Modernist Era of the Semester

As the end of the semester has arrived, I have enjoyed my English Literature course most of all. While finishing the third essay, my computer crashed, just as I completed my essay of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," but before it was submitted. My computer is on its last let, but did not let me down, and somehow I was able to salvage the essay! For a second, I felt the grip of Eliot's words, "son of man... I will show you fear in a handful of dust." This picture of Salvador Dali, "The Persistence of Memory," reminded me of Eliot's landscape in "The Waste Land," as well as the fact that all the knowledge I would like to have retained reminds me of the fragmented juxtaposed images of his landscape... hopefully, through persistence I will be able to remember it all. I still want to read Joyce's "Ulysses" and re-read Virginia Woolfe's "Mrs. Dalloway," as well as all the other authors we have visited this semester. I would like to know all the meaning to all the references in classical literature, the languages, etc., as well as to interpret as well as Freud and Jung do in psychoanalysis, but what can I expect? It was a quick tour on an omnibus?, like going on an introductory tour and trying to take in all the sites and history in a short matter of days, but it was well worth the effort. It is really not the end, but only the beginning. Thanks to our professor for a great start!

Virginia Woolf: "Words"

I could not read "Mrs. Dalloway" without hearing the voice of the author in her work. This is my first time to read the novel, or to know anything about the author, Virginia Woolf. I have heard the name "Virginia Woolf," but had no idea about who she was, only that she was a writer and maybe a movie had been made about her. I started first reading the novel, with no background information, and I immediately began to get an impression of her. I wondered if she was young when she wrote it, I also wondered if she was sane. I felt that the book was like the proverbial fruit cake that people give as gifts during the holidays, but no one wants to get, and I had just bit into it. I thought it was too much, too thick with meaning, too rich with words. The words that lived in this mind must have been difficult to manage as they ran their stream of consciousness from the inward to the outward descriptions, so thick that it took the ringing of Old Ben with each hour to separate the layers of meaning, too saturated to distinguish a single train of thought, past to present, memory to reality. I tried to tolerate it in order to get to the good parts, but I felt left with sticky parts in between. All in all, I did not like the book. I felt I needed more information in order to be able to appreciate this writer. My ignorance is sometimes my biggest hindrance to appreciating someone's work. I think the timing also has something to do with it, too bogged down with so many things to read and do at the same time this week. My plate was already too full when I started to read, so "dessert" on such a full plate was not as welcome with no time between occasions. It also happens to be Thanksgiving, a time when the metaphor is more a reality. I hope to try it again at some other time, when I can see the book with different eyes.

I don't want to sound judgmental or harsh regarding the author. I was amazed that my impression of her was close to the truth, that she had suffered from abuse as a child and disorders that led her to take her own life eventually. She was brilliant and her writing reflects that, however, as she says in her video, words live in the mind, and they also reflect her struggle to some degree. At least that was my initial impression. I have much to learn about her writing and life, she was an intellectual and one of the most important modernist literary figures and authors of the 20th century. Her style reminds me somewhat of another author I read, Christina Garcia's "Dreaming in Cuban." I had a similarly difficult time reading her novel, but when I decided to write an essay about the use of color in her book, I worked with the text enough that it grew on me and has become one of my favorite books.

After reading the book and looking at a little more information about the life of Virginia Woolf, the author, I definitely have a high opinion of her. I especially like her description of words on the video recorded in her voice, which I included in this post.

T.S. Eliot - A second look...

T.S. Eliot said of modern drama, "A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good."

This same logic can be applied to his poem "The Waste Land." The mixed allusions to works in anthropology and literature, shifts in location, time and subject, seem fragmented and obscure like viewing the ruins of an ancient city rising randomly and remotely out of the sand. Reading through, the reader is riveted by an image that suddenly comes into focus, a recognition, like pot shards heralding ancient burials or portraits in mosaics uncovered by an excavation tool. Each one significant, while both in place and out of time. A language lost, where only the winds whisper the moaning of their memory. The references to vegetation ceremonies, comparative mythology and religion, esoteric references to games such as the tarot cards and a game of chess, and the stream-of-consciousness flow of words give the poem meaning on many levels at once, yet remain obscure and inaccessible at first look, much like a dream. The poem seems to have a language of its own.

When reading this poem, I am inspired to take a second look. The words do something on a subconscious level and I am drawn to it again and again. It would seem worthwhile to research the references in the poem and find at least what each one means;yet, the sounds of the words themselves have their own effect and the mystery its own reward.

"There is a shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust." (l. 25-30, "The Waste Land")

A look into: "In An Artist's Studio" by Christina Rossetti

The aesthetic movement during the Victorian era of England, represented by the school of William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, had a permanent influence on English decorative art. One of the tenants of the Aesthetic movement was to make an art of life.

Two of the models in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's paintings were his sister, Christina Rossetti, as the Madonna, and the female model later to become his wife, Elizabeth Siddal.



Around this same time, Oscar Wilde wrote in his work, "The Picture of Dorian Gray," "All art is quite useless." His statement was intentionally literal, as it was a reflection in keeping with the doctrine "art for art's sake," a phrase coined by the French philosopher Victor Cousin, promoted by writers such as Theophile Gautier, the French poet, and brought into prominence by James McNeill Whistler, an American-born, French-schooled and British-based artist.

Christina Rossetti's poem, "In an Artist's Studio," raises questions about the nature of art. There is much debate over the responsibility of artists to portray life in realistic terms, or by focusing on the idealization of beauty. To this, a quote of Oscar Wilde makes a good point, leaving the question to the individual:

"It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art." -Oscar Wilde

resources:
Damrosch, David, Gen. Ed. "The Longman Anthology of British Literature," Vol. B., 2nd ed. New York: Pearson Longman, 2004. 756-759.
Online sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde

"My books! At last because the time was ripe, I chanced upon the poets." From "Aurora Leigh, Discovery of Poetry:" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Photo: Elizabeth & Robert Browning
Photo: PJ Harvey/London
I included pictures of one of my favorite musical artists, Polly Jean Harvey, with one of my favorite Victorian poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, because I've always thought they look alike to some degree. P.J. Harvey has also been included in literary comparisons with Victorian women, dead women poets, or rather, the way Victorian women poets portray dead women as a part of their identity, or loss of it. P.J. Harvey is linked to them due to her style and contemporary approach to the topic of female identity in her lyrics and musical expression. Here is a link to one essay on the topic:
http://www.tau.ac.il/humanities/english/files/fred_essay_06.pdf

In the Longman Anthology (2nd ed.), British Literature, in The Victorian Age, under the heading "The Age of Self-Scrutiny," the author says that "the energy of the Victorian literature is its most striking trait, and self-exploration is its favorite theme" (p. 469).

Although Harvey's music is often along the lines of the punk genre, she explores other musical influences in the search of feminine identity through Victorian expression in literature and applies it in new ways through some of her works, such as her album "Dry." Her Victorian influenced dresses can also be seen on her album cover "White Chalk."

1910 Movie of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein"

This presentation of the movie "Frankenstein," by director J. Searle Dawley in 1910 with Thomas Edison's Company, gives a first film depiction of the monster. His look is similar in some ways to Nosferatu, although the 1910 film predates the film of "Nosferatu" in 1922, by director F.W. Murnau, which is a German Expressionist film.

The special effects of the creation of the monster is a possible inspiration to the recent movie, "Frankenstein" with Robert De Niro as Frankenstein, as Dr. Frankenstein also looks through a sealed window to see his creation coming to life. The mirror image in the 1910 version is used to reflect a juxtaposition of Dr. Frankenstein as both the monster and man, the nature of good and evil, with good prevailing. The movie plays on the idea of man playing God, by creating life, which results in an extension of his evil nature.

The twist in the movie is that the monster disappears and Dr. Frankenstein prevails. In the book, as Dr. Frankenstein dies, the monster appears and makes his final comments before retreating to the North Pole to destroy himself on his funeral pyre. The novel's subtitle,"The Modern Prometheus," makes the connection to fire. The monster's end being fire, it ties in with Prometheus stealing fire from Zeus, to return it to the human race after he withheld it to punish Prometheus for swindling him by placing two offerings before him, one with good interior and undesirable exterior, and the other with a desirable exterior and undesirable interior of bones. The two offerings could be seen as a metaphor for the doctor and the monster. Ovid's "Metamorphoses" depicts Prometheus as a creator of mankind from the earth, like a potter makes clay, which is also similar to the theme of "Frankenstein."

"Ode" to a Bard: Keats and "Ode to a Nightingale"

I used to say that, if all else fails, I would retire to some obscure place and become a drunk poet... that place usually being some unknown South American villa or colony of artists, poets and intellectuals. Whether such a place exists, I don't know, but its one of my fantasia fallback plans.

In Keat's poem, "Ode to a Nightingale," he seems to have taken a similar path, at least for the night, to recline himself under a tree. Whether drunk with wine or with the ideas he contemplated, I can't tell, but he seems to be in a similar state of mind. Depressed with existence in a world where there is that constant grind, he contemplates an escape by associating his plight with a nightingale that sings through the night.

This is one of my favorite lyrical poems, because it is pensive and speaks of the hardships in this world, yet finds an escape in poetic expression. In the lines, "That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, / And with thee fade away into the forest dim" (l. 19-20) he is referring to drinking from "Hippocrene" (16), the fountain of the muses on Mount Helicon (footnotes, p. 438). Drinking along these lines seems to be a metaphor for using poetry to induce an elevated state of consciousness, used as a kind of sedative.

I adore the fact that he uses a nightingale as a form of lyrical instrument, like the bards who used instruments to perform Odes in the original Greek and later. The nightingale provides the music and he provides the words. His thoughts take on the form of a songbird that may have been the same song heard during the hardships in the lives of people, from kings to peasants, who lived from ancient times through history, such as "the sad heart of Ruth" (66) as she stood, homesick in tears, as a gleaner in a foreign field during a time of famine. Yet the "hungry generations" (62) have not silenced the songbird. As he contemplates the thought of "easeful Death" (52), he realizes the limitations of this kind of vain escape, because he would not be able to hear the song of the bird. He then compares the nightingale to an "immortal Bird" (61) possibly a metaphor for an immortal Bard. Then he speaks of the song of the bard which has been heard down the paths of time.

As the song of the nightingale fades, he recalls the echo of "faery lands forlorn" (70), the very word "forlorn" calls him back to his senses, and he is no longer engaged in his fanciful flight with the bird. His resolution is to ponder the questions at the end, "Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music: -- Do I wake or sleep?" (79-80). The music of the original bards of Odes has not been replicated for centuries, fled is that music, like the nightingale. Yet their songs linger in their words, and they are still relevant as inspiration today. I think Keats finds an escape in being caught up in the ecstasy of these poetic musings and finds inspiration in them, just as his poems continue to inspire us today. He may also be wondering if he, too, will be remembered once he has flown to the next "valley-glade" (78).

Keats, John. "Ode to a Nightingale." In The Longman Anthology, British Literature, Volume B. Ed. David Damrosch. 2nd ed. New York: Pearson Education, 2004. 438-440.

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A Description of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

After reading the Longman's introduction to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, I wanted to know more about him. The description in the introduction of Coleridge as a Logician, Metaphysician and Bard (Longman 323), as well as Magus (324), caught my attention. This greatly interested me, along with his radical view on politics and enthusiasm for an ideal democracy. His literary accomplishments were progressive, and although accompanied by his addiction to pain medicine (a form of heroin), leading to depression, estrangement from his wife, and accusations of plagiarism, he continued to capture a particular charm, especially among the young generation and maintained a productive public life (323-234, paraphrase).

In researching the web-link provided in our lesson, I found a letter from Dorothy Wordsworth to Mary Hutchinson in June, 1779, which describes Coleridge, then age 25, in endearing terms. There is also a self-portrait description on the same website which he wrote at age 24 that matches some of his features given by Mary Hutchinson; yet her description gives a brief but very good impression of what it would be like for someone meeting him for the first time. Here is the link:

http://etext.virginia.edu/stc/Wordsworth/letters/DW_MH_0697.html

After reading this letter, I must agree with her first statement, "You had a great loss in not seeing Coleridge."

Table Talk: Week 1

This is the beginning of my blog for British Literature Since 1800. I decided to name my blog after Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Table Talk, which "posthumously captured the echoes of his voice" (Longman 324). In the next eight weeks, I hope to capture many echoes of the authors we will be visiting and I will be posting my impressions, thoughts and comments as we go along each week. Please feel free to add or share your comments, thoughts and impressions as well!