Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Eliot: I Still Like Him, but We’re Not Speaking Right Now

Hands down, my absolute favorite author this semester is Katherine Mansfield. It was a tie between Mansfield and Eliot, but now I have deducted some points from Eliot for “Four Quartets.” Sometimes, I feel like I am not a good Literature person when I do not like the greats, but that does not change the fact that I still do not like them. Woolf is mediocre. Howard’s End was a little better. Eliot was awesome until now. My major problem with “Four Quartets” is that even with the extra reading, I do not think I understand it and apparently, I am not the only one. You (Dr. Sparks) said that it told you years to grasp and Brooks says the same. However, Brooks also says that even though scholars can explicate “Four Quartets” line for line, they still do not understand the whole. I do not understand why T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” is a classic if no one understands it, except Brooks. I am thinking of writing my masterpiece by making it intentionally elusive and including a ton of allusions. It might not sell, but I have no doubt that it will make the canon. People will read it and praise it forever and never feel like they understand it. In much the same way that people refer to a foreign accent or language, they will say, “I don’t know what Wiley said, but it sounds so good.”

There are many images in “Four Quartets” that Eliot reuses from other poems, such as aridity, dying things, the state of time, the king fisher, ether, seasonal changes, and Dante and Shakespeare references. So it must be essential to deftly understand the previous works before tackling this later one. However, even the meaning of these previous images change in “Four Quartets,” which adds ambiguity to an already ambiguous poem.

Since I cannot yet deal with “Four Quartets” as a whole, I will deal with it in parts like everyone else. I really like the following stanzas:

The chill ascends from feet to knees,The fever sings in mental wires.If to be warmed, then I must freezeAnd quake in frigid purgatorial firesOf which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

The dripping blood our only drink,The bloody flesh our only food:In spite of which we like to thinkThat we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

Eliot begins this excerpt by mixing burning and freezing images in a confusion of the senses. He illustrates this picture of descent into hell, but this hell is simultaneously cold and hot. Maybe it is like a freezer burn. Then he says that the roses, the only beauty in hell and one of the things necessary for life, are the flames. This initiates a recurring theme of barrenness. I am actually surprised that with all of the Biblical allusions in “Four Quartets,” Eliot never mentions some of the famous once barren women in the Bible. These flames are not actually beautiful or life giving: they are the opposite of an earthly rose. This becomes clearer in the following line. He also illustrates a person breathing in briars. Just as oxygen is what roses produce, smoke is what flames produce. Concordant with this analogy, just as the roses give life, hells flames are an eternal death. However, I think that Eliot believes that in order to live, one must die. Similar to him saying “to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.” Thus, this flame might be a purging flame rather than a deathly one.

Eliot stresses that the flame is a purging one in the second stanza. He paints a primitive and even cannibalistic picture by having people drink blood and eat flesh. This is actually a reference to Communion and he expresses a viewpoint that I have long held about Communion (I think that might make me a genius, too.) He says that even though Christians are celebrating a resurrection, they do it by enacting a death—pretending to eat someone’s flesh and drink that person’s blood. Because it is Good Friday, everything is suppose to be kosher. When one breaks down the basic concepts of Communion, it sounds like some occult stuff to me. I understand that it is a symbol of sacrifice and that the sacrifice sustains and nourishes the person who is saved. That symbol still does not change the fundamental cannibalism.

To quote a famous heiress, “That’s hot!” —a burning freezing heat. My thoughts about these stanzas apply sporadically to other parts of the poem. There are moments, like the ones he explains in the Buirnt Norton, of epiphany and splendor. However, they are rare and short moments. I am just frustrated with Eliot right now. I still like him. I just choose not to like him right now and choose to belittle his craft as I did at the beginning of this journal because he is pissing me off. I want to be a true Klingon right now and scream “You have dishonored me!” then challenge him to a fight. However, my Vulcan side keeps reminding me how illogical that is. I will wrestle with “Four Quartets” some more and then make a new assessment. For now, Eliot and I are not cool.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Oedipus in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

Something that caught my attention in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is the language that Virginia uses to describe James and Mrs. Ramsey's relationship. One could easily forget the James is Mrs. Ramsey's six year old son and think that there is some kind of sexual tension between them. I thought that Woolf would extend the Oedipal complex throughout the novel. She does in a way, but I thought that it would be more prevalent. Other than this language in “The Window” the text loses all indication of the notion until “The Lighthouse.” In this last section, the rift between James and Mr. Ramsey is clear and James’s memories of Mr. Ramsey stealing Mrs. Ramsey’s attention still weighs heavily on his mind. This memory actually plays a major role in damaging his relationship with his father.

Just as with the contrast between Mrs. Ramsey and Lily Briscoe, there is a distinct contrast between Cam and James. These are the two youngest of the Ramsey children. Cam is described as “wild.” She is not shown much in the novel, but the reader knows some parts of her personality. For example, as a child she refuses to give William Bankes a flower for his lapel, she runs wildly past people without much regard for them, and the boar’s skull scares her. James on the other hand, as a child, is described by Mrs. Ramsey as the most sensitive of her children. They are able to share many moments because they are so much alike. He however, likes the boar’s head.

I noticed the contrast most when Mrs. Ramsey puts them to sleep by addressing them each in a distinctive manner. She tells Cam to ignore the skull and think of mountains, valleys, stars, antelopes, parrots, and gardens. This set of things really doesn’t match logically. Mrs. Ramsey pacifies Cam by freeing her imagination. Her speech here is described as “nonsensical.” She wants Cam to think of impossible combinations: parrots and antelopes, antelopes and bird nests, and maybe bird nests and women, women and art, etc. and she wants Cam to ignore the skull, which may be read as frighten patriarchy.

However, Mrs. Ramsey addresses her very sensitive son, James, in a very logical manner, much in the same way that Mr. Ramsey and Tansley address him. She says that the boar’s head is still there under the shawl even though it looks different. Then when he asks if they can go to the lighthouse the next day, she does exactly what she criticizes Ramsey and Tansley of doing: She gives James a dose of reality and kills his hope. Mrs. Ramsey gives into the dominance of patriarchy, thus going against her intuition and perpetuating the patriarchical institution.

So with patriarchy as the dominant theme, how does James’s Oedipal complex support or undermine patriarchy? I think that it supports it in that James thinks he owns his mother just as much as Mr. Ramsey does. It indicates that no matter how sensitive the son is, he is selfishly interested in continuing the patriarchy at a very early age. His way of perpetuating the patriarchy is to overthrow his father and to seduce his mother. So just like his father “James…stood stiff between her knees, felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote, demanding sympathy.”

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Cage the Insurgents!: Modernist Political Discourse

Sara Blair begins her chapter of The Cambridge Companion to Modernism by saying that Modernism’s “most notable—indeed, perhaps only—unifying feature was the attempt to transcend the political altogether” (Blair 157). However, even in this attempt to “transcend” is an inherent, almost unavoidable failure. In the purposeful absence, avoidance, or omission of a political stance is a political stance. As Blair continues, she supports my premise that endeavoring to move beyond political debates is yet another political position that inevitably engages in an ongoing political discourse. She mentions the right wing fascism of Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, for which Pound was incarcerated for treason (161) and the anti-Semitism found in T.S. Eliot (160). She also brings up liberals James Joyce, H.G. Wells, and D.H. Lawrence, who fought for the proletariat by making them the central to their works (164). Each author was unable to “transcend the political” because he or she wrote with the ink of his or her own personal experience and political bias.

However, E.M. Forster seems to express this transcendence best in “What I Believe.” He asserts that the importance lies in people rather than politics, relationships rather than republic. He accurately predicts what can come of loving a democracy, which is a governmental structure (not the actual government of a particular country). A reader in 2008, may not be able to avoid a continuous echo, voiced with the drawl of Texas twang, of “War on Terrorism” and “Spread of Democracy,” while reading Forster’s comment, “Democracy is not a beloved Republic really, and never will be” (Forster 167). Well, Forster is absolutely right. Democracy is to government as MLA is to paper format. Democracy is to the United States as blue print is to an architect. According to Forster, democracy is even less deserving of allegiance than country is.

Now, with this devotion to a blueprint, we hear the screams of “extremist anxieties of ‘liberty,’” just as were heard by Ezra Pound circa World War II. He promoted such fallacies as “[A]re you the arsenal of democracy or of judeocracy?” and “[W]hat races can mix in America without the ruin of the American stock, the American brain?” (Blair 161). Woolf would equate these “extremist anxieties” to fear and would point out yet another appearance of the repetition of history though the voice of the Owl when he says, “[P]lus ça change plus c’est la meme chose” (L. Woolf 148).

Pound seems to have been calling for a cage to protect “the American stock.” Mussolini and Hitler seem to have been calling for a cage, of sorts, for the same reason. The Elephant, in “Fear and Politics: A Debate at the Zoo” though he claims to have no position, having “transcend[ed] the political” (Blair 157), also calls for a cage for mankind and reveres its protection (L. Woolf 151). The dangers of the wild are much too risky and undoubtedly degenerative, much like the dangers of racial mixing and government heterogeneity. This “somber, meditative melancholy” (138) of certain caged animals such as those of the Zoological Gardens and the “old gentlemen” (137) of South Kensington is an indicator of achieved civilization, in Woolf’s satire. These animals, humans included, should be confined and made powerless and protected from the powerful, which relieves them of fear. The absence of this fear allows for an environment conducive to wonderful debates, at least until this “somber, meditative melancholy” state grows into “homicidal irascibility” and the gentlemen “go mad and kill their wives” (138). How’s that for civilization?

Woolf’s satirical answer to the world’s problems is to cage all of the fascists, communists, imperialists, colonialists, Sunnis, Shiites, Hutus, Tutsis, insurgents, Islamic extremists, Catholics, Protestants, etc. because none of these individuals and groups can control themselves or their need to conquer or, as Woolf would claim, their fear of being conquered.