Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock tells the story of the downfall of the Boyle family (Jack the father, Juno the mother, Mary the Daughter, and Johnny the son) from relative poverty into destitute conditions. They live in a tenement in Dublin and are working class through and through. Near the beginning of the play, it seems as if good fortune will finally smile upon the Boyle family, as they receive news that a rich uncle has passed away and intends to leave them a sizable sum.
It turns out bad for the family as they are swindled by Bentham, a young lawyer from London, who has, in the words of Captain Jack Boyle done to us the same as he's done to Mary. He had "screwed" the family financially and Mary literally, as he has absconded leaving Mary pregnant and unmarried.
Some interesting parallels to a Doll's House, which Mary is reading at one point in the play: a woman leaving her husband is the finale of both dramas, and the idea that this is pretty radical given the time and the social conditions is evident. Perhaps, as Juno claims "two mothers'll be better than one"... tough from very different social classes, both stories present powerful argument for suffrage.
Mary's character is interested in improving herself, but she has been born into unfortunate circumstances. Page 5 stage direction states that there are "two forces working in her... one, through circumstances of her life... the other, through books..."
Captain Boyle is antagonistic toward her reading and sees it as putting on airs. At one point he even indirectly blames Mary's reading and new ideas as leading to her pregnancy. "What did the likes of her born in a tenement house, want with readin?"
There is an interesting attitude toward religion in the play, as the clergy certainly has power, but religion and god seems to be rendered impotent "agen the stupidity of men". Bentham presents himself as a theosophist and then proceeds to swindle the family. It could be a symbolic indictment of the church in Ireland. Another interesting line comes from the mother of Tancred during her son's funeral procession: "O blessed Virgin where were you when me darlin' son was riddled with bullets?"
The lines spoken by Joxer near the end of the play seem so important thematically: "The whole worlds in a terrible state of chaos." This seems a very modern idea, reminiscent of Eliot's "unreal city" and Yeats' widening gyre of history coming apart. This modern idea of history coming apart, is not a totally hopeless state in the hands of a writer with a truly modernist bent. That, I think, explains the feeling of hopefulness one may feel at the end of Juno or a Doll's house. The modernists see the end as the beginning. Things have to be wiped out before they can begin again, anew. Similar to Giambista Vico's theory of history, which Joyce drew on to write Fennigan's Wake, Juno constructs a world that needs to be torn down-- a world that by being torn down opens the door for new possibilities.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Monday, November 15, 2010
A Day with Leopold
A Day with Leopold
a play list loosely tied to James Joyce’s Ulysses
“This song is first associated (in the Wandering Rocks episode of Ulysses) with Blazes Boylan, who steps to the catchy refrain as he marches down the street. We hear the song later played on the pianola in Bella Cohen's brothel during the Circe episode, where it is linked with Privates Carr and Compton, two British soldiers who eventually get into an altercation with an inebriated Stephen Dedalus.
The song features two young men discussing their girls; in the course of the conversation they find out that the respective girls share similar characteristics. Inevitably it turns out they are both talking of the same girl; and to make matters worse, the lads — who have decided to pay her a visit — are greeted at the door by her husband, who chases them off with his own rendition of the chorus of the song.
Obviously the song furthers the Odyssean theme of a universal temptress, suitors, and a husband who reclaims his right to her. In this way it is a direct parallel to the main dilemma of Ulysses.”
[from CD liner notes, contributed by Prof. Zack Bowen]
2) I know I’m losing you—This is a recording by Rod Stewart from the 1971 album Every Picture Tells a Story. Stewart was born and raised in North London. The song was a 1966 #1 hit single by The Temptations, on Motown records. Thematically, I connected this song to Leopold’s likely feeling that his wife having slowly slipped away from him.
3) Leopold’s Morning—this is a homemade piece, with sound recording from pages 59-60 of Ulysses, and my addition of music using Apple Garageband software. I like this passage as it sets up so much of Leopold’s and Molly’s and Millie’s and Boylan’s relationship, and all in a stream of Leopold’s thoughts as he goes through his morning routine.
4) The Letter—The song was a number one hit for the Memphis group, the Boxtops in 1967. This is a live recording by Joe Cocker of Sheffield, England with his band Mad Dogs and Englishmen. The song appeared in the film and on the live Album Mad Dongs and Englishmen (1969-1971). Letters figure prominently into Leopold’s Morning (one from Millie and one from Boylan). Also, the theme of this song is desperately trying to get home to someone you love, which connects both to Leopold and to Homer’s Odysseus.
“This is a song Bloom buys for his daughter Milly when she is taking piano lessons. Known in English as "The Flower Song," it is tied to Bloom's pen name, Henry Flower, which he uses in his clandestine correspondence with Martha Clifford. It is one of a number of flower references throughout Ulysses.”
[from CD liner notes, contributed by Prof. Zack Bowen]
6) The Rocky Road to Dublin—this is a recording of the traditional Irish ‘slip-jig’ performed by The Chieftains and The Rolling Stones. “The song is partially recited several times by Mr. Deasy in James Joyce's Ulysses. The words were written by D.K. Gavan, "The Galway Poet", for the English music hall performer Harry Clifton (1824-1872), who popularized the song.”
Wikipedia
“This cheerful ditty is perhaps the most frequently mentioned song in Ulysses. Milly's morning letter to Bloom erroneously refers to the song as having been written by Blazes Boylan, and Bloom associates the song with Boylan throughout much of the rest of the book. It becomes the motif of the universal temptress figures leading all men to their eventual destruction. Most of the subsequent references to the song in Ulysses are made by Bloom, who of course is never far from female temptation.”
[from CD liner notes, contributed by Prof. Zack Bowen]
8) Tales of Brave Ulysses—This is a song recorded by the group Cream. The explanation from Wikepedia makes clear the song’s thematic connection to Ulysses. “The lyrics are inspired by Homer's Odyssey, an account of the adventures undertaken by Ulysses. This can be seen in the song's reference to "naked ears ... tortured by the sirens sweetly singing," an event from Homer's epic. When interviewed on the episode of the VH1 show, Classic Albums, which featured Disraeli Gears, lyricist Martin Sharp explained that he had recently returned from Ibiza, which was the source of many of the images in the song (e.g. "tiny purple fishes run laughing through her fingers") and the general feeling of having left an idyll to return to "the hard lands of the winter"; Clapton stated in the same show that he had been independently writing a tune based on the Loving Spoonful's "Summer in the City", and when Sharp gave him the words (on the back of a bar napkin) they fit the tune.” [1](Wikipedia)
9) Finnegan’s Wake—No allusions to Ulysses here, but to Joyce’s last work. Probably no need to explain this choice!
10) Stranger in a Strange Land—The title of this song and its mood connects to how Leopold might be feeling as he wanders Dublin all day, possibly feeling, if not homeless, at least dispossessed of his home for the time being. Incidentally, Leon Russell, who recorded this song as part of his 1971 Album Shelter the People, was a part of Joe Cocker’s Mad Dog’s and Englishmen album and tour, so we have some intertextuality within this compilation!. Also, a bit of trivia is that this song contains one of the first uses by a popular musician of the Moog Synthesizer, which later became very common in pop and rock music.
“One of the major musical themes running through Ulysses, this song gathers many large issues — Ireland's tortured political history, Roman Catholicism, divided loyalty, betrayal, and Christ-like self-sacrifice — into one bundle, ripe for Joyce's elaboration. The song dates to the rebellion of 1798; like their hoped-for French allies, the most ardent Irish revolutionaries wore their hair short (i.e., cropped ) in emulation of the virtuous republican Romans. Stephen Dedalus shares a similarity with the song's protagonist by failing to pray for his mother, even on her deathbed: this thought will come back to haunt him, literally, at the climax of the Circe chapter.”
[from CD liner notes, contributed by Kevin McDermott]
12) Satisfaction—This is from the Band Devo, and it just seemed to fit thematically with how Leopold might be feeling by the end of his day. The name of the Band, interestingly, is based on the concept of “Devolution”—the idea that humans are actually devolving rather than evolving.
13) Dublin—I think this is just a beautiful, moody song that happens to be set in Dublin home of the band featured here—Thin Lizzy.
14) Struggling Man—Jimmy Cliff is not normally associated with Ireland, but with Jamaica—another Island nation with a somewhat turbulent history. I certainly see Leopold Bloom, much like all moderns perhaps, as a Struggling Man.
“This is one of the most frequently referred to and significant musical allusions throughout Ulysses. Molly Bloom will be singing this song on her concert tour with Blazes Boylan and, indeed, the afternoon liaison between her and Blazes is ostensibly for the purpose of rehearsing the music for that concert, including this song. Bloom learns that the song will be included in the concert tour early in the morning, and it serves throughout his day and the novel Ulysses both as a leitmotif of Molly's adultery and as the theme song of her potential reconciliation with Bloom.
” [from CD liner notes, contributed by Prof. Zack Bowen]
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Mrs. Dalloway
I read Mrs. Dalloway some time ago, and didn't take particularly good notes. I need to try here to summarize some very basic ideas I have about the book:
This is a modern novel, one that breaks with tradition in rendering its vision of the life of a small group of people. Like many great modern works, it is stylistically, and perhaps thematically linked to classic of western literature. Again, as with Joyce, Pound, Eliot, the famous dictum "make it new" does not mean a complete destruction of the past, but rather a reworking of classical elements in order that the tradition may continue. The dramatic structure of one 'day in the life' is much in line with Aristotle's pronouncement in his Poetics that drama take place within a 'reasonable time frame'. This is reminiscent of Joyce's one day in the life of Leopold Bloom, in Ulysses. Other things, such as the stream of consciousness style, identify this work as a modernist piece of fiction, as well as the non-linear narrative (with flash-forwards and flash-backs). Thematically many part of the story also seem distinctly modernist: the focus on time's passing, the obsessions of the characters with the past and confusion about their places in the world, or if not confusion, at least thoughtfulness.
This is a modern novel, one that breaks with tradition in rendering its vision of the life of a small group of people. Like many great modern works, it is stylistically, and perhaps thematically linked to classic of western literature. Again, as with Joyce, Pound, Eliot, the famous dictum "make it new" does not mean a complete destruction of the past, but rather a reworking of classical elements in order that the tradition may continue. The dramatic structure of one 'day in the life' is much in line with Aristotle's pronouncement in his Poetics that drama take place within a 'reasonable time frame'. This is reminiscent of Joyce's one day in the life of Leopold Bloom, in Ulysses. Other things, such as the stream of consciousness style, identify this work as a modernist piece of fiction, as well as the non-linear narrative (with flash-forwards and flash-backs). Thematically many part of the story also seem distinctly modernist: the focus on time's passing, the obsessions of the characters with the past and confusion about their places in the world, or if not confusion, at least thoughtfulness.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
A few Rounds with Wallace Stevens
And in this corner, the heavyweight champion of the world (in poetry, in the 20th century, in English)... okay some qualifiers, but honestly Wallace Stevens (in Hemmingwayesque parlance) is not a poet you'd want to go a few poetic rounds with... actually, interestingly I heard a story of Hemmingway and Stevens actually getting into a fist fight in Key West (supposedly Stevens broke his hand on Papa's jaw).
Some notes from The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens
:(P. 1-- para 1) "... they see Stevens as a major poet because he addresses major themes: the relationship between the world and the mind, the beauty of planet earth as an end in itself, poetry (or art in general) as an affirmation of life, the problem of belief in a secular age, the need for creating a sense of nobility in a crass and violent world."
(P. 3-- para 2) "If there is a common thread throughout his work, it is that reality and our responses to it are in constant flux. We must learn to live with multiple perspectives... be at home with multiple truths... and accept uncertainty, contradiction, even chaos, as central to existence..."
(P. 4-- para 2) "More than other poets, Stevens pointedly declares that everything we believe is a fiction, that reality is an invention of the mind..."
(P. 6-- para 1) "... he creates new linguistic structures that attain integrity... valorizes perception over conception, moments of genuineness and authenticity that, in a world of constant change, lie beyond, or, one might say, above, reason."
(P. 11-- para 2) "He had come, like his father, to leave behind orthodox belief and observance. But, like William James, he realized the value of preserving some variety of religious experience in expressing what he came to consider the "divine"".
(P. 24-- para 4-5) "... "the poetry of the subject" the specific and precise details of which a poem consists, and the "true subject", which is what the poem expresses... Stevens' "true subject" is the relation of reality and the imagination..."
(P. 27-- para 1) "... the explicit purpose of many (all?) of his poems is to re-create and embody the presence of another person, "an interior paramour."
(P. 29-- para 2) (Regarding Sunday Morning) "Present pleasure set against ancient sacrifice is one of the several antitheses upon which the poem is built: life versus death, change versus stasis, the actual world versus an imaginary one." (and para 3) "She wants a religion of the earth, not of the supernatural..."
(P. 31-- para 1) "Considering different perspectives is fundamental to Stevens' way of thinking about the world."
(P. 32-- para 1) "Sunday Morning is a poem set in the present about the relations of the poet with himself and concerned with discarding the past in order to enter more fully into the present. Eliot, Pound, an Crane need both a mythic and a historical past. Stevens wants the present."
(P. 34-- para 2) (Regarding Tea at the Palaz of Hoon) "Stevens believes that there is a real world, but that we perceive it imperfectly" (Para 3)... If the relation between the individual and the world is uncertain, then any definition of the self is problematic."
Chapter 3 (pgs. 37-47)... about Stevens' long hiatus after Harmonium was published and his perceived conservative politics during 1930s (Man With Blue Guitar) figures prominently into this essay...
(P. 49-- para 2) "A high toned old Christian woman dramatizes the central insight in George Santayana's Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900)... poetry and religion are both human fabrications, designed to express and at least partly satisfy our longing for the ideal... poetry must step forward to provide us with a new mythology..."
Chapter 4 (pgs 48-61) explores the "supreme fiction"-- Stevens' ideas about poetry in some ways taking the place of God/ coming from the same source/ and fulfilling a vital human need...
Chapter 8 (pgs. 103-117) discusses Stevens' less obvious relationship to philosophy-- he was not an historical name dropper as were other great modern poets-- Pound, Eliot...
(P. 109-- para 3) "Much of Stevens' work is epistemological in inspiration... how can we know the external world around us..."
Chapter 9 (pgs. 118-132) Reflects on Stevens' and the importance of the seasons... makes the case for Stevens as a great pastoral modernist poet...
(P. 120-- para 2) "The poems of autumn are always of departure, dislocation, and a enveloping destitution."
(P. 122-- para 2) "The poems of winter are like those of autumn, except pushed further, and in some cases, to an extreme. "... what would it be like to be one with the earth in an absolute sense, to erase altogether the Cartesian rupture?"
(P/ 124-- para 3) "Spring-- the ensuing season offers a different delight. It signals the beginning of subjectivity reemerging... it is possible to discover a meaning in nothingness..."
(P. 127-- para 3) "Summer- the imagination's happiest and most requiting pairings with the world... find celebration in the fullness of summer..."
(P. 132-- para 1) "His 'grand poem', in which he found both frustration and placation, was also his personal refuge and self-appointed cure."
(P. 193-- para 1) "The major poetic idea in the world is and always has been the idea of God."
(P. 193-- para 2) "I am not an atheist although I do not believe today in the same god in whom I believed as a boy."
Yeats (The Collected Poems/ Cullingford on Yeat's Love Poetry)
I will try to blog here in a way that separates Yeats' work into three rough periods (early, middle, and late). I will attempt to describe each period, provide examples of poems from each period, and explain some of the thematic and stylistic variation from period to period.
NOTES FROM COLLECTED POEMS
Yeats' early work...
* Song of the Happy Shepherd
Seems like an example of a london influenced somewhat self-consciously romantic poem. This is from Yeats early period.
* The Stolen Child (the theme of escape)
Interesting repetition of italicized verse. This is also an early work, and makes use of Irish Mythological content (the Faeries)
* The Lake Isle of Innisfree
Also, romantic, but a romanticism of solitutde and nature-- where poet may find peace. Yeats shows his love for County Sligo. A refreshing image that may be carried back into the grey of urban Dublin.
* When you are old
Beautiful poem written to a beautiful woman (Maude Gonne) who the speaker loved, more for who she was then simply for her physical beauty...
* Who Goes With Fergus
Joyce used this at quite a few points in Ulysses... "Who will follow King Fergus to know the wisdom of nature and have the cares of the world (possibly exhorting his generation to leave off with Ireland's political struggles and look to a deeper mythical past... There is a deeper mystical meaning, a unity, within the natural world...
* The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland
Inspired image from his time in Sligo/ Yeats as in (Fergus) encouraged young Irish to return to nature... druids felt all natural things control the divine...
* The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner
Nice poem of old age/ how women don' look at him anymore, but he has the women from his past stored in memory... he 'spits in the face of time'... Perhaps having these memories is worse, or perhaps not... maybe it really does comfort him...
* To Ireland in the Coming Times
Yeats defends his poems as patriotic, in the sense that they benefit Ireland... he implores us to remember to reflect on eternal things.
* Aedh Thinks of Those Who Have Spoken Ill and Aedh Wished for the Clothes of Heaven
Aedh is one of Yeats' three archetypal/ mythological characters. Aedh is the most romantic of the three.
* No Second Troy
A poem comparing Maude Gonne to Helen of Troy... she in her nature has spurned the speaker... may lead men and be responsible for revolution...
* September 1913
Yeats criticizes employers who locked out workers in general strike... also criticizes rampant mercenary materialism. Also celebrates Irish heroes such as John O'Leary...
* AN Irish Airman Forsees His Death
Seems the story of a poor Irish soldier dying for the British Empire... probably based on Yeats' friend's death (Major Robert Gregory)-- the only child of Yeat's patron Lady Augusta Gregory (co-founder of Abbey Theatre)...
* Easer 1916
About Yeats confused feelings about Easter 1916 uprising, in which many IRA members were executed for treason..."A terrible beauty is born"/ beauty of martyrdom?
* The Second Coming
Yeat's uses Christian imagery of the apocalypse to describe conditions in post World War I Europe... I often have an image of Hitler/ Mussolini/ and fascism emerging out of world war I... something slouching toward Bethlehem...
* A Prayer for My Daughter
During a storm the speaker imagines his infant daughter's life/ and wishes for peace and happiness for her...
* Mohini Chatterjee
Seems to be a poem in which the Brahmin tries to calm someone and worries about life with talk of reincarnation and the endless circle of samsara...
Opening quote from Virginia Woolf sets tone of book:
"All human relations have shifter-- those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature. Let us agree to place one of those changes abut the year 1910." (from Mr. and Mrs. Bennett)
Chapter one: (pgs. 11-24) discusses ho Yeat's deviates from stereotypical/ canonical male love poet.
Chapter two: (pgs. 25-42)
Chapter three (pgs. 43-54) deals with the concept of 'liebstod' which conflates sex with death...
Chapter four (pgs. 55-72) primarily offers Yeat's view of Ireland as represented in the image of the beloved/ woman and country are symbolically linked.
Chapter five (pgs. 73-101) discusses suffrage movement during Yeats' time and his association with Maude Gonne and the love poems about her...
Chapter six (pgs. 102-120) provides much discussion of Yeats's sex life-- particularly his wife George's disappointment with Yeats...
Chapter seven (pgs. 121-139) This chapter brings together images of love and patriotism-- especially in Easter 1916...
Chapter eight (pgs. 140-164) Much focus in this chapter on Leda and the Swan, and sexuality in Ireland being repressed by previously agrarian culture and the clergy...
Chapter nine (pgs. 165-184) A very interesting portrayal of the Crazy Jane poems as "attempt to construct the erotic as a site of popular resistance", which culminated in "Crazy Jane's defiance of the Irish Episcopate..."
Chapter fourteen (pgs. 261-287) Yeats become randy in his final years...
Eliot (More from BC Southam & The Cambridge Companion)
I am purely a product of a postmodern age, and so at times when I try to think of either classical rhetoric (Aristotle, Plato, Quintillian, Cicero), or even the more recent Modernist writers (in this case Eliot), my mind dredges up unlikely, useless (or so it seem to me) references. Every time I pick up my Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot, I keep hearing that little wrinkly ant-like creature, saying "Eliot...Eliot...". No good can come, I fear, from connecting an 80s movie to a 20s poet. Except for the fact that these connections simply help me remember.
So where were we? Ah yes, T.S. Eliot. He was famous, in fact for his own borrowings; his own stealings; his own quotations drawn from so many varied sources, throughout literary history. A quick look at Eliot's Annotated Wasteland reveals the following references in the first 60 of 430 lines: Grail Legend: From Ritual to Romance, The Golden Bough, Ezekiel, Ecclesiastes, Tristan and Isolde, The Fisher King, and Baudelaire. So my own mind ranging over its catalog of mediocre films, bad television, strip malls, bible school, and comic books comes up with a reference to E.T. This is what, at base, I had bestowed upon me in my youth. The important thing to remember from my own little mnemonic story is that Eliot, as modernists often do, borrows from the sacred western tradition-- not to slight or destroy it. His borrowing and allusions are not of the iconoclastic variety, but are, in the words of Ezra Pound, attempting to "make it new." I don't see Eliot as hoping to do anything but bring a renewed vigor to, in his estimation, a worn and outdated literary tradition.
FROM A CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO T.S. ELIOT
An interesting part of the Cambridge Companion to Eliot is the connection drawn between Eliot and Yeats:
(P. 5-- para 2) "So very present was yeats to Eliot...we find echoes...of such late Yeats poems as "A Prayer for Old Age," "An Acre of Grass," and "What Then..."
(P.8-- para 1) "The shift from the plural "emotions" of life to the singular "emotion in the writing" is altogether relevant, implying the transformation of multiple disordered emotions into the ordered and significant emotion of the poem."
(P. 10-- para 2) "Shakespeare too was occupied with the struggle which alone constitutes life for a poet-- to transmute personal and private agonies into something rich, and strange, something universal and impersonal."
(P. 11-- para 1) "What Eliot implies with the commencement of the Waste Land is that as Chaucer was the first great individual talent in the English tradition, so, as of 1922, the poet of this poem is the last, the most recent individual talent in the same line."
(P. 19-- para 3) ""Eliot's earliest poems quietly register the American tendency to associate culture with what is foreign..."
(P. 20-- para 2) "... nearly every poet and writer of his generation left for Europe, in search of living art..."
(P. 20-21) "... St. Louis Heritage connected Eliot's work to the then current popular phenomenon-- ragtime music..."
((P. 26-- para 2) "Rev. Eliot's last book [was an abolitionist book] The Story of Archer Alexander From Slavery to Freedom..." (this author was Eliot's grandfather).
(P. 27-- para 20 "His poems borrowed a measure of the humor, rhythm, and musical expression of Afro-American culture, while also acknowledging its peculiar burden of morality and history-- distinct from, yet related to, Eliot's own."
(P. 31-- para 2) "Eliot pursued philosophical questions throughout his career..."
(Pgs. 37-39) Eliot was deeply influenced by his friendship with Bertrand Russell-- particularly Eliot's ideas of literary criticism as objective/ impersonal logical analysis... without emotion or relationship to the author...
(Pgs. 41-43) Eliot mirrors in his criticism much of Wittgenstein (i.e. language's dependence on social use... valid interpretations of texts may thus change over time...
(P. 44-- para 2) "Eliot's later philosophy thus abandoned the objectivist scientism of his early critical theory for a hermeneutic historicism which emphasized the contextual limits and pragmatic functions of world human knowledge (as distinguished from the absolutes of faith).
(P. 44-- para 3) "The kind of pragmatism Eliot most wanted to revive for modern life was not the philosophy of Peirce, James, and Dewey but the classical idea of practical wisdom... elaborated by Aristotle-- phronesis..."
(P. 46-- para 1) "It is practical wisdom which involves the development of character and the education and discipline of the emotions. Eliot thought...such emotional discipline..."only attainable through dogmatic religion"... which offers a time-tested version of the good life, and a solid, reinforcing community and social practice for its pursuit..."
(Pgs. 48-59) Eliot's critical program created an unrivaled influence in his generation (other than Pound).
(P. 58-- para 2) "When T.S. Eliot was an experimental poet, rebelling against literary convention, his respect for tradition generated a creative dialectic in his work."
(Pgs. 60-75) The social critic in Eliot created some troublesome or "problematic" social criticism.
(P. 61-- para 2) "In Eliot as in Yeats and Pound, we see the cultural alienation definitive of modernism, which drove all three poets to emigre obsession with the cultural defectiveness of their homelands."
(P. 63-- para 3) "Analytical psychology... can do little except produce monsters; for it is attempting to produce unified individuals in a world without unity; the social, political, and economic sciences can do little, for they are attempting to produce the great society with an aggregation of human being who are not units but merely bundles of incoherent impulses and beliefs."
(P 81-- para 2) "The highest goal of the civilized being... to unite the profoundest scepticism with the deepest faith..."
(P. 96-- para 2) "What I want to suggest is this: that Eliot's development as a writer from the Wasteland on is governed by his changing relationship to England..."
(P. 122-- para 3) "This contradiction, along with the poem's lack of thematic clarity and its careful refusal of connections between images, scenes, and voices, makes the Wasteland particularly open to different interpretations."
(P.123-- para 2) "While the poem provides an emotional and often visceral critique of the state of human life, it equally provides a critique of the desire to transcend and escape that life, and it offers no alternatives beyond that life of the persistence of that desire."
(P. 131-- para 2) "The Passionate and paradoxical desire to end desire leads only to the continuation of life in all its variousness, confusions, tragedies, and improper desires."
(P. 229-231) An interesting parallel is drawn between modern and postmodern architecture and writing.
(P. 230-- para 3) "What such 'difficulty' writing as that of Eliot, Joyce, and Pound potentially offered was justification for claiming the status of a discipline for English..."
BC SOUTHAM/ ON THE WASTELAND
(P. 126-- para 2) "THe wasteland is not, however, that of war's devastation... but the emotional and spiritual sterility of western man, the 'waste' of our civilization (para 3) The theme of the poem is the salvation of the wasteland... of emotional, spiritual, and intellectual vitality to be regained."
(P. 128-- para 3) "The common source of all these myths lay in the fundamental rhythm of nature... and their varying symbolism was an effort to explain the origin of life-- their symbolism was basically sexual."
(P. 135-- para 4) "A personal wasteland closes book II of the confessions of St. Agustine... I became to myself a wasteland."
(P. 137 para: 1) "Pound's cutting was largely responsible for the cinematic effects of the poem in its sudden disjunctions and shifts of scene."
(P. 138-139) discussion of opening of poem "April is the cruelest month" may refer to Egypt waiting for flooding of the Nile for land to be fertile, of to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales..."
(P 141-- para 1) "Image... from Whitman's when lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed/ Elligaic poem to Lincoln... in some ways both post war mournful poems..."
(P. 144-- para 6) "A handful of dust... found in many places such as John Donne's meditation IV/ in Tennyson's Moud.../ In Conrad's Youth.../ also biblical-- dust is the symbolic reminder to man of his bodily mortality..."
(P. 145-146) Hyacinths... a symbol for the resurrected god of fertility rites...
(P. 147) Madame Sostoris borrowed from "Chrome Yellow" a novel by Aldous Huxley... a posing fortune teller...
(P. 151 para 5) "Such a long stream of people: refers to Dante's inferno and the reaction upon seeing so many unhappy spirits-- those who in life knew neither good nor evil, who never learned to care for anyone but themselves..."
(P. 163 para 3) ""Hayward makes it clear that Eliot thinking of the post war ragtime world, the jazz world of the 1920s, restless, aimless, hectic, fearful, futile, enurotic."
(P. 165 para 1) "THe fire sermon was preached by the Buddha against the fires of lust, anger, envy, and other passions that consume men."
(P. 172 Para 2/ 3) about Tiresias character from Ovid's Metamorphoses a character who has been both man and woman...
(P. 181 para 3) "In the Buddhist tradition the image of fire carries both the pain of worldly experience and the processes of purification."
(P. 190 para 2) "Bertrand Russell recalls that he told Eliot of a nightmare in which he had a vision of London as an unreal city-- its inhabitants like hallucinations..."
(P. 188 para 6) "Sanskrit word so repeated signifying peace which passeth understanding"
So where were we? Ah yes, T.S. Eliot. He was famous, in fact for his own borrowings; his own stealings; his own quotations drawn from so many varied sources, throughout literary history. A quick look at Eliot's Annotated Wasteland reveals the following references in the first 60 of 430 lines: Grail Legend: From Ritual to Romance, The Golden Bough, Ezekiel, Ecclesiastes, Tristan and Isolde, The Fisher King, and Baudelaire. So my own mind ranging over its catalog of mediocre films, bad television, strip malls, bible school, and comic books comes up with a reference to E.T. This is what, at base, I had bestowed upon me in my youth. The important thing to remember from my own little mnemonic story is that Eliot, as modernists often do, borrows from the sacred western tradition-- not to slight or destroy it. His borrowing and allusions are not of the iconoclastic variety, but are, in the words of Ezra Pound, attempting to "make it new." I don't see Eliot as hoping to do anything but bring a renewed vigor to, in his estimation, a worn and outdated literary tradition.
FROM A CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO T.S. ELIOT
An interesting part of the Cambridge Companion to Eliot is the connection drawn between Eliot and Yeats:
(P. 5-- para 2) "So very present was yeats to Eliot...we find echoes...of such late Yeats poems as "A Prayer for Old Age," "An Acre of Grass," and "What Then..."
(P.8-- para 1) "The shift from the plural "emotions" of life to the singular "emotion in the writing" is altogether relevant, implying the transformation of multiple disordered emotions into the ordered and significant emotion of the poem."
(P. 10-- para 2) "Shakespeare too was occupied with the struggle which alone constitutes life for a poet-- to transmute personal and private agonies into something rich, and strange, something universal and impersonal."
(P. 11-- para 1) "What Eliot implies with the commencement of the Waste Land is that as Chaucer was the first great individual talent in the English tradition, so, as of 1922, the poet of this poem is the last, the most recent individual talent in the same line."
(P. 19-- para 3) ""Eliot's earliest poems quietly register the American tendency to associate culture with what is foreign..."
(P. 20-- para 2) "... nearly every poet and writer of his generation left for Europe, in search of living art..."
(P. 20-21) "... St. Louis Heritage connected Eliot's work to the then current popular phenomenon-- ragtime music..."
((P. 26-- para 2) "Rev. Eliot's last book [was an abolitionist book] The Story of Archer Alexander From Slavery to Freedom..." (this author was Eliot's grandfather).
(P. 27-- para 20 "His poems borrowed a measure of the humor, rhythm, and musical expression of Afro-American culture, while also acknowledging its peculiar burden of morality and history-- distinct from, yet related to, Eliot's own."
(P. 31-- para 2) "Eliot pursued philosophical questions throughout his career..."
(Pgs. 37-39) Eliot was deeply influenced by his friendship with Bertrand Russell-- particularly Eliot's ideas of literary criticism as objective/ impersonal logical analysis... without emotion or relationship to the author...
(Pgs. 41-43) Eliot mirrors in his criticism much of Wittgenstein (i.e. language's dependence on social use... valid interpretations of texts may thus change over time...
(P. 44-- para 2) "Eliot's later philosophy thus abandoned the objectivist scientism of his early critical theory for a hermeneutic historicism which emphasized the contextual limits and pragmatic functions of world human knowledge (as distinguished from the absolutes of faith).
(P. 44-- para 3) "The kind of pragmatism Eliot most wanted to revive for modern life was not the philosophy of Peirce, James, and Dewey but the classical idea of practical wisdom... elaborated by Aristotle-- phronesis..."
(P. 46-- para 1) "It is practical wisdom which involves the development of character and the education and discipline of the emotions. Eliot thought...such emotional discipline..."only attainable through dogmatic religion"... which offers a time-tested version of the good life, and a solid, reinforcing community and social practice for its pursuit..."
(Pgs. 48-59) Eliot's critical program created an unrivaled influence in his generation (other than Pound).
(P. 58-- para 2) "When T.S. Eliot was an experimental poet, rebelling against literary convention, his respect for tradition generated a creative dialectic in his work."
(Pgs. 60-75) The social critic in Eliot created some troublesome or "problematic" social criticism.
(P. 61-- para 2) "In Eliot as in Yeats and Pound, we see the cultural alienation definitive of modernism, which drove all three poets to emigre obsession with the cultural defectiveness of their homelands."
(P. 63-- para 3) "Analytical psychology... can do little except produce monsters; for it is attempting to produce unified individuals in a world without unity; the social, political, and economic sciences can do little, for they are attempting to produce the great society with an aggregation of human being who are not units but merely bundles of incoherent impulses and beliefs."
(P 81-- para 2) "The highest goal of the civilized being... to unite the profoundest scepticism with the deepest faith..."
(P. 96-- para 2) "What I want to suggest is this: that Eliot's development as a writer from the Wasteland on is governed by his changing relationship to England..."
(P. 122-- para 3) "This contradiction, along with the poem's lack of thematic clarity and its careful refusal of connections between images, scenes, and voices, makes the Wasteland particularly open to different interpretations."
(P.123-- para 2) "While the poem provides an emotional and often visceral critique of the state of human life, it equally provides a critique of the desire to transcend and escape that life, and it offers no alternatives beyond that life of the persistence of that desire."
(P. 131-- para 2) "The Passionate and paradoxical desire to end desire leads only to the continuation of life in all its variousness, confusions, tragedies, and improper desires."
(P. 229-231) An interesting parallel is drawn between modern and postmodern architecture and writing.
(P. 230-- para 3) "What such 'difficulty' writing as that of Eliot, Joyce, and Pound potentially offered was justification for claiming the status of a discipline for English..."
BC SOUTHAM/ ON THE WASTELAND
(P. 126-- para 2) "THe wasteland is not, however, that of war's devastation... but the emotional and spiritual sterility of western man, the 'waste' of our civilization (para 3) The theme of the poem is the salvation of the wasteland... of emotional, spiritual, and intellectual vitality to be regained."
(P. 128-- para 3) "The common source of all these myths lay in the fundamental rhythm of nature... and their varying symbolism was an effort to explain the origin of life-- their symbolism was basically sexual."
(P. 135-- para 4) "A personal wasteland closes book II of the confessions of St. Agustine... I became to myself a wasteland."
(P. 137 para: 1) "Pound's cutting was largely responsible for the cinematic effects of the poem in its sudden disjunctions and shifts of scene."
(P. 138-139) discussion of opening of poem "April is the cruelest month" may refer to Egypt waiting for flooding of the Nile for land to be fertile, of to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales..."
(P 141-- para 1) "Image... from Whitman's when lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed/ Elligaic poem to Lincoln... in some ways both post war mournful poems..."
(P. 144-- para 6) "A handful of dust... found in many places such as John Donne's meditation IV/ in Tennyson's Moud.../ In Conrad's Youth.../ also biblical-- dust is the symbolic reminder to man of his bodily mortality..."
(P. 145-146) Hyacinths... a symbol for the resurrected god of fertility rites...
(P. 147) Madame Sostoris borrowed from "Chrome Yellow" a novel by Aldous Huxley... a posing fortune teller...
(P. 151 para 5) "Such a long stream of people: refers to Dante's inferno and the reaction upon seeing so many unhappy spirits-- those who in life knew neither good nor evil, who never learned to care for anyone but themselves..."
(P. 163 para 3) ""Hayward makes it clear that Eliot thinking of the post war ragtime world, the jazz world of the 1920s, restless, aimless, hectic, fearful, futile, enurotic."
(P. 165 para 1) "THe fire sermon was preached by the Buddha against the fires of lust, anger, envy, and other passions that consume men."
(P. 172 Para 2/ 3) about Tiresias character from Ovid's Metamorphoses a character who has been both man and woman...
(P. 181 para 3) "In the Buddhist tradition the image of fire carries both the pain of worldly experience and the processes of purification."
(P. 190 para 2) "Bertrand Russell recalls that he told Eliot of a nightmare in which he had a vision of London as an unreal city-- its inhabitants like hallucinations..."
(P. 188 para 6) "Sanskrit word so repeated signifying peace which passeth understanding"
Monday, October 25, 2010
Family Ties (Raisin, Foxes, Journey, Juno)
I set this blog up for summer, but now, well into fall, I find that blogging about my reading helps me think out loud (which I need in order to process information). So, I'll continue to try to tie things together here from reading. Comps are now less than four months away.
I read Lorraine Hansberry's Raisin in the Sun
. After Dr. Power suggested parallels between this work and Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock
. Reading it through that lens, I have to say there did seem to be some very obvious comparisons. First, surface similarities such as an unwanted pregnancy (Mary and ...). Then, of course social class similarities, and the money motive inspiring and driving everything. On a deeper level, there is the family dynamic in both plays, which seems to be breaking apart. The major difference is that in the American play (Raisin) the family seems to come together finally, in opposition-- dare we say solidarity-- to oppose the exclusionary practices of the all white neighborhood association. In the Irish play (Juno) the family breaks in to splinters, with the death of one, and the mother and daughter leaving at the end to live to raise the coming child with two mothers and no father.
I also read the Little Foxes
by Lilian Hellman last week, and that particular play immediately made me think of Eugen O'Neil's Long Day's Journey into Night
. Both plays are realistic depictions of American families, and these families are dysfunctional. In fact you could describe both plays as a painful protracted glance at dysfunction-- dysfunction on display. An interesting contrast to the Irish plays, which do not allow this intimate glance into family life (at least in O'Casey's case), and though you are in the home of the family, you are not in the head of the characters so deeply. Both O'Neil and Hellman seem to write from within the family secret they have been party to.
One of the most helpful, and fun, things I've been doing in conjunction with my reading and meeting with Dr. Power has been finding films version of the plays and novels I've been reading. There is an old version of Juno directed by Alfred Hitchcock, a film version of Raisin in the Sun with Sidney Poitier, a film of Long Day's Journey with Katherine Hepburn and Jason Robards, and a Bette Davis version of Raisin in the Sun. All of these are worth watching and the O'Neil, the Hansberry, and the Hellman stay very close to their original sources.
The Little Foxes
I read Lorraine Hansberry's Raisin in the Sun
. After Dr. Power suggested parallels between this work and Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock. Reading it through that lens, I have to say there did seem to be some very obvious comparisons. First, surface similarities such as an unwanted pregnancy (Mary and ...). Then, of course social class similarities, and the money motive inspiring and driving everything. On a deeper level, there is the family dynamic in both plays, which seems to be breaking apart. The major difference is that in the American play (Raisin) the family seems to come together finally, in opposition-- dare we say solidarity-- to oppose the exclusionary practices of the all white neighborhood association. In the Irish play (Juno) the family breaks in to splinters, with the death of one, and the mother and daughter leaving at the end to live to raise the coming child with two mothers and no father.I also read the Little Foxes
by Lilian Hellman last week, and that particular play immediately made me think of Eugen O'Neil's Long Day's Journey into Night. Both plays are realistic depictions of American families, and these families are dysfunctional. In fact you could describe both plays as a painful protracted glance at dysfunction-- dysfunction on display. An interesting contrast to the Irish plays, which do not allow this intimate glance into family life (at least in O'Casey's case), and though you are in the home of the family, you are not in the head of the characters so deeply. Both O'Neil and Hellman seem to write from within the family secret they have been party to.One of the most helpful, and fun, things I've been doing in conjunction with my reading and meeting with Dr. Power has been finding films version of the plays and novels I've been reading. There is an old version of Juno directed by Alfred Hitchcock, a film version of Raisin in the Sun with Sidney Poitier, a film of Long Day's Journey with Katherine Hepburn and Jason Robards, and a Bette Davis version of Raisin in the Sun. All of these are worth watching and the O'Neil, the Hansberry, and the Hellman stay very close to their original sources.
The Little Foxes
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)