style, for the passages that step back and offer symbolic/interpretive stuff. It is possible, of course, to read some parts more closely than others.

2. Last day on Hawthorne--I'd like to decenter the discussion some, encourage everybody to contribute. The journals today were both insightful and strikingly diverse in what they focused on, so let's try this--I'll give back your journals, pay attention or don't to what I highlighted, let's just go around and let everyone talk a bit about something in your journal.

(notes from last time)

192 Chillingworth's transformation and fate, again cf. Ahab.

Ch. 20: What's Dimmesdale's reaction afterwards? Desire to do crazy, sinful things? But he settles back into writing a new sermon . . . why? Has he already repented? Can't he handle freedom? He imagines going out in a burst of glory . . . Baym 229: released from iron Puritan frame, his imagination surrounds him with horrors. He's less like her than she imagines, much more conservative and in need of that rigid framework.

Election Day: the carnival atmosphere; the procession of the patriarchs and Dimmesdale in the middle of them; of the sermon we hear only the tone, not the words; he's an artist, his voice an instrument; what comes through is his sense of his own sin . . . We tend to regard Dimmesdale as hardly sinful at all, hmm, except in his refusing to accept his guilt and take his punishment? Baym: D. is artist in his voice, which speaks from the heart, not reason, but is "unable to identify his 'self' with the passionate core he regards as sinful, he is even less able to admit that this sinful core can produce great, true sermons." (225)

His final confession: note effect on Chillingworth and Pearl: what happens to each of them? Ch. wastes away, his purpose gone; Pearl finally becomes human. Do we accept that Dimmesdale dies in a state of grace?

The ending: various accounts, again; what do we choose? What is the moral? Do you accept the "Be true!" thing, or does that seem too simple? Why does Hester return? The last line? Emblem of the somber vision of the book: red of passion/individuality against black of authority, community, order? To be heroic is to accept one's fate, not to demand that the world answer to our conceptions of it? To yield to the judgment of the community even when we believe it is wrong?

Is this a vision we accept? Is it deeply conservative, as Bercovitch maintains, or radically subversive with a certain wavering at the end, as Benstock suggests? Or does it hold those two visions in tension, refusing to choose, letting us decide from the multiple options, as we're forced to decide what we believe about the letter A's on Dimmesdale's breast and in the sky?

What about Hester as heroine? Her free thinking, feminism, refusal of patriarchal categories--how do we integrate that with her acceptance of discipline, her return to the community to live out her days, her seeming acceptance of its judgment?

3. What about the handout? What from that did you respond to? Lots of rich ideas there, I think, many of which we've touched on already in one way or another. How do we sum this up?

I esp. like Leverenz on "unresolved tensions."

Another reader-response sort of question: who do you identify with? Hester or Dimmesdale? I find him pretty much repulsive, myself, though maybe it's because I can identify him with myself on some level. I find Hester much more sympathetic, though I'm not sure I believe the end. What I want to have happen there is not to have her reunited with Dimmesdale--he's too much of a coward to be worthy of her--but to have her spring free somehow, recognize her guilt but also the possibility of grace, which is also biblical after all. Jesus said go and sin no more, he didn't say punish yourself forever. Or is it not possible for her because she never truly repents? But if she never truly repents why does she come back? I don't accept Bercovitch's claim that "we" accept the ending as inevitable (345)--do you?

This book certainly isn't about conventional heroism. It is I think about a very enduring question, how to be heroic within a community that has its own very tight ideas about what that means. It's about women's heroism, which we've already seen in Rowlandson and Jacobs is a very different thing than men's. It's about time, it's about space . . .

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 20027

Day 7 January 23, 2002

1. Names. Keep reading, what else? Some cartoons, to start.

2. Melville and Moby Dick. He was b. 1819, distinguished N.Y. family, father died at 12 though and left the family broke. Went to sea in 1837 as cabin boy, at 22 spent 18 months on the whaler Acushnet, deserted the ship in the South Pacific, lived among cannibals for a while, returned in 1844. Made various other voyages . . . First books were on his travels: Typee, Omoo, Redburn, White-Jacket. Popular in proportion to their "exciting" qualities . . . again, the problem of writing popular literature, making money at it, vs. writing "serious" novels, is crucial to Melville's writing career. With MD he more or less lost his popular audience, sank into literary obscurity, worked as a customs inspector, wrote little fiction and rather bad poetry until the last years of his life. His reputation didn't really begin to rise until ca. 1920.

He seems to have begun this book as a rather conventional sea story. But he met Hawthorne halfway through the writing of it, wrote "Hawthorne and his Mosses," a kind of manifesto for his own work. He found a clue in Hawthorne for the method of MD: the search for mystical depths of meaning, interest in the power of blackness, in unconventional religious questing and questioning, in a sense of innate depravity and original sin. Their relationship eventually cooled; Fiedler says both of them can't help but feel that writing a book is a satanic revolt, and probably Hawthorne was uneasy about Melville's disbelief in immortality. Hawthorne, anyway, calls Scarlet Letter "hell-fired," Melville says "I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as a lamb." Melville also discovered Shakespeare about this time, took from him a dramatic, elevated, artificial language for his "democratic hero-villain" and a dramatic technique for some scenes; also soliloquies and combats of wits, tragic "nihilistic truth-telling" and bleak vision. Ahab speaks mostly in blank verse set as prose

The result on the book was the rambling, mixed, heterogeneous conglomeration that we have. Two main threads: Ahab's tragedy and Ishmael's Bildungsroman, and then all the catalogs and whaling-industry stuff. One mark of the splicing: Bulkington, who survives only to p. 105. With all this revised ambition, but with time and financial pressures pushing him to get something done, he kept the humorous early chapters and Bulkington, who has no function in the final version.

335: "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method."

3. Who is Ishmael? In Gen. 21 he and Hagar are cast out of Israel. God makes a covenant with his brother Isaac, but "God was with the lad" Ishmael, too. Sometime schoolteacher, we learn . . . why does he go to sea? His melancholy and temptation to suicide? What does the represent to him? Cf. Ahab: Ishmael's attracted to death and its restfulness. Ahab wants to strike at evil and blot it out. Newton Arvin, 549: self-destructiveness vs. urge to murderous destruction of the other. Ishmael is dreamy, a bit of a drifter, an observer; Ahab is obsessed by the desire to act, once and for all.

What's his attitude toward authority? Sort of pragmatic obedience, with inner reservations? Note he's a Presbyterian, with Calvinist roots. . . . very much a free thinker and asker of questions, esp. about religion and social categories.

And Ahab: in the Bible he's a wicked king, the husband of Jezebel; he worships Baal, and 450 of his prophets are destroyed by Elijah after a contest in which they fail to get Baal to set fire to their sacrifice.

4. What's the tone of the early chapters? Breezy, often comic, though with portents of doom and death? Might be a conventional adventure-at-sea novel.

5. What about Queequeg? The dark companion, the Natural Man. Chingachgook in Leatherstocking Tales, Jim in Huck Finn. How do they become such quick friends? Is their something weird in their domestic, bedded bliss? Well of course there is. 33 ff, 57 ff. Ishmael decides he can worship with Queequeg; is this broad-minded tolerance or cowardly casuistry? "First congregation of this whole worshipping world": Ishmael is a tolerator, a unifier, and in strict terms a heretic. The carefully diverse cast of whalemen and Melville's insistence on their common humanity and refusal of white supremacy, orthodoxy, conventions. Since his potential readers were mostly rather conventional members of the governing white order, this created difficulties.

On the "inn" scenes, though, as Alaina notes: The 19th century mores on men sleeping with men, women with women, quite different from our own. The 20th century in America was much more homophobic . . .

6. Style and method. Typical motion of chapters from matter-of-fact to symbolic, speculative, metaphoric language. Ch. vii, the Chapel, 41 ff. Second, piling up of alternative views and perspectives, e.g. "Extracts" at the beginning. Truth is multiple, complex, to be sought among the welter. Where does Melville stand among it all? Layers of irony and ambiguity.

Conventions: the heroic sea-journey, with exotic adventures, cannibals, etc.

Ch ix, the sermon: Father Mapple's basically orthodox reading of Jonah and the whale, the lesson being subordination to the will of God and determination to stamp out evil, "Kill, burn, and destroy all sin," (54). Is this the real lesson of the book, or is it subverted by Ahab's story?

7. The whaling industry: as application of technology and imperialism, possessing, exploiting: 18,000 whalers in 1840's, 1/2 new each voyage, 2/3 deserted each voyage as Melville himself did. General shortage of fats and oils, pre-petroleum . . .

The Pequod: half-Christian, half-savage, owned by "fighting Quakers," themselves a colorful and ambiguous batch, not willing to spill the blood of their fellow men but with no such qualms about mere whales. All sorts of signs and portents about their loading, Elijah the prophet (95), and the men who sneak aboard.

And (finally) they're off! What happens in the early stages? Ishmael's voice almost disappears; static chapters on whaling industry and on crew members; we get the first hints that Ahab is a man to be reckoned with.

3. Topics for discussion. Some structures: the sea-journey. The quest myth. The struggle between good and evil. Between activism, seeking to destroy evil, and nonresistance, seeking to somehow live within the world. In our terms, between "heroism" pushed to its extreme in Ahab, and "humility" almost at its extreme of quietism and going with the flow in Ishmael.

Religion: Mapple's sermon on Jonah, its orthodox yet disturbing overtones, vs. Queequeg's paganism, vs. Ishmael's tolerance and openness, 57 ff. Symbolism of Ishmael leaving Father Mapple for Queequeg? Mapple's sermon is more or less conventional theology, but with disturbing overtone; foreshadowing Ahab's determination to strike out at evil whatever the cost, and sharing his confidence that we can know what is evil and what is good. Ishmael, in contrast, is up on the mast head dreaming and meditating, 148-50, with "the problem of the universe revolving in me." Circular images, revolving, vs. linear ones like the harpoon and the lance. 203 ff: the mat-maker, meditation on fate, free will, chance.

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 20028

Day 8 January 25, 2002

1. Names. Hang in there . . . all worthwhile journeys involve a certain amount of tedium.

2. Today I hope we can both look at some particular passages in the first 200 pp. and start to sort out some of the main themes and tensions that Melville sets up in the early going. The ship, the journey, other structures and characters, religion, politics, space.

Let's begin, in fact, with Olson on SPACE.

2. The Pequod: half-Christian, half-savage, owned by "fighting Quakers," themselves a colorful and ambiguous batch, not willing to spill the blood of their fellow men but with no such qualms about mere whales. All sorts of signs and portents about their loading, Elijah the prophet (95), and the men who sneak aboard.

3. Topics for discussion. Some structures: the sea-journey. 221 the liminal point, crossing into "dismal realm" after long voyage south. Around the Horn of Africa, into the Indian Ocean and then into the Pacific. The Moby Dick Map.

The quest myth. The struggle between good and evil. Between activism, seeking to destroy evil, and nonresistance, seeking to somehow live within the world. In our terms, between "heroism" pushed to its extreme in Ahab, and "humility" almost at its extreme of quietism and going with the flow in Ishmael.

Religion: Mapple's sermon on Jonah, its orthodox yet disturbing overtones, vs. Queequeg's paganism, vs. Ishmael's tolerance and openness, 57 ff. Symbolism of Ishmael leaving Father Mapple for Queequeg? Mapple's sermon foreshadowing Ahab's determination to strike out at evil whatever the cost, and sharing his confidence that we can know what is evil and what is good.

Ishmael, in contrast, is up on the mast head dreaming and meditating, 148-50, with "the problem of the universe revolving in me." Circular images, revolving, vs. linear ones like the harpoon and the lance. 203 ff: the mat-maker, meditation on fate, free will, chance.

What about politics? 113 equivocal celebration of democracy, as ordained by God. Does Ishmael buy it? Certainly Ahab's no democrat, as Olson notes. 117 the ship as Anacharsis Clootz delegation: "a German-born baron who appeared at the bar of the French assembly in 1790 at the head of 36 foreigners, and in the name of this 'embassy of the human race,' declared that the world adhered to the Declaration of the Rights of Man." (Matthiessen 410) The crew as carefully distributed amongst all the races of the world, though (of course) the white guys are in charge. Pronounced As: änäkärss klots , 1755-94, Frenchrevolutionary, self-styled Orator of the Human Race. Born near Cleves and a member of the lesser German nobility, his given name was originally Jean Baptiste. Fanatically devoted

to humanitarian ideals and to the liberal ideas of the Encyclopédie, he came to Paris in 1776 and spent his large fortune for the advancement of those ideas. After the outbreak of the French Revolution, he headed (1790) a delegation of foreigners as "ambassadors of the human race

to the National Assembly; he adopted the name Anacharsis and was elected to the Convention, the revolutionary assembly, where he was an ardent supporter of the liberation of Europe in the name of the ideals of the Revolution. Aligned with the Hébertists (see Hébert, Jacques René), he was executed when that faction fell in Mar., 1794, during the Reign of Terror."

What else? Ahab, 119 ff. Finally appears, "ungodly, god-like man." "Like a man cut away from the stake." His long wound. First speeches are grousing and snapping as Stubb; he's not Capt. Kirk nor Picard, is he. 146: not truly in the world. 157 "I'd strike the sun if it insulted me." Starbuck accuses Ahab of blasphemy, but Ahab insists that MD is the agent, if not the principal, of evil itself, of "an inscrutable malice." And then he tries to sweet-talk Starbuck, to minimize what he's doing. Ritual, ceremonial quality of the drink he makes them take from the harpoon, the oath they swear on 159 to kill MD. Following: soliloquies, crew dancing, Pip's fears. Ahab's madly determined, Starbuck knows he's outmatched, Stubb merely laughs it all off.

Whales and the whale. All that lore, to slow the pace of revelation, as the voyage is long and tedious? As ballast, as someone says? To suggest how much we don't know among all that we do?

Moby Dick: First real mention of him isn't till 155; all the harpooners know of him. 169 ff: folklore, unreliable hints and rumors, supernatural overtones. Is he ubiquitous and immortal, like God, or like Satan? 175: Ahab sees him as personification of evil.

The whiteness of the whale. As symbol, as mystery, whiteness that "appalls." Cf. polar bear, shark, Jove in bull, white dog, all sacred, godlike beings. White Squall. Cf. this chapter to Whitman's catalogs for piling up of detail. 185: both holy and appalling, indefinite, representing the "heartless voids and limitless space." Olson on SPACE as the essential American reality, "A dumb blankness, full of meaning."

The Essex. True story of ship destroyed by whale. One function of all the lore is to convince us the story is realistic, that it could happen.

From Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel: The essential themes are those projected in Queequeg and Fedallah, rep. of the beneficent and destructive aspects of the id. Also Tashtego and Dagoo: 4 quarters and 4 elements:

Queequeg yellow water

Fedallah brownfire

Tashtego red air

Dagoo blackearth

"Q. stands for the redemptive baptism of water (or sperm), and around him the 'Western' or sentimental . . . develops; while Fedallah stands for the destructive baptism of fire (or blood), and around him the gothic or Faustian romance which is its other half unfolds." Queequeg wins, says F. (530)

531 It's also a love story, but one of the sentimental companionship of males "passing the love of women." But M's also aware of the taboo nature of such love; thus Q. is black. Thus the stuff about squeezing the sperm, puns on it, assoc. of Whale's penis with cassock and with Yojo; it's essentially anti-Christian, perhaps Platonic. Ishmael plays finally the role of sacred virgin in meeting w. Q. He tends to think of himself in passive, feminine role (534), and calls their rel. a marriage very early. Triggers memories of evil stepmother, almost all we learn about I's past. "climbing up his mother's chimney??"" Continual assertion of the innocence of I and Q's connection.

Stuff about the loss of the mother: not just Ishmael, but Ahab, who later says that he knows all about the father but has lost the mother.

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 20029

Day 9 January 28, 2002

1. Names. Brief meditation on complaining only to be sociable, especially to people who are likely to find that complaining merely tedious in its own right. How interested are you in the question, "Did my classmates enjoy the experience of reading today's assignment?"

Some Thoughts and Questions on Moby Dick.

1. Series of encounters with other ships: The Town-Ho, 228 ff: conflict leading to mutiny; MD appears when S. the mutineer is on the point of murder; MD punishes the unjust, kills the one who incites the mutiny, the others escape more or less unpunished. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.???

The Jeroboam, 293 ff.: MD singles out those who oppose him. He kills the mate Macey, but leaves the others and the boat untouched.

1a. The Whiteness of the Whale, 178 ff. "The palsied universe lies before us like a leper." As symbol, as mystery, whiteness that "appalls." Cf. polar bear, shark, Jove in bull, white dog, all sacred, godlike beings. White Squall. Cf. this chapter to Whitman's catalogs for piling up of detail. 185: both holy and appalling, indefinite, representing the "heartless voids and limitless space." Olson on SPACE as the essential American reality, "A dumb blankness, full of meaning."

The Essex. True story of ship destroyed by whale. One function of all the lore is to convince us the story is realistic, that it could happen.

Queequeg yellow water

Fedallah brownfire

Tashtego red air

Dagoo blackearth

Stuff about the loss of the mother: not just Ishmael, but Ahab, who later says that he knows all about the father but has lost the mother.

2. Ahab: with the albatross, 223--24. Monomania: all is part of his quest, all around the world. Note that in another treatment he would be the unequivocal hero: St. George and the dragon, Beowulf, all those stories. Melville's most radical move, probably, is his complication of the heroic myth, and especially his skepticism about locating and destroying evil. But cf. Lord of the Rings, say, where the heroic quest is not to conquer evil by force but to destroy it by resisting its lure.

Pearson's version of the hero, just for a further complication.

291: Ahab speaks to the whales' head. Like Faust he wants knowledge beyond the human; Fedallah is Satan to his Faust, says Fiedler. Then speaks of being converted . . . 303 Stubb thinks Fedallah is the devil, bargaining for Ahab's soul. 306

296: crazy Gabriel warns him: beware of the blasphemer's end. Again, like Shakespeare, Melville uses the madman and the fool as voices for uncomfortable truth-telling, stuff running counter to dominant line. Gabriel thinks MD is the Shaker God, not the Devil.

3. Ishmael.

His first chase after a whale very nearly ends in death; lost in the fog, run down by the ship, barely saved; he immediately decides to make out his will, 216.

224: with the Albatross he says that around the world leads only to the starting point; he's reflective, skeptical of action. Linear vs. circular time: he's pre-Christian, or post-Christian, while Ahab is a heretical Christian.

His study of the whales. All the bad portrayals; 251, no way to know that they really look like; still, he studies them exhaustively. He wants to learn, not know. Both book-study and very careful direct observation, e.g. descriptions of whale hunts and equipment and carcasses: the two heads, one on each side.

Ishmael and Queequeg: "Monkey-Rope" shows, in effect, married life, after the honeymoon (Fiedler 537). Again Q. is the active one, Ish. the passive provider of stability. But when Ahab enters the marriage business is pushed into the background.

4. The Sea: 221 "devilish charm," crossing into dismal and dangerous seas around cape: crossing into spirit realm? 259 as awful, cannibalistic: world "red in tooth and claw." 290 ff as reservoir of mystery, representative of all the 2/3 of the world's surface that's hidden away, under a foot to five miles of water. What is down there that we don't know? Giant squid, kraken, dragons?

5. Catching the first whale, killing it, taking it apart for blubber and sperm. This is the time-honored American way of dealing with what's bigger than we are, of course: organization, teamwork, technology. Putting up with unpleasant, hard, disgusting work for the sake of profit.

A sense of wonder at the power of technological organization is one of the running sub-themes of this book: that we can catch Leviathan on a hook, cook him down and use him for what we want. Cf. the question in Job. The long, half-comic dialogue between Stubb and the cook: 282, "who is not a cannibal?"

A whale-head on each side means the boat can't sink, says Fedallah; but what does he know?

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200210

Day 10 January 30, 2002

1. Names. Thanks for journals; they did seem a bit more focused and substantive, overall. Give out exams and Pearson stuff for those who missed: Katie, Sarah, Aron, Tony.

2. Items for today--scattered; we'll try to pull together and systematize some on Friday.

Erin:Fedallah as devil 303 and passim. Stubb says he doesn't fear the devil--which tells us something about him. Can you kill the devil? Unhealthy and unwholesome, Ahab's shadow. Cf. Chillingworth as Dimmesdale'? The shadow, Jung says, is where we put the parts of ourselves that we don't want to acknowledge. But they don't go away, they just go out of our sight.

Alaina: why is Queequeg so morbid? Meanings of the doubloon?

Magda: "Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish"--how does it fit into the structure? What's property and what's there for the taking? Last paragraphs slip into political and economic and class musings. Who's owned and who isn't? Justice? Power?

Leslie: re "Heads or Tails": why should the whale belong to the Duke? Are we supposed to be mad about this? Ishmael's ambivalent about democracy, but hardly enamored with monarchy either, hmm? Plenty of resentment here.

Eric: narrative and descriptive passages. The Doubloon chapter, again: what's going on there? The characters each read it differently, according to their qualities. We learn about them from their readings; Ahab's egotism, Starbuck's piety, Stubb's humor as defense, Flask's reducing all to money and animal pleasures, 960 cigars. Manxman: signs, prophecies. Queequeg: compares it to his tattoos. Fedallah: fire worship. Pip: the ship's navel, bound for the bottom of the sea.

Leah: The sperm whale as lacking a face, 351. As God? Angry at God? Ahab is surely angry at Moby Dick--the question is what MD is, and/or represents. Power, surely, but malice or something else? Inscrutability? The Grand Armada chapter, 358 ff, entering the calm at the heart of the storm, 360. Melville on that "live in the all" feeling," in letter 534-535.

Tony: Ahab losing his leg: a comic scene? A constant reminder. Sympathy for his obsession with retribution . . .

Chad: Does the Whale's magnitude diminish? No, Ishmael says, it's impossible that we'd ever catch all the whales. He's confident and has (it seems) evidence and reason on his side, he's just wrong, is all.

Jill: Ahab's odd behavior, other encounters with the whale (?). Are we supposed to think Ahab was already psychotic?

If time, read from Lawrence.

"    So ends one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world, closing
up its mystery and its tortured symbolism. It is an epic of the sea such as no man
has equalled; and it is a book of esoteric symbolism of profound significance, and
of considerable tiresomeness.

But it is a great book, a very great book, the greatest book of the sea ever written. It moves awe in the soul.

The terrible fatality.

Fatality.

Doom.

Doom! Doom! Doom! Something seems to whisper it in the very dark trees of America. Doom!

Doom of what?

Doom of our white day. We are doomed, doomed. And the doom is in America. The doom of our white day.

Ah, well, if my day is doomed, and I am doomed with my day, it is something greater than I which dooms me, so I accept my doom as a sign of the greatness which is more than I am.

Melville knew. He knew his race was doomed. His white soul, doomed. His great white epoch doomed. Himself, doomed. The idealist, doomed: The spirit, doomed.

The reversion. 'Not so much bound to any haven ahead, as rushing from all havens astern.'

That great horror of ours! It is our civilization rushing from all havens astern.

The last ghastly hunt. The White Whale.

What then is Moby Dick? He is the deepest blood-being of the white race; he is our deepest blood-nature.

And he is hunted, hunted, hunted by the maniacal fanaticism of our white mental consciousness. We want to hunt him down. To subject him to our will. And in this maniacal conscious hunt of ourselves we get dark races and pale to help us, red, yellow, and black, east and west, Quaker and fireworshipper, we get them all to help us in this ghastly maniacal hunt which is our doom and our suicide.

The last phallic being of the white man. Hunted into the death of upper consciousness and the ideal will. Our blood- self subjected to our will. Our blood-consciousness sapped by a parasitic mental or ideal consciousness.

Hot blooded sea-born Moby Dick. Hunted maniacs of the idea.

Oh God, oh God, what next, when the Pequod has sunk?

She sank in the war, and we are all flotsam.

Now what next?

Who knows ? Quien sabe? Quien sabe, senor?

Neither Spanish nor Saxon America has any answer.

The Pequod went down. And the Pequod was the ship of the white American soul. She sank, taking with her negro and Indian and Polynesian, Asiatic and Quaker and good, business- like Yankees and Ishmael: she sank all the lot of them.

Boom! as Vachel Lindsay would say.

To use the words of Jesus, IT IS FINISHED.

Consummatum est! But Moby Dick was first published in 1851. If the Great White Whale sank the ship of the Great White Soul in 1851, what's been happening ever since?

Post-mortem effects, presumably.

Because, in the first centuries, Jesus was Cetus, the Whale. And the Christians were the little fishes. Jesus, the Redeemer, was Cetus, Leviathan. And all the Christians all his little fishes."

-D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200211

Day 11 February 1, 2002

1. Whitman and Dickinson for next week: here's a schedule for Whitman.

2. OK, so things finally get exciting.

The conclusion: we do get the action/adventure climax, hmm? Three days of battle, all plotted carefully to once again show us Ahab's utter refusal to stop, and MD's equally stubborn and even more massive refusal to be conquered. Finally, he destroys not just Ahab but the Pequod too, and everybody but poor Ishmael, who's left another orphan.

So what do we conclude about this book? Side note on flawed masterpieces and brilliant failures. I read an essay once that argued that great writers are great because they take foolish chances, and often fail in the midst of their successes. Surely the greatest writers are the easiest to parody. Constantly risking absurdity, etc. Certainly if he wanted Melville could have written a more reader-friendly book. The sci fi epics I read routinely show more sense of plot and pacing and what it takes to keep readers engaged in a long journey. Yet I can't help but agree with those who find this a great, essential American novel, with all its difficulties.

Some polarities and oppositions:

a. Calm vs storm, Pacific and sweet mystery (442) vs. typhoon and "The Candles": faces of nature associated with Ishmael and Ahab, respectively.

b. Acquiescence, meditation, passivity, immersion, vs. defiance, action, determination, individualism."The Symphony, 492: "Why this strife of the chase?" His abandonment of family. Fate and free will and all of that.

c. Ishmael as hero/coward vs. Ahab as hero/villain: both seem incomplete, don't they? Cf. epic hero like Odysseus, tragic hero like Lear? What if we go back to Pearson's scheme of the hero? Where would you place each of them on it?

2. Other points:

a. Ahab's doubles/shadows: Ishmael, Fedallah, Queequeg; Q. as only true alternative, one who combines a moral sense and the ability to act? Ahab and Pip, the one other who understands him best; Ahab and MD himself, both grizzled, wounded, both with instinctive malice. Ahab and Starbuck, the conventional "good" man who keeps begging Ahab to stop but can't make anything happen.

b. Pip as Shakespearean fool, with vision of "vast, oceanic universe" (383-4). Ishmael accepts that vision, but is less deeply immersed in it; Ahab sympathizes but feels fated to oppose rather than to accept it, to penetrate and conquer the mystery. Is is mere blankness? Creature-kinship? God? What lurks behind the wall?

c. Marriage motif: pairs of whales in Grand Armada chapter; Ishmael "wedded to Queequeg; rescue of Tashtego from whale's head as midwifery and rebirth. Late references to Ahab's wife and son: sense that he's broken some sort of natural law by neglecting his wife. References to absent mother, 462, and the "stepmother world," 491. The Bachelor, the only happy ship, the only one that has a successful voyage. The general absence of women does seem a loss, I think, in the terms of the book: note Ishmael is picked up at the end by the Rachel. Sense of being orphan. He's cut off from family throughout . . . technology as isolating, separating force? There's plenty of manly love of comrades, but otherwise it's an impoverished set of relationships, hmm?

d. Cannibalism: Pequod as cannibal craft, try-works where "fritters" are used to cook out the oil, Stubbs' supper, the sharks, all men as cannibals. the killing that's part of life, of survival.

e. The hunt: is Ahab's problem that he lacks a proper stance toward what he hunts? Mythic hunters, e.g. Actaeon or Orion, who approach the hunt with lust or hatred in their hearts are destroyed. In American Indian lore, in the Christian eucharist, the eating is an act of love, of sacred marriage, performed with gratitude and reverence and respect for the sacrifice involved. Ahab's stance is the Puritan extreme: he thinks he must either conquer/destroy the natural world or be captive of it. (Slotkin) He thinks, like Father Mapple, that sin must be sought out and destroyed, and (key) he thinks that whatever is natural and powerful, bigger than he is, must be sinful and evil if it's not God.

The secret motto, Melville said, is the baptism in the devil's name in "The Candles." Fire-worship, defiance, the fiery father, the God of Wrath. Where is the mother, Ahab asks on 462. Indeed.

Olson says removal of Christ and the Holy Ghost from the book is significant, not for economy, but because "Of necessity, from Ahab's world, both . . . are absent. . . . the conflict in Ahab's world is abrupt, more that between Satan and Jehovah, of the old dispensation than the new. It is the outward symbol of the inner truth that the name of Christ is spoken only once," when it's torn from Starbuck. The forgiveness and grace of Christ are curiously lacking.

f. The whale revealed: first description of it as both male and female, majestic, godlike, powerful, but not malicious until it's attacked. It destroys only after repeated provocations; the first day it quite delicately avoids killing anyone, the second it takes only Fedallah. "God resisteth the proud," John M. Brenneman uses as his main text. In Melville's theology, as in the Mennonites', the sin of pride is very nearly the worst one.

g. D.H. Lawrence: Moby Dick is a prophecy of the fall of white European/American civilization due to its relentless and perverse "reason," its attempt to control and destroy whatever it cannot understand, its devotion to material progress, exploitation and repression of natural, sexual, and deeply human forces. Ishmael may believe that there are too many whales for us to kill them all, but we know better, and just maybe Melville did too.

And that killing, he suggests, is finally suicidal . . . The final image of catastrophe, of the inexorable revenge of the forces of nature when we challenge and torment them beyond all forgiveness, is one that should strike us as even more terrifying than it was in Melville's day. If Spaceship Earth goes down, there will be no Rachel along to pick up the survivors.

h. This book draws us into a realm of titanic, perhaps ultimate forces, ones that seem to dwarf the human beings that challenge them. That image of Pip's little head afloat in a vast immensity of water . . . of Ishmael, later, floating on the coffin. Machado: "Oh God, your sea is so great, and my boat is so small."

Our planet, the only one we know that has any hope of keeping us alive, afloat in the vacant and enormous darkness around it. What can we know, and what can we be, among all this? Melville is far from a soggy save-the-whales New Ager; he scoffs at Goethe's "live in the all" dictum, even as he recognizes there's something to it. (See his letter to Hawthorne, 534-5.) And yet this seems to me a deeply cautionary book, a warning about the dangers of the sort of God-is-on-our-side, absolutist thinking that assumes we can externalize, locate, target and destroy all the sevil in the world. Pogo: We have met the enemy, and he is us.

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200212

Day 12 February 4, 2002

1. Names. Dickinson handout. More Whitman for next time.

2. Whitman: getting started. Show the overhead, the famous visual of manifest destiny. Like Melville, Whitman is both entranced by the magnitude and capacity of American civilization and frightened by it . . . By the mid-19th century, Whitman's time, it seems all things were ready for someone like him to come along and claim them, to hope to be the spirit of American democracy, large, inclusive, major. Emerson's call for the emergence of an American poet, and a truly American literature. "Song of Myself" as the magnum opus of his magnum claim, but "Open Road" is something like that vast sprawling poem in miniature, with many of the same themes and maneuvers. Show his picture.

He wanted to be the American poet, to be central. But it was a long work. He wrote reviews of his own books, trying to pump them up. He read Emerson and tried to be the poet that Emerson said was due to emerge; he got a complimentary letter from Emerson re the first edition of Leaves of Grass and scandalized both Emerson and many others by quoting the whole thing in the second edition without consulting Emerson.

What's "heroic" and new in Whitman's poetics? Personality, form, and language, says Calvin Bedient. (Voices and Visions 8). The heroic as the "divine average," not the extraordinary but the sum of all the ordinary.

Both the form and the subject matter were shocking. Where was rhyme and meter? Where were order and decorum and propriety and concern for the niceties? What if ladies were to encounter such blatant immoralities?

On sexuality and homosexuality in Whitman: see the handout. I think Reynolds is correct about the differences between Whitman's time and ours, in which homophobia has all but erased expressions of same-sex love between people who aren't sexually involved. If so, then the shocking element of his work in its time was likely that it was so explicit about sex, not that it was homoerotic.

"I Sing the Body Electric": read this in conjunction with the material from Reynolds' book about Whitman's America and the body-mores of his time. Reading the poem again, I do wonder if Reynolds doesn't protest a bit too much; it seems unlikely that Whitman would feel the need for a poem like this if he weren't reacting against some degree of unease about the body. Anyway the poem gives us the body as sacred, as of the soul, not as "brother pig" or as some nasty burden to be carried around until we can dispense with it. Much in the Western tradition, all the way back to Plato, regards the body as the weak and untidy vessel for the Soul, which is what matters and what is (at least potentially) pure and holy. Cf. Scarlet Letter, where bodies, esp. the female body, are covered up, hidden away, regarded with fear as the site of/sight that might generate "unholy" desires. Cf. Ahab and Ishmael on the whales; Ishmael's recognition of the massive physicality of Moby Dick as beautiful and a-moral is much akin to Whitman's sense of the body.

On the open road: Lawrence, again, says this is the great American innovation: a morality of process rather than destinations, not journeying toward heavenly mansions but life on the road. "It is a new great doctrine. A doctrine of life. A new great morality. A morality of actual living, not of salvation. Europe has never got beyond the morality of salvation. America to this day is deathly sick with saviourism. But Whitman, the greatest and the first and the only American teacher, was no Saviour. His morality was no morality of salvation. His was a morality of the soul living her life, not saving herself. Accepting the contact with other souls along the open way, as they lived their lives. Never trying to save them. As leave try to arrest them and throw them in gaol. The soul living her life along the incarnate mystery of the open road." (in Shapiro, Prose Keys, 247).

Lawrence thinks that Whitman went wrong in acting out this vision, was too eager to subsume everything into himself. Certainly "Open Road" tries that, hmm? A sort of crossing into a mysterious, visionary world, ecstatic experience there, glimpses of secrets, claim of visionary unity and vision of the universe as a great road, as "progress of souls," with the emphasis on progress there, no doubt. "Reception, nor preference nor denial." Ishmael, not Ahab.

"I think whoever I see must be happy," 121. Wow, hmm? The mystery of others, of The Other as philosophers put it. When he ordains himself his own master, what does that mean? An ecstatic, Emersonian vision, out of schools and into the welter of experience. "The excellence of things," 122.

Against heaping up things, against "bat-eyed and materialistic priests," the journey with no arrival, no destination. Consider this against the Puritan morality in which life begins with original sin, proceeds as a great drama of good struggling against evil and culminates in judgment.

Going toward something great, though the journey is also entangled with this secret, dark other who appears in sec. 13, the one of "secret silent loathing and despair," "skulking and hiding."

Call to struggle and war and privation, let's go! How do we read all those calls to move? I think the visionary optimism needs to be seen against a background of loneliness, fear, isolation, depression; hope is a choice and a duty. Note the recognition of difficulties and suffering near the end, sec. 14, 127. He wants us to come with him, he implores us, but what if we don't?

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200213

Day 13 February 6, 2002

1. Names. Dickinson for Friday, and essay-exams. Please do come ready to talk about the poems. Chopin next week. It's a short novel, 190 pp. in my edition; let's read carefully and well.

2. On with Whitman. People were less won by these, not surprisingly, but I hope we can think carefully about them anyway. They are, as many of you noticed, less "optimistic" and more "depressed," for some pretty good reasons that I want to discuss.

"Out of the Cradle" and "As I Ebb'd": Shore odes, crisis poems. Abrams and the Greater Romantic Lyric. Lone speaker in nature, confronting some crisis, interchange with natural world that leads to some kind of resolution.

The first of childhood, of awakening to the awareness of death and the vocation of poet. Hero as artist, as solitary singer, as wounded into song by depth and intensity of awareness. His vocation comes out of reconciliation of opposites (death/life, sea/land), consciousness of totality, assertion that the acceptance and recognition of death is the beginning of wisdom and poetry. The bird's song, mournful but beautiful, in response to the loss of the beloved. Opera and ocean as structural analogies: rhythm of waves in opening lines, aria/recitative business.

"As I Ebb'd": an even deeper crisis of confidence here, sense of the inadequacy of his poems to the mystery of being, the vulnerability of laying them out to by judged. He recognizes here the gap between himself and nature, "mother" and "father" who speak, but not in human language, as of course the bird and the sea in "Cradle" don't either, really. A strong contrast to the rampant ego of some of the other poems. Written in 1860; Whitman wanted to be the "good gray poet," benign, potent, serene father-figure for America. But the country wasn't all that interested; it was going to war. His own father was dying in 1855 but Whitman strove to keep him out of the poems; now, in sec. 3, he comes in, is faced and confronted. And Whitman's own failure, his insignificance, is confronted and accepted as well.

3. The Drum-Taps poems: out of his experience as wound-dresser and camp visitor in Civil War. He spent a lot of time and energy at it; it was a sobering experience, as we might expect I suppose. These poems less centered around the "I," more objective and descriptive: brief moments from war experience concretely rendered. With Matthew Brady's photographs as records of the war; Whitman was as patriotic as anyone, yet despite the occasional glimpses of beauty the center of these is on personal, individual suffering, compassion, and mourning. These are not "heroic" war poems, are they? Few exploits of battle and triumphant victories in them.

Beautiful moments in the field, quiet times in camp, at night; field hospitals, dying men, the physicality of the body that Whitman so celebrates elsewhere, here the object of an enormous tenderness and grief.

The three dead men, one old, one young, one perhaps "the face of the Christ himself" . . .

These poems have a simplicity of presentation but (it seems to me) an extremely subtle and elusive quality about them, as though even Whitman himself is trying to avoid thinking his way to some conclusive point of view about these events, intentionally restricting himself to recording and personal impressions rather than larger, "political" statements. They aren't anti-war poems, yet they certainly would not be useful in mustering enthusiasm for the next great patriotic struggle . . .

"Lilacs . . ." Another poem about loss and grief and trying to find strength to continue. In the long tradition of the elegy, complete with a procession of mourners and eventual consolation.

4. Where to start on "The Sleepers?" It's similar in some ways to "Open Road," but here the journey is at night, and there's a considerably different feel about it, isn't there? Is "Sleepers" less insistently egocentric, less arrogant? Its insistence on unity comes without the idea that Walt himself is the great unifier/agent/container: They unite, not they are me. The darkness of sleep as strange, solemn, sometimes nightmarish, though healing as well. In fact at the beginning he says that he's confused, contradictory, feeling uncertain. Sex here is ecstatic, and even rather explicit for the mid-19th century, but not without guilt and trauma. Waiting for lover, then remembering lover; identification in part 2 that involves loss of self, blankness. Dying swimmer: where does he come from? Confusion, disasters, lots of water and defeat here. What about the Indian squaw? There's a return home in 7, with everyone "averaged" and made beautiful in sleep. Zweig: sleep is to the poet as soil is to grass, "nourishing ground linking him to a life beyond himself." And they unite, join hands, beautifully, without lust or anger or categories.

Finally, Whitman confronts the problems of human inadequacy, incapacity, ugilness, evil, as much as he asserts the Imperial Self or the belief in Progress. He takes on the task of creating himself as poet-hero, as Representative Man, and he is honest enough to recognize and revise that self as he goes, to re-create himself in relation to a society that is resistant or indifferent to his idealistic visions of it. If it's a little frightening, given his peculiarities, that he is and remains the American poet in a way no one else does, it's also (for me) reassuring that he is as earnest and complex a searcher for truth, for the true way of life, for the real Open Road as opposed to all the false ones, as he is. We'll see a variety of responses to him as we go on; many American poets, in particular, have felt compelled to answer or respond in many and various ways.

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200214

Day 14 February 8, 2002

1. Names. Collect essay-exams. Start Awakening on Monday; back to the journals.

Cf. Dickinson to Whitman: he as expansive, public, gregarious, sprawling; she as concentrated, private, reclusive, circling inward. Sewing up those little packets of poems and putting them away in her desk . . . Like Rowlandson and Hester, she's a woman in a Puritan society, though a less rigid one than theirs; like Hester she's a rebel, quiet but subversive, asks radical questions while remaining within her original context.

Like Whitman she writes to create herself, to create a persona she can live in and with. Like Melville and Hawthorne, she's preoccupied with ultimate questions: if God is a cruel God, or is merely indifferent natural processes, what holds life together and gives it meaning? What does death mean? Love? Hope? The artist as hero, as maker of meaning, vs. the servant of God or men.

Wendy Martin, in Columbia Lit. History: she's "the ghost that haunts American literature," her isolation was self-imposed strategy to get time and space to write. Her "radical questioning, reworking and often rejection of conventional language, poetic style, theology, feminine roles, and attitudes toward her world." (610) Separation from social context protected her from conventional opinion. [NOTE: again cf. Hester] She gained sense of herself "as an independent thinker and writer" through youthful "series of conflicts with powerful male figures." "In order to achieve psychological and artistic autonomy, she had to undergo a 'civil war' of the self against the very authorities--religious, familial, literary--she sometimes sought to follow." (610)

Resistance to submission to all-powerful God; alternate self-possession and self-abnegation. "The shore is safer, but I love to buffet in the sea." Rejected theology of absolutes of salvation and damnation, and accepted "the experiential discontinuity and linguistic ambiguity that characterized her life." (611)

Also need to resist her stern father, who thought academic work was harmful to her health. "Father buys me many books--but begs me not to read them--because he fears they joggle the Mind." (611) Competition with brother Austin; eventually she won recognition among the family as the creative one, ccess to father's library, exemption to schedule.

Also struggle for psychological autonomy: "I've ceded--I've stopped being theirs." And to receive validation as an artist. Higginson, who was often overwhelmed by her intensity, as in her definition of poetry: "If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. Is there any other way? (614)

Martin sees her poetry as "intended [in part] to demolish patriarchal poetic conventions." (619) Rejects subordination for relationship and interconnection. Oxymorons, unusual metaphors, deliberate indeterminacy. Movement from passive femininity to autonomous womanhood. Etc.

3. These poems: what's to say?

The versions of 216: the key to both of them is that the resurrection doesn't happen.

241: what, then, isn't true, if the look of agony is? Cf. the moral of Scarlet Letter?

303: I still remember Lannie Conrad my good friend trying to write a paper about this poem. Note how she writes about "The Soul" as though it's a part of the self with powers all its own. Something about how little control we have over who we choose to fall in love with? About how we reject the ones who really want us, who are "good" for us? Confrontation with the irrational within us.

449: What angle do you have on this one? What's it mean to "die for Beauty"? How are we supposed to feel about these two? Are they heroes, or fools?

What's the tone of these? resignation? The shy, frail, timid belle of Amherst? That is the older stereotype; the new one is something else. Shira Wolosky: "The overwhelming effect of Dickinson's verse is not delicacy. It is ferocity. Dickinson is an assertive and determined poet, as much fury as maiden, whose retirement is a stance of attack, whose timidity is aggressive." Dickinson: a world where God is not a comforter but a terror? where cathedral tunes bring depression, like winter light. Cf. Arnold she's also troubled by a sense of vanishing, of falling away, something that we see in Wordsworth and in Whitman, in poems like "As I Ebb'd . . .". The last stanza of 632 is the crux, hmm? Beware of misreading because we want these people to be more orthodox than they are. Also beware of course of thinking we need to accept their ideas just because we're studying them.

These poems show, I think, the struggle for autonomy, the attraction/fear of being taken and controlled. E.g. "I cannot live with you," 640. Sense there that the beloved is too intense to handle, or her emotions about him. That he's "good," served Heaven, while she "could not"--she never joined the church, never had a conversion experience.

The Open Road: Dickinson's version is going to Heaven, all along, resisting conversion to orthodoxy when everybody in Amherst was getting saved at revival meetings. 1545, the Bible as antique volume, stories whose telling seems "faded" besides the captivating music of Orpheus.

Power: 754: My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun--. Taking on the power of the male, the phallic rifle; it's an equivocal gain, though. Guarding the Master's head, not sharing the pillow. The power to kill, without the power to die."

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200215

Day 15 February 11, 2002

1. Names. Exams back Wed., I hope. Handout with some critical stuff, much of it a bit dated, but some useful ways into the book perhaps. Might spin off further journals from this, esp. if you've read the book before as a number of you clearly have.

2. What about The Awakening? It was controversial from the start, at first for its suggestion that women had sexual feeling at all, much less that they might be attracted to men besides their husbands. "Too strong drink for moral babes," "should be labeled poison." It was banned and then ignored, rediscovered only in mid-century; Chopin's reputation has risen steadily since, largely on the basis of this book, partly for exactly the things it was criticized for: the recognition that women do have sexual feelings, that they might be attracted to men other than their husbands, that they might be less than perfectly satisfied with being "mother-women," their identities swallowed up in their husbands and children. A good deal of criticism on it, and a good deal of argument about whether Edna is hero or mere victim, bold individualist or mere neurotic.

The style: much crisper and leaner than Melville and Hawthorne, much more in the "realistic" tradition, though still filled with imagery and interiority.

Some stuff: character revelations, set-up of relationships in early chapters. The birds as symbols of her situation. Creole society: influence of French, Catholic, aristocratic, cf. Edna who's Kentucky/Mississippi Presbyterian stock. She's baffled by the frankness and flirtaciousness of Creole society, but it's held within rigid boundaries; it's acceptable for Robert to spend time with her, as long as it's platonic.

Ch. 3 Edna and Leonce quarrel about the children. Ch. 4 on mother-women. Creole society seems to offer freedom to women, but it's talk only.

Awakening, itself: where mentioned, and how?

25: early hint of "awakening," 28 re the sea, cf. Whitman. And cf. Melville as well, the sea as vast, untamed, alluring, beautiful, equivocal, perhaps dangerous. 26-34 her childhood comes out through talk with Adéle; attraction to inaccessible lovers, fear of real self-disclosure? 35 Adéle warns Robert to leave Edna alone, she might take him seriously. 44: music, solitude, naked man, the sea. Following she becomes a swimmer, one threshold crossed perhaps. 48 on "the unlimited," dangers of losing herself in it. 49: 28's again, Robert's fantasy. (days in moon's cycle?) Increasing element of the fantastic. 52 Leonce comes home and wants her to come to bed with him, but she refuses; 53 awakening.

Note how vague and confused it is just what she's awakening to. How would you react, if you were her husband?

55 off to the Cheniere with Robert, the lovers, the woman in black, Mariequita. The snakes in the old fort: the sensual life? Her leaving the mass, sleeping, waking up, eating--seems a ritual, doesn't it? As though she's entering a new life. The threshold, the liminal: there's a crossing here. 63: again Robert plays along with her fantasies. Is he her enabler?

Day 16 February 13, 2002

1. Names. Essay/exams back. They were quite strong overall; perhaps the nature of this kind of thing is to ease the strain to memorize and remember, and I'm not quite sure what that means for learning and retention, but what the hey. The best ones were strong on detail and written well, and found ways of organizing and developing ideas that allowed for real analysis and discovery as well as restating the basic elements of the texts.

EMail: Unknown user: adial3_80@hotmail.com

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2. Edna's awakening, part two. More than just sexual, that's a consensus from the journals . . . but what, then?

Hero-quest into self: mingling/confusion of inner and outer. Pearson would say that she's, what, the Wanderer, surely. First stage: Feels isolation, alienation. Second: "Chooses to embark on quest, flees captivity, finds treasure of self." Third: "Discovers can be oneself and have love and community." "To find and name one's own truth," on the other side of page.

The problem is, of course, what keeps Edna from accomplishing this quest.

Step 1: swim, start of journey.

Step 2: Cheniere, crossing threshold.

Step 3: The city, trials to be passed.

Step 4: The helpers: Reisz, Dr. Mandelet, Arobin.

Her own house

The dinner party: what will be enough?

79: Sacrifice and the children. Her "self" as sacred, above all. The cult of the individual? She reads Emerson, "Self-Reliance," no doubt, but he puts her to sleep.

83: Going back to the city: away from the sea and the domination of the matriarchs there. First thing she does is stop her Tuesdays "at home." Léonce chastises her, but she doesn't care, nor does she explain really. 87 seeking herself in half darkness, but the voices aren't hopeful; she tries to destroy her ring but can't.

93 The Ratignole's domestic harmony: tone here? Their "fusion"? It doesn't fit Edna; she begins to "do as she likes," the road to disaster warns Matthew Arnold.

Working on her art in the studio on the top floor, 96-97. Seeking expression through this art, but she's not satisfied with it.

98 ff. Help from Madame Reisz? Is she a witch, in the technical sense? What sort of helper? Music . . . in her room on the top floor, with the windows open: Bachelard would tell us the top floor is the place where art takes place, the highest kinds of thought and expression, but there's risk there too: she warns Edna it will take nerve, and strong wings, to be an artist. Difference between sexual awakening and some other, more general, kind of awakening here? Crucial passage on 106-07. The music, Robert's letter, strange things going on in her head, tears.

3. What is it that these men represent to her? Robert runs away. Edna's self-absorption and reveries frighten him, as does his realization that she's attracted to him. It's all right for him to spend time with her, to flirt playfully, to treat her as his "lady" in the old courtly love way, which is strictly platonic. But when she begins to signal that she's seriously attracted to him it's another thing, he's both attracted and scared, has to flee lest he violate decorum.

Arobin: what about him? She has not much real interest in him, does she? Her first time with him, 138 ff: she cries a little; isn't ashamed, but neither is she really satisfied. He's merely a body, hmm? She's not in love with him, she succumbs it seems more from curiosity and because she can than anything else. She learns from him that she can find sensual pleasure, but it's not more than temporarily satisfying, is it? What would satisfy her, we might ask? Is Robert worthy of the emotion she attaches to him? or just a vehicle for her longings?

c. Wolff on Chopin: The Awakening interests us not because Edna's a prototypical woman, but because she's so human. Her fantasy life is intense, her outer life less so. She's schizoid in Laing's terms, 266. Her hidden self is primarily oral, 268. Sleeping and eating dominates her "adventure" at the island, and her party too. The Freud passage on oceanic feeling is here too. This inner self is "orally destructive, a limitless void" (272). Connection with time in womb, pregnancy, fusion with other. But Adèle's confinement and ordeal give Edna no hope of finding that union again. Her final act is regression to infancy, only way of satisfying the demands of insatiable oral self.

"In this way, then, the ego detaches itself from the external world. Or, to put it more correctly, originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive -- indeed, an all-embracing -- feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it. If we may assume that there are many people in whose mental life this primary ego-feeling has persisted to a greater or less degree, it would exist in them side by side with the narrower and more sharply demarcated ego-feeling of maturity, like a kind of counterpart to it. In that case, the ideational contents appropriate to it would be precisely those of limitlessness and of a bond with the universe -- the same ideas with which my friend elucidated the `oceanic' feeling . . . The feeling of happiness derived from the satisfaction of a wild instinctual impulse untamed by the ego is incomparably more intense than that derived from sating an instinct that has been tamed."

-Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200216

Day 17 February 15, 2002

1. Names. Gatsby and Their Eyes to come, a week on each. Let's try to have Gatsby read by Wed., so that next Friday we can have a wider/deeper discussion. Web links on both that and Chopin are up and running.

2. The journals for today were extremely interesting, I think, mainly because they were so ambivalent and so passionate. Edna's character and especially her final decision are so compelling and so disturbing, I think, that it's hard not to be both moved and angered by her. Yes?

So what do we make of it all. Maybe we can try to sort out some possible reasons for/ways of thinking about her suicide, categorize them, evaluate them.

Pass out "edna p journey" sheet, talk our way through that . . .

Dr. Mandelet: he warns her, he realizes she's in danger, but she won't open up to him either. Who does she really talk to? Certainly not Leonce; she refuses to explain anything to him, doesn't she?

The big dinner party: it should be her triumphant moment, and for a while it is, although finally it seems to fall flat. She's the regal woman, 148, but she still longs for something more. What? One critic [Wheeler] suggests the Victorians made a religion of sexuality, the "angel in the house," the one who gives the man all he can know on earth of the transcendent. The other side of course is horror at "unholy" love, the "desecration of a sacred vessel." But this book shows that sex isn't enough to fill a person's life with meaning, even romantic love isn't. Spilled wine, hurried departures. "Is that all there is?"

Robert: his return. What is he to her, really? What does she want from him/with him? Some fantastic fusion of selves, some love that would be its own sanctification, cf. Scarlet Letter? There seems an insatiable quality in her desires, hmm? For absolute possession of the beloved?

If she's so committed to him that nothing else matters, why then does she run off to Adele's labor? It doesn't seem surprising when he's gone on her return, does it? From watching Adele and talking to the doctor, she comes to see love only as a trap, to ensure that the race goes on . . .

What about that last scene? Why go back to the sea to end it? What has she learned, and what hasn't she learned?

What has she "awakened" to, really? Wheeler: Her five awakenings: "1) a sense of personhood; 2) a sense of "true love" as self-consecrating; 3) the awareness of sensuality independent of love; 4) the discovery that love is only a biological trap; and 5) existential despair--the conclusion that there is no exit but self-destruction." (123)

What doesn't she find? A society that will allow her to fulfill all her desires? A society that will help her to adjust her desires to those that are socially desirable? The right man? Some critics see her as merely an ego out of control, someone who wants more than anyone can have. Others see her as a victim of a society that allows women to want only certain carefully prescribed things, and destroys anyone who goes outside the boundaries. Others say she didn't have the nerve or the will or the stamina it takes to complete the sort of quest she starts on, to become a--what--self-actualized individual?

Seems to me that the frustration we feel at the end of the book comes from this sense that she's given up too soon, that she's chickened out when the going got tough. Sure she's got problems . . . but others do too. Cf. Hester Prynne, and the way that book ends with her coming back and living out her long, lonely life? That Jack Gilbert poem about the heroic: not the beautiful brief gesture, the cavalry going out against the tanks to be slaughtered, but the long haul, the life lived bravely. What if, say, she had decided that her real task was to educate LSonce, to help him be the kind of husband that she needed and deserved?

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200217

From Critical Theory text essays:

4. Walker on The Awakening: argues for centrality of the culture of which Chopin wrote, the Acadian world and its importance to the novel. Edna not as feminist hero/martyr but as naturalistic victim of society that she never really understands. She has a sensual awakening but never awakens to an intellectual understanding of her own actions, and thus drifts into death.

Hmm? Note that here the social/historical is not connected quite so directly to the author, though Walker could have done more to do so; Chopin lived in that culture and knew it well

Shaw: Shifting points of view in The Awakening gradually move us from external view of Edna to (at last) her interior perceptions in last scene. Some sharp insights: "She dabbles in self awareness much as she dabbles in art, evincing a fatal dilettantism . . ." (199). But a lot of this seems sort of strained and doubtful to me, at least. Again, she works with an implied reader whose reactions and thought processes she claims to be able to describe in some detail.

4. Yaeger on Awakening: Edna's problems are linguistic and social, not psychological; she seeks a language for understanding her desires, one that she can't find. Mere adultery is only mildly transgressive, not revolutionary. Her absence of speech is the key. 436: Edna lets Robert's utopian narrative structure her desires. Lacan and metonymy (that again!)

438: Lyotard's "différend": something that asks to be put into sentences, but can't be. The novel asks for a language that Edna can't find. Thus her final retelling of her story, 439, is a radical betrayal of the original awakening.

Ff.: traces "linguistic counterplot [of] . . . dis-articulate meaning." (440) Mere traces of what she might have said and thought, going beyond boundaries, 443 ff. She also lacks "speech community" 444 that will share her concerns. Foucault and heteropia and "unspoken orders." 446: "Within the novel an extraordinary register of speech is always opening up and then quietly shutting down."

NOTES ON KATE CHOPIN, THE AWAKENING

Ringe, Donald A. "Romantic Imagery in Kate Chopin's The Awakening." American Literature 73 (1972): 580-588.

Ringe claims critics "construe her theme too narrowly," as merely sexual freedom or feminism. He connects "awakening" to the romantic "image for the emergence of the self or soul into a new life" (581). Thus he reads the book as depicting Edna's "process of developing self-awareness as she reacts to what she perceives as not-herself--the physical world and the people in it." (582) He connects this to Emerson's theory of correspondence, and the romantic use of the sea, which "serves here a double purpose for the individual: it invites `the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.'"(583, quoting the novel 34) The sea can thus cause the soul to lose itself either in outer infinity or inward one. Cf. Pip in Moby Dick, and Melville's use of the sea generally. Ishmael too.

Ringe, Donald A. "Romantic Imagery in Kate Chopin's The Awakening." American Literature 73 (1972): 580-588.

The other image that's key is the city, the symbolic opposite to the sea, as Auden points out. It's community, social organization. Vs. both sea and "happy isle." As Edna becomes her "real self," though, we discover that it "will brook no interference from others" (584), that she's alone most of the time. Cf. the self-absorbed Madame Reisz and Mrs. Ratignole, who surrenders herself to others. "Edna . . . never really achieves the loss of self in love for another, and . . . is never presented as submitting herself to worship God in communion with others" (585). She's selfish, and wishes to possess Robert though she won't let anyone possess her. Thus her final awakening is hopeless; the truth about herself is "for her no lasting union with anyone is possible" (586). So she ends up drowning in the lonely abysses of solitude, like Shelley's Alastor (my comparison). "In defending her self against the threat of community, she loses it in the infinity suggested by the expanse of the sea" (587). Chopin's key concern, then, is "the relation of the individual self to the physical and social realities by which it is surrounded, and the price it must pay for insisting upon its absolute freedom" (588).

Ringe, Donald A. "Romantic Imagery in Kate Chopin's The Awakening." American Literature 73 (1972): 580-588.

NOTE: Good on the sea and the city, but too eager to moralize her death as her own damn fault. No recognition that the union she's looking for isn't possible because the social organism she inhabits won't allow it, or even perhaps allow her to imagine it clearly. There's a subtle anti-feminism at work here, suggesting that she should stay in her place and not make these outrageous demands.

Koloski, Bernard. "The Swinburne Lines in The Awakening." American Literature 75 (1974): 608-610.

He quotes the whole sonnet Gouvernail begins to quote on p. 149, noting that it "reinforces the atmosphere of impending death," of the presence of death behind the wild and sensual activities of the party.

Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. "Thanatos and Eros: Kate Chopin's The Awakening." American Quarterly 25 (1973):449-471.

The criticism she reviews sees the power of the novel as growing from confrontation between heroine and repressive force of stifling sexual standards or tedium of provincial marriage or being merely a possession, an object. But its importance lies in "its ruthless fidelity to the disintegration of Edna's character" (450). She's not "woman" but human. She's lived a dual life from the outset, concealing her inner questions, daydreaming rather than revealing herself to others. She's frightened of emotional involvement from the first, fantasizes about the safely unattainable "tragedian," marries Léonce because he's safe and won't threaten her inner self. She's a schizoid as R.D. Laing describes them, her personality "a set of defenses which have been established as an attempt to preserve some semblance of coherent identity" (453). Thus she can't relate to others except in cataclysmic terms. Léonce is not a brutal villain, more indifferent than anything, but she sees herself as his possession. She's both tempted and terrified by the idea of "possession," with its threat of engulfing her into nothingness. There are the lovers, and the woman in black. So she tries to have a non-adult relationship with Robert, incorporating him into her own personality or trying to. When he's in Mexico she can have the affair with Arobin, which is safe because she has no feeling for him. When he returns, she can't finally yield to his plea to stay; "Both of Edna's selves are truly betrayed and barren, and she retrenches in the only manner familiar to her, that of a final and ultimate withdrawal" (456). Like Laing's schizophrenics, she can relate only to objects or images, not to real persons.

Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. "Thanatos and Eros: Kate Chopin's The Awakening." American Quarterly 25 (1973):449-471.

Edna's puzzled by the Creole freedom to express feeling, even passion, without transgressing the limits. She's starving for such freedom, but fears that the "hidden self will emerge as voracious, omnivorous and insatiable" (457). Her "awakening" is sensuous, but not wholly or even primarily sexual. The "succulent" Adèle attracts her, her intimate scene with her is much more sensual and intense than the pale scenes with Robert. He's somewhat like her in his seeking "safely unattainable" women. The day of the boat trip he makes her a meal rather than kissing her, it's on that level that her appetite is awakened. Her appetite gets "fixated at the oral level," in fact. All kinds of food stuff, a sleep-and-eat pattern repeated throughout; the dinner scene, of course. Yet even the party leaves her yearning for some indefinite further satisfaction. Wolff cites Freud on those fixated in the oral phase, still longing for "limitless fusion with the external world," the "oceanic feeling"; again cf. Melville and Moby Dick. Edna remains fixed in this fundamental longing, again connected with the sea. "She has achieved some measure of personal identity only by hiding her `true self' within--repressing all desire for instinctual gratification. Yet she can see others [the Creoles, Adèle] who seem comfortably able to indulge their various sensory appetites and to do so with easy moderation. Edna's . . . . inner being cannot be satisfied. It is an orally destructive self, a limitless void whose needs can be filled, finally, only by total fusion with the outside world, a totality of sensuous unfolding. And this totality means annihilation of the ego" (464) NOTE: This is quite similar to Ringe's argument, though posed in more psychological terms. Again it's persuasive in a narrow sense, but too willing to translate her whole situation into mere pathology. Her problem seems to me a failure of imagination, as well as of identity. And a failure of society, which offers no models of integrated and yet fully functioning persons. Everybody in the book is incomplete, except maybe the doctor.

Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. "Thanatos and Eros: Kate Chopin's The Awakening." American Quarterly 25 (1973):449-471.

Given this vulnerability, Edna seeks people who might help her: Mademoiselle Reisz, the artist, and her painting. But Edna's too passive to be a real artist. A real genital relationship? All her attempts are badly flawed; she can't become a "mother-woman" like Adèle. But Adèle does have a "rewarding adult relationship" with her husband, they're described as fused into one and talk happily and freely together. But Edna wants some kind of pre-verbal fusion, one impossible in this world. She won't even try to talk to Léonce. Her affair with Robert is "genuinely narcissistic" (467); he's really "a part of herself," a "figment of her imagination." She tells him nothing else matters, but then runs off to Adèele's confinement, where she isn't really needed. Why? Because "to have stayed with Robert would have meant consummation, finally, the joining of her dream-like passion to a flesh-and-blood lover" (468). She's unconsciously ambivalent about actually attaining him; finally realizes her "inner emptiness." Edna needs to be with Adèle at birth to view again that sense of oneness, that oceanic feeling, she can't recover. But what she experiences is a bad, painful birth, a separation that gives her no comfort. "Nature's cruel message" is "an awakening to separation, to individual existence, to the hopelessness of ever satisfying the dream of total fusion" (470). She finally regresses "back beyond childhood, back into time eternal" (471)

Wheeler, Otis B. "The Five Awakenings of Edna Pontellier." The Southern Review 11(1975): 118-128.

Wheeler says the book outraged early reviewers not because Edna commits adultery and then destroys herself, but because she "rejected the pervasive Victorian notion that sexual love is, or should be, a variety of religious experience" (118). Cf. "Dover Beach," Hester's "What we did had a consecration of its own!" The "angel in the house" in Coventry Patmore. Their reverence for married love "is matched by the Victorian horror of `unholy' love," which must be "the desecration of a sacred vessel." (119) Chopin examines and rejects both Victorian roles, the "angel in the house" and the "scarlet woman," through Edna. Her five awakenings: "1) a sense of personhood; 2) a sense of "true love" as self-consecrating; 3) the awareness of sensuality independent of love; 4) the discovery that love is only a biological trap; and 5) existential despair--the conclusion that there is no exit but self-destruction." (123)

Wheeler, Otis B. "The Five Awakenings of Edna Pontellier." The Southern Review 11(1975): 118-128.

Stuff about not being mother-woman, about the sea and the threat of loss of self in it. Secular baptism in scene where she learns to swim, then the boat trip and the serpents and long sleep, "coming through the ritual of erotic love into the presence of life's essential vital mystery" (124). Final awakening: alive, she's "a prisoner of the social order . . . and of the biological order" (125). She "now understands that the possibility of religious transport through love . . . [either marital or extramarital] is a delusion" (125). So she refuses the assigned roles of wife, mother or lover, but in doing so is alienated from "life-defining and life-supporting relations" (125). Thus the book is also a rejection of "the pervasive nineteenth-century faith in the individual, in spite of the Whitmanesque imagery" (126). NOTE: In these terms, it seems like a sort of quasi-naturalist, quasi-realist book, might be compared to Crane's Maggie.

Thornton, Lawrence. "The Awakening: A Political Romance." American Literature 52 (1980): 50-66.

Cf. Edna to Emma Bovary, but Edna is more aware of "political crises related to her position." (50) Edna is deceived both by her private vision and by Grand Isle society, which seems to grant women more latitude than it really does. Edna really has nowhere to go. The bird as image, of the self that would free itself, the naked man/woman along the beach. Men are free to go places, women must remain. Madame Reisz sees that Edna doesn't have the disipline or clarity of vision needed by the artist and the rebel. She's a free woman, but an imperfect model, abrasive and egocentric. Edna's "imaginative life belongs to the realm of fantasy" (56); she can't connect it to the real world. Her "imagined self has no substance . . . . none of her visions of her self, or of a future, achieve clarity" (58). Marriage is the inescapable and monolithic fact of the novel (59).

Thornton, Lawrence. "The Awakening: A Political Romance." American Literature 52 (1980): 50-66.

This isn't an "erotic novel"; as an American woman, Edna mistrusts her senses, but discovering the "dark aspects" of her self "leads to increased self-knowledge that isolates her from human contact, rather than providing a means by which she could experience emotional and physical gratification" (62). Yet the understanding of life she thinks she finds in sex with Arobin is deceiving; it doesn't help her escape. Her vision has been enlarged, but the conditions of her life remain. Her children still bind her to a life that doesn't fit her. NOTE: All these critics treat her as not fully "awake," in the sense Thoreau or Stafford or Denise Levertov is, and they are right. She recognizes her limits and struggles against them, but never manages to imagine a life that might be satisfying within the inevitable limits of being human. Freud's "love and work"? She has neither . . .

Franklin, Rosemary F. "The Awakening and the Failure of Psyche." American Literature 56 (1984): 510-526.

She tries to mediate between heroic and tragic views of Edna, using Eros and Psyche myth. Edna as Psyche figure needs more heroism than she has to resist the "lure and power of the unconscious" (510). She's surrounded by collective of Grand Isle, dominated by matriarchs, while the men are "satellites of the female society" (513). Robert is mainly passive reflector of Edna's erotic drives. She's a curiously virginal woman, almost without adult experience; her early fantasies all center on unattainable men, and she falls again into the "masochistic quality of romantic love" with Robert (516). Edna has trouble separating her sexual awakening and her awakening to self. Mlle. Reisz is a witch-figure, "ambiguous guardian figure of mythology" (521). She aids Edna, but must let her go on alone. Also Dr. Mandelet might have helped her, but he's too little too late. In the party scene she feels the "old ennui," the hopelessness. She's faced with mythic journey to the underworld, "either to accept the fantastic nature of romantic love and continue on her solitary journey to self, or to refuse to acknowledge romantic love's transient nature and embrace death" (524). She wants to leap over the difficult labors, directly to fulfillment with Robert, and "avoids confronting the problems presented by reality" (525). She then awakes to "illusory nature of romantic love," but maybe not too. Alone, she's prey to "suicidal thoughts, the voices which distort the victim's choices and exaggerate her plight" (526). "The paradigm of Psyche reveals Edna's exploit as heroic, but it also shows where she fails to finish her task and is dragged down by fear of a long and lonely period of change" (526).

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200218

Day 18 February 18, 2002

1. Names. On with Gatsby, then Their Eyes.

2. Just to tie up loose ends: thanks much for the excellent discussion Friday. Perhaps our view of Edna depends partly on thinking of her as literary character or as "human being"? As character her trajectory seems utterly right for Chopin's purposes, I think--to dramatize the difficulty of "awakening" as a woman in that particular society. And note that the critique of Edna as not brave enough is in the text itself, not something we bring in from some superior position.

As human being, we want her to survive, don't we? To find a way of thriving, as well. It's here that I think the categories of heroism and humility might be relevant. As hero, she needs more courage and persistence than she finds. And she needs humility, not to make her satisfied with her old way of life, but to help her see that a new way of life must be more egalitarianl and communitarian than the old for everybody, that the romantic myth of total possession of the beloved is only a myth, that she also must accept relationship based on true recognition of others and respect for them. Love and Work. Etc.

2. Fitzgerald. "The very rich are different from you and me." The Twenties, 1919-29; the "Lost Generation," all values lost it seemed except immediate lust for living; rebellion against nationalism and belief in corporate progress. There was an optimism about it in the beginning. Fitzgerald said that after the war it seemed like the young and sensible would soon be in power. On the other hand, for many the war had destroyed all belief in progress, in the great march of the western spirit, all that.

Fitzgerald as both participant and critic of all this: cool, self-indulgent, wealthy on paper stock earnings and Prohibition whiskey, wild parties and wild living, elegant self-destructiveness. He came to be seen as the representative figure of the Twenties; Gatsby 1925. He and Zelda as charmed couple; 1919 makes $879, 1920 $18,520 from writing. By 1934 when his next novel appears he's on the wrong side of things, seen as a burnt-out representative of a failed hedonism that brought on the Depression with its irresponsible consumption. When he dies in 1940 none of his books are in print.

Gatsby, one of the very short list of "classic" American novels, portrait of a man caught up in "vast, vulgar, meretricious dream" of what money will do for him; it promises to buy him the woman of his dreams as well as all the other material things. (?)

Cf. this book to Awakening? Another lonely hero searching for an ultimate love, one that will make life worth living . . .

Some beginning Q's: The epigraph: what might that mean?

Narrative style: economy, probably even more laconic than Chopin. Fitzgerald's argument with Thomas Wolfe about "putting in" vs. "leaving out." Concise, succinct prose, incisive character analysis and lyrical statement. Some of the devices of poetry: symbol, lyrical passages, sudden shifts of time/space. Vs. the encyclopedic Melville or the methodically analytical Hawthorne.

His argument with Hemingway: "The very rich are different from you and me." "Yes, they have more money." Not entirely clear who gets the better of that one, is it? who is the hero? Nick or Gatsby? Cf. Ishmael and Ahab: the partially engaged narrator and the "great man" at the center of the action.

East vs. West, esp. Midwest: first pages that's established, returned to at end. Rich vs. the rest, old money vs. new.

Symbols: Eyes of T.J. Eckleburg, Valley of Ashes, cars, lawns, houses, colors, the green light.

Relationships: Tom and Daisy, Gatsby and Daisy, Tom and Myrtle, Nick and Jordan.

The "New Woman": Daisy, Jordan, Myrtle.

Nick's prologue: after the fact; issues of "moral attention," ethics and behavior, Gatsby vs. what "preyed on him." It's Nick, not Gatsby, we meet first--what happens in those opening lines? Nick sets himself up as both narrator and moral arbiter of the novel, I think. His ideas about "moral attention" and "advantages" seem somehow fundamentally midwestern and middle-class, don't they? Yet even knowing all about Gatsby that he knows (which we don't know yet) he admires him for his "gift for hope," his "romantic readiness."

Island and city; nature? Again, cf. Awakening: two main settings. People with lots of money, and the nearly unconscious sense of privilege that comes along with it. Lawns, houses, cars.

Dinner with Buchanans: manners, luxury, boredom, complacency, buried tensions, adulteries. Tom and "colored empires." Daisy's voice. Jordan Baker. Nick on her, 18, and Gatsby and the green light, 21.

Gatsby as quest novel. Gatsby as novel of American dream. Gatsby as novel of manners. Gatsby as novel about money and love. About post-WW I culture, the Jazz Age, "old" and "new" money, class in a supposedly democratic society. About the East vs. the Midwest. About style. Etc.

Point of view: first person observer. Cf. Ishmael. Often such characters are relatively passive, commentators on the action that swirls around them. The party at the apartment, many other things, Nick present because he's invited or more or less forced along. What are his values? Do we trust his judgments?

The first scene with Daisy, Tom, Jordan: what do we learn from that? Physical stuff: the house, the yard, Tom's body, Daisy's beauty. The way they go through dinner. Their personal relationships? The way they use their money? Their history? And Jordan Baker, who's significant in her own right, especially Nick's involvement with her.

Under all these glittering surfaces the moral questions are always lurking, aren't they? Honesty and dishonesty. Tom's racism and contempt for the darker races. His tacky affair with Myrtle.

Landscape: East Egg and West Egg, the fashionable and the less so; note Nick and Gatsby are on the unfashionable side of the bay, even with all G's money. Sense of division, splitting . . .

The Valley of Ashes, and Eckleburg's eyes? What do you think they mean? Connect with Waste Land; last night Bly talked about male initiation rituals involving a passage through a valley of ash, a kind of male grief, something you have to go through to become a man. Among other things, we could certainly call this an initiation story, hmm? Also, of course, it's where the poor people live, and an industrial district, which the wealthy have to pass through between their suburban homes and the city. God there is either absent, or an empty front, or a commercial mockery of himself. Note that it's here Tom meets Myrtle, yoked to the weak and unsuccessful Wilson, who's obviously not a real man because he has no money.

32 Catherine tells the first of many stories about Gatsby. What about the way those accumulate? Effect? A Man of Mystery? What does he do? And how crucial is that, for a man?

36 Nick and "Inexhaustible variety of life," cf. Ishmael. Cf. Whitman and Edna, too. The party, which involves newly purchased dogs and various neighbors and relatives, ends with Tom breaking Myrtle's nose, not that she really minds.

Chapter III: party at Gatsby's. A contrast to Tom's party, and to the dinner at the Buchanan's? How do people behave? Beauty and extravagance, shifting toward hostility and fights and drunken silliness. Nick finally meets Gatsby, 47-48. He's anomalous from the start, hmm? Elegant young roughneck, formal speech, "old sport." Oxford? He gets more correct as others get more drunk. 54 car crash: foreshadowing, yes?

57 more on New York: lonely young men wasting their lives. Crowds, Nick imagines he follows romantic women to their apartments. He starts to like it, though, probably for that sense of possibility. And so it seems consistent he starts up with Jordan, though he remembers along the way that dishonesty is her fatal flaw: she's a "careless person" who expects others to get out of her way; driving again, 59. But you can't hold mere dishonesty against a woman . . . In contrast, Nick tells us, he's honest. But how honest is he? Why does he help Gatsby get together with Daisy? Because he hates Tom? Feels threatened by him? He never misses a chance to make Tom look bad, does he?

Society. Ch. III: party at Gatsby's! How do people behave? What notes come through? The beauty and extravagance, shifting toward hostility and fights and drunken silliness . . . another Gatsby story, 44, the man in spectacles in the library, 45. Nick meets Gatsby, 47-48. He's anomalous from the start, hmm? Elegant young roughneck, formal speech, "old sport." He gets more correct as others get more drunk, 50. 54: auto accident, foreshadowing; the driver's too drunk to realize the wheel is missing. Ch. VI the second party: unpleasant somehow, the hard edges and dissipation showing.

To consider: Gatsby's quest in comparison to Edna's. What does each of them want? How do they go about trying to get it? What do their methods tell us about social roles, expectations, needs?

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200219

Day 19 February 20, 2002

1. Names. For Friday's journal, how about if everybody hunts up some critical commentary, on the web or in the library, and tosses in something you find interesting?

2. Where should we start today? With the Valley of Ashes, and Eckleburg's eyes? What do you think they mean? Connect with Waste Land; Bly talks about male initiation rituals involving a passage through a valley of ash, a kind of male grief, something you have to go through to become a man. Among other things, we could certainly call this an initiation story, hmm? Also, of course, it's where the poor people live, and an industrial district, which the wealthy have to pass through between their suburban homes and the city. God there is either absent, or an empty front, or a commercial mockery of himself. Note that it's here Tom meets Myrtle, yoked to the weak and unsuccessful Wilson, who's obviously not a real man because he has no money.

32 Catherine tells the first of many stories about Gatsby. What about the way those accumulate? Effect? A Man of Mystery? What does he do? And how crucial is that, for a man?

See this as Novel of Manners? Rendering reality closely, in detail, focus on specific usually higher social class. Jane Austen, high comedy. See the naming of names, the party scenes; though it turns tragic in the end, unlike most such.

As Romance? Gatsby as quester, as mythic hero, as Man from the Provinces: "A stranger rode into town." Mysterious origins, entering and disturbing society, threatening to disrupt social order--cf. Shane, tho with many differences. Also as American Adam, sprung from Platonic conception of himself (99), cutting links with his ordinary past. Note the epigraph: the element of performance. How do you prove you're worthy, if you're an American male of humble origins? Where do you find a dragon to slay? One angle on this would be as specifically male tragedy, of the pressures men face if they want to mate well. ??

Why isn't Gatsby's dream possible? What gets in his way?

1. Changes in landscape: valley of ashes, Eckleburg, 160; the lawns which are synthetic, depressing, linked with violence, masks of power; machines, esp. cars, 164--instruments of ostentation and destruction.

2. Human opposition, esp. Tom and Daisy. Money gives them power to be careless and all the rest, then retreat back behind it. And his own opportunities are limited; if he wants to make big money, the kind that will impress Daisy, he's almost got to break the law to do it. Social reality.

3. His dream is just too grandiose. What woman could be the one he wants? Cf. Edna's search for some absolute love, someone who'll be "everything" to her. He wants Daisy to say she never loved Tom, to have something with her that's more than "just personal." He wants to repeat the past (111).

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200220

Day 20 February 22, 2002

1. Names. Hurston next week. Here's a short handout to read along with the book.

2. Last looks at Gatsby and Fitzgerald. On saying something once.

3. On these various critical perspectives: what do we do with them? My first urging is that we remember, again, the distinction between characters and human beings that I've been pushing, and try to resist the "advice" and "why we can't be friends" models of literary criticism, or at least not let them be the last word.

Similarly, what critics say should be regarded with care, as potentially useful rather than inevitably prophetic. No? Who are they talking to?

"Gatsby is naive, impractical and oversentimental. It is this which makes him attempt the impossible, to repeat the past. There is something pitiful and absurd about the way he refuses to grow up." "Gatsby's Theme." http://www.isd196.k12.mn.us/schools/rhs/classconnect/depthomepages/english%20courses/fitzgerald%20webpage/index.html

This strikes me as ok, but doesn't it sound like a high school teacher hectoring his/her students about their lack of maturity? Lacks subtlety and nuance. I might suggest that we regard with suspicion anybody who would write something and call it "Gatsby's Theme," anyway. Just a tad presumptuous.

Justyna: 'So I walked away and left him standingthere in the moonlight-watching over nothing.'This was after some meeting, after Gatsby leaves Tom and Daisy alone. Plath's comment to that was:'Knight waiting outside--dragon goes to bed with princess.'

What do we think? Pretty astute, as a marginal comment. Of course the real heartbreaker here, if you're the knight, is that the princess is going to bed with the dragon of her own free will, she's chosen him over you. It's just a marginal comment, but what if she'd written "princess goes to bed with dragon"? /

Erin: also from Plath: "I printed off the critical comments made on "The Great Gatsby" by Sylvia Plath (since Plath happens to be one of my favorite authors) I especially like the title that it had been given... "Princess Daisy". This is EXACTLY how I viewed Daisy the farther I got into the book. She aggravated me to no end. I really think she needed to be slapped."

Interesting, esp. since I felt that way about Sylvia Plath for a long time: that she was a sort of spoiled upper-middle-class girl who never realized how privileged she was.

Magda: "I completely agree with Marius Bewley, who said that for the characters

portrayed in the book "the illusions seem more real than the reality itself." Interesting. Which illusions for which characters? Tom's, Daisy's, Gatsby's, Nick's?

Humility and purity in Gatsby, from Hugh Kenner, A Homemade World. New York, Knopf, 1975. He says "Purity of intention lies at the center of American achievement; it will cover . . . a multitude of lapses" (13). Fitzgerald works from the myth of Promise, which goes back all the way to the Renaissance. Gatsby's schedule for self-improvement connects with Alger, except that Gatsby/Fitzgerald has a somewhat clearer idea of what might actually make for success: "studying electricity," projecting self-assurance. Alger would call Gatz corrupt, but he does an Algerian good turn and is duly rewarded (24-5).

Kenner, more: The failure of the Ren. dream of "making us all as gods" leaves us in crisis, "each man confronting in his own way his bankruptcy." "Humility like so much else is in crisis" (27), no theologian can define it; "One can even argue that it was Jay Gatsby's salient virtue: the pleasure he took in his house and his hydroplane and his shirts measured his sense of how far their lavishness exceeded his deserts" (28). NOTE: somewhat different take on the shirt scene; again his pleasure in them seems connected too with Daisy's reaction. He loves that she loves them . . . she's the one who seems venal and corrupt, not him.

Kenner: Gatsby creates effects, but not intentionally, he doesn't lust after them; he wants to repeat the past, to have some infinite life. Fitzgerald manages in Gatsby to "get a frame around Romance," which is fortunate since his subject is really himself. Gatsby starts as someone else but turns into Fitzgerald himself. Nick, the skeptical narrator, is the brilliant stroke, his use double: "to grump about Gatsby's meretricious facets; meanwhile his temperamental resistance could slowly crumble, to calibrate Gatsby's magnitude." (35) Kenner reads Gatsby the way Nick does, more or less, as "all right in the end," not as Horace did, as "only a great fraud." What do we think? Nick is the one we identify with, finally, hmm? The friend who survives the collapse of his "great" friend, the one who remains alive to tell us, the one who goes back home to the safety and security of the midwest?

Kenner: Nick's sententious and boring when we notice him, e.g. the first pages [note: not Poundian enough for Kenner] but mostly stays out of the way. He helps keep Fitzgerald honest, like a conscience or a "saturnine big brother" (36). The important thing is that he ends on Gatsby's side; a good citizen on his side is needed "to save the book from triviality," mere exposure of Gatsby as another rich and corrupt bastard. "What is held to matter [in America] is intensity of intention. Gatsby is a bootlegger and a thief. What matters is the purity of his vision" (39).

Lionel Trilling. The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. New York: Scribner's, 1950. Emphasizes Fitzgerald's heroic awareness, his "assumption of the 'exemplary role'" (243) and awareness that he's "been only a mediocre caretaker . . . of [his] talent" (244). The roots of his heroism are in his power of love, which shows in his style, his capacity for "gentleness without softness: (244). He was a moralist, but "more drawn to celebrate the good than to denounce the bad" (245). He maintains a balance between personal free will and circumstance; Trilling quotes him: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind, (245) at the same time, and still retain the ability to function" (246).

Trilling: "How innocent of mere 'sex,' how charged with sentiment is Fitzgerald's description of love in the jazz age" (246). On his humility: Fitzgerald says that "at a certain point in his college career 'some old desire for personal dominance was broken and gone.' He connects that loss of desire for dominance with his ability to write; and he set down in his notebook the belief that 'to record one must be unwary.' Fitzgerald, we may say, seemed to feel that both love and art needed a sort of personal defenselessness" (246).

Trilling: Did Hemingway get the better of Fitz. by responding "Yes, they have more money"? The novelist needs to deal with "the reality of differences of class" (247). "Fitzgerald was perhaps the last notable writer to affirm the Romantic fantasy, descended from the Renaissance, of personal ambition and heroism, of life committed to, or thrown away for, some ideal of self" (249). He benefitted from his own commitment to being in the line of the great. In Gatsby he manages to "seize the given moment as a moral fact" (251). We're to see Gatsby as America, sprung from "Platonic conception" of itself, to see as the rest of the world does the anomaly "that so much raw power should be haunted by envisioned (251) romance" (252).

Trilling: Gatsby's characters aren't "developed," they're ideographs. like the valley of ashes and the parties and the eyes. Gatsby makes only two memorable remarks: "Her voice is full of money," and "In any case it was just personal": "With that sentence he achieves an insane greatness, convincing us that he really is a Platonic conception of himself, really soem sort of Son of God" (252). [Note: I'd add the line about being able to repeat the past.] (252). It's the voice of his prose that is "the essence of his success" (253). It's "characteristically modest, yet it has in it, without apology or self-consciousness, a largeness, even a stateliness, which derives from Fitzgerald's connection with tradition and with mind, from his sense of what has been done before and the demands which the past accomplishment makes (253). He lacks prudence, but that's "the generous fault, even the heroic fault" (253). Like Gatsby, a "heightened sensitivity to the promises of life . . . . an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness" (254).

NOTE: connect with business of artist as hero/hero as Satan/ hero as Christ, and the impossibility of a non-ironic hero for serious American artists. All our successful heroes are popular, sentimentalized, manipulated products: Daniel Boone and Paul Bunyan and Rambo. Our serious writers give us Ahab and Gatsby and the Invisible Man and Yossarian, glorious failures or subversive successes.

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200221

Day 21 February 25, 2002

1. Names.

2. On Zora Neale Hurston and Their Eyes: 1937, 12 years later than Gatsby, but pretty distant in place, subject matter, even style, though there are some connections, I think. A female protagonist and a book very consciously about a woman's growth, a woman's development; also very specifically about black culture, although there's been some controversy about how "representative" the book is, about its politics, etc. It's one of those books that was almost lost, then rediscovered; Hurston's career is oddly like Melville's in some ways, at least in that she was nearly forgotten, then rehabilitated by a few strong champions, and today seems on the way to being canonized.

Issues/ideas/passages:

The use of dialect: today she'd probably do it differently, but it was the convention then to use spelling as well as syntax and vocabulary to show dialect speech. The farther you read, the less noticeable that seems, I found.

The big controversy among black writers about race and ideology: Richard Wright, for one, harshly critical of this book for its lack of "theme" and its portrayal of blacks who were certainly not free of racism but weren't determined by it either.

Also, perhaps a corollary: the images of African-American men and women in literature. Black men complain that black women writers slander black men, and vice versa . . . An issue in Alice Walker's work, also in Hurston perhaps. Sherry Taylor, http://cityhonors.buffalo.k12.ny.us/city/rsrcs/eng/IB/Taylor.html:

"The absence of a female heroine in Richard Wright's novel, Native Son, is an important indicator of a prevalent theme of female inferiority that pervades this piece of literature. The women in the life of Bigger Thomas, the protagonist, are characterized as threats to his manhood, and, to a more drastic degree, they are considered a part of the forces that prevent a Black male from breaking free of his social constraints.

The reader is introduced to Bigger's mother in the opening scene of the novel, when she mercilessly belittles her eldest son, scolding him and questioning his manhood. "Bigger, sometimes I wonder why I birthed you," she asks him. "We wouldn't have to live in this garbage dump if you had any manhood in you" (Native Son 11-12). Immediately, Wright introduces us to a woman, Bigger's mother, who is obviously influential in his life, speaking to him in a derogatory way. By her insistence that Bigger has a responsibility to find employment to support his family, his mother is forcing and encouraging his involvement with the white working world; the very world that forces him to succumb to a life of subservience - certainly a threat to his manhood. "

Is part of the issue really gender rather than politics, then? Are Wright and the others threatened by strong black women, as authors or characters? I dunno for sure . . .

The issues: Heroism? Humility? How might those terms apply to a person in Janie's situation? Cf. other strong women we've encountered? Harriet Jacobs, clearly. Hester? And Edna Pontellier, of course.

Initial impressions of Janie? She's strong and beautiful, a person to be reckoned with.

The style: what about those first paragraphs? They're epigrammatic, imagistic, suggestive . . . a narrative technique that's partly within the character, partly outside, so we sometimes know her thoughts but not always. "Free indirect discourse." (187)

Gates further reads those first 2 paragraphs as a response to Frederick Douglas's autobio and that famous passage about the ships out in the bay (170 ff in Signifying Monkey). He emphasizes the difference Hurston sees in the lives of men and women, the way they respond to time, the ways their desires are figured. For women, she says, dream is truth, controlled by memory, as in the process of narration Janie does with Phoeby, and we overhear. She's thought to be inarticulate by her first two husbands, both of whom effectively silence her as well, but "is a master of metaphorical narration."

Where is it she's coming back to? The village of her youth, it seems, a place where people know her. She's been away . . . we get a little foreshadowing, not too much. Janie and the conventional gossips of the town, 5. Janie's back, not broken tho weary, from her adventures.

The frame is her telling her story to her friend Pheoby, who brings her some supper. It's Eatonville where they are, a real town in Florida founded and populated almost entirely by blacks. Hurston herself grew up there. . . .

Ch. 2: she starts at the beginning. She was six before she knew she was colored--cf. Harriet Jacobs, who says she was six before she knew she was a slave. Father and mother both absent, she's raised by grandma and white family. Cf. Gatsby, she also must fashion her own identity, but the void in her past is created by racist and sexist conditions, rape and abandonment.

10: her sexual awakening, with the pear tree, at which Nanny immediately marries her off to the lovable Brother Logan Killicks. "The nigger woman is de mule of de world," says Nanny (14). She herself had to run away when her mistress found out her baby was half-white, and her daughter was raped by the schoolteacher. Nanny gets her chance to speak in that chapter, and Janie is/feels bound by that narrative, bound to accept Nanny's judgments and values at least temporarily.

What about all this? Sort of classic hardship story, not to say it's not realistic or even typical. A lot's been said and written about black family structures; here at least it seems clear that women have not much say in those structures, or about who they sleep with, in the generations before Janie's. And she has little say in that first marriage either . . .

Ch. 3: back w. Nanny; Janie wants to want him, but Nanny says she should be satisfied with security and propriety. 24: "Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman."

Ch. 4: The honeymoon's over, he means to start her in plowing behind a mule. And just then Joe Starks shows up, with money and prospects. 28 and 29 she talks with Joe and with Logan; cf. Carrie between Drouet and Hurstwood? Janie makes the same sort of decision, doesn't she?

(Side note, picking up from last time: 27 Joe's "free indirect discourse" to Janie--it seems more or less like speech, but it's not presented that way. Lots of discussion in the critics of those point-of-view things and what they mean for other black writers.)

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200222

Day 22 February 27, 2002

1. Names. Poems from The Voice, Mon. and Wed. after break, then into Faulkner. "High John" for anyone who didn't get it--read it for Friday if not before, I want to talk about that folklore figure and Hurston's depiction of him, along with her other characters, in light of our ongoing stuff on heroism and humility.

2. Heather's selections from the Tao Te Ching, on humility and yieldedness.

3. Journals: lots of interesting stuff, and maybe we'll start with them today. One big divide: Janie as sympathetic figure in search of non-oppressive relationship, aka "true love," vs. Janie as desperate seeker for ultimate love that's well beyond what she ought to expect. Let's hear from both sides, and go from there . . .

4. The Eatonville sections of the book, also (mainly) the time of Janie's marriage to Joe Starks; that's roughly 33-83, though it covers about 20 years in time. What about 1) Eatonville as place, what happens there, what it's like, how does it change?

2) the relationship between Joe and Janie: what goes on with that, what expectations and frustrations do each of them have, all that stuff?

Themes/issues: town-building; folklore and stories; gender and gender roles; relationships, aging, etc. Being a "trophy wife," which Janie does but does not enjoy.

Ch 5: Joe comes into Eatonville like a storm . . . makes all sorts of changes happen. He does seem to have a kind of vision the others don't, hmm? He's able to imagine things that aren't there, and make them happen, and make a profit along the way. Mostly he's good for the town, isn't he? But he's systematically and relentlessly frustrating to Janie, insists that she behave as he wants her to, which mainly means things she can't do. 39 he wants her to be the "bell-cow." Wow, huh? Ff. in that chapter, the talk at the store, which Joe insists Janie stay out of. Signs of trouble there. The chapter ends with him the power of the town, the big man, and insisting that Janie should be satisfied because she's lifted up as he is. Cf. Tom in Gatsby? Differences?

Jody Starks = Joe Clark, the real first mayor of Eatonville. How are we supposed to judge him? He's not an out-and-out demon, is he? How does he function in the town? What does he provide, and what does he expect? Hurston made a great deal of having grown up in Eatonville, which she always regarded as home; she was also always less willing to talk and write directly about racism and prejudice as horrible disasters than writers like Richard Wright. This led Wright to say Their Eyes had "no theme," one of the stupider statements made by a major American writer, I'd say, but indicative.

What happens to Janie during these years? How does she function in the town? 40 "mah wife don't know nothin bout no speechmakin." Joe constantly tries to silence her, keep her in her place, pretty effectively, hmm? How does Janie react? 43 she tries to talk with him about it. 46 Sam Watson: he's the wind and we de grass. There's a kind of power which enables some kinds of "development" but thwarts others. Voice is a recurring issue in this book, hmm? Joe tries to deny Janie a voice, as did Logan in a more brutal way. At least Joe doesn't expect her to shovel manure, right? Just work in the store, keep her head covered, and her mouth shut.

Ch. 6: what is all this weird stuff about the mule? (Jill asks desperately.) Hurston was trained as an anthropologist, did serious folklore work . . . that shows here. How do you read the way she presents the people of the town in here? They're colorful, witty, they delight in what Gates will later call "signifyin(g)," the wordplay and lies and verbal invention that's sometimes aggressive, sometimes defensive, sometimes just playful. Again, 50, Joe tells Janie not to talk with the people. 56 he won't let her go to the mule's funeral. 58 the buzzards speak . . . what's going on there? Veering from realism into folk tale? Note that even the buzzards get to the funeral, even they get to speak, only Janie doesn't. More folk observation in that chapter--dimestore philosophizing, chatting up women . . . but that scene ends with another spat between Joe and Janie, him saying "somebody got to think for women and chillen and chickens and cows." (67) Her change toward him, 67-68--she learns to keep some things secret, to save part of herself for someone she hasn't yet met. 70 she does step into the conversation, but Joe shuts her up at once.

Hemenway claims (New Essays, 44) that these stories represent a claim to a free, imaginative narrative voice, one that Janie is eventually able to reclaim for herself, too, when she tells her story to Phoeby.

Ch 7 & 8: Aging, esp. Joe--he responds by talking about her getting old. Finally she gets him back, and good, 75: "When you pull down your britches, you look like de change uh life." Talk about attacks on one's manhood, hmm? Something goes out of him with that; he goes downhill pretty fast, not that she's the whole reason of course. 81 ff. she tries to talk to him one last time, but he still won't hear it from her. She finally does feel pity for him, more than he ever seems able to feel for her. What's the symbolism here? When she breaks free of his control he collapses? How much of his power is built on his control of her? Is she as trophy wife, part of the way he demonstrates his "manliness" to the town? Keeping such a beautiful and vital woman under his control shows he's a "real man"?

Ch 9: after he's gone she burns her head rags, lets her hair free (cf. Hester, hmm?), waits around being courted if not just pestered by every man around, until Tea Cake shows up. Note that the long hair, evidently not kinky, is a sign of her mixed race. Cf. Tea Cake, who's much darker than she is.

What about Tea Cake? What does Hurston want us to see in him? How's his relationship with Janie different from her others? And, on your own terms how do you think of him? What key scenes would you pick out? Is it just silly, Janie taking up with this younger man? Is he her "trophy husband," or is there more to it than that?

85 re Nanny. Their courtship, Janie thinking about him in pear tree terms, 101. 105 ff the town reacts, and Janie says she's ready to live her own life, finally, 108-09. 112-121 T.C. takes Janie's money, then wins it back.

Consider as you finish the book: what kind of quest is Janie on? To what extent does she accomplish it? Issues of voice, of love, of self-definition and self-creation . . . we'll take all this up next time.

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200223

Day 23 March 1, 2002

1. Names. Next exam soon to come. Williams, HD, Jeffers for Monday after break, Eliot and Millay for Wed., then Faulkner. Handout.

And High John de Conquer--well, what about that? As folkloric figure, cf. Brer Rabbit and other trickster figures, ones who win or at least survive with guile, craft, wit. 141: "Hitting a straight lick with a crooked stick. . . . Fighting a mighty battle without outside-showing force, and winning his war from within." Surviving the "ruthless man." 144 ff. he takes people on a journey to heaven and hell, when they come back they're sustained in their hardship by the memory. 148: "The power of love and laughter to win by their subtle power."

A couple of web sites on the home page with more stuff; the root, the motif in blues songs, etc.

2. This time: we have all the stretch where Janie's with Tea Cake, and the brief stretch at the end, after his death, when the book comes full circle with her return to Eatonville and her telling of her story to Phoeby. Key concerns, I think:

MarriageCommunityVoiceJourney Rabies (??)

Cf. the time with Tea Cake to D.H. Lawrence's novels about marriage, the twists and complexities of passion and all the other human emotions stretched over time and changes . . .

What about their whole time down there on the muck? A specific community, one that Tea Cake is able to make his way in; Janie clearly respects his abilities. Cf. Joe, though: he doesn't put on airs, or try to boss people around. He has in fact considerable more humility, hmm?

What about the business of voice? What are the men's voices like in this novel, and what do they talk about? The scene at the trial, 178, when she doesn't speak in first person? Pheoby's response to her story?

Key passages: 126 domestic bliss on the muck. 138 re Mrs. Turner. 140 Tea Cake whips Janie just to show the Turners he can. ff. he and the others tear up the Turners' restaurant. 150-151 the hurricane, and the title. Ff. T.C. gets bit by the dog, gets rabies, Janie has to shoot him . . . what is the deal with that?

Do you have the feeling that this part is following somebody's "real life," that some of these events are here just because they happened, rather than because they follow a neat plot trajectory? It seems that way to me, though I don't have any evidence.

175. Somehow the trial "must be the same day," passing strange, but never mind. 178 her speech, again in indirect discourse; some say this shows she still hasn't truly, fully found her voice. But she's set free, and comes back.

180: Tea Cake's funeral, cf. Gatstby's. All sorts of people at Tea Cake's. He's a part of the community, his love for Janie not the only thing in his life. Their relationship is interwoven into the life of the community, not a solitary "world of our own" sort of thing. Cf. Gatsby, again.

Male signifying is grounded in competition and in mastery of women; Hurston seems attracted to it, she enjoys reporting it as Janie enjoys being around it. Still, Janie's speaking is something different, both in its quality and its purpose: she comes to learn the power of figural, metaphorical language, not just over others but to help her conceive her own situation, tell her own story. E.g. the blossoming pear tree, as that's repeated when she's changing her mind about Joe. (68)

182: Janie finishes her story, Pheoby says she's "growed ten feet higher from jus' listenin' tuh you, Janie." The book ends--how? Cf. The Awakening? Gatsby? Certainly there's more sense here that she's learned something, that it's been worthwhile somehow, though it's not exactly clear what or how, hmm?

Janie as hero? Mary Helen Washington points out that she fulfills the pattern of Jos. Campbell's hero: leaving home, etc., all the way to returning (ZNH:Critical Perspectives Past and Present, 105 and 109). But in other ways she's not a traditional male hero--her quest is to achieve inwardness and a sense of her self, not to conquer but to overcome illusions that others have tried to make her live by. Yes?

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200224

Day 24 March 11, 2002

1. Names. Eliot and Millay for Wed. Second essay-exam coming up soon. Faulkner starting Friday.

2. For today we have Williams, H. D., and Jeffers, three poets of almost exactly the same time but wildly different in some ways. Williams and H. D. were schoolmates at the U. of Penn with Ezra Pound, who dated H. D. and helped to get her first poems published. Williams a pediatrician and poet who was insistently American, who worked with local materials above all. Carruth's introduction is excellent if brief. H. D. who also began as an "Imagist,' cf. Williams' "Between the Walls" and the more famous "Red Wheel Barrow," but whose materials were as many noticed much more cosmopolitan and classical. Jeffers as a real anomaly in modernism, always out there doing his own thing, insistently independent. "Inhumanism" was his philosophy, now there's one that'll win friends and influence people.

To the poems, then. Williams: these emphasize I think his love of common speech, of everyday life, his search for materials in the most homely places. "Heroism" in refusing the lofty and grandiose for the plain, in several senses: literary, linguistic, cultural.See "Death" and "Tract" and "The Sparrow." "No ideas but in things," he famously insisted. "A poem is a small machine made of words."

"To a Solitary Disciple": poses the moon against the steeple, careful observation and immediate perception over similes and the "oppressive weight" of human constructions like the church. Note that his own metaphors and similes creep in . . . but that's ok.

"The Sparrow" and the triadic line, cf. Carruth's remark that his theoretical statements weren't always very helpful. But it did work as a structure for his poems. The celebration of the sparrow, again, for his "small size . . . and general truculence." (72)

H. D.: strange, in a number of ways. Attempts to combine epic visions and minimalist strategies, clipped lines, condensed narratives. Leanings toward the classical and the mystical, which are not easily merged. I couldn't find much about "Acon." But "Eurydice" is one of the best-known myths, one written over and over by many poets. Her version emphasizes not Orpheus but Eurydice; how does he come across here? As rather a dolt, right? Arrogant and ruthless, concerned with his own needs not hers, and inept to boot. Questions, 108: what did he see in her face? The light of his? The turn in section V and the claims in the last sections: just because she's lost to him doesn't mean she's truly lost.

Elizabeth Dodd on "Eurydice":

As recent critics have often noted, H.D.'s speaker presents a feminist twist to the familiar myth, telling the woman's story through her own voice. The sympathy aroused is not for poor Orpheus, who lost his lover twice, but rather for Eurydice, who twice lost life upon the earth; moreover, Orpheus appears, through Eurydice's accusations, to be a self-important, unthinking fool rather than a great artist.

Here is a point that has not been fully recognized in most discussions of this poem: Eurydice makes no mention of Orpheus's great gift of song. In H.D.'s revisionist mythmaking, the plight of the female speaker at the hands of the egocentric male eclipses the traditional emphasis on the power of the poet. Indeed, a more traditional understanding of the myth includes a sense of tragic inevitability; the sensitive poet's song is the product of a love so strong that it empowers his own splendid talent, but it also compels him to look back to his beloved. How can such a sensitive lover not look back? H. D. subverts this interpretation both when Eurydice accuses Orpheus of looking back to see his own reflection and in her omission altogether of poetry's role.

Clearly, this is a persona poem and not a confessional poem adorned with ornamental allusion like Plath's "Lady Lazarus," nor is it a modern feminine lament of disappointed love like those written by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Yet within the persona, H. D. has merged her own sense of outrage and betrayal with that of her mythic speaker. H. D. probably wrote the poem before the events at Mecklenburgh Square and thus before her disappointing relationship with Lawrence and the escalation of Aldington's affair with Yorke, although he had pursued an affair with Flo Fallas. Yet already she could empathize with her speaker's nearly powerless resentment toward a poet-lover's arrogance and actual abandonment.

Also Penelope. And Sappho. And the Goddes, in "The Mysteries Remain" and "We Have Seen Her."

Jeffers: The intro somewhat overstates his late turn, but not entirely. "The enormous beauty of things," 123. His artist is a kind of avatar for his own life, out there on the Carmel coast in a tower he built by his own hand, out on his lonely. Babies are self-centered, he said, but as they grow they must grow out of that, to find their place in the larger world. He thought human beings as a whole needed to do the same thing. "Fierce and flesh-eaters." "I'd sooner, except the penalties, shoot a man than a hawk." Etc., etc.

Frederic I. Carpenter

Of course, Jeffers does not believe that modern man will achieve freedom: neither his own poetry nor any other writing will accomplish much. Pessimistically, he believes that our civilization is doomed to decay. The most famous and characteristic of his poems is, perhaps, "Shine, Perishing

Republic." "America," he says, is "thickening to empire; and protest, like a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens." But the significant thing about this poem is that this ultimate "perishing" of the republic does not deny the sense of the social values--rather it emphasizes them. A "republic" is good; an "empire," bad. "Protest" is good; acquiescence, bad. His pessimism as to the future of these goods merely enhances the sense of their importance.

from "The Values of Robinson Jeffers" American Literature (1940).

Gilbert Allen

Jeffers also tends to apostrophize his countrymen as they blunder toward a comfortable destruction. Even in the midst of the Great Depression, Jeffers insists in "Shine, Republic" that prosperity is the enemy of freedom. He begins by invoking the timeless qualities of tree, sky, water, and rock, which he associates with Western civilization's "love of freedom." Like Yeats's Romantic Ireland, Jeffers's ideal America needs marrow, not money: "Freedom is poor and laborious; that torch is not safe but hungry, and often requires blood for its fuel." Jeffers does not believe that America can supply such blood for the torch of freedom indefinitely. Wealth and power will corrupt America, as they have corrupted every other society, but at least we can "keep the tradition [and] conserve the forms" for a time. Always a master at providing cold comfort, Jeffers ends the poem by suggesting that our decline may provide a useful negative example for the future: "The states of the next age will no doubt remember you, and edge their love of freedom with contempt for luxury."

Jessica Hueter

A Patriot's Lament

For Robinson Jeffers in 1925 America was dying, and civilization was hastening its death. Using life-cycle imagery and stressing the decaying phase of the cycle, the prophet foretells the end, courts indifference, and urges isolation to avoid corruption.

"This America" implies there have been and/or will be other Americas. Nothing is permanent. "Empire" evokes Alexander the Great, Rome, the British Empire -- all reduced to history lessons. "The mould of its vulgarity" suggests commonness, crudity, possibly obscenity as it nears its end.

"Mould" could be a form for shaping the "molten mass"; it also is the decay of organic matter. "The fruit rots to make earth./ Out of the mother; and through the spring exultance, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother." The civilization will turn to compost.

All life-cycles move to such a conclusion. "You making haste haste on decay" implies that those promoting civilization are shortening the natural life-span of America. Yet Jeffers does not condemn. "Life is good," regardless of length, and all life is significant: "Meteors are not needed less than mountains." One must dispose oneself; patriotism yields to reality; it is all unblameworthy.

However, despite acceptance of inevitable decay, he will not participate. The apocalyptic monster cannot be stopped; recalling the advice of Matthew 25, he chooses the mountains. A final warning to his children: beware entanglement with men. Love of less than God is incestuous. No saviors. You can only watch.

Albert Gelpi

"Birds and Fishes," one of Jeffers' last poems, almost makes the mistake of attributing greed and malice to the feeding of seabirds on fishes but then recovers to find in the violence of the scene a manifestation of the "beauty of God":. . . .

For Jeffers, then, as for Emerson, original sin consisted in a fall into ego consciousness, which sets mind against nature and individuals against one another.

Alan Brasher

Jeffers's sense of natural beauty as independent of man dominates the account of pelicans feasting on fish who are drawn to the shore during mating season in "Birds and Fishes." Jeffers closes the poem by proclaiming "their quality ... the beauty of God," but not before asserting the lack of "mercy ... mind ... [and] goodness" in their actions. Though Jeffers sees God behind nature, he cannot imagine the existence of human virtues in their absolute states operating there:

... and which one in all this fury of wildfowl pities the fish?

No one certainly. Justice and mercy

Are human dreams, they do not concern the birds nor the fish nor eternal God.

It goes without saying that Emerson would not have been so naive as to look for pity in a pelican, but Jeffers's position that God also lacks any concern with virtues, such as justice and mercy, renders Emerson's search for universals within nature pointless. How can nature be a tool for man in his search for realization if those absolutes he seeks do not reside there?

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200225

Day 25 March 13, 2002

1. Names. Essay-exam by Friday, for sure. "Old People" for Friday, and maybe finishing up this poetry section depending on how far we get.

2. Pick up with Jeffers, briefly.

3. On to Eliot--some responded to him, others less so. He was one of the first poets that I discovered, in high school I remember reading "The Hollow Men." He was the most revered and influential poet and critic in English for a long period in the middle of the last century, renowned for his criticism as well. Interesting combination of conservative politics and religion and experimental poetics. He and Pound doing startling things in their early poems, e.g. "Preludes." Cf. Williams for taking the city as subject matter. All that stuff about what living in a large, impersonal modern city does to the inner lives of human beings. Strange, wild, startling images. His theory of the "objective correlative," and "the smell of steaks in passageways." Pronouns: one, you, his soul, finally that "I" that emerges in the last lines, still a shadowy figure.

"Sweeney" and "The Hippopotamus": written in the late teens, during WW I or very shortly after, when he and Pound decided that a return to formal verse was needed at the moment, and that irony and satire were needed as well. Against romanticism--note the scornful reference to Emerson--and the Church, though E. would come to accept its discipline before long.

Then The Waste Land, which we don't have but which made him famous, along with Joyce and Pound, as one of the radicals of a whole new sort of literature--innovative in form and in subject, filled with "the disillusionment of a generation," etc.

"In June 1927 few followers were prepared for Eliot's baptism into the Church of England. And so, within five years of his avant-garde success, Eliot provoked a second storm. The furor grew in November 1927 when Eliot took British citizenship, and again in 1928 when he collected a group of politically conservative essays under the title of For Lancelot Andrewes, prefacing them with a declaration that he considered himself a "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion." Eliot's poetry now addressed explicitly religious situations. In the late 1920s he published a series of shorter poems in Faber's Ariel series--short pieces issued in pamphlet form within striking modern covers. These included "Journey of the Magi" (1927), "A Song for Simeon" (1928), "Animula" (1929), "Marina" (1930), and 'Triumphal March" (1931). Steeped in Eliot's contemporary study of Dante and the late Shakespeare, all of them meditate on spiritual growth and anticipate the longer and more celebrated Ash-Wednesday (1930)."

Ash-Wednesday, then, as an explicitly religious poem, especially meditating on human limitations and helplessness--"the only wisdom we can have is the wisdom of humility." Paradoxes of hope and hopelessness, action and waiting; Eastern influences as well.

"During the Blitz, Eliot served as an air-raid warden, but spent long weekends as a guest with friends near Guildford in the country. In these circumstances, he wrote three more poems, each more somber than the last, patterned on the voice and five-part structure of "Burnt Norton." "East Coker" was published at Easter 1940 and took its title from the village that Eliot's ancestor Andrew Eliot had departed from for America in the seventeenth century. (Eliot had visited East Coker in 1937.) "The Dry Salvages," published in 1941, reverted to Eliot's experience as a boy on the Mississippi and sailing on the Massachussetts coast. Its title refers to a set of dangerously hidden rocks near Cape Ann. "Little Gidding" was published in 1942 and had a less private subject, suitable to its larger ambitions. Little Gidding, near Cambridge, had been the site of an Anglican religious community that maintained a perilous existence for the first part of the English civil war. Paired with Eliot's experience walking the blazing streets of London during World War II, the community of Little Gidding inspired an extended meditation on the subject of the individual's duties in a world of human suffering. Its centerpiece was a sustained homage to Dante written in a form of terza rima, dramatizing Eliot's meeting with a "familiar compound ghost" he associates with Yeats and Swift.

Four Quartets (1943), as the suite of four poems was entitled, for a period displaced The Waste Land as Eliot's most celebrated work. The British public especially responded to the topical references in the wartime poems and to the tone of Eliot's public meditation on a common disaster. Eliot's longtime readers, however, were more reticent. Some, notably F. R. Leavis, praised the philosophical suppleness of Eliot syntax, but distrusted Eliot's swerve from the authenticity of a rigorously individual voice. And, as Eliot's conservative religious and political convictions began to seem less congenial in the postwar world, other readers reacted with suspicion to his assertions of authority, obvious in Four Quartets and implicit in the earlier poetry. The result, fueled by intermittent rediscovery of Eliot's occasional anti-Semitic rhetoric, has been a progressive downward revision of his once towering reputation."

And Millay? Anybody who finds those sonnets merely conventional isn't reading them very closely, I'd suggest, esp. considering this is the early part of this century and she's a woman writing about a clearly physical affair that's not sanctified by matrimony . . .The heroism of telling those sorts of truths, within the traditional form.

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200226

Day 26 March 15, 2002

1. Names. On with Faulkner: reminder: next two days on "The Bear," then a day on "Delta Autumn." Journals for this time were, well, not very substantial in many cases. That you found it difficult may be the case without rising to the level of being very interesting.

Distribute essay-exam.

Pick up a bit on Millay from last time.

2. On Faulkner, Go Down, Moses, and "The Old People." As the handout suggests, these all have to do with the McCaslin families, and especially with Ike. It also has to do with the South and its history, with race, with sex, with the land, with hunting, and so on.

Let's first look closely at "The Old People," see what we can discover/decide inductively, and also try to acclimate ourselves to his prose style, which is sometimes rather forbidding, as you know by now I hope. It's sprawling, sometimes overheated, long complicated sentences and ornate vocabulary mingled with very colloquial dialects. Classically modernist in all of this, cf. Eliot and Joyce for range of diction and allusion, consciously difficult and experimental, high expectations of reader.

Collect journals, discuss in groups the first three pages of "The Old People": what themes and ideas are contained there? What does it connect with? The myth of the hunt, of initiation? Daniel Boone, Moby Dick. The problem of how to be a man in America; whether we think it's "universal" or not, it's a real problem.

Again, the key questions: how do men relate to what's bigger and wilder than they are? in what spirit should they hunt? ("should they hunt" is another question, not really asked here.) "Sacred violence?"

pening, 163: "In the beginning" . . . Emergence, condensing, magic. The ritual quality that Faulkner tries to create throughout this story.

164 marking with blood. The "true hunters": giants in the earth. Through a child's eyes, anyway. Ike's passage into manhood, killing his first deer, being marked with blood, passing the test. Bly and Iron John on rituals of manhood and on mentors to aid the passage of boys to men, something our society isn't doing very successfully according to many people. Cf. Clint's book, on Nolan Vann who can't be a real man until he somehow becomes a veteran.

165 white boy and old dark man: the guide, the helper. Sam Fathers had no children; Ike is almost an orphan, his own father absent. Sam's father is Ikkemotube, who steals the kingdom with heroin and sheer gall. Sam is one who's been betrayed and kept in bondage of a sort, though no one tells him what to do.

170 Boon Hogganbeck: Indian blood, but not chief's blood. Loyal mastiff, almost incapable of thought.

171 With Sam, past becoming present; hold on land seems trivial and unreal. The People: Sam's ancestors, ones Ike's connected to indirectly through Sam, as surrogate father. Sam goes to live at Big Bottom.

175 sense of woods as alive, gigantic and brooding. 177 emerging out of them, into mere country.

181 the wilderness again, "perhaps only a country-bred one could comprehend loving the life he spills. He began to shake again."

182: being marked, not just as hunter, but with something of Sam's people.

184: the buck appears. Sam simply greets him. "Not proud and not haughty but just full and wild and unafraid." Times when you don't shoot.

186-7: Talking it over with Cousin McCaslin: all that life, all that history, all that energy soaking into the earth. Using it, somehow. Ike answers: them, not it. Ghosts, spirits, ancestors? The "old people" of the title?

What are the themes? The wilderness, time, history, slavery, initiation, youth and manhood, the hunt, the proper love of what you kill to survive, the proper respect for what's bigger and older than you are. All these are explored further in "The Bear." As you read that, look for the convergence of the terms "pride and humility"--tough sledding though it is, in some ways this is a very key text for this class.

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200227

Day 27 March 18, 2002

1. Names. Continue . . . Exams due Friday.

2. The Bear. Oh yes indeed. Again, the key questions: how do men relate to what's bigger and wilder than they are? in what spirit should they hunt? ("should they hunt" is another question, not really asked here.) "Sacred violence?"

In some ways, this is a central text for this class; at least it's one in which the combination of pride and humility, paradoxical as it may seem, is insisted upon over and over. What's that mean, exactly? How's it acted out? And, of course, do we buy it? Those are some of the questions.

Connections with Moby Dick, in the hunt and the relation of humans to the wilderness, to nature. Ike and Ishmael? There's no real Ahab character, is there? Because Faulkner wants us to see these hunters as preserving an old and heroic way of life, and the enemy for him is not in rapacious hunting but elsewhere, in petty capitalism, in slavery, in "ownership" rather than stewardship of the land? Cf. Southwest tall tales, the myth of the Boss Bear. Cf. Grendel, the monster of the wilderness. Ritual trappings: the three hunts, the crowd of spectators larger each time. The dogs. Lion. Sam and Boon and Ike.

http://www.usd.edu/engl/SDR/v34n1p3.html Brian Bedard, THE REAL MEANING OF WILLIAM FAULKNER'S "THE BEAR"

"The Bear" is not a great hunting story. It is not an historical exorcism. It is not a medieval myth. It is not an allegory of the Garden of Eden. It is not a primordial initiation ritual. It is not a diatribe on slavery. It is not the Fall of the South. It is not a tale of revenge. it is not an ode to Ursa. It is not a cubist snow ornament. It is not a portrait of Christ as a brown bear. It is not a voodoo doll for the Industrial Revolution. It is not a deconstructed version of Pavlov's dogs.

The sad truth of the matter is that "The Bear" is an obituary for the last Republican in America. Consider the following evidence carefully, and you will become extremely reluctant to return to traditional interpretations.

1.The bear is a rugged individualist.

2.The bear is a short-tempered patriarch who has had things his own way for a long, long time.

3.The bear believes in States' Rights.

4.The bear's wife is a shadowy figure.

5.The bear has no interest in unions of any kind.

6.The bear has survived several assassination attempts by unwashed and deranged democrats.

I rest my case.

Utley, Francis Lee. "Pride and Humility: The Cultural Roots of Ike McCaslin." in Bear, Man, and God: Seven Approaches to William Faulkner's The Bear. Ed. Francis Lee Utley, Lynn Z. Bloom, Arthur F. Kinney. New York: Random House: 1964: 233-260. Utley talks about the cultural roots of the story in the hunt and the closeness of hunter and hunted. Connections with folk tales and songs, with American Southwest humor. "The Myth of the Boss Bear."

Old Ben the bear as like Grendel, appearing in series of ritual epiphanies and finally being killed when he knows his time has come. Also cf. Moby Dick, embodiment of wilderness, of uncontrollable nature, part of folklore of the community of hunters. They gather to tell stories about him, as the whalers do with MD.

193 the wilderness is clearly being diminished, as Melville may not have seen but Faulkner does.

How does the hunters' attitude toward him compare to those in MD? Is there an Ahab figure here? An Ishmael figure? Note that like Ishmael Ike is mainly an observer, not the central actor. Sam? Boon? Major de Spain?

What seem to be the key attitudes Faulkner values here? "Pride and humility" occur ca. twenty times as a pair. They even drink whisky humbly, 192.

Ike learns humility through preparing his gun when he won't shoot, sensing "his own fragility and impotence against the timeless woods," relinquishing gun and watch.(245)

Part one, he has to give up his "civilized" tools and helps before he can see the bear, before the vision is given. Again the ritualistic form. Lose your life to find it, Thoreau on getting lost to find ourselves, all that. "The infinite extent of our relations." Ike as part of wilderness; it's his family, his blood, his place, much more than anyone or anywhere else. The vision of the bear, like Ishmael seeing Moby Dick

Part II he works at pride and independence. Lion, the great dog; 210 wilderness as college for Ike, cf. Ishmael who says sea is his Yale and Harvard.

The fyce: little dog with nothing but bravery; in saving it Ike has his closest encounter with Ben, doesn't shoot when he might have. For him, as for Sam, the hunt is more a process than a project demanding closure; they're fascinated by Old Ben, they chase him, but they're not manic about killing him, they don't see him as evil the way Ahab does. ??

Lion, Sam, Boon: they all seem to take on ritual identities, on 215 Sam seems to know what will happen, he's alone, nearing end and glad of it. The audience gathers: onlookers, poor locals and strangers; 2 unsuccessful hunts, but a little closer each time. Rituals happen in 3's.

Part 3, the final hunt: the pleasure of it, 233, humility and pride. The last encounter, 240-41; why a knife? The intimacy of it, the tableau almost like Ahab on MD's back. And note that all the other principals also suffer: Sam has what seems to be a stroke and more or less decides to die; Lion gets his guts ripped out; Boon goes more or less crazy.

People come, the procession of mourners 248. 250 Gen. Compson's tribute to Ike. Question remains: what good will this wood-knowlege do him? Is it enough? Is this ritual the beginning of something, or the end?

Sam is dead at the end; did Boon kill him? Probably, I think.

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200228

Day 28 March 20, 2002

1. Names. Finish Faulkner Friday. Monday and Wed., poems: Rexroth 268-76, Roethke 284-300, Olso 304-11, Bishop 319-22 (handout possible), Levertov 508-18.

2. Issues in part 4: relinquishing is the central term, I think, 256 and ff. Why does Isaac feel he must? The curse on the land and the family. He has a vision of how people should live together, in humility, sufferance, pride, (257 and elsewhere). But the reality is injustice, slavery, rape, interbreeding, incest. The bare hints in the records, becoming clearer; Buddy has child (Tomy) with Eunice, and then another with Tomy herself. Eunice kills herself when she finds out that Buddy is her father. Ike reacts with more disgust than may be readily apparent, I think. Posing the "pride and humility" business, the sort of purity and restraint he learns concerning hunting, against this sordid dealing in human lives.

Decline from "great" ancestors, at least wealthy ones, to present squalor: how explain the debased condition of the South? The wilderness is shrinking, the carpetbaggers and petty merchants are taking over, the sordid business of commerce crowding out the old traditions of honor and courage--and even the past is itself sordid, of course. "They can learn nothing save through suffering," but even that doesn't teach them much. The inheritance: from silver cup to tin coffeepot, from gold to coppers. The ancestors prove not worthy of their ancestors, or of the high standards Ike wants to uphold. Ike's real patrimony is through Sam and the bear and the dog, not his "family"; stuff on blood, 259. Thus he's determined to relinquish, free himself at least from the curse. Decides to imitate the carpenter. His wife is furious; gives him sex to try to lure him into keeping the farm, but rejects him when he isn't swayed. The farm is what she really wants anyway, it seems; she's not give much credit, or much depth, is she? This is pretty clearly another "man's book."

There's a fair measure of sheer crankiness here, isn't there? What about that section re Sophonsiba and the Northern black guy that takes her off to Arkansas? He's portrayed as an utter dolt, arrogant and indolent and stupidly misguided. 274-81. McCaslin puts money in the bank for her, to be given out three dollars a month. Paternalism?

And the cranky invective following, about "females of both sexes" 283 and commercialism and so forth. 286 ff. the heroic Southern fighters and the piddling northerners. Heroic struggle against overwhelming odds, love of land and courage, etc., 289.

Then white trash and the KKK, 290, the Jim Crow South 291, disgust with decayed society.

On blacks, 294 ff: their vices and virtues, hmm. And back to the bear and Ike and his heroic cast of characters, who teach him this Lesson nobody else seems able to learn. Keats and Truth, 297.

300 ff: the legacy, from silver cup and gold coins to tin cup and coppers.

309: imitating Jesus. "Without the arrogance of false humility and without the false humbleness of pride." His money, his wife, ff.

The last section: the wilderness is on the way out; Isaac makes one last trip back. Progress, the lumber mill, 318. The locomotive like a snake. 321 the railroad isn't harmless any more, it's bringing the final change to "the doomed wilderness." Ash warns him the snakes are crawling; he makes his return to the graves of Sam and Ben, not coincidental that they're buried together. He leaves his little ritual gifts, 328. 326: the woods as his mistress and his wife. Compare all the other great American isolatoes, men without women; what sort of purity does this country require of us?

329 the snake. Again, it just glides away, as the deer and the bear do when he sees them. Totems, symbolic animals: the deer in "Old People," Old Ben, finally here a snake: is it Ike's final totem? Associated with the railroad, as well as with the Fall and the Curse and all the rest. He greets it with "Grandfather," as Sam did the deer.

The last tableau: Boon gone crazy with the lust of ownership, beating his gun to piece for a bunch of squirrels trapped in a tree. He doesn't have the perspective Ike does, the balance of pride and humility; he's an emblem of one of the ways things have gone wrong, though maybe not the only one.

From Utley, Francis Lee. "Pride and Humility: The Cultural Roots of Ike McCaslin." in Bear, Man, and God: Seven Approaches to William Faulkner's The Bear. Ed. Francis Lee Utley, Lynn Z. Bloom, Arthur F. Kinney. New York: Random House: 1964: 233-260.*Boon's killing Old Ben is "pride overcoming humility; through great, rash heedless acts, compelled by destiny and by love, Boon will pay for his excess of virtue; by the last act Boon, mad with contact with the God and the loss of his beloved Wilderness and his beloved Lion, is a mass of shivering hysteria." (247) His last mad cry ("Don't touch them! . . . They're mine!") "is for the pride of possession, the vice which has destroyed the wilderness. Ike has learned the humility of pride; Boon has never learned the humility; he is in imbalanced, out of mesure, mad." (248) NOTE: this affirms the idea that pride and greed run together, as do humility and resistance to greed. Connects with my idea about "mystical ecology" in Stafford, refusing possession.

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200229

Day 29 March 22, 2002

1. Names. Collect essay-exams. Reminder on what's coming up. Invitation to D. Kline. Read a bit.

2. On Delta Autumn. And where is this Delta? I puzzled about that for a long time before I finally found this:

The Delta: In Mississippi, the term by which the common floodplain of the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers is known. It stretches nearly 200 miles from the Tennessee line near Memphis to near Vicksburg and is about 60 miles wide at its widest point. A mostly flat region with rich black soil, bayous, sluggish streams, and oxbow lakes, and the traditional location of large cotton plantations, it differs markedly both in terrain and in way of life from the red clay hills of Yoknapatawpha County. Faulkner refers to it in The Sound and the Fury, Sanctuary, and

especially in the "Delta Autumn" section of Go Down, Moses.

and Yazoo_River: The principal river draining northeastern Mississippi, including the locations in Mississippi approximated by Yoknapatawpha County. It is formed when the Tallahatchie and the Yalobusha Rivers meet, and it drains into the Mississippi River just upstream from Vicksburg. The region of Mississippi known as the Delta is actually the common floodplain of the Yazoo and Mississippi Rivers. According to Calvin S. Brown, the "ceasing to flow and then reversing once a year [depicted in Go Down, Moses] happens when the snow melts in the

northern part of the drainage basin of the Mississippi River, which then rises rapidly and high, and backs up into the local streams that normally empty into it." This "running backward" also is depicted in the "Old Man" portion of If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem [The Wild Palms] (A Glossary of Faulkner's South 220). The hunting camp depicted in the story "Delta Autumn" in Go Down, Moses is somewhere along the lower Yazoo, probably near its mouth into the Mississippi River. The Yazoo is also referred to in Requiem for a Nun.

-from http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/egjbp/faulkner/glossaryd.html#Delta

3. "Delta Autumn": This story recapitulates much we've heard and seen in the rest of the book, gathers and summarizes.

Ike as old man: how much do we like him?

Questions: how do we evaluate Isaac's choice? Is it noble but stupid, just stupid, the right thing to do in some unworldly way? Is he a true imitator of Christ, or a no-count who just quit? I was surprised to find that a lot of critics argue the second, tho most of them I read were of the post-war era when the progressive Man of Action role seemed much less ambiguous than it does now.

And all the "pride and humility" stuff: it's connected to hunting and Ike's more or less mystical view of that, which connects to Native American sacramental circle-of-life stuff, which I don't mean to cast aspersions upon. As much as we may admire all that, though, what about Ike's dealings with other people?

The young men he hunts with now: what are they like? Crude, obnoxious, boors? Ike seems of another sort, doesn't he?

Roth Edmonds? The young woman he's had the child with, now wants nothing to do with except money? What does Ike feel about her? Note 361: "You're a nigger!" and her response, which seems calm and not offended. "Maybe in a thousand or two thousand years," he thinks, "But not now!"

Why does he give her the horn? Note she's related to Edmonds, it's incest between them too though not very close. She's Ike's relative too, she calls him "Uncle Ike." Note what she says to Ike: "don't you remember anything you ever knew or felt or even heard about love?" (363)

A good question, I think, and she gets the last word. But then Ike's last word, the sort of dismal vision of the whole Delta and the "races" who "breed and spawn together until no man has time to say which one is which nor cares." (364). Whew.

A troubling meditation on modernity and what it does to people? Or a reactionary refusal to come to terms with change? Faulkner seems to have his own vision of the waste land here, one in which the possibilities for heroism are sadly restricted.

Again the problem of love and relationship and marriage and generation, which seems both an eternal issue and a particularly troublesome American one, at least from the evidence of our texts. Another childless marriage, more or less broken, with not much resembling love. Ike's an idealist like Gatsby but never seems to spend nearly the amount of energy thinking on his own relational life as he does being repulsed by the transgressions of his relatives.

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200230

Day 30 March 25, 2002

1. Names. More poems for Wed., start Vonnegut after break. Ca. 90 pp./ day.

Exams back. Pretty good work, though they could always be sharper. To get to the point, once, then to the next point.

2. On Rexroth and Roethke. Rexroth was a leading figure of the SF Renaissance of the fifties and sixties, under-appreciated for his own work, I think. A poet of nature, of the eternal themes of love and death and beauty, informed by an Eastern sensibility. The poems we have here, longish meditations in an elegaic mode. From Nelson:

" Rexroth died in Santa Barbara, and, characteristically, Catholic eulogies, Buddhist chants, and Beat poems were performed at his funeral.

"Kenneth Rexroth's distinctive poetic voice emphasized sexuality, ecology, and mysticism and provided an aesthetic alternative to social realism and New Critical formalism. Although some feminists have objected to his philandering and dated representations of women, as a writer and editor, Rexroth generously promoted both male and female radical writers. His contributions energized postwar American poetry." -Caren Irr http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/rexroth/rexroth_life.htm

"When James Wright wrote in l980 that "Over the years I have learned that I am far from being alone in being so grateful to Rexroth, and I believe he has saved many poets from imaginative death," he was in part alluding to Rexroth's essays and translations, but even more to Rexroth's love verse. But I would guess that what poets like Wright and many others--poets and non-poets--essentially prized about Rexroth's work was that he seemed to have a great knack for clearing away the rant, pretensions and chicanery in society concealing reality. When he turned his keen sense of the real away from organized society, which he described as held together by the Social Lie, and focused on love, political/philosophical and nature subjects, a particular lucidity, vividness and intensity emerged in his verse that one could call the natural supernatural. Speaking of D. H. Lawrence's Look! We Have Come Through!, Rexroth says "Reality is totally valued. . . ..The clarity of purposively realize objectivity is the most supernatural of all visions." This applies perfectly to Rexroth's own poetry as well, and is another way of indicating that numinous glow on and within the natural and the ordinary that his best work gives off-the holiness of the real."

-Donald K. Gutierrez, http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/rexroth/gutierrez.htm

Sam Hamill and Elaine Laura Kleiner

By turns revolutionary and conservative, simultaneously spiritual and worldly, Asian and Western, Kenneth Rexroth created what must surely be regarded as the most original synthesis of transcendent metaphysical and erotic verse ever written by an American poet. A polyglot iconoclast, Rexroth was steeped in the world's spiritual and literary traditions, absorbing ideas and philosophy into his poetry and prose all his life. The author of nearly sixty books, including translations of poetry from Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Swedish, and other languages, and two volumes of Classics Revisited among several volumes of essays, he was one of the most original and universal literary scholars of this century. William Carlos Williams, reviewing the philosophical The Phoenix and the Tortoise (1944), remarked, "Let me say that this is one of the most completely realized arguments I have encountered in a book of verse in my time."

But nowhere is Rexroth's verse more fully realized than in his erotic poetry. While he continuously celebrated matrimonial relationships, he also refused to pretend that he did not enjoy daydreams of "copulating with sixteen year old nymphomaniacs of my imagination" in a poem probably inspired by a Catullan precedent. No doubt he made use of that ugly, sterile-sounding Latinate verb precisely because such imaginings are without love. In contrast, his love poems, like priestly offerings, raise all that is beautiful in this world so that it may be seen freshly transformed into the body of the sacred. In his famous "A Letter to William Carlos Williams," another kind of love poem, Rexroth defines the role of the poet as "one who creates sacramental relationships that last always." In his poetry the profane becomes the sacrament, the diurnal, mundane moment suddenly made luminous by perceptions that positively resonate with philosophical and historical content. Within the parameters of such a deep spirituality,

he could remain astonishingly profane at times. He delighted in telling audiences, "I write poetry to seduce women and to overthrow the capitalist system. In that order." And yet the poetry transcends mere human sexuality, eroticism becoming but an emblem of the synthesis of self and other, the sacred revealed within the profane world, the light of eternal love exposed in temporal flesh."

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/rexroth/sacramental.htm

Look at some of those poems. I find them just dazzling, some of the most beautiful meditative nature poems that I know of anywhere.

3. On Roethke. He was famous, and deservedly so, I think. Also a great nature poet, a wonderful poet of childhood and of love. The greenhouse, Papa's Waltz, those later exploratory poems in the voices of children and old women. The interior landscape, action and description symbolic of psychological processes.

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200231

Day 31 March 27, 2002

1. Names. Into Vonnegut after break.

2. On Olson, Bishop and Levertov.

Olson--where to start? With Projective Verse, maybe. His ideas so much more interesting than his poems. The didactic urge. "To dream is easy . . ." 307. His place in the poetry of the later century, important in something of the way Pound was. Black Mountain, Levertov, Creeley, Duncan, all quite different poets but all seeking a way forward outside the formalism and academicism of the fifties.

Maximus, learning the simplest things, breaking the estrangement from the familiar. To be an object among other objects. From "Projective Verse":

"if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way. It is in this sense that the projective act, which is the artist's act in the larger field of objects, leads to dimensions larger than the man...I would hazard the guess that, if projective verse is practiced long enough, is driven ahead hard enough, along the course I think it dictates, verse again can carry much larger material than it has carried in our language since the Elizabethans. But it can't be jumped. We are only at its beginnings.... "

http://www.flashpointmag.com/projvers.htm

From Creeley, http://www.jacket.zip.com.au/jacket12/olson-preface-by-creeley.html

Possibly the most public and defining relation Olson had is with Ezra Pound, surely his own signifying elder. It was Pound's "world" which Olson had necessarily to enter and contest. Clearly their battle was all male, so to speak, all the gesture and response of two men defining their authority. Olson's need was to so think the given world that it might again be initial, a fact of its physical event, of lives thus admitted and recognized. The "universe of discourse" was his term for the abstracting, generalizing system of reference, which put the immediate always at a

theoretic "distance," so that reflection and representation might then be the primary human acts rather than the very 'actions' themselves. "I have this sense," he writes, "that I am one with my skin..."

So he is able to read his own life as text rather than reference. One time at Black Mountain he said to me, "I need a college to think with," meaning, I understood, that he wanted the multiplicity of instance, all particular and active, not the discrete or isolating possibilities of a

chosen few. "Come into the world," he said, "Take a big bite." It was poetry that could move with the necessary syntax and speed, to 'be here' coincident with recognition, a locating act. Just as Pound's Cantos proved a first time record of human thought so sustained for almost half

a century, Olson then moved the art to an exceptional capacity for thinking itself. Given Olson's 'methodology,' a favorite term, poetry had no longer a simply literary or cultural practice. It became, rather, a primary activity and resource for what can be called "historical geography," as Duncan McNaughton notes, adding then with significant emphasis taken from Olson's characteristic friend, the geographer, Carl Sauer, that "nothing whatever is outside the

consideration of historical geography."

How needs one say it? A tracking of the earth in time? A place? Olson loved John Smith's curious phrase, "History is the memory of time." Equally he prized the sense of history which he got from Herodotus as against the abstracting Thucydides:

...'istorin, which makes anyone's acts a finding out for him or her

self, in other words restores the traum: that we act somewhere

at least by seizure, that the objective (example Thucydides, or

the latest finest tape-recorder, or any form of record on the spot

- live television or what - is a lie

as against what we know went on, the dream: the dream, being

self-action with Whitehead's important corollary: that no event

is not penetrated, in intersection or collision with, an eternal

event...

We are such stuff/As dreams are made on, and our little life/Is rounded with a sleep... In fact, for the human, only the 'dream' is true, can realize the world in which one has existence. It is the only passage either evident or possible. It's all a dream, one says, rightly.

I went to read at Cornell some years ago, not long after Olson had been there. The director of the writing program was still seemingly confounded by his visit. It had little if anything to do with the poems he had read, or with his conversation in the company of faculty and students. Rather the fellow was still bemused by the fact that Olson had rented a car from Avis to make the trip from Gloucester to Ithaca and back. "He must have spent all the fee on the car," he kept saying,

somehow intrigued by that untoward (for him) determination. I remember once visiting Charles, Betty and their son Charles Peter in Gloucester, and finding that they were broke. Charles showed me the single dollar bill he had left. I had a little money from recent work and

offered him an all too meager ten dollars. "Ten dollars," he said with some humor, "I need ten thousand!" And so he refused it.

I wondered at times and certainly worried about him, about myself as well, be it said. I used to think of myself as the proverbial smallest of the three Billy Goats Gruff, Robert Duncan being the next, and then Charles the one who could finally manage to defeat the malignant Troll

under the bridge. Then we would be free to cross over to that initiating place Robert so beautifully invokes in his poem, "Often I am permitted to return to a meadow," in The Opening of the Field. When Robert went to New York to see Olson in hospital in the last days, it was Charles' wry comment that he had been waiting for Robert to give him the solution,

so to speak, the transforming means, which would let him survive. But Robert answered that he'd come for Charles' advice and had none himself to offer. They had been a lifetime together upon a great adventure, he felt. That was the burden of the story, neither to be changed nor avoided.

3. Bishop. A major poet we will only glimpse here. "Armadillo" for Lowell, her great friend, and "Visits" for Ezra Pound, locked up in St. Elizabeth's as an alternative to being hung for treason. There's a beautiful clarity and intensity in her world, a depth of feeling kept under the most rigorous control. Penelope Laurens on "The Armadillo":

"All of the animals' panic and misery is conveyed in Bishop's own summation (italicized to separate it from the rest of the poem). In these final lines, their plight extends subtly to become our own. We, of course, understand the fire balloons. But, mailed as we are, with our own strength and intelligence, we cannot protect ourselves from the equally mystifying and terrible events that shake us. It is surely important to note, at this point, that Bishop dedicated this poem to Robert Lowell, who became a conscientious objector when the Allied command began fire-bombing German cities. Bishop's poem points directly to these fire bombings, which wreaked the same kind of horrifying destruction on a part of our universe that the fire balloons wreak on the animals."

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/bishop/armadillo.htm

4. Denise Levertov: a prolific and widely known poet, represented here by her earlier work; wide range of influences, political commitments, mysticism, spirituality out of Hasidism and Christianity. Paying clear attention to the world, so that (as we saw in Rexroth) the physical becomes the carrier or the embodiment of the spiritual, the truly real.

"Else a Great Prince": John Donne, "The Ecstasy":

So must pure lovers soules descend

T'affections, and to faculties,

Which sense may reach and apprehend,

Else a great Prince in prison lies.

Those Vietnam poems.

From her last interview:

"In the essay "Some Affinities of Content," you spoke about how you responded to the goal of Northwest poets to submerge themselves in something larger than individual ego, in their case, nature. Do you try the same approach in your poetry?

I hope I do. I'm certainly very tired of the me, me, me kind of poem, the Sharon Olds "Find the dirt and dig it up" poem, which has influenced people to find gruesome episodes in their life, whether they actually happened or not. Back when Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton were the models for neophytes, you had to have spent some time in a mental hospital to qualify as a poet. Now you have to have been abused. I know perfectly well that lots of people really have been abused, but it's unfortunate to use the fact of abuse as the passport to being a poet. I'm certainly tired of that kind of egotism.

Does this desire to submerge the ego involve a kind of spiritual quest, whether explicitly religious or not?

I think that's true, don't you? It's in the air. When I started writing explicitly Christian poems, I thought I'd lose part of my readership. But I haven't actually. I think interest in religion is a counterforce to the insane, rationalist optimism that surrounds the development of all this new technology. This optimism is a twentieth-century repeat of attitudes in the nineteenth century, when they thought that steam, electricity, and telephones were going to make for some kind of utopia. There's a lot of dependence on technology today, and a willful ignorance that it's messing up resources, may end up destroying life on this planet, and then we'll have to start over without it. Our ethical development does not match our technological development. This sense of spiritual hunger is something of a counterforce or unconscious reaction to all that technological euphoria.

Did your understanding of poetic inspiration help to imagine what it would be like to have religious faith?

That's one way of putting it. When you're really caught up in writing a poem, it can be a form of prayer. I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer. I feel it in different degrees and not with every poem. But in certain ways writing is a form of prayer.

Is prayer similar to poetic inspiration, in that you can't force it, but simply must wait and hope for it?

But you do have to focus your attention. I was really amazed at how close the exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola were to a poet or novelist imagining a scene. You focus your attention on some particular aspect of the life of Christ. You try to compose that scene in your imagination, place yourself there. If it's the Via Dolorosa, you have to ask yourself, are you one of the disciples? Are you a passerby? Are you a spectator that likes to watch from the side, the way people used to watch hangings? You establish who you are and where you stand and then you look at what you see. -

from O'Connell, Nicholas. At the Field's End: Interviews with 22 Pacific Northwest Writers (University of Washington Press, 1998). Reprinted in Poets & Writers Magazine (May/June 1998) Copyright © 1998 Poets & Writers, Inc., New York, NY. Online Source

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/levertov/oconnell.htm

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200232

Day 32 April 3, 2002

1. Names. The Final Essay: due 4/19, according to the syllabus. We can put it off till 4/22, I think.

2. So, so it goes. What is it about this novel? It's so hard not to like, but why? What is it about the style that's so captivating? What does he do, after giving the whole thing away as Justyna notes, to keep us reading?

The meta-narrative--talk about his struggle to write the book, about his daughter and her friend (14-15), about going to see his war buddy Bernard O'Hare and his wife Mary (16-20), that whole first chapter. "There's nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." And Roethke, and Celine's dance with death, 27. And Lot's wife looking back on Sodom and Gomorrah. The book as an act of "looking back."

All the things it refuses to do: offer us heroic soldiers fighting for The Good Cause. Remember, this is "the good war" we're talking about, the one that people still insist be remembered for its justice and rightness.

Roland Weary, Billy's sometime companion, who seems seriously homicidal and delusional, hardly the conventional Good Buddy of conventional war stories. Billy himself, of course, is utterly different from the conventional war hero. 42-48 and ff. 62 the Three Musketeers, ha. The scouts ditch Billy and Roland, both. 65: the German soldiers wonder why an American would try to murder another so far away from home . . .

America in the 60's, Billy's later life: what about all this? Being an optometrist, trying to care about those middle-class concerns. 77 the Serenity Prayer and the things Billy can't change: past, present, and future.

Explain why it was necessary to bomb Dresden.

Talk much at all about the event itself.

The question of the hero, which Alaina struggles with in her journal. What about Billy and the category of the anti-hero?

What about the hero as narrator, Vonnegut himself? How does he undercut the image of the heroic author?

Notice his identification with Mary O'Hare, who expects him to be a macho celebrant of war stories.

And what does it insist on doing that tests our willingness to go along? All that time travel stuff, and the alien stuff. How do we deal with that? Various reactions in journals.

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200233

Day 33 April 5, 2002

1. Names. Some Vonnegut links now added.

2. Ways of thinking about the book, part 2.

Sarah: "Vonnegut IS the main character and Billy Pilgrim is just a device to tell his tale. Am I wrong?"

What is the relation between KV and BP? Both hapless white guys who live through the war, become successful and comfortable, and yet remain obsessed by their experiences?

Alaina: "Is this to tell us that army men are either murderous psychotics, completely incompetent, or heartless, like the scouts who left Billy behind enemy lines?"

What about the images of military men we get here? What others? The British POW's who are getting 10x the packages from the Red Cross, and having a luxurious war?

Magda: "how different is [the aliens'] concept of time and their approach toward s the human fate and free will."

What about this idea of time as "dewdrops on a spiderweb" or like the Rocky Mountains, a dimension that we could travel through the way we do the first three? Time travel is among the most persistent science fiction themes, of course. And the question of free will inevitably arises (!?), since if time is travelable it must be either fixed (simple, but no free will) or changeable (big hairy mess).

Leslie, on Billy: "as though he is running away from something greater than himself. . . . He won't tell his wife his war stories, but he tells his "Alien Lover" his deepest stories--is she even REAL?"

How do we read Billy being "unstuck in time"? As literal truth? As his subjective experience? Same with the Tralfamadore stuff--are we supposed to think it's "real," or BP's way of coping with the trauma that he can't escape otherwise? Why does he tell Montana all those stories that he doesn't tell Valencia?

Chad: "the plot seems to have been run through a 3-speed blenderizer." What if we were to chart the events? Allowing for all the skipping around, how do things generally run? The war thread is more or less chronological in its detailed telling, and so is the thread about Billy's later life, right? There are more flashes forward and back than usual, but the transitions and signals are much clearer than in, say, "The Bear," aren't they?

Eric: "I don't know then if I am attracted to the book because it is vile, disgusting, and crude at times, or if I am attracted to the overall anti-war theme or what. . . . [the reoccuring phrases] lend a binding force to the text . . . .[on `so it goes'] something about hopelessness. Or maybe it's just there."

What about that "vile, disgusting" stuff? Pornographic pictures, drawings of breasts, casual use of obscenities? Another refusal of convention? Against the extremity of all these dead people, what use are polite conventions and restrictions on mere words? Why is it that sex is considered "pornographic" but violence is not?

Tony: "Pilgrim. He's on some journey? An innocent naive man in the midst of war?"

Tony, part 2: repetitions. ivory and blue feet, forty-four, Three Musketeers bars, radium dials, mustard and roses. The barbershop quartet, which Billy associates with the quartet of guards looking out after the bombing. And of course the phrases, especially "so it goes."

How do we understand all this? Obsessive-compulsive disorder? Efforts to assert order against mere chaos? Or the fear of too much order, paranoid order? Cf. time as a mountain range.

Katie: "I think that the time travel issue is important because Billy can go to any

point in his life and relive it over and over. The author has tried to escape from that period in his life, but it keeps coming back. I think it is all tied in with his repeated phrases, like "so it goes" and "if the accident wills." Billy and the author know that there is no way to change what happened -- even though both of them relive it in thier heads. There is no control and no reason. So why not talk about aliens and spider webs? How else CAN you explain the things that can't be believed? Give all control to someone else and become a totally passive observer in the world

around you!"

Wallace Stevens: Connoisseur of Chaos

A. A violent order is a disorder; and

B. A great disorder is an order. These

Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.)

Robert Scholes sums up the theme of Slaughterhouse Five in the New York Times Book Review, writing: 'Be kind. Don't hurt. Death is coming for all of us anyway, and it is better to be Lot's wife looking back through salty eyes than the Deity that destroyed those cities of the plain in order to save them.'

http://www.duke.edu/crh4/vonnegut/sh5/index.html

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200234

http://www.duke.edu/crh4/vonnegut/sh5/sh5_nytimes.html

March 31, 1969

At Last, Kurt Vonnegut's Famous

Dresden Book

SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE OR THE CHILDREN'S CRUSADE

By Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr., an indescribable writer whose seven previous books

are like nothing else on earth, was accorded the dubious pleasure of

witnessing a 20th-century apocalypse. During World War II, at the

age of 23, he was captured by the Germans and imprisoned beneath

the city of Dresden, ''the Florence of the Elbe.'' He was there on Feb.

13, 1945, when the Allies firebombed Dresden in a massive air attack

that killed 130,000 people and destroyed a landmark of no military

significance.

Next to being born, getting married and having children, it is probably

the most important thing that ever happened to him. And, as he

writes in the introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five, he's been trying to

write a book about Dresden ever since. Now, at last, he's finished the

''famous Dresden book.''

In the same introduction, which should be read aloud to children,

cadets and basic trainees, Mr. Vonnegut pronounces his book a failure

''because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.'' He's

wrong and he knows it.

Kurt Vonnegut knows all the tricks of the writing game. So he has not

even tried to describe the bombing. Instead he has written around it

in a highly imaginative, often funny, nearly psychedelic story. The

story is sandwiched between an autobiographical introduction and

epilogue.

Fact and Fiction Combined

The odd combination of fact and fiction forces a question upon the

reader: how did the youth who lived through the Dresden bombing

grow up to be the man who wrote this book? One reads

Slaughterhouse-Five with that question crouched on the brink of one's

awareness. I'm not sure if there's an answer, but the question

certainly heightens the book's effects.

Here is the story: Billy Pilgrim, ''tall and weak, and shaped like a bottle

of Coca-Cola,'' was born in Ilium, N.Y., the only child of a barber

there. After graduating from Ilium High School, he attended night

sessions at the Ilium School of Optometry for one semester before

being drafted for military service in World War II. He served with the

infantry in Europe, and was taken prisoner by the Germans. He was in

Dresden when it was firebombed.

After the war, he went back to Ilium and became a wealthy

optometrist married to a huge wife named Valencia. They had two

children, a daughter named Barbara who married an optometrist, and a

son named Robert who became a Green Beret in Vietnam.

In 1968, Billy was the sole survivor of a plane crash on top of

Sugarbush Mountain in Vermont. While he was recovering in the

hospital, Valencia was killed in a carbon-monoxide accident. On Feb.

13, 1976, Billy was assassinated by a nut with a high- powered laser

gun.

As you can see, there is much absurd violence in this story. But it is

always scaled down to the size of Billy Pilgrim's world, which makes it

more unbearable and more obligatory for the reader to understand the

author's explanation for it. As I said, Mr. Vonnegut knows all the

tricks.

Now there are two things I haven't yet told you about Billy Pilgrim,

and I'm hesitant to do so, because when I tell you what they are

you'll want to put Kurt Vonnegut back in the science-fiction category

he's been trying to climb out of, and you'll be wrong.

First, Billy is ''unstuck in time'' and ''has no control over where he is

going next.'' ''He is in a constant state of stage fright...because he

never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.''

Story Told Fluidly

This problem of Billy's enables Mr. Vonnegut to tell his story fluidly,

jumping forward and backward in time, free from the strictures of

chronology. And this problem of Billy's is related to the second thing,

which is that Billy says that on his daughter's wedding night he was

kidnapped by a flying saucer from the planet Tralfamadore, flown

there through a time warp, and exhibited with a movie star named

Montana Wildhack.

The Tralfamadorians are two feet high, green, and shaped like

plumber's friends, with suctions caps on the ground and little green

hands with eyes on their palms at the top of their shafts. They are

wise, and they teach Billy Pilgrim many things. They teach him that

humans cannot see time, which is really like ''a stretch of the rocky

Mountains,'' with all moments in the past, the present and the future,

always existing.

''The Tralfamadorians... can see how permanent all the moments are,

and they can look at any moment that interests them.'' They teach

Billy that death is just an unpleasant moment. Because Billy can go

back and forth in time, he knew this lesson when he was in Dresden.

In 1976, when he was assassinated, Billy Pilgrim was trying to bring

this message to the world. He knew he would die, but he did not mind.

''Farewell, hello, farewell, hello,'' he said.

I now, I know (as Kurt Vonnegut used to say when people told him

that he Germans attacked first). It sounds crazy. It sounds like a

fantastic last-ditch effort to make sense of a lunatic universe. But

there is so much more to this book. It is very tough and very funny; it

is sad and delightful; and it works. But is also very Vonnegut, which

mean you'll either love it, or push it back in the science-fiction corner.

http://www.holocaust-history.org/questions/irving-david.shtml

On David Irving, historian and now Holocaust denier:

David Irving

Question:

I realize that david irving is an idiot, but I would like to know if

there is a bibliography of his works so I can avoid them in my

research. I would appreciate any information on his writings or

where I can get the information without having to go to his site.

To deny the holocaust--gas chambers is to deny the

anti-semitism that allowed it to occur, and it opens the door for

other genocides in the future. We must learn from the past or be

condemned to repeat--an old adage used to the point of cliche,

but that doesn't lessen its truth.

Andrew Mathis responds:

You can find a nearly complete listing of Irving's books here:

http://catalog.loc.gov/

This list does not include his Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich, which, I

believe, is his most recent work but was self- published.

You should be aware that Irving's earlier works, for instance, The Destruction of

Dresden, while clearly biased, are not works of Holocaust denial. Irving claims to

have been "converted" to "revisionism" in the late '80s, long after Dresden was

completed. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., a survivor of the Dresden bombing who wrote

Slaughterhouse-Five on the experience, actually cites Irving's Dresden in the

book.

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200235

Day 34 April 8, 2002

1. Names. How are we all? Atwood next--I think you'll like it too, though it's very different.

2. Last discussion of Slaughterhouse-5--where do we go? Let's work with these journal entries, see where they take us.

Sarah: the problem of expression. What do you say about a massacre? What about her theory about the ending?

Alaina: I doubt you're a minority in thinking war is sometimes necessary, first. The famous cartoon: "Dammit, Karl, if you're not for nuclear war and you're not for conventional war, what the hell kind of war are you for?" What does "antiwar" mean? For me that scene where Billy watches the movie backwards has always been one of the most powerful ones. 93-95. But then I'm a guy who hates throwing away the green beans or peas left at the end of the meal, even though if I put them in the fridge I just end up throwing them away a week later.

Also note the time this book was written: 1968, American society in enormous turmoil over Vietnam and civil rights and all the rest, Bobby and MLK shot, riots in the cities, etc., etc.

Alaina, part 2: Billy's just a liar, because his story is too inconsistent for him to be crazy. Now there's a theory I think KV would like.

Justyna: Both little green men and war are insane ideas. The cosmic, broad perspective: but note that the Tralfamadorians have their wars too, and are responsible for the end of the universe, if we believe their stories. So it goes.

Leslie: question at end: is the book really about the firebombing, or the effects war has on people? What about that "moon" imagery? The book seems in some ways curiously distanced from politics, doesn't it? It doesn't really take up the argument about whether WW II was necessary or not . . . though it pretty clearly suggests that bombing Dresden was not necessary. 138-39: why do Christians find it so easy to be cruel? The crucifixion, and picking on the wrong guy, which suggests that there are right guys to pick on.

Leah: Kilgore Trout , who understands. Maybe. What about science fiction? Bad writers with great ideas, 140. 128: it's a help, somehow. But why? The effort to take the big view, to get some kind of distance and perspective on what otherwise seems like

Erin: why would you want more about Dresden? What is there to say about a massacre? A couple of web sites . . . fascinating how much the neo-Nazis are attracted to this story, probably because it allows them to complain about Allied atrocities. . . .

Jill: the book connects the horrors of war with everyday life.

Katie: the "all in Billy's head" reading, with the guards as "aliens." Also cf. "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," Ambrose Bierce.

Chad: what is the point of the book? That we ought to be better to each other? That we can't change anything and shouldn't bother trying? That we had better start trying?

Stevens poem: does it connect? Well, maybe. Trying to find an order in disorder, to make some kind of sense?

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200236

Journals, April 8, 2002:

Sarah Garza

American Lit.

April 8th

I thought there could not be a better ending to this novel than the one Vonnegut ended with. The bird asks a question, "Poo-tee-weet?" to which there can be no reply. As the narrator warns in the first chapter, there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. I think the novel's ending suggests that bird talk makes as much sense as anyone's talk. Even if they are meaningless, we should be thankful that words and stories still exist at all in the aftermath of a war . Moreover, Vonnegut has succeeded in constructing a thing of beauty out of shreds of senselessness and anguish. That is my humble opinion on the book's ending.

Alaina Schulte

April 8, 2002

I have finished this book, and I must say that I really did like it, although like Eric, I am not sure why. I don't think that it is necessarily because of the antiwar message, because I am not entirely antiwar. I don't like war, but I am of the campus minority who believes that on occasion war is necessary. So, I don't think that it is the antiwar message. I think that perhaps it is the strangeness of the book. I found myself turning pages rapidly just to see what kind of wierd things Vonnegut was going to write next. I did find one flaw in the things that he wrote. He first said that the Tralfamadorians returned him through a timewarp to the exact moment from which they had taken him, even though he had time to travel to their planet and have a child, etc. However, if this was the case why would the Tralfamadorians not return Montana to the moment from which they took her? At the end of the book, he talks about how Montana is missing, and some presume that she is at the bottom of the lake. Why is she missing when he was returned to his time? Why did time continue without her. In theory, she should have been put back where the Tralfamadorians took her from. However, that is not the case. Is this an oops for Vonnegut? Probably not. I think that this in itself is an indication that Billy is in fact making all of this up. It seems that he has forgotten his original story, and has changed it a little bit. I think this is Vonnegut's way of saying that Billy really isn't crazy because if he was nuts he would have one crazy story to stick to. Instead, he is simply a liar, or in the least, making an attempt to appear crazy.

Justyna

I was thinking whether the reason Vonnegut combined the idea of war with the SF was purely to give the escapist quality to the book and make it more post-moden or whether there is something more to that. We might say that both the idea of little green men and the idea of war are insane for most people and Vonnegut has just found another way to make us see that fact through the combination of those two plots. He probably also wanted to say that the only place where you can successfuly look for peace is somewhere definitely out of this planet. This idea is not a new one, but it is interesting where Vonnegut finds the source of this state of affairs. The usual featues of

character that cause the militant qualities in men are supposed to be greed, pride or inexplainable drive towards violence. What he sees as the factor detemining our tendency to 'solve' the world's

problems with war is our short-sightedness. He seems to be saying that it's enough to see the Earth and its existance in time from the cosmic, broad perspective to be able to recognise the futility and stupidity of all violent solutions. So we have the recipe for the end of wars. But Vonnegut does not endowe humans with that knowledge, he gives the golden cure to the far-away invisible aliens. Maybe it is because he realises this project is too utopian for any real

sentient being that exists.

Leslie

Anyway, I think that a major reason why I liked the book was simply because of Billy. Here is this guy, who wants others to think he is crazy, so he invents this story about being kidnapped by a group of aliens with the ability to travel back and forth into time. I don't think that any of this is real..I kept thinking to myself that I think Billy must have been lying on the "Magic Fingers" one to many times because it seems to have shook his brain and all of the clear thinking that he ever had. However, I don't really understand what the book was about. Throughout the first chapter, the narrator tells the reader and other people in teh book that he is writing about the bombing in Dresden. However, we don't even hear about the actual bombing until the second to last chapter. We understand throughout the book that it is an anti-war novel simply because of the author's language and the way he developed his characters and their language with each other. But is this book really about the firebombing in Dresden or the effects that war can have people(bad enougfh to make them go crazy)?

Leah

i am not sure that i think billy pilgrim is crazy, or that he wants people to think he's crazy. perhaps he really did go to tralfamadore and now his life is just a series of moments. or if he didn't go to tralfamadore, it might be a little post-traumatic stress disorder. it's hard to tell with mr vonnegut. kilgore trout was pretty groovy. i think he understands what billy is experiencing. and finally, while as a whole this book isn't all that compelling to me, i do really like particular sentences of the book, and certain situations vonnegut writes about, the echolalia, for instance. i was quite amused by that.

Erin Wahl

American Lit.

4/8/02

I am intrigued by Justyna's idea that the aliens represent a type of utopia that we as humans will never be able to achieve. What a neat perspective! I was very disappointed that after all the talk about how the book was going to be about the firebombing of Dresden, that there was not that much about Dresden IN the book. It seemed like we only got a summary of that point in time and minute details about everything else that didn't relate to Dresden... or did it?!?! I think one of the reasons that Vonnegut may have presented it this way was to display the mental deterioration of Billy Pilgrim and perhaps Dresden was the last straw. I don't exactly know. But I must say that I enjoyed this book immensely and I'm very much looking forward to "The Handmaid's Tale".

Jill

I really enjoyed this book despite the peculiar style it was written in. I think that it flows together so well despite jumping around because it connects everything in his life not just as moving in one fluid moment of time but as a repeated serious of actions that he does in every part of his life. It connects the horrors of war with the same actions that he performs in everyday life and even when he is a little bit off his rocker if you don't believe that he was truly snatched by some aliens. I think this connection is the reason why the book goes together so well for me.

Katie

Well, this book reminds me a lot of that movie [Jabob's Ladder]. Especially after talking to

my mom about it this weekend. She read this novel in one of her classes when she was in college, and she mentioned that one of the theories they discussed was that the aliens were actually the German guards -- that Billy Pilgrim was never really a time traveler... if fact, it is possible that he never even came home from WWII and all of his visions happen while he is

still a POW. I thought that was a pretty plausible explaination since so much of what the aliens say mirrors what the soldiers around him say, and as Tony pointed out on Friday, a lot of his descriptions (of the feet, bad breath, etc) are the same no matter what planet or time he is in.

Chad

This is hillarious, I have been trying to type my journal for the past ten minutes, but everytime I read the last journal, someone else sends their's. First Erin, then Jill, then Katie.....hee hee hee... Anyway, now that they have stopped coming in, I will write my own. As everyone seems to state, I too thouroughly enjoyed this book. This book is in a close tie with The Great Gatsby for my favorite book of this class so far. Also like most of the class, I have trouble placing my finger on exactly what it is that makes me like this book so much. I am not sure if it is simply that Vonnegut has a writing style so unlike the other authors we have read, or if Billy Pilgrim is just a rather humorous and zaney character that I wish I could take to Cedar Point, but for some reason this book stands out amongst the rest. I am still looking for a deeper meaning in this book. Vonnegut, as we have discussed, warns the reader not to read the book, and that it is a poor piece of li! terature, but he has to be saying something. The man may be a psycho, but he would not write a book for nothing. I liked Katie's interpretation of the aliens, and if that is the case, what is Vonnegut trying to say? What is the reader supposed to walk away with after reading this book? I just do not seem to be able to completely grasp the point of the book. There is the anti-war theme that several have brought up, which to an extent I believe Vonnegut set out to address, but what else is he trying to say? Is he saying that we take life too seriously? That we spend too much time worrying about the past, present, and future; that we should step back and revisit certain parts of our life? This book draws me in so much because I start to lose sanity if I contemplate the meanings within it for too long. I am not sure I have ever read a book with such effects before. Albert Camus' The Stranger came close, but I think Vonnegut's work has gone further. I am awestruck to s! ay the least. And alas, I am spent.

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200237

Day 35 April 10, 2002

1. Names. Carry on with reading; essays due Monday the 22nd.

2. Into Atwood and Handmaid's Tale. Where to start? Maybe with some basic sci-fi terminology:

-space opera

-near future

-speculative fiction, extrapolation, thought experiment

-dystopia: to isolate and extrapolate trends, to warn: "If this goes on . . ."

What's the politics here? What trends have been extrapolated? What groups/trends seem to have come together? The religious right, which was calling itself the "moral majority" when the book was written. And the Rachel Carson Silent Spring stuff about declining birth rates. But also anti-pornography feminists seem implicated somehow, eh?

From Paul Brians: "But another social controversy also underlies this novel. During the early 80s a debate raged (and continues to rage, on a lower level) about feminist attitudes toward sexuality and pornography in particular. Outspoken feminists have taken all kinds of positions: that all erotica depicting women as sexualobjects is demeaning, that pornography was bad though erotica can be good, that although most pornography is demeaning the protection of civil liberties is a greater good which requires the toleration of freedom for pornographers, however distasteful, even that such a thing as feminist pornography can and should be created.

The sub-theme of this tangled debate which seems to have particularly interested and alarmed Atwood is the tendency of some feminist anti-porn groups to ally themselves with religious anti-porn zealots who oppose the feminists on almost every other issue. The language of "protection of women" could slip from a demand for more freedom into a retreat from freedom, to a kind of neo-Victorianism. After all, it was the need to protect "good" women from sex that justified all manner of repression in the 19th century, including confining them to the home, barring them from participating in the arts, and voting. Contemporary Islamic women sometimes argue that assuming the veil and traditional all-enveloping clothing is aimed at dealing with sexual harassment and sexual objectification. The language is feminist, but the result can be deeply patriarchal, as in this novel."

http://www.wsu.edu:8080/brians/science_fiction/handmaid.html

Some introductory notes by Gisèle Baxter, University of British Columbia

"Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale was published in 1985, and written in the early 1980s. Hence, its production coincides with renewed interest in a novel it resembles, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell's speculation on the extremities of totalitarianism (of the right or left) examines the everyday working life of a minor civil servant, Winston Smith, his love affair with a colleague, and their doomed attempt to join an underground rebellion. A postscript detailing the regime's attempt to control thought through restricting language suggests that the circumstances described have ended or evolved in some way. Atwood treats the daily life of Offred, a handmaid selected and trained to produce children for the sterile elite of a fundamentalist republic, and her memories of the subtle as well as the sudden ways the revolution took place (Orwell in choosing a year for his novel simply reversed the digits of its year of writing, 1948, while Atwood probably had in mind the early 21st or even late 20th century). In her novel as well, a postscript (treating an academic conference in the late

22nd century) suggests that the period described is one of the past, while remaining silent on what ultimately becomes of Gilead.

Context:

This novel was produced in the aftermath of the Iranian revolution of 1979, with its establishment of a fundamentalist theocracy, and during Ronald Reagan's presidency of the United States, which saw both an escalation of global tension (the doomsday clock moved to within five minutes of midnight) and a rise of the religious right. The 1980s were in many ways a backlash against the rise of social liberalism, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly against feminism, multiculturalism, and freedom of expression. However, Atwood is also concerned more generally with patterns of totalitarianism and theocracy as they have manifested themselves in various periods in history (her most obvious analogies are to the rise of Nazism in Germany which preceded and precipitated the Second World War, and to the social organization of the New England Puritans in 17th century America. Elements of the South African system of apartheid in place till the 1990s might also be identified)."

Notice the epigraphs: Rachel, Swift, Sufi proverb about the desert and not being forbidden to eat stones. What's that one mean? A long-term Q. for this book, perhaps.

Brians: "Atwood extrapolates outrageously from this point, as is typical of dystopian writers: it is highly unlikely that the puritanical religious right would ever adopt the sexual practices depicted in this novel; but she is trying to argue that patriarchal traditions which value women only as fertility objects can be as demeaning as modern customs which value them as sex objects. She makes clear that this is a reductio ad absurdum, a theoretical exercise designed to stimulate thought about social issues rather than a realistic portrait of a probable future by comparing herself to Jonathan Swift, who in A Modest Proposal highlighted the hard-heartedness of the

English in allowing the Irish masses to starve by satirically proposing that they should be encouraged to eat their own children. It is not so obvious what the application of the third epigraph is to this novel. It seems to say that no one needs to forbid what is undesirable. Can you interpret it any further?"

Cf. our earlier reading: so Edna thinks she's got it bad? :-)

What about the form of this book? First chapter, the gym: starting in medias res, making us catch up, introducing the mystery of what's happened. Sleeping in the gym, hints of old games and dances, old blankets that still said U.S. Guards with cattle prods and Angels.

Ch 2: her room, nothing to tie a rope to. More about what she's doing, again revealed gradually and from the inside, in terms of colors, clothes, flowers, "typical" women's things.

Relations to other women in the house: Rita, Cora, Serena. Notice how many women to one man, tho there's also the chauffeur Nick. What's the narrator's situation, in relation to them? Separated, mistrusted, defined by her role, which is defined by her ovaries and by men?

Ch. 3 the Wife, Serena Joy, powder blue and hostile. She used to be a Christian TV singer. "It's worse than I thought." Cf. Tammy Faye Baker.

Ch 4 Nick. 25 pretending to be a tree. Going to the store with the other Handmaid, Ofglen, not talking except in official platitudes. The encounter with the guards, swaying her hips to feel the little power she has, like a dogbone, passive but there. Does the power of sex and the awareness of others as sexual beings disappear, even in this society?

Ch. 5: Econowives and freedom from, re which Aunt Lydia switches Fromm's valuations. The shops, the pregnant Janine, tourists from Japan. What's this society remind you of? Saudi Arabia or Iran? Japan or China in the old days? Afghanistan under the Taliban was probably a more complete instantiation of these principles than any place that existed when the book was written. . . .

Ch 6: to the Wall with Ofglen, where they hang the bodies. Doctors with bags over their heads. Cf. the days of the killing fields in Cambodia, when to be educated or successful was doom?

Ch. 7: night, again, back to the past, "somewhere good," memories of Moira. In the park with her mother, burning porn magazines. End of chapter: about the telling of this: is it a story? who is she telling, not writing, it to? Bending the rules, breaking the fourth wall, metafiction, etc.

Ch 8: back at the wall, the new guys guilty of "gender treachery," meaning homosexuality. Ofglen says "May day," which will turn out to matter. Back with the women in the kitchen, who continue to treat her minimally at best. The commander in the hall: first glimpse of him.

Ch 9: Luke, and "nolite te bastardes carborundorum."

10: Moira, etc.

11: The doctor: he offers to "help" her get pregnant.

12: the bath, remembering the beach, remembering her daughter.

13: blank time, spare time: is it erotic when women spend it, for men? Testifying. In the apt. with Luke, running with their daughter, trying to escape.

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200238

Day 36 April 12, 2002

1. Names. Schedule for last days.

2. On with Atwood. Dystopian structures, according to Amy: Hero immersed in awful society becomes aware of resistance, gets involved, usually with speech by resistance leader. Endings: either rebellion is crushed, or it succeeds . . . hero dies, or doesn't. Even Star Wars fits this structure. Difference between standard hero myth and dystopia structure? Focus on social structure and issues, rather than heroic individual action?

What about Offred as character? She is plucky and likeable and admirable for hanging in there . . . but she's hardly a hero of the revolution, is she? She's really only marginally involved. She's an ordinary person, not Luke Skywalker. Her mother and Moira are more radical than she is. She's representative, not exceptional, hmm?

So what is it that makes people like this book so much? Her character? The way the society is envisioned and presented?

On satire and Swift--the epigraph, and "Modest Proposal." What about that analogy?

Scenes: waiting for the Commander, watching the news. 104 on the "Household." 106 watching the news, the paternalistic news anchor, his children. The language of "family" and "family values." What does it mean? Daddy's in charge? Are families democratic? Do we want a country run like a family? And what kind of family is this, anyway, obviously.

The Commander finally enters, 111. 113: to be a man watched by woman.

120: the Ceremony. How weird, hmm? Must be the least erotic three-way sex scene in literature. "One detaches oneself. One describes." Dissociation, often described in cases of rape and abuse. If this isn't precisely rape by the usual definition, it's not that far away, is it?

Afterward: butter, going out to steal something, Nick. 127 her urge to make love to him, "like shouting" or "shooting someone." Just for the release. Interlude following: where is Luke? She can only imagine.

Ch 19: to the birthing. 151: from each, to each, from Acts, they say, more satire for those of us in the know. Note that the pronouns have been changed.

143-4 ecology in crisis. 146 women in charge of birth, for what that's worth.

151 ff: movies at the Center, porno films or of Godless Unwomen. 154: Feminism. Offred's mother, her feminism.

More of the birthing: there is a women's culture, now.

Moira's escape, 166 ff, a "better story." Resistance, without violence beyond threat.

174: key passage, addressed outward: control and forgiveness. Only now do we actually see her with the commander, who summoned her 50 pages before. Crafty, hmm?

Going to play Scrabble with the Commander, and what they want: he wants her to kiss him, she wants to kill him, or at least she inserts that fantasy when she narrates the scene.

Ff.: meditation on all this, what she can get from it, context, the woman who's mistress of a Nazi prison-camp commander. "He was not a monster, to her." 188 How should she feel about him? This could turn into a love story, I suppose. Self-pity knows no bounds. We all feel like we deserve more than we've got. Don't we?

On forgiveness and the need sometimes to withhold it, not to succumb to it: that seems here to be a main issue for Offred, hmm? The temptation to see everyone as human, even while they're doing unspeakable things to people. Cf. the di brandt poem, on the back of your handout.

196; spring, flowers, shears, desire. The Wives as neo-Victorian, sick a lot, needing something to do. 198

The commander gets her hand lotion and magazines, and doesn't know that she has nowhere to keep them that they won't be found.

202 the double standard: the ruling class needn't obey their own rules. Cf. Jezebel's, where the commander takes her later.

The second ceremony, 206: things have changed, they're more aware of each other as persons; O. feels differently re Serena Joy, too. Hatred, jealousy, guilt, enjoyment of new power over her. And it all gives her something else to do, to think about. 210

Aunt Lydia's speech about women, 209: what about her? She's the feminist converted to the cause, she shows them porno movies to disgust them with how women were degraded by the old days. The stuff about PornoMarts and trucks and stuff.

217: breakthrough with Ofglen: she discovers there is an "us," an outside, a resistance. At once tho the scene where the Eyes carry somebody off.

Arguments with Moira, 221-3: about Luke, about living with men or without them. 224 ff: memory of the big change, the takeover. Bank accounts and jobs for women disappear all at once. 236: "Something had shifted, some balance. I felt shrunken. . . ."

238 ff: developing with the commander. The Latin phrase. And O. discovers her predecessor hanged herself. "You want my life to be bearable to me." 243. O. wants to know "what's going on."

249 ff: trying to get away, being betrayed. Then back to the gym: I'm just realizing now that she's an adult woman there, that most of them must be, not schoolgirls as they're treated. The prayers, 251. Talking to God, a moment of near-despair; cf. Celie's letters to God at the beginning of Color Purple?

A little more on networks and Mayday, with Ofglen; talk with Serena, 263 ff. Serena sets O. up with Nick, more or less.

272: the Commander: "There are things he wants to prove to me . . ." Sex was too easy, he says. He wants her opinion, he wants intimacy: "I can't give him that." But he knows what she thinks. "I feel buried."

Jacob Meets Rachel

29 Then Jacob went on his journey, and came to the land of the people of the east. ²As he looked, he saw a well in the field and three flocks of sheep lying there beside it; for out of that well the flocks were watered. The stone on the well's mouth was large, ³and when all the flocks were gathered there, the shepherds would roll the stone from the mouth of the well, and water the sheep, and put the stone back in its place on the mouth of the well.

⁴Jacob said to them, "My brothers, where do you come from?" They said, "We are from Haran." ⁵He said to them, "Do you know Laban son of Nahor?" They said, "We do." ⁶He said to them, "Is it well with him?" "Yes," they replied, "and here is his daughter Rachel, coming with the sheep." ⁷He said, "Look, it is still broad daylight; it is not time for the animals to be gathered together. Water the sheep, and go, pasture them." ⁸But they said, "We cannot until all the flocks are gathered together, and the stone is rolled from the mouth of the well; then we water the sheep."

⁹While he was still speaking with them, Rachel came with her father's sheep; for she kept them. ¹⁰Now when Jacob saw Rachel, the daughter of his mother's brother Laban, and the sheep of his mother's brother Laban, Jacob went up and rolled the stone from the well's mouth, and watered the flock of his mother's brother Laban. ¹¹Then Jacob kissed Rachel, and wept aloud. ¹²And Jacob told Rachel that he was her father's kinsman, and that he was Rebekah's son; and she ran and told her father.

¹³When Laban heard the news about his sister's son Jacob, he ran to meet him; he embraced him and kissed him, and brought him to his house. Jacob told Laban all these things, ¹⁴and Laban said to him, "Surely you are my bone and my flesh!" And he stayed with him a month.

Jacob Marries Laban's Daughters

¹⁵Then Laban said to Jacob, "Because you are my kinsman, should you therefore serve me for nothing? Tell me, what shall your wages be?" ¹⁶Now Laban had two daughters; the name of the elder was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel. ¹⁷Leah's eyes were lovely, and Rachel was graceful and beautiful. ¹⁸Jacob loved Rachel; so he said, "I will serve you seven years for your younger daughter Rachel." ¹⁹Laban said, "It is better that I give her to you than that I should give her to any other man; stay with me." ²⁰So Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her.

²¹Then Jacob said to Laban, "Give me my wife that I may go in to her, for my time is completed." ²²So Laban gathered together all the people of the place, and made a feast. ²³But in the evening he took his daughter Leah and brought her to Jacob; and he went in to her. ²⁴(Laban gave his maid Zilpah to his daughter Leah to be her maid.) ²⁵When morning came, it was Leah! And Jacob said to Laban, "What is this you have done to me? Did I not serve with you for Rachel? Why then have you deceived me?" ²⁶Laban said, "This is not done in our country-giving the younger before the firstborn. ²⁷Complete the week of this one, and we will give you the other also in return for serving me another seven years." ²⁸Jacob did so, and completed her week; then Laban gave him his daughter Rachel as a wife. ²⁹(Laban gave his maid Bilhah to his daughter Rachel to be her maid.) ³⁰So Jacob went in to Rachel also, and he loved Rachel more than Leah. He served Laban for another seven years.

³¹When the Lord saw that Leah was unloved, he opened her womb; but Rachel was barren. ³²Leah conceived and bore a son, and she named him Reuben; for she said, "Because the Lord has looked on my affliction; surely now my husband will love me." ³³She conceived again and bore a son, and said, "Because the Lord has heard that I am hated, he has given me this son also"; and she named him Simeon. ³⁴Again she conceived and bore a son, and said, "Now this time my husband will be joined to me, because I have borne him three sons"; therefore he was named Levi. ³⁵She conceived again and bore a son, and said, "This time I will praise the Lord"; therefore she named him Judah; then she ceased bearing.

30 When Rachel saw that she bore Jacob no children, she envied her sister; and she said to Jacob, "Give me children, or I shall die!" ²Jacob became very angry with Rachel and said, "Am I in the place of God, who has withheld from you the fruit of the womb?" ³Then she said, "Here is my maid Bilhah; go in to her, that she may bear upon my knees and that I too may have children through her." ⁴So she gave him her maid Bilhah as a wife; and Jacob went in to her. ⁵And Bilhah conceived and bore Jacob a son. ⁶Then Rachel said, "God has judged me, and has also heard my voice and given me a son"; therefore she named him Dan. ⁷Rachel's maid Bilhah conceived again and bore Jacob a second son. ⁸Then Rachel said, "With mighty wrestlings I have wrestled with my sister, and have prevailed"; so she named him Naphtali.

⁹When Leah saw that she had ceased bearing children, she took her maid Zilpah and gave her to Jacob as a wife. ¹⁰Then Leah's maid Zilpah bore Jacob a son. ¹¹And Leah said, "Good fortune!" so she named him Gad. ¹²Leah's maid Zilpah bore Jacob a second son. ¹³And Leah said, "Happy am I! For the women will call me happy"; so she named him Asher.

¹⁴In the days of wheat harvest Reuben went and found mandrakes in the field, and brought them to his mother Leah. Then Rachel said to Leah, "Please give me some of your son's mandrakes." ¹⁵But she said to her, "Is it a small matter that you have taken away my husband? Would you take away my son's mandrakes also?" Rachel said, "Then he may lie with you tonight for your son's mandrakes." ¹⁶When Jacob came from the field in the evening, Leah went out to meet him, and said, "You must come in to me; for I have hired you with my son's mandrakes." So he lay with her that night. ¹⁷And God heeded Leah, and she conceived and bore Jacob a fifth son. ¹⁸Leah said, "God has given me my hire because I gave my maid to my husband"; so she named him Issachar. ¹⁹And Leah conceived again, and she bore Jacob a sixth son. ²⁰Then Leah said, "God has endowed me with a good dowry; now my husband will honor me, because I have borne him six sons"; so she named him Zebulun. ²¹Afterwards she bore a daughter, and named her Dinah.

²²Then God remembered Rachel, and God heeded her and opened her womb. ²³She conceived and bore a son, and said, "God has taken away my reproach"; ²⁴and she named him Joseph, saying, "May the Lord add to me another son!"

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200239

Day 37 April 15, 2002

1. Names. Poems for last two days, schedule if you missed Friday.

2. Last day on Handmaid's Tale.

Stuff from journals:

Leslie: what does happen at the end? Who turns Offred in? Is Nick really on her side? It doesn't seen to be Serena Joy or the Commander. Is it just the resistance coming to rescue her? That's what Nick seems to suggest. I think really that we're not meant to be sure.

Chad: "The last few chapters had me on the verge of combustion. I could not read fast enough to satisfy the growing thirst for answers. . . . at a loss for words to describe exactly why I enjoyed this book so much."

Erin: "I don't know exactly why I like the story . . ."

Justyna: "I don't really always like to talk about books that I liked . . . After all most texts are written to talk for themselves. . . . Atwood's language sometimes really makes me wonder. . . . it's all so dense it seems almost too much for a novel, not to mention a chapter."

Consider types of information and focus. We learn a lot about some kinds of things, from which others can be inferred.

Leah: "Some parts [of the historical notes] were quite funny." What? The Nunavit or whatever they are doing anthropological study of quaint, bizarre, failed white cultures?

Alaina "And so it goes." and, more substantially, the time questions: reading this book about a future, and people in her far future talking dispassionately and nonchalantly about her terrible fate.

Sarah: "The last line of The Handmaid's Tale is, "Are there any questions?" The novel refuses to reveal the questions, much less their answers. Therefore, the novel is an unfinished story again. Perhaps, the ambiguous ending symbolizes the incomplete project of establishing equality between men and women."

"I believe that the Handmaid's Tale is a cautionary tale. It details the methods through which power is abused, and these methods are not exactly unfamiliar. The most nightmarish aspect to The Handmaid's Tale is that Gilead is marked with traces of our own history and culture."

Eric: "I wonder what the text as a whole is saying about organized religion." The text "appears to be making some great, powerful statement . . . that I can't put my finger on." What do we think?

272-74 with the Commander. He wants to know what she thinks. He wants her to say it's all right, when really (maybe?) he knows what a mess it is. "We thought we could do better." "Better never means better for everyone."

Do you have any sympathy for him? Do you think we're supposed to? I don't. Especially after the outing to Jezebel's, which reveals the essential hypocrisy of the ruling class, along with their lack of imagination and taste. At least they could see to it that the women had something attractive to wear. 308: "Nature demands variety, for men. It's part of the procreational strategy." Lest we forget, this from an elite member of a religious autocracy allegedly based on principles that supercede mere "nature," and one that refuses to take any account of what "nature" might demand for women. All the ex-professional women now reduced to badly dressed whores.

276: "God is a National Resource" and the Prayvaganza. Janine, again. In the Red Center, going crazy and back out.

The Commander's justification for his side, 283 ff: what about all this? "All we've done is return things to Nature's norm." All this in the context of the group wedding, submission, etc. 286 the stuff from Paul, "all subjection," etc. Vs. love, which is (strangely?) Offred's only response to what the men of Gilead have left out. What about independence, autonomy, the right to choose, the right to speak?

*The visit to the "club," "Jezebel's," with the Commander. Women on display, incl. Offred, the flaunting of the rules, the idea that the elite needn't confine themselves within the system they've created. And the Commander takes Offred up to a room . . . what does he really want from her? Love? Passion? Some sort of response? If so, to what? His power, his position? Him as a person? He looks more and more pathetic as the book goes on, doesn't he? Fake it, she tells herself.

*Meeting Moira again, and her story--the Underground Femaleroad. She says her life isn't so bad, comparably . . . Offred's shaken by Moira's seeming complacency, her tolerating what she's got. 324: "I don't want her to be like me."

*Nick, and her affair with him: what about that? The chance to be a physical woman again? To take chances, fear as powerful stimulant? To have some part of her life that's not controlled and prescribed? Is it love they have? How does she feel about it? Guilty about Luke, yet not enough to stop? How are we meant to feel about her? Her wish to be free of shame, to be ignorant, 340. 349: "I have made a life for myself, here, of a sort." And she finds herself wanting to keep it, little as it is . . . She's not, fundamentally, "Heroic," capital H, is she? She doesn't want to help Ofglen's group, to find things out. Why not, do you think? What's Atwood's aim with her?

*The Salvaging and the Particicution: rituals of release and involvement, scapegoats. Janine afterward, 361. Things getting out of control, Ofglen hangs herself, Offred is rescued it seems by Nick.

*The afterword: what happens there? What do we learn? The "scholarly" treatment? Comfort and easy jokes? Contrast with Offred's terribly pinched life? About the Aunts, about Rumania, sociobiology and "natural" polygamy.

*The last paragraphs: Offred returns to obscurity, we don't know the end of her story; there may be a happily ever after but there may not.

*Overall, what do we have here? A cautionary tale? "If this goes on . . ." Seems to warn against too lax and permissive a society, as being ripe for a repressive backlash . . . is some of that happening now?

*Who gains in this society, really? Any of the women? Any but a few of the men? Nobody wants to live within the alleged order, certainly not the Commanders. The problem of imposing an order on people "for their own good": you may be able to do it, for a while, but eventually such orders tend to collapse under the weight of their own contradictions and the burden of maintaining them.

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200240

Day 38 April 17, 2002

1. Names. Papers due Monday, as you recall . . . no class Friday, so you'll have a free day to procrastinate writing your paper, which I imagine most of you will do late Sunday night or Monday morning. It's all good.

2. The poems for today. Let's try just reading for a bit, at least one of Patchen's and the other four. Read around by stanzas, or so, and try to put some vigor into it. Then we'll have some discussion, perhaps on and around this question:

What might it mean to be "heroic" as a poet, and to be humble? As a reader?

Patchen is surely a romantic, yes? Love, solidarity, the poor and the outsiders. "Genius is an enormous littleness." (340). Heroism in the search for language, bridging love and the world, action and meditation, the silent world and human language. What is that business with the broken windows of heaven, 341?

Stafford: what is the deal with this animal? Draining sound from the world, analagous to winter in a way, but worse, yes? And the cricket--heroic in its action, making the critical little sound which allows all else to resume, but humble in its very cricket-ness, a mere bug as Justyna says? This has a folk-tale sort of feel, so what's the moral, what's the symbolism? The cricket as poet, restoring the world to life and meaning when it's frozen by consumers and exploiters?

Brooks: what's the tone here? "trouble with a gold-flecked beautiful banner." "Nobody is furious . . . however, it should occur to us / How much more fortunate they are than we are." The poet's work? Registering this reality accurately? Resisting the urge to sermonize, exaggerate, overdramatize? I'd suggest there's a beautiful humility in the balance of the last stanza, the distinctions it makes, that small last recognition: inequity affects relationships among the poor, the rich are insulated from it all. I don't know what part of Chicago she's describing here, but I've been to Lake Forest . . .

Ferlinghetti: not a complicated poem, exactly, is it? The social criticism of the first stanzas, the commercialization of Christmas and Christianity in general; it's accurate and witty and net especially unusual. What I like most is that last stanza--the idea of an "Immaculate Reconception," another crazy Second Coming--which might be both a heroic and a humble gesture, something away from social exploitations of Jesus, back toward the "bare tree," which is also of course a very Anabaptist gesture.

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200241

Day 39 April 22, 2002

1. Names. Collect papers. For Wed., only asst. is to pick one favorite passage, be prepared to read it and explain why you chose it.

2. Poems for today: start by turning back to "The Bear" and talking about it. Sorry for those of you troubled by the dead animals in these poems . . . I suppose (as F. O'Connor said) that sometimes extremity provides a clearer view of crucial issues.

And Kinnell and "The Bear." Eric on the humility of this sort of hunt, without weapons or equipment or food, relying on bloody bear dung for food. And the dream-vision fusion of hunter and bear at the end. At the end, unexpectedly, the word "poetry" enters--what's with that? Poetry is the sharp piece of bone that pokes a hole in your stomach? The bloody turd that you eat because that's all there is to eat while you're hunting the bear?

Cf. Faulkner's bear for hunting mythology, hmm? What else? Another version of the hero's quest, the arduous journey to bring back something the community can use?

Let's read these for today as well.

Kelly, "Song": is this a female, skeptical version of the male myth that killing something is the way to become a man? The girl, innocent and protected. The song, a kind of revenge? The goat's head singing: "death is the mother of beauty," Whitman on the dead bird singing for its mate. The voice of those who have been wronged, who speak from death and for death. ?

What about "they"? And what about the phrase "silly sacrifice"? The boys, in a pack, stupid and violent, underestimating how much work it would be and how long the song would stay with them after they think it's `finished.' And the insistence on "sweetness," of which the heart dies. The sweetest songs are the saddest, aren't they? Is there a truly great poem anywhere that isn't sad?

Chad's surely onto something with the connection to Poe and those stories about animals and bodies walled up in the house but speaking/beating just the same.

Merwin, "The Last One": what about voice and narrative here? Who speaks? Some voice outside the human, it seems. And how do we take this? As a kind of ecological parable? Another cautionary tale? We could read "Song" that way too, couldn't we, come to think of it? Warnings about heedless action, about confusing activity with heroism, and most of all about what happens when we lack the humility that makes us consider long consequences?

Oliver, "The Journey": this poem has come up several times lately in other contexts. It seems a specifically female version of the hero's quest, focused on the need to put aside the idea of saving anybody else's life. Yes? There's an Adrienne Rich poem with the lines "Save yourself / others you cannot save." This runs against all our societal wisdom about women, especially, and the goodness of sacrificial love. Yes? It is disquieting . . . lonely, too. If I was making gender generalizations I'd say that women need to learn not to sacrifice for others, men need to learn to sacrifice for others. Hmm?

"Gabriel": an angel, a male muse in a ruined country, the effort to find language when the context seems almost impossible.

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200242

Day 40 April 24, 2002

1. Names. Distribute final, discuss briefly. I updated the web page class notes; they load fairly quickly through the campus network, but would probably be really slow from outside. It's a large large file . . .108 pages of text.

2. Your passages, and why. Talk about them.

3. My final words: what would I choose?

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

Walt Whitman, Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass

Why this? Because it balances heroism and humility so beautiful, because it's so eloquent and lovely in its language, because it all rings true to me as the way I think I ought to live, because I know I don't manage to do it.