Out of Egypt:

levertov has got our number...

"Those Who Want Out"

In their homes, much glass and steel. Their cars
are fast - walking's for children, except in rooms.
When they take longer trips, they think with contempt
of the jet's archaic slowness. Monastic
in dedication to work, they apply honed skills,
impatient of less than perfection. They sleep by day
when the bustle of lives might disturb their research,
and labor beneath flourescent light in controlled environments
fitting their needs, as the dialects
in which they converse, with each other or with
the machines (which are not called machines)
are controlled and fitting. The air they breathe
is conditioned. Coffee and coke keep them alert.
But no one can say they don't dream,
that they have no vision. Their vision
consumes them, they think all the time
of the city in space, they long for the permanent colony,
not just a lab up there, the whole works,
malls, racquet courts, hot tubs, state-of-the-art
ski machines, entertainment...Imagine it, they think,
way out there, outside of 'nature,' unhampered,
a place contrived by man, supreme
triumph of reason. They know it will happen.
They do not love the earth.

my favorite thing about Jack Kerouac

...is that he wrote haiku with the "wrong" number of syllables.

say what you will, at least they're teaching kids about svalbard...

So, yes, I finally finished reading the Pullman series. I should've waited to comment till now, though I still believe in principle that one doesn't have to read everything in order to have an opinion on it. But my assessment of the books is much more complex than Pullman's antipathy toward Lewis and Tolkien would have made me believe.

I will never use the narrative tropes of his novels as guides for my own life, as I do the Ringbearer's wound in The Lord of the Rings or the idea of the Crooked versus the Straight in That Hideous Strength or the prince's enchantment in The Silver Chair. Pullman's moral imagination is too confused to serve as an inspiration in that respect. Still, he does present the wonder and the complexity of the world in which we actually live more successfully than either Lewis or Tolkien. Their characters are, for the most part, drawn more simply and their settings do not evoke quite the same sense of pleasure in the material. Pullman sees the particulars better than his Christian counterparts, and his effort to piece them together into a coherent whole is impressive. But in the end, I am not convinced that romantic love and common decency is really enough to sustain the universe.

It is fascinating to me to see that the Cross is never mentioned in Pullman's series, nor is the Incarnation. Pullman's critique of Christianity is well-taken insofar as it is an attack on the "theology of glory" - the worship of a distant God, a God of power, a disembodied God who bids us be like Him. The theology of the Cross is not touched by this critique. The Incarnation as God's fullest revelation, humility as His power, the Cross as the light in which we see how we are all victimizer and victim - these truths remain. I wonder if Pullman has ever read Rene Girard. If he did, perhaps he would recognize that not all Christians seek authority; rather, that the message of the Gospel is quite opposite. For we worship a God who is most glorified in the glorification of His people and the blessing of His creation - a God beyond envy, who calls us to participate in His life. He entrusted the Church with His Gospel, though it has often been lost, and the message of liberty turned into a license for oppression. For the highest things are the most destructive when corrupted. Earthly tyrants are not as sinful as spiritual, nor is the lust for wealth as sinful as the lust for spirituality.

because everybody's talking about it...

Michael Spencer on Philip Pullman. Sounds like Pullman is arguing against Milton, rather than the Bible. That's not surprising, though, since many Christians have also gotten the two confused.

Pullman is misreading Lewis if he thinks that Lewis and Milton have the same view of sex. He should re-read the end of That Hideous Strength. Then he might see that Lewis, despite being a crusty old bachelor most of his life, actually appreciated the gendered nature of creation. And he might see that the end of atheism is not freedom of choice, but rather the dissipation of Wither or the automatism of Frost.

If you want to see atheism at its most convincing, then the "new atheists" are not for you. Better to consider Nietzsche (who rediscovered the pagan concept of virtue, and challenged Christianity compassion by saying it was the consolation of the weak against the strong), Camus (who skillfully portrayed a form of "Christian resignation" to evil in The Plague), or Christianity's pagan critics, especially Celsus, who shows the horror with which "natural religion" must view the Incarnation. No one else goes deep enough in their heresy - their anti-Christianity is not atheism, but simply Gnosticism (Christianity without the Cross).

Someday I'd like to see Pullman in a debate with Rene Girard. Then he would have to admit that the "concern for victims" is an ideal which stems from the Hebraic and Christian tradition, and is completely foreign to paganism. Strange to realize that atheists like Pullman, Hitchens, and Lewis (before his conversion) are really sentimentalists: they want to believe that it is natural for people to be good to each other. In contrast to Enlightenment rationalism, Christianity recognizes that we must die to ourselves before such charity is possible. Natural human life is entirely governed by envy; when one oppressor is deposed, another one will inevitably take the throne.

A human republic cannot save us, but rather the rule of the righteous King. For Him, envy is impossible, since He possesses all things, and gives of them freely. And we, as Christians, are called to participate in His gracious rule. Yet we have failed so regularly that the Church appears to the world as merely another form of tyranny, made worse because of its claims to transcendence. When we truly know what we possess in Christ, we will not need to claim worldly power. Then the "household of faith" will be a model of the peaceable reign of God to come (Isaiah 65:17-25).

if you want to understand my attitude toward fantasy & the moral formation of youth...

You must read two things: C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man and the short stories of Lewis' master, George MacDonald. Most especially, you must read A Double Story, a tale of two disobedient children and their redemption which ascends past allegory to archetype. (Click here to download the full text, without ads.)

By the way, for those of you who take special interest in questions of gender, one should note that most Christ-figures in MacDonald's fairy stories are female, and that, in contrast to Lewis and Tolkien, his female characters are as richly characterized as his male characters.

I hardly believe too much can be said about MacDonald, especially since his works have become so obscure, though many of his stories are available online. In the midst of the strange blend of sentiment and sacrilege that was the Romantic era, MacDonald was a shining witness to Christ. Through his use of fantasy to describe the timeless themes of creation, fall, and redemption, he transcended the trap of apologetics, and portrayed for many, like Lewis, the "beauty of holiness." Through his suffering for his beliefs, he showed the way of the Cross. Through his life as husband and father, he showed that the Fatherhood of God was not tyranny but service - service from a position of strength. He showed virtue is liberty and duty is delight. While I cannot ultimately hold to his universalism, I am convinced that his heresy is closer to the truth than a cramped hyper-Calvinist orthodoxy which makes man's mercy greater than God's.

sometimes books are revelatory

...in a way that makes you rejoice at the possibility of words. I think again.

Recently, looking at Marshall McLuhan's work for my SIP was such an experience. His writings provide me with the tools to interpret many things that would otherwise be completely obscure to me, to make the invisible (the world of media) visible.

I bought myself the complete poems of Emily Dickinson on Monday evening with part of the gift certificate money I got for Christmas. Reading her writing, which is in a sense more confessional than the confessional poets (since it confesses inner sensibilities - the universal through the particular - rather than exterior circumstances), is another relevatory experience for me. Poetry seems worthwhile again. Her writing, which in its edited, excerpted form seemed a mere idiosyncratic curiousity now appears numinous, God-haunted, strange in the way that all great things are strange. I think I'll put some of the significant quotes up here later, when I have the text in front of me.

Oh, and I also bought Rachmaninov's Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom and Getz/Gilberto. Beautiful.

provocative thoughts of a mormon science-fiction writer

I read Seventh Son by Orson Scott Card recently. It's certainly odd reading fiction that alludes heavily to Scripture, yet isn't written by an orthodox Christian. Reading fantasy fiction where folk magic and stereotypical characterizations of Calvinist preachers intersect is even odder. Definitely thought-provoking though, and worth reading. The Wikipedians say that the Alvin Maker series parallels Joseph Smith's life in some respects, but I don't see it yet. Guess I really will have to read more of the series, which is unusual for me. I don't often read genre fiction, so I don't often read books that come in series of three or more.

If you go to the Wikipedia article on Card, scroll down to the bottom and follow the link to the article on Card's moral vision, as expressed in Ender's Game. I actually haven't read that book (yet), so the article doesn't make as much sense to me as it otherwise would, but it's still thought-provoking (I really need to find a better word).

I am not as surprised as the author that Card characterizes a school of moral thought which evaluates actions based on their goodness in themselves, rather than on the goodness of one's intentions (the school Card apparently belongs to) as "Calvinist." The WCF's section on the 10 Commandments certainly does this. Jonathan Edwards and his followers, if I understand correctly, did as well. In fact, I think the Scripture itself encourages us to take this rigorist view of moral action. After all, our salvation is a gift of God's grace received by faith - His justification gives us peace, but also reveals that we stands utterly condemned before His holiness, and thus lack all reason for self-justification. (As a sidenote, the author of the article, like everyone who doesn't know anything about Calvinism other than the lies of high school and Max Weber, thinks that Calvinism is the same thing as fatalism. In reality, of course, one action - our belief in Christ - does bring us salvation, though it is not the ground of our salvation. And the elect are the righteous. The tree is known by its fruit.)

Reading Card makes me wonder once again, as Dr. Hesselink asked at the end of 20^th-century Christian fiction, where are the good Calvinist writers? What is it about our faith that makes us so suspicious of art? Is it our catechismal, logical way of thought, our fear of iconography? I, for one, love paradox, the numinous, the iconographic. Perhaps I'm a bad Calvinist; that's why I love art. Maybe England will turn me Anglican. Who knows?

Favorite Shakespeare quote

Now comes in the sweetest morsel of the night, and we must hence, and leave it unpicked.

-Falstaff, 2 Henry IV
Act II, Scene 4

True Confessions

I've never read a Harry Potter book, and I don't particularly care to start now. I think it's because when they first came out they had more of a kid lit reputation, whereas now they seem to be all the rage among people of all ages. And because there was a guy on my cross-country team who carried them around (possibly read them) who we all disliked. And he kept taking his shirt off at the slightest provocation.

Don't bother telling me how great they are and how I should read them as soon as possible. It won't work. If I don't get in on a trend on the ground floor, I won't get in on it ever. I'm not a bandwagon jumper. (Except for a brief moment in middle school when I liked the Dallas Cowboys. And I was temptated to become a Red Sox after the series last year - then sanity returned, telling me I could never actually sit through an entire televised game of baseball.)

Parallel scenario: I've never seen Pirates of the Caribbean. People tell me it's actually a great film, Johnny Depp is amazing, Keira Knightley is hot, etc. I don't care. I didn't see it in the theater because I thought it was just another Bruckheimer-style flick based on a theme park ride, something slightly above the level of Super Mario Bros. or the D & D movie. If I was wrong, I was wrong. But now that the movie has reached the "Covenant plays it during preview weekend" stage of its life cycle, I don't care to become a fan.

Alanna, I've been reading the beats too

I discovered Desolation Angels, by Jack Kerouac, at Mike Hardie's house about half a year ago, when I was doing laundry down there. Since Christmas I've been reading it off and on. It's incredible, but the denseness and frenetic thought-clutter of his writing makes it hard to read much at once. The paradox, I suppose, is that if he had written slower, I could read it quicker.

Sometimes I think I should just turn this blog into a set of quotes, with (I suppose) my commentary on them. But since I don't have a computer next to me when I'm engrossed in reading (and anyway it would spoil the mood), I haven't done it yet. But here's just one Beat quote to whet your appetite. It's from the preface:

"A man who uses Buddhism or any other instrument to remove love from his being in order to avoid suffering, has committed, in my mind, a sacrilege comparable to castration." - William S. Burroughs

"For there is no musick in flats and sharps which are not in God's natural key."

Jubilate Agno. Things like this make me praise the Lord for language. It's obscure, to say the least, but it's probably a first draft manuscript. God grant me to speak with him above!

Also see Smart's Song to David. And consider genius' close kinship to madness.

For I am under the same accusation with my Saviour - For they said, he is besides himself. For the officers of the peace are at variance with me, and the watchman smites me with his staff.

Studies in Canon Formation

One of the journal articles I was browsing through tonight suggested that an interesting study in canon formation could be done by compared the Oxford World's Classics catalog and the Penguin Classics catalog. Well, here are the links if anyone wants to do that study.

Query

I caught a question flitting by
one late evening as I was reading:
Is Billy Collins a comic poet,
Or not?

Arty things you can do to make your fiction annoying

Pt. I of an occasional series

This was inspired by reading Claire Messud's The Hunters for Contemporary Lit and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon for American Novel, both of which are great novels, yet fall victim to some trends I see in prose style in general.

1. Modify a clause with another clause. Repeat.

She was addicted to despair, teenage angst, a disraught feeling brought on by trivialities.

How to fix: Seperate the clauses or cut, as the case may be. You're trying to say too much at once and are in danger of creating run-on sentences.

She was addicted to despair. She became disraught at trivialities.

Even better (because not passive voice):

Despair overtook her like a habit. She became disraught at trivialities.

2. Put two parallel clauses at the end of a sentence without a conjunction. Don't make them actually parallel.

She found solace in books, fantasies that would have pleased a child.

How to fix: Once again, separate the clauses or cut

She found solace in books. But her fantasies would have pleased a child.

or (the sentence as it stood was ambiguous)

She found solace in books - fantasties that could have pleased a child. (or "fantastic books, that could...")

"You want to get quotable. Let's get QUOTABLE!"

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is now my favorite writer. Why, o why did I wait so long? Not sure if I would put Catch-22 up there on the list, though. If I were to make a favorite novel list, Karamazov would be near the top.

Anyway...quotes (and I'm not even finished with the book yet). These are all totally decontextualized - presented without proper antecedents and haphazardly chosen, but hopefully will give you an idea of how much I love this book.

"Children and adults sucked with delight on the delicious little green roosters of insomnia, the exquisite pink fish of insomnia, and the tender yellow ponies of insomnia, so that dawn on Monday found the whole town awake."

"The sign that he hung on the neck of the cow was an exemplary proof of the way in which the inhabitants of Macondo were prepared to fight against loss of memory: This is the cow. She must be milked every morning so that she will produce milk, and the milk must be boiled in order to be mixed with coffee to make coffee and milk. Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escaped irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters.
At the beginning of the road into the swamp they put up a sign that said Macondo and another larger one on the main street that said God exists."

"She went back to eating earth. The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that the bad taste would be the best cure for the temptation. And, in fact, she could not bear the earth in her mouth. But she persisted, overcome by the growing anxiety, and little by little she was getting back her ancestral appetite, the taste of primary minerals, the unbridled satisfaction of what was the original food."

"Aureliano, for his part, found in her the justification that he needed to live. He worked all day in his workshop and Remedios would bring him a cup of black coffee in the middle of the morning. They would both visit the Moscotes every night. Aureliano would play endless games of dominoes with his father-in-law while Remedios chatted with her sisters or talked to her mother about more important things."

"Three days later they were married during the five-o`clock mass. Jose Arcadio had gone to Pietro Crespi's store the day before. He found him giving a zither lesson and did not draw him aside to speak to him. "I'm going to marry Rebeca," he told him. Pietro Crespi turned pale, gave the zither to one of his pupils, and dismissed the class."

Obscure literary reference bingo

Can anyone tell me what the title of the poem is in which the stars are called "God's brain?" That's one of my favorite metaphors of all time.

Then again, maybe I'm imagining it. After all, I was manic at the time...

not failing? (an essay on Levertov)

So I got the Levertov poetry essay done for Contemporary Lit. Wow, my eyes burn. I feel like I've written a four-page love letter to a dead Anglo-American female author. I hope that I did the poem justice, and didn't interpret it backwards or something.

By the way it's on the same poem that I posted way back a few weeks ago.

Enjoy.

"Soutine" and Unfaithfulness to Creation

“Soutine (Two Paintings)” is a shocking poem, depicting, not the beauty of creation or the grandeur of God, but the work of an artist who seems to deny both. In it, Denise Levertov, the poet of the incarnational image, responds to the distorted images of the painter Chaim Soutine. Therefore, it is impossible to grasp the poem’s full meaning without some knowledge of Soutine and his work. To try would be like entering a conversation that is already half over.

Soutine was a French expressionist painter between the two world wars (Benfrey Online). He, like the enigmatic figure of “Wings in the Pedlar’s Pack,” was a wandering Jew; though born in Lithuania, he headed for Paris as his artistic fortunes improved (Tigertail Online). At first, the critics did not appreciate his work: Waldemar George wrote of it in 1928, “Is this not the art of an exile or a savage?” (Benfrey Online) In Slate, Christopher Benfrey describes his early paintings, like Still Life with Herrings and Red Stairs at Cagnes, as “little parables of deprivation.”

In “Soutine (Two Paintings),” Levertov recreates with surrealistic fidelity the crudities of these two paintings – their world of “avid” forks, “wavering” houses, and “famished” steps. However, she forms again this world of lurid sterility only to reject it.

Her desire to repudiate Soutine’s portrayal of reality is evident from the poem’s placement within the broader context of section III, from its hyperbolic use of imagery and personification in the description of the two paintings, and from the two editorial comments she makes on the paintings – in the first stanza, an exclamation; in the second, a question.

In most of Levertov’s works, she seeks to depict nature faithfully, as God sees it. She recognizes its otherness, its basic indifference to man, as when she says in “Two Mountains,” “I had to accept…my own complete insignificance,” (58) and when she says in “In Tonga,” “If [bats] could think / it would not be of us” (59). The aim of her life and her poetry, as expressed in “Flickering Mind,” is to “focus [her] flickering,” to “perceive/ at the fountain’s heart / the sapphire I know is there” (64). This requires of the artist humility, not Romantic, expressionistic boldness. Often Levertov’s writing, as in “Early” and “The Braiding” seems to shrink back behind itself, as if it had no theme and no author, except for the divine Author whose glory it seeks to express. He is “the stream, the fish, the light / the pulsing shadow” (64). He is the Word with whom she wrestles, until the “glass bubble” of dulled perception shatters (53).
Man is not the measure in Levertov’s poems. “Soutine” is an exception. Here nearly all the objects in the poem are personified, made grotesque with desire. The forks of lines 1 and 2 are “avid,” though the only thing before them is three “dead scrawny” herrings (line 3). Presumably, they will never receive sustenance from these insubstantial fish either – their role is simply to be the instrument carrying sustenance to the hungry artist, who stands outside the work. The steps of lines 7 to 10 also hunger, in Levertov’s account of these two paintings. She describes them as “famished,” clutching and crawling interminably toward a nearly invisible summit. The houses in line 16 “lean, wavering” in expectation. The cup of lines 14 and 15 is both “parched” and “abandoned.” All are described as “desperate things” (line 9).

The objects Levertov presents in Soutine are portrayed as simply and as starkly as possible, using only personifying verbs and adjectives and color indications. The plate in line 4 is “dead white,” the steps in the next line “red,” the “void” in line 13 “grey” – a somber palette with which to work.

This hyperbolic use of personification, combined with a paucity of adjectival description, is not characteristic of Levertov. Even in “Envy,” though the bare trees “make up” their seed bundles as if they were pilgrims preparing for a journey, they are still recognizably trees (62). Even in the original paintings by Soutine, reality did not appear this skewed. However, Levertov is not breaking from her usual style simply out of boredom. The lurid starkness of the poem’s imagery, with its dramatic contrast to her usual subtlety, is intended to show the distortion inherent in the work of Soutine and his successors, their unfaithfulness to creation.

Levertov breaks out, halfway through her account of the two paintings, in an exclamation that shows her anguish at seeing art of this kind. “O desperate things,” she cries, “living lives unheeded, / disbelieved / by those who made them!” (ll. 10-12) With these words, she is questioning the idea of art which, in order to express human emotion, requires distortion of reality. Levertov’s art seeks rather to mirror the world, and thus to mirror the self. Her art speaks of fullness, of the “fountain,” (64), not the “void,” the “parched hollow” (54, ll. 13, 15).

Yet section III is a section of doubt. “Soutine (Two Paintings)” is appropriately placed within it, practically at the midpoint between her invocation of the Angel and her speaking of the “Sapphire [she] know[s] is there” (64). Soutine, if these paintings are any indication, could not overcome the doubt that Levertov so strongly feels, the doubt that makes her question whether she can write of beauty and grace. His art portrays vividly desire and deprivation, mankind’s state without the Savior. Levertov wonders also whether the cup of creation is “abandoned” (l. 54). She closes the poem, in lines 18 to 20, with a question, not an answer: “…[W]hat could there be, / up there, / to fulfill desire?”

Transcendence is not easy for Levertov to find – she seeks it through the everyday. Flannery O’Connor called this showing “grace through nature, mystery through manners.” “What could there be…?” Levertov does not answer the question here; after what Soutine’s paintings show, a word about Christ would seem facile. Still, the mystery of Christ is her answer to Soutine – He is “the stream, the fish, the light, the pulsing shadow” (64). He, as she says later in A Door in the Hive, is our example. Though “aching for home,” “He must return, / first, in Divine patience, and know / hunger again, and give / to humble friends the joy / of giving Him food – fish and a honeycomb” (105-106). His is the meal that satisfies.

Works Cited

Benfrey, Christopher. "The Wandering Jew." Slate: 6 May 1998.

Levertov, Denise. A Door in the Hive. New York: New Directions, 1984.

The Tigertail Virtual Musuem. Director Robert Uzgalis. 12 Nov. 2003.

George MacDonald - Getting Better with Age

Reading "The Wise Woman," "The Shadows," and "The Golden Key" for Inklings class. If the sign of a good book is that it works on multiple levels, then his works rank somewhere near the top. Every time he stabs me a little deeper. Now I only hope that he can help me be good, not just feel good.

Was it Lewis who said that MacDonald's favorite subject was Death? Reminds me of Bonhoeffer's distinction - the penultimate and the ultimate. MacDonald wrote from the ultimate all more than anyone else I know.

I don't know how you all feel, but I think that Lewis, Tolkien, and all of us are but disciples at his feet.

Denise Levertov is my new best friend (plus Garden State stuff)

Got yet more textbooks in the mail today, yay. If the first few poems I've read of Levertov are any indication of the quality of the book as a whole, she's everything I want in a poet and more. I really am contemporary lit at heart; "classics" just seem so stiff. "Essay on Man," anyone?

I just wish that I had a guide to the world of contemporary lit - Percy, O'Connor, Paz, Neruda...these figures I have come across in various ways but I never know when another one will come along. But for now, here's a bit of Levertov for you. Hope the poem's short enough that I'm not violating fair use:

Soutine (Two Paintings)

As if the forks themselves
were avid for the fish,
dead scrawny fish
on dead-white plate.
As if the red steps
were clutching the hill,
famished,
crawling toward the summit.
O desperate things,
living lives unheeded,
disbelieved
by those who made them!
O grey void, usurping
the abandoned cup's
parched hollow!

And houses lean, wavering,
to watch if the steps will ever
arrive, and what could there be,
up there,
to fulfill desire?

O, and I saw "Garden State" today finally. More details to come. For now, all I'll say is that it was beautiful, perceptive, and funny, but the ending was rushed and a bit facile. That last speech was out of some kind of Hollywood romance movie dialogue book, which was not the feel of the rest of the movie at all.

O, and I love the use of music in the movie. Simon & Garfunkel even make it in - it really is our generation's "Graduate," as the Times, I think it was, suggested. An interesting piece could be written comparing those two films, particularly since both are good yet flawed, and the flaws are in vastly different areas. To throw a preliminary thesis out there, though, I'd say that "The Graduate" is the introvert of the two, giving the impression of more depth than perhaps actually is there, whereas "Garden State" is the extrovert, perhaps more telling than its comic veneer would suggest. But as a first film, wow. Expect good things from Bratt, or Braff, or whatever his name is.

Another comparison I just might develop: "Garden State" and "Eternal Sunshine." Both romantic comedy-dramas (is that even a genre?) with a repressed male - manic female dynamic; both beautifully composed and shot, relying heavily on visual imagery to convey mood and theme; both sympathetic treatments of mental illness (a subject I should know fairly well).

Of the two, it's hard to say which one I like better. From the pure wish-fulfillment fantasy standpoint, "Garden State" wins hands down. From the movie-as-a-whole standpoint, perhaps "Eternal Sunshine." The difference (other than Natalie Portman)? "Garden State," with its essential coming-of-age story character, speaks to me more directly than "Eternal Sunshine," which is about unmarried people, yes, but at a significantly later time in life. (How old is Carrey by now, anyway?)

Scenes that I could relate to in "Garden State": many. Not the family dynamic, though, thankfully. But the scene where he sits on the couch at the party while all the "fun" goes on around him - I know that feeling well. Could anything be more soul-destroying than the party life? I suppose some things could, like a life of prostitution, but those people sometimes are forced into it for economic reasons. Copious drug use and promiscuity out of simple boredom: it doesn't get much worse than that.

To end on a lighter note, the Issue 1 Bagpipe layout is finished. Now if only they can open the file at the printer's. O, and I was listening to Interpol last night in the Cave. That CD must directly stimulate my pleasure center or something, it's so good. Those punchy ringing guitar lines get me every time.

Get me away from here I'm dyin'; sing me a song to set me free...

Well, here it is. My last paper of the semester. 10 hours - 5 research, 5 writing. One night.

It's on Dostoevsky. Enjoy it.

Well, as much as you can enjoy anything on Notes from the Underground, a novel that has tempted some people to commit suicide. Not me, though - it's painful, but possibly even redemptive. That could be (and has been) the subject for another essay. But not tonight.

Dostoevsky’s Underground Man: Philosophical or Pathological?

Dostoevsky’s vision of the world is violent and his characters tortured; it is no wonder that many have viewed his work as prophetic of the 20th century. However, though Dostoevsky, in his unflinching portrayal of depravity, gives the Devil some of his best arguments, the Gospel often triumphs. Ivan Karamazov is at least offered the possibility of repentance when kissed by his saintly brother Alyosha. Raskolnikov, the nihilistic antihero of Crime and Punishment, is eventually redeemed through the love of the pure prostitute Sonja.

Notes from the Underground, however, breaks this pattern. The protagonist of this novel, who, uncharacteristically for Dostoevsky, is also the narrator, is not redeemed by his encounter with a prostitute, but rather degrades both her and himself by his actions. While Notes from the Underground has often been analyzed from a philosophical perspective, as Dostoevsky’s defense of free will against the mechanistic determinism and utilitarian moral theories popular in his day, it is more properly viewed as a character study. This view is necessitated, Ralph Matlaw writes, by the unreliability of the underground man as a guide to his own character and motivations (102). One who consistently proves to be a liar in matters of fact is not likely to be an honest theoretician either. The underground man himself, nearing the conclusion of his philosophical reflections, writes, “I swear to you, gentlemen, there is not one thing, not one word of what I have written that I really believe. That is, I believe it, perhaps, but at the same time I feel and suspect that I am lying like a cobbler” (Dostoevsky 212).

Regarding the novel as primarily a character study rather than a philosophical treatise preserves the unity of its two parts, so that the second section is not seen as an addendum to the first, merely an enactment of the principles which the underground man has already stated abstractly (Matlaw 101). Notes from the Underground, despite its unpolished narrative and paradoxical narrator, is a coherent whole, a subtle portrait of a man in conflict with himself. The first portion of the Notes is “a revelation of personality,” according to J. M. Coetzee, whereas the second is “a revelation of a shameful history” (219).

The two cannot be separated from each other; both are necessary to complete the underground man’s portrait. Though he may put on a bold front in the ideological jabs of the first section, the second shows his ineffectual character, the seemingly irresolvable paradoxes of his personality. The underground man is paralyzed by indecision, governed by spite. His inability to “live life” is a malady that has grown prevalent in the “educated nineteenth century” (Dostoevsky 296, 191). As Dostoevsky writes in a footnote at the beginning of the work, “such persons as the writer of these notes not only may, but positively must, exist in our society, when we consider the circumstances under our society was formed” (179). The true philosophical lessons of the Notes are implicit, hidden within the narrative, and condemn the underground man as much as they do his rationalist opponents.

Any satisfactory analysis of Notes from the Underground must keep in mind the singular consciousness and unreliability of its narrator. If he is simply the mouthpiece for Dostoevsky’s own ideas, then why is the novel structured as it is, placing Dostoevsky at a double remove from the events it recounts? As Gary Rosenshield writes, the underground man who tells the story is not the same as the underground man who acts in it, and neither can be identified with Dostoevsky, whose hidden judgment hides behind both (325). Though Dostoevsky does employ the underground man’s philosophies as a polemic against Chernyshevsky and the other fashionable philosophers of the day, one must also consider how the underground man’s philosophy functions as a rationalization of his own behavior.

Some readers have taken the underground man’s philosophy as a bold statement of Dostoevsky’s existentialist faith in the freedom of the human will, his refusal to be a “piano key” in a future deterministic utopia (Dostoevsky 206). This reading, while it does contain some truth, is superficial, confusing the real author of the Notes, Dostoevsky, with their fictional author. Bernard Paris, in his psychological analysis of the underground man, writes that the well-integrated individual, one who feels in possession of himself, does not need to assert his freedom every minute, as does the underground man (229).
Furthermore, the underground man’s critique of utilitarian moral theory, specifically the concept of the highest good, rests on a characterization of humanity as irrational, perverse, and destructive. The underground man writes that “man may consciously, purposely desire what is injurious to himself…– simply in order to have the right to desire for himself even what is very stupid and not to be bound by an obligation to desire what is sensible” (Dostoevsky 204). Even suffering can sometimes be an object of desire, he writes, since it is “the sole source of consciousness,” which is “infinitely superior to [the] twice two makes four” world of the rationalists (209).

In order to accept this philosophy as a true account of human nature, Ralph Matlaw writes, one would also have to take at face value the underground man’s account of himself in the second part of the novel (106). Regarding the underground man as a reliable narrator is impossible, however. As James Lethcoe writes, Dostoevsky, as implied author, shows the underground man’s unreliability even in the novel’s first paragraph (13). The underground man begins his account of himself with self-loathing and contradiction:
"I am a sick man…I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However…I don’t consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors" (Dostoevsky 179).
Soon after this, he shows the spirit which made Dostoevsky call him a “paradoxicalist” (297). He says, possibly without realizing the contradiction, “I was lying when I said just now I was a spiteful individual. I was lying from spite” (181). This spirit of contradiction continues through the novel, recurring a few paragraphs later when the underground man speaks about aging. At first he says “forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral” (181). However, a few sentences later, he says that he has a right to make this statement, since he intends to live to eighty himself (182).

Perhaps the most interesting of the underground man’s paradoxes is that identified by Gary Saul Morson. At the end of the novel’s first part, the underground man declares, “…[I]f I write as though I were addressing readers, it is simply because it is easier for me to write in this form. It is a form, an empty form – I shall never have readers” (Dostoevsky 214). He then denies that he will write his reminiscences in any systematic fashion. However, he follows this by saying, “[S]omeone will catch at the word and ask me: if you really don’t reckon on readers, why do make such compacts with yourself…Why are you explaining? Why do you apologize?” (214) This paradox will remain unresolved through the course of the novel.

Almost as characteristic of the underground man as his “paradoxicalist” nature is his social isolation, which he calls an inability to “live life” (Dostoevsky 297, 296). The underground man’s relationships are generally characterized by a lack of empathy and a persecution complex, a propensity to think the worst about both himself and others. He wonders whether he alone out of his coworkers in the civil service acquaintances “fancied he was looked upon with aversion” (Dostoevsky 216). Compared to them, he regards himself as a “coward and a slave,” though at other times he thinks himself superior to all of them (217). Even at school, he says, he was taunted all around for his face and his “clumsy figure” (238).

More significantly, the underground man regards his servant Apollon as the “bane of [his] life, the curse laid upon [him] by Providence” (280). He believes that Apollon “despised [him] beyond all measure,” but only offers Apollon’s supposed pride in appearance and haughty air, his lisp, his habit of reading psalms behind a screen, and his quiet insistence that his wages be paid on time as proof of this (280-281).

Finally, the underground man is unable to recognize Liza’s concern for him as love. When she first enters his rooms, he thinks she has come simply to hear more “’fine sentiments,’” as he offered her in the brothel (Dostoevsky 293). When he finishes calling himself the worst of the worms on earth and berating her for coming to him, he finds it “a strange thing” that Liza realizes he is unhappy and begins to weep (291). Only after reflection does he realizes that she does this because she loves him. Only in a brief moment of recognition, according to Sacvan Bercovitch, is he able to temporarily break out of his ego trap (289). When this recognition strikes him, it causes immediately within him a counter-reaction of revulsion (Dostoevsky 291). This revulsion will cause him, in succession, to weep, to make love to her, and to thrust a five-rouble note into her hand, which she casts back into the room as she rushes out. Later, in explanation of this sequence of events, the underground man will say that he “was incapable of love, for…[to him] loving meant tyrannizing and showing [his] moral superiority” (293). “Even in [his] underground dreams,” he writes, “[he] did not imagine love except as a struggle,” beginning with hatred and ending with “moral subjugation” (293). The underground man considers defining love as “the right – freely given by the beloved object – to tyrannize over her” (293).

Lethcoe considers it likely that the underground man’s acquaintances do not in reality despise him. Rather, he is simply projecting his feelings of inferiority upon others (14). Paris writes that the underground man compensates for his lack of security and esteem by isolating himself, embracing a philosophy of “freedom, will, caprice,…[and] intellectual superiority” (513). He cannot create an adequate self-image and so “oscillates between feeling like a god and like a piece of dung” (514). As he says, “either to be a hero or to grovel in the mud – there was nothing between” (Dostoevsky 229).

By twenty-four, the underground man is in the civil service, his life “gloomy, ill-regulated, and as solitary as a savage” (Dostoevsky 215). In the service, he makes friends with no one, since he believes they all despise him, and so “buri[es] himself more and more in [his] hole” – the underground of the novel’s title (215). In that underground he remains until the decisive incident with Liza that haunts him “like an annoying tune,” eventually spurring him to write his confessions (214). That incident is significant because it is the final revelation of his own inability to live up to his philosophy, his retreat into the “everlasting spite” of the “crushed and ridiculous mouse,” the educated man of the nineteenth century (187).

Sacvan Bercovitch offers an accurate summation of the underground man’s character in the Notes. The novel, he says

describes the constant return to a central spiritual imbalance. The underground man says that he wants to break the ‘stone wall’ before him in order to ‘master reality.’ But his actions – as student and clerk – fetter him to a vicious circle of shame and revenge, and when, responding to Liza’s compassion, he obliquely sees the source of his malaise, he turns violently from his perception. His attempts at ‘self-liberation,’ therefore, draw him deeper into illusion, and in failing to ‘bind his disabling excitation,’ he succumbs finally to the attractions of Thanatos: the ‘dark cellar’ of isolation and inertia. (613, emphasis mine)

The “stone wall” which Bercovitch mentions is one of the central concepts in the underground man’s philosophy. According to Matlaw, it represents for him first “single-minded purpose, finality, all that is in keeping with the normal, stupid, average man” whom the underground man, in mockery of Rousseau, calls l’homme de la nature et de la verite (107). Later, it will grow to represent “natural science, the laws of nature…all that can be connected with rational theories of the nineteenth century” (107). It is associated in his thought with the “crystal palace,” which is “wall-like because it is deterministic and rational” (107). Like “twice two makes four,” it is an incontrovertible fact, at which one cannot stick out one’s tongue (Dostoevsky 210).

Paris writes that the underground man is so opposed to the theory of enlightened self-interest since it contains an element of compulsion (521); one cannot argue with reason, with “twice two makes four.” Morson amplifies this statement, saying that the impersonality of the laws of nature is the very thing that offends the underground man (473). The underground man’s protests are useless against the indifference of the laws of nature. His willingness to have “independent choice” whatever the cost is not an evidence of existential boldness so much as evidence of his neurosis (Dostoevsky 201). “The underground man,” according to Paris, “does not wish to be free so that he can fulfill his human potentialities. For him,” as the quintessential detached individual, “freedom is the goal of life, the highest fulfillment, and he is ready to embrace suffering, chaos, and destruction in order to have it” (521). The novel’s second section exists partially to prove this, since in it “all the characteristics of an anti-hero” are “expressly gathered” (296).

The underground man’s status as an anti-hero shows, therefore, that Notes from the Underground cannot be claimed as a prototypical existentialist novel. The underground man may create his own values, but he cannot act upon them. Rather, even when he wishes to become spiteful, he finds in himself “many, very many elements…absolutely opposite to that…positively swarming…and craving some outlet” (Dostoevsky 181). The underground man seeks something beyond the underground, but he cannot define what it is that he seeks. It is merely “something different” for which he is thirsting but cannot find (212). This statement by the underground man justifies Olga Meerson’s suggestion that, for Dostoevsky, the practice of existentialism “indicates the lack of that which is most precious and needed…rather than the heroic self-sufficiency of living on without it” (321). Certainly no one can say that the underground man holds himself up as a moral exemplar at the end of his narrative.

Works Cited

Bercovitch, Sacvan. “Dramatic Irony in Notes from the Underground.” The Slavic and
East European Journal 8.3 (Autumn, 1964): 284-291.

Coetzee, J. M. “Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky.”
Comparative Literature, Vol. 37, No. 3. (Summer, 1985):193-232.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Three Short Novels: Notes from the Underground. Garden City, NY:
Anchor Books, 1960.

Lethcoe, James. “Self-Deception in Dostoevskij's Notes from the Underground.” The
Slavic and East European Journal 10.1 (Spring, 1966): 9-21.

Matlaw, Ralph. “Structure and Integration in Notes from the Underground.” PMLA 73.1
(March 1958): 101-109.

Meerson, Olga. “Old Testament Lamentation in the Underground Man’s Monologue: A
Refutation of the Existentialist Reading of Notes from the Underground.” The Slavic and East European Journal, 36.3 (Autumn 1992): 317-322.

Morson, Gary Saul. “Paradoxical Dostoevsky.” The Slavic and East European Journal
43.3 (Autumn 1999): 471-494.

Paris, Bernard. “Notes from Underground: A Horneyan Analysis.” PMLA 88.3 (May
1973): 511-522.

Rosenshield, Gary. “The Fate of Dostoevskij's Underground Man: The Case for an Open
Ending.” The Slavic and East European Journal 28.3 (Autumn, 1984): 324-339.

So That's How Well Read I Am

Not as much as I wish. This list was borrowed from diber.

Careful kids, it's long.

After doing this, I'd like to see if there are any more, shall we say, authoritative lists to take on. I agree with those who said this one was heavy on American Lit.

Following convention, those I've read are in bold.

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger (The Plague also)
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop (I agree with Jeanette - My Antonia is more well-known, but this one was good as well.)
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales (as much of it as was in the Great Books of the Western World anthology)
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness (hated it for ideological reasons, as an earlier blog post made clear)
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans (may have read part of it)
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno (since I took a class in him, I've read the other parts of the Commedia as well)
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote (read a few chapters as a kid - does that count?)
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities (started it)
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment (also read Notes from the Underground, The Brothers Karamazov, The Gambler)
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust (scanned it in the CHOW book)
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms (also The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea, some short stories)
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame (no, but I read parts of Les Miserables)
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House (no, but I did read "Hedda Gabler")
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis (also "The Trial")
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird (saw the movie)
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain (read the first section; the book is about as fun as staying at a tuberculosis colony for real - plus entire chapters are in French, untranslated; I did read "Death in Venice")
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude (I need to read this, in order to respect myself again)
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick (read in fourth grade, but didn't understand it)
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find (one of the few authors of whom I can say I've read all her fiction)
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm (also 1984, which is better)
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago (movie)
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar (I read one poem by her - "Daddy")
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales (it depends how selective they are)
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye (read all his fiction, except "Seymour: An Introduction")
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream (in elementary school gifted class; adapted version)
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet (my memory of it is vague)
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion (it's on my list for the summer)
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island (long time ago)
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden (excerpts in CHOW, full work on my list)
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace (started it, haven't finished yet)
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (long ago, can't remember if it was the full thing)
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five (and some other Vonnegut, too)
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass (some of the poems, though not a significant number)
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie (no, but I saw the movie of "A Streetcar Named Desire")
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse (yes, but I hated it)
Wright, Richard - Native Son

Absurdity

Saw Kill Bill Friday night. Expect a post when I have time. I have five papers due this week - pray for me.

Despite the ridiculous workload and due to my procrastinating nature, I went both to the Film Festival and the Five Points Poetry Reading today. The Film Festival was uneven, though I enjoyed it overall. The music chosen for Kornman's SIP was excellent, practically telling the story in itself.

The poetry reading was enjoyable as always. Generally, it had a comic spirit, with such highlights as Phil's story of the territorial squirrel, Hope's anatomy of the word "round," and Courtney's reading of "The Epileptic Bicycle" by Edward Gorey.

Contrasting with all these, however, was Rob Heiskell's reading of the sonnet "Prayer" by George Herbert, which made the night in my opinion.

Prayer the Church's banquet, Angels' age,
God's breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth;
Engine against th' Almighty, sinners' tower,
Reverséd thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted Manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,
The Milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
The land of spices; something understood.

That poem was one of my delights in my days recovering from madness, when I was crying out, "Put my mind back together, God."

Herbert's words - "reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear/the six days' world transposing in an hour" - have a mystical power I have not seen elsewhere, except perhaps in Hopkins. They made my mind, which hungered for them, run too fast. And I still can't say that I am fit to speak of their meaning. Let the secular critics do with this poem as they will - they cannot speak of food who never were invited to the feast.

A long while back on here, I promised I would write of that crazy time in my life. I haven't forgetten that promise, but starting is so hard. Perhaps over the summer, when I can devote myself to it and not feel guilty.

One last thing before I go: the greatest metaphor ever I found in a sonnet in the same book, calling the stars "God's brain." If anyone can remind me of the name of that poem, I'd much appreciate it.

"The Helga Pictures," by Emily Miller

...is a lovely poem by a graduate of my high school whom I hardly knew. (Hardly as in I may have spoken to her once or twice. She was a year older than I and moved in different circles.) In any case, this poem is like the binding thread between two things that I've blogged about within the past 24 hours: Andrew Wyeth, whom I love, and the ideals of poetry. I just wish that I could find a copy of this poem on the Internet, since the last time I heard it or read it was in Mr. Lewis' 12th grade AP English class. (One of the few things I miss about high school - or at least that I miss about the academic part of it.)

Serfass, Dagen, any other secret Solanco grads who read this blog, are you in possession of a copy of this poem? It's been a while...

The Poetical Philosophy of William Wordsworth

(In Which I Take Up Cause Against the Illusions of Romanticism)

Yes, this is me posting another journal entry. This is just to prove how affected the tone of my writing can get when it doesn't matter what kind of grade I get on it and when I am pressed for time, burdened with a desire for sleep. I agree with the things I wrote, however; otherwise I wouldn't have written them.

If anyone can think of a better way to say what I say in here, then feel free to tell me. This is an issue that I'd like to revisit.(Pardon the non-gender-neutral language, however - I'm not really a fan of recasting all my sentences in generic plurals, or whatever other grammatical tricks have been developed to get around English's supposed masculinist bias.)

Sometime I need to work out my ambivalence to the Romantic poets. As it stands, I appreciate their motives, at least to some extent, but I think they were sadly deceived regarding the true nature of reality and how best to live one's life in it.

The Poetical Philosophy of Wordsworth: In Which I Take Up Cause Against the Illusions of Romanticism

To Wordsworth, the poet is a man among men; in his feelings, he shares the common life of all. The words he employs in his art are not foreign to everyday language, although the use of meter elevates them above the monotony of prose.

However, though Wordsworth’s poet shares the sympathies of the people, preferring the rustic scene to any other, in his capacity for feeling and expressing emotion, Wordsworth’s poet is the leader of all. His poetry possesses its power to please primarily because it articulates the longings which the mass of humanity lacks the ability to express.

Wordsworth considers the “Lyrical Ballads” to be an actualization of this philosophy, as it is outlined in his preface to them. I’m not sure if this is the case. The words which employs are not the words of my daily speech, much less that of the ploughmen and village children which he idealizes. If his words are like anything, they are like the words with which I opened this journal – slightly portentous, slightly affected. Give me something with dirt, with irony, with wavering between opinions – then I know you have given me real life.

Still, perhaps I am the wrong one to judge the success of the “Lyrical Ballads.” I am not sympathetic to the Romantics, generally; the aims of their art are not the aims of mine. I suppose one who looked only at our stated aims without considering the fruits of our artistic efforts might say that they are the same, however. In both cases, all that is produced strives toward one chief end – to reflect life. However, the Romantics’ view of life is not my own.

The Romantics regarded life as all glorious, at least when one is apart from the sordid life of the cities. I find glory only in the world that is touched by grace. The Romantics thought there was a kind of salvation in seclusion, a secularized form of monasticism. I see this as an illusion, a way of evading one’s responsibilities. It is only when engaged in the world that we can fulfill God’s calling upon us, the ministry of reconciliation.

I am not the optimist that Wordsworth was; I do not have his pantheistic leanings. If I looked out over the Wye and the ruins of Tintern Abbey, I doubt I would write, as Wordsworth did, “Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.” There is only one sight – the face of Christ, once scarred and now exalted – that leads us “from joy to joy.”

Looking over what I have just now written, rescanning the lines of the poem I have just critiqued, I realize I sound like a dogmatician – as if I were attempting to win a prize for my theological correctness. I know my own experience. “The sounding cataract haunted me like a passion,” Wordsworth writes. Has this not been, at least occasionally, the experience of us all? The old glory, the old mystery, still haunts this world, and it would be dull and foolish to deny it. The other danger, however, is to see the beauty that lingers here as a source of salvation. In my writing, I must seek to succeed where Wordsworth failed, to depict the beauty of nature as a witness to the One to whom she groans for redemption. That means I will not attribute to nature any powers which she does not possess.

Neruda Lit Crit, pt. II

All right, now we're getting somewhere. The Neruda poems I like are the focused ones - whether on love (as in Veinte Poemas), politics (as in the readings for Methods of Lit Study today, Tercera Residencias and Canto General), or the beauty of South America (Canto General again). I like when he gets beyond his few favorite imagistic tropes (the noun catalogs, anything involving water or the sea).

Here's my report for today, if anyone cares. It gives a little biographical context for the Tercera poems, as well as some of my evaluation and a brief critical look at "Explico Algunas Cosas (I'm Explaining A Few Things)."

The Tercera Poems and Neruda’s Turn toward Politics

Several of us have criticized Neruda’s poems for their seeming lack of focus and randomness of imagery. Last time we met, I attempted to defend this as being a stylistic technique rather than a deficiency in his work. Perhaps his catalogs of seemingly dissociated objects such as the establishments, gardens, merchandise, glasses and elevators of “Walking Around” (Neruda Selected 105) are an attempt to create a literary parallel the works of surrealists such as Dali. Still, as Dr. Barker said, we are not Neruda; without access to the workings of his subconscious mind, such poems are impenetrable.

Neruda’s poetic philosophy ultimately resists categorization, since he changed his style so greatly over time. His stance on the realist/anti-realist question can be seen, however, in these words, from his Confieso que he Vivido:

Poets who are not realist are dead. But poets who are only realist are dead also. Poets who are only irrational will be understood only by themselves and their lovers, and that is pretty sad. Poets who are only rationalist, will be understood even by donkeys, and that too is very sad. (361)

Neruda sought to retain the avant-garde flavor of his work to some extent, even as it became increasingly popular, being read at times in front of thousands of people (346-50).

It is refreshing to see, however, that in the selections from Tercera Residencia, published in 1947, what remains of the avant-garde in Neruda’s work has been transmuted into a powerful cultural and political statement. Neruda speaks now, not primarily as a lover or even as a poet, but as a witness, having seen the horrors of war in Spain. His voice will deepen still further in Canto General, which was published in 1950 and is often regarded as his principal work. This volume consists of around 250 poems in fifteen literary cycles, all of which relate to the theme of South America – “its nature, its people and its historical destiny” (Nobel Biography). Perhaps the best poem and most characteristic poem of this work is “The Heights of Machu Picchu,” in which Neruda combines a spiritual sympathy with the ancient Incas, a socialist critique of society, and reminiscence of his crisis years in the 1920s and 30s.

Perhaps the best context for a discussion of the poems in today’s reading is a history of the events which occasioned them. The Tercera poems were written over the course of 1925 to 1945, during the time of Neruda’s “deepening political commitment, first to the Spanish Republic, then to anti-fascism, and later to socialism” (Dawes). For most of this period, Neruda was abroad as Chilean consul, first to Burma, then to Spain, and finally to France (“Biography”). This experience abroad was quite disorienting and troubling to him, at first producing the poems of alienation that were collected as Residencia en la Tierra (Nobel Biography). While he was in Spain, he witnessed the Spanish Civil War, the horrors of which made him join the Republican movement and become more explicitly political (ibid.). After his European consular posts in the 1930s, Neruda returned to the continent of his birth, holding a post in Mexico as he wrote Canto General (ibid.).

In some respects, “I’m Explaining A Few Things,” from Tercera Residencias, is a return to the terser poems of Veinte Poemas de Amor<. It is, like them, restricted in vocabulary; its lines are broken to a greater extent. However, the poems in that earlier volume were essentially self-absorbed: in them, a lover writes about his love. Neruda then was still innocent enough to believe that the saddest line in verse was, “I loved her and sometimes she loved me, too” (33). It is a greater disenchantment to have seen “the blood of children [running] through the streets/without fuss,” to have seen “jackals that the jackals would despise” (153).

Now Neruda is writing on others’ behalf, and so he adopts a more public tone. He begins the poem in the interrogative, anticipating the questions of a reader, perhaps one who expects to hear the Neruda of the avant-garde poems speaking:

You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
And the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
And the rain repeatedly spattering
Its words and drilling them full
Of apertures and birds? (151)

His answer is matter-of-fact (I would have said “clipped,” but that is more a characteristic of the translation than the original). The middle section of the poem will have colorful reminiscences and sentimental questionings (“Remember, Raul?/Eh, Rafael?”), such as might have been in his earlier work, but here they are to a different purpose – as contrast for the horrors that would later come and which he will soon describe.

The poem closes in the imperative, as if Neruda were holding up this war scene to us in a glass and asking us to acknowledge its reality. Implicitly this is a call to action. “…[F]rom every crime bullets are born/which will one day find/the bull’s eye of your hearts” – Neruda states this as a proverb, but it could almost be marching orders for the revolution.

Baby Steps in Criticism

I wrote the latter part of this journal entry (for Dr. Barker's sometimes-stimulating yet far-too-early Methods of Literary Study class, which I have today at eight) while listening to "Christmas Time is Here." Shades of Royal Tenenbaums.

Neruda and Vince Guaraldi. Lovely. Is he still alive?

Speaker and Audience in the Residencia Poems

Never before have I read so much lyric poetry at a single sitting. I agree with Gerard Manley Hopkins that poetry’s native element is the spoken word, in accordance with its origins. Thus poetry is meant to be performed. I was not able to do that in this case.

Perhaps poetry’s essentially performative character, however, can actually serve as an interpretive key to Neruda’s poetry. Much can be discovered critically by considering the voice of the speaker and the likely character of the individual whom he is addressing. I obviously cannot speak on every poem in this week’s reading, however, so I will simply speak on a few that I found particularly striking. Coincidentally (or perhaps not so coincidentally), these also have quite distinctive voices – and audiences.

Neruda spoke truly when he said that he is not one but many, both in life and art. His poetry reflects this multiplicity of voices.

The first poem in this week’s reading, “Nocturnal Statutes,” seems spoken out of mania and artist’s egotism. I doubt this is the true Neruda speaking – if the rest of his work can be any sure guide. “The night creature, the intelligent being, myself” – is this how a sane man speaks? These words remind me of myself during my own manic break, when I had delusions of grandeur. I cannot imagine any human audience to which these words could appropriately be addressed.

“Lone Gentleman” is similarly spoken by a deranged individual. Here the poet is voyeur, is Freud. The power of these sexually charged lines is unmistakable, yet the title hints, at least, that the speaker does not share in the goings-on. Rather, he derives his pleasure from what he can overhear and see and the interpretations he can construe for other’s acts, as he whiles away his indolent days and nights. He speaks amorously, but it is only himself he pleasures.

The speaker of the following poem, however, has known the romantic entanglement the previous speaker, cynical as he is, has sought to avoid. He dances the “Widower’s Tango” in a poem shaped like a discursive letter, full of emotion and non-physical caresses. This poem, unlike those I have spoken about previously, has an audience, clearly specified: Maligna, the woman the speaker presumably once loved. She is defined, however, largely by her absence – and by the speaker’s regretful desire. I can see her, however, almost like a Renoir painting, lonelily drinking her afternoon tea.

Posted by donovan at 2:13 AM |

As Requested... (some thoughts on Hopkins, also)

"Camp"

Somehow these rainstorms always make me think of camp
In summer, thunder's echo in the night
A kind of steamy rumble, as if in a cave
While on the metal roof, the rain
Would break

In chains - almost a crinkling,
Popping, as if my skin were wet
And I would turn under the sheets
A womb-like peace, though half outdoors

Five Points Poetry Night - nearly as well-attended as that other holiday. And infinitely cooler. Also there was shrimp.

I read some Gerard Manley Hopkins. "Spelt From Sibyl's Leaves" - I don't know what it means, but it sounds wonderful.

As of right now, I'm listening to Elliott Smith's "Roman Candle" again. I could almost live off nothing else.

"Spelt" makes more sense when I read it - again and again. The poem rewards that. But as Hopkins said, it is meant to be performed - almost sung. That's what I tried to do.

Here it is. Do with it as you will.

"Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves"

EARNEST, earthless, equal, attuneable, ' vaulty, voluminous, ... stupendous
Evening strains to be tíme's vást, ' womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night.
Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, ' her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height
Waste; her earliest stars, earl-stars, ' stárs principal, overbend us,
Fíre-féaturing heaven. For earth ' her being has unbound, her dapple is at an end, as-
tray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs; ' self ín self steepèd and páshed -- qúite
Disremembering, dísmémbering ' áll now. Heart, you round me right
With: Óur évening is over us; óur night ' whélms, whélms, ánd will end us.
Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish ' damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black,
Ever so black on it. Óur tale, O óur oracle! ' Lét life, wáned, ah lét life wind
Off hér once skéined stained véined variety ' upon, áll on twó spools; párt, pen, páck
Now her áll in twó flocks, twó folds -- black, white; ' right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind
But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these ' twó tell, each off the óther; of a rack
Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, ' thóughts agaínst thoughts ín groans grínd.

As of right now, I think the best way to describe the poem is a contemplative's meditation on the Last Judgment. I just saw an essay that described it as a gateway to the Dark Sonnets, such as "Carrion Comfort" and "Thou are indeed just, Lord..." It certainly has a different "feel" than his more famous work such as "The Windhover" and "God's Grandeur."

You want to hear about good book buys? I'll tell you about good book buys...

Wherever this is, (note to everyone: there should be some way for us Covbloggers and Chattabloggers to identify each other. The way I see it, if you're going to share your thoughts with us, we should be able to know who you are.) the writer speaks about a French design book bought at McKay for a dollar.

Reading this, my mind took a tangent (as it often does, though not quite as much as Dagen's) back to one of one of my favorite places/events: the yearly Lancaster Co. Library Book Sale held at Overlook Skating Rink. It's amazing - the entire skating rink is filled with tables and tables of books, stacked up to 10 high. Pretty much every genre imaginable is represented, though the country being as it is, poor quality religious books take up more space than they ought.

It's quite an event: hundreds of people mill about the rink, browsing the stacks; they carry boxes, baskets, grocery bags - anything that could bear a load of books; over a dozen volunteers work the registers non-stop.

The prices are what bring people in. All paperbacks - 50 cents. All hardcovers - 50 cents. Romance novels, detective novels - a few dollars a bag.

So anyway, all that to say, I got this book, first edition, for 50 cents.

I need to check my local paper this coming May. Hopefully, school will be out by the time that sale rolls around. Oh, and that I'll have money too...

On the Vicarious Enjoyment of Suffering

Sometimes it's pleasant to be miserable. And sometimes it's even more pleasant to savor the creative products of someone else's misery. Such at least is the view of Nick Hornby, with whom I wish I were more acquainted:

It sounds harsh, I know, but if you are currently romantically involved with someone with a real talent — especially a talent for songwriting — then do us all a favour and dump them. There might be a Heartbreaker — or a Blood On The Tracks or a Layla — in it for all of us.

Of course, for me, I believe it's the exact opposite. I do my best work under the influence of joy. That's why I actually managed to write a poem yesterday, something I haven't done for weeks.

Someone once said, "Laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep, and you weep alone." While that may be true in the realm of social discourse, it's certainly not true in the realm of art, I believe. There everyone has a sob story, a hidden beating heart of pain. If I had to point to a single goal for all my creative endeavor , it would be this: to transcend the superficial in capturing joy, to reveal the motions of the Spirit in the human soul.

Chinua Achebe: Hatin' On Heart of Darkness

Well, I did some semi-serious lit crit on Monday night and, wonder of wonders, actually enjoyed it. Unfortunately, I enjoyed it at the most inopportune time - say, around 2 am. I was sittin' out in the commons, poring over my sources and I just found some quotes that glistened like pearls. So now I'm going to cast them before swine.

Just kidding. I love you. And if you love me, love literature, hate Conrad, love Achebe, or some combination of those four, you'll keep reading.

So, anyway, I was researching Chinua Achebe, one of Africa's most prominent post-colonialist writers, and in the course of my studies I found an essay he wrote called "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness." Now this was particularly interesting to me, since, like many of you, I was required to read Conrad's novel for English in HS. And, also like many of you, perhaps, I didn't like it.

Now, why I didn't like it was basically aesthetics: I didn't think Conrad's little book developed any original ideas on human nature or paint an accurate picture of the African continent. Rather, what we have here is a good writer blinded by his own prejudices. He basically says, whites are bad because whites can become like Kurtz, who was bad because he became bad like blacks are bad. So, there's original sin here, but not really any depth of insight into here. If I want to see original sin, I can get a better grasp upon it from reading the daily paper than from reading Conrad's book. And I don't have to get racism along with it.

Now, Conrad's book was anti-colonialist. But he goes about it ass-backwards, in my opinion. Achebe's writing is also anti-colonialist, but as he is one of the colonized, it actually works. It's not all adjectival theatrics and "The horror! The horror!"

And Achebe is completely aware of this. In fact, one of the main reasons he wrote his novels was as a response to such studies in bigotry as Heart of Darkness. His hatred of the work and, one might say, of Conrad himself, is awesome to behold. Try these quotes on for size:

In the final consideration, [Conrad's] method [of evoking the African environment] amounts to no more than a steady, ponderous, fake-ritualistic repetition of two antithetical sentences, one about silence and the other about frenzy..."It was the stillness of an inplacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention"..."The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy." Of course, there is a judicious change of adjective from time to time, so that instead of "inscrutable," we might have "unspeakable," even plain "mysterious," etc., etc. (Hopes and Impediments, 4)

Herein lies the meaning of Heart of Darkness and the fasincation it holds over the Western mind: "What thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity - like yours...Ugly." (6)

As everybody knows, Conrad is a romantic on the side. He might not exactly admire savages clapping their hands and stamping their feet but they have at least the merit of being in their place, unlike this dog in a parody of breeches [the boilerman on the ship]. (7)

But wait! there's more! Here's Achebe summing up: "The point of my observations should be quite clear by now, namely that Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist" (11). And the knives really come out on this one: "Certainly Conrad had a problem with niggers" (13). Finally, on page 14, he submits Conrad as a candidate for psychoanalysis. For a writer with pretensions to seriousness, I can hardly imagine a worse indignity.

Conrad, however, deserves it.

Who is Tom Bombadil?

Talk amongst y'selves. This might help to get you started.

The question was raised in my mind through reading Sacra Doctrina, which I wish was updated more often. Still, he's a professor; I'm a lowly college student. Thereupon hangs a tale, I suppose.

Someone who's even more grammar-obsessive than myself can tell me whether that was a proper use of the ever-elusive semicolon.

Metaphors from Hell

Those blurbs on the back of books can get weird. Personally, I'm looking to read "A novel so steeped in milieu that it feels as if you've blasted to Mars in the grip of a demon who won't let you go."

Link from the BookBlog, home of the Gender Genie. I came up as male, thankfully.

A project for my more computer savvy readers: is there a way to turn the Gender Genie into one of those Internet quiz thingies that everyone was posting about a year ago? (I'm so thankful that trend is over.)

Lit Studies, the Pleasures and the Pitfalls of

My theory is that the editors of anthologies for HS English classes have as their goal to choose the worst stories by famous authors, so as to sour as many students on literature as possible. After reading "The Birthmark," Nathaniel Hawthorne became a kind of running joke in my mind. It was only in the past few months that I really gave him a chance again, and found out that some of what he wrote was excellent, when he wasn't allegorizing to the max. The Scarlet Letter might have been a stronger novel had he not thought it necessary to mention the letter "A" on nearly every single page, but I still found it to be a vivid, lurid ____ (insert your favorite review-like noun in here).

I suppose I'm not cut out to be a lit critic. Of course, I never really intended to be. I've always wanted to be a journalist (well, ever since I rejected the possibilities of programming, creative writing, and graphic design, respectively). I'm just studying English at Covenant because I enjoy literature, and because there's no specific program in journalism.

Who knows how the Lord will lead in the next year? Perhaps, with my financial situation being as it is, I'll end up going to a different school, one that's cheaper and does offer journalism. If anyone thinks that would be a tragedy, feel free to let me know. As for me, I'm pretty much ready for anything. Covenant hasn't been a tremendous disappointment for me, and there have been many conversations, many friends, many professors that I will cherish forever. Yet I don't know if I can justify the cost in my mind if I end up writing critical paper after critical paper, developing skills the value of which I now find questionable.

I know I've said some of this before to some of you. I was just thinking about it again. I was also thinking that I love pop songs with a jazzy backbeat. "When You Wake Up Feeling Cold," by Wilco is one of those songs.

Now, on a tangent, Infradig played a great, and ridiculously long, show last night. The whole time I was dancing like a fool and thinking how much Serfass would appreciate it. Man, if you'd been there. There are some things I really value about Chattanooga. If my own bank account were higher in value, perhaps I would be able to value the city even more. To my friends in Philly -though I don't think you read this - you need to take advantage of that. I know you can afford to.

Eco...(Eco)

Just to start this entry off right - that is, with irrelevance - I'd like to say that I think Starflyer 59 is/was (are they still together?) a regrettably underrated band. I don't know much about them, only having their songs on an old Tooth & Nail compilation (wow, that was a record label that went downhill quick), but they have a "wall of sound" effect and an air of pleasant desolation that I've never heard elsewhere. Surprisingly melodic, too, for all that.

Anyway...(That little reminiscence was provoked by my scavenging through the remains of my CD collection - I will never forgive you, music thieves from Bluefield.)

Last night I stayed up past 4 (an absurd hour, especially when one is going [and did go] to church the next day) finishing off Umberto Eco's second novel, Foucault's Pendulum, which I picked up the day before (!) with the Borders' gift card I got for Christmas. The last 70 pages of the book were an almost epiphanic experience for me, which has very nearly prompted me to indulge in that acme of indulgences, the fan letter. But instead of inflicting that on the good doctor, whom I imagine to be rather pompous and critical (thus damaging to my fragile ego), I decided to inflict my fandom upon you, my anonymous readers.

I don't feel equipped to say what I would've said last night. It was really an of-the-moment sort of thing. So I'll simply reproduce the note I scrawled on a napkin after finally setting the book down:

Eco has composed a symphony of quotes, a conspiracy theory covering creation. That is the semiotician's view of the world; everything a referent to everything else, the world a signifier by which itself is signified. But we who know Christ, in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, can see beyond the outward opulence of Eco's words - meaning everything, his Plan means nothing. It lacks a center around which to cohere.

Actually, what I said above was a lie - I wrote most of that just now. But it's what I would've said last night, if you had asked me. But at the time, I was just in awe of his narrative genius. The book is perhaps more creative than The Name of the Rose, though not as profound and certainly not as literary as that work was. I'll have to read Baudolino next. Donations, anyone?

So, now I take my leave of you all. But first, two items provoked by the book. No. 1: It's interesting to think just how permeable was the boundary between science and magic back in the days before the Enlightenment had really set in. Isaac Newton, arguably, spent more time on alchemy than he did on physics. I read somewhere that the reason he was willing to consider the possibility of action-at-a-distance was because of his belief in the possibility of magic. What is magic, after all, other than that which is not already understood? The magical world is a black box inside which unknown forces interact. Almost all our technology today is magical insofar as I am unaware of all but the most basic details of the principles by which it operates.

No. 2: The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz: referenced several times in the book, has a great title. Haven't read it yet, but if the whole is anything like the quotes Eco has chosen, then it might prove fascinating.

And a final question, for my learned audience: What was Swedenborg's relationship to the Rosicrucians? I don't know actually, so this isn't a quiz, just curiousity.